Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-02T20:55:38.315Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Death and the social order: the funerary preferences of Elizabethan gentlemen

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

David Cressy
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Articles
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , May 1990 , pp. 99 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

ENDNOTES

1 Finucane, R. C., ‘Sacred corpse, profane carrion: social ideals and death rituals in the later middle ages’, in Whaley, Joachim ed., Mirrors of mortality: studies in the social history of death (New York, 1982), 41.Google Scholar For a clear exposition of the power of ritual see Kertzer, David I., Ritual, politics, and power (New Haven and London, 1988), esp. 1–14.Google Scholar For the range of relevant research see Grimes, Ronald L., Research in ritual studies: a programmatic essay and bibliography (London, 1985).Google Scholar For funerals see Huntington, Richard and Metcalf, Peter, Celebrations of death: the anthropology of mortuary ritual (Cambridge, 1979).Google Scholar

2 Ayre, John ed., Sermons of Edwin Sandys (London, 1841), 12Google Scholar; Weever, John, Ancient funeral monuments (London, 1631), 17Google Scholar; see also Pilkington, James, ‘A godlie exposition upon several chapters in Nehemiah’, in Scholefield, James ed., The works of James Pilkington (Cambridge, 1842), 320.Google Scholar

3 James, Mervyn, Society, politics and culture: studies in early modern England (Cambridge, 1986), 176–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stone, Lawrence, The crisis of the aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965), 572–81.Google Scholar

4 Thomas, Keith, Religion and the decline of magic (New York, 1971), 39, 66, 556, 601–5Google Scholar; Stannard, David E., The Puritan way of death: a study in religion, culture and social change (New York, 1977), 96–134Google Scholar; and Gittings, Clare, Death, burial and the individual in early modern England (London, 1984), 86.Google Scholar See also Geddes, Gordon E., Welcome joy: death in Puritan New England (Ann Arbor, 1981), 105–12.Google Scholar

5 Gittings, , Death, burial and the individual, 120–2, 151–64Google Scholar; Stannard, , Puritan way of death, 110–17.Google Scholar

6 Emmison, F. G. ed., Elizabethan life: wills of Essex gentry and merchants (Chelmsford, 1978)Google Scholar; Emmison, , Essex wills … 1558–1572 (Washington, D.C., 1982)Google Scholar; Emmison, , Essex wills … 1565–1571 (Boston, 1983).Google Scholar All citations from wills are found in these indexed volumes.

7 Gittings, , Death, burial and the individual, 86–7.Google Scholar Note the cautions in Margaret Spufford, ‘The scribes of villagers' wills in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and their influence’, Local Population Studies 7 (1971)Google Scholar, and Gittings, , ‘Will formularies’, Local Population Studies 19 (1979).Google Scholar

8 Perkins, William, A golden chaine: or, the description of theologie (Cambridge, 1600), 79–80.Google Scholar

9 Pilkington, , ‘Godlie exposition’, 317–18.Google Scholar See also Gilbey, Anthony, A pleasant dialogue (London, 1581)Google Scholar, sig. M4; Perkins, , Golden chaine, 80Google Scholar; ‘An admonition to the Parliament’ (1572)Google Scholar, in Frere, W. H. and Douglas, C. E. eds., Puritan manifestoes (London, 1954), 28.Google Scholar For examples of pre-Reformation funerary preferences see Foster, C. W. ed., Lincoln wills (Lincoln, 1914–1930), esp. 1, 74, 84, 245–6; 2, 45; vol 3, 20, 148.Google Scholar

10 Haigh, Christopher ed., The English Reformation revised (Cambridge, 1987), 21–9, 209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Collinson, Patrick, ‘The Elizabethan church and the new religion’, in Haigh, Christopher ed., The reign of Elizabeth (London, 1984), 169–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Collinson, , The religion of Protestants: the church in English society 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar; Scarisbrick, J. J., The Reformation and the English people (Oxford, 1984).Google Scholar

11 Rowell, Geoffrey, The liturgy of Christian burial (London, 1977), 84–8Google Scholar; ‘Order for the burial of the dead’, in Clay, William Keatinge ed., Liturgical services. Liturgies and occasional forms of prayer set forth in the reign of Queen Elizabeth (Cambridge, 1847), 233–6Google Scholar; Greaves, Richard L., Society and religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis, 1981), 695–716.Google Scholar

12 Porter, Stephen, ‘Death and burial in seventeenth-century Oxford’, Oxfordshire Local History 1 (1980), 2–7Google Scholar; Porter, , ‘Death and burial in a London parish: St. Mary Woolnoth 1653–99’, London Journal 8 (1982), 76–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar By contrast, the Earl of Shrewsbury who died in 1560 was ‘opened, cered, and coffined’, and lay for 28 days until all funeral arrangements were made, Peck, Francis, Desiderata Curiosa (London, 1779), 252–6.Google Scholar See also Stone, , Crisis of the aristocracy, 572–3.Google Scholar

13 ‘Order for the burial of the dead’, in Clay, ed., Liturgical services, 233–6.Google Scholar

14 Gittings, , Death, burial and the individual, 162–3Google Scholar; Giesey, Ralph E., The royal funeral ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva, 1960) 160, 165.Google Scholar See also the popular anxiety about the souls and shades of suicides, in MacDonald, Michael, ‘The secularization of suicide in England 1660–1800’, Past and Present 111 (1986), 53–4.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

15 John Weever noted that ‘in ancient times there was likewise made a difference of personage in the carriage of their dead bodies to the place of sepulture, according to their state and dignity’, and thought it entirely appropriate to make similar distinctions in the present. Weever, , Ancient funeral monuments, 11.Google Scholar

16 Clay, ed., Liturgical services, 211Google Scholar; Becon, Thomas, The sick man's salve (1561)Google Scholar, quoted in Geddes, , Welcome joy, 105Google Scholar; Greaves, , Society and religion in Elizabethan England, 699.Google Scholar On the Puritan problem see Spufford, Margaret, ‘Puritanism and social control?’, in Fletcher, Anthony and Stevenson, John eds., Order and disorder in early modern England (Cambridge, 1985), 41–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Collinson, Patrick, ‘A comment: concerning the name Puritan’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31 (1980), 483–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Cressy, David, ‘Kinship and kin interaction in early modern England’, Past and Present 113 (1986), 38–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 ‘Strange mourning by changing their garments’ is criticized as ‘hypocritical … superstitious and heathenish’ in the Puritan ‘Admonition to the Parliament’, 28. The Anglican Richard Hooker, by contrast, judges mourning attire to be ‘lawful and decent’: Works of … Richard Hooker (London, 1723), 269.Google Scholar

19 See Sir Ralph Verney's account of his role in the funeral of Sir Richard Pigott in 1685, in Verney, M. M., Memoirs of the Verney family (London, 1899), 4, 327.Google Scholar

20 ‘Admonition to the Parliament’, 28.Google Scholar James Pilkington noted, in ‘Godlie exposition’, 321Google Scholar, that ‘whether burial sermons are to be suffered and used’ agitated one of the ‘controversies in these our days’.

21 Some testators attempted to sustain the ideals described by Heal, Felicity, ‘The idea of hospitality in early modern England’, Past and Present 102 (1984), 66–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 For descriptions of eating at later seventeenth-century funerals see Latham, Robert and Mathew, William eds., Diary of Samuel Pepys, 5 (London, 1971), 90–1Google Scholar; Sachse, William L. ed., The diary of Roger Lowe (New Haven, 1938), 66, 82, 109Google Scholar; Turner, J. Horsfall ed., The Rev. Oliver Heywood, B.A. 1630–1702; his autobiography, diaries, anecdote and event books, 1 (Brighouse, 1882) 339, 351Google Scholar; and Gittings, , Death, burial and the individual, 151–64.Google Scholar

23 ‘Admonition to the Parliament’, 28Google Scholar; Pilkington, , ‘Godlie exposition’, 319Google Scholar; Gittings, , Death, burial and the individual, 87.Google Scholar

24 The understanding behind these provisions was expressed in a consecration address by the Bishop of Hereford in 1635, describing the churchyard as ‘a dormitory or place for Christians to sleep in. … They lying in their graves expect to be raised again at the last day by the voice of the archangel, as those which lie in their beds are raised in the dawning by the cocks crowing.… Those which in their lifetime like neighbours assembled together in one place, as members of the same body, might after death lie together in one place, expecting the same resurrection … and lie as near the place as might be where they were first initiated into the church,’ PRO, C115/N9/8876.

25 Women (all widows) were responsible for less than ten per cent of the wills in this collection. A systematic analysis of gender differences might confirm the impression that women cared less than men about the formal ritual of their funerals.

26 See also Stone, , Crisis of the aristocracy, 580–1.Google Scholar

27 Weever, , Ancient funeral monuments, 10.Google Scholar

28 An instructive example is in Heal, ‘Idea of hospitality’, 93.Google Scholar

29 Gittings, , Death, burial and the individual, 160.Google Scholar Men attending funerals in later seventeenth-century England and New England accumulated memorial gloves by the dozen.

30 Huntington, and Metcalf, , Celebrations of death, 1, 53–4, 46–7.Google Scholar

31 Goody, Jack, Death, property and the ancestors: a study of the mortuary customs of the Lodagaa of West Africa (Stanford, 1962) 29–30.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., 33.

33 Ibid., 46. The best discussion of liminality is Victor Turner, The ritual process: structure and anti-structure (Chicago, 1969)Google Scholar and Turner, , Dramas, fields and metaphors; symbolic action in human society (Ithaca, New York, 1974).Google Scholar

34 Huntington, and Metcalf, , Celebrations of death, 61–6.Google Scholar See also Goody, , Death, property and the ancestors, 30Google Scholar; Bloch, Maurice and Parry, Jonathan eds., Death and the regeneration of life (Cambridge, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Whaley, Joachim, ‘Symbolism for the survivors: the disposal of the dead in Hamburg in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’Google Scholar, in Whaley, ed., Mirrors of mortality, 80–105.Google Scholar

35 Huntington, and Metcalf, , Celebrations of death, 93.Google Scholar

36 On the Puritan ambivalence to bells see Gilbey, , Pleasaunt dialogue, sig. M4Google Scholar; Emmison, F. G., Elizabethan life: morals and the church courts (Chelmsford, 1973), 174–5Google Scholar; and Cressy, David, Bonfires and bells: national memory and the Protestant calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London, 1989).Google Scholar

37 Goody, , Death, property and the ancestors, 26–7.Google Scholar

38 Thompson, E. P., ‘Anthropology and the discipline of historical context’, in Midland History 1 (1973), 43.Google Scholar

39 Seaver, Paul S., The Puritan lectureships: the politics of religious dissent 1560–1662 (Stanford, 1970), 347.Google Scholar For more on ‘garlands in country churches, and strewing flowers on the graves’ see Brand, John, Observations on popular antiquities, 2 (ed. Ellis, Henry, London, 1813) 203–12.Google Scholar

40 Weever, , Ancient funeral monuments, 17Google Scholar; Pilkington thought two to three days sufficient for mourning, and anything more than a week excessive: ‘Godlie exposition’, 319.Google Scholar For formal mourning in the eighteenth century see Trumbach, Randolph, The rise of thegalitarian family (New York, 1978) 34–41.Google Scholar