Flitch of bacon custom
The awarding of a flitch of bacon[a] to married couples who can swear to not having regretted their marriage for a year and a day is an old tradition, the remnants of which still survive in Great Dunmow, Essex.
A similar tradition practiced at Wychnor in Staffordshire can be traced back to the fourteenth century; related customs are also known from mainland Europe in Brittany and Vienna.
[2] In a version of this story created by the Victorian writer William Harrison Ainsworth, Fitzwalter and his wife disguised themselves as peasants and begged the prior of Dunmow for his blessing after a year of marriage; the prior gave the couple a flitch of bacon and Fitzwalter in return gave land to the priory on the condition that they should give a flitch of bacon to any subsequent couple who could swear that they had not regretted their marriage for a year.
[4] The Dunmow flitch was apparently widely known by the late fourteenth century, when it was alluded to by William Langland in Piers Plowman and Geoffrey Chaucer in "The Wife of Bath's Tale".
[2] The earliest surviving record of the flitch being awarded, from the cartulary of Dunmow Priory, dates to 1445, some time after the custom was mentioned by Langland and Chaucer.
[17] For the three awards of the flitch before the dissolution of the monasteries, there is no record of a jury judging the claimants; according to Steer "it must be assumed that the seriousness of the oath was sufficient to prevent perjury".
[19] The records dealing with the 1751 ceremony record the oath:[20] You shall swear by the custom of our confession That you never made any nuptial transgression Since you were marri'd man & wife By household brawls or contentious strife Or otherwise in bed or at board Offended each other in deed or in word Or since the parish clerk said Amen[b] Wished yourselves unmarri'd agen Or in a twelve month & a day Repented not in thought any way But continued true & in desire As when you join'd hands in holy quire If to these conditions without all fear Of your own accord you will freely swear A gammon of bacon you shall receive And bear it hence with love & good leave For this is our custom at Dunmow well known Though the sport be ours, the bacon's your own[14] It is uncertain whether the oath was originally sworn by the husband alone, or by both husband and wife.
Charles Kightly observes that the surviving oath has a "suspiciously 18th-century ring",[7] and Francis Peabody Magoun comments that it is "certainly centuries younger than that by which any friends of the Wife of Bath ever swore".
[8] In its modern incarnation, the awarding of the flitch involves a mock trial, with representatives for the claimants and "for the bacon" making their cases in front of an audience and jury.
[29] Successful modern claimants are carried in a chair, by bearers dressed in traditional outfits, from the trial location to the old town hall; there they swear the oath and are presented with the flitch.
[32] Since the revival of the Dunmow custom, flitch trials have been held in several other places in Britain, including Ilford, Tunbridge Wells, and Oulton Broad.
[1] The earliest literary references to the Dunmow flitch custom come from William Langland's Piers Plowman and Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale.
[43] It subsequently appears in the fifteenth-century poem Peter Idley's Instructions to His Son, where the narrator discusses the Dunmow flitch as encouragement to marital fidelity,[44] and Ben Jonson alludes to the custom in Bartholomew Fair.
[45] Henry Bate Dudley's "ballad opera" The Flitch of Bacon was first performed in 1778; it continued to be widely produced into the nineteenth century.
[27] The 1952 film Made in Heaven, starring David Tomlinson and Petula Clark, is about a married couple attempting to win the Dunmow flitch.
