In the York Cycle as it survives in the Register, biblical and liturgical text is rewritten for performance in rhymed English verse. The material from which it is shaped remains, as we have seen, demonstrably theologically orthodox, although it may imaginatively embellish the causal patterns of its narrative sources. Its orthodoxy derives from the material of worship, liturgy, and preaching by which sacred text and commentary were mediated for the whole community of believers. The clerics who wrote the pageants can, however, also be seen drawing on other fields of experience to convey how and why events happened in the way they did. The title of this final section acknowledges those other sources and, in particular, the potential there was in the writing and especially in the performing of the pageants for subverting their inherent orthodoxy. In looking at this area finally we put the politics, especially the ecclesiastical politics, of fifteenth-century York, back in the centre of the stage.

The authors of the cycle were educated in scholastic habits of thought which treat the relationship between God and man as bound by a causal pattern of rights and duties from which the principles of canon law were derived. The problem of authority within a fixed hierarchy trickling down from God to man via established social structures is one of the major preoccupations in much of the literature of post-Black-Death England, including notably Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales.