Grave Goods

Hello everyone and welcome to the second podcast in the University of Aberdeen School of Laws Death and Law Interdisciplinary Explorations podcast series. I'm Dr. Jonathan Ainsley. I'm a lecturer in private law within the School of Law. I'm joined by my colleagues Neil Curtis and Jennifer Riley. Neil, would you like to introduce yourself? Yes, I'm Neil Curtis. I'm head of University Collection at the University of Aberdeen and among my responsibilities is acquiring archaeological material through the treasureful process for the University Collection. And Jennifer? Hi, I'm Dr. Jennifer Riley. I work in the divinity school as a research father and currently on a leave of him early career. Thank you. In this podcast we shall be discussing grave goods in their contemporary contexts as well as the discovery of grave goods by archaeologists many centuries after they have been initially interred. And so this will be a podcast in two parts dealing with both grave goods and the law of treasure trove. In this section of the podcast we shall be discussing the law of treasure trove, which is the area of Scots and English law engaged when grave goods are dug up by archaeologists many years after they have been interred. I'm joined in this discussion by Neil Curtis, our head of collections at the University. I'm going to focus primarily on some of the differences between Scots law and English law concerning the legal definition of treasure. And then Neil shall be discussing the practical aspects of the treasure trove units and the allocation process in Scotland. So begin with then what is the law of treasure trove? Treasure trove is concerned with objects which are discovered to either buries or embedded within the ground and which vest in the ownership of the crown in exercise of the crown's prerogative rights. Items which are not treasure fall to be considered under the ordinary rules of property law and will therefore usually belong to the land owner. The first and most important question which must be addressed in any treasure trove regime is what the falls within the definition of treasure and what's not and different jurisdictions have answered this question in quite different ways. In England for example historically an item had to meet three criteria in order to be considered to treasure. Firstly it had to be made substantially of either silver or gold. Secondly it had to be concealed with the intention of being recovered as a later date. And finally it had to be no longer possible to trace the original owner of the treasure or to trace the identity of the person who initially believed it. Now this definition of treasure was originally designed in the medieval period in order to secure revenues for the crown and it didn't necessarily serve the modern policy rationale of a treasure trove system in the 20th and 21st century which is the secure archaeological finds for the public benefit. The main deficiency with the definition of treasure common law in England was how narrow it was. In particular it didn't include goods which had not been concealed with the intention of later recovery. And the definition of treasure in England's therefore could not include grave goods, items which had been left associated with the burial of human remains and which the individual burying the objects did not intend to recover later. A very famous example of this was the Sutton Who Finds in England. The Sutton Who Finds related to an Anglo-Saxon ship burial dating from the 6th or 7th centuries which was discovered near Woodbridge in Suffolk in England in the 1930s. The objects contained within the Sutton Who Finds could not fill within the definition of treasure because they had not been concealed with the intention of later recovery. And the coroner's inquests in the 1930s therefore determines that the items fell into the ownership of the local landowner a lady called Edith Prissy. Now Mrs. Prissy decided that she would donate the Sutton Who Finds to the British Museum that she was under no obligation to do so. She could, as she still chosen, keep them for herself, sell them as a prophet, or donate them elsewhere. And this is perhaps the most famous example of the narrowness of the English legal definition of treasure causing difficulties and perhaps arguably failing to safeguard important archaeological finds for the public benefit. The approach taken to the definition of treasure in Scotland is radically different from that in England. In Scotland we do not have a technical legal definition of treasure. We treat it instead as a subset of a larger class known as the Bonavacanthia or apparently Oralus property. And in Scotslaw all Bonavacanthia vests in the ownership of the crumb. There is therefore no requirements that finds the Scotland be made substantially of gold or silver or any kind of matter, flat matter. And further there has never been any requirements in Scotslaw for treasure to have been buried with any particular purpose in mind. In particular there is no requirements that treasure must be buried or concealed with the intention of later recovery. And this means that grave goods as well as accidentally lost items have always been considered treasure in Scotland, whereas they would not historically have been considered treasure under the common law in England and Wales. If the Sussan who finds had been discovered in Scotland in the 1930s instead of in England and Wales, they would have automatically vested in the crown at the moment they were discovered. And it would never have been left up to the landowner Mrs. Priti to make a decision as to whether they should be donated to museum or not. All treasure in Scotland follows the cordonuleus rule, cordonuleus esfet domini regis, which is to say that all apparently ownerless property vests in the crown. And historically the basis of this rule in Scotland was understood to be the status of the monarch as the universal landlord under feudalism. And there are feudal lands tenure system, which we had in Scotland until 2004. The crown is deemed to be ultimate landlord of all property. And therefore it can exercise certain prerogative rights in relation to lands such as rights to minerals such as gold and silver. And before the 1960s most Scottish lawyers would have told you that the basis of the cordonuleus rule granting the crown rights to treasure in Scotland was their status as the universal landlord under feudalism, that the right to treasure was fundamentally a feudal prerogative. This understanding changed, however, in the case of Lord Advocates against the University of Aberdeen and Butch, which was decided in the 1960s after the St. Nenean's Isle treasure was discovered in the Shetland Isles. The St. Nenean's Isle treasure was uncovered by an excavation led by a professor at the University of Aberdeen and the University of Aberdeen had initially taken possession of that treasure. Following which the University resisted as an action brought by the Lord Advocate on behalf of the crown, so asserts the crown's rights to the St. Nenean's Isle treasure. Now it isn't necessary here to go into the details of the arguments made in Lord Advocate against the University of Aberdeen, but the essential thrusts of the arguments made by Council for the University T. B. Smith was that feudal landlord did not apply in the Shetland Isles and therefore the crown should not enjoy the rights to treasure as a feudal prerogative. The outcome of this case was a re-articulation of how Scottish lawyers understood the basis of the crown's right to treasure in Scotland. The point made by the Lord Ordinary in the outer house and then reiterated on appeal to the inner house was that the Codnullis rule and the right of the crown to treasure in Scotland was based not on their status as a universal landlord under feudalism but instead on their status as the representative of the national community and that the crown therefore took treasure in order to safeguard the public interests and not as a landlord under feudalism. This is why the crown's right to treasure in Scotland survive to the abolition of feudal tenure in 2004. Now, in recent years in England, there have been a number of attempts to expand their previously very narrow definition of treasure. In 1996, legislation was passed removing the requirements that it be concealed with the intention of recovery, and further changes were made by a statutory order in 2023 to expand the definition of treasure to metallic objects not made out of gold or silver, provided that the demonstrated an exceptional historical archaeological or cultural insights. It remains to be seen, however, whether all of the objects that we would ideally like to see safeguarded for the public benefits will fall within this expanded definition of treasure. So these are the legal issues relating to treasure in Scotland and England, and as you will be able to see, while grave goods have always fallen within our definition in Scotland, they historically did not in England, and it is only finds which have been discovered since 1996 which should be considered treasure if they were buried to human remains as part of a grave site. And now going to hand over to Neil Curtis, our head of collections to talk about some of the practical aspects of the treasure trove system in Scotland's. Thank you. I can give a few comments first on the implication of that history and how we work, and then run through how the system operates, and then finally reflect a wee bit on thinking about improvements to the practice. There has been a recent review of the treasure trove system. So one thing that strikes me about the way it developed is like in England, there was no original plan that the quadnolious rule would be to benefit museums or archaeology. Museums or archaeology didn't exist in the Middle Ages. So that's something that really developed through the 19th century that we have some records of the very beginning of the century to the Society of Antichrist of Scotland and to Marshall College and University of Aberdeen of coins being allocated. So not directly enriching the crown, but enriching public benefit and having museums. So that's the very beginning of it. In the middle of the 19th century, the private museum of the Society of Antichrist of Scotland was conveyed to the state and became what is now the core of the National Museums of Scotland. And so that, therefore, took a different emphasis that the feeling then was that crown-clade material should be allocated to its own museum to the National Museum, and while that happened initially in the mid-19th century, they then realized, and this is a factor that continues, is everything wasn't being reported, that although the law is very clear, until the 1963 judgment, there was no court case, it hung on six little Latin words. And so they started bringing in awards for finders in the 1890s to try to encourage people to report. So that was encouraging the collections of the National Museum. The interesting thing, of course, one of the many interesting things, whether it's an Indian's aisle case, was that at that point, this was the National Museum, we're very keen to make sure that the treasurer's system, one of a candidate, was being used to make sure that those finds ended up in our museum, but actually specifically in the museum, the National Museum. Now, when Aberdeen was displaying those in the '60s, the intent was that there would be a museum built in Shetland to house them in the long term, and indeed Shetland Islands Council then built a museum, so there was a great deal of very strong local feeling in Shetland, that these shouldn't be taken away. And that's something that led to the establishment of an advisory panel, which included people from the National Museum, also included people from other museums. And the history since the 1960s to the present day has actually seen a steady decline in the number of items allocated to the National Museum, and many more allocated to local museums. And indeed, nowadays, there is a presumption in favour of local allocation. Nothing entirely clear what local is meant. Does that mean local as not national, or does it mean local authority, not other museums, or does it mean closest to the find spots? And I know sometimes when I've been writing applications, I've been measuring on Google Earth how far away if find spots is to the museum in Aberdeen to see if we are the most local museum. So there's lack of clarity in some of these things, but I think my gracious point about the way the system operates in Scotland is it's not statute law. Therefore, there's a lot more opportunity for sensitive interpretation and development of the code of practice that we don't need to define what is treasure. We're not trying to get into these daft ideas they used to suffer from in England about working out the motivation of somebody who died 4,000 years ago. So it's something that can be very practical. So what happens now is that the treasure of unit who report to the King's Lord Treasurer's Remembrance, who is actually the same person who is responsible for the Crown Office and the procurator of physical service, but operating as a different aspect, a different hat that they're wearing. The KLTR is responsible and they're advised by an advisory panel, a psychological finds allocation panel, to help advise what values should be set and which museum should receive material. But the system is operated by the treasure trove units who are based in the National Museum, but they're not really part of the National Museum. I think it could be a bit clearer that they're reporting to KLTR rather than the National Museum. I find that feeds that presumption that there is a bias towards the National Museum, which there isn't, I can in practice. And the treasure trove unit, often they have their own expertise, enough expertise within the staff to be able to say what something is, what how important it is, whether it should be claimed, they can decide. Sometimes there are things that are not claimed. I remember one case where a spark plug had been excavated in an archaeological site, which is really important for the archaeology because it proved that it wasn't an ancient site, but it wasn't something was ever worth keeping in a museum. So they were able to disclaim it. But then the list of finds that have been claimed, which can range from a small item, metal found to a badge or a token or a coin found by metal detectors, right up to one that we were recently allocated, was all the excavation assemblage from the Aberdeen Western peripheral road, 90 boxes of material. So it can be hugely important material or very, very low value individual items. Those assemblages are items that are advertised to all museums in Scotland, but there are a number of criteria that are followed and who will get which one. And the first one is, you must be in a credited museum, so you've got to meet basic standards, and you've got to have a collecting policy that says that you already intend to collect for a particular area. So in our case, that is the archaeology of North East Scotland. But then there are other factors. So do you already have material that can be seen as part of that assemblage? So you're not splitting a coin hoard between different museums. Have you the ability to conserve them to make sure they survive for the future? And then factors that are coming to play more if there are two museums interested in the same material. So are you able to support research? By providing access to researchers or actually having facilities and researchers on your own staff, those are factors that might be considered. But I think what seems to be most important is benefiting the public. So supporting local heritage and interpretation, maximizing public access, these are words that are used within the go-to practice. So when there are competing applications, which there can be, if you have a local authority museum, an independent museum, maybe a small village, has its own community museum, a university museum, a regional museum, and a large city within a rural area, and the national museum. So there can be potentially five different institutions. Now, often between ourselves, we understand that we are different specialisms. So, you know, competition often doesn't come up, but sometimes it does. And that's where having the allocation panel is really important. They're able to make a decision independently without us having to fight over it or something. So, but there are a number of wrinkles in the system that, you know, I think having a review last year was really valuable to sort of have a look, a fresh at the whole system. And so there are things like I said, that definition of national and local. There's also the issue that keeps running on, which is how do you encourage reporting? In a system like they have in England, where fewer items are claimed, I think more are reported. And so almost in any place you have to make a decision, do you think that it's more important to have the archaeological knowledge of what has been found or is it more important to make sure that things come to the museum? So the award system helps that by making sure that people can't financially benefit. benefit from selling things on the black market. But I think there is a difficulty. People feel that things are being taken away to Edinburgh away from the locality. That's one to just swage them from handing things in. So I think this is one of the things that we need to do is to make sure it's seen as a national system and not as something just for the national. So that's one bit. Another bit that is a problem that Johnson's mentioned is this question about what about in an excavation of a grave, what about the human remains, the skeleton? Those are not onable property. What about remains of animals, which again are not really property? What about soil samples that include pollen samples that can be used to help interpret what the landscape was like? So these different things, when there is a site that has an artifact, then what currently happens is there was other items so next to them travel alongside. But what about sites where there are no artifacts? When it is only a skeleton in a grave, the maybe of archeological great value. And they also might feel, well, a human skeleton needs treating in some way. We need to have a way in which we can come to a decision about what is the best future for them, whether that's rebarial or care in a museum. So there is a rather an absence of legal guidance in that area that would be good. I think there are issues that increasingly excavations can be run by community groups. And so are they having to go through the same system that a professional archeology unit is going through? When they might have a very close relationship with a particular local museum. And if they are not allocated to the museum, the museum can't really then buy display cases and do things to interpret them if they might not end up getting them. So I'd be very keen on seeing earlier allocation. I think we're very helpful. Likewise, there has been, going back to 1890s, this idea of awards being given to founders to encourage them. And there's an idea, I think, behind that, that says that people wouldn't willingly hand things over, that they need that financial incentive. And so that means that items that are found through archaeological field work don't attract an award, because the feeling is the archeologist, so they're either doing it as the goodness of their heart or because they're employed to do it. What about a community group? Will they be classed as archeological field work? And therefore, there will be a new award. When actually, they might be able to benefit from an award. They would let them buy more barrels and trowels and bags and things to help them excavate. So I think that question of what award there should be who benefits from it. Sometimes can be a disincentive and sometimes it definitely operates as an incentive. So I think there are a number of issues, which are being discussed now. But behind them all lies this flexibility of the law that Bonavacante Aquadnuleus is tremendously flexible and lets us think what is the best thing we can do in the current circumstances where we do have a desire to have museums. We do have a desire to support taking finds into museums and increasingly to support local community groups in doing the archeology. So I think we're very fortunate in Scotland to have a flexible system. The disadvantage is how few people actually understand it and something won't statute law, which I think would be a dreadful mistake. - Yes, and I would tend to agree with you on that, Neil. The codification of treasure trove in Scotland is a recipe for all manner of trouble. It's some really interesting observations that are about the decentralization of the treasure trove system in Scotland. And I hadn't thought about the implications of our own community groups and exhibition payments. So it's interesting to hear a practitioner's perspective on that. - And it is amazing for, as they say, six little Latin words. And if you look at the most recent review, an enormous publication, how much can be built on top of full it all? - It is notable the extent to which the treasure trove system has got them is almost entirely extra legal. - Yeah. - And lawyers have relatively little to say about it beyond the codnolist rule itself and the justification for the codnolist rule, whereas English lawyers have an awful lot to say. And the manifest difficulties are trying to adjust a rule that was designed to support the revenue use of the crown for a modern policy of Jackson. Well, thank you very much, Neil. - Thank you. - This section of the podcast will examine contemporary grave goods in Scotland and in other parts of the UK. And I'm very pleased to be joined by Dr. Jennifer Riley to discuss the topic. Jennifer is a Liverpool Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen. Jennifer, would you like to talk to us about your current research on grave goods? - I would love nothing more. So yes, I'm currently in the middle of a project called Baggage for the Beyond, which is, as you say, all about contemporary grave goods. And we're all quite familiar with the concept, things that get put with people when they die. But most of us probably primarily associate it with ancient civilizations, maybe the ancient Egyptians, something like such and who. We're probably less conscious that actually it's going on all around us in the UK to a reasonably significant extent, we think, and that people actually often put an awful lot of significance by it when someone dies. And for me, it was the first time I encountered it was during a piece of research about grave identity. So we were looking as a team at the University of Aberdeen at funerals as how they were affected by the pandemic and the restrictions placed around them during the pandemic. And people were putting grave goods, objects in the coffins, almost in a kind of compensatory way. So in the absence of being able to have a coitone, quote, normal funeral with lots of people, there was a kind of a felt need to do something more. And so suddenly people were thinking outside the box and maybe reaching for grave goods in a way that they wouldn't have before. Although that's not to say it's a particularly new phenomenon, particularly if we think of clothing, people wearing their own clothes in their coffins. That's a phenomenon that has been really important now in the UK for a good 50 years. So from the 1970s onwards to the point when we now don't really think of clothes as grave goods and the idea of the vacant debt actually really unsattles us. So I get to spend my days principally talking to people, people who work in deaf industries, few nor directors and celebrants and crematorium managers about the grave goods that they encounter, but also to people who have lost somebody and have picked up in specific out or perhaps specifically chosen not to, because there are some people for whom the idea of putting something in the coffin is either thinking unpleasant or a bit irrational or doesn't help them in any particular way. So I'm as interested in the people who pick no grave goods at all as those who pick out all manner and there's different things. - Mavelis, would you be able to tell us more about the contemporary legal significance of grave goods Jennifer? - I can now, but only because I found myself towards the start of the project, asked a question about their legal status and realized I didn't actually have a clue. I'm not a lawyer by any sense. But it was an interesting question. The question came from our colleague Alistair, who said, are they classified as property? What if there's something very valuable and that detracts from the worth of someone's estate? So when you're going through the probate process, suddenly you've got an object that maybe some relatives wish to vary, others don't, or even wish to cremate, that being a slightly more permanent decision, I suppose. So I did some digging. I'm probably now slightly too familiar with things like crematorium regulations, the difference between English and Scotts law, because of course they are different when it comes to handling the body, and particularly handling the body once it's been buried. Now with cremation, there's an extent to which you're a bit stuffed, once the coffin has been sealed almost certainly, it's not going to be opened. And obviously, most things placed in the coffin alongside human remains are going to be destroyed. But it gets a bit more interesting with burial, because while there are no specific laws or policies around grave goods as property or valuable items, not in the way that we think of treasure graves of ancient grave goods, certainly, you do have to comply with exclamation law. And exclamation law, The Scotslaw term for it is particularly beautiful. you would be in violation of Sepalru, or the right to Sepalru. If you were to go and extract someone or their coffin or anything in the coffin from a grave. And so again, I kept digging. I looked, I probably on some sort of watch list, no, for the government, looked at the ministry of justice, application form. Apparently they get a thousand applications a year in England and whales' reximation licenses. And discovered that what we're dealing with is actually kind of not quite law. And I think that's partly why it's interesting. So when somebody dies, usually you instruct a funeral director. That's a fairly standard thing to do, whether they're going to be buried or cremated, usually go through a funeral director. And that's the point at which the first kind of legal pinch point for grave goods arises, because people don't always agree about grave goods. Even if there is something in somebody's will or funeral plan about what they want to happen to their belongings, particularly valuable belongings, unless that's part of the will specifically, it doesn't have any legal status. So the wishes of the dead have no legal weight, they have moral weight, I suppose. And, you know, we all like to think that we'll leave our relatives behind us with good will and good wishes, but that's not always the case. And when objects are very valuable, there can be a tussle. So if there were to be a disagreement about whether or not say a valuable piece of jewelry should be buried with somebody, we don't really have a legal precedent for knowing what should happen. If you know directors will probably say let's err on the side of caution, it is very complicated to get a warrant for exclamation, it's impossible to reverse the cremation process. And so a wise funeral director will usually try and say let's take a step back and look a big picture here, but I think there's an extent to which we don't have laws around this, just because people are a little bit reluctant to make laws around it. There's a broadest sense in which English and Welsh law in particular is quite patchy and quite complicated when it comes to burial and cremation, or at least to my non-lawyer eyes, it's very complicated and patchy. And Grave Good seemed to have kind of fallen between the cracks, as it were, this kind of property, as it belongs to the deceased, as it's being interred or burnt. We don't know quite how to handle it. A second fence point will come if you're being cremated. So about 75 to 75% of deaths in Britain are cremations, and there are some things you cannot put in a cremator. Anything that's going to explain unsurprisingly, so batteries, electronics, rubber, which for a lot of people means they can't wear shoes. Coconut turns out, unless they have holes drilled in, like for a coconut shy and potatoes, for example. And much as some people seem to think that things will vaporise often in a cremator, and it does get very hot, actually, and awful lot of things won't vaporise, they will melt. And again, here we've got something very, very fuzzy going on. Who's responsibility? Is it to make sure that nothing ends up in that cremator oven that's going to cause damage? And for a policy perspective, it tends to fall with a few nor directors, but it's not actually the law. There are regulations, those are set at local authority level, usually an individual curatoria have more or less similar versions of the same cremation form, whereby a funeral director has to sign to say, I've taken responsibility for this body, I have checked thoroughly what is inside, and I can say in good conscience that there is nothing in there that will cause damage. And again, in theory, they could be sued, so that's where the legal precedent could come in, but again, I'm yet to find any example of that having actually been tested. So again, you're relying on the funeral director, you're relying on them having a certain amount of due diligence, you're relying on them being on side of the crematorium, rather than on the side of say a family that might want to bend the rules, and people do, people do try and quote unquote sneak things in, so they have to be reasonably thorough. And I have heard anecdotally, but I'll figure on reason the broad authority, that there are cases where a few nor director would rather see a family's wishes for what their loved ones should have with them when they die and when they cast on quite against some of the regulations. Now, we're probably not talking explosives, but we might be talking burning things like more plastic than maybe as advisable, or leather, for example. So there's your second pinch point, and again, there's this kind of legalish, but not fully legal, untested precedent, and dependent some funeral directors. And then that third pinch point would be if you were to bury somebody, and regret it, and make a mistake, and at which point you would be, as I said, coming under exclamation or support or law. And when I first started looking into this, I couldn't find any examples of kind of grief goods gone wrong, if you like. But then please be waited to record this, because I made an interviewing a couple of weeks ago, somebody who had indeed encountered grave goods gone wrong. So he had been a kind of privy to an application by a funeral director, where they had accidentally buried a wedding rig, and it was requested that that would be retrieved. And then I also came across an example of the opposite, where somebody left out a wedding ring from a coffin, and it was requested that that would be put back in. So at least in England, we do have something of a precedent, and the mystery of just this website for this does say, you know, these will be treated sympathetically. So much as their policy doesn't say anything about grave goods at all, and most local authority regulations around cremation also say very nothing, very little specific or nothing specific. There is a kind of a route, but it's slow, it's bureaucratic, it's expensive, and it often involves consulting an awful lot of people in a kind of hierarchy diagram next to kin, and all grave or in Scotland layer ownership. So it's not a straightforward route. So you can see one of a few other actors are on the side of maybe not burying something if they think it's going to cause a dispute. That's fascinating. I have a personal interest in violation of sepulchres in Scotts law, because it relates to more general issues around the property lost status of the human body and human remains. In that when a deceased human body isn't heard, it remains a thing or a raise, as we would say, in property law, but it falls into a special category of raise, which is extra patrimonial, meaning that it cannot be subject to private ownership. And so the offence of violation against sepulchres is also an offence against property, nor is an offence against the person. It falls into its own special category. And of course, it is possible to abandon corporeal movables in Scotts law, and thereby cease to be the owner. And one would imagine that if you place a grave goods in the coffin, in the knowledge that it will be buried, and will therefore come under the protection of the law of sepulchres, that one is abandoning that thing, that it's very unclear, and that it isn't a great deal of litigation on the issue. And I thought it's that lack of clarity in that fussiness that I find fascinating. And I suppose it's worth pointing out that I've been talking in terms of things that are materially valuable. So metals and particular, but a lot of people do pick grave goods that are cute or intense in purposes utterly valueless. So a lot of people want to be buried, or want their loved ones to be buried, because the wishes do usually come from the relatives, rather than the passing themselves, with food items, for example. So I suppose I'm untickled by the possibility that somebody could trigger the extensive bureaucracy surrounding exclamation and violation of sepulchre to recover a mazboar potentially. But I can say, lacking legal president about either. Would you be able to tell us about any ongoing legal changes that might affect the practice relating to grave goods going forward? Yes, absolutely. So this is a, well, I think this is a very exciting time to be studying grave goods, but it's particularly an exciting time to be studying for a legal perspective. And that's the two main reasons. So on the one hand, we've got what has just closed the law commission review. Now I'm mindful that the law commission only applies to England and England. Wales. So briefly put Scotland aside, although basically because they've done a much better job before England and Wales, up to this point and keeping things tidy. So the Law Commission is currently looking at that patchwork of laws that apply to England and Wales. So in England and Wales, the burial act that we use is still the 1857 burial act. So we're talking early Victorian. We're talking a very different culture, and we're talking an absolute assumption that burial is for eternity. We're also taking an England and Wales that were much less heavily populated, and this was in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, so they were starting to have problems with grave space, particularly in big cities, but we now have a big problem with grave space. So one of the things that the Law Commission review is looking at is smoothing over some of those laws and working out if that might give us capacity to look at grave reuse. They're also looking at introducing potentially some legal status to the wishes of the deceased. So that will be quite separate from their will, which is already obviously a legal document. We'd be talking about more informal wishes, or at least which are currently informal wishes, about things like what you'd like your funeral to be like, whether you would prefer to be buried or committed, or other options, or come onto that in a second. And for example, whether or not you would like any of your property to be included as grave goods. And so it would be an interesting thing to see whether or not we're still in that phase where we like to be a little bit kind of fuzzy about some of these things. Do we prefer clarity or do we prefer rules that may be open to a bit of interpretation? Because some people I think would say we need a clear structure for grave goods, particularly from the environmental perspective. A lot of the reason that you can't create things is to do with the emissions that they create. We live in a climate crisis, I suppose. And so needing to kind of reify these things for the sake of long-term ecological sustainability is important. But there are other people who would say, actually, this is a time of death and grief, the examples where grave goods, as I say, go wrong, are very far in between. What's the benefit of adding legal status to these wishes when actually most of the time we don't need them to have legal status? So that is going to be an interesting thing to watch. As I say, Scotland is slightly ahead of the game there. They have recently brought in a new set of regulations, which I believe kick in formally on the 1st of March 2025. So not long left to go, a new funeral director codec practice, which will eventually introduce him, Inspectorate, so a bit like off-stead, but for funeral directors. And so that is slightly different approach to kind of smuting out some of the differences and varieties that can otherwise occur in the funeral industry, which at the moment, at least for the next two and a half weeks, in the UK, is unregulated. They also nicely tidied up their cremation and burial laws into one neat package in 2016. So thank you for that, Scotland. That makes digesting the legal background a lot easier for people who want lawyers like me. But part of the reason that we need to look at this patchwork of burial law and cremation law in England and Wales is because we are, and you heard it here first, we are on the cusp of a death revolution. And we're on the cusp of a death revolution, particularly in the form of what is known as alkaline hydrolysis. So alkaline hydrolysis is also known as water cremation. You might hear it referred to by the brand name Resimation. And it's an alternative mode of disposing. That's a distasteful word, but that is essentially what we're talking about here, disposing of dead bodies. So rather than using a crater oven, you would be using an alkaline solution, which essentially mimics and speeds up the process of natural decomposition. And you're left at the end with water, which doesn't contain any human DNA. And in that respect can be sent back into the water system on a fine white powder. So very much like ash, but a little bit more aesthetically pleasing, a little bit less literally kind of grey and grizzly. And Resimation doesn't qualify as either burial or cremation. So in England and Wales, it would not be qualified under the 1857 burial act, nor would it be under the I think 1902 where don't quote me on that cremation act. It's kind of its own thing. And so while it's legally allowed, we obviously have no sites that can offer it yet. And there's still under development. It's going to be a little while. We don't actually know kind of what laws, if any, would govern this practice, other than presumably health and safety laws. So I've mentioned the water effluent bus, that's one of the examples where health and safety law would apply. But the other interesting thing about Resimation is that it's deliberately marketed and indeed has deliberately been developed as an ecologically friendly option. Crimation and burial, both in their own way, are polluting. Crimation, you're releasing toxins and carbon into the air, burial, you're obviously bearing them in the earth. Resimation in theory will do neither. And so potentially, although you need to offset the energy, the machine's use, potentially it is the greenest way forward. But that leaves a bit of an issue. At least in terms of great goods. Because that will mean there probably need to be some really quite strict regulations around what we can and can't put in the tank with the body. The preference would be for the body to be essentially plain with nothing but a shroud made from biodegradable natural materials. And on the one hand, you can litigate for that or you can at least create a policy for that with precedent to create legal challenge of the back of the policy. But the law is a blunt instrument. And whether or not we're ready for policies that kind of enforce that from a practical perspective, but require us to really quite significantly change our moral sensibilities around what a good death physically looks like remains to be seen. But I suppose the thing that is worth underlining here is we talk about cremation and burial and that mixed economy in the UK as though it's always been like that. Where it's actually cremation is really, really young in its kind of present modern iteration. I mean cremation date back thousands and thousands of years, but modern cremation in the kind of late Victorian, let's build a machine to do this fashion. There's really been around for 150 years. And so it's sometimes useful to remember that what we think of as an established norm, something like people wearing their own clothes, even people being in coffins, really as part of our culture, but in a very kind of flashing Japan kind of way. And so actually, you know, moral sensibilities around death and dying can change and do change. And indeed, we have seen the kind of pre-shift around the emergence of natural burial in the UK. You've only really been doing natural burials in the UK, again, in their kind of modern iteration rather than the active burying someone in the ground, which is itself reasonably natural. Since the late 1990s, I am slightly older than the modern iteration of a natural burial in the UK. And again, there's policy there that there's also a bit of self-selection going on. The people who choose natural burial or choose natural burial on behalf of somebody else are more likely to already be mindful of the kind of eco-implications of human dying, as well as human living. So it might be that actually, when we get to reservation, it's a little way off. It's coming, but it's a little way off. Actually, natural burial has already set that precedent for having policies that favor the environment, but which the people who are opting to follow them are actually already keen to follow. Thank you very much. As a Roman lawyer, I'm fascinated in shifts in burial practices, because the law of Seppelcurs ultimately has its origins in ancient Roman law. The Roman is commissary to the dead, and then very beautiful. I know exactly. They move between the two as well, across the different parts of the Roman era. They are lovely. I'm lovely. Yeah, that's a pose. There was some secretists in the different parts of the empire, again, absolutely. And so for the Romans, Seppelcurs was an earn. Yes. And it's associated monuments or objects. Well as we might often stick hands in the back of wardrobes because the UK is relatively unusual in that it has no regulations really around scattering ashes. So okay we're not talking grave goods anymore but we're talking a close parallel. A lot of my colleagues in Europe kind of do a physical kind of start when I go well yeah you can just do whatever you want with ashes. So I suppose we don't apply support to so that's already distinct from me. No indeed indeed we don't. No unless they have been buried. But giving legal effects to the wishes of the disease is something that I think will be explored further as part of the death and law projects both with regards to the manner of disposal. Of the disease and wishes which have been expressed in the will in that regard and also in any objects that we would like to be to be buried or cremated with. Thank you very much Jennifer for for fascinating discussion. In this podcast we have discussed grave goods in both their contemporary context looking at the practice of leaving grave goods with the deceased in modern Scotland but we have also looked at the legal regulations governing grave goods which are unearthed many decades or centuries after they have been buried and perhaps after the identity of the disease and indeed the culture to which they belong has passed out of memory. Thank you very much.