There is a like custom of Wicknor in Staffordshire, but the ultra-learned seem to me to have overstrained their fancies in imagining a common origin for these flitches of bacon, and the "sow and pigs" which, according to "Murray," are frequently seen on the carved bosses of church roofs in Devonshire, and in suggesting a connection between the Dunmow flitch, which after all was but a gammon, and the flitch which according to Dion Halicarnassus, was kept at the Temple of Alba Longa until the time of Augustus, because Æneas found there the white sow and pigs. It may be true that it was the custom of the Prussians of old time to offer a flitch of bacon to the thunder-god whenever a thunderstorm came. As for the sow and pigs on the roofs of Devonshire churches, they seem to me to have no more direct connection with the Dunmow flitch than "the sow and pigs" as an inn sign (which may be seen in Oxfordshire and perhaps elsewhere), or than the Gadarene swine. Surely, when there is an obvious and historical explanation there is no sort of need for plunging into the troubled waters of comparative folk-lore. Robert Fitz-Walter desired to establish a reward for conjugal fidelity. That is plain, and there was nothing out of the way about such a desire in times when foundations similar in character, rewards for constancy in servants and the like, were by no means uncommon. It probably never occurred to him that the claimants would be other than peasants. The recorded claimants in fact were in 1445, a labourer and his wife; in 1510, a fuller; in 1701, a butcher; in 1751, a woolcomber; the three last with their wives of course; and in the other cases the callings of the claimants are not recorded. Fitz-Walter's domain was situate in the heart of the forest country, a land of innumerable oak trees, whereon herds of swine were fed upon the acorns in autumn, under the care of the successors in title of Gurth the Swineherd. To the peasantry the pig was, economically speaking, everything; for that matter he is a great deal to them still since, take him for all in all, he is the most profitable of domestic animals. What could be more natural than that the great landowner should establish as the reward of fidelity among peasants a part of the familiar beast whom they knew best, and whom, to this day, they like best on the table. Those who have seen the excitement of pig-killing at a cottage home, who know how it spells plenty of fresh meat for a while, and how large a part fat bacon plays in the meals which the agricultural labourer eats under the lee of a hedge, will not desire to go to Alba Longa for an explanation of the Dunmow flitch; nor, in a country where "chaw-bacon" was once synonymous with farm labourer--unhappily they now consume tinned meat instead--need we think in their connection of the sacrifices of the ancient Prussians. Robert Fitz-Walter could not have devised a benefaction more to the taste of the intended recipients.