This is a grave from the Victorian age when a fear of zombies
and vampires was prevalent. The cage was intended to trap the
undead just in case the corpse reanimated. ARE YOU GUYS
SERIOUS?! This was to protect against body snatching! Here:
educate yourself. Seriously? Trust me, fear of premature burial
was there (it’s been stipulated in more than one will that the
head is to be cut off before burial “just in case”, so that the
person doesn’t wake up underground), but if there were any
legitimate fear of zombies, no one would have ever even thought
of a “Waking Mortuary”, where rich British people stayed after
death, until they started to decompose. No one actually woke up
in any of those Waking Mortuaries, by the way. Even that fear
was far more transient a cultural standpoint than the totally
legitimate fear of body-snatchers, especially in England. France
allowed dissection of executed criminals and unclaimed cadavers
from the Revolution onward, but England didn’t allow any sort of
dissection (aside from on