Dr Rugg has made the academic study of churchyard, burial-ground and cemetery provision and management from the nineteenth century her own. In her 1988 PhD thesis, sadly unpublished but now available for free download via the British Library's EThOS service, she cautioned against the then current paradigm of the academic study of places for the burial of the dead which had been set by the London-centric prosopographical studies of Edwin Chadwick by Finer and Lewis and studies of Victorian funerary architecture and memorialisation by Morley and Stevens Curl. In her thesis she comprehensively examined the incidence and use made of private joint-stock cemetery companies to expand ground available for burial, showing, among other things, how they were frequently promoted by non-conformists as a means of evading the unwelcome strictures on the exercise of the common-law right of burial in Anglican churchyards.

Churchyard and Cemetery looks at the other side of the coin – the public provision of grounds for burial by the church, by Burial Boards established under the Burial Acts from the 1850s onwards and by local authorities later. The focus of her study is 277 settlements in the central portion of the old North Riding of Yorkshire where burials took place between 1850 and 2007. In 1850 16 per cent of these had no burial space of their own, 2 per cent had a denominational burial space only, 5 per cent had both an Anglican and one or more denominational burial grounds, and the remainder had only an Anglican churchyard. Though the area suffered as a whole from depopulation, fresh burial space had to be found, whether from necessity or from growing popular reluctance to have corpses disturbed and increasing popular desire for memorials. Through a painstaking examination, in the main, of the records of parishes and burial boards that survive in the record repositories of Yorkshire, Rugg has studied the process of responding to this need.

Early chapters deal with: the previously unstudied process of closing burial grounds by Order in Council under the Burial Acts (25 Orders were made before 1894); churchyard extension and its facilitation by the Consecration of Churchyards Act of 1867 (there were at least 256 extensions during the period of the study and this was by far the most common response to the need for more burial space, partly because it was the least cumbersome); and the establishment of burial boards (18 or 19 had been set up by 1894). Rugg then turns her attention to denominational burial space and local responses to the Burial Laws (Amendment) Act 1880, which was designed to give non-conformists access to Anglican burial grounds on terms more acceptable to them but which fewer people resorted to than might be expected, partly because the denominations to the fore in the campaign for this reform were not those most represented in the study area and partly because of the fleeting contact of non-conformist ministers with their congregations on the one hand and the long incumbencies of Anglican ministers on the other. She examines the increase in the completely secular provision of burial space as a result of the Public Health (Interments) Act of 1879, the Local Government Act of 1894 and the Burial Act of 1900, which finally terminated the right of an Anglican parson to a fee for burials in consecrated ground even where he had not performed any service. Lastly Rugg looks at the changing appearance of churchyards and cemeteries during the period of the study as both became more bureaucratically managed. She does not refer to the Places of Worship Sites Acts of 1873 and 1882, presumably because burial space was not provided in the study area under their provisions.

Dr Rugg is not a lawyer: Hoare v Ram excepted, readers will not read here of the many cases referred to in Brooke Little's book on The Law of Burial. Yet they will read of legal disputes and uncertainties as burial-ground controllers queried the exact meaning and effect of closure orders (whose terms appear to have been remarkably variable), or, as in the Llanfrothen burial case in north Wales, donors of land for burial sought to confine its use to Anglicans. Lawyers may pause to check some minor points of legal detail. A curious one relates to the ways in which a churchyard could be closed to further burials. Rugg refers to what she calls closure by ‘consent’, of which her earliest example comes from 1850. She does not explain whose ‘consent’ was given or required. In the interwar years of the twentieth century, Orders in Council closing churchyards dropped to almost nil and churchyards, it seems, were closed unilaterally. Rugg quotes a Diocesan Registrar in 1927 advising a vicar that closure by Order in Council was very seldom resorted to ‘and it is usually considered sufficient if notice is given to the Parish Council that the churchyard is full or will be full at a certain specified time’ (p 334). She asks why the relatively simple expedient of closure by ‘consent’ was not favoured more often than applying for an Order in Council. Is the answer not that, at least in the nineteenth century, an Order in Council was the only way in which the common-law right of burial in a churchyard could be extinguished, the law of nuisance and particular statutory provision apart? This was a right of all parishioners, including, in a sense, those as yet unborn. Moreover, only with an Order in Council behind them could churchwardens or parochial church councils compel local authorities to bear first the cost, and later the responsibility, of maintaining closed churchyards. Rugg suggests instead that before the Local Government Act of 1972 this could be done without an Order in Council.

But this is to quibble. The book is a well-conceived, meticulously undertaken, rich and highly nuanced account of how national legislation and Anglican governance played out in one rural area of the country. Just as her doctoral thesis led her to enter a caution about the then received view of commercial cemeteries, so this account leads her to question two contemporary theses about the process of public burial-ground provision: first, that it is an example of Foucaultian hegemonic aggrandisement and, second, that, from the Burial Acts of the 1850s onwards it has been a steady process of secularisation, a thesis to which Rugg admits having previously hearkened. In fact in 2007 in the study area, despite the existence of forty-three publicly provided cemeteries created since 1850, there were thirty more active churchyards than earlier (though some were open only for the reception of cremated remains); and this is to ignore the existence of consecrated ground in cemeteries. For urban and other rural areas, a less nuanced account than Rugg's might turn out to be appropriate, but anyone bent on writing seriously about almost any aspect of burial-ground provision in England and Wales from the 1850s onward will ignore this book at their peril.