he close of the 14th or the earlier part of the 15th; the
body of the _Coventry_ probably belongs to the 15th or 16th. Many of the
individual plays in these collections were doubtless founded on French
originals; others are taken direct from Scripture, from the apocryphal
gospels, or from the legends of the saints. Their characteristic feature
is the combination of a whole series of plays into one _collective_
whole, exhibiting the entire course of Bible history from the creation
to the day of judgment. For this combination it is unnecessary to
suppose that they were generally indebted to foreign examples, though
there are several remarkable coincidences between the Chester plays and
the French _Mystere du vieil testament_. Indeed, the oldest of the
series--the _York_ plays--exhibits a fairly close parallel to the scheme
of the _Cursor mundi_, an epic poem of Northumbrian origin, which early
in the 14th century had set an example of treatment that unmistakably
influenced the collective mysteries as a whole. Among the isolated plays
of the same type which have come down to us may be mentioned _The
Harrowing of Hell_ (the Saviour's descent into hell), an East-Midland
production which professes to tell of "a strif of Jesu and of Satan" and
is probably the earliest dramatic, or all but dramatic, work in English
that has been preserved; and several belonging to a series known as the
_Digby Mysteries_, including _Parfre's Candlemas Day_ (the massacre of
the Innocents), and the very interesting miracle of _Mary Magdalene_. Of
the so-called "Paternoster" and "Creed" plays (which exhibit the
miraculous powers of portions of the Church service) no example remains,
though of some we have an account; the Croxton _Play of the Sacrament_,
the MS. of which is preserved at Dublin, and which seems to date from
the latter half of the 15th century, exhibits the triumph of the holy
wafer over wicked Jewish wiles.

English collective mysteries.

To return to the collective mysteries, as they present themselves to us
in the chief extant series. "The manner of these plays," we read in a
description of those at Chester, dating from the close of the 16th
century, "were:--Every company had his pageant, which pageants were a
high scaffold with two rooms, a higher and a lower, upon four wheels. In
the lower they apparelled themselves, and in the higher room they
played, being all open at the top, that all beholders might hear and see
them. Th