In early 17th century England, a glutton named Nicholas Wood (right), who was known as ‘the Great Eater of Kent’, performed at many country fairs and festivals. Wood was a native of the village of Harrietsham, near Maidstone, in Kent and in his youth had been employed as a servant of a local gentleman. The rumour of his prodigious appetite soon became widespread, though, and he became a local hero. Once, when invited by Sir Warham St Leger to his Kentish seat at Leeds Castle, he won a bet by eating a dinner intended for eight people. Another local gentleman, Sir William Sedley, laid an even more magnificent table for the Great Eater; it was the first time this celebrated glutton had faced defeat. After a valiant effort, Wood fell to the floor in a death-like trance, his stomach distended like a huge balloon. Fearing that the glutton would die, Sedley’s servants laid him down near the fireplace, and smeared his belly with fat to make it more readily distensible; the insensible man was then carried up to bed, many spectators fearing for his life.
The following day, the Great Eater revived, but his fickle benefactor decided to mock the once famous performer. Sedley’s stewards dragged him outside, and he was put in the stocks to be jeered by the populace. At the castle of Lord Wotton in Boughton Malherbe, Nicholas Wood got his own back; he won a bet by eating seven dozen rabbits, and was again celebrated by his friends for using his unique talents to score off those above him in society. Wood’s greatest misfortune occurred at the market of Lenham, where a cunning trickster named John Dale had made a bet that he could fill the Great Eater’s belly at the price of a mere two shillings. He accomplished this feat by soaking 12 one-penny loaves of bread in six pots of very strong ale; Wood fell asleep, and remained insensible for nine hours, after finishing only half of this rather alcoholic meal.
In 1630, Wood met the poet John Taylor, who at a country inn in Kent saw him win a bet by devouring a breakfast consisting of a leg of mutton, sixty eggs, three large pies and an enormous black pudding. This was all the food in the inn’s larder, but the Great Eater was still hungry. The waiter ran out to fetch a large duck, which Wood tore to pieces and ate, leaving only the beak and quills. Taylor was deeply impressed by this exhibition and poetically envisaged that the duck, which had, a mere minute ago, been peacefully swimming in the pond of the tavern, now “swomme in the whirlepole or pond of his mawe.”
Taylor paid Wood 20 shillings to visit him in London some time later. In the meantime, the shrewd poet had come up with a cunning plan to cash in on his new acquaintance. Wood had never performed in London, and his gluttonous orgies would be a novelty even for the blasé citizens of the Metropolis. After a grandiose advertising campaign, the Great Eater was to make his bow to the London audience at the Bankside bear-garden. At the first show, he would wolf a wheelbarrow full of tripe and at the second devour “as many puddings as would reach over the Thames.” At the subsequent shows, he would eat a fat calf worth 20 shillings, and then 20 sets of sheeps’ innards. Initially, Wood felt disposed to accept this plan, hoping, perhaps, to become a super-star of gourmandising. His ‘agent’ wrote a pamphlet to celebrate “the Admirable Teeth and Stomachs Exploits of Nicholas Wood” which was widely distributed among curious Londoners.
Taylor spared no superlatives to describe his artist’s enormous powers of digestion. His intestinal tract was a stall for oxen, a sty for hogs, a park for deer, a warren for rabbits, a pond for fishes, a storehouse for apples, and a dairy for milk and honey. His jaws were a mill of perpetual motion, and his capacious stomach the “rendez-vous or meeting place for the Beasts of the Fields, the Fowles of the Ayre, and Fishes of the Sea.” But when the day of the grand opening was imminent, the Great Eater became increasingly worried: he suffered from stage-fright and remembered, with horror and apprehension, the many distasteful and dangerous practical jokes he had encountered during his long and perilous career. The embarrassing anæsthesia in Lenham had not been forgotten and, shortly before leaving for London, he had lost all his teeth but one at the market of Ashford, after being tricked into eating a shoulder of mutton, bones and all. And so, one day, Nicholas Wood fled his lodgings in London, never to be heard of again. John Taylor, his prize attraction vanished, had to content himself with writing a long complimentary poem to ‘the Great Eater of Kent’.