[music playing]
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.
This is his actual gravestone?
Yeah, this is it.
Wow.
So this is the final sin eater.
Look at that.
And there you see family as children, four children.
Wow, this gives more of a sense of him as a person.
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?
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.
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.
So while they were viewed somewhat as a pariah
within the community, there is also
this sense of this is a value.
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.
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.
[music playing]
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.
This is his actual gravestone?
Yeah, this is it.
Wow.
So this is the final sin eater.
Look at that.
And there you see family as children, four children.
Wow, this gives more of a sense of him as a person.
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?
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.
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.
So while they were viewed somewhat as a pariah
within the community, there is also
this sense of this is a value.
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.
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.
[music playing]
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