In one shape or another, the drama, acting with or without written words, is always in existence, at least in the form of pantomime, even among the rudest peoples. The Church permitted a kind of half-ritual, half-dramatic representation of sacred scenes at a very early period: but we have no earlier relic of English written plays than the very brief "Harrowing of Hell" of the first half of the fourteenth century. There are a few speeches between our Lord and Satan, and our Lord and the released Hebrew patriarchs. A good idea of the plays of the fifteenth century may be obtained from the set called the "Townley Plays" because the manuscript belonged at one time to the old Jacobite family of Townley. It is thought to have been originally the property of the Abbey of Woodkirk or Widkirk near Wakefield, and one play, the second play representing the Shepherds at the birth of Christ, contains allusions to the country scenes near Woodkirk. The plays were acted on movable wooden stages, by the members of the various trade guilds, such as the Glovers, the _Barkers_ (Tanners, "There is brass on the target of _barkened_ bull's hide," says Scott in "Bonnie Dundee"), the Grocers, and so forth. The plays of one town are sometimes the basis of the plays of another town, some of those of York follow those of Wakefield, and in places Wakefield borrows from York. The authors are unknown; if they were priests, these clerics had much more of broad humour than of reverence as we understand it. No doubt the plays informed the spectators on points of the scriptural story, but the religion was highly recreative. Nothing can have been more amusing to the crowd than the spectacle of their neighbours playing all manner of highly laughable pranks by way of illustrating the gross, grumbling, reckless, impudent Cain; or the rustic waggeries of the local shepherds of Bethlehem. Even now the words of the plays make a man laugh aloud, in the comic parts, as he reads them. They are of the broadest farce, yet our mirth rises more from the character displayed than from mere practical buffoonery and clowning. The Tanners enacted the "Creation"; the Glovers, the "Death of Abel". Many Old Testament stories were played, the unaccomplished Sacrifice of Isaac, the story of Abraham, and so on, with the Birth, Crucifixion, and Ascension of our Lord, and the soliloquy and suicide of Judas, a fragment. Whoever the authors may have been, they took pains to represent the most unearthly characters as very human, though the opening soliloquy of the Deity at the Creation is orthodox and majestic. The Cherubim then take up the tale, praising the Works, especially praising Lucifer, "He is so lovely and so bright!" Lucifer enters and, accepting the praise, proposes to be Lord of all and says that the Throne becomes him rarely, taking his seat on it! The bad Angels approve in the most colloquial style; the good dissent, and the bad, sent down below, express their lively regrets.