“A worthy Galloway minister, feeling that the newly-passed Poor Law Act with its assessments was burdensome to his flock, seriously proposed to the Parochial Board of his district that to narrow down the rates a ‘slip-coffin’ should be made for the poor, out of which the body could be slipped into its narrow home. The proposal met with scant consideration, and during the rest of his lifetime the well-meaning man was known as ‘Slip.’”[(77)]
A Galloway Funeral of Other Days.
Sketch by J. Copland, Dundrennan.
Before the days of hearses the coffin was borne to the grave on two long poles or hand-spokes. Over the simple bare coffin the “mort-cloth” was spread, for the use of which the “Kirk-Session” made a charge, the money received being devoted to the relief of the poor of the parish. As superstitious custom refused the rites of Christian burial to those who died by their own hand, so was also the use of the “mort-cloth” withheld.
Until comparatively recent days the bodies of suicides were buried at the meeting of four cross roads, or at all events at some lonely, unfrequented spot, the remains having not unusually the additional indignity of being impaled by a stake practised upon them. It is of interest to note that the name of the “Stake Moss,” Sanquhar, may be traced to this callous practice.
A superstition of the churchyard itself that still lingers and is worthy of notice, is that the north side is less hallowed than the other portions of “God’s Acre.” The origin of this comes from the Scriptural description of the last judgment (Matthew xxv.), which tells how “He shall set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on His left.”
A recent local writer has thus embodied the idea and its probable derivation:—
“This superstition (he says) is said to have originated in the New Testament story of the Day of Judgment, when the Lord on entering His house (the entrance of the old churches being at the west end, or on the south near the west) would separate the sheep from the goats—the former to His right hand, the south; and the latter to his left, the north. Our forefathers would not see their dear ones among the goats, ‘for evil,’ said they, ‘is there.’ This credulous imagining is not exemplified in the kirkyard alone. Many of our old pre-Reformation churches exhibit evidence of the superstition in the entire absence of windows in their north walls; and in general it would appear that in mediæval times there was a common belief in the evil influence of the north, and that thence came all kinds of ill.
“In Sanquhar Kirkyard it is evident that the superstition prevailed until comparatively modern times, for there are no headstones on the north side of the kirk earlier than the beginning of the last century, all the older monuments being to the south of the kirk, and at its east and west ends.”[(78)]