What Is a Sin Eater? | The Story of God

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NARRATOR: This rugged border land between England and Wales was the scene of many battles over the centuries, and it's a place with a rich tradition of ghost stories. Sal Masekela and historian Davit Mills Daniels are on the trail of England's last known sin eater, a man whose job was to rid the dead of sin and purge the land of ghosts.

Here we are at Richard Munslow's tombstone.

SAL MASEKELA: This is his actual gravestone?

DAVIT MILLS DANIELS: Yeah, this is it.

SAL MASEKELA: Wow. So this is the final sin eater. Look at that. And there you see family as children, four children.

DAVIT MILLS DANIELS: Wow, this gives more of a sense of him as a person.

SAL MASEKELA: Yeah, it does. And you mentioned earlier that usually it was poor people that chose to practice this, almost out of necessity, not necessarily choice. Munslow was a farmer, a family man, he seemed like he was fairly successful. Why would he choose this?

DAVIT MILLS DANIELS: Yeah, it is a curious choice. In particular, someone like Munslow. The basic motivation Munslow seems to have had is that his children died quite suddenly.

NARRATOR: Three of Munslow's young children took sick and died in a single week in 1817. Davit believes Munslow may have linked his personal tragedy to the notion that unforgiven sins were haunting the village.

DAVIT MILLS DANIELS: This fear is about the souls from the dead coming back to haunt their own society. What the senator was doing was saving society from the negative consequences of sin.

NARRATOR: So while they were viewed somewhat as a pariah within the community, there is also this sense of this is a value.

SAL MASEKELA: Right, yes. Christ taken with sins of the world, but he has to die for that to make it happen. And so Munslow, he's agreed to be damned.

DAVIT MILLS DANIELS: Munslow seemed to have viewed it as this act of self-sacrificial love. Personal tragedy led Richard Munslow to become the last sin eater. Bereft by the loss of his children, he sacrificed his soul to save the soul of his community. He provided grieving families with a sense of peace that he himself would never know. For someone already so heavily burdened, it was an incredibly noble act.

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