<< HERITAGE NEWS - 15 October 2002
Celebrate Life - Explore Your Heritage
Laird C. Towle, Ph.D., Editor
lairdtowle(a)heritagebooks.com
Copyright 2002 by Heritage Books, Inc.
AN EXERPT FROM "PURITAN CHILDREN IN EXILE":
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by Gerald Garth Johnson
PURITAN BURIAL
Thomas Lechford, one of New England's early lawyers,
observed [for the 1630s and 1640s] "At burials, nothing
is read nor any Funeral Serman made, but all the neighborhood,
or a good company of them, come together by [the] tolling of
the bell, and carry the dead solomnly to his grave, and there
stand by him while he is buried.
This all but silent "service" epitomizes the burial of New
England Puritans between 1630 and 1660. Besides their usual
somber ways, the Puritans were forbidden to show excessive
mourning lest the Indians [and other non-Puritans] see the
funeral as a decline of their presence, and their emotionless
response to death as an example of their trust in God.
Basically, until the late 1650s and early 1660s, funerals
followed the same practices as might be found in Old England
for the same time period.
The range of burial preparations was from no coffin to a
double coffin; and from no embalming to embalming the body.
Also, preparation differences could be related to the number of
days after death burial occurred as well as the social rank of
the dead person. But most of the deceased were buried between
two and four days. In such cases, embalming of the body was not
necessary.
Depending on the social and civil rank, elaborate services
generally were not provided for the deceased. An exception was
the funeral for Governor John Winthrop in 1649 when the Boston
Artillery Officers requisitioned one barrel and a half of the
country's store of powder from Captain John Johnson from
Roxbury, Massachusetts, Surveyor General of the Arms, to
acknowledge the Colony's affection for the departed Governor.
By the late 1660s, funerals became more elaborate for the
general public to the extent, in fact, that by 1724 laws were
passed to limit the exraordinary cost of funerals.
For the first twenty to thirty years of the Massachusetts
Bay Colony, funeral sermons were not part of the finality of
service for the deceased. In fact, even the placement of a
funeral marker was practically unheard of between 1630-1650.
The popularity of gravestones came into being during the 1660s.
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Extracted from Chapter Seven of Johnson, Puritan Children in
Exile, 2002, #J2009
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