04/04/2026
The origins of the Easter egg hunt. Happy Easter from the farm!
The Easter egg was not invented by a giant menacing bunny or a chocolate factory. They were born through 40 harsh days of medieval discipline.
During Lent in medieval England, eating eggs was completely forbidden. Not discouraged. Forbidden. This created an unusual problem: hens do not observe Lent. They kept laying through all 40 days, and every egg had to be either boiled to preserve it or thrown away.
By the time Easter Sunday arrived, medieval households had weeks of accumulated eggs sitting in storage, many of them hard-boiled and starting to turn. What do you do with several hundred eggs that need to be eaten immediately? You dye them, you decorate them, you give them as gifts, and you eat as many as humanly possible before they go off. The Easter egg tradition was not symbolic at first, it was a practical solution to a very specific medieval food storage problem.
The documented evidence for this is extraordinary. The household accounts of King Edward I of England, held in the British National Archives, record that in 1290 he spent 18 pence on 450 eggs decorated with gold leaf and dyed in bright colours, distributed to his royal household on Easter Sunday. That same year, the Bishop of Hereford, Richard Swinfield, threw an Easter feast for 70 guests that consumed, among other things, 4,000 eggs in a single day. Four thousand eggs. In one day!!! The surviving accounts list two and a half carcasses of salt beef, a bacon, two boars, one live ox, five pigs, six calves, 27 lambs, 12 capons, 148 pigeons and three fat deer alongside those 4,000 eggs. This is what 40 days of fasting looks like on the other end. Easter Sunday in medieval England was not a quiet family lunch. It was a release valve.
The tradition of hiding eggs for children to find, which everyone assumes is a modern commercial invention, is also medieval and also documented. Adults hid the surplus decorated eggs for children to find as a direct allegory: searching for the hidden egg was meant to teach children the experience of the disciples finding the empty tomb on Easter morning. The rolling of eggs downhill, still practiced in parts of England and at the White House lawn every year, began the same way. Children with surplus hard boiled eggs and a hill. The theological layer came later. The chocolate version did not appear until Germany in the early 19th century.
The hollow egg you unwrap on Sunday morning is the latest iteration of a tradition that began in a medieval monastery because nobody knew what to do with six weeks of accumulated eggs and a feast to feed.
Happy Holy Week. Go eat some eggs!
-Donnie
eatshistory.com
