While these performances were thus falling under the censure of the church authorities, they were taken up by the laity, and under their management both the plays and the machinery for acting them underwent considerable extension. The municipal guilds contained in their constitution a considerable amount of religious spirit. They were great benefactors of the churches in cities and municipal towns, and had usually some parts of the sacred edifice appropriated to them, and they may, perhaps, have taken a part in these performances, while they were still confined to the church. These guilds, and subsequently the municipal corporations, took them entirely into their own hands. Certain annual religious festivals, and especially the feast of _Corpus Christi_, were still the occasions on which the plays were acted, but they were taken entirely from the churches, and the performances took place in the open streets. Each guild had its particular play, and they acted on movable stages, which were dragged along the streets in the procession of the guild. These stages appear to have been rather complicated. They were divided into three floors, that in the middle, which was the principal stage, representing this world, while the upper division represented heaven, and that at the bottom hell. The mediæval writers in Latin called this machinery a _pegma_, from the Greek word πῆγμα, a scaffold; and they also applied to it, for a reason which is not is easily seen, unless the one word arose out of a corruption of the other, that of _pagina_, and from a further corruption of these came into the French and English languages the word _pageant_, which originally signified one of these movable stages, though it has since received secondary meanings which have a much wider application. Each guild in a town had its pageant and its own actors, who performed in masks and costumes, and each had one of a series of plays, which were performed at places where they halted in the procession. The subjects of these plays were taken from Scripture, and they usually formed a regular series of the principal histories of the Old and New Testaments. For this reason they were generally termed _mysteries_, a title already explained; and among the few series of these plays still preserved, we have the "Coventry Mysteries," which were performed by the guilds of that town, the "Chester Mysteries," belonging to the guilds in the city of Chester, and the "Towneley Mysteries," so called from the name of the possessor of the manuscript, but which probably belonged to the guilds of Wakefield in Yorkshire.