Charles Davidson — English Mystery Flays. 255 



The wide agreement in these plays seems to me to argue a common 

 knowledge of models existing in England. These models may have 

 been in part Anglo-Norman, as the cycle of the Parish Clerks of Lon- 

 don probably was. Most of them were undoubtedly church plays, 

 would be often in Latin, possibly sometimes in Anglo-Norman, and 

 often in English/ 



The continual presence of plays in the churches upon appropriate 

 festival days must be assumed. Few remains of such plays are ex- 

 tant, but the known opposition of the reforming party to these 

 plays, and the efficient zeal of King Henry's spoilers, would satisfac- 

 torily account for their destruction with the dispersion of libraries 

 that were their proper repositories. The repeated enactment of im- 

 perative laws^ forbidding plays in the churches, the presence of sep- 

 ulchres in many churches to-day, and the occasional references to 

 them in hostile writings,^ are conclusive evidences of their presence. 



A mistaken interpretation of phenomena presented by the plays 

 has often arisen through the failure to give due weight to two facts 

 that concern the church customs of that daj^ It may be well to in- 

 terrupt for a moment the course of this discussion to present those 

 facts. 



First, the solidarity of custom, as well as of belief, throughout the 

 churches of England and France. This gave rise to a uniformity of 

 method and expression in the mystery plays, which resulted in such 

 striking similarities between plays formed on models used in the 

 churches of England and those that arose from other models on the 

 continent, that oftentimes direct dependence of the English play 

 upon the French has been asserted, when, very possibly, each author 

 knew no plays but those of his own cathedral church and immediate 

 neighborhood. Churches are conservative bodies, slow to change 

 their customs ; therefore the church plays would diverge from their 

 common type very slowly. They were viewed almosl as parts of the 

 liturgy. 



1 See the ' Mystery of the Burial of Christ,' ' Off the Wepluge of the Thre Maries,' 

 and the 'Mystery of the Kesurrection,' given in Wright's Reliquias Antiqu^e, vol. 1, 

 pp. 124-161. These are English church mysteries, which have been passed by without 

 remark by writers upon this subject. 



2 The chief trace that the old hierarchy left of its dramatic existence was the acting of 

 plays in the churches, which was finally ordered to be discontinued by proclamation in 

 1543, but was continued by choristers of St. Paul and of the Chapel Royal until the time 

 of Chas. I.— Hone, p. 22i). In 1603, canon 88 of the canons of the Church of England 

 enacted that church-wardens should not suffer plays in cluirches, chapels, or church- 

 yards.— Encyclopa3dia Britannica s. v. Theatre. 



8 ' The Beehive of the Komish Church ' speaks of the shows of Buiial, Resurrection, 

 etc.— Hone, p. 231. 



