A somewhat anomalous position is occupied amongst towns in which the plays were in the hands of the crafts by Lincoln. Here the task of supervision was shared with the corporation by a special guild, religious and social rather than industrial in character[369], of St. Anne. Perhaps this guild had at one time been solely responsible for the plays, and there had been a crisis such as took place at Norwich in 1527. Before that date the charge of the plays had been borne, fittingly enough, by the guild of St. Luke, composed of painters and metalworkers. But in 1527 this guild was ‘almost fully decayed,’ and upon the representation of its members the corporation agreed that in future the pageants should be distributed amongst the various crafts as was customary elsewhere. The Lincoln plays were on St. Anne’s day, but one does not find a position comparable to that of the St. Anne’s guild held by Corpus Christi guilds in other towns. As a rule such guilds concerned themselves with the Corpus Christi procession, but not with the plays. At Ipswich, indeed, the Corpus Christi guild had the whole conduct of the plays, and the craft-guilds as such were not called upon; but this Ipswich guild arose out of a reorganization of the old merchant-guild, included all the burgesses, and was practically identical with the corporation. Other towns, in which the corporation managed the plays itself, without the intervention of the craft-guilds, are Shrewsbury, New Romney, and Lydd. On the other hand, where neither the corporation nor the crafts undertook plays, it was no uncommon thing for a guild of the religious or social type to step into the breach. A series of London plays recorded in 1384, 1391, 1409, and 1411 may all be not unreasonably ascribed to a guild of St. Nicholas, composed of the ‘parish clerks’ attached to the many churches of the city. At a later date the performances of this guild seem to have become annual and they are traceable, with no very great certainty, to the beginning of the sixteenth century. They were cyclical in character, but not processional, and took place hard by the well known indifferently as Skinners’ well or Clerkenwell, amongst the orchards to the north of London. Chaucer says of his ‘parish clerk,’ the ‘joly Absolon,’ that ‘Somtyme, to shewe his lightnesse and maistrye, He pleyeth Heródës, on a scaffold hye[370].’