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