Weme! tord! what speke ye here in myn eeres? 
    Tell us no clerge I hold you of the freres.

It is one of the little ironies of literature that in the earliest picture of pastoral life in England the greatest pastoral writer of Rome should be quoted, not as a pastoralist, but as a magician.

Before the appearance of the angels, however, there is nothing to lead one to expect this strange display of learning.  A rougher, simpler set of countrymen it would have been hard to find in the England of Chaucer and Langland.  In the shepherd-play known as prima pastorum the comic element consists mostly in quarrels and feasting among the shepherds, but in the secunda pastorum it constitutes a regular little three-scene farce, which at its date was absolutely unique in literature.  It is thence only a step, and a very short one, to John Heywood’s interludes—­though it is a step that took more than a century to accomplish.

The first shepherd comes in complaining of the hard weather; his fingers are chapped, the storms blow from every quarter in turn.  ‘Sely shepardes,’ moreover, are put upon by any rich upstart and have no redress.  A second shepherd appears with another grumble:  ‘We sely wedmen dre mekyll wo.’  Some men, indeed, have been known to desire two wives or even three, but most would sooner have none at all.  Whereupon enters Daw, a third shepherd, complaining of portents ‘With mervels mo and mo.’  ’Was never syn noe floode sich floodys seyn’; even ’I se shrewys pepe’—­apparently a portentous omen.  At this point Mak comes on the scene.  He is a notorious bad character of the neighbourhood, who boasts himself ’a yoman, I tell you, of the king,’ and complains that his wife eats him out of house and home.  The shepherds suspect him of designs upon their flocks, so when they lie down to rest they place him the middle man of three.  As soon, however, as the shepherds are asleep—­’that may ye all here’—­Mak borrows a sheep and makes off.  Arrived at home he would like to eat the sheep at once, but he is afraid of being followed, so the animal is put in the cradle and wrapped up to resemble a baby, and Mak goes back to take his place among the shepherds.  Before long these awake and rouse Mak, who, pretending he has dreamt that Gill his wife has been brought to bed of another child, goes off home.  The shepherds miss one of their sheep and, following him, find Gill on the bed while Mak sings a lullaby at the cradle.  They proceed to search the house, Gill the while praying she may eat the child in the cradle if ever she deceived them.  They find nothing, and are about to depart when Daw insists on kissing the new baby.  Gill vows she saw the child changed by an elf as the clock struck midnight, but Mak pleads guilty and gets off with a blanketing.