As in Greece, drama in England was in its beginning a religious thing.  Its oldest continuous tradition was from the mediaeval Church.  Early in the Middle Ages the clergy and their parishioners began the habit, at Christmas, Easter and other holy days, of playing some part of the story of Christ’s life suitable to the festival of the day.  These plays were liturgical, and originally, no doubt, overshadowed by a choral element.  But gradually the inherent human capacity for mimicry and drama took the upper hand; from ceremonies they developed into performances; they passed from the stage in the church porch to the stage in the street.  A waggon, the natural human platform for mimicry or oratory, became in England as it was in Greece, the cradle of the drama.  This momentous change in the history of the miracle play, which made it in all but its occasion and its subject a secular thing, took place about the end of the twelfth century.  The rise of the town guilds gave the plays a new character; the friendly rivalry of leagued craftsmen elaborated their production; and at length elaborate cycles were founded which were performed at Whitsuntide, beginning at sunrise and lasting all through the day right on to dusk.  Each town had its own cycle, and of these the cycles of York, Wakefield, Chester and Coventry still remain.  So too, does an eye-witness’s account of a Chester performance where the plays took place yearly on three days, beginning with Whit Monday.  “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 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 upon it at one time, till all the pageants for the day appointed were played.”  The “companies” were the town guilds and the several “pageants” different scenes in Old or New Testament story.  As far as was possible each company took for its pageant some Bible story fitting to its trade; in York the goldsmiths played the three Kings of the East bringing precious gifts, the fishmongers the flood, and the shipwrights the building of Noah’s ark.  The tone of these plays was not reverent; reverence after all implies near at hand its opposite in unbelief.  But they were realistic and they contained within them the seeds of later drama in the aptitude with which they grafted into the sacred story pastoral and city manners taken straight from life.  The shepherds who watched by night at Bethlehem were real English shepherds furnished with boisterous and realistic comic relief.  Noah was a real shipwright.

“It shall be clinched each ilk and deal. 
 With nails that are both noble and new
 Thus shall I fix it to the keel,
 Take here a rivet and there a screw,
 With there bow there now, work I well,
 This work, I warrant, both good and true.”