It’s now time for me to tell you my favourite extended fact about Bath Abbey - it involves Extreme Victorian Nonsense, as do all of the best facts.

So, the thing about Bath Abbey, is that despite the fact that it is one of the lightest and brightest of England’s churches, it is, more so than any other, basically just one huge mass grave. Now, all big old churches are filled with bodies, but Bath takes it to a new level.

Until burials were stopped in the middle of the 1800’s, somewhere between 4000 and 6000 people were jammed into shallow graves beneath the floor of Bath Abbey - it’s the reason the entire floor of the Abbey is made up of memorial stones (more than any other church in the country)

Now, anyone who has ever been to a graveyard… or even thought about it for a few seconds, will know that when bodies decompose they leave gaps, and sometimes the ground above collapses, to fill that void.

Another problem with the burials was that jamming thousands of people into shallow graves under the floor led to… a bit of a stench. People would visit Bath Abbey and come away with “abbey throat” from breathing in the foul air caused by the decomposing bodies.

So, all considered, perhaps making the floor of a large and well-used building out of bodies isn’t a good idea?

By the time burials beneath the floor of Bath Abbey stopped around 1840 the voids caused by decomposing bodies had become a serious structural problem. The floor was buckling, uneven, and collapsing. It stayed like this until the 1860’s.

The great controversial church restorer of the Victorian era, George Gilbert Scott, arrived at Bath Abbey, to fix the problem, and being Victorian he had a GREAT IDEA. The workmen pulled up the floor exposing all the bodies (some only 20 or 30 years buried) and… churned them up.

To create a stable(ish) foundation, they just… desecrated all of the burials, smashed up the bones, stirred up the remains, poured a thin layer of concrete on top, and put the floor back.

Not only was this horrific, it also didn’t really work. Recently, the problem returned.

The thing was, nobody realised what the Victorians had done to the bodies beneath the floor of the Abbey until the modern restoration work began, and the workmen came across all of the bone fragments, and the churned up graves.

Each bone fragment that was found was set aside, and re-interred by the Abbey’s clergy with a prayer. There were thousands and thousands of them.

So, despite looking as angelic as this... Bath Abbey is basically the biggest desecrated mass grave in the country.

Does this count as a history thread? Probably. I write history threads - you can find them here - they're all as wild as this one if not more so. https://twitter.com/JayHulmePoet/status/1077958443410042880