Domestic folk-lore

CHAPTER V

DEATH AND BURIAL

Warnings of Death – The Howling of Dogs – A Cow in the Garden – Death-presaging Birds – Plants – The Will-o'-the-Wisp – The Sympathy between Two Personalities – Prophecy – Dying Hardly – The Last Act – Place and Position of the Grave.

The superstitions associated with the last stage of human life are most numerous; and that this should be so is not surprising when it is considered how, from the earliest time, a certain dread has been attached to death, not only on account of its awful mysteriousness, but owing to its being the crisis of an entirely new phase of the soul's existence.

Commencing then with popular omens, it may be noted that every incident out of the common course of natural events is looked upon by the superstitious as indicative of approaching death. Hence we find the credulous ever conjuring up in their minds imaginary prognostications of this sad occurrence, which, apart from the needless terror they cause, are based on no foundation of truth. Foremost among these is the howling of a dog at night, a superstition which, while not confined to our own country, appears to have been almost as well known in ancient times as at the present day. As a plea, however, for its prevalence, even among the educated, we might urge that it is not unnatural for the mind, when unstrung and overbalanced by the presence of sickness and impending death, to be over-sensitive, and to take notice of every little sound and sight which may seem to connect themselves with its anxiety. Out of the innumerable instances which are recorded in our own country respecting this popular superstition, may be mentioned one which happened a few years ago at Worthing. It appears that no slight consternation was caused by a Newfoundland dog, the property of a clergyman in the neighbourhood, lying down on the steps of a house and howling piteously, refusing to be driven away. As soon as it was known that a young lady, long an invalid, had died there, so much excitement took place that news of the occurrence reached the owner of the dog, who came to Worthing to inquire into the truth of it. Unfortunately, however, for the lovers of and believers in the marvellous, it eventually turned out that the dog had by accident been separated from his master late in the evening, and had been seen running here and there in search of him, and howling at the door of the stable where he put up his horse, and other places which he often visited in Worthing. It happened, moreover, that his master had been in the habit of visiting the particular house where the young lady had died, which at once accounted for the apparent mystery. In the same way, indeed, other similar instances of this superstition might be easily cleared up, if only properly investigated at the time of the occurrence. The howling of the dog is ascribed by some to its keen sense of the odour of approaching mortal dissolution; whereas others affirm that this animal can see the spirits which hover round the house of sickness, ready at the moment of death to bear away the soul of the departed one to its distant home. In Aryan mythology the dog is said to see ghosts, and in Germany, at the present day, a dog howling before a house portends either a death or a fire. In Wales, it is thought that horses, too, have the gift of seeing spirits. Carriage-horses, it is said, have been known to display every sign of the utmost terror, although the occupants of the carriage could see no cause for alarm. Such an occurrence is considered highly ominous, and thought to forebode that a funeral will soon pass by that way, bearing to his resting-place some person not dead at the time of the horse's fright.

Whilst speaking of animals in connection with death, it may be noted that an ox or a cow breaking into a garden is an omen of death. In illustration of this notion a correspondent of Notes and Queries relates the following narrative as written down by himself about the time to which it relates. He says, "Though I laugh at the superstition, the omen was painfully fulfilled in my case. About the middle of March, 1843, some cattle were driven close to my house, and the back door being open, three got into our little bit of garden, and trampled it. When our school-drudge came in the afternoon, and asked the cause of the confusion, she expressed great sorrow and apprehension on being told – said that it was a bad sign – that we should hear of three deaths within the next six months. Alas! in April we heard of dear J – 's murder; a fortnight after A – died; and to-morrow, August 10th, I attend the funeral of my excellent son-in-law. I have just heard of the same omen from another quarter. But what is still more remarkable is that when I went down to Mr. M – 's burial, and was mentioning the superstition, they told me that while he was lying ill, a cow got into the front garden and was driven out with great difficulty. It is still a common saying in Scotland, when any one is dangerously ill, and not likely to recover, 'The black ox has trampled upon him.'"

Another common omen of death is the hovering of birds around a house, and their tapping against the window-pane. Amongst the death-presaging birds may be mentioned the raven, the crow, and the swallow. The crowing of the cock, also, at the dead of night is regarded as equally ominous. The appearance of a jackdaw is in some parts of the country much dreaded. Thus a correspondent of Notes and Queries tells us, that a stonemason at Clifton related to him an accident that happened to a workman at the suspension bridge over the Avon, at the time when the river was simply spanned by a single chain, placing much emphasis on the fact that a single jackdaw had been noticed by some of the workmen perched upon the centre of the chain, and had been regarded by them as a precursor of death. We must not omit the evil reputation of the owl and the magpie; and a well-known superstition current in some parts that to catch a sparrow and keep it confined in a cage is an omen of death. Once more, it is a bad sign when an invalid asks for a dish of pigeons to eat, such an occurrence being considered an omen of his approaching death. Some also affirm that if one hears the cuckoo's first note when in bed, illness or death is certain to come upon the hearer or one of his family. If any one be about to die suddenly, or lose a relation, the cuckoo will light upon a piece of touchwood, or rotten bough, and cuckoo.

Plants, in the next place, are sometimes regarded as ominous of approaching mortality. When, for example, an apple-tree or pear-tree blooms twice in the year it denotes a death in the family. If, too, green broom be picked when in bloom it is believed that the father or mother will die in the course of the year. Mrs. Latham, in her "West Sussex Superstitions," gives the following touching little anecdote: – "A poor girl, who was lingering in the last stage of consumption, but whose countenance had always lighted up with pleasure at the sight of flowers, appeared one morning so exceedingly restless and unhappy after a fresh nosegay of gay spring flowers had been laid upon her bed, that I asked her if the scent of them was disagreeable to her. 'Oh, no!' she exclaimed, 'they are very nice indeed to smell; but yet I should be very glad if you would throw away that piece of yellow broom; for they do say that death comes with it if it is brought into the house in blossom during the month of May.'" According to a Yorkshire superstition, if a child gathers the germander speedwell its mother will die during the year; and others consider it equally unlucky to bring the first snowdrop of the year into the house. To dream that a tree is uprooted in one's garden is regarded as a death-warning to the owner. Indeed plants may be said to hold an important place in the folk-lore of death, so many curious legends and quaint superstitions having clustered round them both in ancient and modern times. Thus, to quote one further instance, if yew is accidentally brought into the house at Christmas among the evergreens, it is looked upon as a sign that a death will occur in the family before the end of the year.

Among other omens of death, may be noticed the will-o'-the-wisp, which has on this account been much dreaded, its undulating movement being carefully observed, from an anxiety to ascertain in which direction it disappears, as it is supposed to be —

to the inhabitants of the house nearest that spot. We have heard also of an occasion in which considerable uneasiness was created by a pale light moving over the bed of a sick person, and after flickering for some time in different parts of the room to vanish through the window. It happened, however, that the mystery was cleared up soon afterwards, for, on a similar light appearing, it was found to proceed from a luminous insect, which proved to be the male glow-worm. In the same way the "corpse-candles" in Wales, also called the "fetch-lights," or "dead man's candles," are regarded as forerunners of death. Sometimes this unlucky sign appears in the form of a plain yellow candle, in the hand of a ghost, and at other times it looks like "a stately flambeau, stalking along unsupported, burning with ghastly blue flame." It is considered highly dangerous to interfere with this fatal portent, and persons who have attempted to check its course are reported to have been severely afflicted in consequence, many being actually struck down on the spot where they stood as a punishment for their audacity.

There is a popular idea prevalent in Lancashire that to build or even to rebuild a house is always fatal to one member of the family – generally to the one who may have been the principal promoter of the plans for the building or alteration. Again, we are also told how the household clock has been known to depart from its customary precision in order to warn its owner of approaching death by striking thirteen. A clergyman relates that one evening he called on an old friend more than eighty years of age, who had lost her husband about six months before. Whilst sitting with her he heard the clock strike the hour in an adjoining room, and counted it seven. Being surprised that it was no later he involuntarily took out his watch, and found that it was in reality eight o'clock. The old lady noticing this remarked, "Ah! the clock lost a stroke against my poor husband's death, and I have not altered it since."

According to another very common superstition there seems to be a kind of sympathy and harmony between two personalities, whereby dying persons themselves announce their departure to their friends in certain mysterious ways. Countless instances are on record of such supposed forebodings of death. A curious and interesting example of this species of folk-lore happened not so very long ago, in connection with the lamented death of Mr. George Smith, the eminent Assyriologist. This famous scholar died at Aleppo, on the 19th of August, 1876, at or about the hour of six in the afternoon. On the same day, and at about the same time, a friend and fellow-worker of Mr. Smith's – Dr. Delitzsch – was passing within a stone's-throw of the house in which Mr. Smith had lived whilst in London, when he suddenly heard his own name uttered aloud in a "most piercing cry," which, says The Daily News (Sept. 12th, 1876) thrilled him to the marrow. The fact impressed him so strongly that he looked at his watch, noted the hour, and, although he did not mention the circumstance at the time, recorded it in his note-book.

Again, as a further illustration, we are told how on board one of Her Majesty's ships lying off Portsmouth, the officers being one day at mess, a young lieutenant suddenly laid down his knife and fork, pushed away his plate, and turned extremely pale. He then rose from the table, covered his face with his hands, and retired. The president of the mess, supposing him to be ill, sent to make inquiries. At first he was unwilling to reply; but on being pressed he confessed that he had been seized by a sudden and irresistible impression that a brother he had in India was dead. "He died," said he, "on the 12th August, at six o'clock; I am perfectly convinced of it." No argument could overthrow his conviction, which in due course of time was verified to the letter. Events of this kind, which in the minds of many seem to point to a mysterious sympathy between two individuals, are explained by others as simply the result of "fancy and coincidence." Any one, it is argued, may fall into a brown study, and emerge from it with a stare, and the notion that he heard his name spoken. That is the part of fancy, and the simultaneous event is the part of coincidence. Against this theory it will always be argued that these coincidences are too many to be accidental, and this position, as a writer in The Daily News has shown, will generally be met by counter-efforts to weaken the evidence for each individual case, and so to reduce the cumulative evidence to nothing. Taking into consideration however, the countless instances which are on record of this kind, many of them apparently resting on evidence beyond impeachment, we must, whilst allotting to them the credence they deserve, honestly admit they are occasionally beyond the limits of human explanation.

From a very early period there has existed a belief in the existence of the power of prophecy at that period which precedes death. It probably took its origin in the assumed fact that the soul becomes divine in the same rate as the connection with the body is loosened. It has been urged in support of this theory that at the hour of death the soul is, as it were, on the confines of two worlds, and may possibly at the same moment possess a power which is both prospective and retrospective. Shakespeare in his Richard II. (Act ii., sc. 1) makes the dying Gaunt, alluding to his nephew, the young and self-willed king, exclaim: —

Again in 1 Henry IV. (Act v., sc. 4), the brave Percy, when in the agonies of death, conveys the same idea in the following words: —

Some have sought for the foundation of this belief in the forty-ninth chapter of Genesis: – "And Jacob called his sons, and said, Gather yourselves together, that I may tell you that which shall befall you in the last days. And when Jacob had made an end of commanding his sons, he gathered up his feet into his bed, and yielded up the ghost, and was gathered unto his people." This notion has not died out, but still prevails in Lancashire and other parts of England.

Referring to death itself, there is a widespread belief that deaths mostly occur during the ebbing of the tide: a superstition to which Charles Dickens has so touchingly alluded in "David Copperfield." While the honest-hearted Mr. Peggotty sat by the bedside of poor Barkis, and watched life's flame gradually growing dimmer, he said to David Copperfield, "People can't die along the coast except when the tide's pretty nigh out. They can't be born unless it's pretty nigh in. Not properly born till flood. He's agoing out with the tide – he's agoing out with the tide. It's ebb at half-arter three, slack water half an hour. If he lives till it turns, he'll hold his own till past the flood, and go out with the next tide." And after many hours' watching, "it being low water, he went out with the tide."

Persons, too, are said to "die hard," to quote a popular phrase, or, in other words, to have a painful and prolonged death, when there are pigeons' feathers in the bed. Hence, some will not allow dying persons to lie on a feather bed at all, maintaining that it very much increases the pain, and retards the inevitable crisis of their departure. Many, on the other hand, have a superstitious feeling that it is a great misfortune, nay, even a judgment, not to die in a bed. Many are the anecdotes illustrative of the former superstition, one or two of which we will quote. Thus a Sussex nurse one day told the wife of her clergyman that "never did she see any one die so hard as old Master Short; and at last she thought (though his daughter said there were none) that there must be game-feathers in the bed. She, therefore, tried to pull it from under him, but he was a heavy man and she could not manage it alone, and there was no one with him but herself, and so she got a rope and tied it round him and pulled him by it off the bed, and he went off in a minute quite comfortable, just like a lamb." Again, one day, when an old woman near Yarmouth was speaking of the burning of game-feathers as a precaution in case of death, her neighbours said to her, "Of course we don't believe that can have anything to do with a hard death," whereupon she replied, "Then you yourself use such feathers." "Oh, no; we always burn them, unless we want them for a chair-cushion." The same notion prevails in Yorkshire with regard to cocks' feathers. According to another popular fancy a person cannot die comfortably under the cross-beam of a house, and we are told of the case of a man of whom it was said at his death, that after many hours' hard dying, being removed from the position under the cross-beam, he departed peaceably.

Again, the interval between death and burial has generally been associated with various superstitious fears and practices. Thus, as soon as the corpse is laid out there is still a widespread custom of placing a plate of salt upon the breast, the reason being no doubt to prevent the body swelling; although there is a belief that it acts as a charm against any attempt on the part of evil spirits to disturb the body. Pennant tells us that formerly in Scotland, "the corpse being stretched on a board and covered with a coarse linen wrapper, the friends laid on the breast of the deceased a wooden platter, containing a small quantity of salt and earth, separate and unmixed; the earth an emblem of the corruptible body, the salt as an emblem of the immortal spirit." Mr. Napier, in his "Folk-Lore of the West of Scotland," points out that we may find another explanation for the plate of salt on the breast in the "sin-eaters," persons who, in days gone by, when a person died, were sent for to come and eat the sins of the deceased. On their arrival their first act was to place a plate of salt and one of bread on the breast of the corpse, repeating a series of incantations, after which they devoured the contents of the plates. By this ceremony the deceased person was supposed to be relieved of such sins as would have kept his spirit hovering about his relations to their discomfort and annoyance.

It is customary, especially among the poor, for those who visit a house while the dead body is lying in it to touch the corpse, thereby showing that they owe the departed one no grudge. This practice, in all probability, originated in the belief that a corpse would bleed at the touch of the murderer, constant allusions to which we find in old authors.

The practice of watching the dead body until its burial is not yet obsolete, a custom indeed which, among the Irish, is even still occasionally the scene of the most unseemly revelries, those present oftentimes indulging in excessive drinking and riotous merry-making. In days gone by, however, this practice was attended with every mark of respect to the deceased one, the leading idea being to see that the devil did not carry off the body.

Lastly, since the formation of cemeteries, many of the quaint old funeral customs which formerly existed in many of our country villages have passed away. Now-a-days, the "last act," as the committal of the body to the grave has been termed, has been shorn of much of its pomp. Thus, in the North of England it was customary, only a few years ago, to carry "the dead with the sun" to the grave, a practice corresponding with the Highland usage of making "the deazil," or walking three times round a person, according to the course of the sun. On one occasion, in the village of Stranton, near West Hartlepool, the vicar was standing at the churchyard gate, awaiting the arrival of the funeral procession, when, much to his surprise, the entire group, who had come within a few yards of him, suddenly turned back and marched round the churchyard wall, thus traversing its west, north, and east boundaries. On inquiring the reason of this extraordinary procedure, one of the mourners quickly replied, "Why, ye wad no hae them carry the dead again the sun; the dead maun ay go wi' the sun." This is not unlike a Welsh custom mentioned by Pennant, who tells us that when a corpse was conveyed to the churchyard from any part of the town, great care was always taken that it should be carried the whole distance on the right-hand side of the road. A curious custom, which still survives at Welsh funerals, is termed "the parson's penny." After reading the burial service in the church, the clergyman stands behind a table while a psalm is being sung. In the meantime each of the mourners places a piece of money on the table for his acceptance. This ceremony is regarded as a token of respect to the deceased, although it was no doubt originally intended to compensate the clergyman for praying for the soul of the departed. In some Welsh parishes a similar custom, called "spade-money," is observed. As soon as the corpse has been committed to its resting-place, the grave-digger presents his spade as a receptacle for donations, these offerings, which often amount to a goodly sum, being regarded as his perquisites.

From time immemorial there has been a popular prejudice among the inhabitants of rural villages against "burial without the sanctuary." This does not imply in unconsecrated ground, but on the north side of the church, or in a remote corner of the churchyard. The origin of this repugnance is said to have been the notion that the northern part was that which was appropriated to the interment of unbaptised infants, excommunicated persons, or such as had laid violent hands upon themselves. Hence it was generally known as "the wrong side of the church." In many parishes, therefore, this spot remained unoccupied while the remaining portion of the churchyard was crowded. White, in his "History of Selborne," alluding to this superstition, says that as most people wished to be buried on the south side of the churchyard, it became such a mass of mortality that no person could be interred "without disturbing or displacing the bones of his ancestors." A clergyman of a rural parish in Norfolk says: – "If I were on any occasion to urge a parishioner to inter a deceased relative on the north side of the church, he would answer me with some expression of surprise, if not of offence, at the proposal, 'No, sir, it is not in the sanctuary.'"

Great attention has, also, generally been paid to the position of the grave, the popular idea being from east to west, while that from north to south has been considered not only dishonourable, but unlucky. Indeed, the famous antiquary, Thomas Hearne, was so particular on this point that he left orders for his grave to be made straight by a compass, due east and west. In Cymbeline (Act iv., sc. 2), Guiderius, speaking of the apparently dead body of Imogen disguised in man's apparel, says: —

It is worthy of notice that the burial of the dead among the Greeks was in the line of east and west; and thus it is not to late and isolated fancy, but to the carrying on of ancient and widespread solar ideas, as Mr. Tylor has so clearly shown, that we trace the well-known legend that the body of Christ was laid towards the east, and the Christian usage of digging graves east and west. A pretty custom was once observed in many of our country villages at the funeral of a young unmarried girl, or of a bride who died in her honeymoon; a chaplet of flowers being carried before the corpse by a girl nearest in age, size, and resemblance, and afterwards hung up in the church over the accustomed seat of the deceased.

Among other customs connected with burial may be mentioned "funeral feasts," which have prevailed in this and other countries from the earliest times, and are supposed to have been borrowed from the Cœna feralis of the Romans: an offering, consisting of milk, honey, wine, aloes, and strewed flowers, to the ghost of the deceased. In a variety of forms this custom has prevailed amongst most nations, the idea being that the spirits of the dead feed on the viands set before them. In Christian times, however, these funeral offerings have passed into commemorative banquets, under which form they still exist amongst us. In the north of England the funeral feast is called "an arval," and the loaves that are sometimes distributed among the poor are termed "arval bread."