The last great change to be noted was inevitable when the plays became popular: they were spoken in English and in rimed verse, with only an occasional tag or stage direction or hymn in Latin to show their origin. The variety of the texts, and of the modes and purposes of their representation, make it impossible to assign a date to the transition that would be generally applicable; and its course was not always the same. There is an example of direct translation from Latin in the Shrewsbury fragments,[16] which contain one actor's cues and parts in three plays: first the Latin foundation is given in verse or prose, and then its expansion in English alternate rime. That translations were sometimes made from the French is proved by the oldest known manuscript of a Miracle in English—an early fourteenth-century fragment of a Nativity play, consisting of a speech in French followed by its rendering in the same stanza form.[17] But there is no reason to doubt that as English gained ground and secularization became more complete, original composition appeared side by side with translation.[18] [Foot-note 16: Shrewsbury School MS. Mus. iii. 42 (early fifteenth century), ed. Skeat, _Academy_, January 4 and January 11, 1890. The fragments are (i) the part of the Third Shepherd in a Nativity play; (ii) the part of the third Mary in a Resurrection play; (iii) the part of Cleophas in _Pilgrims to Emmaus_. Manly, who reprints the fragments in _Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperean Drama_, vol. i (1900), pp. xxvi ff., notes that these plays seem to have been church productions rather than secular.] [Foot-note 17: See _The Times Literary Supplement_ of May 26 and June 2, 1921. The fragment comes from Bury St. Edmunds. The dialect is E. Midland.] [Foot-note 18: On the production of Miracle plays see L. Toulmin Smith, Introduction to _York Plays_, Oxford 1885; and A. F. Leach in _An English Miscellany presented to Dr. Furnivall_, pp. 205 ff.] For one other kind of writing the fourteenth century is notable—its longer commentaries on contemporary life and the art of living. In the twelfth century England had an important group of satirical poets who wrote in Latin; and in the thirteenth there are many French and a few English satires. Their usual topic was the corruption of the religious orders, varied by an occasional attack on some detail of private folly, such as extravagance in dress or the pride of serving-men. These pieces are mostly in the early French manner, where so much wit tempers the indignation that one doubts whether the satirist would be really happy if he succeeded in destroying the butts of his ridicule.