Page:Lancashire Legends, Traditions, Pageants, Sports, Etc., with an Appendix Containing a Rare Tract.djvu/144

 would be lost. The "ordinances" and "orders" may be found in Baines's Lancashire, and for the guilds of 1842 and 1862, see Dobson's History of Preston Guild.

THE PACE-EGG MUMMERS. from its title this piece of rustic pageantry and mumming apparently belongs to Easter, it is evident from the fourth, fifth, and sixth lines of the doggrel that it was a piece written for and enacted at Christmas. The writer has seen and heard it performed in the open air, before country houses, at both seasons, and some years ago a sort of dramatic entertainment of a similar kind was performed at the annual Christmas festive night of the Manchester Mechanics' Institute, in the old Free Trade Hall, Peter Street. The dramatis personæ are usually the Fool, whose byplay, antics, and buffeting of the spectators, especially women, with a bladder suspended to a stick, serve to sustain the action of the piece throughout; St George, the champion of England; Slasher, a soldier with sword and buckler; the Doctor, a specimen of the old itinerant quack-salver; the Prince of Paradine, wherever that may be; perhaps originally a misprint for Palestine. He is "a black Morocco dog," and the son of the King of Egypt, who, on finding his son slain, calls on Hector to slay St George. It is needless to say that the English champion defeats Hector, as he had before vanquished Slasher and the Prince; and here ends the heroic part of the piece. As is found in many of these relics of mediæval pageants, the play ends with the appearance of two devils, Beelzebub and Little Devil Doubt.