The Harleian Manuscripts in the British Library include copies of guild charters, petitions, lists of company members and text of the mystery plays performed by the guilds
An Illustrated Cultural History of England by Hallday ( Thomas and Hudson Ltd London 1967 )
It is a fascinating to glimpse the literary scene, when England was struggling
for recognition as a literary language. The poet then plunges into his history, which is a succession of stories
as romantic in manner as the romances he deplores, the Harrowing of Hell, for example, being a contest between
the King of Bliss and Sir Satan, Duke of Death and Prince of Hell. Cursor Mundi is an entertaining poem, written
in lively octosyllabic couplets and, apart from its merit as literature, important as the storehouse from which
the writers of miracle pla3 took much of their material.
By this time the artless Christmas and Easter plays performed in church had been extended and elaborated, and now,
written in English instead of Latin had become so popular that the clergy had handed them over to the laity generally
the craft guilds, who performed them in 'ways or greens'. Then, with the aid of Cursor Mundi, forty-eight short
plays, ranging from the Creation to the Coronation of the Virgin, were written about 1340 for the guilds men of
York and similar cycles for those of Chester, Wakefield, and Coventry. The medieval drama was a popular art in
every sense of the word, and at midsummer, on the Feast of Corpus Christi, the guildsmen presented them. Each guild
was assigned an appropriate play - thus at York the goldsmiths were the Magi the Nativity, though the glaziers
had to combine with the saddlers for the Harrowing of Hell - and this they performed on a large cart, or 'pageant',
with a curtained dressing-room below the stage. Each play on its movable stage was performed at about twelve different
places in the town, so that at each of these 'stations' the whole cycle could be seen between sunrise and sunset.
Of course the plays vary in quality, the best and most popular generally being those with a touch of broad comedy,
like Noah's Flood at Chester, in which Noah's wife refuses to go into the Ark without her 'gossips'. Her sons carry
her in:
Noye. Welcome, wife, into this botte.
Wife. Have thou that for thy note!
Noye. Ha, ha! marye, this is hotte!
It is good for to be still.
When we remember that men played women s parts, we can imagine the clowning and laughter of such incidents. Even
better is the farcical interlude in the Wakefield Nativity, in which Mak steals a sheep and hides it in bed with
his wife, pretending that it is a newborn baby:
A pratty child is he
As syttys on a woman's kne;
A dyllydowne, perde,
To gar a man laghe.
The shepherds discover the culprit and toss him in a canvas' before entering the stable to find Mary nursing the
Child they were seeking. No wonder Shakespeare borrowed this native device of a sub-plot for his plays.
The pageant method of production was peculiar almost to England, but not all miracle plays were presented in this
way. The three long plays of the Creation, Passion, and Resurrection, which constitute the Cornish cycle, were
performed in round, open-air theatres, two of which still exist. The early conventions were observed: Heaven was
at the east, Hell at the north, good characters on the south side and worldly ones on the west. Each main character
had a tent, or 'house'; Heaven may have been a hut with a platform in front, and Hell was a pair of gaping jaws.
The performance in the arena, or 'plain', was full of variety, from the lyrical love-making of David and Bathsheba,
part of the Legend of the Rood taken from Cursor Mundi, to the brutal murder of Maximilla; and there was comic
relief in plenty, as when God hurls Lucifer from Heaven, and he 'goeth down to Hell, apparelled foul, with fire
about him burning, and every degree of devils of leather and spirits on cords running into the plain'. Similar
plays, long since lost, were acted in similar theatres-in-the-round all over England. Although the art of the French-speaking
upper classes was becoming effete, that of the people, the drama, was bursting with energy, and it was the English-speaking
masses, particularly the rising middle class, who were to reinvigorate society and revitalize the arts.
The origins of the Midsummer
show in Chester date back to the fifteenth century but are probably even
earlier , The Pagan origins of the festival of Midsummer day the equivalent of the summer solstice has been celebrated
from the earliest times of which there are records , as Yuletide corresponds to the winter solstice .Sir Isac Newton
observed that the heathens were delighted with the festivals of their gods and unwilling to part with these ceremonies
; therefore Gregory bishop of Neo - Caesarea , in Pontus , to facilitate their conversion instituted annual festivals
to the saints and martyrs : hence the keeping of Christmas with joy , feasting plays and sport
