The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

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 letter S from Roger Crab, The English Hermite (1655)

The story that the vegetarian diet starved Norwood to death would scarcely seem credible if we did not know that Norwood did indeed perish in 1654, two years after Crab retreated to his hermitage.18 This was not a good advertisement for the novel diet and it played into the hands of detractors who preferred their beefsteaks to the grass and turnip leaves proffered by Crab. Norwood’s death confirmed John Reeve’s accusations against John Robins, and one later commentator made the unfounded claim that Crab ‘destroyed himself by eating bran, grass, dockleaves, and such other trash’ – even though he actually lived to the impressive age of nearly seventy.19

This connection with Norwood suggests that there was a loose association of vegetarian radicals. Crab may also have been connected with the Diggers whose membership was largely composed of disaffected Levellers. Both Crab and Winstanley had been Baptists,20 they both said that private property was a curse,21 that the upper classes would wither if peasants lived off their own produce instead of labouring for landowners,22 and Crab wielded the digging metaphor, for example in his sequel pamphlet, The English Hermites Spade at the Ground and root of Idolatry (1657).23 Like Winstanley also, Crab was said to have extended to animals the commandment to ‘do unto others as you would be done by’.24

Like the other vegetarian radicals, as well as some of the Quakers,25 Crab accompanied his retreat into vegetarianism with a conversion to pacifism.26 He pitted his harmless herbivorous lifestyle against his opponents who ‘prepare themselves by thirsting after flesh and blood’.27 Crab even suggested that flesh-eating had triggered the violent passions that led to the war in the first place: ‘that humour that lusteth after flesh and blood,’ he said, ‘is made strong in us by feeding of it.’ Killing animals and eating their flesh was widely believed to inure men to cruelty.28 Crab saw in this the workings of God’s Providence: all aggressive meat-eaters would succumb to their ferocious instincts until they ended up killing each other, thus wiping the carnivorous sinners off the earth.29 Conflating the two meanings of ‘flesh’, Crab hoped that just as he gave up ‘flesh’, so England would give up the ‘fleshly’ cares that motivated violent conflict. This in turn he saw as an allegory of giving up Moses’ old ‘fleshly’ law for the new spiritual laws of Christ.30

According to Crab’s observations, nature unambiguously revealed that meat was bad for the body and the soul. Now Crab had to balance that with evidence from the Book of God. In doing so, Crab inaugurated the English school of vegetarian Bible exegesis, and he managed to manipulate just about any passage in the Scriptures to suit his purposes. Engaging in doctrinal disputes with theologians up and down the country, and apparently deriving some arguments from St Jerome, Crab developed a rigorous scriptural defence of vegetarianism.31

For Crab, as for others, vegetarianism started in the beginning, with Adam and Eve. Crab even implied that the Fall itself was caused by Adam lapsing from his God-given diet into meat-eating: ‘if naturall Adam had kept to his single naturall fruits of Gods appointment, namely fruits and hearbs,’ he lamented, ‘we had not been corrupted.’ God permitted mankind to eat the animals after Noah’s Flood, he insisted, only because all the water had temporarily killed off the world’s vegetation.32 God intended mankind to return to the vegetable diet as soon as the earth recovered from the Flood. But having once tasted flesh, Crab complained, men were inflamed by a desire for more, and rejected natural vegetables as ‘trash in comparison of a Beast, or beastly flesh’. From that point on, man was bound on an inexorable decline into corruption and violence. Like other vegetarians on both sides of the political spectrum, Crab imagined his vegetarian hermitage was a route to ‘the Paradise of God from whence my Father Adam was cast forth’.33

Crab viewed the whole of biblical history as one long saga in God’s attempt to return men to their natural diet. Moses led the Israelites into the desert, Crab claimed, to bring them away from their carnivorous Egyptian masters (perhaps this was even latent in Robins and Garment’s ideas of themselves as Moses figures). When the recalcitrant Israelites ‘murmured, and rebelled against the Lord, lusting after the flesh pots of Egypt’, God punished them: the flock of quails God sent was poisoned and they died with the flesh in their teeth.34 The prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah, and Christ’s apostles, had continued the message by either living on vegetable food or practising harsh asceticism for our emulation.35 The prophet Daniel had confined himself to lentils and water, a diet on which he had achieved divine epiphanies.36 Just as the saints were assisted by animals, so Crab was brought bread in prison by a spaniel, and he claimed that birds came to him from God to inform him of future events.37 Even Christ himself, Crab wilfully suggested, was in favour of vegetarianism: we hear of Christ eating various comestibles, he said, ‘but we never finde that ever he was drunke, or eate a bit of flesh’.38 In a rare example of Crab’s concern for animal welfare, he defended Christ’s feeding of fishes to the five thousand on the grounds that the meal was ‘innocent’ because it was made ‘without hurting any creature that breathed on earth’ (excluding aquatic animals from the category of flesh was a standard division of Catholic fasting laws).39 Even the Passover feast, where Christ decidedly partook of the lamb, was an irregularity which he was obliged to undertake only to fulfil the Jewish prophecies.

Crab’s presentation of the Bible as a monolithic vegetarian manifesto became more problematic when his adversaries threw back at him passages in the New Testament that were clearly designed to abolish old Jewish food taboos. Each of the New Testament passages that Crab and his contemporaries referenced in their disputes about vegetarianism had already been used by St Augustine and St Aquinas against vegetarians such as the heretic Manicheans. The doctrinal dispute was new in England, but it had a history that reached back more than a millennium, and the English clergy were happy to rely on such authoritative texts to prove the unorthodoxy of their adversary.40 But Crab – a Houdini of biblical exegetes – found an answer to all his detractors.

Christ had taught that all food should be accepted with thanksgiving and none of it should be rejected as unclean. Crab retorted that this was manifestly absurd since some things were poisonous, and even if meat wasn’t unlawful it was still undesirable. Deftly perverting the sense of St Paul’s famous edict, ‘if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth,’ and his allusion to one ‘who is weak, eateth herbs’, Crab appealed for people to ‘forbear Flesh for my conscience sake, as Paul did declare he would do concerning his weak Brother’.41 Crab even challenged the passage that John Reeve had used against John Robins’ vegetarianism which warned against devilish prophets ‘commanding to abstain from meats’.42 Crab insisted that he commanded no one: he just wanted everyone to be enlightened enough to give up of their own accord.43 By attacking him, he objected, the ignorant English priests were breaking Paul’s commandment aimed specifically at the vegetarian dispute: ‘Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not.’44 Despite his efforts at scriptural justification, Crab was defamed by the local priests as a devil and the Puritan minister of St Margaret’s in Uxbridge, Thomas Godboult, told everyone Crab was a witch.45 Crab retorted that he was willing to meet any of the clergy for a wrangle, and claimed they had lost the argument so many times they were scared to meet him in public. He had in any case absolutely no respect for the incumbent priesthood or the government that supported it: priests compelled the people to pay tithes, which in Crab’s eyes made the Church a whore-house and the priests its pimps and the whole idea of forcing people to go to church on Sunday turned religion into idolatry. Despite the puritanical fervour of Cromwell’s England, church-goers still saw Sunday as an excuse to dress up in fancy clothes and blow their week’s savings on a feast of roast meat. To Crab, therefore, it was the most sacrilegious day and he made a point of flouting Sabbath laws.46

Crab’s seditious ravings were no less threatening to the authorities than they had been back in 1646 when he was put in prison. The priests whom he attacked could criticise his vegetarianism, but there was little they could do about it. His refusal to abide by the Sabbath laws, however, and his overt encouragement to the people to skive off church provided the authorities with the opportunity they needed. By 1657 Crab had been hauled in front of the magistrates at least four times for Sabbath-breaking. He had been set in the stocks in front of Ickenham church, and locked in Clerkenwell Prison on more than one occasion. Crab even claimed that Cromwell had once sentenced him to death. In January 1655 he was locked up and tried before magistrates but managed to get off the charge of calling the government a tyranny.47 It was always his vegetarianism that attracted controversy at these times, bringing people in flocks to gaze at him behind bars.48

In 1657 Crab stood unrepentantly in court listening to the judges demand that he abide by the laws of the ‘Higher Powers’. In his daring and brilliant retort we get a glimpse of Crab at his strongest: not a wizened hermit eccentrically whiling his life away on a patch of ground in the country as many represented him, but a hardened radical taking on the authorities.49 His reply split open the paradox of revolutionary government: he had fought alongside them when they were Cromwellian rebels, he pointed out, ‘with my sword in my hand against the Highest Powers in England, namely, the King and the Bishops, upon which account ye sit here.’ How could they tell him now that rebellion was forbidden when their authority was founded on the biggest rebellion in memory? Crab made them address their own hypocrisy in trying and sentencing a rebel whom they had once championed as one of their own.

Unpopular with the authorities, but blessed with eloquence and charisma, Crab soon attracted a band of vegetarian followers. By 1659, a year before the Restoration of the monarchy, he had converted enough people to earn his group a name – the ‘Rationals’ or ‘Rationallists’. Vegetarianism was their key policy, and it was lauded in a ballad by a publisher, one ‘J.B.’, who counted himself as one of their disciples:

Illustrious souls more brighter than the morn,

Oh! how dark mortals greet you still with scorn,

Admiring at your homely sack-cloth dresse,

Hearbs, Roots, and every vegetable mess

On which you live; and are more healthy far

Than Canibals, that feed on lushious fare;50

By this time Crab had become convinced that God was speaking through him, and wrote his pamphlets as if in the voice of God Himself. His competing claims for divine inspiration embroiled him in controversy with the Quakers. In January 1659 the Quaker Thomas Curtis wrote to George Fox with his concerns about a ‘very great and precious’ meeting in Buckinghamshire attended by ‘fish of all sorts’, ‘many of the world, some baptized, and some of Crab’s company’. Crab incited attacks from the well-known Quaker controversialists John Rance and George Salter (who would one day be arrested at a meeting with John Robins’ old rival, John Reeve). Salter derisively attacked the Rationals, calling Crab ‘a corrupt bulk of Fog, who art like a quagmire that sucks up those that comes upon thee’.51

Crab was later said to have joined forces with the leader of one of the most prominent and long-lasting international mystic organisations of the period, the Philadelphian Society – named after the Greek for ‘brotherly love’.52 Crab might have known the spiritual leader of the Philadelphians, Dr John Pordage, since Pordage was a doctor in Cromwell’s army.53 As a deeply subversive clergyman in the parish of Bradfield, Pordage had been ousted from his post for encouraging polygamy, refusing tithes and hosting crazed spiritual revelries with their friends from the Family of Love and the Ranters. Pordage was said to have made an alliance with Thomas Tany, and used fasting as a method of achieving ‘visible and sensible Communion with Angels’.54 Pordage himself claimed that he was hastening Christ’s second coming by uniting the dispersed tribes of Israel,55 and establishing an ideal primitive community practising ‘Universal Peace and Love towards All’.56 Like Crab, Pordage thought one could access God by studying nature, for he said the universe was ‘as ye Cloathing of God’.57

There is little evidence to suggest that the Philadelphian Society took up vegetarianism as a whole,58 but they were renowned for their extreme fasting and were mocked for not being able to ‘eat and drink their common Dyet’.59 One of their later members, Richard Roach, recalled that they modelled themselves on the ascetic Jewish sect of Essenes, believing that austerity made them ‘more conversant wth ye Mysteries of Religion’.60 Some Philadelphians believed that animals had souls and would achieve spiritual liberation on Judgement Day, and objected to the abuse of birds, beasts and fishes to satisfy people’s luxury and gluttony.61 And above all, Crab and Pordage shared a fascination for the mystical vision of the German shoemaker Jacob Böhme (1575–1624),62 whose emphasis on personal enlightenment and the pantheistic search for God in nature inspired generations of thinkers. It is difficult to exaggerate Böhme’s influence on European culture: mystics during the seventeenth century revered him; scientists in the Enlightenment clung to his revelations; and the Romantics revived him again for his intense spiritual communication with nature. In the 1650s interest had reached fever pitch with the translation into English of his most important writings. Böhme may not have been vegetarian himself, but judging from the number of vegetarians who shared an interest in Böhme, there was something about his teaching that encouraged it. Perhaps it was his reverence for nature, perhaps his passionate call for all to embrace love in the world and shun the fierce wrath that lay hidden in everything (even God). His specific comments about eating meat are in the vein of traditional Christian asceticism; he complained that the soul is defiled and clad with stinking flesh when ‘the body feedeth upon the flesh of beasts’: ‘Dost thou know why God did forbid the Jews to eat of some sort of flesh?’ he asked, ‘consider the smell of it … and thou shalt discern it.’63

Böhme aspired to the spiritual purity of Adam before the Fall. He wasn’t explicit about any dietary regulations for achieving that goal (which might have been difficult since he believed that before the Fall Adam didn’t even have a material body and so ate no food at all). But vegetarians might have been encouraged by Böhme’s comment that God ‘created so many kindes and sorts of beasts for his Food and Rayment’ only because he had foreknowledge of man’s Fall. If man was to ‘come againe into his first estate’, as Böhme fervently wished, it could follow that he would have to give up eating animals.64 Crab also shared Böhme’s theory that ‘Seven Grand Properties’, corresponding to the seven planets, governed the seven spirits of the human body. Crab, whose seven properties were actually more akin to conventional astrology, held that it was the Martian spirit that stirred up flesh-eating and murder.65

Most of the radicals of the mid-century period died in anonymity. After the Restoration in 1660 their politics became unpopular and dangerous to espouse. Roger Crab, exceptionally, sustained his local fame until he died in 1680. Secondary sources report a large concourse of people attending his funeral on 14 September at St Dunstan’s Church in the parish of Stepney. In the churchyard a large monument was erected in his memory with a versified tribute to his vegetarianism:

Tread gently, Reader, near the Dust,

Cometh to this Tomb-stone’s Trust.

For while ‘twas Flesh, it held a Guest,

With universal Love possest.

A soul that stemm’d Opinion’s Tyde,

Did over Sects in Triumph ride.

Yet separate from the giddy Crowd,

And Paths Tradition had allow’d.

Through good and ill Reports he past; Oft censur’d, yet approv’d at last. Wouldest thou his Religion know? In brief ‘twas this: To all to do Just as he would be done unto. So in kind Nature’s Law he stood, A Temple undefil’d with Blood: A Friend to ev’ry Thing that’s good. The rest, Angels alone fitly can tell: Haste, then, to Them and Him; and so farewel.66

The lines – written by a more proficient poet than Crab himself – represent vegetarianism as perfectly compatible with orthodox Christianity. To a large degree this agenda seems to have been achieved: he had been married in 1663 to a widow, Amy Markham, in St Bride’s church; he was buried in the yard of another Anglican church, and according to the parish register was considered a ‘Gentleman’.67 This elevated status betrays his former radical rejection of personal property and social distinction, but it shows that he kept his vegetarian message alive in the wholly altered political environment of the Restoration.

Vegetarianism was a familiar expression of political and religious dissent in seventeenth-century England. It is unclear to what extent the Robins sect, the Diggers, the Family of Love, George Foster, Thomas Tany, Robert Norwood and Roger Crab were actively conspiring with each other. But diet was an integral part of a broadly cohesive radical agenda which they shared. Vegetarianism, for some, was an inherent part of the revolution. After their gory experience in the Civil War, veterans developed an aversion to blood so strong that they extended it to shedding animal blood. The rejection of violence, oppression and inequality went hand in hand with vegetarianism in a movement that aimed to achieve a bloodless revolution. Later, in the revolutionary 1780s and 1790s, vegetarianism re-emerged as part of a radical ideology. In the period between, vegetarianism survived by adapting to different cultural contexts, though often carrying with it traces of the old agenda. Roger Crab was the pioneer: lifting vegetarianism out of its Civil War context and refashioning it to new tastes laid the foundations for its continuation in Restoration England.

FOUR Pythagoras and the Sages of India

Clown: What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?

Malvolio: That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.

Clown: What think’st thou of his opinion?

Malvolio: I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.

Clown: Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness: thou shalt hold th’ opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits; and fear to kill a woodcock, lest thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam. Fare thee well.

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, IV. ii

While meat-eating Christians fended off the vegetarian schism at home, another force was gathering strength that would assail them with even greater intensity. Having accustomed themselves to thinking of Europe as the pinnacle of humanity, travellers were shocked to find in India a thriving religion which had been sustained in a pristine form since well before – and virtually oblivious to – the invention of Christianity. The discovery of a people following an unbroken tradition of vegetarianism and exercising an extreme moral responsibility towards animals radically challenged European ideas about the relationship between man and nature. The stories of Indians living at peace with the animal kingdom were imaginatively merged with Christian traditions of prelapsarianism and Puritanism, and were a catalyst of Europe’s seventeenth-century vegetarian renaissance. This neglected movement in European history profoundly affected some of the period’s best-known figures and has had a lasting influence on Western concepts of nature.