Other Than religious obligations, such as masses and prayers, there is scant information how the Anglo-Saxons mourned their dead. After the Conversion most information on death rituals comes via text sources, which are highly selective and eclectic in what they choose to transmit. The funeral of Edgar, for example, is described in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but his wake or a funeral feast is not. The eleventh-century illustrated Hexateuch (BL, Cotton Claudius B.iv) shows the death of several biblical figures, their shrouding and the sadness of their relatives, but no feast or burial rite. The depiction of common practice, unfortunately, is not the prime objective of literature, and only in exceptional circumstances was unusual or undesirable behaviour recorded. While the religious part of funerals and the commemoration of the soul may have become standardised during the ninth century, there is no accounting for the secular part of the ritual. That it must have continued is evident from glimpses of such customs as can be snatched from written sources by disgruntled churchmen. Regardless of injunctions and criticism by the clergy, it seems that part of the funerary rite still included some form of drinking. Continental sources in particular, such as the early eleventh-century Burchard of Worms, reprimand ‘dancing, wearing masks, singing and drinking in the graveyard’. The sixth-century capitula of the Frankish king Childebert had already forbidden nightly wakes for the dead, which seem to have been celebrated with drinking, chanting and dancing, but the same was advised for Christmas and Easter as well. The tenth-century cleric, Regino of Prüm, was especially exasperated by carmina diabolica, ‘devilish songs’ sung in the churchyards. While there is no indication of such excesses in Anglo-Saxon sources, it seems from the rebuttal by Ælfric in the Life of St Swithin that heavy drinking was still a part of wakes in tenth-century England:

Ælfric, admittedly, is a lone voice, but these few lines show that, at least for some of the laity, feasting was still part of funerary rites, and that perhaps invitations were extended to the clergy as well.