Talk:Flitch of bacon custom

Flitch of bacon custom has been listed as one of the Social sciences and society good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Review: July 17, 2013. (Reviewed version).

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A fact from Flitch of bacon custom appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 1 March 2010 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that a flitch of bacon was offered at Wychnor Hall to married couples if they could swear that they did not regret their union, but it was so rarely claimed it was replaced with a wooden one?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2010/March.

Wikipedia

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Flitch of bacon custom/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Adam Cuerden (talk · contribs) 00:58, 17 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This looks like a pretty good article. Well-written, entertaining, comprehensive, and well-referenced.

The only problem, really, is a few missing references in the last section, so once those are sorted, this can easily be promoted. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 00:58, 17 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What facts specifically do you think are so dubious that they need to be provided with citations? Bear in mind that GA criterion 2b does not require every sentence to be sourced. Spinning Spark 13:20, 17 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, obviously. But there are certain amounts of "good practice" to consider. I've marked it; I'll see if any of it can be cited. The last one (the film existing) is probably optional, but better done.

One other issue: "The flitch of bacon" is very weird capitalization for an opera title. I'm going to capitalize it.

Also, I found a source for the opera: Hauger, George (Oct. 1950). "William Shield". Music & Letters. 31 (4). Oxford University Press: 337–342. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link). I think the book is already cited in the article. I'll check and copy that source, leaving just the film. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 16:07, 17 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Right. Here's a list of the changes I've made:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Flitch_of_bacon_custom&diff=564673170&oldid=563735335

It's generally good practice to have a citation at least for every paragraph. Mainly just enough to show things exist, and provide a little more information if people are interested. ✓ Pass Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 16:43, 17 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

As a bit of a late aside, I do think this would be a good FAC. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 16:39, 18 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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, both of which are wrong (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)[reply]

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)[reply]

Modern developments

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

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.
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 married. 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 ([1]) and upcoming 2024 trials ([2]) 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 can. We could 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)[reply]