The PCC arranged to sell at auction a painting of the Madonna and Child, by a German painter, Franz Ittenback (1813-1979) at a reserve of £3,000. It was sold for £20.000 to a dealer, who spent a considerable amount on restoring it before it came to the attention of the Archdeacon that the painting had been sold without the authority of a Faculty. The PCC then sought a Confirmatory Faculty. In a long judgment the Chancellor sets out the law relating to objects belonging to churches and the obligations of churchwardens, and explains that no title can pass when an object such as the painting is sold without the authority of a Faculty. The Church Buildings Council objected to the sale. The Chancellor determined that the reasons for granting a Confirmatory Faculty outweighed the reasons for not doing so.

A baby girl had died at birth, though a twin had survived. The baby had been buried in the churchyard of a village in Devon. Six months after the burial, the mother had managed to free herself from her relationship with the father of the baby, from whom she had suffered domestic abuse for two years and she sought help from local domestic abuse professionals and the police. The father had been given a prison sentence for offences relating to abuse. The mother returned to live with her parents in another village. She suffered post-traumatic stress symptoms and could not contemplate visiting the village where the baby was buried. She therefore wished to have the baby’s remains exhumed and reinterred in the village where she and her parents lived. The father objected, as he was under a restraining order not to visit that village. The Chancellor was satisfied that the need to protect the mother and her surviving daughter was sufficient to establish an exception to the general principle against exhumation, and he therefore granted a faculty.

The petitioner applied for a faculty for the exhumation and reinterment of a body buried (due to an administrative error of the burial authority) in a grave reserved for a member of his family, as part of a block of graves reserved for the family. The Chancellor refused to grant a faculty on the grounds that (a) the desire of the petitioner's family to keep family burials in a rectangular block was just a 'personal preference', which was outweighed by the distress which would be caused to the family of the deceased and the Christian theology of the permanence of burial (the burial authority were willing to grant an exclusive right of burial for the petitioner's family in a plot adjacent to the 'block'); and (b) there had been a delay of one year between the burial in the wrong grave and the lodging of a petition.

The Petitioner sought a faculty to authorise the exhumation of the body of his father from the cemetery at Bloxwich, the interment having taken place in 1985. The Petitioner proposed that his father's remains should be reburied in a recently opened cemetery at Strawberry Lane, Cheslyn Hay, which had been laid out on land which the deceased had formerly farmed. After considering Re Blagdon Cemetery and other judgments, the Chancellor concluded that "the fact that a new cemetery or the like is created after the interment in circumstances where that new cemetery is thought to be a more fitting resting place for the remains in question than the place where they are interred will not, save in the most extreme of cases, be capable of being a special circumstance justifying exhumation."

The Chancellor refused to permit on a headstone a design of two intersecting triangles and a '12 spoked Dharmachakra', an Indian religious symbol, as he could not see in the design anything consistent with the three general principles of honouring the dead, comforting the living, and informing posterity, nor was there anything in the design to indicate the Christian hope of resurrection. 

The petitioners' daughter had died aged 20 in a car accident in 1988 and her ashes had been interred in the cemetery. The petitioners wished to exhume the ashes and reinter them in a full-size plot in the same cemetery, which would become a family grave. There was no evidence of an existing legal right to a grave which could become a family grave. The Chancellor envisaged that, if the petition were dismissed and a family grave was subsequently purchased, the situation would then be different. He was not satisfied that the present circumstances justified exhumation. However, he determined to grant a faculty (without limit of time), which would allow the exhumation and reinterment of the ashes at the time of the first burial of one of the family members identified in the judgment in a grave intended to be a family grave.

The petitioner's father's body had been buried in a triple depth grave in 1976. In 1999 the cremated remains of the petitioner's grandfather had been buried in the same grave at a depth of two feet. The petitioner's mother died and before her death she had expressed a wish for a coffin burial in the same grave as her husband, but this could not be achieved without disturbing the cremated remains in the grave. The Chancellor granted a faculty to allow the cremated remains to be exhumed and reinterred at the head of the grave, in order to allow the burial of the petitioner's mother's body with that of her husband.

The cemetery has two lodges. One has been used for many years as a private residence, and the other as Council offices. The land on which the lodges were built is not consecrated, but the immediately adjacent land used as garden is consecrated. The local Council wished to sell both lodges for use as private residences with gardens. The Chancellor determined that the consecrated pieces of land to be used as gardens (which contained a number of recorded burials, but none within the last 100 years) could not lawfully be sold by the Council, but the Chancellor was willing to grant a faculty to authorise the granting of licences by the Council for the two pieces of land to be used as gardens.

The Chancellor granted a faculty to allow the exhumation of the body of the petitioner's father, who died in 1992, in order that the body might be cremated and the ashes taken to Italy to be interred with the cremated remains of the petitioner's mother, who died in 2015, in a family grave in the village where the petitioners' parents had been brought up and were married.

A husband and wife sought permission to exhume the cremated remains of the wife's father ("the deceased"), who died in 1982, from the consecrated part of Gravesend Cemetery with a view to the remains being scattered in the Thames View Crematorium along with the cremated remains of the deceased's late wife, who had recently died. The Chancellor could find no special circumstance which would justify him in granting a faculty.