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I've too much time on my hands today :-)
Here's what Michal Quinion's World Wide Words says on the matter:
Whilst we are on the subject of consuming unconsumables: the expression to eat one?s hat, expressing one?s complete confidence in the outcome being described??if that horse doesn?t win, I?ll eat my hat??dates in this form only from 1836, when it appeared in Charles Dickens? Pickwick Papers: ?If I knew as little of life as that, I?d eat my hat and swallow the buckle whole?. According to the OED, the phrase used to appear sometimes in the form eat old Rowley?s hat, though I?ve never seen it and the OED has no citations for it. Who Rowley was I suspect nobody knows. There was a Jacobean playwright named William Rowley and Thomas Chatterton?s supposed medieval monkish poet was named Thomas Rowley, though it is just as probable that Rowley was a character in a story or some minor personage now quite forgotten. There were earlier expressions invoking one?s hat in support of some assertion: by my hat (which turns up in Love?s Labour Lost), my hat to a halfpenny, and I?ll bet a hat, so it is possible that Dickens? formation may draw on one or other of these and on the then newish eat humble pie.
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