9♥ The Sin-Eater · Unburdening
A loaf of bread was carried out of the house and passed across the body of the person who had just died. Everything they had done in their life went into the bread. Then a man ate it, and it was his.
In Herefordshire, John Aubrey knew of one living in a cottage on the Ross highway. When the corpse was brought out of the house and laid on the bier, the loaf was handed to him over the body, along with a maple bowl full of beer, which he was to drink, and sixpence. In return he took upon himself, there and then, “all the sinnes of the defunct, and freed him or her from walking after they were dead.”
In Shropshire they called him the old Sire, and word was sent to him as soon as anybody died. John Bagford wrote it down in 1714, within the memory, he said, of their fathers. The man came to the house and stood outside the door. Somebody brought him out a cricket, a low three-legged stool, and he sat down on it facing the door. They gave him a groat, which he put in his pocket, a crust of bread, which he ate, and a full bowl of ale, which he drank off in one draught. Then he stood up and pronounced, with composed gesture, the ease and rest of the soul departed, “for which he would pawn his own soul.”
He never went inside. That was the arrangement. He was fed at the threshold, took what he was given, and went, and the family carried on with the funeral of somebody who was now free to rest.
The last of them in England was not a beggar at all. Richard Munslow farmed at Ratlinghope in Shropshire, was comfortably off and well thought of, and seems to have taken the work up late in life. In one week in May 1870 he lost three of his children to scarlet fever. He died in 1906 and was buried in his own parish, and a century later the village paid to put his grave back in order and held a service for him.
Fourpence for a crust of bread, and a soul pawned to pay for it.
Sources
John Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (written c.1686, ed. James Britten, 1881). John Bagford, letter of 1714, printed in John Leland, Collectanea.