Innocent barred from the churches were primarily the Feasts of Fools, and the like[332]. And as a matter of fact the _glossa ordinaria_ to the decretal by Bernard de Bottone, which itself dates from about 1263, so interprets the words of the Pope as expressly to allow of Christmas and Easter representations calculated to stimulate devotion[333]. Yet there would have been no need for the gloss to have been written had not an opposite interpretation also been current. It was perhaps on the strength of the decree that another reformer, Robert Grosseteste, justified his action when in 1244 he directed his archdeacons to exterminate, so far as they could, the _miracula_, which he put on the same level as May-games and harvest-Mays, or the _scotales_ of the folk[334]. And it is certainly appealed to before the end of the thirteenth century in the _Manuel des Péchés_ of the Anglo-Norman William of Waddington[335]. Robert Grosseteste presumably, and William of Waddington specifically, objected to _miracula_ even out of doors, which is surely stretching the words of Innocent III beyond what they will reasonably bear. In any case the austere view of the matter was not that which prevailed. The lax discipline of the ‘Babylonish captivity’ at Avignon, which allowed the Feast of Fools to grow up unchecked through the fourteenth century, was not likely to boggle at the plays. The alleged indulgence, not without modern parallels[336], of Clement VI to the spectators of the Chester plays and the performance of a _Stella_ given by the English bishops in honour of their continental colleagues at the council of Constance in 1417[337] are two out of many proofs that the later mediaeval Church found no difficulty in accommodating itself to the somewhat disconcerting by-product of its own liturgy[338]. Such opposition to the religious drama as can be traced after the thirteenth century came not from the heads of the Church but from its heretics. It is chiefly represented by a curious _Tretise of miraclis pleyinge_ which dates from the end of the fourteenth century and may safely be referred to a Wyclifite origin[339]. The burden of it is the sin of making ‘oure pleye and bourde of tho myraclis and werkis that God so ernestfully wrouȝt to us.’ On this note the anonymous preacher harps rather monotonously, and adds that ‘myraclis pleyinge ... makith to se veyne siȝtis of degyse, aray of men and wymmen by yvil continaunse, eyther stiryng othere to letcherie and of debatis.’ Like Gerhoh of Reichersberg, he thinks the plays ‘gynnys of the dyvul to drawen men to the byleve of Anti-Crist.’ He elaborately confutes the views that they are for the worship of God, or the more compassion of Christ, or lead to conversion. He will not allow that ‘summe recreatioun men moten han, and bettere it is or lesse yvele that thei han theyre recreacoun by pleyinge of myraclis than bi pleyinge of other japis.’ The analysis of the piece need not, perhaps, be pushed further. The opinions