best witness at Chester. This was a rather late one.
Archdeacon Rogers, who saw them in 1594, when they had been going
on for something like three centuries in all. From his account (in the
Harleian Miscellany) it appears the Chester plays were given on
Whit-Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
"The manner of these plays were, every company had his pageant or
part, 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 on the top, that all beholders might hear and
see them." They were played, he goes on to say, in every street:
"They began first at the abbey gates, and when the first pageant was
played, it was wheeled to the high cross before the mayor, and so to
every street. So every street had a pageant playing before it at one time,
till all the pageants for the day appointed were played. When one
pageant was near ended, word was brought from street to street, that so
they might come in place thereof, exceeding orderly, and all the streets
have their pageants before them, all at one time playing together, to see
which plays was great resort and also scaffolds and stages made in the
streets in those places where they determined to play their pageants."
The same writer explains elsewhere that these plays were divided into
twenty-four pageants, according to the number of the city companies,
and that each company brought out its own pageant.
At York, whose plays Miss L. Toulmin Smith edited in 1887, we can
turn to Davies's two books[5] and the local records, to complete the
Chester description. Those who travel to York by rail to-day, and there
dismount, as most of us have often done, to walk through the city to the
cathedral, will be interested to find that the railway station now stands
where once was Pageant Green. Near it was formerly another kind of
station, where stood the houses hired to keep the pageants stored and
put away from one year's show to another. The word "pageant,"
(pagina, or plank), we ought to recall, was used for the stage, or
wheeled car of two stories, before it was used for the show set forth
upon it. Davies helps us, as we perambulate York to-day, to mark
where the old pageants were performed in 1399, at twelve stations,
which were fixed and stated beforehand. The first station was at the
gates of the Priory of the Holy Trinity in Mickle Gate, and the pageants
were moved on them in turn to places at Skelder Gate end, North Street,
Conyng Strete, Stane Gate and the gates of the Minster, so to the end of
Girdler Gate; while the last of all was "upon the pavement." But the
stations were subject to change, and there was much competition
among wealthy householders (one of whom may have been the Robert
Harpham mentioned in a 1417 list) to have the pageant played before
their windows. The highest bidder gained the coveted right.
Before the actual day came, a town-crier was sent round the city to
proclaim the "banes" or banns.[6] Arms were forbidden: "We command
that no man go armed in this city with swords ne with carlill-axes, in
disturbance of the king's peace and the play, or hindering of the
procession of Corpus Christi, and that they leave their harness in their
inns, saving knights and squires of worship that ought to have swords
borne after them!" The plays began betimes. We read that at York the
players were to be ready "at the mid-hour betwixt the IVth and Vth of
the clock in the morning." Finally, for the players themselves, care was
taken to secure good ones for the several parts. Sometimes a player
doubled or trebled the characters in a particular play.
All through the XIVth and XVth centuries miracle-plays went on being
performed regularly, or irregularly, in most of the English towns and
larger villages. One of the smaller cycles was that of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, played at Corpus Christi, from 1426 onwards.
The Three Kings of Cologne is mentioned in 1536, which the
goldsmiths, plumbers, glaziers, and others were to play. Here the
pageants were not movable ones, but were given at fixed points. No
doubt some of the spots associated with the Whitsuntide
"shuggy-shows" (as I remember them in my time) were originally
show-grounds of the town pageants too. Only one play of the
Newcastle series has survived, and that fitly enough, having regard to
the Tyneside shipbuilding, is a shipwrights' play. Unluckily it has been
so modernised that not a vestige of the local colour or Tyneside dialect
remains.
We come now to the date and origin of these town pageants.
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