he sermons were very few, and
printing was uninvented. The plays themselves, introduced into the
country by the Normans, were, in the foolish endeavour to make Normans of
Anglo-Saxons, represented in Norman French[14] until the year 1338, when
permission was obtained from the Pope to represent them in English.

The word _Miracle_, in their case, means anything recorded in Scripture.
The Miracle Plays had for their subjects the chief incidents of Old and
New Testament history; not merely, however, of this history as accepted
by the Reformed Church, but of that contained in the Apocryphal Gospels
as well. An entire series of these _Miracles_ consisted of short dramatic
representations of many single passages of the sacred story. The whole
would occupy about three days. It began with the Creation, and ended with
the Judgment. That for which the city of Coventry was famous consists of
forty-two subjects, with a long prologue. Composed by ecclesiastics, the
plays would seem to have been first represented by them only, although
afterwards it was not always considered right for the clergy to be
concerned with them. The hypocritical Franciscan friar, in "Piers
Ploughman's Creed," a poem of the close of the same century, claims as a
virtue for his order--

At markets and miracles we meddleth us never.

They would seem likewise to have been first represented in churches and
chapels, sometimes in churchyards. Later, when the actors chiefly
belonged to city-guilds, they were generally represented in the streets
and squares.

It must be borne in mind by any who would understand the influence of
these plays upon the people, that much in them appearing to us grotesque,
childish, absurd, and even irreverent, had no such appearance in the eyes
of the spectators. A certain amount of the impression of absurdity is
simply the consequence of antiquity; and even that which is rightly
regarded as absurd in the present age, will not at least have produced
the discomposing effects of absurdity upon the less developed beholders
of that age; just as the quaint pictures with which their churches were
decorated may make us smile, but were by them regarded with awe and
reverence from their infancy.

It must be confessed that there is in them even occasional coarseness;
but that the devil for instance should always be represented as a baffled
fool, and made to play the buffoon sometimes after a disgusting fashion,
was to them only the treatmen