fulminations were directed against perversions of divine worship, mock festivals and profane plays with the monstrous disguisings or mummings involved,[9] there is also no doubt that the prohibition came speedily to apply to the use of masks and other disguises in sacred plays, and then to the presentation of plays in church for any other than devotional purposes. Such for instance was the _animus_ with which William of Wadington, in the _Manuel des Pechiez_, about 1235, called attention to the scandal of the foolish clergy who, in disguise, acted miracles '_ky est defendu en decré_.' To play the Resurrection in church, _pur plus aver devociun_, was permissible; but to gather assemblies in the streets of the cities after dinner, when fools more readily congregate, that was a sacrilege. At this early date, we may be sure that the kind of drama which was extruded from the church had already invested such of its subjects as were biblical or legendary with the realistic and comic qualities which made for popularity, and so was fitting itself for adoption by the crafts. Indeed, we are told by a thirteenth-century historian of the Church of York,[10] that, at a date which must be set near 1220, there was a representation _as usual_ of the Lord's Ascension by masked performers, in words and acting; and that a large crowd of both sexes was assembled, led there by different impulses, _some by mere pleasure and wonder_, others for a religious purpose. This was the play in the churchyard of St. John's, Beverley, to which I have referred before. The _miracula_ of the story cited by Wright[11] and conjecturally assigned to the thirteenth century, had also passed beyond the sheer didactic stage, for the auditors, who resorted to the spectacle in the "meadow above the stream," expressed their appreciation _nunc silentes nunc cachinnantes_. When, after the reinstitution of the festival of Corpus Christi, in 1311, these plays began to be a function of the gilds, their secularization, even though the clerks still participated in the acting, was but a question of time; and the occasional injection of crude comedy was a natural response to the civic demand. It would be erroneous, however, to imagine that the church abandoned the drama when the town took it up: the church maintained a liturgical drama, in some places, until well into the sixteenth century; and as late as 1572 individual clergymen are condemned for playing interludes in churches.[12]