under Henry VII. in 1505 and for Henry VIII. in 1516; and the archers of the Maying in the time of Henry VI. are suggestive of the Robin Hood as an accepted figure for some kind of pageant in the middle of the fifteenth century, when Bower was writing of "comedies and tragedies," mentioned above. The pageants and probably the plays of Robin Hood are still alive in the seventeenth century and later. Their dramatic quality was of a very primitive sort, but the plot, wherever existent, displayed sequence of motive and effect. The popular dramatist had, as in the Sacrament play and saints' plays, learned how to magnify a hero by making him the pivot of the action, how to interest the spectators in the affairs and manners of their own class, how to produce a comic effect by means of dialogue, as well as by the humour of the situation. But he knew nothing of the development of character, and in that respect, without doubt, was inferior to the contemporary author of the moral play. Passing the Hox Tuesday play, of which we cannot be sure that it was anything more than a crude and entirely serious representation of the historic massacre which it commemorated, and of which no adequate account survives, we may turn with profit to the most popular and long-lived of English festival dramas, the St. George play. Of this Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps says that numerous versions are used in the north of England, and that they are doubtless a degraded form of an old "mystery."[35] Of course, he means legendary miracle or saint's play. Ward more accurately describes this rural drama as a combination of miracle and processional pageant. As the latter, it appears frequently to have formed part of a mumming or disguising, and was early associated with the morris-dance of May-day or Christmas. [Collier, _Hist._, vol. I., p. 29.] The first indubitable mention of a St. George pageant is in 1416, and would appear to refer to a "splendid dumb show" rather than a play, which, as Caxton tells us, was presented for the entertainment of Emperor Sigismund of Almayne when he "brought and gave the heart of St. George for a great and precious relique to King Harry the fifth." It is, however, more than probable that the soldier saint had figured in saints' plays, and in popular play and pageant, long before this time. He had been honoured in the eastern church even in the fourth century, and in England there had been churches and monasteries devoted to him before the Norman invasion. On account of his fabled services in the crusade he was already the patron of individual knights, and orders of chivalry and even of kingdoms, when Edward III., in the years 1348-50, built the chapel in his honour at Windsor, confirmed him as the saint and champion of England and instituted the order that still bears his name. It is likely, indeed, that the _ludi_ exhibited before the same monarch at Christmas, 1348, were to some extent of St. George, for we read that the dragon figured