Isolated performances of plays picked out of a cycle, or upon subjects usually treated in a cycle, are, however, not unknown. One or more of the Chester plays occasionally formed part of the civic entertainment of a royal or noble personage. When Henry VII visited Winchester in 1486, the schoolboys of the two great abbeys of Hyde and St. Swithin’s gave a _Christi Descensus ad Inferos_ before him at dinner. At York the acting of an ‘interlude of St. Thomas the Apostle’ on a St. Bartholomew’s eve towards the end of the reign of Henry VIII became the occasion for a papist demonstration. This might have been either the Incredulity of Thomas (Play xlii) or the Apparition of the Virgin to St. Thomas in India (Play xlvi) from the Corpus Christi cycle. At York, also, there was, in the hands of a Corpus Christi guild, a distinct play, frequently performed between 1446 and the Reformation, called the Creed play. This was apparently an expansion of a motive found in the Pentecost scene at Chester and probably at Coventry, but not at York itself, wherein, after the coming of the Holy Ghost, each of the apostles in turn enunciates one of the articles of the so-called Apostles’ creed. At Hull, where I find no trace of a cycle, the Trinity guild of sea-faring men had their play of Noah. At Lincoln, a play of Tobit, which does not actually, so far as I know, form part of the Old Testament section of any English cycle[386], was substituted for the regular Corpus Christi play after the Reformation. Naturally such exceptional performances became more common in the decadence of the religious drama[387]. Thus the very scratch series of plays shown before the earl of Kildare at Dublin, in the Christmas of 1528, included, besides other contributions both sacred and secular, an Adam and Eve by the tailors and a Joseph and Mary by the carpenters. The choice of these subjects was evidently motived by their appropriateness to the craft representing them. Similarly, when John Bale was bishop of Ossory in 1553, he had performed at the market-cross of Kilkenny, on the day of the proclamation of Queen Mary, a short fragment of a cycle consisting of a _Prophetae_, a Baptism, and a Temptation. One fancies that this strange protagonist of the Reformation must have had in his mind some quaint verbal analogy between ‘John Bale’ and ‘John Baptist,’ for he states that he also wrote a dramatic _Vita D. Ioannis Baptistae_ in fourteen books. Nor is this the only example of the treatment of a subject, merely episodic in the Corpus Christi cycles, in a distinct and elaborate play. The invaluable Digby manuscript contains a similar expansion, from the East or West Midlands, of the story of Mary Magdalen. It follows the narrative of the _Golden Legend_, and introduces the familiar scenes of the Raising of Lazarus, the Feast in the House of Simon the Leper, the _Quem quaeritis_, and the _Hortulanus_, preceding these with episodes of the life of the Magdalen _in gaudio_,