Gillg, I can totally confirm what you say. When I was a young child I was terrified out of my mind one winter night, when a group of people, older than children, I think, who came into our kitchen, humming or mumming as you said, and swept around the table. I think they were given drink and cake before they swept out. (Perhaps that was the way to get them to go?) I also think it was somewhere round Christmas / New Year it took place - but over in Yorkshire, not Rochdale in our case.
The Pace Egg plays you mention are familiar too, and are still done each year by at least two groups touring round in the upper Calder Valley, so, quite close to the Lancashire border, and not all that far from Rochdale.
The speeches quoted seem word-for-word from these, and they are not just a Morris Tradition - the closest Morris-type dancers to that area would be the Brittannia Coconut Dancers, and it certainly wasn't them!
I think a School in the area started doing them in the 1950s, and later another group sort of "muscled in" and now seems almost to have supplanted the children/ young people doing the Pace (or Pascal) Egg plays. Years later I did a remembered version of the traditional Pace Egg Play for a young theatre group I knew, and they performed it with great aplomb.
Your account brought memories flooding back, though.
