Our last records from the end of the thirteenth century indicated that the open-air Miracle had been disowned by the Church from which it sprang. Yet a century later processional performances appear on a scale that postulates strong and competent management. In the interim the control of the great cycles had passed from the clergy to the municipalities, who laid upon each guild of craftsmen within their jurisdiction the duty of presenting a play. Ecclesiastics still wrote Miracles, and occasionally performed them; but when Canterbury, London, Salisbury, Winchester, Oxford, which have no extant texts and few records of popular performances, are named against York, Wakefield, Chester, Coventry, Beverley, it is obvious that official Church influences were no longer the chief factor in the development of Miracles. For their growth and survival in England the cycles depended on the interest of powerful corporations, willing to undertake the financial responsibility of their production, and able to maintain them against the attacks of the Lollards, or change of policy in the orthodox Church, or the fickleness of fashion in entertainment. The steps by which the English guilds assumed the guardianship of the plays cannot now be retraced. We must be content to note that the undertaking called for just that combination of religious duty, civic patriotism, and pride of craft that inspired the work of the guilds in their best days. And the clergy had every reason to welcome the disciplining by secular authority of a wayward offspring that had grown beyond their own control. The York texts, which bring us nearest to the time when the corporations and guilds first took charge of the Miracles, are very creditable to the taste of the city, and must represent a reform on the irresponsible productions that scandalized the thirteenth century. The vein of coarseness in some of the comic scenes of the Towneley group seems to be due to a later recrudescence of incongruous elements.