The lid of the coffin is not screwed down until all the guests are assembled, and the person whose business it is to see to it, comes into the room where they are met, and invites them to take a last look. Hearses are almost unknown, even in cases where the distance from the house to the cemetery is considerable. The coffin is almost invariably borne on the shoulders by hired bearers, but in former days it was only persons of a certain standing in society who were considered entitled to this honour; the poor were carried by their friends, three on each side, bearing the coffin slung between them. Care was always taken that the corpse was carried to the church by the way the deceased was in the habit of taking during his lifetime.[47]
The custom of females attending funerals, which was formerly universal, has disappeared entirely from the town, but in the country it is still occasionally observed, the mourners being attired in long black cloaks with hoods that almost conceal the face. The funeral feast, when there is one, takes place when the cortège returns to the house of mourning. A chair is placed at the table where the deceased was wont to sit, and a knife, fork, plate, etc., laid before it as if he were still present.[48] Tea and coffee, wine, cider, and spirits, cakes, bread and cheese, and more especially a ham, are provided for the occasion. The last-named viand was, in bygone days, almost considered indispensable, and where they kept pigs,—and almost everyone then kept pigs—every year, when the pig was killed, a ham was put away “in case of a funeral” and was not touched till the next pig was killed and another ham was put in readiness; and from thence it comes that “màngier la tchesse à quiqu’un”—“to eat a person’s ham”—is proverbially used in the sense of attending his funeral. The first glass of wine is drunk in silence to the memory of the departed, whose good qualities are then dilated upon, but the conversation soon becomes general, and it not unfrequently happens that more liquor is imbibed than is altogether good for the guests. In fact the mourners had generally to be conveyed home in carts.[49]
From ancient wills it seems that money was sometimes left for the purpose of clothing a certain number of poor, and from the ordinances of the Royal Court prohibiting begging at funerals, or even the voluntary giving of alms on these occasions, it is not improbable that the custom of distributing doles was, at one time, almost general. There is no trace of it in the present day.
Till within the last few years it was almost an universal custom, even among the dissenters, for the members of a household in which a death had occurred, to attend their parish church in a body on the first or second Sunday after the funeral, and the custom is still kept up to a certain extent. If they are regular frequenters of the church they occupy their usual seats, if not, they are placed, if possible, in some conspicuous part of the building, where they remain seated during the entire service, not rising even during those portions of the service in which standing is prescribed by the rubric. This is called “taking mourning,” in French “prendre le deuil.” Widows remain seated in church during the whole of the first year of their widowhood.
[47] Editor’s Note.—Mr. Allen told me (1896) that attending a short time ago at a funeral in the Mount Durand, the corpse was to be carried to Trinity Church, to which of course the shortest route was down the hill, but the widow of the deceased remonstrated so vigorously, saying that she could not allow anything so unlucky to happen to her husband, as that he should start for his funeral down hill, that, in deference to her wishes they went up the hill and round by Queen’s-road.
[48] At funeral feasts it was an ancient custom in Iceland to leave the place of the dead man vacant.—See Gould’s “Curiosities of Olden Times,” p. 84.
[49] Editor’s Notes.—Unless the forehead of the corpse is touched after death the ghost will walk. When you go into a house of mourning and are shown the corpse you should always lay your hand on its forehead.—From Fanny Ingrouille, of the Forest Parish.
The same idea prevails in Guernsey which we meet with in Yorkshire and many of the Eastern Counties of England that, having your pillow stuffed with pigeons’, doves’, or any wild bird’s feathers will cause you to “die hard.”—See Notes and Queries, 1st Series, Vol. IV.
It is also said that it is unlucky to keep doves in a house, but if they are kept in a cage and anyone dies in the house, unless a crape bow is placed on the top of the cage they will die too.
The country people also believe that no one ever dies when the tide is rising. Frequently when talking of a death they will say, “the tide turned, and took off poor —— with it.”—From Fanny Ingrouille and many others.