As the earliest notices of moralities are found in English records and as this particular development of the drama is thoroughly well represented in English texts, I may save space by confining my attention to these, merely noting as I pass the contemporary existence of precisely parallel records and texts on the continent and particularly in France[442]. The first English moralities seem to have been known as _Paternoster_ plays. Such a play is mentioned by Wyclif about 1378 as existing at York, and at some date previous to 1389 a special guild _Orationis Domini_ was founded in that city for its maintenance. The play, however, survived the guild, and was acted from time to time as a substitute for the ordinary Corpus Christi plays up to 1572. Similarly, at Beverley a _Paternoster_ play was acted by the crafts, probably in emulation of that of York, in 1469, while a third is mentioned in Lincoln documents as played at various dates from 1397 to 1521. Although all these _Paternoster_ plays are lost, their general character can be made clear. In that of York ‘all manner of vices and sins were held up to scorn and the virtues were held up to praise,’ while an incidental entry in a _computus_ shows that one division of it was known as the _ludus accidiae_. The information to be derived from Beverley is even more explicit. There were eight pageants. One was assigned to ‘Vicious,’ probably a typical representative of frail humanity, the other seven to the seven deadly sins which beset him, ‘Pryde: Invy: Ire: Avaryce: Sleweth (or Accidie): Glotony: Luxuria.’ The _Paternoster_ play seems, therefore, to have been in some fashion a dramatization of the struggle of the vices and the corresponding virtues for the soul of man, and the name given to it may be explained by the mediaeval notion that each clause of the Lord’s Prayer was of specific merit against one of the deadly sins[443]. Here then is one version of just that theme of the Conflict of Vice and Virtue noted as dominant in the moralities.