The Historical Significance

Barrie Dobson, Hon Professor, Department of History at the University of York

For almost two hundred years after 1376, the year in which the existence of pageant waggons is first recorded in York, the annual Corpus Christi plays offered the most famous and elaborate dramatic spectacle which any city in late medieval England had to offer.

The solitary surviving manuscript of the York plays (now in the British Library) dates from as late as 1463-77: by that date the York Mystery Cycle usually comprised some 48 pageants, each sponsored and subsidised by one of the city's craft guilds.

Though little can be known about the visual presentation of the plays, the city archives hold information from the 1390s onwards regarding the administration of the plays and the twelve or so "stations" at which they were performed. There are many indications that the administration of the plays was under the close and direct supervision of the mayor and council.

The richest laymen in the city, the York mercers or overseas merchants, were responsible for the final and most elaborate play, on the grandest theme - the Day of Judgement. But the York Corpus Christi plays appealed to every sector of Yorkshire urban and rural society; and it was only under the gradual impact of the new Christian ideology of the Reformation that increased criticism brought about their final performance in 1568, not to be revived until 1951.

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