| Summary: | The widest definition encompasses all burial rites outside those prescribed by the Church, including non-normative practices within consecrated spaces, such as prone or staked burials and post-burial practices, including translated burials. As argued above, Christian burial practices encompassed a broad range of atypical and minority burial modes that carried contextual social meanings; in some circumstances, even prone burials constituted spiritual strategies to signal pious humility.[96] The term deviancy should be reserved for late-medieval burials outside consecrated ground, particularly those that have been deliberately dismembered. While burial practices drew largely upon a common vocabulary of Christian mortuary rites, individual cemeteries demonstrate idiosyncratic preferences in traits including positioning of the body, the shape of the grave, the prevalence of "multiple burials" (ie the interment of more than one individual in a single burial plot), the frequency of clothed burial, or the selection of specific objects and materials placed with the dead. At St Margaret in Combusto (Norwich), a documented place of burial for hanged felons (12th-15th century), excavations revealed that 40% of interments were part of multiple burials that included prone individuals, dumped in the grave face down.[77] These non-normative burial rites were expedient measures tolerated within consecrated ground.
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