The difference between English and Irish as regards the funeral customs
of the peasantry in both countries is great. To have a large assemblage
at the ‘berrin’ is among the latter an object of ambition and pride to
the family; and the concourse of neighbours, friends, and acquaintances
who flock from all parts to the funeral is often immense. Even
strangers will swell the funeral cortège, and will account for doing so
by saying: ‘Sure, won’t it come to our turn some day, and isn’t a big
following—to do us credit at our latter end—what we’d all like? So why
shouldn’t we do what is dacent and neighbourly by one another?’
What a contrast there is between a quiet interment in an English
country parish, attended only by the household of the departed, and the
well-remembered scenes in the churchyard of Kilkeedy, County Limerick!
Here, in days gone by, a funeral was a picturesque and touching sight.
There was something very weird and solemn in the sound of the ‘keen,’
as it came, mournful and wild upon the ear, rising and falling with
the windings of the road along which the vast procession moved. In the
centre was the coffin, borne on the shoulders of relatives or friends,
and followed by the next of kin. Outside the churchyard gate, where was
a large open space, there was a halt. The coffin was laid reverently on
the ground, the immediate relatives of the dead kneeling round it.
And now on bended knees all in that vast assemblage sink down. Every
head is bowed in prayer—the men devoutly uncovered—every lip moves;
the wail of the keeners is hushed; you could hear a pin drop among
the silent crowds. It is a solemn and impressive pause. After a few
minutes the bearers again take up their burden and carry it into the
churchyard, when after being three times borne round the church, it is
committed to its final resting-place.
Years have passed since these scenes were witnessed by the writer of
these pages. The old familiar church has been pulled down (a new
one built on a neighbouring site), and nought of it remains but the
ivy-clad tower and graceful spire left standing—that ‘ivy-mantled
tower,’ where the sparrow had found her a house and the swallow a
nest; whose green depths in the still eventide were made vocal by the
chirpings and chatterings of its feathered inhabitants—the sparrows
fluttering fussily in and out, and after the manner of their kind,
closing the day in noisy gossip before subsiding into rest and silence.
Here too were to be found owls, curiously light—soft masses of feathers
with apparently no bodies to speak of, who captured by the workmen
while clipping the ivy, were brought up, all dazed-looking and sleepy,
to be admired and wondered at by the rectory children, and finally
restored tenderly to their ‘secret bower!’
A funeral scene similar to that just described forms the subject of
one of the illustrations in Lady Chatterton’s _Rambles in the South of
Ireland_, sketched by herself. She had stopped to make a drawing of the
beautiful ruins of Quin Abbey in the County Clare, when the wail of an
approaching funeral came floating on the breeze, and the melancholy
cadence was soon followed by the appearance of the usual concourse of
country people. Their figures scattered about in groups, and the coffin
in the foreground, enter with very picturesque effect into the sketch.
When the funeral is over, those who have attended it disperse through
the churchyard; and any having friends buried there betake themselves
to their graves to pray and weep over them. The wild bursts of grief
and vehement sobbing, even over moss-grown graves whose time-stained
headstones bear witness to the length of time their occupants have
slept beneath, would surprise those who are unfamiliar with the
impulsive and demonstrative Irish nature.
An old man sitting beside a grave was rocking himself to and fro, and
wiping his eyes with a blue cotton handkerchief, while, rosary in hand,
he prayed with extraordinary fervour.
‘It’s my poor old wife is lying here,’ he said; ‘the heavens be her
bed! God rest her soul this day! Many’s the long year since she wint
from me, poor Norry, and left me sore and lonesome! She was well on
in years then, though the childer were young; for we were married a
long time before there was any. The neighbours were all at me to marry
again, if it was only for one to wash the shirt or knit the stocking
for me, or to keep the weenochs from running wild about the roads while
I was away at my work earning their bit. But I couldn’t give in to the
notion. I was used to my poor Norry, and the thoughts of a stranger
on the floor was bitter to my heart. Ah, it’s a sore loss to a man in
years when his old wife is took from him! The old comrade he’s had so
long; that understands every turn of him, and knows his humours and
his fancies; and fits him as easy and comfortable as an old shoe. A
man might get a new one—and maybe more sightly to look at than the one
that’s gone—but dear knows, ’twould be at his peril! As likely as not,
she’d fret him and heart-scald him, and make him oneasy day and night,
just blistering like new leather! The old wife is like the shoe he’s
used to, that will lie into his foot. Stretching here and giving there,
and coming, by constant wearing, to fit, as easy and souple as the
skin itself, into th’ exactness of every bump and contrairy spot! For
there’s none of us,’ continued the old man, who seemed to be a bit of
a moralist, ‘that hasn’t our tendher places and our corns and oddities
in body and mind, God help us! Some more and some less, according. And
there’s no one can know where them raw spots lie, or how to save ’em
from being hurt, like the loving crathur that’s been next us through
the long years, in rain and shine. So yer honours,’ he added, getting
up with a last sorrowful look at his wife’s grave, ‘I wouldn’t hearken
to the neighbours, and take a strange comrade. And after a while a
widow sister o’ mine came to live with me and to care my poor orphans;
but my heart is still with my poor Norry here in the clay!’
There was another loving couple in the same neighbourhood, whose
apparently impending separation by death caused much sympathy among
their friends. The man was a farmer, and owing to his industry and good
conduct, he and his young wife were in comfortable circumstances and
well to do. They were devoted to each other. When he was attacked with
the severe illness that threatened his life, she nursed him night and
day until she was wasted to a shadow, and looked from anxiety and want
of sleep almost as corpse-like as he did. Her misery when the doctors
pronounced the case hopeless was dreadful to witness. The poor fellow’s
strength was, they said, nearly exhausted, his illness had lasted so
long; so that his holding out was considered impossible.
Things were in this state, and the sufferer’s death daily expected,
when we were called away from the place, to pay a distant visit. On our
return home after some weeks’ absence, one of the first persons we saw
was young Mrs D—— dressed in the deepest widow’s weeds—a moving mass of
crape.
It was on a Sunday morning going to church; she was walking along the
road before us, stepping out with wonderful briskness, we thought,
considering her very recent bereavement. We had to quicken our pace to
come up with her, and said when we did so: ‘We are so sorry for you, so
very sorry! You have lost your husband.’
‘Thank you kindly; you were always good,’ she said, lifting up her
heavy crape veil from off a face radiant with smiles. ‘He isn’t dead
at all, glory be to God! an’ ’tis recovering beautiful he is. The
doctor says if he goes on gettin’ up his strength as he’s doing the
last fortnight, he’ll soon be finely; out and about in no time.—Oh, the
clothes, is it? Sure ’twas himself, the dear man, bought them for me!
When he was that bad there wasn’t a spark of hope, he calls me over to
him, an’ “Katie my heart,” sez he, “I’m going from you. The doctors
have gave me up, and you’ll be a lone widow before long, my poor child.
And when I’m gone, jewel, and you’re left without a head or provider,
there’ll be no one in the wide world to give you a stitch of clothes
or anything conformable. So I’ll order them home now, darlin’, the
best that can be got for money; for I’d like to leave you dacent and
respectable behind me.” And your honours,’ she went on, ‘so he did.
Two golden guineas he gev for the bonnet; and as for the gownd, ladies
dear, only feel the stuff that’s in it, and ye may guess what _that_
cost. And beautiful crape, no end of a price!—every whole thing the
hoight of good quality—top lot of the shop, and no stint.—Well,’ she
continued, ‘there they all were in the chest. And sure when himself
got well we thought it a sin and a shame to let lovely clothes like
these lie by without wearing ’em—to be ruined entirely and feed the
moths—after they costing such a sight of money too. So he made me put
them on; and a proud man himself was this morning, and a happy, seeing
me go out the door so grand and iligant—the best of everything upon me!’
There was something absurd, almost grotesque, in the self-conscious
complacent way in which the young woman gazed admiringly down on her
lugubrious finery; tripping off exulting and triumphant, her manner in
curious contrast with the sore woe associated with those garments—the
saddest in which mortal can be clad.