The Langley Burrell body snatch

In March 1832, a disturbing report appeared in several newspapers in the southwest of England. On the night of 6 March, body snatchers, or ‘resurrectionists’, had exhumed the body of John Smart in the graveyard at Langley Burrell and carted his corpse away. At the time, insufficient cadavers were available for anatomical research or teaching, and it had spawned a grizzly trade in the bodies of the recently deceased. Criminal gangs had gotten involved in cities like Edinburgh. In the months before the Langley Burrell incident, one gang was even discovered committing murders to sell the corpses to the London teaching hospitals. The implication was that in rural Wiltshire, the plundered body of John Smart had likewise been sold for dissection. The report ended by observing that a guard had been placed on the graveyard in Chippenham, presumably to stop such desecration from spreading to the town.

That such things could occur in a small Wiltshire village was alarming. However, the story was likely false.

A second report appeared a week later. The rector of the parish, Robert Ashe, had written to the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette to state that his graveyard had not been plundered and no one by the name of John Smart had been buried for a great many years. However, the newspaper did not apologise or retract the story but instead recorded the clergyman had requested them to quote his words. They also observed their reporter had ‘upon all preceding occasions been correct’, perhaps believing his testimony to be true.

The story fascinated me and caused me to leaf through the parish registers for 1832. While the incident does have a morbid fascination, I am relieved that no one by the name of John Smart was buried in the graveyard that year. Indeed no one was recently interred before 6 March 1832. Thus, the story of the Langley Burrell body snatch, to my mind at least, was fabricated.

~ Louise Ryland-Epton