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FOLK LORE.

Easter Eggs.—­The custom of presenting eggs at Easter is too well known to need description; but perhaps few are aware that, like many other customs of the early Church, it had its origin in paganism.

Sir R.K.  Porter (Travels, vol. i. p. 316.) mentions that at a period of the year corresponding to Easter, “the Feast of nooroose, or of the waters,” is held, and seems to have had its origin prior to Mahometanism.  It lasts for six days, and is supposed to be kept in commemoration of the Creation and the Deluge—­events constantly synchronised and confounded in pagan cosmogonies.  At this feast eggs are presented to friends, in obvious allusion to the Mundane egg, for which Ormuzd and Ahriman were to contend till the consummation of all things.

When the many identities which existed between Druidism and Magianism are considered, we can hardly doubt that this Persian commemoration of the Creation originated our Easter-eggs.

G.J.

Buns.—­It has been suggested by Bryant, though, I believe, not noticed by any writer on popular customs, that the Good Friday cakes, called Buns, may have originated in the cakes used in idolatrous worship, and impressed with the figure of an ox, whence they were called [Greek:  boun].  The cow or bull was likewise, as Coleridge (Lit.  Rem. vol. ii. p. 252.) has justly remarked, the {245} symbol of the Cosmos, the prolific or generative powers of nature.

G.J.

Gloucestershire Custom.—­It is a custom in Gloucestershire, and may be so in other counties, to place loose straw before the door of any man who beats his wife.  Is this a general custom?—­and if so, what is its origin and meaning?

B.

Curious Custom.—­The custom spoken of by “PWCCA” (No. 11 p. 173.) was also commonly practised in one or two places in Lancashire some ten or twelve years back, but is now, I believe, obsolete.  The horse was played in a similar way, but the performer was then called “Old Balls.”  It is no doubt a vestige of the old “hobby-horse,”—­as the Norwich “Snap,” who kept his place in the procession of the mayor of that good city till the days of municipal reform, was the last representative of his companion the dragon.

J.T.

[Nathan also informs us “that it is very common in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where a ram’s head often takes the place of the horse’s skull.  Has it not an obvious connection with the ‘hobby-horse’ of the middle ages, and such mock pageants as the one described in Scott’s Abbot, vol. i. chap. 14.; the whole being a remnant of the Saturnalia of the ancients?”]

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QUERIES.

WHITE HART INN, SCOLE.