Julian Litten, historian who traced changing death and burial practices and ‘loved a good funeral’

Litten, whose name means ‘corpse’ in Anglo-Saxon, had no fear of probing the more macabre fashions in embalming, shrouds, coffins and vaults

Julian Litten, the historian who has died aged 76, dedicated much of his life to death and its rituals, embracing the idea of style in death with the sort of enthusiasm others devote to lifestyle; he was once described as “England’s foremost funerary historian”.
His interest in interment was sparked in 1970 when he was involved in excavating a church in London which had been destroyed by fire: “The agreement with the PCC was that we would not disturb any of the burial vaults, but the roof of one gave way and I fell in. 
“Luckily for me it was an extensive chamber and, having recorded and published the contents, I subsequently received a number of requests to look at other vaults. By 1990 I had probably seen about 500 vaults in England and had sufficient information to put together a history of the post-Reformation coffin. This led to further research on the post-Reformation funeral trade.”
The result was the lavishly illustrated The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral Since 1450, a deft and amusing guide to the consumerism of death, in which Litten charted the history of the changing etiquette surrounding burial over the centuries. 
Litten (fittingly his name means “corpse” in Anglo-Saxon) showed himself unafraid to deal with the more macabre aspects of fashions in embalming, shrouds and coffins, and even the design of burial vaults – “the eternal bedchamber”. “Oooh, I love a good funeral,” he told an interviewer. “Death needs a champion. Would the same attention be paid if I had gone into baptisms, or some other branch of social history?”
Occasionally Litten took on the artistic direction of historically authentic funerals, reenactments and requiems. He was adviser for the 1984 requiem in Portsmouth Cathedral for a sailor from the Mary Rose, and in 1987 advised Westminster Abbey on how to display its royal funerary effigies. In 2002 he staged the re-enactment of the heraldic funeral in 1502 of Prince Arthur for Worcester Cathedral, and he advised on the re-interment of Richard III at Leicester Cathedral in 2015.
He was scathing about the modern crematorium ritual, in which, he wrote, “an unaccompanied funeral car glides noiselessly under the porte cochère, the coffin is transferred to a stainless steel ‘hors-d’oeuvre’ trolley and wheeled into the chapel, which looks more like a waiting room in a … hospital than a dignified setting for the disposal of the dead. 
“Ten minutes later, to the accompaniment of slurred canned music, the curtains jerk their way noisily round the catafalque as the coffin sinks slowly through the floor, like a Wurlitzer organ at the Roxy Cinema, to the furnace below. We have only ourselves to blame for putting up with such banalities.’’
Nor, he pointed out, were crematoria at all “green”: burnt amalgam fillings in teeth release mercury into the atmosphere; smuts of fat percolate through chimney filters so that “if you run your finger along the top of what look like nice shiny memorial stones … you will find traces of lard”; and there are noxious fumes from the burning of plastic coffin handles and sundry prostheses.
From 1966 to 1999 Litten was on the curatorial staff of the Victoria & Albert Museum, and there was some surprise when his name did not appear in the catalogue for its 1992 exhibition “The Art of Death”, which was curated by  Nigel Llewellyn, a lecturer in the history of art at Sussex University.
The exhibition had first been scheduled to go on view in 1991 and the publisher’s blurb on Litten’s magnum opus described him as “the co-organiser of the spring 1991 exhibition at the V&A”. The show was delayed because it was thought it might offend sensibilities during the first Gulf War, although the museum’s crisis of confidence had become clear when, just weeks before its original scheduled opening, Litten had been dismissed from further involvement with the exhibition –  and barred from taking part in any publicity.
Litten, a bon viveur with a fondness for claret and cigars, had a wicked sense of humour and liked to shock, coming out with remarks that would make the Woke tremble and everyone else fall about laughing. 
According to Mary Greene in the Independent, the V&A had  feared his style would “attact sensational publicity which it wished to avoid”, and there seems to have been a clash of personalities between Litten and Nigel Llewellyn, who, in his own book, The Art of Death, paid Litten a rather barbed compliment by acknowledging his expertise on the subject, but wondering “how it might have been gained this side of the grave”. 
Julian William Sebastian Litten was born on November 6 1947 in Wolverhampton, then in Staffordshire, to Edwin Litten and Audrey, née Murdoch, and educated at St Peter’s Collegiate Boys’ School, Wolverhampton, at North East London Polytechnic and at Cardiff University, where he took a PhD on Post-Reformation Vault Burial in English Churches, 1550-1850.
He joined the staff of the V&A as a museum assistant, rising to be curator public affairs. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), a staff member who worked there in the 1990s recalled sharing an office with Litten, along with a skull called Pat Hogan and a mini coffin, and described him as “sharing his knowledge generously over our daily gingerbread person in the V&A’s ace caff”.
After his retirement in 1999, Litten became a visiting lecturer in Built Heritage Conservation at Canterbury Christ Church University College, Kent. A Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, he was a member of the Royal Archaeological Institute and a director of the Council for British Archaeology.
A dedicated High Church Anglican, Litten served on the Cathedrals Advisory Commission and on several cathedral fabric advisory committees, and in 2005 formed a civil partnership with Fr Anthony Couchman, the first Anglican priest to enter into such an arrangement.
For many years Litten represented the Diocese of Chelmsford on the General Synod where, in 2007, he gave the church’s policy on civil partnerships (that marriage is the proper context for sexual activity, and that civil partnerships should be sexually abstinent), a vigorous drubbing.
Neither Jesus nor the Civil Partnership Act mentioned gay sex, Litten declared: “Our Lord’s greatest condemnation was not for gays, but for hypocrites.” He had been with his partner for 31 years, “longer than most marriages. . . How can this be a bar to receiving Holy Communion?” 
As a founder member, and president (2001-06), of the Church Monuments Society, Litten was particularly interested in ledgerstones, the unassuming inscribed stone slabs laid into the floor of churches to commemorate or mark the place of the burial of an important person. He established the Ledgerstone Survey of England and Wales, with the aim of recording all such monuments, a programme which has now been taken over by the Church Recording Society. 
Litten and Fr Anthony Couchman shared a love of historic buildings and in later life they moved to King’s Lynn in Norfolk, where Litten became involved in local history activities, giving talks or displaying his impressive collection of historic funerary ephemera, and served as chairman of the St Margaret’s with St Nicholas wards of the town, as a trustee of the Lynn Minster Trust, as a governor of the town’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital and churchwarden at All Saint’s South Lynn.
He had an unmistakable way of speaking with precision, articulating every letter, and was precise, too, about his appearance, dressing in beautifully tailored outfits with a jewelled tie pin and sometimes arriving at Sunday morning Mass in spats. 
Litten was one of the founders, later chairman, of the Friends of Hardwick Road Cemetery, a large municipal cemetery on the town’s outskirts and an early example of a Victorian cemetery landscape, editing Studies on Hardwick Road Cemetery, Kings Lynn, from 1849 to the Present Day (2022).
Earlier he had founded the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery and in 2004 he revealed that he had planned his own magnificent funeral and even booked a place at the cemetery, where he and Fr Anthony would be installed in lead-lined, oak coffins in a 12ft deep, 9ft long, brick-lined vault.
Elaborating on his plans, he explained that he would be setting aside his dislike of cremation to enable up to 288 others to be laid to rest with him, and that his funeral, which would cost at least £16,000, would be a classic Anglican requiem followed by champagne and canapes for the mourners. His coffin would be draped with his coat of arms, featuring the Cross of St Julian and a skull, as well as his motto: “Through Death to Life”.
Subsequently, however, Litten seems to have had a change of heart, and when Fr Anthony Couchman died in 2022, he was laid to rest in the churchyard at Thaxted, Essex (where for many years he had a holiday home), albeit after suitably elaborate obsequies, as his Church Times obituary recorded, “a high mass of requiem the Thaxted Morris Men stood guard as his coffin was lowered into the ground.”
Over the last five years Litten had several heart operations, but he refused to give up cigars and claret until the last. His attachment to Fr Anthony was very touching and he never really recovered from his death. He will be buried with him.
Julian Litten, born November 6 1947, died October 19 2024