Pace Egg play

The plays, which involved mock combat, were performed by Pace Eggers, who sometimes received gifts of decorated eggs from villagers.

[7] They often blacked their faces (as was common in English folk traditions such as Border Morris) and wore animal skins,[6] ribbons or coloured paper, masks, and sometimes wooden swords.

[11] In the early 1930s, the American folklorist James Madison Carpenter recorded a version from a man named Herbert James Blades in Hunton, Yorkshire, who had learnt the song 40 years prior from a Thomas Thompson (born c.1810); the recording is available on the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library website.

[7] Pace Egg plays were most common in Northern England, in the counties of Lancashire, Yorkshire and Northumberland.

[7] Many Pace Egg plays died out after the First World War, when many of the men who took part in them were killed in action.

[14] The Bury Pace Eggers were revived in 1970, and still perform in pubs and squares around the town and surrounding villages in the week before Easter.

That school is no longer interested in such things, but ex-pupils maintain the tradition, performing in the original Midgley, West Yorkshire location as well as at the tourist magnet, Heptonstall.