Chapter I · A Narrative of Nine Hundred Years
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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.
May not this conceivably be the Bacon of the popular saying?
The curious Dunmow Custom, by which a Flitch of Bacon has been given to married folk who have sworn that, for a year and a day, they have neither had differences nor wished themselves unwed, is certainly very old.
It may, indeed, have come over with the Conqueror. More than one book of antiquities avers that "at the abbey of Saint Melaine near Rennes"—the old capital of Brittany—there had been hanging, for more than six centuries, a side of Bacon "still quite fresh," which had been set apart for the first pair who "for a year and a day had lived without dispute and grumbling" and without repenting of their marriage.
To the Dunmow Custom we have a reference not only in old Chaucer, but in that great song of England, The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman, written under the shadow of the Black Death. Says the good Langland—
Many a couple since the Pestilence Have plighted them together; The fruit that they bring forth Is foul words In jealousy without happiness, And quarrelling in bed; They have no children but strife, And slapping between them, And though they go to Dunmow (Unless the Devil help!) To follow after the Flitch They never after obtain it; And unless they both are perjured, They lose the bacon.[*]
Then in Reliquiae Antiquae, which dates back to the fifteenth century, another poet, discoursing in relation to the Seventh Commandment, laments that he can
fynd no man that will enquere The parfyte wais unto Dunmow; For they repent them within a year, And many within a week and souner men trow.
Yet another century later one Howell says choicely—
Do not fetch your wife from Dunmow For so you may bring home two sides of a sow!
In fact, up and down our literature there are plenty of references to the Dunmow Flitch.