The chairing of the two couples through the crowds in the meadow with their Bacon swinging before them followed.
It is hardly necessary to add the comment of an historian of Essex on the attempt "to raise the ghost of the Custom": "The ceremony was only a theatrical parade of dry bones; the ancient spirit of the thing was not there—so impossible is it for society to go backward or to clothe with flesh the skeleton of an obsolete habit or dead custom, which modern feeling and refinement have long entombed."
Three years ago an imitation of the Dunmow celebration was attempted at Walthamstow.
In 1909 the farmers round about Dunmow, by co-operating to form a Dunmow Flitch Bacon Factory, carried forward the Bacon tradition on new lines.
This local record—by a Vegetarian! for tempora mutantur, and with the changed times which have overthrown the Flitch, nos mutamur in illis—should not close perhaps without the following extract from a rhyme in Punch. If a little better than some other poetical effusions on the subject of the Flitch, it certainly ignores the basic principle of the Flitch foundation, that it takes two to make a quarrel!—
If ever through the coming year,
You feel a mood of deep distress,
The cause whereof may not appear
(Maybe the cook, or cussedness);
If there should come the moment when
You seem to lose your self-control,
And counting slowly up to ten
Fails to relieve your soul;
If you should feel insanely prone
To controversial debate
Till reason totters on her throne
For pure desire to aggravate;
If you would madly say, you will,
Merely because I hope you won't,
Dear, though it almost makes you ill,
Think of the Flitch, and don't.
DUNMOW TOWN HALL, "COUNSEL FOR THE BACON", PRIORY CHURCH IN 1802