nd through the
latter, by means of the Norman Conquest, England, became acquainted with
what may be called the literary monastic drama. It was no doubt
occasionally performed by the children under the care of monks or nuns,
or by the religious themselves; an exhibition of the former kind was
that of the _Play of St Katharine_, acted at Dunstable about the year
1110 in "copes" by the scholars of the Norman Geoffrey, afterwards abbot
of St Albans. Nothing is known concerning it except the fact of its
performance, which was certainly not regarded as a novelty.

The joculatores, jongleurs, minstrels.

These efforts of the cloister came in time to blend themselves with more
popular forms of the early medieval drama. The natural agents in the
transmission of these popular forms were those _mimes_, whom, while the
representatives of more elaborate developments, the "pantomimes" in
particular, had inevitably succumbed, the Roman drama had left surviving
it, unextinguished and unextinguishable. Above all, it is necessary to
point out how in the long interval now in question--the "dark ages,"
which may, from the present point of view, be reckoned from about the
6th to the 11th century--the Latin and the Teutonic elements of what may
be broadly designated as medieval "minstrelsy," more or less
imperceptibly, coalesced. The traditions of the disestablished and
disendowed _mimus_ combined with the "occupation" of the Teutonic
_scop_, who as a professional personage does not occur in the earliest
Teutonic poetry, but on the other hand is very distinctly traceable
under this name or that of the "gleeman," in Anglo-Saxon literature,
before it fell under the control of the Christian Church. Her influence
and that of docile rulers, both in England and in the far wider area of
the Frank empire, gradually prevailed even over the inherited goodwill
which neither Alfred nor even Charles the Great had denied to the
composite growth in which _mimus_ and _scop_ alike had a share.

How far the _joculatores_--which in the early middle ages came to be the
name most widely given to these irresponsible transmitters of a great
artistic trust--kept alive the usage of entertainments more essentially
dramatic than the minor varieties of their performances, we cannot say.
In different countries these entertainers suited themselves to different
tastes, and with the rise of native literatures to different literary
tendencies. The literature of the _t