Death, Ritual, and Bereavement

Ralph Houlbrooke

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367437077
• eBook ISBN: 9781000026917
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1989, Death, Ritual and Bereavement examines the social history of death and dying from 1500 to the 1930s. This edited collection focuses on the death-bed, funerals, burials, mourning customs, and the expression of grief. The essays throw fresh light on developments which lie at the roots of present-day tendencies to minimize or conceal the most unpleasant aspects of death, among them the growing participation of doctors in the management of death-beds in the eighteenth century and the creation of extra-mural cemeteries, followed by the introduction of cremation in the nineteenth century. The volume also underlines the importance of religious belief, in helping the bereaved in past times. The book will appeal to students and academics of family and social history as well as history of medicine, religion and anthropology.

1

INTRODUCTION

RALPH HOULBROOKE

‘All that lives must die’:¹ death is an inescapable fact of human existence whose essential nature does not alter in the course of time. But its causes and incidence, understanding of its physical aspects and beliefs about the after-life, the treatment of the dying and their comportment, the disposal of mortal remains and the ritual responses of survivors – all these have clearly changed, and the historian can study the process in a wealth of remaining evidence. This collection of essays is particularly concerned with the death-bed, the funeral, burial, grief, and mourning in England between the close of the Middle Ages and the early twentieth century. Funerary rites have long interested both historians and anthropologists, largely because of the great range of purposes they have been designed to fulfil in different cultures. Perhaps the most important has been to secure the happiness, or at least the tranquillity, of the departed, and if necessary prevent their return to earth to haunt the living. These rites have also served to repair the breaches in the fabric of society caused by the deaths of important people, to confirm the transfer of property and responsibilities to successors, reinforce the social hierarchy, and uphold traditions of hospitality. Mourning garb not only manifested respect for the memory of the dead, but also emphasized shared kinship and corporate solidarity.² Much less has been written about the death-bed, though the copious literature of the ars manendi, the ‘craft of dying’ has attracted some attention.³ Historians have shown themselves even more wary of getting to grips with the subject of grief.

Two subjects not directly addressed in the following essays are the demography of death and changing conceptions of the hereafter. Yet so important are they to a proper understanding of the themes to be treated that something needs to be said about them at the outset. Before the twentieth century, death was much more obviously the companion of life than it is today, because infections and working conditions killed so many more people before they reached old age. Over the period between 1541 and 1871, the English expectation of life at birth fluctuated between about twenty-seven and forty-two years.⁴ Within this band, there was a clear rising trend from the 1730s onwards, but the life expectancy of 1871 (41.31) was less than it had been nearly three hundred years before in 1581 (41.68), a good year in which to be born, in Elizabeth’s reign. Not until the very end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth did this pattern change dramatically; nearly twenty years had been added to the life expectancy of 1870 by 1930, and another ten by 1970.

The most important element in low life expectancy at birth was persistently high infant mortality; until the twentieth century a higher proportion of deaths occurred in the first than in any subsequent year of life. The United Kingdom infant mortality rate was about 150 per thousand as late as 1870. Not till just before 1900 did infant mortality begin to fall consistendy, gradually at first, and then, during the first decade of the new century, much more rapidly, to drop below twenty per thousand by 1970. The later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw substantial, though less striking, falls in mortality in childhood, youth, and middle age. Adult mortality started falling earlier than infant mortality. A man aged thirty, for example, could in 1810–11 expect to live another 32.5 years, perhaps three years longer than his counterparts between 1550 and 1649. Life expectancy for a man of this age was actually marginally less in 1840–1 than it had been thirty years earlier, but by 1890–1 it had grown by more than six years. Thereafter the rate of increase slowed: the biblical three score years and ten were what the man who was thirty years old on the eve of the First World War might expect to achieve. Adult mortality rates before old age were still comparatively high in the early nineteenth century. A quarter of all children lost one parent or both before their sixteenth birthday in the 1830s, while over a third of all marriages begun at the average age in the 1820s were terminated by death within twenty years. The impression given by these figures needs to be qualified in one important respect. They conceal wide variations in experience, and reflect above all what happened to the working classes who constituted the majority. The nobility, for example, experienced a sharp fall in mortality in the eighteenth century which was not shared by the population at large. Males born in this highest social group in the last quarter of the eighteenth century already enjoyed a life expectancy at birth rather better than that of the cohort of male babies born in England and Wales in 1875–6.⁵

Although it is clear that the most dramatic falls in mortality have taken place since the mid-nineteenth century, considerable changes occurred long before that in the patterns and causes of death. National mortality crises, when deaths leapt far above their normal levels, were far commoner before 1750 than they were after that date. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, plague was the foremost epidemic killer, and its disappearance after 1665 was the biggest single reason for the long-term decline in crisis mortality. Plague was especially terrifying because of its capacity to kill off whole households and devastate urban parishes. Other diseases which reached epidemic proportions included smallpox, typhus, cholera, and influenza (which was responsible for the last great crisis of our period, in 1919). Background mortality remained at a high level even when crises became more infrequent. Smallpox succeeded plague as the chief killer of the young, and tuberculosis succeeded smallpox. Until the nineteenth century, the growth of towns and cities with their fumes, overcrowding, and problems of refuse disposal, produced a net deterioration in the environment in which English people lived. Until after the First World War, medicine played little part in reducing mortality: the one outstanding exception was the introduction of smallpox inoculation in the eighteenth century. More important were the diminishing virulence of particular diseases, preventative measures such as the quarantining of plague-stricken ships, improvements in water supply, sanitation, clothing and working conditions, and a rising standard of nutrition.⁶

Throughout the centuries of high mortality the prospect of an after-life offered the hope of compensation for the likely brevity of earthly existence and the disruption of human relationships by death. Most human societies have in varying measure denied mortality. Some have envisaged no more than a shadowy and somewhat tenuous existence for the departed, while others have accepted schemes laying out in some detail the geography and chronology of future states of existence. The Christian assertion of the immortality of the soul and the ultimate resurrection of the body constitutes the most fundamental denial of death. But during the centuries when the hold of Christianity was strongest, and its association with secular institutions at its closest, the churches also asserted uncompromisingly the reality of suffering in and after death. Their teaching emphasized the eternity of torment which awaited the damned, and, especially during the later Middle Ages and the first 150 years after the Reformation, the horrors of physical death itself. Yet rigour was followed by relaxation, almost as if by a process of natural reaction: each attempt to bring home to the faithful the bleaker implications of Christian doctrine was succeeded in the longer term by some accommodation. In the later Middle Ages a new emphasis on the awful prospect of a divine judgement exercised upon each individual was followed by the elaboration of the doctrine of purgatory, a place where repentant sinners might undergo a punishment made endurable by the knowledge that they were saved. Its effect was probably to lift the fear of damnation from the minds of the great majority. The Protestant reformers repudiated the doctrine of purgatory. But the centuries since 1700 have seen a gradually increasing reluctance among Christians themselves to recognize the inescapable reality of the eternity of pain which used to form the obverse of eternal happiness. Many in the age of reason could not accept what came to seem like cruelty and vindictiveness in God.⁷

During the Victorian period, despite the presence of an assertive and pervasive religiosity, doubt spread: rigorists complained that the clergy were increasingly reluctant to spell out the truth of damnation, while heterodox speculation about the after-life percolated downwards among the faithful. Perhaps this blurring of the outlines of doctrine has served in the long run to make more uncertain the prospect of the after-life itself. Some philosophers long ago contemplated with equanimity the extinction of the individual personality. In denying immortality, Lucretius the Epicurean (99?-55 BC) sought to free men from terror of the gods; annihilation and the cessation of all sensation meant that men had nothing to fear after death. Perhaps such ideas are increasingly acceptable in a society in which most people die old. The notion that a longer lifespan greatly reduces society’s concern with death and the hereafter was aired as long ago as 1899, when the upper and middle classes were already experiencing big improvements in life expectancy which would soon be shared by the population at large. ‘Thus on all sides death is losing its terrors. We are dying more frequendy when our life’s work is done, and it seems more natural to die.’⁸ Yet our age has not achieved a new certainty or equanimity. It seems rather to face Hamlet’s ‘undiscover’d country’ with a certain unease.

During the last twenty years the process by which death has supposedly been pushed to the margins of modern social experience has aroused considerable interest among sociologists and historians. The most important single stimulus has been provided by Geoffrey Gorer’s Death, Grief and Mourning in Contemporary Britain (1965). Gorer claimed that the drastic simplification of funeral and mourning customs during the present century was symptomatic of a desire to ignore death. Grief itself, deprived of the supportive framework of mourning, was discouraged, while the terminally ill increasingly often died alone in hospital rather than at home surrounded by their families. Gorer’s work has provoked a continuing debate about British attitudes to death during the last hundred years. It has also helped set in train an international discussion of the social history of death since the Middle Ages.

Gorer’s call for more sympathetic treatment of the dying and the bereaved has been supported by a number of writers. But some historians have felt that his vision of the past was clouded by nostalgia. J. Morley, in his Death, Heaven and the Victorians (1971) described the extravagant panoply of funerary and mourning display in a tone of horrified fascination. In 1981 David Cannadine published a trenchant dismissal of the idea that Victorian mourning customs helped the bereaved to come to terms with their loss, arguing that the Victorian era ‘was not so much a golden age of effective psychological support as a bonanza of commercial exploitation.’⁹ The expense of funerals and mourning attire imposed a heavy financial burden on bereaved families. Moreover, many Victorians recognized this themselves, and long before the reign was out, a reaction was under way. (It is only fair to Gorer, incidentally, to point out that the years to which he looked back with some nostalgia were those immediately before the First World War, not the first half of Victoria’s reign.) Over half the essays in this volume focus on the Victorian period. Three general points about them may be made at this juncture. First, they illustrate the great complexity of the cross-currents of opinion and feeling which flowed through the reign. Secondly, they underline the importance of the differences in sensibility between its first and second halves. Finally, they show that the roots of ‘Victorian’ attitudes must be sought in previous decades.

That recent changes in attitudes can only be properly understood if they are set in a much longer perspective than that afforded by the last 150 years is the conviction underlying the work of a number of other historians of death. In his three books on the subject, Philippe Aries traced their origins back to the Middle Ages.¹⁰ In seeking to explain why death, for centuries supposedly familiar and accepted, had become fearsome and unmentionable, he was guided by the hypothesis of ‘a relationship between man’s attitudes towards death and his awareness of self. The roots of modern individual self awareness were, he believed, to be found in the later medieval centuries. A new sense of the uniqueness of loved ones developed later as an extension of individual self consciousness. Individualism, meaning a more acute sense both of one’s own identity and of the irreplaceability of loved ones, made death harder to endure. Three other ‘psychological themes’, as he called them, came to seem important to Aries: the defence of society against untamed nature, whether by collective ritual or the advances of science, belief in an after-life, and belief in the existence of evil. It nevertheless seems fair to assert that awareness of self remains the leitmotiv of his work. Aries’s writings on attitudes to death, though full of challenging insights and immensely impressive in their chronological sweep, are difficult to come to grips with. Distinctions between facts and hypotheses, the central and the less important parts of the argument, what is relevant to its main thread and what not: all these are sometimes hard to discern. The relationships between the changes he sought to document are often highly obscure, and the choice of ‘individualism’ as the main motor of change seems an arbitrary one. The idealized picture of the traditional death is unconvincing and rests on a few widely scattered examples.

In her Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (1984), the widest ranging recent study of the social history of death in England, Clare Gittings acknowledges her debt to Aries’s explanation.¹¹ But here, precisely because Gittings seeks to set out the links between ‘individualism’ and other elements in the developing situation in a clearer and more explicit fashion than Ariès, the difficulties involved in making it the most important cause of change become even more apparent. The Reformation, for example, whose influence on some aspects of funerary practice is well illustrated by Gittings, may have stimulated individualism (though this is far from clear), but it would be hard to argue that the growth of individualism played more than an indirect part in bringing it about. The nature and functions of the ‘traditional group ties’ whose gradual dissolution during her long period supposedly threw the ‘burden of death’ increasingly on the immediate relatives of the deceased are never fully defined. The core of Clare Gittings’s work, an immensely valuable analysis of expenditure on funerals between the Reformation and the Interregnum, has been set in a much larger explanatory framework which does not really fit it. The basic problem with all theses which place a heavy burden of explanation on the ‘rise of individualism’ is that the sorts of evidence which enable us to detect its presence, such as ‘the character drama or novel, the portrait and the biography or autobiography’ can usually be equally or more plausibly attributed to other causes. And their non-existence or disappearance do not in themselves demonstrate its absence or weakness.

Various studies of other countries point to the eighteenth century, the age of the Enlightenment, as a critical phase in the development of attitudes to death. Michel Vovelle’s study of Provençal wills led him to the conclusion that the decline of the devout clauses and provisions characteristic of ‘baroque’ piety was so marked in the second half of the eighteenth century that it was explicable only in terms of ‘dechristianization’ or secularization. Whether or not men were less assured of the hereafter in 1780 than in 1710, he could not say: but they had certainly decided not to reveal their assurance. In Paris, Pierre Ghaunu discerned trends broadly similar to those discovered by Vovelle in Provence. Two features in his picture of the eighteenth century are perhaps especially important: the reaction against the fear of a severe judgement, and the decline of crisis mortality in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Mortality of course remained at a far higher level than today’s; but, Chaunu believed, the impact of death had become less terrifying. In his survey of changing attitudes to death in eighteenth-century France, John McManners assigned some weight to an improved expectation of life among the more fortunate classes; rather more to the influence of new notions about the hereafter; most of all to a supposedly new intensity of feeling within the nuclear family.¹²

More liberal theological currents also flowed in the eighteenth-century New England depicted by David Stannard, softening the austere face of inherited Puritanism. Whereas for the godly among the early setders death had commonly been an ordeal rendered more terrible by uncertainties about their future state, their mid-eighteenth-century descendants were often comforted in their last hours by confidence of salvation. The reception of new ideas was facilitated by the growth of a more complex and worldly society, but, Stannard believed, the latter process was fraught with tension. One sign of this was the elaboration of previously starkly simple funeral rituals among the pious towards the end of the seventeenth century. Stannard attributed this to feelings of insecurity in a puritan group which found itself increasingly cut off from its English roots and under pressure within its own community. The growth of ceremony (or so he argued from anthropological studies of apparently analogous situations) was characteristic of groups and societies under threat. But is it not possible that the elaboration of ritual, far from reflecting the puritans’ sense of insecurity, was simply symptomatic of their increasing conformity with contemporary English practice?¹³

These examples will suffice to illustrate the lively interest in past attitudes to death which has developed among historians in recent years, and some of their differences of opinion about the nature and causes of significant change. It is time to say something more about the essays which follow. A comprehensive survey of the social history of death in England would be beyond the scope of a collection such as this, and has not been attempted here. Our volume explores a field of research which may be likened to a vast continent whose coasts are disputed by rival bands of colonists while much larger inland tracts remain unexplored. Many of these essays are primarily designed to open up the unknown rather than to engage in existing debates, though at least half of them throw some light on matters in controversy. Very broadly speaking, the questions raised by each contributor are ones suggested by previous work in the field. The most important of these may be listed as follows. To what extent was death viewed as a test of the dying individual? What was expected of him or her? How might the dying be assisted by those around them? What were the most significant elements in funeral rites? In what ways were their shape and content influenced by religious beliefs and social demands? How did grief manifest itself in the past? How effective were the support and consolation which the bereaved derived from their beliefs, from the sympathy of other people, and the operation of ritual and custom?

The major subjects alluded to in our title – Death (above all the death-bed), Ritual, and Bereavement – were the original guideline themes of the conference from which this volume has sprung. The price paid for the thematic unity made possible by the choice of certain clearly bounded areas of investigation is the exclusion of other important topics in the social history of death. As has already been pointed out, changing patterns of mortality and conceptions of the after-life fall into this category. Other topics we have not broached include (to name only a few of the more obvious examples) suicide, accidental deaths, and the impact of war. It will also be clear that the coverage even of its own period and themes achieved by this volume is somewhat patchy: inevitably so, given the fact that so much work has yet to be done.

Within the bounds set by the demands of thematic coherence there has nevertheless been room for a considerable variety of vantage point, social coverage, and materials used. Among the authors dealing with the death-bed, for example, Luc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Front Matter
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Death, Church, and Family in England Between the Late Fifteenth and The Early Eighteenth Centuries
• 3 The Good Death in Seventeenth-Century England
• 4 Godly Grief: Individual Responses to Death in Seventeenth-Century Britain
• 5 Death and The Doctors in Georgian England
• 6 The Burial Question in Leeds in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
• 7 Why was Death so Big in Victorian Britain?
• 8 Ashes to Ashes: Cremation and The Celebration of Death in Nineteenth-Century Britain
• 9 The Two Faces of Death: Children's Magazines and Their Treatment of Death in the Nineteenth Century
• 10 Victorian Unbelief and Bereavement
• 11 Death, Grief, and Mourning in the Upper-Class Family, 1860–1914
• 12 The Lancashire Way of Death
• Notes
• Bibliography
• The contributors
• Index