It is now necessary to consider briefly some modifications in the general character of the religious plays which accompanied or resulted from this great expansion of their scope. These all tend towards that process of secularization, that relaxing of the close bonds between the nascent drama and religious worship, which it is the especial object of this chapter to illustrate. Of capital importance is the transference of the plays from the interior of the church to its precincts, to the graveyard or the neighbouring market-place. This must have been primarily a matter of physical necessity. The growing length of the plays, the increasing elaboration of their setting, made it cumbrous and difficult to accommodate them within the walls. It is a big step from the early _Quem quaeritis, Pastores_ or _Stella_, with their simple _mises-en-scène_ of _sepulchrum_ and _praesepe_ to the complicated requirements, say, of the Fleury group, the _tabernaculum in similitudinem castelli Emaus_ for the _Peregrini_, the half-dozen _loca_, _domus_, or _sedes_ demanded by the _Suscitatio Lazari_ or the _Conversio Pauli_. Still more exigent is the _Antichristus_ with its _templum domini_ and its seven _sedes regales_, and its space in between for marchings and counter-marchings and the overthrowing of kings. Yet for a long time the church proved sufficient. The Tours _Quem quaeritis_ and some, if not all, of the Fleury plays were demonstrably played in the church. So was the Rouen _Prophetae_, and an allusion of Gerhoh of Reichersberg makes it extremely probable that so was the _Antichristus_[272]. One must conceive, I think, of the performances as gradually spreading from choir to nave, with the _domus_, _loca_, or _sedes_ set at intervals against the pillars, while the people crowded to watch in the side aisles. It is in the twelfth century that the plays first seek ampler room outside the church. Of the transition plays dealt with in the present chapter, the _Adam_, the Benedictbeuern Christmas play, the Anglo-Norman _Resurrection_, were certainly intended for the open, and the contrary cannot be affirmed in any case with the same assurance. Again, the Riga _Prophetae_ of 1204 was _in media Riga_, the Padua Passion play of 1244 was in a meadow, the _Pratum Vallis_, while in England an early thirteenth-century biographer of St. John of Beverley records a miracle wrought at a Resurrection play in the churchyard of the minster. Of the type of performance now rendered possible, a very good notion is given by the full stage directions of the _Adam_. These are so valuable a document for the history of stage management that I must take leave to excerpt from them somewhat liberally. The opening rubric recalls at once the minute stage directions of Ibsen and the counsel to the players in _Hamlet_.