The expansion of the cycles caused difficulties of time, as well as of space. Without a compression of manner alien to the long-winded Middle Ages, it was sometimes impossible to get the whole of the matter to be treated within the limits of a single day. The problem was amenable to more than one solution. The performance could be spread over two or more sittings. The first recorded example of such an arrangement is at Cividale in 1298[285], but it is one that would naturally suggest itself, especially for the Easter cycle, which fell naturally enough into the two dramas of Passion and Resurrection, from which, indeed, it sprang. In the Frankfort cue-book of the fourteenth century, it is carefully noted, that if the audience are being kept too long, the _rectores_ of the play shall defer the Resurrection to a second day[286]. Another device, which does not occur so early, was to divide the cycle into parts and play them in successive years. This method was adopted with the play of the Seven Joys of Mary at Brussels[287], and English examples will be found in a later chapter[288]. The cycles required in many cases a larger number of actors than the ecclesiastical bodies, even with the aid of wandering clerks and the cloister schools, could supply. It was necessary to press the laity into the service. The Easter play, of which the thirteenth-century anchoress Wilburgis was disappointed, was acted _tam a clero quam a populo_[289]. It was a further step in the same direction when the laity themselves took over the control and financing of plays. For this one must look mainly to that most important element in mediaeval town life, the guilds. Just as the Feast of Fools passed from the hands of the clergy into those of the _sociétés joyeuses_, so did the religious drama into those of more serious confraternities. The _burgenses_ of Cahors, who in 1290 and 1302 played a _ludum de miraculis beati Marcialis_ in the graveyard of St. Martial of Limoges, not improbably belonged to a guild formed to do honour to the patron[290]. The primary purpose of such guilds as these was devotional, and if they acted plays, it was doubtless with the countenance and assistance of the clergy to whose church they were affiliated. But those more secular and literary guilds, the _puys_, also undertook to act religious plays no less than _sotties_ and farces; and in them it may be suspected that the influence of the clergy would have to contend shrewdly with that of the minstrels[291]. It is not surprising to come in time upon signs of a rivalry between lay and clerical actors. Thus, in 1378, the scholars of St. Paul’s are said to have presented a petition to Richard II, praying him to prohibit a play by some ‘unexpert people’ of the History of the Old Testament, a subject which they themselves had prepared at great expense for the ensuing Christmas. It may have been some similar dispute which led about the same date to the