IT IS SOMETHING of a commonplace that the N-Town Play is the most liturgical of the four Middle English cycle plays. In what follows I examine the liturgical material in the play, assess its likely impact on the play audience, and suggest the extent to which it can inform our knowledge of religious observance in late medieval East Anglia. This is part of a larger project on the liturgical content of the N-Town Play and other fifteenth-century dramatic works. The present article focuses on why the liturgical material was there – both in terms of what pieces were used and their assumed function in the play – and how familiar those liturgical pieces would have been to the audience.

The N-Town Play is a mystery, in the modern rather than medieval sense, with no surviving records of either authorship or performance of either the whole play in its present form or any of the four originally separate parts of the text. It is certainly well established, through records and extant texts, that East Anglia had a high concentration of dramatic performances of single plays in its towns and villages, especially in the general area of the south-west Norfolk-Suffolk border around Thetford; it is also well established that the N-Town text belongs to that area. So it can be argued that any record of a ‘game’ in that area of East Anglia is a candidate for a possible performance of the N-Town Play or of its constituent parts.

The two parts of the play dealing with the early life and Assumption of the Virgin Mary, both of which include a large amount of set piece singing, could have been produced as show-cases for a collegiate or monastic establishment, much as the Christmas Eve Nine Lessons and Carols is today for the choir of King's College Chapel, Cambridge. Thetford priory and Bury St Edmunds abbey are two possible sponsors or venues that have been canvassed. However, as Lawrence Clopper firmly states, ‘there are no unequivocal references to nonliturgical dramas in English monasteries and cathedrals … up to the Reformation’. Accordingly, another writer regrets that the Assumption pageant cannot be linked with Ely, ‘for a performance of that play on a sunny 15 August under the great lantern of St Etheldreda's cathedral would have been a wonderful experience’.