MORTUARY, from the Latin mortuarium, by our Saxon ancestors called raul-rcear, soul-shot, or money paid at death. The mortuary was really a gift left by a man to his parish church, as a recompense for his personal tithes and offerings not duly paid. Dugdale, in his History of Warwickshire,' p. 679, enters minutely into the reason and original occasion of such bequests, the earliest mention of which he finds in the ' Council of ./Ensham,' in the year 1009, and in the Laws of King Canute.' Mortuaries were afterwards distinguished into dead mortuaries, and mortuaria lira, or live mortuaries : the former con sisting of money, or any other goods or chattels ; the latter of live stock : Blount says the second-best beast, after the first had been paid to the lord for his heriot. After the Conquest we find the mortuary sometimes called a cars-present, because the beast was presented with the body at the funeral. John Arden, iu his will dated 4th of June, 17 Hen. VIII., says, " Item, I bequeath for my mortuary, or cora preseute, a black gelding ambling, that Almighty God may the rather take my soul unto his mercy and grace." Dugdale quotes several
ancient wills from the time of Hen.. III. to that of Henry V., in which horses, caparisoned and bearing the military weapons of the defunct, are directed to be led before the corpse at his fuperal, and delivered as mortuaries. This was the origin of the practice of leading horses at the funerals of persons of distinction. Mortuaries, in time, were found oppressive to the yeomanry and poorer inhabit ants of parishes : they were regulated, and converted into a money payment by stat. 21 Henry VIII., chap. 6, 1530. Kennett, in the Glossary to his Parochial Antiquities,' says that a mortuary was sometimes paid to the lord of a fee, as well as to the priest of tho parish.
ifi4t. of Tythes, p. 287; Dugd., Mist. Warw., ut supr. ; Jacob's Zaw Diet. ; Manning and Bray's Mist. of Surrey, i., pp. 386, 188; Kennett's Paroch. Antiq., f., p. 101, and Glossur.)