Each great nobleman had around him a number of officers like a royal court--chamberlains, chancellors, and others. Besides these, he kept in his employ companies of minstrels, jugglers, tumblers, and players, who sang and displayed their tricks for the amusement of the company during their meals. Travelling companies of minstrels and jugglers wandered over the country, giving performances in the various noblemen's houses. Tregetours, or conjurers, were in high favour. There were both male and female tumblers, who went about together in companies, called gleman's companies; they also amused their audiences with buffoonery of all kinds. Other men made it their profession to train bears, apes, and horses to perform tricks. The spectators always connected these tricks with witchcraft, and supposed them to be done by means of magic. Theatres did not exist in those days; but there were mysteries or miracle plays, which formed a great part of the amusement of the people during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Their origin was no doubt purely religious, and their object was to illustrate passages of Scripture and teach moral lessons. They were performed in churches, or on stages erected in the churchyards and the fields, and sometimes on movable stages in the streets. They were written by monks, and were performed sometimes by monks themselves, sometimes by the members of a trade-gild. They seem very soon to have lost most of their religious character, and to have become little more than a means of amusement for the people; to secure this better, they degenerated into rather coarse comedies. Three complete sets of these old mysteries still exist, and in all we see the same desire for comic effect, which led the authors to take liberties with the text of Scripture, so as to be able to introduce comic incidents. Noah's wife is a favourite character, and is endowed with a very obstinate temper, so that Noah has great difficulty in getting her into the ark. Devils played an important part, and were represented with horns, tails, claws, and terrible masks. Everything possible was done to make them awful in the eyes of the women and children. Masks were much used in the performance; the women's parts were acted by men or boys wearing masks. The play as a whole cannot have produced any very serious impression, though it was by no means entirely deficient in religious feeling. But the comic element predominated, and gave rise to the most boisterous merriment. We cannot wonder therefore that the preachers and moralists of the day regarded the miracle plays with disfavour, and spoke of them in the same way as the Puritans of later date did of the theatres.