Why are people who carry a coffin at a funeral called "pallbearers"?

It stands to reason that a pallbearer is one who bears, or carries, a pall. So what's a pall? As we learned from <a href="http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entries/52/p0025200.html">Yahoo! Reference</a>, the word comes from the Latin pallium, which refers to a cloak or covering. Thus, a pall refers to the cloth covering the coffin. A <a href="http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?fr=fp-pull-img-t&p=coffin+pall">Yahoo! Image search</a> on "coffin pall" resulted in a number of helpful <a href="http://www.tiscali.co.uk/news/galleries/qm_mourning/images/medium/pall_bearers.jpg">illustrations</a>. In the case of a military funeral, the pall is often a <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/39235000/jpg/_39235192_coffin3.jpg">national flag</a>. The word can also be used in a general sense to refer to anything that cloaks, shrouds, or obscures. In ecclesiastical terms, the <a href="http://www.seattlearch.org/NR/rdonlyres/270E2117-C8B1-4F75-B395-D7EEFB84E4C1/0/ ...  more