PROCESSION AFTER THE MODERN CEREMONY.
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.
Whether the chair belonged originally to the Prior and was actually used when he gave away the Flitch, or was the property of one of the Lords of the Manor, who, after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, continued the custom, has been disputed. But there is evidence pointing to the chair having been employed on the occasion of the Manorial awards only. Mr. F. Roe, in his Old Oak Furniture, though he attributes the chair to the thirteenth century, doubts very much whether it can have been used from the beginning for the ritual of the Flitch. For this reason—
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.
In the accounts available of the awarding of the Flitch after the closing of the religious houses by Henry VIII we hear of "two great stones near the Church door" on which the applicant for the Bacon had to kneel. Whether they are still in existence is uncertain.