For a long time, however, the mystery and miracle-plays remained the staple of theatrical performance, and until the 13th century actors as well as performers were more or less taken from the clergy. It has, indeed, been well pointed out that the offices of the church were themselves dramatic performances, and required little more than development at the hands of the mystery writers. The occasional festive outbursts, such as the Feast of Fools, that of the Boy Bishop and the rest, helped on the development. The variety of mysteries and miracles was very great. A single manuscript contains forty miracles of the Virgin, averaging from 1200 to 1500 lines each, written in octosyllabic couplets, and at least as old as the 14th century, most of them perhaps much earlier. The mysteries proper, or plays taken from the scriptures, are older still. Many of these are exceedingly long. There is a _Mystere de l'Ancien Testament_, which extends to many volumes, and must have taken weeks to act in its entirety. The _Mystere de la Passion_, though not quite so long, took several days, and recounts the whole history of the gospels. The best apparently of the authors of these pieces, which are mostly anonymous, were two brothers, Arnoul and Simon Greban (authors of the _Actes des apotres_, and in the first case of the _Passion_), c. 1450, while a certain Jean Michel (d. 1493) is credited with having continued the _Passion_ from 30,000 lines to 50,000. But these performances, though they held their ground until the middle of the 16th century and extended their range of subject from sacred to profane history--legendary as in the _Destruction de Troie_, contemporary as in the _Siege d'Orleans_--were soon rivalled by the more profane performances of the moralities, the farces and the soties. The palmy time of all these three kinds is the 15th century, while the Confrerie de la Passion itself, the special performers of the sacred drama, only obtained the licence constituting it by an ordinance of Charles VI. in 1402. In order, however, to take in the whole of the medieval theatre at a glance, we may anticipate a little. The Confraternity was not itself the author or performer of the profaner kind of dramatic performance. This latter was due to two other bodies, the clerks of the Bazoche and the Enfans sans Souci. As the Confraternity was chiefly composed of tradesmen and persons very similar to Peter Quince and his associates, so the clerks of the Bazoche were members of the legal profession of Paris, and the Enfans sans Souci were mostly young men of family. The morality was the special property of the first, the sotie of the second. But as the moralities were sometimes decidedly tedious plays, though by no means brief, they were varied by the introduction of farces, of which the jeux already mentioned were the early germ, and of which _L'Avocat Patelin_, dated by some about 1465 and certainly about 200 years subsequent to Adam de la Halle, is the