and communal pleasure. As we read
them, indeed, though it be in cold blood, we are carried out of our
book, and set in the street or market-square by the side of the "commons
and countrymen," as in the day when Whitsuntide, or Corpus Christi,
brought round the annual pageantry to Chester, Coventry, York, and other
towns.

Of the plays that follow, six come from the old town pageants,
reflecting in their variety the range of subject and the contemporary
effect of the cycles from which they are taken. They are all typical,
and show us how the scenes and characters of the east were mingled with
the real life of the English craftsmen and townsfolk who acted them, and
for whose pleasure they were written. Yet they give us only a small
notion of the whole interest and extent of these plays. We gain an idea
of their popularity both from the number of them given in one town and
the number of places at which regular cycles, or single pageants, were
represented from year to year. The York plays alone that remain are
forty-eight in all; the Chester, twenty-four or five; the Wakefield,
thirty-two or three. Even these do not represent anything like the full
list. Mr. E. K. Chambers, in an appendix to his _Mediaeval Stage_, gives
a list of eighty-nine different episodes treated in one set or another
of the English and Cornish cycles. Then as to the gazette of the many
scattered places where they had a traditional hold: Beverley had a cycle
of thirty-six; Newcastle-on-Tyne and Norwich, each one of twelve; while
the village and parochial plays were almost numberless. In Essex alone
the list includes twenty-one towns and villages, though it is fair to
add that this was a specially enterprising shire. At Lydd and New
Romney, companies of players from fourteen neighbouring towns and
villages can be traced in the local records that stretch from a year or
so before, to eight years after, the fifteenth century.

Mrs. J. R. Green, in her history of _Town Life_ in that century, shows
us how the townspeople mixed their workday and holiday pursuits, their
serious duties with an apparent "incessant round of gaieties." Hardly a
town but had its own particular play, acted in the town hall or the
parish churchyard, "the mayor and his brethren sitting in state." In
1411 there was a great play, _From the Beginning of the World_, played
in London at the Skinner's Well. It lasted seven days continually, and
there were the most part of the lords and ge