Britain's first crematorium was tested on a horse in 1879
Cremation is at least 17,000 years old, yet Christian Europe abandoned it for over a millennium. Its modern comeback relied on a steel furnace, fears about disease, and a Welsh druid who won a court case. In 1885 Britain managed just three official cremations out of nearly 600,000 deaths.
The oldest known example is the Mungo Lady, a partly cremated body found at Lake Mungo in Australia and dated to at least 17,000 years ago. Burning and burial both appear in Neolithic Europe and the Middle East, and preferences swung repeatedly. Ancient Egyptian beliefs about the soul forbade cremation. In Rome, cremation largely replaced burial around the mid-Republic, then gave way to burial again by the middle of the Empire. Bronze Age Europe's Urnfield culture, from about 1300 BCE, made cremation the dominant rite. In India it is first attested around 1900 BCE, and Hinduism and Jainism go beyond permitting it to prescribe it.
Christianity ended the practice in Europe, where burning bodies could be illegal or even a capital crime if linked to pagan rites. The church sometimes used it as a posthumous punishment: John Wycliffe's remains were dug up, burned and thrown into a river because he had rejected transubstantiation. The physician Thomas Browne wrote in favour of cremation in 1658, and in 1769 Honoretta Brooks Pratt was illegally cremated in London, the first recorded case in modern Europe.
The revival began in the 1870s. Many supporters believed in miasma, the idea that bad air from corpses spread disease, and in Italy the cause was tied to anticlericalism and Freemasonry. The engineering came from Charles William Siemens's regenerative furnace, which preheats air and fuel using hot bricks and can melt steel. Milan opened the first Western crematorium in 1876. In England the royal surgeon Henry Thompson founded the Cremation Society in 1874, and its Woking furnace was first tested on a horse on 17 March 1879 before the Home Secretary halted the plans.
A strange trial broke the deadlock. In 1884 the Welsh neo-druid William Price was prosecuted for trying to cremate his son and argued successfully that no law made cremation illegal. The following year Woking performed the first official British cremation, of Jeanette Pickersgill. Westminster Abbey began accepting ashes in 1905. Today a cremation leaves on average about 2.4 kilograms of remains, mostly ground bone mineral rather than true ash.
Source: Cremation
