The Old Miracle Plays of England

I Introduction

Of all the delightful games which children play in the nursery or in the schoolroom, perhaps the favourite one is dressing-up, and acting. And of all the Christmas treats, perhaps the best is going to the theatre—either to the pantomime or to one of the fairy plays which fortunate children can now enjoy.

There are grown-up people too who never get tired of dressing-up and acting, nor of going to the theatre to see other people act. It is a taste which is shared by children and grown-up people alike. And it has always been so. Long, long ago, when all the people in the world were savage, there is no doubt that little naked children picked up their fathers’ spears, and bows and arrows (or made smaller ones in imitation of them), and “acted” the hunting of animals or the killing of enemies, while their parents looked on, pleased and interested by the performance.

Thousands of years have passed since the first “acting” took place on some lonely beach, perhaps, or in a clearing of the forest where savage children played; and now in all our big towns we have big houses specially built for acting, and there are many men and women who spend most of their time either in writing plays or in learning and acting them.

Every evening in London hundreds of cabs and motor-cars stop before some brilliantly lighted theatre to set down people who have come to see one of the many plays performed night after night in this great city. And seven hundred years ago people also crowded to see plays in London, though it was a very different London then, and a very different building at which they arrived.

Instead of ladies in evening gowns, and gentlemen all dressed alike in black coats, stepping out of cabs and motor-cars to walk across a pavement to the theatre door, you would have seen, on certain days long ago, a curiously dressed crowd of men, women, and children, some on horseback, some on foot, all pressing in one direction. There would be barefooted monks, soldiers with breastplates and helmets of steel, nuns with white caps and veils, little boys with long stockings, one red, one green perhaps, and short tunics belted at the waist; ladies with full flowing robes and strange head-dresses, some pointed like a sugar-loaf, some with veils arranged over a frame in the shape of two horns. And all these people in their quaint and varying costumes would be threading their way through narrow, dirty streets, like lanes, between overhanging houses, till they stopped—not before a big lighted house with playbills outside, and a marble hall and gilded ceiling with doors leading to the theatre within—but in front of the great gates of a church, and that church might have been Westminster Abbey. For there the play they had come to see was to be performed!

Strange as it may seem to us now, the first theatres in England were the churches, and, as you may guess, the first plays to be acted were religious plays.

Let us try to understand the reason for this. You remember that William I conquered England in 1066—eight hundred years ago. Well, from the time that he and his followers came to this country the English race has been gradually growing into the nation to which we belong and into the sort of people we see round us every day. Even the very poorest English children nowadays go to school and can read and write. Children whose parents are not so poor learn much besides reading and writing, and thousands of the sons and daughters of rich or fairly well-to-do people go to college, and spend years of their life in study. So that now, in the twentieth century, English people are on the whole educated. But it has taken a very long time to arrive at such a state of things as this, and for hundreds of years after the Conquest, not only the poor, but even the richer and quite rich people were ignorant. Very few men except those who belonged to the Church studied at all. Thousands of the rest could neither read nor write.

Now very naturally the Church considered that religion at least must in some way be taught and explained to these masses of ignorant folk. Whatever else they knew, or did not know, it was necessary that they should understand the faith they professed. They called themselves Christians, yet how were people who could not read, to learn even the Bible stories, or anything at all about the teaching of Christ?

“They might go to the churches,” you will say, perhaps, “where the Bible would be read to them by the priests.” But that would not do. For remember that for hundreds of years after the Conquest the service was always read in Latin, a language which very few people except lawyers, priests, and scholars understood. No doubt, so far as they could, the clergy privately explained the teaching of the Church to as many people as they could reach. But thousands and thousands of them were never reached privately at all. They just came to church on Sundays and on Saints’ days, and went away without any real knowledge of what the services meant.

It was a difficult problem, yet the monks and clergy conquered it. They thought of a way of teaching for which no books were necessary. A way moreover, by which hundreds of people could learn at the same time, merely by using their eyes and their ears. The life of Christ, the lives of the Saints, the whole Bible history, they discovered, could be shown to the people in the form of plays or acted stories. The clergy should write the plays, they agreed, and the clergy themselves should act them!

It was a clever idea, cleverly carried out. In various monasteries monks began to write and to arrange such plays, to be acted in the churches on special days, at special pauses in the service.

At first the religious scenes they prepared were very simple, and performed chiefly in dumb show.

We know, for instance, of one little play that was acted about eight hundred years ago in a church dedicated to S. Nicholas.

Now the priests of that church were naturally anxious for the people in their charge to know as much as possible about the saint—their own special saint, whose name they mentioned every time they spoke of the church.

On the feast day of S. Nicholas therefore, before the service began, they removed from its niche the stone image of the saint, and in its place a priest stood, dressed as much like the statue as possible.

That was the beginning of the story. The rest had to be explained by acting. Not only was S. Nicholas the special saint of children, he was also the protector of travellers, and the play was meant to show how powerful he was in this respect, and what miracles he could work for those who put their trust in him.

The usual service was begun, and then, at a stated time, a pause was made. The church doors were thrown open, and a priest dressed as a traveller from a distant land, came in and bowed before the shrine of S. Nicholas. The priest represented a heathen who had heard of the saint’s power, and wanted to discover whether all he had been told was true. His flowing robes and his jewelled turban showed the audience that he came from a foreign land, and was not a Christian. Presently, from the folds of his robe, this man took a rich treasure, and placing it at the feet of the saint, told him that he was going on a journey, and prayed him to guard the wealth he left in his keeping. Then he went his way out of the church.

But no sooner had he departed, than other priests dressed as robbers, crept in, and stealing up to the shrine, took the treasure and hurried away with their booty. Meanwhile, the heathen, who felt uneasy about leaving his wealth in the saint’s care, returned to make quite sure of its safety and finding the treasure gone, began to storm and rave. He was proceeding to beat and insult the image, when to his amazement it moved! Stepping down from the niche, it went out to seek the robbers who were hidden just outside the church. So terrified were they at the approach of a living saint when as they thought, only a statue had watched their theft, that they immediately restored the treasure, and tremblingly followed S. Nicholas into the church. The heathen, overjoyed and full of awe and wonder, fell at the saint’s feet. Then S. Nicholas bade him become a Christian, and worship the true God.

So the play ended, and the interrupted service went on.

Simple as it was, the little scene no doubt persuaded the congregation that S. Nicholas was a great and powerful personage, and the impression it made upon them was one they were not likely to forget, because of the strange and interesting manner in which the lesson was taught.

This is the first play we know anything about, but we may guess that others more or less like it, began to be very popular, for we find from old books—books written hundreds of years ago, that twice a year at least, at Christmas and at Easter, the people were taught by means of acting, two of the greatest events in the life of Christ.

Let us try to imagine a Christmas Eve in Westminster Abbey, long ago, when Henry III was king. The Abbey was not nearly so large then as it is to-day, for much of it has been built since. Yet the central part was finished, and six hundred years ago people looked up at some of the same soaring arches, and leant against some of the same pillars as those we now see in the beautiful church.

The Abbey bells had been ringing for a long time, calling the Londoners from their homes, and from the crooked narrow lanes of the city, through the gates in the walls which then surrounded Westminster, there had come flocking to the church a great crowd of gentle and simple folk. There were merchants and shopkeepers, wearing hoods like jelly-bags with their long points dangling at the back; ladies with strange fantastic head-dresses; poor women and children muffled in cloaks; soldiers, nobles, and monks of various orders. Some of them stood thronging the aisles, others knelt on stools, or beside wooden benches.