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.
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