Pleasing the Queen but Preserving Our Past:
Cheshire and Lincolnshire Attempt to
Continue Their Cycle Plays and Satisfy
Elizabeth’s Injunctions
Spelling and grammar for most quotations from original sources
have been modernized.
By the mid-fourteenth century community-based performances of
religious drama based on stories from the Bible and the lives of saints had
become a part of the popular culture of many a town and city in England. The
institution of the feast of Corpus Christi (1311) seems to have spurred this
phenomenon. The feast of Corpus Christi falls shortly after Pentecost, usually in
mid-May, and involved an elaborate procession of churchmen, town officials,
and guildsmen bearing a consecrated wafer through the streets of the
community. Before long, especially in larger municipalities like York and
Coventry, plays performed by the laity based on religious themes began to
become part of the celebrations. In other communities, like Chester, the feast of
Whitsun (Pentecost) involved similar festivities (Wickham Medieval 62-99,
Chambers 2: 94-146).
Sources reveal that by the beginning of the fifteenth century, smaller
communities had developed their own local performances, dramatizing the lives
of their patron saints, or Bible stories like The Flood, or their own version of a
Passion play. Many of these community performances were complex and costly.
The volumes of the University of Toronto’s Records of Early English Drama
{REED) are flill of entries like those from Devon, Dorset, and Cornwall that
describe, for example, 17 shillings, 10 pence paid in 1415 for costumes for the
Corpus Christi celebrations in Exeter {REED. Devon 17, 360, 382). That sum of
money equaled the cost of 160 chickens or 20 sheep at the time {Reed Bristol
18), an indication of just how much money communities were willing to lay out
for their community celebrations. REED volumes show payments made to guild
members in compensation for the time they, or their apprentices, spent in
rehearsal, and for the purchase of properties and costumes, like sacks of wheat
to create the image of Lot’s wife as a pillar of salt, purple satin gowns to
costume Jesus, crimson vestments, and gloves and devils’ coats. Costume
expenses alone in New Romney (Kent) for the year 1560 totaled almost £10
{Malone Kent 207-11), more than a year’s salary for a parish clerk (Hanham
154), and the total expense that year was almost £50 {Malone Kent 207-11).
Even the Easter sepulchers set up in small parishes sometimes involved what we
would call “special effects”—machinery that lowered effigies of angels from