At the end of Cowgate stood the old Cowgate cemetery (the graveyard belonging to Peterborough Parish Church, St John the Baptist).
The original churchyard of the old church in Boongate was in St John’s Close but in 1803 it was full, so the Churchwardens bought 3 acres of farm land at the end of Cowgate for £540 with the cost of the brick wall enclosing the new burial site coming out of funds in the following financial year (1804/05).
The first burial was that of Mrs Elizabeth Money in March 1805. The cemetery, like the former graveyard located north of the Cathedral, reached its capacity in 1859. An approach road into the city was made through the graveyard in 1912 to replace the Cowgate level crossing (over 6 sets of rails) with a bridge. In 1911 work began on removing those gravestones which were directly in the line of the new approach road and in 1913 Crescent Bridge was opened.
In November 1828 Peterborough had its first body snatchers. One evening a cart was seen outside Cowgate cemetery with two men loading suspicious sacks onto it. The alarm was raised, and the men fled, with a cart chase ending between Yaxley and Norman Cross – then on the edge of the city. Here the men abandoned their getaway cart and fled over the fields. The next recorded body snatching incident at Cowgate took place between November and December 1830 when the perimeter brick wall was breached. As a result, the wall was repaired with extra security provided by the addition of iron railings surmounting all the walls. These events were reported in the Stamford Mercury newspaper.
Spookily, Cowgate cemetery was one of the last places in the UK to be raided by grisly body snatchers. Body snatching was common in the 18th and early 19th century. Doctors then, like today, needed to practice on humans, and the only way they could really do so was on a corpse, but there was a shortage of these, so they paid body snatchers for fresh corpses and other parts of the anatomy. This practice largely ended with the Anatomy Act 1832 which gave doctors, surgeons and students legal access to corpses via a licensing system.
Religious beliefs of the time said that the body needed to be whole for the Day of Judgement – when the dead will rise. The law meant that the only bodies doctors could have were those of condemned criminals, and so unless society was getting particularly unruly there was usually a shortage. This problem was solved by the body snatchers. These men would dig up freshly buried corpses from graveyards, and sell them to medical practitioners. Ghost stories of today say that their victims still wander Cowgate, eternally trapped and angry at their sad fate!
Eventually the Cowgate graveyard was bought by Peterborough Development Corporation to make way for the existing Crescent roundabout in the 1970s. Exhumed bodies were reinterred at the Eastfield Road cemetery. It was the sale of this cemetery that gives us our Burial Trust Fund – and to this day our annual parish accounts show that we receive interest on the capital (used as income) and that the unrestricted fund can be used for any purpose.
