A terrible death

Genealogists often find themselves wandering around graveyards (usually, it seems, in the rain!), checking names and dates on the stones. Many graves give us additional information, like the leaf designs on medieval graves that tell us the occupant was a forester. Unusual inscriptions are worth researching, and sometimes reveal macabre tales.

One such grave is that of Thomas Meaykin, at the church of St Lawrence the Martyr ­(also known as ‘the chapel in the wilderness’) in Rushton Spencer, Staffordshire. The inscription, on a weathered stone beneath a yew tree, reads:  

Momento Mori [Be mindful of death]

Thomas, son of Thomas and Mary Meaykin

Interred  July 16th 1781

Aged 21 years.

As a man falleth before

wicked men: so fell I.

Bia Thanates [death by violence]. 

Thomas left the tiny village of Rushton and went south, ending up in the comparatively large and prosperous town of Stone. There he found work as an odd-job boy for the local apothecary, a post which included taking care of the horses. The tale goes that the apothecary’s daughter developed a crush on Thomas and, after putting up a weak resistance, knowing his notoriously ill-tempered boss would not approve, Thomas succumbed. The affair was the talk of the town, and local gossip went into overdrive when Thomas unexpectedly died following a very brief illness. He was buried, many thought with an unbecoming speed, at St Michael’s church on 6 July 1781.

Rumours abounded about Thomas’s death, with people pointing out the apothecary’s knowledge of, and access to, poisons, and how he might quite like Thomas out of the way.  When, some time later, Thomas’s favourite horse was found at his grave, scraping at the ground, it was taken by many as a sign. The rumours gathered steam, and a year after Thomas’s death an exhumation was ordered to settle the affair.

When the coffin was opened Thomas Meaykin – who had been buried on his back – was lying face down.

The theory at the time was that he had been drugged so deeply that he appeared dead, and that he had then re-awakened in the ground – a fate which doesn’t bear thinking about. No one was ever brought to trial for his murder, however, presumably because there was no actual evidence.



Parish records show that Thomas’s remains were taken to St Lawrence’s, where they were reburied on 17 July 1782. In what today might seem a further indignity but which was believed at the time to bring him eternal rest, his body was buried the wrong way round, with his feet to the west rather than the east, so preventing his spirit from walking. 

 

 St Lawrence's, Rushton