[Bibliographical Note.—The English moralities are well treated from a literary point of view in the books by Ten Brink, Ward, Creizenach, Pollard, Collier, Klein, Symonds, Bates, Jusserand, and Courthope, named in the bibliographical note to Chapter xxi, and also in the Introduction to A. Brandl, Quellen des weltlichen Dramas in England vor Shakespeare (1898). Some texts not easily available elsewhere are given in the same book; others are in Dodsley’s A Select Collection of Old English Plays (ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 1874-6), vol. i, and J. M. Manly, Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama (1897), vol. i. Extracts are given by Pollard. Lists both of popular moralities and of moral interludes will be found in Appendix X. The French plays of a similar type are dealt with by L. Petit de Julleville, La Comédie et les Mœurs en France au Moyen Âge (1886) and Répertoire du Théâtre comique en France au Moyen Âge (1886).—On puppet-plays, C. Magnin, Histoire des Marionnettes en Europe (1852), and A. Dieterich, Pulcinella (1897), may be consulted. The traditional text of the stock English play is printed, with illustrations by G. Cruikshank, in J. P. Collier, Punch and Judy (1870). English pageants at the Corpus Christi feast and at royal entries are discussed by C. Davidson, English Mystery Plays (1892), § xvii, and Sir J. B. Paul, in Scottish Review, xxx (1897), 217, and the corresponding French mystères mimés by L. Petit de Julleville, Les Mystères (1880).]

I have endeavoured to trace from its ritual origins the full development of that leading and characteristic type of mediaeval drama, the miracle-play. I now propose to deal, very briefly, with certain further outgrowths which, in the autumn of the Middle Ages, sprang from the miracle-play stock; and a final book will endeavour to bring together the scattered threads of this discursive inquiry, and to touch upon that transformation of the mediaeval into the humanist type of drama, which prepared the way for the great Elizabethan stage.

The miracle-play lent itself to modification in two directions: firstly, by an extension of its subject-matter; and secondly, by an adaptation of its themes and the methods to other forms of entertainment which, although mimetic, were not, in the full sense of the term, dramatic. There are a few plays upon record which were apparently represented after the traditional manner of miracles, but differ from these in that they treat subjects not religious, but secular. Extant examples must be sought in the relics, not of the English, but of the continental drama. The earliest is the French Estoire de Griselidis, a version of the story familiar in Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale, which was written and acted, according to the manuscript, in 1395⁠[427]. Slightly later is a Dutch manuscript which contains, amongst other things, probably the répertoire of some compagnie joyeuse, three plays on the subjects respectively of Esmoreit, Gloriant of Brunswick, and Lanseloet and Sanderijn⁠[428]. Both the French and Dutch plays belong to what may be called the wider circle of chivalric romance. An obvious link between such pieces and the ordinary miracle-play is to be found in those of the Miracles de Nostre Dame which, like Amis et Amiles or Robert le Diable, also handle topics of chivalric romance, but only such as are brought technically within the scope of the miracle-play by the intervention of the Virgin at some point of the action⁠[429]. Similarly, another French play, dating from about 1439, on the subject, drawn not from romance but from contemporary history, of the Siege of Orleans, may be explained by the sanctity already attributed in the national imagination to Joan of Arc, who is naturally its leading figure⁠[430]. But the usual range of subject was certainly departed from when Jacques Millet, a student at Orleans, compiled, between 1450 and 1452, an immense mystère in 30,000 lines on the Istoire de la destruction de Troye la grant⁠[431]. In England, the few examples of the mingling of secular elements with the miracle-plays which present themselves during the sixteenth century can hardly be regarded as mediaeval⁠[432]. The only theme which need be noticed here is that of King Robert of Sicily. A play on this hero, revived at the High Cross at Chester in 1529, is stated in a contemporary letter to have been originally written in the reign of Henry VII. But a still earlier ludus de Kyng Robert of Cesill is recorded in the Lincoln Annales under the year 1453.

Far more important than this slight secular extension of miracle-plays is another development in the direction of allegory, giving rise to the ‘moral plays’ or ‘moralities,’ as they came to be indifferently called⁠[433], in which the characters are no longer scriptural or legendary persons, but wholly, or almost wholly, abstractions, and which, although still religious in intention, aim rather at ethical cultivation than the stablishing of faith. The earliest notices of morals are found about the end of the fourteenth century, at a time when the influence of the Roman de la Rose and other widely popular works was bringing every department of literature under the sway of allegory⁠[434]. That the drama also should be touched with the spirit of the age was so inevitable as hardly to call for comment. But it will be interesting to point out some at least of the special channels through which the new tendency established itself. In the first place there is the twelfth-century Latin play of Antichristus. In a sense the whole content of this may be called allegorical, and the allegory becomes formal in such figures as Heresis and Ypocrisis, Iustitia and Misericordia, and in those of Ecclesia, Synagoga, and Gentilitas, suggested to the clerkly author by a well-known disputatio. The same theme recurs in more than one later play⁠[435]. Secondly, there is the theme of the Reconciliation of the Heavenly Virtues, which is suggested by the words of the eighty-fifth Psalm: ‘Mercy and Truth are met together: Righteousness and Peace have kissed each other.’ This is treated in two unprinted and little known French plays, also of the twelfth century, which I have not as yet had occasion to mention and of which I borrow the following analysis from Dr. Ward: ‘These four virtues appear personified as four sisters, who meet together after the Fall of Man before the throne of God to conduct one of those disputations which were so much in accordance with the literary tastes of the age; Truth and Righteousness speak against the guilty Adam, while Mercy and Peace plead in his favour. Concord is restored among the four sisters by the promise of a Saviour, who shall atone to Divine Justice on behalf of man.’ One of these pieces is ascribed to the Anglo-Norman poet, Guillaume Herman (1127-70), the other to Stephen Langton, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury. They are generally spoken of as literary exercises, not intended for representation⁠[436]. But it is obvious that they might very well find their places in miracle-play cycles, as links between the scenes dealing respectively with the Fall and the Redemption. Further, precisely such an episode, in precisely such a position, does occur, three hundred years later, in the English cycle known as the Ludus Coventriae. Nor is this the only allegorical element which distinguishes a certain part of this patchwork cycle from nearly all the other English plays⁠[437]. It is not, perhaps, of great importance that in the Assumption scene the risen Christ receives the name of Sapientia, or that Contemplatio is the ‘exposytour in doctorys wede,’ by whom several other scenes are introduced. But there is a striking passage at the end of the Slaughter of the Innocents, where ‘Dethe, Goddys masangere,’ intervenes to make an end of the tyrannic Herod⁠[438], and here, I think, may clearly be traced yet a third stream of allegorical tendency making its way into the drama from that singular danse macabre or ‘Dance of Death,’ which exercised so powerful a fascination on the art of the Middle Ages. Death hobnobbing with pope and king and clown, with lord and lady, with priest and merchant, with beggar and fool, the irony is familiar in many a long series of frescoes and engravings. Nor are cases lacking in which it was directly adapted for scenic representation. An alleged example at Paris in 1424 was probably only a painting. But in 1449 a certain jeu, histoire et moralité sur le fait de la danse macabre was acted before Philip the Good at Bruges, and a similar performance is recorded at Besançon in 1453⁠[439].

The process of introducing abstractions into the miracle-plays themselves does not seem to have been carried very far. On the other hand, the moralities, if God and the Devil may be regarded as abstractions, admit of nothing else. Two at least of the motives just enumerated, the Dance of Death and the Reconciliation of the Heavenly Virtues, recur in them. But both are subordinate to a third, which may be called the Conflict of Vice and Virtue. This débat-like theme is of course familiar in every branch of allegorical literature. Prof. Creizenach traces one type of it, in which the conflict is conceived under the symbols of siege or battle, to the Psychomachia of Prudentius⁠[440], and perhaps even further to the passage about the ‘whole armour of God’ in St. Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians⁠[441]. For the purposes of the stage it is eminently suitable, both because it lends itself to many and various modes of representation, and because conflict is the very stuff out of which drama is wrought.

As the earliest notices of moralities are found in English records and as this particular development of the drama is thoroughly well represented in English texts, I may save space by confining my attention to these, merely noting as I pass the contemporary existence of precisely parallel records and texts on the continent and particularly in France⁠[442]. The first English moralities seem to have been known as Paternoster plays. Such a play is mentioned by Wyclif about 1378 as existing at York, and at some date previous to 1389 a special guild Orationis Domini was founded in that city for its maintenance. The play, however, survived the guild, and was acted from time to time as a substitute for the ordinary Corpus Christi plays up to 1572. Similarly, at Beverley a Paternoster play was acted by the crafts, probably in emulation of that of York, in 1469, while a third is mentioned in Lincoln documents as played at various dates from 1397 to 1521. Although all these Paternoster plays are lost, their general character can be made clear. In that of York ‘all manner of vices and sins were held up to scorn and the virtues were held up to praise,’ while an incidental entry in a computus shows that one division of it was known as the ludus accidiae. The information to be derived from Beverley is even more explicit. There were eight pageants. One was assigned to ‘Vicious,’ probably a typical representative of frail humanity, the other seven to the seven deadly sins which beset him, ‘Pryde: Invy: Ire: Avaryce: Sleweth (or Accidie): Glotony: Luxuria.’ The Paternoster play seems, therefore, to have been in some fashion a dramatization of the struggle of the vices and the corresponding virtues for the soul of man, and the name given to it may be explained by the mediaeval notion that each clause of the Lord’s Prayer was of specific merit against one of the deadly sins⁠[443]. Here then is one version of just that theme of the Conflict of Vice and Virtue noted as dominant in the moralities.

Of the half dozen extant English moralities which can with any plausibility be assigned to the fifteenth century, two are based upon a motive akin to that of the Dance of Death. These are the fragmentary Pride of Life, which is the earliest of the group, and Everyman, which is by far the finest⁠[444]. In the former Death and Life contend for the soul of Rex Vivus, the representative of humanity, who is only saved from the fiends by the intervention of the Virgin. In the latter, God sends Death to summon Everyman, who finds to his dismay that of all his earthly friends only Good Deeds is willing to accompany him. The Conflict of Vice and Virtue is resumed in the moral of Mundus et Infans and in the three morals of the Macro manuscript, the Castle of Perseverance, Mind, Will and Understanding, and Mankind. In all four plays the representative of humanity, Infans or Humanum Genus or Anima or Mankind, is beset by the compulsion or swayed this way and that by the persuasion of allegorized good and bad qualities. At the end of the Castle of Perseverance the motive of the Reconciliation of the Heavenly Virtues is introduced in a scene closely resembling that of the Ludus Coventriae or the earlier essays of Guillaume Herman and Stephen Langton.

A somewhat unique position between miracle-play and morality is occupied by the Mary Magdalen drama contained in the Digby manuscript. The action of this, so far as it is scriptural or legendary, has already been summarized⁠[445]; but it must now be added that the episodes of the secular life of the Magdalen in gaudio are conceived in a wholly allegorical vein. The ‘kyngs of the world and the flesch’ and the ‘prynse of dylles’ are introduced with the seven deadly sins and a good and a bad angel. The castle of Magdala, like the castle of Perseverance, is besieged. The Magdalen is led into a tavern by Luxuria and there betrayed by Curiosity, a gallant. We have to do less with a mystery beginning to show morality elements than with a deliberate combination effected by a writer familiar with both forms of drama.

The manner of presentation of the fifteenth-century moralities did not differ from that of the contemporary miracle-plays. The manuscript of the Castle of Perseverance contains a prologue delivered by vexillatores after the fashion of the Ludus Coventriae and the Croxton Sacrament. There is also, as in the Cornish mysteries published by Mr. Norris, a diagram showing a circular ‘place’ bounded by a ditch or fence, with a central ‘castel’ and five ‘skaffoldys’ for the principal performers. Under the castle is ‘Mankynde, is bed’ and near it ‘Coveytyse cepbord.’ The scaffolds are the now familiar loca or sedes. The scantier indications of more than one of the other moralities proper suggest that they also were performed in an outdoor ‘place’ with sedes, and a similar arrangement is pointed to by the stage directions of the Mary Magdalen. Nor could the moralities dispense with those attractions of devils and hell-fire which had been so popular in their predecessors. Belial, in the Castle of Perseverance, is to have gunpowder burning in pipes in his hands and ears and other convenient parts of his body; Anima, in Mind, Will and Understanding, has little devils running in and out beneath her skirts; and in Mary Magdalen, the ‘prynse of dylles’ enters in ‘a stage, and Helle ondyr-neth that stage.’ The later moralities, of which the sixteenth century affords several examples, were presented under somewhat different conditions, which will be discussed in another chapter⁠[446]. Allusions to the ‘morals at Manningtree,’ however, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, suggest that moralities may have continued in out-of-the-way places to hold the open-air stage, just as miracle-plays here and there did, to a comparatively late date. Actual examples of the more popular type of morality from the sixteenth century are afforded by Skelton’s Magnificence and by Sir David Lyndsay’s Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, shown successively at Linlithgow in 1540, on the Castle-hill at Cupar of Fife in 1552, and in the Greenside at Edinburgh about 1554. This remarkable piece differs in many ways from the English moralities. The theme consists of the arraignment of the estates of the realm before Rex Humanitas. Various ‘vycis’ and allegorical personages appear and plead, and the action is enlivened by farcical interludes for the amusement of the vulgar, and wound up by a sermon of ‘Folie,’ which points rather to French than to English models⁠[447]. The flight of time is also shown by the fact that the Satyre aims less at the moral edification with which the fifteenth-century plays contented themselves, than at the introduction of a sharp polemic against abuses in church and state. Skelton’s Magnificence had also, not improbably, some political bearing. To this matter also I return in another chapter⁠[448].

Miracle-plays and moralities ranked amongst the most widespread and coloured elements, century after century, of burgher and even of village life. It is not surprising that their subjects and their methods exercised a powerful influence upon other manifestations of the mediaeval spirit. The share which their vivid and sensuous presentations of religious ideas had in shaping the conceptions of artists and handicraftsmen is a fascinating topic of far too wide a scope to be even touched upon here⁠[449]. But a few pages must be devoted to indicating the nature of their overflow into various pseudo-dramatic, rather than strictly dramatic, forms of entertainment.

One of these is the puppet-show. It has been pointed out, in speaking of the liturgical drama, that the use of puppets to provide a figured representation of the mystery of the Nativity, seems to have preceded the use for the same purpose of living and speaking persons; and further, that the puppet-show, in the form of the ‘Christmas crib,’ has outlived the drama founded upon it, and is still in use in all Catholic countries⁠[450]. An analogous custom is the laying of the crucifix in the ‘sepulchre’ during the Easter ceremonies, and there is one English example of a complete performance of a Resurrection play by ‘certain smalle puppets, representinge the Persons of Christe, the Watchmen, Marie and others.’ This is described by a seventeenth-century writer as taking place at Witney in Oxfordshire ‘in the dayes of ceremonial religion,’ and one of the watchmen, which made a clacking noise, was ‘comonly called Jack Snacker of Wytney⁠[451].’ This points to the use of some simple mechanical device by which motion was imparted to some at least of the puppets. A similar contrivance was produced by Bishop Barlow to point a sermon against idolatry at Paul’s Cross in 1547 and was given afterwards to the boys to break into pieces⁠[452]. More elaborate representations of miracle-plays by means of moving puppets or marionnettes make their appearance in all parts of Europe at a period when the regular dramatic performances of similar subjects were already becoming antiquated, nor can they be said to be even yet quite extinct⁠[453]. Most of them belong to the repertory of the professional showmen, and it will be remembered that some form or other of marionnette seems to have been handed down continuously amongst the minstrel class from Roman times⁠[454]. In England the puppet-shows were much in vogue at such places as Bartholomew Fair, where they became serious rivals of the living actors⁠[455]. The earliest name for them was ‘motions⁠[456].’ Italian players brought ‘an instrument of strange motions’ to London in 1574⁠[457]. Autolycus, in The Winter’s Tale, amongst his other shifts for a living, ‘compassed a motion of the Prodigal Son⁠[458].’ Ben Jonson, in Bartholomew Fair, introduces one Lanthorn Leatherhead, a puppet-showman, who presents in his booth a curious rigmarole of a motion in which Hero and Leander, Damon and Pythias, and Dionysius are all mixed up⁠[459]. It would appear to have been customary for the showman, like his brethren of the modern Punch and Judy, to ‘interpret’ for the puppets by reciting a suitable dialogue as an accompaniment to their gestures⁠[460]. The repertory of Lanthorn Leatherhead contained a large proportion of ‘motions’ on subjects borrowed from the miracle-play. Similar titles occur in the notices of later performances at Bartholomew Fair⁠[461] and of those given by the popular London showman, Robert Powell, during the reign of Queen Anne⁠[462]. In more recent times all other puppet-shows have been outdone by the unique vogue of Punch and Judy⁠[463]. The derivation of these personages from the Pontius Pilate and Judas Iscariot of the miracle-plays is the merest philological whimsy. Punch is doubtless the Pulcinella⁠[464], who makes his appearance about 1600 as a stock figure in the impromptu comedy of Naples. Under other names his traditions may, for all one knows, go back far beyond the miracle-plays to the fabulae Atellanae. But the particular drama in which alone he now takes the stage, although certainly not a miracle-play, follows closely upon the traditional lines of the moralities⁠[465].

Another kind of religious dumb-show, at once more ancient and more important than that of the puppets, was presented by living persons in the ‘ridings’ or processions which formed an integral part of so many mediaeval festivals. Like the miracle-plays themselves, these tableaux reached their highest point of elaboration in connexion with the ceremonies of Corpus Christi day; and, in order to understand their relation to the regular dramas, it is necessary to return for a moment to the early history of the great feast. It has already been suggested that the processional character of the great English craft-cycles, with their movable pageants and their ‘stations,’ may be explained on the hypothesis, that the performances were at one time actually given during the ‘stations’ or pauses before temporary street altars of the Corpus Christi procession itself. The obvious inconveniences of such a custom, if it really existed, might not unnaturally lead to its modification. Except at Draguignan, where the dialogue was reduced to the briefest limits, no actual traces of it are left⁠[466]. In England the difficulty seems to have been solved at Newcastle by sending the pageants round with the procession in the early morning and deferring the actual plays until the afternoon. At Coventry representatives of the dramatis personae appear to have ridden in the procession, the cumbrous pageants being left behind until they were needed. Herod, for instance, rode on behalf of the smiths. At other places, again, the separation between procession and play was even more complete. The crafts which produced the plays were as a rule also burdened by their ordinances with the duties of providing a light and of walking or riding in honour of the host; but the two ceremonies took place at different hours on the same day, and there was no external relation, so far as the evidence goes, between them. Even so there was still some clashing, and at York, after an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the clergy in 1426 to get the plays put off, the procession itself appears to have been transferred to the following day.

On the other hand the difficulty seems to have been met in certain towns by suppressing the plays and reducing them to dumb-show ‘pageants’ carried in the procession. Lists are extant of such pageants as they were assigned to the crafts at Dublin in 1498 and at Hereford in 1503, and although it is not of course impossible that there were to be plays later in the day, there is no proof that this was the case. For a similar procession of tableaux held in London, in the earlier part of the fifteenth century, a set of descriptive verses was written by John Lydgate, and the adoption of this method of ‘interpreting’ the dumb-show seems to put the possibility of a regular dramatic performance out of court⁠[467]. There were pageants also in the Corpus Christi processions at Bungay and at Bury St. Edmunds, but the notices are too fragmentary to permit of more than a conjecture as to whether they were accompanied by plays. The tableaux shown at Dublin, Hereford, and London were of a continuous and cyclical character, although at Hereford St. Catherine, and at Dublin King Arthur, the Nine Worthies, and St. George’s dragon were tacked on at the tail of the procession⁠[468]. A continental parallel is afforded by the twenty-eight remontrances, making a complete cycle from the Annunciation to the Last Judgement, shown at Béthune in 1549⁠[469]. But elsewhere, both in England and abroad, the shows of the Corpus Christi procession were of a much less systematic character, and Dublin was not the only place where secular elements crept in⁠[470]. At Coventry, in addition to the representative figures from the craft-plays, the guild of Corpus Christi and St. Nicholas, to which, as to special Corpus Christi guilds elsewhere, the general supervision of the procession fell, provided in 1539 a Mary and a Gabriel with the lily, Saints Catherine and Margaret, eight Virgins and twelve Apostles. The Coventry procession, it may be added, outlived the Corpus Christi feast. In the seventeenth century Godiva had been placed in it and became the most important feature. By the nineteenth century the wool-combers had a shepherd and shepherdess, their patron saint Bishop Blaize, and Jason with the Golden Fleece⁠[471]. At the Shrewsbury ‘Show,’ which also until a recent date continued the tradition of an older Corpus Christi procession, Saints Crispin and Crispinian rode for the shoemakers. At Norwich the grocers sent the ‘griffin’ from the top of their pageant and a ‘tree’ which may have been the tree of knowledge from their Whitsun play of Paradise, but which was converted by festoons of fruit and spicery into an emblem of their trade⁠[472].

Aberdeen seems to have been distinguished by having two great mimetic processions maintained by the guilds. The interpretation of the data is rather difficult, but apparently the ‘Haliblude’ play, which existed in 1440 and 1479, had given way by 1531 to a procession in which pageants of the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Coronation of the Virgin were eked out by others of Saints Sebastian, Laurence, Stephen, Martin, Nicholas, John, and George. The other procession seems originally to have been introduced as an episode in a play of the Presentation in the Temple on Candlemas day. Its ‘personnes’ or ‘pageants’ are such as might furnish out the action of a short Nativity cycle, together with ‘honest squiares’ from each craft, ‘wodmen,’ and minstrels. But in this case also the play seems to have vanished early in the sixteenth century, while the procession certainly endured until a much later date.

There are no other English religious dumb-shows, outside those of Corpus Christi day, so elaborate as the Aberdeen Candlemas procession. On the same day at Beverley the guild of St. Mary carried a pageant of the Virgin and Child with Saints Joseph and Simon and two angels holding a great candlestick⁠[473]. The guild of St. Helen, on the day of the Invention of the Cross (May 3), had a procession with a boy to represent the saint, and two men bearing a cross and a shovel⁠[474]. The guild of St. William of Norwich paraded a knave-child between two men holding candles in honour of the youthful martyr⁠[475]. In the Whitsuntide procession at Leicester walked the Virgin and Saint Martin, with the twelve Apostles⁠[476]. More interesting is the pageant of St. Thomas the Martyr on December 29 at Canterbury, with the saint on a cart and knights played by children and an altar and a device of an angel and a ‘leder bag for the blode⁠[477].’ Probably this list could be largely increased were it worth while⁠[478]. The comparatively modern elements in the Corpus Christi pageantry of Coventry, Shrewsbury, and Dublin may be paralleled from the eighteenth-century festival of the Preston guild merchant on or near St. John Baptist’s day with its Crispin and Crispinian, Bishop Blaize, Adam and Eve, Vulcan, and so forth⁠[479], or the nineteenth-century wool trade procession on St. Blasius’ day (February 3), at Bradford, in which once more Bishop Blaize, with the Jason and Medea of the Golden Fleece, appears⁠[480]. It is noticeable how, as such functions grow more civic and less religious, the pageants tend to become distinctively emblematic of the trades concerned. The same feature is to be observed in the choice of subjects for the plays given by way of entertainment to the earl of Kildare at Dublin in 1528.

The dumb-show pageants, which in many cities glorified the ‘ridings’ on the day of St. George (April 23), have been described in an earlier chapter⁠[481]. These ‘ridings,’ of curiously mingled religious and folk origin, stand midway between the processions just mentioned and such seasonal perambulations as the ‘shows’ and ‘watches’ of Midsummer. Even in the latter, elements borrowed from the pageants of the miracle-plays occasionally form an odd blend with the ‘giants’ and other figures of the ‘folk’ tradition⁠[482]. The ‘wache and playe’ went together at Wymondham, and also apparently at Chelmsford, in the sixteenth century. At York we find the pageants of some of the crafts borrowed for a play, though apparently a classical and not a religious one, at the Midsummer show of 1585. At Chester, when the Whitsun plays were beginning to fall into desuetude, the crafts were regularly represented in the Midsummer show by some of their dramatis personae, who, however, rode without their pageants. The smiths sent ‘the Doctors and little God,’ the butchers sent ‘the divill in his fethers,’ the barbers sent Abraham and Isaac, the bricklayers sent Balaam and the Ass, and so forth. These with the giants, a dragon, a man in woman’s clothes, naked boys, morris-dancers and other folk elements, made up a singular cavalcade.

In London, pageants were provided for the Midsummer show by the guilds to which the lord mayor and sheriffs for the year belonged. Thus the drapers had a pageant of the Golden Fleece in 1522, and pageants of the Assumption and Saint Ursula in 1523⁠[483]. To a modern imagination the type of civic pageantry is the annual procession at the installation of the lord mayor in November, known familiarly as the lord mayor’s show. This show was important enough from the middle of the sixteenth century, and the pens of many goodly poets, Peele, Dekker, Munday, Middleton, and others, were employed in its service⁠[484]. But its history cannot be taken much further back, and it is exceedingly probable that when the Midsummer show came to an end in 1538, the pageants were transferred to the installation procession. The earliest clear notice is in 1540, when a pageant of the Assumption, perhaps that which had already figured at the Midsummer show of 1523, was used⁠[485]. The ironmongers had a pageant when the lord mayor was chosen from their body in 1566. It was arranged by James Peele, father of the dramatist, and there were two ‘wodmen’ in it, but unfortunately it is not further described⁠[486]. In 1568, Sir Thomas Roe, merchant tailor, had a pageant of John the Baptist⁠[487]. William Smith, writing an account of city customs in 1575, mentions, as a regular feature of the procession, ‘the Pagent of Triumph richly decked, whereupon, by certain figures and writings, some matter touching Justice and the office of a Magistrate is represented⁠[488].’ And about ten years later the series of printed ‘Devices’ of the pageants begins.

The influence of miracle-plays and moralities is also to be looked for in the municipal ‘shows’ of welcome provided at the state entries of royal and other illustrious visitors. A large number of these, chiefly at coronations, royal marriages and the like, are recorded in chronicles of London origin, and with the London examples in their chronological order I will briefly deal. The earlier features of such ceremonies include the riding of the mayor and corporation to meet the king at some place outside the gates, such as Blackheath, or, in the case of a coronation, at the Tower, and the escorting of him with joyous tripudium or carole to the palace of Westminster, the reading of loyal addresses and the giving of golden gifts, the decking of walls and balconies with costly robes and tapestries, the filling of the conduits with wine, white and red, in place of the accustomed water⁠[489]. The first example of pageantry in the proper sense occurs about the middle of the thirteenth century, in certain ‘devices and marvels’ shown at the wedding of Henry III to Eleanor of Provence in 1236⁠[490]. These are not described in detail; but when Edward I returned to London after the defeat of William Wallace at Falkirk in 1298, it is recorded by a chronicler, quoted in Stowe’s Annals, that the crafts made ‘great and solemne triumph’ and that the fishmongers in particular ‘amongst other pageantes and shewes’ had, as it was St. Magnus’s day, one of the saint accompanied by a thousand horsemen, and preceded by four gilded sturgeons, four salmons on horseback and ‘sixe and fourtie knights armed, riding on horses made like luces of the sea⁠[491].’ It was the fishmongers again who on the birth of Edward III in 1313 went in a chorea to Westminster with an ingeniously contrived ship in full sail, and escorted the queen on her way to Eltham⁠[492]. At the coronation of Richard II in 1377 an elaborate castle was put up at the head of Cheapside. On the four towers of this stood four white-robed damsels, who wafted golden leaves in the king’s face, dropped gilt models of coin upon him and his steed, and offered him wine from pipes laid on to the structure. Between the towers was a golden angel, which by a mechanical device bent forward and held out a crown as Richard drew near⁠[493]. Similar stages, with a coelicus ordo of singers and boys and maidens offering wine and golden crowns, stood in Cheapside when Richard again rode through the city in 1392, in token of reconciliation with the rebellious Londoners. And at St. Paul’s was a youth enthroned amongst a triple circle of singing angels; and at Temple Bar St. John Baptist in the desert surrounded by all kinds of trees and a menagerie of strange beasts⁠[494]. No similar details of pageantry are recorded at the coronations of Henry IV or Henry V. But when the latter king returned to London after the battle of Agincourt in 1415 there was a very fine show indeed. The procession came to the city from Eltham and Blackheath by way of London Bridge. Upon the tower masking the bridge stood two gigantic figures, one a man with an axe in his right hand and the city keys in his left, the other a woman in a scarlet mantle. Beyond this were two columns painted to resemble white marble and green jasper, on which were a lion and an antelope bearing the royal arms and banner. Over the foot of the bridge was a tower with a figure of St. George, and on a house hard by a number of boys representing the heavenly host, who sang the anthem Benedictus qui venit in nomine Dei. The tower upon the Cornhill conduit was decked with red and had on it a company of prophets, who sent a flight of sparrows and other birds fluttering round the king as he passed, while the prophets chanted Cantate Domino canticum novum. The tower of the great Cheapside conduit was green, and here were twelve Apostles and twelve Kings, Martyrs and Confessors of England, whose anthem was Benedic, anima, Domino, and who, even as Melchisedek received Abraham with bread and wine, offered the king thin wafers mixed with silver leaves, and a cup filled from the conduit pipes. On Cheapside, the cross was completely hidden by a great castle, in imitation white marble and green and red jasper, out of the door of which issued a bevy of virgins, with timbrel and dance and songs of ‘Nowell, Nowell,’ like unto the daughters of Israel who danced before David after the slaying of Goliath. On the castle stood boys feathered like angels, who sang Te Deum and flung down gold coins and boughs of laurel. Finally, on the tower of the little conduit near St. Paul’s, all blue as the sky, were more virgins who, as when Richard II was crowned, wafted golden leaves out of golden cups, while above were wrought angels in gold and colours, and an image of the sun enthroned⁠[495]. The details of the reception of Henry and Catherine of France, six years later, are not preserved⁠[496]. Nor are those of the London coronation of Henry VI in 1429. But there was a grand dumb-show at the Paris coronation in 1431⁠[497], and it was perhaps in emulation of this that on his return to London in the following year the king was received with a splendour equal to that lavished on the victor of Agincourt. There is a contemporary account of the proceedings by John Carpenter, the town clerk of London⁠[498]. As in 1415 a giant greeted the king at the foot of London Bridge. On the same ‘pageant⁠[499]’ two antelopes upbore the arms of England and France. On the bridge stood a magnificent ‘fabric,’ occupied by Nature, Grace, and Fortune, who gave the king presents as he passed. To the right were the seven heavenly Virtues, who signified the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, by letting fly seven white doves. To the left, seven other virgins offered the regalia. Then all fourteen, clapping their hands and rejoicing in tripudia, broke into songs of welcome. In Cornhill was the Tabernacle of Lady Wisdom, set upon seven columns. Here stood Wisdom, and here the seven liberal Sciences were represented by Priscian, Aristotle, Tully, Boethius, Pythagoras, Euclid, and Albumazar. On the conduit was the Throne of Justice, on which sat a king surrounded by Truth, Mercy, and Clemency, with two Judges and eight Lawyers. In Cheapside was a Paradise with a grove full of all manner of foreign fruits, and three wells from which gushed out wine, served by Mercy, Grace, and Pity. Here the king was greeted by Enoch and Elijah⁠[500]. At the cross was a castle of jasper with a Tree of Jesse, and another of the royal descent; and at St. Paul’s conduit a representation of the Trinity amongst a host of ministering angels. In 1445 Margaret of Anjou came to London to be crowned. Stowe records ‘a few only’ of the pageants. She entered by Southwark bridge foot where were Peace and Plenty. On the bridge was Noah’s ship; in Leadenhall, ‘madam Grace Chancelor de Dieu’; on the Tun in Cornhill, St. Margaret; on the conduit in Cheapside, the Wise and Foolish Virgins; at the Cross, the Heavenly Jerusalem; and at Paul’s Gate, the General Resurrection and Judgement⁠[501].

The rapid kingings and unkingings of the wars of the Roses left little time and little heart for pageantries, but with the advent of Henry VII they begin again, and continue with growing splendour throughout the Tudor century. Space only permits a brief enumeration of the subjects chosen for set pageants on a few of the more important occasions. Singing angels and precious gifts, wells of wine and other minor delights may be taken for granted⁠[502]. As to the details of Henry VII’s coronation in 1485 and marriage in 1486 the chroniclers are provokingly silent, and of the many ‘gentlemanlie pageants’ at the coronation of the queen in 1487 the only one specified is ‘a great redde dragon spouting flames of fyer into the Thames,’ from the ‘bachelors’ barge’ of the lord mayor’s company as she passed up the river from Greenwich to the Tower⁠[503]. At the wedding of Prince Arthur to Katharine of Aragon in 1501, ‘vi goodly beutiful pageauntes’ lined the way from London Bridge to St. Paul’s. The contriver is said to have been none other than Bishop Foxe the great chancellor and the founder of Corpus Christi College in Oxford. The subject of the first pageant was the Trinity with Saints Ursula and Katharine; of the second, the Castle of Portcullis, with Policy, Nobleness, and Virtue; of the third, Raphael, the angel of marriage, with Alphonso, Job, and Boethius; of the fourth, the Sphere of the Sun; of the fifth, the Temple of God; and of the sixth, Honour with the seven Virtues⁠[504]. As to Henry VIII’s coronation and marriage there is, once more, little recorded. In 1522 came Charles V, Emperor of Germany, to visit the king, and the city provided eleven pageants ‘very faire and excellent to behold⁠[505].’ The ‘great red dragon’ of 1487 reappeared in 1533 when yet another queen, Anne Boleyn, came up from Greenwich to enjoy her brief triumph. It stood on a ‘foist’ near the lord mayor’s barge, and in another ‘foist’ was a mount, and on the mount Anne’s device, a falcon on a root of gold with white roses and red. The pageants for the progress by land on the following day were of children ‘apparelled like merchants,’ of Mount Parnassus, of the falcon and mount once more, with Saint Anne and her children, of the three Graces, of Pallas, Juno, Venus, and Mercury with the golden apple, of three ladies, and of the Cardinal Virtues⁠[506]. The next great show was at the coronation of Edward VI in 1547, and included Valentine and Orson, Grace, Nature, Fortune and Charity, Sapience and the seven Liberal Sciences, Regality enthroned with Justice, Mercy and Truth, the Golden Fleece, Edward the Confessor and St. George, Truth, Faith, and Justice. There was also a cunning Spanish rope-dancer, who performed marvels on a cord stretched to the ground from the tower of St. George’s church in St. Paul’s churchyard⁠[507]. Mary, in 1553, enjoyed an even more thrilling spectacle in ‘one Peter a Dutchman,’ who stood and waved a streamer on the weathercock of St. Paul’s steeple. She had eight pageants, of which three were contributed by the Genoese, Easterlings, and Florentines. The subjects are unknown, but that of the Florentines was in the form of a triple arch and had on the top a trumpeting angel in green, who moved his trumpet to the wonder of the crowd⁠[508]. There were pageants again when Mary brought her Spanish husband to London in 1554. At the conduit in Gracechurch Street were painted the Nine Worthies. One of these was Henry VIII, who was represented as handing a bible to Edward; and the unfortunate painter was dubbed a knave and a rank traitor and villain by Bishop Gardiner, because the bible was not put in the hands of Mary⁠[509]. At the coronation of Elizabeth in 1559, with which this list must close, it was Time and Truth who offered the English bible to the queen. The same pageant had representations of a Decayed Commonwealth and a Flourishing Commonwealth, while others figured the Union of York and Lancaster, the Seat of Worthy Governance, the Eight Beatitudes, and Deborah the Judge. At Temple Bar, those ancient palladia of London city, the giants Gotmagot and Corineus, once more made their appearance⁠[510].

I do not wish to exaggerate the influence exercised by the miracle-plays and moralities over these London shows. London was not, in the Middle Ages, one of the most dramatic of English cities, and such plays as there were were not in the hands of those trade- and craft-guilds to whom the glorifying of the receptions naturally fell. The functions carried out by the fishmongers in 1298 and 1313 are much of the nature of masked ridings or ‘disguisings,’ and must be held to have a folk origin. The ship of 1313 suggests a ‘hobby ship⁠[511].’ Throughout the shows draw notions from many heterogeneous sources. The giants afford yet another ‘folk’ element. The gifts of gold and wine and the speeches of welcome⁠[512] need no explanation. Devices of heraldry are worked in. The choirs of boys and girls dressed as angels recall the choirs perched on the battlements of churches in such ecclesiastical ceremonies as the Palm Sunday procession⁠[513]. The term ‘pageant’ (pagina), which first appears in this connexion in 1432 and is in regular use by the end of the century, is perhaps a loan from the plays, but the structures themselves appear to have arisen naturally out of attempts to decorate such obvious architectural features of the city as London Bridge, the prison known as the Tun, and the conduits which stood in Cornhill and Cheapside⁠[514]. It is chiefly in the selection of themes for the more elaborate mimetic pageants that the reflection of the regular contemporary drama must be traced. Such scriptural subjects as John the Baptist of 1392 or the Prophets and Apostles of 1415 pretty obviously come from the miracle-plays. The groups of allegorical figures which greeted Henry VI in 1432 are in no less close a relation to the moralities, which were at that very moment beginning to outstrip the miracle-plays in popularity. And in the reign of Henry VII the humanist tendencies begin to suggest subjects for the pageants as well as to transform the drama itself.

Certainly one does not find in London or in any English city those mystères mimés or cyclical dumb-shows, with which the good people of Paris were wont to welcome kings, and which are clearly an adaptation of the ordinary miracle-play to the conditions of a royal entry with its scant time for long drawn-out dialogue. The earliest of these upon record was in 1313 when Philip IV entertained Edward II and Isabella. It is not quite clear whether this was a procession like the disguising called the procession du renard which accompanied it, or a stationary dumb-show on pageants. But there is no doubt about the moult piteux mystere de la Passion de Nostre Seigneur au vif given before Charles VI and Henry V after the treaty of Troyes in 1420, for this is said to have been on eschaffaulx and to have been modelled on the bas-reliefs around the choir of Notre-Dame. Very similar must have been the moult bel mystere du Vieil testament et du Nouvel which welcomed the duke of Bedford in 1424 and which fut fait sans parler ne sans signer, comme ce feussent ymaiges enlevez contre ung mur. Sans parler, again, was the mystère which stood on an eschaffault before the church of the Trinity when Henry VI was crowned, only a few weeks before the London reception already mentioned⁠[515].

It may be added that in many provincial towns the pageants used at royal entries had a far closer affinity to the miracle-plays proper than was the case in London. The place most often honoured in this sort was Coventry. In 1456 came Queen Margaret and poor mad Henry VI. One John Wedurley of Leicester seems to have been employed to organize a magnificent entertainment. At Bablake gate, where stood a Jesse, the royal visitors were greeted by Isaiah and Jeremiah. Within the gate was a ‘pagent’ with Saint Edward the Confessor and St. John the Evangelist. On the conduit in Smithford Street were the four Cardinal Virtues. In the Cheaping were nine pageants for the Nine Worthies. At the cross there were angels, and wine flowed, and at another conduit hard by was St. Margaret ‘sleyng’ her dragon and a company of angels. The queen was so pleased that she returned next year for Corpus Christi day. It appears from the smiths’ accounts that the pageants used at the reception were those kept by the crafts for the plays. The smiths’ pageant was had out again in 1461, with Samson upon it, when Edward IV came after his coronation, and in 1474 when the young prince Edward came for St. George’s feast. The shows then represented King Richard II and his court, Patriarchs and Prophets, St. Edward the Confessor, the Three Kings of Cologne and St. George slaying the dragon. Prince Arthur, in 1498, saw the Nine Worthies, the Queen of Fortune, and, once more, Saint George. For Henry VIII and Katharine of Aragon in 1511 there were three pageants: on one the ninefold hierarchy of angels, on another ‘divers beautiful damsels,’ on the third ‘a goodly stage play.’ The mercers’ pageant ‘stood’ at the visit of the Princess Mary in 1525, and the tanners’, drapers’, smiths’, and weavers’ pageants at that of Queen Elizabeth in 1565. I do not know whether it is legitimate to infer that the subjects represented on these occasions were those of the Corpus Christi plays belonging to the crafts named⁠[516].

York was visited by Richard III in 1483, and there were pageants, the details of which have not been preserved, as well as a performance of the Creed play⁠[517]. It was also visited by Henry VII in 1486, and there exists a civic order prescribing the pageants for that occasion. The first of these was a most ingenious piece of symbolism. There was a heaven and beneath it ‘a world desolaite, full of treys and floures.’ Out of this sprang ‘a roiall, rich, rede rose’ and ‘an othre rich white rose,’ to whom all the other flowers did ‘lowte and evidently yeve suffrantie.’ Then appeared out of a cloud a crown over the roses, and then a city with citizens with ‘Ebrauk’ the founder, who offered the keys to the king. The other pageants represented Solomon and the six Henries, the Castle of David, and Our Lady. There were also devices by which a rain of rose-water and a hailstorm of comfits fell before the king⁠[518]. During the same progress which took Henry to York, he also visited Worcester, where there were pageants and speeches, ‘whiche his Grace at that Tyme harde not’ but which should have represented Henry VI and a Ianitor ad Ianuam. Thence he went to Hereford, and was greeted by St. George, King Ethelbert, and Our Lady; thence to Gloucester, where the chronicler remarks with some surprise that ‘ther was no Pageant nor Speche ordeynede’; and finally to Bristol, where were King Bremmius, Prudence, Justice, ‘the Shipwrights Pageannt,’ without any speech, and a ‘Pageannte of an Olifaunte, with a Castell on his Bakk’ and ‘The Resurrection of our Lorde in the highest Tower of the same, with certeyne Imagerye smytyng Bellis, and all wente by Veights, merveolously wele done⁠[519].’ In 1503 Henry VII’s daughter Margaret married James IV of Scotland, and was received into Edinburgh with pageants of the Judgement of Paris, the Annunciation, the Marriage of Joseph and Mary, and the Four Virtues⁠[520]. Eight years later, in 1511, she visited Aberdeen, and the ‘pleasant padgeanes’ included Adam and Eve, the Salutation of the Virgin, the Magi, and the Bruce⁠[521].

The facts brought together in the present chapter show how ‘pageant’ came to have its ordinary modern sense of a spectacular procession. How it was replaced by other terms in the sense of ‘play’ will be matter for the sequel. It may be added that the name is also given to the elaborate structures of carpenters’ and painters’ work used in the early Tudor masks⁠[522]. These the masks probably took over from the processions and receptions. On the other hand, the receptions, by an elaboration of the spoken element, developed into the Elizabethan ‘Entertainments,’ which are often classified as a sub-variety of the mask itself. This action and reaction of one form of show upon another need not at this stage cause any surprise. A sixteenth-century synonym for ‘pageant’ is ‘triumph,’ which is doubtless a translation of the Italian trionfo, a name given to the edifizio by the early Renascence, in deliberate reminiscence of classical terminology⁠[523].