Eccl. [L. fossor in late L. sense of ‘grave-digger.’] An officer of the early Church charged with the burial of the dead.
1854. Cdl. Wiseman, Fabiola (1855), 205. ‘I saw it all,’ answered the old fossor, ‘and it would have been intolerably frightful in another. He had been first placed on the rack, and variously tormented, and he had not uttered a groan; when the judge ordered that horrid bed, or gridiron, to be prepared and heated.’
1877. Withrow, Catacombs of Rome (ed. 3), 519. A very numerous class in the economy of the primitive church was that of the fossors, or grave-diggers, by whose labours these vast labyrinths were excavated.
