Not to be morbid...but...I'd like to talk a little about palls.
I'm sure that just about everyone reading this post knows what a pall is. So for the one or two people who are unsure, I'll offer a few tidbits of information.
The primary definition is that a pall is a piece of cloth used to cover a casket during a funeral. A secondary definition is that a pall is a small, cloth covered square of card used in Catholic church services to cover a chalice holding the Eucharist. This post is concerned with the first definition.
The pall covering a funeral casket developed out of the funerary shroud, a piece of cloth used to cover an embalmed body of a deceased person during the Greek and Roman Classical Periods. (The most famous being the Shroud of Turin.) In fact, the name comes from the Latin word, pallium, meaning a "cloak". In a sense, the pall "cloaked" the casket. During the Medieval Ages and through the Renaissance, funeral palls took the form of lavishly embroidered cloths, often bearing the deceased person's armorial achievements as a design. After the deceased was laid to rest, the fancy palls might be retained by the surviving family members and used for wall hangings. As the centuries passed, the palls became solid black, known in Scotland as a mortcloth; eventually they were simple, solid white cloths, symbolizing the resurrection of Jesus, the Christ. In some cases even into modern times, the white cloth might be decorated with a cross in some color. And in some cases, such as in that of a military funeral, the national flag is utilized as the pall. The photo at the head of this post is of the pall used on the casket of my father, Bernard R. Smith. In a military funeral, the flag that is used as the pall is removed from the casket before the casket is lowered into the ground. The flag / pall is folded into a triangle and then presented to the surviving family members. In situations in which plain cloths are utilized for the pall, they are not presented, as a flag, to the surviving family, but instead retained and used in the funeral of other individuals.
The pall-bearers at a funeral are the persons who carry the casket from one point to another. In some cases, such as where the cemetery in which the deceased will be interred adjoins the church, the pall-bearers might carry the casket directly from the church to the cemetery plot. In other cases, such as where the memorial service is held at a location some distance away from the cemetery, the pall-bearers might simply carry the casket from the church to a hearse, and then from the hearse to the cemetery plot. And in effect removing the pall-bearers completely from the task for which they are named, a modern funeral might involve the pall-bearers simply walking behind the casket, which, being rested on a wheeled cart, may be pushed along by the funeral director. In either situation, if there are certain individuals designated to bear the casket and others to bear the pall, suspended a few inches above the casket, the former are specifically called casket-bearers to differentiate them from the actual pall-bearers.
The phrase: "Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?" is perhaps the most identified phrase heard in television court-room dramas and movies about court cases ~ that is, with the exception of "I object!" and "Sustained." Despite the fact that many people do not get into trouble themselves, forcing them to experience a trial in person, or have to serve on juries during their lifetimes, the phrase is well known. Not only is the phrase itself well known, but the fact that it's recitation is a standard element of every court case is also well known. Even people who have never set foot in a court of law seem to be aware that no court case (in the United States of America) will proceed until each and every witness is 'sworn in'.
The phrase apparently became popular on television court-room dramas from the sixties and seventies, ~ weekly night-time dramas such as Perry Mason, starring Raymond Burr in the title role. It is probably safe to say that Perry Mason was the first dramatization of actual court-room proceedings that most people ever experienced. Perhaps many people think that the phrase was created by the writers of the Perry Mason show.
The fact of the matter is that the phrase was in use long before Perry Mason became a popular court-room drama. In fact, it was in existence long before there was television. The phrase was in use during the Colonial Period of United States history. On 30 June 1775, the delegates of the Second Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia adopted a set of rules and regulations for their fledgling militia. Titled, Articles of War, the document consisted of sixty-nine articles by which the militia would be governed. Article #54 stated that "all persons called to give evidence, in any case, before a court-martial, who shall refuse to give evidence, shall be punished for such refusal at the discretion of such court-martial: The oath to be administered in the following form, viz."
"You swear the evidence you shall give in the case now in hearing, shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So help you God."
I attempted to find evidence of the phrase from times before the Colonial Period, but was unsuccessful in my search. It may or may not have existed prior to that time. But what can be stated, with certainty, is that the court-room in which an attorney named Perry Mason practiced law was not the first to use the phrase.
Children growing up today ~ in fact children growing up through the last fifty years ~ have probably heard that children's rhyme and thought it was just silliness. Everyone knows that you don't bake birds, of any sort, whether blackbirds or ostriches, in pies. Pies contain apples or peaches or cherries or blueberries. Sometimes, if you're lucky and have a mommy who really loves you, you'll get a pie containing chocolate pudding with whipped meringue on top.
So why would a children's nursery rhyme speak about two dozen blackbirds (specifically, Turdus merula) being baked into a pie?
The nursery rhyme Sing A Song Of Sixpence was composed around the time of the Tudor monarchy in England. That was around the time that Henry the Eighth was king; and for those who don't know much about English history, that was during the 1500s. It has been claimed that the rhyme was a parody of the marriage of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, his second wife.
Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye,
Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.
When the pie is opened the birds began to sing,
Oh wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the King?
The King was in his counting house counting out his money,
The Queen was in the parlour eating bread and honey.
The maid was in the garden hanging up the clothes,
When down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose!
But to get back to pie... In the ancient world, the Greeks came up with the idea of the pastry shell, created by simply mixing water and flour. I'm not sure what they put into those pastry shells, or if they covered them with another layer of pastry. The first baked pies are known from the Roman world. Their ingredients included various types of meats and even seafood, but they also made a type of cheesecake for the dessert course. Pies spread throughout Europe, and it was found, during the Medieval and Renaissance periods, that pie ingredients remained fresh for a longer time than the ingredients themselves. The pie crust effectively functioned as a container that kept the air out and the freshness in. During the Medieval Age, pyes were most often comprised of beef, lamb, fowl, such as chicken or duck, and sometimes pigeon. So the baking of a blackbird in a pie really would not have been too unusual ~ with the exception that there would not have been much actual meat on the bones. (Maybe that's why so many were needed for one pie!)
In more recent decades, the pie made of mince meat (usually at Christmas-time) and the beef, chicken and turkey pies marketed as frozen food items are the only types of pies containing something other than fruit, preserves or pudding.
So when, after Easter, I had some green bean casserole left over, I decided to bake it into a pie. I placed a pastry crust in the glass
baking dish, filled it with the left-over green bean casserole, to which I added some extra mixed vegetables, cream of mushroom soup, and diced ham, and then placed another pastry crust over top. I baked it in my oven; and after twenty-five minutes I ate the delicious pie while visions of four and twenty blackbirds floated in my head.
There are many times that we say things ~ words or phrases ~ that we don't realize had special or particular meanings to our ancestors. One such phrase is "signed, sealed and delivered". We say it when we have finished something, simply to mean that it is complete ~ that we don't intend to add to it. We often don't even consider that at one time the phrase actually meant that something had been signed, then sealed and then delivered.
In the early 18th Century, a deed was "an instrument written on paper or parchment, consisting of three things, viz. Writing, sealing and delivery; and comprehending a contract, or bargain between party and party." That's the definition from a book published in London in 1741 ~ Cyclopaedia: Or An Universal Dictionary Of Arts And Sciences.
A simple deed, such as a Last Will And Testament, in which one
person (or party, as in "the party of the first part") gave property (real or personal) to a second person (or party, as in "the party of the second part"), retained that simple name: a deed.
When there were more than one persons involved, where one person (or party) gave property (real or personal) to a second person (or party), and the second person reciprocated in some way, such as by paying money to receive the property, the deed was given a different name: an indenture. It was called an indenture, because the various sections of the document (one for the giver and one for the receiver) each had the first word of their part indented, so as to easily be found when the document was read. Each person, or party, involved in the deed or indenture would sign the document, usually along the bottom edge.
The transaction, whether a simple deed or a multi-party indenture, was not complete in the writing of it on the paper or parchment (and thusly being signed). In fact, it was only one third completed at that point. It still had to be sealed and delivered. And if those two steps were not completed, the transaction, in the sight of the law, did not exist.
Again, according to the 1741 Cyclopaedia: "Sealing deeds, makes persons parties to them: and if they are not thus sealed they are void. If a Seal is broken off, it will make the deed void; and when several are bound in a bond, the pulling off the Seal of one makes it void as to the others..." The seal was a small ball of clay that was
formed around the paired ends of a thin strip of parchment that had been woven through a slit in the document's bottom edge. The ball of clay, when it was still damp and pliable, would have a relief design pressed into it, usually from a signet ring possessed by the person creating the deed (i.e. the party of the first part). Individuals who did not own a signet ring, usually owned a small metal object intended for the purpose of sealing documents. That object was called a seal or a seal die. In some cases, such as the large clay seal shown on the document, dated 1638, above, the seal entirely encloses the thin strip of parchment, whereas the seal shown on the document, dated 1770, below, simply sits on the surface of the parchment strip. The latter one might not even consist of clay; wax tended to be used because it was more easily obtained and used.
The wax seal would harden like the clay one, retaining the relief design pressed into it by either a signet ring or a seal die. Some deeds were sealed by weaving a piece of silk ribbon through the parchment, as in the example dated 1762 and signed by John Penn, shown below, in which the ribbon is sewn over the signature in order to 'seal' it in.
The third part of the process involved the physical delivery of the document to the second person (or party). In the case of a Last Will And Testament, the document might not be delivered to the second person until the first person actually died. On the other hand, an indenture, being a transaction of property between two persons, would probably be signed and sealed by both parties at the same time, and therefore the document could be delivered to the second person (or party) immediately.
So, there were three parts to the transference of property known as a deed, which had to exist in order to make the transaction valid and lawful: it had to be signed, sealed and then delivered. If it had all three parts, it was considered complete. That is why today we signify something that is complete by saying it is "signed, sealed and delivered".
This morning I looked out of my kitchen window, and there, on the ground ~ on a small patch of wet grass, cleared so that the dog would have a place to 'do her business', while surrounded by the four inches of snow we got overnight ~ was a red breasted harbinger of spring. There, standing as proud as any proud thing could be, was a robin. Now, most people might not have taken notice of, nor understood the singular importance of, the sight. But I was one who listened to the old folks when they talked ~ and the old folks always said that when the first robin was seen, Spring was not far behind.
Before we had 'doppler weather' to mislead us about the weather (more often than not, if the 'doppler weather' tells you that it will be sunny tomorrow, you can bet it will rain most of the afternoon!), the old folks would look at, and listen to, insects, birds and the like to tell what the weather around the corner would be.
When the mourning dove could be heard making its 'who-woo-oo who who who' call, you knew that rain wasn't too far off. And when you saw the leaves of trees turning over to show you their undersides, you knew that the rain was pretty close. And speaking of rain, Uncle So-and-so's arm or Aunt So-and-so's leg would ache like 'all-get-out' when rain was coming.
But it wasn't only rain that could be foretold. When you would see hornets in the dreadful heat of the Summer building their nests up high, you could be sure that there was going to be some pretty high snows in the coming Winter. Contrary-wise, if the hornets built their nests low, then the snows would be light that Winter. And then there are the woolly-worms. In Pennsylvania, we call them woolly-worms, even though their proper names are "banded woolly bear caterpillars", or even more properly "Pyrrharctia isabella" (i.e. the Tiger Moth's larval stage). Whatever you call them, woolly-worms usually have black 'fur' on each end with orangish-brown 'fur' in the middle. The old folks used to say that if the black ends were so large that there was only a thin band of brown, it would be a harsh winter. Conversely, if the black ends were thin themselves, with the brown band covering most of the worm, a mild winter would be coming. Since I have always believed what the old folks said, I didn't need the fancy 'dopppler weather" to tell me that we'd see a lot of snow during this winter of 2012/13 because during last Autumn I came across five or six of the woolly-worms, and all of them were nearly completely black!
Many of the weather prognosticators, even though the old folks didn't know it, were based on logical, if not scientific, facts. You could see the undersides of a tree's leaves when rain was close by because a warm layer of air pushing underneath a cold layer ~ the friction of the positively charged and negatively charged ions, which would result in rain ~ was what pushed the leaves upward, turning them over. The old folks didn't know much of anything about warm air versus cold air, they just knew that when you saw the leaves turning upside-down it was going to rain soon.
So today, although I didn't know the scientific explanation of it, I knew that since I saw the first robin of Spring, it (Spring, that is) would not be far behind it (the robin, that is).
I think that I'll take my broad ax and head out into the forest to cut down a tree.
Oops! There's something wrong in that sentence above. Could it be that I probably would not want to exert the energy necessary to cut down a tree? Could it be that my sciatica would prevent me from heading too far from home - that my right leg would be aching too much before I got very far into "the forest". ~ No, the thing that's wrong with the sentence at the head of this post is that in order to cut down a tree, I would not use a broad ax; everyone knows (I'm sure that, at least, you did) that a felling ax is needed to cut down a tree, and that a broad ax would be used to dress the logs after the tree was felled.
The idyllic image of the ax-wielding homesteader, as created and spread by early-American historians who didn't know what they were writing about, was that he used a broad ax for his every wood-cutting need. Indeed, if the myth is believed, the homesteader carried his broad ax everywhere he went, setting it aside only when he ate his supper. Unfortunately, that myth, like the one about hanging your musket on the fireplace mantle above the raging fire, came into being during the first half of the 20th Century. There was a Colonial Revival movement in the United States during the 1920s, and certain objects, including the broad ax, spinning wheel and musket with powder horn, became mythologized. The advocates of the Colonial Revival style were fond of the art form of the tableau, in which they arranged properly dressed 'colonists' in their idea of 'realistic' situations. This means that one of their tableaus was bound to show a man, dressed in knee breeches and black leather shoes with giant brass buckles, standing beside a tree that has been just recently cut down, holding a broad ax with its big, massive iron head. Despite the fact that that image was wrong, it was made that way because the diminutive sized head of the
felling ax wasn't as impressive as the broad ax.
The broad ax (shown in the photo above) was used primarily for dressing (i.e. finishing) a log to remove the bark and flatten the sides. The dressing of a log made it more useful in home construction. The broad ax was constructed with a single beveled edge (i.e. beveled just on one face, as seen in the photo to the left) to enable it to shave pieces of wood off the log with ease.
On the other hand, the felling ax had a double beveled edge (i.e. beveled on both faces) which made it ideal for deep-cutting slashes into a standing tree. A photo of a pre-1750s felling ax is shown below.
The broad ax is notable for its curved handle. More than likely, most people who see a broad ax for the first time probably think that the handle has just bent into a curve over time. But they were produced that way to accommodate how they were used. The broad ax would be held by the user as he stood on top of the log, facing at a right angle to the log, with the handle forming a concave curve when held parallel to the side of the log. The curve in the handle allowed the user to stand with both feet on the log and not have to bend and twist uncomfortably to bring the ax's face in contact with the log. The felling ax, on the other hand, was held by the user, standing on the ground, striking the tree at right angle, and therefore did not require any curve in the handle.
St. Patrick's Day is special to me ~ as it is to all Irish and descendants of the Irish who live either in the Irish Diaspora, or in the homeland herself.
I can trace certain ancestral lines back to Ireland, directly and indirectly. I say 'indirectly' because I descend from both, Fergus and Angus, two of the sons of Erc who took the Celtic Dal Riada culture (descended from the Milesians) from Eire to Pictland. My lineage descends from Erc to Cinaed mac Ailpin (i.e. Kenneth MacAlpin), and from there to the Mackintosh and Shaw clans. From Scotland, my Shaw ancestors migrated back to Ireland, where they intermarried with the Townsons and Hydes. At the same time, my Muirhead ancestors were being relocated from their ancestral home in Scotland to the Ulster Plantation in northern Ireland. From Ireland, my Shaw and Muirhead ancestors emigrated to America, and their descendants became part of the Irish Diaspora.
Sure, I've got Swiss and German blood in me also, because the Germans and Ulster Scots intermarried quite heavily in the South-Central Pennsylvania region in which I was born, but the Irish part of me always bubbles and boils with pride when St. Patrick's Day comes around.
And so, on this St. Patrick's Day, I would like to extend to all my family and friends the following blessings and toasts:
May you live as long as you want, and never want as long as you live.
May you be half-an-hour in Heaven before the Devil knows you're dead.
May the road rise to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face. May the rain fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you securely in the hollow of His hand.
