f individual plays continued, the evolution of the drama as part of
the Church's liturgy was practically complete by the middle of the
thirteenth century.

+The Earlier Miracle Plays+.--The next hundred years brought a number
of important changes: the gradual substitution of English for Latin,
the removal from the church to the churchyard or market-place, and the
welding together of the single plays into great groups or cycles. The
removal from the church was made possible by the growth of the plays in
length and dramatic interest, which rendered them independent of the
rest of the service; and it was made inevitable by the enormous
popularity of the plays and by the more elaborate staging which the
developed plays required. The formation of more or less unified cycles
was the result of a natural tendency to supply the missing links
between the plays already in existence, and to write new plays
describing the events which led up to those already treated. Just as
Wagner in our day after writing his drama on _The Death of Siegfried_
felt himself compelled to write other plays dealing with his hero's
birth and the events which led to this birth, so the unknown authors of
the great English cycles were led to write play after play until they
had covered the significant events of Biblical history from the
creation of the world to the Last Judgment. This joining together of
isolated plays necessitated taking them away from the particular
festivals with which they had originally been connected and presenting
them all together on a single day, or, in the case of the longer
cycles, on successive days. After 1264, {24} when the festival of
Corpus Christi was established in honor of the sacrament of Holy
Communion, this day was the favorite time of presentation. Coming as
it did in early summer on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, it was
well suited for out-of-door performances, besides being a festival
which the Church especially delighted to honor.

+The Great English Cycles+.--Of the great cycles of miracle plays, only
four have come down to us: those given at York and at Chester, that in
the Towneley collection (probably given at or near Wakefield), and the
cycle called the Ludus Coventriae or Hegge plays, of which the place of
presentation is uncertain. The surviving fragments of lost cycles,
however, taken together with the records of performances, show that
religious plays were given with more or less regularity in