3o8 THE GERMAN PASSION-PLA Y 



he no longer frequents the courts of archbishops and 

 prelates, but associates with the dregs of society- 

 he has become a magician, a hawker of wonders, and 

 a quack. 1 Such a song casts considerable light on the 

 life of the vagabond scholar, who developed the part 

 of the mercator, the pedlar of the passion-plays. He 

 is a man of the people, and he moulds the religious 

 play in the spirit of the people. He played a note- 

 worthy part in the adaptation of Christianity to the 

 needs of mediaeval man. 



The capture of the religious drama by the people was 

 not, of course, achieved entirely through the agency of 

 the strolling scholars. There is a rubric to one of the 

 scenic rituals which clearly illustrates another route by 

 which the folk-spirit penetrated into the ecclesiastical 

 citadel. It runs as follows : 



It is allowable for those who peradventure cannot find persons 

 of this type (i.e. the necessary clergy) to perform the Visitation 

 of the Sepulchre after the above manner with other persons, if 

 they be of becoming and discreet behaviour. 2 



This rubric left a considerable latitude to the 

 local clergy themselves sons of the people and 

 the following incident from Tyll Ulenspiegel* will 

 sufficiently exemplify what sort of persons in the 

 fifteenth century, and probably long before, were 

 considered in country places to be of 'becoming and 

 discreet behaviour.' 



1 Grimm, Altdeutsche Wdlder, ii. p. 49. 



2 G, p. 129. The rubric was probably common long before the fifteenth 

 century, when we first find it attached to a very primitive form of the ritual. 



3 XIII Historic, ed. Lappenberg, p. 16. 



