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.
Why this wins its question: The move of burial out of churches is usually told as a French or Italian story, with Spain and its American kingdoms absent or arriving late by imitation. The documents say otherwise and say it in detail: a 1787 cedula with an epidemiological preamble, a 1804 specification requiring a medical survey of the soil and sizing the ground by the five-year death rate, and a 1791 order to the archbishop of Mexico making his cemetery the model for a hemisphere. This object quotes those articles from the page, and puts beside them the three things a defensive account would drop: a crown that says it cannot pay, a priest at Sisante charging a ducado a body, and mass trenches at Cartagena de Indias thirty-two years before the reform was circulated to the Indies at all.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The cedula states its own occasion in the preamble. An epidemic suffered in the villa del Pasage in Guipuzcoa in 1781 was attributed to "el hedor intolerable que se sentia en la iglesia parroquial de la multitud de cadaveres enterrados en ella"; a royal order of 24 March of that year charged the Council to consider how such results might be prevented; the three fiscales gave their opinion in a consulta of 9 December; and the royal resolution was published and ordered fulfilled on 12 March, with the purpose stated as "una providencia general que asegurase la salud publica".
Article 1 kept church burial as a narrow exception rather than abolishing it: canonical discipline was to be observed as prescribed in the Roman Ritual and in ley 11, title 13 of the first Partida, with the qualification that the persons of virtue or sanctity who might still be buried in churches be only those for whose death the ecclesiastical ordinaries must open processes of virtues or miracles, and that those who might be buried there by having chosen graves be only those who already owned them at the date of the cedula.
Article 2 set the order of works by epidemic risk and congregation size, not by rank: the corregidores, acting as delegates of the king and Council in agreement with the ecclesiastical prelates, were to begin with the places where there had been or might be epidemics or that were most exposed to them, continue by the most populous, then by the parishes with the largest congregations where burials were most frequent, and go on afterwards to the rest.
Article 3 required the burial grounds to be made "fuera de las poblaciones", wherever there was no insuperable difficulty or great open space within them, in ventilated sites close to the parishes and away from the houses of the neighbourhood, and directed that hermitages standing outside the towns be turned to use as the chapels of the new cemeteries.
Articles 4 and 5 set cost and funding. Construction was to be carried out at the least possible cost, on a plan drawn up by the parish priests in agreement with the corregidor of the district; the works were to be paid from the fabric funds of the churches where these existed, and whatever was lacking prorated among the sharers in tithes, including the crown's own tercias, the excusado and the fondo pio de pobres, with public funds also contributing a half or a third of the cost according to their state, and with the land itself where it was common or municipal. The cedula closes "Dada en Madrid a 3 de abril de 1787.-Yo el Rey", countersigned by Manuel de Aizpun y Redin, with the conde de Campomanes among those recorded.
New Spain has a documented first move four years later. A royal order of the conde de Floridablanca, dated Aranjuez 29 June 1791, answers a representation of 30 September of the previous year from the archbishop of Mexico proposing a cemetery at the site of the sanctuary of Nuestra Senora de los Angeles next to the city, with a plan enclosed and an offer of twelve thousand pesos towards it. The king was to be pleased that the archbishop had worked so long to dispel, "sin herir, las perjudiciales impresiones de la ignorancia y la supersticion", and had "de antemano vencida la preocupacion general de ese pais contra dicho establecimiento". The project was to be settled with the viceroy conde de Revillagigedo and to serve "de norma a los demas pueblos de ese vasto dominio".
The same order states, without evasion, that the crown could not fund what it was ordering: "El Rey querria contribuir tambien a los gastos, y aun hacerlos todos; pero no sufriendolo el estado actual de su real erario, cotejado con los grandes e inexcusables de la corona, espera del acreditado celo y discrecion de V. EE. que hallaran recursos". The financing article of the 1787 cedula was the substitute for a treasury that admitted it had nothing to give.
The rules circulated in 1804 under Charles IV turned the principle into a technical specification. The ground had to be of a quality "mas a proposito para absorber los miasmas putridos" and to hasten the consumption of the bodies, while avoiding "aun el mas remoto riesgo de filtracion o comunicacion con las aguas potables del vecindario"; and because judging this depended on scientific knowledge, an exact survey of the site had to be carried out first by accredited professors of medicine. Only then was an approved architect, or in his absence the most trusted master builder of the town, to draw the plan and the cost estimate.
The same rules sized the ground by arithmetic rather than by eye. The enclosure had to be large enough not merely for the bodies of an average year deduced from a five-year period, but calculated so that with two bodies placed in each grave three years could be allowed for their consumption, with surplus ground left over for extraordinary occurrences. The walls were to be high enough to keep out people and animals capable of profanation but open above the burial area.
Rank was written into the reform rather than levelled by it. Priests and infants were to have their own graves or small separate enclosures, and "sepulturas de distincion" might be built both to preserve the rights that particular persons or families had acquired in parish or conventual churches and to be granted to others who aspired to that honour, "pagando lo que se estime justo". The hierarchy of burial survived the move outside the walls intact and priced.
Where the reform touched fees it met resistance, and the record of the resistance is printed beside the law. A Council circular of 18 April 1806 to all the ecclesiastical ordinaries was occasioned by the corregidor and town council of the villa de Sisante reporting that, their cemetery finished, the parish priest was seeking to raise the existing dues by a ducado for each body on account of the greater labour of carrying it out to the cemetery and burying it there, and to appoint a gravedigger at five reales for each person who died.
The Indies waited thirty-two years for a general order, and the petition that finally produced it describes what burial outside the walls looked like without one. A royal cedula of 16 April 1819 records the representation of D. Luis Jose Pimienta, maestrescuela of the cathedral of Cartagena de Indias: a piece of ground near the sea had been set aside at a regular distance from the city walls, but the bodies were carried there publicly in carts, most of them without any priest accompanying them because of their poverty, and buried "en una sola zanja seis, ocho y hasta diez sin division de sexos", with secular and regular clergy laid in the same trench as the rest.
On the consulta of the Council of the Indies of 12 December, the king ordered the royal dispositions circulated to those dominions so that, in conformity with them and with the general cedula issued on 15 May 1804, the diocesans and vice-patrons should proceed by common agreement to the regulation of cemeteries and the reform of the abuses noted, and commanded his viceroys, presidents and governors vice-patrons, and charged the archbishops and bishops of the Indies and the Philippine Islands, to carry it into effect. It is dated at Palace, 16 April 1819, "Yo el Rey", by mandate of the king, Estevan Varea.
The reform also ran backwards where an interest was strong enough. A further royal cedula printed in the same title has Ferdinand VII resolve, on the representation of religious communities distressed at the thought that their bodies would be "extraidos de clausura y entregados a hombres tal vez indiscretos" for burial in the general cemeteries, that from then on the bodies of the professed nuns of the convents of those kingdoms be given burial within their own enclosure.
Two cautions about the text read here. The compilation is Mexican and of 1839, and its compiler states in a note at number 238 that in place of the law he prints the cedula "cual fue comunicada al virey" — so this is the cedula as transmitted to New Spain, not the original despatch. And the volume dates the peninsular measure inconsistently on a single page, citing "real cedula y orden circular de 3 de abril de 1786" in one line and "la citada real cedula de 3 de abril de 1787" a few lines below; the printed text of the cedula itself gives 1787, which is the date used here, but the discrepancy is recorded rather than silently corrected.