The Protestant tract, The Beehive of the Romish Church, in describing the Good Friday customs of the late medieval church, underscores the fuzzy division between liturgical ceremony and mimesis that haunts any attempt to interpret the external evidence for Easter drama in English churches:

...

Yea, doe wee not see likewise, that vpon good Friday they haue a crucifixe, eyther of Wood or of Stone, which they lay downe softly vpon the grounde that euery body may come creeping to it, vpon handes and knees, and so kisse the feete of it, as men are accustomed to doe the Pope of Rome; And then they put him in the graue, till Easter: at which time they take him vp againe and sing, Resurrexit, non est hic, Alleluia: He is risen, hee is not heare: God be thanked. Yea and in some places they make the graue in a high place in the Churche where men must goe vp many steppes, which are decked in blacke cloth from aboue to beneath and vpon euery step standeth a siluer candlesticke with a waxe candle burning in it, and there doe walke souldyers in harnesse, as bright as Saint George, which keep the graue, till the Priestes come and take him vp: & then commeth sodenly a flashe of fire, wherewith they are all afraide and fal downe: and then vpstarts the man, and they begin to sing Alleluia, on al hands, and then the clocke striketh eleuen.⁽¹⁾

...

In this description, the deposition ceremony, the "creeping to the cross", and the burying of the cross are all part of the liturgy for Good Friday but the Easter morning events are a curious blend of the liturgical and the mimetic with costumed soldiers and a dramatic flash of fire to signify the resurrection.

One of English Easter plays, the Bodleian Burial and Resurrection, contains the rubric, "This is a play to be playede, on part on gud-friday after-none, & þe other part opon Ester-day after the resurrectione In the morowe."⁽²⁾

Others are divided among two days without specifying the days.⁽³⁾

The regular "lusum resurreccionis" performed at Henley-upon-Thames in Oxfordshire was detached from the Easter liturgical events being played on Low Sunday⁽⁴⁾

(the Sunday after Easter) while the one at Thame, up river from Henley, was performed on the Tuesday of Easter week⁽⁵⁾

. The events dramatized in these plays could include any episodes from the deposition to the resurrection appearances. Indeed, it can be argued that this sequence of episodes represents a more common series of plays than the longer Creation to Doomsday cycles long thought to be the English norm. Unfortunately, we may never know the extent of this Easter drama since it is often impossible to disentangle the external evidence that record payments for necessary components of liturgical events and mimetic ones. The records of the parish of St Laurence, Reading are a case in point⁽⁶⁾

.

St Laurence is one of the three ancient parishes in Reading. The parish was contiguous with the great Benedictine abbey that dominated the life of the town until the dissolution. When the abbey was consecrated by Thomas a Beckett in 1163, the parish church seems to have already been in existence on the site⁽⁷⁾

. Indeed, its churchyard was incorporated into the abbey precinct so that the church provided an interface between the town and the abbey with its west door facing the market place and its choir overlooking the abbey. The churchwardens' books, surviving from 1498, are among the most detailed of the early sixteenth century accounts. They record the life of a wealthy parish with a rich liturgical tradition. It supported a choir⁽⁸⁾

(an unusual practice in English parish churches) and possessed an organ as early as 1505 (p.22) that was substantially rebuilt in 1511-2 (p.89). The music of the parish continued to have a national reputation as late as 1557-8 when expenses were paid for the "syngyng man a base yat was sent for to westmynster" (p. 286) They maintained a special walkway called the "procession way" which contained a gate possibly allowing the parish into the abbey precinct in the course of their ceremonies. Several inventories are included in the churchwardens' book that provide rare detailed information about the possessions of a major parish church just before the Reformation (pp. 41-73).

Playmaking and other kinds of celebration were part of the life of the parish. It is one of our major sources for evidence of the summer festivals with its hock gatherings, king play, Robin Hood play and morris dance troupe⁽⁹⁾

. The first evidence of Biblical plays comes in the first account in the book which records a performance of the Kings of Colen on Mayday complete with minstrels in 1498-9 (p. 3). In 1506-7, they received 23 shillings 8 pence for the performance of a play on what appears to have been a booth stage in the Forbury (an open area behind St Laurence against the town wall near the abbey) on St Bartholomew's Day, August 23 (p. 30). There was also a separate dramatic event on Corpus Christi that year and the accounts record payment for the building of costumes for Adam and Eve and another body suit of white leather complete with a bag to store it in (p. 29). It is unclear which event the costumes were provided for. Five years later (in 1511-2) they record payment for a Cain play (p. 88) that appears again in 1515-6 (p. 106). The last evidence for playmaking not associated with Easter occurs after the dissolution of the monastery in 1542-3 when Richard Deane (who was the priest of the Jesus Chapel) was paid five shillings "to play the play in thabbay"(p.227).

One further record may indicate a mimetic custom. The Jesus Chapel was maintained by a guild called the "Brethren of the Mass of Jesus" established in 1493.⁽¹⁰⁾

The special mass of the confraternity seems to have been associated with the Feast of the Transfiguration⁽¹¹⁾

In 1506-7, a member of the guild, John Cokk, a notary and clerk of the Guild Merchant, was paid for "wryting of the fest of Iesus & for vj heddes and berdes to the church"(p. 29). There is other evidence of Cokk mending the great pricksong book of the Jesus Mass.⁽¹²⁾

Clearly, Cokk was using his skill as a clerk to keep the liturgical books of the confraternity in order. But what are we to make of the six wigs and six beards? There is much later evidence, as we will see, for a Palm Sunday prophet event where beards and wigs were often used but none this early in the accounts. However, six figures appear on the mountain top in the story of the Transfiguration -- Jesus, Peter, James and John and Elijah and Moses. It is possible, given the mimetic tradition of the parish, that the mass itself was supplemented by a mimetic presentation of the story. The interest of the parish in the Feast of the Transfiguration was further expressed by the provision of an altar piece for the high altar depicting this scene in 1526-7⁽¹³⁾

. Many members of the parish contributed to the work but, although they collected four pounds, thirteen shillings and one pence (p.164), the work cost six pounds, thirteen shillings and four pence (p.166).

The Easter observances began with the singing of the Passion on Palm Sunday. After the palm procession, it was the custom to have the entire passion narrative from Matthew sung in three dramatic parts by the clerks --the treble to sing the part of the crowd, the mean to sing narration and bass to sing the part of Jesus⁽¹⁴⁾

. We know that St Laurence Reading followed this practice from a regular entry in the accounts for wine or other refreshments for the performers including the late entry of a coat of motley made for John Brown "that sang the mean" in 1535-6 (pp.197-8) in the same entry as the payment for the Palm Sunday wine. Five late entries between 1540 and 1547 record payments to a man who "plaied the prophet" on Palm Sunday. Three times the undersexton, a man called Loreman, is named as the performer.⁽¹⁵⁾

This is a familiar insertion into the procession sequence when a performer⁽¹⁶⁾

sang the Old Testament prophetic lesson after the Gospel at the first "station" of the procession⁽¹⁷⁾

. Many London churches had elaborate additions to this liturgical practice with a choir of bearded and costumed performers playing the role of the prophets⁽¹⁸⁾

. St Laurence seems never to have had a fully developed sequence of prophets and it may be that the part of the prophet had been taken by one of the choir members as part of his regular duties before 1540.

The next observance in the Easter rituals that we have external evidence for is the watching of the sepulchre. This would have followed the liturgy described so scathingly in The Beehive of the Romish Church in which a representation of the body of Christ was laid in a sepulchre located in the chancel of the church. Some parish churches in England had elaborate stone sepulchres as part of the permanent fabric of the church. Others had recesses in the chancel wall into which the host was put⁽¹⁹⁾

. St Laurence, like many churches had a wooden structure. Thirty three shillings, four pence were collected from members of the parish in what seem to be memorial gifts in 1498-9. The new sepulchre was not built until 1511-12 when four pounds, twelve shillings four pence was paid to Water Barton "to the new Sepulchre" (p. 89). Two pounds of glue was also bought that year "to the sepulchre" (p. 91) indicating that Barton may have delivered the carved wood in pieces to be assembled in its place. Charles Kerry in his account of the parish says that the sepulchre was located "on the north side of the choir beneath the middle arch of the arcade"⁽²⁰⁾

. The next year a frame was provided for the sepulchre light which was recreated as a "loft" for the light (p. 95). One of the regular payments in the accounts is for a "nail" or "spike" to the sepulchre which was probably used to secure the elaborate cloths listed in the inventory that were either draped over the sepulchre or hung as a curtain. One is described as "an awter cloth of Crymson & tawny velweyy ymbrowdred with ffloures of gold & for the nether parte of the same Crymson Saten & cloth of bawdekyn for the Sepulchre Awter" (p. 55). Another is described as a "sepulchre Cloth of right Crymson Saten imbrowdered with Imagerye with a frontall of panys contenyngin length iiij yerdes of the gifte of mr Richrd Smyth with ijo clothes of lawnde for the Sepulchre ./ (p. 57). A third entry lists two other altar cloths with red crosses for Lent and curtains. (p. 55) One of these cloths was mended and rebound in 1520-1 (p. 137) and in 1544-5 silk points are bought for the sepulchre (p. 238). The sepulchre was dismantled in Edward's reign but rebuilt in 1556-7 the year before the accession of Elizabeth and the return to the district of Sir Francis Knollys, the most Puritan of the queen's counsellours, brought an end to all the sepulchre ceremonies.⁽²¹⁾

We have no indication of what the parish of St Laurence used to represent the body of Christ but it was either a reserved host or a simple cross. No special statue like the one with a cavity for the host used in St Alphege, London Wall⁽²²⁾

or elaborate crucifix appears in the inventories. We do know that the priest wore a special red silk chesible with a narrow cross embroidered on it for the Good Friday service (p. 67). Red was the normal liturgical colour in England for Good Friday.⁽²³⁾

The items that appear regularly in the accounts that refer to the events between the "burial" on Good Friday and Easter matins are payments for "watching", for coals and for incense. Pamela Sheingorn suggests that it was necessary to set a watch because of the danger from the burning candles⁽²⁴⁾

; Eamon Duffy suggests that the pyx in which the sacrament was buried was extremely valuable⁽²⁵⁾

. Whatever the reason a watch was set and paid for every year from the time the accounts begin until the accession of Edward VI. Duffy suggests the coals were to warm the watchers⁽²⁶⁾

but they are referred to in 1503-4 as "colyes on Ester eveyn", in 1504-7 as "Colys on ester evyn to be halowyd" and in1512-3 as "to make the halowid fyer"⁽²⁷⁾

. In 1520-1, among the Easter expenses is payment for a "fire pan"(p. 137). It seems clear that the coals were used as they were in the neighbouring parish of St Giles⁽²⁸⁾

to ignite the new fire with which the Resurrection candles (especially the great Paschal candel) were lit on Easter morning⁽²⁹⁾

. The incense frequently specified "on Easter eve" was probably mixed with the coals as part of the ritual. This much we can deduce for certain from the records about the events that took place in St Laurence, Reading between Good Friday and Easter morning. What else may have taken place during that period we will return to.

We do know that the parish mounted an Easter play on Easter Monday. In 1507-8, one William is paid "for carying and recarying of bordes to the church for the pageaunt of the passion on ester Monday"(p. 35). A similar entry appears the next year "for the pageant on Estyr Monday"(p.74). In 1510-1, someone is paid for carrying boards on Easter Monday with no specification of a play (p. 85). Over twenty years later, in 1533-4 as the Henrician reforms began to take effect a man called Labourne was paid half a mark "for refourmyng the resurreccion play"(p. 194) and two years later 9 shillings 10 pence for making another copy and binding it (p. 202). Labourne does not appear anywhere else in the Reading records. He is called "mr" in the first entry but "sir" in the second indicating that he may have been in orders. The last mention of the Easter plays is in 1537-8 when the parish makes a profit of 23 shillings 2 pence "at the ffirst play in Easter weke" and 9 shillings 2 pence at the "Second play" (p. 208). The shape of this play is that of the Reformation Resurrection of Our Lord that is specified as being played on two days but is not clearly associated with the liturgical "time" of Easter weekend as the Bodleian Death and Burial is. The 1537-8 performance is the first time that an Easter play in St Laurence records receipts, although the Resurrection play at Thame regularly made a profit⁽³⁰⁾

. The next year Reading Abbey was dissolved and the town plunged into a state of dislocation and then trauma as the last abbot and two of his monks were burned for their obduracy. No Biblical drama appears in the St Laurence accounts after 1537-8.

But I have not considered three further pieces of evidence from the accounts. They may mean nothing or merely confirm the reconstruction of the St Laurence Easter activity that I have been discussing. However, they could indicate that something more mimetic was going on on Good Friday. The first is the small payment, in 1506-7, of 2 1/2 pence to Sybil Darling, the widow of a prominent parishioner who died that year for a combination of nails for the sepulchre with "rosyn to the resurreccyon pley"(p.29). Pamela Sheingorn suggests, on the analogy of parishes such as the church of St Mary the Great in Cambridge who had a special statue for the Easter ceremony, that the resin may have been used to improve the operation of a mechanism to cause whatever was buried on Good Friday to rise⁽³¹⁾

. This is unlikely, as we have seen, given the detail of the information about the possessions of the church with no mention of such a statue. We will never know what the resin was used for but of more interest to me is the use of the term "resurreccyon pley". Why is it here associated with the nail for the sepulchre if it is not referring to what took place at the sepulchre during the liturgical ceremony marking the resurrection on Easter morning?

The second piece of evidence comes from the accounts for 1522-23. The clerk who wrote the St Laurence accounts seems to have proceeded with all due deliberation through the year. The receipts and expenses are entered in the chronological order in which they occurred. Until 1516, the accounts run from Lady day (March 25) to Lady Day making the Easter expenses among the first to be listed. That year the accounting pattern changes to the more normal Michaelmas (September 30) to Michaelmas thus placing the Easter expenses near the end of the fiscal year. We can be reasonably sure, therefore, that the expenses that are clustered with the normal Easter entries have relevance to the events during the Easter period. In 1522-3 there appears the following set of entries:

...

Item payd for makeng of the playeres garmentes vij d

Item payd for xj li of wex for the paschall & makeng yerof ix s vij d

Item for a quart of bastard iiij d

Item payd to william wey for sir williams hors hyer v s

Item payd to Roger Iohnson for stevens hors hyre xvj d

Item payd to Iohn paynter for makeyng of geyr

for the play iij s iiij d

Item payd for watchyng the Sepulcre viij d

(p.149)

Three of these entries concern normal Easter liturgical functions, two refer directly to costumes and painted "gear" -- presumably a set of some kind -- for a play and one, the horse hire may have nothing to do with the Easter celebration. No other play entries appear for that year -- not even a king play entry. It is hard not to associate the players and their gear with the Easter events.

Finally, in the last version of the inventory of the possessions of the parish dated that same year the red chasuble for Good Friday is linked with the phrase "& all thapparelles for good ffryday" (p. 67). A "+" appears in the margin against this item and another appears farther down the page against another entry that appears to have been left out indicating that the items belong together. That entry reads "Item for a Cotte for Mary Magdeleyn of Cloth of gold". There is no assurance that the "apparel" for Good Friday is anything more than a complete set of vestments for the officiating clergy. Nor is there any assurance that the coat for Mary Magdalen is a costume for a human being. It is perfectly possible that it is a costume for a statue. All the play gear provided in 1522-3 could have been for the play in the week after Easter. Nevertheless, the entries are suggestive -- not only of a greater embellishment of the Good Friday ceremony but of the Easter celebration too. Mary Magdalen plays a prominent part in the first Resurrection appearance episodes and it is possible that the costumes and gear were for a "Resurrection" play similar to those that appear in the contemporary play texts. Pamela Sheingorn has shown us that parishes used a variety of devices to "show forth" the Resurrection -- painted or embroidered cloth as at St Peter-upon-Cornhill, London⁽³²⁾

, or a combination of a painted cloth and pewter angels, St Stephen Coleman Street, London⁽³³⁾

. St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol had four wooden angels with detachable wings and wigs.⁽³⁴⁾

It is possible that St Laurence, Reading, with its strong mimetic tradition "showed forth" the Resurrection with costumed performers. But we will never know.

The line between liturgy and mimesis remains blurred but, as the rhetoric of the Beehive of the Romish Church makes clear, the connection between the liturgy and playacting in the minds of the Puritans was clear. After a long description of the gestures of the mass itself the writer thunders, "In suerite, Christe hath not done any thing in his death & passion, but they do play and counterfeite the same after him so trimly and liuely, that no player nor iuggler is able to do it better"⁽³⁵⁾

(206) Perhaps we should accept the ambiguities for what they are and allow the rich commingling of celebration and representation, as yet unchallenged by Reformation and Counter Reformation, "show forth" the religious and mimetic sensibilities of the dying years of the Roman church in England

1.

¹ Marnix, Phillips van, The beehive of the Romish church. Tr. George Gilpin, London, 1598. STC 17445, 206-v.

2.

² Donald C. Baker, et al, The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digdy 133 and E Museo 160, Early English Text Society, O.S. 283 (Oxford, 1982).

3.

³ J.Dover Wilson and Bertram Dobell, eds., The Resurrection of Our Lord, Malone Society Reprints, Oxford University Press, 1912.

4.

⁴ Oxfordshire Archives, MSS DD Thame c.5, ff. 72-7; b.2, ff. 6, 10, 27, 45.

5.

⁵ Oxfordshire Archives, MS DD Henley A V/3, f 27v.

6.

⁶ Berkshire Record Office D/P 97 5/2. All specific references to these accounts appear in the body of the text.

7.

⁷ Charles Kerry, A History of the Municipal Church of St Lawrence, Reading, Reading, 1883.

8.

⁸ I have deduced this from the money spent on albs and amices for children. Peter le Huray in Music and the Reformation in England 1549-1660 (Cambridge, 1978) discusses the state of music in parish churches just before the Reformation in his first chapter.

9.

⁹ See my "Summer Festivals in the Thames Valley Counties" in Thomas Pettitt and Leif Sondergard, eds. Custom, Culture and Community in the later Middle Ages, Odense, Odnese University Press, 1994 and "Reformation and Resistance in the Thames/Severn Parishes: the Dramatic Witness," with Sally-Beth MacLean in The Parish in English Life, eds. Kumin, Gibbs and French, Manchester University Press, 1997.

10.

¹⁰ Kerry, 28.

11.

¹¹ Kerry, 31. See accounts for 1502-3, p. 9-13.

12.

¹² ibid.

13.

¹³ Kerry, 29.

14.

¹⁴ Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, New Haven and New York, 1992, p. 26.

15.

¹⁵ See pages 222, 226 and 242

16.

¹⁶ Henry John Feasey, Ancient Holy Week Ceremonial, London, 1897. He tells us the Sarum Processionale specifies "an acolyte in the guise of a prophet" p. 75.

17.

¹⁷ ibid.

18.

¹⁸ See Mary C. Erler, "Palm Sunday Prophets and Processions and the Eucharistic Controversy", Rennaissance Quarterly, 48, 1995, pp. 58-81.

19.

¹⁹ Pamela Sheingorn, The Easter Sepulchre in England. Early Drama, Art and Music 5. Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1987.

20.

²⁰ Kerry, p. 41.

21.

²¹ See Johnston and MacLean "Reformation and Resistance".

22.

²² Sheingorn, p.221.

23.

²³ William St John Hope and E.G.Cuthbert F. Atchley, English Liturgical Colours, London, 1918, p.85.

24.

²⁴ Sheingorn, p.57

25.

²⁵ Duffy, p.30.

26.

²⁶ ibid.

27.

²⁷ See pages 16, 21, 25, 29, 93.

28.

²⁸ Berkshire Record Office, D/P 96 5/1.

29.

²⁹ Feasey, p. 182 ff.

30.

³⁰ See above note 4.

31.

³¹ Sheingorn, p. 59.

32.

³² Sheingorn, p. 235.

33.

³³ Sheingorn, p.237

34.

³⁴ Feasey, 148-9.

35.

³⁵ Beehive, 206.