It’s often said there’s no right or wrong way to grieve. For our forebears, the traditions they took comfort in when a loved one passed tell us much about attitudes to family, faith and beliefs. From paying vagrants to dine over the dead to delivering the news to a thrumming apiary, here we explore some of the curious – and often poignant – death customs and folklore from around Britain.
Sin-eaters
An outcast looked down upon by their peers, the local sin-eater was a loathed but seemingly indispensable part of Welsh life in the 19th century. Prevalent in the north of the country and in the towns and villages along the English border, they were summoned to eat and drink over a corpse to absorb their sins.
Its origins are elusive, says author Megan Campisi, whose debut novel Sin Eater was inspired by the custom. Much of the information comes from a handful of sources, several secondhand, and hundreds of years old.
“Most folklorists believe the scarcity of evidence is due to sin eating’s pagan nature. Individuals in a Christian culture might have been reticent to record their participation in a ‘heretical’ custom,” she explains.
A firsthand account to the Cambrian Archaeological Association in 1852, however, sheds light on it:
“When a person died, the friends sent for the sin-eater of the district, who on his arrival placed a plate of salt on the breast of the defunct, and upon the salt a piece of bread. He then muttered an incantation over the bread, which he finally ate, thereby eating up all the sins of the deceased. This done, he received his fee of 2 [shillings], 6 [pence], and vanished as quickly as possible from the general gaze… he was utterly detested in the neighborhood – regarded as a mere pariah – as one irredeemably lost.”
Though mostly the work of beggars and poor people, the last-known sin-eater was a farmer rather than an outcast. It was never listed on census records but the myth around Richard Munslow’s second occupation is widely reported. He was buried in the Shropshire village of Ratlinghope in 1906 and just over a century later, campaigners paid to have his gravestone restored – long-overdue acknowledgement, perhaps, of his service to the community.
Corpse candles
Death and superstition often go hand in hand – and in the Welsh countryside, there were countless testimonies to the “cannwyll corff” or corpse candle. These flickering lights were considered a portent of death, often spotted near a house shortly before someone’s demise.
Such stories have been documented by the Museum of Wales and National Library of Wales from both written records and oral histories. In one conversation, a woman recalled how her grandfather saw a corpse candle before his wife died.
“He'd had many experiences of the corpse candle. My grandmother… died of [tuberculosis]. And the night before she died [my grandfather] was by her bedside and he saw a little lighted candle on the bed, and he saw it going out of the house. And she saw it too. She said: 'Do you see that light going out through the door, Tomos?' Both she and he saw the light, and she died the next day.”
Accounts of the corpse candle often take place in rural areas or in close proximity to churchyards, according to the library. But one encounter suggested they could appear anywhere:
“Years ago two ladies of Llanbadarn were returning home from the chapel one dark night in the depths of winter… when they came to the main road and started towards home in Pwllhobi, Mari saw a cannwyll corff coming straight to meet her, in the middle of the main road.”
A similar account came from three friends who encountered a man carrying a candle on a country lane during a storm. Despite the wind and rain, his flame was unaffected; later that night he died and his body travelled the same road when he was buried days later. A coincidence or a foreshadowing of his final journey?
Telling the bees
It is an unenviable task to deliver the sad news of a death to relatives. But for centuries, the list of those that had to be informed also included the household’s resident honey-makers.
Mark Norman, folklore historian and author of Telling the Bees and Other Customs, said it was virtually impossible to pinpoint where the custom came from but some believe it might be rooted in Celtic ideas about the soul.
In England, the custom was seemingly well-known, if not always practised. British apiarist and rector Charles Fitzgerald Gambier Jenyns recounted two stories in his 1886 work A Book about Bees of hives in Norfolk and Oxfordshire that perished after the tradition was ignored. When carried out, it was generally accepted the right way to do so was at midnight and to hang a “piece of crape (sic)” on the hives to signify mourning. Norman says more rarely the news was delivered by song.
“There would often be a further ritual known as ‘ricking’ which took place,” he adds. “In this, the eldest son of the family (if there was one) would move the hives to reflect the change. This would often mean turning them to face the door of the family home.”
Norman says telling the bees was popular in the 18th and 19th century, perhaps because there was a surge of interest in folklore in the Victorian era. The custom was also far-reaching, he says, with records of it in Europe and the Americas.
“New England has many examples [of it] in the folklore record and so it seems probable that the custom travelled with the settlers,” he adds. Indeed, an 1858 poem by New England writer John Greenleaf Whittier entitled Telling the Bees described a girl draping hives with black cloth, according to academic research library JSTOR.
The remaining question is, why tell the bees at all?
“Hives were often viewed as a family unit so by extension the bees might be viewed as part of the wider family of the keeper,” explains Norman. “It invited bad luck to ignore them. If the custom was not observed, then it was likely that the bees would leave the hive and find a better home, or sometimes would perish altogether.”
Pennies, photos and kissing corpses
Death customs were plentiful in the Victorian era, from putting pennies on the eyelids of a corpse to kissing it before burial. Many had practical as well as touching functions, explains Dr Julie-Marie Strange, professor of modern British history at the University of Durham. She points in particular to the emergence of post-mortem photography in the 1840s, in which the deceased – often young children – were posed as if sleeping.
“With adults, we have their stuff and the choices they made to construct a memory and a legacy around,” she says. “With young children, you don't have that, which is why the technology was really meaningful. There’s something so poignant about capturing forever a life that was cut short.”
Though predominantly accessible to only the middle class, at the turn of the 20th century studios in Liverpool’s Bold Street offered post-mortem photography to the working classes for shillings and pence rather than pounds, explains Dr Strange, an expert on grief and death in working class Victorian Britain.
“The photo was printed on a matchbox, so it was much more affordable, and the parent could put a lock of hair in it. In a context where people had big families and child mortality was not unusual, it was a way of retaining the memory of a life that never blossomed.”
Many Victorian customs also had pragmatic functions, she says. For instance, the corpse would remain in working class homes before burial, so washing it and stuffing it with herbs was both a mark of respect and kept smells at bay. Pennies, then roughly the size of an eye socket, served the purpose of keeping the lids shut until rigor mortis set in. But there was also a belief that eyes were windows to the soul and leaving them open would hinder its final journey.
“Before the Reformation, there were a lot of practices geared around enabling a soul to move through purgatory,” explains Dr Strange. “A lot of those were so deeply ingrained and practised for centuries – they didn’t just disappear because some theologians and the State decided everyone [should be] protestants. So a lot of the practices around dead bodies, up until the early 20th century, were hangovers [of that], to make sure the soul wasn’t lingering.”
Many Victorians believed in opening a window shortly after death so the soul could escape – which, incidentally, helped combat the smell. Children were also encouraged to not only view dead bodies – often unavoidable in small, working-class homes – but to kiss them.
“A lot of these customs were about how to manage the living alongside a dead body,” says Dr Strange. “It normalised it in a context where death was much more frequent, where you're much more likely to lose your siblings.”
But, as often was the case with the Victorians, there was a spiritual side too.
“If someone in your street died, as a kid you would often be made to go and knock on the door and kiss [the corpse]. Number one, it was a gesture of affection and respect for the dead but the parents would often say ‘it's to stop them coming back to haunt you’,” she adds.
It’s easy to label such customs as ghoulish or illogical by modern standards but Dr Strange argues strongly against judging them.
“A lot of these practices are about caring for someone you had a relationship with who becomes less familiar through death,” she explains. “It’s easy to call them superstitions but that implies it's illogical. What I firmly believe is most of these practices have a very clear logic. Sometimes that’s about the supernatural, but those beliefs exist in a world that we don't understand and can't make sense of.”