One thing you'll notice is that Christian churches tend to orient their altars to face east. This actually started as a pagan tradition by the early sun worshippers. Along the same lines, the dead are buried with their head in the west, and their feet facing east. The important people and martyrs were buried inside the church, and everyone else in the church graveyard.
People were buried as close to each other as possible, all facing east. But you'll notice that the graveyard around a church will be full of stones on the south, east, and west sides, but few on the north side. For here is where the outcasts were buried - criminals and suicides.
"In order to understand the matter we must know that the north or left-hand side of the altar which is, of course, in the chancel at the east end of the church, is known as the Gospel side, whilst the right or south side of the altar is called the Epistle side. In the Roman Catholic church the Epistle is read on the south or Epistle side of the altar, and the Gospel at the north or Gospel side.
Before the Reformation, this country necessarily conformed to this Catholic practice. The underlying idea of this is that the Gospel was preached to "call not the righteous, but sinners to repentance." Hence the side from which the Gospel is read was delegated to those who, having committed crimes, were in greater need of salvation, and those so buried were said to be "out of sanctuary."
If it is thought that this treatment of the social outcast was too severe, what will be said of the earlier custom which denied him even so favoured a position? The body of the suicide has in all times been subject to some sort of penal measures."
In 1582 the Kirk Sessions of Perth refused to allow the corpse of a man who had committed suicide by drowning to be "brought through the town in daylight, neither yet to be buried among the Faithful"--"but in the little inch (island) within the water." To trace the matter still further, we find it laid down by the canons under Egbert, Of A.D. 740, that Christian burial was to be denied to those who laid violent hands upon themselves, and who thus act by any fault, so excluding those who may commit the deed in a state of frenzy. Not unfrequently the suicide was buried in the spirit of charity, without ceremony in the unconsecrated ground in the churchyard as we have seen, but the earlier practice was to take the body away from human habitation and bury it where four roads met.
Various reasons for this strange custom have been given; knowing as we do, that one of the prominent features of the treatment of the dead is the terror which all ages and all peoples have shown at the possibility of the return of a revengeful spirit, we are justified in thinking that the real object was to confuse the mind of the departed as to the direction of his former home, and the fact that it was a common practice to anchor the body down by driving a wooden stake through the heart tends to support this theory. We see the same attempt to "maze" the dead in a sense of direction in another custom, for it was once considered necessary for the funeral procession to return from the graveside a different way to that by which the corpse had been carried, in order to render it more difficult for the departed shade to return if it had any intention of haunting the relatives.
A stake through the heart? Crossroads? Can you say vampire? How about the Crossroads Demon (okay, you have to watch Supernatural to get that one).
So we don't know where John was buried. If he was buried in a churchyard, it would probably be in Mersham Churchyard, now known as St John the Baptist Churchyard. There is no stone that survived, if ever he was privileged to have one, and being a suicide, he would be buried on the north side of the church itself.
Next up, we'll see what happened to John and Margaret's oldest son, Alexander.
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