They are not only a primitive religious drama, born of the church and its feasts; they are the genuine expression of the town life of the English people when it was still lived with some exuberance of spirits and communal pleasure. As we read them, indeed, though it be in cold blood, we are carried out of our book, and set in the street or market-square by the side of the "commons and countrymen," as in the day when Whitsuntide, or Corpus Christi, brought round the annual pageantry to Chester, Coventry, York, and other towns.
Of the plays that follow, six come from the old town pageants, reflecting in their variety the range of subject and the contemporary effect of the cycles from which they are taken. They are all typical, and show us how the scenes and characters of the east were mingled with the real life of the English craftsmen and townsfolk who acted them, and for whose pleasure they were written. Yet they give us only a small notion of the whole interest and extent of these plays. We gain an idea of their popularity both from the number of them given in one town and the number of places at which regular cycles, or single pageants, were represented from year to year. The York plays alone that remain are forty-eight in all; the Chester, twenty-four or five; the Wakefield, thirty-two or three. Even these do not represent anything like the full list. Mr. E. K. Chambers, in an appendix to his Mediæval Stage, gives a list of eighty-nine different episodes treated in one set or another of the English and Cornish cycles. Then as to the gazette of the many scattered places where they had a traditional hold: Beverley had a cycle of thirty-six; Newcastle-on-Tyne and Norwich, each one of twelve; while the village and parochial plays were almost numberless. In Essex alone the list includes twenty-one towns and villages, though it is fair to add that this was a specially enterprising shire. At Lydd and New Romney, companies of players from fourteen neighbouring towns and villages can be traced in the local records that stretch from a year or so before, to eight years after, the fifteenth century.
Mrs. J. R. Green, in her history of Town Life in that century, shows us how the townspeople mixed their workday and holiday pursuits, their serious duties with an apparent "incessant round of gaieties." Hardly a town but had its own particular play, acted in the town hall or the parish churchyard, "the mayor and his brethren sitting in state." In 1411 there was a great play, From the Beginning of the World, played in London at the Skinner's Well. It lasted seven days continually, and there were the most part of the lords and gentles of England. No copy of this play exists, but of its character we have a pretty sensible idea from various other plays of the Creation handed down from the north-country cycles. In the best of them the predestined Adam is created after a fashion both to suggest his treatment by Giotto in the medallion at Florence, and his lineaments as an English mediæval prototype:--
"But now this man that I have made,
With the ghost of life, I make him glad,
Rise up, Adam, rise up rade,1 A man full of soul and life!"
But to surprise the English mediæval smith or carpenter, cobbler or bowyer, when he turns playgoer at Whitsuntide, assisting at a play which expressed himself as well as its scriptural folk, we must go on to later episodes. The Deluge in the Chester pageant, that opens the present volume, has among its many Noah's Ark sensations, some of them difficult enough to mimic on the pageant-wagon, a typical recall of the shipwright and ark-builder. God says to Noah:--
A ship soon thou shalt make thee of trees, dry and light.
Little chambers therein thou make,
And binding pitch also thou take,
Within and out, thou ne slake
To anoint it thro' all thy might.
In the York Noah's Ark pageant, which seems to be the parent-play in England of all its kind, we have this craftsman's episode much enlarged. "Make it of boards," God says, "and wands between!"
Thus thriftily and not over thin,
Look that thy seams be subtly seen
And nailéd well, that they not twin:
Thus I devised it should have been;
Therefore do forth, and leave thy din
Then, after further instructions, Noah begins to work before the spectators, first rough-hewing a plank, then trying it with a line, and joining it with a gynn or gin. He says:--
More subtilely can no man sew;2 It shall be clinched each ilk and deal, With nails that are both noble and new, Thus shall I fix it to the keel: Take here a rivet, and there a screw, With there bow,3 there now, work I well, This work, I warrant both good and true.
To complete the pedigree of this scene we must turn to the old poem, the "Cursor Mundi," which, written in the fourteenth century, the time when the northern miracle-plays were taking decisive shape, appears to have served their writers as a stock-book. The following passage is own brother to that in the York miracle-play:--
A ship must thou needs dight,
Myself shall be the master-wright.
I shall thee tell how broad and long,
Of what measure and how strong.
When the timber is fastened well,
Wind the sides ever each and deal.
Bind it first with balk and band,
And wind it then too with good wand.
With pitch, look, it be not thin!
Plaster it well without and in!
The likeness we see is startling: so near to the other indeed as to suggest almost a common authorship.
As for the pastoral plays in the same towns, we find the shepherds and countrymen were just as well furnished with rough cuts from the life. The most real and frankly illustrative, and by no means the least idyllic of them is perhaps the Chester play of the three shepherds. It was not played by countrymen but by townsmen, like the other plays in the town cycles, being in this case the "Paynters and Glasiors" play. The first shepherd who opens it talks of the "bower" or cote he would build, his "sheep to shield," his "seemly wethers to save:"--
From comely Conway unto Clyde
Under tyldes4 them to hide A better shepherd on no side No earthly man may have For with walking weary I have methought Beside thee such my sheep I sought My long-tail'd tups are in my thought Them to save and heal
In the Death of Abel, another Chester play, Cain comes in with a plough, and says:--
A tiller I am, and so will I be,
As my daddy hath taught it me
I will fulfil his lore
In the subsequent incident of the corn that Cain is to offer for his sacrifice, we hear the plain echo of the English farmer's voice in the corn-market mixing with the scriptural verse: "This standing corn that was eaten by beasts," will do:
God, thou gettest no better of me,
Be thou never so grim
So throughout the plays the folk-life of their day, their customs and customary speech, are for ever emerging from the biblical scene.
In trying to realise how the miracle-plays were mounted and acted, we shall find the best witness at Chester. This was
