Burke and Hare murders Burke and Hare murders The Burke and Hare murders were a series of 16 killings committed over a period of about ten months in 1828 in Edinburgh, Scotland. They were undertaken by William Burke and William Hare, who sold the corpses to Robert Knox for dissection at his anatomy lectures. Edinburgh was a leading European centre of anatomical study in the early 19th century, in a time when the demand for cadavers led to a shortfall in legal supply. Scottish law required that corpses used for medical research should only come from those who had died in prison, suicide victims,
Burial in Anglo-Saxon England some cases, the body was mutilated prior to burial, primarily through decapitation, and there are examples of entire cemeteries being filled with these decapitated corpses, leading archaeologists to conclude that these were sites specifically for the burial of executed individuals. There are few examples of these possible execution cemeteries from the early Anglo-Saxon period, with one exception being the barrow cemetery at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. Here, several burials containing the corpses of individuals who had been hanged, beheaded or in other way mutilated were placed around Mound 5 on the eastern side of the cemetery. Using radiocarbon dating, archaeologists