Indications of the authorship of plays are very scanty. John Bale has preserved a list of his own plays, some at least of which were acted in mediaeval fashion. It may perhaps be assumed that Nicholas Udall, afterwards author of _Ralph Roister Doister_, wrote the play performed at Braintree in 1534, while he was vicar there. At Bassingbourne in 1511 one John Hobarde, ‘brotherhood priest,’ was paid ‘for the play-book.’ In this and in several of the following cases it is impossible to determine whether an author or merely a copying scribe is in question. The corporation of Beverley employed Master Thomas Bynham, a friar preacher, to write ‘banis’ for their plays in 1423. At Reading we find Mr. Laborne ‘reforming’ the Resurrection play about 1533. The later Cornish play of the Creation of the World was ‘wryten’ by William Jordan in 1611, and that of St. Meriasek by ‘dominus Hadton’ in 1504. At Bungay William Ellys was paid in 1558 ‘for the interlude and game-book[416],’ and Stephen Prewett, a priest at Norwich, for some labour about the matter of a game-book in 1526. This same Stephen Prewett had a fee from the Norwich grocers ‘for makyng of a new ballet’ in 1534. One of the extant Coventry plays was ‘nevly correcte’ and the other ‘nevly translate’ by Robert Croo in 1535. The name ‘Thomas Mawdycke’ and the date 1591 are written at the head of some songs belonging to the former. In 1566 Thomas Nycles set a song for the drapers. Robert Croo or Crowe seems to have made himself generally useful in connexion with the Coventry plays. In 1563 the smiths paid him for ‘ij leves of our pley boke.’ In 1557 he wrote the ‘boke’ for the drapers, and between 1556 and 1562 further assisted them by playing God, mending the ‘devell’s cottes,’ and supplying ‘iij worldys’ for burning and a hat for the Pharisee. A later Coventry playwright was John Smith of St. John’s College, Oxford, who wrote the ‘new play’ of the Destruction of Jerusalem in 1584 for a sum of £13 6_s._ 8_d._ The fifteenth-century Croxton play has the initials ‘R. C.’ One of the plays in the Digby manuscript ‘Ihon Parfre ded wryte.’ The three others have the initials ‘M. B.,’ and against the _Poeta_ of the prologue to one of them a later hand has written in the margin ‘Myles Blomfylde.’ I repeat the caution that some at least of these names may be those of mere copyists. Miles Blomfield has been identified with a monk of Bury of that name. As he was born in 1525 he obviously was not the original author of the Digby plays, which are probably of the fifteenth century. A much greater monk of Bury, John Lydgate, has been claimed as the author of the _Ludus Coventriae_, but there does not seem to be any real evidence for this[417]. On the other hand I see no reason to doubt the old Chester tradition which connects the plays of that city with the name of Randulph Higden, author of the _Polychronicon_. The story is very fairly coherent, and the date (1328) which it assigns for the plays falls within the