Guy Halsall has used the expression ‘scene-making’, borrowed from Virgina Woolf, to describe the mnemonic value of burial displays. He associated ‘scene-making’ with the rituals that occur around Merovingian burials and which serve to enhance the family's standing in the memory of those who participated in the funeral. The burial takes on an act of performance, with the translation of the body from the home to the grave field, feasting around the grave, and the display of goods. The distribution of food and drink in this context is a form of gift-giving.

The remains of animal bone and vessels found in early Anglo-Saxon graves not only indicate a meal with the dead, which was celebrated in their honour at the graveside, but also that the dead themselves deserved a certain portion of such a meal, which was therefore left on or in the grave. There is no indication that anybody seriously expected the deceased to consume this sustenance, rather it was a symbolic gesture that exemplified the care that was lavished on the dead and which reiterated their role as members of a community.

Material evidence that indicates some form of funerary feasting ceases after the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons. Text sources give a little information about how funeral services were conducted, and the earliest of them mainly concern religious men and women. According to the seventh-century Penitential of Theodore, based on Theodore of Tarsus, who was archbishop of Canterbury from 668 to 690, monks or religious men were supposed to have had a funeral service in a church, which required the dead monk to be carried to the church, where the breast was anointed and masses are sung for them. They were carried to the grave cum cantatione, ‘with chanting’. Masses were to be celebrated for them on the day of the burial, as well as the third day (after the burial) and monks were usually remembered each week with a mass where their names would be recited. The service for laymen is supposed to include neighbours and family. Nearly two centuries later, the Old English penitential labelled Pseudo-Egbert, which is essentially a translation of a Frankish penitential (Halitgar's Penitential), instructs that according to Roman law a layperson should be brought to the church where his breast is anointed and a mass is celebrated for him, after which he is translated to the grave mid sange, ‘with singing’.