The tradition of eating chocolate eggs at Easter dates from the Great Egg Shortage of 1527, the result of an epidemic of chicken blight that swept the English countryside. Mr John Cadbury, a cloth merchant from Shrewsbury, struck on the idea of replacing the eggs with chocolate (a recent import from the New World) fashioned into an egg-like shape. The idea caught on and soon every fashionable household in the land had its own collection of Mr Cadbury's Marvellous Chocolate Eggs. Some years later Mr Cadbury decided to fill the eggs with a substance called 'creme' (a mixture of putty and syrup) and changed the name to something a bit more snappy: thus was born the Cadbury's Creme Egg that we know and love today.