“Upon my ryght syde y me laye Blesid lady to the y prey For the teres that ye lete Upon your swete sonnys feete Send me grace for to slepe And good dremys for to mete Slepyng wakyng til morowe daye bee Our Lorde is the frute, Our Ladye the tree Blessid be the blossom that sprange lady of thee. In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.” The inventories of parish churches and the churchwardens’ accounts show how very common a feature the religious plays--“miracle or mystery plays,” as they were generally called--were in the village life of the fifteenth century. It requires very little examination of the “books” of those plays that have come down to us to see that these sacred dramas must have been most powerful aids to the religious teaching of the Church among the simple and unlettered villagers of England, and even among the crowds which thronged great cities like Coventry, Chester, and York to witness the traditional acting of the more elaborate performances. As to their popularity there can be no question. Dramatic representations of the chief events in the life of our Lord, etc., were intimately associated with the religious purposes for which they were originally produced. They were played on Sundays and feast-days, sometimes in the aisles of the churches, in church porches and churchyards. The author of _Dives and Pauper_ says-- “Spectacles, plays, and dances that are used on great feasts, as they are done principally for devotion and honest mirth, and to teach men to love God the more, are lawful if the people be not thereby hindered from God’s service, nor from hearing God’s word, and provided that in such spectacles and plays there is mingled no error against the faith of Holy Church and good living. All other plays are prohibited, both on holidays and work-days (according to the law), upon which the gloss saith that the representation in plays at Christmas of Herod and the Three Kings, and other pieces of the Gospel, both then and at Easter and other times, is lawful and commendable.” There can be no reasonable doubt that such simple dramatic representations of the chief mysteries of religion and the principal events in our Lord’s life, or of some incidents in the lives of the saints, served to impress these truths and fix these events upon the imaginations of the audiences that witnessed them, and to make them in the true sense of the words “vivid realities.” The religious drama was the handmaiden of the Church, and it helped to instruct the people at large and, quite as much as the painted wall or pictured window, formed a “book” ever open and easily understood, graphically setting forth and illustrating truths which formed the groundwork of the formal instruction in the Sunday sermon.