In the midland districts of Ireland, viz., the province of Connaught, on Good Friday, it is a common practice with the lower orders of Irish Catholics to prevent their children having any sustenance, even to those at the breast, from twelve o’clock on the previous night to the same hour on Friday, and the fathers and mothers will only take a small piece of dry bread and a draught of water during the day. It is a common sight to see along the roads between the different market towns, numbers of women with their hair dishevelled, barefooted, and in their worst garments: all this is in imitation of Christ’s Passion.—Every Day Book, vol. ii. p. 411.
March 21.] EASTER EVE.
March 21.]
EASTER EVE.
On Easter Eve it was customary in our own country to light in the churches what was called the Paschal Taper. In Coates’s History of Reading (1802, p. 131) is the following extract from the Churchwarden’s accounts: “Paid for makynge of the Paschall and the Funte Taper, 5s. 8d.” A note on this observes, “The Pascal taper was usually very large. In 1557 the Pascal taper for the Abbey Church of Westminster was 300 pounds weight.”—Brand, Pop. Antiq., 1849, vol. i. p. 158.
On the eves of Easter and Whitsunday Font-hallowing was one of the very many ceremonies in early times. The writer of a MS. volume of Homilies in the Harleian Library, No. 2371, says, “in the begynning of holy chirch, all the children weren kept to be chrystened on thys even, at the font-hallowyng; but now, for enchesone that in so long abydynge they might dye without chrystendome, therefore holi chirch ordeyneth to chrysten in all tymes of the yeare, save eyght dayes before these evenys the chylde shalle abyde till the font-hallowing, if it may safely for perill of death, and ells not.”
Cumberland, etc.
In Cumberland and Westmoreland, and other parts of the north of England, boys beg, on Easter Eve, eggs to play with, and beggars ask for them to eat. These eggs are hardened by boiling, and tinged with the juice of herbs, broom-flowers, &c. The eggs being thus prepared, the boys go out and play with them in the fields; rolling them up and down like bowls upon the ground, or throwing them up like balls into the air.—Brand, Pop. Antiq. 1849, vol. i. p. 172.