188 THE CHESTER MYSTERIES. 
Clergy, and on the Town Council. Nevertheless, in spite of 
the extreme disapprobation with which all Puritans habitually 
regarded everything in the shape of “ play-acting,” Mr. Rogers 
could not help feeling very much interested in what he calls the 
‘‘ Anchant Customs” of Chester. As a good Protestant, he 
takes care to call them by the hardest possible names, and to 
speak of them in terms of contempt and depreciation, but at 
the same time he carefully noted down what he saw, and his 
description of the Chester Mysteries is the more valuable, 
because, as I have said, no other description exists, in the Eng- 
lish language, of the manner in which these performances were 
given. (After his death his notes were copied out, and set in 
order, by his son, David Rogers, under the title of :— 
‘«« A Breviary, or some few Collectiones of the Cittie of Chester, gathered 
out of some fewe writers, and heare sett down and redused into these Chapters 
following—’’) 
In speaking of the origin of “the Playes of Chester, called 
the Whitson Playes,’’ Archdeacon Rogers says :— 
‘“« Heare note that these playes of Chester were the work of one Rondoll 
a Monke of the Abbaye of S. Warburg in Chester, who redused the whole 
storye of the Bible into English stories in metter . . . and this Monke, 
in a good desire to do good, published the same. Then the first Mayor of 
Chester, Sir John Armway, Knight, he caused the same to be played.” 
The ‘‘Banes,” read before the plays were acted in 1600; 
repeat the same statement, which was evidently a tradition com- 
monly believed in Chester during many generations. Sir John 
Arnway was Mayor of Chester towards the close of the 13th 
century, and as Fitzstephen, the biographer of Thomas a Becket, 
speaks of such performances as being frequently given 
in London as early as the 12th century, there is no great 
improbability in supposing that the Chester Plays may actually 
have been performed for the first time, as some say they were, 
in the year 1268. Only it is certain that the language of the 
copies that have come down to us is not 13th century English, 
and that if that was the language of the Randoll, who put the 
Bible stories into English metre, he cannot have lived till about 
100 years later. 
This brings us to another tradition. Attached to one copy of 
the Chester Plays is a vellum fly-leaf which says :— 
‘‘ The Whitson Plays were made by one Randle Higginett, who was thrice 
at Rome before he could obtain leave of the Pope to have them in the 
English tongue.” 
Here, I think, is the key to the whole difficulty. Randle 
Higginett (whom Warton has tried, but I think on insufficient 
grounds, to identify with Ralph Higden, of the Polycronicon) 
did, indeed, *‘ reduse”” the Chester Plays into English metre ; 
not, however, as a composer, but as a translator. 
They were then originally performed in some other language ? 
Yes, certainly. Plays of this kind were not native to our soil, 
they entered England from the Continent, during the period 
