A “Month's Mind .” 
379 
fast day. The custom of haying a grand repast a month 
after a person’s decease probably arose from the inability 
of the relations to give sufficient importance to the obse¬ 
quies in the few days which intervened between the death 
and the funeral. Postal arrangements were by no means 
rapid, relations and family friends had to be summoned 
from a distance, and provisions to the required amount 
could not be obtained without due preparation. Vernon, 
wffio wrote in 1561, alludes to the extensive scale on which 
these feasts were sometimes provided:— 
“ I should, speake nothing, in the mean season, of the costly feastes 
and bankettes that are commonly made unto the priestes (which come 
to suche doinges from all partes, as ravens do to a deade carkase), in 
their buryinges, moneths mindes, and yeares mindes.” 
Some idea may be gained of the magnitude of these 
feasts from an account of a meal partaken of by the 
mourners, on the occasion of the interment of the Duke 
of Norfolk, at Framlingham, in Suffolk, in the year 
1554. Machyn, citizen and merchant-taylor of London, 
in his Diary tells us that on this occasion the following 
substantial repast was provided : forty great oxen, a hun¬ 
dred sheep, and sixty calves, besides venison, swans, and 
cranes, capons, rabbits, pigeons, pikes, and other pro¬ 
visions, both flesh and fish (p. 70, ed. Camden Soc., 1848). 
There was a notion that eels were bred from the slime 
of other fish, also that they could be produced by laying 
horsehair in water. Shakspeare refers to this theory, 
though it would appear from the context that snakes and 
not eels were the result of the experiment:— 
“ Much is breeding, 
Which like the courser’s hair hath yet but life, 
And not a serpent’s poison.” 
(Antony and Cleopatra, i. 2, 199.) 
Sir Thomas Browne admits that he failed in his 
attempt thus to produce living creatures: he writes:— 
“ Besides horseleaches and periwinkles, in plashes and standing 
