For corrections or for any light on difficulties still confronting the historian of the Flitch, the Author will be greatly obliged.
In order to save labour to other students of the subject, he may perhaps mention that he has searched the following MSS. at the British Museum: "Registrum Cartarum Prioratus de Dunmawe," "Exscripta è Chronico de Dunmow," "Collectanea ex Chronico de Dunmowe," "Excerpta ex Chronico de Parva Dunmowe," "Memorandum de Pernis, a Prioratu de Dunmowe," the household accounts of the last Prior of Dunmow, and "Transcripta ex Libro Rubeo in Scarrario," and has glanced through certain Court Rolls. One list of presentations of the Bacon (which appears in Leland) is described in the catalogue at the British Museum as "perhaps a fragment of some larger work on the subject." Does it still exist?
GREAT CANFIELD, DUNMOW. Christmas, 1909.
CHAPTER I
A Narrative of Nine Hundred Years
Everybody knows that delightful Shakespearean scene in which Sir John Falstaff robs the travellers at Gadshill. But some readers of the play must have been puzzled a little by the sorry Knight's ejaculation—
"On, bacons, on!"
From the Conquest, however, it had been common to call the multitude hogs. To this practice, it has been declared, we owe the phrase "to save one's bacon." Is not bacon the back and sides of the hog—the part, therefore, on which a blow would generally fall? And is not "to save one's bacon," obviously, to escape a blow?
But it is possible that "to save one's bacon" may have had, in part at any rate, another origin. In "The Wife of Bath's Prologue" in the Canterbury Tales, which were given to the world as long ago as the fourteenth century, Chaucer's free-spoken dame says—
The bacon wae not fet for hem, I trow,
That som men have in Essex at Donmow.