"Please the Pigs"

"*Please the Pigs*" is a phrase too vulgarly common not to be well known to your readers. But whence has it arisen? Either in "NOTES AND QUERIES," or elsewhere, it has been explained as a corruption of "Please the *pix*." Will you allow another suggestion? I think it possible that the pigs of the Gergesenes (Matthew viii. 28. *et seq.*) may be those appealed to, and that the invocation may be of somewhat impious meaning. John Bradford, the martyr of 1555, has within a few consecutive pages of his writings the following expressions: "And so by this means, as they save their pigs, which they wou…