St Peter’s at Stanton Lacey is an Anglo-Saxon church in a small Shropshire hamlet. Every year, on the second weekend of February, it hosts a Snowdrop Weekend in celebration of the masses of snowdrops—or <em>Mary’s Tapers</em>—that fill the churchyard at this time. The weekend serves as both a social gathering and a fundraiser, with tea and locally made cakes on offer, and tables set up throughout the nave and chancel. People wander among the snowdrops and catch up on local gossip afterwards. The event has become increasingly popular—a welcome social gathering after the hibernation of January.
Some years ago, the need for a toilet and small kitchen in the church was brought to the attention of the local landowner, partly due to the increased popularity of the snowdrop event and partly because of the ageing population. It was decided that the work would be best undertaken within the walls of the church. Archaeologists were consulted, and construction began last year.
On digging down to lay the foundations, the builders discovered, quite close to the surface, the skeleton of a woman. She was thought to have been buried in the medieval period, wrapped in a cloth before the time of coffins. She was found within the walls of the church, suggesting she had been a person of some social standing. Local people have given her the name Alys.
Of course, she had to be disinterred, with a plan for reburial in the churchyard in the spring. However, in the process, her lower legs became separated from the rest of her skeleton and were left behind. Alys was placed—legless—in a box in a storeroom.
Local people were genuinely upset by this. Even in this secular age, where traditional burial rites are increasingly ignored in favour of cremation—often unattended—there was distress at Alys’s plight. Polly Bolton, a local folk singer and songwriter, composed a song about Alys, which was performed in her honour at the opening of the new toilet and kitchen over the weekend, coinciding with the annual snowdrop celebration. Toasts were raised to Alys with cups of tea and slices of cake, to the strains of <em>Alys, your dancing days are over</em>, sung in harmony in the echoing chancel. The final verse begins:
"Maybe you still dance among us, in snowdrops, celandine and moss"—raising all sorts of interesting eschatological questions about the nature of the body in the afterlife.
The local vicar was rather breezy about Alys’s legs, saying she wouldn’t need them in Paradise and citing St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: <em>“We are sown in dishonour, raised in glory.”</em> He argued that since she had already died and been raised in Heaven, there need be no concern about her legs now.
The people of Stanton Lacey and its environs are not a particularly religious community—church attendance at St Peter’s is declining, as is the case in many small rural parishes. But perhaps their instinctive unease at the loss of Alys’s legs has been well expressed by John Paul II in his work <em>Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body</em>. At the heart of this work is the idea that the human body is a “witness to love”, a manifestation of the human and the divine in union. Our bodies, and those of all human beings, stand as reminders that God chose to show His love for humanity by entering time and space in human form—as a humble infant, vulnerable and under threat.
<strong>“The fact that theology also includes the body should not astonish or surprise anyone who is conscious of the mystery and reality of the Incarnation. Through the fact that the Word of God became flesh, the body entered theology—that is, the science that has divinity for its object—I would say, through the main door.”</strong><strong><br></strong>—John Paul II
There is an instinctive horror at the thought of her legs being left behind somewhere among the new footings for the toilet and kitchen.
When Alys was alive, in the medieval period, theology suggested that the body had to be buried whole if it was to be resurrected. The state-sanctioned mutilation of bodies before and after death was an added humiliation and terror—how could one be resurrected without a complete body?
When William Tyndale, the English biblical scholar, faced execution due to the coordinated efforts of Henry VIII’s government and the Holy Roman Empire, he had already made powerful enemies on both sides. As he was strangled before being burned at the stake, he may have feared the fire more than the act of execution itself—perhaps dreading that cremation would prevent his resurrection on the Last Day.
St Augustine dismissed such fears outright—<em>nothing can prevent God in His omnipotence from raising the dead to new life</em>—but perhaps at the heart of these concerns is a deep-seated desire to show reverence for the human body, made in God’s image, and to protect and honour it.
Meanwhile, a grave will soon be dug for Alys, among the fading snowdrops, which, without doubt, will rise again next February.
<em>(Photo credit: from author)</em>
