A Hatchment is "a display of the arms and other heraldic insignia of a person on the occasion of his or her death . . . The custom was to hang the hatchment on the housefront of the deceased for a period of mourning, which might last as long as a year, and then transfer it to the interior of the parish church. . . The custom, which may have been imported from the Netherlands, was in vogue from the early seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth, and had not entirely died out in the 1920s." T.V.H. Fitzhugh: The Dictionary of Genealogy. A. & C. Black, London (1994).
Index created 8 Aug 1999, by Andrew Lutley
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