did, for some years, between
1815 and 1830, brood over many a village in this district like a cruel
night-mare!

The reception of bodies, or "subjects," from country or town burying
grounds for the dissecting rooms of London and other hospitals, became
almost a trade, not altogether beyond the commercial principle of
supply and demand. Generally about two guineas was the price, and
students would club together their five shillings each for a "subject."
In the face of such facts it would be idle to suggest that the
tradition of that mysterious cart, moving silently through the darkness
of night on muffled wheels towards our village churchyards, was merely
a creature of the imagination. The tradition of that phantom cart
which lingered for years had a substantial origin as certain as the
memory of many persons still living can make it! In many of the
villages around Royston, as indeed in other districts, the terror of it
became such that not a burial took place in the parish graveyards, but
the grave had to be watched night after night till the state of the
corpse was supposed to make it unlikely that it would then be
disturbed! The watch was generally kept by two or three men taking it
in turns, generally sitting in the church porch, through the silent
hours of the night armed with a gun! The well-to-do were able to
secure this protection by paying for it, but many a poor family had to
trust to the human sympathy and help of neighbours. Under a stress of
this kind probably some brave Antigone watched over the remains of a
dead brother, and certainly it was not uncommon for husband and wife to
face the ordeal of sitting out the night till the grey light of
morning, in some lone church porch, or the vestry of some small
meeting-house--watching lest the robbers of {82} the dead should come
for a lost son or daughter! Over the grave of some poor widow's son,
or of that of a fellow workman, volunteers were generally forthcoming
to perform this painful office.

Though the law was seldom invoked, there must have been numberless
cases in which bodies were stolen, cases in which the modest mound of
earth placed over the dead had mysteriously dropped in, and the
outraged parents or relatives, not unnaturally perhaps, turned with
bitter revengeful thoughts to the London and other hospitals of that
day--whether justly or unjustly God knows! Around the parish
churchyards of Bassingbourn, Melbourn, and especially Therfield