mortsafe

A mortsafe outside the west door is an interesting historical object.

YouTube video and commentary on a mortsafe in Prestwick, Ayrshire.

There is a model of a mortsafe of this type in Marischal Museum, Aberdeen.

A team working at the former Providence Baptist Chapel site found a mortsafe - a metal cage fixed around a coffin to stop people stealing the body.

Sandwell Council's Museums Manager, Frank Caldwell said: "The body protected by the mortsafe belonged to a young woman who we found suffered from a disfiguring skin and bone disease.

It meant that her remains would have fetched a premium for the body snatchers and that would be why her body was protected by the mortsafe - her family were concerned that it would be stolen.

They may not have been secure enough; as one 20th-century writer observed, an empty coffin found beneath a buried mortsafe in Aberlour had probably been "opened during the night succeeding the funeral, and carefully closed again, so that the disturbance of the soil had escaped notice or had been attributed to the original burial."

The grave of Sarah Wrench (1833-1848), by the North wall of the chancel at St. Edmund's Church in East Mersea is unusual for an English grave because it is covered by a mortsafe, a protective cage used at the time in Scotland to protect corpses from graverobbers.