When someone died, the family would send for a poor man of the neighbourhood. The corpse was laid out and a loaf of bread and a bowl of beer were handed to him across the body. He ate and drank, was given a small coin, and was understood to have taken the dead person's sins on himself so that the soul could go free. He was then sent away quickly, and in some accounts he was shunned by everyone else in the parish for the rest of his life.
John Aubrey, collecting old customs in the 1680s, was told that this was once done all over Wales and was still found in parts of the Welsh border. As one of his proofs he mentions Llangors in Breconshire, where the minister, a Mr Gwin, tried to stop it around 1640 and could not.
That single line is the whole of the Llangors evidence. Sikes, writing two hundred years later, pointed out that no Welsh or English writer before Aubrey refers to a sin-eater in Wales at all, and scholars since have argued over whether Aubrey was describing a real, widespread practice or stretching a few local funeral doles into something more dramatic. Welsh funerals certainly did involve food and small payments handed over the coffin and grave well into the nineteenth century. Whether anyone at Llangors thought they were buying off sin is less certain.
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