Like the minstrels, the interlude players found a welcome not only in the halls of the great, but amongst the _bourgeois_ and the village folk. In the towns they would give their first performance before the municipality in the guildhall and take a reward[551]. Then they would find a profitable pitch in the courtyard of some old-fashioned inn, with its convenient range of outside galleries[552]. It is, however, rather surprising to find that Exeter, like Paris itself[553], had its regular theatre as early as 1348, more than two centuries before anything of the kind is heard of in London. This fact emerges from two mandates of Bishop Grandisson; one, already quoted in the previous volume, directed against the _secta_ or _ordo_, probably a _société joyeuse_, of Brothelyngham[554], the other inhibiting a satirical performance designed by the youth of the city, in disparagement of the trade and mystery of the cloth-dressers. In both cases the ‘theatre’ of the city was to be the locality of the revels[555]. Much later, in 1538, but still well in anticipation of London, the corporation of Yarmouth appear to have built a ‘game-house’ upon the garden of the recently surrendered priory[556]. In the villages the players probably had to content themselves with a stage upon the green; unless indeed they could make good a footing in the church. This they sometimes did by way of inheritance from the local actors of miracles. For while the great craft-cycles long remained unaffected by the professional competition and ultimately came to their end through quite different causes, it was otherwise in the smaller places. If the parson and the churchwardens wanted a miracle in honour of their patron saint and could readily hire the services of a body of trained actors, they were not likely to put themselves to the trouble of drilling bookless rustics in their parts. And so the companies got into the churches for the purpose of playing religious interludes, but, if the diatribes of Elizabethan Puritans may be trusted, remained there to play secular ones[557]. The rulers of the Church condemned the abuse[558], but it proved difficult to abolish, and even in 1602 the authorities of Syston in Leicestershire had to buy players off from performing in the church[559].