Burial society
A burial society is a type of benefit/friendly society. These groups historically existed in England and elsewhere, and were constituted for the purpose of providing by voluntary subscriptions for the funeral expenses of the husband, wife or child of a member, or of the widow of a deceased member. Some also allowed for insuring money to be paid on the death of a member.[1]
Not-for-profit burial societies still exist today. For-profit companies also provide
In antiquity
Burial society is a precursor to general insurance which is a recent innovation. Burial societies were first known to exist in ancient Rome and not before. In ancient Rome, various associations of a fraternal nature, as well as religious groups, political clubs, and trade guilds, functioned as burial societies. Terms for these include
One of the ways that the Romans made sense of the earliest Christian groups was to think of them as associations of this kind, particularly burial societies, which were permitted even when political conflict or civil unrest caused authorities to ban meetings of other groups; Pliny identified Christians collectively as a hetaeria.[3]
19th century
References
- ^ public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Burial Societies". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 4 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 824. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the
- ^ Maureen Carroll, Spirits of the dead: Roman funerary commemoration in Western Europe (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 45–46.
- ^ Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (Yale University Press, 1984, 2003), pp. 31–47 online.
- ^ Roberts, Edmund (1837). Embassy to the Eastern Courts of Cochin-China, Siam, and Muscat. New York: Harper & Brothers. p. 396.