The renascence of farce in the fifteenth century will call for consideration in a later chapter. It is possible that, as is here suggested, that renascence was but the coming to light again of an earth-bourne of dramatic tradition that had worked its way beneath the ground ever since the theatres of the Empire fell. In any case, rare documents of earlier date survive to show that it was at least no absolutely sudden and unprecedented thing. The _jeux_ of Adan de la Hale, indeed, are somewhat irrelevant here. They were not farces, and will fall to be dealt with in the discussion of the popular _fêtes_ from which they derive their origin[326]. But the French farce of _Le Garçon et l’Aveugle_, ascribed to the second half of the thirteenth century, is over a hundred years older than any of its extant successors[327]. And even more interesting to us, because it is of English _provenance_ and in the English tongue, is a fragment found in an early fourteenth-century manuscript of a dramatic version of the popular mediaeval tale of Dame Siriz[328]. This bears the heading _Hic incipit interludium de Clerico et Puella_. But the significance of this fateful word _interludium_ must be left for study at a later period, when the history of the secular drama is resumed from the point at which it must now be dropped. BOOK II FOLK DRAMA Stultorum infinitus est numerus. ECCLESIASTES. CHAPTER V THE RELIGION OF THE FOLK