On a sheet pasted on the last page of a volume of MSS. consisting of extracts from the Red Book of the Exchequer ("Transcripta ex Libro Rubeo in Scarrario"), the foregoing entries are recorded in cramped English, and also a third, which, as a matter of fact, is written first-- Memorandum: that one Stephen Samuel, of Little Easton, in the County of Essex, Husbandman, came to the Priory of Dunmow, on our Lady-day in Lent, in the Seventh year of King Edward IV, and required a Gammon of Bacon, and was sworn before Roger Bulcott, then Prior, and the Convent of this place, as also before a multitude of other neighbours, and there was delivered to him a Gammon of Bacon. It will be seen that in two cases it was a Gammon not a Flitch of Bacon that was awarded. (A Flitch is a side, a Gammon a leg of Bacon.) It is also of interest to notice that, in the cases reported, the Bacon is given to a man, not to a husband and wife. An historian also speaks of "the Pilgrim" and of "_his_ Bacon being borne before _him_." The first recorded presentation of the Bacon is dated, as will be observed, 1445. But, in view of the allusion in Chaucer a century before, it is plain that the custom must have existed even before his time. The references to the custom in other early authors would also seem to point to the fact of it having been frequently observed. There are, however, only three gifts of the Bacon noted down in the documents of the Priory, now in the care of the British Museum. CHAPTER IV The Vanished Cloisters There is little now to be seen of the old Priory spoken of by Leland. Approached from the hamlet, the existing Priory Church of Little Dunmow, with its roof of staring blue slates, its factory chimney-like bell tower and mean walling, attracts attention only by its oddity. But when one walks up the farm land from which the south side of the building may be viewed, one receives a different impression. In the architecture now seen there are the lines where beauty lingers, the lines which tell of a splendid structure. The remains of no common building stand in solitary domination of these quiet corn fields. One enters the church and is surprised, as Mr. Hartley has written, by that indefinable feeling which ever strikes us on our entry into a spacious and beautiful edifice. That the building is a fragment of what must have been a structure of extreme beauty becomes evident. Columns of such dimensions and arches of such design were never intended for purpose so slight as the support of the present roof; windows of such size and elegance were made for shedding light upon a much more spacious interior than we now find.