||This article may contain original research. (February 2010)|
Corpse roads provided a practical means for transporting
corpses, often from remote communities, to cemeteries that had
burial rights, such as parish churches and chapels of ease. In
Britain, such routes can also be known by a number of other
names: bier road, burial road, coffin road, coffin line, lyke or
lych way, funeral road, procession way, corpse way, etc. Such
"church-ways" have developed a great deal of associated folklore
regarding wraiths, spirits, ghosts, etc. In late medieval times
a population increase and a concomitant expansion of church
building took place in Great Britain inevitably encroaching on
the territories of existing mother churches or minsters. Demands
for autonomy from outlying settlements made minster officials
feel that their authority was waning, as were their revenues, so
they instituted corpse roads connecting outlying locations and
their mother churches (at the heart of parishes) that alone held
burial rights. For