some fragments of liturgical plays in Latin, which have been
reprinted by Professor Manly, in his _Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperean
Drama_. The earliest example there is may be dated as early as 967, an
important landmark for us, as it is often assumed that we have no
dramatic record of any kind in these islands earlier than the Norman
Conquest. Another generation or two of research, such as the pioneer
work of Dr. Furnivall and the Early English Text Society has made
possible, and we shall distinguish clearly the two lines of growth,
French and Norman, English and Saxon, by which the town-pageants and
folk-plays of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries came to a head.
Then the grafting of the English pastoral on the church-play, after it
had been carried out into the open town or market-place, may become
clear. Then, too, one will know how charged with potential dramatic life
was the mind of him who wrote that interlude in four lines of the "Three
Queens and the Three Dead Men," which contains in it the essence of a
thousand moralities.

_1st Queen._ I am afeard.

_2nd Queen._ Lo, what I see?

_3rd Queen._ Me thinketh it be devils three!

_1st Dead Body._ I was well fair

_2nd Dead Body._ Such shall thou be.

_3rd Dead Body._ For Godes love, be-ware by me!

These breathe, not a Norman, but an Anglo-Saxon fantasy, and they speak
for themselves. But many tell-tale documents exist to mark the
concurrent Norman and English development that went on in the English
mediaeval literature, and was seen and felt in the church and guild
plays, just as it went on in the towns themselves. It finds at last its
typical expression in an interlude like the Coventry Nativity-play,
reprinted in this volume. Long before the miracle-play was written in
the form it finally took, and about the time when William of Rouen,
after much trouble with his son Robert culminating at the battle of
Gerberoi, was about to return to England, the new opening in the church
in this country became one to tempt poor foreign students of some parts
and some ambition. Among these was a graduate of the University of
Paris, one Geoffrey, known to us now as Geoffrey of St. Albans. He had
been offered the post of master of the abbey school at that place, but
when he arrived after some delay--due perhaps to his going to see a
mystery play at Paris--he found the post filled up. He then made his way
to Dunstable, and while there proved h