funeral customs

What would you like to see on your TV?

19 June 2013
Charles
8 Comments
Categories: ceremony, death and funerals, funeral, funeral customs, funeral trends, funerals in other cultures, memorialisation, Reasons to go to a funeral, Secular approaches to death

When media people phone the press office here at the GFG-Batesville Shard, their requests for information often conform to whatever they suppose to be trending.

“We’re doing something on living funerals. Are these catching on?”

“No.”

“We’re doing a documentary about the dying process and we want to film someone actually dying. Can you help us?”

“No.”

“Arranging a funeral?”

“No.”

When they say they want to expose malpractice, we urge them to shine a light on good practice, too, in the interest of fairness and balance.  We can introduce you to lots of good undertakers, we say. They always promise. They never do.

Today we received an enquiry about the growth of professional mourners in the UK. We replied a little perfunctorily that there hasn’t been. Actually, there’s an outfit called Rent A Mourner but we’ve always thought it must be a spoof. Have you ever encountered a professional mourner? We thought that would be the end of it.

But the enquirer, Malcolm Neaum of CB Films, pursued the topic on a broader front. Are British funerals being in any way cross-fertilised by multiculturalism, he wondered. And it’s a good question because, even though they haven’t to any remarkable degree, we have from time to time, on this discount cialis coupon blog, discussed the desirability of respectfully and gratefully adapting rituals and observances from other cultures with which to enrich our own ‘secular’ funerals, many of which are beautifully and expertly scripted, but are characterised by a DVT-threatening inactivity on the part of the audience. Funerals are going to go on evolving. The question is whether they are going to evolve in the direction of elaboration or extinction. 

Malcolm is keen to make a documentary about funerals — has been for some time. He tells us: ‘I’ve been working in documentaries for 15 years and have never been able to get a commissioning editor interested in even approaching the topic of death.’ 

He adds: ‘My grandfather died last year and I can’t help but feel that so much of the symbolism and power has been stripped from a modern day funeral. Hopefully, an interesting programme may be an opportunity to you explore the funeral ritual in modern times.’

Malcolm has asked me to ask you what you think. What could he most usefully make a programme about? 

It’s a rare thing to be asked what we think. I hope you will tell him. He says, ‘it’s very exciting to think what we will hear back.’ 

Go on: excite him!

Thinking the unsinkable

3 June 2013
Charles
21 Comments
Categories: cremation, direct cremation, funeral customs, funeral directors, funeral trends

In October 2008, in a piece about direct cremation, I wrote this: In the UK we are culturally conditioned to believe that a funeral for a body is indispensable. Could that change? In July 2009 I wrote: I never thought [direct cremation] would jump the Atlantic, but it has. We now have our first direct cremation service over here and it’s busy. Simplicity Cremations*, it’s called.

I seem not to have been wholly persuaded, however, for in March 2010 I wrote: It seems unthinkable that the practice of direct cremation … could land on our shores. In May 2010, in response to a very valuable analysis by Nick Gandon, Jonathan, a sagacious and valued commenter on this blog, wrote: Funeral directors aren’t set up to cater for direct cremation because the demand is almost nil. 

Seems like ancient history now.

The growth of direct cremation marks a cultural shift that, so far as I know, has gone unremarked by the British media. So far as the media is concerned, direct cremation doesn’t mark a cultural shift at all, it’s simply a branch of the cheaper funerals market, and we all want cheaper funerals, don’t we? The Dismal Trade seems mostly to share this analysis. Direct cremation is for poor people who can’t afford a full fig funeral, for a few well-off middle class people who want a ‘fuss-free’ funeral, and for the I’m-not-worth-it brigade who don’t reckon they’re worth funeralling anyway. It’s a niche market. 

So far as we can tell from their responses, funeral directors experience the impact of direct cremation as a commercial, not a cultural phenomenon, and certainly not as an existential threat. Most people still want a trad funeral, but direct cremation has affected the trad funerals market by making stripped-down respectable.  It has empowered funeral shoppers to say no to stuff they don’t actually really want. The days of one limo or two have been succeeded by one limo or none — oh, and no flowers, either, thanks. We are witnessing a watering down of the Big Black Funeral. How much more dilution can it take? 

Culturally, until the last five years or so, we supposed there to be a crucial, indispensable emotional and spiritual value in holding a funeral in the presence of a dead body.  Now, we’re not so sure. A combination of all manner of factors may be responsible, longevity in particular — when death is merely the postscript to a long and beastly illness, there doesn’t seem to be much more grief work to do. On the other hand, the deaths of young people remain not just as momentous as ever, but more so. 

There is, arguably, a perfectly good rationale for direct cremation. Reducing a body to ‘ash’ and rendering it, thereby, portable, durable and divisible, is a very effective way of preparing it for a funeral. There is remarkably little understanding of this among funeral directors; most of them simply do not get it, probably because they scent no commercial opportunity. 

So here are the big questions:

Is it preferable, in the interest of emotional and spiritual health, to hold a funeral in the presence of a dead body? Or do ashes actually serve perfectly well?

Biggest question of all: 

  • Is it perilous to your emotional health not to hold a funeral at all? After all, we get to carry on without the benefit of a formal ceremony or other ritual observance after near-bereavement experiences like the breakdown of a relationship, or redundancy, or a child leaving home. We resolve those privately. 

It seems extraordinary that the funeral industry has mounted no concerted defence of the funeral. Nor, so far as I know, have any academics responded to what’s going on and debated the question: Is your funeral really necessary? 

Because if pragmatic Brits cotton on to the idea that a funeral serves no purpose, does them absolutely no good at at all, is all just a lot of hollow show and hot air, they’ll be only too pleased to say goodbye to a tradition they never had much time for anyway. 

And that’ll be curtains for an industry thought to be unsinkable. 

*Simplicity Cremations is now Simplicita Cremations. I’ll leave it to Nick to explain why.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum

16 April 2013
Charles
9 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, celebrants, ceremony, Etiquette, funeral customs, funeral directors, Personalisation

Pace the spirit of the age, a celebration-of-life funeral does not fit everybody. Nasty, bad, horrible people die, too. We refrain from holding celebration-of-death funerals for them, preferring instead to curtail, allude and acknowledge, to a degree, often disguising our meaning between the lines. Difficult people die, too. They often mean different things to different people. As any celebrant or undertaker will tell you, they’re possibly the hardest of the lot. 

Mrs Thatcher was one of the latter. In the shadow of the old idea that one mustn’t speak ill of the dead, there’s been a lot of talk about what we may and what we mustn’t say about her just now, before she’s had her funeral. 

In the Independent, the philosopher AC Grayling wrote this:

Why should one not speak as one did when the person was alive? The story of a prominent individual’s life cannot be complete without the truth about what people felt at the moment of summing up, whether it is in mourning or rejoicing. Let us say what we think, and be frank about it: death does not confer privileges.

Respect for the dead is a hangover from a past in which it was believed that the dead might retain some active influence on the living, and that one might re-encounter them either in this life or a putative next life.

Future historians will be glad that people have begun to speak frankly of their estimations of major figures when they die. Frank opinions explain far more than the massaged and not infrequently hypocritical views expressed in obsequies [he means eulogies, of course].

The democratic value of frank expression of opinions about public figures and public matters should not be hostage to squeamishness or false ideas of respect – let us respect ourselves instead, and say what we truly feel.

In The Times, Libby Purves responded thus:

In November 1990 a young Quaker was staying with us. He was even more anti-Thatcher than me, but as the news of her fall from office came, he took George Fox’s advice to “walk cheerfully across the world, answering that of God in every one” and muttered unironically: “I hope she’ll be happy.”

The nastiness of the past few days on the streets, online and sometimes in print raises a bigger question about our attitude to death itself. Traditionally it “pays all debts” and you do not insult the newly deceased at least until after the funeral and family shock, when history may claim its due. To dance in the streets when a dictator falls is understandable, so is the soldier who, fresh from extreme danger, high-fives at a successful shot. But we don’t let the soldier urinate on the corpse. We bury enemies decently. We acknowledge the fellowship of mortality.

For the modish entrepreneurial philosopher Professor A. C. Grayling, this is nonsense. “Do we owe the dead respect, even if we disagreed with them?” he pipes scornfully. For him the Bitch-Is-Dead celebrations are “understandable and justifiable” and “death does not confer privileges”. Respect is “a hangover from a past in which it was believed that the dead might retain some active influence on the living”. He likens it to Chinese ancestor worship. “Honouring the dead is not only a form of remembrance but propitiation.”

Concluding, Professor Grayling condemns “false” respect and smirks: “Let us respect ourselves instead.” There lies all the smug, narrow, self-regarding, inhumane, mechanistic aridity of atheist academe. Thank goodness he’s still alive, so I can say so straightaway.

Finally, on Facebook, and not à propos Thatcher, the celebrant Lol Owen wrote this:

I’ve written services for some right swine. For my own father’s service, who definitely had many faults, there was nothing to be gained from disclosing any of them. It would in no way validate our feelings towards him, and only diminish him in the eyes of others. Those who know the truth will gain nothing from shouting it from the rooftops. Rather, they will look small people.

EXCLUSIVE: It’s going to be one wacky sendoff for Downton’s Matthew

1 April 2013
Charles
11 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, bereavement, celebrants, cremation, crematoria, DIY funeral, funeral customs, funeral pyres, home funerals, open-air cremation, viking funeral

The GFG can exclusively reveal that Downton star Matthew Crawley will be cremated in a way-out guerilla funeral on the ancestral estate in a ritual created by the grief-stricken family.

Devotees of toff-soap Downton Abbey were left dazed and heartbroken at the end of the 2012 Christmas special when heir Matthew Crawley was violently killed after his motor car flipped as it swerved to avoid an oncoming lorry.

According to plot notes for upcoming series 4, jotted by writer Julian Fellowes and seen exclusively by the GFG, a distraught Lady Mary will banish local undertaker Grassby’s men when they come to take Matthew’s body into their care.

In  heartrending scenes that follow, viewers will see Lady Mary supervise sobbing servants as they wash Matthew’s body, dress it in his favourite suit and lay it out in the state drawing room flanked by bowed footmen and surrounded by candles and essential oils. Here, it is reverently watched over by members of the family.

Meanwhile, it’s all hands to the pump downstairs as the servants are enlisted to build Matthew’s coffin and refurbish a derelict cremator (pictured) which was last used to cremate Lady Mary’s convention-busting great-grandfather Lord Bertram Crawley in 1882.

In a final agonising development, the funeral procession, led by butler Carson, is surrounded by police tipped off by villainous valet Thomas Barrow. After a tense standoff the proceedings are allowed to go ahead in a ceremony led by real-life funeral celebrant and GFG commenter Gloria Mundi.

The storyline is believed to be inspired by Fellowes’ near neighbour and cremation pioneer Captain Thomas Hanham, who lived just 20 miles away in Blandford Forum. Hanham illegally cremated his wife and his mother in the grounds of his estate. The authorities did not prosecute him and a few years later the first Cremation Act was passed.

The GFG believes that Fellowes intends to raise awareness of family-arranged or home funerals, sometimes termed DIY funerals. He was overheard at a funeral he recently attended to exclaim, “Why on earth do we hand over the whole bally shooting match to strangers? We really should jolly well do more of this ourselves.”

Fellowes’ plot notes reveal that he even considered cremating Matthew on an open-air pyre. A scribble in the margin betrays second thoughts: “No. A twist too far. Maybe for Maggie [Smith].” Dame Maggie Smith plays the part of the Dowager Countess of Grantham.

NOTE: Journalists and bloggers are asked as a matter of courtesy to acknowledge the GFG as their source when reporting this story.

Ask not what you can do for the bereaved; ask what the bereaved can do for themselves

28 March 2013
Charles
25 Comments
Categories: funeral customs, funeral directors, Grief, Processions

SCENE – A village wedding. Church bells. Assorted villagers have assembled at the lych gate waiting for a glimpse of the bride. They are joined by a TOURIST who happily happens to speak perfect English.

VILLAGER: There she is! Just coming round the corner now.  Ooh, it’s a Rolls!

TOURIST: Who’s that walking in front of it? That person in the Tudor costume and the three-cornered hat and, what’s that, a mace?

VILLAGER: That’s the wedding organiser.

TOURIST: Why is she walking in front of the car?

VILLAGER: It’s the way it’s done in this country. The wedding organiser walks in front of the car.  

TOURIST: But why?

VILLAGER: Oh, ah… tradition. Yes, it’s always been done that way. It’s the way we do it.

TOURIST: But a wedding is not about the wedding organiser –

VILLAGER: Oh, look at that dress! Doesn’t she look lovely! And look, there’s the bride!

_______________________________

 

The Great British Tradition whereby a funeral director walks in front of, or ‘pages’, a hearse is a well-loved custom stretching back to the heraldic funeral processions of the middle ages. Well, not really. Actually, they didn’t have funeral directors then, it was the Head of the College of Arms who would walk in front of the cortege. No, ah, paging is a lot more recent. There are several schools of thought about where it originated… and little chance of a consensus. Nowadays, it’s a ‘mark of respect’, that’s what it is. Will that do?

It is undeniably a good look.

Yes it is, and I think it is capable of adaptation. If funeral directors were to suggest to families that one or more of them might like to undertake this role instead, I wonder what the uptake would be.

What would be the point?

In a word, empowerment.

Why is it important to empower bereaved people at a funeral?

So that they can go home feeling proud of themselves. If a funeral is to be a valuable event, they need to feel proud they did their bit.

Would this not take away from the status of the funeral director?

Wrong question. Would it add value to the funeral? Yes, I think so. No one ever went wrong who sought to empower the bereaved. The trick is to find them things to do that they’re comfortable with.

But the job of a funeral director is to take all possible burdens from their families.

I respectfully disagree. The job of a funeral director is to organise an event where bereaved people can do good grief work. They can’t do that if they’re spectators. I repeat: they need to go home feeling they played their part in giving the person who died a good send-off. So, I say: ask not what you can do for the bereaved; ask what the bereaved can do for themselves.

Well, I don’t know that I’d want to be a funeral director if you took paging away from me.

Look, I may be wrong, I acknowledge that. But right now I do absolutely believe that you guys have got to stop obsessing about the price of funerals and start looking for ways to add value to them. You can do that in ways that cost nothing. This may be one. 

Familiarity breeds contentment

21 January 2013
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: funeral, funeral customs, funeral reformers, funeral trends

The so-called traditional or Victorian funeral derives from a time when they did death differently, when people grieved differently.

It was characterised by hush and awe, ostentatious gloom and social pretension. It was an invention of the Gothic Revival and claimed, spuriously, descent from the medieval guild funerals devised and superintended by the College of Arms. 

And that Victorian schtick (lite) is still, amazingly or not, what people want. Formality, military precision, archaic fancy-dress, steroidal motorcars, the whole aesthetic. Even though many people no longer dress themselves up particularly for funerals, not like they used. 

Yet they still like things to be done ‘properly’, most people, even though the tenor of funerals these days tends to be celebratory and no longer magnificently sad. They still like to have a priest presiding, too, even if the theology they spout is just so much blather. 

To those bien-pensant middle class freethinking liberals who mostly comprise the funeral reform movement it is a matter of some bewilderment that the new age of more meaningful funerals and a more contemporary aesthetic hasn’t got here sooner. 

What’s the holdup? 

No more faking it

22 November 2012
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: funeral customs, funerals in other cultures

A fine feminist manifesto here from Grace Mutandwa in the Zimbabwe Standard:

A group of my female friends are tired of being stuck in the house during funerals while their boys hang out at the shops and do fun things.

The girls want to know why it is cool for the boys to visit the local bottle store and swap war stories while the girls alternate between cooking, serving food and wailing like banshees. And they do not want the usual spiel about tradition this or tradition that!

Why is it all cool and dandy for the guys to stroll around in controlled emotion while women are expected to wail in show of pain and grief?

If a woman does not cry, she is labelled cold or a witch. And if tradition is so important, why is it that men who lose wives can remarry as soon as they can no longer bear living without a moving cooking, laundry and cuddling machine while women are expected to grieve for a year?

Is it really necessary to have a bunch of women thrashing about in feigned grief while the men get on with their lives?

Why do widows have to be stuck at the head of the corpse, but when a woman dies the husband gets to sit outside with his buddies? For all we know the reason why most men quickly remarry might be because while all the women are stuck in the house wailing, the widowed man and his buddies are busy going through their little black books trying to hook up the “grieving” hubby with some hot mama!

I get grief, but what I do not get is the need for whole extended families to hurl themselves into group mourning therapy even when they hated the guts of the dead relative.

Wouldn’t life be easier if we were a bit more honest? I am not saying that you should insult someone or say nasty things about the dead, but do we really have to lie? If someone is dead, they are dead — period!

There are films that bring tears to my eyes but I really find it difficult to cry at every funeral I attend. If I am not close to the person, I just feel faking it is the worst thing I could do at someone’s funeral. I get faking orgasms — many women play that card once-in-a-while (and it is a humane act, it protects men’s egos) — but faking tears is really beyond me.

When the husband dies, the tears might represent real grief or great relief and pure joy that they are free at last!

I am a ruddy realist and will be the first one to face up to the simple fact that by the time one spouse dies, most couples will have been transformed into two strangers sharing bills and helping each other raise children. So if you catch my drift — it really would be hard to shed tears for a stranger, even one that you occasionally shared body heat with.

I know apart from pretending to be a nice person, we sometimes have this uncontrollable urge to attend a particular funeral just to make sure the person is really dead.

More here

The eloquence of silence

16 October 2012
Charles
14 Comments
Categories: burial, ceremony, funeral customs

Posted by Georgina Pugh

On Friday the autumn sun was just too much – I had to leave my cave like dwelling and head out somewhere you can touch the sky. On the advice of a friend I found myself at the edge of the North York Moors, just past the aptly named ‘surprise view’ at the village of Gillamoor, searching for an old Quaker Burial Ground. In the 1600s non-conformist churches were persecuted and not permitted to bury their dead in consecrated ground so Quakers used private land.

Lowna was used as a cemetery for Quakers between 1675 and 1837 – I guess even after the ban was lifted, the Friends still preferred their lovely corner of peace as the final resting place for their earthly remains.

The burial ground has well and truly returned to nature but remains defined by dry stone walls just high enough to create a space that feels gently enclosed and yet part of the woodlands that surround it. A beck flows nearby. There is an old bench on which you can sit (so long as you are happy to ignore the ‘no entry- falling branches’ health and safety warning sign) and soak up the peace and quietly blessed atmosphere that in my experience always pervades Quaker spaces.

It was quite easy to imagine the Friends all those generations ago, quietly and reverently carrying the bodies of their dead to Lowna and laying them down into the earth – perhaps a prayer if anyone felt moved to speak one, otherwise the rich silence saying all that needed to be said.

I have often mused how afraid we are of silence these days –I used to teach a meditation class at a boarding school in Surrey that was originally established with an hour of silence enshrined in each day. The headmaster described how over the years the ‘Frensham Silence’ had shrunk, being slowly squeezed out by various (I’m sure noble) activities until it was completely absent in the modern school. This seemed an interesting example of how silence has perhaps lost its value in modern society – it’s just not considered productive enough.

I am curious to know of others’ views/experience of weaving silence into modern funerals. I sometimes suggest to a family they might like to have some brief silence as part of a funeral ceremony and sometimes they agree.

Sometimes those silences feel natural and rich and sometimes you can feel people are just not comfortable with it……. Personally I love words and music but I also love quiet and instinctively I feel it has its part to play in a ‘good’ funeral but the whys and hows – I have my thoughts but it would be lovely to hear yours.

Here is the ‘surprise view‘.

You, the good news and Channel 5

24 September 2012
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: celebrants, funeral, funeral customs, funeral directors, funeral trends

We are pleased to pass on to you this appeal from a TV production company making a good-news documentary for Channel 5. We’ve spoken to them at length and like them. If you have created a really special funeral, or are a funeral director or a celebrant who has collaborated, or is currently collaborating, with families to achieve something special, we encourage you to get in touch. 

Planning a personalised funeral? Breaking with convention? 

We’re making a really positive television documentary for Channel 5. We would like to show the diverse range of possibilities for people to take control of their funeral and create ceremonies and memorials that are more personal and reflective of the individual concerned. The documentary aims to explore all the diverse ways this can be done which the wider public may not know about. 

As producers, it has been a real eye opener to learn that the conventional funeral is a Victorian invention and that legally we are much freer to do things differently than we ever realised. We’d love to get this across and to illustrate it we’d like to meet people who are planning a personalised funeral or memorial. We are not prescriptive and open to all new suggestions. We will be filming from mid September to the end of October. 

The tone of the programme will celebrate the diverse range of commemorations that are possible and highlight a more contemporary approach to marking death in a really positive way. We hope the film itself may serve as a good memory and we can make it available to families. In certain circumstances we may be able to contribute towards expenses. 

Back2Back Productions is a Brighton-based documentary production company specialising in high quality factual programming and you can see our work on our website.  

If this sounds interesting please get in touch and feel free to ask us anything at all about the project. anne.mason@back2back.tv or  01273 227700

A very damp day, some part Foggy, not very Cold

20 September 2012
Charles
12 Comments
Categories: Academia and death, funeral customs, funeral directors, History

A guest post by Mike Rendell

We are very grateful to Mike Rendell for so generously sharing with us this fascinating account of an eighteenth century funeral. Mike Rendell is a published author who specializes in 18th Century history. He blogs on all aspects of life in the Georgian era here.  Mike is an especially fortunate family historian. He tells me “I still cannot believe how much of my ancestors’ paperwork has survived from the Georgian period, and it is good to share it.” 

I recently came across the bill submitted to my ancestor Richard Hall by the Funeral Director on the occasion of the death of his first wife Eleanor in 1780. The undertakers (that is to say, the company which undertook the arrangements….) were John Cooper & Co. 

Their bill gives some idea of what was involved in a funeral in the Georgian Era in the latter part of the 18th Century. Eleanor Hall had died in her 47th year – she got up and had breakfast as normal on 11th January 1780 at her home at One London Bridge, had a splitting headache at midday, and was dead by six in the evening. In all probability she suffered a brain haemorrhage. It must have been a terrible shock for Richard, who had married Eleanor nearly 27 years earlier, and for their three grown-up children, who all lived at the property.

Richard records her death in his diary “Oh the affliction of this Day. My Dear and Affectionate Wife was suddenly seiz’d with a pain in her head after Twelve at Noon, which issued in a Fit; no Prescription of Physician Avail’d”

Richard was devastated and made a beautiful cut-out in paper as a memorial. The memento is only just over one inch across and is extraordinarily delicate.

He would have employed the firm of John Cooper & Co to make all the arrangements for the actual funeral, which was to take place at Bunhill Burial Grounds (where many Dissenters were buried). Richard and Eleanor were both Baptists and as an additional incentive to choose Bunhill, it was where both her parents had been buried back in 1754. The expenses included opening up the family vault and constructing a tent over it so as to keep prying eyes at bay.

The invoice starts by showing the actual funeral as taking place on January 18th, exactly one week after Eleanor’s death.

To start with the actual coffin and furniture:

An inside Elm Coffin lined and ruffled with fine Crape and a mattress (£1/11/6)

A Superfine Sheet, Shroud and Pillow (£1/15/00)

An outside lead coffin with plate of Inscription (£4/10/00)

An Elm case covered with fine Black Cloth, finish’d in the best Manner with black nails and drape, Lead Plate Cherubim handles, lead plate and wrought Gripes (that is to say, grips) (£5/10/00).

Then there were the extras:

4 Men going in with Lead Coffin and Case (10/-)

7 Tickets and Delivering – 7 shillings. (These would have been official invitations to attend the funeral service, sent out to close friends and often in the form of Memento Mori like this one, shown courtesy of the University of Missouri).

Hanging the Shop and Stair-case in Mourning (in other words, draping black cloth over the entire ground floor and stairs of One London Bridge, from where the funeral procession started its sad and solemn journey)

Use of 16 double silver’d sconces and Wax Lights for ditto

2 Porters with Gowns and Staves with Silk cover & hats & gloves

The best Pall

There then follow a few items which are hard to decipher. What looks like:

A coffin lid of black feathers and man in hatband and gloves

Crape hatbands

Silk ditto

Rich three quarter Armageen (?) scarves for a Minister

12 Pairs of Men’s laced kid gloves

2 Pairs of Women’s ditto

6 Pairs of Men’s and Women’s plain and one pair Mitts

Use of 11 Gent Cloaks

A Hearse and 4 coaches with Setts of horses

Velvet Coverings and black feathers for hearse and six

10 Hearse pages with truncheons , 6 of ye bearers

10 Pairs of gloves and favours for ditto

Eight coach pages with Hatbands and gloves

Use of 5 Coachmans cloaks

10 pairs of gloves for ditto and Postillion

Paid at Bunhill for opening the Vault and for Tent

Fetch and carrying Company

Turnpike and drink for the Men

A total of £51/8/6 which you would need to multiply by perhaps seventy to give a modern-day equivalent i.e £3500 or $5250

It must have made a sombre and imposing sight as the funeral cortege wended its way north of the Hall household on its one mile journey to the graveside. As Richard noted in his diary that night, it had been “a very damp day, some part Foggy, not very Cold” You can almost see the black horses with their black plumes, attended by page boys dressed from tip to toe in black, the heavy coats of the pall bearers, the coffin lined with black velvet….