Quite unique, as dealing with a contemporary ‘miracle,’ is the play of the Blessed Sacrament, performed at one of the many places bearing the name of Croxton, in the latter half of the fifteenth century. According to the manuscript, the event upon which it was based, the marvellous conversion of a Jew who attempted an outrage upon a host, took place at Heraclea in Spain, in 1461. There is, curiously enough, a late French play, quite independent of the English one, upon an exactly parallel miracle assigned to Paris and the thirteenth century[392]. The variation in the types of English miracle-plays naturally implies some variation also in the manner of representation. The normal craft cycles of the greater towns were processional in character. They were not played throughout by a single body of actors and upon a single stage; but the action was divided into a number of independent scenes, to each of which was assigned its own group of performers and its own small movable stage or ‘pageant.’ And each scene was repeated at several ‘stations’ in different parts of the city, pageant succeeding pageant in regular order, with the general effect of a vast procession slowly unrolling itself along the streets[393]. This method of playing was convenient to the distribution of the _leitourgia_ among the guilds, and was adopted in all those places, Chester, York, Beverley, and Coventry, from which our records happen to be the fullest. But it was not the primitive method and, as has been pointed out in a previous chapter, it probably arose from an attempt about the beginning of the fourteenth century to adapt the already existing miracle-plays to the distinctive feature of the festival of Corpus Christi. To this point it will be necessary to recur[394]. The processional play was rare outside England, and even in England it at no period became universal. Two at least of the great cycles that survive, the Cornish one and the _Ludus Coventriae_, as well as several smaller plays, can be clearly shown from internal evidence to have been intended for stationary performance. They do not naturally cleave asunder into distinct scenes. The same personages appear and reappear: the same properties and bits of scenery are left and returned to, often at considerable intervals. Moreover stationary performances are frequently implied by the records. At Lincoln, after the suppression of the old _visus_ of St. Anne’s processional play, the corporation ordered the performance of a ‘standing’ play ‘of some story of the Bible.’ At Newcastle, although pageants of the plays went in the procession, the actual performance seems to have been given in a ‘stead.’ This arrangement is exactly parallel to that of the Florentine _rappresentazioni_ on St. John’s day in 1454[395]. Elsewhere there was commonly enough no ‘pageant’ at all. The ‘standing’ plays may be traced at various removes from their original scene, the floor of the church[396].