The outer right-hand side of the chair is carved with wheel-like decorations, but on the left-hand side the surface of the wood is plain, and various mortices are visible, which show that the seat is part of a larger structure, being, in fact, the end unit of a series of stalls. The truth is that the chair used by merry-makers at the ceremony of the Flitch, is actually a waif from the conventual establishment. It is, one is bound to admit, a remarkable coincidence that the chair and ceremony should have had their origin in the same reign, but the fact that it is only part of some fitted furniture, precludes the possibility of it having been designed for the purpose for which it was used in later years. In the accounts available of the awarding of the Flitch after the closing of the religious houses by Henry VIII we hear of "two great stones near the Church door" on which the applicant for the Bacon had to kneel. Whether they are still in existence is uncertain. What are to-day pointed out as the stones on which the Pilgrims knelt may possibly be the bases of two of the many columns which local vandals in want of building material have demolished. They are certainly not "sharp," as some chroniclers describe the stones to have been. A pair of stones like those in the Church are to be seen in Little Dunmow village. In Hone's _Table Book_, published about the time of the accession of Queen Victoria, it is said that "the two great stones" were then in the Church. But whether the writer of this statement had actually seen them for himself does not appear. It may perhaps be mentioned that, as the first presentations of the Bacon were made seemingly not to wedded pairs but to husbands only, there could not be at this early stage of the history of the Custom any need for "two" stones. The present stones are each only about half a foot in diameter and the right distance apart for one person to kneel on them. They could hardly be described as "great" stones. CHAPTER V A Tale of Tyranny and War Below the pavement of the Priory Church many dead sleep. Four graves only are marked by stones. One resting-place, supposed to be that of the Lady Juga, the foundress of the Priory, is covered by a slab of grey marble "coffin-fashioned, with a cross flory." Over three other tombs are mutilated alabaster effigies, once "heedlessly thrown among heaps of bricks and rubbish." Begun, Dugdale and Morant say, in 1104, the Priory was more than a century a-building. Indeed, it was as late as 1501 that "five bells were blessed in Dunmow steeple." Only thirty-four years were to pass before the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It is doubtful if the Priory was even then finished. In fact, in the expenses of the Priory for 1534 are payments to two men "for making of ix foote of the stepull." (_See_ Appendix.)