1363, and long after his death the "Polychronicon" stood in high credit as a sketch of universal history, with special reference to England.

Although not beyond doubt, it is very likely that the date assigned to the first acting at Chester of MIRACLE PLAYS in English is right, and that Ralph Higden was the author of the series. Since the days of Stephen and Henry II. religious entertainments of this form had been growing in popularity. A twelfth-century MS., found in the town library of Tours, contains three Anglo-Norman miracle-plays, as old, or nearly as old, as the plays of Hilarius, already described (ch. iii. § 9). The stage directions illustrate the first removal of the acting from the inside to the outside of the church. This must soon have become necessary, if it were only for accommodation of the increasing number of spectators. For the acting of those plays of which a MS. was found at Tours, scaffolding was built over the steps of the church, and the audience occupied the square in front. Out of the heaven of the church, Figura-God-passed to Adam in Paradise, upon a stage level with the highest steps of the church door. From that Paradise Adam and Eve were driven down a few steps to the lower stage that represented Earth. Below this, nearest to the spectators, was hell, an enclosed place in which cries were made, chains were rattled, and out of which smoke came; out of which also men and boys dressed as devils came by a door opening into a free space between the scaffolding and the semicircle of the front row of spectators. They were also directed now and then to go among the people, and passed round by them sometimes to one of the upper platforms. The original connection of these plays with the Church service was represented by the hymns of choristers.

The next step in the development of the miracle-play was hastened by the complaint that the crowds who came to witness the performance, on an outside scaffolding, attached to the church, trampled the graves in the churchyards. Decrees were made to prevent this desecration of the graves, and the advance probably was rapid to the setting up of detached scaffolding for the performance of the plays-still by the clergy, choristers and parish clerks-upon unconsecrated ground.

In London the parish clerks had formed themselves into a harmonic guild, chartered by Henry III. in 1233, and their music was sought at the funerals and entertainments of the great. As miracle-plays increased in popularity, the parish

TO A.D. 1378.]

MIRACLE PLAYS.

ΙΟΙ

clerks occupied themselves much with the acting of them. Chaucer's jolly Absalom, of whom we are told that

"Sometimes to shew his lightness and maistrie

He playeth Herod on a scaffold high,"

was a parish clerk.

The strongest impulse to a regular participation of the laity in the production of these plays seems to have been given by the Church when, in 1264, Pope Urban IV. founded, and in 1311 Clement V. firmly established, the festival of Corpus Christi in honour of the consecrated Host. This was the one festival of the Church wherein laity and clergy walked together. The guilds of a town contributed their pictures, images, and living representatives of Scripture characters to the procession, and the day was one of common festival. From the parade of persons dressed to represent the Scripture characters, it was an easy step to their use in the dramatic presentation of a sacred story. The festival of Corpus Christi, always held on the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday, which is eight weeks after Easter, was a holiday of brightest summer time. It came but a fortnight after the older and yet more popular festivities of Whitsuntide, and Whitsuntide and Corpus Christi soon were established as customary times for the out-of-door performance of mysteries or, as we called them, miracle-plays, by guilds of

towns.

But, even in Chaucer's lifetime, such plays were still being acted by the clergy. Both clergy and laity were actors in the middle of the thirteenth century, when in that "Manuel des Péchés," which in the time of Chaucer's childhood Robert of Brunne translated as "The Handlyng Synne," it was declared to be sin in the clergy to assist at any other plays than those which belonged to the Liturgy and were acted within the church at Easter and Christmas. This author especially condemned participation by the clergy in plays acted in churchyard's, streets, or green places. A century later, in 1378, when Chaucer was fifty years old, the choristers of St. Paul's Cathedral petitioned Richard II. to prohibit the acting of the History of the Old Testament, to the great prejudice of the clergy of the Church, who had spent considerable sums for a public representation of Old Testament plays at the ensuing Christmas.

In the hands of the English guilds-which stood for the rising middle classes of the people--miracle-plays received a development peculiar to this country. Instead of short sequences of

three or four plays, complete sets were produced, and they told what were held to be the essential parts of the Scripture story from the Creation of Man to the Day of Judgment. The number in each set may have corresponded to the number of guilds in the town for which it was originally written. Each guild was entrusted permanently with the due mounting and acting of one play in the set. Thus, at Chester, the tanners played "The Fall of Lucifer;" the drapers played "The Creation and Fall, and the Death of Abel ;" "The Story of Noah's Flood" was played by the water leaders and the drawers of Dee. Among the possessions of each guild were the properties for its miracleplay, carefully to be kept in repair, and renewed when necessary. Actors rehearsed carefully, and were paid according to the length of their parts. They wore masks, or had their faces painted in accordance with the characters they undertook. The player of the devil wore wings and a closely-fitting leather dress, trimmed with feathers and hair, and ending in claws over the hands and feet. All the other actors wore gloves, or had sleeves continued into hands. The souls of the saved in the day of judgment wore white leather; the others, whose faces were blacked, wore a linen dress suggestive of fire, with black, yellow, and red. Thus we have, among the miscellaneous items in old books of the Coventry guilds, a charge for souls' coats; one for a link to set the world on fire; and "paid to Crowe for making of three worlds, three shillings." The stage furniture was as handsome in thrones and other properties as each company could make it. They gilded what they could. Hell mouth, a monstrous head of a whale, its old emblem (chap. ii. § 12), was painted on linen with open jaws-sometimes jaws that opened and shut, two men working them—and a fire lighted where it would give the appearance of a breath of flames. By this way the fiends came up and down.

The acting of one of these great sequences of plays usually took three days, but was not limited to three. In 1409, in the reign of Henry IV., the parish clerks played at Skinner's Well, in Islington, for eight days, "matter from the Creation of the World." In this country the taste for miracle-plays was blended with the old desire to diffuse, as far as possible, a knowledge of religious truth; and therefore the sets of miracle-plays, as acted by our town guilds, placed in the streets, as completely as might be, a living picture Bible before the eyes of all the people. Such sequences of plays were acted in London, Dublin, York, New

TO A.D. 1580.]

THE COVENTRY PLAYS.

103

castle, Lancaster, Preston, Kendal, Wakefield, Chester, Coventry, and elsewhere. The set used in one town might be adopted by another. Many sets must have been lost, but three remain to show how thoroughly the English people sought to use the miracle-play for the advancement of right knowledge. These three are known as the Chester, Wakefield, and Coventry plays. Those which were acted at Wakefield have been called the "Towneley" Mysteries, because the sole existing MS. of them belonged to the Towneley family.

The Chester Plays were a series of twenty-four, written, as we have seen, by a monk of St. Werburgh's in Chester, probably Ralph Higden, and first acted in 1327 or 1328.

There is some reason to think that the Wakefield Plays were produced by a monk of the cell of Augustinian canons at Woodkirk, four miles north of Wakefield, and there is clear evidence that they were written to be acted by the Wakefield guilds. There are thirty-two plays in the Wakefield series, perhaps not all from the same hand, but most of them distinguished among other plays of the kind by unusual ability; there is breadth of humour where that was called for, and in other places a true natural pathos.

The Coventry Plays are forty-two in number, the work of a duller mind. Of the three sets they are the least interesting, and there is reason to doubt the statement, first made in the seventeenth century by a librarian on a fly-leaf of the MS., that these were the plays acted at Coventry. The guilds of Coventry did act plays; and it is to Coventry that we are indebted for much valuable information on the details of the acting from the entries still preserved in its guilds' books. But this evidence proves also that the plays acted by the guilds of Coventry were not those which we now call Coventry mysteries. A religious house at Coventry may possibly have produced a second set. Wherever written, they came, no doubt, from a house dedicated to the Virgin Mary; for in the pains taken to give prominence to the Virgin we find the most characteristic feature of this series of plays.

The spectator who had taken his place betimes-by six o'clock in the morning-at a window or upon a scaffolding, to see the miracle-plays, would have first the great decorated stage upon six wheels, which was to present the Creation, rolled before him. He would receive from that such living impression as it was meant to convey, and when it rolled away to begin the

during the boyhood and youth of Chaucer, when two North of England men, Laurence Minot, and Richard Rolle, of Hampole,. have been included in the sketch. One wrote of war, the other of religion.

Laurence Minot was a poet who in Northern English celebrated victories of Edward III. over the Scots and the French, from the battle of Halidon Hill, in July, 1333, to the capture of Guines Castle, in January, 1352.* ¡is war-songs were linked together by connecting verses. When he had celebrated the defeat of the Scots at Halidon Hill, which caused the surrender of Berwick, he exulted in his second song over the avenging of Bannockburn; then celebrated the king's expedition to Brabant, in 1338; proceeded to the first invasion of France; the sea-fight of Sluys or of the Swyne; the siege of Tournai; a song of triumph for the great battle of Crécy, in 1346; songs of the siege of Calais, and of the battle of Neville's Cross (October, 1346), in which David King of the Scots was taken prisoner. Then followed his celebrations of victory at sea over the Spaniards in 1350, and lastly, of the taking of Guines Castle, in 1352, when Chaucer was twenty-four years old. Probably Minot died soon afterwards, as he did not sing of the memorable events of the next following years. He was our first national song writer, and used with ease a variety of rhyming measures, while he retained something of the old habit of alliteration.

7. Richard Rolle, known also as the Hermit of Hampole, was born, about the year 1290, at Thornton in Yorkshire. He was sent to school, and from school to Oxford, by Thomas Neville, Archdeacon of Durham, and made great progress in theological studies. At the age of nineteen, mindful of the un

* New Style.-An Act of Parliament of the year 1752 introduced "New Style" by bringing the English reckoning of dates into conformity with that of countries which had adopted Pope Gregory XIII.'s reform of the calendar, a reform first instituted in 1582, and then at once adopted in France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Flanders, and Portugal. Protestant Germany did not accept this reformation by a pope till 1699; Protestant England held aloof till 1752. Besides the rectificati of the day of the month, which then was eleven days behind the reckoning in foreign countries, the Act of 1752 abolished the custom, begun in the twelfth century, and until then in use in England, not in Scotland, of reckoning the 25th of March as the first day of the legal year, while the 1st of January was, according to the popular reckoning by the Julian Calendar, accounted New Year's Day. Before 1752, therefore, any date in a public record or official document, falling in January or February, or in March, to the 24th inclusive, would be ascribed to the year preceding that in which we should now reckon it. Thus the capture of Guines Castle was dated January, 1351. I give all such dates according to the present way of reckoning.