in every way worthy of Hogarth. We are, by the courtesy of Messrs. W. & R. Chambers, enabled to include a woodcut of it from their "Book of Days." William Hone in his "Every Day Book," reproduces a print of great rarity "sold by John Bowles, Map and Printseller, in Cornhill," entitled "The Manner of Claiming the Gammon of Bacon, etc., by Thomas Shakeshaft and Ann his wife." We give a copy of the picture on page 149.

Its

The antique chair in which the successful claimants were formerly carried is still preserved in the chancel of Little Dunmow church. dimensions are such as to bring the loving pair who may occupy it in a rather close juxtaposition. It is undoubtedly of great antiquity, probably the official chair of the Prior, or that of the Lord of the Manor, in which he held his usual courts and received the suit and service of his tenants. It in no way chairs of ancient halls.

of this interesting relic.

differs from the chief We furnish an engraving

The claimants were first carried about the Priory churchyard and then through the town, the bacon being bore before them.

According to a newspaper of 1772, on the 12th

June that year, John and Susan Gilder, of Terling, in Essex, made their public entry into Dunmow, escorted by a great concourse of people, and demanded the gammon of bacon, according to

notice previously given, declaring themselves ready to take the usual oath; but to the great disappointment of the happy couple and their numerous attendants, the Priory gates were found

fast nailed, and all admittance refused, in pursuance of the express orders of the Lord of the Manor.

In 1851, Mr. and Mrs. Hurrell, owners and occupiers of a farm at Felsted, Essex, claimed from the Lord of the Manor the bacon, but he declined to give it, on account of the custom being so long dormant. The inhabitants of Great Dunmow presented it to them at a fête in Easton Park.

Shortly after the publication of "The Flitch of Bacon," a popular novel by W. Harrison Ainsworth, there was a revival of ye ancient custom, in which he took an active interest. The history of the modern presentations do not come within the scope of this work.

A Deserted Primitive Village.

BY G. FREDK. BEAUMONT.

HE sites of the early villages of this country

ΤΗ

can in a great many instances be traced by the remains of earthworks, stonecircles, and other material external evidences, but, in the majority of cases, there is literally nothing left to indicate to the transient observer that some of the lands which the husbandman of these latter days yearly cultivates for his fellow man, once bore the habitations of his ruder forefathers. But to the archæologist to the comparative philologistthere are voices which, though they have slumbered long, are now waking from the deep delved earth to tell their tales of bygone days.

The fair fields of old England would lose one of their charms if their archaic names were allowed to be lost in oblivion. "There is much," says Carlyle, nay almost all in names; the name is the earliest garment you wrap round the earth, to which it thenceforth cleaves more tenaciously

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(for there are names that have lasted nigh thirty centuries) than the very skin."

The fields of Essex, in common with the fields of other counties, have many tales to unfold; relating now how that in the distant ages past they bore upon the once green sward the village council deliberating in rude form upon their rights and wrongs, prescribing laws and meting out the measure due to each; how that a mound was heaped o'er some great warrior, and clustered round it rose the lesser mounds of those who falling on some field of blood had perished with their chief. The fields may also tell of the gallows place where culprits hung their final hours and passed to other realms.

The locality which is now to come under consideration has hitherto received no attention from an archæological point of view, and there is little, save in the field names, to lead the observer to the conclusion that it once may have been the home of one of those little Anglo-Saxon communities whose members gathered periodically around the moot-hill or beneath the sacred tree.

The place in question is about two miles from the ancient little town of Coggeshall, between the two great Roman ways which once bore the