The application followed the creation of the Washburn Heritage Project from the demolition of a hearse house and extension to the church. The works had required the exhumation of some 154 sets of skeletal remains, for which the petitioners sought a faculty for re-interment at a commemoration service. Although there was no objection to the petition, a judgment was warranted by the fact that no authority had been given for the exhumations, either by faculty or by licence of the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). In considering the consequences of this failure, the chancellor held that the permission granted under this petition could operate as a confirmatory faculty for the exhumations. However, a confirmatory faculty could not operate retrospectively and so could not relieve those who conducted the exhumations from the criminal consequences of breaching section 25 of the Burial Act 1857 by conducting an exhumation with neither faculty nor an MoJ licence. The chancellor nevertheless noted the success of the Washburn Heritage Project and commended the sensitivity and thought behind the proposals for re-interment. He found that the failure to obtain appropriate permissions for the exhumations resulted from ignorance and a failure to recognise that the faculty granted did not cover the exhumations. Accordingly, a faculty was granted for the burial of 15 sets of identified remains with individual headstones, a further 7 sets of identified remains to be interred with a single memorial, the replacement of a damaged nineteenth-century gravestone with a copy and the re-interment of another set of identified remains in an existing family grave. There were 132 sets of unidentified remains, which would be buried in a single mass grave with appropriate memorial. In order to provide a historic context, the memorials were to include wording that testified to their removal from other parts of the graveyard and their re-interment during the construction of the Heritage Centre.

The faculty also provided for a list to be lodged of artefacts to be displayed in the Heritage Centre, with the remainder of such artefacts being buried in the mass grave. After considering the list, the chancellor delivered an addendum to the judgment providing that non-personal items such as coffin plates, windows, handles, coins, pottery fragments and animal bones could be displayed in the museum. Personal items such as buckles, buttons, shroud pins and beads should be re-interred with the remains, reflecting the fact that they were originally consigned to ‘God's acre’ in perpetuity with their owners. [Catherine Shelley]