Sin Eating

Sin eating is an English funerary custom of the 17th century, our knowledge of which rests heavily on the evidence of a single man, the antiquary John Aubrey (1626–1697). In his notes on folk beliefs and customs, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, he wrote:

This custom, says Aubrey, had been kept up even in Puritan times in some places in Herefordshire and Brecon: He believed it had once been done throughout Wales, but in his own time was rare.

In 1714 to 1715, some years after Aubrey's death, another antiquary, John Bagford, wrote in a personal letter that he had read in a “Collection of Curious Observations” by Aubrey (since lost) that sin eating had also been practiced in Shropshire villages near the Welsh border “within the memories of our fathers.” An old man would be given a small coin, a crust of bread, and a bowl of ale, after which “he pronounced … the ease and rest of the Soul departed, for which he would pawn his own Soul.”

Finally, in 1852, a certain Matthew Moggridge claimed that sin eating had existed “within the past twenty years” at one place in Wales, and moreover that a sin-eater was shunned and detested by everyone because he carried all the sins of those for whom he had performed the ritual. How far he should be believed is uncertain.

Victorian folklorists hunted for further evidence. They easily discovered instances of bread and ale, or cakes and wine, or bread and cheese being consumed by mourners around the coffin before it was carried from the house, and/or distributed to the poor—but found nothing more about the human scapegoat, the sin-eater. Two scraps of hearsay evidence were reported from East Anglia by 20th-century folklorists. In 1945, L. F. Newman was told that sometimes in the 19th-century, bread and salt that had been laid on a corpse would be given to some unsuspecting beggar, who thus acquired its sins; fearing this trick, tramps still avoided houses where there had been a recent death. In 1958, Enid Porter reported that she had been told that an old woman who had died in 1906 had heard tell, when she was young, of a woman who had become a sin-eater, presumably in the late 18th or early 19th century. She would eat bread and salt laid on the shroud of the dead, and would be paid 30 pennies, whitewashed to look like silver.

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