At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember then.

We will remember them.

Hello, I'm Neil McGregor, and in this series of podcasts, I'm looking at objects to see how shared beliefs help shape societies

and how individuals take their place in a larger community.

In this episode, we begin at the end with the dead.

This is the BBC. We've all, I imagine, been in situations where a group of us are sitting around talking,

and some people are making no contribution at all.

At the moment I'm with six people in the British Museum, and two of them are saying absolutely

nothing. And that's because they're dead. They have been dead for several hundred years,

but extraordinarily, this is certainly not the first conversation that they've been asked

to join. We're used to asking how societies look after the weak and the old,

often as a measure of how civilised they are.

But we've lost the habit of asking how they look after the dead,

and that's the subject of this programme.

In the next five episodes, we should be looking at the relationship between the short life of the individual

and the larger, longer-term life of the community.

When an individual dies, is that an absolute break?

Or can the dead in some way remain part of the ongoing community?

No, remain part of the ongoing community. What's the proper relationship that we should have with our ancestors?

In medieval England, offering prayers and masses for the souls of the dead was a central

duty of the living. Performing those ceremonies required special chapels and chantries

and so many priests that one could say that in England 500 years ago

...