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 soevere 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;
