The English Moral Plays 335 
Lord’s Prayer... in which play all manner of vices and sins were 
held up to scorn, and the virtues were held up to praise.”?  Like- 
wise in the Pater Noster plays at Beverley and Lincoln the craftsmen 
of the towns represented on a series of pageants the cardinal sins, 
as they bore, it must be inferred, on the petitions of the prayer, 
‘The representation of Gluttony, for example, was fittingly assigned 
to the bakers, vintners, innkeepers, cooks, and tilers.2_ In France, 
also, the earliest known morality, performed at Tours in 1390, 
concerned the deadly sins.* Thus as early as the time of Wiclif, 
assuredly, the church’s exposition of the Pater Noster was displayed 
concretely on the stage, “for the health and amendment of the 
souls as well of the upholders as of the hearers.” * 
As evidence of the importance attached by medieval churchmen 
to the teaching of the Lord’s Prayer and the sacraments, no more 
conclusive or timely document can be cited than the Constitutions 
issued in 1237 by Grosseteste, the reforming bishop of Lincoln. 
This episcopal charge was modeled to conform to the Constitutions 
framed by Edmund Rich and the bishops in attendance with him 
at the Council of London, and to the canons of the third and fourth 
Lateran Councils in 1179 and 1215.5 But while they specified in 
a more or less general way the qualifications that appointees to 
the different grades of clerical service should have, stressing especially 
the need for a thorough understanding of the sacraments, Grosseteste 
gave the most explicit commands. In the first of the forty-five 
articles of his charge, he stipulated that the clergy should be com- 
petent to instruct their parishioners in the Decalogue, the temptations 
of the deadly sins, the Articles of Faith expressed in the three 
creeds, and the significance of the sacraments. These points of 
doctrine were promulgated not only in formally declared ‘“ Con- 
stitutions,” but in treatises like Archbishop Rich’s Mirror of the 
Church and the widely translated Somme des Vices et des Vertues® ; 
in religious poems like Grosseteste’s own Chasteau d’ Amour and 

' English Gilds, 137 ff. 
* Leach, 220-21. The first of the eight pageants at Beverley was 
given to “ Viciose.” Chambers conjectures (2. 154) that this figure 
was the representative of “ frail humanity,’ who became the central figure 
of the later morals. See also. Ramsay, Magnijficence, cliii. 
? Petit de Julleville, Repertoire, 137. 
* English Gilds, 137. 
5 Stevenson, 132-38; Mansi, 22. 217 ff., 998 ff.; Lyndwood, 8—10, 
55—56. 
6 Petit de Julleville, Aistocre, 2. 178-82. Date 1279. 
