Funerary hatchment

The ancient term used in place of "achievement" was "hatchment", being a corruption (through such historic forms as atcheament, achement, hathement, etc.)

The word "hatchment" in its historical usage is thus identical in meaning and origin to the English heraldic term "achievement".

An example of the historic use of "hatchment" in a non-funerary context to denote what is now termed "achievement" is in the statute of the Order of the Garter laid down by King Henry VIII (1509–1547) concerning the regulation of Garter stall plates:[4] It is agreed that every knyght within the yere of his stallation shall cause to be made a scauchon of his armes and hachementis in a plate of metall suche as shall please him and that it shall be surely sett upon the back of his stall.The word appears in Shakespeare's play Hamlet (1599/1602): Laertes laments that his dead father Polonius has "No trophy, sword or hatchment o'er his bones" (Act IV, Scene 5).

The funerary hatchment was usually placed over the entrance door of the deceased's residence at the level of the second floor, and remained in situ for six to twelve months, after which it was removed to the parish church.

[1] The practice developed in the early 17th century from the custom of carrying an heraldic shield before the coffin of the deceased, then leaving it for display in the church.

At the universities of Oxford and Cambridge it was usual to hang the funerary hatchment of a deceased head of house over the entrance to his lodge or residence.

In Scottish funerary hatchments it was not unusual to place the arms of the father and mother of the deceased in the two lateral angles of the lozenge, and sometimes there are 4, 8 or 16 genealogical escutcheons ranged along the margin.

Symbols of death like batwings, skulls, hour-glasses and crying angels with torches were added and the names of the 8, 16 or even 32 armigerous forebears (sometimes an invention, there were a lot of "nouveaux riches") and their genealogical escutcheons were displayed.

A surviving document of Strathbogie in Aberdeenshire records that: "Att Grange, 19th December, 1649... the presbytry finding some pinselis in memorie of the dead hinging in the kirk, presentlie caused them to be pulled doun in face of presbytry, and the minister rebuiked for suffering to hing ther so long."

They include: Twenty-nine 18th- and early 19th-century Dutch-style rouwborden ('mourning boards') are known to survive in the province of the Western Cape, which was a Dutch colony from 1652 to 1806.

During the period of Dutch rule, the display of rouwborden was evidently restricted to senior officials and military officers, and a few high-ranking foreign dignitaries who died at the Cape.