The Materials of Early Theatre: Sources, Images, and Performance: Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies [1 ed.] 1472488083, 9781472488084

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Also in the Variorum Collected Studies Series:

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VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES

The Materials of Early Theatre: Sources, Images, and Performance

Meg Twycross Edited by Sarah Carpenter and Pamela King

The Materials of Early Theatre: Sources, Images, and Performance

Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Sarah Carpenter and Pamela King; individual chapters, Meg Twycross The right of Sarah Carpenter and Pamela King to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of Meg Twycross for the individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Twycross, Meg, author. | Carpenter, Sarah, editor. | King, Pamela M., editor. Title: The materials of early theatre: sources, images, and performance : shifting paradigms in early English drama studies / Meg Twycross ; edited by Sarah Carpenter and Pamela King. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Variorum collected studies series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017030229| ISBN 9781472488084 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315123004 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Theater--England--History--Medieval, 500-1500. | Theater--Production and direction--England--History. | English drama--To 1500--History and criticism. | Mysteries and miracle-plays, English--History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN2587 .T87 2018 | DDC 792.0942/0902--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017030229 ISBN: 978-1-4724-8808-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-12300-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES CS1068

CONTENTS

Introduction by Sarah Carpenter and Pamela King

ix

Part I: York   1. ‘“Places to hear the play”: pageant stations at York 1398–1572’, Records of Early English Drama Newsletter, (1978:2), pp. 10–33

3

  2. ‘The left-hand-side theory: a retraction’, Medieval English Theatre, 14 (1992), pp. 77–94

27

  3. ‘Some aliens in York and their overseas connections up to 1470’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 29 (1998), pp. 359–80

45

  4. ‘The King’s Peace and the play: the York Corpus Christi Eve Proclamation’, Medieval English Theatre, 29 (2007), pp. 121–50

63

 5. ‘The Ordo paginarum revisited, with a digital camera’, ‘Bring Furth the Pagants’: Essays in Early English Drama presented to Alexandra F. Johnston, ed. by David N. Klausner and Karen Sawyer Marsalek (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 105–31

89

Part II: Performance   6. ‘Playing the Resurrection’, Medieval Studies for J.A.W. Bennett Aetatis Suae LXX, ed. by Peter Heyworth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), pp. 273–96

115

  7. ‘Books for the unlearned’, Drama and Religion, ed. by James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 65–110

135

vii

contents   8. ‘“Transvestism” in the mystery plays’, Medieval English Theatre, 5:2 (1983), pp. 123–80

185

Part III: Theology   9. ‘“As the sun with his beams when he is most bright”’, Medieval English Theatre, 12:1 (1990), pp. 34–79

239

10. ‘“With what body shall they come?”: black and white souls in the mystery plays’, Langland, the Mystics, and the Medieval Religious Tradition, ed. by Helen Phillips (Cambridge: Brewer, 1990), pp. 271–86

281

11. ‘Kissing cousins: the Four Daughters of God and the Visitation in the N. Town Mary Play’, Medieval English Theatre, 18 (1998 for 1996), pp. 99–141

299

Part IV: Processions and the wider culture 12. ‘The Flemish ommegang and its pageant cars’, Medieval English Theatre, 2:1 (1980), pp. 15–41, and 2:2 (1980), pp. 80–98

337

13. ‘Felsted of London: silk-dyer and theatrical entrepreneur’, Medieval English Theatre, 10:1 (1988), pp. 4–16

391

14. ‘The York Mercers’ Lewent Brede and the Hanseatic trade’, Medieval English Theatre, 17 (1995), pp. 96–119

403

15. ‘The Leuven ommegang and Leuven City Archives: report on work in progress’, European Drama 4: Selected Papers from the Fourth International Conference on ‘Aspects of European Medieval Drama’, Camerino, 5–8 August 1999, ed. by André Lascombes (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), pp. 77–90

423

Meg Twycross’ bibliography Index

437 441

viii

INTRODUCTION

In bringing together the volumes in this series the General Editors are ­attempting to bring to a wider scholarly and student readership the most important twentieth- and early twenty-first-century scholarship on English medieval drama/theatre. In the second half of the twentieth century there were some fundamental shifts in our knowledge of medieval theatre and its practice. The authors in this series, Professor Alexandra Johnston (Toronto), Professor Peter Meredith, (Leeds), Professor David Mills (Liverpool) and Professor Meg Twycross, (Lancaster), have between them been respons­ ible for some of the most important research in this field. The purpose of the series is to widen the readership for their work and make it more accessible to scholars in related areas. There are also many young scholars of medieval drama/theatre who are not aware of the depth of investigation that has ­already been carried out in their field. It is important, therefore, that they do not feel the need to ‘reinvent the wheel’ when the ‘wheel’ has already been invented. The essays selected for this volume are chosen to reflect the important and intersecting ways in which over the last forty years Meg Twycross has shifted paradigms for people reading early English religious drama. From her earliest engagement with late medieval theatre, in innovative productions of rarely performed plays, her focus has been on performance in its many aspects. Striking out from the close focus on texts which characterised scholarship until the early 1970s, she explored the processes of staging, acting and organisation, and the theological and civic contexts that shaped the ways in which drama engaged its audiences. Her work was based in experimental production, in pioneering work in archival records alongside the Records of Early English Drama project, in sensitive readings of devotional and theological sources, in the rich field of visual imagery and analogues, and in meticulous and innovative manuscript scholarship. These all contributed to new ways of understanding the theatricality of medieval religious drama, and the complexity with which it engaged with its social and spiritual contexts. This volume chooses four of the most important strands of Meg Twycross’ work, concentrating especially on essays that are not easily available today. ix

i n t ro d u c t i o n One strand focuses on the York plays, a recurrent topic which her work has illuminated from many different angles across the last four decades. Early work focused on the pragmatics of processional wagon performance, exploring how the specifics of location, orientation and local involvement affected the reception of the plays. Work on the wider civic context demonstrated how richly the drama grew out of and engaged with its city community, while innovative transcription work on the surviving manuscripts has illuminated the shifting and continually developing forms of what was once assumed to be an unchanging cycle. Another strand opened a range of new ways of understanding acting and performance in late medieval theatre in Britain and across Europe. Insights arise both from close analysis of single plays in performance, and from exploration of broad and sometimes unfamiliar modes of performance. An essay on the York Resurrection Play examines through practice research the nature and effect of the demonstrative style adopted when performers project verse lines and accompanying gesture to mobile outdoor audiences. It helps readers to recognise the ways in which performance might engage audiences in the experience of religious drama. A wider consideration of the effects of male performers cross-dressing to take on female roles in these plays addresses crucial questions about theatrical transvestism in the late medieval period. An investigation of works of lay devotion not only contributes to source study of the plays, but also shines light on the ways in which readers and viewers were primed and trained to affective response, offering further insight into audience reception. Turning to the plays themselves, a group of essays illuminates why scenes are staged in the ways they are, verbally and by extrapolation visually, by close reading of texts against the background of medieval theology. Episodes and images in the plays, some so brief as almost to escape notice, are shown to arise from rich theological traditions. The transfiguration of the Virgin at the Annunciation, the kissing of Peace and Truth at the Parliament of Heaven, or even the apparently obvious ‘black and white souls’ of Doomsday are shown to carry complex meanings and an unnoticed cultural weight, helping us to understand the ways in which they are dramatised. A research interest that ranges beyond but also underlies all these strands is demonstrated in the attention paid to wider contexts of medieval theatre, be it European analogues, the communities from which plays emerged or the materiality of their social environment. A vivid account of the Flemish Ommegang brought to students of English processional drama a spectacular continental analogue few had or, indeed, have encountered. Locating and piecing together widely scattered scraps of record evidence brings to life the career of a theatrical entrepreneur of the early sixteenth century, while research into the etymo­ logy of fabric terms and the Hanseatic cloth trade opens up the material and social culture of the community that produced the York Mercers’ spectacular Doomsday pageant. x

i n t ro d u c t i o n These thematic strands are reflective of Meg Twycross’ major contribution to the field. They also represent those areas from her wider work which will have most utility and value for those, whether students or senior specialists in areas beyond early drama, who are looking for ways to understand English medieval plays. The crucial work that has been done here has opened new perspectives on late medieval theatre and will allow new generations to begin their study and research from further along the road.

I ‘“Places to hear the play”: pageant stations at York, 1398–1572’ appeared in Volume 3:2 of the REED Newsletter in 1978. The year 1978 was something of a watershed year for medieval English drama studies: it saw the publication of the Records of Early English Drama’s first set of records, York, edited by Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, and it was also the year in which Meg Twycross organised the first Medieval English Theatre meeting in Lancaster, generating the first volume of the journal of the same name, which appeared the following year. Both enterprises have continued to thrive and expand in ambition and reputation ever since. The article Meg wrote is reproduced here with all its meticulously handdrawn charts of the stations and their ownership along the route of the Corpus Christi Play in York. These were the days long before digital technologies offered solutions to such schematic illustration. The research style and particular mode of enquiry behind this article, however, offer clear indications of why Meg was later to embrace with enthusiasm the possibilities of the digital age. Dissatisfied with Anna Jean Mill’s previous identification of the stations, with characteristic tenacity, patience and distrust of all previous accounts, Meg set about working with the surviving lists from the Council Minutes, and the Chamberlains’ Books and Rolls of Account, neither reliably accurate nor legible. Lists of nothing but names were made to yield up evidence within a larger pattern. Indeed, no stone is left unturned as the House Books and the Memorandum Books, as well as unpublished antiquarian sources are plundered until Meg writes: I have had a problem about how much information to put on the chart. It would, of course, be possible in many cases to append an entire biography in little … [but] there are over 225 names, with information ranging from ‘nothing else known’ to full biographies. The reader should realise that the chart itself is merely the tip of a social iceberg. Thus, what began as a schematic exercise turns quickly into a re-creation of the social and genealogical make-up of medieval York. The knowledge thus xi

i n t ro d u c t i o n gained was, moreover, added to and teased out through most of her research in years to follow. But the retraction of one of the conclusions here was also to lead down another fruitful line of enquiry: ‘In trying to identify actual houses, I have been brought to an extremely interesting though necessarily tentative conclusion. Those stations which we can identify are all on the lefthand side of the route.’ ‘The left-hand-side theory: a retraction’ was to wait until volume 14 of the by then well-established journal Medieval English Theatre, although the ideas within it had been developing for much longer. By this time Meg’s own productions had demonstrated that she had moved on from her belief that wagons played side-on to one side of the street, but the academy continued to quote what she said in 1978. Thus, she finally felt she had to go into print to say plainly: ‘I have changed my mind.’ Firstly, Meg had accepted Eileen White’s work, which showed that some stations on the 1569 route were indisputably on the right-hand side. Secondly, and much more contentiously, she had concluded that the proscenium booth on wheels, a ‘side-on wider-than-it-was-high box’ enclosed on three sides, supported by David Gee’s imaginative reconstruction of the Coventry plays, was quite wrong. Since the initial explorations of pageant wagons in the late 1970s, scholars had begun to look at continental pageant-cars and Spanish pasos, all of which are orientated end-on. Readers are introduced to the desirability of wagons being ‘transpicuous’, with viewers getting a good view from all or most of three sides of the wagon. Van Alsoot’s painting of The Triumph of Isabella in Brussels, conveniently available as an Athena printed poster that all medieval theatre students bought for their study-bedroom walls, assisted the case. The article makes clear that none of the examples, which include Japanese floats in Kyoto and Nagahama, is being invoked as an instance of cultural interchange, but that they ‘present an interesting non-culture-specific solution to a common situation’ – that is, how in a narrow street to make a tableau or moving action visible to the maximum number of spectators possible. The solution proposed has resolved itself into the still-heated side-on-or-end-on debate, but re-reading the original essay reminds us that the other element which Meg considers is the matter of height and the imposing additional visibility that this confers. As she further observes, heavy lifting machinery is more stable if mounted to the short back side of an end-on wagon. She concludes on an aesthetic point, however, that we must remember came before many medieval theatre scholars had ever looked at a real live procession: Unlike modern indoor theatre, the set does not disappear when the play is at an end, nor is it an ‘unworthy scaffold’ only brought to life by the actors. The humdrum business of dragging it along the street and setting it up is not an embarrassment to be got over as quickly as possible, but an essential part of the show, a trailer, an xii

i n t ro d u c t i o n anticipation-stirrer. The main sense of this is lost if you allow your waggons to sidle into place. In ‘Some aliens in York and their overseas connections up to 1470’, which appeared in Leeds Studies in English in 1998, another set of assumptions about the York of the cycle was attacked, drawing on Meg’s growing knowledge both of the who’s who, and where to find them, of medieval York. This builds on the groundwork for the 1978 essay, but also on her work on processions and pageants in the Low Countries, which had contributed to the retraction of the left-hand-side theory and is more widely reflected in her essays on the ommegangen. And this time it was about potential cultural interchange. The essay sets about demonstrating that there were many more resident aliens from the Low Countries in York in the period of the Play than had previously been acknowledged, certainly by theatre scholars, but also by urban historians. With typical thoroughness, Meg not only went through the available records in York itself, but also visited in person the places in the Low Countries from which York’s alien merchants came, and in which the younger sons of indigenous York merchants lived, ‘on the other side’, facilitating family business interests. The essay is presented as ‘work in progress’ and ends with a number of provocative questions that have yet to be adequately ­addressed: Can we prove that any of our Flemings and Brabanders had any influence over what the plays looked like? That the people directly connected with the plays were also either aliens from the right area, or denizens who had been to the right area at the right time of year?  … who was responsible for the overall look of the plays? Might the 1415 Ordo Paginarum play the same sort of role to the pageants as instructions to an illuminator do to the final illumination? Is it prescriptive or descriptive? Who designed the original Mercers’ Doomsday waggon? Was it even a mercer? Could it perhaps have been a painter like Johannes Braban (free 1365), or if he is too early, Willelmus Smythhusen (free 1389)? ‘The King’s Peace and the play: the York Corpus Christi Eve Proclamation’, written for Medieval English Theatre in 2007, is also framed around questions, this time offering some answers. By the time she was writing this, Meg’s early interest in the materiality of the documents relating to the Play and surviving in the York archives had matured from alerting her readers to unreliabilities, to an approach to codicology which views all such working documents as evidence of process rather than finished products. She also plays to modern theories of performativity – though never squarely signing up to that, or any other, fashionable theoretical approach – by demonstrating that documents are neither transparent nor neutral repositories of information, but are performing xiii

i n t ro d u c t i o n specific functions, speaking with specific voices to target audiences. Of all documentary records, for the theatre historian the text of a proclamation thus presents a peculiarly rich case in point. This essay systematically describes the function of a proclamation, its structure, validating authority, the injunction contained within it and the statement of penalties for non-compliance. Meg points out that, unlike ‘banns’ advertising a play, the primary purpose of the proclamation was, on the occasion of a major holiday, to enforce the King’s Peace, reminding the people of the rule of law and order. It thus stands as a regulatory counter to the association between holiday and misrule, and the essay goes into exhaustive detail to illustrate how the ridings of the sheriffs of the city seasonally asserted their authority in this way. The remainder of the essay goes on to explore the whole legal context of the Proclamation, ‘to restore it to its proper importance and legal weight’, and to offer further commentary and understanding of the pageant route as a linear performance space. The final essay in this section, ‘The Ordo paginarum revisited with a digital camera’, which appeared in the festschrift prepared for Alexandra F. Johnston in 2007, unites many of the themes in the others while displaying the impressive degree to which by this time Meg had embraced the very latest digital technologies in pursuit, as ever, of very traditional research goals. Here we find codicological tools being pressed into service to expose another civic document as itself a work-in-progress, a palimpsest, rather than a finished testimony to anything. Furthermore, the document from which layers are peeled away, the challengingly damaged earliest detailed record of the Corpus Christi pageants, is further interrogated for what it may or may not describe. In one move, we are back with the front-on processional cars with which a number of scholars of medieval theatre were now familiar. The question posed here comes down in the end to matters of grammar, as the demonstrably earliest records of each pageant are shown to be simpler and more numerous than later accretions – or, indeed, the York Cycle as recorded in the later Register – and the action is described commonly using the present continuous. All this leads to the further speculation about what kind of event is being described. In addition, the close examination of the documents has led to a radical, if speculative, proposal about the scribal hands involved. As ever, the essay ends with a plea for further work and with the stiffening injunction that although ‘we are unlikely now to find any substantial new documents for York in the REED mode … this does not mean that there are no new discoveries to be made’.

II Another strand of work that contributed to a groundbreaking change of focus on medieval drama in the 1980s involved the practicalities of performance. Meg was a striking forerunner of what has now become xiv

i n t ro d u c t i o n ‘research-through-practice’, mounting a series of productions of medieval plays that had not only been rarely or never seen in performance in the lifetime of current scholars, but were also designed to explore questions about medieval performance itself. While Meg herself would always insist that those who produce plays should not assume that modern performances can ever ‘tell us the truth’ about medieval performance, the essays that emerged from her own productions tellingly reveal what we might learn about the plays from engaging not just with their scripts but also with their techniques of acting, presentation and engagement of audiences. From her first productions in Oxford in the 1970s, she encouraged actors to avoid the unexamined assumptions of naturalist performance current at the time, and to pay close and sympathetic attention to the ways in which speeches and scenes were constructed for the stage, looking to the resources of art for visual analogues and to other medieval writings on the subject matter of the plays for a context of understanding. ‘Playing the Resurrection’, published in 1981 in the festschrift for J.A.W. Bennett, grew out of a production of the York Resurrection pageant staged in Lancaster in 1978 to research the effects of ‘a pageant-waggon staging in a street-shaped space, with a standing and potentially mobile audience’. The results were not, as this might suggest, confined to the practicalities and possibilities of staging – how the scripts were found to define which action took place on and off the wagon, how the wagon structure framed performers or how spectators were brought into intimate proximity with street-based action. Without becoming entangled in the impossibility of re-creating a medieval audience, the essay reveals how such practical aspects of staging can also affect both the responses of spectators and the meanings they carry from the plays. The laments of the three Maries approaching the tomb, static and formal when read or played naturalistically on a raised stage, turned out to be ‘the most intense form of audience-involvement in the play’ once performed by actors moving among closely standing spectators. The production also uncovered how this kind of staging, which acknowledges and plays on the presence of spectators, could move them seamlessly from emotional engagement in human grief, to the devotional ritual of the liturgy, to laughter at human inadequacy. The texture of performance and the meanings it could convey is revealed as more complex, sophisticated and self-aware than literary scholarship had recognised. ‘Books for the unlearned’, an essay for Drama and Religion, edited by James Redmond (1983), reads medieval biblical plays through contemporary popular devotional writing, exploring how both readers and audiences were encouraged to respond to the biblical material played before them. Although this essay looks seriously at popular meditative literature, which until then had attracted very little scholarly attention, it is not essentially concerned with specific sources for the plays, revealing though these can be. Rather, the attentive reading of works such as Nicholas Love’s Mirror of xv

i n t ro d u c t i o n the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ identifies a style of writing and reading, exploring how readers were explicitly urged and persuaded to imagine, and to respond affectively to, a vividly detailed and concrete, human realisation of biblical action. This analysis of popular lay devotion significantly foreshadowed the more recent interest in affect and the bodily throughout medieval studies. It also becomes a means to begin assessing the implied audience-response to the plays, giving us a potential insight into the medieval experience of live performance. This was tested not only against the scripts of the plays, but also experience from Meg’s own productions, in particular the N-Town plays of the Virgin performed in Oxford in 1971. Yet, as with all her writing, she was never satisfied with the first and obvious insights. Although the essay begins by alerting us to the powerful affective comparison between meditations and plays, it moves on to explore the equally significant dissimilarities between the two forms. Theatrical audiences may, like meditative readers, be prompted to emotional engagement with the human presentation of the Virgin or of Christ’s passion in the plays, but they are also, as the essay robustly demonstrates, challenged by theological and intellectual ideas and images, pushed to understand their own emotive responses within a larger framework of cosmic reach and divine purpose. The elucidation of this complex mix is rooted in a recognition and analysis of the sophisticated theatricality of the plays in performance. While ‘Books for the unlearned’ looked back to earlier performances, ‘“Transvestism” in the mystery plays’, which appeared in METh, 5:2 (1983), was founded in, while moving far beyond, an all-male production of the Chester Purification and Doctors, which contributed to a performance of the Chester plays at the Leeds Festival in 1983. The production, and indeed this essay, grew out of a project both practical and academic that Meg initiated with her Medieval Theatre students. In exploring the historical evidence for male performance of female roles, the history of attitudes to such theatrical transvestism, and the lessons to be learned from practical performance, the essay was again a forerunner of a topic that a few years later exploded into the interest in gendered performance that has more recently been so dominant a strand of scholarship on the early modern stage. The essay itself is not centrally interested in the representation or understanding of gender per se, which quickly became the focus of that early modern scholarship on theatrical cross-dressing. Meg even confesses that she is ‘not very happy with the word “transvestism” in my title’, feeling it carried too many connotations she considered irrelevant to the tradition of ‘cross-playing’. But in its lively engagement with the practicalities of cross-gendered acting, cautiously tested against historical evidence of practice and thinking, this essay raises key questions about the purposes and effects of all-male performance – on characterisation, on audience engagement and on male actors – that have still not been superseded in the study of medieval drama. xvi

i n t ro d u c t i o n III While the essays on performance practice all draw on the theological contexts of religious drama, it is the pieces in the third section that focus centrally on how moments and episodes of medieval drama can be seen to arise from a rich hinterland of theological tradition, releasing meanings that are barely noticeable any longer. One such is ‘“As the sun with his beams when he is most bright”’, which appeared in METh, 12:1 (1990). This picks up what might seem a passing compliment paid to the Virgin by her husband Joseph in the N-Town plays, when he returns home to greet her after the Annunciation. Few readers, audiences or even actors today would be likely to question the moment when Joseph observes that his wife’s face is too dazzling to look on, which the Virgin modestly ascribes to the grace of God. Yet Meg’s constant alertness to detail and intellectual curiosity led her to probe into the phrase, establishing it as an allusion to a rich and complex tradition of Marian theo­ logy. The image is tracked through theology and symbol, through narrative and popular marvel, exploring the subtle overlaps between these modes. We are led to observe the slippage between the figurative and the literal, and are faced with questions of authorial intention and audience reception. The role of transfiguring light in the theology of virginity, as protecting Mary’s purity, repelling invaders or revealing the Godhead within, offers layers of potential meaning to a brief theatrical moment. The essay’s complicated journey through divergent sources compellingly demonstrates the complex texture of medieval play texts, and what a rich foundation of linked theological and literary, learned and popular tradition they draw upon. Similarly revealing exposition, this time of a question of costuming, is offered in ‘“With what body shall they come”: black and white souls in the mystery plays’ (1990). A 1987 production of the York Doomsday play forced consideration of what the damned and saved souls should wear, and since the York evidence itself was imprecise, research led in other directions. Guild accounts confirmed that in Coventry the resurrected souls were dressed in black and white, but instead of taking this apparently obvious symbolism for granted, the essay turns to the learned and popular theology of the Last Judgment to examine what beliefs and attitudes may have resulted in the colour contrast. This uncovers a range of anxiously specific questions posed to theologians about the physical appearance of resurrected souls and addressed by explanation of the spiritual implications they carry. It leads into discussion of medieval ideas about disability and deformity, about the relationship of soul to body, and of mortal to immortal life, which informs the apparently simple and popular costuming. In ‘Kissing cousins: the Four Daughters of God and the Visitation in the N-Town Mary play’ from METh, 18 (1996), it is a motif of action, rather than of words or costumes, that prompts investigation into the rich implications of a theatrical moment. The essay investigates the sources and analogues of xvii

i n t ro d u c t i o n the kiss of greeting between the Virgin and Elizabeth, bringing to life a web of interconnection between complex typological pairings, and between visual art and drama. It begins from a performance which made clear a vivid but apparently random visual echo between the Visitation kiss and the embrace between the Four Daughters of God at the Parliament of Heaven. Probing the link uncovers a typological connection between the two episodes, attested to in a variety of programmes of stained glass and psalter illumination that draw together not just the episodes themselves but also the principles of Old and New Law, Truth and Mercy, Justice and Peace, and the in utero encounter of John the Baptist and the Christ child. Exegesis of the Psalms, and the liturgy of Advent, reinforce the connection and the intertwining ideas that the visual moment signifies. The intricate pattern of ideas unravelled in this essay demonstrates more than a largely forgotten scholarly tradition that may lie behind a moment of theatrical action. As Meg concludes: ‘If this seems a tenuous and complex web of argument, I can only say that it is matched by most of the commentaries and sermons to which I have been led. It was a medieval way of thinking.’

IV The final group of essays in this volume represents the breadth and continuity of Meg’s research into the social, practical, cultural and geographical contexts out of which the plays arise. Her explorations in alternative forms of performance, in European analogues, in the practical infrastructure of medieval theatre and in the make-up of communities, all offer deeper and wider insights into the plays themselves. Two essays, twenty years apart, make available to anglophone scholars the still relatively unknown riches of the processional theatre of the Low Countries. ‘The Flemish Ommegang and its pageant cars’ (METh, 2:1 and 2:2, 1980) starts from the absence of any visual evidence of the pageant wagons on which English processional drama was performed. It proceeds to chart an introduction to the plentiful narrative and visual evidence of civic processional shows in Antwerp, Leuven and Brussels. We discover vivid accounts and representations of subject matter and iconography, the history of enduring and changing floats, and the assertively mixed religious and classical, medieval and Renaissance styles of the different pageant cars. If in some ways this reveals the relative modesty of English equivalents, in others it opens our eyes to the spectacular possibilities of late medieval processional theatre and its functions in asserting civic power and identity. This is the kind of research that helps scholars of the medieval drama of the British Isles to see the theatrical richness that may lie behind their own relatively meagre surviving evidence, but also to understand that drama from the perspective of a wider, more international cultural perspective. This is even more apparent when in 2001, the ommegangen are revisited in ‘The Leuven Ommegang and Leuven City Archives’. This time it is work on a xviii

i n t ro d u c t i o n rich archive of record and accounting evidence that enables close encounters with the materiality of pageant cars and performance, with insights not only into practical details of staging, but also into the individual human effort and organisation involved. There are payments recorded to ‘the man who hung on the cross for his labour’ or to the woman who heated the public bath ‘in order to clean up and to wash the young children’ who were dirty from playing the roles of devils. Apart from the abundance of evidence uncovered, all wholly unknown to scholars working in English, the essay communicates the excitement of new archive discovery. It is testimony to Meg’s lifelong commitment to finding and engaging directly with primary evidence, pursuing what it can reveal in meticulous detail, often to challenge received opinion. This essay not only opens up for many scholars a new field of evidence about medieval processional theatre, it is also used to encourage reflection on the assessment of more familiar territory. Thus, it concludes: ‘By 1413, Leuven had thirteen floats, and four groups of marching costumed characters. By 1415, York had a chronologically organized sequence of over 50 pageants. It really looks as if the British were first in the field, but the Belgian material outguns them for sheer quantity and practical detail.’ ‘Felsted of London: silk-dyer and theatrical entrepreneur’ (METh, 10:1, 1988) is the result not of a whole new archive, but of patient and exhaustive pursuit of the strands of evidence that throw light on one isolated and intriguing reference. A story of playscript and theatrical costume hire from Felsted, a London draper, involving near-disaster over a shipwreck, is recorded in letters of the Lisle family from 1538 to 1539. Pushing behind and well beyond the engaging details of this one story, explorations in the accounts of the Drapers’ Company, council records from Essex, legal proceedings, the Court Revels and Lord Mayor’s Shows, piece together a professional identity for Felsted. His family and trading connections are traced, and his activity is established as a supplier of a wide range of theatrical costumes, props and special effects, and as the project organiser of theatrical events. The result is more than the identification of a particular individual trader. Felsted’s business activities offer a window into a web of theatrical contacts and infrastructure that ranged across London and beyond in the years preceding the establishment of the commercial playhouses. The other essay in this section, ‘The York Mercers’ Lewent Brede and the Hanseatic trade’ (METh, 17, 1995) is another investigation that begins from a play and then moves far beyond it; however, in doing so, it explicitly raises some of the crucial methodological questions posed by this kind of research. The ‘lewent brede’ appears in the York Mercers’ 1433 inventory for their Doomsday pageant: ‘iij other costers [hangings] of lewent brede for þe sides of þe Pagent’. The essay starts from an etymological examination of the puzzling ‘lewent’ and in doing so comes to challenge the definition that still appears in most dictionaries of ‘cloth from Louvain/Leuven’. Lewent emerges as far more likely to refer to linen (linwant) cloth of various grades. The study xix

i n t ro d u c t i o n then moves on to uncover the trade routes that brought lewent cloth to York and other northern cities, establishing it as deriving from the Baltic through Hanseatic traders. Links between Hansard and York merchants, and investigation of other material from the trade that might contribute to pageant manufacture, build up a more three-dimensional sense of the practices of the communities producing the York plays. The essay recognises the fundamental questions such research poses for the study of medieval theatre, questions that Meg’s research has raised throughout her career: ‘What is relevant to the study of medieval theatre?’ Where should one ‘draw a line in collecting records’, considering that a ‘play is anchored in the life of its community’? Research into medieval theatre cannot be confined only to playscripts or even to records of performance. To understand the play, we need to understand that life of the community: ‘This “life” ranges from their spiritual aspirations and their practical piety, the books that urged them to it and the action they took on it … to their material culture.’ These are the very fields of exploration out of which the essays collected here emerge, and which have shaped their contribution to the new understanding of medieval theatre.

xx

Part I:

York

1 ‘Places to hear the play’ ‘PLACES TO HEAR THE PLAY’: PAGEANT STATIONS AT YORK, 1398–1572

Anna J. Mill’s valuable article on ‘The Stations of the York Corpus Christi Play’ uses only those lists which state more or less exactly where these stations were. However, she observes that ‘others … may, with caution, be derived from the names of those who pay rent, if the location of their houses is known and is on the route indicated’.1 This sounds daunting: it is just not possible, even from the comparatively full York records, to find out exactly where two hundred and more named people lived over a time span of nearly two centuries. But one can, with caution, proceed a little further than she did. At the end of her article she provides a chart of station sites, but she makes no attempt to correlate it horizontally and has no particular interest in the names of lessees if no location is provided for them. But even lists that consist solely of names can be made to yield information when they are seen as part of a larger pattern. At the end of this article I provide a chart that not only gives the names of all station lessees in all the surviving lists, but also attempts to site them along the pageant route in what I calculate to be their correct places. Much of the pattern is provided purely from the internal evidence of the lists themselves. As one reads through the lists, certain names become familiar: names like John Lister, Matthew Hartley, Thomas Scauceby, William Caton, and Alan Staveley. They not only appear more than once, they turn up at roughly the same place in the lists each time. Earlier attempts have tended to assume, rather unthinkingly, that Station 8, for example, will always be at the same place, but it seems much more sensible to assume that if the same person turns up for several years running at, say, Stations 10, 8, 11, and 9, that the person and the place are constants and that the numbering of the station is a variable. One can check this for stations whose places are known: between 1538 and 1572 the Minster Gates station is variously number 8, 12, 7, 11, and 9. Now the station-holder ‘at the Mynster yaitis’ in 1538, John Lister, is just finishing a run of eighteen years, for nine of which (1520–8) we have consecutive records, with varying station numbers. His neighbour ‘in Stayngayt’, Matthew Hartley, seems to have kept the same station, with one short break, for twenty-nine years (1523–51). Not many others show such remarkable runs (partly because 3

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’ there are breaks in the evidence, as one can see from the dates of the surviving lists), but there is an impressive amount of short- and middle-term continuity which, of course, suggests that hiring stations was a profitable affair! Then one finds the groups of associates: for example, from 1501 to 1527, a group of people (John Caldbek, Richard Ashby, John Blakey, John Myres, George Churchman, and John Cowper) take turns to pay for Station 2, never all at once, but singly, or in pairs, or even threes, with enough permutations for it to be obvious that they are neighbours, if not actually a syndicate. Chronological same-person runs like these provide us with the horizontals for our table. The verticals are provided by the pageant route itself. The actual route remained the same for the whole period; only the stopping-places varied in number and location. Along this route, the same sequences of names will turn up from year to year, though not always in successive years: eg, Hartley, Lister, Wylde, and Nicholson (1526–8); Halliday/Hudson, Scauceby/Kilburn, and Mrs Toiler (1468, 1475). If one can pin down a location every now and then, either from information in the lists themselves or from external evidence, then the other names in the sequence can be spaced out along the intervening stretch of street: we are, after all, dealing with a real city, not a theoretical piece of elastic. The result, though some of the placings can only be relative (at what number in Petergate did Alderman Gillour reside?), is more complete than could at first be imagined possible. One can assume that, on the whole, these stations are outside the dwelling houses of the people named on the lists. The 1416 ordinance lays down that the play shall be played ‘ante ostia et tenementa illorum vberius et melius camere soluere et plus pro commodo tocius communitatis facere voluerint pro ludo ipso ibidem habendo’:2 nearly a century and a half later, the 1554 ordinance warns that ‘suche as woll haue pageantz played before ther doores shall come in and aggree for theym before Trynytie Sonday next’.3 The formula in the lists is ‘ante ostia tenementi sui in Staynegate’ (1454), ‘ante ostia sua ad porta[m] Sancte Trinitatis’ (1468), ‘at my lady Wyldes’ (1538), ‘ageynst Heryson doore’ (1551), and ‘at William Gilmyn hows’ (1572). Occasionally the indication is made that a lessee does not own the house he lives in, but merely rents it: ‘tenemento in tenura sua’ (1454, Station 1). The word tenementum means simply a ‘building’ as distinct from a messuagium, which can include grounds: in 1454 the church of St John Ouse Bridge is described as a tenementum. The first two lists (1398 and 1416) are anomalous in that they refer to some named houses as belonging to people who are already dead. John of Gyseburn, mercer and lord mayor, at Station 3, died in 1390, well before the date of even the first list. In the 1416 list, two more, Adam del Brigg (died 1404) and Henry Wyman (died 1411), are marked out as ‘quondam’. However, the writer of the 1416 list is concerned mainly with establishing the official status of that of 1398, so he quotes it almost verbatim. Houses (or business premises: the distinction is a false one in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries) are occasionally known by the name of their builder, but 4

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’ these two lists are an exception of their kind. All other lists until very late (1551, 1569, and 1572) are concerned with recording payment from individuals rather than marking out locations, and every person on whom a check can be made appears to have been alive at the time at which payment was recorded, though some narrow margins are found. John Bateman died in December 1521, and Lady Agnes Staveley is possibly paying the fee already contracted for by her husband Alan, who died in June 1522. The one exception is this at-home rule is the occasional hiring by a religious house. The abbot of Fountains brings a party to the station at St John’s Micklegate in 1454; St Leonard’s Hospital, which is not on the route,4 hires the nearest station, the one at the Common Hall, in 1454, 1468, 1499, 1506, and 1516. The Austin Friars (1454) and the Guild of St Christopher and St George (1468) are on their own doorstep at the Common Hall Gates.5 The other major exception is the mayoral party, to which we shall return. One is able, though very rarely, to locate a particular house exactly through wills, mortgages, and conveyances. This area is not as promising as it might seem: very few official records of property transactions exist, and both they and wills are disappointingly vague: ‘To my sonne Peter … my gret hows in Coppergate & my landes, etc. in the parish of Alhalows upon the Pament’ (Sir John Gilliot 1509),6 or even more tantalisingly, ‘my chefe place in Yorke that I dwell yn’ (William Nelson, 1524).7 A house can be located at least along a particular stretch of pageant route, however, if one knows the parish in which the owner lived or, as it appears in the wills, in which he died and was buried. Central York was graced with a large number of churches and a correspondingly large number of parishes, and a satisfactory number of these parish boundaries intersect the roads along the pageant route, as the map below shows. I have superimposed a map of parish boundaries over the existing street plan of York by John Harvey. Thus, if we know that William Moresby (1506, Station 4) asked in 1517 to be buried before the image of St Anne in the churchyard of St Michael Spurriergate,8 the odds are that he lived in the parish and that his station must therefore be located between the east end of Ouse Bridge and the end of Spurriergate, not at the west end of Ouse Bridge. The exception, after the Cathedral, is Holy Trinity Priory, which seems to have been popular outside its strict parish boundaries. Richard Gibson, cordwainer, who rented Station 3 in 1499, 1501, and 1508, whom one would have thought would have been well down Micklegate in St Martin’s parish, went to Mass ‘at Trenites in Mekilgate’.9 John Ellis, senior, with whom he rented the station in 1499 and 1508, was buried there. He also turns out to have owned the Three Kings Inn, which appears under its own name in the station lists of 1551 and 1554, as he leaves it to his wife Joan in his will: meum messuagium cum pert. in Mikkilgate, vocatum Les Thre Kingges, sicut iacet ibidem inter terram W. Holbek ex parte orientali 5

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’ et terram quondam W. Shirwod ex parte occidentali, unde unum caput buttat super regiam viam ante et super quoddam vicum voc­ atum les Northstrete retro.10

Map of pageant route showing parish boundaries. © Meg Twycross

This still does not tell us precisely where the Three Kings Inn was, but it does show that the inn was on the left-hand (north) side of Micklegate: ‘les Northstrete’ in the early sixteenth century also included Tanner Row. Occasionally one can pick up a location from other sources, such as the House Books and the Memorandum Books for the period.11 Thomas Wells, goldsmith, who rented Station 4 in 1486, was witness to an affray, recorded in the House Books on 27 July 1496, between Richard Thornton, sheriff, and Ralph Nevill, esquire: Thomas Welles saith wher as on Wednesday at viij of the clok at after nowne … the said Ric. Thornton and the same Thomas satt togedder on a stall to fore the dore of the said Thos, and Sir Ric. York, knyght, and the said Rauff Nevill come togedder in armez from Skeldergate, and when they come in mydds of the strete that goeth toward Ouse brigge, Sir Ric York said he wald bryng the said Rauff to his loggyng and he said he shuld not for he wold 6

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’ rest hym on the above said stall and then Ric. Thornton and the said Thomas bad hym good evyn and put of theyr bonets, and the said Rauffe furthwith drewe his swerd and then and ther made assaut opon the said Ric. Thornton, and witt that Sir Ric. York toke the said Rauffe by the arme and asked him what he wald doo and pulled hym bake.12 Thomas Wells lived at the junction of Skeldergate and what is now Bridge Street, opposite St John’s Church. Because the two armed men had come from Skeldergate and were in the middle of Bridge Street before the argument started, Wells seems to have lived on the same side of the main road as the church, also the left-hand side of the route. One is, of course, haunted by the possibility that somebody, at some point, may have moved house, or at least asked to be buried somewhere other than in the church of his parish. Occasional instances exist. Robert Cliff seems to have moved from somewhere in Coney Street (1499 and 1500) to somewhere in Pavement (1506), if one is to trust the 1506 list, which is doubtful. William Nawton (1521, 1524, and 1525) seems to have crossed the Ouse. Simon Vicars (1508 and 1521) buried his first wife in St Michael Spurriergate, which fits his station, but was living in the parish of All Saints Pavement in 1524. Thomas Scauceby (1454, 1462, and 1468), who has a son William (1475), could be, on the evidence of the date of his death, the mercer who asked to be buried with his wife and children in St Michael le Belfrey, but he and his son rent a station in Micklegate. Fortunately we have the feoffment, dated 1449, of the property in Micklegate to which he moved (see below). These are, however, unusual cases: on the whole, station lessees, even those who own several houses, seem to stay in the same place and even pass on their stations to their sons. Much of the information about the people named in the lists can be found in the invaluable three-volume manuscript catalogue of York Worthies compiled by Robert Skaife and presented by him to York City Library in the 1890s. He provides a mass of information about dates, parishes, wills, genealogies, and miscellaneous matters for anyone who is on record as having held civic office. I have also used D.M. Palliser’s List of York Aldermen and Members of the 24, 1500–1603, deposited with the York City Library Archivist. He gives names, professions, parishes, and dates. Even the civic records, however, seem on occasion to be lacking. Richard Stirlay (1521 and 1522) is described in the pageant station lists as ‘aldermanno bowyer’ and ‘bowyer and alderman’, but he does not appear in the standard reference lists as alderman. For those leaseholders not prominent enough to be in Skaife or Palliser, one can consult the two-volume Freemen’s Register published by the Surtees Society.13 This gives annual lists, starting from 1273, of those made free in that particular year, with their trades and professions. Those who are free per patres, in their fathers’ right, are listed separately at the end of 7

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’ each year as X filius X. Thus, one can confirm, for example, that Tristram Lister (1542; free 1538, draper) is indeed the son of John Lister (1520–38; free 1506, tailor). The Register is, however, not completely comprehensive. Some of the fathers  in the per patres lists, for example, cannot be found earlier in their own right. Those leaseholders of whom I can find no trace either in Skaife or the  Register are: Ralph Babthorp, Philip Carvour, John Pannal (1454); John and Thomas Barbour (1462, 1468, and 1475); Nicholas Caton  (1499); William Caton (1501, 1506, and 1508); William Catterton  (1499 and 1501); John Rothley (1501); Henry (?) Gale (1516); John Bower (1520); John Cawdewell (1522 and 1524); and Archibald Foster (1526 and 1528). On the other hand, a plethora of possible John Nicholsons (1499) exists, all free about the same time, all with possible occupations. One is aware of a  certain amount of subjectivity creeping into one’s choice on such an occasion. Richard Thomson (1499), for example, could be either the baker (free 1487), the fishmonger (1489), or the glazier (1492), but the fact that he rents Station 5, which is in the region of the Ouse, makes one decide on the fishmonger. Several good circular arguments can, of course, start in this way. The instinct to go for the most important figure bearing a particular name must, if it is present, be resisted. For example, there are two Nicholas Blackburns (1454), both merchants: the first is the notable son of a notable father, both lord mayors of York; the second is much less important, but he was alive in 1453, whereas the other died in 1447 and so cannot be our man. The minor problem of aliases sometimes occurs: the son of John Bawd (1475), free in 1461 as a ‘saddiller’, is made free as Robertus Bawd alias Sadiler (1500), and John Bawd’s partner in the 1475 station, John Gylde, seems to belong to a family of saddlers who also call themselves Driffield. I have had a problem about how much information to put on the chart. It would, of course, be possible in many cases to append an entire biography in little. To provide brief notes on each of the persons and institutions mentioned in the lists would be helpful, but space forbids this: there are over 225 names, with information ranging from ‘nothing else known’ to full biographies. The reader should realise that the chart itself is merely the tip of a social iceberg. Who was whose son-in-law, who married whose widow, who witnessed whose will, who had a troublesome brother, who used ‘unsitting words’ to my lord mayor, even who is recorded as having been in bed by 9pm on 18 May 1555, after which his servants stole the key of Monk Bar and went outside on a drunken hunt for a grid-iron: all these build up the illusion of becoming part of a whole late-medieval urban community, closely related by ties of friendship, trade, and bickering, motivated by piety and profit. Many of the names on the chart have become characters in a fifteenth-century Forsyte Saga. For the purposes of this investigation, however, the essentials are name, profession (where known), parish (where the exact site of the station is not given), date of death (where relevant: for example, where a run of leases 8

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’ comes abruptly to an end), and the amount paid for the lease of the station. The lists of leases themselves occasionally record the profession of the lessee, possibly to avoid confusion with others of the same name, possibly just because other records habitually do so. The station lists themselves come from two sources: the Council Minutes; and the Chamberlains’ Books and Rolls of Account. The Minutes, from the Memorandum Book and the House Books, are concerned only with fixing locations. They provide information for the years 1398, when an excess of  unofficial stations was making the completion of the performance impossible, and repeated in 1416, when the Council are concerned with collecting  revenue from leasing of stations, probably, as Margaret Dorrell suggests, for the first time, as two different methods of assessing contributions are suggested, and the third-penny system is rejected in favour of the auctioning  of leases;14 1551, when the number of stations was limited to ten because of risk of infection from the plague; 1569, after a lapse due to censorship; and 1572, when the Pater Noster Play was played at the Corpus Christi stations. The Account Books and Rolls record receipts of money from persons paying for the pageants to be ‘played before their doores’. Their fullness varies. The Rolls for 1454, 1462, and 1468 record in detail both names and sites. Between 1475 and 1528 they record names only, with a very few scattered indications of place. The first and last stations are usually described: at the gates of Holy Trinity Priory, and on the Pavement. In 1538 the accounts are in English for the first time, a practice that seems to have encouraged the bookkeeper to give full descriptions of name and place thenceforward. The quality and completeness of the accounts also vary. The most frustrating feature from the point of view of this study is the tendency of some accounts to leave gaps for potential stations which have not been let, or for which no money has as yet come in. Some of these (notably 1520 and 1522) try to fit in two stations where only one has been usual. The three worst years in this respect are 1506, 1516, and 1525. The year 1516 has no record even of receipts. In 1525 the Creed Play was played instead of the Corpus Christi Play, and the incompleteness may be due to the fact that a different system of financing was in operation: all except one of those whose payments are recorded are or have been regulars, and may have paid for their stations in advance. The other unsatisfactory lists date from 1506 and 1516, and it is interesting to note that Alexandra Johnston thinks that these may have been years for the Pater Noster Play.15 The year 1526, however, which ought also to be a Pater Noster Play year, is perfectly normal. One cannot be totally certain about the accuracy or even the order of all the stations in the lists. In 1501, both Stations 1 and 11 are said to be leased to William Catterton, whereas Station 11 clearly belongs to William Caton, who rents it by indenture for 5s a year between 1499 and 1508. In 1528 we have two lists, one in the Chamberlain’s Roll 6:6 and one in Book CC3, p. 232. The 9

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’ layout of the Roll looks competent, whereas that in the Book is careless: the writer jumps straight from Station 4 to 6, fails to give the mayoress a number, calls the next two stations 7, inserts the missing 5 between 7 and 8, and ends up losing two altogether. However, he attempts to salvage the affair by adding locations to the names, so we have reason to be grateful for his carelessness. I have reversed the order of Stations 2 and 3 in the 1454 list. Thomas Scauceby is at 2 in 1462 and 1468, and the writer of 1454 actually describes him as being in secundo loco, though he is third in sequence. The writer does not give numbers to any other stations, so it looks as if he were correcting a mistake. I have not altered any of the other lists. It goes without saying that the legibility of the lists also varies enormously. Not only does the handwriting vary in quality, the Rolls themselves have suffered badly from damp and flooding. Some portions can be read only under ultraviolet light, and that not very satisfactorily. The chronological layout of the table is slightly misleading. To show the diachronic continuity of station leases, I have left out the barriers between the years. It should be remembered that there is only one completely continuous sequence, that from 1520 to 1528 inclusive. The gaps between the rest vary from one to fifteen years. So Thomas Scauceby (1454–68) appears only three times, but bridges fifteen years; if the Henry Watson of 1454 (free 1435) is the same man as the Henry Watson of 1486, which he appears to be, he took out his twelve-year indenture in 1478 at about the age of sixty-four, which seems optimistic even in these days, but must have been remarkable in the fifteenth century. If he is in fact two people, father and son, this fact does not show up in the Freemen’s Register. What can one deduce from this table? I would like to list a few observations of various kinds. Many of them are susceptible of more detailed treatment: 1 Stations did not always follow the pattern laid down in the 1398 ordinance, as is often too easily assumed; indeed, this ordinance was repeated in 1416 with the specific proviso that the 1398 stations could be varied if more profit would accrue that way, or if those at the stations refused to pay for their leases: loca ad ludendum ludum predictum mutentur nisi ipsi ante quorum loca antea ludebatur aliquod certum quid soluerint communitati pro ipso comodo suo singulari sic annuatim habendo, et quod in omnibus annis sequentibus dum ludus ille ludi contigerit ludatur ante ostia et tenementa illorum qui vberius et melius camere soluere … voluerint pro ludo ipso ibidem habendo.16

Not only does the number of stations change from year to year, from ten in 1462 to sixteen in 1542 and 1554, but the actual sites of the stations can change, and even quite popular ones, like St John Ouse Bridge, can be eclipsed for a while (1506, 1508, and 1516).17 10

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’ In practice, however, certain stations remain stable because they are ‘naturals’, either because they are in front of city landmarks like the Common Hall or Minster Gates, or because they are at road junctions, where there is more audience manoeuvrability. Others spring up before the houses of important people, like those of alderman Paul Gillour (1520–2) and Robert Wylde (1523–38) in Petergate. The most difficult to locate, and this is reflected in the chart, are those sited along streets like Micklegate and Coney Street, which are fairly lengthy and have no particularly obvious stopping places. It should be remembered that the ‘boxes’ in the chart cannot always show exact points, but merely indicate stretches of road within which a station might be situated. One might best think of them as ‘spheres of influence’ for each performance. In fact, even what seems a large number of such areas along one stretch of road need not necessarily have meant awkward crowding and interference with each other. Maps tend to straighten out the curves of Coney Street, Micklegate, and even Stonegate and Petergate. Walking round the route, one is struck by the fact that very few of the stations of which we can be certain are in fact within view or earshot of each other, and what looks on the map like a very short stretch, such as the gap between the east end of Ouse Bridge (at the Staith Head) and the junction of Low Ousegate and Spurriergate, is in fact a substantial distance. There was probably less distraction from the stations on each side than one might think. Another and perhaps necessary caveat about the chart: naturally, the more names there are to copy out, the longer the entry will be. This does not, of course, mean that the station itself was any larger. 2 The earliest records available show that station lessees paid different amounts for their stations. Given that the leasing of stations was a commercial enterprise and not a charitable concern (though we have to take the latter into account as a possibility in some cases), we can assume that the more money people were willing to pay for a station, the more popular (and profitable) it was likely to be. It is a pity that the ‘third-penny’ method of payment was rejected, as that would give us some idea of actual audience receipts at each station. The ‘fashionable’ areas, measured by the amount of money that people were prepared to bid for them, and sometimes the number of stations clustered along those stretches of the route, change over the years. Between 1454 and 1486, the Micklegate stretch attracts by far the largest contributions; the Spurriergate end of Coney Street comes next, but after the Common Hall payment trails off badly. Around the turn of the sixteenth century (1499–1516), Micklegate is still the most popular, but the Common Hall end of Coney Street is rising up the scale, as is Stonegate. In the 1520s, the mid-Micklegate stations are still highly popular, but the station at Minster Gates, run by John Lister, is equally so, and signs 11

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’ suggest that Petergate is outstripping Coney Street. In the last years, payments level out (in 1554, everyone seems to have paid a flat rate of 3s 4d, unless they are on ‘Alderman’s preferential rates’), but many more stations are massed in the latter part of the route, in Petergate, Colliergate, and in front of the residence of prosperous merchants in the Pavement. To account for fashion is very difficult: individual enterprise (quality of beer obtainable, comfort and stability of scaffolds?) may account for a great deal, as may the shift in fashionable residential areas. Wills indicate that in the second half of the sixteenth century, prosperous merchants tend to move out of the city centre to residences outside the walls, presumably because the times were more peaceful, and also because a fair amount of land had become available after the Dissolution. Such moves could also have contributed to the tailing off of the plays themselves. However, from the point of view of the day’s entertainment, it would seem as if at the beginning of our period, people were more certain of getting their money’s worth at the beginning of the route than at the end. As the sixteenth century progresses, more confidence about the later stations seems to grow, but even so, the Pavement, which one would have thought should be greatly in demand, seems mysteriously difficult to sell. Not only does it regularly take less than the other stations when it is leased, but in many years (1468, 1499, 1508, 1520, 1521, 1522, 1523, and 1525) the space for receipts is left blank, whereas in others (1524, 1527, 1528, and 1554), it is specifically said to have been unlettable: ‘nullo super Pavimentum’ (1524); ‘nullis super Pauimentum’ (1527); ‘super Pauimentum hoc anno nihil’ (1528); and back in 1486, depressingly, ‘aliquibus denarijs’. In 1538 the statement is made that this ‘place is accustomyd to go free’, but given its previous record, this seems to be making the best of a bad job. That it is a formal station for the lady mayoress, as has been suggested, cannot be so, for in many of these years the lady mayoress is elsewhere (see section 9 below). One is led to the conclusion that the Pavement was considered a bad investment because the time schedule for the playing of pageants could fall behind and, frequently, ‘lack of day’ blacked out a fair number of the pageants at the end of the sequence. The same argument could account for the continued popularity of the Micklegate stations. As early as 1416 they were considered a case for special treatment, though why is not stated.18 An audience in Micklegate could see all the plays before the schedule had a chance to get too dislocated, while the actors were still fresh and in good voice. They would even have some of the holiday left for other pursuits. Other possible advantages – did the slope of Micklegate allow more people to see the play at any one station?; was there an overspill from the congregation for Mass at Holy Trinity Priory?; were more of the stations inns? – can be left to the imagination. 3 In trying to identify actual houses, I have been brought to an extremely interesting though necessarily tentative conclusion. Those stations which 12

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’ we can identify are all on the left-hand side of the route: [See essay in this volume ‘The left-hand-side theory: a retraction’: Ed.] (a) John of Gyseburne (1398 and 1416: died 1390) divided his property between his two daughters. In an agreement between them, Isabella and her husband are to have the capital messuage which belonged to the said John in Mykelgate, with the four shops built in front thereof, lying in width between the tenement of Thomas de Kyllom, fisher, and the messuage of John de Drynghouses, fletcher, and in length from Mikelgate in front as far as a room, assigned to Sir William and Alice [the other daughter and her husband], abutting on the new gate … with free entry and exit for horses and carts through the gate to Northstrete.19 As mentioned before, Northstrete included Tanner Row. (b) Thomas Scauceby (1454, 1462, and 1468, son William 1475) is feoffed in 1499 of lands and tenements in Mekilgate, lying in width between the tenement of John Karr, citizen and merchant, on the one side, and the tenement of the chantry founded at the altar of St John the Evangelist in the Cathedral Church of St Peter on the other, and in length from Mekilgate in front as far as Northstrete behind.20 (c) John Ellis (1499 and 1508) identifies ‘meum messuagium … vocatum les Thre Kingges’ (1551 and 1554) as lying between Micklegate and Tanner Row.21 (d) The church of St John Ouse Bridge is also on the left-hand side. The station is described variously as ‘coram tenemento & Cimiterio Sancti lohannis’ (1454); ‘exopposito ecclesiam Sancti Iohannis Baptiste’ (1462: does ‘exopposito’ mean, as it would at first appear, ‘on the other side of Micklegate’ or, as the other entries for this station would suggest, ‘on the other side of North Street’?); ‘ad finem de Northstrete’ (1468: no mention of Skeldergate); ‘enenst St Iohn Churche’ (1554); and ‘abowt St Iohn kirkstile’ (1569). The house of Thomas Wells, goldsmith, also seems to have been on this side. (e) The Common Hall Gates (during the building works which were still going on in 1454, this station is said to be ‘apud Stayngate lendyng’) and the Minster Gates are both on the left-hand side. (f) The house of Robert and Isabel Wylde (1523, 1524, 1527, 1528, and 1538) is one of the few which can be identified for certain. It is better known as Alderman John Stockdale’s ‘new house in Petergait’,22 for which leases exist, as it later became part of Deanery property.23 Lady Wylde was born Isabel Stockdale, daughter of John: she and 13

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’ her second husband appear to have taken up residence in her father’s house, where Robert Wylde died in 1533.24 (Incidentally, his will was witnessed by Alderman George Gale, who takes over the lease of the station after Isabel’s death in 1541.) It is a large house on the lefthand side of the route (where all Deanery property was situated), not quite halfway down Low Petergate from the Minster Gates. (g) The house inhabited by Mr Christopher Harbert (1569 and 1572) is the famous Herbert mansion, which still stands on the Pavement, again on the left-hand side of the route. Other identifications are made difficult by the usual problem: exactly how accurate are the writers of the lists trying to be in their descriptions? Are subtle distinctions to be drawn among the uses of ‘ad’, ‘apud’, and ‘ante’? I am afraid that if they are, I cannot see what they might be. Since everyone knew where the houses were, there was not much point in detailing the exact location. Most of the descriptions of street locations merely indicate a junction (‘ad finem de Iowbritgate’ 1454; ‘apud  le guderangaytt’ 1528; ‘at Conygstrete end enenst Castelgate’ 1554) or areas  (‘ad finem Conyngstrete iuxta Aulam Communem’ 1396; ‘in medio  de Connyngstrete’ 1468; ‘at Sporyer gate end’ 1538). In certain places, however, the writer seems to be making an effort to define the  site more clearly. Most lists describe Station 1 as being ‘ad portas Sancte Trinitatis in Mikelgate’ (1398 and 1416), ‘apud portas Sancte Trinitatis’ (1475), or ‘at Trenytie yaitis’ (1538, 1542, 1554, 1569, and 1572). If we are to take this at face value, it would mean that the first station was on the right-hand side of the road. However, some of the lists seem to suggest otherwise. In 1454 Station 1 is said to be ‘coram tenemento in tenura sua iuxta Portam Sancte Trinitatis in Mikilgate’, that is, ‘close to, beside the gate’. In 1462 Nicholas Haliday and Adam Hudson are said to have their place ‘exopposito tenementum in tenura iuxta portam Sancti Trinitatis in Mikilgate’. (In 1468 the same people are said to be ‘ante ostiam suam ad portas Sancte Trinitatis’ and in 1475 ‘apud portas Sancte Trinitatis’.) We do possess evidence of Nicholas Haliday’s accommodation: it is, as the wording suggested, rented, and it is said to extend between tenements of the said priory on either side, and extending from the high street of Mikelgate in York before, to a garden of the priory in the tenure of Maud Belamy behind.25 That it is said to be surrounded by Priory property suggests that it is on that side of the road:26 it may be one of numbers 99–103 Micklegate, which still exist. In that case, the writer of the 1462 list is saying that the lessees have set up their scaffold opposite their houses; the 1468 and 1475 descriptions would then be mere formulae, and we should be very cautious about reading too much into other formulae. 14

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’ The left-hand-side theory has interesting implications for staging. The accounts of the Mercers’ pageant wagon suggest that it had not only a backcloth, but was, after the remodelling by Drawswerd, enclosed on three sides, much like a proscenium stage.27 If audience scaffolds were on both sides of the route, to keep turning a heavy cart round so as to face them would be extremely awkward. If they are all on the same side of the road, this does not arise. The cart can, moreover, hug the right-hand kerb (or gutter, in many cases) and give the audience maximum room to dispose themselves, standing or sitting. 4 The professions of the lessees reflect the business areas of medieval York.28 The mercantile area along Skeldergate and North Street provides merchants and grocers at the St John’s station. On the east side of Ouse Bridge we tend to find fishers and mariners: Henry Watson (1454–86), Richard Thomson (1499), John Stringer (1516), Miles Robinson (1520– 1), Richard Bateman (1526–8), and John Hogeson (1538). This station, described as being ‘at ousebrygend’, seems probably to have been actually on the end of the bridge. In the fifteenth century, Spurriergate provides fletchers, armourers, and spurriers. Coney Street, with the Common Hall, appears to be the place for merchants and lawyers. Stonegate is occupied by tailors, goldsmiths, embroiderers, and vestment-makers. Petergate and the Mercery, in what is now King’s Square, has mercers, glovers, goldsmiths, haberdashers, and, not surprisingly at the junction with Girdlergate, now Church Street, girdlers. It also seems to have cookshops and bakeries, and at least two medical men: Laurence Thomlyson (1542) at Minster Gates is an apothecary, and the mysterious Dr Adrian (1508: in Petergate) appears in 1507 in a list of Minster accounts as Magister Adrian being owed £3 10s for unspecified services, but he is between two other persons who are owed similar sums ‘pro medicinis’.29 On the Pavement are the merchants’ residences. In 1525 the bookkeeper describes four of the eight lessees as ‘Inholder’, including Lister and Hartley, who are elsewhere said to be tailors. Provided one brewed one’s own beer, one could add this profession to one’s chief occupation. 5

Many stations were hired by more than one person. Groups like Scauceby, Wright, and Kilburn (1454–75), Parot, Scalby, and Hogeson (1462–86), Calbeck and friends (1501–28), Ellis and Gibson (1499–1508), and Mason and Wilkinson (1522–42) look very much like syndicates. Sometimes only one man is named, with the rider ‘et sociis suis’ or ‘et aliis’. Sometimes several people hire one station but pay separate amounts, which are recorded in superscript. In 1454 Ralph Babthorp pays 5s, John Swath 2s 6d, and Thomas Bynglay 2s 6d towards a total of 10s for Station 7. In 1526 Thomas Wilman pays 3d, Archibald Foster 2d, and Widow 15

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’ Bekwyth 4d towards a total of 9d probably at the Common Hall. People who rent a portion of the station occupied by the mayoral party, after such a party becomes normal in the sixteenth century, pay a very much reduced rate, presumably because they would have a very much smaller area to let out for seats. In 1520 Nicholas Baxter pays 10d for his share of the mayoral station, in comparison with fees of 2s 8d, 3s 4d, and 4s 8d for other stations. In 1525, Brian Lord pays 2s for his station; the next year, he shares it with the mayor and pays only 6d. In 1501, though the mayoral party is not mentioned in the lists, William Slater pays only 12d for Station 9, which appears to be at the Common Hall Gates. The same applies to St Leonard’s Hospital in 1506. It is possible that the mayor and aldermen were already occupying station room. 6

Family continuity is shown. Fathers ‘bequeath’ stations to their sons:



Thomas Scauceby, who dies in 1471, is succeeded at Station 2 by his son William; John Lister (died 1541) hands the Minster Gates to Tristram; John Ellis Senior passes on the Three Kings station to John Ellis junior, but after a gap: he died in 1511, and his son had become free only the previous year; in 1572 Gregory Peacock was away as a member of parliament, and his station was taken by his son-in-law George Aislaby; William Gascoigne (1454) is the grandson of Henry Wyman (1398, 1416). Also, husbands pass their stations on to their wives. Alan Staveley died in June 1522, and his station was taken over by his widow Agnes. Robert Wylde, who died in 1533, was succeeded by his wife Isabel.

7 Lady Agnes Staveley also inherits what appears to be the sixteenth-century ‘Alderman’s preferential rate’. Alan Staveley (1508 and 1521) and Robert Wylde (1523) pay a much reduced rate of 12d. Later on, George Gayl (1542 and 1554) and Thomas Appleyerd (1554) pay a reduced rate of 16d. All these men were lord mayor at least once in their careers, but the rate in some cases antedates the mayoralty. The problem of the lord mayor and aldermen and how their hiring of a banqueting room fits in with their claiming of a station is not actually solved, but at least the nature of the problem becomes clearer. Alexandra Johnston has conveniently listed the station evidence side by side with the chamber evidence in her review of Alan Nelson’s book.30 When this list is compared with the pattern shown by the chart, the position seems to be as follows. Up to 1516, the lists do not earmark a station specifically for the mayor’s party, though it is possible, as I suggested in section 5 above, that they were occupying one as early as 1501. However, there are records of the hiring of a room on Corpus Christi Day from as far back as 1433. From 1476 onwards, the party are said to be ‘seeing and hearing the play’

8

16

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’ in this room. Is the room at the same place as the station, and if not, how is ‘seeing and hearing the play’ to be interpreted? Before 1500, the room is not identified until 1478, when it is said to belong to Nicholas Bewik. He is a vintner who in 1475 hires Station 8, which appears to be at the Common Hall Gates. He dies in 1479. In 1486 the room is said to belong to Thomas Cokke, also a vintner, who may be one of the socii of William Harpham at Station 8, which could also possibly be at the Common Hall Gates. In 1499, 1501, 1506, and 1508, the room is said to be the hospitium of the Common Hall, but the station at the Common Hall is hired by St Leonard’s Hospital (twice) and William Slater (once). In 1508 the ‘Common Hall’ space is left blank. In 1516 the mayor’s party is not located, but could be at the Common Hall. A note at the end of the station leases, partly illegible, appears to say that the Master and Brothers of St Leonard’s are at the Common Hall. There is no reason why they should both not be there. No receipts are recorded that would tell us if the brothers paid a reduced rate, as they did in 1506. The year 1516 is the first time the mayoral party is definitely mentioned in the station lists. From then onwards, a station is usually allocated to the mayor and his brethren, but it is by no means always at the Common Hall. In 1521, 1522, and 1528 it probably is. In 1523, 1524, 1526, and 1527 it conspicuously is not. The year 1525 has no entry, but in that year the Creed Play was played before the mayor and his brethren, who assembled at the Common Hall to hear it.31 The year 1520 is difficult. The mayor is said to hire a station at the same place as Nicholas Baxter, who pays a reduced rate of 10d. In 1508, however, Baxter shares a station with John Bateman, who in 1521 hires the station before the mayor. There are also two more potential stations between the mayor’s party and the mid-Stonegate station, but as the spaces have been left blank, we cannot tell if they were ghost stations. The odds seem to be on the mayor’s not being at the Common Hall, but the room rental says that the person from whom it is hired is Thomas Flemyng, who later is associated with the chamber at the Common Hall Gates, and who in 1524 and 1527 hires what seems to be the Common Hall station. In the years when the mayor appears to be at the Common Hall, no problem exists. In the years when he is not, Alexandra Johnston has pointed out that there is no specific mention of whom the room belongs to, merely that Thomas Sadler gets it ready for the party, and in some years there is no mention of the hire of a room. In 1523 Mayor Thomas Drawswerd could have entertained the company in his own home: no expenses are given for that year. The other three, John Norman, Peter Jackson, and Robert Wylde, are definitely not at home: Wylde lives in Petergate, and Jackson and Norman in the parish of All Saints Pavement. However, in 1526 Jackson shares the station with Brian Lord, who lived 17

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’ in the parish of St Michael Spurriergate at the top end of Coney Street. It is possible that there was a convenient room available in some hostelry in this area. One would like to propose the Bull Inn, which was at one stage in the fifteenth century used as a guesthouse for official visitors and is probably the ‘tenementum communitatis’ mentioned at Station 6 in 1468.32 However, it does not appear to have been in very good repair in the early sixteenth century: in 1511, it is said to be ‘in gret decay’.33 In 1524 and 1527, when Thomas Flemyng hires the Common Hall station, the mayor’s party is two stations up the road, and Flemyng is clearly acting as an independent agent. Not until 1535 is his name regularly mentioned in connection with the chamber at Common Hall Gates and, by that time, the mayor’s party have been taking the Common Hall station for eight successive years, long enough for the accounts of 1538 to remark that it is ‘where my Lord Mayer and his bredren ar acustomyd to be’. Eleven years in succession are quite long enough to create a custom, it seems – a fact that should perhaps be remembered when we speculate about the phrase in locis antiquitus assignatis in the 1394 o ­ rdinance. 9 The way in which the lady mayoress acquired her ‘official’ station is equally fascinating. In the fifteenth century the only surviving list to mention the mayoress is that of 1475, when Lady William Lamb takes the station on the Pavement, apparently free. Unfortunately we do not know where she lived. The first sixteenth-century mayoress to be mentioned is Lady Simon Vicars in 1521. She takes a station which in 1508 had been taken by her husband; presumably she is entertaining her ‘sisters’ in her own home. The next year, Lady Agnes Gillour takes over the lease held by her husband for the two preceding years, and possibly before, and entertains her ‘sisters’. Between 21 June and the early part of August, Paul Gillour dies, and she does not take the lease again. In 1523, Lady Matilda (Maud) Drawswerd appears to be given the Common Hall station in her official capacity, possibly because her husband is entertaining his party at home. The year 1524 has no station for the mayoress, possibly because at that time Mayor John Norman was unmarried: he married his third wife, Ann Buley, in January 1525.34 In 1525 neither mayor nor mayoress is mentioned. In 1526 Lady Peter Jackson takes the final station on the Pavement, presumably in front of the house in which her son James Jackson is living in 1542. The Jacksons have not hired a station before, but the party habit seems to be established. The next year (1527), Lady Wylde takes over the entertainment in Petergate; her husband hired the same station in 1523, 1524, after his mayoralty in 1528, and probably after that. The bookkeeper makes an interesting slip of the pen: he describes the station as ‘coram Domina maioratus’, the mayor’s house, instead of ‘maiorissa’. In 1528 Lady Thomas Mason takes Station 7, the one before her husband’s at the Common Hall. He was buried in St 18

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’ Nicholas, Micklegate, perhaps too near to the common clerk’s station to be acceptable for the mayoress. At some point between 1528 and 1538 some lady mayoress must have decided it was all too much for her, as in 1538 we find Lady Wylde, now a widow, again taking a station in order to entertain the current lady mayoress, Lady North. In the next set of accounts, 1542, James Jackson, son of Lady Peter Jackson, provides the entertainment for Lady Jane Shadlock, who also lived on the Pavement. In 1554, William Bekwyth entertains Lady North, mayoress for the second time, at his house on the Pavement. From the lists, it would appear that the custom grew up when a few lady mayoresses who already had an interest in a station decided to hold parties at their houses, events so successful that they settled into a custom. I have not, however, looked at the lists of expenses for the ladies’ entertainment, which may suggest a different pattern. The lady mayoress’ station naturally goes free. 10 It is surprising to find that the common clerk, who from 1501 is said to be stationed at the beginning of the route by the gates of Holy Trinity Priory, also occasionally hires a later station on his own behalf. The first one is John Shirwod in 1462: he appears to hire the Common Hall Gates station. In 1524 and 1526 Miles Newton hires the station immediately before the Common Hall. They do not, however, appear to profit from reduced rates. 11 Anna J. Mill has already pointed out the startling drop in receipts between 1486 and 1499. By the 1520s, they have dropped still further, ‘reaching’, as she points out, ‘the nadir with a mere 19s 6d and 16s 8d respectively for the 1523 and 1538 performances’.35 12 Certain persons or groups of persons secure themselves against competition by taking out for their station an indenture to run for a specified number of years. We are lucky enough to possess a copy of the indenture taken out by Henry Watson, fishmonger (1454 and 1486) in 1478, when he and Thomas Diconson engage to pay the city 11s that year and for the following twelve years to have the play played ‘in alta strata de Ousegate inter tenementa modo in tenura prefatorum Henrici et Thome scilicet apud finem Pontis Vse ex parte orientali’.36 Henry Watson’s name appears in the 1486 list of leases, but Thomas Diconson is not mentioned; other names in partnerships of this kind may well not have been recorded. Other indenture-takers mentioned in the lists are Nicholas and William Caton, probably at the Minster Gates station, for 5s (1499– 1508). John Swath (1454 and 1462), John Smyth (1468 and 1475), Miles Robynson (1520–1), and Paul Gillour (1520–1) also pay a suspiciously steady sum. 19

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’

Chart of York station lessees and sites. © Meg Twycross

20

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’

Chart of York station lessees and sites. © Meg Twycross

21

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’

Chart of York station lessees and sites. © Meg Twycross

22

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’

Chart of York station lessees and sites. © Meg Twycross

23

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’

Chart of York station lessees and sites. © Meg Twycross

24

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’ Work on the chart is, clearly, by no means complete: various problems remain to be solved (for example, the exact place of Reginald Beesley, 1524–7), and more sites and lessees remain to be identified. However, it provides a useful tool, both for comparative work on the pageant route and for the social and topographical history of late medieval York in general.

Acknowledgements I should like to thank Mrs Rita Freedman, the York City Archivist; Mrs Mary Thallon; and my brother, Mr Ian Pattison, FSA, of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, for their invaluable help during my work on this art­ icle. Mr Peter Meredith of Leeds University read an earlier draft and made many helpful suggestions.

Notes  1. Anna J. Mill, ‘The Stations of the York Corpus Christi Play’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 37 (1951), 492–502, Appendix III.   2. York Memorandum Book A/Y, f. 188, transcribed and translated by M. Dorrell, ‘Two Studies of the York Corpus Christi Play’, Leeds Studies in English ns 6 (1972), 90–1.   3. York City Archives, MS HB XXI, f. 44; printed by Dorrell, ‘Two Studies’, 92.   4. For St Leonard’s Hospital, see Angelo Raine, Mediaeval York: A Topographical Survey Based on Original Sources (London: J. Murray, 1955), pp. 113–16.   5. For the Austin Friary, see Raine, Mediaeval York, pp. 131–33; for the Guilds of St Christopher and St George, pp. 134, 140.  6. Testamenta Eboracensia, 5, Surtees Society 79 (1884), pp. 14–15.  7. Testamenta Eboracensia, 5, Surtees Society 79 (1884), p. 199.  8. Raine, Mediaeval York, p. 157.  9. York Civic Records, Vol. 2, ed. by Angelo Raine, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, 103 (1941 for 1940), p. 136: 27 February 1498, from MS HB8, f. 33v. 10. Robert H. Skaife, ‘Civic Officials of York and Parliamentary Representatives’ (MS held by North Yorkshire County Record Office, ?1890), 1, sv Ellis. 11. York Memorandum Book, Vol. 1, ed. by M. Sellers, Surtees Society, 120 (1912 for 1911); York Memorandum Book, Vol. 2, Surtees Society, 125 (1915 for 1914); York Memorandum Book B/Y, Vol. 3, ed. by J.W. Percy, Surtees Society, 186 (1973 for 1969); York Civic Records, Vol. 1, ed. by Angelo Raine, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, 98 (1939); York Civic Records, Vol. 2; York Civic Records, Vol. 3, YASRS, 106 (1942); York Civic Records, Vol. 4, YASRS, 108 (1945 for 1943); York Civic Records, Vol. 5, YASRS, 110 (1946 for 1944); York Civic Records, Vol. 6, YASRS, 112 (1948 for 1946). 12. York Civic Records, Vol. 2, pp. 127–8, from MS HB 8, f. 6v. 13. Register of the Freemen of the City of York, Vol. 1, ed. by F. Collins, Surtees Society, 96 (1897 for 1896); Register of the Freemen of the City of York, Vol. 2, Surtees Society, 102 (1899). Other useful information is provided by R. Skaife, The Register of the Guild of Corpus Christi in the City of York, Surtees Society, 57 (1872 for 1871) and M. Sellers, York Mercers and Merchant Adventurers, 1356– 1917, Surtees Society, 129 (1918).

25

‘ p lac e s t o h e a r t h e p lay ’ 14. Dorrell, ‘Two Studies’, 92. 15. A. Johnston, ‘The Plays of the Religious Guilds of York: The Creed Play and the Pater Noster Play’, Speculum, 50 (1975), 55–90 (at 73–4) 16. Dorrell, ‘Two Studies’, 90–1. 17. This is the conclusion to which the pattern on the chart forces me. It is possible that Station 4 was on the other side of the Ouse, though William Moresby belongs to the parish of St Michael Spurriergate. Of the other two lessees, John White had no recorded parish, and Thomas Parker belonged to the parish of St Martin Coney Street. There were extensive building works at St John in the period after 1506 (see An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the City of York, Volume 3: South-West of the Ouse, Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (HMSO, 1972), p. 16), but even the building of the Common Hall does not appear to have impeded the station there in 1454. 18. Dorrell, ‘Two Studies’, 90–1. 19. Percy, York Memorandum Book B/Y, p. 73. 20. Percy, York Memorandum Book B/Y, pp. 139–40. 21. See note 10. 22. Testamenta Eboracensia, Vol. 4, Surtees Society, 53 (1869 for 1868), pp. 256–7, the will of John Stockdale, alderman of York, died 1507. He leaves the house to his wife Ellen, but she did not long outlive him. The house should then have gone to ‘four of the most honest inhabitants of the parish’, but we later find his daughter and son-in-law living there (Skaife, ‘Civic Officials’, sv Wylde). The house was divided into several apartments. 23. From records held by the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, York. I am grateful to Mr Ian Pattison for this information. 24. Skaife, ‘Civic Officials’, sv Wylde. 25. Sellers, York Memorandum Book, Vol. 2, p. 218. 26. See York, Vol. 3: South-West of the Ouse, pp. lxi–lxiii. 27. Alexandra Johnston and Margaret Dorrell, ‘The Doomsday Pageant of the York Mercers, 1433’, Leeds Studies in English ns 5 (1971), 22–34 (at 31); ‘The York Mercers and their Pageant of Doomsday, 1432–1526’, Leeds Studies in English ns 6 (1972), 11–35 (at 19). 28. See Raine, Mediaeval York, passim. 29. Testamenta Eboracensia, 4, p. 298. 30. A. Johnston, review of Alan Nelson, The Medieval English Stage, in University of Toronto Quarterly, 44 (1975), 242–4. 31. Raine, York Civic Records, Vol. 3, p. 104: 28 July 1525, from MS HB X, f. 122v. Also transcribed by Johnston, ‘The Plays of Religious Guilds’, 84. 32. In 1459, the mayor and council lay down ‘ab hac die in antea nulli alienigine, venientes de partibus extraneis ad civitatem predictam, hospitentur, nec eorum aliquis hospitetur, infra eandem civitatem, suburbia, et libertatem ejusdem, nisi solummodo in hospicio maioris et communitatis, ad signum Tauri in Conyngstrete, nisi aliter licensientur per maiorem’ (Sellers, York Memorandum Book, Vol. 2, p. 203). In 1468 it is said to be ‘exopposito’ the station of Alexander Menerous and Nicholas Saunderson, and, apparently, to share in their lease. 33. Raine, York Civic Records, Vol. 3, p. 37: entry for 15 December 1511, from MS HB 9, f.61v. 34. Testamenta Eboracensia, Vol. 3, Surtees Society 45 (1865 for 1864), p. 373 for the licence. The will of John Norman, alderman of York, 13 November 1525, is in Testamenta Eboracensia, Vol. 5, pp. 213–15. His wife Anne is already dead. 35. Mill, ‘Stations’, 498. 36. Sellers, York Memorandum Book, Vol. 2, pp. 239–40, printed from A/Y Book, f. 331v; also printed, with translation, by Dorrell, ‘Two Studies’, 92–3.

26

2 THE LEFT-HAND-SIDE THEORY: A RETRACTION

In 1978 I published in the REED Newsletter my first piece on medieval theatre, on the stations of the York Corpus Christi Play.1 In it I attempted to identify the actual or possible locations of the houses outside which the Play was performed. This topic has subsequently been the subject of further detailed research by Eileen White, part of whose 1984 Leeds PhD thesis on the stations and their owners in the later sixteenth century was reworked and published by Medieval English Theatre in 1987,2 and by David Crouch, whose 1990 York MA thesis on the fifteenth-century stationholders formed the basis for his 1991 article in METh.3 It would appear that one of the most memorable things I said in the REED Newsletter was this: In trying to identify actual houses, I have been brought to an extremely interesting though necessarily tentative conclusion. Those  stations which we can identify are all on the left-hand side of the route … The left-hand-side theory has interesting implications for staging. The ­accounts of the Mercers’ pageant wagon suggest that it had not only a b ­ ackcloth, but was, after the remodelling by Drawswerd, enclosed on three sides, much like a proscenium stage. If the audience scaffolds were on both sides of the route, to keep turning a heavy cart round so as to face them would be extremely awkward. If they are all on the same side of the road, this does not arise. The cart can, moreover, hug the right-hand kerb (or gutter, in many cases) and give the audience maximum room to dispose themselves, standing or sitting. (pp. 19–20) Since it appears that the spoken word and, more alarmingly, two major onsite productions have less power than the written word (the pen is mightier than the pageant waggon?), I am taking this opportunity to declare in writing that I have changed my mind. I no longer believe in the left-hand-side theory. It was perfectly reasonable in its time, but further evidence has come to light 27

t h e l e f t - h a n d - s i d e t h e o ry : a r e t rac t i o n about the stations, and a mixture of visual evidence and actual practice has suggested the possibility that the waggons were oriented quite differently from the way in which we visualised them in 1977 when that article was written. Firstly, the evidence about the stations. Eileen White’s admirably thorough investigation of the 1569 route shows that at least four stations that year were on the right-hand side: the gate of Holy Trinity Priory itself and the houses of Reginald Fawkes in Coney Street, Christopher Willoughby in Stonegate, and Richard Hutton in the Goodramgate-head area; and that, further to this, the last two stations ‘on the Pavement … between Mr Harbert’s and Mr Sheriff ’s houses’ and ‘between Mr Paycock’s and Mr Allen’s places’ are ‘very clearly located between houses on the opposite sides of the road’.4 So the left-­hand-side theory is no longer tenable. Secondly, the evidence about the waggons. It is clear from my 1978 account that I, like most others at the time, assumed without question that the ­pageant waggon was sideways-oriented, ‘much like a proscenium stage’ (or possibly a booth stage) on wheels. This vision was probably unconsciously both created and confirmed by David Jee’s frontispiece to Sharp’s Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries anciently performed at Coventry (1825),5 backed up by a prejudged reading of the orientation of the biblical pageant cars in Denis van Alsloot’s Triumph of Isabella (1615), the other image most familiar to English-speaking theatre historians. At the time, it seemed axiomatic that the pageant-waggon stage was, as it had appeared in the Leeds and PLS York Cycle performances of 1975 and 1977 respectively, a side-on, wider-than-it-was-high box, probably enclosed on three sides. (It is interesting, in view of Philip Butterworth’s article in this volume of METh,6 that the one play at Toronto which seems to have varied from this was the Crucifixion, done on a plain waggon without superstructure. There Christ was crucified on the ground, and the cross raised to a standing position on the front end of a forward-facing waggon. The stage business appears to have forced them into lateral thinking. However, the waggon itself was not aligned down the ‘street’, but turned end-on to an audience seated on bleachers and the roadside grass.7 I cannot remember the 1975 Leeds’ Engineering Department’s production clearly enough to recall how they did it.) The 1971 reconstruction of the York Mercers’ waggon by Alexandra Johnston and Margaret Dorrell following the discovery of the 1433 Indenture,8 and Peter Meredith’s revised and improved version published in the first issue of METh,9 both took this for granted. This image seems immensely tenacious. Eileen White’s highly ingenious diagrams showing the possible orientation of the waggon at street corners on the route are worked out on that assumption.10 David Crouch’s account of the pageant route and its problems, from the point-of-view of one who has been physically involved with the Lords of Misrule’s waggon-plays, also seems to take a side-on orientation for granted.11 In the late 1970s, most of us had never seen a traditional pageant waggon in real life. But Alan Nelson, in the first-ever METh meeting in 1979, introduced 28

t h e l e f t - h a n d - s i d e t h e o ry: a r e t rac t i o n us to the Spanish Holy Week pasos of Valladolid and Medina del Campo.12 These elaborate floats, in dimensions very near to those recorded for early Renaissance pageant waggons, carried like litters on the shoulders of the bearers, and loaded with life-size wooden figures rather than actors, are designed to be borne through narrow streets in procession, and their orientation is exclusively forwards. As Alan Nelson said in his METh article: The principal axis of processional pageants is normally ­longitudinal, i.e. toward the front. Reconstructions of English pageants with ­orientation to the side should be considered problematic, as a) virtually without precedent in illustrations of medieval or Renaissance processions, and b) limiting visibility to one side of the pageant or the other, unless the pageant is turned around in its course. METh, 1:2 (1979), 69 My own work on the pageant-cars of the Flemish ommegangen, published in METh, 2 (1980),13 seemed to confirm Nelson’s arguments, or at least to suggest that they demanded serious consideration – though on re-reading, I appear to have been overly cautious about this.14 All the Antwerp waggons, and most of the waggons in Brussels and Leuven were conspicuously ‘longitudinal’ in orientation. The exceptions might be the Annunciation and Nativity waggons of Brussels (Christ and the Doctors is definitely front-facing, and so is the Jesse Tree, though artfully slewed for pictorial reasons). Also problematic are the Leuven waggons which show two people in conversation (the Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, and Christ’s Appearance to his Mother; the Expulsion from Eden is, however, longitudinal), where the characters are ambiguously disposed on the ‘acting area’, possibly because a front-oriented scene has had to be adjusted by the painter for a book format which shows all waggons from the side. All these two-person waggons are transpicuous, and the processional audience would get a good view of the characters from all angles save possibly, in the case of the Brussels Annunciation, from the front stage left corner (as I commented, ‘Seen from the front, Van Alsloot’s Virgin would be totally obscured by her bedhangings’).15 Others, such as the Leuven Nine Orders of Angels, and possibly Pentecost, are multi-sided: no one point of view seems to predominate. Since then I have seen both on video and in real life the pasos of Seville and the roques of Valencia (some of which are supposed, though with many renovations, to go back to the early sixteenth century), and the Japanese floats of Kyoto and Nagahama.16 These are all essentially processional pageant floats, but with interesting variations. The Seville pasos carry life-size wooden statues posed in dramatic scenes from the Passion and Resurrection.17 The Valencia roques carry statues (in the triumph-waggon mode) and live musicians. The Kyoto floats carry, variously, musicians, dignitaries, and groups of statues. The Nagahama floats are the most interesting, as they are set up for the 29

t h e l e f t - h a n d - s i d e t h e o ry : a r e t rac t i o n performance, by boys, of quite elaborate Kabuki plays, and behave processionally exactly like the English pageant-waggons of York and Chester: they are manhandled along a fixed route, with some very narrow streets and sharp corners, stopping to perform at pre-arranged stations. The front of the waggon is arranged as a stage, the back as a tiring house; entrance is by a gallery along the stage-right side of the waggon, imitating the fixed stages of Kabuki and No. All these stages are definitely forward-aligned. I am not suggesting that there was any form of cultural interchange between sixteenth-century Japanese or indeed Spanish pageant carts and the English mystery-play variety; I merely present it as an interesting non-culturespecific solution to a common situation. These pageants are drawn/carried processionally through the streets, and oriented so as to make the maximum visual impact as they approach. As John McKinnell said when discussing the 1988 York Festival pageant waggon plays: ‘The initial approach of the waggon makes an important impact when it is designed to be seen front-on, but looks as unimpressive as the side of a fairground booth when performance is side-on.’18 If it is true that the English pageant-waggon plays developed from processional floats, it seems unlikely that they would realign them without very pressing practical reasons. However, with all these pageants, the side-view is also impressive, and in the case of the carved tableaux, is designed to be as ornamental and meaningful from the side as from the front. When we talk about a stage ‘picture’ we should not be misled into thinking of it as two-dimensional. Even the most stilted proscenium-arch stage picture is more than that. We should think in terms of sculpture. In theatrical terms, we are looking here at a thrust stage. Even their retreating back-view is impressive. Some of the Valencia waggons feature a subsidiary statue facing backwards – e.g. the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception is backed up by her typological forerunner Judith carrying the head of Holofernes. The Japanese waggons have elaborately embroidered hangings with huge tassels: some of them display Flemish tapestries imported in the sixteenth century. In York in 1988, I was struck by the blankness of the back of our Doomsday waggon, a twenty-one-foot drop of empty red material. It was so conspicuous that it cried out for some kind of decoration. The original Mercers’ Doomsday waggon had ‘a grete coster of rede damaske payntid for the bakke syde of þe pagent’. This has always been thought of as a ‘backcloth’ in our sense, and the painting as some kind of scenic dressing, but it could equally well have been the answer to: ‘Have you seen yourself retreating?’19 I was sufficiently impressed by Alan Nelson’s suggestion to try it out with the Joculatores Lancastrienses’ waggon at the 1983 performance of the Chester Cycle at Leeds and subsequently in the mini-Cycle presented at Chester. (Both are reported in METh, 5.) 20 We set up our pageant waggon for the Purification and Doctors with a front-facing thrust stage, encouraging the audience to stand around it on three sides. The stage picture thus 30

t h e l e f t - h a n d - s i d e t h e o ry: a r e t rac t i o n produced was very compact and suited the rhetorical detailed acting-style I had developed as a director first in Oxford and subsequently in Lancaster. It was not translatable to a wide horizontal staging – and we must have been a great nuisance to the Festival organisers when it rained, and we insisted on building the stage-setting portion of our pageant waggon in the body of the hall into which the plays were driven, instead of, like everyone else, using the conventional proscenium stage. However, when we got to Chester, we did something that in retrospect seems both ludicrous and very revelatory: we used our front-facing pageant-waggon set – but turned it, with considerable physical effort, round through ninety degrees so that it stuck out horizontally across the street. In other words, having gone to all the trouble of working out a new orientation, we then treated it in the street as if it were merely a variant on the traditional side-on one. (Eileen White’s illustrations to her 1987 METh article show that in 1960 Stewart Lack, who pioneered twentieth-century street waggon performances in York, did precisely the same with his Christ and the Doctors in Colliergate.)21 I think this was partly due to our inexperience: this was the first time we  had  taken to the actual streets of an original route, and the audience were  as untrained as we were. Since all the other plays were sideways-­ oriented, we subconsciously assumed that the audience would be confused if asked to  accept another orientation. (If we had been lucky enough to perform outside at Leeds, we would have had to cope with the audience seated in fixed spectator stands intended for a sideways-oriented performance. This may also be a major historical stumbling block to this theory: see below.) Secondly, Eastgate is very wide: there was plenty of room for us to turn round and for the audience to surround us. (Eileen White’s article shows Stewart Lack’s 1966 York Noah’s Ark turned at right angles across Stonegate, which it virtually blocks. This appears to be a sideways-oriented performance – I should be glad of further information – in which case he interestingly anticipates our sense that the audience needs to congregate down the length of the street, but keeps to the traditional view of the stage.) But it did make a nonsense of one of the most important parts of the experiment, of which more below. However, it proved to us that you could use a pageant waggon as a thrust stage and that the audience responded to this without any visible problems. Five years later, when I was organising the pageant-waggon plays for the York Festival of 1988, where we played along part of the original route down Low Petergate from Minster Gates to King’s Square, I suggested to the four participating groups that we should all play head-on and see what happened. The result was revelatory. John McKinnell has described and discussed it in his article on ‘Producing the York Mary Plays’ in METh, 12:2 (1990). In the section headed ‘Side-on or Front-on?’, he lists (pp. 114–16) a mixture of practical and aesthetic reasons for the front-on solution. Practically: 31

t h e l e f t - h a n d - s i d e t h e o ry : a r e t rac t i o n heavy lifting machinery is more stable if the waggon is front-on; at certain points on the route the road would be potentially too narrow to allow for a standing audience in front of a sideways-­oriented waggon, but ‘a front-on waggon, by contrast, can use as much of the length of the street in front of it as the audience needs’; it ‘involves the smallest possible amount of awkward manoeuvring for waggon pushers’. Aesthetically: ‘the initial approach of the waggon makes an important impact when it is designed to be seen front-on’; the audience is presented with ‘a narrow, concentrated scene whose shape parallels that of much contemporary art’. His possible objections involve the existence of steering mechanisms – if the waggon had moveable steering – under the front end of the waggon, which make it difficult to use the space beneath the stage floor for e.g. a Hell Mouth, and the steering bar, which has to be detached before action can take place on the street immediately in front of the waggon. He suggested that a solution to the first might be to play ‘rear-on (i.e. with the back of the waggon as the front of the stage)’, which he and the Durham Medieval Drama Group did in fact do very effectively in their production of the York Harrowing of Hell in 1992. The front end was hung with a dramatic ‘painted cloth’ showing the Harrowing of Hell, which created the necessary oncoming audience impact. I am still not convinced of this, for historical reasons, but it does work, and one front- and one back-oriented waggon might explain how the York Shepherds and Nativity plays could have played in tandem.22 Since then we have repeated the experiment, with five plays instead of four, at the York Festival of 1992 (Plates 1–3). This time the individual groups were given, implicitly, a free hand in how they played. Four out of the five chose a longitudinal orientation, though the actual waggon sets varied widely, according to the demands of the play. Phil Butterworth describes his Crucifixion waggon and the thinking behind his production in this volume of METh. The University of Groningen’s Hortulanus waggon also had no superstructure except for an arbour at the back of the pageant. The two actors skilfully directed their performance to all three sides. The Joculatores Lancastrienses’ Resurrection waggon had a heaven roof, borne on six columns, from which the Angel of the Resurrection descended by winch, but was otherwise transpicuous. The Durham Medieval Players played the Harrowing of Hell from a threatening pele-tower with a portcullis behind which the patriarchs and prophets were locked, and battlements manned 32

t h e l e f t - h a n d - s i d e t h e o ry: a r e t rac t i o n

Plate 1 The Resurrection (Joculatores Lancastrienses) at Stonegate / Little Stonegate, 1992 © Meg Twycross

33

t h e l e f t - h a n d - s i d e t h e o ry : a r e t rac t i o n

Plate 2 The Crucifixion (Bretton Hall) in Stonegate, 1992 © Rosemary Phizackerley

34

t h e l e f t - h a n d - s i d e t h e o ry: a r e t rac t i o n

Plate 3 The Death and Burial (Lords of Misrule) at Stonegate / Little Stonegate, 1992 © Rosemary Phizackerley

by a nice derangement of devils, with a projecting ‘booth-stage’ platform in front, on which Christ and Satan disputed. The whole set, as I have already said, pointed backwards, and the audience had no apparent problems with this. Only the Lords of Misrule decided, because of the peculiar number of different groups of characters in the Death and Deposition, to play sideways. This time we were lucky enough to secure permission to play in Stonegate as well as Petergate, on two consecutive days, and had sizeable audiences – not all of whom were voluntary. We therefore have a considerable body of practical experimental evidence on the way in which a sequence of pageant waggons fits into the original route. Of course, the fact that a particular method of performance ‘works’ does not conclusively prove that it was the original way, but at least it substitutes real theatre for the theatre of the imagination. As often happens, many of the problems raised by academic speculation about the practicalities of this kind of staging turn out either not to exist or to be minimal. I would like to add to some of the points John McKinnell made from his 1988 experience in the light of my own in both 1988 and 1992. The question of improved stability, though it may appear minor, was crucial in 1988 as three of the four waggons (The Assumption, The Coronation, and Doomsday) had ‘heavy lifting gear’. One of our major concerns was where the main lifting stress (which is of course much greater than the simple weight of the person 35

t h e l e f t - h a n d - s i d e t h e o ry : a r e t rac t i o n being lifted) would fall, and where the waggon’s centre of gravity would be. As far as we know, we were using waggons much taller than any previous reconstructions – the Doomsday waggon was 20 feet 6 inches high, and the Assumption not much lower – and the prospect of overbalancing did not bear thinking of. With the forwards-orientation, we were able to set our lifting gear in a much safer position than would have been possible in a sideways-oriented waggon. As John McKinnell pointed out, this orientation is also much more economical in terms of time and effort. The waggon has merely to come down the street and stop at the required playing place. This of course would be the same for a side-on waggon if all the stations had been at the left-hand-side, but as Eileen White has demonstrated, this was not so. A sideways orientation would lead to the ‘awkward manoeuvring’ and turning implicit in the diagrams she provides to show how side-on waggons could play to a right-hand audience. At bends and crossroads, one positions a front-on waggon in the neck of the street one is about to leave, so at Minster Gates the bulk of the waggon is still in Stonegate. This would have given an excellent view to the Archbishop, Dean, and Chapter when in 1484 they watched the Play ‘from a room above the gates of the Close’.23 But there are two other major advantages in this front-on method. Firstly, if a waggon holds to the centre of the street, there is little chance of it taking side-swipes at overhanging jetties or (in the case of modern York) projecting shop signs. This danger has in any case been grossly exaggerated and probably had its genesis in the folk-myth that the waggons went down the Shambles – for no particular reason than that this is the most cramped and therefore ‘medieval’-looking street in tourist York. In any case, no jetties seem to project further than the modern pavements – our waggons were of course confined to the roadway. In 1988 we went down Low Petergate, the narrowest street in that section of the surviving route, which had been further narrowed by major roadworks on the pavement near Holy Trinity Goodramgate, with no overhead problems whatsoever, and two of our waggons, The Assumption and Doomsday, were, as I have said, around twenty feet high. The pageant route was after all not a random collection of narrow back streets, but the main official processional route of the city. One reason for this is that the waggons themselves are not particularly wide. I have found only one record of a medieval or early Renaissance one over eight feet wide (it was ten feet square).24 In practice an eight-foot waggon (as wide as a modern fire-engine – I had to measure those for the 1988 and 1992 plays) leaves plenty of space on either side of the street. According to Eileen White’s measurements, the tightest fit would have been on old Ousebridge, which was 18 feet 6 inches, so left five feet either side to play with, and the tightest turn at the junction of Ousegate and Spurriergate, though the fact that this was a crossroads must have allowed more room for manoeuvre. In 1988 during the performance of Doomsday, even at the narrowest station in 36

t h e l e f t - h a n d - s i d e t h e o ry: a r e t rac t i o n Low Petergate, we managed to fit a Hellmouth and a flight of Heaven steps into the street on stage left and stage right respectively as well. However, with a sideways orientation on a waggon hugging ‘the right-hand kerb (or gutter)’, as I suggested in 1978, this advantage would disappear. Moreover, it could cause real problems with the disposition of the audience. As John McKinnell points out, in a tight situation a sideways orientation ‘would force the audience too close to a left-side waggon for anyone to get a good straight-on view of the whole stage; a front-on waggon, by contrast, can use as much of the street in front as the audience needs’. Earlier discussions seem to have been unnecessarily worried about the manoeuvrability of the audience: for instance, that ‘they would have to be moved, presumably unwillingly, ‘before the waggon could continue its journey’.25 However, experience shows that an audience will move out of the way if it sees a pageant-waggon coming towards it, just as it would move if it saw a doubledecker bus bearing down on it. In practice, audiences are fairly suggestible, and the ‘tradition’ that has developed in our two York experiments of preceding each pageant waggon with a banner and the cast walking in procession is very effective in clearing the way and pegging out an acting space on the platea/street which can then be protected by a few simple theatrical devices. Similarly, at the end of each play, the audience breaks up and reforms to allow the waggon to pass, before reassembling themselves around the next one – if necessary, in a different pattern from the one they had adopted before. The accompanying photographs from 1992 will show, better than words, how an audience disposes itself down the street (Plates 1–3). (Those interested in counting heads can also test Eileen White’s conclusion of ‘a round number of 100 people’ as an average station audience. We are of course assuming maximum interest in the plays.) At this point, the junction of Stonegate and Little Stonegate, the main street is about twenty-five feet wide. It is noticeable how the audience place themselves in relation to the type of staging adopted by the plays. As Phil Butterworth explains in his article, his Crucifixion was plotted virtually in the round, with the action directed outwards. The audience have responded by surrounding the waggon completely. The same tended to happen with the Hortulanus, which had no superstructure, though the arbour provided a certain ‘backcloth’ effect. The Resurrection was plotted for the thrust-stage configuration, with a slight but noticeable front orientation (as in the line-up of Pilate, Annas, and Caiaphas when speaking to the soldiers). Apart from a few people interested in the workings of the angel’s winch, the audience have arranged themselves round three sides, but mostly to the front – though some of them seemed to prefer a close position at the side of the waggon rather than a rather more distant one at the front. Unfortunately I have no aerial photographs of the Durham Harrowing of Hell, though it appears from above on the video. The interesting contrast comes with the Lords of Misrule’s sideways-oriented waggon for the Death and Deposition. Their audience are 37

t h e l e f t - h a n d - s i d e t h e o ry : a r e t rac t i o n very tightly packed into a fairly narrow channel between the front of the stage and the building behind, and had it not been for Little Stonegate acting as a safety valve at the back, could have been potentially quite dangerous. One can imagine what it might have been like in a narrower street. All this is of course very different from our normative concept of the controlled, immobilised audience in their theatre seats or even on spectator stands. The whole question of audience dynamics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is difficult to test in a modern setting, for the simple fact that modern audiences have not been trained and do not know what to expect. But even with an untrained audience, some kinds of behaviour seem to be instinctive. Eileen White’s discovery that the last two stations in 1569 involved people who lived on opposite sides of the road makes the head-on theory much more plausible. It would be interesting to know if more information turns up about other joint holders of stations (e.g. Thomas Barbour, Christopher Tomlinson, Richard Croklyn, and Richard Sawer at the end of North Street in 1468) and their houses. The main difficulty for the head-on theory lies, as she points out, in the fact that ‘scaffolds’ were apparently erected before the houses of the stationholders on the city’s land, i.e. the highway. The evidence for this is the 1417 City Council ordinance that: omnes illi qui pro skafaldis quas ante eorum ostia super solum communitatis edificant in locis predictis de supersedentibus monetam recipiunt soluant tercium denarium monete sic recepte Camerarijs ciuitatis ad vsum communitatis eiusdem applicandum … [all those who receive money from those sitting on them for scaffolds which they build in front of their doors in the aforesaid places on the land belonging to the City shall pay the third penny of the money so received to the Chamberlains of the City to be applied to the use of the same City …] REED: York, p. 29 This is the only evidence in the whole of the York records for these scaffolds, but it sounds fairly comprehensive: it is implied that everyone who pays builds a scaffold. We do not of course know how big these scaffolds were, and at some of the named places in later years (e.g. halfway down Petergate) they sound frankly impossible if a waggon were also to get through, unless the scaffold was actually built across the mouth of e.g. Grape Lane. But the main problem, as Eileen White points out, is that: ‘If the waggons were designed to face down the street, then the lease-paying householders were offering their audience a sideways, and therefore perhaps limited, view of the waggon and its pageant, and one which could equally be enjoyed by the householder across the street who paid nothing’ (p. 53). 38

t h e l e f t - h a n d - s i d e t h e o ry: a r e t rac t i o n This seems to hinge on the nature and amount of visibility expected by a medieval audience. It may be that this was not the same as ours. In fact, the concept of equally good sightlines for every member of the audience is a relatively new one, even in purpose-built theatres, and we would not expect it when watching a procession. Our practical experience suggests that those who get the best view are likely to be in two areas: (1) those in the front two lines of the standing audience. This may form a quite sizeable arc if the actors or crowd marshalls have cleared a platea-type space in front of the waggon; (2) those sitting or standing at the first-floor windows of the adjacent buildings. We were fortunate enough in both 1988 and 1992 to have the use of the firstfloor window of Alderman Stockdale’s ‘new house in Petergait’, leased as a station by his son-in-law Robert Wylde in 1523, 1524, and 1528, and from which Lady Wylde and the aldermen’s wives watched the play in 1527 and 1538.26 It gave an excellent and very slightly raised view of the various pageant waggon stages. The pictorial evidence I cited in the ‘Flemish Ommegang’ article for the height of pageant-waggon stage floors seems borne out by the existing Valencia roques as rather above head-height, a good two-and-a-half to three feet higher than those of our waggons. Conversely, the first-floor height in medieval York buildings was clearly, from surviving examples, low by modern standards. A first-floor window seat would give the equivalent of a good seat in the circle, or possibly, from a social as well as a positional point of view, a box. It is possible that people were willing to pay for seats in these spectator stands because they provided a raised viewpoint, as well as a chance to sit down, which was not enjoyed by the front rows of the standing audience, not because they got a front-on view of the action. Certainly, if the Lord Mayor and aldermen in later years watched from inside ‘the chamber at the Common Hall gates’, they would be in the same situation, though possibly they paid about as much attention to the detail of the Play as a party of businessmen enjoying corporate hospitality at Wimbledon do to the tennis. This would obviously only work if the waggons were largely transpicuous. The more enclosed the stage, the less likely the head-on orientation seems. Even with a stage fairly open on three sides, one can have problems. In 1988 we found that as the daylight faded, there was a visibility problem with the inner reaches of the Doomsday waggon under the roof, and I noted a similar one with the slightly set-back mandorla in the Assumption. This was obviously a specialised problem which could be solved with the use of some form of stage lighting, but it points up a potential objection. Clearly, if the waggon is used front-on, one cannot have a proscenium-style stage with hangings down the sides as well as at the back. (There is no reason why a small portion at the back cannot be curtained.) So what is the evidence for the three-sided enclosure of the pageant waggon which I cited in 1978? It was mostly deduced from the evidence on the Mercers’ Doomsday waggon. The 1433 Indenture lists several costers (‘hangings’): ‘A grete coster of rede damaske payntid for the bakke syde of þe pagent ij other lesse costers 39

t h e l e f t - h a n d - s i d e t h e o ry : a r e t rac t i o n for ij sydes of þe Pagent iij other costers of lewent brede for þe sides of þe Pagent’ (REED: York, p. 55). In our reconstruction we interpreted the grete as referring to the highest-of-heaven-to-street-level drop of the backing cloth: it could equally well refer to a horizontally lengthy backcloth on a sidewaysoriented stage. The ‘two other smaller hangings for two sides of the pageant’ could be the side hangings for a sideways-oriented stage or, as we interpreted them, hangings for the back end of a front-oriented waggon; they could not be side hangings for a front-oriented waggon, or they would not have been ‘lesse’ than the ‘grete coster’. Then there are three more costers ‘of lewent brede’ (possibly the Flemish ell of 27 inches?) ‘for þe sides of þe Pagent’. We interpreted them as waggon skirts, but they could honestly have gone anywhere. Doomsday is such a complex set that, especially if reveals were used, there are a myriad potential places for them. My statement that the Mercers’ pageant waggon ‘was, after the remodelling by Drawswerd, enclosed on three sides, much like a proscenium stage’ was derived from the article by Johnston and Dorrell.27 It is their interpretation of the iiij wendows of the 1526 inventory: ‘If the body of the waggon was a solid structure enclosed on three sides’ (a deduction they reach because there is no mention of costers in this document): it would have been necessary to provide some means to let in light so that the players on the wagon could be seen in the gathering darkness of a midsummer evening. This may have been provided by the ‘wendows’, which would not have been glazed but were probably ornately carved alabaster or wood frames set into the walls of the waggon. I find these windows mystifying. Experience shows that they would not have been particularly successful ‘in the gathering darkness of a midsummer evening’: as we proved, nothing short of full-scale stage lighting would have been effective in the later stages of the route. The inventory also contains an equally mysterious pagand dure, which manages to create the picture of a totally enclosed Wendy house on wheels.28 One has to agree with Peter Meredith that ‘there is very little to go on to get a picture of the Drawswerd waggon’: not enough, certainly, to help with this investigation. But by themselves the wendows do not prove enclosure of the whole waggon, though they may suggest that a part of it (the highest of Heaven?) was. The comparison with a booth stage to suggest enclosure is in fact misleading. Surviving Northern European pictures (Brueghel, Callot, the various Dutch/Flemish Rhetoricians’ stages, Boonen’s Judgment of Solomon play at the end of the Leuven ommegang) do not show a fully enclosed ‘prosceniumtype’ booth stage. They consist of a projecting thrust stage with a tiring-house behind, which can be adapted for use as an inner stage for reveals. Only some Royal Entry scaffolds have anything like an enclosed acting area. 40

t h e l e f t - h a n d - s i d e t h e o ry: a r e t rac t i o n The other evidence to be accommodated is the use of at least two pageant waggons, the Assumption and Doomsday, as shows for Royal Entries.29 In 1486, Henry VII was to be greeted ‘at thend of Swynegale Ioning of staynegate’ by ‘our lady commyng frome hevin’ (REED: York, p. 142) apparently on the Assumption pageant; this is the junction shown in our crowd pictures. The wording suggests that it is to be backed up ‘Swynegale’ (now Little Stonegate). However, for his actual Entry this was relocated ‘by yonde the brigge At the turnyng Into Quonyenx strete’, i.e. at the junction of Low Ousegate, High Ousegate, and Spurriergate. In 1541 when Henry VIII entered York, the Mercers’ Pageant was to be ‘Sett at Ousegate end as the kynges maiestie shall enter into Connyngstrete and þerin to be an oþer showe with asmuch melodye as may be deuysyd þerin’. Both these suggest to me that the waggon was to be backed up High Ousegate. Another pageant, whichever ‘shalbe thought most meyt and conuienyent þerfore’ was to be set ‘at the far end of Connyngstrete beyond the common hall yaites’ (REED: York, p. 272), possibly backed down Lendal. There is no real need to think of them as sideways-on fixed scaffolds. Illustrations of Flemish Joyous Entries occasionally show Ommegang waggons used as part of the show in their original longitudinal orientation.30 What difference does this make to the stage picture? As John McKinnell said, it ‘presents the audience with a narrow, concentrated scene whose shape parallels that of much contemporary art, especially popularly available forms such as stained glass, alabaster carving, and woodcuts and engravings’. The portrait-format of most of these is an ongoing headache for the makers of films and videos, whose screens are landscape-format: so inevitably are these pageant waggons. In fact, the shape of the front-on frame is not vertical so much as square. Most of our modern reconstructions have gone for the eightfoot-wide stage evidenced by the records, with an ergonomically-based ceiling height of seven-and-a-half to eight feet. Within this, modern actors used to wide-open spaces need to be carefully deployed, but once they have got the idea that every movement counts, the proximity gives a strong sense of interaction, and one can create some striking stage pictures. Phil Butterworth’s Crucifixion showed that these are not dependent for their power on the flat two-dimensional ‘medieval illumination’ effect. With a waggon anything from ten to fifteen feet long, one gets a strong sense of depth and recession, thematically powerful in plays which, like the  Chester Purification, depend on the characters moving from the mundane world of the street into a Holy of Holies. The director can also deploy quite a large number of actors, provided s/he is prepared to think three-dimensionally. A Last Supper, for example, would have to replace the Leonardo tradition with Dieric Bouts. (It would actually reinforce the sense of community.) The 1988 Doomsday stage held twelve seated Apostles and Christ on his three-foot-square brandreth, economically if not comfortably. I gave up counting the number of Patriarchs and Prophets incarcerated in Durham’s 1992 Hell. 41

t h e l e f t - h a n d - s i d e t h e o ry : a r e t rac t i o n But the real bonus is the sense of height, which is at its most breathtaking with the doubledeckers. This is conspicuously a case of ‘less is more’. The dynamics between the waggon and its setting add to this, especially since, proportionally, it is ever so slightly oversized for the streets into which it is introduced.31 We should make more of this dynamic in our thinking about the spatial semantics of the plays. We should also think of the waggon’s contribution to the overall spectacle of the Corpus Christi Play itself. As I said in the Cambridge Companion: Banners, pennants, processional singing and music – all features taken up by modern productions – emphasise that one of the main features of the Corpus Christi Play was this processional quality, a sense of marvel following upon marvel. We should remember that the whole event was a performance, not just the individual pageants enclosed in it.32 One major effect of the 1988 and 1992 experiments was to show just how  ­important this sense of a processional event is, even with so small a segment of the whole as we attempted. Unlike modern indoor theatre, the set does  not  disappear when the play is at an end, nor is it an ‘unworthy scaffold’ only brought to life by the actors. The humdrum business of dragging it along the street and setting it up is not an embarrassment to be got over as quickly as possible, but an essential part of the show, a trailer, an ­anticipation-stirrer. The main sense of this is lost if you allow your waggons to sidle into place.

Notes  1. ‘“Places to Hear the Play”: Pageant Stations at York, 1398–1572’, REED Newsletter, 2 (1978), 10–33. This was of course written before the first REED volume was published.   2. Eileen White, ‘Places for Hearing the Corpus Christi Play in York’, METh, 9:1 (1987), 23–63.   3. David Crouch, ‘Paying to See the Play: The Stationholders on the Route of the York Corpus Christi Play in the Fifteenth Century’, METh, 13 (1991), 64–111.   4. White, p. 53. She discusses the locations of the two Pavement stations in detail on pp. 45 and 46.  5. See John Marshall, ‘“The Manner of These Playes”: The Chester Pageant Carriages and the Places Where They Played’, in Staging the Chester Cycle, ed. by David Mills, Leeds Texts and Monographs, NS 9 (Leeds: University of Leeds School of English, 1985), 17–48 (pp. 21–3) for an account of how our prejudices have been formed by this.  6. [Philip Butterworth, ‘The York Crucifixion: Actor/Audience Relationship’, Medieval English Theatre, 14 (1992), 67–76. Ed.]   7. See David Parry, ‘The York Mystery Cycle at Toronto, 1977’ METh, 1:1 (1979), 19–31 (p. 24, Figs 12 and 13). Their waggons were 12’ by 6’ (p. 19).

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t h e l e f t - h a n d - s i d e t h e o ry: a r e t rac t i o n   8. Alexandra Johnston and Margaret Dorrell, ‘The York Mercers and their Pageant of Doomsday, 1433–1526’, Leeds Studies in English, NS 6 (1972), 10–35: see diagram on p. 10.  9. Peter Meredith, ‘The Development of the York Mercers’ Pageant Waggon’, METh, 1:1 (1979), 5–18: see diagram on p. 14. He has since refined and altered this design. 10. White, p. 55, Fig 5. 11. Crouch, pp. 99–100. 12. Alan Nelson, ‘Easter Week Pageants in Valladolid and Medina del Campo’, METh, 1:2 (1979), 62–70. 13. Meg Twycross, ‘The Flemish Ommegang and its Pageant Cars’, METh, 2:1 (1980), 15–41 and 2:2 (1980), 80–98. 14. ‘The Flemish Ommegang’, pp. 87–8. 15. ‘The Flemish Ommegang’, p. 87. 16. I am deeply indebted to Professor Takeo Fujii and Mrs Fujii for taking me to see the pageant-houses of Nagahama, and for sending me videos of the pageant waggons in action. It is remarkable how similar in size and construction these waggons are to both the surviving waggons of Valencia and our reconstructions. 17. Geoff Lester, ‘Holy Week Processions in Seville’, METh, 8:2 (1986), 103–18; Rafael Portillo and Manuel Gomez Lara, ‘Vestiges of Dramatic Performances of the Passion in Andalusia’s Holy Week Processions’, METh, 8:2 (1986), 119– 31. See also Manuel Gomez Lara and Jorge Jimenez Barrientos, Semana Santa: Fiesta Mayor en Sevilla (Seville: Alfar, 1990). 18. John McKinnell, ‘Producing the York Mary Plays’, METh, 12:2 (1990), 101–23 (p. 114). 19. See my comments in ‘The Flemish Ommegang’, pp. 87–8. 20. See reviews in METh, 5:1 (1983), 29–44. 21. White, p. 52, Pl. 11. 22. David Crouch suggests (pp. 99–100) that in the case of the subsidiary 1463 Doomsday pageant ‘for ye sallys to ryse owtof’ (REED: York, p. 95): ‘It is likely, in view of the restricted breadth of the roadways, that such waggons processed in line with the principal one, and that they remained side-by-side during performances, both in the interest of efficient movement en route and of sightlines when stationary.’ Our ‘pageant’ was a low box on wheels large enough to accommodate four actors lying flat, but not as high as the main waggon deck. (For obvious reasons it was called ‘the dead box’.) It preceded the main waggon and was set up immediately in front of it, which is iconographically more authentic and dramatically more pleasing than to station it at the side of the main waggon, as David Crouch seems to suggest. 23. REED: York, p. 135. 24. For a discussion of this, see ‘The Flemish Ommegang’, p. 83. 25. White, p. 53. 26. ‘Places to Hear the Play’, p. 19: see also An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the City of York Volume 5: The Central Area, Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (London: HMSO, 1981), p. 189. The original ‘three-storeyed, timberframed range, five bays long’ was divided into three houses in the early seventeenth century, and now comprises numbers 56, 58, and 60 Low Petergate. We watched from no. 58, now The Fudge Kitchen. 27. ‘The York Mercers and their Pageant of Doomsday’, p. 19. 28. In other accounts of this period, pageant door seems to refer to the door of the pageant house: see REED: York, p. 207 (1508) ‘pro factura de lez pagyand Dores cum operacione carpentorium’, which comes with pageant house expenses under

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t h e l e f t - h a n d - s i d e t h e o ry : a r e t rac t i o n ‘Reparaciones facte de & Super tenementis supradictis’, as does the 1514 ‘Et pro le pageant dore vnum stancheon & nales’ (REED: York, p. 212). However, the 1521 ‘Et pro emendacione hostium ludiculo vocatum pagant doore ij d’ [And for mending the door of the little play called pageant door 2 d] is entered under ‘Reparaciones terre & tenementorum’ together with the repair of a pair of pipe organs (REED: York, p. 226). What is this ludiculus? REED suggests ‘pageant’. Could it, as with the 1526 helle dure, presumably for a full Hell Mouth (?), be the pageant for the souls to rise out of ? 29. This also happened at Coventry in 1456, 1461, 1474 and 1566: see Reg Ingram, ‘The Coventry Pageant Waggon’, METh, 2:1 (1990), 9–10. 30. See illustrations to the Entry of Albert and Isabella in Johannes Bochius, Historica Narratio Profectionis et Inaugurationis Serenissorum Belgii Principum Alberti et Isabellae … (Antwerp and Brussels: Plantin-Moretus, 1602); of Ferdinand, Caspar Gevaert and Pieter Pauwel Rubens, Pompa Introitus …. Ferdinand Austriaci … a S.P.Q. Antverp … (Antwerp: Meursius, 1635). 31. Both Richard Beadle and I discuss this briefly in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. by Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 47–48 and 99–100. 32. Cambridge Companion, p. 47.

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3 SOME ALIENS IN YORK AND THEIR OVERSEAS CONNECTIONS: UP TO C. 1470

This paper is very much a work in progress, an offshoot from the investigations currently under way on the York Doomsday Project.1 One branch of this is a study of the people involved in the play, actively as guild members or passively as audience. This particular topic suggested itself when I went back to the York Freemen’s Register2 and noticed all over again how many foreigners, practising how many different trades, are enrolled there in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: Laurentius de Dordraght, patenmaker; Godfridus van Uppestall, webster; Nicholaus de Andwerp, cordwaner; Elias de Bruges, carnifex; Arnald de Colonia, armourer, Warmebolt de Arleham, a.k.a. Warmbald van Haarlem, goldsmith … and this is only a selection from the 1370s to 1390s. This seemed to contradict the easy assumption that York was an upcountry Northern city, possibly with big ideas about itself, but basically insular and – of course – inferior to London. We had decided as a test case to begin our biographical hunt by asking what we knew of the careers of the people named in the 1433 Mercers’ Indenture, the first recorded pageant document after the legal incorporation of the Mercers’ Guild in 1430.3 How true was it, for example, that the 1433 Pageant Masters were, as seems to have been the case later, young Freemen in their twenties, starting out in the guild, getting their first taste of corporate organisation and accounting – and, as Louise Wheatley pointed out, catering – besides doing the legwork of actually collecting the annual contributions? And we realised, of course (it is not a new discovery), that not only did their putative ages range from 52 to 30,4 but one of them was actually a German – or what we nowadays would call a German. His name was Henry Market, he must have been in his mid-40s at least, and he came from Köln (Cologne). He had taken out letters of denization, or as we would say, been naturalised, in 1430, three years earlier. This revived the obvious questions. How many alien immigrants were there in York? Why did the ones entered in the Freemen’s Register come so particularly from the Low Countries (the modern Netherlands and Belgium) and the Rhine basin? Why did they come to England? How long did they stay? Were they fully integrated into Yorkshire urban society or did they act like 45

s o m e a l i e n s i n yo r k a n d t h e i r ov e r s e a s c o n n e c t i o n s ex-patriates and keep themselves to themselves? And, if you happen to be interested in theatre and pageantry and potential Anglo-Flemish connections, did they come to York in sufficient numbers and at the right time to influence the Corpus Christi Play (or indeed the Paternoster and Creed Plays)? And were they personally involved with the production of any of these plays? Then, on the obverse, was it a two-way traffic? Did the citizens of York travel overseas in such a way and at such times as to pick up ideas about thea­ trical processions from the Low Countries? In addition, since the Project is looking at material culture, and these people were traders and craftsmen, was York, and so York theatre and pageantry, influenced in a secondary way by Flemish and Flemish-style art and artefacts, imported or made in the city by alien artisans: painted cloths, carved chests, and Books of Hours? This is not a new idea. Alexandra Johnston has sketched one scenario in her paper on ‘Traders and Playmakers’ in the proceedings of the 1991 London conference on ‘England and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages’.5 She stresses the number of York mercers who were actively engaged in trade or correspondence overseas, and outlines the contemporary dramatic and processional activity in York and the Low Countries.6 But I am sure she would be the first to agree that her paper is only a taster and that we need to mount a much wider search among the relevant documents, unpublished as well as published,7 and by scholars from both sides of the Channel. The present paper is merely the first chapter. First, a semantic clarification. Late medieval terminology on the subject of those-who-are-not-us was not exactly the same as ours, which can be misleading. Those they called aliens, ‘others’, are in medieval legal Latin alienigenae ‘other-born, of different and unfamiliar stock’. In common usage this seems to imply coming from another country. Those they called foreigners (in Latin forinsecae, etymologically ‘people outside the doors’) were ‘people on the outside’, but not, as in modern English usage, exclusively from a different nation. Although in local dialects foreigners can still imply ‘incomers’, for a late medieval citizen of York, aliens came from Haarlem, or Antwerp, or Gdansk – or Edinburgh. Foreigners came from Leeds. The native-born are called denizens, ‘insiders’, from French dans ‘in, inside’  + ein, the suffix adopted from French for-ein < Latin forinsecae, ­‘outsiders’. So who were these aliens, where did they come from, and why were they there? It would be convenient to be able to produce statistics, but there is a problem: how can one tell which of the names in the Freemen’s Register belonged to aliens? The difficulties of recognition are exacerbated by the clerks’ habits of writing Christian names in Latin and anglicising surnames.8 However, there are more clues than one might at first expect. It is not necessary to confine oneself to people whose places of origin in Brabant or Holland (i.e. the County 46

s o m e a l i e n s i n yo r k a n d t h e i r ov e r s e a s c o n n e c t i o n s of Holland, not the modern Netherlands) or Alemannia are recorded. There are certain tell-tale Christian and, especially, surnames. It is a fair bet that Petrus van Rode, Tydman van Camp, Godfridus van Uppestall, Riginaldus van the Brouke (the York scribes start using van more frequently instead of de or del towards the end of the fourteenth century), Tylman Lyon, Hermannus Horn, Matheus Rumbald, and Arnaldus Lakensnyder (‘cloth-cutter’) are aliens.9 Moreover, there may well be a hidden company. If we did not know from other sources that Henry Market and Henry Wyman were Germans, would we ever have guessed? I calculate on a rough count that at least 1% to 6% of freemen admitted every year in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were alien-born or descended, with a downwards curve in the second half of the fifteenth century. The alien presence in York must have fluctuated with the various political and commercial pressures of a very disturbed time. Politically, an alien could very easily wake up one morning to find himself an enemy alien. Economically, patterns of demand and supply made it more or less worth their while to come there. Politically, for example, Edward III practised positive discrimination in favour of immigrants from Flanders,10 and there appears from the Freemen’s Register to be a sharp upwards increase in the numbers of alien incomers to York in the second half of the fourteenth century. In the first half of the fifteenth century, things took a downward trend: political alliances shifted, and then in 1435 the Treaty of Arras aligned Burgundy with France instead of with England.11 In 1436 suspicion, particularly of Flemish aliens, led to a rumour in London that they were poisoning the beer, and all aliens were asked to take an oath that they were not attempting to overthrow the regime.12 In return they were issued with certificates of political cleanliness, and the names of those to whom these were granted are listed extensively in the Patent Rolls.13 These are potentially very useful documents – if you happen to be looking at the South of England and the Midlands. Unfortunately, for some strange reason, in 1437 there appear to have been only two Flemish/ Dutch/German aliens recorded in England above a line drawn from Lincoln to the Dee: John Petirson, ‘berebruer’, born in ‘Leydyn’ in Holland, dwelling at Scarburgh (Scarborough), and Adrianus Vanlere (Van Lier), born in Brabant, in Newcastle upon Tyne.14 Two years later he has migrated to York, and takes out the Freedom of the city.15 This seems so essentially unlikely that I have christened it ‘The Case of the Disappearing Aliens’, especially since the alien enrolments in the York Freemen’s Register show no diminution around this period, and three years later they have mysteriously reappeared again in national records: in the alien subsidy return of 1440, 328 aliens are recorded in Yorkshire, of which 49 are identifiably ‘Duche’ (Germanic speakers).16 The alien subsidy was what it sounds like: in 1439/1440 and recurrently for the next few years, aliens resident in England were taxed at 16d for a householder and 6d for a non-householder.17 These returns are also very useful, though 47

s o m e a l i e n s i n yo r k a n d t h e i r ov e r s e a s c o n n e c t i o n s the difficulties of keeping up with a transient population are well illustrated from the marginalia: in the 1439/40 return for York, of 36 aliens hospitia non tenentes (non-householders), 19 are labelled ammovet and three more mortuus/a est. The householders are somewhat more stable: only 9 out of 45 have moved (and only 3 have died).18 It is of course difficult to disentangle ‘political’ from ongoing economic rivalry. However, York does not appear to have been particularly chauvinistic: it possibly could not have afforded to be in matters of trade. There were ongoing power struggles with the Hansards over the Baltic trade, and fairly general North Sea piracy, which had localised repercussions. Different guilds had different rules about the admission and role of aliens to their mysteries, but these seem to have been dictated very much by the nature of the trade concerned.19 Their main animus seems to have been against the Scots, a more immediate threat: the 1419 prohibition against aliens holding civic office or entering the Common Hall to listen to deliberations is directed at ‘nulli Scoti nec aliquii alii aliengene’.20 York facilitated the collection of the alien subsidy,21 but although in 1439/40 the anti-alien pressure group in Parliament attempted to enforce the rules on hosting,22 the first real York attempt to corral aliens in an approved lodging, the Bull in Coney Street, does not appear to be until 1459.23 Judging from the Freemen’s Register, the number of incomers to York did not decrease drastically overall in and immediately after the 1430s. The kind of people who came changed slightly, but this may be as much due to changing commercial fashions as political pressure. In the second half of the fifteenth century, however, there is a conspicuous drop in aliens taking out the freedom of the city. Economically, as is well known, patterns of trade shifted dramatically in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. At the beginning of the fourteenth century the main commodity was raw wool, exported largely by alien merchants  for conversion into cloth in the cities of Flanders and Brabant. During the century, English merchants took over this export trade. But meanwhile the English had also been learning cloth-making skills, and at the beginning of the fifteenth century were exporting as much finished cloth as raw wool; in fact, they effectively killed the industry in the Low Countries. They also, at least in York, came to dominate the import trade in general, which may be one reason for the relative dearth of alien freemen from the 1460s onwards.24 What did our York aliens do for a living? Maud Sellers’ section in the Victoria County History follows the received line that in the early period the majority were Flemish weavers and ancillary clothworkers, imported by Edward III to set up a rival to the cloth industry of Flanders and Brabant. From the Freemen’s Register she picks, among others, Nicholas de Admare de Brabant, webster (1343); John de Colonia, webster (1343); Thomas Braban de Malyns, textor (1352); Laurence Conyng de Flandre, webster (1352); George Fote de Flandre, walker (1352); Robert de Arays, taillour (1352); Gerwin Giffard 48

s o m e a l i e n s i n yo r k a n d t h e i r ov e r s e a s c o n n e c t i o n s de Gaunt, textor (1355); Levekyn Giffard, his brother (1352); Gerome and Piers de Durdraght, walkers (1358); Arnald de Lovayne, teinturer (1359); and Geoffrey de Lovayn, webster (1361).25 I have done a brief sorting out of alien trades from the beginning of the Freemen’s Register in 1272 to 1370, and there are a fair proportion of dyers, tondours (shearers), walkers (fullers), weavers, and tailors. But there are also a sizeable number of other traders, especially metalworkers, of which the main branches are metal polishers (furbours) who mostly come from ‘Almain’, connected with the armour industry (armourers follow), and goldsmiths. These latter were presumably attracted to York because of the ecclesiastical trade. They keep coming steadily during the second half of the fourteenth century and are about equally spread between Netherlanders and Almains, with a recurring number from ‘Colonia’. It is just a thought, but is this why the Goldsmiths were given the Play of the Three Kings?26 From time to time we see someone identifying a gap in the market. In 1416 arrives Florencius Jansen, the first alien berebrewer (beer, with hops, appears to be a speciality of Flanders and Brabant: ale, without hops, was English),27 followed up by Johannes Tydeman (1420), Jacobus Garardson (1423), and Lamkin Vantreight (1447). There was a luxury import trade in organs and clavicymbals: in 1446 arrives Willelmus Nivell, organmaker.28 There was an unbelievably large import trade in felthattes, which came in by the hundred dozen, varied seasonally by strawhattes, and fashionably by copintank hats, and greyhattes.29 In 1462 arrived Johannes Mogan, felthatmaker, to take advantage presumably of the raw material (rabbit fur) which was exported to Flanders to make the hats in the first place: he found the trade so profitable that he was still there ‘xx yere and more’ later.30 Why did so many people emigrate to England from the Southern Low Countries? My explanations are necessarily second-hand.31 There are several possibilities arising from the particular demographic and economic circumstances of the Low Countries in the period. The area was very heavily populated. It could not feed its population from its own resources; this had forced a manufacturing economy on them rather earlier than in England, whose main export in the fourteenth century and earlier was raw wool, the bulk of it of a very high quality, which was then treated and woven in the Low Countries, especially Flanders and Brabant. Famine and the plague, when they struck, struck proportionately more severely. The area was too important to be peaceful in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as the English slogged it out with the French, the French with the Burgundians. The English currency was relatively stable in comparison with the constantly adulterated currency of the Dukes of Burgundy. These are negative aspects. More positively, a craftsman who could offer advanced manufacturing skills but was not particularly outstanding in his own country could make a much better living in a country which could not offer these skills. The fact that several of the emigrants seem to be related to each other suggests serial migration: one 49

s o m e a l i e n s i n yo r k a n d t h e i r ov e r s e a s c o n n e c t i o n s member of the family tests the water and then sends encouraging messages home, and others follow. Whether the skilled craftsmen came intending to settle, or whether they meant to make their fortunes and go back home, we cannot really tell. To find out what happened, we need to do a survey of all the putative descendants of aliens in the Freemen’s Register and elsewhere, for example, through wills.32 The other group are the merchants and mercers. This immediately raises the question of the status and intentions of these aliens in the Freemen’s Register. We tend to assume that weavers and tailors, furbours, and saddlers have come to stay. Merchants are different. Alien merchants had, if they wished to trade in their own right, to take out the freedom of the city. But this did not necessarily mean that they wished to take up permanent residence. In 1371, the York A/Y Memorandum Book talks about ‘certain folks [who] come yearly to the city, and are enfranchised’.33 So did Godefridus Overscote, mercator, de Brabane (1372) or Dericus Bogholl van Wosell, mercator (1378) do more than make a flying visit? Or did Dionysius Tukbacon (1397), Petrus Uppestall, mercator (1402), or Henricus Markett, marchaunt (1411) originally intend to stay? I promised some case histories.34 The histories of Henry Wyman and Henry Market are relatively familiar (though their wills and their family connections will repay further study). I discard with regret Wormbold van Haarlem, goldsmith, who took out letters of denization in 1403, who got through three wives, and when the relations of the second tried, as he saw, to cheat him out of a piece of property by producing a forged writ with what they claimed to be his seal hanging from it, swore that it was not his seal, it had never been his seal, and: ‘Then in the presence of the mayor and persons aforesaid, Warmebold offered to wage judicial combat against anyone who asserted the contrary, saying that anyone who did so was wrong in his head, and with great spirit he threw down his glove on to the exchequer table.’35 Let me recommend to your attention the less famous Tubbacs and their friends the van Uppstalls. Thomas Tubbac is relatively well known to the theatre fraternity as the recipient under the will of William Revetour, theatrical priest, of ‘a certain book drawn from the Bible into English’ and 6s 8d.36 His wife Katerina (Katherine) Tutbag received an alabaster crucifix. He is the second of an immigrant mercantile dynasty – not a major dynasty, but a comfortable one – who were closely connected with the Mercers’ Company, and hence, though exactly how wholeheartedly we can only speculate, with the play of Doomsday. The Tubbacs are difficult to disentangle partly because the local York clerks had difficulty with their name. They appear variously as Tutbag, Tutbages, Tubbac, Tubbat, and, extravagantly, Tukbacon. The last is probably the nearest to their original Flemish etymology,37 as Tuc-bake appears to mean ‘killbacon’, and the original Tucbak was probably a pig-sticker, as featured in the month of December in so many calendars. It is still a well-known family 50

s o m e a l i e n s i n yo r k a n d t h e i r ov e r s e a s c o n n e c t i o n s name, as Tobback, in modern Brabant, with representatives in both civic and national government. There are a number of York Tubbacs in the late fourteenth century, who appear to be related to each other, though exactly how is unclear. There may have been two Tubbac families: one which died out and one which founded a dynasty. The first Tubbac in the dynasty appears himself under an alias in the Freemen’s Register, free in 1397/8, as ‘John Mylner, de Hyst in Brabancia’.38 This is almost certainly Heist-op-den-Berg, about 22 kilometres north of Leuven and 18 kilometres northeast of Mechelen. The Etymological Dictionary of the Surnames in Belgium and North France by Frans DeBrabandere39 led me to an article on ‘De familie Tobbac uit Berg’ by Paul Behets and Jules Reusens which confirmed that there were Tobbacks (with an almost equally bewildering range of spellings) in Heist in 1375, and recorded regularly there through the fifteenth century. They included a wheelwright, two tanners, and a cordwainer: two others were aldermen of Heist. Reverting to John Tubbac, though his alias Milner suggests a profession, he describes himself in his will as mercator and he seems to have lived in York as a merchant. John allied himself with the nascent Mercers’ Guild in its social and charitable role. He appears as one of the brethren of the Hospital of the Trinity, the Blessed Virgin Mary and All Saints in Fossgate (now the Merchant Adventurers’ Hall) in its inaugural list in 1420, and is recorded as paying dues in the account rolls of the Mercers’ Company up to his death in 1438. He married Alice, possibly Ireby, possibly from a seafaring family,40 by at least 1409 (the putative date of birth of their son Thomas). From 1414 they lived and traded in two houses on Ouse Bridge, let to them by the Council at a rent of 40s per annum.41 The couple entered the Corpus Christi Guild together in 1431.42 He died in July 1438, after 40 years in the city, and in his will asks to be buried in St John’s Church, Ousebridge, ‘if he dies in York’, which implies that he might well be elsewhere, possibly trading overseas. He makes legacies to his wife Alice, his brother Martin (presumably also in York, though he is not mentioned in the Freemen’s Register), his son Thomas, and his sisters’ (plural) children ‘in partibus transmarinis’, and also to William Revetour, priest, and Nicholas Husman of Antwerp. Alice outlived him by 16 years, long enough to see her grandchildren, Alice, John, William, and Robert. Her nephew, son of Martin, was also a Thomas, married (like almost everyone else at the time) to an Agnes. She makes no legacies to anyone overseas. Son Thomas, the legatee under Revetour’s will, was free by patrimony (as ‘Thomas Tutbages, fil. Johannis Tutbages’) in 1429/30. He seems to have had two wives: Katherine, with whom he entered the Corpus Christi Guild in 1440/1 and who was also a legatee under Revetour’s will, and Agnes.43 He had a modest but busy civic career (chamberlain in 1454) and was much in demand as witness to deeds and inquisitions. In 1454, as one of the Guardians of St John’s Ousebridge, he acts as agent for them and the Abbot of Fountains in 51

s o m e a l i e n s i n yo r k a n d t h e i r ov e r s e a s c o n n e c t i o n s leasing a station outside the church for the Corpus Christi Play.44 He also turns up in the same Chamberlains’ Roll selling 8 quires of paper to the Council.45 He traded with the Low Countries and paid jetsam for the ill-fated Katherine of Hull in 1457.46 He spent his retirement (he died in 1486/7 and must have been at least 77) as Clerk to the Mercers’ Guild, which he had joined in 1438,47 where he seems to have developed a major retirement interest in witnessing wills, marching up and down Fossgate with penner and inkhorn at the ready. In his own will, he asked to be buried in St John’s next to his parents, leaving the church a chained Historica Scholastica and mentioning ‘all my books’, so he appears to have a library. He also left a violet robe trimmed with beaver, a full set of armour, and his merchants’ scales with their weights.48 Robert Tubbac, the grandson, was free by patrimony in 1470/71. He had a wife called Marion, and sons.49 He also was Chamberlain, briefly, in 1489,50 and traded overseas, mainly, from the surviving records, exporting lead and woven cloth.51 He also held office in the Mercers’ Guild and joined the Corpus Christi Guild in 1467/8.52 None of his children took out the Freedom; they may either have become gentrified or died young.53 A ‘dom. Will. Tutbag’ is mentioned in the Corpus Christi Guild lists in 1505 as one of the Keepers of the Guild for that year. He might be a son, or William, the brother of Robert, mentioned in Alice’s will. If so, the family may have died out in the male line. We seem here to have a relatively prosperous, devout, and well-read family, with strong local attachments to church and to guild, once the guild had been created. The second and third generations enter the cursus honorum of civic office, though they do not make the top echelon: John was possibly debarred by being an alien born or possibly merely because he was finding his feet. The first generation has sufficiently close links with the homeland to leave legacies to friends there; after that there is a gradual loosening of intimacy, though we do not know anything yet about their trading companions on the other side or whether their family there survived. The son Thomas certainly was literate in English, as well apparently as in Latin. The other elder Tubbacs appear, like John, in the 1390s. Dionysius Tukbacon, mercator, was made free in 1397, in the same list as ‘Johannes Milner de Hyst in Brabancia’. Four years earlier (1393), a Henricus Tukbacon de Malynes, wever, took out the freedom. (Again, De Brabandere records Tucbacs in Mechelen in 1311 and 1474.)54 Was this another branch of the same family? In July 1398, a Henricus Tutbak ‘de Eboraco, marcator’, writes a will in which he names Denis (Dionysius) Tutbak as his brother (‘fratri meo carnali’), forgiving him all debts and leaving him ‘all the goods of mine which are in his hands tempore recessus mei’ and £20 sterling currently in York. To ‘my other brother existenti in partibus transmarini’ he leaves £20 sterling ‘de bonis meis existencibus Eboraco et in diuersis partibus Anglie et in diuersis partibus transmarinis’. 55 It sounds as if we have stumbled upon a cross-North Sea trading partnership in which Henry is a travelling partner. Despite having 52

s o m e a l i e n s i n yo r k a n d t h e i r ov e r s e a s c o n n e c t i o n s a base in York, he seems to have traded mainly through Great Yarmouth, where he asks to be buried by the Carmelite friars. The fact that his other brother is specifically said to live overseas seems to discount John Tutbag, alias Milner; besides this, if they were brothers, why did they both sign on at the same time under different names? However, Henry leaves 6s 8d to the church of St Mary ‘de Harelere in Brabante’, possibly Hallar on the northern outskirts of Heist op den Berg. There is a celebrated statue of the Virgin, O.L.V. van Altijddurende Bijstand (Our Lady of Perpetual Succour) in the church at Hallar, though physically she dates from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century.56 He also names Godfridus Uppestall as one of his executors, thus introducing our second surname, also still a common one (as Van Opstall) in Brabant. Godfrey van Upstall was made free in 1376 as a webster. He took out letters of denization on 17 June 1393 (confirmed by Henry IV on 26 May 1400),57 in which it is said that he was born in Brabant, but not where (Upstall seems to be a family name, not a place of origin), and promises not to export in his own name any wools or other merchandise except his own. He already had a flourishing import/export business: in 1383, he was importing, via Hull, swords, madder, oil, and glass on the St Mary of Veer; onionseed and soap, on the St Mary of Arnemuiden; and onions, garlic, and oil on the St Mary of Westkapelle; while exporting onions (again), calfskins, and thrums on the Godberade of Veer, Master the euphoniously-named William Halibut. In 1391 the customars of Hull record him, as an alien, exporting raw wool and calf’s hides.58 Coming in as a weaver does not seem to have inhibited a change of profession; one gets the impression that links with the other side positively encouraged trading. Peter van Upstall (perhaps a son, perhaps a very young brother) was free in 1401 as mercator. He married Alice, sister of Richard Russell, vintner (not the more famous merchant, but the one who was Pageant Master to the Vintners, and City Chamberlain in 1426).59 The Vintners imported wine, so were merchants to that degree. He lived in the parish of St Martin, Coney Street. On 22 May 1414 he also took out letters of denization, which say that he too was born in Brabant, but do not say where. On 28 April 1416 he brought these Letters Patent to be enrolled by Roger Burton on behalf of the Mayor and the city council. They were tied up ‘cum cordulis sericis colorum rubei et viridis, suo sigillo magno in cera viridi pendente sigillatas’ [with silk cords in the colours of red and green, sealed with [the King’s] Great Seal hanging from them in green wax] records Burton: their contents are duly copied out, and we can compare them with the originals in the Patent Rolls.60 His will, proved on 14 September 1430, asks that he should be buried ‘vbicumque deus disposuerit’ [wherever God will have disposed], a common Lollard formula, but which might have added point if he were a travelling man, and he leaves his son John all the lands and tenements ‘que habeo in Harsyll in Braband’ (possibly Herselt, about 12 kilometres east-southeast as 53

s o m e a l i e n s i n yo r k a n d t h e i r ov e r s e a s c o n n e c t i o n s the crow flies from Heist). Alice died later the same winter as her husband, leaving an enormous amount of bedroom furniture.61 Among her many bequests to a wide circle of friends and family (which includes money to make a bier for the shrine of Corpus Christi) are two to the elder Tutbags, John and Alice, and she makes John Tutbag one of her executors. Did the Brabanders from round Heist stick together? Her son John, draper, free by patrimony in 1444 and also of St Martin Coney Street, died in 1451;62 with him the family seems to have disappeared. Taking out letters of denization was not as common as one might expect. Until the panic of 1436, there were only one or two a year in the kingdom. They were expensive and time-consuming to solicit. You had to have impeccable references: long residence in the country, freedom of the city, usually a native-born wife and children. Henry Wyman’s letters of denization, dated 26 January 1388, state that he is a citizen of York, who has long lived there with wife and house, and paid tenths, fifteenths, and other taxes;63 Warimbald (Wormbold) Harlam’s letters, dated 18 February 1403, say that he ‘for twenty four years has dwelt at the city of York [which would put him there in 1379: he was made free in 1385], and is of the freedom of the city, as he says’.64 It clearly needed a considerable amount of thought before you  took this step. Alien merchants were exempt from local and national taxes, though they paid heavier customs duties – unless they were Hansards, in which case they paid lower duties than the natives.65 It was not until 1440 that the alien subsidy taxed aliens just for being aliens. However, aliens could not officially buy or sell property (though it doesn’t seem to have prevented them from doing so) and it is possible that they were unofficially banned from civic office, though it does not seem to have debarred their sons, as we have seen above.66 Henry Wyman ‘of Almain’, the most distinguished of the immigrants, was a Hansard, possibly from Gdansk: a person of that name supplied household goods to Henry Earl of Derby during his expedition there in 1381.67 He was shipping through Hull as an alien as early as 1379, but again took out the freedom only in 1386.68 This may have been in response to a fracas in 1385, when his goods were seized in reprisal for the seizure of York merchants’ goods in Prussia, and he himself was forbidden to trade outside the realm. He obtained a royal form of release for this, but may have wanted more security.69 Two years later (26 January 1388) he took out letters of denization, and by 1406 was Mayor, a role he filled again the following year. Henry Market, who came from Köln (he left a brother there in ordine sacerdotali, apparently with a son and daughter)70 and thus was also a Hansard, may have intended to embark on the same career. He took out letters of denization in 1430,71 and was Chamberlain in 1437 and Sheriff in 1442/3, but unfortunately he died later that year. He left one daughter, Alice, who married Thomas Beverley, one of the regular names in the Hull Customs accounts and a merchant of the Staple.72 Whether his wife’s German connections were 54

s o m e a l i e n s i n yo r k a n d t h e i r ov e r s e a s c o n n e c t i o n s involved in his overseas trade, I do not yet know. Their sons and grandsons kept on the Beverley family name and business. Henry also had a brother Roger with a family living in London. These people were coming across and settling about the time that the Corpus Christi Play was taking on the form in which we know it, and the same was happening to the ommegangen of Flanders and Brabant. It is of course difficult to know exactly which were the formative years for the Corpus Christi Play. The earliest record of pageant waggons in 1376 does not necessarily imply a fully fledged pageant cycle;73 if the 1394 Memorandum Book entry saying that ‘omnes pagine corporis christi ludent in locis antiquitus assignatis & non alibi’ suggests waggon plays,74 then these pre-date anything we have from the Low Countries, even Bruges, judging from the evidence presented by Wim Husken.75 Bart Ramakers’ recent book suggests that the early evidence from Oudenaarde, recorded from 1407, shows a characteristic pattern of varied figures linked with the overall theme of the procession, but not arranged in any chronological order like the English cycle Plays, even though the characters may have spoken words.76 In Antwerp, the earliest record published is 1398. It lists a lengthy walking procession, headed  by the trade guilds, with tableaux(?) of the Joys of Mary mixed with the Passion (very like the programme of a Flemish Book of Hours made for the English market); these end with ‘een poijnt van den oerdeele’ [a float of the  Judgement].77 Perhaps a merchant of Brabant might have described this to a merchant of  York? Or was it vice versa? Then further commerce across the narrow seas might have kept up a flow of smaller innovative ideas. The Antwerp ommegang was refurbished about the same time as the Drawswerd redoing of the Doomsday wagon, but, disappointingly, surviving illustrations show that the two waggons had very little structurally in ­common.78 But we must regulate our heated enthusiasm with the cold douche of evidence. Can we prove that any of our Flemings and Brabanders had any influence over what the plays looked like? Or that the people directly connected with the plays were also either aliens from the right area, or denizens who had been to the right area at the right time of year? Merely to write letters to somebody on the other side does not necessarily imply that you have been there; even to be a proven attendee at the various markets there (and I have chased some members of the Mercers’ Guild and even pageant masters  through Smits’ Bronnen to the markets of Bruges and Antwerp) does not necessarily imply that you have seen their pageantry. (The Project hopes to pursue this line of investigation further in our Anglo-Belgian collaboration.) And, indeed, who was responsible for the overall look of the plays? Might the 1415 Ordo Paginarum play the same sort of role to the pageants as instructions to an illuminator does to the final illumination? Is it prescriptive or descriptive? Who designed the original Mercers’ Doomsday waggon? Was it even a mercer? Could it perhaps have been a painter like Johannes Braban (free 1365) 55

s o m e a l i e n s i n yo r k a n d t h e i r ov e r s e a s c o n n e c t i o n s or, if he is too early, Willelmus Smythhusen (free 1389)? Now there’s a whole new line of enquiry. Lancaster University 1997 Family Tree of the Tubbacs of York Tubbacs of Heist in Brabant

John Tubbac, alias Milner free 1397, died 1438 = Alice ?Ireby died 1454

Martin Tubbac = ??

sisters

Thomas II = Agnes

children overseas

Robert Tubbac free 1470-71 = Marion

William Tutbag poss. priest?

Thomas Tubbac free 1429-30, died 1487 = (1) Katherine died before 1454 = (2) Agnes

Alice

John Tubbac

sons

Family Tree of the Tubbacs of York © Meg Twycross

Acknowledgements Part of the research on this article was undertaken with the help of a grant made to the York Doomsday Project by the Nationaal Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek of Belgium and the British Council, for a joint research project with the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. I also wish to thank J.L. Bolton for his generous advice and information on the subject of economic history in general and aliens in particular, and for lending us his unpublished Oxford BLitt thesis ‘Alien Merchants in England in the Reign of Henry VI, 1422–61’. He is currently completing a book on aliens. [This appeared as The Alien Communities of London in the Fifteenth Century: The Subsidy Rolls of 1440 & 1483–84 (London: Richard III & Yorkist History Trust, 1998). (Ed.)] Very warm thanks are also due to Olga Horner for her work in the Public Record Office and advice on legal matters; to Ann Rycraft and the York Craftsmen’s and Women’s Wills Project for supplying 56

s o m e a l i e n s i n yo r k a n d t h e i r ov e r s e a s c o n n e c t i o n s the Project with information from their database; to Louise Wheatley for discussing the York Mercers and lending the project a copy of her unpublished MA thesis, ‘The York Mercers’ Guild 1420–1502: Origins, Organisation and Ordinances (University of York, 1993); and to my Project co-Director Pamela M. King for her advice and comments. This article is a branch of the research undertaken by the Project and has benefited, as has all published work arising from the Project, from our weekly in-house discussions.

Notes   1. [The York Doomsday Project, initially funded in 1995/1996 by a British Academy Major Research Grant, grew from a multimedia computer project on the fifteenth-century York Mystery Plays into a research project exploring all aspects of the plays and their various social, intellectual, religious, and theatrical contexts. The collaborating partners were the University of Lancaster and the British Library. (Ed.)]  2. Register of the Freemen of York from the City Records, 1: 1272–1558, ed. by Francis Collins, Surtees Society Publications (Durham: Surtees Society) XCVI (1897 for 1896). Further references to the Freemen of the City should be sought under the relevant years in this volume. N.b. that the dating is not always entirely accurate: the dates at which the names were entered changed over the years, and the earlier lists appear to have been copied from other manuscript lists.  3. Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, 2 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), I, 55–56. For the Mercers’ charter as recorded by the city officials, see York Memorandum Book, ed. by Maud Sellers, 2 vols, Surtees Society Publications (Durham: Surtees Society) CXX (1912) and CXXV (1915 for 1914), II, 135–7; The York Mercers and Merchant Adventurers, ed. by Maud Sellers, Surtees Society Publications, CXXIX (Durham: Surtees Society, 1918 for 1917), pp. 35–36.   4. William Bedale: free as mercator 1402, therefore born c. 1381 (assuming a Freedom taken out at the average age of 21), Pageant Master at 52; William Holbek, free as mercer 1424, therefore born c. 1403, Pageant Master at 30; Thomas Curteys, free as mercer 1420, therefore born c. 1399, Pageant Master at 34; Henry Market, free 1412 but alien, so born c. or before 1391, denization 1430 (at the age of 39 or older), Pageant Master at 42 at least.  5. England and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages, ed. by Caroline Barron and Nigel Saul (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1995), pp. 99–114. This provides a useful summary of published work to date.   6. However, see below for the possible implications of overseas involvement in trade on dramatic activity. The mere fact of writing letters to overseas correspondents or taking decisions at home about overseas trade does not necessarily imply physical presence at or even conversations about theatrical events in the Low Countries. Johnston also says ‘the Flemish waggons undoubtedly provided a model for the northern English pageant wagons’ (p. 111); the dates involved suggest that it might possibly be the other way round.   7. Wills, as will be seen below, are a case in point. Those published in the Testamenta Eboracensia series, though useful as pointers, often turn out to be excerpted or inaccurate when compared with the originals.   8. One can see the same thing in the fourteenth- and fifteenth‑century Hull Customs Accounts, where for example in 1453 one gets names like Bartholomeus White, Cristof[e]rus Constable, and Henricus Fyssher, all of whom are then qualified as

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s o m e a l i e n s i n yo r k a n d t h e i r ov e r s e a s c o n n e c t i o n s Hansard: see The Customs Accounts of Hull 1453–1490, ed. by Wendy R. Childs, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, CXLIV (Leeds: Y.A.S., 1986 for 1984), pp. 4–6.   9. Petrus van Rode, coleourmaker, free 1400; Tydman van Camp, free 1408; Godfridus van Uppestall, webster, free 1376; Riginaldus van the Brouke (Vandenbroeck), shether, free 1451; Tylman Lyon, merchaunt, free 1435; Hermannus Horn, goldesmyth, free 1430; Matheus Rumbald, skynner, free 1406; Arnaldus Lakensnyder, free 1350 as Arnaldus de Lakensnither; his son Henricus is free 1380 per patres, and the name is spelt as above. 10. See The Victoria History of the Counties of England: Yorkshire, ed. by William Page, 3 vols (London: Constable, 1912; repr. London: Dawsons for University of London Institute of Historical Research, 1974) III, 438; The Statutes of the Realm I (London: 1810, repr. London: Dawson, 1963) p. 281, 11 Edw. III cap. 5 (1336/7). E. Miller, ‘Medieval York’, in A History of Yorkshire: The City of York, ed. by P.M. Tillot, Victoria County History (London: Oxford University Press for University of London Institute of Historical Research, 1961) pp. 25–116 (pp. 108–9) briefly discusses alien incomers. 11. See Caroline Barron, ‘Introduction: England and the Low Countries 1327–1477’, in England and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages, especially pp. 8–9, for a useful summary of these events. 12. Sylvia Thrupp, ‘A Survey of the Alien Population of England in 1440’, Speculum, 32 (1957), 262–73 (265). 13. Calendar of the Patent Rolls: Henry VI Vol. II, A.D. 1429–1436, ed. by A. Hughes and others (London: HMSO for the Public Record Office, 1907: repr. Nendeln: Kraus, 1971), pp. 537–9, 541–88; CPR: Henry VI, Vol. III, 1436–1441, ed. by A. Hughes (dec.) and A.E. Bland (London: HMSO for the Public Record Office, 1907: repr. Nendeln: Kraus, 1971), p. 37. Marie-Rose Thielmans, Bourgogne et Angleterre: Relations politiques et économiques entre les Pays-Bas Bourguignons et l’Angleterre 1435–1467 (Brussels: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1966) makes extensive use of these lists to map the distribution of aliens, their trades, and their Low Countries origins at the time, but possibly because she is largely Londoncentred, she does not seem to notice the strange discrepancy mentioned below. 14. CPR: Henry VI Vol. II, 1429–36, pp. 555 (Van Lier), 579 (Petirson). 15. Freemen’s Register for 1438. 16. Thrupp, ‘Alien Population’, p. 272. 17. Thrupp, ‘Alien Population’, pp. 262–4. 18. PRO E179/217/46. Many thanks to Mrs Olga Horner for researching, transcribing, and translating these documents. 19. For example, the Tapiters (additions to Ordinances 1419): any ‘alienigena natus extra terram et regnum Anglie, cuiusdam nacionis fuerit’, is to pay 53s 4d to the City as an entry fee, and 26s 8d to the guild for pageant silver (York Memorandum Book I, p. 109); the Weavers’ Ordinances (1400) demand a written testimonial from an alien’s previous master about his character and competence (York Memorandum Book I, p. 242); the Millers in 1475 decide to forbid all aliens entry to the mystery: York Memorandum Book BY [for B/Y], ed. by Joyce W. Percy, Surtees Society Publications, CLXXXVI (Durham: Surtees Society, 1973 for 1969), p. 182. 20. York Memorandum Book II, p. 86. 21. York City Chamberlains’ Account Rolls 1396–1500, ed. by R.B. Dobson, Surtees Society Publications, CXCII (Durham: Surtees Society, 1980 for 1978 and 1979), p. 67 (1449/50). 22. Making aliens stay in supervised lodgings with hosts who were responsible for

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s o m e a l i e n s i n yo r k a n d t h e i r ov e r s e a s c o n n e c t i o n s overseeing their trading: The Statutes of the Realm, Vol. II (London: 1816: repr. London: Dawsons, 1963), pp. 303–5: (18 Hen. VI c. 4): this is a reinforcement of the statute of 5 Hen. IV c. 9. on hosts and surveillance, Hansards excepted (Statutes of the Realm Vol. II, pp. 145–6, mainly concerned with the preservation of bullion). It was reconfirmed in 4 Henry V c. 5 (1416: Statutes of the Realm II, p. 197). But as J.L. Bolton says, ‘the hosting legislation lasted only seven years and there were so many exceptions to it that it was pointless’ (‘Alien Merchants in England in the Reign of Henry VI, 1422–61’, BLitt Oxford 1971, p. 265). 23. York Memorandum Book II, p. 203: fol. 299r, date 27 April 1459. Compare with House Book Y B 2/4, fols. 4v, 12v, 18r (The York House Books 1461–1490, ed. by Lorraine C. Attreed, 2 vols (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1991), I, 214, 224–5, 229–31), where the revision of articles on aliens is prompted by the Scottish invasion. There is not much detailed information about the events of the 1440s and 1450s, as the House Books do not start until 1476. It is not clear what sparked this decision in 1459. 24. See J.L. Bolton, The Medieval English Economy 1150–1500 (London: Dent, 1980), ch. 9. 25. Victoria County History, p. 439. 26. Köln Cathedral boasts the shrine of the Three Kings, containing their relics, brought there in 1164 from Milan. It is a remarkable and massive piece of goldsmiths’ work. See Arnold Wolff, The Cologne Cathedral (Köln: Vista Point, 1990), p. 9 and plates 27–32. 27. See the OED s.v. beer for quotations from Skelton’s ‘Elinor Rumming’ and Andrew Boorde’s Dietary, both attributing beer to ‘Duchemen’, and suggesting that it is detrimental to the English digestion. See also Nelly Johanna Martina Kerling, Commercial Relations of Holland and Zeeland with England from the Late 13th Century to the Close of the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 1954), pp. 110–17 and 205–6. She suggests that brewing with hops was originally German. England exported ale up to c. 1375, then there was a massive importation from c.1400 to c. 1440, after which it died out from various causes. See also Laura Wright, ‘Trade between England and the Low Countries: Evidence from Historical Linguistics’, in England and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages, pp. 169–75, especially pp. 174–5 and notes 15–27. Of the 18 house-holding aliens in the 1440 returns for Hull, 3 are surnamed Berebrewer: PRO E179/202/112. 28. Hull Customs Accounts, pp. 59, 190, 193; York Mercers and Merchant Adventurers, p. 70, for the buying of an organ in Bergen-op-Zoom. 29. See for an example Hull Customs Accounts, pp. 46–7: the freight of the Mary of Hull and the Katherine of Veer. 30. House Books Y B 2/4 fol. 130v: dated 1 September 1484, certification that ‘John Mogan, ducheman’ is a freeman and denizen of the city: York House Books, pp. 322–3. 31. These factors were suggested to us by J.L. Bolton. 32. The information supplied to the Project by the York Craftsmen’s and Women’s Wills Project headed by Ann Rycraft has already proved invaluable. 33. ‘… pur ceo que certeins gentz veigne chascun an a la citee et sount enfranchisiez …’ York Memorandum Book I, pp. lxv, 14. Much of the trading must also have been managed by factors, as was customary on the other side of the North Sea. 34. Pioneering work on the biographies of York worthies was done by Robert Skaife, Civic Officials of York and Parliamentary Representatives (York City Library, MS, c. 1890). He does not, however, cover those who were not involved in the city’s administrative hierarchies. 35. York Memorandum Book B/Y, pp. 49–50 (1422).

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s o m e a l i e n s i n yo r k a n d t h e i r ov e r s e a s c o n n e c t i o n s 36. York, Borthwick Institute, York Probate Register 2, fol. 138v; see Testamenta Eboracensia II, ed. by James Raine, Surtees Society Publications (Durham: Surtees Society, 1836), XXX, p. 117. See also Meg Twycross, ‘Books for the Unlearned’, in Drama and Religion, ed. by James Redmond, Themes in Drama, V (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 65–110. 37. See Frans DeBrabandere, ‘De familienaam Tobback’, Vlaamse Stam, 26 (1990), 955–6, and his Woordenboek van de Familienamen in Belgie & Noord Frankrijk (Brussels: Gemeentekrediet, 1993) s.v. Tobback(x), etc. I use the word ‘Flemish’ in its popular meaning of the form of Dutch spoken in the Southern Low Countries. The Tubbacs are of course Brabanders in origin. 38. He calls himself Johannes milner alias dictus Tutbag Ciuis mercator Ebor. in his will, York Probate Register 3, fol. 526v. In the B/Y Memorandum Book on 31 October 1424, he is called John Mylner alias Tutbag : see below, note 41. 39. See note 37. I was introduced to this by Edward Vanhoutte and Benny De Cupere, who kindly brought me back a copy from Belgium. 40. Her will (York Probate Register 2, fols 296v–297r) leaves money to ‘Agnes Ireby my relative’. A Willelmus de Irby, mariner, was free in 1356: he was Chamberlain in 1374. But her connections need further research. 41. York Memorandum Book B/Y, p. 63: ‘John Mylner alias Tutbag’, citizen of York, and Alice his wife: two houses on Ouse Bridge, with the two rooms above them and another room over the stallage of the said bridge called Salmonhole: rented for 20 years from Whit Sunday 1414, and an additional 8 years thereafter. Rent 40s p.a. Given at York 31 October 1424. Marked ‘Void’ in margin, but unclear why. In his will, proved in 1438, John leaves Alice ‘omnes terminos [‘leases’? ‘bonds’?] meos quos habeo in illis duobus tenementis in quibus inhabito super Pontem Vse’. In her will, dated 1454 (see note 40), Alice leaves her son Thomas all ‘bonorum meorum in Shopa existencium’. 42. The Register of the Guild of Corpus Christi in the City of York, ed. by R.H. Skaife Surtees Society Publications, LVII (Durham: Surtees Society, 1872 for 1871), p. 32: John Tudbag et Alicia uxor. 43. John Tubbac does not mention a wife of Thomas in his will, dated 1438. Thomas’ wife becomes a sister of the Mercers’ Guild and Hospital in 1440 (‘Item, recevyd of Thomas Cutbagg [sic in transcription] for his wife to be a sister, xxd.’): Sellers, York Mercers, p. 52. Had they just married? They enter the Corpus Christi Guild in 1440/1 as ‘Tho. Tutbak. Katerina uxor ejus’: Corpus Christi Guild, p. 38. Revetour leaves an alabaster crucifix to Katherine Tutbag in his will of 1446 (Testamenta Eboracensia II, p. 117). However, when Alice dies in 1454, Thomas’ wife is named as Agnes, and she is named Agnes when Thomas dies in 1487. 44. York Chamberlains’ Rolls, p. 90 (1454/5): REED: York, p. 85. 45. York Chamberlains’ Rolls, p. 99. 46. Sellers, York Mercers, p. 59. 47. Sellers, York Mercers, p. 49. His parents pay a large sum ‘in alms’ at the same time. His father dies that year. 48. York Probate Register 5, fol. 299v. 49. Information from will of Thomas his father, and Mercers’ Cartulary: see Louise Wheatley ‘The York Mercers’ Guild 1420–1502: Origins, Organisation and Ordinances’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of York, 1993), p. 296. His will does not seem to be extant. 50. The Freemen’s Register gives this as 1488, R.B. Dobson’s lists in his edition of the York Chamberlains’ Rolls as 1489 (p. 212). Robert seems however to have struggled financially. On 1 April 1489 he was released from the office of Chamberlain until he is ‘so growen in goodes that he be able to take the same office upon hym’:

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s o m e a l i e n s i n yo r k a n d t h e i r ov e r s e a s c o n n e c t i o n s House Books, pp. 644–5. Earlier, in 1484, he was discharged from all office against the payment of 16d English (Housebooks, p. 329). 51. Hull Customs Accounts, pp. 179 (1473, Hilda of Hull), 211 (1489/90: Maryknyght of Hull), 214 (1489/90: Trinity of Hull), 216 (Maryknyght: 1489/90). His surname is spelt Tutbage, Tuttbag, and Tutbag. 52. Corpus Christi Guild, p. 73: Rob. Tutebag. 53. Corpus Christi Guild, p. 162. 54. Woordenboek van de Familienamen s.v. Tobback(x): 1311 Reyner Tucbake, Mechelen; 1474 Rommout Tucbacx, Mechelen. 55. York Probate Register 3, fol. 4r. There is no will recorded for Denis Tubbak. 56. Paul Welters, Beknopt Overzicht van de Kerken van Heist-op-den-Berg (Heist-opden-Berg: the author, 1992), pp. 7–10. There was a church there from 1131; it was however dedicated to the Holy Cross. At the end of the fourteenth century it was known as the Capellania de Herlaer Sancte Crucis, and the dedication does not seem to have been changed to Our Lady until 1502. The oldest part of the existing church appears to have been built in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. At some point in its history during a period of severe sickness, the church became so derelict that it was totally covered with ivy. Further research seems necessary.   The other possibility is a small but elegant chapel attached to the castle of Herlaer, about 4 kilometres north of Heist. This has always been dedicated to Our Lady; however, the present owner does not think that it was a likely candidate for bequests from a merchant and artisan, as its main worshippers would have been the family and the estate workers. Besides this, the castle was not necessarily known as Herlaer (after the family) in the late Middle Ages, merely as ten Hof. 57. CPR: Richard II Vol. V, 1391–96, ed. by G.J. Morris (London: HMSO for PRO, 1905; repr. Kraus 1971) p. 285; confirmed by Henry IV on 26 May 1400, CPR: Henry IV Vol. I, 1399–1400, ed. by R.C. Fowler (London: HMSO for PRO, 1903; repr. Kraus 1971), p. 295. 58. H. Smit, Bronnen tot de Geschiedenis van den Handel met Engeland, Schotland en Ierland, 2 vols, Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatie, LXV (‘s‑Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1928), I, 359–60, 367 (1383/4), 422–23. 59. See his will, York Probate Register 2, fol. 633r, and her will, fol. 640v. Vintners’ petition: York Memorandum Book B/Y, p. 157. 60. York Memorandum Book II, pp. 49–50: CPR: Henry V Vol. I, 1413–1416 ed. by R.C. Fowler (London: HMSO for PRO, 1910; repr. Kraus 1971), p. 194, summary only. 61. See above note 58; and Testamenta Eboracensia II, pp. 8–9. Her will is dated 27 December 1430. 62. York Probate Register 2, fol. 255v. 63. CPR: Richard II Vol. II, 1385–1389, ed. by G.J. Morris (London: HMSO for PRO, 1900; repr. Kraus 1971), p. 463. 64. CPR: Henry IV Vol. II, 1401–1405, ed. by R.C. Fowler (London: HMSO for PRO, 1905; repr. Kraus 1971), p. 204. 65. Bolton, Medieval English Economy, p. 308; Childs, Hull Customs Accounts, p. xii. 66. Various cases recorded in the Patent Rolls suggest that any property bought by an alien was to be forfeited to the King: CPR: Henry VI Vol. IV, 1441–1446, ed. by A.E. Bland (London: HMSO for PRO, 1908; repr. Kraus 1971) pp. 20, 31, 63. The 1419 ban on entering the York Council Chamber, presumably for fear of espionage, would have disqualified them in practice. 67. Expeditions to Prussia and the Holy Land made by Henry Earl of Derby (afterwards King Henry IV) in the years 1390–1 and 1392–3, being the Accounts kept by

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s o m e a l i e n s i n yo r k a n d t h e i r ov e r s e a s c o n n e c t i o n s his Treasurer during two years, ed. by Lucy Toulmin Smith, Camden Society, 2nd Series, LII (1894), p. 165: ‘per manus Henrici Wymmon’. 68. Smit, Bronnen, p. 329 (Hull 1378/9). 69. Calendar of Close Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office: Richard II Vol. III, 1385–1389, ed. by W.H.B. Bird (London: HMSO for PRO, 1908; repr. Kraus 1972), pp. 2–3 (29.9.1385). He is described as ‘merchant of the Hanse in Almain’, but stands bail not to leave the country. 70. York Probate Register 2, fol. 69v–70r Testamenta Eboracensia II no. 78. His bequests and obits show an interesting circle of friends and colleagues, including Henry Wyman and his wife. 71. CPR: Henry VI Vol. II, 1429–1436, p. 43 (26 February 1430), by petition in Parliament: summary. These are entered in full into the A/Y Memorandum Book, fols 289v–290r (York Memorandum Book II, pp. 185–6). He is said to be born ‘infra partes Almannie’. He sought a royal writ confirming these letters in 1441 (18 October 1441) and had this recorded in the B/Y Memorandum Book, fols 114v– 115r (York Memorandum Book B/Y, p. 152). These charge the Mayor etc. ‘to allow him all privileges, offices, and customs within the city’; possibly he was intending to stand for Sheriff and someone had contested the legality of this. 72. He was Mayor in 1460 and 1472. See also his will (York Probate Register 5, fol. 184r) and that of his wife (York Probate Register 5, fol. 28r). Since he is not of immediate concern here, I do not give details of his career. There is a genealogical note in Testamenta Eboracensia III, pp. 196–7. 73. REED: York, p. 3. 74. REED: York, p. 8. 75. Wim Hüsken, ‘The Bruges Ommegang’, in Formes teatrals de la tradició medieval: Actes del VII Colloqui de la Société Internationale pour l’Étude du Théâtre Médiéval, Girona, Juliol de 1992, ed. by Francesc Massip (Barcelona: Institut del Teatre, 1995), pp. 77–85. Costumed characters of the 12 Apostles and 4 Evangelists are recorded as walking in the procession of the Holy Blood in 1396; there appears to have been a mobile show of the ‘Play of the Garden of Gethsemane’ in 1397 for the next few years – possibly, as Hüsken suggests, a series of tableaux on waggons. Whether these spelen were genuine plays or tableaux is unclear. 76. B.A.M. Ramakers, Spelen en Figuren: Toneelkunst en processiecultuur in Oudenaarde tussen Middeleeuwen en Moderne Tijd (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996). 77. Leo de Burbure, De Antwerpsche Ommegangen in de XIVe en XVe Eeuw (Antwerp: Kockx, 1878), pp. 1–5: the Judgement float is on p. 4. 78. See my ‘The Flemish Ommegang and its Pageant Cars’, Medieval English Theatre, 2:1 (1980), 15–41 and 2:2 (1980), 80–98.

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4 THE KING’S PEACE AND THE PLAY: THE YORK CORPUS CHRISTI EVE PROCLAMATION

The Proclamacio ludi corporis christi facienda in vigilia corporis christi recorded on ff. 254v–255r of the A/Y Memorandum Book is one of the least altered of the set of pages which is our main evidence for the organisation of York’s Corpus Christi Play.1 Apart from the heading, which seems to have been written (later?) by Common Clerk Roger Burton, the addition about the exact amount of a fine, and of course the last paragraph,2 it is all in the same hand and unaltered from 1415, or soon after. Here we have, then, a continuous tradition with one major adaptation, attached to but separate from the Play. I thought it might be illuminating to look at the original text as a whole, and then to contextualise it, using the good old legal questions, otherwise Kipling’s six honest serving men: ‘What and Why and When / And How and Where and Who’, or, in the original Latin (where they are seven): ‘Quis, quid, ubi, quibus auxiliis, cur, quomodo, quando’? – though not necessarily in that order.3

QUID? [What?] It takes the standard form of a proclamation:4 1. Call for attention. 2. Here it launches straight into the meat of the matter: some proclamations start with a ‘forasmuch as …’ explaining or even propagandising the context.5 ‘We command’ is a performative verb; the act of proclaiming is performative in the original Austinian sense.6 3. It states the authority on which these injunctions are made – essential because in this case proclaiming is effectively enacting. Here it is the King and the civic authority, and the sheriffs, the agents of both. 4. Injunction followed by Penalty – repeated if necessary, when directed to different specific groups of people. Some Exceptions may be made.

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t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay Cry

Oiez &c.

Performative Authority

We comand of þe kynges behalue and þe mair & þe shirefs of þis Citee

Article 1A

þ[at] no man go armed in þis Citee with swerdes ne with carli[l] axes ne none othir defences in distourbaunce of þe kinges pees & þe play or hynderyng of þe processioun of Corpore christi

Article 1B Exceptions

And þat þai leue þare hernas in þare Ines saufand knyghtes [and] sqwyers of wirship   þat awe haue swerdes borne eftir þ[ame] of payne of forfaiture of þaire Wapenn & inprisonment [of þaire] bodys

Penalty

Article 2 Injunction Penalty

Article 3 Injunction

Exceptions Penalties Article 4 Injunction Penalty

And þat men þat brynges furth … page[ntes þat þai] play at the places þat is assigned þerfore & now[ere elles of] þe payne of forfaiture to be raysed þat is orday[ned þerfore]   [þ]at ys to say xl s [later addition] And þat menn of craftes & all othir menn þat fy[ndes torche]s þat þai com furth in array & in þe manere   as it [has been us]ed & custumed           be fore þis tyme noght haueyng wape[n saveyin] keepers of þe pagentz And officers þat ar kepers of þe pees of [pay]ne of forfaiture of þaire fraunchis & þaire bodyes to prisoun And þat ylk a player þat [shal] play þat he be redy in his pagent at [costum]able tyme of payne of inprisonment & þe forfaiture to be raysed þat is ordand þer fore

Fig. 1 1415: York City Archives, MS E20, f. 254v

Proclamacio ludi corporis christi facienda in vigilia corporis christi. (Heading in Roger Burton’s writing)

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t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay CUR? [Why?] It is clearly a public order directive. Like all public order directives, it largely tells you what not to do. But what is it for? We tend to think of it as an advertisement. But this isn’t a Banns – nor is it ever described as such. Chester had both Banns and proclamation (1531/2, 1539/40).7 The York Paternoster Play and the Creed Play had banns, presumably because they were departures from the norm: CREDE PLAY þat is to say þe furst bone to be cryed on Whissonmonday [8 June] þe next at maudeleyn day [Wednesday 22 July] & þe play on seynt bartylmewe Evyn [Sunday 23 August] &c … 12 May 1495: House Book, 7 f. 135r; REED: York, 177 PATER NOSTER PLAY and that the furst bayn or messynger shall Ryde in dyver Streetes within this Citie appon St George day [Saturday 23 April] next and the other messynger to Ryde in like manner vppon Whitson Monday [30 May] to thentent that the Contry may have knowlege that the head [sic: said?] play shalbe playd appon Corpus Christi day next [9 June] / 20 April 1558: HB, 22 f. 125v: YCR 5, 181–2; REED: York, 327 The Corpus Christi Play, it seems, didn’t. The Proclamation indubitably served as an advert, if one were needed, but it had another more serious purpose, which also explains who and when. Corpus Christi Eve was one of the four occasions in the year when the Sheriffs were statutorily obliged to ride and proclaim the King’s Peace. This seems originally to have taken the form of drawing public attention to the Statute of Winchester (1285), the locus classicus of provisions for the maintenance of public order.8 This statute was invoked several times during our period. The nearest in time to the Corpus Christi Proclamation was the statute of 7 Richard II (1383), a follow-up to a writ of the previous year in response to the uprising popularly known as ‘the Peasants’ Revolt’. It calls on the Sheriffs throughout England to make proclamation of the Statute of Winchester, or at least its tenor, with a comprehensive summary of its main heads: & au fyn qe homme ne se purra desore excuser par ignorance de mesme lestatut, est auxint assentuz qe chescun Viscont Dengleterre soit tenuz decy en avant en propre persone de faire proclamacion de mesme lestatut quatre foitz lan en chescun hundred de sa baillie & par ses bailiffs en chescune ville marchee sibien deinz franchises come dehors. 65

t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay [… and to the Intent that no Man shall excuse himself by Ignorance of the same Statute, it is also assented, That every Sheriff of England shall be bound from henceforth in proper Person to make Proclamation of the same Statute four Times in the Year in every Hundred of his Bailiwick, and by his Bailiffs in every Market Town, as well within Liberties as without.] Statutes of the Realm, II, p. 33 It was, in turn, reinforced in 5 Henry VI (12 October 1426) by a writ commanding the sheriffs ‘to cause proclamation to be made in every hundred [court], and in markets, fairs, and all other places where a company or assembly of people shall be’ of the Statute of Winchester, and the statute of 7 Richard II, ‘the tenor whereof the king is sending in form of patent, to the end that no man may excuse him by ignorance thereof’. The sheriff is then to deliver this writ to his successor at the end of his term, so that ‘proclamation thereof may be made four times a year’.9 The King’s (or Queen’s) Peace is an ideal state more noted in the breach than the observance. The statute of 5 Edward II (1311/12) comes nearest to a definition:10 Derechef ordeine est qe la pees le Roi soit fermement gardie per tute le Realme issint qe chesqun puisse sauvement aler, venir, & demorrer solom la lei & lusage du Realme. [MOREOVER, It is Ordained, That the Peace of the King be firmly kept throughout the Realm, so that every one may safely go, come, and tarry, according to the Law & Usage of the Realm.] It is about safeguarding person and property: not exactly the concept of a  naked virgin being able to travel unmolested from one end of the kingdom  to the other carrying a sackful of gold, but as the traditional motif has it: God man he wes 7 micel æ wes of him: durste nan man misdon wið oðer on his time. Pais he makede men 7 dær. Wua sua bare his byrthen gold 7 sylure, durste nan man sei to him naht bute god.11 [He was a good man, and held in great dread: no-one dared to offend against another in his time. He made peace for [protected?] men and animals. If someone were to be carrying a pack of gold or silver, noone would dare to speak him other than fair.] Note how this peace depends on a proper fear of the man himself. It was vested in the person of the king. When a king died, his peace died with him, and it was understood that you could take advantage of this. It was therefore 66

t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay crucial that his successor should proclaim his or her peace as soon as possible. Fortunately the lag in communications usually meant that the death of the old incumbent was announced by the new.12 In York the Sheriffs’ Riding was known as ‘making the King’s p ­ roclamation’: Robert ffous & Iohn Gegges sheriffes of the City of york accordyng to auncyent & laudable Custome of the seid City vsyd withoute tyme of memory to ye contrary & also accordyng to the worshipfull ordynance of the same Citie shall solemply ryde with þer mynysters & officers betwixt the feastes of seynt Mighell archangell & the Natyuyte of our lorde & make the kinges proclamacion accordyng to the auncyent Custome of the forseid Citie ffor the honour & worship of the same Citie … 28 November 1521: HB, X, fol 19v: YCR, III, p. 75: REED: York, pp. 223–4 In 1551, this was described as ‘to see the kynges peace kept’.13 The earliest reference to a Sheriffs’ Riding is this very Corpus Christi proclamation of 1415. The York Sheriffs were created only in 1396, when by Charter of Richard II the City became a county. Before that there were three Bailiffs.14

QUANDO? [When?] The Sheriffs rode to make proclamation, as prescribed, four times a year. The first and presumably the most important marked the election (21 September, St Matthew’s Day), and oath-taking (29 September, Michaelmas) of the new Sheriffs.15 The Sheriffs’ inauguration date was the same as in London and coincides roughly with the beginning of the Michaelmas Law Term.16 In York the actual Riding took place any time between 29 September and Christmas, though the antiquarian Francis Drake says in his Eboracum that in his time it was ‘usually on Wednesday, eight days after Martinmas’ (11 November), which is quite late.17 It had the double function of reminding people of the rule of law and order, and introducing the new Sheriffs. After the Riding the Sheriffs gave a dinner at their own costs, which is where we get most of our evidence from as they, especially in the sixteenth century, did their best to wriggle out of it. Our earliest piece of evidence of this inaugural Riding, from 1500,18 is a list of complaints against ex-Sheriff George Essex on the grounds that: • • • •

he had no followers to accompany him in the Riding; he did not find suitable table cloths and towels for the dinner; the chamberlains, Common Clerk, and the Mayor’s sergeants were not bidden to it; he habitually went out without having the mace borne before him. 67

t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay A sneaking sympathy develops when you realise that the City Council operated the well-known Medieval English Theatre principle that if you don’t come to the meeting you get volunteered to host the next one.19 In 1558 the Council minutes that at the time of election one Sheriff-elect was overseas and the other was sick.20 Being on your deathbed was no excuse. On 2 December 1504, they were faced with the problem that: Oliver Middelton one and elder of the Shireffs of this Citie is now so sore seke and lykly to departe from this mortall warlde unto the mercy of God and upon Tuesday come a seven nyght the Shireffs of this Citie ar accustomed to ryde and make the dyner as hath ben used heretofore … The Council decision was ‘if it please God that he lyff to none [noon] of the said Tuysday then the said Oliver to bere the half charge of the dyner of  his awn cost’.21 (This puts the projected date of the Riding that year at 10  December.) Annoyingly for us, however, because they were paid for by the Sheriffs at their own costs, neither the Riding nor the dinner were official expenses, and so accounts for them were not returned to Exchequer.22 If they had been, we would presumably know far more detail about the proceedings. The other three Ridings were massed together in the summer: Corpus  Christi Eve (a movable feast), Midsummer Eve (23 June: 24 is St John’s Day and a  quarter day), and St Peter’s Eve (31 July: St Peter ad Vincula is 1 August, or Lammas).23 The first two can of course get pretty close to each other,  and even, once in a blue moon, coincide: Easter has to be at its latest on 25 April.24 It was suddenly plain why the notes of remarkable events in the mayoralty of William Holme (1546/7) include ‘Also Corpus Cristi  day  and  mydsomer  day fell bothe uppon one day’,25 which must have  been  administratively awkward: two Ridings scheduled for the same day. The choice of at least one of these dates may have been affected by the Archbishop’s Lammas fair, ‘a two-day gathering which began on the afternoon of 31 July’.26 Like Corpus Christi, it fulfils the criterion of being an occasion when there was a great confluence of people – and presumably when fights might break out.27 However, the records most often mention the Ridings of Michaelmas and Corpus Christi; Midsummer appears much less and St Peter’s Eve fades out completely. Perhaps the fact that the Archbishop took over the policing of the city from the Sheriffs for the time of his patronal Fair (the Minster is dedicated to St Peter) caused problems with jurisdiction.28 In 1553, the year after all ridings were cancelled because of the plague, they were reinstated for Corpus Christi Day and Midsummer Eve, but were ‘to be spared on Saynt petre even’.29 Four years later it isn’t even mentioned: 68

t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay It was nowe alsoo aggreed that the Shirefes of this Citie shall ride with harnessed men on Corpus christi day & mydsomar even accustomed … 11 June 1557: HB 22 f. 53v; REED, p. 323: not in YCR Intentionally or not, this seems to have been a permanent cancellation,30 although the timing seems odd, because in 1557 the two Ridings were less than a week apart. As for the hour of day, in 1569 it was ‘Agreed also that pro[cla]mation accustomed for peace kepyng shalbe on Moneday in wytsonweeke and to begyne at iiijor of the clok in thaftr none’, but whether this was a new timing or the traditional one we cannot tell.31 Once the Riding settled down as the Midsummer Show of armour it was scheduled to start at 9 a.m.32 There was also a spoof riding on St Thomas’s Day (17 December) by Yule and Yule’s Wife in which the Sheriffs’ Sergeants were involved.33 This event has been revived in the present-day city by the York Waits in the ‘festive carnival’ spirit. According to Roger Dodsworth, the antiquarian (?1585–1654) from whom Drake ultimately got the information,34 it made proclamation in the same terms as the ordinary Sheriffs’ Riding, but added the rider that in the topsy-turvy world over Christmas: … all manner of Whores and Theiues, Dice-Players, Carders, and all other vnthrifty ffolke be welcome to the towne, whether they come late or early, att the Reuerence of the high ffea[st] of Youle, till the twelue dayes be passed.35 This was probably part of the reason why the Archbishop and Dean took against it.36 It is noteworthy that in the pro-Yule broadside, the Sergeants (not the Sheriffs) are mentioned as ‘the noble spreaders & publishers of this Mysticall and miraculous nut’ (Drake says that the Yule proclamation is made by the Sheriffs’ Sergeant)37 and that the Council minute on the Archbishop’s letter refers to ‘the Sheryffes Seriantes’, both of which suggest that it was seen as a non-serious affair, though the Sheriffs graced it with their presence, at least at the beginning of the event.38

QUOMODO? [In What Manner?] The antiquarian Francis Drake gives a version of the winter proclamation (Fig. 2) which he says is taken from ‘a manuscript which is in my hands, the collector unknown’.39 ‘This proclamation’ says Drake, ‘I have given at length as it was antiently used in the city, what is used now [i.e. in 1736] is much abridged’. To us it seems strangely random, because not only do the Sheriffs proclaim the King’s Peace, they also proclaim the assizes of bread and ale, and the gist of various other public-order statutes and bylaws, for many of which there are chapter and verse in A/Y and the House Books. However, they cover 69

t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay O yes, &c. we command in our liege lord’s behalf the king of England whom God save and keep, that the peace of the king be well kept and maintained within this city, and the suburbs thereof by night and by day with all manner of men, both gentle and simple, in pain that falls thereon. Also we command that no man walk armed within the city by night or by day, except the officers assigned for keeping the peace, on pain of forfeiting his armour and his body to prison. Also we command that the bakers of the city bake good bread, and of good boulter, and sell after the assize, &c. and that no baker nor no huckster put to sale any manner of bread, unless that it be sealed with a seal delivered from the sheriffs. Also we command that the brewers of the city brew good ale, and wholsome for mans body, and sell after the assize, and by measure ensealed. Also that no man pass out of the citty by night or by day to encounter any manner of victual coming to the city to sell, neither by water nor by land, to lett to come to the market, upon paine ordained therefore. Also that corn brought to the market be pursuand, i.e. as good beneath in the sack as above, upon forfeiture of the same corn and his body to prison. Also that corn thats once brought into to the market to sell, be not led out of the market for to keep from market-day to market-day, without licence of the sheriff or his deputys, upon pain that falls thereupon. Also we command that no manner of man walk in the city nor in the suburbs by night without light before him, i. e. from Pasche to Michaelmas after ten of the clock, and from Michaelmas to Pasche after nine of the clock. Also we command that no ostler harbour any strange man no longer than a night and a day, unless he do the sheriffs to witt, and if he do the contrary he shall answer for his deeds. Also we command that no foreign victualer bring any victuals to the city for to sell, whether that it be flesh, or fish, and poultry, that he bring it to the market-stead limitted therefore in the city, and not sell it or it come there, upon pain that falls thereupon. Also we command that the lanes and streets of the citty be cleansed of all manner of nuisance, i. e. of stocks, of stones, of middings, and of all manner of filth, on the paine that falls thereupon. Also we command that no manner of men make no insurrection, congregation, or assembly within the city or suburbs in disturbance of the peace; nor in letting of the execution of the common-law, upon paine of punishment, and all that he may forfeit to the king. Also that no common woman walk in the street without a ray=hood [*] on her head and a wand in her hand. [*] A radiated, or striped, hood I, suppose. Fig. 2 From Francis Drake, Eboracum I, pp.196–7

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t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay the main heads which the manuscript cited by Drake says come under the jurisdiction of the Sheriffs’ Turn (court),40 and comparison with the London Liber Albus suggests that this format is standard: [These are the articles of ancient usage, as to the assize of bread, and of ale, and of other victuals, and as to various trades, in the City of London, that ought each year, after the feast of St Michael, to be proclaimed throughout the said City.] In the first place, that the peace of God, and the peace of our Lord the King shall be well kept and maintained among denizens and strangers; and that the places and the lanes of the city shall be kept clear of all manner of annoyance, such as dung, rubbish, pigsties, and other annoyances, under heavy penalties …41 etcetera. By Drake’s time it was becoming a self-conscious ‘heritage’ event – it seems unlikely that the common women of York in the eighteenth century still wore striped hoods and carried wands – but at the time in which we are interested it was a serious legal instrument. It is noticeable that the winter proclamation given by Drake is not the same as the Corpus Christi Eve proclamation, which is tailored to that particular occasion, and concentrates solely upon public order and the proper organisation of the Procession and the Play. Presumably the former allows it to be counted as one of the four statutory occasions. The only persons allowed to bear weapons, apart from ceremonial swords,42 are the officers who are ‘keepers of the peace’ (the Sheriffs’ officials), and the ‘keepers of the pageants’, who are presumably the guildsmen who escorted their individual pageants,43 both it appears actively engaged in policing the o ­ ccasion. We are accustomed to thinking that the force of a piece of legislation lies in its wording. The case in the later Middle Ages is rather different. There was a tension between the language of record and authority (Latin, though sometimes Anglo-French) and the vernacular of those to whom the legislation was directed (various dialects of late Middle English). It was clearly necessary that the gist should be universally understood. Add to this a culture in which a messenger bearing a letter was expected to deliver the detail and even the subtext of the message himself viva voce,44 and we have an interestingly different stance on authentication and on what constitutes the actual message. The York House Books and to a lesser extent the A/Y Memorandum Book are full of proclamations of all sorts.45 Some are royal in origin, some local, from the Mayor and Council. The earliest in the House Books is a proclamation of the King’s Peace made in York on the 13 March 1476 by the command of Richard Duke of Gloucester on his brother’s behalf: Et super hoc missa fuit et directa quedam proclamacio per ipsos Ducem et Comitem predicto Maiori ad pronunciandum et 71

t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay proclamandum per totam Ciuitatem cuius Tenor sequitur in his verbis: [And upon that, a certain proclamation was sent and directed by the same Duke and Earl [of Northumberland] to be pronounced and proclaimed throughout the whole city, whose tenor follows in these words:] The king our souereine . lorde straitely chargith and . commaundith that nomanere man of what so euere condicion or degre he be of. make ne cause to be made any affray. or any othir thing attempt or doo / Wherthrough þe pease of the king . our saide souereine lorde shulde be broken … York City Archives: House Book 1 f. 2v46 The thing to note is that whereas the embedding narrative is in Latin, the proclamation is in English, just as the Corpus Christi Eve proclamation is a long English insert in the middle of a Latin text – indeed, possibly the earliest dated sustained piece of English in the A/Y Memorandum Book. On the other hand, we can see the development of English versions of certain curial formulae which serve to authenticate the spoken as well as a written document – ‘The king our souereine lorde straitely chargith and commaundith … nomanere man of what so euere condicion or degre he be of …’ – which we can compare with the preamble to the Corpus Christi Eve proclamation. In the earlier part of our period at least, written instructions (warrants) for proclamations were in Latin, but they were proclaimed in English and earlier in Norman French. Writs often ask for the tenor to be proclaimed, which puts a lot of responsibility on someone to do an accurate translation. According to James Doig,47 Edward IV was the first to produce English versions of proclamations as a matter of course, which begs the question, who translated them before this? Were there as many different versions as there were sheriffs or sheriff ’s clerks? Proclamation was not, as it is nowadays, a rarely used ceremony. It was the way in which laws, national and by-, were published, that no one might excuse him by ignorance thereof. The period of the plays is also that of the drift from oral communication to written. Documents of all kinds were read out at Council meetings – there was no circulating of photocopied sheets or e-mails beforehand. (Seditious libels, however, tended to be written and posted on church doors, etc., for obvious reasons of anonymity.)48 Reading a document out aloud not only communicated it, it authenticated it. Even after proclamations were printed and displayed in public, they were still read aloud and copied into the House Books.49 The Corpus Christi Eve proclamation was, then, far more than a banns; it was a legal instrument. In 1419 the Carpenters and Cordwainers were accused before the Council of breaking the Skinners’ torches with clubs and Carlisle 72

t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay axes ‘in grauem perturbacionem pacis domini Regis & impedimentum ludi & processionis corporis christi’, virtually a translation of ‘in distourbance of þe kynges pees & þe play or hynderyng of þe processioun of Corpore christi’.50 As late as 1554, the Girdlers were fined because on Corpus Christi Day they ‘did not forthwith folowe with their pageant in dewe course accordyng to thordynance & proclamacion þerof madebut taried an wholle hower & more in hyndrans & stoppyng of the rest of the pageantz folowyng and to the disorderyng of the same’, which echoes the later version of the proclamation.51

QUIS? [Who?] Why were the sheriffs responsible for it? The sheriffs were the king’s representatives for the keeping of law and order. It was a tough job and expensive, but you only did it once, and you had to do it if you wanted to enter the final stage of the civic cursus honorum.52 They were the public face of peace-keeping, and they were the channel between the king and the public. The best description of what a Sheriff did is by Caroline Barron in London in the Later Middle Ages.53 Many of the things she says about the clash of interests and serving two masters, the King and the City – besides the paying to get away – is true of York as well. Like London, York was fiercely independent, though it had different areas of sensitivity. The sheriffs executed the king’s writs. A writ is essentially a writing from the king commanding that something or other be done. Because writs were directed to individuals, and thus sealed, they are to be found in the Close Rolls in the National Archives, not the Patent Rolls. Plate 1 shows one that got away, sewn into York City Archives F 1, the York Sheriffs’ Court records. The strip of parchment at the bottom, with the addressee, was wrapped round the rolled-up letter and sealed. Royal proclamations came as or with a writ (warrant) charging the Sheriff to execute it. The writ was then by statute to be returned to the Chancery endorsed with a report on the action taken. 54 For proclamations this ought to give us the answer to ‘where?’

Plate 1 York City Archives MS F1, f. 37r: Writ stitched into records of the Sheriffs’ court Photo: Meg Twycross, reproduced by permission of York City Archives

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t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay UBI? [Where?’] It would be good to be able to show that there was a standard route around the city with traditional points at which proclamation was made – even better if it were to replicate the route of the Corpus Christi Play. Unfortunately both the surviving endorsed writs from York and the civic copies usually give some variant on ‘in all placs accustomyd within this City’.55 The writs themselves tend to leave it open to the Sheriffs to choose: ‘in singulis locis infra balliuam vestram … vbi magis expediens fuerit & necesse’ [in individual places within your bailiwick … where it may be most expedient and necessary].56

Fig. 3 Named places of proclamation in York Photo © Meg Twycross

Sometimes they specifically mention Thursday Market, this being one of the ‘plaics as moost resorte is’,57 besides being the obvious venue for any proclamations concerning prices, weights, and measures. Pavement, the largest open space in the city, where fairs, executions, and other public events were held, is also an obvious place (Fig. 3). When on 24 November 1558 the Mayor and Council were summoned hastily to the Minster ‘than and there to knowe further of certayne weighty matters concernyng the Quenes majestie’, they were read a letter from Elizabeth announcing the death of ‘our lait derest suster’ together with her accession proclamation and: they went all togiders streight way unto the Pavement and there caused the said proclamaccon openly to be redde in thaudiens of 74

t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay a great numbre of people there ready assembled and from thens went forthwith unto Thursday market and there alsoo made an other proclamaccon.58 Others were proclaimed in the most appropriate places: the one for keeping the peace during the mayoral election was read on the Pavement and then outside and inside the Common Hall, because its intended audience, the electorate, was not that large.59 However, Drake in 1736 gives an extended itinerary for the Michaelmas Sheriffs’ Riding.60 The map [Fig. 4] shows that this pretty well covers the pageant route with two excursions to the side and does not go through Thursday Market.61

… they first ride up Micklegate [A] into the yard of the priory of the Trinity (q), where one of the serjeants at mace makes proclamation as has been given. Then they ride through the principal streets of the city, making the same proclamation [B] at the corners of the streets on the west side Ousebridge.62 After that [C] at the corner of Castlegate and Ousegate ; then [D] at the corner of Coneystreet and Stonegate over against the Common-hall ; then again [E] at the south gate of the Minster. After that they ride unto [F] St. Marygate tower without Bootham-bar, making the same proclamation there. Then returning they ride through the streets of Petergate, Colliergate, Fossgate, [G] over Fossbridge into Walmgate, where the proclamation is again made ; and lastly they return into [H] the market-place in the Pavement ; where the same ceremony being repeated, the sheriffs depart to their own houses, and after to their house of entertainment; which is usually at one of the publick halls in the city.   (q) The riding of the Sheriffs into this priory, and into Bootham, formerly the jurisdiction of the Abbot of St. Mary’s, must have commenced a custom since the Reformation ; and seems to be a taking possession of those two, before privileged, places.   Francis Drake, Eboracum (London: William Bowyer for Francis Drake, 1736), p. 197.

Fig. 4 Route of Sheriffs’ Riding as specified by Drake. Apart from the stations at F and G, this follows the route of the Corpus Christi Play (other stations numbered). Map © Meg Twycross

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t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay In 1448, nearly three centuries earlier, which is more historically convincing, one of the returned writs in the National Archives (C 255/3/9 no. 18) is actually fully endorsed with a list of places where it was proclaimed [Plate 2 and Fig. 5]. This is a variant on the pageant route: once over Ouse Bridge, it proceeds in the opposite direction – again with a side trip to Foss Bridge. Interestingly, à propos of the pageant route, the writer calls four of the streets ‘the king’s highway’ (regia strata): Micklegate, Petergate, Stonegate, and Coney Street. Does it identify them as having a special status or perhaps merely indicate that they were better maintained than others? Responsus Nicholai Holgate & Roberti Perte vicecomitum ciuitatis Ebor. Virtute istius littere in singulis necessarijs infra Ciuitatem Ebor. die Jouis proxima ante festum sancti Andree Apostoli Anno regni domini Regis nunc infrascripti vicesimo septimo videlicet apud mykilgate infra Ciuitatem predictam Item ad finem [p]ontis vse iuxta / ecclesiam sancti [I]ohannis Euangeliste infra Ciuitatem predictam Item ad finem Regie strate de Overousegate infra Ciuitatem predictam Item apud Pauimentum infra e[a]ndem Ciuitatem Item ad finem Pontis aque de ffossa infra Ciuitatem predictam Item ad finem regie strate que vocatur Petergate infra eandem Ciuitatem Item ad finem regie strate que vocatur Stayngate iuxta portam ecclesie Cathedralis beati Petri Ebor. infra Ciuitatem predictam Item ad finem regie strate que vocatur Conyngstrete infra ~ Ciuitatem predictam ex parte domini Regis publice proclamari fecimus omnia & singula in breue isto contenta & specificata secundum tenorem ~ eiusdem & prout in eius nobis precepit

Plate 2 London, National Archives C 255/3/9 no. 18 Endorsement of writ of proclamation, 1448

Photograph Meg Twycross, Crown copyright, reproduced by permission of the National ­Archives

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t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay

A.  at Mykilgate (Micklegate) inside the city; B.  at the end of Ousebridge next to the church of St John the Evangelist; C.  at the end of the king’s highway of Overousegate (High Ousegate); D.  on the Pavement; E.  at the end of the bridge over the water of Fosse; F.  at the end of the king’s highway which is called Petergate; G.  at the end of the king’s highway which is called Stonegate next to the gate of the Cathedral Church of the blessed Peter; H.  at the end of the king’s highway which is called Conyngstrete (Coney Street).

Fig. 5  Route of proclamation specified on the dorse of TNA, C 255/3/9 no. 18. Endorsement of writ of proclamation, 1448. All maps © Meg Twycross

QUIBUS AUXILIIS [With what help?] with some QUOMODO? The Riding was a formal ceremonial occasion. Drake again gives a detailed account of who rode in the eighteenth century: … they appear on horseback, apparelled in their black gowns and velvet tippits, their horses in suitable furniture, each sheriff having 77

t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay a white wand in his hand, a badge of his office, and a servant to lead his horse, who also carries a gilded truncheon. Their serjeants at mace, attorneys and other officers of their courts, on horseback in their gowns riding before them. These are preceeded by the city’s waites, or musicians, in their scarlet liveries and silver badges playing all the way through the streets.63 There is sufficient evidence from our period to suggest that the personnel and trappings were not very different, save that the Sheriffs would have been in scarlet or crimson, not black.64 A change was effected in 1561 for Corpus Christi: since ‘the lat fest … is not nowe celebrat & kept holy day as was accustomed’, the city officials were to ‘goe about in semely sadd apparell & not in skarlet’.65 Their white wands were an official sign of office.66 The presence of the City Waits is not mentioned in the earlier records, though they may well have been there.67 The City seems to have hired visiting trumpeters for the odd proclamation, and when in 1546 the King prescribed that proclamation was to be made of a treaty with France ‘with sounde of trumpetts yf ye have any there’ they had to decide on a substitute ‘in default of a trumpett to have a drum’.68 One assumes that the harnessed men (men in armour) who are an increasingly prominent feature of the sixteenth-century Ridings were always there in some form or other as ‘kepers of þe pees’. Who actually read the proclamation? One obvious candidate might be the City bellman.69 A Council decision of 18 December 1570 speaks of ‘all proclamccons and common cryes … made by the Lord Mayor, Sheryffs bellman and others’.70 It seems unlikely, however. The bellman was more the local free newspaper to the royal proclamation’s national (and up-market) daily. He could be hired by private citizens: his most dramatic appearance in the records is in the case of the recalcitrant Masons, thrown into the kidcote on suspicion of breaking the Tilers’ tools, who ‘presumptuouslie hired the belman to go thrugh the Cite with the bell shewing if eny man wold haue oght forto doo with maister mason and his feliship Masons com vnto the kidcote and þer they shall fynd þame in dispite of all his f Enemyes’.71 The Bellman ended up in jail beside the Masons. Before the Reformation, he made most of his income from obits; when this lucrative source of revenue was removed, he seems to have struggled.72 Drake says that in his day one of the Sheriffs’ sergeants-at-mace read the actual proclamation.73 However, Eileen White alerted me to another piece of evidence. From 1578, it is quite late in our story, and refers to the Michaelmas Riding. [margin] Controversie for readyng the proclamacion at Ridyng of the Shireffes And now forasmoche as ther ys some contrauersie now depending betwene James Birkebye gent of thone partie And Laurence 78

t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay Robinson and Edward Vavasour Sheriffes of the Cittie of Yorke And william Vavasoure gent of thother partie for and concerninge the rydinge with the said Sheriffes and reading of the proclamacion as hath bene accustomed by the predecessoures of the saide Sheriffes and for that yt hath bene crediblye enformed to this Courte that the Recorder of the said Cittie heretofore in tyme past hath rydden betwene the Sheriffes of the said Cyttie yt is ~ therefore now ordered And established by this Courte that mr Byrnand now Recorder shall ryde betwene the said Sheriffes to morow in ther rydinge of the said Cittie And the rather for the better conservac[ion] of the quenes majesties peace in breache wherof dyverse presumpcions hath bene enformed and partely appar[ant] in this Courte betwene the said parties And wheras also yt standes in question betwene the said parties whether to the said James Birkebie or to the said William vavasour the readinge of the said proclamacion apperteyneth yt is therfore further ordered And established by this Courte that neyther the saide James Birkebie or yet the said William Vavasoure claiminge both the title of readinge ye same shall not take vpon them the readinge or publishing therof neither ride in the Companie of the said Sheriffes or suche As shall Assocyate them the said day As in the sayd rydinge, but that Edmond Faile74 as a personne indifferent shall reade the said proclamacion at the ryding aforesaid for this tyme onlie as the Sheriffes Clerk hath heretofore bene accustomed Provided alwaies that the riding of the saide Recorder and the reading of the said proclamacion by the saide Edmond Faile shall not in annie Wise be preiudicyall to the titles of eyther of the said parties or to the disseasen of eyther of them in the lawfull possession thereof anie thing in this vnder conteyned to the contrary notwithstanding … 1 December 1578: HB, 27, ff. 123v–24r It turns out to be one of those situations in which what is reported is only the tip of the iceberg. Why did Mr Birkby and Mr Vavasour each think they were  entitled to pronounce the proclamation? It transpires that James Birkby  was the Sheriffs’ Clerk, and had every expectation that he should read the proclamation ‘as the Sheriffes Clerk hath heretofore bene accustomed’.75  In 1571 he was elected Sheriff and it was agreed that he could pursue his salaried post by deputy for that year.76 Several years later, in 1579 and after this entry, the House Book records that questions were raised as to whether he had violated the conditions of his patent. There are no details of exactly how this had happened. Whatever it was, it blew up into a cause célèbre in which Birkby appealed to the Lord President of the Council in the North – thus breaching a major city taboo. He may well have been overconnected with that body for the City’s liking; in 1574 he was said to be ‘one of the attorneys before the L. Presydent and Counsell in these North partes’,77 79

t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay and Huntingdon says in his supporting letter that ‘he is now a member of this bodie’. The final decision (12 October 1579) was that while it was all being sorted out they should appoint a substitute ‘for two or thre yeares as law will permit’. The substitute duly elected was … William Vavasour.78 So it looks as if two people are using this as a test case as to which is to be Sheriffs’ Clerk – with all the emoluments attached. (It did not disqualify Mr Birkby from civic office: he was twice Lord Mayor: 1587 and 1595).79 This makes sense. If the Sheriffs’ Clerk was originally the one who translated the proclamations in some haste,80 he might well be the one to read them. (It could be that in the fifteenth century – or earlier  – no one else in the Sheriff ’s entourage could read.)81 It also emphasises the seriousness and prestige of the occasion.

QUO? [Whither? or What happened next?: not in the original seven] What happened to it? It would take too long to trace how the Corpus Christi proclamation became a Midsummer Show in which every able-bodied man between 15 and 60 had to turn out under arms, and which consumed 600 lb of gunpowder (half paid for by the City and half by the Sheriffs personally). This seems to turn the original proclamation on its head. But the Sheriffs had always been accompanied by armed men: Master Shyrryffes of this Citie shall Ryde vppon Corpuscristy day with men in hernesse accordyng to the ancyent Custome of this said Citie 3 May 1537: HB, 13, f. 96r; REED, p. 263; YCR, 4, p. 21. The Statute of Winchester provided for a twice yearly view of armour.82 As the sixteenth century goes on, however, York appears to get more and more paranoid about rebellion and invasion – or better organised to confront them. Musters are called and inventories of arms are taken. In 1545, during the invasion of Scotland, Corpus Christi Day is made the occasion for ‘alle suche persons within this Citie that haith harnes & wapen to serue the king … to attend appon the Shyrryfes / thorro this Citie honestly furnyshed with ther harnes & wapen’.83 (It is difficult to tell whether the Play was also played on that day: the Creed Play had been suggested, but the Bakers appear to have played their Corpus Christi pageant.) When you read through the House Books in an attempt to get the general picture, what comes over is a century when plague, religious dissension, and the collapse of Ouse Bridge each in their way contribute to a general discontinuity in the Play, while war, rebellion, and rumours of war and rebellion elbow their way to the front. Men are scouring breastplates rather than burnishing haloes. I hope I have answered most of my questions, however briefly: ‘Quis?’ the Sheriffs; ‘quid?’ a proclamation of the King’s Peace; ‘ubi?’ ‘divers places 80

t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay in the city’; ‘quibus auxiliis?’ the Sheriffs’ Clerk, Sergeants, Recorder, and Waits; ‘cur?’ carrying out various statutes; ‘quomodo?’ with legal formality; ‘quando?’ at four several times in the year, and various times of day. I also hope I have provided a different slant on the kind of creature it was, and how it thus managed to slide fairly easily into a military occasion with no-one apparently finding it particularly incongruous. The Sheriffs’ Riding has tended to be seen only as an adjunct to other more ‘theatrical’ performances: the Corpus Christi Play on the one hand, and the Riding of Yule and Yule’s Wife on the other. Investigating the context of the proclamation restores it to its proper importance and legal weight, and has incidentally extended our understanding of the Corpus Christi pageant route as a traditional performance space.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Rita Freedman, Joy Cann, Anna Wheeler, and the rest of the staff at York City Archives for their help and tolerance while I was working on this article; also Lynda Sayce, DIAMM photographer, Olga Horner, Andrew Prescott, and Pamela King for advice, suggestions, and information.

Abbreviations YCR.  York Civic Records, edited by Angelo Raine HB.  York House Book AY.  York Civic Archives MS E 20 (A/Y Memorandum Book) Sellers A/Y.  A/Y Memorandum Book, edited Maud Sellers, 2 vols Statutes of the Realm.  The Statutes of the Realm, from original records and authentic manuscripts (1101–1713), printed by command of His Majesty King George the Third, edited A. Luders, Sir T. Edlyn Tomlins, J. France, W.E. Taunton, and J. Raithby, 12 vols (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall for the Records Commission, 1810–1828; reprinted 1963). Drake Eboracum.  Francis Drake Eboracum: or the History and Antiquities of the City of York …, 2 vols (London: William Bowyer for F. Drake, 1736).

Notes   1. It has virtually been washed away by the waters of the Ouse, but UV images show that the pre-1892 flood transcription by Lucy Toulmin Smith in her edition of the York Plays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885) xxxiv is extremely accurate. I only take issue with a few of her readings, of which ‘careynge tapers of ye pagentz’ for ‘[saveyin] keepers of þe pagentz’ is the most crucial. Francis Drake has the latter reading (Eboracum, 1, p. xxxii), which seems to be correct.   2. Meg Twycross ‘Forget the 4.30 a.m. Start: Recovering a Palimpsest in the York Ordo paginarum’, Medieval English Theatre, 25 (2003), 98–152.   3. The poem is appended to the tale of ‘The Elephant’s Child’ in Rudyard Kipling

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t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay Just So Stories (numerous editions). The doctrine of the seven ‘circumstances’ is attributed to Cicero in the De inventione 1: 24. They were formulated as questions by Victorinus in his commentary on this work, and passed on by Boethius De Differentiis Topicis, PL 64, 1212. The tag is quoted by St Thomas Aquinas as: Quis, quid, ubi, quibus auxiliis, cur, quomodo, quando in Summa theologiæ 1a2æ. 7.3 – see Summa Theologiae: Volume 17, Psychology of Human Acts, ed. and trans. Thomas Gilby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; paperback edition of the Blackfriars edition, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1970) pp. 42–3. Its use has for centuries been well-nigh universal: in the law, the confessional, and today in journalism and management. See further D.W. Robertson Jr., ‘A Note on the Classical Origin of the “Circumstances” in the Medieval Confessional’, Studies in Philology, 43 (1946), 6–14.  4 See Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, 2 vols (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1964), I, pp. xxvi–xxix. Though this concentrates on Tudor proclamations, the overall scheme remains true for earlier periods.   5 James A. Doig, ‘Political Propaganda and Royal Proclamations in Late Medieval England’, Historical Research, 71 (1998), 253–80, at 265–8. Doig suggests that these were part of the preamble to the writ, and not necessarily proclaimed. See also Tudor Royal Proclamations, I, pp. xxv–xxviii (Rationalization).   6. J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (London: Clarendon Press, 1962).  7. Records of Early English Drama: Cheshire Including Chester, ed. Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence M. Clopper, and David Mills, 2 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, and London: British Library, 2007) I, 71–72 (William Newhall’s proclamation, 1531–2); I, 81 (proclamation 1539–40), 81–7 (Early Banns). The Chester proclamation is shorter than the York, but likewise stresses public order.   8. 13 Edward I (8 October 1285): Statutes of the Realm, I, pp. 96–8. Among other provisions, it specifies the closing of the city gates from sunset to sunrise, the night watch, the clearance 200 feet each side of highways, the arms that every man shall have in his house according to his means, and a view of these arms twice a year. The last two items were not repealed until 21 James 1 (1623); the item about the night watch not till 7 & 8 George IV.   9. Westminster, 12 October 1426; to Sheriff of Somerset and Dorset: like writs to sheriffs throughout England (Calendar of the Close Rolls Henry VI, 1, pp. 316–17). 10. Statutes of the Realm, I, p. 158; Ordinances c. 2. This, with elaborations, becomes the formula: see e.g. the first Statute of 1 Henry IV, Statutes of the Realm, II, p. 111. 11. The Peterborough Chronicle, ed. Cicely Clark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 54 (1135). The king concerned is Henry I. 12. Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London: H: 1375–1399, ed. Reginald R. Sharpe (London: Francis, 1907), p. 71 (Richard II); Statutes of the Realm, II, p. 111 (Henry IV, as above note 10); Foedera, ed. Thomas Rymer, revised by George Holmes, 20 vols (London: J. Tonson, 2nd edn 1726–35), IX, 1 (Henry V); X, 254 (Henry VI); British Library Harleian Manuscript 433, ed. Rosemary Horrox and P.W. Hammond, 4 vols (Gloucester: Alan Sutton for the Richard III Society, 1979–83), III, 31–2 (Richard III); Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations (see note 4), I, 3 (no. 1, Henry VII); 79–81 (Henry VIII); 381 (no. 275, Edward VI); II, 3 (no. 388, Mary Tudor), 99 (no. 448, Elizabeth); Royal Stuart Proclamations, ed. Paul H. Hughes and James L. Larkin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), I, 1 (James I and VI): etc. 13. House Book, Book 20, f. 67; REED, 1, pp. 300, 302 ‘ridyng in harnesse to kepe the Kynges peax on Corpus christi Day, mydsomar even & Saynt Petre’.

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t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay 14. Sellers, A/Y, pp. 157–62; A/Y, ff. 61r–62v. The change seems to have increased the standing, income, and responsibilities of the persons elected as sheriffs, though the area of responsibility remained much the same. See ‘The Later Middle Ages: The City’s Franchise and Officers’ in A History of the County of Yorkshire: the City of York, ed. P.M. Tillot (Victoria County History; London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Historical Research, 1961) pp. 69–75; on-line at . 15. Sellers A/Y, II, pp. 259–60. 16. Caroline Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 159–60. 17. Drake, Eboracum, 1, p. 196. Presumably he means in the week after Martinmas. He adds ‘but they are not strictly tied to that day, any day betwixt Martinmas and Yoole, that is Christmas, may serve for the ceremony’. 18. 16.12.1500: HB, 8, f. 102v. 19. It was also a potential source of revenue: see Drake, Eboracum, I, 186. 20. 21.9.1558: HB, 22, f. 135r (YCR, 5, p. 186). He died: see 24.11.1558: HB, 22, f.140v (YCR, 5, p. 190). 21. 2.12.1504: HB, 9, f. 20v (YCR, 3, p. 10). See also the longest-documented tussle, in 1516, over William Barker who was legitimately in London: 12.12.1516: HB, 9, f. 87v (YCR 3, pp. 53–54). He eventually invoked Cardinal Wolsey as having said ‘that they shuld make no fest nor dynner at ther rydyng as other Shireffs hais doyn affore tyme’. Less dramatic, but still reprehensible, was Rauf Symson, who was banned from the Council for the ‘manyfest contempt’ of going to Malton last Michaelmas instead of making the traditional dinner: 13.1.1530/31: HB, 11, f. 105v (YCR, 3, p. 135). 22. See e.g. Kew: TNA, E 101/599 for York Sheriffs’ returns to the Exchequer. 23. E.g. on 10 July 1551, the House Book notes that Sheriffs Parsyvall Crawfurth and Edwarde Grenebery: ‘shold haue rydden apon myddsomer even ^ \Corpus christi day. And saynt petre even/ with their officers and a nombre in harnes to se the kyngs peas kept accordyng to the Laudable custome of the Citie and hath not soo done contrary to their dewties’ and are therefore fined £10 each: HB, 20, f. 67 (REED, pp. 300, 302; YCR, 5, p. 63); see also HB, 20, f. 87 (REED, p. 302). 24. It would also have happened in 1451: see C.R. Cheney and Michael Jones, A Handbook of Dates (Royal Historical Society Guides and Pamphlets 4; Cambridge UP, revised edn 2000) p. 225. It happens very rarely – once every century, sometimes once every two centuries. 25. 3.1.1546/7 (possibly): HB, 18, f. 67 (YCR. 4, p. 150). 26. David Palliser, Tudor York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 182. According to Drake, the Sheriffs proclaimed Whit Monday and ‘St Peter’s fair’ (Drake, Eboracum, 1, pp. 217–18). At some point during the day, however, they handed over their authority to the Archbishop, whose fair it was. See also H. Richardson, The Medieval Fairs and Markets of York, St Anthony’s Hall Publications, 20 (York: Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, 1961). 27. Possibly they are also accounting dates? Midsummer was a Quarter Day. The Sheriffs had to account on the Friday after Corpus Christi Day, i.e. the day after. But this does not seem particularly relevant to the Ridings. 28. Palliser, Tudor York, p. 182. 29. 9.5.1553: HB, 21, f. Mv (REED, pp. 307–08, YCR, 5, p. 89): It is more ouer aggreed by the sayed presens that the Shirefes of this Cite that nowe be shall accordyng to the auncient custome of the same City in peaceable maner ride with a numbre their officers and a numbre of

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t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay fotemen with theym in harnesse orderly On Corpus christi day / And than their officers on mydsomar even ffor the worship of this Cite & seeing the Kinges peax then kept / And so to be spared on Saynt petre even /

This suggests that the Midsummer Riding was less important if it could be undertaken by the Sheriffs’ officers alone. 30. In 1580 the Sheriffs’ Riding and the Show of Armour was to be on St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August) ‘and so from hensforth yerely upon Mayday and Midsomar even’: HB, 27, f. 246r; YCR, 8, p. 36; REED, p. 393. 31. HB, 24, f. 140r; REED, p. 357; not in YCR. 32. It took some time to settle down. In 1580 it was to be on St Bartholomew’s Day (24. August) at 1 p.m. (see above note 30); in 1584 the Show was to begin between 4 and 5 a.m. and to be ended by 11 so that Grafton’s Play could begin at 1 p.m. (HB, 28, f. 144v; YCR, 8, p. 77; REED, p. 406); 1587 it was timed for 6 a.m. (HB, 29, f. 196v; YCR, 8, p. 140; REED, p. 429); in 1591 at 7 a.m. (HB, 30, f. 241v; REED, p. 445), then from 1593 onwards it moved to 9 a.m. (HB, 31, f. 124v; REED, p. 452), as with 1594 (REED, p. 458), 1595 (REED, p. 463), 1596 (REED, p. 469), 1598 (REED, p. 481), 1600 (REED, p. 1491). 33. A.F. Johnston ‘Yule in York’, REED Newsletter, 1 (1976), pp. 3–10. See also Patricia Badir ‘Textuality, Corporeality, and the Riding of Yule in York’, Essays in Honour of Peter Meredith, ed. Catherine Batt, Leeds Studies in English, NS 29 (1998), 19–34. 34. The question of how far back this account goes is too complicated to explore here. Patricia Badir points out that the version Drake cites in Eboracum, 1, pp. 196–7 comes from Thomas Hearne’s edition of John Leland’s Itinerary, 9 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press at the Sheldonian Theatre, 1710–12) IV, pp. 146–7. She therefore deduces it must be c. 1534. But it is not actually in Leland: Hearne has added it ‘Out of Mr. Dodsworth’s Coll. MSS’ (p. 146). Roger Dodsworth (Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Dodsworth 155, f. 114r) attributes it to Charles Fairfax’s transcription from the York City Records. The mention of the Sheriffs going to ‘heare a Masse of St. Thomas’ suggests a date of either pre1547 or 1553–8. 35. MS Dodsworth 155, f. 114v. The larger letters presumably copy those in the original manuscript. Drake’s version is fractionally different: ‘… all manner of whores, thieves, dice-players, and all other unthrifty folk be wellcome to the town, whether they come late or early, at the reverence of the high feast of Yoole, till the twelve dayes be passed’ (pp. 196–7). 36. 13.11.1572: HB, 25, 27r–v: REED, p. 369. See further Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘And how the state will beare with it, I knowe not’, Medieval English Theatre, 30 (2008), 3–25. 37. REED, p. 361. 38. 21.11.1572: HB, 25, f. 27r; YCR, 7, p. 55; REED, pp. 368–70. Drake, Eboracum, I, 196–7. 39. Drake, Eboracum, I, 189, n.1, for attribution; p. 196 for text. He does not say how old the manuscript is. It appears to concern the roles and duties of the Sheriffs. 40. Drake, Eboracum, I, 189–90. 41. Munimenta Gildhallæ Londoniensis, ed. Henry Thomas Riley, 3 vols in 4 (Rerum britannicarum medii ævi scriptores 12; London: Longmans, 1859–62), I, Liber Albus f.78.) The first paragraph is ‘[s]upplied from the Liber Custumarum, f. 201, it being omitted in the Liber Albus’ (footnote to p. 78). It is difficult to tell from Riley’s edition how many of the provisions were to be proclaimed. 42. This is also one of the bylaws of London: see Riley, Liber Albus, ff. 387–90 (c. 1363):

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t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay No-one is to go about armed. Also, that no-one, regardless of status, is to go about armed in the city or its suburbs, nor bear arms by day or night, except for: the squires of the great lords of the land, who carry the swords of their masters when accompanying them; the sergeants-at-arms of the king, queen, prince, and the other children of the king; the city officials and persons who, at their command, go about in their company to assist them in preserving and upholding the peace. Upon penalty as mentioned and the confiscation of their weapons and armour. Corporation of London Records Office, Liber Albus, ff. 223–4.

See also Kew: TNA, C54/300, mb 13d, dated 11.3.1450: Proclamation: no arms of offence to be carried except lord, knight or notable esquire may have one single sword carried behind him (CCR Henry VI 5: p. 182); HB, 2–4, f. 157v, dated 4.3.1485 (Attreed, 354). For the Mayor of York’s sword, see Sellers, A/Y, 160 (A/Y, f. 6v). 43. The best account of this is 20.10.1475, the Armourers Constitution: … alle the maisters of the same Crafte frome nowefurth yerely on Corpus Christi day in the mornyng be redy in thair owen propre personnez euery one of thayme with Ane honest wapyn to awayt apon thair pagende maisters ande pageande at þe playnge and settyngefurth of thair saide pagende at þe firste place were theyshall begyns Ande so toawayte apon þe same þair pageande thrugh þe Cite to þe play be plaide as of þat same pagende. B/Y Memorandum Book, f. 140r; REED, p. 104.

See also e.g. 1417 Cordwainers (A/Y, f. 78r; REED, pp. 30, 715); 1422/3 Plasterers and Tilers (A/Y, ff. 258r–v; REED, p. 39, 725); 1432 Millers (A/Y, f. 283v; REED, pp. 49, 733–34); 1477 Masons (A/Y, f. 291v; REED, pp. 113, 778); 1494 Spurriers and Lorimers (HB, 7 f. 109v; REED, p. 176). This extends the meaning of the verb produce: ‘Bring/lead forth’. In 1572 it was specifically said that the pageant masters of the occupations whose waggons were being used in the Paternoster Play should accompany them ‘and see good ordre kepte’ (HB, 25 f. 15r; REED, p. 366). The Paternoster Guild Return of 1388/9 says that members of the Guild are to accompany the play on horseback and in livery ‘pro dicto ludo pacifice gubernando’ (Kew: TNA, C47/46/454; REED, p. 7). 44. See J.D. Burnley, ‘Curial Prose in England’, Speculum, 61:3 (July 1986), 593–614; Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn 1993), pp. 220–3, 253–78, though he deals with an earlier period. 45. The A/Y Memorandum Book has a number of Statutes copied out in full, dating from between 1381 and 1421. It seems that they were intended to be proclaimed; e.g. the Statute of 8 Henry V which appears on ff. 85r–v is addressed in Latin to the Sheriffs of York, and ends with an injunction to proclaim it, also in Latin. The body of the statute is in Anglo-Norman. Since the version of this statute in the Statutes of the Realm (II, 203) says nothing about proclamation, it seems that in this copy the Latin writ has been ‘wrapped round’ the actual statute. It even ends with the name of the Chancery clerk who issued it, as do actual writs. Conversely, A/Y omits the call for proclamation from the statute of 17 Richard II (ff. 83r–84v), presumably because this is taken for granted. 46. See Lorraine C. Attreed, York House Books 1461–1490, 2 vols (Stroud: Alan Sutton for Richard III & Yorkist History Trust, 1991) I, 8–9. It is noticeable that at this stage most of the text of the House Books is in Latin, but transcriptions of letters tend to be in English, as are some of the transactions which might be

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t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay of interest to individual citizens. The punctuation in this proclamation may be rhetorical. 47. James A. Doig, ‘Political Propaganda and Royal Proclamations in Late Medieval England’, Historical Research, 71 (October 1998), 253–80, at 264–5. There were occasional English proclamations before this, but on the whole ‘most writs of proclamations continued to be issued in Latin’. Doig suggests that the lack of a standard language until the mid-fifteenth century may have meant that Latin was more comprehensible over the country as a whole. 48. See e.g. Kew: TNA, C54/300, mb 7d: 14.4.1450, proclamation forbidding seditious libels, ‘quos tamen quia ipsi eorum auctores se facere seu cognosci non volunt in valuis seu foribus ecclesiarum aut aliorum locorum claui affigi seu in locis quibus volunt proici faciunt ac iactari’. For a York case in 1536 about slanderous bills, see YCR, 4, pp. 7–13. 49. See e.g. HB, 22, f. 196r (YCR, 7, p. 8), Oath of Submission for taking part in the Rising in the North, 1569: copied into the House Book complete with ‘Imprinted in London at Powles Church-yerde’. 50. A/Y, f. 201r (Sellers, A/Y, 2, p. 79, REED, pp. 32–3). See also HB, 7, f. 4v: 16.6.1490: the Cordwainers in the Corpus Christi Procession were ‘rebell and disobeaunt’ to the proclamation about bearing their torches (REED, p. 158, YCR, 2, p. 40). 51. HB 21, f. 46v (REED, p. 312). 52. Palliser, Tudor York, p. 71. 53. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 159–63 (see note 16). Drake also gives a detailed account of the responsibilities of the Sheriffs in Eboracum, I, 186, 189–97. 54. 13 Edward I, 1285; 2 Edward III 1328, 1425. 55. 14.10.1541: HB 15 fol. 56r, YCR 4, 146. 56. A/Y f. 85v: Statute of 8 Henry V, 28.1.1421. 57. 6.7.1546: HB, 18, f. 45v; YCR, 4, p. 146. 58. HB, 22, f. 140v–41r; YCR, 5, pp. 190–1. 59. HB, 6, f. 140r; Tuesday, St Blaise’s Day, 3 February 1488/9, proclamation for keeping the peace during Mayoral election: ‘Et eadem die quandam proclamacio \pro/ Rege in tribus locis infra. Ciuitatem videlicet primus locus eiusdem ad stallago [Pavement] secundus locus ad ostium Guihald tercius ad & infra Guihald in forma sequente factus fuit’ (also YCR, 2, p. 40). 60. Drake, Eboracum, I, p. 197. 61. For a convenient map of the pageant route, see The York Plays, ed. Richard Beadle (London: Arnold, 1982) p. 34. 62. This may suggest several stops in Micklegate. 63. Drake, Eboracum, I, pp. 196–7. 64. In the sixteenth century their ceremonial gowns are more often described as crimson: see e.g. HB, 27, ff. 265r, 266v, (January 1580/1: YCR, 8, p. 41). On 27 January 1580/1 the Council agreed ‘that the Aldermen, Sheriffes and xxiiij shall weare ther skarlet and cremisyn gownes with tippetts’ at all time when commanded by the Lord Mayor, save that widowers may wear black for a year, HB, 27, f. 271r (YCR, 8, p. 43). 65. HB, 23, f. 19v (REED, p. 333). This item suggests that the Mayor and aldermen accompanied the Sheriffs ‘in makyng the proclamacion accustomed’. 66. For their symbolic use in marking out the limits of their jurisdiction and that of the Sheriff of Yorkshire during the visit of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots, see HB, 9, f. 4v (YCR, 2, pp. 188–9, REED, pp. 197–8). On this occasion the Sheriffs were dressed in crimson. They also probably had a mace borne before them: see HB, 8, f. 102v (REED, p. 184).

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t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay 67. In the 1440–60s (see REED, pp. 65–73, 75–84, 94, 101, 106) they were paid at Easter, at Corpus Christi, St John’s Eve, and Christmas, and on the feast of St  William (‘viz the day that my Lord Mayour makith his great feast’: CCR 8:3  mb. 5, REED, p. 397). Easter and Christmas appear to have been official paydays, and St John’s Day was a quarter day, so it is difficult to tell if any of these dates were anything to do with the Ridings. The entry for 1499 (CCR C4:4, REED, p. 181) says that they are paid at these times ‘pro honore Ciuitatis super magistros attendentes’. In the 1580s they went with and proclaimed the Show with fife and drum. 68. King’s trumpeter hired: 14.10.1541, HB, 15, f. 56r (YCR, 4, p. 68); drum substituted 6.7.1546, HB, 18, f. 45v (YCR, 4, p. 146). 69. First mentioned in 1377 as being paid 10s yearly: A/Y, f. 9v (Sellers, A/Y, 1, p. 26). On the Bellman, see T.P. Cooper ‘The Common Bellman of the City of York’ in Burdekin’s Old Moore’s Almanack (York, 1937) pp. 2–12. 70. HB, 24, f. 219r (YCR, 7, p. 18). The punctuation is uncertain. 71. 31.8.1490: HB, 7, f. 14r; YCR, 2, 60. 72. In 1587 he was reduced to petitioning the Council for the right to cry prices of wood and coals on the Staithe in order to collect the dues, 22.3.1586/7: HB, 29, f. 130r; YCR, 8, p. 135. 73. He did make proclamation for the Sheriffs (27.7.1587: HB, 29, f. 207r; YCR, 8, p. 143). In London, the Common Sergeant-at-Arms was the ‘Common Crier’, elected by the Common Council upon pleasure to be part of the Mayor’s household (Riley, Liber Albus, 9; Barron, London, pp. 190–1). 74. Edmund Fale or Faile was the son (?) of Common Clerk Thomas Fale (died March 1571). He lived and died (March 1588) in the parish of St Michael le Belfrey, marrying twice and having at least six children, half of whom died in childhood (The Registers of St Michael le Belfrey, York, ed. Francis Collins, 2 vols (Yorkshire Parish Register Society, 1899), I). He was admitted to the Freedom of the City in 1573/4 as ‘Edmondus Fayll, scryvener’ (Register of the Freemen of the City of York, ed. Francis Collins, 2 vols, Surtees Society 96 (1897 for 1896), 102 (1900 for 1899) 2, p. 15) – like John Clerke, who was also admitted as ‘scryvener’, son of Thomas Clerke generosus, in 1537/8 (Collins, Freemen 1, p. 256). In a deed enrolled by his (?mother) Joan Turner formerly Fale in the B/Y Memorandum Book (York Memorandum Book BY, ed. Joyce W. Percy, Surtees Society 186 (1973), pp. 289– 90) he is also described as ‘scrivener’. From 1573 he appears regularly in the House Books on matters connected with record-keeping. Perhaps he had become Deputy Common Clerk to Leonard Belt (Freeman, 1570/71), his father’s successor, following John Clerke, and took out the freedom accordingly. At the time of his death he was one of the City’s three coroners (HB, 30, f. 19r; YCR, 8, p. 162). He knew Birkby, as they both attended the same church, and are marked down by the vicar as having taken communion together there at the feast of St John the Baptist in 1572, when Birkby was Sheriff (Collins, St Michael le Belfrey, 1, p. 103). 75. On the Sheriffs’ Clerk, his duties and emoluments, see A/Y, f. 54r (Sellers, A/Y, 1, pp. 138–9). It was a responsible position and was held by someone with legal qualifications. 76. 21 September 1571 (St Matthew’s Day): HB, 24, f. 260r; YCR, 7, p. 37. In 1573 he is back being Sheriffs’ clerk (HB, 25, f. 97r; YCR, 7, p. 81). 77. HB, 25, f. 145r (YCR, 7, p. 97). 78. HB, 27, 190r–192v; YCR, 8 pp. 19–22. 79. 29 Eliz, 1586/7; 37 Eliz, 1594/5. Register of the Freemen of the City of York, ed. Francis Collins, 2 vols, Surtees Society 96 (1897 for 1896), 102 (1900 for 1899) 2, pp. 29, 38.

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t h e k i n g ’ s p e ac e a n d t h e p lay 80. James Doig suggests: ‘More than likely a local official, possibly the sheriff ’s clerk, was responsible for translating the Latin text of the proclamation into English’: ‘Late Medieval Royal Proclamations’, p. 264. This incident would seem to reinforce this. 81. Certainly in the earlier centuries, there is no reason to believe that all Sheriffs were customarily literate. In the late thirteenth century (14 February 1298) Parliament was sufficiently concerned about this to issue a Statute deprecating the reliance of Sheriffs upon their clerks in interpreting and answering writs, even though they might themselves be lettered. Clerks were therefore to be liable for damages arising out of their defects of return if it could be proved that they were responsible, and not their sheriffs (Statutes of the Realm, I, p. 213). All civic officials were much more dependent on their secretariat than nowadays we can begin to imagine. It suggests that there might have been another reason for having documents read to them than either the demands of formality or the dearth of photocopiers in the fifteenth century. 82. ‘E qe veue des armes soit fete deus fois per an’ [And that View of Armour be made every year two times]: repealed 21 James I (1623) c. 28: 44 (SL, p. 307). 83. 2.6.1545: HB 17 f. 90r, REED, p. 285 (not in YCR). The war with the Scots was 1542–50.

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5 The Ordo paginarum revisited

THE ORDO PAGINARUM REVISITED, WITH A DIGITAL CAMERA

The Ordo paginarum (‘Order of pageants’, a term with ceremonial and religious connotations, as in ‘Order of Service’) kept by the York civic authorities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is arguably the most important surviving document in the history of medieval English theatre, other than the scripts themselves. It was first compiled in 1415 for the city’s official Memorandum Book (A/Y) by the newly elected common clerk Roger Burton,1 and kept thereafter, conveniently at the back of the book,2 apparently as a working checklist of the pageants of the York Corpus Christi Play. According to a later marginal annotation, possibly late fifteenth-century, the Ordo was to be used by the common clerk as a copy-text for the sedule (elsewhere called billets) issued annually to the guilds in the first or second week in Lent by the Mayor’s sergeants-at-mace. These ‘schedules’ presumably had a quasi-legal status (‘you will bring forth your pageant as described, on pain of the forfeitures as laid down’), though by the 1460s/70s, the time when most of the plays in the Register (what we think of as the ‘York Cycle’ text) were recorded, some of the descriptions are not very exact matches with the pageants they apparently represent. This list of pageants (ff. 252v–254v) is followed by a list of processional torches and their bearers (f. 254v); a proclamation of the Corpus Christi Play, in English, to be made on the eve of the feast, and mostly concerned with law and order and the (severe) penalties for infringing these (ff. 254v–255r); then a second list of pageants, in two columns, with much shorter descriptions (f. 255r); and another, apparently supplementary, list of torches (f. 255r). The original scribe of the Ordo not only had a very neat hand, he also had a sense of orderly layout. Indeed, he seems to have intended a rather impressive document. His page layout was originally spacious. (It is difficult to measure it exactly, as the parchment has become distorted by damp, and damaged along the bottom edge.3) Because of the unusual format, it is rather different from the rest of A/Y; he had to manipulate two columns instead of one, so that though he allowed himself a good-sized outer margin and a reasonable gutter4 – on the rectos quite wide, since it runs alongside his list of the guilds – they were not quite as wide as in most of the rest of the book. In common, 89

The

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however, with the rest of the book, the top margin is narrower, but the bottom is quite ample.5 The list itself is neatly tabulated. The names of the guilds are arranged down the left-hand side of the page and the descriptions on the right. On the first page, folio 252v (Plate 1), he gave the guilds about 40 per cent of the text area; on the next folio he reduced this to 35 per cent, and then on f. 254r to 28 per cent, but there is still a clear space between them and the edge of the descriptions; this space was later bridged by fork-shaped brackets linking the guild with its pageant.6 The spacing between items was at least one and a half lines in depth, though they vary according to the number of guild names he had to fit in, and the amount of space he had available as the bottom of the page approached. It appears to have been written freehand, without ruling.7 Since the text is not right-justified, the right-hand margin of the page is naturally ragged. It has a carefully flourished heading (up to ‘tercio’), written in littera fracta, a display version of Anglicana.8 This is far more elaborate than for any of the other important documents in this section of the A/Y Memorandum Book. The body script is also more than usually formal, written in the littera acuta form of Anglicana. It is upright and angular, with a tall double-­ compartmented a and figure-of-eight g. The names of the guilds responsible for each pageant are written in a slightly larger script, with elaborated initials. Each pageant description is also given a capitalised initial. Both the guild names and the descriptions are preceded by a paraph. For a civic document, it was visually satisfying and easy to navigate around. This is far from the impression the Ordo gives now. Because it was a working document, it has become a palimpsest. As the ownership and content of the pageants changed, so the list was updated. Alterations, erasures, and insertions have obscured the layout and content, though one can see the ghost of the underlying original. Besides the scrapings-out and rewritings, the bare space around the items gave later writers room to add extra information. (This is probably one of the reasons why the alterations were made on the main Ordo and not on the Second List, which is very tightly packed together.) The result is an enticing mess. But what the document has lost in clarity, it has gained as a source of historical information. Scholars have used it to trace the history of the organisation of the York cycle throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as pageants changed hands and content was altered.9 The latest organisational change recorded on the Ordo, as noted by Richard Beadle and Peter Meredith in their facsimile,10 is the guild attribution to the Vestmentmakers who became contributory to the Skinners pageant in 1517.11 This appears (I  am tentative about this) to be in the same hand as made the major alteration to the last paragraph of the proclamation ‘to be made on the eve of Corpus Christi’ at the top of folio 255r.12 After that it seems to have been neglected. It shows, for example, no sign of the amalgamations of the 90

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Plate 1 York City Archives, A/Y Memorandum Book, fol. 252v: beginning of the Ordo paginarum. Photo DIAMM. © York City Archives and Meg Twycross

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Cardmakers’ and the Fullers’ pageants in 1529,13 or the cuts made in the Edwardian reforms of 1548.14 Perhaps these latter were tactfully disregarded, in the hope that they would go away – as they did, for a brief while, in 1554. Richard Beadle suggests that it was superseded by the Register as the document of record.15 This is plausible if we take it that the focus of interest (and penalties) had shifted from the number and type of characters to the actual words, though the ‘billetes accustomed’ were still being sent out in 1569, for the last recorded performance, and in 1561 the Minstrels describe the content of the play of Herod and the Three Kings, which they have just taken over from the Masons, in terms which echo the Ordo almost exactly, another piece of evidence that the Ordo was still in use as a source of reference in the mid-sixteenth century.16 Less productively, it has also suffered rather more than its fair share of the depredations of time, accident, and apparently deliberate vandalism. In her 1885 edition of the York Mystery Plays, Lucy Toulmin Smith noted that ‘Leaves 243–4–5–6 have all been cut by some destroyer, two of them nearly severed in half’.17 (There does not seem to be any rhyme or reason for the placement of these slashes, and their date is unknown.)18 The Ouse flood of 1892 soaked the lower half of the manuscript thoroughly, and it was not rescued and dried out in time to prevent considerable damage.19 As a result, river water has washed out much of the ink in large areas, and parchment already weakened by continuous or deep erasures has turned into holes. These holes and slashes were subsequently reinforced with archivist’s brown paper patches, which have hidden all the text underneath them, except where the ink has indefatigably made its way through again (Plate 2).20 It is not only a mess, it is in by far the worst mess of any section of the A/Y Memorandum Book, almost as if it had been singled out by fate to become an editorial nightmare. For subsequent editors, such as the REED duo of Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Dorrell Rogerson, recovering the original text has been an archaeological challenge. Fortunately, Lucy Toulmin Smith had transcribed the Ordo and the proclamation (though not the lists of torches or the Second List) for the introduction to her 1885 edition of the York Plays, before the 1892 flood and its aftermath.21 Ultra-violet light has been helpful, and the marks of the quill on the parchment often show up where the ink has been washed away if you tilt the page sideways,22 but a glance at the REED transcription, which represents the manuscript ‘in its present [1979] state of preservation’, will show that large gaps remain.23 The whole of the list of guilds in the bottom half of f. 253v, for example, has vanished under the patch, though occasional ghost words appear insubstantially through the paper, and we know from Toulmin Smith and other sources what they must have been.24 The bottom corner of folio 253 has been torn off, with any material it might have contained. Judging from the photographs published with the 1983 Leeds Studies in English facsimile of the York Register, the general legibility of the manuscript has deteriorated even over the last twenty years. 92

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Plate 2 York City Archives, A/Y Memorandum Book, fol. 254r. Photo DIAMM. © York City Archives and Meg Twycross

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So given that we have most of the text in printed form, why bother to look at the manuscript again? Precisely because its actual physical state tells a more detailed and complex story than any edition can, no matter how good. The REED edition is scrupulous in signalling alterations and emendations with its standard range of diacritics, but these cannot, even to the most practised reader, give more than a distant sense of the process behind the writing and rewriting. The unskilled may well not notice them at all. Through no fault of its own, because of the medium of print on paper, it presents a misleadingly homogeneous face to the reader. Besides this, in 2002 the A/Y Memorandum Book was disbound for conservation and rebinding. The York City Archivists took the opportunity to scan certain portions of it, including the Ordo paginarum. Having bought copies of the scans, I succumbed to the lure of an old puzzle. The pageant descriptions in the Ordo are rather strange. Unlike the concise entries of the Second List (f. 255r), which summarise the content of each pageant – ‘Creacio celi et terre, Cain occidens Abel, Temptacio Christi in deserto, Spoliacio inferni’ [The Creation of heaven and earth, Cain killing Abel, The Temptation of Christ in the desert, The Harrowing of Hell], and so forth – the Ordo issues a cast list – ‘Noe in Arche & vxor eius tres filij Noe cum vxoribus suis cum diuersis animalibus; Maria cum puero Iosep Anna obstetrix cum pullis columbarum Symeon recipiens puerum in vlnas suis & duo filij Symeonis; Ihesus Maria xij apostoli iiijor angeli cum tubis & iiijor cum corona lancea & ij flagellis iiijor spiritus boni & iiijor spiritus maligni & vj diaboli’ [Noah in the Ark and his wife, three sons of Noah with their wives, with various animals; Mary with the child, Joseph, Anna, a midwife with fledgling doves, Simeon receiving the child in his forearms, and two sons of Simeon; Jesus, Mary, twelve Apostles, four angels with trumpets and four with the crown, the spear, and two scourges, four Good Souls and four Bad Souls, and six devils]. Sometimes it would be difficult without other evidence (the existence of the play, its place in the list, knowledge of the story, and its likely cast) to tell what the pageant was actually about: ‘Herodes duo consiliarii iiijor milites Ihesus & iij Iudei; Ihesus Maria Gabriell cum ij angelis duo virgines & tres Iudei de cognacione Marie viij apostoli & ij diaboli’ [Herod, two counsellors, four soldiers, Jesus, and three Jews; Jesus, Mary, Gabriel with two angels, two virgins and three Jews from Mary’s kindred, eight Apostles, and two devils]. Usually, however, there is action, but expressed in one or more present participles: Abel & Kaym immolantes victimas; Ihesus spolians infernum xij spiritus boni & vj mali; Maria Iohannes Euangelista xij apostoli ij angeli Ihesus ascendens coram eis & iiijor angeli portans nubem [Abel and Cain sacrificing their offerings; Jesus harrowing Hell, twelve Good Souls, and six Bad (presumably devils?); Mary, John the Evangelist, twelve Apostles, two angels, Jesus ascending in their presence, and four angels carrying a/the cloud]. The characters are apparently fixed in an eternal present. What kind of production can this possibly describe? One has only to compare the Ordo with the 94

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N. Town or Chester Banns to sense a certain static quality, a snapshot of the action from the play rather than a plot summary. The question begs to be asked: are these descriptions of plays at all? Or could they conceivably be prescriptions for an earlier kind of pageant, groups of costumed characters either posed on a pageant waggon, or marching along the route, similar to the Dublin or Hereford Corpus Christi processions,25 and familiar from the roughly contemporary pageant processions of the Low Countries?26 However, we know that by 1421/2, at least two plays were being joined together so that the populace might more conveniently hear the significant words (oracula) of the players, and the amalgamation is described in terms of one guild taking over the materiam loquelarum, ‘the substance of the speeches’ in the other’s pageant.27 (We should beware of extrapolating from the Paternoster Play, which had a listening audience in 1388/99, to the Corpus Christi Play – they originally served different functions).28 A considerable number of the descriptions involve ‘speaking’ verbs. Have we caught them in 1415 in a sort of halfway house between tableau and play? We can tell from other documents that the second and third decades of the fifteenth century were a time of drastic change in the organisation and content of the Corpus Christi Play. It may possibly mark its expansion into a theatrical event in our sense. The very existence of the Ordo suggests that it had reached a stage where some kind of increased control was felt necessary, not merely that a reforming common clerk wanted to have the documents firmly filed in the right place. The fact that the Ordo, having been drawn up and pinned down on parchment, immediately began to change shape shows exactly how revolutionary the next twenty years were. It seemed to me that if I could reconstruct the original 1415 list on screen, I might be closer to answering these questions. Indeed, this was originally going to be the focus of this article, but this will have to wait now for a later publication. In order to return to the pristine state of the 1415 Ordo, I first needed to strip out all the later accretions and deletions. But this of course meant identifying them, and if possible identifying when they were made and who made them. I became aware of how many more of them there were than most of us had realised. It became even more clear that the nature of the York cycle had changed radically during those crucial two decades. Peter Meredith has discussed in depth the case of the Tilers’ pageant and the pageants with which it was amalgamated in 1422,29 but what about the Bakers’, the Butchers’, the Spicers’, the Carpenters’, the Tilethatchers’, the Chandlers’, and the Curriers’ pageants? Major, medium, and minor alterations on the Ordo all reflect what could be corresponding changes in performance or even the nature of the pageants. My attention became focussed on the process of alteration and the evidence for it: erasures, overwritings, interpolations, and the different hands at work – and that is what this article is about. For this form of manuscript archaeology, the printed edition can only be of limited help. Its diacritics told me that something had been added to the text, 95

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but not in whose writing. They pointed out that some material was written over an erasure, but not what had been erased. (I must add hastily here that sometimes it is impossible to ascertain what has been erased, even with the current state of technology.) I took the facsimile down from the shelf. But it was in black and white, which irons out distinctions between erasures and shadows, irregularities in the parchment and intentional ink marks. I needed to look at the manuscript again – which I did. I needed to take it home with me and spend time with it – which is clearly impossible. I needed to enlarge it. I needed to do things to it which would have destroyed the original manuscript. I needed digital photography. The original scans of the Ordo made by York City Archives, though excellent for all ordinary purposes, were not quite detailed enough for the kind of examination I needed to subject them to. I therefore, with the permission of the Archivist, Rita Freedman, went in and acquired some state-of-the-art digital photographs, taken for me by the specialist manuscript photographer for the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM) project.30 Digital images have several advantages: though they do not replace work on the original manuscript, they supplement it very usefully. One advantage is that something about having the light source as it were behind the manuscript forces you to notice erasures and changes of ink. In the manuscript, it is possible to see them without being aware of them; on-screen they are in your face. How many people have noticed that the famous 1376 entry ‘De vno Tenemento in quo Tres pagine Corporis Christi ponuntur per annum’31 is written over an erasure in a different ink and different, later hand, and that the accepted dating of the earliest record of the York cycle is therefore, to say the least, unsafe? It had become crucial to see as much of the written text as possible. Here the depredations of time, water, and archivists’ repairs on the manuscript are particularly frustrating. Lucy Toulmin Smith was a scrupulous palaeographer and noted where she had observed erasures and other alterations before the 1892 flood and subsequent patching. However, she assumed that the main-text hand and the hand which made alterations both belonged to Roger Burton. Her main interest was to establish the original content of the pageants, and so, though she noted in general that ‘some of the erasures and alterations were evidently made by Burton himself’, she assumed that this was ‘when writing’, and disregarded them in detail. Thus, we have no pre-Ouseflood evidence for them.32 Here we are thrown back on what the DIAMM project has christened ‘virtual restoration’ by electronic means. 33 It is possible, using various techniques, to recover quite a lot of the vanished text, even through the paper patches. Even if you cannot recover it all, enough of the letter shapes may show up to enable you to determine which hand you are looking at. For example, it seems pretty clear that in the Ironmongers’ pageant (Christ in the House of Simon the Leper, f. 253r), ‘Maria magdalena lavans pedes Iesu lacrimis suis & 96

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capillis suis tergens’ [Mary Magdalene washing the feet of Jesus with her tears and wiping them with her hair] is a later addition, or at least an alteration. Conversely, the Smiths’ ‘Ihesus super Pynaculum templi & diabolus temptans eum cum lapidibus & ij angeli administrantes &c’ [Jesus on the pinnacle of the Temple, and the devil tempting him with stones, and two attendant angels etcetera; f. 253r] seems to be totally original (Plate 3).

Plate 3 York City Archives, A/Y Memorandum Book, fol. 253r: Smiths’ pageant, The Temptation of Christ, apparently unaltered; Ironmongers’ pageant, Christ in the House of Simon the Leper, altered by Hand B. Photo DIAMM. © York City Archives and Meg Twycross

One can even sometimes read erasures. It is marginally possible to pick out remnants of ink which has soaked into the parchment even after the eraser’s penknife has removed most of it, and enhance them. Minute gradations in ultra-violet scans can also sometimes produce at least the ghost of the original, though they have to go through a sequence of processes, since what one is reading there appears to depend on the relative distribution of dark and light pixels. Usually, however, one needs a combination of different techniques: for example, digital enhancement of ‘straight’ scans, compared with the same area under ultra-violet. It is immensely time-consuming: each minor problem has probably taken me two or three hours, and the major ones several weeks. However, one major piece has already paid off: I now have a pretty good idea of what was originally written in the last paragraph of the Proclamation, 97

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buried under its early sixteenth-century emendation, and have published the tentative results in Medieval English Theatre.34 And a minor clarification. In the Second List, the pageant of the Raising of Lazarus (Suscitacio Lazari, f. 255r) is attributed in Johnston and Rogerson’s York to the ‘Hartshorners’.35 In fact, the ultra-violet scan reveals that the owners are given as ‘Hatters Horners’. The imagined r is the ascender of the k on ‘Skynners’ underneath, and the abbreviation for er after ‘Hatt-’ is quite clear. The scribe presumably missed out the ampersand for lack of space. This solves the problem of what has always seemed to me a peculiarly restricted commercial activity, and confirms Peter Meredith’s inspired guess that ‘since Hartshorners is preceded by two capitula instead of the usual one, it may represent a group of crafts rather than a single one’.36 The ‘erased name’ on f. 253v is infuriatingly ambiguous: it clearly begins with an H, but after that could be either ‘Hatters’ or ‘Horners’. (Moreover, there appears to be another name under it and above ‘Skynners’.) On the whole I would rather go for ‘Horners’, but this is purely subjective. Another small but pleasant emendation: the English translation in the Second List of the Bowyers’ pageant, Illusio christi coram Cay[phas], is not ‘perryng’, as suggested in the REED transcription, but, as one might expect, ‘poppyng’. As the Soldiers say, ‘we schall play popse for þe pages prowe’ (play 29 line 355). The next translation looks closer to Beadle and Meredith’s suggestion of ‘accursyng’ rather than REED’s ‘accunsyng’37 – it appears to have an r in the middle – but I am not yet totally satisfied that I can see what it might be. For this research, I have found myself working largely on-screen, making transcriptions, annotations, and observations on html pages. The drawback for a paper-based presentation, like this one, is that it is often very difficult to show the minute gradations which you have presented in contrasting colour on-screen in the different medium of a grayscale and necessarily heavily reduced image on paper. The future of publication in manuscript studies seems inexorably to be screen-based – see for example the Beowulf and Boethius editions. My major interest in computers and manuscripts so far has been in the teaching of and research into palaeography. Digital images enable the researcher to get in close to the mechanics of writing. With a high-resolution scan (these were 850 dpi on an actual-size image) each letter can be magnified  to over ten times its actual size without losing definition; in the case of  the Ordo’s minims, for example, to 20 mm high on-screen. The movement  of the pen is clearly visible. Not only does it make reading easier, hands from different pages and even from different manuscripts in different libraries can be anatomised and compared at length. One of the first things that struck me was the difference in the hands involved in the writing of the descriptions, to such an extent that the existence of characteristic letter shapes suggested even through the paper patches whether or not an alteration had been made. 98

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It is fairly easy to see that there are two main hands involved in the text on ff. 252v–255r, disregarding the later alterations made at intervals to the guild attributions, and the major early sixteenth-century rewriting of the text of the Proclamation at the top of f. 255r, about which I have written elsewhere.38 Hand A, whom we have always assumed to be Roger Burton, wrote the heading and text of the original Ordo, the first list of torches, and the official proclamation to be read, in English, on the Eve of Corpus Christi; from f. 252v to the top of f. 255r. Another hand, Hand B, then wrote what is known as the Second List, which presents all the pageants at a glance. This takes up most of the rest of f. 255r. Opinion about this second hand has varied: some scholars have thought that it was another scribe, and some that it was Hand A using a less formal script, while some appear to have wavered between the two.39 Malcolm Parkes, however, believes that it was not the same as Hand A, but: a second scribe who was probably younger than the first. [In the heading h]e employed a slightly later version of [Anglicana] Littera acuta, where m was again traced with multiple strokes, but formed with very shallow clockwise curved movement (instead of the diagonal ones in the handwriting of the first scribe)  … The handwriting  of the second scribe in [the Second List] is less consistent, since  he was writing more quickly. My attribution of the handwriting is  based on  the personal ductus of the scribes (the ways in which they wrote  – mainly the rhythms which are harder to describe than to see – and the treatment of certain letter forms other than m).40 Ian Doyle confirms that these two hands are ‘quite distinct’.41 Hand B’s preferences include the use of a single-compartmented Secretary letter a, and a pointed-apex Secretary g with an open tail, which became my touchstone for recognising his alterations. Ian Doyle also points out his use of ‘Secretary final s, and the forms of the I/J, f, and long s’. Where Hand A almost always uses the nomen sacrum abbreviation ‘Ihc’ for ‘Ihesus’, with a rather elaborate capital I/J, Hand B also not infrequently spells ‘Iesus’ in full with a simple looped head to the I/J (Plate 4). It is easy enough to note the difference between the hands en bloc, but equally easy to miss the fact that the contribution of Hand B to the Ordo is quite extensive. (Peter Meredith and Richard Beadle are so far the only people really to remark on them, and that necessarily briefly, though they attribute both hands to Burton.)42 He rubs, scrapes, overwrites, and makes insertions. Some of his alterations are major, like the scraping out and overwriting as one item of the separate pageants of the Saucemakers (Suicide of Judas), Tilemakers (Trial before Pilate), and Turners, Hairsters and Bollers (The Scourging and Crowning with Thorns), and the total removal of the 99

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Plate 4 Hand A compared with Hand B.

Photo DIAMM. © York City Archives and Meg Twycross

Millers’ pageant (Dicing for Christ’s Garments) some time during or after 1422.43 Others are quite small, but reflect at the least a mildly editorial approach to what the Ordo was trying to describe. Hand B first appears in the Ordo adding a subtitle to the original flourished title: Ordo paginarum \ludi/ Corporis Christi tempore Willelmi Alne Maioris Anno regni Regis Henrici quinti post conquestum Anglie tercio [Hand A] compilatus per Rogerum Burton clericum communem in anno domini millesimo ccccxvmo [Hand B] Alongside this addition, Burton has set his notarial signum: two trefoils flanking the R for ‘Registravit’.44 Hand B has made another alteration to the title: the word ‘paginarum’ is written over an erasure,45 and then ‘ludi’ superscribed. I have spent some time trying to see if anything of the original word underneath ‘paginarum’ is 100

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visible, so far unsuccessfully.46 It might just, disappointingly, have been ‘paginarum’ misspelled – but what if it were, for example, ‘processionis’?47 After this, Hand B seems regularly to have updated and corrected Hand A’s original text. At first I thought that some of the alterations were merely cosmetic – where for example ink had blotted the original – but that does not seem to be so. A ?later hand has drawn over some of the letters in a darker ink, most noticeably in the Plasterers’ pageant, where he has traced over the doublecompartmented a favoured by Hand A. It is thus unlikely to have been Hand B, who favours the single-compartmented Secretary a. Lucy Toulmin Smith suggests that this tampering was ‘recent’ when she saw the manuscript. The same hand with apparently the same ink has been at work in other documents in the Archives, for example Y: A15, the Corpus Christi Indenture of 1432. But all Hand B’s alterations appear to be substantive. Some emend vocabulary: the Cardmakers’ ‘de costa Ade’ [from Adam’s rib] seems originally to have been the more unusual ‘de costera Ade’, [from Adam’s side]. Others appear to be correcting Hand A’s grammar, like the misguided alteration of ‘inspirans in eos spiritum vite’ [breathing into them the spirit of life],  which is biblical and correct,48 to ‘inspirans eos spiritu vite’ (inspiring them with the spirit of life’).49As for the crowd of singing angels which accompany Mary’s Coronation, he knows that something has definitely gone wrong with the grammar, but hasn’t quite put his finger on the problem: ‘cum turba Angelorum cantantes’ is unfortunate, but ‘cantans’ is if possible even worse, and further emendations have disappeared into a mercifully concealing blot. Some are clarifications, like adding Isaac to Abraham immolans filium suum (if that is not a later hand), and ab Aramathia to the Ioseph in the Butchers’ and Poulterers’ pageant (ditto), or explaining, in the Spurriers’ and Lorimers’ pageant (Christ and the Doctors in the Temple), that ‘Ihesus’ is in fact a ‘puer’, and that ‘eorum’, ‘eos’, and ‘eis’ refer to ‘Doctores’. Or, in the Scriveners’ pageant (Doubting Thomas) and the Woolweavers’ pageant (The Assumption), deciding that ‘Thomas de India’ was probably too obscure, and altering him to plain ‘Thomas apostolus’. He seems to have had serious problems with the nature of the Body of Christ in the Deposition, rejecting ‘Ihesum’ and then ‘mortuum corpus’, before settling for the ‘eum’ which he had crossed out in the first place. Hand B also seems to have had a mild obsession with rearranging the material according to what he thinks is the focal point: the Painters’, Pinners’, and Latoners’ pageant (The Crucifixion) and the following Butchers’ and Poulterers’ pageant (The Death and Deposition) have both had their opening words altered to ‘Crux’, (The Cross); and in the Spicers’ pageant (The Annunciation), the Pewterers’ and Founders’ pageant (Joseph’s Trouble), and the Mayor’s pageant (The Coronation) ‘Maria’ is pushed to the head of the cast list, displacing respectively ‘Angelus’ (Gabriel), ‘Iosep’, and ‘Ihesus’. The original ‘Mariam’ appears in each case to have been erased, or in the case of the Mayor’s pageant, just left there;50 the Painters’ clearly once read ‘Ihesus 101

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extensus in cruce’, but Hand B altered it to ‘\Crux/ Ihesus extensus in ea’. This produces a curious proleptic syntax: ‘Maria Iosep volens dimittere eam’ (Mary, Joseph wishing to put her away), ‘Crux Ihesus extensus in ea super terram’ (The Cross, Jesus stretched out on it on the ground). It does, I suppose, preserve the list pattern, if one thinks of the Cross as a character. Then there are the alterations which arise from alterations in the actual performance. Some are small updates as characters are added to the cast lists: like Herod’s son and the messenger in the first Goldsmiths’ pageant (The Three Kings, later the Masons’), and, apparently, Mary Magdalene in the Ironmongers’ pageant (Jesus in the House of Simon the Leper). But some of them are major. In early 1422 the Painters and Stainers (The Stretching and Nailing to the Cross) petitioned to combine pageants with the Pinners and Latoners (The Raising of the Cross upon Mount Calvary) to produce a composite pageant of the Crucifixion of Christ.51 The result is recorded at the top of f. 254r: the second pageant has been scraped out, and the material rewritten as one continuous entry (Plate 5). The Pinners and Latoners, who kept their pageant wagon, and became the lead guild in the organisation of the pageant, have been moved to the head of the guild attribution, but Hand B has thriftily recycled the P of ‘Payntours’ so that it now begins ‘Pynners’.52 Conversely, the 1431 splitting up of the Goldsmiths’ entry to show that the first of their pageants has been taken over by the Masons only needed the insertion of ‘Masons’ alongside the guild attribution, and a new paraph to begin the second episode with ‘Maria cum puero …’ The major amalgamation of 1421/2, when the Saucemakers’ (Suicide of Judas), Tilemakers’ (Trial before Pilate), Turners’, Hairsters’, and Bollers’ (The Scourging and Crowning with Thorns), and Millers’ (Dicing for Christ’s Garments) became one play of The Condemnation of Christ, has left its mark across the bottom third of f.  253v and the top of f. 254r, where the Millers’ pageant has been erased, tantalisingly, not quite completely.53 The radical scraping and rewriting of the pageants at the bottom of f. 253v suggests that the Shearmen (Via Crucis) were also affected by the change, though there may have been other reasons. The otherwise unrecorded but preRegister joining together of the Bakers’ Last Supper and the Waterleaders’ Washing of Feet resulted in a major scraping and rewriting which suggests that the writer was having organisational problems as well as doctrinal difficulty in expressing what the pageant was about. And the Butchers’ and Poulterers’ pageant, of the Death and Deposition, seems to have undergone a refashioning, but with no sign of when this was or what the changes were. I am very much aware that some of the corrections which I have attributed to Hand B may on further examination turn out to be the work of a Hand C or even a Hand D or E. (Some alterations, such as the addition to the Bowyers’ and Fletchers’ pageant of The Buffetting, are conspicuously later, though it reflects the scene with Peter and the maidservant which is part of the pageant as we know it, and so must have been before the writing of the 102

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Plate 5 A/Y Memorandum Book, top of fol. 254r: the Millers’ pageant erased; the Painters’ and Stainers’ pageant (The Stretching and Nailing to the Cross) combined with the Pinners’ and Latoners’ pageant (The Raising of the Cross upon Mount Calvary) to produce a composite pageant of The Crucifixion of Christ; something strange happening to the Butchers’ and Poulterers’ pageant. Photo DIAMM. © York City Archives and Meg Twycross

Register.) Hand A himself made an alteration at the very beginning: the description of the Tanners’ pageant (The Creation and Fall of the Angels) has been erased and rewritten a line-space further up. It is written in the same script as the other original entries. But however many hands may eventually turn out to have been involved, it does not change the fact that there are a considerable number of alterations which must, because of their content, have been made anything from seven to seventeen years later than 1415, and the vast majority represent a change, either of content or of attitude towards what the list was aiming to describe. Now comes the shock. Hand A is not Burton. The writing does not match anything written by him in the rest of A/Y or elsewhere, even in the lengthy Chronicle of the Archbishops of York, ‘scripta propria manu Rogeri de Burton’ on ff. 219v–246v of the Memorandum Book (Plate 6).54 Even at his most formal, Burton writes a cursive, slightly forward-leaning hand with single-compartmented Secretary a, and a pointed-apex Secretary g with an open lower loop.55 Hand A belongs to a previous generation of scribes. The nearest hand to his which I have so far found is the one that in the Freemen’s Register, f. 12r, records Burton’s election to the post of common clerk in 1415, the year in which William Alne was elected Mayor and the Ordo was first drawn up. The Freemen’s Register was not only used to record the annual admissions to the freedom of the city, it also recorded the annual election of the mayor, the common clerk, and the servientes Maioris, who became the sword- and mace-bearer respectively. These folios, 4r–27v, are not transcribed into the Surtees Society edition.56 One would imagine that 103

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a man would record his own election, but there seems to have been a habit (rather than a tradition) that the outgoing clerk or a deputy wrote the final Minute of his reign.57 I am not capable as yet of confirming whether this person was William del Bothe, the previous common clerk, or if he was the one who wrote the Ordo. His as are mildly suspect. But Hand A was certainly someone of his scribal generation.58

Plate 6 [Explicit to The Chronicle of the Archbishops of York] A/Y Memorandum Book, fol. 246v: scripta propria manu Rogeri de Burton. Photo DIAMM. © York City Archives and Meg Twycross

It seems more than likely that Burton was Hand B. Close comparison of word formation in the Chronicle of the Archbishops and in the entries in the Freemen’s Register shows without a doubt that he wrote the Second List (which he signed at the end), and it is likely that he wrote the alterations to the Tilers’ and the Shearmen’s pageants and, for example, the pastores alterations in the Tilethatchers’ and Chandlers’ pageants. The general aspect of most other, shorter, alterations within the time-scale suggests that he wrote them too.59 This completely alters the received opinion of what is going on in the Ordo. Burton did not write it himself, but commissioned someone else to write it. This is not in itself odd, considering what we know of the role and status of notaries public. Though Burton was an assiduous record-keeper in A/Y, other hands besides his are employed in it during his regime. However, he was determined that later users of the list should know that it was he who drew it up, so he added the subtitle with his name and confirming the date, and added his notarial signum to make sure it was properly recorded. He does seem, at this stage, to have been insistent that credit should be afforded to him where credit was due. The first thing that he did when taking over the Freemen’s Register was to alter his predecessor’s account of his election, adding ‘notarius publicus’ to his own name. The following year he recorded the exact sum (£7 p.a.) of the fee for himself and his clerk, ‘vnanimi voce omnium nemine reclamante’, citing his qualifications as ‘clericus Eboracensis diocesis auctoritatibus apostolica & imperiali Notarius’.60 One can only imagine what office politics were when he entered on his twenty-one-year period of office and what role Hand A played in them. Was he the retiring incumbent, 104

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taking on a retirement job? Or was he Burton’s own clericus? In which case, logic would suggest that if he were the deputy common clerk, and if Burton’s deputy common clerk were, as Sandy Johnston has suggested, William Revetour,61 here we have Revetour’s hand. But I would prefer not to build too many assumptions on such logic without a great deal more detailed research into the hands of York city officials in the early fifteenth century; let us stick with calling him Hand A. This then raises the question of what Burton meant by compilatum. The verb, in both Latin and English, had a wider semantic field in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries than it does today. In English, it can be used where we would use ‘composed’ – ‘Heere is ended the book of the tales of Caunterbury, compiled by Geffrey Chaucer’– but from the medieval point of view which sees literary composition as the amassing and arrangement of pre-existent material. It looks as if here ‘compiled’ is used much as in our modern sense, which was also available: ‘I haue compiled þis werk of þe  sawes of þe foresaide auctores, and of myn owne experience’ (Chauliac, quoted MED sv compilen 2(a)). Burton has collected together (and perhaps redrafted) the matter of the billets. These were already being sent out in 1396, when two sheets of parchment were bought for them.62 Whether he also updated the traditional material (which is well within the standard late medieval meaning of ‘compile’) we cannot tell; nor what type of draft he supplied to Hand A to copy up. If he had only handed over the tattered original copy-text from 1396 and before, it seems unlikely that he would have claimed to be the compiler of the 1415 list, and the heading states very clearly that this is the list of pageants as they stand ‘tempore Willelmi Alne Maioris Anno regni Regis Henrici quinti post conquestum Anglie tercio’. After that, he took over the charge of correcting and updating the list from the original scribe. If some of his corrections seem a bit quibbling, he had the right as common clerk to pull rank. And he had the status and the confidence to alter not only the content of the pageant descriptions, but also their mode, so that they become much more like descriptions of plays: like, in fact, his Second List. Those made in his hand presumably antedate his final retirement in 1432/3 – though even that is uncertain, as a new common clerk was not sworn in until 1435/6.63 At some point before 1421/2 he wrote the Second List, perhaps, as Beadle and Meredith suggest, as ‘an order of pageants supplementary to the Proclamation, possibly even for the practical purpose of checking their order as they left Toft Green’.64 What questions do these discoveries raise (apart from the ones I set out to answer in the first place)? There are a variety of intriguing little problems, such as ‘Why were Jesus and the apostles struck out of the Raising of Lazarus?’ and ‘What else can there possibly have been to erase in the description of the Mayor’s pageant of the Coronation of the Virgin?’ – ‘Ihesus coronans Mariam cum turba Angelorum cantants\t/es’ seems perfectly adequate. But the major ones centre around documents and people. 105

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Much more can and must be done about the hands of scribes in the York records, using digital photography to make close comparisons and identifications. It would be useful to create a database of hands. To advance, we would have to go outside the strictly limited range of documents on early drama. Eventually we might even discover which scribes were responsible for the main text of the York Register. (Peter Meredith has already located the sixteenth-century additions by John Clerke, who also appears in the Bakers’ records, now Additional MS 33852 in the British Library.)65 There needs to be a lot more work on Roger Burton and his circle: the group of professional functionaries who worked for the city and for the church. Burton was a secular married notary public of the diocese of York;66 Revetour was a cleric in orders who nevertheless worked for the City and made influential friends such as the Boltons and Nicholas Blackburn Senior who got him his chantry post in St William’s Ousebridge, next to the council chamber. Sandy Johnston has shown the way with her detailed work on Revetour’s will;67 we need to pursue the ramifications. We tend to think of the city and the church as two separate establishments, but here was a group of men with common professional interests and a common involvement, whether through personal interest or professional duty, in pageantry. What practical effect might this linking of Church and City have had on the development of the Corpus Christi Play? We are unlikely now to find any substantial new documents for York in the REED mode, but this does not mean that there are no new discoveries to be made. We can and must go back and look again at those documents which we have got, using all the technological tools at our disposal – which are likely to become yet more helpful as technology progresses. The Heroic Age of the York records is not over yet, it is just entering its second phase. Dwarfs, maybe, standing on the shoulders of the REED giants, but exciting and newdirectional all the same.

Acknowledgements Plates 1–6 are published by kind permission of the Archivist, York City Archives. I would like to thank: Rita Freedman and the staff of York City Archives; Julia Craig-McFeely of the DIAMM Project for arranging for the digital photography and instructing me in the techniques of virtual restoration; Peter Scott for taking the photographs; Malcolm Parkes and Ian Doyle for their expert palaeographical opinions; Pamela M. King, Olga Horner, Lena Etherington, and Muriel Utting, of the York Doomsday Project, for energetically discussing and rearranging my argument; Peter Meredith, for lending me the original prints of the A/Y Memorandum Book used in the facsimile and for making encouraging noises; Rosemary Phizackerley; Ann Rycraft for answering my queries on fifteenth-century York worthies; Andrew Prescott, for helping with notaries public; and David Klausner and Karen Marsalek, for being patient. 106

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Notes   1. Elected 2 Henry V on Saint Blaise’s Day (3 February 1415): York City Archives MS D1 (Freemen’s Register), f. 12r. Resigned 3 February 1432/3, having stayed on in the job at the earnest solicitation of the mayor and aldermen ever since his first attempt to resign in 1428, with the proviso that he is doing it of his own free will and is not bound by oath: Freemen’s Register, f. 14v. However, no successor was immediately elected, and later notes say that he was common clerk for twenty-one years, which suggests that he did not get away until 1435/6, when Thomas Uldale was formally elected. According to the heading the Ordo was drawn up in 3 Henry V (1415/16), confirmed by the subheading as 1415. For an account of Burton, see Richard Beadle and Peter Meredith, The York Play: a Facsimile of British Library MS Additional 35290, Together with a Facsimile of the ‘Ordo Paginarum’ Section of the A/Y Memorandum Book (Leeds: University of Leeds School of English, 1983), lv; hereafter cited as York Play: Facsimile.   2. Originally the A/Y Memorandum Book was in two volumes, the maior registrum and the novum registrum, with a paper section intended for an index: see Beadle and Meredith, York Play: Facsimile, li, and Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, 2 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979) I, p. xx: hereafter cited as REED: York. The Ordo was written on a series of folios which would originally have been at the back of the first volume, possibly preceded by a few blank leaves which were later filled up with material dated 1419 and after. This seems to give a terminus ad quem for both the Ordo and the Second List; the Ordo might just conceivably have been drafted in 1415 on some other document and transferred to the Memorandum Book later. For a collation diagram of this gathering, see York Play: Facsimile, p. li.   3. At this point the folios are about 202–5 mm wide at the top and 290–3 mm deep – slightly narrower than a piece of A4. The written area varies, since the text is not right-justified, and the bottom margin depends on the amount of content to be fitted in, but overall is about 155 mm wide and 245 mm high. These figures vary slightly from the codicological description given in REED: York, I, p. xx, as I made the measurements when the book was disbound: the height measurements were made in the gutter.   4. This is not so visible in the Leeds facsimile, as the manuscript was tightly bound when the black and white photographs were taken, but since it has been disbound, the original layout is much clearer.   5. Dimensions very variable. Outer margin, between 30 and 40 mm on the versos, can be less (down to 15 mm) on the rectos because text block is unjustified. Gutter: on the rectos quite wide, 25 mm to 28 mm, variable on the versos because unjustified. On f. 253r the left margin suddenly narrows (from Marshalls) from 28 to 20 mm. Top margin: fairly stable, matching the rest of the A/Y Memorandum Book at about 20 mm to the bottom of the first line. Bottom margin variable, 30–35 mm. The rest of this section of the book has outer margins of 45–50 mm, and gutters of 28–30 mm; top margins of 20 mm to top line, and bottom of 45 mm.   6. The forked brackets seem to be an afterthought, as the first one (the Tanners) runs over the paraph mark for the description. Some (e.g. the Chandlers) are purely straight lines. In complicated cases, such as the Goldsmiths, they become a veritable cat’s cradle.   7. I can see no ruling on these folios, except for a vertical line on the right hand side of f. 255r, which seems to have come through from the other side. Where there is pricking, it does not, oddly, seem to apply to this particular layout: on f. 252v there is a prick in the middle of the w of ‘Pewterers’, 50 mm in. This appears to be

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the original pricking for the rest of this part of the manuscript, totally disregarded for the Ordo. There is no attempt to match the text blocks on the recto and verso.   8. I am very grateful to Professor Malcolm Parkes for this information, made in a private communication dated 6 November 2004.  9. See for example Martin Stevens and Margaret Dorrell (Rogerson), ‘The Ordo Paginarium (sic) Gathering of the York A/Y Memorandum Book’, Modern Philology, 72 (1974–75), 45–59; Margaret Dorrell, ‘The Mayor of York and the Coronation Pageant’, Leeds Studies in English, ns 5 (1971), 35–45; Peter Meredith, ‘The Ordo Paginarum and the Development of the York Tilemakers’ Pageant’, Leeds Studies in English, ns 11 (1980), 59–73; Beadle and Meredith, York Play: Facsimile, pp. liii–liv; The York Plays, ed. Richard Beadle (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), pp. 23–7; and of course REED: York passim, especially Appendix 6, II, pp. 657–85. Most of these belong to what might be called the Heroic Age of the York records, when the REED: York volumes were in preparation and just published, and attention was focussed on the manuscripts. 10. For a detailed and unemotive codicological description of the Ordo paginarum, see York Play: Facsimile, pp. li–lix. 11. REED: York, pp. 214, 215; York Play: Facsimile, p. liii. As Beadle and Meredith point out, nor do we get any evidence of the later organisational changes, such as the passing over of Emmaus to the Sledmen in 1535 (REED: York, p. 307), or the Minstrels taking on Herod and the Kings from the Masons (Beadle and Meredith refer to this mistakenly as ‘the Purification’) in 1561 (REED: York, pp. 334, 337–8). Lucy Toulmin Smith suggested (York Plays, p. xxvi, n. 4: see below note 17) that the addition of the Joiners, Cartwrights, Carvers, and Sawyers to the Carpenters and their pageant of the Resurrection must date from 1562 when these trades ‘were united’, but REED: York, p. 127, shows that this entry dates from 1482 (A/Y, ff. 367v–68r), which would fit the script of the addition. 12. Meg Twycross, ‘Forget the 4.30 a.m. Start’, Medieval English Theatre, 25 (2003), 98–152. 13. REED: York, pp. 249–50. 14. REED: York, pp. 291–2. 15. Richard Beadle, Introduction to York Plays, p. 24. 16. REED: York, p. 355 (billets accustomed); REED: York, p. 338 (Minstrels). 17. York Plays: The Plays Performed by the Crafts or Mysteries of York on the Day of Corpus Christi in the 14th, 15th, and 16th Centuries, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), p. xix, n. 1. She uses the medieval foliation: modern ff. 252, 253, 254, 255. The slashes on ff. 253 and 254 stretch for two-thirds and half of the folio respectively. They might have been the effects of one knife attack on f. 253r, which went through to the following folio, but not as damagingly. The knife-cut swerves sharply to the right and then possibly to the right again as it gets towards the bottom of the page – a right-handed criminal? But why should his venom be directed against The Flight into Egypt and The Massacre of the Innocents? 18. R. Davies, Extracts from the Municipal Records of the City of York during the reigns of Edward IV, Edward V, and Richard III (London: J.B. Nichols, 1843) does not mention them, but then he is not interested in the condition of the manuscript, merely its content. 19. See Stevens and Dorrell, ‘The Ordo Paginarium Gathering’, p. 46. 20. See York Play: Facsimile, pp. lv–lvi. 21. York Plays, ed. Toulmin Smith, pp. xix–xxvii and xxxiv. REED: York footnotes her transcriptions where they fill in gaps in what can be seen nowadays. The Second List was published by Davies, Extracts, pp. 233–6.

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22. See Stevens and Dorrell, ‘The Ordo Paginarium Gathering’, p. 46, though my impression is that what one can see are the indentations rather than clean parchment. The marks of the pen are also clearly visible in the facsimile, but we did not succeed in capturing them well enough in our digital scans to be able to do much with them. 23. Transcription in REED: York, pp. 16–26; explanatory note, p. 869. 24. There actually seem to be more than even she discerned. 25. For Dublin, see E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1903), II, p. 364; For Hereford, see REED: Herefordshire/ Worcestershire, ed. David Klausner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), pp. 115–16. 26. See B.A.M. Ramakers, Spelen en Figuren: Toneelkunst en processiecultuur in Oudenaarde tussen Middeleuwen en Moderne Tijd (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996); Wim Hüsken, ‘The Bruges Ommegang’ in Formes teatrals: Actes del VII Col.loqui, Societé Internationale pour l’Étude du Théâtre Médiévale, Gerona 1992 (Barcelona: SITM, 1996), pp. 77–85; Meg Twycross, ‘The Leuven Ommegang and Leuven City Archives’ in European Medieval Drama 4 (2000): Selected Papers from the Fourth International Conference on ‘Aspects of European Medieval Drama’, Camerino, 5–8 August 1999, ed. André Lascombes and Sydney Higgins (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), pp. 77–90. 27. REED: York, pp. 37–8. 28. REED: York, pp. 6–7. 29. Meredith, ‘The Ordo Paginarum and the Development of the York Tilemakers’ Pageant’, 59–73. 30. For the DIAMM Project, see their website, www.diamm.ac.uk [checked 1 March 2016. Ed.]. The A/Y Memorandum Book has recently been disbound for conservation. York City Archives took the opportunity of scanning it. However, the flatbed scanner they used, though it has produced some very good results (especially since it acted as a sort of lightbox), also automatically ‘sharpened’ the images, removing some of the fine gradations in colour between pixels, reducing their usefulness for really detailed work. I therefore brought in a specialist manuscript photographer, Peter Scott, from the DIAMM project with their camera to take supplementary digital photographs of the Ordo paginarum and various pages from the Freemen’s Register. He used a PowerPhase FX camera, taking images as RGB under daylight balanced lighting conditions. This is ‘cold light’ and does not harm the MS by overheating it. Images were digitised at 850 dpi, and stored as uncompressed TIFs. The copyright in the images resides with York City Archives; DIAMM is licensed to hold copies for archiving purposes; the copyright in the digital restorations belongs to Professor Meg Twycross.   We tried several different approaches: a straight image; raking light, to try and bring up the grooves left by the pen, when the ink was washed away; ultra-violet; and a light sheet which cast a glow through the layers of paper of the patch. These techniques were variously successful. Unfortunately, since the light sheet shows the ghosts of the writing on both recto and verso, the original flatbed scans were often more effective in showing up underlying writing. The raking light needed more time than we could give, and the results were disappointingly thin, not much better than the straightforward scans. The ultra-violet was useful, but because of the different pathologies of the water-damaged and undamaged parchments, it needs two different treatments on screen to reveal the writing on the two different areas. The straightforward scans proved eventually to be the most detailed and useful. 31. A/Y Memorandum Book, f. 4v: see REED: York, p. 3. I hope to identify the hand, which looks to me at the moment like one which appears later in the Memorandum Book, from the 1390s.

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32. York Plays, ed. Toulmin Smith, p. xix, n. 1. 33. See www.diamm.ac.uk for an account of the techniques [checked 1 March 2016. Ed.]. 34. See above, note 12. 35. REED: York, p. 25. 36. Beadle and Meredith, York Play: Facsimile, p. lii. 37. REED: York, p.26. 38. See above, note 12. 39. Angelo Raine, as reported by Mendal G. Frampton, appears to suggest that the two hands are different, but his comments are ambiguous. Raine is reported as saying that the signature ‘Burton’ at the bottom of the Second List ‘is not in either of the hands of the list proper. That list is in two hands, all the emendations being in one hand and the entries in another … As to whether any of the three hands is Burton’s Mr. Raine does not commit himself. Whether Burton wrote any of the entries, however, the list is later than Burton’s 1415 list’ (Mendal G. Frampton, ‘The Date of the “Wakefield Master”: Bibliographical Evidence’, PMLA, 53 (1938), 86–117, at 102, n. 79. Either Frampton did not fully understand Raine, or Raine was hedging his bets. Martin Stevens and Margaret Dorrell (Rogerson) appear to subscribe to the theory that Burton wrote both; however, in the REED edition Johnston and Rogerson say of the two Lists: ‘The hands are similar though not identical’ (REED: York, p. 869, note to p. 16). Richard Beadle three years later (1982) is cautious: ‘If the list is in Roger Burton’s hand, then it is not the more formal variety of it which he used for copying the Ordo’ (York Plays, p. 25, n. 59). In the facsimile a year later, he and Peter Meredith seem to come down on the ‘Burton writing in two styles’ camp: ‘the script of the Second List is Secretary with Anglicana r, and it is this script which Burton frequently uses for the additions and alterations in the descriptions’ (p. lv). [In his subsequent edition (The York Play: A Critical Edition of the York Corpus Christi Play as Recorded in British Library Additional MS35290, Early English Text Society, Supplementary Series 24, Vol. II (2013 for 2011)), Richard Beadle responds to the questions raised in the present article with the modified view that ‘the common clerks of York did not work alone, but ran an office adjacent to the council chamber on Ouse Bridge, where they were normally assisted by at least one deputy or servant … There is obviously considerable likelihood that the original compiler of the Ordo was a clerk in this position working under Burton’s direction’ (p. xxiv, n. 20). Ed.] 40. Private communication dated 6 November 2004. 41. Private communication dated 26 November 2004. 42. Beadle and Meredith, York Play: Facsimile, p. lv. 43. REED: York, pp. 37–8. The date of the council meeting which discussed this is cited as 9 Henry V (1421/2). Peter Meredith calls it 1422/3, on the grounds that the alteration would not have taken place before the next Corpus Christi. 44. On notarial signa, see C.R. Cheney, Notaries Public in England in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 108. 45. A happy combination of his characteristic Secretary a and g. 46. Peter Meredith (York Play: Facsimile, p. liv) suggests that it originally read ‘ludi’, but the word is far too short for the space. Malcolm Parkes suggests ‘ludorum’, but that does not go along with the usual vocabulary: the ‘ludus’ is always the cycle as a whole, the pageants are ‘pagine’. 47. Peter Meredith points out that the document is called the Ordo paginarum elsewhere in A/Y (York Play: Facsimile, p. liv; REED: York, p. 11, ostensibly 1399 but in fact a later marginal note), but since this particular reference was made after the

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Ordo had been drawn up, it does not tell us anything about what an earlier document might have been called. 48. Based on Genesis 2:7: Vulgate ‘et inspiravit in faciem eius spiraculum vitae’; Douai-Rheims ‘breathed into his face the breath of life’. ‘Spiraculum’ is the direct object; ‘faciem’ is in the accusative because it follows ‘in’ meaning ‘into’. 49. If the extension of the abbreviation as given in REED: York, p. 17 is correct. It could however be a blanket abbreviation for spiritum. 50. It is largely underneath the paper patch, but is visible through electronic restoration. 51. REED: York, pp. 37–8. 52. Peter Meredith points this out in York Play: Facsimile, p. liv. 53. See Meredith, ‘The Ordo Paginarum and the Development of the York Tilemakers’ Pageant’. 54. F. 246v: ‘Explicit cronica de successionibus & gestis notabilibus Archiepiscoporum Eboracensium incipiendi ad Paulinum & finiendo ad Iohannem Thuresby scripta propria manu Rogeri de Burton clerici communis tempore Ricardj Russell maioris [Signed] ♣Burton Registravit ♣ ♣’ 55. The 1432 Indenture between the City and the Corpus Christi Guild (York City Archives MS A15) might be in Burton’s hand (he notarised it on the bottom), but even though he/the scribe uses double-compartmented a and figure-of-eight g, the aspect of the script is completely different from that used by Hand A. 56. Register of the Freemen of the City of York, ed. Francis Collins, 2 vols, Surtees Society Publications, 96 (1897 for 1896) and 102 (1900 for 1899). 57. This is not universal and would not, of course, work if a new clerk was needed because the outgoing Clerk had died. 58. A similar hand wrote ff. 142r–143r of the A/Y Memorandum Book (The Weavers’ ordinances), dated 1400. 59. Beadle and Meredith rightly say this too (York Play: Facsimile, p. lv), though they assume that he wrote the body of the text as well. 60. For the double title, see Cheney, Notaries Public, pp. 85–7. 61. Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘William Revetour, Chaplain and Clerk of York, Testator’ in Essays in Honour of Peter Meredith, ed. Catherine Batt, Leeds Studies in English, ns 29 (1998), 153–72. 62. REED: York, p. 9: ‘Et pro ij pellibus pergameni tempore billarum corporis Christi vj d.’ See also p. 14 (1405). 63. York City Archives MS D1, f. 14v. Later comments add that he served as common clerk for twenty-one years, which would make his clerkship from 1415 to 1436. See also note 1. 64. Beadle and Meredith, York Play: Facsimile, p. liii. 65. Peter Meredith, ‘John Clerke’s Hand in the York Register’, Leeds Studies in English, ns 12 (1980/1), 245–71. 66. Angelo Raine, Medieval York (London: John Murray, 1955), p. 135; Joan, widow of Roger Burton late common clerk, lived in a dwelling near the old Common Hall in 1446, when plans were drawn up for the building of a new and larger Guildhall (York City Archives MS G16). 67. Johnston, ‘William Revetour’.

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Part II:

Performance

6 PLAYING THE RESURRECTION 1

This essay is about the performance of a medieval English mystery play, and what it showed me, the producer, about the way in which these plays seem to work dramatically. The play was the York Carpenters’ pageant of The Resurrection of Christ, performed in March 1977 in the Nuffield Theatre Studio of the University of Lancaster. Here I attempted to re-create the effect of a pageant-waggon staging in a street-shaped space, with a standing and potentially mobile audience. I have documented the details, and the historical evidence for my reconstruction, elsewhere.2 I want here to concentrate on what happens to the play in performance: how the physical circumstances of production seem to me to have been exploited by the playwright, and especially how the audience is implicated in the play. Let us start with the most obvious feature. With this kind of staging, actors and audience are very close to each other. There are of course no footlights. There is not even a respectful gulf of open space marking the divide between them: even in the widest urban street, there is no room for one. The actors may even have to walk into the crowd. Entrances and exits are of course made through the audience, but from the script of the Resurrection it is clear that several speeches, in certain cases even whole scenes, are played at some remove from the waggon. The Centurion, for example, begins to speak out of earshot of Pilate: [To] oure princes and prestes bedene Of this affray, I woll go weten, withouten wene What thei can saye.3 (45–48) The Maries see the Angel from a distance: Sisteris! a ȝonge child, as we goo Makand mornyng, I see it sitte wher we wende to, In white clothyng…  (225–28) 115

p lay i n g t h e r e s u r r e c t i o n so they presumably play their whole scene of lamentation in the street. In our production, even on the nights when the audience tried to keep their distance, they were never more than three feet away from the actors. This physical closeness made the audience very much an active factor in the performance, and to us an unpredictable one. We did not know until they were actually there on the first night how we, as well as they, were going to react in these unfamiliar ‘medieval’ circumstances. It was not just that we did not know where they were going to stand, or whether they would move out of the way at the right time, or whether the action we had rehearsed at street-level would be at all visible; they presented an active physical presence which had to be reckoned with. They might be responsive, or they might be inert, but they were there. In an open-air, close-up form of theatre like this, it is impossible, no, fatal, to pretend they are not. You cannot sustain the familiar darkened-auditorium illusion that the audience are eavesdropping on a private conversation. The actors can solicit their attention, or they may pointedly ignore them, but they must acknowledge their presence. Because we approach these plays from the other side of the three hundred years of the proscenium arch, we find it difficult to get this relationship in perspective. Critics tend to feel that the medieval theatre must have been either extremely naive, or extremely radical. In fact it is neither. The deliberate audience-involvement that we notice is not approached in the embarrassingly self-conscious way of some modern theatre. It is just accepted that the audience is there, and that the characters can talk to them. There is a certain selfconfidence in the handling that precludes embarrassment. This does not mean that the characters become ‘part of’ the audience, or that they are ‘the same as’ them. It is difficult, of course, to tell how far the fact that our characters were wearing fifteenth-century clothing marked them out as peculiarly separate, but the effect would have been the same in the original productions, because it is not primarily a matter of costuming, but that the actors belong to a different world, and that they are in charge of the action. Meeting the Magdalen face to face in the crowd was rather like seeing the Queen ‘as near as I see you’ in a Jubilee celebration – if one can imagine seeing the Queen in tears. Despite the lack of physical separation, the actors are still inhabitants of the world of the play, the audience still onlookers. The illusion is not ­‘broken’.4 But the playwright uses this physical closeness to extend as it were the terms of the contract between them. The characters (not merely the actors) are made to acknowledge the audience’s presence and to make use of it. This operates within strict limits. The audience have no independent hand in the action. They cannot control the course of events, nor is it ever suggested that they might. (Sometimes it is suggested that they might have, but that is a different kind of game.) They may occasionally be given the role of ‘crowd’, say as spectators at the Via Dolorosa, but this is not extended to full participation in the action; they are used as spectators because 116

p lay i n g t h e r e s u r r e c t i o n they are spectators no more. Most of the time, if they have a role, it is the role of audience: a willing ear, sympathetic to lamentation, attentive to instruction, cheerfully submissive to bullying. But they have consented to be an audience more actively implicated than we are used to. The characters seem to be saying, ‘We know you’re there, and we intend to use you’. The audience respond, ‘We’re willing to be used, and we’ll answer to any role you like to cast us in, friend or enemy. But we are still both aware that we’re playing a game’. This relationship is thus as much part of the dramatic illusion as the more obvious forms of stagecraft. The interesting thing is that this appears to be recognised openly. This is part and parcel of what seems to be in medieval theatre a heightened consciousness of the whole fact of dramatic illusion. This is partly due, no doubt, to the use of distinctly non-naturalistic stage props, like the Chester Noah animals on boards, and, for example, the use of masks. Far from trying to pretend that these things are real, the playwrights underline the lack of naturalism, as when Noah remarks on how smoothly his Ark-building is going.5 It is also partly due to the medieval sense, particularly in religious matters, of the ‘figural view of reality’, which produces a drama where it is quite natural for one character to hand another a symbol to commemorate a real but many layered event: ‘This beest, John, thou bere with the … John, it is the lamb of me’.6 The effect it seems to have in our present context is that the audience are invited into a kind of complicity with the players, in which they behave as if they were taking the illusion for reality, while at the same time reserving the right to remember that it is only illusion. But there would be no point in this game if it were not also accepted that the illusion represents a historical and spiritual reality which is vitally important to both actors and audience. The play does not always, of course, operate on this intimate level of audience-recognition. There may not be a natural ‘foot-lights’ line of demarcation, but there is always the opportunity of withdrawing from acknowledged contact with the audience. When the actor climbs up on the stage, the height, and the fact that he has entered a frame, give him a certain distance which he can choose to use or ignore. Pilate can look down on the audience and hector them, or he can enter into a ‘private’ conversation with Annas and Caiaphas (Plate 3), though even this illusion of privacy can be manipulated by the playwright, as we shall see. The extreme of distancing comes when the ‘framing effect’ of the waggon posts and fascia is exploited so that the playwright, in the midst of events, suddenly resolves the action into a familiar picture – the Annunciation, the Crucifixion, Pentecost. The contrast between action and image, the sudden shift of focus, can be emotionally extremely powerful; at one moment the characters are talking to the audience, at the next they are part of a venerable icon. This suddenness of contrast seems also to be part of the playing with illusion: ‘Now you see it, now you don’t’ in reverse. But even on a less striking 117

p lay i n g t h e r e s u r r e c t i o n level, the playwrights seem conscious of their ability to exploit the contrasts between different distances, different depths of focus. The writer of the York Resurrection is particularly good at these shifts. He is also particularly adept at manipulating the actor-audience relationship which we have been looking at. In part this is due to the theme of the play itself. I should like now to analyse his use of this relationship, starting off with some of the simpler and more familiar instances of audience-involvement, and gradually complicating things. The comic effects are probably the most recognisable exploitation of the relationship, rather like circus or music-hall; the Soldiers threaten the audience with their swords, the audience shriek, knowing that the Soldiers are not really going to attack them, but thinking that those swords are sharp and dangerously close all the same. Here we are only a step away from the circus clown with his hosepipe or bag of flour. We had planned for this in rehearsal; what we had not reckoned on was the way in which the playing to the audience would extend itself. What had in rehearsal been private conversations became public boasts or threats: ‘And sone we schall crake his croune / Whoso comes here’ (185–6) became ‘Don’t any of you try anything on while we’re asleep’. Audience-involving ‘business’ blossomed: the First Soldier, coming round after a stolen nap, found himself moved to exchange a luxurious stretch and self-satisfied smile with the audience before realising, with a mighty doubletake, that the body had gone. This did not only happen with comedy, however. We found the whole balance of what we had read on the page and prepared in rehearsal as private deliberation, voice-over on which the audience were to be permitted to eavesdrop, shifting in performance. Suddenly there was no such thing as a private soliloquy. The Centurion’s opening speech, ‘A! blissid lorde Adonay!’ (37) is ostensibly addressed either to himself or to God, but he found himself sharing what had read like private bewilderment with the audience among whom he was standing – ‘What may thes mervayles signifie?’ (38) – and thus calling on them to sympathise with his perplexity. But here something else is happening. The audience know what the marvels signify. They cannot tell him, because he is a character in the story, and they are not, but they want him to realise what has happened, and then they want him to convince Pilate and the Bishops. Because the audience are not coming to the play cold (indeed, in some ways they are already better informed than the characters), the playwright can use their superior knowledge to engage them emotionally. A ‘good’ character who doubts, or is mystified, or who gets things unwittingly wrong, and ‘soliloquises’ about it, is in this kind of staging actively calling on the audience for help. (This technique is particularly striking in plays about ‘Joseph’s Doubts’.) The audience respond with a feeling of active support, and if, as here, the situation leads into a debate with agents of the ‘other side’, a feeling of definite partisanship. What they do not realise is that in drawing out this support, the 118

p lay i n g t h e r e s u r r e c t i o n playwright is making them give emotional consent to their own convictions – ‘strengthening their faith’. In the debate with Pilate, in fact, the Centurion talks to persuade; his speech  is as much an emotional appeal as a factual one. Taking up the ‘all ­creation wept’ theme found in the commentaries,7 he gives the inanimate world emotions: All elementis, both olde and ȝing, In ther maneres thai made mornyng In ilke a stede, And knewe be countenaunce that ther kyng Was done to dede. The sonne for woo be waxed all wanne; The mone and sterres of schynyng blanne; The erthe tremeled, and also manne Began to speke… (86–94) Against this, the logical replies of Pilate and Caiaphas ȝe wote oure clerkis the clipsis thei call Such sodayne sight: Both sonne and mone that sesonne schall Lak of ther light  (92–102) sound like rationalisations. The Centurion has to use this kind of language ­ ecause he is talking about something outside nature; the audience accept b it,  because they know that something outside nature has happened and ­because by this time they want the unbelievers to realise it too. It is characteristic of debates in medieval drama that they are there for the audience rather than for the characters. It does not matter if the Centurion fails to persuade Pilate, though of course we would like him to, provided he has persuaded us. It is a form of didacticism, but a more subtle one than straightforward assertion. The debate’s function is to lay out both sides of the case for the audience to consider. To quote from a completely different context: If you put a superior thing side by side with an inferior, for the sake of comparison, that is, in this case, the virtue over against the vice, you will get a firm understanding of their important and distinctive qualities. For when you compare the qualities of contrary things, you should be immediately and clearly able to assess which are the better ones. So when you have surveyed these roots, branches, and fruits of ours, it will be up to you to choose which one you want.8 119

p lay i n g t h e r e s u r r e c t i o n There is never any doubt about the eventual outcome: of the green tree and the dry, which would you choose? But the demonstration, against suitably strong, if suitably venal, opposition, is necessary in order to confirm with you that your choice is the right one. The playwright manoeuvres you into partisanship with the right side to make quite sure that you give your emotional as well as your intellectual consent to it. We have been concentrating on the evidence of the play in performance. The most striking example in the Resurrection of the use of the audience is almost invisible in the script, and yet it comes over very powerfully in performance to reinforce the theme of the play. It plays with the two worlds of involvement and illusion by first acknowledging the presence of the audience and then pretending that in fact they aren’t there, that there really is a private stage-world in which the characters can’t be overheard. Then, in a final sleight of hand, this too is shown up to be an illusion. Let me elucidate. The Resurrection is an extended Quem Quaeritis; it goes to some trouble to make this quite clear. It is not particularly concerned with expressing the cosmic, triumphal aspects of the Resurrection; this has been done already, in the preceding pageant of the Harrowing of Hell. Like the Quem Quaeritis, which takes its essential character from an earlier age, it concentrates on the theme of bearing witness to the event, true witness and false witness. The evidence is scrupulously displayed, both by the Maries and the Soldiers: the empty tomb; the sudary; the angelic message; the portents that surround the actual moment of Christ’s rising. At the end, the epigraph could be Credendum est magis soli Mariae veraci quam Judaeorum turbae fallaci.9 But it goes beyond the Ludus Paschalis in giving the actual ocular proof: dressing up an actor as Christ, and making him emerge from the tomb in the sight of all. The audience are also made witnesses. The end of the play thus rests on an immense dramatic irony. It seems to show Pilate and the Jews successful: they have bribed the Soldiers to lie; the scandal has been swept under the carpet. But they have not succeeded, because the audience know the truth: they have seen it with their own eyes. Once the audience is there, the argument is no longer about fooling some hypothetical ‘people’ of first-century Jews and Romans; they are ‘the people’. They were swept into the role in this play when Annas said The pepull, sirs, in this same steede Before ȝou saide with a hole hede That he was worthy to be dede  (19–21) At the end of the play, Pilate and the Bishops are plotting to keep from them the truth of an event they have just witnessed with their own eyes. Caiaphas 120

p lay i n g t h e r e s u r r e c t i o n says, ‘We nolde, for thyng that myght befall / That no man wiste’ (405–6); the reaction is, ‘Well, that’s a bit late, because we know’. The playwright plays off the fiction that Pilate, Annas, and Caiaphas are having a private conversation (which is reinforced visually if they draw together inside the ‘walls’ of their waggon while the Soldiers remain outside) against the real-life fact that the audience can hear everything they are saying. This would not work if the play had not consistently implicated the audience and made them conscious of their own role in the drama. As it is, they are again in the familiar position of being one jump ahead of the characters (not only have they seen Christ, they have been privy to the Soldiers’ desperate fabrication of a story). The playwright then points this up by making the characters openly despise the audience. Pilate sums up: And to the pepull schall we saie It is gretely agaynste oure lay To trowe such thing. So schall thei deme, both nyght and day, All is lesyng.  (444–8) ‘The people’ can be easily fooled. The audience are probably made more aware of their own separateness because the characters have a­ ntagonised them: there would be no reason to feel that way if they were in agreement. We then get a curious two-layer effect. Pilate ends the play with a piece of ‘confession’ moralizing, half-stepping out of character: Thus schall the sothe be bought and solde, And treasoune schall for trewthe be tolde  (449–50) and an ambiguous remark, addressed ostensibly to Annas and Caiaphas, Therfore ay in youre hartis ȝe holde This counsaile clene  (451–2) To the Jews, this would seem to mean ‘Keep quiet about this’; to the audience ‘Remember what you have seen and think about it’. On one level, the cover-up conspiracy is going on here and now, aimed at the audience, who are, ­however, not fooled by it; thus, ‘The Jowis and thair errour ar confoundit’. At the same time, we are watching a historical event, with the valid ‘story-line’ observation that ‘this saying is commonly reported among the Jews to this day’ (Matthew 28:15). This double time-focus, and its implications, is more usually commented on with reference to the ‘anachronism’ of, say, the Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Play, but the presence and involvement of the audience make it an ongoing thing throughout the Cycles. The difference between this and ordinary anachronism is that, as here, one lens may show quite a different picture from the other, not the same one made ­contemporary. 121

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Plate 1 Mary Magdalen: Of ilke a myscheve he is medicine (l. 195) The ‘affective’ mode in action. Note also how the sleeping Soldier is completely forgotten: he belongs to a different world. Photo: Ivor Dykes, Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster University

Plate 2 The Resurrection. The familiar icon is created in the frame of the pageantwaggon. Photo: Joe Thompson, Lancaster University

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p lay i n g t h e r e s u r r e c t i o n To move to what may seem a completely different part of the play, both in style and technique, it may come as a surprise to the reader to be told that the three Maries and their lamentation were engaged in the most intense form of audience-involvement in the play. On paper, they look remote from this. Their role is about as far from naturalistic drama as can be imagined. A modern audience, used to the convention that grief is inarticulate, and to whom the vocabulary of lament is unfamiliar, finds the whole concept of public, ritualised mourning alien, the thought that they might actually be touched by it unimaginable. In the type of production that invites the audience to observe the Maries at a distance, as private persons undergoing an emotional crisis, they become tedious; we listen to them out of good manners, or because we feel we ought. Set them down in the audience, on their level, ‘as we goo Makand mornyng’ (225–6), and their role suddenly becomes quite different. They are almost agitators, inciters to emotion. They are down among the audience partly because of the dictates of staging (they have a journey to go before they can see the Angel) and partly because the audience seem to be rather more emotionally vulnerable to figures in their midst. (For some of them, perhaps, it is the shock of finding themselves close to the source of the magic.) There seems to be a certain intentional correlation of ‘togetherness’ with the characters who start off down in the street (the Maries, the Centurion, the Soldiers), and of distance, though not necessarily hostile, with those who put themselves up at a height, on stage (Pilate and his boasting, Christ and the Resurrection). So far we have been looking at emotion as the unacknowledged handmaid  of  argument. We now see emotion almost as a goal in itself: ‘who  cannot  wepe, come lerne at me’. The writer’s aim is that of popular affective  piety:  the techniques he uses are borrowed from the vernacular ­lyrics and meditations. But the drama does part of the job of imagination for us. Typically, in the meditations we stir up our own sorrow at the death of Christ by focusing it on the figure of one of those near to him, but here we do not have to imagine their sorrow, as we can see it before us. As the Christ from the York Crucifixion is a devotional image come to life, so the Maries are the figures from the meditations made visible, embodiments of mourning. We are not, however, to stop at contemplating them. They share the techniques of affective piety in that they are there to engage us in activity; we are to use them as channels through which to direct our emotions. They describe their suffering, drawing the audience to share in it, because they are not asking for sympathy for themselves, but for the sufferings of Christ. They are not even lamenting over a present scene, but a remembered one; Magdalen, in the meditative tradition, visualises the crucified Christ: ‘Allas! that I schulde se his pyne!’ (193); Mary Jacobi suggests a meditation on the Five Wounds, ‘Allas! who schall my balis bete / Whanne I thynke on his woundes wete?’ (199–200). A literature which was devised to help the late 123

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Plate 3 Pilate: And to þe pepull schall we saie / It is gretely agaynste oure lay / to trowe such a thing (l.446) A more conventional situation: an apparently ‘private’ conversation. The soldiers are, however, on the level of the crowd, which opens out the picture. Photo: Les Stringer © Times Higher Education Supplement

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p lay i n g t h e r e s u r r e c t i o n medieval reader imagine the emotions of being at the Crucifixion is being used to provide the techniques for representing those emotions in characters who are supposed to have just come from the Crucifixion. If the audience was at all familiar with this kind of aid to meditation, and it seems likely that they were, they would presumably recognise their own role in it, and the end to which it was working. Because the Maries are used as conductors for this emotion, we are not particularly interested in the individuality of their feeling. The stress in the script on ‘my sorowe’, ‘my balis’, ‘my mone’ makes it look as if their lamentations are personal and private, but when you hear them, the very fact that they echo each other makes them already part of a group emotion. Their laments are formal in shape, almost operatic; the three voices chime in one after the other, weaving variations on the same pattern, three in one. (It also ensures that though they are down among the audience, and so not visible to all of them and therefore harder to hear, nothing of the content of their lament is really lost, as it is repeated three times.) From the point of view of the story, this shows their unity of love and purpose. As in the liturgical drama, from which the overall shape though not the detail of the scene seems to come, this is emphasised by their shared verbal patterns. But they are also urging the audience to join in their feeling. These shared patterns are also the familiar rhetorical patterns of language traditionally used to stir emotion in the hearers: repetition: ‘Allas! … Allas! … Allas!’, ‘is dede… is dede…’; concatenation: ‘Withouten skil … Withowten skil …’, ‘Sen he is dede … Sen he is dede…’; and audience-involving exclamations and rhetorical questions: ‘Allas! to ded I wolde be dight!’ (187), ‘To whome nowe schall I make my mone?’ (209). It is a familiar observation that the ‘I’ of affective piety is meant to be the ‘I’ both of the (imagined) speaker and of the reader. Affective meditation calls on the individual to respond, but with those emotions which he shares with everyone. When he is set down in a crowd, and then spoken to in the same way, he is responding as an individual still, but he will find himself doing it at the same time and to the same stimuli as everyone else, and to a certain extent, he will surrender his individuality to the movement of the group (Plate 1). Audiences are, it should be remembered, vulnerable to each other’s emotion. Standing in an open-air crowd, you cannot isolate yourself and your reactions from those of your neighbour. If you feel moved to weep (and some members of our audience did, mostly old women and small girls), you cannot hide it in the protective darkness of your cinema seat. I also got the impression that by joining such an audience, you had consented to share in the group emotion, as you would nowadays with a crowd watching a sporting event. Emotions, both grief and laughter, become catching. This works in an interesting way to neutralise any disadvantages there might have been in setting scenes in the street. When the actors are on the waggons, they are perfectly visible even from the thick of the crowd. This is 125

p lay i n g t h e r e s u r r e c t i o n not so when they are on the ground. Then only a few people can see the actors perfectly, but they can all hear and, oddly enough, seem to feel the reactions of the people closest to the actors. Laughter or sensations run like a ripple through the crowd to the outside edge. The actual joke or appeal may have been indistinct, may even have been a visual one, and so lost, one would think, to any but the people standing next to the actor, but the mood manages to transmit itself through the crowd. Thus not only does the audience never lose concentration, but there is very much the sense of taking part in an occasion, rather than ‘merely’ being spectators to a play. It is noticeable how quickly an audience like this can be shifted en bloc from one emotion to another, and how adept the playwrights are at such sudden contrastive shifts. It seems characteristic of the plays in performance that they turn out, many of them, to have been constructed in blocks, each with one ruling emotion or mood, which is then played almost to the limits of its capacity, but with a very sure sense of just how much the audience can take before the mood has to be switched. In a way, particularly with comedy and lamentation, this exploitation of one particular mood is part of the awareness of artifice of which I have been talking. A scene of lamentation will not just show characters displaying  a normal (certainly not a restrained) amount of distress, it will show distress itself, formalised and orchestrated to operatic heights. Comedy will wring the last ounce of laughter out of the audience. Both can thus be placed without incongruity alongside presentations of cosmic or symbolic acts, because they seem themselves to be aware that they too are representative. This does not mean that they are stylised to the point of being remote or unnatural. They are still true to life, in the sense that each emotion is perfectly recognisable, and evokes its proper response; it is just pushed as far as it can properly go. I am not saying that every scene is so intense or that there are no gradual movements from one emotion to another. But quite often one is aware that there has just been a complete switch of mood, precisely when one was ready for it. This often seems to operate more on instinct than on any logical basis. It can even run directly counter to narrative probability. In the Resurrection, the Magdalen’s second lamentation seems completely illogical. Why, having just accepted the news of the Resurrection with delight, should she suddenly turn back to weeping? But it is emotionally and thematically necessary, as I shall hope to show, and at the time, nobody questions it. This switch is most effective where it seems most daring, in the way in which the most serious episodes in the plays are often juxtaposed with scenes of high comedy. A riotously comic scene, which exhausts the audience with laughter, will be replaced – it is as distinct as that – by an act of immense seriousness, which grows out of the silence following the dying away of that laughter. In the Resurrection, the laughter that accompanies the setting of the watch fades as the Soldiers fall asleep, to be replaced by the earthquake, the plainsong, 126

p lay i n g t h e r e s u r r e c t i o n and the Resurrection itself. The new seriousness neither discredits the laughter nor is discredited by it; the laughter wipes away all potential restlessness and enhances the seriousness of what follows. This change of mood is often accompanied by a change of mode, a shift of verbal and dramatic style. This has been noticed in such plays as the York Crucifixion.10 Here Christ speaks only twice, and each time the stage picture has suddenly been resolved into a familiar devotional icon: the ‘Christ seated on the Cross’ and the Crucifix itself. Each time what he says, and how he says it, comes from a completely different tradition than the noisy jibing of the Soldiers. He is a living version of the devotional images illustrated by Woolf and Gray; his words belong to the kind of lyric that accompanies them in the manuscripts.11 We would probably consider this a non-dramatic tradition, but the playwright has no qualms about using it, and is completely justified by the results. The plays use a much wider variety of literary and dramatic traditions than is perhaps recognised: the overall pattern of the verse-forms tends to obscure this fact. This may partly be due to the kind of eclecticism that has never heard of the unities. We cannot know how much it is a matter of deliberate choice and how much a matter of taking what was there. But in competent hands the effect is unmistakable. As the playwright moves from one tradition to another, he produces this sense of shifting focus, in time, and in nearness and distancing, that we have noticed. The Resurrection is a particularly rich example of this. The subject itself has a complex literary and dramatic history. It was the earliest piece of liturgical drama and the playwright seems to realise its antiquity. Besides this, partly because of what the Bible leaves unsaid, and partly because of changes of emphasis in what was felt to be important about it, it has acquired more of apocryphal embroidery and of commentary than most other episodes. Our play attempts to give the fullest possible account of the event, and as a result each episode and each batch of characters belongs to a different tradition: the Soldiers, Annas, Caiaphas, Pilate, and the Centurion to the narrative apocryphal writings like the Northern Passion and the vernacular Gospel of Nicodemus; the Maries, and especially the Magdalen, from the tradition of popular affective meditation and romantic hagiography; the Resurrection itself, and the Quem Quaeritis, to religious iconography and liturgical drama. Each of these has its own style and preoccupations, which the playwright mirrors. In effect, the theme of the Resurrection is played over four times – as itself, by the Maries and in the Quem Quaeritis, by the Magdalen, and lastly by the Soldiers. Each time we are given a different reaction to the event (the ‘witness’ theme), and each time we see it in a different focus, so that by the end of the play we have experienced it through a fairly complex variety of emotions. Let us trace these through, starting with the Resurrection itself. Seen soberly, it is an outrageous thing to have to present on stage, especially an openair stage with no possibility of dimming the lights, or doing any of the other 127

p lay i n g t h e r e s u r r e c t i o n things which, in a modern theatre, denote the supernatural. This word has been devalued; it is an event so cosmic and mysterious that in fact none of the liturgical plays actually attempts to enact it. Instead they represent it, either by some variant on the Easter Sepulchre ceremony, in which the Cross or the Host stands for Christ, or by having the Angels sing a Resurrection anthem.12 But the York playwright is committed to impersonation. He solves the problem by drawing on the audience’s experiences of the sacred; he presents them with an icon of the Resurrection, and he uses singing to remind them of the Liturgy. Apart from this, the whole scene takes place in silence. Because in the script the whole scene is limited to the laconic stage direction Tunc Iesu resurgente, it is possible for the reader to underestimate its dramatic effect. In practice, it took some three minutes of extreme tension to play through, heralded by the thundering of the earthquake, and acted in silence, while the Angel chanted its Easter Sepulchre anthem Christus resurgens.13 The pictorial effect was stunning (Plate 2). Within the frame of the waggon, the red of Christ’s cloak seemed to fill the stage; the banner extended his height, which was enhanced by the fact that everyone else on stage, except for the young Angel, was either sitting or lying. He really seemed to be bursting the bonds of something confining. How much more powerful this must have seemed to an audience who were actually familiar with the traditional image. For a modern audience, too, the singing of Christus resurgens was merely an appropriately unearthly accompaniment. In the fifteenth century, anyone who went conscientiously to his parish church on Easter Sunday at dawn must have been strongly reminded of his emotional response to the Easter Sepulchre ceremony.14 At the same time, being referred so strongly to a ceremony is a way of reminding the audience that this too is representational, that what they are seeing is only a shadow of something real. The actual emergence of a Christ-figure from the tomb must at first have seemed like the ritual come to life. Where there is usually a cross or a wooden figure, now there is a human being, with the wounds painted on him. The actual physicality of the actor playing Christ is almost shocking, especially since the audience has to watch the whole process of resurrection, not just contemplate, safely, a posed, two-dimensional, triumphal moment. Yet no one for a moment believes that this is really Christ; he is a representation of Christ. The first sense of shock was succeeded by silence, awe, and amazement. The mood was so powerful that the only thing one could do, it seemed, was to break into it in some way. The playwright does this with the unexpected cry of anguish from Mary Magdalen. The focus is changed; there follows the canon of lamentation from the Maries, a complete shift of mood, tone, and distance. We are now to get the first of the replays; we are going to see the Resurrection through their eyes. As far as the story is concerned, of course, they do not know what has happened. The audience do, and they might be expected to have some sort of ‘superior knowledge’ attitude towards the lamentation. In fact the lamentation 128

p lay i n g t h e r e s u r r e c t i o n is so intense the audience are swept into it. It is psychologically necessary for them that they should be. They have been stunned by the Resurrection: they now have to start realising it. The Maries’ ignorance of what has just happened enables the playwright to go back in time, to a situation when Christ is still dead. The Maries then talk the audience through the whole experience of Easter, starting with loss and lamentation, ending with realisation and joy.15 We have already seen how they engage the audience in their grief. They then have to engage them in their joy. This transition is very difficult to handle; it was in fact the most difficult part of the play to work out in rehearsal, because it was in no way naturalistic. The Maries do not react like the Soldiers. They have to witness in a different way, a formal, liturgical way: they are given the angelic message, are shown and display the evidence, the empty tomb, the sudary; they believe, they rejoice, they go off to obey the command Ite nunciate. In terms of naturalistic psychology, this scene does not work. It is too sudden. They have no time to get over the shock, to reassemble the picture. The Soldiers’ reaction is much more plausible: they merely have to cope with the fact that the body has gone, and immediately they fasten on the one small part of it that seems to affect them, ‘Witte sir Pilate of this affraye / We mon be slone’ (309–10). They then talk themselves into accepting the situation. The Maries are not even allowed to talk; they must react in silence. It is in fact too big a thing to take in naturalistically. Tradition demands that they should accept it without question. (The Gospels are more naturalistic, and the ‘Appearances’ plays deal with the problem of acceptance at more length.) Two things operate to make the audience accept the Maries’ acceptance. One is the fact of their own superior knowledge. They have actually seen Christ rise. (They also accept the way in which the Soldiers, reporting to Pilate, describe things which, if they were ‘slepande whanne he ȝede’ (318), they cannot possibly have seen.) The other is the very stylisation of the acceptance, which refers them again to the ancient patterns of liturgical drama, and the familiar icon. Again, the change of mode is accompanied by a physical distancing. The Maries have been lamenting in the street, Magdalen sees the Angel from a distance and they go up to him – ‘Nere will we wende’ (232) – on the waggon. They thus enter the frame and complete the picture, the ‘Holy Women at the Sepulchre’, and the Angel engages them in the ancient dialogue. This is so deliberate a translation of a Quem Quaeritis that it comes as a shock to find that no direct source has yet been discovered.16 It echoes the liturgical drama so strongly that it calls for a completely different style of acting. We found that the only way to make it work was to make it an accurate copy of the stylised gestures of the early Quem Quaeritis: Quo viso, deponant turribula quae gestaverunt in eodem sepulchro, sumantque linteum et extendant contra clerum … veluti ostendentes quod surrexerit dominus, etiam non sit involutus …17 129

p lay i n g t h e r e s u r r e c t i o n The displaying of the sudarium is an important feature of the Ludus Paschalis from its beginnings. Here, they display it while the Angel is saying ‘He is resen and wente his way’ (245), thus combining the angelic witness with the visible evidence: Angelicos testes, Sudarium et vestes. Here we get a curious historical reversal. In the early Quem Quaeritis, the displaying of the cloth was the high point of audience involvement. Instead of being spectators to a ritual which was being enacted for but not by them, the congregation were suddenly caught up into it, the evidence was being shown to them. Here, the showing had quite a different quality: it was being shown as part of a ritual. It remained curiously distant, high and dry on an ancient historical beach-head of drama. The Maries then rejoice, embrace, and go off, still in unison and silence, until the Magdalen breaks abruptly into the mood with the declaration that she intends to stay behind. As soon as they go, she starts to lament again. This new section seems, as I have said, illogical. Why, having heard of the Resurrection and accepted it with joy, should she suddenly start to weep? Why should the audience be made to weep with her? It does not really help to be told that here the author was faced with an uncomfortable hiatus in his sources, which were trying to reconcile the Gospel according to St. Mark, which provided the Quem quaeritis, with the Gospel according to St. John, which provided the Hortulanus, the next pageant. True, he has to provide a bridge to the next play. But it is not until we look at the actual content of her lament that the main reason for it becomes clear. In naturalistic terms this is bewildering, as she goes back to the Crucifixion again: Allas ! what schall nowe worthe on me? Mi kaytiffe herte will breke in three Whenne I thynke on that body free How it was spilte. Both feete and handes nayled tille a tre, Withouten gilte.  (270–5) The words ‘Whenne I thynke on that body free’ show us where we are. The shift of mood is also a shift from the liturgical mode, which seems to be proper for the presentation of great events, back to the meditative, affective, personal mode. The audience have seen the Resurrection, they have been called on to live through the appropriate cycle of emotions, now they are to pause and consider what it means to them personally. It is reminiscent of the structure of those meditative works where each narrative section is followed by a prayer which brings the historical events to the here-and-now of the reader.18 She stands before the audience as the Mary Magdalen of tradition, the beautiful, the rich, the emotional, the ex-courtesan, the great sinner, the penitent, whose ‘sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much’ (Luke 7:4). Though on paper she seems to speak in first-person terms, 130

p lay i n g t h e r e s u r r e c t i o n The woundes he suffered many one Was for my misse; It was my dede he was for slayne, And nothyng his  (278–81) every member of the audience is meant to take them personally. She is speaking for Every Sinner.19 She leads the audience through the stages of affective meditation – compassion, tears (the audience may be stirred to weep in sympathy), love; even her exit lines, which have a purely narrative linking function, express the devout longing of the soul for God:20 Ther is no thing to that we mete May make me blithe.  (286–7) Her lamentation dies away, and we wake up to the ordinary, short-sighted world of the Soldiers. I hesitate to mention the words ‘comic relief’, but this is how it seems to work; it provides a sudden release of tension from high serious emotional involvement into laughter, but also directs the laughter away through another set of people, with a different set of values, a new change of focus. A young member of the audience said, when consulted, that she thought the Soldiers were there ‘to restore our faith in human nature’, and one can see what she meant. The high emotion of the centre part of the play has to be anchored to the everyday world; we cannot stay on the mountain peak. To a certain extent the audience are laughing at themselves, as they might have behaved in a situation that is just too big for them: even when the Soldiers confess the truth to Pilate, it becomes ‘I was a-ferde, I durst not loke’ (393). They even laugh in recognition when the Soldiers accept the bribe with such unbecoming alacrity: ‘That’s how things are’, ‘Thus schall the soothe be bought and solde’ (449). Yet somehow it is not reductive laughter. This is possibly because the Soldiers lack malice (and at the end, even Pilate dissociates himself from his role, and turns into an actor commenting on it); possibly because they have in fact borne witness to the event by accepting it in front of the audience even though in the story they are too cowardly to stand up for their acceptance; possibly also because their betrayal does not actually make any difference to the outcome, for the audience are by now secure in their own knowledge. But the laughter is something more positive and simpler than these explanations might suggest. I have been talking about a play in performance, where the sense of mood often seems to override logic, and also where the effects are often simpler than literary criticism might like them to be. Here what came over most strongly was that the soldiers were eventually ‘on our side’ because they were funny. We weren’t even aware of anything complicated about accepting the shortcomings of human nature; rather it was as if the playwright 131

p lay i n g t h e r e s u r r e c t i o n had sensed that the play should end with laughter; the Resurrection is a joyful thing, and on the everyday level to which we had returned, comedy is the appropriate expression of this. Haec dies quam fecit Dominus: exultemus et laetamur in ea. ‘This is the day which the Lord hath made: we will rejoice and be glad in it.’

Notes   1. I should like to thank Miss Sarah Carpenter of the University of Edinburgh, and Miss Helen Phillips of the University of Lancaster, who played the Magdalen, for their invaluable help and encouragement during the writing of this essay.  2. ‘The Flemish Ommegang and its Pageant Cars’, Medieval English Theatre, 2 (1980), 15–41 and 80–98, especially 19–33, 83–4, 88–9.   3. Quotations are from York Plays: the Plays Performed by the Crafts or Mysteries of York on the Day of Corpus Christi in the 14th, 15th and 16th Centuries, ed. by Lucy Toulmin Smith (New York: Russell & Russell, 1885), repr. 1963, slightly adapted.   4. R.C. Johnson, in an otherwise very interesting article on ‘Audience Involvement in the Tudor Interlude’, Theatre Notebook, 24 (1969–70), 101–10, makes this assumption, which seems common to writers on this kind of drama; it is a much too simplistic view. The best discussion on the topic I have found is in J.W. Robinson, ‘Medieval English Dramaturgy’, Ph.D. Thesis, Glasgow (1961), pp. 279–81, though this is based entirely on scripts, not performance.  5. Wakefield Noah, 283–8, and throughout the speech. [See The Towneley Plays, ­edited by Martin Stevens and A.C. Cawley, EETS, SS15 (1994), p. 37, lines 397–403, Ed.]  6. Wakefield John the Baptist, 209, 211; stage direction hic tradat ei agnum dei. [See Towneley Plays, p. 224, Ed.]  7. Glossa Ordinaria, PL 114, pp. 176, 348; Ludolphus de Saxonia, Vita Jesu Christi (Paris/Brussels: V.Palmé/Lebrocquy, 1878), pp. 119 and 131, quoting Chrysostom, Pope Leo, Anselm, and Augustine.   8. Pseudo-Hugh of St. Victor, De fructibus carnis et spiritus, PL 175, p. 997, translation Meg Twycross.  9. Victimae Paschali Laudes, v.6. This sequence was frequently incorporated into the Ludus Paschalis; see K. Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), I, 273ff. 10. See J.W. Robinson, ‘The Late Medieval Cult of Jesus and the Mystery Plays’, PMLA, 80 (1965), 508–15. 11. Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), Plates 1 and 2; Douglas Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), Plates 1, 2, 3, and 5. 12. See Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 274–5; Young, Medieval Church, I, 408, 423, 435, 439. Only a few plays even include the Soldiers and the setting of the watch; usually they start with the Elevatio Crucis or Hostiae, and then slip into ‘drama’. 13. The marginal stage direction Tunc angelus cantat Resurgens is a later addition but seems genuine; in Wakefield we have Tunc cantabunt angeli ‘Christus resurgens’, & postea dicit ihesus; in Chester Tunc cantabunt duo angeli ‘Christus resurgens a mortuis’ etc.; et Christus tunc resurget; ac postea cantu finito, dicat ut sequitur. 14. The singing of this anthem was a traditional part of the Easter Sepulchre ceremony in parish churches as well as in religious houses: see Manuale et Processionale ad

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p lay i n g t h e r e s u r r e c t i o n Usum Insignis Ecclesiae Eboracensis, ed. W.G. Henderson, Surtees Society, 63 (1875), pp. 170–71. Henderson also cites a version from a MS Manual of c. 1405, where Christus resurgens is sung even closer to the Sepulchre, and the Sarum Processional for the same ceremony. The Ordinal and Customary of St. Mary’s Abbey, York, also provides for it, with procession (ed. by the Abbess of Stanbrook and J.B.L. Tolhurst, Henry Bradshaw Society, 75 (1937), p. 298. No permanent stone Easter sepulchres have survived in York city churches, but records of bequests show that almost every one had a temporary sepulchre, presumably of wood, which was erected for Easter. See Angelo Raine, Medieval York (London: Murray, 1955), pp. 37, 125, 161, 191, 214, 231, 235, 250, 254, and 295. A wooden sepulchre, formerly in the church of Cowthorpe, west of York, and now in Temple Newsam House, Leeds, is illustrated in F.E. Howard and F.H. Crossley, English Church Woodwork (London: Batsford, 1927), p. 143. 15. This is similar to the narrative meditative exercises of the pseudo-Bonaventure, Meditationes Vitae Christi, ed. A.C. Peltier, Opera Omnia, 12 (Paris: Ludovicus Vivès, 1868), Ch. 87, p. 617, and of Ludolphus de Saxonia, Vita Jesu Christi, Part 2, Ch. 71, p. 4, ‘Cogitationes mulierum, dum veniunt ad sepulchrum’: p. 184. The women going to the Tomb are made to retrace the Via Dolorosa, recalling the incidents of the Stations of the Cross, the pause by Calvary itself to recall the Crucifixion and Deposition: an emotional recapitulation to enable the reader to experience the full contrast of the Resurrection. 16. No liturgical Resurrection play-texts survive from the Yorkshire area: there are references to performances, e.g. the famous one from Beverley in the thirteenth century, and the account (1522) from the Earl of Northumberland’s palace, just north of Beverley, of rewards to ‘them of his Lordship Chapell and other, if they do play the play of Resurrection upon Esterday in the morning in my Lord’s Chapell’ (E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903), pp. 339, 375. For further speculation see W. Van der Gaaf, ‘Miracles and Mysteries in S.E. Yorkshire’, Englische Studien, 36 (1906), 228–30. York Minster had a Stella: see Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. A.F. Johnston and M. Rogerson (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1979), I, p. 1. The 1343 Constitution printed on the same page seems to forbid drama rather than suggest that any is going on in the Minster. 17. Young, Medieval Church, I, 249, the Regularis Concordia version. 18. For example Ludolphus, Vita Jesu Christi, p. 191. 19. There is even an independent morality tradition of her as an Everyman figure, seduced by the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. See the Digby Mary Magdalene, in The Digby Plays, ed. F.J. Furnivall, EETS, ES 70 (1896). A later morality by Lewis Wager, The Life and Repentance of Mary Magdalene, ed. F.I. Carpenter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1904), is even more allegorical. Her role as the lover makes her a favourite figure in popular affective meditation. Helen M. Garth, Saint Mary Magdalene in Mediaeval Literature, John Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science 68:3 (1950), 68–74, writes of this role, but does not explore the spiritual implications. Victor Saxer, La Culte de Marie Magdaleine en occident des origins à la fin du moyen-âge (Auxerre: Publications de la Société des feuilles archéologiques et des monuments historiques de l’Yonne, 1959) is mainly interested in the cult at Vézelay and the liturgical aspects. 20. For this idea, see especially the homily De beata maria Magdalena attributed to Origen (London c. 1504), f.9r–v.

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7 BOOKS FOR THE UNLEARNED

In 1446 William Revetour, chaplain of St William’s Ousebridge, York, and a theatrically minded clergyman, left in his Will ‘to the Brotherhood of Corpus Christi in York, a certain book called Le Crede Play, with the books and banners thereto appertaining … to the Guild of St Christopher, a certain play of St James the Apostle, put together in six pageants/pages’ (the word paginae is ambiguous here), and to the Girdlers’ Guild, a gilt crown and girdle for their Corpus Christi play, the Massacre of the Innocents.1 He also left a small library. Besides several service books, and a few standard theological and pastoral works, this included an interesting handful of books of a certain type in English: ‘a book of The Lord’s Prayer and The Prick of Conscience in English’, a book of the Gospels and ‘a Lives of the Saints, drawn into English’, and ‘a certain book drawn from the Bible into English’, which it has been suggested was the Historia Scholastica later bequeathed by his legatee, Thomas Tubbac, to St John’s Ousebridge.2 Among his other bequests were a glossed Bible, a glossed Psalter (both presumably in Latin), the commentary on St Matthew attributed to Chrysostom, a book of Lenten sermons, all of which he left to clerics, and what sounds suspiciously like a local version of the exultet roll, ‘a large roll drawn out of the Bible in Latin, with pictures on one side and a table of the Lord’s Prayer in Latin on the other’.3 Revetour may not have written the Creed Play himself, though he seems in some undefined way to have been in charge of it, but he would clearly have agreed with the sentiments later attributed to him by the Corpus Christi Guild, that it was to be performed ‘to the glory of God and the instruction of the people’.4 He sounds like someone with an interest in multi-media teaching: the Bible picture roll may have been like the Holkham Bible Picture Book, designed as a visual aid for the laity.5 The books in English, though he may have used them himself, sound as if they were meant to be read aloud to lay people, as Margery Kempe’s spiritual director read aloud to her. In his Will he leaves them to lay friends. We ought, I think, to look at the religious plays of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in the light of the devotional and instructional reading of men like Revetour, their potential authors, and men like Tubbac, most certainly their audience. 135

bo oks for the unlearned Thanks to bequests of this kind, we do know something of the type of books which were owned by both clergy and laity in, for example, late medieval York. Both Moran and Vale, who have mapped out the general patterns of piety and literacy there at the time, stress an increasing interest in works of devotion, both liturgical and meditative.6 The laity leave service books, lives of the saints, and devotional works, ‘particularly the Life of Christ, the Passion of Christ, and the works of Richard Rolle’, quite a number of which were available at least in part in English. Of the three English books left by Revetour, one is a book of private devotion and examination of the conscience (its dramatic equivalent the Paternoster Play), and two are narratives, possibly narratives with some kind of didactic comment, if the Legenda Sanctorum is anything like the Golden Legend. The minor clergy, besides the tools of their profession, seem to have had a taste for the more accessible types of meditative literature, such as the Meditations of St Bernard and St Anselm, the Speculum Ecclesie of St Edmund (which was also translated into English), and again the works of Rolle, all of which must have coloured the emotional approach to the Life and Passion of Christ which we see in the mystery plays.7 J.W. Robinson and Clifford Davidson have already written in some detail about this affective approach, particularly to the Passion of Christ.8 I would like to take up the other thread, and look at the plays as an extension of the narrative Lives of Christ and the Saints which were popular with the laity. I would particularly like to compare them with the most popular of all medieval Lives of Christ, the Meditationes Vitae Christi, then attributed to the Franciscan St Bonaventure:9 ‘librum meum Bonaventurae’, as John Dawtree of York called it, leaving it to his son William in 1459.10 Margaret Deanesley suggests that its popularity may be partly due to the fact that it was used by lay people as a substitute for the Bible, especially once it had been translated: ‘a vernacular Life of Christ, with the orthodox editor’s interpretation often inserted, was less likely to mislead the laity than the “naked” text of the Gospels – and no appeal could be made to it in support of theological argument’.11 In England at the beginning of the fifteenth century, when the plays were first becoming established, ‘Archbishop Arundel not only took the negative step of prohibiting, in 1408, the reading of English Bibles without episcopal licence, but before 1410 he took the positive one of licensing a substitute’. This authorised version was the translation of the Meditationes by Nicholas Love, Prior of the Charterhouse of Mount Grace in Yorkshire, which itself, to quote Deanesley, ‘was probably more popular than any other single (English) book in the fifteenth century’. I hope it will become apparent why its popularity was deserved. I should stress that I am not suggesting Love’s translation as a direct source for any of the plays I cite (except where verbal echoes are so strong as to make it overwhelmingly likely), but as a parallel treatment of the same material, which uses much the same techniques and has very similar intentions.12 One of the 136

bo oks for the unlearned most useful things about Love is that, elaborating on ‘Bonaventure’, he tells us what his intentions are. There is virtually no contemporary criticism of the mystery plays, but what little there is matches Love’s statements of intention, and I have tentatively tried to extend this to see if he throws light on other aspects of the plays. His aims are in fact fairly common to most late medieval devotional and didactic literature written for the laity; he just makes them more explicit than most. ‘Bonaventure’, or The Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Crist, as Nicholas Love entitled his translation, is a narrative meditation on the Life of Christ. To call it a meditation does not mean that it is mystical, though Love knows what mysticism is. It is meant, as he says, for ‘symple creatures’, ordinary men and women, ‘the whiche as children hauen nede to be fedde with mylke of lyȝte doctrine / and not with sadde mete of grete clergie and of hiȝe contemplacioun’ (p. 8). The very fact that he has translated it into English shows that it is intended for a lay audience, for ‘lewed men and wommen and hem that ben of symple vnderstondynge’ (p. 8). In this respect it fulfils the same function as the mystery plays, which are also written in English so that everyone can understand them. We should be careful, however, of underestimating the intelligence or even the learning of Love’s symple creatures, and by extension of the lewed or the unlearned sometimes addressed in the plays. It need mean no more than ‘unable to read Latin fluently’. It comes as a shock, for example, to find Walter Hilton addressing the recipient of The Scale of Perfection: ‘redinge of holi writ; mai þou nouȝt wel vsen and þerfore þe bihouiþ more occupie þe in preiere; and in meditacioun’.13 In several cases these unlearned are female religious – the original of the Mirrour was written for ‘a religious womman’ (p. 8), though she could understand Latin – and this seems to colour the type of emotional approach used. One should certainly beware of making the modern equation of ‘illiterate’ with ‘unintelligent’, or even ‘uninformed’. As the translator of the thirteenth-century Mirrour of St Edmund says to his audience: Bot nowe may þou say to me: ‘I þat knawes na letters, how may I euer-mare com to contemplacyone of haly writte?’ Now, my dere frende, vndirstande me swetely and I sall say perchance to þe: all þat es wretene may be tald.14 Margery Kempe, who could neither read nor write, nonetheless managed to find a sympathetic priest to read to her ‘many a good boke of hy contemplacyon & oþer bokys, as þe Bybyl wyth doctowrys þer-up-on, Seynt Brydys [Birgitta’s] boke, Hylton’s boke [the Scale?], Bone-ventur [the Mirrour, in Latin the Meditaciones, possibly in Love’s version], Stimulus Amoris [Bonaventure], Incendium Amoris [Rolle?], & swech oþer’, which took him seven or eight years, and which, she reports with satisfaction, later stood him in excellent 137

bo oks for the unlearned stead when ‘he wex benefysed & had gret cur of sowle’.15 Margery’s own spiritual autobiography shows very interestingly how much of these works she managed to carry, sometimes almost verbatim, in her head, and some of her reported ‘meditations’ seem to show the kind of creative processes that must have gone on in the composition of the mystery plays; it was, one suspects, all much more oral/aural than literary. Margery may have been a specially enthusiastic case, but the way in which Love’s translation and the plays are written shows that their audiences were expected to be familiar with at least the more usual forms of the interpretation of the Scriptures current at the time. The narrative skeleton of the Mirrour is the Life of Christ, with a prologue on the Life of his Mother. It is based on the Gospels, or rather on a Gospel Harmony, but the narrative is amplified: ‘Among the whiche beth writen deuout meditaciouns of cristes lyf / more pleyn in certeyn parties than is expressed in the gospelle of the foure euangelistes’ (p. 8); in other words, he has taken carte blanche to add incidents and dialogue, either from the Apocryphal Gospels or from his own imagination. He justifies this proceeding: Also seint John seith / that alle tho thinges that Jesu dide ben not writen in the gospell. Wherfore we mowen to sterynge of deuocioun ymagine and thynke dyuerse wordes and dedes of hym and othere that we fynde not writen / so that it be not aȝenst the byleve / as seynt gregor and other doctoures seyne; that holy writt may be expowned and vndirstonden in dyuers maneres and to dyuerse purposes / so that it be not aȝenst the bileue or gode maneres. And so what tyme or in what place in this book is writen / that thus dide or thus spak oure lord Jesu or othere that ben spoken of / and it mowe not be preued by holy writ / or grounded in expresse seienge of holy doctoures / it schal be taken none othere wise than as a deuoute meditacioun that it myȝte be so spoken or doon. (p. 9) This can be taken as a justification not only of Bonaventure’s use of the creative imagination, and Love’s after him, but also of all the inventions of the mystery plays. Provided it is not ‘aȝenst the bileue or gode maneres’, the playwright can also invent dialogue, business, or even whole episodes as he will. Why, however, would one wish to ‘ymagine and thynke dyuerse wordes and dedes … that we fynde not writen’? Sometimes, it seems, to answer a purely narrative curiosity: In this forseide proces of Jesu what hope we that he didde? or where and in what manere lyued he tho thre dayes? We mowe suppose that he went to somme hospitale of pore men; and there he schamefastly praed and asked herberwe / and there ete and lay with pore men as a pore child. And some doctoures seien that he 138

bo oks for the unlearned begged in thoo thre dayes / but thereof litel forse so that we folwe hym in perfiȝte mekenes. (p. 77) Since the Blessed Virgin plays such an important role in popular devotion, quite a lot of this narrative invention goes to devising where she might have been and what she might have been doing during, for example, the three days of the Passion, or during the Childhood of Christ. However, this narrative invention is not directed solely towards making a plausible story line, as we might with our modern conditioning expect. We are so accustomed to the idea that the plays were used to teach the events of the Bible to a partially illiterate audience that we may have an unconscious tendency to measure their success only by how effectively they do this, and this by rather modern criteria: do they present the events as believable? Are the characters ‘real people’? Even, how successfully do they bring the story and situation up to date? The narrative of the meditations and plays is important, but the emphasis laid on the reader’s response was rather different. The ordinary devout man was advised to anchor his meditation by ‘reading and meditating the outward acts of our Redeemer’.16 This was more than just reading the story devoutly. As he read, he was to try and ‘be present at’ each incident, to bring it before his inward eyes and ears: Wherfore thou that coueytest to fele truly the fruyte of this book / thou moste with al thy thouȝt and al thyn entente in that manere make the in thy soule present to tho thynges that ben here writen / seide / or done of oure Lord Jesu; and that besily / likyngly / and abidynge; as theyh thou herdest hem with thy bodily eeres / or seie hem with thyne eiȝen done; pyttynge awey for the tyme and leuynge alle othere occupaciouns and besynesses. (p. 12) Imagination actually means the making of images in the mind. The reader (or listener) is expected to imagine himself at the events described, and see and hear them as vividly as if he were present. Margery Kempe not only ‘sees’ the events of the Passion she describes: ‘Sche had many an holy thowt of owr Lordys Passyon & beheld hym in hir ghostly syght as verily as he had ben a-forn hir in hir bodily syght’ (pp. 184–5), she also ‘hears’ the dialogues: ‘The creatur herd as clerly þis answer in þe vndirstondyng of hir sowle as she xulde vndirstondyn o man spekyn to an-oþer’ (p. 195). Here is an example of the kind of ‘imaging’ she reports: þan þe creatur left stille wyth owr Lady & thowt a thowsand ȝer tyl  þe thryd day cam, & þat day sche was (wyth) owr Lady in a chapel þer owr Lord Ihesu Crist aperyd vn-to hir & seyd ‘Salue sancta parens’. And þan þe cretur thowt in hir sowle þat owr Lady 139

bo oks for the unlearned seyd, ‘Art þu my swete Sone, Ihesu?’ & he seyd, ‘Ȝa, my blissyd Modyr, I am ȝowr owyn Sone, Ihesu’. Þan he toke vp hys blissyd Modyr & kissyd hir ful swetly. And þan þe creatur thowt that sche say [saw] owr Lady felyn and tastyn owr Lordys body al a-bowtyn & hys handys & hys feet ȝyf þer wer ony sorhed er any peyne. And sche herd owr Lord seyn to hys Modyr, ‘Der Modyr, my peyne is al a-goo. & now xal I leuyn for euyr-mor. And, Modyr, so schal ȝowr peyne & ȝowr sorwe be turnyd in-to ful gret joye. Modyr, aske what ȝe wole & I xal tellyn ȝow’. And whan he had suffyrd hys Modyr to aske what sche wolde & had answeryd to hir questyons, þan he seyd, ‘Modir, be ȝowr leue I must go speken wyth Mary Mawdelyn’. Owr Lady seyd, ‘It is wel don, for, Sone, sche hath ful meche sorwe for ȝowr absens. And, I prey ȝow, beth not long fro me’. (pp. 196–7) This is interesting in that though she presents this as a ‘seeing’ (which it may well have been), she has in fact based it on some version of ‘Bone-ventur’, possibly even Love’s version, and reprocessed it in her own slightly more colloquial tone of voice. Love has a more formal style, and far more visual sense: And with that / sche so prayenge and swete teres schedynge / loo / sodeynly oure lord Iesu came and aperede to hir / and in alther whitest clothes / with a glad and louely chere / gretynge hir on side half in thise wordes: Salue / sancta parens / that is to say Haile / holy moder. And anone sche tornynge her saide: Art thou Jesu / my blessed sone? And therwith sche knelynge doun honourede hym; and he also aȝeynwarde knelynge saide: My dere moder / I am. Ego sum; resurrexi et adhuc tecum sum / I haue vprisen / and loo ȝit I am with the. And after bothe risynge vp kisseden louely other: and sche with vnspecable ioye clippede hym sadly / restynge all vppon hym / and he gladly bare her vppe and sustened hire. Afterward bothe sittynge to gidre / oure lady besily and curiously byhelde hym in semblaunt and in handes and feet and all the body where he hadde the signes of the woundes to fore / askyng hym whether all the sorwe or the peyne were aweye. And he answerde and seide: Ȝe sothely / worschipful moder / all sorwe is awaie fro me; and deth and sorwe and alle peynes and angwische I haue ouercome / so that I schall neuere hethen forwarde fele ouȝt of hem. And than sche saide: Blessid be thy holy fader / that hath aȝen ȝeuen the to me; and his holy name be exalted / loued / and magnified euere with outen ende. And so thai bothe louely and likyngly talkynge togidre maden a grete ioyful feste. And oure lorde Jesu tolde hir thoo worthy thinges that he dede in thoo thre dayes after his passioun; and how 140

bo oks for the unlearned he delyuered his chosen peple fro helle / and fro the deuel. Loo / this is a souereyn pasch. (pp. 263–4) ‘Bonaventure’ has visualised completely the gestures of the characters and their spatial relation to each other, so that the scene could be transferred on to the stage almost intact. It does indeed appear in painting, as for example in a fifteenth-century Netherlandish panel in the Metropolitan Museum, New York (see Plate 1): Christ appears from behind the Virgin’s right shoulder (‘on side half’) as she kneels ‘prayenge and swete teres schedynge’ and raises his hand in greeting; she ‘tornynge her’ seems to say ‘Art thou Jesu, my blessed sone?’ In both painting and prose the gestures and movements are expressive of the loving intimacy of the two characters: the whole scene is centred on the emotions of the mother being reunited with her son. Christ is seen primarily as a person responding to another person; or, as the writers of the meditations say, we are contemplating him in his Manhood. It was generally accepted that, as Love says, quoting St Bernard, for symple soules: contemplacioun of the manhede of criste is more lykynge / more spedeful / and more siker than is hiȝe contemplacioun of the godhede. And therfore to hem is principally to be sette in mynde the ymage of cristes incarnacioun / passioun / and resurreccioun: so that a symple soule that kan not thenke bot bodies or bodily thinges mowe haue somwhat accordynge vnto his affeccioun wherwith he may fede and stire his deuocioun. (pp. 8–9) This ‘deuocioun’ is ‘sterynge specially to the loue of Jesu’ (p. 8): the meditator is encouraged to think of him as a person who relates in the story to those around him, and to whom therefore he can also relate. This response is largely on the emotional level: Christ is presented in situations evoking tenderness at his vulnerability (the baby of the Incarnation), sympathy, or in their word, compassion, at his suffering (the tortured figure of the Passion), and the contrasting emotions of desolation at loss and joy at recovery felt by his followers at the Resurrection. It so happens that these are also the sequences which the plays focus. It does not matter particularly how this happened; once they are there, they provide a God-given opportunity to treat the material in this fashion. The dialogue imagined in the meditations is, in one of Margery’s favourite words (it is also a favourite of Love’s), homely: a word that expresses both a down-to-earthness and the tender intimacy between loving friends. In the Mirrour, after the (uncanonical) Appearance to Peter ‘thay stoden and speken homely to gidre’ (p. 272); Christ calls Magdalen ‘by her homely name and saide. Marie: the whiche worde sodeynly heled al her sorwe’ (p. 68). Margery makes Magdalen respond to the command Noli me tangere, 141

bo oks for the unlearned

Plate 1 Juan de Flandes, copy c. 1496 of Rogier van der Weyden, Christ appearing to His Mother (1442–5)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Bequest of Michael Dreicer, 1921: www.metmuseum.org

142

bo oks for the unlearned ‘A, Lord, I se wel ȝe wil not þat I be so homly wyth ȝow as I haue ben a-forn’ (p.  197): an interesting use, as this command was usually interpreted, as Hilton says: Marye Magdaleyn lufed brennandely [ardently] oure Lord Iesu befor tyme of His passioun, bot here luf was mikel bodily, litel gostly. Sche trowed wel þat He was God, bot sche lufed Him litil as God, for sche couþe not þan; and þerfore sche suffred al here affeccioun  & al here þoȝt fallen in Him as He was in forme of man. And oure Lord blamed hire not þan, bot preisid it mikil. Bot aftir whan He was risen fro ded & appered to hire, sche wold haue wurschipid Him with swilk maner luf as sche did before; & þan oure Lord forbede hire & seid þus: Touche me not, þat is, sette not þe reste ne þe luf of þine hert in þat forme of man þat þou seest with þi flesc(h)ly eiȝe only … bot sett þi þoȝt & þi luf into þat forme in whilk I am euen [equal] to þe Fader, þat is þe forme of þe Godhed, & lufe Me, knowe Me, & worschip Me as God & Man godly, not as a man manly … Nerþeles oþer soules þat are not sotil in kynde ne are not ȝit made gostly þurgh grace, it is gode to hem þat þei kepe forþ here owne wirkynge in ymaginacioun with manly affeccioun, vntil more grace come freely to hem. It is not siker to a man to leuen oo gode vtterly til he see & fele a better. (Scale of Perfection, BL MS Harley 6579, fol. 104v–105r) The observed ‘business’ is often equally homely. Love’s picture of the home life of the Holy Family, with Joseph at his carpentry, Mary at her distaff and needle, and the child Jesus laying the table and making the beds, has been often and deservedly quoted.17 But even on a smaller scale, the observed gestures and attitudes are expressive of this human intimacy and unselfish affection. At the Circumcision, the child Jesus weeps with the pain, and Mary weeps in sympathy: And than mowe we ymagyne and thynke how that litel babe / in his moder barme / seynge hir wepe / putte his litel honde to hir face as he wolde that sche schulde not wepe and sche aȝeynward / ynwardely stired and hauinge compassioun of the sorwe and the wepynge of hir dere sone / with kissynge and spekynge conforted hym as sche myȝte. (p. 52) At the Deposition, Joseph of Arimathea draws the nail out of the right hand: And when the nayle was drawe oute / John maketh signe to Nichodeme forto take it to hym priuely so that oure lady see it nouȝt for discomfortynge. (p. 249) 143

bo oks for the unlearned Details of this kind speak strongly enough to the emotions, but the author also explicitly draws our attention to the emotional reaction we are expected to have. This is most usually seen as compassion; the tendency to see the sorrow in every incident is a very medieval one, and can grow cloying to us, but it runs as a continual leitmotif through the narrative: Shulde we than not haue compassioun of hym? Ȝis sothely: and also of his dere moder for wel mowe we wite that whan sche seih hir louely sone wepe sche myȝte not withholde wepynge. (p. 52) Who so wole than here ynwardely take hede and byholde how oure lorde jesu wepeth / the sistres wepen / the Jewes wepen / ȝe and as resoun telleth the disciples wepen / skilfully he may be stired to compassioun and wepynge / at the leste ynwardely in herte. (p. 176) One purpose of this concrete imagining, then, is to produce the fullest possible emotional reaction to Christ in his Humanity. This was then seen as producing a chain reaction: compassion, sympathy, leads the reader to identify with the emotions of the characters (the disciples and Mary as much as with Christ); identification leads to love and an espousing of the loved one’s attitudes: ‘And herof moche ouȝte we to haue compassioun / and be stired to the loue of vertuouse pouerte by ensaumple of hir: blessed mote sche euer be. Amen’ (p. 40). Thus, we are moved to the second main stated function of the meditation, which is the imitation of Christ (and the others) in moral action: ‘that it kepeth fro vices and disposeth souereynly to getynge of vertues: preveth wel in that the perfectioun of alle vertues is founden in cristes lyf’ (p. 11). The episodes of the narrative are used as ensaumples of virtuous living, especially of ‘perfite despisynge of the worlde’ and ‘in pacience suffrynge of aduersitees’ (p. 10). The margins are scattered with Nota de paupertate (p. 58), Nota contra huius mundi dilectores (p. 86), and the narrative itself with authorial comments: And so haue we here ensaumple of oure lorde jesu to withstonde the vice of glotonye (p. 94) ȝif we take hede hou oure lord Jesu toke in his owne persone somme tyme prosperite and welthe / and sumtyme aduersite and woo / we schulde not be stired to inpacience what tyme that it befalleth to vs in the same manere. (p. 65) Sometimes the moral of the ensaumple strikes a refreshingly homely note. Of Joseph: This is an open ensaumple of reproof to jelouse men that ben so suspecious / that at the leste contenaunce or louely speche of her wifes with othere men han hem suspecte of avoutrie. (p. 41) 144

bo oks for the unlearned These overt morals have brought us from the processe, as Love calls it, to the commentary. The processe is there in its own right; it is also there as a jumping-off point for further reflection: Now ȝif we take good entent to the forseide proces / and hou longe tyme they haue leyne oute of her owne hous in so grete pouerte and symplenesse / by resoun we schulde be stired to compassioun / and to lerne by ensaumple of hem mekenesse / pouerte / and buxumnesse; that weren openly schewed in her symple dwellynge / in her pore offrynge / and in the lawe kepynge. (p. 64) This is a fairly simple gloss on the story of the Purification; other meditations arising out of the processe can stretch to pages. This one demonstrates succinctly the two main strands of approach to the narrative, which are also two stages in the desired response of the reader to the narrative. Firstly, he (or she) is invited formally to feel compassion, not merely made to feel it by the author’s manipulation of his narrative. Secondly, he is invited to take the characters’ actions as ensaumples of the three connected virtues of meekness, poverty, and obedience, and, by implication, urged to imitate these virtues himself. Other strands of interpretation appear in the meditations. The author answers possible objections by the reader: And ȝif we wole wite why and wherto oure lady was wedde to Joseph / sithe he hadde noȝt to doo with hir bodily / but sche was euere clene mayden: herto answerynge ben thre skilles: Firste  / for sche schulde haue conforte and solace of man to hir bodily seruice and wittenesse of hir clene chastite: the seconde is / that the merueylous birthe of goddes sone schulde be heled [concealed] and pryvey fro the deuel: and the thridde / that sche schulde not be defamed of avoutrie / and so / as worthy the deth after the lawe / be stoned of the jewes. (p. 45) He points out allegorical interpretations: By thise tweyne sistres byfore seide / Martha and Maria / as holy men and doctoures wryten / ben vndirstande tweyne manere lyues of cristen men / that is to say actyf lyf and contemplatyf lyf. (p. 158) and anagogical (spiritual) interpretations: This is the processe of the gospell after the vndirstondinge of the letter; in the whiche we mowe goostly vndirstonde first / that as oure lorde god than reised bodily the douȝter at the prayer and by 145

bo oks for the unlearned the feith of the fader / so he reiseth now ofte sithes goostely deede soules by synne to lyfe of grace thoruȝ the prechynge and preyenge of holy men / and the feithe of holy chirche. (p. 68) Similarly the Raising of Lazarus shows God raising to spiritual life ‘the soule that is ouerleide with the stone of dedly synne’ (p. 179). The author seems to expect his reader to follow this type of interpretation, and the concept of the literal sense overlaid by the spiritual sense, without any difficulty. On a larger scale, certain incidents are used as the starting points for quite lengthy sermon-like discussions: the Last Supper leads to a disquisition on the Blessed Sacrament, the repentance of Magdalen to one on the sacrament of Penance, Christ’s departure into the wilderness to one on spiritual dryness. The author himself thus plays an active part in the meditation; or rather, he creates for himself a guide persona, who steps gently in and points the reader’s attention: Now take hede diligently to the manere of crucifixioun. There ben sette vppe tweie ledders. (p. 238) See now / for goddes loue / how he stant in that manere / hangynge the face downe toward the erthe. (p. 231) More often he associates himself with the reader so that they take heed ­together: Als ȝif we take good entente to the wordes of marye and Eliȝabeth / alle they weren in lowynge of hem self / and to worschippynge of god. (p. 39) And alle this he seide to teche vs the vertue of good prayere. (p. 142) And herof moche ouȝte we to haue compassioun / and be stired to the loue vertuouse pouerte by ensaumple of hir: blessid mote sche euere be. Amen. (p. 40) The tone is one of communication between friends: the writer is not talking at you because he is not displaying himself and his feelings, but encouraging the reader to experience the feelings he assumes you both share – ‘herof moche ouȝte we to haue compassioun’ – when gazing at the absorbing picture before you. Even in instruction he associates himself with the reader in the learning process: ‘And alle this he seide to teche vs’. It is fairly easy up to this point to see how the plays could be seen as an extension of this kind of narrative meditation. They tell the story by means of ‘bodies and bodily thinges’ in a far more concrete way than books can. In a way, they relieve the onlooker of the responsibility of using his own imagination by providing him with ready-made images. He can see the characters, and their gestures, and he can hear the dialogue. By going to the play he has at 146

bo oks for the unlearned least a substitute for the all-engulfing experience he should create for himself when reading. (I do not go here in to the question of the divine inspiration of these ‘seeings’ and ‘hearings’.) We have not so far mentioned the use of real visual images in the stimulation of meditation, especially of compassionate meditation. Margery Kempe at Leicester: cam in-to a fayr cherch wher sche behelde a crucyfyx was petowsly poyntyd & lamentabyl to be-heldyn, thorw whech beheldyng þe Passyon of owr Lord entryd hir mende, whe(r)thorw sche gan meltyn & al-to-relentyn be terys of pyte & compassyown. (p. 111) At another time in Norwich, she was similarly stirred by ‘a fayr ymage of owr Lady clepyd a pyte [Pietà]’ (p. 148). Rosemary Woolf has pointed out how writers in defence of plays found themselves drawing on the arguments in defence of religious images: that they were books for the unlearned, that they were more easily recalled to memory, and that they had a stronger emotive power than mere words: ‘Pictura namque plus videtur movere animum, quam scriptura.’18 This suggests that they were aware that the effect of drama is different from that produced by narrative alone, and that this effect is in some way produced partly by the visual element, but they seem to have been conditioned by this sort of apology to see the plays as living pictures: sithen it is leveful to han the miraclis of God peintid, why is not as wel leveful to han the miraclis of God pleyed, sithen men mowen bettere reden the wille of God and his mervelous werkis in the pleyinge of hem than in the peintinge? And betere they ben holden in mennus minde and oftere rehersid by the pleyinge of hem than by the peintinge, for this is a deed bok, the tother a quick. (Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, p. 40)19 The Tretise author has taken the argument one stage further: as pictures are more memorable than words, so ‘living pictures’ are more memorable yet. It is as if the plays are seen as a version of the little poems in BL MS Add 37049, where a poetic Complaint of Christ, for example, is written around a drawing of Christ on the Cross (see Plate 2), but a version which has miraculously come alive, animated the drawing, and made the poem audible. There does not, however, seem to be any idea of theatre as an art form of its own with its own special effects, and it may well be that the playwrights themselves did not think of it this way. I will return to this idea in the second half of my argument. The very few recorded observations on the intention of the religious drama say that it is ad devotionem excitandam, to ‘stir up’ devotion.20 We have seen in Love how this devotion is usually seen in terms of compassion, and its visible 147

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Plate 2 Carthusian Miscellany, Yorkshire, pre-1450

© The British Library Board, BL MS Add 37049, fol 67v. Some verses of the poem to the left also appear in the Towneley Resurrection play, which was adapted from the York cycle.

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bo oks for the unlearned expression as weeping. This is the audience reaction selected by Of Miraclis Pleyinge for possible approval: ofte sithis by siche miraclis pleyinge men and wymmen, seinge the passioun of Crist and of hise seintis, ben movyd to compassion and devocion, wepinge bitere teris. (p. 39) However, the Tretise author finds such weeping too easy, an automatic response to a purely ‘bodily’ stimulus, and not associated with real contrition: ‘having more compassion of peine than of sinne, they falsly wepyn for lakkinge of bodily prosperite more than for lakking of gostly’ (pp. 43–4). It must be said that this is often the effect of the calls to compassion both of Love’s version, and of the affective lyrics. Even when they couple ‘Wel ou ic to wepen / And sinnes for leten’, the second strand is much less prominent than the first;21 the weeping is seen as a response to Christ’s suffering rather than to sorrow for one’s sins, and one sympathises with the Tretise author’s obvious feeling that the audience are getting their religious emotions on the cheap. There may also be an echo of the suspicion of the dangerously seductive emotional power of art which we see in the stern warning of the Mirrour of St  Edmund against those who delight in prayers which employ ‘Rymede wordes and queynte’: ffor whon þei wenen han deuocion, þey han a foul fleschliche wille, ffor eueri fleschliche corage delyteþ him kuyndeliche in turned langage and rymed. And þerfore beo war; ffor I seye þe forsoþe, hit is a foul lecherye to delyten in such Rymynge. (p. 251) I talked a little way back about the reader of the meditation identifying with the emotions of the characters: this response is so strong that it hardly needs stressing here. ‘Identification’ is a dangerously loose word, however, and perhaps we ought to consider precisely what we mean by it. It does not mean that the audience see themselves as Christ. One of the qualities of the charismatic hero is that he does things we cannot do and feels things we cannot feel, but we do, I think, wish to share in his charisma by reflection; we would like him to speak to and look at us. It is part of the emotional effect of drama that this wish is unresolved, and that we stay, as it were, on the fringe of his followers. The nearest we as audience come to identification is with figures like Peter and Mary Magdalen, who, as Eleanor Prosser pointed out, have been set up for precisely this function, and who incidentally provide us with ensaumples of failure, repentance, and reunion with the hero.22 It is fascinating that Margery Kempe actually feels jealous of Mary Magdalen: ‘“A, blysful Lord”, seyd sche, “I wolde I wer as worthy to ben sekyr of thy lofe as Mary Mawdelyn was”’ (p. 176), and Christ reassures her ‘Trewly, dowtyr, I loue þe as wel’, and explains that no saint in heaven is jealous of his 149

bo oks for the unlearned affection for any earthly creature. Most of the time, however, in her seeings, Margery follows around on the fringe of the crowd, or acts as handmaid to the Blessed Virgin, much as Love’s reader is asked to: ‘But nowe goo we to the berielles or graue of laȝare / folowynge oure lorde Jesu with alle that meyne’ (p. 177), and as the audience of a play would follow him, especially in a place and scaffold staging. The use of characters and incidents as ensaumples of moral action is common to any kind of drama which seeks to comment on human actions. The only difference with a mystery play is one of degree: as with any drama written within a framework of values of right and wrong, the action provokes us implicitly or explicitly to make value judgements, and having made them, to relate them to our own behaviour. The question is only how much guidance we are given in this process, and we shall see later how this is achieved. I have said how the plays provide physically the experience of being immersed in sight and sound which the meditations suggest one should bring about by the imagination. There is also the experience of being involved in the narrative as it played out before us. The meditations are anxious that one should not skim over the narrative: ‘Caveat tamen provide, ne cursorie ipsam vitam legendo transeat’,23 and for that reason divide it into set portions for reading at set hours. As Roger Ellis rightly stresses, religion is lived experience: it is experienced as a process.24 To be in the audience of a play is to involve oneself in that process. It has the added feature of enacting in the present events which have taken place in the past, and making them part of the audience’s present experience. This is part of the process of reading also, but drama adds to it the complete present tense of action as well as the present tense of dialogue. We might expect, from the way the argument has been running so far, that if the mystery play were the logical extension of the narrative meditation as I have described it, it would show certain additional features. The stress on the humanity of Christ would lead to a concentration in the plays on his ‘homeliness’, indeed, on the ‘homeliness’ of all the characters. To a certain extent we find this. It was recognised very early by scholars in the Shepherds at the manger, in figures like Noah and Joseph, but they misread it as preShakespearian (or pre-nineteenth-­century) dramatic naturalism. Where it is found in company with comedy (or brutality, as with Cain, or the Soldiers of the Crucifixion) it has been christened ‘realism’, either with a small, or more recently with a philosophically capital R. Pilate’s squire’s ‘Will ȝe ­wasshe whill þe watir is hote?’ (York, Play 33, line 443) has been picked out as the outstanding example of the art of the ‘York Realist’;25 in fact it is no more or less ‘realistic’ than Margery’s attempt to give Our Lady a hot drink when they come home from the Crucifixion (p. 195). On the ‘homeliness’ of emotions, Rosemary Woolf notes the affectionate warmth of relationships in the plays leading up to the Nativity: the ‘tenderness and delight’ of the reconciliation of Mary and Joseph after the settling of 150

bo oks for the unlearned Joseph’s Doubts, Elizabeth’s ‘warmth that expresses itself in recurrent terms of endearment’ in the Wakefield Visitation, and the touching and imaginative treatment of the Nativity in the York cycle, which she sees as ‘indebted partly to the Meditationes’ (‘Bonaventure’) and partly to the Revelations of St Birgitta.26 One would expect the dialogue to be ‘homely’, even novelistic, or, where appropriate, to follow the form of the affective laments of Christ and the Virgin whose transference to the plays has been well discussed by J.W. Robinson and others. The gesture and business would be like that of the meditations, expressive of the relationships between the characters, or emphasising the sufferings of Christ and his followers, though of course we might not be able to see this in either dialogue or stage directions if it was taken for granted. In fact any producer of the plays would be well advised to read the relevant section of Nicholas Love before directing his actors. Here, for example, is a supplementary ‘stage direction’ to the sending of Gabriel: Now take hede, and ymagyne of goostly thing as it were bodily / and thinke in thyn herte / as thou were present in the siȝt of that blessed lord / with how benigne and glad semblaunt he speketh these wordes and on the tother side how gabriel / with a likynge face and glad chere / vppon his knees knelynge and with drede reuerently bowynge / resceyueth this message of his Lorde. (p. 24) The main interest of the drama would be narrative and naturalistic, with a strong emotional slant, and a tendency to demonstrate moral lessons by example. All this is true to a certain extent, but it is not actually a picture of the plays we know. Oddly enough, far from exploiting the ‘human’ side of the drama, and abstracting from the meditations, as it were, their dialogue and business, and the emotional and moral effects of showing these, but leaving all other comment behind, many of the plays seem to be determinedly trying to prove the author of Of Miraclis Pleyinge right: that they are living pictures and, far more than we in the twentieth century expect from the drama, ‘quick books’. Look back again at the two versions of the Appearance of Christ to His  Mother, by Margery and by Love, quoted early in this essay. Of the two, Margery possibly follows our imaginary scenario more closely, but both play the scene as intimate and personal; the recognition is expressed by an interchange of short question and answer (more formal in Love because of the use of liturgical quotations, but still brief), followed by their embrace. When the recognition is over, Margery draws back and allows them to  discuss the deeper matters without our overhearing: ‘And whan he had suffyrd hys Modyr to aske what sche wolde & had answeryd to hir questyons’ (p. 196). Love allows us a summary of what they spoke about. Here, 151

bo oks for the unlearned however, is the beginning of the scene from the N-Town cycle, the only one to use it: Jesus: Salue sancta parens: my moder dere All heyl modyr with glad chere Ffor now is A-resyn with body clere Þi sone þat was dolve depe Þis is þe thrydde day þat I ȝow tolde I xuld a-rysyn out of þe cley so colde now am I here with brest ful bolde Þerfore no more ȝe wepe. Maria: Welcom my lord welcom my grace welcome my sone and my solace I xal þe wurchep in every place Welcom lord god of myght mekel sorwe in hert I leed whan þou were leyd in dethis beed but now my blysse is newly breed All men may joye þis syght (Passion Play II, lines 1432–47)27 The whole recognition scene has been formalised. It might just be possible to play Love’s ‘business’ with these speeches, but even that would hardly make the scene naturalistic in the way in which the meditations imagine it. The ­patterns are formal: stanzaic, rhymed, rhetorical, affirmative rather than questioning. The intimacy is expressed verbally, by statements of relationship: ‘my modyr dere’, ‘þi sone’, ‘my sone’. The characters describe their feelings and situations rather than enact them naturalistically: ‘now am I here with brest ful bolde, now my blysse is newly breed’. If, at the beginning, Mary asks, ‘Art thou Jesu?’, she does it tacitly. Why should the playwright want to write a recognition scene this way, rather than as Love or Margery had imagined it? Possibly to make it more dignified, or rather to emphasise the cosmic scale of what has been done, and the sacredness of the persons (much of the succeeding dialogue emphasises the status of Christ’s mother as the means through which Salvation was born). But it also reads as if the playwright wanted to make quite sure that the audience knew what the implications of the Resurrection are for them, and how they are to react emotionally to it: Now all mankynde beth glad with gle Ffor deth is deed as ȝe may se and lyff is reysed endles to be. (lines 1468–70) 152

bo oks for the unlearned Both Christ and Mary open up the closed circle of their reunion and rejoicing which we saw in the narratives, to include all mankind, here represented by the audience – and the characters speak not only as one might imagine a son and a mother to speak on such an occasion, and as Love, followed by Margery, in fact imagines them speaking, but as guiding, instructing, authorial voices. We have already seen how marked the authorial voice is in the meditations, not only in the affective tone of the writing, but as an actual guide persona, stepping in to marvel, to urge compassion, or to point to an ensaumple of virtuous behaviour to be followed. In the process of transforming narrative into  play, we might expect either that this authorial voice would be abdicated altogether, leaving the events to speak for themselves, with the added emotional and exemplary forcefulness peculiar to drama, or that it would be transferred to the characters in a more or less oblique way. In fact, very often something quite opposite happens. At its most extreme, the authorial voice itself is given a ‘body’ and appears on stage. It is incarnated in the figure called Expositor, or Doctor, who stands outside the action and comments on it. He appears in the Chester cycle, in N-Town, in the Brome Abraham and Isaac (though possibly as a later addition), and possibly as Prologue in the Norwich Fall of Man. (He is not a feature of York, except as  the composite Prophet figure of the Annunciation, or of Wakefield.) He does not appear regularly throughout the two cycles. He is sporadic in Chester, and in N-Town he is chiefly a feature of the Mary plays,28 but in those latter, as Contemplacio, he binds the whole sequence together, and his name and function have been usurped, it would seem, for the link-figure in the Passion plays. Usually he is seen as a preacher figure, and this is often said in pejorative tones. It is true that on the page he can look flat: he has no obvious ‘character’ as such, and he does not take part in the action (except in the one electrifying moment of the N-Town Parliament of Heaven when he becomes the voice of all captive mankind). But in performance he changes. He has the privilege of speaking straight to the audience: he can, indeed must, set up an immediate rapport with them. He may have no ‘character’, but he has an all-important role. Television has reinvented him, and called him the Presenter. We know from television how immensely sympathetic he can be if he has the right public personality. Like Love, his appeal both feeds and feeds on his attitude to his material. It tends to be a function of his engagement with his subject, his ability to make us look at it with his enthusiasm and through his eyes. He is also a useful and extreme example of something I want to stress again later: that there is no such thing as a ‘flat’ character, or a ‘mere mouthpiece’. As soon as someone is standing there saying the words, his personality becomes involved. In the case of the Presenter it is crucial that it should be a compelling and sympathetic personality, as the entire conduct of the play is felt to depend on him. We also know from television how the audience tends to make him responsible for the material he presents. Even if he hasn’t personally 153

bo oks for the unlearned researched and written ‘his’ programme, he will be perceived by them as the author. There is the tendency to attribute great depths of knowledge (or, in other cases, of resource and helpfulness) to him. He becomes, in a very medieval way, both author and authority. The mystery play Presenter carries both these roles. He can stand for ‘author’ in several ways. The most obvious is that he is often called on to carry the narrative: After, wee reden of this storye That in this monte of Synaye God gave the lawe witterlye wrytten with his hand in stonye tables, as reede I; before, men honored mawmentrye. Moyses brake them hastelye for that hee would not wond. But after, played as yee shall see other tables owt carved hee (Chester, Moses, lines 49–58)29 In this passage from the Chester Moses, he is merely relating events that are not to be enacted, being a bridge between one acted scene and the next. He is used as a narrative link in order to save time: But all that storye for to fonge to playe this moneth yt were to longe (lines 45–6) Similarly, in this play, and in several others, including the N-Town Mary plays, there is what seems to us a curious tendency to compress the end of the story into a narrative epilogue which is delivered by the Presenter. Contemplacio rounds off the Mary plays with a two-and-a-half-stanza epilogue which reads like a precis of some version of the Meditationes, possibly Love’s. I quote a verse and a half, together with Love’s narrative version: Than ferther to oure matere for to procede Mary with elizabeth abod þer stylle iij monthys fully as we rede thankynge god with hertly wylle A lord god what hous was þis on þat (held) þese childeryn and here moderys to as mary and elizabeth jhesus and john and joseph and zakarye Also … (lines 9–16) 154

bo oks for the unlearned Whan all was don oure lady fre toke her !eve than aftere this At Elizabeth and at zakarie And kyssyd johan and gan hym blys Now most mekely we thank ȝou of ȝour pacyens (Visitation, lines 25–9) And so in thonkynge god and gostly merthe they contynueden dayes and nyȝtes. For oure ladye dwelled there the terme or tyme of thre monthes / seruynge Eliȝabeth in all that sche myȝte … A lord god / what house was that / or what chambre / and what bedde in the whiche dwelleden to gidre and resteden so worthi moderes with so noble sones / that is to saie Marie and Eliȝabeth / Jesu and John! And also with hem dwellynge tho worschipful olde men / ȝacharie and Joseph … And at the laste whan al this was done (our Lady) toke hir leue at Eliȝabeth and ȝacharye / and blessid the child John: and so wente home aȝeyn to hir owne hous in Naȝareth. (pp. 38–40) In both cases the Presenter specifically refers to the narrative source: ‘wee reden of this storye’, ‘as we rede’, ‘as rede I’. There is not much difference here ­between this type of presentation and that of the ‘minstrel’ story-telling voice found in the romances. He also usurps the authorial voice to make emotive comments: ‘A lord god, what hous was þis on!’ and to add further information: ‘before, men honored mawmentrye’. However, he goes further than mere reference to his narrative ‘authority’. He seems to take responsibility for the conduct of the story. He apologises  for  either the intractability of his material or the insufficiency of its treatment: Lordings, mych more mattere is in this storye then yee have hard here. But the substans, withowten were, was played you beforen. (Chester Balaam, lines 440–3) And we be-seche ȝow of ȝoure pacyens þat we pace þese materys so lythly Away; If þei xulde be do with good prevydens Eche on wolde suffyce for An hool day. (N-Town Betrothal, lines 5–8) In a minstrel story-teller, this would be an apology for his own performance. With a play, the scale becomes larger. Contemplacio’s we must be taken in this context for the players, the creators of the performance, for which he seems 155

bo oks for the unlearned to make himself responsible almost as if he were the meneur du jeu. (When we performed this at Oxford, Contemplacio was played by the director, which seemed completely appropriate.) This has interesting implications. In narrative story-telling, an approach like this is perceived as the author apologising either for his own inadequacy in the face of his subject matter (a very Chaucerian pose), or for the constraints that time has placed on his presentation of it. Either way, it makes us aware that the subject matter and the treatment are two separate though connected entities, and the implication is that, of the two, the subject matter is by far the greater: Lordings, mych more mattere is in this storye then yee have hard here. With a play there is an added dimension. The audience, presented with the performance, are asked to realise that there is mych more mattere than can actually be shown to them, both in narrative, and, by implication, in meaning. But this emphasises that what they are seeing is only a representation of reality: of historical fact and spiritual truth. This serves to emphasise the ‘authority’ role of the Presenter. He is seen as making a selection for us, both from the story, and from the vast body of wisdom and learning accumulated by the Church. (This sense that there is a vast reservoir of revealed truth behind the plays is highly reassuring, and important to their other function of ‘strengthening of faith’.) It also emphasises the representational nature of the performance. There is no consistent attempt to create a naturalistic illusion: the Presenter is there to point out that it is an artifice. But it is an artifice created to tell us something about reality, ‘a lie designed to tell the truth’.30 Besides taking responsibility for the conduct of the narrative, the Presenter also provides the overt moral guidance of the authorial voice: lo sofreynes here ȝe haue seyn in þe temple of oure ladyes presentacion she was nevyr occapyed in thyngys veyn but Evyr besy in holy occupacyon (N-Town Betrothal, lines 1–4) This is a quiet reminder of an ensaumple, only obliquely directed to us, but the Presenter can mount a full Wesleyan attack: thys story schoyt ȝowe her How we schuld kepe to owr powere Goddys commawnmentys wythowt grochyng. 156

bo oks for the unlearned Trowe ȝe, sorys, and God sent an angell And commawndyd ȝow ȝowre chyld to slayn, Be ȝowre trowthe ys ther ony of ȝow that eyther wold groche or stryve therageyn? How thyngke ȝe now, sorys, therby? I trowe ther be thre ore a fowr or moo. (Brome Abraham, lines 439–47)31 The moral of the Chester Abraham is more learned and more layered. It combines the human ensaumple with the typological one: This deede yee seene done here in this place, in example of Jesus done yt was, that for to wynne mankinde grace was sacrifyced one the roode. By Abraham I may understand the Father of heaven that cann fonde with his Sonnes blood to breake that bonde that the dyvell had brought us to. By Isaack understande I maye Jesus that was obedyent aye, his Fathers will to worke alwaye and death for to confounde. (lines 464–75) The Doctor then, sermon-like, relates this typological explanation to the audience and himself (the us technique) in a prayer: Such obedyence grante us, O lord, ever to thy moste holye word (lines 476–7) and then slides back into the other and more obvious lesson of obedience presented by Abraham: that in the same wee may accorde as this Abraham was beyne (ready and willing) (lines 478–9) The expository structure is clear: first we have the narrative processe, then comes the authorial significacion. The episodic construction of several of the Chester plays shows this up even more clearly: in Abraham, or 157

bo oks for the unlearned the composite Temptation and Adultress, the Doctor enters after each episode to give his commentary. This is of course the pattern not only of the narrative  meditation, but of all exegetical writing, though it may be broken up into larger or smaller units. In the case of the gloss the unit can be a line, a phrase, or even a word at a time; we shall see this scale of exegesis later. The moral can be so obvious as to be almost embarrassing, as in the Brome Abraham; or it can be unnerving for the completely opposite reason. In the Chester Temptation, it seems strangely unconnected with the way in which the play is written. After the Temptation is over, the Doctor arrives to tell us: Loe, lordinges, Godes righteousnes, as Gregorye makes mynd expresse: syns our forfather overcommen was by three thinges to doe evill – gluttonye, vaynglorye, there bine too, covetous of highnes alsoe – by these three poyntes, bowt moe, Christ hasse overcommen the devil. (lines 169–76) But unless you were already familiar with Gregory’s gloss, you could certainly never have deduced it from the way the play itself is written. In the York Temptation the playwright does something that seems to us much more natural; the Devil himself tells us before he proffers each temptation: ‘In glotonye þan halde I gude / To witt his will’ (lines 47–8); ‘I schall assaye in vayne-glorie / To garre hym falle’ (lines 93–4); ‘I will assaye in couetise / To garre hym fall’ (lines 131–2).32 Chester is doing something very different, but actually much more in the formal tradition of exegesis: first it  presents the act, then it applies a moral (or typological, or anagogical) pattern  to it. Presumably the effect on the audience is meant to be one of sudden enlightenment – ah, so that’s what it means! This riddle-­ solution effect can be seen most conveniently in something like the Chester Antichrist’s Prophets: Ezechiel comes on and prophesies, the Expositor caps it: Nowe that you shall expresselye knowe these prophettes wordes upon a rowe, what the doe signifie I will shewe that mych may doe you good. (lines 25–8) 158

bo oks for the unlearned Zacharias prophesies: the Expositor says: Nowe for to moralyze aright which this prophett sawe in sight, I shall found through my might to you in meeke mannere. (lines 73–6) and so forth all the way down the line. (Actually, much the same effect must have been produced for at least some of the audience when a Latin quotation was first pronounced and then translated.) In fact it does have its own excitement, the excitement of unravelling a mystery and, presumably, of recognition, of a sense of the inexplicable slotting into place. This also must hint at the vast body of spiritual knowledge available to the Presenter, as the ‘authority’ figure, and give a sense of the huge and complex pattern of meaning lying behind the action as performed, of which the audience are allowed glimpses through his mediation. I talked about the embarrassing obviousness of the moral of the Brome Abraham, though it has a good homiletic force, and probably plays well. The embarrassment is compounded because the Doctor seems to us to have missed the deeper and more important typological meaning, and only seen the more conspicuous·everyday moral one. One instantly wonders if he is talking down to his audience, though he stresses that: It ys good lernyng to lernd and lewyd, And þe wysest of vs all (lines 437–8) But perhaps he is hinting to the lernd of his audience that they should not, in their subtlety, forget the obvious. The Chester expositors, however, seem peculiarly anxious to spell everything out so that: the unlearned standinge herebye maye knowe what this may bee. (Abraham, lines 115–16) To us this may seem over-anxious or even fussy, but it is certainly evidence of a strong desire to provide a guiding voice. This may invoke the spectre of the constricting, over-protective Church – a spectre that haunts many present-day undergraduates – rather than the desire to share the riches of its accumulated wisdom which the writers probably felt. But there may be a reason for the popularity of the Presenter figure. To the argument in favour Of Miraclis Pleyinge, that they were even better than religious pictures because they were alive, the Tretise writer replies that even pictures ‘ben but as nakyd lettris to a clerk to riden the treuthe’ (p. 45); in other words, that they are useful only 159

bo oks for the unlearned if they are shown to the public in the hands of a responsible interpreter. It is implied that miraclis do not provide this responsible interpretation, leaving the audience their own interpreters to form all sorts of wrong-headed and dangerous ideas. Some of Chester seems almost to have been written in anxious reaction to such an accusation. But of course the guiding voice is not always embodied in an Expositor. Almost anyone in the plays can take on this role. This is probably true, to a limited extent, of all drama, but here the voice is so frequently present that it becomes a dominant feature of style. To begin with, the characters are prone to tell the story, not just as exposition at the beginning of plays, which we are used to, but all the way through. The Wakefield Noah not only starts off his play by telling God the story of the cycle so far: Myghtfull god veray / Maker of all that is, Thre persons withoutten nay / oone god in endeles blis, Thou maide both nyght & day / beest, fowle, & fysh, All creatures that lif may / wroght thou at thi wish. (lines 1–4)33 and so on for seventy lines; even after he has slid from invocation into the action, he keeps returning to his role as story-teller: Aboue all hillys bedeyn / the water is rysen late Cubettis fyfteyn, / bot in a highter state It may not be, I weyn, / for this wel I wate, This forty dayes has rayn beyn: / it will therfor abate Full lele. This water in hast, eft will I tast; Now I am agast, It is wanyd a grete dele. (lines 442–50) And, six lines later: we have been here, all wee, thre hundreth dayes and fifty. (lines 456–7) The Chester Noah marks the passing of time in the same way: Now 40 dayes are fullie gone. Send a raven I will anone. (Appendix 1A, lines 1–2, p. 464) 160

bo oks for the unlearned The speeches here have the same function as a cinema caption or programme note reading ‘1914’, or ‘A week later’; in other words, they unashamedly state things which those modern dramatists who are committed to a sort of naturalism have been forced to push out of the play itself into a set of subsidiary signals. To have a character conducting the narrative in this way suggests a type of dramatic illusion which is radically different from the type with which we have been brought up, where characters are only supposed to say the kind of things they would say if they were really in that situation. We have only to compare this Noah with André Obey’s [Noé, 1930, Ed.] to see that it is not only the extreme extravagance of the plot which makes them talk like this. Even when the material is suitable, the medieval playwrights do not seem to go out of their way to present the dialogue and action naturalistically all the time; where it does occur, they slip in and out of it almost casually. Instead the norm seems to be what Peter Meredith has christened ‘the third-person style’.34 He defines this as ‘a character telling the audience what he is doing at the same time as he is doing it’ and, in addition, ‘a character moralizing on or explaining the meaning of what he or another character is doing or saying’. This is immediately familiar: the character assumes the authorial voice not only in describing his own action (the narrative line), but in commenting on it (the guiding moral and explicatory voice). This begs a fairly obvious question. Do the playwrights write this way because it is the best way to demonstrate the many-layeredness of what they are trying to say, or because they have no concept of theatre as a separate mode from narrative? Are we just to see the plays as direct transfer from vernacular Life of Christ, or Life of Christ plus meditation, to the stage, with the authorial voice shared out between the ­several characters? We have already seen that the criticism of plays in Of Miraclis Pleyinge suggests that they had no separate critical vocabulary for theatre, and so were forced to see it in terms of books or of pictures, or possibly of books-pluspictures. Does this reflect the actual way in which they composed plays? It is also true that at the time story-telling was, as far as we can see, much more of a performance art, and that there does not seem to have been that clear-cut distinction between narrative and drama that we think of as axiomatic. Large areas of medieval literature (like the debate poem, and some religious lyrics) hover between the two. The case of the Bodley Burial of Christ shows how a work can be seen both as a play to be playede, and, by writing in a few ‘said Josephs’ and ‘The thrid mary saides’, be turned into a ‘treyte or meditatione’, presumably to be read.35 It is certainly true that most mystery plays are very verbal: people talk themselves through scenes as if they were committed to providing a commentary for radio. It is a commonplace that there are very few stage directions partly because most of the action is stated or implied in the text. This is even true of some of the plays which have been especially praised for their 161

bo oks for the unlearned ‘realism’, for example, the York Crucifixion, where every move is signposted in the script, but which comes over as naturalistic because it is the nature of workmen tackling a difficult job to talk themselves through it. (‘Left hand down a bit your end, Charlie.’) Nothing in the work of the ‘York Realist’ is actually theatrically realistic rather than narratively realistic, if there is such a distinction: the ewer of hot water is precisely the kind of detail Love would have written into the Mirrour if he had been as interested in Pilate as he was in Christ and His Mother. However, these are not narratives, but plays, and no matter what the style in which they are written, this very fact makes them different. It would be very easy (and most source-based criticism does this) to go through the plays comparing the script with the text of a narrative meditation, and making them sound like precisely the same thing. But they are not. I would like to look at a few examples from the N-Town Mary plays, both because they are very much in this style of writing and because I am lucky enough to have been involved in their production, and to have seen first what happens when this style is transferred to theatre, and second, how theatre can produce some of the same effects more economically and more ‘feelingly’ than the prose meditation. First, a piece of self-presentation. The Presenter figure has no invented character, and he presents others, not himself, but here we have an invented character presenting himself as a character to the audience: My name is joachym a man in godys substancyall Joachym is to say he þat to god is redy so haue I be and evyr more xal ffor þe dredful domys of god sore dred I. I am clepyd Ryghtful why wole ȝe se ffor my godys in to thre partys I devyde On to þe temple . and to hem þat þer servyng be A nodyr to þe pylgrimys and pore men . þe iijde ffor hem with me abyde. So xulde euery curat in þis werde wyde ȝeve a part to his chauncel i-wys A part to his parochonerys þat to povert slyde the thryd part to kepe for hym and his. (N-Town Conception of Mary, lines 21–32) The bulk of this self-description probably comes from the Golden Legend’s version of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew: Joachim namque ex Galilaea et civitate Nazareth sanctam Annam ex Bethlehem duxit uxorem, ambo autem justi erant et ambo sine reprehensione in omnibus mandatis domini incedebant omnemque suam substantiam trifarie dividebant, unam partem templo et templi 162

bo oks for the unlearned servitoribus impendebant, aliam peregrinis et pauperibus erogabant, tertiam sibi et familiae suae usibus reservabant. 36 [For Joachim, who was from Galilee and the city of Nazareth, took to wife Saint Anna of Bethlehem: both were righteous, and walked without reproach in all the commandments of the Lord. And they divided all their substance into three parts: one part they allotted to the temple and those serving in the temple; another to pilgrims and poor men; the third they kept back for their own use and that of their household.] All the playwright has done is to transfer the description from narrative third person to dramatic first person, and add, meditation-wise, a couple of moralisations: the etymology of Joachim’s name, praeparatio domini, ‘he þat to god is redy’; and the application of his threefold charity to the present-day clergy. He has also enlivened the appellation Justus, ‘ryghtful’, with a very NicholasLove-type question, ‘why wole ȝe se?’, ‘Do you want to know why?’. We are thus given a definition of ryghtful that not only involves the fear of the Lord and the keeping of his commandments, but also active charity. As Peter Meredith suggests, the use of this voice makes the actor change ‘from protagonist to presenter’.37 We are not given a little scene in which Joachim is generous to a pilgrim: he tells us that he is generous to pilgrims. In fact this way is much more economical. Because of the accepted relationship between characters and audience, which allows them to be addressed directly, we avoid all the twists and turns of the ‘You also know…’ type of closedcircuit exposition that a more ‘naturalistic’ staging has to demand of its characters. He does not have to pretend he’s telling Anna, for example, what she must surely know already; he tells the audience, completely unembarrassed, and they, equally unembarrassed, assimilate this as their given knowledge of him. It is understood that when he speaks in this voice, he is providing trustworthy information about himself. Moreover, in this voice he can even, without appearing to lose humility, approve of his own actions, and present himself as an example to others. Meredith also suggests that this style tends ‘to distance the actor from the action, and make the actor someone dressed in the clothes of a character and presenting his words and actions, rather than an actor embodying a character’s actions and words in what he says and does’. I would go along with this only so far. I do not, from experience in watching these plays, think that these are alternatives: they can coexist. Joachim here is both the presenter of the character and the character himself. In fact alienation is an almost impossible device, except under very carefully contrived circumstances. Once you have a person standing there, cast and dressed appropriately, and calling himself ‘I’, he will come across as the character he represents. The human perception of the audience will read him this 163

bo oks for the unlearned way. It has a wonderfully wide tolerance; it will make some kind of image out of rank bad acting or miscasting, or even the fact that you recognise Joachim as your next door neighbour. Moreover, in this kind of theatre it can hold that image even when the character steps out of the narrative to speak straight to the audience. This is not so much to do with a different type of illusion as with the terms of the unspoken contract with the audience. We would be alarmed in the middle of The Cherry Orchard if Madame Ranevsky suddenly came down to the footlights and acknowledged our presence, because she and the rest of the cast have been strenuously pretending that we are not there. Nobody in a mystery play even tries to pretend this; quite the contrary. They talk to us continually. It is a part of the contract between us. As a result there is no naturalistic ‘illusion’ to be broken, and so no shock to remind us that Madame Ranevsky is really an actress pretending to be Madame Ranevsky. Here one just accepts that, for the moment, Joachim has stopped the story to tell us about himself (he has enough of the author about him to be able to do that). He comes over as no more or less Joachim than when he steps back into the story. It is only that temporarily he is more involved with us than with the other characters; when he returns to them the story can go on. Indeed, the playwright becomes very skilled in playing games with the juxta­position of presentation and representation. Anna introduces herself in an interestingly more subtle way: my name is Anne þat is to sey grace we wete not how gracyous god wyl to us be. (lines 43–4) She presents herself both with outside knowledge (‘Anna interpretatur gratia’) and as a character inside the story, not knowing what her role in it is to be.38 She knows what it should be, considering the meaning of her name, but the play is yet to be played, and neither she nor the audience can see yet how it is to be worked out. Yet the fact that Anna means ‘grace’ remains as something given, and the audience have been alerted to watch how it does in fact work out, through the Shepherds’ ‘Aftere grett sorwe mayster . evyr gret grace growyht’ (line 117) to her final ‘now may we sey husband . god is to us gracyous’ (line 218). Anna is not a personification of Grace: she is an ensaumple of grace received. The characters present themselves morally and draw overt morals from their story, but we still feel the full moral force by living through their actions and predicaments with them. Abraham may be a type of obedience, or Mrs Noah of disobedience, or Mary Magdalen of repentance, but we still on the first level perceive them as people and their interaction as personal. This obtains even when the ‘character’ is not a person as such at all, but a personified abstraction such as Truth or Mercy. Once it is embodied by an actor, we see it as a person, and its interaction with the other personifications 164

bo oks for the unlearned on stage becomes a personal interaction, at least on the narrative level, though behind this we can see the other levels at which the interaction operates. We too find it difficult not to think ‘but bodies and bodily thinges’, but in this particular kind of religious drama it is appropriate, as Christianity is a religion of personal relationships, with God and with our neighbour, rather than, for example, a religion of intellectual enlightenment. In the mystery plays the personalising tendency of the theatre merely makes this more explicit. On the other hand, the characters are not personalised in the sense that they are given exclusively individual quirks of character which pertain to themselves alone. They play roles rather than individuals, but these roles are taken from the life and we can recognise and identify with them, and that is sufficient. The character of the actor playing them fills out the non-essential mannerisms and inflections. Furthermore, since they exist chiefly by virtue of their moral role, we do not get the uneasy effect that we sometimes have in the modern theatre where a character is devised as naturalistic and at the same time as a mouthpiece for some moral stance or creed, and the two do not quite match (‘That sort of person wouldn’t hold opinions like that’); or where because we expect him to be above all an individual, his use as a mouthpiece sounds unnaturally automaton-like (‘Only a Nazi would be so unthinking’). I suspect also that a ‘flat’ character is partly one with whose opinions we do not agree. These plays are set against a background of universal consent: I dowte not þe wordys ȝe han seyd to me But I Aske how it xal be do. (N-Town Annunciation, lines 249–50) Let us look now at the beginning of the Annunciation from N-Town, because it is an excellent illustration of how one type of meditative style can be transferred to theatre, and of the effects of this.39 The first thing that strikes one is that it is so elaborate as to be almost baroque. Gabriel greets Mary: Ave Maria gratia plena Dominus tecum Heyl fful of grace god is with the Amonge All women blyssyd art thu here þis name Eva . is turnyd Aue þat is to say with-owte sorwe ar ȝe now. Thow sorwe in ȝow hath no place ȝett of joy lady ȝe nede more Therfore I Adde And sey Fful of grace Ffor so Ful of grace was nevyr non bore ȝett who hath grace he nedyth kepyng sore therfore I sey god is with the 165

bo oks for the unlearned Whiche xal kepe ȝow endlesly thore So amonge All women blyssyd ar ȝe (lines 217–29) Compare this with the simple declaration of York, or of Chester here: Hayle be thow, Marye, mother free, full of grace. God is with thee. Amongst all women blessed thow bee and the fruite of thy bodye. (Chester, Annunciation, lines 1–4) Chester actually gives the game away by adding the fourth line to the Gospel greeting. Gabriel’s words are not perceived as a simple translation of Luke 1:28, but as the Ave Maria: ‘Ave Maria gratia plena dominus tecum benedicta tu in mulieribus et benedictus fructus ventris tui Jhesus.’ For Chester the recitation (translated into English) seems enough: the writer of this N-Town play spins a whole commentary round it, keeps us waiting until the Visitation to have it completed, and has Contemplacio as presenter explain: lystenyth sovereynys here is conclusyon how þe Aue was mad . here is lernyd vs þe Aungel seyd . Ave gratia plena dominus tecum; benedicta tu in mulieribus. Elizabeth seyd . et benedictus . fructus uentris tui . thus þe chirche addyd Maria And jhesus . her who seyth oure ladyes sawtere dayly ffor A ȝer þus he hath pardon . ten thousand And eyte hundryd ȝer. (Epilogue, lines 1–8) Gabriel first greets Mary (possibly first in Latin, then in English; we have no way of telling the status of the Latin, as it is not incorporated into the rhyme scheme, as is, for example, Contemplacio’s version). He then glosses his greetings: Ave reverses Eva, and can be divided into a + ve (a + vae, without woe).40 He then proceeds to concatenate his glossing: ‘without woe’ leads to joy, to complete this joy you need to be ‘full of grace’; grace requires the protection of God, who therefore is ‘with you’; He is with you endlessly, so you are ‘blessed above all other women’. I do not recognise this particular meditation on the Ave, but since the rosary came into circulation almost every writer had his own version, often linking it with the Five Joys and Sorrows.41 (Nicholas Love here inserts his own meditation, saying that he finds it preferable to the original in ‘Bonaventure’.) It may well be the playwright’s own. This glossing has the effect not so much of explaining the text, for it doesn’t really explain it as such, as of making the audience dwell on each phrase of 166

bo oks for the unlearned the greeting, imparting a sense of depth and connection. The Ave is so familiar that one might begin to treat it mechanically, and pass over it lightly: it is important to feel its full weight, to experience it fully. Hearing the Angel deliver it also lifts it out of the pattern of everyday repetition, sets it in its original, one might almost say romantic, context, and associates it even more firmly with Our Lady at a climactic moment of her life. (Wakefield does the same but rather more ineptly.) Mary then responds: A mercy god þis is a mervelyous herynge In þe Aungelys wordys I am trobelyd her I thynk how may be þis gretynge Aungelys dayly to me doth Aper But not in þe lyknes of man þat is my fer And Also þus hyȝly to comendyd be and am most vn-wurthy I can-not Answere grett shamfastnes and grett dred is in me. (lines 229–36) As Luke says, ‘she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be’ (1:29). Luke gives her no direct speech, and the commentators were unanimous in saying that she did not in fact speak. ‘And so as wise and warre / as shamefast and dredful / sche hild hir pees and answered not’ (Love, p. 27). What we are hearing here are the thought­processes that the commentators attribute to her. Why was she troubled? ‘sche was wont to aungels presence and the siȝt of hem’ but ‘for also  meche as the  perfiȝt meke may not here his preisynge with oute abasshement and shamefastnesse / therfore sche was abasshed and astonyed with an honeste shamefastnes / and also with drede’ (p. 26–7). (If Love, or another version of ‘Bonaventure’, is the source of this passage, he may well have got the idea that Mary was not used to seeing angels in the form of men from the earlier passage where Gabriel ‘takes his flight’ from heaven: ‘and in a moment he was in mannis likenesse byfore the virgyne marye’ (p. 24).)42 In  Love, Gabriel ‘byholdynge  her semblaunt / and knowynge the cause of hir abaschement and drede / answered to hir thouȝt and spake more homeliche /  callynge hir by  name and  seide: Drede thou noȝt marye’ (p. 27). But the playwright is anxious that the audience too should know her thought. That this is a matter of choice becomes apparent a few speeches further on, where he shows a masterly theatrical handling of silence and suspense, as Mary hesitates before the magnitude of the role she is being asked to take on: here þe Aungel makyth a lytyl restynge & mary be-holdyth hym & þe Aungel seyth: Mary com of & haste the (line 261) 167

bo oks for the unlearned Here ‘Bonaventure’ asks us to visualise both actors in this heavenly drama, the: aungel gabriel stondynge with reuerence byfore his lady / enclynynge  / and with mylde semblant abideth the aunswere of his message. And on the tother side take hede how mary stondeth / sadly with drede and mekenes / in grete avisement / hauinge none pride ne veynglorie for alle the hiȝe preisynge bifore seide. but … alle sche arette only to the grace of god. (p. 30) This time, instead of getting the characters to voice their emotions or even their attitudes, the playwright shows them to us in silence, and the use of silence and tension underlines both the magnitude of the responsibility and the fact that Mary takes it on avisedly. This is a theatrical effect, one that cannot be accomplished in the same way by narrative, and the playwright uses the tension he has created by making Gabriel, apparently able to bear the suspense no longer, burst into his version of the great rhapsody of St Bernard which sees the whole of Creation and its Creator waiting on ‘þin answere … and þin assent’. In theatrical terms, this means the whole cast of the play, from the Trinity downwards, and also all þe gode levers and trew That Are here . in þis erthely place (lines 273–4) here represented by the audience, ‘thyn owyn kynrede. þe sothe ho knew’ (line 275), who are both waiting in the here and now of the performance for the actor to answer, and in the eternal and historical time of the play, here overlapping, are waiting for Mary to answer: Gyff me myn Answere . now lady dere to All these creaturys comfortacion. (lines 283–4) Mary underlines her answer with the traditional gesture: With All mekenes I clyne to þis A-corde Bowynge down my face with All benyngnyte Se here þe hand-mayden of oure lorde Aftyr þi worde . be it don to me. (lines 285–8) We may ask here, what effect does it have when someone ‘says what he’s doing while he’s doing it’? Fairly obviously, it underlines the gesture and its meaning: 168

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bo oks for the unlearned Anna. For dred and ffor swem of ȝour wourdys I qwake thyres I kysse ȝow with syghys ful sad and to þe mercy of god . mekely I ȝow be-take (Conception, lines 53–5) is a formalisation of sorrowful leavetaking, while: Isaker. It is a tokyn þou art cursyd þare Whereffore with grett indygnacion . þin offeryng I refuse (Conception, lines 79–80) is a formalisation of angry rejection. We accept it when it is part of a ceremony: Episcopus. Joseph with þis ryng now wedde þi wyff and be here hand now þou here take. Joseph. Sere with þis Rynge I wedde here Ryff and take here now here ffor my make. (Betrothal, lines 318–21) This would seem to suggest that all action, if accompanied by words, is equally ceremonious and, as with ceremonies, must have some symbolism, however slight. As a theatrical style it perhaps draws attention to a gesture or emotion which might be dissipated in the open-air production, but it also seems to suggest a style of acting that has a certain – not formality, as that is too stiff a word – economy and expressiveness, even a sort of code of gesture, especially where gesture is allied to the description of emotion. When the characters are moved, they tend to signal emotion by describing it, and usually some physical sign of it: Anna. ȝour swemful wurdys make terys trekyl down be my face (Conception, line 41) Maria. I qwake grettly for dred . to here þis comendacion (Mary in the Temple, line 252) Joseph. Alas ffor joy I qwedyr and qwake (Joseph’s Return, line 180) It seems as if we as audience are willing to pick up these verbal descriptive signals and read them as the real thing, whereas if we were watching a naturalistic modern play of the same, we would expect to pick them up from gesture and tone of voice alone, as if they actually were the real thing. Yet neither of them is the real thing: both are artifices, signs for us to create  our  illusion from. The strange thing is that they both seem to operate emotionally  equally well. The medieval audience was said to be very 169

bo oks for the unlearned strongly   emotionally affected, perhaps more visibly so than any modern  English audience allows itself to be: ‘men and wymmen, seinge the passioun of Crist and of his seintis,  ben movyd to compassion and devocion, wepinge bitere teris’ (Tretis, p. 39). Yet, to pursue the sign and signal theme further, some recent work done by Sarah Carpenter and myself suggests that the Passion of Christ was enacted by a figure dressed in a suit of white leather, and even possibly wearing a gold mask.43 Dressed to symbolise naked vulnerability and  Godhead,  he  still  managed to evoke the  emotional response we  would give to a naturalistically naked  actor.  Similarly in the Massacre of the Innocents, the soldiers slaughter pillows: it is no less horrifying. This does not mean, again, that the playwright is incapable of writing what we would see as naturalistically emotional dialogue. When Joachim is told by the angel that Anna will conceive, he becomes almost incoherent with joy: his shepherds perceive that something good has happened and rejoice with him, but they never find out why: Joachym. Now fare wel myn shepherdys . governe ȝow now wysly. 1us pastor. Haue ȝe good tydyngys mayster . þan be we glad. Joachym. Prayse god for me . for I am not wourthy. ijus pastor. In feyth sere so we xal . with all oure sowlys sad. iijus pastor. I holde it helpful þat on of vs . with ȝow . be had. Joachym. Nay abyde with ȝour bestys sone . in goddys blyssynge. 1us pastor. we xal make us so mery . now þis is be-stad þat a myle on ȝour wey . ȝe xal here us synge. Conception of Mary, lines 179–86) Alternatively, the self-descriptive style can come over as self-parody: Joseph. Com ȝa ȝa . god help full fayn I wolde but I am so Agyd and so olde þat both myn leggys gyn to folde I am ny Almost lame (Betrothal of Mary, lines 225–8) Presentation of oneself here suggests that one is standing outside oneself looking on, and we tend to read this in certain situations as consciousness of playing a part; it is very difficult to tell here whether this is how Joseph is meant to be read, or whether it is a modern reaction to the style. When he has made his heroic attempt to stop ‘playing’ old and weary: lo wyff lo. how starkly I go be-fore (Visitation, line 22) 170

bo oks for the unlearned the effect is of a child proudly showing off his own ‘goodness’. Similarly, when they arrive, his running commentary suggests both childlike call-­attention and a piece of comic business: A. A. Wyff Infeyth I am wery therfore I wole sytt downe and rest me ryght here. lo Wyff. here is þe hous of zakary Wole ȝe I clepe Elyzabeth to ȝow to A-pere (Visitation, lines 43–6) Presumably he sits down on the doorstep of the very house he is looking for. Mary replies ‘Nay husband And it plese ȝow I xal go ner’, which simultaneously shows her humility (she will not have Elizabeth summoned before her as though she were the more important – though she is), her thoughtfulness (Joseph is tired), and her tact (she asks his permission to do him a favour). The plays are ‘naturalistic’ because they are true to the emotions and relationships of real life, not because they try to counterfeit the surface details of real life. In this sequence of plays, too, as in the meditations, these emotions and relationships are intensely domestic. This perhaps makes them less typical of the rest of the cycles, though I think not less typical of the popular religious climate of the time. The veneration of the Holy Kindred was very much a fifteenth-century bourgeois affair (see Plate 3): several groups of stainedglass windows show us how popular it was, for example, in York at the time. It is also, which gives it more in common with the Mirrour but perhaps less with the other cycles, very female-centred. The husbands are distinctly supporting cast, even if they may have some of the more interesting parts: they suggest those very bourgeois Flemish paintings of the Holy Kindred where the women and children are in the centre of the picture, and the menfolk are corralled away from them apparently behind the garden fence. Zacharias is even reduced to speechlessness, and Elizabeth seems to refer to him with friendly dismissiveness: it is þe vesytacion of god . he may not speke veryly let us thank god . þerffor both he xal remedy it . whan it plesyth his mercy. (Visitation, lines 122–4) This emphasises what seems at first to be a paradox. The characters are seen on an intimate everyday level, yet they reveal God to us in their actions. The ‘homely’ tone is nowhere better seen than in Mary’s greeting to Elizabeth: A cosyn Elizabeth . swete modyr what cher ȝe grow grett . A my god how ȝe be gracyous (Visitation, lines 49–50) 171

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Plate 3 The Holy Kindred Jean Bertaud, Encomium trium Mariarum (Paris: Josse Badius Ascensius, 1529) vol. 2, fol. VIb © The British Library Board, C.111.c.30

It comes over as a heartfelt ‘You look marvellous!’ But then we get the secondary level: she is indeed gracyous, full of grace, and ‘ffulfyllyd with þe holy gost’ (line 57), and she replies on that level ‘A-non as I herd of ȝow þis holy gretynge’ (line 51). There is no jar between the domestic and the spiritual, as some people have seen, because the whole point is that the one mediates the 172

bo oks for the unlearned other. All three female characters in this sequence of plays are pregnant, but this is not a private affair of their own; though the meditations never state this openly, they are each in their degree Theotokos, God-bearing. This can be seen on the moral level, as the meditations also urge on us. When Mary explains her reason for coming to see Elizabeth: but cosyn Elyzabeth I xal ȝow here kepe And þis thre monethis Abyde here now tyl ȝe han childe to wasche skore and swepe and in all þat I may to comforte ȝow (lines 109–12) Elizabeth immediately moralises it into an ensaumple: A ȝe modyr of god . ȝe shewe us here how we xulde be meke þat wrecchis here be. (lines 113–14) The Visitation becomes a parable of service: For oure ladye dwelled there the terme or tyme of thre monthes / seruynge Eliȝabeth in all that sche myȝte / mekely / reuerently and deuoutly / as a seruaunt / forȝetynge that sche was goddis modir and quene of al the worlde. (Mirrour, pp. 38–9) We have seen in Joachim how the characters tend to present themselves in moral terms. They also see their predicaments as part of a moral, Godordained, scheme of things: Of ȝour dissese thynkys no greff thank god of al aduersyte Ffor he wyl chastyse and repreff þo þat he lovyth most hertyle (Visitation, lines 125–8) This can even express itself proverbially, which is the everyday apprehension of a moral pattern of things: Aftere grett sorwe mayster . evyr gret grace growyht (Conception, line 117) Most of us can perceive some sort of moral pattern in a play and apply it to ourselves. Here the characters are continually stepping out of their 173

bo oks for the unlearned involvement in the action to make a conscious application both to their own actions and to us. The moral level is pushed to the fore, and yet the characters remain people, involved in human predicaments. What of the other levels which we have seen in the meditations? So far we have only seen the typological or anagogical interpretations as they are stated by the Expositor figure. I would suggest that this is somewhere where the drama can speak even more directly to us precisely because it is drama, where the visual and emotional elements are more immediate and can be perceived other than verbally. Let us look at the scene of the three-year-old Mary’s dedication in the Temple. The High Priest Ysakare (Issachar) summons Mary to climb the fifteen steps up to the sanctuary: Come gode mary . come babe I þe call þi pas pratyly to þis plas pretende þou xalt be þe dowtere . of god Eternall If þe fyftene grees . þou may Ascende It is meracle if þou do . now god þe dyffende Ffrom babylony to hevynly jherusalem þis is þe way Every man þat thynk his lyff to Amende þe fiftene psalmys . in memorye of þis mayde say (Mary in the Temple, lines 76–83) From being in the original apocryphal gospel a miracle that happened felicitously but almost by accident, it has been elevated into a rite de passage: þou xalt be þe dowtere . of god Eternall If þe fyftene grees . þou may Ascende. According to the story, Mary had only set foot on the ground once before (this is hinted at in Anna’s ‘can ȝe gon a-lone . Lett se beth bolde’ (lines 27–8)), but even if we did not know that, we can see it as a test, something difficult and even dangerous: Anna. husbond and it plese ȝow not hens go we xal tyl mary be in þe temple above thore I wold not for al erthe se here fal. (lines 73–5) Here the visual side of the play comes into its own. Illustrations of the Fifteen Degrees tend to make the stairs look forbiddingly steep, but even on the stage fifteen steps rise to a considerable height. (As we discovered when we tried to construct them, if the risers are six inches high, the steps will end up seven foot six inches overall; if they are a shallow four inches, they still add up to five 174

bo oks for the unlearned foot.) Add to this that Mary is actually played by a child: not of three years old, perhaps, but still the youngest you can get to play the part (our Mary was eight); and that besides negotiating the steps she has to deliver a sixty-line speech translating and moralising on the first verse of each of the Fifteen Gradual Psalms: the sense of tightrope-walking becomes terrifying. When at the end Ysakare exclaims ‘It is An hey meracle’ (line 148), the audience, letting out their breath in unison, are inclined to agree. The whole thing is a theatrical tour de force and, since it involves a child, a whole-hearted attempt to manipulate our emotions. But besides this, it is easy to see the spiritual allegory lying behind the acted narrative. The general sense of a rite de passage is particularised when we know the protagonists. The scene in art tends to be consciously constructed on the Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Candlemas). One can see this from the page of a Psalter illustrated at Plate 4, which shows the Presentation of Christ as the central scene, and the Presentation of Mary as its typological foreshadowing in the margin around it. This illumination also shows how seemingly naturalistic details can be seen at a second look to be symbolic: the well in the courtyard, the courtyard itself, the tower on the hill behind are not only features of a delicately painted landscape background, but all types of the Virgin Mary: fons signata, hortus conclusus, turris Davidis. The festival of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or the Presentation of Christ, is the festival of the dedication of the soul to God.44 It does not take much imagination to see the High Priest as the Church, waiting at the top to receive the tiny human figure. But more than that, in ascending from ‘babylony to hevynly jherusalem’ she leaves her parents at the bottom. In a severe moralisation, they would be her earthly affections: she takes her leave: of my fadyr . and ȝow my modyr i-wys I haue a fadyr in hefne þis I be-leve (lines 50–1) to become ‘þe dowtere of god Etemall’; as she says, ‘here is my fadyr and my modyr bothe’ (line 57). The fifteen steps, which have been perceived as a sort of trial or rite de passage, now become particularised as the steps by which we leave earthly things and ascend to things heavenly. Each member of the audience is told directly that if he ‘thynk his Lyff to Amende’, he is to use the Fifteen Gradual Psalms (traditionally a psalm to a degree, gradus, or step of the Temple) as a spiritual exercise ‘in memorye of þis mayde’. (They formed part of any Primer, and often of Books of Hours.) Here we have an anagogical scene which can be perceived as such without any glossing. (One would require a degree of training to see it as typological as well, and I think the playwright has not tried to emphasise this.) Yet at the same time it is a narrative scene enacted by actors representing real historical people, and the emotions of parting (leaving for school for the first 175

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Plate 4 Bodleian Library MS Douce 112, fol 71r. Book of Hours, Flemish, beginning of the sixteenth century. The Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple

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bo oks for the unlearned time?) ring true. Anna speaks to Mary in simple, comforting language as to a child: Mary in þis holy place leve ȝow we xall In goddys name . now up go ȝe oure fadyr. oure prest . lo doth ȝow call. (lines 46–8) In what follows we get an inversion which is both theatrical and true to life. Children in the mystery plays do not tend to be childish (except for the infuriatingly sentimental Isaac of the Brome Abraham). This is partly because of whom they enact, but also partly because children on stage are not childish: they tend to terrify everybody with their capacious memories and shattering self-possession. The playwright knew precisely what he was doing when he gave Mary a sixty-line moralisation to learn and deliver: it is a theatrical trick which never fails. He prepares us for it after Mary’s first speech: Joachym. I-Wys dowtere . it is wel seyd ȝe answere . and ȝe were twenty ȝere olde. (lines 25–6) He makes use of it to characterise Mary as the reverse of what one might expect: instead of clinging and lamenting, the gracious child takes formal leave of her parents, asks their forgiveness for any offence, and comforts them: blysse me day and nyght evyr her ȝe slepe good ffadyr and modyr . and beth mery. (lines 66–7) Her unchildish gravity and consideration reads in one way morally: Joachym. A ho had evyr suche a chylde nevyr creature ȝit þat evyr was bore Sche is so gracyous sche is so mylde so xulde childyr to fadyr and modyr evyr more. (lines 68–71) Spiritually it marks her out as a chosen soul (the soul as a child is a familiar metaphor) with the right to speak with authority; at the same time she is a visible allegory that ‘He … hath exalted the humble and meek’. Her reaction to the Angel’s promise that ‘Aunge[ls] alle howrys xal to ȝow apere’ (line 241) is: Mercy my makere . how may þis be ment I am þe sympelest creature . þat is levynge here. (lines 242–3) 177

bo oks for the unlearned In one respect it is the same effect as in the ceremonies associated  with  Holy  Innocents’ Day, of which there may be echoes, but there the  symbolism is  due  to a conscious reversal of the accepted status quo, whereas here  it  is  given an extra depth by this theatrical inversion of ­expectation. As I said earlier, though we can see the allegorical layers behind the acted narrative very clearly, they are still mediated to us through enacted personal relationships. We see the workings of God in recognisable human terms. In Mary in the Temple, for example, we have the constant play on the father– daughter relationship: Mary is seen with her natural father Joachim; with her spiritual father Ysakare, ‘oure fadyr . oure prest’, who also calls her Dowtere (line 152); and she acknowledges her ‘Fadyr in hefne’. She brings her natural father and her heavenly Father together in one line: now good ffadyr . with þat fadyr ȝe me blysse.  (line 52) Visually we see the tall men with the little child, one father taking over from the other; both speak to her in gravely affectionate tones, and Ysakare reinforces the theme of paternal love in his exposition of the Commandments: Ȝe muste love god severeynly . and ȝour evyn crystyn pleyn god fyrst ffor his hyȝ and sovereyn dygnyte he lovyd ȝow fyrst . love hym a-geyn ffor of love . to his owyn lyknes . he made the. (lines 156–9) Earlier, Anna, speaking in simple terms as to a child, has emphasised another close and affectionate relationship: Wole ȝe go se þat lord ȝour husbond xal ben and lerne for to love hym . and lede with hym ȝour lyff telle ȝour ffadyr and me her . ȝour answere let sen Wole ȝe be pure maydyn . and also goddys wyff (lines 13–16) which has been underlined in her own relationship with Joachim and is to be echoed on several levels in the Betrothal of Mary and Joseph play. But simultaneously we see the people and their relationships in terms of God. This ability to see God behind men is not confined to the stage. Margery Kempe, for example, almost made a habit of these epiphanies: Sche was so meche affectyd to þe manhode of Crist þat whan sche sey women in Rome beryn children in her armys, ȝyf sche myth wetyn þat þei wer ony men children, sche schuld þan cryin, roryn, & wepyn as þei sche had seyn Crist in hys childhode. And, yf sche 178

bo oks for the unlearned myth an had hir wille, oftyn-tymes sche wolde a takyn þe childeryn owt of þe moderys armys & a kyssed hem in þe stede of Criste. And, ȝyf sche sey a semly man, sche had gret peyn to lokyn on hym les þan sche myth a seyn hym þat was boþe God & man. & þerfore sche cryed many tymes & oftyn whan sche met a semly man & wept & sobbyd ful sor in þe manhod of Crist as sche went in þe stretys at Rome þat þei þat seyn hir wondryd ful mych on hir, for þei knew not þe cawse. (p. 86) She sees biblical events and characters lying behind the ceremonies of the Church which commemorate them; she turns a Palm Sunday procession into an Entry into Jerusalem (pp. 184–5) and a Holy Thursday procession into a Via Crucis: On þe Holy Thursday, as þe sayd creatur went processyon wyth oþer pepil, sche saw in hir sowle owr Lady, Seynt Mary Mawdelyn,  & þe xij apostelys. And þan sche be-held wyth hir gostly eye how owr (Lady) toke hir leue of hir blysful Sone, Crist Ihesu, how he kyssed hir & alle hys apostelys & also hys trewe louer, Mary Mawdelyn. (p. 174) and on Candlemas Day she sees: owr Lady offeryng hyr blisful Sone owr Sauyowr to þe preyst Simeon in þe Tempyl, as verily to hir gostly vndirstondyng as ȝyf sche had be þer in hir bodily presens for to an offeryd wyth owr Ladys owyn persone. (p. 198) Here again the two layers of time, past and eternal present, are seen as touching, the interface having become transparent. The most interesting of her perceptions is: Also whan sche sey weddyngys, men & women ben joyned togedyr aftyr þe lawe of þe Chirche a-non sche had in meditacyon how owr Lady was joynyd to Joseph & of the gostly joynyng of mannys sowle  to Ihesu Crist, preying to owr Lord þat hir lofe & hir ­affeccyon  myth be joynyd to hym only wyth-owtyn ende … (pp.  198–9) Here she not only sees a biblical (actually an apocryphal) event behind the present event, she also sees an anagogical one; then she relates that to her own mystical marriage, which though it took place in Rome and in her soul, might from the words used and the form of congratulations offered (‘And þan þe Modyr of God & alle þe seyntys þat wer þer present in hir sowle preyde þat 179

bo oks for the unlearned þei myth haue mech joy to-gedyr’ (p. 87)) have taken place in real life at home in Norfolk. She sees these epiphanies as being sudden illuminations: for sche had hem not of hir owyn stody ne of hir owyn witte, but of hys ȝyfte whos wisdom is incomprehensibyl to alle creaturys saf  only to hem þat he chesith & illuminyth mor er lesse as he wil hys owyn selfe, for hys wil may not be constreyned, it is in hys owyn fre disposicyon. (p. 199) It is, however, noticeable that these last seeings are called up by rites and ceremonies in which man has tried to formalise something of the many-­ layeredness of our experience of God, and which the plays and meditations try to make explicit. The only difference between the ceremonies on the one hand, and the plays and meditations on the other is that the ceremonies start as the general, available to everyone, and the individual then makes them personal and particular, whereas the plays and meditations apparently start from the particular (the processe, involving particular persons and incidents) and move through the general (the significacioun, available to all) to the personal (the response of each individual). Margery’s reactions to her seeings is to weep with ‘profownde teerys, syhyngys, & sobbyngys, & sumtyme soft teerys & preuy wyth-owtyn any boistownesse’ (p. 199). Her extravagance of response should not blind us to the truth of her reaction: to have such an epiphany is an emotional shock as well as an enlightenment, because it is partly administered to us through our emotions. I have once had a typological experience of this kind: it was mediated through a ceremony, though not one which would have been available  to  Margery. It was a christening, though it happened to be the christening of the son of our then curate, who was being baptised by his father. As the  priest, in all the hieratic splendor of white and red and gold, took the baby in his arms, for a moment two images were superimposed on each other. The Church was accepting into its care the newborn soul, but at the same time it was a real father receiving his own son – and the relationship for that instant transferred itself from the one to the other and onwards to the Fatherhood of God, and yet they were all present simultaneously. It was in its way something of a theatrical experience: there was the role-playing, the costume, the gesture, the visual crystallisation of a relationship, but it was underpinned by the real-life relationship. The plays supply their version of this real-life relationship by presenting us with the narrative characters who have a known part to play in the story, and whose emotional relationships are recognisably the same as ours. We have seen some of the ways in which the moral and spiritual levels are communicated. Like the meditations they do much of this verbally and explicitly, but the plays have the advantage that they can also use ‘bodies and bodily thinges’ to speak to us directly without words. 180

bo oks for the unlearned Acknowledgements I should like to thank Professor S.S. Hussey for introducing me to these the lower reaches of meditation and for allowing me to quote from his unpublished thesis, an edition of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection from BL MS Harley 6579; Miss Helen Phillips for trying to keep my argument under control; and Mr Peter Meredith for sharing his expertise and enthusiasm, particularly on the subject of N-Town.

Notes  1. Testamenta Eboracensia, ed. by James Raine, 6 vols (Durham: Surtees Society, 1885), II, 117: ‘Lego fraternitati Corporis Christi in Eboraco quemdam librum vocatum Le Crede Play, cum libris et vexillis eidem pertinentibus. Et gilde Sancti Christoferi quemdam ludum (so original: Raine reads librum) de Sancto Jacobo Apostolo in sex paginis compilatum … Lego zonariis Civitatis Ebor., ad ludum suum in festo Corporis Christi, unam coronam auricalcam deauratam, et j. zona cum boses deauratis et enameld.’  2. Raine, Testamenta Eboracensia, II, 117: ‘Aliciæ Bolton, seniori, i. librum de Oracione Dominica et Stimulus Conscientiæ in Anglia … Willelmo Haryngton … Legendam Sanctorum in Anglia tractatam … Thomæ Tutbagg quemdam librum tractatum de Biblia in Anglica.’ For Thomas Tubbac or Tutbag, merchant, free 1430, who left in his Will (1487) ‘eccl. S. John. Evang. j. librum voc. Historia Scholastica cum cathena firrea ligandum, et in summo choro dictæ eccl. permanendum’, see Robert Skaife, Civic Officials of York and Parliamentary Representatives (York City Library, MS, ?1890) sv Tubbac. In 1454 Tubbac paid 3s 4d on behalf of the churchwardens of St John’s Ousebridge as a fee for having the fourth station of the Corpus Christi Cycle at the church that year: see M. Twycross, ‘“Places to Hear the Play”: Pageant Stations at York, 1398–1572’, Records of Early English Drama Newsletter (1978: 2), pp. 10–33.  3. Raine, Testamenta Eboracensia, II, 118: ‘johanni Bolton quemdam magnum Rotulum tractatum de Biblia in Latina cum ymaginibus ex una parte et Tabula Oracionis Dominicæ in Latina ex altera parte’.  4. Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, 2 vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979) I, 80 (1449/51) [ad laudem dei erudicionem(que) populi]. [Hereafter REED: York.]   5. F.P. Pickering, The Anglo-Norman Text of the Holkham Bible Picture Book, AngloNorman Texts, 23 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971), p. 3, ll. 12–13. It is to be shown to wealthy people: ‘mustré serra a riche gent’.   6. M.G.A. Vale, Piety, Charity and Literacy among the Yorkshire Gentry, 1370–1480, Borthwick Papers, 50 (York: St Anthony’s Press, 1976), pp. 29–30; and Joann H. Moran, Education and Learning in the City of York, 1300–1560, Borthwick Papers, 55 (York: St Anthony’s Press, 1979), pp. 29–31 and 34–7.   7. See C. Horstman, Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle of Hampole and His Followers, 2 vols. (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1895) for a collection of Northern English translations, not only of Rolle’s Latin works, but of The Mirrour of St. Edmund, and from the Pseudo Bonaventure Meditationes Vitae Christi, and other Latin meditative pieces; also Hilton’s Mixed Life, the Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost, and other English meditative works.   8. J.W. Robinson, ‘The Late Medieval Cult of Jesus and the Mystery Plays’, PMLA, 80 (1965), 508–15; Clifford Davidson, ‘Northern Spirituality and the Late

181

bo oks for the unlearned Medieval Drama of York’, in The Spirituality of Western Christendom, ed. by E. Rozanne Elder (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1976), pp. 125–51. See also Sandro Sticca, ‘Drama and Spirituality in the Middle Ages’, Medievalia et Humanistica, NS 4 (1973), 69–87; Laurence G. Craddock, ‘Franciscan Influences on Early English Drama’, Franciscan Studies, 10 (1950), 383–417; David L. Jeffrey, ‘Franciscan Spirituality and the Rise of Early English Drama’, Mosaic, 8 (1975), 17–46. It would seem however that in the fifteenth century, the Carthusians were equally influential.  9. It is now attributed to his fellow Franciscan Johannes de Caulibus: Sancti Bonaventurae Opera Omnia, ed. by A.C. Peltier, 15 vols (Paris: Vives, 1868), XII. 10. Raine, Testamenta Eboracensia, II, 232. 11. Margaret Deanesley, ‘Vernacular Books in England in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, Modern Language Review, 15 (1920), 354–5. 12. It would be difficult to do this accurately, as there is no definitive modern edition, and work on the various manuscripts and cannibalisations of Love is likely to go  on for some years yet. I use the edition by Lawrence F. Powell, The Mirrour of  the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ, Roxburghe Club (Oxford: Clarendon Press,  1908). See further Elizabeth Salter, Nicholas Love’s ‘Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ’, Analecta Cartusiana, ed. by James Hogg, 10 (Salzburg, 1974). [Readers are now able to use Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Reading Text, ed. by Michael G. Sargent (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2004). References in this essay remain to the 1908 edition. Ed.] 13. MS Harley 6579, fol. 9r (Book 1, chapter 15). Professor Hussey kindly provided me with this quotation. 14. Horstman, Yorkshire Writers, I, 223–4 (MS Thornton: Lincoln Cathedral Library, A 1, 17) 15. Sandford B. Meech and Hope Emily Allen, The Book of Margery Kempe, EETS, OS 212 (1940), p. 144. 16. William of St Thierry, Epistle to the Brethren of Mount Dieu, ed. by Abbot Justin McCann (London: Burns, Oates, 1930), p. 76. 17. Mirrour, ed. Powell, pp. 82–3. 18. Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 90: the quotation is from Durandus, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum (Naples, 1859), p. 24. 19. A Middle English Treatise on the Playing of Miracles (A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge), ed. by Clifford Davidson (Washington DC: University Press of America, 1981). 20. Woolf, Mystery Plays, p. 79; see also REED: York, p. 37: ‘ob magnam deuocionis Causam’; Records of Early English Drama: Chester, ed. by Lawrence M. Clopper (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), p. 33: ‘to exhort the myndes of the comen peple to gud deuocion and holsom doctryne ther of’. 21. Douglas Gray, A Selection of Religious Lyrics (Oxford: Clarendon Medieval and Tudor Texts, 1975), no. 33, lines 8–9 (p. 34). 22. Eleanor Prosser, Drama and Religion in the English Mystery Plays, Stanford Studies in Language and Literature, XXIII (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961). 23. Ludolphus de Saxonia, Vita Jesu Christi (Paris: Palmé, 1865), p. 1. 24. Roger Ellis, ‘A Literary Approach to the Middle English Mystics’ in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, ed. by Marion Glasscoe (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1980), pp. 99–119.

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bo oks for the unlearned 25. J.W. Robinson, ‘The Art of the York Realist’, Modern Philology, LX (1963), 244; Clifford Davidson, ‘The Realism of the York Realist and the York Passion’, Speculum, 50 (1975), 274–5. 26. Woolf, Mystery Plays, pp. 173–4, 180–1. 27. Ludus Coventriae, ed. by K.S. Block, EETS, ES 120 (1922). 28. M.P. Forrest, ‘The Role of the Expositor Contemplacio in the St Anne’s Day Plays of the Hegge Cycle’, Medieval Studies, 28 (1966), 60–76. 29. The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. by R.M. Lumiansky and David Mills, EETS, SS 3 (1974). 30. V.A. Kolve, The Play called Corpus Christi (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), p. 32. 31. Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. by Norman Davis, EETS, SS 1 (1970), 56. 32. The York Plays, ed. by Lucy Toulmin Smith (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963). 33. The Towneley Plays, ed. by George England, EETS, ES 71 (1897). 34. Peter Meredith, ‘“Nolo Mortem” and the Ludus Coventriae Play of the Woman Taken in Adultery’, Medium Aevum, 38 (1969), 47. 35. The Digby Plays, ed. by F.J. Furnivall, EETS, ES 70 (1896), 171–226. Peter Meredith has discussed the rubrics and their intention in a paper given at the Dublin Colloquium of the International Society for the Study of Medieval Theatre (1980). 36. Legenda Aurea, ed. by T. Graesse (Dresden and Leipzig, 1846), p. 587. 37. See note 34 above. 38. The etymology comes from Isidore, Etymologiae, ed. by W.M. Lindsay, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911), Book VII, vi, 59, where it is applied to Hannah, the mother of Samuel. Since the story of Anna is partly modelled on that of her namesake, it remained appropriate. See F.J. Mone, Lateinische Hymnen des Mittelalters, 3 vols (Freiburg im Breslau, 1853–5), III, 184–200 for hymns playing on the etymology. 39. I call this the Annunciation rather than by Block’s title of the Salutation, which can be confused with the Visitation. 40. The conceit Eva / Ave was commonplace (see Rosemary Woolf, English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) pp. 115–16) and was enshrined in the Ave maris stella, sung on the Feast of the Assumption of the BVM, and in the Missus Gabriel de coelis, sung in the Mass of the BVM during Advent. The Eva / vae conceit was almost as familiar, though sometimes concealed in allusions such as Eva tristis and Evae fletum (see Mone, Hymnen, II, 231, 237, 498: an elaboration of the Alma redemptoris mater (p. 200) has tibi dicunt omnes ‘ave!’ / quia mundum solvens a vae / mutasti vocem flentium; see also pp. 97, 111). Ludolphus de Saxonia links this with a quotation from the Ave maris stella: Mutans ergo Angelus nomen Evae Dicit Virgini: Ave, indicans eam ab omni vae liberam (Vita Jesu Christi, p. 20). This could be the direct source. 41. The Sequence asked for in the stage direction at the end of the play is a short elaboration on the Ave Maria; for other more elaborate ones, see Mone, Hymnen, II, 90–114. Prose meditations are innumerable. For an English rosary prayer, see Horstman, Yorkshire Writers, 1, 377–9: like the play, it addresses her as ‘Qwene of heuene, Lady of erthe, Empryce of helle … socoure and comforthe to þe saluacyone of alle Mankynde’. 42. Ludolphus de Saxonia quotes Chrysostom: she was troubled ‘propter novie apparitionis speciem; quia etsi consueta fuit videre Angelum, nunc tamen novo modo apparuit ei, sumpta specie corporali, et cum ingenti lumine et splendore’ (p. 21). This also seems to imply that she was not used to angels in human form.

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bo oks for the unlearned 43. Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter, ‘Masks in Medieval English Theatre’, Medieval English Theatre, 3:2 (1981), 100–5. 44. See the Collect (oracio) in The Sarum Missal, ed. by Wickham Legg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916), p. 249. For the Festival of the Presentation of the BVM, see R.W. Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) pp. 103–15.

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8 ‘TRANSVESTISM’ IN THE MYSTERY PLAYS

Most of us know, academically speaking, that in medieval English mysteries the women’s parts were played by men, but no-one seems to have followed through the implications of this in terms of theatrical style. This paper is an attempt to explore some of these implications. It is based on work done during 1982/3 with my Medieval Theatre students at Lancaster, and owes a great deal to their skills and enthusiasm. I am particularly indebted to Peter Norton, who did a practical project on the subject: I shall quote fairly extensively from his paper and verbal reports. I would also like to thank Nick Murchie, Tony Bell, and Mike Elliston of Lancaster University and John Turner, then at Lancaster Royal Grammar School, for playing the women on the various occasions. It all arose from my decision to revert to medieval practice and cast men to play the parts of Anna the prophetess and the Blessed Virgin Mary in the production of the Chester Purification and Doctors which was our contribution to the Leeds Festival performance of the Chester Cycle on 30th April–2nd May 1983, and which we also performed at Chester itself and in various other places during the summer of 1983 (see Plates 1 and 2). Peter Norton’s project was designed to look more closely at this aspect of the production, and was first presented to a largely undergraduate audience at Lancaster, where it occasioned a lively and useful discussion, but we also took it to the METh meeting on ‘Characterisation’ at Salford on 26th March 1983. He chose two strongly contrasting scenes: the N-Town Visitation, which centres on the two serious female roles of Mary and Elizabeth, and the first fight episode from the Towneley Noah, which shows Mrs. Noah at her most comically combative. Each of these scenes was played twice, first with women and then with men playing the female roles. The male characters were played by the same actors both times. At Lancaster, the male and female actors had not seen each other’s performances; for Salford, when they had, we worked on slightly different aspects of the characterisation, which I will explain when I come to each in detail. Most of my illustrations in this paper will be taken from these performances, and my thinking owes a lot to the discussions in and outside the seminar. 185

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s I am not very happy with the word ‘transvestism’ in my title: it has too many irrelevant and catchpenny connotations. ‘Cross-playing’ (by ­analogy with ‘cross-dressing’) sounds more sober, and I shall use it where it seems to be called for. But in fact, the wearing of female clothes was at the centre of the sixteenth-century discussion about the playing of women’s roles in stageplays: the text which was invoked against it was Deuteronomy 22:5: Non induetur mulier veste virili, nec vir utetur veste feminea; ­abominabilis enim apud Deum est qui facit haec. A woman shall not be clothed with man’s apparel, neither shall a man use woman’s apparel: for he that doeth these things is abominable before God. (Douai Rheims translation) Practically, this is an acknowledgement that the transformation is most conspicuously wrought by the change of garments, but the image that develops is that of ‘putting on’ a role as one puts on a garment, and this has interesting effects on their perception of the nature of this kind of acting. But more of this later.

Historical evidence Since even at Salford there seemed to be a residual reluctance to accept the original premise, it is worth spelling out the evidence. For the English mystery plays, we are limited, as usual, to those guild accounts which show payments to named actors with named roles, and these are, not surprisingly, thin on the ground. Of the major Cycles, Coventry is the most helpful. The Weavers’ play of the Purification, as ‘newly translate’ by Robert Croo in 1534, has two substantial female roles, Mary and Anna, and by a stroke of luck we have the names of three actors who played Anna, one before and two after the ‘translation’, and of one actor who played Mary. The relevant entries are:1 1524 Resseyvyd of our lady Rychard byrscow Resseyvyd of Anne thomas sogdyn

xd x d

(122)

1525 Item payd to mare Item payd to sodden for Ane

x d x d

(124)

1527

Resseyvyd of Rychard brysco

x d

(126)

1544

Resseyvyd of rychard ye capper borsleys man that playth ane

wax

(168)

1550

Item resseyvyd of hew heyns pleyng anne for hys fyns

vjd

186

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s …… Item payd to anne

xx d

1551

viij d (188)

Resseyvyd of hewe heyns capper

(186)

These are the only occasions when the players are named, though the roles continue to be mentioned. As Reg Ingram points out, Hugh Heyns and Richard, Borsley’s man, were both Cappers, not Weavers; had the Weavers to go outside the Guild for specialist roles?2 The other named Coventry actor playing a female role belongs to the Smiths: Ryngolds man Thomas þat playtt pylatts wyff in 1496. There are payments to Pilate’s wife from 1477 to 1499 (after which individual roles are not mentioned in the surviving records): the two runs of dates thus cover 74 years of playing: 1477 Item for sowing of dame procula [Pilate’s]   Wyff Shevys [?shoes] Item for mendyng of dame procula garments

iij d vij d

(60) (61)

1488 Item to reward to Maisturres grymesby for lendyng Off her geir ffor pylatts wife xij d

(69)

1489 … heyrynge of procula is gowne

(72)

ij d ob.

1496 Ryngolds man Thomas þat playtt pylatts wyff 1499 Item payd to dame Percula for his wages Item paid to pylatts wyffe for his wages

(86)

ij s viij d ij s (93)

More ambiguous is the name of the actor who played Solome (Salome) in The Destruction of Jerusalem in 1584, Fraunces Cocckes. The sixteenth century did not make the modern spelling distinction between Francis and Frances; however, since the other apparently female part, Zilla, was played by one Henry Chamberleyne together with that of Pristus and ‘a pece of Ananus’, the actor is almost certainly a Francis.3 Unfortunately there are no named actors playing female parts in Chester.4 As Peter Meredith has pointed out, however, there are some interesting gaps.5 In the Smiths’ Purification of 1561 (p. 67) it looks very much as if Thomas Ellam, listed next to Anna as earning 12d for his performance, played the missing role of the Virgin Mary. However, since the role of Joseph is also missing, he might have played that, leaving Mary for another male actor, William Loker, who is paid 16d for plleyinge (sic: Mary is usually paid slightly more than Joseph in this production). Ellam is not listed in 1561 as a member of the company, and the Freemen’s List turns up two Thomas Ellams, one a clerk and tayler made free on 28th August 1559, so possibly about 23, another a singer made free 11th October 1574, which unless it was an unusually 187

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s late admission (possible, considering his profession) would make him only about eight at the time of playing. Loker or Looker is named as a member of the Guild, and if he was the furbour, alias William Richardson, who was made free on 26th September 1544, would have been about 38 at the time. One of the Ellams seems the most plausible.6 As always, there is no guarantee that the men with these names in the Freemen’s Lists are the ones mentioned in the accounts. But the important thing there is that the names are all male. A substantial piece of evidence comes from New Romney in Kent in 1555, when the players engaged for a large-scale place-and-scaffold Passion play signed recognisances binding them to learn their parts, appear at rehearsals, and perform.7 The lists of actors and roles give nearly a full New Testament cast: … Iohn Crockey Annas handmayde … … Iohn Watt St. Philipe & ye blynd mans mother … … Iohn Wallys martha / Iames Christian magdalen /   Henr(y) Standen marthas servaunt …   … Robert Gallyn Marye the vyrgyn … Leonard Iolly marye salome … The play was apparently produced at least at early as 1428.8 The female character one might think least susceptible of being played by a man is Eve, but in the Norwich Grocers’ play of the Fall in 1534, she was played by Frances Fygot.9 His Christian name may again be spelled ambiguously, but he is not the only male Eve on record in Britain. In Perth, on 23rd May 1553, the Hammermen’s Accounts record: Item þis instant ȝeir ar chosen playaris to wit george allan trinitie / Andro brydie adam / dauid horne eue / patrik balmen þe mekle d ­ evill  / Robert colbert þe serpent / Williame [?] þe angell / Andro ­kelour þe litill angell … Iohne robertsoun sanct eloy / Andro throskaill marmadin …10 The mermaid seems to belong to the story of St. Eloi, the patron saint of the guild. Some clues can be picked up from accompanying music. In Coventry, the Mothers of the Innocents in the Shearmen and Taylors’ play were played by men, as their famous ‘lullaby’ is scored for alto, tenor, and bass.11 (Richard Rastall has some interesting things to say about the way in which is it scored.)12 Liturgical drama is slightly different, as the tradition is more obviously singlesex, but it is worth noting that the Shrewsbury Fragments contain a part ­written for someone who apparently played the Third Mary, Third Shepherd, and Cleophas the pilgrim to Emmaus, and the accompanying music is written for male voices.13 188

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s So far the overwhelming evidence is for male actors. There are no unambiguously female names recorded, either attached to named roles, or in the lists of players willing to play, as for example for the Cappers at Coventry in 1566; Ingram notes that since Halliwell-Phillipps’ ‘interest at that time was  in  the possibility of women acting’, his only comment on the list is ‘all men’.14 At this point someone is sure to invoke the Chester Early Banns: The wurshipfful wyffys of this towne ffynd of our Lady thassumpcion It to bryng forth they be bowne And meyntene with all theyre might. (1539–40)15 The Banns do not however say that the Worshipful Wives are to act the play. They are to ffynd, bryng forth, and meyntene it; in other words, they produce and finance it, and make sure that it appears on the streets of Chester on the third day at the right time. Unfortunately we need not even imagine an early Joan Littlewood directing the play; all the Wives would have to do would be to hire some male pageant-master to do it for them. The guilds were not chary about having their female members pay for the play, but they do not seem to have invited them to act.16 One is reminded of the present-day situation at Elche, also an Assumption play, where the women are allowed to make costumes and do the washing, but not, as far as one can see, to come anywhere near rehearsals, which are the men’s mystery. In any case, though The Assumption of Our Lady is an appropriate subject for the Townswomen’s Guild to sponsor, it is not a particularly rewarding one for women to act: the York Assumption features only one female role (Mary) to twelve Apostles and several (male) angels. The one genuine exception to this rule in English theatre seems to be, as John Marshall pointed out at the Salford meeting, the dancers in Wisdom. The stage direction for the third dance stipulates: Here entreth six women in sut, thre dysgysyde as galontys and thre as matrones, wyth wondyrfull vysurs congruent; here mynstrell, a hornepype.17 This does seem to suggest that we have a professional troupe of female dancers, three of whom are dressed transvestitely as galontys (dysgysyde merely means ‘costumed’ – it does not have the connotations of deceit that our use of the word now has). They could be boys, but as Eccles says, ‘it is not easy to see why boys disguised as gallants should be called women’.18 Will says of the proposed dance ‘Here forme ys of þe stewys clene rybaldry’ (line 749), and it is possible that a professional troupe might have been called in to dance something professionally lewd. It is interesting to speculate on the relations 189

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s between the dancers and the rest of the cast, especially if they were, as has been suggested (though not on particularly strong grounds) ecclesiastics. It should be stressed that the fact that a stage direction may call a character ‘she’ or ‘her’, or a guild account entry list a female role, does not mean it is evidence of the sex of the actor. Without the name Hugh Heyns, Thomas Sugden, or Richard Briscoe, we would never have known that the Anna and Our Lady of the Coventry Cappers were played by men. Stage directions indicate the role rather than the performer, and experience shows that this tends to happen in production as well. There comes a point in the proceedings where everyone starts to refer to the role rather than the actor (‘Where’s the Virgin Mary?’) and gets a certain evil pleasure from deliberately twisting the answer (‘She’s in the Gents having a shave’). Paid to dame Percula for his wages sounds like a tongue-in-cheek version of the same thing. How and why this convention of cross-playing arose we can only speculate. It seems likely that it echoes the casting of liturgical plays, where the clergy were naturally all men (exceptions like the Nuns of Barking or Hrotswitha’s colleagues are due to very particular circumstances). This, combined with the low reputation of female tombesteres and other professional entertainers, of whom we know very little, but whose name seems to have been synonymous with ‘harlot’, would be enough to create a tradition, and the tradition to engender a taboo.19 An Elche-like sense of acting as a male prerogative was probably combined with a fear of the dangers to female modesty (in every sense) of allowing your wives and daughters to act in public with men not of their own immediate family. It should be remembered that we are talking about amateurs.

Other theatrical events It is interesting and useful to compare this with other forms of show, from religious processions to disguisings. One might think that in processions, where the danger to female modesty would be far less, one might find women enacting female roles. At first some of the evidence seems to point this way: for example, the Coventry Corpus Christi Day procession which featured the Blessed Virgin Saints Catherine and Margaret, and up to eight virgins, seems always to refer to Mary’s wages and her gloves, but again, this is not necessarily an indication of ‘her’ actual sex.20 The Beverley records newly edited by Diana Wyatt contain detailed instructions (dated in a return of 1389) for two dramatic processions, one of St. Helena and one of the Purification.21 Both heroines are enacted by men: the Guild of St. Helena are to assemble on the Feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross: & ibi ordinatus pulcherrimus Iuuenis qui ad hoc apcior inuenire poterit & decenter ornatus & vestitus ad modum Regine & ad ­instar sancte Elene & quidam Senex ante eundem Iuuenem baiulans 190

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s quandam crucem & alius senex portans vnam vangam similiter ante eundem Iuuenem in signum Inuencionis crucis predicte … [and there the fairest young man and the most suitable for this role who can be found having been appointed, and appropriately arrayed and robed in the manner of a Queen and in the likeness of St. Helena, and a certain old man, preceding the same young man, bearing a certain cross, and another old man carrying a [lit. one] spade similarly preceding the same young man, in token of the aforesaid Discovery of the Cross …] are to process two by two to the church of the Friars Minors and to the altar of St. Helena to make their offering. The ceremony of the Purification is even more play-like: the Guild of St. Mary are to assemble: eritque ibi ordinatus quidam de gilda qui ad hoc apcior inuenietur nobilissime & decenter vestitus & ornatus vt regina virgo instar gloriose virginis Marie habens quasi filium in vlnis suis / eruntque ibi alij duo assimilantes Iosephum & Simeonem / eruntque duo Angeli portantes candelabrum formam cratis habens & super se xxiiijor grosses cereos cum aliis magnis & grossis luminaribus precedentibus et sic cum omnia melodia & exultacione / dicta virgo cum filio suo / & Iosephus & Simeon sequentur dicta luminaria in processione versus dictam ecclesiam / sequenturque tunc immediate dictam virginem omnes sorores dicte gilde & postremo omnes fratres … ad dictam ecclesiam et cum ibi peruentum fuerit: offeret ibi dicta virgo filium suum Simeoni ad [ad] summum altare instar Purificationis gloriose virginis Marie … [and there shall be appointed a certain [man] of the Guild, the most suitable for this role who may be found, most nobly and a­ ppropriately robed and arrayed as a virgin queen in the likeness of the glorious Virgin Mary, having as it were a son in her arms; and there shall be two others there representing Joseph and Simeon, and there shall be two angels bearing a candlestick in the form of lattice work and on it twenty-four thick candles, with other large and thick lights preceding [them]; and thus with all melody and exultation the said virgin with her son and Joseph and Simeon shall follow the said lights in procession to the said church; and then shall follow immediately after the said virgin all the sisters of the said guild, and finally all the brothers … And they shall there go two by two, in sober order and at a moderate pace thus in procession to the said church, and when they shall have arrived there, the said virgin shall offer her son to Simeon at the high altar, in the likeness of the Purification of the glorious Virgin Mary …] 191

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s I have quoted this last in more detail, and shall return to it again, because in many respects it resembles what happened in our production of the Chester Purification. Here, however, notice how, though the sex of the person portraying the Virgin Mary is definitely male, he is thereafter described as dicta virgo, ‘the said virgin’; the role takes over from the actor. Street pageants seem occasionally to have used women or, as seems more likely, young girls. In the London Lord Mayor’s Show of 1523, payments are recorded: to Gleyns daughter for thassumpcion & Childes eldest daughter for Saynt Vrsula & vj virgens wt hyr bothe nyghtes after viijd apece. Summa vs iiijd.22 Twelve years later, 2s 8d was paid out: to Elyn Tuck that plaied the ladye .M. Elizabeth smyth agnes Newell & to Margret Cristean the iij ladies that satt in þe same pagent after viijd a pece.23 This would seem to be clear evidence of ‘actresses’, as the Malone Society edition indexes them, but later in the same accounts there are references to the Children in the pageants, and it looks as if Ellen Tuck and her fellow actresses were not full-grown women; the use of the term Gleyns daughter suggests the same. A century and a half earlier, at the Coronation of Richard II, a pageant castle was built in Cheapside in the towers of which: quatuor virgines speciosissimae collocatae fuerant, staturae et aetatis regiae, vestibus albis indutae, in qualibet turri una … [there had been placed four very lovely maidens, of the same age and  height as the King, dressed in white robes, one in each of the towers …]24 As the King approached, they wafted gold leaves, and scattered imitation gold florins on him and his destrier. Note that they are said to be the same age and stature as the King, that is, ten years old. Groups of ‘maidens’ playing various roles appear in most Royal Entries thence onward.25 In 1501, Katherine of Aragon was greeted at the Drawbridge by a faire yong lady wt a whele in hir hand, in liknes of Seint Kathryn, wt right many virgins on eu(e)ry side of her; and … another lady in likenes of Seint Ursula, wt her great multitude of virgyns right goodly dressed and arrayed.26 192

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s But this ‘multitide of virgins’ are not necessarily all they seem. Glynne Wickham and Hillebrand point out that they are often choirboys: ‘Singing Childerne. Some arrayde like Angells and others like vyrgyns’.27 In 1464 at the Coronation of Elizabeth Woodville, the pageant on the Drawbridge also showed female saints – apparently the Holy Kindred – but the accounts show that the performers paid for playing the parts were boys: Et Salamon Batell pro labore suo vice & loco Sancti Elizabeth loquentis Regine ad pontem traxentem – xx d. Et Edmunde Herte ibidem extistenti loco Marie Cleophe – xx d.28 Other female figures in the pageant were literally ymagines muliebris. The angels and the ‘girls’ both wore saffron-dyed flax wigs, which suggests that they were choirboys. The use of children in pageants, especially complicated mechanical ones, was partly dictated by the convenience of having someone lightweight to ‘fly’ from heaven or stand in an elaborate structure: in Katherine of Aragon’s Royal Entry, the ‘III armyd Knights’ which turned the wheel of the Zodiac at the approach of the Princess turn out to be ‘iiij yong stripelinges of the age of xij or xiij yeres’.29 The girl playing ‘thassumpcion’ had to be flown in a harness.30 Thus, it would appear that the ‘virgins’ of the pageant stages were either boys or very young girls. It seems to have been permissible for the girls to appear (both here and on the Continent), just as it is permissible for girls below the age of puberty to appear in public in Gulf Arab countries with uncovered faces; they are officially sexless, as it were. After puberty, they have to wear the traditional mask. The same seems to happen in the secular processions that feature female characters. Fairly late on in Chester, when the plays had ceased, we find the Mercers dressing a ‘lady’ for the Midsummer Show in a dress of russet fustian and buckram, with gold parchment lace and gold buttons, and corseted with whalebone (1605), but the Mercers’ Company Book makes it plain that while the boy that accompanies the ‘lady’ is a ‘comely stripling’, his companion is ‘some other childe, to Ride as a gentelwoman or ladye’.31 In the same way, I suspect that the Alewife figure in the Cups and Cans Show of the Innkeepers was probably not a woman but a Betty, despite the ‘geven to heare for heare paynes’.32 ‘She’ would fit in with the tradition of men dressing up as women in masquerades which was frowned on and frequently legislated against by the authorities, which would partly explain why Mayor Henry Hardware decided to put her down.33 In post-Reformation Scotland the authorities invoked Scripture against mummings involving transvestism, as, for example, in Aberdeen on 4th August 1605: anent the delation geven in to the sessioun aganis sum young men and young wemen of this citie, for dansing throcht the towne 193

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s togidder this last vlk, the tyme of the brydellis; the young men being cled in wemennis apparell, quhilk is accompted abhominatioun be the law of God that ony man suld put on wemennis rayment, Deuteronomie 22, vs 5; and the young wemen for dansing opinlie with thame throw the streittis, with maskis on thair faces, thairby passing the bounds of modestie and schamefastnes, quhilk aucht to be in young wemen, namely in a reformed citie.34 The one form of entertainment in which grown women were apparently allowed to take part were the Court masking and disguisings. Since these were private entertainments, even royal ladies were allowed to play a leading, though possibly silent, role: Of these foresayd .vi. ladyes, the lady Mary, syster vnto the kyng was one, the other I name not.35 However, the more play-like entertainments at court featured Cornish’s Children of the Chapel playing female roles, which leads us to the beginning of the boys’ companies, about which much has been written.36

Continental parallels37 On the Continent, things seem to have been much the same as in England, though there is no room here to attempt an exhaustive survey. The exception appears to be France and occasionally the Low Countries.38 (The appearance of French actresses in London as late as 1629 caused considerable scandal.)39 But even France did not consistently practice what we would consider to be the normal pattern. Women did appear on stage: for example, in the Romans performance of Le Mystère des Trois Doms in 1509 all the female roles were apparently taken by women,40 and in 1535 at Grenoble Francoise Buatier played the Virgin Mary and charmed everyone by les gestes, la voix, la pronunciation, le débit.41 In general, however, the rule seems to be that young girls were allowed to play, but older women were not. The Mary of the Avignon Presentation of 1372 and her two companions were only circiter trium aut iiijor annorum; though the rest of the cast list suggests that women were used, it later becomes clear that Ecclesia, described in the introduction as mulier pulcerrima etatis circiter .xx. annorum (‘a most lovely woman of about twenty years old’) is in fact quidam pulcerrimus iuuenis circa xx. annos sine barba et … capillis mulieris extensis super humeris (‘a very lovely young man of about twenty years old, beardless, and … with the most beautiful woman’s locks spread over his shoulders’) – it thus seems plausible that Synagoga and Anna are also men.42 This is liturgical drama, where one might expect to find men, but the same applies in the mystery plays. In Mons in 1501, ‘the daughter of George de la Motte’ played the Virgin Mary aged seven, and ‘Waudru, daughter of Jorge de la Nerle’ played Mary aged fourteen (up to and including the Nativity), the bride of John the Evangelist, and Florence the daughter of Herodias. But Eve was played by a man, Colin Rifflart; Elizabeth by Colart Olivier, who also appeared 194

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s as St. John the Evangelist; Mary Magdalene by Jehan Maisnard, priest and Canon of Saint-Germain; as were most of the other women’s parts. Waudru also seems to have played Victoria, the Fourth Daughter of Sion, but the other three Daughters were played by men, one of whom, Jehan Macquefosse, also played Satan before he fell.43 In Valenciennes in 1547 a number of jeunes filles appear at the end of the cast list: Jennette Caraheu played the Virgin Mary and Hagar, servant of St. Anne, and Jennotte Watiez, Jennette Tartelette, Checille Gerard, and Cole (? a boy’s name) Labequin several minor female rôles, including those of the maidens of the Temple and the Daughters of Jerusalem. But the maidens of the Temple also included boys: Guislain Rasoir played la jonesse de la Vierge Marie, and Josse le Ricque doubled the child Christ confounding the Doctors and Jairus’ daughter. There are no adult women in the cast list: certain men seem to specialise in female roles, for example, Jehan le Trieure ‘dict l’Enfant’ played Magdalene, Jhennot de la Myne Herodias and St. Anne, Jehan Denis Truth and the Queen of Iscariot, and the other three Daughters of God were also men.44 The most striking example of the apparent interchangeability of boys and girls in female roles comes from Metz: in 1468 a girl of around eighteen, daughter of Dediet the glazier: portoit le personnaige de saincte Catherine … et fist merveilleusement bien son debvoir, au gré et plaisir d’un chescun. Touttes fois avoit ladite fille vingt trois cents vers de personnaige, et neant-moins elle les scavoit tous sur le doigt; et parla celle fille si vivement et piteusement qu’elle provocqua plusieurs gens a pleurer, et estoit agreable a toutes gens.45 A gentleman soldier of Metz fell promptly in love with her and married her. In 1485, however, when Metz put on a play of St. Barbara, the part was played by a boy called Lyonnard: ung jonne fils bairbier … qui estoit ung tres beaul filz et ressembloit une belle jonne fille … qui fist – le personnaige de saincte Barbe si preudemment et devotement que plusieurs personnes pleuroient de compassion; car il tenoit si bonne faconde et maniere avec si bonne mine et gestes avec ses pucelles, qu’il estoit a chescun agreable et n’estoit possible de mieulx faire.46 His reward was to be sent to school, and he eventually became a Master of Arts and Canon of Metz. The next year he played St. Catherine, but with less success, because his voice had begun to break (ledit Lyonnard avoit desja un peu mué sa voix), and the part was not as well written as that of St. Barbara.47 Elsewhere in Europe the pattern was more like that in England: in Spain, a husband, wife, and baby team played the Holy Family because it was thought 195

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s that this would be edifying to the audience, but this seems to be the exception.48 At Lucerne Renwart Cysat began his dramatic career by playing the Virgin Mary, and while Regent of the play he implemented regulations to try and clear even serving maids out of the acting area during performances.49

Attitudes ancient and modern So much for the evidence. What we have, then, is a theatre in which men (and boys) are the rule: girls are a very rare exception. Women never appear in England, unless they are professional entertainers of a particularly specialised (and it must be said, hardly evidenced) kind. Any attempt to assess the effects of this on theatrical style is bound to be distorted by our twentieth-century assumptions. For us, men playing women are the exception, not the rule, and fall into two categories; the pantomime dame and the drag-queen. Both these stereotypes do, in my opinion, turn up in the mystery plays: Mrs. Noah is a classic Dame, and the York Percula, Pilate’s Wife, has distinct traces of the drag-queen. Both are traditional theatrical and, before that, folk figures: there are good reasons for their existence, and we shall look at them in due course. But we are not used to having the serious women’s parts played by men: the Maries, the Magdalens, the Elizabeths. For us, men playing women means transvestism of one sort or another; it has either an element of parody or of misaligned sexuality. It is very difficult for a modern audience not to feel some kind of gut reaction against it. My students sensed this at the Salford meeting, where the audience should certainly have been used to the idea intellectually, but the majority seemed to react instinctively most strongly against it. When pushed, they were clearly happier with the idea of boys playing women than with the idea of full-grown men, for what seemed to be more than logical historical reasons. Oddly enough, the students who worked on the project and discussed it were much more open and matter-of-fact about both accepting the concept and analysing their reactions to it. This student generation is currently more interested not only in sex roles, imposed or genetic, but also in the areas in between, the overlapping of roles and characteristics. They recognise, even if they do not actually imitate, the Boy George figure: they enjoy playing the ‘is he or isn’t he?’ game. It may be that this is a passing fashion – and possibly only a British one – but it meant that it was much easier to engage on the project than it would have been, say, twenty years ago. Even so, the degree of willingness to take part depended on the person. Our Mary in the Purification was eager to play the role, partly because he felt it would improve his outré image with his contemporaries; our Anna (who had last appeared as Harry Hotspur) shared the reactions of Peter Happé [METh 5.2, p. 110 Ed.] and Francis Flute the bellows-mender, with the horror outweighing the fascination. He always kept at a distance from his role, and tended to send it up, consciously and unconsciously; he ended up playing a very stagey old woman 196

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s (see Plates 1 and 2). One wonders if the fines meted out to Hugh Heyns, the Coventry Anna, were due to a similar reluctance. Our reactions are bound not to be medieval, for the simple reason that for us, in the serious theatre, men play men and women play women, and any departure from this norm is thereby highlighted. In our post-Stanislavskian era, this also goes with an assumption that any actor playing a woman must necessarily have been trying to impersonate one naturalistically. There is very little, however, to suggest, either from the way in which the plays are written or from what we know of the general mode of presentation, that this was likely to have been the case, and here the alienation effect produced by this to us unnatural proceeding may in its distorted way tell us something by practical experiment about the mode of medieval theatre. The effects of cross-playing are also peculiarly difficult to assess because it assaults our sense of our own sexual identity, and there is no real way of gauging how far it would have done this when there was no other pattern against which to match it. Moreover, your reaction to what is going on is bound to be conditioned by your own sex. This complicates the matter even further: if we talk of ‘audience reaction’ which half of the audience are we talking about? ‘Medieval Man’ or medieval Woman? When we tried the experiment for the first time at Lancaster, we found a distinct split between the reactions and preferences of the men and the women members of the audience. The Towneley Noah actually makes use of the split by setting the two halves of the audience against each other: Yee men that has wifis, whyls they ar yong, If ye luf youre lifis, chastice thare tong  ll. 397–8 And We women may wary all ill husbandis  ll. 208 though here the use of the dichotomy is a lot more sophisticated and tonguein-cheek than it at first seems, when you remember that Mrs. Noah was played by a man. I am therefore at a disadvantage because though I can imagine what a man’s reaction to our male Mary or Mrs. Noah might be, I can never experience it at first hand, and I have a suspicion the plays were written primarily by men for men. Partly for this reason, we (as editors) asked a variety of people to write down their reactions to the Salford demonstration and/or the Chester Purification for us: it will be interesting to see whether they do in fact have different reactions or see different features as important [see METh 5.2, pp. 110–18 Ed.]. On the whole, with some honourable exceptions, I have found that when I have talked about it to my friends, the women have reacted to the whole concept much more positively than the men, possibly because 197

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s they feel less threatened by the subject, possibly also because at present they are more interested in exploring the redefining their own sexual roles. It is also a minefield of buried assumptions, and almost everything you say could potentially cause offence somewhere. But one can fall over backwards trying to be balanced: when I found myself writing ‘On the average, most men are larger than most women’ and worrying because I didn’t have statistical proof, I decided to be well and truly subjective, but to allow other voices, especially Peter Norton’s, to balance my reactions. However, despite the barriers of modern stage convention and modern sexual assumptions, I believe we can find out something about the probable effects of men playing women on medieval theatrical style. In many respects one must accept that it is a matter of ‘If such and such happened, then the effect was likely to have been such and such’, and that this is one thing that we as a twentieth-century audience are never likely fully to understand. However, though I cannot prove all my contentions, they fit in so well with other features of medieval theatre that they must be at least partially valid. We are not completely without contemporary evidence. Some of it is negative: for example, one might expect Of Miraclis Pleyinge to cite the text from Deuteronomy, but it does not, which suggests that cross-playing per se was not considered particularly offensive. The comments on the French boy, Lyonnard, show that beauty, poise, and pathos were valued. However, most of the serious discussion of cross-playing comes from the latter end of the sixteenth century, and the bulk of it is of course directed at the professional theatre. The polemic rapidly solidified into conventional patterns, and as the anti-theatrical party brought up the big guns of Scripture and the Fathers, it shifted from the living experience of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre to the theatre of late-classical Rome: Prynne’s Histriomastix,50 the bulkiest of them all, is a treasure-house of fourth- and fifth-century opinion, and each time you think you have detected him in a comment on the modern stage, you find him in the next breath quoting Apuleius. But among these one can find the odd voice which seems to reflect actual experience. One such is John Rainoldes Th’overthrow of Stage-Playes (printed 1599).51 Rainoldes was a Puritan divine and don at Queen’s College, Oxford; he later became President of Corpus. In February 1591/2 he was invited to a performance by Christ Church undergraduates of a group of Latin plays, starting with the Ulysses Redux of William Gager, the distinguished Latin playwright and don of Christ Church.52 Rainoldes refused the invitation, but Gager unfortunately added to his Ulysses a comic epilogue by one Momus, a sour theatre critic who parroted all the stock arguments against stageplays, referring them particularly to the performance of Ulysses just witnessed, so that one of the actors could then refute them. Rainoldes took Momus as a caricature of himself, and wrote to Gager; Gager replied, and there was an exchange of letters. Rainoldes then published his side of the correspondence – inevitably one-sided, though he quotes large passages of Gager’s letters in order to 198

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s refute them. However, Rainoldes preserved Gager’s main letter together with his own, and the collection still exists as MS CCC 352. Though the letters repeat the standard arguments, they are anchored in the real event: Gager, naturally, is particularly concerned to defend his play and his actors from the imputations Rainoldes flings at them. Sometimes he sidesteps the points at issue, but even his sidestepping reveals his attitudes and his hidden worries. Rainoldes, too, does not come at the subject entirely from the outside: he reveals halfway through his first letter that ‘when I was about the age that they [Gager’s undergraduates] are, six and twentie yeares since, [I] did play a woman’s parte vpon the same stage, the part of Hippolyta’, in the famous play of Palamon and Arcite presented before Queen Elizabeth in Christ Church in 1566.53 Above all, they are discussing amateur actors, not professionals. The main difference between the mystery-play actors and the undergraduates was not so much that the undergraduates were better educated and acting in Latin as that the women’s parts they played were more sexually orientated, with ‘amatorie pangs expressed in most effectual sort’.54 The mainstream objection to cross-playing was based on the text in Deuteronomy: The Law of God very straightly forbids men to put on womens ­garments, garments are set downe for signes distinctiue betwene sexe & sexe, to take vnto vs those garments that are manifest signes of another sexe, is to falsifie, forge, and adulterate, contrarie to the ­expresse rule of the worde of God. Which forbiddeth it by threatening a curse vnto the same. All that do so are abhomination vnto the Lord, which way I b ­ eseech you shall they bee excused, that put on, not the apparrell onely, but the gate, the gestures, the voyce, the passions of a woman? 55 Faced with this wholesale condemnation: some Play-patrons [object] that this Scripture extends to those alone, who usually clothe themselues in womans array from day to day; or to those who put it on with a lewde intent to circumvent or inamor others: or to satisfie their lusts … not to such who only weare it now and then to act a womans parte or in case of necessity to saue their liues, as some haue done. (Prynne Histriomastix, I, 179) If the intention is blameless, they argue, then the anathema of Scripture cannot apply. The argument then widens out into the stock discussion of whether theatrical illusion was by definition a lie: Let vs therefore consider what a lye is, a lye is, Actus cadens super indebitam materiam, an acte executed where it ought not. This acte is discerned by outward signes, euery man must show him selfe 199

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s outwardly to be such as in deed he is. Outward signes consist eyther in words or gestures, to declare our selues by wordes or by gestures to be otherwise than we are, is an act executed where it should not, therefore a lye. The profe is euident, the consequent is necessarie, that in Stage Playes for a boy to put one the attyre, the gesture, the passions of a woman; for a meane person to take vpon him the title of a Prince with counterfeit porte, and traine, is by outwarde signes to shewe them selues otherwise then they are, and so with in the compasse of a lye. which by Aristotles iudgement is naught of it selfe and to be fledde. (Gosson, Playes Confuted, E 5r) The putting-on of stage costume extends into a metaphor of the putting-on of a stage persona, which is made up of words, gestures, attyre, and passions. This suggests something of their concept of acting technique as a series of external skills (and incidentally tells us which were considered most important), but they are also concerned with: the care of making a shew to doe such feates, and to doe them … lively … [which] worketh in the actors a maruellous impression of

Plate 1 Anna the Prophetess (Nick Murchie), Purification, Chester Waggon Plays 1983 Photo: Joe Thompson, Lancaster University

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Plate 2 The Virgin Mary (John Turner), Purification, Chester Waggon Plays 1983 Photo: © Rose Bugler (née Rosemary Cross)

being like the persons whose qualities they expresse and imitate: chiefly when earnest and much meditation of sundry dayes and weekes, by often repetition and representation of the partes, shall as it were engraue the things in their minde with a penne of iron, or with the point of a diamond. (Rainoldes, Th’overthrow of StagePlayes, p. 19) They are afraid that even if the actors may not have identified with their roles at the beginning, concentration and constant rehearsal will end up making them do so: by imitating at last the actor becomes the thing he imitates. I want now to move on our experiment and try to see among other things where our experience seems to match with these theories.

The project: practical observations Our project attempted to compare the effect of men in women’s roles with women in women’s roles by a controlled experiment. After a lot of thought, we settled on two scenes. The first, the encounter between Noah and his Wife in the Towneley Noah, showed a domestic affray in terms of what our Dutch 201

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s friends charmingly call ‘the conjugal farce’. The second was also domestic in a sort: the Visitation from the N-Town Mary plays. Here the two women, Mary and Elizabeth, are cousins, friends, and pregnant. They move from affectionate and homely greeting to the spiritual heights of the Magnificat and back to an affectionate farewell. These scenes were played twice: first with women, and then with men playing the female roles. The same men played the male roles in both scenes each time. As I said at the beginning, neither group saw the other’s performance until the Lancaster seminar: after that we made certain further experiments which I will chart in more detail when we come to them. In the Purification, the cross-playing was merely one production feature among many: we also tried the effect of gilding ‘Little God’s’ face, and giving the Angel a gold mask and gold lamé curls. The plot calls for a miracle, when the writing in the book is changed, and a very formal liturgical style in the ceremony of Purification itself. So much of the play is in the symbolic mode that it probably provided an easier framework for an audience to accept the male actors as part of the overall style. As far as possible, we dressed the male and female ‘women’ of the experiment in identical costumes. The male Mary and Elizabeth wore the costumes I had already designed for Mary and Anna in the Purification. Both hung from the shoulders in a trapeze line to the ground: Elizabeth was loosely belted, but Mary’s dress hung straight – I was partly thinking of the triangular Virgins in South American churches, stiff, bejewelled, and elaborately crowned (the crown appears in the Chester Smiths’ accounts).56 Mary had a long slightly auburn wig under her veil; Anna/Elizabeth was encased in a widow’s wimple with pleated barbe, tight-fitting cap, and two veils, which concealed ‘her’ hair completely. Both these costumes were asexual in the sense that they did not emphasise features like busts or waists, and attempted to minimise shoulder-width, but they were certainly not unisex. The male and female Mrs. Noah both wore dusky pink dresses, though the woman’s was more obviously waisted, pinafores, and mop caps which completely ­concealed the hair. The first and most obvious difference that you noticed was, of course, physical. It was not so much the presence or absence of busts or hips – we didn’t pad Mrs. Noah out in the relevant places, though we could have, which  would have been in the pantomime-dame tradition – it was one of scale. Even a slight man makes an above-average-sized woman. The result is a cast of Olympians. It is no accident that the model for the drag-queen is the six-foot showgirl rather than the slighter or more cuddly type of woman, and of course this height can be turned to threatening effect in the pantomime-dame stereotype. In the low-ceilinged room at Salford, some of the audience found them oppressively oversized; in the open air, however, this becomes an eye-catching asset. It also, I think, emphasises the heroic and archetypal quality of the female figures: not excessively, in a Statue of Liberty 202

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s sense, but enough to impress themselves effortlessly as figures of importance by just being, whereas a woman in the same situation has either to be startlingly beautiful or have a 1,000-watt stage presence to produce the same effect. The same thing applied to gesture. Men’s shoulders are on the average much wider than women’s, and their gestures more expansive. I had to prevent my male Mary gesturing with her arms spread wide or she looked like a windmill. Walking in a cloak with her arms held out, she all too readily suggested Superman rather than the Virgin Mary. Men’s hands are also much larger than women’s. We disguised their lack of surface delicacy with gloves (another good reason for wearing them), but even so, they looked proportionately bigger, and gestures made with them were much more emphatic. I had to restrain Mary from clenching her fist to emphasise a point; she looked threatening rather than decisive. Feet, too, are on the average much larger – the Virgin Mary wore size nines – and though this is not so important, as feet are usually hidden under skirts, the way in which men walk is different. This may be partly a  learned characteristic, but it is also to do with the way in which men are hinged. Several people remarked on Mary’s non-feminine gait. Our men  also  found it very difficult to manage long skirts, both in walking, and  getting up and sitting down: this is presumably a modern difficulty, though  female garments have tended through the centuries to be more restrictive in one respect or another than men’s. The Purification Anna particularly felt trapped inside her sixteenth-century widow’s headdress, which restricted not only her field of vision but her hearing. Costume has more effect than one might at first think in defining patterns of gestures and even sex roles. Facially, the effect was not so much more rugged as more strongly marked.  A  young man in a long wig can be strikingly beautiful, but it is a Technicolor beauty, a kind of facial assertiveness that in real life you tend to find only in professional actors or models. A good shave can produce a reasonably smooth cheek (in the case of old ladies the odd bristle doesn’t of course matter); this was no particular problem, though a Virgin Mary with a five o’clock shadow is a horrific sight. But there is a noticeable lack of softness – not a­ nything definable, but something more brilliant and larger in scale, which again is overwhelming in a small space but suits outdoor performance. Everything becomes slightly larger than life. (It seemed, interestingly, to depend on personal taste (and again, sex) whether the audience found this effect strikingly beautiful or over-brilliant to the point of being tarty.) ­ isappears The transforming moment comes when the actor puts on a wig or d completely into a headdress. The mere existence in a Guild inventory or set of accounts of ‘maries heare’ is not first-grade evidence that the part was played by a man, but it is good supplementary ­evidence.57 203

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s Voices and ages Richard Rastall is writing about this for our next issue [METh 7.1, pp. 25–51 Ed.], so I will not go into it at length, but since it became one of the central arguments at Salford, it must be mentioned. We made no attempt to alter the pitch of our ‘women’s’ voices or, in the case of Elizabeth and Mrs. Noah, the voice quality. John Turner, playing Mary, altered his natural speaking voice to a more female timbre, but a large part of the Salford audience still seemed to find this unacceptable, and it led to the suggestion that we should have cast a true boy actor in the part instead of an eighteen-year-old man. The unstated sub-text seemed to be that it would have been more acceptable for a pre-pubertal boy to play a woman, but the argument focussed round the pitch of his voice. The problem nowadays is that to find a boy with an unbroken voice I would have had to have looked for a twelve- or thirteen-year-old (who would, incidentally, have looked very strange as the mother to our twelve-year-old Little God). It seems, as Richard Rastall told us at the Salford meeting, that boys’ voices broke much later in this period, which might have made it possible to find an actor with a wider emotional range and a more assured stage presence than one would expect to find from the present-day First Former. We do not have sufficient information about the ages of the mystery-play ‘women’ to talk about this with any surety. Lyonnard, the French actor in Metz who played St. Catherine when his voice was beginning to break, seems to have been about fifteen.58 It is interesting that at least two of the named English Guild actors are referred to as someone else’s ‘man’, ‘rychard ye capper borsleys man that playth ane’ (Coventry Weavers 1544), and ‘Ryngolds man Thomas þat playtt pylatts wyff ’ (Coventry Smiths 1496), which suggests that they were journeymen and so probably teenagers. Unfortunately I have not been able to find out any more about the Coventry men and their ages. As we have seen, the boy street-pageant ‘virgins’ are not really relevant to our subject. The undergraduate actors at Christ Church who played women are referred to indiscriminately as ‘young men’, ‘boys’, and ‘youths’: the wanton maidservant Melantho was acted by ‘an ingenuous boy’, and the discussion speaks of ‘a youth of tender yeares’, and ‘ a hansom boy apparelled like a woman’59 – the younger end of the undergraduate age range was fourteen or fifteen.60 Rainoldes implies at one point that some of the ‘damsels’ were below the age of legal responsibility. They appeared in a cast of mixed ages. However, it seems that he himself was possibly seventeen when he played Hippolyta in 1566, and, to take a fictional example, Pyrocles in Sidney’s Arcadia, who disguises himself successfully as the Amazon Zelmane, is said to be eighteen, the same age as our Mary.61 (Boys’ companies cannot really provide evidence, as they played roles of all ages: Salathiel Pavy specialised in old men. The ‘squeaking Cleopatra’ may have belonged to a boys’ company.) I think, however, that the analogy with singing voices is not as relevant as we thought at the time it was. Pitch is only one of the features which distinguishes 204

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s a woman’s voice from a man’s. One is sheer volume and carrying quality: men have larger and stronger larynxes. This was extremely noticeable during the outdoor performance of the cycle, where women’s voices were very hard put to it to carry naturally over the audience area without straining. It was also interesting that the one person in our cast whose voice did not carry very well was Mary, because he was trying to adapt it to a female voice pattern. In fact, many of the features which distinguish a woman’s voice from a man’s in our culture are learned ones. (I am here relying on information given  to me, with some practical demonstrations on the fundamental frequency analyser, by my phonetician colleague Dr. Gerry Knowles. It makes no claim to scientific accuracy.) Others include the degree of breathiness, specifically ‘female’ intonation patterns, and the use of pitch-range. If you listen to a female impersonator, the one thing he will not do is alter the essential pitch of his natural voice, in the sense that you would have to alter the frequency of the machine to a female range to pick it up. What he does do is to select certain features of speech, intonation, breathiness, and turns of phrases which spell ‘female’ to the listener. This tends to be most successful when the female impersonated is of a highly idiosyncratic kind: the county swoops and gravelly tones of Hinge and Bracket are a particularly good example. (The same is true of Mike Yarwood’s impressions: he doesn’t reproduce the actual voice of his victim, but makes a selection of the most characteristic mannerisms and intonations.) The only concession to pitch is sometimes to cut out the lower frequencies in the male voice and thus give the impression that he is speaking in a higher voice. I did precisely this in reverse when I attempted to say something at exactly the same pitch as Gerry: to my astonishment, the machine showed that I had not altered the actual pitch at all, which still remained a musical octave above his, but I had flattened out my top frequencies. (Apparently American women restrict their pitch range to the higher frequencies, and American men to the lower, which is why British men seem to them effeminate.) When John played Mary, he tended automatically to restrict these lower notes and also to introduce breathiness to his natural voice. If we stop thinking of pitch as the only criterion, then there becomes less point in concentrating on the choirboy voice. Younger children tend to have a much narrower pitch range (measured in semitones) than adult women – or, to put it in lay terms, you would not mistake a child’s voice for a woman’s if you heard it in the street. Nor, I think, would you mistake a boy’s for a girl’s, for all the reasons I have gone into above. Only when there were sufficient other features present – imitation of intonations and so on, coupled with female dress and behaviour – would a boy be an acceptable substitute for a woman. A very young boy would not only not have the emotional range, he would not have the pitch range and flexibility to be able to sustain a ­demanding speaking part; though, as I suggest later, the women’s parts in mystery plays are emotionally restricted in several ways, the techniques required are different from and much more varied than those required by, for example, the boy singers in the Elche 205

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s play, where I at least got the curious impression that the women belonged to a completely different world from the men. Did they try consciously to imitate female voice patterns? Gosson talks of men putting on ‘the voyce … of a woman’;62 Rainoldes seems to imply it when he says of Quintilian ‘Hee would not haue his youth to counterfeit a womans voice: you procure Minerva, Penelope, Euryclea, Antonoe, Eurynome, Hippodamia, Melantho, Phaedra, and Nurse, the Nymph … to bee played by yours’.63 But this need have been no more than the semi-instinctive way in which John adapted his normal speaking voice. It seems likely that they were cast for a variety of features, particularly, as mine were, for acting ability and looks. It is clear that looks were highly important: the Beverley St. Helena was to be pulcherrimus Iuuenis qui ad hoc invenire poterit; Lyonnard was ung beaul filz et ressombloit une belle jonne fille; Rainoldes talks of ‘beautifull boyes transformed into women’ and ‘such children as God had adorned with comlines of body’.64 There is a certain delicacy of feature, which is not girlish though it is often termed so, which does not outlast one’s teens, and which would seem to put an age-limit on the playing of female roles. On the other hand, if you found a good actor, you would be likely to use him as long as you could: Richard Briscoe, the Coventry Cappers’ Mary, seems to have played for at least four years.65 In the professional theatre, of course, technique could extend this period indefinitely, as it does in traditional Japanese theatre. Another determining factor might be costume: the Coventry Pilate’s Wife apparently fitted Mrs. Grimsby’s clothes, though of course we know nothing about the size of Mrs. Grimsby. Lady Powis of Lincoln lent her kirtle for one of the Maries, who was presumably a man.66 Julia, disguised as a page in Two Gentlemen of Verona, recalls how at Pentecost When all our pageants of delight were played Our youth got me to play the woman’s part And I was decked in madam Julia’s gown, Which served me as fit, by all men’s judgement, As if the garment had been made for me; Therefore I know she was about my height IV. 4. 165–71 which again suggests, in modern terms, a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old, but it is very hard to speculate about relative sizes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It would seem therefore that for young women they are likely to have used young men in their middle to late teens. We should remember that according to The Golden Legend, the Virgin Mary was only fourteen at the time of the Annunciation.67 Older women are no problem: everyone seemed to accept 206

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s our Anna’s gruffer voice; some were uncertain as to how old he was (in fact twenty) and some even failed to notice that he was a man. The mystery plays probably used an age range which is not really available for us, not so much because of the voice problem, but because fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys are edgy about their sex-roles and tend to be excessively loutish – Third- and Fourth-Years are notoriously unmanageable – and definitely unwilling to play the woman. I did in fact at first ask the English teacher at Lancaster Royal Grammar School if he could find me a Fourth Year, but he said this was impossible. I was driven up the age-range to John (who had been my first choice, for the other two reasons); Peter Happé’s English master down it to his thirteen-year-old St. Joan.

Representation and the ‘dual consciousness’ We also found, especially in the Visitation, a distinct difference in the way in which the actors related to each other emotionally on stage. The women players in the Visitation immediately gave the impression of warm and affectionate interaction. They sounded concerned and supportive, and they had a whole vocabulary of affectionate gesture. This included a great deal of body contact; they seemed to embrace easily and touch each other naturally. The men, on the other hand, kept their distance: they spoke at rather than to each other, and naturally stood at arm’s length, as if unwilling to invade each other’s territory. This diffidence on the part of the men may have been due purely to modern British cultural conditioning. We have no stage vocabulary for male affection except the hearty slap on the back. This reflects real life; any physical expression of male friendliness seems to be cloaked socially in jesting aggression. With no stage vocabulary and no real-life experience to draw on, our male actors were at a loss. At Lancaster, where they had not previously seen each other’s performances, the contrast between the women’s naturalness and the men’s stiffness was extremely marked. For Salford, I was roped in, as a woman as much as a director, to try and help the men develop this side of their performance. I found myself not only explaining how two women would feel, but also demonstrating, movement by movement, and out of my own experience, how they would relate to each other physically. There is enough evidence in sixteenth-century discussions of the stage to suggest that their male actors would also build up their ‘female’ performances in this external way. Rainoldes implies that it was generally accepted that to play a woman the actor had to learn to imitate a series of mannerisms and behaviour patterns: quoting Statius, he says: Thetis taught Achilles how to play the woman in gate, in speech, in gesture: Sic ergo gradus; sic ora, manusq[ue] nate feres, comitesq[ue] modis imitabere fictis68 207

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s [‘And so you must walk in this way, my son; carry your head and hold your hands in this way; imitate your companions with counterfeit mannerisms.’] And because his mother had not taught him enough, or he was but a bad scholer: Deidamia gave him farder advertisements, how he must hold his naked brest, his hands, and so foorth. These are wemens maners vnseemlie for Achilles to imitate: he should not have done it. Th’overthrow of Stage-Playes, p. 17 The fact that anti-theatrical polemic stresses the unnaturalness of a man adopting ‘not the apparrell onely but the gate, the gestures, the voyce, the passions of a woman’ suggests that the accepted codes of male and female signals were, as one might expect, even more distinct than they are today.69 Gager agrees that ‘different behavioure becummethe different sexes, and it beseemethe not men to followe weemens maners, in the common course of lyfe, to the pervertinge of the lawe of nature, honesty, and semlynes’.70 There were certainly more formal external signs of the distinction – for example, Gager mentions, as evidence that his undergraduate actors had not actually ‘studied’ to identify with the women they were playing, that ‘when one of owre actors shoulde have made a Conge like a woman, he made a legge like a man’.71 This distinctiveness probably made it even easier for a male actor to imitate the more conspicuous features of ‘a womans … gesture, countenance and behaviour’ sufficiently adequately to provide the audience with a recognisable series of signals which they would read as ‘woman’.72 How far in the amateur theatre it became a fully developed set of stage conventions, as in the professional Japanese Kabuki theatre, we cannot tell. Our actors had no such clear-cut conventions to follow. Moreover, the lack of a physical vocabulary seemed to make it very difficult for them to relate to each other emotionally. But the reason may be more deep-seated and simpler (and thus possibly more universally applicable?) than the lack of a traditional grammar of female gesture. Peter Norton suggested that the very fact of their being men got between them and the stage relationship: … the men were more detached from the content of the script: rather than acting a character and ‘getting under its skin’ they were presenting a situation. When we went to the Salford conference I took the part of Elizabeth, and I was aware of a distance between myself and the part I was playing: at no stage did I identify with the part of Elizabeth. I felt comfortable on stage with John [the Virgin Mary], but I did not relate to him as I would have if he had been playing a man, or if his part had been taken by a woman. When women take the parts of Mary and Elizabeth they not only relate more closely with the character they are playing, but also with the other female character on stage. 208

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s The men were unable to think themselves into the character naturally, either because they were not physically at home with the way in which these emotions should be expressed, or, more basically, because they just could not imagine what it was like to be women in this particular situation. The women did not have to overcome these twin barriers and could proceed to build up their parts semi-instinctively. It may be that this problem was thrown into particularly high relief because we had chosen one of the very few scenes – possibly the only scene – in the mystery plays which features two women interacting seriously on a subject of peculiarly female interest. It was noticeable that when John also played Mary in the Purification, he was much better at relating to Joseph in a ‘female’ way than he was in this scene to Elizabeth; in fact, in rehearsal, in his ordinary clothes, the incongruity between his masculine appearance and his feminine behaviour was very funny. Presumably this was a relationship he recognised and could therefore reconstruct. It is, I think, true to say that most of the scenes from the mystery plays which involve female characters allow for this by showing them either interacting with men, or if with other women (I am thinking especially of the Three Maries) on a very formal level. Even in the Elizabeth-Mary scene, the intimacy is suggested rather than made explicit. How strongly it comes over, and in what way, depends largely on the nonverbal element in the acting, which is precisely where, according to our experiment, the difference between the sexes lies. This verbal formality would presumably make it easier for male actors, like ours, to keep within their learned patterns of behaviour. Even intimate male/ female scenes tend to be enacted ceremoniously: Joseph, my owne trewe fere, Now redde I – if your will weare … Chester, Purification, ll. 207–8 Often the formality is underlined by the familiar ‘third-person’ commentary: Anna takes leave of Joachim, For dred and ffor swem of ȝour wourdys I qwake thryes I kysse ȝow with syghys ful sad and to þe mercy of god . mekely I ȝow be-take and þo þat departe in sorwe god make þer metyng glad. N-Town, Conception of Mary, ll. 53–6 This type of self-description also, of course, emphasises the representational quality of the characterisation and emotions. This distancing fits precisely with what happened in our experiment. As Peter Norton describes, the male players remained detached from their roles. 209

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s The effect of this was interesting. The audience at Lancaster, where we discussed it in rather more depth than was possible at Salford, seemed to agree that when the women played Mary and Elizabeth, they came over as two individuals, each with their own character, history, and experiences, who almost incidentally were also the Virgin Mary and Elizabeth. It was easy to relate to the warmth of their feeling for each other, and the naturalism of the situation came to the fore. They were ‘people like us’. The men communicated none of this: in Peter Norton’s words, what came across was ‘a representation of Mary and Elizabeth, and the “alienation” of the actors combined with their female clothing help[ed] to stress the narrative content of the play’. We were very much aware that they ‘stood for’ Mary and Elizabeth, rather than feeling in any way that they ‘were’ Mary and Elizabeth. The Lancaster audience split on their reactions to this, very interestingly, by sexes. The men on the whole preferred the female version for its warmth and what they called its ‘femininity’. The women preferred the male version, because they felt that with the female version the naturalistic individuality conferred on the characters got in the way of the story and its significance. The inbuilt naturalism of the female version made it somehow too cosy and fussy: it detracted both from the status of the characters and the spiritual force of the scene. The women were also not particularly attracted by an abstract quality called ‘femininity’ – indeed, they didn’t recognise that it existed. They were interested in role and situation, and took the femaleness of the characters for granted, whoever was playing them. This latter was probably closer to the medieval reaction, since for them there was of course no ‘feminine’ option. This does not mean, however, that they would have been restricted to a dispassionate, distanced, narrative version of the scene. In the male version, the detachment of person from role did not mean that we were equally alienated from the experience that they were presenting. Indeed, in a curious way it made it easier for the audience to react directly and strongly to the situation, its emotions as well as its implications, because we were not filtering them through the individual personality of the actress. There are probably several reasons for this. It may well have helped that we knew the story already, and the actors had only to present the familiar pictures and speak the familiar words to trigger off a stock of strong traditional responses. Mary and Elizabeth are invested with more power if they are icons rather than individuals. In that case the audience is more of an active partner in the construction of responses than we normally expect. But the same is probably true of the representational mode as a whole: it is interesting that both Sarah Carpenter and Carl Heap talk independently in this context of puppets. Carl Heap refers the strength of this effect to their ‘selectivity’; Sarah Carpenter to the fact that, since you cannot ‘become personally psychologically involved in the puppet’, you are released to respond to ‘the situation itself, or the emotion itself … not the presenter’. Either way, the fact that the 210

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s synthesis takes place more obviously inside our imaginations than on stage seemed to make it even more powerful in effect. This effect has obvious implications for the style of playing. For the Visitation we adopted a very formal stylised pattern of gesture which was designed to underline the exposition of the text, especially for the Magnificat, and to emphasise this representational quality, and the gap between player and role. The Salford audience, many of whom were clearly uncomfortable with the man/woman convention, focussed its unease on this, which at first seemed to us irrelevant – it wasn’t what we had come to discuss – but which was in fact obliquely talking about the same thing. As Diana Wyatt points out, the stylisation of men playing women is no different in kind from the stylisation of Little God with his gold face, or the masked angel with his gold lamé curls. It is part and parcel of a ‘non-naturalistic’ theatre. But our demonstration also incidentally revealed the power of familiarity and unfamiliarity in stage conventions. Nobody objected to the ‘stylisation’ of Mr. and Mrs. Noah, but only Jane Oakshott pointed out that the scene had been as carefully planned and was as ‘artificial’ as the preceding one – it just happened to be a form of artificiality with which we are familiar, the comedy routine combined with ‘low’ characters and a colloquial vocabulary, which unwary students tend automatically to call ‘realistic’. We used the same formal visual style for our production of the Purification, since the play is centred on a very formal and liturgically-based ceremony, and again it was read as highly stylised because of its context. But I have used an equally ‘constructed’ style for the Wakefield Mactacio Abel, where because the central characters are low and the vocabulary, verbal and visual, obscene, it was read as a ‘realistic’ comic routine. Our modern expectations of casting can lead us to make the same sort of judgements even within the one play. Peter Meredith made a very interesting distinction when he observed that for him, the stylisation of the Purification  ‘women’ seemed to clash with the ‘naturalism’ of the men. Both were using the same stylised gestures, but because the men were of the ‘right’ sex, these came across as naturalistic, whereas their use underlined the fact that the female roles were representational. In fact our thirty-year-old Simeon playing extreme old age was no more ‘naturalistic’ than our male Mary or Anna; we are just more used to the one form of representation than the other. In the Purification, we also underlined the stylisation by giving Mary a very obviously blank-faced doll with a halo for a baby. It would have been interesting, pursuing the ‘mixture of styles’ motif, to see what would have happened if we had given her a real baby, as the director of the Shepherds play did for his Mary, and, as it seems likely, the Coventry Purification play gave its Mary (see Plates 3 and 4). It is encouraging that such medieval descriptions as we have (the late fourteenth-century Beverley documents, for example) tend to use forms of words 211

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s which suggest that they too acknowledge this representational quality.73 The Beverley St. Helena is described as pulcherrimus Iuuenis qui ad hoc apcior inuenire poterit … decenter ornatus & vestitus ad modum Regine & ad instar sancte Elene [the fairest young man, and the most suitable for this [role] who can be found … appropriately arrayed and robed in the manner of a Queen and in the likeness of St. Helena] and the Virgin Mary of the Purification quidam de gilda qui ad hoc apcior inuenietur nobilissime & decenter vestitus & ornatus vt regina virgo instar gloriose virginis Marie habens quasi filium in ulnis suis] [someone from the Guild, the most suitable who can be found for this [role], robed and arrayed as a virgin queen in the likeness of the glorious Virgin Mary having as it were a son in her arms] (which suggests that the baby, like ours, was a doll). Both these descriptions make it quite plain that the actor is representing, not ‘being’ the woman he is dressed up as. Another form of words is ‘vice & loco Sancte Elizabeth’.74 The English version of the idiom is ‘in liknes of Seint Kathryn … and … in likenes of Seint Ursula’.75 John and Peter appeared ad instar and vice et loco of Mary and Elizabeth. The term ‘alienation’ clearly takes us into Brechtian territory; this was something that the students recognised without my prompting. It seems to me to go furthest towards explaining the effects I am discussing. Most writings on boy actors, for example, tend to concentrate on how convincing they are likely to have been as women, or talk about parameters of ‘acceptability’. But they then assume that the actors are attempting fully to impersonate women, and that we will gauge their success by the degree to which they make us forget that they are really men. The unacknowledged criteria used are those of naturalistic theatre. To a certain extent these are valid, at least in so far as it is clear that they tried, as our actors partly tried, to approximate female appearance, gesture, voice, and mannerisms. The match has to be sufficiently good to make the audience accept the role as being that of a woman. But there is one essential difference. When men play women, no matter how well they do it, we as audience are always aware in some corner of our consciousness that they are men. Shapiro, writing about the Elizabethan boy actors, calls this the ‘dual consciousness’.76 This knowledge can never be entirely shaken off. We as audience cannot relate to a man in a female role in exactly the same way as we do to a woman in that role: there is always a tension between the role and the player. 212

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Plate 3  Joseph and Mary (David Cross and John Turner), Purification, Chester Waggon Plays 1983. Photo: Geoffrey Newcombe

Contrast between male and female Maries.

Plate 4  Chester Shepherds’ Mary (name unknown), Chester Waggon Plays 1983. Photo: © Rose Bugler (née Rosemary Cross)

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‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s The same must have been true of the audience of the mystery plays. The sixteenth-century apologists for the professional and university theatre were certainly aware of it. Gager denies that his actors could be said to ‘wear’ women’s apparel, because wearing implyes a custome and a common vse of so dooinge, wheras we doe it for an howre, or twoe, or three, to represent an others person, by one that is openly knowne to be as hee is in deede. MS CCC 352, p. 52 Sir Richard Baker’s Theatrum Redivivum (printed 1662), though late for our period, makes perhaps the best statement: But what is it, wherein Players are such Hypocrites? Forsooth! because men weare womens Apparel, and counterfeit the gestures, and behaviours of women, and soe appear to be women, when they are men: and to appear other than they are, is plain Hypocrisie. It is plain Hypocrisie, no doubt; but it is not plain, that it is unlawfull Hypocrisie … For the evil of Hypocrisie is not in the Act, but in the End: and though Players may be guilty of the Act; yet certainly of the End they are not. For, seeing that, which they do, is not done to Circumvent, but to Represent; not to Deceive others, but to make others Conceive: though it may without question be called Hypocrisie, yet it is not Hypocrisie, that can be called in question.77 The actor takes on the costume and mannerisms of a woman in order to ­represent a woman: not in order to deceive the audience into thinking that he really is a woman, but so as to give the audience material to create their own perception of the role. It is interesting that in the controversy between the two Oxford dons, the incident that Rainoldes seems to find most shocking is: Howe many did obserue, and with mislike haue mentioned, that Penelopes maides did not onely weare [wemens raiment] but also sate in it among true wemen in deed, longer than David wore Saules armour? neither were more knowne to them to bee men, then Achilles was to Deidamia; vntill they suspected it, seeing them entreated by the wooers to rise and danse vpon the stage. Th’Overthrow of Stage-Playes, p. 102 The Christ Church undergraduates inadvertently deceived the audience into thinking they were women until it became plain they were part of the play, when knowledge of current stage conventions told everyone that they must be men. The audience, apparently, reacted as a modern audience would to the deception: it unsettled them. Recognising who is a man and who a woman is 214

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s one of the most essential features of our social relationships. The same sort of reaction but with a different cultural background greeted our Mary in the Purification: the audience tended to assume he was a woman until they heard his voice, and there was always a murmur of surprise and often startled laughter. We have seen how Elizabethan critics assumed that the male actor built up his part by imitating female behaviour patterns. It is more difficult to assess quite how far he was also expected to identify emotionally with his part as a woman, since any suggestion that he should do so instantly brings down charges of effeminacy and worse: Yea, witnes … M. Stubbs, his Anatomy of Abuses p. 105. where he affirmes, that Players and Play-haunters in their Secret Conclaves play the Sodomites: together with some modern examples of such, who have beene desperately enamored with Players Boyes thus clad in womans apparell, so farre as to solicite them by words, by Letters, even actually to abuse them. (This I have heard credibly reported of a Scholler of Bayliol Colledge, and doubt not but it may be verified of divers others.) Prynne, Histriomastix, p. 208 The fear of being thought to have corrupted their undergraduate actors runs very strongly through both Rainoldes’ and Gager’s arguments. It is not a frivolous one, considering the average age of the actors, which was more like that of present day Fifth Formers. Their teachers must have been aware of the dangers of confusing them at an impressionable age about their own sexroles, especially if they were exposed to potential solicitation from homosexual members of their audience, or, in the heightened emotional atmosphere of a production, from each other. Gager is anxious to point out that no overt sexual behaviour took place on stage, though his undergraduates did present amorous females: As for the danger of kissinge of bewtifull boyes, I knowe not howe this supposition shoulde reache to vs, for it is vntrwe, whoesoever toulde you so, that owre Eurymachus did kisse owre Melantho. I have enquyred of the partyes them selues, whether any suche action was vsed by them, and thay constantly denye it; sure I ame, that no suche thinge was taught MS CCC 352, p. 55 and that if I coulde suspecte any suche thinge to growe by owre Playes, I would be the first that should hate them, and deteste my selfe, for 215

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s gyvinge suche occasion … I haue byn often moved by owre Playes to laughter, and somtyme to teares, but I cannot accuse eyther my selfe, or any other of any suche beastly thought styrred vp by them. MS CCC 352 p. 56 It is a delicate business: I was conscious of it even though I was rehearsing undergraduates presumably old enough to know what they were doing in a play which could hardly be described as inflammatory. I also felt happier that I was a woman acting as it were as a consultant on the customs of an exotic tribe and therefore to a certain extent distanced emotionally from my actors, rather than a man, where I think it could have become dangerously weighted.

Depersonalisation, sexuality, and virginity One way of avoiding the ‘bad effectes’ both on actors and audience of representing the passions ‘lyvely expressed’ is to depersonalise them. Gager maintains (justly) that he has done this: ‘Whoe could be the worse for [Phaedra’s] wooing Hippolytus, in so generall termes?’78 He sees this distancing as contributing to the moral function of his plays: it presents general examples, instead of engaging actors or audience too closely in particular cases. But it also fits perfectly with the alienation of role from person which we have already seen, and indeed seems to be an integral part of this kind of theatre. It would be very interesting, and is the one part of the experiment that I regret I have not yet done, to see a boy playing a female part which depends for its effect on sexual appeal. I suspect that he would convey a very strong sensuality, but not a particularly female sexuality. Instead it would be a curious thing, a boy’s sexual appeal divorced from the boy himself and presented as a woman’s. (It would thus avoid being either homosexual or transvestite in the accepted senses.) Followers of the Japanese Kabuki theatre apparently say that no woman can ever be so strikingly feminine as a male actor can: it must be partly because the femininity is being presented to the audience as a concept rather than as part of a real person. Brecht says in passing, ‘if the part is played by somebody of the opposite sex, the sex of that character will be more clearly brought out’.79 I suspect that this is because it is separated from the person playing and produced as a series of signs and signals; we are aware that the sex of the character is something to which the actor wishes to draw our attention, rather than something we take for granted as a natural part of him. It is difficult, however, to find such a role in the mystery plays. This is not entirely due to the subject matter; at least one role, Mary Magdalene, is traditionally a courtesan. But she never in the mystery plays appears behaving as such: we first see her (and the Woman Taken in Adultery) as she repents, in, as Gager would say, ‘so generall termes’ that they might almost refer to anything: 216

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s þer was nevyr woman of mannys kynne so ful of synne in no countre I haue be ffowlyd be fryth and ffenne and sowght synne in many A cete but þou me borwe lord I xal brenne with blake ffendys Ay bowne to be N-Town, Last Supper, ll. 477–82 This generality would help a boy to play the role; it is also part and parcel of the overall style of self-presentation – ‘Mary mavdelyn is my name’ (470) – and self-description which can be used to set a distance between the actor and the role. Again, this does not mean that it would necessarily be distanced in emotional effect; it could even be stronger because generic. It is interesting that the one female character who flaunts her sexual attractiveness, Pilate’s Wife in the York Plays, does it not primarily to Pilate but to the audience, also in this self-descriptive mode, and in terms so extravagant they inevitably suggest the exhibitionism of the drag-queen: I am dame precious Percula, of prynces þe prise, Wiffe to ser Pilate here, prince withouten pere. All welle of all womanhede I am, wittie and wise, Consayue nowe my countenaunce so comly and clere. The coloure of my corse is full clere,    And in richesse of robis I am rayed, Ther is no lorde in þis londe as I lere In faith, þat hath as frendlyar fere    Than yhe, my lorde, myselffe þof I saye itt. Play 30, ll. 37–45 She and Pilate embrace histrionically, on which her comment is ‘All ladise we coveyte þan bothe to be kyssid and clappid’ (l. 54), another generalisation which underlines the fact that ‘she’ is not really a woman at all. It would be interesting to see a boy playing Lechery in The Castle of Perseverance. Here sexuality is conveyed by explicit but again generalised statement, which I suspect would be much more compelling and less confusing if it were to be spoken by a boy: ȝa, whanne þi flesche is fayre fed, þanne schal I, louely Lecherye, Be bobbyd wyth þe in bed; Hereof serue mete and drynkys trye. In loue þi lyf schal be led; Be a lechour tyl þou dye. þi nedys schal be þe better sped 217

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s I þou ȝyf þe to fleschly folye Tyl deth þe down drepe. Lechery syn þe werld began Hath avaunced many a man: þerfore, Mankynd, my leue lemman, I my cunte þou schalt crepe  (ll. 1178–90) When a woman says these words, we refer the invitation to her personal sexuality: the sense of personal involvement can even make it embarrassing. If a boy were to say it, I think we would be much more conscious of it as a personification of sexuality. In fact, if it were not for the final line, and the invitation to her bed, there is nothing to indicate that this speech is meant to be spoken by a woman: it is an external description of a temptation, the more chilling for its total lack of personal involvement – the Playboy view of sexuality. There is nothing much in it that a female actor could identify with. The nearest to a naturalistic seduction scene comes in the saint’s play of Mary Magdalene. I suspect that if Magdalene were played by a boy, the seduction scene would carry a much stronger sense of innocence corrupted, and yet essentially untouched. For a modern audience, when the role is played by a woman, we feel the sense of personal involvement on the naturalistic level, but I think we also have a residual sense (cultural, certainly, as well as instinctive) that she is not that much to be blamed since she is after all doing something natural and even, if mistakenly, generous. If she were played by a boy, not only would this sense be removed, thus strengthening the play’s moral point (something that would also remove our modern and distracting sympathies for the sin of the Woman Taken in Adultery), but we might also feel subconsciously that a boy was being corrupted by the man, thus ­bringing into play all the confusions and revulsions revealed by Rainoldes. At the same time we would be much more aware that he was playing a part, and so take it as a demonstration of innocence corrupted rather than the reality. There are cases in which the femaleness of the actress can be a definite drawback. Eve, who seems at first a ludicrous part to be played by a boy, is not in the English plays a temptress in the sexual sense. Rosemary Woolf points out that in all the plays, Eve’s temptation of Adam seems unnecessarily brief (especially when compared with the Jeu d’Adam).80 The only two Fall plays that suggest that her temptation of Adam might be reinforced even by ordinary conjugal affection are the Chester Play 2 and the Norwich Grocers’ Play B. The latter is expansive but, again, formal in expression: Man: Woman:

My love, for my solace I have here walkyd longe. Howe ys yt nowe with you? I pray you do declare. Indede, lovely lover, the Heavenly Kyng most stronge To eate of this apple his angell hath prepare; 218

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Take therof at my hande th’other frutes emonge, For yt shall make you wyse and even as God to fare. Then Man taketh and eatyth and sayethe: Alack! alacke! my spouse, now se I nakid we ar  (ll. 59–65)

The Chester Eve is more briefly affectionate: Adam, husbande liffe and deare, eate some of this apple here. Yt is fayre, my leefe feare; hit may thou not forsake  (ll. 249–252) Woolf comments ‘These loving endearments suggest that it is Eve rather than the apple that Adam cannot bring himself to reject’, but ‘at what point, if any, innocent affection merges with feminine wiles, it is impossible to detect’.81 We assume that Eve’s temptation must be sexual, I think, automatically, because she is naked. But Eden is not a Carry On nudist camp: Adam and Eve are naked and unashamed, and only become aware of their nakedness after the Fall. The English playwrights seem to play down anything potentially sexual that would make the part difficult for a boy actor. I suspect that modern productions, which present an actress as Eve in the semi-nakedness of a leotard, and thus force the sexual side upon us, are introducing an irrelevant distraction. (In the same way, the nakedness of the Christ-figures tend to distract with too-human fleshliness from the archetypal quality of the action.) Played by a boy in a suit of whitleather and a long blonde wig, Eve would be a representation of naked femininity without any of its distracting actuality; we could concentrate on the role. She would I think come over a lot less frivolous than our modern sexy Eves: less of a simpleton, more of an innocent. It might also make the fig-leaf episode less irresistibly funny, which seems to be its fate on the modern stage. The effect of our ‘dual consciousness’ can therefore vary quite strikingly depending on the role. In the case of the Virgin Mary, it cuts out the signals of female sexuality which inevitably are received from a young and pretty girl. Since all the other signals being sent out, however, spell ‘woman’, and since she is not acting sexual attraction, this has the effect of de-sexing her. If this is combined with physical beauty, it can produce a sense of ‘otherness’ that can be read both as chastity as a positive quality and as other-­worldliness. The Golden Legend echoes this uncannily: Candlemas was established propter ostendendam virginis puritatem … virtus sanctitatis ejus usque ad alios extendebatur et transfundebatur, ita quod in aliis omnes motus carnalis concupiscientiae extinguebat. Unde dicunt Judaei, quod cum Maria pulcherrima fuerit, a nullo tamen unquam potuit concupisci.82 219

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s [and to show forth the purity of the Virgin Mary … the power of her holiness reached forth and was poured into others, so that it quenched any instincts of fleshly desire in them. And so the Jews tell that though Mary was surpassingly lovely, no man could ever look upon her with desire] The same effect must have operated in a different context with chilling veracity when Lady Macbeth calls on the ‘spirits that tend on mortal thoughts’ to ‘unsex me now’. Our Mary could be almost frighteningly ethereal when he chose. At the same time he managed to convey a certain strength, without which Mary becomes insipid, but which again related more to the role than to the person of the actor. Mary has in fact to take the leading part without seeming self-assertive, a difficult part for a woman, where any attempt at domination is read as self-assertiveness, but one which is accepted from a man. The ‘beautiful woman’ roles, then, seem to be written so as to make it possible for a young man to play them. They are not aggressively feminine, though they give the actor scope to be poised, graceful, and to show emotions that are within his range. In rehearsal, I was conscious of directing John as the Virgin to suppress certain stances and movements which were distractingly masculine – many of which had to do with managing the costume, which itself dictated much of the ‘impersonation’. For the rest, I was more concerned with establishing relationships, especially with Joseph (affectionate, respectful to him as her husband, protective, as he is to her) and with Little God (for example when He apparently rejects them to be about ‘My Father’s work’, and the desire to protect, which she had shown to the baby when Simeon prophesied of the sorrow to come, fights with the knowledge that He is growing up into independence). The key phrase was ‘think family’. In retrospect, I am most conscious of working on the relationships and letting the picture he presented do the other half of the work: ‘John, remember you’re an icon!’ One of the main qualities required was stillness: naturalistic fussing with the baby, for example, would have destroyed this iconic effect. It may be that what I have been saying about actors also applies to producers, and that because I was a woman I automatically stressed relationships as they were filtered through my own experience. An insensitive male director might well have produced something far more stereotyped and flat. But I don’t think any of this is peculiarly ‘female’, and in any case, the whole trend of meditative literature which lies behind the plays stresses and explores precisely these emotions. There is much less to say about the old women. They could be played by a much wider age range of men, since a slight gruffness of voice and more strongly marked features are acceptable. We did not explore Anna nearly so thoroughly, partly because I sensed the actor was unwilling, partly because she is a very unrewarding part as far as motivation and character go: most of the 220

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s time she plays bookends with Simeon, reacting to his doubts with prophetic certainties. More could probably have been made of her: in our production she lacked any real warmth, which an actress might perhaps have given her.

Noah and his wife In contrast, the domestic affray between Noah and his Wife in the Towneley Noah’s Flood brings traditional sex roles to the fore. It is a battle between the sexes, inevitably a power-struggle over who shall have the maistrye, in which the audience are invited to take sides (lines 208, 388–403). The problem for us is that Mrs. Noah is a part which was written for a man to play, but which says certain very decisive things about the character, status, and proper behaviour of women. Initially, I think, because she was written to be played by a man, the role developed in a certain direction. She became the archetypal male portrait of a shrew, a role which is sustained as long as the plot demands it – is Noah going to be able to save the world or will she frustrate him? As soon as the plot demands, she does a complete and unnaturalistic volte-face into wifely obedience. While she was played by a man, she presumably came over as an admitted caricature, an incarnation of Misrule, entertaining and theatrically attractive because she is a rebel, but not to be taken too seriously. Nowadays, when she is played by a woman, she becomes a person, and her rebelliousness gains overtones and raises questions that it was never meant to raise. Add to this a generally feminist climate of opinion, and you have a problem play, not a straightforward demonstration of the rightness of hierarchy. (I should be interested to see the reactions of a strict Muslim family to the basic plot.) The reasons for this change lie in much the same processes as I have ­described when discussing the serious characters of Mary and Elizabeth, but the fact that the context is comic instead of serious produces a different set of responses. It also depends rather more on the stage relationship between her and Noah, as woman and man. Again, it is sited partly in the audience’s ‘dual consciousness’, and partly in the processes of the actor’s characterisation. An actress playing Mrs. Noah has to ‘find’ her character and her relationship with Noah as a woman. Her portrayal is likely to be recognisably something of what she herself might, under other circumstances, or with a different temperament, have become. But the part was originally written for a man to play. Both because of this, and because her literary persona is that of a harridan, that is to say an ‘unwomanly’ woman, her major characteristics in the script are scolding and fighting. She is aggressive towards her husband: Yit rede I no man let me, ffor drede of a knok  (ll. 341–2) 221

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s and to her children: Yit for drede of a skelp Help well thi dam  (ll. 323–4) and shows a lack of proper wifely submissiveness: I will not, for thi bydyng go from doore to mydyng  (ll. 375–6) Both aggression and self-assertiveness are ‘mannish’ traits. In a part written to be played by a man, they are perfectly acceptable: they exploit his mannishness. If she is played by a woman, where the instinct is to see her naturalistically, they stand out as ‘unnatural’ and extreme, and we have to find psychologically valid reasons for them if we want her to be a sympathetic character – which we do partly because her gusto is theatrically attractive and partly because our view of husband/wife relationships does not include the right of the husband to chastise his wife with a walking stick. The fight scene we chose illustrated this very well. In it, the war between the sexes is fought on two fronts: Mrs. Noah attacks Noah verbally (lines 191–216); when he threatens to beat her (line 217), the affray becomes physical (lines 218–34); it ends in an uneasy truce with both parties retiring to regroup (lines 235–43). The differences between the male and female performances were even more striking than they were for the Visitation, and for initially very obvious reasons. For a start, sheer physical size affects both the stage relationship between the characters and the way in which the audience are led to react. Peter Norton had started off, unconsciously, by seeing Mrs. Noah in female terms: I envisaged Mrs. Noah as a shrewish character, always complaining about her husband, constantly badgering and taunting him. For the Lancaster seminar I decided to have a large Noah and a smaller wife,  so that the intimidation of the former by the latter was psychological rather than physical, and the audience were presented with the comic situation of a small wife bossing around a large husband. This was very much a male-female stage situation. The comedy here arises out of inversion of expectation: we expect the larger person (normally the man) to be the dominant one. But women are traditionally supposed to have subverted this state of affairs by learning to excel in the war of words; physical warfare is replaced by psychological, where they stand more chance. As this scene is written, Mrs. Noah wins hands down, not so much by argument as by sheer unstoppability. It is not just meaningless abuse; she is subversive 222

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s because she invents and sustains a role for Noah as a mean, whingeing old sourpuss who has his long-suffering family completely under his thumb, a role which is ludicrously forced on him as he stands there unable to get a word in edgeways. He is reduced to threatening physical violence to shut her up (i.e. regain the dominant role): ‘We! hold thi tong, ram-skyt, or I shall the still’ (line 217). However, with a woman playing Mrs. Noah, once they move on to physical combat, the balance of power switches, despite her willing aggression. A small woman is not supposed to win a physical struggle with a large man (judo not yet having been introduced). Our Mrs. Noah used the distaff as a weapon, which helped to redress the balance and even gave her an initial advantage, but even though her sallies were vicious and her methods distinctly dirty, there was not much doubt of the outcome. When Noah wrested the distaff from her and flung her over his shoulder, she was rendered helpless, though fighting back gamely – it became an honourable defeat. I think everyone felt a considerable degree of admiration and sympathy for her, even though Noah had the moral advantage. Substitute a man, and for a bumblebee attacking a St. Bernard, you get a bulldog. Even a smaller male Mrs. Noah becomes disproportionately large for a woman; une femme forte, as the French say. He takes up much more space, especially if he squares his shoulders and stands arms akimbo. His aggression is male: the effect of the verbal tirade was like a dam bursting, and Noah was completely overwhelmed. And there was no change in the balance of power when the fight began. At Salford, where he was actually larger than Noah, he: was much more physically dominating than the … female Mrs. Noah. The male Mrs. Noah came across as being capable of hammering Mr. Noah into the ground (literally so when armed with the distaff!). It was only when Mr. Noah disarmed his wife of the distaff that they were on equal terms, and he finally gained the decisive upper hand when he started to chase her with the distaff (line 227). When Jane played Mrs. Noah, the fight was one-sided from the beginning (line 219): she takes on Noah on his own terms (i.e. physically), and puts up a spirited fight, but the reassertion of male dominance is predestined. At Salford the distaff actually snapped in two (throwing Noah over backwards in possession of the pieces!) in the struggle. The size and strength of the male Mrs. Noah – he was much too heavy for Noah to fling him over his shoulder, as he had with his female ‘wife’ – made it very much an equal fight ‘in which’, to quote Peter Norton again, ‘Noah comes from behind to win’. There was some genuine doubt about whether he would. He was the underdog, and our sympathies lay with him throughout. 223

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s Oddly enough, in most modern productions of both the Towneley and Chester Noah that I have seen, the directors have chosen the other possible variation in size: knowing that the fight is traditionally the central theatrical happening of the play, or just because they see Mrs. Noah as a virago, they cast the smallest and gentlest man they can find as Noah, and the largest and toughest woman, or at least the least prepossessing in the Nora Batty mode, as Mrs. Noah, almost as if they were instinctively trying to r­ eproduce the m ­ edieval balance by giving Mrs. Noah the largest number of male characteristics possible. (An exaggeratedly busty Mrs. Noah is also a ‘male’ version, for reasons which I will explain later.) This certainly wins Noah our sympathy, but it has the effect of making him the ‘little man’ figure throughout, the gentle incompetent who nevertheless manages to muddle through to fulfil God’s commands and save the human race. This is one possible way of playing it, given the Towneley Noah’s Joseph-like references to his age and disabilities, but it necessarily either weakens his authority or means he has to play in effect two disparate roles: the henpecked husband and the confident patriarch. We too like to laugh at the gaps between the private and public images of our patriarchs, but if we are looking for psychological coherence, it necessarily undermines our sense of his authority. The choice seems to be between a domestic tyrant or a henpecked nonentity. If, however, Mrs. Noah is not naturalistic, we can take the episodes separately, one as a theatrical ‘turn’, the other as serious theatre. Neither Noah reflects on the other. The main difference between the male/female and the male/male struggle is that the first is naturalistically possible and the second isn’t. In the first, we can become involved in the stage relationship between Noah and his wife as a human one, even as a sexual one. When we played it in front of the seminar at Lancaster, there was a roar of delight when Noah, throwing his female ‘wife’ over his shoulder, inadvertently revealed her legs up to the knees. The effect was irresistibly Sabine Women. When he tried to repeat this success with his other ‘wife’, all he managed to do was reveal ‘her’ rolled-up trousers. The audience howled again, but the reason was rather different, and it points up the basic difference in comic reaction. If Mrs. Noah is played by a man, our ‘dual-consciousness’ comes into play. Our whole attitude to him will be affected by the fact that we know he is a man. But the difference in effect also grows out of the process of characterisation. As we have seen already, instead of playing a woman from the starting point of being a woman, the actor has to build up the impression of being a woman out of a set of observed mannerisms. As director, you keep on having to say to your actors, whether they are playing serious or comic roles, ‘No, stand like this, take shorter steps, don’t sit with your knees apart’. It is much more like assuming a disguise. Because of our dual consciousness, the better he does it, the more, in the context of comedy, we shall applaud his ability to imitate life. Doesn’t he do it well? The artificiality of the construct is an essential part of the joke. 224

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s In building up a comic character the actor will tend to base his characterisation even more on physical and vocal quirks, whether he finds these from his own observation or from theatrical stereotypes. If he is imitating a harridan, he will display a range of characteristics which are not appreciated in a woman, so he comes across as presenting evidence against her – not against her as an individual, but against the whole sex. We applaud his virtuosity and the accuracy of his indictment. At the same time, the material for his indictment is drawn partly from observation of particularly disagreeable women, and partly provided by his own unwomanishness. Physically, his maleness appears as a comment on her lack of sexual attractiveness, and therefore lack of value, as this is still one of the main male indices of female value. Alternatively, he can exaggerate the outward signs of female attractiveness to the point of caricature: a tendency shared by the drag-queen, partly because these signs can be easily faked by make-up and padding, partly because they are the least stereotypically male sexual call-signs. Paradoxically, because they are known to be artificially produced even in women, they are therefore associated with female deceit and sexual voraciousness. A good example is Mark Heap’s terrifyingly predatory Tyb in the Medieval Players’ Johan Johan, a devouring houri who looked as if she could break her lover in half, let alone her minuscule husband. It seems very difficult for an actor in a comic role not to parody femaleness. Peter Norton actually tried two versions of the male Mrs. Noah: the first, at Lancaster, was a straight ‘pantomime dame’ – the role into which the actor most easily fell. At Salford he: wanted to minimise differences in the plotting of action on stage and also in the actors’ psychological interpretation of the character, in order to point up the effects of transvestism [alone]. Because of what I regarded as the unique ‘maleness’ of the panto-dame typecharacter, I worked away from a parody of Mrs. Noah towards a psychological realism … However, instead of being more convincing as a woman, the actor was merely robbed of an essential comic substitute for it. At Lancaster, the audience had laughed at two difference things: when Mrs. Noah was played by a girl: the audience laughed at the comic relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Noah … rather than at the absurdity of the character of Mrs. Noah that came across in Mike’s performance. The female version, came over as situation comedy, the male as pantomime. At Salford, when the man tried to be as ‘straight’ a woman as possible: 225

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s the female version [was] more amusing. The male Mrs. Noah wasn’t uneffective, but less effective, not unfunny, but less funny. Interpreting the character ‘straight’, without parody, meant that Tony found himself in a role [which had been interpreted] for a woman. The actor came out as a second-class woman, unable to get as many laughs out of the natural situation, and forbidden to try by emphasising his nonfemale femaleness. Peter Norton concluded: The only way to properly make the role a male one would be to parody Mrs. Noah in the sort of way Mike Elliston did, making her into a panto-dame figure. This interpretation would completely alter the ‘battle’ that I have talked about: the dominant-woman figure would become ridiculous and absurd from the outset, and the point of view entirely male-biased, with the fight being Mrs. Noah’s come-uppance, rather than a spirited resistance. The battle is no longer a battle – instead it becomes, from the start, a celebration of male dominance. In fact, I doubt anyone at Salford who had not seen the Lancaster performance laughed at anything but the parodic qualities, which arose naturally from the stage situation. Mrs. Noah thus becomes a pantomime dame. Several of my colleagues instinctively resist this because to them ‘pantomime dame’ means parody, and they want to take Mrs. Noah seriously as a person; it makes the play less admirable, in modern terms, if they can’t. They want to find psychological reasons for her behaving as she does, and they want to sympathise with her. (I might add that they are also mostly men.) But it may well be that the playwright never intended us to do either of these things. He was unlikely to believe that, in a non-topsy-turvy world, she had a claim to wear the trousers. He clearly enjoyed her uppishness, but I doubt he or his audience took it seriously. This critical situation has much in common with the Wife of Bath dilemma. Several of the literary qualities which create the impression of a rounded character and make critics try to psychoanalyse the Wife of Bath are missing from Mrs. Noah – the life history, the explicit self-revelation, the ‘human’ inconsistencies – but there is sufficient continuity of character in her mannishness, at least up to her sudden conversion to true wifeliness, and sufficient ‘life’ from her colloquialness, for it to be tempting. But it has curious effects on the role if it is played by a woman, and is almost impossible on the naturalistic level if the part is played by a man. I was interested in David Mills’ report in our last issue of the militant feminist Mrs. Noah of the Toronto Chester Cycle: in the modern context this would explain her behaviour and even make it sympathetic, but, again, it 226

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s eventually runs against the grain of the play and what the character herself turns into. She is very similar to her Towneley counterpart, with the added complication that the only affection she shows is for her gossips, and that in modern performances this introduces a note of pathos and a hint of unfairness in God’s proceedings that are almost certainly not what the original wanted us to feel, because again it unbalances the play. If we think of them as a chorus-line of drunken (male) harridans, they become far more grotesque, and though their drowning may well have its pathos, it will not be of the personal kind which distracts from the main line of the play. Can one take a parodic character seriously? Could you take a male Mrs. Noah seriously? I think yes, but not on a naturalistic level. Instead, we recognise the situation, which is sufficiently like life, and relate to it without being particularly involved in her as a person. Everything said about her, and everything she does, is generic, because she is a stereotype: as the Wife of Bath says: Deceite, wepyng, spynnyng, God hath yive To wommen kyndely, whil that they may lyve.  Canterbury Tales D, ll. 401–2 The Towneley Mrs. Noah is the anti-Jovinian woman whose distaff is the mark of Eve, and who chides ‘like a leaky roof on a wet day’: the Chester Mrs. Noah – ‘Lord, that weomen bine crabbed aye!’ (line 105) adds the stereotypical drunkenness. Provided there is enough truth in the stereotype, whether it be in character or situation, in a funny way our reaction to this can be stronger than to the plight of an individual woman because it has been abstracted from her as a person and become part of a universal plight. An individual can be sympathised with purely as an individual but she will not become really moving unless she has something generic about her as well. However, here we have an added complication. The battle is explicitly set up to divide the sexes in the audience, which suggests there is enough truth in the situation for them to respond. But if Mrs. Noah is played by a man, can it do so in the straightforward way that it seems in the script to suggest? Possibly yes and no. On one level, again, we recognise the real-life situation and respond to the truth and implications of that: and there is no difficulty, presumably, in the men lining up behind Noah, who is a man. On the other, theatrical, level, we have the loaded situation of a man disguised as a woman appealing to the women to line up behind him. This seems a fifth-column sort of thing to do, designed to sell the women down the river. But I’m not sure that in fact is works or worked that way. As a woman, I personally don’t feel either offended or threatened by, for example, the transvestite sketches of the Two Ronnies or Les Dawson, because I feel that the laugh is on them: no matter how hard they try, they can’t ever be women: they are nothing more than a caricature. Also, since we recognise them through the disguise, their male characteristics are transmuted into 227

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s undesirable female ones, and you can’t take them seriously as men any more. At Lancaster, the eruption of Mrs. Noah was greeted by a shriek of delight, partly because of ‘her’ ungainly size and threatening stance, partly because the audience recognised the actor and found it hysterical that he should have been transmuted into a woman. (I recommend this to women as a useful teaching technique when they are feeling annoyed or browbeaten by the lordly behaviour of their male colleagues: imagine them in a skirt and high heels, and then imagine what kind of a woman they would be, and what would be said about them, if they behaved as women as they do as men.) Women are still not taken seriously and we belong to a society considerably less hierarchical than the one which gave birth to Mrs. Noah. No woman could take Mrs. Noah seriously, in that sense, either as a woman or as a man, which robs her of offence. On the other hand, since we do recognise the situation, perhaps Mrs. Noah’s appeal to the women in the audience makes us recognise our allegiance but robs the battle of its seriousness. Instead, the conflict becomes a ritual in which honour is satisfied, because the subject has been given an airing, but which doesn’t seriously involve on a personal level. I can only speculate what it does or did for the men in the audience. I think one strand may be the ritualisation of Misrule. I have said that physical combat is traditionally a male affair: men have created rules for it. Women have no rules for fighting, and so when like Mrs. Noah they do, the result is total anarchy. If the combatants are played by men, as with Carl and Mark Heap’s Gammer Gurton and Dame Chat (see Plate 5), we have a horrified and delighted vision of what could happen if women were also as strong as men. It is a glimpse into primal chaos. I suspect that Mrs. Noah has a folk ancestor in the Betty, the man-woman figure who dressed up on New Year’s Eve to go rioting in disguise round the town, and who is inveighed against by the same Decretals and legal proclamations which inveigh against masks and face-blackenings, as well as incurring  the full anathema of Deuteronomy 22:5.83 They belong to the area of misrule which was both a release from inhibition and potentially dangerous. (The pantomime dame, who appears at the same time of year, seems to have succeeded to the first of her functions, whatever her actual history.) But misrule is only liberating if it is eventually brought under control, and the participants return at the end to their accustomed roles – so Mrs. Noah returns at the end of the series of fights to her role as obedient and compliant wife. It also seems to give some men a chance to exorcise their own fears of the unknown. When one of them dresses up as a woman, it not only frees them from the rules imposed on their own sex in everyday life, it also seems to act as a ritual exorcism of their fear of the opposite sex. Peter Happé mentions the ‘fascination and horror’ with which he approached the playing of St. Joan. I don’t think you’d find a woman feeling the same about dressing up as a man:

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Plate 5 Medieval Players: Gammer Gurton’s Needle, 1982. Gammer Gurton and Dame Chat (Mark and Carl Heap) Photo: © Tessa Musgrave

she might revel in the freedom, but I don’t think there would be that sense of the unexplored: A woman is a foreign land, Of which, although he travel young, 229

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s A man can ne’er quite understand The customs, practises, and tongue.84 Presumably in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with sex-roles so much more stereotyped, this sense of moving into strange and forbidden territory was even stronger. But one of the characteristics of this exorcism seems to be that it must be expressed in crude and eventually belittling terms. How far could a man play a naturalistic Mrs. Noah? She has no coherent character: she is there to be a figure of anarchy and then to be tamed. Her aggression, her obstinacy, are not the psychological traits of an individual woman, they belong to the antiwoman stereotype. The more human the actor tries to make her, the more he goes against the grain of the role. Alternatively, could a woman play a pantomime dame? I have never actually seen a sufficiently outrageous female Mrs. Noah. Can a woman caricature being that kind of woman? Surely whatever she does is going to come out as an attempt to naturalism? The nearest thing I have seen to a parody of a woman as woman is Marti Caine, who sends up the male stereotype of glamorous femininity. She does this by being in herself breathtakingly glamorous, but letting us see the real woman underneath, a down-to-earth Northern housewife with husband trouble, prone to ladders in the incredibly sexy tights. She epitomises our failure to live up to the glossy standards of what is expected of us as sex-objects. But Mrs. Noah is hardly a sex-object. Perhaps Nora Batty is more her mark, but Nora Batty would never surrender, and to Compo she is a sex-object: she comes across as a person, which makes this, even if remotely, possible. The trouble with both of them is that they are played by women, and the part of Mrs. Noah was written for a man.

Should women act in the mystery plays? Just try to stop them. But there are certain things an actress and a director could bear in mind. At Lancaster, a (male) colleague of mine suggested that since the plays were written by men for men to perform, they necessarily created women from the male point of view, and these were likely to be stereotypes, visions of impossible purity or impossible shrewishness. I would prefer, at least in the case of Mary, to call them archetypes, since ‘stereotype’ suggests a limited and unthinking characterisation. The playwrights have not individualised their serious women, in the sense of giving them unique and detailed quirks of character. What they have done is to work on role, function, and relationships, and left it to the personality of the actor to provide what individuality is necessary. The plays belong partly to the meditative tradition which interested itself in emotional responses and relationships, and where the cast is often predominantly female: the N-Town Visitation is in this tradition. I have found 230

‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s it most productive to work on these responses and relationships, rather than trying to create a ‘character’ for Mary: the character will arise naturally out of the situations. They may not be overtly expressed in the words; the Chester Purification does not immediately suggest all the patterns which we finally found in it, but it is based in a tradition of such strength and complexity that they were there subliminally waiting to come out. The director and actress should therefore explore this side and not bother about ‘characterising’ her part, in the sense of making her quirkily individual. She will already probably show too much individuality by the very fact of being a woman. It could be no bad technique to think what the part would be like if it were played by a man. I have seen one successful young Mary, Kathy Despicht, who played the N-Town Mary at Oxford for us in 1970, and she succeeded because of her strength, coupled with strikingly Marian good looks. (She later played Eve with equal distinction.) Casting, as both Diana Wyatt and Henrietta Twycross-Martin suggest, is extremely important. If it is a choice between a softly pretty curly blonde and a strong-looking punk brunette, pick the punk – you can always make up the deficit with a wig. The director should realise that what his actresses gain in warmth, they will lose in remoteness, and that the spiritual dimension of the action is in danger of disappearing: he should take steps to underline this. Another suggestion made at Lancaster was that here we had a theatre without sex. I would not entirely agree, but as we have seen, it operates differently, and this is again something that an actress will find difficult. In the modern theatre, sexual attractiveness is part of the general attraction of the actor or actress, at least when they are also chosen for their good looks, and it is presumably impossible to command an actress to switch this part of her personality off completely. But she must strive at least to seem untouchable, which may mean restraining anything that may suggest softness or ­yieldingness, except, as Henrietta again pointed out, in non-sexual relationships as with the baby – or presumably with Joseph. (‘Superman loves ­everybody.’) I have no suggestion for Mrs. Noah. I think she should be played by a man. University of Lancaster

Notes I should like to thank all those with whom I have discussed this topic, especially Richard Rastall, Richard and Marie Axton, Helen Phillips, Peter Meredith, Henrietta Twycross-Martin, Nick and Cicely Havely, and above all Sarah Carpenter, who has also patiently read and commented on several drafts of several sections of this article. I should also like to thank the Archivist of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, for allowing me to consult CCC MS 352, the collection of letters between Rainoldes and Gager.  1. Records of Early English Drama: Coventry, ed. by R.W. Ingram (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1981). Page references are to this edition.

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‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s  2. REED: Coventry note to p. 121 (pp. 562–3).  3. REED: Coventry, p. 308; Oxford Dictionary of Christian Names, ed. by E. Withycombe, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), svv Frances, Francis.   4. Page references to Records of Early English Drama: Chester, ed. by Lawrence M. Clopper (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1979).   5. ‘“Item for a grone – iij d” – records and performances’, in Records of Early English Drama: Proceedings of the First Colloquium, ed. by JoAnna Dutka (Toronto: Records of Early English Drama, 1979), pp. 26–59, especially pp. 32–36 and note 40. He miscalculates on one point: the second Thomas Ellam, clerk and tailor, was probably about twenty-three, not ‘about thirty’. (Incidentally, William Loker in his late thirties may not be ‘an obvious type-casting for the aged Joseph’, but in this play, the ‘old man’ role is taken over by Simeon; our Joseph was in his early thirties, and fitted the role well, more because of character than age.) In 1567, the characters missing are Mary, Simeon, and the First Doctor, but there is only one actor’s name to share between them, Robert Rabon. He gets 16d, which puts him in the right salary range for both Mary and the First Doctor, but since he was made free in 1547, that would make him about forty-one at the time of playing, which does not sound like a Mary.  6. The Rolls of the Freemen of the City of Chester I: 1392–1700, ed. by J.H.E. Bennett (n.p.: Record Society for … Lancashire and Cheshire 51, 1906): the Ellams pp. 35, 48; Looker or Locker pp. 24, 49 (as father of Thomas Richardson); Rathbone (see n. 5 above) p. 23.  7. Plays and Players in Kent 1450–1642, ed. by Giles Dawson, Malone Society Collections 7 (1965), pp. 202–4.   8. Dawson, p. 189.  9. Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. by Norman Davis, EETS, SS 1 (1970), p. xxxii. 10. Anna J. Mill, Mediaeval Plays in Scotland (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1927), p. 273. 11. Thomas Sharp, A Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries Anciently Performed at Coventry (Coventry: Merridew, 1825), pp. 116–17 12. Richard Rastall, essay on ‘Music’ for forthcoming book on Contexts of Medieval English Drama edited by John Coldewey and Marianne Briscoe, to be published by Toronto University Press. He points out that the Mothers’ lullaby is restricted in pitch range in exactly the same way as I have described for speaking voices later in this article. I should like to thank Dr. Rastall for letting me see part of his  ­article in  typescript. [See Richard Rastall, ‘Music in the Cycle Plays’, in Contexts for Early English Drama, ed. by Marianne G. Briscoe and John C. Coldewey (Bloomington  and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 192–218 Ed.] 13. Non-Cycle Plays, pp. 1–7. 14. REED: Coventry, pp. 235–6, 574. 15. REED: Chester, pp. 37–8. 16. See REED: Chester, pp. 65 (1561), 77 (1566–7), 85 (1568), where contributions to the upkeep of the pageant are recorded against names of members of the Guild: the women seem to be widows of Guild members who have succeeded to their membership. 17. The Macro Plays, ed. by Mark Eccles, EETS 262 (1969), p. 139. Line references to the play in this edition. 18. Macro Plays, p. xxxiv. 19. OED, sv harlot 4 (b); the Catholicon Anglicum (1483) glosses harlot as ioculatrix … pantomima … histrix. Earlier the term seems to have been applied to travelling

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‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s players, tumblers, and jugglers in general: see sv (3), where ‘tumbleres and harlotis’ seem to go together. The ‘loose-living’ connotations of the word as attached to women seem partly to have been acquired via this connection with the professional stage. Allardyce Nicoll’s Masks, Mimes and Miracles (London: Harrap, 1931) makes random references to professional female entertainers, though most of his evidence is late classical (pp. 92–9). 20. REED: Coventry, pp. 152 (1539), 154–5 (1540) etc. 21. PhD thesis, University of York, 1983, to be published as REED: Beverley. PRO C47/46/446 (Certificates of St. Helen’s Guild, 1389) thesis 396–7; PRO C47/46/448 (Certificate of the Guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 1389) thesis 402–4. I have slightly adapted her translations. 22. A Calendar of Dramatic Records in the Books of the Livery Companies of London 1485–1640, ed. by Jean Robertson and D.J. Gordon, Malone Society Collections 3 (1954), p. 14. One of the ‘virgens’ seems to have been called ‘Gallys doughter’ (15). In 1519 ‘2 Maidens’ appeared in the pageant of Our Lady and St. Elizabeth (4), but I have not seen the original document, and it is possible that these ‘maidens’ were boys, like the ones in 1464 (see below). 23. Malone Society Collections 3, p. 24. 24. Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, 3 vols, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1980), I, 55: from Walsingham’s Historia Anglicana. My translation. 25. H.N. Hillebrand, The Child Actors (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964) gives an excellent summary of the use of children in pageants (pp. 28–32), and Wickham, Early English Stages, provides further information and documentary evidence in his chapter on ‘Pageant Theatres of the Streets’. Gordon Kipling is writing a book on Royal Entries which will provide yet more information. [See Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) Ed.] The earliest recorded pageants after the Coronation of Richard II include the Reconciliation of the king with the citizens of London in 1392, when he was greeted at the Conduit by a castle hanging in the air from which descended: ‘juvenis formosaque virgo / Hic velut angelus est, haec coronata fuit’. (Richard Maydiston, De concordia inter regem Ric. II et civitatem London, quoted by Wickham, Early English Stages, p. 69). Henry V on his return from Agincourt was greeted by ‘a choir of most beautiful young maidens’ who sang to him as the daughters of Israel did to David returning from the slaying of Goliath (Gesta Henrici Quinti, ed. by Frank Taylor and John Roskell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 108–11). 26. Quoted Wickham, Early English Stages, I, 87. 27. Hillebrand, Child Actors, p. 29; Wickham, Early English Stages, I, 106. Hillebrand quotes a pageant at Norwich in 1575 where Elizabeth was greeted by ‘eyght small women chyldren spinning worsted yarne, and at the other side as many knittyng of worsted yarne hose’ (32); one suspects that the girls had to be employed because they knew how to spin and knit. 28. Wickham, Early English Stages, I, 330–1. 29. Wickham, Early English Stages, I, 97. 30. Malone Society Collections 3, p. 29. 31. REED: Chester, pp. 215 (1605) and 471. 32. REED: Chester, p. 135. 33. REED: Chester, p. 198, see note 83. 34. Mill, Mediaeval Plays in Scotland, p. 163. 35. Edward Hall, Hall’s Chronicle (London: J. Johnson, 1809; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1965), p. 514 (1509/10): see also pp. 519, 526, 535 etc. For an extended discussion of these entertainments, and of Cornish’s part in them, see Gordon

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‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s Kipling, ‘Henry VII and the Origins of Tudor Patronage’ in Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. by Guy F. Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton N.J.: Guildford: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 117–64. 36. See especially Hillebrand, The Child Actors, and Michael Shapiro, Children of the Revels (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). 37. I make no attempt at thoroughness. Much of my information comes from The Staging of Religious Drama in Europe in the Later Middle Ages: Texts and Documents in Translation, ed. by Peter Meredith and John E. Tailby, EDAM Monograph Series 4 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1983). W.M. Tydeman, The Theatre in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) has a useful if necessarily brief summary in Chapter 7 (pp. 199–200). 38. In the Low Countries, my evidence relates mainly to street pageantry of various kinds, where the same rules seem to apply as in the English street pageants: for example, at Leuven in 1495 ‘Barbara, the daughter of the landlord of the Star’ played the Virgin Mary seated on top of the Jesse Tree (Edward Van Even, L’Omgang de Louvain (Louvain: C.-J. Fonteyn, 1863), p. 31, note 2). 39. William Prynne, Histriomastix (London: Michael Sparke, 1633; repr. New York: Garland, 1974), pp. 214–5. He also mentions ‘they have now their female-Players in Italy, and other forraigne parts’. 40. Gustave Cohen, Histoire de la Mise en Scène dans le Théâtre Religieux Français du Moyen Age (Paris: Champion, 1951), p. 206. I have not been able to get hold of the details of the Romans production. 41. Petit de Julleville, Les Mystères, 2 vols (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1968) I, 127. 42. Philippe de Mézières: Campaign for the Feast of Mary’s Presentation, ed. by William E. Coleman, Toronto Medieval Latin Texts (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 1981), pp. 85, 88. A translation of the staging instructions is in Meredith and Tailby, Staging, pp. 207–24. The Virgin Mary herself is played by a small girl of three or four. 43. Gustave Cohen, Le Livre de Conduite du Régisseur et Le Compte des Dépenses pour le Mystère de la Passion joué à Mons en 1501 (Paris: Publication Séries bleue, 1925), pp. c–cv. 44. Petit de Julleville, Mystères, II, 147–9. The list of ‘noms de junes filz et junes filles juant plusieurs parchons’ follows that of the adult actors. They seem to be divided according to sex, though Cole Labequin, who appears at the end of the girls’ list, is surely a boy? 45. Petit de Julleville, Mystères, II, 32. 46. Petit de Julleville, Mystères, II, 48. 47. Petit de Julleville, Mystères, II, 52. 48. Meredith and Tailby, Staging, pp. 55–6. However, in the Castilian Trial in Heaven God was doubled with Our Lady, and two of the Four Daughters of God with two of the shepherds (p. 54). In Florence in 1439, the part of the Virgin Mary in the Annunciation and Ascension was played by ‘a beautiful youth richly dressed in a maiden’s clothes with a crown on his head … very much like the Virgin Mary to look at’ (p. 243). 49. Meredith and Tailby, Staging, p. 55. 50. See note 39 for edition. 51. John Rainoldes, Th’Overthrow of Stage Playes (Middelburgh: Schilders, 1599; repr. New York: Garland, 1974). For Rainoldes and this controversy, see F.S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), pp. 230–46, and also T.J. Manning, The Staging of Plays at Christ Church, Oxford, 1582–1592 (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan 1972; published University Microfilms, Ann Arbor), Chapters 4–7.

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‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m ys t e ry p lay s 52. For Gager, see Boas, University Drama, pp. 165–246 passim, and also Manning. 53. Rainoldes, p. 45. 54. Rainoldes, p. 104. 55. Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London: Thomas Gosson, 1582; repr. New York: Garland, 1972), sig E 3v. 56. REED: Chester, p. 67 (1561). 57. REED: Coventry, p. 277 (1576). In Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1518/19 the choristers playing a Hortulanus play paid out among other things pro crinibus mulieribus (Chambers, Medieval Stage II, 389). 58. Petit de Julleville, Mystères, II, 53. A friend of his ‘so alike that I was often taken for him’, who played one of the saint’s maidens, was then fifteen. 59. Rainoldes, pp. 78, 107, 105. 60. Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England (London: Routledge, 1965), p. 131. 61. Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1593), ed. by Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977), p. 66; ‘her’ costume pp. 130–1. 62. Gosson, Playes Confuted, sig E 3v. 63. Rainoldes, p. 122. 64. Rainoldes, pp. 34, 35. 65. REED: Coventry, pp. 122 (1524), 126 (1527). 66. Records of Plays and Players in Lincolnshire, ed. by Stanley J. Kahrl, Malone Society Collections 8 (1974, for 1969), p. 49. 67. Jacobus a Voragine, Legenda Aurea, ed. by T. Graesse (Leipzig, 1846), p. 589 (Nativity of the BVM). 68. Publius Pampinius Statius, Achilleid, ed. by J.H. Mozley Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1928) II, 534 (Bk I, lines 339–40). 69. Gosson, Playes Confuted, sig E 3v. 70. MS Corpus Christi College 352, pp. 54–5. 71. MS CCC 352, p. 56. 72. Prynne, Histriomastix, p. 206. 73. See note 21. 74. See note 27. 75. See note 26. 76. Children of the Revels, p. 103. 77. Sir Richard Baker, Theatrum Redivivum or The Theatre Vindicated (London: Francis Eglesfield, 1662; repr. New York: Garland, 1973), pp. 22–3, a lively and sensible contribution to the discussion which gives the effect of someone thinking about the nature of drama in his contemporary theatre rather than chewing over old arguments. 78. Gager, MS CCC 352, p. 57. 79. Berthold Brecht, ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’ (59), in Brecht on Theatre, ed. by John Willett (London: Methuen, 1978), p. 197. I would like to thank Sarah Carpenter for this reference. 80. The English Mystery Plays (London: Routledge, 1972), pp. 116–17. The Jeu d’Adam of course presents Eve fully clothed. 81. English Mystery Plays, p. 117. 82. Legenda Aurea, cap 37, p. 164. 83. See Chambers, Medieval Stage I, chapters on ‘The Mummers’ Play’ and ‘Masks and Misrule’, for scattered references, also appendices on ‘Winter Prohibitions’ (II, 290–305); also The English Folk Play (OUP, 1933) pp. 5, 125; Alan Brody, The English Mummers and their Plays (London: Routledge, 1970), pp. 20–21 and 61; Mill Mediaeval Plays in Scotland, pp. 16, 163, 239, 242, 246, 263, 282. She points

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‘ t ra n s v e s t i s m ’ i n t h e m y s t e ry p lay s out (p. 23) that there is no Maid Marian mentioned in the Robin Hood plays; David Wiles, The Early Plays of Robin Hood (Cambridge: Brewer, 1981) thinks that the Maid’s role was taken over by a man in the early sixteenth century (pp. 23–4), after which we got Nashe’s heroine ‘his face handsomely muffled with a diaper-napkin to cover his beard’ (p. 5). 84. Coventry Patmore, cited in The Penguin Book of Quotations, which throws up an alarming number of quotations on this theme.

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Part III:

Theology

9 ‘AS THE SUN WITH HIS BEAMS WHEN HE IS MOST BRIGHT’

The episode of ‘Joseph’s Doubts’ in the N. Town manuscript appears to be a conflation of parts of two plays: a scene from a self-contained Mary Play dealing with the early life of the Virgin Mary up to and including the Visitation, and a traditional pageant play of ‘Joseph’s Doubts’. In his 1987 edition of the Mary Play, Peter Meredith disentangles the two as satisfactorily as they are ever likely to be disentangled.1 The result is interesting. In the Mary Play, the episode of Joseph’s return and his reaction to Mary’s pregnancy is reduced to eight lines, so brief that it is worth quoting them in full: Maria Husbond, ryght gracyously now come be ȝe. It solacyth me sore, sothly, to se ȝow in syth. Joseph Me merveylyth, wyff, surely, ȝour face I cannot se, But as þe sonne with his bemys qwan he is most bryth. Maria Husbond, it is as it plesyth oure Lord, þat grace of hym grew. Who þat evyr beholdyth me, veryly, They xal be grettly steryed to vertu; For þis ȝyfte and many moo, good Lord, gramercy! (1411–19) Joseph (apparently) returns and Mary greets him lovingly; he does not comment on her pregnancy, but on the unexpected and dazzling brilliance of her face. She modestly attributes this phenomenon to the grace of God and remarks that the sight of her will always inspire men to virtue. They then decide to go and visit Elizabeth. It is noticeable that there is no mention in this exchange of Joseph’s traditional Doubts. There may well be some very good commonsense reasons for this. It is possible that the Joseph of the original Mary Play was as much tormented with doubts as the Josephs of the N. Town pageant play, of York, Towneley, Chester, and Coventry, but that the N. Town redactor so much preferred the pageant play’s treatment that he did not incorporate any lines on the subject from the Mary Play in his final version, and they have thereby been irretrievably lost. Or it may purely be due to the order of the narrative. The 239

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ episode of Joseph’s Doubts comes from Matthew (1:18–25), the Annunciation and Visitation from Luke (1:26–56), and Gospel Harmonies had to decide which came first in chronological sequence. The usual pattern assumed that Mary’s pregnancy did not become obvious until she had returned home after visiting Elizabeth, when Joseph noticed it. This is the order followed by Chester and York, though not Towneley – Coventry has no Visitation. It is also the order followed by the apparent immediate source of this part of the Mary Play,2 the later thirteenth-century Pseudo-Bonaventure Meditationes Vitae Christi, possibly in the standard translation and adaptation of Nicholas Love (pre-1410). It may well be that the narrative of the Mary Play, which ends with Joseph and Mary leaving Elizabeth to return home, merely came to an end before it could get on to the subject. However, no other mystery play mentions the detail of Mary’s shining face, nor is it mentioned in either the Latin Meditationes or Love’s translation. It is worth asking where the playwright found the episode, and why he included it. Is it just a throwaway marvel, a casual narrative enhancement? Or does it also operate on a deeper level? Knowing the symbolic code of medieval theatre, we might expect that the brilliance of Mary’s face represents her new state of grace, and Joseph’s bedazzlement his reaction to it. But is there any evidence about the nature and implications both of her state and his reaction which would explain why the playwright used this particular symbol for them? Is it even possible – to anticipate my argument – that the shining face and the lack of doubts are connected: that in the original Mary Play this brilliance was actually meant to forestall any doubts Joseph might have had, thus incidentally reinforcing the play’s distinctively iconic presentation of Mary as miraculously consecrated to God from before her Immaculate Conception? Are we, in fact, in a completely different tradition? This investigation started when I accidentally came across a possible source for the episode in the Vita Jesu Christi of Ludolphus the Carthusian (died 1378).3 But the contexts in which the motif was embedded were so complex that when I started to follow up his references, I soon found myself in a veritable jungle of intertextuality. It seemed necessary to clear a few paths. However rough and occasionally meandering these are, I think they lead us to some degree of understanding of the figure of Mary, and of her relationship with Joseph, which the N. Town playwright received from his culture. They also very clearly demonstrate the way in which, in medieval Christian thought and possibly even outside it, one and the same motif can slide from being metaphor or symbol to being a marvel of popular legend, and then back to metaphor or symbol again. This presents us with a further problem. In works of literature, where we can make an educated guess at context and audience, we can usually tell which is meant to be which, though even there we may be predisposed to overstate the symbolism. But what happens when we meet the same motif in a mystery play, which is necessarily both narrative and 240

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ popular, and the playwright does not give us a helpful gloss on his intention? How do we know what degree of its heritage of symbolism and theological allusion it would have communicated – was meant to communicate? The answer probably lies in audience reception rather than authorial intention. Different members of the audience would respond differently, one imagines, depending on their degree of education and natural spirituality, and it would not much matter whether the playwright had intended the symbolism to be there or not. The tradition was bigger than he was. And in theatre, happily, marvels and metaphors can coexist: nobody demands that they should be mutually exclusive. Ultimately, the shining-face motif comes from the folk-tale world of the Apocryphal Gospels of the nativity and early life of Mary, where it has nothing to do with her pregnancy or with Joseph. The Gospel of Pseudo Matthew (eighth–ninth century) gives a lengthy description of the beauties and virtues of the child Mary in the Temple. Among them is that ‘resplendebat facies eius sicut nix, ita ut vix possent in eius vultum intendere’ (her face was as radiant as snow, so that they could scarcely look at her countenance).4 This account becomes part of the ‘historical’ tradition of writings about Mary. Hrotswitha of Gandersheim (c. 935) in her Historia Nativitatis Laudabilisq ue Conversationis Intactae Dei Genitricis versifies this detail as: Ipsius faciem niveo candore nitentem Tradunt, ardentis radios praecellere solis, Nec non humanum penitus devincere visum.5 (350) [They say that her face, shining with snowy brilliance, excelled the rays of the blazing sun, and utterly defeated the human gaze.] Vincent of Beauvais (c. 1190–1264) includes a potted version of the Pseudo Matthew in his Speculum Historiale (1247–59), in which the line has become ‘facies eius splendebat, vt vix posset in eius vultu quisquam intendere’ (her face shone, so that one could scarcely look at her countenance).6 It is thus, for the later Middle Ages, given the status of history. It is difficult to say whether the Apocryphal Gospel intended to convey the literal idea of visible light. Much of the vocabulary of beauty overlaps semantically with the vocabulary of light. Even nowadays, we can talk about ‘a dazzling platinum blonde’ or report that ‘ the bride was radiant in oyster satin’, without suggesting that either of these ladies would show up significantly on a photometer. The Middle English lyric ‘Blow, Northern Wynd’ rhapsodises ‘Hire lure 1umes liht / ase a launterne anyht / hire bleo blykyeþ so bryht’.7 Comparisons of female beauty with the sun, the brightest of all light-sources, are common place even in secular literature: the poet of ‘The fair Maid of Ribblesdale’ declares ‘Ase sonnebem hire bleo ys briht’.8 Pseudo Matthew may merely be making a comment about Mary’s superlative loveliness. Even in the 241

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ fifteenth century, when Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady (c. 1434), which is based on Pseudo Matthew,9 develops the motif as And of this mayde eke, as it is tolde, Hir godely face was so full of light That no man myght susteyn to by holde, For it was cle[r]er then the sonne bryght: That the crowne in the wynters nyght Of Adrian, ne of þe sterres sevene,  Ariadne To her fairnesse be not for to nevene  (I, 287) it would be possible to read the verse, out of context, purely as a rather extravagant tribute to her beauty. On the other hand, whereas poets and theologians may use figurative language in the full consciousness that it is figurative, popular literature tends to report it as if it were literally true. The folktale motif of the woman who is so beautiful that she shines in the dark is merely an extension of the kind of amorous hyperbole used by the Harley ‘Northern Wind’ lover of his mistress.10 One man’s metaphor becomes another man’s marvel. As we shall see, the history of Marian hagiography is particularly susceptible to this process. John Mirk, in his Festial,11 tells the tale of a monk who so loved her, and who had heard so much of her beauty, that he prayed to see her once before he died. An angel appears to tell him that his prayer may be granted, but ‘yf þow see hur yn þys world, þou most lese þyn een-syght; for þe lyȝt and þe clerte of hur ys soo bryght, þat þyn een mow not ber þe syght þerof’. The monk agrees to this, but when the day comes, he prudently covers one eye with his hand. He is duly blinded in the other eye, but her beauty is so great that he feels he will die unless he can see her again. Again, she appears to him and asks him what he is going to do now that he will lose his other eye? He replies, ‘My dere lady, þagh I had a thowsand een, I vouchsaf forto lese hom forto haue þat ioyfull syght þat I haue of you’, whereupon she restores him the sight of both eyes, and he sees better than he had before. It is a nice story, mixing folk-tale shrewdness with a rather touching obsession, and it is salutory to remember that for everyday believers the radiance of the Mother of God was not merely a metaphor for outstanding beauty, or even for a spiritual state, but charged with supernatural electricity and always (like her relics) potentially dangerous, even if approached with humility and devotion. The sun is beneficent, but will burn out your eyesight if you stare at it directly. Despite the romanticism of this account and of other love-affairs with the Virgin, however, they insist on a paradox: in Mary, superlative beauty inspires virtue, not desire. Lydgate’s next verse continues Yet neuer man temptyde was to synne While he behelde on hir hooly face; 242

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ The holy goste so hoole was hir within That all envyron sprede gan his grace Where þat she was present in any place, For all way god gaffe to hir presence So fulsum light of hevynly influence  (I, 294) or, as the N. Town Mary says: Who þat evyr beholdyth me, veryly, They xal be grettly steryed to vertu.  (1410) Side by side with the apocryphal ‘radiant beauty’ motif, but originally independently of it, the tradition had grown up that though Mary was the most beautiful woman in the world, her beauty was so spiritual that it was impossible for any man to think of her as a sex-object. The root of this appears to be a fairly restrained conjecture about her effect on those with whom she came into contact. Ambrose (d. 397) said of her ‘Cujus tanta gratia, ut non solum in se virginitatis gratiam reservaret, sed etiam his quos viseret, integritatis insigne conferret’ (Her grace [was] so great that not only did she preserve the grace of her own virginity, but even transmitted the distinction of chastity on those at whom she looked).12 He cites the saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist as examples. We would talk, using a dead metaphor belonging to the same semantic field, of her influence on their attitudes to sex. Jerome (c. 342–420) added to this the conspicuous example of the chastity of Joseph, for which he implies Mary was directly responsible:13 Tu dicis Mariam virginem non permansisse: ego mihi plus vindico, etiam ipsum Joseph virginem fuisse per Mariam, ut ex virginali conjugio virgo filius nasceretur. [You say that Mary did not remain a virgin: I will take it upon myself to make an even larger claim, that Joseph himself was a virgin because of Mary, so that from a virgin marriage a Virgin Son should be born.] This comment will become important later in our argument. Nine centuries after Ambrose and Jerome, the Legenda Aurea (1255–66),14 reflecting the controversy about the Immaculate Conception, relates this active influence for chastity to the claim for her sanctification in her mother’s womb and popularises the tradition as: non solum aliquod inclinamentum ad peccatum in ea penitus non remansit, sed etiam virtus sanctitatis ejus usque ad alios extendebatur et transfundebatur, ita quod in aliis omnes motus carnalis concupiscientiae extinguebat. Unde dicunt Judaei, quod cum Maria 243

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ pulcherrima fuerit, a nullo tamen unquam potuit concupisci, et ratio est, quia virtus suae castitatis cunctos adspicientes penetrabat et omnes in iis concupiscentias repellebat. [not only did not the slightest inclination towards sin remain within her, but the power of her holiness reached out to and infused itself into others, so that it extinguished all instincts of fleshly lust in them. Whence the Jews say,15 that though Mary was exceedingly beautiful, nonetheless she could never be desired by anyone, and the reason is (and this is rational?), because the power of her chastity sank deep into all those who looked at her, and drove away all lusts from them.] This may already have become tinged with the ‘radiant face’ motif, though logically it depends on the sinner being able to contemplate her beauty, not to be dazzled by it. (Logic is not always a very conspicuous quality in these adaptations; Lydgate apparently sees no contradiction in stating first that ‘no man myght susteyne to byholde her’ and, second, that no-one was tempted to sin ‘While he behelde on hir hooly face’.) On the other hand, it could still be a somewhat extravagant description of a recognisable human quality. Some later Middle English versions, for example, report it as restrainedly as Ambrose does.16 But with the mention of her beauty, it has moved from a sober statement about Mary’s influence on her immediate circle to a much more dubiously romantic view of her own sexuality: her vibrant chastity hands off any potential suitors. Though it is presented as a transference of spiritual energy (virtus), it is used much more like a weapon. The Speculum Humanae Salvationis (?1310–24) presents this outflowing influence of virtus as radios, rays of spiritual light:17 Et non solum a se temptaciones et peccata repellabat Sed eciam quibus radios sue gracie infundebat Quamuis enim maria pulcherrim[a] erat Tamen nunquam ab aliquot male concupisci poterat Nam virtus quedam diuina ab ipsa procedebat Et eam videncium concupiscientias illicitas extinguebat [Noght onely in hireself voiding temptaciounes Bot be bemes als in othere of hire infusiounes; For alle werre sho sothly the gudeliest of wymmen, ȝit moght neuer none be synne desire hire of all men, For swilk vertue divine bemed of hire excellence Þat whoevre hire behelde it qwenchid his concupiscens]  (898) Again, it is difficult to tell whether these radios are meant to be taken metaphorically, or literally as visible rays of light. The writer might have intended the first, but it would be easy for the careless reader, expecting marvels, to pick it up as 244

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ the second. One could rationalise it as a scientific description of eye-contact: eyesight was thought to be composed of subtle and invisible rays of light which struck the object of vision rendering it visible.18 A thirteenth-­century verse Life of the Virgin (to which we shall return) sees it in these terms:19 ex eius oculis radii fulserunt Qui eam intuentium visum percusserunt.  (1705) [rays shone from her eyes which beat down the gaze of those who looked at her.] One can see how in this form this quellingly chaste radiance could almost imperceptibly ally itself with the ‘shining beauty’ motif until the two were fused, so that Lydgate, as we have seen, sees the one as following on naturally from the other. These two motifs, however, might not have joined forces (though given the eclectic tendencies of medieval imagery, they probably would have sooner or later) if it had not been for the all-encompassing imagery of Mary as a lightsource, both celestial and terrestrial. The onomastic school of interpretation spearheaded by Isidore of Seville provided the authority: one etymology of the name Maria, he states, is illuminatrix, ‘she who illuminates’; another is stella maris, ‘star of the sea’.20 Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) explains: Ipsa est igitur nobilis illa stella ex Jacob orta, cujus radius universum orbem illuminat, cujus splendor et praefulget in supernis, et inferos penetrat: terras etiam perlustrans, et calefaciens magis mentes quam corpora, fovet virtutes, excoquit vitia.21 [For she is that noble star come out of Jacob (Numbers 24:17, the prophecy of Balaam), whose ray illuminates the universal globe, whose splendour shines gloriously in the heavens and reaches down to hell; casting her light over the earth, and warming the hearts of men rather than their bodies, she nourishes virtues, and shrivels up vices.] Like a planet, Mary radiates her benign influence on the world, quenching desire in her chaste beams. Either under the influence of these etymologies or independently, almost every major image of light in the Bible was eventually either applied directly to Mary, or used to link her with Christ. Typologically she is the star of Jacob (Numbers 24:17), the Burning Bush (Exodus 3:2–6), the dawn (Song of Songs 6:10), the sanctuary lamp and seven-branched candlestick (Exodus 39:37), and in the New Testament the lamp of the Wise Virgins (Matthew 25:1–12), and the candle of the woman who lost a piece of silver (Luke 15:8). As the Virgin of the Assumption she is associated with the Woman clothed in the Sun (Revelation 12:1), and with the Bride of the Song of Songs, ‘she 245

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ who looketh forth as the morning (dawn), fair as the moon, clear as the sun’ (6:10).22 Innumerable laudes and litanies list these as her attributes, in Latin and in English, learned and simple: praise of the lady ‘so faire and so briht’ ranges from St. Bernard’s great rhapsody on Mary as stella maris in his second Homily Super Missus Est to the pellucid hymn:23 Of on that is so fayr and bright, Velud maris stella Brighter than the dayis light, Parens et puella. This illustrates the main difficulty of writing about this subject. Once you depart from simply mapping the direct lines of transmission and try to find a context and a rationale for its curious persistence, there is just far too much secondary material. One could write a book about the imagery of light which surrounds the Blessed Virgin. It becomes a kind of free-floating aura, a skein of references and images from which her worshippers can draw filaments to weave their own rhapsodies or embroider their arguments. It is as difficult to prove a direct connection between one text and another as it is in some cases to find who first used a particular image; they have become common property, especially if they are enshrined in the liturgy. But this luminous background is part of our evidence: time and again we see connections being made, or a latent image being inescapably developed because of it. In this context, the apparently simple question ‘Why should Mary have a shining face?’ suddenly has a myriad of possible answers. One reason for this is the existence of several semantic fields, particularly in Latin, for the language of light. Since in the Middle Ages both poets and biblical commentators tend to work largely through allusion and verbal association, this enables them to link images and quotations from different fields with a triumphant sense of rightness and rediscovery, often without themselves seeming to be aware when they slide from one area of reference to another. They can even create an implicit causality. We have already seen this at work. The language of light is related to Mary’s radiant beauty. It is also used to convey her purity, which increasingly meant her chastity, and hence her virginity: the image is probably originally that of a burnished mirror with no spot of tarnish, or of the dazzling whiteness of untrodden snow.24 Beauty and chastity are thus paradoxically aligned, especially on the evidence of the Song of Songs 4:7, ‘macula non est in te’ (‘there is no spot (flaw) in thee’: the translation forces us to make a choice, the Vulgate does not). Less familiarly, the Latin vocabulary of dignity and reputation also includes a large proportion of words in the semantic field of light – splendens, clarus, fulgens, illustris and their nouns (a brief look at Roget will show how this still applies in English) – which incidentally makes it easier to suggest that 246

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ beauty and chastity are causally linked with status and renown. And the vocabulary of divine revelation uses the term illumination, which is, again, given literal expression in stories where divine beings appear to humans, and those in which humans become quasi-divine, as in the Assumption. Thus, beauty and chastity become compelling poetic reasons for spiritual illumination and celestial status. And because light radiates from its source, Mary can be seen as an active force of virtue and illumination. When we move from metaphor and allusion to narrative, we find the same fields of reference in operation. Instead of being purely a verbal game, however, played on an acknowledgedly metaphorical level, in narrative the imagery of light tends to be realised, that is, it is visualised as physically emanating from persons and places. (Popular narrative thus has a lot in common with medieval theatre: it likes to ‘see’ its symbols.) Like the Pseudo-Matthew detail of the shining face, those episodes in the Lives of the Virgin which recount such manifestations usually go back to the Apocryphal Gospels. There, most of this imagery reflects the narrative semiotics of folk-tale which equate light with the presence of the super­natural.25 For example, divine messengers are usually signalled ‘cum immenso lumine’ [with fulle grete light].26 Commentators and sermon-writers are quick to pick this up. In a sermon attributed to St. Augustine, Mary recounts how ‘Venit ad me Gabriel Archangelus facie rutilans, veste coruscans, incessu mirabilis’ [the Archangel Gabriel came to me, with a dazzling face, glittering garment, and wonderful gait’],27 from whence, says Aquinas, it is sung (in the Breviary) ‘Et expavescit Virgo de lumine’ [And the Virgin was afraid at the light]:28 Mari was afrayd of that syght, That cam to her with so gret light.29 Even objects can be treated in the same way. In the Pseudo-Melito Transitus (?fourth century), the palm brought by the angel (later identified with Gabriel) in token of Mary’s imminent death has its own internal radiance: the Legenda Aurea chapter on the Assumption, which is based on this account, says that ‘palma autem illa nimia claritate splendebat et erat quidem virgae viriditate consimilis, sed folia ipsius ut stella matutina fulgebant’ [that palm shone with the most exceeding brightness: it was as green as a fresh branch, but its leaves glittered like the morning star’].30 Mirk Englishes this as ‘a branche of palme of paradyse of þe wheche þe ȝearde was grene as gresse, and þe leues dytdyn schyne as þe day-ster, and’ (nice extra touch) ‘bare datus swettyr þen any wordely spyces’.31 In the Elche Festa, which is based on this version of the Assumption, the palm branch is stapled with strips of gold foil: perhaps the York ‘palme oute of paradise’ (Play 44, 15) was too. When it is related to human beings, this light brings intimations of immortality, but it can also signify those other qualities we have seen above – and 247

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ by implication link them to the supernatural. In the Transitus, Christ and the angels (as supernatural beings) descend for Mary’s soul in a great light, but the soul itself is: tantum lucis candorem, vt nulla mortalium lingua digne possit effari. Vincebat enim omnem candorem niuis, & vniuersi metalli, & argenti radiantis magni claritate. [‘of syche whitnes that noon erþely tonge myȝt say it, for it passid the snowe and alle maner of schynyng metal in clerenys and fayrenes.’] 32 This radiance demonstrates both the purity of Mary’s soul and the clarity her body will share with it in heaven. But then the body itself undergoes a preliminary transfiguration. When her maidens come to wash and lay her out for burial: Cumque exuissent illam vestibus suis, sacrum corpus illud tanta claritate resplenduit, vt tangi quidem posset pro obsequio, videri autem species prae nimia luce coruscante, non posset: & nihil splendor apparuit magnus, & sentiebatur, dum lauaretur corpus mundissimum, & nullo horrore sordis infectum. Cumque vestissent eam lintheis & indumentis mortalibus, paulatim lux illa euanuit. [‘after that they hadden spoilid the holy cors of hire clothynge, the body schoon with siche a clerenes þat unnepe myȝte eny-body beholde it or haue eny siȝt of it for grete lyȝtenynge and bryȝtnes that there was. And as the body was in wasshynge, it was feled to be clene of alle kyndes of fylȝehede or infeccion. And when they hadde cloþed hire in white clothes, as is the maner of dede bodies, the lyȝt of the bodie with-drewe by litell and litell.’] This light fulfils two functions, apart from creating the appropriate atmosphere of wonder and giving a foretaste of the glory that is to come: it provides supernatural proof of Mary’s physical and moral spotlessness – macula non est in te – and it preserves her modesty even in death. Though the proper (if unnecessary, for we are told by Pseudo-Melito that the body was preternaturally clean) rituals are performed, the body itself is protected from mortal eyes by its exceeding brightness. This episode may well have contributed to the linking of the ‘brilliant face’ motif to the ‘piercing chastity’ motif. One can see how, under the influence of an increasingly magical sense of her virginity and its powers, the significance of this supernatural light could alter. Instead of being there to prevent the beholder from attempting to gaze at the mysteries of God, it becomes a protective device to preserve the chastity of the Mother of God, a luminous chadour. 248

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ Another apocryphal example seems at first to be only tangentially related to our theme, but turns out eventually to form one of its central strands. The Gospel of Pseudo Matthew reserves its most striking use of supernatural light for the Nativity. This takes place in an underground cave which has never seen the light of day, but: Ad ingressum vero Mariae coepit tota spelunca splendorem habere, et quasi sol ibi esset ita tota fulgorem lucis ostendere; et quasi esset ibi hora diei sexta, ita speluncam lux divina illustravit; nec in die nec in nocte lux ibi divina defuit quamdiu ibi Maria fuit.Pseudo Matthaei Evangelium ch. 1333 [At the entrance of Mary, the whole cave began to shine, and to radiate blazing light as if the sun were there; and as if it were noonday there, so did divine light lighten the cave; and this divine light did not cease there by day or by night for as long as Mary was there.] The light appears to have no operative function: it is there primarily to enhance the numinosity of the event. It accompanies Mary, but does not emanate from her. But in the earlier (?second-century) Protevangelium of James, almost certainly its source, the light first appears as a luminous cloud – which overshadows the cave and then turns into a great light which gradually decreases until the baby is born.34 We shall come back to the possible theological implications of this luminous cloud later. The mystery plays pick up this striking phenomenon, even though it must have caused some practical problems of stagecraft to represent. It is usually assumed that the mystery plays, since they were performed outdoors, did not use stage lighting, but the stage direction to the Chester Harrowing of Hell, ‘fiat lux in inferno materialis aliqua subtilitate machinata’ (let there be material [i.e. real] light in Hell, contrived by some ingenious method) suggests that it was perfectly possible, if you had the technical know-how, and that they left less to the imagination than we assume.35 Perhaps the stable was lined with reflective material to enhance the light of candles or oil-lamps. We have to bear in mind the possibility that all references to supernatural light were physically represented on stage, even in the streets. We shall see another striking evidence of this a bit later. In the N. Town Nativity, which follows Pseudo Matthew closely, we are not given any indication of when the light begins to shine or where exactly it comes from, only that the midwives refuse to encounter it by entering the stable: We dare not entre þis logge in fay þer is þer-in so gret bryghtnes mone be nyght nor sunne be day Shone nevyr so clere in þer lyghtnesse.  (ll. 161–4) 249

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ The York Nativity, however, pinpoints it to the exact moment of Christ’s birth. Joseph cries out: A, lord God, what light is þis þat comes shynyng þus sodenly?  (Play 14, 79) Mary appears to attribute it to the appearance of the Star,36 but a few moments later identifies the star of Balaam’s prophecy with ‘my sone so free’ (line 104), and Joseph hails him as ‘lemer of light’ (line 111). It would seem that the baby is, at least metaphorically, and perhaps literally, its source. The York playwright may well have known the revelation of St. Birgitta of Sweden (c. 1303–73) concerning the Nativity. Here the light emanates from the baby himself: in momento et ictu oculi peperit filium, a quo tanta lux ineffabilis et splendor exibat, quod sol non esset ei comparabilis. Neque candela illa, quam posuerat senex, quoquomodo lumen reddebat, quia splendor ille diuinus splendorem materialem candele totaliter annichilauerat … vidi illum gloriosum infantem iacentem in terra nudum nitidissimum. Cuius carnes mundissimi erant ab omni sorde et immundicia.37 [suddenly in a moment and the twinkling of an eye she gave birth to her son, from whom proceeded such an indescribable light and splendour, that the sun could not be compared to it; nor did the candle that St. Joseph had put there give any light at all, because that divine radiance had totally annihilated the material radiance of the candle … I saw that glorious infant lying on the ground naked and shining brilliantly. His flesh was completely clear of any kind of filth or uncleanness.] Birgitta’s version of the Nativity was a favourite with artists from about 1400. The baby is the main light source: sometimes this is represented realistically, sometimes in formalised rays. Joseph, preoccupied, is shown shielding the feeble light of his candle with his hand. Since her revelation is so short, Birgitta does not, unlike the Transitus, have to cope with awkward narrative questions about how long the radiance lasted. In any case, this is not relevant: it is a vision, not a story. The clarity of the baby is at one and the same time a marvel, a testimony – his shining cleanliness shows that his mother has given birth without’ any kind of filth or uncleanness’ – and a metaphor: light has come into the world. As the Introit to the Dawn Mass on Christmas morning sings, ‘Lux fulgebit hodie super nos: quia natus est Dominus’ (Isaiah 9:2) [‘Lyghte shall shyne vpon vs thys day. for the lorde is borne to vs’].38 Birgitta’s revelation, like many medieval ‘seeings’, creates a memorable ‘snapshot’ image out of generations of traditional theology. The imagery of light 250

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ was particularly suited to the mystery of the Incarnation. At its simplest level, it celebrates the coming of Christ the Light of the World (John 1:9). In Pseudo Matthew, an angel makes a preliminary Annunciation to Mary, in which he tells her: ‘Ecce veniet lux de caelo ut habitet in te, et per te universo mundo resplendebit’ [Behold, Light shall come from heaven to  dwell  in you, and through you it shall shine over the whole world].39 This prophecy enters the main stream of popular hagiography (though not, as it happens, the Legenda Aurea). In the early fifteenth-century English stanzaic Life of St. Anne,40 which follows Pseudo Matthew closely, the angel ays: mary, blyssed mot þu be, Ffor lyght sall com fro heuen to þe & ryst in þi body.       rest In þi wambe ys goddes dwellyng made þat sall lyght þis world wyde & brade.  (l.659) Mary thus fulfils the etymology of her name, illuminatrix, by bearing and bringing forth the Light. This is then linked to her other etymology, stella maris. The liturgy must have reinforced this with its annual repetition: the lectiones in the Sarum Breviary for the Feasts of the Conception (8 December) and Nativity (8 September) of the Blessed Virgin Mary include this passage from a homily attributed to Bede:41 Maria … stella maris recte vocatur: quia huic mundo tenebris perfidiae et peccatorum obscurato veram lucem edidit, de qua Johannes ait, Erat lux vera: quae illuminat omnem hominem venientem in hunc mundum. [Mary … is rightly called the Star of the Sea, because into this world darkened by the shadows of falsehood and sinners, she brought forth the True Light, of which John says, ‘That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the World’ (John 1:9).] The Ave regina caelorum praises her with ‘ex qua mundo lux est orta’ [from whom light has arisen into the world].42 Another recurring liturgical refrain is ‘ex te enim ortus est sol justiciae Christus deus noster’ [For of you is arisen the Sun of Righteousness, Christ, our God].43 Mary the Star of the Sea is thus linked, on the poetic and liturgical plane, with Christ the Sun of Righteousness: He is Sol de stella [the Sun from the Star]. However, the images which call up the etymology of Mary the Illuminator could also be used to substantiate the Virgin Birth. Here we are at the poetical end of theology, where analogies can be produced in evidence for a difficult mystery. One favourite image used to illustrate how it could be possible that Mary retained her virginity even in partu (while giving birth) is ‘the star puts 251

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ forth its ray, but is not diminished by it’. This was made most popular by the eleventh-century Sequence Laetabundus:44 Angelus consilii, natus est de virgine,   Sol de stella, Sol occasum nesciens, stella semper rutilans   Semper clara. Sicut sidus radium, profert virgo filium   Pari forma: Neque sidus radio, neque mater filio   Fit corrupta. [The Angel of Counsel (Malachi 3:1) is born of the Virgin, the Sun from the Star: the Sun who knows no setting, the Star for ever shining, for ever bright. Just as the star sends out its ray, so does the virgin bring forth her son, in the same fashion: the star does not suffer damage from (sending out) its ray, nor does the mother by (bringing forth) her son.] This image lies behind Birgitta’s Burning Babe and its painless, unmessy, instantaneous entry into the world. It is inappropriate here to stress the negative side, from a feminist view point, of this dematerialisation of one of our life’s most physical processes. The image of light, which is such an appropriate symbol for the workings of the spirit, could potentially do the flesh a serious disservice; moreover, it could ultimately rob us of any sense that Mary, or Christ, shared our common humanity. But women seemed to have no problems identifying with her, and the popularity of the clean and painless Nativity may have been due as much to female wish-fulfilment as male distaste. The same logic and the same images are used to explain Mary’s virginal Conception of Christ, deemed to have taken place at the Annunciation. The most familiar analogy is the famous ‘as sun through glass’: My son shall in a madyn light … wythouten wem, os son thrugh glas, And she madyn as she was.  (Towneley Plays, 10, l.38) This was part of the sixth Lectio for Matins on the Third Sunday in Advent in the Sarum Breviary: 45 Solis radius specular penetrat, et soliditatem ejus insensibili subtilitate pertransit … ad ingressum et egressum ejus specular integrum 252

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ perseverat. Specular ergo non rumpit radius solis: integritatem virginis ingressus aut egressus numquid vitiare poterat deitatis? [A ray of the sun passes through a window-pane, and travels through its solid mass with an imperceptible insubstantiality … and the window-pane remains unbroken both at its point of entry and exit. A ray of the sun therefore does not break the window-pane: why should the entry and exit of the Godhead mar the Virgin’s wholeness?] Again, with repetition, from a parallel this ineluctably becomes a process: Mary’s conception was caused by an inflowing of light. John of Howden (d. 1275) puts it succinctly in his Philomena:46 Salutata caelesti nuntio, gravidaris divino rado 18 [Greeted by the heavenly messenger, you are made pregnant by the divine ray.] Art helps to reinforce the sense of literalness: in later medieval illustrations of the Annunciation, rays of light are painted coming through a window towards the Virgin. Sometimes the Holy Spirit glides down them in the form of a dove; sometimes a minute infant Christ, often carrying a Cross, follows the Spirit. In some paintings, the rays proceed from a figure of God the Father seated above in a cloud.47 And again, the theatre seems to have been impelled to represent this physically. Something of the sort seems to be suggested by the enigmatic stage direction in N. Town: ‘Here þe Holy Gost discendit with thre bemys to Our Lady, the Sone of þe Godhed nest with thre bemys to þe Holy Gost, the Fadyr godly with thre bemys to þe Sone, and so entre all thre to here bosom’ (s.d. at 1355). We still do not really know how this was done. Were the bemys, as in the recent Toronto production, painted wood? In which case this shows an extreme reification of the concept of light. Or were they some complex form of firework running down three ropes, as in the 1439 Florence Annunciation Play?48 One solution would be posed, static, and expository; the other breathtakingly dynamic, and Mary would almost appear a Christian Semele. This would fit with one branch of exegesis to which we will come in a moment. Whatever it was, we must remember that it immediately preceded the scene of Joseph’s Return, and may have been scored on the audience’s retinas. Christ is light; Mary conceives Christ in a ray of light; she becomes pregnant because she is filled with light. These images enter into the mainstream of biblical exegesis through the commentaries on Luke 1:26–38, and the homilies on the Annunciation which are woven round the text of Luke. The key text here is Gabriel’s explanation to Mary of how the conception is to come about: ‘spiritus Sanctus supervenit in te et virtus Altissimi obumbrabit tibi’ [‘The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall 253

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ overshadow thee’: Luke 1:35]. One influential interpretation explained the word obumbrabit [shall overshadow] in terms of Divinity taking on humanity, the Word becoming flesh, so that mankind will be able to see Him:49 Umbra vero fit a lumine et a corpore, cum quodlibet ombraculi genus inter nos et solem opponimus, quod lucem ejus nobis tolerabiliorum reddamus. Itaque lux incorporea divinitatis, in natura sua invisibilis, ut quoquomodo posset in nostra videri substantia, infirmitas nostra velamen (id est, humanam naturam) assumpsit in virgine. [A shadow is made from the light and a body, as when we place some form of shade between us and the sun, so as to render its light more bearable to us. And so the bodiless light of the Godhead, which in its own nature is invisible, took on the veil of our infirmity (that is, human nature) so that it could in a certain measure be seen in our substance.] This process of ‘overshadowing’ thus made the Godhead of Christ perceptible to mortal eyes: as, Aquinas says, we can look directly at the sun through a passing cloud,50 or, as the Legenda Aurea elaborates:51 quia Deus spiritus est, nos vero umbra corporis sui, temperavit se nobis, ut per objectum vivificae carnis videamus verbum in carne, solem in nube, lumen in testa, cereum in lanterna. [because God is Spirit, he tempered himself to us by the shadow of his body, so that by the interposition of the quickening flesh, we should be able to see the Word in the flesh, the Sun in a cloud, the Light in an earthenware lamp, a candle in a lantern.] Mary provides the flesh which enables us to see God. A slight shift of emphasis, foregrounding her role in the Incarnation, and she becomes the cloud,52 the lamp, or the lantern, by whom we see the Word: as Ryman versifies it, she is the ‘lanterne of eternall light, / By whome of Criste we haue a sight’.53 Another interpretation, especially favoured by Bernard in his mystical interpretation of the Song of Songs, sees the overshadowing as protecting Mary herself. The Christ Child’s flesh acts as a buffer, lest, like Semele, she should be consumed by the brightness of his Divinity:54 Habet et de Christi corpore umbram, quae audivit: Et virtus Altissimi obumbrabit tibi (Luc.1, 35). Nec enim vilis umbra, quae de virtute Altissimi formatur. Et vere virtus in carne Christi, quae virgini obumbravit, ut quod impossibile erat mortali feminae, objectu tamen involucri vivifici corporis ferret praesentiam majestatis, ut lucem sustineret inaccessibilem. 254

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ [She who heard, ‘And the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee’, had a shadow made of the body of Christ. And indeed it was no mean shadow which was formed out of the power of the Highest. And truly, there was a power in the flesh of Christ which overshadowed the Virgin, so that (though it was impossible for a ­mortal woman) she should nevertheless, because of the i­ nterposition of the wrapping of his quickening body, (be able to) bear the presence of his majesty, and support the unapproachable light.] Bernard speaks of the Incarnation as light flooding through her: ‘splendor ille inaccessibilis virgineis sese visceribus infuderit’ (PL 183, 81: that unapproachable splendour will flood into her virginal womb), and says:55 Tanta denique in conceptionem refulsit superni luminis claritas de supervenientis abundantia Spiritus, ut ne ipsa quidem Virgo Sancta sustinuisset, si non sibi obumbratum foret a virtute Altissimi. [For in the Conception, such an intense radiance of celestial light blazed from the overflowing of the hovering Spirit that even the Holy Virgin would not have been able to endure it, had He not overshadowed Himself by the power of the Highest.] One can see how the Florentine playwright saw this moment in terms of fireworks. Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173), writing like Bernard on the Song of Songs, identifies Mary with the Bride of 4:7: ‘Tota pulchra es amica mea et macula non est in te’ [‘Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee’], and suggests that her internal illumination must have showed outwardly: sol justitiae se infudit, et in ea se carne vestivit. Nec mirum si lucida fuit quam splendor gloriae implevit, si pulchra fuerit quam splendorem lucis in se suscepit. Non quoque dubitandum amoris ignem et interiorem candorem exterius etiam in ea lucere, ut quae puritatem angelicam habuit, vultum etiam angelicum habuerit.  PL 196, 483 [the Sun of Righteousness poured himself [into her], and in her he clothed himself in flesh. It is no wonder that she was clear, since the radiance of glory had filled her; that she should be fair, since she had taken into herself the radiance of light. There is therefore no doubt that the fire of love and her inner clearness shone outwardly through her: so that she who possessed the purity of the angels should also possess the face of an angel.] In other words, she would appear like Gabriel, facie rutilante. It is not possible to say whether the author of the Mary Play was familiar with this doctrine, 255

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ but it does suggest that Gabriel’s accolade ‘ȝe lanterne off lyght’ (1355) is not a totally fortuitous choice.56 This light was also seen as the agent of a spiritual cleansing. For Aquinas (c. 1225–74), the Incarnation was the second stage of a process which gave Mary total immunity from sin. He was thus able to avoid subscribing to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, while affirming her essential sinlessness in practice. She was sanctified in the womb in that, though the natural human disposition to sin was not removed from her, God’s grace, aided by divine providence, neutralised it, so that it was never put into effect. However, at the conception of Christ: in qua primo debuit refulgere peccati immunitas, credendum est quod ex prole redundaverit in matrem totaliter a fomite subtractio. Et hoc significatur Ezech., ubi dicitur, Ecce, gloria Dei Israel ingrediebatur per viam orientalem, idest per beatam Virginem, et terra, idest caro ipsius, splendebat a majestate ejus, scilicet Christi. ST 3a, 27, 3 (18) [in which immunity from sin was to shine for the first time, we must believe that the total removal of the impulse to sin overflowed from the child into the mother. This is what is signified by Ezechiel (43:2), where it is said, ‘And behold, the glory of the God of Israel came from the way of the East’, that is, through the Blessed Virgin, ‘and the earth’, that is, her flesh ‘shined with his glory’, that is, of Christ.] This second infusion of grace freed Mary from even the disposition to sin. It also, he says elsewhere, conferred on her the gift of not being desired, thus accommodating one of the motifs in which we are interested.57 Aquinas speaks of this grace as if it were an informing light, engendered by the presence of the Light within her. Richard of St. Laurent in his De Laudibus Beatae Mariae Virginis (c. 1239–45) had already spoken of both accesses of grace as illuminations: Illuminata etiam per gratiam Spiritus sancti, quando in utero sanctificata, et quando Spiritus sanctus supervenit in eam. Item, illuminata a Filio Dei vero sole justitiae in illius conceptione, quem totum in corde, totum suscepit et portavit in vent re: nec potuit esse non illu minata, quae fontem luminis susceperat in se totum. Ideo dicitur, Apocal. [xii],1: Mulier amicta sole.58 [She was illuminated by the grace of the Holy Spirit when she was sanctified in the womb and when the Holy Spirit came from above into her. Then she was illuminated by the Son of God, the true Sun of Righteousness, whom she received and carried wholly in her heart and in her womb: nor could she not be illuminated, she who had received the very source of light into herself. Therefore she is said (to be) the ‘woman clothed with the Sun’ in Revelation 12:1.] 256

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ All this suggests that by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the apocryphal motif of Mary’s shining face had already been integrated into the imagery of light surrounding the mystery of the Incarnation. One might expect that, considering its rather suspect folktale quality, the first explicit link between the two would have been made in some popular hagiographical retelling. In fact, the first work to make the connection that I have found so far is the entirely respectable Expositio in Mattheo by Paschasius Radbert, who died c. 860, not so far in time from the suppositious date of the Gospel of PseudoMatthew.59 Moreover, not only does it arise in the context of Matthew, rather than of Luke, whom one would think a much more promising candidate, it also appears in an initially rather surprising context in Matthew, as part of Paschasius’ commentary on the text of 1:25, ‘Et non cognoscebat eam donec peperit filium suum primogenitum’ [‘And knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son’]. This text was one of the major stumbling blocks for the doctrine of the Perpetual Virginity of the Virgin as, on the face of it, it implies that after Christ’s birth, her marriage with Joseph was physically consummated.60 The locus classicus for the main counter-arguments to this is Jerome’s famous Treatise against Helvidius on the Perpetual Virginity of the Virgin,61 in which, as we have seen, he claims perpetual virginity for Joseph as well as Mary. Paschasius draws on Jerome for the standard semantic argument that the word rendered in the Vulgate as donec (‘until’) does not necessarily imply that the postponed action was completed afterwards (as in ‘He did not touch alcohol again until his dying day’). But before this, he invokes the equally traditional argument that, in this case, the verb cognoscere (‘know’) has no sexual connotations. In this context, it must mean something more like ‘realise her true quality’.62 However, he says, some people take it more literally as ‘recognise’ and maintain that Joseph could not recognise Mary because he could not see her: Verum tamen quorundam traditio habet quod Joseph non potuerit in faciem eius prospicere quam Spiritus Sanctus ut conciperet penitus adimpleuerat et uirtus Altissimi ne pateretur libidinis aestu diuinitus obumbrabat. Et ideo ut uolunt non cognoscebat eam facie quam uirginem disponsauerat donec uacuaretur uterus quia nimiam ob reuerentiam claro aspectu nequiuerat intueri. Religiosa quidem et plena pietate traditionis assertio. (133–8) [However, a tradition (held by) certain people has it that Joseph could not look directly at the face of the woman whom, so that she should conceive, the Holy Spirit had filled to the innermost part of her being, and whom the power of the Highest had overshadowed by Divine providence so that she should not be exposed to the heat of lust.63 And therefore, as they would like to have it, he did not know, by 257

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ (looking at) her face, her whom he had espoused as a virgin, until her womb had been left untenanted, since it was impossible to look at her because of the great awe created by her shining appearance: certainly a devout declaration of traditional belief, and one rich in reverence.] Paschasius seems dubious about the evidential value of this tale – he calls it quorundam traditio – and his ut volunt (as they want it) also suggests a certain caution, though it is impossible to tell whether his final sentence is ironic or serious: should one translate religiosa … traditionis assertio as ‘a pious legend’? He does not say where this legend comes from, and one would imagine that it was a popular deduction from Pseudo-Matthew, but that a later redaction (the De Laudibus Beatae Mariae Virginis; see below) attributes it to the Evangelium Nazareorum, the mysterious lost ‘Gospel of the Hebrews’.64 But the import is clear enough: not only is Joseph too much in awe of Mary to look at her, it is a physical impossibility for him to do so. The next work to pick up this story (possibly from Paschasius) planted it firmly in the mainstream of biblical commentary: it was the Glossa Ordinaria (c. 1110–30) of Anselm of Laon and his collaborators. As this was the standard critical apparatus on the text of the Bible, the detail was ensured a lot of highly authoritative exposure. The gloss on Matthew 1:25 appears to be a precis of Paschasius:65 Dicitur quod Joseph Mariam facie ad faciem videre non poterat, quam Spiritus sanctus a conceptione impleuerat penitus. Et ideo non cognoscebat facie ad faciem quam desponsaverat, donec vterus euacuaretur. [It is said that Joseph was not able to look at Mary face to face, because from the moment of her conception the Holy Spirit had filled her to the inner most part of her being. And therefore he did not know, face to face, the woman he had espoused until her womb had been left untenanted.] The Glossa does not specifically say why the presence of the Holy Spirit made Joseph unable to look at Mary, but the implication is clear: he was dazzled. Though this legend is ostensibly referred to the indwelling in Mary of the Holy Spirit, the context in which it appears links it even more firmly with the doctrine of her perpetual virginity. It also has the curious effect of foregrounding Joseph as the major potential (because legally sanctioned) threat to her chastity. It is leaping out of our chronology, but it is interesting to point out here that the Speculum Humanae Salvationis (1310–24) takes this threat so seriously that the motif appears transplaced to the episode of the marriage of Joseph and Mary. There, it is particularised to explain how Joseph kept chastity in marriage before the Incarnation, as if, on his side at least, their mutual vow of chastity needed supernatural support. He is somewhat unkindly 258

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ compared to the seven husbands kept from Sara, later the wife of Tobias, by the demon Asmodeus:66 Si saram a septem viris custodiuit asmodeus Quomodo ab vno viro non custodieret matrem suam deus Quocienscumque ioseph matrem dei inspiciebat Splendorem quendam diuinum ab ipsa procedere videbat Et ideo nunquam faciem eius intuere audebat Nisi forte quando hoc aliquo casu aliqua accidebat. [If Sara fro seven husbandes kept the feend Asmodee, Why ne moght his modere fro oone Godde kepe, be his poustee? For wheneuer Seint Josep loked on thilk virgins floure, Se he of hire to sprede ane hoege divyne splendoure: Forthi durst he nevre more on eghe cast on hire face Bot in fulle hoege reuerence and when it felle be some case.] Probably the first ‘popular’ work to take up this theme was the anonymous Vita beate virginis et salvatoris rhythmica (first half of the thirteenth century),67 a lengthy Latin verse Life of the Virgin and of Christ in the tradition of the Apocryphal Gospels, which firmly sites the motif of the dazzling face at the Incarnation, and picks out Joseph as its major intended target: Postquam virgo Maria concepit salvatorem Tantum ei dominus contulit splendorem, Quod ex eius oculis radii fulserunt, Qui eam intuentium visum percusserunt, Quod Joseph hanc respicere ultra non valebat, Nec in eam aliquis vir oculos figebat.  (1702–7) [When the Virgin Mary had conceived the Saviour, the Lord conferred such radiance on her that rays shone from her eyes which beat down the gaze of those who looked at her, so that Joseph did not have the power to look at her further, nor did any man fix his eyes on her.] Here there is no generalised radiance: her ‘eye-beams’ are converted into powerful lasers which strike down the gaze of anyone so rash as to look at her. About the same time, Richard of St. Laurent wrote the De Laudibus Beatae Mariae Virginis (c. 1239–45),68 a prose panegyric which weaves together biblical imagery and typology to praise her interior and exterior beauties. In Book 5, chapter 2, De corporali pulchritudine Mariae (Of the physical beauty of Mary), he speaks of the beauty of her face: Sed forte sicut in apocrypho de infantia Salvatoris scriptum reperitur, nemo plene poterat ipsius faciem intueri. Unde dicitur, Matth. l, 25 259

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ quod Joseph accepit Mariam, et non cognoscebat eam, donec peperit filium suum primogenitum etc. Et dicit Chrysostomus, ut quidam asserunt, quod in Evangelio Nazaraeorum legitur, quod Joseph Mariam videre non poterat facie ad faciem: quia Spiritus sanctus eam a conceptione Filii Dei penitus impleverat, ita quod non cognoscebat eam propter splendorem vultus ejus. De isto decore eleganter dicit ei quidem prosaice: Tu decorem induisti, Tu plus sole refulsisti, Cum beata membra Christi Tuae carnis protexisti Polymita tunica. Alij dicunt, quod ex quo Joseph cognouit et credidit Mariam de Spiritu sancto concepisse, in tanta eam habebet reverentia, quod numquam ausus est contemplari faciem ejus: unde non cognoscebat cujusmodi esset vultus ejus. Simile legitur de Moyse, Exod. xxxiv, 29, et II ad Corinth. III 13, quod non poterant filii Israel respicere in faciem Moysi propter gloriam vultus ejus: quia cornuta apparuit facies ejus ex consortio sermonis Domini. Si ergo tam pulchra apparuit facies Prophetae ex consortio sermonis Domini, quid aestimas de facie matris ipsius Verbi? De Laudibus BMV, lib. 5 cap. 2 [But perhaps, as it is found written in the Apocrypha of the Infancy of the Saviour (Pseudo Matthew), nobody could look her fully in the face. Whence it is said in Matthew 1:25 that Joseph received Mary, ‘and knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son’ etc. And Chrysostom says,69 as some maintain, that in the Gospel of the Nazarenes it is read that Joseph could not see Mary face to face, because from the conception of the Son of God the Holy Spirit had so filled her to the innermost depths of her being, that he could not know her because of the brilliance of her face. Of this beauty someone says felicitously to her in the Prose: ‘You clothed yourself in beauty, you shone more than the sun, when you protected the blessed limbs of Christ with the many-coloured coat of your flesh.’ Others say, that since (?from the time when) Joseph knew and believed that Mary had conceived of the Holy Spirit, he held her in such awe that he never dared to gaze at her face, and for that reason he did not know what her face looked like. In the same way, it is read of Moses in Exodus 34:29 and 2 Corinthians 3:13 that the children of Israel could not steadfastly behold the face of Moses for the glory of his countenance, since his face appeared horned because of his converse with God. If the face of the Prophet appeared so beautiful, what do you think of the face of the mother of the Word himself ?] 260

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ This does not, however, prevent Richard from anatomising her with complete rhetorical thoroughness. Richard probably found the comparison between Mary and Moses in the Pseudo-Bernard De Laude Mariae Virginis,70 though here it refers primarily to the Virgin as Queen of Heaven rather than the Virgin of the Incarnation: Si splendida facta est facies Moysi ex consortio sermonis Domini (Exod. xxxiv 20); quam gloriosum credimus inter omnes sanctos lumen vultus tui, quae cum filio una es caro ex mirabili genitura, et unus unius ardentissimae charitatis spiritus. [If the face of Moses shone because of his converse with God (Exodus 34:20), how glorious must we believe the light of your face amongst the saints, who are one flesh with your Son from the marvellous conception, and one spirit in a single most blazing charity.] Both these works, however, use the motif rhapsodically rather than attempting to explore its theological implications. With St. Thomas Aquinas (c.  1225–74) the ‘shining face’ motif, and the comparison with Moses, is treated theologically, in the contexts of the Incarnation and of the perpetual virginity of Mary. In the Summa he too tackles the implications of Matthew 1:25, and rejects any idea that Joseph and Mary could have had sexual relations.71 He favours the interpretation (from the Homily on Matthew by Pseudo-Chrysostom) that cognoscere is here to be taken intellectually, not carnally: Joseph did not ‘know’ Mary fully until after the Nativity, when her true dignity was revealed to him by the marvels which accompanied the birth of Christ.72 After realising Mary’s true status, Joseph would never have presumed to enter where God had gone before. Aquinas then turns to the ‘visual cognition’ theory:73 Quidam vero hoc referunt ad notitiam visus. Sicut enim Moysi cum Deo colloquentis glorificata est facies, ut non possent intendere in eum filii Israel [2 Cor. 3:7]; sic Maria, claritate virtutis Altissimi obumbrata, cognosci non poterat a Joseph, donec pareret. Post partum autem a Joseph agnita invenitur, specie faciei, non tactu libidinis. Summa Theologiae, 3a, q.27 art. 3 [Some however relate this to visual cognition. For just as the face of Moses, conversing with God, was glorified, so that the children of Israel could not steadfastly behold his face [2 Cor. 3:7], so Mary, overshadowed by the brightness of the power [virtus] of the Highest [Luke 1:35] could not be recognised by Joseph, until she had given birth. However, after the birth, he rediscovered and knew her again, but by the sight* of her face, not through the touch of desire.] [*species can mean either ‘beauty’ or ‘sight’ or ‘excellence’.] 261

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ The analogy with Moses suggests that both St. Laurent and Aquinas would agree with Peter Meredith’s instinct that the brightness of Mary’s face is ‘like a transfiguration’.74 Because of his transfiguration on Mount Sinai, Moses appears in the Synoptic Gospels as one of the two companions,75 flanking Christ at His Transfiguration on the mountain.76 The description of this process centres on His face and His garments: Matthew says that when He ‘transfiguratus est ante eos … resplenduit facies ejus sicut sol, vestimenta autem eius facta sunt alba sicut nix’ (‘He was transfigured before them [Peter, James, and John]: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the [snow]’ Matthew 17:2). In biblical typology, Moses became the main type of Christ’s Transfiguration.77 With these biblical precedents, medieval scholars could more easily accept the concept of Mary’s radiant countenance. Aquinas discusses his theology of the Transfiguration of Christ in the Summa Theologiae.78 It depends on the theory of the properties of the bodies of the blessed after the General Resurrection, the fourth of which is claritas, ‘brightness’ or ‘splendour’. These will be conferred upon the resurrected body by the quality of the soul. (Mary’s glory at the Assumption is a foretaste of this.) Aquinas explains that at the Transfiguration, Christ was showing the disciples an image of the claritas of the glorified body in heaven. For a brief moment, He allowed his body to be flooded with the claritas of his (infinitely greater) divinity and of his soul ‘as when the air is lit up by the sun’.79 This was a voluntary, miraculous, and temporary state: his own body was at that time human and passible, and therefore not in the state of permanent claritas enjoyed by the glorified body. This claritas is so great that mortal eyes cannot gaze at it: ‘humana fragilitas conspectum majoris gloriae ferre non sustinet’ [Human frailty can not bear to look at the greater glory].80 One more detail links the Transfiguration of Christ to Mary’s transfiguration. In the accounts of the Transfiguration in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 17:1–8, Mark 9:2–8, Luke 9:29–36), a cloud – Matthew calls it ‘a bright cloud’, nubes lucida – overshadowed (obumbravit) Christ, Moses and Elijah, and out of it God the Father spoke. Commentators identified the cloud with the Holy Spirit.81 Aquinas relates this directly to the tradition of exegesis on the ‘overshadowing’ of Mary in Luke 1:35: she is ‘claritate virtutis Altissimi obumbrata’ [overshadowed with the brightness of the power of the Highest]. The paradox of the bright cloud, a shadow composed of light, clearly appealed to Aquinas. Did he also know the episode in the Protevangelium when the bright cloud overshadowed the cave of the Nativity, dissolving slowly into a great light?82 The brightness of her face arises, like Moses’, by contact with the divine and not through her own intrinsic claritas (though even this begins to be implied as her cult pushes her closer and closer to divinity, especially as the Assumption becomes her major festival). It too is temporary, though of longer duration, coterminous with her pregnancy, the time during which God was literally within her and she was ‘quasi tota repleta divinitate’.83 Yet 262

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ for her the contact is not external, as Moses’ was, but internal. As soon as she becomes God-bearing, His Spirit shines through her. She is like a semitransparent vessel through which the light of God glows. The comparison with the transfiguration of Moses entered the mainstream commentary tradition with the Postilla of Nicholas of Lyra, which became the standard biblical accompaniment of the later Middle Ages. His commentary on Matthew 1:25 explains:84 Et non cognoscebat eam quod exponunt aliqui de cognitione faciei [text: facta] dicentes: quod ex presentia christi in vtero virginis tanta erat claritas in eius facie, quod ioseph non poterat eam cognoscere: sicut dicitur de claritate faciei moysi ex consortio sermonis domini. quia non poterant intendere in eam filii1srael: vt habet .ij. Cor. iij. Aliter exponit hieronymus de cognitione carnalis copule. [‘And knew her not’ which some explain as referring to his ‘knowledge’ of her face, saying that because of the presence of Christ in the Virgin’s womb, there was so great a brightness in her face that Joseph could not recognise her: as it is said of the brightness of the face of Moses from his converse with God, that the children of Israel could not look at it (2 Cor. 3). Jerome explains it in another fashion, as concerning carnal knowledge.] It is possible that the Postilla provided the N. Town playwright with a direct source. Another attractive possibility is the other major late medieval Life of Christ written for meditation, the Vita Jesu Christi of Ludolphus of Saxony (d. 1377). Ludolphus used the Pseudo-Bonaventure Meditationes: his work has essentially the same narrative framework, the Gospel Harmony, but his approach and apparatus is much more scholarly, in the tradition of his time. He produces a kind of continuous gloss to the actual words of the Gospels, weaving a skein of explanations and added details around them, and supporting his points of view by ample quotations from authorities.85 Like the Meditationes, his chapter on De eo quod Joseph voluit dimittere Mariam [Concerning the reason why Joseph wished to put Mary away] follows chronologically on the episode of the Visitation, and is based on Matthew, while his Annunciation and Visitation are based on Luke. His gloss on Matthew 1:25 uses the arguments of the Pseudo-Chrysostom Homily about the recognition of Mary’s status86 and expounds the meanings of the word donec. Then he continues:87 Aliqui exponunt hoc de cognitione faciei, dicentes quod ex praesentia Christi in utero virginis, tanta erat claritas in facie ejus, quod Joseph facie ad faciem eam videre non poterat, quam Spiritus Sanctus a conceptione penitus impleverat. Sicut dicitur de claritate faciei Moysis, ex consortio sermonis Domini, quia non poterant intendere in eum 263

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ filii Israel [2 Cor. 3:7]. Et ideo Joseph non cognoscebat facie ad faciem, quam desponsaverat, donec uterus evacuatus esset. Pars 1, cap. 8, 6 [Some explain this as referring to his ‘knowledge’ of her face, saying that because of the presence of Christ in the Virgin’s womb, there was so great a brightness in her face that Joseph was not able to look at her face to face, because from the moment of her conception, the Holy Spirit had filled her to the innermost depths of her being. The same thing is said of the brightness of the face of Moses from his converse with God, because of which the children of Israel could not look at him. And therefore Joseph ‘did not know’, face to face, the woman he had espoused until her womb had been left untenanted.] This is a very clear blend of the Glossa with the Postilla. Ludolphus thus attributes the radiance of Mary’s face to the indwelling of two Persons of the Godhead, both Christ – ‘ex praesentia Christi in utero virginis’ (Postilla)  – and the Holy Spirit – ‘quam Spiritus Sanctus a conceptione penitus impleverat’ (Glossa), thus echoing Richard of St.Laurent. Its purpose is to keep Joseph at arm’s length until the Nativity, after which, it is implied, he would not presume to touch her, as Aquinas says, tactu liidinis. However, this is the second time that Ludolphus has used this motif. A few  paragraphs earlier, he discusses the implications of Matthew 1:19: ‘Joseph autem vir eius cum esset iustus et nollet eam traducere voluit occulte dimittere eam’ [‘Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily’] like this:88 JOSEPH OCCULTE VULT EAM DIMITTERE. – Joseph autem vir ejus perpendens hoc et ignorans tanti secretum mysterii, dolebat et turbabatur; sed, cum esset justus et nollet eam traducere in publicum, id est, divulgare et diffamare, ne scilicet tamquam adultera, lapidaretur; vel nollet eam traducere in domum suam ad cohabitationem assiduam, quia se, propter mysterii virtutem, quam nesciebat, indignum ad ejus consortium aestimabat, voluit occulte dimittere eam parentibus, a quibus eam acceperat. Legerat enim: Egredietur virga de radice Jesse, unde noverat Mariam duxisse originem. Legerat etiam: Ecce virgo concipiet, etc., et haec de ea credebat, praesertim, quia post conceptionem facies ejus ita resplenduit divinitate, ut propter coruscationem, vix eam irreverberatis oculis, et non cum timore, posset intueri. Ideoque voluit se ante tantam gratiam humiliare, indignum se reputans, tantae Virginis cohabitatione. Vita Jesu Christi, Pars 1, cap 8, 2 264

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ [JOSEPH WAS MINDED TO PUT HER AWAY PRIVILY. – ‘Then Joseph her husband’, noticing this [her pregnancy], and not knowing the hidden cause of so great a mystery, was grieved and upset; but, ‘being a just man, and not willing to traduce her’, that is, to expose and disgrace her publicly, in case she should be stoned as an adulteress; or, [taking the literal meaning of traducere], not wishing to take her into his house to live permanently with her as man and wife, because he, through the innate power (which he did not understand) of the mystery, considered himself unworthy to associate with her, ‘was minded to send her away privily’ back to her parents, from whom he had received her. For he had read, ‘There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse’, from where he knew Mary to have traced her ancestry. And he had also read : ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive’ etc., and he believed that this referred to her, above all because after the Conception, her face shone so with the Godhead, that because of its glittering brilliance, he could scarcely look at her, his eyes were so dazzled – not because he was afraid. And therefore he wanted to abase himself before so great a divine grace, considering himself unworthy to live with such a Virgin.] Here the coruscation of Mary’s face acts as a visible sign of the God head within, and a confirmation of Joseph’s intuition that she is the Chosen One of God. This intuition gives him a thoroughly reverent and laudable alternative motivation for his desire to ‘put her away privily’: that he felt himself unworthy to live in the same house as someone so clearly marked by God. As students of medieval theatre, we are so used to the theme of Joseph’s Doubts that we tend not to remember that there were other accounts of Joseph’s state of mind before the angelic intervention. There were three possibilities: (1) he was sure Mary must be an adultress; (2) all the evidence suggested that this was the case, but his instinct and knowledge of her suggested otherwise; and (3) he never suspected her for a moment. His desire ‘to send her away privily’ could therefore be attributed either to pain and righteous indignation, or to an attempt to escape the turmoil of internal debate, or to a sense of his own unworthiness.89 The cycle plays waver between (1) and (2). The Joseph of the N. Town pageant play mocks himself with: Olde cokwold, þi bowe is bent Newly now after þe Frensche gyse!  (55–6) but cannot bring himself to deliver her to be stoned, because: I knew never with here, so God me spede, Tokyn of thynge in word nor dede þat towchyd velany.  (101–3) 265

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ But the third interpretation was as well known, even in fifteenth-century England. James Ryman’s carol ‘Awake, Joseph, awake, awake’ belongs to this tradition:90 Josephe wolde haue fled fro that mayde, Not for noo synne ne for offence, But to abyde he was affrayde In here so good and pure presence, Extans virgo concipiens, The mysterie for cause he knew In her of so full grete vertue. ‘With her’, he seide, ‘why shulde I dwell? Than I of degre she is more, And in vertue she doth excelle; I will deperte from her therefore.’ But God, that hath alle grace in store Sent an aungell, that was full bright, Vnto Joseph vpon a nyght. It had some influential Patristic supporters, and became more uncompromising the more exalted and etherealised the figure of Mary became. One of the key passages, from Jerome’s Commentary on Matthew, was adopted into the Breviary as one of the lectiones for Matins on Christmas Eve,91 thus giving it liturgical authority: hoc testimonium Mariae est, quod Joseph sciens illius castitatem, et admirans quod evenerat, celat silentio, cujus mysterium nesciebat. [This is a witness on Mary’s behalf, that Joseph, knowing her chastity, and marvelling at what had happened, keeps secret the mystery of which he knew nothing.] This suggests that Joseph sensed instinctively what had happened, but could not explain it, so the angel’s message was necessary to clarify it for him. Another very influential early text was the Pseudo-Chrysostom Homily on Matthew 1 which we have met before.92 This gives a very lively and much-quoted account of Joseph’s thought-processes. The story is loosely based on the Protevangelium of James. Joseph discovered that Mary was pregnant when he came home from a long absence on business. It is possible that he threatened her, or tried to put the fear of God into her; but when she wept, saying ‘nescio unde sit hoc’ (I do not know where this comes from), ‘he was greatly afraid, and began to believe that there might be something divine about her’. He then reviews her character and behaviour, and convinces himself that she has shown no signs of anything that might lead to wantonness (a spirited and satirical list, later adopted by the Speculum Humanae Salvationis),93 and ‘because of all this he concluded that 266

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ what she had in her womb was of the Holy Spirit. For nothing so convinces a husband of his wife’s chastity as a well-ordered, lifestyle’: O inaestimabilis laus Mariae! Magis credebat castitati ejus, quam utero ejus: et plus gratiae, quam naturae. Conceptionem manifeste videbat et fornicationem suspicari non poterat. Possibilius esse credebat mulierem sine viro posse concipere, quam Mariam posse peccare. [O praise of Mary beyond all price! He believed in her chastity, rather than (the evidence of) her womb; and more in grace, than in nature. He saw clear evidence of her conception, and could not suspect her of fornication. He could more easily believe that a woman could conceive without a man, than that Mary could sin.] This is an almost legal argument, with Joseph as both plaintiff and characterwitness for the defendant. Bede’s Joseph is also prepared to believe, but on the grounds of prophecy: nam et in Isaia legerat virginem de domo David concepturam et parituram Dominum, de qua etiam domo noverat genus duxisse Mariam, atque ideo non discredebat in ea prophetiam hanc fuisse complendam. Homily 5, on Matthew: PL 94, 31–2 [for he had read in Isaiah that a virgin of the House of David was to conceive and bear the Lord, and he also knew that Mary traced her ancestry from that house, and therefore he did not disbelieve that this prophecy was to be fulfilled in her.] a possibility entertained by the York Joseph: But wele I wate thurgh prophicie A maiden clene suld bere a childe before he dismisses it with: But it is nought sho, sekirly  Play 13, 63 The Joseph of Hrabanus Maurus (d. 856) needs no such props to faith: though he cites the prophecy, he seems certain from the start, and the angelic message is necessary only to free him from his deep sense of unworthiness. His argument is elsewhere attributed to Origen (though it does not appear in any of that Father’s surviving works),94 blended with the passage from Bede: Ideo eam dimittere volebat quoniam virtutem mysterii et sacramentum quoddam magnificum in eadem cognoscebat, cui ad proximare 267

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ sese indignum aestimabat. Nam et in Isaia legerat virginem de domo David esse concepturam et parituram Dominum, de qua etiam domo noverat genus duxisse Mariam, atque ideo non diffidebat in ea prophetiam hanc implendam esse. Ergo humilians se ante tantam et ineffabilem rem, quaerebat se longe facere, sicut et beatus Petrus, Domino se humilians aiebat: ‘Recede a me, Domine, quoniam homo peccator sum’ (Luc. v.) [He wanted to send her away for this reason: because he recognised the power of the mystery, and something numinous and sublime about her (?it), and he thought himself unworthy to approach her. For he had read in Isaiah that a virgin of the House of David was to conceive and bear the Lord, and he also knew that Mary traced her ancestry from that house, and therefore he did not doubt that this prophecy was to be fulfilled in her. Therefore, abasing himself before so great and inexpressible a thing, he attempted to distance himself from it, just as the blessed Peter, abasing himself before the Lord, said: ‘Depart from me: for I am a sinful man, O Lord (Luke 5:8).] Bernard in his second Homily Super Missus Est elaborates on this sense of unworthiness and sheer terror: ‘Videbat et horrebat divinae presentiae certissimum gestantem insigne: et quia mysterium penetrare non poterat, volebat dimittere eam’ (He saw and shuddered at the clear signs that she was bearing the divine presence: and because he could not fathom the mystery, he wanted to send her away’: PL 183, 68). To Peter, Bernard adds (from Origen?) the examples of the Centurion who thought himself unworthy for Christ to enter his house (Matthew 8:8), and Elizabeth, who wondered that the mother of the Lord should visit her: later writers add Moses hiding his eyes before the Burning Bush, the widow who did not want to entertain Elijah, and John the Baptist, fearing to baptise Christ.95 The Speculum Humanae Salvationis, probably the most popular late-­ medieval version of Joseph’s predicament, is also the most lavish in providing motivations. Joseph, in ‘grete dred of hert’ (918) comparable to that of John the Baptist when asked to baptise Christ, runs through Mary’s known character, basing his list on ‘Chrysostom’ (‘Impossible is þat this woman be fornicatrice / So seynt, abstynent, and hatere of all vice’: 919–20); describes how she has been kept locked away, first in the Temple and then in her own chamber; remembers the prophecies of Isaiah’s Ecce virgo concipiet, Balaam’s star, and the rod out of the stem of Jesse; and concludes:96 Aliud autem neququam de hac virgine estimari potest Et idcirco certissimum est quod ipsa mater christi est Non sum ergo ego dignus cum tali virgine habitare Quapropter expedit mihi a completione nupciarum cessare 268

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ Et ne forte aliqua sinistra suspicio in populo oriatur Oportet vt occulte et valde caute dimittatur In hire may noght be rette bot vertuouse honoure, Wharefor certein this is modere of the Saveoure. I am vndigne with hire of conuersacioune, Wharefore gude is I flee of sposailles completioune. In auntre suspeccione badde the folke take ellis þerby, Me nedes fro hire presence withdrawe me prively.  (943–8) The tradition therefore has Joseph convinced by prophecy, by the known good character of his betrothed (and her lack of opportunity), and by what Ludolphus calls the ‘mysterii virtutem’ (the innate power of the mystery). For Ludolphus, this is given a physical manifestation in the dazzling brilliance of her face. Despite Christ’s strictures on those who seek after a sign (Matthew 16:4), popular religion still looks for them. What then is the conclusion of all this? A folk-tale motif which may ­originally have related purely to Mary’s outstanding beauty has joined with the concept of her all-pervading spiritual influence to produce a phenomenon rather more magical than spiritual. It is then pressed into service by the apologetics of her perpetual virginity. Since the context of this is usually the homily or commentary on Matthew l, the focus of attention is shifted from Mary to Joseph. Here, the light which shines from her keeps him, her legitimate husband, at a distance, acting as a force-field which prevents him approaching her until the birth of Christ sets the seal on their chaste marriage. This motif can be linked, usually in homilies and commentaries on Luke 1:35, to the theology of the Incarnation, with its imagery of light as an analogy for Mary’s virginal Conception of Christ, and as sanctifying grace. It can also be seen on the level of popular hagiography as a marvel, which should create the proper feelings of wonder and religious terror in Mary’s worshipper. The interesting thing from the point of view of N. Town is that this motif can be used in the context of the school of biblical exegesis which suggested that Joseph, far from being motivated by shame and jealousy in wishing to put away Mary privily, had behaved with the utmost religious propriety, instinctively realising the truth, and silently withdrawing from her in recognition of his unworthiness. It is not always found in this context: the Vita Beatae Mariae Virginis, for example, shows Joseph suffering violent distress, if not  exactly Doubts,97 but the implications (how could Joseph reconcile Doubts with such a striking supernatural phenomenon?) tend to push the two together. Since this motif appears in the N. Town Mary Play, can we assume that the playwright was familiar with its usual scholarly context, and say that it must therefore be the only surviving English mystery play which rejects the theme of Joseph’s Doubts for the more dignified tradition of Joseph’s Humility? 269

‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ There is not enough left to tell. It can only be a possibility. The most we can say is that it would seem logical to remove the eight lines 13–20 in Peter Meredith’s edition from the text of the pageant play in his Appendix 2, where as he says, they do not fit metrically,98 on the negative grounds that they do not fit thematically either, and confirm them in the Mary Play, where they do. The other interesting question is how did the Mary Play playwright envisage this as being staged? Given the usual tendency on the medieval stage to realise symbols as props, and divine radiance as stage lighting, haloes, or gilded faces, this seems an uncharacteristic use of the audience’s imagination. It is difficult to see how Mary could have received a visible gilding or masking on stage at that point in the scene, and her transfiguration is not a temporary one where light ‘aliqua subtilitate machinata’ can be directed on her from burnished basins or mirrors.99 We do not know if they managed to produce the oil-burning equivalent of a follow spot, or how that would work in daylight. At Bourges in 1536, the special effects team were told that ‘the face of St. Stephen must ­appear radiant as the sun to terrify the false witnesses who testify aginst him … until he had returned to his former appearance’ which, however, sounds like another temporary illumination.100 Or was it symbolised by a halo, or perhaps a crown? Above all, what happened when the Trinity descended in that ­enigmatic stage direction? Solving that might help us to solve this enigma.

Abbreviations Ante-Nicene: The Ante-Nicene Fathers VIII: The Twelve Patriarchs … Apocrypha, ed. by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Edinburgh: T & T Clark; repr. Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1978). Breviarium: Breviarium ad Usum Insignis Ecclesiae Sarum III, ed. by Francis Procter and Christopher Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1886). Breviarium Sanctae Birgittae: Breviarium Sacrarum Virginum Ordinis Sanctissimi Salvatoris vulgo Sanctae Birgittae (Rome; Paris; Tournai: Societas S. Joannis Evangelistae, 1908). Funk and Wagnall: Funk and Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary of Folklore, ed. by Maria Leach, rev. edn (New York: Funk & Wagnall, 1972). Glossa: Glossa Ordinaria, attributed (wrongly) to Walafrid Strabo: PL 14. Graef: Hilda Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion, 2 vols (London: Sheed and Ward, 1963), Volume 1. Greene: The Early English Carols, ed. by edited Richard Leighton Greene, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). Harley Lyrics: The Harley Lyrics, ed.by G.L. Brook (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1948). James: The Apocryphal New Testament, trans. by M.R. James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924). Legenda Aurea: Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea, ed. by T. Graesse (Leipzig, 1846; repr. Osnabruck: Otto Zeller, 1965).

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‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ Life of Our Lady: John Lydgate, A Critical Edition of John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady, edited Joseph A. Lauritis, Ralph E. Klinefelter, and Vernon F. Gallagher, Duquesne Studies in Philology, II (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Press, 1961). Ludolphus: Ludolphus de Saxonia, Vita Jesu Christi, ed. by L.M. Rigollot, 4 vols (Paris: Palmé, Brussels: Lebrocquy, 1878), Volume 1. McHugh: John McHugh, The Mother of Jesus in the New Testament (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1975). Mary in the NT: Mary in the New Testament, ed. by Raymond E. Brown et al. (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1978). Mary Play: The Mary Play from the N. Town Manuscript, ed. by Peter Meredith (London: Longman, 1987). Meditationes: Pseudo Bonaventura, Meditationes Vitae Christi, from S. Bonaventurae Opera Omnia, ed. by A.C. Peltier (Paris: Vives, 1868) 12. Mirour: The Mirour of Mans Saluacioune, edited Avril Henry (Aldershot: Scolar, 1986). Myroure of Oure Ladye: The Myroure of Oure Ladye, ed. by John Henry Blunt, EETS 19 (1873). PG: Patrologia Graeca, ed. by J.-P. Migne. PL: Patrologia Latina, ed. by J.-P. Migne. Schiller: Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, trans. by Janet Seligman, 2 vols (London: Lund Humphries, 1971). Speculum: Speculum Humanae Salvationis, ed. by J.P. Berjeau, facsimile (London: C.J. Steward, 1861). ST: St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (London: Blackfriars/Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1963–), especially vol. 51, ‘Our Lady’, ST 3a qq. 27–39, ed. and trans. by Thomas R. Heath O.P. (1969), and vol. 53, ‘The Life of Christ’, ST 3a qq. 38–45, ed. and trans. by Samuel Parsons O.P. and Albert PInheiro O.P. (1971). Leonine edition: St. Thomas Aquinas, Opera Omnia, iussu impensisque Leonis XIII P.M. edita (Rome, 1903). Tischendorf: Evangelia Apocrypha, ed. by Constantine Tischendorf, 2nd edn (Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1876). Vincent of Beauvais, SH: Vincentius Bellovacensis Speculum Quadri­partita vel Speculum Maius… Tomus Quartus qui Speculum Historiale Inscribitur (Douai: Balthazar Bellerus, 1624; repr. Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1965).

Notes 1. See Mary Play, pp. 3–4 and 124 for his discussion of the problems involved. 2. Mary Play, 14–15. In the other Visitation plays, Joseph does not accompany Mary on the visit. 3. Ludolphus, Part 1, chapter 8, section 2 (61) and Part 1, chapter 8, section 6 (63). 4. Tischendorf, p. 63. Pseudo Matthew is relatively late (eighth–ninth century) and Latin seems to be the original language. It is probably based on the Protevangelium of James (James, p. 70), but there are considerable differences in detail. It would be interesting to know if any of them came from the lost Gospel of the Hebrews (see note 15).   One would expect the detail of the shining face to appear in the Meditationes, which borrow quite extensively from Pseudo Matthew, but by a quirk of

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‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ arrangement, its discussion of Mary’s early life picks up the Pseudo Matthew narrative a few lines after this description. The Meditationes start with the Parliament of Heaven, and then flash back to Mary’s early life in the Temple, which prepared her for the Incarnation and is, incidentally, suitable reading for the nun to whom the book was originally addressed. We thus get none of the apocryphal stories of her conception or three-year-old Presentation in the Temple, or of her personal appearance. The author starts with the account of her life given by Mary in her revelation to ‘St. Elizabeth’ (see Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green, Meditations on the Life of Christ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 393, note 8), followed by the account of her daily routine from Pseudo Matthew. This latter is attributed to St. Jerome: various prefaces ‘signed’ by the saint were attached to the work in the Middle Ages, which may have given the impression that he wrote it. 5. PL, 87 (1879), col 1070; also in Hrotsvithae Opera, ed. by Paulus de Winterfeld (Berlin: Weidmann, 1902), pp. 348–50 (14). 6. Vincent of Beauvais, SH, lib. 6, cap. 66 (p. 195). 7. Harley Lyrics, no. 14, lines 23–25 (p. 49). 8. Harley Lyrics, no. 7, line 7 (p. 17). In Middle English, the adjectives bright, clere, and schene all refer to beauty as well as light: see the MED under these words. It refers to secular heroines (and heroes: Horn at fifteen ‘was briȝt so þe glas’) as well as sacred. For a Latin version, see e.g. Carmina Burana, no. 177, verse 2: ‘Stetit puella / tamquam rosula: / facie splenduit’: ed. by Alfons Hilka and Otto Schumann (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1941), 1:2, 295). In Latin, the verb nitere means both ‘to shine’ and ‘to be beautiful’ or even ‘to bloom’, or (of cattle) ‘to be sleek and plump’. 9. See Life of Our Lady, p. 61. The quotations are from the Lauritis edition, but with my punctuation. 10. Funk and Wagnall, s.v. illuminating beauty. In the Mahabharata, the celestial damsel Tilottama is rewarded by the Supreme Deity for her work in setting Sunda and Upasunda at odds with each other by ‘Thy splendour shall be so great that nobody will ever be able to look at thee for any length of time’: Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa, The Mahabharata, trans. by Kisari Mohan Ganguli, 7th edn, 12 vols (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1990), I, p. 416. 11. John Mirk, Festial, ed. by Theodore Erbe, EETS ES, 96 (1905), p. 234. See also pp. 57, 249 etc. 12. Ambrose, De Institutione Virginis, chapter 7 (section 50): PL, 16, col. 233. 13. Against Helvidius, 19 (PL, 23, col. 203). See Graef, pp. 90–1. Bede (PL, 94, col. 33) also insists on the virginity of both Mary and Joseph. 14. Legenda Aurea, cap 37, Purification (2 February), p. 164. 15. Is the attribution to ‘the Jews’ (Judaei) a reference to the lost Gospel of the Hebrews, used by the Nazarenes (a Hebrew Christian sect), for which see James, pp.1–8? (Hennecke, however, sees them as two separate works: New Testament Apocrypha, Vol 1 (London: Lutterworth Press, 1963), pp. 139–165.) Jerome claims to have translated the Gospel into both Greek and Latin. It may be that his Latin version was still circulating in the later Middle Ages. If so, it seems to have been fond of supernaturally radiant faces. James cites a thirteenth-century marginal note to Peter Riga’s Aurora which attributes to the Gospel a quotation which states that Christ casting the moneylenders out of the Temple terrified them ‘because rays issued from his eyes’ (pp. 7–8). James quotes Jerome on Matthew 21:12 as saying ‘a certain fiery and starry light shone (radiated) from his eyes and the majesty of Godhead gleamed in his face’ (‘Igneum enim quiddam atque sidereum radiabat ex oculis ejus, et divinitatis majestas lucebat in facie’: PL, 26, col. 158).

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‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ Was Jerome perhaps quoting from his own translation? For another reference to the Gospel, see Richard of St. Laurent, p. 55 and note 69. 16. E.g. The Myroure of Oure Ladye: ‘And in them that were mooste redy to synne. the feruoure of synne was quenched anon by the honeste of her wordes & berynges, as longe as they behelde her’ (p. 225), a translation of ‘In his autem qui ad peccandum pronissimi erant, ex ejus verborum, et gestuum honestate, statim peccati furor extinguebatur, quamdiu ipsam conspiciebant (Breviarium Sanctae Birgittae, p. 325: see note 38). 17. Speculum, p. 18: the translation is from Avril Henry’s edition of the Mirour, p. 65, lines 895–8. 18. See e.g. Bartholomeus Anglicus, De rerum proprietatibus Libri XVIII (Frankfurt: Wolfgang Richter, 1601; repr. Frankfurt: Minerva GMBH, 1964 facsimile), lib. 5, cap. v and vi (pp. 128–34); English translation by John of Trevisa, On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomeus Anglicus’ De Proprietatibus Rerum, ed. by M.C. Seymour and others, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), I, pp. 178, 182–6. 19. Vita beate virginis et salvatoris rhythmica: see note 67. 20. Isidore of Seville (560–636), Etymologiarum libri XX, ed. by W.M. Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), VII, x, 1: ‘Maria inluminatrix, sive stella maris. Genuit enim lumen mundi.’ Jerome had suggested stilla maris ‘a drop of the ocean’, but a scribal misreading, copied by Isidore and popularised by Bede (PL, 92, col. 319), was enshrined in the eighth-century hymn Ave maris stella (‘Hail, Star of the Sea’) and became ‘a favourite theme of Marian devotion’ (Graef, p. 175). 21. Bernard of Clairvaux, Homily 2, Super ‘Missus Est’, PL, 183, col. 70. 22. For a typical collection of these typological images, see Mirour, p. 81, lines 1273– 8, which is sparked off by the theme of the Purification, and for a systematic listing, see Richard of St. Lauren, De Laudibus (see note 68). F.J.E. Raby, Christian Latin Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), pp. 363–75 has a section on the typology of the Virgin. For the Woman clothed with the Sun (Revelation 12:1: ‘mulier amicta sole, et luna sub pedibus eius, et in capite ejus corona stellarum duodecim’), see Mary in the NT, pp. 219–39, 280. The identification is not biblical, but stems from the fourth century. The identification of Mary with the Bride of the Song of Songs 6:9 (Vulgate), 10 (AV) (‘quasi aurora consurgens, pulchra ut luna, electa ut sol, terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata’) begins in the twelfth century: see Mary in the NT, p. 280. See also Rosemary Woolf, English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 124–7. 23. For Bernard, see note 21. This homily was immensely influential. There is a translation in Bernard of Clairvaux and Amadeus of Lausanne, Magnificat, trans. by Marie-Bernard Said and Grace Perigo (Kalamazoo MI: Cistercian Publications, 1979), pp. 30–1, though it is sometimes rather too free. The poem is Greene, 191b verse 1 (p. 126). For a collection of Latin verse addressed to Mary, see Lateinische Hymnen des Mittelalters, ed. by F.J. Mone, 3 vols (Freiburg: Herder, 1854; repr. Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1964), II, Marienlieder: see for example nos. 507, 600, 610, 612, 613. For English examples, see also Greene, nos. 192, 193, 198 v.4, 199 v.5, 201 v.4, 204 v. 7, 207 v.11 (lantern of light); 200 v.1, 204 v.8 (star); 201 v.4, 202 v. 5 (sun beam); 240 v.5 (as bright as cristal stone). 24. See, for example, Anselm, De Conceptu Virginali, chapter 18: ‘decens erat ut ea puritate, qua maior sub Deo nequit intellegi, Virgo illa niteret’ [it was fitting that this Virgin should shine with a pure ity than which one cannot imagine a greater under God], PL, 158, col. 451, a passage which was quoted in the Bull defining the Immaculate Conception, though Anselm himself did not hold this doctrine

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‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ (Graef, p. 211). Is he speaking of a radiance of spirit, or does he imagine a visible one? See also Bernard, ‘splendebat in carne virginitas’ [her virginity shone brightly in her flesh], PL, 183, col. 442. 25. See Stith Thompson, A Motif-Index of Folk Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), under F574 ‘Luminous person’, F969.3.2 ‘Hero light’, H71.6.l ‘Luminous face as sign of royalty’, and V211 and V222 on marvellous lights accompanying supernatural events; also Funk and Wagnall, s.v. Light. One of the examples of sacred persons with dazzling faces is Mohammed, who often appears veiled in medieval Islamic manuscripts. 26. English quotation, Greene, no. 255, line 5. The angel of the Annunciation to Joachim in the Latin De Nativitate Mariae appears ‘cum immenso lumine’; later, Gabriel appearing to Mary floods her room ‘ingenti lumine’, but we are told that she was used to the visitation of angels, and was not afraid: Tischendorf, p. 114 (ch. 3), p. 119 (ch. 9). The Sarum Breviary for the Feast of St. Anne ties the Annunciation to Joachim to the Light of the World theme (see below and note 40): ‘cum luce ingenti Joachim patri angelus apparuit, quia lumen mundi processurum de luce, id est, de nascitura virgine declaravit’ [An angel appeared to her father Joachim with a great light, because he declared that the Light of the World was to proceed from the Light, that is the Virgin who was to be born] (Breviarium, p. 548). 27. PL, 39, col. 2108. 28. Aquinas, ST, 3a q.30 a.3 (pp. 76–77). It is the Response in the Breviary to the first lectio in the First Nocturn for the Feast of the Annunciation. See also Ludolphus (p. 36) who collects several explanations of the text turbata est [she was troubled: Luke 1:29]; the first is that she was a little afraid, because the angel appeared to her ‘sumpta specie corporali, et cum ingenti lumine et splendore’ [having taken on a bodily form, and with an immense light and radiance]. 29. Greene, no. 237, verse 4. 30. S. Melitonis Episcopi Sardensis De Transitu Virginis Mariae Liber in Bibliothecae Patrum, et Veterum Auctorum Ecclesiasticorum, Volume 7, ed. by Margarinum de la Bigne (Paris, 1610), col. 583; ‘Palma autem illa fulgebat nimia luce’: Legenda Aurea, 505. 31. Mirk, p. 221 (see note 11). 32. Pseudo Melito, De Transitu (see note 30), cols 585–6. Translation from the Speculum Sacerdotale, edited Edward H. Weatherly, EETS OS 200 (1936) 187. For a full translation, see Ante-Nicene 592–4, 596–7. 33. Tischendorf, p. 77. This motif gets into the Legenda Aurea (ch. 6 on the Nativity) in very summary form: ‘in ipsa nocte nativitatis dominicae, obscuritas noctis in claritatem diei versa est’ [on the very night of the Birth of Our Lord, the darkness of night was turned into the brightness of day] (p. 43). 34. Composed c. 150 AD, the Protevangelium existed mainly in a Greek version, but it influenced Eastern Mariology, and through the Greek Fathers ‘dominated the development of the Marian legend’ (see Mary in the NT, pp. 247–9). The Opus Imperfectum on Matthew attributed to Chrysostom (see note 69) may have popularised some of the incidents. 35. Stage direction to Chester Harrowing of Hell, beginning of play: The Chester Mystery Cycle, edited R.M. Lumiansky and David Mills, EETS SS, 3 (1974), p. 325. In The Staging of Religious Drama in Europe, ed. by Peter Meredith and John Tailby, EDAM Monograph Series 4 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1983) there are many instances of ‘miraculous’ light being created in confined spaces: in Mons in 1501, the Harrowing of Hell was shown with ‘great brightness’ in the Limbo Patrum behind a gauze curtain (p. 113); the Resurrection

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‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ was accompanied by ‘a great brightness and smoke of incense and light’ which suggests fireworks (p. 114); in Bourges in 1536 Peter and Paul escape from prison in ‘a great light’ (p. 101). 36. Chester’s characters make no comment, but the stage direction says ‘Tunc stella apparebit’ (s.d. at line 508) at the moment Mary gives birth. 37. St. Birgitta of Sweden, Revelationes Liber VII, ed. by Birger Bergh, Samlingar utgivna av Svenska Fornskriftsallskapet, Series 2, Latinska skrifter 7:7 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1967), pp. 188–9. The early fifteenth-century English translation in The Liber Celestis of St Bridget of Sweden, ed. by Roger Ellis, EETS 291 (1987), book 7, chapter 22 (p. 486) actually misses out the Burning Babe motif. For the iconography, see Schiller, pp. 79–80, figs 196–202, 207–8, 210. 38. Missale ad Usum … Sarum Pars Prima: Temporale (Burntisland: Pitsligo, 1861), p. 55. Translation from Myroure of Oure Ladye (p. 297), a fifteenth-century English translation of the Holy Office written specially by St. Birgitta for the Brigittine 0rder which she founded. This translation was for the house at Syon (founded in 1415 by Henry V). 39. Cap. 9 (Tischendorf, p. 71). 40. The Middle English Stanzaic Versions of the Life of Saint Anne, ed. by Roscoe E. Parker, EETS OS 174 (1928) p. 18. 41. Breviarium, cols 49 and 779 (Third Nocturn). I have not found the original. Another passage from Bede, read at the Third Nocturn of the Annunciation, is from his In Lucae Evangelium Expositio, lib. 1 (PL 92, 316): ‘Maria vero Hebraice stella maris: Syriace vero domina vocatur. Et merito: quia et totius mundi Dominum, et lucem seculis meruit generare perhennem’ [Mary means ‘star of the Sea’ in Hebrew; and in Syriac, ‘Lady’. And fittingly: because she deserved to bring forth the Lord of al1 the world, and the ever lasting Light of the ages] (Breviarium, col. 242). The feast of the Assumption was established around 650, the Annunciation a little later, the Nativity of Mary towards the end of the seventh century (Graef, p. 142). On the Feast of the Conception of Mary, originally Eastern (seventh century), celebrated in Anglo-Saxon England, suspended by the Normans, and reintroduced by Anselm, see Graef, pp. 152 and 218. Its celebration was much involved with the arguments on the Immaculate Conception. 42. See Joseph Connelly, Hymns of the Roman Liturgy (London: Longmans Green, 1957), no. 31 (p. 44) for its origins and use. See also e.g. Speculum Sacerdotale, p. 200 (see note 32). 43. Breviarium, col. 46: York Breviary (Breviarium ad Usum Insignis Ecclesie Eboracensis 2, ed. by Lawley, Surtees Society, 75 (1883)), Assumption (p. 480); Missal, Gradual for 8 September; in the Office of the BVM (the Hours) it is the Responsory at the end of Matins. It is said to be from a sermon of St. Augustine. 44. Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse, ed.by F.J.E. Raby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), no. 113 (pp. 156–7). See Greene, pp. xcviii-cii for text and discussion of its influence on English lyrics. ‘The Angel of Counsel’ seems to be a blend of Malachi 3:1 with Isaiah 9:6. 45. Quoted Greene, note to no. 21 (p. 348). See Ryman’s carol (Greene, no. 194, verse 9 (p. 128)). It comes from a sermon attributed to St. Augustine (PL, 39, col. 2197), and is found, with slight verbal differences, attributed to St. Hildefonsus under Sermones Dubii in PL, 96, col. 282. 46. Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse, no. 266 (p. 405), l. 18. 47. See Schiller, pp. 42–7, figs. 102–5, 111, 114, 121; also the miniature in the Hours of Catherine of Cleves. 48. Meredith and Tailby (see note 35), p. 245. In Barcelona in 1453 a mechanical dove emitting ‘rays of light or fire’, which have to be harmless, descends to Mary

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‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ (p.  119). The Holy Spirit’s descent at Pentecost also demanded the descent of flames of fire: a complicated system for use at Paris in the fifteenth century is described on p. 107. In Chester, God ‘emittet Spiritum Sanctum in spetie ignis’ and angels cast fire on the Apostles (Play 21, s.d. at l. 238). 49. From Unum ex Quatuor, a Gospel Harmony with comment (attributed in Migne to Zacharias Chrysopolitanus c.1100): PL, 186, col. 55. It is based on a homily attributed to Bede (PL, 94, col. 326). 50. Aquinas, Expositio in Evangelium Joannis, n. 181: quoted by Heath in Blackfriars edition of ST, 93. See also Bede, In S. Joannis Evangelium Expositio: PL, 92 (1862), col, 642. 51. Legenda Aurea, p. 219, citing Bernard. I have not found an exact source, but the phraseology is very like the quotation from Sermon 31 on the Song of Songs quoted below (see note 54). 52. This was in fact a venerable interpretation of Isaiah 19:1: ‘Ecce Dominus ascendit super nubem levem’ [Behold, the Lord rideth upon a swift (interpreted ‘light’) cloud]. See Graef, pp. 82, 87, 92. In the thirteenth century, the commentators on the Celestial Hierarchies of Pseudo-Dionysius speak of the way in which angels are referred to in the Scriptures as ‘clouds’. The angels transmit the light of God to lesser beings in much the same way as Christ’s flesh is said to transmit the divine light to Mary (see below and note 55): ‘For clouds are filled with the light of the sun’s rays just as angels are when the divine light secretly shines upon them’: Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100–c. 1375: The Commentary Tradition, ed. by A.J. Minnis and A.B. Scott (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 188 and see also p. 193. 53. Greene, no. 192 (p. 127). 54. Bernard, Sermons on the Song of Songs, 31: 9 (PL, 183, col. 945). Ludolphus renders this as: ‘Divinitas obumbrata fuit virgini per susceptionem humanitatis, ut quod impossibile erat mortali feminae, objectu tamen vivifici corporis ferret praesentiam majestatis, et lucem sustineret inaccessibilem, sicut sol, quando eum visu intueri non possumus, obumbratur nobis aliquo velamine.’ [The Godhead was shadowed to the Virgin by the taking-on of humankind, so that, which was impossible for a mortal woman, she should nevertheless [be able to] bear the presence of [his] majesty because of the interposition of his quickening flesh, and support the unapproachable light, just as the sun, when we cannot gaze directly at it, is shadowed for us by some kind of filter.] See also the Glossa: ‘Potest utraque saluatoris natura intellegi: quia vmbra a lumine et corpore obiecto solet formari. Et virgo sicut purus homo plenditudinem diuinitatis capere nequibat: sed virtus altissimi obumbrat. dum incorporea lux diuinitatis corpus suscepit humanitatis. vt sic posset deum pati.’ [(By this) one can understand the dual nature of the Saviour: because a shadow is usually made from the light and a body placed in its way. And the Virgin, being purely human (?), could not receive the full force of the Godhead, but ‘the power of the Highest overshadowed’ her, while the bodiless light of the Godhead took on the body of humankind, so that she would thus be able to endure (the power of) God.] (From Glossa to [?] 1480 Bible, BL IC 813: it does not appear in PL, 114.) This note is a precis of Bede, PL, 92, cols 318–19 (Commentary on Luke) and is

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‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ quoted by the Legenda Aurea, p. 219. Another passage from Bede (PL, 94, cols. 12–13), which was adopted in the Sarum Breviary as a lectio for the Feast of the Annunciation, says merely that the Holy Spirit shaded her ‘ab omni aestu concupiscientiae carnalis’ (Breviarium, 3, col. 240). This is based on the suppositious sermon by Augustine which quotes Mary describing Gabriel (PL, 39, col. 2108): ‘ita te virtus Altissimi obumbrabit, ut nee aestum patiaris libidinis, et mater sis Creatoris’ [the power of the Highest will overshadow you, so that you will not suffer the burning heat of desire, and will be the mother of the Creator]. It is mildly possible that this could be read as God’s libido. In fact Bede goes on in the same sermon to give the more complex interpretation.   In the Third Homily Super Missus Est, Bernard, though he describes the Incarnation as a flooding with light (see note 55), maintains that the ‘overshadowing’ implies that its exact details were, and always should be, shrouded as a divine mystery (PL, 183, col. 81): Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Historiale, lib.6, cap. 76 (p. 119) glosses ‘occulto et secreto modo in te intrabit’. Ludolphus (I, 5: 19) also suggests ‘de te corpus quasi umbraculum assumet quia in beata virgine sub umbra carnis latuit virtus deitas’ like a fishhook hidden in bait. 55. Bernard, Homily 2 Super Missus est: PL, 183, col. 81, and Sermon 70 on the Song of Songs (1120). It was picked up by Amadeus of Lausanne in his third Homily: ‘Obumbrabit ergo tibi, quia luci se inaccessibili assumpta a Verbo humanitatis objiceret, cujus objectu lux illa temperata, castissima viscera tua perfundet’ [He will overshadow you, therefore, because the humanity put on by the Word will place itself in front of the unapproachable light, and that light, filtered by this interposition, will pour into your chaste womb], PL, 188, col. 1318. Richard of St. Laurent (see below note 57) De Laudibus Beatae Mariae Virginis, quotes Isaiah 33:14: ‘Quis poterit habitare cum igne deuorante’ [Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire?] and Hebrews 12:29, ‘Deus noster ignis consumens’ [For our God is a consuming fire] in this context, which comes near to the Semele image (Beati Alberti Magni … Opera Omnia, ed. by August Borgnet (Paris: Vives, 1898), XXXVI, p. 640. 56. The Myroure of Oure Ladye refers to Mary at her birth as ‘lyke vnto a new lanterne not yet lyghte. & yet it muste be lyghte’ (p. 213) with the flames of charity, virginity, humility, and obedience, to attract to herself the three great flames of Divine Charity burning in each Person of the Trinity (Breviarium … Sanctae Birgittae, pp. 264–5; also Sermo Angelicus, ed. by Sten Eklund, Samlingar utgivna av Svenska Fornskriftsallskapet, Series 2, Latinska skrifter VIII: 2 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1972), Feria Quarta, Leccio Tercia, Cap. XII, pp. 107–8). Could this have suggested the three bemes of the stage direction? 57. Reference to Aquinas, Sentences 3, 3.1, art 2i ad 1, from ST, Blackfriars edition (p. 88). This is the position taken up by Nicholas of Lyra’s Postilla (Venice: Franciscus Renner de Hailbrun, 1482). He adds the gloss ‘Obumbrabit tibi. quia in beata virgine sub vmbra carnis latuit virtus deitatis’ [Shall overshadow you. Because in the Blessed Virgin the power of the Godhead lay hidden under the shadow of the flesh]. 58. B. Alberti Magni … Opera, XXXVI, pp. 17–18. 59. Paschasii Radberti Expositio in Mattheo Libri XII, ed. by Bede Paulus O.S.B. Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis, 56 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1984), pp. 138–9. 60. For a convenient discussion of this, see McHugh, pp. 200–7 and 343–7: for its origins, see Mary in the NT, pp. 273–5. 61. Jerome, De Perpetua Virginitate B. Mariae Adversus Helvidium (PL, 23, cols 188– 90); for a translation, see Saint Jerome: Dogmatic and Polemical Works, trans. by

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‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ John N. Hritzu (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1965), pp. 18–20. 62. Probably based on the Homily of Pseudo Chrysostom (see note 69). 63. From Bede on Luke, PL, 92, cols 318–19. 64. See note 15. 65. PL, 114, col. 72. 66. Mirour I, p. 65. The idea presumably goes back to Jerome’s contention that the effect of Mary’s chastity spread most signally to Joseph (Helvidius, 19: PL, 23, col. 203). Aquinas maintains that they took a mutual vow of virginity (ST, 3a 28.4). The Mirour says the same: lines 869–70. On the increasing emphasis on Mary’s virginity, see Mary in the New Testament, pp. 267–78. 67. Ed. by A. Vogtlin (Tubingen: Stuttgart Litterarischen Verein, 1888), p. 64. 68. For a long time attributed to Albertus Magnus (see Graef, pp. 266–70) and therefore published in his collected works. See note 57 for edition by Borgnet: this passage, pp. 279–80. Also available in Beati Alberti Magni Opera Omnia, ed. by Petrus Iammy S.T.D., 21 vols (Lyons: Prost et al., 1651), XX, this passage p. 159. 69. Not Chrysostom himself, but the Latin sermon of Pseudo Chrysostom printed in PG, 56 (1862) under the title Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum Homilia I. But this Homily does not in fact say anything about the shining face, or the Gospel of the Nazarenes (see note 15). On the text ‘Et non cognovit eam’, he lists the marvels at the Birth of Christ (col. 633), in order to explain how Joseph could not have failed then to recognise Mary’s true status, and honour her perpetual virginity (see below note 72), and he mentions a Historia (the Protevangelium: col. 632) as evidence for his suggestion that when the Annunciation occurred, Joseph must have been away or, as a caring and watchful husband, he would have had to be present (presumably since his wife was entertaining visitors). Perhaps the author had an annotated text. 70. PL, 182, col. 1148. 71. Published as volume 51 of the Blackfriars edition of the Summa Theologiae. This has a very useful Appendix on the writings of St. Thomas on Our Lady. 72. Ludolphus (p. 63) also cites the quotation from Pseudo Chrysostom (Opus imperfectum: PG, 56, col. 635) in his exposition, which suggests that he is using Aquinas as a direct source, though he does not use him verbatim, as he does the Glossa. 73. ST, Blackfriars edition vol. 51, pp. 48–51: Leonine edition vol. 11, p. 307. The Blackfriars translation here is too free to be useful for our purpose, so I have made my own. Aquinas treats of the subject in almost exactly the same terms in his Expositio in Euangelium secundum Matthaei, ed. by Cosmas Morelles (Paris: Dionysius Moreau, 1540), cap. 1 (p. 18). The relevant sentence is: ‘Ergo si ex consortio Dei hoc habuit Moyses multo magis haec beata virgo quae portauit eam in vtero habuit tantam claritatem in facie quod Joseph non cognoscebat eam.’ 74. Mary Play, p. 117: note on lines 1405–6. 75. With Elijah, who was ‘transfigured’ by being caught up in the fiery chariot, 2 Kings 2:11 (because he was virgin: see Jerome’s Letter 22 to Eustochium, section 21: PL, 22, col. 408). 76. Matthew 17:1–8, Mark 9:2–8, Luke 9:29–36. 77. The Biblia Pauperum, ed. by Avril Henry (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1987); however, since it shows the ‘Trinity’ of Christ, Moses, and Elijah, and thus contains the primary typology in the central panel, it concentrates on theophanies of the Trinity: the Three Children in the burning fiery furnace, and Abraham and the Three Angels (m). 78. ST, 3 q. 45 a. 2: Blackfriars edition 53, pp. 162–3. Aquinas may have known a Latin version of St. John Chrysostom’s Homily on John 1:14, ‘and we beheld his

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‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’ glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father’, which discusses the way in which this ‘glory’ appeared, in a lesser form, in the temporary transfiguration of certain Patriarchs and Prophets. Chrysostom’s first example is Moses coming down from Mount Sinai: ‘even the just man needed the protection of a veil sufficient to shield the brilliance of that glory from him, and to show the face of their Prophet to them, with its radiance dimmed and, therefore, not dazzling to behold’ (St. John Chrysostom, Commentary on Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist: Homilies 1–47, trans. by Sister Thomas Aquinas Goggin S.C.H. (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1957), pp. 110–113). 79. ST, 3a q.45 art. 2: Blackfriars edition 53, pp. 152–3: ‘ad corpus Christi in transfiguratione derivata est claritas a divinitate et anima ejus per modum passionis transeuntis, sicut cum aer illuminatur a sole’. 80. ST, 3a, Q 45, art. 4 (Blackfriars edition 53, pp. 162–3), quoting Jerome, Commentarii in Evangelium Matthaei, 17: 6, PL, 26, col. 127; also quoted by Glossa on Luke (PL, 114, col. 281). 81. Aquinas, ST, 3a, Q 45, art. 4: see also Glossa on Matthew 17:5: ‘Spiritus Sanctus ibi [at the Baptism] in columba, hic in nube lucida’ (PL, 114, col. 144). Richard of St. Laurent (Alberti Magni … Opera, ed. by Borgnet, XXXVI, p. 152) quotes Richard of St.Victor: ‘Si lucida fuit nubes quae obumbravit discipulos Christi, quam lucida recte creditor, quae obumbravit matrem Christi?’ [If the cloud which overshadowed the disciples of Christ was bright, how bright are we to believe that which overshadowed the mother of Christ?]. Cf. also the lightning cloud on Mount Sinai of Exodus 24, 15–18, though it is not described as ‘bright’. McHugh sees Mary as the Ark of the Covenant overshadowed by God from Exodus 40:34–5 (McHugh, pp. 56–63), but e.g. Speculum does not mention this in its very extended comparison of the Ark with Mary, and Mary in the NT rejects it (pp. 132–4). 82. Amadeus of Lausanne links the overshadowing of the Annunciation with that of the Nativity: he relates the story of the miraculous light, and a few lines later says, ‘ille obumbrabat ei in ortu Christi, qui in conceptu obumbraverat’ [at the birth of Christ he overshadowed her who overshadowed her at his conception]. The baby is ‘lucem incomparabiliter sole pulchriorem … Suscepit in testa carnis genitae fulgorem illuminantem omnia’ [a 1ight incomparably more beautiful than the sun … She took up [in her arms] in the screen [lit. earthenware lamp] of the flesh she had borne, the brilliance that illuminates all things] (PL, 188, col. 1324). The likeness to Birgitta’s luminous Christ child is striking. 83. Aquinas, Expositio In Evangelium S. Matthaei, 1:18 (Opera Omnia, X, 13–14). Quoted by Heath, p. 91, n. 49. 84. Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla super Matheum (Nuremberg: Anthonius Koberger, 1493), sig. a viv. 85. For sources, see Sister Mary Immaculate Bodenstedt S.N.D., The Vita Christi of Ludolphus the Carthusian (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1944). 86. See note 72. 87. Ludolphus, p. 63. 88. Ludolphus, p. 61. 89. See McHugh, pp. 164–72 for a discussion. He does not, however, make a sufficient distinction between (1) and (2). Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 169–73 and notes, discusses the theme of Joseph’s Doubts. She does not, in my opinion, make enough of (2). The Homily of Pseudo Chrysostom was also clearly very influential.   90. Greene, no 258, verses 2 and 3 (p. 163).  91. PL, 26, col. 24.

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‘as the sun with his beams when he is most bright’   92. See note 69.  93. Mirour, pp. 919–48.   94. By the Unum ex Quatuor (PL, 186, col. 71). It cites the examples of Peter, the Centurion, and Elizabeth, but it is not clear if it got these from Origen or added them itself.  95. Speculum Humanae Salvationis, fol. 42v; Mirour, lines 950–3. Albertus Magnus borrows from Pseudo Chrysostom on traducere: ‘Aliter exponeretur … in domum ad cohabitandum … hanc nolebat facere, ut in animo volvebat, propter humilitatem reputans, quod tam gloriosae dominae, quam deus pater filio … matrem praeparavit … non esset satis idoneus ad serviendum’ [It can be interpreted in another way, as ‘to take her into his home to live with her as man and wife’. He did not want to do this, because he was turning over in his mind, and thinking in his humility, that he was not a sufficiently suitable person to serve such a glorious Lady, whom God the Father had prepared as a mother to his Son]: Alberti Magni OSP Super Mattheum, ed. by Bernhardus Schmidt (Munster: Aeschendorff, 1987), cap. 1:20 (p. 33). See also Mone (see note 22), 2, no. 385 (p. 79), from a fifteenth-century German MS: Joseph justus vir expavit, istam dum consideravit, sciens quod non temeravit florescentem virgulam: Bene tamen conservavit arcanum, nee divulgavit sponsam, sed magnificavit honorans ut dominam.  (24) [Joseph, a just man, was terrified when he thought about her, knowing that he had not plucked the flowering spray: nevertheless, he kept the secret well, and did not betray his bride publicly, but magnified her, honouring her as (his) Lady.]  96. Speculum, fol 42r, Mirour, 67.   97. 1638–55: although his distress is violent, and he is afraid of opprobrium, he knows that she is castam atque mundam (line 1644) and cannot tell how she has come to be pregnant.  98. Mary Play, p. 131, note to lines 13–20.   99. Stage direction to Chester Harrowing of Hell, beginning of play: see note 35. See Meredith and Tailby, p. 114 for a Transfiguration engineered by reflected light from a polished bowl – if the sun is not shining, torches and other lights are to be in readiness (Revello, Italy, 1483). 100. Meredith and Tailby, p. 101.

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10 ‘WITH WHAT BODY SHALL THEY COME?’: BLACK AND WHITE SOULS IN THE ENGLISH MYSTERY PLAYS There is one thing about staging medieval plays: it forces you to confront questions you had never even thought of asking. In the summer of 1987, the Joculatores Lancastrienses took their production of the York Doomsday to its original setting in the city’s medieval streets. Almost every detail of the set and costumes had presented us with a problem to solve. This is about just one of them, ‘on the Day of Judgement, what should the Damned wear?’1 The official civic Ordo Paginarum of the York Mystery plays, written down in 1415, lists among the characters of the Mercers’ Doomsday play ‘iiijor spiritus boni & iiijor spiritus maligni’.2 The York Mercers’ Indenture of 1433, a formal checklist of set, properties, and costumes in the possession of the Company, and the chief source of our knowledge of how the play was actually staged in the fifteenth century, lists immediately after the devils’ costumes, Array for ij euell saules þat ys to say ij Sirkes ij paire hoses ij vesenes [masks] & ij Chauelers [wigs] Array for ij gode saules þat is to say ij Sirkes ij paire hoses ij vesernes & ij Cheuelers York, Merchant Adventurers Company MS D633 Apart from the drastic reduction in the number of Souls during the intervening eighteen years, this part of the Indenture corresponds both to the Ordo Paginarum and to the characters (Prima and Secunda Anima Bona; Prima and Secunda Anima Mala) as they appear in the script of the play transcribed into the York Register between 1467 and 1475.4 So far so good. However, here we hit a snag. The checklists of garments for both types of soul in the Indenture appear to be identical in number and description. Good Souls and Bad alike have a Sirk (‘top’ – the word ‘shirt’ is probably misleading, as we shall see in a moment), a pair of tights, a mask, and a wig each. Yet they are listed separately, and were presumably immediately recognisable as Good or Bad to the pageant master ticking each item off. What were their distinguishing features? How would we expect a Good Soul to be visibly differentiated from a Bad Soul? 281

‘ w i t h w h at b o dy s h a l l t h e y c o m e ? ’ Nothing in the script is of immediate help. The usual proceeding here is to look round other mystery-play accounts for the same episode to see if we can find any comparative material. The obvious place is Coventry, which has the only other full-ish set of accounts for a Doomsday play. Inevitably, with the kind of luck that usually operates in medieval theatre studies, the play itself has not survived. Moreover, the Coventry Doomsday play was the responsibility of their Drapers’ Guild, whose earliest surviving pageant accounts date from 1534, a century after the York Mercers’ Indenture.5 However, with the usual caveat about the dangers of assuming that what happened in one cycle and century was automatically what happened in another, we seem to strike lucky. The Coventry souls turn up regularly in the accounts between 1537 and 1573. The earliest entry is ‘for mendyng the white & the blake soules cots viij d’ (1537). In the years that follow they are described variously as ‘Savyd Sowles’ and ‘damnyd Sowles’ (1563) or ‘whyt Soules’ and ‘blakke soules’ (1566). There were three of each. In 1538 there appears to have been a general overhaul of their garments: the ‘blakke Soules’ were bought ‘v el[n]ys of Canvas for shyrts & hose’, and 9d was paid out ‘for Coloryng & makyng the same cots’, which suggests that in the world of theatre costume ‘shyrts’ and ‘cots’ were synonymous. Presumably the Sirkes of the York Souls, together with the ‘Sirke Wounded’ of Christ, were the same kind of garment. They then paid for ‘makyng & mendynge of the blakke Soules hose’,6 while the ‘white soules’ had ‘a payre of newe hose & mendyng of olde’. The material and the terminology suggest that the Souls (they are always called that, even though strictly speaking they are body and soul reunited) wore close-fitting top and tights to represent the naked resurrected body familiar from the iconography of Doomsday. In 1543, the ‘whyte Sollskotts’, were mended with two skins, which suggests that while the black souls were dressed in canvas, the white souls were dressed in tawed leather, like the Adam and Eve or Christ figures of many accounts.7 In 1555 the Guild paid for ‘a dossyne of Skyns for the sollys cottys’ (it does not say whether these were Black, White, or both), and ‘for makyng’. ln 1557 they bought nineteen ells of canvas ‘for the sollys cottys’, of which nine ells were (it seems) dyed yellow and ten ells black, and which was made up into ‘cotts’. The White Souls seem to have turned yellow, or perhaps, since the vocabulary of colour is limited, cream or off-white, to match the skin-colour of tawed leather. Ten years later these were replaced with other yellow canvas ‘Cotts’. In 1557, too, there is the first appearance of what is to become a regular item, ‘for blakyng the Sollys fassys’. Presumably these were the Black Souls, and the face blacking was a cheaper but perhaps more expressive way of producing the effect created by the York masks. The Damned are therefore black from top to toe. The blackness and whiteness of the Souls’ costumes are usually taken as purely symbolic, representing their spiritual state and signalling their eventual destination. But it may well be that the citizens of Coventry, and very 282

‘ w i t h w h at b o dy s h a l l t h e y c o m e ? ’ possibly of York and Chester, saw it more literally than that. In at least three late medieval English works of popular religious instruction, the Cursor Mundi, the Pricke of Conscience, and The Mirour of Man’s Salvation, the English translation of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis, and it may well be in o ­ thers, we are told that though we will all be raised body and soul together at the Last Judgment, there will be a visible distinction between the saved and the damned.8 The medieval theology of the General Resurrection and the nature of the body in which we shall be raised is far too extended and complex to go into here in detail: a sketch will have to suffice. It was based on 1 Corinthians 15:35–54, especially verses 51–53: Ecce mysterium vobis dico: Omnes quidem resurgemus, sed non omnes immutabimur. In momento, in ictu oculi, in novissima tuba; canet enim tuba, et mortui resurgent incorrupti, et nos immutabimur. Oportet enim corruptibile hoc induere incorruptionem, et mortale hoc induere immortalitatem. At the last trumpet, we shall all be raised, body and soul, immortal and incorruptible. ‘But some man will say: How do the dead rise again? or with what manner of body shall they come?’ (1 Corinthians 15:35). The nature and appearance of the corpus spirituale (‘spiritual body’: 1 Corinthians 15:44) provided fascinating and fertile material for speculation. The locus classicus for the discussion was St Augustine’s City of God, Books 20–2, which formed the basis for later compendia such as the Sentences of Peter Lombard (c. 1100–60)9 and the various works of St Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74), especially the Summa Theologica, which superseded Lombard as the standard text of Catholic theology. The Speculum Humanae Salvationis takes much of its resurrection theology from Aquinas, probably the Compendium Theologiae, and it seems that in at least one respect the Cursor and the Pricke of Conscience do too.10 It was agreed, following St Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians 4:13, ‘Donec occuramus omnes in unitatem fidei, et agnitionis Filii Dei, in virum perfectum, in mensuram aetatis plenitudinis Christi’ [Until we all meet into the unity of faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the age of the fulness of Christ], that the dead are to arise in virum perfectum. id est in virilem perfectionem, quasi scilicet in statu aetatis 30. circiter annorum, in qua Christus habuit annorum & corporis plentitudinem. Igitur vniusquisque mensurae corporis plentitudinem sui recipiet, quam in aetate 30. annorum habuit, etiam si senex objit, vel quam illa habiturus esset si vsque ad eam peruenisset. 283

‘ w i t h w h at b o dy s h a l l t h e y c o m e ? ’ [that is, to the perfected state of man, as it were to the condition of around 30 years of age, in which Christ reached the fullness of years and [growth] of body. Therefore each person will receive the fullness of the measure of his body which he had at the age of 30, even if he died an old man, or which he would have had if he had lived to that age.] Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Historiale cap CXIII11 or, as Cursor Mundi adapts it, All at þat mikel up-rising Sal be of eld als þai suld here       [age] Haf deied in eild o thritte yere, Þat eild þat crist had at his ded  [death] 22821 and Resurrection. Strictly speaking, as the Pricke of Conscience points out, this should be thirty-two years and three months: … sal alle ryse in þe same eld þan Þat God had fully here als man, Namly, whan he uprayse thurgh myght Fra dede, als says Saynt Austyn ryght; Þan was he of threty yhere elde and twa, And of thre monethes þar-with alswa   (4988)12 Even infants and aborted children will be raised in virum perfectum. The exact wording of Ephesians 4:13 gave rise to a host of further problems, some provoked by what St Augustine described as frivolous queries from the pagans, some by serious over-literalness from the believers. Were we all to be raised the same size as Christ (in which case, those taller than him would suffer an unfair diminution in substance)? Since St Paul says in virum perfectum, were women to be resurrected as men? No: ‘man’ subsumes ‘woman’, and since there will be no marrying or giving in marriage, women will not provoke inconveniently lustful thoughts among the resurrected: ‘Non enim libido ibi erit, quae confusionis est causa.’ Then since there will be no need of them, shall we be resurrected with genitalia, or, since there is no eating and drinking, with intestines? Yes, we will have them, otherwise a large part of our bodies would be lacking, but we shall not use them as they are used on earth.13 A good many of these queries are referred eventually to what seems at first to be purely aesthetic decorum, but which is more serious than that: the perfection of the corpus spirituale reflects the perfection of beatitude. This explains the insistence on one feature of the resurrected body in which they seem disproportionately interested. All congenital deformities and accidental 284

‘ w i t h w h at b o dy s h a l l t h e y c o m e ? ’ mutilations or scars will be removed. Cursor Mundi reminds us quite how emotionally, rather than intellectually, satisfying this must have been to a society where congenital abnormalities could not be operated on, crippled beggars were commonplace, and the approach of age (past the perfection of thirty) meant shrivelled toothlessness: And if þat ani her liuand Was wemed, or on fot or on hand, Or hefd, or bak, or brest, on side, Als we se chances oft bitide, On muth or nese, or elles-quar. (MS bote) botch Or bo[c]e apon his bodi bar,   Cripel, croked, or tumed o baft, Or limes ma gain kindli craft, Thoru ma or less o lim haf last, At þis vprising þat sal be [r]ast.     (MS last) All þaa þat godd has chosin til his For to be broght into his blis, Quat-sum þai in þis luf has bene, It sal na wem o þam be sene, Ne naking thing bot all fair-hede.  (22823–37) Even this provoked a further worry: if all our losses were to be restored to us, does this imply that we will be burdened with all the hair and nails that we have trimmed and pared during the course of our lives, since Christ had said, ‘Yea, the very hairs of your head are all numbered’ (Luke 12:7)? No, they will be included in our substance, as we are not to suffer diminution, but God will redistribute them, like a potter remolding a mis-thrown pot, or a sculptor melting down and recasting a defective statue:14 Et si quid enormiter abundauerit in parte aliqua, per totum spargetur, ita, quod ibi nihil indecorum erit, sed omnia decentia … sicut statua, quando iterum funditur, quod prius erat de naso, fit de pede, vel econuerso … [And if anything anywhere should be over-excessive, it will be dissipated throughout the whole, so that there will be nothing unbalanced, but everything in seemly proportion … like a statue, when it is melted and recast, what was in the nose the first time round ends up in the foot, or vice versa …] Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Historiale cap. cxiii15 To our modem ears this may at first sound like purely cosmetic surgery, especially when Augustine remarks wistfully ‘per hoc non est macris pinguibusque metuendum,ne ibi etiam tales sint, quales si possent nec hic esse uoluissent’ 285

‘ w i t h w h at b o dy s h a l l t h e y c o m e ? ’ [wherefore the fat or the lean need never fear to be such hereafter as, if they could choose, they would not be now], but it is making a serious point about the decorum of proper proportions (congruentia): ‘quae praua sunt corrigentur, et quod minus est quam decet, unde Creator nouit, inde supplebitur, et quod plus est quam decet, materiae seruata integritate detrahetur’ [Whatever is deformed will be corrected, and what is less than seemly will be made up by the creator from his resources, and what is more than is seemly will be taken away, but preserving the integrity of its material].16 Moreover, the spiritual body will have a lustre (claritas) like that, though  not  the same in nature as that, of the heavenly bodies:17 for, as Augustine quotes, ‘Tunc justi fulgebunt sicut sol in regno Patris eorum’ [Then  shall the just shine as the sun, in the kingdom of their Father] (Matthew 13:43):18 And þus sal he do namly, to al þa Þat sal be save and til blis ga. For þair bodys sal be semely and bright With avenand lymes til alle mennes sight. Pricke of Conscience, 5020 However, according to the Cursor Mundi, there will be a striking difference between the luminous bodies of the just and the bodies into which the unjust will be resurrected: þaas oþer sal ha fairhed nan, For al welth sal þam be wan  (22845–6) The text ‘Et procedent qui bona fecerunt, in resurrectionem vitae; qui vero mala egerunt, in resurrectionem judicii’ [And they that have done good things, shall come forth unto the resurrection of life; but they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of judgment] (John 5:29) suggested that there might be two different modes of resurrection as well as two different fates for the resurrected.19 The plays take over this idea, probably because it emphasises their point: judgement depends on what you have done in this life (Matthew 25:31–46, the structural basis of all the Doomsday plays). The General Judgment is after all the sentence rather than the actual process of trial and verdict, which will be decided at each man’s Particular Judgment. When the dead rise, their fates are already decided, and the plays make this visible. But how is it to be made visible? As Aquinas argues, the Damned must, like the saved, be immortal and incorruptible (otherwise their pains would some day have an end, if only because their spiritual bodies would wear out). Therefore, like the Saved, they too must arise with their physical deformities removed: 286

‘ w i t h w h at b o dy s h a l l t h e y c o m e ? ’ Unde Apostolus dicit (l. Cor. XV. 52): Mortui resurgent incorrupti; quod manifestum est de omnibus debere intellegi, tam bonis, quam malis, exhis quae praecedunt et sequuntur in littera. [Whence the Apostle (Paul) says (1 Corinthians 15:52) ‘The dead shall be raised incorrupt’: which it is clear is to be understood as referring to everyone, evil as well as good, from what precedes and follows in the text.] Contra Gentiles 4:89 p. 704 It was of course assumed, however, that the spiritual bodies of the damned would not acquire the special characteristics of the blessed, specified by Aquinas as subtilitas, agilitas, claritas, and impassibilitas:20 Claritee take for the first, the secound impassibilitee, Sutyltee for the thredde, the feerthe agilitee. Mirour, 4333–4 The soul, acting as form, creates these in the bodies of the blessed: Quamvis autem, merito Christi, defectus naturae in resurrectione tollatur ab omnibus communiter tam bonis, quam malis, remanebit tamen differentia inter bonos et malos quantum ad ea quae personaliter utrisque conveniunt. Est autem de ratione naturae quod anima humana sit corporis forma, ipsum vivicans, et in esse conservans; sed ex personalibus actibus meretur anima in gloriam divinae visionis elevari, vel ab ordine hujusmodi gloriae propter culpam excludi. [Although, however, by the merit of Christ, the shortcomings of nature will be taken away from everyone equally, evil as well as good, nevertheless there will remain some differences between the good and the evil, as regards the things which befit each of them individually. For it is in the course of nature that the human soul is the Form [in the Platonic sense] of the body, giving life to it, and preserving it in its being: but through individual acts, the soul either deserves to be raised to the glory of the sight of God, or to be shut out from the rank of this type of glory on account of sin.] Contra Genrtiles 4:86 p. 701 The wicked, cut off from the Beatific Vision by the misuse of their own souls, will lack the qualities that arise from participation in that Vision. Above all, they will lack claritas: Erunt etiam eorum corpora opaca, et tenebrosa, sicut et eorum animae a lumine divinae cognitionis erunt alienae; et hoc est quod Apostolus dicit (1 Corinth. XV 51), quod omnes resurgemus, sed non 287

‘ w i t h w h at b o dy s h a l l t h e y c o m e ? ’ omnes immutabimur: sed enim boni immutabuntur ad gloriam; malorum vero corpora absque gloria resurgent. [For their bodies will be opaque, and shadowed, as also their souls will be foreign to the light of divine knowledge; and this is what the Apostle says (1 Corinthians 15:51), that ‘we shall all be raised, but we shall not all be changed’, for only the good will be changed into glory: the bodies of the evil will certainly arise without glory.]21 Contra Gentiles 4:89 p. 704 This by itself might be enough to create the idea of White and Black Souls. The whiteness is a way of showing the claritas of the blessed (was the yellow canvas perhaps an attempt to match this claritas to the superior gilded radiance of the body of Christ?); the blackness, ‘opaca et tenebrosa’, is an absence of light rather than a positive quality.22 They will also lack agilitas: Nec ipsa corpora erunt agilia, quasi sine difficultate animae obedientia; sed magis erunt ponderosa, et gravia, et quodammodo animae importabilia [Nor will their bodies be agile, as obeying the soul without difficulty, but rather they will be weighed down, and heavy, and to a certain extent unresponsive to the soul] Contra Gentiles 4:89 p. 704 This is a feature which some commentators, notably Bede, use to explain how, at the Last Judgment, the wicked will be weighed down by their sins while the good will rise to meet their Saviour in the air, thus solving the potential problem of over-crowding in the valley of Jehosaphat, by stacking the resurrected like aircraft.23 By the time Aquinas comes to write the Compendium, he has subtly altered the tone of his description, apparently to bring it into line with the more punitive simplicity of popular eschatology: As we said above, in speaking of the saints, the beatitude of the soul will in some manner flow over to the body. In the same way the suffering of lost souls will flow over into their bodies … the bodies of the damned will be complete in their kind, [but] they will not have these qualities that go with the glory of the blessed. That is, they will not be subtile and impassible; instead, they will remain in their grossness and capacity for suffering, and, indeed, these defects will be heightened in them. Nor will they be agile, but will be so sluggish as scarcely to be manoeuvrable by the soul. Lastly, they will not be radiant but will be ugly in their swarthiness, so that the blackness of the 288

‘ w i t h w h at b o dy s h a l l t h e y c o m e ? ’ soul may be mirrored in the body, as is intimated in Isaias 3:8: ‘Their countenances shall be as faces burned’.24 Cap. 176 (p. 192) (Facies combustae vultus eorum is also translated in Douay Rheims as ‘their countenances shall be as faces burnt’.) Here at last we have a conspicuously Black Soul. This visible blackness has a popular feel to it. (There should be no need to state that this has nothing at all to do with racial stereotypes.) To view the state of the Damned in purely negative terms may be satisfying philosophically, but at least as far back as Augustine popular notions of poetic justice demanded that their humiliation should be visible, even vindictive. Why, for example, should their bodily deformities be removed? Peter Lombard, asking the question, points out that Augustine (Enchiridion) sits on the fence, saying Utrum vero ipsi [reprobi] cum vitiis et deformitatibus suorum corporum resurgant, quaecumque in eis gestarunt, in requirendo laborare quid opus est? Non enim fatigare nos debet incerta eorum habitudo vel pulchritudo, quorum erit certa et sempiterna damnatio.25 [What is the point of researching to find out whether they (the Damned) will arise with blemishes and deformities in their bodies? For we ought not to exhaust ourselves on speculations about the appearance or comeliness of those we know for certain to be damned eternally.] Aquinas deals with the question several times: his fullest exposition is in the Summa Theologiae. He is not in agreement with the idea that the Damned should arise with all their earthly imperfections upon them, but we learn of its details because he quotes them in order to refute them. The argument is that bodily deformity is a punishment for sin (presumably either one’s own or the sins of one’s fathers – to us a repellent concept), and therefore: Illud … quod in poenam peccati inductum est, desinere non debet. Sed membrorum defectus qui accidunt per mutilationem, in poena peccati inducti sunt; et similiter etiam omnes deformitates corporales. Ergo a damnatis, qui peccatorum remissionem non sunt consecuti, in resurrectione non removebuntur. [That … which was appointed as a punishment for sin should not cease except the sin be forgiven. Now the lack of limbs that result from mutilation, as well as other bodily deformities, are appointed as punishments for sin. Therefore these deformities will not be taken away from the damned, seeing that they will not have received the forgiveness of their sins.] III: Supplement Q.86 art. 1, p. 200 (trans. p. 253) 289

‘ w i t h w h at b o dy s h a l l t h e y c o m e ? ’ Besides this, if the deformities of the just are to be removed in order to take away anything that would mar their ultimate perfection, so the damned should not be deprived of anything that might contribute to their miseries – and likewise, if the damned are not to have their tarditas (the opposite of the agilitas of the saved) removed, then neither should their deformities be removed. In refutation, Aquinas reiterates 1 Corinthians 15:52 as evidence that all the dead shall be raised whole and incorrupt. However, there can be a further distinction. As to congenital defects (as opposed to accidental mutilations), or those which result from disease rather than accident, Augustinus indeterminatum et sub dubio relinquit in Enchiridio, ut in littera Magister dicit. Sed apud doctores modernos est duplex super hoc opinio. Quidam enim dicunt quod huiusmodi deformitates et defectus in corporibus damnatorum remanebunt: considerantes eorum damnationem, qua ad summam miseriam deputantur, cui nihil incommoditas subtrahi debet. [Augustine left this undecided and doubtful (Enchiridion. xcii) as the Master (Peter Lombard) remarks. Among modern masters, however, there are two opinions on this point. For some say that such-like deformities and defects will remain in the bodies of the damned, because they consider that those who are damned are ­sentenced to utmost unhappiness wherefrom no affliction shall be rebated.] This, however, he says is unreasonable: ‘si aliquis cum defectibus vel deformitatibus resurget, hoc erit ei in poenam’ [if a person rise again with such defects and deformities, this will be for his punishment]. It would be unfair for a heavily deformed sinner to be more heavily loaded with punishment than an undeformed sinner with much graver sins. Therefore, God will wipe the slate clean, and in any case, the type of punishment they will suffer in the next world will be far more severe than the kind suffered in this world. These minor earthly punishments are irrelevant. Despite Aquinas’s opposition, however, the popular tradition continued to insist on visible retribution, and even to increase it. The Pricke of Conscience tells how the saved will be restored whole: Bot God sal amend on nane wise Defautes of þe lyms of synful bodys, For þair bodys sal alle unsemely be And foul, and ugly, opon to se.  (5021–4) The author here starts from the premise that the damned will continue to bear their existing defects, but he somehow manages to imply that all the 290

‘ w i t h w h at b o dy s h a l l t h e y c o m e ? ’ damned will be affected in this way (or, taking ‘alle’ as an adverb, that they will be affected completely, which produces the same end result): ‘þair bodys sal alle unsemely be / And foul, and ugly, opon to se’. The Mirour of Mans Saluacioune draws on Aquinas (notably the Compendium) at this point, but interprets ‘they will remain in their grossness and capacity for suffering, and indeed, these defects will be heightened in them’ by adopting the arguments which Aquinas quoted in order to refute: At Domesday, bodyes and sawles shal be revnit certayne, And euermore both togidere haf joye or suffre payne. The wikked mens bodies shall rise vnshaply and passible, Bot the gude mens fulle faire without eend impassible. A dampnid bodie shalle rise in swilk deformitee Þat infinite horrour bes it the awen fote or hande to see; And the more þat thaire synne here haf bene abhomynable So mykel thaire bodyes than shalle be more defourmable.26 (4311–18) The iconography of Doomsday never, to my knowledge, shows this distinction in this way. The saved and the damned are usually identical in bodily perfection: what distinguishes them are the gestures of despair and the rictus of terror on the faces of the damned as they are dragged or pitch-forked off into Hellmouth. The only even slightly related illustration that I know is from the naive, eccentric but delightful Carthusian manuscript London BL Add. MS 37049:27 Here folowes a vysion of saules þat ware dampned and put to helle after þer Jugement and how þai ar deformed and myschapyn Sum of þaim was horned as bolles.and þai be betokyn prowd men And tothed as bares. And þai signyfie manslaers and morderers in wil or in dede. and ireful. And sum semed as þaire eene hang opon þaire chekys þe whilk ar þai þat ar inuyos lokyng apon oþer mens prosperite and hatyng þaire welfare and weleplesyd of þaire ylle fare. Sum has lang hokyd nayles lyke lyons þe whilk ar fals couetos men and extorciouners. Sum had bolned belys þat ar fowl glotons and lifes al in lust of þaire belys. Sum had þaire rygges al rotyn and þaire bakkes. þat ar lycheros caytyfes þe whilk had all þaire delyte in lustynes of lychery. Sum had fete al to gnawyn and bun (bent) as þai wer brokyn and bolned leggys. þat ar slewthly caytyfs þat wil not labour in gode werkis for þe hele of þair saules. Þie[s] caytyfes ledes sathanas to hell. f.74r The illustration shows a rather sprightly row of horrors looking, thanks to the ineptitude of the artist, rather cheerful than grisly. Though the vision is organised on the pattern of the Seven Deadly Sins, the theme is essentially 291

‘ w i t h w h at b o dy s h a l l t h e y c o m e ? ’ the same as that of the Pricke and the Mirour, and the premise is the same as Aquinas’s: that these deformities are all the direct result of sin, a spiritual deformation made visible. The Chester Doomsday play, however, suggests that there is yet another theme underlying these hideous visions. Rex Salvatus says: My fowle bodye through synne blent, that rotten was, and all to-rent through thy might, lord omnipotent, raysed and whole yt ys. Chester Cycle, play 24: 125–828 Ostensibly the Saved King is pointing out how his body has been restored to him whole and incorruptible, but what comes over is that it is not just incorruptible but no longer corrupt, a restored corpse. In the grave it was a ‘fowle bodye … rotten, and al to-rent’: God has now made it whole and clean. The Mercator Damnatus, however, has been eternally reunited with his decaying, noisesome body: Alas, alas, nowe woe ys mee! My fowle bodys, that rotten hath be, and soule together now I see. All stynketh, full of synne.  (325–8) The social stratification of the Chester Saved and Damned Souls, as has often been pointed out, echoes that of the ‘Dance of Death’, or of the versions of the ‘Three Living and the Three Dead’ which are arranged to represent the Three Estates.29 The Chester Damned, like Lazarus in the Towneley play, speak as reanimated corpses. Mills and Lumiansky are puzzled, in the context of Augustine, at the words of the Regina Damnata: I, that soe seemelye was in sight, where ys my blee that [was] so bright? Where ys baron, where ys knight for mee to alledge the lawe? Where in world ys any wight that for my fayrenes nowe wyll fight, And from this death I am to dight That dare me heathen drawe? 

MS ys

hence (285–92)

They comment ‘the sense seems to be that the lady has lost her beauty’.30 But the Queen’s desolate lament for lost beauty belongs to a memento mori 292

‘ w i t h w h at b o dy s h a l l t h e y c o m e ? ’ tradition:31 it echoes the words of the corpse of the anonymous lady of ‘The Debate between the Body and Worms’, also in London BL MS Add 37049: Now where be ȝe knyghtes cum forth in place And ȝe worschipful sqwyers both hye and base Þat sumtyme to me offerd ȝour seruyse Dayes of ȝour lyfes of hertes frawnchyse     MS frawnchsyse Saying promyttyng ƺour lyfes to myne a vyse To do me seruys cum and defende nowe me ffro þies gret horrible wormes vgly to se here gnawyng my flesche þus with gret cruelte Deuowryng and etyng now as ƺe may se Þat sumtyme ƺe lufed so innterly Now socour and defende here my body.  f.33v The worms reply that they have made short shrift of Julius Caesar, Alexander, Hector, Charlemagne, and the other Worthies, and are quite willing to take on any of her champions à l’outrance. Eventually they and the Body are reconciled, promising to: kys and dwell to gedyr euermore To þat god wil þat I sal agayn vpryse At þe day of dome before þe hye justyse With þe body glorified to be.  f.32r It looks as if a theatrical tradition born more of a desire for an effective visual lesson than of strict theology may have crept into the mystery plays. The Towneley Lazarus, himself presented as a resurrected corpse, a memento mori, makes the point: Amende the, man, Whils thou may, Let neuer no myrthe fordo thi mynde; Thynke thou on the dredefull day When god shall deme all mankynde … Amende the, man, whils thou art here, Agane thou go an othere gate; When thou art dede and laide on bere, Wyt thou well thou bees too late …  Play 31, 18532 This is as far as we can go in the way of proof. We do not know that the York Good and Bad Souls were white and black. The chain of ‘evidence’ illustrates the problems of this kind of research. We do not know whether the Chester Salvati and Damnati were described as White Souls and Black Souls in the accounts, because we have no accounts. We do not know what the Coventry 293

‘ w i t h w h at b o dy s h a l l t h e y c o m e ? ’ Souls said about themselves, because we have lost the script. The N. Town Souls add a further complication: God appears to work the transformation on the bodies of the Saved in sight of the audience: All þou ffowle wyrmys from ȝow ffalle With my ryght hand I blysse ȝow here my blyssyng burnyschith ȝow as bryght as berall As crystall clene it clensyth ȝow clere All ffylth ffrom ȝow ffade.  Play 42, line 4833 which suggests that all the Dead were corpses, but that the Saved shed their costumes like a cocoon. All we know of the Damned from the script is that ‘on here forehead’ … þer is wretyn with letteris blake Opynly all here synne.  (77–8) and the end of the play, which might have told us more, is missing. Conversely, the beginning of the Towneley Doomsday play with the opening speeches of the Good Souls is missing – though that part of the play is merely an inflated version of York. The York Good and Bad Souls do not descant on their physical states in detail. It is only when their words are reinforced by their array that their lines take on a different emphasis. The First Good Soul rises with Loued be þou lorde, þat is so schene,   Þat on þis manere made vs to rise, Body and sawle togedir, clene,   To come before þe high justise.  (97–100) Even the phrase ‘þat is so schene’ is not a casual line-filler, but refers to the infinite claritas of Christ. The Bad Souls seem to know from the moment of their resurrection that they are damned, but say nothing about their physical state except Oure wikkid werkis may we not hide, But on oure bakkis vs muste þem bere  (154–5) Either they are carrying a burden of sin like a haversack, or their sins are written on rolls pinned to their backs. But we decided to dress them as black corpse-souls, and the costuming added another dimension of horror to their words. As the Mirour says, A dampnid bodie shalle rise in swilk deformite, Þat infinite horrour bes it the awen fote or hande to see.  (4215–16) 294

‘ w i t h w h at b o dy s h a l l t h e y c o m e ? ’ Our second Bad Soul, dressed in the blackened rags of flesh, burrowed by snakes and spiders, and wearing a mask with an eye sliding down her cheek, could draw from the depths of horror with the catalogue of Þe dedis þat vs schall dame bedene … Þat fote has gone or hande has wroght, That mouthe hath spoken or ey has sene.  (164–6) A footnote. As the light faded, the Damned became shadows outlined against the glow of hell-mouth. But the Good Souls, dressed from top to toe in offWhite, and with masked faces uncannily impassive (for which read impassible), were strangely luminous in the gathering dusk.

Notes   1. This is not a topic which seems to have worried the contributors to the latest book on Homo, Memento Finis: The Iconography of Just Judgement in Medieval Art and Drama, papers by David Bevington et al., Early Drama, Art and Music Monograph Series 6 (Kalamazoo MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985).  2. Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, 2 vols (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1979) [hereafter referred to as REED: York], p. 24.  3. REED: York, p. 55.  4. The York Plays, edited by Richard Beadle (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), pp. 408–9.  5. Records of Early English Drama: Coventry, ed. by R.W. Ingram (Toronto: Toronto University Press, l98l) [hereafter referred to as REED: Coventry], p. 455. The Coventry volume is arranged, as with other REED volumes, in chronological order. The transcript of the Drapers’ accounts from 1537 to 1560 by Daffern is not, however, dated exactly, and appears as Appendix 2, pp. 455–81: 1537, p. 464; 1563, p. 224; 1566, p. 237; 1538, p. 465; 1543, p. 469; 1555, p. 472; 1557, pp. 474–5.  6. In REED: Coventry, ‘for makyng & mendyng of the blakke of Soules Coats hose’. I have deleted the second of and Coats.   7. For a discussion of technical terms for garments and of materials used to make them, especially for close-fitting garments, see Meg Twycross, ‘Apparell comlye’, in Aspects of Early English Drama, ed. by Paula Neuss (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1983) pp. 30–49.  8. Cursor Mundi, ed. by Richard Morris, 4 vols, EETS OS 57, 59, 62,66 (London l874–7); The Pricke of Conscience, ed. by Richard Morris (Berlin: Asher, 186l); The Mirour of Mans Saluacioune, A Middle English Translation of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis, ed. by Avril Henry (Aldershot: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986). The Mirour (MS post 1429) is a fairly close translation of the Latin text (c. 1324). The sermon tradition stemming from the Legenda Aurea does not deal with the topic in the same way.  9. Petri Lombardi Libri IV Sententiarum, ed. by the Franciscans of the College of S. Bonaventura, 2 vols (Quarracchi, Italy: Collegium S. Bonaventura, 1916). 10. See Mirour p. 254, notes to 4331ff and 4345–6. 11. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Historiale (Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck-u. Velagsanstalt, 1965: facsimile of 1624 Douai edition by Balthazar Bellerus), p. 1326.

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‘ w i t h w h at b o dy s h a l l t h e y c o m e ? ’ 12. Pricke of Conscience, ed. by Morris, following Peter Lombard Sententiae lib. iv dist. xliv, cap. 1: ‘triginta enim duorum annorum et trium mensium aetas erat Christi, in qua mortuus est et resurrexit’. (p. 1000). See J.A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 104 and 141–3 for a further development of this theme. 13. St Augustine of Hippo, Sancti Aurelii Augustini De civitate Dei Libri XI–XXII, ed. by B. Dombatt and A. Kalb, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, vol. 48 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955). [Hereafter referred to as DCD]. Translation from the 1610 version by John Healey, The City of God, ed. by R.V.G Tasker, 2 vols (London: Dent, 1945), 22, caps 12–18. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica in Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris Angelici Opera Omnia, ed. by Iussu Impensaque Leo XIII P.M. (Rome: Typographia Polyglotta S. C. De Propaganda Fide, 1882ff.), vol.12 (1906). [Hereafter referred to as ST]. Translation from The ‘Summa Theologica’ of St Thomas Aquinas, edited by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 22 vols (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1920–22), Vol. 20: Third Part (Supplement), QQ.LXIX-LXXXVI III Q.80. 14. DCD, 22, cap. 19. 15. Speculum Historiale, cap. 113, p. 1326. 16. DCD, 22, cap. 19, pp. 838–39. 17. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles Libri Quatuor, issued Pope Leo XIII (Rome: Typographia Polyglotta S. C. De Propaganda Fide, 1894), 4 cap. 86, pp. 701–02. 18. DCD, 22, cap. 19. 19. DCD, 20, cap. 6, pp. 707–08. 20. St Thomas Aquinas, Compendium of Theology, translated by Cyril Vollert (St. Louis & London, 1952), cap. 168: he quotes 1 Corinthians 15:42–4 as source for these four properties. 21. Peter Lombard, Collectanea (PL 191, 1686), quoting Hrabanus Maurus (PL 112, 151), also says ‘infidelitas enim non potest claram resurrectionem habere, quia sicut carbo cinere suo coopertus obcaecatur, ita et perfidia sua erroris tenebris circumdati luce carebunt’ [for the infidel cannot have a luminous resurrection, because he is blinded like coal covered with its own ash, and in the same way they will lack light, surrounded by the shadows of error in their lack of faith]. 22. Anglo-Saxon Doomsday poetry refers to the Damned as ‘dark’: ‘swearte ­synwyrcend’  (Christ III, line 1104) in contrast to the radiance of Christ and  the  blessed. See Graham Caie, The Judgement Day Theme in Old English  Poetry  (Publications  of the Department of English, University of Copenhagen 2, 1976), pp. 156, 180–1, 219–20. Anglo-Saxon poetry is so allusive that it is difficult to build any very firm argument for the survival of the motif from these poems. 23. Bede, De Tempora Ratione, cap. 70, ‘De Die Judicii’ (PL 90, 575–6). 24. This is a change from the attempt to define two different types of passibility. Hrabanus Maurus argued the same using the concept of two types of corruptibility: ‘illi, qui ad judicium resurrecturi sunt, non commutabuntur in illam corruptelam quae nec doloris corruptionem pati potest, illa namque fidelium est atque sanctorum: isti vero perpetua corruptione cruciabuntur, quia ignis eorum non extinguetur, et vermis eorum non morietur’ (Marc. IX). 25. Peter Lombard, Sententiae 4, dis. 44, cap. 4 (p. 1002). Bonaventura’s Commentary on the Sentences apparently makes more of this: Aquinas refutes him in ST III, Q.86. 26. This seems to be deduced from the generally held belief in degrees of blessedness, extrapolated from 1 Corinthians 15:41: ‘Stella enim a stella differt in claritate.’

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‘ w i t h w h at b o dy s h a l l t h e y c o m e ? ’ 27. The folios with illustrations are edited by James Hogg, An Illustrated Yorkshire Carthusian Religious Miscellany, vol. 3 (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1981). 28. The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. by R.M. Lumiansky and David Mills, 2 vols, EETS SS 3 & 9 (London, 1974 and 1986) [hereafter referred to as Chester Cycle]. 29. Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (London: RKP, 1972), p. 295. She suggests that the different ranks are recognisable by their costume: in note 96 (p. 413) she adds that this might be just an appropriate headdress. 30. Chester Cycle, vol. 2, p. 363. 31. See Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), chapter IX, ‘Lyrics on Death’, pp. 309–55. 32. The Towneley Plays, ed. by George England, EETS ES 71 (London, 1897). 33. Ludus Coventriae or The Plaie called Corpus Christi, ed. by K.S. Bloch, EETS ES 120 (London 1922). Many thanks to Dr Avril Henry for chasing up her references for me.

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11 KISSING COUSINS: THE FOUR DAUGHTERS OF GOD AND THE VISITATION IN THE N. TOWN MARY PLAY Misericordia et Veritas obviaverunt sibi; Justitia et Pax osculatae sunt. Psalm 84:11 (Vulgate) [Mercy and Truth have met each other: Justice and Peace have kissed. (Douai/Rheims)] Et intravit in domum Zacchariae et salutavit Elisabeth. (Luke 1:40) [And she entered into the house of Zachary, and saluted Elizabeth.]

It is of course appropriate that a play about the early life of the Blessed Virgin Mary should end with the episode of the Visitation. After all, this is the setting for the Magnificat, her great canticle of praise and thanks for the Incarnation. Many paintings of the Annunciation are paired with one of the Visitation, ‘its confirmation, as it were’.1 But it was not, inevitably, until we performed it that I noticed the strong visual link between the embrace of reconciliation of the Four Daughters of God and the cousinly embrace of Mary and Elizabeth. Yet why should this be a meaningful parallel? Apart from being a same-sex embrace, narratively the pairs have not much in common. Pamela Sheingorn, in a recent judiciously theorised discussion of embraces in medieval religious art and theatre, discusses both, but classifies them quite differently: Mary and Elizabeth participate in an ‘equal embrace’ which can however become a ‘subservient embrace’ on Elizabeth’s part; the Four Daughters are engaged in a ‘loveday’ embrace of reconciliation.2 Mary and Elizabeth were not at odds, and therefore had no need to be reconciled. Was this just an accidental motif in a play which after all deals largely with the affection between members of a family, whether earthly or celestial? Was it even a self-engineered accident, as following an instinct that the play was strongly liturgical in tone, I had choreographed both on the kiss of peace?3 It appears not. There is a recorded medieval typology which links the two episodes. It was not included in those familiar canonical works of European typology of the later Middle Ages (and at the time of the writing of the N. Town 299

kissing cousins Mary Play), the Biblia Pauperum or the Speculum Humanae Salvationis. In fact, neither the Biblia nor the Speculum in their printed versions include the Visitation in their main New Testament sequence of antitypes. The Speculum treats of it in its pendant section on the Seven Joys of the Virgin, but the types there relate more to Mary’s virginal pregnancy – the Burning Bush, the Hortus Conclusus, Abishag – than to her meeting with Elizabeth.4 But though these are the sources we normally go to for information, they were not  the only typological programmes current in the Middle Ages; moreover, they seem to have been largely continental in popularity before the printed versions made them a universal pattern-book favourite.5 There was another, apparently mainly English, programme current from the twelfth century onwards, which specifically linked the meeting and embrace of the Four Daughters of God with the meeting and embrace of Mary and Elizabeth in the Visitation. It was sufficiently popular and long-lasting in England, and, as we shall see, in the right part of the country, to make it possible or even likely that the playwright intended his audience to make the thematic link. Its earliest recorded pictorial representation in England is in the typological stained glass of Canterbury Cathedral, the programme probably completed between the fire of 1174 and 1184.6 Unfortunately the glass in the first typological window, North Choir Aisle 16, is now missing and the window itself blocked up, but three late-medieval written records of it remain.7 These manuscripts all describe the subject matter of the windows and the tituli which, by analogy with the surviving typological windows, must have framed the panels: a double communication in words and image typical of typological works. They conveniently tell us how we are to understand the link between the antitype and its types. Madeleine Caviness has reconstructed the layout of the window.8 It would have had four circular panels arranged in a vertical row, containing the New Testament scenes of the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, and the Annunciation to the Shepherds. Flanking these and offset downwards were one pair each of semicircular panels containing the corresponding Old Testament types. The Annunciation has Moses and the Burning Bush and Gideon’s Fleece; the Visitation has Mercy and Truth on one side, and Righteousness and Peace on the other. The titulus for the Visitation scene was Salutacio Marie & Elizabeth. The types had longer tituli in leonine hexameters relating the central scene to its precursor. These not only identify the scene, but explain the thematic relationship between type and antitype. The Canterbury titulus for the meeting of Mercy and Truth was: Plaude puer puero virgo vetule quia vero Obviat hic pietas veteri dat lex nova metas. [Boy-child greet boy-child, virgin [greet] old woman: because here Mercy (pietas)9 meets Truth, the New Law sets boundaries to the Old.] 300

kissing cousins For the embrace of Justice10 and Peace, the verse is: Applaudit regi precursor gratia legi Oscula iusticie dat pax cognata Marie. [The forerunner greets the king, Grace the Law; Peace kisses Justice, her cousin (kisses) Mary.] The action of meeting and greeting is broken down, as it is in the psalm, into two gestures: first the encounter (Misericordia et Veritas obviaverunt sibi), then the embrace (Justitia et Pax osculate sunt). The typology is conveyed by the structure of the lines as well as the content. Each line contains two contrasting pairs; three of the four pairs share a verb. We are left to deduce which New Testament person represents which Old Testament personification. Looked at purely structurally, the verses balance out like this: Subject Boy Young woman Mercy New Law

Object Boy Old woman Truth Old Law

Action Greeting Greeting Meeting Limiting

Leaving out the (undifferentiated) children for the moment, Mary/Mercy/the New Law are linked together as agents of the action: she ‘saluted Elizabeth’. The other parallels match thematically: because Mary is a young woman she ‘becomes’ the New Law; she ‘becomes’ Mercy partly because, as the Magnificat emphasises, the New Law is characterised by Mercy.11 Elizabeth is thus equated with Truth and the Old Law: she is the recipient of the action recorded in the Gospel. The one additional motif is that of the New Law ‘setting limits’ to the Old: visually this could refer to the embracing arms. If so, the limits are friendly ones. The second type is less clearly dichotomised. At first glance, the typological pairs do not seem to match: we have to assume that each pair of lines are balanced chiastically: Subject John Grace Peace Elizabeth

Object Action Christ Greeting but The [Old] Law Greeting Righteousness Kissing but Mary Kissing

Here the shifting balance, whether or not dictated by the rhyme scheme, emphasises mutuality: John/the Old Law and Christ/Grace greet each 301

kissing cousins other, Mary/Peace and Elizabeth/Righteousness kiss each other. But both John and  Elizabeth as agents are reacting to action initiated by Mary in the  first  scene. (In the Gospel, Elizabeth and Mary are not explicitly said to embrace, but the scene is represented like this in art from quite early on, and the typology would tend to reinforce this.)12 The equation here of Truth and Righteousness with the Old Law, Mercy and Peace with the New,13 suggests that the inventor of the programme is thinking of the well-known narrative allegory of the Four Daughters of God based on Psalm 84:11, initiated by Hugh of St Victor c. 1120, and rounded out and popularised by St Bernard in his Sermon on the Annunciation c. 1140. It was retold and elaborated by Robert Grossteste in his Chasteau d’Amour, and by Pseudo-Bonaventure in the Meditationes Vitae Christi, which, together with the Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost, is the source of the N. Town ‘Parliament’.14 In fact, neither  Hugh nor Bernard (nor indeed any of their followers) specifically ­identify the opposition of the Daughters with the clash between the Old Law and the New, though Bernard may hint at this when he makes the Father as Judge write with his finger in the earth: Porro Judex inclinans se, digito scribebat in terra [Further, the Judge bending forward wrote with his finger in the  earth], a gesture taken from the story of the Woman Taken in Adultery.15 It is however implicit in the placing of the debate as the catalyst for the Redemption, and the strongly legal flavour of the arguments of Veritas and Justitia, which employ the ‘Latin’ theology of the Atonement.16 Justice particularly is presented as the retributive Mosaic ‘letter of the law’.17 There are however two invisible players in this typology. Both the tituli draw  attention to the fact that though Mary and Elizabeth are  significant in  themselves, their major significance at this moment derives  from  the  fact  that they are both pregnant. The children in their  wombs  are  to be more  important players in the drama of salvation: so much so that they are visualised as taking an active part in the meeting. Luke reports that when Mary spoke to Elizabeth, the six-month foetus John kicked his mother. Elizabeth is made to interpret this as a joyful act of recognition: 41. And it came to pass, that when Elizabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the infant leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost: 42. And she cried out with a loud voice and said: Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. 43. And whence is this to me, that the mother of my lord should come to me? 44. For behold as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. 302

kissing cousins The sequence of events in verse 41, and the perceived difference of status between mothers and children, led to the explanation that John was the real agent of Elizabeth’s inspiration: Deinde repleta est etiam ejus mater Elisabeth Spiritu Sancto, per filium et meritis filii. Non prius repleta est mater, quam filius, sed filius repletus replet et matrem.18 [Thereupon his mother Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, through her son and by the merits of her son. The mother was not filled before the son, but the son, being filled, then filled the mother…] thus echoing the process of the Incarnation, and the relationship between Mary and the Christ Child. But conversely, since the children could not, being in the womb, speak for themselves, the mothers become important as their spokespersons. The children as it were ventriloquise through their mothers: Filius intus latens docet quid mater exterius agere debeat; spiritus enim infantis, non valentis clamare, nec loqui voce propria, fecit clamare matrem voce magna.19 [The son, lying hidden within, teaches what the mother ought to do outwardly: for the spirit of the infant, not being able to call out, or to speak with his own voice, made his mother call out with a great voice.] The children are reduced to ‘speaking’ by gesture: non voce, sed motu [not by voice, but by movement].20 In some paintings, the infants are shown in a glory in the wombs of their mothers, the Christ Child raising a hand in blessing, the foetal John kneeling in homage to him.21 In N. Town ‘the infant in my womb leaped for joy’ has become: Anon as I herd of ȝou þis holy gretynge, Mekest mayden and þe modyr of God, Mary, Be ȝour breth þe Holy Gost vs was inspyrynge ȝat þe child in my body enjoyd gretly And turnyd down on his knes to oure God reverently: Whom ȝe bere in ȝour body, þis veryly I ken.22 (1462–7) John here is previewing his later and more famous greeting in John 1:29: Et tunc primo, Præcursorem suum Jesus prophetam fecit, qui in utero exiliens, ejus adventum evangelizavit, et præcursionis suæ officium inchoavit, quasi etiam intra matris viscera jam clamavit, Ecce Agnus dei, ecce qui tollit peccata mundi.23 303

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Plate 1 Brussels, B.R. MS 9961-2: The Peterborough Psalter, fol 10r © Bibliothèque Royale Albert Ier, Bruxelles

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kissing cousins [And then first, Jesus made his forerunner a prophet, who, leaping up in the womb, proclaimed His Coming, and began his role as forerunner, just as if, even in his mother’s bowels, he was already calling, Behold the Lamb of God: behold Him that taketh away the sins of the world.] In the titulus, his role is also stated to be that of precursor, the forerunner, the ‘last and greatest of the prophets’.24 We shall see this idea developed at more length a little later on. For the time being, however, the Canterbury tituli merely hint at a more developed role for the children. Pictorially, the window emphasises the relationship between their mothers, reflected in the gender of the Four Daughters. The same grouping appears about a century later in the Peterborough Psalter (Brussels Bibliothèque Royale MS 9961-2), dated by Lucy Freeman Sandler to between 1299 and 1318.25 Folio 10 is divided into four scenes, with accompanying tituli (see Plate 1). The two New Testament scenes, the Annunciation and Visitation, are on the right-hand side of the page: flanking them on the left are their types. This is a slight misnomer, as the ‘type’ of the Annunciation turns out to be a group of four prophets, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Moses, and Gideon, with their attributes, all gazing up towards a Christ halffigure: their individual written prophecies overflow from their frame into and around the Annunciation’s space, so that it is difficult to disentangle them. On the left of the Visitation is a group of the Four Daughters, also with attributes (Plate 2): each pair has an individual couplet, but these also spill across into the Visitation’s pictorial space, so that the couplet relating Misericordia and Veritas to their antitype are under the Four Daughters, while those for Justitia and Pax are under the Visitation: Plaude puerperio. uirgo uetule quia uero Obviat hic pietas, veteri dat lex nova metas. Oscula iusticie. dat pax. cognata marie. Applaudet regi. precursor gracia legi. Apart from a mistake in the second word, which makes a nonsense of the syntax, and the rearrangement of lines 3 and 4, the verses are clearly the same as at Canterbury. There are two more enticing potential examples of this Visitation typology in accounts of paintings in East Anglia, both now lost. While it would be difficult to prove that the N.  Town playwright or playwrights had seen the Peterborough Psalter, or even the window at Canterbury, it might seem very possible that he was familiar with images in two of the most impressive cathedrals in his region. M.R. James suggested in 1895 that the typological paintings in the Peterborough Psalter were direct copies of a programme of panel paintings once set into the choir stalls in the Abbey at Peterborough, 305

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Plate 2 Brussels, B.R. MS 9961-2: The Peterborough Psalter, fol 10r (detail): The Four Daughers of God and the Visitation © Bibliothèque Royale Albert Ier, Bruxelles

and dated by him ‘about 1160 A.D’.26 The account of these by Gunton, the seventeenth-century antiquarian, in his History of Peterborough Cathedral (1686) cites exactly the same verses as in the Psalter, and identifies the first couplet (Plaude puerperio …) as being ‘Under the Pictures of Mary and Elizabeth’.27 Unfortunately for this theory, however, his identification is somewhat suspect, as the whole run of paintings he records as being on the South side of the Choir are Old Testament types or prophecies of the Incarnation: Isaiah saying Ecce virgo concipiet, the Burning Bush, Gideon’s Fleece, Aaron’s Rod, and Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream of the stone cut from the mountain without hands. None of them are New Testament antitypes. Gunton’s description ‘Pictures of Mary and Elizabeth’, with the Mercy and Truth couplet, is followed by ‘Another by it’, which has the Justice and Peace couplet. It seems probable that the ‘Mary and Elizabeth’ painting was in fact one of Mercy and Truth. In this case there would not be a direct connection between the Visitation and the Four Daughters, as there is in the Psalter – and indeed Lucy Freeman Sandler has since modified James’s suggestions, especially with regard to the supposed layout, re-dated the stalls to between 1233 and 1245, and has come to the decision that ‘It is doubtful 306

kissing cousins whether the Psalter miniatures were directly copied from the panel paintings at all’.28 They would therefore not be available as a visual source for a fifteenth-­century playwright: however, both tituli, confusingly in the context, definitely refer to the Visitation. M.R. James also suggested that the Visitation featured with the meeting of Pax and Justitia in a series of typological paintings in circuli (‘roundels’?) at the altar of the Virgin in the Lady Chapel of the Cathedral Church of Bury St  Edmund’s, destroyed by fire in 1465: even more enticing for those who would like to link the N. Town Plays with Bury.29 However, this seems to have been based on a similar mistake. James summarises the matter of the third roundel as: In tercio. Pax and Justitia meet. The Visitation. The manuscript source of this information, however, College of Arms MS Arundel 30, does not appear to identify this scene as the Visitation. It merely reports the wording of the inscriptions in the cathedral, not their subjectmatter, and Avril Henry’s transcription reads:30 In tercio. Pax cum iustitia gaudet pariente maria. Cum puer accessit quem virgo puerpera gessit. [In the third. Peace rejoices with Justice when Mary gives birth, when the boy whom the Virgin who had given birth (in labour?) bore approached.] This could at a pinch be read as a Visitation link, but it really only speaks of the approach of the Christ Child, and the emphasis on Mary’s virgin childbirth suggests that this is meant for a Nativity typology. The Bury St Edmunds titulus is not the same as the Peterborough one, but belongs to another early medieval English typological programme, exemplified by ‘The Eton Roundels’ edited by Avril Henry.31 In this (‘The Eton Roundels’, the Worcester Chapter House inscriptions, and various other ‘quotations’ on artefacts and in the subordinate images of the Sherborne Missal), the programme is abbreviated, the Visitation does not feature as an antitype, and the Four Daughters have been re-routed to being types of the Espousal of Christ and the Church. This is also an Advent theme, and we shall return briefly to it. Despite the emphasis on visual parallels, typology depended quite heavily on words to explain its parallels. The Speculum Humanae Salvationis, for example, could be described either as a picture book with a lengthy 307

kissing cousins commentary, or a long poem with mnemonic illustrations. The corresponding text for the twelfth/thirteenth-century English typologies is the elaborate Latin work, without illustrations, known as Pictor in Carmine (‘The Painter in Verse’).32 M.R. James located thirteen manuscripts of this, ‘All but two … of the thirteenth century, and all … of English origin’.33 Pictor starts with a prose preface condemning the ‘foolish pictures’ and ‘misshapen monstrosities’ of Romanesque fantasy art which sounds exactly like the diatribe of the venerable Jorge of Burgos in The Name of the Rose, and which presumably came from the same source, Bernard’s Apologia to William of St Thierry.34 He proposes as a decent alternative a selection of typological incidents from the Old and New Testaments, of which he provides a lavish menu. He then drafts a choice of couplets (bini uersus) for each type, apparently suggesting that the artist should make his own selection from among them: for the antitype, which is more familiar, he says, it is sufficient to write the names of the personages (which indeed is what happens in the surviving examples).35 These verses add up to a substantial volume. Not being limited by the layout of a page or a window, Pictor apparently allowed himself to collect as many types as he felt appropriate for each antitype: the Annunciation holds the record with 21 (including the Maiden and the Unicorn), with the Crucifixion as runner-up with 17, the Baptism third with 14, and the Nativity and the Choosing of the Twelve Apostles joint fourth with 13 each; the standard number is however two or four. The Visitation is, interestingly, split into four episodes: Mary going into the mountains, the salutation of Mary and Elizabeth, the Magnificat, and the birth of John the Baptist. In the contents list under Salutant se inuicem Maria et Elisabeth there are four typologies: Moyses et Aaron sibi obuiantes in monte dei oscula iungunt. Duo Cherubin obumbrantes propiciatorium respiciunt se inuicem at alis contingunt. Misericordia et ueritas obuiauerunt sibi. Iusticia et Pax osculate sunt. The body of the text is written in the same Leonine hexameters (with internal rhymes) as the tituli in Canterbury and the Peterborough Psalter, and in ‘The Eton Roundels’ group, though none of them actually quotes here from Pictor. (I have not made a complete comparison of all the tituli and the Pictor verses, which is a thesis in itself.) The following transcription is based on Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson C 67 (thirteenth century, from Hereford Cathedral) fols 32v–33r, checked against MSS Rawlinson A 425 and MS Digby 65 (both also thirteenth century):36 Misericordia et ueritas obuiauerunt sibi. Obuia fit uero pietas . non ore seuero : 308

kissing cousins Que lex immittit : dum gratia lora remittit . Verum commutat sua iura . piumque salutat : Vt miles regem . cum lenit gratia legem . Ius legis strictum cessit . pietate relictum : Dum uocem uerbum . dum dulce reuisit acerbum . Dura quod inuoluit lex compede : gratia soluit : Dum simul applaudunt pueri . quos uiscera claudunt . Prisca noue morem lex gessit . passa fauorem : Dum regi miles artus tremefecit aniles Adueniente noua : data lex mitescere discit : Cum sinus Elisabeth gaudente Iohanne tremiscit . Veri iudicii flectit compassio normam Lex ewangelii dum suscipit obuia formam . Veri iudicii compassio mitigat arcum : Cum graue legis onus reddit noua gratia parcum . [Mercy and Truth have met each other (Psalm 84) Mercy (Pietas)37 comes to meet Truth (Verum), (who wears) no stern expression, Which the Law allows, when Grace relaxes the reins; Truth commutes its rights, and greets the Merciful One38 As a knight does a king, when Grace makes the Law relent; The rigid code of the Law has withdrawn, abandoned by Mercy, When the Word reviews the Voice,39 when the sweet replaces the sour; What the unyielding Law trammels with a fetter, Grace sets free, When the boy-children, whom the wombs shut in, greet each other simultaneously; The ancient Law accomplished the will of the New, having experienced favour When the knight made the old woman’s frame tremble before the king; At the coming of the New (Law), the prescribed Law learns to become gentle, When the womb of Elizabeth trembles with the rejoicing John. Compassion deflects the measuring rule of True Judgement When the Law, encountering her, takes on (upholds?) the form of the Gospel; Compassion unbends the bow of True Judgement When New Grace renders the burden of the heavy Law light.] Iusticia et pax osculate sunt. Ivsticiam nectit sibi pax . et ad oscula flectit : Quos data lex pungit : dum gratia mulcet et ungit. Iusticiam uisit pax . et dans oscula risit : Lege subinductum dum tersit gratia luctum . 309

kissing cousins Mitior ut cedat : pax oscula iusticie dat : Cum ueterem mollit noua lex . et onus graue tollit . Pax cum iusticia componit . et oscula defert : Cum noua lex ueteri pietatis uiscera prefert . Paci iusticia fauet . usa prioribus annis Id christo presente notat caro mota iohannis [Justice and Peace have kissed. Peace entwines Justice to herself and bends to kiss (her); When Grace soothes and anoints those whom prescribed Law stings; Peace visits Justice, and, kissing (her), laughs; When Grace has wiped away the lamentation instituted by Law. So that she should become gentler, Peace gives kisses to Justice When the New Law makes the Old gentle, and takes away the heavy burden; Peace comes to terms with Justice, and tenders kisses When the New Law displays the bowels of compassion to the Old. Justice, employed in former years, honours Peace, A thing which the flesh of John indicates [when it is] moved at the presence of Christ.] Pictor is a difficult text, not only because of its convoluted syntax, but also because it assumes a prior knowledge of the typological interpretations, and is dense with verbal allusion and word-play,40 both to the Bible and to standard exegesis, some of which, such as his allusions to Bede, he probably got through the liturgy. It points to the complexity of reference that was already in place, and this is useful, because if we can trace his main sources, we can trace the main lines of his thinking. These are not always necessarily as selfcoherent as we might have liked. The meeting of Misericordia and Veritas is largely expressed in terms of the encounter of two legal systems: the word lex (‘law’) predominates (eight times) with ius and iudicium. Truth is virtually equated with the Law and Judgement (veri iudicium),41 in opposition to Grace, who is therefore equated with Misericordia, and by implication the New Law: ‘… misericordia, quae Novum illuminat testamentum, et rigorem veteris legis extenuat’ [Mercy, which illuminates the New Testament, and lessens the rigour of the Old Law].42 As the Old Law, Truth has legal rights (iura – either promulgated laws, or conditions which have been sworn to by her or in her favour); she acts according to given laws (data lex – the law of Moses: John 1:17)43 administered according to an unbending yardstick (norma), and keeps control with a tight rein (lorum). In her original persona, she is rigid and constraining (ius … strictum), unyielding of aspect (ore seuero) and even sour (acerbum), trammelling those in her charge with a fetter (compede), and exacting retribution with her bow (arcum). 310

kissing cousins But at the approach of Misericordia/Grace, all this changes. Her countenance softens, she learns to become gentle (mitescere discit): her bow is unbent,44 her fetters loosened,45 and she gives up her rights freely. Though literally the verses describe the release of those under her jurisdiction, the impression is that she too is being released from the burden of having to act as ‘the heavy law’, and is relieved and glad to be so. She not only does the will of the New Law, she appears to be transmuted into it: ‘Lex ewangelii dum suscipit obuia formam.’46 Strict legality becomes Equity. This is developed in the next section, on the embrace of Justice and Peace. It is clearly a kiss of peace: ‘Pax cum iusticia componit.’ Peace is the instigator; she tenders the kiss. She is emollient, almost cajoling, caressing Justice into a softer mode. Again, Peace is identified with Grace, curative where Justice/the Old Law has wounded (a possible reference to Synagogue’s spear?), wiping away the tears Justice has caused (Revelation 21:4: John 16:20). She also fuses with Mercy, and probably also with Mary, in the word-play on the viscera pietatis, ‘the bowels of compassion’, which refers forward  to the Benedictus (Luke 2:78) ‘per viscera misericordiae Dei nostri’, translated by the Authorised Version as ‘the tender mercy of our God’ but more correctly by Douai/Rheims as ‘the bowels of the mercy of our God’.47 There is a tension here, which could easily lead us to misidentify the roles of the two figures, between the sense of opposition set up by the structure of the verse, which seems to set Truth against Mercy and Justice against Peace, and the action it describes, where the one is transformed by the other while still keeping her own identity. This sense of opposition goes back to the structure of the verse in the Psalm, and was enhanced by Hugh of St Victor and Bernard when they developed it into a debate. Debates are meant to clarify the issues they explore by setting them in opposition, with the result that we often remember the opposition without remembering the reconciliation at the end. Bernard indeed introduces his as a gravis contentio inter virtutes, in which they are said to be interpellantes.48 It is very easy to see it and its derivatives as a battle between the ‘vengeable’49 sister and the kindly one, in which the kindly one wins, or at least wins a larger share of God’s favour: an assumption which seems to have been made by the author of The Castle of Perseverance50 when he makes God declare that He will adopt: Alle pes, sum treuthe, and sum ryth, And most of my mercy.  (3572–3) In one way, this is an accurate reading, if seen (as here) in the context of Man’s inability to win heaven justly through his own merits, or (as in the Bernardine debate) to rescue himself from the state of alienation brought about by Original Sin. It is misleading if it seems to suggest that one virtue is more valuable than another. Earlier commentators on Psalm 84, before Bernard, stress the embrace rather than the contention, and see it not as one 311

kissing cousins of reconciliation, but as expressing a necessary interdependence. (This will become thematically important for us later.) Augustine, for example, stresses that Justice and Peace are inseparable: Fac iustitiam et habebis pacem … Si enim non amaueris iustitiam, pacem non habebis; amant se duo ista, iustitia et pax … Vis pacem? … Ama et iustitiam; quia duae amicae sunt iustitia et pax, ipsae se osculantur; si amicam pacis non amaueris, non te amabit ipsa pax, nec ueniet ad te.51 [Do justice, and you will possess peace … For if you do not love justice, you will not possess peace: they love each other, those two, justice and peace … Do you want peace? … Then love justice as well, because Justice and Peace are two friends, they kiss each other; if you do not love Peace’s friend, Peace herself will not love you, nor will she come to you.] Augustine Enarrationes in Psalmos Indeed, as the exposition of the Psalm attributed to Bede makes clear, Justice is the necessary precursor of Peace: Sunt enim hae duæ virtutes quasi duæ sorores, quia altera non vult venire sine altera. Si quis ergo justitiam offenderit, pacem non habebit; quia non veniet pax, si non præcedat justitia.52 [For these two virtues are like two sisters, because one of them does not want to come without the other. Thus if anyone should offend Justice, he will not have Peace, because Peace will not come, unless she is preceded by Justice.] (?Pseudo) Bede De psalmorum libro exegesis: In Psalmum LXXXIV These two passages focus not on the opposition but on the embrace. The way in which you read the scene depends very much on what you see in it: is it the meeting of two figures, or the meeting of two figures? Are you concentrating on defining the two as separate or on the action in which they are engaged? It has to be said that as contrasted figures, Mary and Elizabeth do not fit the typology particularly well. (Or vice versa: the type seems to have taken over centre stage from the antitype, and to be forcing an interpretation on it.) It has little or nothing to do with them as characters on a naturalistic/historical level. Nothing in the Gospels suggests that Elizabeth was more truthful or law-abiding than Mary (commentators go out of their way to emphasise how Mary wished to be bound by all the observances of the Mosaic Law), or that Mary was necessarily more merciful or peaceful than Elizabeth, except in so far as she excelled all women. The fact that Mary is spiritually of higher status than Elizabeth might be relevant, though dangerously so, as it would tend to 312

kissing cousins reinforce the ‘Mercy and Peace are more important than Justice and Truth’ assumption, but again, the Magnificat shows her humility, in ‘quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae’ [‘because He hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden’], and the naturalistic/moral school of interpretation beloved by writers like Pseudo-Bonaventure emphasise Mary’s natural humility, both in going to visit Elizabeth instead of vice versa and in offering to serve Elizabeth through the later days of her pregnancy.53 All these added complexities merely serve to fog the clarity of the comparison. Elizabeth was older than Mary, and thus could be allegorised as the Old Law,54 just as the elder sister Leah became the Old Law and Rachel the New, but that is about as far as one can go.55 In fact, Pictor does not refer to Mary and Elizabeth at all as independent entities, and Mary not at all by name: Elizabeth is mentioned merely as a vehicle who is physically shaken by the reaction of John to the approach of his King. He concentrates instead on the two children in utero. They, it appears, clarify for him the meaning of the action. The importance of the scene lies not in any correspondences between the women themselves and their counterparts, but in the pivotal moment it records. Within their mothers John the Baptist and Christ meet, and a new state of things is inaugurated. Veritas meets Misericordia: John meets Christ ‘ut miles regem’ [as a knight does a king]; interestingly, this image seems to have come from Bede, who presumably would have seen it as warrior and Anglo-Saxon lord, but he uses it of the status of the mothers, to emphasise the humility of Mary – ‘Quis dubitet matrem regis æterni jure matri militis præferendam?’ [Who doubts that the mother of the eternal king is not to be preferred by right before the mother of a warrior?]56 – a preferment which she gracefully sets aside. John is subordinated to Christ, but not in the same way as Truth in the debate might be seen to be subordinated to Mercy, because we meet them at a different stage in the narrative, when the decision has been taken and the process of salvation has swung into action. The Voice encounters the Word. The scribe of MS Rawlinson C 67, anxious that his reader should understand the allusion, has glossed vox as iohannes and verbum as Christus. Bede had explained why John is the: Vox clamantis in deserto: Parate viam Domini, etc. Constat quia unigenitus Filius Verbum Patris vocatur, Joanne attestante, qui ait: In principio erat verbum, et verbum erit apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum (Joann. 1). Et ex ipsa nostra locutione cognoscimus quia prius vox sonat, ut verbum postmodum possit audiri. Joanne ergo vox a propheta vocatur, quia verbum præcedit. Adventum itaque dominicum præcurrens vox dicitur, quia per eius ministerium Patris verbum ab hominibus auditur.57 [The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord etc. It is agreed that the only-begotten Son is called the Word 313

kissing cousins of the Father, to which John [the Evangelist] bears witness, who says: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1). From our own speech we know that the voice sounds first, so that afterwards the word may be heard. John therefore is called a ‘Voice’ because as a prophet he went before the Word. He is called a Voice, as forerunner of the Coming of the Lord, because the Word of the Father was heard by men through his ministry.] In his exposition of Luke, Bede also makes great play with the relevance of John as voice to Zacharias’ dumbness.58 Later commentators on Luke enjoy themselves with the idea of the Voice who cannot speak, and the prophet who prophesies in the womb, and to Elizabeth speaking voce magna [with a loud voice].59 The important thing here is that it highlights the concept of prophecy, and introduces John the Baptist’s other role. As Luke has Christ say of him, he is ‘a prophet, and more than a prophet’ because ‘This is he of whom it is written: Behold, I send my angel before thy face, who shall prepare thy way before thee’;60 as his father had prophesied: et tu puer propheta Altissimi vocaberis, praeibis enim ante faciem Domini parare vias eius ad dandam scientiam salutis plebi eius in remissionem peccatorum eorum.  Luke 1:76–7 [And thou child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways. To give knowledge of salvation to his people, unto the remission of their sins.] He is a bridge figure between the Old Testament and the New. He prepares the way of the Lord by calling on the people, ‘Paenitentiam agite; appropinquavit enim regnum caelorum’ [Do penance: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand] (Matthew 3:2). There was another, older interpretation of Psalm 84 (in fact, Hugh of St Victor’s original allegory began with it), and we can see it inevitably converging upon John the Baptist. The verse following the meeting of the Four Daughters reads, ‘Veritas de terra orta est et iustitia de caelo prospexit’ [Truth is sprung out of the earth, and justice hath looked down from heaven] (Psalm 84:12), and the last verse of the psalm, ‘Iustitia ante eum ambulabit et ponet in via gressus suos’ [Justice shall walk before him: and shall set his steps in the way] (Psalm 84:14). Augustine gave two readings of verse 12: one with Christ as Divine Truth born of the earthly Virgin, offering the sacrifice which enabled Divine Grace to justify mankind (a completely different reading of Justice); the other also an allegory of redemption through justification, but instigated by mankind’s repentance. When Man, being made of earth, realises his sins, 314

kissing cousins he engenders truth, for Man is sinful: when he repents and confesses them, divine Justice is empowered to look down and justify him, like the Publican in the parable.61 (Bede takes this interpretation up, and it is enshrined in the Glossa Ordinaria, and Peter Lombard’s standard Commentary on the Psalms: Hugh of St Victor actually begins his disputation between Truth and Mercy with it.)62 Augustine’s commentary on verse 14 is a variation on the same theme. Justice in this case is the same as Truth: it consists in being just to yourself by truly recognising your sin and punishing your wicked self for it, so that God may make you good. This confession of sins is therefore the direct way to God: Ideo et Iohannes cum baptizaret in aqua paenitentiae, et uellet ad se uenire paenitentes de suis prioribus factis, hoc dicebat: Parate uiam Domino, rectas facite semitas eius …63 [For this reason John, when he baptised in the water of repentance, and wanted those who repented of their previous deeds to come to him, would say this: Prepare ye the way of the Lord: make straight his paths …’] This realisation of sin and consequent repentance, the message of John the Baptist before the Coming of the Lord, is the theme of the self-preparation of Advent. An Advent Sermon of the Cistercian Guerric, Abbot of Igny (1070–1157, a follower of Bernard), on Quomodo proficiendum in paranda via Domino [How we are to prepare the way of the Lord], weaves all these strands together in an ingenious web: Parate viam Domino (Isa. XL, 3) … Psalmista … docet: Incipite, inquit, Domino in confessione (Psal. CXLVI, 7). Ipse ad poenitentiam superbum inclinat, ut vocem clamantis in deserto viamque parari jubentis, et unde incipiendum sit ostendentis, audiat: Poenitentiam agite; appropinquabit enim regnum coelorum (Matth. III, 2). Huic sententia consonat Salomonis, qui manifesta definitione rudes instruit, dicens: Initium viae bonae, facere justa (Prov. XVI, 5). Quid est enim justa facere, nisi poenitentiam agere? nisi de nobisipsis quod Deo debemus exigere, et quod rapuimus exsolvere? Haec est justitia quae ante Dominum ambulat, viamque ei placitam parat, sicut scriptum est: Justitia ante eum ambulabit, et ponet in via gressus suos (Psal. LXXXIV, 14). Sicut enim Joannes Jesum, sic poenitentia gratiam praecedit; illam scilicet gratiam, qua post satisfactionem reconciliati, suscipimur in osculo praecedit; illam scilicet gratiam, qua post satisfactionem reconciliati, suscipimur in osculo pacis. In hac siquidem poenitentiae via, grato atque hilari occursu obviant sibi, seseque osculantur justitia et pax; justitia scilicet hominis se punientis, et pax 315

kissing cousins Dei ignoscentis: laetumque ac jucundum celebrant in osculo sancto foedus reconciliationis.64 [Prepare ye the way of the Lord (Isaiah 40:3) … The Psalmist … teaches [the necessity of confession]: Begin, he says, to the Lord in confession (Psalm 16:7). He himself inclines the proud man to repentance, so that he hears the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ordering [us] to prepare a way, and showing where one is to begin: Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand (Matthew 3:2). The opinion of Solomon agrees with this, who instructs the simple with a clear statement, saying, The beginning of a good way is to do justice (Proverbs 16:5). What is it to do justice, if not to repent? if not to exact from ourselves what we owe to God, and to make restitution of what we have seized? This is the Justice which walks before God, and prepares a pleasing way for him, as it is written Justice shall walk before him; and shall set his steps in the way (Psalm 84:14). For thus John walked before Jesus, as Repentance must before Grace, that Grace which, reconciled after making satisfaction, we receive65 in the kiss of peace. For in this path of Repentance, they meet together at a joyous and laughing run, and Justice and Peace kiss each other, Justice, that is to say, in man punishing himself, and Peace in God forgiving it: they celebrate a happy and cheerful pact of reconciliation in a holy kiss.] The other major theme of Advent is prophecy, and John the Baptist is its dominating figure. In the Sarum and York Missals, his message is told and retold in the Gospels for the first three weeks in Advent. Then, in the fourth week, as the actual Incarnation becomes imminent, they return to the historical, narrative level, taken from Luke. On the Wednesday, the first Ember Day, the Gospel is the account of the Annunciation; on the Friday, the second Ember Day, it is the Visitation; on the Saturday, the third Ember day, it is the beginning of John’s ministry. And on the Friday, Gradual and the Offertory are both taken from Psalm 84.66 In Peter Comestor’s Fifth Sermon on Advent he notes: Misericordia et veritas obviaverunt sibi, justitia et pax osculatae sunt (Psal. LXXXIV). Hujus prophetiae non nisi in quarta septimana Adventus Domini meminit Ecclesia, quia praemissis tribus recolit desiderium Patrum antiquorum Christi adventum desiderantium.67 [The Church calls this prophecy to mind only in the fourth week in Advent, because in the three previous weeks she reviews the longing of the ancient Patriarchs desiring the coming of Christ.] The first three weeks are given over to expectation, preparation, and longing: in the final days the longed-for reconciliation between God and Man has 316

kissing cousins begun, though its manifestation is still in the womb. This Psalm, recording the reconciliation on a tropological level, is reserved for one of these final days, and the fact that it is linked with the narrative of the Visitation means that there would be a permanent liturgical reminder that the two go together.68 The return to the narrative level focuses our attention again on Mary and Elizabeth. Though Pictor seems to dismiss them as little more than vehicles for their unborn children, that is not what the Gospel suggests. They come over as human as well as types. Their pregnancy is real and recognisable: we can both wince in sympathy with Elizabeth and share her delight. Even the male commentators’ fanciful variations on what the baby was actually doing – ‘kneeling down’ (presumably turning over?) or dancing a jig (tripudiavit,69 which sounds exhaustingly energetic for his mother) – are pardonable everyday exaggerations. Bede makes a distinction between the reaction of Elizabeth and the reaction of John which is meant to show the superior spiritual understanding of the children, but which tacitly recognises the human level on which we perceive the mothers: Et factum est ut audivit salutationem Mariæ Elisabeth, exsultavit infans in utero eius, et repleta est Spiritu Sancto Elisabeth. Vide distinctionem, singulorumque verborum proprietates. Vocem prior Elisabeth audivit, sed Joannes prior gratiam sensit. Illa naturæ ordine audivit, iste exultavit ratione mysterii. Illa Mariæ, iste Domini sensit adventum. Istae gratiam loquuntur, illi intus operantur, pietatisque mysterium maternis adoriuntur profectibus, duplicique miraculo prophetant matres spiritu parvulorum. Exsultavit infans, et mater repleta est.70 [And it came to pass that when Elizabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the infant leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost. See the distinction, and the connotations of the individual words. Elizabeth was the first to hear the voice, but John was the first to feel the grace. She heard in the course of nature; he leaped for joy by reason of the mystery. She recognised the coming of Mary, he recognised the coming of the Lord. The women spoke of grace; they worked inwardly, and set in motion the mystery of mercy by employing their mothers, and in a double miracle the mothers prophesied through the spirit of their little ones.] The mothers prophesy: Elizabeth recognising what Mary is, Mary giving thanks in the Magnificat. Bede points out that up to this moment, both had been silent about their pregnancies, Mary because it was God’s mystery and not to be divulged, Elizabeth, who ‘hid herself five months’ (Luke 1:24), because she was embarrassed at being pregnant so late in life (Ludolphus later suggests that this was because she thought it would be attributed to an improper sexuality):71 317

kissing cousins Erubescebat Elisabeth onus parientis, quandiu nesciebat mysterium religionis. Sed quæ occultabat se quia conceperat filium, jactare se coepit quia generabat propheta. Et quæ ante erubescebat benedicit, et quæ dubitabat ante firmatur.72 [Elizabeth was embarrassed at the burden of pregnancy, as long as she did not know the hidden mystery of faith. But though she hid herself because she had conceived a son, she begins to boast because she has engendered a prophet. And she blesses what she had previously blushed for: and affirms what before she had doubted.] This detail probably explains the puzzling little addition in the N. Town Mary Play where the two women sit down and solemnly exchange brief accounts of the occasion of their conceiving, Elizabeth ending rather lamely, ‘And þus of my concepcyon I haue tolde ȝow sum’ (line 1491), before they launch into the Magnificat. It is not in Nicholas Love, or his source, and confirms the suspicion that the N. Town playwright was better read in the commentaries than one might at first think necessary. Mary is prompted to the Magnificat by Elizabeth’s recognition: quam quia cognovit mysterium per Spiritum Sanctum cognovisse, intelligens Dominum illud revelari velle, Deumque magnificat, id est, magnum in operibus ejus laudat et prædicat.73 [because she recognised that she (Elizabeth) knew the mystery through the Holy Spirit, and understanding that the Lord wishes it to be revealed, magnifies God, that is, praises and proclaims that He is great in His works.] To prophesy here means ‘to speak with divine inspiration rather than ‘to foretell the future’. Because Elizabeth ‘was filled with the Holy Ghost’ and ‘cried out with a loud voice’, she is a prophetissa.74 This prophetiæ donum [gift of prophecy] makes her recognise in Mary ‘the mother of My Lord’: ‘Prophetico repleta spiritu genetricem ad se adventasse Salvatoris intellexit’ [Filled with a prophetic spirit, she understood that it was the mother of the Saviour who was coming to her]. But Bede also sees the other meaning of prophecy in verse 45: ‘Et beata quae credidit; quoniam perficientur ea quae dicta sunt ei a Domino’ [And blessed is she that believed, because there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord].75 Through the Spirit she knows of past, present, and future: past, of what the angel had told Mary; present, that Mary is the mother of the Redeemer, and future, that the promised things will come to pass.76 Gertrud Schiller remarks that in cathedral sculpture from the thirteenth century onwards, Elizabeth’s ‘expression is sometimes that of a seer – which explains why the celebrated thirteenth-century Bamberg figure was called a sibyl until it became clear that it was from a Visitation group’.77 318

kissing cousins Besides this, Elizabeth has a theatrical history as a prophet in her own right. In the Pseudo-Augustine sermon Contra Judaeos, Paganos et Arianos Sermo de Symbolo, the source of the various versions of the liturgical Ordo Prophetarum, the penultimate in the list of witness are ‘parentes Iohannis, Zacharias et Elisabeth, iuuenes steriles, in senecta fecundi [qui] dicant … testimonium Christo’ [the parents of John, Zacharias and Elizabeth, barren in youth, fertile in old age, [who] will speak testifying to Christ’]. Ipsique matri et uirgini, Helisabeth ait: Vnde mihi hoc ut ueniat Mater Domini ad me? Ecce enim ut facta est uox salutationis tue in auribus meis, exultauit in gaudio infans in utero meo. Intelligens enim Iohannes matrem Domini sui uenisse ad suam matrem inter ipsas angustias uteri adhuc positus, motu salutauit quem uoce non poterat.78 [To that same Mother and Virgin, Elizabeth said, ‘And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy’. For John, realising that the mother of his Lord had come to his mother, still placed in the narrow confines of the womb, greeted Him with movement since he could not with voice.] (A motif we have met already.) The last of the prophets in the Sermon is of course John the Baptist himself. In some later versions of the Processus (Laon, Limoges), Zacharias disappears, but Elizabeth (femineo habitu, pregnans) remains an apparently essential figure.79 She does not appear in the English mystery cycle Prophets’ Plays, presumably because she has a more extended spot in the narrative of the Visitation, just as Simeon and the Baptist, the other New Testament Prophets, have their own episodes in the cycles. But the N. Town Mary Play almost goes out of its way to insist on her prophetic role. Its source, the Pseudo-Bonaventure Meditationes Vitae Christi speaks conventionally of Elizabeth’s ‘Benedicta tu inter mulieres’ as prophecy: ‘illa prophetice locuta est’, or as Nicholas Love has it, ‘she spake and prophecied’.80 In N. Town she plays an antiphonal translator’s part in the Magnificat, which Mary describes as ‘This psalme of prophesye seyd betwen vs tweyn’ (line 1538). Contemplacio goes one further and even credits Elizabeth with joint prophetic composition of the Benedictus, which is not in his source:81 He [Zacharias] and Elizabeth prophesyed as þus, They mad Benedictus them beforn …  (1581–2) It is uncertain how the original play was intended to end: the manuscript offers two possible choices. Peter Meredith suggests that: ‘It seems likely that neither represents the original ending of the play, which perhaps consisted simply of Contemplacio’s speech.’82 The second offering, however, would fit in 319

kissing cousins with this version of Elizabeth. The play ends, before Contemplacio’s epilogue, with Elizabeth urging Zacharias to: ryse up I beseke ȝow, And go we to þe temple now fast To wurchep God with þat we mow And thank hym bothe – this is my cast – Of þe tyme that is comynge now. For now is cum mercy and venjauns is past: God wyl be born for mannes prow To brynge us to blysse þat euer xal last.83 (21–8) In the context of Advent prophecy which seems to have been set up, this would make Elizabeth the formal link, like a more extended Prophets Play, between the action of the play and the promised future. The Mary Play is an Advent play, not necessarily in its time of performance, of which we know nothing, but in its matter and mode.84 The second half, starting with Contemplacio’s impersonation of the prophets, is particularly strongly so, and the Visitation is its logical conclusion. Is there, however, any evidence, apart from the liturgy of Advent Ember Friday and the existence of a body of available Patristic writings and other commentaries, that the typology linking the Four Daughters to the Visitation was still alive in the mid-fifteenth century, and available to the author of the N. Town Mary Play? He may have been familiar with Pictor in Carmine, but it seems unlikely. Would the original audience have had any inkling of it, or would they just, like us, see a visual shadow in the two embraces? On the current evidence this must remain an unsolved mystery. There are various dead ends. If we are looking for reinforcements of the link, Books of Hours at first seem promising. An image of the Visitation usually appears in French and some Netherlandish Books of Hours illustrating Lauds, while Psalm 84 is recited in the following Hour of Prime, which could suggest some sort of link by juxtaposition, and familiarise it to a lay audience, but in English Books of Hours the illustrations of the Life (or Joys) of Mary are generally replaced by scenes from the Passion. Then the feast of the Visitation (2 July) as such was a late one in the West, instituted only in 1389.85 It does not seem to have been particularly popular in England at the time in which we are interested, and in any case it does not include Psalm 84. However, the visual motif does seem to have lingered on in East Anglia, to judge from one and possibly a half pieces of evidence. In the Church of SS Peter and Paul at Salle, Norfolk, the second window in the east range of the North Transept has in its tracery figures of Mercy and Truth on the one side, and Justice and Peace on the other flanking the Visitation in the centre (see Plates 3–6). David J. King, working on the Corpus Vitrearum for Norfolk, dates the old glass in the North Transept to the 1440s, as does Richard 320

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Plate 3 Stained glass window, St Peter and St Paul, Salle, Norfolk: The Visitation with the Four Daughters of God Photo: © Meg Twycross

Marks.86 Inevitably the usefulness of this particular window as evidence rests on the amount of restoration (done in 1912, by Bryans of London, in a restoration of the transept), of which I am uncertain. In 1930, M.R. James reported that when he saw the figures in 1884 they consisted of ‘Mercy and Truth (gone), and Righteousness and Peace meeting, with the appropriate Psalm verse’.87 He does not mention whether the Visitation was there. King, however, implies that the Visitation is part of the old glass: The old glass of the north transept, also of the 1440’s, is likewise of iconographical interest, though very much restored. It is in the tracery over the excellent modern Jesse window by Hensman …and represents the Visitation accompanied by personifications of the meeting of Mercy and Truth, Justice and Peace, following Psalm 85, v.10, the text of which is in the scrolls they carry. The extent of the restoration is difficult to gauge without getting up close to the window. Judging purely from my photographs, Truth, described by James as ‘gone’, is completely restored, though very sympathetically. Mercy appears to have acquired the head of an archangel, but it looks original, and certainly matches the rest of the figure (lines of collar, neck, etc.), which also looks largely original, so she may always have had it. Justice has what looks 321

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Palte 4 Salle, Norfolk: Misericordia and Veritas Photo: © Meg Twycross

like an original and somewhat decayed head and possibly a fair percentage of other original glass: Peace, facing her and confusingly carrying a book open at ‘Veritas de terra orta est’ (which however suggests, if it is original, that the designer knew about the extended exegesis), looks to have been fairly heavily restored, though some of her lettering looks original. Mary and Elizabeth 322

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Plate 5 Salle, Norfolk: Justitia and Pax Photo: © Meg Twycross

look suspiciously well-restored, apart possibly from the word Magnificat in Mary’s scroll. For further information we shall presumably have to wait for the Corpus Vitrearum volume, but the main problem here is whether the Visitation was originally a part of the programme, and if not, why a nineteenth-century restorer would have thought it was appropriate. The odds, on 323

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Plate 6 Salle, Norfolk: Mary and Elizabeth. Apparently mostly modern; Mary based on Justitia (reversed), Elizabeth adapted from Pax (reversed) Photo: © Meg Twycross

present information, seem to be for the motif to be original though most of the glass is not. In the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity at Tattershall all the remaining glass which has not been pillaged by other institutions has been collected into the East Window. Among the figures which were originally in the tracery lights of one window (though which is not known) are the figures of the Four Daughters, each as a separate figure under an arch. Misericordia faces Pax, both labelled. Now separated from them into a different light but paired, and from the same cartoons, are Veritas (labelled Vertas) and Justitia (damaged and the label missing).88 They are crowned and sceptred, and the Justice/Mercy figure holds up its hand in a speaking gesture. (Neither in Salle nor in Tattershall are they dressed in different colours, as 324

kissing cousins in The Castle of Perseverance, however.) They are not recorded in the glazing accounts, and there is no way of telling what their original position in the church was, or if they were associated with a picture of the Visitation, though as  Richard Marks points out, since they were tracery figures ‘the connection must have been with the contents of the main lights’. The main typological programme at Tattershall was taken from the blockbook Biblia Pauperum, so if these were typological in function they must belong to an older tradition. They may have belonged to the window de historia magnificat for which John Wymondeswold of Peterborough was paid in 1482, and which contained 102 square feet of glass.89 The Magnificat Window (1501) in Great Malvern Priory consists of ‘a series of eleven “Joys of Mary” arranged as illustrations of the verses of her canticle’, which appear as tituli to each of the scenes, with an accompanying Gaude … verse.90 The Visitation has salutari meo and Gaude pregnans divino radio. It is not, however, arranged typologically. It is of course possible that the historia magnificat was not a full sequence of this kind, but a shorthand way of referring to a Visitation with banderoles quoting the Magnificat, though the Creed window which was paid for at the same time, a standard one with twelve Prophets and twelve Apostles, measured ninetyfour square feet, much the same size, so probably we are talking about a more complex Magnificat window too. Either way, Salle at least suggests that in East Anglia the Four Daughters were iconographically alive and well in the fifteenth century, and possibly still related to the Visitation. I am not trying to suggest that the Bernardine theme of the debate of the Four Daughters is not the major version of Psalm 84:11 in the play, or indeed in late medieval literature and theatre in general. Concerned as it is with the springs of the Redemption, it is a highly adaptable scene, and can be used at various chronological points in salvation history. In St Bernard, followed by the N. Town Mary Play and its sources, it is related to the Annunciation as the moment of Incarnation, though their first appearance in the sermon is at Man’s Creation and Fall. It can become an episode at the Crucifixion and Resurrection, as in Piers Plowman.91 It can move out of chronological time: in The Castle of Perseverance it is related ahistorically to the Particular Judgement of the human soul; in Chandler’s Liber Apologeticus to the redemption of mankind through repentance, as in the Augustine-based exegesis.92 The same happens in the visual arts,93 especially in the early sixteenth-century cycles of Brussels tapestries, where: the allegory is combined with the Fall of Man, the Plan of Redemption, the Conflict of the Virtues and Vices, and the Warfare of a Christian Knight.94 But we should not let the elaborated allegorical version become so dominant that it blinds us to other continuing interpretations. For instance, Francis 325

kissing cousins Chew noticed that in the sixteenth-century (French) Pierpont Morgan MS 69, the Four Daughters appear facing the Visitation in one opening, but declared that: There is no traditional or doctrinal connection between the meeting of the Virgin Mary and St Elizabeth and the meeting of the Four Virtues. Yet … the meeting and greeting and postures of the two groups has led to the juxtaposition of the two scenes, facing each other on opposite pages. This illustration of the Four Daughters shows how the contamination of the medieval tradition with Renaissance classicism has degraded the subject almost into meaninglessness.95 On the contrary, it shows the continuation of a variant tradition. To sum up: there was a visual link between the Four Virtues of Psalm 84:11 and the Visitation, strong enough to make it a twelfth-century typology, though apparently mainly English. Pictor in Carmine alerts us to a background of biblical exegesis which draws on the developed debate allegories of Hugh of St Victor/ Bernard of Clairvaux, but which is also aware of other patterns of reference. These make use of other verses in Psalm 84 which speak of Justice, Mercy, and Truth. One strong and early motif is that of repentance as a necessary precursor of justification by Grace, and this links up, also early on, with the role of John the Baptist as precursor of Christ. This naturally belongs to the liturgical season of Advent, where we find the episode of the Visitation and Psalm 84 sharing the Mass for Friday in Ember Week. Commentaries and sermons on Luke, especially those of Bede, which are regularly used as liturgical homilies, emphasise not only the inspirational relationship between Mary and Elizabeth and their infant children, who are foregrounded in Pictor to the virtual obliteration of their mothers, but also Elizabeth’s role as a prophet, a role that is also picked up in various versions of the Ordo Prophetarum. This may throw some light on her treatment in the Mary Play, which seems to emphasise her function as a prophet. If this seems a tenuous and complex web of argument, I can only say that it is matched by most of the commentaries and sermons to which I have been led. It was a medieval way of thinking. There is also a small amount of iconographical evidence which suggests that the motif may still have been there, if only subliminally, in the right time and at the right place for these connections to have been made by the playwright of the Mary Play and, possibly, his audience. Lancaster University

Acknowledgements I would like warmly to thank Richard Beadle for transcribing the relevant passages from the Cambridge Corpus Christi College MS 300 of Pictor in 326

kissing cousins carmine for me, and Alison Samuels for struggling with me over the translation of Pictor’s convoluted syntax and recondite vocabulary.

Notes   1. Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, trans. by Janet Seligman, 2 vols (London: Lund Humphries, 1971), I, 55.   2. Pamela Sheingorn, ‘The Bodily Embrace or Embracing the Body: Gesture and Gender in Late Medieval Culture’, in The Stage as Mirror: Civic Theatre in Late Medieval Europe, ed. by Alan E. Knight (Cambridge: Brewer, 1997), pp. 51–90: reference to Mary and Elizabeth on 59, to the Four Daughters on 85–9. This article might be considered a pendant to Dr Sheingorn’s.   3. See Adrian Fortescue, The Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Described (London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1930), p. 30: ‘The KISS OF PEACE at Mass is given in this way. The two persons stand facing each other with hands joined. The one who is to receive the kiss bows. Then the one who gives it lays his hands on the shoulders of the other; the receiver puts his arms under those of him who gives it. Each bows the head over the left shoulder of the other. The one who gives the kiss says Pax tecum. The other answers Et cum spiritu tuo. Then they stand again with joined hands facing each other and both bow.’ This is the attitude of many paintings of Mary and Elizabeth. The position of the arms therefore does not indicate subordination, but who initiated the embrace. The iconography of the Visitation where Mary kneels to Elizabeth is said by Schiller to be fifteenth-century and mainly Italian.  4. Speculum Humanae Salvationis, ed. by J. Lutz and P. Perdrizet, 2 vols (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1907), I, 97; The Mirour of Mans Saluacioun, A Middle English Translation of ‘Speculum Humanae Salvationis’, ed. by Avril Henry (Aldershot: Scolar, 1986), p. 219.  5. Biblia Pauperum, ed. by Avril Henry (Aldershot: Scolar, 1987) 4: The Eton Roundels: Eton College MS 177, ed. by Avril Henry (Aldershot: Scolar, 1990) 17: ‘Biblia Pauperum had no English version, nor are any of its manuscripts known to have been produced in this country.’   6. Madeline Harrison Caviness, The Windows of Christ Church Cathedral Canterbury, Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Great Britain, 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1981), p. 78.  7. Caviness, Canterbury, p. 78: description of window 83–5. The MSS are Cambridge Corpus Christi College MS 400 (late thirteenth century), Canterbury Cathedral Archives MS C246 (early fourteenth century: now missing but survives in printed editions), and Oxford Corpus Christi College MS 256 (first half of the fifteenth century).  8. Caviness, Canterbury, plate 59, fig. 147.   9. The Latin reflects the semantic change of the word pietas from the classical ‘attitude of dutiful respect’ to the gods or members of one’s family, ancestor of our piety, to the merciful attitude of God towards us, and thus our attitude to our fellow men: ‘Pité, that passes alle poyntes’ (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, line 654). See OED svv Piety, Pity. Here it is clearly used as a synonym for Misericordia. 10. There are similar problems with the English Rihtwisness, which is used in Middle English to translate the Latin Justitia, and whose main semantic field referred to ‘Justice, fairness, impartiality … Mosaic law, the precepts of God’ (see MED sv right-wísnes). I have translated Justitia as ‘Justice’.

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kissing cousins 11. Luke 1:50, 54. Mary is also known as the mater misericordiae ‘moder of mercy’ (N.  Town Mary Play, line 1401): see Peter Meredith’s note to line 9 in his edition: The ‘Mary Play’ from the N. town Manuscript, ed. Peter Meredith (London: Longmans, 1987; repr. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), p. 86. It was familiar from the popular antiphon Salve regina, mater misericordiae possibly by Hermann the Cripple (1013–54; see Joseph Connelly, Hymns of the Roman Liturgy (London: Longmans Green, 1957), pp. 46–7). 12. Schiller, Iconography, p. 55. 13. They are called the Old Law and the New Law, and the other terminology here suggests that the contrast between the two is seen in a quasi-legal context. But in other cases Old Law and New Law seem to be used much more loosely to refer merely to Old and New Dispensations, or even Old and New Testaments. Compare Henry, The Mirour of Mans Saluacioune, p. 35:

Take hede in ilka chapitle the certein guyse es this, That of the New Law forthemast a sothe reherced is To whilk sothe suwyngly out of the Testament Old Thre stories ilk after other appliables shall be tolde …. (21–4)

14. The standard works on this motif are Hope Traver, The Four Daughters of God, Bryn Mawr College Monographs 6 (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1907) and Francis Chew, The Virtues Reconciled (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970). Both are concerned with the narrative allegory, Traver from a purely literary/theological point of view, Chew with a bias towards iconography and the Renaissance. 15. John 8:7: ‘Iesus autem inclinans se deorsum digito scribebat in terra.’ 16. Gustaf Aulen, Christus Victor (London: SPCK, 1931; repr. 1970), chapter 5 and p. 146; C.W. Marx, The Devil’s Rights and the Redemption in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: Brewer, 1995). Marx discusses the Debate of the Four Daughters on pp. 58–9. 17. 2 Corinthians 3:6: ‘For the letter killeth, but the spirit quickeneth.’ St Paul’s major statement of the Old and New Covenants is in the Epistle to the Hebrews, especially in his discussion of Jeremiah 31:31–4 in chapters 8–10. 18. Ludolphus of Saxony, Vita Jesu Christi, ed. by L.M. Rigollot, 2 vols (Paris and Brussels: Societas Generali Librariae Catholicae, 1878), I, 49. He is reworking the standard passage from Bede’s Exposition on Luke (PL 92, col. 320). 19. Ludolphus, pp. 49–50. 20. Ludolphus, p. 49. 21. Schiller, Iconography, p. 56 and fig. 133: mid-Rhine, c. 1410–20, Centraal Museum Utrecht. See also Lexikon der Christlichen Ikonographie, ed. by Engelbert Kirschbaum and others, 8 vols (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder Verlag, 1968–76), sv Ratschluss der Erlösung. He illustrates the painting by Konrad Witz (1430– 40) now in Berlin, which shows the Son agreeing to the Incarnation on the left (though not with the debate of the Four Daughters), with the Visitation (with visible foetuses) on the right. 22. Meredith, Mary Play, p. 79. 23. Ludolphus, p. 49. 24. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologie 53: The Life of Christ, ed. and trans. by Samuel Parsons OP and Albert Pinheiro OP (London: Blackfriars: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1971), pp. 5–6: ‘Joannes non solum fuit propheta, sed plus quam propheta, ut dicitur Matt. Fuit enim terminus legis et initium Evangelii’ [John was not only a prophet, but more than a prophet, for he was the end of the Law and the beginning of the Gospel]. See Matthew 11:9, Luke 16:16.

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kissing cousins 25. Lucy Freeman Sandler, The Peterborough Psalter in Brussels and Other Fenland Manuscripts (London: Harvey Miller, 1974), p. 110. 26. M.R. James, ‘On the Paintings Formerly in the Choir at Peterborough’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 9:2 (1897), pp. 178–94, at 182. 27. James, ‘Peterborough’, p. 180. 28. Sandler, Peterborough Psalter, p. 43. 29. M.R. James, On The Abbey of S. Edmund at Bury (Cambridge: printed for the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 1895), pp. 142–3 and 192–3. 30. Henry, Eton Roundels, p. 72. 31. Henry, Eton Roundels, pp. 71–3 and passim. 32. M.R. James, ‘Pictor in Carmine’, Archaeologia, 94 (1951), pp. 141–166. 33. James, ‘Pictor’, pp. 143–4; Henry, Eton Roundels, p. 15 points out that it ‘belonged to at least five English cathedrals or religious houses’. 34. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. by William Weaver (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980), pp. 79–80; St Bernard of Clairvaux, Apologia to William of St Thierry, in The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, Volume 1: Treatises 1, Cistercian Fathers Series 1 (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1970), p. 66. The Apologia was written in 1125. 35. James, ‘Pictor’, p. 142. 36. M.R. James’s ‘best’ manuscript, Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 300, appears to be less accurate, with a proportion of mismanaged rhymes, let alone some patches of virtually untranslatable text where the three Oxford MSS I have consulted make sense, e.g. inmitat for inmitit (line 2), gessco for gessit (line 9), tremescit for tremefecit (line 10). 37. See note 9. 38. Veritas has become Verum and thus changed grammatical gender: it is difficult to decide whether pium refers equally (as a neuter) to Pietas/Misericordia, or (as masculine accusative) to its embodiment in Christ. In English one has to decide one way or the other: in the Latin it can be left open. 39. Vox, Verbum: see below for discussion. 40. Pictor makes use of the semantic range of the Latin in a way which is unreproducible in English, where the temptation is to plump either for the literal translation, which in English does not evoke the metaphor, or for one of the metaphors, which then makes no literal sense in English. His allusions to the Bible are complicated by his habit of synonym hunting, so that one gets a familiar text with one word changed: for example, the viscera misericordiae (Luke 1:78, etc.) turn into the viscera pietatis. He also indulges the habit of selective quotation, so that his allusions sometimes do not fit their origins in every respect: for example the lex data reference to John 1:17, which however goes on to align Truth and Grace, instead of opposing them, as he appears to be doing here. Anyone embarking on an edition of Pictor is setting out on a long journey through Concordances and the Patrologia. 41. ‘Iustitia illa est quae est in confessione peccatorum: ueritas ipsa est’ [Justice is that one which exists in the confession of sins: she is Truth herself] from PL 210: Alain of Lille Summa de Arte praedicatoria, a convenient preachers’ dictionary of major Biblical terms and their possible interpretations, drawn from the accepted commentators. Under Veritas (cols 996–7), he identifies Veritas with Justitia: ‘Dicitur et justitia, unde “Misericordia et veritas obviaverunt sibi”, id est in Christo convenerunt misericordia et justitia’ [it is called [equated with] Justice, whence [we have] ‘Mercy and truth are met together’, that is, mercy and justice come together in Christ]. He goes on to refer to the First and Second Comings: the First was characterised by mercy, the Second will be characterised by justice. Augustine (Enarrationes in Psalmos, 1175: Psalm 84:16) equates the two, in a

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kissing cousins different context, to which we shall return. It is in any case difficult to make Truth work against Mercy, which would make Mercy untruthful, unless one redefines her borders somewhat. Bernard and his followers effectively read her as ‘the letter of the Law’, and ‘God’s given word’, not as absolute truth. 42. Alain of Lille, Summa, column 149, sv Misericordia. He again quotes ‘Misericordia et veritas obviaverunt sibi …’ with the comment ‘Debet enim justitia misericordiam quoddammodo osculari, ut ipsa a tramite misericordiae non recedat, et misericordia justitiae lineam non evadat’ [For Justice ought, so to speak, to kiss Mercy, so that she shall not depart from the path of Mercy, and Mercy should not swerve from the straight line of Justice]. Is this the source of Pictor’s norma? 43. ‘Quia lex per Mosen data est: gratia et veritas per Ihesum Christum facta est’ [For the law was given by Moses: grace and truth came by Jesus Christ]. 44. Possibly a reference to Revelation 6:2, the Rider on the White Horse, usually identified with Christ as avenger: maybe also a pun on the rainbow of the Covenant (Genesis 9:16)? As the Chester Noah play points out, the rainbow points away from mankind. 45. Psalm 145:7 ‘Dominus solvit compeditos’ [The Lord looseth them that are fettered]. This immediately clashes with the usual meaning of solvere in this context: ‘Non venio solvere legem, sed adimplere’ [I am not come to destroy [the Law], but to fulfil] (Matthew 5:17). 46. Suscipere has a range of meanings starting from the concrete ‘under-take’: it can mean ‘to take up, embrace’ (both literally and metaphorically), ‘to uphold a person, or adopt a role or an idea, to receive as a guest, to undertake a task’: in the Vulgate, it is usually used of supporting or raising up. The reference may be to Luke 1:54 (from the Magnificat), ‘suscepit Israhel puerum suum memorari misericordiae’ [he hath received Israel his servant, being mindful of His mercy – AV, ‘He remembering His mercy, hath holpen his servant Israel’]. There is probably also a reference to Isaiah 47. 10 ‘Suscepimus Deus misericordiam tuam in medio templi tui’ [We have received Thy mercy, O God, in the midst of Thy temple] (Introit for the Feast of the Purification).   Forma can mean both a physical shape and a Platonic Form: in the Vulgate it is usually used of physical form or appearance, often ‘beauty’ (Isaiah 52:14): the most obvious reference is to Phil. 2:7 ‘sed semet ipsum exinanivit, formam servi accipiens’ [But emptied himself, taking the form of a servant]. One might imagine a double meaning here: physically the Law (Elizabeth/Truth) embraces/receives the physical embodiment of the Gospel (Mary/Mercy); tropologically the Law adopts the essence of the Gospel. Syntactically ewangelii must go with formam, but for a moment or two it sounds as if it belongs to lex, so that we have a merging of both worlds. Christ is of course also the Truth (John 14:6). 47. See also Colossians 3:12. Bernard starts the debate of the Four Daughters when Peace and Mercy ‘pio quodam susurrio paterna pulsantes viscera loquebantur’ [spoke, striking the(ir) Father’s bowels with a sort of reverent whisper] PL 183, col. 387. 48. PL 183, col. 387: ‘gravis quaedam inter virtutes videtur orta contentio’ [a certain serious conflict appears to have arisen between the Virtues]; ‘Forte enim interpellantibus tale dicatur dedisse responsum’ [Perhaps [He] may be said to have given a response like this to the contestants] col. 387. 49. ‘Systyr Ryghtwysnes, ȝe are to vengeabyl’ (N. Town, Mary Play, 1167). Bernard speaks of Truth and Justice as ‘perseverantibus … in ultione’ (PL 183, col. 387). 50. The Macro Plays, ed. by Mark Eccles, EETS 262 (1969), p. 108. 51. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos LI–C, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, 39 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1956), p. 1172.

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kissing cousins 52. Pseudo-Bede, in Bedae Venerabilis Opera Exegetica … Dubia et spuria: PL 93, col. 939. 53. See Bede, In Lucæ Evangelium Expositio, PL 92, col. 320; Homilia II, PL 94, col. 15. 54. Bede suggests, in the context of the conception of John, that Elizabeth might be seen as the Old Law and Zacharias as the Jewish priesthood: they were ‘just before God’ (Luke 1:6) because they kept the commandments of the Law, which are good in themselves, but because the Law had grown old, and the priesthood was split with ambition and schism, they were unable to produce effective ‘offspring’: Bedae Venerabilis Opera: In Lucæ Evangelium Expositio Liber 1, PL 92, cols 314–15. 55. They belong to the same family, and their relationship is obviously loving: but that suits the Augustine/Bede view rather than the contentio pattern. 56. Bede, Homiliæ, PL 94, col. 15: Homily 2, described as In festo Visitationis beatæ Mariæ, but in fact an Advent sermon. 57. Bede, Exegetica Genuina: In Marci Evangelium Expositio, PL 92, col. 135. 58. Bede, In Lucæ Evangelium Expositio Liber 1, PL 92, col. 324. 59. Ludolphus, Vita Jesu Christi (see note 18), p. 50. Elizabeth cried with a loud voice ‘quia illum in utero tenebat qui vox Verbi erat’. He quotes Anselm urging his sister to contemplate ‘sterilis et virginis … complexum, et salutationis officium, in quo servulus Dominum, præco judicem, vox Verbum, inter anilia viscera conclusus, in  Virginis utero clausum agnovit, et indicibili gaudio prophetavit’: Ludolphus, Vita, p. 52.   The Feast of the Visitation, though prescribed in 1389, did not take a particular hold in England (see R.W. Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) pp. 40–61), but the late Sarum and York Breviaries both include a Sequence containing the verse:    Vox non loquens exultavit    ad verbi presentiam;    sed Elizabeth expavit   matris excellentiam,   benedictamque clamavit   fructus affluentiam.

[The speechless Voice rejoiced at the presence of the Word, but Elizabeth was terrified at the excellence of [his] mother, and called the abundance of her fruit blessed.]   Breviarium ad Usum Insignis Ecclesiae Sarum, ed. by Francis Procter and Christopher Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1886), cols 393–4; Breviarium ad Usum Insignis Ecclesie Eboracensis, ed. by Mr. Lawley, 2 vols (Surtees Society 71 and 75: 1880 for 1871 (sic ?1881) and 1883 for 1882), I, col. 738. 60. Luke 7:26–7: ‘Sed quid existis videre prophetam? utique dico vobis et plus quam prophetam. Hic est de quo scriptum est: ecce mitto angelum meum ante faciem tuam, qui praeparabit viam tuam ante te.’ [But what went you out to see? a prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet. This is he of whom it is written: Behold, I send my angel before thy face, who shall prepare thy way before thee.’] 61. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, 1173–4. See note 16. 62. Glossa Ordinaria (attributed to Walafrid Strabo), PL 113, col. 983: ‘Veritas de terra orta est: Confessio de homine, ut se accuset etc. [Augustine] usque ad data est justificatio confitentis; Bede, De Psalmorum Libro Exegeses, PL 93, col. 939; Hugh

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kissing cousins of St Victor, Adnotationes Elucidatoriae in Quosdam Psalmos David, Cap. 63: Misericordia, et veritas, qua disceptatione sibi mutuo obviam venerint …, PL 177, col. 623; Peter Lombard, Commentarius in Psalmos Davidicos, PL 191, col. 798. 63. Augustine Enarrationes in Psalmos 1175: Iustitia illa est quae est in confessione peccatorum: ueritas enim ipsa est. Iustus enim debes esse in te, ut punias te; ipsa est prima hominis iustitia, ut punias te malum, et faciat te Deus bonum. Quia ergo ipsa est prima hominis iustitia, ipsa fit uia Deo, ut ueniat ad te Deus; ibi illi fac uiam, in confessione peccatorum. [That Justice is the one which exists in the confession of sinners: for it is Truth herself. For you must be just in yourself, so that you punish yourself: that is the first Justice of man, that you should punish yourself, being wicked; and God will make you good. Because that is the first Justice of Man, she herself is made the path to God, so that God may come to you: make a path there for him, in the confession of sinners.] 64. Guerrici Abbatis Igniacensis Discipuli S. Bernardi Sermones per Annum: De Adventu Domini Sermo V. Quomodo proficiendum in paranda via Domino, PL 185, cols 26–27. Guerric also applies Psalm 84 to the Purification, where Simeon and Anna reflect Truth and Justice, Jesus and Mary, Mercy and Peace (PL 185, cols 70–1). 65. There is a sense of ‘embrace’, ‘take up’ in suscipere which is difficult to translate without giving the wrong impression. 66. Gradual: Ostende nobis, Domine, misericordiam tuam: et salutare tuum da nobis (verse 8). Benedixisti Domine terram tuam: avertisti captivitatem Jacob (verse 2: opening verse). Offertory: Deus, tu conversus vivicabis nos : et plebs tua lætabitur in te: ostende nobis, Domine, misericordiam tuam, et salutare tuum da nobis (verses 7 and 8). V. Benedixisti Domine terram tuam: avertisti captivitatem Jacob: remisisti iniquitatem plebis tuæ (verses 2 and 3a). V. Misericordia et veritas obviaverunt sibi: veritas de terra orta est, et justitia de coelo prospexit (verses 11a and 12). Missale ad Usum Insignis et Præclaræ Ecclesiæ Sarum, ed. by F.H. Dickinson (Burntisland: E Prelo de Pitsligo; Oxford and London: J. Parker & Soc, 1861–1883), cols 32–3. 67. Petri Comestoris Sermones: Sermo V De Eodem Adventu Domini, PL 198, col. 1737. Sermon on the text Ascendet Dominus super nubem levem, et ingredietur Aegyptum, et movebuntur simulacra Aegypti (Isaiah 19:1), dated by Migne 1179. He speaks at length of the Four Daughters and their roles in man’s creation and salvation. 68. I am not enough of a liturgiologist to know whether their proximity in the liturgy led to their exegesis in this context, or vice versa. The Breviary prescribes the Homily by Bede, which would reinforce all the other material we have been looking at. The N. Town Mary Play is strongly liturgical in mood: this comes over even more strongly in performance, where the amount of singing and ritual is striking. I remarked some time ago on the surprising formality of N. Town where one might, in the tradition of affective piety, expect a more naturalistic emotive

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kissing cousins style of writing: ‘Books for the Unlearned’ in Drama and Religion, ed. by James Redmond, Themes in Drama, 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 65–110, especially 80–1. In this play the intimacy and affection between the two women is communicated by the actors and their relationship; the words move from formality to ‘naturalism’ and back in what looks on the page in a disconcerting way, but which works in performance. 69. Ludolphus, Vita Jesu Christi, p. 49: ‘exsultando et saltando tripudiavit, ac quosdam gestus ad similitudinem exsultantis repræsentatavit.’ 70. Bede, In Lucæ Evangelium Expositio, PL 92, col. 320. The same idea is repeated more briefly in his Advent Homily 2 (PL 94, cols 15–16). 71. Ludolphus, Vita Jesu Christi, p. 30: ‘et quia senex erat, præ verecundia occultabat se mensibus quinque, donec Maria conciperet, et foetus ejus exsultans cum gaudio prophetaret. Licet enim de conceptu et de ablato opprobrio sterilitatis gauderet, propter anilem tamen ætatem aliquantulum erubescebat, ne in senectute videretur libidine vacasse.’ [And because she was old, she hid herself five months, until Mary had conceived, and her foetus, leaping with joy, prophesied. For it is permissible that she should have rejoiced in her conceiving and the taking away of the reproach of her barrenness, nevertheless she was a little ashamed because of her advanced age, lest she should have seemed to have given way to lust in her old age.] 72. Bede, In Lucæ Evangelium Expositio, PL 92, col. 321. 73. Ludolphus, Vita Jesu Christi, p. 51. 74. Bede, Homily 2, PL 94, col. 17. In an elaboration of the Eva/Ave motif, he also makes the point that ‘Bene autem vel Domini vel Joannis exortum matres prophetando præveniunt, ut sicut peccatum a mulieribus coepit, ita etiam bona a mulieribus incipiant, et quæ per unius deceptionem periit, duabus certatim præconantibus mundo vita reddatur’ [And [it is] well that their mothers anticipate the rise of both the Lord and of John by prophesying, since, as sin began from women, so also did good things come into existence from women, and that thing, life, which perished through the deception of one [woman], should be restored to the world by two, striving together in prophecy] (In Lucæ Evangelium Expositio, PL 92, col. 323). 75. The Authorised Version (quoted here) is actually a more accurate translation of the Vulgate text than the Douai, which makes Elizabeth address Mary directly: ‘Blessed art thou who hast believed …’ 76. Bede, Homily 2, PL 94, col. 17. 77. Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, p. 55. 78. Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), II, 128–9. 79. Young, pp. 141, 145, 148. 80. Nicholas Love, The Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ, ed. by Lawrence F. Powell, Roxburghe Club (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), p. 38; Meditationes Vitae Christi in Bonaventura, Opera Omni, ed. by A.C. Peltier (Paris: Vives, 1868), XII, 516. 81. The Meditationes, like Luke, attribute it only to Zacharias (Luke 1:67; Meditationes, p. 518). 82. Mary Play, p. 134. 83. Mary Play, p. 137. 84. Medieval religious plays tend to be associated with the liturgy and the liturgical year, even when they are no longer liturgical plays as such. The same may be said of many cycles in art. Caviness, Canterbury, p. 80, suggests that the typological windows there ‘may best be viewed as a liturgical cycle, comprising Advent,

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kissing cousins Lent, and Easter festivals … Up to [the beginning of Lent] the commentary provided by the types, which are chiefly selected from the Old Testament, is largely ­allegorical’. 85. See note 57. It was however apparently a favourite of Lady Margaret Beaufort, owner of Tattershall after Ralph Baron Cromwell (Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts, pp. 48, 52). 86. David J. King, Stained Glass Tours around Norfolk Churches (Woodbridge: The Norfolk Society, 1974), p. 22; Richard Marks, The Stained Glass of the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity, Tattershall (Lincs.) (New York and London: Garland, 1984: facsimile reprint of Courtauld Institute PhD thesis, 1975), p. 237. 87. M.R. James, Suffolk and Norfolk: A Perambulation of the Two Counties, illustrated by G.E. Chambers (London: Dent, 1930; repr. Bury St Edmunds: Alastair Press, 1987), p. 165. It is possible that they were related to the ‘figure of the Virgin from a Coronation’ in the adjoining window. For the restoration, see Walter Parsons, Salle: The History of a Norfolk Parish (Norwich: Jarrold, 1937), p. 46, though he says nothing more about the original glass. 88. Marks, Tattershall, pp. 269, 271, plates 21a, 21b, and 22. 89. Marks, Tattershall, pp. 33, 233. 90. G. McKnight Rushforth, Medieval Christian Imagery as illustrated by the painted windows of Great Malvern Priory Church, Worcestershire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), pp. 369, 378. 91. Langland, Piers Plowman, Passus 18, 112–259, 407–23, where, in suspense, they observe the Harrowing of Hell and rejoice and are reconciled at the Resurrection. 92. Thomas Chaundler, Liber Apologeticus, ed. by Doris Enright-Clark Shoukri (London and New York: MHRA & Renaissance Society of America, 1974). Shoukri discusses the debate on pp. 19–21. For the debate of the Four Daughters in The Castle of Perseverance, see The Macro Plays, ed. by Mark Eccles, EETS 262 (1969), lines 3129–593. At the end, God emphasises the importance of Mercy at the Last Judgment, but it is Mercy as demonstrated by mankind in doing the Seven Corporal Works. 93. There is no room here to give a full analysis of this: see Chew, The Virtues Reconciled, passim. The Lambeth Bible (London, Lambeth Palace MS 3, fol. 198r) refers them to the Incarnation by presenting them as two branches of a Jesse Tree of which Mary is the stem (Schiller, Iconography, I, p. 19 and fig. 35), where they are part of a balanced composition suggesting the fulfilment of prophecy. The Sherborne Missal depicts Justice and Peace, complete with tituli from the Eton Roundels group, in medallions in the frame of its Crucifixion: Henry, Eton Roundels, p. 65; see The Sherborne Missal facsimile with an introduction by J.A. Herbert (Oxford: Roxburghe Club, 1920), plate 22. For a family of French Books of Hours manuscript illuminations showing the Four Daughters and the Annunciation, see Margaret Manion, The Wharncliffe Hours (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), pp. 58–9 and 89. 94. Chew, The Virtues Reconciled, p. 64. See Anna Gray Bennett, Five Centuries of Tapestry from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and Chronicle Books, 1992), pp. 54–77. 95. Chew, The Virtues Reconciled, pp. 63–4.

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Part IV:

Processions and the wider culture

12 THE FLEMISH OMMEGANG AND ITS PAGEANT CARS

It is extremely frustrating that nobody in England seems to have thought it e­ ither necessary or desirable to leave us so much as a sketch of the mystery play pageant waggon in its heyday. All of our evidence is verbal; moreover, apart from Rogers’ description, none of it was meant to record the appearance of the waggon for posterity – at its most informative, it is still only inventories of items present and items missing. The nearest English pictorial evidence for the appearance of any type of pageant waggon comes from the seventeenthcentury Lord Mayor’s Shows (the earliest illustrated booklet ­appears to be Anthony Munday’s Chrysanaleia, or the Golden Fishing of 1616), and these show pageant floats in our sense: the scenes static, not dramatic, and the subject matter usually secular, not religious.1 So the pictures that appear on the dustcovers of books about medieval English drama are not English at all, but Flemish.2 Nor are they medieval, as such: they date from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. We are probably most familiar with the painting by Denis Van Alsloot, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, of the Triumph of Isabella, Archduchess and joint ruler of the Netherlands, held in the Grand’Place in Brussels on 31 May, 1615.3 I assume that most of my readers will have seen at least a reproduction of this picture. Then George Kernodle drew our attention, nearly forty years ago, to the nineteenth century copies by Edward Van Even of the drawings, now lost, of the Louvain ommegang of 1594 by William Boonen, their Town Clerk.4 (If only Roger Burton had been similarly inspired!) I would like to add to these several less familiar paintings and woodcuts of the then no less celebrated ommegang of Antwerp. For though they are Flemish and not English, and though they look Renaissance and not medieval, they seem to be the nearest we are likely to get to visualising the kind of waggon on which the English mystery plays were performed. These ommegangen (from the verb omgaan, to go around or about) were originally religious processions which on certain holy days went about the town by a prescribed route, carrying the local relics, or a particularly celebrated image, for veneration by the people. Like the Corpus Christi festivals in England, they took place in high summer, which seems, in Northern Europe at least, to be the traditional processional 337

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and holiday season. The Antwerp Procession of the Circumcision took place on Trinity Sunday, divorced from the actual Feast of the Circumcision on 1 January; the other groot ommegang, in honour of the Blessed Virgin, was on the Sunday in August next after in the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady (15 August).5 The Mechelen ommegang in honour of Our Lady of Hanswyck took place in the last fortnight in August (presumably to be near the Feast of the Assumption).6 The Louvain ommegang was slightly later, on 8 September, which is the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin.7 The Brussels ommegang, which also celebrated a statue of Our Lady, Notre Dame de Sablon, was earlier, on the Sunday before Whitsun.8 Most of these ommegang were in honour either of the Blessed Virgin herself or of some relic connected with the Infancy of Christ. They therefore have a strong Marian slant, and later, when the rather eclectic enthusiasm of the earlier processions becomes regularised, the pageant floats are usually organised on a pattern reflecting the Joys and Sorrows of Mary – a programme which had become particularly popular in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries because of the cult of the Rosary.9 Many of these processions were, it was claimed, of great antiquity. They first engaged our attention at the very end of the fourteenth century, when, again in common with the English Corpus Christi and Whitsun processions, they begin to include floats bearing religious tableaux. Before this, it seems, costumed figures representing the Prophets and Apostles, for example, had walked in the processions.10 The first floats appear in Antwerp in 1398, and in 1401 in Louvain and Mechelen. In Brussels, where most of the earlier records were destroyed in the bombardment of 1695, they are certainly going strong by the 1440s.11 These floats increase in number during the fifteenth century; until around 1500 there were, for example, sixteen at Louvain, and possibly about twenty at Antwerp.12 When Dürer saw the Antwerp procession in 1520, ‘It took more than two hours for this ommegang to pass our house, from beginning to end’.13 As the processions grow, secular figures and jeux d’esprit are added to them: eponymous giants and fantastic animals in wickerwork, heroes of folklore like the Four Sons of Aymon and their horse Bayard, local historical figures like Godfrey of Bouillon and the Dukes of Brabant. They seem to coexist quite happily with the Biblical floats, just as in the Norwich St. Luke’s procession, for example, ‘disguisinges and pageauntes … of the liff and marterdams of diuers and many hooly sayntes’ seem to be placed without any sense of incongruity alongside ‘many other light and feyned figures and pictures of other persones and bestes’.14 The main impulse is clearly still religious. During the troubled years of the sixteenth century, however, this secular element of the processions accelerates.15 Guicciardini’s Descrittione … di tutti I Paesi Bassi, published in 1567, describes how he saw ‘molte alter fantasie moderne piaceuoli & gioconde’ [many other new, delightful and amusing devices] mixed with the Biblical floats in the processione solennissima della nostra 338

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Donna in Antwerp.16 These will have included not only the Maid of Antwerp on her triumphal chariot, but also the Giant Antigonus and his children, the Antwerp Elephant ‘soo groot als dleuen’ [as large as life], the Whale ‘lanck meer dan dertich Voeten’ [more than thirty foot long], which carried Neptune on its back, and spouted water through its nostrils on the bystanders, and the pièce de résistance, the great Ship, thirty-three feet high and twenty feet long, crewed by Ionghe Schippers making music on trump and fife, all appropriate to the maritime power and splendour of this great trading city.17 In 1549, when the Brussels ommegang of Our Lady of Sablon was rolled out to celebrate the visit of the Emperor Charles V and his heir Philip, the religious cars were preceded by ‘juegos y inuenciones de diuersas maneras’ [various types of amusements and devices], which included a firebreathing dragon, a griffin, a winged Pegasus (Bayard), a camel with the Tree of Jesse on its back, the Giant and Giantess ‘de espantosas y grandes estaturas dançando al son de vna gayta’ [of terrifying and huge size, dancing to the sound of a bagpipe], and the Giant’s ferocious baby, with its nurse. A rather more charivari-like spectacle was provided by an organ full of cats, played by a boy dressed up as a bear: as he pressed the keys of the organ, strings, some short and some long, pulled the cats’ tails, and ‘sintiendose los gatos tirar par las colas, aullauan cada vno conforme com se dolia, y hazian con sus aullidos altos y baxos vna musica bien entonada, que era’, says Don Christobal Calvete de Estrella, who described the scene, ‘cosa nueua y mucho de ver’ [when the cats felt their tails being pulled, each one yowled according to how much it hurt him, and with their high and low-pitched yowlings they made a very harmonious music, which was a novelty, and quite a spectacle].18 The generally eclectic nature of these mid sixteenth century processions made it equally easy to roll them out for a secular as for a sacred occasion. As we have seen with Charles V and Philip, the local ommegang could be deployed in compliment to the Joyous Entries of a succession of Hapsburg rulers and deputies. Sometimes it was merely the case of certain waggons from the ommegang being used as pageant stages, as with our own Royal Entries (for example, at York and Coventry).19 Sometimes the ommegang itself was paraded, but with the addition of allegorical and triumph chariots alluding to the pretensions and hopes of the city or dynasty. The magpie tendency of all public celebrations to make use of anything they happen to have acquired then asserts itself, and the procession becomes even more mixed. The Giant of Antwerp was, according to tradition, first made by Pieter Coeck van Aalst for the Entry of Charles and Philip into Antwerp in 1549: he was seated on a pageant stage like the other displays, but so impressive was he (according to contemporary accounts, he nodded his head and rolled his eyes most horribly)20 that thereafter he turns up mounted on a waggon as a regular feature of the ommegang. Similarly, when Charles V died in 1558, his exequies were celebrated in Brussels by a solemn procession which culminated in the famous funeral nef, a great ship en forme de galère with black taffeta sails inscribed 339

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with elegiac mottoes in gold, and moving on a counterfeit sea.21 After the funeral, the nef was presented to the city, and it, too, became a regular and much-looked-forward-to part of the ommegang. It appears as the last float in van Alsloot’s Triumph of Isabella, and was still going strong in 1698.22 Despite the upheavals of the Revolt of the Netherlands, the ommegangen survived, partly because the South Netherlands, for reasons discussed by Geyl and others, emerged from the struggle Catholic.23 Even during the iconoclasm of 1566, when so much of Flemish religious art was destroyed, the ommegangen seem to have remained largely untouched, though they went into temporary retirement, possibly because they were associated as much with civic pride and solidarity as with religion. (This is not quite true of the Brussels ommegang, which does seem strangely depleted when it reappears after the troubles: the religious waggons shown in the Triumph of Isabella are merely a handful of those described by Calvete de Estrella, and a rather curious selection, at that.)24 Thus, in the 1580s, while in England the mystery plays are being cold-shouldered out of existence by the Protestant persuasion, in the South Netherlands the ommegangen are being enthusiastically revived. To this period belong the Boonen drawings and the paintings by Van Alsloot. When the traditional ommegang did expire, it was partly from too much religion rather than too little: the Jesuit Schools took over their organisation, and replaced the old-fashioned Biblical waggons by new and extremely learned allegorical Triumphs of the Faith.25 The fact that we have a relatively large number of illustrations of these processions from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is due partly to artistic fashion and partly to patronage, aristocratic and popular. On the popular level, this revival of the ommegangen brought with it a series of printed pamphlets, sometimes illustrated with woodcuts, intended as tourist guides.26 From these we get most of our information about the appearance of the Biblical waggons. On the more exalted level, since the Netherlands were such a sensitive area, their Hapsburg rulers encouraged the publicisation of their Joyous and Triumphant Entries, which were usually accompanied by a reaffirmation of the rights and privileges of the States. The printing house of Christopher Plantin in Antwerp was responsible for some of the more elegant recordings of these Entries.27 These tended to concentrate more on the triumphal arches and other fashionable paraphernalia of the Renaissance triumph al antico, but, as I have said, pageant cars from the ommegang, especially the secular cars, would often be part of the show, and are therefore recorded earlier, from the mid sixteenth century, than the Biblical waggons. The Van Alsloot’s painting belongs to, or at least tries to associate itself with, a slightly different type of patronage. In the Netherlands, the bourgeois Guilds of Archers and Arquebusiers were accustomed to commission group portraits of themselves – Rembrandt’s Night Watch is the most famous example of this fashion. The ommegangen were one of the most important civic events of the year, and the Guilds formed an important traditional part of 340

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the procession. The companion-piece to the Triumph of Isabella, also in the Victoria and Albert (there are others in Brussels and the Prado),28 shows what to them would be the no less fascinating spectacle of each Guild marching with its weapons, and led by its patron saint: the giant St. Christopher, St. Michael and the Devil, St. George (Joris), and St. Margaret and her dragon. This group of paintings was, it is true, commissioned by the Archduchess herself, but she did it to show her solidarity with the civic life of Brussels and its Guilds. The ommegang of that year was a specially festive occasion, mounted to celebrate the Archduchess’ feat in shooting down the popinjay, which made her Queen of the Archers’ Guild for the year.29 Again, the fashion in Netherlandish painting for genre scenes, and scenes from bourgeois life, led to a recording of the details of everyday life unmatched in its own age, and seldom since. Thanks to this, for example, we get a good idea of what an early booth stage looked like, from the Flemish Fair paintings of Brueghel and his followers. Some of the most useful pictures of the Antwerp ommegang come from the late seventeenth century, because of the fashion for painting crowd scenes: from a painter like Van Bredael (Figs. 25–7) or the engraving by Bouttats (Fig. 10) we get an unique picture of what the pageant floats looked like surrounded by people: something which the earlier illustrations, which show the floats in isolation, do not manage to convey.30 So much for the background. The particular interest of our material is, of course, that it shows us what a city, not a court, can produce when it wants to celebrate a civic and religious occasion. Everyone who sees the Triumph of Isabella for the first time comments on the sheer elaboration and richness of the whole affair, even to the extent of saying that it must be a fantasy, or an idealisation. But the written evidence, and the corroborating pictorial evidence from other towns (and I should add, from the Spanish pageant cars illustrated by Alan Nelson on our previous issue)31 confirm it as accurate reportage. Much of the material provided by this evidence is, naturally, secular. It provides extremely interesting parallels with the ‘mixed’ pageant processions like those of Norwich and Dublin, and, of course, with the Chester Ridings. Sheila Williams has already attempted to prove a definite influence of the Antwerp ommegang on the London Lord Mayor’s Show.32 In the rest of this article, however, I intend to concentrate on the religious waggons, and how they reflect on our verbal evidence for the English religious pageant waggon. First, however, in what sense can these late Renaissance waggons be compared with medieval ones? Well, of course, much of our ‘medieval’ English evidence is in fact Renaissance: the Norwich Grocers’ Inventory of 1565 is actually a year later than the Antwerp Ordinantie of 1564.33 This latter describes both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ waggons – the ‘new’ are the allegorical floats devised specially for the occasion, the ‘old’ include the Giant Antigonus, the Maid of Antwerp, Neptune on the Whale, the Elephant, the Ship, and all the Gheestelijcke Poincten (‘Spiritual Items’ – the semantic history of the word 341

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poinct or punct is as tangled as that of the word pageant): the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Three Kings, the Seven Sorrows, the Assumption, and the Last Judgement. The procession seems to be divided very carefully into the sacred and the secular: the secular comes first, the sacred brings up the rear. This seems to be the standard pattern in the later ommegangen, from the middle of the sixteenth century, in Antwerp as in other cities: Van Alsloot is anomalous in mixing the two so thoroughly. The break between the secular and the sacred is often marked in the pamphlets by some such rubric as ‘Daer naer sijn ghevolcht seer vele schoone gheestelijcke puncten ende vercierde waghens’ [After this follow many very beautiful sacred floats and decorated waggons]34 or ‘Ici commencent les Chars de Devotions’.35 It seems likely that the Biblical pageant waggons we see in the illustrations are older in conception if not in actual fact than the secular waggons which precede them. There do not seem to have been many innovations made in the subject matter of the religious waggons after around 1500. By the mid-­sixteenth century, their number seems to have stabilised from around twenty to half that number, and the rather random assembly of scenes of the early and mid-fifteenth century (Antwerp, for example, featured David and Bathsheba, and the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, among others; Louvain, Daniel in the Lions’ Den – the lions were played by four dogs – and the Temptation of St. Anthony)36 to the Marian pattern we see thereafter. (The only exception to this is the fearsomely impressive Antwerp Hell-cart, which forms a pendant to the Day of Judgement, where Mary, of course, appears as intercessor.) This compartmenting of the ommegang into sacred and secular suggests that all the innovation henceforward goes into the secular side: the sacred ‘spiritual waggons’ are there as much to be venerated as to be admired. In the panoramic engraving by Jan Luyken of the Antwerp ommegang of 1682 (Fig. 9), many of the bystanders (mostly, it would seem, women, and many holding rosaries) are shown falling on their knees as the Marian waggons pass.37 Besides this, illustrations of the Antwerp ommegang, which are more numerous and cover a longer period than those of any of the other cities, show that the waggons remained unchanged in form from 1599 to 1696.38 We can probably take this date back to the 1550s at least, when this particular programme of waggons is first evidenced.39 In Louvain, the last complete refurbishment seems to have taken place immediately after 1548, when Jan Van  Rillaert was appointed Pageant Master: his are the designs, Van Even suggests, that we see in Boonen’s drawings.40 Similarly, the Brussels ­ommegang of 1549, as described by Calvete de Estrella, contained waggons bearing tableaux, which we can identify directly in the Van Alsloot painting of 1615.41 It is also interesting that, as one can see in the Van Alsloot painting, the Biblical waggons seem to belong to a completely different style from that of the secular ‘triumph waggons’: a cuboid base, often with a ‘house’ upon it, 342

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in direct contrast to the tilted, right-angled triangle ‘triumph waggon’ of the Renaissance, where the scene slopes backwards and upwards towards the figure of the triumphator at the apex (Fig. 1): This distinction becomes even more marked if we compare, say, the Annunciation waggon (Fig. 8) with the later ‘sacred’ allegorical cars, like the one from Ghent in 1767 (Fig. 2):42 The typology of the Trionfo waggon has not yet been fully investigated,43 but we can see the same sort of contrast if we compare the early quattro-cento version from Italy (which tends to have the same cube-shaped platform we see in these waggons, sometimes with a raised seat on it), with this later ship-like chariot.44 It looks as if in the cube-and-house pattern we have the survival of an earlier style of float: and there seems no reason to believe that it is not basically a late medieval style, which has survived longer in Northern Europe, even though on these pictures we see it with Renaissance trappings.

Fig.1 Biblical waggon and Trionfi waggon © Meg Twycross

Fig.2 ‘Sacred’ allegorical car, Description du Jubilé … 1767 (Ghent: Jean Meyer, 1767) © The British Library Board, 605.e.24

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The connections between Burgundian and English pageantry have been canvassed very persuasively at the court level by Gordon Kipling in his Triumph of Honour.45 Sheila Williams, as I have said, has attempted to do the same on a civic level for the Antwerp ommegang and the London Lord Mayor’s Show, and even given that some of her parallels might have arisen naturally anyway – Gog and Magog were around even before the Giant Antigonus – the general shape of the floats of the Lord Mayor’s Show suggests that we are in a similar tradition, and that details can be fruitfully compared between the two countries. We do not have to confine these links to court and capital. It is also possible that the merchants of York, for example, who in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries traded with and resided in ‘Bruges, Andwarpe, Barow (Bergen op Zoom), and Midilburg’46 would have noticed and even possibly carried back and copied striking details from the ommegangen. The foreign ‘Nations’ in Bruges and Antwerp were certainly expected to be actively involved in the production of pageantry for any Royal Entry. In 1494, when Bianca Maria Sforza, bride of Maximilian after the death of Mary of Burgundy, entered Antwerp, Molinet says that the citizens ‘avoyent … ordenné leurs hystoires trop plus magnifiquement que ceulx de Malines, à cause des nations tant d’Engleterre, de Portugale …’;47 later the same year, they welcomed Maximilian ‘en riches parures, decorement de hours, d’histoires nouvelles et de luminaire à grant plenté comme des joyeusetéz et singuliers esbatemens: et souverainement s’emploièrent ad ce faire les nacions d’Espaigne, de Portugal et d’Engleterre’, who produced a castle hanging in the air which made a most terrifying noise as the Prince passed by.48 In 1549, when Philip of Spain entered Antwerp, the English Nation produced a triumphal arch,49 and the York Mercers’ records contain an acrimonious correspondence between John Fargeon, Governor of the English merchants at Antwerp, and Thomas Appleyard, Master of the York Mercers, on ‘the bearing of suche charge as shulde be spente at the entry of the prynce of Spayne into thys towne of Andwarpe’;50 this is repeated in 1551, as York had failed to pay up.51 York merchants, such as Richard Plumpton, who died at Antwerp in 1545, and Christopher Herbert, who was there in the 1560s, were Pageant Masters in their early days:52 it would be interesting to know if they passed on anything about the ommegangen to their young successors. So what were these waggons like? Far more varied than we might at first have imagined, though they all have a family resemblance – and even more, the portrayal of the same scene in different cities is often remarkably similar. A fair amount of inter-City rivalry and copying seems to have gone on. Of the three cities to which I want to pay special attention, Brussels and Louvain are very similar: Antwerp has a slightly different style of waggon, often like the early cubic triumph car. As has often been noted, the Brussels (Fig. 8) and Louvain (Fig. 3) Annunciations are almost perfect illustrations of the description in the Norwich Grocers’ Inventory: 344

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A pageant, that is to saye, a howse of waynskott paynted and buylded on a carte with fowre whelys A square topp to sett over the sayde howse53 In Louvain and Brussels, this seems to be the dominant pattern for the Biblical waggons. The Louvain Fifteen Degrees (Fig. 11), Annunciation (Fig. 3), Visitation, Nativity (Fig. 5), Resurrection (Christ Appears to His Mother: Fig. 4), and Pentecost (Fig. 12), and the Brussels Annunciation (Fig. 8), Nativity (Fig. 7), and Doctors are all houses on carts. They are not, however, solid houses, or even three-walled booth houses. In each case the house ‘walls’ have vanished: the roof is held up on four or more pillars placed at the corners, thus giving the spectators a view through from all four sides: ‘beinge all open to the behoulders’.54 Sometimes the wall may be built up to a knee-high parapet, as with most of the Louvain waggons, and the Brussels and Antwerp Nativity (Fig. 4). The roofs, both Brussels and Louvain, look far too substantial to be easily dismountable, and there is no suggestion in the Antwerp Inventory of 1571 that this was so,55 but then the Flemish waggons were stored in large halls en masse – in Louvain in the Halle au Blé (Van Even says that in 1484 a special coach house, with very large doors known as the Reuzenpoort [Giants’ gate], was built by it for the cars and figures),56 and in Antwerp in the Steenen

Fig.3 Louvain Annunciation      Van Even, L’Omgang de Louvain, Pl. XIV © The British Library Board, 9930.i.11

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Fig.4 Louvain Resurrection      Van Even, L’Omgang de Louvain, Pl. XX © The British Library Board, 9930.i.11

Eeckhof, the City arsenal and storehouse– so there was presumably no need to take them apart for storage.57 Most of the Brussels roofs are flat, with decorated parapets: the roofs themselves are heaped festively with green boughs (Fig. 8). The exception is the pitched, thatched roof of the Nativity cart. Of the Louvain roofs, only two, the Nativity again (though the thatch, ragged in the Brussels car, has completely disappeared – ‘þe ruffe is rayned aboven oure hede’58 –leaving only the bare rafters: Fig. 5), and the Annunciation are pitched: the others are flat. Of the Antwerp waggons, which follow a rather different pattern, only two have roofs, the Nativity and Epiphany (Fig. 6): both represent the stable, both are pitched, and look thatched, but the Epiphany waggon is always shown as much higher than the Nativity, and whereas the Nativity stable is supported on four pillars, the Epiphany stable soars on two: it is more a canopy than a roof. Above it rises the star of the Magi. In two cases the Louvain roofs are made to support steeples, as in the Chester Purification and Temptation plays.59 The Temple steeple in the Presentation of the Virgin is purely ornamental, as far as I can see (Fig. 11). The Pentecost steeple may have been used to lower the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove, though in the illustration divine inspiration is quite 346

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Fig.5 Louvain Nativity      Van Even, L’Omgang de Louvain, Pl. XVI © The British Library Board, 9930.i.11

Fig.6 Jan Luyken, Antwerp Epiphany and Nativity waggons, detail from De Jarelijkse Triumphante Omgang tot Antwerpen (1682).      From Edward Brown Naauwkeurige en gedenkwaardige reysen … door Nederland, Duytsland, Hongaryen (Amsterdam: Jan Claesz ten Hoorn, 1682) engraving Boek I, p. 45. © Antwerp City Archives. Reproduced by kind permission of the Board of Burgomaster & Aldermen of Antwerp

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Fig.7 Brussels Nativity waggon 1615 (detail) from Denis Van Alsloot, The Triumph of Isabella (painting) © Victoria and Albert Museum

Fig.8 Brussels Annunciation waggon 1615 (detail) from Denis Van Alsloot, The Triumph of Isabella (painting) © Victoria and Albert Museum

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Fig.9 Antwerp Ommegang 1682. Jan Luyken De Jarelijkse Triumphante Omgang tot Antwerpen (1685)    1. The Ship  2. The Whale  3. The Sea-Chariot  4. The Elephant  5. The Great Giant  6. The Little Giants  7. Mount Parnassus  8. The Maid of Antwerp  9. The Annunciation  10. The Visitation  11. ‘Bethlehem’  12. The Three Kings  13. The Camels  14. The Circumcision  15. The Seven ‘Hours’ (Joys and Sorrows)  16. St Christopher  17. The Judgement  18. Hell © Antwerp City Archives. Reproduced by kind permission of the Board of Burgomaster & Aldermen of Antwerp.

adequately shown by the tongues of fire the Apostles are balancing on their heads (Fig. 12). There are two men walking alongside the cart holding cords, which run to the summit of the of the pinnacle. They are not, I think, as might first appear, lowering the Holy Ghost, but helping to keep the steeple steady. The same thing is happening in the curious tiered wedding cake construction of the Nine Orders of Angels (Fig. 13). In 1464, there is a note in the Louvain accounts of payment to four men: Pauwelse vanden Bossche, Peter vanden Bossche the Younger, Janne Katsuers, and Arnde vanden Savelpoele, ‘die den Ommegangck … hilpen verwaren en houden met corden die ix choiren der Ingeln dat in gene mesvalle comen en souden’ [who helped in the ommegangen by holding the Nine Orders of Angels with cords, so that no mishap should come to it].60 Which only proves, both that medieval pageant structures could be unstable, and that medieval pageant masters knew how to cope with it. Presumably, since the tableaux were static, the ommegang pageants did not need pitched roofs to conceal lifting and other gear: though there is plenty of evidence for other kinds of machinery, especially if it involved jets of flame or streams of water.61 It is hard, in this context, to interpret the description of the Brussels Assumption waggon of 1549 by Calvete De Estrella: Our Lady was ‘vna hermossisima donzella vestida de raso blanco 349

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Fig.10 Gasper Bouttats, Verbeeldinghe vanden Triumphanten Jaerelycksen Ommeganck van Antwerpen (1685) © Antwerp City Archives Reproduced by kind permission of the Board of Burgomaster & Aldermen of Antwerp.

cercada de muchos Angeles que cantando suauissimamente la subian en alto’ [a very pretty damsel dressed in white satin surrounded by many angels who were singing sweetly as they raised her upwards].62 Was the scene frozen, as in the Descent of the Holy Spirit upon Mary in the Van Alsloot Annunciation waggon (Fig. 8)? Or was the girl playing the Virgin actually raised (and presumably lowered again) as the cart went along? The Louvain Assumption (Fig. 14) seems to be making use of one of those wooden figures of the Woman Clothed with the Sun which are to be found in so many Netherlandish and German churches at the end of the Middle Ages, but she might be a real person. This waggon was first made in 1482:63 unless it was very heavily restored by van Rillaert in the 1540s, it could be contemporary with the York Assumption pageant that greeted Henry VII on his Royal Entry into York in 1486.64 The figure appears, though the drawing is uncertain, to be hanging in an apse-shaped embrasure under a painted representation of the Trinity. The whole construction is steadied with stay-rods (‘Irens to bere vppe heuen’?).65 From the drawing it looks unlikely that this Virgin would ever actually ­ascend to the higher stage. 350

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Fig.11 Louvain Presentation of the Virgin      Van Even, L’Omgang de Louvain, Pl. XIII © The British Library Board, 9930.i.11

There are not really enough of the Brussels Biblical waggons in Van Alsloot’s painting to determine whether the house-on-a-platform pattern was the most common there. Calvete De Estrella only describes the tableaux, not the shape of the waggons, except for the very first: ‘Enel primero auia vna quadra hecho de quarto colunas Doricas que sostenian vn chapitel hecho como corona, sobre la qual estaua vn Angel vestido de blanco y en la quadra y sobre las colunas auia otros niños como Angeles que cantauan con muy suaues bozes’ [On the first car was a pavilion made of four Doric pillars holding up a spire made like a crown, on which was an angel dressed in white, and in the pavilion and on the pillars were other children as angels, who sang with very sweet voices].66 This sounds like a less elaborate form of the Louvain Presentation car (Fig. 11), with real people for the carved angelic figures. The only real non-house type of waggon is the Jesse Tree, of which more later. The Louvain waggons, though elaborate in terms of the multiplication of pillars and balustrades, are again mostly of this design. The one thing that has always bothered me about the house on a waggon with a roof at Norwich is that it is the Garden of Eden, and Gardens do not normally have roofs. The Lemontree Island of the Golden Fishing seems quite happy without one.67 For such a thing to be possible, there must be a fairly 351

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Fig.12 Louvain Pentecost      Van Even, L’Omgang de Louvain, Pl. XXI © The British Library Board, 9930.i.11

strong tradition of waggons with roofs for some other reason than verisimilitude. But even though the Louvain Garden of Eden has no roof, it still manages, with the elaboration of the gate and the fountain, to suggest that it has one (Fig. 15). It is the same with the rest of the Louvain waggons: where possible, a scene will be shown taking place in an ‘interior’, but even where it is not, there is still the tendency to enclose the space, often very elaborately, with parapets and other architectural features. One can understand that the actors in the tableaux needed to be given a sense of security as they lurched along the streets: it is surprising how dangerous even a standing open stage of rather small dimensions can feel when your feet are your own height above the ground: and even more surprising how much safer the mere fact of four corner poles and a roof can make you feel. It must be something to do with the way the eyes measure and define space in relation to balance. It also seems true of open-air floats that they need some kind of upward definition to give the figures on them a scale and focus: otherwise the limit becomes the sky, and the effect of the grouping – how the figures relate to each other – is dissipated in the vastness of the space around it. Added to this here I think we have an aesthetic motivation, the medieval 352

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Fig.13: Louvain Nine Orders of Angels       Van Even, L’Omgang de Louvain, Pl. XXIII © The British Library Board, 9930.i.11

desire to frame significant scenes, particularly when they are to be looked at in sequence. It is of course difficult to be absolutely sure that the illustrations show the pageant as it would have appeared to the original onlookers: the illustrator himself is composing a picture. So Van Alsloot has drawn the pillars of the Annunciation waggon slightly set in from the corners of the waggon platform, so as to leave a margin round the outside on which the angel can stand (Fig. 8): he then splays the perspective slightly so as to give us more of the back of the waggon than we would have been able to see in real life. By doing these two things, he is able to place one of the pillars between the archangel Gabriel and Mary and thus give us the traditional image of the angel subintrans in conclave. (Boonen (Fig. 3) does something very similar, by making the pillar cut across the figure of Gabriel.) We cannot tell if the effect was intended or achieved in the original pageant, though it is worthwhile remembering that they were probably designed, painted, and posed by the official Town Painter, as Pageant Master.68 Generally there is a very strong sense of framing, achieved by a number of means, so that any overspill or projection – the star on the roof of the Antwerp Three Kings, God the Father on the Louvain Nativity, the angel on the roof of the Brussels Nativity, the shepherds who in 353

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Fig.14 Louvain Assumption of the Virgin      Van Even, L’Omgang de Louvain, Pl. XXII © The British Library Board, 9930.i.11

all three cities follow the Nativity waggon on foot – is made so much the more striking. A roof has several practical purposes. It keeps the rain off: you can hang props, like the Dove of the Holy Ghost, from it. But it is also, in processions, a canopy, a sign of honour. It is noticeable that whereas the Valladolid pageant cars described by Alan Nelson in our last issue did not have canopies, and nor do the Seville Holy Week cars which show scenes from the Passion, the Seville cars which carry statues of the Blessed Virgin are most elaborately canopied. Canopies are held over the King making a Royal Entry; over the Blessed Sacrament in the Corpus Christi procession. It is noticeable that several of the early Trionfi illustrations which show the triumphator seated on the box-like chariot add a canopy, either held independently over his head by attendants or as part of the waggon: they all manage to give the foursquare ‘house’ effect that Rogers seems to be trying to describe, a most unclassicallooking shape.69 The Antwerp waggons, which, as I have said, differ in general shape from those of Louvain and Brussels, reinforce this feeling. They are on the whole the open trionfo type of waggon, but still contrive to distinguish their 354

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Fig.15 Louvain Garden of Eden      Van Even, L’Omgang de Louvain, Pl. V © The British Library Board, 9930.i.11

important figures by some kind of architectural setting which frames and overtops them. The Annunciation waggon has no roof but instead the Virgin kneels before a baldacchino canopy (Figs. 16 and 17). The Visitation and Circumcision waggons set the important figures in high-backed chairs (Figs. 18 and 19): Gordon Kipling’s Throne of Honour?70 The Visitation scene is not the familiar one of the two women meeting on foot, but has been copied from the woodcarvings of the Virgin and St. Anne seated side by side which were so popular in the Netherlands at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century (Fig. 20).71 The Trinity (this is the only picture of this particular waggon) stand together under a portico-like construction (Fig. 21). In Louvain and Brussels, the Jesse figure is distinguished by his baladacchino pavilion, set round the base of the Tree (Figs. 23 and 24). One can see the same kind of thing happening in paintings such as the Munich Seven Joys of the Virgin, by Memling (1480): where possible, each of the Joys is placed not only in an architectural frame – which may be ­emphasising the privacy of Mary’s character and experience – but the figure of Mary herself is placed under some subsidiary canopy; the ruined gable of the stable, the red canopy of her bed, even, in Pentecost, the fireplace of the upper room.72 355

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Fig.16 Antwerp Annunciation waggon      Jan Luyken, Antwerp Ommegang, 1682 (detail)

© Antwerp City Archives Reproduced by kind permission of the Board of Burgomaster & Aldermen of Antwerp.

Fig.17 Antwerp Annunciation waggon. Bouttats, 1685 Verbeeldinghe (detail)

© Antwerp City Archives Reproduced by kind permission of the Board of Burgomaster & Aldermen of Antwerp.

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Fig.18 Antwerp Circumcision waggon    Jan Luyken, Antwerp Ommegang, 1682 (detail)

© Antwerp City Archives Reproduced by kind permission of the Board of Burgomaster & Aldermen of Antwerp.

Fig.19 Antwerp Visitation waggon      Jan Luyken, Antwerp Ommegang, 1682 (detail)

© Antwerp City Archives Reproduced by kind permission of the Board of Burgomaster & Aldermen of Antwerp.

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Fig.20 Antwerp Visitation scene on waggon     Christopher Van Essen, Antwerpsche Omme-gangh ofte Lvst-Triumphe (Antwerp: Jacob van Ghelen, 1649) woodcut, no 15 © Antwerp City Archives

Fig.21 Antwerp Trinity scene on waggon    Van Essen, Antwerpsche Omme-gangh woodcut, no. 18 © Antwerp City Archives

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The House and Throne shapes are by no means the only ones. Unfortunately we have no pictorial records of the few fifteenth-century Crucifixion waggons: it would be interesting to see if they were enclosed or open, as in the Spanish pageant cars. We do, however, have examples of certain other popular shapes: shapes so popular in both Biblical and secular processions that it seems they have to turn up, under whatever pretext. These include the Tree, the Mountain, and the Ship. To these we should add the Fantastic Animal, and the Antwerp Judgement and Hell. The Tree appears as a prop in the Louvain Garden of Eden, and, in a much more impressive form, as the Jesse Tree (Fig. 23); in Brussels again as the Jesse Tree (Fig. 24) and in Antwerp as the Tree of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin (Fig. 22). The Antwerp Tree is delightfully formalised: it looks like a dressing table ring-tree writ large. In fact it is a rosary, bearing portrait medallions of the Seven Sorrows: in the middle is the figure of the Blessed Virgin with the Sword of Sorrow piercing her heart – ‘an iron sword for the Rod’ (1571 Inventory). At its foot sit fourteen maidens representing the Seven Joys and the Seven Sorrows. Unfortunately the waggon itself is not included in the 1571 Inventory, though several of the costumes and props associated with it are mentioned (and it is called ‘The Rod of Jesse’ which suggests that a certain thematic recycling has been going on). Van Even quotes several items from the Louvain archives about their Jesse Tree. It was among the first of the waggons to be constructed, in 1401: it was renewed in 1446, and again in 1486, when it was completely remade, with iron branches and, in the open flowers, thirteen Prophets and Kings (only twelve are visible in the Van Even engraving, but otherwise it answers to this description) with gilt-bronze crowns and wooden sceptres (Fig. 23). The Virgin at the top, seated in the crescent moon, is not however a statue but a real girl: in 1495, ‘Berbele, die dochter inde Sterne … conterfeyt onse Lieve Vrouwe sittende op de roede van Yessé’ [Barbara, daughter of the landlord of the Star, played Our Lady sitting on top of the Jesse Tree].73 The Brussels Jesse Tree (Fig. 24) is even more alarming: all the Prophets and Kings seated in the tree are real children. Calvete de Estrella actually describes two Jesse Trees in the 1549 procession, one mounted on a waggon and one on a camel: el qua traya encima vn artificio hecho de bastones como ramos de arbol, que salian de vn tronco, y al cabo de cada vno d’ellos estaua hecho vn assiento, donde yua puesto vn niño muy pequeño, y d’esta manera yuan enel arbol onze niños en sus assientos todos desnudos, muy sossegados y seueros en sus rostros, que era marauilla de ver aquello en tan poco edad, que no passaua ninguno d’ellos de quatro años. Representauan el arbol d’el linaje y Reyes de donde la sagrada Virgen nuestra Señora decendia. 359

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Fig.22 Antwerp Seven Sorrows waggon     Jan Jegher(s), Icy voeyez vous la Triumphante procession d’Anvers (Antwerp: 1649) panoramic series of woodcuts (detail) © Antwerp City Archives

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Fig.23 Louvain Jesse Tree      Van Even, L’Omgang de Louvain, Pl. XII © The British Library Board, 9930.i.11

[which carried on its back a wooden framework like the branches of a tree, which sprang from a trunk, and at the very end of each of them was fashioned a seat in which was deposited a very small boy: and in this way there were in the tree eleven children in their seats, quite naked, and very poised and grave of countenance, so that it was a wonder to see this in creatures so young, for not one of them was over four years old. They represented the Tree of the lineage and Royal ancestry of the Blessed Virgin Our Lady.] There was another Jesse Tree, this time on a waggon, also with small boys perching on the seats, and ‘enla cumbre d’el arbol vna linda niña vestida de blanco con vn niño pequeño en sus braços’ [on the apex of the tree was a comely girl dressed in white with a small boy-child in her arms];74 this time the children represented the Holy Kindred. Those who are worried about the instability of certain over-tall pageant waggons should consider the willingness of the citizens of Brussels to entrust their four-year-old children to the Jesse Tree. The one at Coventry was at least static!75 The Mountain is another favourite shape, well evidenced in indoor entertainments in England as well as in outdoor pageants.76 The Chester ‘king 361

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Fig.24 Brussels Jesse tree waggon      Denis Van Alsloot, The Triumph of Isabella, 1615 (detail) © Victoria and Albert Museum

Fig.25 Antwerp Judgement and Hell     Alexander van Bredael, Ommegang in the Grote Markt. Antwerp, ?1696: painting (detail). Musée de l’Hospice Comtesse, Lille Courtesy of the Musée des Beaux Arts, Lille

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Fig.26 Alexander van Bredael, Ommegang in the Grote Markt, Antwerp (?1696)    Courtesy of the Musée des Beaux Arts, Lille © Victoria and Albert Museum

herod & the mount victoriall’,77 the York Transfiguration, and possibly the Abraham and Isaac plays may have used a mountain something like the Antwerp Parnassus (Fig. 28). It is an extravagant and extremely tall affair arranged in tiers, with Pegasus at the summit striking the ground with his hoof and not one but many Castalian fountains springing out in response: ‘tusschen beiden siet-men uyt-bersten menichte Fonteynen, tot groot Contentement vande aenschowers’ [at intervals many fountains could be seen gushing forth, to the great delight of the spectators].78 The 1571 Inventory mentions ‘three copper pipes for the fountains’. The Ship was also a highly popular feature of entertainments indoors and out, both in the Low Countries and England (Fig. 29). None of the ommegang ships actually represents the Ark, though there is an account, unfortunately not illustrated, of a stationary three-tier one in the Brussels ommegang of 1688.79 Any suggestion that the Shipwrights would have been satisfied with a makeshift or even imaginary affair must be refuted by one look at these magnificent galleons, dressed overall and laden with allegorical passengers and crew. Their bases are hung with painted cloths: ‘Ceste nef estoit mise sur une mer contrefaicte, de sorte qu’on ne pouvoit veoir comme elle procedoit’ 363

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Fig.27  Alexander van Bredael, Ommegang in the Meir, Antwerp (?1696) Courtesy of the Musée des Beaux Arts, Lille

[this ship was set on an artificial sea, in such a way that one could not see how it moved along].80 This mysterious locomotion will be considered when we come to the matter of propulsion. The Antwerp Day of Judgement and Hell carts are classics of their kind (Figs. 25, 30–2). Judgement is unfortunately nothing at all like the York Mercers’ waggon: it has no roof, no machinery, though it has clouds and the rainbow. Christ, dressed in ‘a red silk mantle lined with red linen’ and a white loincloth (1571 Inventory) is seated on a massive rainbow, his feet resting in clouds, holding in his hand the banner of the Cross. Below him, Mary and John the Baptist, also in clouds, intercede: below them, two angels blow the Last Trump. The floor of the waggon represents the earth, from which the figures of the dead are rising, waist high: the central figure is Death, in the form of a skeleton, who beckons to the audience with one long bony finger (Fig. 30). It is ‘Eenen schriekelijcken ende vervaerlijcken wagen’ [A hideous and fearful waggon]81 and inspired the chapbook writers to heights of minatory eloquence. Following it is the ‘schroomlijck backhuys’ [fearful bakehouse] of Hell. We are used to seeing Hellmouth in two dimensions and mostly from the front: in three dimensions, this one looks rather like an enraged hippopotamus. 364

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Fig.28 Antwerp Parnassus waggon    Jan Jegher(s), La Triumphante procession (detail) © Antwerp City Archives

One illustration shows three little devils inside its jaws: ‘Item, noch drie duivelshoofden, in de helle’ [Item, three more devils’ heads, in Hell].82 Another devil, hideous and leathery-winged, sits between its ears as a charioteer, armed with a fleshhook: others, including a well-endowed female devil, dance alongside (Fig 32).83 It belches fire and smoke, an effect considerably  enhanced in the dusk, as one can see from the Van Bredael painting (Fig. 25). 365

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Fig.29 Antwerp, The Ship     Joannes Bochius, Descriptio publicæ gratulationis, spectaculorum et ludorum, in aduentu sereniss. principis Ernesti Archiducis Austriae … an. M.D.XCIIII… (Antwerp: Plantin, 1595) page 121 © The British Library Board, 808.m.3

Leaving the superstructure for a while, how were these waggons propelled? Most of them were horse-drawn: the Brussels waggons by two pairs of horses, the Antwerp ones (where the horses are shown) by one, two, or even three pairs of horses. Hosley suggests that the Louvain artist’s habit of showing strings of single horses hitched in tandem is shorthand for showing pairs, and that we should multiply by two each time, which seems plausible.84 The Louvain artist also shows the shafts, poles, and allied gear fairly clearly. Where the wheels show in the Van Alsloot painting of the Brussels waggons, there are four of them, the back pair being rather larger than the front, which 366

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Fig.30 Antwerp Last Judgement and Hell waggons. Bouttats, 1685 Verbeeldinghe (detail) © Antwerp City Archives Reproduced by kind permission of the Board of Burgomaster & Aldermen of Antwerp

possibly suggests moveable steering. Most of the Brussels wheels, however, are concealed by extremely elaborate ‘painted cloths’ which run all round the waggon, hanging from just under the edge of the platform to the ground. It is not easy to see how they are attached, unless the bottom table of the cornice is detachable and acts as a pelmet, as in the Valladolid waggons. The Louvain hangings, which are fringed, and look much more like curtains, could in some cases be attached like this. There is something unnaturally smooth about Van Alsloot’s hanging which emphasises the squared-off nature of the waggon’s base. The Antwerp waggons also have concealed wheels, but in this case it looks as if the cloths have been replaced by a wooden surround masking the wheels; the decoration suggests carved panelling. 367

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Fig.31 Antwerp Last Judgement and Hell. Jan Luyken Antwerp Ommegang (detail) © Antwerp City Archives

About half the Antwerp waggons are, however, not waggons at all, but sleds (Fig. 33). The 1571 Inventory divides the ‘large pieces’ [groote stucken] into waghens and sledden. Of the Biblical floats, Augustus and the Sibyl, the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Three Kings, the Last Judgement, and Hell, are all called sleds: only the Circumcision and the Trinity are waggons. This corresponds with Jan Jeghers’ 1649 woodcuts, save that ­ his  Last  Judgement  is  a waggon. His Seven Sorrows is also a waggon. Surprising as this is to us, it seems on consideration to be eminently sensible, as the Sledmen were the heavy hauliers of the medieval city, and runners would probably move more smoothly over cobbles than wheels. The remaining carts are those which have no visible means of locomotion, such as the Ship and the various Antwerp Seamonsters and Fishes. The Inventory of 1571 calls the chariot of ‘Nereus and Doris’ a sledde, but doesn’t mention how the Fish, the Seamonster, or the Ship are propelled. It does, however, list ‘tweendertich halsbanden die den Vis ende het Zeemonster draegt’ [32 collars for those who drew the Fish and the Seamonster]. The Jegher illustration shows two little windows in the front end of the Neptune chariot (Fig. 34); in the same place on the Dolphin (Fig. 35) and the Whale there are sea-monster masks. These windows also appear in the 1698 painting by Van Bredael (Fig. 27). They are peepholes for the leading pullers concealed under the stage by the skirts of the waggon; as with some of Alan Nelson’s Valladolid cars. An illustration to a London Pope-Burning of 1680 shows more clearly what is going on (Fig. 36).85 The men inside the Whale also worked the pumps which spewed water from its mouth and ears (?) on the crowd: ‘desen Vis spuydt overvloedig waeter uyt sijn in-ghewandt’ (Fig. 37).86 Sixteen bearers suggests 368

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Fig.32 Antwerp Hell     Copy of Jan Jeghers’ woodcut, in F.W. Fairholt, Lord Mayor’s Pageants (London: T. Richards for the Percy Society, 1843) page xxx

a considerable weight: one cannot tell if the Whale and Ship were sleds or on wheels – they look too heavy to be litters. Though they do not strictly count as waggons, one ought to mention the Fantastic Animals, especially since James Laver seems to believe that the Brussels quartet (Fig. 7) are real camels dressed up.87 Real camels appear in the foreground of the picture, but those in the background are wickerwork beasts, whose long skirts disguise the legs of the men inside them. The Louvain illustrations make this perfectly clear (Fig. 38). Though they are distinctly ‘folkloric’ in aspect, and multiply in number and variety as the years go by, they seem originally to have been meant for the Three Kings to ride on. They were introduced into the Louvain procession in 1482, and were called the ‘drie kemelen oft beesten daer die drie Coninghen op ryden in die processie’ [three camels or beasts on which the Three Kings ride in the procession],88 and one of the things which particularly struck Dürer as he watched the Antwerp ommegang in 1520 was ‘die heiligen 3 konig auff grosen camelthiren und auff andern selczamen wundern reidend’ [the Holy Three Kings riding on great camels and other marvellous monsters].89 The 369

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Fig.33  Antwerp Annunciation and Visitation floats     Jegher(s), La Triumphante procession (detail) © Antwerp City Archives

Louvain camels were made on the pattern of the great wickerwork Bayard, ridden by all four Sons of Aymon first in 1428. The Sons were all small boys, presumably because of their weight: Bayard and his passengers were carried by two men only.90 This is presumably what the Dublin ‘camell’ and the Chester ‘drombandarye’ looked like.91 It is difficult to determine the dimensions of the waggons, for various reasons. Some dimensions are given for the more striking secular pieces, and we can try to compare their relative heights with the Biblical waggons when they appear together in the panoramic pictures, but any deductions must only be approximate. They are very tall. The Antwerp Giant was twenty-seven foot high; the Whale twenty-seven foot long and seventeen foot high, Neptune’s Chariot was twenty-eight foot long, the Ship twenty foot long and thirty foot high. No widthways dimensions are given.92 The attempts by Hosley to estimate the dimensions of the Brussels waggons from Van Alsloot’s painting shows how difficult this can be.93 He decides on a possible ten foot wide by thirteen foot long for the Annunciation waggon, 370

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Fig.34 Antwerp Neptune float     Jegher(s), La Triumphante procession (detail) © Antwerp City Archives

twelve foot by twenty foot for the Nativity. This could well be right, but we must be careful. The Parnassus waggon looks much the same size, base-wise, as the Nativity waggon: yet the English Court Revels managed to get the same cast on a ‘Chariott of xiiij foote Long & viij foote brode with a Rock vpon it & a fountayne therin with the furnishing and garnishing therof’ which seems to have included a seat.94 People tend to overestimate the amount of space needed to group standing figures in a tableau, especially if they are slightly raked. The Lord Mayor’s Show waggons quoted by Morrissey were only one of them over eight foot wide, and that was a pageant ten foot square: the others were respectively eight foot wide by fifteen, fourteen (twice) and thirteen foot long.95 Hosley points out that the artist tends to use different scales for the actors in the tableaux and the characters on the ground. It is not even safe to make guesses from the actors, as many of them seem to be children. The Angel in the Brussels Annunciation is a child (Fig. 8), if one looks a second time: ‘Era el Arcangel San Gabriel vn niño blanco y rubio vestido de blanco, y 371

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Fig.35 Antwerp Dolphin float     Van Essen, Antwerpsche Omme-gangh woodcut, no 5 © Antwerp City Archives

nuestra Señora vna hermossisima donzella vestida de tafetan blanco’ [The Archangel Gabriel was a boy, red and white, dressed in white: and Our Lady a most beautiful damsel dressed in white taffeta].96 The four-year-old Kings on the Jesse Tree are an extreme example (Fig. 24), as are the children riding on the camels. It is difficult to tell if Don Christobal only mentions child actors when they are conspicuously not grown up, and his word for the girls playing the Virgin is either niña or donzella, which seems to mean just ‘girl’. Bergeron, a French visitor to Antwerp in 1619, speaks of the pageants as being ‘assez bien representez par jeunes filles et garcons’:97 in the Antwerp Landjuweel of 1561, an English visitor described how the Brussels Chamber of Rhetoric entered in seven pageants ‘being carried by 150 men; and the pageants being so trymmyd with young children in cloth of gold, silver, and satin in all colours so embroidered and wrought, and to such good purpose, that I cannot tell what to write of them’, but later he speaks of the waggons as bearing ‘very faire personages’.98 The Maid of Antwerp and her attendants look very grown up until we come to the picture of them in Rubens’ Entry of the Archduke Ferdinand (1635), when it suddenly becomes apparent that they are all little girls.99 In some cases, living people seem to have shared the stages 372

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Fig.36  The Solemn Mock Procession (detail) (a London Pope-Burning)    The solemn mock procession of the Pope cardinalls Jesuits fryers &c. through the citty of London November the 17th, 1680 ([London:] Nathaniel Ponder, etc., [1680]) © The British Library Board, C.20.f.6.(26.)

with carved figures and automata,100 but these seem to be the later rather than the medieval pageants, which if anything went in for rather disconcerting realism.101 The stage platforms of the Brussels waggons seem to be of a roughly standard height from the ground; rather higher than the heads of the shepherds accompanying the Nativity waggon. The Louvain drawings are useless in this respect: the artist has used a different scale for the undercarriage, which strikes him as less important than the tableau it carries. The Antwerp waggons seem to be of differing heights, but none seems to be below shoulder height, and most are represented as being above head height. When one looks at the crowd scenes of Bouttats and Van Bredael, the reason for this is obvious. Access to the Maid of Antwerp’s carriage in the Rubens illustration is by a draped gangway almost as long as the waggon itself; in the Bochius Entry of Albert and Isabella it is by a flight of steps.102 These tableaux never developed into plays, probably because there was a strong independent tradition of semi-professional dramatic performance by 373

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Fig.37 Antwerp, The Whale    Bochius, Descriptio publicæ gratulationis page 123 © The British Library Board, 808.m.3

Fig.38 Louvain, wickerwork Pelican and Camel    Van Even, L’Omgang de Louvain, Pl. XIX (detail) © The British Library Board, 9930.i.11

the Chambers of Rhetoric.103 The Rederijckers (‘Rhetoricians’) were a far more organised body of literary men than anything that existed in England at the time: each City had several ‘Chambers’ and national competitions were held for plays composed on a set theme. The Rederijckers would sometimes 374

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present a dramatic performance on a fixed stage after the ommegang: Boonen’s drawing shows a performance of the Judgement of Solomon taking place on a booth stage in the main square of Louvain (Fig. 39). These plays were never of Cycle length, and as far as I know do not appear to have used the waggons as stages. Nonetheless, I think we are right in seeing these waggons as all but dramatic. They are not static allegorical groups: they show incidents in a story, frozen in a carefully arranged pictorial tableau, but with the potential of movement and speech. The Angel has just arrived, the Virgin looks up from her book: ‘Estaua de rodillas con vn libro en las manos, que era cosa de maravilla de ver la modestia y honestidad de su rostro’ [she was on her knees with a book in her hands, that it was a marvel to see the modesty and candour of her countenance].104 A great deal is made of ‘speaking’ gestures: Gabriel holds up his hand in the traditional herald’s greeting; the child Christ in the Brussels Doctors holds his  up as if preaching; the Resurrected Christ of Louvain greets his Mother with a gesture of blessing. The chapbooks attempt to supply the words: ‘Wat seyt dat Engeltien, aen die Maeghet? hy seyt aldus …’ [What is the little Angel saying to the Virgin? he is saying this …].105 But the pageants themselves often supply them, inscribed in cartouches on the waggon skirts, on placards, on scrolls held by the characters: the Brussels Angel of the Nativity holds a scroll inscribed GLORIA IN EXCELSIS DEO, the skirts of the Annunciation waggon proclaim AVE MARIA, as does the placard across the canopy of  the ‘bed’ on the Antwerp waggon: in Jeghers, a man marches before the Antwerp Judgement waggon with a placard saying RECTVM IVD (IC) IVM TVVM DOMINE (Fig. 40). The mottoes vary between the dramatic (what are the characters actually saying?), the hortatory (what moral are we to draw from this?) and the explanatory (what does this mean?). Sometimes there are various mottoes of differing length: Bouen den Hemel stont gheschreuen Deo Trino & Vni ende wat benedenn Tres viros vidit Abraham, vnum adorauit. Voor wert ghedraghen in dese inscriptie: Die aenbidt eenen Godt in persoonen Dryvuldick Ghelijck Abraham eertijdts heft ghedaen, Wordt hier gheloont seer menichfuldich Ende sal namaels des Hemels croon ontfaen106 [Above the heaven was inscribed To God in Three and One, and somewhat below, Abraham saw three men and worshipped one. In front was borne this motto: Who worships One God in Persons Three As Abraham did of yore, Shall be repaid here plenteously, And Heaven’s crown gain therefore.] 375

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Fig.39 Louvain: ‘Standing Play’ of The Judgement of Solomon    Van Even, L’Omgang de Louvain, PL. XXXVI © The British Library Board, 9930.i.11

If the characters do not speak, except in writing, they are however allowed to sing: ‘Hier boven state ghescreven Gloria in Excelsis Deo etc… Die Schaepheyderkens die reopen al be be, dat is to segghen Benedictus, ofte ghebenedijt moet wesen den desen die comt genesen onse sonden met onverdiende wonden’ [Above this was inscribed Glory to God in the highest etc … The shepherds all halloo Be be, that is to say Benedictus, or Blessed may He be who comes to heal our sins with undeserved stripes], which sounds like a Flemish carol.107 There seems to have been a tradition that the shepherds sang: in Louvain they apparently also poured out wine, whether for the spectators, as Van Even suggests, or for themselves, which seems more likely: ‘Den herders die achter Bethlehem ghingen al singhende, voir haren cost van wijnen die sy schincen doen men onser liever Vrouwen andwerf ommedroegh’ [The shepherds who walked after Bethlehem all singing, for their cost for the wine that they poured out, during our Lady’s ommegang].108 In Brussels in 1549, Joseph was made to react to the singing: Venia tras este otro carro, en que yuan vnos pastores y vnos niños en forma de Angeles todos vestidos de blanco, que cantauan, Gloria in Excelsis Deo … Estaua la Virgen con su hijo como parida en la cama, la qual era vna muy Hermosa donzella y junto à ella el santo Joseph entendiendo en su oficio de carpinteria. Parauase algunas vezes con 376

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Fig.40 Antwerp Judgement banner bearer    Jan Jegher(s) La Triumphante procession (detail) © Antwerp City Archives

gran alegria como espantado de oyr las diuinas bozes delos Angeles y pastores que yuan cantando.109 [Behind this came another waggon, in which were shepherds and children got up like the angels dressed in white, singing, Glory to God in the highest … The Virgin, a very beautiful damsel, was in bed with the child, as if lying in, and next to her was St. Joseph busy about his trade of carpentry. He paused from time to time with great joy as if he were astonished to hear the heavenly voices of the angels and shepherds as they sang.] The costumes, settings, and props are the familiar mixture of the symbolic, the domestic, and the highly ornamented that we see in our own plays. The Louvain waggons have the most elaborate architectural detail and the simplest costumes: there is an absence of properties which seems to me unreal, and one wonders how much has been filtered through the eye of the nineteenth century copyist. The Brussels Annunciation and Nativity waggons (Figs. 7 and 8) are the nearest to the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Flemish paintings on the same themes, with all the traditional furniture and props:110 the Blessed Virgin’s red-canopied bed, the lily pot, the priedieu  – each of 377

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which, as Panofsky has tried to show is not merely a realistic scene setting, but expressive of a moral or typological truth.111 The Blessed Virgin herself is dressed neither in contemporary costume, nor in the anonymous draped ‘Biblical’ garb of the Louvain (and later Renaissance) painters: with her ruff, veil, and crown, she looks far more like the statue of Notre Dame de Sablon.112 She appears like this both with Gabriel (who is dressed in alb and stole), on the top of the Jesse Tree, and with the shepherds, who wear totally contemporary garb – one raises his hat to the Child. A group on the parapet outside the stable includes a shepherdess: they are listening to one of their number playing a bagpipe; they carry crooks, and, apparently, luncheon baskets. In the Antwerp procession, the sacred personages are distinguished with haloes, good solid star-shaped ones that sit firmly on the top of their heads, unlike the rather improbably flying-saucer type seen in Louvain. Altogether, the Louvain illustrations suggest a certain amount of idealisation: Adam and Eve, for example, are shown stark naked, whereas in 1531 we know they wore doublet and hose.113 There is no space here to go into the question of props and costumes, which deserve an article to themselves: the 1571 Inventory ranges from ‘A sword named the Word of God’ and ‘two pairs of wings made of peacocks’ feathers’ to ‘two carved wooden pigeons’ and a wardrobe that seems to go in for red, yellow, and green, with stripes and fringes ad lib. Alan Nelson in his Valladolid article was worried that the pageant tableaux he had seen were all set on a longitudinal axis, and that therefore ‘reconstructions of English pageants with orientation to the side should be considered as problematic’.114 He points out that we have no existing illustrations of Biblical pageants meant to be seen from the side, and that it would be difficult to use those designed as stages (presumably with backcloths) as pageant floats as well, as seems to have happened at Norwich, for example. It is true that ‘a bigger iron fane to sett on the ende of the Pageante’ could suggest that the Norwich Grocers’ cart was longitudinally arranged. 115 But it is also true that unless you have a very tidy and symmetrical tableau, like that of Christ and the Doctors at Brussels, it is always going to make more sense from some points of view than from others, and that if you are trying to pose almost a copy of a well-known picture, there is bound to be a back to front: someone is always going to be looking at the back of the Virgin of the Annunciation’s head. Also, though a tableau may be grouped longitudinally, the spectators are still going to get their best view of it latitudinally, as it passes directly in front of them. Painters like Van Alsloot have accommodated for this slightly already: they arrange the tableau so you, who are looking at the picture, can see it to its best advantage, which usually means showing it broadside on, so that the scene is set in the widest possible frame. Seen from the front, Van Alsloot’s Virgin would be totally obscured by her bed hangings. Would one not merely do the same thing with a living picture, if it were to be presented as a play? The difficulty would come with the backcloth, and a backcloth the York Mercers’ waggon certainly seems to have had. One possibility would be to 378

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rethink the whole reconstruction so that, like the Antwerp Last Judgement, the backcloth really was at ‘the bake syde of þe pagent’. This would give a stage deeper than it was wide, which goes against all our modern instincts, but there is nothing to say that it is impossible. It would certainly make it possible for spectators to stand on both sides of the street, instead of only on one. I think my main objection to this in York is the likelihood of spectator stands: would people pay to see only one half of a performance?; what about the privileged spectators at the upper windows?; and, in Norwich, would you have to act over the horses’ backsides? It really depends on whether you see the pageant waggons as being primarily pageant floats (as Alan Nelson clearly does) or as booth stages on wheels (as most of the rest of us probably do). Either way, you can’t have everything. There were possibly more open-sided waggons, and more waggons with no roofs at all, than we have been brought up to imagine, conditioned as we are,

Fig.41 Brussels Ommegang, 1644 (detail)    Erycius Puteanus, Bruxella, incomparabili exemplo septenaria … (Brussels: Mommaert, 1646) page 123 © The British Library Board, 794.i.8

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even now, by the proscenium stage. It would be interesting to hear further arguments. How pageant waggons related to pageant stages will clearly be germane to the problem. This can only be an introduction to a fascinating and I think relevant field. My main intention has been to sketch in the background and reproduce as many of the pictures as possible, but I hope it has also suggested a few other lines of enquiry.

Acknowledgements I should especially like to thank Dr. J. Van Roey, the City Archivist of Antwerp, for his more than generous help to me over the last two years. The illustrations by Gaspar Bouttats, Jan Luyken, Jan-Christoffel Jegher, and C. Van Essen are copyright of the City Archives, Antwerp, and are reproduced here by kind permission of the Board of Burgomaster and Aldermen of Antwerp. The painting by Alexander Van Bredael is the property of the Musée des Beaux Arts de Lille, and is reproduced by their kind permission. The engravings from the Solemn Mock Procession of 1680 and from the 1767 Description du Jubilé … de S. Macaire, from Van Even, Bochius and Puteanus, and the details from Bouttats are published by kind permission of the British Library. The details from Van Alsloot are Crown Copyright, and are published by permission of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Main Sources Sources are listed under towns, in chronological order. I have only included works on Joyous and Triumphant Entries when these include floats from the ommegangen, or which later entered the ommegangen. Antwerp Leo de Burbure (de Wesenbeeck), ‘De Antwerpsche Ommegangen in de XIVe en Xve Eeuw’, Maatschappij der Antwerpsche Bibliophilen, 2 (Antwerp, 1878): manuscripts from 1398, 1420/59, 1491, and undated. Albrecht Dürer, Tagebuch der Reise in die Niederlande (1520–1), printed by Hans Rupprich in ‘Die Beschreibungen Niederländischer Prozessionsspiele durch Albrech Dürer und Hieronymus Koler d.Ä.’ Maske und Kothurn 1:2 (1955), 88–102. Cornelius Grapheus Scribonius (Schrijver), Spectaculorum in susceptione Philippi … Mirificvs Apparatvs (Antwerp: Pieter Coecke van Aelst, 1549), illustrated. There is also a Flemish and a French version. Ordinantie van den Besnijdenis Ommeganck van desen tegenwoordeghen Jar. M.D. ende LIX (Antwerp: Hans de Laet, 1559).

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Ordinancie, Inhoudende de Poincten vanden Helighen Besnijdenis Ommeganck der Stadt van Antwerpen, geschiet inden Iare M.D.LXI (Antwerp: Hans de Laet, 1561). Allegorical tableaux only. Ordinancie, Inhoudende de Poincten vanden Heylighen Besnijdenis Ommeganck der Stadt van Antwerpen … M.D.LXII (Antwerp: Hand de Laet, 1562). Allegorical waggons. Ordinantie van de nieu Punten van onser Vrouwen Ommeghanck half Oogst, 1563 (Antwerp: Hans de Laet, 1563). New allegorical waggons only. Ordinantie inhoudende die Oude en Nieuwe Poincten van onser Vrouwen Ommeganck, der Stadt van Antvverpen, geschiet inden Iare. 1564 (Antwerp: Hans de Laet, 1564). Biblical waggons as well as allegorical ones. Nieuwe ende Poetijscje Inuentien figuerlijcken vvtgestelt tot den Ommegangck van der stadt van Antwerpen … 1564 (Antwerp: Hans de Laet, 1564). New waggons. Ordonantie (sic) inhoudende de nieuw Poincten van den Ommeganck half Oogst Anno 1566 (Antwerp: Hans de Laet, 1566). See Floris Prims, ‘De Antwerpsche Ommeganck op den vooravond van de Beeldstormerij’, Mededeelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamsche Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schoone Kunsten van Belgie, Klasse der Letteren 8:5 (1946), 5–21. Lodovico Guicciardini, Descrittione … di Tutti I Paesi Bassi (Antwerp: Guglielmo Silvio, 1567). Inventaris van alle de abyten ende ciraten die men in de twee groote ommeganghen jaerlijcx binnen deser stadt gehouden, gebesicht heeft, gheinventarieert den twelfden dach decembris, 1571 … typescript kindly supplied to me by Dr. Van Roey from an unpublished transcription of Ms. P.K. 2194, Oude Standhuis, Antwerp. Michael Etzinger (Aitsingerus), De Leone Belgico, 2 vols (Cologne: Gerardus Campensis, 1583). A history of the Netherlands, with royal entries: illustrations by Frans Hogenberg. La Ioyeuse & magnifique Entrée de Monseigneur Francoys, Fils de France, et … Duc … d’Anjou … en sa tres-renommée ville d’Anvers (Antwerp  : Christopher Plantin,  1582).  Illustrated by Abraham de Bruyn: edition by H.M.C. Purkis for Renaissance Triumphs and Magnificences, general editor Margaret McGowan, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 5 (Amsterdam, New York  : Johnson Reprint Co., [1976]). Johannes Bochius, Descriptio Publicæ Gratulationis Spectaculorum et Ludorum in Adventu Serenissimi Principis Ernesti, Archidueis Austriæ Omnia a Ioanne Bochio S.P.Q.A. a secretis conscripta (Antwerp : Plantin, 1595). Illustrations by Pieter Van Der Borcht (Entry 1594) ; see also Bodleian MS Douce 387. Johannes Bochius, Historica Narratio Profectionis et Inaugurationis Serenissimorum Belgii Principum Alberti et Isabellae, Austriae Archiducum … (Antwerp and Brussels : Plantin-Moretus, 1602). Illustrated by Van Der Borcht (1599). C.L. Truyens-Bredael, Het kantwek van den Ommegang (Antwerp: Standaard Boekhandel, 1941). Illustrated description of the lace bedcover showing scenes from the ommegang probably presented to Albert and Isabella on their Entry into Antwerp in 1599. Cort Verhael van t’Ghene is ghepresenteert ghevveest in den Ommeganck die men tot Antvverpen ghehouden heeft op den xiiij. Iunij Anno 1609 (Antwerp: Abraham Verhoeven, 1609).

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Verclaringhe ofte bedietsel vande verthooninghen die ghedaen sullen worden in den Ommegang diemen tot Antwerpen sal houden op den xvj. Augusti 1615 (Antwerp: Abraham Verhoeven, 1615). Jan Gessler, ‘De Antwerpse Ommegang van 1619’, De Gulden Passer, NS 13:4 (1935),  123–5. Quotes description by Pierre Bergeron, who visited Antwerp in 1619. Caspar Gevaert and Pieter Rubens, Pompa Introitvs Honori Serenissimi Principis Ferdinandi Austriaci … a S.P.Q. Antverp. WV Kal. Maii MDCXXXV (Antwerp: J.  Meursius, 1635). Theod. A. Tulden engraved the illustrations from Rubens’ drawings. Jan Van Hilten, Den Triumphanten Omganck van Antwerpen (Amsterdam: Jan van Hilten, 1648). Christopher Van Essen, Antwerpsche Omme-gangh ofte Lvst-Trivmphe (Antwerp: Jacob van Ghelen, 1649). Woodcuts. Jan Jegher(s), Icy voeyez vovs la Triomphante procession d’Anvers. Fort cvrievsement Svivant levr prototype. Mis en lumiere par Iean Iæghers (Antwerp, 1649). Panoramic series of woodcuts. Verbeldinghe van den Jaerlijckxschen Trivmphanten Ommeganck van Antwerpen (Antwerp: Jacob Mesens, 1661). Woodcuts. Michel de Saint Martin, Relation d’Vn Voyage fait en Flandres … en l’An 1661 (Caen: Marin Yvon, 1667). Relates to Antwerp, Brussels and Ghent. Edward Browne, Nauwkeurige en Gedenkwaardige Reysen (Amsterdam: Jan ten Hoorn, 1682). Account by an English doctor of his travels, contains engraving by Jan Luyken (1649–1712) of the ommegang. This engraving also appears independently, undated, and reversed. A brief description of the ommegang appears in the 1696 edition (f 42). Alexander Casteels (d. 1681), De Ommegang op de Meir, Musée Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, Brussels. Appears to be a copy in oils of Bouttats (see below): the dating or attribution seems suspect, unless Bouttats is a copy of this. Gaspar Bouttats, Verbeeldinghe vanden Triumphanten Jaerlycksen Ommeganck van Antwerpen … Ghemaeckt naer’t door Gasper Bouttats … (Antwerp: Hieronymus Verdussen, 1685). Broadsheet. Alexander Van Bredael, De Ommegang op de Grote Markt, De Ommegang op der Meir (1696, according to Wilenski, p. 349). Painting: Musée des Beaux Arts, Lille; Museum van Rijsel. Solemnelen ende Triumphante Antwerpschen Extraordinarischen Omme-ganck Verthooninghe der triumphwaghens nieuwe Cavalcade door de studenten vande Paters der Societeyt Jesu … 25 Maij 1698 (Antwerp: Hieronymus Verdussen, 1698). Daniel Papebrochius SJ (Papenbroeck), Annales Antverpienses ab Urbe Condita ad Annum MDCC, 5 vols (Antwerp: J.E. Buschmann, 1845): see under 1698.

Louvain Edward Van Even, L’Ommegang de Louvain (Brussels: Louvain Fonteyn, 1863) lists all printed material and makes extensive quotations from manuscript archives. He also reproduces the text and drawings of the ommegang by William (Guilliam) Boonen made in 1594.

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Brussels Alphonse Wauters, L’Ancien Ommeganck de Bruxelles (Brussels: Briard, 1848) cites archive material not easily available elsewhere, and prints the ordinance of 1547 as an appendix. Juan Christoual Calvete de Estrella, El Felicissimo Viaie d’El Muy Alto y Muy Poderoso Principe Don Phelippe, Hijo d’El Emperador Don Carlos Quinto Maximo … (Antwerp: Martin Nucio, 1552). Records tour by Philip in 1549. Jan De Pottre, Dagboek (1549–1620), Maatschappij der Vlaamsche Bibliophilen, 3:5 (Ghent, 1861). Hieronymus Cock, La Magnifica e Suntuosa Pompa Funerale (Antwerp: Plantin, 1559). The funeral nef of Charles V. Denis Van Alsloot, The Triumph of Isabella (1615). Painting in the Victoria and Albert Museum, described by James Laver, Isabella’s Triumph (London: Faber & Faber, 1947). The fullest account is by Fr. V. Baesten SJ, ‘L’Ommeganck de Bruxelles en 1615 d’apres les Tableaux de Denis van Alsloot’, Précis Historiques, 38 (Brussels, 1889); see also Leo Van Puyvelde, ‘De Ommegang te Brussel in 1615 naar de schilderijen van Denijs van Alsloot’, De Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Taal- en Letterkunde nr. 1–2 (Ghent, 1958). Adriaan de Meerbeeck, Theatre Fvnebre Ou sont representees les funerailles de plusieurs Princes et la vie, trespass, & magnifique obseques de Albert le pie (Brussels: Ferdinand do Hoy-maecker, 1622). Erycus Puteanus, Pompa Funebris … Principis Alberti Pii … veris imaginibus expressa a Iacobo Francquart (Brussels: J. Mommartius, 1623). Quadrilingual. Bruxella Incomparabile exemplo Septenario (Brussels: J. Mommartius, 1644). Engraving of the Town Hall and ommegang, p. 124. Michel de Saint Martin, Relation d’Vn Voyage fair en Flandres … en l’An 1661 (Caen: Marin Yvon, 1667). Jacques Stroobant, Brusselsche Eer-triumphen (Brussels: Peeter de Dobbeleer, 1670). Cort Verhael van de Feeste van get Hondert jarigh Jubilé over de herstellinghe van het  Alder-heylighste Sacrament van Mirakel … (Brussels: Peeter de Dobbeleer, 1685). Vier-hondert-jarigh Jubilé over de Memorable Victorie van Woeringhen … (Brussels: Martinus van Bossuyt, 1688). Vier-hondert-Iarighen Iubilé van den Brusselschen Ommegangh … (Brussels: Jacob vande Velde, 1688). Brusselschen Ommegangh ofte Des self Vrueghden-feest (Brussels: Jodocus de Grieck, 1688). Afbeeldinghe Van den Solemnelen ende seer Triumphanten Brusselschen Ommeganck … (Brussel: Martinus van Bossuyt, 1698). Cavalcade ende Triumph-Waghen … door de Jonckheyt der Scholen Van de Paters der Societeyt Jesu … (Brussels: Martinus van Bossuyt, 1698).

Notes 1. Anthony Munday, Chrysanaleia; or the Golden Fishing, 1616, ed. by J.G. Nicholls ([London]: Printed for the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, 1844 by J.B. Nichols and Sons, printers). The print contains facsimile coloured illustrations.

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2. I must apologise to our Belgian colleagues for my very English use of terminology. I use ‘Flemish’ for the language and culture of the Germanic-speaking people of the South Netherlands, which roughly corresponds with present-day Belgium. Names of cities I give in the form in which they are most commonly known to the English: thus Antwerp, Brussels, Louvain – this last partly because it is the form used by Kernodle in his article (see n. 4). 3. See Van Alsloot under Sources. 4. George R. Kernodle, ‘The Medieval Pageant Waggons of Louvain’, Theatre Annual 1 (1943), 58–62; see Van Even under Sources. 5. Guicciardini (under Sources), pp. 69–70. 6. Kort Verhael … van het Seven Hondert, en Vijftig-Jaerig Jubilé van Het Mirakeleus Beeld des Alder-heyligste Maegd … MARIA … binnen Mechelen den 17. en 24 August 1738 (Brussels: J. Lambertus Marchant, 1738); Victor Vervloet Album du Jubile de 875 Ans de l’Honneur de Notre Dame d’Hanswyk … (Mechelen: H.Dierickx-Beke Fils, 1863). The ommegang of St. Rumoldus (Rombout) seems to have been in early July (his saint’s day is 24 June). 7. Van Even, p. 13. 8. Calvete de Estrella (under Sources), fol. 74r. In 1549, which this work describes, this fell on 2 June; in 1615, on 31 May – Baesten (Sources under Van Alsloot), p.  13, n. 1. The Ghent ommegang in honour of the Holy and Miraculous Blood was on the octave of Corpus Christi, but it was only established in 1584 – Boecxken vanden oorspronck … den Ghendtschen Ommeganck (Ghent: Maximilien Graet, 1698). The Bruges Procession of the Holy Blood is now (as a revival) held on Ascension Day; earlier it was on 3 May – Album Descriptif des Fêtes et Cérémonies Réligieuses à l’Occasion du Jubilé de 700 Ans du Saint Sang, par l’Abbé C.C. …(Bruges: Daveluy, 1850), p. 20. This is the Feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross. 9. Baesten, pp. 107, 110. 10. Louvain: Van Even, p. 26 (1394); Brussels: Baesten, pp. 97–8 (the Dukes of Brabant rode in cavalcade); Aalst: Baesten, pp. 104–5 (costumed figures presenting the Apostles, etc.: the first cars did not appear till 1424); Antwerp: De Burbure (under Sources), p. xi, n.1. 11. Antwerp: De Burbure (under Sources), pp. ix, 1; Louvain: Van Even, p. 26; Mechelen: Baesten, p. 104; Brussels: Baesten, p. 106. 12. Louvain: Van Even records a slimming-down to sixteen floats and fantastic ­animals by 1502. Antwerp is harder to estimate: not all the floats went out at once. 13. ‘Dieser umbgang von anfang bis ans end, ehe er für unser hauss gieng, wehret mehr dann zwo stunde’, Dürer (under Sources), p. 90. 14. JoAnna Dutka, ‘Mystery Plays at Norwich: Their Formation and Development’, Leeds Studies in English, ns 10 (1978), 107–20 (p. 108). 15. It is difficult to tell precisely why this happened. In Antwerp, the Feast of Corpus Christi, which had been the third occasion on which the ommegang was held, was deliberately turned back to a purely religious procession by an ordinance of 11 June 1544: Leon Voet, Antwerp: the Golden Age (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1973), p. 452. 16. Guicciardini, p. 70. 17. Ordinantie, 1564 (under Sources). The Ship: dimensions from Bochius (1595, under Sources) p. 121; the young sailors: Van Hilten (1648, under Sources). 18. Calvete de Estrella, fols 74v–77r (the foliation jumps from 74v–77r). 19. York: Records of Early English Drama 1: York, ed. by Alexandra Johnston and Margaret Rogerson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), pp. 142,

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145, 149; Coventry: Reg Ingram, Medieval English Theatre, 2.1 (1980), 3–14 (pp. 9–10). See also Wauters (under Sources), p. 11 for Brussels entertainments. 20. Calvete de Estrella, pp. 245v–246r: ‘meneaua la cabeça algunas vezes … mouia los ojos de tal fuerte, que ponia espanto al que le miraua’; Grapheus (under Sources), L4v: ‘nutat non-numquam capite, grandesque oculos mouet, aliquo scilicet ad intrinsecus agente’. 21. De Meerbeeck (under Sources, 1622): description, pp. 59–78; given to the city, p. 260. 22. Afbeeldinghe (under Sources, 1698). Its popularity can be measured by the fact that the diarist Jan de Pottre mentions it particularly as one of the features of the depleted ommegang of 1585: ‘ende het scheept ende Plus oultre’ (the Ship, and the Pillars of Hercules bearing the device of Charles V Ne plus ultra); the pillars are in fact on a separate waggon, as can be seen from the engraving in Puteanus, Septenario (under Sources, 1644), p. 124 (Fig. 41). 23. Pieter Geyl, The Revolt of the Netherlands 1555–1609 (London: Ernest Benn, 1958); Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (London: Pelican, 1979). 24. Calvete de Estrella lists The Conception, Birth and Infancy of the BVM (a symbolic scene), the Holy Kinship (a Jesse Tree pattern), the Presentation of the BVM in the Temple, the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Shepherds, the Circumcision, the Three Kings, the Purification, the Resurrection, the Pentecost, and the Assumption. Of these, only the Jesse Tree, the Annunciation, and the Shepherds appear in Van Alsloot, who, however, also shows Christ and the Doctors (the Fourth Joy), which Calvete de Estrella does not mention. Wauters says ‘dans les jours de deuil, dans les années de calamité, toute cette splendeur disparaissait; on la renvoyait à des temps meilleurs’ (13). He then traces the pattern of depletion and renewal from 1539 to 1585 through brief mentions in chronicles and diaries like that of De Pottre (13–15). Louis Hymans, Bruxelles à travers les Ages, 3 vols (Brussels: Bruylant-Christophe, 1882–9), I, 186, says L’Ommegangh perdit beaucoup de son éclat pendant les troubles religieux. It was, he says, revived after the submission to Parma (1585), and recovered all its old splendour under Albert and Isabella, but ‘Les cavalcades du XVIIe siècle, quoique très belles, d’avaient rien de commun avec l’ancien Ommegangh du Sablon’. However, though it is true that in the accounts of the ommegangen of the 1580s and 1590s, the only ‘old’ features seem to be the patron saints, the giants, the fantastic animals (who have proliferated) and the nef, by 1615 the religious cars have returned, though there are fewer of them. Baesten, p. 110 suggests that not all the waggons would be rolled out in any one year because of repairs and so forth; he gives no evidence for this, but it sounds quite plausible. 25. Baesten, pp. 119–23 defends his Society against the charge that their addiction to classical mythology and high-flown allegory alienated the common people. 26. E.g. Antwerp (under Sources): Cort Verhael 1609, Verclaringhe 1615, Van Hilten 1648 which explains the subjects of the waggons as if to a small child, Van Essen 1649, Kan Jeghers 1649, Verbeldinghe 1661, Bouttats 1685. 27. E.g. the Entries of the Duke of Anjou 1582, Ernest (Bochius 1595) and Albert and Isabella (Bochius 1602). 28. Laver (Sources under Van Alsloot), pp. 3–4. The companion piece has been cut in two. 29. Baesten, pp. 10–18; illustrations Hymans, Bruxelles, pp. 181, 185. 30. As in e.g. Anjou 1582, Bochius, Ernest, 1595 and Albert and Isabella 1599: occasionally the odd spectator is put in for scale, but even so there is a tendency to reduce the height of the base of the waggons, as the artist is only interested in the superstructure.

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31. Alan H. Nelson, ‘Easter Week Pageants in Valladolid and Medina del Campo’, METh 1:2 (1979), 62–70. 32. Sheila Williams, ‘De Antwerpse Ommegang en de “Lord Mayor’s Show” te London’, Tijdschrift der Stadt Antwerpen (2 July 1958); ‘Les Ommegangs d’Anvers et les Cortèges du Lord-Maire de Londres’, in Fêtes et Cérémonies au Temps du Charles Quint, Les Fêtes de la Renaissance 2, ed. by Jean Jacquot (Paris: CNRS, 1960), pp. 343–57. 33. Norwich Grocers’ Inventory, in Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. by Norman Davis, EETS SS 1 (1970), p. xxxv; Antwerp, Ordinantie 1564. 34. Cort Verhael, 1609. 35. Jeghers, 1649 (under Sources, Antwerp). 36. Antwerp: De Burbure, pp. 3, 4; Louvain: Van Even, p. 28. 37. Browne (under Sources, Antwerp; translated Jacob Leeuwe Dirkx), 1696: the spiritual orders produce scenes from ‘de passie van Christus, den Hemel / de Hel / of eenige andere dingen / waar toe een groote tobloed van menschen komt / welcke dit siende alle op de knyen moeten nedervallen’. 38. The earliest illustrations are the panels of the lace bedspread (Truyens–Bredael, under Sources) of 1599, which show the Annunciation and the Three Kings. 39. The Ordinantie of 1559 is the earliest. 40. Van Even, p. 33. 41. Calvete de Estrella, fols 77v–78r. 42. Description du Jubilé de Sept Cent Ans de S. Macaire, Patron particulier contre la Peste, qui fera célébré dans la Ville de Gand … 30 Mai–15 Juin 1767 (Ghent: Jean Meyer, 1767), fig. 3. 43. The standard work is still D’Essling & Muntz, Petrarque, ses études d’art, son influence … (Paris: Gazette des beaux-arts, 1902). For a modern summary, see D.C. Carnicelli, Lord Morley’s Tryumphes of Fraunces Petrarcke (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 38–46. 44. See e.g. Margaret Freeman, The Unicorn Tapestries (New York: Dutton, 1976), figs. 66, 68; Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, Bollingen Series 38 (New York, 1953), fig. 89 (a sea-borne version); the curious plinth-like chariots of the planets in the astrological works printed by Erhard Ratdolt in Augsburg and Venice, and of the planets of Nicola d’Antonio degli Agli (illustrations unfortunately most accessible in S. Klossowski De Rola, Alchemy (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973), figs. 31–4. See also my note 67. The trionfo chariots in the Flemish tapestries of c. 1520 in the Victoria and Albert Museum and Hampton Court (Carnicelli, figs. 7–10; H.C. Marillier, The Tapestries at Hampton Court Palace (London: HMSO, 1962), pp. 19–23), and in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (A.M.L. Erkelens, Wandtapijten 1 (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1962), pp. 28–33) are still basically of this type, and Gordon Kipling informs me that the ship-type of chariot took some time to come North across the Alps. 45. Gordon Kipling, The Triumph of Honour (The Hague: Leiden University Press, 1977). 46. York Mercers and Merchant Adventurers, ed. by Maud Sellers, Surtees Society, 129 (1918 for 1917), p. 65. The chief mart town was Antwerp, Sellers, pp. xxxvi–xlii. 47. Georges Doutrepont and Omer Jodogne, Chroniques de Jean Molinet (1488– 1506), 3 vols (Brussels: Academie Royale de Belgique, 1935), II, p. 394. 48. Doutrepont and Jodogne, II, p. 398. 49. Grapheus, Lr–L3v. 50. Sellers, York Mercers, pp. 140–3. 51. Sellers, York Mercers, pp. 151–2. 52. Johnston and Rogerson, REED: York, pp. 652 (1513–14), 654 (1550, 1551).

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53. Davis, Non-Cycle Plays, p. xxxv. In Brussels, they were called huysken (‘little houses’), Wauters, pp. 13–14. 54. Rogers, Breviary, Cheshire Record Office MS DCC 19 version, quoted by John Marshall, ‘The Chester Pageant Carriage’, METh 1.2 (1979), p. 54. All versions of the Breviary were of course written while the Flemish waggons were still in use. 55. The waggons are grouped together at the end as ‘large pieces’ (groote stucken). 56. Van Even, pp. 17–18. 57. Inventory 1570, in De Burbure, p. x. In Brussels they were stored ‘dans un magasin situé près de l’église du Sablon … qui se nommait la Grange aux Géans, de Reuse Schure … fut rebati en 1591 (et) était loué par la ville à l’église, moyennant 300 florins du Rhin’ (Wauters, p. 8). 58. York Mystery Plays, ed. by Lucy Toulmin Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), p. 112: The Tilethatchers’ Pageant of the Nativity, l.18. 59. Records of Early English Drama: Chester, ed. by Lawrence M. Clopper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), pp. 50 (1550), 78 (1567). 60. Van Even, p. 29 and n. 6. 61. The Louvain dragon vomited flames and fireworks (Van Even, pp. 30 and n.3, 10); so did the Brussels dragon and St. Michael’s devil (Calvete de Estrella, fols 77r, 77v). The Antwerp Whale spouted water, Parnassus had real fountains, and Hell fireworks (e.g. Bouttats). The Giants rolled their eyes, moved their heads, etcetera. 62. Calvete de Estrella, fol. 78r. 63. Van Even, p. 30. 64. Johnston and Rogerson, REED: York, pp. 142, 145, 149. 65. Peter Meredith, ‘The Development of the York Mercers’ Pageant Waggon’, METh 1.1 (1979), pp. 10–14 invents a not dissimilar reconstruction in three dimensions. 66. Calvete de Estrella, fol. 77v. 67. Munday, Chrysanaleia, fig. 5: most of his floats are open-topped, mounted on cube-shaped bases hung with painted cloths to represent the sea. 68. The title often seems to go with the Pageant Mastership of the ommegang. In Antwerp in 1398, Andries De Cuypere, ‘pyngerere, die den ornamente maecte ende pyngerde ende bewaerde how dat zy gaen ende riden souden’ [painter, who made and painted the decorations, and ruled how they were to go and ride] had twenty-one shillings for his pains (De Burbure, p. x); a century later, in 1494, Hendrik Scillemans was to come ‘met synen boeck, ende set inne de mechende, ende die personagien vervolghende’ [with his book, and position the Maiden and the personages who follow] (De Burbure, p. 10). The ‘book’ sounds like the official procession book, like Roger Burton’s pageant list. In Louvain, there seems to have been a continuous succession of Pageant Masters, all professional painters or sculptors, from 1398 to 1681. They designed and made new waggons and repaired and painted the old (Van Even, pp. 26–54). The city ordered a new pageant book in 1505; there were also two Registers (Van Even, p. 35). 69. See especially George L. Hersey, The Aragonese Arch at Naples, Yale Publications in the History of Art, 24 (Newhaven: Yale UP, 1973), pp. 13–16 and 63–4, figs 8 and 9. The 1443 Entry of Alfonso of Aragon into Naples took place on a ‘great chariot, extremely magnificent, with four wheels, with a great construction (bastiment) above the said wheels made in the manner of catafalque’, horsedrawn: in the illustrations it appears as the chair-set-on-a-cube type of early triumph car. Over him was borne ‘a very rich canopy of gold brocade, held up by twelve staffs’: though the staffs are borne by attendants, the general effect is precisely that of our house-on-a-cart waggons. See also the triumph car of

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the Queen of Sheba in Maso Finiguerra, A Florentine Picture Chronicle, ed. by Sidney Colvin (New York: Blom, 1970 reprint of 1898 edition), fig. 13 and The Triumph of Julius Caesar tapestry (M. Freeman, The Unicorn Tapestries (New York: Metropolitan Museum, 1976), fig. 267). 70. Kipling, Triumph, pp. 76, 77, 111–15. 71. See e.g. D. Bouvy, Beeldhowwkunst (Bussum: Van Dishoeck, 1966), figs. 25, 42. The figure of Mary is often smaller than or subordinate to St. Anne: but in paintings, such as the famous Altarpiece of the Cologne Master of the Holy Kindred (Late Gothic Art from Cologne (London: National Gallery Catalogue, 1977), pp. 62–5), and the painting of the Holy Kindred by Quentin Massys (R.H. Wilenski, Flemish Painters, 2 vols (London: Faber & Faber, 1960), II, Pl. 207) they sit side by side as equals. The motif was also copied in early sixteenth-century Brussels tapestry: see Tapisseries bruxelloises de la Pré-Renaissance, Exhibition catalogue (Brussels: Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, 1976), pp. 55–57. 72. M. Corti and G.T. Faggin, L’opera completa di Memling (Milan: Rizzoli, 1969), Pls 12–13. 73. Van Even, p. 31, n. 2. It seems highly likely that, as he suggests (p. 30, n. 11), the Kings are also real children, though in the engraving they are shown only as busts. 74. Calvete de Estrella, fols. 77r, 77v. 75. Reg Ingram, ‘The Coventry Pageant Waggon’, METh 2.1 (1980), 3–14 (p. 9). See, for other English versions of the Tree, G. Wickham, Early English Stages, 3 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959–81), I, pp. 43–44 (in ‘The Tournament’), 72 (a Jesse Tree), 244, and Pl. XVI (pageant stage for Queen Claude, Paris 1517); also Kipling, pp. 118–21. 76. Wickham, pp. 44, 70, 91, 167, 170, 209, 220, 224–6 and Pl XII, Nos 16, 17. Kipling, pp. 97–9, 104, 109–10, 127. 77. Clopper, REED: Chester, p. 32. 78. Bouttats. 79. Vier-hondert-jarigh Jubilé (van Bossuyt, p. 16; vande Velde, p. 3). 80. De Meerbeeck, p. 77. In the tourney to celebrate the marriage of Prince Arthur in 1501 one of the jousters entered in a ship with its ‘nether parts … hanged with painted cloth coloured like to water’ (Kipling, p. 123; see also pp. 104, 122, 128–9, 132; and Wickham, pp. 44, 54, 92, 167, 201–2, 209, 213–16, 221, 223–4, 394, 396, 398. 81. Cort Verhael (1609). 82. Van Essen (picture); quotation (Inventory). 83. Jegher; Fig. 32 is the clearer copy by F.W. Fairholt in Lord Mayor’s Pageants (London: Percy Society, 1842), p. xxx. 84. Richard Hosley, ‘Three Kinds of Outdoor Theatre before Shakespeare’, Theatre Survey, 12 (1971), 1–33 (p. 17). 85. The Solemn Mock Procession of the POPE Cardinalls Jesuits Fryers etc: through the City of London November the 17th 1680: broadsheets. I am grateful to Gordon Kipling for drawing my attention to this picture. The funeral nef of Charles V was admired for its mysterious motion: ‘dit Schip wordt met gheen Peerden ghetrocken, aan ghedreven, ende keert hem so vlitich, als een Schip op het water’ (400-jarigh Jubilé, van Bossuyt (1688), p. 18) [this ship was not horsedrawn, but swept on and manoeuvred as cleanly as a ship on the water]. See also n. 80. The pageant ship at the wedding celebrations of Prince Arthur and Katharine of Aragon in 1501 was ‘sett upon whelys, without any leders in sight, in right goodly apparel … as though it hade been saylyng in the see’ (Wickham, p. 209): leders surely means ‘porters’?

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86. Bouttats. In Brussels in 1682, a payment is made ‘aux individus qui ont dirigé le vaisseau’ (Wauters, p. 18). 87. Laver, p. 8, Pl. 4. 88. Van Even, p. 30, n. 7. They were carried by two men each, and ridden by a child (p. 64). 89. Rupprich (see under Sources, Antwerp), p. 90. 90. Van Even, p. 27. 91. Dublin: E.K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903), II, p. 364: ‘for the body of the camel, and Our Lady and her chil(d)e well aperelid, with Joseph to lede the camel … and the Portors to berr the camell’. Chester: Clopper, REED: Chester, p. 72; the Midsummer Show had ‘ffoure Ieans (giants), won vnicorne won drombandarye, won Luce, won Camell, won Asse, won dragon, sixe hobby horses & sixteen naked boyes’; ‘the Vnicorne the Antilop the fflowerdeluce & Camell’ were each borne by two men (p. 481). R.M. Lumiansky and David Mills, The Chester Mystery Plays EETS, SS 3 (1974): the Magi forsake their horses (p. 158) for dromodaryes (p. 160), and the stage direction is ‘Then goe downe to the beastes and ryde abowte’ (p. 161). Presumably the camels would not stand up to adult riders for the whole Watch, but the porters could last out for this short excursion in the play. 92. Bochius, Ernest (1584): Giant p. 108, Ship, p. 120, Whale, p. 122; Albert and Isabella (1599), Neptune’s Chariot, p. 283. Purkis, Anjou (1582) (see under Sources, Antwerp), illustrates a great ‘seahorse’ – it looks more like a seadog! – which is said to be 20 foot tall (p. 34). 93. Hosley, pp. 18–20. 94. Documents relating to the Office of the Revels in the time of Queen Elizabeth, ed. by Albert Feuillerat, Materialen zur Kunde des älteren Englische Dramas, 21, ed. by W. Bang (Louvain: A. Uystpruyst et al., 1908; repr. Vaduz: Kraus, 1968), pp. 157–8, 160, 162. 95. L.J. Morissey, ‘English Pageant Waggon’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 9 (1975– 6), pp. 353–74 (dimensions at p. 368). He points out the extreme difficulty even a 12’ by 20’ waggon would have getting through the then streets of London. 96. Calvete de Estrella, fol. 77v. 97. Gessler (see under Sources, Antwerp), p. 125. 98. Het Antwerpse Landjuweel van 1561, ed. by C. Kruyskamp (Antwerp: De Nederlandsche Boekhandel 1962), p. xx. 99. Gevaert and Rubens (see under Sources, Antwerp), p. 9. With hindsight, one can see the same of the Bochius, Albert and Isabella (1599): Maid of Antwerp (p. 185). Morissey makes the same point about the London Lord Mayor’s Show pageant casts (pp. 364–7). 100. E.g. the funeral car of Albert (Puteanus, Pompa Funebris, 1622) which had a colossal figure of Liberality, 12’ tall, which shook its right arm; it was accompanied by Virtues, who were boys (XLVII). The Triumph Car of Calloo designed by Rubens (Gevaert and Rubens, 1635, Fig. 43) which still exists, seems, from its surviving state, to have mixed carved figures with humans. 101. The Louvain Christ on the Cross of 1437 was a living person (Van Even, p. 28). One of the first Louvain waggons was The Martyrdom of St. Peter, and St. Peter was played by a live actor: can he really have been bound to the Cross upsidedown, as the story would require? (Van Even, p. 26 and n. 7). 102. See note 99. 103. Van Even, p. 15. For the Antwerp Chambers, see Leon Voet, Antwerp: The Golden Age (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1973), pp. 417–18. In general, see Albert Heppner, ‘The Popular Theatre of the Rederijkers in the Work of Jan Steen and

389

The Flemish

ommegang

a n d i t s pa g e a n t c a r s

his Contemporaries’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 3 (1939– 40), 22–48; Pierre Brachin, ‘La Fête de Rhétorique de Gand (1539)’, in Fêtes et Cérémonies au Temps de Charles Quint, ed. by Jean Jacquot (Paris: CNRS, 1960), pp. 255–79. In Brussels, a play of one of the Seven Joys of the BVM was performed on a stage set up in the Grand’Place, one Joy per year until all were run through, and then going back to the beginning again (Wauters, pp. 10–11, 25). It has been suggested that the surviving plays on the First and Seventh Joys are two of these: see Die Eerste Bliscap van Maria & Die Sevenste Bliscap van Onser Vrouwen, ed. by W.H. Beuken (Culemborg: Tjeenk Willink-Noordiujn, 1978), pp. 10–18. 104. Calvete de Estrella, fol. 77v. 105. Van Hilten, 1648 (see under Sources, Antwerp). 106. Cort Verhael, 1609. 107. Van Hilten, 1648. 108. Van Even, p. 28, n.10. 109. Calvete de Estrella, fol. 77v. 110. No one particular painting suggests itself to me, but the general iconography is that of the late fifteenth or early sixteenth-century Flemish school. The Brussels Annunciation seems to be copying a painting in the tradition of Roger Van Der Weyden (possibly the St. Columba Altarpiece from Cologne?): see E. Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953; repr. New York: Icon, 1971), II, Pl. 214. Van Der Weyden introduced the bed in the Annunciation scene, with its looped-up curtain (Panofsky, I, p. 254); previously it was glimpsed in the background in another room. The motif remains a Netherlandish one, copied by Memling (Corti and Faggin, Pls XII and XVI, also Fig. 17A), Petrus Christus (Panofsky, Pl 256 – but here the bed is green), and the German Dürer, De Houtsneden van Albrecht Dürer 1471–1528 (Groningen: Foresta, n.d.), Pls 111 (1501) and 148 (1511). It also appears in popular woodcuts, as for example in the Biblia Pauperum. The baldacchino of the Antwerp Annunciation waggon is common as a distinguishing feature of the BVM as for other dignitaries in late fifteenth-century Netherlandish and German art: for a similar version of the Annunciation, see H. Wofflin, The Art of Albrecht Dürer (New York: Phaidon, 1971), Pl. 109 (1526). I have not managed to find a Nativity with the motif, common to all three ommegangen, of Joseph busy at his carpentry: the nearest are the Joseph’s Trouble scene in the Master of Mary of Burgundy’s Book of Hours for Engelbert of Nassau, ed. by J.G. Alexander (London: Phaidon, 1970), fol. 153r, and Dürer’s Flight into Egypt (Houtsneden 118). 111. Panofsky, pp. 254, 287; Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, trans. by Janet Seligman, 2 vols (London: Lund Humphries, 1971), pp. 50–1. 112. See R.H. Wilensky, Flemish Painters, 1430–1830, 2 vols (London: Faber, 1960), II, Pl. 514: Sallaert’s Procession of the Maidens dowered by the Infanta Isabella, commissioned at the same time as Van Alsloot’s Triumph. 113. Van Even, pp. 31 and n. 11: cf. the Norwich Adam and Eve, who wore cotes and hosen (Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. by Norman Davis, EETS, SS 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. xxxv). 114. Alan Nelson, ‘Easter Week Pageants in Valladolid and Medina del Campo’, METh, 1:2 (1979), p. 69. [See the later essay in this volume: ‘The Left-Hand-Side Theory: A Retraction, Medieval English Theatre, 14 (1992), 77–94. Ed.] 115. Davis, Non-Cycle Plays, p. xxxv.

390

13 FELSTED OF LONDON: SILKDYER AND THEATRICAL ENTREPRENEUR

I hope to provide a sidelight on the commercial sector of theatre in the 1530s and 1540s by fitting together glimpses of the recorded activity of one man, or perhaps, since he is usually referred to without a Christian name, a firm: Felsted of London. Two of these sightings have been individually written about before at some length, but I think this is the first time that anyone has drawn them all together. As happens with these things, once I had become alerted to him, I noticed his name in a couple of other contexts by sheer serendipity, after which I actively looked for him elsewhere, and was rewarded with a couple more mentions. Perhaps now I have drawn attention to him other scholars may find him lurking in their work and the picture can be rounded out even further. His recorded appearances span eighteen years. To go through them chronologically: 1) The first accredited sighting is in the period 3 October 1538–17 April 1539, when ‘Felstede silcke dyer’ appears in the Lisle Letters. He is hiring out costumes to John Husee, steward and London agent of Lady Lisle, for an interlude to be played over Christmas in her household at Calais, where her husband Lord Lisle is Lord Lieutenant. This was noted by Ian Lancashire in Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain, and Paula Neuss wrote a brief account of the episode in Theatre Notebook.1 2) The next sighting comes the following year, on 11 July 1540, at Maldon in Essex, where ‘ffelstede of Londone’ spends a week ‘servynge the play that yere kepte on Relyke Sonday’: in other words, he is one of the ‘enterprising property player(s)’ described by John Coldewey in Theatre Notebook 31 (1977 ) 5–12, more particularly on pages 8–9. 3) The third sighting is next year, back at home in London, where in June 1541 ‘felsted’ (again, no Christian name) ‘silk dyer’ makes a number of costumes for and hires several beards and wigs to the Drapers’ Company of London for ‘thre pageaunts, one of Crist disputing with the Doctors in the temple, the ij of a Rocke of Roche alam [‘rock alum’: the Mayor’s name was William Roche: alum is a dye fixative] & the iij of seynt Margaret’ for the Midsummer Watch.2 391

f e ls t e d o f l o n d o n 4) Five years later there comes a non-theatrical sighting: on 4 May 1546 a certain Thomas Felsted stands with John Singleton of London as recognisance for the bail of John Hilly, master of the King’s pinnace called the Sacre, from the Marshalsea where he is being held on a charge of spoil (pillage, unlawful seizure of goods) of certain pieces of ‘russell worstedde’.3 5) Two and a half years later, at Christmas 1548/9, ‘ffelsteade’ makes ‘ix  globes with all thinges necessarie’ at 16d a piece for the Court Revels.4 6) The last known sighting is in October 1556, when ‘Felstede’ (again no Christian name) is reminded to provide a ‘foyste’ (small ship) with ordnance and shot for the Lord Mayor’s water procession to Westminster.5 After this he disappears: or he may, as I said, be lurking in someone else’s work. We may have an earlier sighting: in 1521 (the Mayor again being a Draper), a ‘Thomas ffelsted’ was hired for 8d to play ‘with a ij handyd staf bothe nyghtes’ at the Midsummer Watch.6 If he was born around 1500, this might be a staff-twirling incarnation at around the age of twenty, while his costumier and production activities came later at the less agile though more substantial age of the early forties to mid-fifties. Or this may have been our Felsted’s father, or an uncle, or a cousin, or even an older brother. So, who was Felsted of London, and what did he do? I propose to go through each of these glimpses of him in rather more detail, and try to gauge something of the range of activities a theatrical supplier could undertake in the first half of the sixteenth century. First for his costume-hiring business. On 3 October 1538 John Husee writes to Lady Lisle: accordyng vnto your Ladyshippys wryting I wylbe in hand with f[e]lstede silcke dyer for the players garmenntys / and also to procure to gett some good mater for theym. But this nyw ecclesiastycall maters wylbe herde to com by.7 Two days later he reports: I haue byn with ffelsstede. and gevin him ernest for a sywt of players garmentys / which he wyle kype for you / and an entrelywde which is callyd Rex Diabole / Sparke knoweth the mater / I woll do my best to gett some of this nyw skryptur maters / but they be very Deere they askythe aboue xx sh f[o]r an Entrelywde.8 Though Felsted is described both here and in (3) as a silk dyer, it is already clear that his activities cover a much wider range than the mere dyeing and 392

f e ls t e d o f l o n d o n supplying of material. In the Drapers’ accounts for the 1541 Midsummer Show, he is paid: for the makyng of ij gownes ij capes iij cappes a payre of sleves & for j yard canvas to lyne iij cappes vs9 and possibly also for the next item: for makyng a payr of playted sleves & vpper bodyeng a gown for mary xiiij d which suggests that he was a designer and dressmaker as well as a dyer and stockist of silks and satins: the 5s and the 14d do not include the cost of any material except the yard of canvas. The cost of material appears immediately previously in the accounts: it comprises ‘blew, violet’, and ‘red satten brudgs’ (of Bruges) at 20d a yard, ‘white satten brudgs’ at 24d a yard, and ‘rysell worsted’ at 16d a yard. Presumably this was also bought from Felsted; at least, it is not attributed to anyone else. Moreover, Husee is not buying the made-up ‘sywt’ (matching set) of players’ garments from him, but hiring it. It would appear that as a hire firm Felsted stocked the full range of theatrical costumery: in the 1541 Drapers’ Accounts, he hires out wigs and beards as well as garments: iiij ealow heres for thangells, a black here for crist, iiij heres & iiij byerds for the doctors & Joseph & ij capes of white fur powdert all for 3s 4d : apparently a reduction for quantity, since the hiring of a single ‘here’ (longer? newer?) for Mary from another dealer, Mistress Shakerley, cost 12d. Perhaps Husee’s sywt also included wigs and beards. Husee does not mention the agreed hire fee for the set of costumes, or even say how much he put down in ‘ernest’, as a deposit to book them over what was presumably the busy time of Christmas. Interestingly, whatever sum he did agree and pay also included the booking of the script of an interlude, which clearly shows that, like John Rastell,10 Felsted combined the costume-hiring business with the provision of up-to-date play-texts, though presumably unlike Rastell he did not print them himself. He thus offered what one might call a total package. Whether the costumes were directly related to the play, or whether a standard set was deemed to cover all requirements for the stock characters of an interlude, we cannot tell. Rastell’s stage wardrobe seems to have been considered suitable irrespective of the type of play.11 Since Husee talks about paying over 20s for an interlude based on ‘these new Scripture matters’ – possibly a John Bale? – it sounds as if he was looking to buy the scripts, rather than hire them. In any case, he was willing to shop around for something nearer to Lady Lisle’s requirements than the play 393

f e ls t e d o f l o n d o n Felsted offered him, which was called Rex Diabole – a dog-Latin title which suggests either a morality or a romance subject.12 It is impossible to tell, as Paula Neuss points out, whether Felsted had this particular set of costumes already in stock, or whether he was proposing to run up a special order for Lady Lisle to collect in time for Christmas. She came over to England in November and went back to Calais on 14 December, where the Christmas entertainments presumably included either Rex Diabole or some other ‘matter’. By April the costumes were on their way back to London. Unfortunately, however, the ship in which they were travelling was wrecked on Margate Sands. On 7 April 1539 Husee wrote to Lady Lisle telling her of the wreck, and what he had learned of the salvage, but: I can not tell in what casse I shall stonde in for the pleyerys garmenttys / for by your Ladyshippys commandement I am bownde in x li for it and it is not to be dowtyd but seing the garmenntys ar wett I shall haue somwhat ado i[n] it / and peradventur I shall be compellyd to pay ffor all / if y can fynde some measnes to take an honest ende with him it shall be best.13 Presumably the £10 to which Husee was ‘bownde’ was the total assessed value of the set of costumes. Husee knows that they are wet and that he will have to pay something towards repairs and replacement (‘I shall haue somwhat ado in it’): moreover, if they are totally ruined ‘I shall be compellyd to pay ffor all’. As it happened, the damage was not as extensive as he had feared: Sparcke is come and hathe broughte the playeng garmentys / which with muche ado ar resseyued and I haue payde the mony as well for the cariage and tryminng of them as to the skynner and others / as f[o]r the hire / who had ovir and besidys his dywty xl d for amendys / I intende to deal nomore with suche merchandys.14 One recognises the heartfelt ‘Never again!’, but I suspect that ‘merchandys’ is, as Paula Neuss suggests, ‘merchandise’ rather than Byrne’s ‘merchants’. However, Felsted is hardly the ‘villain’ of the scenario, as she casts him. I know precisely what I felt when a set of costumes I had hired out came back with all the woollens put through the launderette and reduced to playing garments for six-year-olds. A close encounter with the English Channel is not likely to have done very much good either to fur, or to gold kid, which was often used to ‘guard’ theatrical costumes,15 and which might, rather than furs, be why the garments were sent to the skinner. Husee seems to me to get away quite lightly with paying for transport (‘cariage’) to the skinner ‘and others’, for repairs and refurbishment (‘the tryminng’), and an extra 40d (not 60d) to Felsted for his trouble (‘for amendys’) on top of the agreed hire charge (‘his 394

f e ls t e d o f l o n d o n dywty’). We still do not know how much precisely this latter was, but we can compare with the going rate of other hire charges of the same period, most notably those cited in the famous lawsuit (c. 1530) of Rastell and Walton. There, it will be remembered, the goods at issue were eleven player’s garments, two caps, two curtains, and several loose pieces of material which had comprised the stage wardrobe of John Rastell, printer, would-be merchantadventurer and theatrical entrepreneur, which he had left in the charge of Henry Walton for safekeeping while he, Rastell, was ‘in the parts beyond the sea, in France’. On his return, Rastell asked Walton for the costumes back: Walton prevaricated, and kept him waiting for two or three weeks, at the end of which Rastell found himself the defendant in an action for a debt of 40s. He was told that Walton was holding the costumes against this debt, and that they had, to Rastell’s great indignation, been priced only ‘at 35s. 6d, which were worth at that time 20 marks [£13 6s 8d] and above … for the great part of the said goods were garments of silk and other stuff, fresh and newly made, with much workmanship done upon them, to the great cost and charge of your said orator (Rastell)’.16 Here we get the usual insurance dilemma: Rastell priced the garments as new, at replacement value, whereas Walton’s assessors had taken depreciation in to account, and considered that ‘the said goods were of no more value than they were priced at, for they were rotten and torn players garments’. To which Rastell said that one of the reasons why they were in this state was because ‘the said Walton hath letten them out to hire to divers stage plays and interludes, and hath received and had for the hire of them since the said praisement of them the sum of 20 nobles [£10 or £6 13s 4d]17 and above’. There follows a complete inventory, with what looks like Rastell’s own valuation alongside each garment (which adds up to £9.16s, with one garment missing). This comes interestingly near to the liability of £10 for which Husee had bound himself to Felsted. It is difficult to compare prices without a much more detailed survey. Both materials and ‘workmanship’ would have to be taken into account. Rastell’s costumes were largely made of silk, in the form of sarcenet (a fine light silk), and ‘satin of Bruges’, but out of used material, ‘And if they had been bought of new stuff it would have cost much more money’, according to the tailor who helped to make them.18 He priced them at ‘better than 20s’ each. In the 1541 Drapers’ accounts, a gown for Christ supplied by Felsted took six and a half yards of Bruges satin and cost 10s 10d,19 only half of what Rastell was claiming for his costumes, but that does not allow for the price of ‘workmanship’. Here the costs could vary widely: compare the garment of Rastell’s which was said to be ‘worth a noble [10s? 6s. 8d?] in the making’20 with the 14d for the pleated / plaited sleeves and upper bodice of the Mary dress made by Felsted in 1541. As for hire charges, again, there are too many variables to use the RastellWalton case as a completely reliable yardstick against which to measure Felsted’s prices. Presumably if a set of costumes were hired for four months 395

f e ls t e d o f l o n d o n or more, as Lady Lisle’s were, the hire costs would have been considerably greater than for a short-term hire. One of the actors who had worn Rastell’s costumes said that Walton ‘lent them out about 20 times to stage plays in the summer and interludes in the winter’ (an interesting distinction) ‘and used to take at a stage play for them and others, sometimes 40d, sometimes 2s, as they could agree, and at an interlude 8d. for every time’. Another witness agreed and added that ‘the common custom is for an interlude 8d. for the garments, and at a stage play as the parties can agree’.21 The germane time of Walton’s hirings was said to be three or four years after the King’s great banquet at Greenwich (for which Rastell had supplied much of the set). This was in 1527, so these are early 1530s prices, as opposed to the late 1530s prices of Felsted. Rastell’s claim that Walton had hired them out ‘continually this 4 year … above 3 or 4 score times’, if true, would mean that Walton had made a total of between £2.13s.4d and £13.6s.8d, which fits in with his claim that Walton had made ‘20 nobles and above’ (£10 or £6.12s). The hire fee negotiated with Lady Lisle must have been ‘as the parties can agree’.22 So – and much more briefly – on to Felsted’s activities at Maldon the following year, 1540.23 He was paid £6 8s. 9½d ‘for servynge the play that yere kepte on Relyke Sonday [the third Sunday after Midsummer Day: 11th July] and for other expencs and chargs in and abowte the same playe as yt appereth pertycularly in a boke therof made and to this acownte annexede’.24 This subsidiary account book survives, and contains the full break down of expenses.25 The sum of all recorded expenses in the book, £6.8s.9½d, is the same as the sum paid by the Chamberlains to Felsted, which suggests that he was ultimately responsible for actually handling the budget. Production costs accounted for include wood ‘for the skaffoldis’, other timber, work on the playing area, the materials and making of some costumes, mostly ‘cotes’ of leather (apparently bodystockings for Christ and John the Baptist), pots and vessels of various kinds, a large quantity of paper (perhaps for writing out parts, but it was also used in the Revels for props and scenery), ironmongery, gunpowder, labour of various kinds, and refreshments: also fees for minstrels and morris dancers and ‘for the wast of the dawnswers bellis’ (but no actors’ fees), and board and lodging for seven days for Felsted, his man, and their two horses. The impression is that Felsted was in charge of setting up the acting (and spectator?) area, building the set, but not this time providing costumes, which were from the town’s own wardrobe. The speciality costumes were probably made on site. Most of the easily obtainable materials were brought by local contractors, who also provided labour. Felsted is paid ‘for serteyne pots and for colowris’ which he may have brought with him from London, but others were supplied locally. (These may have been paints or dyes.)26 As John Coldewey shows, the overall sense is that he is hired as a sort of executive consultant: he provides his expertise and organising ability and possibly specialist materials which could only be got in London, the local 396

f e ls t e d o f l o n d o n contractors provide the labour. His fee, besides board and lodging, seems to have been 25s 4d, though this may of course have included further expenses and goods. As ‘property player’ Felsted aligns himself with those other professionals from the big city of whom Coldewey treats in his article. They include the ‘Mr. Gibson’ who between 1526 and 1533 assisted the Kentish towns of Lydd and New Romney with their plays, and was probably, as W.R. Streitberger says, Richard Gibson of the Revels Office (died 1534).27 Gibson was reimbursed largely in kind, including half a porpoise (1531/2) which cost the town of Lydd 11s ½d overall (including 5s carriage), and given board and horsefodder when he came in person. The Lydd and New Romney accounts show that a considerable amount of prior consultation went on: various people are paid expenses for going up to London ‘to speke with master Gybson of our playe’ (Lydd 1526/7). Lydd took him the script of their St. George play (1530/1, 1531/2); New Romney sent him a ‘byll of our arrayment for the play’ (1525/6), which suggests that he was acting as general production consultant.28 One might expect officials of the Revels Office to be called on in a consultancy role: they also hired out costumes.29 What is interesting is the way in which the Home Counties even at this early stage look to the City of London as the source of specialist theatrical supplies and expertise. Theatrically minded amateurs all over the area must have had a network of names and addresses. John Husee talks about his colleague in the Lisle household, Spark, as if he were more familiar with this kind of thing: ‘at Sparckys comyng I will tacke his cownsell for he is better acquayntyd with suche maters then I am’.30 The next summer (1541) ‘felsted silk dyer’ is on home ground, as one of the suppliers to the City of London Midsummer Watch. I have looked at this already in comparison with the Lisle hiring. He and ‘a taylour at blanck chapelton’ are the only costumiers actually mentioned. It shows that even though he did not hire costumes to Maldon, that side of his business was still active. His next appearance is nothing to do with the stage. On 4 May 1546, John Hilly, master of the King’s pinnace called the Sacre, in the Marshalsea for spoil (pillage, unlawful distraint) of certain pieces of ‘russell worstedde’ was released upon sureties, viz. Thomas Felsted and John Singleton of London, whose recognisances are given.31 The fact that cloth was involved suggests that this is our Felsted, or perhaps one of our Felsteds. According to Sayle, there were two Felsteds, Humfrey and Thomas: their relationship to each other is not stated.32 London testamentary records show a Humfrey Felsted involved in the administration of a will in 1563, and another Humfrey (perhaps the same man?) dying in 1591.33 If these two Felsteds were related, the chronology suggests father and son or uncle and nephew, or even grandfather and grandson/great-uncle and great-nephew, and the younger one possibly rather too young to be involved in the 1530s and 1540s activities. Whether they formed a theatrical dynasty, or whether father/uncle’s interests were treated with suspicion by the younger generation, we do not know. 397

f e ls t e d o f l o n d o n At Christmas 1548/9, ‘ffelsteade’, Christian-nameless as ever, made ‘ix globes with all thinges necessarie ffor theyr makyng at xvjd the pece’ for the Court Revels, for which he was paid 12s.34 What they were for is not revealed. They were painted by Waplett the painter at 10d the piece, and they seem to have been props for a masque of friars, ?pilgrims, and hermits, probably attached to the latter, of which there were nine. Felsted’s last recorded appearance shows a rather different branch of activity from the hiring of costumes. In October 1556 he was asked to provide a foist (a small-scale barge) with ordnance and shot for the Lord Mayor’s water-pageant to Westminster.35 The foist was a traditional part of the water procession: at Anne Boleyn’s coronation (1533), Mayor Stephen Peacock and his Haberdashers’ Company was asked to provide ‘a barge for the Batchelers with a wafter [a sort of police launch] and a foyst garnished with banners and streamers likewyse as they vse to doe when the Mayor is presented at Westminster on the morowe after Symon and Jude’.36 Machyn regularly refers in his Diary to ‘a goodly fuyst trymmed with banars and guns’ (1553); ‘a goodly foist mad with stremars’ (1561).37 According to Fairholt, a foist had ten pairs of oars, and masts for the banners: it had a master and gunner ‘and squibbs sufficient for the tyme, with all things well paynted, and trymmed acordyngly, with twenty pavases [shields]’ and two half-barrels of gun powder on board (1566).38 The foist seems to have been the focus of a dramatic firework display. At Anne Boleyn’s coronation the ‘Foyst or Wafter’ was ‘full of ordinaunce, in whiche Foyst was a great Dragon continually mouyng, & castyng wyldfyer, and round about the sayd Foyst stode terrible monsters and wylde men castyng fyer, and makyng hideous noyses. Next after the Foyst a good distaunce came the Maiors barge’ (another foist held a pageant of a mount with a falcon environed with white roses and red).39 It would appear that Felsted’s theatrical skills included pyrotechnics: in Maldon, the entry ‘to Felstede of Londone xxvs iiiid’ is followed immediately by ‘for gonepowder iis vid’, and a little further down the accounts, ‘for vii dayes bordynge of Felsted and his mane iiiis iiiid’ and ‘for grasse for his iio horses by all the same tyme iiiid’ is followed immmediately by ‘for a pound and a half of gonepowder ixd’.40 Felsted and gunpowder seem to go together. I have not been able to find any more about Thomas Felsted as a private individual through any of the usual channels. He should be a member of the Dyers’ Company, which included ‘Every person occupying ye Arte of Dyinge of any manner of clothe, woollen or lynnen, olde or newe, silke or fustyan, lether, woole, hatts, felts or cappes, or any other thing dyed or colored.’41 The extant Dyers’ records, however, only go back to 1632. The family may originally have come from Essex: the village of Felsted lies halfway between Great Dunmow and Braintree, nine miles almost due north of Chelmsford, and of course, only about fourteen miles as the crow flies from Maldon. Perhaps Felsted was recommended to the Maldon church wardens by a distant relative. But the family seems to have been in London by the end of the fifteenth 398

f e ls t e d o f l o n d o n century: there was a William Felsted in the parish of All Hallows Barking by the Tower in 1490.42 Humfrey Felsted appears twice in wills, one of them (1591) his own. He might even be two people, perhaps father and son. John Felsted, son of the later Humfrey, died in the parish of All Hallows the Less in 1600. He, like our Felsted, was a silk-dyer.43 The Dyers Company Hall was erected in Thames Street, in the parish of All Hallows the Less.44 Perhaps he was a grandson or a greatgrandson of our theatrical Felsted. We will probably never know what made our Felsted diversify from a respectable life as a silk-dyer to this more rackety existence. One can see why, dealing in the kind of material favoured for stage costumes, he might be well situated for such a move. Maybe, having been introduced to the stage by the Guild activities, he realised there was money in it. Since he was a dyer, rather than a draper pure and simple, he must have had an eye for colours and expertise in chemicals. Maybe, however, he always had been hooked, from the days of staff-twirling. It takes a particular kind of enthusiasm to move from rock alum to sulphur and saltpetre

Notes   1. Ian Lancashire, Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1028; Paula Neuss, ‘The Dyer’s Hand in Rex Diabole’, Theatre Notebook, 38 (1984), 61–5. We were all saddened by Paula Neuss’ premature death last year. The fact that I disagree with some of her conclusions in this article does not detract from my respect for her many achievements in the field of medieval theatre.   2. A.H. Johnson, The History of the Worshipful Company of the Drapers of London, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), II, 274–8 (at p. 275). These accounts are summarised in Jean Robertson and D.J. Gordon, ‘A Calendar of Dramatic Records in the Books of the Livery Companies of London, 1485–1640’, Malone Society Collections, III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 32–5.  3. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. by J.S. Brewer, J. Gairdner, and R.H. Brodie, 21 vols (1862–1918), XXI, i (38 Henry VIII), no 738, p. 369.   4. Albert Feuillerat, Documents relating to the Revels at Court in the time of King Edward VI and Queen Mary (Louvain: Uystpruyst, 1914), p. 43: 3 Edward VI.   5. R.T.D. Sayle, Lord Mayor’s Pageants of the Merchant Taylors’ Company in the 15th, 16th and 17th Centuries (London: private, 1931), p. 23; see also pp. 27, 29. Summarised in Robertson and Gordon, ‘Calendar’, p. 40.   6. Robertson and Gordon, ‘Calendar’, p. 8.   7. My quotations are taken from Paula Neuss, ‘The Dyer’s Hand’: she gives references both to Public Record Office papers and to the modern-spelling edition of The Lisle Letters, ed. by Muriel St.Clare Byrne, 6 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). This quotation is to be found in PRO, SP 3 XII no 3; Byrne, Lisle Letters, V, p. 237 [1241]; Neuss, p. 61.   8. PRO, SP 3:7; Lisle Letters, V, p. 238 [1242]; Neuss, p. 62.  9. Johnson, Drapers, p. 275. All quotations are from this page. 10. For Rastell’s theatrical activities, see Three Rastell Plays, ed. by Richard Axton, Tudor Interludes (Cambridge: Brewer; Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield, 1979), Introduction, especially pp. 4–10.

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f e ls t e d o f l o n d o n 11. See ‘Pleadings in a Theatrical Lawsuit: Rastell vs. Walton’ in Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse, ed. by Edward Arber (London: Constable, 1903), pp. 307–21. Walton hired them out to ‘stage plays’ and ‘interludes’, apparently as a package, as the rates cited are ‘for the garments’ (p. 317) or ‘them’. 12. As Paula Neuss points out implicitly (p. 64), this is not grammatical Latin for ‘Devil King’, which would be Rex Diabolus, as it is in the Digby Mary Magdalen (The Digby Plays, ed. by Donald C. Baker, John L. Murphy, and Louis B. Hall Jr., EETS, 283 (1982), lines 560, 722, etc.). On the other hand, we do not have the title page, only Husee’s version of it. Diabole could well be his blend of diabolus and diable. ‘King [by permission of the] Devil’ is too ingenious. In the titles she cites (King Darius, King Johan, Rex Vivus, Dux Moraud) the second word is a name or nickname. Perhaps it was a dramatised version of the story of Robert the Devil (Robert le Diable), father of William the Conqueror, who was, according to legend, begotten by the agency of the devil after his mother and father had been long childless (an Anna and Joachim tale in reverse), and who led a career of unbridled savagery until his mother awakened his remorse. He was sent to a holy hermit in Rome, who set him the penance ‘ye must counterfayte and playe the fole / and ye may ete no mete but that ye can take it frome the dogges whan men gyue them ought / also ye must kepe you doumbe without speche and lye amonge dogges’. He becomes the Emperor’s fool, and after several incognito feats of bravery against attacking Saracens, is released from his penance and married to the Emperor’s daughter, who has also been dumb until miraculously given speech to reveal his prowess. Thenceforward he is known as ‘the servant of God’. Wynkyn de Worde printed a prose version of the story (the lyfe of the moast myscheuoust Robert the deuyll whiche was afterwarde called the seruaunt of God, ?1510: quotation here is from sig. ciijv–ciiijr). The Middle English romance of Sir Gowther is a version of the story. There was also a fourteenth-century French dramatised Miracle de Nostre Dame on the subject: Miracle de Nostre Dame de Robert le Dyable, filz du duc de Normandie (printed Rouen: Edouard Frere, 1836), and there were many other versions of the story in other European languages. It occurs to me that the ‘fool’ episode is very like that in Robert of Sicily. A Ludus de Kyng Robert of Cesill was played at Lincoln in 1452/3 (Stanley J. Kahrl, ‘Records of Plays and Players in Lincolnshire 1300– 1585’, Malone Society Collections, VII (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974 for 1969), p. 31), and The play of Robert of Cicell was played at the High Cross in Chester in 1529 (REED: Chester, ed. by Lawrence M. Clopper (Toronto; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), pp. 26, 484). Even if the homonymous heroes have not been confused, their stories belong to a strain of romance plays which have not survived in England (except in the parcel from Dux Moraud), though they have in the Netherlands and France. On the other hand, it might well be an allegorical play, though the idea that it was a Faustus-like plot is pure conjecture. 13. PRO, SP 3:XI no 57 (fol 74); Lisle Letters, V, p. 428; Neuss, p. 63. 14. PRO, SP 3:XI no 59 (fol 76); Lisle Letters, V. p. 437; Neuss, p. 64. 15. See ‘Rastell vs. Walton’, p. 312 (IV); p. 317 (IX). 16. ‘Rastell vs. Walton’, p. 311. 17. The exact price depends on whether Rastell is talking of the new Henry, royal, or rose noble valued at 10s, or the older noble valued at 6s.8d. 18. ‘Rastell vs. Walton’, p. 315. 19. Johnson, Drapers, p. 275. 20. ‘Rastell vs. Walton’, p.315 21. ‘Rastell vs. Walton’, pp. 316, 317.

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f e ls t e d o f l o n d o n 22. It seems highly unlikely, therefore, that ‘the total cost of hiring Felsted’s costumes for three or four months was fifteen pounds’ or that he made ‘£15 10s clear profit’ (Neuss, p. 64). She mistakes the £10 for the outstanding hire charge instead of the value of the costumes. 23. W.A. Mepham, ‘Medieval Drama at Maldon in the 16th Century’, Essex Review, 55 (1946) 169–75, and 56 (1947), 34–41. 24. Essex Record Office, D/B 3/3/235, quoted Mepham, 55 (1946), 170 and 56 (1947), 37. 25. Essex Record Office, D/B 3/ 3/236, transcribed Mepham, 56 (1947), 37–40. 26. Mepham, 56: Thomas Wedd, who makes ‘xv hundred lyveries’. Mepham (55, p. 173) suggests that these are ‘badges or ribbons’ (?or rosettes) in the town colours. In that case, colowris may mean ‘dyes’: in the accounts immediately after the lyveries he is paid ‘for clothe’ and ‘for coloure’ (56, p. 39). 27. W.R. Streitberger, ‘The Development of Henry VIII’s Revels Establishment’, METh, 7:2 (1985), note 50. For Gibson in general, see this article (pp. 83–100). 28. For the Lydd and New Romney accounts, see ‘Records of Plays and Players in Kent 1450–1642’, ed. by Giles E. Dawson, Malone Society Collections, VII (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). For the porpoise and other rewards, and visits to Mr. Gibson, see p. 199; for New Romney, see p. 132. 29. See e.g. Robertson and Gordon, p. 25 (1535); Feuillerat, Edward and Mary, pp. 249–52: 1546/7 (City of London), 1554 (Lord Lumley), 1555 (Venetian Ambassador), undated (New College, Oxford), 1558 (Nonesuch), 1547 (Lord Protector Somerset). 30. PRO SP 3:XI, no 57 (fol 74); Lisle Letters, V, p. 428; Neuss, p. 63. 31. See note 3. 32. See note 5. 33. A Humfrey Felsted appears in testamentary records of the mid-sixteenth century. He is granted administration of the Will of Robert Whittal (parish of All Hallows the Less) in 1563 (Index to the Testamentary Records in the Archdeaconry Court of London Volume 1: (1363)–1649, ed. by Marc Fitch, The Index Library, 89 (British Record Society, 1979) p. 408), and the Will of a Humfrey Felsted of the parish of St. Peter Paul’s Wharf was proved in 1591 (Index to Testamentary Records in the Commissary Court of London 3: 1571–1625, ed. by Marc Fitch, The Index Library, 100 (British Record Society, 1985), p. 145. His wife was called Anne, and he was father of John (see note 42). Perhaps, given the dates, he was son or even grandson of Thomas. His profession is not stated in the Index. 34. Feuillerat, Edward and Mary, p. 43. 35. Sayle (see note 5), p. 23; see also pp. 27, 28. Summarised in Robertson and Gordon, p. 40. 36. Edward Hall, Chronicle (New York: AMS Press, 1965; facsimile of 1807 edition), p. 798. 37. Henry Machyn, The Diary of Henry Machyn, ed. by J.G. Nichols, Camden Society, 42 (1848), pp. 47, 271: quoted Robert Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline, 2 vols (New York: Arno Press, 1980; reprint of 1926 Harvard University Press edition, reprinted Benjamin Blom, 1963), II, p. 13 (1553); p. 19 (1561). 38. F.W. Fairholt, Lord Mayor’s Pageants (London: Percy Society, 1843), p. 17. See also quotation from William Smyth on pp. 20–21. 39. Hall, p. 799. 40. Mepham, 56 (1947), p. 39. 41. Edward C. Robins, ‘Some Account of the History and Antiquities of The Worshipful Company of Dyers, London’, London and Middlesex Archaeological

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f e ls t e d o f l o n d o n Society Transactions, 5 (1881), pp. 441–76: see p. 450. The Ordinances quoted here go back only to 20 Elizabeth. 42. Index to Testamentary Records in the Commissary Court of London 2: 1489– 1570, ed. by Marc Fitch, The Index Library, 86 (British Record Society, 1973), p. 94. There was a Luke Felsted, brewer, in the parish of St. Sepulchre in 1397 (Commissary Court 1: 1374–1458, ed. by Fitch, The Index Library, 82 (British Record Society, 1969)), but this is too distant to connect with any certainty. 43. Archdeaconry Court of London, Volume 1 (see note 31), p. 131. His widow was Anne. In Commissary Court, 3 (see note 31), he and his mother Anne are however said to be dead by 1598. Son of Humfrey and Anne (see note 31), and married to Anne, he left two daughters, Anne and Mary. 44. Robins, ‘Dyers’, p. 462. It was destroyed in the Great Fire of London. See John Stow, A Survey of London, ed. by Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), I, p. 237.

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14 THE YORK MERCERS’ ‘LEWENT BREDE’ AND THE HANSEATIC TRADE

Among the many items listed in the York Mercers’ 1433 Indenture of stage properties and costumes for their play of Doomsday are a variety of hangings for the pageant waggon. These include: A grete coster of rede damaske payntid for the bakke syde of þe pagent ij other lesse costers for ij sydes of þe Pagent iij other costers of lewent brede for þe sides of þe Pagent.1 In their article on ‘The Doomsday Pageant of the York Mercers, 1433’,2 Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Dorrell guessed, following the OED, that ‘lewent brede’ was a measurement involving an ‘eleventh’ of something (i.e. ‘of an eleventh breadth’?).3 This has always sounded slightly implausible: an eleventh is not a common fraction in the terminology of cloth, and the citations of lewent as ‘eleventh’ in the OED are all of ordinal numbers, not fractions. The L4 volume of the Middle English Dictionary, which appeared in 1972, the following year, presents the word under the head-spelling leuwin, though in fact none of its examples are spelt quite in that way.4 Alternative spellings are given as lewin and lewent, and it is defined as ‘A kind of cloth made in, or associated with, Louvain; ?also, linen waste for the wick of a candle or torch’; this latter because of a citation from the household accounts of Henry Earl of Derby in 1381, of which more later. The link with Louvain, the Flemish version of which is Leuven, which is phonetically closer to the word in question, appears to be a guess, on analogy with other materials called after their place of origin, such as arras, musterdevilers (from Montivilliers), and possibly lawn (from Laon?), though there is nothing in the citations which might suggest this. The latest edition of the OED (1989) picks up this information, citing the word as lewyn, with alternatives leuwyn, levyne, and lewan(e). It also gives the etymology ‘from Flemish Leuven, Louvain’ and defines it as ‘A kind of linen cloth’. Both give several examples of its use, though since they are all from inventories or lists, they present the usual disadvantage, also seen in early theatrical records, that the persons who made the lists knew what they were listing, and so usually do not bother to define items further. However, 403

t h e yo r k m e rc e r s ’ ‘ l e w e n t b r e d e ’ the OED quotes a 1485 inventory from Ripon which at least confirms that it was a linen material: ‘De panno lineo vocato lewan j par linthiaminum de lewan’ [Of linen cloth called lewan: one pair of sheets of lewan].5 As part of the York Doomsday Project, we have been looking at the late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century York Mercers and Merchant Adventurers in their wider context. This includes a foray into their trading relations with the continent of Europe, which was conducted largely through the port of Kingston upon Hull. They imported wine, wax, salt, soap, bowstaves, painted trenchers, bitumen, clavicymbals, peppermills and sturgeons, felthattes, strawhattes … and thousands of ells of lewent. Economic historians working on trade and customs accounts have known about lewent from at least as far back as N.S.B. Gras’s still valuable The Early English Customs System (1918).6 He however provides a different etymology: his index defines it as from ‘Leinwand, linen cloth’. Wendy Childs’ glossary of imports in her enthralling edition of the Customs Accounts of Hull 1453– 1490 also defines lewent as ‘linen cloth’, adding ‘probably from the medieval German Linwaat but possibly from the town of Louvain’.7 And Henry S. Cobb in his article in the 1995 issue of the journal Costume, which refers to the Hull Customs accounts, says that it ‘has been interpreted as linen cloth of Louvain but often seems to mean linen generally’.8 All of which is an interesting insight into the way in which dictionaries and glossaries are compiled, and how etymologies can be taken for granted, if they have a sufficiently authoritative presentation. It seems unlikely to me that the etymology could be simultaneously both from linwaat/wand and from Leuven, and I think that we shall have regretfully to discard Leuven as a possibility. The cargoes in which lewent appears listed in Wendy Childs’ edition almost all seem to have originated in the Baltic. For example, on 15 May 1453, the Baltic merchant fleet arrived at Hull.9 The Jacob of Dansk (Danzig, Gdansk), master, Henry Cambowe, Hansard, freighted almost entirely by Hansard merchants, carried over 1210 ells of ‘lewent’ (the part of the Customs roll which lists one of the shipments is illegible) together with the lasts of bitumen and the amber rosaries, the dozens of ‘Pruce skynnes’ and timbers (bundles of 40) of marten skins, barrels of selsmolt (seal blubber) and stacks of wainscot. On the same day, the cargoes of the George of Dansk (master, Hans Droye, Hansard) and of the Jurian of Dansk included 354 ells and 540 ells of lewent respectively. A trawl through the Customs accounts here, in Gras, and in Smit’s magisterial collection of sources for the history of trade between the Netherlands and England, Scotland, and Ireland,10 suggests that it was almost always an import into England, usually carried by Hansard merchants, though in the earlier period not always in Hansard bottoms.11 This seems to confirm a Low German origin for its name, an anglicised version of a variant form of Leinwand. The Modern German Leinwand [linen cloth] is a late medieval adaptation of the original Old and Middle High German lin‑wat, in which the first 404

t h e yo r k m e rc e r s ’ ‘ l e w e n t b r e d e ’ element is lin [linen] from *lino [flax] and the second cognate with our archaic weed [clothing] from OE wæd. The version ending in ‑wand/want (called by the OED a ‘perverted’ form)12 first appeared in the fourteenth century, according to Grimm, still the standard historical dictionary of German, in Low (i.e. Northern) German. The second element seems to have been affected by the use of the verb wind in the sense ‘plait, weave’.13 The brothers Grimm quote the forms lynenwant, lennewend, linewant, and linwant. They do not give forms with the elided middle n: however, the Middelnederlansch Woordenboek quotes lu-, lou-, lo-, le-, liwant, liwent, and even luwet as variations on the more standard Middle Dutch linwaet and lijnwant [linen cloth], and suggests an East Dutch origin for the forms in ‑want, quoting the German leinewand as a parallel.14 I am not sufficient of a Germanic philologist to pursue this further, but it looks as if existing evidence would at least not contradict a North German origin for the word. So we are left to wonder why and for what kind of commodity Northern English customs accounts and inventories use this particular Low German/East Dutch loan-word. Was it just a German word for ‘linen generally’, as Cobb suggests, or was it a word for a particular kind of German linen? Linen cloth – and yarn – was produced and imported into England from several areas of continental Europe, though as far as economic historians are concerned, as a subject it has always been a poor relation when compared with the attention paid to the medieval wool trade.15 One of these areas was North Germany. According to Philippe Dollinger’s The German Hansa: The only textile industry of any importance in the Hanseatic zone was the linen weaving of Westphalia. This gave rise to a considerable volume of trade, especially with the west … The production of flax seems to have increased remarkably in the fifteenth century in North Germany, Prussia, and especially Livonia, where it gradually became the principal article of export.16 Their woollen industry did not, apparently, ever become significant, as the market was swamped first with Flemish and later with English cloth: Linen was a different matter. It was much in demand in Europe because of its cheapness and usefulness for clothes, sails, and as a packaging material. The manufacturing centres were in Frisia and Westphalia, in the neighbourhood of Osnabrück and Münster, and later on in Saxony, as well as around Lake Constance in South Germany. Westphalian linen, woven in both villages and towns, was exported in many directions, but especially to Hamburg, from where it was re-exported to the Low Countries and England, and also to Lübeck, which dispatched it to all the Baltic countries. Production and trade appear to have increased considerably in the fifteenth century.17 405

t h e yo r k m e rc e r s ’ ‘ l e w e n t b r e d e ’ According to Vanessa Harding18 and Henry S. Cobb,19 the highest proportion of linen imports into London both in 1384 and in 1480–1 was from Westphalia. In the 1480–1 accounts, Cobb cites Brunswick, Hamburg, Hannover, hastrey, Herford, minsters (from Münster), ‘Niperfeld’, Osnabruck, soultwich (from Salzwedel), and spruce (Prussia) linens from the Hansard areas, while the Low Countries supply the Brabant, Brussels, diaper, Dornik, Flemish, Gelder, Ghentish, Hainault, Holland, lawn, and Zeeland varieties. How can one pursue the search for lewent, its origins and nature, further? The existing written records are largely fairly reticent Customs accounts and household inventories. There are however various ways in which one can try to narrow it down. First, we can see whether it is defined in any way: did it come in different qualities, and is there any clue as to what these might be? Then we can see what other kinds of linen product appear in the same lists: if in the Customs accounts, then the occurrences should, for purposes of comparison, be listed in the same cargoes, and thus recorded by the same customar. Different customs officials might possibly use a different vocabulary, although one would expect a certain standardisation. Thus one might be able to define by elimination what lewent is not. Next, how was it priced, especially in comparison with other linens? Finally, is there any evidence about what it was used for? It has to be said from the start that to answer these questions properly calls for more time and more technical skills than I possess. Besides this, I have only been able to look at printed sources. However, one has to start somewhere: I can sketch in a few lines of enquiry, and someone else may be able to finish what I have begun. The lewent in the Hull Customs Accounts is sometimes further defined by adjectives, which suggests that though it might be a generic name for linen cloth from a particular locality, it could come in different qualities. For example, the Mary (‘Mare’) of Dansk, when she docked in Hull on 22 August 1463, declared: 3 M ulnis großlewant (imported by Rainaldus Kirkholde, Hansard) 5 C ulnis hynderlantes lewant (imported by Hans Broun, Hansard) 2 M 8 C großlewant (imported by Henricus Keyspenny, Hansard) 3 C ulnis smalle lewant (imported by Hans Broun, Hansard)20 Großlewant is a descriptive, possibly technical, compound word. Groß is from a Low German or Dutch adjective meaning ‘coarse’. It appears in the printed Hull Customs accounts for 1453, describing yarn:21 this pre-dates the OED’s earliest citation for ‘gruff ’, from 1533, by 80 years. The OED suggests, correctly, that ‘possibly the Du. or LG word was introduced in commercial use’. (Alison Hanham’s edition of the Cely Letters has an example in a letter written, from Calais, on 12 September 1487, which she claims for the earliest instance, but the Hull Accounts are 34 years earlier.)22 Hynderlantes, sometimes 406

t h e yo r k m e rc e r s ’ ‘ l e w e n t b r e d e ’ anglicised as hyndorlawnce, is also a German loan-word, ‘from the hinterland’, and can be used as a noun, defined by Wendy Childs as ‘a linen cloth, probably from inland Germany (inderlans was a coarse hemp cloth from Hamburg in the eighteenth century)’.23 Small could mean either ‘fine’ (thus opposed to groß) or ‘narrow’ (thus opposed to broad); in the latter case, it would be the equivalent of the lower-grade Scottish linen straits.24 It also seems as if it is tacitly distinguished from some other linens. The 1463 Hull Customs accounts, rendered by the controllers John Fereby and John Grene, list in the cargo of the Mare of Dansk, beside the groß, hynderlantes and smalle lewant, 60 and 28 ells panni linei. On the same day, the Mareknyght of Dansk declared, together with 7300 ells of hynderlantes lewant and 60 ells of (?ordinary) lewant, 60 ells of lyncloth and 50 ells panni linei.25 It would seem therefore that lewent was a different kind of linen than straightforward lyncloth, and possibly from pannus lineus (if this were not just a spontaneous slide into Latin). Extending the range of comparison further, on the same day the Marie of Hull brought in ‘2M ulnis canvas’: 26 canvas could be made of linen, though as its name suggests it was usually of hemp (‘cannabis’); however, on this evidence lewent and canvas seem to be different. Nor is it fustian (a mixed fabric of linen and cotton): the accounts of John Dey and John Brydde for 1465, which also record lewan(d), implicitly distinguish it from canvas, pannus lineus, and fustyane, not to mention tapestrewerk and quysshynclothes.27 Again in 1463, but in the previous accounting year, John Dey records ships from Flanders and Hull importing brabandcloth and holandcloth, both fine linen weaves.28 Back in 1383/84, the Hull customars distinguish it from fustian, canvas, and bocaram (buckram, a fine linen weave before it became the loose-woven glue-stiffened lining fabric we know today), besides pannus lineus.29 It is also apparently distinguished from westfale, which may suggest either that it comes from somewhere else, or that it was a different grade of cloth, or both.30 By great good luck, there survives the inventory of the stock in trade of a York chapman and member of the Mercers’ Guild, Thomas Gryssop, made on 20 October 1446 immediately after his death.31 It lists a wide range of linens and other haberdashery, including Braban cloth, Chaumpan cloth, laune (lawn, a very fine linen), umpill (another fine linen weave, of which kerchiefs were made), bokasyn (bocasin, a fine linen cloth, originally cotton, ‘a form of buckram resembling taffeta’), fustyan, and lewent. All of them are priced, though the prices vary with, presumably, the quality, width, and age of the stock. Lawn heads the linens price list, at up to 3s a plyte; umple is next at from 8d to 20d an ell; Champaun cloth is from 6 2/3d to 10d an ell; fustian, and Brabant cloth are 5d to 4½d an ell; buckram 4d an ell; and the better grades of lewent are around 3d an ell: the lower grades, however, at 1½d an ell, seem the same as canvas, at about 1½d to 2½d an ell. However, there is also some ‘lewent store’ (‘coarse’ lewent? the same as groß lewent?) at 1.4d the ell, and down among the canvas and pakclath some more lewent at 1d an ell.32 407

t h e yo r k m e rc e r s ’ ‘ l e w e n t b r e d e ’ On the whole, attempts to distinguish lewent by price through the shipping accounts are inconclusive, mostly for lack of evidence. The later Hull Customs accounts only record the subsidy on goods, and then usually on a whole merchant’s shipment. However, earlier Hull accounts, in the late fourteenth century, do give gross values as well as subsidy, and the later Lynn Customs accounts (as recorded by Gras) also conveniently give the value of the goods.33 Occasionally we can tease out comparative prices, but they are very random, and unfortunately so far apart in time as to make larger comparisons suspect.34 The task is made more difficult for a non-specialist by the fact that most of the quantities are cited as pieces or bundles rather than by yardage. And the valuations given by customars on wholesale goods might differ significantly from those given by post mortem auditors on retail stock. What was lewent used for? The 1485 entry from Ripon quoted above says that it was made up into a pair of sheets. Another MED entry from the accounts of Finchale Abbey, County Durham, in 1360, also cited in the second edition of the OED, reads ‘Et xij ulnæ de leuwyn pro mappis’ [And 12 ells of leuwyn for – I shall go by Elyot’s 1538 Dictionary and call them ‘table clothes’].35 Another inventory, possibly from the 1440s, of the goods of a mason living at Beverley, lists two lewent curtains, worth 16d the pair.36 In the Lynn Customs Accounts of 1466–7 it appears to have been used as packing material, as in Thomas Gryssop’s stock above, covering for a bale of pieces of ‘Pruse canvas’: De Johanne Gaunse indigena … pro I. pakke lewent continet xiiiic pruse canvas’ val. £viii.37 And a previously unnoticed entry in the Ordinances of the York Saddlers recorded on 20 October 1470 in the York A/Y Memorandum Book talks about the seat portion of a saddle being made from canvas (canues, mistranscribed by Maud Sellers or miswritten by the clerk as cannes) or lewent.38 This suggests it was a tough and hardwearing weave (at least when compared with lawn or the finer weaves used for personal garments), suitable for heavy-duty household use, and also for the wear and tear of dramatic performance; possibly where we nowadays would use heavy-duty calico.39 What about the second half of the phrase, brede? In Middle English, the word is usually the abstract noun from broad, meaning ‘breadth’.40 On the face of it, the whole phrase would then mean ‘three other hangings of the breadth of lewent’. The only other idioms like this that I have found are in Dutch, for example, the phrase scarlakens lingde [scarlet’s length],41 but here they are talking about other cloths which are the same length as scarlet, not scarlet itself. In this context, it would only make sense if lewent were woven to a single very distinctive width. As we shall see in a minute, this was not the case. There was a type of woollen(?) cloth called stock brede, from the Dutch meaning ‘yard-stick wide’, which entered the English cloth-traders’ 408

t h e yo r k m e rc e r s ’ ‘ l e w e n t b r e d e ’ vocabulary, but again, the defining element of the compound implies a standard measurement.42 There is a more specialised meaning of brede: ‘a piece of stuff of the full breadth’. This is used in phrases like ‘Oon paire of fyne sheetis of ij bredes and a half, and oon paier of two bredes’, i.e. made out of two and a half widths of material joined side by side.43 It is possible that the clerk was implying that the three costers were made of the full uncut width of a piece of lewent, however wide that might be. Or we might push it even further and suggest, by analogy with ‘strait’, ‘a narrow cloth’, that brede here is ‘a broad-cloth’, i.e. the widest possible weave. The obvious comparison here is with the distinction between the standard widths of woollen cloth: the Statutes of Assize of 1483–4 give the standard for broadcloth as 24 yards long by 2 yards wide, and streytes as 12 yards long by one yard wide.44 This does not of course mean that the standards for linen cloths were the same, but the principle might be the same.45 It would obviously be useful to know exactly how wide, as it might give us some idea of the size of the lewent costers, and thus possibly of the dimensions of the waggon. I have not found any reference to ‘broad’ lewent. However, there is one to double lewent in the 1446 inventory of Thomas Gryssop’s stock: De vjxx lewent xv s. De vjxx de duplici lewent xxx s. De iijxx lewent xv s. De j dos. single lewent xv d.46 [For 6 score lewent, 15 s. For 6 score of double lewent, 30 s. For 3 score lewent 15 s. For 1 dozen single lewent, 15 d.] The prices here are ambiguous. Ordinary(?) lewent is 120 units/ells @ 15s = 1s for 8 units = 1½d a unit. Double is 120 units @ 30s = 1s for 4 units = 3d a unit. Single lewent is 12 units @ 15d = 1¼d per unit. The double lewent seems to be worth twice the price of the ordinary (i.e. unqualified) lewent, but the single lewent is much cheaper. There are two possible interpretations for single and double.47 As a weaving term, double refers to what in knitting we would call two-ply: two threads are twisted round each other to produce a doubled thread which is then used to form both warp and weft threads. The resulting fabric is more springy, warmer, and generally of better quality than one which is woven with a single thread of the same thickness. Single fabric is not necessarily less heavy, but of a lower quality. In this case, double lewent would not necessarily be wider than single, simply a better quality material. It can also refer to the way the cloth is packaged. Here double means ‘folded’: broadcloths were doubled lengthwise, selvedge to selvedge. It thus also implies that the doubled cloths were wider than the single ones; if we go by the assize of woollen cloths, twice as wide. In this case, double lewent and brede would be synonymous. 409

t h e yo r k m e rc e r s ’ ‘ l e w e n t b r e d e ’ It is of course possible that we are just not paying proper attention to the particular syntax of lists: A grete coster of rede damaske payntid for the bakke syde of þe pagent. iij other costers of lewent brede for þe sides of þe Pagent Compare it with these items from Thomas Gryssop’s inventory: De j reme white pauper, spendable … De j reme spendable pauper, blak48 De x pare women gloves, furred, ij s. vj d. De ij pare men glovez, penulatis cum gray, iij s.49 Punctuate the Indenture according to the manner of inventories and you get: A large hanging of red damask, painted, for the back side of the pageant … 3 other hangings of lewent, brede, for the sides of the pageant in which case brede seems to be an adjective, or a substantive that can be used adjectivally. It is even remotely possible that the list writer is thinking in Dutch. Modern Dutch breed, Middle Dutch bre[e]de, is the adjective ‘broad’.50 York mercers must have been used to dealing with goods in at least three languages, Latin, English, and Flemish, at least in a sort of travellers’ pidgin. (The Cely Letters give us enough evidence of the way in which wool- and cloth-merchants unconsciously picked up Flemish trading terms.)51 There were also enough Fleming and Hansard aliens among their own number to keep this flexibility alive. One of the four pageant masters cited on the Indenture is himself a German from Cologne. It is interesting, also, that the word lewent only, on current evidence, appears in definitely northern and eastern texts: the Hull Shipping Accounts, the Lynn accounts, inventories in York, Beverley, Ripon and Finchale, and the Scottish Exchequer records.52 The one apparent exception is from the 1381 household accounts, quoted by OED and MED, of the Earl of Derby (later Henry IV). His chamberlain bought lewent for making torches – possibly shredded as a wick, or perhaps wrapped round a staff and dipped in flammable liquid? However, when one traces the quotation back to its source, in 1380–1 the Earl was on an expedition to the Hanseatic regions, and at the date when that particular section of the accounts was drawn up, he was lodging in Danzig.53 What have we here, a commodity confined to one part of the country, or a dialect difference? It seems unlikely that the Hansards did not import lewent the fabric into London, their headquarters. Was there something about either 410

t h e yo r k m e rc e r s ’ ‘ l e w e n t b r e d e ’ the north-eastern Danelaw dialects or the linguistic context of the speakers which made the adoption of a German/Flemish word more natural? Lewent is not mentioned in any of the later pageant accounts. However, the Mercers’ accounts of 1449/50 record: Item for ij 3erdes & dimidium [2½ yards] of lynen cloth to hevyn of oure pageant xv.d Item paide for sewynge of þe same clothe ij.d … Item payde to Thomas Steynour for stenyng [painting] of ye clothes of oure pageand xiij.s iiij.d54 Was this linen cloth the same as the lewent? The cloths of the pageant do not turn up in any later accounts. Either they proved remarkably durable and needed no further repairs or replacement, or they were transferred to some other accounting head, the documents for which have not survived. All this would merely be an interesting if somewhat prolix footnote to the vocabulary of medieval drama records, except that it opens a window on a wider issue. To come up with a possible meaning for lewent I have had to range far outside the standard records of early English drama. And I only started on this investigation because my eye was caught by the word in the Hull Customs Accounts, which we were investigating for the York Doomsday Project, not because we were at that time looking for commodities, but because we were interested in the overseas trade of the Mercers and Merchant Adventurers as an aspect of their larger material culture, and as a possible lead to their knowledge of the pageantry and piety of the Low Countries. So, was this trail started by accident? What is relevant to the study of medieval theatre? We can sometimes feel a sense of unease when we find ourselves, as here, apparently ranging far outside the direct boundaries of our ‘subject area’. Are we merely being self-indulgent? This has recently been the subject of an e-mail discussion, inaugurated by James Cummings, a postgraduate just beginning to research his field, about where one should draw a line in collecting records. The discussion not unnaturally reflected on the greatest recordcollecting enterprise of our generation, REED, and its rules of selection. One of the (unnecessarily defensive – REED is the giant on whose shoulders we all climb) practical arguments was that we are limited by the economic dictates of our patrons and publishers. But what if we were not? The York Doomsday Project is founded on several premises. One of them is that the play is anchored in the life of its community. This ‘life’ ranges from their spiritual aspirations and their practical piety, the books that urged them to it and the action they took on it – the central message of the Judgment in the play – to their material culture. Theatre is a very material art; hence we are as much concerned with lewent and brandreths of iron as we are with sources and analogues, and no literary theory will stand up that does not take this materiality into account. If we 411

t h e yo r k m e rc e r s ’ ‘ l e w e n t b r e d e ’ want to study the material culture, we shall not only have to look at its physical remains, in so far as they exist, but also the documents – wills, inventories, customs accounts – which record its vanished substance. We look at them partly for the material itself. This involves examining the language with which the objects are described, as I have been partly doing in this paper. We are also interested in the nature of the documents. The York Mercers and Merchant Adventurers were an association of shippers. They were used to drawing up bills of lading: the 1433 Indenture would have been no new departure for them. Some of them even acted as customars for Hull.55 One can presumably also count on an ingrained measure of accuracy in their listings. There is actually a relationship between the Indenture and  their other professional activities, just as there is also a relationship in form between the Indenture and the various post mortem inventories of ­household goods of which some are printed in the Testamenta Eboracensia, and which incidentally contain so many brandreths. The Project is interested in these formal correspondences because they should tell us what type of document our records come from, and therefore what kind of information they are designed to enshrine – or withhold. Raw information, like raw material, is a very necessary thing, but it must be interpreted in context. But there are so many contexts, or perhaps, since we define them, we should say points of view. (Some of them are more evanescent than others, and we tend to describe them in terms of a ‘feel’ or a hunch, while being subconsciously aware that there is a pattern there, if only we could identify it. Sometimes further research reveals what this pattern is.) We hope that the potential methods of organisation which seem to be adumbrated by hypermedia will enable more of these frames to co-exist, that we shall no longer have to be exclusive, to say ‘This is the only way to look at this’, though we may say ‘This way seems more immediate, or more illuminating, than that way’. One approach reads rather like this. We are used to the (rather old-fashioned) idea that some plays were allocated to, or chosen by, guilds with a measure of appropriateness to their everyday work. So in 1415 the Bakers have the Last Supper and the Waterleders the Washing of Feet.56 Equally, these original correspondences may have disappeared, as did this particular one, under financial or organisational pressures. It may not always be a straightforward connection between craft and subject matter: the BarberSurgeons seem to have the Baptism because their patron saints were St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist, who nicely combine both subject matter and the Gospel which opens with the witness of the ‘vox clamantis in deserto’, though further research may show why these saints were particularly appropriate to the craft which combined shaving, dentistry, and surgery.57 Or perhaps it was vice versa: they took on these saints because they were given the play. Why did the Mercers get the Last Judgment? We know the standard answer: they were the richest and most important guild who could provide the 412

t h e yo r k m e rc e r s ’ ‘ l e w e n t b r e d e ’ best production values and would demand the place of honour at the grand finale. This may be one of the reasons, though it loses some of its force if we accept Louise Wheatley’s contention that at the time of the assignation of the plays, the Mercers were an association of middle-income traders, and did not include the big commercial names which we are used to citing, like Blackburn and Bolton, at all.58 But so much of a sense of appropriateness may arise through hindsight: once something is there, we can always find reasons for it to be so: or it may have made itself so after the event. Richard Beadle has shown how the Shipwrights’ Play of the Building of the Ark was written as a showcase for their professional knowledge.59 If the Shipwrights’ play both advertised the building of ships and showed that this could be done to the glory of God and indeed the salvation of the human race, what can we make of the Mercers’? The York Mercers, and later the Merchant Adventurers, were not craftsmen. They dealt in commodities: specifically with the import/export trade. They are the ones whose names appear in the Customs accounts of Hull: Thomas Wrangwish, Thomas Scauceby, Thomas Beverley, Richard York, John Gilliot, John Kent (and his wife Marion), Robert Taylor, Nicholas Holgate, William Scauceby, John Middleton, to take one shipping list at random from 1463.60 The materials which the 1433 Indenture lists so carefully, and the materials which later documents account for, include commodities which were probably unloaded on the wharf at Hull and/or weighed on the Crane at York. Lewent is only one of them. The great coster of red damask was, if silk, probably Italian- or Spanish-made, and so probably in this period imported via London.61 The ‘v 3erddes of now canvays to I now pagand yat was mayd for ye sallys to ryse owtof’ in 1463, however, almost certainly came from the Baltic.62 So did the ‘sparres of fyre’ [fir] which braced it: though the 200 ‘fyrsparres’ which came in on the Mareknyght of Zierickzee on 21 August that year arrived too late to have been the very ones used on Corpus Christi Day.63 Wanskot like that sawed for the repairs on the pageant in 1461 came in from the Baltic in vast quantities, together with clapholt [split oak for barrel staves and panelling], rygholt [roofing timbers?], tunholt [barrel staves], scofhowlt [scaffolding timber], and all manner of other timber from the forests of North and Eastern Europe.64 Even the iron from which heaven and the brandreth were made probably came from the Baltic in osmunds, or from Hungary.65 The ‘chauelers of 3alow’ for the Apostles, if not from local horsehair, may have been made from Baltic hemp or linen yarn. The four ropes that pulled the brandreth up were almost certainly imported: the Baltic supplied most of the rigging and cordage, as well as the sailcloth, for the ships in which these imports and exports sailed;66 indeed, the entire rigging of the lift for God may have owed something to the nautical expertise of the York shipmen, or the mechanical nous of the keepers of the Crane on the Ouse-side quay. 413

t h e yo r k m e rc e r s ’ ‘ l e w e n t b r e d e ’ We must avoid the naive view that the guild gave goods and services free: nothing in any accounts from any guilds suggests that this was anything except a commercial proposition. Guild members might be able to provide materials for the waggon, but that does not necessarily mean they did so at a discount. They might however be willing to wait a little for payment. For example, in 1461 Thomas Beverley provided 3¼ yards of ‘redbokuram to iiij baners’ for 2s 2d: a note adds that the pageant masters have paid a deposit of 8d.67 It would be pleasant to be able to match this with his record of imports: unfortunately there are gaps in the records at the crucial point. But he certainly knew a source: in 1463 he imported ‘20 pece bukerames’ on the Mary of Hull, one of the vessels largely freighted by the Company.68 He also in 1461 provided wax for the Corpus Christi torches.69 Wax (together with rosin70 and candlewick:71 the basic ingredients for these processional lights)72 was one of the major Baltic imports; unfortunately again we cannot match this particular consignment to the cargo of the Jacob of Dansk, which arrived too late, on 6 August, for either Hans Gronhowe, or George Skeke, or Hans Aldbryght (Albrecht) to be the supplier this year.73 One could say that the production-values of the play of Doomsday were a testimony to the commodities in which the Mercers traded. (The Chester Banns are a rather more overt statement of this facet of the enterprise.)74 One could see their pageant waggon as a great vessel, pennants flying, displaying their stock in trade. Perhaps. Who knows, without contemporary reports, how many (conflicting? subversive? complementary?) messages the production gave off ? The action and the words of the play, of course, discuss the proper use of material goods and the wealth arising from commodities. It also presents the final accounting: ‘Þat we did ofte full pryuely / Appertly may we se þem wreten’ (131–2). The original Elkerlijk was a merchant. In the Groeningemuseum in Bruges there is a painting by Jan Provoost (1465–1529) of a merchant or moneychanger being presented with a bill of account by Death which vividly sums up that message.75 Though there is no mention of the scales wielded at the psychostasis in the script, the overall spatial semantics of the play suggest a weighing, as imported goods were weighed in the balance at the Cranegarth.76 Perhaps this is becoming fantastical, but there does seem to be more than one possible network of connections between overseas ­commerce  and the Day of Judgment: we hope to tease some of these out. Even the most famous painting of the subject, Memling’s Last Judgment, is entangled in it in a not entirely random way. Painted for an Italian bank manager and his wife in Bruges, and destined for Florence, it set  out from Zeeland for London on 25 April 1473, during the AngloHanseatic wars, in the galley San Matteo, under the Burgundian flag. The pirate Paul Benecke, working for the Hansa, swooped as it left the mouth of the Zwin, and bore it off triumphantly – to Gdansk, where it has remained ever since.77 414

t h e yo r k m e rc e r s ’ ‘ l e w e n t b r e d e ’ Notes  1. Records of Early English Drama: York, ed. Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, 2 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), I, pp. 55–6.   2. Alexandra Johnston and Margaret Dorrell, ‘The Doomsday Pageant of the York Mercers, 1433’, Leeds Studies in English, ns 5 (1971), 29–34 (p. 31): ‘Three other curtains which measured “lewent brede” were also provided “for þe sides of þe Pagent”. These may have been pageant cloths to conceal the wheels’, and note 3: ‘“Lewent” here does not mean “of the Levant” but “eleventh”, a term of measurement.’  3. OED s.v. ‘lewent’.   4. Basing himself on this, Peter Meredith suggested ‘broadcloth of Louvain’ as a meaning in ‘“Item for a grone – iij d” – records and performance’ in Records of Early English Drama: Proceedings of the First Colloquium … 1978, ed. JoAnna Dutka (Toronto: REED, 1979), p. 49. Johnston and Rogerson do not actually gloss ‘lewent’ in the REED: York volume.   The Cely Letters use ‘Loven’ as an adjective meaning ‘from Leuven’: ‘I require you bespeke me xij dosin payre of Loven glovis’ (Letter 161, p. 147), which fits better with the old spelling ‘Loeven’, and the Latin adjective ‘Lovanensis’.  5. Acts of the Chapter of Ripon, ed. J.T. Fowler, Surtees Society 64 (1875), p. 366.   6. Norman Scott Brien Gras, The Early English Customs System, Harvard Economic Studies, 18 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918).  7. The Customs Accounts of Hull 1453–1490, ed. Wendy R. Childs, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, 144 (Leeds, 1986 for 1984), p. 241.   8. Henry S. Cobb, ‘Textile Imports in the Fifteenth Century: The Evidence of the Customs’ Accounts’, Costume, 29 (1995), 1–11 (p. 7).  9. Childs, Customs Accounts of Hull, pp. 3–7. The four ships mentioned, the Jacob, the Catyntroghe, the George, and the Jurian, had probably been sailing in convoy to avoid pirates in the Sound between Denmark and Sweden: see P. Dollinger, The German Hansa, trans. and ed. D.S. Ault and S.H. Steinberg (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1970) p. 147. Though they may have stopped off at a Dutch port on the way, their cargoes are typically Baltic. For other Hanseatic cargoes (all from Dansk) containing ‘lewent’, see Childs, Customs Accounts, pp. 1–32 (1461); 58–60 (1463); 80, 85 (1465); 106 (1467); 122–3 (1468). After this the Anglo-Hanseatic War diverts the Baltic cargoes by other routes (see note 11). When trade resumes, the word ‘lewent’ mysteriously no longer appears.   For the Hanseatic trade in general, see also M.M. Postan ‘The Economic and Political Relations of England and the Hanse (1400 to 1475)’ in Studies in English Trade in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Eileen Power and M.M. Postan (London: Routledge, 1933), pp. 91–153. 10. H. Smit, Bronnen tot de Geschiedenis van den Handel met Engeland, Schotland en Ierland, 2 vols, Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatie, 65 (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, ’s‑Gravenhage, 1928). 11. The only drawback, as far as this investigation is concerned, to Smit’s otherwise magisterial work, which summarises English customs accounts from the earliest records, is that he is interested only in the traffic between the (modern) Netherlands and Britain: he merely notes the number of ships arriving from other countries. Likewise he translates the names of commodities into Dutch, which hampers etymological work. It seems to be a convention with some historical series that original documents should be translated; the conveniences seem to me to be outweighed by the difficulties this creates.   However, the earlier Customs accounts in Smit show what we would think of as particularly Baltic goods – bitumen, wainscot, wax, hemp – arriving in Dutch

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t h e yo r k m e rc e r s ’ ‘ l e w e n t b r e d e ’ and Flemish vessels: see e.g. the Hull accounts for 1383/4 (pp. 351–66), where ‘lewent’ comes in with bitumen, wax, bowstaves, ash, wainscot, eels, and roskyn (squirrel skins) on the Godberade of Zutphen (master Polonisius Yser); and with similar cargoes on the Godberade of ‘Campe’ (Veere: p. 355), and the Haligost of Campe (p. 357); two of the importers are Pers Duche and Johannes de Dansk. (Incidentally, when the two former ships set out again, Henry Wyman was among the freighters: pp. 366–7.) This is the earliest mention of ‘lewent’ I have found in the printed customs accounts. In Childs’ edition, which covers 1453–90, the exceptions are a Scottish vessel, the Michael of Dysart, which in 1453 carried a small amount of ‘lewent’ (p. 7); in 1467 the Cumweltohous ‘de Anstirdam’, with a conspicuously Baltic cargo including bitumen, glass, clapholt, ash, and ‘bever womes’, imports ‘20 virgis lewant’ (p. 109). The import trade was affected by the state of Anglo-Hanseatic relations, during which shippers found other routes: see Postan ‘Economic and Political Relations’, pp. 135–6. During the AngloHanseatic war of 1468–74, Baltic cargoes either cease or come in via other vessels: in 1469, the George of Hull seems to have a mixed Flemish/Hanseatic cargo including ‘2 C ulnis lewent’ (pp. 127–8); and in 1471, with the war continuing, the Anna of ‘Selyksee’ (Zieriksee) imports 6 pieces of ‘groß leuent’ belonging to the master Johannes Person (p. 147). The war did not end till the treaty of 1474. Twice ‘lewent’ is exported: in 1465 in the Trinity of Hull, on which the Mayor and burgesses of Hull exported 300 yards of ‘lewan’ (p. 89); and in 1490, when an unnamed Hull vessel freighted by English merchants exported 60 yards of ‘lewantt’. 12. See OED s.v. ‘weed’ sb2. 13. Deutsches Wörterbuch, von Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984 reprint of 1885 edition) s.v. leinwand. 14. E. Verwijs and J. Verdam, Middelnederlansch Woordenboek (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, ’s‑Gravenhage, 1899), s.v. lijnwaet. The Modern Dutch word is lijnwaad; J. Heinsius Woordenboek der Nederlansche Taal (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1924), s.v. lijnwaad says that in Middle Dutch it was lijnwaet, or ‘met syncope van de n ook lijwaad’.   Low German and Middle Dutch in fact shaded into each other, and it is sometimes difficult to tell which a loan word comes from.  In The Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, Volume 2, 1359–79, ed. George Burnett (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1878), from which the OED took another of its citations, the Queen’s 1373 Wardrobe accounts sort different types of material into groups. Levyne is distinguished by its position from tela lata [broadcloth] and canubium [canvas] (p. 443). In an earlier listing, it is not mentioned, but its place in the order is taken by mappe [household linen], between tela lata, tela stricta, and canubium (p. 440). 15. According to Postan, ‘canvas, linen, and linen yarn (“Cologne thread”) were probably the most important [of the Hanseatic exports]’. These originated in South Germany, Northern France, and the Low Countries, and were then imported into Britain: ‘England and the Hanse’, p. 139.   Henry S. Cobb in ‘Textile Imports in the Fifteenth Century’ stresses the need for a reconsideration of ‘the large-scale importation of linen and canvas’ in the fifteenth century: see note 19 below.   For other useful information on linen production and trade, see: N.J.G. Pounds, An Economic History of Medieval Europe, 2nd edn (Harlow: Longman, 1994), pp. 316–319; Elisabeth Crowfoot, Frances Pritchard and Kay Staniland, Textiles and Clothing c.1150–c.1450, Medieval Finds from Excavations in London, 4 (London: HMSO, 1992) pp. 18, 80–1; Marie-Rose Thielmans, Bourgogne et Angleterre: Relations politiques et économiques entre les Pays-Bas Bourguignons et l’Angleterre

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t h e yo r k m e rc e r s ’ ‘ l e w e n t b r e d e ’ 1435–1467 (Brussels: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1966); Nelly Johanna Martina Kerling, Commercial relations of Holland and Zeeland with England from the Late 13th Century to the Close of the Middle Ages (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1954); Norman Lowe, The Lancashire Textile Industry in the Sixteenth Century (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1972) – the linen yarn woven in Lancashire was either home-grown or imported from Ireland, but his chapter 4 gives a very good conspectus of the processes involved; Anne F. Sutton, ‘The early linen and worsted industry of Norfolk …’ Norfolk Archaeology, 40 (1989), 201–25.   For the trade into and out of Gdansk, see Jerzy Wyrozumski, ‘The Textile Trade of Poland in the Middle Ages’, in Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe: Essays in Memory of Professor E.M. Carus-Wilson, ed. N.B. Harte and K.G. Ponting (London: Heinemann, 1983), pp. 248–58, especially p. 252. This mentions the home-based linen trade of Poland, though he is more interested in the more prestigious woollen trade, and suggests that it went mainly eastward to Russia. He mentions imports of woollen cloth from Leuven (p. 257) but says it was not of any importance: presumably not enough to be exported again.   Linen was also imported as raw yarn for further processing and weaving: Thielmans, Bourgogne et Angleterre, says ‘La matière première, le lin à l’état brut, était introduite par les ports de la côte est de l’Angleterre et à Londres: il était presque toujours d’origine hanséatique’ (p. 231). In the 1453 cargoes, yarn is imported in bundles in different qualities, großgarne (coarse yarn: see note 22 below) and smale garne (fine yarn). Unprocessed flax (linum) is also imported in bundles. 16. Dollinger, German Hansa, p. 223. 17. Dollinger, German Hansa, p. 228. 18. Vanessa A. Harding, ‘Some Documentary Sources for the Import and Dis­ tribution of Foreign Textiles in Later Medieval England’, Textile History, 18:2 (1987), 205–18. 19. Cobb, ‘Textile Imports’, and The Overseas Trade of London: Exchequer Customs Accounts 1480–81, ed. Henry S. Cobb, London Record Society, 27 (1990). He has translated the documents into modern English, but interestingly, if lewent was imported into London in the period, the customers appear to have registered it under another name. The temptation is to identify it with some of the brands not mentioned by the Hull and King’s Lynn customs officials: hastrey? Hamburg? Hannover? minsters? soultwich? even spruce? He estimates this one year’s linen imports by alien merchants into London as ‘at least 420,000 ells (about half a million yards)’, with a value of £5,000–£10,000 (pp. xxxv–xxxvi). 20. Childs, Hull Customs Accounts, p. 59. 21. Childs, Hull Customs Accounts, p. 4. 22. The Cely Letters 1472–1488, ed. Alison Hanham, EETS, 273 (1975): Letter 234 line 53; p. 233; note p. 293. Smit lists ‘groß linnen’ (p. 449), ‘groß’ russet, and ‘groß’ salt (p. 458) in the 1393/4 Hull Customs accounts, but this is his translation into Dutch: I have not yet seen the original lists to check if the word actually appears. 23. Childs, Hull Customs Accounts, p. 241. 24. Childs, Hull Customs Accounts, p. 88: ‘3 dos’ panni linei vocati Scottes streytes’, on the Michael of Dysart. 25. Childs, Hull Customs Accounts, pp. 59–60. 26. Childs, Hull Customs Accounts, p. 63. 27. Childs, Hull Customs Accounts, pp. 80, 82. 28. Childs, Hull Customs Accounts, p. 47. 29. Smit, Bronnen, pp. 352, 355, 357 etc. 30. Fustian (p. 363), canvas (pp. 354, 359 etc.), ‘bocaram’ (pp. 362, 363), ‘pannus lineus’ (p. 362), ‘westfale’ (p. 357).

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t h e yo r k m e rc e r s ’ ‘ l e w e n t b r e d e ’ 31. Testamenta Eboracensia, 3, ed. James Raine, Surtees Society, 45 (1865 for 1864), pp. 101–105. Gryssop joined the Corpus Christi Guild with his wife in 1441/2, and he and his wife Margaret occur in the Mercers’ Account Rolls: see Louise Wheatley, ‘The York Mercers’ Guild, 1420–1502: Origins, Organisation and Ordinances’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of York, 1993), p. 258.   The pricing of his stock presents some problems, since it is done in a shorthand involving dozens and scores of some unit, as well as plytes of lawn. Some rough and ready calculations suggest that the unit involved is the ell: I assume the English ell of 45 inches. Plytes (see MED s.v. pleit), according to a document from c. 1500, appear to have been folded square with the width of the material, which is a yard and an 1/8th (40½ inches); see Hubert Hall and Frieda J. Nicholas in Select Tracts and Table Books Relating to English Weights and Measures (1100–1742) (Camden Miscellany 15: Camden Society 3rd Series, 41: 1929) 18. The pricing is obviously also affected by other considerations, as it can vary widely.   For the definitions of the different types of material, see the OED and MED under the various words. 32. ‘Store’ is probably a conflation of two words, LOE stor, related to ON storr (stor is the Danish for ‘great’), and ME stur, from MLG stûr, MDutch stuur ‘rough, violent, harsh’: see OED s.v. stour, stoor. Here it is clearly a technical term. OED s.v. stoure, stoor 7 quotes Palsgrave (1530) ‘stoure, rude, as course cloth is, gros’. 33. Gras, Early English Customs System, p. 614. 34. For what it is worth: on 28.7.1383/4, the Godberade de Sutfene (Zutphen) shipped into Hull an unspecified number of packs of lewent, ‘continentibus 400 ulnas, precii 46s. 8d, subsidium: 14d’: an average of 1s.4d an ell (Smit, Bronnen, no. 603, pp. 351–2): on 18.11.1383/4, the Godberade de Camfere (Veere) declared ‘60 ulnis westfale precii 10s’. Westphalian linen at 2d an ell. The lewent is cheaper than the westfale. On 20.5.1384, the Saint Marischip of Middelburgh carried 60 ells of canvas value 11s = 2s 2d per ell, so the canvas was marginally more expensive again. Leaping forward in time to the Lynn accounts for 12.5.1466–7, on a Hanseatic ship (master Brant Otto), the Hansard Hennyng Buryng imports ‘i pakke lewent continent’ cc ulnas val. £iiii’. This works out at 50 ells to the £ sterling, or 2s for 5 ells, an average of 4s.8d an ell. (Gras, Early English Customs System, p. 614). We can compare this with an unspecified quality of teli linii valued at 26s. 8d. (4 marks) for 72 ells, an average of 4s.4d. per ell (Gras, p. 615). Lewent is thus marginally more expensive. However, none of this mentions widths, and one would need to do a great deal more comparative work in order to come up with anything positive. 35. The Priory of Finchale: The Charters of Endowment, Inventories and Account Rolls of the Priory of Finchale in the County of Durham, ed. James Raine, Surtees Society, 6:2 (London: J.B. Nicholls, 1837), p. lii: ‘v mappæ et xij ulnæ de leuwyn pro mappis Monachorum ordinatis’. The date is 1360. Thomas Elyot, Dictionary 1538 (Menston: Scolar Press facsimile, 1970), s.v. ‘Mappa’. 36. Testamenta Eboracensia, 3, p. 98. 37. Gras, Early English Customs System, p. 612. 38. York Memorandum Book, ed. Maud Sellers, 2 vols, Surtees Society 120 and 125 (1912 and 1914) 1, p. 92. Though it is transcribed as ‘cannes’ in the text, Miss Sellers gives ‘canvas’ in the Index. 39. Verwijs and Verdam, Middelnederlansch Woordenboek, s.v. lijnwaet give quotations showing linen being used for banners etc. in processions. 40. MED s.v. brede. It can also mean ‘braid’, but this, though also a textile term, seems excluded by the context.

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t h e yo r k m e rc e r s ’ ‘ l e w e n t b r e d e ’ 41. John H. Munro, ‘The Medieval Scarlet and the Economics of Sartorial Splendour’, in Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe, ed. N.B. Harte and K.G. Ponting, Pasold Studies in Textile History, 2 (London: Heinemann, 1983) pp. 13–70 (p. 31). 42. John Coke (1549), The Debate between the Heralds of England and France, in Le Debat des Herauts d’Armes de France et d’Angleterre, ed. L. Pannier and P. Meyer (Paris: SATF, 1872): ‘fyne scarletts, clothes, corseis [kerseys], stock bredes, fryses, cottons, worsteds, sayes and coverlettes’. Quoted by Raymond van Uytven, ‘Cloth in Medieval Literature of Western Europe’, in Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe, p. 174. The OED gives ‘stocbred … a. MFlem stocbreet (MLG stockbret, MHG stockbreit) lit. “yard wide” (stock yard measure, breet broad). Some kind of cloth’, and quotes from 1526 ‘The bourgeysys of the sayd town [Bruges] causyd to bryng fro Andwerp and fro the Sclus manny kerseys and stocbreds’ (J. Hacket To Wolsey 4 July; in London BL MS Cotton Galba B 9 22). 43. OED s.v. brede, sb2, 2. Quoted from 1554 (Bury Wills). 44. 1 Richard III c. 8, Statutes of the Realm, 2 (1816; reprinted London: Dawsons, 1963), pp. 485–6. Broadcloths are to be 24 yards long by two yards wide; straytes 12 yards by one yard; kerseys 18 yards by one yard plus one nail. 45. Anne F. Sutton, ‘The Early Linen and Worsted Industry of Norfolk …’, Norfolk Archaeology, 40 (1989), 208 quotes the 1327 Ulnage of hemp and linen cloth, which ‘time out of mind’ was said to be made to 50, 40, 30, and 24 ells, but no width is given except for coverlet weaving. The same applies to the York records: only the ulnages of coverlets are recorded (Sellers, York Memorandum Book, Vol. 2, pp. 195–6). The Act of 21 Henry VIII c. 14, ‘An Acte for the Lynnen Drapers in London’ gives the ideal dimensions of imported Breton Dowlas and lokeram, which are both one yard wide (Statutes of the Realm, 3 (1817: reprinted London: Dawsons, 1963), p. 296). The various notebooks containing weights and measures edited by Hubert Hall and Frieda J. Nicholas in Select Tracts and Table Books Relating to English Weights and Measures (1100–1742), Camden Miscellany 15: Camden Society 3rd Series, 41 (1929), deal only with lengths: see especially p. 18 for articles of mercery. 46. Testamenta Eboracensia, 3, p. 102. The third item in the list appears, from its pricing, also to be double lewent. Similarly, on 17 June 1467, the George of Dansk declared not only ‘1 M ulnis hynderlandes lewant’, and ‘2 C groß lewant’, but also ‘6 C syngle lewant’, all the property of the ship’s master, Theodoricus Schach (Childs, Hull Customs Accounts, p. 106). 47. OED s.v. double. Thanks also to Bryan Sadler for consulting a practising tailor for information about weaves and twists. 48. Testamenta Eboracensia, 3, p. 102. 49. Testamenta Eboracensia, 3, p. 103. 50. John H. Munro in his article on ‘The Medieval Scarlet’ (46–8) quotes the prices of woollen broadcloths purchased by the Franc de Bruges in the early fifteenth century: ‘breede sanguine scaerlaken … breede vulle ghegreinde scaerlaken’ [broad sanguine scarlets … broad fully engrained scarlets] and so forth. 51. See Hanham, Cely Letters, pp. xxii–xxiii and the vocabulary used by the Celys passim. For some examples: ambaght for ‘embassy’ (MDu. ambacht, more familiar as meaning ‘craft guild’, Letter 242); forehousing [moving stock from one store to another] (MDu. verhuizen, Letter 105); gyldern (MDu. gulden [gold coin, guilder], passim, together with most other terms for foreign coinage, as one might expect); ynshyppyng [embarkation] (MDu. inscepen, Letter 212); whysteler and wystyll [money changer] and [exchange] (Du. wisselaar and wissel, Letters 133, 165); Sinksen [Whitsun] (MDu. Sinksen, Sinxon, passim). See also Laura Wright, ‘Trade between England and the Low Countries: Evidence from Historical Linguistics’,

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t h e yo r k m e rc e r s ’ ‘ l e w e n t b r e d e ’ in England and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Caroline Barron and Nigel Saul (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1995), pp. 169–80, though she has a rather restricted range of evidence. Was the Indenture even drawn up by Henry Market, one of the four named pageant masters? He originally came from Cologne. 52. See the entries in OED, MED. I have found nothing in any of the printed Customs accounts south of King’s Lynn. 53. Expeditions to Prussia and the Holy Land made by Henry Earl of Derby (afterwards King Henry IV) in the years 1390–1 and 1392–3, being the Accounts kept by his Treasurer during two years, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith, Camden Society, 2nd Series 52 (1894), p. 80: Expense Hospicii Domini apud Dansk, 17 February to 19 March 1391. 54. REED: York, p. 78. 2½ yards for 15d = 6d a yard. This implies 7½d an English ell of 45 inches – considerably more than any of the lewent in Thomas Gryssop’s stock. But we are probably talking retail here, not wholesale. 55. Henry Wyman, Collector 1403/4 (CPR, p. 251: 13.8.1403) and Nicholas Blackburn, Collector 1404/5, 1407/8 (Customs Documents: PRO 177/34, 61/21, 60/15) are not strictly connected with the Mercers’ Guild in their time. Robert Middleton, mercer, Collector 1413–16, is described in the York A/Y Memorandum Book, f. 196v, as ‘nuper custumarium in portu de Kyngeston super Hull’ (York Memorandum Book, 2, ed. Sellers, Surtees Society, 125 (1914), p. 75); Richard Lematon was Collector 1449–50: he is not recorded in the Mercers’ records, but is described as ‘citizen and Alderman’ in the B/Y Memorandum Book in 1458 (York Memorandum Book BY, ed. Joyce W. Percy, Surtees Society, 186 (1973), p. 205). John Tong was Collector 1470–1 (Childs, Hull Customs Account, p. 233). The John Fereby who was Controller 1454–6 and Collector 1461–3 appears to be the Beverley-based namesake of the Mayor of York and Master of the Guild (Testamenta Eboracensia, 3, pp. 179–80: Will p. 43). 56. ‘Ordo Paginarum’, REED: York, pp. 25–6. See Richard Beadle’s edition of The York Plays (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), pp. 29–30 for an assessment of this subject. 57. London BL MS Egerton 2572 (The Barber Surgeons’ Book) f. 51r. The other two saints are the more expected Cosmas and Damian. The opening speech of the play, by John the Baptist, paraphrases John 1:6–9 and 15–28. 58. Wheatley, ‘York Mercers’ Guild’, pp. 101 and 126–48. 59. Richard Beadle, ‘The Shipwrights’ Craft’, in Aspects of Early English Drama, ed. Paula Neuss (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1983), pp. 50–61. 60. The Mare of Hull, arrived 24 August 1463 (Childs, Hull Customs Accounts, p. 63). 61. Textiles and Clothing, pp. 82–9 and 124–6 for satin damasks. These were produced in Italy and Spain. Because the widths were often quite narrow (less than two feet) and the weaving techniques easier, they became very popular in England, and Edward IV issued a Statute of Apparel limiting to those of the degree of knight and above: 3 Ed. IV c. 5, Statutes of the Realm, 2 (1816: reprinted London: Dawsons, 1963) p. 399. A statute of 12 Edward IV c. 3 gives a mouthwatering list of imported silk textiles, including ‘Draps de or Draps dargent Bawedekyns Velueuettis Damaskez Satens Sarcenetz & Tarterons Chamlettis & autres draps de soie & dor & soie esteauntz de graund value per voie de marchaundise’ (Statutes of the Realm, 2, p. 433). Very little silk appears in the Hull Customs Accounts (for a reference, see Smit, Bronnen, p. 455 (1393/4)). For London imports of silk on the Venetian galleys in 1420–1, see Gras, Early Customs Accounts, pp. 511–14, especially p. 512 for damask. The word ‘damask’ does not seem to have been used of a patterned linen weave until the sixteenth century, judging from the citations in the OED s.v. damask 3b, though according to Walter Prevenier and Wim Blockmans,

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t h e yo r k m e rc e r s ’ ‘ l e w e n t b r e d e ’ The Burgundian Netherlands, trans. Peter King and Yvette Mead (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 88, the material itself was produced in Flanders, Holland, and Brabant in the fifteenth century. They also say (p. 88) that silk production began in Bruges and Antwerp about 1500. 62. REED: York, p. 95. 63. REED: York, p. 96; Childs, Hull Customs Accounts, p. 58. 64. Wainscot: REED: York, p. 91; Childs, Hull Customs Accounts, p. 31 (1461) and passim; Smit, Bronnen, e.g. pp. 351–66 (imports Hull 1383–4); rygholt: Smit, Bronnen, pp. 351–2, 357; tunholt: Smit, Bronnen, p. 357; scofhowlt: Childs, Hull Customs Accounts, p. 59. See Dollinger, German Hansa, p. 221: ‘The Hanseatic east was also the west’s great source of timber … the vast forest areas in the basin of the Vistula and in Lithuania which made Danzig the leading exporter of timber, as well as of such highly valued by-products as ash, pitch and resin. The principal customers were England and Flanders, who needed timber for their ships. In the fifteenth century Prussia was exporting oak beams and planks (Wagenschoss [wainscot]) in thousands, and boards of varying thickness (Klappholz, Dielen) in hundreds of thousands …’ 65. Iron ‘came mainly from Sweden and Hungary, but also from the Rhenish slate mountains, the Siegerland, from where it was shipped to western Europe’ (Dollinger, German Hansa, p. 222). See also Pounds, Economic History, p. 402. Osmunds were originally high-quality Swedish iron (see OED s.v. osmund1). The other source of iron was Northern Spain. 66. See note 59. 67. REED: York, pp. 91–2. 68. Childs, Hull Customs Accounts, p. 47. 69. REED: York, p. 91. 70. For rosin, see e.g. Childs, Hull Customs Accounts, pp. 69–71, p. 74: here however it is shipped from Zeeland. It is easy however to confuse the spelling with ‘raisin’. 71. Childs, Hull Customs Accounts, pp. 4, 6 etc. 72. REED: York, p. 63 (1444). 73. Childs, Hull Customs Accounts, pp. 31–2 and passim; Smit, Bronnen, p. 329 (Hull 1378/9: by Henry Wyman, apparently still as an alien), pp. 351–66 (Hull 1383/4). See Dollinger, German Hansa, p. 219 and table on p. 436: it came from Russia, Livonia and Prussia, and the Hansa had a monopoly on its import. 74. Chester Early Banns, especially: ‘The gouldsmyths then full soone will hye / & massons theyre craft to magnyfye’ and ‘The mercers worshipffull of degree / The presentation that haue yee / hit falleth best for your see’, and it goes on to list the materials which the Mercers will be able to display on their carriage: ‘with sondry Cullors it shal shine / of veluit satten & damaske fine / Taffyta Sersnett of poppyngee grene’ (REED: Chester, ed. Lawrence M. Clopper (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1979) pp. 35–6). In the Late Banns there is a certain caution about the appropriateness of such display for the subject, since Christ was born ‘poorelye in a stable’ (p. 243), but the ‘welthie’ Drapers are told ‘The creation of the worlde. Adam & Eue. / Acordinge to your welthe sett out wealthelye’ (p. 242), and the Bakers at the last Supper are to ‘caste godes loues abroade with accustomed cherefull harte’ (p. 245). 75. See, for a reproduction, Dirk de Vos, Groeningemuseum, Bruges, Musea Nostra series (Brussels: Ludion, 1987), p. 49. 76. The City Crane and the Cranegarth where imported goods of foreign merchants were stored was at the lower end of Skeldergate, by Hingbridge (Angelo Raine, Medieval York (London: John Murray, 1955), pp. 240–1). In 1417 it was agreed that ‘quedam trabes magna, que quondam fuit stapula lanarum cum grossis scalis

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t h e yo r k m e rc e r s ’ ‘ l e w e n t b r e d e ’ eidem pertinentibus Johanni Northeby, mercatori, custodi crane predicte, ad ponderandum omnimodas mercandisas per pondus vendendas, cuiuscumque fuerint generis et speciei’ [a certain great beam which was formerly the wool Staple with heavy scales (presumably not ‘steps’) belonging to it (should be brought there and handed over to) John Northeby, merchant, the Custodian of the aforesaid crane, to weigh all manner of merchandises which are to be sold by the weight, of whatever kind or type they may be]: York Memorandum Book , 2, ed. Maud Sellers, Surtees Society, 125 (1915 for 1914), p. 82. 77. Dirk de Vos, Hans Memling, Exhibition Catalogue (Bruges: Ludion for the Groeningemuseum, 1994), p. 36 and note 25. Despite representations from the Pope and legal proceedings instituted by the Duke of Burgundy, the painting was not returned, and the city of Bruges eventually indemnified the Medici bank for it. See also Dollinger, German Hansa, p. 93.

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15 THE LEUVEN OMMEGANG AND LEUVEN CITY ARCHIVES: REPORT ON WORK IN PROGRESS

It is rare for scholars in our field to be able to indulge themselves with the excitement of exploring virtually virgin territory; however, I believe that I have joined that select band. I have been working in the Leuven Stadsarchief (city archives) on the records of their processional and, as it turned out, theatrical activity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Many of you will be familiar with the watercolour drawings of the famous Leuven ommegang or procession in honour of Our Lady Sedes Sapientiae, patroness of the city and of the university, by the distinguished sixteenth-century local historian and Clerk of the Registry Willem Boonen, as part of his comprehensive History of Leuven and its institutions.1 These show the procession as it stood in 1593/4, with its fabulous pageant waggons, cortèges of famous women of the Old Testament (all types of the Blessed Virgin), and divers giants and fabulous beasts, presented as a Renaissance comic strip. I am in the process of making a bi-lingual edition of this part of Boonen’s History, in collaboration with Dr Guido Latré of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Lancaster’s long-time Erasmus partner. We hope it will be both paper and electronic, enabling us to present full-colour images of all the fabulous waggons ‘etcetera, etcetera, etcetera’. The text has been transcribed and translated into English, the copyright cleared, and the photographs from which the scans will be made are commissioned. There remain the introduction and notes. I only had to check up on what I thought were a few references to the ommegang in the city archives. I had not the faintest idea what I was going to find. I said ‘virtually virgin territory’ because it has been surveyed before. In the mid-nineteenth century it was surveyed by Boonen’s nineteenth-century successor as distinguished local antiquarian, Edward van Even, whose L’Omgang de Louvain was published in 1863. He footnotes various references to expenses in the city archives. In the summer of 1999 I was introduced to the dissertation presented in 1982 by Griet Verlinden, a student at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, for the degree of Licentiaat in the History of Art. It is entitled Ommegang en Toneel te Leuven in de Laat Middeleeuwen. She gives as an appendix what then appeared to me an astonishingly full set of original records, thirty-two A4 pages of transcriptions from the city accounts in 423

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the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The current distinguished Leuven historian, Dr Eduard van Ermen, said cautiously that he thought there might be rather more than that in the city archives. He introduced me to them, and generously spent a couple of hours showing me how the accounting year worked (1 August to 31 July, arranged in various ways), and explaining the complex exchange-rate system operated by all late medieval cities in the Low Countries. Then he lent me his copy of Joseph Cuvelier’s Index of Manuscripts in the Leuven City Archives and departed.2 There are four hundred and fifty-two fat volumes of annual accounts stretching from 1345 to 1794, when the city finally came under French Republican rule. The ommegang went out through almost the entire period, and there is something, often a substantial something, about it in every year that I have seen so far. Even if I were to stop in 1600, which is my current intention, that still involves two hundred and forty volumes. And after the mid-fourteenth century and the first decade of the fifteenth, where the records are patchy, there is an almost unbroken run of annual accounts. So far I have reached the mid-1460s, and I reckon at the moment it is taking me a day to survey a year, though 1466/7 took me three days: Philip the Good died, Charles the Bold took over as Duke of Burgundy, and there were two Royal Entries, with much taking up and replacing of paving stones. As REED editors will know, ‘surveying’ does not include transcribing everything, or checking the transcriptions.3 The earliest surviving accounts are from 1345. They are all paper books, mostly in very good condition, though some are affected by damp. From the beginning, the accounts are in Dutch, not Latin. The only reason I did not feel totally intimidated was that I very quickly recognised the mind-set and vocabulary of the accountants. Accountants use the same language no matter what language they are writing in: meester willem beer ouerbracht septembris xviij gehaelt tot anthonijs brunincks dijuerse nagele georbert toter stellingen vorscreuen Ierst vjC ij s nagele val xlviij pl. Item ijC iiij s nagele val. xxxij pl vjC xij d nagele val. xxiiij pl. Item iijC viij d. nagele val. Viij pl. Item vjC vj d nagele val. xij pl. Sijn tsamen C xxiiij pl. Ende In gulden te liiij plecken ij gulden xvj plecken4 [Master Willem Beer [account] presented September 18th: fetched from Anthonijs Bruninck divers nails for use in* the afore-mentioned scaffold: First, 600 two-shilling nails worth 48 plekken, Item 200 four-shilling nails worth 32 plekken, Item 600 twelvepenny nails worth 24 plekken, Item 300 eightpenny nails worth 8 plekken, Item 600 sixpenny nails worth 12 plekken: together are 124 plekken, and in guilders at 54 plekken [a guilder] 2 guilders 16 plekken.] [*georbert: for use in, suitable, useful for, appropriate to, needful] 424

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Or even more succintly: henrix van velp van j ponde smeers den voirscreuen waghen mede te smeren ende van zepen           iiij½ plecken5 [Henrick Van Velp for one pound of grease to grease the aforementioned waggon with, and for soap    4½ pl.] Over the months Willem de Beer, stad timmerman [city carpenter]; Gheert de Smet, the merchant of the sixpenny-nails, and much, much more; Peter van den Bossche, carter, who helped to drive the Nine Orders of Angels; Jan de Mandemakere, who made baskets and was in demand for laths and withies for the Giant Hercules and for St George’s dragon; Willem van Herlaer (originally from Tubbac land), who for thirty-six years provided ever-increasing numbers of gloves to the prelates and city officials who marched in the procession; Geerd de Pape, who sold gold and silver foil; and Roelof vanden Elst, who sold painter’s colours in bulk: they have all become as familiar friends as Roger Burton, Thomas Scauceby, Thomas Drawswerd, or any of the tribe of Tubbacs in York.6 I have to say that a lot of them seem to have names out of a medieval Dutch farce, or The Blues Brothers. Almost the first people I met in 1346  were Ellwood (Ellewout) and his son Willeken. (A couple of years later, Willeken,  despite his juvenile-sounding name, was in England negotiating  officially for the city.) I am particularly fond of Hendrick Hondertjaer,  who  clearly came from a long-lived family, and Jan Peperco ren. I thought Meester Pan had to be a piper, but in fact he turned out to be a building contractor. However,  there was a Peeter de Pijpere, though he  was  actually Peeter den  Haze (‘Peter  Rabbit’).  And in the 1460s most of the musicians who played before Our Lady appear to have been called Barbier. There are enough fascinating details about production to fill the rest of this paper, but I will present only a selection here: den man die ane crucifixe hinck voere sinen arbeit   xl pl7 [to the man who hung on the cross for his labour 40 pl] Item van j yser daere de heylichgeest mee gehecht es     ix pl.8 [Item for an iron to which the Holy Ghost is attached 9 pl.] Item van j½C cleinden nagelen daere de clederen gheslagen omme tvoirscreuen werck met genichgelt sijn omme dat de Ingelen op ende af ghaen soude sonder te siene    iij pl.9 [Item for 1½ hundred small nails with which the cloths attached to the afore-written work are nailed, so that the Angels can get off and on without being seen   3 pl.] 425

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Ghegeuen bj beuele der stat Arde van voirspoel voirscreuen van hout linenlaken ende dachueren die hi verleegt heeft doen hi maken dede den kuyle der leeuwe van Sinte Daneel     cxx pl hem seluen van iiij hoden totten iiij leeuwen             lj pl10 [Given by order of the City to Arnold van Voirspoele afore-written for wood, linen cloth, and payment by the day, which he laid out when he had the den of lions of St Daniel made   120 pl. To the same for 4 hoods/hats for 4 lions   51 pl.] Der vrouwen Rogiers vander stouen te heitene des sondaechs auonts om die Ionge kindere hen In te Reynegen ende te dwaen die onreinlijc mesmaect waeren mids dien dat sij die personage vanden duuelen gehouden hadden vergeuen    xxij pl. xij s.p.11 [To the wife of Rogier for heating the (public) bath on the Sunday evening in order to clean up and to wash the young children in it, who were uncleanly defaced because they had played the roles of the devils – given   22 pl. 12 s.p.] Item j ommeloop bouen ane dwerck jegen dafvallen vanden appostelen12 [Item, something encircling (a gallery? an iron band?) for the work [Pentecost] to stop the Apostles falling off] In the rest of this paper I shall concentrate on the first couple of decades, partly to see if they can throw any light on similar developments in England. The procession of Our Lady went out every year on the Feast of her Nativity, 8 September. It was processing when the records begin, and is said to have been so from time immemorial, though the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church says that the Feast was not generally celebrated in the West until the eleventh century. Local tradition maintained that their festival commemorated the pivotal defeat of the Vikings at Leuven on 1 September 891, an event of equal importance as the Treaty of Wedmore for England. This would certainly explain why the procession went out on the Nativity of Our Lady instead of on the more usual and earlier established (by the end of the eighth century) Feast of the Assumption, 15 August. We know about the procession from the City Accounts because it was the custom to give gloves and a schinckwijn (vin d’honneur) to all the prelates and city officials who walked in the procession. The same applied to the Corpus Christi procession three or so months earlier, though it never acquired pageant waggons. They appear to have drunk a phenomenal amount of Rhenish and Beaune: so much so that I assumed that they took it home with them, until quite serendipitously I found this (from The Beehive of the Romish Church) in the back of Young’s Drama of the Medieval Church:13 I speake not of their perambulations, processions, and going about the towne, cariing their crucifixes alongst the streetes, and there play 426

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and counterfeite the whole passion, so trimlie with all the seuen sorrowes of our Lady, as though it had been nothing else but an Enterlude to make boyes laugh at, and a litle to recreate heauie or sorrowfull hearts: for these matters fal out onlie vpon Church holy dayes or solemnities, when the Catholikes are determined to be merrie, and drink themselues so droncke, that they tumble from their seat: as you shall see our Maisters of Louen doo euery yere in their solemnitie, and especially at the seuenth yeres procession, which is, of the seuen sorrowes of our Lady. The procession actually commemorated the Seven Joys of Our Lady, not the Seven Sorrows, but it makes a better rhetorical point. The processie wijn, the  gloves, and the torches appear in the first surviving accounts, in 1345, and  continuously thereafter. I started by copying out the entire list of ‘de processie wijne de de stat geuen dede den prelaten den ordenen ende personen hier na bescreuen in onser vrouwen dage natiuitas’14 [the procession wine, which the City caused to be given to the prelates, religious orders, and persons hereinafter written in the Day of Our Lady’s Nativity], but very soon descended to jotting down the folio number followed by ‘the usual suspects’. Nothing else very exciting theatrically happened for a while. Then in 1394, after the usual processie wijn, and fees to the eight torchbearers, suddenly, we have: Item gegeuen bi beuelen der stat / viij in septembris romboude van hingenen den beeldmakere van linnelakene van hare van dyademen ende van screuene totten apostolen propheten marteleren ende magheden de ghingen inde vorscreuen processie tegadere ———————— xix lb p. Item janne gorijs van .iiii. brieuen daer toe te sniden ————    viiij lb p. Item willemme gorijs opten kerchof van xij dyademen der toe te makene —————————————————————— xiiij lb. p. Item janne olijpots w. der was van hare van barden te makeren dertoe  ———————————————————————    xvj lb p.15 [Item given by order of the City (on the) 8th of September to Romboud van Hingene, the image-maker, for linen cloths, for hair, for diadems, and for inscriptions (screuene) for the apostles, prophets, martyrs, and virgins who went in the same procession together ————————— 9 lb p]  [‘together’ could refer to the characters, or could be the usual accountant’s formula] Item to Jan Gorijs for cutting out (writing?) 4 writings thereto — 8 lb p Item to Willem Gorijs in the Churchyard for making 12 diadems thereto ———————————————————————— 14 lb p Item to Jan Olypots (widow?) for making of hair and of beards thereto ———————————————————————     16 lb p] 427

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Why did this suddenly happen in 1394? As far as I know there was no major event in Leuven life that year, and nor was there any especially important visitor to the procession. The charter for the free market was granted back in 1377. I have not found anything yet which might indicate that Leuven was imitating an initiative from elsewhere in the country; it seems to be the first of its kind. The only possibly relevant item is that the previous year (1393) there was some kind of entertainment on the day of the procession in the kerchof, the area round St Peter’s Church which is now the Grote Markt: Item gegeuen heinen boudens vanden goten te stoppene aen den kerchof daermen spelle speelde in onser vrouwendage lest leden …16 [Item given to Heine Boudens for stopping the gutters in the Churchyard where a play was played on Our Lady’s Day last …] There is no indication what this spell might have been, or who played it, and the word speel is as ambiguous in medieval Dutch as play is in Middle English, or ludus in medieval Latin. Even the occasion does not have to imply that it was a religious play, as the procession was celebrated in 1421 by an action replay of the Battle of Woeringen (1288), and in 1437 by the entertainment of the blind men who killed the pig.17 But if it were a religious play (and we equally have no idea what sparked it off; there is no record of one having been performed before), it might have planted the idea in someone’s imagination. We shall probably never know whether this ‘someone’ was a city artistcraftsman, or a theatrically-minded cleric. There is nothing else of particular interest for the remainder of the 1390s, or the early 1400s. The usual wine is drunk, the processional torches are carried: there is no mention of prophets, apostles, martyrs, or maidens, so presumably if they went out, their wigs and beards and haloes remained serviceable. The records are in any case infuriatingly patchy at this point. They exist for 1393/4 (play after procession), 1394/5 (costumed characters), 1395/6, 1399/1400 (a fragment), and 1401/2. Then there is a gap of six years. And then, in September 1408:18 Dits de coste vander processien te ordineren ende te makene iegen onser vrouwen dage natiuitas Primo gielis van nechelen [sic] van j sedelen te makene daer onse here ende onse vrouwe opsaten doen sij gecroent was        ——————   xxvij pl. Item rombout van hinghenen vander vorscreuen sedelen te stofferen met linenlaken[en?] ende te varwen     ————————————— liiij pl. Item hem seluen van onser vrouwen te stofferen daer sij lach opt bedde doen sij verschiet met haren toebehoerten ————————— —— iiij pl. 428

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Item hem seluen van — viij haren ende barden te makene den apostelen de metter baren ghingen ——————————————    xxj pl. viij s.p. Item hem seluen van — vj diademen te makene den apostelen —— vj pl. Item hem seluen van spaeus hoede metten cruce te stofferen de sinte peter op sijn hoet ende in sijn hant hadde daer hi achter de bare ghinc    ————————————————————————— vj pl. Item hem seluen vanden palmeryse te stofferen met guldenen sterren dat sinte Jan droech voere de bare ——————————————    iiij pl. Item hem seluen van xij ryseren te makene van wasse de de xij coninge droegen voere onser vrouwen     ——————————————      xlviij pl. Item hem seluen vanden ryse te makene dat quam wt yesse monde ————————————————————————    vj pl. Item madox wrider [?] was van — xij baerden te makene totten xij coningen      ———————————————————————      xij pl. Item haere seluen van onser vrouwen te stofferen metter zonnen ———————————————————————— xx pl. Item van haren ende barden te vermakene ende te versiene totten apostelen ———————————————————————  xij pl. Item haere seluen van j hoede metter dyademen te makene tot gods behoef ————————————————————————      iiij pl. Item haere seluen van— vj vlogelen te makene totten yngelen  ——   xij pl. Item van lazaro te bereiden dien god dede opstaen vten graue     —   xiiij pl. Item van — ij scilden te makene tot ix den besten  —————— viij pl. Item vanden gerempte te makene daer onse vrouwe op lach doen sij verschiet      ——————————————————————— xiiij pl. Somma hier af compt op — iijC xxij pl. ende viij s.p. [fol. 18r] Item gegeuen hern Janne pieders pristere viij in septembrj voere sinen loene ende arbeit dat hj dese vorscreuen processie heeft geordineert   ————————————————————— C lx pl.19 [This is the cost of ordering (arranging?) and making the procession for the Day of Our Lady’s Nativity: First, to Giles of Mechelen for making a seat where Our Lord and Our Lady sat when she was crowned 27 pl. Item to Rombout van Hingenen for furnishing* the afore-written seat with linen cloths and for painting 54 pl. Item to the same for equipping* Our Lady where she lay on the bed when she expired, with her necessaries  54 pl. Item to the same for making 8 hairs and beards for the apostles who went with the bier 21 pl. 8 s.p. Item to the same for making 6 diadems for the Apostles 6 pl. Item to the same for providing one Pope’s headdress with the cross 429

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which St Peter had on his hat and in his hand where he went after the bier 6 pl. Item to the same for furnishing the palm-branch with golden stars that St John carried before the bier 4 pl. Item to the same for making 12 branches of wax which the 12 kings carried in front of Our Lady 48 pl. Item to the same for making the branch that came out of Jesse’s mouth 6 pl. 12 pl. Item Madox’s (?)widow for making 12 beards for the 12 kings Item to the same (fem.) for furnishing Our Lady with the sun 20 pl. Item for making and decorating hair and beards for the Apostles 12 pl. Item to the same for making one headdress with the diadem on behalf 4 pl. of God Item to the same for making 6 wings for the angels 12 pl. Item for preparing Lazarus whom God caused to rise up from 14 pl. the grave Item for making 2 shields for 9 of the Worthies 8 pl. Item for making the structure upon where Our Lady lay when she 14 pl. expired The total of this comes to 322 pl and 8 s.p. Item given to Sir Jan Pieders, priest, on the 8th of September, for his wages and labour because he has put in order this afore-written 160 pl.] procession [*stofferen: furnish, provide, equip] I have kept the translation in the order in which it was written, because it echoes the sometimes ambiguous wording of the original: for example, did Madox’s widow (?) equip Our Lady with the Sun, or did she provide all the necessaries for Our-Lady-in-the-Sun, who is a different personage from Our Lady of the Coronation? The accountant sometimes had trouble with how to put things: I particularly sympathise with his predicament over St Peter’s papal tiara and cross. This is extremely familiar. If you happen to have been to Elche, you will know exactly how Our Lady can process while dead upon a bier, and why St John carries a palm branch full of golden stars, and why St John and St Peter are the two major apostles in the procession. In Leuven, St Peter was important for another reason: the city church was dedicated to him, and the statue of the Virgin is always described as ‘Our Lady of St Peter’s’. The procession clearly focuses on the Death, Assumption, and Coronation of the Virgin, in three episodes. There are at least three separate Marys, possibly four: one on the bed ‘when she expired’, one on the bier, one ascending ‘in the Sun’, and one being crowned by God. The twelve bearded kings were a bit of a puzzle, and I was distracted by the Valencia Corpus Christ play where there are four and twenty Elders from the Apocalypse, each staggering under the weight of 430

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an enormous processional torch, but the mention of Jesse here – and the fact that in later years they are also called de propheten and that their branches are made of green wax – identifies them as a perambulating Jesse Tree. Nor is it clear whether Jesse with the branch coming out of his mouth (not the usual site) is walking, or being carried. However, in 1410 they appear to have built him a bed with a branch growing over it, which suggests that originally he was walking. Item hem seluen van den ryse te makene bouen op Jesse bedde Item van den houtwerke te maken totten bedde20 [Item to the same (Rombout van hingenen) for making the branch above Jesse’s bed. Item for making the woodwork for the bed.] What Lazarus and the Nine Worthies were doing in the procession remains a mystery that I hope to solve later. The next year, 1409, the Duke of Brabant with his new Duchess and his heir ‘my young Lord’ came to see the procession. The hair and beards and St John’s palm branch were repaired, and new branches and a lily for Our Lady in the Sun were made; it becomes quite clear that she was a real person, and not, as has been suggested, a dummy: Item van dat de ghene hadde de onse vrouwe was inde zonne ende van haren hare tegadere —————————————————— xiiij pl.21 [Item for what the one [sex unspecified] had who was Our Lady in the Sun, and for her hair together —————————————— 14 pl.] St George and St Christopher are paid, and there is a new dragon; the boy who leads it is paid, too. These are the patron saints of the Archers’ guilds, the Small and Great Guilds of the Footbow (crossbow) and the Guild of the Handbow (longbow), who have always marched, armed, in the procession. The connection between the religious and the military – so obvious in the modern Valencia Corpus Christi procession – is nothing new and they may have been there from the beginning; we have no means of telling. St Christopher was of course a giant, and not only had a traditional kynde [child], but also two companions who went along with him, presumably to prop him up if he began to wobble. In 1410, Paradise is added, with Adam and Eve, propelled by four serving men, and ‘den cruce der sinte peters ane was ghecruyst’ [the cross on which St Peter was crucified]. We also get our first named performer: ‘gielis blanckart  de sinte peter was doemen cruyste’ [Gielis Blankart who was St 431

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Peter when he was crucified]. Remembering how St Peter was crucified, he earned all of his five plecken. The exciting thing about this year is that the original invoice submitted by Her Jan Pieders is sandwiched between the pages of the accounts: ‘Dit[s] den cost die ic ghedaen hebbe’ [This is the outlay that I have made].22 He writes in a small neat hand and has a completely different set of abbreviations, having been presumably educated in ecclesiastical Latin. Jan Pieders, priester, is the unsung hero of the ommegang. He hardly gets a mention from van Even, except to say that he ‘advised’ on the procession.23 This might be nineteenth-century anti-clericalism or just a mistake in chronology like that of van Even’s mistranscription of the date 1410 as 1401. Thus, van Even puts the beginning of the pageant procession seven years too early, besides confusing the sequence of what happened, and Verlinden copies him.24 It is clear that not only did Pieders organize it, he also did all the grunt work: ‘Item minen arbeit ende mijn modenesse .v. weken lanch’ [For my labour and my pains for five weeks long].25 He ran it from 1408 to 1413, getting a flat fee for his ‘labour and pains’ of one hundred and sixty plecken, and reimbursement of expenses. Romboud van Hingene, image maker, took over and ran it to 1417, followed by Arde de coffermakere, Arnold van Vorspoele, from 1418 to his death in 1453. But it was Jan Pieders, theatrical priest and spiritual brother of William Revetour, who was its founder. What then are the conclusions so far? A solemn religious and civic procession centred on a miraculous statue, adds costumed characters in the last decade of the fourteenth century. In the first decade of the fifteenth, the concept becomes so elaborate that some of the characters have to be carried, or wheeled. It is themed initially round the Seventh Joy of Mary, as defined in the Sevenste Bliscap: Death, Assumption, and Coronation – the standard material of other known Assumption plays. Then there is a process of accretion. The source of the Marian theme seems to be related to that of the later Brussels Blijscapen:26 editions refer to the Golden Legend as the major source of this, but structurally it seems to belong to one of the meditations on the Rosary which are probably associated with the programmes of illustration in Books of Hours. The Speculum Humanae Salvationis seems to have influenced it as well. It leads into the history of Mary by way of the Garden of Eden – see the Eerste Bliscap – and the first new float to be added is Paradise, in 1410. (Oddly, the Annunciation itself does not appear until 1440, when it is described as ‘a notable work’.)27 Two years later, in 1412, the Nativity (the Second Joy) is added, and so is ‘a tafel where Our Lord, Our Lady, St John the Evangelist, and St Mary Magdalen sat’. The only occasion where they are the key players would seem to be the Marriage at Cana, which, under some extended programmes, is counted a joy. Then in 1413, they added an elaborate Doomsday, presumably where Mary’s role as intercessor was featured, as it is in the Speculum. 432

[Death] Burial Assumption Coronation Jesse Tree

VIRGIN MARY Death Burial Assumption Coronation Jesse Tree

Crucifixion of St Peter Scourging (of St Peter?)

Death Burial Assumption Coronation Jesse Tree (with bed) Paradise with Adam and Eve

1410

[ ] = not mentioned but presumed to be there. Bold = apparently newly made that year.

SECULAR HISTORY AND TRADITION Nine Worthies [Nine Worthies] [Nine Worthies]

ARCHERS’ GUILDS [St George & Dragon] St George & Dragon St George & Dragon [St Christopher] St Christopher St Christopher OTHER LOCAL SAINTS AND RELICS

OTHER BIBLICAL Lazarus ST PETER

1409

1408

The Leuven Ommegang 1408–13 © Meg Twycross 1413

Nine Worthies [The Count in the Ship]

St Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins

St Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins [Nine Worthies] The Count in the Ship

St George & Dragon [St Christopher]

St George & Dragon St Christopher

St George & Dragon St Christopher

[Nine Worthies] [The Count in] the Ship

[St Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins]

[Crucifixion of St Peter] [St Peter in Prison (ad Vincula)]

[Death] [Burial] [Assumption] [Coronation] [Jesse Tree] Paradise [Nativity (Bethlehem)] Our Lord, Our Lady, Our Lord, Our Lady, St John Evangelist, St St John Evangelist, St Mary Magdalen (?Cana) Mary Magdalen (?Cana) Last Judgement

[Death] [Burial] Assumption Coronation Jesse Tree Paradise Nativity (Bethlehem)

1412

Crucifixion of St Peter [Crucifixion of St Peter] St Peter in Prison (ad Vincula)

[Death] Burial Assumption Coronation Jesse Tree [Paradise]

1411

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Meanwhile, there is a subsidiary theme: the city’s other patron, St Peter. His crucifixion is added in 1410, and his imprisonment in 1412; the feast of St Peter ad Vincula on 1 August was also commemorated in Leuven by a ­procession. We do not of course know who impersonated the original apostles, prophets, martyrs, and maidens in 1393, or whether they kept marching without needing any further repairs. The sight of the Apostles escorting the miraculous statue of Our Lady may have given Jan Pieders the idea of the Burial sequence; the prophets prophesy the Incarnation, and since Sedes Sapientiae is the seat of the child Christ, it would be easy for him to imagine a Jesse Tree. The maidens may well have included St Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins, since there was a relic of them in St Peter’s; it was a dramatic stroke, in 1411, to put them in their ship. But there is another ship ‘der de hertoge inne was’ [wherein the count was].28 Later references call him the Graf van Loeuen, and it is suggested he was the Lohengrin figure, drawn by a swan, who was the ancestor of the dukes of Brabant. He is the first of the local heroes who were later to include the Emperor Charlemagne, the Four Sons of Aymon with their horse Volbeyaert, and in 1463, the Giant Hercules (also an ancestor of the dukes of Brabant). Besides all this, we have the rise of the post-processional play that from the 1440s was usually entrusted to the gesellen van den Roese, the local chamber of rhetoric. These become increasingly elaborate and involve more and more timber, nails, and putting up and taking down. And there are the infrequent, but splendid, Blijde Incomsten [Joyous Entries] of the dukes of Brabant and eventually, of Burgundy. Leuven was not a sleepy university city, but the first city of Brabant, ranking above Brussels: that was why it was granted its university in 1426. Looking at the dates, it seems to have led the other cities in pageantry as well. This makes York even more of a phenomenon in comparison. By 1413, Leuven had thirteen floats, and four groups of marching costumed characters (see table). By 1415, York had a chronologically organized sequence of over fifty pageants. It really looks as if the British were first in the field, but the Belgian material outguns them for sheer quantity and practical detail. *************************** All this is by way of prolegomena. The time has come to inaugurate a project on Records of Early Netherlandish Drama — with a small prize for anyone who can think of a title whose acronym is less ferocious, though thinking of those lions, perhaps it is appropriate after all. It should not interfere with any of the existing and excellent projects which are currently looking at Dutch-language drama, as their focus is rather different. There will be a meeting of interested parties at the SITM Colloquium in Groningen in 2001. Elsa  Strietman, Bart Ramakers, and I would be glad to hear from anyone 434

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who would like to be involved, and particularly colleagues’ opinions on questions like: • • • •

•

•

Where should the cut-off point be? 1650 and the Treaty of Munster? What form of publication – paper or electronic or both? How much should go into an electronic edition? Could we raise funding for ­facsimiles? How would it fit into the other drama-related projects currently running in the Netherlands and Belgium? Should it attempt to copy the REED pattern, or considering the current patterns of research in the countries concerned, should it go for more bite-sized pieces which could be tackled by postgraduate students under supervision? Should the findings also be translated into English, considering its ­potential value to its British and North American audience? There are two opinions here. One thinks it should; the other that we could provide a full introduction and detailed glossaries and Anglophones will be able to cope. What should actually be included? REED editors have the well-known problem: when is a morris dancer not a morris dancer? (When he is not jingling his bells.) There does not seem to be any evidence of morris dancers in Brabant yet, but their place is taken quite satisfactorily by schutteres and beiarders. When is an archer not an archer, for entertainment purposes? When he goes to war. One minute they are shooting at the papengaye, and the next they are off to Agincourt. Do bellringers count? Do bells count? Does Leuven’s stormclock – the warning tocsin? What about when it was rung to start the procession? We await your feedback.

Notes  1. Een cort Verhael oft Memorie Boeck van den Hertoghen van Brabant van den Ouderdom der Stadt van Loven van de Seven Oude Originele Geslachten der selver stadt ende haere Sinte Peetersmannen, bedeijlt in iiij deelen oft capiielen. For a printed edition, see Willem Boonen, Geschiedenis van Leuven geschreven in de Jaren 1593 en 1594, ed. by Edward van Even (Leuven: Vanbiesem and Fonteyn, 1880).   2. Joseph Cuvelier, Inventaire des Archives de la Ville de Louvain, 2 vols (Louvain: van Grunderbeeck, 1930).  3. REED: Records of Early English Drama.   4. Leuven, Stadsarchief (hereafter SAL), 5087 (1459), fol. 14r.   5. SAL, 5075 (1446), fol. 15r.   6. Burton was the Town Clerk who wrote out the first official list of York mystery plays in 1415; Scauceby was a mid-fifteenth-century merchant whose activities were too varied to specify; and Drawswerd was a carver with a national reputation who rebuilt the Mercers’ Doomsday pageant waggon in the early sixteenth

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century. Tubbacs were Flemish immigrants about whose history and integration much research has been published recently.   7. SAL, 5060 (1435), fol. 17r.   8. SAL, 5074 (1445), fol. 15v.   9. SAL, 5074 (1445), fol. 15v. 10. SAL, 5054 (1432), fol. 14v. 11. SAL, 5087 (1459), fol. 14r. 12. SAL, 5076 (1447), fol. 21v. 13. The Beehive of the Romishe Church, trans. by George Gilpin the Elder (London, 1579); quoted in Karl Young, Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), II, 538. 14. SAL, 5005 (1395), fol. 27r. 15. SAL, 5004 (1394), fol. 25v. 16. SAL, 5003 (1393), fol. 44r. 17. SAL, 5064 (1437), fol. 15r. 18. SAL, 5009 (1408/9), fol. 17v. 19. SAL, 5009 (1408/9), fol. 18r. 20. SAL, 5012 (1410), fol. 17v. 21. SAL, 5010 (1409), fol. 22v. 22. SAL, 5012 (1410), inserted between fols 17v and 18r. 23. Edward van Even, L’Omgang de Louvain (Louvain: Fonteyn; Brussels: Arnold, 1863). 24. Griet Verlinden, ‘Ommegang en Toneel te Leuven in de Late Middeleeuwen’ (unpublished dissertation, Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven, Faculteit van de Letteren en de Wijsbegeerte, Afdeling Kunstgeschiedenis: Verhandlung aangeboden tot het verkrijgen van de grad van Licentiat in de Kunstgeschiedenis, 1981/2). 25. SAL, 5012 (1410), parchment strip in Jan Pieders’ autograph inserted between fols 17v and 18r. 26. For example in Die Eerste Bliscap van Maria & Die Sevenste Bliscap van Onser Vrouwen, ed. by W.H. Beuken (Culemborg: Tjeenk Willink/Noorduijn, 1978), pp. 32–3. 27. In the accounts for 1440. See SAL, 5069 (1440), fol. 12v: ‘Arde de coffer meker van enen notable wercke dat hi van nws gemaect \heeft/’. 28. SAL, 5013 (1411), fol. 18v.

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MEG TWYCROSS: BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books and Editions  1. The Medieval Anadyomene: A Study in Chaucer’s Mythography (Medium Ævum Monographs NS1: Oxford: Blackwell, 1972).  2. The Chester ‘Purification and Doctors’ (Medieval English Theatre ModernSpelling Texts 1: 1983), edition.  3. The Chester ‘Noah’s Flood’ (Medieval English Theatre Modern-Spelling Texts 2: 1983).  4. The Chester ‘Antichrist’ (Medieval English Theatre Modern-Spelling Texts 4: 1983).  5. Terence in English: An Early Sixteenth-Century Translation of the ‘Andria’ (Medieval English Theatre Modern-Spelling Texts 6: 1987), edition.  6. Evil on the Medieval Stage: Papers from the 1989 SITM Colloquium, edited, with Introduction (Medieval English Theatre, Lancaster, 1992) (edited papers).  7. Festive Drama: Papers from the Sixth Triennial Colloquium of the International Society for the Study of Medieval Theatre, edited Meg Twycross (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1996), with introductory article on ‘Some Approaches to Dramatic Festivity, Especially Processions’, 1–33.   8. with Sarah Carpenter, Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).

Book Chapters  1. ‘“They Did Not Come out of an Abbey in Lancashire”: Francis Douce and the Manuscript of the Towneley Plays’, in The Best Pairt of Our Play: Essays Oresented to John J. McGavin, Part One, edited Sarah Carpenter, Pamela M. King, Meg Twycross and Greg Walker, Medieval English Theatre 37 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015), 149–65.  2. with Elisabeth Dutton, ‘Lydgate’s Mumming for the Mercers of London’, in The Medieval Merchant: Proceedings of the 2012 Harlaxton Symposium, edited Caroline M. Barron and Anne F. Sutton (Harlaxton Medieval Studies 24; Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2014), 310–49.  3. ‘Organising Theatricals in York between 1461 and 1478: Seventeen Years of Change’ in The Yorkist Age: Proceedings of the 2011 Harlaxton Symposium, edited Hannes Kleineke and Christian Steer (Harlaxton Medieval Studies 23; Donington: Shaun Tyas and The Richard III and Yorkist History Trust, 2013), 237–55.   4. ‘The Widow and Nemesis: Costuming Two Allegorical Figures in a Play for Queen Mary Tudor’, Yearbook of English Studies 43 (2013), 254–72.

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m e g tw yc ro s s : b i b l i o g ra p h y   5. ‘John Redford, Wit and Science’, in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama, edited Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 224–45.   6. ‘The Ladies of Bohemia and the Party Friar: An Allegorical Cast List from the Early Tudor Revels’, in Inventing a Path: Studies in Medieval Rhetoric in Honour of Mary Carruthers, edited Laura Iseppi De Filippis (Nottingham Medieval Studies 56; Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 399–419.  7. ‘Der Prinz des Friedens und die Mummers’, in Theater und Fest in Europa: Perspektiven von Identität und Gemeinschaft, edited Erika Fischer-Lichte, Matthias Warstat and Anna Littmann (Theatralität 11: Tübingen and Basel: A. Francke Verlag, 2011), 181–204.   8. ‘The Triumph of Isabella: or The Archduchess and the Parrot’, in Gender and Fraternal Orders in Europe, 1300–2000, edited Máire Fedelma Cross (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 63–90.   9. ‘Virtual Restoration and Manuscript Archaeology’, in The Virtual Representation of the Past, edited Mark Greengrass and Lorna Hughes (AHRC ICT Methods Network: Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities; Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 23–48. 10. ‘The Ordo Paginarum Revisited, with a Digital Camera’, in ‘Bring Furth the Pagants’: Studies in Early English Drama Presented to Alexandra F. Johnston, edited David Klausner and Karen Sawyer Marsalek (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 105–31. 11. ‘Medieval Theatre: Codes and Genres’, in The Blackwell Companion to Medieval Literature and Culture, edited Peter Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 454–72. 12. ‘The Theatre’, in The Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture, edited John Sawyer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 338–64. 13. ‘Worthy Women of the Old Testament: The Ambachtsvrouwen of the Leuven Ommegang’, in Urban Theatre in the Low Countries, 1400–1625, edited by Elsa Strietman and Peter Happé (Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe 12; Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 221–50. 14. ‘The Contexts of the Last Judgement in Fifteenth-Century Northern Manuscripts: Doomsday as Hypertext, 1: The Bolton Hours’, Proceedings of Harlaxton Conference 2000, edited Nigel Morgan (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2005), 377–403. 15. ‘The Leuven Ommegang and Leuven City Archives’, in European Drama 4: Selected {apers from the Fourth International Conference on ‘Aspects of European Medieval Drama’, Camerino, 5–8 August 1999, edited André Lascombes (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 77–90. 16. ‘Medieval Theatre Design’, in The Dictionary of Art (1999); now Graham F. Barlow et al., ‘Theatre’, Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T084345pg3. 17. with Andrew Prescott and Pamela M. King, ‘The York Doomsday Project’, in Towards the Digital Library, edited Leona Carpenter, Simon Shaw and Andrew Prescott (London: British Library, 1998), 50–7. 18. ‘Directing Apius and Virginia’, in European Theatre 1470–1600: Traditions and Transformations, edited Martin Gosman and Rina Walthaus (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1996), 141–8. 19. ‘Some Approaches to Dramatic Festivity, Especially Processions’, in Festive Drama: Papers from the Sixth Triennial Colloquium of the International Society for the Study of Medieval Theatre, edited Meg Twycross (Cambridge: Brewer, 1996), 1–33. 20. ‘The Theatricality of Medieval Plays’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, edited Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 37–84.

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m e g tw yc ro s s : b i b l i o g ra p h y 21. ‘Civic Consciousness in the York Mystery Plays’, in Social and Political Identities in Western History, edited Claus Bjørn, Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (København: Academic Press, 1994), 66–89. 22. ‘La teatralidad en las funciones inglesas medievales’, in Teatro y Espectaculo en la Edad Media (Actas, Festival d’Elx 1990), edited Luis Quirante (Instituto de Cultura ‘Juan Gil Albert’, Alicante, 1992). 23. ‘Introduction’ to Iconographic and Comparative Studies in Medieval Drama, edited Clifford Davidson and J.H. Stroupe, Comparative Drama 25:1 (1991), 1–3. 24. ‘“With What Body Shall They Come?”: Black and White Souls in the Mystery Plays’, in Langland, the Mystics, and the Medieval Religious Tradition: Essays in Honour of S.S. Hussey, edited Helen Phillips (Cambridge: Brewer, 1990), 271–86. 25. ‘Costume’, in The Greenwood Companion to the Medieval Theatre, edited R.W. Vince (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1990). 26. ‘The Chester Mystery-Play Wardrobe’, in Staging the Chester Cycle, edited David Mills (Leeds Texts and Monographs NS 9: Leeds University School of English, 1985), 100–23. 27. with Sarah Carpenter, ‘Purposes and Effects of Masking’: reprinted in Medieval English Drama, edited Peter Happé (London: Macmillan, 1984), 171–9. 28. ‘Books for the Unlearned’, in Drama and Religion, edited James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 65–110. 29. ‘Apparel Comlye’, in Aspects of Early English Drama, edited Paula Neuss (Cambridge: Brewer, 1983), 30–49. 30. ‘Playing the Resurrection’, in Medieval Studies for J.A.W. Bennett Aetatis Suae LXX, edited Peter Heyworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 273–96.

Articles in Refereed Journals   1. ‘The Interlude: Linlithgow Palace June 2013’, in Reports on Productions, Medieval English Theatre 35 (2013), 147–152.  2. ‘Virtuous and Godly Susanna: Exemplum and Allegory’, Medieval English Theatre 34 (2012), 96–145; ‘Appendix: The Changing Face of Hester’, 146–54.   3. ‘“Say Thy Lesson, Fool”: Idleness Tries to Teach Ignorance to Read’, Medieval English Theatre 33 (2011), 75–121.  4. ‘Neque Vox Neque Sensus: The Resuscitation of Wit in Wit and Science’, Medieval English Theatre 32 (2010), 81–115.   5. with Hilary Hinds and Alison Findlay, ‘The Journeys of George Fox, 1652–1653 – Interim Report on a Research Project and Website’, Quaker Studies 14:2 (2010), 224–35.  6. ‘The King’s Peace and the Play: The York Corpus Christi Eve Proclamation’, Medieval English Theatre 29 (2007), 121–50.   7. ‘Forget the 4.30 a.m. Start: Recovering a Palimpsest in the York Ordo Paginarum’, Medieval English Theatre 25 (2005 for 2003), 98–152.  8. ‘Fart Prike in Cule: The Pictures’, Medieval English Theatre 23 (2001), 100–21.   9. ‘Teaching Palaeography on the Web’, Journal of Literary and Linguistic Computing 14:2 (1999), 257–83. 10. ‘Some Aliens in York and their Overseas Connections: Up to c.1470’, Leeds Studies in English NS 29 (1998), 359–80. 11. ‘Kissing Cousins: The Four Daughters of God and the Visitation in the N. Town Mary Play’, Medieval English Theatre 18 (1998 for 1996), 99–141. 12. ‘Records of Medieval English Theatre’, Archives (Journal of the British Records Association 22:97 (October 1997), 111–18.

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m e g tw yc ro s s : b i b l i o g ra p h y 13. with Pamela M. King, ‘Beyond REED?: The York Doomsday Project’, Medieval English Theatre 17 (1995), 132–48. 14. ‘The York Mercers’ Lewent Brede and the Hanseatic Trade’, Medieval English Theatre 17 (1995), 96–119. 15. The Left-Hand-Side Theory: A Retraction’, Medieval English Theatre 14 (1992), 77–94. 16. ‘More Black and White Souls’, Medieval English Theatre 13 (1991), 52–63. 17. ‘“As the Sun with His Beams When He is Most Bright”’, Medieval English Theatre 12:1 (1990), 34–79. 18. ‘Beyond the Picture Theory: Image and Activity in Medieval Drama’, Word and Image 4 (1988), 589–617. 19. ‘Felsted of London: Silk-Dyer and Theatrical Entrepreneur’, Medieval English Theatre 10:1 (1988), 4–16. 20. ‘Birds or Beards?’, Notes and Queries NS 35 (1988), 33. 21. ‘My Visor is Philemon’s Roof’, Fifteenth-Century Studies 13 (1987), 335–46. 21. ‘Two Maid Marians and a Jewess’, Medieval English Theatre 9:1 (1987), 6–7. 22. ‘The Liber Boonen of the Leuven Ommegang’, Dutch Crossing 22 (April 1984), 93–6. 23. ‘“Transvestism” in the Mystery Plays’, Medieval English Theatre 5:2 (1983), 123–80. 24. with Sarah Carpenter, ‘Materials and Methods of Mask-Making’, Medieval English Theatre 4:1 (1982), 28–47. 25. with Sarah Carpenter, ‘Masks in Medieval English Theatre’, Medieval English Theatre 3:1 (1981), 7–44, and 3:2 (1981), 69–113. 26. ‘The Flemish Ommegang and its Pageant Cars’, Medieval English Theatre 2:1 (1980), 15–41, and 2:2 (1980), 80–98. 27. ‘A Pageant-Litter Drawing by Dürer’, Medieval English Theatre 1:2 (1979), 70–2. 28. ‘“Places to Hear the Play”: Pageant Stations at York 1398–1572’, Records of Early English Drama I (1978), 10–33.

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INDEX

Fullers: 92 Girdlers: 73, 135 Goldsmiths: 49, 102, 107n6, 421n74 Grocers: 188, 218, 341, 344, 378 Haberdashers: 398 Hairsters: see Turners, Hairsters and Bollers Hammermen: 198 Handbow: 431 Hartshorners (as erroneous reading): 98 Hatters: 98 Helena, St: 190 Horners: 98 Inkeepers: 193 Ironmongers: 96–7, 102 Joiners, Cartwrights, Carvers and Sawyers: 108n11 Latoners: 101–3 Lorimers: see Spurriers and Lorimers Mary, St: 191 Masons: 78, 85n43, 92, 102, 108n11, 421n74 Mercers: 41, 45, 50–2, 55, 60n43, 193, 281–2, 344, 403–22 See also Staging and Presentation: Pageant waggons: Mercers’ pageant waggon Merchant Adventurers: 51, 281, 404, 411–3 Millers: 58n19, 85n43, 100, 102–3 Minstrels: 92, 108n11 Painters: 101–3 Paternoster: 85n43 Pewterers: 101, 107n7 Pinners: 101–3 Plasterers: 85n43, 101 Poulterers: 101–3

Banns: 65, 95, 189, 414 Chambers of Rhetoric: 274, 372, 434 Freemen’s List (Chester): 187–8 Freemen’s Register (York): 7, 10, 45–51, 60n50, 103–4, 109n30 Guilds: Archers: 340–1, 431, 433 Armourers: 85 Arquebusiers: 340 Bakers: 80, 95, 102, 106, 412, 421n74 Barber Surgeons: 412 Bollers: see Turners, Hairsters and Bollers Bowyers: 98, 102 Butchers: 95, 101–3 Cappers: 187, 189–90, 206 Cardmakers: 92, 101 Carpenters: 72, 95, 108n11, 115 Cartwrights: see Joiners, Cartwrights, Carvers and Sawyers Carvers: see Joiners, Cartwrights, Carvers and Sawyers Chandlers: 95, 104, 107n6 Christopher, St: 135 Christopher, St, and St George: 5 Cordwainers: 72, 95n43, 96n50 Corpus Christi: 51–2, 60n43, 111n55, 135, 418n31 Curriers: 95 Drapers: 282, 391–3, 395, 421n74 Dyers: 398–9 Fletchers: 102 Footbow, Small and Great Guilds of the: 431 Founders: 101

441

index Saddlers: 408 Saucemakers: 99. 102 Sawyers: see Joiners, Cartwrights, Carvers and Sawyers Scriveners: 101 Shearmen: 102, 104, 188 Shipwrights: 363, 413 Skinners: 72, 90, 98 Sledmen: 108n11, 368 Smiths: 97, 187, 202, 204 Spicers: 95, 101 Spurriers and Lorimers: 95n43, 101 Stainers: 102–3 Tanners: 103, 107n6 Tapiters: 58n19 Taylors: 188 Tilemakers: 99, 102 Tilers: 78, 85n43, 95, 104 Tilethatchers: 95, 104 Turners, Hairsters and Bollers: 99, 102 Vestmentmakers: 90 Vintners: 53 Waterleders: 102, 412 Weavers: 58n19, 111n58, 186–7, 204 Woolweavers: 101 House Books: 6, 9, 59n23, 65, 69, 71–2, 79–80, 83n23, 87n74 Liturgy: 128–30, 136, 151, 202, 211, 246, 251, 266, 299, 310, 317, 319–20, 326, 333n84 Liturgical Drama: 125, 188, 190, 194, 127–30, 133n16, 333n84 Mayoral party: 5, 16–18, 39 Mayoress: 10, 12, 18–19 Ordo Paginarum: 55, 89–111, 281 Pageant Masters: 45, 53, 55, 85n43, 189, 281, 342, 344, 349, 353 Patent Rolls: 47, 53, 61n66, 73 People: Alne, William: 100, 103, 105 Appleyard, Thomas: 16, 344 Babthorp, Ralph: 8, 15 Barbour, Thomas: 8, 58 Bateman, John: 5, 17 Baxter, Nicholas: 16–17 Beverley, Thomas: 54, 413–14 Birkby, James: 79–80, 87n74

442

Blackburn, Nicholas: 8, 106, 413, 420n55 Caton, William: 3, 8–9, 19 Catterton, William: 8–9 Drawswerd, Thomas: 15, 17, 27, 40, 55, 425 See also Staging and Presentation: Pageant waggons: Mercers’ pageant waggon Ellis, John: 5, 13, 15–16 Felsted family: 391–402 Flemyng, Thomas: 17–18 Foster, Archibald: 8, 15 Gillour, Paul: 4, 11, 18–19 Gryssop, Thomas: 407–10, 420n54 Gyseburn, John of: 4, 13 Hilly, John: 392, 397 Jackson, Peter: 17–19 Lisle, Lady: 391–4, 396–7 Lister, John: 3–4, 8, 11, 15–16 Norman, John: 17–18 Revetour, William: 50–1, 105–6, 135–6, 432 Rumbald, Matheus: 47, 58 Scauceby, Thomas: 3–4, 7, 10, 13, 15–16, 413, 425 Staveley, Alan: 3, 5, 16 Stockdale, John: 13, 39 Tubbac family: 50–2, 54, 56, 135, 425 Tubbat see Tubbac Tukbacon see Tubbac Van Haarlem, Warmbald: 45, 50, 54 Van Hingene, Romboud: 427, 429, 431–2 Van Uppestall family: 45, 47, 50, 53 Vavasour, William, 79–80 Walton, Henry: 395–6 Watson, Henry: 10, 15, 19 Wylde family: 4, 11, 13–14, 16–19, 39 Wyman, Henry: 4, 16, 47, 50, 54, 62n70, 415n11, 420n55, 421n73 Artists and Illustrators: Boonen, William: 40, 337, 340, 342, 353, 375, 382, 423 Jee, David: 28 Van Alsloot, Denis: 28, 29, 337, 340–2, 348, 350–1, 353, 362, 366–7, 370, 378, 385n24, 390n112 Authors: Drake, Francis: 67, 69–71, 75, 77–8, 83n26, 84n34, 86n53

index Leland, John: 84n34 Palliser, D.M: 7 Rainoldes, John: 198–201, 204, 206–7, 214–15, 218 Skaife, Robert: 7 “York Realist”: 150, 162 Directors, Producers, Pageant Masters and Companies: Bretton Hall: 34 Butterworth, Philip: 37, 41 Chester Waggon Plays: 200, 201, 213 Durham Medieval Players: 32 Gager, William: 198–9, 208, 214–6 Husee, John: 391–5, 397 Joculatores Lancastrienses: 30, 32–3, 281 Lack, Stewart: 31 Lords of Misrule: 28, 35, 37 McKinnell, John: 30–1, 35–7 Market, Henry: 45, 47, 50, 54, 57n4 Medieval Players: 225, 229 Norton, Peter: 185, 198, 208–10, 222–3, 225–6 Pieders, Jan: 429–30, 432, 434 PLS: 28 York Waits: 69 Monarchs and Dignitaries: Anne Boleyn: 398 Arthur, Prince: 388 Arundel, Archbishop: 136 Bianca Maria Sforza: 344 Edward III: 47–8 Edward VI: 72, 420 Elizabeth I: 74, 199, 233 Elizabeth Woodville: 193 Charles V, Emperor: 339, 385, 388 Henry I: 82 Henry IV: 53, 61, 410 Henry V: 233, 275 Henry VII: 41, 350 Henry VIII: 41 Henry Earl of Derby: 54, 403, 410 See also Henry IV Katherine of Aragon: 192–3, 388 Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots: 86 Mary of Burgundy: 344 Maximilian I: 344 Philip of Spain: 339, 344, 383 Richard II: 67, 192, 233 Richard Duke of Gloucester: 71

Players: Briscoe, Richard: 190, 206 Ellam, Thomas: 187, 232n5 Heyns, Hugh: 186–7, 190, 197 Loker, William: 187–8, 232n5 Scribes and Clerks: Burton, Roger: 53, 63–4, 89, 96, 99–100, 103–6, 110n39, 337, 387n68, 425 Clerke, John: 87n74, 106 Places: Pageant stations and streets (York): Bootham: 75 Bridge Street: 7 Bull Inn: 18, 2, 48 Castlegate: 75 Church Street see Girdlergate Colliergate: 12, 31, 75 Common Hall: 5, 11, 13–19, 26n17, 39, 41, 48, 75, 111n66 Coney Street: 7, 11–15, 18, 26n7, 28, 41, 53–4, 75–7 Conyngstrete see Coney Street Coppergate: 5 Eastgate: 31 Foss Bridge: 75–7 Fossgate: 51–2, 75 Girdlergate: 15 Goodramgate: 28, 36 Grape Lane: 38 High Ousegate: 41, 76–7 Holy Trinity Priory: 5, 9, 12, 14, 19, 28, 75 Hospital of the Trinity, the Blessed Virgin Mary and All Saints: 51 King’s Square: 15, 31 Lendal: 41 Little Stonegate: 33, 35, 37–8, 41 Low Ousegate: 11, 41 Low Petergate: 14, 31, 36–7, 43n26 Mercery: 15 Micklegate: 5–7, 11–14, 19, 75–7, 86n62 Minster: 3, 5, 11, 13–16, 19, 31, 36, 75–6 Monk Bar: 8 North Street: 6, 13, 15, 38 Northstrete: see North Street Ouse Bridge: 4–6, 10–11, 13, 15, 36, 51, 75–7, 80, 106, 110n39 Ousegate: 19, 36, 41, 75

443

index Pavement: 5, 7, 9, 12, 14–15, 17–19, 28, 74–7, 86n59 Petergate: 4, 11–15, 17–18, 35, 38–9, 75–7 Shambles: 36 Skeldergate: 6–7, 13, 15, 421n76 Sporyer gate see Spurriergate Spurriergate: 5, 7, 11, 14–15, 18, 26n17, 36, 41 Stonegate: 11, 13, 15, 17, 28, 31, 33–7, 75–7 Swynegale see Little Stonegate Tanner Row: 6, 13 Three Kings Inn: 5, 13 Walmgate: 75 Pageant traditions: Antwerp: 29, 51, 55, 337–9, 341–2, 344–7, 349, 353–4, 356–60, 362–75, 377–80, 384n15, 387n68, 390n110 Avignon: 194 Beverley: 133n16, 190, 206, 211–2 Bourges: 270, 275 Brome: 153, 157–9, 177 Bruges: 55, 344, 384n8 Brussels: 29, 337–40, 342, 344–6, 348–51, 353–5, 359–63, 366–7, 369–79, 384n19, 387n53, 389n86, 389n103, 390n110, 432, 434 Chester: 30, 41, 65, 95, 117, 132n13, 153–5, 157–60, 166, 185, 187, 189, 192–3, 196–7, 200–2, 209, 213, 218–9, 224, 226–7, 231, 239–40, 249, 275n36, 275n48, 283, 292–3, 330n44, 341, 346, 361, 370, 400n12, 414 Coventry: 44n29, 186–90, 197, 204, 206, 211, 239–40, 282, 293, 339, 361 Dublin: 95, 341, 370 Florence: 253 Grenoble: 194 Hereford: 95 Kyoto and Nagahama: 29 Leuven: 29, 40, 234n38, 337–8, 342, 344–7, 349–55, 359, 361, 366–7, 369–70, 373–8, 386n61, 387n68, 389n101, 423–36 Louvain: see Leuven Lucerne: 196 Lydd: 397

Maldon: 391, 396–8 Mechelen: 338 Metz: 195, 204 Mons: 194, 274n35 “N. Town”: 95, 152–6, 162, 165–6, 185, 202, 209, 217, 230–1, 239–40, 243, 249, 253, 263, 265, 269, 294, 299–334 New Romney: 188, 397 Oudenaarde: 55 Seville: 29, 354 Towneley: 148, 185, 197, 201, 221, 224, 227, 239–40, 252, 292–4 Valencia: 29–30, 39, 430–1 Wakefield: 121, 132n5–6, 132n13, 151, 153, 160, 167, 211 York: 28, 89–90, 95–6, 148, 151 et passim Streets: see Pageant stations and streets (York) Trading cities: Hull: 52–4, 57–9, 404, 406–8, 410–14, 416, 418, 420 Leuven: 383–402 Louvain: see Leuven Plays, Pageants, Floats and Events: Abraham: 153, 157–9, 177, 363 Adoration of the Shepherds: 385n24 Annunciation: 29, 101, 117, 153, 165–6, 253, 345–6, 348, 350, 353, 355–6, 370–1, 377–8, 385n24, 386n38 Antichrist’s Prophets: 158 Assumption of the Virgin: 35–6, 39, 41, 101, 189, 349–50, 354, 385n24, 430, 432–3 Balaam: 155 Betrothal of Mary and Joseph: 155–6, 169–70, 178 Buffetting: 102 Burial of Christ: 161 Burial of the Virgin Mary: 433 Building of the Ark: 413 Cana: 433 Castle of Perseverance: 217, 311, 325 Chester Play 2: 218 Christ and the Doctors: 29, 31, 101, 345, 375, 378, 385n24, 391 See also Purification and Doctors Christ’s Appearance to his Mother: 29 Christ in the House of Simon the Leper: 96–7, 102

444

index St Christopher: 341, 431, 433 Circumcision: 355, 357, 368, 385n24 Conception, Birth and Infancy of the Blessed Virgin Mary: 385n24 Conception of Mary: 162–4, 169–70, 173, 209 Condemnation of Christ: 102 Coronation of the Virgin: 35, 101, 105, 430, 432–3 Corpus Christi Day: 16, 65, 69, 73, 80, 190, 413 Corpus Christi Play: 3, 9, 27, 42, 46, 52, 55, 63–88, 89, 95, 106 Court Revels: 371, 392, 398 Creation and Fall of the Angels: 103 Creed Play: 9, 17, 46, 65, 80, 135 Crucifixion: 28, 32, 34, 37, 41, 101–3, 117, 123, 127, 162 Crucifixion of St Peter: 389n101, 433 Day of Judgement: 55, 342, 359, 362, 364, 367–8, 375, 377, 379, 433 Death and Deposition: 35, 37, 101–2 Death of the Virgin Mary: 433 Destruction of Jerusalem: 187 Dicing for Christ’s Garments: 100, 102 Doomsday: 30, 35–6, 39–41, 50, 281–2, 286, 292, 294 See also Staging and Presentation: Pageant waggons: Mercers’ pageant waggon Doubting Thomas: 101 Emmaus: 108n11 Epiphany: 346–7 Expulsion from Eden: 29 Festa: 247 Fifteen Degrees: 174, 345 Flight into Egypt: 108n17 Gammer Gurton’s Needle: 228–9 Garden of Eden: 351–2, 355, 359 George, St: 341, 397, 425, 431, 435 Harrowing of Hell: 32, 37, 120, 249, 274n35, 280n99 Hell: 342, 359, 362, 364, 367–9, 387n61 Herod and the Three Kings: see Three Kings Holy Kinship: 385n24 Hortulanus: 32, 37, 130, 235n57 Jesse Tree: 29, 234n38, 339, 351, 355, 359, 361–2, 372, 378, 385n24, 431, 433–4 Jesus in the House of Simon the Leper

445

see Christ in the House of Simon the Leper Jeu d’Adam: 218 Joseph’s Doubts: 118, 239 Joseph’s Return: 169 Joseph’s Trouble: 101 Joyous Entry: 41, 339, 434 Joys of Mary: see Seven Joys Judgement of Solomon: 40, 375–6 Last Judgement: see Day of Judgement Last Supper: 41, 102, 217 Lazarus: 98, 105, 292–3, 431, 433 Lord Mayor’s Show: 192, 337, 341, 344, 371, 389n99 Mactacio Abel: 211 Margaret, St: 341, 391 Mary in the Temple: 169, 174–5, 177–8 Mary Magdalene: 218 Mary Plays: 31, 153–4, 162, 202, 239–80, 299–334 Massacre of the Innocents: 108n17, 135, 170 Mayor’s pageant: 101, 105 Michael, St: 341, 387n61 Moses: 154 Mystère des Trois Doms: 194 N. Town Play 42: 294 Nativity: 29, 32, 151, 249–50, 342, 345–8, 353–4, 371, 373, 375, 377, 385n24, 432–3 Nine Orders of Angels: 29, 349, 353, 425 Noah: 31, 117, 160, 185, 197, 201, 221–31, 330n44 Norwich Grocers’ Play B: 218 Ommegangen: 29, 39–41, 55, 337–90, 423–36 Palamon and Arcite: 199 Paradise: 431–3 Parliament of Heaven: 153 Passion: 29, 55, 152–3, 170, 354 Paternoster Play: 9, 65, 85n43, 95, 136 Pentecost: 29, 117, 275n48, 345–6, 352, 355, 385n24, 426 Peter, St, in Prison: 433 Presentation of the Virgin: 194, 346, 351, 385n24 Purification: 41, 186–7, 190–2, 196–7, 200–3, 209, 211–13, 215, 231, 346, 385n24 See also Purification and Doctors

index Purification and Doctors: 30, 185 Raising of Lazarus see Lazarus Raising of the Cross upon Mount Calvary: 102–3 Resurrection: 29, 32–3, 37, 108n11, 115–133, 148, 274n35, 345–6, 385n24 Rex Diabole: 392, 394 Royal Entry: 40–1, 192–3, 339, 344, 350, 354, 424 Scourging and Crowning with Thorns: 99, 102 Scourging of St Peter: 433 Second Shepherds’ Play: 121 Seven Joys: 55, 359, 389n103, 427 Seven Sorrows: 342, 359–60, 368, 427 Shepherds: 32, 211, 213 See also Second Shepherd’s Play Stretching and Nailing to the Cross: 102–3 Suicide of Judas: 99, 102 Temptation: 158, 346 Temptation and Adultress see Temptation Three Kings: 49, 92, 102, 108n11, 342, 353, 368–9, 385n24, 386n38 Towneley Play 31: 293 Transfiguration: 363 Tree of Jesse: see Jesse Tree Tree of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin: see Seven Sorrows Trial before Pilate: 99, 102 Trinity: 355, 358, 368 Ulysses Redux: 198 Ursula, St, and the 11,000 Virgins: 433–4 Via Crucis: 102 Visitation: 29, 151, 155, 166, 170–1, 173, 185, 202, 207, 211, 222, 230, 239–40, 263, 299–334, 342, 345, 355, 357–8, 368, 370 Washing of Feet: 102, 412 York Play 30: 217 Religious Houses: Austin Friars: 25 Fountains: 5, 51 St Leonard’s Hospital: 5, 16–17 Second List: 89–90, 92, 94, 98–9, 104–5, 107n2, 110n39

Sources, Analogues and Commentaries: Aquinas, St Thomas: 247, 254, 256, 261–2, 264, 278n66, 283, 286–92 Augustine, St: 247, 275n43–4, 277n54, 283–6, 289–90, 292, 312, 314–5, 325, 329n41, 331n55 Bede: 251, 267, 273n20, 276n54, 278n63, 288, 310, 312–15, 317–18, 326, 328n18, 331n54–5, 332n68 Bernard of Clairvaux, St: 136, 141, 168 245–6, 254–5, 268, 273n24, 302, 311, 315, 325–6, 328 Bonaventure, St: see Meditationes Vitae Christi Cursor Mundi: 283–6 Golden Legend: see Legenda Aurea Hrabanus Maurus: 267, 296n21, 296n24 Kempe, Margery: 135, 137, 139, 141, 147, 149–53, 178–80 Legenda Aurea: 136, 162, 206, 219, 243, 247, 251, 254, 274n33, 276n54, 295n8, 432 Love, Nicholas: see Meditationes Vitae Christi Ludolphus of Saxony: 132n7, 133n15, 133n18, 182n23, 183n40, 183n42, 240, 263–4, 269, 274n28, 276n54, 278n72, 317 Ludolphus the Carthusian: see Ludolphus of Saxony Ludus Paschalis: 120, 130, 132n9 Meditationes Vitae Christi: 133n15, 136–47, 149–54, 162–3, 166–8, 171, 181n7, 240, 263, 302, 318–19 Mirour of Man’s Salvation see Speculum Humanae Salvationis Mirrour of St Edmund: 136–7, 149, 181 Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Crist see Meditationes Vitae Christi Ordo Prophetarum: 319, 326 Origen: 133n20, 267–8, 280n94 Peter Lombard: 283, 289–90, 296n12, 296n21, 315 Peterborough Psalter: 304–6, 308 Pricke of Conscience: 135, 283–4, 286, 290, 292 Pseudo-Bonaventure: see Meditationes Vitae Christi

446

index Pseudo-Matthew: 162, 241–2, 247, 249, 251, 257–8, 260 Quem Quaeritis: 120, 127, 129–30 Rolle, Richard: 136–7 Scale of Perfection: 137, 143 Speculum Ecclesie see Mirrour of St Edmund Speculum Historiale: 241, 276n54, 284–5 Speculum Humanae Salvationis: 244, 258, 266, 268, 283, 300, 307, 432 Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge: 147, 149, 151, 159, 170, 198 Vita Jesu Christi see Ludolphus of Saxony Staging and Presentation: Booth stage: 28, 35, 40, 341, 375 Hellmouth: 32, 37, 44n28, 291, 295, 364

Pageant waggons: 27–42, 55, 95, 115, 423 Mercers’ pageant waggon: 15, 27–8, 30, 39–40, 55, 364, 378, 403, 414, 435n6 Pasos: 29 Roques: 29, 39 Proscenium stage: 15, 27–8, 30–1, 39–40, 116, 380 Thrust stage: 30–1, 37, 40 Statute of Winchester: 65–6, 80 Triumph of Isabella see People: Artists and Illustrators: Van Alsloot, Denis York Doomsday Project: 45, 55–7, 106, 404, 411

447