FUNERALS 265

Funeral ceremonies were also the occasion of much rude
merriment. The vigil or wake had its serious moments, but it
also had much about it that caused moralists to link "wakes" and
taverns together as leading to sin. In 1342, a church council de-
nounced wakes as giving opportunities for fornication and theft,1
while a century earlier bishops had prohibited singing, games
and choruses during the time the dead person still lay in the
house.2 Although we have little direct evidence for our period
the constant series of prohibitions from Anglo-Saxon times on-
wards against pastimes at vigils for the dead, together with the
abundant evidence from the sixteenth century onwards, makes
us certain that throughout the Middle Ages elaborate meals and
drinkings, accompanied by boisterous behaviour, were an in-
separable part of funeral ceremonies. The rich, as we should
expect, made much of these occasions, and rich and poor were
summoned to pay their last respects to the dead, and were
lavishly entertained during and after the ceremonies. The death
of Maurice, the fourth Lord Berkeley, on 8 June 1368, was the
signal for the reeve on his manor of Hinton to start fatting up
one hundred geese for his funeral, "and divers other Reeves of
other Manors the like, in geese, duckes, and other pultry".3
These were but a small part of what was provided, as may be
seen from more detailed accounts of some fifteenth-century
funeral arrangements.4 And there, it will be noticed, the presence
of "poor men" is constantly mentioned, and we may feel sure
that the funeral of the lord of the manor, no less than the funeral
of a neighbour, was a day of mixed sorrowing and feasting for
the medieval peasant. Sidney's famous phrase "Hornpipes and
funerals" is but another way of indicating the frame of mind
which was capable of turning " the house of mourning and prayer
into a house of laughter and excess".

Mention of the "bride ales" and "wake ales" recalls one of
the most popular forms of medieval festivity. Scot ale, church
ale, play ale, lamb ale, Whitsun ale, hock ale, and the like: we

1 Wilkins, op. cit. n, 707.
2 Ibid. I, 600, 625, 675; cf. in, 61, 68.
3 Lives of Berkeley s, I, 378.
4 See my The Fastens and their England, 197-9. Cf. the arrangements for
a clerk's funeral, Arch. Journ, xvm, 72.