Norse ideas and beliefs on death are pretty well known, if a little too generously applied. Valhalla, the valkyries, Odin's judgement, and so on have all been thoroughly diffused through popular culture. Viking ship burials are likewise well known.

But what about other Germanic societies in different parts of the world, ones that do not have written sources such as the sagas to provide some context? Pre-Christian England is a good example, there are a plethora of burial sites, some spectacularly furnished, that cover a wide variety of times and cultures, including latent Christian communities from Roman times, Anglo-Saxon furnished and unfurnished graves, and inhumations and cremations, later on during the Norse invasions of England in the late 800's there are also two distinct types of burial customs found in their winter camp.

One thing that is important to establish right off the bat is that grave furnishings and goods are not necessarily indicative of religious affiliation or identity. Guy Halsall argues convincingly that in Merovingian Gaul elaborate and furnished graves match up with times of social and economic strife. Burying your dead with elaborate goods such as jewelry, clothing, weapons, and so on was not necessarily an indication of ideas on the afterlife or religious affiliation, but as a method of social competition between elites. This also applied to Anglo-Saxon England at this time, both Gaul and Britain underwent acute economic collapse as a result of the collapse of Roman authority in the west.

Another important aspect to keep in mind with Anglo-Saxon England is that the cemeteries were not, as originally believed, the sole domain of one particular ethnic/religious identity. Sites containing Anglo-Saxon migrants also include British natives and many include varied burial practices.

So with these factors working against using graves and funerals as resources for identifying the change in religious practices and beliefs, what can they be used for?

While the practice of furnishing graves with goods is not necessarily useful, the contents of the goods certainly is. The prevalence of weapons in certain graves, while not evidence of activity in life as even the poor and very young were buried with token weapons such as slings, is interesting, and indicative of other factors. Swords in graves were extremely rare, and while this might be due to the costs associated with their manufacture, they are even less prevalent than in continental sites. Food offerings are also important. While the presence of grave goods is not an indicator of religious affiliation, certain food items might be, such as horse meat.

While spectacular examples of furnished graves such as Sutton Hoo certainly capture the imagination and are of course useful for the goods that they preserve, and the ties to continental antecedents that they also preserve, they are not the only graves that are of interest to study. Robin Fleming in Britain After Rome dedicates a great deal of space to talking about the aberrant funerals that have been uncovered, some of which have been theorized to belong to members of society that earned particular scorn, such as one burial where the occupant was staked to a riverbank, or that Sutton Hoo, in centuries after the famous burial, became a burial spot for criminals. Other grisly sites such as one living internment on top of a buried dead woman (theorized to have been accused of sorcery on the other woman). Fleming claims that sites with Pagan associations became the dumping ground for criminals.

Of the many strange innovations that the Middle Ages wrought upon the Matter of Troy, perhaps the strangest is the account of the eternal preservation of Hector's corpse. It's a story that first pops up in Benoît de Saint-Maure's mid-twelfth-century Roman de Troie, and as it isn't in his main sources it's not explicitly clear where he got the idea. What is clear is that the story stuck; it also appears in the influential late-thirteenth-century Historia Destructionis Troiae of Guido delle Colonna, and in its many later translations. The particular version I quote here is an elaborated Middle English version from John Lydgate's Troy Book (1412–1420):

Ther may be made noon opposicioun,

Above the grounde yif the body lie,

That of resoun it mut putrefie;

But yif crafte be above nature,

Uncorrupte it myghte nat endure.

Wherefore, the kyng shope him to ordeyne

To preserve it hool fro thinges tweyne -

From odour and abomynacioun -

And therwith eke by crafty operacioun

That in sight it be not founde horrible,

But that it be lifly and visible

To the eye, as be apparence,

Like as it were quyk in existence.

...

For on his hede, like as it is tolde,

Thorugh smale pipes wrought and made of gold

That be mesour wern enbowed doun

To an entré makyd in his crown

Be grete avys and subtylité

To eche party and extremyté

Of his body lyneally porrect,

Thorugh nerfe and synwe driven and direct,

Be secré poris craftely to extende,

Wherby the licour myghte doun discende

To kepe hym hool fro corrupcioun,

Withouten any transmutacioun

Of hyde or hewe in any part to tourne.

And at his hede of gold was an ourne

That was filde with bawme natural

That ran thorugh pipes artificial

Thorugh nekke and hed into many place,

Penytrable by veynes of the face,

That thorugh vertu and force of the lycour

He was conserved lifly of colour,

Fresche of hewe, quyke, and no thinge pale,

So myghtely the bawme dide avale

 

There's no denying it: if a corpse lies above the ground, it must necessarily putrefy; unless artifice were greater than nature, it cannot endure uncorrupted. For this reason the king took it upon himself to work to preserve it wholly from two things, from odour and from decay, and also, through cunning operation, to make it so that it not be horrible to see, but instead to look truly and visibly in appearance as if it were in a living state.

...

For on his [Hector's] head, or so they say, through narrow golden pipes which were calculatedly curved down to a hole in his crown by great contrivance and subtlety, stretched in lines to each portion and extremity of his body, driven and directed through nerves and sinews to extend cunningly through hidden passages, the liquid could descend down to keep him whole and free of corruption, without any change of complexion or colour in any part of his body. And on his head was a golden urn that was filled with a natural balm that ran through artificial pipes within his neck and head into many places accessible through the veins of the face, such that through the virtue and power of the liquid his complexion was vividly conserved, fresh of hue, lively and not at all pale, so powerfully did this balm take effect.

• John Lydgate, Troy Book, III. 5586–684.

King Priam effectively gives his favourite son the Weekend at Bernie's treatment. Hector's corpse, eternally refreshed and propped up by this snazzy golden plumbing, stands brandishing a sword atop an extraordinarily costly and elaborate tomb. There are some fascinating manuscript illuminations of this curious funeral artifice: for instance, in copies of Guido's Historia (Cod. Bodmer 78, f. 58r), and Lydgate's Troy Book (BodL MS. Rawl. C. 446, f. 115r, the figure in white, and T.C.C O.5.2, f. 137v, where I think Hector's body is the background figure in black – you'll have to navigate to the correct folio manually). Honourable mention goes to the funeral procession itself in JRL Eng. MS. 1, f. 109v, which is both poignant and very beautiful but doesn't depict the body.

What exactly are we to make of this most curious preservation and display of the dead? The obvious parallels are to the elaborately jewelled reliquaries and tombs of some Christian saints, and the stories of permanently incorruptible bodies that often accompanied them. The body of St Cuthbert, for instance, was reported by Bede to have been untouched by time when his tomb was opened eleven years after his death. But is that the right connection to make?

Scholars have read Hector's preservation in a few ways. Paul Strohm ('Sovereignty and Sewage', 2008), looking specifically at Lydgate, identifies a connection between Hector's plumbed body, the descriptions of Troy's utopian plumbing system earlier in the poem, the actual practices of plumbing in a late medieval London often visited by plague, and the metaphor of the "body politic" popularised by John of Salisbury's Policraticus; he ultimately reads Priam's preservation of Hector's body as symptomatic of a conception of the ideal sovereign state as working to purge its every member of physical and spiritual filth. E. R. Truitt (Medieval Robots, 2015), examining the whole tradition of this story in the context of medieval accounts of automata, perceives a development in the presentation of the incorrupt body from fantastical wonder to technological possibility.

What stands out to me, however (and Truitt does pick up on this, particularly in relation to Guido), is the sheer hubris of the attempt and its result. Unlike the stories of incorrupt saints, Hector has emphatically not been preserved by a miracle, but by human will and artifice. Constantly Lydgate draws our attention to the craftiness (a craft "above nature", in fact), the subtlety and the cunning that has gone into subverting the natural order of things. Hector, he says, has become like 'a sowle...vegetable', ie like the soul of a flower or a tree, "alive" but unresponsive. This isn't really something that can be reconciled in any positive way with a medieval Christian worldview. Priam in fact always acts imprudently in Troy Book; he chooses self-destructive war against the advice of Hector, who is (except where Patroclus's armour is concerned) generally the poem's voice of reason. The expensive, worldly, unnatural preservation of his son's corpse from death is all of a piece with Priam's "doomed pagan" role in the larger narrative of the medieval Christian reception of the Troy story.

The real clincher, I think, comes in what we're not told, but which we already know. Hector's body might have been preserved against Time, but not against Fortune. No medieval reader of the Troy story went into it not knowing that Troy would soon fall and be utterly annihilated, Hector's body along with it. As such, Hector's wondrous body is, like all the vaunted glory of Troy, merely so much transient vanity; it is simply so much waste.

So one thing pirates are obviously most famous for are their black flags often depicting a skull and crossbones/death's head or other morbid design. This was based on the medieval idea of memento mori or to "remember that you have to die." The message as used by pirates was for ships to surrender or die. The traditional symbolism of memento mori in European art was a skull sometimes placed next to an hourglass, and a number of pirate flags crudely depicted this in the form of a skull beside an hourglass or a skeletal figure holding an hourglass in one hand and a sword in the other. The common contemporary name for this flag as used by pirates was "Jolly Roger" which has a number of probable origins but the most usual meaning was probably in reference to "Old Roger" as a name for the devil or the personification of death.

Although pirates never began using this type of flag until the beginning of the 18th century, and not commonly until the late 1710s, as European nations mostly stopped using privateers (what most pirates had always pretended to be before this time) and aggressively cracked down on actual piracy, the remaining pirates of the 1710s found themselves declared "hostis humanis generis" or enemies of all mankind and were aggressively hunted down by the combined navies of all European nations. They were truly enemies of all mankind and against all flags and they probably adopted this kind of anti-social symbolism because of that.

It's a romantic idea to be sure, and this "Devil may care" persona and image has I think contributed much to the enduring popular fascination with pirates, as exemplified by a quote attributed to Bartholomew Roberts by the author of the book A General History of the Pyrates published in 1724:

"In an honest Service," says he, "there is thin Commons, low Wages, and hard Labour; in this, Plenty and Satiety, Pleasure and Ease, Liberty and Power; and who would not ballance Creditor on this Side, when all the Hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sower Look or two at chocking. No, a merry Life and a short one, shall be my Motto." (244)

The same book (which has done much to popularize the image of pirates) is fond of such anecdotes. Defiant last words attributed to a pirate hung in Nassau in 1718:

"Yes," answered one of them, "I do heartily repent; I repent I had not done more Mischief, and that we did not cut the Throats of them that took us, and I am extremely sorry that you an't hanged as well as we." (43)

Another pirate named Dennis Macarty hung in Nassau in 1718 is also described going out with some style:

The Third, Dennis Macarty, aged 28, who had also been formerly a Pyrate, ... During his Imprisonment, he behaved himself tolerably well; but when he thought he was to die, and the Morning came, without his expected Reprieve, he shifted his Cloaths, and wore long blue Ribbons at his Neck, Wrists, Knees, and Cap; and when on the Rampart, look'd chearfully round him, saying, he knew the Time when there were many brave Fellows on the Island, who would not have suffered him to die like a Dog; and at the same Time pull'd off his Shoes, kicking them over the Parapet of the Fort, saying, he had promis'd not to die with his Shoes on; so descended the Fort Wall, and ascended the Stage, with as much Agility and in a Dress of a Prize-Fighter; when mounted, he exhorted the People, who were at the Foot of the Walls, to have Compassion on him, but, however willing, they saw too much Power over their Heads to attempt any Thing in his Favour. (659)

The reliability of some things in A General History is questionable but no doubt things like this did happen and were said by pirates. But this image of pirates was doubtless also something that pirates themselves tried to cultivate. Everyone wants to be cool and fearless in the face of death, especially macho criminals. Some pirates like Edward Thache (Blackbeard) did go out in a “blaze of glory” fighting to the death and refusing to surrender, but many pirates did choose to surrender and met less-than brave deaths meekly reciting prayers or fruitlessly begging for clemency before they were hung. The pirate Stede Bonnet wrote a number of very pathetic letters to the governor of North Carolina in 1718 while awaiting execution for piracy in which he desperately begged for a pardon, even going as far as asking that all of his limbs be amputated as proof that he wouldn’t commit any more piracies. He was hung anyway.

Pirates were often full of bluster and bravado in the face of death but ended up not appearing so tough in the end. There was a street ballad probably written circa 1707 about the London criminal Jack Hall which I think summarizes this nicely. In it, Hall is taken in a cart to Tyburn Hill where along the way he unrepentantly confesses to murder and swears at the crowd and his girlfriend and the authorities (saying “damn their eyes”) and tells the parson to kiss his arse, but in the last verse as he reaches the scaffold and the hangman “fetches the rope,” Hall grows quiet and seems to fumble as the realization of his impending death sets in. This is ultimately the whole point of memento mori -- that life is fleeting and all the pretensions and personas that people adopt in life to distract themselves from death don't matter in the end and are simply vanity.

The real Jack/John Hall was hung in December 1707 along with his two accomplices Stephen Bunce and Richard “Dick” Low, the latter of whom as it happens was the older brother of the later notorious pirate Edward “Ned” Low active circa 1721-25.