358 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts, and Letters. 
On the whole, then, we are right in saying that the religious 
influence accounts in large measure for the first stage in the de¬ 
velopment of Towneley, the group of didactic or liturgical plays 
which make up the bulk of the cycle, though of inferior interest. 
The York influence accounts for the second stage, marked by 
imitation, comprising a less considerable group of plays, 
though of slightly more interest and worth. 
There remains the third class of sources, namely the secular 
or profane sources. As I have already pointed out, it is this 
class about which least is known and most is desired. Of the 
group of plays containing material whose presence is due 
neither to the religious nor to the York influence, there are ten, 
namely: plays number 2 (the Oarcio and Cain episode) ; 
3 (Noah and his wife) ; 12 (the dinner of the shepherds and their 
attempt to sing) ; 13 (the farce of Mak the sheep-stealer) ; 16 
(the bout between the soldiers and the women) ; 21 (the pas¬ 
sion of Caiphas and the rough play jof the tortures) ; 22 and 23 
(the rough farce of the torturers) ; 24 (the dicing scene) ; and 
30 (Tutivillus and the demons). Of these ten, whose sources 
for the secular material must almost certainly be secular since 
the action is decidedly secular, we have clear sources for parts 
of only two plays, namely the First Shepherds^ Play and the 
play of The Judgment. In Prima Pastorum the farcical epi¬ 
sode of the shepherds quarreling over the imaginary sheep is 
almost certainly a dramatization of an English folk-tale, one 
version of which is found in Tale No. 1 of ‘‘The Merry Tales 
of the Mad Men of Gotham,” printed by W. Carew Hazlitt in 
his Shakespeare Jest Books.^ The reference to Moll and her 
Pitcher in the same play is to one of a multitude of tales about 
the Milkmaid and her Pitcher of Milk current throughout Eur¬ 
ope and known to modern readers in La Fontaine’s fable 
of Perrette.^*^ Here again is an instance of the dramatist’s 
use of common property, property which must have been just 
as common to Englishmen as to Frenchmen. The play of 
The Judgment contains some satire on women which has been 
»The only other extant version may be seen in the same author’s “A Hun¬ 
dred Merry Tales” folio VIII, obverse, London, 1887. See Eaton, H. A., 
Mod. Lang. Notes XIV, 265-8. Another possible source for the secular ma¬ 
terial of this play (11. 215-39) is a Middle English collection of “Grotesque 
Receipts”. 
Fables de La Fontaine —par M. Felix Lemaistre, Paris, p. 183 (Livre 
VII, Fable X). See Gerould, G. H., Mod. Lang. Notes 19: 225-30. 
