From its first appearance in the records, the performance of what became the York Cycle is linked with the feast of Corpus Christi. This great summer moveable feast was a late arrival in the Church's calendar, authorised by the papacy for universal use in 1264. It occurred on the last Thursday after Trinity Sunday, which could be any time between 23 May and 24 June. Corpus Christi celebrates Christ's presence in the Host consecrated at the Mass, effectively an annual affirmation of the doctrine of transubstantiation. Both the feast itself and the festive events which clustered around it have been the subject of a number of studies and a wide range of different approaches, yet the precise relationship between the festal meaning of Corpus Christi and the nature of the cycle remains in certain respects to be satisfactorily addressed. The cycle, from its first modest appearances in civic records at the end of the fourteenth century, became an increasingly ambitious project, involving a sequence of pageants in procession, telling the story of the world from Creation to Doomsday. By the time the scripts were closely recorded in the Register in the 1460s/1470s, it was made up of forty-seven pageants, performed on wagons which stopped in sequence at each of twelve stations around the city, with around 14,000 lines of spoken dialogue, and involving a huge cast of characters, including twenty-four men capable of taking on the role of the adult Christ.