a ‘tree’ which may have been the tree of knowledge from their Whitsun play of Paradise, but which was converted by festoons of fruit and spicery into an emblem of their trade[472]. Aberdeen seems to have been distinguished by having two great mimetic processions maintained by the guilds. The interpretation of the data is rather difficult, but apparently the ‘Haliblude’ play, which existed in 1440 and 1479, had given way by 1531 to a procession in which pageants of the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Coronation of the Virgin were eked out by others of Saints Sebastian, Laurence, Stephen, Martin, Nicholas, John, and George. The other procession seems originally to have been introduced as an episode in a play of the Presentation in the Temple on Candlemas day. Its ‘personnes’ or ‘pageants’ are such as might furnish out the action of a short Nativity cycle, together with ‘honest squiares’ from each craft, ‘wodmen,’ and minstrels. But in this case also the play seems to have vanished early in the sixteenth century, while the procession certainly endured until a much later date. There are no other English religious dumb-shows, outside those of Corpus Christi day, so elaborate as the Aberdeen Candlemas procession. On the same day at Beverley the guild of St. Mary carried a pageant of the Virgin and Child with Saints Joseph and Simon and two angels holding a great candlestick[473]. The guild of St. Helen, on the day of the Invention of the Cross (May 3), had a procession with a boy to represent the saint, and two men bearing a cross and a shovel[474]. The guild of St. William of Norwich paraded a knave-child between two men holding candles in honour of the youthful martyr[475]. In the Whitsuntide procession at Leicester walked the Virgin and Saint Martin, with the twelve Apostles[476]. More interesting is the pageant of St. Thomas the Martyr on December 29 at Canterbury, with the saint on a cart and knights played by children and an altar and a device of an angel and a ‘leder bag for the blode[477].’ Probably this list could be largely increased were it worth while[478]. The comparatively modern elements in the Corpus Christi pageantry of Coventry, Shrewsbury, and Dublin may be paralleled from the eighteenth-century festival of the Preston guild merchant on or near St. John Baptist’s day with its Crispin and Crispinian, Bishop Blaize, Adam and Eve, Vulcan, and so forth[479], or the nineteenth-century wool trade procession on St. Blasius’ day (February 3), at Bradford, in which once more Bishop Blaize, with the Jason and Medea of the Golden Fleece, appears[480]. It is noticeable how, as such functions grow more civic and less religious, the pageants tend to become distinctively emblematic of the trades concerned. The same feature is to be observed in the choice of subjects for the plays given by way of entertainment to the earl of Kildare at Dublin in 1528.