While funerals in seventeenth-century Virginia were solemn occasions, there was an inescapable social aspect to the gatherings of family and friends, who assembled from the countryside, both to comfort the bereaved and attend the departed on his last journey. When a planter or a member of his family died, messengers were sent out at once by sloop or shallop up and down the rivers or later, overland, on horseback. If the family bore arms, the hatchment, emblazoned with this emblem, was hung upon the door. Incidentally, the only known hatchment, that has survived in Virginia, is in possession of the Carter family at "Shirley" in Charles City County.
At once, preparations were begun to accommodate the relatives and friends who were sure to assemble for the last rites. Coming from a distance, they would be hungry upon arrival, and not only was a great amount of food prepared but the cellar was explored for its contents of drink, which the company expected to be brought forth. Occasionally, a man, in making his will, directed what should be spent for the "funeral meats" and drink, although Edmund Watts of York County, in 1675, forbade the serving of drinks at his funeral.
At the final rites for John Smalcomb in 1645, the company consumed a steer and a barrel of strong beer, the cost of which amounted to 960 pounds of tobacco, while the coffin cost only 250 pounds. The gathering assembled in 1678, for the funeral of Mrs. Elizabeth (Worsham) Epes, widow successively of William Worsham and Francis Epes of Henrico County, consumed a steer, three sheep, five gallons of wine, two gallons of brandy, ten pounds of butter and eight pounds of sugar.
The firing of guns was accepted as a regular feature of a funeral, and at the Smalcomb rites the powder spent amounted to twenty-four pounds of tobacco. In order to curb the waste of ammunition at entertainments, the Assembly, in 1655, passed an act forbidding its use on occasions except at "marriages and funerals."
In addition to expenditures as aforesaid and for the coffin, the latter usually made by some local carpenter, there were costs for notifying the countryside, costs for mourning bands, sitting up with the corpse, and the fee for the funeral sermon. If burial was in the churchyard, there was the cost of digging and filling the grave. The cost of a winding sheet of Holland (coarse unbleached linen), in 1652, was 100 pounds of tobacco. The cost of the funeral sermon in two instances in York County in 1667, was two pounds sterling each and in 1690, five pounds sterling.
As there were no undertakers, the laying out of the corpse was a tender ministration for which some close friend of the family volunteered. The technique for this service was passed from generation to generation and only in comparatively recent years has that custom been abandoned altogether.
The company of relatives and friends, who gathered for the funeral occasion, remained for several days and were, of course, fed and housed at the expense of the deceased's estate.
The law required that servants be buried in public cemeteries established for the purpose. This decree issued in the seventeenth century followed several scandals, occasioned by private funerals of deceased servants. In order to remove all possibility of suspicion, prior to burial, several neighbors were summoned to view the corpse, if death occurred under extraordinary circumstances, and to accompany the body to the grave. That such precautions were taken as early as 1629, so that possible murder would not go undetected, is shown in testimony before the General Court at Jamestown after the newly-born bastard child of a servant girl was found dead. Several persons were called as witnesses, and when evidence was produced that the child might have been born alive, the serving maid's master was required to give bond for her appearance at a higher court.
Tombstones
The well-to-do planters or their families invariably saw that appropriate tombstones with proper inscriptions—lengthy ones, characteristic of the day—were duly placed. Some of these stones remain with barely legible inscriptions; others, the inscriptions on which, fortunately, were copied in a past era, have disappeared altogether. The oldest tombstone in Virginia with a legible inscription is that of Mrs. Alice Jordan at "Four Mile Tree" in Surry County. The inscription, reciting that she was the wife of George Jordan, gives praise in verse to her virtues.