on the conflux of two rivers – the Chelmer, whence the town is
called, and the Cann.
At Lees, or Lee’s Priory, as some call it, is to be seen an ancient
house in the middle of a beautiful park, formerly the seat of the
late Duke of Manchester, but since the death of the duke it is sold
to the Duchess Dowager of Buckinghamshire, the present Duke of
Manchester retiring to his ancient family seat at Kimbolton in
Huntingdonshire, it being a much finer residence. His grace is
lately married to a daughter of the Duke of Montagu by a branch of
the house of Marlborough.
Four market towns fill up the rest of this part of the country –
Dunmow, Braintree, Thaxted, and Coggeshall – all noted for the
manufacture of bays, as above, and for very little else, except I
shall make the ladies laugh at the famous old story of the Flitch
of Bacon at Dunmow, which is this:
One Robert Fitzwalter, a powerful baron in this county in the time
of Henry III., on some merry occasion, which is not preserved in
the rest of the story, instituted a custom in the priory here: That
whatever married man did not repent of his being married, or
quarrel or differ and dispute with his wife within a year and a day
after his marriage, and would swear to the truth of it, kneeling
upon two hard pointed stones in the churchyard, which stones he
caused to be set up in the Priory churchyard for that purpose, the
prior and convent, and as many of the town as would, to be present,
such person should have a flitch of bacon.
I do not remember to have read that any one ever came to demand it;
nor do the people of the place pretend to say, of their own
knowledge, that they remember any that did so. A long time ago
several did demand it, as they say, but they know not who; neither
is there any record of it, nor do they tell us, if it were now to
be demanded, who is obliged to deliver the flitch of bacon, the
priory being dissolved and gone.
The forest of Epping and Hainault spreads a great part of this
country still. I shall speak again of the former in my return from
this circuit. Formerly, it is thought, these two forests took up
all the west and south part of the county; but particularly we are
assured, that it reached to the River Chelmer, and into Dengy
Hundred, and from thence again west to Epping and Waltham, where it
continues to be a forest still.
Probably this forest of Epping has been a wild or forest ever since
this island was inhabited, and may show us, in some parts of it,
where enclosures and tillage has not broken in upon it, what the
face of this island was before the Romans’ time; that is to say,
before their landing in Britain.
The constitution of this forest is best seen, I mean as to the
antiquity of it, by the merry grant of it from Edward the Confessor
before the Norman Conquest to Randolph Peperking, one of his
favourites, who was after called Peverell, and whose name remains
still in several villages in this county; as particularly that of
Hatfield Peverell, in the road from Chelmsford to Witham, which is
supposed to be originally a park, which they called a field in
those days; and Hartfield may be as much as to say a park for doer;
for the stags were in those days called harts, so that this was
neither more nor less than Randolph Peperking’s Hartfield – that is
to say, Ralph Peverell’s deer-park.
N.B. – This Ralph Randolph, or Ralph Peverell (call him as you
please), had, it seems, a most beautiful lady to his wife, who was
daughter of Ingelrick, one of Edward the Confessor’s noblemen. He
had two sons by her – William Peverell, a famed soldier, and lord
or governor of Dover Castle, which he surrendered to William the
Conqueror, after the battle in Sussex, and Pain Peverell, his
youngest, who was lord of Cambridge. When the eldest son delivered