MYSTERIES AND MIRACLES.--To deal with the theatre of the Middle Ages it is necessary to go further back. Without considering as drama those pious performances which the clergy organised or tolerated even in the churches from the tenth century and probably earlier, there was already a popular drama in the twelfth century outside the church whereat were performed veritable dramas drawn from holy writ or legends of saints. This developed in the thirteenth century, and in the fourteenth and fifteenth it was prolific in immense dramatic poems which needed several days for their performance. These were _Mysteries_, as they were termed, or _Miracles_, wherein comedy and tragedy were interwoven and a great deed in religious history or sometimes in national history commemorated, such as the _Mystery of the Siege of Orleans_, by Greban. FARCES; FOLLIES; MORALITIES.--The comic theatre also existed. It provided _farces_, which were really little comedies (the most famous was the _Farce of the Lawyer Patelin_); _follies_, which are farcical but good-humoured caricatures of students and clerks; and _moralities_, which are small serious dramas, interspersed with comedy, having real personages mingled with allegorical ones. The drama of the Middle Ages was very living and highly original, coming from the soil and exactly adapted to the sentiments, passions, and ideas of the people for whom and, a little later, by whom it was written. CHAPTER VI THE MIDDLE AGES: ENGLAND Literature in Latin, in Anglo-Saxon, and in French. The Ancestor of English Literature: Chaucer. THE THREE LITERATURES.--In England, prior to the Norman invasion, that is before 1066, England possessed Saxon bards who sang of the prowess of forbears or contemporaries, and monks who wrote in Latin the lives of saints or even lay histories. From 1066 must be distinguished in England three parallel literatures: the Latin literature of the cloister, the Anglo-Saxon literature, and the French literature of the conquerors. Latin literature, so far as prose is regarded, was devoted exclusively to philosophy and history; in verse the subjects are more diversified, satire more especially flourished. The poets of the French tongue wrote more particularly _chansons de geste_, and those of such songs which form what is termed the _Cycle of Artus_ are for the most part the work of poets born in England. Finally, in the different popular dialects, Saxon, Western English, etc., epic poems were written in verse, or romances, discourses, homilies, different religious work in prose. The Normans, ardent, energetic, and practical, had founded universities whence issued, endowed and equipped, those who by patriotic sentiment or taste were destined to write in Anglo-Saxon or in English.