Historians see dead people. Most of the time, history isn’t about death. It’s about past lives. But death, being even more common than taxes, makes a good subject for history.
How did our predecessors approach death? How did their attitudes change – to everything from funeral rites to mourning, memorialising and medicalising death – or not change, over time?
No Ordinary Deaths, a new book by Molly Conisbee, a fellow at the Centre for Death and Society (a new one on me) at the University of Bath, illuminates British experiences of death since medieval times.
The book sets itself the difficult task of pursuing the last days of those who died as they had lived, in obscurity.
We might think of Thomas Gray’s vision of ‘some mute, inglorious Milton’ or George Eliot’s ‘number who lived a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs’ – except that most of Conisbee’s subjects didn’t get anything as fancy as a tomb.
She writes about the 19th-century Southwark nurse who also worked as a ‘watcher’ – a ‘comforter for the dying’. In Britain, up until the later-20th century, death was – and in other countries it still is – what the French historian Philippe Ariès called a ‘public ceremony’.
He quoted a late-18th-century French doctor who complained that, as death approached, ‘Tout le monde s’assemble autour du malade’ (‘Everyone gathers around the sick person’).
One of the watcher’s duties, Conisbee says, might have been ‘gathering relevant neighbours or religious advisers to ease death’. Rather alarmingly, she connects this with a story her grandmother told her from the 1930s, of a woman in Ireland who took this ‘easing’ role rather literally, and ‘expedited an [apparently lengthy] dying with a smothering’.
Don’t tell Kim Leadbeater, the MP behind the Assisted Dying Bill.
If our own hang- ups with death centre around shying away from it, or wondering whether to hasten it, did our ancestors cope any better?
In the Middle Ages, when life was much more precarious, there was no prospect of hiving the dying off into hospitals, hospices and nursing homes, and ‘easing’ death ran the risk of mortal sin.
But the consolations of religion didn’t necessarily get the balance right either. The medieval church has been described as ‘a cult of the living in service of the dead’ – all those chantry chapels and masses for the souls of the departed.
But the reverse is true, too. Bequests, mostly in property, to the medieval church were its lifeblood, and such things as church ales or collections were ‘pin money by comparison’. The dead paid for the living.
In her example of a medieval ‘ordinary’ death, based on the work of Eamon Duffy on the Devon parish of Morebath during the Reformation, she speculates about the last rites.
The miller’s wife Luce Scely – thought to have died at the same time as Queen Mary, who had reintroduced Catholic observance – could have been buried under the new rituals or the old.
Touchingly, her name associates her with the feast of St Lucy and candlelight – a December day still observed in Scandinavia as a winter light festival.
Protestant reforms had come down hard on such fripperies as candles. So if Luce had gone to her grave under the newer dispensation, none would have lit her way.
We are more squeamish about dead bodies than our ancestors were, which isn’t wholly a bad thing.
Some of Conisbee’s examples remind us of the past relish for public execution and, after the passing of the Murder Act in 1752, for public dissection.
Under the Act, the bodies of those condemned and hanged for murder could be turned over to anatomical study – both as a practical measure for scientific
purposes (though the demand far outstripped the supply) and as an additional punishment, extended even beyond death itself.
In The American Way of Death (1963), Jessica Mitford compared the rampant commercialism of the funeral industry in the United States with its comparatively modest version in Britain.
She interviewed a no-nonsense British undertaker (not a funeral director), who thought lavish ‘caskets’ ‘perfectly awful-looking things’. He said, ‘I honestly don’t think I could keep a straight face’ if he had to describe the deceased as ‘your loved one’.
Mitford was reassured that American funerary excess wouldn’t catch on in Britain. To some extent, her confidence has been vindicated, though American- style caskets are pretty common these days, and you can’t move for ‘loved ones’.
But the origins of the American consumerist death can be traced to Victorian England, where ‘Jay’s London Mourning Warehouse’ in Regent Street advertised itself as providing ‘the very best goods ... made up in the best taste and the latest fashion’.
Jay’s biggest rival, also on Regent Street, was Peter Robinson’s Mourning Warehouse, where a young John Lewis cut his teeth.
Dying never goes out of style. No Ordinary Deaths by Molly Conisbee is out on 1st May
