Let’s talk about death more honestly

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1:26Choose your sweetness, dial it up, or keep things light. Add a touch of pistachio, a hint of strawberry or vanilla, or make it a spring classic with lavender. Because this season, there's endless ways to chai at Starbucks. We should be better at talking about death, and maybe we should get ourselves comfortable with personal rituals to help us through that. That is what Dr Helen Gittos thinks about how medieval people let rituals roll throughout their lives. Now if you're struggling with grief right now, just be aware that we do talk about some specific personal experiences of death in this conversation.

2:08Welcome to Life Lessons from History with me, Dave Musgrove. The concept is simple. I find a great historian and I ask them to propose a life lesson from history. some learning from the past that will help us today to live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.

2:28Helen, how are you? Welcome to the podcast. It's wonderful to be here. It's really good to have you. Now, look, you are fellow and tutor in medieval history at Oxford, and the opening line of your biography on your Oxford page is brilliant. It says, I am a medieval historian with wide interests. I mean, that's great. What are your interests? Oh gosh, I love places and stories and I suppose I like being surprised by the things that we see in the past and being surprised about where the stories that I'm pursuing take me, I guess. Perfect. Well, we've got what may be a surprising conversation today, it may not for our listeners.

3:10We're going to talk about rituals and why rituals matter and perhaps why we ought to reflect on rituals in the past and think about how they might help us to navigate the present. So when we're talking about rituals, what sort of things are you imagining? Well, I started off by wanting to know more about churches. You know, I spent a lot of my early life wandering around medieval churches and wondering about why they were like they were. And so I did a lot of my early research trying to answer some questions about that. So, for example, early medieval buildings are often laid out in long lines of separate buildings.

3:47And I wanted to know why that was. And so I've spent time thinking about the written evidence for rituals. but I'm also increasingly interested in the sort of the physical material evidence and what you can deduce from things that weren't written down but do seem to have been happening. Yeah, perfect. We'll dive into that in just a second. But in terms of our sort of chronological and geographical framework, your medieval history, what does that mean in this context? Well, sort of after Rome and before the Reformation, something like that. So much of my stuff has been on the early middle ages but increasingly i'm i'm interested in the in the later period too and i focus mostly on england but you can never look at england in isolation at all so yeah i mean that's that gives us a thousand years to play with so um you know that is a wide interest there isn't it and i guess rituals change quite a lot over that period as well so maybe we'll find out some interesting things so in terms of sources let's think about how you might understand rituals that people have engaged with in the past so as you said if someone's written down that they do a ritual, that's quite an obvious answer.

4:56Quite often, I suppose, they wouldn't be writing down things that they're doing. So how can we understand kind of the ritual landscape that people engage with? Yeah, I think a lot of it depends on who you're interested in knowing about. The most obvious source is when you're thinking about the church, which I suppose most people think of as being where a lot of ritual activity happens in the Middle Ages. You know, you then want to find the books that tell you this is how to perform certain rituals, this is what you should do if you're a priest or a monk or whatever. But increasingly as historians, we've realised that those sources tell us lots of things, but they're not necessarily very good for telling us exactly what people were doing.

5:39People weren't following things word by word. So we have to really find ways of learning how to read those written sources in creative ways. And what about archaeology? How does that help us to understand ritual sources? I think archaeology is fundamental and I increasingly am really interested in the archaeology of liturgy, the archaeology of church rituals. And gosh, we have so much material to go on, both in terms of buildings, but also particularly in the early Middle Ages in terms of burials, these moments when, you know, they're very intense periods in life where they often are involving all sorts of rituals which are of many different kinds, informal, familial, but also institutional too.

6:29So paying attention to the scraps of evidence, particularly that you can sort of triangulate together. So when you've got archaeological finds that seem to help us understand sources that we've got from elsewhere. It's so much about sort of building up a texture that gives us an indication of the kinds of things that people were doing. Tell me about lead crosses in Bury St Edmunds because when we chatted about this on email you said I've been doing a bit of research on this and that seems like quite an interesting way in actually because that is a clear archaeological exemplar. Yeah so I was looking for something else I was looking at a collection of inscriptions from the early middle ages and came across a reference to these lead crosses so they're just the things you might hold in your hand that were found mostly in the 19th century in Bury St Edmunds in the monastery there in the gardens and as people were digging graves and gardening and and rebuilding they kept finding these lead crosses and they had scratched inscriptions on them sort of made with something like a sort of like a pointed a sharp point and those inscriptions are in latin and they say something like the cross of christ triumphs the cross of christ drives away the enemy they're all a bit different and yet they're a sort of and i just sort of wanted to know what these were for why were they turning up and how did we try to you know what clues did they give us as to what was going on there.

8:02And so I started really trying to find ways of interpreting them. And I started off by talking to people about what date they are and discovered that they're pretty clearly 12th century. They're probably sort of in the years immediately after the Norman conquest. And they seem to be found in the cemetery where the monks of Bury St. Edmunds were buried. And they fit with other things that have been found elsewhere, in other monasteries, both on the continent and in England too, but they're not identical with them. And they have the text that they have on them clearly comes from a liturgical ritual, but nothing to do with, you know, monks or burial rites.

8:47It comes from the ritual that a bishop conducts when he makes a new church holy. And this is a very long and lengthy ritual. and he starts by banging on the door and saying, let me in. And the people say, no, you can't come in. And eventually he does cross the threshold. And when he's there, he writes a cross on the floor of the church. And he says those words that are on the lead crosses from Bury St. Edmunds. So it's quite clear that these are sort of borrows from a liturgical context. But the more I investigated, the more I found out that they really don't have anything to do with church dedication, rituals.

9:28They seem to be crosses that were being placed in the graves of monks and they were being made for each monk. And I think it's not quite clear whether they were being given to them on their deathbed. I suspect they probably were, that this is something that will keep you safe, keep the devil away and keep Christ close, but then also that they are placed on their chest when they're laid in the coffin. And so here we have something which there is no written evidence that that was going on in Bury St Edmunds. There's tiny little bits of evidence that you can fit it together with from elsewhere, but it's a clue, an example of how archaeological evidence can give us an indication of particular local rituals in a community that were being practiced and understood by the people there, but that never got written down and that we wouldn't know about otherwise without finding this stuff.

10:28So that's really interesting because that is requiring you to do something which historians are often nervous about, which is employing imagination to try and get to that point. How do you feel about that? I think it's fundamental, isn't it? You have to constantly try to imagine other worlds and other worlds, you know, other ways of thinking about things. And I suppose that's what really reeled me into doing history in the first place was the chance it gave you to imagine how differently the world can feel and be experienced and be understood, even by people with the same bodies and brains as us.

11:07You know, it's that tension all the time between things that are so familiar, that moment when somebody from a thousand years ago almost whispers in your ear and it feels so immediate and familiar. And other times when you're just presented with something that's completely weird and intriguing. I suppose the place where ritual is most likely to happen is when people are commemorating a death of some sort. That's a clear place where people bring in rituals as solace, presumably. What sort of things were people doing in the medieval period to ritualise death? What was their approach, do you think?

11:40I think it starts before people died. so that's one of the most striking things is that you have these ritual texts that go all the way from the deathbed that are about guiding a good death that are helping somebody to you know in some kind of ideal situation that they are eased into death so that's about sort of helping what's going on around the bedside but then there is a whole plethora of things partly about making it a community activity so that around the the grave side it's very clear that really through all of the periods there was a tableau being created that was a moment in which people were coming together to commemorate to note what's passing and also I think to manage the change that comes with that you know all of the changes that follow from the death of an individual person and what what also followed then was something that I think we really have lost at least in much of western Europe is a ritualization of what happens afterwards you know that we're all very good at contacting somebody in a moment of crisis many of us are less good at contacting them a month later three months later, a year later.

13:03And one of the things that was really characteristic about the Middle Ages was this kind of formal way in which there were rituals that followed death that helped people to negotiate, you know, the aftermath, not just the moment itself. Well, that is fascinating. So were there sort of set moments that people were supposed to sort of come back to remember? That's right. Yeah. Tell me about that. Their formal series of commemorations exactly when they were changed over time, but that they were services, that those things were marked, that there were prayers. And I do think that that's something that is badly missed, really, and would help an awful lot of people if they weren't just, yeah, to deal with that more difficult time, I think, once that moment of sort of crisis and change and the busyness that comes with dealing with a death.

13:56is past. Yeah, that's good, isn't it? That feels like the right sort of thing to do. I mean, you might remember the anniversary of a death, I guess, but that might be quite a personal thing, whereas all the people who went to the funeral wouldn't necessarily bear that in mind. I mean, one of the things that people worry about today, certainly in the West, in Britain specifically, maybe, or in the West generally, is that we're not very good at talking about death, that we kind of just don't get it right. The conversations don't happen. do you think were people in the middle ages better at talking about death better at being aware of what happens and the I suppose the inevitability of it I think because it was so much more part of daily life there is a real contrast I think between the way that now it is so sanitized by the institutions that sort of are involved with it you know so many people die in hospital rather than at home.

14:52So many people order professionals to be able to manage, you know, the undertakers that come in and are involved, the crematoriums and the sort of very impersonal ways in which we choose to manage it or often we feel we don't have much choice within it. And I think, you know, there's been a lot of effort some people have gone into to try to find ways of making that more personal. But I think it is a very, very different process now, now that it is so much taken away from the home and the family. It's quite a formal journey, isn't it? There are certain things that you kind of, I guess you need to...

15:33So maybe that goes back to what we're talking about. If there was a bit more flexibility to kind of break free from whatever liturgical bounds existed in the medieval world, that people were a bit more able to approach it. Yeah, I suppose that is something that I have tried to do at the times at which it has mattered to me. I suppose I have been aware of the flexibility that there is and wanted to try to, or have dared, I suppose, to do something with that because I have been aware of, I don't know, this long history of what death rituals have been and how much room there is for improvisation.

16:10Well, can we go into your experience a bit then? So that's one of the reasons why when we were chatting about this in advance, you said that you suffered a bereavement. Tell me about it. Yeah, very sadly, my middle daughter, Harriet, died as a very little, very young child. And at the time at which she died, I was writing that piece about the Bury St. Edmund's Crosses. I was in the middle of it. And it's hard sometimes to be a historian and not to turn off your historian's head. so all the way through I don't know I was sort of watching almost and contrasting the way in which we now deal with death with what I was looking at and studying at the time in the 11th and 12th centuries and you know I think there was a particular moment in the hospital where you know real efforts were made to try to include families she died in hospital and they wanted to try and sort of help us to wash her, to give her care, the kind of care that would have happened, of course, at, you know, at home in the period that I was studying.

17:14But there were also bits of it that were just so far away from what I'd been seeing that these monks were doing. So, you know, not to be too graphic about it, but when she was taken away from the room in which she died, they brought in a cool bag I mean literally a cool bag and they wrote a a chit which was a bit like the kind of thing you might get if you'd taken your shoes in to be mended and it was just a sort of a record to make sure I suppose that you know the bodies didn't get mixed up and so there this was this chit going into a cool bag with my with my daughter and the contrast between thinking of those monks who were handling with such care and love and attention and effort and craft to help their loved ones, you know, at that moment.

18:11And it was one of those sudden moments of shock as a reminder that, you know, gosh, history isn't a linear progression of things getting better. Sometimes the contrasts are really, really stark. I mean, that must have been very difficult to contend with, surely. I mean, that doesn't feel right. No, no, it wasn't. You know, so many aspects of what was happening and the care she was given at that time were really great. But that bit of it was just shocking in its sort of perfunctoriness. we were really lucky then that the hospital where she died had an arrangement as many do that for very young babies in particular they will help you to arrange a funeral and they will do it for free and so some bits of all of that were made very easy but I you know I gosh in in the aftermath I went home and I, you know, it's shock enough to have to bury a child, but to come to terms with them having to having to arrange a funeral for them and to do so, so keenly aware of what that might be like.

19:29And, you know, I was going to do it in a London crematorium, which was a very long way from my home then in Kent, because, you know, we'd been transferred into London. And it was a big urban cemetery. And so I was faced with thinking, how can I create something that feels right in those circumstances? And it was a funny kind of mixture of being a historian and being a mum. There was a very odd day when I, in the aftermath, went into the British Library, as I had been used to doing. And I sat in the British Library reading through some of the monastic death rituals that I'd been looking at for this rite.

20:16You know, looking really for inspiration, looking for things that might work for me, and not really finding it in that sort of very formal environment. And so I had to sort of think about how to craft something that would feel right. And I was, you know, I think lots of us do this and face that moment. But I was very glad that what we did craft in a very short period of time did end up feeling really, really right. and we sort of dispensed with all of the formality and we simply put together things that involved real music and real musicians playing live. I had to find a violinist who I didn't, I couldn't immediately play my hands on a violinist so I sort of hired a violinist to come and play and a friend found a wonderful pianist and we had a whole series of family members who read things that mattered to them And then afterwards, we took everybody, we walked back to the hospital where she died because there was a playground there, this beautiful, small oasis of a genius playground that had been created and sadly is not quite there now.

21:31But it was a wonderful, it had been a place where I could play with my son in the time when she was in hospital. And so we all gathered there amongst these, you know, these playthings and were able to be in an environment that felt right for me and right enough for the people who were close to us. hmm that's amazing that sounds that sounds like a really good way of of commemorating something so you were kind of able to break free of the institutional formality and create something for you and for harriet presumably something you felt reflected her essence as well so did you actively draw on on sort of your historical knowledge i can't imagine at that point you must have been so struck by grief that was hard yeah yeah it was hard and i so i did i tried and I did go to look at the things that I was studying and they, in their precise form, they felt very alien.

22:27But I think what I took with me was this confidence, I suppose, to put together something which built on an awareness of the kinds of things that people have done in the past and an awareness that I didn't have to do what I was being guided to do or the things that I had seen done in more formal settings and that we could create something that was a mixture of something that was appropriate for us and that was, yeah, that was daring to do the kinds of things that mattered. And, you know, in retrospect now, it was lovely and it was lovely, yeah, it was lovely especially to go and, you know, be in a playground, the sort of antithesis of everything else, but somewhere that was a very, you know, to be outside and to be together in somewhere playful felt right.

23:16And the way you're describing it, it sounds like that it was a good experience, a good ending for what was obviously a horrific experience.

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24:35Zootopia has a secret reptile population. You can watch the record-breaking phenomenon at home. Zootopia 2, now available on Disney Plus Rated PG. Right now you can get Disney Plus and Hulu for just$4.99 a month for three months with a special limited time offer. Ends March 24th. After three months, plan auto renews at$12.99 a month. Terms apply. So sort of just broadening it out a bit. What is it about ritual like this that helps us? What's the underlying sort of human benefit? Why do we do rituals? Well, I think I suppose there's a lot that's in that, in that I wasn't inventing anything from scratch.

25:09It was done within a formal context, within a chapel, in a place where you go to do that kind of thing. So ritual often gives us a sort of a framework for how to act at moments in which we feel lost and shocked and uncertain and wanting a map for how to navigate some period of major change. and a way of doing that collectively. So much of this, isn't it, is about collective groups managing changes either amongst a whole group or for people within it. And so where you have a sort of set, shared expectations about these are the kinds of things we can do, but I think what they also do, and we have increasingly understood that, is to give a sense of freedom and flex and scope to create a new within that framework.

26:09And that, I think, then allows these improvisations to feel right and to feel like ways that are appropriate. Yeah, there was another moment in COVID. You know, that was a particularly difficult moment for many people when, you know, you couldn't do the things that you're expected. you weren't allowed to bring people into funerals my uncle died and we were not allowed to have people there and so you know I kind of stepped in to that moment at the graveside and said could we do something here that would help and so we we created a set of sort of of readings and speeches gathered collectively around the graveside where we weren't allowed to go and meet indoors or on mass.

26:54So, you know, that sense that there's a kind of, yeah, there's freedom of movement, but within a framework that holds everything together. There's a lot of this, which is about safety, I think, in moments of great change and crisis. That all makes perfect sense. But I suppose if we're trying to understand sort of the human condition in the past, this is very experiential. This is stuff that wouldn't necessarily be written down as you said quite hard to see in the archaeological record there's a lot of interpretive effort sort of trying to understand the performative aspect to archaeological sites nowadays isn't it like you know to think about so can we sort of get to that at all do you think can we understand how people in the past really engage with with these sorts of rituals do you think?

27:43I think you can see it you can see it particularly in the early middle ages where I was lucky enough to be in Sutton Hoo a few weeks ago where they were excavating newly and you know you could walk to that open area of ground that we've never seen before and there were these clusters of burials and there you could see family groups buried together. There is an amazing example in Dover where ancient DNA is something so scientific perhaps you mightn't think would be a way into understanding some of this but it really is. There's a cemetery in Dover on the 6th and 7th centuries where Duncan Sayre and others have been sampling ancient DNA which allows you to be able to see the relationships between these individuals that we couldn't see when it was excavated.

28:38And for example there is a family there where you can see a young woman who was buried next to her grandmother and her mum and her dad and next to her set apart from that is buried her sister within her sister's family and it's quite clear that one of her sister's children also died young and that child was then buried next to his aren't. There you've got a sort of way into seeing a moment in time where that child was being sort of given the protection of the family who were already laid in the ground. So I think weirdly, you know, ancient DNA, seeing the relationships between these family groups particularly, is giving us a whole new wealth of insights into how people were looking after one another and really sort of thinking very hard about those moments of time.

29:42But we can also see it very clearly in the tableaus that people are being buried with. So particularly in the early Middle Ages, in the 6th and 7th centuries, people were being laid out and that deathbed tableau was clearly meant to be seen. It was a gathering place. And we can see that people are being given all sorts of objects, including things like bowls of hazelnuts, flowers, pillows to protect them. There are sometimes sort of stones that are placed around the body and when the osteologist goes and looks at the bones of the skeleton they discover sometimes that those stones are being placed to protect an injured knee or an arthritic hip.

30:30So I think we can't ever know what was precisely in the heads of an individual, but we can begin there to see acts of love and kindness, which are ways into that sort of emotional, imaginative thought world of more than a thousand years ago. and History Extra listeners I spoke to Duncan Sayre about his work on the podcast, on the History Extra podcast so have a listen to that and he goes into more details about that We talked quite a lot about death rituals Can we see life rituals very much in the archaeological record? We can but it's often a bit harder to get at, you know death gives us so much archaeological evidence, I can think of an example.

31:17Brilliant. I can think of a really good example which emphasises that sort of the usefulness of the archaeological stuff. There was a very tiny, again, lead plaque, or piece of lead that was found by a metal detectorist in Norfolk. And it's got this scratched runic inscription on it. And it probably dates from, you know, sometime in the early Middle Ages. And it's got a punched hole in it. And it says on it, the dwarf is dead. Oh. The dwarf is dead. Now, how do you go about interpreting that? I don't know. We can tell from the hole that it's meant to be hung. And we have these medical remedies from the early Middle Ages, which talk about, for example, how you heal people who've got asthma or who are sometimes described in the remedies of being shaken by a dwarf.

32:12They have a dwarf within them. They're shaking. The condition that they have is being explained by this dwarf which is inhabiting them. and one of the things that they're told to do is to hang this stuff around their neck, to hang a plaque against the dwarf around the neck. And so this, if you read this text, you would have no idea of knowing whether this is some kind of thing that's sort of made up, that wasn't really being written down, it seems a long way away from folk, it's written in very high status manuscripts, and yet put it together with this little lead plaque and that indicates that people were actually doing some of the medical remedies that we have textual evidence for.

32:50And that that kind of wearing things around your neck as protection against the dwarf was something that was being practiced in rural circumstances. So some of those kind of medical remedies are a real way into seeing the protective strategies that people are adopting to live healthier lives. So the dwarf in this context is some sort of supernatural goblin evil thing. Yeah, yeah. yeah yeah that's okay that's a that's a really good example right so look so from what you're saying it sounds like certainly in the early medieval period and probably throughout the medieval period people were sort of more attuned to ritual and more willing to engage with ritual perhaps and certainly in a communal basis what can we learn today then so if our if our presumption of this conversation is that we can learn from people in the past and we shouldn't just assume that they're all backwards and we're all better what can we learn from the way they they dealt with life events?