period of Higden’s monastic life at St. Werburgh’s abbey. It must, of course, be borne in mind that the notion of authorship is only imperfectly applicable to the miracle-plays. The task of the playwrights was one less of original composition than of adaptation, of rewriting and rearranging existing texts so as to meet the needs of the particular performances in which they were interested. Obviously this was a process that could be carried out with more or with less individuality. There were slavish adapters and there were liberal adapters. But on the whole the literary problem of the plays lies in tracing the evolution of a form rather than in appreciating individual work. Even when written, the plays, if periodically performed, were subject to frequent revision, motived partly by the literary instinct for furbishing up, partly by changing conditions, such as the existence of a varying number of craft-guilds ready to undertake the responsibility for a scene[418]. Further alterations, on theological rather than literary grounds, were naturally called for at the Reformation. Thus Jordan’s Cornish _Creation of the World_ is clearly based upon the older play printed by Mr. Norris. The book of the Norwich grocers contains two versions of their play of Paradise, the later of which, ‘newely renvid accordynge unto yᵉ Skrypture,’ was substituted for the earlier in 1565. The Towneley manuscript has two alternative versions of the _Pastores_. That of York has a fragmentary second version of the Coronation of the Virgin, and when read with the records affords much evidence of the dropping, insertion, and rearrangement of scenes, and of doctrinal revision during the sixteenth century. At Coventry the local annals mention ‘new playes’ in 1520, fifteen years before the existing texts were ‘nevly correcte’ and ‘translate’ by Robert Crowe.