Gravedigger
If the grave is in a cemetery on the property of a church or other religious organization (part of, or called, a churchyard), gravediggers may be members of the decedent's family or volunteer parishioners.
In municipal and privately owned cemeteries, gravediggers may be low-paid, unskilled and temporary labourers, or they may be well-paid, trained and professional careerists, as their duties may include landscaping tasks and courteous interactions with mourners and other visitors.
A template, in the form of a wooden frame built to prescribed specifications, is often placed on the ground over the intended grave.
Additionally, on the day of the back-fill and for the funeral service, typically artificial turf will be placed around the grave whilst the coffin is being lowered.
[3] In the Gesta apud Zenophilum by St. Optatus of Mileve, a reference is made to the character of the fossors as an order of inferior clergy.
Speaking of the "house in which Christians assembled" at Cirta in the year 303, during the persecution of Diocletian, this writer enumerates first the higher orders of the clergy present, from the bishop to the subdeacons, and then mentions by name the fossors Januarius, Heraclius, Fructuosus, et ceteris fossoribus.
St. Jerome alludes to fossors as clerici, and a sixth-century chronicle edited by Cardinal Mai enumerates the (minor) orders of the clergy as ostiarius, fossorius, lector, etc.
For example, in the cemetery of St. Cyriacus, two women bought from the fossor Quintus a bisomus, or double grave, retro sanctos (behind and near a martyr's tomb), and there are several other references to this practice.
[3] The corporation of fossors probably did not consist merely of the labourers who excavated the galleries of the catacombs; it also included the artists who decorated the tombs, as appears from another allusion in the Gesta apud Zenophilum already cited.
The figures are represented pointing toward three Eucharistic scenes, a reference to another of their duties, which was to exclude unauthorized persons from taking part in the liturgical celebrations held occasionally in the cemeteries in commemoration of martyrs.
They enter and begin digging a grave for the newly deceased Ophelia, discussing whether or not she deserves a Christian burial after having killed herself.
The scene ends with Hamlet's soliloquies regarding the circle of life prompted by his discovery of the skull of his beloved jester, Yorick.
[16] In 1979, in what came to be called the Winter of Discontent, British gravediggers and crematorium workers in Liverpool and Manchester, took industrial action for the first time.
Other alternatives were considered, including allowing the bereaved to dig their own funeral's graves, deploying troops, and engaging private contractors to inter the bodies.
In their later memoirs, Labour Leader James Callaghan and Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey both blamed NUPE for letting the strike go on as long as it did, as would Conservatives.
