An hour-glass in the coffin

A writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1746 recalled stopping in Clerkenwell churchyard in June 1718 to watch a gravedigger who had come upon a long-rotted coffin. Beside the skull lay an hour-glass with the sand still in it, which the writer bought. Antiquaries told him it had been an ancient custom to put an hour-glass in the coffin as an emblem of the sand of life run out, while others thought small hour-glasses had once been given at funerals, like rosemary, and put into the coffin or thrown into the grave by the mourners.