Patrick Comerford
During my visits in April sunshine to Rugeley, Brereton and Armitage, I heard stories of murder and alleged murder over the centuries in rural Staffordshire.
On Thursday evening (23 April 2026), I recalled one of those stories with tangential links to the Comberford family: Dorothy Chetwynd was said to have murdered her husband Sir Walter Smyth in Elford, and local lore says she was executed by being burnt at the stake on open land for dispatching of the husband who was three times her age.
Other stories of murder and alleged murder are told in the graves of two churchyards in Rugeley.
In the grounds of the Old Chancel to the east of the ruins of Saint Augustine’s Church, an old tomb dating back 230 years to the late 17th century is said to be the grave two ladies were put into sacks and buried alive inside the tomb on the capricious whim of Oliver Cromwell.
On top of the tomb, two carved effigies show two female figures, each tied at the top and bottom in a shroud. These curious effigies are behind a local legend that Cromwell had the sisters buried alive in sack – despite the fact that Cromwell died 40 years died earlier, in 1658.
The two sisters who share this unusual tomb are Elizabeth Cuting, who died in 1695, and Emma Hollinhurst, who died in 1696. At one end of the tomb is a skull and cross bones, a symbol that signified mortality and that is a common adornment on tombs of the time.
The true story of the tomb is connected to a 17th century act that required corpses to be buried in wool. These women were not alone in preferring to be buried in linen shrouds and in defying the legislation, as burial registers show. The two sisters Elizabeth and Emma decided to be buried in linen rather than wool, in defiance of the law. Such defiance would have resulted in a fine … but what judge or court was going to insist two dead women should pay such a penalty, or try to collect it?
Their images on the lid of the tomb of two women in their tied burial shrouds later gave rise to a popular local legend in Rugeley that the two sisters had been buried alive in sacks on the orders of Oliver Cromwell.
The churchyard has been cleared and the stones have been used to pave the site of the nave and north aisle of the Old Chancel. The remains of a late 14th-century penitential cross are still in place, and the tomb is still there too, and is now a Grade II listed monument.
In the churchyard across the street, at Saint Augustine’s Church, built in 1822-1823 to replace the older church now known as the Old Chancel, two graves tell the stories of real rather than legendary murders in the 19th century: the headstone of Christina Collins, murdered on a canal boat in 1839, and the grave of John Parsons Cook, Palmer’s victim., and the grave of John Cook, the friend and last victim of William Palmer, known as the ‘Rugeley Poisoner’ or the ‘Prince of Poisoners’.
But these are stories, perhaps, for another evening.
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