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STOTHARD'S PICTURE, "THE PROCESSION OF THE FLITCH OF BACON."--It was published in 1833 and was dedicated to Samuel Rogers, the poet.

STOTHARD'S PICTURE ADAPTED, WITH QUEEN VICTORIA AND PRINCE ALBERT AS LEADING ACTORS.--Among the figures are Lord Brougham, Lord Palmerston, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, Lord John Russell, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Dukes of Sussex and Cambridge. Date of print, 1841.

"Who art thou, son?" the Prior cried, His tones with wonder falter-- "Thou should'st not jest with reverend men, Nor with their feelings palter." "I jest not, Prior, for know in me Sir Reginald Fitzwalter.

"I now throw off my humble garb, As I what I am, contest; The wealthiest I of wealthy men, Since with this treasure blest." And as he spoke, Fitzwalter clasp'd His lady to his breast.

"In peasant guise my love I won, Nor knew she whom she wedded; In peasant cot our truth we tried, And no disunion dreaded. Twelve months' assurance proves our faith On firmest base is steadied."

Joy reigned within those Convent walls When the glad news was known; Joy reigned within Fitzwalter's halls When there his bride was shown. No lady in the land such sweet Simplicity could own; A natural grace had she, that all Art's graces far outshone: Beauty and worth for want of birth Abundantly atone.

L'ENVOY

What need of more? That Loving Pair Lived long and truly so; Nor ever disunited were;-- For one death laid them low! And hence arose that Custom old-- The Custom of Dunmow.

Of this Fitzwalter we shall hear later on.

A Yeoman, a Husbandman and Thomas le Fuller

Now all may have fallen out exactly as Harrison Ainsworth tells us; but then, again, as Uncle Remus says, "it moughtn't."

"Among the jocular tenures of England," writes Grose--he was the antiquary for whom Burns wrote "Tam o' Shanter"--"none has been more talked about than the Bacon of Dunmow." In the theory of a jocular tenure we have probably the true origin of the Flitch custom.

Morant, the historian of Essex, seems to think that this was the case. He writes--

The Prior and Canons were obliged to deliver the Bacon to them that took the Oath, by virtue of a Founder or Benefactor's Deed or Will, by which they held lands, rather than of their own singular frolic and wantonness, or more probably it was imposed by the Crown, either in Saxon or Norman times, and was a burthen upon their estate.

It is explained that "after the Pilgrims, as the Claimants were called, had taken the Oath, they were taken through the Town in a Chair, on Men's Shoulders, with all the Friars, Brethren, and Townsfolk, young and old, male and female after them, with shouts and acclamations, and the Bacon was borne before them on poles."

The Chartulary of Dunmow Priory , a thickish quarto, clearly written in old contracted Latin, is still to be seen any day in the British Museum. There are two entries in reference to the Flitch. One is dated 1445, the other 1510. The first is on page 128 and the other on the opening page. Both are among collections of memoranda apart from the actual Chartulary, which itself contains no reference to the Flitch. Here are translations of the entries--

Memorandum: that one Richard Wright, of Badbourge, near the City of Norwich, in the County of Norfolk, Yeoman, came and required the Bacon of Dunmow on the 17th day of April, in the 23rd year of the reign of King Henry VI, and according to the form of the charter, was sworn before John Cannon, Prior of this place and the Convent, and many other neighbours, and there was delivered to him, the said Richard, one Flitch of Bacon.

On a sheet pasted on the last page of a volume of MSS. consisting of extracts from the Red Book of the Exchequer , the foregoing entries are recorded in cramped English, and also a third, which, as a matter of fact, is written first--

Memorandum: that one Stephen Samuel, of Little Easton, in the County of Essex, Husbandman, came to the Priory of Dunmow, on our Lady-day in Lent, in the Seventh year of King Edward IV, and required a Gammon of Bacon, and was sworn before Roger Bulcott, then Prior, and the Convent of this place, as also before a multitude of other neighbours, and there was delivered to him a Gammon of Bacon.

It will be seen that in two cases it was a Gammon not a Flitch of Bacon that was awarded.

The first recorded presentation of the Bacon is dated, as will be observed, 1445. But, in view of the allusion in Chaucer a century before, it is plain that the custom must have existed even before his time. The references to the custom in other early authors would also seem to point to the fact of it having been frequently observed. There are, however, only three gifts of the Bacon noted down in the documents of the Priory, now in the care of the British Museum.

The Vanished Cloisters

There is little now to be seen of the old Priory spoken of by Leland.

Approached from the hamlet, the existing Priory Church of Little Dunmow, with its roof of staring blue slates, its factory chimney-like bell tower and mean walling, attracts attention only by its oddity. But when one walks up the farm land from which the south side of the building may be viewed, one receives a different impression. In the architecture now seen there are the

lines where beauty lingers,

the lines which tell of a splendid structure. The remains of no common building stand in solitary domination of these quiet corn fields.

One enters the church and is surprised, as Mr. Hartley has written, by that

indefinable feeling which ever strikes us on our entry into a spacious and beautiful edifice. That the building is a fragment of what must have been a structure of extreme beauty becomes evident. Columns of such dimensions and arches of such design were never intended for purpose so slight as the support of the present roof; windows of such size and elegance were made for shedding light upon a much more spacious interior than we now find.

But when account is taken of all the stately arches and columns, and the beautifully cut ornament thereon, now embodied in the brick rubble and plaster which we owe to Georgian and Early Victorian dulness and parsimony, no more of the old Priory survives for our refreshment than the south aisle of the choir. The stones of the structure that were hewn and raised by some "Master Henry" or "Master Hubert the Mason," the timbers that some "Master John the Carpenter" industriously wrought, even the marble and alabaster which crowned the work have long been torn away. They are come upon now, in fragments in the walls and floors and roofs of cottages and barns which adjoin the church.

PROCESSION AFTER THE MODERN CEREMONY.--Two couples in chairs, recent imitations of the original in the Priory Church. The Bacon is swinging from poles behind the second couple.

Where the monastic building once extended nothing remains but the out of sight foundations which try the patience of the digger of land drains. Labourers' patches of potatoes and greens range over consecrated ground. The fishponds of the monks, to which they had recourse "on Fridays when they fasted," grow grass or bear the burden of a railway embankment. Tradition and propinquity, but these only, point to venerable cottages and a farmhouse as marking the position of the Priory's Manor house and Grange.

Of memorials of the Flitch ceremony two are shown--the oaken seat, in which successful applicants for the Bacon were chaired, and the stones on which they knelt.

The chair is kept within the altar rails. Two persons could no doubt be squeezed into it. There are holes in the chair through which the bearers' poles went.

The outer right-hand side of the chair is carved with wheel-like decorations, but on the left-hand side the surface of the wood is plain, and various mortices are visible, which show that the seat is part of a larger structure, being, in fact, the end unit of a series of stalls. The truth is that the chair used by merry-makers at the ceremony of the Flitch, is actually a waif from the conventual establishment. It is, one is bound to admit, a remarkable coincidence that the chair and ceremony should have had their origin in the same reign, but the fact that it is only part of some fitted furniture, precludes the possibility of it having been designed for the purpose for which it was used in later years.

What are to-day pointed out as the stones on which the Pilgrims knelt may possibly be the bases of two of the many columns which local vandals in want of building material have demolished. They are certainly not "sharp," as some chroniclers describe the stones to have been. A pair of stones like those in the Church are to be seen in Little Dunmow village.

A Tale of Tyranny and War

Below the pavement of the Priory Church many dead sleep. Four graves only are marked by stones. One resting-place, supposed to be that of the Lady Juga, the foundress of the Priory, is covered by a slab of grey marble "coffin-fashioned, with a cross flory." Over three other tombs are mutilated alabaster effigies, once "heedlessly thrown among heaps of bricks and rubbish."

Begun, Dugdale and Morant say, in 1104, the Priory was more than a century a-building. Indeed, it was as late as 1501 that "five bells were blessed in Dunmow steeple." Only thirty-four years were to pass before the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It is doubtful if the Priory was even then finished. In fact, in the expenses of the Priory for 1534 are payments to two men "for making of ix foote of the stepull."

We have seen how much now remains of the scene whereon the Prior and his dozen Augustinian monks prayed and ruled on revenues drawn from holdings of land in four counties.

The Lady Juga was sister to one Ralph Baynard who came over from Normandy with William. Among the twenty-five Essex lordships which his sovereign gave him were those of Great and Little Dunmow. When the grandson of this Baynard fell out with Henry I, it was not long before that energetic monarch had a Fitzwalter enjoying the advantages of the lordships.

Fitzwalters followed one another for ten generations. The family is notable for the "Sir Reginald Fitzwalter" of Harrison Ainsworth's ballad. Tradition has long declared him to be old Dugdale's Lord Robert who "re-edified the decayed Priory of Dunmow." He had the generalship of that "Army of God and Holy Church" which wrung Magna Charta from John in 1215, and was "the first champion of English liberty."

The battered and chopped effigy of the Fitzwalter now lying by the side of his wife in the church is no longer said to be, however, but rather the bearer of the name who died in 1432.

"Maid Marian" is, however, as Dr. Brewer points out, the boy in the Morris dance, and is so called from the morion which he wore on his head.

But the story of the pursuit of the beautiful daughter of Fitzwalter by John has been thought to be well founded. Upon her father resisting the King he was dispossessed of all his property. Other barons took sides against the sovereign, and Newcourt writes that Fitzwalter fled into France. John, having spoiled the castles of those who resisted him,

sent a messenger to the fair Matilda now remaining here in Dunmow about hie old suit in love, and because she would not agree to his wicked motion, the messenger poison'd a boil'd or poch'd egg against she was hungry and gave it to her, whereof she died, and was buried here in the choir at Dunmow, between two pillars in the S. side thereof.

Another story is that the King sent Matilda a pair of poisoned gloves.

THE ANCIENT CHAIR AND THE "SHARP-POINTED STONES."--Both are in the Priory Church, the former within the altar rails, the latter just outside.

THE EFFIGIES IN THE PRIORY CHURCH.--Traditionally regarded as representing the founder of the Flitch custom and his wife, and the "Fair Matilda" poisoned by King John. There is no doubt that the knight is one of the Fitzwalters, and that the female figure lying by itself represents a member of the same house. An interment in 1627 recorded in the Register of the Church is described as "next to the tomb of Matilda."

Then the King of France also began to waste his dominions, but a day of reconciliation being appointed between the two Kings, King John passed over into France, and the two Armies were parted by an arm of the sea.

Then an English knight went out and challenged any to break a spear for his mistress's sake. Robert Fitzwalter came over, and, encountering with his great Lance, overthrew both the Knight and the Horse, and so returned to the King of France.

Then said King John, by God's Troth, he were a King indeed who had such a Knight in his Retinue. His friends, hearing this, knelt before the King and said, Sir, he is your Own Knight, and ready at your command, Robert Fitzwalter. The next day he restored to him his Barony with all appurtenances, and the two Kings were reconciled by the interposition of Robert, and all the banished persons were recalled, with leave to rebuild their castles.

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