The latter half of the fourteenth century saw the translation of the Bible into the English tongue, for those who were fortunate enough to have learned to read; for the many to whom this was an impossibility, the Bible was already a familiar book, thanks to the nationalising of the Theatre—the only Theatre—which was the religious one. The rapid growth of religious drama all over the country was at this time phenomenal; old Latin and French plays were put into the vernacular, new plays were written in the English tongue in all its variety of dialects. To us, looking back on the period as a whole, there appears one stream of tendency, watered by many springs, but those who lived and wrought then, failed to perceive the fact. Reform from the first separated itself from the Theatre, and Wiclif himself was an early instance of the narrowness of the Nonconformist Conscience. The plays came under his censure and those of his followers, and the playwrights retorted with a jibe at Lollards. He consented, none the less, in pleading for a free translation of the Scriptures, to take a text from the Devil, and thus we get one of our earliest references to the Mystery Plays of York. Friars, said Wiclif, have taught in England the Paternoster in the English tongue, as men see in the play of York and in many other countries: since the Paternoster, as clerks know, is a part of Matthew's Gospel, why may not the other portions be taught in English also?

This Play of the Paternoster has gone the way of another doctrinal drama, highly popular in York, the Play of the Credo, long supported by a large and enthusiastic guild or fellowship among the citizens. Both are but names and serve merely to indicate the vitality of the interest aroused by even the most abstract teachings of Christianity when put into dramatic form.

But contemporary with Wiclif's reference there existed in York the institution of a great cycle of plays to be performed at the feast of Corpus Christi, and of which forty-eight have come down to us in a MS. of the early fifteenth century (the Ashburnham MS.). TO witness the performance of these plays Richard II. visited York in 1397; for the Corpus Christi play was to mediæval kings almost what the race-meeting and bullfight are to their modern successors, and then as now, the presence of the monarch drew additional crowds to the festival. At the time of Richard's visit, the plays had long since passed out of the four walls of the Church into the street, and were played in rotation, on movable stages called Pageants, which succeeded one another at various Stations in the town. The route to be taken by the pageants appears to have been a matter of much dispute, particularly about this time, when the first Station was at the Gates of the Priory of Holy Trinity, the monks of which house had then or later the property of what is now known as the Ashburnham MS. Various routes are mapped out from time to time in the city annals, for the greater convenience not only of the players, but of the crowd of strangers gathered to see the play, easily confused in the narrow, winding streets

of the mediæval town. By 1417 the authorities seem to have despaired of a fixed route; probably as years went by, the character of districts altered and old landmarks were modified or removed, as in other towns; at any rate, in 1417, after a renewed attempt to direct proceedings, we find the suggestion that "those persons should be allowed to have the play before their houses who would pay the highest price for the privilege, but that no favour should be shown."

Twenty-nine years later it was found necessary to intervene again, owing to the boisterous character gradually acquired by the festival, and quite unsuiting to the original purpose of its institution, which was the honouring of the feast of Corpus Christi. Like many another custom, this was becoming "more honoured in the breach than in the observance," and it seemed advisable to separate the performance and the actual festival, to prevent any scandal from clinging to the latter. In addition to the plays, there was, it seems, a procession supported by a Guild of Corpus Christi, and no doubt similar in character to that described in Lydgate's poem. A Corpus Christi procession is, above all, a procession of the Sacraments, and such allegoric figures or tableaux as might be included in it, were meant to illustrate and typify the doctrine of the Eucharist. That those who had just beheld with reverence, the passing of such a procession, should turn at once to scramble for places for the play, was in itself, unseemly, and the overcrowding of the streets by the production of the plays on their movable scaffolds or stages, while the procession was passing from church to church, was highly dangerous. It was therefore resolved to separate the two, as follows:

Whereas for a long course of time the artificers and tradesmen of the City of York have, at their own expence, acted plays, and particularly a certain sumptuous play exhibited in several pageants, wherein the history of the Old and New Testaments, in divers places of the said city, in the feast of Corpus Christi, by a solemn procession, is represented … beginning first at the great gates of the Priory of Holy Trinity in York, and so going in procession to and into the Cathedral Church of the same, and afterwards to the Hospital of St. Leonard in York, leaving the aforesaid Sacrament in that place preceded by a vast number of lighted torches and a great multitude of priests in their proper habits, and followed by the Mayor and citizens with a prodigious crowd of the populace—

—A certain holy father, a Friar Minor, William Melton, observing that the play occasioned "revellings, drunkenness, shouts, songs and other insolences, little regarding the divine offices of the said day," whereby the indulgences granted by Pope Urban IV. (1264) for the good observance of Corpus Christi were in danger of forfeiture, advised, with the consent of the better part of the people, that the play should be performed on the vigil of the feast, and the procession of the Sacraments on the day of Corpus Christi, that all who came to see the play might have leisure to attend Mass and Vespers for their souls' health. This was done by decree of the Mayor and citizens on the 10th of June, 1426, Peter Buckley being Mayor of the city.

The last performance of the cycle in York was in 1584, two years before the author of the Arcadia fell at Zutphen, four years before Shakespeare wrote Love's Labour's Lost. Elizabeth, but not Protestantism, viewed such plays with favour. In 1568, it had been already agreed by the City Council of York, that the book of the plays must be perused and amended before the performance, and there is little doubt that this was a concession to Archbishop Grindal of reforming tendencies. The manuscript actually bears traces of erasure and amendment to meet the approval of the new days and the new thought, while it is to this time that we have to ascribe the loss of the Play of the Credo. Submitted, by his request to Archbishop Grindal, the manuscript disappeared, and repeated requests for its return fell as vainly on episcopal as to-day they might on managerial ears.

From the nature of their verse and of their dialect, it seems improbable that the York Plays were translated from French or Latin. They are too intimately native and local for the supposition, and we can safely presume them to have been of English authorship from the beginning. The verse, infinitely more varied in metre than is usual in old French Mysteries, is closely related to the alliterative lines of early English poetry, and would in itself preclude the possibility of translation or adaptation. There are touches, too, of rude nature poetry here and there, quite unlike the nature poetry of the imported romances, wild, free, intimate, as the touches in our oldest lyrics. It is only in the York play that Herod, the braggart, praises his power and his person in terms of pure poetry: the clear clouds trailing one behind the other above his realm rejoice him, the thunder is his to throw, he can "rapely ride the rack of the red sky"; and speaking of his beauty, he does not say in the conventional phrase of the Towneley Herod—"cleanly shapen, hide and hair, withouten lack"—but, with a soaring simile that paints a picture of wide, wheeling, sunlit wings, I am fairer than glorious gulls, that are gayer than gold.

Such touches, it must be confessed, are rare in the collection, but it should be remembered, that although written in one manuscript, in their present form, the plays are not likely to be the work either of one thought or of one period….