What had Mary Woodfield done to deserve the alias which the Croydon register gives her of "Queen of Hell"? (1788.) Distinguished people were buried in effigy, in all the different churches with which they were connected, and each sham burial service was entered in the parish registers, a snare and stumbling-block to the historian.
This curious custom is very ancient. Thus we read in the Odyssey that when Menelaus heard in Egypt of the death of Agamemnon he reared for him a cenotaph, and piled an empty barrow "that the fame of the dead man might never be quenched." Probably this old usage gave rise to the claims of several Greek cities to possess the tomb of this or that ancient hero. A heroic tomb, as of Cassandra for example, several towns had to show, but which was the true grave, which were the cenotaphs? Queen Elizabeth was buried in all the London churches, and poor Cassandra had her barrow in Argos, Mycenae, and Amyclae.
"A drynkyng for the soul" of the dead, a [Greek text] or funeral feast, was as common in England before the Reformation as in ancient Greece. James Cooke, of Sporle, in Norfolk (1528), left six shillings and eightpence to pay for this "drynkyng for his soul;"and the funeral feast, which long survived in the distribution of wine, wafers, and rosemary, still endures as a slight collation of wine and cake in Scotland. What a funeral could be, as late as 1731, Mr. Chester Waters proves by the bill for the burial of Andrew Card, senior bencher of Gray's Inn. The deceased was brave in a "superfine pinked shroud" (cheap at 1L. 5S. 6D.), and there were eight large plate candle-sticks on stands round the dais, and ninety-six buckram escutcheons. The pall-bearers wore Alamode hatbands covered with frizances, and so did the divines who were present at the melancholy but gorgeous function. A hundred men in mourning carried a hundred white wax branch lights, and the gloves of the porters in Gray's Inn were ash-coloured with black points.
Yet the wine cost no more than 1L. 19S. 6D.; a "deal of sack," by no means "intolerable."Leaving the funerals, we find that the parish register sometimes records ancient and obsolete modes of death. Thus, martyrs are scarce now, but the register of All Saints', Derby, 1556, mentions "a poor blinde woman called Joan Waste, of this parish, a martyr, burned in Windmill pit." She was condemned by Ralph Baynes, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield. In 1558, at Richmond, in Yorkshire, we find "Richard Snell, b'rnt, bur. 9 Sept." At Croydon, in 1585, Roger Shepherd probably never expected to be eaten by a lioness.
Roger was not, like Wyllyam Barker, "a common drunkard and blasphemer," and we cannot regard the Croydon lioness, like the Nemean lion, as a miraculous monster sent against the county of Surrey for the sins of the people. The lioness "was brought into the town to be seen of such as would give money to see her. He"(Roger) "was sore wounded in sundry places, and was buried the 26th Aug."In 1590, the register of St. Oswald's, Durham, informs us that "Duke, Hyll, Hogge, and Holiday" were hanged and burned for "there horrible offences." The arm of one of these horrible offenders was preserved at St. Omer as the relic of a martyr, "a most precious treasure," in 1686. But no one knew whether the arm belonged originally to Holiday, Hyll, Duke, or Hogge. The coals, when these unfortunate men were burned, cost sixpence; the other items in the account of the abominable execution are, perhaps, too repulsive to be quoted.
According to some critics of the British government, we do not treat the Egyptians well. But our conduct towards the Fellahs has certainly improved since this entry was made in the register of St.
Nicholas, Durham (1592, August 8th): 'Simson, Arington, Featherston, Fenwick, and Lancaster, WERE HANGED FOR BEINGEGYPTIANS.' They were, in fact, gypsies, or had been consorting with gypsies, and they suffered under 5 Eliz. c. 20. In 1783 this statute was abolished, and was even considered "a law of excessive severity." For even a hundred years ago "the puling cant of sickly humanitarianism" was making itself heard to the injury of our sturdy old English legislation. To be killed by a poet is now an unusual fate, but the St. Leonard's, Shoreditch, register (1598) mentions how "Gabriel Spencer, being slayne, was buried." Gabriel was "slayne" by Rare Ben Jonson, in Hoxton Fields.
