the dialogues became
familiar, sometimes facetious, and contrasted wonderfully with the
occasional Latin songs and responses, which were maintained in the
midst of them, and which also gradually became German. The personages
in the Biblical plays still appear under the same comic figures, with
the coarse jokes and street wit which the roving people had introduced
into the churchyards. Generally the fool entered as servant of a quack.
From the oldest times these strollers had carried about with them
through the country, secret remedies, especially such as were
suspicious to the Church, primitive Roman superstitions, ancient German
forms of exorcism, and others also which were more noxious and
dangerous. At the great Church festivals and markets, there were always
doctors' booths, in which miraculous remedies and cures were offered
for sale to the believing multitudes. These booths also of the
wandering doctors are older than the Augustine age; they are to be seen
depicted on the Greek vases, and came to Germany through Italy, with
the grotesque masks of the doctors themselves and their attendant
buffoons, and were the most profitable trade of the strollers. These
doctors and their servants were introduced as interludes to the
spiritual plays, with long spun out episodes of the holy traffic, in
which ribaldry and drubbing are not wanting.

But the strollers introduced another popular person into the holy
plays, the devil, probably his first appearance in the church. Long had
this spirit of hell spit out fire under the tents of the churchyard,
and wagged his tail, and probably he had often been beaten and cheated,
to the delight of the spectators, by clever players, before he assisted
in the thirteenth century as a much-suffering fellow-actor, in the holy
Easter dramas, to the edification of the pious parishioners.

Such was the active industry carried on by these strollers through the
middle ages. Serving every class and every tendency of the times,
coarse in manners and morals, as privileged jesters both cherished and
ill treated, they were probably united amongst themselves in firm
fellowship, with secret tokens of recognition; they were distinguished
by their outward attire, and chiefly by fantastic finery, and by the
absence of long hair and beard, the honourable adornment of privileged
people, which they were forbidden to wear.

In the fifteenth century the severity of the laws against them were
relaxed, for the w