WHY Mistress Fripp,’ said the Vicar. ‘I didn’t know you had such a fine pig. You’ll have some rare flitches at Christmas!’ Mr Gilfil the churchman can’t resist imagining this magnificent porker carved up and gracing plates over the festive season. Novelist George Eliot’s fictional clergyman appears in her Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) and, in mid-19th-century England, few cottagers’ pigs could expect an active existence beyond December. Mr Gilfil, however, is in for a surprise. Having chanced upon Mistress Fripp sitting in a dry ditch with her pig’s head in her lap, she retorts: ‘Eh, God forbid! My son get him me two ’ear ago, an’ he’s been company to me over sin’. I couldn’t find i’ in my heart to part wi’m, if I never knowed the taste o’ bacon-fat again.’
Long-bodied, stocky-legged, omnivorous, bristled has found favour with small-scale farming folk for centuries, as grunty, convivial companions (1669).
