They had revised the text, and had a new and Protestant version of the preliminary ‘banns’ prepared. Copies of the text appear to have been got ready for yet another performance in 1600, but the local annalists record that Henry Hardware, then mayor, ‘would not suffer any Playes.’ In one or two cities, new plays, dealing with apocryphal or other merely semi-religious themes, were substituted for the old ones. Thus at Lincoln a ‘standing play’ of the story of Tobit was given in 1564 and 1567; and in Coventry, where the old cycle had been ‘laid down’ in 1580, an Oxford scholar was hired in 1584 to write a semi-religious semi-historical drama of the Destruction of Jerusalem. In 1591, the Conquest of the Danes and the History of King Edward the Confessor were proposed as alternatives for this. By the end of the sixteenth century all the cycles of which most is known had come to an end. The smaller places—Chelmsford in 1574, Braintree in 1579, Bungay in 1591—had sold off their stock of playing-garments. For such dramatic entertainment as the provinces were still to get, they must look to travelling companies taking their summer vacation from the metropolis. Miracle-plays during the seventeenth century were a mere survival. They lingered in distant Cornwall and at Kendal in the hill country of the north; and had been replaced by morals, themselves almost equally obsolete, at Manningtree. The last religious play recorded in England is a quite exceptional one, given at the end of James I’s reign before Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, and an audience which numbered thousands at Ely Place in Holborn. In giving some account of the distribution of the various types of religious play throughout England during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, I am dispensed from any obligation to be exhaustive by the fact that the greater municipal dramas at least have already been the subject of more than one fairly adequate discussion. All I shall attempt will be a brief general summary of the main points which emerge from the more or less detailed local notices collected in a lengthy appendix.