Roger Crab: Opposition Hunger Artist in 1650s England

Abstract

Roger Crab represents an extreme oppositional voice in the ideological wars of opinion that raged throughout the aftermath of civil war in seventeenthcentury England. Defiantly political, angrily religious, celibately vegetarian, strangely mystical - to his contemporaries, criminally insane - Roger Crab published what he considered to be 'rational' and 'reserved' views and insisted that others agree with him. According to his first publisher, Crab approved of civil magistracy but positioned himself as 'neither for the Levellers, nor Quakers, nor Shakers, nor Ranters, but above Ordinances'.1 He was, however, clearly in favour of insistent and thoroughgoing opposition to the dominant cultural forces of his day. His publications include two rare quartos: The English Hermite (1655) and Dagons-Downfall (1657) and two rarer 1659 pieces: Gentle Correction for the High-flown Backslider and A Tender Salutation.2 Through such controversialist publication, Roger Crab finds a voice that rises above the status of local village crackpot, and Crab's agenda warrants attention both as 'history from below' and as early modern oppositional stance. In England's fledgling republican atmosphere, an atmosphere suffused with contention, Roger Crab asserts himself as a nonaligned seventeenth-century voice for change.In one of the very few serious appraisals of this figure, Christopher Hill writes: 'Crab's vegetarianism and teetotalism were part of a political and social programme.'3 And yet Hill perpetuates in many ways the convenient caricature of Crab as 'Mad Hatter of Chesham'. Upon release from the army, Crab did deal in hats out of a shop in Chesham, Buckinghamshire. His extreme opinions no doubt helped to label him as mad as hatters were proverbially supposed to be.4 But Crab's 'programme' also asserted poverty and self-abnegation as highest moral truth in addition to direct political action. Herein less is not only more, it is powerful and full of grace - a paradoxical state that looks beyond physical and material appearances. Granted, Crab is basically a scriptural literalist - he signally cites Mark 10:21, 'sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven'-but his difference resides in the fact that he publishes his extreme positions in argumentative terms for popular consideration. Even though his argument, as he well knows, is very un-popular, he insists on conveying his opinion and registering his opposition. In effect, he fashions an unacceptable self and then upholds that position as the most acceptable self possible. His contemporaries would call such action heretical. A fuller understanding would recognize that his guiding principle involves radical religious mysticism in the service of social and political opposition.Roger Crab's political slogan might very well be the one issuing from his mouth in the woodcut frontispiece to The English Hermite: 'Herbes and Roots'! In his book, he claims to have found God in Nature and in overcoming his own preconversion fleshly extravagances. He is clearly pictured as singular, accentuating a bold praxis of defiance. Indeed, from the outset, his strange diet positions him as singular, controversial, and oppositional. As Colin Spencer points out in The Heretic's Feast: A History of Vegetarianism: 'What people eat is a symbol of what they believe'.5 Spencer goes on to credit Thomas Tryon (1634-1703) as England's most ardent vegetarian during and after the English Civil War, mentioning also the vegetarian Ranter John Robins (known popularly and derisively as 'the Ranters' god'). But Roger Crab clearly deserves precedence as well as critical consideration. Imprisoned as a political offender and repeat Sabbath-breaker in the 1650s, Crab endured - even encouraged - much in the way of public rebuke and misunderstanding. And yet he was laid to rest at his death in 1680 with a remarkable amount of public sympathy. Local historians revived him in the nineteenth century as an eccentric amusement, an easily dismissed crackpot. …