St Bartholomew’s — Parish Records & Research Notes
Buried in Woollen
What the burial register’s affidavit notes actually mean
Between 1666 and 1814, English law required that the dead be buried in wool rather than linen, to protect the country’s struggling woollen trade. To prove this had been done, a sworn affidavit had to be brought to the parish within eight days of the burial — and clerks at St Bartholomew’s noted this in the register using a small set of recurring terms. The table below explains what each of these notations means.
Register Notations and Their Meaning
| Register notation | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Affidavit / Aff. / A. | A valid affidavit of burial in wool was sworn and delivered within the eight-day period. |
| Att. & Cert. | Attested and certified — the affidavit was sworn and the officiating clergyman has certified its receipt in the register. |
| Naked | The deceased was too poor for any shroud; this was not a breach of the Act, since no forbidden fabric had been used. |
| No affidavit / blank | No affidavit was produced within the period. The estate, or the parish officers in the case of paupers, were technically liable to the £5 fine — though enforcement became increasingly inconsistent after about 1700. |
| Plague / dyed of ye plague | The burial was exempted from the wool requirement under the Act’s specific proviso for victims of plague. |
The Background
The requirement was introduced by the Burying in Woollen Act of 1666, and strengthened by further Acts in 1678 and 1680. The motive was economic rather than religious: England’s domestic wool trade was under pressure from imported linen used for shrouds and grave-clothes, and Parliament hoped that a universal, compulsory market in wool would support clothiers, sheep farmers and landowners across the country.
The 1678 Act set out the rule plainly: no corpse — other than a victim of plague — was to be buried in any shirt, shift, sheet or shroud made of or mixed with flax, hemp, silk, hair, gold or silver, nor in a coffin lined with anything but sheep’s wool. Within eight days of the burial, two credible witnesses had to swear an affidavit confirming that the rule had been followed, before a Justice of the Peace, a Mayor, or a clergyman. The completed affidavit was then delivered to the parish, where the officiating minister noted its receipt against the burial entry — which is exactly the practice recorded in St Bartholomew’s own register.
Failure to produce the affidavit in time left an estate liable to a £5 fine, paid towards the relief of the parish poor. Enforcement was patchy from the outset and fell away steadily through the eighteenth century as the woollen trade lost ground to cotton; the underlying requirement was abolished in 1814, and the original Act was formally repealed in 1863.
Why It Matters to Local Research
- Dating precision — the eight-day rule can occasionally help narrow an otherwise ambiguous burial date.
- Evidence of relationships — a witness named in a surviving affidavit is very often a close relative of the deceased.
- Indicator of poverty — a “naked” burial is a direct, datable marker of a family’s circumstances at the time of death.
- Evidence of parish administration — patterns of compliance and lapse reflect the diligence of successive incumbents and parish officers.
- Plague identification — an explicit plague exemption noted against a burial is a rare piece of local epidemiological evidence.