This droll mode of rewarding forbearing
tempers was certainly current even in Edward
the Third's time, because Chaucer makes his
merry, wanton wife of Bath say of her worried
husband,

The bacon was not fet, for hem, I trow,
That some men have in Essex at Dunmowe.

The flitch was, it is said, claimed on an average
about once in a century. The claim of the 20th
of June, 1751, was peculiarly immortalised by an
engraving of Moseley's, from an original drawing
of the scene made by David Ogborne. It
represents the joyous procession on their return
from Dunmow Church with the flitch, and
before the traditional quarrel had taken place, as
to how the bacon was to be disposed of. The
happy and successful claimants were Thomas
Shakeshaft, weaver, of the parish of Weathersfield,
and Ann his wife. They knelt down on
the sharp stones, as cruelly insisted upon, took
the oath, and bore away the gammon.
Moseley's scarce engraving was republished by
Cribb, 288, Holborn, in 1826. The celebrated
Bowles, of Cornhill, also published another
large print, now rare, of the Dunmow procession.
After the repetition of the oath, the
couple were seated in a square wooden chair,
still preserved in the priory (very small it is),
and carried round the site of the old manor,
with drums and fiddles, and much noisy and
exulting village minstrelsy, the flitch, totally
ruined by the process, being thrust through
with a pole, and carried before them. The
steward's lord and officers of the manor followed
with the inferior servants. Then came a very
interesting part of the procession—the jury—
six ogling bachelors and six smiling and
backward-glancing maidens, who were by this great
example urged onward to the blessed matrimonial
state. The ceremony must indeed have
been like a wedding breakfast—a perfect seed-
plot of future marriages. Many thousands of
people from all villages and towns, even as
far as the borders of Suffolk, then followed,
shouting and exulting in this triumph of Love
and Hymen.

The oaken chair used on this occasion, was
probably the official chair of some former prior
of Dunmow, or else the official seat of the
lord of the manor, being that in which the
Fitzwalters for generations had, perhaps,
received the suit and service of their servants.
It was, however, a satanic device, the very
Fiend's arch mock, the shrewdest subtlety of
Discord, Mrs. Candour's grandmamma, to make
the chair too small, so that the jammed and
aching couple should quarrel instantly they
had won the prize.

A custom, almost precisely similar to that of
Dunmow, existed at Whichenoure, in Staffordshire,
but is much less generally known.
Pennant, who visited Whichenoure House in 1780,
states that it was "remarkable from the painted
wooden bacon flitch still hung up over the hall
chimney, in memory of the singular tenure by
which Sir Philip de Somervile in the time of
Edward the Third held the manor." The oath
ran as follows: "Hear ye, Sir Philip de Somervile,
Lord of Whichenoure, maintainer and
giver of this bacon, that I, A., syth I wedded
B., my wyfe, and syth I had her in my kepyng,
and at wylle, by a yere and a daye after our
marryge, I would not have changed for hane
other, farer nor fowler, richer no pourer, ne
for none other descended of gretter lynage,
sleeping no waking, at noo time; and if the
said B. were sole, and I sole, I would take her
to be my wyfe before all the wymen of the
worlde, of what condytions soerere they be,
good or evyle, as help me God, and his seyntys,
and this flesh and all fleshes." If the claimant
were a "villager," corn and a cheese were given
him in addition to the flitch, and a horse was
likewise provided to take him out of the limits
of the manor, all the free tenants thereof
conducting him with "Trompets, tabourets, and
other manoir of mystralsie." In respect to the
Whichenoure flitch, Pennant remarks, that it
has "remained untouched from the first
century of its institution to the present,"
adding, jocosely, "We are credibly informed
that the late and present worthy owners of the
manor were deterred from entering into the
holy state, from the dread of not obtaining a
single rasher of their own bacon."

In Grose's time the Dunmow lords of the
manor tried hard to save their bacon, and
refused the honourable trial of the flitch to
several believers in the excellence of gammon.
Probably, says the sly, fat friend of Burns, it
was refused because "conjugal affection is
not so rare now as heretofore, or else because
qualification oaths are now supposed to be held
less sacred."

The Dunmow flitch was first claimed in 1445,
at least that is the first claim on record. Shakeshaft
and his wife were shrewd people, for they
made a large sum, in 1751, by selling slices of
the beatified bacon to many of the five thousand
persons present. Gradually the custom
slept, as good and bad customs sometimes do,
had indeed a good nap of a hundred and four
years, then Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, the
historical novelist, made a gallant and
disinterested effort to revive it. The lord of the
manor opposed the revival as a nuisance, but
Mr. Ainsworth and his friends defrayed the
expense of the festival, and provided not merely
one but two sets of claimants. We almost
forget whether they were advertised for, but
there they appeared as large as life, and much
more real, Mr. and Mrs. Barlow, of Chipping
Ongar, and the Chevalier Chatelaine, an ex-
Bourdeaux editor, not unknown in England as
the dexterous and rather daring translator of
Chaucer and other of our poets. It was quite
a romantic picture by Frith. Rosettes? We
believe you! Banners? Rather! Fiddles,
fifes and drums, trumpets, bassoons, and horns?
Plenty of them. Whether the stubborn lord
of the ill manner could not have been compelled
by the Dunmow people to carry out the old
tenure, is a moot point which the crow merely
throws out to the worthy lawyers of Essex
generally. Let the cynics say what they like;