The earliest evidence of dramatic effort in England is to be found in Latin tropes of the Easter service, composed for use in churches at different periods between 967 and the middle of the eleventh century. While these are, of course, serious in nature and function, they interest the historian of comedy because they show that the dramatic spirit was at work among our ancestors before the Anglo-Saxons had passed under the yoke of the Normans. Likewise naturally devoid of comic interest, but of vital importance in the development of a dramatic technique, are certain fragments of liturgical plays, belonging to the library of Shrewsbury School, which were published in 1890 by Professor Skeat.[1] Each of these deals, as an integer, with a crisis in the career of our Lord; and, except for occasional choruses and passages from the liturgy in Latin, the plays are English--the English, in fact, translating and enlarging upon the Latin of the service. Though the manuscript is probably not older than 1400, it is a fragment, as Professor Manly has said, of a series of plays of much earlier date, which were "performed in a church on the days and in the service celebrating events of which the plays treat."[2] These fragments are of great importance as constituting a link between the dramatic tropes of the tenth and eleventh centuries and the scriptural pageants presented at a later period outside the church: first by the clergy, with the assistance, perhaps, of townspeople (as may have been the case when a Resurrection play was given in the churchyard of St. John's, Beverley, about 1220); afterward by the civic authorities and the several gilds when church plays had come to be acted commonly in the streets, that is, after the reinstitution of the feast of Corpus Christi in 1311.