In 17th-century England, one man sold his business, gave the money to the poor, moved to a field near Uxbridge, and lived on grass. Rather than being dismissed as eccentric, he was seen as disruptive.
Most people, when they reach their limits, change jobs or move house. Roger Crab, deeply convinced that society’s values were misguided and harmful, sold everything he owned. He went to live in a hut on a single rood of land near Ickenham, wearing sackcloth and eating dock leaves and bran.
He was not running away from anything. Instead, Crab sought to demonstrate that life could be lived both differently and more honestly, intentionally rejecting prevailing conventions because he believed they perpetuated corruption.
Crab was born around 1621, probably in the southwest. He fought for Parliament, survived a serious head wound, was sentenced to death for speaking out, and was imprisoned. After his release, he rejected most of what society offered.
After leaving Parliament, Crab moved to Chesham and set up as a haberdasher, making and selling hats. His commitment to a simpler life only intensified. By 1652, he had given that up, too. He sold what little he had, distributed the proceeds amongst the poor, and walked to Ickenham to begin a different kind of life.
Three Farthings a Week
He built a cottage and garden, wore homemade sackcloth, and ate only vegetables, bread, and water.
Remarkably, Crab calculated that he could live on just three farthings a week. By the standards of the 1650s, this was almost nothing.
What is striking about Crab is that this was not depression or indifference. He was sharp, opinionated, and prolific. He built up a practice as a herbal doctor. He treated local people and advised them on food and drink. By most accounts, he was very popular with the women of the village. He wrote and self-published his autobiography in 1655, titled The English Hermite, or Wonder of this Age. The book drew such attention that the authorities arrested him.
The charges remained vague, but the underlying anxiety was real. A man who gives everything away and refuses to participate in the normal economy is unsettling; he challenges conventions simply by existing.
The Trouble He Caused
They put him in the stocks for refusing to observe Sunday as a day of rest. A local minister accused him of witchcraft, possibly because he had taken to issuing prophecies while digging his garden. He was arrested four times. He was flogged. His sackcloth was torn from his back. He was moved from prison to prison.
After each episode, he returned and continued his practices without change.
The historian Christopher Hill, writing in the 1950s, recognised Crab as a significant figure in the radical politics of the English Revolution. He was connected to the Levellers and the Diggers, those short-lived movements that argued the land should belong to the people who worked it. Crab’s vegetarianism was not merely personal preference. He saw meat as the luxury of the wealthy and ate as the poor ate, in a deliberate act of solidarity. He connected the violence done to animals with the violence done to the poor and believed both were symptoms of the same corruption.
Hill also raised a more playful question: that Crab, a hat-maker with unusual eating habits who spoke in riddles and lived by his own rules, may have been the model for Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter. The suggestion has never been proved, but it has never quite gone away either. The geography fits. The character fits.
The Quiet Years
Crab’s later years marked a quieter chapter. After 1657, he moved to Bethnal Green and joined a small mystical group called the Philadelphians. He spent the last twenty years of his life in relative peace. He seems to have acquired a reputation in his old age. People came to consult him. He was said to have predicted the Restoration and foreseen the arrival of William of Orange on the throne. Whether he did or not, the fact that people believed it tells you something about the kind of authority he had earned.
He died in 1680, buried at St Dunstan’s in Stepney. He ate only plants and drank only water for nearly forty years.
The epitaph on his gravestone reads, in part: A soul that stemmed opinion’s tide, did over sects in triumph ride. Yet separate from the giddy crowd and paths tradition had allowed.
Why He Matters Now
Despite his influence, Crab is not in the history books that most people read. He is not in any curriculum. He does not have a statue.
But he was doing, in the 1650s, what thousands are now trying to do in the 2020s. He questioned what we eat and why. He rejected the accumulation of things as a measure of a life and refused to participate in systems he believed caused harm. He did it without a platform, followers, or money. He did it in sackcloth in a field and wrote it down in a pamphlet printed on a London street corner.
Such a life is worthy of reflection.
If You Want to Find Him
Crab’s gravestone is set into the pavement at St Dunstan and All Saints Churchyard in Stepney, east London. The inscription is worn but still legible. The church itself is one of the oldest in London. It is worth visiting in its own right.
In Chesham, the town’s own history pages acknowledge Crab as one of their most unusual former residents, a man who made hats and then gave it all up for a rood of land and a diet of grass.
There is no museum, marked trail, or commemorative plaque marking his shop’s former location in Francis Yard. This seems consistent with his preferences; he likely would not have wanted such recognition.
A Final Note
Crab lived the way most people claim they would like to live, if only circumstances were different. No debt. No excess. No violence. No pretence. He simply decided the circumstances were as different as he needed them to be. Then he got on with it.
The thing that the 17th century could not forgive him for was not the grass or the sackcloth. It was the suggestion that the life he had chosen was not the strange one.
