Carnary

The rugged walls, which formed the gateway and part of the ancient monastery, in this supposition, must have been the work of Walkelin; the chapel and carnary are evidently of a later date, by more than a century.

Green relates that Bishop de Blois built a carnary chapel at Worcester, that is, a crypt with a chapel over it; in the former were laid all the bodies disinterred during the restoration of the cathedral; in the latter, chaplains said service, and Walter de Cantelupe, bishop in 1265, consecrated it to the honour of God, SS. Mary and Thomas, (Worcester, i. 55).

These carnaries, or charnel houses , were intended to supplement the wholly inefficient churchyards of large cities, which in times of pestilence became so hideously choked that frightful heaps of bones were constantly to be seen on the surface of the soil, sometimes with the half-decomposed flesh adhering to them.

In the latter were buried Sir John Wodehouse, in 1430, and his wife, whose skeletons were found entire in 1850, when the carnary was rescued from the ignoble use of a wine cellar.

The Carnary College was founded by bishop Salmon in 1316 with four priests (six after 1322) to pray for him and other bishops of Norwich and to preserve bones in the chapel crypt (carnary or charnel).