The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India. Tristram Stuart

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СКАЧАТЬ against the Immortality of the soul’, and telling them ‘that it was better to have a golden Calfe or an Asse set up … then to have a King over them’.²

      In 1647 Fairfax got wind of Crab’s sorry plight and was so incensed that he took the case straight to Parliament where, speaking uncompromisingly to newly empowered statesmen, he raised Crab to the status of a cause célèbre. At Crab’s trial, Fairfax complained, Justice Bacon had locked the jury up without food and water until they agreed to return a guilty verdict. Crab had been sent in chains to the White Lyon where he was to remain until he found a way of paying the inordinate sum of 100 marks.³ In being imprisoned for preaching against tyranny, Crab had proved just how tyrannous the system was. As Crab himself later added, he had nearly lost his life on the battlefield when his head was ‘cloven to the braine’; imprisoning him now was the depths of ingratitude. The case created a ripple of excitement: Fairfax’s complaint was copied down and published, and eight years later the newspapers still remembered Crab as a leading Levelling ‘Agitator in the Army’.⁴

      Writing in his will at the end of his life, Crab still looked back on this time as the catalyst to his future self; he had nearly ‘departed this humane Life’ but God saw fit to let him be born again ‘upon which account the Lord himselfe took my Soule into his custody’.⁵ Disgruntled and disillusioned by parliamentary policies, Crab left the army to set up a hat shop at Chesham in Buckinghamshire. But like Gerrard Winstanley, he soon came to see commerce as con-artistry; it was the grease that oiled the system of decadent consumerism.⁶ He started stirring up trouble; as one satirical publication declared ‘we have amongst us a Crabbed cavelling fellow, being both a Barber, Hors-Dr. and a Hat-maker, that disturbs and jeers at Ministers that come to preach with us’.⁷ In 1652 he sold his hat shop, gave his estate away to the poor and rented an isolated spot in Ickenham near Uxbridge where he built a little hermitage and started digging the land.⁸ Thrusting himself metaphorically into the wilderness, Crab cast himself as a John the Baptist figure and proceeded to hurl abuse at the system that exploited the poor to satisfy the material pleasure of the few: ‘if John the Baptist, should come forth againe,’ he exclaimed, ‘and call himself Leveller, and take such food as the wildernesse yeelded, and such cloathing, and Preach up his former Doctrine, He that had two coats should give away one of them, and he that hath food should do likewise; How scornfully would our proud Gentlemen and Gallants look of him’.⁹

      Reviling the carnal pleasures of the corrupt ‘Sodomite generation’, Crab stopped eating meat and took up the bleakest of vegetable diets. Meat was a sign of wealth; renouncing it was an act of solidarity with the oppressed.¹⁰ Home-grown vegetables were the answer to social inequality, and the key to spiritual regeneration:

      instead of strong drinks and wines, I give the old man [‘‘(meaning my body)’’] a cup of water; and instead of rost Mutton, and Rabbets, and other dainty dishes, I gave him broth thickned with bran, and pudding made with bran, & Turnep leaves chop’t together, and grass.

      Crab rejected butter and cheese, and like John Robins despised alcohol as much as flesh. The production of beer used up grain which would otherwise be good as food, pushing up prices and oppressing the poorest of the poor. Luxury, Crab noticed, was not just a sign of inequality, it was a cause of it – an economic argument still being used at the end of the century by Thomas Tryon, and again a century later by radicals including Percy Bysshe Shelley.¹¹

      Despite his puritanical asceticism, Crab insisted that the vegetable diet was perfectly suited to sustain the body. Standing in a long tradition of vegetarian doctors, Crab opened a folk medical practice, claiming to have up to 120 patients on his books at any one time. The evidence he accumulated from his patients suggested to him that meat was the cause of human ills and abstinence was their cure. ‘If my Patients were any of them wounded or feaverish, I sayd, eating flesh, or drinking strong beere would inflame their blood, venom their wounds, and encrease their disease, eating of flesh is an absolute enemy to pure nature.’ As one newspaper added in more purple prose, Crab claimed that meat made ‘the body a Dunghill, filling it with gross Humors and snakie Diseases, engenderers of Lust, Sloth and Melancholy, that so corrupt the senses & bodies of men and Women, that take aside a little reason, there is no difference between them and bruit beasts.’¹²

      Keeping his body in tune with nature’s vegetarian laws, Crab soon achieved spiritual illumination and began consulting the radicals’ favourite astrologer William Lilly, about his revelations.¹³ Then in 1655 Crab journeyed to London and published the first of his radical vegetarian pamphlets, The English Hermite, or, Wonder of this Age. He cut a striking figure – an ex-soldier turned bearded hermit – and his unwonted dietary habits created a sensation in the city. His publisher registered the astonishment with which ordinary folk greeted Crab ‘who counteth it a sin against his body and soule to eate any sort of Flesh, Fish, or living Creature’; ‘his dyet is onely such poore homely foode as his own Rood of ground beareth, as Corne, Bread, and bran, Hearbs, Roots, Dock-leaves, Mallowes, and grasse, his drink is water.’¹⁴

      Roger Crab’s horoscope consultation with William Lilly, ‘de Revelatione’

      The press had a field day: Crab ‘observes the stricktest life of a Hermet that we have heard of’, announced one popular paper.¹⁵ Even though Crab rarely spoke about animals, contemporaries were anxious that he was eroding the distinction between man and beast, as had his fellow Leveller Richard Overton,¹⁶ so the papers satirically suggested that his reluctance to kill animals stemmed from the fact that he had love affairs with them. Comparing him to a Judaist who wouldn’t eat pigs, the twice-weekly Mercurius Fumigosus claimed that ‘Roger Crab had formerly some such beast to his Valentine; that makes him now to turn Hermit, live in a solitary Cave neer Uxbridge, and feed on nothing but Roots’.¹⁷ Even his publisher liked to poke fun at him. One of his pamphlets is accompanied by a woodcut apparently showing Crab naked, in a compromising position with an unidentified herbivore: Crab, they thought, was taking animal husbandry too far.

      Roger Crab, The English Hermite (1655)

      Crab swiftly forged a link with the Robins sect by converting the leading Leveller, Captain Robert Norwood, who collaborated with Thomas Tany and was impeached with him for blasphemy in 1651. But the alliance was to be short-lived, for Norwood could not sustain the austerities of his diet-master. Crab’s publisher reported that ‘Cap. Norwood was acquainted with Roger Crab, and being enclining to his opinion, began to follow the same poore diet till it cost him his life.’

      Illuminated СКАЧАТЬ