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 Food, Religion and Communities
in Early Modern Europe

9781350008465_pi-222.indd i 03-Apr-18 6:47:24 PM

 Cultures of Early Modern Europe

Series Editors: Beat Kümin, Professor of Early Modern European History,

University of Warwick, and Brian Cowan, Associate Professor and Canada
Research Chair in Early Modern British History, McGill University.

Editorial Board

Adam Fox, University of Edinburgh, UK

Robert Frost, University of Aberdeen, UK
Molly Greene, University of Princeton, USA
Ben Schmidt, University of Washington, USA
Gerd Schwerhoff, University of Dresden, Germany
Francsesca Trivellato, University of Yale, USA
Francisca Loetz, University of Zurich, Switzerland

The ‘cultural turn’ in the humanities has generated a wealth of new research
topics and approaches. Focusing on the ways in which representations,
perceptions and negotiations shaped people’s lived experiences, the books in
this series provide fascinating insights into the past. The series covers early
modern culture in its broadest sense, inclusive of (but not restricted to) themes
such as gender, identity, communities, mentalities, emotions, communication,
ritual, space, food and drink, and material culture.

Published

Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640, Paul S. Lloyd

The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600–1850, Sara Pennell
Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750, David Hitchcock
Angelica’s Book and the World of Reading in Late Renaissance Italy,
Brendan Dooley
Gender, Culture and Politics in England, 1560–1640, Susan D. Amussen
and David E. Underdown

9781350008465_pi-222.indd ii 03-Apr-18 6:47:24 PM

 Food, Religion and Communities
in Early Modern Europe

Christopher Kissane

9781350008465_pi-222.indd iii 03-Apr-18 6:47:24 PM

 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in Great Britain 2018

Copyright © Christopher Kissane, 2018

Christopher Kissane has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension

of this copyright page.

Cover image: ‘A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms’ by Pieter Aertsen
(Archivart/Alamy Stock Photo).

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-
party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were
correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience
caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no
responsibility for any such changes.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0846-5

ePDF: 978-1-3500-0847-2
eBook: 978-1-3500-0848-9

Series: Cultures of Early Modern Europe

Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India

Printed and bound in Great Britain

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com
and sign up for our newsletters.

9781350008465_pi-222.indd iv 03-Apr-18 6:47:24 PM

 Contents

List of Figures vi
List of Tables viii
Acknowledgements ix
List of Abbreviations xi

1 Introduction: Food and History 1

Part 1 Food and Inquisition

2 ‘The Foods of a Christian’: Food, Religion, and Inquisition 13

3 Kitchens and Neighbours: Food, Gender, and Community 35

Part 2 Food and Reformation

4 ‘The Eaters’: Fast-Breaking Protest in Reformation Zürich 53

5 ‘Sausage-Makers’ and ‘Cheese-Hunters’: The Cultural Context of

Reformation Fast-Breaking 77

Part 3 Food and Witchcraft

6 Dining with Demons: Food, Witchcraft, and Evil 107

7 ‘Plain Hunger and Necessity’: Food, Crime, and Community 131

8 Conclusions: Thinking about Food, Thinking with Food 157

Notes 163
Bibliography 205
Index 223
 Figures

5.1 Joost Amman, The Butcher, from Hans Sachs, Das Ständebuch
(Nuremberg, 1568) 79
5.2 The Lambs, the Shepherd, and the Butcher, from Heinrich
Steinhöwel, Vita et Fabulae. Aesopus (Basel, 1487/9), p. 126 81
5.3 Detail from copy of Hans Holbein, Schweizerschlacht (early 1520s) 82
5.4 Urs Graf, Schlachtfeld (1521) 83
5.5 Detail from Die Verkehrte Welt (German, early seventeenth
century) 84
5.6 Woman Preparing Sausages Banters with Man (German,
sixteenth century) 84
5.7 Peasant with Wurst (late fifteenth-century German engraving),
from The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 8, Commentary Part 1, .022, p. 314 85
5.8 Hans Baldung ‘Grien’, The Witches’ Sabbath (1510) 86
5.9 Urs Graf, The Witches’ Sabbath (1514) 87
5.10 Pieter Aertsen, The Butcher’s Stall with the Flight into Egypt (1551) 89
5.11 Detail from Ein Newer Kunckelbrieff: Die widersinnige Weldt
genandt (German, seventeenth century) 91
5.12 Albrecht Dürer, The Peasant Couple at Market (German, 1519) 92
5.13 Jacob Binck, Peasant Selling Eggs (German, sixteenth century),
from The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 16, .73 (286), p. 52 93
5.14 Erhard Schön, Peasant Breeding Eggs (Nuremberg, early
sixteenth century), from The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 13,
Commentary, 184, p. 341 94
5.15 Daniel Hopfer, The Sausage Seller and Carnival Dancers
(Augsburg, early sixteenth century), from The Illustrated Bartsch,
vol. 17, .73(490), p. 150 99
5.16 Nuremberg Shrovetide Carnival (German, sixteenth century),
Bodleian MS. Douce 346 100
5.17 Detail from Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Battle Between Carnival
& Lent (1559) 101
5.18 Detail from front of Huldrych Zwingli, Vonn dem Nachtmal
Christi (Christoph Froschauer, Zürich, 1525) 102
 Figures vii

5.19 Front of Huldrych Zwingli, Ejn klare Underrichtung vom

Nachtmal Christi (Hans Hager, Zürich, 1526) 102
6.1 Detail from Johannes Vintler, Buch der Tügend (Augsburg, 1486) 111
6.2 Detail from Johan Geiler von Kaysersburg, Die Emeis oder
Quadragesimale (Strasbourg, 1516) 113
6.3 Detail from Ulrich Molitor, De lamiis et pythonicis mulieribus
(Basel, 1489) 122
6.4 Detail from Jan Ziarnko, ‘Description of the Witches’ Sabbath’ in
Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et
démons (2nd edn, Paris, 1613) 126
 Tables

2.1 Evidence in Soria Bishopric, 1486–1502 25

2.2 Food evidence in Soria Town, 1490–91 26
2.3 Food evidence from confessions in Atienza, 1504–5 27
2.4 Food evidence from trials in Ciudad Real, 1483–5 28
2.5 Examples of food evidence from cases in Almazán, 1501–2 28
2.6 Foods mentioned in testimonies from Soria Town, 1490–91 29
3.1 Gender differences in food evidence 43
7.1 Witchcraft cases in Shetland, 1602–16 138
 Acknowledgements

This book grew out of my research at Oxford where Lyndal Roper and Deborah
Oxley supported me with an incredible generosity of time, a wealth of ideas, and
endless encouragement. Their advice and suggestions have been invaluable, as
was their patience in putting up with me! I am enormously grateful to both of
them as mentors, scholars and friends. I feel very fortunate to have received their
support, and I will never forget how much I owe them.
Turning research into a book is quite a challenge, and at Bloomsbury I would
like to thank Beat Kümin and Rhodri Mogford for their patience and assistance
throughout the process. I am also thankful that publication of the book’s images
was made possible by a grant from the Scouloudi Foundation, in association
with the Institute of Historical Research.
Many friends helped me through what was often a very lonely endeavour, and
led me to realize the importance of collaboration, moral support and honesty
about struggles and weaknesses. I would especially like to thank my friends in
the Oxford Early Modern Workshop for their support and advice; Peter Burke
and Robin Briggs for their rigour and insight; Helga Robinson-Hammerstein for
first introducing me to early modern history; Hannah Murphy for her always
excellent suggestions; and John Gallagher for endless conversation, friendship
and camaraderie. I am very grateful to my family for their support and
encouragement, and to my partner, Caroline, who has always been unfailingly
understanding and supportive.
My work benefitted greatly from suggestions and feedback offered at various
seminars, workshops and conferences where I was fortunate enough to present
my work, including the Economic and Social History Graduate Workshop
at Nuffield College, Oxford; the Comparative Social and Cultural History
Seminar at Cambridge; the Reform and Reformation Colloquium at Queen
Mary, University of London; the Department of History and Civilization at the
European University Institute, Florence; the Oxford Symposium on Food and
Cookery; the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference; and the Renaissance
Society of America conference. I have also been fortunate enough to share my
work with wider audiences through the BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinkers
scheme.

9781350008465_pi-222.indd ix 03-Apr-18 6:47:24 PM

 x Acknowledgements

I would also like to thank Patrick Wallis, Chris Minns, the Department of
Economic History at the London School of Economics, and Maarten Prak,
for the opportunity to engage in postdoctoral research and collaboration.
Finally, I would like to thank those whose financial support made my research
possible: the Economic and Social Research Council; many at Oxford including
the Scatcherd Fund, the Prendergast Bequest, the Bishop Warner Fund and the
Starr Foundation; Martin Foley, without whose support I never would have
been able to come to Oxford in the first place; and Balliol College (especially
Rev. Douglas Dupree), who were greatly supportive throughout my time as a
member of the college community.
For all of this support I am extremely grateful.
Cádiz, March 2018

9781350008465_pi-222.indd x 03-Apr-18 6:47:24 PM

 Abbreviations

AGZR Actensammlung zur Geschichte der Zürcher Reformation in den

Jahren 1519–1533, ed. Emil Egli (Zürich, 1879)
CWE Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1974–)

DWB Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jakob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, 17

vols (Leipzig, 1854–1971)

FIRC Fontes Iudaeorum Regni Castellae, ed. Carlos Carrete Parrondo et al.,
8 vols (Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1981–98)

OSCB Court Book of Orkney & Shetland, 1612–13, ed. Robert S. Barclay
(Kirkwall: W. R. Mackintosh, 1962)

OSR Orkney & Shetland Records, eds Alfred W. Johnston and

Amy Johnston, vol. I (London: Viking Society for Northern
Research, 1907)

RTSI Records of the Trials of the Spanish Inquisition in Ciudad Real,

ed. Haim Beinart, 4 vols (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press,
1974–81)

SCB Court Book of Shetland, 1602–4, ed. Gordon Donaldson

(Edinburgh: Scottish Record Society, 1954); Court Book of
Shetland, 1615–29, ed. Gordon Donaldson (Lerwick: Shetland
Library, 1991)

SI Schweizerisches Idiotikon, 17 vols (Zürich, Basel, 1881–)

Z Huldreich Zwinglis sämtliche Werke, ed. Emil Egli et al., 14 vols
(Berlin, Leipzig, Zürich, 1905–91)

9781350008465_pi-222.indd xi 03-Apr-18 6:47:25 PM

9781350008465_pi-222.indd xii 03-Apr-18 6:47:25 PM
 1

Introduction: Food and History

Bärbel von Arm had gone to the butcher herself. She had to lie, but Hans Hess
sold her the sausages without fuss. The councillors said they just wanted to know
what she and Elsi Flammer had bought and cooked, and who had eaten it. They
didn’t ask what Bärbel or Elsi thought.

Margaret Patersdochter was on the boat, fleeing her home, because she had been
banished. She had stolen only because she was hungry, because she had nothing
at all to eat. But they told her if she stayed, or if she ever came back, she would
be drowned.

Marina González was distraught. She felt abandoned, betrayed, hopeless. There
was no point in eating since the inquisitors planned to kill her anyway. But
they still ordered the jailers to make her eat, to violently force-feed her, as if the
water torture had not been enough. And still they asked what she had eaten and
what she had cooked.

What did these women have in common?1 They were of very different social
standings – maids; a destitute thief; the wife of a merchant – and lived in very
different places: Bärbel and Elsi from Reformation Zürich, Margaret from
remote Shetland, Marina from the plains of La Mancha. Yet their stories share
something that they all would have recognized, and that would have been
understandable to all sorts of early modern people: the fact that food was a
matter of great significance. Perhaps things look different when viewed from
that perspective. This book starts from there.

9781350008465_pi-222.indd 1 03-Apr-18 6:47:25 PM

 2 Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

Three disparate stories about early modern women and food, stories where
food moved far beyond the kitchen door, belied its banality, transcended the
mundane. What are we to make of them? For a long time the answer might
have been ‘not much’. It took a long time for historians to take food seriously,
rather too often treating it, in the words of Barbara Ketcham-Wheatam, as
‘comic and trivial, rarely rising above the level of Charles Laughton as Henry
VIII with a drumstick in his hand’.2 Reay Tannahill commented that when the
idea of writing her seminal Food in History ‘first occurred to me, I was mystified
by the fact that no one had already written such a book’.3 Food was ‘almost too
obvious to dwell on’, wrote the sociologist Sidney Mintz in his pioneering study
of sugar.4 Introductions to works of food history have at times acquired an
almost ritualistic quality in describing the subject’s journey from ignorance to
illumination. Ours, food historians defiantly insist, is a proper subject, and we
deserve to be taken seriously.
And, of course, we are right. While food long received too little attention,
those of us studying it today are lucky enough to be part of an exciting and varied
field, full of different directions and opportunities: the days of food not receiving
its scholarly due are long gone.5 Yet the restatements of our own value betray both
a lingering chip on the shoulder – most historians of food have at least one story
of being sniffed at by those who perceive their subjects to be more ‘serious’ – and
a lack of clarity about what the subject actually is, and how it is to be done.
The most fundamental requirement for histories of food is to know what
people in the past actually ate, and it was with diet that the historical study
of food began. Many of the earliest academic studies of dietary history – Jack
Drummond and Anne Wilbraham’s survey of English diet; Redcliffe Salaman’s
seminal study of the potato; Noel Deerr’s history of sugar – were undertaken
by scientists, somewhat exposing what Derek Oddy and Derek Miller called
‘a conceptual gap in the framework [of history]’.6 Early treatments of diet by
academic historians, such as William Ashley’s history of bread in England, were
generally economic, as were early examples of wider history that gave significant
attention to food, such as Eileen Power’s history of English nunneries, in which
food recurs throughout a story of religion, economics, and gender.7 Indeed
both economic and medical historians continue to undertake some of the most
important work on the history of diet, exploring its relationship with living
standards, human welfare and broader economic development.8
In the 1960s, the economic and social facts of ‘material life’ became a focus
for the historians associated with the Annales journal in France, and diet
formed a major part of their historical project, inspiring studies of changing
diets, nutrition, food production and consumption, and explorations of

9781350008465_pi-222.indd 2 03-Apr-18 6:47:25 PM

 Introduction 3

the place of food in academic history. 9 Some of the Annalistes also began
to use food to explore cultural as well as economic and social questions.
Jean Soler’s semiotic approach to biblical dietary restrictions, and Roland
Barthes’s suggestion of a ‘psychosociology’ of eating, showed how food’s
historical significance went beyond the material, and that historians needed
to employ a wide variety of approaches to capture its importance. 10 After all,
Fernand Braudel commented, ‘the mere smell of cooking can evoke a whole
civilisation’.11
Braudel’s belief that food could be connected to the ‘deep structures’ of
historical societies also lay at the heart of another foundational strand in the
study of food: anthropology. Food had been of interest to anthropology since
the discipline’s nineteenth-century origins, particularly the way it is used to
construct social and cultural groups. ‘Those who sit at meat together’, William
Robertson Smith wrote in his study of ‘semitic’ peoples in 1889, ‘are united for
all social effects; those who do not eat together are aliens to one another, without
fellowship in religion and without reciprocal social duties’.12 Early twentieth-
century anthropologists noted how food was also used to define and enforce
the boundaries between groups: excluding people from food, Alfred Radcliffe-
Brown wrote in 1922, excludes them from ‘social communion’.13
It was Eileen Power’s colleague at the London School of Economics, Audrey
Richards, who pioneered the anthropological study of food as a cultural subject as
well as a social one, producing what her doctoral supervisor Bronislow Malinowski
called the ‘first [academic] collection of facts on the cultural aspects of food and
eating’.14 In a study of the Bemba people in what is now Zambia, Richards noted
that despite humans’ ability to adapt to almost all types of food – what we now call
‘the omnivore’s dilemma’ – we actually tend to have a fairly limited diet, controlled
by inherited habits, traditions and taboos, and that these limits vary considerably
between all sorts of groups. ‘Man’s selection of food,’ she wrote, ‘is determined
very largely by the habits and values which his “social heritage” has imposed upon
him’; ‘Culture imposes restrictions where nature would have left him free,’ and
therefore ‘food acquires for him a series of values other than those which hunger
provides.’15 ‘Nutrition in a human society,’ therefore, ‘cannot even be considered
apart from the cultural medium in which it is carried on.’16
Not only did culture influence food, but food influenced culture, and indeed
the structure of society itself. Since food was so fundamental to how families,
communities and societies organized themselves, Richards argued that ‘food
acquires . . . a series of values other than those which hunger provides’; it
‘becomes symbolic . . . of society, and acquires some of the attributes of the
society itself ’.17

9781350008465_pi-222.indd 3 03-Apr-18 6:47:25 PM

 4 Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

The idea that food symbolisms could reveal the deepest structures of society
became a focus for both Annalistes and anthropologists in the 1960s and ’70s.
Jean Soler argued that the symbolic meals and food taboos of Old Testament
Judaism could reveal the fundamentals upon which their society and culture
rested – the prohibition of pork, the insistence on ritual slaughter, fasts,
ritual meals and so on, were all waves produced by structural undercurrents,
alimentary expressions of a collective unconscious.18
Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used the transformation of food via
cooking as a universal conceptual metaphor for the creation of culture and
‘civilization’ in his seminal 1964 book, The Raw and the Cooked.19 In 1972 Mary
Douglas offered another structural theory of dietary practices and taboos in
her controversial Purity and Danger, provocatively arguing that even the most
mundane of everyday meals contains hidden cultural ‘code’ about the context
that produces and consumes it.20 Like much of structural anthropology, however,
the universal nature of Lévi-Strauss’s and Douglas’s ideas meant they were
somewhat divorced from both cultural diversity and historical change: what
might have been arguable for prehistorical societies or ancient Judaism often
made little sense in a different place or time. As Audrey Richards had noted,
because cultures vary so widely between different places and peoples, food must
be analysed ‘in the structure of each different culture’.21
That sensitivity to different cultural contexts lies behind the rise of cultural
history, emphasizing a desire to see things, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz put
it, ‘from the native’s point of view’ or, as Will Pooley recently adapted Geertz’s
phrase for historians, ‘native to the past’.22 Indeed Robert Darnton famously
characterized cultural history as anthropology applied to Western civilization. 23
Culinary culture has been at the heart of much recent research on food in history,
from Ken Albala’s pioneering explorations of food in early modern Europe to
the wide-ranging work of Massimo Montanari.24
As with their intellectual forerunners, many cultural historians see food as a
way to illuminate broader cultural issues. Albala has argued that we can see how
cultural beliefs become ‘social facts’ – for example, the widespread early modern
belief that melons were dangerous – that help to ‘reveal the workings of the
Renaissance mind on a level unattainable by other means’.25 Robert Appelbaum
has tried to penetrate early modern ‘mentalities’ using ‘interjections’ regarding
food in plays, novels and poems to examine the ‘multitude of discourses’
surrounding food in early modern European society. Appelbaum has argued that
the varying nature of these discourses – be they about hunger or gluttony, joy or
regret, restraint or enjoyment – reveals that early modern people ‘experienced

9781350008465_pi-222.indd 4 03-Apr-18 6:47:25 PM

 Introduction 5

food with great intensity and perspicuity’, often with an ‘awareness of the social,
philosophical, and religious issues that eating and drinking in the human world
can raise’; ‘The experience of food reached as deep into the individual as the
vitalities of the genitals, the brain, and the soul’.26 Eric Rath has demonstrated
that food had such emotional power in cultures far beyond Europe, showing the
way that eating evoked all sorts of knowledge, experiences and ideas for the early
modern Japanese.27
Cultural and temporal distance can make understanding that intensity
difficult. ‘It requires a real effort of imagination,’ Richards wrote about studying
the Bemba, ‘to visualize a state of society in which food matter so much and
from so many points of view.’28 This is a particular challenge for early modern
historians, as Piero Camporesi emphasized in his provocative work on food
and fantasy. To understand the importance of food to early modern people, he
argued, we must understand that they lived in societies and cultures defined by
the physical, emotional, and psychological effects of hunger.29 In premodern and
hungry societies, Caroline Walker Bynum has written, ‘food forces itself forward
as an insistent fact, an insistent symbol’.30
Just as food pervaded early modern mentalities and culture, so too did the
omnipresence of religion.31 From the ritual meal of the Lord’s Supper to the
fasting of Lent, Advent and dozens of feast days, medieval and early modern
Christianity was infused with food, to the extent that Bynum has argued that
people often saw food as ‘the most basic and literal way of encountering God’.32
Yet the relationship between food and religion has received a ‘relative lack’ of
attention from early modern historians in comparison to those studying the
ancient and medieval periods.33 While recent research on early modern religion
has embraced a wide variety of innovative new approaches – from the senses to
emotions to material culture – food history and the study of the period’s great
religious subjects have too often remained separate.34
This points to a wider issue for historians of food: the breadth and popularity
of our subject (especially in light of previous ignorance) should not lead to
the creation of a segregated subdiscipline. As Deborah Simonton and others
have written about gender history, subjects that stay (or are kept) apart from
‘mainstream history’ are less likely to change and enrich broader historical
narratives and perceptions.35 The challenge for historians of food is to integrate
our rich and growing subject into questions of wider history, and to explore and
reveal the role of food in them.
Lévi-Strauss argued that animals and their meat had become endowed
with cultural and religious significance ‘not because they were good to eat, but

9781350008465_pi-222.indd 5 03-Apr-18 6:47:25 PM

 6 Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

because they were good to think with’.36 Food offers similar advantages to the
historian, forcing us to think about the past from all angles: from economic to
cultural, class to gender, medical to religious. Rather than focusing on sources
that concentrate explicitly on food – such as cookbooks or dietary handbooks –
this book makes use of more incidental information about and around food in
other types of sources, in particular judicial records, such as Inquisition case
documents, city council records, and witchcraft trial records.37 Rather than just
thinking about food, it looks at early modern history through food, using the
subject as a prism to offer new refractions of life in a period structured – from
farm to table, faith to status – around food.
This book is organized in three parts, each exploring the relationship between
food and one of the processes through which early modern Europe constructed
its communities of conformity and deviance: Inquisition, Reformation and
witch-hunting. While food has often been somewhat overlooked in these three
subjects’ rich and diverse historiographies, approaching them through food can
yield fresh insights into a Europe undergoing tumultuous religious change. All
three parts make use of sources from both the different legal institutions that
determined and enforced conformity, and the heterodox cultural contexts that
produced and occupied those institutions, spreading from Spain to Switzerland
to Shetland. What emerge are three early modern manifestations of what Audrey
Richards saw in colonial Rhodesia, or what Robertson Smith described about
the ancient Middle East: how food both unites and divides at the same time. In
religious, cultural, and social life, food bound neighbours into communities, but
also marked out the shifting boundaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that defined deviance
and the ‘others’ who practiced it.
Part 1 focuses on food and the Inquisition during its early decades in
Castile, at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth
century. The newly unified Christian Spain tasked the Inquisition with policing
the religious practices of ‘new Christians’, particularly the large numbers
with Jewish ancestry (conversos) who were believed by many to be privately
practicing a form of ‘crypto-Judaism’. As a visible difference between Christian
and Jewish religious practices, food became a central focus of identity and
suspicion.
Chapter 2, ‘The Foods of a Christian’, explores how eating became
an activity fraught with hidden meanings as certain foods and dishes
became linked with particular identities. From pies to stews, garlic to
aubergines, what you ate could communicate to observant neighbours and
suspicious Inquisitors who you really were, and what you really believed.

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 Introduction 7

The records of the Inquisition’s early decades – confessions, testimonies, trial

documents – are full of details about food, indicating how the Holy Office,
its informers and witnesses saw eating as a central part of ‘lived’ religious
practice for both Christians and Jews.
Chapter 3, ‘Kitchens and Neighbours’, takes up the story of Marina
González and examines the relationship between the Inquisition’s
concentration on food and issues of gender and community. The
Inquisitors’ interest in the women’s world of cooking and the kitchen
reflected its particular concern about the behaviour of women conversas
and their perceived role as guardians of the faith in allegedly ‘crypto-
Jewish’ households. Both defendants and accusers in early Inquisition cases
were often women, and trial records reveal a great deal about how women
interacted (both positively and negatively) in early modern Castilian society.
They also reveal a more complicated picture of social relations than the idea
of separate ‘converso’ and ‘old Christian’ communities implies. Food lay at
the heart of how communities lived, defined, and negotiated their religious
practices, cultures and identities.
Part 2 moves 1,000 miles to the northwest, where a different group of
Europeans were using food to help define religious identity. In Zürich in 1522,
the followers of evangelical preacher Huldrych Zwingli broke some of the very
dietary regulations that the Inquisition was trying to uphold in Spain by eating
sausages during Lent. Fast-breaking protest was to play an important and
underappreciated part in the birth of the Zürich Reformation.
Chapter 4, ‘The Eaters’, examines the fast-breakings of Lent 1522 through
the records of legal investigations launched by the Zürich city council and
Zwingli’s sermons and writings. The infamous sausage meal, prepared by
Elsi Flammer and Bärbel von Arm, was far from the only occasion on which
the city’s evangelicals provocatively violated the church’s dietary laws, and
public controversy over fasting was much more important than scholarship
of the Zürich Reformation has generally portrayed. Zwingli’s defence of fast-
breaking invoked not only early Reformation ideas of ‘Christian liberty’ and
the primacy of scripture, but also a wide variety of populist and social ideas
about the impact of unsuitable dietary laws imposed by a corrupt foreign
church. The importance of food to his congregation’s religious practice and
culture meant that the issue became a crucial turning point in the city’s break
with the church.
Chapter 5, ‘Sausage-Makers and Cheese-Hunters’, examines the cultural
context of early Reformation fast-breaking, exploring what ideas and meanings

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 8 Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

the foods prohibited during Lent would have called to mind for an early modern
Swiss or southern German audience. Sausages, and the butchery behind them,
were explicitly linked to the contemporary controversy over Swiss mercenary
recruitment and the slaughter of young Swiss men in the service of the empire
and papacy. Sausages brought to mind other aspects of manhood as well and
could be an ambiguous symbol of male sexuality and independence, issues
which linked to Lent’s prohibitions on sex and marriage. Such issues were also
brought to mind by other prohibited foods with explicitly feminine associations,
such as eggs and dairy. Lent’s restriction on carnal pursuits stood in stark
contrast to the preceding Carnival, a time of raucous debauchery, excess eating,
and political protest. Many elements of the Zürich fast-breaking protests show
the evangelicals turning the seasons ‘upside-down’ by extending Carnival into
Lent, presaging the seminal religious upheavals to come.
Part 3 examines how food’s symbolism and importance related to another
major issue of early modern European religion and culture – the widespread
belief in and persecution of witchcraft. Food was central to ideas of witchcraft’s
operation, the thinking behind those beliefs, and the way that witchcraft was
understood and dealt with in local communities.
Chapter 6, ‘Dining with Demons’, analyses the place of food in demonology,
the wide-ranging body of thought about how witchcraft worked. Demonologists
considered food both a target of witchcraft – with witches and demons ruining
harvests, spoiling food or using it to poison people – and a central part of its
practice. Demonologists detailed elaborate evil banquets, where the bread was
made from the bones of murdered children, and food never sated hunger. Such
rituals represented an inversion of the role of food in Christian religion and
culture, so salt – sanctifying and pure – would never be found on witches’ tables.
The food most associated with witchcraft was milk: its symbolic association with
female fertility, and women’s control of the domestic dairy economy coupled
with demonology’s tortured views of gender.
Chapter 7, ‘Plain Hunger and Necessity’, examines how these ideas of milk
magic and wider witchcraft operated in local communities, where milk magic
and disputes over food were at the root of many witchcraft accusations. The
court records of early seventeenth-century Shetland – filled with cases of
witchcraft and many other crimes about food – reveal how anxiety about food
insecurity permeated early modern communities. With dairy central to the
islanders’ economy, complaints that women were using magic to manipulate the
butter yields of their own or neighbours’ cows were particularly serious, but so
too were more mundane threats to food, such as endemic levels of theft. The

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 Introduction 9

harsh treatment of Margaret Patersdochter, who stole because she had nothing
to eat, illustrates what the islanders perceived as a threat to the order of their
community. Focusing on food opens up seams in the fabric of early modern
Shetland society.
In Chapter 8, ‘Thinking about Food, Thinking with Food’, I draw a number
of comparative conclusions about the issues of identity, belief, and community,
and explore the ways in which we can think with, as well as think about, food in
social and cultural history.

We are long past the days when food was not given serious attention by
historians. But that does not mean we have yet figured out how to approach
such a vast subject. This book is not a blueprint for food history, but rather an
experiment in using food as a prism through which to offer a different refraction
of historical light. It is, hopefully, also an illustration of why food should not be
an insular historical subgenre on its own, but instead a subject that sits at the
heart of historical study and spreads right through its breadth – just as it did in
the worlds and lives of early modern people.

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9781350008465_pi-222.indd 10 03-Apr-18 6:47:25 PM
 Part One

Food and Inquisition

 2

‘The Foods of a Christian’:

Food, Religion, and Inquisition

One Saturday in 1490 in the Castilian village of Quintana Redonda, a man called
Yohan Alonso hosted a local priest, Father Pedro Gutierrez, for dinner. The meal
Yohan’s wife served included some ‘empanadas’ – little pies – made with rabbit
meat. Something about how Father Gutierrez reacted to the rabbit empanadas
seemed suspicious to Yohan, as the priest seemed to insist that his host eat them,
as if he perhaps wanted to avoid eating them himself. Six months later when the
Inquisition sat in nearby Soria (about five miles away), Yohan told this story to
the inquisitors, who also heard that other people in the community had said that
Father Gutierrez was a heretic and that he would ‘burn’.1
The inquisitors in Soria heard many more stories about empanadas. In
December 1488, a Jewish widow called Jamila had told them that Diego García
Costello (a tailor and surgeon who had worked in the towns of Aranda and
Palencia) and his wife made fish empanadas on Fridays, with the intention of
eating them the next day.2 South of Soria in Almazán, the García family had
allegedly done the same with pigeon empanadas.3 In August 1491, a number
of people told the inquisitors of suspicious behaviour by Alonso de Luçena, the
prothonotary of Soria, including that a Jewish man called Capón had ‘once or
twice’ brought Alonso’s mother little pies made with pigeon, which the Luçenas
had eaten together.4 A woman in Almazán told the inquisitors that in the house
of Luis Vélez, people had made empanadas filled with mince meat and mutton’s
head fried in oil, and that those there had eaten the pies ‘with much pleasure
and celebration’.5 Many of these piemakers and pie-eaters were condemned for
heresy. Why would people think that the Spanish Inquisition would be interested
in such details about pies and their fillings? And why did the Inquisition take
such information seriously?
By the late fifteenth century, the long Christian ‘reconquest’ of Spain from
its medieval Islamic rulers was nearing completion. In the 1470s the Christian

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 14 Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

Spanish kingdoms of Castile and Aragón were united, providing a platform

for a final defeat of the last bastion of Islamic Spain in Andalusia, and in 1492
centuries of Muslim power in Iberia came to an end at Granada.
As Christian Spain united and expanded, its intolerance of the religious
diversity that characterized medieval Iberia increased. Restrictions on the rights
of Jews and Muslims – often in contrast to how minorities had been treated in
Islamic Spain – led many to convert to Christianity in order to enjoy rights and
privileges increasingly reserved for the majority (such as government service,
entrance to certain religious and professional institutions).6
These ‘new Christians’ (in Spanish generally ‘cristianos nuevos’ or ‘conversos’;
or ‘moriscos’ for those of Muslim origin) became the target of prejudice from
some parts of fifteenth-century Spanish society. ‘New Christians’ who had
come from prominent Jewish and Muslim families unsurprisingly achieved
success and prominence in Christian society, and envy and intolerance
led many to question the veracity of conversos’ and moriscos’ Christian belief.
Since they or their parents might have converted due to social pressure or
for social advancement, were they perhaps secretly still practicing their old
faiths?7
Conversos could become convenient scapegoats for economic and political
problems, and in the 1440s, populist anger fused with intolerance in violent
unrest against them, most notably in the New Castilian city of Toledo in 1449.8
The atmosphere of suspicion led many prominent Spanish families to chart and
advertise their genealogy to show their ‘pure’ Christian lineage, and – following
the lead of anti-converso officials in Toledo – many institutions, from religious
orders to local town councils, passed rules about ‘limpieza de sangre’, ‘purity of
blood’, restricting entry and membership to those who did not have Jewish or
Muslim ancestors (‘old Christians’).9
Conversion was a central concept for medieval and early modern Christianity.
The original Christians, after all, were converts, and accepting the true Word
of God was Christianity’s desired end for all of God’s children. The Church
hierarchy opposed attempts in Spain to restrict the faith to those with Christian
lineage. In 1449 Pope Nicholas V condemned the idea of blood purity in his bull
Humani Generis Inimicus, and a wide variety of Spanish scholars, royal officials
and other church leaders followed suit.10
Yet suspicion about conversos and moriscos remained across society, and
among certain religious leaders and polemicists. The ‘reconquest’ of large
Jewish and Muslim populations presented the Spanish state and church with
the question of how to treat religious minorities. Religious and political

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 ‘The Foods of a Christian’ 15

thought was increasingly hostile to tolerance, with Nicholas V’s predecessor

Pope Eugene IV ordering the separation of Jewish and Christian communities,
and the segregation of Jews in Christian towns and cities.11 With Spanish Jews
and Muslims increasingly restricted to ghettoized juderías and morerías in
the late 1400s, suspicion and prejudice focused on conversos living among the
Christian population.
As the Christian forces advanced on Granada in the late 1470s, certain monastic
and church leaders including the Dominican friar Tómas de Torquemada
lobbied Queen Isabella of Castile to address claims of widespread ‘judaizing’ –
secret adherence to Judaism – among Andalusian conversos. Her husband
Ferdinand’s kingdom of Aragón had maintained an Inquisition (often subject
to condemnation from Rome for its treatment of conversos), and in 1478 the
monarchs requested papal permission to establish an Inquisition in Seville.12
Torquemada (who many historians have argued was of converso lineage himself)
was placed in charge of a system that by the end of the century had spread across
central and southern Spain, and would eventually extend to the frontiers of the
expanding Iberian world, from Sicily to Portugal to the Americas.13
In the 1480s and 1490s, the Inquisition’s Holy Offices received enormous
amounts of evidence about alleged ‘judaizing’ in towns across Castile: indeed this
was the Inquisition’s most active and most brutal phase.14 Conversos had certain
social characteristics – like their Jewish ancestors, they were mostly employed
in finishing crafts, local commerce and the professions – but increasingly they
lived alongside ‘old Christians’.15 Indeed, who was or was not a converso was a
somewhat intractable question: one fifteenth-century royal official asked ‘who
knows who are [not] descended from them [conversos]’, so great was the extent
of intermingled ancestry and relations.16
Unable to see into their neighbours’ souls, accusers and witnesses focused on
noticeable differences that might indicate ‘crypto-Judaism’. With early modern
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam visibly divided by complex dietary regulations,
much of the information provided to the early Inquisition focused on food. Just
as empanadas concealed a hidden filling, perhaps conversos’ eating and cooking
habits were concealing their true faith, the contents of their kitchens and meals
tell-tale signs of their deception.
Filled with copious detail on the behaviour and professed beliefs and views
of ‘ordinary’ people, Inquisition records are, as Carlo Ginzburg once put it, ‘the
notebooks of anthropologists’, illuminating what Michael Alpert called the
‘most intimate aspects’ of society; they can be, Brian Pullan has written, ‘the
key which unlocks the mind of the people’.17 In their search for ‘crypto-Jews’,

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 16 Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

Castilian inquisitors recorded confessions, accusations and testimony on

all manner of everyday practices and habits, creating a massive corpus of
evidence about the actions and beliefs of conversos and their neighbours.
Few documents can reveal such copious detail about late medieval and early
modern people.
Such sources, however, come with inherent biases. The inquisitors and their
suspicious witnesses were searching for deviance rather than conformity, so
we often have a picture of the social exception rather than the rule (although
the intensity of Inquisition prosecutions in the late 1400s indicate that many
‘suspect’ practices were widespread).18 A reliance on Inquisition records and
their focus on ‘judaizing’ has inevitably focused historical study on the issue
of ‘crypto-Judaism’, with research sharply divided between those who believe
a widespread secret religion existed, and those who see instead paranoid
persecution of sincere Christians.19 More recent research, however, has offered
a more heterodox religious picture, noting the complex, shifting beliefs and
practices of converso individuals and families.20
We need not follow the inquisitors by focusing on ‘crypto-Judaism’: the
evidence about food from the early decades of the Inquisition allows us to ask
wider questions about early modern Castilian culture, religion, gender and
community. Amidst the vast treasure trove of Inquisition records, seemingly
mundane stories about empanadas can understandably be overlooked.
But those who told such stories thought them important enough to tell the
inquisitors, thought it important enough to be specific about what the pies
were filled with, about when they were made, and about when and how they
were eaten. And the inquisitors thought the information important enough to
take seriously.
Father Gutierrez’s reluctance to eat the Alonsos’ rabbit empanadas could
suggest that he was avoiding meat that was not kosher. A Jewish woman
knowing that the Costello Garcías made Saturday’s empanadas on Friday
might suggest that they were unwilling to cook on the Sabbath. The fact that
the Soria prothonotary’s family received chicken and pigeon empanadas as gifts
(perhaps regularly) could mean that they were receiving them from someone
who slaughtered the birds in a ritual Jewish way, as the poultry sold by Christian
butchers was not kosher. The fillings for the Vélez family’s empanadas being
fried in olive oil might mean that they habitually used that fat rather than (un-
kosher) lard in their kitchen. Inside these pies, behind these stories, lies a world
of food meanings that reveals a great deal about how early modern Castilians
saw themselves, their neighbours, and their religion.

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 ‘The Foods of a Christian’ 17

Eating

As Father Gutierrez found out, revealing your dietary preferences in front of

others could be a fraught business in the early years of the Inquisition. Refusing
something offered could carry considerable risk if the ingredients or dish had
cultural or religious significance in the mind of one’s neighbours. So too could
taking especial pleasure or celebration in a particular food or dish, as shown
by the story of Luis Vélez and his taste for fried mutton empanadas. Avoiding
foods or dishes with symbolism or significance, however, was not easy. The sheer
variety of ingredients and dishes discussed in early Inquisition cases reveals a
food culture where the acts of cooking, eating, and avoiding were all endowed
with complex layers of meaning.
Eating could be a strong social barrier between religious communities. In
medieval and early modern Europe it was difficult for Jews to eat or drink with
their neighbours. In William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish
moneylender Shylock describes the impossibility of him dining at a Christian table.
Bassanio:
If it please you to dine with us.

Shylock:
Yes, to smell pork; to eat of the habitation which
Your prophet the Nazarite conjured the devil into. I
Will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you,
Walk with you, and so following, but I will not eat
With you, drink with you, nor pray with you.21

Eating together is a line that Shylock feels he cannot cross: food is central to his
faith and identity, in ways that are incompatible with what and how Christians
eat. Such restrictions on interreligious eating were also true for Christians and
Muslims, and while medieval Spain’s much-debated convivencia (‘coexistence’)
made such difficulties often permeable and negotiable, they also inevitably
created social divides between – and within – communities.22 The assimilation
of large numbers of converso families into Spanish Christian communities over
just a few generations created a whole new set of social interactions across old
identity boundaries. ‘New Christians’ and ‘old Christians’ had no religious dietary
boundaries between them: not only could they pray together but eat and drank
together too. But dietary habits and preferences practiced over generations were
far too ingrained as cultural practices to simply disappear. No matter how sincere
a converso’s Christianity (or how hidden their ‘crypto-Judaism’), local or family

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 18 Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

kitchen traditions would not disappear with conversion. The fuzzy dividing line
between which food habits were ‘religious’ and which were ‘cultural’ could create
something of a dietary minefield for conversos, one which was made all the more
dangerous when inquisitors arrived in a town or village, asking questions about
‘suspicious’ activity.
The most prominent dietary difference between Christians, Jews, and Muslims
is pork. Jordan Rosenblum has argued that since antiquity – even before the
birth of Christianity – pork has been an iconic boundary of religious identity
for Jews, with ancient ‘Jewish and Gentile sources equat[ing] the ingestion of, or
abstention from, pork as indicative of one’s identity’.23 For ancient Jews pork was
a ‘metonym’ for ‘the other’, while for non-Jews forcing pork on Jewish people can
be a form of ‘cultural domination’.24 Peter Schäffer notes that pork was a focus of
ancient anti-Semitism, on the basis that ‘once the Jews eat pork, they have given
up their [central laws] and will become like any other nation’, as pork refusal
is the ‘embodiment’ of their laws.25 In multireligious medieval Spain, pork was
a stark and visible division between Christians and their Jewish or Muslim
neighbours, and so acceptance or avoidance of pork among ‘new Christians’
became a Shibboleth for those with anti-converso suspicions.
Pedro de Villegas, a clothmaker in Ciudad Real, was accused of ‘judaizing’
in 1483, and tried by the Inquisition. Pedro undertook his own defence, and
managed to secure an acquittal by steadfastly insisting he was a good Christian,
calling character witnesses after character witness (many of whom were reputable
people in the town) to testify on his behalf. When accused of eating unleavened
bread, Pedro replied that it was as likely for him to have eaten such a thing as
for the Muslim prophet Muhammad to have eaten pork.26 Everyone was aware
of pork’s significance in Jewish and Islamic identity, and of its place as a dividing
line between Christians and their neighbours.
Indeed pork was also an important food for Christians’ identity, not just as a
point of difference with the other faiths, but also as a cultural totem. The rearing
of pigs has been a feature of Spanish agriculture for millennia, and pork has
long been the most popular meat in Christian Spain. The matanza del cerdo,
the annual slaughter of the pig, is a major cultural and social event for Christian
communities in central Spain dating back to medieval times. Inquisition
testimonies alleging that people refused to eat pork often speak in an almost
incredulous tone. Pedro de Teva of Ciudad Real was certain that a woman on
trial was Jewish because she had once refused a piece of wild boar meat he had
offered to her, as if no one would ever have turned down such a delicacy without
a suspicious reason.27 This related too, of course, to Muslims and moriscos: Jillian

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 ‘The Foods of a Christian’ 19

Williams has shown how pork refusal was also a central issue of identity in the
treatment of Valencian moriscos.28
In early modern Castilian kitchens, the most common types of pork were cured
and smoked products, such as ham and bacon. In the records of the Inquisition’s
activities in the village of Almazán during 1501–5, abstention or avoidance from
bacon appears as an accusation in over forty documents. Witnesses said that
María García and her family ‘never ate bacon’.29 Sebastian Sainz, a butler to the
Count of Monteagudo, recounted to the inquisitors in 1505 that he had once had
dinner with a fisherman named Juan and a ‘new Christian’ of Almazán called
Pedro López de Ayala. For dinner they made a stew with chicken and bacon, but
Sebastian found Pedro’s behaviour suspicious: he barely ate anything, sought to
avoid the bacon and then said he didn’t want any dinner.30 Andrés Gutierrez of
La Vallana told the inquisitors in 1505 that he and his father had eaten with the
‘new Christian’ Miguel Pérez Nuñez, and that they had served bacon and eggs.
Andrés said that Miguel ate the eggs but threw the bacon to the cat.31 Quiteria,
wife of Pedro Teresa of Matamala was both suspicious and unimpressed when
she once cooked for Pedro and Aldonza Lainez and their children. After killing
‘a good chicken’ and cooking it with bacon (trying to show ‘more honour’ to
her diners), she was disappointed to see the Lainezes (particularly Aldonza)
effectively refuse to eat, and decide to eat eggs instead.32
As a preserved meat often used in the base of stews, bacon was extremely
difficult to avoid without people noticing: bacon was the litmus test of the
Inquisition kitchen, and thus ostentatious consumption of cured pork was a
way of demonstrating one’s status as a good Christian. People might be able to
question ancestry or spiritual devotion, but there was no questioning a piece of
ham or bacon hanging in your kitchen or being tossed into your pot.
Accused conversos offered various different defences against the charge that
they would not eat pork, many of which, in the cold light of historical study,
seem plausible. But they seemed much less believable to either a suspicious
inquisitor or a pork-loving neighbour. Marina González’s husband in Ciudad
Real ascribed her avoidance of pork in 1494 to ‘concern for her health’ (‘not for
other ceremony’), adding that he had ‘scolded her for it’.33 Others said they did
not like the taste, while some claimed that it made them ill.34 Pedro de Villareal
of Cogolludo said he had asked for pork to be left out of his dinner because it
exacerbated his gout.35 When the Inquisition were in town, disliking pork and
bacon was not an option.
Like the concealed fillings of empanadas, the hidden contents of sausages
could also become a focus for suspicion, especially if they did not contain

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 20 Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

pork. In Almazán, a local type of sausages, cabaheas, seem to have acquired an

association with Jewish food culture, appearing in seventeen different Inquisition
testimonies. Leonor Méndez and her husband Diego were alleged to have many
times made cabaheas with ox head, chopped and minced with spices and eaten
them.36 Magdalena, the wife of Pedro the carpenter, told the inquisitors in 1505
that the wife of a Master Bernal made cabaheas with cow lung and head, along
with garlic and spices, that her family ate ‘on Saturdays and other days’.37 María,
wife of Juan Martínez, a labourer, testified in 1505 that Pedro González and his
wife Ana often made cabaheas and other types of cured sausages like longanizas
out of ox heads, offal and mince, which they ate.38 Witnesses and inquisitors may
have suspected that such minced meat and offal might have come from Jewish
butchery, and as we will see in Part 2, the hidden filling of sausages made them a
fertile ground for malleable food symbolisms across early modern Europe.
Offal could also become a focus of suspicion, having perhaps originated
in Jewish ritual slaughter and butchery (a subject which will be discussed in
the next chapter). Many allegations were made about eating stewed tripe on
Saturdays that had been prepared the previous day to avoid cooking on the
Sabbath. In such an allegation relating to Pedro Méndez and a woman called
Leonor in Almazán, witnesses said that the tripe was from sheep or cow.39 Much
like with the cabaheas sausages, the notable absence of pork is implicit (callos
de credo, pig’s tripe, is a traditional ingredient in Christian Spanish cookery).
Various people were alleged to include cow’s or sheep’s hooves with their stewed
tripe.40 Gabriel the innkeeper and his wife in Almazán were alleged to have
cooked kid’s spleen.41
The complex restrictions around which fish are permitted on Jewish tables
and which are forbidden meant that seafood too could become a subject of
suspicion, particularly given early modern Christianity’s long series of fast and
‘fish days’ on which meat and dairy products were prohibited. Pedro López de
Ayala was alleged in 1505 to not eat conger eel, which is not kosher.42
Many foods that became perceived as quintessentially ‘Jewish’ were not
part of Jewish religious practices, but instead stereotypical parts of Jewish (and
indeed Islamic) cultural tradition. Garlic, for example, was heavily associated
across Europe with Jewish cooking and eating habits, and was another food
that acquired identity connotations in Inquisition Castile. Testimonies in Soria
and Almazán include many references to garlic in recipes, most often in spiced
meat sausages or pies, generally alongside coriander.43 It is notable, however, that
there are no allegations in these records where garlic is emphasized as the tell-
tale ‘Jewish’ ingredient that is portrayed in early modern anti-Semitic polemic.

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 ‘The Foods of a Christian’ 21

Indeed many Spanish Christians certainly ate garlic, just like their Jewish and
Muslim neighbours. Fray Alonso de Herrera wrote an extensive guide to the
agriculture of Spain at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and included a
detailed entry on garlic.44 Roberto di Nola, a Catalan chef to the King of Naples,
was the author of the first printed cookbook in Spain (1520 in Catalan, 1525 in
Castilian) and includes garlic in many of his recipes.45
Rather than a binary test or a complete taboo, garlic may have become
suspicious only in certain temporal or geographic contexts, for example during
bursts of anti-Jewish feeling or under the eyes of the Inquisition. Maria Diemling
has suggested that garlic declined from its medieval popularity in Germany
during periods of early modern anti-Jewish fervour, and it is possible that the
same thing may have happened in Castile, at least among the most fervently
anti-Jewish/converso Christians.46 It is also possible that anti-Semitic and anti-
converso polemicists exaggerated a ‘Jewishness’ around garlic that was not as
notable in everyday village life where food cultures and traditions may have
mixed for centuries. The Spanish royal chronicler Andrés Bernáldez, infamous
for his anti-converso prejudice, wrote in the late 1400s that the conversos had
‘the smell of the Jews’ because of their use of garlic.47 The ‘smell of the Jews’, the
‘foetor judaicus’, was a well-known anti-Semitic theme in ancient, medieval and
early modern Europe.48
Smell permeates and lingers. It is difficult to shake off. Its resonance and
importance was much greater for those in early modern times than today.49
Before daily washing, regimented hygiene, refrigeration, ventilation and
sanitation, towns and villages were considerably more odorous (and not in a
pleasant way) than they are today. The narrow streets of towns and villages in hot
early modern Castile would have been extremely smelly places. Early modern
people took notice, and placed significance, in their olfactory environment, and
it would have been very difficult to hide the smell of something as odorous as
garlic from one’s home.
Many Inquisition witnesses made reference to olfactory identification, and
not just with regard to ‘the smell of Jews’. Ana Lainez, who was brought before
the Inquisition in Almázan, was alleged to have responded to her maid bringing
a small piece of pork into the house by throwing it into the fire and covering
her nose and mouth with her wimple to prevent the smell of the pork reaching
her nostrils and getting into her throat.50 Mayor Mélendez of Hita was accused
in 1521 of removing herself to another room whenever anyone roasted pork or
melted pork lard, and blocking up any holes in the wall in order to avoid the
smell of pork.51 If these charges have some truth behind them, it is intriguing to

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 22 Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

see those privately clinging to either Jewish religious practice or Jewish culture
identifying even the smell of pork as offensive and dangerous to their identity.
In the context of Inquisition and post-expulsion Spain, hiding from the smell of
pork could certainly be seen as hiding from repression, clinging to one’s identity
by defending one’s home and body from the permeation of an oppressive smell.
If, alternatively, Ana Lainez and Mayor Mélendez never did such things, it is still
interesting that Christians thought Jews and ‘crypto-Jews’ would see the smell
of pork as so powerful a threat to their identity and to the practice of their faith.
Indeed when Shylock refuses Bassanio’s dinner invitation, Shakespeare has him
mention ‘the smell of pork’ as something he must avoid.
Another smell that Bernáldez considered quintessential to Jewish and
converso households was olive oil: ‘they cooked their meat with olive oil, which
they used instead of bacon or lard so as to avoid pork; and olive oil with meat
is something which smells very bad on the breath’.52 The aforementioned Luis
Vélez from Almazán was alleged to have fried mince meat in oil, as was Aldonza
Lainez while making meatballs.53 There are many other references to the use
of oil in recipes from Almazán.54 Preferring olive oil to pork lard was certainly
a marked difference between Jewish (and Muslim) households and their
Christian neighbours. Again, however, as with garlic, Spanish Christians did not
traditionally avoid olive oil completely; after all it had been in use in Iberia for
centuries. The perceived significance of certain foods was heavily contextual.
Even foods with no religious role and a limited association with particular
religions could attain significance through anti-converso feeling and Inquisition
suspicion. Juan Gil has noted that residents of Toledo, the reputed centre of the
Castilian converso community, were often referred to as berenjeneros, ‘aubergine-
eaters’, due to the prevalence of the vegetable in the town’s cuisine and its
association with conversos and Jews.55 ‘Berenjenero [became] a generic insult
used against Toledans in an attempt to hit them where it hurt most, namely
alluding to their [stereotype as Jews and conversos]’.56 In picaresque ballads and
popular plays, eating aubergines was often used as a satirical mockery of Toledans
and their supposed Jewishness. Thirteen witnesses in trials of conversos from
Ciudad Real from 1494 to 1512 (the legal proceedings of which were actually
held in Toledo) mention aubergines. Many are in relation to Sabbath dishes,
such as a casserole of fish, eggs and aubergines that a servant called Pascuala
accused María González, wife of Pedro Díaz de Villarrubia, of having prepared. 57
Another María González, married to Pedro de Villareal, was said to have made
stuffed aubergines, as was Leonor Alvárez.58 Luzia Fernández, a woman who
testified against a number of her converso neighbours, alleged that Juana Nuñez

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 ‘The Foods of a Christian’ 23

fried aubergines in oil, leaving Juana accused of using two suspect ingredients.59
The complex interplay between food, culture, and identity endowed foods with
significance far beyond their seeming mundanity.

Inquisition

To fully understand the evidence about food in early Inquisition cases, we must
ask two questions about the relationship between food and the Inquisition
itself: how prevalent was food evidence, and how was it used?
The question of prevalence opens up a troublesome can of historical
worms: the quantification of Inquisition cases. The Holy Office’s vast repository
of documents are an irresistible target for quantitative analysis, in particular to
offer a general context for the widespread use of colourful individual stories
and examples. In the 1980s the ethnographer Gustav Henningsen and various
collaborators analysed tens of thousands of cases to build a statistical picture
of the Inquisition’s work, an undertaking that inspired grandiose praise of a
‘breathtaking’ brave new world of Inquisition scholarship that could move
beyond microhistory (one reviewer described Inquisition quantification as the
‘bridgehead’ of a ‘revolution’).60 The Inquisition’s very vastness, however, has
made such quantification highly problematic: huge number of documents are
simply no longer extant, while those that are are extremely varied and thus defy
easy categorization and labelling. Henry Kamen has been particularly critical of
the impact further study has had on the work of Henningsen and his partners,
going as far as criticizing other scholars for even citing it.61 He has argued more
broadly that

as an exercise in statistics [this effort] is now seen as wholly unreliable. The

margin of error has been unacceptably high . . . The classification of offences has
been unreliable and arbitrary. Important categories of offence did not appear
at all in the analyses. The use of figures, in short, has been helpful only within
certain limits.62

Even with the advent of digitization and more advanced quantitative

tools, these major pitfalls remain. Many of the problems with Inquisition
quantification, however, become less pronounced when analysing defined local
and regional samples from particular years or periods, and such analyses can
show what concerned local inquisitors and those who offered them evidence.
As part of a research project trying to relate the religious beliefs of converso

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 24 Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

defendants to ‘more general European incidence of heresy and scepticism’,

John Edwards analysed the cases from the bishopric of Soria in northeastern
Castile (1486–1502) that have been collected and transcribed by Carlos Carrete
Parrondo.63 Edwards’s analysis was inspired by a suggestion from José María
Monsalvo Antón that sources such as those collected by Carrete Parrondo could
be compared with Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s celebrated study of the Pyrenean
village of Montaillou, which was compiled from the evidence contained in a
fourteenth-century Inquisition register.64 In Montaillou, Le Roy Ladurie had
recreated the mental world of late medieval villagers, and Edwards sought to
examine the beliefs of similar people further south in Castile.
Edwards argued that far from being uniquely Spanish expressions of ‘crypto-
Judaism’, many of the ‘heresies’ catalogued against Castilian conversos (or
perjoratively ‘marranos’) were often observed among many other people in
many other places in late medieval and early modern Europe. Relating many
of the ‘blasphemous’ statements from the accused in the bishopric of Soria to
long traditions of popular religious belief elsewhere in Europe, Edwards argued
that ‘clearly, the concept of “marranism” as a specific and systematic mixture of
Judaism and Christianity practised by Spanish conversos seems, on this as on
other evidence, to be the misleading fabrication of later scholars’.65
Edwards quantitative analysis of the Soria accusations (which he described
as ‘primitive’) show how many of the accusations in Soria, against both men
and women, were by no means specific to Judaism, nor serious ‘heresy’. In
Table 2.1, I have rearranged his results to show the most prominent subjects in
the documents.
Very general ‘heresies’ such as a ‘materialist’ worldview and unbelief in the
afterlife, universalism of faiths, blasphemy, not going to Mass, or hostility to the
Inquisition, make up a significant proportion of the accusations. Those relating
specifically to Judaism are often what Edwards describes as ‘nostalgia for Judaism’
or ‘general adherence’, either at home or in public: in practice these were general
accusations about perceptions of ‘acting Jewish’. Edwards focuses on how mundane
many accusations were, and how they related not to any systematic Judaism, but
instead to ordinary religious doubt. For example he cites the case of Isabel, wife of
Pedro Alonso, who got into trouble with the Holy Office for describing the Host
as the ‘figuranza’ (resemblance, representation) of God, rather than the physical
body of Christ.66 Edwards argues that such views can be seen as similar to other
‘popular’ or ‘peasant’ religious views visible elsewhere in Spain, not least in other
parts of Castile during the sixteenth century, as explored by Sara Nalle.67

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 ‘The Foods of a Christian’ 25

Table 2.1 Evidence in Soria Bishopric, 1486–1502

Accusations Women Men Total

Blasphemy 2 74 76
Jewish nostalgia/general Judaism 19 54 73
Food 24 45 69
Ignoring mass 7 40 47
Jewish observance at home 21 24 44
Materialism 4 33 37
Jewish observance in public 9 23 32
Use or reading of Hebrew 2 28 30
Sabbath observance 14 15 29
Breaking lent/passiontide 5 16 21
Universalism 5 15 20
Hostility to Inquisition 3 16 19
Others 10 16 26
Total defendants 71 247 318
Source: Adapted from Edwards, ‘Religious Experience’, p. 43. Data is compiled from FIRC II.
Note: Defendants could have more than one accusation against them so totals are not a sum.

Edwards’s findings, however, also pointed to the prevalence of food-related

accusations in the early years of the Inquisition. The prominence of food is
even starker when one takes into account the gender division of Edwards’s
sample. As he notes, the approximately 70–30 per cent male–female divide in
the extant Soria records is not representative of the general picture of the early
Castilian Inquisition, where women – as perceived custodians of both the Jewish
bloodline and the allegedly ‘crypto-Jewish’ home – were more likely to be the
target of Inquisition proceedings than men. Edwards himself suggests adjusting
the female figures by a ‘conservative’ factor of 3, an adjustment which would
make food the most prevalent subject in his sample.
The prevalence of food is further reinforced after consideration of Edwards’s
method of classification, whereby he places each defendant in the category most
reflective of the accusations placed against them. As Edwards admits, this is an
imperfect classification since ‘many of the so-called offences overlap or appear
to be sub-sections of each other’, and furthermore ‘many of the accusations were
made against the same individual’.68

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 26 Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

It is important to note that while the Inquisition focused on alleged Jewish

practices, it was a Christian institution whose jurisdiction extended only over
self-identified Christians. Cases of alleged ‘judaizing’, therefore, were not just
about features of Jewish religion, but also about what was considered important
to Christians. Eating meat on Fridays or during Lent might have been a sign
of ‘crypto-Judaism’, but it was also a sin for Christians, and not permitted in a
Christian community. Dietary evidence is relevant not just to how the Christian
community saw Jews (open or ‘crypto’) and their faith, but also how they saw
their own religion, community, and social norms.
To examine these dietary accusations in greater detail we can analyse a subset
of the records of the Soria bishopric, comprising all those testimonies given in
the town of Soria itself in 1490 and 1491, a total of 112 documents, involving
seventy-seven conversos accused of ‘judaizing’ (Table 2.2). The documents are
witness testimonies provided to the inquisitors in the Inquisition’s intense early
phase, right before the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.
More than one third of the documents mention food. Many reference multiple
accusations relating to food, with a total of fifty-five references appearing. Thirty-
two individuals were charged following accusations directly specifying food and
dietary choices or habits, out of a total of seventy-seven people charged on the
basis of the 112 testimonies. Food was clearly a subject of significant importance
both in the minds of the witnesses and in the eyes of the inquisitors, and was
widely prevalent in the evidence provided to the Holy Office and in its charges,
even in a sample of cases with an unusually high proportion of male defendants.
The importance of food in early Inquisition cases is reflected elsewhere
in Castile. Three other samples of Inquisition cases involving conversos from
the Holy Office’s first twenty-five years in Castile confirm that evidence about
food was highly prevalent, generally one of (or the) most common subjects in

Table 2.2 Food evidence in Soria Town, 1490–91

Women Men Total

Accused 25 52 77
Related to food 12 (48%) 21 (40%) 32 (42%)
Testimonies – – 112
Referencing food – – 38 (34%)
References to food – – 55
Foods mentioned – – 19
Source: FIRC II, Soria Town, 1490–91, documents 1–73, 76–107, 113–19.

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 ‘The Foods of a Christian’ 27

Table 2.3 Food evidence from confessions in Atienza, 1504–5

Women Men Total

Confessions 23 33 56
Referencing food 21 (91%) 30 (91%) 51 (91%)
Confession mostly/all 20 (87%) 20 (61%) 40 (71%)
regarding food
Source: FIRC VII, Confessions from Atienza, 1504–5, documents 81–3, 85–6, 89–96, 98–101,
103, 105, 107–12, 114–18, 120–28, 130–42, 145–8.

evidence provided to inquisitors. The Soria town testimonies come from the
1490s, so I have analysed three other samples from the 1480s and the early
sixteenth century. They come from different areas of Castile, and from different
types of evidence: confessions, full trial proceedings, and witness testimonies.
As a result of the differing documentary profile of the three samples, a slightly
different method of classifying the data has been used for each.
In Atienza in 1504 and 1505, fifty-six conversos took advantage of an ‘Edict
of Grace’ issued by the Inquisition and confessed to various sins of ‘judaizing’
(Table 2.3). These grace periods were commonly used by the Holy Office as an
invitation to come forward and confess, and to then be ‘reconciled’ with the
church (while also giving information on those who were unwilling to confess).
Almost all of the confessions in Atienza make reference to food, and a large
majority (71 per cent) are either entirely or mostly about food and dietary
choices and habits. This again reinforces the importance of food in the minds of
all concerned: even though these are confession documents, confessions to the
Inquisition had to contain what it wanted to hear.
After an Edict of Grace, those who had not confessed but were suspected
or were the subject of accusations would be charged and put on trial. Haim
Beinart collected and transcribed the trials of accused conversos from Ciudad
Real in southern New Castile during 1483–5. These documents are much longer
and more complex than the testimonies from Soria town or the confessions in
Atienza, as they involve full trial proceedings with arraignment documents and
the evidence of multiple witnesses.
Food again emerges as a major subject of concern. Eating Jewish foods like
unleavened bread, or breaking Lent were even more common accusations than
more explicitly ‘religious’ activities such as engaging in Jewish prayer (Table 2.4).
This illustrates the importance of food in perceptions of both religious practice
and religious identity, with certain eating habits being seen as just as notable as

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 28 Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

Table 2.4 Food evidence from trials in Ciudad Real, 1483–5

Accusation References Women Men Defendants

Total defendants – 15 17 32
Meat and eggs during lent 77 9 (60%) 11 (64%) 20 (63%)
Unleavened bread 67 12 (80%) 13 (52%) 25 (78%)
Jewish prayers 45 7 (47%) 13 (52%) 20 (63%)
Source: RTSI I, Trials in Ciudad Real of 1483–5, excluding cases where no evidence is available.

Table 2.5 Examples of food evidence from cases in Almazán, 1501–2

Accusation Women Men Total

Avoiding pork/bacon 23 19 42
Kosher/ing meat 20 10 30
Meat in lent/Fridays 7 11 18
Cabaheas sausages 8 9 17
Jewish breads 3 2 5
Various pies 3 0 3
Source: FIRC IV, Cases from Almazán, 1501–2, excluding cases where no evidence is available.

actually praying as part of another faith. It is also notable in this sample how
accusations surrounding bread were especially prevalent in accusations against
women, illustrating the perceived importance of female domestic practices such
as baking in maintaining a ‘Jewish home’.
Finally, an analysis of witness testimonies collected against accused conversos
in Almazán in in the first few years of the sixteenth century again shows similar
results (Table 2.5).
It is important to note that the dietary accusations do not simply focus on
one or two of the most obvious charges, such as the eating of unleavened bread
as Passover or the refusal of pork. For example, nineteen different ingredients or
dietary choices are mentioned in the 112 testimonies from Soria town in 1490–
91 (Table 2.6).
Evidence regarding dietary habits is perhaps less likely than evidence of
more dramatic heresy to have been prompted by suggestions from paranoid
inquisitors, a problem historians have long noted about using Inquisition
records to examine social behaviour.69 That is not to say that food accusations

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 ‘The Foods of a Christian’ 29

Table 2.6 Foods mentioned in testimonies from Soria Town, 1490–91

Food References
Sabbath stews 10
Unleavened bread 9
Kosher wine 7
Kosher poultry 5
Meat on holy days/lent, avoiding pork/bacon 4 each
Lentils, chickpeas 2 each
Eel, gosling, hare, tripe, pigeon pies, rabbit pies, chicken 1 each
gizzards, certain stews, certain roasts
Source: FIRC II.

could not have been invented by witnesses bearing grudges (a subject which will
be discussed in the next chapter). The value of these testimonies, however, is
not only the insight they offer into dietary habits, but also in the fact that people
thought that the information in them was important.

Identity and religion

At the heart of the Inquisition’s hunt for ‘judaizing’ was the idea of conversion.
Converting from one religion to another was a radical decision in early modern
Europe, but in the rapid religious change and shifting religious borders of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was a notable phenomenon for those on the
geographic or spiritual frontlines.70 As previously discussed, while conversion
was central to Christianity and much of contemporary religious thought, it was
socially, culturally and politically much more controversial. The study of converso
conversion has long divided between two extremes. Cecil Roth, Yitzhak Baer,
Haim Beinart and others have argued that most conversos were ‘crypto-Jews’
privately adhering to and practising Judaism, with no spiritual conversion to
Christianity.71 Benzion Netanyahu and Norman Roth provocatively challenged
this view, arguing instead that most conversos were practicing and believing
Christians, their genuine conversion (or that of their ancestors) wrongly
dismissed by a paranoid and intolerant Inquisition (and indeed disliked by Jews
as well).72 Both extremes elide the wide range of personal experiences and beliefs
inherent in religious conversion.
The Inquisition historian Brian Pullan has argued that conversions are most
fruitfully studied as individual stories, an approach that Kim Siebenhüner has

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 30 Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

recently applied to Jewish conversion cases from the Roman Inquisition, showing
how varied and complex the process of conversion could be, both for converts
and their descendants.73 Indeed, recent research has increasingly questioned the
existence of collective converso religious views, instead emphasizing the diversity
of heterodox (and even shifting) religious views and practices that characterized
their individual, family, and local experiences.74
Diverse experiences and heterodox practices, however, existed in a context of
firmly held and strongly perceived religious identities. Inquisitors repeatedly used
the term ‘new Christian’, while witnesses seemed keenly aware of behaviour that
indicates or deviates a certain identity. The prevalence and importance of food in
early Inquisition evidence provokes questions about the relationship between food,
religion and identity. How important was food to identity in early modern Castile,
and what was the nature of its importance in religious identity and practice?
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s famous aphorism ‘tell me what you eat, and
I will tell you what you are’ has become a well-worn cliché in the study of food,
while culinary differences have long been popular and cultural shorthands
for denoting identity.75 The sociologist Claude Fischler has argued that food
is central to the creation of individual and group identities because of the role
of choice in our food habits, creating active decisions to construct, reinforce,
or reject identities through food.76 Peter Burke has noted how opposition to
the ‘other’ was often central to all sorts of identity formation in early modern
Europe, with emphasis on what Freud famously called ‘the narcissism of small
differences’.77
The anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that food communicated
identity through ‘inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across
boundaries’.78 Yet Douglas’s structuralism was too universalizing to explain the
diversity of ways that food affects identity. Rather than generalizing a relationship
from one context, Jordan Rosenblum has argued for ‘more geographically and
temporally localized studies aimed at explaining how and why specific food
practices are used to create identity’.79 Just as the importance of different forms
of identity – gender, status, faith – vary, it is not always the same differences in
food that matter: what was unremarkable in one place or time could become
totemic in another.
Throughout early modern Spain, food helped to communicate one’s social
status, setting apart haves and have-nots and reflecting the social order that
defined society.80 Yet in early Inquisition Castile, it was religion, particularly its
everyday practice, where the relationship between food and identity was most
pronounced.

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 ‘The Foods of a Christian’ 31

Every Passover since ancient times, the Jewish seder meal is preceded
by a series of questions about the food to be served.81 In order to explain the
meaning of the meal, it is asked why certain foods have been chosen, cooked
in certain ways, served and eaten in a particular fashion. Each element of the
seder meal has been chosen to represent and evoke important elements of the
Passover story: greens dipped in salt water or vinegar for the tears of enslaved
ancestors; the dark, thick charoset for the adobe clay bricks of those ancestors’
slave labour; bitter herbs for the pain of oppression; unleavened bread for the
rush of the Exodus. Throughout the questions and answers of the Ma Nishtana,
the celebrants are asking ‘why do we eat this?’, explaining to each other a meal
that is not just a religious tradition, but an important religious ritual.
Christian rituals too involved food practices that offered and answered these
questions, from the abstention from flesh and dairy (and all that they symbolized,
as will be discussed in Part 2) that characterized the sombre reflection of holy
days and Lent, to the carnal celebration of Christ’s rebirth at Easter. In fifteenth
century Spain, ‘why do we eat this?’ – and ‘why do they eat that?’ – was an
important religious and cultural question not just for Jews or ‘crypto-Jews’, but
for their Christian (and Muslim) neighbours too.
Whether certain meals and dishes were evidence of defiant ‘crypto-Judaism’,
heterodox religious identities, or cultural traditions, food practices were
considered integral parts of religious practice itself. Sociologists of religion have
recently argued for greater emphasis on ‘embodied practices’, acts through which
the sacred becomes real and present, connecting the material and the spiritual 82.
Spiritual meanings become embedded in such ritual expressions and activities,
and they become ways of physically ‘living’ one’s faith.83
Edward Muir has emphasized how historians must remember the corporeal
nature of early modern religion, arguing that we must ‘appreciate fully how
Christian Europe once really thought in bodily images and habitually juxtaposed
sacred and profane bodies’.84 This is especially true for our understanding of food
practices, as the consumption of food inherently links mind and body, creating
embodying cultural, spiritual and personal associations.85 Eating was a bodily
act through which medieval and early modern people lived their religion every
day, habitually renewing or altering both how they communicated their identity,
and how they physically experienced their religion. The inherently social nature
of eating, both on family and community levels, means that these processes
existed not just for individuals making choices, but also as dynamics within
groups. ‘Lived religion’ connects the individual and the social, as collective
experiences, shared meanings and learned practices all inflect even the most

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 32 Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

private and individual belief.86 Both conversos and their neighbours ate in a
world where eating choices were a way of experiencing religion, and of creating
and expressing religious identity.
Thinking about food as part of religion requires conceiving of religion, as
Natalie Zemon Davis once put it, ‘as practised and experienced and not merely
as defined and prescribed’.87 Thinking of ‘lived religion’ rather than ‘popular
religion’ goes some way towards avoiding the minefield of hierarchies (between
elite and common, official and deviant, religion and ‘superstition’) implied by
the latter term. In his study of religious practice in early modern Spain, William
Christian preferred the term ‘local religion’, arguing that the distinctiveness of
religious practice in Castile and central Spain by locale was far more important
than distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ or ‘official’ and ‘popular’.88 Considering
the local and the lived can help us better understand both food’s place in
religious practice, and its place in people’s perceptions of their neighbours’ true
religious faith.
For both Jews and Christians (and indeed also for Muslims), the religious
calendar was punctuated by certain food patterns: Sabbath stews, fish on Fridays,
Ramadan, holy days, Carnival, Lent, Passover, Easter, Yom Kippur, Christmas,
marriages, funerals. The meals or dietary regulations that accompanied these
religious events were both cultural traditions and integral parts of religious
practice. Eating and not eating certain things at certain times was not just a
statement or revelation of identity – or a private act of defiance – but also an
affirmation and embodiment of faith.
Medieval and early modern Christianity was characterized by a complex
system of fast days and periods during which the eating of meat and other animal
products was forbidden. Breaking Lent or fast days was a common enough sin
that occurred in Christian communities across Europe (as will be discussed in
Part 2), but in Castile fast-breaking became particularly tied to the suspicion
of ‘judaizing’, as evidence that a converso was following a Jewish religious and
food calendar. People’s perceptions of what religious faith involved might place
greater emphasis on daily lived practices than on their theological thought or
conformity with official worship. Early Inquisition records contain many ‘new
Christians’ confessing to or being accused of breaking Lent, including twenty-
nine testimonies from Almazán alone: María García was alleged to have eaten a
leg of partridge during Lent; Pedro López de Hituero and María Sánchez both
apparently ate meat on Holy Thursday; Álvaro de Luna allegedly ate eggs on
Fridays and during Lent; Leonor Méndez, wife of Diego, confessed to having
eaten meat on fast days.89

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 ‘The Foods of a Christian’ 33

Many of these accusations are, as John Edwards argued about Soria, evidence
of general everyday religious transgressions, rather than anything particularly
‘Jewish’. Pedro López de Hituero, for example, was a ‘new Christian’ accused of
breaking Lent by making a stew of chicken and conger eel (which is not kosher),
an excellent example of the complex web of culture and religious practice that
characterized these cases.90
Just as for Christians elsewhere in Europe accused of breaking Lent or other
fasts, illness was a reasonable excuse, and many conversos claimed to have either
eaten or not eaten things due to their health. Luis Hurtado in Almazán in 1501,
admitted to the sin of eating meat during Lent, claiming he did it only as he
had been very sick with syphilis.91 Another man justified eating meat during
Lent and on Fridays ‘for the sake of his health’, as he too was ill with syphilis.92
Francisco Nuñez and his wife allegedly ate meat during lent because of illness.93
In another testimony, Francisco is alleged to have on many occasions eaten meat
on Fridays, and on Saturdays (an odd detail), and during Lent again because of
syphilis.94 Marina González said she had only ever refused to eat bacon because
of heart pains and other ailments she suffered after childbirth.95
Illicitly eating meat was not the only thing that could arouse Inquisition
suspicion on a Friday. For Jews, abstaining from work (including all cooking) is a
central part of the observation of the Sabbath. Jewish families precook food before
sundown on Friday, and then eat it the next day. Cooking on Fridays – especially
if the dish being cooked could be eaten the next day, such as pies or a stew – could
become a source of suspicion. The González women (Beatriz, Leonor and Isabel)
from Ciudad Real, tried 1511–13, were said to often cook stews of aubergine with
onions, coriander and spices on Fridays for use the next day.96 María González,
wife of Rodrigo de Chillón, was said to have cooked casseroles on Friday for
Saturday, which she and her family then ate cold the next day with fruit.97 Juana
Nuñez was also supposed to have cooked cazuelas and other dishes on Friday for
Saturday, when she and others would eat them cold.98 In Almazán, many people
were accused of cooking dishes on Friday to eat on Saturday.99
The kind of meals traditionally served to mark other Jewish religious
customs, such as funerals, were also noted by suspicious witnesses. Spanish
Jews ate together at funerals at a meal called the cohuerzo, where fish, eggs and
lentils were served at low tables with the mourners sitting on the floor.100 These
symbolic foods were common in Sephardic funeral customs: the round shape of
lentils and eggs symbolizes the cycle of life and the world, while their smooth
‘mouthless’ surfaces represents the voiceless mourners, silently accepting the
will of God. Many conversos admitted or were accused of eating at cohuerzos.

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 34 Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

Leonor Vélez was alleged to have eaten at a cohuerzo with her family and other
‘new Christians’ after the death of her grandfather in Almazán.101
Such meals may have been acts of crypto-Jewish religious defiance, or
cultural traditions in families now firmly Christian, or somewhere between.
But the fact that early modern Castilians noted them and connected them to
religious practice shows how they, regardless of faith, saw food as a central part
of religious practice and identity, an association that was to persist and spread in
the early modern Spanish world.
Olivia Remie Constable has shown how perceptions of Islamic food rules and
habits characterized Spanish Christian views of the morisco minority well into the
seventeenth century, with community boundaries and identity defined by what
and how one ate and cooked.102 Jillian Williams has emphasized the role of food
in contested morisco identities in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Valencia.103
Rebecca Earle has revealed how as Spain’s horizons stretched into the ‘New
World’, food became a way to define imperial ideas of religious and racial identity,
othering and dehumanizing indigenous American peoples through perceptions
about their food.104 The Inquisition too spread across the ocean, prosecuting
‘crypto-Jews’ in ‘New Spain’ for centuries, while Spanish missionaries wrestled
with how one could eat like a Christian in lands with strange foods, and how
those strange foods could fit into Christian diets back home.105 For Christians and
worlds old and new, food was at the heart of constructing and defining identities.

Eating was a serious business in Castile Inquisition, one in which dietary choices
carried all sorts of significance and all sorts of risk. Witnesses and inquisitors
noticed and placed importance on what – and how and when – people chose
to eat. Eating communicated religious and cultural identity, and also formed
part of how people experienced and practiced their everyday faith. Focusing on
these early Inquisition food stories reveals a lot more than a binary between
Inquisition Catholicism and ‘crypto-Judaism’, or a heterodox religious culture
between them; it emphasizes the importance of food in early modern religion, its
identities, experiences, and practices. In her 1494 defence, Marina González said
that not only did she eat pork but also partridges, pigeons, hares, rabbits and all
sorts of birds and game, and ‘all the other foods of a Christian’.106 Marina’s phrase,
‘the foods of a Christian’ emphasizes the importance of food to the people of her
society: how you ate revealed, and embodied, what you believed and who you
were. To understand Marina, others like her, and the thousands of neighbours
whose testimony put them on trial, we must take food as seriously as they did.

9781350008465_pi-222.indd 34 03-Apr-18 6:47:25 PM

 3

Kitchens and Neighbours:

Food, Gender, and Community

In 1484, the Inquisition took confessions from the village of Almagro near
Ciudad Real, under an Edict of Grace. Those who admitted their sins would
be ‘reconciled’ to the faith through religious penance, social pressure, and
shame: generally they had to take part in an auto-da-fé (‘act of faith’) procession,
wearing penitential garments to identify them as sinners to their watching
neighbours. Like many others (indeed confessions during Edicts of Grace are
often almost formulaic), a woman called Marina González admitted to having
engaged in what the inquisitors saw as ‘judaizing heresy’: as a girl, she said, her
relatives (especially her brothers-in-law) had encouraged her to avoid cooking
on the Sabbath, to abstain from eating pork, to eat unleavened bread, to fast for
atonement (a reference to Yom Kippur) and to say Jewish prayers. She ascribed
these sins to her youth and to family pressure. As an adult, she admitted once
having told her maid to prepare a meat stew on a Friday as she had forgotten
what day it was. Her husband, Francisco de Villarreal, a spice merchant, had
scolded her for her mistake, and they had had fish for dinner.1
Thousands of people confessed such behaviour to the Inquisition during Edicts
of Grace, and most never appeared before the Holy Office again, promising to be
good Christians and abiding by any specific penances they were given (e.g. women
might be forbidden from wearing certain qualities of cloth: Marina was seemingly
banned from wearing crimson).2 Ten years after her confession, however, Marina
was once more accused of judaizing heresy. The Inquisition prosecutors alleged
that Marina had not changed her ways after her previous confession, and was a
relapsed heretic, returning (as the Inquisition often put it) ‘like a dog to its vomit’.3
They said that she had continued to abstain from eating pork and refused to sit
at the same table as those who did, would not eat partridges or strangled birds,
attempted to butcher her meat in a kosher way, regularly observed the Sabbath
and did other things out of adherence to ‘Mosaic law’.4

9781350008465_pi-222.indd 35 03-Apr-18 6:47:25 PM

 36 Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

While the inquisitors also alleged that Marina kept no cross or images of
saints in her home – which she and witnesses for her refuted – her trial focused
in large measure on her kitchen and table. Her (often unhelpful) defence
witnesses argued that she did eat pork (though sometimes not, because it made
her feel ill), but that they weren’t sure if she ate rabbit or octopus or eel, and they
often could not speak definitively to many of the charges.5 The first prosecution
witness, Pedro de Teva, a good friend of Marina’s husband, said that because of
suspicions about Marina, he had carefully watched what she ate and cooked.6
He noted that she never ate pork or strangled partridges (which Pedro and
Francisco often did together, once prompting an argument between Franciso
and Marina), and that she would not eat at the same table or even drink from
her husband’s glass if he had eaten pork.7 Women friends and neighbours made
claims about foods that Marina would not allow in her pots, or how he she had
refused to eat certain foods they had offered her.8 Her husband’s rather confused
testimony claimed that she occasionally didn’t eat pork out of concern for her
health, but that he would ‘reprimand’ her for it.9
Despite lengthy proceedings, the inquisitors felt they could not reach a
conclusive verdict from the evidence they had heard, and Marina refused to
confess to any of the charges. The inquisitors decided to use torture in order
to force her to tell the truth.10 They tied her to a board and put a hood over
her head, and then began to pour water into her nose and mouth, producing
a painful and terrifying feeling of drowning, a torture technique very similar
to the waterboarding used by the CIA during the Bush Administration in the
first decade of this century. The inquisitors offered her chances to speak, but
Marina said nothing until after multiple pints she begged them (‘for Holy Mary’s
sake’) to stop, and said she would tell the truth; but the inquisitors were not
convinced when she offered only an accusation that her neighbour fasted (the
inquisitors asked if she meant Jewish or Christian fasts), and kept the Sabbath.11
The torture continued but despite six full pints of water and repeated demands
from torturers to speak, Marina refused to say anything further.12
Marina troubled the inquisitors, and though their suspicions remained, they
felt they did not have enough evidence to condemn her. They offered her the
possibility of ‘compurgation’, whereby witnesses could swear on her behalf and
she would be released. But on 22 May 1494, as the compurgatory witnesses
she had chosen were read out, Marina interrupted the officials and said she
wanted no witnesses on her behalf. The prosecutors claimed she had failed the
compurgation and implied her own guilt.13

9781350008465_pi-222.indd 36 03-Apr-18 6:47:25 PM

 Kitchens and Neighbours 37

The Inquisition heard evidence from her jailers that Marina despaired in
prison during June 1494, and had stopped eating, refusing to eat even though
a doctor could find no illness in her.14 The jailers had had to violently force her
to eat, ‘by pure force’.15 Marina told them that she saw no point in eating, as the
Inquisition planned to kill her anyway. As she became weaker, a jailer asked
her if she wished to confess but she said no.16 When he asked if she believed in
Christianity and the Church, Marina despairingly said that she would not be here
if she did.17 Fellow women prisoners recounted that Marina did not want to eat
and was often silent and withdrawn, sometimes sane but sometimes seemingly
not, and that she spoke of how the jailers had to ‘kill and tear her asunder’ to
make her eat; a jailer used similarly violent terms to describe her force-feeding. 18
On 30 June, Marina’s behaviour was deemed enough for the Inquisition to finally
condemn her to death as a relapsed heretic, ‘relaxing her to the justice of the
secular arm’ in the Holy Office’s formulaic sentencing.19
Marina’s long ordeal emphasizes not just the importance of food to the
Inquisition and those who encountered it, but also the ways in which gender
and community inflected evidence about food and the accusations in which it
played a central role. Renée Levine Melammed has charted the early Castilian
Inquisition’s focus on women conversas, noting the Inquisition’s perceptions
about women’s place in the Jewish family, and its need to focus on domestic
religious deviance in pursuing what it (and Melammed) believed to be a ‘crypto-
Jewish’ religion operating behind closed doors.20 Nowhere was this gendering
more prevalent than in the kitchen, a heavily gendered space for cooking and
eating, watching and being watched, performing and imagining.
Whether the religious deviance practiced by conversa women was real or
imagined, deliberate or accidental, religious or cultural, orthodox or heterodox,
evidence about their kitchens reveals patterns of social and gender relations that
help illuminate family and community life in early Inquisition Castile. Women’s
responsibility for cooking made them often both defendant and accuser in
Inquisition trials, bringing a domestic food world into contact with wider
community dynamics, as enmity between women found outlet in the Holy
Office’s system of denunciation. Marina and many other conversas did not live
in a converso community separate from the Christian community: rather than
between two segregated communities, the social relations between witnesses and
defendants generally took place within one community, between neighbours
and relatives, enemies and friends. Moving beyond a binary inquisition of these
women’s ‘true’ faith and the reality of their Christianity or ‘crypto-Judaism’, this

9781350008465_pi-222.indd 37 03-Apr-18 6:47:25 PM

 38 Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

interplay between kitchens and neighbours can help us explore wider issues of
early modern gender and community.

Cooking

We have seen how eating habits and choices were of great interest to the
Inquisition, but the inquisitors were not just interested in what ended up on
people’s kitchen tables for dinner; they wanted to know how it had got there.
Stories from maids and neighbours about cooking practices fill the testimony of
early Inquisition cases from Castile. There were not just suspicious ways to eat,
but also suspect ways to cook and keep a kitchen as well.
Probably the most onerous dietary restriction on Jews – especially for those
not living in a large Jewish community – is the need to butcher and prepare
meat in certain prescribed ways in order to make it kosher for consumption.
The restrictions and processes are both complicated and labour intensive. Only
the meat from mammals who both ruminate and have cloven hooves can be
considered kosher. The primary application of these rules is to animals which
have one of these characteristics but not the other, for example, hares and, most
famously, pigs.21 Trefa (forbidden) birds are listed in the book of Deuteronomy,
and the Mishnah further elucidates the characteristics necessary for a bird to be
kosher (namely having more than one toe on each foot, a crop in the mouth, and
a gizzard which can be peeled).22 Meat and poultry may not be eaten if they are
killed in any way other than a method of ritual slaughter known as schechita,
which involves severing the jugular vein, carotid artery, oesophagus and trachea
all in one fluid knife motion, and draining as much blood as possible from the
carcass.23 This means that Jews cannot eat meat or poultry killed in a Christian
slaughterhouse or by a Christian butcher, or eat meat from animals that died
from natural causes or were killed through hunting.
Jillian Williams has shown how meat markets emphasized and reinforced
physical separation between Christians, Jews and Muslims in fifteenth-century
Valencia, and how places for the butchery of meat became sites to showcase
and enact religious identity.24 Like the Valencian moriscos studied by Williams,
Castilian conversos faced a menu of controversial meanings in their choice of meat.
While medieval Spain had many Jewish butchers, for conversos in the late 1400s
trying to privately keep kosher out of either religious conviction or traditional
custom, the kashrut regarding meat presented a number of logistical problems.
If one’s town still had a Jewish butcher, strolling in to purchase some kosher meat

9781350008465_pi-222.indd 38 03-Apr-18 6:47:25 PM

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"God bless me!" said Mr. Orton, "something very big keeps blocking
up the whole of my window."
They all looked, and as they were silent at that moment, they heard
a voice from the street, say—
"Come! Come, my dear! Don't set the water-works a-going. Always
remember, that easy does it. You come in here, and have something
to eat, if you won't go home. Lor bless me! what will they think has
become of me at the tower?"
"Why, it is Ben!" cried Johanna.
"Ben?" said Ann. "Who is Ben?"
"Hush! Stop," said Sir Richard, "I pray you, stop."
Johanna would have rushed out to speak to Ben, who certainly was
at the window of the fruiterer's shop, with Arabella Wilmot upon his
arm, endeavouring to persuade her to enter, and partake of some
refreshment.
"I will bring him in," said Sir Richard. "Retire into the parlour, I beg
of you, Miss Oakley, for he will make quite a scene in the shop if you
do not."
Johanna knew well Ben's affection for her, and doubted not, but that
as Sir Richard said, he would not scruple to show it, even in the
open shop, probably to the great edification of the passers by. She
accordingly retired to the parlour with Ann. In a few moments, Sir
Richard Blunt ushered in both Ben and Arabella Wilmot. Arabella
with a shriek of joy, rushed into Johanna's arms, and then with
excess of emotion she fainted. Ben caught up Johanna fairly off her
feet, as though he had been dancing some little child, and holding
her in a sitting posture upon one arm, he said—
"Bless you! Easy does it. Easy I say—does—it. Don't you think I'm a
crying. It's a tea-chest has flew in my eye from that grocer's shop
opposite. Oh, you little rogue, you. Easy does it. What you have got
them what do you call 'ems on, have you?"
The kiss that Ben gave her might have been heard at Sweeney
Todd's, and then when prevailed upon to sit down, he would insist
upon holding her fast upon his knee.
"I must go," said Johanna, and then looking at Arabella, she added
—"Let me go, before she awakens from her transient forgetfulness
to beg me to stay."
Ben was furious at the idea of Johanna going back to Todd's, but Sir
Richard, overruled him, and after some trouble, got him to consent.
Then turning to Johanna, he said—
"The moment night comes on, you will have some visitors, and
remember, Miss Oakley, that St. Dunstan's is the watch-word.
Whoever comes to you with that in his mouth, is a friend."
"I will remember, and now farewell and God bless and reward you
for all your goodness to me. I will live for the many who love me yet,
and whom I love in this world."

Was it not a world of wonders that amid all this, Johanna did not go
mad? Surely something more than mortal strength must have
sustained that young and innocent girl in the midst of all these
strange events. No human power that she possessed, could have
possibly prevented her mind from sinking, and the hideous
fascinations of an overcharged fancy from breeding
"Rude riot in her brain."

But there was a power who supported her—a power which from the
commencement of the world has supported many—a power which
while the world continues, will support many more, strengthening
the weak and trampling on the strong. The power of love in all the
magic of its deep and full intensity. Yes, this was the power which
armed that frail and delicate-looking girl with strength to cope with
such a man—man shall we call him? no, we may say such a fiend as
Sweeney Todd. If it required no small amount of moral courage to
go in the first instance upon that expedition—so fraught with danger,
to Todd's shop—what did it require now to enable her to return after
having passed through much peril, and tasting the sweets of
friendship and sympathy? Surely any heart but Johanna's must have
shrunk aghast from ever again even in thought, approaching that
dreadful place. And yet she went. Yes upon her mission of justice
she went. To be sure, she was told that as far as human means
went, she would be upheld and supported from those without; but
what could that assure to her further than that if she fell she should
not fall unavenged? Truly, if some higher, some far nobler impulse
than that derived from any consciousness that she was looked after,
had not strengthened her, the girl's spirit, must have sunk beneath
the weight of many terrors. With a sad smile she once again crossed
the threshold of that house, which she now no longer suspected to
be the murderer's haunt. She knew it.
 CHAPTER LXXXII.
TODD PLANS.

How she sped with Todd we are already aware. Let us take a peep
at the arch-demon in that parlour, which he considered his
sanctuary, his city of refuge as it were. At least Todd considered it to
be such, whether it was or not. He sits at a table, the table beneath
which there was no floor, and covering up his face with his huge
hands, he sets about thinking. Yes, that man now abandons himself
to thought, as to how he is, with a blaze of wickedness, to disappear
from the scene of his iniquities. It was not remorse that now filled
his brain. It was not any feeling of bitter heart-felt regret for what he
had done that oppressed him now. No such feeling might possibly
find a home in his heart at the hour of success, but now when he
saw and felt that he was surrounded by many difficulties, it had no
home in his brain. But yet he thought that they were only difficulties
that now surrounded; he did not as yet dream of positive danger. He
still reasoned, as you have heard him reason before, namely, that if
anything beyond mere suspicion were entertained regarding his
mode of life, he would be at once apprehended. He thought that
somebody—most likely Colonel Jeffery—was trying to find out
something, and the fact that he, Todd, was there in his own parlour,
a free man, appeared to him proof-sufficient that nothing was found
out.
"How fallacious!"
If he had but known that he was virtually in custody even then, as
he, indeed, really was, for Fleet-street was alive with officers and the
emissaries of the police. If he had but guessed so much for a
moment what a wild tumult would have been raised in his brain. But
he knew nothing and suspected little. After a time from generalizing
upon his condition, Todd began to be particular, and then he laid
down, as it were, one proposition or fact which he intended should
be the groundwork of all in other proceedings. That proposition was
contained in the words—
"Before the dawn of to-morrow I must be off!" "That's settled," said
Todd, and he gave the table a blow with his hand. "Yes, that's
settled."
The table creaked ominously, and Todd rose to peep into the shop to
see what his boy was doing. Charley Green, alias, Johanna Oakley,
was sitting upon a low stool reading a bill that some one had thrown
into the shop, and which detailed the merits of some merchandize.
How far away from the contents of that bill which she held before
her face, were her thoughts?
"Good," said Todd. "That boy, at all events, suspects nothing, and
yet his death is one of the things which had better not be left to
chance. He shall fall in the general way of this place. What proper
feeling errand-boy would wish to survive his master's absence. Ha!"
Of late Todd had not been very profuse in his laughs, but now he
came out with one quite of the old sort.
The sound startled himself, and he retired to the table again.
By the dim light he opened a desk and supplied himself with writing
materials; the twilight was creeping on, and he could only just see.
Spreading a piece of paper before him, he proceeded to make a
memoranda of what he had to do.
It was no bad plan this of Todd's, and the paper, when it was
finished was quite a curiosity in its way.
It ran thus—
Mem.—To go to Colonel Jeffery's, and by some means get into the
house and murder Tobias.
Mem.—To pack off goods to the wharf where the Hamburg vessel,
called the Dianna, sails from.
Mem.—To arrange combustibles for setting fire to the house.
Mem.—To cut Charley Green's throat, if any suspicion arise—if not to
let him be smothered in the fire.
Mem.—To have a letter ready to post to Sir Richard Blunt, the
magistrate, accusing Mrs. Lovett of her own crimes, and mine
likewise.
"I think that is all," said Todd.
He folded the paper and placed it in his bosom, after which he came
out of the parlour into the shop, and called to Johanna.
"Charles?"
"Yes, sir."
"Go to the market, and get me a couple of stout porter—I want
something carried a short distance."
"Yes, sir."
Away went Johanna, but before she got half way down to Fleet
Market she met Sir Richard, who said—
"What is it?"
"He wants a couple of porters to carry something."
"Very well, get them. Depend upon me."
"I do, sir. I feel now in good heart to go through with anything, for
you are near to me, and I know that I am safe."
"You are safe. It will need to be some very extraordinary
circumstances, indeed, that could compromise you. But go at once
for these porters; I, and my men will take good care to find where
they go to."
There was no difficulty in finding parties in abundance at the end of
Fleet Market, and Johanna speedily returned, followed by two sturdy
fellows. Todd had quite a smile upon his face, as he received them.
"This way," he said—"This way. I hope you have been lucky to day,
and have had plenty of work."
"No, master," said one, "we haven't, I'm sorry to say."
"Indeed," added Todd. "Well, I am very glad I have a little job for
you. You see these two little boxes. You can carry one each of you,
and I will go with you and show you where to."
One of the porters raised one of the boxes, and then he gave a long
whistle, as he said—
"I say, master is there penny pieces or paving stones in this here, its
deuced heavy, that it is."
"And so is this, Bill," said the other. "Oh, my eyes ain't it. There must
be a quarter of a pound of goose feathers in here."
"Ha! ha!" said Todd, "How funny you both are."
"Funny?"
"Yes, to be sure, but come. This will put strength into you if you had
none before."
He took a bottle and glass from a cupboard, and gave each of the
men a full measure of such frightfully strong spirits, that they winked
again, and the tears came into their eyes, as they drank it.
"Now shoulder the little boxes, and come along," he said, "and I tell
you what I'll do. If you step in here in the evening, and I should
happen to be at home, I'll give each of you a shave for nothing, and
polish you off in such a manner, that you will recollect it as long you
live."
"Thank you, master—thank you. We'll come."
One of the porters helped his companion with the chest on to his
back and head, and Todd then lent a helping hand with the other.
"Charley," he said. "I shall be back in a quarter of an hour."
Away he went, preceding the porter by some half dozen steps only,
but yet ever and anon keeping a wary eye upon the two chests,
which contained cash, and jewels, sufficient to found a little
kingdom. If he got clear off with those two chests only, he felt that
he would not give himself much uneasiness about what was left
behind. But was Todd going to trust these two porters from out his
own immediate neighbourhood, with the secret of the destination of
the boxes? No. He was by far too crafty for that. After proceeding
some distance, he took them round the unfrequented side of St.
Paul's Church yard, and stopping suddenly at the door of a house
that was to let, he said—
"This will do."
"In here, master."
"This will do. Put them down."
The porters complied, and Todd set down upon one of the boxes, as
he said—
"How much?"
"A shilling each of us, master."
"There's double the money, and now be off, both of you, about your
business."
The porters were rather surprised, but as they considered
themselves sufficiently paid, they made no objection, and walked off
with considerable alacrity, leaving Todd, and his treasure in the
street.
"Now for a coach," he muttered. "Now for a coach. Here boy"—to a
ragged boy who was creeping on at some short distance. "Earn a
penny by fetching me a coach directly."
The boy darted off, and in a very few minutes brought Todd a
hackney coach. The boxes, too, were got upon it by the united
efforts of Todd, the coachman, and the boy, and then, and not till
then did Todd give the correct address of the wharf in Thames
Street from which the Hamburg ship was going, and in which he
fully intended to embark that night. The ship was advertised to sail
at the turn of the tide, which would be about four o'clock in the
morning. All this did not take long to do. The coach rumbled along
Thames Street, but Todd was not aware that Mr. Crotchet had got up
behind the vehicle, but such was the fact, and when the lumbering
old machine stopped at the wharf, that gentleman got down, and
felt quite satisfied with the discovery he had made. "He's a trying of
it on," soliloquised Mr. Crotchet in the bolting line, "but it ain't no
manner of a go. He'll swing, and he can't help it, if he were to book
himself to the moon, and there was a coach or a ship as went all the
way, and no stoppages."
"Mem," said Todd to himself. "To go to Colonel Jeffery's and murder
Tobias—Ha!"
"Lor!" said the coachman, "was that you, sir?"
"What do you mean?"
"Why as made that horrid sort of noise."
"Mind your business, my friend, and tell me if you can take me
quickly to Islington, for I have no time to lose."
"Like the wind, sir, you can go with these here osses," replied the
coachman, "did you ever see sich bits o' blood, sir, one on 'ems
blind, and' t'other on 'em is deaf, which is advantages as you don't
get in one pair."
"Advantages?"
"Lor bless you, yes, sir. The blind 'un goes unknown quick, cos you
sees, sir, he thinks he's only in some dark place, and in course he
wants to get out on it as soon as he can."
"Indeed?"
"Yes, sir, and the deaf 'un, he goes quick too, cos as he hears
nothink, he thinks as there never was sich a quiet place as he's go's,
and he does it out o' feeling and gratitude, sir, yer sees."
"Be quick then, and charge your own price."
Todd sprang into the vehicle, and stimulated by the idea of charging
his own price, the coachman certainly did make the bits of blood do
wonders, and in quite an incredibly short space of time, Todd found
himself in the immediate neighbourhood of the Colonel's house. It
was now getting dark, but that was what he wished. He dismissed
the coach, and took from the angle of a wall, near at hand, a long
and earnest look at the Colonel's house, and as he did so dark and
hideous thoughts concerning Tobias passed through his mind.
 CHAPTER LXXXII.
TODD VISITS THE COLONEL

"Well, Tobias," said Colonel Jeffery, as he entered the pretty, cheerful

room into which the now convalescent boy had been removed.
"Well, Tobias, how are you now?"
"Much better, sir. Oh, sir,—I—I—"
"What would you say?"
"I feel that when I see you, sir, I ought to say so much to convince
you of how truly, and deeply grateful I am to you, and yet I can
scarcely ever say a word about it. I pray for your happiness, sir,
indeed I do. Your name and my mother's, and—and Minna Gray's,
are always uttered to God by me."
"Now, Tobias," said Colonel Jeffery gravely. "I am quite satisfied that
as regards all that has passed, you feel as you ought to feel, and for
my own part, I beg you to feel and to know that your saying
anything about it only distresses me."
"Distresses you, sir?"
"Yes, it does, indeed. I see your eyes are upon the door. You expect
Minna, to day, I am sure."
"Yes, sir,—she—she—my mother was to bring her, sir."
A ringing at a bell now came upon Tobias's ear, and his colour went
and came fitfully.
"You are still very weak, my poor boy," said the colonel, "but you are
certainly much improved. Do you feel any confusion in your head
now?"
"None at all, only when I think of Todd suddenly, ever it makes me
feel cold and sick, and something seems to rush through my heart."
"Oh, that will go away. That is nothing. There, I will draw up the
blind for you. The evening is coming, and the sky is overclouded.
You can see better now, and there is one coming whom I know you
wish to lose no sight of."
"I hear her foot upon the stairs," said Tobias.
"Do you?—It is more than I do."
"Ah, sir, the senses are sharpened, I think, by illness."
"Not so much as by love. Tobias! do you hear her footstep now?"
"Yes, and it is like music."
He had his head on one side in an attitude of listening; and then
with joy sparkling from every feature of his face, he spoke again—
"She comes—she comes. Ah, she comes fast. My own—my beautiful.
She come—she comes."
"This is real love," said the colonel, and he stepped from the room.
Nearly on the landing at the head of the stairs, he met Minna Gray.
"Welcome," he said as he held out his hand to her. "You will find
your young friend up and much better."
Minna could only look her thanks. Mrs. Ragg was following her, and
as the ascent of stairs was always rather a task to that good Lady,
she was making a noise like a stranded grampus in breathing.
"Ah, colonel," she said, "young legs get up stairs faster than old
ones, sir, as you see. Well—well, there was a time when first I knew
poor dear Ragg, who is of course dead and gone, quite premature."
"Exactly, Mrs. Ragg," said the colonel, as he rapidly descended the
stairs.
"Did you ever, my dear, know such a strange man?" said Mrs. Ragg
to Minna.
"Who?"
"The colonel, to be sure. So soon as I begin to tell him any little
what do you call it. No it ain't nannygoat—that's ridiculous. It's—it's
—what is it?"
"Anecdote do you mean, Mrs. Ragg?"
"Yes, to be sure. Well, as I was a saying, no sooner do I begin telling
him a little nannygoat—no, I mean anecdote, than off he is like a
shot."
Minna smiled to herself, and she was far from wondering that the
colonel was off like a shot, for well she knew, that when Mrs. Ragg
did begin anything concerning the late Mr. Ragg, it usually lasted
three quarters of an hour at the very least.
"Minna, Minna!" called Tobias.
"I am here, Tobias."
In another moment she was in the room. Truly it was a pleasant
thing to see the face of Tobias, when, his sunshine, as he called
Minna, came close to him, and in her soft voice asked him if he was
better.
"Don't mind me," said Mrs. Ragg, "I am going to darn a stocking or
two. that's all. Just say what you both like. Young folks will be young
folks. Bless me, I recollect just as if it were only yesterday, when I
used to speak to poor departed Mr. Ragg, who is, premature, dead
and gone, in a manner of speaking. Ah, dear me! How the world
goes round and round—round and round, continually."
Tobias and Minna were so well accustomed to the garrulity of Mrs.
Ragg, and so well aware that she required no answer, that they let
her talk on, and did not mind her, as she requested they would not;
and so the evening grew apace, and the light gradually began to
wane, as those two young loving hearts spoke together of the
future, and indulged in that day dream of happiness which can only
belong to youth and love.

Todd is skulking round the angle of the garden wall, from which he
can get a view of the colonel's house, and yet not be seen himself.
The more he looked the more the desire grew upon him,
notwithstanding the immense risk he ran of personal detection, by
so doing, to get into the house, and finish the career of poor Tobias.
He would have had no particular objection rather to have taken the
life of Mrs. Ragg, if it could be easily and comfortably done.
It has been said that there are folks in the world who never forgive
any one for doing them a kindness; and such paradoxical views of
human nature have been attempted to be laid down as truths; but
whether this be so or not, is still to be proved, although it is certain
that nothing stirs the evil passions of men who will inflict injury upon
the innocent, as to find themselves baffled in their villany. From that
moment the matter becomes a personal affair of vengeance.
Hence, since Todd had become thoroughly aware that Tobias had
escaped from the death he had intended for him at the mad-house,
his rage against the boy knew no bounds.
Indeed, the reader will conclude that it must have been a feeling of
no ordinary strength, that, at such a busy and ticklish time, would
take Todd to the colonel's house at all.
It was revenge—bitter, uncompromising revenge!
Now, you must know the colonel's house was one of those half-villa,
half-mansion-like residences, that are so common in the
neighbourhood of London. There was a kind of terrace in the front,
and a garden with flowering shrubs, that had a pretty enough
appearance, and which at night afforded abundance of shelter.
It was by this front garden that Todd hoped to reach the house.
When it was nearly dark, he slunk in, crouching down among the
trees and shrubs, and crawling along like a serpent as he was. He
soon came to a flight of stone steps that led to the kitchens.
By the time Todd had got thus far, some of her domestic duties had
called Mrs. Ragg to the lower part of the house. He saw by the fire-
light that some one was going about the kitchen, close to the foot of
the stone steps; but he could not exactly, by that dim and uncertain
radiance, take upon himself to say that it was Mrs. Ragg.
She soon lit a candle, though, and then all was clear. He saw the
good lady preparing divers lights for the upper rooms.
While Todd was half-way down the stone steps, peeping into the
kitchen, one of the other servants of the house came into that
receptacle for culinary articles, and commenced putting on a bonnet
and shawl. Todd could not hear one word of what was said by Mrs.
Ragg and this young woman who was getting ready to go out; but
he saw them talk, and by their manner he felt convinced that it was
only upon ordinary topics.
If the young woman left the house by the steps upon which Todd
was, and which it was more than likely she would do, his situation
would be anything but a pleasant one, and discovery would be
certain.
To obviate the chance of this, he stepped back, and crouched down
in among the shrubs in the garden.
He was not wrong in his conjectures, for in a few moments the
servant, who was going out, ascended the steps, and passed him so
closely, that by stretching out his hand, he could, if he had been so
minded, have touched her dress. In a short time she was out of ear-
shot.
Todd emerged from his concealment again, and crept down the
steps, and once more peeped into the kitchen.
Mrs. Ragg was still busy with the candles.
He was just considering what he should do, when he heard the
tramp of horses' feet in the road above. He ascended sufficient of
the steps to enable himself to get a peep at what was going on. He
saw a groom well mounted, and leading another horse. Then no
other than Colonel Jeffrey himself, although he did not of his own
knowledge, feel assured that it was him, come out at the front door
of the house and mounted.
"Now, William," said the colonel, "we must ride sharply."
"Yes, sir," said the groom.
Another moment and they were gone.
"This is lucky," said Todd. "It is not likely that there is any other
room in the house; and if not, I have the game in my own hands."
He crept down the remainder of the stone steps, and placed his ear
quite close to the kitchen window.
Mrs. Ragg was enjoying a little conversation to herself.
"Ah!" she said, "it's always the way—girls will be girls; but what I
blame her for is, that she don't ask the colonel's leave at once, and
say—'Sir, your disorderly has won my infections, and may he come
here and take a cup of tea?'"
This was Greek to Todd.
"What is the old fool talking about," he muttered. "But I will soon
give her a subject that will last for her life."
He now arrived at the door of the kitchen. It was very unlikely to be
locked or otherwise fastened, so immediately after the young
woman, who had left the house, and passed so close to him, Todd.
Yet he listened for a few moments more, as Mrs. Ragg kept making
observations to herself.
"Listeners hear no good of themselves, says the proverb, and at all
events it was verified in this instance."
"Lor' a mussy," ejaculated Mrs. Ragg, "how my mind do run upon
that horrid old ugly monster of a Todd to day. Well, I do hope I shall
never look upon his frightful face again, and how awful he did
squint, too. Dear me, what did the colonel say he had with his vision
—could it be—a something afixity? No that isn't it."
"Obliquity!" said Todd, popping his head in at the kitchen door. "It
was obliquity, and if you scream or make the least alarm, I'll skin
you, and strew this kitchen with your mangled remains!"
Mrs. Ragg sank into a chair with a melo-dramatic groan, that would
have made her fortune over the water in domestic tragedy if she
could have done it so naturally. Todd kept his eye upon her. That
basilisk-like eye, which had fascinated the good woman often, and
this time it acted as a kind of spell, for truly might he have said, or
rather might some one have said for him,
"He held her with his glittering eye."

Todd's first care now was to get between Mrs. Ragg and the kitchen
door, lest upon some sudden impulse she should rise and flee. Then
he folded his arms, and looked at her calmly, and with such a
devilish smile as might have become Mephistopheles himself, while
contemplating the ruin of a soul. He took from his pocket a razor.
"Mercy," gasped Mrs. Ragg.
"Where is Tobias?"
 Todd Horrifies Mrs. Ragg.

"Up stairs. Back room, second floor, looking into the garden."
"Alone?"
"No, Minna Grey is with him."
"Listen to me. If you stir from here until I come to you again, I will
not only murder you, but Tobias likewise, and every one whom I
meet with in this house. You know me, and can come to some
opinion as to whether or not I am a man likely to keep my word.
Remain where you are; move not, speak not, and all will be well."
Mrs. Ragg slowly slid off her chair, and fell to the floor of the kitchen,
where she lay, in what seemed a swoon.
"That will do as well," said Todd as he glanced at her, "and yet as I
return." He made a movement with his hand across his throat to
indicate what he would do, and then feeling assured that he had
little or, indeed, no opposition to expect in the house, he left the
kitchen, and walked up stairs.
When he reached the top of the kitchen stairs he paused to listen.
All was very still in the house.
"'Tis well," he said "tis well. This deed of blood shall be done, and
long before it can be thought that it was I who struck the blow, I
shall be gone."
Alas! After passing through so much! After being persued in so
almost a miraculous manner from the murderous intentions of Todd,
backed by the cupidity of Fogg, and his subordinate Watson, was
poor Tobias yet to die a terrible death as a victim to the cruel
passions of his relentless persecutor? No, we will not yet believe that
such is to be the fate of poor honest Tobias, although at the present
time, his prospects look gloomy. Todd may, and no doubt has taken
as worthy lives, but we will hope that the hand of Providence will
prevent him from taking this one. He reached the landing of the first
floor, and he paused to listen again. He thought this time, that he
heard the faint sound of voices above, but he was not quite sure.
Otherwise all was quiet. This was a critical situation for Todd. If any
one, who was a painter of pictures or of morals had but seen him,
Sweeney Todd, as he there stood, they would no longer have
doubted either that there was a devil, or that some persons in this
world, were actuated by a devilish fiend. He looked the incarnate
fiend!—the Mephistopheles of the imagination, such as he is painted
by the German enthusiast. His laugh too? Was not that satanic? He
set himself to listen to the voices that he heard in that quiet rooms
and the sounds, holy and full of affection as they were, awakened no
chord of answering feeling, in that bold, bad man's breast. He stood
apart from human nature, a solitary being. A wreck upon the ocean
of society
"None loving, and by none beloved."

Who would be Sweeney Todd, for all the wealth, real or fabled, of a
million Californias?
"He is here," he said, "I know his voice. Tobias is here. Ah! he
mentions the name of God. Ha! He is more fitting to go to that
heaven he can talk of so glibly, but there is none. There is none! No,
no! all that is a fable."
Of course Todd could not believe in a divinity of goodness and
mercy. If he had, what on earth could have saved him from absolute
madness?
 CHAPTER LXXXIII.
TOBIAS IN JEOPARDY.

"And so you do love me, Minna?" said Tobias.

How his voice shook like a reed swayed by the wind, and yet what a
world of melody was in it.
"Can you ask me to say yes?" was the reply of the fair young
creature by his side. "Can you ask me to say yes, Tobias?"
"It seems to me," said Tobias, "as though it would be such a joy to
hear you say so, Minna, and yet I will not ask you."
"How well you have got, Tobias. Your cheek has got its old colour
back again. The colour it had long before you knew there was such a
man as Sweeney Todd in the world. Your eyes are bright too, and
your voice has its old pleasant sound."
"Used it to be pleasant to you, Minna?"
She held up her hand, and shook her head laughingly.
"No questions, Tobias! No questions. I will confess nothing."
"Stop!" said Tobias, as he put himself into an attitude of listening,
"what was that, I thought I heard something? It was like a
suppressed growl. I wish the colonel would come home. Did you not
hear it, Minna?"
Minna had heard it, but she did not say she had.
"Where did it come from, Tobias?"
"From the stair-head, Minna."
"Oh, it is some accidental noise, such as is common to all houses,
and such as always defy conjecture and explanation, and being
nothing and meaning nothing, always comes to nothing. Yet I will go
and see. Perhaps a door has been left open, and is banging to and
fro by the wind, and if so it will only vex you to hear it again,
Tobias."
It was Todd, who upon hearing the soft and tender speeches from
the young lovers, had not been able to suppress a growl, and now
that he had heard Minna Grey talk of coming to look what it was, he
felt the necessity of instantly concealing himself somewhere.
It was not likely she would come down the stairs, so Todd adopted
an original mode of keeping himself out of sight.
He descended steps sufficient, that by laying at full length along
them, his head did not reach the top, and in the darkness he then
considered that he should be quite safe from the casual glance, that
in all likelihood, merely to satisfy Tobias, Minna would give outside
the room door.
Todd thought by her manner she had heard nothing.
"No, no, Minna," said Tobias, "there is no occasion. It is nothing, I
dare say, and I don't like you to be out of my sight a moment."
"It is only a moment."
She rose, and proceeded to the door.
An unknown feeling of dread, she knew not why, was at the heart of
Minna. Certainly the slight sound she had heard, and that too in the
house of Colonel Jeffery, was not sufficient to warrant such a feeling,
and yet there, at her heart, it sat brooding.
She stood for a moment at the door.
It was only for a moment.
"How foolish I am," she thought, and then she passed out on to the
landing, where she stood for a moment glancing round her.
"It is nothing, Minna," called out Tobias, "or shall I try and come. I
feel quite strong enough to do so."
"Oh, no—no! It is nothing."
Minna stepped lightly back and sat down. She clasped her hands
very tight indeed together, and then placed both upon her breast.
She had seen Todd.
Yes, Minna Grey had seen the man that had been, and who was for
all she knew to the contrary still to be, the bane of Tobias's
existence. The clear eyes of youth had noticed the lumbering figure
as it lay upon the stairs before them.
And she did not scream—she did not cry for help—she did not faint,
she only crept back as we have seen, and held her hands upon her
heart, and looked at Tobias.
There was no mistaking Todd. Once seen he was known for ever.
Like some hideous picture, there dwelt the memory of Sweeney
Todd upon the young imagination of the fair Minna Grey.
Once before, a long time ago, so it seemed to her, she had seen him
in the Temple skulking up an old staircase. From that moment the
face was Daguerreotyped upon her brain.
It was never to be forgotten, and with the face comes the figure too.
That she saw upon the stairs.
Alas! Poor Minn!
"And so it was nothing but one of those odd accidents that will occur
in defiance of all experience, and calculation," said Tobias.
"Just that," replied Minna.
"Ah, my dear Minna. We are so safe here. It always seems to me as
though the very air of this house, belonging as it does to such a
man, so full of goodness as the colonel is, such that nothing very
bad could live in it for long."
"I—I hope so—I think so.—What a calm and pleasant evening it is,
Tobias, did you see the new book of the seasons, so full of pretty
engravings in the shape of birds and trees, and flowers, that the
colonel has purchased."
"New book?"
"Yes, it lies in his small study, upon this floor. I will fetch it for you, if
you wish it, Tobias?"
"Nay, I will go."
"You are still weak. Remain in peace upon the couch, dear Tobias,
and I will go for you."
Before she left the room, she kissed the forehead of the boy. A tear,
too, fell upon his hand.
"Who knows," she thought, "that I shall ever see him in life again?"
"Minna, you weep."
"Weep? No—no—I am so—so happy."
She hastily left the room. Todd had heard what had passed, and had
turned to hide himself again. The young girl knew that she passed
the murderer within a hair's breadth. She knew that he had but to
stretch out his right hand and say—"Minna Gray, you are my victim!"
and his victim she would have become. Was not that dreadful? And
she so young and so fair—so upon the threshold, as it were, of the
garden of her existence—so loving, and so well-beloved. She felt for
a moment, as she crossed the landing—just for a moment as though
she were going mad. But the eye of the Omnipotent was upon that
house. She staggered on. She made her way into a bed-room. It
was the colonel's. Above the mantel-shelf, supported on a small
bracket, was a pair of pistols. They were of a large size, and she had
heard from the current gossip of the house, how they were always
loaded, and how the servants feared to touch them, and how even
they shrank from making the bed, lest the pistol from some malice
aforethought, or from something incidental to such watching, should
go off at once of their own accord, and inevitably shoot whoever
chanced to be in the room. Minna Gray laid her hand upon the
dreaded weapons.
"For Tobias! for Tobias!" she gasped.
Then she paused to listen. All was still as the grave. Todd was not
yet ready for the murder, or he wished to take their lives both
together, and in the one room. That was more probable. Then she
began to think that he must have some suspicion, and that it was
necessary upon her part to do something more than merely make no
alarm. The idea of singing occurred to her. It was a childish song
that she had been taught, when a pretty child, that she now warbled
forth a few lines of—
"If I were a forest bird,
I'd shun the noisy town;
I'd seek the verdure of the spring
The dear autumnal brown.
And even when the winter came,
By sunny skies bereft,
I'd sleep in some deep distant cave,
Which wanton winds had left."

She crossed the landing.

"Minna," said Tobias. "My Minna!"
"I come."
She passed into the room, and the moment she crossed the
threshold—she turned her face to it and presented both the pistols
before her. Then as she wound, inch by inch, into the centre of the
room, all her power of further concealment of her feelings deserted
her, and she could only say, in a strange choking tone—
"Todd!—Todd!—Todd!"
"No—no—no! Oh, God, no!" cried Tobias.
"Todd!—Todd!—Todd!"
"No—no! Help! help!"
"D—n!" said Sweeney Todd, as he dashed open the door of the
chamber, and stood upon the threshold with a glittering knife in his
right hand.
"Hold!" shrieked Minna Gray. "Another step, murderer, and I send
you to your God!"
Todd waited. He could almost see down the barrels of the large
pistols, which a touch of the young girl's finger would explode in his
face. With a sharp convulsive cry, Tobias fell to the floor. The blood
gushed from his mouth, and he lay bereft of sensation.
 Heroic Conduct Of Minna Gray.

"Away!" cried Minna. "Monster, away! Another moment, and as

Heaven hears me, I will fire; once—twice—"
Todd darted to the stair head, but he darted away again quicker
than he had gone there; for who, to his horror, should he meet,
advancing with great speed up the steps, but Mrs. Ragg, who had
managed to get out of the kitchen, and who bore, as a weapon of
offence and defence, the large kitchen poker, which was of a glowing
red heat. Todd caught a touch of it on his face.
"Oh, you villain of the world!" cried Mrs. Ragg, "I'll teach you to
come here murdering people. My poor Tobias is no more, I know;
but I'll take the law of you, I will. Murder! murder! Police! Colonel!"
With an alacrity, that was far beyond to all appearance Mrs. Ragg's
powers, that good lady pursued Todd with the red-hot poker. He
dared not take refuge in Tobias's room, for there stood Minna with
the pistols in her hand, so he darted up the first flight of stairs he
saw, which led to the top of the house. Mrs. Ragg pursued him; but
when she got to the head of the stairs, Minna pressed too hard upon
the hair-trigger of one of the pistols, and off it went. Mrs. Ragg fully
believed herself shot, and rolled down the stairs, poker included;
while Todd, labouring under the impression that the shot was at him,
became still more anxious to find some place of refuge. Upon the
landing, which he was not a moment in reaching, he found a great
show of doors; for he was, in fact, upon the floor from which all the
sleeping rooms of the servants opened. It was quite a chance that
the first one he bounced into was one that had in the roof a little
square trap-door, facetiously called "a fire escape;" but which, in the
event of a fire, would have acquired the agility of a harlequin, and
the coolness of a tax-gatherer to get through. Todd dragged a
bedstead beneath the trap; and then his great height enabled him to
thrust it open, and project his head through it. He found that part of
his corporality was in the roof as it were—that is to say, in the cavity,
between the ceiling of the room and the house. A trap-door of
somewhat larger size in the actual roof, opened to the air. Todd
dragged himself through, and was fairly upon the top of the colonel's
house. A slippery elevation! But surely that was better than facing a
red-hot poker, and a pair of hair-trigger duelling pistols; and so, for a
time, the desire to escape kept down every other feeling. Even his
revengeful thoughts gave way to the great principle of self-
preservation; and Todd was only intent upon safely getting away. He
glared round him upon the night sky, and a gaudy assemblage of
chimney tops. What was he to do? In a minute he uttered a string of
such curses, as we cannot very well here set down, and he turned
preternaturally calm and still.
"Shall I go back," he said, "or escape?"
He heard the tramp of horses' feet, and peeping carefully over the
front parapet of the house, he saw Colonel Jeffery arrive on
horseback, and dismount. His groom led the horse away, and the
colonel ascended the steps. Then, and not until then, Todd made up
his mind.
"Escape," he said, "and be off."
There was a long sloping part of the roof close to where he was, and
he thought that if he slid down that very carefully he should be able
to get on to the roof of the next house, and so perchance through
their trap door, and by dint of violence or cunning, or both united,
reach the street.
It was a desperate resource, but his only one.
The top part of the long sloping roof was easily gained, and then
Todd began to let himself down very carefully, but the angle of the
roof was greater than he had imagined, and by the time he got
about half way down he found a dangerous and most uncomfortable
acceleration of motion ensuing.
It was in vain he tried to stop himself: down he went with a speed
into the gutter behind the copping-stone, that left him lying there for
a few moments half stunned, and scarcely conscious if he were safe
or not.
The colonel's house, however, was stoutly built, and Todd's weight
had not displaced anything; so that there he lay safe enough,
wedged into a narrow rain gutter, from which, when he did recover
himself sufficiently to make the attempt, he found some difficulty in
wrenching himself out of.
Sore and shaken, Todd now looked about him. He was close to the
roof of the next-door house. To be sure there was a chasm of sixty
feet; but its width was not as many inches, so Todd ought, with his
long legs, to easily step it.
 CHAPTER LXXXIV.
TODD'S WONDERFUL ESCAPE.

The step was but a trifle; and yet, shaken as Todd was by his fall, it
really seemed to him to be one of the most hazardous and nervous
things in the world to take it.
He made two feints before he succeeded. At length he stood fairly
upon the roof of the adjoining house. He did not say "Thank God!";
such words were not exactly in the vocabulary of Sweeney Todd; but
he wiped the perspiration from his brow, and seemed to think that
he had effected something at last.
And yet how far was he from safety? It is some satisfaction to have
got such a man as Todd upon the house-tops. Who pities him? Who
would be violently afflicted if he made a false step and broke his
neck? No one, we apprehend; but such men, somehow, do not make
false steps; and if they do, they manage to escape the
consequences.
Surely it was about as ticklish a thing to crawl up a sloping roof as to
come down one. Todd did not think so, however, and he began to
shuffle up the roof of the house he was now on, looking like some
gigantic tortoise, slowly making its way.
Reasoning from his experience of the colonel's house, Todd thought
he should very well be able to pitch upon the trap, in the roof of the
domicile upon which he was, nor was he wrong. He found it in
precisely the same relative position, and then he paused.
He drew a long breath.
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