afterwards confessed that the duke was smothered
with pillows. His body was then undressed,
covered with furred mantles, and a report
spread that he had died of a fit of apoplexy
while dressing for dinner. The Earl Marshal,
who was nearly related to the duke, instantly
put on mourning for him, as did all the English
knights and squires in Calais. The body of
the murdered man was then embalmed, put
into a leaden coffin, and sent to England. It
was landed at Hadleigh Castle, that fortress
whose mossy rains still look down upon the
junction of the Thames and Medway. There
the dishonoured corpse, to which nobody dared
show respect, was put in a cart and sent, without
escort, to Pleshy to be buried in the church
of the Holy Trinity, which the duke himself
had founded, and endowed with twelve canonries.
Here at last the stern duke found real
mourners; and the duchess, his son Humphrey,
and his two daughters shed bitter tears of rage
and grief at his murder, and double cause indeed
had the duchess to grieve, for the king had just
had her uncle, the Earl of Arundel, beheaded
in Cheapside before his own eyes, and the Earl
of Warwick banished for life to the Isle of
Wight, "opposite the coast of Normandy."

Pleshy-Plaisant, the pleasant place, had
become a desolation; God's vengeance may
sometimes seem slow, but it is unerring—two
years after the halberds of those Pontefract
men of arms raised together, fell together, and
when they fell they beat out the life of Richard
of Bordeaux. In Shakespeare's Richard the
Second—a play in which the poet has thrown a
false halo of sympathy over an abandoned and
ruthless king—he makes the widowed Duchess
of Gloucester revile John of Gaunt for not
revenging his brother's slaughter, and the mourning
duchess sends a sorrowful and bitter message
to York, her dead husband's second brother:

                                 Bid him ah, what?
With all good speed at Pleshy visit me.
Alack! and what shall good old York there see
But empty lodgings and unfurnished walls;
Unpeopled offices, untrodden stones?
And what hear there for welcome but my groans?
Therefore commend me; let him not come there
To seek out sorrow that dwells everywhere.

And in a later part of the same play the Duke
of York at Ely House (Ely-place) commands a
servant

Sirrah! get thee to Pleshy, to my sister Gloster—
Bid her send presently a thousand pounds.

Many a sorrowful day after, at Flint, and at
Pontefract, Richard of Bordeaux must have
thought of that fatal evening when at star rise
"the murdered man" rode gaily beside him on
the London-road, lured by treacherous flattery
to a cruel death in the vaulted room at Calais.

Pipes and tabors sound your best, for
Dunmow is hard by Pleshy, with its purple waves
of clover not untenanted by bees; malthouse
cowls peer out among the green trees. The
crow honours Dunmow, not so much for the
sake of its world-famous Flitch, as for having
been the birthplace of one of those great
originators who reshape the world on their
lathes, and send it spinning on truer and faster.
Lionel Lukin, the inventor of lifeboats, was
born in this Essex village, and all advocates
for local patriotism should desire to see a statue
to him erected there, to incite future Dunmow
men to direct their talents to as noble
issues as Lukin. He obtained his patent in
1785. In 1789 a Mr. Henry Greathead, of
South Shields, carried out a similar idea to meet
a similar want, and by 1804 there had been
thirty-one lifeboats built and three hundred
lives saved. Mr. James Beeching, of
Yarmouth, improved the lifeboat in 1851, and in
1852 the tubular lifeboat was patented by
Mr. H. Richardson, "the challenger." In 1865
there were one hundred and eighty-five
lifeboats on our coasts. In 1864 they and Captain
Manby's invaluable rope-throwing rockets
together had saved three thousand six hundred and
nineteen lives, making, with the nine previous
years, thirty- six thousand two hundred and
sixty-one lives saved by the invention of
Lionel Lukin, the noble man of Dunmow.

Ghosts of Beaumont and Fletcher hover
round us while we tell of the old custom of
Little Dunmow, referred to by Chaucer, and
mentioned by Grose as a jocular tenure never
to be forgotten. One of the Fitzwalters, in
the early part of the thirteenth century, is
said, after some sardonic reflections on the joys
and sorrows, the roses and thorns of matrimony,
to have first instituted the ceremony
(circa May 3). He was probably the son of
that "Mars of men," Robert Fitzwalter, father
of Matilda the fair, a lady with whom King John
fell madly in love. He banished her father, who
was in the way, in 1213, and then sent a
perfumed messenger to the lonely Matilda, with
fresh protestations of his old suit; but she, being
still cold, disdainful, and inexorable, the
messenger, who either took it very much to heart,
or else had conditional orders, poisoned the
lady with a poached egg salted with arsenic.

The celebrated custom at Dunmow was to
solemnly and rejoicingly present a flitch or
gammon of bacon to any married couple who,
a year and a day after their marriage, would
take a prescribed oath that neither of them had
repented their union, or had a word of quarrel.
The claimants kneel on two uncomfortably
sharp-pointed stones in the churchyard, and
there, after certain other rites, take the following
quaint oath:

You shall swear by custom of confession,
That you ne'er made nuptial transgression;
Nor since you were married man and wife,
By household brawls or contentious strife,
Or otherwise at bed or at board,
Offended each other by deed or by word;
Or since the parish clerk said Amen,
Wished yourselves unmarried again;
Or in a twelvemonth and a day
Repented not in thought any way;
But continued true in thought and desire
As when you joined hands in holy quire.
If to these conditions without all fear,
Of your own accord you will freely swear,
A whole gammon of bacon you shall receive,
And bear it hence with joy and good leave;
For this is our custom at Dunmow well known
Though the pleasure be ours, the bacon's your own.