Talk:Flitch of bacon custom

GA status?
I do not think that the article as it currently stands would pass a GA review. I have several minor issues with it, but the two major ones are based on the structure and the sourcing.

Firstly, the structure is odd. I can see no good reason why the article should discuss the Wychnor flitch before the Dunmow one, and it seems to me that this choice gives the Wychnor custom undue prominence. There are several reasons that the Dunmow custom ought in my view be first: it is, at least by tradition, the earlier custom (said to have been established either by Robert Fitzwalter who died in 1235, or at the founding of the priory in 1104; cf. Wychnor which is attributed to Philip de Somerville in 1336); it was continued for longer; it was the version of the custom which was revived and continued into the modern day, and is surely thus the more famous; and it is the subject of significantly more sources (including multiple books specifically on the topic of the Dunmow flitch). Even our article says that it is "rather better-known" than the Wychnor custom, which today is only ever mentioned as a parallel to the Dunmow one.

Secondly, the sourcing is erratic. The most comprehensive and recent book on the history of the flitch is Francis Steer's The History of the Dunmow Flitch Ceremony, published by the county record office in 1951; when this article was promoted I imagine that it was fairly obscure and hard to get hold of but it has since been digitised and put on archive.org and it's a fairly glaring omission. Instead, the current article is largely based on Victorian or pre-Victorian sources, and as a result does things like list two different names for the 1751 winner of the flitch, (modern sources from at least Steer onwards unanimously list the husband as Thomas Shakeshaft, as does the original record in the County Records Office as quoted by Steer). Using questionable sources also leads to us reporting fiction as fact: the story of the Vienna man who had his ham refused is, as Steer notes, also told of a claimant at Wychnor; there is good reason to be suspicious of this! (Indeed the section on Wychnor reports a version of this story quoted in the Spectator, but there it is described as "almost certainly fictitious"! Of course the source is simply the Spectator article itself, which does not actually support this analysis...)

I've been gradually working up a proposed rewrite offline, but as it's getting closer to being publishable I wanted to check in on the talkpage to see if anyone is still watching this article who would like either to collaborate or to tell me that they fundamentally disagree with my assessment of the issues Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 22:12, 5 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Update: I have published my drafted rewrite here. Along with the reordering and bringing in of more modern sourcing discussed above, I have also trimmed a lot of the more questionable stuff: for instance, given that nobody writing about the Wychnor flitch since Walpole seems to give any attention to him, I have cut all of the stuff about his letters as undue weight.  My proposal is thus quite a bit shorter than the current text. Given the scale of the changes I'm putting it here for the moment for comments; if nobody has any objections in a week or so I might push it to mainspace. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 20:53, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

Modern developments
Two (relatively) modern changes to the Dunmow flitch trial process:


 * 1) In the 1994 Dunmow Centenary Book, it says (p.227) that applicants "must have been married in Church". At least by 2006 (because it's mentioned by sources on the same-sex couple question, on which more below), any couple who had legally married, whether or not they had a Christian church ceremony, was apparently eligible. But while I can find sources saying that this is now the case, the best sources about the trials all seem to predate this change and I haven't found any reporting on the change yet.
 * 2) In 2006 there was a suggestion that since the passing of the Civil Partnership Act 2004, same-sex couples in legally recognised civil partnerships should be eligible to win the flitch.  There was reporting on the time about the controversy caused by this suggestion (BBC, Telegraph). In the event this proposal was not adopted, the reason given being that gay couples still could not get . In 2014 same-sex marriage was introduced in England, Wales, and Scotland, and so gay couples could have been eligible for the 2016 trials, but I cannot find any news articles discussing this possibility; for the 2022  and upcoming 2024 trials  I can find sources which do explicitly say that same-sex couples are eligible but again no sources seem to discuss when (or even that!) a change was made.

While I think it would be valuable to discuss how the tradition continues to change with the times in these two specific ways, until sources actually discuss these changes I'm not sure we really. We discuss the 2006 controversy about same-sex couples, but it seems misleading to do that without saying that same-sex couples are now eligible, and the sourcing to do that is remarkably thin: there is a bit of local news coverage which mentions it in passing. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 19:41, 8 May 2024 (UTC)