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Performing the Word of God: Corpus Christi Drama in the Northern Province*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2016
Extract
The feast of Corpus Christi, as is well known, seems to have been widely and rapidly adopted from the time of its formal promulgation at the Council of Vienne. The feast was being celebrated in England from within a few years of the Council. Processions of the Sacred Host were invariably the focus of these celebrations, and these appear sometimes to have been accompanied by Corpus Christi Plays in the form of Creation to Domesday drama cycles. Such are recorded for the first time at Beverley in 1377 and, indirectly, at York a year later.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History Subsidia , Volume 12: Life and Thought in the Northern Church , 1999 , pp. 145 - 170
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1999
Footnotes
*
I wish to thank Patricia Cullum and Felicity Riddy for reading an earlier draft of this paper and for their helpful comments.
References
1 See Rubin, M., Corpus Christi: the Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 181–5, 199–204.Google Scholar
2 The York reference is to the leasing of pageant houses by craft guilds: Leach, A. F., ed., Beverley Town Documents, Selden Society, 14 (1900) [hereafter BTD], p. 45Google Scholar; Johnson, A. F. and Rogerson, M., eds., Records of Early English Drama [hereafter REED]: York, 2 vols (Toronto, 1979), p. 3Google Scholar. I have followed the convention here of using the term ‘Play’ to describe a full cycle of pageants, and the term ‘pageant’ to denote individual episodes separately performed within the larger cycle. There is evidence of similar Play cycles in some German cities as at Künzblsau and Freiburg, but the particular Creation to Domesday form is distinctive to the British Isles: Tydeman, W., ‘An introduction to medieval English theatre’, in Beadle, R., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 21–2Google Scholar; Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 286.
3 Clopper, L. M., ed., REED: Chester (Toronto, 1979), pp. 6–7.Google Scholar
4 An imperfect eighteenth-century edition of the Newcastle shipwrights’ pageant of ‘Noah’s Ark’ is reprinted and also partly reconstructed in Davis, N., ed., Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, EETS, extra series, I (1970), pp. 19–31.Google Scholar
5 An invaluable edition of record material relating to the Beverley Play is contained in Wyatt, D. K. J., “Performance and ceremonial in Beverley before 1642’ (York D.Phil. thesis, 1983).Google Scholar
6 Wyatt’s thesis (cited in the previous note) offers a brief introduction, but her concern is to make the sources known rather than to analyse the evidence.
7 I have explored some of these themes before in an essay specific to the York cycle, and consequently I shall make only modest use of York material here. See Goldberg, P. J. P., ‘Craft guilds, the Corpus Christi Play and civic government’, in Jones, S. Rees, ed., The Government of Medieval York: Essays in Commemoration of the 1396 Charter, Borthwick Studies in History, 3 (1997), pp. 141–63.Google Scholar
8 An illuminating recent discussion of guilds, which highlights the problem of definition, since different collectivities were constituted with varying degrees of formality and had overlapping, but not necessarily identical, social, devotional, and (sometimes) craft concerns, is Rosser, G., ‘Crafts, guilds and the negotiation of work in the medieval town’, P&P, 154 (1997), pp. 66–86.Google Scholar
9 There is no clear evidence as to the form of the Corpus Christi Play cycle at Chester before the change to Whitsun week, but it has been suggested that the Play was a fixed set rather than a processional production: Mills, D., ed., The Chester Mystery Cycle: a New Edition with Modernised Spelling (East Lansing, 1992), p. xiiiGoogle Scholar. For evidence of a Play at Durham see Bonney, M., Lordship and the Urban Community: Durham and its Overlords, 1230-1540 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 183, 187, 190–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Newcastle see Anderson, J. J., ed., REED: Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (Toronto, 1984)Google Scholar. The Towneley Play has most recently been edited in Stevens, M. and Cawley, A. C., The Towneley Plays, EETS supplementary series, 13 (1994)Google Scholar. The relationship of this manuscript with Wakefield is discussed below.
10 The Play at Kendal is first documented in 1575, but was clearly already established by that date. It may have been performed in a fixed location rather than processionally. The Plays at Lancaster and Preston are much more sparsely and retrospectively documented as still being performed at the beginning of the reign of James I. Nothing is known of them beyond their title: George, D., ed., REED: Lancashire (Toronto, 1991), pp. 29, 86–7Google Scholar; Douglas, A. and Greenfield, P., eds., REED: Cumberland/Westmorland/Gloucestershire (Toronto, 1986), pp. 17–19, 168–80, 213Google Scholar. A ‘Noah’ pageant was performed at Hull in the fifteenth century by the Trinity guild of the mariners, but, given the comparatively substantial nature of Hull’s civic records, we can be reasonably confident that this was not part of a larger cycle. It may be that proximity to Beverley inhibited the development of a cycle there, but it may also be noted that Hull as a royal borough was constitutionally more advanced than its neighbour and hence may have had less need of a Play in order, as I shall argue below, to assert its urban identity: Chambers, E. K., ed., The Medieval Stage, 2 vols (London, 1903), 2, pp. 370–1Google Scholar. For Doncaster see Hutton, R., Stations of the Sun: a History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford, 1996), pp. 306, 309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 First noticed in 1471-2: Craig, H., English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1955), pp. 269–77Google Scholar. It may be noted, however, that Beverley, York, and Lincoln all possessed Creed Plays, which itself suggests cultural links within an East Yorkshire-Lincolnshire region that are reflected in a variety of other ways, including architecture and trade.
12 Fletcher, A. J., ‘The N-Town Plays’, in Beadle, , ed., Medieval English Theatre, p. 163.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 Coldewey, J. C., ‘The non-cycle Plays and the East Anglian tradition’, in ibid., p. 201Google Scholar; Davis, ed., Non-cycle Plays, pp. xxvi-xxxvi. JoAnn Dutka argues that the cycle was originally a Corpus Christi Play after the manner of York or Beverley, but there is no evidence to support this view: Dutka, J., ‘Mystery Plays at Norwich: their form and development’, Leeds Studies in English, 10 (1975), pp. 107–20.Google Scholar
14 Davis, ed., Non-cycle Plays, pp. xlvii-liii. That this pageant seems to have been the model for the rather later equivalent pageant within the Chester cycle does nothing to undermine this interpretation.
15 Johnson, A. F., ‘What if no texts survived? External evidence for early English drama’, in Briscoe, M. G. and Coldewey, J. C., eds, Contexts for Early English Drama (Bloomington, IN, 1989), p. 11Google Scholar cited in Tydeman, ‘An introduction’, pp. 21, 28. There is documentary evidence, mostly from the second half of the fifteenth century, relating to Corpus Christi Plays at Canterbury, Hereford, and Ipswich. The evidence for the first is too slight to draw conclusions as to the form of the Play, but the two last appear to have been in the form of tableaux vivants and integral to the procession rather than a separate event. The same appears to have been the case at Dublin: Chambers, ed., Medieval Stage, 2, pp. 344, 363-5, 368-9, 371-3; Coldewey, The non-cycle Plays’, p. 201; Klausner, D., ed., REED: Herefordshire and Worcestershire (Toronto, 1990), pp. 11, 115–21.Google Scholar
16 See Coldewey, The non-cycle Plays’, pp. 189-210. Craig cites an early seventeenth- century antiquarian source to argue that ‘the Corpus Christi play was a northern rather than a southern institution’: English Religious Drama, p. 141.
17 Of course, the full extent of this ‘borrowing’ cannot be known since only a fraction of the original Play material has survived. Such free use of existing texts was normal within medieval culture.
18 The evidence in respect of Durham is slight, and Bonney suggests that craft guilds may only have emerged comparatively late, implicitly during the fifteenth century. On the other hand, the earliest surviving ordinances (the weavers’, dated 1450) describe the guild’s responsibility for a pageant within the Corpus Christi Play as being ‘eftir the old custome’. Durham is also an example of an ecclesiastical borough that possessed no formal rights of self-government, and where the emergence of the Play may have been an attempt to create an urban identity (this point is discussed at length below): Bonney, Durham and its Overlords, pp. 183, 187, 190-2.
19 The gentlemen (at first distinguished merely as ‘aliis reverendis de dignioribus’ of Beverley) petitioned for their own pageant in 1411. Gentlemen, husbandmen, and labourers are all noted in a list of collectivities associated with the Paternoster Play in 1441: BTD, pp. 34-5; Leach, A. F., ed., Report on the Manuscripts of the Corporation of Beverley, HMC, 54 (1900) [hereafter MCB], pp. 128–9.Google Scholar
20 Horrox, R., ‘Medieval Beverley: the guilds and their plays’, in VCH, Yorkshire: East Riding, 6, pp. 42–3.Google Scholar
21 I have argued the same point in relation to York in ‘Craft guilds’, pp. 141-63.
22 Sellers, M., ed., York Memorandum Book, 2, SS, 125 (1915), pp. 277–83.Google Scholar
23 Ordinary of the saddlers (1460) in Anderson, ed., REED: Newcastle, p. 6. The earliest ordinary, the coopers’ dated 1427, exists only in a copy of 1497. This is couched in the same language as the later ordinaries and refers to the procession and Play as ‘the anycient Custome’ of the city. The earliest ordinaries refer to ‘discencion And discorde that has benne emonge diverse Craftes’, but by the time of the barbers’ ordinary of 1442 (surviving only in a seventeenth-century copy) this discord is described as ‘now late’. The implication could be that, despite the reference to ancient custom, the origin of the Play was still within living memory in 1427, but was essentially historic by 1442: ibid., pp. 3-5.
24 BTD, p. 59; Wyatt, ‘Performance and ceremonial’, p. xxxii.
25 Ibid., p. 197.
26 This entry in the town cartulary, fol. 45 is undated, but may belong to the mid-fifteenth century: ibid., p. 225.
27 It is also reflected in the clear connections between performing guild and pageant subject, sucb as in the production of tbe pageant of ‘The Last Supper’ by the bakers at both Beverley and York. For further discussion of this phenomenon see Goldberg, ‘Craft guilds’, pp. 142-5.
28 BTD, pp. 33-4.
29 Wyatt, ‘Performance and ceremonial’, p. 18.
30 BTD, pp. 34-5. Cf. the ordinances of the fletchers and coopers of 1414 × 1416 which talk of ‘quando communitas in festo sancti Marci conseciunt pagendas generaliter ludi’: Wyatt, ‘Performance and ceremonial’, pp. 49-50.
31 Ibid., pp. 333, 336.
32 BTD, p. 335.
33 Ibid., pp. 344-53.
34 Ibid., pp. 258, 262. The governors’ minute book in which these fines are recorded goes back to 1436.
35 Ibid., pp. 266-7, 278.
36 BTD, pp. lix, 33-4; Wyatt, ‘Performance and ceremonial’, pp. I, 80. That the number of crafts recorded in the 1390 list was slightly greater than the number of pageants recorded in the early sixteenth-century list may imply that some of the crafts combined to perform pageants at the earlier date. Alternatively, it may reflect the sort of enthusiasm also found at York, whereby even very small collectivities of craftsmen took responsibility for a pageant. Sometimes individual pageants were subsequently combined to reduce the total number performed. For a discussion of this see Goldberg, ‘Craft guilds’, pp. 51ff.
37 MCB, p. 171; Wyatt, ‘Performance and ceremonial’, pp. 351-2.
38 Ibid., pp. li-liii.
39 Cf VCH, Yorkshire: East Riding, 6, pp. 76-7. The Percy earls of Northumberland were patrons of the borough over several decades. The fifth Earl, for example, also entertained the governors to breakfast, gave the corporation a deer and lent his bear-ward and performing bears for entertainment in the market-place. The corporation in turn made gifts to the family. The second Earl and his family were present on Corpus Christi Day in 1423, but the fifth Earl’s own dramatic interests are reflected in the performances of Nativity and Resurrection pageants at his castle at Leconfield at Christmas and Easter respectively: MCB, pp. 160, 165, 169, 171-2, 174; Chambers, The Medieval Stage, 2, p. 375.
40 Wyatt, ‘Performance and ceremonial’, pp. lii, 353; MCB, p. 172.
41 Beadle, R., ed., The York Plays (London, 1982), pp. 10–11Google Scholar; Johnson and Rogerson, eds, REED: York, p. 351.
42 Mills, ed., Chester Mystery Cycle, pp. xiii-xiv.
43 Meredith, P., ‘The Towneley cycle’, in Beadle, , ed., Medieval English Theatre, p. 145.Google Scholar
44 Ibid., p. 145.
45 Based on a poll-tax population of 482: PRO E179/206/35/40. I am grateful to Dr R. M. Smith for supplying this information, which is based on work he has done with Dr C. Fenwick.
46 ‘Rolls of the Collectors in the West Riding of the Lay-Subsidy (Poll Tax) 2 Richard II’, YAJ, 6 (1881), pp. 150-2.
47 Goldberg, P. J. P., Women, Work, and Life Cycle: Women and Work in York and Yorkshire c.1300-1520 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 126–7.Google Scholar
48 He left £20 to his son and £12 to his daughter. He also left 20s. to the fabric of Wakefield parish church: BI, Prob. Reg. 3 fol. 6v.
49 The east window glass was given in 1475, glass on the north side of that window was dated 1481, and the chancel stalls bear the arms of Thomas Savile of Lupset and his wife, who married in 1482: Walker, J. W., The History of the Old Parish Church of Ali Saints, Wakefield (Wakefield, 1888), pp. 43–5, 74, 87, 101.Google Scholar
50 Ibid., pp. 67-71, 73-5. Other chantries were founded by local gentry.
51 Quoted from Cawley, A. C., ed., The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle (Manchester, 1958), p. xvi.Google Scholar
52 Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, pp. 75-6; Walker, J. W., Wakefield: its History and People, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (Wakefield, 1939), p. 388.Google Scholar
53 Wakefield was held by the Warenne earls until the demise of the dowager countess, Joan de Barr, in 1361. It then reverted to the Crown, but only to be granted to Edmund de Langley, Earl of Cambridge. It passed in 1402 to his widow until her own death in 1434, when it then passed to Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York. It follows that for lengthy periods in the mid-fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Wakefield was held by dowagers, who may have been particularly reluctant to grant any new liberties to the borough: Walker, Wakefield, pp. 62, 108-10.
54 The charter of 1509 granted exemption from tolls rather than any constitutional change: ibid., pp. 51, 95, 417; Barber, B. J., ed., Doncaster: a Borough and its Charters (Doncaster, 1994). p. 99.Google Scholar
55 Wakefield was again transferred from the Crown estate to the Duchy of Lancaster in 1558: Walker, Wakefield, pp. 99, 110, 149; Goldberg, P. J. P., ‘From Conquest to Corporation’, in Barber, , ed., Doncaster, pp. 51–3Google Scholar. Doncaster also possessed a Corpus Christi Play, though this is not recorded until the post-Reformation era (no doubt due to the paucity of civic records there before the earlier sixteenth century).
56 Stevens and Cawley, eds, The Towneley Plays, 1, pp. xxvii-xxviii.
57 Stevens and Cawley conclude that the so-called Wakefield Master ‘was a major redactor of the full cycle, if not the compiler himself: ibid., p. xxxi.
58 Stevens and Cawley note the possibility that the manuscript was the ‘regenall’ noted in the burgess court roll of 1559: ibid., p. xxiv.
59 See Cawley, A. C. and Stevens, M., eds, The Towneley Cycle: a Facsimile of Huntington MS HM1 (Leeds, 1976)Google Scholar; Stevens and Cawley, eds, The Towneley Plays, 1, pp. xxii-xxv. The manuscript is remarkably clean and, unlike the York Register, free from subsequent annotations that might suggest this was a working text. It hard also to imagine a readership for such a text that might otherwise explain its compilation.
60 Cawley, ed., The Wakefield Pageants, p. xv.
61 Goldberg, ‘Craft guilds’, p. 146.
62 Ordinances of the fletchers and coopers: Wyatt, ‘Performance and ceremonial’, p. 49.
63 For example, in a recent (1994) and distinguished collection of essays on medieval drama it is stated variously that ‘these [women’s roles], as in the Elizabethan theatre, were played by male actors’ (Twycross) and ‘all the English evidence confirms the exclusion of women from medieval performance’ (Marshall): Beadle, ed., Medieval English Theatre, pp. 43, 309. In neither instance is any evidence provided in support of these statements, though Twycross suggests that women would not have been able to project their voices sufficiently.
64 BTD, p. 34.
65 For studies that use gender as analytical tool in relation to the Plays see Ashley, K. M., ‘Medieval courtesy literature and dramatic mirrors of female conduct’, in Armstrong, N. and Tennenhouse, L., eds, The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality (London, 1987), pp. 25–38Google Scholar; Coletti, T., ‘A feminist approach to the Corpus Christi cycles’, in Emmerson, R., ed., Approaches to Teaching Medieval English Drama (New York, 1990), pp. 78–89Google Scholar; Evans, R., ‘Body politics: engendering medieval cycle drama’, in Evans, R. and Johnson, L., eds, Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature (London, 1994), pp. 112–39.Google Scholar
66 ‘Adam and Eve’, 11. 105-6. This and the subsequent quotations are from the edition by Mills in modern spelling: Mills, ed., Chester Mystery Cycle.
67 ‘Noah’s Flood’, 11. 200ff. and 225ff.
68 ‘The Last Judgement’, 11. 273-6.
69 ‘The Harrowing of Hell’, 11. 121-2.
70 ‘Noah’s Flood’, 11. 161ff., 173-5.
71 To give two late examples, Henry Gee, as mayor in 1533, instituted an ordinance to prevent women under the age of forty from keeping ale-houses or taverns and, as mayor a second time in 1539, acted to control vagrancy by drawing up lists of ‘deserving’ poor who were alone permitted to solicit alms: Driver, J. T., Cheshire in the Later Middle Ages, A History of Chester, 6 (Chester, 1971), pp. 36, 38Google Scholar. Such radical policy could only have been achieved in the appropriate climate of opinion created in the preceding decades.
72 Laughton, J., ‘The alewives of later medieval Chester’, in Archer, R. E., ed., Crown, Government and People in the Fifteenth Century (Stroud, 1995), pp. 200, 205–8Google Scholar; McIntosh, M. K., ‘Local change and community control in England’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 49 (1986), pp. 219–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, pp. 155-7.
73 ‘The Nativity’, 11. 338ff.
74 Rubin sees this distinction as a product of social change following the Black Death, but Cullum locates it in the experience of economic recession from the later fifteenth century: Rubin, M., ‘The Poor’, in Horrox, R., ed., Fifteenth-Century Attitudes (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 175–82Google Scholar; Cullum, P. H., Hospitals and Charity in Medieval England (Manchester, forthcoming).Google Scholar
75 ‘Healing the Blind Man and the Raising of Lazarus’, 11. 40-3.
76 Ibid., l. 188.
77 Cf. John 9. 13-41.
78 ‘The Last Judgement’, 11. 329-32.
79 Merchants dominated the government of the city during the first part of the sixteenth century. Driver, Chester in the Later Middle Ages, p. 104.
80 Harris, M. D., ed., The Coventry Leet Book, EETS, 134-5, 138, 146 (1907-13), p. 544.Google Scholar
81 Driver, Chester in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 30, 36. A hostile attitude to gaming within the Play is reflected in the treatment of the Tormentors dicing for Christ’s garments in the pageant of ‘The Crucifixion’.
82 Ibid., pp. 25, 39, 138. Interestingly the almshouse gave priority to the needs of former aldermen and councillors fallen on hard times.
83 It is unlikely that all the major cycles survived into Elizabeth’s reign, for there is no record of the Beverley Play after 1520. However, the account rolls which might record fines in relation to the Play there are lost between 1522 and 1541, and there are no council minutes extant between 1470 and 1558, so the actual moment of the Play’s demise cannot be determined. (Wyatt speculates that it followed the poor performance in 1520 of what I have suggested may have been a radically reworked text.) The Newcastle Play is recorded as active at least until 1562 and is still referred to in the masons’ ordinary of 1581, but not in that of the joiners dated 1589. We may suppose the Play was stopped between those last two dates. The Play at Doncaster ended at much the same time: Wyatt, ‘Performance and ceremonial’, p. lii; MCB, pp. 3, 6; Chambers, Medieval Stage, 2, p. 385; Anderson, ed., REED: Newcastle, p. xi; Hutton, Stations of the Sun, p. 309.
84 The final production saw certain supposedly ‘superstitious’ pageants dropped from the cycle. It is apparent that changes were made to the Play, including the introduction of new banns even prior to the final performance. Changes had earlier been made during Edward VI’s reign, but it is unclear whether the Play was in effect suppressed sometime after 1550 and revived again under Mary, since by this period it seems to have been performed only periodically: Clopper, ed., REED: Chester, pp. liv, 49-51, 54, 96-7, 103-5, 110.
85 Mills, D., ‘“None had the like nor the like darste set out”: the City of Chester and its mystery cycle’, in Mills, D., ed., Staging the Chester Cycle, Leeds Texts and Monographs, ns, 9 (Leeds, 1985), pp. 5–7Google Scholar; Clopper, ed., REED: Chester, pp. 240-8. The late banns also attempted to offer justification for those parts of the play, such as the Harrowing of Hell, which had no strict scriptural authority.
86 Douglas and Greenfield, eds, REED: Cumberland, pp. 19, 171.
87 Craig, English Religious Drama, pp. 156-7; Clopper, ed., REED: Chester, pp. liv-lv, 109-10, 112-17.
88 Douglas and Greenfield, eds, REED: Cumberland, p. 18. The continued survival of Plays at Kendal, Lancaster, and Preston and their demise early in the reign of James I would repay further research, but it is worth noting that the suppressions occurred during the period after Matthew Hutton had returned to York as archbishop and also as president of the Council of the North.
89 For a discussion of Hutton’s activities within York Minster see Cross, M. C., ‘From the Reformation to the Restoration’, in Aylmer, G. E. and Cant, R., eds, A History of York Minster (Oxford, 1977), p. 208.Google Scholar
90 Johnson and Rogerson, eds, REED: York, p. 351.
91 Ibid., pp. 352-4. Hutton wrote that ‘now in this happie time of the gospell, I knowe the learned will mislike it and how the state will beare with it I know not’. The city clearly noted this last implied threat and rightly concluded that the Play was ‘not meet to be playd’.
92 Ibid., p. 354.
93 Ibid., pp. 355, 365-8.
94 Hutton ruled that no pageant should represent God the Father, Christ, or the Holy Ghost, and that the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist should likewise not be represented. This was tantamount to a bar on the Play. The text of the injunction is printed in Cawley, ed., The Wakefield Pageants, p. 125.
95 Johnson and Rogerson, eds, REED: York, pp. 390, 392-3. The city bridgemasters continued to collect rent on various of the pageant houses (used to store the waggons and no doubt various properties) well into the following century. Guilds likewise continued to appoint pageant masters and to hold pageant dinners.
96 Cf. Ashley, ‘Medieval courtesy literature’, pp. 25-38; Goldberg, ‘Craft guilds’, p. 157. This is a subject that merits further research.
97 One of the shepherds in the Chester cycle is specifically cast as a Welshman. Mak of the Wakefield second shepherds’ pageant is identified as an outsider by his parody of a southern dialect, although it has been suggested that he represented a Scot, i.e., the archetypal northern outsider.