I'm taking the liberty to repost a several comments from the Mudcat thread "Help: Pace Egging"


Subject: RE: Help: Pace Egging?
From: sian, west wales - PM
Date: 15 Nov 00 - 05:09 AM

There's a version of this at Easter in parts of Wales, notably Anglesey. It's now a (dying) children's custom - going door to door with clappers (bits of wood that you slap together, sort of) and recite a poem asking for eggs…

thread.cfm?threadid=27721#340964

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Subject: RE: Help: Pace Egging?
From: Malcolm Douglas - PM
Date: 15 Nov 00 - 09:18 AM

The following is taken from Charles Kightly's The Customs and Ceremonies of Britain (Thames and Hudson, 1986); not the best reference available, but the only one I have to hand:

Paste (Pasch: Easter) or Pace Egging was ... popular throughout Northern England and Scotland…In earlier generations, [the song} would have been sung by young men - doubtless more interested in money and "small beer" than eggs - as part of a Pace-Egg Play, a regional variant of the Mumming Play: …

"…Once collected (or, in recent times, bought) "real" Easter eggs are still often painted, decorated or dyed either by boiling in a coloured cloth or with some natural dye like onion skins (for a golden-brown egg); furze-blossom (yellow); "Pasque flower" (bright green) or cochineal (for the favourite red). Then (if not eaten for breakfast) they may be concealed about the garden for an egg hunt: or, especially in northern Britain, hard-boiled for egg rolling down a hill or slope - the winner being, according to local preference, the one which rolls furthest, survives most rolls, or is successfully aimed between two pegs

"Alternatively, the eggs may be "dumped" (another northern habit) by being clasped firmly in the hand and smashed against that of an opponent until one or other breaks: or (as in parts of south-western England) a number may be marked and "shackled" (shaken) together in a sieve, the last to crack being the winner. All such old egg customs, however, are now in acute danger from the 20th century's principal contribution to the Easter canon, namely the chocolate Easter egg."

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Subject: RE: Help: Pace Egging?
From: TheBigPinkLad - PM
Date: 22 Apr 03 - 03:59 PM

Like Bill, I too hail from County Durham (Witton Park) and we used to either roll the eggs down a bank (called appropriately the Rolly Bank) or bash them together, called 'jarping.' We dyed the eggs by boiling with onion skins or with crepe paper left over from Christmas decorations.

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Subject: RE: Help: Pace Egging?
From: GUEST,Roger the skiffler - PM
Date: 15 Nov 00 - 05:55 AM

In Alderney in the Channel Isles they have a ceremony on "Milk-a-Punch Sunday" * when by tradition you could help yourself to an egg from anyone's henhouse and a jug of milk from their cow to be turned with rum and spices into a creamy punch. Each pub has its own recipe and devotees travel round the pubs trying them all (though they don't steal the ingredients anymore) until they collapse!
In Greece on Easter Sunday people take boiled eggs dyed red to church and after the marathon Easter service (being Greeks they break it up by popping out for a smoke and a chat while the poor priest carries on)they greet each other: "Christos Anestis" "Anestis Eleftheros" (pardon my poor transliteration) Meaning "Christ is risen" "He is risen indeed". Then you bang your egg against theirs for good luck for the year. Probably your good luck if theirs break. Probably same idea of egg =life, mixture of pagan and Christian tradition.
RtS

* the poster corrected this reference from "jug 'o punch Sunday" to
"Milk-a-Punch Sunday" in a subsequent post to that thread.