366 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
we have evidence that Secunda Pastorum was very much later, 
or that Patlielin, in this or some earlier form, was very much 
earlier, it would seem impossible to admit that Pathelin in¬ 
fluenced the English farce. 
(3) The fact that practically all of the other farcical ele¬ 
ments in the Towneley cycle have either English sources or 
English parallels, and that we possess in a late English form an 
English folk-tale much nearer to Secunda Pastorum than is 
Pathelin, makes an English origin for the play much more likely 
than a French origin. I have pointed out that all but three of 
the ten farcical passages in Towneley have either English 
sources or parallels. Moreover, two of these passages are 
dramatized folk-tales current in England, May the farce of 
Mak not likewise be a dramatization of an earlier form of 
Archie Arynstrong^s Aith, identical with the Mak farce except 
for the conclusion This supposition is strongly supported 
by still another parallel recently discovered by Prof, A. S. 
Cook and described by him in Modern Philology, XIV, 11-15. 
In this case it is Thomas Armstrong, an actual character living 
in the latter half of the eighteenth century, to whom is attri¬ 
buted the same trick in concealing the theft of a pig as Mak 
attempted with the sheep, namely, hiding it in a cradle. 
Whether the trick was actually perpetrated or whether it is a 
case of some old folk-tale getting itself attached to an indivi¬ 
dual, matters little. We have here the episode embodied in 
two forms in England itself, and the probability is more than 
a reasonable one that the farce of Mak is based upon just such 
native material as we have before us in modern form. 
If, however, we cannot admit Pathelin to be the source of 
Secunda Pastorum, may there not be some other French farce or 
at least some farcical material which might have served as a 
source or at least be a parallel ? To satisfy myself whether this 
could be true, I have made a careful examination, first, of the 
complete Repertoire du Theatre Coynique en France au Moyen 
Age (1886) of Petit de Julleville, and second, of the same auth¬ 
or’s Les My stores (2 vols. 1880), in both cases with an eye to 
21 See the article by Kolbing, E., in the England^Pollard edition of the 
Towneley plays, p. XXXI. 
