The City and the Parish: Drama in York and Beyond: Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies [1 ed.] 1472478886, 9781472478887

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The City and the Parish: Drama in York and Beyond

This volume brings together a selection of the major articles of Alexandra F. Johnston, which along with similar volumes by the late David Mills, Peter Meredith and Meg Twycross, makes up a set of “Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies”. Alexandra Johnston, the founding director of the research project Records of Early English Drama, is one of these four key scholars whose work has had a profound influence on the study of medieval and early modern English drama. This collection of essays focuses especially on the York plays: on the Mercers’ documents that initiated the project itself; on the theology and christology of the plays; on the relationship between the plays and contemporary administrative bodies, both civic and national; and on the performance of the York plays in modern times. A further group of articles considers documentary evidence for the wide range of drama and mimetic ceremony in the Midlands and the West Country, reinforcing our understanding that these events took place predominately on a local parish level. The collection is rounded out with a survey of the immense changes that our reading of early English drama have undergone over the past half century. Alexandra F. Johnston is professor emerita at the University of Toronto, Canada. David Klausner is professor of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Also in the Variorium Collected Studies Series

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Studies on Medieval Liturgical and Legal Manuscripts from Spain and Southern Italy Roger E. Reynolds Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif ’s Writings Anne Hudson Councils of the Catholic Reformation Pisa I (1409) to Trent (1545–63) Nelson H. Minnich Reform, Ecclesiology, and the Christian Life in the Late Middle Ages Thomas M. Izbicki Masters of Learned Ignorance: Eriugena, Eckhart, Cusanus Donald F. Duclow Reorientations of Western Thought from Antiquity to the Renaissance F. Edward Cranz Religion in the History of the Medieval West John Van Engen Church, State and Community: Historical and Comparative Perspectives Antony Black Councils and Clerical Culture in the Medieval West Richard Kay Monastic, Scholastic and Mystical Theologies in the Later Middle Ages and Beyond Kent Emery, Jr.

The City and the Parish: Drama in York and Beyond Shifting paradigms in early English drama studies Alexandra F. Johnston

Edited by David N. Klausner

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Editorial material and selection © 2017 Alexandra F. Johnston; individual owners retain copyright in their own material. 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 A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-4724-7888-7 (hbk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Introduction

1

DAVID N. KLAUSNER

1

York records

7

1.1 The Doomsday pageant of the York Mercers, 1433 From: Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 5 (1971), 29–34 [with Margaret Dorrell (Rogerson)]

9

1.2 The York Mercers and their pageant of Doomsday, 1433–1526 From: Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 6 (1972), 8–35 [with Margaret Dorrell (Rogerson)]

18

1.3 The procession and play of Corpus Christi in York after 1426 From: Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 7 (1973–74), 55–62

43

1.4 The plays of the religious guilds of York – the Creed play and the Pater Noster play From: Speculum 50 (1975), 55–90

49

1.5 The guild of Corpus Christi and the procession of Corpus Christi in York From: Medieval Studies 38 (1976), 372–84

88

1.6 The York Cycle and the libraries of York From: The Church and Learning in Late Medieval Society: Essays in Honour of Barrie Dobson, Caroline Barron and Jenny Stratford, eds., Harlaxton Medieval Studies 11 (Donington, UK: Shaun Tyas, 2002), 355–70

99

vi

Contents

2

Other records

113

2.1 The emerging pattern of the Easter play in England From: Medieval English Theatre 20 (1998), 3–23

115

2.2 The feast of Corpus Christi in the West Country From: Early Theatre 6 (2003), 15–34

132

2.3 Summer festivals in the Thames Valley counties From: Custom, Culture and Community, Thomas Pettitt and Leif Søndergaard, eds., proceedings of the 17th International Symposium of the Centre for the Study of Vernacular Languages, Odense University (Odense, Denmark: Odense University Press, 1994), 37–56

149

2.4 The Robin Hood of the records From: Playing Robin Hood: The Legend as Performance in Five Centuries, Lois Potter, ed. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 27–44

165

3

Suppression and change

181

3.1 The city as patron: York From: Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, Paul Whitfield White and Suzanne Westfall, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 150–75

183

3.2 ‘And how the state will beare with it, I knowe not’ From: According to the Ancient Custom: Essays Presented to David Mills, Part 2, Philip Butterworth, Pamela M. King, and Meg Twycross, eds., Medieval English Theatre 30 (2008), 3–25

206

3.3 William Cecil and the drama of persuasion From: Shakespeare and Religious Change, Kenneth Graham and Philip Collington, eds. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 63–87

224

Contents

vii

4

Theory/theology

247

4.1 ‘The word made flesh’: Augustinian elements in the York Cycle From: The Centre and Its Compass: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor John Leyerle, Robert Taylor et al., eds., Studies in Medieval Culture 33 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), 225–46

249

4.2 ‘At the still point of the turning world’: The Augustinian roots of medieval dramaturgy From: European Medieval Drama, vol. 2, Sydney Higgins, ed. (Camerino, IT: Tempo di Spettacoli, 1998), 5–25

263

4.3 ‘His langage is lorne’: The silent centre of the York Cycle From: Early Theatre 3 (2000), 185–95

279

4.4 Making yourself ‘þer present’: Nicholas Love and the plays of the Passion From: In Strange Countries: Essays in Memory of John J. Anderson, David Matthews, ed. (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010), 96–107

289

5

Performance

299

5.1 The York Corpus Christi play: A dramatic structure based on performance practice From: The Theatre in the Middle Ages, Herman Braet, John Noive, and Gilbert Tournoy, eds. (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 1985), 362–73

301

5.2 York, 1998: What we learned From: Early Theatre 3 (2000), 199–203

310

5.3 Acting Mary: The emotional realism of the mature virgin in the N-Town plays From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama, John Alford, ed. (Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1995), 85–98

314

viii

Contents

6

Summing up

327

6.1 The history of English drama before 1642 revisited From: The Southern African Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20 (2010), 1–29

329

Index

349

Introduction David N. Klausner

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 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 first authors in this series, Professor David Mills, Liverpool; Professor Peter Meredith, Leeds; Professor Meg Twycross, Lancaster; and Professor Alexandra Johnston, Toronto, have between them been responsible 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. Alexandra Johnston’s scholarly work has been focused since the beginning on the biblical drama of late medieval England. A master’s thesis at the University of Toronto on the Abraham and Isaac plays, completed in 1962 under the direction of Professor F. David Hoeniger, set a course for her career from which she has rarely deviated. Her consideration of biblical plays grouped thematically, rather than within a single collection or cycle, was not a common approach in the 1960s and was expanded significantly in her 1964 doctoral dissertation in the Department of English on the Christ figure in the ‘Four English Cycles’ (as they were generally known at that time), under the guidance of Prof. L.K. Shook of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Johnston spent the following three years teaching at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, and in 1967 returned to her alma mater, Victoria University in the University of Toronto, where she spent the rest of her career, until her retirement in 2004. The focus of Johnston’s career changed significantly in 1971 when she was alerted to the existence among the York civic records of a single-sheet manuscript containing an internal 1433 indenture of the city’s Mercers’ guild passing on the guild’s pageant wagon and its appurtenances to its new administrative officials.The indenture, with its wealth of detail concerning the construction of the wagon, gave us our first real glimpse of what the York wagons might have

2 Introduction

looked like, although the Mercers’ Judgment Day wagon with its two-storey construction was clearly more elaborate than required by many of the other plays. At the same time that Johnston was given access to the Mercers’ indenture, she was made aware of the request by Margaret Dorrell (Rogerson), an Australian graduate student working with A.C. Cawley at Leeds, for access to the documents relevant to drama in the Merchant Adventurers’ Archive. This request clearly would include the newly found indenture, and Johnston suggested that the two of them work together and make a joint announcement, and their discovery was announced in the next issue of Leeds Studies in English. For the next decade, Johnston’s work focused on the York plays.The extraordinary changes brought to our understanding of the staging of the plays by the 1433 indenture brought also a realization that there were likely further documents critical to understanding the staging of late medieval drama yet to be found. Following intense discussion at the medieval drama session at the 1973 meeting of the Modern Language Association, followed by a gathering of Canadian scholars interested in editing records of early drama at the annual Congress of Learned Societies of Canada in Toronto, and a further meeting at the inaugural colloquium of the Société Internationale pour l’étude du théâtre médiéval in Leeds (both in 1974), an organizing conference was held in Toronto in 1975, drawing together scholars from Canada, Great Britain, and the United States and including several scholars already involved in local archival research. And so the project Records of Early English Drama (REED) was born, with a mandate to search out, edit, and publish exhaustively the surviving documentary evidence for dramatic performance, with Alexandra Johnston as founding director. The first volume of an unknown number would be for the city of York, to be edited by Johnston and Rogerson. Research in the records of several other urban centres was already in progress, largely by scholars such as Reginald Ingram in Coventry, Lawrence Clopper in Chester, David Galloway in Norwich, and J.J. Anderson in Newcastle, with a previous interest in the cities of their research. Significant to the early development of the project was the involvement of performance as an aspect of research, an uncommon idea in the mid-1970s. Given the information in the Mercers’ indenture on the construction of a wagon, it now seemed possible to consider a complete production of the York Cycle on appropriately constructed wagons. The principal aim of the production, staged outdoors in the University of Toronto’s King’s College Circle, was to counter the scholarly position that processional wagon staging at a sequence of performance places, as appears to be described in a number of York documents, is not technically possible, owing to the difference in length of plays and the time needed to move a wagon into position and prepare it for performance. The 1977 production proved the viability of wagon staging as well as the accuracy of the York documents, creating a link between research and performance which changed the field for good. Johnston and Rogerson’s edition of the York records appeared in two volumes in 1979 as the first fruits of Records of Early English Drama. Since that time, twenty-seven collections have been published, and twenty-six editors are

Introduction

3

working in the field.The project’s first digital collection was published in 2015, and work is underway to provide digital access to all published collections, as well as all future publications. REED, as it is now familiarly known, has changed just about everything we know about late medieval English drama and has become a major part of the paradigm shift in the study of early English drama which has taken place over the past forty years. Closely linked to REED, the research of a number of scholars working with the manuscript context of the plays has shown much of what was previously understood to be profoundly mistaken.We now know that the so-called ‘Four English Cycles’ are more properly understood as two cycles (York, Chester) performed annually in the streets of the respective cities and created explicitly for this purpose. The Towneley plays we now understand to be an anthology collected from a variety of sources, including a few plays from Wakefield and several borrowings from York, brought together privately for a wealthy recusant family for devotional reading rather than for performance, while Peter Meredith’s research has demonstrated that N-Town is a compilation from at least three sources perhaps also intended for devotional reading. Before REED, it was the common understanding that the norm for drama in English towns was a Creation-to-Doomsday cycle performed under guild auspices on wagons at set locations in the town’s streets. REED has shown the situation to have been far more diverse than this. Although texts do not survive, it is now clear that the most common form of drama in most towns was the parish play, which might have been a saint’s play, perhaps linked to a patronal festival, but might just as frequently been a secular play designed for fundraising, a Robin Hood play perhaps. Some towns (Coventry, Norwich) appear to have staged sequences of plays less comprehensive than the Creation-to-Doomsday model, while some (Hereford) seem to have adopted an alternative mode of performance, such as the tableau vivant. Central to our present understanding of the place of drama in late medieval life is the notion that a far broader spectrum of performance was available to townspeople than previously thought. The nineteen articles in the present collection have been assembled to reflect these changes in our understanding of late medieval English drama, especially the cycle plays of York and Chester. The first six deal explicitly with the York plays, beginning with Johnston’s initial articles announcing and then discussing the 1433 Mercers’ indenture, the document which can be seen as the catalyst for the whole REED project (both written jointly with Margaret Dorrell (Rogerson). These are followed by her seminal article on the York Creed play and Pater Noster play – plays for which we have documentary evidence but no surviving texts. The focus on York’s civic guild structure and its importance for the plays (since guild records provide virtually the only surviving evidence of the Creed and Pater Noster plays) is maintained in Johnston’s study of the relationship between the various components of the celebration of Corpus Christi Day: the plays and the civic procession. Discussion of the authorship of the plays has long been an important part of York scholarship; Johnston examines in the final article in this first section the overlap between the content (especially

4 Introduction

theological) in the plays and the availability of possible sources, both patristic and contemporary, in the various libraries in the city. The second group of essays continues the focus on records research, but moves to other parts of Britain, beginning with a consideration of the evidence for Resurrection plays intended to celebrate the Easter season. Johnston concentrates on stand-alone plays in English, Latin, and Anglo-Norman, rather than on the plays of the four biblical sequences or on dramas performed in a liturgical context. In the following paper, she takes advantage of the publication of the REED volumes for the west and southwest, examining the documentary materials describing the celebration of the feast of Corpus Christi. Her own REED research in the Thames Valley counties of Oxfordshire, Berkshire, and Buckinghamshire forms the basis for her discussion of the surviving evidence for various summer festivals in the busy season leading up to Midsummer on 26 June. The final essay in this section examines the documentary evidence for performance traditions of Robin Hood, considering as well the relationship between traditions of the outlaw with those of other lords of misrule and figures of inversion and discord. The third group of essays revisits the relationship of drama, especially of the true cycle plays of York and Chester, to the political life of their cities, beginning with the embedding of York’s biblical plays, as well as the Creed play and the Pater Noster play, in the life of the city, its guilds and confraternities, and the city’s civic administration. Her essay on Matthew Hutton’s 1568 letter to the city fathers advising them to set aside the performance of the Creed play for doctrinal reasons leads to a discussion of the complex reasons, both local and national, for the final decline of the religious plays.The final essay in this section considers the use of drama as a tool for propaganda, looking especially at the unexpected interest in drama of Elizabeth’s secretary, William Cecil, Lord Burghley. The fourth group of papers returns Professor Johnston to her beginnings, bringing to the fore the interest of her doctoral dissertation on the theology, in particular the Christology, of the biblical plays. Three of these take as their starting point Augustine’s formulation (elaborated by Boethius) of the binary opposition between stasis and action, in which the quiet and stationary Christ reflects T.S. Eliot’s ‘still point of the turning world’. The third of these essays, in particular, demonstrates the contrast between the various levels of stasis and order exhibited by Christ in the various versions of the Passion sequence and the chaos and disorder around him in the persons of Herod, Pilate, Annas, and Caiaphas.The final essay in this group examines the surviving Passion plays in the light of Nicholas Love’s ‘Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ’ and their relationship to the movement of ‘affective piety’ in the fifteenth century. The three essays in the fifth group are all examples of performance-based research, focusing on three productions of the group Poculi Ludique Societas, with which Professor Johnston has been associated since 1974. The first is, in effect, a justification of performance-based research, in which Professor Johnston puts forward a convincing argument in favour of the traditional understanding of the mode of performance of the York Cycle based on the 1977 Toronto production,

Introduction

5

which was mounted in order to test the validity of the ‘processional staging’ theory, in which all forty-eight plays were presented sequentially at (usually) twelve sites or ‘stations’ around the city, so that all plays were performed at each station. The second paper is a survey of the 1998 Toronto production of the complete York Cycle, the research agenda of the production, and the results of that research. Finally, Professor Johnston considers the figure of Mary as she is seen in the N-Town plays, a mature and matronly figure rather than the young girl of the Annunciation. Her discussion is based largely on her own experience of playing Mary in the N-Town ‘Assumption’ play, a process during which she discovered how different the N-Town Mary is to the character in the other biblical sequences. The collection ends with Professor Johnston’s summary of the way in which the field of early English drama studies has changed vastly and irrevocably in the past half century or so, moving from a placid ‘Darwinian’ understanding of the development of drama up to the governmental suppression of the plays under Elizabeth to a far more complex and nuanced reading of a broad range of documentary materials from a wealth of local and national sources. As can be seen in these essays, it is both the discovery and the close reading of these sources that has led to the immense paradigm shift that presently enlivens the field.

1

York records

1.1 The Doomsday pageant of the York Mercers, 1433 From: Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 5 (1971), 29–34 [with Margaret Dorrell (Rogerson)] During 1971 the firm of Gray’s Solicitors, Duncombe Place,York, sent to various depositories of manuscripts in that city documents which had been in their possession for many years. Among these documents was an indenture made between the master and the constables of the Mercers of the city of York and their pageant masters for the year 1433.The document is now in the possession of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of York, the successor to the medieval guild of Mercers.1 It is one half of the indenture, written on parchment, and it measures approximately 8.9 inches by 12.9 inches. The irregular cut at the top intersects a word which seems to be seven letters long. An endorsement is written in an entirely different hand but bears the same date. In the transcription that follows, the form of the document has been reproduced as accurately as possible, abbreviations have been expanded silently and line terminations have been indicated by an acute stroke. This endenture made in þe feste of Corpus Cristi In þe ȝere of oure lorde god m1cccc xxxiii betwene Richard Louth maister of þe Cumpany / of Mersers of þe Cite of Ȝorke Nicholas Vsflete and William, Ȝarom Custables of þe saide Cumpany on þe to syde2 And William Bedale William / Holbek Henry Market and Thomas Curtays þan Pagent Maisters on þe tother syde beris witnes þat þe saide Maister and Constables has deliuerde / to þe saide Pagent Maisters all þir parcelles vndrewretyn langing to þaire pagent safely to kepe and to gouerne for þaire tyme And thos same / parcelles to deliuer forthe agayne in resonable tyme to þe nexte Pagent Maisters þat sall occupy in þe nexste ȝere after And so all Pa / gent Maisters to deliuer forth be þis endenture to other Pagent Maisters þat sall occupy for þe ȝere while þe Pagent gere lastes First a / Pagent with iiij wheles helle mouthe iij garmentes for iij deuels vj deuelles faces in iij Vesernes Array for ij euell saules þat / ys to say ij Sirkes ij paire hoses ij vesenes and ij Chauelers Array for ij gode saules þat ys to say ij Sirkes ij paire hoses ij vesernes and ij che / uelers ij paire Aungell wynges with Iren in þe endes ij trumpes of white plate and ij redes iiij Aubes for iiij Appostels iij diademes with / iij vesernes for iij Appostels iiij diademes with iiij Cheuelers of ȝalow for iiij Apostels A cloud and ij peces of Rainbow of tymber Array / for god þat ys to say a Sirke wounded a diademe with a veserne gilted A grete coster of rede damaske payntid for the bakke

10 York records

syde of þe / pagent ij other lesse costers for ij sydes of þe Pagent iij other costers of lewent3 brede for þe sides of þe Pagent A litel coster iiij squared / to hang at þe bakke of god iiij Irens to bere vppe heuen iiij smale4 coterelles and a Iren pynne A brandreth of Iren þat god sall sitte vppon / when he sall sty vppe to heuen with iiij rapes at iiij corners A heuen of Iren with a naffe of tre ij peces of rede cloudes and sternes of gold / langing to heuen ij peces of blu cloudes payntid on bothe sydes iij peces of rede cloudes with sunne bemes of golde and sternes for þe / hiest of heuen with a lang small border of þe same wurke vij grete Aungels halding þe passion of god Ane of þame has a fane / of laton and a crosse of Iren in his hede giltid iiij smaler Aungels gilted holding þe passion ix smaler Aungels payntid rede to / renne aboute in þe heuen A lang small corde to gerre þe Aungels renne aboute ij shorte rolles of tre to putte forthe þe pagent [Endorsement] Item j Baner of rede bukeram bett / with golde with þe Trinite and with ostret / feders and with j lange stremer / Item iiij smale baners with Trinite in þam and roset / 1433 / Since this indenture has come to light only very recently, it is impossible here to make a detailed study of its significance in the history of staging, the history of the York Cycle, or even the history of the Mercers’ pageant. However, a few tentative observations can be made.

1. The indenture This must be considered a definitive inventory of the properties of the pageant. It is a binding legal document. If a dispute had arisen over the integrity of the pageant masters in their care of the properties, both halves of the indenture would have been produced and the irregular cut at the top of this half of the document would have had to correspond exactly to the cut at the top of the other half so that the intersected word (see above) was clearly legible. That the Mercers bothered to draw up an internal legal document, dated and indented, indicates both the importance of the pageant to the guild and the value of the properties. This indenture was intended to be passed from one elected group of pageant masters to the next ‘while þe Pagent gere lastes’. Indeed, there is a reference to it in a later document of the guild.5

2. The stage properties From the details given of the mechanical properties of the pageant, it would appear that the pageant was taken down at the end of each performance and reassembled the next year. The careful statement ‘a Pagent with iiij wheles’, taken together with the final statement ‘ij shorte rolles of tre to putte forthe þe

The Doomsday pageant of the York Mercers, 1433

11

pagent’, indicates that the four wheels constituted a chassis upon which the pageant itself was set for the production, and that it was stored without the wheels and rolled in and out of the pageant house on the rollers.We are given full details of the superstructure. It represented heaven and was made of iron and wood (‘A heuen of Iren with a naffe of tre’), supported by four iron poles (‘iiij Irens to bere vppe heuen’).These were probably fitted into sockets at the four corners of the wagon and bolted to ‘heuen’ with ‘iiij smale coterelles’. The structure, once set up, must have been fairly solid since it had to bear the weight of the actor playing Deus, as he is called in the dramatis personae of the text,6 sitting on an iron grill-work swing (‘A brandreth of Iren þat god sall sitte vppon [. . .] with iiij rapes at iiij corners’) as he ascended to heaven (‘when he sall sty vppe to heuen’). The single ‘Iren pynne’ specified in the properties may have been similar to a ring-bolt through which the ropes to manipulate the swing were passed to stage-hands concealed behind the ‘grete coster of rede damaske payntid for the bakke syde of þe pagent’.This curtain and the others are itemized separately, again indicating that the pageant came apart.The pageant was enclosed on three sides with the great curtain and two smaller ones ‘for ij sydes of þe Pagent’. 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.7 Another curtain is mentioned as a backdrop for Deus (‘A litel coster iiij squared to hang at þe bakke of god’). This was probably the backrest of the swing seat which appears, from the text, to have been used as the Judgement seat. The pageant appears to have included a representation of heaven and ‘þe hiest of heuen’. It is likely that the first two pieces of scenery mentioned, ‘A cloud and ij peces of Rainbow of tymber’, either rested on the floor of the pageant or were fixed against the back curtain. The superstructure, in all probability, was semi-arched or sloped towards the rear of the cart. Heaven, with its stars and red and blue clouds (the latter probably suspended since it is specified that they were ‘payntid on bothe sydes’) seems to have given way towards the front of the wagon to ‘hiest of heuen’ with its red clouds, golden sunbeams, and stars. The upper or front edge of the superstructure seems to have been hung with a ‘lang small border of þe same wurke’, that is a border painted with stars and sunbeams.The nine smaller red puppet angels running about on their string (manipulated, like the swing, from behind the back curtain) were probably suspended over the wagon under ‘heuen’. The swing seat itself was probably towards the rear of the wagon, making it as easy as possible for the stage-hands to pull Deus up to heaven. Hell mouth is listed as a separate property. This argues that it was not part of the pageant itself but set in front of it on the street. It is specified that the swing was used by Deus only ‘when he sall sty vppe to heuen’.Therefore, when Deus says, [. . .] till erþe nowe will I wende, Mi-selue to sitte in mageste. To deme my domes I woll descende, (XLVIII, 179–81)

12 York records

it is likely that he came down from the wagon to the street level. After greeting his apostles (XLVIII, 185–216) he may have returned with them to the wagon to take his place on the swing seat. He says to the apostles, ‘Comes fourthe, I schall sitte ȝou betwene’ (XLVIII, 215) and there follows the stage direction ‘Hic ad sedem iudicij’ (XLVIII, SD between ll. 216–17). Once the judgement was passed, the good souls could have mounted the wagon, clearly making the distinction between the saved and the damned left on the street to be dragged into hell mouth.

3. The costumes There are costumes provided for at least twenty-one actors. Masks (‘vesernes’) are specified for the devils (these were especially elaborate, bearing two faces each), the good and bad souls, Deus, and three of the eleven apostles. Wigs (‘cheuelers’) are listed for the good and bad angels, and it is specified that four of the apostles wore blonde ones. Four other apostles wore diadems and a special gilded one is listed for Deus. The devils and the good and bad souls all wore hose and ‘sirkes’ or simple tunics, while four of the apostles wore albs. The garment specified for Deus, ‘a Sirke wounded’, must have been a tunic bearing the marks of the Passion. Before he descends for the judgement, he refers to it: Ϸis body will I bere with me, Howe it was dight, mannes mys to mende, All mankynde þere schall it see. (XLVIII, 182–84) Again, in the sermon before the judgement he displays the wounds: Here may ȝe see my woundes wide, Ϸe whilke I tholed for youre mysdede, Thurgh harte and heed, foote, hand, and hide, Nought for my gilte, butt for youre nede. Beholdis both body, bak, and side, How dere I bought youre brotherhede. Ϸes bittir peynes I wolde abide To bye you blisse, þus wolde I bleede. XLVIII, 245–52)

4. The number of characters The information about the dramatis personae offered by the document corresponds more closely to the text than to the Ordo paginarum written by Roger Burton in 1415.8 The Ordo names Jesus first, then Mary, who appears neither

The Doomsday pageant of the York Mercers, 1433

13

in the document nor in the text, and then twelve apostles. Eleven apostles are provided with costumes in the document; the text gives only two apostles but in doing so probably limits itself to the speaking parts. The Ordo specifies four good spirits and four bad ones; the document and the text each provide for only two. Finally, the Ordo lists six devils, while the document and the text have only three. However, there are interesting vestigial remains of the six, since each of the documentary devils wears a two-faced mask.

5. The angels The angels provide the greatest single problem in the document. Altogether twenty are mentioned, nine of these are the red puppets suspended from heaven. The other eleven fall into two distinct categories, ‘vij grete Aungels halding þe passion of god Ane of þame has a fane of laton and a crosse of Iren in his hede giltid’ and ‘iiij smaler Aungels giltid holding þe passion’. Further, there is mention of only ‘ij paire Aungell wynges with Iren in þe endes’. To complicate the situation, there are three speaking parts for angels in the text, while the Ordo lists four angels with horns and four with a crown [of thorns], a lance and two scourges.9 The confusion can be lessened somewhat by separating out the four smaller gilt angels holding the Passion. These were, in all probability, either painted on the backdrop (the curtain is specified as ‘rede damaske payntid’) or free-standing. Unless these angels were children painted in gilt paint, which seems improbable, it is likely that they were a pictorial representation. But the seven great angels remain a problem. In some way they, too, represented the Passion. As we have seen, the Ordo provides for four of them to be carrying three symbols of the Passion. In the text, Deus refers specifically and directly to these symbols: Mi body was scourged with-outen skill, As theffe full thraly was [I] thrette, On crosse þei hanged me, on a hill, Blody and bloo, as I was bette. With croune of thorne throsten full ill, Ϸis spere vnto my side was sette, Myne harte bloode spared noght þei for to spill, Manne for thy loue wolde I not lette. (XLVIII, 253–60) The use of the demonstrative ‘þis’ in line 258 indicates that as he spoke Deus gestured towards an angel bearing that symbol. A fourth symbol referred to in the speech, the cross, is provided for in this document by the angel bearing the fane who has ‘a crosse of Iren in his hede giltid’. The Ordo also specifies four angels with four horns; the musical instruments are in this document specified as ‘ij trumpes of white plate and ij redes’. Further, there are stage directions

14 York records

calling for two songs from an angelic choir. The first comes as Deus mounts the Judgement seat ‘cum cantu angelorum’ (XLVIII, SD between ll. 216–17), and the second at the conclusion as he flies to heaven ‘Et sic facit finem cum melodia angelorum transiens a loco ad locum’ (XLVIII, SD after l. 380). There remains, also, the separate listing of ‘ij paire Aungell wynges with Iren in þe endes’. In 1415 when Burton drew up the Ordo it seems that there were eight angels who were actors. The obvious assumption to make, then, is that these seven ‘grete Aungels’ were actors. But this is borne out neither by the text nor by the document. The role of the angels in the text is to blow the trumpets signifying the end of the world as Deus specifically instructs them (XLVIII, 63–65) to act as his messengers summoning the souls to judgement (XLVIII, 81–96), and to part the good souls from the bad (XLVIII, 168–76). Since there are only two good souls and two bad, as many as seven angels seems excessive. The description given in the document of the great angels also argues against the idea that they were actors. They appear in the list long after the list of costumes for the actors and together with the other angels that are clearly artificial. Further, the detailed description of one of them is more like that of an object than of properties for an actor: ‘Ane of þame has a fane of laton and a crosse of Iren in his hede.’ The use of the preposition ‘in’ argues for something fixed, not something that is to be worn like the masks, wigs, and diadems specified earlier. The fane also seems a fixed part of an object. Further, these items are not preceded by the formula ‘array for’ that is used for all the other costumes. It is likely, therefore, that these seven angels, like the other thirteen, were artificial and somehow part of the properties of the wagon. The two pairs of angels’ wings that do appear in the costume list, then, were for two actors playing angels. The discrepancy between the two given here and the three provided in the text is not a serious one. Indeed, it is possible that there never were three angels. Two angels speak together as they summon the dead (XLVIII, 81–96); but the speech given to the third angel (XLVIII, 168–76) separating the good souls from the bad is an isolated one and could easily have been spoken by either the first or second angel. Exactly where the seven great angels were placed and what their relationship was to the four smaller ones remains a problem, but it seems clear that they were part of the complex properties of the wagon.

6. The endorsement The five red and gold banners that are listed in the endorsement should not be considered as an integral part of the pageant properties.The Mercers’ Guild was not strictly speaking a craft guild but rather an association of traders.There were two distinct sides of the guild’s activities, the side concerned with trade which was the Mercers’ Guild itself, and the Confraternity of the Holy Trinity which embraced the membership of the guild and their wives, daughters, or sisters. The banners are those of the Confraternity. They bear the sign of the Trinity,

The Doomsday pageant of the York Mercers, 1433

15

probably a version of the familiar device of the figure of God the Father holding the crucified Christ with the dove of the Holy Spirit hovering above them. These banners undoubtedly accompanied the pageant but they were also used in the formal Corpus Christi procession the next day and on any other occasion of celebration or display in which the Confraternity of the Holy Trinity and the Mercers’ Guild took part. From this document, the colourful lavishness of the ‘Doomsday’ pageant comes alive. From it we can surmise much about the forty-seven other pageant wagons in the York Cycle. But it must be remembered that ‘Doomsday’ was the finale of the entire day’s playmaking and that the Mercers were a wealthy and powerful guild. What we have here is one of the most elaborate pageants in the cycle. Yet, from its ingenuity and the multiplicity of the properties, we can be confident that, though perhaps to modern taste over elaborate and garish, the York pageants were neither simple nor crude.

Notes 1 York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D63. We wish to thank the Governor and Court of the Company of Merchant Adventurers for permission to publish the document, and Mr Bernard Johnson, archivist to the Company, for his kindness in allowing us access to it. We also wish to acknowledge the assistance of Mr C.B.L. Barr and Miss Katherine Longley of York Minister Library. 2 For ‘on þe to syde’ see OED s.v. To, adj. 3 ‘Lewent’ here does not mean ‘of the Levant’ but ‘eleventh,’ a term of measurement. 4 We made two errors in transcription in our initial work, both involving ‘s’ in its long form: ‘smale’ we transcribed as ‘finale’ and ‘sty’ we transcribed as ‘fly’ in the next item. We are grateful to Peter Meredith for pointing out the second error. Both errors and a few minor mistranscriptions in the Mercers’ documents in this and the following article that do not change the meaning are corrected from York, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, 2 vols, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), pp. 55–56. 5 The York Mercers and Merchant Adventurers 1356–1917, ed. by Maud Sellers, Surtees Society, CXXIX (1917), p. 82. 6 York Plays, ed. by Lucy Toulmin Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), pp. 497–513. All subsequent quotations from the text are taken from this edition and are cited by play and line number. 7 Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300 to 1660, vol. 1 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), p. 173, fig. 13. 8 Smith, York Plays, p. xxvii. 9 Ibid., ‘iiijor angeli cum tubis, et iiijor cum corona, lancea, et ij flagellis’.

York Mercers’ Wagon, 1433.

Diagram of York Mercers’ Pageant Wagon, 1433. Key to the York Mercers’ Pageant Wagon, 1433 A Pagent with iiij wheles iiij Irens to bere vppe heuen iiij smale coterelles 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 11 12 13 14 15

A cloud and ij peces of Rainbow of tymber 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 A litel coster iiij squared to hang at þe bakke of god a Iren pynne A brandreth of Iren þat god sall sitte vppon when he sall sty vppe to heuen with iiij rapes at iiij corners a heuen of Iren with a naffe of tre ij peces of rede cloudes payntid on bothe sydes iij peces of rede cloudes with sunne bemes of gold and sternes for þe heist of heuen a lang small border of þe same wurke vij grete Aungels halding þe passion of god Ane of þame has a fane of laton and a crosse of Iren in his hede gilted iiij smaller Aungels gilted holding þe passion ix smaller Aungels payntid rede to renne aboute in þe heuen A lang small corde to gerre þe Aungels renne aboute

1.2 The York Mercers and their pageant of Doomsday, 1433–1526 From: Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 6 (1972), 8–35 [with Margaret Dorrell (Rogerson)] 1. The York mercers1 The Mercers’ Guild of York is first mentioned as a trading company with its own internal organization in an entry in the civic records dated 1366.2 It is also mentioned in the Ordo paginarum of 1415 as the guild responsible for the pageant of Doomsday.3 Its own account rolls begin in 1432–33 when William Bedale was master. From this year until the present day there is an almost complete series of accounts. By the time its records begin in consecutive sequence in 1432–33 the Mercers’ Guild was a powerful and wealthy company owning its own hall in Fossgate (frequently called the Hospital of the Holy Trinity or Trinity Hall) and much other property as well.4 The mercers were the wealthiest citizens of York and played an important role in civic politics. Of the eighty-eight mayors between 1399 and 1509, sixtyeight were mercers.5 In some years they dominated the city council; for example, in 1420 twenty of the twenty-nine members of the council were mercers.6 Their influence declined in the sixteenth century, a decline which reflected the serious economic depression which affected the city, but even then ‘the number of mayors who were merchants exceeded that of all other vocations combined’.7 Individual mercers dominated both the guild and the city in the fifteenth century. Thomas Scauceby, seven times master of the guild,8 was city chamberlain in 1442–43 and mayor in 1462–63; John Gylliot, five times master,9 was city chamberlain in 1450–51 and mayor in 1463–64 and 1474–75; and Thomas Wrangwish, twice master,10 was city chamberlain in 1462–63 and mayor in 1484. Of all the masters of the guild from 1432 to 1598, only John Calton, master of the guild in 1445, failed to become either city chamberlain or mayor; fifty-two of the sixty-seven masters in this period were mayor at least once.11 Because the city council controlled the Corpus Christi play and because it is clear that the council was dominated by mercers, it is reasonable to assume that the Mercers as a guild took a special interest in the play. In any consideration of the records concerning their own pageant of Doomsday, then, it must be recognized that they were not a typical guild nor was their pageant a typical pageant as it formed the grand finale of the Corpus Christi cycle. The lavishness of their wagon and its properties reflected the Mercers’ wealth and prestige.

The York Mercers and their pageant of Doomsday

19

Medieval York (after York Archaeological Trust).

Therefore, to make analogies from this guild and its wagon to other guilds in York or elsewhere is dangerous.

2. The mercers’ documents The medieval and Tudor documents of the Mercers’ Guild consist of a series of compotus (or account) rolls, a Chartulary and Minute Book of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, several paper account books and loose documents. Among the loose documents are deeds and indentures written on parchment, paper accounts (some in books and some on single sheets) and other miscellaneous items. There are several gaps in the fifteenth century compotus rolls; the accounts for the years 1438, 1452–58, 1462–63, 1467–71, 1473, 1475, 1479–80, 1482–84, 1495 and 1498 are missing. Of the rolls from 1499–1582, those for 1523, 1532 and 1558 are missing.

3. The pageant masters and the performance On March 26 1443, the day Thomas Scauceby was first elected master of the Mercers, the guild passed a general ordinance concerning their pageant masters.12 It was agreed that the pageant masters should be chosen ‘with þe assent of þe ffelship’ on the Friday after Midsummer Day (24 June). They were charged with bringing forth the play and received all the ‘ornements’ that belonged

20 York records

to the pageant ‘by Indentour’. This last phrase refers to the indenture of 1433 where it is specified that the masters received all þir parcelles vndrewretyn [i.e. the properties listed in the indenture] langing to þaire pagent safely to kepe and to gouerne for þaire tyme And thos sam parcelles to deliuer forthe agayne in resonable tyme to þe nexte Pagent Maisters þat sall occupy in þe nexste ȝere after And so all Pagent Maisters to deliuer forth be þis endenture to other Pagent Maisters pat sall occupy for þe ȝere while þe Pagent gere lastes.13 In 1443 it was further ordained that the masters ‘sall be countable to þe maister constables and ffelowship of all þair receytes and expenses resonable’.14 Further the masters were to return the pageant wagon to the pageant house on Toft Green and store the portable gear ‘within iiij days next after corpus cristi day’.15 Any master defaulting was to be fined 6s 7d ‘without any fforgiuness’. It is evident that the pageant wagon and its properties became the responsibility of the new masters very soon after the production on Corpus Christi Day.16 The pageant masters probably began their preparations in the first or second week of Lent, for it was then that the city council of York sent out billets reminding the guilds of their responsibilities towards the play.17 Between the issuing of the billets and the feast of Corpus Christi the pageant wagon and its properties had to be refurbished and arrangements made for the performance. There is evidence that the Mercers hired clerks to choose the players and direct the play. In the 1451–52 roll a note is made for 6s 7d paid ‘of þe comon silvere to Wrangle for plaiyng of our pageante by þe assent of þe feliship’.18 This entry indicates that a formal proposal authorizing the pageant masters to make such a payment was brought before the guild. It could mean that this was the first time that the Mercers used ‘professional’ players. As many of the mercers were aldermen or councillors, they would not therefore be available to take an active part in the production of their pageant because the mayor and the city council regularly saw the pageants at the Common Hall station along with any visiting dignitaries.19 Possibly this was the original reason for the engaging of William Wrangle.20 The entry for payment to the players is a regular one in the accounts of the 1460s.The standard fee was about 18s, sometimes specified as ‘to þe klarke for playeng’ as in 1461 and sometimes simply ‘to the players for playinge’ as in 1462.Two references are made to rehearsing. In 1463, 4d was spent for cakes and ale ‘at þe ferst rehers’, indicating that there was more than one rehearsal, and in 1467 10d was paid to ‘William Clark and his players for rehersyng’. The expenses were covered by the pageant money, a tax levied on each member of the guild for the maintenance of the wagon and the production of the play.21 There are two specific references to the collecting of the pageant money. In 1462, 6d was spent ‘for costes when we went about pageant silver’ and in 1453, 4d was spent ‘qwene we went Ibotte for pagand syluere’. There are also references in the pageant expenses for 1461 and again in 1462 to sergeants who were paid for going ‘with vs at dyuers tymes’.22 In 1443 the pageant money exceeded the cost of the production, for 5s 7d was received by

The York Mercers and their pageant of Doomsday

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the company from the pageant masters ‘ouer all expenses’. In 1464 there was a surplus of 21d and, in 1467, 13d was returned to ‘þe master handes’. But in 1461, a year when major repairs were done to the pageant wagon (see below p. 31, Appendix 1, Document 7), only 15s 4d23 was collected while the pageant expenses were 45s 8½d,24 and so the Mercers made good the loss incurred by the pageant masters from the general funds of the company. On the vigil of Corpus Christi the formal proclamation of the play was made ‘of þe kinges be halue and þe Mair and þe shirefs of þis Citee’.25 The proclamation of 1415 ordered ‘euery player that shall play be redy in his pagiaunt at convenyant tyme that is to say at the mydhowre betwix iiijth and vth of the cloke in the mornyng’.26 This is the only Corpus Christi proclamation recorded, but the custom of proclaiming the play on the vigil of the feast continued until at least 1561 when the council made the following decision: 30 May 3 Elizabeth (1561) And for so much as the late fest of Corpus cristi is nowe celebrat and kept holy day as was accustomed it is therfor aggreed that on Corpus euen my lord mayour and aldermen shall in makyng of proclamacion accustomed goe about in semely sadd apparell and not in skarlet.27 But it is likely that the content of the proclamation changed, for in 1415 the play and the procession honouring the host were held on the same day and the recorded proclamation refers to both.28 The performance of the Mercers’ ‘Doomsday’ pageant did not begin until late in the afternoon,29 yet it is clear from the 1461 account which mentions that a breakfast and dinner were provided for the players as well as supper (as in 1462, 1463, and 1464) that at least some of the players were with the pageant all day. On the vigil or very early on the feast day itself the pageant masters probably arranged for the movable properties to be brought from the Mercers’ Hall in Fossgate across the River Ouse to the pageant house on Toft Green. The account for 1461 specifies ‘Item for naylls and beryng of ger to þe pagant fro þe trenyte Hall ij d’. The account of 1462 simply says ‘Item paide for þe pageant gere beryng to and fro iij d’. The pageant wagon would then be set up. Provision was made to prevent the wheels from squeaking in 1464 when 2d was spent ‘for sope to the whelys’ and in 1467 when both soap and grease were used. Labourers were hired to take the wagon out of the pageant house and to set it up. In 1461, 3d was paid for ‘alle to þe puters’. In 1462, 2d was paid for ‘puttyng forth of þe pageant’ and, in 1464, 2d was again paid for ‘bryngyng forth of the pagyantes into the strette’. In 1461, 8d was paid for ‘putyng the pagant ouer ousse and settyng vpe’, that is for both setting up the wagon on Toft Green before the performance and returning it from the Pavement across the river to Toft Green after the performance (just inside Micklegate Bar). In 1467, 6d was paid for ‘puttyng þe pajand aboute on þe morn’. Two to four ‘puters’ must have been employed for these tasks. None of the payments is sufficient to be for the entire day of the performance (that is from four-thirty a.m. till after

22 York records

midnight).30 Therefore the putters do not seem to have been employed to move the wagon through the streets. Once the performance began, the wagon must have been manhandled by the players themselves. The physical effort involved in moving the heavy wagon from station to station was considerable.The route followed by the pageant began by descending the hill from the gates of Holy Trinity in Micklegate to the River Ouse (the one hill of any size within the walls of York), stopping at least twice on the way and once on the actual slope.31 To keep the wagon from careering down the hill must have required both strength and skill. Once down the hill the wagon had to be dragged over the hump of the bridge. After the river was crossed there were still several corners to be manoeuvred. It is clear that there must have been some device attached to the axle of the wagon by which it was pulled.Yet the 1433 indenture specifies sufficient curtains to cover the wheels on all four sides.32 A pole fixed to the axle would have disturbed the hang of the curtain. An item in the account for 1463 may throw some light on this problem. In that year a penny was paid for a ‘pottyng stang’. ‘Stang’ is defined in the OED as a ‘pole, or stake, wooden bar or beam.33 It is possible that the ‘pottyng stang’ was a pole fitted into a key on the front axle when the wagon had to be moved and taken out for each performance. Money for drink for the players appears regularly in the accounts. In 1461, 5d was spent on drink; in 1462, 6d was spent for ‘drynk vpon corpus cristi day be þe way’, and in 1463, 4d went for ale ‘thorow þe tone’. In 1464, 6d was spent ‘for our dynner and drynke to the players’. In 1467, although there are two entries concerning drink, neither is specifically for the players. From 1461–67 there is a regular entry providing for supper for the players. This may have come midway through the performance but it was more probably a meal eaten in the Merchants’ Hall in Fossgate in the small hours of Friday morning after the play was over. After the performance, the pageant masters seem to have inspected and stored the gear and arranged for the immediate restorations to be done. In both 1461 and 1467 there are items specifying payment for ‘weshyng’. In 1461 two pair of hose were washed.The curtains, costumes and other movable ‘gere’ were then stored in the Hall and the wagon was returned to Toft Green. Once the ‘now pagand’ was made in 1463 (see below, p. 24) it, too, was returned to Toft Green. In 1462 the entry concerns only one pageant wagon: ‘Item paide for puttyng horn of þe pageant’, but in 1463 more than one pageant is mentioned: ‘hayng home of þe paggandes’. Later the pageant masters drew up and submitted their account to the company and prepared to hand over their responsibility ‘by Indentour’ to their successors on the Friday after Midsummer Day.

4. The Pageant wagons and their properties a. The pageant wagon, 1433–1501

The most complete description of the Mercers’ pageant wagon in the fifteenth century is found in the 1433 indenture.34 The wagon’s structure was a simple one: it seems to have been a platform set on wheels (‘a Pagent with

The York Mercers and their pageant of Doomsday

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iiij wheles’) with a superstructure consisting of four iron poles (‘iiij Irens to bere vppe heuen’), probably sunk into sockets in the four corners of the platform, to which was bolted a roof made of wood set in an iron frame (‘A heuen of Iren with a naffe of tre’). The roof may have tilted slightly towards the back to allow for perspective and also to conceal the mechanism for drawing Christ up to heaven (‘A brandreth of Iren þat god sall sitte vppon when he sall sty vppe to heuen with iiij rapes at iiij corners’). There were three large curtains for the back and sides of the wagon, a smaller one for the ‘bakke of god,’35 and various painted clouds. There also seem to have been twenty artificial angels. i. Repairs to the wagon 1433–67

During the thirty-four years between 1433 and 1467 the Mercers undertook two major repairs to the wagon. The first is recorded in the account roll of 1451–52 when Robert Joynor and his servant were paid a shilling a day for three days’ work and Pers Loksmith 3s 8d for ‘makyng and mendyng’ the ironwork.The major payment that year was 23s 4d to Robert Michell for ‘payntyng of þe said pagient newe’ (i.e. giving the wagon a new coat of paint). Ten years later, in 1461, another major repair was undertaken and 7s 5d was spent for materials and labour and 20d for painting the wagon. The materials used included ‘iij stanschns’,36 ‘ij stayes’, ‘a wanskott’,37 and ‘a staue of yryn’. Four ‘staffs to þe pagant’ and ‘bemys’ were made from these materials. A wright (or carpenter)38 was employed for five days to complete the work, and a smith engaged to repair the ironwork. It seems from the description of the materials that the repairs were to the superstructure. Other repairs to the fabric are recorded in 1462, 1464, and 1467. In 1462, 10d was spent for ‘mendyng of þe pageant’ and an additional 2d paid to a wright. Since the wright was paid 6d a day in 1461 the actual work involved must have been slight.39 In 1462, 2d was paid for a new rope which may have been one of the ropes for the ‘brandreth’ or a rope used to pull the wagon. In 1464, 8d was spent for boards and three years later in 1467 more boards were needed. These are the last records of repairs to the 1433 wagon. No pageant masters’ accounts survive after 1467 and there are no references to the pageant in the compotus rolls. Presumably repairs similar to these continued until the old large wagon was replaced in 1501–02. ii. The wheels

The 1433 indenture specifies that the pageant had four wheels. In 1448 John Catryk was paid 13s 3d for ‘a newe whele to oure pageand’.This is puzzling because in 1462 a pair of wheels cost only 3s 8d.40 Possibly the earlier entry refers to the complete set of wheels including the axle, or possibly in 1462 only the outer rim of two of the wheels needed to be replaced. In 1464, 10d was spent on ‘a wod axiltre’ and three years later, in 1467, it was reinforced with ‘iren pykes and gret nales’.

24 York records iii. The hangings

The curtains and other hangings were completely overhauled in 1449–50.That year 15d was spent for two and a half yards of linen cloth ‘to heuyn of our pageant’ and 2d spent for sewing it. Since seven and a half feet of cloth would have been insufficient to line the roof or ‘heuen’ it was probably used to replace some of the clouds or the ‘lang small border’ that hung along the front edge of the superstructure. That same year Thomas Steynour was paid 13s 4d for ‘steynyng of þe clothes of oure pageand’. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the verb ‘to stain’ had a specific meaning associated with the staining of banners and cloths, i.e. ‘to ornament with coloured designs or patterns’.41 iv. The angels

Among the properties of the 1433 wagon were twenty artificial angels: the ‘vij grete Aungels’, the ‘iiij smaler Aungels gilted holding þe passion’, and ‘ix smaler Aungels payntid rede’ which were made to run ‘aboute in þe heuen’ on ‘A lang small corde’. Each of the seven great angels held one of the seven signs of the Passion. One is specified as having ‘a fane of laton and a crosse of Iren in his hede giltid’. It is possible that these angels were made of straw with only the heads, hands and the symbols they held made of some heavier material, perhaps wood or alabaster.There are three references to the angels in the subsequent records. In 1449–50 20s was paid ‘for þe aungels of oure pageand’. As 20s is more than all the costs for the replacing of some of the cloths and the staining of other hangings in the same year, this could indicate extensive repairs to the angels or even suggest that the Mercers acquired some new ones. In 1462, 2d was paid to repair the angels and, in 1464, another 2d was paid for a ‘rope to the angels’, which presumably refers to the ‘lang small corde’ used to manipulate the little angels. v. The banners

In 1461, 8s 4d was spent for the making of four banners from three and a quarter yards of red buckram decorated with gold and silver leaf. These probably replaced the four small Trinity banners that are mentioned on the dorse of the 1433 indenture.42 vi. Hell mouth

Nothing appears in the documents subsequent to the 1433 indenture concerning hell mouth. In 1433 it seems to have been separate from the wagon itself, set up on the street during the performance but perhaps transported from station to station on the wagon.43 b. The ‘now pagand’ of 1463

The 1433 indenture specifies a single large pageant wagon and hell mouth, but in 1463 the Mercers constructed a special ‘now pagand [. . .] mayd for þe sallys to ryse out of ’.44 Before 1463 the souls may simply have appeared from behind the

The York Mercers and their pageant of Doomsday

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wagon when the angels blew their trumpets to summon the dead to Judgement.45 Perhaps the Mercers felt that the resurrection of the dead should have greater dramatic impact and so constructed this ‘now pagand’. From the account of 1463 it appears to have been a frame of fir spars with lathes nailed to it wrapped in five yards of ‘now canuays’ sewed together with pack-thread. Perhaps it was shaped like a coffin with a hinged lid.46 It must have been large enough to hold the two good souls and the two bad as they waited for the sound of the trumpet.The entry later in the 1463 list specifying that 12d was paid to Garnett Smeght ‘for yrne warke þat he mayd’ may refer to ironwork such as hinges for the ‘now pagand’ as well as to ironwork on the larger wagon. Neither here nor in the two later accounts concerning the ‘now pagand’ is any mention made of wheels. It is possible that the ‘now pagand’ was transported from station to station on the large wagon and then set on the street where the souls could climb into it before the pageant began. In the repair list of 1464, nails and a ‘sparre and burdes’ were needed for both pageants. Spars are mentioned only once in the records referring specifically to what appears to be the frame of the ‘now pagand’. Three years later, in 1467, the frame of the pageant ‘where þe saulys lyes’ was further strengthened by ‘stowres’47 and two ‘Inglyshe’ boards. c. Thomas Drawswerd’s pageant, 1501 i. The wagon

From 1467 until 1501–02 nothing has survived in the Mercers’ records that refers to the pageant. In 1501–02 it was recorded that Thomas Drawswerd, a carver, was admitted to the ‘broderheid’ as partial payment for making ‘the pagiant of the dome belonging to the merchauntes newe substancialie in euery thing þervnto belonging’.48 He was also to receive ‘vij marcs in money’ and the old pageant wagon. In 1504 Henry Marshall was paid 12s 6d for ‘diverse stuff for paynting of þe pagiant’. A further payment of forty shillings was made to Thomas Drawswerd ‘kerver pro pagina de Domesdaye’ in 1507. Since the pageant was performed at least four times between 1502 and 1507 it is possible that the 1504 entry refers to a second painting of the pageant.49 Presumably, by 1507, certain things needed altering or repairing and Drawswerd, as the original designer, was asked to undertake the work. The major evidence concerning Drawswerd’s pageant appears in an inventory made for Robert Wilde in his first year as master of the company in 1526. Little sense can be made of it unless it is assumed that the list on the left-hand side of the document and the items in the ‘wants’ list on the right-hand side made up a complete inventory of the properties. One important change from the fifteenthcentury wagon is that there is no mention of curtains, hanging clouds or borders. This could be because Drawswerd, as a carver, provided a solid wooden structure with the details of heaven carved into it or painted on the fabric. The primitive machinery used for Christ’s ascension to heaven was replaced by a windlass. This may have resulted in another change in the appearance of the wagon. In order

26 York records

to house the windlass, the flat roof of the fifteenth-century wagon was probably replaced by a gabled one. There appear to have been six items that could be detached from the wagon – four windows, the Trinity and the ‘trinette hus’. If the body of the wagon was a solid structure closed on three sides, 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 wagon. The Trinity was probably also of carved alabaster or wood and may have replaced the Trinity banners mentioned in the 1433 indenture and replaced in 1463. The ‘trinette hus’, which presumably contained this representation of the Trinity, may well have been set into the gable at the front of the wagon, thus concealing the windlass and placing the symbol of the guild in a prominent position. There are eleven nails specified in the list. It is possible that these were used to secure the windows and the Trinity house containing the Trinity to the framework (two nails for each window and three for the symbol). ii. The ‘charts’

There are only two possible meanings for the word ‘chartt.’ It can mean either a ‘charter’ or a ‘small cart’.50 The first meaning is unlikely, so it would seem probable that the ‘charts’ of the 1526 list are small carts on wheels. Further, there are listed in 1526 two doors – ‘pagand dure’ and ‘hell dure’. Possibly Drawswerd’s design included a large wagon and two smaller ones each provided with a lid or ‘dure’, one depicting hell mouth and the other a coffin for the souls to rise from. These small carts could have taken the place of the hell mouth of the 1433 pageant and the ‘now pagand’ for the souls constructed in 1463.The advantage in having these pieces of property set on their own wheeled carts is clear.There would be no need to lift them from the street to the wagon as the pageant moved from station to station; instead they could be pulled along by the actors playing the souls and the devils and placed in position quickly and easily. In 1514, 1½d was spent for a stanchion and nails for the ‘pageant dore’ and, in 1521, 2d was spent mending the ‘pagant doore’.These probably refer to one or the other of the ‘dures’ of the 1526 list. iii. The angels

The number of angels was reduced from twenty to twelve. The nine red angels of the 1433 wagon seem to have become four by 1526 (‘iij lyttell angelles’ in the major list and ‘j lyttell Angell’ in the ‘wants’ list). Two ‘grett angels’ and ‘iiij angelli’ appear in the major list and ‘ij Angell’ in the ‘wants’ list. Since a distinction is made between the ‘grett angels’ and the ‘iiij angelli’ in the main list, it is probable that the ‘iiij angelli’ correspond to the ‘iiij smaler Aungels gilted holding þe passion’ of the 1433 indenture and that the number of the great angels has been reduced from seven to four.51 Thomas Drawswerd’s pageant was very different from the fifteenth-century wagon it replaced, but it was no less impressive. In 1541 it was used in the Royal

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Entry of Henry VIII and stationed ‘at Ousegate end as the kynges maiestie shall enter into Connyngstreyt’. There a show ‘with as much melody as may be deuysed’ was to be displayed for the musician king.52

5. The costumes i. The costumes in 1433

The specifications for costuming in the 1433 indenture are precise. There were three devils’ ‘garments’ and three two-faced masks (‘vj deuelles faces in iij Vesernes’). The two good souls and the two bad ones wore sarks (tunics), hose, masks, and wigs. Christ’s costume consisted of a sark bearing the marks of the Passion (‘a Sirke wounded’), a diadem, and a gilded mask. The costumes for the eleven apostles and the two angels are not specified in detail. Four apostles wore ‘Aubes,’ three had diadems and masks, and four had diadems and yellow wigs. The angels were provided with wings ‘with Iren in þe endes’.53 ii. The sarks

In 1461, 15d was spent for five yards of cloth to make two sarks. The making of the garments cost 3d.Two years later, in 1463, 2d was paid for ‘ij sarkkes mendeng’. Five and a half yards of ‘spannall’ were used in 1464 to make two sarks at a total cost of 20d. In 1461, 3d was spent for half a yard of cloth ‘to god’ and, in 1462, 2s 4d was spent to make a new sark for Christ and to paint it with the marks of the Passion.The custom of painting sarks was not limited to the one for Christ, for in 1464 there was a general payment for the ‘payntyng of serkes’. It seems evident that all the costumes, though perhaps of a simple design, were brightly decorated.This was especially true of the devils’ gear, for in 1463, 12d was paid to ‘master pantur’ for ‘pantyng of þe dellwys gere’. By 1467 the angels had been provided with special costumes since in that year ‘an angell cote’ was mended. iii. The angels’ wings

In 1433 the guild owned two sets of angels’ wings for the two actors playing angels but, at least by 1461, one pair had fallen apart or been lost, as in that year they paid 2d for ‘boroweng of Angell wengs’. In 1462 and 1463 they paid 4d for ‘iiij aungelles weynges hyre’. It is possible that the Mercers hired these wings from one of the guilds that portrayed the Old Testament scenes where angels appear.54 iv. Miscellaneous

The only reference to the various types of headgear that are specified in the 1433 indenture appears in 1463, ‘Item for tow chapletts iiij d’. These ‘chaplets’ would presumably replace two of the four diadems worn by the apostles. Gloves as specific items of costume appear in 1463 and again in 1467.The trumpets with

28 York records

which the angels summoned the dead to Judgement gave little trouble and the only repair recorded is in 1462 when 1d was spent ‘for mendyng of þe tromppez’. v. The costumes in 1526

Very few items of costuming appear in the 1526 list. Of the actual garments, mention is made only of ‘ij dewell cottes’, which must correspond to the ‘dellwys gere’ of 1463. It is clear, however, from this entry and the next one (‘ij dewelles heddes’) that the number of devils has been reduced from three to two. The text provides for three devils who speak three separate speeches while Christ moves to the seat of Judgement, but these three speeches could easily have been spoken by two devils.55 This discrepancy is similar to another problem presented by the 1433 indenture, which specifies wings for only two angels, when three appear in the text.56 Only four masks are specified in the 1526 list. In 1433 there were seven – a gilded one for Christ, three for three apostles and four for the good and bad souls. Only one mask appears to have been in the possession of the Mercers in 1526, since three appear in the ‘wants’ list The remaining problem of the 1526 list is the entry ‘þe viij chyffes’. ‘Chyff ’ is a possible spelling of ‘chief ’. The OED gives as a possible sixteenth-century meaning ‘the head, top, upper end (of anything)’; the MED gives as a meaning ‘the end (of an object), top (of the head)’.57 It is possible, then, that ‘þe viij chyffes’ are the eight wigs or ‘cheualers’ needed for the good and bad souls and four of the apostles mentioned in the 1433 list.

6. Conclusion The Mercers of York spent approximately thirty shillings annually on the maintenance of their pageant wagon and properties and the production of their pageant in the Corpus Christi play. This sum represents an amount equal to sixty days’ labour by a wright.When the Mercers, as mayors, aldermen, or councillors, sat with the distinguished visitors at the Common Hall station to watch the performance, they could be sure that their pageant, the finale of the long day of playmaking, would be both lavish and impressive.

Appendix I The documents: Merchant adventurers of York

1 26 March 1443. York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Chartulary and Minute Book D19, fol. 9. For a detailed discussion of this document see Appendix III. Item ordaind and acordid by þe who assent of þe hele ffeliship in þe Trinte hall on þe election daye Thomas Scausby being mister William Bluefront William Gaing Constables þat

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þay with þe assent of þe ffellship sall chuse pagent masters on þe ffriday next after Missondday of the merceres and mechants of þe Citte and þay iiij shall bring forth þair58 play and recyue all þe ornements thatt belanges þto: by Indentour and so deliuer ouer to þaym þat shall com after and þy sall be countable to þe maister constables and ffellow ship of all þair receytes and expenses resonable and þe iiij pagant maisters being [blank] shall bring furth þe pagants and haue them in againe within iiij days next after corpus cristi day which of them þat doth contrary shall pay vj s viij d to þe ffelo ship without any fforgiuness 2 1443.York, Merchant Adventurer’s Archives, compotus roll, Box D53B. Item of v s vij d ressayued of pagyanmaisters þis yere ouer all expencs be þaim made for bryngyng furth of þe pagyant 3 1448.York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, compotus roll, Box D53E. Item paid to John Catryk for a newe whele to our pageand

xiij s iij d

4 1449–50.York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, compotus roll, Box D53F. Item payde for þe aungels of oure pageand Item for ij ȝerds and dimidium of lynen cloth to hevyn of our pageant Item paide for sewynge of þe same clothe Item payde to Thomas Steynour for steynyng of þe clothes of oure pageand

xx s xv d ij d xiij s iiij d

5 1451–52 York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, compotus roll, Box D53H. (Pageant Repairs) Item payde to Robert Joynor for helpyng of þe pagiante he and his seruant by iij days Item to Pers Loksmyth for makyng and mendyng of þe Irenwerke þerof Item to Robert Michell for payntyng of þe said pagient newe xxiij s iiij d Summa (Necessary expenses) Item payed of þe comon silvere to Wrangle for plaiyng of our pageante by þe assent of þe feliship

iij s iij s vij d xxix s xj d vj s viij d

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6 1461. York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D63. Paper account, single sheet 11.8” by 17”. Pageant costs written on one side, sheet then folded lengthwise and list of names and amounts (probably the pageant money list) written on front in two columns, second column continued on an irregular piece of paper, approximately 3.8” by 6.5”, sewn to bottom right-hand corner. Ϸis is þe costes a bowitt þe pagant In primis for iij stanschns Item for sowyng of a wanskot Item for beryng of þe same stuffe Item for ij stayes Item for naylls Item to a wryght v days Item for makyng of þe bemes Item for a wanskot Item to a smyth Item for v ȝerdes of spenall to make ij seks Item for iiij ȝordes and quarter red bokeram to iiij Baners Item for j C party geld j C sylver Item for makyng of iiij baners Item for naylls and beryng of ger to þe pagant fro þe Trenyte Hall Item for putyng of þe pagant ouer ousse and settyng vpe Item for dimidium ȝard of cloth to god Item for iiij mynstralls Item to a Sargent Item for alle to þe puters Item for a dener to þe players Item for a staue of yryn Item for a brekfast to þe players Item for pantyng of þe pagant Item for a sopper to þe players and þe mynstrelles att euyn Item for makyng of ij [rees (f ?)] to þe bemys Item for boroweng of Angell wengs Item for makyng of ij serks Item for makyng of iiij staffs to þe pagant Item for wesschyng of ij payr hosse and helpyng Item payd to þe klarke for playeng Item for drynke to þe players

xd ij d jd vj d iiij d ij s vj d iij d viij d viij d xv d ij s ij d iij s ij d iiij s ij d viij d iij d ij s iiij d iij d xj d viij d xj d ob xx d ij s vj d iiij d ij d iij d iiij d iij d xviij s vd

Summa totalis of our payment xlv s viij d ob qwer of res. in pagand sylver all it a pers be for xv s iiij d Item res. of þe master of þe felchype xxx s iiij d ob [Cancelled] Wylliam Goddyrsswyke

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Herry Wylliamson Thomas Skotton John Bosswell 7 1461.York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, compotus roll, Box D53M. Et sol’ Thome Nandyke et sociis suis magistris pagine dicte fraternitatis tam pro reparacione eiusdem pagine quia pro conductione lusor’ in ludo Corporis Cristi ultra omne id quod collect’ fuit inter artifices soluent ad dictem ludum xxx s iiij d ob (And paid to Thomas Nandyke and his fellow pageant masters of the said fraternity for the repair of the same pageant so that it could be brought forth in the Corpus Christi play, more than the total collected among the artificers paid for the said play, 30s 4½d). 8 1462.York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D63. Paper account, single sheet (repaired) 16 1/5” by (approx.) 5”. Four names erased and names of pageant masters written in a contemporary hand. Thise be þe parcelles of expenses made aboute þe pageant of þe mercers Item primis paide to þe players for playinge Item paide for þe cloth of god sarke and þe hose makyng and payntyng Item paide for a pare of newe wheles Item paide for þe puttyng forth of þe pageant Item paide for mendyng of þe pageant Item paide to a wright Item paide for a new rope Item paide for mendyng of þe aungells Item paide for mendyng of þe tromppez Item paide for iiij aungelles weynges hyre Item paide for puttyng hom of þe pageant Item paide for þe pageant gere beryng to and fro Item paide for costes when we went about pageant silver Item in expenses for drynk vpon corpus cristi day be þe way Item for players sopper and oures Item paide to a sargeant þat went with vs at dyuers tymes Item paide for ynke paupir and for writyng Summa xxx s ij d Richard York William Tele John Lythtlope Richard Sawer

xviij s ij d ij s iiij d iij s viij d ij d xd ij d ij d ij d jd iiij d vd iij d vj d vj d ij s iij d ij d

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9 1463.York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D63. Paper account, single sheet 5” by 8”. Sellers, Mercers, pp. 70–71. Thys is þe expens mayde be John Leghtlop William Thelle and Richard Sawar in þer ȝer beyng pagand massters Ferst qwene we went Ibotte for pagand syluere iiij d Item at þe ferst rehers in kakkys and alle iiij d ob Item in v ȝerddes of now canuays to j now pagand þat was mayd for þe sallys to ryse owt of xv d Item in naylles boght to þe same xiij d Item in viij sparres of fyre ij s Item for lattes iij d Item to j wreght so for makkyng þerof vj d Item for ij roppys j d ob Item for pakthrede jd Item for j pottyng stang jd Item in hayng home of þe paganddes iij d Item in resches jd Item payd to Garnett Smeght for yrne warke þat he mayd xij d Item payd on corpos cresty dall in all to þe playars thorow þe tone iiij d Item to þe playris super xx d Item for owre denere on corpus cresty day xd Item for ij sarkkes mendeng ij d Item for angell wengys iiij d Item for tow chaplets iiij d Item for þe farme of þe pagand hus xij d Item payd for playng xviij s ij d Item for pantyng of þe dellwys gere to master pantur xij d [This last item in a different hand.] 10 1464. Document now lost. Reproduced as published by Sellers, Mercers, p. 72. Memorandum that this is the costes made of our pagyant, In primis paid to our players, xviijs. jd. Item to the said players and his felows for the super, xd. Item, to the said players for a pair glovys and payntyng of serkes, and half a yerd cloth, vjd. Item, for byndyng of a paire whelys, js. Item, for sope to the whelys, ijd. Item for a wod axiltre, xd. Item, for nayls to both pagyants, and for a sparr and burdes, viijd. Item, for borowyng out of 6 iryn pyns, ijd. Item, for v yerdes and dimidium of spannall to ij serkes,and makyng of the sam, xxd. Item, for a rope to the angels, ijd. Item, for bryngyng forth of the pagyantes into the strette, ijd. Item, for our dynner and drynke to the players on Corpus Christi day, xvjd. Item for havyng of both pagyantes agayn to the pagyant hows, vijd. Summa xxxs. jd. Rest in our hands xxjd.

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11 1467.York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D63. Paper account, single sheet 8” by 11”, folded lengthwise. Pageant expenses on front, inside a list of names and amounts (probably the pageant money list). Document at one time folded crosswise and bottom right-hand corner chewed by a rodent, resulting in irregular holes at right and left-hand edges of sheet. Holes roughly semi-circular, 2” deep and 4” long at edges of sheet. Sellers, Mercers, p. 63. Thes are þe costes payd aboute þe paujand In primis payde to Wylliam Clark and his players for rehersyng Item to John Lytster for goyng with vs Item payd for iren pykes and gret nales for þe axeltre and burdes and nales and warkmanship to þe grete paujand Item payd for stowres and ij Inglyshe burdes and dubyll spykynges and warmanship whare þe saulys lyes Item for mendyng of an angell cote Item payd to Wylliam Clark for [. . .] gloues and half a yerd lynen [. . .] Item payd for sope and gr [. . .] þe pajand wheles [. . .] Item for weshyng of [. . .] Item payd to Wylliam [. . .] felowse on Co [. . .] Item payd to Wylliam [. . .] playng of þe play [. . .] Item payd to Wylliam C [. . .] Lytster for settyng vp [. . .] and takyng downe þat langes [. . .] Item puttynghome of þe pajand [. . .] Item puttyng þe pajand aboute on þe morn Item spend at ale and dyuers tymes on Wylliam Clark and John Lytster and Malum Item þat we hafe spend at dyuers tymes aboute þe towne and our drynkyng and oure soper on Corpus cristi day at evyn Summa of þe costes xxx s iij d ob and in þe master handes

xd ij d xxj d xiij d [. . .]

vj d vj d iij s vj d xiij d

12 1501–02. York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Chartulary and Minute Book D19, fol. 157v. Memorandum that Thomas Drawswerd this present yere abouesaid is admit into the broderheid of the fraternite of the holy trinite in ffossegate by the said maister by thassant and consent of Richerd Thornton maior of the Cite of Yorke George Kirke John Elwald William Neleson John Stokdale aldermen Thomas ffynch John Shawe Thomas ffolneby and many other merchauntes brethern of the said ffraternite vnder condicion felowing þat is to say that the said Thomas shal mak the pagiant of the dome belonging to the merchauntes newe substancialie in euery thing pervnto belonging

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havyng for the warkemanship and stuff of the same vij marcs in money and his entrie fre with also the old pagiaunt. 13 1504.York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, compotus roll, Box D55VV. Et sol’ Henrico Marsshall for diverse stuff for payntyng of þe pagiant xij s vj d 14 1507.York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, compotus roll, Box D55YY. Et eciam petunt allocari de xl s solute, Thome Drawswerd kerver pro pagina de Domesdaye Summa xl s (And also they [the master and constables of the company] make allowance for forty shillings paid to Thomas Drawswerd, carver, for the pageant of Doomsday.) 15 1514.York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, compotus roll, Box D56FFF. Et pro le pageant dore vnum stancheon et nalez (And for the pageant door one stanchion and nails.) 16 1521.York, Merchant Adventurers’Archives, compotus roll, Box D 56NNN. Et pro emendacione hostium ludiculo vocati pagant doore ij d Et pro emendacione duorum organes vocat. pyps ij d (And for the mending of the door of the pageant called ‘pagant doore’ 2d. And for the mending of two instruments called ‘pyps’ 2d.) 17 1526.York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D 63. Paper account, single sheet 8.1” by 11.25”. Stitching marks 0.6” apart along left-hand edge. Sheet marked with several diagonal creases, list of names on dorse. Sellers, Mercers, p. 128. Ihesu Reces’ off pagand maisteres de maister Wyld frest ȝerre Jorg Norman Here Woid pagand maisteres Bartell Yorke [possible break here – line left] Necolles cure þes perselles ij dewell cottes ij dewelles heddes j wesseren j chartt the clowd ij grett angells-wants j weng [crossed through] ij trompys hell dure

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iiij angelli Wants j chartt pagand dure iij wesserons iiij wendows j Rope þe yren sett with iiij rappes ij Angell þe wendes with j repe wants j lytell Angell þe trenette hus and ij Nalles iij lyttell angelles þe viij chyffes ix nalles þe trenette

Appendix II The dating of the documents

1

2 3

4

Document 1. Dr Sellers (Mercers, p. 82) implies that this document is dated 1488. But she makes no clear distinction between this entry on fol. 9 of the Chartulary and the note of the election of John Shawe as master in 1488 on fol. 9v, which is in a different and later hand.The will of one of the constables named, William Bluefront, was probated 26 June 1447.59 Thomas Scauceby, who is named master of the company in the document, held that office only once before 1447 in 1443. This document must therefore be dated 1443. Documents 2–5, 7, 13–16. These are all from compotus rolls and are internally dated. Document 6. The financial crisis recorded in this document allows us to date it 1461. In that year (see Appendix I, Document 7) there is an entry in the compotus roll of the company making up the exact sum needed by the pageant masters in excess of the pageant money collected (30s 4½d). The only problem here is that the roll speaks of ‘Thome Nandyke et sociis suis magistris pagine’.Thomas Nandyke is not one of the names that appear on Document 6 as pageant master. Three of the four named pageant masters were Henry Williamson, John Bosswell and Thomas Skotton. Nandyke was made free in the same year as Williamson (34 Henry VI, 1455–56), one year before Bosswell and two before Skotton.60 They were all young men in 1461 and possibly the pageant masters, finding themselves in financial difficulties, prevailed upon their friend Thomas Nandyke to present their case to the company. Corroborative evidence that this document belongs to 1461 is found in the appearance of the name of John Gudale in the list of names and amounts on the front of the document. It was the custom for such lists to be written before the collection was made and the amounts entered as they were received. No amount appears against Gudale’s name. His will was probated 21 April 1461.61 He apparently died between the time the list of was drawn up and the pageant money collected. Documents 8 and 9. These two documents must be considered together. They share the same pageant masters John Leghtlop, William Thelle, and

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5

6 7

8

Richard Sawer. Leghtlop became a member of the Mercers’ Guild in 1459 and Sawer in 1462.62 Richard Sawer was a clerk and would have been admitted to the guild as a special member. His admission in 1462 gives us the earliest possible date for these documents. They clearly refer to two different years and, since they name the same men as masters, it is likely that they refer to two consecutive years. One of the documents refers to the making of the second pageant. Document 6, dated 1461 (see above), makes no mention of it; but Document 10, dated 1464 (see below), speaks of ‘nayls to both pagyants’. These documents must come after 1461 and before 1464. Since one mentions the second pageant and the other does not, Document 8 must belong to 1462 and Document 9 to 1463. Document 10. Dr Sellers mistakenly dates this 1472.63 She prints, together with the pageant masters’ account reproduced in Appendix I, the list of the pageant silver collected which is headed ‘this is the rakynyng of our pagyant silver reseyved be the handes of Thomas Wrangwyshe, Thomas Maryott and John Lokwod in the yere Thomas Neylson beyng mayor’. Dr Sellers assumed that the three men named in the heading were the master and constables of the company. Wrangwyshe was master of the company in 1472, but neither Maryott nor Lokwood were constables. On all other accounts the men named are the pageant masters. Thomas Neylson was twice mayor, but his years of office were 32 Henry VI (1453) and 4 Edward IV (1464).The final evidence refuting the date of 1472 is found in the pageant silver list. Thomas Scauceby, the first member of the company listed, died in 1471.64 He appears in the list as having contributed 6d to the expense of the pageant. Once the date 1472 is discarded we are left with 1453 and 1464. Richard Sawer, clerk, who joined the company in 1462 (see above), appears in the list. This document must be dated 1464. Document 11. The list on the inner leaves (see description in Appendix I) is dated 1467. Document 12. This entry appears on a folio in the Chartulary bearing the date of the meeting at which the decision was made to engage Drawswerd to make a new pageant. The entire folio is in one hand. The words ‘this present yere abouesaid’ therefore refer to the years 1501–02. Document 17. The document specifies that this list was made in the ‘frest ȝerre’ of ‘maister Wyld’. Wilde was master of the company in 1526 and 1527.65 This document can therefore be dated 1526.

Appendix III Pageant masters’ ordinance, 1443

Transcription of the 1443 ordinance in the Chartulary and Minute Book is complicated by the fact that it has been overwritten in a late nineteenthcentury hand. The first published version of this entry was by Rev Charles Kerry, ‘Discovery of the Register and Chartulary of the Mercers’ Company, York’, The

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Antiquary xxii (1890), p. 269, and wrongly indicates that the pageant masters of the Mercers were in charge of the ‘Pater Noster’ play.66 Dr Sellers did not have the manuscript in her possession when she prepared her edition of the Mercers’ documents and at first relied on a transcription provided by Sir Henry Bemrose of Derby.67 The manuscript was recovered shortly before publication and Dr Sellers corrected the earlier work; she, too, transcribed ‘paternoster play.’68 But consideration of the MS under ultra-violet light has shown that the original entry (see above, p. 25, ll. 8–9) was not ‘þe paternoster play’ but ‘þair play’. The overwriter does not appear to have been familiar with fifteenthcentury script and made several errors when retracing the words of the entry. He used punctuation not in use in 1443: hyphens in ‘pater noster-play’ (ll. 8–9) and ‘belanges’ (ll. 9–10), and a colon after ‘þ’to’ (l. 10). He also dotted the letter ‘i’ and was apparently unable to distinguish between the letters ‘i’ and ‘r’ in some cases as ‘r’ is dotted in ‘Bluefront’, (l. 4), ‘forth’ (l. 8), ‘receyue’ (l. 9) and ‘Cristi’ (l. 17). In line 1 he wrote ‘who’ for what must have been originally ‘whol,’ in line 4, ‘Gaing’ for original ‘Gaunt’ (William Gaunt is named as a constable in the 1443 compotus roll, Box D 53B), and ‘pto’ for original ‘þ’to’ in line 10. Under ultraviolet light what appears to be ‘þe pat’ noster-play’ in the overwritten version can be seen to have been originally ‘þair play’. The overwriter traced ‘þe’ over the ‘þa’ of ‘þair’ and ‘pat’ noster’ over the ‘ir’ (the ‘r’ in ‘þair’ is a long ‘r’). The words ‘pat’ noster’ extend into the right-hand margin and the line is ½” longer than any other in the entry. The 1443 ordinance is therefore not concerned with the Pater Noster play but with ‘their play’, that is the Doomsday pageant which was the Mercers’ contribution to the Corpus Christi play.

Appendix IV There is one further document (dated 27 February, 1453/4) among the records of the Mercers that mention the pageant. A transcription of it has been made by Dr Maud Sellers and a translation by Canon J.S. Purvis.69 The document is parchment 11.8” by 4.6” and bears the personal seals of the three men named in the document. It reads as follows: Nouerint vniuersi per presentes nos Robertum Hewyk de Ledes in comitatu Ebor’ parisshe clerke Thomam Fitt de Ebor’Tapiter et Henricum Clayton de Ebor’Textorem teneri et firmiter obligari Gubernatori et Custodibus Communitatis Mercatorem Ciuitatis Ebor’ in decem libris sterlingorum Soluendis eisdem Gubernatori et Custodibus vel successoribus suis seu suorum [MS sorum] certo attorno ad festum Corporis cristi proxime futurum post datam presencium sine dilacione longiori ad quam quidem solucionem dicte pecunie vt permittitur faciendam obligamus nos heredes et executores nostros ac omnia bona nostra et quemlibet nostrum per se pro toto et insolido per presentes Sigillis nostris signatis Datum vicesimo septimo die ffebruarij Anno regni Regis Henrici sexti post conquestum Anglie tricesino secundo Condicio istius obligacionis talis est quod si prescripti Robertus

38 York records

Thomas et Henricus teneant perimpleant ex parte sua omnes et singulas conuenciones et condiciones contentas in quibusdam indenturis inter supradictum Gubernatorem et custodes ex vna parte et prefatos Robertum Thomam et Henricum ex parte altera confectis de et super eductione ludi Corporis cristi videlicet pagine vacate domysday secundum vim formam et effectum indenturarum predictarum quod extunc ista obligacio pro nullo habeatur Alioquin in suis robore permaneat et virtute. Shirwood (By the present document let it be generally understood that we, Robert Hewyk, parish clerk of Leeds in the county of York, Thomas Fitt, tapiter, of York and Henry Clayton, weaver, of York, are firmly bound and held to the Governor and Wardens of the Guild of Merchants in the city of York, in the amount of ten pounds sterling to be paid to the said Governor and Wardens, or their successors, or their accredited attorney, on the feast of Corpus Christi immediately after the date of the present document, without any further delay. To the necessity of paying this said sum we bind ourselves, our heirs, and our executors, and all our goods, and each one of us in himself for the whole amount in its entirety, by the present document. Witness our seals, 27 February, 23 Henry VI (1453–54). The terms of this obligation are that if the aforesaid Robert, Thomas, and Henry keep and fulfill on their part each and every agreement and condition contained in certain indentures made between the aforesaid Governor and Wardens on the one hand and the aforesaid Robert, Thomas and Henry on the other, about and concerning the production of a Corpus Christi play, to wit, the pageant called Doomsday, according to the meaning, form and effect of the aforementioned indentures, then from that point this obligation is to be annulled. Otherwise it is to stand with strength and power in its [?terms].)70 In her introduction to The York Mercers and Merchant Adventurers, Dr Sellers comments: But in 1453 the mercers concluded local talent was not sufficient to bring out the play. An agreement was made with Robert Hewyk parish clerk of Leeds, Thomas Fitt tapiter and Henry Clayton weaver to bring out the pageant of ‘Domysday,’ for which they were to receive a payment of ten pounds. Doubtless this covered all the expenses such as fees to players, expenses of representation, repairs and renewals of properties, otherwise the payment would seem excessive.71 She clearly misunderstood the force of the document. It is a formal agreement confirming a forfeit. If the three men named failed to fulfill the terms laid down

The York Mercers and their pageant of Doomsday

39

in ‘certain indentures’ concerning the production of the Doomsday pageant they would forfeit ten pounds to the Mercers. The Mercers were not, as Sellers suggested, paying Clayton, Fitt, and Hewyk ten pounds to produce the pageant. Canon Purvis, although he recognized that it was a forfeit, also assumed that this document related to the Mercer’s own production of the Doomsday pageant in the Corpus Christi Play. When this document is considered with all the other documents concerning the Mercer’s pageant discussed in the body of this article, its strangeness becomes apparent. Firstly, if the men were pageant masters, they appear to have been elected in February, not in June as specified in the 1443 ordinance; and secondly, none of the men named is a Mercer as specified in that ordinance. Further, the sum named (10 pounds), is completely inconsistent with the sum (6s 8d) named for defaulting pageant masters in the 1443 ordinance. Therefore the document does not seem to refer to a regular performance of the pageant on Corpus Christi Day at York.

Notes 1 This article is based on documents in the archives of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of York, the lineal descendant of the medieval Mercers’ Guild. Both mercers (local shopkeepers) and merchants (overseas traders) were members of the guild. We are grateful to Mr Bernard Johnson, the archivist of the Company, for his kind co-operation in allowing us access to the documents. 2 York, York City Archives, A/Y Memorandum Book, fol. 153v; see Maud Sellers, York Memorandum Book II, ed. by Maud Sellers, Surtees Society CXXV (1915), p. 9. 3 A/Y Memorandum Book, fol. 253v. See York Plays, ed. by Lucy Toulmin Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), p. xxxvii. 4 Many medieval commercial guilds had religious guilds or fraternities associated with them which included the wives, sisters and daughters of the men. The Fraternity of the Holy Trinity was associated with the Mercers Guild. See Maud Sellers, The York Mercers and Merchant Adventurers 1356–1917, Surtees Society cxxix (1918), p. x. 5 R. B. Pugh, A History of Yorkshire: City of York, The Victoria History of the Counties of England (London: University of London Institute of Historical Research, 1961), p. 71. 6 Ibid., pp. 78–79. 7 Ibid., p. 160. 8 In 1443, 1451, 1452, 1458, 1462, 1464, and 1465; Sellers, Mercers, p. 3n. 9 In 1456, 1460, 1476, 1485, and 1486; Sellers, Mercers, p. 322. 10 In 1471 and 1472; Sellers, Mercers, p. 322. He was pageant master in 1464 (see Appendix II). 11 A list of the masters of the company is printed in Sellers, Mercers, pp. 322–25. The Register of the Freemen of the City of York I, ed.by Francis Collins, Surtees Society xciv (1897) records the mayor and chamberlains for each year. These figures were reached by comparing Sellers’s list with Collins’s. 12 The documents referred to in the body of the text are printed in chronological order in Appendix I. The special problems of this document are discussed in Appendices II and III. 13 York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D63. For a discussion of this document see Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Dorrell, ‘The Doomsday Pageant of the York Mercers, 1433’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 5 (1971), pp. 29–34. 14 In the same year, 1443, the Marshalls and Smiths passed a similar ordinance: ‘þe pageant maisters [. . .] shal make þair rakenying and gife accompt euere yere fro nowe furth vpon

40 York records

15 16 17

18 19

Sononday next before Missomerday’. A/Y Memorandum Book, fol. 288; see Sellers, York Memorandum Book II, p. 181. The Mercers rented land on Toft Green on which their pageant house was built from the Bridgemasters of Ousebridge. Records of payment appear both in the Bridgemasters’ accounts in the York City Archives and in the Mercers’ accounts. The feast of Corpus Christi is the Thursday after Trinity Sunday (21 May–24 June). The feast fell on Midsummer Day (24 June) only twice (in 1451 and 1546) during the years that the cycle was performed. 9 February–27 March.The billets or ‘sedule paginarum’ were to be sent out ‘prima vel ija septimana quadragesime annuatim’ (the first or second week of Lent annually). Written in the left-hand margin beside the heading of the Ordo paginarum, A/Y Memorandum Book, fol. 243v. See Smith, York Plays, p. xix, note. William Wrangle, clerk, was made a freeman of the city in 1428–29; Collins, Freemen, p. 142. The first record of this practice is in the Chamberlains’ Rolls for 1433 (York,York City Archives, C 1:2). In 1463 the following record appears: Et in expensis maioris Aldermannorum et aliorum concilium Civitatis in festo corporis cristi una cum diversis presentacionibus ut in pane dominico fructiis et vinis datis et presentatis diversis dominis et dominabus militibus prelatis et aliis generosis tunc in civitate presentibus ut comitisse Warwick et aliis Summa xlv s v d ob (And in the expenses of the mayor, the aldermen, and other councillors of the city on the feast of Corpus Christi, along with various presentations as the best bread (pane dominico: Sunday bread), fruit and wines given and presented to various lords and ladies, soldiers, prelates and other gentlemen then present in the city, as the Countess of Warwick and others.) Total 45s 5½d.

20 It is clear that by 1476 many of the performers in the pageants were professionals since an ordinance was made to prevent actors being hired to play more than two parts;York City Archives, HB 1, fol. 14v. See York Civic Records I, ed. by Angelo Raine, Record Series xcviii (Wakefield: Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 1939), p. 5. See also Margaret Dorrell, ‘Two Studies of the York Corpus Christi Play,’ Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 6 (1972), p. 101. 21 In 1464 amounts contributed by individual members of the guild varied from 4d to 6d; Sellers, Mercers, p. 71. For the dating of this document see Appendix II. 22 It appears that the sergeants were civic officers who assisted in the collection of pageant money. In 1545 the Bakers’ pageant masters were accompanied by a civic officer: ‘Item payd þat day þat we went abowt ffor to geder pagand mony and to the offesor ffor his lawbor’; London, British Library, MS Add. 33852, fol. 6v. 23 This was less than half the normal amount collected. In 1464, 31s 9d was collected and in 1467 31s 4d. The normal expenses were approximately thirty shillings. 24 V. H. H. Green, The Later Plantagenets (London: Arnold, 1955), p. 335. The early months of 1461 were difficult ones for the city of York. On 30 December 1460, the Duke of York was killed in battle at Wakefield and his head brought to York and displayed over Micklegate Bar. After another Lancastrian victory at the second battle of St Albans, Queen Margaret retreated to the city with Henry VI. They were defeated by the Yorkists at Towton on Palm Sunday, 29 March, and the young Edward IV entered York in triumph. He stayed there until May when he went south for his coronation; see Pugh, History of Yorkshire, pp. 59–60; Green, Later Plantagenets, p. 335. It may be that the meagre amount collected in pageant silver is related to the civil war. Many of the members of the guild may have been away from York when the collection was made. In 1482 individual mercers as members of the city council helped to raise an army against the Scots for Richard, Duke of Gloucester (York,York City Archives HB 2–4, fol. 58).

The York Mercers and their pageant of Doomsday

41

25 A/Y Memorandum Book, fol. 254 ; see Smith, York Plays, p. xxxiv. 26 Ibid. 27 York, York City Archives House Book 23, fol. 19v; York Civic Records VI, ed. by Angelo Raine, Record Series cxii (Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 1948), p. 17. 28 Some time after 1426 the play and the procession took place on consecutive days. From 1476 the procession was regularly on the day after Corpus Christi Day. It was agreed on 31 May 1476, that each alderman and councillor should have a torch carried by his servant ‘annuatim in processione die veneris in Crastino Corporis cristi ad dei laudem et honorem huius Ciuitatis’ (annually in the procession on Friday the day after Corpus Christi to the praise of God and the honour of this city); York, York City Archives HB I, fol. 19v; Raine, Civic Records I, pp. 5–6. 29 Dorrell, ‘Two Studies’, p. 99. 30 At the time the Mercers regularly paid 4d to each man who carried one of their torches in the procession of Corpus Christi: ‘Et sol’ pro portacione vj torchiarum dicti fraternitatis in processione in festo corporis cristi hoc anno ut in annis precendentibus ij s’ (And paid for the bearing of the six torches of the said fraternity in the procession on the feast of Corpus Christi this year as in years preceding 2s); York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D53L. Dorrell, ‘Two Studies’, p. 98. 31 Dorrell, ‘Two Studies’, p. 88; see above, p. 31. 32 The curtains specified are ‘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’ (Johnston and Dorrell, ‘Doomsday 1433’, p. 29). We conjectured that the three curtains ‘lewent brede’ were pageant cloths to conceal the wheels (ibid., p. 31). The ‘grete coster’ was probably long enough to cover the wheels on the fourth side. 33 OED, s.v. Stang, sb. 1. 34 Johnston and Dorrell, ‘Doomsday 1433’, pp. 9–15 above. Sketches of a wagon and properties based on the information provided by the indenture accompany this article.We are grateful to Mrs Elizabeth Chalmers of Hurst, Berkshire, for drawing them for us. 35 In our preliminary discussion of the 1433 indenture (Johnston and Dorrell, ‘Doomsday Pageant’, p. 31), we suggested that this small curtain was a backrest for the ‘brandreth’. It seems more likely that this was a backdrop and hung in front of the painted back curtain behind the ‘brandreth’. 36 ‘An upright bar, stay or support’; OED, s.v. Stanchion, sb. 1. 37 ‘A superior quality of foreign oak imported from Russia, Germany, and Holland chiefly used for fine panel work; logs or planks of this oak; oak boarding for panel-work. A piece or a board of wainscot oak’; OED, s.v. Wainscot, sb. 1a and 1b. 38 ‘One who works in wood; a carpenter, a joiner’; OED, s.v. Wright, sb. 1. #1 and 3. 39 He was paid 2s 6d for five days’ work. 40 In 1552, the Bakers paid only 7s for a pair of wheels; see Anna J. Mill, ‘The York Bakers’ Play of the Last Supper’, MLR, xxx (1935), p. 156. 41 OED, s.v. Stain, v. 6. 42 Johnston and Dorrell, ‘Doomsday 1433’, p. 34. We suggested that the banners were not peculiar to the pageant but were carried on other public occasions. However, it appears from this evidence from the 1461 accounts that the banners were considered part of the property of the pageant itself. 43 Johnston and Dorrell, ‘Doomsday 1433’, p. 31. 44 This was the year that the Countess of Warwick was in York for the play. Perhaps a special effort was made to honour the important visitor (see above, note 20). 45 Smith, York Plays, p. 499, 1. 65. 46 Among the more famous medieval representations of souls rising from coffins are the great carvings over the west door of Bourges Cathedral; see Joan Evans, The Flowering of the Middle Ages (London: Thames and Hudson, 1966), p. 94 and the Last Judgement tympanum at Rheims (Evans, p. 224). v

42 York records 47 ‘A stake, pole or post; each of the upright staves in the side of a wagon, 1641’; OED, s.v. Stower, sb. 1 and 2. 48 Thomas Drawswerd, ‘carvour’, was made free in 1496, city chamberlain in 1501, and mayor in 1515 and 1523; see Collins, Freemen, pp. 220, 225, 237, 244. Drawswerd died in 1529; see Index of Wills in the York Registry 1514–1553, ed. by Francis Collins,Yorkshire Archaeological and Topographical Association, Record Series xi (1891), p. 55. 49 1502, 1503, 1504, and 1506. In 1505 the Creed Play was played instead of the Corpus Christi Play; see York Civic Records III, ed. by Angelo Raine, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series cvi (1942), p. 12. 50 OED, s.v. Chart, sb. 2; MED, I a. 51 See ‘Key to York Mercers Wagon, 1433’ #14, p. 17. 52 York City Archives House Book 15, fol. 36r; see Raine, Civic Records IV, p. 60. 53 Johnston and Dorrell, ‘Doomsday Pageant’, p. 29. 54 These would all be finished playing long before the Mercers began the ‘Doomsday’ pageant; see Dorrell, ‘Two Studies’, p. 99. 55 Smith, York Plays, p. 505, ll. 217–28. 56 Johnston and Dorrell, ‘Doomsday Pageant’, pp. 32–33. 57 OED, s.v. Chief, sb. 2; MED, 5a. 58 Sellers, Mercers, p. 82, has ‘the paternoster’; see further discussion in Appendix III. 59 Index of the Wills in the York Registry 1389–1514, ed. by Francis Collins,Yorkshire Archaeological and Topographical Association, Record Series vi (1888), p. 19. 60 Collins, Index 1389–1514, pp. 175–6, 178. 61 Ibid., p. 71. 62 Sellers, Mercers, p. 70. 63 Ibid., p. 71. 64 Collins, Index 1389–1514, p. 146. 65 Sellers, Mercers, p. 323. 66 The Pater Noster Play existed in 1378 (see E.K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), vol. ii, p. 403) and was last played in York in 1572 (Chambers, p. 404). Chambers was under the impression that the Mercers were responsible for the Pater Noster Play from reading Kerry’s version of this document in The Antiquary. 67 Sellers, Mercers, p. 81, note i. 68 Ibid., p. 82. 69 York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D63; Sellers, Mercers, pp. 58–59; J. S. Purvis, From Minster to Market Place (York: St Anthony’s Press, 1969), pp. 42–43. 70 Translation by Professor A.G. Rigg of the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto. 71 Sellers, Mercers, p. xxiv.

1.3 The procession and play of Corpus Christi in York after 1426 From: Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 7 (1973–74), 55–62 One of the most famous documents concerning the York Corpus Christi Play to survive is the record of the sermon that was preached by William Melton in 1426. In this sermon, Melton urged that because the play tended to keep the citizens of York away from the strictly religious observances of the feast of Corpus Christi, the play and the procession honouring the host should be held on different days. As a result of this sermon, a public meeting was held and the people of York agreed that the play should be played every year on the Wednesday, the vigil of the feast, and that the procession should always be held with due solemnity on the day of the feast itself.1 Although the two pioneering scholars in the field, Robert Davies and Lucy Toulmin Smith both express reservations about the absolute nature of this decision, it is generally assumed that after 1426 the procession and the play were held on succeeding days.2 Unfortunately, such evidence as has survived does not support such an assumption. The evidence concerning the York Corpus Christi celebrations for the fifty years between 1426 and 1476 is scanty. It consists of a few guild ordinances in the A/Y Memorandum Book, a document recording an agreement between the city and the Guild of Corpus Christi, and some account rolls of the city, the Guild of Corpus Christi, the Mercers’ Guild and the Minster.3 It is the purpose of this article to bring together all the evidence concerning the procession and the play from these documents which specifically state the day upon which these events took place. From this evidence it is clear that the earliest possible date for an absolute division between the procession and the play is 1468. The first evidence concerning the procession after 1426 is found in an ordinance of the Marshalls and Smiths, internally dated 1428. At that time the Marshalls and Smiths were pledged not only to look after their pageants but also to ‘uphald thair torches in the procession of Corpus Christi day’.4 The procession is clearly held on the feast day in 1428. There is no evidence from this document concerning the day of the performance of the play that year. However, there are two documents surviving from 1432. The first is the formal agreement between the city and the Guild of Corpus Christi concerning the carrying of the civic shrine in the procession.The Guild of Corpus Christi at no time controlled the procession of Corpus Christi5 but took part in the

44 York records

procession along with the other guilds of York.Yet their relationship to the feast was a special one and in 1432 the city acknowledged this by allowing the guild to carry the shrine ‘singulis annis in festo eiusdem corporis cristi’.6 Clearly, then, the procession was held on the day of the feast in 1432. But a document concerning the Saucemakers and their pageant of the ‘Hanging of Judas’ for the year 1432 makes it equally clear that the play was also performed on the day of the feast.The Saucemakers are enjoined by the city council to walk with their pageant as had been their custom ‘in die et ludo Corporis Christi’.7 From these documents it is clear that whatever happened between 1426 and 1431, by 1432 the play and the procession were again taking place on the same day. The evidence for the next thirty-six years seems also to point to the continuation of the procession and the play as separate events on the same day. There is at least one record concerning some aspect of the Corpus Christi celebration for most years during this period. The records are mainly concerned with two different payments, one made by the mayor for the feast which he held for his council and any visiting dignitaries while they saw the play, and one made by the Mercers’ Guild for hiring men to carry the torches of the guild in the Corpus Christi procession.8 Fortunately, the records of both the city and the Mercers have survived for the years 1445, 1446, 1448, 1449, 1450 and 1451. These confirm that the play and the procession took place on the same day. The entry recording the expenses for the mayor’s feast in 1445 is headed in the Chamberlains’ roll, ‘Expensis in festo corporis cristi’.9 The entry in the Mercers’ accounts for 144510 is ‘Item paide for beryng of vj torches apon corpus cristi day ij s’.11 In the Chamberlains’ book for 1446 the expenses are recorded for the mayor ‘in festo corporis cristi’12 and in that year the Mercers are again paying 2s to have their torches carried ‘upon corpus cristi day’.13 Further corroboration that the play was performed on the day of the feast comes from the will of William Revetour, dated 1446, where it is recorded that he left certain properties to the Girdlers’ Guild for their play ‘in festo corporis cristi’.14 In 1448, expenses for the mayor are again noted ‘in festo corporis cristi’15 and the Mercers again paid 2s for their torches to be carried ‘apon corpus cristi day’.16 The entry in the 1449 Chamberlains’ roll is again headed ‘Expensis in festo corporis cristi’ and in the body of the entry the scribe speaks of the dignitaries who were present ‘in festo corporis cristi’.17 The Mercers kept their accounts for 1449 and 1450 together, and that entry reads, ‘Item paide for berynge of vj torches apon corpus cristi day be ij ȝere iiij s’.18 Further evidence concerning the procession for these years is found in the account roll of the Corpus Christi Guild for 1449–1451 in which the masters of the guild account for four shillings spent for the carrying of the cross ‘ante processionem in die corporis cristi per ij annos’.19 Finally, an entry in the Chamberlains’ book for 1451 records the sum of 55s 1½d paid ‘in festo corporis cristi’ for the mayor’s expenses.20 There is also evidence of a slightly different kind to indicate that in the year 1443 the play and the procession were held on the same day. The Mercers’ ordinance concerning their pageant masters for that year implies that the play

Corpus Christi in York after 1426 45

was performed on the day of the feast since the pageant gear was to be returned ‘within iiij days next after corpus cristi day’.21 Also in 1443, the Mercers paid for their torches to be carried in the procession ‘on corpus cristi day’.22 In that year as well the Marshalls and Smiths passed another ordinance reinforcing the injunction that the torches of the guilds were to be carried ‘in the procession upon Corpus Christi day’.23 The other records of this period cannot be cross-checked because only one piece of evidence for each year has survived. However, they too may suggest that the play and the procession were held on the same day. In 1433 the corporation paid for the playing of the pageant of the ‘Coronation of the Virgin’24 ‘in festo corporis cristi’ and also paid for the room from which the mayor and his party saw the play and had their feast that same day – ‘die predicto’.25 In 1437, 1439 and 1440, the Mercers paid to have their torches carried in the procession ‘on corpus cristi day’.26 In 1453, the mayor’s expenses are again recorded ‘in festo corporis cristi’27 and in 1454 the Chamberlains’ roll again notes payment for the feast ‘in festo corporis cristi ’and for the pageant of the Coronation of the Virgin that was played ‘eodem die’.28 In 1459 and 1460 the Mercers paid to have their torches carried ‘in processione in festo corporis cristi’29 and the corresponding entry for 1461 reads ‘in processione corporis cristi in festo eiusdem’.30 In 1462, a pageant masters’ account of the Mercers’ Guild records expenses incurred in providing drink for the players of their Doomsday pageant ‘vpon corpus cristi day be þe way’.31 Other entries suggesting that the play was played on the day of the feast occur in the pageant masters’ accounts for the years 1463, 1464, and 1467.32 The mayor’s feast was held ‘in festo corporis cristi’ in 1463. The Mercers’ account roll for 1466 specifies that their torches were carried ‘in þe feyst of corpus cristi’.33 It seems probable, then, that from the year 1432 until the year 1467, the procession and the play were held on the same day – that is on the day of the feast of Corpus Christi – just as they had been held on the same day up to 1426. It is impossible to say whether or not in the five years between 1426 and 1432 the city council did indeed separate the two events. From the weight of the later evidence it is unlikely that the people of York ever did fulfil their pious intention when they agreed to the separation in 1426. In 1468 there appears the first entry in the Chamberlains’ rolls recording the payment by the city for a sermon preached on the day after Corpus Christi. The sum of 3s 4d was paid ‘cuidam fratre Augustine predicanti in crastino dicti festi in capillo ecclesie Cathedral beati petri Ebor’.34 It is clear from the Mercers’ rolls and the rolls of the Corpus Christi Guild that have survived from the sixteenth century that by that time the procession was regularly held on the day after Corpus Christi,35 and from the civic records for the same period that the last civic event of that day was a sermon preached in the chapter house of the Minster.36 The entry recording payment for the sermon in 1468 comes in the regular expense list for the mayor, which also indicates that he and his party had their customary feast while watching the play ‘in festo corporis cristi’.37 This is the first real evidence of two special events related to the

46 York records

celebration of Corpus Christi taking place on two succeeding days. Supporting evidence for a change in the pattern of the Corpus Christi celebrations comes from the surviving fabric rolls of the Minster. These rolls provide a single entry for offerings ‘in festo corporis cristi’ in the years 1433, 1434, 1445–46 and 1457.38 However, the roll for 1469–70 notes offerings given on the vigil of the feast, on the day of the feast and the day after the feast,39 indicating for the first time that special events which would bring the people to the Minster were held on more than the single day of the feast. This division appears again in 1473 and 1474.40 In 1475 there is a second entry in the city rolls concerning the sermon which is now paid for ‘ex consuetudine’.41 After 1476 we have a much clearer picture of the events that took place in York at the time of the feast. From that year the House Books that contain the minutes of the city council have survived.42 On 31 May 1476, the council passed a formal ordinance requiring the twelve aldermen and the twenty-four members of the council each to have one torch carried ‘annuatim in processione die veneris in Crastino [italics added] Corporis cristi’43 upon pain of forfeiting forty shillings to the chamber.44 In this same year the Mercers paid to have their torches carried ‘in crastino [italics added] corporis cristi’.45 It is clear from the subsequent evidence that after 1476, if not after 1468, the play was performed on the day of the feast and the procession took place on the day after the feast. In only one year before 1548 was the pattern broken in the surviving documents.46 In 1481 the Mercers paid to have their torches carried ‘in festo corporis cristi’,47 and the Minster rolls indicate that although there were offerings for the vigil of the feast and the day of the feast nothing was contributed on the day after the feast.48 Perhaps this year the council tried to fulfil the motion passed by their predecessors fifty-five years earlier.The experiment seems to have found as little favour in 1481 as it had before. In 1482 the procession was again being held ‘in crastino corporis cristi’.49 To assume that after 1426 the York Corpus Christi Play took place on a different day from the procession of Corpus Christi is clearly invalid. Dr Margaret Dorrell’s reconstruction of the procession and play before 1426 can therefore be accepted as a likely reconstruction of the events as they normally took place until 1468 at the earliest.50 It is also clear from the documents I have been discussing that the procession and the play were organized and paid for as two separate events even when both took place on Corpus Christi day.The Mercers’ accounts always distinguish between the entries concerning their torches and the entries concerning their pageant of ‘Doomsday’. The Marshalls and Smiths speak of their support of their pageants and their bearing of torches as distinctly separate activities. In their ordinances the torch bearing is associated not with their pageants but with the maintenance of votive lights in the Minster and elsewhere. No mention was made of the play when the city and the Guild of Corpus Christi entered into their agreement concerning the shrine. No mention is ever made of the play in the rolls of the Corpus Christi Guild, although there are regular entries about the procession. On the basis of the documentary evidence, therefore, it can be stated that until 1468 at the earliest the procession

Corpus Christi in York after 1426 47

of Corpus Christi and the play of Corpus Christi were probably two separate events taking place in the city of York on the day of the feast.

Notes 1 York, York City Archives E20, A/Y Memorandum Book. For a complete transcription, translation and discussion of this document see Margaret Dorrell (Rogerson),‘Two Studies of the York Corpus Christi Play’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 6, (1972), pp. 72–75. 2 Extracts from the Municipal Records of the City of York during the Reigns of Edward IV, Edward V and Richard III, ed. by Robert Davies (London: J.B. Nichols and Son, 1843), pp. 243– 44. York Plays, ed. by Lucy Toulmin Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), p. xxxv. 3 I wish to acknowledge the kind helpfulness of Mrs Rita Green, archivist in the York City Library, Mr Bernard Johnson, archivist to the Worshipful Company of Merchant Adventurers of York, and Mr Bernard Barr and Miss Katherine Longley of York Minster Library. 4 York,York City Archives, A/Y Memorandum Book, fol. 287v; York Memorandum Book II, ed. by Maud Sellers, Surtees Soc. CXXV (1914), p. 180. 5 The first reference to the participation of the Corpus Christi Guild in the procession does not appear until their account roll for 1415 (York City Archives, Rolls C99: l and 2.) 6 York,York City Archives, B/Y Memorandum Book, fols 116d–l l7b; see The Register of the Guild of Corpus Christi, ed. by R. H. Skaife, Surtees Society LVII (1871), p. 252. 7 Sellers, York Memorandum Book II, p. 173. 8 For a discussion of this practice see Dorrell, ‘Two Studies’, p. 81. 9 The phrase ‘in festo’ meant on the day of the feast. If events took place on the days surrounding the feast the phrases used were ‘in vigilia corporis cristi’ (on the vigil or eve of Corpus Christi) or ‘in crastino corporis cristi’ (on the day after Corpus Christi). 10 York,York City Archives, roll C 2:2. 11 York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D53C, account of John Calton, master. 12 York,York City Archives, Chamberlains’ Book I, fol. 26. 13 York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D53D, account of John Calton master, second year. 14 Testamenta Eboracensis, ed. by James Raine, Surtees Society XXX (1885), p. 117. 15 Chamberlains’ Book I, fol. 67. 16 York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D53E, account of John Calton, master, third year. 17 York,York City Archives, roll C 2:5. 18 York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D53F, account of John Cateryk, master. 19 York,York City Archives, roll C 99:3. 20 York,York City Archives, Chamberlains’ Book Ia, fol. 60. 21 Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Dorrell (Rogerson), ‘The York Mercers and their Pageant of Doomsday, 1433–1526’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 6 (1972), p. 25. 22 York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D53, account of Thomas Scauceby, master. 23 Sellers, York Memorandum Book II, p. 181. 24 See Margaret Dorrell (Rogerson), ‘The Mayor of York and the Coronation Pageant’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 5 (1971), p. 37. 25 York,York City Archives, roll C l:2; see Dorrell, ‘Mayor’, p. 37. 26 York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D53, account of Thomas Kirk, master. 27 York,York City Archives, Chamberlains’ Book Ia, fol. 113. 28 York,York City Archives, roll C 3:2; see Dorrell, ‘Mayor’, p. 38. 29 York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D53, accounts of John Gyllyot, master, first and second years. 30 York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D53, account of John Gyllyot, master, third year.

48 York records 31 York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D53; see Johnston and Dorrell, ‘York Mercers’, p. 27. 32 York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D53; see Johnston and Dorrell, ‘York Mercers’, pp. 28–29. 33 York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D53, account of Thomas Scauceby, master. 34 York,York City Archives, roll C 3:4. 35 See, among other Corpus Christi Rolls,York City Archives, roll C 100:2, 1501; C 100:5, 1505; C 100:6, 1506; C 101:1, 1508; C 101:2, 1511; C 101:3, 1512; C 101:4, 1516; C 102:1, 1520; C 103:2, 1541. York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D55 for 1502, 1503, 1506, 1507; Box D56 for 1511–1513, 1515, 1517, 1518, 1520, 1521–23; Box D57 for 1524–1531, 1533–1547; Box D59 for 1555–1557. 36 See, among others,York,York City Archives, roll C 5:1, 1501; C 5:2, 1506; C 5:3, 1508; and York, York City Archives, Chamberlains’ Book IV, fol. 73v, 1542. See also Davies, Extracts, p. 248. 37 York,York City Archives, roll C 3:4. 38 York,York Minster Library, Fabric Rolls E3/12; E3/13; E3/18; E3/22. 39 York,York Minster Library, Fabric Roll E3/24. 40 York,York Minster Library, Fabric Roll E3/26. 41 York,York City Archives, roll C 3:6. 42 York Civic Records, I -VIII, ed. Angelo Raine, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series, XCVIII (1939), CIII (1941), CVI (1942), CVIII (1945), CX (1946), CXII (1948), CXV (1950), CXIX (1953). 43 York,York City Archives, House Book 1, fol. 19v. See Raine, York Civic Records I, pp. 5–6. 44 This was invoked in 1492. (York City Archives, House Book 7, fol. 73. See Raine, York Civic Records II, p. 89.) 45 York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D54V, account of John Gyliot, master. 46 This year, the year after the dissolution of the religious guilds, is the first year that the procession of Corpus Christi is not mentioned in the surviving records. The procession was revived briefly during the reign of Mary. 47 York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D54Z, account of William Brouneflete master. 48 York,York Minster Library, Fabric Roll E3/29. 49 York,York City Archives, House Books II-IV, fols 59v and 60. Not in Raine. 50 Dorrell, ‘Two Studies,’ 62–77.

1.4 The plays of the religious guilds of York – the Creed play and the Pater Noster play From: Speculum 50 (1975), 55–90 During the late Middle Ages, three great plays were performed in the city of York. The most well known is the Corpus Christi Play, which tells the biblical story from Creation to Judgement in great detail. This play was controlled by the city council and performed by the craft guilds, normally on the feast of Corpus Christi every year. Unlike the other plays, its text, as well as a wealth of detail concerning its performance and the involvement of the individual guilds, has survived.1 The amount of evidence concerning the Corpus Christi Play has obscured the nature and significance of the other two great plays. The Creed Play and the Pater Noster Play were not originally the property of the city council and its craft guilds. Rather they were the property of two religious guilds which were each responsible (as was the city in the case of the Corpus Christi Play) for the production of its particular play. The Corpus Christi Guild was responsible for the Creed Play and the Pater Noster Guild (later the St Anthony’s Guild) was responsible for the Pater Noster Play. These religious guilds were fraternal organizations comprising laymen and clergy, men and women, joined together for mutual support and dedicated to fulfill a particular function. The primary function of the Corpus Christi Guild was to honour the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.2 The production of the Creed Play was an auxiliary function of the guild. The primary purpose of the Pater Noster Guild was the production of the Pater Noster Play. Any discussion of playmaking in York during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is, in part, predicated upon an understanding of the normal method of play production in that city. For years the assumption has been that the performance of the civic play, the Corpus Christi Play, was ‘true processional’ – that is, performed in procession from pageant wagons that were the property of the individual guilds. The understanding has always been that in York each episode normally was played twelve times at twelve ‘stations’ or playing places designated by the council within the walls of the city.3 This traditional view has recently been challenged by Alan H. Nelson, who argues that although there was a procession of pageants which stopped at each station, the actual Corpus Christi Play was performed only once, indoors at the Common Hall for the Mayor and his party.4 Martin Stevens as well has rejected the traditional theory

50 York records

and argues that a single performance followed a procession of pageants and took place on the Pavement, the location of the last station.5 The traditional view, however, has been convincingly reasserted by Margaret Dorrell (Rogerson) after long and careful study of the original manuscripts of all the surviving documents, taking into account not only the civic records, which Nelson relies on, but also records surviving in York Minster Library, and all the guild records and ordinances as well as the evidence of the manuscript of the play itself.6 Miss Dorrell has clearly demonstrated that the Corpus Christi Play (which was preceded by a torch procession honoring the host) was played at various stations throughout the city, each episode being mounted by a single guild or a combination of guilds on a pageant wagon. Her argument is strengthened by the details of the Mercers’ pageant wagon which have recently come to light.7 I have myself seen all the evidence which Miss Dorrell has used and concur in her conclusions. Although there are many aspects of the mechanics of the production of the York Corpus Christi Play which remain open to debate, it seems clear that the normal method of production was ‘true processional’. The present article, first of all, brings together for the first time all the documentary evidence concerning the Creed Play and the Pater Noster Play, some of which has never been published before. The documents are presented in Appendices I and II in chronological order.8 The body of the article is an attempt to reconstruct, on the basis of the documents, the origin and motivation of these plays, their method of production, and a history of their performances, and to form hypotheses concerning their structure and content.

1. The Creed play The Creed Play is first mentioned in the will of William Revetour in 1446 when he left to the Guild of Corpus Christi ‘quemdam librum vocatum le Crede Play cum libris et vexillis eidem pertinentibus’.9 That the play was of considerable magnitude we learn from the later inventory of 1465 where the playbook is said to comprise twenty-two quires or eighty-eight leaves. The manuscript of the Corpus Christi Play contains 248 leaves.10 The Creed Play, then, was approximately one-third the length of the longer cycle. William Revetour seems to have been a man of learning and ability. He was chantry priest of St William’s Chapel, the civic chapel on Ousebridge where the shrine of Corpus Christi was housed near the council chamber of the city. He was made free of the city in 1420, ordained acolyte in 1421, and became deputy town clerk in 1424. That same year he joined the Guild of Corpus Christi and in 1440 was made one of the wardens of the Guild.11 In his will he left nine books to various friends and relatives, including The Prick of Conscience, a glossed Bible, and the Latin commentary on Matthew attributed to St. John Chrysostom.12 His interest in plays, perhaps stimulated by his association with the civic play as deputy town clerk,13 was not limited to the Creed Play since he also left a play on St James ‘in sex paginas compilatum’ to the St Christopher’s Guild, and a gilded crown and an enamelled belt to the Girdlers of York

The plays of the religious guilds of York

51

for their episode (or pageant) in the Corpus Christi Play, the ‘Slaughter of the Innocents’. It is probable that he was himself the author of the two plays in his personal possession. From the wording of Revetour’s will we learn little concerning the motivation behind the Creed Play. However, from the account roll of the Corpus Christi Guild for 1449–51 we learn that the play was one of ‘instruction and information of the Christian faith’ dedicated ‘to the glory of God and especially to the instruction of the people’, designed to bring a knowledge of the Creed ‘to the ignorant’. It was to be played ‘openly and publicly’. The only surviving evidence from the manuscript of the play itself is a general statement concerning the production of the play written when a new copy of the manuscript was made in 1455. The statement was copied into the minute book of the city council forty years later. It repeats the emphasis of the 1449–51 roll. The play is to be performed ‘in public [. . .] for the sake of the audience gathered together for the sake of their spiritual health’. The play was clearly didactic, designed both to educate and inspire the audience, who are conceived of not as sophisticated playgoers but rather as ‘the ignorant’.14 The Creed Play, then, was part of the organized campaign of religious didacticism of the late Middle Ages in England concerned with educating the layman in the basic principles of his faith.15 The only evidence concerning the properties of the Creed Play comes from Revetour’s will and from two inventories recorded by the Guild of Corpus Christi, one in the roll of 1449–51 and the other in the register of the Guild written in 1465. Revetour’s will speaks of the banners (‘vexillis’) belonging to the play.These are specified in the inventory of 1449–51 as seventeen large banners painted or otherwise worked ‘with signs and divine mysteries’, four smaller silk banners ‘painted and gilded with angels and statements of the faith’, as well as four other ‘pennons’ similarly painted. It can be argued that the great number of banners indicates that part of the production of the play was a procession of such banners. However, it appears that the pageant wagons of the Corpus Christi Play were normally accompanied by banners. One large banner and four smaller ones appear in the inventory of the Mercers’ pageant of Doomsday in 1433, and in 1461 8s 4d was spent in replacing four of them.16 The Mercers’ banners accompanied the wagon as the episode was performed. It seems more likely, then, that the banners specified for the Creed Play were in some way part of the actual production of the play.The banners are also mentioned in the 1465 inventory, as well as twenty-four iron sockets used to extend the length of the banner poles and nine new pennons ‘with painted arms of the faith and chalices’. There was also a wooden box to store the banners, for which a lock and key are specified in 1465. An important part of the properties of the play, then, appear to have been banners embroidered or painted with devices or phrases to underline the didactic message of the play. The other properties of the play listed in the inventories are minimal. In 1449 thirteen diadems, one gilded mask, wigs (‘cheualerȝ’), and other properties were listed. In 1465 the diadems were specified as being for Christ and

52 York records

the apostles, and ‘12 rolls newly written with the articles of the Christian faith’ are also listed.17 It seems apparent from these entries that the play was based on the Apostles’ Creed rather than on the Nicene Creed or some less familiar formula.18 It also seems probable that the play was divided into twelve different episodes, each based upon one of the articles of the Creed. This possibility is supported by the fact that Revetour’s will specifies the master copy of the play (‘librum vocatum le Crede Play’) and other books belonging to it. The other books may well have been the texts of the individual episodes or pageants, similar to the single copies of the episodes or pageants of the Corpus Christi Play in the possession of the individual guilds.19 The other properties listed in 1465 are the mask, a pope’s mitre, two bishops’ mitres, a king’s crown with sceptre and glove, a key for St. Peter, two pieces of a painted tunic, and ‘nine other cheverons’.20 a. Performances

On the dorse (or reverse) side of the 1449–51 account roll of the Corpus Christi Guild, the conditions stipulated by Revetour concerning the performance of the Creed Play are stated. It was to be played ‘every twelve years or more often if possible by the City of York openly and Publicly [. . .] (to) the proper advantage of the city and honour and greater merit of the [. . .] fraternity’. Revetour did not seem to have conceived of the play as the exclusive possession of the Corpus Christi Guild. The Guild was to be the guardian of the play just as the Pater Noster Guild was the guardian of the Pater Noster Play. He seems to have hoped that the performance of the play would in some way be undertaken by the city. By the time the new master copy of the play was made in 1455, the conditions of the performance had been somewhat modified. John Fox, Revetour’s executor, with the consent of the other wardens of the Guild of Corpus Christi that year, laid down more specific conditions. According to this document the play was to be played every ten years ‘in various places (‘in varijs locis’) of the said City of York’ to audiences gathered together in these places.The play was to be financed by ‘eisdem locis inhabitantes’, the inhabitants at these places. Here is a strong indication that the Creed Play, like the Corpus Christi Play, was ‘true processional’ in its performance. It is probable that the ‘various places’ were the twelve familiar stations of the civic play. Some support for this supposition can be found in three later records.The normal tenth station for the Corpus Christi Play was outside the gates of the Minster.21 In 1483 the Dean and Chapter sat in a room above the minster gates to see both the Corpus Christi Play and the Creed Play. In 1525 and again in 1535, the mayor and council saw the play from the Common Hall station, their normal practice for the Corpus Christi Play.22 The method of financing, however, was different from the financing of the civic play. The production costs of the Corpus Christi Play were borne by the craft guilds from their own internal levies of pageant money from their

The plays of the religious guilds of York

53

members.23 The city acquired extra revenue from the play by renting out the various stations yearly to the highest bidder, who then had the right to sell seats to the public and thus make a personal profit from the concession. What seems to be suggested by the 1455 statement that the ‘inhabitants’ should pay for the play is that no personal profit was to be made at the time of the Creed Play, but rather that any profit accrued should be turned over to the Corpus Christi Guild to be used to meet the production costs. Support for this conjecture is found in two later civic documents. In 1525, the city paid the Master of Corpus Christi 4s to see the play. This amount is approximately the amount of the highest station rental at that time.24 It certainly would not have been sufficient to meet the entire cost of a play one-third the length of the Corpus Christi cycle.25 In 1535, when, as we shall see, the Creed Play was played on Corpus Christi day rather than the cycle, the city chamberlains noted that no revenue was received by the city from the stations. Lesys of Corposcristy Play Item þerof this yere nothing for that þat [sic] the play was not playd forsomuche as Creyd play was then playd by the order of my lord mayer and his bredren Summa nihil. This entry may indicate that the stations were not used, but it seems more likely from the other evidence that the entry simply means that the city did not receive payment for them because the money from the stations went to the Corpus Christi Guild. There is no other evidence concerning the normal method of financing the Creed Play.Two account rolls for the Guild of Corpus Christi survive for the years in which we know the play was performed (1505 and 1535), but no mention is made of the production. It was probably a selfsustaining enterprise accounted for on loose sheets now lost.26 On 7 September 1483, a special performance of the Creed Play was mounted for Richard III. Richard of Gloucester had long been a trusted friend of the city of York. Early in his reign, Edward IV sent his young brother to the north to act as governor. From about 1474 until he himself became king, Richard was a frequent visitor to the city and intervened for them on several occasions. For example, in 1476 Richard supported the city against a plea lodged by a dismissed common clerk to the powerful Percy family. Again in that year, Edward threatened to withdraw the city’s liberties over an incident concerning William Holbek, and Richard interceded with his brother on behalf of the city.27 In 1477 Richard and his wife became members of the Guild of Corpus Christi.28 In 1482 he settled an internal dispute in the city to which the city responded with gratitude as can be seen from this note in the minutes of the city council. 7 March, 22 Edward IV. At the which day it was agreid þat all abouesaid (i.e. the entire council) shall attend vppon the maiour vnto the frere

54 York records

austaune to thentent to yiff vnto the right high and myhti prince the duc of Gloucestre a laudable thanks for his gude and benevolent lordship that he at all tymes have had vnto this Citie desirying his grace of gude contynuaunce etc.29 After the death of Edward IV in April 1483, Richard rode into York and exacted an oath of allegiance to the young Edward V from the northern nobles assembled there. The events surrounding Richard’s own ascension to the throne are not recorded in the York records but he appeared later that year in his beloved city, where he and his retinue lodged in the archbishop’s palace.30 The occasion was the investiture of his son as Prince of Wales in the Minster on 8 September. To honor the king and celebrate the investiture, it was agreed that the Creed Play should be performed on the eve of the ceremony. The mayor and the council were with the king for the performance and the dean and chapter of the minster viewed the play from the Minster gates. Because this was a special performance, it was not financed in the usual way but rather from a general levy on all the citizens. The city council decreed that the play should be performed ‘apon the cost of the most onest men of euery parish of thys Cite’. This special performance of the Creed Play financed from a general levy indicates that the play was considered suitable for such an important royal occasion and that it was considered the property not only of the Corpus Christi Guild but also that of the city. In 1495 the Creed Play acquired a new status in the city of York. In that year the St Anthony’s Guild, which was by that time responsible for the Pater Noster Play, defaulted in the presentation of their play, and the city council agreed on 12 May that the Creed Play should be played instead. There are two entries for this year. One on 12 May agrees to the performance on the eve of the feast of St Bartholemew (23 August) and specifies that the banns were to be cried twice before the performance, once on Whit Monday (8 June) and again on the feast of Mary Magdalen (22 July). The council seems to be simply confirming an agreement reached by the mayor and the master of the Guild on the feast of Philip and James (1 May), eleven days before the meeting recorded. The second entry (dated 23 May) concerns the establishing of a regular performance every ten years according to the conditions laid down by John Fox in 1455. The conditions were copied from the manuscript of the play into the minute book of the city at this time as the scribe notes, ‘on þe next syde folowyng’, thus providing the only evidence from the register of the play that has survived. At the end of the 23 May entry there is the following notation in Latin in the same hand as the major entry. Et prima pagina et ostencio in festo apostolorum Philippi et iacobi secunda in crastino penticostes. (And the first pageant or show on the feast of Philip and James (1 May), and the second day after Pentecost (Whit Monday, 8 June.))

The plays of the religious guilds of York

55

The chronology of events is made confusing by the use of saints’ festivals but it appears that the sequence was as follows: 1.

1 May

2. 3.

12 May 23 May

4. 5. 6.

8 June 22 July 23 August

The mayor perhaps sees the ‘prima pagina’ or first episode mounted especially for him and gives the master of the Corpus Christi Guild a ‘warning’ that the banns may be called and the play played on the agreed dates. The city council confirms the mayor’s promise. The City is made aware of the entry in the Creed Play manuscript specifying a performance once every ten years. They agree to these regular performances. The banns are called for the first time, again using the first pageant. The banns are called a second time. The play is performed.

From these entries it appears that the initiative for the performance that year and the establishing of the ten-year pattern came not from the city but from the Corpus Christi Guild. In taking this action the guild was remaining faithful to the wishes of William Revetour and his executors that the play should be in some way associated with the city. It is also clear that the play could be broken up into its component ‘paginas’, pageants or episodes, adding further support to the conjecture that the play consisted of twelve separate episodes, possibly performed on ‘paginas’ or pageant wagons.31 The ten-year pattern seems to have been carefully followed. On 28 February 1504/05, the city council decreed that the Corpus Christi Guild should bring forth the Creed Play before Lammas Day (1 August) on pain of a fine of twenty pounds. No records of playmaking of any kind have survived from 1515, but the Creed Play was again performed in 1525. On 28 July 1525, the city council agreed that the sheriffs and all the council should join the mayor at the Common Hall on 30 July to see the Creed Play. It was at this time that the city paid 4s to the master of the Guild for the performance. In 1535 another step was taken in transferring the play from the sole possession of a religious guild to the possession of the city and citizens of York. In that year, for apparently the first time, the Creed Play replaced the Corpus Christi Play as the dramatic performance presented at the feast of Corpus Christi. The performance was an unusual one since it was performed on Corpus Christi Day and also on the next day: ‘Item payd to Maister Thomas Flemyng for the Chamber that my lord mayor and his bredren stude in of Corpuscristi day and the fryday after to here the play vj s viij d’. The procession of Corpus Christi was held on the day after the festival as was customary at this time,32 and the city council paid their normal fee for the sermon preached on the occasion.33 The play seems to have been divided (perhaps at the end of the seventh article) and played on two successive afternoons leaving the morning of the day after the feast for the procession and the sermon of Corpus Christi.

56 York records

As it happens, the performance of 1535 was the last recorded performance of the Creed Play. On 17 March 1545, the mayor was instructed to call the master of the Corpus Christi Guild to discuss the ‘playng of the creyd play as he shall thynk good for the mooste profett and aduantage of the sayd Citie’. Apparently (for possible reasons to be discussed below) it was agreed that the Creed Play should not be played since there is no further mention of it that year and the preparations for the Corpus Christi Play went ahead as usual.34 The actual recorded performances of the Creed Play, therefore, were in the years 1483, 1495, 1505, 1525 and 1535. From the beginning the play seems to have been considered by its sponsors and by the city itself in some way the possession of the city and citizens, to be performed for their honour and benefit. In 1535 it had taken the place of the Corpus Christi Play as the major dramatic presentation for that year. Thirty-three years later the city again sought to perform the play, with unfortunate results. b. The Creed play after dissolution, 1547

The Act of Dissolution in 1547 abolished all religious guilds and confiscated their property to the crown. With this act the Guild of Corpus Christi ceased to have any legal existence. However, as early as 1478 the guild had taken over the assets of the Hospital of St Thomas the Martyr without Micklegate Bar. The hospital continued in existence after Dissolution and eluded the seizure of its property by the crown by inviting the mayor and the aldermen to become members of the hospital. This they agreed to do and on 28 April 1552, they joined the hospital, whereupon the master resigned and the mayor, Richard White, was elected master and two councillors became wardens.35 By this device the Hospital of St Thomas was taken over by the municipality. Further more, the city council considered itself to have become, in some ways, the Corpus Christi Guild. When the ancient customs were revived under Mary in 1554, the mayor took on the role of master of the Guild, as can be seen from the following entry in the Chamberlains’ accounts: ‘Item payd for a whyte wand to my Lorde Maior as Master of Corpuscrysty gyld the fryday after Corpus cristi day iiij d’.36 In 1546 an inventory had been made of the possessions of the Corpus Christi Guild by the commissioners of Henry VIII.37 No mention is made in the inventory of the Creed Play or its properties. On 5 February 1564/65, a man called Symson who had been sheriff of the city at the time of Dissolution brought to the wardens of St.Thomas’ Hospital the ‘aunciente booke or Regestre of the Crede play to be saffly kept emonges th’evidens as it was before’.38 It appears to have been common knowledge that the play had survived, since three years earlier the city council agreed that either the Corpus Christi Play should be played ‘or elles the Crede play if apon examinacion it may be’. By 1565, however, the play was openly in the possession of the successor to the Corpus Christi Guild, the Hospital of St Thomas, which was itself under the control of the city of York.

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On 15 February 1567/68, the city council decided to stage the Creed Play instead of the Corpus Christi Play and made detailed preparations for its production. Since the Corpus Christi Guild no longer existed as a real entity, the city itself was for the first time in complete control of the financing and mechanics of the production. The play was to be financed from the pageant money of the craft guilds which normally sponsored a pageant in the Corpus Christi Play.39 The other preparations specified in the minutes for February 15 are of particular interest. Because this was the first time that the city produced the play, the details listed here may well represent the normal procedures for the Creed Play, never before recorded in the civic records because the Corpus Christi Guild had previously been responsible for the production. The Chamberlains were to be in charge, first acquiring from the ‘master and bretherne’ of St Thomas’ Hospital the ‘Original or Registre’, then auditioning the players and providing the parts they were to play ‘soo that they may haue leysure to kunne euery one his part’.40 Finally, and perhaps most significantly, they were to ‘see all maner the pageantes playeng geare and necessaries to be provided in a readynes’ for the performance. This is the first time that pageant wagons are specified clearly for the Creed Play. As we have seen, the earlier records indicate that the play was ‘true processional’ which suggests the use of wagons for the stage settings as they were used in the Corpus Christi Play. The note in 1495 that the ‘prima pagina’ had been played separately also suggests that a pageant wagon may have been used. An hypothesis concerning what the pageant wagons were and who supplied them will be suggested below, but this entry seems to confirm the earlier suggestions that the Creed Play was mounted on pageant wagons in procession at various locations throughout the city of York in a manner similar to the Corpus Christi Play. The elaborate preparations outlined on 15 February came to nothing. Word of the impending production reached the Ecclesiastical Commissioners of the Council of the North and the Register was called in. On 27 March 1568, Dean Matthew Hutton, having ‘pervsed’ the play, sent the mayor and the council a letter ‘advising’ them not to produce it. In his words,‘how the state will beare with it I know not’.41 On March 30 the council was read his letter and agreed ‘to have no play this yere.’ The newly copied parts were called in by the city council.This is the last specific mention of the Creed Play in any of the records of the city of York, although we can assume that it was one of ‘all suche þe bookes as pertayne this Cittie’ which two aldermen were to request from the Archbishop in 1575. There is no evidence that this request was ever made or granted. c. Possible content of the play

The content of the Creed Play at York and other Creed plays which are known to have existed elsewhere has been the subject of considerable speculation.42 Most recently, Rosemary Woolf has suggested that it might have been ‘a sleeker

58 York records

version of an Old and New Testament cycle’.43 In this suggestion, Miss Woolf is simply reinforcing the interesting theory put forward by M.D. Anderson earlier for the general shape of the Creed Play.44 Miss Anderson based her theory upon her wide knowledge of the didactic art of the period, particularly on the Creed illuminations in the Arundel Psalter and the Malvern Windows, as well as on the Pentecost pageant in the Chester Cycle (which is a Creed Play in little) and on other texts. She points out the traditional ascription of one article of the Apostles’ Creed to each of the twelve apostles which appears again and again in contemporary didactic tracts.45 These twelve traditional articles were probably those written on the twelve scrolls specified for the apostles in the 1465 Corpus Christi inventory. But even more interesting are her suggestions, based on pictorial evidence, for the scenes that traditionally accompanied each article: Article

Apostle

Scene

1 I believe in God the father almighty maker of heaven and earth 2 In Jesus Christ his only son our Lord 3 Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary 4 Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried 5 He descended into hell and the third day rose again from the dead 6 He ascended into heaven and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty 7 From which he shall come to judge he quick and the dead

Peter

God enthroned

Andrew

Christ enthroned

James Major

Nativity

John

Crucifixion

Thomas

Resurrection

James Minor

Ascension

Philip

8 I believe in the Holy Ghost 9 The Holy Catholic Church and the communion of saints

Bartholomew Matthew

Second coming, Christ between angels with emblems of the Passion Pentecost Three arches each containing a robed figure of the catholic church Penance Resurrection of the dead Coronation of the Virgin46

10 The forgiveness of sins 11 The Resurrection of the dead 12 The Life everlasting

Simon Jude Matthias

It has been argued above that the Creed Play at York was ‘true processional’ in its performance and that pageant wagons were probably used for the production from the beginning. Pageant wagons and their properties were bulky and expensive items which had to be continually refurbished and housed when they were not in use.47 There is no mention of pageant wagons or rents for pageant houses anywhere in the accounts of the Corpus Christi Guild or in the city records concerned with the renting of pageant houses.48 Furthermore, until

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1478 when it merged with the Hospital of St Thomas, the Guild of Corpus Christi had no permanent home, but stored its possessions in a single storeroom and rented the Mercers’ Hall for its annual feast.49 The Guild, therefore, never possessed pageant wagons of its own for the Creed Play. However, there existed in the city of York wagons and properties for ten of the twelve scenes suggested in Miss Anderson’s list. Only article two (Christ enthroned) and article nine (the Holy Catholic Church) could not be easily mounted from among the wagons and properties of the craft guilds. But the Corpus Christi Guild itself possessed just those properties (and, except for the diadems, wigs, and scrolls for the apostles, only those properties) which were needed for the two missing scenes. Among those listed were a diadem for Christ, a gilded mask and two pieces of a painted tunic. Those were exactly the articles of costuming used by the Mercers for Christ in Judgment: ‘Array for god þat ys to say a Sirke wounded (i.e., a tunic painted with the marks of the Passion) a diademe with a veserne (mask) gilded’.50 The costuming was thus provided by the Guild for the scene of Christ enthroned. Also among the properties held by the Guild were one key for St Peter, one pope’s mitre, two bishops’ mitres and one king’s crown with sceptre and glove. These were clearly used in the representation of the Holy Catholic Church, probably indicating the supremacy of the church over all temporal rulers. It was possibly this aspect of the play that caused the city council and the Corpus Christi Guild to cancel the regular performance in 1545, during the last years of the reign of Henry VIII, and that caused the phrase ‘and how the state will beare with it I know not’ in Matthew Hutton’s letter of 1568 to carry such weight. It seems clear from all the evidence which Miss Anderson brings to bear, and all the evidence of the didactic tracts, that the Creed Play must have contained something very close to Miss Anderson’s twelve scenes. The York Creed Play, as we have noted, was approximately one-third the length of the York Corpus Christi Play. There are forty-eight separate pageants in that manuscript.51 It seems reasonable, then, to argue that the manuscript of the Creed Play was long enough to contain twelve separate pageants in a scheme similar to the one suggested by Miss Anderson. The Corpus Christi Guild had properties for only two of the scenes. It is possible, then, that the other ten scenes were provided by the craft guilds concerned whenever the Creed Play was performed. There is no documentary evidence for such a suggestion, but it must be remembered that the Guild of Corpus Christi was not necessarily an organization separate from the guildsmen of York. There are 16,850 names in the register of the Guild, listing the membership from 1415–1547.52 Almost every citizen of York who could afford the annual fee of 2d belonged to the Guild.53 In this way, participation in the Guild play by the members of the craft guilds was not participation in the play of an alien body, but in the play of their own religious guild. If, then, we assume that the Creed Play, like the Corpus Christi Play, was staged in a ‘true processional’ manner, there is no other conclusion that can be reached but that the pageants of the craft guilds were used

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in the performance.54 Granting such an assumption, it is possible to draw up the following scheme for the play: Petition

Apostle

Scene

1 I believe in God the father almighty maker of heaven and earth 2 In Jesus Christ his only son our Lord

Peter

God enthroned Barkers

Andrew

Christ enthroned

3 Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary

James Major

Nativity

4 Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried.

John

Crucifixion

5 He descended into hell and the third day rose again from the dead. 6 He ascended into heaven and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty 7 From which he shall come to judge he quick and the dead

Thomas

Resurrection

Any or all of: Tapisters Tilemakers Painters Butchers Wrights

James Minor

Ascension

Taylors

8 I believe in the Holy Ghost 9 The Holy Catholic Church and the communion of saints 10 The forgiveness of sins 11 The Resurrection of the dead 12 The Life everlasting.

Guild

Properties from the Corpus Christi Guild Any or all of: Tilethatchers Chandlers 2nd Goldsmiths55

Philip

Second coming, Mercers Christ between angels with emblems of the Passion56 Bartholomew Pentecost Potters Matthew

Representation of church and state

Properties from the Corpus Christi Guild

Simon

Penance

Plummers

Jude

Resurrection of the dead Coronation of the Virgin

Saddelers

Matthias

Mayor59 later Ostlers

Pageant in CC Play Creation 1

Journey and birth Angels & shepherds Adoration of Magi 1st Trial Pilate 2nd Trial Pilate Crucifixio Mortificacio Resurrection

Ascension

Doomsday

Pentecost

Woman taken in Adultery57 Harrowing of Hell58

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It is interesting to note that if all the ‘Nativity’ and ‘Crucifixion’ pageants were used, the total number of pageants is seventeen, the number of large banners bequeathed by William Revetour to the Guild of Corpus Christi in 1446. What wagons were used for the two scenes whose properties were provided by the Guild is open to speculation. It is possible that the scene of Christ enthroned was the first Goldsmiths’ pageant of Herod’s court. If this theory is correct, then the production of the Creed Play, like that of the Corpus Christi Play, would follow the pageant route from the priory of Holy Trinity Micklegate to the Pavement. The first episode would depict St Peter reading the first clause of the Creed from his roll, followed by a scene where the angels adore God enthroned in heaven using the Barkers’ pageant of Creation (Play I).The second episode would see St Andrew with a similar scene of adoration of Christ enthroned. The third would present St James Major and possibly all three nativity pageants grouped together to dramatize the Incarnation. The fourth would present the Coronation of the Virgin. The texts, of course, would not be those of the narrative Corpus Christi Play, but rather interpretations of the various events using the scenes and properties ‘to the glory of God and the education of the people’.

2. The Pater Noster play Scholarly speculation concerning the nature and history of the York Pater Noster Play has been hampered by the mistranscription of one document seemingly related to the play and the disappearance of another. It was not until 1890 that the chartulary and minute book of the York Mercers was discovered and recognized for what it was. At that time a short article concerning the discovery appeared in The Antiquary.60 One of the few pages transcribed in that article was an ordinance concerning playmaking, in which it appeared that the Mercers were setting out general regulations to ‘bring forth pater noster play’. When Maud Sellers began her edition of the Mercers’ records for the Surtees Society she did not have the chartulary in her possession and relied on what she refers to as the ‘Bemrose’ transcript.61 She also printed ‘pater noster play’.62 The chartulary is now in the possession of the Worshipful Company of Merchant Adventurers in York. The ordinance in question has been over-written in black nineteenth-century ink. Close study of the page under ultraviolet light has made it clear that the words are not ‘pater noster play’ but ‘þair play’, that is, the Mercers’ pageant of ‘Doomsday’ in the Corpus Christi Play.63 Any speculation, therefore, concerning the involvement of the Mercers in the Pater Noster Play as producers is invalid. There is no documentary evidence to indicate that they were in any way especially associated with this play. The second document which has hampered consideration of the Pater Noster Play is a compotus or account roll of the Pater Noster Guild for the year 1399. This roll was in the personal possession of James Raine, who allowed

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Lucy Toulmin Smith (the first editor of the Corpus Christi Play) to see it and transcribe parts of it. Miss Smith writes, But the only gleaning as to the gild-play is that among the ‘debita verita’ scored off. John Downom and his wife had owed 2s. 2d. for entrance fee, ‘sed dictus Johannes dicit se expendisse in diuersis expensis circa ludum Accidie ex parte Ric. Walker ij s j d ideo de predicto petit allocari.’ In this play we may presume that the vice of gluttony [sic] was held up to scorn.64 The episode mentioned here is a play concerning the sin of ‘accidie’ or sloth. In 1928, when Karl Young was preparing his article on the Pater Noster Play, the roll could not be found in York.65 However, when Angelo Raine, James Raine’s son, published his Medieval York in 1955, he discussed the document in considerable detail.66 Whether he was relying on the document or on his own or his father’s earlier transcription, it is impossible to tell. The document still cannot be found. The problem is that Raine transcribes the entry concerning the play as ‘ludum doctorum’ or the play of the doctors. It will appear from the discussion of the possible content of this play that although Miss Smith was probably correct, either reading is possible. The earliest record of the existence of the Pater Noster Play in York occurs incidentally in Wyclif ’s De Officio Pastorali: herfore freris han tauȝt in England þe Paternoster in Engliȝesh tunge, as men seyen in þe pleye of Yorke and in many oþere cuntreys siþene paternoster is part of matheus gospel, as clerkes knowen, why may not al be turnyd to English trewely as is þis part?67 Karl Young dates this reference about 1378.68 It is part of Wyclif ’s argument for the translation of the Scriptures and suggests two things about the play – first, that it was inspired or otherwise encouraged by the friars, and secondly, that it must have presented the words of the prayer fully and accurately, otherwise his final question would have no meaning. The first major document concerning the Pater Noster Play is the return made by the Pater Noster Guild to Richard II’s council in 1388–89.69 This return makes it clear that the play predated the Guild and that the Guild was founded for the specific purpose of being the custodian of the play. We learn from the return that in the course of the play ‘many vices and sins were condemned as well as virtues commended’ and that the play was considered beneficial for the ‘health and emendation of the souls both of the controllers and the audience’. The Pater Noster Play, then, like the Creed Play, was considered to be an instrument of religious instruction which the Guild was bound to cause to be performed as an act of piety. Supplementing its concern for the play, the Guild kept a seven-branch candelabrum (one candle for each of the seven petitions of the prayer) which was lit on Sundays and feast days.70 Furthermore, the guild was responsible for a table or drawing (tabulum) which hung in the

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minster next to the candelabrum and depicted the complete argument and usefulness of the prayer (‘de toto processu utilitatis oracionis dominice’).71 This secondary concern of the guild taken with Wyclif ’s comments makes it clear that although the play was concerned with vices and virtues, it was equally concerned with the words of the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. a. Performances

The only general evidence concerning the way in which the Pater Noster Play was performed comes from the earliest and latest documents. The 1389 return and the minutes of the city council for 1558 and 1572 provide the only clues to the actual method of performance. The major clause concerning the play in the return is as follows: Item whenever there is a performance of the play of the said Lord’s Prayer in the City of York, they [the members of the fraternity] are bound to ride with the players of the same through certain principal streets of the City of York and, for the better appearance of the ride, are to wear one and the same livery; and to ensure a peaceful performance of the said play some of them are bound to ride or go with the players until the said play is completely finished. From this we may conclude that, first of all, the play was not necessarily performed by the members of the Guild, but by players engaged for the purpose. Secondly, it appears that this play, like the Creed Play and the Corpus Christi Play, was performed in procession. The guildsmen were to ‘ride [. . .] through certain principal streets in the city’, probably following the pageant route, and also some of them were to ride or go with the players until the said play is completely finished. This last phrase clearly implies that the play was played in more than one location.72 The evidence of the last performances of the Pater Noster Play confirms this suggestion. In 1558 the Pater Noster Play was substituted for the Corpus Christi Play on Corpus Christi Day and the mayor and the city council saw the play from a chamber at the Common Hall gates, as was their custom at this time to see the civic play.73 The usual three meals were provided on that occasion, which suggests that the performance, like that of the Corpus Christi Play, took all day to complete, again indicating a ‘true processional’ production. The final evidence suggesting this type of performance comes from the minutes of 1572 when the familiar stations of the Corpus Christi Play are specified for the Pater Noster Play. The evidence for the ‘true processional’ performance of the Pater Noster Play is scanty and separated by more than 150 years. It can be argued that the evidence supports a single performance for the mayor and corporation as well as a more public one.74 But this play, like the others, was a didactic tool. The Pater Noster Guild was established to see to it that the play was performed for

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the general good of the people of York, not for the edification of a small group of leading citizens. To fulfil the original purpose of the play it would have to be played openly and publicly. Furthermore, the minutes of 1558 indicate that every effort was made to advertise the play by the crying of the banns throughout the city on St George’s Day (23 April) and in the surrounding countryside on Whit Monday (30 May). Such advertising would hardly be done for a private performance. In 1389 the properties of the play could be stored in a single wooden box and were of no value except for the play. This indicates that, as in the case of the Creed Play, the guild held only some of the properties necessary for the production of the play.What these properties were is not specified. It is possible that this play, like the Creed Play, was mounted on the pageant wagons of the craft guilds. Evidence supporting this suggestion comes from the details provided for the 1572 performance when it was specified that the pageant maisters of suche pageantes of certayne Occupacions of this Citie as shalbe occupied in Pater Noster play or for the Shew this yere and alsoo twoo other honest men of the same occupacions shall goo togithers with their owne pageant and attend apon the same and see good ordre kepte.75 Here it is clear that, for the last performance as least, the wagons of the guilds were used. Fortunately, the guild records of the Bakers have survived for that year and it is clear that their pageant of the Last Supper and its gear were part of the performance. An hypothesis concerning how the pageant of the Last Supper came to be part of a Pater Noster Play will be suggested below. No records survive of an actual performance of the Pater Noster Play before 1536. But the existence of the play and the fact that performances had been held or were projected is clear from other evidence. In 1446 the Pater Noster Guild merged with the St Anthony’s Guild.76 The merger seems to have been similar to that of the Corpus Christi Guild with the Hospital of St Thomas, although the St Anthony’s Guild was the larger body and the name Pater Noster Guild disappears. The St Anthony’s Guild, however, maintained responsibility for the play. Apparently this responsibility was felt initially by the chaplains, since the will of William Downham, guild chaplain, turns over what he refers to as his playbooks of the Pater Noster Play (‘omnes libros meos’) to William Ball, Master of St Anthony’s, in 1464.These seem to have been his personal possessions and were probably single acting copies of various episodes. This again argues for a ‘processional’ performance. On 12 May 1495, the same day that the city council instructed the master of the Corpus Christi Guild to produce the Creed Play, the master and brethren of the St Anthony’s Guild were fined an unspecified amount for not bringing forth the Pater Noster Play ‘accordyng to þe wurship of þis Citie’ and instructed to prepare their play for the next year. It would appear from this entry that the Pater Noster Play had enjoyed a position similar to the Creed

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Play after this date and was regularly performed. It would also appear that, like the Creed Play in later years, the regular performance was accompanied by an agreement with the city council that involved a fine for not playing the play at the appointed time. Since no documentary evidence of any kind concerning playmaking has survived from 1496, it is impossible to say whether the play was performed that year. On 19 April 1536, the city council agreed that the Pater Noster Play ought ‘by course’ to be played that year. Following the pattern set the previous year for the Creed Play, it was agreed that the Corpus Christi Play should be ‘sparyd for this yere and not playd’ although the Pater Noster Play was not to be played on Corpus Christi Day, as the Creed Play had been, but at its regular time of Lammas Day (1 August). The date was later changed to 6 August. Apparently there was no dramatic performance on Corpus Christi Day that year, although the Corpus Christi procession took place as usual on the day after the feast.77 The phrase ‘by course’ in the minutes for 19 April again suggests that the performance of the Pater Noster Play came at regular intervals. At first glance it would appear that perhaps the Pater Noster Play was done every tenth year, beginning in 1496, as the Creed Play was. This is impossible to verify since the Corpus Christi Play was definitely played ten years later in 1516.78 It is possible, but unlikely, that both were played that year. Whatever the stipulated time, it is clear that the performances were regular and under quasi-municipal control from the late fifteenth century. There is no evidence concerning how the play was financed before Dissolution. b. Performances after 1547

After Dissolution the lands and properties of the St Anthony’s Guild became the property of the city of York. How this was accomplished is not clear but it may be related to the following regulation passed by the city council on 3 January 1546/47: Item if that the Chauntery lands within this Citie be sold into the Kings majesties hands that the Citie of York may have the preferment of the said lands for the amendment and uphold of the same Citie whiche is in gret decaye.79 In 1551 the council undertook a major repair of St Anthony’s Hall. An organization known as the St Anthony’s Guild continued after Dissolution and from the minutes of 14 April 1572, and 17 June 1575, seems to have retained some connection with the play, but its structure must have been different from the old religious guild. The performances of the Pater Noster Play recorded after 1547 are those for 1558 and 1572. The production of 1558 was undertaken entirely by the city and financed by the craft guilds which were at first to turn over to the city one half of the pageant money which they had collected in the normal way. This

66 York records

did not prove totally satisfactory since the chamber was short four pounds in the final reckoning and the mayor was later instructed to approach the craft guilds again for the remaining half of their pageant money. This performance in 1558 was the first civic production of one of the plays of the old religious guilds. The city was clearly feeling its way towards the best way in which to finance the play. In 1568, when the Creed Play was proposed, it was simply stated that the craft guilds would turn over their pageant money.This use of the guild money might seem to argue against any involvement of the guilds and their pageant wagons in the actual performance. However, the same method of financing seems to have been used in 1572.That year the Bakers paid 12s ‘to the Chambre for our pagyant money’, as well as paying l1d for the setting up of their pageant and gear for the performance and 6d for ale for the members of the guild who walked with the pageant wagon during the performance. Both the performances of the Pater Noster Play after 1547, then, replaced the regular performance of the Corpus Christi Play and were financed by the craft guilds.The city had by this time taken over the care of the properties other than those supplied by the crafts. In 1558, the chamber paid the considerable sum of 53s 4d to a painter called Ametson for painting ‘bannar clothes’ for the play. These may have been replacing banners painted with signs and symbols similar to those specified for the Creed Play. The question of the players for the Pater Noster Play and the Creed Play remains a tantalizing one. As we have seen, the city chamberlains were to audition and engage the players for the proposed production of the Creed Play in 1568. The Bakers’ accounts for 1572 mention no payment by the guild for players for the Pater Noster Play, although in earlier Bakers’ records for performances of the Corpus Christi Play a lump sum of 10s 8d regularly appears for the players.80 It is possible that the financial responsibility of the producer of the Creed Play and Pater Noster Play, whether it was one of the religious guilds or the city, was limited to the special properties for that play and the payment of the players, while the craft guilds bore the expenses for the wagons and properties. The Creed Play was discontinued in 1568. The last known performance of the Corpus Christi Play was 1569. The performance of the Pater Noster Play in 1572 was the last production of a religious drama staged by the city council of York. They agreed to perform the play on ‘the Thursday next after Trynitie Sonday’, that is, on Corpus Christi Day, in defiance of an ecclesiastical hierarchy which had banned the feast. The play was mounted at the thirteen stations of the Corpus Christi Play and the guilds seem to have cooperated fully. But the performance was not without incident. Two aldermen (both merchants), William Bekwith and Christopher Harbert, refused to stay in the Common Hall chamber to see the play, apparently leaving the performance mid-way through. The rest of the council was so incensed that Bekwith and Harbert were thrown in jail, only to be released the next day to be disenfranchised for refusing to obey the mayor and follow the ancient customs of the city. They were later reinstated.

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The performance and the ensuing scandal did not escape the notice of the ecclesiastical authorities. On 30 July the archbishop sent for a copy of the ‘bookes of the Pater Noster play’.This effectively put an end to religious drama in York although three years later new copies of some of the books of the Pater Noster Play were made and delivered to the master of St Anthony’s ‘to be saiflie kepte to thuse of the said hospital’. It was agreed at that time that the books in the hands of the archbishop should be ‘required to be restored agayne’. Three weeks later the general agreement was made concerning the playbooks of the city in the hands of the archbishop, which has been discussed in relation to the Creed Play. The Pater Noster Play, then, began as part of the educational activities of the friars in the fourteenth century and ended 200 years later as the last civic play of York. As it evolved from quasi-municipal control to complete control by the city from the end of the fifteenth century to 1572, only three actual performances are recorded.Yet it was an ancient and honoured play thought worthy to replace the Corpus Christi Play. Like that play and the Creed Play it seems to have been performed in a ‘true processional’ manner and to have employed the pageant wagons of the craft guilds to mount the production. c. Possible content of the play

It is by no means clear what comprised the various scenes of the Pater Noster Play. It has long been considered as one of the first morality plays, and the assumption has always been made that it was a straightforward presentation of the Seven Deadly Sins.The words of the 1389 return that it was a play in which ‘many vices and sins were condemned as well as virtues commended’ taken with Miss Smith’s reading of the 1399 roll as ‘ludum Accidie’ has led naturally to this conclusion. Further support for this idea comes from the details which have survived concerning the Pater Noster Play at Beverley.81 The Beverley play was done by the guilds of the city at seven assigned stations similar to the stations for the Beverley Corpus Christi Play. There were eight pageants representing ‘viciose,’ pride, lust, sloth, gluttony, hatred, avarice, and anger. One other theory concerning Pater Noster plays has been proposed. Basing his arguments on records surviving in Lincoln, Hardin Craig has suggested that each vice was matched against a particular saint who represented the corresponding virtue.82 M.D. Anderson discounts this theory because of a lack of pictorial evidence and is further troubled by the difficulty of reconciling such a series of saints’ plays with the title Pater Noster Play. Two facts about the York Pater Noster Play emerge from the documents we have been considering. From Wyclif ’s comments it is clear that the words of the seven petitions were in some way emphasized. From the 1572 entry it is clear that the pageant wagon of the Last Supper and its gear (which comprised diadems and a paschal lamb) were used.83 These facts cannot be reconciled with either the theory that the play was a straightforward confrontation of the sins and their opposites or the theory that it was a kind of saints’ play.

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Miss Anderson discusses the Pater Noster plays under the chapter heading ‘The Painted Sermons and the ‘Pater Noster Plays’.84 A clearer idea of what scenes comprised the Pater Noster Play can be achieved within the context of the contemporary sermons on the subject. Two published collections of sermons in Middle English, Mirk’s ‘Festial’ and the BL MS Royal 18.B.xxiii collection; both contain sermons which treat the Lord’s Prayer in considerable detail.85 From these two sermons it is clear that there was a standard interpretation of the prayer matching each petition of the prayer with one of the Seven Deadly Sins. The first petition, ‘Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name’, is matched with the sin of pride; the second, ‘Thy Kingdom come’, with covetousness; the third, ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’, with envy; the fourth, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’, with sloth; the fifth, ‘And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors’, with wrath; the sixth, ‘Lead us not into temptation’, with gluttony; and the seventh, ‘Deliver us from evil’, with lechery. There is no need, then, to match the vices with virtues or with saints since there was a standard homiletic tradition matching them with the actual petitions of the prayer. The Baker’s pageant of the Last Supper fits easily into a scheme based on the vices and the petitions. At the Last Supper Christ instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist. In his discussion of the fourth petition of the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’, John Mirk, having discussed ‘bodely fode’, then goes on to discuss the sacrament: Ϸen ys þer bred þat ys gostly fode and susteynyth þe sowle as oþer bred doþe þe body. Ϸe wheche bred ȝe schull pray our gostly Fadyr forto ȝeue you on þe holyday, þat ȝe mowe ete þat in your hert yche day aftyr yn your labour, and soo strenkþen your soule þerwyth pat ȝe grucche not aȝeyn God for doses þat ȝe haue yn your labour, but taketh hit in paciens and yn pennaunce for your synnys.86 The preacher of the Royal MS collection begins his discussion of the fourth petition with a discussion of the sacrament, citing St Augustine and various New Testament texts: þat is to sey, brede for oure fode bodelyche; and brede of oure mynd of God to resceyve hym in is Sacrament of is body; also of gosteliche brede, þat is tech ynvs of Goddes worde to fede with oure sowle. Ϸerfore Criste biddeþ vs to aske oure iche dayes brede to-daye; þat is to sey, we shall desire to be fed iche daye with brede of bodely fode, and with brede of þe Sacrament, resceyvynge it goostely as prestes resceyve it bodely; for what man þat is disposed by charite and verry byleve, he resceyveþ as medefully Goddis bodie in is sowle as þe preste resceyveþ hym in þe holy Sacrament. Also we shall desire to fede vs iche day with þe brede of Goddes word; þat is to sey, we shull desire to here all predicacions and oþur holy tales and writynges / of holy writt, þat oure sowles myȝght be fed þerwith goostely as oure body is fed with bodely fode.87

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The pageant based on the fourth petition, then, included the institution of the Sacrament as part of the exposition of the meaning of the petition and probably went on, from the exposition, to condemn the sin of sloth, which, as Mirk puts it, ‘woll noþer trauayll to helpe his body, ny his soule, but faryth as a swyne, etyth and drynkyth and slepyth’.88 If Miss Smith’s reading of the 1399 roll is correct, then it is this pageant concerning the fourth petition which is the ‘ludum Accidie’. However, if Raine is correct and the reading is ‘ludus doctorum,’ then it may be the pageant of the fifth petition, ‘And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors’. The preacher of MS Royal 18.B.xxiii introduces his exposition of this petition in this way: Worthy sirs, takes good hede to þis preyour, for amonge all oþur oure Fadur in heven chargeþ vs moste with þis. God will þat we knowe and haue freshlich in oure mynd þat we ben all is dettores for we arn bownd to serve hym and to kepe is commaundementis. Also God chargeþ vs to love hym aboven all þinge, and oure neyþbore as oure-selfe. And as often tymes as we afend God in anny of þese synnes falesly, we breke is commaundementes, and þan we serve hym nott ne love hym not as we shuld.89 The two commandments of the New Testament here enunciated are presented in the York Corpus Christi Play in the pageant of the Sporiers and Lorimers depicting Christ with the doctors in the Temple. Following an exegetical tradition of the church fathers,90 the substance of the discussion in the Temple in that episode is the exposition of these two commandments, ‘God chargeþ vs to love hym aboven all þinge, and our neyþore as oure-selfe’.91 It is possible, then, that Raine’s reading is correct and the pageant of ‘Christ and the Doctors’, the ‘ludus doctorum’, was used for the exposition of the fifth petition before the play moved into a discussion of the corresponding sin, wrath. It is also possible that Miss Smith was correct and a more obvious pageant such as the Plummers’ ‘Woman Taken in Adultery’ was used for the fifth petition. Clues to the pageants used to illustrate petitions 1, 2, 3, and 6 can also be found in the sermons. Both Mirk and the preacher of MS Royal 18.B.xxiii relate the first petition honouring God, and its corresponding sin of pride to the fall of Lucifer who refused to acknowledge the supremacy of God the Father. Mirk says that a man in pride is ‘lyke to Lucyfere þat wold haue beraft God his worschip’.92 The obvious pageant and properties from the Corpus Christi Play to be used here is the Barkers’ ‘Creation’ (I), which includes the fall of Lucifer through pride.The second petition, ‘Thy kingdom come,’ could have used the Mercers’ ‘Doomsday’ pageant with its representation of heaven and the angels that decorated the wagon. The MS Royal preacher relates the third petition ‘Thy will be done’ to Christ’s agony in the garden: But here ȝe shall vndirstond þat ryght as Crist afore is passion preyed þat is passion shuld passe fro hym, for he was so sore a-dred of is deth þat he swett stremes of blod for drede of is passion þat he knewe was commynge, and ȝit

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he seid to is Fadur, ‘Ϸi will be do and nott myn,’ and so shull we, what-euer þat we will desire of God, putt it all in is will for he will do þe beste for vs, þoȝ it be strait and hard to vs.93 Possibly the pageant of the Cordwainers which included this episode was used for this petition. The sixth petition, ‘Lead us not into temptation’, was matched with the sin of gluttony, and together they inevitably resulted in Mirk’s using the Fall of Adam and Eve as the illustration for his sermon. Here the Cowpers’ pageant of Creation (V), the ‘Fall of Adam and Eve’, could have been used. Neither preacher cites a text for the seventh petition, ‘Deliver us from Evil’, but an obvious choice for a pageant would be the Saddlers’ pageant of the ‘Harrowing of Hell’ which must have included an elaborate Hellmouth. From this discussion it is possible to draw up a tentative scheme for the Pater Noster Play: Petition

Sin

Pageant

Guild

1 Our Father which art in heaven hallowed by thy name 2 Thy Kingdom come 3 Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven 4 Give us this day our daily bread 5 And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors 6 Lead us not into temptation 7 Deliver us from evil

Pride

Fall of Lucifer

Barkers

Covetousness Doomsday Mercers Envy Garden of Gethsemane Cordwainers Sloth

Last Supper

Bakers

Wrath

Spicers & Lorimers Plummers

Gluttony

?Play of the Doctors ?Woman Taken in Adultery Fall of Adam and Eve

Lechery

Harrowing of Hell

Saddelers

Cowpers

Whatever validity this scheme may have, it must be remembered that the scenes depicted in these pageants represented only part of the action used to expound each petition and its corresponding sin. Possibly the petition was read before each episode began, to be followed by the introduction of the appropriate sin. The sins may have been presented dramatically on other pageants or played on the street. The presentation of the sin would in its turn have been followed by a condemnation of the evil represented by the sin. During the course of this condemnation, the scene on the borrowed pageant wagon would be acted. Without the text or more details concerning the properties it is impossible to be more definite about the content of this play, but it is unlikely that it had much in common with the lively (not to say riotous) moralities such as Mankind. The Creed Play and the Pater Noster Play both were conceived as didactic instruments for the cure of souls. They began as the property of two religious guilds in York and ended as two parts of the great dramatic trilogy at York controlled by the municipality. Yet there was never a time when they did not, in fact, belong to the citizens of York. It was for them that they were written and

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played. Furthermore, if the arguments for ‘true processional’ staging of these plays mounted in part at least upon the pageant wagons of the crafts is accepted, then it is clear that the people of York were deeply committed to these plays, sharing in their production in a very real way. It was perhaps the involvement of the craft guilds that encouraged the city council to gradually assume more and more civic responsibility for these plays. By at least 1495, fifty years before Dissolution, they were already in some measure under the control of the city council. This in no way detracted from their didactic function or religious purpose. This function and purpose they shared with the Corpus Christi Play, which seems to have been under the guardianship of the city council from the beginning. From the history of these other plays it is possible to understand more fully the way in which the city became involved in the management of the Corpus Christi Play. Perhaps when it was first performed (in the words of the 1389 Pater Noster return) ‘many said, Would that this play could be put on a permanent basis in this city for the good of souls and the consolation of citizens and neighbours’.94 In a world where the modern distinctions between the church and state, the sacred and the secular, did not exist, there was nothing incongruous in the city undertaking such a play.

Appendix I The documents:The creed play

1 1446. Extracts from the will of William Revetour. York, Borthwick Institute for Archives,York Registry of Wills, vol. 2, fol. l38v; in Testamenta Eboracensia, ed. by James Raine, vol. 2, Surtees Society 30 (1855), p. 117. [. . .] Item lego ffraternitati Corporis cristi in Ebor quemdam librum vocatum le Crede Play cum libris et vexillis eidem pertinentibus Et gilde Sancti Cristofori quemdam ludum de sancto Jacabo apostelo in sex paginas compilatum [. . .] Item lego zonariis ciuitatis Ebor’ ad ludum suum in festo corporis cristi vnam coronam au riall [sic] deauratam et vnam zonam cum Boses deauratis et enameld [. . .] ([. . .] Item I will to the brotherhood of Corpus Christi in York a certain book called the Creed Play with the books and banners belonging to it And to the Guild of St Christopher a certain play concerning St James the apostle compiled in six pages. [. . .] Item I will to the Girdlers of the City of York for their play on the feast of Corpus Christi one crown gilded and one girdle with enamelled and gilded Boses [. . .]). 2 1449–51. York, York City Archives C 99:3, account roll of the Corpus Christi Guild. Receipts. Et de vno libro anglicano continente [blank] paginas de instrucione et in formacione fidei cristiane vulgaritate vocato Crede Playe per dominum

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Willelmum Revetour dato precii iij li vj s viij d Item ex dono eiusdem Willelmi xvij vexille laudabiles et sumptuose precii iiij li Item iiij vexille de cerico rubeo cum auro laudabiliter operata precii iiij s Item iiij vexille depicte vocate penonȝ precii xxvj d Item xiij diademȝ cum vna larua aurata cum cheualerȝ et cum ornaturis ludi prefati ordinatis precii vj s viij d Et de vna vase lignio [sic] pro eisdem vexillis seruandis ordinata precii iij s iij d similiter ex dono domini W. Revetour data tali condicione habita prout notatur in dorso istius Rotuli (And concerning one book in English containing [blank] pages of instruction and information of the Christian faith called in the vernacular Creed Play given by lord William Revetour value £3 6s 8d Item from the gift of the same William 17 sumptuous and praiseworthy banners value £4. Item 4 banners of red silk commendably worked with gold value 4s Item 4 painted banners called pennons value 26d Item 13 diadems with one gilded mask with wigs and with the ordained ornamentation of the aforesaid play value 6s 8d And of one wooden container ordained for the use of the same banners value 3s 4d similarly from the gift of lord William Revetour given and bound with respect to such conditions noted on the dorse of this roll). 3 1449–51.York,York City Archives, C 99:3, account roll of Corpus Christi Guild. Expenses. Et de vno libro anglicano prius recepto et modo ad staurum posito cum xvij vexillis aptis et aliis viij vexillis secundariis cum aliis ornamentis in parcellis pro le Crede Playe ordinatis precii viij li ij s x d [. . .] Item solutum cuidem sissori pro sincione et le borderyng vexillorum predictorum vj d (And concerning one book in English received earlier and now placed in the store room with 17 banners belonging to it and the 8 other secondary banners with the other properties (ornaments) ordained for the Creed Play in parcels value £8 2s 10d [. . .] Item paid to a certain cutter for the cutting and the bordering of the aforesaid banners 6d). 4 1449–51.York,York City Archives, C 99:3, account roll of Corpus Christi Guild, dorse. Entry very faded. Read under ultra-violet light. Square brackets indicate illegible words. Et de xvij vexillis laudabiliter et digne operatis cautelose in se signa et misteria cuiusdem ludi vulgariter nuncupati Crede Playe cum iiijo aliis vexillis cericis cum angelis et sententiis fidei depictis et deauratis Item iiij penonȝ similiter depictis Item xiij diademȝ cum leȝ cheualers et ceteris ornamentis eodem ludo pertinentiis Item j liber de pergameno vocatur Orygenal in lingua anglicana scriptus et continens [blank] paginas ex dono laudabilis [. . .] confratris nostris domini Willelmi Revetour cuius anime propricietur deus supra condicione [. . .] quod infra xij annos ad maius si congrue poterit per Civitatem Ebor’ palam et publice [2 words much abbreviated] et ad laudem dei erudicionem [que] populi specialius [. . .] immo ut crede

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porteratur ad ignorantium modicum commodum Civitatis et honorem magnumque meritum presentis fraternitatis quoad [. . .] poterit nobis per [. . .] Amen (And concerning 17 banners commendably, fitly and prudently worked with the signs and divine mysteries in them of that play called in the vernacular Creed Play with four other silk banners painted and gilded with angels and statements of the faith Item 4 pennons similarly painted Item 13 diadems with the wigs and the other properties (ornaments) belonging to this play Item one parchment book called Original written in the English language and containing [blank] pages from the gift of our estimable brother lord William Revetour God have mercy on his soul under the [following] condition that [it be played] every twelve years or more often if possible by the City of York openly and publicly [. . .] and to the glory of God and especially for the instruction of the people [. . .] in very truth so that the Creed may be carried to the ignorant (to) the proper advantage of the city and honour and greater merit of the present fraternity as long as it is possible to do so. Amen). 5 1455. From the ‘Original’ of the Creed Play copied into the city council minutes in 1495.York,York City Archives, House Book 7, fol. 137. Skaife, The Guild of Corpus Christi, p. 308, note p (as cited above, n. 2). Universis fratribus et sororibus fraternitatis corporis cristi Ebor presentibus et futuris Quod tempore quidam Johannis Foxe Johannis Evenwod Christoferi Doblay Roberti Stokton Thome Flesshner et William Salisbery capellanorum Ebor’ac dicte fraternitatis custodum anno videlicet ab incarnacione dominum millesimo cccc lv existit iste liber in nouatus ac de nouo factus et nuper scriptus ac secundum copiam inueteratem et debilem compilatus quam Willelmus Revetour nuper capellanus in capella Sancti Willelmi super pontem use predictem fraternitatem in testamento suo contulit et legauit ad instanciam Johannis Foxe eiusdem Willelmi Revetour executoris Et tamen ea condicione vt quolibet anno decimo future in varijs locis dicte Civitatis Ebor’ congruis audientibus ob salutem spiritualem ludus iste incomparabilis publice promilgetur Itaque eisdem locis inhabitantes pro ludi sumptibus et expensis soluant ac satisfaciant ad condignum (Let it be known to the brothers and sisters of the Guild of Corpus Christi of York present and future that in the time of a certain John Foxe John Evenwood Christopher Doblay Robert Stokton Thomas Flesshner and William Salisbery chaplains of York and wardens of the said fraternity that year that is to say from the incarnation of our Lord one thousand four hundred and fifty-five (1455) this restored book was newly made and freshly written and compiled at the request of John Foxe executor of William Revetour in accordance with the old and worn copy which William Revetour late chaplain in St William’s chapel upon Ousebridge contributed and willed to the aforesaid fraternity in his will. And however on this condition that this incomparable play shall be brought forth

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in public every ten years in the future in various places of the said city of York for the audience gathered together for the sake of their spiritual health Accordingly the inhabitants at these places pay and worthily provide sufficient for the charges and expenses of the play.) 6 1465. London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 403, fols. 4v–5. Skaife, Guild of Corpus Christi, pp. 293–94; Davies, Extracts from the Municipal Records of York, p. 273. (as cited above, n. l). In primis liber vocatus Originale continens Articulos fidei catholice in lingua anglicana nuper scriptus appreciatus x li Et alius liber in ueteratus de eodem ludo C s. Et alius liber eodem anglice vocatus Credeplay continens xxij quaternos. Et xvij vexilla magna appreciata iiij li et iiij vexilla minora de serico rubeo preciata j s viij d Et nonem alia vexilla vocata pennons de nouo factis cum scutis fidei et calicibus depictis appreciata xj s vj d Et xxiiijor instrumenta ferrea vocata sokkettes ordinata pro extensione vexillorum appreciata iiij s vj d Et vna mitra papalis appreciata x d Et vna corona regis cum ceptro et vn cirotheca apprec’ vj d Et xij rotule nuper scripte cum articulis fidei catholice appreciate iij s iiij d Et vna cistula quadrata cum vna sera et claue pro dictis vexillis seruandis apprec’ ij s Et ij mitre episcoporum appreciate xij d Et vna clauis pro sancto petro cum ij pecijs vnius tunice depicte apprec’ xij d Et iiij alia vexilla vocata pennons iij s iiij d Et x diademata pro cristo et apostolis cum vno larvo et aliis nonem cheverons [sic] vj s. (First the book called the Original containing the Articles of the Catholic faith in English newly written value £10 And another old book of the same play 100s And another book of the same in English called Creed Play containing 22 quires And 17 large banners value £4 and 4 lesser banners of red silk value 6s 8d And nine other banners called pennons newly made with painted arms of the faith and chalices value 11s 6d And 24 iron devices called sokkettes used for the extending of the banners value 4s 6d And one pope’s mitre value 10d And one king’s crown with a sceptre and glove value 6d And 12 rolls newly written with the articles of the Catholic faith value 3s 4d And one square box with a lock and key for storing the said banners value 2s And 2 bishop’s mitres value l2d And one key for Saint Peter with 2 pieces of one painted tunic value l2d And 4 other banners called pennons 3s 4d And 10 diadems for Christ and the apostles with one mask and nine other cheverons [wigs?] 6s). 7 2 September 1483. York, York City Archives, House Books 2–4, fol. 98v. Raine, Civic Records, l:81 (as cited above, n. 1). CREYD PLAY Also the same day it was agreid that the Creid play shall be playd afore our suffreyn lord the kyng of Sunday next cumyng apon the cost of the most onest men of euery parish of thys Cite.

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8 6 September 1483. York, City Archives, House Books 2–4, fol. 99v. Raine, Civic Records, 1:81. Parentheses indicate words cancelled. At the which day it was agreid that for the honour of thys Cite that all my maisters the aldermen and all the xxiiij shalbe with my lord the mair to atend apon the kynges gude grace tomorow at seyng of the Creid play (and at a steward shalbe made emong tham to parvie for tham and euery man shall pay elyk that is to say as moch he þat is away as he þat is thar.) 9 1483.York,York Minster Library, Chamberlain’s Rolls El/53. Et pro firma Camere supra portas clausi ubi domini Decanus et Confratres sui ludum Corporis Cristi iij s iiij d et ludum vocatum Credplay iij s iiij d audierunt vj s viij d 10 12 May 1495. York, York City Archives, House Book 7, fol. 135. Raine, Civic Records, 2:118. Item it was agreid be the said presence þat þe master and kepers of Corpus cristi gilde shall cause þe Crede play to be plaid þis yere þat is to say þe furst bone to be cryed on Whissonmonday þe next at Maudeleyn day and þe play on Seynt bartylmew evyn etc. acordyng to þe warnyng gyfyn to þe said maister be þe maire on Philyp day and Jacob etc. or els to pay xx li to þe Chambre. 11 23 May 1495.YCA, HB 7, fol. 136v. Raine, Civic Records, 2:120, omits last sentence. Item þe same day þe maister of corpus cristi Gild and þe kepers graunted to play þe crede play þis yere and euery tent yere successively as apereth by a writyng remanyng with þe said maister and kepers þe tenour wherof ensuyth on þe next syde folowyng and entiled in þe booke of þe cred play. Et prima pagina et ostencio in festo apostolorum Philippi et iacobi secunda in crastino penticostes. 12 28 February 1504/05. York, York City Archives, House Book 9, fol. 24. Raine, Civic Records, 3:12. Item it was agreed þat my lord shall send for þe master and vj kepers of the corpus cristi guild and to comaund and charge theym vpon payn of xxti li that þe said maister kepers and gild to be leved to þe Comon Well and proffyte of þis Citie þis yere to fore the fest of Lammese next ensuyng herafter of thayr cost and charge to bryng furth the crede play. 13 28 July 1525. York, York City Archives, House Book 10, fol. 122v. Raine, Civic Records, 3:104, omits second clause.

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Creyd play [in the margin] Also it ys agreed for the honour and worship of this city þat all my lorde maires bredren shiriffes and xxiiij shall attend of my lorde maire att the comen halle vppon sunday next and þer to here the crde [sic] play and who so as makes defaut beyng within the seid city shall bere like charges as thos att be þer present with my said lorde maier and the costes and charges then and þer made shalbe borne indifferently by the said presens. 14 1525.York,York City Archives, Chamberlains’ Books C2, fol. 246. Item paid to Thomas the Master of Corpus Cristi for the Crede play at was playde before my lorde mayer and his brederin iiij s. 15 1535.York,York City Archives Chamberlains’ Books C 3:2, fols 51–52. [Under Lesys of Corpuscristy play] Item þerof this yere nothing for that þat [sic] the play was not playd forsomuche as Creyd play was then playd by the order of my lord mayer and his bredren Summa nihil [Under Expenses necessary] Item paid to Maister Thomas Flemyng for the Chamber that my lord mayor and his bredren stude in of Corpuscristi day and the fryday after to here the play vj s viij d. 16 17 March 1544/45. York, York City Archives, House Book 17, fol. 84. Raine, Civic Records, 4:124. Also it is further agreyd that my lord Mayour shall call before hym the master of Corpuscriste gyld and to take an order as towchyng playng of the creyd play as he shall thynk good for the mooste profett and aduantage of the sayd Citie. 17 13 March 1561/62. York, York City Archives, House Book 22, fol. 49v. Raine, Civic Records, 6:35. Aggreed that the play comonly called Corpus cristi play shall this yere apon reasonable consideracon be played on St Barnabe Day thapostle And thystories of the old and new testament or elles the Crede play if apon examinacon it may be shalbe played and billettes therapon to be gyven forth as hath ben accustomed. 18 5 February 1565/6. York, York City Archives, E Book 66, fol. 48v. Skaife, Corpus Christi Guild, pp. 307–08. Memorandum that Mr Symson brought nowe in the aunciente booke or Regestre of the Crede play to be saffly kept emonges th’evidens as it was before.

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19 13 February 1567/68.York,York City Archives, House Book 24, fol. 104v. Raine, Civic Records, 6:134. Alsoo the day and yere aforesayd it was aggreed by all the sayd worshipfull presens that in steade of Corpus Christi play this yere the Crede playe shalbe played and the same to be provided for and brought forth by thoversight and ordre of the Chambrelaynes And first the Original or Regestre of the seyd Crede play to be goten of the master and bretherne of St Thomas hospitall whoo haue the Custody therof And after expert and mete players found owte for the conyng haundlyng of the seyd playe than euery of theym to haue ther partes fair wrytten and delyuered theym soo that they may haue leysure to kunne euery one his part And the seyd Chambrelaynes further to see all maner the pageantes playeng geare and necessaries to be provided in a readynes And as occasion shall requyre to aske advise and ayde aboute the same Item it is further aggreed by the sayd presens that all such the Craftes and occupacions of this Citie as are chardged with bryngyng forth of the pageantes of Corpus cristi shall gather euery of theym their accustomed pageant money and pay it to the Chambrelaynes handes towards the chardges of bryngyng forth the seyd Crede playe And warnyng to be gyven to euery of theym accordyngly. 20 27 March 1567/8. York City Archives, House Book 24, fol. 106a. Letter from Hutton bearing his signature bound into the House Book. Endorsement ‘To the right honourable my Lorde Mayour of Yorke and the Right Worshipfull his Brethren yeue this’ at the bottom copied in the hand of the scribe of the corresponding entry (see Document 21). Davies, Extracts, pp. 267–68. Sal in Christo My most humble remembred etc. and I haue pervsed the boke that your wordshipp with your brethren sent me and as I finde manie thinges that I mvche like because of thantiquitie, so see I manie thinges, that I can not allowe because they be Disagreinge from the senceritie of the gospell the which thinges yf they shuld either be altogether cancelled or altered into other matter, the wholle drift of the play shuld be altered and therefore I dare not put my pen vnto it, because I want bothe skill, and leasure, to amende it, thoghe in goodwill I assure you Yf I were worthie to geue your lordshipp and your right worshipfull brethren consell: suerlie mine advise shuld be, that it shuld not be plaid ffor thoghe it was plausible to yeares agoe, and wold now also of the ignorant sort be well liked yet now in this happie time of the gospell, I knowe the learned will mislike it and how the state will beare with it I know not.Thus beinge bold to vtter mine opinion vnto your lordshippe I committ you, and youre brethren to the tuition of gods spirit ffrom Thorneton the 27 of March 1567. Your lordshipps in Christ to command Matth Hutton

78 York records

21 30 March 1568.YAC, HB 24, fol. 106v. Raine, Civic Records, 6:134. Assemblyd in the Counsell Chambre of Owsebrige of this Citie the day and yere abouesaid whan and whear apon a letter sent by Mr Hutton Dean of the Cathedrall Churche of Yorke vnto my L Mayor and his Brethren It apereth þat by his advise and counsell the Creyd play is not meet to be playd for that he seyth many thynges theren that he cannot allowe bycause they be dysagreying from the Senceritie of the gospell and for other causes as by the said letter it doth also appere. It is therfore agreyd to have no play this yere and the bookes of the Creyd play to be delyverd in agayn. 22 8 July 1575.York,York City Archives, House Book 26, fol. 27. Raine, Civic Records, 8:108. Also it was now agreed that before Michelmas next Mr Allyn Mr Maskewe aldermen Mr Robert Brook and Mr Andrewe Trewe shall goe and requier of my L Archebishop his grace all suche þe play bookes as perteyne this Cittie now in his graces custodie and þat his grace will apoynt twoe or thre sufficiently learned to correcte the same wherein by the lawe of this Realme they ar to be reformed And if ther leysure will serve to goe about the premisses before lammas next.

Appendix II The documents:The Pater Noster play

1 1388–89. London, The National Archives C47/454. Translation in The English Gilds, ed. by J. Toulmin Smith, pp. 137–40 (as cited above, n. 69). Transcription by Karl Young,‘Records’, pp. 541–42 (as cited above in n. 65). Primo quo ad causam fundacionis dicte fraternitatis: Sciendum est quod postquam quidam ludus de utilitate oracionis dominice compositus in quo ludo quam plura vicia et peccata reprobantur et virtutes com mendantur in ciuitate Ebor’ lusus fuit, talem ac tantum saporem habuit vt quam plures dixerunt,Vtinam iste ludus in Ciuitate ista gubernaretur in salutem animarum et in consolacionem Civium et vicinorum. Unde pro illo ludo futuris temporibus in salutem et emendacionem animarum tam gubernancium quam audiencium illius ludi gubernaturo, fuit plena et integra causa fundacionis et associacionis confratrum fraternitatis eiusdem. Et ideo onus principale dicte fraternitatis est: pro illo ludo gubernaturo in maiorem laudam dei, dicte oracionis opificis, et pro peccatis et vicijs reprebandis [. . .] Item tenentur quotienscumque ludus dicte oracionis dominice in forma ludi in Ciuitate Ebor’ monstratur cum lusoribus eiusdem per certas principales stratas ciuitatis Ebor’equitare et pro meliori ornatu in sua equitacione habendo in vna secta indui, et pro dicto ludo pacifice gubernando

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aliquieorum tenentur equitare seu ire cum illis lusoribus quousque dictus ludus totaliter finiatur [. . .] Nec perinent ad dictam fraternitatem terre redditus nec tenementa vel aliqua alia catalla, excepto solum modo apparatu pro dicto ludo disposito, qui quidam apparatus ad aliquem alium usum nisi tantum ad dictum ludum, modicum vel nichil potest proficere. Et habetur vna cista lignea pertinens ad dictam fraternitatem prodicto apparatu in ponendo [. . .] (First of all with respect to the reason for the founding of the said fraternity, be it known that after a certain play which had been written on the usefulness of the Lord’s Prayer was played in the City of York in which many vices and sins were condemned as well as virtues commended, it had such an effect that many said, ‘Would that this play could be put on a permanent basis in this city for the good of souls and for the consolation of citizens and neighbours.’ Hence the whole and the sole cause of the founding and associating of the brothers of this fraternity was the control for the future of this play for the health and emendation of the souls of both the controllers and the audience. And so for that reason the principal work of the said fraternity is the controlling of that play for the glory of God, the author of the said prayer, and the condemning of sins and vices [. . .] Item whenever there is a performance of the play of the said Lord’s Prayer in the City of York, they [the members of the fraternity] are bound to ride with the players of the same through certain principal streets of the City of York and for the better appearance of the ride, are to wear one and the same livery; and to ensure a peaceful performance of the said play some of them are bound to ride or go with the players until the said play is completely finished [. . .] The said fraternity possesses neither rent from land nor tenements or any other chattels save only the properties cannot be put to any other use and are of little or no value except to the said play.) 2 3 January 1464/65.York, Borthwick Institute for Historical Research,York Registry of Wills, vol. 2, fols 487–87v. Extract from the will of William Downham. Raine, Testamenta Eboracensia, 2, p. 268. In Codicils Item ego Willelmo Ball omnes libros meos de ludo de pater noster. 3 12 May 1495.York,York City Archives, BB 7, fol. 135. Raine, Civic Records, 2:118. Item it is agreid þat þe master and bredren of þe Gild of Seinte Anthonyes forsomuch as thay may not þis yere conuenyently bryng furth þe play called þe pater noster play accordyng to þe wurship of þis Citie þerfor þai shall pay to the vse of the Comonaltie [blank] and to prepar þaim þerfor ayanst þe next yere etc.

80 York records

4 19 April 1536. York, York City Archives, House Book 13, fol. 35v. Raine, Civic Records, 3:174. [. . .] it was agreyd by the said presentes that Corpuscristy play shalbe sparyd for this yere and not playd for somuche as pater noster play aught by course to be playd this yere Therfor it is agreyd that the sayd pater noster play shalbe playd vppon Lames day next. 5 19 June 1536.YCA, HB 13, fol. 50v. Item it is agreyd that pater noster play shalbe playd vppon Sonday next after Lames day. 6 20 April 1558. York, York City Archives, House Book 22, fol. 125v. Raine, Civic Records, 5:181–82. Assemblyd in the Counsell Chambre of Ousebrige of this Citie the day and yere abouesayde whan and where it was agreyd by the said presens That John Branthwate Master of St Antonys and his kepers shall ffurthwith provyd for the playing of one play callyd the Pater noster play this yere and the Charges therof to be borne of the money to be gatheryd by the occupacions of this Citie of there pagyant money and that the ffurst bayn or messynger shall ryde in dyver stretes within this Citie appon St George day next and the other messynger to ryde in like mane[r] vppon Whitson Monday to thentent that the Contry may haue knowelege that the head [sic] play shalbe playd appon Corpus cristi day next Mr Holme alderman haith promysed to speke with the said Master of St Antonys for the same purpose. 7 11 May 1558.YCA, HB 22, fol. 127. [. . .] aggreed that all the pageant maistres within this Cite shalbe warned to bryng in the half of all such pageant money as they gather towardes the chardges of settyng forth of the pater noster play to be played this yere. 8 31 May 1558.YCA, HB 22, fol. 127. Raine, Civic Records, 5:182. that this yere Pater Noster play beyng playd on Corpus Cristi day, dynar with brekfast and supper shalbe provyded by the Chamberlaynes for my sayd Lord Mayor, Alder men and xxiiij as hath ben accustomed at Corpus Cristi play in the Chambre at the Common Hall yates. 9 8 July 1558.YCA, HB 22, fol. 129. Raine, Civic Records, 5:183. And here alsoo it was aggred that Amerson paynter shold haue for payntenge of certayn bannar clothes for pater noster playe liij s iiij d of the money gathered of pageant sylver.

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10 15 July 1558.YCA, HB 22, fol. 129v. See Davies, Extracts, p. 226. Item ffor asmoch as the money gathered of the pageant sylver will not amont to the chardges of pater noster play by iiij li at the above it is therfor aggred that my lord mayour shal goe ouer ageyne and ratebly gather of euery occupacion chardgeable to the same the sayd somme behynde and if the wholl expenses cannot begoten than further order to be taken þerfor. 11 14 April 1572.York,York City Archives, House Book 25, fol. 6. Raine, Civic Records, 7:46. And further it is aggreed by theis presens, that my Lord Mayour shall send for the Maister of St Anthonyes and he to bryng with hym the booke of the play called the Pater noster play, that the same may be pervsed amended and corrected And that my said Lord Mayour shall Certifie to theis presens at their next assemblee here of his pleasure to be taken therin. 12 14 May 1572.YCA, HB 25, fol.12v. Raine, Civic Records, 7:47. Item it is aggreed by theis presens that the play commonly called Pater noster play shalbe played this yere on the Thursday next after Trynitie Sonday nexte coming [this was Corpus Christi Day in 1572.]. 13 2 June 1572.YCA, HB 25, fol. 15. Raine, Civic Records, 7:48–49. Assembled in the Counsell Chambre apon Ousebrig the day and yere abovesaid whan and where it was aggreed by theis presens that the pageant maisters of suche pageantes of certayne Occupacions of this Citie as shalbe occupied in Pater Noster play or for the Shew this yere and alsoo twoo other honest men of the same occupacions shall goo togithers with their owne pageant and attend apon the same and see good ordre kept. And nowe was appoynted by theis presens places for hearyng of Pater Noster play on Thursday nexte etc. viz The first at Trynitie gate, The secunde at Mr. Henry son hows The thirde at John White hows the iiijth at the East end of Ousebridge at George Aslaby dore The vth between Thomas Parker and Robert Brooke howses, the vjth at Henry Pulleyn hows, The viijth at the Common hall gates, the viijth at William Gilmyn hows, The ixth at the Mynstar gates The xth at Mr Birnand hows, the xith at Goodromegate Corner,The xijth at John Wightman Corner,The xiijth at Mr Harbert doore and he to pay therfor iij s iiij d. 14 5 June 1572.YCA, HB 25, fol. 15v. Raine, Civic Records, 7:49. [meeting held in Common Hall] Alsoo it is further aggreed by theis presens that forasmoche as Mr William Bekwith and Mr Christofer Harbert Aldermen of this Citie this

82 York records

present day haue disobeyed the commandement of my Lord mayor whan as he did the same day in this place commande the said Mr Bekwith and Mr Harbert to assocyate and assist his Lordship at the tyme of playeng of the Pater Noster play whoo than and there refused the same, and wolde than haue departed frome this place Wherapon the said Mr Bekwith and Mr Harbert by thadvise and consent of this worshipfull presens are nowe commanded to warde there to abide duryng my Lord mayour pleasure. 15 30 July 1572.YCA, HB 25, fol. 19. Raine, Civic Records, 7:52. And nowe my said Lorde mayour declared to this said worshipfull assemblie that my Lord Archebisshop of York requested to haue a copie of the bookes of the Pater noster play wherapon it is nowe aggreed by theis presens that his grace shall haue a trewe copie of all the said bookes even as they weare played this yere. 16 1572. London, British Library MS Add. 33852. Bakers’ Register, vol. 1, fol. 37v. Anna J. Mill, ‘The York Bakers’ Play of the Last Supper’, p. 150 (as cited above, n. 40). Item to John Wylliamson for lokyng abowte the pagyant and gear Item to the putters of the pagyant in bread and ale Item in ale whan we went to se the pagyant Item for a Sheyll of maynbread to carry to my Lorde Mayour Item to my Lorde mayours offycer Item to the Chambre for our pagyant money

vj d vd vj d xij d ij d xij s.

17 17 June 1575. York, York City Archives, House Book 26, fol. 25. Raine, Civic Records, 7:107. Assembled in the counsell chamber vpon Ousebrig the day and yeare abouesaid when and where it was agreed that Christofer Learmouth shall paid him forthwyth by Nicholas Haxvppe master of St Anthonies xx s for making iij play bookes perteyninge the said hospitall of St Anthonies which iij bookes were now Delyuered to the said Nicholas to be saiflie kepte to thuse of the saide hospitall. And wheras certayne of the same bookes are in my L Archebishopps handes it is agreed that the same shalbe required to be restored agayne.

Notes 1 These are to be found in the MS of the play (London, British Library, MS Add. 35290) and in the records of the Bakers (London, British Library, MS Add. 33852), and the many documents surviving in York itself in the City Library,York Minster Library, the Borthwick Institute for Archives, and the archives of the Worshipful Company of Merchant

The plays of the religious guilds of York

2 3 4

5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13

14 15

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Adventurers. Most but not all the documents have been printed in the following works: York Plays, ed. by Lucy Toulmin Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1885); The York Memorandum Book, ed. by Maud Sellers, 2 vols., Surtees Society 120 (1911) p. 120, and (1915) p. 125; York Civic Records, ed. by Angelo Raine, vols 1–8,Yorkshire Archeological Society, Record Series 98 (1939), 103 (1941), 106 (1942), 108 (1945), 110 (1946), 112 (1948), 115 (1950), and 119 (1953); Extracts from the Municipal Records of the City of York during the Reigns of Edward IV, Edward V and Richard III, ed. by Robert Davies (London: J.B. Nichols, 1843). The Register of the Guild of Corpus Christi in the City of York, ed. by R. H. Skaife, Surtees Society 57 (1872), p. v. See Davies, Extracts, pp. 227–79; Smith, York Plays, pp. iv–lx. Alan H. Nelson, ‘The Wakefield Corpus Christi Play: Pageant Procession and Dramatic Cycle’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 13–14 (1970–71), p. 221. See also Alan H. Nelson, The Medieval English Stage: Corpus Christi Pageants and Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 65–69. Martin Stevens, ‘The York Cycle: From Procession to Play’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 6 (1972), pp. 37–61. Margaret Dorrell, ‘Two Studies of the York Corpus Christi Play’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 6 (1972), pp. 63–111. See pp. 9–15. The documents presented here are new transcriptions from the original manuscripts. Transcriptions of crown copyright records in the Borthwick Institute for Archives,York, and The National Archives, London, appear by permission of the Controller of H.M. Stationery Office. I wish also to thank Mrs Rita Green, archivist in the City Library, York, C.B.L. Barr and Miss Katharine Longley of the Minster Library, and the late Mrs Norah Gurney of the Borthwick Institute for their kind helpfulness. Although this article does not deal primarily with the Mercers’ documents, I must again acknowledge the kindness and cooperation of Mr Bernard Johnson, archivist of the Worshipful Company of Merchant Adventurers of York, who allowed Miss Margaret Dorrell (Rogerson) and myself complete access to their archives. I am especially grateful to Professor Leonard Boyle of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, and Professor Colin Chase of the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, for their help with the transcription of document 1 in Appendix II and the translations generally. I also wish to thank Professor Alan Nelson for allowing me to see the York chapter of The Medieval English Stage before it was published. There is no evidence to support the suggestion made by Canon J.S. Purvis that the Creed Play existed in the fourteenth century. J.S. Purvis, From Minster to Market Place (York: St Anthony’s Press, 1969), p. 8. Smith, York Plays, p. 515. Skaife, Guild of Corpus Christi, p. 24, note p. Testamenta Eboracensia, ed. by James Raine, Surtees Society 30 (1885), p. 117. In 1426, two years after Revetour became deputy clerk, Friar William Melton preached a sermon suggesting that the play of Corpus Christi and the procession of Corpus Christi take place on separate days. Roger Burton, the clerk, records the entire sermon and the subsequent action of the city council (York City Archives A/Y Memorandum Book, fols 278–278v; Sellers, Memorandum Book, 2:156–57). Revetour must have been close to the whole situation. Between 1415 and 1433 the Doomsday pageant, at least, was revised (see above, p. 14). Alan Nelson in Medieval English Stage, pp. 51–57 argues for a single select performance of all the plays at York. This suggestion does not take into account the educational motivation behind the plays. For a full discussion of the didactic movement see W. A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), pp. 189–262. His references to the plays within this context are illuminating (pp. 242–43).

84 York records 16 Johnston and Dorrell, ‘Doomsday Pageant’, p. 34; ‘York Mercers’, p. 18. Alan Nelson, Medieval English Stage, p. 53, argues that the banners indicate that the play was played once and preceded by a procession of banners. He supports this by noting that in the Surtees Society edition of the Register of the Guild of Corpus Christi, the 1465 inventory of properties is followed by a torch list. The torches, he claims, went with the banners for the procession. Unfortunately, he has not consulted the manuscript of the register (London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 403). In the manuscript the property list and the torch list are separated by a four-inch gap and the torch list begins with a new ‘In primis’. The torch list is, in fact, the third in a sequence beginning with the first roll of the Corpus Christi Guild in 1415 (York, York City Archives, C99: 1–2) listing the ceremonial torches used by the Guild in the procession of Corpus Christi. It has no more to do with the property list which precedes it than it has to do with the list of linen which follows it. 17 The number of diadems listed in 1465 is only ten. It must be remembered that this is an inventory of the properties actually on hand, not those needed to mount the play. This discrepancy is similar to those found in the last inventory of the Mercers written in 1526 (see above, pp. 34–35). 18 There were several creeds and catechisms extant in the vernacular in this period, the most famous of which is attributed to John Thoresby, Archbishop of York 1352–1373 and found in both English and Latin in his official register (York, Borthwick Institute for Archives, Register 11, fols 295–298v). It is published as the Lay Folks’ Catechism, ed. by F. Simmons, Early English Text Society, o.s., 71 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1879). 19 The single copy of the Scriveners’ play of ‘Doubting Thomas’ has survived. It is now in the York City Archives. See A.C. Cawley,‘The Sykes Manuscript of the York Scriveners’ Play’, Leeds Studies in English, 7 and 8 (1952), pp. 45–80. 20 The meaning of the word ‘cheveron’ is obscure here. It is possible that the scribe misread the word ‘cheualer or ‘wig’ which appears in the 1449–51 inventory. 21 Smith, York Plays, p. xxxiii. 22 Dorrell, ‘Two Studies’, p. 76. 23 For the Mercers’ practice see Johnston and Dorrell, ‘York Mercers’, p. 13. 24 In 1522 the rents for the stations varied from ls 6d to 4s 3d (York, York City Archives, C 2, fol. 98); in 1523–24 from 10d to 3s 4d (York,York City Archives, C 2, fol 143v); in 1529 from 2d to 4s 8d (York,York City Archives, C 6:6). Nelson, Medieval English Stage, p. 68, suggests that the 4s paid by the mayor was the total payment for the play which was given this one performance. 25 The Mercers spent approximately 30s annually to mount their single pageant of Doomsday in the Corpus Christi Play (Johnston and Dorrell, ‘York Mercers’, pp. 26–29). 26 The rolls which have survived are York, York City Archives C 100:5 and C 03:1. There are only a few references in the Mercers’ account rolls to the pageant of Doomsday although we know that it was regularly performed. Most of our information concerning that pageant comes from loose single sheets recording the pageant masters’ accounts which have survived. There are only three references to the play in the Mercers’ rolls after 1500, although only three rolls are missing from the entire series: Johnston and Dorrell, ‘York Mercers’. 27 A History of Yorkshire: City of York, ed. by R.B. Pugh, The Victoria History of the Counties of England (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 61. 28 Skaife, Guild of Corpus Christi, p. xii.York,York City Archives, C 99:5. 29 York,York City Archives, House Book 2–4, fol. 53v. Raine, Civic Records, 1:52. 30 Pugh, History of Yorkshire, pp. 61–62. 31 The Latin word ‘pagina’ at this time seemed to carry the meaning of stage; see R.E. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word List (London: British Academy, 1965), p. 327. The OED gives the meaning of a play or episode to the word ‘pageant’. It seems, however, that the word in both languages, although usually meaning the pageant wagon, often also meant the play or episode. This is clear from the Mercers’ accounts. They speak of

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32 33

34

35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45

46

47 48 49 50 51

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‘reparacione eiusdem pagine’ but they also refer to the ‘eductione [bringing forth or production of] Ludi Corporis Cristi videlicet pagine vocate domysday.’ In English they speak of the ‘mendyng of þe pageant’ but also they pay the clerks who directed the playing of the episode ‘for plaiyng of our pageante’ (Johnston and Dorrell, ‘York Mercers’, pp. 25–31). The account roll of the Mercers for 1535 contains the normal entry, ‘And for beryng of Torcheȝ the morow after Corpus cristi day xij d.’ (York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D57ZZZ). York,York City Archives, C3 (2) fol. 52. The first record of the city paying for a sermon to be preached on the day after Corpus Christi is in 1468. In the Chamberlains’ Roll for that year it is recorded that they paid 3s 4d ‘cuidem fratre Augustine predicanti in crastino dicti festi in capillo [sic] ecclesie Cathedral beati petri Ebor’ (York, York City Archives C3:4). The normal expenses of the Lord Mayor and council ‘at the place therat they hard the seyd play of corpus cristi’ are recorded in the Chamberlains’ Rolls of 1545 (York, York City Archives, C 5:15) and the Bakers collected pageant money and paid the players that year as they normally did for the Corpus Christi Play (MS BL Add. 33852, fol. 6–6v). Skaife, Guild of Corpus Christi, p. 298 ff. York,York City Archives, C 4, fol. 142. Skaife, Guild of Corpus Christi, pp. 284–87, 296–98. Ibid., p. 307. For the same practice with the Pater Noster Play see above pp. 74–75. Auditions for players for the Corpus Christi Play supervised by the city council were instituted in 1476 (York,York City Archives, House Book 1, fol. 14v; Raine, Civic Records, 1:5). It was the regular practice in York for some payment to be made for the players. The first mention of this in the Mercers’ records is in 1451–52 when William Wrangle (a clerk) was paid 6s 8d for playing the pageant. By the 1460s the regular payment was approximately18s (Johnston and Dorrell, ‘Doomsday 1433–1526’, see above, pp. 31–33). The Bakers regularly paid 10s 8d in the sixteenth century (Anna J. Mill, ‘The York Bakers’ Play of the Last Supper’, Modern Language Review, 30 (1935), p. 151). York,York City Archives, House Books Y: B24, fol. 106. See among others E.K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903), vol. 2, pp. 120, 130; Hardin Craig, English Religious Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 336–37. Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 60. M.D. Anderson, Drama and Imagery in English Medieval Churches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 37–40. Anderson, pp. 37–38. See also The Chester Plays, ed. by Herman Diemling, Early English Text Society, e.s., 115 (London: Oxford University Press, 1916), vol. 2, pp. 384–87; London, British Library, MS Burney 30 (a fifteenth-century MS which matches prophets to the apostles); and London, British Library, MS Harley 2335 (the so-called ‘Pore Caitif ’ creed ascribed to Wyclif). This chart is based on the one provided by Miss Anderson, Drama and Imagery, p. 40. She omits the articles and includes the prophets often associated with the apostles. Since there is no evidence that the prophets appeared in the York Creed Play, I have omitted them and included the articles for the sake of clarity. Johnston and Dorrell, ‘York Mercers’, see above, pp. 31–33. These are mostly in the York City Archives, Bridgemasters’ Accounts. See Appendix I, document 3; the notation of rent received from the Corpus Christi Guild for the hall is a regular entry in the Mercers’ accounts before 1478 (York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Boxes D53 and D54). The last entry is for 1478. Johnston and Dorrell, ‘Doomsday Pageant’, see above, p. 19; Smith, York Plays. Smith, York Plays.

86 York records 52 Skaife, Guild of Corpus Christi, p. xii. 53 Ibid., p. vi. 54 The pageant wagons of the craft guilds were used for the Pater Noster Play in 1572. See below. 55 There were apparently two separate pageants for this episode. Between line 216 and line 217 of episode XVII in the Corpus Christi Play there is a note in a different hand ‘the Harrod passeth and the iij kynges comyth agayn to make there offerynges’ (Smith, York Plays, p. 134). 56 This is exactly the scene depicted in the Mercers’ ‘Doomsday’ Pageant (Johnston and Dorrell, ‘Doomsday Pageant’ and ‘York Mercers’). 57 Since there was probably no set scene for the ‘Woman Taken in Adultery’, this pageant need not necessarily have been used. Any wagon with an undefined scene would be possible. 58 Since the Mercers’ pageant is accounted for (see above, note 56) the obvious other choice for the resurrection is the Saddlers’ pageant of the ‘Harrowing of Hell’, which must have had an elaborate Hellmouth. 59 The Mayor was himself responsible for this pageant until 1475, when it was turned over to the Innholders (York, York City Archives, C 3:6). See Margaret Dorrell, ‘The Mayor of York and the Coronation Pageant’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 5 (1971), pp. 35–45. 60 Now York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, D19; Charles Kerry, ‘Discovery of the Register and Chartulary of the Mercers’ Company,York,’ The Antiquary, 22 (1890), p. 269. 61 The York Mercers and Merchant Adventurers 1356–1917, ed. by Maud Sellers, Surtees Society 129 (1918). 62 Sellers, Mercers, p. 81. 63 Johnston and Dorrell, ‘York Mercers’, Appendix III, see above, pp. 36–37. 64 Smith, York Plays, p. xxix. 65 Karl Young, ‘The Records of the York Play of the Pater Noster,’ Speculum 7 (1935), p. 544, n. 1. 66 Angelo Raine, Medieval York (London: J. Murray, 1955), pp. 91–92. 67 John Wyclif, De Officio Pastorali, cap. 15; in The English Works of Wyclif, ed. by F.D. Matthew, Early English Text Society, o.s., 74 (London: Trübner, 1880), pp. 429–30. 68 Young, ‘Records’, p. 540. 69 This document was translated by J. Toulmin Smith in The English Gilds, Early English Text Society, o.s., 40 (London: Oxford University Press, 1870), pp. 137–40. It was transcribed by Karl Young and forms the major part of his article (‘Records’). I have transcribed and translated the entire document, but have presented only those extracts specifically concerned with the play in Appendix II. 70 Young, ‘Records’, p. 541; Smith, Gilds, p. 138. 71 Cf.Young, ‘Records’, p. 542. 72 This inference and the inference that the play was performed on pageant wagons (see below) were also drawn by Professor Young, ‘Records’, p. 543. 73 Dorrell, ‘Two Studies’, p. 82. 74 Alan Nelson argues for a single performance (Medieval English Stage, pp. 51–65). 75 York,York City Archives, House Book 5: B25, fol. 15. 76 Raine, Medieval York, p. 93. 77 The Mercers record their normal expenditure for torch bearing on the Friday after the feast that year (York, Merchant Adventurers’ Archives, Box D57A(a)). 78 York,York City Archives, House Book 18, fol.15v. See Raine, Civic Records, 4:139. 79 Raine, Civic Records, 4:149. 80 Anna J. Mill, ‘The York Bakers’ Play’, p. 151. 81 A.F. Leach, ‘Some English Plays and Players, 1220–1548’, in An English Miscellany Presented to F.J. Furnivall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1901), pp. 220–21. See Chambers, Medieval Stage, vol. 2, p. 41. 82 Craig, Religious Drama, pp. 339–40.

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83 MS BL Add. 33852, fol.13 . See also Anna J. Mill, ‘The York Bakers’ Play.’ 84 Anderson, Drama and Imagery, pp. 60–71. 85 Mirk’s Festial, ed. by Theodor Erbe, Early English Text Society, e.s., 96 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1905), pp. 282–88 and Middle English Sermons, ed. by W.O. Ross, Early English Text Society, o.s., 209 (London: Oxford University Press), pp. 46–59. 86 Erbe, Mirk’s Festial, pp. 284–85. 87 Ross, Middle English Sermons, pp. 52–53. 88 Erbe, Mirk’s Festial, p. 285. 89 Ross, Middle English Sermons, p. 54. 90 See Origen in Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers, ed. by M.F. Toal (Chicago: Regnery, 1957), vol. 1, p. 245; see also Bede, ibid., p. 237. 91 Smith, York Plays, p. 162, lines 146–68. 92 Erbe, Mirk’s Festial, p. 283. 93 Ross, Middle English Sermons, p. 51. 94 London, The National Archives C47/46/454. v

1.5 The guild of Corpus Christi and the procession of Corpus Christi in York From: Medieval Studies 38 (1976), 372–84 The history of the Guild of Corpus Christi in York can be briefly sketched. It was founded in 1408 and flourished during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.1 Until 1478 it had no permanent home but rented the hall of the Mercers (referred to as Holy Trinity Hall in many of the documents of the Guild) for its annual feast.2 In 1478, it merged with the Hospital of St Thomas without Micklegate Bar at which time the Guild of Corpus Christi took over the assets and properties of St. Thomas’. The Guild was abolished by the Act of Dissolution in 1547.3 Such a sketch, however, does not fully reflect the power and influence of the Guild. Over the one hundred and thirty-nine years of its existence, 16,850 people are listed in the Register as members of the Guild. Almost every citizen of York who could afford the 2d. annual torch fee belonged to it as well as many people from the surrounding countryside.4 It was a prestigious organization among whose members are listed the archbishop of York, the bishops of Carlyle, Durham, Exeter and Hereford, the abbots of St Mary’s York, Fountains, Rievaulx, Selby, and Whitby, the priors of Bridlington, Kirkham, Newburgh, Nostell, and Watton as well as such prominent secular figures as Richard, duke of Gloucester (later Richard III) and his wife, his mother Cecily, duchess of York, Francis, Viscount Lovel, Lord Clifford, Lord Latimer, Lord Scrope, Sir Richard Bingham, Sir Thomas Falthorpe, and Sir Ralph Poole.5 The first detailed consideration of the York Corpus Christi Guild is in Robert Davies’ work on the civic records of York during the latter part of the fifteenth century.6 J. Toulmin Smith gives it only brief comment.7 The lengthiest treatment is found in the Surtees Society edition of the Register of the Guild edited by R.H. Skaife.8 None of these works makes clear the place which the Guild had in the Corpus Christi celebrations at York. Davies simply does not attempt to define the relationship between the city and the Guild, but both Smith and Skaife are actively misleading. Smith thought that the Corpus Christi Play was an integral part of the procession and controlled by the Corpus Christi Guild.9 Skaife gives the impression that the Guild was in control of all the Corpus Christi celebrations. He writes, ‘The principal object of its founders appears to have been to promote the decorous observance of the religious festival of Corpus Christi, and to provide for the due performance of the ceremonies of the day.’10 These statements have led to considerable confusion

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concerning the relationship between the York Guild of Corpus Christi, the procession of Corpus Christi held in York, and the York Corpus Christi Play. It is the purpose of this article to make clear the place which the Corpus Christi Guild had in the Corpus Christi celebrations and to clarify its relationship to the city council of York.11 First of all, the Guild of Corpus Christi never at any time had anything to do with the Corpus Christi Play. That great dramatic production was in the hands of the city council and the craft guilds.12 The Guild did possess a play of its own, the Creed Play, but this was not performed at the Corpus Christi festival until 1535.13 However, the Guild did have a distinct role in the procession of Corpus Christi. This was an evolving one, moving from simple participation as a group of citizens, to one of prominence as a Guild by the time of Dissolution. The feast of Corpus Christi was proclaimed in York on 16 August 1325: ‘Statuerint etiam ad honorem dei quod festum corporis christi sub officio duplici in chora et mensa de cetero celebratur’.14 Nothing is recorded concerning the Corpus Christi celebrations for the next fifty years except a riot which occurred in the Minster on the vigil of Corpus Christi in 1345.15 The first civic record to mention the festival is the first civic record of the Corpus Christi Play noting rent paid for storing three pageant wagons (‘Tres pagine Corporis Christi’) in 1377.16 The first mention of the procession of Corpus Christi is found in a notation in the York Memorandum Book for 8 May 1388. William Selby, then mayor, used 100s left to the city by Thomas Bukton to buy four torches which were to be burned around the shrine of Corpus Christi in the procession on the day of the feast (‘iiijor torcheas circa corpus cristi in eodem festo ardentes in processione’).17 This indicates that a procession existed and that the city council was in some way concerned with it. This entry is twenty years before the founding of the Guild of Corpus Christi. It is clear, then, that the procession predated the Guild. The Guild was founded in 1408. Its official Register begins with a sermon on the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and then moves on to what appear to be the original statutes of the Guild.18 The first statute specifies that on the Feast of Corpus Christi the chaplains in their surplices were to walk ‘in processione modo honesto processionaliter antiquitatis ordine’. To assure that the chaplains were kept in order, the six masters (or failing all six, at least two) were to carry white wands and set the pace ‘ad laudem dei honestatem sacerdocii edificacionem ac bonum exemplum tocius populi cristiani maxime autem ad honorem dei et civitatis Ebor’.19 Who the chaplains were is unclear from this entry, but there is later evidence to show that they were all the clergy of York who were members of the Guild.20 The seventh statute specifies that ten great torches (‘luminaria magna’) were to be carried by the Guild before the sacrament (‘coram sacramento’) in the Corpus Christi procession and that each member of the Guild was to contribute 2d. annually ‘ad dictorum luminariorum sustentacionem’.21 From these statutes it appears as if the Guild had a prominent place in the Corpus Christi procession. Yet the first statute refers only to chaplains and speaks of the ‘order of ancient times’ (‘antiquitatis ordine’)

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which cannot be an order of the newly founded Guild. Furthermore, it specifically mentions that true decorum should be kept to honour the city of York as well as God. There are two documents which are concerned with the procession of Corpus Christi from the year 1415.The first is the first surviving account roll of the Guild that contains an inventory of its possessions which included ten torches ‘ob reverenciam Corporis Cristi’.That year the six masters collected 48s 10d in ‘pecunia torches’ or torch money from the members.22 The second document is the more important.This is the famous ‘Ordo paginarum’ entered in the civic Memorandum Book which lists the various pageants in the Corpus Christi Play and the crafts who were responsible for them. It also provides the proclamation of both the play and the procession and ends with a list of torches to be carried in the procession.23 In the proclamation it is commanded ‘of þe kynges be halue and þe mair and þe Shirefs of þis Citee’ that no man carry weapons to the disturbance of ‘þe kynges pees and þe play or hynderyng of þe processioun of Corpore Cristi’.24 Here, then, is a civic order governing the procession.There is no mention of the Guild of Corpus Christi in the Torch list: Portours viij torcheae Challoners iiij torcheae Coblers iiij torcheae Fullers iiij torcheae Cordwaners xiiij torcheae Taillours torcheae Wever servauntȝ iiij torcheae Et lviij cives ciuitatis habuerunt torcheas Carpenters vj torcheae similiter die corporis cristi Ordinatum est quod Portours Coblers eant antea primo Et tunc a dexteris Websterseruauntȝ et Cordwaners Et ex opposito fullers cuttellers Girdellers Chaloners Carpenters Taillours Et tunc boni cives et postea xxiiij xij maior et iiijor torcheae Magistri Thome de Bukton.25 This torch list is a civic one and the setting out of the order in which the torches are to be carried is a civic proclamation. Furthermore, in the place of honour at the end of the procession, perhaps surrounding the shrine with the four torches of Thomas Bukton, are the twenty-four members of the city council, the twelve Aldermen and the mayor. It is clear from this evidence, that whatever the Corpus Christi Guild may have ordained for itself in 1408, in 1415 the procession was a civic affair regulated by the council in which the Guild had no special place. There is, however, a second torch list in the Memorandum Book which is undated but is generally considered to date from 1417–22.26 In that list the ten torches of the Corpus Christi Guild are specifically mentioned and come immediately before the four torches of Thomas Bukton. It is probable that the Guild, gaining membership and influence during the first ten years of its existence, prevailed upon the city to give it a specific place in the procession. Here it seems to have a place second only to the city and the civic torches.

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In 1419, the Skinners, Carpenters, and Tanners defied the civic proclamation and carried weapons in the procession.27 Whether this was done with malicious intention is unclear but a brawl ensued which disturbed the king’s peace and impeded the play and the procession of Corpus Christi (‘ludi et processionis corporis cristi’).28 The matter was brought to the city council who bound the members of the guilds concerned to a forfeiture of one hundred pounds sterling should they break the peace again. This evidence again indicates that both the play and the procession were under the jurisdiction of the city of York.The Guild of Corpus Christi was only one group out of many that took part in the procession. In 1426, Friar William Melton preached a sermon in York urging that the Corpus Christi Play and the procession should take place on two successive days.29 His eloquence was so persuasive that a public meeting of citizens agreed that the play should be played on the vigil of the feast (‘die mercurii vigilia ejusdem festi’) and that the procession should take place ‘semper modo solempni’ on the day of the feast.30 The division of the play and the procession, however, did not take place until 1468 at the earliest.31 The entry concerning Melton’s sermon is long and detailed. From it we learn that the play and the procession took place at the same time and that both began at the gates of Holy Trinity, Micklegate. The procession of Corpus Christi proceeded to the Minster and from there to the Hospital of St Leonard where the host was deposited. At this time the procession of priests and torch bearers preceded the sacrament while the mayor and other citizens followed it (‘precedentibus numeroso lumine torchearum et magna multitudine sacerdotum in superpeliciis indutorum et subsequentibus maiore et ciuibus Ebor’ cum alterius magna copia populi confluentis’).32 There has been considerable debate about the relationship between the play and the procession of Corpus Christi in York, but the reconstruction of events which accounts for all the evidence argues that the sacrament was consecrated in the priory of Holy Trinity and carried through the streets as the first event of the Corpus Christi celebrations and was followed by the play performed from the pageant wagons of the craft guilds.33 In 1426, although the presence of the priests seems a prominent feature of the procession, there is no mention of the Guild of Corpus Christi in this civic event which could be regulated as the city council thought best. On 17 January 1431/32, the Guild of Corpus Christi acquired a new status in the procession of Corpus Christi. That day the city entered into an agreement with the Guild that the Guild should henceforth be responsible for carrying the civic shrine of Corpus Christi in the procession.34 This shrine was quite a simple affair of carved wood (‘ligneum sculptum’) ornamented with gold and silver.The shrine was to continue to be housed in St William’s Chapel, the civic chapel on Ousebridge and the mayor was to retain the key to the box which contained the shrine when it was not in use. The agreement specifies that the Guild should be responsible for taking the shrine to the priory of Holy Trinity where the procession began and return it to St William’s Chapel when

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the procession was over. During the procession, the torches of the Guild were to precede immediately the sacrament contained ‘in cristallo vel berillo’ within the shrine.35 This is the first evidence that the Guild of Corpus Christi itself had any special place in the procession of Corpus Christi.The expressed function of the Guild was to honour the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and it is entirely in keeping with its aims that it should be given the special responsibility of carrying the sacrament in the civic procession. In 1449, Bishop Spofford of Hereford, a member of the Guild, left to the Guild a new silver shrine to house the sacrament.36 The account roll for the Guild for 1449–51 provides a detailed account of the splendour of the shrine, which was shaped like a church with a bell tower, and the many jewels and ornaments which adorned it.37 It seems from other entries in the roll, however, that the shrine continued to be housed in St William’s Chapel. This was only suitable since the Guild had no permanent home at this time. Although Spofford had left the shrine to the Guild, it seems that they allowed the civic chapel to house it when it was not in use at the time of the procession. The positions of the city and the Guild concerning the shrine were now reversed. Earlier the city had allowed the Guild to carry the civic shrine. Now the Guild was sharing the shrine with the city. Perhaps to confirm the new arrangement, the Guild spent £4 18s ½d that year on a feast for the mayor and the council held in the Mercers’ Hall.38 The roll of 1449–51 is the first one to provide the detailed payments for the aspects of the procession paid for by the Guild of Corpus Christi. In the two years of the record, the Guild paid 12d to four deacons to carry the ‘baudekyn’ over the shrine, 2d each year to a clerk for carrying a cross ‘ante processionem in die corporis cristi’, 8d for marshalling the procession and summoning the ‘presbiteros’ to the procession, and 3s 1d each year for carrying the ten torches of the Guild. The final entry is a curious one: ‘Item soluto pro portacione ciste noue cum feretro incluso et pro pro (sic) le bere et tresteȝ ad domum Sancte Trinitatis deinde ad monasterium Sancti Petri et postea ad locum proprium viij.’39 This refers in part to the carrying of the shrine from St William’s to the priory of Holy Trinity and in part to the carrying of the shrine on its ‘bere’ from Holy Trinity to the Minster and then to the place where it was deposited. It is not here specified as St Leonard’s Hospital and may have been one of the many churches near the Minster. A clear picture of the trappings of the shrine and the equipment used for both the shrine and the torches in the procession comes from an inventory of the Guild taken in 1465 and entered in the Register of the Guild: In primis vna capsula lignea supra summum altare in capella sancti willelmi supra pontem Use apprec’ iij li Et vnum baiulatorium pictum deauratum pro dicto feretro in processione ferendo vj s viij d Et octo puluinaria albi coloris pro portantium feretrum humeris ordinata ij s ij d Et iiijor ymagines evangelistarum et xvj angeli cum scutis et rotulis nuper depicti

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similiter calicibus duobus de cupro deauratis cum ij cristyls pro dicto baiulatorio et feretro supportandis xxxviij s Et ij panni parvi de bukysyn depicti cum calicibus deauratis pro dicto baiulatorio cum una celatura lignea quadrata et cum quatuor lanceolis apprec’ iij s Et pannus pictus cum ymagine summe trinitatis apprec’ iij s Et vna cista breuis ligata cum ferro pro feretro tute custodiendo apprec’ viij s viij d [. . .] In primis quatuordecem torchie apprec’ Et iij Judasseȝ veterates apprec’ xiiij d Et xij castella picta cum calicibus aureis et laminis de ferro eiusdem castellis pertinentibuȝ apprec’ iiij s Et xxxiiij vexilla picta pro torcheis ordinatis apprec’ xx s40 The Guild of Corpus Christi, by 1465, had not only achieved a prominent position in the procession of Corpus Christi but it had also acquired many brilliant and costly trappings to honour better the Host. The city council paid for a sermon preached in the Chapter House of the Minster on the day after Corpus Christi for the first time in 1468.41 The regular payment of their expenses for watching the play is recorded for the day of the feast.42 This is the first suggestion of what was to become common practice. By 1476, the procession of Corpus Christi was definitely taking place normally on the day after Corpus Christi. On 31 May 1476 the city council passed an ordinance requiring each member of the city council to have a torch borne before him ‘in processione die veneris in Crastino festi corporis cristi’.43 From this date on the procession seems to have regularly taken place on the day after the feast and the final event of the day was a sermon preached in the Chapter House and paid for by the city council. New statutes were drawn up for the Guild of Corpus Christi in 1477. Those which pertain to the procession are of particular interest.The master of the Guild as ‘presidens principalis’ wearing a silk cope was to come last in the procession. The place of honour is now clearly given to the master of the Guild. With him were to walk two former masters chosen by the incumbent, one on his right and the other on his left. The two senior wardens of the Guild were to attend the shrine carrying white wands while the other four wardens, also carrying white wands, were to regulate the procession. All the wardens were to wear silk stoles. Furthermore, all the clergy of York who were members of the Guild were to take part in the procession or be fined 6d payable to the Guild.44 The participation of the Guild of Corpus Christi in the Corpus Christi celebrations had evolved from simple participation in the civic procession in 1415 to a place of power and prominence within the procession. From this time on, the rolls of the Guild show regular payment for carrying the cross at the head of the procession and carrying the shrine, the baudkyn, and the torches.45 Beginning in 1490 there is also a regular entry recording tips paid to clerks ‘in vestiario monasterij’ and later still to ‘sacriste Ste Trinitatis’.46 The prominence of the Guild is reflected in the last

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torch list recorded in the Memorandum Book of the city in 1501.That year John Stokdale as mayor decreed the order of the procession: Torchys ordinaunce how they shall goo in ordyr In primis for the coblers Item for the porters Item for the ropers and heirsters Item for the glovers per se Item for the buchers by tham self Item for the bakers of the left hand Item for the ffullourz of the right hand Item for the carpenters goyng by tham self Item for the Smyths goyng of þe right hand Item for the couerletweuers going on the left hand Item for the fysshmongers fysshers and maryners goyng to gedir by tham self Item for the wevers goyng of þe right hand Item for the Cordwaners goyng of þe left hand Item for the Taillourz goyng by themself Item for the mercers Item ilkon of þe aldermen ilkman a torche Item for the Corpus Christi Gild

iiijor viij ij iiij iiij vj vj vj iiij iiij

Torchis Torchis Torchis Torchis Torchis T T T T T

xiiij xvj T viij T T T47

T T T

Here the Guild has replaced the city council in the place of prominence at the end of the procession. It is clear from the 1477 statute that it was the Guild that had the right to fine the priests for not taking part in the procession. Yet it was the city that continued to regulate the participation of the craft guilds. This is clearly seen from the lengthy and unseemly dispute carried on by the Cordwainers and the Weavers over which guild should take precedence in the procession.48 For over ten years, from 1482 to 1493, the city council struggled to settle the quarrel. Finally, after the Cordwainers had appealed their case to the king, the abbot of St. Mary’s Abbey was called in to arbitrate the matter. At that time, the city council stood stubbornly on its rights to regulate the affairs of its citizens lest it should lose any of its ‘fraunchesieȝ and libertieȝ’. The abbot swore ‘opynly by his own mowth’ that he would rather cast ‘a thousand pound of the tresory of his monastery’ into the River Ouse than interfere with the freedom of the city.49 The matter was eventually settled, but it underlines the city’s continued legal jurisdiction over the procession of Corpus Christi and the participation of the secular guilds. Its overall authority is further demonstrated by this colourful order passed by the city council as late as 1544 and the fine which it carried with it: Item it is further agreyd by the sayd presens that for the honour of god and worship of this Citie the master of Corpuscrysty gyld and the prestes beyng of the same gild with all other prestes that goyth procession vppon fryday the Morro after Corpuscrysty day shall goo in the sayd procession in

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Coopes of the best that can be gottyn within the sayd Citie and that every howseholder that dwellith in the hye way ther as the sayd procession procedith shall hang before ther doores and forefrontes beddes and Coverynges of beddes of the best that they can gytt and Strewe before the doores resshes and other suche fflowers and Strewing as they thynke honeste and clenly for the honour of god and worship of this Citie and this to be fyrmely kepte hereafter vppon payn of every man that clothe the contrary this agrement shall forfait and pay to the Common Chambre of this Cite iijs iiijd.50 The Guild of Corpus Christi ceased to exist as a legal entity with the Act of Dissolution in 1547. In that year the last procession was held in the old way. But it did not take place without dissenters. On 17 June the city council reacted swiftly to invoke its fines: Also it is agred that whereas Mr. Dogeshon Mr. Dobson and Mr. White wantyd ther Torches in the procession the ffriday after corpuscristie day they shall pay every one of them iii s iiij d for ther defaltes in that behalf And also the occupacions of the Taillours oght to haue had xij Torches in the said procession and they wantyd iiijor torches of the nombre for the whiche it was agreed they shall pay for a fyne therefore iijs iiijd.51 After Dissolution, by a complex manoeuvre, the city itself took over the assets of the Guild (including the Hospital of St Thomas which had been absorbed by the Guild in 1478.)52 When Mary ascended the throne in 1554, the city council reinstated all the old customs including the Corpus Christi procession: Item that procession on the morne aftr Corpus cristi day shalbe lykewise made with torches and oþer solempnyties accordyng to the old vsage at charge of the Chambre.53 That year they also paid 4d for a white wand for the mayor so that he could walk in the procession ‘as Master of Corpuscrysty’.54 The spirit of the Guild and its concern to honour the Host had been transferred back to the city of York. The procession was held again in 1555, 1556, and 1557.55 There are no records surviving for the procession in 1558.56 But with the death of Mary came the death of the Corpus Christi procession. The city council of York struggled for another fourteen years to perform some kind of religious drama at the time of the feast, but the procession belonged to the Catholic past.57 The attitude of the Council to the new regime can be clearly deduced from the following entry concerning the proclamation of the Corpus Christi Play in 1561: And for soo moche as the late fest of Corpus cristi is not nowe celebrat and kept holy day as was accustomed it is therfor aggreed that on Corpus euen my lord mayour and aldermen shall in makyng of proclamacion accustomed goe about in semely sadd apparell and not in skarlet.58 ***

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The procession of Corpus Christi in York was begun before the Guild of Corpus Christi was established and continued after it had been abolished. For the first half of the life of the Guild, from 1408–1477 the Guild gradually assumed a place of honour and prominence within the procession. This place it held for the second half of its life from 1477–1547.Yet at no time did it control the procession. Its participation was limited to honouring the sacrament and regulating its member priests within the procession. From first to last it was the city council of York who ordered and controlled the procession as part of its lavish celebration of the Feast of Corpus Christi.

Notes Note: the references to the procession of Corpus Christi in York were subsequently published and translated in York, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, 2 vols, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979). 1 The Register of the Guild of Corpus Christi in the City of York, ed. by R. H. Skaife, Surtees Society 57 (1872), p. vi. 2 The records of the medieval guild of Mercers survive in the archives of the Worshipful Company of Merchant Adventurers in York. I am grateful to Mr Bernard Johnson, their archivist, for allowing me access to the documents. The notation of rent received from the Corpus Christi Guild for the hall is a regular entry in the Mercers’ accounts before 1478 (York, Merchant Adventurers Archives, Boxes D53 and D54). 3 Skaife, Register, p. xii. 4 London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 403, f. 19; Skaife, Register, p. 8. 5 Skaife, Register, p. xii. 6 Extracts from Municipal Records of the City of York during the Reigns of Edward IV, Edward V and Richard III, ed. by Robert Davies (London: J.B. Nichols, 1843). 7 English Gilds, ed. by J. Toulmin Smith, Early English Text Society, o.s. 40, (London: Oxford University Press, 1870), pp. 141–46. 8 Skaife, Register, pp. v–xiv. 9 Smith, Gilds, p. 143. On this point he was corrected by his daughter, Lucy Toulmin Smith, in her edition of the York Corpus Christi Play (York Plays, ed. by Lucy Toulmin Smith, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), p. xxx, n. 2). 10 Skaife, Register, p. vi. 11 This article is an incidental result of work done in York and in London on the original documents concerned with playmaking in York in the late Middle Ages. All the transcriptions quoted are my own. Earlier printed transcriptions are cited after the manuscript citation. I wish to thank Mrs Rita Green, archivist of the York City Library, and Mr C.B.L. Barr and Miss Katharine Longley of York Minster Library for their kind helpfulness. 12 Smith, York Plays, pp. xi-xiii. See also Margaret Dorrell, ‘Two Studies of the York Corpus Christi Play’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 6 (1972), pp. 65–111. 13 Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The Plays of the Religious Guilds of York – the Creed Play and the Pater Noster Play’, Speculum, 50 (1975), pp. 55–90. 14 York, Minster Library, M2 (4) g, fol. 28v. 15 York, Minster Library, H 1/1, fols 16v and 87v. 16 York, York City Archives, A /Y Memorandum Book, fol. 4v; (hereafter cited as A/Y); York Memorandum Book 1, ed. by Maud Sellers, Surtees Society 120 (1911), p. 10. 17 A/Y, fol. 164; York Memorandum Book 2, ed. by Maud Sellers, Surtees Society 125 (1915), p. 32. 18 BL, MS Lansdowne 403, fols 17v–19v; Skaife, Register, pp. 6–9. 19 Skaife, Register, p. xii.

The guild of Corpus Christi 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47

48 49

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See above p. 93. BL, MS Lansdowne 403, fol. 19; Skaife, Register, p. 8. York,York City Archives, C99:1–2. YCA, A/Y, fols 252v–55. Smith, York Plays, pp. xix-xxvii prints the pageant list. Sellers, Memorandum Book 2, p. 118 prints the torch lists from A/Y, fols 254v–55. For a new transcription of the entire gathering see Martin Stevens and Margaret Dorrell, ‘The Ordo Paginarum Gathering of the A/Y Memorandum Book’, Modern Philology, 72 (1974), pp. 45–59. A/Y, fol. 245v; Smith, York Plays, p. xxxiv. A/Y, fol. 245v; Sellers, Memorandum Book 2, p. 118. A/Y, fol. 255; Sellers, Memorandum Book 2, p. 118. A/Y, fol. 201; Sellers, Memorandum Book 2, p. 79. A/Y, fol. 201; Sellers, Memorandum Book 2, p. 79 prints ‘ludi processionis Corporis Christi’. A/Y, fols 278–278v; Sellers, Memorandum Book 2, pp. 156–58. For a complete transcription and translation of this document see Margaret Dorrell, ‘Two Studies’, pp. 72–74. Dorrell, ‘Two Studies’, pp. 72–74. Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The Procession and Play of Corpus Christi in York after 1426’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 7 (1973–74), see above, pp. 43–48. A/Y, fol. 278; Sellers, Memorandum Book 2, p. 156. Dorrell, ‘Two Studies’; Martin Stevens, ‘The York Cycle from Procession to Play’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 6 (1972), pp. 36–63; Alan H. Nelson, The Medieval English Stage: Corpus Christi Pageants and Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 65–69. York, York City Archives, B/Y Memorandum Book, fols 116–117v; Skaife, Register, pp. 251–52. Skaife, Register, pp. 251–52. Davies, Extracts, p. 248. York,York City Archives, C99:3. This is the longest and most important of the series of account rolls for the Corpus Christi Guild. Skaife did not make use of them at all; Davies used only one or two. YCA, C99:3. Ibid. BL, MS Lansdowne 403, ff. 4v-5; Skaife, Register, pp. 293, 294. York City Archives C3:4. Ibid. York,York City Archives, House Book 1, fol. 19v. York,York City Archives, G11 A; Skaife, Register, pp. 263–64. York, York City Archives, C99:5 (1477), C99:7 (1490), C99:8 (1496), C100:1 (1498), C100:2 (1499), C100:3 (1501), C100:4 (1502), C100:5 (1505), C100:6 (1506), C101:1 (1508), C101:2 (1511), C101:3 (1512), C101:4 (1516), C102:1 (15110), C101:2 (1533), C103:2 (1541). C99:7–Cl03:2. A/Y, fol. 380. This entry is undated but it can be dated from two entries in the House Books. The first is for 8 June 1501: Memorandum pro le ordryng del occupacions in le procession Item the same day by the said presence þe craftȝ and occupacionȝ within þe Citie wer ordered after a bill shewed emonges þe said presence howe þei singlry shal go in procession on morn next after corpus cristi day. (York City Archives, House Book 8, fol. 112) The second is in the list of accomplishments of John Stokdale, mayor in 1501: Item euery crafft was put in clothyng and ordered howe thei shall go in procession at corpuscristemass and at all oþer tymȝ of assembleȝ. (YCA, HB 8, fol. 124v) There are frequent entries in the House Books recording the various stages of this dispute. For a lively account see Davies, Extracts, pp. 250–57. YCA, HB 7, fol. 97v; Davies, Extracts, p. 256; York Civic Records, ed. by Angelo Raine, vol. 2,Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series 103 (1941), pp. 97–100.

98 York records 50 YCA, HB 17, fol. 51; York Civic Records, ed. by Angelo Raine, vol. 4,Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series 108 (1945), p. 109. 51 YCA, HB 18, fol. 97v; Davies, Extracts, p. 260. 52 Johnston, ‘Plays of the Religious Guilds’, p. 64; Skaife, Register, pp. xi-xiii. 53 YCA, HB 21, fol. 43; York Civic Record, ed. by Angelo Raine, vol. 5,Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series 110 (1946), p. 105. 54 York,York City Archives, Chamberlains’ Books 4, fol. 142. 55 The Mercers paid their normal 12d to have their torches carried in these years (York, Merchant Adventurers Archives, Box D59). The Bakers also paid to have their torches carried (BL, MS Add. 33852, fols 21, 22). 56 That year the Pater Noster Play was played on Corpus Christi Day; Johnston, ‘Plays of the Religious Guilds’, pp. 74–75. 57 Johnston, ‘The Plays of the Religious Guilds’, see above, pp. 56–57; 65–67. 58 YCA, HB 23, fol. 19v; York Civic Records, ed. by Angelo Raine, vol. 6,Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series 112 (1948), p. 17.

1.6 The York Cycle and the libraries of York From: The Church and Learning in Late Medieval Society: Essays in Honour of Barrie Dobson, Caroline Barron and Jenny Stratford, eds., Harlaxton Medieval Studies 11 (Donington, UK: Shaun Tyas, 2002), 355–70 The received tradition has it that the normal form of provincial early drama was the large biblical plays performed by cities all over the country – ‘thystories of the old & new testament’ as they are called in the York City Council Minute Books.1 However, the research of the last three decades has shown that there were very few such plays performed in a restricted number of cities that were, almost exclusively, in the north.2 Yet the survival of the texts of three northern ‘cycles’ continues to perpetuate the idea that the York Cycle, the Chester Cycle and the Towneley Plays are typical of early drama. This has led to a remarkable lack of concern on the part of scholars in English literature really to probe the reasons behind the production of these plays. For many years, I have taught graduate courses in the York Cycle, the play performed at York from the third quarter of the fourteenth century to 1569. In the course of this teaching, I have had students come to the text from many different directions – some are interested in the history of the text, some in the history of its performance. But the most interesting response I get comes from students of modern poetry taking their compulsory pre-1500 course who read the text as a highly sophisticated, unified, poetic whole and sit baffled as I explain the layers of the composition and the discontinuity caused by its performance by the York craft guilds. There is no easy answer to why the York Cycle is arguably one of the greatest poetic achievements of the late Middle Ages in England. How can this be when the received tradition is that it evolved over the course of the fourteenth century from the Corpus Christi Procession, coming to be ‘produced’ by the city council of York with the forty-eight separate plays performed by the craft guilds of the city, and eventually written down from the several guild copies in the third quarter of the fifteenth century? The tradition argues that this is ‘folk art’, proletarian drama, and the actors are the York equivalents of Shakespeare’s rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yet a sensitive reading of the text reveals a remarkable theological and philosophical sophistication

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on the part of the playwright, or playwrights, steeped in the learning of the Fathers (particularly Augustine) for both its theoretical framework and specific theological insights. There is also immense verbal density with images, ideas and phrases echoing from episode to episode, tying the forty-eight surviving pageants together in a powerful Christian statement. How could this have happened by chance? Over the years I have been prepared to ignore the logic of the evolutionary argument following my instinct that there was a guiding intelligence behind this set of plays who knew exactly what he was doing, why he was doing it, and also wrote for the curious method of performance followed in York, playing each episode twelve times at twelve different places throughout the city.3 Yet this flew in the face of the received wisdom of my discipline that could not be refuted from the fragments of early evidence that my colleague, Margaret Rogerson, and I had been able to find in the external records of York. It took the historians to suggest a solution to us. In 1988, Jonathan Hughes published his doctoral dissertation Pastors and Visionaries firmly establishing the wider pastoral context for the plays within the diocese of York.4 That same year in her article ‘The Illusion of Economic Structure: Craft Guilds in Late Medieval English Towns’,5 Heather Swanson challenged the romantic notion that the ‘mysteries’ or craft guilds of late medieval England represented the independent spirit of the artisan class. Much emphasis has been laid on the fact that the plays in York were performed by individual craft guilds, but little attention has been paid to the money and the control behind the plays – that is, to the city government as producer. Literary historians, unaware of the debates raging among urban historians about the nature of the guild structure in English cities, accepted the received tradition of the guilds as the sturdy backbone of English urban democracy. Swanson suggested that the guilds were, in fact, the invention of the civic oligarchies used as instruments to control commercial activity, and her major examples are drawn from York. Her final sentence, ‘The most oppressive aspect of the guilds lay in quite another direction, in the way its members were expected to subsidise civic pomp, not least in the form of the Corpus Christi pageants’, has raised the whole question of the relationship between the civic government and the craft guilds in the production of civic drama.6 Some years later, R.B. Dobson took up Swanson’s point and proposed a radical new approach to the creation of the York Cycle.7 Basing his argument on the paucity of evidence for a guild structure of any kind in York before the Black Death in 1349, he dismissed the idea that the cycle as we know it could have evolved from the procession of Corpus Christi (itself only instituted in York in 13258) and posited what he called the ‘big bang’ theory of the origins of the York Cycle in which he suggested that the dramatic event, with its extraordinary method of production, was created by the civic elite at a time when they needed to assert their control over the commercial life of the city. He argued that by the appearance of the Ordo paginarum (or detailed play list) in 1415 the ‘mystery plays [. . .] have already become intensely regulated from above, a more or less deliberate exercise in

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social control upon the city by its governing elite’.9 But the extension of that argument is that there must have been either a pre-existing play text or a playwright who could be commissioned to take on the writing of a play that could serve the council’s purpose. But why use a play at all? What were the forces at work that could have led a hard-headed set of Yorkshire merchants (York’s controlling elite) to conceive the idea that they could achieve their control over the victualling and manufacturing trades with the performance of a play that dramatised the history of the world from Creation to Judgement? The York Cycle is part of the widespread movement of religious didacticism whose aim was to evoke what W.A. Pantin called ‘affective piety’, dwelling on the humanity and suffering of Christ to stimulate a closer relationship with him and so enhance faith.10 The movement had a double thrust. The first was a strictly didactic one coming from the decrees of the fourth Lateran Council of 1215 concerning the education of both the clergy and the laity. In England, this was best represented by the late thirteenth-century tract, Ignorancia Sacerdotum, of John Pecham (reissued by John Thoresby, archbishop of York for his province in 1357). Pecham’s tract set the tone for the English response to Lateran IV, starting the phenomenon within the English church now studied as ‘pastoralia’. The Latin letter that accompanied the reissuing of Pecham’s text was ‘Englished’ by a Benedictine from St Mary’s Abbey, John Gaytrick, and has come to be known as ‘The Lay Folk’s Catechism’.11 The other thrust came from St Bernard, and the Franciscan mystics, who moved beyond simple learning to mystic transformation. The far-reaching effects of Lateran IV are well known.The Council acknowledged ‘a heightening of interest in the cure of souls’ and initiated a movement to provide ‘a better educated clergy who could bring the laity to a reasonable understanding of the essentials of Christian belief and practice’.12 The Council was followed by the decree of Omnis utriusque sexus which made ‘annual confession to the parish priest and annual communion at Easter obligatory on all Christians’.13 The significance of this decree for didactic vernacular literature was immense. First of all, both the priests and the laity had to have sufficient knowledge of the faith for such confession to have any meaning. The clergy, therefore, had to be provided with instruction in the elements of moral theology, and the laity had to be provided with a rudimentary knowledge of the faith. For, it was argued, only through knowledge of God could man’s soul be saved. The ‘Lay Folk’s Catechism’ makes this abundantly clear. Adam and Eve before the fall had perfect knowledge of God but now, all þe knawyng þat we haue in þis world of him is of heryng and leryng and techyng of othir of þe lawe and þe lare þat langes till halikirk þe whilke creatures that loues god almighten awe to knawe and to kun and lede þair lyue aftir and so com to þat blisse þat neuer more bynnes.14 To reinforce the necessity for such knowledge, the confessional was used not only for confession but also for instruction as the ‘confessor was expected to

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cross-examine penitents on their religious knowledge’.15 This, again, is clear from Thoresby’s letter. It contains six separate doctrinal and moral sections: the fourteen articles concerning the Trinity, the ten commandments of the Old Testament and the two of the New Testament, the seven virtues, the seven sacraments, the seven acts of corporal mercy, and the seven deadly sins. ‘Parsons and vikers and al paroche prestes’ were to ‘enquere diligently of thair suggettes in the lentyn tyme when thai come to shrift whethir thai kun this sex thinges’. If they were found not to know them, they were enjoined upon ‘payne of penaunce for to kun tham’. It was to make it possible for everyone to learn them that Thoresby decreed ‘that thai be shewed openly on inglis omanges the folk’. The final section of Thoresby’s letter listed the seven deadly sins. It was believed that men must have knowledge of the sins ‘for man mai noght fle tham but he knawe tham’.16 Thoresby was archbishop of York from 1352–1373 in the period immediately before the appearance of the York Cycle. Another significant figure engaged in the teaching of the laity in York rose to prominence during these years. John Waldeby from the Augustinian Friary was appointed a confessor by Thoresby 12 October 1354. He is described in Thoresby’s register as sacre theologie professor and is therefore assumed to have taken his degrees at Oxford before that date. He probably died at about the same time as Thoresby in 1372.17 He led the delegation from the English Augustinians to the General Chapter of the Order in Perugia in 1354. Five years later he was nominated by the Prior General to act as the vicar of the English province and then seems to have himself served a term as the prior provincial of the English Austin friars before returning to York as a brother of the friary there and an active propagator of the faith.18 A fluent preacher both in Latin and the vernacular, he provided three reasons why the gospel should be preached to the laity in a preface to one of the collections of his sermons. The preacher ‘is fulfilling God’s commandment to preach the gospel to every creature; he who hears the gospel earns a blessing from God; and the gospel has been given to us as the good tidings of our salvation.’19 In addition to his emphasis on the Biblical narrative in his sermons, Waldeby also prepared three sets of homilies that have survived: a series of homilies on the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, a series of five on the Ave Maria, and a more elaborate twelve part series on the twelve articles of the Apostles’ Creed.These he preached in English ‘outside the church of the Austin friars in York between 1358 and 1370’.20 He was persuaded by his friend and mentor Thomas de la Mare, abbot of St Albans to translate them into Latin.21 As we shall see, the corpus of Waldeby’s sermons was deposited in the library of the Augustinian friary. It was also during the same third quarter if the fourteenth century that the Pater Noster Guild flourished in York with its own play on the Pater Noster. Among its other responsibilities, the Pater Noster Guild maintained a tablet hung on a column in the Minster depicting the ‘layout and usefulness of the Lord’s Prayer’.22 In the pictorial arts, glaziers were being engaged to provide the splendid depictions of the biblical stories in the windows of many parish churches in York as well as in the Minster. There are, for example,

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fourteenth-century depictions of the Adoration of the Magi, the Crucifixion, the Coronation of the Virgin, the Annunciation, the Nativity, and the Resurrection in All Saints’ North Street; the Nailing to the Cross, the Crucifixion, the Deposition, the Entombment, the Descent into Hell, the Resurrection, and Resurrection appearances in All Saints’ Pavement, and a Doubting Thomas in St Denys, Walmgate. In the Minster, there are two fourteenth-century biblical scenes, Gethsemane in the north aisle of the choir and the apocryphal episodes of the Death of the Virgin in the south clerestory, in addition to the great East Window dating from 1405–8, which has so often related to the plays.23 Practical didactism, then, through lessons to be learned by rote, through sermons or through pictures or even (for the literate) by reading placards in the Minster, flourished in York in the late fourteenth century. But so too did the more ‘affective’ didacticism often attributed to the Franciscans that became omnipresent in the vernacular literature of England in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. The great English mystic Richard Rolle who died in 1349 came from near Pickering in Yorkshire and became known as the Hermit of Hampole. But arguably the most important English text was Nicholas Love’s The mirrour of the blessyd lyf of Jesu Christ, based on the Franciscan text attributed to St Bonaventure, Meditationes Vitae Christi. Love was the prior of the Charterhouse of the Assumption of our Blessed Lady and St Nicholas at Mount Grace in the North Riding from 1409–21 when he retired to be a simple monk. Ian Doyle has, however, suggested that he was the same Nicholas Love who was prior of the Augustinian friary in York around 1400, before taking the more stringent vows of the Carthusians.24 In his prologue, Love makes the didactic purpose of his work clear: [. . .] Ande as it is seide, þe deuoute man & worthy clerke Bonauentre wrot hem to A religiouse woman in latyne þe whiche scripture ande wrytyng for þe fructuouse matere þerof steryng specialy to þe loue of Jesu ande also for þe pleyn sentence to comun vndirstondyng, [s]emeþ amonges oþere souereynly edifiying to symple creatures þe whiche as childryn, hauen nede to be fedde with mylke of lyȝte doctryne & not with the sadde mete of grete clargye & of [hye contemplacion]. Wherfore at þe instance & þe prayer of some deuoute soules to edification of suche men or women is þis drawynge oute of þe foreseide boke of cristes lyfe wryten in englysche with more putte to in certeyn partes & wiþdrawyng of diuerse auctoritis [and] maters as semeth to þe wryter hereof moste spedefull & edifying to hem þat bene [of ] symple vndirstondyng to þe which symple soules as seynt Bernerde seye contemplacion of þe monhede of cryste is more likyng more spedefull & more sykere þan is hyȝe contemplacion of þe godhed ande þerefore to hem is pryncipally to be sette in mynde þe ymage of cryistes Incarnacion passion & Resurreccion so that a symple soule þat kan bot þenke bot bodyes or bodily þinges mowe haue somwhat accordynge vnto is affecion where wiþ he maye fede & stire his deuocion.25

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But these embellished retellings of the biblical stories were not directed only to the mind of the reader or hearer. In his discussion of the Crucifixion, in a section he calls, ‘Of the crucifying of our Lord Jesu at the hour of sext’, for example, Love speaks to the heart of his reader, Take hede now diligently with alle þi herte, alle þo þinges þat be now to come, & make þe þere present in þi mynde, beholdyng alle þat shale be done aȝeynus þi lorde Jesu & þat bene spoken or done of him.26 As the gruesome details are recounted, the reader or hearer is to make him or herself ‘þere present in þi mynde’. This same technique is called for again and again in Love’s work. By an act of the imagination, carried away with devotion, the believer is to put him/herself into the events as they unfold, suffering and rejoicing with Christ and the people around him as though present. It is just this technique that Margery Kemp follows as she imagines herself at the foot of the Cross with the Virgin and comforts her.27 This is not the pretentious silliness of an obnoxious female, but rather the working out in practice of the ‘affective piety’ called for by Love. It is an easy step to see how the plays, the dramatic representations of the events, were conceived as another way in which believers could be brought to feel ‘þere present in þi mynde, beholdyng alle þat shale be done aȝeynus þi lorde Jesu’, as the Incarnate Christ taught, suffered, died and rose again. This, then, is the local context out of which the York Cycle emerged during the last quarter of the fourteenth century. The religious of York, both secular and monastic, were active participants in the didactic movement. The city council, which undertook the production of the play, was dominated by the Mercers’ Guild whose guild records refer to themselves not simply as Mercers and Merchants but also as the Guild of the Holy Trinity. Like many other commercial or craft guilds, the York Mercers, however anxious they might have been as a civic oligarchy to consolidate their power, were also dedicated to acts of piety and charity. To use a cycle of plays written by clerical playwrights inspired by the wide-spread devotional movement as an instrument of civic control would have seemed perfectly logical. The York Cycle is a work of remarkable theological and philosophical sophistication.The playwright, or playwrights, have grounded their work in the theoretical and theological writings of the Fathers, particularly Augustine, reinforcing what at first glance seem to be episodes of simple affective piety with complex theological interpretations.28 The plays are presented as living Bible stories and yet they are undergirded with learning that could only come from years of study of the seminal texts of the late Middle Ages. As it happens, we know that someone writing in York at the end of the fourteenth century and into the fifteenth century had access to just such texts. The library lists of both the Augustinian Friary and St Mary’s Abbey have survived. We know, therefore, what manuscripts the playwrights could have read. The book list of the Augustinian friary at York was compiled under the direction of Prior William de Staynton in 1372,29 exactly one hundred years

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after the first mention of the friary in the reign of Henry III.30 The Austin Friars were formed in the thirteenth century from various heremetic orders that followed the rule of St Augustine. Their purposes (in keeping with the teachings of Lateran IV) were ‘to preach and hear confession and edify the people by the holiness of their lives’.31 The order came to England in 1249 and as it spread was organised into four districts or ‘limits’: of Cambridge, Oxford, Lincoln and York. The York house was the centre of the ‘Limit of York’ and housed a Studium concursorium for students of theology from the entire province.32 The historian of the order, Francis Roth, describes a studium concursorium as one of the three types of studia generalia that provided training for the brothers at the level of a university education. Roth suggests that it is the presence of the studium that accounted for the library that was the greatest treasure of the house. In 1372, just over 250 volumes were listed by one scribe, leaving space for additions in each category. Much of this space was soon filled up by entries representing the personal library of John Erghome, a brother of the house, containing a wealth of rhetorical and classical texts as well as works by more contemporary writers including books on music, mathematics, astronomy and black magic. Erghome was one of the witnesses to the writing of the original catalogue and seems to have made his career in York, rising by 1385 to be both master regent (along with another master Richard Brothertum) and prior.33 The next year he became the master regent of the papal court taking his place, as one historian has said, as ‘one of the most prominent theologians of the Roman obedience’.34 In his earlier years he had been a familiar in the court of the Black Prince and it was long thought that he was the author of the satiric Vaticinia Canonci Iohannis Bridlington although the most recent editor of the library list, K.W. Humphreys, suggests that this is unlikely.35 When Erghome’s books came to the library is unclear although Humphreys suggests that John Waldeby, who died in 1372, had access to books in Erghome’s collection, arguing that they had been deposited very soon after the original list was made.36 Humphreys asserts that the original 1372 collection with the addition of Erghome’s library ‘made York potentially one of the great centres for scholarship late in the century’.37 One hundred and eleven more volumes were added from time to time by various hands and the list was completed by fifty-eight entries made in the fifteenth century, including twenty-one volumes from the personal library of one of the brothers, John Bukwode. By the late fifteenth century, the library contained 646 volumes.38 Although it was essentially the library of a theological college, it contained an impressive collection of secular works including the poetry of Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Macrobius’ Dream of Scipio, the major classical poets and contemporary historical chronicles. Particularly significant, however, for the present argument, is the fact that its core collection of books was in place when the York Cycle must have been written, and was still being added to at the end of the century when Nicholas Love (if Ian Doyle’s contention is correct) was prior. The library continued to acquire volumes throughout the fifteenth century when the plays were being revised.

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The friary was part of the life of the city. It stood beside the Guildhall near the end of Coney Street with St Leonard’s Hospital just across the street and St Mary’s Abbey just over the walls of the city and backed on the Ouse with the constant traffic of passing commerce. (see map, p. 19) This location made involvement with the city inevitable. As David Knowles has said of the order in general ‘they were ubiquitous as effective preachers to the city folk and as advisers and directors of those who strove for a more perfect following of Christ’.39 One of the few fifteenth-century ‘station lists’ to survive records the friary, along with its neighbour St Leonard’s Hospital, renting the ninth station (located very close to their front gate) for the Corpus Christi Play in 1454.40 The Corpus Christi Guild, the most popular fraternity in a city of fraternities, established an altar in the friary church to honour the Real Presence of Christ in 1470–1.41 Over the years nine brothers became members of the guild.42 These included, in 1469, John Bedford who became a lector in theology and then, after a period of study at Cambridge, master in 1483 before becoming prior of the London house, and William Bewick who was prior in the late 1480s and early 1490s and master of the king’s work for Richard III when he was staying in the friary from time to time.43 Bewick later became a professor of sacred theology at Cambridge. In 1487, the friary established a special relationship with the Carpenters’ Guild, where the brothers undertook to sing masses for the souls of the guildsmen in return for financial support and the use of two pieces of property running down to the river ‘on the corner of the landing near St Leonard’s’.44 It was in the chapel of the Austin Friary that the abbot of St Mary’s acted as arbiter in 1493 in an unseemly dispute between the Cordwainers and the Weavers over precedence in the Corpus Christi procession in the presence of Prior William Bewick.45 Thomas Gare, mercer and mayor in 1420, left the friary 100 marks for the improvement of their building,46 and William Revetour left the house five shillings as part of his general support of all the religious houses in York.47 It is possible that the lay friends of the friary were given access to the library.Various names appear in the catalogue as donors or borrowers of the books. Humphreys assumes that they are all friars and identifies several as priors provincial. He notes that the name ‘Gysburne’ written against entries 240 (a copy of Gregory’s Sentences from Erghome’s collection) and 631 (a sermon possibly by Waldeby) ‘cannot be identified’.48 It is interesting that the first document to describe the pageant route through York (1399) lists the third station in Micklegate as ‘ad ostium Iohannis de Gyseburne’.49 Humphreys speculates that there may have been a brother called Gyseburne, or that the notation indicates a loan to the Austin Canons house in Guisborough in the North Riding. If the friars were intimately concerned with the cultivation of the spiritual lives of the people among whom they lived and served then it seems more than likely that books may have been lent to lay friends of the house. It was this library, and its catalogue, that first made me aware of the extent to which writers of the didactic literature of Yorkshire in the vernacular in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries may have had access to the riches of classical and patristic writings as well as to more contemporary works. But

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a second library catalogue has survived from York, the fifteenth-century catalogue of the great Benedictine abbey of St Mary, whose impressive buildings rose above the city wall that divided it from the Hospital of St Leonard. This catalogue has only been recently identified by the editors of English Benedictine Libraries50 by matching the books listed in British Library, MS Harley 2268, fols 295–304v (a catalogue without heading) with the entries for St Mary’s in the Registrum Anglie,51 what one scholar has referred to as a fifteenth-century ‘Union catalogue’.52 The Registrum listed the holdings of ninety-five libraries across England in the fifteenth century and, curiously enough, St Mary’s was the only one surveyed in Yorkshire.The list is not of the same order as the careful catalogue of the Augustinian friary. Rather, it may be the private list of the compiler – a kind of finding guide that would allow him to locate whatever book he wanted.53 Nevertheless, it provides enough information to see it as a further possible source for the playwrights in York. We must add to this already impressive amount of potential reference material the library of the Minster, and the books that would be available in the other religious houses and in the grammar schools associated with the Minster, and St Leonard’s Hospital. The playwrights of York, indeed, had potential access to an extraordinary richness of material out of which to fashion their history ‘of the old & new testament’.54 I have argued elsewhere that the fundamental dramaturgical principles behind the York Cycle are based on Boethian and Augustinian theories of sound and action.55 The Friary possessed a copy of Boethius’ De musica and the treatise by the same name by Saint Augustine. Of the fundamental Augustinian texts, whose theories of the nature of God and man inform the shaping of the plays, there were five copies of De ciuitate Dei (three in the Friary and two in the Abbey); four copies of De doctrina christiani (two in each library); and seven copies of De Trinitate (five in the Friary and two in the Abbey). The friary also possessed the fundamental rhetorical texts: Cicero’s De inventione and the Rhetorica ad Herrenium both from the library of John Erghome and other classical rhetorical texts by Boethius and Seneca, as well as the standard medieval tracts Ars dictaminis in septibus partibus, Ars dictandi in metro, Ars predicandi, Tractatus de modo dictandi and Tractatus de rhetorica. The Friary also had a Senecan text entitled Tragedia prima. Each library possessed a substantial number of manuscripts of the mystical writings of Bernard of Clairvaux: all his major works were represented in at least one copy. The friary had a copy of the Gospel of Nicodemus (the essential source of most of the non-canonical episodes in the Passion sequence of the York Cycle) and a copy of William of Pagula’s Oculus Sacerdotis, one of the most important texts in English pastoralia, while the Abbey possessed five more. Seminal theological works by some of the Fathers were available in multiple copies: Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo (seven copies); Augustine’s De concensu evangelorum (two copies) and De genesis ad litteram (six copies); many commentaries by Origen; three copies of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and, in the Abbey, single copies of Augustine’s important Enarrationes in Psalmos, and Bede’s Commentary on Luke.

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In addition to these works, there were also several other patristic texts that seem to have been used specifically by the playwright or playwrights in the interpretation of specific episodes: Augustine’s De libero arbitrio for the ‘Cain and Abel’ episode, De verbis domini for the episode of the ‘Temptation of Christ’ and De Tractatus in evangelium used in the episode of the ‘Woman Taken in Adultery’, and the general characterisation of Pilate, two works On Matthew by Chrysostom and Jerome are clearly the source for the ‘Transfiguration’ episode. The abbey also possessed three copies of the Glossa ordinaria which was essential for some of the episodes, such as the actions of the scribes and the pharisees as they turn away from their baiting of Christ, and in the ‘Woman Taken in Adultery’ play. The friary possessed the major patristic writings on the Virgin Mary that embellish her story with the details dramatised in the plays of the ‘Death’, ‘Assumption’, and ‘Coronation of the Virgin’. Finally, the Latin versions of the sermons of John Waldeby were deposited in the friary library. Of these, only the homilies on the Creed, the Pater Noster, the Ave Marie and the Novum Opus Dominicale are known to have survived. They remain in manuscript.56 Further work needs to be done on these manuscripts to determine whether any connections can be made not only with the biblical cycle but also with the two other large plays performed in York, the Pater Noster Play and the Creed Play. Drama scholars have puzzled for years over the description of the Pater Noster plays in York,57 Lincoln,58 and Beverley59 as portraying the vices and virtues. The explanation may lie in the fact that Waldeby, in his treatise on the Pater Noster, applied each petition to one of the seven vices and its corresponding virtue.60 The first evidence that there was a major event on Corpus Christi Day in York comes in 1376 in the form of rent received by the city for space that housed ‘tres pagine Corporis christi’.61 This occurs in the first gathering of the so-called A/Y Memorandum book of the city that was begun that year. It is possible, therefore, that the play had been begun some years before that date. Over the next twenty years, the ordinances of several guilds speak of their pageants of Corpus Christi.62 In 1394, there occurs the first mention of the playing places ‘in locis antiquitus assignatis’,63 and in 1399 the twelve stations are named.64 By this time, other details of the production, including the ‘billets’ issued by the city council notifying the guilds that the play was to be performed, are beginning to appear.65 Evidence for the text comes later. In about 1415, two master lists of the pageants were compiled by the then town clerk, Roger Burton, and entered into the Memorandum Book. The first list, the Ordo paginarum, describes the pageants as they then existed.66 The second list seems to be a list of crafts, and an extraordinary proliferation of sub-crafts and the episodes for which they were responsible.67 These master lists were used as running tallies of which craft or sub-craft was responsible for each play, or part of a play.The so-called ‘Ordo gathering’ has survived in a severely damaged condition but it is still possible to see the changes not only of craft ascription but also, from time to time, of play content.The episodes described in the Ordo correspond in broad outline, but not in detail, to the play text as it has come down

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to us. There is evidence to indicate, however, that about 1422 during the mayoralty of Henry Preston a major revision took place.68 A detailed description of the wagon, props and costumes for the Mercers’ Judgement play dated 1433 provides interesting evidence for the revisions.69 The details of character that can be deduced from the costume evidence in both descriptions of the pageant indicate that it would have been impossible to perform the play as described in the 1415 Ordo with the 1433 set and costumes, but perfectly possible to perform the text that has survived with the 1433 set and costumes.70 The revision to the Judgement episode, then, was made between 1415 and 1433. Another, more significant change was made in the Passion sequence in the early fifteenth century. Thirteen crafts were responsible for the episodes beginning with the Betrayal and ending with the division of Christ’s garments. These were divided into eleven episodes in the Ordo but appear in only eight in the play text. One pageant, The ‘Condemnation of Christ’, brought together parts of four earlier pageants into a new mix.The text as we have it was written down in an official register around 1475.71 There is, therefore, a period of at least one hundred years between the inception of the play and the surviving text. There is only one tantalising early reference to play books.William de Thorp, a clerk made free in 1368–9,72 left ‘libros meos de ludis’ to one Richard de Yedingham in 1376, if Yedingham wanted them, along with an ‘armarialum.’ If Yedingham didn’t want the ‘armarialum’ it was to go to the church of St Mary ad Valvas ‘de rebus imponendis’.73 St Mary ad Valvas was a parish church within the precinct of the Minster near the east end of the cathedral. Thorp seems to have been a parishioner there, arguing that he was connected to the Minster in some capacity.There is no evidence of the contents of the ‘libros meos de ludis’. Yet during the last quarter of the fourteenth century the York Cycle was conceived and written, and then during the first quarter of the fifteenth century, it underwent a major revision.We cannot name the playwrights and revisers with certainty, but I hope we are getting closer to that circle of writers who influenced the playwrights either directly or, like John Thoresby and John Waldeby, through their works preserved in the libraries of York. I have long been convinced that there must have been a community within York with natural continuity for whom the text of the play was of sufficient importance that they undertook the responsibility for overseeing the revisions, carefully monitoring the patterns of the poetry and ensuring the basic structure and theology remained intact. Three such communities have emerged from this study – the Minster, St Mary’s Abbey and the Augustinian Friary. Records do survive from the Minster but, despite Jonathan Hughes’ arguments for the primacy of the Minster clergy in the diocesan pastoral movement, there is no evidence of ‘hands on’ involvement in the play.74 The Dean and Chapter took their place over the gate of the Minster Close every year to see the play, but there is nothing to suggest their further involvement. The abbot and monks of St Mary’s, though more involved with the city than most monastic establishments, were not of the city. Although the abbot was called in to settle the dispute between the Cordwainers and the Weavers in 1493, he appears as a neutral, outside

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arbiter. All other mention of the abbot related to ceremonial at York is in connection with the many royal visits where he is invited to the events as the head of a neighbouring, but separate, jurisdiction. It is the Augustinian Friary with its library, its studium and its close connection with the affairs of the city and its citizens that most readily fills the requirements of a continuing community with a natural interest in the didactic purpose of the play. The connection I have been tracing between the library of the Friary and the play makes it all the more likely that the York Cycle was written and revised by men connected with that house – men who studied under John Waldeby, John Erghome and, it would be nice to think, Nicholas Love, sharing the life of the community with them.

Notes 1 York, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, 2 vols, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), i, p. 340. 2 See The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. by Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Contexts for Early English Drama, ed. by Marianne Briscoe and John Coldewey (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989); The Theatre of Medieval Europe, ed. by Eckehard Simon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 3 See, for example Alexandra Johnston,‘TheYork Corpus Christi Play:A Dramatic Structure Based on Performance Practice’, in The Theatre in the Middle Ages, ed. by Herman Braet, John Noive, and Gilbert Tournoy (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1985), see below, pp. 301–309. 4 Jonathan Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1988). This immensely thought-provoking book is largely unaware of the recent work on which has revolutionised our understanding of the field. 5 Past and Present, 121 (1988), pp. 29–48. 6 Ibid., p. 48. 7 R.B. Dobson, ‘Craft Guilds and City: The Historical Origins of the York Plays Reassessed’, in The Stage as Mirror: Civic Theatre in late Medieval Europe, ed. by Alan Knight (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1997), pp. 91–106. 8 REED:York, i, p. 1. 9 Dobson, ‘Craft Guilds’, p. 100. 10 W.A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), p. 190. 11 Alberic Stacpole, ‘The Monastic and Religious Orders in York, 660–1540,’ in The Noble City of York, ed. by Alberic Stacpole and others (York: Cerialis, 1972), p. 656. 12 Leonard E. Boyle, ‘The Oculus Sacerdotis and Some Other Work by William of Pagula’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series (1955), p. 81. I would like to acknowledge the debt I owe to Father Boyle who, when he was associated with the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto, became my mentor and friend as he became the mentor and friend of so many Toronto medievalists. His death in 1999 was deeply mourned by us all. 13 Pantin, English Church, p. 192. 14 The Borthwick Institute for Archives,York Register 11, fol. 295. 15 Pantin, English Church, p. 192. 16 York Register 11, fols 295–97. 17 A. Gwynn, The English Austin Friars in the Time of Wyclif (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940), pp. 114–15.

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18 A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500, ed. by A.B. Emden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), vol. iii, p. 1957. 19 Gwynn, Austin Friars, pp. 117–18. 20 Hughes, Parsons and Visionaries, p. 50. 21 Ibid., p. 95. See also the dedicatory preface to the copy of the sermons now in the British Library (MS Royal 7.E.ii, fols 50–50v) where Waldeby recounts how de la Mare had suggested that his work be preserved by being translated. 22 REED:York, ii, p. 864. 23 See P. Gibson, ‘The Stained and Painted Glass of York,’ in Stacpole, Noble City, pp. 67–224. 24 A.I. Doyle, ‘Reflections of Some Manuscripts of Nicholas Love’s Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ’, in Essays in Memory of Elizabeth Salter, ed. by Derek Pearsall, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 14 (1983), p. 82. 25 Nicholas Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Critical Edition based on Cambridge University Library Additional MSS 6578 and 6686, ed. by Michael G. Sergeant (New York: Garland, 1992), p. 10. 26 Ibid., p. 176. 27 For a full discussion of affective piety and the relationship between these two works see Laurelle M. LeVert, The Rhetoric of Response: Affectivity and Didacticism in Middle English Devotional Experiences of the Passion (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1999). 28 See Alexandra F. Johnston, The Christ Figure in the Four English Cycles (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1964). 29 ‘The Catalogue of the Library of the Augustinian Friars at York’, ed. by M.R. James, in Fasciculus Iohanni Willis Clark Dicatus (Cambridge:Typis academicis impressus, 1909), p. 4. The catalogue has now been re-edited by K.W. Humphreys in The Friars’ Libraries, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues (London: British Library, 1990), pp. 11–154. The manuscript is in Trinity College Dublin (MS 359). It belonged to the collection of Archbishop Usher which was purchased for the college in 1661. 30 A.C. Little, ‘The Austin Friars of York’ in The Victoria History of the County of York, ed. by William Page, vol. iii, (London: Constable, 1913), p. 294. 31 Francis Roth, The English Austin Friars 1249–1538, 2 vols (New York, NY: Augustinian Historical Institute, 1966) vol. i, p. 16. 32 Ibid., p. 364. 33 Gwynn, Austin Friars, p. 130; Roth, Friars, vol. i, p. 147 and vol. ii, p. 225. 34 Gwynn, Austin Friars, p. 130. 35 Humphreys, Libraries, p. xxx. 36 Ibid. 37 Humphreys, Libraries, p. xxviii. 38 These basic details are derived from James, ‘Catalogue’, pp. 2–8. 39 David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), vol. ii, p. 359. 40 REED:York, vol. i, p. 85. 41 Roth, Friars, vol. ii, pp. 356–57. 42 See The Register of the Guild of Corpus Christi, ed. by R.H. Skaife, Surtees Society 57, (Durham, 1872). 43 Skaife, Register, p. 73 and Roth, Friars, vol. i, p. 357; vol. ii, pp. 367, 369 and 383. 44 Roth, Friars, vol. ii, pp. 374–75. 45 Extracts from the Municipal Records of the City of York, ed. by Robert Davies (London: J. B. Nichols, 1843), pp. 254–5. See also REED:York, vol. i, p. 170. 46 Skaife, Register, p. 11. 47 Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘William Revetour, chaplain and clerk of York, Testator,’ in A Festschrift in Honour of Professor Peter Meredith, ed. by C.J. Batt, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 29 (1998), p. 159. 48 Humphreys, Libraries, p. xxviii.

112 York records 49 REED:York, vol. i, p. 11. 50 English Benedictine Libraries, ed. by Richard Sharpe, James P. Carley, Ron M. Thomson and Andrew G. Watson, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, (London: British Library, 1996). 51 Registrum Anglie, ed. by R.A.B. Mynors, Richard H. & Mary A. Rouse, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, (London: British Library, 1991). 52 Elza Tiner, ‘Evidence for the Study of Rhetoric in the City of York to 1500’, (unpublished licenciate thesis, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, 1984), p. 40. 53 R.A.B. Mynors, Richard H. and Mary A. Rouse, English Benedictine Libraries, p. 681. 54 REED:York, vol. i, p. 340. 55 Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The Word Made Flesh: Augustinian Elements in the York Cycle,’ in The Centre and Its Compass: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor John Leyerle, ed. by R. Taylor and others, Studies in Medieval Culture 33, (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993) pp. 225–46 and ‘At the still point of the turning world: Augustinian roots of Medieval Dramaturgy’, in European Medieval Drama 1997, ed. by S. Higgins, vol. i, (Camerino, IT: Tempo di Spettacoli, 1997), see below, pp. 263–78. 56 Emden, Register, vol. iii, pp. 1957–58 lists the manuscript references. 57 In 1388–9, in response to Richard II’s survey of the English guilds, the Pater Noster Guild replied that its purpose was to present a play on the Lord’s Prayer ‘in quo ludo quam plura vicia & peccata reprobantur & virtutes commendatur’. (REED:York, vol. i, p. 6) 58 Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain, ed. by Ian Lancashire, Studies in Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), p. 169. 59 Ibid., p. 84. 60 Sanctificetur nomen tuum is matched with luxuria; Adveniat regnum tuum with avaricia; Fiat voluntas tua with superbia; Panem nostrum cotidianum da with gula; Dimitte nobis debita nostra with invidia; Et ne nos inducas in temptacionem with accidia and Et libera a malo with ira (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc 296, fols 6–33v.) This matching of the petitions and the vices may have originated with Hugh of St Victor (British Library, Catalogue of Royal MSS, p. 234). I have read several other schemes but there does not seem to be a standard pattern for the pairing of petitions and vices. 61 REED:York, vol. i, p. 3. 62 Ibid., pp. 4–9. 63 Ibid., p. 8. 64 Ibid., p. 11–12. 65 Ibid., p. 9. 66 Ibid., pp. 16–24. 67 Ibid., pp. 25–6. 68 Preston was mayor 1421–2. See Francis Drake, Eboracum: Or the History and Antiquities of the City of York (London, 1736), p. 362. 69 REED:York, vol. i, pp. 55–6. 70 London, British Library, MS Add. 35290. 71 The York Plays, ed. by Richard Beadle (London: Arnold, 1982), pp. 13–19. 72 Register of the Freemen of the City of York, ed. by Francis Collins, Surtees Society 96, (London, 1897), p. 64. 73 REED:York, vol. i, p. 3.This will seems to indicated that St Mary ad Valvas was still standing in 1376. Francis Drake (Eboracum, p. 570) states that the church was removed in 1365 to enlarge the walks about the Minster. 74 Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, passim.

2

Other records

2.1 The emerging pattern of the Easter play in England From: Medieval English Theatre 20 (1998), 3–23

Because the majority of the texts of biblical drama that have survived from the late Middle Ages in England are compiled in four manuscripts that contain episodes that cover the sweep of salvation history from Creation to Doomsday, we have come to think of this long sequence as the ‘norm’. Recent scholarship has made clear that although the York Cycle and the Chester Cycle can be clearly identified as being conceived in such broad terms, the nature of the other two ‘cycle’ texts is less clear. Both the texts that we have come to call ‘N-Town’ and ‘Towneley’ are composite texts with episodes drawn from demonstrably different sources.1 From evidence provided by the component parts of these collections, other surviving texts, and external evidence being uncovered by Records of Early English Drama, new and shorter sequences of biblical episodes are emerging. Their existence is deepening our understanding of the mimetic traditions of England in new ways. Art critics have long contended that Gothic art is essentially episodic. Many years ago, Arnold Hauser stated the basic premise that has been used to analyse work as diverse as altar-pieces, cycle drama, and the Canterbury Tales. The basic form of Gothic art is juxtaposition.Whether the individual work is made up of several comparatively independent parts or is not analysable into such parts, whether it is a pictorial or a plastic, an epic or a dramatic representation, it is always the principle of expansion, not of concentration, of co-ordination, and not of subordination, of the open sequence and not of the closed geometric form, by which it is dominated.The beholder is, as it were, led through the stages and stations of a journey, and the picture of reality which it reveals is a panoramic survey, not a one sided, unified representation dominated by a single point of view. In painting it is the ‘continuous’ method which is favoured; the drama strives to make the episodes as complete as possible and prefers, instead of the concentration of the action in a few decisive situations, frequent changes of scene, of the characters and the motifs [. . .] Gothic art leads the onlooker from one detail to another and causes him, as has been said to ‘unravel’ the successive parts of the work one after the other [. . .].2

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Such linearity informs the episodic structure of late medieval and early modern English drama.This is a commonplace in the study of the processional drama of the York Cycle or the Chester Cycle or the ‘place and scaffold’ configurations of the N-Town Passion Play but it is also true of series of plays that are designed not for spatial linearity but for temporal linearity. Temporal linearity lies at the heart of the English Easter plays – a form that lies somewhere between liturgical celebration and mimetic representation. Any attempt to deal with the phenomenon of the Easter play in England must, first of all, acknowledge the difficulty presented by external evidence, especially in ecclesiastical records. It is often unclear whether a reference is to ritual or drama. The Protestant tract, The Beehive of the Romish Church, in describing the Good Friday customs of the late medieval church, underscores the fuzzy division between liturgical ceremony and mimesis that haunts any attempt to interpret the external evidence for Easter drama in English churches: Yea, doe wee not see likewise, that vpon good Friday they haue a crucifixe, eyther of Wood or of Stone, which they lay downe softly vpon the grounde that euery body may come creeping to it, vpon handes and knees, and so kisse the feete of it, as men are accustomed to doe the Pope of Rome; And then they put him in the graue, till Easter: at which time they take him vp againe and sing, Resurrexit, non est hic, Alleluia: He is risen, hee is not heare: God be thanked. Yea and in some places they make the graue in a high place in the Churche where men must goe vp many steppes, which are decked in blacke cloth from aboue to beneath and vpon euery step standeth a siluer candlesticke with a waxe candle burning in it, and there doe walke souldyers in harnesse, as bright as Saint George, which keep the graue, till the Priestes come and take him vp: & then commeth sodenly a flashe of fire, wherewith they are all afraide and fal downe: and then vpstarts the man, and they begin to sing Alleluia, on al hands, and then the clocke striketh eleuen.3 In the description, the deposition ceremony, the ‘creeping to the Cross’, and the burying of the Cross are all part of the liturgy for Good Friday, but the Easter morning events are a curious blend of the liturgical and the mimetic with costumed soldiers and a dramatic flash of fire to signify the Resurrection. However, the evidence of external references and of the surviving texts indicates that this blending of the liturgical and the mimetic is characteristic of English Easter drama, perhaps because this drama is associated exclusively with worshipping communities – religious houses, secular households that kept chapels, and parishes. The Easter or ‘Resurrection’ plays have the longest history of any vernacular biblical plays from the medieval and early modern period. Besides the four sequences in the ‘cycle’ manuscripts to which I will return, five texts survive that will be considered as part of the tradition: the twelfth-century AngloNorman ‘La Seinte Resurrection’, the ‘Shrewsbury Fragments’, the Bodleian

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‘Burial and Resurrection’ (from Bodleian MS e museo 160), and the Protestant plays ‘The Resurrection of Our Lord’ and Nicholas Grimald’s Latin ‘Christus Redivivus’. The last three plays, although very different from each other, are all now dated in the reign of Henry VIII about the same time that there is a remarkable rash of evidence from large parish churches of expenses and sometimes even receipts for Resurrection plays. All but the ‘Burial and Resurrection’ are fragmentary but the general shape of each can be deduced from what remains. All pick up the biblical narrative after the death of Christ and follow the story conflated from Matthew 27–8, Mark 15–6, Luke 23–4 and John 19–20. The essential episodes are the scene of the three Marys at the tomb (the Quem quaeritis sequence) and the appearance of Christ to Thomas. ‘La Seinte Resurrection’, ‘The Resurrection of our Lord’, and ‘Christus Redivivus’ share with the corresponding sequences in the cycle plays a strong sense of the external hostile world of Pilate, Annas and Caiaphas, and the soldiers set to guard the tomb. Only the ‘Burial and Resurrection’ confines the episodes to the Christian community and its pain that is turned to rejoicing. Of all these plays, also, the ‘Burial and Resurrection’ is the only one that moves significantly away from the biblical narrative by including the Virgin at the Deposition (as in N-Town). It shares with ‘The Resurrection of Our Lord’, in a parallel to the French tradition, considerable emphasis on the outpouring of Peter’s remorse.4 In his seminal book Christian Rite and Christian Drama, O.B. Hardison made a useful distinction between plays that are based on narrative history and those that are based on the lyric tradition.5 Four of these five plays are firmly based in the narrative tradition. Only the ‘Burial and Resurrection’ mines the rich vein of affective piety so familiar in much late medieval lyric poetry and drama. In its emphasis on the suffering of the community, especially the Virgin, it has more in common with the N-Town Passion Play than with the other Resurrection plays. However, its structure places it firmly among the plays performed during the Easter festival. Two of the five plays, ‘The Burial and Resurrection’ and the ‘Shrewsbury Fragments’, are divided between a portion of the play (ending with the Burial) that is to be played on Good Friday afternoon or Saturday and a second part (the Quem quaeritis sequence and the Resurrection appearances) that is to be played either later on Easter day or on the Monday or Tuesday of Easter week. ‘The Resurrection of Our Lord’ also divides the play into two days but in a different way. The two non-English language plays, ‘La Seinte Resurrection’ and ‘Christus Redivivus’ are stand-alone plays. ‘La Seinte Resurrection’ seems to have been performed either outside or in a large church or cathedral with a series of sedes arranged to enable the audience to follow the action with ease.6 ‘Christus Redivivus’ was written on classical principles, probably for Brasenose College, Oxford, although the only evidence for its performance was in Augsburg in 1556.7 It could easily be played in a college hall. The external evidence for Resurrection plays covers an equally long time span. Setting aside the Winchester evidence for the definitely liturgical Quem quaeritis sequence recorded in the Regularis Concordia in the tenth century,8 there are two external references to Easter dramatic events from the twelfth

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century, one of which may reflect a play similar to the contemporary ‘La Seinte Resurrection’. Both these references come from narrative sources – one from the account of a vision of a monk of Eynsham Priory just west of Oxford and the other from Beverley in the East Riding of Yorkshire. The vision of the monk of Eynsham ends with the comment that after he woke he attended what appears to have been a lengthy Resurrection play in the context of the Easter services.9 This probably refers to a liturgical event in the regular Easter offices of the priory. However, the Beverley event involves the miraculous rescue of two boys from injury by St John of Beverley.The boys had climbed up high to see a performance of a Resurrection play and had fallen to no harm.10 Between 1321 and 1369, Lincoln Cathedral had a play identified as a play of St Thomas the Apostle during Easter Week. From 1383 to 1391, there is reference to a Resurrection play in Easter Week. Since the episode of Doubting Thomas is a regular feature of Resurrection plays it is quite possible that these references are all to the same play paid for by the Chapter annually.11 Also during the fourteenth century the prior of Christ Church Cathedral, Canterbury, paid players twice on Easter, in 1364 and again in 1372. These entries, however, are only two among many other entertainment records in the prior’s accounts paid for at almost any great feast and may not represent anything related to the Easter liturgical events themselves.12 Evidence from Wells Cathedral in Somerset and Ripon Minster in Yorkshire from the first half of the fifteenth century is more compelling. In 1417–8 the cathedral accounts of Wells record payment for costumes for the Pilgrims pro ludo in Ebdomada Pasche – that is in Easter week – indicating that there was an Emmaus play that may or may have been attached to the liturgy later in the week after Easter. On the continent, the traditional time for the Emmaus sequence, according to Young, was in the context of Vespers on Easter Monday.13 The next year, expenses are recorded for what is possibly a liturgical Quem quaeritis event at Easter matins.The records from Wells are silent for almost fifty years until 1470–1 when the Easter play is mentioned again. This year they provide costumes, coifs, and dyed hemp wigs for the Marys, for a play to be played in nocte Pasche indicating that the event may have shifted from being a purely liturgical celebration to a more representational one detached from the liturgy14. Ripon Minster paid for fifteen ministris ludentibus at Christmas, Epiphany, and Easter in 1439–40 and 1447–8, and paid one Robert Brompton, chaplain, to write plays that year.15 The accounts of St George’s, Windsor, for 1449–50 record a payment for a costume for a player ‘in festo Pasche’ along with other play expenses that may or may not be for the Easter play.16 A similar pattern to Wells and Ripon Minster appears in a smaller household – that of the earls of Northumberland a hundred years later. In the statutes of the household customs the Chapel was specifically directed to perform the ‘Play of the Nativity uppon Christymes-Day in the morning’, as well as the ‘Play of the Resurrection upon Estur-Day in the Mornynge’.17 If a college can be considered a household, we may have yet another record of a similar event from much later in the fifteenth century. Magdalen College, Oxford, bought

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costumes pro ludo in die pasche in 1495–6. In 1509–10 they spent money on food for the pueris ludentibus in die pasche, and in 1517–8 they bought wigs for the women indicating that a Quem quaeritis sequence was part of the play. That it was more than a simple liturgical event can be deduced from the payment in 1519–20 to a painter for work on a cross and a crown & diligentia sua circa ludum die pasche.18 It is at the end of the fifteenth century that the evidence of parish Easter plays begins to accumulate from substantial parishes all over the country. Some come from the first surviving churchwardens’ accounts but a significant number, especially from the Thames valley, come from parishes whose accounts survive from long before the first reference to an Easter play. From the external evidence as well as the two surviving texts that may represent the parish tradition – the ‘Burial and Resurrection’ and ‘The Resurrection of Our Lord’ – the period just before and during the Henrician reforms seems to have been the time these plays were written and performed. Only six accounts survive from St Saviour’s parish in Dartmouth in Devon, but the first one (from 1494–5) records a payment for ‘payntyng of the clothes for the play on Ester day’.19 Records of a Resurrection play at Kingston upon Thames in Surrey begin in 1509–10 but there is little detail about the event.20 The next year another Resurrection play is recorded up river at Henley in Oxfordshire when there is evidence of a ‘lusum resurrectionis & processionem’ in the Sunday in the octave of Easter (Low Sunday).21 Thame, also in Oxfordshire, had a Resurrection play from 1515 performed in the church, which earned the parish a tidy profit every year. Evidence of payment for bread and ale for both the Tuesday in Holy Week and the Tuesday after Easter suggest a rehearsal in one week and a performance after the feast.22 In 1522–3 the parish church in Rye, Sussex, made a coat for ‘hym that in playing represented the part of almighty god’. A stage was built for the performance and in 1525–6 ‘plates’ were bought for the play of the Resurrection indicating that the Emmaus meal or the meal in the upper room was one of the episodes in the play.23 The last external evidence for a parish Easter event comes from St Martin in the Fields, Westminster, from 1556–7 and reads simply ‘Item paide to the players vppon Ester Daye in the morenenge xvjd’.24 Although this could indicate any kind of play, it is most likely to have been a Marian liturgical revival rather than the kind of parish historical plays that we have been identifying in the early decades of the sixteenth century. The fullest accounts of a parish Resurrection play come from St Laurence, Reading, beginning in 1507. St Laurence is one of the three ancient parishes in Reading and its churchwardens’ books, surviving from 1498, are among the most detailed of the early sixteenth-century accounts. They record the life of a wealthy parish with a rich liturgical tradition. It supported a choir25 (an unusual practice in English parish churches) and possessed an organ as early as 150526 that was substantially rebuilt in 1511–12 (89). The music of the parish continued to have a national reputation as late as 1557–8 when expenses were paid for the ‘syngyng man a base yat was sent for to westmynster’ (286). They maintained a special walkway called the ‘procession way’, which contained a gate

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possibly allowing the parish into the adjacent precinct of Reading Abbey in the course of their ceremonies. Several inventories are included in the churchwardens’ book which provide rare detailed information about the possessions of a major parish church just before the Reformation (41–73). Playmaking and other kinds of celebration were part of the life of the parish. It is one of our major sources for evidence of the summer festivals with its Hock gatherings, King Play, Robin Hood play, and morris-dance troupe. It also had a rich tradition of single-episode biblical plays played during the summer festivals.27 The Easter observances at St Laurence began with the singing of the Passion on Palm Sunday. After the palm procession, it was the custom to have the entire Passion narrative from Matthew sung in three dramatic parts by the clerks – the treble to sing the part of the crowd, the mean to sing narration, and bass to sing the part of Jesus.28 We know that St Laurence followed this practice from a regular entry in the accounts for wine or other refreshments for the performers including the late entry of a coat of motley made for John Brown ‘that sang the mean’ in 1535–6 (197–8) in the same entry as the payment for the Palm Sunday wine. Five late entries between 1540 and 1547 record payments to a man who ‘plaied the Prophet’ on Palm Sunday.Three times the undersexton, a man called Loreman, is named as the performer.29 This is a familiar insertion into the procession sequence when a performer sang the Old Testament prophetic lesson after the Gospel at the first ‘station’ of the procession.30 Many London churches had elaborate additions to this liturgical practice with a choir of bearded and costumed performers playing the role of the Prophets.31 St Laurence seems never to have had a fully developed sequence of prophets and it may be that the part of the Prophet had been taken by one of the choir-members as part of his regular duties before 1540. We know that the parish mounted an Easter play on Easter Monday performed on a trestle stage in the church that may have used the permanent Easter sepulchre as part of the staging. In 1507–8, one William is paid ‘for carying and recarying of bord to the church for the pageaunt of the passion of estr Monday’ (35). A similar entry appears the next year ‘for the pagaeant on Estyr Monday’ (74). In 1510–1, someone is paid for carrying boards on Easter Monday with no specification of a play (85). Over twenty years later, in 1533–4 as the Henrician reforms began to take effect, a man called Labourne was paid half a mark ‘for refourmyng the resurreccion play’ (194) and two years later 9s 10d for making another copy and binding it (202). Labourne does not appear anywhere else in the Reading records. He is called ‘mr’ in the first entry but ‘sir’ in the second indicating that he may have been in orders. The last mention of the Easter Plays is in 1537–8 when the parish makes a profit of 23s 2d ‘at the ffirst play in Easter weke’ and 9s 2d at the ‘Second play’ (208). No reference to biblical drama in Reading appears after this year. What is less certain in the Reading Easter celebration is how mimetic were the liturgical ceremonies from Good Friday to Easter morning. We have no indication of what the parish of St Laurence used to represent the body of Christ but it was either a reserved host or a simple cross. No special statue

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like the one with a cavity for the host used in St Alphege, London Wall,32 or elaborate crucifix appears in the inventories. We do know that the priest wore a special red silk chasuble with a narrow cross embroidered on it for the Good Friday service (67). Red was the normal liturgical colour in England for Good Friday.33 The items that appear regularly in the accounts that refer to the events between the ‘burial’ on Good Friday and Easter matins are payments for ‘watching’, for coals and for incense. The sepulchre watch would have followed the liturgy described so scathingly in The Beehive of the Romish Church in which the representation of the body of Christ was laid in a sepulchre located in the chancel of the church.The St Laurence sepulchre was a wooden structure. A total of 33s 4d was collected for a new sepulchre from members of the parish in what seem to be memorial gifts in 1498–9. The new sepulchre was not built until 1511–12 when £4 12s 4d was paid to Water Barton ‘to the new Sepulchre’ (89). Two pounds of glue was also bought that year ‘to the sepulchre’ (91) indicating that Barton delivered the carved wood in pieces to be assembled in its place. Charles Kerry in his account of the parish says that the sepulchre was located ‘on the north side of the choir beneath the middle arch of the arcade.’34 The next year a frame was provided for the sepulchre light which was recreated as a ‘loft’ for the light (95). One of the regular payments in the accounts is for a ‘nail’ or ‘spike’ to the sepulchre which was probably used to secure the elaborate cloths listed in the detailed inventories that were either draped over the sepulchre or hung as a curtain. One is described as ‘an awter cloth of Crymson & tawny velwett ymbrowdred with ffloures of gold & for the nether parte of the same Crymson Saten & cloth of bawdekyn for the Sepulchre Awter’ (55). Another is described as a ‘sepulchre Cloth of right Crymson Saten imbrowdered with Imagerye with a frontall of panys conteynyng in length iiij yardes of the gifte of mr Richrd Smyth with ijo clothes of lawnde for the Sepulchre.’(57). A third entry lists two other altar cloths with red crosses for Lent, and curtains (55). One of these cloths was mended and rebound in 1520–1(137), and in 1544–5 silk points are bought for the sepulchre (238). The task of watching the Easter sepulchre normally fell to the clerk or the sexton. Pamela Sheingorn has suggested that it was necessary to set a watch because of the danger from the burning candles.35 Eamon Duffy suggests the pyx in which the sacrament was buried was extremely valuable.36 Whatever the reason, a watch was set in St Laurence and paid for every year from the time the accounts begin until the accession of Edward VI. Duffy suggests the coals were to warm the watchers37 but they are referred to in 1503–4 as ‘colyes on Ester eveyn’, in 1504–7 as ‘Colys on ester evyn to be halowyd’, and in 1512–3 as ‘to make the halowid fyer’.38 In 1520–1, among the Easter expenses is payment for a ‘fire pan’ (137). It seems clear that the coals were used as they were in the neighbouring parish of St Giles39 to ignite the new fire with which the Resurrection candles (especially the great Paschal candle) were lit on Easter morning.40 The incense frequently specified ‘in Easter eve’ was probably mixed with the coals as part of the ritual.

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This much we can deduce for certain from the records about the events that took place in St Laurence, Reading, between Good Friday and Easter morning. But what happened on Easter morning? The work of Philip Butterworth will help us to unravel some of the puzzle. In 1506–7, the wardens record a payment of 2½d to Sybil Darling, the widow of a prominent parishioner who died that year, for a combination of nails for the sepulchre with ‘rosyn to the resurreccyon pley’ (29). Butterworth states that ‘one of the simplest methods of producing an effect of lightning is to cast a powder such as rosin into or over a flame to produce a flash of fire’.41 When we combine the reference to rosyn with the other equipment for creating fire such as the fire-pan, we can deduce that the moment of Resurrection was marked at St Laurence, as it was in the ceremony described in The Beehive of the Romish Church, with a flash of light. Two other pieces of evidence may indicate a more elaborate mimetic presentation of Easter morning. The clerk who wrote the St Laurence accounts seems to have proceeded with all due deliberation through the year. We can be reasonably sure, therefore, that the expenses that are clustered with the normal Easter entries have relevance to the events during the Easter period. In 1522–3 there appears the following set of entries: Item payd for makeng of the playeres garmentes Item payd for xj li of wex for the paschall & makeng yerof Item for a quart of bastaard Item payd to willȝiam wey for sir willȝiams hors hyer Item payd to Roger Iohnson for stevens hors gyre Item payd to Iohn paynter for makeyng of geyr for the play Item payd for waatchyng the Sepulcre

vijd ixs vijd iijd vs xvjd iijs iijd viijd (149)

Setting aside the two references to horse hire that may have nothing to do with the Easter celebration, these entries are suggestive. Three concern normal Easter liturgical functions – the creation of the Pascal candle, the wine for the Prophets, and the Sepulchre watch. But two refer directly to costumes and painted ‘gear’ – presumably a set of some kind or props. No other play entries appear for that year – not even a king-play entry. It is hard not to associate the players and their gear with the Easter events. The second suggestive entry is in the last version of the inventory of the possessions of the parish dated that same year: the red chasuble for Good Friday is linked with the phrase ‘& all thapparaelles for good ffryday’ (67). A ‘+’ appears in the margin against this item and another appears farther down the page against another entry that appears to have been left out,indicating that the items belong together. That entry reads ‘Item for a Cotte for Mary Magdeleyn of Cloth of gold’. There is no assurance that the ‘apparel’ for Good Friday is anything more than a complete set of vestments for the officiating clergy. Nor is there any assurance that the coat for Mary Magdalene is a costume for a human being. It is perfectly possible that it is a costume for a statue. All the play gear provided in 1522–3 could have been for the play in the week after Easter.

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Nevertheless, the entries are suggestive – not only of a greater embellishment of the Good Friday ceremony but of the Easter Morning celebration too. Mary Magdalene plays a prominent part in the first Resurrection appearance episodes and it is possible that the costumes and gear were for a ‘Resurrection’ play similar to those that appear in the contemporary play texts. The evidence from Reading may well be that of an episodic play made linear not through space but through time as the mimetic events follow the sequence of the liturgical offices of Easter. And it is here that a new pattern seems to be emerging. There obviously were and continued to be liturgical embellishments of the Easter services. But some, as we know from the evidence of Barking Abbey near London, were not the familiar liturgical inclusion of the Quem quaeritis passages chanted by the clergy at Easter matins. At Barking, during the rule of Lady Katherine of Sutton, for example, the Easter liturgical events consisted of a ritual Harrowing of Hell in which the entire convent took part followed by the ‘resurrection’ of the Host from the tomb and its ceremonial return to the altar.42 When mention is made of liturgical embellishments, therefore, we cannot assume a simple Quem quaeritis or even a perigrini. Similarly when we have evidence of the supplying of a costume for Mary Magdalene (as in the will of Agnes Burton in Taunton, Somerset, in 1503–4)43 we should not assume that this is necessarily for a strictly liturgical event. If there is an emerging pattern – and the pattern is by no means ‘set’ – it seems to me to have more components than simply a long-standing liturgical practice and then, in the sixteenth century, parish plays springing up that may be historical in their approach (as in ‘The Resurrection of Our Lord’) or lyrical (as the ‘Death and Burial’). There are too many references where ludentibus are hired by religious houses, cathedral chapters or private household chapels to perform at Easter. Surely a strictly liturgical sequence would be taken by members of the convent or cathedral chapter themselves as part of the festive ritual. It is far more likely that these hired players were performing, from quite an early date, Easter plays based on the scriptural story that were not embedded in the liturgy. In the pre-1500 payment to players at Easter, it seems to me that we have something between the liturgical observance and the sixteenth-century parish drama. Indeed, I would suggest that here we have the pattern on which the later parish drama was modelled – representational plays based on the scriptural narrative taking place within substantial ecclesiastical or secular households – those that kept ‘chapels’. I would like to suggest that the ‘Shrewsbury Fragments’ provide us with an important fourteenth-century witness to what might be called ‘extra-liturgical’ drama. The ‘Fragments’ have been associated with Lichfield Cathedral although, heretofore, no one has been able to suggest how or why this should be.44 However, the evidence from the cathedrals of Wells and Ripon Minster, and the much later chapel of the earls of Northumberland, speak to a tradition of retaining specially skilled performers, be they secular actors or especially gifted singing brothers, to provide extra liturgical presentations based on the historic scriptural texts rather than the liturgy around the great feasts of Christmas and

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Easter within a cathedral chapter. It has long been noted that this macaronic text is a single actor’s part for a Christmas play and two Easter plays – a Quem quaeritis sequence and Emmaus. The actor played the parts of the third shepherd, the third Mary and Cleophas – one part for a Christmas play and two for the most common events dramatised at Easter. The rubrics in the surviving manuscript fragments associate the Quem quaeritis sequence with Easter day but the Emmaus play is headed ‘Feria secunda in ebdomada Pasche’ or the Monday of Easter Week. Furthermore a line is drawn after line 71 of the Emmaus episode after Christ has broken the bread. Similar lines in the rest of the manuscript indicate the end of an episode.45 The subsequent lines seem to be the beginning of a Thomas play that could possibly have been played later in the week. The ‘Shrewsbury Fragments’ are neither purely liturgical nor purely narrative. The fact that much music is involved argues for a medium that falls somewhere between pure liturgy and an historical recounting of biblical events. This text and the matching references from ecclesiastical records may represent one version of the English Easter play tradition that is neither purely liturgical nor purely historical but something in between that served as a model for the sixteenth-century texts. In these texts, ‘The Burial and Resurrection’ and ‘The Resurrection of Our Lord’ we have two very different plays written about the same time on the events from the Deposition to the Resurrection. Both are designed to be played in two parts. There the similarity ends. We do not know where ‘The Resurrection of Our Lord’ comes from but the most recent editors of ‘The Burial and Resurrection’ have located it by the dialect in south-east Yorkshire.46 The rubric at the beginning of ‘The Burial and Resurrection’ reads, ‘This is a play to be played, on part on Gud Friday afternone, and þe other part opon Ester Day after the resurrection in the morowe.’47 The play has the fewest episodes of any sequence on the Resurrection. In part one Mary the Virgin dominates the scene with her mourning. The body of Christ is taken from the cross, and she continues her laments as the body is given to her and she cradles it on her lap. Joseph and Nicodemus then take it and bury it. Here the first day ends. The second day contains the actual Resurrection and the visit of the Marys. Mary Magdalene now becomes the central mourning figure as the events marking her relationship with Christ are recalled. Similarly Peter mourns his denial in an echo of the French tradition. The risen Christ appears to them all and the play ends with a hymn without carrying the story further to the later Resurrection appearances. ‘The Resurrection of Our Lord’ is fragmentary at the beginning but it has a running title of ‘The first dayes playe’ from the conversation between Pilate and the Centurion through the Resurrection itself which is accompanied by a gunpowder explosion, and the appearance to the Marys until the speech by the ‘doctor’ (here called ‘Appendix’), after the soldiers have been bribed to say that the body was stolen. The second day in this text, then, is devoted to a

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non-scriptural appearance to Peter (partly lost from the text) that deals with Peter’s remorse. Appendix is rather apologetic for the inclusion of an appearance not attested to in the gospels but rather in Acts and in the Epistles of Paul. This sequence is followed by the Road to Emmaus, during which Christ delivers a sermon laced with quotations from the Old Testament. Luke and Cleophas then report back to the rest of the disciples and the play ends with the episode of Doubting Thomas. These two plays make a fascinating contrast. ‘The Burial and Resurrection’ is in the lyric tradition of affective piety. The Virgin speaking to Mary Magdalene refers to the body of Christ on the cross as ‘þis ymage of pitee’ (l. 796). The playwright has stripped away all the scriptural details of the external world.This is the community of the faithful mourning their loss and receiving the great gift of the assurance of the Resurrection. At the end the rubric says that the hymn Scimus Christum or another Easter hymn is to be sung whether by just the cast or by the congregation as well as in the continental liturgical sequences is unclear. In an epilogue the figure of John commends the audience to Christ. This clearly Catholic play stands within the tradition that we have been tracing. However, so, in a very real way, does the Protestant ‘The Resurrection of Our Lord’. In fact, the action of this play is closer to the Resurrection sequences in the cycle MSS with its inclusion of the outside world and its careful use of Scripture. What is strikingly different is its theology and the strange way the piece is divided in two in a manner that does not follow the ritual observance of the sequence from Deposition to Resurrection Appearances. Anna J. Mill in her entry on this play in A Manual of Writings in Middle English 1050–1500 says: The writer is saturated with the doctrines of Wyclif and gives evidence of reading Tindale’s New Testament and in the works of the Continental Reformers. But even with some readjustments of dates, the restrained and unpolemical tone of the fragments would seem to rule out any ascription to the militant John Bale, for which the editors would fain have discovered documentation.The Resurrection, still dramatically in the medieval tradition, forms a link between the mystery cycles and the late Bible plays of Bale and his followers.48 The Protestantism of the writer may have determined the way the episodes are split with the Resurrection itself on Day 1 and the long and cerebral portrayals of the Resurrection appearances on Day 2, perhaps in conscious defiance of the liturgical pattern. It is also possible that the play, even in its truncated form, runs to 1321 lines was not played over Easter weekend but on two days during Easter week. Nevertheless, this play is firmly in the tradition and reminds us that Protestant writers, especially in the early days of the Reformation in England, used the drama as a vehicle for disseminating their interpretations of the Gospel message. The two plays that stand outside the tradition of dividing the episodes between two days are the earliest and the latest. The twelfth-century ‘La Seint

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Resurrection’ survives to us only as a fragment of about 360 lines but there is sufficient information in the surviving stage directions to get a sense of what the complete play contained. It seems to have dealt with all the biblical episodes from the Deposition to the Commissioning in Galilee since provision is made for a Galilee sedes. If what remains is any indication of what was once dramatised, we have lost one of the most fascinating versions of the story. In the few short scenes we have two unique interpretations. Longinus having pierced Christ’s side, receives his sight, and testifies to Christ’s divinity, is promptly thrown in jail where he is still languishing when the fragment ends; and Nicodemus, in a highly sophisticated bit of characterisation, refuses to help Joseph of Arimathea with the burial until he is assured by Pilate that no harm will come to him if he takes part in this act of charity. The manuscript breaks off at the setting of the guard. At the other end of our time period, Nicholas Grimald’s ‘Christus Redivivus’, despite its classical form, presents a straightforward set of episodes. The mourning voices of the community are changed into formal classical choruses and much of the action (such as the Emmaus sequence) is reported not portrayed. Interestingly, Grimald did actually provide a scene (albeit very short) for the Harrowing of Hell. Written from a Protestant perspective for a school performance, this play combines the native and classical traditions with a clearly didactic purpose. But we do have, as well, dramatisations of the Easter sequence embedded in the so-called ‘cycle’ texts. The two civic plays – York and Chester – present the material in a straightforward way. What makes their sequences from Deposition to Doubting Thomas essentially different from the shorter plays we have been discussing is the intervention after the Burial and before the Resurrection of the plays on the Harrowing of Hell. This episode, that can be argued to be essential to the sweeping pattern of salvation history that both these collections depict, interrupts the biblical/liturgical flow. Nevertheless, both cycles depict the episodes we have been discussing. York has separate pageants for the ‘Resurrection’, the ‘Appearance to Mary Magdalene’, the ‘Road to Emmaus’, and the ‘Incredulity of Thomas’. They follow one another in the orderly pattern one expects from the York text. After the ‘Harrowing’, Chester picks up the biblical sequence in the ‘Resurrection’ play that tells the story of the events of Friday to Sunday from the setting of the guards by Pilate to a special separate ‘Appearance to Peter’ reminiscent of the French tradition. The next play covers the Resurrection appearances from Emmaus to Doubting Thomas. Together these two plays cover the material of the Easter plays briefly and episodically. Though having clear affinities with the plays we have been discussing, the York and Chester versions sit well within the larger sequence of episodes depicting salvation history. In both N-Town and Towneley the situation is somewhat different. Both these ‘cycles’ are compilations, editions that seem to have gathered biblical plays from many sources and created from the episodes the semblance of ‘Creation to Doomsday’ sequences. However, it is possible to discern in each of them, as Peter Meredith has so successfully done with the Mary Play embedded in the

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N-Town manuscript, the shape of the original component parts. In his discussion of N-Town in the Cambridge Companion, Alan Fletcher remarks of Passion Play 2, ‘It has no distinct ending, probably because the original ending of the play contained in the Passion Play exemplar was suppressed in the process of dovetailing it with the pageant material.49 Finding the proper ending point has been a real challenge to performance. In the text he prepared for the Toronto production of the Passion Play in 1981,50 Stanley J. Kahrl chose the end of the ‘Appearance to Mary Magdalene’ (fol. 201). Spector notes that after the end of the Mary Magdalene sequence ‘Remainder of fol. 201r filled with scribblings. Amen, Amen appears at right opposite 99, and Explicit is written under the final Latin line’.51 Folio 201v is blank. The Emmaus episode begins on fol. 202 with the heading hic incipit aparacio cleophe et luce. The original finale of the ‘Passion Play’ that would probably have matched the didactic statements of the ‘mediating’ figures who open both segments of the play has clearly been lost in the editorial process. However, it is clear that the pageant that follows is a self-contained and complete ‘Easter Play’ that might have been played by a parish during Easter Week to supplement the liturgical celebrations of Good Friday and Easter Sunday. It lacks the actual Resurrection sequence but neatly and succinctly presents the rest of the episodes. It begins with the peregrini sequence, but then moves back to the gathered disciples with the pilgrims telling their news. Thomas enters in despair to be persuaded by the appearance of Christ and the command to feel the wounds. The play ends with a forty-line formal declaration by Thomas rehearsing the manifestations of the Resurrection. Each of the first three eight-line stanzas ends with the Latin Quod mortuus et sepultus nunc resurrexit. The last stanza ends with a ringing and direct address to the audience: Truste wel Jesu Cryst, þe Jewys kyllyd the same; The fende hath he feryd, oure feyth þat evyr avexit. To hevyn ȝow brynge, and saue ȝow all in-same That mortuus et sepultus iterum resurrexit. Amen.52 Like many of the separate ‘pageants’ in the N-Town manuscript, this play has a sense of completeness that does not depend on the surrounding episodes for its rhetorical or dramatic impact. To tease out the possible editorial changes in the Towneley sequence is more of a challenge. However, the editors of both the 1885 edition of York and the 1994 edition of Towneley have suggested how possibly two Easter plays have been fitted into the sequence to create a manuscript that has the sweep of episodes from Creation to Doomsday. Lucy Toulmin Smith carefully noted what she considered to be the parallels between the York and Towneley texts. The Resurrection sequence (Play 38, produced by the Carpenters in York) is one of the plays generally recognised as having been ‘borrowed’ from the metropolitan cycle by the compilers of the manuscript from the West Riding. Smith notes as she comes to the end of the Carpenter’s pageant ‘Seventy-six lines follow

128 Other records

this in Towneley, on the subject of York 39; they are not parallel’.53 Play 39, the Winedrawers lyrical ‘Appearance to Mary Magdalene’, indeed does not parallel the straightforward narrative version of the Appearance that ends the Towneley sequence: the editors of the new edition comment: The Towneley play of ‘Thomas of Indie’, a corrected title in the manuscript which appears again in the rubricated explicit, is of course misnamed in that the Thomas episode takes up only a little more than half of its narrative. The Towneley version resembles most clearly in general outline the gospel narrative of St. John, in which Mary Magdalene goes directly to the Apostles, followed by Christ’s Appearance before the Ten and then, a week later, before the Eleven (with Thomas); see John xx.18–29. Towneley 28, therefore, picks up directly from the end of Play 26, the Resurrection, when Mary Magdalene prepares for her meeting with the apostles. Play 27 is, consequently, an intruder in the narrative sequence, though some editorial effort seems to have been made to assimilate it (see 457–69).The opening scene of the play between Mary Magdalene and the Apostles (1–64) is linked to the Resurrection Play by virtue of the stanza form, the 6-line tail-rhyme stanza, which however rhymes aabcca in this play as contrasted with the uniform aaabab rhyme in the earlier play.54 Put together, the sequence Play 26: 580, and Play 28 represents an Easter play beginning with the last event on Easter and then taking the events of the postEaster period as they appear in John – with the strange anomaly of the presence of Paul amongst the disciples. Play 27 (the Peregrini) then can be seen as a ‘standalone’ Easter Play on this episode to be played on Easter Monday as a supplement to the liturgy of the day.Thus as the Towneley compilers gathered together the episodes necessary to create their Creation to Doomsday sequence, they seem to have borrowed, possibly from a parish or from one of the many ecclesiastical households in Yorkshire, two separate plays in the Easter Play tradition. When we put together the surviving texts, however fragmentary, with the external evidence, we can, I believe, perceive a pattern in the occurrence of the Easter plays. As we have seen, evidence for a separate ‘Resurrection’ play exists only in ecclesiastical records – the records of monastic houses, cathedral chapters, private chapels, and parishes. Separate dramatisations of the sacred story from the Death of Christ to his final appearances seems too have been associated with a worshipping community. Interestingly enough the Passion Plays’ longer episodic biblical sequences, that add the trials, the beating and humiliation, and the Crucifixion itself to the material presented, seem to have been produced, as in New Romney in Kent, by more secular sponsors. The most common form of English Resurrection play seems to be one that has close connections with Easter liturgical practice but has moved away from the services themselves to present the story in dramatic form while maintaining the liturgical rhythm – the sense of temporal linearity – of the festival. The line between liturgy and mimesis especially in the records evidence, remains blurred but, as the rhetoric of The Beehive of the Romish Church makes

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clear, the connection between the liturgy and playacting in the minds of the Puritans was clear. After a long description of the gestures of the Mass itself the writer thunders, ‘In suerite, Christe hath not done any thing in his death & passion, but they do play and counterfeite the same after him so trimly and liuely, that no player nor iuggler is able to do it better.’55 Perhaps we should accept the ambiguities for what they are and allow the rich commingling of celebration and representation, as yet unchallenged by Reformation and Counter Reformation, to ‘show forth’ the religious and mimetic sensibilities of the Easter season.

Notes 1 For a discussion of the nature of these two manuscripts see The N-Town Play, ed. by Stephen Spector Early English Text Society s.s. 11 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), vol. 1, pp. 13–29; Alan Fletcher, ‘The N-Town Plays,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Literature, ed. by Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 163–88; The Towneley Plays ed. by Martin Stevens and A.C. Cawley, Early English Text Society s.s. 14 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), vol. 1, pp. 22–32; Peter Meredith, ‘The Towneley Cycle,’ in The Cambridge Companion, pp. 134–62. 2 Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), pp. 167–68, citing Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, trans. by Stanley Godman (New York: Knopf, 1952), vol. 1, pp. 272–73; see also Dagobert Frey, Gotik und Renaissance (Augsburg: Fisher, 1929), p. 38. 3 Phillips van Marnix, The Beehive of the Romish Church, trans. by George Gilpin (London, 1598): STC 17445, 206v. 4 See, for example, K. Janet Ritch, ‘A Critical Edition of Eloi du Mont’s La Resurrection du Jesuschrist’ (unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of Toronto, 1995). 5 O.B. Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), p. 262. 6 Medieval Drama, ed. by David Bevington (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. 122. 7 The Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald, ed. and trans. by L.R. Merrill (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1925), pp. 61–2. 8 See Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), vol. i, pp. 249–50. 9 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 66, fols 5v–6. 10 Diana Wyatt, Performance and Ceremonial in Beverley before 1642 (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of York, 1983) pp. 412–13. 11 See Records of Plays and Players in Lincolnshire 1300–1585, ed. by Stanley J. Kahrl, Malone Society Collections 8, 1969 (1974), pp. 24–5. 12 Canterbury, Cathedral Archives, Treasurer’s Account Book, LPL: MS 242, fols 129v and 159v. I am grateful to James Gibson, the editor of the REED edition of the Kent records for allowing me access to his unpublished research. 13 Young, Drama of the Medieval Church, vol. i, p. 458. 14 Somerset including Bath, ed. by James Stokes with Robert Alexander, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996) pp. 248–49, trans. p. 838. 15 From a private letter from Professor Barbara Palmer, the editor of the REED edition for the West Riding of Yorkshire. See also Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain, ed. by Ian Lancashire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), p. 1340. 16 Windsor, Accounts of St George’s Chapel Royal: xv 34 44. The accounts for that year include payments for a play at the time of the founder’s feast and it is unclear if any of the playmaking items beyond the single costume are related to the Easter event. 17 Suzanne Westfall, Patrons and Performance: Early Tudor Household Revels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 28.

130 Other records 18 Oxford, Magdalen College, compotus MSS MC2, 1490–1510; MC Arch., fol. 41v; MC3, 1510–30, fols 126 and 141v. I am grateful to John Elliot, the editor of the REED edition of the Oxford University records for allowing me access to his unpublished research. 19 Devon, ed. by John Wasson, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), p. 62. 20 Woking, Surrey Record Office, KG2/2/1 p.16 ff., I am grateful to Sally-Beth MacLean, the editor of the REED edition of the Surrey records for allowing me access to her unpublished research. 21 Oxford, Oxfordshire Archives, MSS DD Henley A V/3, f. 27v. 22 Oxford, Oxfordshire Archives, MSS DD Thame c.5, fols 73v–77v and b.2, pp. 3–44. 23 Brighton, East Sussex Record Office, St Mary’s Rye Churchwardens’ Accounts, 147/1, fol. 50v. I am grateful to Cameron Louis, the editor of the REED edition of the Sussex records for allowing me access to his unpublished research. 24 St. Martin-in-the-Fields:The Accounts of the Churchwardens 1526–1603, ed. by John V. Kitto (London: Simkin, Marshall, Kent, Hamilton, 1901) p. 165. 25 I have deduced this from the money spent on albs and amices for children. Peter le Huray in Music and the Reformation in England 1549–1660 (Cambridge UP, 1978) discusses the state of music in parish churches just before the Reformation in his first chapter. 26 Berkshire Record Office DI P 97 512, page 22. All subsequent page references to this book appear in the body of the text. 27 See my ‘Summer Festivals in the Thames Valley Counties,’ in Custom, Culture and Community in the later Middle Ages ed. by Thomas Pettitt and Leif Søndergaard (Odense UP, 1994), and with Sally-Beth Maclean, ‘Reformation and Resistance in the Thames/Severn Parishes: The Dramatic Witness,’ in The Parish in English Life ed. by Katherine L. French, Gary G. Gibbs, and Beat Kümin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). pp. 178–200. 28 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1992), p. 26. 29 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 222, 226, and 242. 30 Henry John Feasey, Ancient Holy Week Ceremonial (London: Baker, 1897), p. 75. He tells us the Sarum Processionale specifies ‘an acolyte in the guise of a prophet.’ 31 See Mary C. Erler, ‘Palm Sunday Prophets and Processions and the Eucharistic Controversy’, Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995), pp. 58–81. 32 Pamela Sheingorn, The Easter Sepulchre in England, Early Drama, Art and Music 5: (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1987), p. 221. 33 William St John Hope and E.G. Cuthbert F. Atchley, English Liturgical Colours (London: SPCK, 1918), p. 85. 34 Charles Kerry, A History of the Municipal Church of St. Lawrence, Reading (Reading: privately printed, 1883), p. 41. 35 Sheingorn, Easter Sepulchre, p. 57. 36 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 30. 37 Ibid. 38 See pp. 16, 21, 25, 29, 93. 39 Berkshire Record Office, D/P 96 5/ 1. 40 Feasey, Ancient Holy Week Ceremonial, pp. 182–83. 41 Philip Butterworth, Theatre of Fire: Special Effects in Early English and Scottish Theatre (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1998), p. 37. 42 Young, Drama of the Medieval Church, vol. ii, pp. 164–68. 43 REED: Somerset, p. 227. 44 Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. by Norman Davis, Early English Text Society s.s. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. xxii. 45 Ibid., p. 6. 46 The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and E Museo 160, ed. by Donald C. Baker, John L. Murphy, and Louis B. Hall, Jr., Early English Text Society, o.s., 283 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. lxxx–iii.

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47 Ibid., p. 142. 48 A Manual of Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, ed. by Albert Hartung and others, vol. 5 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1975), #22, p. 1355. 49 Fletcher, ‘N-Town Plays’, p. 171. 50 Stanley J. Kahrl and Alexandra F. Johnston The N-Town Plays: A Modernisation. accessed April 29, 2015. 51 Spector, N-Town Play, vol. I, p. 369. 52 Ibid., pp. 381–2. 53 York Plays, ed. by Lucy Toulmin Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), p. 420. 54 Stevens and Cawley, Towneley Plays, p. 617. 55 Beehive, p. 206.

2.2 The feast of Corpus Christi in the West Country From: Early Theatre 6 (2003), 15–34

The Feast of Corpus Christi is a late addition to the medieval calendar of festivals. It was established in the thirteenth century as a response to the new eucharistic doctrine of transubstantiation. As Miri Rubin has shown in her rich study of the eucharist in late medieval culture, the energy for the establishment of the feast came, not from the hierarchy, but from the laity and the clergy who served them. It was the Beguines of Liege, inspired by the eucharistic visions of Juliana of Cornillon, who first sought to establish a special feast to honour the real presence of Christ in the sacrament.1 But the local bishop showed little interest in the feast and it was the Dominicans who spread the new celebration beyond Liege.2 It was not until Pope Urban IV championed the feast in his bull Transiturus in 1264 arguing that the day of the institution of the sacrament should be celebrated ‘not in sorrow in the Passion week, but on another, joyful, occasion’ that the feast gained real recognition.3 It reached England in the early fourteenth century with the first references coming from the west country in the dioceses of Bath and Wells and Gloucester in 1318 and in the diocese of Exeter in 1320.4 Dioceses across the country soon enthusiastically adopted Corpus Christi, adding a new festival to the progression of spring and summer events that began with Easter and ended with Midsummer or the Feast of St John the Baptist, 24 June. Clergy and laity alike celebrated the day, most commonly with a procession in which the host was carried through the streets of towns and cities in a reliquary to be viewed and venerated by the people. It was also a day on which, in England, plays were performed. However, we now know through the work of Records of Early English Drama that Corpus Christi Day held no more special significance for drama than Whitsun or May Day or Midsummer. And, yet, the idea that there is a recognisable genre called a ‘Corpus Christi play’ has proved very difficult to eradicate. Now, REED collections provide ample evidence from the West Country, where the first Corpus Christi events in England are recorded, to reassess this outdated, yet tenacious, notion. This evidence reveals not only a variety of celebratory practices and the number of festival days on which they were performed, but also the importance of situating these practices within their specific social contexts.

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Despite the growing acknowledgment in recent years that we need to reassess long-held notions about early drama in England, little progress has been made in the way scholars discuss the nature of the relationship between Corpus Christi and performance. A number of years have already passed since I wrote, ‘It has become very clear to me that we must disabuse our minds of the idea that “Corpus Christi Play” is a generic term. The evidence makes it plain that, although Corpus Christi Day was a favourite time for playmaking, any play was possible.’5 Corpus Christi drama as a genre simply did not and does not exist except as a scholarly construct as old as the first commentators on English biblical drama. Yet these antiquarians were at least a generation away from the performance of these plays in time and a world away in religious sensibility. Richard James, Sir Robert Cotton’s librarian, began the idea of Corpus Christi drama in 1629 when he acquired and annotated the manuscript of what we now know as the N-Town Plays. Practically everything James wrote in his note is wrong. Contenta novi testamenti scenice expressa et actitata olim monachos sive Fratres mendicantes vulgo dicitur hic liber Ludus Coventriae sive ludus corporis Christi scribitur metris Anglicanis.6 The plays are in English metre but there the validity of the notation ends.We can only speculate about what led Dr James to write what he did. However, more serious for the history of scholarship, was the way Halliwell reinforced the errors with seemingly corroborative evidence from Dugdale’s 1656 Antiquities of Warwickshire in the first edition of the plays in 1841.7 E.K. Chambers sought to sort the problem out in 1903 but, although he accepted the mis-ascription to Coventry, he did not take up the question of ‘ludus corporis Christi’ reinforced by the English ‘the plaie called Corpus Christi’ that appears in a sixteenth century hand on the fly-leaf.8 Throughout his discussions of the play texts, Chambers loosely refers to the large biblical cycles and smaller plays produced on the feast day without distinction although in his initial discussion he speaks of ‘the ‘cosmic’ type finally presented by the English Corpus Christi plays’.9 Hardin Craig discusses the origin of the genre with magisterial assurance and no evidence, while Rosemary Woolf carefully avoids using the title.10 But it was V.A. Kolve’s use of the phrase ‘the plaie called Corpus Christi’ as the title of his influential book in the 1960s, followed quickly by Eleanor Prosser’s book basing her interpretation of the plays on the nature of the feast of Corpus Christi itself that has embedded this concept in the discourse surrounding the biblical plays.11 Not even Glynne Wickham’s rational laying out of the variants found in the texts themselves in his chapter called ‘Drama of the Christian Calendar’ has shaken the general understanding that there is a genre in English drama called the Corpus Christi play that dramatised salvation history from Creation to Judgement and was performed by craft guilds on the feast of Corpus Christi in the major towns of England.12

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Recent scholarship has not really helped the situation. Although Miri Rubin discusses the variety of dramatic activity on Corpus Christi day in England at some length,13 she begins her discussion with a reiteration of the old theory: [The Feast of Corpus Christi] gave its name to a dramatic type which developed in the North and East of England, a cycle of biblical plays made up in a sequence from the Old and New Testaments, which told the Christian story from Creation through the Fall, the history of the Jews, the Incarnation, Christ’s life and ministry, the Crucifixion, Resurrection to the Day of Judgement.14 However, before she reviews the variety of activity on Corpus Christi day, she rightly identifies the scholarly problem, ‘To modern scholars the Corpus Christi play is a type, a neat sophisticated structure; but in fact it seems far more changeable over time, sometimes even from year to year, and varied in its many manifestations.’15 William Tydeman ruminates about the problem of terminology in his contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ‘Which term – ‘mystery’, ‘miracle’, ‘craft cycle’, ‘Corpus Christi play’ – most appropriately describes the great sequences on biblical episodes presented annually in medieval cities, since all these labels can mislead, and some ‘Corpus Christi plays’ were manifestly not presented as part of the Church’s feast of Corpus Christi at all?’16 He comes to no conclusion. Meg Twycross in the next chapter of the volume takes considerable care to set the play sequences in the summer season rather than on a specific feast and emphasises that Chester’s ‘Creation to Doomsday’ sequence was performed on Whitsun. But she then goes on to reinforce the notion of a Corpus Christi genre with the statement, ‘The great story that composed the Corpus Christi play (the whole cycle was called a play, while the individual portions were pageants: this is the terminology adopted in this chapter), a history of the universe from just before its Creation to its ending at the Day of Judgement, was parcelled up into episodes.’17 On the other hand, Peter Happé in his review of the criticism of early drama uses the term ‘Corpus Christi play’ to mean the ‘Creation to Doomsday’ sequences freely.18 The essays in the most recent collection of early drama criticism, A New History of Early English Drama, open up many new areas of concern but the idea of a Corpus Christi genre still lingers.19 Anne Higgins in her essay ‘Streets and Markets’ concentrates her discussion on the York Cycle, yet it is constantly set in the context of a presumed genre. She writes, ‘The greatest of all such processional displays of influence and efforts at self-definition were the Corpus Christi plays,’ and later in her discussion returns to such sweeping statements as ‘Corpus Christi plays traditionally used the ground level before the pageant wagons, or platea, as a nonlocalized, nontemporalized playing area’ and ‘Many strategies devised for the medieval demotic of physical space that informed Corpus Christi plays lost little of their power for a long time.’20 There is much to admire in this essay and she is basing her argument on the one surviving

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text that does conform to the criteria of a ‘Corpus Christi play’. However, one play, even a play as great as York, does not constitute a genre.21 In the same set of essays both Paul Whitfield White and Richard Dutton suggest that the abolition of the Feast of Corpus Christi in 1548 affected the ‘plays of Corpus Christi’.22 A radical change in the pattern of religious drama did occur in the decade between 1538 and 1548 but the abolition of the Feast of Corpus Christi was only one of the many sweeping changes. One of the truly interesting facts about the civic biblical plays is that they did not stop (as so much other biblical drama did) during the first stages of the English Reformation. York and Chester continued to perform their plays on Corpus Christi Day in some form for another twenty years. But if we can no longer say that there is no genre called ‘Corpus Christi play’, what plays were played during the summer season? Medieval England had an important tradition of biblical plays of all shapes and sizes designed for presentation at Easter or at one of the seasonal festivals.These plays could be prophet plays, plays on Old Testament themes, Passion plays, Resurrection plays, ‘Creation to Doomsday’ sequences, plays on the Creed or the Pater Noster (as at York, Lincoln, and Beverley), plays on the sacrament itself such as the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. They could have Protestant leanings or be staunchly Catholic. They could be lavish and complex multi-parish plays like the Passion play at New Romney, Kent, or simple single parish plays like the Genesis sequence mounted over several years in St Laurence, Reading.23 There were also saints’ plays, morality plays, and folk plays, particularly the ubiquitous Robin Hood plays.24 Any of these could be and were played on Corpus Christi day as they were on Whitsun, May Day, or Midsummer. Corpus Christi was only one of the special days for community and parish events and it was a day when practically anything could be performed. Activities on Corpus Christi took many forms in the West Country. The chief city in the west, Bristol, had a regular procession on the feast day in which the guilds carried ‘pageants’. The first evidence is found in the Wiredrawer and Pinners’ accounts in 1505–06, the Bakers’ accounts that begin in 1537–38 confirm the procession’s longevity.25 Like all such observances of the feast, the procession was suspended during Edward’s reign, restored under Mary, only to disappear again with the accession of Elizabeth. Although the pageants appear in the inventories of the guilds until well into the seventeenth century, they were not carried in public procession after 1557–58.26 Mark Pilkinton, the editor of the Bristol records for Records of Early English Drama, makes clear why the pageants at Bristol were not mounted on wheeled vehicles, [. . .] wheeled vehicles were not permitted in medieval Bristol for fear of crashing through to the extensive network of underground storage warehouses and sewers beneath the streets. As Jacobus Millerd says on his 1673 map of Bristol, ‘There are no sincks yat come from any houses into ye streets but that all is conveyed vnder ground rendering ye Cittie exceeding sweet & delightsom They use no Carts there as in London but carry all uppon Sledds [. . .]’27

136 Other records

This information points up the need for extreme caution in discussing the seasonal customs in England since all were influenced by local circumstances. In this case, it was the sewer system of Bristol that limited the size and nature of the ‘pageants’ used in the Corpus Christi procession. Pilkinton has reconstructed the ‘pageants’ and makes clear that they were similar to the trestle called in the York Corpus Christi Guild accounts ‘le bere’ on which the reliquary containing the host was placed and carried on the shoulders of members of the guild.28 In Bristol, Pilkinton suggests the ‘pageants’ carried images, were sometimes decorated with flowers, and were accompanied as in the York procession by banners and torches.29 The records of only two other municipalities in the west give us evidence of other civic activity on Corpus Christi Day. The Receivers’ accounts of Plymouth record a small payment ‘for dryncke for the players’ on Corpus Christi 1516, and the Black Book of the town records the civic agreement to hold a special ale in the church yard of St Andrew’s parish church on Corpus Christi, 1536.30 In the course of stating the regulations for the event there is a warning that ‘no person that shall goo aboute with the shipp of Corporis christi’ should bring ‘no body [. . .] but him selfe’ to the ale. This indicates that the port town had a pageant representing a ship that was taken about the town on the feast day.31 The Common Bailiffs of Bridgwater in Somerset paid pipers of Ash Prior near Taunton 16d ‘in festo Corporis Christi’ in 1448–49, and in 1495–96 the Water Bailiffs of the town paid 10d ‘more’ for the shepherd’s pageant on ‘corpus cristy day’.32 This mention of a Nativity play on Corpus Christi day does not imply a larger biblical sequence.The parish of Thame in Oxfordshire sponsored an epiphany play on Corpus Christi in 1522, and the parish of St Laurence, Reading, sponsored one on Mayday, 1499. Both parishes performed other plays at other times but not as a sustained sequence.33 All other mention of activities on Corpus Christi in the west comes from parish records. The churchwardens’ accounts of St Andrew’s, Ashburton, in Devon provide the richest records of playmaking activity both on Corpus Christi and on other days. The relevant records cover seventy-two years from 1487 to 1559 with payment for looking after the stock of costumes providing some of the earliest evidence.34 Among the Ashburton records, the most frequent evidence of dramatic activity comes from similar entries for the care of unspecified players’ garments, including a tidy income from the rental of costumes 1542–45.35 Nine references connect the playmaking activity with Corpus Christi. In 1492–93 and again in 1499–1500 bread and ale were provided for the players on the feast day.36 John Soper seems to have been in charge of playmaking in the period from 1516 to 1529. In 1516–17 the parish purchased ‘Ratilbaggez & vysers’, and Soper is paid for painting five wigs as well as keeping the ‘ornamentorum lusatorum’. In 1528–29 he is helping to build new costumes as well as making staffs for the players and ‘crestes’ for their heads. The parish bought gloves for King Herod in 1537–38.37 Eight years later William Bound took over as the parish custodian of the playing gear, building costumes and providing new collars.38 A break in playmaking activity occurs during Edward VI’s

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reign (1548–53), but in 1554–55 we find Bound still in charge of the gear.39 In 1555–56 the parish bought more collars and a pair of gloves ‘for hym that played god almyghty’ and provided wine for ‘hym that playd Saynt Rosmont’. In 1557–58 Bound was paid for mending costumes and the ‘rattylbagys’. The last playmaking reference from the parish comes from 1558–59 when a pair of gloves was bought for ‘hym that played chryst on corpus christi daye’.40 As John Wasson has noted, the play on Corpus Christi does not seem to be the same play every year.41 Indeed from the other playmaking references in the Ashburton accounts, the parish seems to have had several plays that were performed in some years at Corpus Christi, and in some years at Epiphany or other days during the Christmas season. The ‘rattlebags’ appear again in the records for 1542–43 in an entry that includes the building of ‘capitibus diabolorum & alijs necessariis’, but the only date specified for playing that year is the Christmas season.42 The noise-makers and devils’ heads might have been used for a Corpus Christi performance, but it is not specified. One reference among the costume entries – for a ‘noua tunica’ (new tunic) made for Robin Hood in 1526 argues a continuing Robin Hood tradition that is attested to nowhere else in the records of the parish. The last positive evidence for the mounting of the parish play comes from 1559–60, although 1563–4 accounts record of a payment of 2s to unspecified players which could be a reference to a travelling troupe.43 It is possible to deduce more readily the subject of the play performed by the parish church of Bodmin, Cornwall. The parish sponsored many guilds among which was the Guild of Corpus Christi first mentioned in 1469–70.44 A damaged Receivers’ account from 1494–5 records payment for the making of costumes and ‘dyademys & crownys’ that belong to the Corpus Christi ‘game’.45 Although this entry is reminiscent of those for the ‘king games’ in the Thames Valley that were a form of summer inversion ceremony with servants named as the lord and lady of the summer festival,46 it must be taken with subsequent references to the Corpus Christi event in the parish church of Bodmin. A fragmentary entry from 1509–10 records expenses for the building of costumes and sets for the Corpus Christi play that include a costume for Jesus. In 1513–14 more costumes are made and leather for the construction of ‘thynges’ for the ‘show’ of Corpus Christi. Later inventories from 1539 and 1566 list the costumes as including several for Jesus and for the tormentors and two devils’ coats indicating that the play or ‘show’ on Corpus Christi at Bodmin represented part of the Passion story in some way.47 Somerset records include only one reference to a play on Corpus Christi. The town of Yeovil paid 5s 11d ‘of the Corpus Christi playe’ in 1539–40.48 However, James Stokes suggests that this may be the play belonging to the parish church of Sherborne, Dorset, five miles away.49 That play has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention most recently by Rosalind Hays, one of the editors for the REED Dorset collection.50 Hays traces the history of the celebration of Corpus Christi, noting the procession’ which ended with a parish supper in the churchyard that came to an end in the 1530s. She then examines the brief life of the play that may have travelled to Yeovil before it,

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too ended, with the accession of Edward in 1548.The renting of play gear supplied a modest income during the years 1548 to 62, in the years prior to the remarkable 1570s mounting of a play called ‘corpuscrystie playe’ on the theme of ‘Lot’s Wife’ or ‘The Burning of Sodom’.51 This was probably a Protestant play and is one of several community plays on Protestant themes that appear in this decade but did not have a long life. The playmaking references in Sherborne stop in 1575 at the same time that the other community-based religious drama was being suppressed. But the most tantalising and complex reference to a play on Corpus Christi in the West Country comes from Exeter. In the Mayor’s Court of Exeter, 18 June 1414, one John Benet, Skinner and freeman of the city, ‘humiliter [. . .] se submisit gracie eiusdem Maioris &c’.52 Benet’s offence had been a vigorous opposition to an attempt by the city council to change both the nature of the play that had been performed on Corpus Christi day and the date of its performance. The circumstances surrounding this dispute demonstrate not only why it is reasonable to consider all performances within their wider social context, but also how the intersection of religion with politics influenced the nature of the performance of religious drama. The tale recorded in the Court Roll is briefly told.53 In this year, the ‘Maior & Communitas’ decided that a play apparently normally played by the Skinners on Corpus Christi should be played on the Tuesday of Whitsun week rather than Corpus Christi and that the single play should be broken up into ‘certas parcellas [. . .] vocatas pagentes’ and distributed among all the craft guilds who were to be responsible for finding, at their own expense, the players needed to play the episode they had been assigned. Benet and the other Skinners objected and not only refused to take their own guild part in the production, but also suborned the other crafts to do likewise.The result was chaos ‘in obprobrium tocius Ciuitatis & contemptum Maioris & tocius Communitatis predicte’. Reprimanded by the mayor, Benet replied, ‘Parde a man shall noght be an hange with outhe onsser’ and marched away ‘contemptuose & derisorie’.54 After some negotiations (unfortunately unrecorded), Benet was persuaded to make his humble submission to the mayor’s court. This entry appears at the end of the dorse of folio thirty-eight of the Mayor’s Court roll for 1413–14. It is separated from an entirely unrelated entry before it by 38 mm. Nothing follows it. The mayor’s court sat almost every Monday throughout the year, with the business conducted recorded in a highly formulaic manner on the recto of the parchment roll with miscellaneous items – wills, indentures and incidents like this one – entered on the dorse. Presumably the clerk understood the relevance of this item to the deliberations of the court but he provides no context for it in the document. There are two Skinners named in the document – Benet and William French. Benet had been a Freeman for four years before the incident, and French was actually admitted to his freedom on the payment of £1 ‘fine’ or fee only three weeks after the recording of the dispute on 9 July 1414.55 These were not insubstantial troublemakers

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but members of what Maryanne Kowaleski has called an ‘exclusive group’ who alone had access ‘to civic power in medieval Exeter.’56 What are we to make of this episode? What evidence is there for a play performed ‘ab antiqua Consuetudine’?57 Why were the Skinners so upset? Why should the city council take it upon themselves to alter so radically a time-honoured custom? The answers to these questions lie, I believe, in the long-standing tensions between the city and the bishop in the early fifteenth century. The Skinners’ craft and their Corpus Christi activities seem to have been caught in a quarrel not of their own making, that divided the loyalties of the citizens of Exeter. Without stopping to ask the contextual questions, twentieth-century commentators have asserted that Exeter had a ‘Corpus Christi play’. Cecily Redford states this categorically, with considerable imaginative flair in her ‘Three Centuries of Playgoing in Exeter’.58 Joyce Youings, although she tempers Redford’s claim for a large dramatic event, also concludes, on the evidence of the 1413–14 Court roll, that Exeter had a Corpus Christi play.59 John Wasson is less sure about this although he takes the Skinner’s incident as evidence that ‘Exeter once had a Corpus Christi cycle drama’.60 There seems little support for any of these assertions in the surviving evidence. The procession of Corpus Christi in Exeter was an episcopal event. As we have seen the first mention of the feast in the diocese is in 1320. Bishop Stapledon’s register for 1322 mentions the route of the new procession in Exeter making it clear that it had become one of the major processions in the liturgical year that brought the bishop and the cathedral clergy out of the Close and into the city.61 No evidence confirms that the city, as such, supported the procession. The feast day is first mentioned in the Exeter city records in 1386, ‘In vj lagenis vini rubij datis fratribus predictoribus & Minoribus pro processione eorum in die corporis christi iiij s [. . .]’, although an entry for the preceding year that does not mention the feast but does indicate the same sum for the same amount of wine for the two orders of friars ‘venientibus ad processionem’ undoubtedly refers to the same annual event.62 These payments by the city for refreshments for the friars continue regularly until 1423–24 when they disappear from the Receivers’ account rolls.What is not clear is whether the friars had a procession of their own on the feast day.The phrase ‘pro processione eorum’ in the 1385–86 roll states that it is ‘their procession’ but the Latin of the formulaic entries that follow this early one are ambiguous and it is possible that the friars were part of the episcopal event. The association of the Skinners Craft with the feast of Corpus Christi presents another challenge in the interpretation of the evidence. In her analysis of the economic structure of late medieval Exeter, Maryanne Kowaleski, after mentioning the playmaking document, goes on to say that ‘The skinners’ sense of solidarity was also evident in their lease of the charnel chapel for religious services in 1426–31, although they were not formally incorporated until 1462.’ In her discussion of the leather and fur trades in Exeter, Kowaleski makes clear

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that these trades ‘ranked at the top of the artisanal occupations in terms of wealth and status in 1377’ and goes on to state that ‘Skinners [. . .] were at the high end of the group’.63 The Skinners, therefore, were a not inconsequential group of citizens in Exeter at the time of the dispute with the mayor in 1414. Kowaleski also teases out connections between individual Exeter Skinners and members of the rich and powerful London Skinners.64 The confraternal face of the London Skinners was the Guild of Corpus Christi. Just as the Mercers of York were also the Guild of the Holy Trinity,65 so the London Skinners ‘formed the Fraternity of Corpus Christi in the fourteenth century, and what was known as the ‘livery’ of the Skinners’ Company in the fifteenth century’.66 In 1393, the London Skinners were granted a charter in which they were given the responsibility ‘for the Corpus Christi procession in the City’ – a procession that Stow describes in considerable detail.67 Evidence from the Exeter Receivers’ rolls from much later in the fifteenth century suggests that the Corpus Christi Guild was also the confraternal face of the Skinners Craft in Exeter and, indeed, John Wasson asserts that this is so.68 Entries note substantial subsidies given by the city to the Corpus Christi Guild (1482–83) and then to the Skinners’ Guild ‘ad sustentacionem fraternitatis Corporis christi’ (1486–87) and ‘pro sustentacione solempnitatis Corporis christi’ (1487–88).69 In 1493–94 the council specifically subsidised the Skinners Craft ten shillings for the play on Corpus Christi, and in 1494–95 the clerk records that the play subsidy was paid to the ‘fraternitatis corporis christi’.70 The wording of these various entries seems to indicate that after their incorporation in 1462, the Exeter Skinners, like their London brethren, adopted the feast of Corpus Christi as their own. The last year the play was performed – or the last year it received a civic subsidy seems to have been 1494–95. A similar entry for the next year with no payment is recorded and in 1496–97 the payment is recorded as a dismissive ‘nihil’.71 Exeter civic records contain no further evidence of Corpus Christi activity. There is no doubt that the play performed at Corpus Christi before 1414 was performed by the Skinners’ Craft and that the same guild, by the late fifteenth century clearly also the Corpus Christi Guild, is associated with the same play. The incident concerning John Benet and the mayor in 1414, then, seems to have been a unique event in which the mayor attempted to change a time honoured custom but did not succeed. The larger civic context of that attempt by the mayor of the city to alter the nature of Exeter’s Corpus Christi observance merits additional consideration. The long-standing dispute between the Bishop of Exeter and the Mayor of the city was exhaustively treated in the 1930s by legal and constitutional historians.72 The basic issue was who held jurisdiction over (and so had the right to collect taxes from) two Exeter parishes – St Stephen’s within the walls, and St Sidwell’s outside the east gate of the city. The bishop claimed ‘St Stephen’s fee’ and the Dean and Chapter claimed ‘St Sidwell’s fee’. Both claims were contested by the city. The origins of the dispute went back to Doomsday Book accounts and it had been pursued by the city from the

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mid-thirteenth century. In the early fifteenth century, the city stepped up its pressure. Muriel Curtis writes: The first half of the fifteenth century was a critical and decisive period in the history of St. Stephen’s fee and St. Sidwell’s fee. It seems clear that during these years the city adopted a definitely aggressive attitude, which was not so much the outcome of any consistent policy, as the result of exasperation produced by the constantly conflicting claims of the rival authorities. We have seen that during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the difficulty inherent in such a situation gave rise to occasional disputes, but with the beginning of the fifteenth century, we enter upon a period of almost perpetual conflict between the bishop, dean and chapter and the civic authorities, culminating in the defeat of the pretensions of the city first in St. Sidwell’s fee, 1436 and then in St. Stephen’s, 1449.73 I believe that the dispute between the Skinner, John Benet, and the mayor over the play on Corpus Christi is part of this larger dispute. What the historians on the 1930s failed to see in the records was the extent to which public display and ceremony were used by both sides to reinforce their territorial claims.74 In 1322, Bishop Stapledon writing to the confessor of the cathedral, Richard de Braileghe, expresses himself anxious to ensure that due reverence should paid to the ‘Corpus Dominicum’ as it is carried in the ‘nove solempnitatis Corporis Christi’ and in the Palm Sunday Procession. He wants to see the addition of large wax torches to be carried before the reliquary in the procession. In the course of this discussion, he mentions that the processions went ‘extra Portam Orientalem Civitatis Exonie, ex more Ecclesie nostre predicte, annis singulis’ that is ‘outside the east gate of the city of Exeter, according to the custom of our aforesaid church each year.’75 The Cathedral precinct occupied much of the south-east quarter of medieval Exeter. The areas of commerce lay to the north and west. If it was the intention of the bishop only to display the Real Presence of Christ to as many believers as possible (the purpose of the Corpus Christi processions that moved through the cities) then it makes little sense for the route to take the procession out the east gate of the city. However, by processing to and through the east gate, the bishop marked, in his own episcopal way, the boundaries of his claimed jurisdiction. To reach the east gate, the procession had to pass through the disputed parish of St Stephen and once the procession had passed through the gates it was in St Sidwell’s parish. This route took the episcopal party directly away from the busier quarters of the town.We do not know how they returned to the cathedral. As Nicholas Orme writes, ‘they may have retraced their steps down the High Street or come round Southernhay and into the Close via the South Gate.’76 The more provocative return would be to process back down the High Street once again passing St Stephen’s but going farther towards the centre of the city passed the Guildhall on their right before turning into the Close at Broadgate. The Skinners’ play could have been performed outside the walls before the procession returned to the city or in the Close at the end of the procession.

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The 1414 dispute document raises two significant issues. The first is the suggestion by the mayor and council that the Skinners share their play with other crafts, quod de qualibet arte eiusdem Ciuitatis duo tres vel quatuor de qualibet arte habere deberent certas parcellas ludi illius vocatas pagentes Et inuenirent lusores ad numerum sufficientem ad paiecto predictos ludendos sumptibus suis proprijs77 This would have created a play on the pattern of York or Chester parcelled out among the guilds, with the thought that they should appoint some of their members as ‘pageant masters,’ to use the York phrase, to hire the players to perform the play. This would also have relieved the Skinners of the sole responsibility for the play and may have been intended as a positive gesture towards the craft meant to help persuade them to accept the change in the nature of the event. Such a parcelling out of the episodes of the play might also have been a cynical move on the part of the city oligarchs to control the emerging crafts, as some historians have suggested for York.78 However, the second issue raised by the Exeter account – the date of the performance of the play – was far more significant given the ongoing dispute between the bishop and the mayor. By tradition, the play was performed on Corpus Christi day by a guild which would later be clearly identified as the Corpus Christi Guild. Corpus Christi day, then, would have been the high feast day of the guild. The identification of the Skinners with the feast and the procession can be deduced from the gratuities given by the Skinners to the canon in charge of the procession.79 It seems reasonable to suggest, therefore, that the Skinners Guild were firmly identified with the episcopal event. The action of the mayor attempted to move the play from the Corpus Christi to the Tuesday in Whitsun week, the week of the civic spring festival. Medieval Exeter hosted four fairs on St Nicholas day, St Thomas day, Ash Wednesday, and Pentecost or Whitsun.80 On the Monday of Whitsun week, there were traditional ‘May’ celebrations to which the city contributed. Like the parishes in many other cities, the Exeter parishes supported themselves from property rents, and so did not feel the economic imperative to hold spring or summer fund-raising events as did many country parishes where the traditional May festivals were a major part of their fundraising.81 It appears from the evidence for Exeter that there was a city-wide May game on Whit Monday with a May pageant to which the city contributed and at which the city waits, the official town musicians, were regular performers. The first references to Whitsun celebrations in Exeter come from the years immediately surrounding 1414. Civic contributions to Whitsuntide events first appear in 1409–10, when the city pipers (the waits) are paid 12d for a riding on the Monday of Whitsun week.82 The waits are paid for playing on Whit Monday 1411–12, 1412–13, and 1414–15.83 A cancelled entry from 1416–17 speaks of the need to repair a pageant for a minstrel on Whit Monday. The ‘pagena de May’ was repaired

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the next year. By 1418–19 the payments include 40d to the waits for bringing in the May and 4d to ‘lusoribus qui luserunt ante Maij’.84 Later references for 1442–43 and 1456–57 make it clear that a pageant elephant was a regular part of the Whitsun celebrations.85 The city’s attempt to move the Skinners’ play from Corpus Christi to Whit Tuesday seems to be an attempt by the city to ‘steal’ the Skinners’ play away from Corpus Christi and add it to its own growing festivities in Whitsun week. A play performed on Tuesday, the day after the civic Maying events, would have lengthened the festival period and added substance to the fledgling celebrations. The two celebrations – the episcopal Corpus Christi procession/Skinners’ play and the civic Whitsun May games – can be seen as the expressions of rival power bases within the city. Within this context, Benet’s wrath and the opposition he succeeded in mounting against the change is a rare glimpse of opposition to the exercise of municipal power. In the long run it appears that, even if the Skinners, through Benet’s submission to the court, lost the battle, they won the war since there is no mention of the Skinners play in association with Whitsun again. Thwarted by the stubbornness of the Skinners, the city found another very public way to assert its authority over the disputed parishes.This can be tracked in the entries for the civic ‘beating of the bounds’ on the feast of St John the Baptist (24 June), an activity first recorded in 1408–09: ‘[. . .] Item in iiij lagenis vini circa Maiorem & socios suos perambulantes nocte diei festi Natiuitatis sancti Iohannis Baptiste pro Ciuitate. ij s. [. . .]’86 In 1414–15 the entry includes tallow for the torches and payment to a trumpeter named Elfanius who must have called special attention to the procession.87 It is perhaps significant that these additions to the expenses for ‘beating the bounds’ appear the year after the incident over the Skinners’ play. By 1417–18 rosin, pitch, and tar have been added to ‘les Cressantys ardent’ coram Maioris & socijs suis in nocte Natiuitatis festi sancti Iohannis Baptiste’ and two men are hired to carry the torches.88 The regular payment to the Friars Preacher and Friars Minor, already noted, for refreshment after their participation in the Corpus Christi procession, ends in 1423–24.89 The payments for the St John’s night event remain relatively constant until 1430–31 when the city pays for fourteen gallons of red wine and thirteen gallons of white wine for the citizens who ‘beat the bounds’ with the mayor. In the next year thirty gallons were bought along with bread and several pipers were paid at the festivities.90 In 1432–33, the consumption drops to the normal two gallons and John Shillingford, who would later serve as mayor, was given a small amount against his expenses in his trip to London to negotiate on behalf of the city.91 The negotiations did not prosper and in 1433–34 saw yet another large display of civic power, with the waits walking before the mayor as he processed. That year the city’s negotiators in London claimed £13 13s 9½d (of which only £7 5s 10d was allowed).92 Finally, in 1436, the dispute over St Sidwell’s fee was settled in favour of the Dean and Chapter. No Receivers’ Rolls survive from the years 1433–34 to 1436–37 and, uncharacteristically, the roll for 1437–38 does not even record payments to travelling players. In 1438– 39 the last entry for refreshments on St John’s night appears (9s for bread and

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wine) but the entry is cancelled.93 Perhaps significantly, however, 12d is provided that year to pay for wine in the mayor’s house after he has processed ‘ad portam occidentem’ through the still-disputed St Stephen’s parish.94 Although civic payments for feasting have disappeared, the city pays handsomely to keep the ceremonial torches in good repair through the 1440s for the St John’s events as well as other civic processions, and in 1441–42 pays pipers for the procession on St John’s Eve.95 Under the heading ‘Gifts and Grants’ for the year 1446–47 entries document purchases of much food and drink ‘pro materia inter Dominum Episcopum & Maiorem & Communitatum’.96 But the negotiations did not go well for the city and on 12 December 1448 the dispute over St Stephen’s fee was settled in favour of the bishop with the final resolution being recorded in 1449.97 That year the city sent gifts of wine to the bishop and hosted him at a banquet.98 The long-running dispute was over. No records of the Exeter Skinners have survived, nor has any other specific reference to the route of the episcopal processions, other than the incidental comment in Bishop Stapledon’s letter of 1322. We are, therefore, dependent upon the sparse and laconic references to the Skinners’ play on Corpus Christi in the city records. These references, when set within the wider context of the life of Exeter in the early fifteenth century make it possible to arrive at a working hypothesis about the play.The two spring festive events – the civic Whitsun celebrations in the week after Pentecost and the ecclesiastical Corpus Christi celebration nine days later – were seen in the period before 1414 as the focal points of the two rival claimants to the fees of the parishes of St Stephen and St Sidwell: the mayor and the city council, and the bishop and the Dean and Chapter. In that year, the mayor tried to coerce the Skinners to move their play on Corpus Christi away from the ecclesiastical event to the civic one.Thwarted by the refusal of the Skinners to agree to the change, the city then proceeded to enhance its display at the third spring event – the marching of the bounds on St John’s night.The expenses for torches and musicians escalated along with the amount spent on food and drink as the negotiations over the disputed parishes reached crisis points. After the city lost its first suit, it no longer subsidised the riotous behaviour but it continued to pay for elaborate and impressive ‘cressants’ and music for the procession. These expenses fall away after the 1448 settlement. Forty years later, relations between the city and those responsible for the Corpus Christi celebrations had improved enough that the city undertook a regular 10s subsidy to the Skinners/Corpus Christi Guild for their play on the feast day. The nature of the Skinners’ play cannot be determined with any accuracy. It was probably a religious play possibly on a biblical theme, or on the efficacy of the sacrament or on the Creed or Pater Noster. We can deduce two things about it from the 1414 document. It had spoken parts and was sufficiently episodic to allow the mayor and his advisors to break it up among the other crafts of the city. The 10s payments made for it by the council at the end of the fifteenth century argue that it was certainly not a Biblical cycle play on the scale of York or Chester.99 It seems to have been typical of many smaller religious

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plays performed by guilds, parishes and towns attested to by the documentary evidence from all over the kingdom. In fact, it was undoubtedly similar to the other West Country plays that we have been discussing performed on Corpus Christi in Bridgwater, Ashburton, Bodmin, and Sherborne. The Feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated in the West Country with processions and plays. However, each procession was governed by local conditions such as the sewer system of Bristol. Some were civic; some were ecclesiastical. Similarly, the nature and sponsorship of the plays performed on that day varied from place to place and, indeed, from the evidence of Ashburton and Sherborne, were not necessarily confined to a traditional play performed year after year. This pattern is typical of the emerging one from all over the kingdom as more and more evidence is uncovered by Records of Early English Drama editors. The term ‘Corpus Christi play’ in the records represents a rich and eclectic tradition of mimetic performance that included every possible type of late medieval play. It is time to set aside the intellectual straight jacket earlier scholarship provided which was based on misunderstanding of documentary evidence and the few surviving texts. Only when we fully assimilate the wide diversity of possible types of performance within our critical discourse will we be able to clearly understand the drama of late medieval and early modern England.

Notes 1 Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 169 ff. 2 Ibid., p.174. 3 Ibid., p.180. 4 Ibid., pp. 199–200. 5 Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘What if no texts survived?’, in Contexts of Early English Drama, ed. by Marianne Briscoe and John Coldewey (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 11. 6 The N-Town Play, ed. by Stephen Spector, Early English Text Society, s.s., 11 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. xiii. 7 Ludus Coventriae. A Collection of Mysteries, ed. by James Orchard Halliwell (London: Shakespeare Society, 1841), p. x. 8 E.K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903), vol. 2, pp. 416–22. 9 Ibid, p. 77. 10 Hardin Craig, English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 11; Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972). 11 V.A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966) and Eleanor Prosser, Drama and Religion in the English Mystery Plays: A Re-evaluation (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1961). 12 Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages: 1300–1600, vol. iii, Plays and their Makers to 1576 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 42–43. 13 Rubin, pp. 271–87. 14 Ibid., p. 271. 15 Ibid., p. 273.

146 Other records 16 William Tydeman, ‘An introduction to medieval English theatre’ in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. by Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 (1st edition)), p. 4. 17 Meg Twycross, ‘The theatricality of medieval English plays’ in ibid., p. 9. 18 Peter Happé, ‘A guide to criticism of medieval English theatre’ in ibid., pp. 312–43. 19 A New History of Early English Drama, ed. by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 20 Ibid., pp. 79, 90, 91. 21 The plays at Coventry were also performed on Corpus Christi but there does not ever seem to have been an Old Testament sequence. I suggested in ‘What if no texts survived?’ (see note 4 above) that this sequence of plays might well be a Creed Play. Margaret Rogerson has recently taken up this argument (‘The Coventry Corpus Christi Play: A “Lost” Middle English Creed Play’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, xxxvi (1997), pp. 143–77.) 22 Cox and Kastan, New History, p. 135; ibid., p. 290. 23 James Gibson, ‘“Interludium Passionis Domini”: Parish Drama in Medieval New Romney’ in English Parish Drama, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Wim Hüsken, Ludus I (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), pp. 137–48; Reading, Berkshire Record Office, D/P 97 5/2 for 1506–7 (p. 31), 1511–2 (p. 88), and 1515–6 (p. 106). 24 See Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The Robin Hood of the Records’ in Robin Hood:The Legend as Performance, 1500–1993, ed. by Lois Potter, (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1998), pp. 27–44. 25 Bristol, ed. by Mark Pilkinton, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 19. 26 Ibid., pp. xxix–xxx. 27 Ibid., p. xxix. 28 York, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, 2 vols., Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 79. 29 REED: Bristol, p. xxx. 30 Devon, ed. by John Wasson, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), p. 216. 31 Ibid., pp. 225–26. 32 Somerset including Bath, ed. by James Stokes and Robert J. Alexander, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 41. 33 Oxford, Oxfordshire Archives, DD Par Thame c.5, fol. 76v; Reading, Berkshire Record Office, D/P 97 5/2, p. 3; see also Alexandra F. Johnston and Sally-Beth MacLean, ‘Reformation and resistance in Thames/Severn parishes: the dramatic witness’, in The Parish in English Life 1400–1600, ed. by Katherine L. French, Gary G. Gibbs, and Beat Kümin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 181. 34 REED: Devon, pp 17–30. 35 Ibid., pp. 25–26. 36 Ibid., pp. 18–19. 37 Ibid., pp. 20, 22, 24. 38 Ibid., p. 27. 39 Ibid., p. 28. 40 Ibid., pp. 28, 29. 41 Ibid., p. xxv. 42 Ibid., pp. 26, 25, ‘devils’ heads and other necessaries’, translation p. 336. 43 Ibid., pp. 29, 30. 44 Truro, Cornwall County Record Office, B/Bod. 244, p. 2. See also Dorset/Cornwall, ed. by Sally Cross, Rosalind Hays, C.E. McGee, and Evelyn Newlyn, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 386. 45 REED: Dorset/Cornwall, pp. 469–70. 46 See Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘Summer Festivals in the Thames Valley Counties’ in Custom, Culture and Community, ed. by Thomas Pettitt and Leif Søndergaard (Odense: Odense University Press, 1994), pp. 37–56.

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75 76 77 78

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REED: Dorset/Cornwall, pp. 471, 472, 473. REED: Somerset, p. 406. Ibid., p. 482. Rosalind Conklin Hays, ‘“Lot’s Wife” or “The Burning of Sodom”: The Tudor Corpus Christi Play at Sherborne, Dorset’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, xxxiii (1994), pp. 99–125. REED: Dorset/Cornwall, p. 270. Benet was made free in 1410 (Exeter, Devon Record Office, ECA: MCR 11 Henry 4) as an apprentice of John Legh. REED: Devon, pp. 82–83; translation pp. 357–78. REED: Devon, pp. 82–83, translation pp. 357–58. REED: Devon, p. 82, ‘set portions . . .called “pageants,”’ translation, p. 357; p. 83 ‘as an insult to the entire city and a slur upon the mayor and the whole aforesaid commonalty’, translation, pp. 357–58. Devon Record Office, ECA: MCR 1/2 Henry V. He served as Bailiff in 1423 Alexander Jenkins, Civil and Ecclesiastical History of the City of Exeter and Its Environs (Exeter: Norton, 1841) p. 79. Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘The Commercial Dominance of a Medieval Provincial Oligarchy: Exeter in the late Fourteenth Century’, Mediaeval Studies 46 (1984), p. 356. REED: Devon, p. 82, ‘by ancient custom’, translation, p. 357. Cecily Redford, ‘Three Centuries of Playgoing in Exeter’, Report of the Transactions of the Devonshire Association 82 (1950), pp. 241–42. Joyce Youings, Tuckers Hall, Exeter (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1968), p. 10. REED: Devon, p. xxv. The Register of Walter de Stapledon, Bishop of Exeter 1307–1326, ed. by F.C. HingestonRandolph (London: G. Bell, 1892), p. 384. REED: Devon, p. 73. Maryanne Kowaleski, Local Markets and Regional Trade in Medieval Exeter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 100, 157. Ibid., pp. 158, 305–06. REED:York, p. xiv. Elspeth M.Veale, The English Fur Trade in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 78. Ibid., p. 111. REED: Devon, p. xvii. Ibid., pp. 107–08. Ibid., pp. 110–11. Ibid., pp. 111–12. See Bertie Wilkinson, The Medieval Council of Exeter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931), and more particularly Muriel E. Curtis, Some Disputes between the City and Cathedral Authorities of Exeter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1932). Curtis, Disputes, p. 20. Curtis prints large portions of the Receivers’ Accounts that list expenses specifically concerned with the dispute in Appendix C (Disputes, pp. 62–71) but she does not include the expenses for the ceremonial displays of jurisdiction, although she does remark on the added annoyance of ‘ecclesiastical property adjoining the city walls’ that obstructed the progress of the mayor as he ‘made his yearly perambulation of the walls’ (p. 38). F.C. Hingeston-Randolph, The Register of Walter de Stapledon, p. 384. Nicholas Orme, Exeter Cathedral as It Was 1050–1550, (Exeter: Devon Books, 1986), p. 78. REED: Devon, p. 82. ‘that two, three or four (members) of each craft of the same city ought to have set portions of that play called ‘pageants’ and should find players of a number sufficient to play the aforesaid pageants at their own expense,’ p. 357. R.B. Dobson, ‘Craft Guilds and City: The Historical Origins of the York Mystery Plays Reassessed,’ in The Stage as Mirror: Civic Theatre in Late Medieval Europe, ed. by Alan Knight (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1998) pp. 52–91 and Heather Swanson, ‘The Illusion of

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79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

Economic Structure: Craft Guilds in Late Medieval English Towns’, Past and Present, 121 (1988), pp. 29–48. Maryanne Kowaleski discusses the role of the civic oligarchy in late medieval Exeter in ‘The Commercial Dominance of a Medieval Provincial Oligarchy’, Mediaeval Studies 46 (1984). REED: Devon, p. xvi. Wallace MacCaffery, Exeter, 1540–1640 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 77. See Johnston and Maclean, ‘Reformation and Resistance’. REED: Devon, p. 81. Ibid., pp. 81, 82 and 84. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., pp. 97 and 99. Exeter, Devon Record Office, ECA, 1408–9. Ibid., 1414–15. See also REED: Devon, p. 84. The St John’s night entry comes between the Pentecost item and the payment to the trumpeter. Elfanius, therefore, performed for the mayor on St John’s night not Whitsun. Exeter, Devon Record Office, ECA 1417–18. REED: Devon, p. 88. Exeter, Devon Record Office, ECA 1430–31; REED: Devon, p. 93. Exeter, Devon Record Office, ECA 1432–33. Shillingford wrote voluminous letters many of which detail the last years of negotiation between the city and the ecclesiastical authorities. Curtis, Disputes, prints the relevant sections in Appendixes D and E, pp. 71–85. REED: Devon, p. 94; Exeter, Devon Record Office, ECA 1433–34. Exeter, Devon Record Office, ECA 1438–39. Ibid. Exeter, Devon Record Office, ECA 1441–42. Exeter, Devon Record Office, ECA 1446–47. Curtis, Disputes, p. 41. Exeter, Devon Record Office, ECA 1448–49. Although the ten shillings undoubtedly only partly covered the costs, this sum should be compared to the regular 2s subsidy by the York council of the Coronation of the Virgin 1484–1548 (REED:York, pp. 133–44 et passim), the fine of 5s paid by the Weavers for not playing the ‘Fergus’ play in 1486 (REED:York, p. 145) and the amount paid by the Mercers for the Judgement play during the 1460s – 45s 8d in 1461 (REED:York, pp. 91–92), 30s 2d in 1462 (York, p. 95), 31s 3d in 1463 (REED:York, p. 69) and 30s 3 1/2d in 1467 (REED:York, pp. 99–100). Approximately 18s of the Mercers’ annual expenses went to pay the players.

2.3 Summer festivals in the Thames Valley counties From: Custom, Culture and Community, Thomas Pettitt and Leif Søndergaard, eds., proceedings of the 17th International Symposium of the Centre for the Study of Vernacular Languages, Odense University (Odense, Denmark: Odense University Press, 1994), 37–56 Any attempt to reconstruct the summer festivals of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance period in the Thames Valley can only be as definitive as the witnesses to those festivals. Four separate types of contemporary evidence survive for us to consider: 1) the surviving written records of those people actually engaged in the activity (which are both enigmatic and fragmentary); 2) the chronicle or autobiographical evidence showing the participation of royal and other important personages in country customs; 3) the evidence of poets and playwrights (who tended to take a romantic view and conflate classical pastoral conventions and country practice in their writing); 4) the hostile evidence of the Puritan pamphleteers particularly the redoubtable and observant Phillip Stubbes. All four kinds of evidence must be considered. However, only the first kind – the records evidence – for all its infuriating vagueness can be considered to be unbiased. The churchwardens who, in the main, have conveyed the information to us were not engaged in any form of special pleading. Their job was to balance the books of the parish. If, incidentally, among the many entries that occupied their attention, we find hints that help us to elucidate our puzzle we must be grateful. However, we must also beware of reading too much into what they say or, sometimes more important, what they do not say. As the changing hands in the accounts attest, we are dealing with many men over many years.To suggest that a custom has changed because the terminology has changed is a dangerous assumption. For example, David Wiles suggests, because the word ‘Kingham’ is struck

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out in the accounts of Kingston upon Thames in Surrey for the year 1509–10 and the words ‘Church Ale’ inserted, that the holding of a ‘King Game’ ceases in that parish.1 This is to assume that ‘King Game’ and ‘Church Ale’ must necessarily be considered separate events. Instead, the evidence points to the fact that the King Game in Kingston was a very important part of the ongoing generic event, the church ale. The reappearance of the term for the highly profitable years of 1521–24 indicates to me that we have not a major change in folk custom but a more mundane change in accounting practice.2 1) The argument presented here is based, for the most part, on records from the three upland counties – Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, and Oxfordshire. The only major piece of evidence from outside these counties is, of course, the unparalleled accounts of the churchwardens of Kingston upon Thames. Dr Sally-Beth MacLean has done the preliminary research for Records of Early English Drama in Kingston and it is her work on those records that forms the basis of this analysis.3 It is interesting that much of David Wiles’ study is also based on evidence from the Thames Valley counties. He used the printed sources from six parishes: two from Berkshire – Abingdon, and Reading St Laurence (with the occasional reference to Finchampstead, Reading St Mary, and Reading St Giles made in passing in the edition he used of the records of Reading St Laurence4); two from Buckinghamshire – Amersham and Wing; and two from Oxfordshire – Henley and Thame. This study is based on manuscript evidence from 80 parishes – 34 from Berkshire, 13 from Buckinghamshire and 33 from Oxfordshire. Although these figures sound impressive, we must be very careful to consider what they mean. There were 160 ancient parishes in Berkshire and with 34 accounted for in these records; we have evidence from 21% – a very high percentage of survival. On the other hand, there were 207 ancient parishes in Buckinghamshire and evidence from only 13 or 6% – a very low percentage of survival. Oxfordshire had 190 parishes with evidence from 33 or 17%, again a high percentage of survival. The evidence is of three kinds – churchwardens’ accounts, prosecutions before the ecclesiastical courts, and the occasional reference to events in another parish in a set of churchwardens’ accounts. Fifteen churchwardens’ accounts survive from Berkshire. Fourteen of these have evidence of folk activity. The other twenty references come from court records and other documents. In Buckinghamshire, ten accounts survive with evidence in only five. Prosecutions are recorded for only eight further parishes making a total of thirteen locations. In Oxfordshire, twenty-seven accounts survive with evidence in eighteen of them with fifteen other references making the total of thirty-three. I have used these documents, those from Kingston upon Thames and single entries from Guildford in Surrey and the parish of Brentwood in Middlesex. 2) There are three references in other historical records to the activities of Robin Hood.Two of these come from Hall’s Chronicle and concern Henry VIII. The first is the familiar story from the first year of his reign of his appearance with members of his court to dance in the queen’s chamber dressed as Robin

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Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire.

Hood and his men.5 The second comes from the second year in his reign when, at Shooter’s Hill, his guard (some two-hundred strong according to the chronicle) all dressed in green met the king and the entire court and welcomed them back to an arbour for a meal and then allegorical entertainments.6 Since the costuming and arrangements for the entertainments could hardly have been spontaneous, these events must be seen as part of the pageantry of young Henry’s court where the household imitated country customs. The third historical reference to Robin Hood is Bishop Latimer’s wistful recounting of the time he came to preach only to find that his congregation had all ‘gone abroad to gather for Robin Hood’.7 This autobiographical detail serves as a witness to the importance of the event to the people who would not be diverted from their money-raising venture simply to hear a bishop preach.

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Middlesex and Surrey.

3) Perhaps the most famous poetic use of the May customs is Herrick’s ‘Corinna Goes A-Maying’. Here, as so often in sixteenth and seventeenthcentury writings, the English countryside is peopled with allegorical figures drawn from the classical pastoral tradition. It is, however, possible to find behind the artifice, corroboration of customs deduced from external evidence. Sometimes the information is more direct as in the Horatian ode on the country life that Herrick addressed to Endymion Porter, groom of the bedchamber to both James I and Charles I. In it he gives us a catalogue of country customs: For sports, for pageantry, and plays, Thou hast thy eves and holydays, On which the young men and maids meet

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To exercise their dancing feet, Tripping the comely country round, With daffodils and daisies crowned. Thy wakes, thy quintals, here thou hast, Thy Maypoles, too, with garlands graced, Thy morris-dance, thy Whitsun-ale, Thy shearing-feast, which never fail; Thy harvest-home, thy wassail bowl, That’s tossed up after fox-i’-the-hole, Thy mummeries, thy Twelfth-tide kings And queens, thy Christmas revellings, Thy nut-brown mirth, thy russet wit, And no man pays too dear for it.8 This seventeenth-century poetic evidence speaks to the conservatism of much of the countryside. Some of the evidence we have found in our counties comes from well into the 1630s and makes it clear, as we shall see, that large profits were still being made for tiny country parishes from church ales and other events that had supposedly been suppressed decades before. Shakespeare also gives us direct evidence of country customs, particularly in Act IV of The Winter’s Tale where the country revels, over which Perdita as queen of the summer festival presides, resonate with ironic references. 4) The final kind of evidence for folk custom comes from the Puritan pamphleteers particularly from Phillip Stubbes’ Anatomy of Abuses (1583).9 Stubbes, like all good propagandists, judiciously mixes truth and falsehood to achieve his effect. For example, he tells us that the summer lord (or lord of misrule as he calls him) is chosen by ‘all the wilde-heds of the Parish, conuenting together’, when all other evidence tells us that the lord was chosen by the parish under the watchful eye of the churchwardens. In Wing, in Buckinghamshire, twenty years before Stubbes wrote, the local gentry Sir William Dormer, Francis Darrell and John Amore along with the churchwardens agreed to a system of fines to be levied against individuals or their ‘fathers or masters’ for refusing to accept election to the position of summer lord.10 This is hardly the drunken huddle suggested by Stubbes.The practice in Wing lasted until 1580. Phillip Stubbes is a witness to the Puritan vision of country customs. The account he gives, as if it is common practice, of lords of misrule and their morris-dancing followers bursting into the church at service time did happen, particularly when a puritan minister fell out with his parish. Just such an incident happened to John Marten in Windsor in 1620, as we shall see, but it was part of a longstanding quarrel between himself and his churchwarden.11 What Stubbes simply disregards is that the country customs had been, from time immemorial, part of the normal life of the parish. Even he cannot deny that the custom of church ales provided in some cases the major source of income to the churchwardens for the upkeep of the church but he counters that fact with

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a thundering irrelevance, ‘[. . .] these be their exceptions, these be their excuses and these their pretended allegations, wherby they blind the world, [. . .] do they think that the Lord will haue his howse build with drunkenness, gluttony and such like abominations? Must we do euill, that good may come of it? must we build this house of lyme and stone, with desolation, and vtter ouerthrow of his spirituall howse, clensed and washed with the preciouse blood of our Sauiour Iesus Christ?’12 Yet Stubbes does provide us with some useful information. Nowhere else do we have the corroboration of the custom of selling liveries or badges at the summer lord and Robin Hood events that are so much part of the evidence from Kingston upon Thames and Reading St Laurence. His evidence, also, about the larger badges worn by the retainers of the lord or of Robin Hood again helps elucidate puzzling entries from the Kingston records. For all his vitriolic hostility, we must not reject Stubbes as a witness simply because his excessive hostility leads him to slant his argument. When we weigh the evidence from the many sources we must recognize that what we are dealing with is neither satanic nor edenic. From the scraps and shards before us is emerging a picture of customs that had a shape and purpose. The customs were deeply rooted in their parish communities whether those parishes were in country districts or busy market towns. In each location in any year there was the possibility for a local variation that depended on all those things that still prevail in such activities – the availability of money and people power to complete the enterprise successfully. The most difficult challenge in deciphering this evidence comes from the shifting and ambiguous relationship between the King Game or the custom of the summer lord, Robin Hood and the morris-dancing teams. David Wiles has concluded that the figure of Robin Hood and the summer lord are synonymous. Unfortunately, he bases his evidence on an antiquarian transcription that contains seven major inaccuracies two of which appear in Wiles’ argument.13 His source told him that there is a record from Amersham, Buckinghamshire, for 1630 which indicates that money was received ‘of the lord for Robin Hood’.14 Wiles then moves from that evidence to interpret the other evidence from his small selection of parishes in light of it. To begin with, the antiquarian transcriber misread ‘xxxj yere of the Rayne of kyng harre the viij’ (1539–40) as the ‘xxj yere [. . .]’ (1529–30). The record is in the first year’s accounts from St Mary’s, Amersham, which begin in 1539–40. The event being recorded happened at the summer festival in 1540 not in 1530. More significantly, however, the antiquarian also misread the entry. The entry really says ‘Resseuyd of þe lades for Robyn hode’.15 The scribe uses the ‘z’ form of the ‘r’ in secretary hand. There can be no mistaking the ‘a’ for ‘or’ particularly with the clear ‘or’ in the next word ‘for’. What this witness from Amersham is telling us, therefore, is something much more common – that the young men of the parish – the ‘lads’ – were responsible for the Robin Hood gathering. We have evidence for King Games or summer lords and ladies from twelve parishes. The earliest is from Henley in 1454–55 and the latest from Burford

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on the other side of Oxfordshire in 1630–31. Three of the eleven have limited evidence. Single references occur in Oxford St Mary Magdalen, Guildford, and Brentwood in Middlesex. A fourth, Burford, gives us only two years of rare costume evidence, although the details – a jerkin, scarf and ribbons for their lord – are intriguingly like those that Sandra Billington has called our attention to from the House of Fame.16 From four of the remaining eight parishes – Henley, Reading St Laurence, Kingston, and Woodstock – there is also Robin Hood evidence. Henley, Reading St Laurence, and Kingston had morris dancers as well, as did three other parishes with King Games – Reading St Giles, Thame, and Thatcham. Only Wing, of the parishes from which we have extensive King Game evidence, seems not to have had any other adjunct to the festivities except a maypole. Reading St Laurence, Reading St Giles, Thame, Thatcham, and Woodstock also had poles and Reading St Laurence,Thatcham, and Woodstock each had bowers. Of the other parishes from which we have substantial evidence five sponsored morris dancers – Reading St Mary, Marlowe, Bisham (with costumes loaned from Marlowe), Bray, Abingdon, and Wantage. Of these parishes there is Robin Hood evidence from Abingdon only. Wantage had a pole and both Wantage and Abingdon had bowers. There is evidence from seven more parishes of summer poles and two of these parishes also had bowers. What are we to make of this evidence? First of all, it seems as if we have five distinguishable activities recorded here – the custom of a summer lord or lord and lady; Robin Hood with his followers; morris dancers; maypoles; and some activity that demanded a bower. To deal with the last ones first: a bower or arbour appears in the account of the Shooter’s Hill entertainment of Henry VIII by his guard. Other evidence such as that from Reading St Laurence in 1607–08 when a ‘bough’ is provided for the King Play17 or the ‘bushying of the elm’ in Thatcham in 1574–7618 may suggest that bowers are particularly attached to the King Games. However, Phillip Stubbes makes it clear that the bowers set up in the churchyard are there for the feasting. Other evidence from other counties being edited for the REED series indicates that bowers seem to be used as places set apart for some specific purpose. Some were clearly used for the King Games but others may have simply been used as locations for other festival activities such as feasting. We should not, therefore, conclude that every time we find a bower we have evidence of a rustic throne room. Poles, maypoles, summer poles, summer trees, or simply trees have a life of their own within the summer festivities. Whether we are to believe the procession with oxen that Stubbes tells of with such relish, it is clear that the provision of a phallic pole that was then decorated with garlands and ribbons was a ubiquitous feature of the summer festivals. Indeed, we only hear of the practice in the records when frugal churchwardens sell the poles, presumably for firewood, and add several pennies to the church box. The poles, however, seem to be independent of the three intermingled features of the festivals that comprise our puzzle – the relationship among the King Games, the Robin Hood events and the morris dancers.

The Betley Window, originally Betley Old Hall, Staffordshire, now Victoria and Albert Museum. Reproduced by permission of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

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To once again take the last point first, it seems to me that the morris evidence from this area points to abundant activity of troupes that usually comprised six to eight dancers. The Thames Valley evidence seems to support the evidence of the so-called Betley window where the dancing figures include a female figure named Marion and a male figure often identified as a friar and actually named in the Kingston records as Friar Tuck.19 Only Reading St Mary records a hobby-horse, but there is evidence from four parishes for costumes for Marion and six parishes for costumes for the male figure of the friar/fool/vice.20 Of these two – Bray and Marlowe – have no evidence for either a King Play or Robin Hood.The Kingston Marion was played by a woman from the evidence of 1508–09, where she is paid 2s for ‘hir labor’ over two years.21 There is no reason to assume that other Marions were not also danced by women. REED editors are finding evidence in the records of the west country for mixed or female morris teams in this period despite the custom of only male teams that seems to have grown up in modern revivals of the dance.22 And so we come to the really tangled part of the puzzle – the relationship between the summer lords and Robin Hood. I once believed, with Wiles, that the figure of Robin Hood could take the place of a summer lord.23 On the basis of this analysis of the evidence from the Thames Valley counties, however, I no longer believe that this is so. Rather, it seems we have two kinds of figures represented here. At the summer festivals in some locations it seems to have been the custom to elect members of the community to be ‘king’ or ‘queen’ for however long the festivities lasted, to preside over the many activities that were included in the summer customs of that location. It seems clear from what evidence survives that these figures, as Sandra Billington has suggested, were not Bakhtinian subversive figures, but rather, because they operated like the Boy Bishops in a situation of licensed liberty, were figures that reinforced the established social order rather than subverting it.24 Sometimes the summer lords were young men as in Henley in 1502 when Richard Andrew, son of John Andrew, dyer, was named the lord.25 Sometimes servants of the local gentry presided over the events. We have a decade and a half of evidence from Wing in Buckinghamshire where the king and queen are named in the records and the names of their masters are also provided.26 This was a conscious inversion of order, a custom that placed a ‘non-elite’ member of the community in the position of control whose task it was to preside over the summer festival. The chosen ruler was, as Shakespeare tells us, to [. . .] bid These unknown friends to ‘s welcome; for it is A way to make us better friends, more known [. . .]27 This is a figure or order, of reconciliation, not of disorder. And here the problem with the identification of Robin Hood with the summer lord becomes apparent. Unless we accept Stubbes’s biased view of the summer lord as a bacchanalian lord of misrule – a view that fits with no other contemporary evidence – it is very hard to conceive the Robin Hood figure as

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that summer ruler. However fragmentary and elusive the evidence, the Robin Hood of legend and gest is an outlaw, a disturber of the peace, a figure of energy and combat. As such, the Robin Hood figures provide the counterpoint of disorder to the rule of the summer lords. But how do these Robin Hood figures fit into the pattern that is emerging? Among other things, as Latimer reminds us, the Robin Hood figures gathered money. Robin Hood and his ‘fellows’ named frequently as Little John in Kingston in the early sixteenth century and again in Woodstock more than a century later, regularly passed money that they had ‘gathered’ over to the churchwardens.28 Why the public gave them money remains to be determined. It seems to me that these shadowy figures, dressed as the evidence from Kingston, in particular, tells us in Kendal green wearing gloves and hats and livery badges – possibly the badges of their master the summer lord – could have been engaged in any one of three types of enterprises. First, they could simply swagger about playing the part of the outlaws of the legend. Secondly, they could team up with the morris dancers in a combined event such as the one that comes down to us from the sixteenth century that involves Friar Tuck and Maid Marion. The surviving text fits well with a situation where the two parish troupes – Robin Hood and his company and the morris dancers possibly led by the friar figure – come together for a farce full of horseplay and violence that ends with a dance.29 A third variant that fits the evidence of the fragment ‘Robin Hood and the Potter’ and many of the non-dramatic gests is, of course, the combat game probably a sporting contest – a wrestling match or an archery contest or a fight with staves or any other variant on the contest theme. Late evidence from Witney in the 1620s has the summer festivals called ‘Whitson sports’.30 Witney is not far from the Gloucestershire border where a decade later Robert Dover staged his famous Cotswold Games. Sometimes both the Robin Hood figures and the summer lords went visiting. Sally-Beth MacLean has argued that the summer king from Kingston went in mock progress by barge from Kingston to the small villages that comprised Kingston’s ‘hinterland’ in emulation of the progresses along the river of the real king from his palace at Richmond across the river.31 In the Kingston records there are expenses incurred for a parish visit to the king games of such tiny villages as Teddington, Long Ditton, West Mulsey, Hampton, Walton, Croydon, and Cheam all in the first few decades of the sixteenth century. They probably went both to add ‘market town’ class to a village event and to advertise their own very large festival with the hope of attracting customers from the district. The reciprocal visiting of mock courts from one village to another is also suggested by evidence from Somerset where, from the sum involved, it seems as if the parish of Tintinhull is paying for refreshments for the ‘king’ of the neighbouring village of Montacute in 1447–48.32 The visitors may sometimes have included the whole mock court, but in 1505–06 from Reading St Laurence we have evidence of a supper provided for only ‘Robynhod & his company when he came from ffynchamsted’.33 A variant on the travelling game seems to have been an itinerant Robin Hood and his company who actually gathered money for their home parish.

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Among the receipts for 1513–14 we find the entry, ‘Item Reseuid for Robyn hodes gaderyng at Croydon’.34 Similarly, in 1504–05, Henley held their regular king game but it was their visiting Robin Hood figures who were paid by Reading St Laurence in that same year.35 This custom of touring Robin Hoods may explain the laconic payments in the accounts of the Reading Guild Merchant for the years between 1382 and 1428 when payments are made to ‘players’ from the villages of Aldermaston, Wokingham, Sindlesham, Yately in Hampshire, and Henley in Oxfordshire.36 Only Kingston has full evidence for the costuming of Robin Hood and Little John. Small details only are supplied by Reading St Laurence and Abingdon. The costumes were rented in Kingston in 1507 but that same year they began to build some for themselves. The initial costumes seem to have been unsatisfactory and in 1508–09 we find the parish spending the large sum of 12s 10d for Kendal green to make coats for the two men. That same year 6s 4d was spent on coats for Maid Marion and the friar. In 1509–10 costumes are once again being built. The size of Robin Hood’s retinue seems to have increased by 1518–19 when fourteen Kendal coats were made, and in 1522–23 twenty hats were bought. In 1518–19, the parish paid for morris costumes and for shoes for the dancers. An entry in that year for ‘viij payer of schewes for ye mores dansserers ye freer and Made maryen’ supports the idea that Marion and the friar were two members of the eight member morris team.37 It is clear from the mixing of these and other accounts that all the events were closely linked. It is an interesting fact, however, that very little evidence survives for costuming for the summer lords and ladies. It appears that, in the main, the parishioners chosen to preside over the events did so in their own clothes perhaps, like Perdita, wearing a crown of flowers. An important element of the summer festivals was the music provided and here the Thames Valley parishes provide some interesting insights. In this period, the normal payment to the queen’s trumpeter at the time of a royal progress ranged from 10s to 13s 4d.38 By comparison parishes often paid as much as 15 to 20 shillings for musicians, particularly taborers, for the summer festivals. These were sometimes itinerant musicians. In 1554–55 the parish of Thame paid 9s to a taborer ‘þat Came from london’.39 Wantage, in the Vale of the White Horse, paid 12s to the minstrels in 1580–81 and an additional 6s 8d for their board.40 Payments for board and for meals for the musicians are common in these accounts. In 1590–91, on the occasion of a particularly lavish event, Wantage paid taborer John Rowland 16s 6d for his music and continued to engage him in subsequent years.41 Reading St Mary paid 26s 8d for minstrels in 1555–56 and 13s 4d for their board.42 Lutenists, harpers, and singers also appear in the parish accounts but it seems that the performer most necessary to the summer festivals was the taborer. Phillip Stubbes with his comment about the beating drums again corroborates the evidence of the records. The two parishes with the most complete records of the summer festivals are Kingston and Reading St Laurence.We have evidence from both of the size of the events from the number of ‘liveries’ or small paper badges and pins that

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were provided. Although several other parishes record payment for liveries, only these two tell us how many were provided.43 Kingston’s event was by far the larger. It lasted for a full week after the Thursday in Whitsun week. In two years over 2000 liveries were provided and presumably sold.44 Other years ranged from 900 to 1500.45 Even spreading the crowd over the week of the festivities, this is a large number for a town the size of Kingston. Reading St Laurence’s event, by comparison, was much smaller with the highest number of liveries amounting to only 200 to possibly 350.46 However, the St Laurence event, at least in the early years of the sixteenth century seems to have been confined to the daylong fair on May Day. St Laurence’s church backed on the land of the great Benedictine Abbey but faced the market place. The churchwardens took advantage of their location in the centre of town and set up their maypole in the market place in the midst of the fair. Reading St Mary undertook a major rebuilding of their church about the time that the churchwardens’ accounts begin in 1547. They seem to have quarried the ruins of the Benedictine Abbey for the stone. For a few years after 1555 they held a very large festival event that included a morris team with a hobby-horse. This event was never called anything but a church ale. This, as we have seen, is the generic term for the summer festival. It is the records of other ales that comprise most of the rest of our evidence for folk activity from the parishes. From the often laconic accounts we cannot tell what went on at these occasions but we do have some sense of their purpose. The churchwardens of the tiny parish of Winkfield, near Windsor, noted the following in 1549, Memorandum yat we the inhabitance of the sayd parish hath made this Ale this yere to Reffresshe owre por neyburs & mend owre hye wayes wyche be so fowle yat we can well passe with owre caredge with the gaynes yat we have by the sayd ale.47 The road through Winkfield must have been greatly improved after the ale of 1593–94 when the churchwardens recorded a profit of £7 18s.48 The largest profit recorded was in the last ale held at Thame in 1636–37 when £29 12s 7½d was raised.49 In country parishes, the ale receipts sometimes combined with the buying and selling of livestock. Other parishes held ales to meet the ongoing expenses of the upkeep of the fabric of the parish church. In a memorandum dated 1573, the churchwardens of Reading St Laurence list the several parish activities as ‘the Colleccions or gatheringes heretofore Accostomably vsed for and towardes the mayntenaunce of the Church’.50 Stanford-in-theVale replaced its medieval roof early in the sixteenth century with one with a much lower pitch. The accounts of the later sixteenth century record frequent attempts to repair the leaks caused by the new roof with the proceeds from the ale. It is also possible to trace the special relationships of the parishes through the ale entries. The parish church of Marston on the northern edge of Oxford was connected with Magdalen College and each year a bushel of malt for ‘the brewing’ from the college is noted in the receipts for the ale.51

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Puritan pressure against all non-liturgical parish activities grew during the reign of Elizabeth, although the various edicts were interpreted more rigidly in some places than in others. The three Reading parishes discontinued their festivals in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign. There is a gap in the Kingston accounts from 1537–38 to 1566–67 and when they resume all traces of the great festivals have disappeared. In 1603, the so-called ‘final’ prohibition that came to be known as Canon 88 was passed directing ‘churchwardens or questmen, and their assistants to suffer no plays, feasts, banquets, suppers, church ales, drinkings, temporal courts, or leets, lay juries, musters or other prophane usage, to be kept in the church chapel or churchyard’.52 However, despite the prohibition, eighteen of our parishes continued to hold ales after 1603 – five in Berkshire, two in Buckinghamshire and eleven in conservative Oxfordshire. Of these, five continued into the 1630’s – Newbury and Warfield in Berkshire and Burford, Thame, and Headington in Oxfordshire. Tiny Yarnton in Oxfordshire held its last ale in 1642. Only four parishes have records that end before 1642. Of these, only the records of Henley may have contained more evidence. Festive activities in Thatcham, Winkfield, and Marston ceased several years before the records break off. Most parish accounts survive in books but the Henley accounts are loose papers. There is a reference to a Whitsun event in Henley in 1563 the last year before 1642 for which evidence survives. The Puritan spirit that informs the writing of Phillip Stubbes manifested itself in country parishes as the Civil War approached. Often the response of the parishioners against a Puritan vicar was ribald and cruel. John Marten, the vicar of the parish church in Windsor, recounts with anguish his encounters with a conservative churchwarden who ‘vpon the feast day of the Ascension last past when one of the morrice dauncers had leaped & daunced in the face of the minister standing in his owne door, did before a great number of people revile & abuse the minister [. . .]’53 In an equally rowdy and combative fashion a group of townsfolk set up a maypole in Aylesbury in 1636 with the ‘shooting of Gunns [and] drming’.54 and brought the wrath of their neighbours down upon them. The sense of ‘chary-vary’, of ridicule and discord that these incidents convey was an increasing part of the life of the villages of England in the early seventeenth century. The conflict, however, was not based on class. Rather the split was an ideological one between the Puritans on the one hand and those who adhered to the old ways on the other. The battle was often fought over the seemingly insignificant matters associated with the longstanding customs sponsored by country parishes. This element of religious conflict makes a simple Marxist or Bahktinian analysis of the English festivals untenable. The new theology crossed all societal lines. But it is equally true that the pursuit of the country customs crossed all societal lines.We have seen from Hall’s Chronicle how young Henry VIII liked to dress up as Robin Hood. In May 1505, his father, Henry VII, gave the players of Kingston 3s 4d towards the building of their new church spire.55 The powerful Dormer family of Wing and Henley took a personal interest in the election of the summer lords and ladies of the parish. And the procession in the mask

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in the famous Unton portrait from Wadley in north-east Berkshire is led by a figure playing a pipe and tabor. Finally, the mask that Thomas Campion wrote for the visit of Queen Anne to the Knowles’ household at Caversham across the river from Reading in 1613 contains two Robin Hood figures who, with two keepers, the Cynic and the Traveller sing a song in five parts and then dance a morris.56 That inveterate gossip John Chamberlain tells us that among the participants in that performance were the four sons of the Lord Chamberlain (the Earl of Suffolk) and the Earl of Derby, Lord North, Sir Harry Carie, and Sir Henry Rich.57 Country customs belonged to everyone who lived in the country, and this included the nobility and the gentry as well as the villagers. The parish system ensured that all inhabitants of the parish in this period, rich or poor, came together at service time. Our evidence suggests that they also came together at the time of the summer festivals. If this is so we should not be surprised to find the elite culture appropriating elements from the countryside for its private entertainment. The summer festivals in the Thames Valley counties were times of celebration of community. During the period from 1 May to midsummer though most often at Whitsun, the members of parishes large and small came together to feast, to dance, and to participate in ritual games that were part of the social continuity of that place. They also came together to raise money. And for this we must be thankful.Without the careful accounting of generations of churchwardens we would not have the evidence their accounts provide.Their evidence is allowing us to puzzle out a much-needed corrective to theories concerning the festivals based on such hostile witnesses as Phillip Stubbes. Major Parish Sources Berkshire Abingdon: ‘Extracts from the Church-wardens Accompts of the Parish of St Helen’s’ ed. by A.J. Ward, Archaeologia, I (1770), pp.11–23. Bray: Reading, Berkshire RO, D/P 23 5/1. Reading St Giles: Reading, Berkshire RO, D/P 96 5/1. Reading St Laurence: Reading, Berkshire RO, D/P 97 5/1. Reading St Mary: Reading Berkshire RO, D/P 98 5/1. Thatcham: Reading, Berkshire RO, D/P 130 5/1A. Wantage: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Top. Berks. c.44. Winkfield: Reading, Berkshire RO, D/P 151 5/1. Buckinghamshire Amersham: Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire RO PR 4/5/1. Marlowe: Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire RO PR 140/5/1. Wing: Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire RO PR 23415/1. Oxfordshire Burford: Oxford, Oxfordshire RO, MSS DD Par. Burford e.36. Henley: Oxford, Oxfordshire RO, MSS DD Henley A V/1–4, 22, 30; CI/1, 4, 7, 36/1, 4; A XII/11/173–74, 183.

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Marston: Oxford, Oxfordshire RO MSS DD Par. Marston c.2. Thame: Oxford, Oxfordshire RO MSS DD Par. Thame b.2. Woodstock: Oxford, Oxfordshire RO MSS DD Par. Woodstock c.12. Surrey Woking, Kingston upon Thames: Surrey RO, KG 212/1.

Notes 1 David Wiles, The Early Plays of Robin Hood (Cambridge: Brewer, 1981), p. 7. 2 Kingston upon Thames Churchwardens’ Acts, pp. 110–28. 3 Sally-Beth MacLean, ‘King Games and Robin Hood: Play and Profit at Kingston upon Thames,’ in Proceedings of the Fifth International Colloquium of the Société Internationale pour l’Étude du Théâtre Médiéval (Perpignan: 1986), item 27. 4 Charles Kerry, A History of the Municipal Church of St Lawrence, Reading (Reading: privately printed, 1883). 5 Cited in Joseph Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, ed. and rev. by J. Charles Cox (London: Methuen, 1903; rev. ed. Detroit: Bath Firecrest, 1969), p. 278. 6 Strutt, pp. 279–80. 7 Cited in Strutt, p. 278. 8 Seventeenth-Century Poetry, ed. by R.P.T. Coffin and A.M. Witherspoon (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1929), p. 75. 9 Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583, facsimile reproduction New York: Da Capo Press, 1972). 10 Wing Churchwardens’ Accounts, fol. 174v. 11 Oxford, Oxfordshire County RO, MS Oxon. Archd. Papers, Oxon. c. 174, fols 199–199v. 12 Stubbes, sig. Mv. 13 Wiles cites the Records of Buckinghamshire (1892), pp. 7, 44.The other inaccuracies include a second misreading of Roman numerals and two mistakes in names. The antiquarian who clearly was not trained in paleography also misread Sir John Blake for Thomas Blake and Richard Rainton for Richard Bamton. 14 Wiles, p. 7. 15 Amersham Churchwardens’ Accounts, p. 1. 16 Burford Churchwardens’ Accounts, fols 14–15; Sandra Billington, Mock Kings in Medieval Society and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 69. 17 Reading St Laurence Churchwardens’ Accounts, p. 35. 18 Thatcham Churchwardens’ Accounts, fol. 23. 19 Kingston Churchwardens’ Accounts, p. 84. 20 Reading St Mary Churchwardens’ Accounts, p. 41. 21 Kingston Churchwardens’ Accounts, p. 66. 22 Records of Early English Drama: Herefordshire/Worcestershire, ed. by David N. Klausner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 125. 23 Alexandra F. Johnston,‘English Puritanism and Festive Custom’, Renaissance and Reformation, n.s., 15 (1991), p. 293. 24 Billington, p. 1. 25 Henley Churchwardens’ Accounts, fol. 6v. 26 Wing Churchwardens’ Accounts, fols 67v–80. 27 Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, iv p. 64–66. 28 Woodstock Churchwardens’ Accounts for 1627–28, p. 17. 29 Robin Hood and the Friar, ed. by Mary A. Blackstone, PLS Performance Texts 3 (Toronto: PLS, 1981). 30 Witney Churchwardens’ Accounts, fols 43 and 49v.

164 Other records 31 MacLean, ‘King Games and Robin Hood: Play and Profit at Kingston upon Thames,’ p. 1. 32 See the accounts of Tintinhull in Somerset, including Bath, ed. by James Stokes and Robert J. Alexander, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 231. 33 Reading St Laurence Churchwardens’ Accounts, p. 25. 34 Kingston Churchwardens’ Accounts, p. 74. 35 Reading St Laurence Churchwardens’ Accounts, p. 21. 36 Until dissolution, the Benedictine Abbey was the overlord of the town of Reading and the abbot confirmed the master of the Guild Merchant as the chief burgess every year. Reading was incorporated in 1542. The ‘town’ accounts before 1542 are in fact the accounts of the Guild Merchant. The early accounts were destroyed by enemy action during the Second World War but they had been transcribed for the Historical Manuscript Commission for the 11th Report. For the accounts for 1382–6 see ‘The Manuscripts of the Corporation of Reading’, ed. by W.D. Macray, 11th Report (London: HMSO, 1888), Appendix 7, p. 172. Macray also supplies some readings now obliterated in Berkshire RO, R/FCa 2/1–11(1413–21) for 1413–14 and 1419–20.The evidence for 1423–24 is found in R/FCa 2/12–32. 37 Kingston Churchwardens’ Accounts, p. 97. 38 Woodstock Chamberlains’ Accounts, B79 (1), fols 16 and 73. 39 Thame Churchwardens’ Accounts, p. 124. 40 Wantage Churchwardens’ Account, fol. l9v. 41 Wantage Churchwardens’ Accounts, fols 35, 40v and 43. 42 Reading St Mary’s Churchwardens’ Accounts, p. 36. 43 Thame, Reading St Mary’s and Wantage all record expenses for providing liveries. 44 See, for example, Kingston Churchwardens’ Accounts for 1507–08 (p. 62) and 1518–19 (p. 97). 45 There were 900 in 1514–5 (p. 84); 1500 in 1522–3 (p. 120). 46 Reading St. Laurence Churchwardens’ Accounts, 1508–09 (p. 74) and 1509–10 (p. 80). In both years 11d was spent. In 1512–14, 20d was spent on liveries suggesting a crowd of well over 300 (p. 93). 47 Winkfield Churchwardens’ Accounts, p. 31. 48 Winkfield Churchwardens’ Accounts, p. 75. 49 Thame Churchwardens’ Accounts, p. 299. 50 Reading St. Laurence Churchwardens’ Accounts, p. 349. 51 Marston Churchwardens’ Accounts, passim. 52 Thomas Hearne, Liber Niger Scaccarii E Codice, 2 vols (Oxford, 1728), p. 597. 53 Oxfordshire RO, MS Oxon. Archd. Papers, c.174, fols 199–199v. See Johnston, ‘English Puritanism’, pp. 289–90. 54 Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire Record Office, Aylesbury Peculiar Visitation and Court Book, AR 131/181, fol. 24v. 55 Sydney Anglo, ‘The Court Festivals of Henry VII: A Study based upon the Account Books of John Heron, Treasurer of the Chamber’, Bulletin of John Rylands Library 42 (1960), p. 39. Cited from London, British Library MS Add. 2140. 56 A Relation of the Late Royall Entertainment Given by the Right Honorable The Lord Knowles [. . .] 1613 in The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, ed. by John Nichols (London: J.B. Nichols, 1828), pp. 630–39. 57 London, The National Archives, SP 14/72.

2.4 The Robin Hood of the records From: Playing Robin Hood:The Legend as Performance in Five Centuries, Lois Potter, ed. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 27–44 Although the legend of Robin Hood firmly sets his exploits in the late twelfth century, allusive and elusive references to a figure called Robin Hood appear in poetry, letters, chronicles and polemical literature from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The earliest is in Piers Plowman from the late fourteenth century where Sloth, in the course of his confession, reveals that he knows ‘rymes of Robyn Hood’.1 In 1473, John Paston II complains to his brother that some servants have left him so that he will have no one to play ‘Robynhod and the shryff off Notyngham’ at Caister in Norfolk.2 We learn from Hall’s Chronicle that, early in the reign of Henry VIII, the court indulged in Robin Hood activities in imitation of country customs. From the first year of his reign (1508–09) comes the familiar story of the king’s appearance with members of his court to dance in the queen’s chamber dressed as Robin Hood and his men.3 In the second year in his reign, at Shooter’s Hill, his guard (some two-hundred strong and elaborately costumed in green according to the chronicle) met the king and the entire court and welcomed them back to an arbour for a meal and then an allegorical entertainment.4 Over thirty-five years later, the social and religious climate had changed. As the reformation rhetoric began to gather strength, Bishop Stephen Gardiner was accused by the polemicist William Turner, in 1545, of forbidding ‘the players of london (as it was tolde me) to play any moe playes of Christe/but of robin hode and litle Iohn’.5 Four years later, on 12 April 1549 in his sixth sermon before King Edward VI, Bishop Latimer lamented, I came myself once to a place, riding on a journey homeward from London, and I sent word over night into the town that I would preach there in the morning, because it was holiday; and methought it was an holiday’s work. The church stood in my way, and I took my horse and my company, and went thither. I thought I should have found a great company in the church, and when I came there the church door was fast locked. I tarried there half an hour and more: at last the key was found, and one of the parish comes to me and says,‘Sir, this is a busy day with us, we cannot hear you; it is Robin Hood’s day. The parish are gone abroad to gather for Robin

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Hood. I pray you let them not.’ I was fain there to give place to Robin Hood: I thought my rochet would have been regarded, though I were not; but it would not serve, it was fain to give place to Robin Hood’s men. It is no laughing matter, my friends, it is a weeping matter, a heavy matter; a heavy matter, under the pretence of gathering for Robin Hood, a traitor and a thief, to put out a preacher, to have his office less esteemed; to prefer Robin Hood before the ministration of God’s word: all this has come of unpreaching prelates. This realm has been ill provided for, that it hath had such corrupt judgments in it to prefer Robin Hood to God’s word. If the bishops had been preachers, there should never have been any such thing: but we have good hope of better.We have had a good beginning: I beseech God to continue it!6 Latimer here laments the lack of zeal of the Henrician bishops in enforcing injunctions such as that of Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, in 1542, ‘That no parsons, vicars, no curates permit or suffer any manner of common plays, games or interludes, to be played, set forth, or declared within their churches or chapels, where the blessed Sacrament of the altar is, or any other sacrament administered, or Divine service said or sung [. . .]’7 But Latimer also promises ‘good hope of better’ and, indeed, during Edward’s reign, virtually all parish plays, entertainments and folk activities came to an abrupt halt.8 The accession of Mary brought back many of the ancient customs. Biblical plays under direct parish sponsorship were largely a thing of the past, but many of the folk customs were revived with enthusiasm after 1553 and continued into the reign of Elizabeth.9 During that reign, two further polemicists bear witness to Robin Hood. In 1579, the Dutch protestant writer Philips van Marnix (or his English translator George Gilpin) mocks the actions of a priest celebrating mass, [. . .] why hee trippes sometime to the one ende of the Altar, and sometime to the other side of the Altar, as though hee were daunsing the Maides Morice [. . .] and sometime hee foldeth his handes together, like sorrowfull Marie Magdalene, and sometime hee stretches them out on euerie side, as though hee would shoote in Robin Hoodes bowe [. . .]10 In 1589, Martin Marprelate characterizes a parson named Glibbery of Halstead in Essex, who left his pulpit to join a boy following ‘either the sommer Lord with his Maie game/ or Robin Hood with his Morrice daunce’.11 and another named Anderson of Stepney is described as once having ‘made roome before him with his two handed staffe, as he did once before the morrice daunce, at a market towne in the edge of Buckingham of Bedford shires, where he bare the Potters part’.12 These few references spread over more than two hundred years speak of five distinct elements – rhyming, playmaking, ‘gathering’, archery, and morris dancing.The one full text of a Robin Hood play and the two fragmentary texts

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that survive – Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham, and Robin Hood and the Potter include displays of skill at archery, contests with staves or swords, and dancing.13 Were this all the evidence that we have for the Robin Hood phenomenon we would be hard put to define the activity with any assurance or accuracy. Fortunately, considerable evidence does survive, for the most part in churchwardens’ accounts from the sixteenth century.14 Ronald Hutton in The Rise and Fall of Merry England refers to David Wiles as ‘the leading authority’ on Robin Hood.15 Indeed,Wiles’ slim book, The Early Plays of Robin Hood is a very useful and readable synthesis of the various theories surrounding the Robin Hood figure and the plays that include him as a chief actor.16 Wiles does, however, draw one major conclusion that cannot be sustained when all the record evidence is taken into account. Wiles used the published accounts from only six parishes in the Thames Valley as the basis of his study along with other antiquarian sources. The evidence he used, and indeed all the evidence, is confusing since it consists of laconic accounts listing jumbled receipts and expenses for parish summer festivals. In them there are references to two mimetic figures and their followers – Robin Hood and the Mock King or Summer Lord. Based on the evidence before him, Wiles argued that Robin Hood and the Summer Lord are the same figure. In spite of the vagueness of the evidence, he felt that he had found the key in the churchwardens’ accounts of Amersham, Buckinghamshire. Unfortunately, the antiquarian source from which he took his reference is inaccurate.17 His source told him that there is a record from Amersham for 1530 which indicates that money was received ‘of the lord for Robin Hood’.18 Here it would appear that the summer lord was handing over money collected in the Robin Hood gathering. I have twice consulted the original manuscript both in the church in Amersham and in the Buckinghamshire Record Office where it is now deposited.19 The entry really says ‘Resseuyd of the lades for Robyn hode’. The scribe uses the ‘z’ form of the ‘r’ in secretary hand. There can be no mistaking the ‘a’ for ‘or’ particularly with the clear ‘or’ in the next word ‘for’. What this witness from Amersham is telling us, therefore, is something much more common – that the young men of the parish – the ‘lads’ – were responsible for the Robin Hood gathering. There is, then, no unequivocal evidence that the figure called Robin Hood ever took the role of the mock king or summer lord at the summer festivals. Seasonal carnival customs in England, as on the continent, were based on the principal of the inversion of order. As part of the festivities, the natural hierarchy of school, monastic house, church, village, town or household was deliberately turned upside down. Unlike the continental practice, however, the English never had extensive Shrovetide customs heralding the arrival of Lent. Rather the English customs were almost entirely confined to the two solstices – the winter solstice period from the beginning of Advent to Epiphany and the summer solstice period from May Day to 25 June. At the winter solstice came the Boy Bishop ceremonies.These were not held, as in France, with bacchanalian riot on the Feast of the Holy Innocents (28 December). Rather, most were held on the feast of St Nicholas (6 December)

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early in the penitential season of Advent.20 The statute of Eton governing the Boy Bishop ceremony makes this point very clear stating that the ceremony must be held on 6 December and ‘not by any means the feast of the Holy Innocents’. It goes on to say, ‘we allow divine service, except for the sacred portions of the mass, to be performed and said by a Boy Bishop of the scholars to be chosen from among them yearly for the purpose’.21 Here it is clear that all but the acts of consecration were to be performed by the young ‘bishop for the day’. The statute makes it clear that the activity is ‘licensed’ – that is that this is a ceremonial inversion not an unruly romp. Many parishes in the eastern part of England had parish Christmas inversion ceremonies. Christmas lords are recorded at Great Dunmow in Essex, Great Witchingham and Shipdham in Norfolk among others.22 A few parishes, such as the parish of Snittisham, in Norfolk, had both a Christmas lord and a summer event although there is no evidence that the summer event included an inversion of order ceremony.23 Indeed, the summer activity in the eastern counties tended to be the production of large scale plays either by a single parish as at New Romney, Kent, from 1445–1556 or by several parishes together as in Bassingbourn in Cambridgeshire.24 The summer inversion ceremonies that frequently included Robin Hood as part of the larger pattern are rarely to be found in eastern England although Robin Hood himself makes the occasional appearance. New Romney records a payment for ‘Robyn hode playes of hethe’ in 1532–33, and Robert Sydney of Penshurst also in Kent paid Robin Hood players in 1574.25 Shrewsbury’s Abbot of Marham with his costumes and retinue is one of the clearest descendents of both the boy bishop tradition and that of summer inversion of order ceremonies.26 The abbot and his counterpart in Walsall, Staffordshire, ruled in the summer as did many other summer kings.27 There were also summer queens such as Margaret More of Wistow,Yorkshire, who reigned with her court of knights over the summer game in 1469.28 The survival of such customs in the diocese of York can be inferred from Archbishop Grindal’s injunction against all customary activity one hundred years later which included ‘sommerr Lordes or ladyes’.29 However, the majority of the surviving evidence for summer kings comes from the districts of England west and south of Leicestershire particularly in the Thames Valley counties (and contingent parishes in other counties) and in the west country. The most regal of them all reigned in Kingston upon Thames echoing the state of the real king across the river at Richmond. Sally-Beth MacLean has provided a vivid reconstruction of the week long Kingston event from the early sixteenth century.30 Much of our information about the summer customs comes from the pen of that redoubtable Puritan pamphleteer, Phillip Stubbes, in his Anatomie of Abuses (1583) in which, like all good propagandists, he judiciously mixes truth with falsehood to achieve his effect.31 For example, in his discussion of the method of choosing the ruler of the festival (whom he calls disdainfully the lord of misrule) he tells us that the choice is made by ‘all the wilde-heds of the Parish, conuenting together’. This may have been true in some places. However,

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where we have evidence for how the mock rulers were chosen it seems to be altogether more decorous. Like the choosing of the Boy Bishops, the method of choice seems again to reflect ‘licensed liberty’. In many parishes the lord was chosen by the parish under the watchful eye of the churchwardens.The Henley accounts record the choice of Richard Andrew, son of the churchwarden John Andrew, dyer, in 1502.32 The later accounts from St Ives in Cornwall (where the borough had taken over the customs) record the names of the man and woman elected each year under the heading ‘Names of Officials’.33 In Wing, Buckinghamshire, in 1565, the local gentry – Sir William Dormer, Francis Darrell, and John Amore – along with the churchwardens agreed to a system of fines that lasted for twenty years to be levied against individuals or their ‘fathers or masters’ for refusing to accept election to the position of summer lord.34 These hardly reflect the drunken huddle suggested by Stubbes. In the early seventeenth century, Francis Taverner wrote the history of the Hertfordshire village of Hexton. In it he mentions the ‘Maying feasts, with their playes of Robyn-hood, and little Iohn’ that had only recently been abandoned.35 Here the May feast and the Robin Hood events are spoken of as separate things happening at the same time. Similarly, in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, the Town Accounts from 1554 until 1571 record a summer event with a lord which also includes a separate Robin Hood event.36 Since the last mention of the summer lord in the parish accounts is for 1548, it seems that the town (as in St Ives) avoided the prohibition of the custom by the ecclesiastical authorities during Edward’s reign by taking over the responsibility for the summer festival.37 From London itself, we have the witness of the merchant Henry Machyn who recorded in his diary for 24 June 1559 a large ‘May game’ with a giant, drums and guns, the nine worthies, ‘a goody pagant with a quen’, St George and the dragon ‘the mores dansse, and after Robyn Hood and lytyll John, and M[aid Marion] and frere Tuke, and they had spechys rond a-bowt London’.38 The next day the game travelled to Greenwich to play before the queen and the council. Although called a ‘May game’ this was a midsummer show with pageants, speeches and other figures from traditional customary actvities, including a mock queen, taking part. The later Wells Show is another example of a large urban variation on the country practice. But the greatest body of evidence for Robin Hood activities within the context of an overarching ‘King Game’ comes from the parishes of the upper Thames Valley.39 Evidence for ‘King Games’ or events where a summer lord presided survive from thirteen parishes: Brentford in Middlesex, Kingston, Guildford and Shere in Surrey, Reading St Laurence, Reading St Giles, and Thatcham in Berkshire, Wing in Buckinghamshire and Oxford, St Mary Magdalen, Henley, Thame, Burford, and Woodstock in Oxfordshire.40 Six of these also have evidence of Robin Hood activity: Kingston, Reading St Laurence, Thatcham, Henley, Thame, and Woodstock. The only mention of a local Robin Hood that does not set him clearly in the context of summer games is in St Helen’s, Abingdon. However, the original document has been lost and the evidence survives only in an eighteenth-century antiquarian transcription.41

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These same six parishes also record morris dance activity. Other parishes have independent evidence for morris activity that is helpful in seeking to understand the other customs. The most difficult challenge in trying to decipher this evidence from the Thames Valley comes from the shifting and ambiguous relationship among the King Game, Robin Hood and the morris dancing teams. The morris evidence points to abundant activity of troupes that usually comprised six to eight dancers. It clearly seems to support the evidence of the so-called Betley window where the dancing figures include a female figure named Marion and a male figure often identified as a friar and actually named in the Kingston records as Friar Tuck.42 Only Reading St Mary’s records a hobby-horse,43 but there is evidence from four parishes for costumes for Marion and eight parishes for costumes for the male figure of the friar/fool/vice.44 Five of these have evidence of Robin Hood within the context of a King Play. But what was the relationship between the summer lord and Robin Hood? We have seen that the lords or lords and ladies seem to have been chosen within the context of ‘licensed liberty’.These were figures who reinforced the established social order rather than subverting it. Like the Boy Bishop ceremony, this was a conscious inversion of order, a custom that placed a ‘non-elite’ member of the community in the position of control whose task it was to preside over the summer festival. The chosen ruler was, as Shakespeare tells us, to ‘[. . .] bid These unknown friends to ‘s welcome; for it is A way to make us better friends, more known [. . .]’45 This is a figure of order, of reconciliation, not of disorder. It seems clear from the Thames Valley evidence, however, that the Robin Hood figure, within the setting of the summer festival presided over by a summer monarch, was the figure of disorder. Wherever there is a King Game, the king and Robin Hood are not the same figure. However fragmentary and elusive the evidence, the Robin Hood of legend and gest is an outlaw, a disturber of the peace, a figure of energy and combat. As such, the Robin Hood figures provide the counterpoint of disorder to the rule of the summer lords. But this was also a form of licensed disorder because, as Latimer reminds us, the Robin Hood figures gathered money for the parish. Robin Hood and his ‘fellows’ named frequently as Little John in Kingston in the early sixteenth century and again in Woodstock more than a century later, regularly passed money that they had ‘gathered’ over to the churchwardens.46 In this way they joined the men and women who engaged in hocking customs, as well as other groups in the parish, in raising much needed funds to maintain the fabric of the church.47 Before the Reformation, communal fundraising in the context of a parish festival was the most common form of realizing the money needed to

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repair buildings already hundreds of years old. In 1572–3, after a visitation from the bishop of Salisbury, the churchwardens of St Laurence, Reading, entered a memorandum in their book making clear that they no longer followed the old practice, but had adopted a system of pew rentals to produce the necessary revenue. The memorandum begins, In Consideracion That the Colleccions or gatheringes heretofore Accostomably vsed for and towardes the mayntenaunce of the Church As well on the feast of All saintes, The feast of the Byrthe of our Lord god As on Hocke Monday & Hocke Tewesdaye; Maye Daye And at the feast of Penticost commonly called Whytsontyde [. . .] ar lefte of and cleane taken from the Churche to the great Impoverishement therof, the which heretofore Dyd muche healpe the same [. . .]48 This document gives us a sense of how this parish, that had one of the more elaborate summer festivals in the early years of the sixteenth century, had reluctantly put the custom behind it. It also shows the economic imperative that lay behind the many forms of ‘gathering’. The Robin Hood ‘gatherings’ must be seen in this larger context. But what form did the Robin Hood figures’ solicitation of their neighbours take? They were typically costumed (as the evidence from Kingston, in particular, tells us) in Kendal green wearing gloves and hats and livery badges – possibly the badges of their master, the summer lord. These costumes would alert the rest of the parish to their roles in some form of mimetic activity. From the evidence, we can speculate that they could have been engaged in any one of three types of enterprises. First, they could be following the custom of the west country (see below) of mock robbery, accosting their neighbours and demanding money. Secondly, they could team up with the morris dancers in a combined event such as the one that comes down to us from the sixteenth century that involves Friar Tuck and Maid Marion. The surviving text of ‘Robin Hood and the Friar’ fits well with a situation where the two parish troupes – Robin Hood and his company and the morris dancers possibly led by the friar figure – come together for a farce full of horseplay and violence that ends with a dance. A third variant that fits the evidence of the fragment ‘Robin Hood and the Potter’ and many of the non-dramatic gests is, of course, the combat game, probably a sporting contest – a wrestling match or an archery contest or a fight with staves (such as Marprelate’s Anderson seems to have been part of) or any other variant on the contest theme. Late evidence from Witney in the 1620s has the summer festivals called ‘Whitson sports’.49 Witney is not far from the Gloucestershire border where a decade later Robert Dover staged his famous Cotswold Games.50 Of the Thames Valley parishes with Robin Hood evidence, only Kingston has full evidence for the costuming of Robin Hood and Little John. In 1508– 09, we find the parish spending the large sum of 12s 10d for Kendal green to

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make coats for the two men. That same year 6s 4d was spent on coats for Maid Marion and the friar. In 1509–10 costumes are once again being built. The size of Robin Hood’s retinue seems to have increased by 1518–19 when fourteen Kendal coats were made, and in 1522–23 twenty hats were bought. In 1518–19, the parish paid for morris costumes and for shoes for the dancers. An entry in that year for ‘viij payer of schewes for ye mores dansserers ye freer and Made maryen’ supports the idea that Marion and the friar were two members of the eight-member morris team.51 It is clear from the mixing of these and other accounts that all the events were closely linked. Indeed, the evidence from the Thames Valley strongly supports the division of activity between the summer lord and Robin Hood made by Martin Marprelate, when he characterized his lax priest as running after ‘either the sommer Lord with his Maie game, or Robin Hood with his Morrice daunce’.52 One of the features of the King Game in Kingston upon Thames, as SallyBeth MacLean has shown, was the mock progress of the Kingston king to the smaller parishes in the area.53 A variant on the travelling King Game seems to have been itinerant Robin Hood troupes who actually gathered money for their home parish in other parishes. Among the Kingston receipts for 1513–14 we find the entry, ‘Item Reseuid for Robyn hodes gaderyng at Croydon’.54 Similarly, in 1504–05, Henley held their regular King Game but it was their visiting Robin Hood figures who were paid by Reading St Laurence in that same year.55 Prior More of Worcester paid a Robin Hood troupe who were gathering at Tewkesbury Bridge in 1518–19, as well as the Robin Hoods of St Helen’s, Worcester, in 1528–29, of the parish of Claynes in 1529–30, and of Clyve in 1530–31.56 The chamberlains of Ludlow in Shropshire gave ten shillings ‘more’ to ‘Robyn whod’ between 1566 and 1569, and those of Bridgnorth record a Robin Hood payment in 1588–89.57 In 1587–8, the town of St Ives in Cornwall gave five shillings to the Robin Hood of St Columb Minor58 and three years later ‘the Robyn hoode of Maugan’ (St Mawgan, Cornwall) was given the same sum by the churchwardens of St Breock.59 This sixteenth century custom of touring Robin Hoods may explain the laconic payments in the accounts of the Reading Guild Merchant for the years between 1382 and 1428, when payments are made to ‘players’ from the local parish of St Laurence and the villages of Aldermaston, Wokingham, Sindlesham,Yately in Hampshire, and Henley in Oxfordshire.60 It may also explain the surprising entry in the town accounts of Sandwich in Kent to players from Reading in 1489–90.61 This is likely to have been the Robin Hood troupe from the parish of St Laurence. Many of these Robin Hood troupes, such as the one from Henley, had their place within their own parish festival, but it is clear that others, especially in the districts west of the Thames watershed had an existence independent of any summer lord or lady. Indeed, it seems that, in these districts, the Robin Hood figure was in charge of the festival. He was not a mock king but he did act as a combined producer and stage manager of the festival events. In this way he resembled many Christmas lords of misrule. Great households would frequently designate one of the higher servants to be the person responsible for

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the organization of the Christmas festivities. For example, John Thurgoode, a servant of the young Mary Tudor in her household of Ditton Park in Buckinghamshire, was designated ‘pro tempore natalis domini existente domino mali Gubernatoris’ for the twelve days of Christmas 1521–22. His bill of charges for that year headed ‘leyde out and payde by Iohn Thurgoode Lorde of Misrule’ included the building of masks and costumes, providing bows and arrows and gun powder for special effects, hiring morris bells and coats and providing carriage for various other necessities for the activities of the season.62 James Stokes, the editor of the Somerset collection for Records of Early English Drama, has provided us with a detailed consideration of the Robin Hoods of Yeovil. These were invariably young men from prominent parish families many of whom became churchwardens. He writes, ‘Robin Hood was the title given each year to the person who organized the Whitsun ale, conducted the gathering and staged entertainments’.63 He also makes the point that Robin Hood is often referred to as the ‘Keeper of the Ale’.64 John Wasson, writing in the introduction to Devon in the Records of Early English Drama series, also makes the point that ‘the chief function of Robin Hood and Little John was to collect money for the parish and often to serve as alewardens’.65 This is confirmed by the entry in the Alewardens’ Accounts for the parish of St Swithin’s Woodbury in Devon where there is combined entry containing a small costume expense for Robin Hood and Little John followed by ‘& ffor ther Wardyns Labor as the Custome ys’.66 An antiquarian account describing the life of the Dorset village of Netherbury tells us, In the yeare 1566 the plage was in neitherbury. and then the years folloing viz 1567 & 1568 & they keept their Church ale at Whit sundy and had their Robert hoode and Littell Iohn & the gentle men of the said parish the cheef actors in it a requitalle for gods merscys67 Here again we have the chief citizens of the parish arranging the event. In Bridport, also in Dorset, we have two year’s evidence during the Marian period for a Robin Hood ale.68 In the first decade of the sixteenth century, in Poole, the ‘Robyn hoders money’ went into the town accounts rather than to the parish.69 In the parish of St Michael in Chagford, Devon, there was a special section in the accounts headed ‘Hoodsmen’s Account’ where the proceeds from the gatherings were accounted for as well as any costuming expenses.70 A similar situation obtained in Chudleigh, Devon.71 The evidence from Exeter is mixed. In 1426–27, the town paid twenty pence to ‘lusoribus ludentibus lusum Robyn Hood’, which may have been the Robin Hooders from the parish of St John’s Bow who record Robin Hood receipts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.72 Exeter’s Robin Hood activities seem to have been quite rowdy since an order was taken by the City Council in 1510–11 that agreed ‘that from hensforth ther shall be no riot kept in any parysh by the young man of the same parish called Robyn hode’.73

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The fear that the ‘gathering’ activities might get out of hand is reflected in the account of such an event in Staffordshire that has come down through a Star Chamber case for the year 1498. J.A.B. Somerset describes the events: According to the complaint (mb. 1), fears of a breach of the peace had led JPs at Walsall to order that inhabitants of Walsall, Wednesbury, and other towns should not attend a fair to be held at Willenhall on Trinity Sunday. However, a man named William Hampton from Hampton (near Wolverhampton), who called himself the Abbot of Marham, came to the fair with about eighty armed attendants.As well, one Roger Marchall of Wednesbury, calling himself Robin Hood, attended with a hundred followers in harness. The complaint clearly implies a threatened riot or insurrection. However, in his response to the bill of complaint Roger Marchall contended that his activity as Robin Hood was an ancient custom and he describes it briefly: ‘hit hath byn of olde tymes vsed and accustomed on the seide fere day that byth the Inhabitantes of the sede Town of Hampton Weddesbury and Walsall haue comyn to the seide ffere with ther capitanus called the Abbot of Marham or Robyn Hodys to the intent to gether money with ther disportes to the profight of the chirches of the seide lordeshipes [. . .]’ (mb 2)74 Over one hundred years later, in 1607, articles were preferred against the churchwardens of Yeovil as a result of a gathering. Thomas Marshe and Roger Traske were cited, among other things, because they with other paryshioners went to gather the liberality of the Inhabitantes, ther came a traveller ridinge in the street. Roger Traske on of the wardinges with twoo other met him and stayed his horse & told him that they must havemony of him befor he passed. Another witness testified that Traske had pursued a reluctant member of the parish into a house where he had gone to escape being accosted. On this occasion considerable ale seems to have been drunk.75 Both these cases speak to the custom of accosting neighbours (and even strangers) and demanding money for the support of the parish. The parish ‘gatherers’ it seems were costumed for the occasion as the thief of legend who robbed the rich to give to the poor. But the Yeovil case also raises the issue of the context within which the gathering took place. A church ale was a parish festival but it also had the potential to become a drunken assembly. It was this propensity that concerned many of the puritan opponents of the events. A prosecution from West Zoyland, Somerset, in the same year as the Yeovil case gives us a variant on the ‘gathering’ that involved the incumbent of the parish. The action was brought by John Cornish, carpenter, against Robert Wolfall, the minister, whose son, William, had been elected Robin Hood. The custom in this parish was to put the worthies of the parish in the stocks. The only way to be released was to drink two ‘pottes of Stronge Alle’ having presumably bought

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the ale from the parish. Robert Wolfall is accused of being the ‘Chiefe Actor of that Comedye’. He is also cited for interrupting morning prayer and willing ‘his parishioners to departe, and followe Robin hoode, accordinge to their ancient Custome, to the Alle, and to breakfast with him’. He gave them an hour to enjoy the ale and then brought them back to the church ‘and begann the service at the tenn Comandementes’.76 Finally, the figure of Robin Hood appeared in the great Wells Show of 1607– 08.77 Here the figure comes full circle and is seen again within the context of a larger festive event. From the description of the event we learn ‘Nowe first the Lorde of May came in with all his men attending him with true love knottes most fynely knitte’ followed by dancing maidens, warlike captains, the pinner of Wakefield, and then Robin Hood ‘with all his gallantes rayed in greene’. Following the Robin Hood troupe came such figures as St George and then a giant and giantess. Robin Hood is here clearly again distinguished from the lord of the May but also clearly, as he had been in the London May Game of 1559, he is just one traditional figure in a long civic riding. Evidence for Robin Hood, like evidence for much customary activity begins to disappear through the 1590s and is all but gone by the first decade of the seventeenth century. But he was not forgotten. After King James had issued his ‘Book of Sports’ in 1618, there was a conscious return to the old ways.78 The latest evidence for a summer king comes from Burford in conservative Oxfordshire in 1630,79 while the one record of a late Jacobean Robin Hood comes from that royalist stronghold, Woodstock, near Oxford, as they record money gathered by Robin Hood and Little John in 1628.80 These Oxfordshire revivals seem deliberate, almost antiquarian, espousals of ancient customs, perhaps to hold at bay the encroaching sense of impending disaster. Similar nostalgia for what was perceived to have been an ordered and harmonious past can be seen in the poetry of such men as Robert Herrick. By the time he was writing his celebration of the country life to Endymion Porter, little of the pastoral world he conjures up remained.81 Indeed, it had largely never existed. Like all idealized worlds, his fecund countryside whose life was marked by the succession of customary ceremony had been, in reality, less idyllic than he had imagined and more focussed on getting and spending. In particular, the figure of Robin Hood in his various manifestations emerges from the records as the chief fundraiser for the parishes of the Thames Valley and the west of England.

Notes 1 Piers Plowman, the B Version, ed. by George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson (London: Athlone Press, 1975), Passus V, l. 395. 2 The Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. by Norman Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 461. 3 Cited in Joseph Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, new edition much enlarged and corrected by J. Charles Cox (London: Methuen, 1903; reprinted Detroit: Singer, 1968), p. 278. 4 Strutt, pp. 279–80.

176 Other records 5 William Turner, The Rescuynge of the Romische Fox, STC 24355, G ij. 6 Sermons by Hugh Latimer, ed. by George E. Corrie (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1844), p. 208. 7 Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation, ed. by W.H. Frere and W.M. Kennedy (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), vol. 2, p. 88. 8 Alexandra F. Johnston and Sally-Beth MacLean, ‘Reformation and Resistance in Thames/Severn Parishes: The Dramatic Witness,’ in The Parish in English Life 1400– 1600, ed. by Katherine L. French, Gary G. Gibbs and Beat A. Kümin. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 178–200. This article as well as the present one are part of a long term project we have undertaken to write the history of provincial mimetic activity. I am grateful for the continuing support of my work by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 9 Johnston and MacLean, ‘Reformation and Resistance,’ pp. 188–89. 10 Philips van Marnix, The beehive of the Romish Church, trans. by George Gilpin (London, 1636), STC 17445. 11 Martin Marprelate, Hay Worke for Cooper (Coventry, 1589), STC 17456, pp. 3–4. 12 Martin Marprelate, The iust censure and reproofe of Martin Iunior (Wolston, 1589), C2v, STC 17458. This was in all probability during a performance of a ‘Robin Hood and the Potter’ sequence. 13 Collections II, ed. by W.W. Greg (London: Malone Society, 1908), pp.125–32; David Wiles, The Early Plays of Robin Hood (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1981), pp. 72–76; Mary Blackstone, ed., Robin Hood and the Friar, ed. by Mary A. Blackstone, PLS Acting Texts, (Toronto: PLS, 1981). This play was produced during the 1980’s and proved the most popular play PLS ever mounted with over 100 performances. See ‘Robin Hood and the Friar’, a twenty-three minute video directed by David Parry, University of Toronto Media Centre, 1983. Greg argues convincingly that this fragment (dated c1475) was in the Paston papers and represents the event referred to by John Paston in 1473. Collections II, pp. 117–24, 132–36; Wiles, pp. 34–35, 71, 76–79. 14 The remainder of this paper is largely based on both the published and unpublished work of colleagues in the Records of Early English Drama project. I am particularly grateful to Marianne Briscoe for her early work in Oxfordshire, the late Alice Hamilton for her research in Leicestershire, and to C.E. McGee and Rosalind Hays (Dorset), Evelyn Newlyn and Sally Joyce (Cornwall), Sally-Beth MacLean (Surrey), and Mary Erler (Middlesex) for access to their forthcoming collections in the REED series. I have also been able to read the records of East Kent gathered by James Gibson and the full accounts of Bassingbourn, Cambridgeshire, edited by Anne Brannen that contain no evidence of Robin Hood. I am myself in the process of completing an edition of the records of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire. I have consulted with Barbara Palmer (West Yorkshire), A. David Mills (Cheshire) and J.A.B.Somerset (Staffordshire and Warwickshire) concerning the appearance of references to Robin Hood in their REED research in progress. I have not had access to the few accounts that survive from Wiltshire, East Yorkshire, and County Durham.With these exceptions, the survey of pre1642 churchwardens’ accounts is virtually complete. 15 Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 33. 16 Wiles, see note 13. 17 Wiles cites the Records of Buckinghamshire, 7 (1897), pp. 7, 44. 18 Wiles, p. 7. 19 Buckinghamshire RO, PR 4/5/1, p. 1. The source Records of Buckinghamshire was unfortunately also used by Hutton and another error made by the transcriber is now enshrined in Hutton’s appendix (p. 265). The transcriber misread ‘xxxj yere of the Rayne of kyng harre the viij’ (1539–40) as the ‘xxj yere [. . .]’ (1529–30). The record is in the first year’s accounts from St Mary’s, Amersham, which begin in 1539–40.The event being recorded happened at the summer festival in 1540, not in 1530. Hutton includes the earlier date and cites the same source.

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20 E.K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903), vol. i, pp. 336–71. 21 H.C. Maxwell Lyte, A History of Eton College (London: MacMillan, 1911), p.153. 22 John Coldewey, ‘Early Essex Drama’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Colorado, 1973), p. 237. Collections XI, ed. by John Wasson (London,The Malone Society, 1980/1), pp. 8, 81. 23 Ibid., p. 93. 24 James Gibson, ‘Interludum Passionis Domini: Parish Drama in Medieval New Romney,’ in English Parish Drama, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Wim Hüsken, Ludus 1 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), pp. 137–48. Anne Brannen, ‘The Bassingbourn St George Play: A Contextual Study’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1992). 25 Collections VII, ed. by Giles Dawson (London: The Malone Society, 1965), p. 133; Ian Lancashire, Dramatic Records and Texts of Britain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), p. 1296. 26 Shropshire, ed. by J.A.B. Somerset, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 176, 178, 191, 200–01, 203, 404, 658–59. 27 Ibid., pp. 404, 658. 28 Borthwick Institute for Archives, Archdiocese of York Ecclesiastical Court Cause Papers CP.F. 246, sheets 1–2. 29 York, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 358. 30 Sally-Beth MacLean, ‘King Games and Robin Hood: Play and Profit at Kingston upon Thames,’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama xxix (1986–87), pp. 85–93. 31 Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583, facsimile reproduction New York: Da Capo Press, 1972). 32 Oxford, Oxfordshire Archives, MS DD Henley A V/3, fol. 6v. 33 St Ives’ Guild Hall, Record Book 1. Dorset/Cornwall, ed. by Rosalind C. Hays, C.E. McGee, Sally L. Joyce, and Evelyn S. Newlyn, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 513–19. 34 Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire Record Office, PR 234/5/1, Wing Churchwardens’ Accounts, fol. 174v. 35 London, British Library MS Add. 6223, fol. 13, cited by Peter Greenfield in ‘Parish Drama in Four Counties Bordering the Thames Watershed,’ in Johnston and Hüsken, English Parish Drama, pp. 107–36. 36 Leicester, Leicestershire RO, Melton Mowbray Townwardens’ Accounts, DG 36/285–7; 284/4, 284/6–7, 284/10–11. 37 Leicestershire RO, Melton Mowbray Churchwardens’ Accounts, DG 36/140/1, C3. 38 The Diary of Henry Machyn, ed. by John G. Nichols, Camden Society 48, (London: 1848), p. 201. 39 I have treated this subject more generally in ‘Summer Festivals in the Thames Valley Counties’ in Custom, Culture and Community in the later Middle Ages, ed. by Thomas Pettitt and Leif Søndergaard (Odense: Odense University Press, 1994), pp. 37–56. 40 Middlesex: Brentford Library MS 175112/1, St Laurence, New Brentford Chapelwardens’ Accounts, ‘Part I’, p. 19. To appear in the REED series in the Middlesex collection edited by Mary Erler. Surrey: Woking, Surrey Record Office, Kingston Churchwardens’ Accounts, KG 2/2/1; London, British Library MS Add. 6167, fols 239–241. Antiquarian Symmes’ extracts from Guildford Churchwardens’ Accounts; Guildford Muniment Room, Shere Churchwardens’ Accounts. These will appear in the REED series in the Surrey collection edited by Sally-Beth MacLean. Buckinghamshire: Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire Record Office, Wing Churchwardens’ Accounts, PR 140/5/1. Oxfordshire: Oxfordshire Archives, St Mary Magdalene’s Oxford Churchwardens’ Accounts, MSS DD Par., Oxford, St Mary Magdalen c.64, d.8; Henley Churchwardens’/Town Accounts, MSS DD Henley A V/1–4, 22, 30; CI/1, 214, 7, 36/1, 4; A XII/11/173–4, 183; Thame Churchwardens’ Accounts, MS DD Par. Thame b.2; Burford Churchwardens’ Accounts,

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41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63 64

MS DD Par. Burford e.36; Woodstock Churchwardens’ Accounts, MS DD Par. Woodstock c.12. A.J. Ward, ‘Extracts from the Church-wardens Accompts of the Parish of St Helen’s in Abingdon, Berkshire’, Archaeologia, i (1770), pp. 11–23. See p. 156 for a reproduction of the Betley window; Woking, Surrey Record Office, Kingston. Churchwardens’ Accounts, KG 2/2/1, p. 84. Reading, Berkshire Record Office, St Mary’s, Reading Churchwardens’ Accounts, D/P 98 5/1, p. 41. The Marion appears in the accounts of Kingston in Surrey, St. Laurence Reading, and Bray in Berkshire, and possibly Henley in Oxfordshire; the friar/fool/vice figure appears in Marlowe in Buckinghamshire, Kingston in Surrey, St Giles’ Reading, Bray, Wantage, and Thatcham in Berkshire, and Thame and Henley in Oxfordshire. Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, iv. p. 64–66. Oxford, Oxfordshire Archives, Woodstock Churchwardens’ Accounts, MS DD Par. Woodstock c.12, for 1627–8, p. 17. Sally-Beth MacLean, ‘Hocktide: A Reassessment of a Popular Pre-Reformation Festival,’ in Festive Drama, ed. by Meg Twycross (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1996), pp. 233–41. Reading, Berkshire Record Office, St Laurence Reading Churchwardens’ Accounts, D/P 97 5/2, p. 349. Oxford, Oxfordshire Archives, Witney Churchwardens’ Accounts, MS DD Par. Witney d.1, fols 43 and 49v. Cumberland/ Westmorland/ Gloucestershire, ed. by Audrey Douglas and Peter Greenfield, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), pp. 257–58. Woking, Surrey Record Office, Kingston Churchwardens’ Accounts, KG2/2/2, p. 97. See above note 12. See above note 14. Woking, Surrey Record Office, Kingston Churchwardens’ Accounts, KG2/2/1, p. 74. Reading, Berkshire Record Office, Reading St Laurence Churchwardens’ Accounts, DP 97 5/2, p. 21. Herefordshire/ Worcestershire, ed. by David N. Klausner, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), pp. 462, 503, 507 and 513. REED: Shropshire, pp. 19 and 82–83. St Ives Borough Accounts, Guild Hall: Record Book 1, fol. 17v; REED: Dorset/ Cornwall, p. 517. Truro, Cornwall Record Office, St Breock’s Churchwardens’ Accounts, DDP.19/5/1, fol. 54v; REED: Dorset/Cornwall, p. 507. Until dissolution, the Benedictine Abbey was the overlord of the town of Reading and the abbot confirmed the master of the Guild Merchant as the chief burgess every year. Reading was incorporated in 1542. The ‘town’ accounts before 1542 are in fact the accounts of the Guild Merchant. The early accounts were destroyed by enemy action during the Second World War but they were transcribed for the Historical Manuscript Commission for the 11th Report (London: HMSO, 1888). For the accounts for 1382– 86 see ‘The Manuscripts of the Corporation of Reading’, ed. by W.D. Macray, 11th Report, Appendix 7, p. 172. Macray also supplies some readings now obliterated in Berkshire RO R/FCa 2/1–11 (1413–21) for 1413–14 and 1419–20. The evidence for 1423–24 is found in R/FCa 2/12–32. Dawson, Collections VII, p. 148. Ibid., p. 171. James D. Stokes, ‘Robin Hood and the Churchwardens in Yeovil,’ in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England III, ed. by Leeds Barroll (New York: AMS, 1986), p. 7. Ibid., p. 5.

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65 Devon, ed. by John Wasson, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1986), p. xxv. 66 Ibid., p. 284. 67 Dorchester, Dorset Record Office, Yondover Manor Presentments, D1/7623, fol. 17v; REED: Cornwall/Dorset, p. 230. 68 Dorchester, Dorset Record Office, Bridport Miscellaneous Accounts, BTB/ M18/11.2188, fol. 1; REED: Dorset/Cornwall, p. 138. 69 Dorchester, Dorset Record Office, Poole Borough Archives, Record Book, PBA: 23, pp. 23–25; REED: Dorset/Cornwall, p. 238. 70 REED: Devon, pp. 54–56. 71 Ibid., p. 57. 72 Ibid., p. 89, 108, 118, 145. 73 Ibid., p.119. 74 REED: Shropshire, p. 658. 75 REED: Somerset, pp. 411–12. 76 Ibid., pp. 388–89. 77 REED: Somerset, p. 267. 78 See REED: Cumberland/ Westmorland/ Gloucestershire, pp. 365–68. 79 Oxford, Oxfordshire Archives, Burford Churchwardens’ Accounts, MS DD Par Burford e.36, fol. 15v. 80 Oxford, Oxfordshire Archives, MS DD Par Woodstock c.12, p. 17. 81 Robert Herrick, ‘The Country life, to the honoured M. End. Porter/ Groom of the Bed-chamber to His Maj.,’ in The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick, ed. by L.C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 229.

3

Suppression and change

3.1 The city as patron: York From: Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, Paul Whitfield White and Suzanne Westfall, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 150–75 It was once thought that the normal form of provincial early drama was the large biblical plays performed by cities all over the country, ‘thystories of the old & new testament’ as they are called in the York City Council Minute Books.1 The research of the last three decades has shown that there were very few such plays performed in a restricted number of cities almost exclusively in the north.2 A question that has been rarely asked in the past but that is increasingly relevant to drama studies is why these few towns and cities were dramatic patrons and why they continued to be so in the face of economic decline and political pressure from more senior levels of government. In only two English cities do the texts of the plays and the records concerning their production survive – Chester and York. David Mills has recently written about the relationship of Chester and its people to the Chester Plays.3 In this paper I will explore the complex relationship between the city council of York and what were, in the end, three major religious didactic plays and several ceremonial ridings that, one way or another, became their responsibility as the sixteenth century progressed. York was an important provincial city in the fourteenth century, the centre of a large and sprawling county with a hinterland whose business was attracted to the city by the annual dramatic event. It could be argued that the fundamental motivation for patronizing the play was purely commercial, since the crowds coming into the city to see them would also frequent the market stalls of the York craftsmen. But this reasoning becomes less compelling when one considers that York was served by three major fairs on Whitsun, the feast of SS Peter and Paul (29 June), and the archbishop’s fair at Lammas (1 August).4 The feast of Corpus Christi, the day on which York stubbornly performed its Biblical cycle even when the Chester authorities had moved theirs to Whitsun, is a moveable feast, falling on the second Thursday after Whitsun. Depending on the date of Easter, it could fall any time from 21 May to 24 June, but the most common date was in mid-June. The tradesmen of York were unlikely to make a major effort to replenish the stock sold less than two weeks before at the Whitsun Fair when they knew that there would be two more special opportunities for trade at the end of June and the end of July. They were, besides, otherwise occupied on Corpus Christi day since, even if they were not performing in the play, the ordinances of their crafts required that they walk with their pageant, and until

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the 1470s also carry torches in the Corpus Christi procession that was held on the same day.5 The only tradesmen likely to profit from the activities on Corpus Christi were the brewers and the victuallers who did have an unusual number of customers filling the streets of the city. Some scholars have tried to suggest that the crafts undertook the performance of the plays because it provided an opportunity for them to display their craft to the audience.6 Such an argument works for only a very few guilds such as the ‘Building of the Ark’ that was the responsibility of the Shipwrights and the pageant depicting the ark at sea that was the responsibility of the Fishers and Mariners. But the argument can be much more cogently made that these crafts were given those plays because they had easy access to the needed set pieces. Similarly, the Bakers could provide the bread for their episode of the ‘Last Supper’ and, less picturesquely, the Pinners the nails for the ‘Crucifixion’ and the Butchers the necessary blood for the ‘Death of Christ’.The only episode where there is any sense that the craft ascription is driving the text rather than the other way round is in the ‘First Trial before Pilate’ where much is made of the lavish bed where Pilate falls asleep before Christ is brought before him. That episode was produced by the Tapisters, who made expensive bed hangings. The arguments for the performance of the plays being based on commercial gain have been centred on the craft guilds who actually performed the pageants rather than on the civic government that produced the entire play. In a groundbreaking article, Heather Swanson challenged the romantic notion that the ‘mysteries’ or craft guilds of late medieval England represented the sturdy independence of the artisan class.7 Rather, she suggested that the guilds were the invention of the civic oligarchies as instruments to control commercial activity, and her major examples are drawn from York. Her final sentence, ‘The most oppressive aspect of the guilds lay in quite another direction, in the way its members were expected to subsidize civic pomp, not least in the form of the Corpus Christi pageants’, raised the whole question of the relationship between the civic government and the craft guilds in the production of civic drama.8 Some years later, R.B. Dobson took up Swanson’s point and proposed a radical new approach to the creation of the York Cycle.9 Basing his argument on the paucity of evidence for a guild structure of any kind in York before the Black Death in 1349, he dismissed the idea that the cycle as we know it could have evolved from the procession of Corpus Christi (itself only instituted in York in 1325) and posited what he called the ‘big bang’ theory of the origins of the York Cycle in which he suggested that the dramatic event with its extraordinary method of production was created by the civic elite at a time when they needed to assert their control over the commercial life of the city.10 He argued that by the appearance of the Ordo paginarum (or detailed play list) in 1415 the ‘mystery plays [. . .] have already become intensely regulated from above, a more or less deliberate exercise in social control upon the city by its governing elite’.11 But if this is so, there must have been either a pre-existing play text or a playwright who could be commissioned to take on the writing of the play. Many of us who have spent years studying the York Cycle as a literary artifact have

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struggled with the apparent contradiction between the fundamental unity of theology and imagery in the text and the idea that the plays had evolved over many years in the hands of small groups of artisans.12 The York Cycle is part of the widespread movement of religious didacticism whose aim was to stimulate what has been called ‘affective piety’, dwelling on the humanity and suffering of Christ to stimulate a closer relationship with him and so enhance faith. It has parallels in such non-dramatic writing as The mirrour of the blessyd lyf of Jesu Christ written by the Yorkshire Carthusian Nicholas Love and based on the seminal Franciscan text of Pseudo-Bonaventure, Meditationes Vitae Christi.There are also parallels in all forms of late medieval art including much of the medieval stained glass that still can be seen in the churches of York.The idea that the creation of the cycle of plays was a collaborative act between the civic oligarchy and playwrights inspired by the devotional movement all around them makes sense of all the known evidence. The precondition of civic control also explains the method of performance in procession through the city streets that has so bothered scholars in the past.13 The council held jurisdiction within the walls of the city and in the crowded streets there was no large open space where a play and its audience could be fitted. The processional mode moving from one small playing site to another throughout the city solved the problem and ensured civic control. An act of creation for this method of production explains why the text so perfectly reflects the method of production where the motif of travelling, of constant greetings and farewells are written into the text as the natural response to a performance that was constantly moving.14 It also allowed the playwrights to fashion the plays with a verbal complexity and intimacy unparalleled in early drama because members of the audience were always close enough to hear each word that was said. The York Cycle, then, can be seen as the creation of two complementary impulses for political control and religious education. It is this combination of motivation that should be seen behind the city’s own 1399 statement of the purpose of the plays that were to be played ‘en honour & reuerence nostreseignour Iesu Crist & hounour & profitt de mesme la Citee’ (‘in honour and reverence of our lord Jesus Christ and the honour and profit of the said City’).15 The sponsorship of the Corpus Christi play displayed both the power and the piety of the council. The records of the dramatic activity of the city of York begin in the late fourteenth century. Once the play was established, the mayor and the twelve aldermen (who were almost exclusively in this period members of the Mercers guild) acting as its producer, that coordinated the work of the individual crafts and sub-crafts in the presentation of the forty-eight episodes depicting salvation history. Each craft was responsible for its assigned episode collecting ‘pageant money’ from its members to buy material for props and costumes and rehearse, feed and pay the actors. The ‘hands on’ coordination of each episode was the responsibility of pageant masters elected by each craft. In the Mercers Guild (whose records survive in the greatest detail) pageant master was an entry-level position undertaken by the new and frequently younger members of the guild.

186 Suppression and change

However, it was the city council that was responsible for the overall event. In 1476, a system of auditions was implemented to ensure the quality of the production, [. . .] yerely in þe tyme of lentyn there shall be called afore the Maire for þe tyme beyng iiij of the moste Connyng descrete and able playeres within þis Citie to serche here and examen all þe plaiers and plaies [and] pagentes thrughoute all þe artificeres belonging to corpus christi Plaie And all suche as þay shall fynde sufficiant in personne and Connyng to þe honour of þe Citie and Worship of þe saide Craftes for to admitte and able and all oþer insufficiant personnes either in Connyng voice or personne to discharge ammove and avoide.16 It was also the council that decided whether or not the play should be performed and when it would be performed. For example, in 1426, Friar William Melton, a charismatic preacher, urged that the play be moved to the Friday after the feast so that the feast could be better celebrated. This idea was apparently enthusiastically endorsed by the larger body of the Commons, but the council paid no attention and the play continued to be played on the feast day.17 The council was also the body that decided on the occasional substitution of one of the confraternity plays – the Creed Play or the Pater Noster Play – for the Corpus Christ play or cancelling the event entirely because of plague or civil disturbance. As patron and producer, the council derived income from two sources. They designated the normally twelve stations or playing places along the traditional route and then rented them to citizens of the town who in their turn made them available to the public. They also collected fines from guilds that failed to live up to the standard of performance set out in the city ordinances concerning the play. For example, in 1554 the Girdlers did not have their play ready in time ‘but taried an wholle hower & more in hyndrans & stoppyng of the rest of the pageantz folowyng and to the disorderyng of the same’ and were fined for their action.18 One further play-related income for the city came from the rental of space adjacent to Micklegate Bar to some of the guilds for the storage of the pageant wagons and gear of nine or ten of the forty-eight pageant wagons. On the other side of the ledger, Corpus Christi expenses for the council consisted of a regular subsidy to the Innholders for the support of the pageant of the ‘Assumption of the Virgin’ and the often sizable ‘mess bill’ incurred on the feast day itself in eating and drinking both for the council assembled at the Common Hall station and also for their wives who, from the early sixteenth century, held their own separate party at the last station on the Pavement. It seems clear from the York evidence that once the play was established, the texts of each episode remained in the hands of the crafts.The ‘register’ copy, the manuscript that has survived as London, British Library MS Add. 35290, was compiled some time in the third quarter of the fifteenth century when some form of processional performance had existed in York for close to a century.

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The most recent editor of the York text, Richard Beadle, believes it was compiled from the existing guild copies handed in to be compiled for an official copy.19 Unfortunately, there is a lacuna in the records for this period so we have no direct evidence from the time of the original compilation. However, several pageants were not registered at that time and we do have the evidence from the 1560s of the council calling upon the delinquent crafts to submit their texts for registering. But this is not to say that the council was not concerned about the content of the play. A regular feature of the sixteenth-century performances was the presence of the city clerk or his deputy with the playbook at the first station at the gates of Holy Trinity Priory, Micklegate, monitoring the performance and occasionally making notes in the margin indicating new material or new stage business. From very early in the history of the play, however, we can see the council taking a keen interest in its revisions of the play. In about 1415, two master lists of the pageants were compiled by the then town clerk, Roger Burton, and entered into the official Memorandum Book of the city. The first list, the Ordo paginarum, describes the pageants as they then existed.20 The second list seems to be a list of crafts and an extraordinary proliferation of sub-crafts and the episodes for which they were responsible.21 These master lists were used as running tallies of what craft or sub-craft was responsible for each play, or part of a play. The so-called ‘Ordo gathering’ has survived in a severely damaged condition but it is still possible to see the changes not only of craft ascription but also, from time to time, of play content. The episodes described in the Ordo correspond in broad outline, but not in detail, to the play text as it has come down to us. There is evidence to indicate, however, that about 1422 during the mayoralty of Henry Preston, a major revision took place.22 A detailed description of the wagon, props and costumes for the Mercers’ Judgement play dated 1433 provides interesting evidence for the revisions.23 The details of character that can be deduced from the costume evidence in both descriptions of the pageant indicate that it would have been impossible to perform the play as described in the Ordo with the 1433 set and costumes, but perfectly possible to perform the text in BL MS Add. 35290 with the 1433 set and costumes. The revision to ‘Judgement’, then, was made between 1415 and 1433. Another, more significant change was made in the Passion sequence in the early fifteenth century. Thirteen crafts were responsible for the episodes beginning with the ‘Betrayal’ and ending with the division of Christ’s garments.These were divided into eleven episodes in the Ordo but appear in only eight in the play text. One pageant, the ‘Condemnation of Christ’, brought together parts of four earlier pageants into a new mix. Ten years after the event, the crafts were still at odds about the financial support of the new pageant. In an agreement entered into the Memorandum Book in 1432 laying down the rules, it is clear that the city had ultimate authority over the recalcitrant crafts that apparently objected to the new order of things represented by the new text. The York Cycle was brought into being and revised by a city at the height of its power. When Richard II created the city a county in its own right in 1396

188 Suppression and change

amidst much civic pomp and pageantry, the population of the city has been estimated at 15,000.24 It was the second city in the kingdom, the seat of an archbishopric, a great Benedictine abbey (St Mary’s), the largest hospital outside London (St Leonard’s) and major houses of all four orders of friars. One of these, the Augustinian friary next to the Common Hall, housed a remarkable library that challenged a similar great collection in St Mary’s.25 York was a wool-manufacturing town and its guild of Mercers – the powerful civic oligarchs – were trading vigorously across the ‘middle sea’.26 But by 1548, the population had fallen to ‘roughly 8,000’ and the city had sunk to sixth among the provincial towns.27 What emerges from David Palliser’s careful analysis of the reasons for the decline is the picture of a city that had lost its economic base in the wool trade to the West Riding, its port to Hull, and a large part of the ‘market’ that fuelled the service trades – the religious houses – at Dissolution in 1538. Only with the upturn in the economy after 1560, the return of political stability to the north after the rising of the northern earls in 1569 and the reestablishment of York as an administrative centre with the Elizabethan Council of the North and its Ecclesiastical Commission did York regain its position as a major urban centre. The period we are considering, therefore, is a period of poverty and decline, and yet it is through this period that we can trace the active interest taken by the city council in the production of the plays. Although the annual station rent fell from over six pounds in 1454 to a mere pound in 1506, rising to a slightly higher 24s 10d by 1542, the council often took creative steps to ensure that faltering crafts were helped to continue to take their part in the play.28 In 1535, the Corpus Christi play was not performed. That year the Creed Play, sponsored by the Corpus Christi Guild, was played and the city council decided to use all the money that the crafts would normally collect for their pageants to pay the legal expenses of a York man in London.29 We have, therefore, a record of a levy the council collected from all the crafts that were preparing to present their pageants in the Corpus Christi play that year.30 Thirty-two of the possible forty-eight pageants seem to have been ready to go. Fifty years later, in 1585, the city underwrote the second production of a midsummer show to be produced by Thomas Grafton (see below) choosing to pay for it by levying the crafts for sums roughly equivalent to the pageant assessment. The order of the list of crafts and their contributions that Grafton submitted with his own bill reflects the order of the episodes sponsored by the crafts in the Ordo list. It is therefore possible to compare the two lists to assess which crafts were in continuing difficulty. The crafts and pageants that appear in neither the 1535 list nor the 1585 list are Shipwrights (Building of the Ark), Chandlers (Shepherds), Masons (Purification), Ironmongers (Simon the Leper), Shearmen (Road to Calvary), Winedrawers (Appearance to Mary Magdalen), and Scriveners (Thomas of India). Of these, there is no information about the Shipwrights and the Winedrawers although both those episodes could have been easily incorporated into contiguous pageants. In 1517 the city had ordered the common carters to pay towards

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the support of the Shearmen’s pageant because ‘yei were of litill substance & was not able to bring furth yer pageant’.31 There is no other evidence about this arrangement and we can only conclude that it was not sufficient to save the pageant of a craft completely dependent on the manufacture rather than the sale of wool. Shearmen literally sheared the newly woven cloth to remove the nap.32 However, there is evidence that the council had some success facilitating the performance of the other four in the last years of the life of the plays. During the reign of Edward VI and after the accession of Elizabeth when the plays on the death and assumption of the Virgin Mary were suspended, the mayor and council ordered that the pageant money should be collected as normal by the crafts which had been responsible for the three episodes.The money was to be turned over to the mayor ‘to be further ordred by hym towardes setting forth of pageantz on Corpus christi day [. . .] wher he shall see most nede /’.33 In 1563, it was ordered that the pageant money of the Innholders that had gone towards the pageant of the ‘Coronation of the Virgin’ (which they shared with the mayor) should go to the Chandlers for their Shepherd pageant. The order was repeated in 1569 in a document in which the chandlers are described as ‘moch decayed’.34 Here we see the mayor and council directing normal pageant income in a way that would shore up one of the few pageants in recurring financial trouble. A different tack was taken by the mayor and council with the Labourers who were associated with the Masons in the play of the ‘Purification of the Virgin’. The Labourers had no guild structure through which to elect pageant masters and so the city oversaw the election of four masters, one for each ward for the Labourers’ pageant. The results of the election appear in the Chamberlains’ account book seven times between 1523 and 1559.35 The pageant was entered into the register in 1567.36 By 1554, the Scriveners’ Guild, hit hard by the dissolution of the religious houses, had dwindled to a single member, John Meltonby, and the council ordered half the fine (5s) paid by the Girdlers for not having their pageant ready in time should be paid to Meltonby to help him bring out ‘Thomas of India’. In an effort to rectify the problem, on 1 June of the same year, the council ordered that all who had been franchised by the name of Cornmerchant should pay for the support of this pageant.37 Since it is not mentioned again in the records, it is possible that the pageant continued to be presented with the help of the Cornmerchants. The story of the Ironmongers pageant is less happy. During the 1560’s the council turned its attention to that ailing pageant. This is one that was not registered in the late fifteenth century and in 1567 along with the Labourers’ pageant, it was ordered to be surrendered for copying.This never happened and the play is irretrievably lost. The pageant had been recently played, however. In 1562, the mayor and council ordered a merchant named John Granger to undertake to produce the Ironmongers’ pageant and further ordered that all the regular contributors should pay their share of the pageant money.38 Eight years later, in 1568, the council was continuing to worry about this pageant.

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General support does not seem to have been forthcoming. In March, the council challenged the Girdlers about their practice of selling ironware without contributing to the pageant.39 On 26 September, the council worked out a way of coming to the rescue of one Leonard Temple who had performed the pageant for two years as well as repairing it to the total amount of 43s.40 Ironically, after all its trouble to keep this pageant viable, there would be only one more production of the Corpus Christi play. By the mid 1560s the council was itself deeply divided over religion and the performance of this survival of the Catholic past, along with the other two religious plays of York, the Pater Noster Play and the Creed Play, became one of the points of conflict between the Council of the North and the city and among the aldermen themselves. Civic patronage of community drama was about to fall victim to the religious tensions of the early years of Elizabeth’s reign. The stories of the two other religious plays of York, the Pater Noster Play and the Creed Play, demonstrate the power and importance of religious confraternities in the city.41 Although the Pater Noster Play may have had some morality play features, it seems likely that it was based on the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. In their response to Richard II’s survey of guilds in 1388, the Pater Noster Guild stated its major purpose to be the custodian of the play for the ‘health and reformation of the souls, both of those in charge of the play and those hearing it’.42 The document also states that, like the Corpus Christi play, this play was performed ‘through the principal streets of the city of York’. Although nothing is here stated, clearly the city council had to be party to the production of this play as it was to every other processional event since, as we have seen, the council had jurisdiction over the streets of the city. From the inception of its play, therefore, the Pater Noster Guild was dependant on the patronage of the city for their play to be performed. In 1446, the Pater Noster Guild merged with the St Anthony’s Guild and the name Pater Noster Guild disappears.43 The playbooks remained in the possession of the guild chaplain, William Downham, who left them to William Ball, master of the Guild of St Anthony in 1465.44 In 1495, the city fined the master and brethren of the Guild for not bringing forth the Pater Noster Play ‘acordyng to ye wurship of yis Citie’ and ordered the guild to be prepared to perform it the next year.45 It is possible that the play was performed every ten years between 1496 and 1536 since that year the council agreed on 19 April that Pater Noster should be played ‘by Course’ that year on August 1 (Lammas Day). Preparations must have seemed inadequate to the council because on 19 June the play was postponed until the ‘Sonday next after Lames day’.46 By this time, the city clearly felt a proprietary interest in this play. This sense of ownership was to be solidified when, eleven years later, the council managed, despite its protestation that the city was ‘in gret decaye’, to acquire the property of the St Anthony’s Guild after the dissolution of the guild.47 With the property came the playbooks. The city had now acquired its second major religious play. The third play, the Creed Play, probably written by William Revetour, chaplain of the Guild of Corpus Christi and deputy town clerk in the early fifteenth

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century was based on the twelve articles of the Apostles Creed and performed, like the Pater Noster Play, episodically along the same pageant route as the civic play and using some of the pageant wagons of the crafts.48 The play was left to the Corpus Christi Guild by Revetour in 1446 along with the ‘libris & vexillis eidem pertinentibus’.49 A faded memo on the dorse of an account roll of the Guild for 1449–51 tells us a good deal more about the play. Revetour placed a condition on his gift of the play and its properties that it should be performed every twelve years at least.50 This requirement was changed by Revetour’s executor John Fox and his fellow chaplains of the Corpus Christi Guild in 1455. The play was to be performed ‘in various places of the said city of York’ every ten years and to be financed by the ‘inhabitants at these places’ or the holders of the stations along the processional route.51 It is highly probable that the prominent citizens whose houses were the various sites for dramatic performances in York were members of the Guild of Corpus Christi.52 Nevertheless, the city’s apparent support of such a highhanded assumption of payment underlines its involvement in the production of this play as well. Corroboration that this was an acceptable method of financing this play comes from the Chamberlains’ Accounts for 1525 when the city paid 4s (a sum equivalent to the highest station rent at this time) to the Master of the Corpus Christi Guild for the performance at the Common Hall station.53 This would by no means cover the cost of the whole production, so we must assume that payment was made to the Guild by the holders of the other stations. In 1483, Richard III visited the city for the first time as king to have his son created Prince of Wales in the Minster. Richard was himself a member of the Guild of Corpus Christi and on this occasion the city and the confraternity joined to honour the king with a special performance of the Creed Play on Sunday 7 September ‘a pon the cost of the most onest men of euery parish in thys Cite’. On 6 September it was agreed that for the honour of the city the mayor, aldermen and the council of the twenty-four would attend the king at the production.54 By 1495, the Creed Play had become more firmly entrenched within the circle of patronage of the city. That year, after the St Anthony’s Guild had defaulted with their production of the Pater Noster Play, the city council determined that the Creed Play should be played instead. It is at this time that the regular performance every ten years specified in 1455 seems to have been acted upon. However, the production was authorized only after the mayor had seen the ‘prima pagina’ on 1 May and agreed that the banns for the play could be called first on 8 June and then on 22 July for the performance 23 August.55 The Creed Play was performed regularly thereafter at ten year intervals in 1505, probably in 1515 (although no records survive for that year), 1525 and as a substitute for the Corpus Christi play in 1535. On 17 March 1545, in an act of political prudence, the mayor was instructed by the council to discuss with the master of the Corpus Christi Guild the ‘playng of the creyde play[e] as he shall thynke good for the mooste profett & aduantage of the sayd [cit] Citie/’.56 They apparently decided against producing the Creed Play that year since the Bakers’ accounts record the normal expenses for their Corpus Christi pageant that year.57

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With the Act of Dissolution in 1547, the Guild of Corpus Christi ceased to have any legal existence. In anticipation of this event, perhaps after the discussion between the mayor and the master, the play disappeared from among the possessions of the guild. The inventory drawn up in 1446 for the king’s commissioners makes no mention of the playbooks or the properties that appear in all earlier inventories.58 The guild itself maintained a vestige of its former existence since it had taken over the assets of the Hospital of St Thomas the Martyr without Micklegate Bar in 1478.The hospital eluded the seizure of its property by the crown by inviting the mayor and the aldermen to become members of the hospital. This they did on 28 April 1552 whereupon the master of the hospital resigned and the mayor, Richard White, was elected master and two aldermen became wardens.59 In this way, the real property of the guild passed to the city but so did the identity of the ancient confraternity itself. When the Corpus Christi procession was revived under Mary, the mayor, John North, walked in the procession ‘as Master of Corpuscrysty gyld’.60 Ten years later, James Simpson who had been sheriff of the city in 154761 brought to the hospital ‘the Auncient booke [of the] or Registre of the Crede play to be saffly kept emonges thevident as it was before’.62 In this way, the city of York acquired the third religious play anciently performed in the city. The complex manoeuvres of the York city council to preserve and encourage the performance of Catholic drama in the thirty years after Henry’s break from Rome are only one aspect of the prolonged struggle by the people of York and many others in the north against the advancement of the new religion. At first there seems to have been little concern in York about Henry’s break with Rome, but when the consequences of that break began to be felt with the suppression of such small religious houses in the city as St Clement’s and Holy Trinity (the site of the first station of the pageant route in Micklegate) by the summer of 1536 the city became restive.63 In October, two months after the 1536 production of the Pater Noster Play, the Pilgrimage of Grace began in the East Riding under Robert Aske, and the Commons of York were quick to support it. After a show of reluctance, the mayor, William Harrington, a man long associated with the Liberty of St Peter, and the aldermen agreed to admit the rebels within the walls.64 Although the Dean and Chapter were more actively supportive than the city council itself, nevertheless, the city was occupied by the rebels and a great council was held there with the support of several leading citizens including aldermen such as George Lawson who had been mayor in 1530.65 The monks were restored to Holy Trinity and managed to remain together for another two years but then, in David Palliser’s words, ‘Cromwell completed the process of monastic dissolutions. The six priories – St Andrew’s, Holy Trinity and the four orders of friars – surrendered in November and December 1538, while the two giants followed them a year later, St Mary’s Abbey on 29 November 1539 and St Leonard’s Hospital on 1 December.’66 Not only were the physical buildings part of the fabric of the city, the people who had inhabited them were part of the social and ceremonial fabric. The brethren of St Leonard’s had once been responsible for the pageant

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of the ‘Purification of the Virgin’. The Augustinian friary and St Leonard’s had rented a station for the Corpus Christi play together in 1454 and the abbot of St Mary’s frequently acted as arbiter in civic disputes.67 Palliser estimates that ninety monks, nuns and canons were turned into the world from York with pensions and some sixty friars without pensions. The dispersal of the religious and the physical destruction of the buildings ‘had a shattering impact on the city’.68 Yet, because of the implication of the city in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the actions of Cromwell and his commissioners were not openly opposed and when the king and Queen Katherine came in progress in 1541 they were greeted with fawning pleas for forgiveness and considerable pageantry.69 The mayor and council met the royal party at the boundaries of their jurisdiction in the wapentake of the Ainsty and fell as one to their knees while the Recorder, William Cankerd, delivered a speech of grovelling apology for their misguided action during the Pilgrimage of Grace saying, [. . .] we your humble Subiectes the Mayer Aldermen and commons of your grace ys City of yorke [. . .] for lack of syncere and poore knowlege of the verytie of godes worde and ignoraunt of our bounded duety to you our Souereign lord haue agaynst our naturall allegyance disobedyently and contrary your grace ys lawes for the common welth prouyded, greuously heynously and traitoryously offended your high invyncible and most Royall maiesty your imperyall crowne and dignitye in the most odyous offence of traterus rebellyon [. . .]70 Open defiance was now replaced with canny resistance as we have seen in the manouvering of the mayor and council over the even more socially disruptive dissolutions of the chantries and confraternities under Edward. Also during Edward’s reign thirteen parish churches were closed, but one way or another many of the medieval treasures in stained glass windows in the remaining parish churches survived the iconoclasts. Mary claimed her father’s throne 19 July 1553, too late for the festive season in that year. But the event was immediately hailed by the York city council. As soon as the news reached the northern capital, her accession was acclaimed on 21 July with ‘grette fyers, drynkyng wyne and aylle, prayssing God’.71 In sharp contrast to the Recorder’s address to Henry over a decade earlier, the corporation wrote to the queen thanking God for ‘so noble, godly and most rightfull a Quene’.72 The city had almost a year to plan for the seasonal ceremonies of 1554 once again sanctioned by the crown. On 9 February with the new council barely sworn into office, it was agreed ‘god willyng’ that the Corpus Christi play including the plays on the Virgin ‘late [. . .] left forth’ should be played.73 In contrast to this long-term planning, a note of panic appears in the minutes for 20 April when the council hastily put in place ‘at the Chambre costes’ the procession and mass of St George (with sermon) for 23 April that had been the responsibilty of the Guild of St Christopher and St George now dissolved. At the same meeting a procession on Whit Tuesday (15 May), perhaps associated

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with the Whitsun Fair, that had never before appeared in the civic records was ordered to proceed ‘accordyng to the old laudable custome at the charges of the Chambre’ and the liturgical procession ‘on the morne aftr Corpus christi day shalbe lykwise made with torches & oyer solemptnyties accordyngge to the old vsage at chardges of the Chambr’.74 Everything was to be done according to the ancient custom and the council agreed to pay for it all. The evidence from the financial records is spotty in this period but when the receipts and expenses for 1554 are compared to 1542 (the most recent year for which we have full accounts) the contrast is striking.75 In 1542 the income from the station rents was 24s 10d; in 1554 the income from the same source was 34s 8d. In 1542 the city allowed only 17s 8d for expenses while in 1554 the bill for the ceremonial season (including 28s 5d for the St George Riding) was £7 17s 9d – a truly extravagant amount for a city still struggling with economic depression.76 But the revival of the old customs was not without incident. It was this year that the Girdlers were fined for holding up the play.77 The authority of the mayor to shut down their shops was invoked to force three drapers to pay their pageant money for the support of their pageant and the torches surrounding the sacrament in the procession of Corpus Christi, and Nicholas Haxop, baker, was presented by the searchers of the Bakers for refusing to attend their pageant of the ‘Last Supper’ on Corpus Christi day and fined 40d, half of which, in accordance with the Bakers’ ordinances came to the chamber.78 These acts of individual defiance, possibly motivated by Protestant zeal, were to prove portents of things to come. A similar pattern of seasonal celebrations was repeated in 1555, 1556, and 1557. By 1558, however, the costs of such feastings had begun to take their toll. A long minute from the council meeting of 9 March 1558 cited the rising costs of food and drink and disallowed civic payment for the council banquets held on St George’s Day, Midsummer, and the ‘dynars and bankettes made to the ladyes’ on Palm Sunday, Whitsun, Corpus Christi, St Stephen, and Midsummer. The meal on the day of the election of the mayor was reduced to maynbread and beer or wine. However, the ‘players & suche as taketh peyns ouer procession &c. on saynt George day to be playd for their labour of the chambr costes’.79 A week later, the council agreed not to play the Corpus Christi play that year ‘the tyme instant beyng bothe trowblouse with warres and also contagiouse with sykenesse’.80 On 20 April, although it was decided to set St George aside for that year, it was agreed that the Pater Noster Play should be played ‘the Charges therof to be borne of the money to be gatheryd by the occupacions of this Citie of there pagyant money’.81 The play was performed and the feast at the Common Hall station was paid for by the chamber according to the ancient custom. However, by 15 July the craft donations to the production costs was still £4 short and the mayor was instructed to ‘goe ouer ageyne and ratebly gather of euery occupacion chardgeable to the same’. If the arrears were not made up the council was prepared to pass a ‘furthr ordre’.82 No further order appears so presumably the crafts did pay up. However, such reluctance may indicate that in the late 1550s the council was more enthusiastic about the ancient Catholic customs and plays than some of the crafts.

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With the accession of Elizabeth a more determined central administration initiated its long-range religious objectives early in the reign.83 But it took almost ten years before decisive action was taken in the north. Although Nicholas Heath, the Marian Archbishop of York and one of the strongest opponents of the 1559 Settlement was deprived and the province of York subject to a ‘general visitation of the northern clergy [. . .] to enforce the Acts and Supremacy and Uniformity, including a four-day session at York’ no overt changes took place in the relations between the church and the city.84 Heath’s successor, Thomas Young, served as archbishop from 1561 to 1568 and president of the newly re-established Council of the North from 1564–8.Young was not a fervent Protestant, and he was faced with a civic government in no way committed to the new religion. Young wrote to a friend in 1564 that only two of the thirteen members of the York city council were ‘favorers of religion’.85 The others were not yet newly reconverted Catholics or recusants, rather they were ‘Catholic survivalists’ for whom the new ways had little meaning and who clung tenaciously to the customs and beliefs of their childhoods. Nevertheless, they approached the new regime with caution. No performance of the Corpus Christi play was mounted until 1561 when on 27 March, it was agreed ‘that Corpus christi play shalbe played this yere with good players as hath ben accustomed Except onely the pagiantes of [thAssu] the dyenge Assumption and Coronacion of our Lady /’.86 Prudently returning to the form of the play performed under Edward, the council set out once again to sponsor a good performance of the traditional civic drama. Less prudently they proclaimed the play in ‘semely sadd apparell & not in skarlet’ because ‘the late fest of Corpus christi is not nowe celebrat & kept holy day as was accustomed’ and spent the enormous sum of £9 8d on their feast while watching the play.87 Realizing that they now had three possible choices for their civic productions, the council, on 13 March 1562 considered performing the Creed Play on St Barnabas’ Day (11 June, a saints’ day conveniently close to the traditional Corpus Christi date) but, on 6 April, agreed to produce ‘thystories of the old & new testament’ or the Corpus Christi play. No financial records survive from this year, nor do the accounts of the Bakers. There is, therefore, no corroborative evidence that the performance took place. In 1563 the situation is similar, but it does appear as if the play was performed from the wording of an agreement taken on 28 June, after a performance earlier in the month that 4s of the money received ‘of the Inholdars shalbe payd towardes charges of Chandelars pageant/’.88 There is also a minute indicating that the expenses for the mayor and council at the play are to be ‘husbanded this yer by discrecion of my Lord Mayour’.89 There is no mention of playmaking in the House Books for 1564. On 6 January 1565 a disaster befell the city that was to destroy any plans that the council may have had to continue their production of religious drama. A thaw followed a heavy snow storm and the subsequent flooding of the River Ouse carried away Ouse Bridge (and incidentally the ancient Council Chamber) effectively cutting the city in half. The first five of the traditional twelve stations for the plays were on the south side of the river and, perhaps more

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important, many of the pageant wagons (including the Mercer’s magnificent Judgement wagon) were stored on Toft Green near the first station just inside Micklegate Bar. Even if the council had been prepared to have the play performed at a truncated number of stations, many of the sets were simply not available short of dismantling them, ferrying them across the river and then finding somewhere else to store them after the production. The replacement for the bridge was not completed until the end of 1566, effectively prohibiting performances in 1565 and 1566. Although there is no evidence for performance in 1567, it is in that year, as we have seen, that the council called in the plays that have not yet been registered. Clearly, it had not given over its role of patron of civic drama. But a figure who was to be central to the suppression of Catholic drama in the north, Matthew Hutton, was about to take up his new post as dean of York Minster. Hutton had come up to Cambridge in 1546 and became a fellow of Trinity during Mary’s reign in 1555.90 Here he became a member the circle of Edmund Grindal, bishop of London (1559–70) becoming his chaplain in 1561. Amongst his other patrons at this time was Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, one of Elizabeth’s ‘godly’ courtiers and patron of one of the most active touring companies. During his early years at Cambridge, Hutton experienced Mary’s regime first hand. It left a strong impression on his Calvinist soul and, as Peter Lake has written, ‘It was the fragility of the protestant hold on the mass of the English people and the ever present threat of Rome that were to form the dominant concerns of Hutton’s career’.91 Hutton was to spend much of the rest of his career in the north serving himself as Archbishop of York from 1595–1606. He certainly took up the challenge that he found on his arrival enthusiastically pursuing his duties not only as Dean, but as secretary to the Council of the North and its Ecclesiastical Commission. The mayor in 1568, William Coupland, a wealthy tailor who would on his death the next year leave a considerable estate including alms for 1,600 poor of the city was among Archbishop Young’s ‘non favourers’ of religion. David Palliser refers to him as a ‘sturdy traditionalist’.92 Within ten days of his becoming mayor, the council agreed that the Creed Play should be performed instead of the Corpus Christi play at the costs of the ‘Craftes & occupacions of this Citie as are chardged with bryngyng forth of the pageantes of Corpus christi’.93 The Creed Play had not been performed since 1535. As we have seen, the mayor and the master of the Corpus Christi Guild in 1545 had considered it unwise to perform it in the last years of Henry’s reign. Of the three plays in the hands of the city in 1568, it was probably the most doctrinally sensitive, associated as it was with both a credal statement and the guild founded to celebrate the Real Presence in the eucharist. The plans did not go unchallenged. Within six weeks, word had not only reached Hutton but he had acquired a copy of the text from Coupland, read it, condemned it and sent Coupland and the council a firm response. The letter itself is bound into House Book 24 and is written on paper in the spidery Italianate hand of Hutton’s scribe. The Dean begins gracefully acknowledging the antiquity of the play but lamenting how

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it disagrees with the ‘senceritie of the gospell’. His advice is that the play should not be played, ffor thoughe it was plausible 40 yeares agoe, & wold now also of the ignorant sort be well liked: yet now in this happie time of the gospell, I know the learned will mislike it and how the state will beare with it I knowe not.94 After receiving the letter, the council agreed on 30 March to abandon their plans. On 27 April, Coupland went to the council declaring ‘that dyverse commoners of this Citie were muche desyerous to haue Corpuscrysty play this yere’. But the council would not agree to such a performance unless ‘the book thereof shuld be perused / and otherwaise amendyd / before it were playd’.95 No performance was mounted that year and the first hint of conflict over play production had appeared within the council itself. In 1569, the Corpus Christi play was performed for the last time under the watchful eye of the mayor William Beckwith who would be one of the aldermen censured for their refusal to watch the Pater Noster Play three years later. The production was not without trouble. Fourteen stations outside the houses of specific people were decreed on 26 May but with the unusual proviso ‘that if the sayd persones will not pay for the sayd places as the lord mayour & Chambrelaynes shall thynk requisite than furthre ordre yerin to be taken at discrecion of my lord mayour and Chambrelaynes &c.’Three must have refused to pay since the next day three other locations were named.96 That winter the northern earls rose in rebellion in favour of the old religion. Refusing to repeat the error their predecessors had committed at the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace, and perhaps influenced by the Protestant sympathies of the mayor, the York council firmly backed the crown and the leader of Elizabeth’ forces in the north, the earl of Sussex.97 The suppression of the rising was to mark the turning point in the religious climate in York. There is no mention of playmaking in 1570 or 1571. It is perhaps significant that in 1570 the see, which had been vacant since Archbishop Young’s death on 26 June 1568, was filled, partly at Hutton’s urging, by his patron Edmund Grindal. Grindal came to the northern province with a clearly Protestant agenda and it was inevitable that the civic patronage of Catholic drama would not long survive his arrival. In 1572, William Allen, mercer, became mayor. Allen, described by Palliser as ‘the most firmly Catholic alderman’, persuaded the council to authorize the production of the Pater Noster Play, not played since 1558.98 Allen himself seems to have ‘pervsed’ it and declared it fit for playing. The production was to take place on Corpus Christi Day (5 June) and to be financed by the pageant money of the crafts and that the members of those crafts (such as the Bakers) whose pageants were actually to be part of the play were to walk with their pageants to ‘see good ordre kepte’. The traditional stations were named and by 2 June they all seem to have been paid for except the one outside the door of the house of Christopher Harbert for which 3s 4d is noted as outstanding.99

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Christopher Harbert had come to York from Monmouthshire in 1550 and was, with Allen, a member of the Mercer’s Guild dealing in ‘oil, soap, pots wool, wood, bedding, haberdashery and grocery.’100 His imposing house near the Pavement still stands and its general location had been traditionally the site of the last station for all civic productions. He was a firm ally of Hutton and Grindal. Allen seems to have delighted in baiting his rival by insisting that he pay for a station outside his door. On the day of the performance, Harbert and the older William Beckwith refused ‘to assocyate and assist his Lordship at the tyme of playeng of the Pater noster play’ and were arrested and ‘commanded to warde / there to abide duryng may Lord Mayour pleasure’. The next day they were released from prison but declared ‘vtterly disfranchised, and no more to occupie as ffree men of this Citie/’.101 Harbert appealed to the newly appointed Lord President of the North, Henry Hastings, earl of Huntingdon acknowledging on 23 June, as part of his submission to the council, that he had sued Allen ‘before the Lord President and Counsell in theis North parties’.102 After paying a fine of 40s, Harbert was admitted back into the freedom of the city and restored to his rank as alderman. Beckwith, however, would not submit as easily and waited for the last month of Allen’s term of office (January 1573) before he too admitted his part in the suit, paid his fine and was readmitted.103 The next month Christopher Harbert was elected mayor. Harbert’s election as mayor could have been foreseen. A week after he had ‘humbly’ submitted himself to Allen and the council, Archbishop Grindal requested a copy of the Pater Noster Play. The council agreed that it should be sent. In November that year with Huntingdon’s arrival to take up residence in the city anticipated, the archbishop once again moved to put an end to an ancient custom. The feast of St Thomas the Apostle (21 December) the traditional day for the Riding of Yule and Yule’s Wife fell on the fourth Sunday of Advent in 1572. Using the sabbatarian excuse, Grindal banned the riding not only for that year ‘but also for all other yeres ensewyng’.104 Grindal and Hutton knew where the sympathies of the new president lay. It seems likely all three had had a hand in Harbert’s rapid submission to his rival Allen. It was clearly a calculated move to reinstate him as alderman so that he could be elected mayor the next year. On 3 February 1573, the day of Harbert’s election, the religious balance in York had decidedly shifted with lord president, archbishop, dean and mayor all of one mind. For the first time that year, as ‘survivalism was yielding to conformity and recusancy’, the council was required to submit regular returns of recusants and Harbert took the first official civic action on Sabbatarianism.105 But the records for these years do not indicate that the craft guilds were convinced that their playmaking days were over. Although no plays were performed, the Bakers repaired their pageant in 1573 and their pageant house in 1574.106 The Mercers continued to elect pageant masters and the first of the redrawn craft ordinances that were to proliferate in the next few years are recorded in the third Memorandum Book of the city (E 22) still referring to the playing of the pageants.107 On 17 June 1575 one Christopher Learmouth was paid 20s for ‘makyng iij play bookes’ belonging to St Anthony’s or the Pater

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Noster Play. This occasioned the realization that ‘certayne of the same bookes’ were in Grindal’s hands and the council agreed ‘that the same shalbe required to be restored agayne’. At the meeting of 8 July, a motion was passed instructing Allen, Alderman Maskewe and two other councillors to goe and requir of my Lord Archebishop his grace all suche ye playe books as perteyne this cittie now in his graces Custodie and yat his grace will appoynt twoe or thre sufficiently learned to correcte the same wherein by the lawe of this Realme they ar to be reformed./108 There was no response to this request. The last attempt by the council to perform the Corpus Christi play comes during the mayoralty of Robert Criplyng in 1579. On 8 April the council agreed that the Corpus Christi play should be played but that the book (presumably the register, BL MS Add. 35290) should be sent to the archbishop and the dean ‘to correcte’.109 The archbishop and the dean apparently took no action and there is no further mention of the play that year. Two days after their request, in response to an expressed desire from Huntingdon that the city establish a civic preacher, the council sent out an order to all the crafts that they should ‘assemble theym selfs togither forthwith and to aggree what evry company will gyve towards fyndyng of a preacher’.110 After a month’s discussion Criplyng signed a letter to Huntingdon saying that the city had sufficient preachers and the crafts were ‘not willyng to gyve any money towards the fyndyng of a preacher’.111 Whether or not the authorities refusal to allow the play and the city’s refusal to support a preacher had any connection, relations between Criplyng and the Council of the North went from bad to worse. He was a Catholic sympathizer with a recusant wife who ‘made no attempt to enforce the recusancy laws, openly criticized a sermon by the Minster Chancellor, and was said to have uttered ‘very unsemely and fowle woords’ against the clergy, which had encouraged like-minded people to post street bills with ‘filthie and lewde speeches’.112 By the end of his term, the Council had lost patience with him and took the unprecedented step of throwing him in jail and appointing the reliable Christopher Harbert mayor pro tem until the mayor elect, Robert Asquith, could take office.113 On the day of his election, [. . .] the Commons did earnestly request of the Mayour and other this worshipfull Assemblee that Corpus christi play might be played this yere, wherapon my Lord Mayour [and theis] answered that he and his brethren wold considre of their request/.114 Nothing more is heard of the performance of the civic religious plays of York.115 On 12 July that year it was agreed that the riding of the sheriffs that had accompanied the play and other ceremonial occasions should become an event in its own right, and the next year this event at Midsummer Eve became an occasion when the aldermen were expected to supply men in harness to

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accompany the sheriffs.116 The power and piety of the council once represented by the play was now represented by a military display and the civic preacher. The struggle had clearly been a doctrinal one. There is no rhetoric against playing as such in the York story. Although, as we have seen, the financial records are discontinuous in the later sixteenth century, travelling players do seem to have been welcomed in the city. In 1581 the council agreed to performances by the players of both the earl of Sussex and Lord Hunsdon in the first week of September and each minute concludes ‘and to haue such reward as other players haue heretofore had in tymes past/’.117 Since only three sets of financial records survive from the eighteen years between 1558 and 1576 while twenty survive for the remaining twenty-seven years of Elizabeth’s reign we must assume on the strength of minuted statements such as this that the players did in fact play in York on their northern tours. Even Matthew Hutton seems to have approved of players. A paper account book from the Minster Chamberlains’ ‘St Peter’s Part’ or petty cash account of the Dean and Chapter survives from 1572–1600, and records four payments to players during Hutton’s tenure as Dean.118 As the forces of reformation challenged the doctrine of the old plays, several English cities attempted to replace their traditional community religious drama with newly written community drama.119 York was no exception. In 1584, Thomas Grafton, a schoolmaster, asked permission to reintroduce drama into the summer festival by being granted license ‘to set forth certane compiled speaches and also to haue one pageant frame for that purpose’.120 The plan was agreed to and eight stations chosen, all on the north side of the river including ‘at Mr Alderman Beckwith doore’ suggesting that Beckwith’s objection to the Pater Noster Play twelve years earlier had indeed been doctrinal.121 The pageant seems to have had a martial theme since part of the total bill of £3 6s 8d was for the riding of the ‘Champions in their apte and requisite manner’.122 The next year Grafton seems to have proposed another more elaborate ‘Interlude’ which was approved, and the crafts were all assessed for the support of the event as they had been in the past for the Creed Play and the Pater Noster Play. Eight stations were again chosen but this time there was one in Micklegate, as well as at Beckwith’s door. Christopher Harbert was to entertain the ladies of the councillors at his house at the last station. This play involved considerable singing, the appearance of a crowned angel with spangles on his shirt and a crowned queen. It also involved several masked figures. Grafton’s bill provides us with a rare reference to the weather. Apparently it rained on the performance as he dolefully records, ‘Item, for 5 visards wee borrowed, and with the rayne were rotte in peeces [. . .]’.123 Perhaps the rain was taken as a portent since this is the last time pageants were attempted in conjunction with the Midsummer Show which became, as elsewhere in the country, an occasion for the mustering of the militia from the parishes and other martial displays. Travelling players continued to visit the city with the occasional reference to companies being paid not to play.124 On 22 September 1609 a group of citizens petitioned the council asking leave to build a playhouse where the companies could play. The council agreed but by 11 December they had withdrawn their

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support because they feared ‘some of manuell occupacions in this Cittie who do intend to give over ther occupacions and fall to [and] an idle Course of life’. The building had apparently been built but the council demanded that the supporters of the scheme ‘shalbe discharged for kepeinge of anie playehowse in this Cittie, as they will answere at their owne perell’.125 Nevertheless, there seemed to be a continuing tradition of professional players in York. An actor was paid 11s to recite an execrable poem to James I during his visit in 1617 seeking a dredging operation in the River Ouse, written by one ‘Mr Penven the Poet’.126 This is the last time a mimetic interlude was part of a royal visit but when the Cliffords of Skipton performed The Knight of the Burning Pestle in 1636 they sent to York for an actor named Adam Gerdler. The next year Gerdler was back with his brother or son Adam and the waits of York to be part of a performance of Comus.127 But the city was no longer the patron of such activity. To conceive and foster drama such as the city of York had sponsored for two hundred years demanded a commonality of purpose, both doctrinal and civic. When the common ground of doctrine was swept away by the reformers, the civic purpose alone could not sustain the plays. The solidarity of the ruling oligarchy was broken, and the plays became not symbols of civic unity and pride but rather of dispute within the council and among the citizens of York.The plays ended in York because the common will to continue them was no longer there. Civic pride and piety found other means of public expression that were safer and more acceptable to the increasingly diverse social and religious climate of late Elizabethan England.128

Notes 1 York, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, 2 vols, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 340. 2 See The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. by Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; Contexts for Early English Drama, ed. by Marianne Briscoe and John Coldewey (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989); The Theatre of Medieval Europe, ed. by Eckehard Simon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 3 David Mills, Recycling the Cycle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). 4 David Palliser, Tudor York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 181–2. 5 For a discussion of the relationship between the play and the procession see Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The Procession and Play of Corpus Christi in York after 1426’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 7 (1973–74), pp. 55–62. 6 See, for example, Alan D. Justice, ‘Trade Symbolism in the York Cycle’, Theatre Journal, 31 (1979), pp. 47–58. 7 Heather Swanson, ‘The Illusion of Economic Structure: Craft Guilds in Late Medieval English Towns’, Past and Present, 121 (Nov. 1988), pp. 29–48. 8 Ibid., 48. 9 R.B. Dobson, ‘Craft Guilds and City: The Historical Origins of the York Plays Reassessed,’ in The Stage as Mirror, ed. by Alan E. Knight (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1997), pp. 91–106. 10 REED:York, p. 1. 11 Ibid., p. 100.

202 Suppression and change 12 See Richard J. Collier, Poetry and Drama in the York Corpus Christi Play (Hamden CT: Archon, 1977); Clifford Davidson, From Creation to Doom (New York: AMS Press, 1984); Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The Word Made Flesh: Augustinian Elements in the York Cycle,’ in The Centre and Its Compass: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor John Leyerle, ed. by Robert Taylor and others, Studies in Medieval Culture 33 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), see below, pp. 249–62. 13 See, for example, Alan Nelson, ‘Principles of Processional Staging: “York Cycle”’, Modern Philology 67 (1970), pp. 303–20 later expanded in The Medieval English Stage, ed. by Alan Nelson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 303–20; Stanley J. Kahrl, Traditions of English Medieval Drama (London: Methuen, 1974); Martin Stevens, ‘The York Cycle: From Procession to Play’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 6 (1972), pp. 37–61. 14 Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The York Corpus Christi Play: A Dramatic Structure Based on Performance Practice,’ in The Theatre in the Middle Ages, ed. by Herman Braet, Johan Noive and Gilbert Tournoy (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1985), see below, pp. 301–9. 15 REED:York, p. 11. 16 Ibid., p. 109. 17 Ibid., pp. 43–4; Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The Procession and Play of Corpus Christi in York after 1426,’ Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 7 (1973–74), see above, pp. 43–48. 18 REED:York, p. 312. 19 The York Plays, ed. by Richard Beadle (London: Athlone Press, 1982), pp. 13–19. 20 REED:York, pp. 16–24. 21 Ibid., pp. 25–26. 22 Preston was mayor 1421–22. See Francis Drake, Eboracum (London, 1736), p. 362. 23 REED:York, pp. 55–56. 24 Ibid., p. 9; Palliser, p. 202. 25 For the library list of the Augustinian Friary, see The Friars’ Libraries, ed. by K.W. Humphreys, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues (London: British Library, 1990), pp. 11–154; for that of St Mary’s see English Benedictine Libraries, ed. by R. Sharpe and others, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues (London: British Library, 1996), pp. 677–785. 26 Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘Traders and Playmakers: English Guildsmen and the Low Countries,’ in England and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages, ed. by Caroline Barron and Nigel Saul (Stroud: Sutton, 1995), pp. 99–114. 27 Palliser, Tudor York p. 202. 28 REED:York, pp. 84–85, 202, 279. 29 Ibid., pp. 56–57. 30 Ibid., pp. 257–58. 31 Ibid., p. 214. 32 Ibid., p. 924. 33 Ibid., p. 297. 34 Ibid., p. 356. 35 Ibid., pp. 231–32 et passim. 36 Ibid., p. 351; See also Beadle, York Plays, pp. 434–37. 37 REED:York, p. 312. 38 Ibid., p. 340. 39 Ibid., p. 355. 40 Ibid., p. 357. 41 For a detailed discussion of the involvement of the York city council in the Creed Play and the Pater Noster Play see Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The Plays of the Religious Guilds of York:The Creed Play and the Pater Noster Play’, Speculum 50 (1975), see above, pp. 49–87. 42 REED: York, p. 693; ‘[. . .] in salutem & emendacionem animarum tam gubernancium quamaudiencium [. . .]’, ibid., p. 6. 43 Angelo Raine, Medieval York (London: J. Murray, 1955), p. 93. 44 Johnston, ‘Plays of the Religious Guilds’, see above, p. 64; REED:York, p. 99. 45 REED:York, p. 178.

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46 Ibid., p. 262. 47 York City Archives HB 18, fol. 15v. See York Civic Records IV, ed. by Angelo Raine,Yorkshire Archeological Society, Record Series cviii (Wakefield, 1942), p. 139. 48 See Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘William Revetour, chaplain and clerk of York, Testator’ in A Festschrift in honour of Professor Peter Meredith, ed. by C.J. Batt, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 29 (1998), pp. 153–72. 49 REED:York, p. 68. 50 Ibid., p. 80. 51 Ibid., p. 765. 52 See Meg Twycross, ‘“Places to Hear the Play”: Pageant Stations at York 1398–1572’, REED Newsletter 3 (1977), pp. 10–33 and Robert H. Skaife, The Register of the Guild of Corpus Christi in the City of York, Surtees Society 57 (1872). 53 ‘Plays of the Religious Guilds,’ see above, p. 52; REED:York, p. 238. 54 REED:York, p. 131. 55 Johnston, ‘Plays of the Religious Guilds,’ see above, p. 54. 56 REED:York, p. 285. 57 Ibid., p. 286. 58 Ibid., Appendix II, pp. 642–44. 59 Skaife, The Register of the Guild of Corpus Christiin the City of York, pp. 169–74. 60 Drake, Eboracum, p. 364; REED:York, p. 317. 61 REED:York, p. 364. 62 Ibid., p. 348. 63 Palliser, Tudor York, p. 234. 64 Ibid., p. 108. 65 Drake, Eboracum, p. 364. 66 Palliser, Tudor York, p. 235. 67 REED: York, pp. 19, 85; see especially in the matter of the dispute between the Cordwainers and the Weavers over precedence in the Corpus Christi procession, ibid., p. 169. 68 Palliser, Tudor York, pp. 235–36. 69 REED:York, pp. 271–77. 70 Ibid., p. 274. 71 Palliser, Tudor York, p. 241, citing ‘Robert Parkyn’s narrative’, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Lat.Th. d. 15. 72 Ibid., citing House Book 21. 73 REED: York, p. 310; the York civic year began with the election of the officers on St Blaise’s Day, 3 February. 74 REED:York, p. 310–11. 75 The York City Archives were kept for centuries in the lower level of the Guildhall. The River Ouse flows by the foundations of the Hall and the lower Hall was subject to frequent flooding. It is remarkable that so much survives in a legible condition. 76 REED:York, pp. 318–19. 77 Ibid., p. 312. 78 Ibid., pp. 313, 315. 79 Ibid., pp. 326–27. 80 Ibid., p. 327. 81 Ibid., p. 327. 82 Ibid., p. 328. 83 The Settlement was declared in 1559 and what appears to be an active campaign to persuade the populace to accept Protestantism was undertaken on the part of Elizabeth’s councillors using their acting troupes. See Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘English Community Drama in Crisis: 1535–80,’ in European Communities of Medieval Drama: a Collection of Essays, ed. Alan Hindley (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), pp. 348–69. 84 Palliser, Tudor York, p. 243. 85 Palliser, Tudor York, p. 244. 86 REED:York, pp. 331–32.

204 Suppression and change 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

103 104

105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

Ibid., p. 333, 339. Ibid., p. 342. Ibid., p. 342. Peter Lake, ‘Matthew Hutton – a Puritan Bishop?’ History, 64 (1979), p. 183. Ibid. Palliser, Tudor York, p. 245. REED:York, p. 353. Ibid., p. 353; Father Gardiner, in his discussion of this passage, cited it from the published extract of the House Books (Robert Davies, Extracts from the Municipal Records of the City of York (London, 1843), p. 276), where the editor had misread ’40’ in the difficult hand of the secretary as ‘to’. Harold Gardiner, Mysteries’ End,Yale Studies in English 103 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1946), p. 73. REED:York, p. 354. Ibid., p. 356. York Civic Records VI, ed. by Angelo Raine, Yorkshire Archeological Society, Record Series cxii (Wakefield, 1946), p. 139. Palliser, p. 246. REED:York, p. 365–66. Palliser, Tudor York, pp. 94, 193. REED:York, pp. 366–67. Ibid., p. 367; Huntingdon could have been appointed any time after March 1572 when as Claire Cross tells us in her biography his appointment was the result of a ‘general exchange of offices’ that saw the earl of Sussex who she tells us ‘had been a virtually non-resident Lord President in the north ever since Hunsdon had cast reflections on his competence during the Rebellion of the Earls’ become Lord Chamberlain (Claire Cross, The Puritan Earl (London: MacMillan, 1966), pp. 159–60). Angelo Raine notes that he was appointed in August citing no authority (York Civic Records VII, ed. by Angelo Raine, Yorkshire Archeological Society, Record Series cxv (Wakefield, 1950), p. 56). This would be too late for the festive season in the north in 1572. However, new evidence discovered by David Mills in the letter book of the Protestant divine of Chester, Christopher Goodman, establishes beyond doubt that although Huntingdon did not take up permanent residence in York until December 1572, he had been appointed by early May. A letter from Goodman dated 10 May protesting the proposed performance of the Chester is addressed ‘To the Lord President the Earl of Huntingdon’. Cheshire, including Chester, ed. by Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence M. Clopper, and David Mills, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 143–44. Raine, York Civic Records VII, p. 63. REED: York, p. 369; our only other knowledge of the Riding comes from a printed broadsheet in the Bodleian Library which shows all the hallmarks of an attempt to Christianize an ancient custom associated with the winter solstice (REED: York, pp. 359–62). See also Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘Yule in York’, REED Newsletter, 1:2 (1976), pp. 3–10. Palliser, Tudor York, pp. 254, 248, 255. REED:York, pp. 373, 376. Ibid., pp. 374–75. Ibid., p. 378. Ibid., p. 390. York Civic Records VIII, ed. by Angelo Raine, Yorkshire Archeological Society, Record Series cxix (Wakefield, 1953), p. 7. Ibid, p. 9. Palliser, Tudor York, p. 254. YCR VIII, p. 25. REED:York, pp. 392–93.

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115 However it appears from a fugitive note noticed by Eileen White in the Chamberlain’s Book of 1593 that the playbooks had not entirely disappeared.That year the clerk noted ‘Lent Mr Ric hutton apothecarie the book for cred play’. ‘The Disappearance of the York Play Texts – New Evidence for the Creed Play’, Medieval English Theatre 5 (1983), p. 107. 116 REED:York, pp. 393, 396. 117 Ibid., p. 397. 118 Ibid., p. xxxv. 119 See for example Louth and Lincoln in Records of Plays and Players in Lincolnshire 1300– 1585, ed. by Stanley J. Kahrl, Malone Society Collections VIII (London, 1974–75); pp. 67–68), and Shrewsbury in Shropshire, ed.by J.A.B. Somerset, 2 vols, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994) 204–20, 243. 120 REED:York, p. 405. 121 Ibid., p. 406. 122 Ibid., pp. 411–13. 123 Ibid., p. 423. 124 Ibid., p. 481. 125 Ibid., p. 531. 126 Ibid., pp. 554–55; 558. 127 Clifford Family Papers: Chatsworth House, Bolton Abbey 174, f. 92v and 175, fols 182–182v. I am grateful to my colleague Professor John Wasson for allowing me to cite evidence from his unpublished REED edition of the records of the Clifford papers. 128 I would like to acknowledge with gratitude the support I have received over the years from the Canada Council and its successor the Social Sciences an Humanities Research Council of Canada for my research into the dramatic records of late medieval and early modern England.

3.2 ‘And how the state will beare with it, I knowe not’ From: According to the Ancient Custom: Essays Presented to David Mills, Part 2, Philip Butterworth, Pamela M. King, and Meg Twycross, eds., Medieval English Theatre 30 (2008), 3–25 The religious drama that flourished in northern England from the late fourteenth century came to an end in the eight years between 1568 and 1576. In 1946, Father Harold Gardiner published his monograph Mysteries End in which he argued that the civic religious drama had been systematically suppressed by the Protestant authorities.1 There is no doubt that his conclusion was correct. It has become a common place in the history of English drama. But what was the driving motivation behind this suppression? Why did it not happen until after 1568 when as early as 1542 Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, had issued the first injunction against playmaking: That no parsons, vicars, no curates permit or suffer any manner of common plays, games or interludes, to be played, set forth, or declared, within their churches or chapels, where the blessed Sacrament of the altar is, or any other sacrament administered, or Divine service said or sung.2 What was the combination of political and religious circumstances in the North that made the suppression of the plays inevitable in the period 1568 to 1576? This paper attempts to answer those questions by bringing together the external evidence of the suppression with the deliberate policy of Elizabeth and her Council, led by William Cecil, to appoint men who were ‘favourers of religion’ to key civil and ecclesiastical positions in the north in response to the unrest that culminated in the rising of the northern earls in 1569. Even though the rising was defeated and the crisis averted, this unrest was there just below the surface as long as Mary Queen of Scots remained in northern England as a potential rallying point for those who challenged Elizabeth’s right to the throne, especially the remaining Catholics with their close connections with continental powers. For Cecil and other members of Elizabeth’s Council, especially in the years before the defeat of the Armada, Protestantism and the Royal Supremacy were mutually interdependent. Any threat to the newly established Church of England was a threat to the stability of the crown. For the state to flourish, the lingering pockets of Catholicism, particularly in the North, had

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to be eradicated. There was far more at stake than theology and church polity in the eyes of Elizabeth’s councillors and their appointees. They considered the establishment of a strong Protestant Church of England under the headship of the crown essential to the survival of the nation. On 24 March 1568, the newly arrived dean of York Minster, Matthew Hutton, wrote his famous letter to the York City Council discouraging them from producing the Creed Play. In it he expressed what was to become the official view of the religious drama still performed in the Northern Province. The Dean had clearly read the play. He begins gracefully acknowledging its antiquity but lamenting how it disagrees with the ‘senceritie of the gospell’. His advice is that the play should not be played, ffor thoughe it was plausible 40 yeares agoe, & wold now also of the ignorant sort be well liked: yet now in this happie time of the gospell, I know the learned will mislike it and how the state will beare with it I knowe not.3 Although Hutton had been chaplain to Edmund Grindal, bishop of London, under Edward VI, he had not gone in to exile with him, but lived through the reign of Mary in England. His experiences during those years shaped his later career. Peter Lake has written, ‘It was the fragility of the protestant hold on the mass of the English people and the ever present threat of Rome that were to form the dominant concerns of Hutton’s career.’4 His appointment as dean of York in the last year of the life of Archbishop Thomas Young was one of the first to begin the process of bringing the North firmly into the reformed church. The opinion he expressed in his letter was not just a personal one. He was speaking also as a member of the Ecclesiastical Commission of the North, the arm of the Elizabethan Council of the North charged with religious affairs. It was these two bodies that the Privy Council used to force reform and, as a by-product of the larger reform, to end the longstanding tradition of civic religious drama in the North. The move against the York Creed Play was the first action of the Commission against the plays. Eight years later, Hutton accompanied by Sir John Gibson, a civil lawyer, and William Palmer, Chancellor of York, two other members of the Commission, wrote openly in the name of the Commission to the Bailiff Burgesses of the town of Wakefield where a play was proposed for Corpus Christi day, that in the said playe no Pageant be vsed or set furthe wherein the Maiesty of god the father god the sonne or god the holie ghoste or the administration of either the Sacramentes of Baptisme or of the lordes Supper be counterfeyted or represented/ or any thing plaied which tends to maintenaunce of superstition and idolatrie or which be contrarie to the lawes of god or of the Realme5 Between the suppression of the York Creed Play and the play proposed on Corpus Christi day in Wakefield, the two great civic cycles in York and Chester and the York Pater Noster Play were also suspended by the Commission. I have

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examined the end of religious drama in York in detail elsewhere, but that story must be alluded to here as a background to a consideration of the final performances of the Chester Plays within the context of the political and ecclesiastical cross currents in the North.6 The government in London had long recognized the problems inherent in governing the northern counties of the kingdom. Separated by significant distance, close to the troubled border with Scotland and largely controlled by the three great northern families – the Percies, the Nevilles and the Stanleys – the North was a distinct civil and ecclesiastical entity with York as its administrative centre. Edward IV recognized this when he sent his brother Richard to York to establish a royal presence there. When Richard himself became king, he took steps to create a Council of the North. The North was to be governed by a king’s council with a king’s lieutenant at its head. This council ‘laid down the main lines on which the future Council of the North was destined to develop.’7 York was to be the site of the quarterly meetings of this Council. Just as Richard’s reign was short-lived, so the good governing of his Council for the North was also and, in the period between 1485 and 1537, the northern counties were governed uncertainly at best. Henry VII distrusted the North and ignored it; nor did his son pay much more attention to it in the early years of his reign.When serious trouble broke out again on the Scottish borders in 1522, the military men sent to help against the Scots found the whole of the North in turmoil.8 For Henry VIII and his chancellors Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, ‘the real obstacle to good governance was the private liberties of the North’ – both lay and ecclesiastical.9 They therefore pursued a specific policy to bring these liberties into the hands of the crown. By 1536, the year of the suppression of the monasteries, Henry had all the Percy lands in his hands as well as the lands of lesser magnates.10 The Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536–7 simply underscored how inadequate the governing of the North had been. After token resistance, the sitting Council of the North ‘went over to the rebels’ and acted on their behalf before the king. In putting down the rebellion Henry acted ruthlessly, cynically exploiting newly opened wounds between social classes, among the clergy, and among different branches of powerful families.11 However, out of the turmoil, competent northerners came to prominence who owed their safety to the king. These were the men who became the foundation of the new and effective Council of the North established in 1537. The jurisdiction of this new Council was all of England north of the Humber except the palatinate of Lancashire and possibly the palatinate of Chester. Unlike its predecessors, this Council was not concerned with the defence of the Scottish borders.The membership of the Council was a president and a varying number of councillors over its life. Appointments were made from London and usually included a few peers and some knights, often royal officials of one kind or another – with a strong contingent of lawyers well versed in canon as well as common and civil law. After 1561, the archbishop of York, the bishop of Durham, and the deans of the two cathedrals were ex officio members. The Council

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was to meet four times a year for about a month for each session. The original plan was to hold one session a year at York, Hull, Newcastle and Durham but by mid-century the meeting place was almost invariably York. Part of the reason for this was the increasing bureaucracy that came with the continuing life of the Council. The Council and its staff came to be housed in the surviving buildings of St Mary’s Abbey outside Bootham Bar. What is now known as The King’s Manor was part of the Tudor and Stuart quarters of the Council. The first president of the new Council was Robert Holgate, archbishop of York, who served from 1538 to 1549 when Francis Talbot, eighth earl of Shrewsbury, was appointed. Shrewsbury remained in office until 1560. Shrewsbury relied heavily on Thomas Gargrave, a Yorkshire civil lawyer and Member of Parliament who ‘became a formative influence in the institutional development of the council’.12 Gargrave became vice president of the Council in 1557, and as F.W. Brooks has suggested, ‘perhaps the most powerful man in the North.’13 Six months after the passage of the Act of Supremacy and Uniformity (25 January 1559) the Privy Council named a new Ecclesiastical Commission in London with Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal, bishop of London, and Sir Francis Knollys the queen’s vice chamberlain as its chief officers to enforce what has been called the ‘Elizabethan Settlement’ within the Church of England.14 When Henry Manners, fourth earl of Rutland, an old friend of Sir William Cecil’s and a staunch Protestant, replaced the catholic earl of Shrewsbury as president of the Council of the North early in 1561, he wrote to Cecil ‘I do not finde the country so forward in religion as I wish it to be’.15 On 5 May, a seventeen-man Commission similar to the Ecclesiastical Commission created in London in 1559 was named for the North including Thomas Young, the new archbishop of York, as president, Rutland himself, James Pilkington, the newly elected bishop of Durham, Thomas Gargrave, Thomas Enns, the long serving secretary of the Council of the North and five other members of the Council, two of whom (Sir Henry Gates and John Vaughan) served, along with Gargrave, as Members of Parliament through much of this period.16 On 10 June, Rutland wrote again to Cecil, I doo truste by my Lord Archbishops painfull and discrete forwardnes in settinge forthe the true religion wherof he seemeth to be very carefull that this contry in a very shorte tyme shalbe brought to as much quietnes as any other quarter within her maiesties Realme.17 But by the time Rutland died on 17 September 1563, there was little to show for the archbishop’s activities. After a brief hiatus when Ambrose, earl of Warwick, was president of the Council, Young himself became president in May 1564. Young had been a strong supporter of reform in his youth and chose to go in to exile under Mary. However, scholarly opinion is divided about his effectiveness in achieving reform in his notoriously conservative province. Little progress was made during his tenure towards the irradication of what David Palliser calls ‘Catholic survivalism’.18 It was only with the arrival of Matthew Hutton as

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Dean of York Minster in May of 1567 and the appointment of Richard Barnes, Chancellor of York, that same year as suffragan to assist the aging Young that reform began in earnest in the northern province. Some time between Hutton’s election as Dean (15 May, 1567) and Young’s death (26 June, 1568) a new Ecclesiastical Commission for the North was named. The undated commission repeats almost verbatim the wording of the 1559 commission over which Archbishop Parker presided in the south, including the granting of sweeping powers to the Commission, [. . .] to visit reforme redresse order correct and amend in all places within the saide prouince of yorke as well within the liberties as without all such errors heresies crimes abuses offenses contemptes and enormyties spirituall or ecclesiasticall whatsoeuer which by any spirituall or ecclesiasticall power auctoritie or iurisdiccion or by the statutes or lawes of the realme can or may laufully be reformed ordred redressed corrected restreyned or amended to the pleasure of almighty god and the preseruacion of the peace and vnitye of this our Realme [. . .]19 This clause also contains the one significant addition to the Northern Commission’s mandate that is not in the 1559 formulation – the right to intervene ‘as well within the liberties as without’. This addition clearly gives the Commission the right to over-ride the decisions of such ‘liberties’ as the city governments of York and Chester. It was entirely within the powers of all ecclesiastical courts, such as the Commission, to legislate in religious matters. The formula of Bishop Bonner’s 1542 injunction repeated by bishops for most of the century (including Grindal after his arrival in York)20 was used to suppress drama based in the parishes and the complex array of folk customs sponsored by parishes as fundraising activities associated with church ales.21 The inclusion of the phrase about the liberties in the 1568 Commission for the North recognizes that the plays in the North were of a different order.They had either from their inception been under the control of civil authorities (the cities of York and Chester) or, in the case of York’s two other religious plays, the Creed Play and the Pater Noster Play, had come under the control of the city council at the time of the suppression of the religious guilds that sponsored them.22 To forbid the performance of these plays, the Commission must have the power to intervene in the affairs of two northern cities fiercely proud of their independence. These plays telling the story of the faith and interpreting two of the most important credal statements (the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer) were rooted in the Catholic past and, although York had made some concessions during the Edwardian period in the removal of the Marian plays, in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign they had become public displays of the religion of the past. The right of the Commission to over-ride the decisions of the city councils to perform their ancient plays was not readily accepted. One of the key moments in the story of Chester’s suppression is the refusal of the Chester council to accept the authority of Archbishop Grindal in 1572. The 1568 Commission was twice as large as the one named in 1561. The thirty-six men were named included Archbishop Young as president and James

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Pilkington, bishop of Durham, John Best, bishop of Carlisle and William Downham, bishop of Chester, Matthew Hutton, dean of York, William Whittingham, dean of Durham, John Piers dean of Chester, many of the same civil and ecclesiastical lawyers named in the 1561 commission, and four York aldermen and two aldermen from Hull.23 This commission was in place until the next commission was named in 1573 when the membership again doubled with seventy-two men named to serve. As the Commission matured and its work gained effect, the policy seems to have been to include as many of the local magnates and burgesses as was possible. David Palliser, writing from the perspective of the York city council, points out that ‘The commonest church office held by city councillors after the Reformation was membership on the Northern Ecclesiastical Commission.’24 A quorum of the Commission for any formal proceedings was three but each group of three had to include at least one of an inner group of aristocrats, high-ranking clergy and lawyers. In the Commissions named in 1568 and 1573 that oversaw the suppression of the drama associated with the old religion, twenty-two men were named to this inner group. Twelve of them served on both Commissions: George Talbot, ninth earl of Shrewsbury, Sir Henry Percy later twelfth earl of Northumberland, James Pilkington, bishop of Durham, Richard Barnes suffragan bishop of Nottingham and later bishop of Carlisle, Matthew Hutton, dean of York, John Lowth, archdeacon of Nottingham, Thomas Lakyn, prebend of York Minster, and the lawyers Sir Thomas Gargrave, John Rokeby, Lawrence Meres and Walter Jones.25 Two members of the Commission named in 1568 died very soon – Young himself on 26 June 1568 and one of the lawyers, Henry Savile early in 1569. Sir Henry Gates was among the inner circle only for the 1568 commission although he continued to be a member of the later Commission.26 When Edmund Grindal became archbishop of York in 1570 and Henry Hastings, earl of Huntingdon, became the Lord President of the North in 1572 they both became ex officio members of the Commission with Grindal becoming president. William Downham, bishop of Chester (rather surprisingly, from the part he played in the suppression of the Chester plays), Leonard Pilkington, prebend of Durham and brother of James, bishop of Durham,William Palmer, chancellor of York and Sir John Gibson a prominent civil lawyer served only on the 1573 Commission.27 Sixteen of the twenty-two men named to the inner circle – the three earls, the two archbishops, two of the bishops (Pilkington and Barnes), the two deans and seven of the eight lawyers – were also members of the Council of the North. Although the two bodies were separate and had different jurisdictions, the core of men at the centre of power of both bodies was identical. Claire Cross has said of the appointment of Henry Hastings as the president of the Council in 1572, With jurisdiction in civil matters over Yorkshire, co. Durham, Northumberland, Westmorland, and Cumberland, and in ecclesiastical affairs throughout the northern province which extended additionally to Lancashire, Cheshire, and, Nottinghamshire, the promotion at a stroke transformed Huntingdon into the most powerful royal official in the whole of northern England.28

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That power was shared by the handful of men who formed the inner circle of both Commission and Council. With the possible exceptions of the earl of Shrewsbury, Sir Henry Percy and William Downham, bishop of Chester, all the men who formed the inner circle between 1568 and 1577 were ‘favourers of religion’. Shrewsbury conformed but seems to have been indifferent, while Percy’s position is even less clear, convincing some of his Protestantism in the 1560s and others of his Catholicism in the 1570s when he became involved in the Ridolfi plot. Downham owed his position to his long-standing relationship with the queen that stemmed from her childhood. We will see as the Chester story unfolds that he was far from zealous in enforcing the new religious realities in his diocese. Five had been Marian exiles – the two archbishops (Young and Grindal), James and Leonard Pilkington,William Whittingham, and Thomas Lakyn. Lawrence Meres was the brother of the exile Anthony Meres and a close connection of the Protestant duchess of Suffolk. James Pilkington and William Whittingham later joined by Leonard Pilkington were perhaps the most theologically radical, prompting Archbishop Edwin Sandys to take corrective action when he succeeded Grindal in 1577. Grindal had been sent to York explicitly to bring the province into conformity with the Elizabethan settlement. This he did through actively pursuing ‘Catholic survivalism’ through the Ecclesiastical Commission and actively recruiting Protestant clergy from the south. Two others of the inner circle of the Commission – Hutton and William Palmer – had been his chaplains when he was bishop of London. Matthew Hutton’s’ concerns about the danger of the threat from Rome were echoed by the leading lay member of the Commission, Thomas Gargrave, who also saw both the religious and political consequences of the continuing Catholic threat in the North. He was well acquainted with William Cecil, the queen’s first minister, from their military service together at the battle of Pinkie in 1547 and his long parliamentary service.Writing to Cecil in 1570, he said that parliament should enact a [. . .] stricter law for Religyon & agaynst papysts [. . .] yf any refuce the servyce or communyon, I wold wyshe them convyncyd by opyn disputation in every shyre before Commyssyoners and yf they will not relent to the treuth, I wold wyshe them attayntyd in premunire for one yer, and yf they stycke at the yeres end then to be deth for herysey or treson[. . .]29 The final major member of the inner circle of the Commission was Richard Barnes who was made chancellor of York Minster in 1561. He was named suffragan bishop of Nottingham to help the aging archbishop Young in 1567, becoming bishop of Carlisle in 1570 on the recommendation of Gargrave and Hutton (although he held his chancellorship until 1571) and finally bishop of Durham after Pilkington’s death, 19 May 1577. In his later career he was a controversial figure quarrelling with Grindal and challenging the legitimacy of William Whittingham’s ordination on the continent. However, at the time of the suppression of the plays he was a key figure in the life of the Commission and the Council.

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As suffragan he took over the responsibilities of the office of the archbishop between Young’s death in June 1568 and Grindal’s appointment in 1570. The year 1568, when Hutton took the first decisive move against Catholic community drama in the North with the suppression of the Creed Play, was the beginning of a time of turmoil and transition in the North. Many of the powerful northern earls remained sympathetic to the Catholic cause. The arrival in England of Mary Queen of Scots, the Catholic contender to the English throne, gave a notional if not real rallying point for conspirators. Her continuing presence under close house arrest in the countryside south of York was a constant factor in this period. Archbishop Young was replaced as President of the North by September 1568 by Thomas Radcliffe, earl of Sussex.That month the nobles of Scotland and England met in York in a council called by David Palliser ‘the first trial of Mary Queen of Scots’ to discuss the situation created by the flight of the Scottish queen to the south.30 In early 1569, just as the York council began preparations for what would be the last known performance of the Corpus Christi play, rumours swirled about a possible uprising led by the most powerful noblemen in the North and the city was being ordered to prepare to defend itself. The timing of the performance of the play became enmeshed in the need for musters to be called. On 12 May, the council received a request from the Council of the North asking that the men of York, in the name of the queen, be provided with horse, armour and weapons ‘in readynes for safgard of her realme and subjects’.31 In response to this request, the ceremonial muster accompanying the play was cancelled on 18 May and the next week, on 26 May, five days before the performance of the play, the council ordered that a real military muster should take place on 13 June (for the city) and 14 June (for the wapentake of the Ainsty). The play was performed as planned, but by 6 July, a week before the musters, the Council of the North sent out detailed requirements for armour and weapons which the city agreed to provide. A similar request came at the end of July.32 For a few months, all mention of military preparedness disappears from the House Books, but 10 October a request came from the Council asking all innkeepers, taverners and tiplers to report any talk of sedition.33 By 9 November, news of the actual rising reached York and the city was urged to secure the gates and walls. Five days later a ‘letter of commission’ from the Council arrived stating that the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland had rebelled and asking the city and the Ainsty for armed horsemen and one hundred footmen to fight the rebels. This letter was confirmed by another the next day and over the next few days, as the city council seemed to be sitting in constant session, orders came for the troops to go to Darlington, citizens were warned against dangerous talk, boats were forbidden on the river to discourage infiltration of the city by the rebels from the water, and citizens were urged to be prepared to defend their homes. The next day (19 November), all ladders were ordered collected and all those living in the suburbs were brought inside the walls. Two days later (21 November), soldiers loyal to the crown were in the city and preparations were being made to face a siege.34

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And then the emergency passed. The rising that had seemed so threatening fell apart and the Council of the North and the military men sent from London began to round up the ring-leaders. For the next few months the House Books continue to record the billeting of soldiers, but the panicked preparations for disaster of November are over. But a casualty of the year’s crisis was the Corpus Christi play. Although it was played, nothing more is heard of it for ten years when the council voted to perform the play, but first agreed that the play book should be carried ‘to my Lord Archebisshop [Sandys] and Mr Deane [Hutton] to correcte.’35 Nothing more is heard of that play although the manuscript surfaced centuries later in the possession of the Fairfax family. Sir William Fairfax of Walton was a member of both the Council and the Commission at that time and another Fairfax, Thomas, was a member of the Commission.36 Young’s death in 1568 had left the presidency of both the Council and the Ecclesiastical Commission vacant.The presidency of the Council fell to Robert Radcliffe, third earl of Sussex, who was rarely in York but left the day-to-day affairs to Thomas Gargrave while the presidency of the Commission fell to Richard Barnes as suffragan. Both men were ably supported by Matthew Hutton. Radcliffe’s position as president of the Council from 1568 to 1572 is muddied by his association with the duke of Norfolk and his plan to marry Mary Queen of Scots, and what some (including the queen’s cousin, Lord Hunsdon, then governor of Berwick) considered a lack of vigour on his part in countering the rebellion of 1569. He spent most of the period from 1570 to 1572 on the Scottish borders. He did not, however, lose favour with the queen and was appointed to the Privy Council in 1572 in a complex ‘cabinet shuffle’ that saw Henry Hastings, the Protestant earl of Huntingdon, named president of the Council. By that time, the reforming Edmund Grindal had taken up his position as the new archbishop of York. Gargrave, Hutton, and Barnes now had a president and an archbishop whose strong support of the Protestant cause in the northern province matched their own. The spring of 1572 saw the suppression of the Pater Noster Play in York and also the first battle in the suppression of the biblical cycle in Chester. The suppression of the plays in Chester took an entirely different form from that in York, in large part because the jurisdiction of the Council and the Commission, a long way away across the Pennines, seemed unclear. Until the discovery of the letter book of Christopher Goodman by David Mills in the course of his research for the Cheshire collection of Records of Early English Drama, all we knew about the final days of the Chester Whitsun Plays was the curious Star Chamber indictment of Sir John Savage. Savage, mayor in the last year of the performance of the play, 1575, and John Hanky, the mayor at the time of the performance in 1572, were accused of acting alone in mounting the plays in those years.37 The Chester city council, when challenged by the Privy Council, would not declare that Sir John had acted alone in ordering the play. Although twelve councillors voted that to perform the play in 1575 was not ‘meet’, the full council acknowledged that the decision had been properly

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made.38 The story as it unfolds through Goodman’s correspondence, to some extent, explains that indictment but it also gives us another perspective on how the traditional scriptural plays performed in the North were, indeed, viewed with alarm and suspicion by the Evangelical clergy. On 10 May 1572, Christopher Goodman, along with two other Chester clerics, Robert Rogerson and John Lane,39 wrote to the newly appointed president of the North, the earl of Huntingdon. Goodman was a Cestrian – and, he says in his 1575 letter to Grindal, he had ‘a naturall loue to this Citie where I & may parentes were borne & broght vp for the most part [. . .]’.40 He was a fervent Protestant who had spent time as a Marian exile among the reformers on the continent, including John Knox and possibly his fellow Cestrian William Wittingham, by this time dean of Durham and a member of the inner circle of the Ecclesiastical Commission. He spent some time in parishes in Scotland and Ireland before returning to his native Chester in 1568.41 He was alarmed by the preparations for the Whitsun Play in 1572 and determined to bring its enormities to the attention of those whom he considered the authorities. His letter of 10 May to Huntingdon is full of anti-papal rhetoric. He begins by explaining that the ‘plays were devised by a monk about 200 years past & in the depth of ignorance & by the Pope then authorized to be set forth.’ The present city council in Chester were acting, he claims ‘in assured ignorance & superstition according to Papist policy.’ Goodman clearly sets up an opposition between the city council and ‘all preachers & godly men’ who oppose the plays and ‘since the blessed light of the gospell have inveyed & impugned as well in Sermons as otherwise, when occasion has served.’ Despite their efforts, the council is preparing to perform the plays even though ‘the same have neither been perused nor allowed according as by her Majesty in those cases it is provided.’ Referring to a letter to the mayor sent ‘by our Preachers’ that fell on deaf ears, he appeals to Huntingdon to forbid the production ‘in respect of your Zeal to godliness’.42 For Goodman, the production is clearly associated with sedition, claiming that the plays give ‘great comfort to the rebellious papists, & some greater occasions of assembling & conference than their intentions well considered is at this present meet to be allowed.’43 He concludes urging Huntingdon to leave nothing undone which shall be found convenient for the repressing of Papacy, & advancing of godliness, & avoiding of all occasions whereby either perill or danger to her Majesty or to the common weal might begin or grow.’44 At this time, Huntingdon had not yet come north to take up his new post. He must have been in London and was in communication with Archbishop Grindal since it was Grindal who, five days after Goodman sent his letter (15 May) to Huntingdon, responded to Goodman’s plea. He wrote from Westminster as president of the Ecclesiastical Commission to the mayor and council forbidding the production.We learn from the opening lines of Goodman’s next

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letter (11 June) that a copy of Grindal’s letter had been sent to him along with the copy of a letter from Huntingdon, now lost. Grindal required the mayor ‘in the Queen’s Majesty’s name by vertue of her Highnesses Commission for causes Ecclesiasticall within the diocese of York [. . .] to surcease from further preparation for setting forth the said plays, & utterly to forbear the playing thereof for this Summer & for all times hereafter till your said plays shall be perused corrected & reformed by such learned men as by us shall be thereunto appointed & the same so reformed by us allowed [. . .].’45 On 11 June, Goodman, Rogerson, and Lane wrote to Grindal reporting on what was to them a disturbing turn of events. Not only had letters been sent by Grindal and Huntingdon through Goodman to John Hanky, the mayor, but letters had also been sent to the bishop of Chester, William Downham. By this time Downham was close to the end of his career, discouraged and ineffective against the obstinate Catholicism of his diocese and considered by many to be a friend to papists. He had apparently tried to reason with Hanky but had reported to Goodman that ‘he perceived Master Mayor so bent as he would not be stayed from his determination in setting forth the plays by any persuasions or letters.’ The bishop promised to try again but Goodman remarks darkly to Grindal ‘but it is thought otherways by the common voice of many.’ Goodman goes on to report that Hanky and some of the council had sent a letter to the earl of Derby seeking his support. In June 1572, this was Edward Stanley, the third earl, now in the last few months of his life. His lengthy career, in and out of favour, has long been considered equivocal in matters of religion. Louis A. Knafla remarks in his ODNB biography that he ‘accepted the obligations of public office, but acted slowly and reluctantly against Catholics’.46 He had been a prominent local magnate all his life and undoubtedly considered Cheshire to be his to command. As Goodman remarks he was ‘chief of her Majesties commission for Cheshire & Lancashire, wherof also his Worship is one, & by vertue of the same freed from your Grace’s Commission, so as without contempt he is persuaded by his counsel that he may lawfully disobey the same.’ The mayor and council had appealed to their ancient overlord choosing his ruling over that of the Ecclesiastical Commission. We have seen that the palatinate of Lancashire was never part of the Council of the North.The palatinate of Cheshire’s legal status at this time is less clear. However, it is clear that since the establishment of the diocese of Chester on 1537 it was part of the archdiocese of York.This may be the reason Huntingdon turned the matter over to Grindal who wrote to the mayor and council with the authority of the ‘Commission for causes Ecclesiasticall within the diocese of York’. Goodman, clearly upset and thwarted by this response to what appeared a month earlier to be a simple matter of appealing to the royal authorities,

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laments to Grindal that the city is in turmoil over this ‘unhappy broil’. Hoping that Huntingdon and Grindal will assert their authority he wrote with increasing shrillness of tone: Nevertheless I trust your wisdoms know how to meet with such fine devices for the defense of an evill cause. Surely my Lord as the president is greate & worthy a due consideration, so maketh it a great stirr in this City which before was quiet, wounding the hearts of all that unfeignedly favour the gospell, sharply assaulting the publick peace amongst us by making parties as it hath done always when the said plays have been attempted [. . .] my humble request with my brethren and fellow ministers of this City, who now are present to joyn with me in the same, is unto your Grace & your council that in the name of the Lord Jesus your wisdoms may take such order with the said plays, as by your authority they may either be corrected alloed & authorised [. . .] or els by the same your authority utterly & abolished for ever as pastimes unfitt for this time & Christian commonwealths.47 Goodman ends the letter expressing his doubts about the revision of the play concluding, Thus committing the cause (which is god’s) to your godly wisdoms hoping for such order herein to be taken by the same as god may have his glory, the gospell & preachers more obedience and credit & this poor city more peace & your authority better obeyed.48 But the plays went ahead as planned containing all the ‘absurdities’ that so distressed Goodman and his colleagues. The last letter in the letter book for 1572, once again written to Grindal, is undated, but Mills writes ‘given its relative position and the careful chronology of the letterbook – it is undoubtedly for the year 1572.’49 The long list of ‘absurdities’ from which we learn that the 1572 production contained several blatantly Catholic elements that have not survived in the extant manuscripts of the plays is attached to this letter.50 Goodman’s concern here in the aftermath of the play is for ‘divers honest men (who haue misliked of the said plays)’ who have refused to contribute ‘according to their conscience & your Graces commandment’ and ‘have been to their grief and discredit imprisoned’.51 There is no evidence from Chester for 1572 that men were imprisoned for their conscience (as two aldermen had been that same year in York), but the 1575 records include the imprisonment of one Andrew Tailor, a dyer, who had refused to pay his fine to his craft and been committed by the then mayor Sir John Savage to prison. He was later released by the next mayor, Henry Hardwick, when supporters paid his fine.52 In 1575, the city council of Chester under the mayoralty of Sir John Savage (whom Mills identifies as one of the ‘Savages of Clifton’ who were ‘influential local gentry who were thought to have recusant leanings’53) once again prepared

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to mount a production of the Whitsun Plays at Midsummer. Goodman drafted a letter to Savage that he did not send noting at the end of the draft in the letterbook ‘This letter was not deliuered because I had privatly talked with the mayre before & after prached against the plays.’54 The tone of the draft is unlike the strident anti-papal rhetoric of the letters to Huntingdon and Grindal in 1572. The men of substance of Chester (including two of Goodman’s cousins) had suffered a major economic disaster in 1575 when a ship heading home from Spain was seized by pirates off the coast of Brittany.55 Although Goodman remains convinced that the plays ‘nether standeth with godes word nor with religion which you [Savage] professe, nor the laws of the realme,’ his appeal to Savage is in the light of this ‘late losse’.56 He urges him, rather than performing the play, to engage in ‘publique lamentacion or fastinge & prayinge than of solacinge our selves with feastiuite, interteninge of frendes & vaine plays.’ He continues to consider them ‘your vnlawfull, but lawfully forbidden plays’ but the tone is more of a pastor trying to cajole than a preacher trying to persuade. However, someone, and we don’t know who, was determined to bring legal action against the producers of the Chester plays. The Chester Mayor’s List for 1575 records this year the said Sir Iohn Savage caused ye popish plaies of Chester to bee playd ye Sunday Munday Tuesday and Wensday after Midsummer in contempt of and Inhibition and ye primates letters from yorke and from ye Earle of Huntington, for which cause hee was serued by a purseuant from yorke, ye same day yat ye new Maior was elected, as they came out of ye common hall, notwithstanding the said Sir Iohn Sauage tooke his way towards London, but how his matter sped is not knowne Also Mr Hanky was serued by the same Purseuant for the like contempt when he was Maior [. . .]57 The summonses came from York but Savage apparently chose to have his case tried before the Privy Council itself in Star Chamber. On 10 November 1575, he wrote to Henry Hardwick, his successor as mayor, and the council from London. The accusation against him was that he had caused ‘the plays laste at Chester to be sett forwarde onely of myself ’. He urged them since he knows that they ‘do knowe the contrary [. . .] that they were by comon assemblie apointed as remayneth in the Recorde’ to ‘sende me a Certificate vnder your haundes and Seale of your Citie’ testifying to the fact that, since both he and John Hanky were being accused, both the production in 1575 and the one in 1572 had been authorized by a strong majority of the council.58 The council under Hardwick responded on 21 November clearly testifying that both Savage and Hanky acted ‘with the assent of thaldermen Sheriffes and the comon counsell of the saide Citie to set furthe the saide plays.’59 The Chester council did not break ranks over the performance of the plays. This was quite unlike the situation at York where the performance of the plays became the centre of a power struggle between ‘Catholic survivalists’ and the new men on the York City Council who approved of the actions of the

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reforming Council and Commission. Rather the opposition in Chester came, in 1572, from the outside – from Goodman and his fellow clerics who, unable to persuade their fellow Cestrians of the truth of their godly cause, appealed to the higher authority of the leaders of the Council of the North and the Ecclesiastical Commission. Unfortunately for them, that higher authority was a long way away either in London or York. The mayor and council fell back on the local known authority of the earl of Derby who disputed the jurisdiction of the Council and Commission and encouraged Hanky to produce the play. We do not have evidence for what happened in Chester in 1575 except Goodman’s draft letter to Savage. We do not know if he and his friends were behind the second appeal to the authorities in York. We do know that Savage hurried to London and appealed to the Privy Council, refusing to accept the jurisdiction of Grindal and Huntingdon as valid. If Goodman and his friends were behind it, they mistook the suit they brought against Hanky and Savage. The two mayors were accused of acting alone; they could easily prove that they had not – and the case fell. Nevertheless, Goodman’s party won the war since 1575 is the last known performance of the Whitsun Plays in Chester. The only evidence concerning plays in the surviving act books of the Ecclesiastical Commission is the suppression of the play at Wakefield in 1576. One further act of suppression, this time suppressing the Riding of Yule and Yule’s Wife dated 13 November 1572, came from Grindal and Hutton. It was signed by them and by John Rokeby, Thomas Enns, and two other commissioners William Strickland, the Member of Parliament for Scarborough, and Christopher Ashburn a local priest.60 In the city council minutes the letter is said to be from ‘my Lord Archebesshop of York anad certayne others the Quenes Maiesties Commisioners’.61 Grindal writes to the mayor of Chester in 1572 ‘in the Queen’s Majesty’s name by vertue of her Highnesses Commission for causes Ecclesiasticall within the diocese of York’.62 There can be no doubt that the actions taken against the plays were taken in the name of the Commission. The surviving Act Books do not contain any ‘minutes’ of the Commission that might indicate that there had been at some point a decision made about how to deal with the civic religious plays, although one recurring phrase may indicate that there was a consistent policy. It is the content of the plays rather than the fact that they were plays that seems to have been the issue. As early as Hutton’s first letter about the Creed Play presented to the York council on 30 March 1568 there is a hint that amendment might make the play palatable to the Commission. He wrote [. . .] as I find manie thinges, that I can not allowe, because they be Disagreinge from the senceritie of the gospell, the which thinges, yf they shuld either be altogether cancelled, or altered into other matter, the wholle drift of the play shuld be altered, and therefore I dare not put my pen vnto it, because I want bothe skill, and leasure, to amende it [. . .]63 The possibility of amendment was picked up by the York council. At a meeting on 27 April 1568 a performance of the Corpus Christi Play was proposed but not agreed to ‘but that the book thereof shuld be perused / and otherwaise

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amendyd / before it were playd’.64 In 1572, William Allen, described by Palliser as ‘the most firmly Catholic alderman’,65 was elected mayor and, in an act of seeming bravado, persuaded the council to authorize the production of the Pater Noster Play. The minute of 14 April seems to imply that Allen himself would get the playbook from the ‘Maister of St Anthonyes’ who had custody of the text ‘that the same may be pervsed amended and corrected’, and ‘that my said Lord Mayour shall Certefie to theis presens at their next assemblee here of this pleasure to be taken therin’.66 There is no mention of sending the playbook to the Ecclesiastical Commission for approval.The performance, the last performance of any of the plays of the old religion in York, caused a major dispute in the York council that led to the imprisonment and disenfranchisement of two aldermen. That same year, as we have seen, Grindal in his letter to the mayor of Chester ordered him to surcease from further preparation for setting forth the said plays, & utterly to forbear the playing thereof for this Summer & for all times hereafter till your said plays shall be perused corrected & reformed by such learned men as by us shall be thereunto appointed & the same so reformed by us allowed [. . .] It seems that up to 1572 performing the plays if they were amended according to the desires of the Commissioners was a possibility. However, in York, after 1572, it seems to have ceased to be even a possibility. It is clear from the House Books that by the playing season in 1575 three playbooks ‘as perteyne this cittie’ were in the custodie of Archbishop Grindal. The city council asks ‘yat his grace will apoynt twoe or thre sufficiently learned to correcte the same wherein by the lawe of this Realme they ar to be reformed.’67 His grace does not seem to have paid any attention to their request. However, at some point, the register of the cycle must have been returned to the city because in 1579 when the council determined to produce the cycle they said ‘And that first the booke shalbe caried to my Lord Archebishop and Mr Deane to correcte if that my Lord Archebissop doo well like theron.’68 Perhaps the council hoped that the new archbishop, Edwin Sandys, would take a more flexible position than Grindal. He did not. This is the last time that the York council approached the ecclesiastical authorities seeking someone to amend the play. The suppression of the civic religious drama of the North was a deliberate campaign. The drama still being performed in the mid-1560s was seen as evidence of a population who did not sufficiently ‘favour’ the new Protestant reality. The central government, taking seriously the role of the queen as head of both church and state, used the established mechanism of the Council of the North and the Ecclesiastical Commission as its instruments to bring the North in to line. By consistently appointing known and strong Protestant sympathizers to the key ecclesiastical positions in the North as they came vacant, particularly Matthew Hutton as dean of York Minster, then Edmund Grindal as archbishop of York, and capping this change in the Commission with the appointment of

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Henry Hastings as President of the Council, the Privy Council built on the foundations already in place and nurtured by Sir Thomas Gargrave. Both Commission and Council were dominated by godly men who ‘favoured religion’. For them the Catholic threat was both a threat to their deepest personal convictions and to the stability of the state.The story of the suppression of the plays reflects the deep divide in northern society. The drama that had flourished for over two hundred years and fed the souls of countless northerners was in, ‘this happie time of the gospell,’ suppressed. The state could not bear with it.

Notes 1 H.C. Gardiner, Mysteries End (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1946). 2 Cited from Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation, ed. by W. H. Frere and W.M. Kennedy, 3 vols, (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), vol. ii, p. 88. 3 York, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, 2 vols, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 353. 4 Peter Lake, ‘Matthew Hutton – a Puritan Bishop?’ History, 64 (1979), p. 204. 5 The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle, ed. by A.C. Cawley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1963), p. 125. 6 Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The City as Patron,’ in Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, ed. by Paul Whitfield White and Suzanne Westfall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), see below, pp. 224–45. 7 F.W. Brooks, The Council of the North, Historical Association Pamphlets, general series, 25 (London: Historical Association, 1966, rev. ed.), p. 11. 8 Brooks, The Council of the North, p. 13. 9 Ibid., p. 15. 10 Ibid., p. 16. 11 Ibid. 12 ODNB. Citations to the ODNB are given only when a direct quotation is used. Except where otherwise noted, all biographical details about individuals are taken from their biographies in the new online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 13 Brooks, The Council of the North, p. 19. 14 The Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary, ed. by G.R. Elton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), pp. 221–25. 15 ODNB. 16 Thomas Rymer, Fœdera, xv (London: 1713), p. 611. 17 London, The National Archives, SP 59/4, 190r-v. 18 David Palliser, Tudor York (Oxford University Press, 1979) pp. 242–48. 19 London, The National Archives, C66/1042. C66/1042 is the Patent Roll for 10 Elizabeth (17 November 1568 to 16 November 1569) but since Young is named as President and he died on 26 June 1568 the document has clearly been misfiled. 20 REED:York, pp. 358–59. 21 See the volumes of Records of Early English Drama. 22 Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The Plays of the Religious Guilds of York: The Creed Play and the Pater Noster Play’, Speculum, 50 (1975), see above, pp. 49–87. 23 London,The National Archives, State Papers C66/1042, mbs 1–3 dorse. I am grateful to Professor Meg Twycross for making me aware of this document and providing me with photo reproductions of it. 24 David Palliser, Tudor York (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 108. 25 Information about John Lakyn, Walter Jones and John Rokeby comes from Ronald A. Marchant, The Church under the Law 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) 41–2, 94–5, 147–56. There is also a short biography of Rokeby in ODNB

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26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

by David M. Smith . Information about Thomas Lakyn comes from Christina H. Garrett, The Marian Exiles: A Study in the Origin of English Puritanism (University Press, 1966) p. 260, 214. Lawrence Meres served as MP for Oxford in the parliament of 1563. His biography is in the History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1558–1603, ed. by P.W. Hasler, 3 vols (London: Secker & Warburg, 1981), vol. 3, pp. 43–44. Sir Henry Gates served in the parliaments of 1545, 1547, 1559, 1563, 1571, 1572 and 1586. He was closely associated with Thomas Gargrave and was a relative of Sir Francis Walsingham. His biography is in House of Commons, 1558–1603, vol. 2, pp. 173. Sir John Gibson is mentioned in John Strype’s A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster (London: 1720), Book 1, chapter 24, p. 153. Further information about him is found in Rachel R. Reid, The King’s Council of the North (London, Longmans, 1921), pp. 251–2. ODNB. Cited in ODNB from J.J. Cartwright, Chapters in the History of Yorkshire (Wakefield: B.W. Allen, 1872), p. 46. Palliser, Tudor York, p. 54 York City Records VI, ed. by Angelo Raine, Yorkshire Archeological Society, Record Series, cxii (1948 for 1946), pp. 147–48. Ibid., pp. 156–57. Ibid., p. 160. Ibid., pp. 161–168b. REED:York, p. 390. Calendar of Patent Rolls (London: HMSO, 1982), p. 382. David Mills, Recycling the Cycle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 146. Cheshire including Cheshire, ed. by Elizabeth Baldwin, L.M. Clopper and David Mills, 2 vols, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), vol. 1, pp. 159–60. This story has been well told from the perspective of the full context of Chester and its plays by David Mills, Recycling, pp. 145–52. Mills was unable to identify Rogerson but John Lane was a prebendary of Chester Cathedral whom Mills describes as ‘a man of strong Protestant views’ (REED: Cheshire, p. 1016). REED: Cheshire, p. 169. REED: Cheshire, p. cxxxvi. REED: Cheshire, p. 143. REED: Cheshire, pp. 143–4. REED: Cheshire, p. 144. REED: Cheshire, p. 144. ODNB. REED: Cheshire, p. 145. REED: Cheshire, p. 146. REED: Cheshire, p. 1016. Mills, Recycling, pp. 181–83. REED: Cheshire, p. 146. REED: Cheshire, pp. 171–72. REED: Cheshire, p. 1017. REED: Cheshire, p. 170. REED: Cheshire, p. 1018. REED: Cheshire, p. 168. REED: Cheshire, p. 161. REED: Cheshire, p. 172. REED: Cheshire, p. 170. Strickland’s biography appears in House of Commons, 1545–72, vol. 3, pp. 457–58. Drake in Eboracum (York, 1736), p. 267 names Ashburn as the rector of St Mary Bishophill.

‘How the state will beare with it, I knowe not’ 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

REED:York, p. 369. REED: Cheshire, p. 144. REED:York, p. 353. REED:York, p. 354. Palliser, p. 246. REED:York, p. 365. REED:York, p. 378. REED:York, p. 390.

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3.3 William Cecil and the drama of persuasion From: Shakespeare and Religious Change, Kenneth Graham and Philip Collington, eds. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 63–87 Six months after the accession of Elizabeth, the Spanish Ambassador, the count of Feria, reported to his master, Philip II of Spain, that William Cecil was using plays and players for propaganda purposes.1 Recent research has confirmed that this was, in all probability, true.2 Feria, a Jesuit, was familiar with the English court. He had been a member of Philip of Spain’s entourage during Mary’s reign and he married Jane Dormer, a favourite lady in waiting to the queen who was a member of the extended Dormer/Sidney/Dudley clan. Feria was, then, to some extent, an ‘insider’, a well-known personality, privy to the court and to the complex and often seemingly contradictory web of alliances of kinship, marriage, and intellectual and religious affinity that created the rich tapestry of Elizabethan culture. William Cecil was thirty-eight when Elizabeth came into her inheritance. Most biographers rush over the first four decades of his life to chronicle the last three ‘decades of power’ when, some say, more than the queen herself, he ruled England. But by thirty-eight Cecil’s bonds of kinship, marriage and intellectual and religious affinity had been firmly established – bonds that informed his decisions and the advice he offered to his sovereign until his death in 1598. This paper attempts to draw together the evidence that supports Feria’s contention that Cecil continued Cromwell’s custom of using drama as an instrument of public policy. In 1535, still an impressionable teenager of fifteen, Cecil entered St John’s College, Cambridge, the cradle of English Protestant humanism.3 He remained in Cambridge for six years and, although he did not take a degree (since he was not intending to take orders), he was part of the life of a community where the new learning of the continent and the radical new approach to the Christian faith were topics of every day debate. Although leaders in the approaching political and religious struggles were at several colleges, St John’s was the centre. John Cheke, soon to become Regius professor of Greek, was there struggling with new approaches to translation; Roger Ascham, later tutor to Princess Elizabeth was there; George Day, later almoner to Queen Catherine Parr and bishop of Chichester was there; Thomas Hoby of Bisham, the translator of Castiglione’s The Courtier was there; and Robert Horne, later dean of Durham and bishop of Winchester, a leader in the Edwardian debates over

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the eucharist was there. Nicholas Grimald the playwright, who later went to Brasenose, Oxford, was in Cambridge taking his first degree at Christ’s;Thomas Norton, co-author of Gorboduc, was at Michaelhouse and Thomas Smith, philologist and later secretary to Cecil under Elizabeth, was at Queen’s. Among the clergy were two who would dominate the second wave of the Reformation of the English church under Elizabeth as her long suffering and beleaguered archbishops – Matthew Parker of Corpus and Edmund Grindal of Magdalen and Pembroke. And standing behind these men were their admired Cambridge predecessors – the bishops, Hugh Latimer of Clare, Thomas Cranmer of Jesus, and Nicholas Ridley of Pembroke, and the polemicists, John Bale of Jesus and Thomas Becon of St John’s. Cecil was absorbed into this milieu and, to the chagrin of his country gentry family, married into it when he married John Cheke’s sister Mary at the age of 21 in 1541. This marriage lasted only three years when Mary died, but it did produce a son,Thomas, who was Cecil’s eldest son and heir, succeeding him as the second Lord Burghley.This bound Cecil to the Cheke connection for his life. Cecil’s second marriage was into a country gentry family similar to his own but one destined, through the sheer intellectual ability of the family, to a position of extraordinary influence in late sixteenth-century culture and politics. In 1544 he married Mildred Cooke, one of the five formidable daughters of Anthony Cooke, governor to Prince Edward. Mildred’s sister Anne later married Nicholas Bacon and bore Francis Bacon and her sister Elizabeth married first Thomas Hoby whom Cecil had known at St John’s. After Hoby’s death Elizabeth married John, Lord Russell, son of Cecil’s friend and fellow Privy Counsellor, Francis Russell, 2nd earl of Bedford. These three sisters remained close and loyal friends to Queen Elizabeth all her life based on a bond formed when they all studied with Anthony Cooke as young girls. This circle was the moderate Protestant elite who firmly rejected the Roman Church, but its members were equally suspicious of schismatic evangelicalism. They endorsed the idea of a state church governed and disciplined by an episcopacy accountable to the crown. Eclipsed during Mary’s reign, it came into its own with the accession of Elizabeth, but its members had been key figures in various events in the dying years of Henry VIII and during the reign of Edward. It was in Cecil’s London house and the house of Richard Morison (an important influence on Cecil and on the course of drama), for example, that the seminal debate about the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist took place in November 1551. Cheke, then tutor to the king, was there, as were Robert Horne, recently appointed dean of Durham, David Whitehead, chaplain to Catherine Brandon, dowager duchess of Suffolk, and Edmund Grindal, the future archbishop of both York and Canterbury (but then one of the king’s chaplains). This disputation was preliminary to the parliamentary debate on the introduction of the new prayer book. Throughout his life, Cecil was committed to the advancement of the Protestant cause, and so it should come as no surprise that in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign he

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seems to have been prepared to use drama, a medium long used as a vehicle of often strident political and theological discourse, as a tool to reinforce the return to Protestantism. Cecil’s tenure at Cambridge (1535–41) corresponded with the flowering of Cambridge drama. He could not have avoided being drawn in to the many dramatic experiments, since so many of his associates were involved. As Alan Nelson has put it, in 1535 Richard Wade put on a comedy, John Hatcher a dialogue, John Cheke a Play by Terence, and John Redman ‘dyuerse playes.’ Later, possibly the following year, Thomas Smith of Queens’ organized a production of Aristophanes’ Plutus at St John’s in the original Greek, pronounced according to rules which Smith had devised in collaboration with John Cheke. In 1537–8 St John’s produced ‘vij comedes’ and one ‘diolog in greke.’ Thomas Watson of St John’s wrote his Absalom c. 1539–40 [. . .] By 1544–5 playacting had become such as established part of St John’s College life that it was institutionalized in the college statutes.4 These new university plays were written almost exclusively in Latin – the language of instruction – and their target audience was those young men who would later lead the nation. The fashion for writing new plays rather than simply performing the classics came from the humanist and reformation circles on the continent. Scholars often refer to these plays as ‘Terence Christianized’ but a more accurate description for the majority of plays performed in England and particularly at Cambridge would be ‘Terence Protestantized’. Many of these plays, in keeping with the humanist theory, were based on the scriptures, not, as the medieval plays had been, to teach the essential narratives of the faith, but rather to draw moral lessons from biblical material. As Martin Bucer, the continental reformer who spent the last two years of his life (1549–51) as Regius professor of divinity at Cambridge, put it in his De Honestis Ludis (1551), For the making of tragedies the Scriptures constantly offer an abundance of material in almost all the stories [. . .] [that are] thickly packed with godlike and heroic people, with emotion, with character, with actions and with unforeseen events moreover which happen contrary to expectations and which Aristotle calls ‘reversal of fortune’. Since all these qualities have wonderful power to strengthen faith in God, to arouse love and desire of God and to create and increase not only admiration of piety and justice, but also the horror of impiety and of the sowing and fostering of every kind of evil, how much more fitting would it be were Christians to take their poems from sources which can depict great and famous human thoughts, struggles and inborn talents, changes of feeling and of fortune, than from the profane plays and stories of the pagans!5

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Bucer saw plays as tools to be used by teachers to shape the thoughts of their students. So important did he see the use of drama to be that he argued the playwrights should be ‘religious men [. . .] schooled in the knowledge of Christ’s Kingdom and also endowed with discrimination’.6 Here we have the clear articulation of the theory behind the use of drama in the schools and universities of humanist Europe. A famous example of the increasingly Protestant tone of humanist drama is the anti-papal play, Pammachius, written by the German humanist Thomas Kirchmayer and dedicated to Archbishop Cranmer in 1538.7 Written in Latin – still the lingua franca – it was one of those continental compositions that could be immediately adopted by English university teachers.The premise of the play is that Pammachius, bishop of Rome, turns his back on the true word of Christ and, with the help of Satan, aggrandizes himself with wealth and earthly power setting the pattern for all subsequent popes. Kirchmayer intended to inculcate a hatred and fear of the papacy in the young. As he says in the dedication to Cranmer, [. . .] I have judged that it is of the greatest importance that from childhood minds should be imbued publicly with a keen hatred of tyranny of the sort which the popes have practised for more than 400 years [. . .] The play ends after only four acts with Satan and Pammachius rallying the nations loyal to them to fight the rise of the followers of Christ. The epilogue then steps forward and shares Kirchmayer’s apocalyptic vision of Christ himself coming to end the world and the play: Do not expect now, good spectators, that a fifth act is to be added to this play. Christ will act that out one day at his own time [. . .] Nor must we hope that in human affairs things will be better, unless God shall put an end to that tragedy by the arrival of his son who shall carry off from the world his own, as gold out of dung, and shall hand over the wicked to the everlasting fires, this will be the dénouement of this play. In the spring of 1545, four years after Cecil had left the university, Christ’s College, Cambridge, performed this play in Latin.8 The ensuing altercation between the conservative Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester and then Chancellor of Cambridge, and Matthew Parker, later Elizabeth’s first archbishop of Canterbury but then Vice Chancellor of Cambridge, was heated and inconclusive but shows the degree of importance English clerics and educators gave to the performance of academic drama.9 Anti-papal drama, or drama with Protestant themes, flourished in much more political ways under the patronage of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chancellor. Cromwell had come from bourgeois stock and owed his advancement to the highest office in the land to his own innate ability and the skill with which

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he served his employer, Cardinal Wolsey, in the matter of the king’s divorce. After Wolsey’s fall he served as Henry’s chief agent in the complex matter of the dissolution of the monasteries and the transfer of their lands and wealth to the crown. Committed to the evangelical cause, Cromwell became close to, among others in the reformation party, Miles Coverdale, through whom he made connections with the Cambridge humanist reformers. These included Richard Morison who, although associated with Wolsey’s Cardinal College in Oxford, had spent time in Cambridge in 1533 before going to the University of Padua for four years. It was Morison who later shared the task of hosting the debate over the Eucharist with Cecil in November 1551.10 About 1535, the year Cecil went up to Cambridge, Morison, then Cromwell’s secretary, wrote ‘A Discourse touching the Reformation of the Lawes of England’. Morison was Cromwell’s chief propagandist and saw in drama a way to use the tools of the Roman church against it. His position is very close to the one later enunciated by Martin Bucer. First he advocated the abolition of Catholic drama and then its replacement by Protestant anti-papal drama in the vernacular: Howmoche better is it that those plaies shulde be forbidden and deleted and others dyvysed to set forthe and declare lyvely before the peoples eies the abhomynation and wickedness of the bisshop of Rome, monkes, ffreers, nonnes, and suche like, and to declare and open to them thobedience that your subiectes by goddes and mans lawes owe unto your magestie. Into the commen people thynges sonner enter by the eies, then by the eares: remembryng more better that they see then that they heere.11 The perfect vehicle to allow Cromwell to carry out Morison’s plan was another Cambridge reformer, John Bale. Bale, a former Carmelite monk, had been converted to evangelicalism by Thomas, first baron Wentworth of Nettlestead. He put his talents as a polemicist and playwright to the cause of the anti-papal campaign launched by Cromwell to gather support for the break from Rome in the mid 1530s. The partnership between Bale and Cromwell in this campaign is now a well-established and important thread in the history of English drama. The other playwright associated with Cromwell in this campaign is Nicholas Udall, one of the Oxford humanists, who was, in this period, the headmaster of Eton.The plays of Bale and Udall paralleled the university plays and were based on much the same principals. The themes and stories treated were similar, with the same purpose of championing the Protestant cause. The major difference was that they were written in the vernacular for a less elite audience than the university plays and, especially in Bale’s work, were modeled on the native tradition of episodic drama rather than the classical forms used in university plays. Bale’s company toured the countryside in the late 1530s under Cromwell’s patronage with such plays as King John, God’s Promises, Johan Baptystes Preachynge, The Temptation of Our Lord, and Three Laws. His players and Udall’s Eton boys both performed at court in the last years of Cromwell’s power. All this came to an end with the passage of the Act of the Six Articles in May 1539. Bale fled to

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the continent where he continued to write evangelical tracts and anti-Catholic martyrologies. Cecil was still in Cambridge when Bale fled to the continent but he had left by the time the controversy about the production of Pammachius erupted. Yet in the tight circles of Cambridge intellectuals and humanists he must have been aware of both events, and so alert to the power of dramatic performance as propaganda. In 1541, he moved on to Gray’s Inn where he met, for perhaps the first time, his future brother-in-law and colleague in Elizabeth’s early government, Nicholas Bacon. Bacon had had a very successful academic career at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in the 1520s before moving on to Gray’s Inn where, when Cecil arrived, he was well on the way to becoming a bencher of the Inn, having already served under Cromwell in the Court of Augmentation. Cecil’s father Richard was able to secure the first official position for his son as chief clerk of the Court of Common Pleas, a position that set him firmly on the path of civil service. But the last years of the reign of Henry VIII were not conducive to the rapid advancement of young men known to have reformist sympathies. The first phase of the English Reformation had advanced quickly under the Cromwell’s political guidance, but with the Act of the Six Articles, Henry’s innate theological conservatism re-asserted itself, making it a heretical offense to deny the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and to encourage clerical marriage. The conservative members of the Privy Council now felt they could unseat Cromwell and, although it took them over a year to do so, they brought him down. He was executed 28 July 1540. The effect of his fall on Cromwell’s web of propagandists was immediate. Bale, as we have seen, had already fled to the continent. Udall remained in England but he lost his appointment at Eton and, although the evidence is equivocal, was convicted of the sexual abuse of one of the students, the son of Thomas Cheyne, a Catholic Privy Counsellor who was Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. He spent an unspecified time in the Marshalsea prison but reemerged in 1542 with the publication of his Apophthegmes, a translation with commentary of selected passages from the work of Erasmus.This seems to have brought him to the attention of the last of Henry’s queens, Catherine Parr, who brought him into her household to help with a project she had undertaken with the royal children to translate Erasmus’ paraphrase of the New Testament. It is in the court of Queen Catherine that many of the personal, intellectual, and political alliances of the early years of the reign of Elizabeth were forged as men of learning, old and young, came together under the queen’s patronage. Her household provided a vital link between the reformers of the 1530s and the continuing reforms that began with the accession of Edward VI in 1547. Henry married Catherine 12 July 1543, after the brief and disastrous tenure of Catherine Howard. Already twice-widowed and with a long-standing relationship with Thomas Seymour, Catherine had come to the king’s attention as a lady-in-waiting to Princess Mary who, since 1536, had enjoyed her father’s favour. Catherine brought to the marriage stability, learning, and an apparent

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desire to heal the wounds in Henry’s family. She brought the three royal children together for the first time and, although Mary was almost a generation older than her siblings (she was twenty-seven in 1543 while Elizabeth was ten and Edward six) she shared her new stepmother’s love of learning.The younger children were quick to learn. A key figure in bringing the circle of Cambridge humanists into the royal household to teach the children was George Day, bishop of Chichester, the queen’s almoner who had been tutor to Cecil’s brother-in-law John Cheke at St John’s. Day recommended Cheke as the tutor to the young prince, bringing into the circle not only Cheke but occasionally Roger Ascham, a close friend of Cecil’s, whom Elizabeth would later invite to be her tutor. Most scholars agree that Anthony Cooke, who would become Cecil’s father-in-law after his second marriage in 1545 was also attached to the household. Although Cecil, a young man still making his own career in the civil service, is not mentioned as one of the new queen’s circle, he was closely connected to those who were. The playwright Nicholas Udall’s connection with the queen’s household may have been long-standing. Susan James, the queen’s biographer in the new edition of the Dictionary of National Biography suggests that the character of Christian Custance in Ralph Roister Doister is modeled on Catherine. As we will see, the queen did patronize a troupe of players herself. What is known for certain is that Udall worked closely with Princess Mary on Erasmus’ Paraphrases upon the New Testament, published 31 January 1548.Their shared scholarly interests may explain why Udall remained in favour during Mary’s reign providing entertainments for her court despite his evangelical convictions. James McConica has written of this island of comparative calm in the final turbulent years of Henry’s reign, English humanism was directed, after the fall of Cromwell as before, from the court, but [. . .] the nature of this direction had changed. Instead of the professional propaganda circle of Cromwell’s day there is a group of distinguished humanists collected by Catherine Parr to provide instruction for the royal children and for her own friends and associates, in learned pietism.12 Meanwhile other Protestant and evangelical networks were being established. Although many of the more radical evangelicals like John Bale chose to wait out the uncertain last years of Henry’s reign in exile, others did not. One who would become an important voice in the later years of the century and beyond, John Foxe, the martyrologist, spent these years as tutor to the children of the Protestant gentry and nobility. Foxe was an Oxford man, one of the evangelical minority of Magdalen College and a fellow of the college in the early 1540s. The statutes of the college required that every fellow take orders within one year of lecturing after completing an MA. Since the Act of the Six Articles had reinstated priestly celibacy, Foxe resigned his fellowship in 1545 being unwilling to ‘castrate myself and leap into the priestly caste’.13 He was then out of a job and forced to seek patronage elsewhere. His first appointment

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as a tutor was for the children of Sir William Lucy of Charlecote near Stratford, a friend of Bishop Hugh Latimer. His major breakthrough into the centre of the Protestant elite came, however, in 1548 when Mary Howard, the duchess of Richmond, widow of Henry VIII’s illegitimate son, invited Foxe to be tutor to the children of her brother Henry Howard, earl of Surrey. Foxe was not only the central figure in the many editions of Acts and Monuments, now a major source for our understanding of the cross-currents of the mid sixteenth century, but also a playwright. His Titus et Gesippus was written when he was still at Magdalen, and his Christus Triumphans was published in Basel where he was working in the printing houses during his exile there in 1556, and was possibly performed at Magdalen in 1561–2.14 Both were academic Latin plays. It was Foxe who famously said ‘Players, Printers and Preachers be set up of God as a triple bulwark against the triple crown of the Pope to bring him down’.15 During the years that he lived in the duchess’s households in Mountjoy House in London and Reigate in Surrey, Foxe became part of the influential circle that included bishops Ridley, John Hooper and Edmund Grindal, John Bale (returned from exile) and the duchess of Suffolk, and her young friend William Cecil. Although still a relatively young man, Cecil moved in circles of power and influence within the Protestant elite who were well aware of the persuasive power of drama. These connections were to survive the common experience of many of them in exile during Mary’s reign to be consolidated in the early years of Elizabeth. Meanwhile, Cecil was advancing his political career becoming a member of parliament during Henry’s last years. He was the member for Stamford in Edward’s first parliament in 1547. We can associate the rising young civil servant not only with the Protestant gentry, but also with Queen Catherine’s circle. These associations came through his bonds of marriage and intellectual and religious affinity and are reflected in the preface he wrote for Queen Catherine’s Lamentation, or Complaint of a Sinner (1547).16 In it, with the fervour of his own evangelical convictions, he asserts his faith and exhorts the reader to read on: Here is our anchor; here is our shepheard; here we be made whole; here is our life, our redemption, our saluation, and oure blisse; let vs, therefore, now feed, by the gratious queenes example, and be not ashamed to become in confession publicanes, since this noble ladie will be no pharisie.17 These convictions recommended him to Edward Seymour who became the effective ruler of England on the death of Henry VIII. Seymour made Cecil his personal secretary bringing him into the inner circle of power for the first time. Edward Seymour was the brother of young Edward’s mother, Queen Jane Seymour. Seymour’s religious convictions had not been clear under Henry, but he soon revealed himself to be committed to returning to the reform program aborted with the passage of the Act of the Six Articles. Soon styled duke of Somerset and Lord Protector, Seymour, with the help of archbishop Cranmer

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and bishops Latimer and Ridley, brought the English church back to the state of evangelical theology that it had been approaching in 1539. In this enterprise he was ably assisted by what has been called ‘a small group of advisors’ that included Cecil and Cecil’s friend from Cambridge, the philologist, Thomas Smith. With Edward Seymour came the Seymour’s extended network that included his brother Thomas, who quickly married the queen dowager Catherine Parr, only to have her die in childbirth in 1548. A distant kinsman of the Seymours, Thomas, Lord Wentworth, patron of John Bale, who had been present at Edward’s christening, became a member of the Privy Council in August 1547 and other ‘godly’ connections began to displace the conservative ministers and civil servants who had dominated the last years of Henry’s reign. As soon as Edward Seymour felt assured of his power, he gathered around him, besides Cecil and Smith, strong evangelical voices from the 1530s including William Turner as his personal physician and Thomas Becon as one of his chaplains. Both men had been patronized by Wentworth and were Cambridge humanists. Turners’ scientific interests were matched by his strident attacks on Gardiner in such pieces as The Huntyng and Fyndyng out of the Romishe Fox (1543). Thomas Becon had already had a colourful career as a maverick polemicist and his works had been banned in the last years of Henry’s rule. He was a writer of dialogues – a public form of polemic largely ignored by students of drama – and is credited with one play, A New Dialog betwene thangell of God & the Sheperdes in the Felde. John King dates this piece c.1547 and discusses its differences from the medieval treatments of this episode.18 He also comments, ‘Because the writing of plays was a normal duty of chaplains in large Tudor households, Becon’s composition of the work during service to Seymour places him in the company of such clerical playwrights as Skelton, Medwall, Bale, and Udall’.19 King recognizes Cecil’s importance both as a moderate Erasmian himself and as someone who, even after the fall of Seymour, promoted the interests of the more radical ‘gospellers’.20 Paul White has emphasized the control that Cecil and Thomas Smith wielded in the early years of the reign of Edward VI, since they were charged with the licensing of all printed works under the crown policy introduced in 1549.21 It seems likely that Cecil and Smith were also behind the prohibition issued by Seymour against playing promulgated in August of that year. Localized rebellions in 1549 began in the West Country and spread to East Anglia and the Thames Valley. Ket’s Rebellion in Norfolk began during a local summer festival in Wymondham not far from Norwich. Holinshed gives us this version of the events: and so it rested till the sixt of Iulie, at which time there should be a publike plaie kept at Wimondham, a towne distant from Norwich six miles, which

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plaie had beene accustomed yearlie to be kept in that towne continuing for a space of one night and one daie at the least. Wherevpon the wicked continuers of this vnhappie rebellion, tooke occasion by assembling of such numbers of people as resorted thither to see the plaie, to enter further into their wicked enterprise [. . .]22 The records of Wymondham from 1537–8 give us a detailed account for the ‘wache and play’ that includes gear for a giant, shoes for a devil, a costume for a knight as well as payment to players and for torches.23 Clearly the rebels took advantage of a large assembly of people enjoying a long-standing local midsummer tradition similar to many across the country. There seems to have been nothing particularly ‘political’ about the Wymondham ‘play’, but public gatherings of any kind were deemed to be dangerous that year. Furthermore both Cecil and Smith knew the power of polemic drama and probably persuaded the Lord Protector to issue an extraordinary prohibition on August 6 (a month after the Wymondham event): For asmuche as a greate number of those that be common Plaiers of Enterludes and Plaies, as well within the citie of London, as els where within the realm, do for the moste part plaie such Interludes as contain matter tendyng to sedicion, and contempnyng of sundery good orders and lawes, where upon are growen, and daily are like to growe and ensue, muche disquiet, division, tumultes, and uproares in this realme; the Kynges Maiestie, by the advise and consent of his derest Uncle Edward, Duke of Somerset, Governour of his persone, and Protector of his realmes, dominions and subiectes, and the rest of his highnes privie Counsall straightly chargeth and commaundeth al and every his Maiesties subjectes, of whatsoever state, order or degree thei bee, that from the ix daie of this present moneth of August untill the feast of all Sainctes nexte commyng [1 November], thei ne any of them, openly or secretly plaie in the English tongue any kind of Interlude, Plaie, Dialogue or other matter set furthe in form of Plaie in any place, publique or private within this realme, upon pain that whosoever shall plaie in English any such Play, Interlude, or other matter, shall suffre imprisonment, and further punishment at the pleasure of his Maiestie.24 Local authorities were to see this proclamation enforced throughout the entire kingdom. The traditional festival season still celebrated in many parts of the country ended with Midsummer, so the target for the prohibition must have been as much the travelling troupes performing all over the countryside as local plays like the one in Wymondham. It seems to have been remarkably effective. Only two appearances of troupes of travelling players patronized by major national figures have so far been recorded in the database of Records of Early English Drama for the second half of the year 1549.25

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Edward Seymour fell in late October, brought down with his personal household by the earl of Warwick, who felt he had gained sufficient power to challenge the king’s uncle. Cecil was not immediately imprisoned in the Tower, but by November he had joined his companions. However, he had powerful friends not associated with the Protector in John Cheke, Anthony Cooke, and the duchess of Suffolk.26 He was released in January 1550. In the months that followed he proved his political astuteness maintaining a balanced position among the factions of Edward’s Privy Council, and by September 1550 he was himself appointed to the Council along with William Petre. As one of his biographers has put it, ‘In his position as Secretary, Cecil was the servant of the King and his Council, and not of one vulnerable patron. He had reached the comparative safety of the royal bureaucracy, where loyalty and efficiency preserved a man from the dangers of factional strife.’27 Cecil had arrived at the bureaucratic centre of power in the kingdom, a position he would hold (except during the reign of Mary) until his death forty-eight years later. By the autumn of 1551, he seems to have concluded that the future of the reign lay in the hands of Warwick and became one of Warwick’s followers honoured by the king in October that year when Warwick became the duke of Northumberland. He was knighted along with Henry Sidney who found him ‘a most rare man, both for sundrie and singular gifts of nature, learning, wisdome and integritte’.28 Cecil was now even further entrenched in a position of quiet power. The continuing attacks on the papacy from the stage during Warwick’s years of power are mentioned by the Venetian ambassador writing home in May 1551: And this is the summary of what he can tell about the disobedience of the English to the Pope, besides their demonstrations of contempt for him, in paintings, comedies, and in all their amusements [. . .]29 We can, perhaps, see in these remarks the hand of William Cecil who was in a position to guide the official propaganda machine of the Edwardian court. In the spring of 1553 as Edward’s health was failing, Cecil was himself ill and away from the court.When he recovered it was clear that Northumberland was determined to abrogate Henry VIII’s will and substitute Henry Grey’s daughter Jane for Princess Mary. Despite his Protestant convictions, Cecil opposed the move as unlawful but, like many involved in government, he was placed in an impossible position. He was the last of the Privy Council to sign the document favouring Jane Grey. In the event, although he went as far as making conveyances of his land and properties lest he be sufficiently caught in the political cross-currents to lose his life, Cecil survived. He made his peace with Mary, although he declined to serve in her government on religious grounds, and retired to his estates in Lincolnshire. He did not, as did so many of his close relatives and associates in the Protestant cause (including Cheke, Cooke, Richard Morison and the duchess of Suffolk), go in to exile on the continent but kept in touch with them through frequent correspondence. One of his concerns

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during this period was the management of some of the estates of Princess Elizabeth whom he had known since her childhood and who was now studying with his old friend, Roger Ascham. When Elizabeth came to the throne in November 1558, Cecil was called upon to serve her as he had served her brother. His service to Elizabeth was to be his longest and last and would leave a permanent mark on English history and culture. On 24 April 1559 Philip of Spain wrote to the Count of Feria, his ambassador to the English Court, urging him to frighten his erstwhile sister-in-law with the insecurity of her tenure on the English throne. His purpose was to force her to leave the religious settlement of Mary intact, agree to marry one of Philip’s German cousins and accept his (Philip’s) protection. The tone of the letter is peremptory and bullying, as if Philip believed that the young queen could be browbeaten by the threat to have the Pope declare her a bastard and so ineligible to rule. Five days later, Feria reported on a most unsatisfactory interview he had had with the queen, during which she seems to have set out to bait him deliberately, saying she intended to adopt the Augsburg Confession and then, withdrawing the suggestion, telling him she did not want to argue about religion. Feria pressed his case: I told her neither did I, but desired to know what religion it was that she wanted to maintain [. . .] I was terrified to see that whereas the other princes were laying down their arms in order to cope with heresy, she with her kingdom tranquil and catholic, was doing her best to destroy religion; and besides this that she wanted to revoke the good and holy laws that God, your Majesty and the late Queen had enacted here. If for no other reason than the great obligations she owed to your Majesty she should reconsider this matter. The queen continued to be equivocal about religion but Feria reports her to have said ‘that she wished to punish severely certain persons who had represented some comedies in which your Majesty was taken off ’. As he reports this to Philip, Feria makes the side comment, ‘I knew that a member of her Council had given the arguments to construct these comedies, which is true for Cecil gave them, as indeed she partly admitted to me.’30 This is the context from which we glean the information that Cecil interested himself in dramatic presentations at this early stage in the reign. This conversation took place after Elizabeth’s first ‘proclamation against plays’ on 7 April 1559 but before the second one dated 16 May 1559.31 The second proclamation requires all plays to be licensed (as Mary had required) but also requires that no plays be played ‘wherin either matters of religion or of the governance of the estate of the common weale shall be handled or treated’. Scholars have frequently taken this as a prohibition against all use drama as propaganda. But there is a qualifying clause that follows the apparent blanket prohibition: ‘beyng no meete matters be wrytten or treated vpon, but by menne of aucthoritie, learning, and wisdome, nor to be

236 Suppression and change

handled before any audience but of graue and discreete persons’.32 Given the pressure being applied by Philip and the sense of insecurity such international meddling must have created in the new government, this proclamation can be seen (as earlier such proclamations can be) as directed at unauthorized plays not at plays sanctioned by the ‘menne of aucthoritie, learning and wisdome’ who constituted the Privy Council and their agents in the counties, cities and towns of England. Far from prohibiting plays as propaganda, the proclamation sanctions them as instruments to be used by those in power to extend their interests. Scholars now accept that Thomas Cromwell used plays as instruments of public policy. However, we have been slow to recognize that this use of plays to influence public opinion did not stop with his death. Two problems have prevented us from understanding the situation. The first is the relative paucity of texts that can be assigned to this period and the state in which these texts have been preserved. Such plays as Nice Wanton, Lusty Juventus,The Virtuous and Godly Susannah and The Patient and Meek Grissill, presumed to have been performed during Edward’s reign, were not printed until after the accession of Elizabeth.33 Some of their epilogues have been altered to suit the new reign and we have no way of knowing what else has been changed. Play texts are notoriously unstable. We now know from the evidence of the Protestant divine, Christopher Goodman, that the performance of the Chester Plays in 1572 differed in significant ways from any of the manuscripts that have survived.34 Letters from Goodman to Henry Hastings, earl of Huntingdon, Lord President of the North, protesting the performance in 1572 quote passages from the Last Supper play that maintain the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence. This example and others should alert us to the ephemeral nature of performance. Hamlet altered the plot of the Murder of Gonzago to suit his purposes. We must not presume that the plays as they have come down to us are what every audience saw. We do know that the general tone of court performances during Edward’s reign was anti-Catholic and anti-papal, but we do not have the texts of these revels.35 The second problem that has hampered our understanding of the phenomenon of political drama has been any clarity about the playing conditions under which the plays were performed. Lacking texts that are stable enough to be satisfactorily analysed and any clear sense of how, where, and to whom they were performed, scholars of the drama have tended to ignore what is emerging as a crucial chapter in the transition of English vernacular drama from the pedagogical tool of the late Middle Ages to the entertainment industry of the last quarter of the sixteenth century. However, over the last few decades the work of Records of Early English Drama (REED) has been filling in the picture of the playing conditions for these plays.They were performed not just in London, but all over the countryside by patronized companies. Recently REED has provided an important new research tool that allows us to trace the companies on the road in any given year and analyse their provenance. The Patrons and Performances Web Site allows us, for the first time, to have access to all the relevant data in a form that allows scholars to posit hypotheses and then test them against the data.36

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With Feria’s assertion that Cecil was following Cromwell’s policy of using drama as propaganda in mind, I formed that hypothesis that there might be a corelationship between the privy Counsellors and the patrons of the companies on the road in the mid century. I therefore divided the twenty-eight years of the mid sixteenth century into five periods: 1535–41, the years of Cromwell’s ascendancy; 1541–47, the years of conservative reaction under Henry VIII; 1547–53, the reign of Edward VI; 1553–8, the reign of Mary and 1558–63, the first five years of the reign of Elizabeth. I used only the entries that used the terms ‘players’, ‘interluders’, ‘gameplayers’, or ‘performers’ leaving out the records concerning minstrels, bearwards, jugglers, and trumpeters. Using, in the main (though not exclusively), the database and the more recent REED volumes not yet entered into the database,37 I extrapolated whose players had been on the road during these periods and then discovered the relationship of each of the patrons to the government of the day. The results38 are illuminating and emphasize how, especially under Cromwell, Edward VI, and the early years of Elizabeth, the travelling companies were clearly instruments of public policy ensuring, as Seymour’s proclamation of 1549 had decreed, that the companies were sponsored almost exclusively by the crown itself or by the privy Counsellors of the reigning monarch. In the period 1535–41, 88% of the players travelling were patronized by the monarch, his family, or his Privy Council. In the period 1541–47 there is a marked decline in the number of players of the king on the road39 but 89% of the total number of recorded payments are to companies patronized by the crown and the Privy Counsellors. During Edward’s reign (perhaps because of the ‘troublous times’) there is a further decline in the number of references, but the percentage of the recorded payments to companies patronized by the Crown and the Counsellors declines slightly to 85%.Touring falls off even more drastically during Mary’s reign and if we simply count the royal troupes and those of the Privy Council the percentage falls to 68%. However, if we include the performances of the troupe of John de Vere, sixteenth earl of Oxford, whom Mary had restored to his position as the hereditary Great Chamberlain of England in 1555, among the companies patronized by the crown or Counsellors, the percentage of ‘government’ patronage returns to 85%. In the first five years of Elizabeth’s reign, the number of performances rises dramatically to almost the number in the period of Cromwell’s dominance and, if we again include Oxford’s players, the percentage of ‘government sponsored’ troupes is 82%. If we exclude the reign of Mary from our calculations, when Cecil and his circle had no influence, 85% of all players under the last years of Henry, Edward, and the first five years of Elizabeth were ‘government sponsored’. This analysis makes sense of the wording of the second major proclamation concerning playing promulgated by Warwick in Edward’s name on April 1551. Having first limited the freedom of the printing presses, the proclamation continues: Nor that any common players or other persons, vpon like paines, to play in thenglish tong, any maner of Enterlude, play or mattre, without they haue

238 Suppression and change

special licence to shew for the same in writing vnder his maiesties signe or signed by. vi. of his highness priuie counsaill: willing and straightly charging and commaunding al Justices, Mayors, Shirifes, Bailifes, Constables, & other officers and ministers, diligently to enquire for, and serche out al maner offendors within the limites and compasse of their commissions.40 In this proclamation we see plays being controlled not by minor functionaries, but by the Privy Counsellors themselves, the Edwardian equivalent of the ‘menne of aucthoritie, learning, and wisdome’ in Elizabeth’s proclamation of May 1559 – men who, themselves, reign by reign, lent their names to the companies of players who performed all over the country. Not all Privy Counsellors were patrons but many were, and in some cases the widows of Counsellors maintained their husbands’ companies. The most important and influential female patron is Catherine, dowager duchess of Suffolk and close friend of Cecil, who continued the activities of the company of her husband Charles Brandon, president of Henry’s council, well into Elizabeth’s reign with the obvious hiatus of the reign of Mary. The players of Queen Catherine Parr toured at the end of Henry’s reign and those of her brother William, marquis of Northampton, Counsellor to both Edward and Elizabeth toured during those reigns.The major patron in the early years of Edward’s reign was the Lord Protector himself with eighteen appearances before his death in 1551, while Northumberland’s players appear only after he has gained power. His sons, both members of Elizabeth’s first council, had immensely active companies. Robert Dudley’s company, that was to become Leicester’s Men, is recorded thirty-five times in the period from 1558 to 1563 while Ambrose Dudley’s players appear twenty times in the same period. The as yet unanswered puzzle of the last years of Henry’s reign is who controlled ‘the prince’s players’, who begin to tour almost from the moment of Edward’s birth and appear fifty-five times between 1535 and 1547. The evidence being gathered by REED about the travelling companies comes, almost entirely, in the mid-sixteenth century, from official town records. When a company sought the permission of the local authorities to perform in their jurisdiction, the town councils, acting on the repeated injunctions from the crown to fulfill their role as censor, commanded and paid for a performance. The surviving financial records, therefore, provide the evidence for authorized performances. Companies not patronized by the gentry or nobility rarely appear in the records of the mid-sixteenth century. The payments to players (as opposed to musicians) from neighbouring towns and parishes so frequent in the records up to the mid-1530s have virtually disappeared in this period especially from the records of the south and east. The proclamations against ‘rogues and vagabonds’ and ‘common players’ in this period are not against these patronized companies but the unauthorized, uncensored entertainers whose nature and repertoire we have no way of knowing and whose presence is rarely found in surviving records.

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But the period we have been analyzing – the 28 years from the break from Rome through the promulgation of the ‘Elizabethan Settlement’ – was a unique period in the history of English drama. It seems apparent that what was started by the humanist propagandists under Cromwell survived his fall and re-emerged through the reign of Edward and once again in the early years of Elizabeth. This seems to have been drama of persuasion carrying the message of the Protestant cause, sometimes stridently, sometimes less so. The seeming prohibitions against playing and against debating matters of government and religion on stage can be read, as we have seen, as prohibitions against the unauthorized, independent entertainers not against the plays performed by troupes patronized by Privy Counsellors and sanctioned and paid for by local authorities. We have the duke of Feria’s word that Cecil was behind this policy. What we know about his education, his circles of friendship and marriage, and his intellectual and religious affinity makes this plausible. From his university days he had been accustomed to seeing plays that were powerful polemics in the Protestant cause. He was a close associate of Richard Morison who had enunciated the theory that vernacular plays should be used for the inculcating of Protestant principles in the general population. He counted many playwrights among his friends and one of his most powerful patrons, the duchess of Suffolk, was also a major patron of drama. Someone had to be organizing the campaign from inside the government. In the last years of Edward’s reign and in the early years of Elizabeth’s, Cecil was in the key position to do so. Who kept the idea alive from the death of Cromwell until Cecil became a Privy Counsellor is harder to tell. What seems likely is that the machinery existed when he took office, and Cecil found it a congenial policy to continue. Richard Morison had coupled the use of drama for Protestant purposes with the suppression of the Catholic drama. This happened in most parishes and smaller cities quietly during the last years of Henry’s reign.41 But the performance of the large civic religious plays in the north continued with some alterations well in to the reign of Elizabeth. It was not until Elizabeth and her chief secretary felt themselves secure after the defeat of the Northern Earls in 1568 that a concerted campaign was mounted to suppress the biblical drama performed in York and Chester. The active agent for that suppression was another Cambridge humanist, Matthew Hutton, supported by his patron and Cecil’s old acquaintance Edmund Grindal, newly appointed archbishop of York, and a nobleman Cecil had first met when he was a boy in the household of Queen Catherine Parr, Henry Hastings, earl of Huntingdon, the newly appointed Lord President of the North.42 When that mission was accomplished by the mid 1570s the scene was set for a radical change in the nature of vernacular drama in England with the opening of the first public theatres in London and the beginning of the Elizabethan entertainment industry whose nature was quite unlike the drama of persuasion that it replaced.

240 Suppression and change

Appendix 1 The patrons of travelling companies

1) Recorded payments to companies with Royal Patrons 1535–41 1541–47 1547–53 1553–58 1558–63 Total # of Patrons Henry VIII Prince Edward VI Mary Phillip and Mary Phillip Elizabeth Anne Boleyn Jane Seymour Catherine Parr Duke of Richmond (Fitzroy)

40 24

7 31

1 2

67

23

6 1

2

45

25

1 16 3 4

24

44

44

47 55 24 16 3 4 44 1 2 8 1 205

11

2) Recorded payments to companies with patrons who were Privy Counsellors (H=Henry; Ed=Edward; M=Mary; E=Elizabeth) 1535–41 1541–47 1547–53 1553–58 1558–63 Total # of Patrons Thomas, Lord Audley, Lord Chancellor d. 1544 H Lady Elizabeth Audley Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, President of the Council d. 1545 H Catherine (neé Willoughby) Duchess of Suffolk Sir Thomas Cheyne, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports d. 1558 H, Ed, M

5

5

1 5

2

3 12

1

15

7

5

13

21 27

1535–41 1541–47 1547–53 1553–58 1558–63 Total # of Patrons Thomas Cromwell, earl of Essex d. 1540 H Thomas Howard, 3rd duke of Norfolk, Lord Treasurer d. 1554 H Robert Radcliffe, earl of Sussex, Lord Chamberlain d. 1542 H John Russell, 1st earl of Bedford d. 1555 H, Ed Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford H, duke of Somerset and Lord Protector d. 1551 Ed Edward Fiennes de Clinton, Lord Clinton Ed E Walter Devereux, earl of Hereford d. 1558 Ed John Dudley, earl of Warwick, duke of Northumberland Ed Henry Fitzalan, earl of Arundel Ed ME Henry Grey, earl of Dorset, duke of Suffolk Ed William Parr, marquis of Northampton Ed, E William Paulet, marquis of Winchester Ed ME Thomas Seymour, Lord Admiral d. 1549 Ed

7

7 1

1

5

2

7

3

7

1

5

15

18

19

1

1

1

1

5

5

2 3

5

2

2 3 5

11 3

8

1

1

5

5

(Continued)

242 Suppression and change (Continued) 1535–41 1541–47 1547–53 1553–58 1558–63 Total # of Patrons Thomas, Lord Wentworth Ed Thomas Wriosthesley, earl of Southampton H Ed John Bouchier, earl of Bath M Thomas Howard, 4th duke of Norfolk M,E Francis Russell, 2nd earl of Bedford M, E Edward Stanley, earl of Derby M E Lord Robert Dudley E Ambrose Dudley, earl of Warwick E

3

1

1

1

1

4

7 6

2

8

1

1

2

2

46

2

43

50

7

35

35

20

20

75

221

26

3) Recorded payments to companies with patrons who were not Privy Counsellors 1535–41 1541–47 1547–53 1553–58 1558–63 Total # of Patrons Henry Radcliffe, Lord Fitzwalter 6th earl of Sussex John de Vere, 16th earl of Oxford, Great Chamberlain of England after 1555 Henry Daubeney, earl of Bridgwater Arthur Plantagenet, 6th viscount Lisle, Deputy of Calais Sir Thomas Cornwall, Baron of Burford

2

7

1

1 9

3

1

11 23

32

4

4

4

3

3

1535–41 1541–47 1547–53 1553–58 1558–63 Total # of Patrons Henry Bouchier, 15th earl of Essex d. 1540 Henry Courtenay, marquis of Exeter d. 1539 Edward Grey, 4th lord Grey of Powis d. 1551 Henry Stafford, Lord Stafford William Tooke Mr Henings Sir John Brydges, 1st baron Chandos d. 1558 Sir Edward Bray, Constable of the Tower of London John Bray, 2nd baron Bray William Sheldon Sir Anthony Kingston William Windsor, earl of Windsor Sir Henry Parker William Stafford George Somerset William Somerset, earl of Worcester Henry Berkeley, 7th Lord Berkeley Henry le Scrope, Lord Scrope James Blount, Lord Mountjoy William Alley, baron of Exeter William Willoughby, Lord Willoughby of Parham The Fortescues: Sir Henry Sir Andrew Mr Mr Richard Sir Percival Harte

1

1

1

1

1

1

2

1 1 1

1

2

2

2 1 3

1 1 1

1

3

3

1 2

1 2

1

1

1 1 1

1 1

2

1 2 1 3

1

1

1

1 1

1

3

3

3

3

2 2 5 1 2

2 2 5 1 2 (Continued)

244 Suppression and change (Continued) 1535–41 1541–47 1547–53 1553–58 1558–63 Total # of Patrons Sir Ralph Hopton Lord Burgaynes George Talbot, 6th earl of Shrewsbury John Neville, Lord Latimer

Totals

1 1 1

1 1 1

3

3

16

11

13

14

54

108

35

129

99

88

45

173

534

72

Notes 1 The Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, n.s., I (1558–67), (London: HMSO, 1892), p. 62. Cited in David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 127. 2 Paul Whitfield White, Theatre and Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 58–9. 3 Unless otherwise noted, the personal details of the individuals discussed have been drawn from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (www.oxforddnb.com). 4 Cambridge, ed. by Alan H. Nelson, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), pp. 712. 5 Quoted in Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300 to 1600, vol. ii, pt 1, p. 329. 6 Ibid. 7 Five Sixteenth-Century Latin Plays, trans. by C.C. Love (Toronto: Amor Cristoferi Press, 1992); 8 REED: Cambridge, p. 981. 9 The correspondence appears in REED: Cambridge, pp. 133–41. 10 B.W. Beckingsale, Burghley:Tudor Statesman, 1520–1598 (London, 1967), p. 40. 11 White, Theatre and Reformation, p. 14. 12 James McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 234. 13 ODNB. 14 Oxford, ed. by John R Elliott, Jr., Alan H. Nelson, Alexandra F. Johnston and Diana Wyatt, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 823, 853. 15 Cited in White, p. 3 from the Acts and Monuments. 16 The Harleian Miscellany, I (London, 1808). The edition gives no date but Susan E. James gives the date of the work as 1547 (ODNB). The date of Cecil’s preface is not given, but it seems to have been commissioned by her brother William Parr, the marquis of Northampton (Beckingsale, Burghley, p. 73.) 17 Harleian Miscellany I, p. 288. 18 John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 290–6. 19 Ibid., p. 291. 20 Ibid., p. 109. 21 White, Theatre and Reformation, p. 57. 22 Raphael Holinshed, The Chronicle of England, Scotland and Ireland (London, 1808; reprint AMS, 1965), vol. iii, pp. 963–64.

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23 Collections XI (Records of Plays and Players in Norfolk and Suffolk), ed. by David Galloway and John Wasson, Malone Society (1980), pp. 128–9. 24 W.C. Hazlitt, The English Drama and Stage under the Tudor and Stuart Princes 1543–1664 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1963 (reprint)), pp. 8–9. See also Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. by Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, vol. 1, The Early Tudors (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 47–89. 25 26 Beckingsale, Burghley, p. 33. 27 Ibid., p. 34. 28 The Peaceable and Prosperous Regiment of Blessed Queene Elisabeth, ed. by Cyndia Susan Clegg, facsimile from Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587) (San Marino, CA: Huntingdon Library, 2005), section 13, p. 570 (original p. 1550). This quotation is in the context of a memorial for Sidney who died in 1586. 29 Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs: Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice and in other Libraries of Northern Italy, ed. by R.L. Brown (London: HMSO, 1884) vol. v, p. 347. 30 State Papers, Spanish, n.s., I (1558–67), pp. 59–62 31 The reference to the proclamation issued 7 April is in Holinshed ‘The same time also [7 April 1559] was another proclamation made vnder the queens hand in writing, inhibiting, that from thensforth no plaies nor interludes should be exercised, till Alhallollwes tide next insuing’ (vol. 4, p. 184). This seems strangely similar to the proclamation of Seymour in 1549 but without the same results. Touring continued apparently uninterrupted (see Appendix 1). 32 Hazlitt, The English Drama and Stage under the Tudor and Stuart Princes 1543–1664, p. 19–20. 33 A helpful list of the mid-century plays is provided by White, pp. 175–80. 34 David Mills, Recycling the Cycle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 146–51 see also Cheshire including Chester, ed. by Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence M. Clopper, and David Mills, 2 vols, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 143–48. 35 Suzanne Westfall, ‘The Boy Who Would be King: Court Revels of King Edward VI, 1547–53’, Comparative Drama 35 (2001), pp. 271–90. 36 37 Sussex, ed. by Cameron Lewis, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto, 2000); Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, ed. by James Gibson, 3 vols, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); REED: Oxford; John Coldewey, ‘Early Essex Drama: A History of Its Rise and Fall, and a Theory Concerning the Digby Plays’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Colorado, 1972); Malone Society, Collection XI; J.T. Murray, English Dramatic Companies 1558–1642, 2 vols, (London; Constable, 1910). 38 See Appendix 1. 39 Only seven payments are to ‘players’ out of the total of sixty payments to other entertainers such as his minstrels, jester, bearwards, and trumpeters. 40 Hazlitt, The English Drama and Stage under the Tudor and Stuart Princes 1543–1664, pp. 9–10, 13–4. 41 Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘English Community Drama in Crisis: 1535–80,’ in Drama and Community, ed. by Alan Hindley (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), pp. 248–69. 42 Johnston, ‘Community’; ‘The City as Patron,’ in Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, ed. by Paul Whitfield White and Suzanne Westfall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), see above, pp. 224–45.

4

Theory/theology

4.1 ‘The word made flesh’: Augustinian elements in the York Cycle From: The Centre and Its Compass: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor John Leyerle, Robert Taylor et al., eds., Studies in Medieval Culture 33 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), 225–46 One of the most remarkable episodes in late medieval English biblical drama is the episode of the ‘Trial before Herod’ in the York Cycle.1 For 424 gruelling lines, Christ stands silent as his tormentors shriek at him in English, French, and Latin demanding that he prophesy for them to provide sport for the king. Here the Christ figure is not only a sheep that is dumb before his shearers, the willing sacrifice, the central icon in a series of devotional images, he is also the incarnate Word, the logos, here wordless in the act of atonement.2 The effect is not accidental. Each of the long trial plays that has preceded this one has turned on the question of words – what Christ has said or taught that might impinge on the power of his judges. He has been tormented before and asked to prophesy, to use words with power, but has refused. Throughout the Passion sequence, the playwrights have exploited the familiar Augustinian conception of the paradox of the Incarnation: Verbum Patris per quod facta sunt tempora, caro factum, Natalem suum nobis fecit in tempore [. . .] Ipse apud Patrem praecedit cuncta spatia saeculorum, ipse de matre in hac die cursibus se ingessit annorum. Homo factus, hominis factor: ut sugeret ubera, regens sidera; ut esuriret panis, ut sitiret fons, dormiret lux, ab itinere via fatigaretur, falsis tesitbus veritas accusaretur, judex vivorum et mortuorum a judice mortali judicaretur, ab injustis justitia damnaretur, flagellis disciplina caederetur, spinis botrus coronaretur, in ligno fundamentum suspenderetur, virtus infirmaretur, salus vulneraretur, vita moreretur. (The Word of the Father, by whom all the cycles of time were made, when He was made flesh, caused the day of His birth to take place in time [. . .] With the Father he precedes all the ages of the world, by the Mother He set Himself on this day in the courses of the years. The Maker

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of Man was made man that the Ruler of the stars might suck at the breast; that the Bread might be hungered; the Fountain, thirst; the Light, sleep; the Way, be wearied on the journey; the Truth, be accused by false witnesses; the Judge of the living and the dead, be judge by a mortal judge; the Chastener, be chastised with whips; the Vine, be crowned with thorns; the Foundation, be hung upon the tree; strength, be made weak; Health, be wounded; Life, die.)3 The York Cycle is a remarkable work of art that retains, despite the many hands that must have helped to shape it, a high level of theological and poetic sophistication.4 York, in the late Middle Ages, was still the major city of the north. It was a centre both of commerce and of learning and the great civic play that was produced by the city council annually for almost two hundred years (c. 1376–1569) served to demonstrate both aspects of the life of the city.5 As the ecclesiastical centre of northern England, the city boasted not only the Minster but monasteries, friaries, schools, hospitals, and other religious foundations. Some measure of the resources available to the playwrights can be deduced from the library list that survives from the late fourteenth century (about the time that the plays were being conceived) from the Augustinian friary.6 The library contained 646 volumes of scripture, the Fathers, and other texts from late antiquity, including most of the works of St Augustine and Boethius as well as the works of the scholastic theologians, the spiritual writings of such men as St Francis and St Bernard and books of grammar, rhetoric, medicine and science. That library alone contained most of the seminal writings that informed the thinking of the period, and it was only one of many in York.7 Those who wrote the plays and those who saw them had access to a sophisticated body of material. It should not surprise us to find subtle allusions and learned interpretations in these plays. Of all the English drama of this period, the York Cycle is the most verbal. Richard Collier in his study of the poetics of the play remarked that the dramatists paid ‘perhaps their greatest attention to the words’.8 This preoccupation of the playwrights with words and the patterns of sound that they make can be traced to two important elements of the thought of St Augustine – his preoccupation with the paradox of the incarnate Word and his theory of language as signs. The York playwrights, more than any other English dramatists, emphasize the paradox of the creator who was made in time. The cycle begins with the God’s great statement: Ego sum Alpha et O: vita, via, veritas, primus et nouissimus. I am gracyus and grete, God withoutyn begynnyng, I am maker vnmade, all mighte es in me; I am lyfe and way vnto welth-wynnyng. I am formaste and fyrste, als I byd sall it be. (I, 1–4)

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The scriptural statements which he then paraphrases are taken from Revelation 1. 8, John 14. 6, and Isaiah 41. 4. The citation from John is unique to this cycle. Although the other creation sequences begin with some form of Trinitarian statement, only York takes this particular phrase from the chapter from John that is so closely associated with orthodox Christology. By adding this attribute to the speech of Deus at the moment of creation, the figure of Deus becomes ‘Verbum apud Patrem, per quod facta sunt omnia (the Word with the Father, through whom all things were made)’.9 The creative power of the Word is picked up again by the angel who opens the play of the ‘Sacrifice of Abel’ remarks that the ‘lord of lyffe’ has ‘wroughte þis worlde with worde’ (VII, 1 and 4). Christ as creator is emphasized by Mary as she adores her newborn son as he ‘thurgh whos myht/All þis worlde was first begonne’ (XIV, 61–62), and when he is greeted at the Entry to Jerusalem as ‘sege þat schoppe boþe even and morne’ (XXV, 512). In a commentary on John 14. 6, Augustine wrote: Ego sum via, et veritas et vita. Veritatem et vitam omnis homo cupit: sed viam non omnis homo invenit. Deum esse quamdam vitam aeternum immutabilem, intelligibilem, intelligentem, sapientem, sapientes facientem, nonnulli etiam hujus seculi philosophi viderunt.Veritatem fixam, stabilem, indeclinabilem, ubi sunt omnes rationes rerum omnium creatarum, viderunt quidem, sed de longinquo; viderunt, sed in errore positi: et ideireo ad eam tam magnam et ineffabilem et beatificam possessionem [. . .] Christus autem, quia ipse est apud Patrem veritas et vita [. . .] et non habebamus qua iremus ad veritatem; Filius Dei qui semper in Patre veritas et vita est, assumendo hominem factus est via. Ambula per hominem, et pervenis ad Deum. Per ipsum vadis, ad ipsum vadis. Noli quaerere qua illum venias, praeter ipsum. Si enim via esse ipse noluisset, semper erraremus. Factus ergo via est qua venias. Non tibi dico, quaere viam. Ipsa via ad te venit: surge et ambula. (‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life’ (John 14. 6). Truth and life doth every man desire, but the way is not found by every man. That God is a certain Life eternal, immutable, intelligible, intelligent, wise, and making wise, some philosophers even of this world have seen.The fixed, settled unwavering truth, wherein are all the governing principles of all created things, they saw indeed, but afar off. They saw, but amid the error in which they were placed, and hence they did not find the way to attain to that so great and ineffable and beatific possession [. . .] But Christ, in that He is with the Father the truth and the life [. . .] and we had no way by which to go to the truth as the Son of God, who in the Father is ever the truth and the life by assuming man’s nature became the way. Walk by Him the Man, and thou comest to God. By Him thou goest, to Him thou goest. Look not for any way except Himself by which to come to Him. For if He had not vouchsafed to be the way, we should always have gone astray. Therefore He became the way by which thou shouldest come. I do not say to thee, seek the way. The way itself is come to thee; arise and walk.)10

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The York playwrights conceived their Christ much in these terms. More than the other English collections, this cycle emphasises the Ministry episodes.11 This Christ is not only a sacrifice for the sins of the world. He is, as Augustine’s gloss on John 14. 6 suggests, a companion along the way. He is a teacher, a gentle presence. He is, as he constantly reminds the audience a ‘mirror for men’. At the end of the ‘Temptation’, an angel rebukes him for not destroying Satan but he replies: For whan þe fende schall folke see And salus þam in sere degre, Þare myrroure may þei make of me For to stande still, For ouerecome schall þei noȝt be Bot yf þay will. (XXII, 193–98) This Christ is in no way remote from those he has come to save. The episode of the ‘Baptism’, for example, ends with his companionable invitation to John the Baptist: But wende we nowe Wher most is nede þe folke to wisse, Both I and þou. (XXI, 166–69) The York Christ is, indeed, the ‘Way, the Truth and the Life.’ The many connotations of the ‘word’ associated with Christ become a motif in the cycle from the episode of the ‘Sacrifice of Isaac’ onward. Isaac (here made a more perfect type of Christ by being portrayed as an adult) prays for forgiveness if he has sinned ‘In worde, in werke, or in any waye’ (X, 255). In the Baptism play, John tells us that in his preaching he urges man to be ‘clene haly/ In worde and werke [. . .]’ (XXI, 31–32). Later in that episode, the Word himself comes to John for Baptism saying ‘Fyrst schall I take, sen schall I preche’ (XXI, 134). From here until the Passion sequence begins Christ is, indeed, a preacher and teacher. Unlike the other cycles, there is no other expositor to explain the action. He himself explains the Baptism to John, exhorts men to follow his example in taking baptism, and chides the angel in the ‘Temptation’ for his oversimplification of sin. It is he who explains the mystery of the vision on the Mount of Transfiguration and tries to prepare his disciples for the Passion before the event. He is ‘the way’, ‘the mirror’, the example for all men to follow or, as he is called at the Entry, the ‘texte of trewþe’ (XXV, 534). The York playwrights, then, consciously exploited the concept of the logos in their portrayal of Christ. But their interest in ‘the Word’ went beyond Christology. Eugene Vance writes, ‘Medieval linguistic theory begins at the top with speculation about the logos, with its presentation to the soul, and finally, with the external phonetic and textual dimensions of language which are the lowest

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ontological stratum of the Word.’12 The preoccupation of the York Cycle with the logos is central to the didactic purpose of the cycle. Basic to the poetics of the cycle ‘the textual dimensions of language’, however, is a dramaturgical principle shared by all medieval drama that can be traced in large measure to Augustine’s sign theory. This theory, enunciated most clearly in the opening section of Book 2 of De doctrina christiana, argues for the pre-eminence of language as sign and again and again he connects this idea with Christ as the Incarnate Word. In Sermon XXVIII, he wrote, ‘Ecce enim Verbum Dei Deus apud Deum, sapientia Dei manens incommutabiliter apud Patrem, ac procederet ad nos, carnem quasi sonum quaesivit [. . .]’ (For behold, the Word of God, God with God, the Wisdom of God, abiding immutably with the Father, that He might go forth to us, sought flesh to be as it were the sound [. . .])13 Sound and, then, music and words take on theological significance in themselves. At the same time, silence, also has significance. Because sound is associated with time (as Augustine says, ‘quia verberato aere statim transeunt, nec diutius manent quam sonant’ (words pass away as soon as they strike upon the air and last no longer than their sound)’, sound, as we know it, is of this world. If man seeks truly to become one with God, then he will seek tranquility, peace, silence.14 As Vance has expressed it, ‘the very act of speaking our thought is an expenditure in time that, once apprehended, dialectically demands a movement of transcendence, through degrees of silence, to immediate union of the soul with God as timeless, indivisible immobile One’.15 The Christ in the Trial before Herod, then, is the silent Word, manifesting two characteristics of the Trinity. As the logos, he here refuses to be drawn into the parodic game of prophesy for entertainment but he also stands as the ‘immobile One’, the still silent centre of the stage action that swirls around him. That God is immutable and unchanging at the centre of a harmonious universe is a common-place philosophical idea. In his early work, De musica, Augustine sought to find God through harmony: Non ergo invideamus inferioribus quam nos sumus, nosque ipsos inter illa quae infra nos sunt, et illa quae supra nos sunt, ita Deo et Domino nostro opitulante ordinemus, ut inferioribus non offendamur, solis autem superioribus delectemur. Delectatio quippe quasi pondus est animae. Delectatio ergo ordinat animam. Ubi enim erat thesaurus tuus, ibi erit et cor tuum (Matth. vi, 21): ubi delectatio, ibi thesaurus: ubi autem cor, ibi beatitudo aut miseria. Quae vero superiora sunt, nisi illa in quibus summa, inconcussa, incommutabilis, aeterna manet aequalitas? Ubi nullum est tempus, quia nulla mutabilitas est; et unde tempora fabricantur et ordinantur et modificandtur aeternitatem imitantia, dum coeli conversio ad idem redit, et coelestia corpora ad idem revocat, diebusque et mensibus et annis et lustris, caeterisque siderum orbibus, legibus aequalitatis et unitatis et ordinationis obtemperat. Ita coelestibus terrena subjecta, orbes temporum suorum numerosa successione quasi carmini universitatis associant.

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(Let us not, then, be envious of things inferior to ourselves, and let us, our Lord and God helping, order ourselves between those below us and those above us, so we are not troubled by lower, and take delight only in higher things. For delight is a kind of weight in the soul. Therefore, delight orders the soul. ‘For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’ (Matthew 6. 21). Where delight, there the treasure; where the heart, there happiness or misery. But what are the higher things, if not those where the highest unchangeable undisturbed and eternal equality resides? Where there is no time because there is no change, and from where times are made and ordered and changed, imitating eternity as they do when the turn of the heavens comes back to the same state, and the heavenly bodies to the same place, and in days and months and years and centuries and other revolutions of the stars obey the laws of equality, unity and order. So terrestrial things are subject to celestial, and their time circuits join together in harmonious succession for a poem of the universe.)16 Here Augustine is simply adapting the common Platonic/Pythagorean notion of cosmic music. Boethius later elaborated on this theory in his De institutione musica. God is the point of stability. Man is mutable, under the watchful eye of the immutable God. As Boethius puts it in The Consolation of Philosophy, ‘The generation of all things, and the whole course of mutable natures and of whatever is in any way subject to change, take their causes, order and forms from the unchanging mind of God.’17 Whether, as Augustine implies in the passage from De musica, he is at the top of a descending scale or at the centre of concentric circles, the farther away one moves from God the less stable one becomes. This is, of course, related to sin and control of the bodily appetites. By implication, therefore, good is stable, tranquil, harmonious and evil is unstable, restless and dissonant. Augustine expresses this notion clearly when he describes the citizens of the City of God as ‘tranquillus’ and those of the City of Man as ‘turbulentus’.18 Although Augustine rejected the idea that matter was inherently evil, arguing against the Manichees that nothing created by God is evil, by the time he came to write his commentary on the fall (De Genesis ad litteram libri duodecim) ‘the legend of Lucifer’s premundane rebellion and downfall was [. . .] firmly established in the body of Christian doctrine’.19 In Augustine’s hands the many often contradictory interpretations of the story of the fall ‘were welded together in a firm and systematic pattern which was to dominate the Church’s thinking on the subject for the next thirteen centuries and longer’.20 The idea of good as static and evil as active seems to have become attached to the concept of ‘the evil one’ through the Book of Job. When God asks Satan where he has come from in the prose prologue to the book, Satan replies, ‘From going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it.’21 This passage is used in the episode of the ‘Harrowing of Hell’ in the York Cycle. During his debate with Christ, Satan thinks he is being given leave to seek out more souls and cries that he ‘schall walke este and weste’ (XXXVII, 333).

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The depiction of frenetic activity by the wicked in contrast to the calm stillness of good is everywhere in western European art and literature in the later Middle Ages. It provided for the English playwrights an underlying theological principle around which to build their dramaturgy. When the Coventry Herod ‘ragis in the pagond and in the strete also’,22 he is manifesting this principle as are the demons in the Towneley ‘Last Judgement’ as they urge each other to ‘faste take oure rentals’ as they hurry ‘vp watlyn strete’ in response to the trumpet call of Judgement.23 Nor is this principle confined to biblical drama. In The Castle of Perseverance the Bad Angel urges Humanum Genus to become one with the World. Humanum Genus excitedly cries that he will ‘wyth pe Werld [. . .] go play’, to be admonished by the Good Angel, A, nay, man for Cristys blod, Cum agayn, be strete and style.24 In the York Cycle, the principle is manifested not only in the action but also in the complex patterns of sounds in the verse and the music. The York Cycle not only teaches the story of salvation history it also celebrates that history. The sense of celebration is conveyed by the constant use of liturgical music.25 The playwrights knew when to use words and when to use the familiar harmonies of the church. In every other English dramatic version of the Resurrection, for example, the playwrights give the risen Christ a sermon. The York Christ rises from the dead in silence as the familiar ‘Jesus resurgente’ is sung (XXXVIII, 186). Here the event at the heart of the Christian faith is acted out as the silent Word rises to the triumphal assurance of this hymn of praise. In each appropriate place, the familiar songs of the church are sung, punctuating the action with liturgical harmony to offset the seeming triumph of evil. The ‘Te deum’ and the ‘Sanctus’ are sung by the nine orders of angels at their creation (I, 24; 41); ‘Cantate Domino’ (Psalm 96) at the end of the play of the ‘Exodus’ (XII, 407); ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’ three times: at the ‘Baptism of Christ’ (XXI, 154), the ‘Temptation’ (XXII, 91), and ‘Pentecost’ (XLIII, 97); ‘Laus tibi cum gloria’ at the ‘Harrowing of Hell’ (XXXVII, 408); and ‘Ascendo ad patrem meum’ at the ‘Ascension’ (XLII, 177). Two settings of the three hymns sung in the play of the ‘Assumption of the Virgin’ (‘Surge Proxima mea’, ‘Veni de Libano’, and ‘Veni electa’) are provided in the manuscript.26 At the ‘Annunciation’ Gabriel sings ‘Ne timeas’ (XII, 153) and when she visits Elizabeth Mary sings the Magnificat (XII, 241). There is a lacuna in the manuscript at the appropriate point in the ‘Annunciation to the Shepherds’ but the Gloria was apparently sung as the text resumes with the shepherds attempting to imitate the harmony of the angelic choir (XV, 60–71). The cycle ends with the stage direction ‘Et sic facit finem, cum melodia angelorum transiens a loco ad locum’ (XLVII, 381). An appropriate ending would have been to repeat the great hymn of praise, the Te deum, with which the day had begun.

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Similarly, the cycle is full of ritualistic poetic passages that build up a sense of a community of faith sharing in a litany of praise to the Word incarnate. Mary speaks the first lyric as she places the baby (just born in full sight of the audience) in the manger: Hayle my lord God, hayle prince of pees, Hayle my fadir, and hayle my sone; Hayle souereyne sege all synnes to sesse, Hayle God and man in erth to wonne. Hayle, thurgh whos myht All þis worlde was first begonne, Merknes and light. (XIV, 57–63) Joseph, too, kneels before the child: Hayle my maker, hayle Crist Jesu, Hayle riall kyng, roote of all right, Hayle saueour. Hayle my lorde, lemer of light, Hayle blessid floure. (XIV, 108–12) Each of the three kings speaks a stanza of praise as he presents his gift (XVI, 309–44) and, although this play was registered almost a century after the rest of the cycle, Simeon in the ‘Purification in the Temple’ has a similar litany of praise (XVII, 354–73).27 The excitement of the ‘Entry into Jerusalem’ builds to a climax with eight stanzas of praise spoken by the eight burgesses (XXV, 489–544) before the final stage direction of ‘Tunc cantant’ (XXV, 545). These verbal canticles of praise spoken by the godly, however, are viciously parodied in the ‘Second Trial before Pilate’ when Christ is dressed in royal robes: I Miles

III Miles IV Miles

Aue, riall roy and rex judeorum, Hayll, comely kyng þat no kyngdom has kende. Hayll vndughty duke, þi dedis ere dom, Hayll, man vnmyghty þi menȝé to mende. Hayll, lord without lande for to lende, Hayll kyng, hayll knave vnconand. Hayll, freyke without forse þe to fende, Hayll strang, þat may not wele stand To stryve. (XXXIII, 408–16)

The calm dignity of the high style spoken in genuine praise is here brutally twisted and reinforced with plosive alliteration that descends to derisive laughter as Christ staggers under the weight of the mockery.

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This verbal parody has been preceded by sixty-five lines of rapid stychomythia as the four soldiers dance around Christ with their scourges responding to Pilate’s injunction to Skelpe hym with scourges and with skathes hym scorne. Wrayste and wrynge hym to, for wo he be wepyng. (XXXIII, 337–38) The demonic dance has been emphasized throughout the trial sequence by the reiteration of the phrase ‘daunce forth in þe deuyll way’ (XXIX, 395; see also XXXI, 424) as the soldiers drag the passive Christ from one judge to the next as trial follows trial. Cain, the archetypal murderer, is the first to use this phrase in the cycle in his dispute with his brother Abel, the type of Christ (VII, 52).The frenetic activity of the torturers under the cover of the darkness of the night of Maundy Thursday is picked up by the more matter of fact crucifiers in the next episodes whose constant reference to the need to have the crucifixion over ‘be none’ (XXXV, 15 etc.) continues to place these events of eternal significance within the constraints of time. The busyness of the henchmen of the earthly powers at the crucifixion is an extension of the exuberant haste of those sent to capture Christ in the episode of the ‘Agony of the Garden’ who announce that they will ‘come forthe all faste’ (XXVIII, 186) and ‘go [. . .] hens þan in hy and haste vs to þe halle’ (XXVIII, 189). Herod’s henchmen at the ‘Slaughter of the Innocents’ are equally hurried (XIX) as are the doctors keen to capture the woman in the act of adultery.That episode opens with the lines: Steppe fourth, late vs no lenger stande, But smertely þat oure gere wer grayde; Þis felowe þat we with folye fande, Late haste vs fast þat she wer flayed. (XXIV, 1–4) The York playwrights commanded a rich tradition in poetry. In their hands, the lines themselves are signs of the state of grace of the speaker. The two prologues to the Magi play clearly demonstrate this aspect of the poetics of the cycle.28 The Masons’ Pageant gives the prologue to Herod: The clowdes clapped in clerenes þat þer clematis inclosis – Jubiter and Jouis, Martis and Mercurij emyde – Raykand ouere my rialté on rawe me reioyses, Blonderande þer blastis to blaw when I bidde. Saturne my subgett, þat sotilly is hidde, Listes at my likyng and laies hym full lowe. The rakke of þe rede skye full rappely I ridde, Thondres full thrallye by thousandes I thrawe When me likis.

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Venus his voice to me awe, Þat princes to play in hym pikis. (XVI, 1–11) Inflated in both sentiment and style, this speech emphasizes the folly of the king who thinks he, not God, commands the elements.The alliteration on ‘cl’ in line one and ‘bl’ in line four are particularly pretentious, forcing the actor to exaggerate his delivery and underline the ludicrous pride of the character. The Goldsmiths’ pageant, on the other hand, opens with the prayers of the three kings spoken in measured twelve-line stanzas. The third king ends his prayer after six lines, sees the other kings and turns to them in greeting.The first king finishes the stanza completing the rhyme of the third king: III Rex Lorde God þat all goode has bygonne And all may ende, both goode and euyll. That made for man both mone and sonne, And stedde yone sterne to stande stone stille, Tille I þe cause may clerly conne, God wisse me with his worthy wille. I hope I haue her felaws fonne My yarnyng faþfully to fullfille. Sirs, God yowe saffe and see, And were ȝow euere fro woo. I Rex Amen, so might it bee, And saffe yow sir, also. (XVI, 81–92) These are men of God attributing to him all the movements of the planets including the action of the star they are following. The contrast between them and Herod is imbedded in the lines themselves. The actors need only speak the lines as they are written and the prosody establishes their characters. The sharing of stanzas and the exchange of rhymes is a device that the playwrights frequently use to convey harmony and agreement between characters. One of the most charming examples of this technique comes at the end of the episode of ‘Joseph’s Troubles’ when Joseph, reassured of Mary’s virginity by the angel, returns to ask forgiveness: Joseph Saie Marie, wiffe, how fares þou? Maria Þe bettir sir, for yhou. Why stande yhe þare? Come nere. Joseph My bakke fayne wolde I bowe And aske forgifnesse nowe, Wiste I þou wolde me here. Maria Forgiffnesse sir? Late be, for shame, Slike wordis suld all gud women lakke. Joseph Yha, Marie, I am to blame For wordis lang-are I to þe spak. (XIII, 290–99)

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After this tender exchange, Joseph bustles about preparing for the journey to Bethlehem, his bitterness over his assumed betrayal forgotten. The depth of that bitterness is also conveyed through the verse. In the earlier scenes of this play, Mary has been rapt in the wonder of her pregnancy and failed to understand Joseph’s very human conviction that she has cuckolded him. To every demand to know the name of the father, she has replied with a variant on ‘Goddis and youres’ (XIII, 104). His insistence grows and as it does the lines themselves are broken and shared: Joseph Whose ist Marie? Maria Sir, Goddis and youres. Joseph Nay, nay, Now wate I wele I am begiled, (XIII, 103–04) And again: Joseph But who is þe fader? Telle me his name. Maria None but youreselfe. Joseph Late be, for shame. I did it neuer; þou dotist dame, by bukes and belles! Full sakles shulde I bere þis blame aftir þou telles, For I wrought neuere in worde nor dede Thyng þat shulde marre thy maydenhede, To touche me till. (XIII, 177–83) His agitation has momentarily upset his normal pious calm causing him to alliterate on plosives although he recovers his balance quickly. These metric variants have puzzled the editors of this text more concerned with metrical conformity than dramatic effect. Miss Toulmin Smith commenting on this speech of Joseph’s writes ‘this stanza seems to be irregular, unlike any other’.29 At a similar emotional moment in the play of ‘Abraham and Isaac’, as Abraham blesses the son he is about to sacrifice, Miss Smith leaves the irregular lines as they appear in the manuscript: Isaak, I take me leue for ay. My blissyng haue þou enterly, Me bus þe mys! And I beseke god all-myghty He giffe þe his. (Smith X, 230–34) Richard Beadle, on the other hand, amends the text and so blurs the effect: Isaak, I take my leue for ay – Me bus þe mys. My blissyng haue þou enterly,

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And I beseke God allmyghty He giffe þe his. (X, 230–34) Changed relationships and understanding are also conveyed by the stanzaic pattern. In the play of the appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalene, their dialogue up to the ‘Noli me tangere’ line (‘Negh me noght, my loue, latte be’ (XXXIX, 82)) has shared stanzas. After this rebuke, the two exchange complete stanzas of instruction and praise. Similarly, in the next episode of the ‘Road to Emmaus’, the pilgrims speak concatenated eight-line stanzas where part of the last line of each verse is repeated in the first line of the next conveying the heavy sense that they are locked in their despair as they re-tell the story of the Crucifixion. Not even the appearance of Christ changes the verse until he breaks the bread and vanishes. Then, after some lines of metric confusion expressing the confusion of the pilgrims at the disappearance of their companion, the stanzas change to quatrains. Although the verses are still linked, the shorter length conveys the impression not of despair but of excitement as the speeches of the pilgrim seem to tumble over one another in their eagerness to tell the other disciples. In this cycle, there are plays and parts of plays written in four, eight, eleven, twelve and fourteen-line stanzas that are both syllabic and alliterative in style. There are also six, seven and ten-line stanzas that are only syllabic and nine and thirteen line stanzas that are only alliterative.30 This bewildering array of verse forms has traditionally been seen to be evidence of different hands at work and at least three ‘levels of composition’ over the years between the inception of the cycle sometime in the last quarter of the fourteenth century and the creation of the manuscript as we have it approximately one hundred years later.31 There is no doubt that the variations in style do reflect changes in the text. For example, we know that a major revision of the passion sequence took place in the early 1430s.32 The working ‘check-list’ of the pageants, the Ordo paginarum preserved in the civic memorandum book, was compiled in 1415 but was carefully annotated during the life of the cycle to indicate changes of text and ownership.33 This undeniable fluidity of the text has obscured the fact that the playwrights seem to have deliberately used the many verse forms available to them in the northern tradition to build characters and relationships and, above all, establish the state of grace of a character through the verse form. Augustine argued that ‘Signum est [. . .] res, praeter speciem quam ingerit sensibus, aliud aliquid ex se faciens in cogitationem venire [. . .]’ (a sign is a thing which, over and above the impression it makes on the senses, causes something else to come into the mind as a consequence of itself [. . .]).34 The poetry of the York Cycle is profoundly sensuous in the richness of its language and form but this very sensuousness, true to Augustinian doctrine, points the listener to moral significance beyond the words themselves. The language is more than just the conveyance of the meaning of the words. Its order within its prosodic structure also conveys meaning. This fact and the frequent verbal echoes backward and

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forward over the sequence of episodes argues, in the face of all common sense, a guiding intelligence over the course of several generations of revisions that was influenced not just by the theology of Augustine but by his theories about language. Who or what that intelligence was we have yet to discover. What is clear is that what has been preserved in the York register is not the work of clumsy versifiers but that of consciously sophisticated poets using their skill ‘in honour and reverence of our Lord Jesus Christ’ – the Word made flesh.35

Notes 1 The York Cycle is preserved in a single manuscript (London, British Library MS Add. 35290) that was the city ‘register’ or official copy of the plays. The cycle was first edited in York Plays, ed.by Lucy Toulmin Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885). The most recent edition is The York Plays, ed. by Richard Beadle (London: Arnold, 1982). All quotations from the cycle are from Beadle’s text, cited by play number and line number(s). 2 Isaiah 53. 7; Acts 8. 32. 3 Augustine, Sermones CXCI, i, 1 in Patrilogia Latina, ed. by J.P. Migne and others, vol. xxxviii, col. 1009–10; translation from An Augustine Synthesis, trans. by Erich Przywara (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), pp. 180–81. 4 The only full-length study of the poetics of the York Cycle is R.J. Collier, Poetry and Drama in the York Corpus Christi Play (Hamden CT: Archon, 1977). 5 For the external evidence concerning the cycle, see York, ed. by A.F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, Records of Early English Drama, 2 vols, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979). See also Margaret Dorrell (Rogerson), ‘Two Studies of the York Corpus Christi Play’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 6 (1972), pp. 63–111. 6 The list survives in manuscript form in Trinity College, Dublin; ‘The Catalogue of the Library of the Augustinian Friars at York’, ed. by M.R. James, Fasciculum Ioannie Willis Clark Dicatus (Cambridge: privately printed, 1909). 7 See Jo Ann Moran, Education and Learning in the City of York 1300–1500, Borthwick Papers 55 (York: St Anthony’s Press, 1979) and Elza Tiner, ‘Evidence for the Study of Rhetoric in the City of York to 1500’, (unpublished licentiate report, Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto, 1984). 8 Collier, Poetry and Drama, 19. 9 Augustine, In Psalmos CXXX, 9; PL, vol. xxxvii, col. 1711; Przywara, p. 283. 10 Sermones (de Scrpt. Nov. Test.) CXLI, i, 1; iv, 4; PL, vol. xxxviii, cols 776–7; Przywara, p. 198. 11 The York manuscript has seven episodes (counting the double episode of the ‘Woman Taken in Adultery’ and ‘Lazarus’ as two) in the Ministry sequence. Space was left for two further plays one on the Marriage Feast at Cana and the other on the scene of the repentance of Mary Magdalene but the responsible guilds – the Vintners and the Ironmongers – never submitted them to be registered. The Towneley manuscript has only three, and Chester and N-Town have five each. See A.F. Johnston, ‘The Christ Figure in the Four English Cycles’, (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1964). 12 Eugene Vance, Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. x. 13 Sermones XXVIII, v; PL, vol. xxxviii, col. 185; Przywara, p. 209. 14 Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, II, iv; PL, vol. xxxiv, col. 38; translation from A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, trans. by Philip Schaff and others (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1886), vol. 2, p. 536. 15 Vance, Mervelous Signals, p. viii. 16 De Musica XI, xxix; PL, vol. xxxii, col. 1179; Writings of St Augustine, in The Fathers of the Church, trans. by Ludwig Schopp (New York: CIMA, 1948), vol. 2, p. 355.

262 Theory/theology 17 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. by Richard Green (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1962), p. 91; Book IV, Prosa 6. 18 De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim, XI, xv, 20; PL, vol. xxxiv, col. 437. 19 J.M. Evans, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 95. 20 Ibid., p. 93. 21 Job 1. 7. 22 Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. by Hardin Craig, Early English Text Society, e.s., 87 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 27. 23 The Towneley Plays, ed. by George England, Early English Text Society, e.s., 71 (London: Oxford University Press, 1897), p. 371. 24 The Macro Plays, ed. by Mark Eccles, Early English Text Society, e.s., 262, pp. 14–15. 25 Augustine, in the famous passage in the Confessions, (X, xxxiii) recounts how the music of the church caused him to weep ‘in primordiis recuperate fidei meae’ (at the outset of my recovered faith) and, despite his misgivings about the sensuousness of music, goes on to approve of it in church ‘ut per oblectamenta aurium infirmior animus in affectum pietatis assurgat’ (that so by the delights of the ear the weaker minds may be stimulated to a devotional frame), PL, vol. xxxii, col. 800; Schaff, vol. 1, p. 156. 26 Beadle prints this music edited by John Stevens, pp. 465–74. 27 For the dating of the ‘Purification’ episode, see Beadle, pp. 434–37. 28 For a discussion of the history of this pageant, see Beadle, pp. 429–34. 29 Smith, York Plays, p. 108. 30 Beadle, The York Plays, pp. 475–76. 31 The first evidence of the cycle comes from a payment for the rental of a pageant house (a place to store the wagon stage) in 1376 (REED: York, vol. i, p. 3). For the dating of the manuscript see Margaret Rogerson, ‘External Evidence for Dating the York Register’, Records of Early English Drama Newsletter 2 (1976), pp. 4–5 and Richard Beadle and Peter Meredith, ‘Further External Evidence for Dating the York Register (BL Additional MS 35290)’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., xi (1980), pp. 51–58. 32 REED:York, vol. i, p. 49. 33 REED:York, vol. i, pp. 16–26. 34 De doctrina christiana, II, i; PL, vol. xxxiv, col. 35; Schaff, p. 535. 35 REED:York, vol. i, p. 11; translation, p. 697.

4.2 ‘At the still point of the turning world’: The Augustinian roots of medieval dramaturgy From: European Medieval Drama, vol. 2, Sydney Higgins, ed. (Camerino, IT: Tempo di Spettacoli, 1998), 5–25 Many years ago with a large audience at the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo, Michigan, I endured a performance of Mankind that has remained in my memory as one of the worst theatrical experiences of my life. The student playing Mercy could not stand still; he gobbled the long aureate lines; he seemed unable to control the action, and gave the impression that his decision to leave the order and embrace the secular life had already been made. It was not until I saw the late David Parry take the part of Mercy that I realised the fundamental error of the first performance. David commanded the action with his stage presence; he calmly gave the long Latinate lines their full metrical treatment; he focussed attention on the frenetic futility of the vice figures by his very stillness.These two performances demonstrated to me a fundamental principle that lies at the heart of medieval English dramaturgy that we ignore to our peril in modern performance. The moral strength of a character can be measured by the calmness of his or her action or verse. Our students lament that the ‘bad guys’ get all the action and all the funny lines. I will argue in this paper that this is entirely intentional and is based on a simple but all-pervasive theological principle enunciated by Augustine and made commonplace by Boethius. For Augustine, ‘True Being is something that endures without change. Consequently, to say that God is Being is to say that he is unchangeable. He is always the self-same and his years do not fail. He is in fact eternal. Indeed, the very substance of God is eternity. Moreover, because God exists in the highest possible way, he is the highest entity (essentia), and that is why he is immutable.’1 This concept of God as immutable, as essential and eternal stability is everywhere in Augustine’s thought. In De Trinitate he wrote, ‘He who is God is the only immutable substance or essence, to whom certainly Being itself, whence derived the term essence, most especially and most truly belongs’.2 Only

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through God’s grace can man begin to enjoy oneness with God. And, in human society, those who are closest to God manifest a kind of love that marks them as the righteous. This concept is stated most clearly for our purposes in the De Genesi ad litteram, describing the characteristics of the good (the citizens of the City of God) and the wicked (the citizens of the City of Man): There are two kinds of love; of these the one is holy, the other impure; the one is social, the other selfish; the one consults the common good for the sake of the supernal fellowship, the other reducing the affairs of the commonality to their own power for the sake of arrogant domination; the one subject to God, the other endeavouring to equal Him; the one tranquil, the other turbulent; the one working for peace, the other seditious; the one preferring truth to the praise of those who are in error, the other greedy for praise however got; the one friendly, the other envious; the one wishing for the neighbour what it would wish for itself, the other wishing to subject the very neighbour to itself; the one guiding the neighbour in the interest of the neighbour’s good, the other in that of its own [. . .]3 A citizen of the City of God, then, is in Augustine’s word ‘tranquillus’; a citizen of the City of Man is ‘turbulens’. If man seeks truly to become one with God, then he will seek tranquility, peace, silence. As Eugene Vance has expressed it, true communion with God demands ‘[. . .] a movement of transcendence, through degrees of silence, to immediate union of the soul with God as timeless, indivisible immobile One’.4 One of the most remarkable episodes in late medieval English biblical drama is the episode of the ‘Trial before Herod’ in the York Cycle.5 For 424 gruelling lines, Christ stands silent as his tormentors shriek at him in English, French, and Latin demanding that he prophesy for them to provide sport for the king. But he refuses to be drawn into the parodic game of prophesy for entertainment standing as the ‘immobile One’, the still silent centre of the stage action that swirls around him – T.S. Eliot’s ‘still point of the turning world’. Augustine sought to express the principle that God is immutable and unchanging at the centre of a harmonious universe in his early work, De Musica: Let us not, then, be envious of things inferior to ourselves, and let us, our Lord and God helping, order ourselves between those below us and those above us, so we are not troubled by lower, and take delight only in higher things. For delight is a kind of weight in the soul. Therefore, delight orders the soul. ‘For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ (Matthew 6. 21) Where delight, there the treasure; where the heart, there happiness or misery. But what are the higher things, if not those where the highest unchangeable undisturbed and eternal equality resides? Where there is no time because there is no change, and from where times are made and ordered and changed, imitating eternity as they do when the turn of the heavens comes back to the same state, and the heavenly bodies to the same

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place, and in days and months and years and centuries and other revolutions of the stars obey the laws of equality, unity and order. So terrestrial things are subject to celestial, and their time circuits join together in harmonious succession for a poem of the universe.6 Here Augustine is simply adapting the common Platonic ideas of harmony. Boethius picks up the same Platonic theme in his great hymn to God in Poem Nine of Book Three of The Consolation of Philosophy when he says of God, ‘Thou art the serenity, the tranquil peace of virtuous men’.7 God is the point of stability. Man is mutable, under the watchful eye of the immutable God. As Boethius puts it in The Consolation of Philosophy, ‘The generation of all things, and the whole course of mutable natures and of whatever is in any way subject to change, take their causes, order and forms from the unchanging mind of God.’8 Whether, as Augustine implies in the passage from De musica, God is at the top of a descending scale or in Boethian terms at the centre of concentric circles, the farther away one moves from God the less stable one becomes. This is, of course, related to sin and control of the bodily appetites. By implication, therefore, good is stable, tranquil, harmonious, and evil is unstable, restless, and dissonant. Augustine description of the citizens of the two cities is based on this reasoning. The depiction of frenetic activity by the wicked in contrast to the calm stillness of good is everywhere in western European art and literature in the later Middle Ages. It provided for the English playwrights the underlying theological principle around which to build their dramaturgy. When the Coventry Herod ‘ragis in the pagond and in the strete also’,9 he is manifesting this principle as are the demons in the Towneley Plays as they urge each other to ‘faste take oure rentals’ as they hurry ‘vp watlyn strete’ in response to the trumpet call of Judgement.10 But demonstrating the moral and spiritual nature of characters through their actions is only one of the ways in which the playwrights use what I have come to call the ‘stasis and action’ principle. When they are using it to its fullest extent, the lines themselves are used to underscore the stage action. Of the four major English ‘cycles’, York is perhaps the most virtuosic in its use of verse. In this cycle, there are plays and parts of plays written in four, eight, eleven, twelve and fourteen-line stanzas that are both syllabic and alliterative in style. There are also six, seven and ten-line stanzas that are only syllabic and nine and thirteen-line stanzas that are only alliterative.11 This bewildering array of verse forms has traditionally been seen to be evidence of different hands at work and proof of at least three ‘levels of composition’ over the approximately one hundred years between the inception of the cycle and the creation of the manuscript as we have it.12 There undoubtedly were many hands at work over the years on this set of plays. Nevertheless, the attribution of the undeniable fluidity of the text to multiple authorship has obscured the fact that all the playwrights seem to have deliberately used the rich poetic tradition available to them in the northern dialect to build characters and relationships and, above all, establish the state of grace of a character through the verse form.

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A careful look at the opening play of the sequence will demonstrate how the principle is established. The cycle begins with God’s great statement of his own properties: Ego sum Alpha et O: vita, via, veritas, primus et nouissimus. I am gracyus and grete, God withoutyn begynnyng, I am maker vnmade, all mighte es in me; I am lyfe and way vnto welth-wynnyng. I am formaste and fyrste, als I byd sall it be. (I, 1–4) The lines are dignified, deliberate and end-stopped.The Good Angels praise God and Lucifer praises himself in formal alliterative stanzas of measured metres until the moment of the fall which is signalled not by an accusation by God or by a thunderbolt but by a sudden change in the quality of Lucifer’s verse mid-stanza: Ther sall I set myselfe full semely to seyghte, To ressayue my reuerence thorowe righte o renowne; I sall be lyke vnto hym pat es hyeste on heghte. Owe, what I am derworth and defte – Owe! Dewes! All goes downe! My mighte and my mayne es all marrande – Helpe! felawes! In faythe I am fallande. (I, 89–94) In Hell the stanza itself is fractured as the fallen angels quarrel and point blame: Lucifer in inferno Walaway! Wa es me now, nowe es it war thane it was. Vnthryuandely threpe ȝhe – I sayde but a thoghte. II Diabolus We, lurdane, þou lost vs. Lucifer in inferno ȝhe ly! Owte, allas! I wyste noghte þis wo sculde be wroghte. Owte on ȝhow, lurdans, ȝhe smore me in smoke. II Diabolus This wo has þou wroghte vs. Lucifer in inferno ȝhe ly, ȝhe ly! II Diabolus Thou lyes, and þat sall þou by: We, lurdane, haue at ȝowe, lat loke! (I, 113–20) This is in sharp contrast to the calm praise of God that continues in heaven, ‘A, lorde, louid be thi name þat vs þis lyghte lente.’ (I, 121). God finishes the first episode condemning Lucifer’s fall with 32 measured end stopped lines. The two prologues to the ‘Magi’ play also clearly demonstrate this aspect of the poetics of the cycle.13 The Masons’ Pageant gives the prologue to Herod: The clowdes clapped in clerenes þat þer clematis inclosis – Jubiter and Jouis, Martis and Mercurij emyde –

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Raykand ouere my rialte on rawe me reioyses, Blonderande per blastis to blaw when I bidde. Saturne my subgett, þat sotilly is hidde, Listes at my likyng and laies hym full lowe. The rakke of þe rede skye full rappely I ridde, Thondres full thrallye by thousandes I thrawe When me likis. Venus his voice to me awe, Þat princes to play in hym pikis. (XVI, 1–11) Inflated in both sentiment and style, this speech emphasizes the folly of the king who thinks he, not God, commands the elements.The alliteration on ‘cl’ in line one and ‘bl’ in line four are particularly pretentious, forcing the actor to exaggerate his delivery and underline the ludicrous pride of the character. The Goldsmiths’ pageant, on the other hand, opens with the prayers of the three kings spoken in measured twelve-line stanzas. The third king ends his prayer after six lines, sees the other kings and turns to them in greeting.The first king finishes the stanza completing the rhyme of the third king: III Rex

I Rex

Lorde God þat all goode has bygonne And all may ende, both goode and euyll. That made for man both mone and sonne, And stedde yone sterne to stande stone stille, Tille I þe cause may clerly conne, God wisseme with his worthy wille. I hope I haue her felaws fonne My yarnyng faþfully to fullfille. Sirs, God yowe saffe and see, And were ȝow euere fro woo. Amen, so might it bee, And saffe yow sir, also. (XVI, 81–92)

These are men of God attributing to him all the movements of the planets including the action of the star they are following. The contrast between them and Herod is imbedded in the lines themselves. The actors need only speak the lines as they are written and the prosody establishes their characters. The York Cycle is full of ritualistic poetic passages that build up a sense of the community of faith among the righteous sharing in a litany of praise to the Word incarnate. Mary speaks the first lyric as she places the baby (just born in full sight of the audience) in the manger: Hayle my lord God, hayle prince of pees, Hayle my fadir, and hayle my sone; Hayle souereyne sege all synnes to sesse,

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Hayle God and man in erth to wonne. Hayle, thurgh whos myht All þis worlde was first begonne, Merknes and light. (XIV, 57–63) Joseph, too, kneels before the child: Hayle my maker, hayle Crist Jesu, Hayle riall kyng, roote of all right, Hayle saueour. Hayle my lorde, lemer of light, Hayle blessid floure. (XIV, 108–12) Each of the three kings speaks a stanza of praise as he presents his gift (XVI, 309–44) and, although the ‘Purification in the Temple’ was registered almost a century after the rest of the cycle, Simeon has a similar litany of praise (XVII, 354–73).14 The excitement of the ‘Entry into Jerusalem’ builds to climax with eight stanzas of praise spoken by the eight burgesses (XXV, 489–544). These verbal canticles of praise spoken by the undeniably godly are viciously parodied in the ‘Second Trial before Pilate’ when Christ is dressed in royal robes: I Miles

III Miles IV Miles

Aue, riall roy and rex judeorum, Hayll, comely kyng þat no kyngdom has kende. Hayll vndughty duke, þi dedis ere dom, Hayll, man vnmyghty pe mene to mende. Hayll, lord without lande for to lende, Hayll kyng, hayll knave vnconand. Hayll, freyke without forse þe to fende, Hayll strang, þat may not wele stand To stryve. (XXXIII, 408–16)

The calm dignity of the high style spoken in genuine praise is here brutally twisted and reinforced with plosive alliteration that descends to derisive laughter as Christ staggers under the weight of the mockery. This verbal parody has been preceded by sixty-five lines of rapid stychomythia as the four soldiers dance around Christ with their scourges responding to Pilate’s injunction to Skelpe hym with scourges and with skathes hym scorne. Wrayste and wrynge hym to, for wo he be wepyng. (XXXIII, 337–38) The demonic dance has been emphasised throughout the trial sequence by the reiteration of the phrase ‘daunce forth in þe deuyll way’ (XXIX, 395; see also

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XXXI, 424) as the soldiers drag the passive Christ from one judge to the next as trial follows trial. Cain, the archetypal murderer, is the first to use this phrase in the cycle in his dispute with his brother Abel, the type of Christ (VII, 52).The frenetic activity of the torturers under the cover of the darkness of the night of Maundy Thursday is picked up by the more matter-of-fact crucifiers in the next episodes. The busyness of these henchmen of the earthly powers at the Crucifixion is an extension of the exuberant haste of those sent to capture Christ in the episode of the ‘Agony of the Garden’ who announce that they will ‘come forthe all faste’ (XXVIII, 186) and ‘go [. . .] hens þan in hy and haste vs to þe halle’ (XXVIII, 189). Herod’s henchmen at the ‘Slaughter of the Innocents’ are equally hurried (XIX) as are the doctors keen to capture the woman in the act of adultery. That episode opens with the lines, Steppe fourth, late vs no lenger stande, But smertely þat oure gere wer grayde; Þis felowe þat we with folye fande, Late haste vs fast þat she wer flayed. (XXIV, 1–4) In one of the Towneley Plays whose bewildering prosody has puzzled critic and editor alike, the ‘Mactacio Abel’, character building through verse reaches an extraordinary level. Cain is the master of rapid fire abusive verse and his henchman Pikeharness shares his exuberant lines. Abel by contrast shares with God the measured rhythm of the saved. After Cain has tried to get his tainted sacrifice to burn Abel admonishes him, Cam, this is not worth onne leke; Thy tend shuld bren withoutten smeke. To be answered, Com kys the dwill right in the ars! For the it brens bot the wars. I wold that it were in thi throte, Fyr, and shefe, and ich a sprote. God then intervenes, Cam, whi art thou so rebell Agans thi brother Abell? God then goes on to explain the workings of grace with calm patience, to be answered by Cain: Whi, who is that hob ouer the wall? We! who was that that piped so small?

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Come, go we hens, for parels all – God is out of hys wit! Com furth, Abell, and let vs weynd. Me thynk that God is not my freynd; On land then will I flyt. (II, 287–305) And when Abel protests, Cain brutally murders him. The language here, especially in the short line format of the Cawley and Stevens edition, does not seem to have the rich alliterative variance of the York Cycle and yet the way the playwright has fashioned his lines with expletives, rhetorical questions and run on lines, Cain’s speeches bristle with frenetic energy while the lines of both God and Abel seem to slide smoothly on measured syllables and long vowels. The prosodic support for the stage energy of evil is most evident in the late medieval plays with the greatest prosodic variation but even in the Chester Cycle with its more uniform stanza pattern the playwrights, like the author of ‘Mactacio Abel’, create their effect by repetition, expletive and alliteration. For example, in his alarm at the report of the Resurrection, Pilate abuses the guards: Fye, theefe; fye traytour; Fye on thee, thy truth ys full bare! Fye, feynd; fye, feature; hye hence. Fast I read that thou fare!15 The many hands that worked over the plays in the N-Town manuscript thoroughly understood the basic contrast between the portrayal of good and evil.The torturers in the Passion Play are a gang of thugs that, more than any other English torturers, exult in their abuse of Christ.The shocking exuberance of the game of ‘wheel and pill’ combines both verbal and physical action. Christ has been thrust on to a stool and blindfolded while the torturers beat him and demand that he prophesy who hit him but then the fourth torturer has a new idea: A, and now wole I a newe game begynne Þat we mon pley at, all þat arn hereinne: Whele and pylle, whele and pylle, Comyth to halle hoso wylle – Ho was þat?16 In the PLS productions of this play in 1981 and 1984, the torturer grabbed Christ by his beard, pulled him up from the stool and spun him round. The blindfolded Christ staggered and fell into the arms of the three other bullies who tossed him back and forth in a horrifying enactment of frenetic evil. The Christ of York never really loses command.To the astonishment of the crucifiers he deliberately lies down on the cross himself. The Christ of N-Town whose creators sought to present every possible occasion for the depiction of Christ’s suffering here becomes almost an inanimate object at the hands of his enemies.

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Although most of the discussion so far has been based on the biblical plays, I began this paper with a reference to Mankind. Other morality plays use the Augustinian principle of ‘stasis and action’. In The Castle of Perseverance the Bad Angel urges Humanum Genus to become one with the World. Humanum Genus excitedly cries that he will ‘wyth pe Werld [. . .] go play’, to be admonished by the Good Angel, A, nay, man for Cristys blod, Cum agayn, be strete and style.17 But Humanum Genus cannot resist the attraction of evil represented by the energy of the Bad Angel and he falls leaving the Good Angel to mourn his betrayal. In modern performance we all are tempted to ‘highlight the high-jinx’. When Blake said that Milton was ‘of the Devil’s party without knowing it’,18 he recognised that in Paradise Lost Milton was still using the same principle – a principle that had been obscured by Blake’s time. Nevertheless we tend to make Blake’s mistake. It is far too easy to play the Good Angel in Castle as a petulant wimp.The Bad Angel has all the good lines; the Good Angel spends much of the play on the sidelines, and when appealed to by the Soul of Humanum Genus he denies him, precipitating the entrance of the four daughters of God and the denouement of the action. He is a hard character to play and yet if he is once allowed to become shrill in his righteousness, a vital counter balance to the extravagance and attraction of evil is lost. Even the siege of the castle that is at the heart of the stage action of this play demonstrates our central principle.The Sins bring everything they can against the castle; they surround it and attack it; they are the aggressors. Inside, the Virtues are the calm defenders whose weapons are roses symbolising the Passion of Christ. And the castle itself does not fall. It stands at the centre of the action dominating the stage set in all its solidity. It is mutable Humanum Genus who is lured out of the protection of the castle by the words of Covetousness. The castle, like the heavenly city it represents, is immutable. Castle is written, in the main, in what appear to be heavily redundant thirteenline stanzas, and although there are many instances of the use of language to carry the sense of the moral standing of the characters, much of the moral character building is embedded in the action of this play. Mankind is quite different. If Castle was meant to be played in a very large open space (as we discovered that it must be in our production in 1979), there is little opportunity for verbal subtleties. Mankind, on the other hand, seems to have been written for more intimate staging. Although much of the attraction of the ‘bad guys’ is carried by the physical high-jinx of Nought, Newguise, and Nowadays, the duel between Mercy and Mischief is a verbal one. Mercy’s opening sermon ends, Ther ys non such foode, be water nor by londe, So precyouse, so gloryouse, so nedefull to owr entente, For yt hath dyssoluyde mankynde fro þe bytter bonde Of þe mortall enmye, þat venymousse serpente, From þe wyche Gode preserue yow all at þe last jugement!

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For sekyrly þer xall be a streyt examynacyon, The corn xall be sauyde, þe chaffe xall be brente. I beseech yow hertyly, haue þis premedytacyon.19 Mischief, who has been listening to the sermon immediately parodies Mercy’s speech and the moral confrontation is quickly established through the verse, I beseche yow hertyly, leue yowr calcacyon. Leue yowr chaffe, leue yowr corn, leue yowr dalyacyon. Youwr wytt ys lytyll, yowr hede ys mekyll, ȝe are full of predycacyon. But, ser, I prey þis questyon to claryfye: Mysse-masche, dryff-draff, Sume was corn and sume was chaffe, My dame seyde my name was Raffe; Onschett yowr lokke and take an halpenye. Mercy Myscheff

Mercy Myscheff Mercy Myscheff

Why com ȝe hethyr, broþer? ȝe were not dysyryde. For a wynter corn-threscher, ser, I haue hyryde, Ande ȝe sayde þe corn xulde be sauyde and þe chaff xulde be feryde, Ande he prouyth nay, as yt schewth be þis werse: ‘Corn seruit bredibus, chaffe horsibus, straw fyrybusque.’ Thys ys as moche to say, to yowr leude wndyrstondynge, As þe corn xall serue to brede at þe nexte bakynge. ‘Chaff horsybus et reliqua,’ The chaff to horse xall be goode provente, When a man ys forcolde þe straw may be brent, And so forth, et cetera. Avoyde, goode broþer! ȝe ben culpable To interrupte thus my talkyng delectable. Ser, I haue noþer horse nor sadyll, Therfor I may not ryde. Hye yow forth on fote, brother, in Godys name! I say, ser, I am cumme hedyr to make yow game. ȝet bade ȝe me not go out in þe Deullys name Ande I wyll abyde. (45–71)

Mercy wishes to continue his ‘talkyng delectable’ while Mischief has come to make ‘game’.The confrontation through prosody seems here to be close to self-conscious. Wisdom, Mary Magdalen, and The Conversion of St Paul will all reward the kind of analysis that I have been attempting here. The language of Mind, Will, and Understanding in Wisdom before and after their fall pointedly contrasts the righteous and the unrighteous. Mary Magdalen’s intimate exchange of stanzas and rhymes with the gallant Curiosity in her fallen state is not the language of the saint on her missionary journeys. The contrast between the speech of the

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boasting Saul at the beginning of the play and the preaching Paul at the end marks his conversion to a state of grace. The moral plays of the sixteenth century continued to exploit this principle. In Mundus et Infans, for example, it is possible to trace the growing depravity of the ‘mankind’ figure as he grows from the slightly wayward child Wanton playing with his top, through the adolescent phase of Lust and Liking, to the full blown ranting tyrant of Manhood, I am stiff, strong, stalwart, and stout I am royallest, readily that renneth in this rout, There is no knight so grisly that I dread nor doubt For I am so doughtly dight there may no dint me dere, And the king of pride full prest with all his proud presence And the king of lechery lovely his letters hath me sent, And the king of wrath full wordily wil all his intent They will me maintain with main and all their might: The king of covetise, and the king of gluttony, The king of sloth, and the king of envy, All those send me their livery. Where is now so worthy a wight? Yea, as a wight witty, Here in this seat sit I, For no loves let I Here for to sit. Like Lucifer, he then sits himself in the seat of authority and Conscience enters to address the audience in an entirely different style, Christ, as he is crowned king, Save all this comely company, And grant you all his dear blessing, That bonnerly bought you on the rood-tree.20 Even more aureate is the speech of address of the final moral figure in this play, Perseverance: Now, Christ our comely creator, clearer than crystal clean, That craftly made every creature by good recreation, Save all this company that is gathered here bi-dene, And set all your souls into good salvation.21 In Nice Wanton, a play probably from the reign of Edward VI, the same principle applies. Iniquity speaks with a vigorous bounce and jingle, and leads the two wanton children Dalila and Ismael astray with his energetic horseplay. They fall into vice with enthusiasm dancing, singing, and dicing with their tempter. This

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is in contrast to the sober speech of the good brother Barnabas as he reports Dalila’s repentance to their mother Xantippe: And as for my sister, I am able to report She lamented for her sins to her dying day. To repent and believe I exhorted her alway; Before her death, she believed God of His mercy, For Christ’s sake, would save her eternally. If you do even so, ye need not despair, For God will freely remit your sins all: Christ hath paid the ransom – why should ye fear? To believe this, and do well, to God for grace call; All worldly cares let pass and fall; And thus comfort my father, I pray you heartily.22 Other moral plays show the same traditional pattern. However, it is possible also to trace variants to the pattern from the late fifteenth and the sixteenth century. John Redford’s Wit and Science, a play contemporary with Nice Wanton, transforms the principle as it transforms the ‘morality’ genre. The uneven verse and wanton activity belong in this play not to the morally depraved but to the ignorant. Reason and Dame Science speak measured literate verse while the giant Tediousness lays about him with a vigorous jingle, But, hah! mee thynkes I am not halfe lustye. Thes jo[y]nts, thes lynkes, Be ruffe and halfe rustye; I must go shake them, Supple to make them! Stand back, ye wrechys! Beware the fechys Of Tediousnes, Thes kaytyves to bles! Make roome, I say! Rownd evry way! Thys way! That way! What care I what way? Before me, behynd me, Rownd abowt wynd me!23 The routine between Ignorance and Idleness as she tries to get his to say his name later in the play is one of the funniest scenes in Tudor drama exploiting the inability of ignorance, rather than moral depravity, to speak measured verse.

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In the hands of playwrights who were influenced by more courtly literature and wrote for more courtly audiences such as Henry Medwall, another variant on the general principle can be detected. A and B in Fulgens and Lucres do not speak in the same language as the courtly lovers Cornelius and Gaius. Particularly in the bawdy scene with the maid servant that parodies the main plot, A and B have all the vigour of the depraved characters in the biblical and moral plays.Yet with Chaucer’s high and low style in mind in such poems as the Parliament of Fowls, we must be careful to see what is a theological principle and what is a poetic convention, and where the two co-exist and inform one another. Here the prosodic division corresponds with apparent class distinctions. In the Parliament of Fowls the division is the same, but there, from the Scipio Africanus passage at the beginning of the poem, we are at least directed to question whether the eagles or the lower fowls have the greatest concern for common profit. There is no such question, it seems to me, in Fulgens and Lucres. A and B are meant to be the servants, the clever slaves carrying, as well as everything else, that classical connotation. But they are also carrying the tradition of the vice figures in their use of language. The late interpolations in The Conversion of St Paul, dating from the mid-sixteenth century, show a similar ambivalence about the use of the conventions perhaps also layering them for effect. The actors playing the hostelers and the devils were probably doubled. This makes the physical energy of their parodic antics, including the gunpowder effect to mark the entry of the Devil, both a class statement and also a demonic one.24 Paradoxically the layering of the conventions renders the devils comic in this play as they so often become in the sixteenth century. The apparent vices in The Comedy of the Most Virtuous and Godly Susannah – Ill Report and the Devil – are almost gratuitously comic figures. Ill Report, especially, is the busy messenger who runs about the stage for no apparent purpose but to entertain. But this Elizabethan moral play rings yet another change on the principle we have been tracking. These vice figures are not well integrated with the rest of the more sombre plot. The truly evil characters in this play, however, are the false judges Sensualitas and Voluptas who first try to seduce the virtuous Susannah and then, when she refuses their advances, bring false witness against her. These figures are ‘false seeming’ and the playwright does not set them apart from the rest of the court by their language. To have the desired effect, they must seem to be like the court they are addressing or they will not win their suit. Interestingly, the righteous characters in this play do not truly engage in debate with the evil ones nor do they address the audience. Rather, they are constantly in prayer as if they have lost all faith in earthly justice and turn steadfastly with all their Protestant fervour to God. Another Protestant playwright also seems to be deliberately turning his back on the ‘stasis and action’ principle. In John Bale’s The Temptation of Our Lord, Satan does not speak in verse that is radically different from Christ. But this is because, like Sensualitas and Voluptas he is ‘false seeming’. When he approaches Christ, the stage direction reads ‘Hic simulata religione Christum aggreditur’.

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He engages Christ in the debate ‘simulating religion’.That Bale was aware of the convention seems evident from the last measured speech of Baleus Proculator, Let it not grieve you in this world to be tempted, Considering your Lord, your high bishop, Jesus, Was here, without sin, in every purpose proved; In all our weakness to help and succour us; Furthermore, to bear with our frailty thus. He is unworthy of him to be a member, That will not, with him, some persecution suffer. The life of man is a proof or hard temptation, As Job doth report, and Paul confirmeth the same. Busy is the devil and laboureth his damnation. Yet have no despair, for Christ hath got the game; Now is it easy his cruelness to tame.25 Bale uses the ‘stasis and action principle’ freely in King John especially to establish the iniquity of the Roman Church through the figure of Sedition. After a measured and end-stopped lament by Englande, Sedition quips, ‘Hold yowre peace, ye whore, or ellys, by masse I trowe, | I shall cause the Pope to curse thee as blacke as a crowe’.26 But for sixteenth-century playwrights, the Augustinian principle so central to the writers of the biblical and moral drama written and performed first in the fifteenth century, was only one of several conventions upon which they could draw for their effects. As religious didacticism gave way to more educational and political concerns, a dramaturgical principle based on a theological understanding of the nature of man in relationship to God became less central. Other conventions and tools, some variants of the older principle, contributed to the wonderfully eclectic tradition from which the professional theatre grew. And yet an understanding of the older tradition can help us to recognise the layers of convention with which, for example, Shakespeare approaches the rich character of Falstaff in the second tetralogy. Falstaff begins as a comic vice in Henry IV Part I, but in Henry IV Part II he and his cronies take on the viciousness of evil. Hal’s speech to him at the end of that play, so often condemned as the speech of a prig by critics unaware of the deep well of convention that Shakespeare is plumbing, reminds us once again of the calm stillness of God and the righteous: I know thee not old man. Fall to thy prayers. How ill white hairs becomes a fool and jester! I have long dreamt of such a kind of man, So surfeit-swell’d, so old and so prophane; But, being awak’d, I do despise my dream. [. . .] Presume not that I am the thing I was For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,

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That I have turn’d away my former self; So will I they that kept me company. (2 Henry IV,V. 5. 48–60) Falstaff, the centre of so much of the comic action of the plays, is left staring after the newly crowned Henry V in tragic ignorance of his place in the drama. Shakespeare here exploits the centuries old convention demonstrating as he does so often in his plays his debt to the native English traditions of playmaking. In my experience, it is of central importance for us to trust the text when we undertake modern productions of medieval drama. The playwrights understood the principles they were working with. If we trust the lines, they will tell us how they should be spoken. Equally, we must trust the stage directions. In the ‘Last Supper’ episode of the N-Town Passion Play, Christ washes the feet of disciples.The director of our 1981 production was in a panic – twenty-two sweaty feet and all that ‘dead air’. She laid on a choir to cover what she feared would be an embarrassing hiatus in the action. But as the actors worked through their business it became clear that the silence was central to the way the playwright had conceived the scene. In silence, Christ washed the feet of each of the disciples and in silence took his individual leave of them. It was one of the most moving moments of the play. Eliot captured the essence of both the Incarnation and medieval dramaturgy in Burnt Norton when he wrote, At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Notes 1 Armand A. Maurer, Medieval Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1962), p. 12. 2 De Trinitate libri quindecim, V, ii, 3 (PL, vol. xlii, col. 0912); translation from An Augustine Synthesis, trans. by Erich Przywara (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), p. 98. 3 De Genesi ad litteram XI, xv (PL, vol. xxxiv, col. 0437); translation Przywara, p. 266. 4 Eugene Vance, Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. viii. 5 The York Cycle is preserved in a single manuscript (London, British Library MS Add 35290) that was the city ‘register’ or official copy of the plays. The cycle was first edited in York Plays, by Lucy Toulmin Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885). The most recent edition is The York Plays, ed. by Richard Beadle (London: Arnold, 1982). All quotations from the cycle will be from the Beadle text, cited by play number and line numbers. 6 De Musica XI, xxix (PL, vol. xxxii, col. 1179). Translation from Writings of St Augustine, in The Fathers of the Church, vol. 2, trans. by Ludwig Schopp, (New York: CIMA, 1948), p. 355. 7 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. by Richard Green (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), p. 61. 8 Ibid., p. 91.

278 Theory/theology 9 Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. by Hardin Craig, Early English Text Society, e.s., 87 (London: Oxford University Press, 1902), p. 27. 10 The Towneley Plays, ed. by A.C. Cawley and Martin Stevens, 2 vols, Early English Text Society, s.s., 12–13 (1994), i, p. 406. 11 Beadle, The York Plays, pp. 475–76. 12 The first evidence of the cycle comes from a payment for the rental of a pageant house (a place to store the wagon stage) in 1376 (see York, ed. by A.F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, 2 vols, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 3). For the dating of the manuscript see Margaret Rogerson, ‘External Evidence for Dating the York Register’, Records of Early English Drama Newsletter, 2 (1976), pp. 4–5, and Richard Beadle and Peter Meredith, ‘Further External Evidence for Dating the York Register (BL Additional MS 35290)’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 11 (1980), pp. 51–58. 13 For a discussion of the history of this pageant, see Beadle, pp. 429–34. 14 For the dating of the Purification episode, see Beadle 434–37. 15 The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. by R.M. Lumiansky and David Mills, 2 vols, Early English Text Society, s.s., 3–4 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), XVIII, 266–69. 16 The N-Town Play, ed. by Stephen Spector, 2 vols, Early English Text Society, s.s., 11 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), XXIX, 188–92. 17 The Macro Plays, ed. by Mark Eccles, Early English Text Society, e.s., 262 (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 14–15. 18 The Poetical Works of William Blake, ed. by John Sampson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 249. 19 Eccles, Macro Plays, pp. 153–84, ll. 37–44. 20 The World and the Child, in Six Anonymous Plays, ed. by John S. Farmer, Early English Dramatists, vol. i (London: English Drama Society, 1905), p. 171. 21 Ibid., p. 185. 22 Nice Wanton, ed. by David Parry and Kathy Pearl, PLS Performance Texts (Toronto: PLS, 1978), ll, pp. 519–29. 23 John Redford, ‘Wit and Science,’ in Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas, ed. by John Quincy Adams (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), ll, pp. 165–80. 24 The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and E Museo 160, ed. by Donald C. Baker, John L. Murphy and Louis B. Hall, jr., Early English Text Society, o.s., 283 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. xxix. 25 English Moral Interludes, ed. by Glynne Wickham (London: Dent, 1976), p. 141. 26 The Complete Plays of John Bale, ed. by Peter Happé (Cambridge: Brewer, 1985), ll, pp. 87–88.

4.3 ‘His langage is lorne’: The silent centre of the York Cycle From: Early Theatre 3 (2000), 185–95

The Christ of the York Cycle is a teacher and preacher of great power.Yet at the climax of the narrative, the long and gruelling trial sequence, Christ, the logos, the Word stands alone before his accusers, virtually silent,1 beaten and abused – a visual icon of suffering Isaiah had prophesied, ‘He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep to his shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth’ (Isaiah 53. 7) The York playwrights have taken this text and exploited it to extraordinary effect. At the centre of the play the Word falls silent. In the four trial plays Christ speaks only thirty-five lines from a total of 1852 and yet he is the centre of the action, the figure around whom the demonic parody of the law swirls, central yet silent, what I have called elsewhere (using T.S. Eliot’s metaphor for Incarnation), the ‘still point of the turning world’.2 In the final confrontation between Christ and his judges in ‘Christ before Pilate 2: The Judgement’, Christ replies to Pilate’s peremptory demand, ‘Speke, and excuse þe if þou can.’ (XXXIII, 299): Euery man has a mouthe þat made is on molde In wele and in woo to welde at his will, If he gouerne it gudly like as God wolde For his spirituale speche hym thar not to spill. And what gome so gouerne it ill, Full vnhendly and ill sall he happe; Of ilk tale þou talkis vs vntill Þou accounte sall, þou can not escappe. (XXXIII, 300–07) These lines speak of the power of speech and the choice of each man to govern his tongue. Right speaking brings a right relationship with God; ill-governed speech brings harm. Each of us must take responsibility for what we say. This speech is unique to the York Cycle. It is not in scripture, nor is it in any other cycle, nor in the poetic analogues to the cycles – the Cursor Mundi, the Northern Passion, the Gospel of Nicodemus, or the Stanzaic Life of Christ. Yet with its concern for the sins of the tongue, it is grounded in the work of Willelmus Peraldus,

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a thirteenth-century French Dominican whose Summa de vitiis was one of the most influential didactic tracts categorizing the sins to come from the pastoral movement launched by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Particularly in his ‘appendix’ to his discussion of the sin of envy, Peraldus discusses twenty-four specific ‘peccata linguae’ ranging from blasphemy to false testimony to evil counsel.3 This detailed discussion of the sins of the tongue was popularized in William of Wadington’s Manuel des Pechez and its English version, Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne. Edwin C. Craun has recently shown the importance of this section of the Summa de vitiis in the work of the Pearl poet, Chaucer, Gower, and Langland.4 We have no evidence that the playwrights in York had access to any of these vernacular texts but we do know that two copies of the Summa de vitiis were in the library of the Augustinian Friary in York.5 It is clear that the concerns of Peraldus were important to the playwrights from their emphasis on the centrality of the spoken word in this cycle.This particular speech highlights these concerns. During the first two trials, the playwrights give Christ speeches based on the scriptures. Each of them turns on the issue of the sedition of his preaching. Each stresses the truth of what he has said and challenges the judges to prove his words false.The one non-scriptural speech in these plays, his address to Peter in ‘The Trial before Annas and Caiaphas’, is carefully crafted to fit into the pattern the playwrights are building: Petir, Petir, þus saide I are When þou saide þou wolde abide with me In wele and woo, in sorowe and care, Whillis I schulde thries forsaken be. (XXIX, 162–65) Peter’s speech of bravado claiming he would never desert his master is here remembered. His words have not proven to be true. Even the faithful are guilty of ‘iacantia’ or boasting, one of Peraldus’ twenty-four ‘sins of the tongue’.6 Christ’s address to Pilate emphasising the importance of speech brings the four trial plays into focus as the didactic centre of the cycle. His silence in these plays is an ironic inversion, contrasting his silence not only with the nervous bombastic speeches of his opponents but also with the portrayal of his character everywhere else in the cycle. By this speech he points to the truth of what he has said in every other episode when, as he says to Annas and Caiaphas in the first trial: I prechid wher pepull was most present. And no poynte in priuite to olde ne ȝonge. And also in your tempill I tolde myne entente. (XXIX, 315–18) Not only did he preach openly, but the audience has seen him do it. Other cycles portray Christ as a worker of miracles or as only the bleeding sacrifice for the sins of mankind but in the York Cycle the character of Christ is first and

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foremost a teacher.7 Again and again he acts as his own expositor explaining his actions and comforting his puzzled followers as he teaches them how to live a Christian life in a fallen world. Holy living, not holy dying, is the central theme of this cycle.The uniquely long sequence on the ministry (which would have been even longer had the two delinquent guilds – the Vintners and the Ironmongers – turned in their plays to be copied) shows Christ as a teacher and preacher providing himself as a ‘mirrour for men’, an ‘ensample’ for all Christians to follow.8 The speech against ‘peccata linguae’, delivered at the climax of the sequence is one of the most powerful examples of the righteous life since it is reinforced by the compelling action in which it is imbeded. In the ‘Baptism’, the ‘Transfiguration’, the ‘Woman Taken in Adultery’, the ‘Raising of Lazarus’, and the ‘Entry Into Jerusalem’, Christ’s ministry has been public. As he says to Pilate he spoke openly to the ‘pepull’. This is in stark contrast to the claustrophobic huddles that are the trial plays, away from the public and confined to the households of the chief judges. It is the outrageous accusation against Christ that he is committing the sins of the tongue that is at the heart of the entire trial sequence. It is directly engaged in the exchange between Christ and Caiaphas: Jesus

Ye myght haue tane me þat tyme for my tellyng Wele bettir þan bringe me woth brondis vnbrente, And þus to noye me be nyght, and also for nothyng. Cayphas For nothyng, losell? Þou lies! Thy wordis and werkis will haue a wrekyng. Jesus Sire, sen þou with wrong so me wreyes. Go spere thame that herde of my spekyng. (XXIX, 317–23) Here Caiaphas accuses him directly of lying and from here on the claims that all he has done is spread lies come thick and fast. At the end of this play Caiaphas says to Annas, ‘þis ladde with his leysyngis has oure lawes lorne’ (XXIX, 387). In the next play, as they work themselves up to present the case to Pilate, Annas says to Caiaphas that Christ has ‘ofte-tymes in oure tempill has teched vntrewly’ (XXX, 197). In the same sequence, Caiaphas claims that Christ has turned people from the faith ‘thurgh talkyng of tales vntrewe’ (XXX, 209). Later as they present their case to Pilate, Christ’s lying is associated by Annas with the repeated accusations of witchcraft ‘thurgh his fantome and falshed and fendescraft/He has wroght many wondir’ (XXX, 298–99). Yet within this play the Beadle, who can be seen as the representative of the ‘public’ in this closed court, testifies to what he saw of the ministry and stoutly tells the court ‘þe trouþe I haue tolde’ (XXX, 357) to the fury of Annas and Caiaphas. The plot of the York Cycle turns on the confrontation between the Old and the New Law. In this cycle it is Annas and Caiaphas who spearhead the animosity to Christ. The key to this animosity lies in Caiaphas’ line cited above ‘þis ladde with his leysyngis has oure lawes lorne’ (XXIX, 387). It is the issue of the law that the York playwrights choose to make pivotal in their dramatizing of

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the story. Elza Tiner and Pamela King have analysed the trial scenes with a view to explicating their sources in civil and ecclesiastical court proceedings.9 These analyses have been part of the advances that we have all made in our appreciation of the depth of social commentary presented in these plays. But there are deeper theological issues behind the incidentals of the trial details. The issue is first raised as a major confrontation in that most deceptively simple play of ‘Christ and the Doctors’. Here, in the play that provides the bridge between the Nativity sequence and the Ministry of Christ, we have the last appearance of old Joseph and the young Mary but we also have the first appearance of the theologians in the temple – the guardians of the Old Law.The issue is clearly stated by the first Magister as they bustle in and take their seats, Maistirs, takes to me intente, And rede your resouns right on rawe, And alle þe pepull in þis present, Euere-ilke man late see his sawe. But witte I wolde, or we hens wente, Be clargy clere if we couthe knawe Yf any lede þat liffe has lente Wolde aught allegge agaynste oure lawe. (XX, 49–56) But this is precisely what the child Christ does.The passage in Luke 2 on which this incident is based gives no suggestion of what the child talked about with the doctors. All the dramatizations of this episode follow Origen’s interpretation in his sermon on this passage when he says, ‘He was questioning the teachers of the Law, not, I say, that he may learn something from them, but that asking He may instruct them.’10 For the Fathers this episode is where ‘the Word supplants the Law and the power of the temple is broken’.11 The playwrights go to a much later confrontation between Christ and the Scribes and the Pharisees in Matthew 22 for the substance of the debate. The Matthew passage is part of the build-up to the last weeks of the Ministry when again and again Matthew describes incidents where the theologians try to trap Christ only to be confounded to silence. This conflation of the first incident in the Ministry of Christ with a much later one when the lines of antagonism have been clearly established in the gospel account prepares the way for the source of the animus against Christ in the York Cycle. The two secular judges, Pilate and Herod, are portrayed as a vacillating second-rate politician and a buffoon. It is the untiring and implacable hatred of Caiaphas and to a lesser extent Annas that brings Christ to the cross in this cycle. The doctors in the temple are the forerunners of the murderous high priests of the Passion sequence. The issue of the law is a continuing thread in the Ministry plays. In the great vision of the mount of ‘Transfiguration’, an episode unique to York, Moses, the giver of the Law, is present to testify to the power of Christ over the Law. But the emotional trigger, the episode that brings the confrontation down to a personal

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level is the ‘Woman Taken in Adultery’. Here as the story in John 8 makes very clear, the scribes and the pharisees set out to trap Christ. The lacuna in the manuscript in this play occurs just as the fourth ‘Judeus’ has had a bright idea ‘A newe mater nowe moues me’ (XXIV, 54).We know from scripture and the other treatments of the episode that the ‘newe mater’ is to bring the woman before Christ and say, in the words of John: ‘Master this woman was even now taken in adultery. Now Moses in the law commanded us to stone such a one. But what sayest thou? And this they said tempting him, that they might accuse him.’ But Jesus will not be drawn. In the scriptures he simply doodles in the sand before presenting them with the unanswerable challenge,‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.’ In the lost sequence it seems apparent that the playwrights took the common interpretation from the Glossa ordinaria that Christ wrote the sins of his tormentors in the sand.12 When the text resumes, the four accusers are retreating in disarray. The next time we see the representatives of the Temple, Annas and Caiaphas are conspiring to judicial murder. Just as Judas is given the human motivation of greed for his act of betrayal, so the playwrights build up the antagonism between Christ and the keepers of the Old Law preparing the way for the immensely long trial sequence. But can we really conflate the doctors in the Temple and in the ‘Woman Taken in Adultery’ with Annas and Caiaphas? I think we can, and I think this conflation is reinforced by processional staging. In the N-Town Passion Play one actor plays one character throughout. As in a modern production, the audience comes to identify the actor with the character. We first see Christ entering Jerusalem in triumph and then suffer with him and mourn as his battered body is buried. But then when he rises refreshed and as we first saw him we identify the actor as our familiar friend.This never happens in York.The same characters appear again and again, but they are played by different actors.There are twenty adult Christs in the cycle and eight actors each playing Annas and Caiaphas. Identification of the characters is not made by recognizing the actors but by what the characters say. It is their words that identify them and so, because we have heard the doctors in the earlier plays using the same words with the same motivation as Annas and Caiaphas, the thematic and theological connection is made in the minds of the audience. The audience can therefore accept Christ’s claim in the early trial plays that he always confronted his opponents honestly, because they have seen it happen. Like the Beadle who speaks for them, they know that Christ is speaking the truth. His truth claim is supported towards the end of the first trial before Pilate when in reply to Pilate’s demand to know if he is the Son of God he invokes the name of the Father insisting on his own innocence: Þou saiste so þiselue. I am sothly þe same Here wonnyng in worlde to wirke al þi will. My fadir is faithfull to felle all þi fame; Withouten trespas or tene am I taken þe till. (XXX, 477–80)

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Up to this point, although he has said little, Christ has stood firm countering the lies of the High Priests, enduring the beating of their servants and appealing to Pilate’s sense of justice. It is in the next play, ‘The Trial before Herod’, that the playwrights boldly modulate the focus of the character of Christ by having him stand silent before his tormentors. The High Priests are cunning in their animosity; Pilate equivocates; Herod and his court merely jest. Moreover, what they demand is that Christ speak to entertain them and when he does not respond, Herod cries ‘His langage is lorne’ (XXXI, 90). The Word stands silent abused in three languages and when his abusers tire of the sport they dress him in the white garments of a madman and send him back to Pilate. It is in this play, surrounded by the antics of Herod and his court, that Christ withdraws into himself deliberately setting aside the power of speech and letting his enemies condemn themselves out of their own mouths. Caiaphas is still obsessed with Christ’s ‘lesyngis’ at the beginning of the ‘Remorse of Judas’ but it is in the ‘Christ Before Pilate 2’ (XXXII), that the question of the abuse of language takes a new turn. In his opening statement, Pilate clearly states that he has taken it upon himself to be the guardian of the ‘truth’ and that anyone caught lying will be punished: What traytoure his tonge with tales has traped, That fende for his flateryng full foull sall be falland. What broll ouere-brathely is bralland Or vnsoftely will sege in þer sales, Þat caysteffe þus carpand and calland As a boy sall be broght vnto bales. Þerfore Talkes not nor trete not of tales, For þat gome þat gyrnes or gales, I myself sall hym hurte full sore. (XXXIII, 15–24) It is as if he has read Peraldus and is anxious to condemn, in particular, ‘falsum testimonium’.13 When the High Priests enter he demands ‘That ȝe will say the sothe’ (XXXIII, 39). But the truth is not told. Instead Caiaphas insists on the outrageousness of Christ’s teaching only to be mocked by Pilate who claims that for him their ‘langage’ is ‘so large’ (XXXIII, 131). But Caiaphas presses his advantage insisting on a formal court procedure: Oure langage is to large, but ȝoure lordshipp releue vs. ȝitt we both beseke you late brynge hym to barre; What poyntes þat we putte forth latt your presence appreue vs – ȝe sall here how þis harlot heldes out of herre. (XXXIII, 132–35)

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‘Heldes out of herre’ is glossed as ‘behaves in a disorderly fashion’. Christ is brought into the court and the stage action, based on the Gospel of Nicodemus, now exposes the lie. Christ stands still but the banners bow and the court bursts into confusion as first Pilate (184) and then Caiaphas (192) accuse the soldiers of lying about the banners when they claim that they cannot hold them upright. Dawn breaks and in answer to Caiaphas’ demand Christ is formally called to the bar of justice. But once again the court is forced to ‘behave in a disorderly fashion’ as they rise involuntarily from their seats. It is here after the litany of lying, the false accusations, the mocking with words – a concatenation of the ‘sins of the tongue’ – that Christ speaks the uncanonical lines about truth telling. Pilate backs away from judgement to be met once again by Caiaphas’ retelling of the one lie that he knows will bring the vacillating Pilate back into the fold: Nought so ser, for wele ȝe it wate, To be kyng he claymeth, with croune, And whoso stoutely will steppe to þat state ȝe suld deme ser, to be dong doune And dede. (XXXIII, 329–32) Pilate is finally persuaded and in a burst of alliterative hysteria (337–40) turns Christ over to be scourged by the sadistic soldiers. Then, as he stands once again the silent Word now merged with the bleeding Image of Pity, they hail him as king in a parodic inversion of all the litanies of praise that have rung through the New Testament sequence since the child was born. Once again it is the words that provide the link backwards in the memory of the audience. In the words of the tormentors, the audience is made to remember that this is the ‘prince of pees’ (XIV, 57) the ‘souereyne sege’ (XIV, 59) worshipped by Mary as she lays her baby in the manger. Her words were the truth; those of the tormentors are lies. In a world controlled by liars, the Word has deliberately fallen silent.Yet, paradoxically, it is through the sentence based on lies that the world will be redeemed. The playwrights have here emphasised how by corrupting the Old Law by the use of false testimony, the High Priests have defeated themselves.As Origen taught ‘the Word [has supplanted] the Law and the power of the temple is broken’.14 In a strange way, in this cycle, it is the sentencing of Christ that is the climax of the plot.What immediately follows is inevitable from that moment yet it moves away from the cotidian linear plot to the cosmic action of the divine plan. In the next two plays, the presentation of the character of Christ is again in transition. In plays XXXIV, ‘The Road to Calvary’ and XXXV, ‘The Crucifixion’, he seems isolated in the enormity of what he is doing. In neither does he truly interact with the people around him. Although his only speech on the Road to Calvary is addressed to the distraught women of his following, he addresses a time beyond the present pain and prophesies the destruction of Jerusalem.

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In the ‘Crucifixion’, as the efficient soldiers go about their grim business he speaks only the twice – a prayer for the efficacy of the sacrifice (XXXV, 49–60) and then, once the cross is raised, the first of the calls for affective response that ends with the prayer for the forgiveness of the crucifiers (XXXV, 253–64). It is in the ‘Mortificacio’, as he is dying, that the teacher and friend of the ministry sequence re-emerges as he commends Mary to John’s care and forgives the penitent thief. He dies speaking the last of the scriptural words from the cross and the nascent Christian community – a community excluded from the long, lonely trial sequence – in the persons of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus efficiently claim and bury the body in profound mourning. What happens next is radically different from the treatment given these episodes in the Resurrection plays tied to the liturgical observances. These plays were divided between Good Friday and Easter afternoon or even Easter Monday demanding the three days of ritual mourning.15 Divorced from the liturgy, the cycle plays can break the chains of mourning with a display of divine power in the Harrowing of Hell. The testimony – the ‘truth telling’ – of the patriarchs and prophets replacing the lies of the judges prepare the way as Christ, now in the role of Christus Victor, arrives at the gates of hell, breaks them open with the words of the Psalm 24, ‘Attolite portas’ and proceeds to defeat Satan. But for all the call to arms on the part of the agitated devils, it is a battle of words that is waged and Satan is defeated and silenced. Just as the ‘Temptation in the Wilderness’ had been a debate, so here the Word is triumphant as he claims the righteous souls for himself: Jesus I make no maistries but for myne Þame wolle I saue I telle þe nowe. Þou hadde no poure þame to pyne, But as my prisounes for þer prowe Here haue þei soiorned, noght as thyne, But in thy warde – þou wote wele howe. (XXXVII, 217–22) With the ‘Laus tibi cum gloria’ from the end of the ‘Harrowing of Hell’ still ringing in their ears, the audience is confronted at the beginning of the ‘Resurrection’ once again with a closed court and the anxious judges waiting for news. The testimony to the truth told by the centurion is not what they want to hear. They set the guard around the tomb. After Christ has risen (once again in silence), in a comic scene playing once more with the concept of the ‘sins of the tongue’, the soldiers try to work out consistent lies to preserve them from Pilate’s wrath. But the first soldier, in the end, refuses to lie asserting that [. . .] I schall hym saie ilke worde tille ende, Even as it was. (XXXVIII, 345–46)

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Ironically, although they do tell the truth to the judges, they are bribed once again to spread lies. This final appearance of the Annas, Caiaphas, and Pilate re-emphasizes the central theme of the ‘peccata linguae’ that the playwrights exploit in this entire sequence. In the last four plays in which the risen Christ appears, he is once again the teacher and preacher of the Ministry sequence building through the ‘Resurrection’ appearances to the long and formal sermon in the ‘Ascension’ play just before the cloud descends to take him up. The Word is no longer silent but actively preparing his disciples for the Descent of the Spirit at Pentecost and their mission in the world. In their portrayal of the character of Christ, the York playwrights exploited the concept of logos. In the plays of the ministry and again in the post-Resurrection plays, he is indeed, ‘The Word on the Street’ actively teaching and preaching the ways of holy living openly, colloquially, humanly. But at the centre of the sequence, in the hands of his enemies, he falls silent. God the Father includes in His attributes in the first play of creation ‘veritas’ – truth.The playwrights understood Christ to be the Word and the Word to be Truth.The action of the trial plays is based on deceit and lies, reflecting Peraldus’ exposition of the ‘peccata linguae’. All the Word needs to do is stand silent, to be the ‘still centre’ and the redemption of the world is assured. Subtle, sophisticated, learned and above all rooted in language, the portrait of Christ in the York Cycle is a unique creation.

Notes 1 The most recent edition of the York Cycle is York Plays, ed. by Richard Beadle (London: Arnold, 1982); all citations from the plays will be from this edition, by play number and line number(s). For a full discussion of the Augustinian roots of this use of silence see Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The Word Made Flesh: Augustinian Elements in the York Cycle,’ in The Centre and Its Compass: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of John Leyerle, ed. by Robert Taylor and others, (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), see above, pp. 249–62. 2 Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘At the Still Point of the Turning World: Augustinian Roots of Medieval Dramaturgy,’ in European Medieval Drama 1997, ed. by S. Higgins, vol. i, (Camerino, IT: Tempo di Spettacoli, 1997), see above, pp. 263–78. 3 See E.J. Arnould, Le manuel des péchés (Paris: Droz, 1940), p. 197 and Edwin D. Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 31 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 15–16. 4 Craun, passim. 5 MSS 599f and 602a in The Friars’ Library, ed. by K.W. Humphreys, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues (London: British Library, 1993), pp. 145–46. For a full discussion of the relationship between the York Cycle, the pastoral movement and the Augustinian Friary see Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The York Cycle and the Libraries of York,’ in The Church and Learning in Late Medieval Society: Essays in Honour of Barrie Dobson, ed. by Caroline Barron and Jenny Stratford, Harlaxton Medieval Studies XI (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2002), see above, pp. 88–98. 6 Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature, p. 14. 7 In the Chester Cycle, Christ acts rather than speaks; in the Towneley compilation with its few plays on the Ministry of Christ, the emphasis falls on the bleeding sacrifice, almost explicitly on the ‘Image of Pity’.

288 Theory/theology 8 For a discussion of the history of the manuscript as we have it see Beadle, York Plays, ed. by Richard Beadle (London: Arnold, 1982), pp. 1–45. 9 Elza Tiner, ‘Inventio, Dispositio and Elocutio in the York Trial Plays’, (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1987); Pamela King, ‘Contemporary Cultural Models for the Trial Plays in the York Cycle,’ in Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, ed. by Alan Hindley (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), pp. 200–16. 10 Origen in The Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers, ed. by M.F.Toal, vol. i (Chicago: Regnery, 1957), pp. 244–45. 11 Toal, Sermons, I, pp. 235–53. 12 Commentary attributed to Pope John VIII in Bibliorum sacrorum, vol. 5 with Glossa ordinaria and commentary by Nicolas of Lyre, (London: 1545). 13 Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature, p. 15. 14 See note 12 above. 15 For a full discussion of Resurrection Plays associated with liturgical observances see Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The Emerging Pattern of the Easter Play in England’, Medieval English Theatre, 20 (1998), pp 3–23.

4.4 Making yourself ‘þer present’: Nicholas Love and the plays of the Passion From: In Strange Countries: Essays in Memory of John J. Anderson, David Matthews, ed. (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010), 96–107 Before he begins his vivid and passionate translation of the Meditationes Vitae Christi, Nicholas Love famously tells us who his intended audience is. Unlike his supposed predecessor, Love intends to address his treatise not to the learned and the cloistered but ‘to symple creatures þe whiche as childryn, hauen nede to be fedde with mylke of lyȝte doctryne & not with the sadde mete of grete clargye & of [hye contemplacion].’ His intention is to provide for material for the ‘edifying to hem þat bene [of] symple vndirstondyng’. His life of Christ will concentrate on the story, not the theology of the Incarnation. As, he claims, St Bernard himself has said the ‘contemplacion of þe monhede of cryste is more likyng more spedefull & more sykere þan is hyȝe contemplacion of þe godhed ande þerefore to hem is pryncipally to be sette in mynde þe ymage of cryistes Incarnacion passion & Resurreccion so that a symple soule þat kan bot þenke bot bodyes or bodily þinges mowe haue somwhat accordynge vnto is affecion where wiþ he maye fede & stire his deuocion.’1 Love’s immensely popular redaction of the Meditationes serves as a late milestone to a longstanding tradition of pseudo-Bonaventuran writings, and synthesizes the many English versions of late medieval Christian literature focusing on the retelling of the story of the life of Christ, particularly the story of the Passion.2 The tradition deliberately sets out to play on the emotions of the readers to make them experience the humanity and suffering of Christ as a means to stimulate devotion and penance. The literature takes the form of lyrics, long narrative poems such as the Northern Passion, tracts that deliberately call on the reader to repent providing probing questions to guide the spiritual exercise and the biblical plays of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Each literary form has its own conventions but all respond to the

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urgent immediacy of Love’s exhortation to experience the agony of the passion of Christ as he suffered it, Take hede now diligently with alle þi herte, alle þo þinges þat be now to come, & make þe þere present in þi mynde, beholdyng alle þat shale be done aȝeynus þi lorde Jesu & þat bene spoken or done of him. The recounting of the physical details, though based on the Latin original, is nevertheless graphic in its vernacular vividness, And so wiþ þe innere eye of þi soule beholde sume settyng and ficching þe crosse fast in to þe erþe. Sume makyng redye þe nailes & þe hameres to dryue hem wiþ. Oþere makyng redy & settyng vp laddres, & ordeinyng oþer instrumentis þat hem þouhgt nedeful, & oþer faste aboute to spoile him, & drawe of hees cloþes. And so is he now the þridde tyme spoilede & stande nakede in siht of all þat peple & so bene nowe the þridde tyme renvede þe brosours of þe wondes in his scourgyng by the cleuyng of þe cloþes to his flesh.3 The vividness Love’s presentation of the physical detail, the stripping away of dried blood-soaked cloth from the wounds of the scourging, the nakedness all carry out his announced intention to emphasize the body and bodily things. Simple men and women can come to an understanding of the faith through the contemplation of the suffering body of God. Most works of literature based on versions of the Meditatones are just that – meditations – aids for the private devotion of the reader or hearer. But the drama is a public medium; the experience is a corporate one.Yet it is also an immediate one. Rather than having to make themselves ‘þer present’ in their minds with reflection, the plays force the audience to be part of the passion event.The familiar streets of York, Chester and Coventry became Jerusalem. For the time of the performance, the physical quotidian surroundings of the sponsoring cities were transformed. Similarly, in the parishes where many more such plays were performed,4 playing spaces were fashioned in familiar surroundings to create the physical reality that Love enjoins his readers to create with their ‘inner eyes’. Plays such as the N-Town Passion were performed in what is called a ‘place and scaffold’ arrangement with stages representing such locations as Pilate’s court, Herod’s court, and Gethsemane set in a field or a large enclosed space.5 The audience is in the space between these stages and the movement between the stages takes place through the audience. There is nowhere for the audience to be but among the players; it is literally within the action. In the production of the N-Town Passion in Toronto in 1981,6 special provision had to be made after Christ’s ‘daughters of Jerusalem’ speech7 for just the action that Love describes in the passage cited above. The crosses had to be carried in to the playing area, the hammer, nails and ladder had to be ‘set’. On these grounds alone it is possible to argue that the dramatized versions of the familiar meditation texts fulfill

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most completely the purpose Love set out to achieve – to bring an appreciation of the suffering of Christ to the unlearned folk through an emphasis on the physical details. The literature of ‘affective piety’ had flourished in England for well over a century by the time Love wrote his Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. The conception of at least one set of surviving plays, those at York, pre-dates the Mirror, but the text that has come down to us was written down in the 1470s. Almost without exception the dramatic texts survive in fifteenth and sixteenth-century manuscripts and show the marks of revision. The play texts share many of the characteristics of the meditation texts. In the tradition of the Pseudo-Bonaventuran texts they retell the story of the Incarnation in the vernacular, drawing on such material as the writings of Richard Rolle and such long narrative pieces as the Gospel of Nicodemus, The Stanzaic Life of Christ, the Cursor Mundi, and The Northern Passion. The two civic so-called cycles,York and Chester, have Old Testament prologues, drawing, as Pamela King has been showing, on the liturgical calendar for their choice of episodes.8 Some episodic plays may not have had Old Testament sequences. There is, for example, no evidence for any Old Testament episodes in Coventry indicating that the plays there may have begun, as the meditation texts typically do, with the Christmas story. Some non-cycle plays like the N-Town Passion and the Passion play at New Romney9 treat only the Passion story as do such meditation texts as the Meditations on the Supper of our Lord and the Hours of the Passion once attributed to Robert Manning of Brunne. Others, like the N-Town Mary Play, begin (as do the Meditationes) with the childhood of the Virgin and the Parliament of Heaven. The influence of the literature of meditative affective piety is all-pervasive in the dramatic texts that have survived. Denise Baker, in her introduction to her translation of The Privity of the Passion, explains that her text, like the Meditationes, emphasizes the role of the Virgin and the other women in the story, introducing the Virgin specifically on the road to Calvary, expanding her role at the foot of the cross and introducing an episode (brilliantly dramatized in the N-Town Passion) where the resurrected Christ appears first to his mother. She writes, ‘As witnesses to Christ’s suffering, the two Marys (the Virgin and Mary Magdalen) become surrogates for the meditator as they dramatize the compassion that this devotional practice was designed to induce.’10 In a slightly different way, in many dramatic texts, the Virgin, the other Marys, and Veronica in particular also become surrogates for the audience as they give voice to the emotions of the audience over the spectacle of the torture and death of Christ. In the ‘Burial of Christ’ from Bodleian E Museo 160 what action there is derives from the laments of the Virgin.11 Here her mourning (rather than the act of torture and execution) dominates the piece although the body (or image) hanging on the cross remains the focus of meditation.This text is from the early sixteenth century and seems to be one of the few remaining

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examples of a genre of parish Easter plays that was popular just before the break from Rome.12 In the more narrative plays such as the Chester Plays the women provide a lamenting counterpoint to the bustle of the Crucifixion as the Virgin and the three Marys – Magdalen, Jacobi, and Salome – speak sixty-three lines between the fastening of Pilate’s sign ‘Jesus Nazarenus rex Iudeorum’ to the cross and the exchange between Christ and the thieves.13 They remain kneeling at the foot of the cross, the physical presence of mourning. In the version in the Towneley manuscript, just over a quarter of the entire play is taken up by a dialogue between the Virgin and St John between the agony of the dropping of the cross into its mortise (a second time) and the words from the cross.14 This passage takes place at the foot of the cross with Mary lamenting and John explaining to her (and to the audience) the reason for the sacrifice. In a twist on the convention, the first part of the N-Town Passion ends with Mary Magdalen running to the Virgin with news of the arrest of Christ. The lament of the Virgin that follows directs the audience to the reason for the suffering. But, characteristic of the N-Town Mary, she does not minimize her own desolation. Passion Play 1 ends with these lines: Now, dere sone, syn þu hast evyr be so ful of mercy Þat wylt not spare þiself for þe love þu hast to man, On all mankend now haue þu pety – And also thynk on þi modyr, þat hevy woman. (XXVIII, 189–92) In Passion Play 2, after the thieves have been crucified, the stage direction indicates that the dicing for Christ’s garments has begun and then continues: And in þe menetyme xal oure Lady come with iij Maryes with here and Sen Johan with hem, settyng hem down asyde afore þe cros, oure Lady swuonyng and mornyng (XXXII, SD between ll. 92 and 93) The party of mourners has arrived and, as in Chester and Towneley, they stay until Christ is dead, serving as a focus of identification for the audience. In two of the eleven plays of the long and gruelling Passion sequence in the York Cycle, the women serve a similar function. As in the Meditationes, they meet Christ on the road to Calvary in play XXXIV (the ninth of the sequence) and in the last play, the ‘Mortificacio’ (XXXVI), they serve the same purpose at the foot of the cross as they do in the other dramatic versions. The English plays of the Passion, then, share many of the characteristics of the meditation texts and to a greater or lesser degree provide surrogates for the emotional responses of the audience in the women followers of Christ. But in two of the texts – the N-Town Passion and the Passion sequence in the York Plays other things are happening as the playwrights explore other ways to make the audience feel that they are ‘there present’ at the death of Jesus.

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In the N-Town Passion play the extraordinary naturalism of the characterization of the mature Virgin fulfils this role.. In 1984, when the Poculi Ludique Societas of Toronto was asked to take a Passion Play to an Easter play festival in Rome we took a shortened version of the N-Town Passion. I played the Virgin in that production and learned this character from the inside. Her characterization provides the possibility for a close identification between Mary and the mature women, possibly patrons of the play, in the audience. This Mary makes an extraordinary emotional journey; she is no hieratic mourning saint but a woman who moves from self-pitying despair to joyful confidence. She enters at the mid point of Passion Play 2, as we have seen, supported by the other three Marys and John to confront Christ as he hangs on the cross. Her first outburst of anger, shock and shame is followed by a descent into self-pity: A, my good Lord, my sone so swete! What hast þu don? Why hangyst now þus here? Is þer non other deth to þe now mete But þe most shameful deth among þese thevys fere? A, out on my hert – why brest þu nowth? And þu art maydyn and modyr and seyst þus þi childe spylle! How mayst þu abyde þis sorwe and þis woful owth? A, deth, deth! Why wylt þu not me kyll? (XXXII, 93–100) And, as the rubric tells us, here she swoons. To readers who have not been called upon to act this role, and are familiar with the other lamenting Marys in medieval meditation texts and drama, speeches like this one can be passed over as painful but formulaic. However, when you have to examine every word to understand fully what is being said and convey that understanding to an audience, you discover that this is anything but formulaic. The tangle of emotions represented here and the implications of what she is saying for the characterization of this Mary are quite astonishing. All the complex stages of grief are here – the anger at the loved one who is dying, the sense of outrage that such a thing is happening to the mourner, the conviction that somehow this situation has been created simply to make her suffer. Mixed in as well is the sense that by dying between thieves, Christ is bringing shame to his respectable mother. Christ, seemingly ignoring his mother, forgives the thieves and an outraged Mary snaps at him ‘þu hast spoken to alle þo þat ben here/and not o word þu spekyst to me’ (XXXII, 136–37). Christ then commits her to John’s care but in her violent despair she cries that she will die with him and, as the rubric directs here ‘xal [she] ryse and renne and halse þe crosse’. At this point this Mary is completely given over to hysterical grief and must be cared for by others as John and Mary Magdalen support her in her grief.When Christ dies she moves forward, this time to lament in measured eight-lined stanzas before she stoops to kiss the dead feet. When the body has been taken from the cross Joseph of Arimathea lays the body on Mary’s knees and in a living icon of the pietà she

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prepares the body for burial speaking stark, poignant lines in a conscious recalling of the Mary of the Nativity caring for the helpless body of her son. Here this Mary finds again the centre of her being as she accepts Christ’s death. She takes leave of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus like a great lady dismissing her servants – regal, gracious and controlled. The Mary of the N-Town Passion moves from self-centered hysteria to outwardlooking dignity as she is carried through the stages of mourning. Yet there is still another emotion the actor is called upon to portray. Following the tradition of the Meditationes, the resurrected Christ appears first to her. She at first greets him formally but, as they part, her tone moves from ritual to lyric: Farewel, my sone! Farewel, my childe! Farewel, my Lorde, my God so mylde! Myn hert is wele þat fyrst was whylde, Farewel, myn owyn dere love! (XXXV, 121–24) The N-Town playwrights captured the complexity of Mary developed over the long years of the meditative tradition. She interacts with her child, her God and her beloved in a complex way. The N-Town Mary is both a mourning mother and a bereaved lover.This is a mature woman who has experienced all emotions from ecstasy to despair, a woman set apart by God yet at one with all women as the mother and mourner, caregiver and lover. Gail Gibson has called her ‘God’s bride and God’s mother’.15 She is also God’s widow.Through this extraordinary characterization of Mary, the playwrights provided a compellingly real character with whom the audience could identify drawing them to be ‘þer present’ at the Passion through the sheer naturalism of her portrayal. The situation in the York Plays16 provides another approach to the idea of being ‘there present’. The York Passion sequence as it has come down to us in the ‘register’ was significantly altered between 1415 when the Ordo paginarum or ‘Pageant Order’ was first written down in the A/Y Memorandum Book and the compilation of the register some time in the 1470s. The evidence from the guild records is complex but the general consensus is that the plays as we now have them date from the decade between 1422 and 1432 long enough after the date of Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ for that treatise to have an effect on the reviser. Nine of the eleven plays from the first play when the High Priests plot to rid themselves of Jesus to the ‘Mortificacio’ are written in long alliterative lines frequently identified as those of the reviser or revisers. Three are not. One is the fragmentary play of the ‘Last Supper’. The other two plays are ‘The Road to Calvary’ and the ‘Mortificacio’ that, as we have seen, use the conventional device of surrogate mourners. However, in the other eight plays of this sequence, the revisers developed an entirely different approach to affective piety. Here there are no surrogates. In these episodes there is no mediation between the audience and the suffering isolation of Christ. To make these revised plays compelling, their creators ‘thought themselves there present’ and

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opened a fifteenth-century world of folly, fear, legalism, sadism, and hysteria. Not only is the city of York the city of Jerusalem, the first-century judicial murder takes on the overtones of a contemporary one where the victim is isolated and alone. The technique they have adopted is clear in the contrast between the ‘Crucifixion’ play (XXXV) and the ‘Mortificacio’ (XXXVI). Play XXXVI has a complete cast of characters – Christ and the thieves on their crosses, Pilate and the High Priests, the mourning women with John, the centurion, Longeus, Joseph of Arimathea, and Nicodemus. Play XXXV has, famously, only five characters – Christ and the soldiers, who nail him to the cross with efficient brutality, raise it and then jeer at him. Play XXXVI has the surrogate mourners, the comfort of familiar iconography and, at the end, with the praise of Longeus whose sight has been restored by the blood of Christ a powerful statement of the divine purpose. In Play XXXV, as in the long series of trials that precede it, Christ stands alone and helpless in the hands of his enemies. There is no one there to help him and each member of the audience must stand impotent and suffer with him. The York Plays are a complex work of art interwoven by many hands over the centuries of its production. Unlike the meditation texts, it has its own interpretation of the Christian story that is overlaid on the biblical narrative. The plot turns on the confrontation between the Old and the New Law and the revisers of the Passion sequence, recognizing this, re-wrote the trial scenes giving them a distinctly contemporary twist.17 In these plays it is Annas and Caiaphas who spearhead the animosity to Christ. Pilate is a weak and vacillating civil servant, jealous if his own power and Herod is a buffoon. The key to the animosity of the High Priests lies in Caiaphas’ line in the trial before Annas and Caiaphas ‘þis ladde with his leysyngis has oure lawes lorne’ (XXIX/387). The York playwrights chose to make the issue of the law pivotal in their dramatizing of this segment of the story. Both Elza Tiner and Pamela King have analysed the trial scenes, explicating their sources in civil and ecclesiastical court proceedings.18 The revisers of the Passion sequence trial scenes, taking their cue from earlier episodes in the cycle such as ‘Christ and the Doctors’, the ‘Transfiguration’, and the ‘Woman Taken in Adultery’, wrote a stinging indictment of the legal world of fifteenth-century England. In these plays, there is no one with whom the watcher can identify as the Son of God stands, largely silent, as his enemies seek to destroy him by manipulating the law. There are only tiny hints of support for Christ in these plays. For a brief moment in Play XXX, the first trial before Pilate, the Beadle stands up and testifies to what he has seen at the entry into Jerusalem and bows to Christ. Suddenly the pain is eased; the grinding inevitability of the judicial process is lightened for the watcher. In the second trial before Pilate (XXXIII) the banners bow to Christ and the judges rise involuntarily from their seats. For a moment this mute recognition of Christ as king provides relief but the incident only increases the frenzy of Pilate and the High Priests to get rid of this man they are now convinced is a ‘warlowe’ (XXXIII, 190). He is beaten, mocked,

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subjected to every humiliation his enemies can think of and yet he will not acknowledge their right to judge him or entertain them. He turns their arguments against his judges again and again, ultimately enraging them because they know that they are wrong. His stoicism is the stoicism of God and yet, in the tradition of the Meditaciones, the playwrights make it very clear that he is a man. The masterful alliteration of the play of the ‘Agony in the Garden’ near the beginning of the sequence emphasizes that his flesh ‘dyderis and dares for doute of my dede’ (XXVIII, 2). Although he is ‘mased’ in his ‘manhed’ (XXVIII, 91) he prays for the strength to be obedient to the will of God. What follows is not easy to watch. As the long sequence of verbal and physical abuse continues, the watchers become horrified voyeurs privy to, indeed present at, the torture. Each one witnesses what mankind has done to the Son of God and what the Son of Man accepts willingly to save mankind. The contemporary references create a paradoxical sense of complicity as the watcher is both drawn to identify with these characters (whom he recognizes from his everyday world) and, at the same time, to reject them. The revisers planned their unrelenting horror carefully and did not edit out the episode on the Road to Calvary. After the claustrophobic atmosphere of the trials, the pageant provides an enormous emotional release when, at last, the solitary watcher can identify with the mourning women and disciples within the play world. But the revisers have one more stark lesson to teach.The sense of Christ’s isolation returns in the actual Crucifixion, as we have seen, as the watcher is once again a helpless witness to the death of Christ. He or she is ‘there present’ when the judicial murder is committed and is unable to stop it. However, the revisers again chose not to alter the ‘Mortificacio’ and the audience is able to join in the final mourning as the nascent Christian community buries the body of the saviour. The meditation texts of the late Middle Ages and fifteenth-century biblical drama share the same didactic and pastoral impulse.The drama, however, is able to use a wider variety of techniques to respond to the exhortation from Nicholas Love to allow the watchers to be ‘þer present’ in their minds to experience the Passion and repent.The dramatic form of affective piety had a life of its own at every level of late medieval English society with different genres based on different poetic and theatrical principles.Yet, ironically, it seems possible that the similar impulses behind meditation literature and biblical drama has preserved for us, almost by accident, more than half the surviving play texts that would otherwise have been lost. Four major collections of biblical drama have come down to us once thought to be four ‘cycles’ of plays. Of these, two – the York and Chester Plays – are what they have always been thought to be: plays performed by the guilds of the two northern cities under the watchful eyes of generations of city councils. However, codicological studies prompted by new editions and the performance of most of the canon over the last few decades, have made it clear beyond any shadow of doubt that two of the four major collections of plays – N-Town and Towneley – are not dramatic units but rather compilations, anthologies of plays with eclectic staging demands gathered

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together for some other purpose – and that purpose seems to have been to function as meditation texts. In much of the N-Town manuscript, conventional speech headings are mixed in with such lines as ‘Adam dicit sic:’ or ‘Hic ardent decimum Abel, et Caym quo facto dicit:’ as if the scribe anticipated a reader as much as an actor would use his text.The Towneley manuscript is so late and so closely identified with a recusant family that it is unlikely that the text as it has survived was ever used as anything but a meditation text. This is not to say that all the plays, long and short, single episode or sequences in all the manuscripts were not played. They were, all over the country.19 But at least half of the canon has been preserved not because the episodes belonged together as plays but because their episodes could be arranged to serve the purpose of meditation texts. Had there not been a strong and continuing demand for individual spiritual exercises using the techniques of meditation laid out by Nicholas Love, the surviving canon of medieval English drama would be reduced to the cycles of York, Chester, and a few fragments.

Notes 1 Nicholas Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition Based on Cambridge University Library Additional MSS 6578 and 6686, ed. by Michael G. Sergeant (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2005), Text p. 10. 2 See John Thompson and Ian Johnson, Geographies of Orthodoxy: Mapping English PseudoBonaventuran Lives of Christ, 135–1550. 3 Sergeant, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition Based on Cambridge University Library Additional MSS 6578 and 6686, p. 174. 4 Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘An Introduction to Medieval English Theatre,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Theatre, ed. by Richard Beadle and Alan Fletcher, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 10–15. 5 The N-Town Passion Play is embedded in London, British Library Cotton Vespasian D. 8. See The N-Town Play, ed. by Stephen Spector, 2 vols, Early English Text Society, s.s., 11 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). See also The Passion Play from the N-Town Manuscript, ed. by Peter Meredith (London, Longmans, 1990). 6 The production was by the Poculi Ludique Societas, the medieval and Renaissance drama group of the University of Toronto. The text was modernized by Stanley J. Kahrl. 7 Spector, XXXII, l. 21. All quotations from N-Town are from the EETS edition, cited by play number and line number. 8 Pamela King, The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006). 9 The evidence for the complex Passion play in New Romney is found in Kent, ed. by James Gibson, 2 vols, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), pp. 738, 745–95. 10 ‘The Privity of the Passion’ trans. by Denise N. Baker in Cultures of Piety, ed. by Anne Clark Bartlett and Thomas H. Bestul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 89. 11 The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and E Museo 160, ed. by Donald Baker, John L. Murphy and Louis B. Hall, Jr., Early English Text Society, OS 283 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp 141–68. 12 See Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The Emerging Pattern of the Easter Play in England’, Medieval English Theatre, 20 (1998), see above, pp. 115–31. 13 Robert M. Lumiansky and David Mills, eds., The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. by Robert M. Lumiansky and David Mills, 2 vols, Early English Text Society, SS 3 (London: Oxford

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14 15 16

17 18

19

University Press, 1974) and 9 (London: Oxford University Press, 1986), Play XVIa, ll pp. 241–88. The Towneley Plays, ed. by Arthur C. Cawley and Martin Stevens, Early English Text Society, SS 13 and 14 (London: Oxford University Press, 1994), Play XXIII, ll pp. 311–502. Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), p. 137. The York Plays, ed. by Richard Beadle (London: Arnold, 1982). For a discussion of the revisions see also Richard Beadle ‘The York Cycle,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. by Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 1st ed.), pp. 100–08. See Alexandra F. Johnston, “‘His Langage is Lorne”:The Silent Centre of the York Cycle’, Early Theatre, 3 (2000), see above, pp. 279–88. Elza Tiner, ‘Inventio, Dispositio and Elocutio in the York Trial Plays’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1987); Pamela King, ‘Contemporary Cultural Models for the Trial Plays in the York Cycle,’ in Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, ed. by Alan Hindley (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), pp. 200–16. Johnston, ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–15.

5

Performance

5.1 The York Corpus Christi play: A dramatic structure based on performance practice From: The Theatre in the Middle Ages, Herman Braet, John Noive, and Gilbert Tournoy, eds. (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 1985), 362–73 The merchant cities of the English north and midlands devised a unique method of producing episodic biblical drama in the late Middle Ages. York, Chester, Coventry, Beverley, and possibly Newcastle seem to have employed a performance technique different from both continental practice and from the practice in other parts of England. The method seems to have grown out of the great religious processions of the period, and there is growing speculation that it owes a considerable debt to the lavish processions of wagons in the Low Countries. Two complete texts of English plays that seem to follow this unique method of production have survived – the York Cycle and the Chester Cycle. Both towns survive from the period remarkably unchanged so that we have not only the plays themselves, but also the basic ‘sets’. However, the documentary evidence concerning the production of the York Cycle survives in greater detail from an earlier period than the evidence for the Chester Cycle. Since the first publication of the York Plays by Lucy Toulmin Smith in 18851 the traditional understanding of the mode of production has been that each of the episodes was performed many times over on Corpus Christi Day along a route through the city of York beginning at the gates of Holy Trinity in Micklegate and ending at the open space near All Saint’s called the Pavement (see map p. 19). Each episode was performed by a craft guild or consortium of guilds using a movable stage or pageant wagon as the set piece or focal point for the action. Forty-eight episodes are preserved in the manuscript which is the official ‘register’ copy owned by the city council. There is evidence that the normal number of ‘stations’ or playing places offered for lease each year was twelve, although in some years as many as sixteen were offered and in some years as few as eight were actually paid for. During the last decade, some scholars have challenged this understanding. Alan Nelson first refuted the traditional view, arguing that the text as we have it was performed indoors after a procession of tableaux vivants.2 Martin Stevens,

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unwilling to accept Nelson’s radical suggestion of an indoor performance, argued that the play was performed on the Pavement3 – the last station or stopping place named in the records. With this suggestion William Tydeman seems to concur in his more recent The Theatre in the Middle Ages.4 In the same issue of Leeds Studies in English in which Stevens enunciated his theory, my colleague, Margaret Dorrell (Rogerson), put forward a closely argued case based on the documentary evidence upholding the traditional view.5 My own study of the documents relating to the Creed Play and the Pater Noster Play of York, published in Speculum in 1975, confirms Dr Rogerson’s conclusions.6 There is abundant external evidence that each episode of the cycle was performed at each of the stations designated in any given year. There is no evidence whatsoever to support either Professor Nelson’s suggestion of an indoor performance or Professor Steven’s suggestion of performance in the round on the Pavement. Dr Rogerson and I worked for many years on all the surviving evidence from York as we prepared our volume of the York records, the first two volumes in the Records of Early English Drama series.7 We find no reason to question the general outline of the traditional view. Indeed, I believe that the later fifteenthcentury emendation of the end of the 1415 proclamation of the play spells out the method by which the text as it has been preserved for us was performed: And yat all maner of craftmen þat bringeth furthe ther pageantez in order and course by good players well arayed and openly spekyng vpon payn of lesyng of Cs to be paid to the chambre withoute any pardon. And that every player that shall play be redy in his pagiaunt at convenyant tyme that is to say at the mydhowre betwix iiijth and vth of the cloke in the mornyng and then all oyer pageantes fast folowyng ilkon after oyer as yer course is without Tarieng sub pena facienda camere vjs viijd.8 I do not intend to belabour the external evidence here. Anyone interested should study the York records and draw his or her own conclusions from that evidence. There are two other kinds of evidence that support the traditional view. These are, first of all, evidence from actual performance and, secondly, evidence from the text of the cycle itself. There have been two recent processional performances of the York Cycle. The first took place in Leeds in 1975; the second in Toronto in 1977. Neither was a perfect reproduction. The production in Leeds did not have all the episodes. The production in Toronto was forced by torrential rain to perform from ‘Noah’s Flood’ to the ‘Road to Calvary’ indoors. The general conclusions drawn from both productions reinforce the traditional method of performance: I was the producer of the Toronto production, and will draw my performance evidence from that event. First of all, we early came to the conclusion that the only way to produce a play of such magnitude is the traditional way. Only by dividing up the responsibilities into manageable units is the task possible. By the time we added in supernumeraries, stage crews and other necessary participants, there were over

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one thousand people involved in the production. Although this seems a very large number of people, it is only an average of twenty-one people per episode. The sheer numbers involved demand an imaginative method of performance. That method was found in York by dividing the responsibility for the episodes among the craft guilds of the city. The number of separate episodes also produces problems in any method of production except the traditional one. There is no denying that the text demands forty-eight different scenes, and very few set pieces can be used a second time. The genius of the traditional method using separate pageant wagons for each episode was proved in the Toronto production by default. Each episode had been ‘blocked’ for performance using a pageant wagon. When the weather forced us inside into a very large round auditorium normally used for convocations, we set up one pageant wagon on the stage. Because each scene is different, the audience in the auditorium had to wait between each episode as one crew struck one scene and the second built the new scene. How much better, smoother, and faster it was outside when the pageants ‘fast following each after the other’ moved into the playing area, sets in place ready to begin as soon as the wagon of the episode before moved off. Professor Nelson suggested that the named stations are too close together for spoken drama to take place because the noise from one episode would interfere with the next.9 What we found is that noise does carry but in so doing produces anticipation and retrospection in the minds of the audience reinforcing images and ideas and contributing to the sense of timelessness. What remains most forcefully with me is the drum used in the episode of the ‘Road to Calvary’. It echoed over our playing space throughout the plays of the ‘Crucifixion’ and ‘Death of Christ’ tying those three painful episodes together. Under performance conditions, we found this method of production to be extraordinarily flexible. Some episodes demand elaborate set pieces for throne scenes or the complex and mechanically sophisticated ‘Doomsday’ pageant.10 Others demand less elaborate sets. In some, the action is focussed on the wagon; in others, the action takes place on the street and even in among the audience gathered to watch. In some episodes of our production, the audience crowded up to the wagon. In others, it drew back naturally from action taking place on the street. This form of drama is, above all, intimate. In the narrow medieval streets of York, each audience gathered at a station received a pageant into its midst and sent it on its way again. Actors and audience were one in a corporate celebration, unique to York. Over the last decade as I have studied external evidence of drama from all over England and been closely associated with many productions, I have come to the conclusion that each play is different from all the others and that the method of production of each play has, in large measure, shaped the text of each play. I would like now to turn to the text of the York Cycle. Although we do not know the exact date of the manuscript, it is safe to say that it was committed to the ‘register’ copy as we have it sometime towards the end of the third

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quarter of the fifteenth century.11 The first evidence for the production of the play is 1376.12 The text as we have it, then, was honed and polished by close to a century of annual performances. The manuscript was then used for a further century and it contains in marginal notes and addenda indications of changes, additions and some indications of stage business. These were made by subsequent city clerks who sat with the register open in front of them at the first station and ‘monitored’ each guild production noting significant variants.Text and notes, then, provide us with evidence of two centuries of performance practice. However, even without the later notes the text itself reflects the method of performance in procession. One of the most striking features of the York text is the constant sense throughout each episode that the story of salvation history being unfolded before us consists of many journeys. The text is full of introductions and farewells. There are three ways in which all of the forty-eight episodes end – with a blessing or curse, with the singing of a liturgical song or with carefully engineered business making the last few lines of the episode a formal departure.The single most striking of these departures comes in the episode of the pilgrims to Emmaus. Although seemingly caught up in wonder at the appearance of the resurrected Christ, one pilgrim remarks to the other, Here may we notte melle [of] more at þis tide, For prossesse of plaies þat precis in plight. He bringe to his blisse on euery ilke side, Þat sufferayne lorde þat most is of myght. (p. 432) Indeed, because of the length of the plays that precede them at least two of the plays of the resurrection appearances were waiting in place at each station behind the ‘Resurrection’ pageant. This feature of processional performance must be clearly understood. Not all the episodes are of the same length. Sometimes this works to the advantage of the audience. Each of the first eight episodes – up to the building of the Ark – is of approximately the same length. Episode nine, however, is twice as long as episode eight. Therefore, supposing that episode eight lasts for ten minutes and episode nine for twenty, there is a widening time-gap beginning with ten minutes and increasing station by station until, by the final station the gap between episodes eight and nine is well over an hour. A similar gap occurs between the last play of the ministry sequence and the ‘Entry into Jerusalem’.Those members of the audience aware of the nature of the production undoubtedly chose the station from which they would view the play according to the length of time they wished for meals or other diversions during the performance. Conversely, and more frequently, shorter plays backed up behind longer ones providing respite for the actors and, I shall argue, opportunities for creative use of stage conventions. It is this backing up that causes the ‘prossesse of plaies’ spoken of by the pilgrim to Emmaus.

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But to return to the endings of the individual episodes. Six of the forty-eight episodes end with a simple blessing. God blesses the audience at the end of the first three ‘Creation’ episodes (pp. 7, 13, and 17); Joseph of Arimathea blesses the crowd at the end of the ‘Deposition’ (p. 371); Christ blesses the disciples and the audience as his messengers at the end of the play of ‘Doubting Thomas’ (p. 455); and the ascended Christ blesses the audience after the ‘Coronation of the Virgin’ (p. 496). An inversion of this pattern is found in one episode where Cain curses the audience at the end of the ‘Cain and Abel’ episode (p. 39). Six episodes end in song. The ‘Pharaoh’ pageant ends with the Children of Israel singing the ninety-sixth psalm Cantemus domino (p. 91); the ‘Annunciation’ ends with the Magnificat (p. 101); the ‘Harrowing of Hell’ with Laus tibi cum gloria (p. 395); the ‘Death of Mary’ with Ave regina celorum (p. 479). At the end of the ‘Entry Into Jerusalem’ sequence, a sixteenth-century clerk has noted ‘Tunc cantant’ (p. 318); and, at the very end, at the end of the Judgement sequence, is written in the hand of the major scribe, ‘Et sic facit finem cum melodia angelorum transiens a loco ad locum’ (p. 513).Thus thirteen of the forty-eight episodes end in a recognizably conventional manner similar to most other drama of the period. However, thirty-five of the forty-eight pageants (or 73%) have a leave-taking built into their closing lines. Some are directly addressed to the audience as are the lines of the pilgrims to Emmaus. For example, Noah ends the second Noah play with ‘And wende we hense in haste, In goddis blissyng and myne’ (p. 55) anxious to re-establish life in a post-diluvian world; Abraham hurries Isaac off home after the sacrifice to discuss wedding plans (p. 67); Joseph and Mary pack up to leave for Bethlehem at the end of ‘Joseph’s Troubles’ (p. 111); the Holy Family leaves Simeon and Anna at the end of the ‘Purification’, and, more particularly, they flee before the threat of Herod with the line ‘Lette vs goo with goode cheere’ (p. 145). Here the reason for the flight is perfectly clear since the Herod pageant for the ‘Slaughter of the Innocents’ is constantly backed up behind the pageant of the Flight into Egypt – thus posing a visible threat. At the end of the massacre episode, Herod rushes off in the same direction as Mary and Joseph have gone with the impetuous line to his henchmen, ‘Comes after as yhe canne For we will wende be-fore’ (p. 155). ‘Christ and the Doctors’ ends with Joseph’s line taking leave of the doctors in their ‘furres fine’ (pp. 168 and 171) and the ‘Baptism’, the next play, ends with a wonderfully companionable comment by Christ to John the Baptist, But wende we nowe Wher most is nede Þe folk to wise Both I and ȝou. (p. 177) Similar patterns emerge again and again. Sometimes, as in the episode of Christ and the Doctors’ some members of the cast take leave of others, leaving them on the wagon. Sometimes the figure on the pageant remains and sends others

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away as in the Passion sequence when again and again Christ is hauled before a judge and sent away, twice with the haunting jibe ‘daunce forth in þe deuyll way’ (p. 269 and 306). The starkest leave-taking is that of the crucifiers who turn their backs on the crucified Christ and walk away (p. 358). Sometimes the entire cast leaves, abandoning the wagon to be pulled after them as in the ‘Ascension’ play where Peter cries, to Jerusalem go we agayne, And loke what fayre so aftir fall, Oure lorde and maistir moste of mayne, He wisse youe, and be with youe all. (p. 464) Salvation history is conceived as an unfolding procession. One after another the scenes telling the basic stories of the faith are enacted before a stationary audience and then move on. This sense of travelling, of urgency, of leave-taking is built into the fabric of the play itself. The beginnings of the episodes are equally significant. Thirty-seven out of the forty-eight episodes, or 77%, begin with a significant opening statement by one or another character. Some of these statements recapitulate the action. The most notable of these is the Prologue to the ‘Annunciation’. Such recapitulation was and is a familiar pedagogical trait used by countless teachers and preachers. Some statements are statements of introduction usually spoken by one of the tyrant figures. This again reflects the traditional method of production. There are six episodes in which Pilate appears. In the first, the ‘Conspiracy’, Pilate was either played by a Cutler or by an actor employed by the Cutlers.This could not be the same person who played the part four episodes further on in the Tapiters’ episode of the ‘First Trial before Pilate’. Indeed, in the traditional mode of production, none of these parts could have been ‘doubled’ by the same actor. It was, therefore, necessary for each new figure to introduce himself and establish his character in the eyes of the audience. In production, it is also possible for these opening statements to be made while the crew is setting up the pageant wagon, cutting down the delay between the end of one play and the beginning of the next if the episodes are not backed up. All eleven episodes that have no opening statements are backed up waiting behind the play in front. Each has its own dramatic rightness. The play of ‘Christ and the Doctors’ begins with Mary and Joseph emerging from the crowd looking for their lost son (p. 156). This comes hard on the heels of Herod who has rushed off in pursuit of the child. For a moment, it seems as if the child is truly lost, that Herod has succeeded until Mary and Joseph find the child on the wagon with the doctors of the law. Other episodes without declamatory statements begin on the road – Christ and his disciples enter talking on the way to the mountain of ‘Transfiguration’ (p. 185) and leave again while hard on their heels come the accusing Jews in the next episode of the ‘Woman Taken in Adultery’ (p. 193); the pilgrims on the road to Emmaus enter discussing the sad events in Jerusalem (p. 426). This is in sharp contrast to the risen Christ who has just sent Mary before him to Galilee

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(p. 425). Again the pendulum of hope and despair is exploited in the next episode of ‘Doubting Thomas’ that begins with the disciples together in an upper room with the simple ‘Alas’ of Peter (p. 447). The next play begins again with the disciples in a closed room, but this time in joy, waiting for the reappearance of Christ before the ‘Ascension’ (p. 233). A similar tableau without opening statement is the ‘Last Supper’. Here with Judas and the soldiers hurrying to find him, Christ enters with his other disciples and calmly prepares to eat the Passover. The ‘Death of Mary’ begins with a second annunciation as Gabriel comes to her with one of the great litanies of praise so familiar in this cycle (p. 473). The stark brutality of the ‘Crucifixion’ is enhanced by the abrupt business-like opening as the crucifiers hurry to get the job done ‘by none’ (p. 349). The final episode to begin without a preamble is the play of the ‘Shepherds’. This episode is part of what I see as a key sequence that demonstrates the way in which the mode of production was adapted over the years of performance. The play of ‘Joseph’s Troubles’ is twice as long as the next two episodes, the birth and the visit of the shepherds. Thus the two wagons of the Tile-thatchers who presented the birth and the Chandlers who presented the ‘Shepherd’ play were always backed up. As early as 1415, the custom had arisen for an angel from the Nativity wagon to make the annunciation to the shepherds ‘angelus loquens pastoribus ludentibus in pagina sequente’.13 This is noted in the famous Ordo paginarum. Although it is possible that there was a silent Nativity tableau on the Chandlers’wagon for the shepherds to adore, there are late notations in both plays indicating further speeches and, indeed, the note near the end of the ‘Nativity’ play says ‘Hic caret pastoribus sequitur ‘(p. 117). Richard Beadle has argued convincingly that a leaf is missing in this episode.14 I would argue that because, in the procession, they were always backed up, these two ‘episodes’ could have moved together as one, each guild presenting sequential action but using two loci for playing rather than one. A similar situation existed with the Goldsmith’s play of the ‘Coming of the Three Kings’. The Ordo gives us only one episode but it has two loci – Herod’s court and Bethlehem.15 There is evidence that, in 1431, the Goldsmiths had two wagons and again in 1521 and 1523 they are paying to store two wagons.16 The text gives us two plays that are identical after line 144.The first, ascribed to the Masons and later to the Minstrels,17 has a heavily alliterative bombastic opening speech spoken by Herod while the opening speech of the Goldsmith’s play is less extreme. Since the Masons also seem to have had a hand in the lavish ‘Purification’ play,18 the text seems to indicate a stage in the life of the play when two guilds were responsible for the long episode that demanded two wagons. Whoever was responsible, the play worked between the two loci until line 212 when Herod announces Go we nowe, till þei come agayne, To playe vs in som othir place. (p. 133) I would argue that the force of ‘play’ in that line is not only ‘to amuse’, but also ‘to play this scene somewhere else’ as a later clerk noted ‘the Herod passeth,

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and the iij Kynges comth agayn to make there offerynges’ (p. 134). The Nativity sequence, then, exploits the exigencies of the method of production consciously and deliberately taking advantage of the delays and accommodating the vagaries of guild participation. The final episode I want to treat in some detail is the ‘Entry into Jerusalem’. Here the wagon is Jerusalem. As Jesus says, ‘Vnto Jerusalem we shall assende’ (p. 215). Every literate man in England in the fifteenth century knew that Jerusalem was below the Mount of Olives. The Pearl-poet describes the heavenly Jerusalem in terms of the earthly city looking down at it.19 Margery Kempe speaks eloquently of her visit to the city.20 I would argue that there are no other wagons involved in this lavish and long play. Instead, the burghers wait on the wagon for their king to come, just as the burghers of York waited for their kings to enter the city at Micklegate Bar. The ‘Entry into Jerusalem’ is both the biblical event and the welcoming of Christ into the city of York.The pattern is that of all royal entries which, of course, derive from the biblical event. The echoes are complex and self-referring. The king moves along an appointed route and events happen by the roadside until finally he reaches his destination. The royal entry of Henry VII in 1486 into York can be taken as an analogy here.21 Events were planned along the route from Micklegate until he was formally received at the Minster. In fact, the processional route followed by the king, indeed followed by every royal visitor to York, was a shortened version of the route of the Corpus Christi play. Allegorical figures representing the city, former kings and finally the Virgin, confronted the king at specific points along the route. He stopped on each occasion and heard a ceremonial verse presentation. During the ‘Entry into Jerusalem episode’, Christ is confronted on the road by the blind man, the lame man, and finally Zacchaeus, who come out of the crowd and halt the procession just as the real royal processions were halted. The ritualistic ascriptions of praise and the singing that ends this episode are similar to the ‘Joye and Reioysing of the kinges commyng’ recorded by an eyewitness to the 1486 entry.22 Here again the playwrights exploited the processional framework of the play and enlarged it by superimposing on one kind of processional pattern another that the audience had seen enacted in those streets before. In this way, Christ is here fulfilling the messianic kingly role accompanied by great shouts of praise before the dark episodes of the passion begin. All things conspire to reinforce the traditional view of the performance of the York Cycle. All documentary evidence supports the hypothesis; practical experience has shown it to be a flexible and, surprisingly, ‘time efficient’ way to produce the episodes; finally, the episodes themselves reflect the processional mode. The technique of the York playmakers and the playwrights who worked with them was sequential moving from the episodes before time in the early dawn at the gates of Holy Trinity, Micklegate, to the lavish icon of the moment when time shall cease to be in the gathering darkness of the Pavement. Just as the light grows throughout the day only to fade again, so as pageant follows pageant the light of the world is foretold, made incarnate, crucified, risen, and finally returns, as the darkness returns, to judge the world. All those things that

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have seemed to some scholars to argue against the traditional method of production, in fact, are accommodated within the fabric of this astonishing work of art. It is both a theatrical triumph and an eloquent statement of the faith.

Notes 1 The York Plays, ed. by Lucy Toulmin Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885). All citations from the York plays will be from this edition. 2 Alan H. Nelson, The Medieval English Stage (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1974), pp. 15–81. 3 Martin Stevens, ‘The York Cycle: From Procession to Play’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 6 (1972), pp. 37–62 and 114–16. 4 William Tydeman, The Theatre in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 5 Margaret Dorrell, ‘Two Studies of the York Corpus Christi Play’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 6 (1972), pp. 63–111. 6 Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The Plays of the Religious Guilds of York: The Creed Play and the Pater Noster Play’, Speculum 50 (1975), see above, pp. 49–87. 7 York, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, 2 vols. Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979). 8 REED:York, pp. 24–5. 9 Nelson, The Medieval English Stage, p. 80. 10 For a discussion and description of that see Johnston and Dorrell, ‘The York Mercers and the Pageant of Doomsday 1433–1526’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 6 (1972), see above, pp. 18–42. 11 For two views of the dating question, see Margaret Rogerson, ‘External Evidence for Dating the York Register’, Records of Early English Drama Newsletter, 2 (1976), 4–5 and Richard Beadle and Peter Meredith, ‘Further External Evidence for Dating the York Register (BL Additional MS 35290)’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 9 (1980), pp. 51–55. 12 REED:York, p. 3. 13 REED:York, p. 18. 14 Richard Beadle, ‘An Unnoticed Lacuna in the York Chandlers’ Pageant’, in So Meny People Longages and Tonges, ed. by Michael Benskin and M.L. Samuels (Edinburgh: Middle English Dialect Project, 1981), pp. 229–35. 15 REED:York, p. 19. 16 Ibid., pp. 47–48, 226, 233. 17 Smith, York Plays, p. 123. 18 REED:York, p. 19. 19 Pearl, ed. by E.V. Gordon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), ll pp. 985–96. 20 The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by A.B. Much and H.E. Allen, Early English Text Society, o.s., 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 68. 21 REED:York, pp. 137–52. 22 Ibid., p. 149.

5.2 York, 1998: What we learned From: Early Theatre 3 (2000), 199–203

Historic ‘reproductions’ can never replicate the original conditions of space, technical capability, or audience response. Nevertheless, it is possible to learn from such experiments and, while exercising the greatest possible caution, use them to confirm or question speculations and to raise new questions about the performance of an historic play text. The performance in Toronto on 20 June 1998 was no exception. We chose to use the spaces around Victoria College, a large Victorian rococo building with adjacent lawns and Edwardian and modern halls of residence. The first station played against the façade of the Victoria College building with open space and a busy road behind it; the second played in a grassy quad and the fourth towards an Edwardian dining hall from a public street that, though closed to traffic, was still subject to modern ambient city noise. Only the third station in a lane about the width of Coney Street between two halls of residence provided that proper, narrow, enclosed space of the original York spaces where the flanking buildings served as sounding boards and there was a sense of enclosure. It was at this station that the most interesting observations about the detailed method of performance were made. The first general lesson we learned from the day-long production of all fortyeight pageants is that, contrary to much skeptical speculation, it is possible to do them all in one day. Furthermore, the cumulative effect of the entire sequence is extraordinary and powerful. Whether all forty-eight pageants were ever done at one time remains at issue, but we demonstrated that it could be done. The production began at 6:00 am in a light drizzle and ended at the fourth station at about midnight. At least two hours would have been cut from the playing time had we not had trouble with the wagons. We had only eleven wagons to use rather than forty-eight and so had to re-set them as they completed their round for the next series of plays. The early sequence went so quickly that the directors of the later plays (myself included) were frantically contacting their casts and setting forward their call. However, the set of the ‘Temptation of Christ’ was especially elaborate and, although all prefabricated, had to be fitted into a wagon that had already been used once. Rain during the night had swollen the wood of the ‘Temptation’ set and more than half an hour was lost shaving the posts to fit the holes in the bed of the wagon. The second major hold-up came when the director of the ‘Road to Calvary’ added ten minutes of modern additions to make the piece more relevant to her school-aged cast. This added

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forty minutes to the overall playing time and ‘backed up’ several wagons that were needed for the final pageants. Other more minor hitches in the dressing of the wagons accounted for the extra time lost. The original production, where every guild had its own wagon, would not have had this problem. However, our experience makes great sense out of the 1476 city order that no player should play but twice in the play.1 The delay caused by waiting for a wagon or an actor seriously disrupts the flow of the performance. The second major lesson that we learned from the production was that, despite the vigorous academic debate that has surrounded this issue (that is reflected in John McKinnell’s paper) the ‘end/side’ debate is, in the final analysis, irrelevant. In most cases the most effective wagons were those that were ‘transpicuous,’ to use McKinnell’s word, or open so that the actors could be seen equally well from all sides.2 This was particularly evident in such pageants as the ‘Crucifixion’ where the bare wagon acted simply as a platform for the mortise for the cross. Wagons with simple thrones or benches also worked well as in ‘Christ and the Doctors’ or ‘Pentecost’.We learned that simplicity of effect is probably best. Over-elaborate productions did not work, while stunningly elegant but simple ones like the ‘Creation to the Fifth Day’ did. There was considerable debate, after the performance, about whether the wagons should have roofs. Certainly those without roofs were effective as set pieces. If the set designers had provided a back for the wagon, as many did for interior scenes, the back served as a sounding board and there was no need for a roof.The issue here is that such a suggestion is contradicted by the one medieval description of a York set that we have – the Mercers’ Indenture of 1433 for the Last Judgement – that clearly calls for ‘A heuen of Iren With a naffe of tre’.3 However, as dusk gathered in the Toronto production, someone remarked that the four last plays – the three on the Virgin and ‘Judgement’ – emphasized, increasingly, tableaux and sound. It is in these pageants that much of the music in the cycle is concentrated. Two of these pageants call for hoisting devices where the added strength of a horizontal ‘roof ’ is key to the stability of the device. It is possible, then, that the York wagons were not all enclosed but only those few that needed an enclosed space for lighting effects, sound projection for singing, and the solidity needed to hoist an adult from one level to another and have that second level there to function as ‘heaven’. The issue of how the wagons were configured, therefore, has not been resolved except in the direction of practicality. What was visible at noon in York would less visible at dawn or dusk. In the Toronto production, we learned that playing conditions were very different at different times of the day. The quality of the light, the heat, the crowds, the noise from the life of the city around us all varied during the day. The producers of the plays in the Middle Ages knew what time of day their play would be performed. It seems sensible that each guild should have a set design that suited their performance time. The production taught us something about the relationship between the wagon and the street as playing areas, testing the ideas presented by Margaret Rogerson, Ralph Blasting, and Martin Walsh in the accompanying Symposium. Some of the spaces were quite open, especially the second station where, if a

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director wanted to, the action could take place over a widespread area much of it away from the wagon. However, plays directed that way lost focus and the energy of the text was diffused. In the more crowded conditions of the third station playing on the street level meant that the actors were not visible to much of the audience standing in the street. This issue is not new to modern reproductions, and some scholars have argued that the medieval audiences were accustomed to this and that the auditory experience was as important as the visual one. This may be so, but it is certainly more satisfactory to be able to see the actors as well as hear them and frequently the actors can only be seen if they are on the raised space of the wagon.The exclusive use of the wagons, however, does fly in the face of much of the textual evidence, as Martin Walsh has argued. Nevertheless, the 1998 production demonstrated that the closer the action is to the wagons and the tighter the use of space even when the actors are not on the wagon, the more effective the play. It has often been remarked that the York Cycle is the most verbal of all the plays dramatizing Creation to Judgement.The effect of the plays depends as much or more on the words as the visual effects so evident in the other cycles. As both Richard Beadle and I argued in our papers, the poetry is carefully crafted, full of rhetorical devices and carefully structured images that recur throughout the plays. In order for the verbal sophistication of the text to be properly displayed and appreciated, we discovered, the playing space had to be as close as possible to the configuration of the streets of York. Only one station, the third, provided such a space in Toronto and the different impact of the text in that space was palpable. One feature of the dynamics of space that was, to me, quite unexpected was the strain on the actors of projecting their voices over large open spaces. The city order preceding the Ordo paginarum of 1415 speaks of the need to have ‘good players well arayed & openly spekyng’.4 In the production, an interesting twist on the acting situation in York in the Middle Ages arose. Some of the companies used split casts in order to give as many students as possible the opportunity to take part. This raised the question of the stamina of the actors and the strength of their voices. David Klausner played the long and demanding part of Pilate in the ‘Second Trial before Pilate’ with vigour and panache. I asked him, as the wagon moved away from the fourth station, if he could have managed eight more performances and he replied, ‘Probably not – two more but then the voice would give out’. Professor Klausner is a trained singer as well as an experienced lecturer; he knows how to use his voice. Here again we have support for the idea that each of the acting spaces on the pageant route had close and intimate acting spaces. There is no evidence of double casting in the York records. The actors must either have been phenomenally well trained in the use of their voices or the situation of the original production was such that they never had to shout to be heard. Finally, and, to me, in the most significant revelation of the production, we come to the question of the location of the audience to whom the plays were addressed. In modern productions we have been carried away by the idea of street theatre – that somehow the primary audience was on the street with the wagon and the players. This has driven much of the discourse about

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‘end-on’/‘side-on’. We have all grown accustomed to standing (often with umbrellas in the way) on a level below the wagon crushed in a crowd of enthusiasts trying to see the play. Several papers in this collection allude to this phenomenon. But I think we have been mistaken all this while. At the third station in Toronto, some of the windows of the residence overlooking the playing space were of the bedrooms of some members of the conference who were able to hang out their windows and see the performance taking place below. They had the comfort of their room, a retiring space if the play grew tedious and superb acoustics and sight lines – especially if the wagons had no roofs.The evidence we have of actual audiences in York are the Mayor and Council who saw the play at the eighth station from a room on the second (first) floor of the Guildhall overlooking the end of Coney Street and the Dean and Chapter who saw the play from the chamber over the gate of the Minster Close. These were the most important people in town. Evidence from Chester suggests that second-story chambers were rented for the play, and that leases for the tenants who lived there all year made provision for the room to be available for rent during the play.5 David Palliser gave a deeply revealing paper at the Leeds Congress in July 1998 in which he described what the actual streets must have been like – beaten down mud with open sewers running down the middle full of animal and often human excrement. Such conditions were not unusual for late medieval and early modern cities but if an audience member could do so, I would suggest that they would find raised viewing spaces in the houses that lined the route. Some audience must have been crowded around the wagons but I have become convinced that the audience to whom the play was directed was the one seated above. Like the later court masque, where the audience was the monarch seated on a raised dais, so here the primary audience was on a plane slightly above the wagon bed rather than below it, and so able to see all the action on the wagon and in a tight configuration around it. ‘York 1998’ is an experience now in the past. Some veterans of such ventures over the last twenty years have been heard to say that we have now learned all that we will ever learn from such reproductions. Perhaps this is true. But what this production did was introduce a whole new group of people to the York Cycle in all its power and complexity.

Notes 1 This article acted as an introduction to {Early Theatre} III, which was devoted entirely to the 1998 York production and the accompanying Symposium. All references to articles without citations are from that volume. York, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, 2 vols, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 109. 2 John McKinnell, ‘The Medieval Pageant Wagons at York:Their Orientation and Height’, Early Theatre, 3 (2000), pp. 79–104. 3 Ibid., p. 55. 4 Ibid., p. 25. 5 Chester, ed. by Laurence M. Clopper, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979, pp. 80–81.

5.3 Acting Mary: The emotional realism of the mature virgin in the N-Town plays From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama, John Alford, ed. (Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1995), 85–98 The founding almost thirty years ago of Poculi Ludique Societas, the medieval and Renaissance play group of the University of Toronto, can be attributed directly to the enthusiasm of Arnold Williams for the production of early drama. At a meeting of the seminar which he founded in association with the Modern Language Association, John Leyerle caught his excitement and returned to Toronto to make the production of a medieval play (inevitably Everyman) part of his first graduate seminar. Two years later Professor Leyerle’s Seminar (PLS) became independent of the course, and the rather pretentious Latin words that fitted the initials were chosen for the group. The group has passed through many phases since then, but it remains at the centre of much of what we now know about early drama. I have been associated with the PLS since 1974. What follows is based on my experiences as an actor and director, bringing my scholarly knowledge and training to the realization of the mature figure of the Virgin Mary in the N-Town plays.1 Recent feminist scholarship has begun to uncover some unsuspected complexities that underlie the texts of early drama. In her essay on feminist approaches to the Corpus Christi cycles, Teresa Coletti centers much of her discussion on the figure of the Virgin Mary and examines ‘the many roles and meanings attributed to her during the Middle Ages’.2 Three other recent publications have focussed our attention on the figure of the N-Town Virgin. Peter Meredith has abstracted the play on the childhood of the Virgin from the manuscript and published it as a separate play.3 Martin Stevens emphasizes Mary’s role in the Birth sequence but sees her importance, as well, in the episodes after the Resurrection. In N-Town, the risen Christ appears first to his mother and she then becomes, according to Stevens, ‘the presiding spirit of comic resolution’ for the entire sequence.4 Most particularly, however, a consideration of Mary and her cult forms a large part of Gail McMurray Gibson’s fine book on East Anglian lay spirituality and the drama. She writes: The incarnational preoccupation of the late Middle Ages tended to make the Virgin Mary – perhaps even more than Christ himself – the very

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emblem of Christian mystery. Mary of Nazareth had been chosen God’s bride and God’s mother; her body had enclosed divinity, had given Godhead a human form and likeness, had finally been transported to heaven, where Mary, ever Virgin, reigned not only as Queen of Heaven, but as Gabriel extols her in the N-Town ‘Salutation and Conception,’ even as ‘empres of helle’. The Virgin Mary was for late medieval Christendom a mother goddess of powers conceivable and inconceivable, a saint raised uniquely among the whole company of saints to the highest pantheon of the sacred Trinity.5 Although my own approach has been influenced by these works, it has been through the experience of acting Mary and discussing the issues with my students that my ideas have been formed.6 Much of the concern in feminist approaches to the Virgin has been focused on her physical role as mother. Stimulated by the gynecological preoccupation of the plays on the Nativity themselves, attention has been given to the young Mary, the Mary of the Christmas story. Although this young figure seems in many ways to have dominated much of the thinking about Mary in the late Middle Ages, she remains removed from the everyday experience of ordinary women. There is an essential alterity about a virgin mother who bore her child without pain. This alterity sometimes expresses itself in the art of the period, as in the famous east window of the church in East Harling, Norfolk, where the figure of the Virgin remains young and blonde throughout the depiction of the sequence of events that covers more than fifty years. For many artists and theologians the figure of the Virgin remained the unattainable, beautiful child chosen by God to redeem the world, a child whose very physical purity was a constant rebuke to unbelievers. Yet the dramatic character of this Mary, based on the legends of her childhood and the miraculous events that led to the birth of Christ, is of less interest to me than that of the mature Mary of the Passion story, the post-Resurrection appearances, and the plays treating her death and assumption. In the York and N-Town dramatizations of the return of Joseph, for example, her ecstatic reply to his demands to know the father of the child – ‘God’s and yours’ – is the reply of someone living in a private world where no one can follow her. The mature Virgin, on the other hand, is a woman whose experience and sufferings have been shared by many women. I believe it is from a deep understanding of the emotions of mature women that the older Marys of the N-Town plays are drawn. Other dramatic versions of the Passion treat Mary differently than she is portrayed in N-Town. In the Bodleian ‘Death and Burial’, for example, Mary speaks 379 lines of formulaic lament which includes a planctus Mariae, spoken over Christ’s body, that is 184 lines long. Together her lines make up 44% of the entire episode.7 The laments in York and Towneley are equally stylized but form only a small percentage of the action of the plays on the death of Christ.8 In York the Virgin speaks 42 out of the 416 lines of the episode of the Death

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of Christ (or 10%), and in Towneley she speaks 86 out of 666 lines (or 13%). Chester, with its greater emphasis on sign rather than word, gives Mary only 21 lines out of 479 (or 4%).9 These versions are all in contrast to the extraordinary naturalism of the Mary in N-Town where the character progresses from selfpitying despair to joyful confidence. The N-Town Passion Play, unlike the Passion sequences in the three other biblical collections, is conceived as a unit although apparently played over two years.This makes it quite different from the more episodic collections.The York Cycle, for example, has sixteen Christs and two Marys in a Passion sequence that unfolds with the linearity of processional performance. N-Town has one Christ and one Mary, whose characters grow within the constant world of staging in the round. Mary appears first at the end of ‘Passion Play 1’ as Mary Magdalene brings her news of Christ’s arrest. Her speech is full of questioning and concern. She understands the theological significance of what is happening but she continues to demand ‘May man not ellys be savyd?’10 The final line of this part of the play is addressed to her absent son ‘thynk on þi modyr þat hevy woman’ (XXVIII, 192). It is a woman heavy with grief who enters partway through ‘Passion Play 2’, supported by the three other Marys and John, to confront Christ as he hangs on the cross. Her first outburst of anger, shock, and shame is followed by a descent into self-pity: A, my good Lord, my sone so swete! What hast þu don? Why hangyst now þus here? Is þer non other deth to þe now mete But þe most shamful deth among þese thevys fere? A, out on my hert – whi brest þu nowth? And þu art maydyn and modyr and seyst þus þi childe spylle! How mayst þu abyde þis sorwe and þis woful þowth? A, deth, deth, deth! Why wylt þu not me kylle? (XXXII, 93–100) And, as the rubric tells us, here she swoons. If you have never been called on to act this role, and if you are familiar with the other lamenting Marys in medieval drama, speeches such as this one can be passed over as painful, but formulaic. However, when you have to examine each word to understand fully what is being said and convey that to an audience, you discover that this is anything but formulaic. The tangle of emotions represented here and the implications of what she is saying for the characterization of this Mary are quite astonishing. All the complex stages of grief are here – the anger with the loved one who is dying, the sense of outrage that such a thing is happening to the mourner, the conviction that somehow this situation has been created simply to make her suffer. Mixed in, as well, is the sense that by dying between thieves, Christ is bringing shame to his respectable mother.

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Christ, seemingly ignoring his mother, forgives the thieves. The gracious words ‘Þis same day in paradyse / With me, þi god, þu xalt þer be’ (XXXII, 131–32) are barely uttered when Mary again bursts in with her self-centred grief: O my sone, my sone, my derlyng dere! What! haue I defendyd þe? Þu hast spoke to alle þo þat ben here and not o word þu spekyst to me. To þe Jewys þu art ful kende: Þu hast forgove al here mysdede. And þe thef þu hast in mende: For onys haskyng mercy, hefne is his mede. A my sovereyn Lord, why whylt þu not speke To me þat am þi modyr, in peyn for þi wrong? A, hert, hert, why whylt þu not breke, Þat I were out of þis sorwe so stronge! (XXXII, 133–44) This is hardly the hieratic Mary of the iconographic tradition. Christ’s next speech is a direct rebuke of her selfish extravagance. After he has committed her to John’s care with the words one ‘clene mayde xal kepe another’ (XXXII, 148), he reminds her through his pain of the purpose of the Incarnation and her part in it, ‘I was born of the, / To þe blys þat man had lost man aȝen to restore’ (XXXII, 155–56). But she does not listen. Here the rubric tells us that the Virgin ‘xal ryse and renne and halse þe crosse’. She falls at the foot of the cross embracing it while Mary Magdalene and John try to take her She cries out in her grief: I pray ȝow alle, lete me hen here, And hang me up here on þis tre Be my frend and sone þat me is so dere For þer he is, þer wold I be. (XXXII, 161–64) The force of the emotion that was evoked in all of us acting this scene was such that every night we played it, I acquired new bruises on my arms where John and Mary had tried to pull me away from the cross. I never felt the pain. There is nothing controlled here, nothing cerebral. The character of Mary is completely given over to hysterical grief. At this moment, Mary becomes so overcome that she must be looked after by others. The almost unbearable tension is broken as she is led aside and the scene gives way to the high priests and Pilate as they come to affix the ‘Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudeorum’ emblem to the cross. She stands, supported by John and Mary Magdalene, in silence, as his enemies inflict the last physical abuse on Christ.

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When he dies she moves forward this time to lament in measured eight-line stanzas.The grief is there but the frenzy has passed and she is able, with John, to reiterate the purpose of the sacrifice (XXXII, 254–55) before she stoops with great dignity to kiss the dead feet. She is again in control, in command, as she asks John to take her to the temple where she will pray. Here the figure of Anima Christi appears, addresses the audience, and crosses the platea to enter hell. Meanwhile, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea ask for the body and Mary returns to the foot of the cross for the Deposition. Sadly, Joseph lays the body on Mary’s knees and in a living icon of the pieta she gently prepares it for burial: A, mercy! Mercy myn owyn son so dere, Þi blody face now I must kysse. Þi face is pale, withowtyn chere; Of meche joy now xal I mysse. Þer was nevyr modyr þat sey this, So here sone dyspoyled with so grete wo. And my dere chylde nevyr dede amys. A, mercy, Fadyr of Hefne it xulde be so. (XXXIV, 126–33) These stark, poignant lines are in sharp contrast to the wordy lament in the Bodleian version. Yet the point is superbly made through word, action, and stage image. This is a conscious return to the Mary of the Nativity caring for the helpless body of her son. Here the figure of Mary finds again the center of her being and finally accepts Christ’s death. Her parting from Joseph and Nicodemus after the committal is that of a great lady dismissing her servants, regal, gracious, and controlled: Farewel ȝe jentyl princys kende. In joye evyr mote ȝe be Þe blysse of hefne withowtyn ende I knowe veryly þat ȝe xal se. (XXXIV, 154–57) The Mary of the N-Town Passion moves from self-centered hysteria to outward-looking dignity as she is carried along through the stages of mourning.Yet there is still another emotion that she must portray. Christ appears to her first after the Resurrection and so it is she who must express the first joy at the completion of God’s plan. Her litany of praise beginning with ‘Welcom, my Lord! Welcom, my grace/ Welcome, my sone and my solace!’ (XXXV, 97–98) sets the tone for the first formal greeting, but as Christ takes his leave, the tone changes from ritual to lyric, Farewel, my sone! Farewel, my childe! Farewel, my Lorde, my God so mylde!

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Myn hert is wele þat fyrst was whylde. Farewel, myn owyn dere love! (XXXV, 121–24) This Mary must interact with her child, her God, and her beloved. In a complex way, the N-Town Mary is both a mourning mother and a bereaved lover. The playwrights conceived this character not as the awesome, ever-youthful Mother of God but as a woman who experienced all emotion from ecstasy to despair, a woman set apart by God yet at one with all women as the mother and mourner, caregiver and lover. She is not only ‘God’s bride and God’s mother’; she is God’s widow.11 The ‘Assumption’ play is an interpolation in the highly complex and controversial N-Town manuscript. As Stephen Spector, the most recent editor of the plays, has said, ‘It is not mentioned in the Proclamation, is written by a different hand on different paper from that found elsewhere in the codex and is prosodically, stylistically, and orthographically distinct from the other plays’.12 Indeed, this play has suffered in comparison with the Passion Play. Rosemary Woolf, for example, condemns the text as ‘wooden, stilted and lifelessly aureate in diction’.13 It is true that the verse lacks the flexibility of the Passion Play, yet the characterization of the Mary of the ‘Assumption’ play is remarkably similar to the Passion Play Mary. She is specifically made sixty years of age: At fourten yer sche conseyved Cryste in hire matere clere, And in the fiftene yer sche childyd, this avowe dar I; Here lyvyng wyth that swete sone thre and thretty yere, And after his deth, in erthe xij yer dede sche tary. Now acounte me thise yeris wysely, And I sey the age of this maide Marye When sche assumpte above the ierarchye Thre score yer as scripture dothe specyfye. (N-Town XLI, 5–12) Like the playwrights of the Passion sequence, these playwrights did not conceive a Mary who was eternally and impossibly young for all of her life. This is a mature and weary woman longing to be taken from this life to the life that her son had promised her. Although the play closely follows its sources, the Legenda Aurea and the Transitus Mariae, the dramatic version bestows on Mary the same earthly authority that she assumed in the Passion Play after the burial of Christ. The play also manages, again through the arrangement of the lines and the subtle use of stage icons, to reinforce the multilayered relationship between Mary and Christ. The only other dramatic version of the legend of the death, assumption, and coronation of the Virgin is in the York Cycle. The series of three plays plus a later fragment that come just before the Last Judgement in that cycle have a complex history of their own.The funeral of the Virgin with the episode of the conversion of the unbelieving Jew (popularly called the ‘Fergus’ play in York)

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has not been preserved. In 1431 the Masons petitioned the city to be able to give up the ‘Fergus’ play because ‘in sacra non continetur scriptura & magis risus & clamorem causabat quam deuocionem’.14 Although there is some indication that the Linenweavers were responsible for the ‘Fergus’ play in 1476, it was not copied into the official civic ‘register.’15 In its place was entered a play on another aspect of the legend – the appearance of the Virgin to Thomas as she is being assumed. Nevertheless, the other two plays in the York series – the ‘Death of the Virgin’ and the ‘Coronation of the Virgin’, which have close affinity to the N-Town ‘Assumption’ – allow us to make fruitful comparisons. Mary first appears in the N-Town ‘Assumption’ on her knees begging Christ to take her to him.This follows the source closely expressing in Middle English the urgency of the Latin verbs: Me longith to youre presence, now conj[u]nct to the Vnyte, Wyth all myn herte and my sowle, be natures excitacyon, To youre dominacyon. (XLI, 100–3) It is Mary who precipitates the action both in N-Town and in the Legenda Aurea. By contrast, the York ‘Death of the Virgin’ (XLIV) opens with the speech of Gabriel in the second annunciation. The York Mary is a passive figure while the N-Town Mary is an active one. In N-Town Christ responds to his mother’s prayer by sending Gabriel to her. The N-Town Mary initiates the request that the disciples be with her at her death while in York the disciples simply appear. The N-Town Mary makes her request that she not see the Devil during her conversation with Gabriel while the York Mary makes the request directly to Christ as she is dying. The second major contrast between the two treatments of Mary is in the interaction between Mary and Christ. In York Christ remains in heaven sending his angels first to take the soul and then to take the body. The relationship between them in the northern cycle is strictly that of mother and son. This is made very clear in the dialogue between them as she reaches him in heaven: Maria

Jesus

Jesu my sone, loved motte þou be, I thanke þe hartely in my þought Þat þis wise ordand is for me, And to þis blisse þou haste me broght. Haile be þou Marie, maide bright, Þou arte my modir and I thy sone, With grace and goodnesse arte þou dight, With me in blisse ay schall þou wonne. (York XLVI, 85–91)16

Even the music from the Liturgy of the feast of the Assumption that is such a feature of the ‘Assumption’ play (XLV) in York is sung in polyphony by the angelic chorus that summons Mary to Christ. The relationship is formal, liturgical, and

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distant. It is Christ who initiates and controls the action in York.There is none of the sense of a domestic world ordered by Mary, a matriarchal relationship with the disciples and a strong sexual undercurrent in her relationship with Christ, that makes the N-Town ‘Assumption’ such an effective piece of theatre. Again, it was in performance that the realism of the N-Town Mary became apparent to me. It had been eight years since I had played the Passion Play Mary. Yet despite the significant differences in prosody as well as in codicological features between the Passion Play portion of the N-Town manuscript and this play, I felt that the characterization of Mary had much in common with the other mature East Anglian portrayal. Until her death she is always in control. First, as we have seen, she initiates the action and then takes control of her own deathbed as she instructs the disciples and shares with them her last loving moments on earth: Maria

Now I thanke God of his mercy. An hy merakle is this! Now I wyl telle yow the cause of my sonys werkyng. I desyrid his bodily presence to se. Johannes No wonder, lady, thow so dede ye. Maria Tho my sone Jesu of his hye pete Sent to me an aungyl, and thus he sayd, That the thredde nyth I schuld assende to my sone in deite. Thanne to haue youre presence, brether, hertly I prayed, And thus at my request God hath you sent me. Petrus Wys gracyous lady, we are ryth wel payed. Maria Blissid brethere, I beseke you than, tent me. Now wyl I rest me in this bed that for me is rayed. Wachith me besily wyth youre laumpys and lithtis. Paulus We schal, lady. Redy allthyng for you dith is. Maria Now sone schul ye se what Godis myth is. My flech gynnyth feble be nature. (N-Town XLI, 287–302) This Mary becomes weaker as death approaches but she does not complain of her sickness or the awkwardness of her handmaidens as the York Virgin does. Instead she faces her death with the calm assurance that she has set her affairs in order. Peter then instructs each of the disciples to light a candle and in an allusion to the parable of the wise and foolish virgins (Matthew 25. 1–13.) urges them all to watch lest the lord should come and find them wanting (XLI, 303–9). Into the stage silence that follows, reverberating with the bridal images of the parable, Mary cries: A, swete sone Jesu, now mercy I cry. Ouyr alle synful thy mercy let sprede. (XLI, 310–11)

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Her dying intercession calls to her bedside not just the heavenly host as in York, but Christ himself. For our production we had built a large winched hoisting device that brought Christ – masked, crowned, and dressed in gold from the highest of heaven where he and the angels had been observing the action – to Mary’s bedside. Her greeting reflects again the emotional combination of lover, mother, and child of God: A, wolcom, gracyous Lord Jesu, sone and God of mercy! An aungyl wold a ssuffysed me, hye Kyng, at this nede. (XLI, 314–15) The last line, so easy to pass over in reading, once again reminds us of the Passion play Mary by revealing a realism unexpected in such a play. Mary has been longing for this moment, has prayed and planned for this very encounter and yet, when Christ comes to her, she says, in essence, ‘I know you’re busy, dear, you needn’t have come yourself ’. Only in production can this kind of characterization be felt. The line places the relationship between Christ and the Virgin on a level of domestic intimacy that transforms the seemingly formal exchange that follows into a dialogue reverberant with multiple meanings. Christ and Mary, with the disciples joining them for one response, sing excerpts from the liturgy of the Assumption, the Song of Songs, and the Magnificat antiphonally. In production, the bed of the Virgin is center stage with Mary lying on it. Christ stands over the bed leaning toward her as the beautiful evocative words of Scripture float over the scene.The verses rise to this ecstatic exchange: Dominus Veni de Libano, sponsa mea; veni, coronaberis. Maria Ecce, venio quia in capite libri scriptum est de me, Vt facerem voluntatem tuam, Deus meus, Quia exultauit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo. (XLI, 326–29) And she dies. The erotic intimacy of this scene is startling. The density of image and association continues as Christ takes the soul of Mary. Following the iconographic tradition, we represented the soul as a doll dressed in white satin. The actor playing Christ took the doll and, holding it in his arms in a conscious reversal of the Nativity iconography, ascended to heaven on the hoist. The rest of the play centers on the funeral of the Virgin and the conversion of the unbelieving Jew. The text allows the procession to leave the playing area while the antagonists briefly take center stage. This allowed us to effect a costume change so that at the end when Mary is raised bodily, she was dressed like the doll-soul in white satin, not in the blue habit worn at her death. After the final unbeliever has been dragged to hell, Christ once again descends with the archangel Michael carrying the doll-soul. He greets the disciples who

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are watching the grave of the Virgin, and then, moving to the bier as he had moved to her bed, he returns the soul to the body with the words, Go thanne, blyssid soule, to that body ageyn. Arys now, my dowe, my nehebour, and my swete frende, Tabernacle of joye, vessel of lyf, hefnely temple, to reyn. Ye schal haue the blysse wyth me, moder, that hath non ende. For as ye were clene in erthe of alle synnys greyn, So schul ye reyne in hefne clennest in mend. (XLI, 509–14) Mary’s response as she rises and kneels before him, now dressed in the white garment of innocence, reinforces the mystery of the Incarnation while claiming her right to be with her son, her lover, and her God: A, endles worchepe be to you, Jesu, relesere of peyn. and alle erthe may blisse ye, com of owre kend. Lo me, redy wyth yow for to wend. (XLI, 515–17) As Christ and Mary step onto the hoist, Michael announces that ‘God throw Mary is mad mannys frend’ (XLI, 541). The hoist ascends as the angelic host sings the great antiphon from the liturgy of the feast, ‘Assumpta es, Maria, in celum’. When they reach heaven, Christ places the crown on her head and, in our production, the host also sang a coronation anthem. Despite the apparent differences in style, the characterizations of Christ and Mary in the ‘Passion’ and ‘Assumption’ plays are strongly similar. The assumption of Mary into heaven brings this vision of the divine comedy to a close. The lovers who parted in sorrow and longing after the Resurrection have been reunited. This Mary is indeed ‘a saint raised [. . .] among the whole company of saints to the highest pantheon of the sacred Trinity’.17 In The Theater of Devotion, exploring the possible patronage of East Anglian drama, Gail Gibson sees in the expressions of spirituality and affective piety among the laity a ready audience for the drama. Part of her discussion focuses on Margery Kempe, the crying mystic of Lynn. The Book of Margery Kempe is the record of a remarkable spiritual journey of a fifteenth-century matron who sought, with ecstatic longing, a true union with Christ.18 She led a ‘life of extremely literal and concrete achievement of those very spiritual exercises’ that had been set out in the Franciscan Meditationes vitae Christi.19 So real were her visions that at one point she is present with the Virgin and Christ after the Resurrection.20 At another, she envisions herself taking the Virgin home and caring for her after the burial of Christ: ‘Than þe creatur thowt, whan owr Lady was comyn horn & was leyd down on a bed, þan sche mad for owr Lady a good cawdel & browt it hir to comfortyn hir [. . .]’.21 The meditations that led to

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these concrete descriptions of scenes and events from sacred history were part of the same impulse to affective piety that produced the plays. Indeed, Mary’s anguish at the Crucifixion in the N-Town Passion Play is matched by that of Margery as she experiences the death of her Lord in her visions. Much of Gibson’s discussion, however, focusses on women for whom the excessive piety of Margery might appear unseemly. One such woman was Anne Harling of East Harling, Norfolk, a pious woman of substance three times widowed. Dame Anne stands for many late medieval women whose lives were punctuated by the deaths of children and of marriage partners. The portrayal of Mary the matron in the N-town plays would speak directly to the life experience of these women. Martin Stevens has quite rightly suggested that the N-Town Mary is both learned and cloistered. Anne Harling was a lay sister of five monasteries, including the royal convent of Syon. Gibson has described her as ‘indominable and sentimental, intensely religious and rigorously practical’.22 These are adjectives that describe the character of the Virgin in the N-Town ‘Passion’ and the ‘Assumption’ plays. I am not suggesting that Mary is modeled on Anne Harling, or rather on the Anne Harling whom Gibson has re-created from her will. Instead I am suggesting that the mature N-Town Mary, like Anne Harling, exhibits the characteristics of an East Anglian pious widow of the late fifteenth century. The study of woman’s spirituality in the late Middle Ages has too often been centred on Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. More recent work on the Brigittines of Syon and the study of women testators are broadening our picture of a large and important segment of late medieval society whose devotional needs were served in many ways. Many were literate and owned their own missals and service books. In a recent essay, P.J.P. Gilbert has demonstrated that ‘Bequests of service books along the female line or alternatively to the parish are not uncommon’.23 He has also traced through bequests a deep interest in the images in the parish churches such as the small coral beads that Alice Carre of St Stephen’s parish, Norwich, left to be ‘daily about the image of St Anne’.24 Gibson has also shown the importance of the cult of St Anne in East Anglia. She describes it as ‘an undisguised celebration of family ties and relationships of kinship’.25 The portrayal of the Virgin in the N-Town ‘Passion’ and ‘Assumption’ plays as a mature woman whose life experience paralleled that of many members of the audience is yet another way that women’s spiritual needs found empathetic expression. Emotional, dramatic, yet rooted in faith, this Mary provided for the mature women of East Anglia a mediatrix standing beside the throne of God with whom they could uniquely identify.

Notes 1 In 1984 PLS was invited to play to an Easter festival of plays, the Pasqua del Theatro ’84, in Rome. We took an abridged version of the N-Town Passion Play that we had performed three years earlier. The late Stanley J. Kahrl had modernized the text and acted as dramaturge for the original production, which was directed by Kathy Pearl. Pearl also directed the touring version and invited me to play the role of the Virgin Mary in that

Acting Mary

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

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production. After the untimely death of Professor Kahrl in December 1989, a special seminar on early drama in his memory was organized for the meetings of the Medieval Academy of America meeting at his university, Ohio State University in Columbus, in March 1992. PLS was asked to bring a play to the conference. Professor Kahrl had long been a friend of PLS and we wanted to take a production that would truly honor his memory. In 1974 he had published an article making suggestions for a possible way to stage the N-Town ‘Assumption’: ‘Teaching Medieval Drama as Theater,’ in The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature’, ed. by Larry D. Benson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 305–18. That article became the starting point of our production. I co-directed the play with K. Janet Ritch as well as once again playing the role of Mary. Andrea Budgey was the music director. All citations of the N-Town plays are to The N-Town Play, ed. by Stephen Spector, 2 vols, Early English Text Society, s.s., 11 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); citations are by play number and line number. Teresa Coletti, ‘A Feminist Approach to the Corpus Christi Cycles,’ in Approaches to Teaching Medieval English Drama, ed. by Richard Emmerson (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990), p. 85. Peter Meredith, The ‘Mary Play’ from the N.Town Manuscript (London: Longmans, 1987). Martin Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 253. Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 137. I wish to acknowledge, particularly, three students – Bretta Pirie, K. Janet Ritch, my co-director, and Kimberley Yates, whose discussions of these issues have enormously stimulated my own thinking. These figures are based on The Digby Plays, ed. by Frederick J. Furnival, Early English Text Society, e.s., 70 (London: Oxford University Press, 1897). For editions of these plays, see The York Plays, ed. by Richard Beadle (London: Arnold, 1982) and The Towneley Plays, ed. by George England and Alfred W. Pollard, Early English Text Society, e.s., 71 (London: Oxford University Press, 1897). See Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘Performance Practice Informed by Image: The Iconography of the Chester Pageants,’ in Spectacle et Image dans L’Europe de la Renaissance, ed. by Andre Lascombes (Leiden: Brill, 1993), pp. 245–62.The Chester figures are based on The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. by Robert Lumiansky and David Mills, 2 vols, Early English Text Society, s.s., 3 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 314–5. Stephen Spector, N-Town, pp. 28, 186. Gibson, The Theater of Devotion, p. 137. Stephen Spector, N-Town, p. 527. Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (London: Routledge, 1972), p. 287. York, ed. by Alexandra Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, 2 vols, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 48. REED:York, 110. Quotations from the York cycle are taken from Beadle, York Plays. Gibson, The Theater of Devotion, p. 137. The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by S.B. Meech and H.E. Allen, Early English Text Society, o.s., 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940). Gibson, The Theater of Devotion, p. 49. Meech and Allen, The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 196. Ibid., p. 195. Gibson, The Theater of Devotion p. 77. P.J.P. Gilbert, ‘Women in Fifteenth-Century Town Life,’ in Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century, ed. by J.A.F. Thomson (Gloucester: Sutton, 1988), p. 110. Ibid., p. 110. Gibson, The Theater of Devotion, p. 83.

6

Summing up

6.1 The history of English drama before 1642 revisited From: The Southern African Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20 (2010), 1–29 Shakespeare stands astride the drama of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries like a colossus. What he has given to human culture and particularly the culture of the English-speaking world continues to astonish and delight.Yet his monolithic presence has long obscured the variety, beauty, and significance of the performance tradition that came before him. He first appears in London in 1592 as young man of twenty-five with just under one quarter of the accepted canon already written. But where had he suddenly come from? In 1971, Daniel Seltzer, in his contribution to A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, wrote, The drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England was an achievement extraordinary not only for its quality, but for the speed with which that quality in its various forms, seems suddenly to have been achieved.1 Many would have concurred with that comment when it was made. But no one who is aware of the last four decades of scholarship would make that comment today. Much has been accomplished in those four decades as the symbiotic relationship among three strands of scholarly endeavour – the re-editing of all the texts, the performance of the drama in ways that have sought to discover the original staging conventions, and the discovery and editing of the external written evidence for early drama – has changed forever our understanding of the place of performance in late medieval and early modern England.

I Until the mid twentieth century, the only known and assimilated evidence for theatrical activity in England before the 1590s was a handful of texts – four manuscripts of religious plays based on the scriptures, three morality plays – one clearly a courtly piece but the other two more bourgeois in their approach, two saints’ plays and one printed morality play derived from the Dutch (Everyman), a few school plays and interludes, some highly political propaganda pieces from the mid sixteenth century and various identified fragments.2 With the exception of the biblical cycle from York (which had been edited independently) all

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the manuscripts had been rather eccentrically edited for the Early English Text Society in the great push to edit all available Middle English manuscripts for the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary in the late 19th century.The dictionary was to be based on ‘historical principles’, and its compilers realized that a vast number of Middle English literary texts existed only in manuscript. The ‘raw material’ for the great dictionary had to be prepared and so teams of transcribers – among them Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor – were sent, in particular to the British Museum with its great horde of manuscripts, to copy them out. The early printed plays that existed only in black letter type that was almost as hard (indeed sometimes harder) to read than the manuscripts had been reprinted in rather unhelpful facsimile editions by the Malone Society or in John S. Farmer’s The Tudor Facsimile Texts.3 Some documentary evidence compiled mainly by the indefatigable E.K. Chambers from printed sources for the medieval and Elizabethan stage had also been made available.4 The drama before Shakespeare had also suffered badly in the classroom. Until the middle of the twentieth century and beyond, undergraduate students of English literature were exposed to early drama only through anthologies, such as those compiled by J.M. Manly (1897) and A.W. Pollard (1895).5 As David Bevington, the editor of the anthology brought out in the 1970s6 has pointed out, these collections condescended to their subject as a rudimentary stage in the development of later drama. Manly’s infamous title, Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperean Drama, implies a two-fold insult: that the plays are only archeological data with which to construct the stages of the evolution of a dinosaur, and that their only lasting value in such an archeological reconstruction is to discover in it the subsequent flourishing of more advanced forms.7 In addition, many of the formative scholars in the field, especially in the United States, were staunchly Protestant in their religious views, and much of the subject matter was thought to be unsuitable for Protestant readers. Bevington, in his analysis of Joseph Quincy Adams’ popular anthology Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas (1924)8 has written, The more this edition moves towards real accessibilty to students, [. . .] the more fearful it becomes of scenes and language offensive to Protestant sensibilities [. . .] [The] edition turns blushingly away from the Crucifixion and Deposition with their vivid icons of the bleeding God.’9 A true student of my generation in a conservative department of English, I did not read a biblical play concerned with anything after the Nativity until I was in graduate school. Furthermore, this drama refused to conform to the curriculum demands of most English departments in the 20th century, and in many ways still does. When English was established as a discipline worthy of academic study in the late nineteenth century, the prevailing understanding of what might be called

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cultural Darwinism either excluded drama before Shakespeare entirely, or added it as a prologue (through the anthologies I have mentioned) to courses on Renaissance drama. The canon of English literature was established according to the tastes of the day. It consisted of Old English, Middle English (which ended with the death of Chaucer in 1400), and modern literature that was deemed to begin with the Petrarchan imitations of Wyatt and Surrey at the court of Henry VIII in the 1520s. All English literature written between 1400 and 1520 has had a very hard time being recognized in the canon. Even the great and influential Malory was seen as a marginal figure. How much less important were the anonymous religious plays written and performed away from the culture and edification of the court. Furthermore, all that needed to be known about the external evidence for drama had been gathered by E. K. Chambers in 1903;10 all the texts had been edited, and no less a figure than W.W. Greg had written what appeared to be a definitive article on the subject in the prestigious new periodical The Library in 1914.11 A field of very little intrinsic value had been presented to the scholarly world and well documented. What more needed to be done? It was easy to dismiss plays that no one had ever seen performed. In fact, the religious drama of the late Middle Ages in England did not fade away; it was brutally killed as part of the struggle of the early Elizabethan government to rid the country of anything that would encourage Catholicism and to impose the rule of the godly in church and state. In the course of the campaign, two important prohibitions were issued that affected what could be performed in public in England until 1951. The first was issued on 27 May 1576 by the Ecclesiastical Commission of the North.The Commission had got wind of a ‘plaie commonlie called Corpus Christi plaie’ to be performed in Wakefield and issued an order stopping the performance: The order read in part that [. . .] in the saide playe no Pagant be vsed or set furthe wherein the Maiestye of god the father god the sonne or god the holie ghoste [. . .] be counterfeyted or represented.12 Although that prohibition against portraying any member of the godhead on stage was never written into the statutes, it was followed by all the Lords Chamberlain (the official censors of the central government) until 1951. The second prohibition was issued by the government of James I. By chance, exactly thirty years after the first bann, on 27 May 1606, parliament passed an act ‘to Restraine Abuses of Players’. Ostensibly conceived to stamp out blasphemy, the act effectively banned the mention ‘or use of the holy Name of God or Christ Jesus, or of the Holy Ghoste or of the Trinitie’.13 Failure to comply brought a huge fine of £10 with unpleasant entanglement in further legal proceedings. This is why the late plays of Shakespeare – especially King Lear and the romances – with their profoundly Christian themes – make no mention of the Christian God. The second ban was lifted in 1912, and before and during the First World War several popular playwrights wrote and produced their own plays on

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religious subjects. But the real impetus – that led not only to the performance of religious plays but also to the renewed interest in the original medieval texts and their stageworthiness – came from within the Church of England itself. George Bell, bishop of Chichester, formed what came to be called the Religious Drama Society dedicated to ‘fostering the art of drama as a means of religious expression’.14 A key figure in this movement was a talented producer, E. Martin Browne, who, during the 1920s and ’30s, was at the centre of a group of enthusiasts – some amateur, some professional – that included such leading cultural figures as Dorothy Sayers, Gustav Holst, T.S. Eliot, and later Benjamin Britten. Browne and these artists and intellectuals did not share the contempt of their predecessors for the native English drama. The Victorians and Edwardians had travelled every ten years to Oberammergau to see what they believed was a true survival of medieval drama, and considered the pious stasis of those productions to be preferable to the often bawdy and violent English versions no one ever performed.15 The members of the Religious Drama Society, however, studied the English plays with care. Sayers’ radio play The Man Born to be King, first aired on the BBC in the early years of the Second World War, has some of the edgy grittiness of the original texts. Eliot and Browne were close collaborators and when an attempt to perform some English medieval drama for a celebration in Canterbury Cathedral in 1935 came to nothing (because of the ban on the portrayal of the persons of the Godhead on stage) Browne asked Eliot to write him a play – and so we have Murder in the Cathedral.16 It took sixteen more years and the searing experience of the Second World War to bring about the lifting of this 375-year-old final ban. By the late 1940s, England was beginning to recover from the devastating effects of the War and it was felt that a cultural festival that would take place in many centres across the country would go a long way to help people regain a sense of themselves and their history. Browne was called in by the organizers at York (one of the chosen centres) to advise them on a suitable play. He suggested that they do the medieval biblical play that had been performed in their own city for almost two hundred years from 1376 to 1569. The idea caught on with the organizing committee, but the Archbishop of York and other members of the ecclesiastical establishment were worried about the unspoken rule that God could not appear on the public stage. However, as luck would have it, the national committee for the Festival of Britain was chaired by the Lord Chamberlain who happened to be Lord Scarborough, a Yorkshire peer. The York Committee asked the national committee for permission and the chairman of the national committee (Lord Scarborough) in a truly Gilbertian moment asked Lord Scarborough the Lord Chamberlain (presumably in the mirror) to lift the prohibition – and so it was. After almost four hundred years the people of York began to prepare their play for production. Browne decided to perform the play as a continuous narrative in a single location not as a series of 47 separate episodes performed on wagons in procession through the streets of York, (which is what the external evidence then known for York seemed to indicate about original performance practices).

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Although the production values of York 1951 owed more to the spirit of Oberammergau than to the medieval original, the effect of the plays in performance on scholarship in the field was electric. Suddenly the texts that had been studied in the academy were no longer inert religious tracts, but living theatre with a surprising ability to move an audience. Professor Arnold Williams of the University of Michigan was so taken by the plays in performance that he established a regular seminar at the annual Modern Language Association meeting devoted to the discussion of early drama, and especially early drama in performance. Productions sponsored within universities sprang up on both sides of the Atlantic and were avidly discussed by scholars at the MLA Seminar. This seminar became a meeting place of the scholars who were beginning to change the face of early drama scholarship. The year 1955 was seminal in early drama scholarship.Two books were published that year. One, Hardin Craig’s English Religious Drama is a magisterial work summing up the scholarship of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was, I am sure, sincerely understood by its author to be the last word on the subject.17 The other is a slim volume of the 1954 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto delivered by F.M. Salter of the University of Alberta, modestly called, Medieval Drama in Chester.18 Salter had abandoned the great research libraries in London, Oxford, and Cambridge and gone to the local sources – the records of the city of Chester itself. Chester, like York, had had a great biblical play in the sixteenth century, and Salter presented the records of those productions in all their complexity and humanity emphasising the lavishness of the performances and the energy of their producers.The genie was out of the bottle. The participants in the Modern Language Association seminar that had been established to discuss modern production suddenly realized there were untapped sources in town and county record offices that might shed light on the original productions.Young scholars turned from literary and theological analyses of the plays, boned up on their Latin, learned palaeography and headed for the archives. Meanwhile, the hasty nineteenth-century EETS editions of medieval drama were becoming an embarrassment.The Society set out to commission new editions with modern scholarly standards and one by one they began to become available, providing good texts with solid notes, free of mistaken nineteenthcentury notions of the nature of the plays. But it was not only the EETS editors who began to examine the play texts closely. One young scholar from Leeds, Peter Meredith, himself a fine actor, recognized that the ‘cycle’ contained in the manuscript we now call the N-Town Plays did not hang together as a dramatic piece.19 Besides the presence of a two-part Passion Play crudely edited into the narrative of salvation history and a ‘stand alone’ manuscript containing a play on the death and assumption of the Virgin bound into the larger manuscript at the appropriate place, Meredith discovered a unique five-part play on the childhood of the Virgin woven into the Nativity narrative. As he was studying the manuscript he noticed that some of the stanzas in that section and only in that section had red dots in the loops of the capital letters that began each stanza. He

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unscrambled the stanzas and put the ones with the red dots together and realized they constituted a complete free standing play while the rest of the stanzas made a simplified but still coherent set of episodes on the Nativity.20 Once the field had assimilated the fact that N-Town was an artificial ‘cycle’ – indeed was an anthology of many different plays copied out, in all probability, to serve a pious fifteenth-century reader as a meditation text – it was much easier, decades later, to accept a quite recent argument that the third ‘cycle’ of northern plays, the Towneley Plays, is in all probability not the Corpus Christi cycle from Wakefield, but an anthology written as a meditation text for the recusant Towneley family in west Lancashire in the 1550s.21 The significance of the recognition that two of the so-called ‘cycles’ are actually anthologies has allowed us to find analogies between the individual plays in those manuscripts and the records from elsewhere for which no texts have survived. For example, the rich production details from New Romney in Kent of their Passion play gives us some idea of the production conditions of the ‘Passion Play’ contained in the N-Town manuscript.22 Our understanding of medieval performance traditions has grown exponentially since the first performance in York in 1951. The city continued to perform their play in the Museum Gardens every three years during the 1950s and 60s,23 while the first major production of medieval drama outside York was a modified version of N-Town (believed by its producers, erroneously as it turned out, to be the play from Lincoln) presented in Grantham in Lincolnshire during the summer of 1966.24 That same year Poculi Ludique Societas (PLS) [‘the cup and game society’] came into formal being in Toronto, thanks to John Leyerle who, two years earlier, had made it a requirement of graduate students taking his medieval drama seminar to put on an actual play. PLS is now the oldest troupe dedicated to the performance of early drama in the world and has taken a key role in the breaking open of the intricacies of early drama performance. Since the mid 1970s, the troupe has taken the lead in basing its productions, particularly of the large plays, on the evidence that has been accumulating from the newly edited texts and the body of external evidence growing from archival research.25

II In our essential narrative we have come to the 1970s and it is time to pick up the threads that led to the founding of Records of Early English Drama in 1975. We left the scholars associated with the MLA seminar heading to the archives following F.M. Salter’s lead, in their desire to understand the performance conditions of early drama. Little hard evidence of the details of the wagon stages was available. Speculation was rife, with many people arguing from the ‘proletarian’ nature of the productions that the staging must have been quite unsophisticated. Clearly more information was needed. Stanley Kahrl, who had been deeply moved by the performance of the N-Town plays in Grantham in 1966, went to the Lincolnshire Record Office seeking corroboration that those

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plays were from Lincoln. Lawrence Clopper went to Chester following Salter’s lead.Two Canadian Renaissance drama scholars, David Galloway and Reginald Ingram began to research the dramatic records of their native cities of Norwich and Coventry. Alan H. Nelson of Berkeley, California, took a wider perspective and undertook a survey of the record offices known to contain surviving evidence from Chambers’ 1903 work. Although Nelson’s research led him to the quite proper conclusion that the Corpus Christi or other summer processions of pageants in most English cities such as Hereford and Worcester never did develop ‘true drama’ from the pageant wagons, he extrapolated from that information questions about the way in which the York plays were performed and put forward a whole new interpretation of the York evidence.This was first presented at the MLA seminar in 1968 and was subsequently published in 1970 in Modern Philology.26 Nelson’s new interpretation was based on a computer model with which he estimated the playing time of each episode in the surviving York text, together with the time he thought it would take for each wagon to get from station to station, and to set up and strike the wagon set. He put this information into a computer, asking how long it would take to perform the 47 plays twelve times. The answer he received was far in excess of the traditional assumption of 17–18 hours. He concluded that the cycle could not have been performed as scholars had always assumed it had been and he turned to a more detailed analysis of the York records to find a solution to this conundrum. Based on his understanding of the records and the ‘proof ’ of his computer modelling, Nelson proposed that York put on a procession of wagons depicting the scenes of the cycle, and then performed the series of plays once, indoors, for the limited audience of the mayor and council. Many scholars took up his theory. It is at this point that I become part of the story. My own interest in early drama had been theological and contextual. In 1970–71, I had my first research leave and chose to spend it mainly in York where I hoped to improve my skills in Latin and palaeography by reading manuscripts related to the York plays. While I was working in York Minster Library, completely by chance, I became aware of a document of the York Mercers’ guild listing the properties of the wagon for their episode in the cycle, the Last Judgement, complete with double-faced masks for the devils, a hoisting device to take God from one level to another, lavishly painted curtains and no fewer than twenty artificial angels. This was an entirely new document, giving more detail about a medieval wagon stage than had been known before and changing forever the notion that medieval staging was unsophisticated. To make a long story short, I was allowed access to the document and at the same time learned of the interest of a young Australian graduate student, Margaret Dorrell, who, unaware of the new document, had asked to see the known pageant documents of the Mercers. I wrote to her telling her about the new document and suggesting we share the discovery. At our first meeting, we compared notes and found that we had been working on parallel lines of investigations into the dramatic history of York. I had been working with the material

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of the Corpus Christi Guild and other dramatic and musical entries not directly related to the York Cycle, while she was working on the records of the cycle itself. With the optimism of youth, we decided that she would carry on with her doctoral project while I collected everything else and that we would publish it all together.27 We were in agreement that the accumulated evidence we were gathering could sustain only one conclusion – that the traditional method of production for all three large plays in York – the biblical cycle, the Creed Play and the Pater Noster Play – was in procession from wagons that played and then moved on to the next station. Given the weight of the evidence, Alan Nelson’s theory could not be sustained. Seven years later, on a cold and wet Toronto October weekend in 1977, in the first major outdoor PLS performance, we were able to prove beyond any doubt that he was wrong. The York plays were written to be performed in procession from pageant wagons following after one another in the open. That was the first major production where archival evidence was tested in performance and undeniably supported.28 But to return to the archival research: Thanks to our friends and supporters, Margaret and I were able to get the news of the discovery of the document to the scholarly community through the MLA seminar in New York at Christmas, 1972. At that meeting scholars in the field began to grasp what material might survive undiscovered and also how many people had independently taken up records research. Plans were laid for the next meeting in 1973 in Chicago to bring together those people who were known to be collecting external evidence of performance. Meanwhile, in November 1973 at a conference in Toronto, I renewed my acquaintance with David Galloway who was working on the records of Norwich. David had also been invited to be a member of the panel at that year’s meeting of the MLA along with Margaret and myself and Lawrence Clopper from Indiana who had been working on the records of Chester.At that meeting we were made aware of the work of another Canadian – Reginald Ingram of the University of British Columbia – on Coventry. By this time it was clear that there were four locations for which major bodies of performance evidence were under intense research, three of them by Canadians. But we all had a problem. Except for the Malone Society – an old fashioned scholarly society that was struggling to survive and whose main focus, despite the fact that they had published some records, was the publication of Elizabethan drama texts – there was no obvious publisher for what we were doing. More serious in many minds, was the lack of any clear guidelines for editors. If the proposed new editions were to be truly useful there had to be a consistent transcription policy for copying out the often highly abbreviated words, and consistency about what classes of documents should be searched and what activities should be noted. We concluded that something new had to be brought into being. The meeting in Chicago in 1973 also made clear that a project to publish dramatic records could not end, as Margaret and I had planned for York, with the suppression of religious drama in the last decades of the sixteenth century. David Galloway argued that there was a major sub-field of Renaissance drama – the

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activities of the travelling companies in the provinces – that also needed a new and co-ordinated research approach. The dates of the proposed editorial project were, therefore determined as the first occurrence of performance in any given location and the closing of the London public theatres in 1642. Between 1973 and 1975, I worked closely with David Galloway and then with Anthony Petti, a brilliant palaeographer from Calgary who had joined the group, to put together a proposal for a project that would, in the words of REED’s ‘mission statement’,‘locate, transcribe and publish systematically all surviving external evidence of dramatic ceremonial and minstrel activity in Great Britain before 1642’. We secured the interest of University of Toronto Press as our publisher and in February 1975 were able to convene a meeting in Toronto of all the key players. The most important and far-reaching decision made at that first meeting was to agree to what have become the REED ‘Guidelines for Transcription’. At the end of the meeting, I was instructed to apply to the then Canada Council first for a personal grant for York as a pilot project, and then to apply for editorial funding for the proposed series. The most important result of the awarding of the personal grant was the ability to hire research staff. It was at this time that Sally-Beth MacLean, the scholar who has guided the editorial policy of REED ever since, joined us. When the second, a five-year editorial grant was awarded in late 1976, the project was firmly established, at least academically. Our financial security is still a work in progress. Thirty-four years later REED has become the essential ‘third stream’ to the two streams of text and performance that we have been tracing. REED has been called ‘one of the miracles of modern scholarship’.29 As we have seen, REED began as a group of theatre historians who wanted to know the circumstances in which medieval and early modern English drama was created and produced, but it has done much more. Over the last thirty-four years, we have been gathering and editing the external evidence that survives about how the plays were performed and, more specifically, who controlled them, who performed them, what they cost, what the costumes and stages were like and all sorts of other details. Much to our surprise, we have stumbled on a rich vein of evidence that helps to advance our understanding of the social and religious history of a period of profound change. The evidence is to be found in official minute books, accounts, court cases, wills, and notebooks from cities, towns, parishes, great houses (both lay and monastic), bishop’s registers, and eye-witness accounts.

III The most difficult misunderstandings to eradicate about playmaking before the professional theatres began to appear in London in 1575 are that it was amateurish and that it was transgressive. Although there was continual mixing of professional and non-professional performers, early English drama was anything but amateurish; although there are transgressive, satiric, and scatological elements in the drama they are carefully controlled. Mimetic performance was

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used to teach, to celebrate, to advance intellectual debate – especially in religious matters – and to make political points. Let me start with an example from York that, in the late 15th century, was still the second city in the kingdom. A year after his victory at Bosworth Field in 1485, Henry VII went in progress through his new kingdom. The Royal Entry consisting of dramatic scenes played from pageant wagons prepared for him by the city of York resonated with political overtones. Richard III, dead on the field in Bosworth, had lived for many years in York and had been a vital part of its life. In 1485, a contingent of soldiers had been on its way south from York to fight for Richard when news came of his defeat and death. They had returned home and recorded in the official minutes of the city ‘[. . .] that King Richard, late lawfully reigning over us, was, thrugh grete treason [. . .] pitiously slane and murderd, to the grete hevyness of this Citie’.30 In 1486, realizing they had need to impress the new king of their loyalty, the city authorities hired Henry Hudson, a clerical poet, to write the verses for an elaborate series of pageants to be performed as Henry passed through the streets of York. They presented the most spectacular and expensive dramatic compliment to the king they could devise, pouring the expertise of over a century of civic drama in to the production. As a finale the Virgin herself appeared ‘commiyng frome hevin’ and after her speech she ascended ‘ayene into heven wit angell sang and yer schall it snaw by craft made of waffrons in the maner of Snaw’.31 To seek to impress the new king through drama and spectacle was not unusual in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Far from being mere entertainments, dramatic presentations were integral parts of religious and political discourse. Christian theology, biblical history and moral rectitude were taught through drama; rulers were advised through drama and important issues of state such as Henry VIII’s desire to sell ecclesiastical land, James V of Scotland’s attitude to the Reformation, and Elizabeth’s marriage plans were discussed obliquely through drama in the anonymous Godly Queen Hester (1529), David Lindsay’s Ane Satire of the Thre Estatis (1540), and Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s Gorboduc (1560).This last one is of particular interest. A recent discovery of an eye-witness account of the performance given for the queen at the Inner Temple in 1561 makes it clear that, although the text is the one that was printed and became part of Elizabethan discourse about good government, the dumb shows were quite different from the ones in the printed text. The message they clearly conveyed to Elizabeth from Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, who paid for the production, was that she should marry him and not the King of Sweden, who was parliament’s choice at the time.32 Life in late medieval and early Tudor Britain was one of ceremony and display. Processions and rituals, both religious and secular, marked the year as ancient customs with symbolic orders of precedence were accompanied by music, banners, and the processing of pageants and ritual objects. All these activities had mimetic components.The mass itself was often supplemented by what has come to be studied as liturgical drama. Parishes held processions of prophets as part of the late Lenten ceremonies that came to involve costumes and beards.

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Lords of Misrule were elected in court and parish to preside over festive seasons, and had their ecclesiastical counter-parts in the election of choir boys as ‘Boy Bishops’ to rule the community for a day. Masking, mumming, and disguising took place at all levels of society. Such events were part of the life of the court, the cathedral, the university, the great secular and ecclesiastical households, the towns, and even the villages.This is the evidence that the REED project is contributing to the new understanding of drama before Shakespeare. The traditions of performance fall into three major categories – large scale community drama that had a strong didactic component based in cities, towns and parishes, sometimes hand in hand with a local monastic house; smaller adaptable plays performed by travelling companies; and the traditional springtime festive celebrations that involved minstrels, morris dancers, maypoles, and wandering entertainers. The last category fed into the other two providing professional instrumentalists and singers who could be hired to be part of what we would today call ‘true drama’. We have been slow to recognize the widespread nature of the dramatic tradition because so few texts have survived from England and, until the research of the REED project made it clear how ubiquitous the performance tradition was, scholars had no sense of its context. We have also been greatly helped by the work that has been done in the last generation on the cultural and social history of the fifteenth century. Earlier historians seem to have had difficulty coming to terms with a period that had no apparent cultural centre. Just as the literature of the fifteenth century was ignored, so were the social and religious changes. Chaucer belonged to a stable court. He died just as Henry IV usurped the throne and ushered in a century when the legitimacy of the ruler was questioned by one or other powerful faction. The next truly legitimate king was Henry VIII (whose Yorkist mother made up for the usurping Lancastrian blood he inherited from his father) and literary historians chose to re-start their study of literature with his court. Social, cultural and religious historians had no such markers and although the machinations of the Wars of the Roses and their political consequences were well documented, it was not until the last fifty years that the society and culture that survived the struggles of the aristocracy has been analysed and its characteristics identified. The dramatic tradition that I am talking about is quintessentially fifteenth-century, although its essential shape was established in the fourteenth century. The biblical and moral plays were part of the mainstream of the religious life of the English church from the time of Wycliffe. Affective piety, where the emotional side of religious experience was emphasized, is everywhere in the religious poetry and prose of the fifteenth century and finds its communal expression in the religious drama that was produced often by the cooperative enterprise of the secular and religious authorities.33 Social and cultural history is not easily divided into neat boxes – it is messy, it spills over time and varies from place to place. The ‘box’ that nineteenthcentury literary scholars created could not contain the popular literature of the fifteenth century (including the plays) because that literature continued to

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be popular into the sixteenth century mixing with new influences from the Continent, shifting and changing but definitely not conforming to the artificial time imposed on it by later scholarship. Religious drama continued to be performed in the sixteenth century. Some disappears at the time of the Henrician reformation (1529–47) but much of it was still being performed in the early years of Elizabeth. Shakespeare probably saw the biblical plays performed in Coventry when he was a child. The cities, towns, and parishes that performed the plays responded to the changing religious attitudes of the state by prudently not performing them when the Protestants were in ascendancy or adapting them to remove the most offensive expressions of Catholicism, only to exuberantly revive them when the Catholics had the upper hand.34 Far from dwindling away through lack of interest or economic hardship they were systematically suppressed during the late 1560s and 1570s by an Elizabethan government at last sure enough of itself to move against these survivals of the Catholic past.35 The men surrounding Elizabeth – men such as William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, Henry Hastings, earl of Huntingdon, Edmund Grindal, archbishop of York, and many lesser officials – took seriously the role of the queen as head of both church and state. For them, the Catholic threat was both a threat to their deepest personal convictions and to the stability of the state.They believed the continuing performance of these plays provided opportunity for expressions of Catholic solidarity that, in the words of one Protestant divine, could only bring ‘peril and danger to her majesty’.36 Yet, however the state viewed the content of these plays, the performance traditions of this drama were still living traditions even as the first professional theatres were opening in London. The morality plays – those that were built around the ‘psychomachia’ of the struggle of good and evil for the soul of an individual – and plays portraying the lives of the saints were also performed by communities of lay and clerical producers. Some of the moralities took on political overtones. David Klausner has suggested that the lavish play of Wisdom associated with the abbey of Bury St Edmunds is built on ‘modules’. The surviving text has a specific satire of the fifteenth-century judicial system but, as Klausner has shown, that part of the play could be replaced with a satire on the church, the court, or the military depending on the audience.37 The play of Mankind was probably a travelling play, and the version that has survived contains a very specific satire on four named individuals whom we know were in the following of Edward IV. From the reference to ‘no king’ the performance represented in the text can be placed in Cambridgeshire and dated to Shrovetide 1471 during the seven months in 1470–71 when the followers of Henry VI had forced Edward briefly into exile.38 Virtually no secular plays survive from the early fifteenth century, but that there was a flourishing secular dramatic tradition is clear from such plays as Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres performed in the household of Cardinal Morton in the 1490s.39 The sophisticated metatheatrical banter of two apparent members of the audience (named only ‘A’ and ‘B’) who eventually become

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part of the play argues a rich and subtle tradition of playmaking that we are only now beginning to recognise. The courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII secularised the religious morality structure as ‘advice to princes’ in such plays as Skelton’s Magnificence, and in schools and universities the form was modified to become ‘advice to the scholar’ in such plays as Wit and Science, where the central figure is a scholar fought over by ‘Lady Science’ and ‘Ignorance’ and who must defeat the giant Tediousness. But the performance traditions remained the same. Like most of their fifteenth-century counterparts they were written to be performed in the neutral space of a great hall as part of the entertainment at dinner. Travelling players were long thought to be a phenomenon of the late sixteenthcentury professional companies who (as it is erroneously thought) reluctantly left London to tour the countryside and endure the hardships of provincial life. But records of itinerant players are found in the earliest surviving records of towns, monasteries, and the houses of the gentry and nobility. Sometimes such players are free-lancers who appear in the records as ‘a minstrel’ or ‘a player from Wakefield’ but, more frequently, they appear as the players of a local or national figure of political and social importance.40 Some scholars have speculated that they were also spies for their masters, moving from town to abbey to aristocratic or gentry households testing the political winds. A chance survival of ‘the paper books of the said accountants’ for York in the years 1446–8, where the individual payments are recorded rather than summarized in a single payment ‘to minstrels and lords’ servants’ illustrates the ubiquity of travelling entertainers and may also support the suggestion that the players did more than perform for their patrons.41 The years 1446–8 were seminal in the unfortunate reign of Henry VI, as the powerful noblemen who had controlled the king since his childhood grew old and were being replaced by more ruthless individuals anxious to exploit the situation at court and the disenchantment with the unwinnable war in France. During those three years we have payments recorded to more than a hundred retained entertainers performing in York, serving the wide spread of masters from the king down to local knights, including high-ranking clergy. The entertainers’ noble masters included the king’s cousin Edmund Beaufort count of Mortain, his uncle Humfrey duke of Gloucester (the Duke Humfrey of the Bodleian Library), various members of the powerful Neville family and Richard, duke of York (father of Edward IV), Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, James Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele, (who was spectacularly murdered in London during the Cade rebellion in 1450) and William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, beheaded as he went into exile earlier that same year. We do not know if the retained entertainers of bitter enemies were ever in York or anywhere else on the established route at the same time but their presence together in these extraordinary lists is suggestive. The repertoires of these troupes were moralities and interludes: plays with few props and costumes that relied on the words more than the spectacle to please their audience. We know that Hamlet was well acquainted with the ways of travelling players. After he has amused himself with the players that have arrived at Elsinore in Act 2 Scene 2 of the play, reciting long passages of poetry to their mutual

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delight, Hamlet dismisses that into the care of Polonius, and then, almost as an after thought, says, Hamlet [to Players] Players Hamlet Players Hamlet

[. . .] We’ll hear a play tomorrow. Dost thou hear me, old friend? Can you play the murder of Gonzago? Ay, my lord. We’ll ha’t tomorrow night. You could for a need study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines which I would set down and insert in’t, could you not? Ay, my lord. Very well. Follow that lord, and look you mock him not.42

Here Hamlet is asking the players to alter their text, to speak lines of his devising so that he can ‘catch the conscience of the king’. Something similar happens at the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew, when a company similarly well known to the householder agrees to pretend to be the personal players of the drunken Sly. Players could be used to further the ends of their employers and plays altered to make political or satirical points, or merely indulge the whim of the patrons. In this way they became part of the life of the community or household in which they found themselves, rather than separate ‘artists’ presenting their artifice for a fee and departing. They could also be used as deliberate instruments of state policy, as they were for much of the central years of the sixteenth century. In the early days of the Henrician reformation, Richard Morison, a Cambridge friend of William Cecil’s became Thomas Cromwell’s chief propagandist. He saw in drama a way to use the tools of the Roman church against it. First he advocated the abolition of Catholic drama and then its replacement by Protestant anti-papal drama in the vernacular. In Morison’s words, Howmoche better is it that those plaies shulde be forbidden and deleted and others dyvysed to set forthe and declare lyvely before the peoples eies the abhomynation and wickedness of the bisshop of Rome, monkes, ffreers, nonnes, and suche like [. . .]43 The perfect vehicle to allow Cromwell to carry out Morison’s plan was another Cambridge reformer, John Bale, a talented polemicist and playwright. Bale strove with enthusiasm to advance Cromwell’s anti-papal campaign aimed at gathering support for a break from Rome in the mid 1530s, and the partnership of these two men is now a well-established and important thread in the history of English drama.44 More recently, it has become clear that William Cecil also used drama as an instrument of state propaganda. We have long had the opinion of the Spanish Ambassador that this was so but we also now have evidence from the records.45 During the time when he was part of the inner circle of government under Edward IV, and again when he became Elizabeth’s first minister, the pattern of

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provincial touring by players patronized either by the monarch or by members of the Privy Council was reinstated. Some years ago I analysed the evidence presented by REED’s Patrons and Players website listing all the travelling companies and their patrons so far encountered in REED volumes. In Cromwell’s time the percentage of companies on the road patronized by staunchly Protestant members of the Privy Council was 83%; under Edward 77% and in the first five years of Elizabeth’s reign again 83%. Of the 173 performances so far recorded between 1558 and 1563, ninety-nine (or more than half) are by three companies: forty-four were by the queen’s company, thirty-five the company of Lord Robert Dudley (not yet the earl of Leicester) and twenty by the company of his brother Ambrose.46 Ten years earlier, in 1551, their father, John Dudley, earl of Warwick and Edward’s chief minister after the fall of Somerset, issued a proclamation stating clearly that it was the duty of the sovereign to ensure the setting ‘furth of Goddes holy worde and thestablishment of a pure and sincere religion, conformable to goddes institucion, and the vsage of the holy catholique churche’. Dudley’s proclamation lamented the effect that idle invention in books and plays were having on the ‘kinges maiesties louyng and faithful subiectes’ and forbad the printing and playing of such things.47 Early theatre historians tended not to read beyond the prohibitions, ignoring the crucially important exception that followed that stated that, if permission was granted by the king or six members of the Privy Council and a license obtained, such plays could be performed. Local authorities were to ensure that any players seeking to perform within their jurisdictions had the requisite license. Eight years later, on 16 May 1559, Elizabeth issued her ‘proclamation against plays’ requiring the licensing of plays but also requiring that no plays be played ‘wherin either matters of religion or of the governance of the estate of the common weale shall be handled or treated’.48 This has frequently been taken as a prohibition against using drama as propaganda. But again there is a qualifying clause that follows the apparent blanket prohibition to the effect that ‘no meete matters be wrytten or treated vpon, but by menne of aucthoritie, learning, and wisdome, nor to be handled before any audience but of graue and discreete persons’. Like the earlier Edwardian proclamation, this one should be seen as directed at unauthorized plays and playing, not at plays sanctioned by the ‘menne of aucthoritie, learning and wisdome’ who constituted the Privy Council and their agents in the local governments in the counties, cities and towns of England. Two years later John Foxe the author of The Book of Martyrs, wrote triumphantly, ‘Players, Printers and Preachers be set up of God as a triple bulwark against the triple crown of the Pope, to bring him down.’49 In 1569, in the tenth year of Elizabeth’s reign, a rebellion of northern earls sympathetic to the old religion was suppressed, enabling to secure her hold on the throne. From that time onward, her Council moved confidently to appoint Protestant civil and religious leaders in the north and, as we have seen, began the systematic suppression of the old community drama. The tight control of whose players could be ‘on the road’ was also relaxed. State-sponsored

344 Summing up

propaganda pieces became less common. By the time the famous company of the Queen’s Men was established in 1583, many of their plays were concerned with nationalistic (if not jingoistic) themes and plays based on English history were central to their repertoire. These became the direct sources of many of Shakespeare’s history plays. Much court discourse continued to be carried on through drama and pageantry. Many masques and entertainments presented to the queen on her frequent progresses contain political undertones or seek personal favour. This practice continued into the seventeenth century with such pieces as the 1613 Masque of the Fairy Prince in which Prince Henry, James I’s oldest son (who died all too soon after the masque was performed) is clearly signalling to his father that he is now a grown man and should have his own court. But with the opening of the public theatres the fare offered there becomes less controlled and turned more to the public taste. When Shakespeare arrived in London in 1592, he brought with him the rich heritage of playmaking in the provinces to be mixed with the traditions from the universities and the court. The traditions he inherited and exploited were more than entertainment; they were part of the social, political, and religious discourse of the nation. The establishment in 1575 of the first professional theatre in London that was in no way tied into the propaganda machine of the church or state has been rightly hailed by scholars of early modern drama as the beginning of the English classical theatre. But it can also be seen as the beginning of the end of a great tradition. Shakespeare stands on the shoulders of the playwrights who went before him using their conventions to create a unique magic of his own. But he also was part of, and helped to shape, the culture of business that became the foundation of the commercial theatre. Shakespeare made money from his plays and retired to the country on the proceeds. Players before the professional theatres were dependent on their patrons for their stability and for much of their livelihood, and so performed what they were asked to perform as the players did in Hamlet. Although the system of royal or noble patronage survived well into the seventeenth century, the major source of income for players and sharers of the commercial theatre became the box office. To make the theatres pay, audiences had to continue to be attracted. Instead of providing didactic or quasi didactic fare, or even the jingoism so often lamented in the history plays, Jacobean and Caroline playwrights resorted increasingly to sex and violence that not only, as many have argued, reflects the darkness of a society slipping once again in to civil war but also the taste of the paying customers for the equivalent of bread and circuses. The disgust of the Puritan faction at the decadence of the Caroline theatre was in many ways justified. It can be argued that the closing of the playhouses in 1642 had its roots in the creation of the entertainment industry in 1575.The traditions of ceremony and of religious, social and political discourse at every level of society that had shaped the dramatic traditions before 1575 could not withstand the later need for commercial gain to keep an industry alive.

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Notes 1 Daniel Seltzer, ‘The Actor and Staging,’ in A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. by Kenneth Muir and Samuel Schoenbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 35. 2 The standard scholarly editions of these plays are: The Late Medieval Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and E Museo 160, ed. by Donald C. Baker, John L. Murphy and Louis B. Hall, Jr., Early English Text Society, e.s., 283 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); The York Plays, ed. by Richard Beadle, 2 vols, Early English Text Society, s.s., 23 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Everyman, ed. by Arthur C. Cawley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961); The Towneley Plays, ed. by Arthur C. Cawley and Martin Stevens, Early English Text Society, s.s., 13 and 14 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994; Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. by Norman Davis, Early English Text Society, s.s., 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); The Macro Plays, ed. by Mark Eccles, Early English Text Society, e.s., 262 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); The Complete Works of John Bale, ed. by Peter Happé, 2 vols, (Cambridge: Brewer, 1985); The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. by Pamela King (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000); Two Tudor Interludes:Youth and Hickscorner, ed. by Ian Lancashire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980); The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. by Robert M. Lumiansky and David Mills, 2 vols, Early English Text Society, s.s., 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974) and 9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); The Plays of Henry Medwall, ed. by Alan H. Nelson (Cambridge: Brewer, 1980); John Skelton’s Magnificence, ed. by Paula Neuss (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980); The N-Town Play, ed. by Stephen Spector, 2 vols, Early English Text Society, s.s., 11 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 3 Tudor Facsimile Texts, ed. by John S. Farmer (issued for subscribers, 1907–14). All available online through EEBO, http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home. 4 E.K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage, 2 vols, (London: Oxford University Press, 1903); The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923). 5 Specimens of pre-Shakspearean Drama, ed. by J.M. Manly (Boston: Ginn, 1897); English Miracle Plays, Moralities and Interludes: Specimen of the pre-Elizabethan Drama, ed. by A.W. Pollard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895, 2nd ed.). 6 Medieval Drama, ed. by David Bevington (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975). 7 David Bevington, ‘Drama Editing and Its Relation to Recent Trends in Literary Criticism’ in Editing Early English Drama: Special Problems and New Directions, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston (New York: AMS, 1987), pp. 20–21. 8 Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas, ed. by Josiah Quincy Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924). 9 Bevington, ‘Drama Editing’, p. 23. 10 Medieval Stage, vol. 2, Appendix W, pp. 329–406. 11 W.W. Greg ‘“Ludus Coventriae”: The Fabrication of a Cycle’, The Library, 3rd series 5 (1914), pp. 108–43. 12 The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle, ed. by Arthur C. Cawley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), p. 125. 13 Elizabethan Stage, vol. 4, Appendix D, pp. 338–39. 14 John R. Elliott, Jr., Playing God: Medieval Mysteries on the Modern Stage (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), p. 55. 15 Elliott, pp. 25–41. 16 This anecdote was told me by Browne himself some time after 1974 when I met him at a conference in Leeds. He died in 1980. See also E. Martin Browne with Henzie Browne, Two in One (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), Chapter 2 ‘Canterbury: the first Murder’, pp. 91–112. 17 Hardin Craig, English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955).

346 Summing up 18 Frederick M. Salter, Medieval Drama in Chester (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1955). 19 British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian D., The N-Town Play, viii. 20 The Mary Play from the N.Town Manuscript, ed. by Peter Meredith (London: Longmans, 1987). 21 Barbara Palmer, ‘“Towneley Plays” or “Wakefield Cycle” Revisited’, Comparative Drama, 21 (1987–8), pp. 318–48 and ‘Recycling “The Wakefield Cycle”: The Records’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, xli (2002), pp. 88–130. At the International Medieval Congress at Leeds in 2010, Peter Meredith accepted the redating but suggested that the manuscript might represent the play performed in Wakefield the 1550s. He did not address the issue of the formal and elaborate nature of the manuscript that is unlike any other in the canon. 22 Kent, ed. by James M. Gibson, 3 vols, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). See also James M. Gibson, ‘“Interludum Passionis Domini”: Parish Drama in Medieval New Romney’ in English Parish Drama, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), pp. 137–48. 23 Margaret Rogerson, Playing a Part in History: The York Mysteries 1951–2006 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), esp. Chapter 3. 24 Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘Medieval Drama in England – 1966’, Queen’s Quarterly 74 (1967), pp. 78–91. 25 The major productions have been: the York Plays (1977 and 1998), the Chester Plays (1983 and 2010), the N-Town Passion Play (1981), N-Town Pageants (1988), the Towneley Plays (1985), The Castle of Perseverance (1979), Mary Magdalene (2003). See also the website http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~plspls/. 26 Alan H. Nelson, ‘Principles of Processional Staging: the York Cycle’, Modern Philology, 67 (1970), pp. 303–20. 27 This story is told in more detail in Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The Founding of Records of Early English Drama’ in REED in Review, ed. by Audrey Douglas and Sally-Beth MacLean (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 21–38. 28 Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The York Cycle, l977’, University of Toronto Quarterly, xlviii (1978), pp. 1–9. See also various reviews in Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, xx (1977), pp. 107–22. 29 William Proctor Williams, Shakespeare Newsletter, 53 (2003), p. 41. 30 York Civic Records I, ed. by Angelo Raine,Yorkshire Archeological Society Record Series 98 (1939), p. 119. 31 York, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, 2 vols, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 142. 32 See Henry James and Greg Walker, ‘The Politics of Gorboduc’, English Historical Review, 110 (1995), pp. 109–21 and Norman Jones and Paul Whitfield White, ‘Gorboduc and Royal Marriage Politics: An Elizabethan Playgoer’s Report of the Premiere Performance’, English Literary Renaissance, 26 (1996), pp. 3–16. 33 See among other work on the subject Alexandra F. Johnston ‘Making Yourself ‘þer present’: Nicholas Love and the Plays of the Passion’ in In Strange Countries: Essays in Memory of John J. Anderson, ed. by David Matthews (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), see above, pp. 289–98. 34 Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘Introduction’ to the second edition of Cambridge Companion to Medieval Drama, ed. by Richard Beadle and Alan Fletcher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 1–25. 35 See Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The City as Patron’ in Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, ed. by Paul Whitfield White and Suzanne Westfall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); ‘William Cecil and the Drama of Persuasion’ in Shakespeare and Religious Change, ed. by Kenneth Graham and Philip Collington (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009); ‘And how the state will beare with it I knowe not’, in According to

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the Ancient Custom: Essays presented to David Mills, ed. by Philip Butterworth, Pamela M. King and Meg Twycross, Medieval English Theatre 30 (2008), see above, Section 3, pp. 183–246. From Christopher Goodman’s letter of 10 May 1572; Cheshire, including Chester, ed. by Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence M. Clopper and David Mills, 2 vols, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), p. 144. David N. Klausner, ‘The Modular Structure of Wisdom’ in ‘Bring Furth the Pagants’: Essays in Early English Drama presented to Alexandra F. Johnston, ed. by David N. Klausner and Karen Sawyer Marselek (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 181–96. John Geck, ‘“On Yestern Day, in Feverere, the Yere Passeth Fully”: On the Dating and Prosopography of Mankind’, Early Theatre, 12,2 (2009), pp. 33–56. The Plays of Henry Medwall, ed. by Alan H. Nelson (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1980). REED:York, vol. i, p. 67. Ibid., pp. 65–73. The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt and others (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), p. 1702. Sydney Anglo, ‘An Early Tudor Programme for Plays and Other Demonstrations against the Pope’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtnay Institute, 20 (1957), p. 177. See Paul Whitfield White, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage and Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, n.s., i (1558–67), p. 62. Cited in David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 127. Johnston, ‘William Cecil’, see above, pp. 224–45. W.C. Hazlitt, The English Drama and Stage under the Tudor and Stuart Princes 1543–1664 (New York: Burt Franklin, reprint, 1963), pp. 9–10, 13–14. Ibid., pp. 19–20. Cited in White, Theatre and Reformation, p. 3 from John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. by S.R. Cattley, rev. by Josiah Pratt, 8 vols (London: Religious Tract Society, 1877), vol. vi, pp. 31 and 57.

Index

Abingdon, Oxon. 169 Aldermaston, Hants. 172 Amersham, Bucks 167; St Mary’s 154, 176 Anderson, M.D. 58 – 9, 68, 85 Ashburton St Andrew’s, Devon 136 – 7, 145 Ash Prior, Somerset 136 Augustine 68, 107 – 8, 251 – 4, 260 – 2, 263 – 5, 271 Baker, Denise 291 Bale, John 228 – 9, 232, 275 – 6, 342; King John 228, 276; Temptation of Our Lord,The 228, 276 banners 9, 14 – 15, 24, 51, 61, 72 – 3, 80 Barking Abbey 123 Bassingbourn, Cambs. 168 Beadle, Richard 187, 307, 312 Beaumont, Francis: Knight of the Burning Pestle 201 Bedale, William 18 Beehive of the Romish Church,The 116, 121 – 2, 128 – 9 Betley, Staffs. 156 – 7 Bevington, David 330 Bible 50, 251 – 4, 282 – 3, 321 Bodmin, Cornwall 137, 145 Boethius 107, 254, 263, 265 Bonaventure 103, 185, 289 Bonner, Bishop Edmund 166, 206 boy bishops 167 – 70, 339 Brandon, Charles 238, 240 Brasenose College, Oxford 117 Bray, Berks. 178 Brentford, Mdx. 169 Bridgwater, Somerset 136, 145 Bridport, Dorset 173 Bristol 135 – 6 Britten, Benjamin 332 Brown, E. Martin 332, 345

Bucer, Martin 226 – 8 Burford, Oxon. 169, 175 Burial and Resurrection (Bodley) 117, 123 – 5, 291, 315, 318 Burton, Roger 12, 14, 83 Butterworth, Philip 122 Cambridge University 224 – 8 Castle of Perseverance 255, 271 Cecil, Thomas 225 Cecil, William 206, 209, 212, 224, 229, 231, 234 – 5, 237, 239, 244, 340, 342 Chagford, Devon 173 Chambers, E.K. 42, 133 Chaucer, Geoffrey 115, 275, 280, 339 Chester see plays Christ Church Cathedral, Canterbury 118 Clark, William 20 Claynes, Worcs. 172 Clopper, Lawrence 335 – 6 Clyve, Worcs. 172 Coletti, Teresa 314 confraternities: Holy Trinity 14 – 15, 39 Conversion of St. Paul,The 272 – 3, 275 costumes and properties 9 – 16, 21, 27 – 35, 41, 51, 58 – 9, 67, 70 – 4, 77, 79, 82, 84, 118 – 19, 122 – 3, 159, 171, 173, 233, 322 Cotswold Games 171 Council of the North 57, 187, 195 – 7, 199, 207 – 9, 212 – 14, 219 – 20 Coventry see plays Craig, Hardin 67, 133, 333 Cromwell, Thomas 192 – 3, 224, 227 – 9, 236 – 7, 239 – 40, 342 Cursor Mundi 279 Curtis, Muriel 141, 147 dancing, morris 120, 154 – 5, 166, 170, 172 Dartmouth St Saviour’s, Devon 119

350 Index Dissolution, Act of 48, 56, 65, 71, 88, 95, 192 Dobson, R.B. 100 – 1, 183 Dorrell (Rogerson), Margaret 50, 335 – 6 Downham, William 64 Drawswerd, Thomas 25 – 7, 33 – 4, 42 Duffy, Eamon 121 Ecclesiastical Commission 207, 209 – 12, 214 – 15, 219 – 20, 331 Eliot, T.S. 277, 279, 332 Everyman 329 Exeter, Devon: Skinners’ Guild 138 – 45 Eynsham Priory 118 fairs 183 feasts: Assumption 320 – 1; Corpus Christi 15, 20, 43 – 8, 53, 63, 65, 75, 80, 88 – 96, 132 – 45, 183, 194, 301; Easter 115 – 29, 183 (sepulchre 121 – 2); Holy Innocents 167; Lammas 55, 75, 190; Mary Magdalen 54, 75; Midsummer 19, 22, 132, 162, 188, 194, 199 – 200; Palm Sunday 194; Pentecost 54, 64, 75, 161, 194; Philip and James 54, 75; St Barnabas 76; St Bartholemew 54; St George 64, 194; St Nicholas 167 – 8; St Stephen 194; St Thomas the Apostle 198; Trinity 81; Whit Tuesday 19 Fletcher, Alan 127 Foxe, John 230 – 1, 343; Christus Triumphans 231; Titus et Gesippus 231 friaries,York 187, 250; Augustinian 104 – 10, 187, 280 Galloway, David 335 – 7 Gardiner, Father Harold 204, 206 Gardiner, Bishop Stephen 165 Geoffrey of Vinsauf 105 Gibson, Gail McMurray 314, 323 – 4 Glossa ordinaria 108, 283 Goodman, Christopher 204, 214 – 19, 236 Gower, John 280 Great Dunmow, Essex 168 Great Witchingham, Norfolk 168 Greg, W.W. 331 Grimald, Nicholas 225; Christus Redivivus 117, 126 Grindal, Edmund 196 – 7, 207 – 8, 210, 212 – 20, 225, 340 Guildford, Surrey 169 guilds,York 100, 184; Bakers 40, 64, 66, 68, 82, 85, 98, 184, 191, 197 – 8; Barkers 61; Bridgemasters 40; Butchers 184; Chandlers 188 – 9, 195, 307; Cordwainers

70, 106, 109; Cornmerchants 189; Corpus Christi 43 – 7, 49, 51 – 9, 61, 71, 75, 85, 88 – 96, 106, 188, 191 – 2; Cowpers 70; Cutlers 306; Fishers and Mariners 184; Girdlers 44, 50, 71, 186, 189 – 90, 194; Goldsmiths 258, 267, 307; Innholders 186, 189; Ironmongers 188 – 9, 261, 281; Labourers 189; Marshalls and Smiths 39, 43, 45 – 6; Masons 188 – 9, 257, 266, 307, 320; Mercers 9 – 39, 40 – 6, 51, 59, 61, 85 – 6, 88, 98, 148, 185, 187, 198, 335; Pater Noster 49, 61, 63 – 4, 102, 112, 190; Pinners 184; Saddlers 70, 86; St Anthony 49, 54, 64 – 5, 79 – 82, 190; St Christopher 50; Saucemakers 44; Scriveners 84, 188 – 9; Shearmen 188 – 9; Shipwrights 184, 188; Skinners, Carpenters, and Tanners 91; Sporiers and Lorimers 69; Tapiters 184; Vintners 261, 281; Weavers 106, 109, 148; Winedrawers 188 Happé, Peter 134 Harbert, Christopher 66, 81 – 2, 197 – 200 Hardison, O.B. 117 Hastings, Henry 204, 211, 215 – 19, 221, 236, 239, 340 Hauser, Arnold 115 Hays, Rosalind 137 Henley, Oxon. 169, 178 Herrick, Robert 152 – 3, 175 Hester, Godly Queen 338 Hexton, Herts. 169 Higgins, Anne 134 – 5 hockdays 120, 171, 178 Holinshed, Raphael 245 Holst, Gustav 332 hospitals,York 250; Holy Trinity 18; St Leonard 91 – 2, 106 – 7, 192; St Thomas 56, 59, 77, 88, 95, 192 Hughes, Jonathan 100 Hugh of St Victor 112 Hutton, Matthew 57, 59, 77 – 8, 196 – 7, 200, 207, 209 – 10, 212, 214, 219 – 20, 239 Ingram, Reginald 335 – 6 Kahrl, Stanley 127, 325, 334 Kemp, Margery 104, 308, 323 – 4 Ket’s Rebellion 232 – 4 kings: Edward IV 53, 208, 342 – 3; Edward V 54, 340; Edward VI 121, 138, 189, 193, 230, 234, 237, 273, 343; Henry III 104; Henry IV 339; Henry VI 40, 340; Henry VII 161, 208, 308, 338, 341; Henry VIII

Index 59, 117, 119, 125, 155, 161, 165, 193, 196, 208, 229, 237, 338, 341; James I, Book of Sports 175; James V of Scotland 338; Philip II of Spain 224, 235 – 6; Richard II 62, 112, 187; Richard III 53, 88, 106, 191, 208 King games 154 – 5, 167 – 70, 172 King, Pamela 291, 295 Kingston upon Thames, Surrey 119, 150, 154, 158 – 61, 168 – 9, 171 – 2, 178 Kirchmayer, Thomas: Pammachius 227 Klausner, David 312, 340 Kolve,V.A. 133 Kowaleski, Maryanne 139 Langland, William 280 Lateran Council IV 101, 280 Latimer, Bishop Hugh 151, 158, 165 – 6, 170, 232 Lay Folks’ Catechism 52, 101 Leyerle, John 314 libraries 104 – 9, 202, 250, 261, 280 Lichfield Cathedral 123 Lindsay, David: Ane Satire of the Thre Estatis 338 London 175 Lords of Misrule 172 – 3, 339; see also King games Love, Nicholas 103 – 5, 110, 185, 289 – 97 Ludlow, Shrops. 172 Lusty Juventus 236 Machyn, Henry 169 MacLean, Sally-Beth 150, 158, 168, 172, 337 Macrobius 105 Magdalen College, Oxford 118 – 19 Malone Society 336 Mankind 70, 263, 271 – 2, 340 Mannyng, Robert: Handlyng Synne 280 Marlowe, Bucks. 178 Marprelate, Martin 166, 171 – 2 Mary Magdalen 272 masques 344 May games 166, 169, 172, 175 McKinnell, John 311 Meditationes vitae Christi 185, 289 – 92, 323 Medwall, Henry 232; Fulgens and Lucres 275, 340 – 1 Melton, William 43, 83, 91, 186 Melton Mowbray, Leics. 169 Meredith, Peter 15, 126 – 7, 314, 333, 346 metrics 258 – 60, 265 – 6, 269 – 70, 274 Mills, David 183, 204, 214, 222 Milton, John 271; Comus 201

351

Mirk, John 68 – 70 More, Prior William 172 Morison, Richard 342 Mundus et Infans 273 music/musicians 130, 159, 162, 255, 305, 320, 322, 339 Nelson, Alan 49, 83 – 4, 86, 301 – 3, 335 New Romney, Kent 128, 135, 168, 334 Nice Wanton 236, 273 Nichodemus, Gospel of 107, 279, 285 Northern Passion 279, 289 Norton, Thomas 225; Gorboduc 338 Oberammergau 323 – 33 Ordo paginarum 12 – 13, 18, 89 – 90, 100, 108 – 9, 184, 187, 260, 307, 312 Origen 107, 282, 285 Orme, Nicholas 141 Oxford, Oxon. 169 Oxford University 230 pageants 84 – 5, 108, 135, 262, 278, 337; see also wagons, pageant Palliser, David 192 – 3, 196 – 7, 211, 313 Palmer, Barbara 129 Patient Grissill 236 Pearl poet 280 Pecham, John 101 Penshurst, Kent 168 Peraldus, Willelmus 284; Summa de vitiis 279 – 80 Percy family 53, 208, 211 – 12 Pilgrimage of Grace 192 – 3, 197, 208 players 20–2, 45, 57, 118, 136, 165, 194 – 5, 200 – 1, 206, 226, 231, 237 – 8, 290, 302, 312, 339, 344; travelling 158 – 9, 200 – 1, 233 – 4, 237 – 8, 240 – 4, 341 – 4 plays: Beverley 67, 118, 301; Chester 99, 115 – 16, 126, 183, 208, 211, 214 – 19, 236, 261, 287, 290, 292, 296, 301, 313, 333 – 4; Coventry 146, 254, 265, 290, 301, 340; Creed Play 49 – 67, 70, 71 – 8, 83, 85, 186, 188, 190, 196, 202, 205, 207, 210, 213, 219, 302, 336; Exeter 138 – 45; Hereford 335; Lincoln 118; Newcastle 301; N-Town 115 – 16, 126 – 7, 133, 261, 277, 283, 290, 292 – 4, 296 – 7, 314 – 16, 319 – 24, 333 – 4; Pater Noster Play 37, 42, 61 – 71, 78 – 82, 98, 186, 188, 190, 194, 197 – 200, 202, 210, 214, 302, 336; Towneley 99, 115, 126 – 8, 254, 261, 265, 287, 292, 296 – 7, 315, 334; Wakefield 207, 219, 331, 346; Worcester 335;York, Corpus Christi play 45 – 7, 49 – 53, 55 – 7,

352 Index 59, 61, 63, 65 – 7, 69, 71, 76 – 7, 80, 85, 99, 106 – 7, 115 – 16, 126 – 7, 183 – 96, 213 – 14, 219 – 20, 249 – 61, 265 – 70, 279 – 87, 292, 294 – 7, 301 – 13, 315; I Fall of the Angels 69, 250, 255, 266, 304 – 5; II Creation to the Fifth Day 304 – 5, 311; III Creation of Adam and Eve 304 – 5; IV Adam and Eve in Eden 304;V Fall of Man 70, 304; VI Expulsion 304;VII Cain and Abel 251, 257, 269, 304 – 5;VIII Building of the Ark 184, 188, 304; IX Noah’s Flood 302; X Abraham and Isaac 252, 259 – 60, 305; XI Moses and Pharaoh 305; XII Annunciation 255, 305 – 6; XIII Joseph’s Troubles 258 – 9, 305, 307; XIV Nativity 251, 256, 267 – 8, 285, 307 – 8; XV Shepherds 188 – 9, 307; XVI Herod and Magi 256 – 8, 266 – 8, 307; XVII Purification 188 – 9, 268, 305, 307; XVIII Flight into Egypt 305; XIX Slaughter of the Innocents 44, 50 – 1, 186, 257, 269, 305; XX Christ and the Doctors 69, 282, 295, 306, 311; XXI Baptism 252, 255, 281, 305; XXII Temptation 108, 252, 255, 310; XXIIA Marriage at Cana 261; XXIII Transfiguration 108, 281 – 2, 295, 306; XXIIIA Simon the Leper 188 – 9; XXIV Woman taken in Adultery 86, 108, 257, 281, 283, 295, 306; XXV Entry into Jerusalem 251 – 2, 256, 268, 281, 304 – 5, 308; XXVI Conspiracy 306; XXVII Last Supper 66, 68, 82, 184, 191, 194, 294, 307; XXVIII Agony in the Garden 70, 257, 296; XXIX Annas and Caiaphas 257, 268 – 9, 280 – 1, 295, 306; XXX Christ before Pilate 184, 281, 283, 295, 306; XXXI Christ before Herod 253, 257, 269, 284, 306; XXXII Remorse of Judas 44; XXXIII Judgement 109, 256 – 7, 268, 279, 284 – 5, 295, 312; XXXIV Road to Calvary 188, 269, 285, 294, 296, 302, 310; XXXV Crucifixion 184, 257, 285 – 6, 295 – 6, 306 – 7; XXXVI Death of Christ 184, 294 – 6, 305; XXXVII Harrowing of Hell 70, 86, 254 – 5, 286, 305; XXXVIII Resurrection 127, 255, 286 – 7, 304, 306; XXXIX Appearance to Mary Magdalene 128, 188, 260; XL Supper at Emmaus 304 – 5; XLI Incredulity of Thomas 84, 188 – 9, 305, 307; XLII Ascension 287, 306 – 7; XLIII Pentecost 255, 311; XLIV Death of the Virgin 108, 305, 307, 311, 320; XLIVA Funeral of the Virgin 320;

XLV Assumption of the Virgin 108, 186, 195, 311, 320; XLVI Coronation of the Virgin 86, 108, 189, 195, 305, 311, 320; XLVII Last Judgement 9 – 17, 19 – 35, 39, 44 – 5, 51, 69, 84, 86, 109, 187, 255, 303, 311, 320 Plymouth 136 Poculi Ludique Societas 127, 176, 263, 270 – 1, 277, 290, 293, 297, 302 – 3, 310 – 14, 324 – 5, 334, 336, 346 Pope Urban IV 132 Prick of Conscience,The 50 priory, Holy Trinity 187 procession, Corpus Christi 15, 21, 41, 43 – 8, 88 – 97, 99 – 100, 106, 184 – 5, 191, 203 properties see costumes and properties Prosser, Eleanor 133 queens: Catherine Parr 229 – 32, 238 (Lamentation 231); Elizabeth 161, 166, 189, 195, 200, 206, 221, 224 – 5, 229 – 30, 235, 237, 338, 340, 343; Katherine 193; Mary 166, 193, 207, 209, 224 – 5, 230, 234, 237; Mary, Queen of Scots 206, 213 – 14 Quem quaeritis 117, 118, 123, 124 Raine, Angelo 62, 69, 204 Reading, Berks. 164, 169, 172, 178; St Giles 169, 178; St Laurence 120 – 3, 136, 154 – 5, 158 – 60, 164, 169, 171 – 2, 178; St Mary 157, 159 – 60, 170 Records of Early English Drama 236 – 8, 336 – 7, 339, 343 Redford, John: Wit and Science 274, 341 Registrum Anglie 107 Religious Drama Society 332 Resurrection of Our Lord,The 117, 123, 125 – 6 Revetour, William 44, 50 – 2, 55, 61, 71 – 3, 83, 106, 190 – 1 Ripon Minster 118, 123 Robin Hood 135, 137, 150 – 1, 154, 157 – 9, 161 – 2, 165 – 75 Rolle, Richard 103 – 4, 291 Rubin, Miri 132, 134 Rye, Sussex 119 Sackville, Thomas see Norton, Thomas Sacrament, Play of the 135 St Ives, Cornwall 169, 172 St Mawgan, Cornwall 172 Salter, F.M. 333 – 4 Sayers, Dorothy 332

Index Scauceby, Thomas 18, 19, 28, 36 ‘Seinte Resurrection, La’ 116 – 17 Sellers, Maud 36 – 8, 61 Shakespeare, William 276, 329 – 31, 344; Hamlet 236, 341 – 2, 344; Henry IV 276 – 7; King Lear 331; Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 99; Taming of the Shrew 342; The Winter’s Tale 153 Sheingorn, Pamela 121 Sherborne, Dorset 137, 145 Shere, Surrey 169 Shipdham, Norfolk 168 Shrewsbury Fragments 116, 123 Shrewsbury, Shrops. 168 Sindlesham, Hants. 172 Skelton, John: Magnificence 341 Smith, Lucy Toulmin 62, 67, 127, 301 Snittisham, Norfolk 168 Somerset, J.A.B. 174 Spector, Stephen 319 Spofford, William 92 Stanzaic Life of Christ 279 Star Chamber, court of 174, 214, 218 Staynton, William de 104 Stevens, Martin 49, 301 – 2, 314, 324 Stokes, James 137, 173 Stubbes, Phillip: Anatomy of Abuses 153 – 5, 157, 159, 161, 168 – 9 Suffolk, Catherine (duchess of) 238 – 40 Susannah,The Most Virtuous and Godly 236, 275 Swanson, Heather 100, 183 Thame, Oxon. 119, 136, 178 Thatcham, Berks. 169, 178 Thoresby, John 101 – 2, 109 Tintinhull, Somerset 158, 164 torches 43 – 6, 50, 84 – 6, 89 – 96, 98, 184 Towneley see plays Trinity College, Cambridge 196 Twycross, Meg 134, 221 Tydeman, William 134, 302

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Udall, Nicholas 228 – 30, 232; Ralph Roister Doister 230 Wadington, William of: Manuel des Pechez 280 wagons, pageant 9 – 20, 21 – 6, 29 – 34, 86, 196, 310 – 11, 335 waits 201 Waldeby, John 102, 105 – 6, 108 – 11 Walsh, Martin 311 Wantage, Berks. 78 Wasson, John 139 – 40, 173 Wells, Somerset: Cathedral 118, 123; Show 169, 175 West Zoyland, Somerset 174 White, Paul Whitfield 135 Wickham, Glynne 133 Wiles, David 150, 154, 157, 163, 167 Williams, Arnold 314 Winchester, Hants. 117 Windsor St George’s, Berks. 118, 129 Wing, Bucks. 169 Wisdom 272, 340 Wistow,Yorks. 168 Witney, Oxon. 171 Wokingham, Hants. 172 Woodbury, Devon 173 Woodstock, Oxon. 169, 175 Woolf, Rosemary 57 – 8, 133, 319 Worcester, Worcs.: St Helen’s 172 Wrangle, William 20, 29, 40, 85 Wyclif, John 62 – 3, 339 Wymondham, Norfolk 232 – 3 Yately, Hants. 172 Yeovil, Somerset 137 – 8, 173 – 4 York,Yorks.: Minster 43, 46, 50, 52, 54, 63, 89, 91 – 3, 102 – 3, 107, 109, 250, 308; St Mary’s Abbey 101, 107, 109, 192, 209; see also hospitals,York; plays Young, Karl 62, 118 Yule 198, 204, 219