The Creepy British Ritual Of “Eating” Another Person’s Sins

The best-known variant of sin-eating was for someone alive to eat something and drink something belonging to or associated with a dead body, taking on the dead person’s spiritual burden in the process. One of the first accounts is by seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey, who documented it as an old custom in Herefordshire in a manuscript written c.1686-87. This manuscript was not published in full until 1881, but extracts from the passage about sin-eaters were printed much earlier in 1813 and 1832.

The practice of eating sin was certainly centred in Wales, and the surrounding English counties of Herefordshire and Shropshire, collectively known as the Welsh Marches. A few sources later expanded this definition to ‘Britain’. Other works also include Scotland and Ireland, but the sin-eater par excellence definitely hails from the Welsh Marches.

Aubrey called sin-eating an old custom in the late seventeenth century, so it may predate him by a matter of decades or by centuries — nobody can say for certain. Even Wirt Sikes, who was writing on Welsh folk tales in 1880, leaves the link between sin-eating and older funerary rites as an open question.

Aubrey’s version has it as a poor man being hired at a funeral, where bread and beer were passed over the corpse before being eaten. Subsequent accounts substituted in cake, wine, ale, salt or any other food that would be present at a funeral, and there was no definitive menu.

When I first learned about this I thought that the bread went onto the body, sins went into the bread, the sin eater eats the bread and the sins went into them. I was proved wrong, but it was a good way to visualize it! But again, Aubrey just states that the sin-eater absorbed the sins via ritual and doesn’t go into how that happened. And it’s strange enough as it is, so the idea of sins transferring to the bread through some form of osmosis wasn’t really the oddest part of it.

According to Aubrey, the ritual was supposed to stop the dead from “walking” (becoming a restless and returning spirit). The custom may have been located somewhere between Christian anxieties about sin and more vernacular fears about troublesome dead folks. Perhaps the family wasn’t just concerned about where Grandfather was going, they might have also been concerned with making sure that he stayed put.

Many modern accounts assert that sin-eating reduced the duration of time spent in purgatory, a concept that was very much in line with the Roman Catholic belief in the existence of purgatory in the Middle Ages; however, the majority of the more detailed accounts come from periods long after the English and Welsh Reformations, when purgatory was officially excluded by Protestant religious doctrine, and even in Aubrey’s account, it is omitted for the sake of cleansing the sinner and preventing the dead from ‘walking.’

In Britain, feasting at funerals, giving food to mourners and giving charity to the poor had long been a part of things, all completely independent of sin-eating. Wirt Sikes mentions all of these Welsh funeral-food customs along with sin-eating, but he isn’t sure how they’re related. Even before the Reformation, rich Christians paid for charitable food (or alms) to be given to the poor on behalf of their deceased relatives, as payment for prayers for their souls. This seems rather similar to sin-eating, actually.

It’s hardly surprising that commentators from the time onward have drawn parallels between sin-eating and the Christian Eucharist; the modern academy has followed suit. Yet none of this implies that anyone intentionally created sin-eating as an ironic riff on Communion. A safer bet would be that, while sin-eating isn’t based on the Eucharist, its own reliance on the symbolism of ritual food makes it all too understandable why it should remind us of Christianity’s most potent sacrament.

In Aubrey’s description, a poor person was hired for the rite, and later writers consistently associate it with poverty. This seems reasonable: families provided sustenance (and occasionally money) for what others may not have been able to afford. The presence of poverty is repeatedly noted, but complete and ubiquitous ostracism is far less well attested.

If you crack open a copy of the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, it will tell you that each village usually had its own appointed ‘sin-eater’. But in reality the evidence is too sketchy to say for certain whether there really was such a post across Britain, or whether they just got someone to do the job whenever it was necessary.

Nowadays, sin-eaters seem almost to be considered a profession, alongside the blacksmith and the miller. But that’s not supported by the evidence; someone might well have done it once, at one funeral, without having it become a regular occupation. The historian Helen Frisby describes the historical sin-eater as “tantalizingly elusive”, another way of saying our understanding of him or her is much murkier than the popular image suggests.

A common piece of information is that a sin-eater received four pence as well as food and drink. However, this is based on one record relating to one event, not on some kind of national, market rate for a freelancer, so we don’t know what the ‘going rate’ was for it.

In some accounts, sin-eaters live outside the village in their own house, shunned by the locals because they have taken on other people’s sins and are thus thought to be doomed to Hell as a result. While it is true that sin-eating is occasionally portrayed in a negative light, there’s not much evidence to suggest that these workers typically suffered such intense ostracism.

That said, modern folklore still likes the tragic notion that every sin a sin-eater “consumed” stayed with their soul forever. But you can’t really prove this was a universal historical belief because we don’t know what specific local communities believed happened to the sin-eater’s soul. But it makes for a cool movie plot!

Sin-eating sat uncomfortably alongside the Christian teachings of confession, repentance and individual accountability for sin, so I imagine the clergy were not happy about it. However, “The Church banned sin-eating” suggests an official ecclesiastical law, which is much more difficult to find evidence for.

From our earliest evidence, we get very little detail: a bare skeleton of the practice, food, drink, corpse, payment, transfer of sins. This is it. Later accounts add formal speeches, prescribed foods, banishment scenes, doorways, and specific rules for spirits.

British funerals had biscuits, cakes, bread, and ale for mourners and pallbearers long before anyone brought sin into it. We also have that in my culture: we even place the dead person’s favorite food on top of their coffin! But the sight of funeral food doesn’t automatically mean someone was eating a dead person’s sins, and some historical descriptions even go out of their way to distinguish ordinary funeral food from an actual, dedicated sin-eater.

Richard Munslow of Ratlinghope, Shropshire, is thought to have been the last of the English sin-eaters. He died in 1906. However, rather than the destitute outcast often depicted, he seems to have been a respectable farmer. But even local Shropshire church material is careful to present this as a belief, not a fact, and there is no definitive record of who the final sin-eater was.

Munslow may have actually brought back sin-eating when some of his own children died, three of them during an 1870 scarlet-fever outbreak. While the deaths are easy enough to confirm, his purported motivation is not, so we can’t say with any certainty. Since there are other reports from late in the nineteenth century, along with half-remembered versions of the custom, it’s far more likely that the practice slowly fell away during the nineteenth century.

This content was created with the help of AI.