adopted a ‘Hermeticall kinde of life’ in the early 1650s, and thereafter subsisted on the produce of his small patch of earth, surviving on a vegetarian diet of corn, bread, bran, herbs, roots, dock leaves, mallows, and grass. His apparel was likewise of a ‘meane’ condition, for he wore a ‘sackcloth frock’ out of ‘conscience’. He was buried at the church of St Dunstan and All Saints, Stepney, on 14 September 1680, where his tomb was afterwards known to local people as that of ‘the pilgrim’.
(Private Collection)