This page from the register of baptisms and burials for the parish of Winchester St Cross with St Faith shows contrasting burials in 1790 and 1791, of Richard Hart, a Brother of St Cross, and Martha Dubber, a pauper widow.
Brother Hart was buried in a cedarwood coffin he made himself out of a plank from a Spanish Man of War twenty years earlier. He had been a carpenter in Portsmouth Dockyard, where he purchased the plank. He kept the coffin in his room, drawn up on pulleys to the ceiling and had painted funeral processions, skulls and other emblems of mortality in the room.
Martha Dubber’s husband had been crushed to death by a fall of earth in a sand pit in 1780.
Parish registers were first ordered to be kept from the 1530s, but they don’t always survive from this date. In early registers, the detail may vary depending on the incumbent or clerk who kept the them.
In 1754, a standard printed format was introduced for marriage registers, and standard forms were also introduced for baptisms and burials in 1812. This example pre-dates the printed forms, so the priest was able to include more detail.
Brother Hart was happy to show off his coffin to visitors to St Cross Hospital. The purpose of the Hospital was to provide a 'hospice' or home for poor, elderly men and women, rather than a medical hospital, as we use the term today.
Catalogue record for Burial records for a rich man and a pauper widow in the parish register of baptisms and burials for Winchester St Cross with St Faith
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