Sin-eater
A sin-eater is a person who consumes a ritual meal in order to spiritually take on the sins of a deceased person. The food was believed to absorb the sins of a recently dead person, thus absolving the soul of the person.
Cultural anthropologists and folklorists classify sin-eating as a form of ritual. It is most commonly associated with Scotland, Ireland, Wales, English counties bordering Wales, and Welsh culture.
Attestations
History
While there have been analogous instances of sin-eaters throughout history, the questions of how common the practice was, when it was practiced, and what the interactions between sin-eaters, common people, and religious authorities were remain largely unstudied by folklore academics.In Meso-American civilisation, Tlazolteotl, the Aztec goddess of vice, purification, steam baths, lust and filth, and a patroness of adulterers, had a redemptive role in religious practices. At the end of an individual's life, they were allowed to confess misdeeds to this deity, and she would cleanse the soul by "eating its filth".
The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica states in its article on sin-eaters:
In Wales and the Welsh Marches
The term "sin-eater" appears to derive from Welsh culture and is most often associated with Wales itself and in the English counties bordering Wales.Seventeenth-century diarist John Aubrey, in the earliest source on the practice, wrote that "an old Custome" in Herefordshire had been
John Bagford includes the following description of the sin-eating ritual in his Letter on Leland's Collectanea, i. 76.
By 1838, Catherine Sinclair noted the practice was in decline but that it continued in the locality:
A local legend in Shropshire, England, concerns the grave of Richard Munslow, who died in 1906, said to be the last sin-eater of the area. Unusually, Munslow was not poor or an outcast, instead being a wealthy farmer from an established family. Munslow may have revived the custom after the deaths of three of his children in a week 1870 due to scarlet fever. In the words of local Reverend Norman Morris of Ratlinghope, "It was a very odd practice and would not have been approved of by the church but I suspect the vicar often turned a blind eye to the practice." At the funeral of anyone who had died without confessing their sins, a sin-eater would take on the sins of the deceased by eating a loaf of bread and drinking ale out of a wooden bowl passed over the coffin, and make a short speech:
The 1926 book Funeral Customs by Bertram S. Puckle mentions the sin-eater: