No less difficult to determine than the place and time at which the Easter sepulchre itself was devised, are those at which the _Quem quaeritis_, attached to it, stood forth as a drama. That the two first appear together can hardly be taken as evidence that they came into being together. The predominance of German and French versions of the _Quem quaeritis_ may suggest an origin in the Frankish area: and if the influence of the Sarum use and the havoc of service-books at the Reformation may between them help to account for the comparative rarity of the play in these islands, no such explanation is available for Italy and Spain. The development of the religious drama in the peninsulas, especially in Italy, seems to have followed from the beginning lines somewhat distinct from those of north-western Europe. But between France and Germany, as between France and England, literary influences, so far as clerkly literature goes, moved freely: nor is it possible to isolate the centres and lines of diffusion of that gradual process of accretion and development through which the _Quem quaeritis_ gave ever fuller and fuller expression to the dramatic instincts by which it was prompted. The _clerici vagantes_ were doubtless busy agents in carrying new motives and amplifications of the text from one church to another. Nor should it be forgotten that, numerous as are the versions preserved, those which have perished must have been more numerous still, so that, if all were before us, the apparent anomaly presented by the occurrence of identical features in, for instance, the plays from Dublin and Fleury, and no others, would not improbably be removed. The existence of this or that version in the service-books of any one church must depend on divers conditions; the accidents of communication in the first place, and in the second the laxity or austerity of governing bodies at various dates in the licensing or pruning of dramatic elaboration. The simplest texts are often found in the latest manuscripts, and it may be that because their simplicity gave no offence they were permitted to remain there. A Strassburg notice suggests that the ordering of the _Quem quaeritis_ was a matter for the discretion of each individual parish, in independence of its diocesan use[99]; while the process of textual growth is illustrated by a Laon _Ordinarium_, in which an earlier version has been erased and one more elaborate substituted[100]. Disregarding, however, in the main the dates of the manuscripts, it is easy so to classify the available versions as to mark the course of a development which was probably complete by the middle of the twelfth and certainly by the thirteenth century. This development affected both the text and the dramatic interest of the play. The former is the slighter matter and may be disposed of first[101].