Burial outside the walls — the royal cedula of 3 April 1787 and its extension to the Indies in 1819

A public-health law that moved burial out of parish churches and into ventilated ground beyond the towns, written after an epidemic traced to the corpses under a church floor. It required a medical survey of the soil before a site could be chosen and sized the ground by the five-year death rate. It reached Spanish America unevenly, was resisted where it touched burial fees and rank, and was not circulated generally to the Indies until 1819.