Death in England is a fascinating book with many wonderful illustrations and intriguing quotes from old documents. I was especially interested by the way fashions in death seem to swing like a pendulum backwards and forwards, though often accelerating under the impact of disasters such as the great plagues or the two world wars.
The book does not cover the Quaker use of orchard and garden burials back in the 17th century but it does contain an even earlier 15th century instance of 'nature reserve' burial, a foretaste of the woodland burial movement of today. John Reve, a glover of Beccles, on April 18th 1430 confesses in the Bishop's Palace in Norwich "that I have held, believed and affirmed that it as great merit, reward and profit to all Christ's people to be buried in middens, meadows or in the wild fields as it is to be buried in churches or churchyards."
The church evidently considered such beliefs to be pagan and heretical, whereas nowadays they are coming round to the idea, with two Church of England woodland burial grounds about to open, one with the excellent slogan "Go wild when you die!"
The Natural Death Centre has also encouraged a turning away from the practice of embalming. Already in the 1570s, various aristocratic women were in revolt against having their entrails removed after death, prior to embalming. The Countess of Northumberland wrote that she would be "loath to come into the hands of any living man, be he physician or surgeon".
The Carlisle cemetery has in the last few years begun selling a woollen shroud for burial, for those not wanting a coffin. This book tells how, even into the sixteenth century, shroud burials were the norm amongst the lower classes, although a few parishes had a reusable communal coffin in which parishioners could be carried to the grave. Before the Civil War, of those sufficiently wealthy to write wills, "coffined burials occurred widely in Kent, about half the time in Berkshire and only infrequently in Lincolnshire". Some notables and aristocracy preferred shrouds - in 1639 the Duchess of Richmond likened her grave to her marriage bed: "let them wind me up again in those sheets ... wherein my Lord and I first slept when we were married"; and John Donne the poet commissioned a picture of himself in his winding sheet "tied with knots at his head and feet", showing his "lean, pale and death-like face" - a picture he kept at his bedside "where it ... became his hourly object till his death" - echoing up the centuries to the New Age practice of death meditations.
The Western followers of Tibetan Buddhism who today aspire to a conscious death have their antecedents in England's medieval period, with the office for the dead in the Sarum missal, for instance, pleading with "almighty and merciful God ... that he may not lose by a sudden death the fruits of that repentance which his soul desired". Sudden terminal illnesses or death in one's sleep were dreaded. The dying were expected to await death patiently, often holding a crucifix. Those around the deathbed are warned not to give the dying person hope of recovery or to distract him with talk of worldly possessions. Only in the more rationalist 18th century did writers begin to warn against reading too much into the final death scene. Richard Baxter, for instance, commented that the very best man might die in a violent frenzy or distraction.
The first undertaker is relatively late appearing on the scene. Some historians identify him as William Russell, a painter of scrutcheons and hatchments for full heraldic funerals who in the 1680s took up the additional trade of coffin-making "and all other conveniences belonging to funerals", his trade card illustrated with a skull and cross bones.
The 1850s version of the Natural Death Centre was the church-inspired National Funeral and Mourning Association which called for moderation in funeral costs, with undertakers slowly being obliged to offer cheaper funerals. By 1894 the Lancet was able to rejoice that funeral expenditure "of £10 or £15 will allow everything being completed in good taste and reverence, but without any excess". I was not altogether surprised to learn that the British Undertakers Association - which later became today's National Association of Funeral Directors - was set up as a protective grouping to keep prices up.
But I have given an incomplete and biased view of this book. The following adapted extracts from the book's introductory summary take the reader from Neolithic times to the present day.
In the Neolithic period, human bone was an important constituent in ritual of differing kinds. Interment of corpses in chambers produced bones that could either reside in repositories or be circulated among locations. Complex rules were followed to associate such bones with pottery or with the bones of wild or domesticated animals.
In the Bronze Age, individual burials more often retained their skeletal integrity, although cremation deposits could contain the mixed remains of several people. Interments still accumulated within cemeteries, while prominent barrows and rich grave items proclaimed the status of lineages.
A closer link between living places and burial became evident during the second millennium BC.
For the Roman period the evidence is comparatively substantial as graves, cemeteries and tombstones survive. Furthermore, sources from elsewhere in the Roman world record aspects of funeral ritual and the death industry. But was there standardisation across the Roman world? In England, did distinctions between Roman and local practices persist? Whether the dead were cremated or inhumed is a critical issue. The shift to burial eventually created a common rite across England even though the original impetus for the change remains unknown.
From the twelfth century, the formalisation of the doctrine of Purgatory and its steady dissemination throughout society brought a significant shift in the way contemporaries thought about death and the afterlife. This led ultimately to the erection of a massive edifice of postmortem prayers and charitable works to help the souls of the dead towards salvation. In other respects, notably in ideas about the body after death and the status of ghosts, popular thinking was less clearly in step with official teaching. The impact of the Black Death at the end of the period was initially to intensify existing ways of thinking about death rather than to transform them altogether. The emphasis on the macabre, often seen as characteristic of the post-plague world, was in fact well established by the beginning of the fourteenth century and the Church had long urged Christians to contemplate their own mortality by stressing the transience of life and the corruptibility of the body.
Was there a 'new' death in the late Middle Ages, a sensitivity to physical decay born of the experience of the Black Death and later plagues? If so, what were its parameters and how did contemporaries face its challenge? Whilst morbid depictions of death in the visual arts are undeniable, with death now seen as an attacker, most people seem to have approached death with hope rather than fear. Worms and cadavers notwithstanding, memorials and tomb sculpture offered an optimistic reading of death, whilst manuals of dying offered the prospect of a good death for many. Perhaps more challenging was the sixteenth-century attempt, articulated by the Henrician and Edwardian state during the English Reformation, to redraw the boundaries of death, severing the vital links between the living and the dead which had exemplified the social practice of the late Middle Ages.
The century between the Restoration and the accession of George III experienced high mortality, at least until the I730s, but also the dawn of a new confidence that disease could be curbed. It tolerated growing squalor in London slums, and the overcrowding of urban churchyards, yet cherished an ideal of decency, balance, harmony, restraint and seemliness - in respect of deathbeds, funerals and mourning rituals. This was the great age of classical funeral monuments and dignified prose epitaphs. Substantial headstones began to transform the appearance of churchyards. The testimonies of countless funerary inscriptions and funeral sermons are complemented by descriptions of individual reactions to death in some of the most intimately revealing of all English diaries and private correspondence. The apogee of 'rational religion' was followed by the beginnings of evangelical revival.
Towards the end of the period I760 to I850, the Church had begun to lose its hold on sepulchral matters. The centrality of the church building to death ritual was undermined by the increased use of secular burial places where pagan symbolism could hold sway; and a shift in attention to the feelings of the bereaved over the spiritual fate of the deceased reduced the importance of a clerical presence at the deathbed. Mass movements of thought and feeling also transformed attitudes towards death: the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Evangelicalism had a profound impact on beliefs relating to the afterlife and the experience of loss and bereavement. Large-scale urban mortality established the need for new ways of dealing with the dead, and class divisions infused increasingly commercialised death rituals. The secularisation of death was not achieved smoothly; the period also saw the beginnings of the Gothic Revival and its critique of a lack of spirituality in death ritual.
The traditional Christian ideal of the 'good death' was still exceptionally powerful in I850, though its realisation varied widely according to class, religion, age, gender and disease. Christian mourning rituals and the belief in family reunions in heaven helped to reconcile some parents to high infant and child mortality. Moreover, the solace of the private and social memory of the dead was complemented by visible symbols of remembrance such as paintings, photographs and death masks of the deceased, and mourning jewellery. Attitudes to death were transformed between I850 and I9I8 by the decline in religious beliefs and the significant fall in the death rate, which shifted the likely time of death from infancy to old age. The trauma of the First World War accelerated these changes since Victorian deathbed and mourning rituals were inadequate and inappropriate in the face of mass violent deaths far from home.
The Great War helped usher in an era of dramatically improving health. Death was increasingly deferred to old age. As dying became institutionalised and under medical control, control over funeral arrangements passed further from bereaved families to funeral directors, a process aided by the popularity of cremation. At the same time, greater liberal and secular attitudes led in the I960s to legal reforms in capital punishment and suicide. The secular climate encouraged a wider range of beliefs about life after death, challenging traditional Christian beliefs. New models of 'the good death' were developed by the hospice movement. New attitudes to grieving slowly emerged, challenging the more private expression of grief formed by the two world wars. More open expressions of grief accompanied the series of highly publicised disasters in the I980s and I990s, notably with the death of Princess Diana.
The gradual passing of authority for death from the dying and their kin to professional specialists such as undertakers and doctors is a development increasingly criticised in the later twentieth century. The growing interest in the history of death, of which this book is a part, can be seen as one facet in reversing this process and returning decision-making to the dying and bereaved.
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