Different perspectives of a recent case of exhumation and reburial are given in the article The grieving widow who exhumed her husband’s body… because he was buried next to the man who ruined his life, (Daily Mail, Sunday 28 September 2025), and the judgment summary Re St. Nicholas Ash [2025] ECC Can 1 (Ecclesiastical Law Association). Allowing for some differences in terminology, together they provide a more complete picture of events.

Re St. Nicholas Ash [2025] ECC Can 1

The summary by Ecclesiastical Law Association (ELA) states:

“A widow and her daughters applied for permission to exhume the body of the widow’s late husband from the grave which had been reserved for him and his wife and to reinter it in another grave in the same churchyard.

The reason given for the petition was that at about the same time as the burial of the widow’s husband another person had been buried in an immediately adjoining grave and it was alleged that that person had financially abused and exploited one of the daughters of the widow, which caused great distress to the family, whenever they visited the grave of the widow’s husband.

The Commissary General granted a faculty: ‘While this may not amount to a serious psychiatric or psychological problem in the medical sense, I nonetheless give weight to the impact of the status quo on the wellbeing of [the] family’”.

The full judgment refers to the person in the next grave as “X”, since for the purposes of the petition:

“[3]. …there is no need for him to be named in this judgment, and doing so would in my view risk causing undue upset to X’s surviving family, given what the Woods family say about X. For the same reasons, I summarise what the Woods family say about X in outline terms”.

Furthermore, the Commissary General made no findings in his judgment about X’s conduct; however, he recorded what the Petitioner said in the statement supporting her petition, i.e. X had financially abused and exploited Mr and Mrs Woods’ daughter many years ago, causing serious distress to the Woods family and causing Mr Woods to spend years paying off the debts said to have been incurred as a result of X’s actions.

Mrs Woods says that her late husband would have been seriously upset had he known he would come to be buried alongside X; she found this proximity abhorrent and could not accept that she should come to be laid to rest in due course with her husband but adjacent to X. This was a matter of serious distress to her and her family, impeding their grieving and healing [4].

The Commissary General was persuaded “though by a slim margin – that the exceptionality threshold was met, and that faculty should be granted”. He was “not in a position to evaluate the merits or accuracy of their account of X’s actions; nothing in this judgment should be taken as a comment on what X did or did not do” [11(i)]; and “also accepted that the immediate adjacency of these two plots was pivotal, and that any space between the two graves would be sufficient to ameliorate the current difficulties” [11(iii)].

Daily Mail article

The “immediate adjacency” of the two plots is evident in the photographs in the article, as is the separation between the “old” and “new” graves, and that of “X” which is labelled as “Nemesis”.  It reiterates that “there is no suggestion that the trustees of The Canonry Benefice, which administers St Nicholas and six other churches in the area around Ash, had any idea of any connection between Mr Woods and “X” when they allocated the latter a plot adjacent to that occupied by the former. This would have been a particular problem given the limited number of grave spaces remaining at that time, 9, and the Church of England requirement to allow the burial of residents within the parish, those named in the church electoral role, and those dying in the parish – provided the churchyard has not been closed by Order in Council.

The Mail article gave fuller details of “X”, including his name, photograph, and an earlier conviction at Canterbury Crown Court in January 2015. It concludes with a comment from “a legal source” who The Daily Mail: “This is one of the more unusual or downright bizarre cases I have ever come across – it’s more like something from Trollope’s Barchester chronicles than from 21st century Britain”.