Pollard's exhaustive account as given in the introduction to the Early English Text Society's _Macro Plays_ (Extra Series, xci.). Boiled down, the facts are these, so far as they relate to the two Macro Plays included in the present volume, _Mankind_ and _Respublica_. _Mankind_ now forms part of a volume which in the eighteenth century contained other plays and treatises in manuscript, with which we need not now concern ourselves, except to remark the strange juxtaposition of old moralities, a Juvenal, a treatise on alchemy, etc. When sold at auction in 1820 the collection was broken up, and three plays, _Mankind_, _Wisdom_, and _The_ _Castle of Perseverance_, bound afresh in one volume. Other points of interest are given by Mr. Pollard, but which I pass by as not germane to the present purpose. The manuscript of _Mankind_ and _Wisdom_ are contemporaneous; and were, says Mr. Pollard, in the same ownership before the end of the fifteenth century. This is in all likelihood a fact; but that the ownership was a purely personal one is not so clear as appears at first sight, or for the reasons stated by Mr. Pollard. It is now necessary for me to quote Mr. Pollard's own words in order to make my suggestions quite clear. He says: "It is ... possible that both this play and ... [_Wisdom_] were written in different parts of a miscellany-book belonging to Monk Hyngham, though the fact that his doggerel inscription of ownership is written after each of them inclines one at first to think that they were separate units among his possessions. As it occurs at the end of this play [_Mankind_], the inscription ... has been partly erased and partly cut through, the lower part of the leaf being supplied with modern paper. Enough, however, of the inscription remains to make it fairly certain that it reads like that at the end of the next play: O liber si quis cui constas forte queretur Hyngham q_ue_ monacho dices super o_mn_ia, co_n_sto. This apparently is to be translated (I owe the suggestion to Dr. Warner): 'O book, if any one by chance asks to whom do you belong, you are to say I belong to Hyngham, above everything which a monk can own.' Who Monk Hyngham was we do not know. He may have belonged to Bury-St.-Edmunds, whence some of the Macro manuscripts are said to have come." Thus far also Mr. Pollard.