Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/340

 3o8 Collectanea.

printed on one side with a coffin, cross-bones, skulls, hacks, spades, hour-glass, etc.; but this custom is now, I think, left off, and they wrap them only in a sheet of clean writing-paper sealed with black wax." ^ The specimen from Settle points to an intermediate stage, when, probably under the influence of the Evangelical Revival, the skulls and other emblems of mortality had given way to pious but vapid doggerel. Can anyone explain what is meant by " Prepared by T. Robinson, Surgeon, Settle " } One would have thought it would be rather the undertaker who would be thus advertised.

Nor is it in this country alone that a special food is taken by the mourners. Passing over the foreign examples, however, it is probable that the custom of providing cakes or biscuits at a funeral is not remotely related to that known in Wales and the Marches as Sin-eating. The sin-eater, first described by John Aubrey in his Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, was a man who was paid a small sum to receive, over the coffin, when a dead body was brought out of the house immediately before the funeral procession started, bread or cake and cheese with beer or milk, to be then and there consumed. By so doing he was held to take upon him all the sins of the deceased and thus free the latter from unrest and the disturbance of the survivors. The practice is witnessed to in more modern times by Pennant, who wrote a century later than Aubrey, and who seems to have had before him when writing a manuscript book of a bishop of St. Asaph written in the first half of the eighteenth century.^ It is also described by the Rev. W. Bingley at the end of the century, as then usual in Carnarvonshire and elsewhere in North Wales,^ and by Robert Jones, a Calvinistic Methodist minister, as formerly in vogue.^ The late Matthew Moggridge of Swansea gave an account of it to the Cambrian Archaeo- logical Association in the year 1852, and specified the neigh-

' Gent. Mag. Lib.., Manners and Customs, 70. "^ Tours in Wales, ed. 1883, iii. 150. ^ A Tour Round North Wales, 1800, ii. 233. ■* Drych yr A wseroedd [1S20], 50.