Definition
A sepulchre is a place of interment for a dead human body — a grave, tomb, or burial chamber. In legal usage, the term refers specifically to the physical site where a corpse has been placed for permanent rest, and carries with it a cluster of common law protections and rights attaching to that place. The violation of a sepulchre — meaning the unauthorized disturbance, desecration, or disinterment of a burial site — constitutes a misdemeanor at common law, reflecting the law's longstanding recognition that the dead and their resting places are entitled to a degree of sanctity enforceable by criminal and civil process.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A burial chamber; also, a recess in some early churches in which the reserved sacrament was kept from Good Friday until Easter.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A tomb; a grave; a place of interment; the receptacle for a dead body.
The common and legal meanings are closer here than with many legal terms, but the ecclesiastical sense — the church recess used for sacramental reservation — has no legal counterpart and can mislead researchers scanning historical texts. Legal sources use sepulchre exclusively in the burial and interment sense. The broader spiritual or architectural meaning found in religious and literary contexts does not carry legal consequence.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "sepulchre" in historical legal sources should recognize it as a term carrying more legal weight than its archaic appearance suggests. Several research traps are worth noting.
First, the common law misdemeanor for violation of sepulchres is distinct from statutory offenses that later developed around grave robbery, desecration of human remains, and interference with burial. Early American and English sources will use "violation of sepulchres" as the operative phrase; later statutory materials may use entirely different language. Cross-referencing these bodies of law requires attention to the terminological shift.
Second, Bouvier raises a specific property-adjacent question: the right of a widow to remove her husband's body from its place of original sepulchre, which Bouvier conditions on whether she consented to the original interment. This is a narrow but important doctrinal point for researchers tracing the law of disinterment and next-of-kin rights over remains. The law in this area developed unevenly across jurisdictions and across time; what Bouvier states as a principle derived from a single Rhode Island case should not be treated as settled universal doctrine.
Third, "sepulchre" appears with some frequency in ecclesiastical law sources, particularly in the context of the right of burial in a particular church or churchyard. The right to a specific sepulchre — meaning a family vault or designated plot — was a recognized legal interest in English ecclesiastical courts. This usage is distinct from the criminal law of violating sepulchres and requires different research pathways.
Finally, the term is largely archaic in contemporary legal drafting, having been displaced by "grave," "tomb," "burial plot," and "place of interment" in modern statutes and cases. Researchers working in modern law should search under those terms but must retain "sepulchre" for historical source searches.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's are in close agreement on the core definition: a grave or tomb, the place of interment of a dead body, with violation of sepulchres a common law misdemeanor. The entries are brief in all three sources, reflecting the term's relatively narrow functional role in the legal lexicon.
Bouvier's adds the most substantive content, noting the question of a widow's right to remove a husband's remains and conditioning that right on her consent to the original interment. Bouvier also cross-references DEAD BODY and CEMETERY, signaling the doctrinal neighborhood where sepulchre sits. Researchers should follow those cross-references; the law governing dead bodies and burial sites is richer and more contested in the historical sources than the brevity of the sepulchre entry suggests.
What all three historical dictionaries omit is any treatment of the ecclesiastical right to burial in a specific place — the proprietary interest in a family vault or designated church sepulchre — which surfaces in English sources but receives no systematic treatment in American legal dictionaries of this era.
Jurisdictional Note
The common law misdemeanor for violation of sepulchres was recognized in both English and American courts, but American states moved at different rates to codify and expand protections through statute. Researchers should expect meaningful variation in how disinterment, desecration, and interference with burial are treated across state codes, particularly where religious or indigenous burial sites are involved.