 Funeral
Traditions In History
A great deal is known about English funerary customs through the centuries,
both in their religious and their social aspects. Naturally, the picture
is fullest for the better-off classes, but since Victorian folklorists
were interested in life-cycle customs, certain aspects of lower-class
funerals, which struck them as archaic or quaint, are regularly described,
especially for rural districts. Their descriptions, however, are not total;
they are apt to omit aspects, which, being standard procedure in their
own class too, did not by their definition count as folklore, notably
the purely religious ritual. Some things often went unmentioned because
of their very familiarity, such as the rule that a corpse must be carried
feet first, whether inside a coffin or not.
In medieval times, each parish had a burial guild, which supplied bearers
to carry the corpse; the coffin, however, was parish property, and the
corpse would be buried in its shroud, the coffin being taken back for
re-use. After 1552, the Book of Common Prayer required the service to
take place out in the churchyard, leading to the invention of the lych-gate
and the portable bier. Responsibility for organizing the funeral rested
with the family, apart of course from the service itself. By mid-Victorian
times the middle classes had handed over their arrangements to professional
undertakers, but working-class funerals were still basically personal
affairs until the 20th century. Despite local variations, the following
account in 1914, recalling childhood memories of village life in Derbyshire,
can be taken as typical of 19th-century rural custom:
On the day of burial a table was set outside the cottage door, on which
were set a bowl of box and yew sprays, a plateful of bread (each slice
cut in four), half a cheese, a plateful of plum cake, a bottle of homemade
wine, a large jug of beer, and various glasses and wine-glasses—most
of the latter, as well as the white table-cover, having been lent by my
mother. When the funeral-folk assembled about the door, having been bidden
by the ‘laying-out woman’, the bowl of box and yew sprays
was offered round, and each person took a piece. Then a tray of funeral
cakes was brought out of the house in packets. Each packet contained two
cakes wrapped in white paper, on which was printed a suitable verse of
poetry. Each guest, including also the bearers, was presented with a packet.
When this part of the ceremony was over, the table was cleared and the
coffin brought out of the house and laid upon it—open, so that friends
might take the ‘last look’. The funeral man (undertaker) then
closed and screwed down the lid, produced from a large box a number of
‘weepers and scarves’ with which he decked the relations as
mourners, and arranged the procession to the grave. As a rule there were
two sets of bearers, for the churches were distant, and all the village
folk had to walk. After the service each person stepped to the graveside
for a last look (a formal matter not to be omitted), and the sprigs of
box and yew were dropped on to the coffin. The whole party with the parson
(if he was willing) then returned to take tea in the house.
Whilst they were away all the death-tokens had been removed, the windows
set open, and the pictures, looking-glasses and furniture stripped of
the white cloths with which they had been covered from the time of the
‘laying-out’ to the departure of the body. The talk at the
tea-table was of the dead and others who had predeceased him, and the
room was a gossips' rally until the eatables and drinkables were consumed
and the company dispersed. In the arrangements there were many variations
according to the age, sex, and station of the dead.
In this account, the food and drink was displayed before the coffin left
the house, recalling an older custom common along the Welsh Border, and
in the Midlands and northern counties (especially Yorkshire), where mourners
ate around the coffin before setting out for the church. Sweet biscuits,
cakes, bread and cheese, wine, and beer were served; a share was sometimes
given to the poor, in the house or at the graveside. The custom derives
from two pre-Reformation rites: taking Communion at the Requiem Mass,
and giving alms to the poor so that they too would pray for the dead.
Its continued symbolic importance among Protestants is well attested;
in 1671, for instance, a French visitor described how at the funeral of
a nobleman in Shrewsbury relatives and friends assembled in the house
to hear a funeral oration from a clergyman, during which ‘there
stood upon the coffin a large pot of wine, out of which everyone drank
to the health of the deceased, hoping he might surmount the difficulties
he had to encounter in his road to Paradise’ (Burne, 1883: 309-10).
In Derbyshire in the 1890s it was said that at a funeral ‘every
drop you drink is a sin which the deceased has committed, you thereby
take away the dead man's sins and bear them yourself’(Addy, 1895:
123-4); in Herefordshire around 1910, a man was urged, ‘But you
must drink, sir. It is like the Sacrament. It is to kill the sins of my
sister’.
In a simple ‘walking funeral’, as described above, the bearers
were friends and relatives, and chosen, if possible, to reflect the status
of the deceased: older people, especially if married, would be carried
by married men; unmarried girls by young women (or young bachelors, if
the road to the church was a long one); babies and little children by
older children in white. They were generally given black gloves, scarves,
and hatbands. In more elaborate funerals, a pall (hired from the parish
or the undertaker) covered both coffin and coffin-bearers, its hem being
held by pall-bearers. Funerals of the wealthy and the nobility were far
more lavish; they involved long processions of mourners (at first on foot,
later in carriages), increasingly elaborate horse-drawn hearses, displays
of black plumes and velvet drapes, richly lined coffins, attendant ‘mutes’,
and so forth. At the opposite end of the scale was the ‘pauper's
funeral’—a cheap coffin pushed on a hand-cart, as remembered
in the children's rhyme:
Rattle his bones over the stones,
He's only a pauper whom nobody owns.
(Thomas Noel, “The Pauper's Drive”)
An odd but widespread notion, whose origin has never been explained,
was that any path along which a corpse was carried thereby became a public
right-of-way. In some localities, there were traditions that the funeral
procession must approach the church by a rightward circuit, or take one
particular road rather than another, or pause at specified spots on the
way. Gentle rain was welcome, as a token of God's mercy and blessing,
but a storm boded ill for the dead man's soul; so did any untoward accident,
for example the coffin slipping, or horses finding it hard to draw the
hearse.
During the First World War, public ceremonial at upper- and middle-class
funerals was much reduced, and did not reappear thereafter; nevertheless,
some close-knit working-class communities in cities kept up lavish Victorian
customs, such as the hearse drawn by horses in black canopies, with ostrich
plumes on the roof. Press reports and photographs of such funerals still
occasionally appear. The use of flowers has increased, both as professional
wreaths at the funeral itself, and as informal tributes at the grave or
roadside memorial. The post-funeral buffet meal is as important as ever,
though now more often held in a hotel or pub than at home.
Cremation has increased sharply since the 1930s, and is now chosen for
about 70 per cent of deaths; in many cases it consists of a service in
the crematorium chapel rather than in the deceased's own church (if any).
Currently, in reaction against the impersonality of traditional funerals
and cremations, a trend towards variation and individuality can be seen
in, for instance, the choice of music and readings, and the display of
objects symbolizing the life of the deceased person. At the Anglican funeral
of a morris dancer, his hat lay on the coffin, and the men of his side
danced in the aisle (Walter, 1990: 16); during the requiem for a Catholic
nun in 1998, the Latin grammar she had used as a teacher was put on the
coffin, alongside her Bible and a rose (JS). Other recent developments
are the popularity of memorial services some months after the death, to
mark the public aspects of a person's career and achievements; funerals
for stillborn babies and miscarriages, very different from former attitudes
towards the unbaptized (Walter, 1990: 271-80); and new rituals devised
by Wiccans and other neopagan groups.
Cremation is an old custom; it was the usual mode of disposing of a corpse
in ancient Rome (along with graves covered with heaped mounds, also found
in Greece, particularly at the Karameikos graveyard in Monastiraki). Vikings
were occasionally cremated in their longships, and afterwards the location
of the site was marked with standing stones. In recent years, despite
the objections of some religious groups, cremation has become more and
more widely used. Orthodox Judaism and the Eastern Orthodox Church forbid
cremation, as do most Muslims. Orthodox Judaism forbids cremation according
to Jewish law (Halakha) believing that the soul of a cremated person cannot
find its final repose. The Roman Catholic Church forbade it for many years,
but since 1963 the church has allowed it so long as it is not done to
express disbelief in bodily resurrection. The church specifies that cremated
remains are either buried or entombed. They do not allow cremated remains
to be scattered or kept at home. Many Catholic cemeteries now have columbarium
niches for cremated remains, or specific sections for those remains. Some
denominations of Protestantism allow cremation, the more conservative
denominations generally do not.
Ancient Funeral Rites
The most simple and natural kind of funeral monuments, and therefore
the most ancient and universal, consist in a mound of earth, or a heap
of stones, raised over the body or ashes of the departed: of such monuments
mention is made in the Book of Joshua, and in Homer and Virgil.
The place of burial amongst the Jews was never particularly determined.
Ancient Jews had burial-places upon the highways, in gardens, and upon
mountains. In the Hebrew Bible (known as the Christian Old Testament),
Abraham was buried with Sarah, his wife, in the cave in Machpelah, the
field he bought from Ephron the Hittite; David, king of Israel, and the
other kings after him (including Uzziah of Judah) "rested with [their]
ancestors" in the burial field that pertained to the kings.
The primitive Greeks were buried in places prepared for that purpose
in their own houses; but later they established burial grounds in desert
islands, and outside the walls of towns, by that means securing them from
disturbance, and themselves from the liability of catching infection from
those who had died of contagious disorders.
Funerals in Ancient Rome
In ancient Rome, the eldest surviving male of the household, the pater
familias, was summoned to the death-bed, where he attempted to catch and
inhale the last breath of the decedent.
Funerals of the socially prominent were usually undertaken by professional
undertakers called libitinarii. No direct description has been passed
down of Roman funeral rites. These rites usually included a public procession
to the tomb or pyre where the body was to be cremated. The most noteworthy
thing about this procession was that the survivors bore masks bearing
the images of the family's deceased ancestors. The right to carry the
masks in public was eventually restricted to families prominent enough
to have held curule magistracies. Mimes, dancers, and musicians hired
by the undertakers, as well as professional female mourners, took part
in these processions. Less well to do Romans could join benevolent funerary
societies (collegia funeraticia) who undertook these rites on their behalf.
Nine days after the disposal of the body, by burial or cremation, a feast
was given (cena novendialis) and a libation poured over the grave or the
ashes. Since most Romans were cremated, the ashes were typically collected
in an urn and placed in a niche in a collective tomb called a columbarium
(literally, "dovecote"). During this nine day period, the house
was considered to be tainted, funesta, and was hung with yew or cypress
branches to warn by passers. At the end of the period, the house was swept
in an attempt to purge it of the dead person's ghost.
Several Roman holidays commemorated a family's dead ancestors, including
the Parentalia, held February 13 through 21, to honor the family's ancestors;
and the Lemuria, held on May 9, 11, and 13, in which ghosts (larvæ)
were feared to be active, and the pater familias sought to appease them
with offerings of beans.
The Romans prohibited burning or burying in the city, both from a sacred
and civil consideration, so that the priests might not be contaminated
by touching a dead body, and so that houses would not be endangered by
funeral fires.
Restrictions on the length, ostentation, expense of and behaviour during
funerals and mourning were gradually restricted by a variety of law-givers.
Often the pomp and length of rites could be politically or socially motivated
to advertise or aggrandise a particular kin group in Roman society. This
was seen as deleterious to society and conditions for grieving were set
- for instance, under some laws, women were prohibited from loud wailing
or lacerating their faces and limits were introduced for expenditure on
tombs and burial clothes.
The Romans commonly built tombs for themselves during their lifetime.
Hence these words frequently occur in ancient inscriptions, V.F. Vivus
Facit, V.S.P. Vivus Sibi Posuit. The tombs of the rich were usually constructed
of marble, the ground enclosed with walls, and planted round with trees.
But common sepulchres were usually built below ground, and called hypogea.
There were niches cut out of the walls, in which the urns were placed;
these, from their resemblance to the niche of a pigeon-house, were called
columbaria.
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