Let us try to understand the reason for this. You remember that William I conquered England in 1066—eight hundred years ago. Well, from the time that he and his followers came to this country the English race has been gradually growing into the nation to which we belong and into the sort of people we see round us every day. Even the very poorest English children nowadays go to school and can read and write. Children whose parents are not so poor learn much besides reading and writing, and thousands of the sons and daughters of rich or fairly well-to-do people go to college, and spend years of their life in study. So that now, in the twentieth century, English people are on the whole _educated_. But it has taken a very long time to arrive at such a state of things as this, and for hundreds of years after the Conquest, not only the poor, but even the richer and quite rich people were ignorant. Very few men except those who belonged to the Church studied at all. Thousands of the rest could neither read nor write. Now very naturally the Church considered that _religion_ at least must in some way be taught and explained to these masses of ignorant folk. Whatever else they knew, or did not know, it was necessary that they should understand the faith they professed. They called themselves Christians, yet how were people who could not read, to learn even the Bible stories, or anything at all about the teaching of Christ? “They might go to the churches,” you will say, perhaps, “where the Bible would be read to them by the priests.” But _that_ would not do. For remember that for hundreds of years after the Conquest the service was always read in Latin, a language which very few people except lawyers, priests, and scholars understood. No doubt, so far as they could, the clergy privately explained the teaching of the Church to as many people as they could reach. But thousands and thousands of them were never reached privately at all. They just came to church on Sundays and on Saints’ days, and went away without any real knowledge of what the services meant. It was a difficult problem, yet the monks and clergy conquered it. They thought of a way of teaching for which no books were necessary. A way moreover, by which hundreds of people could learn at the same time, merely by using their eyes and their ears. The life of Christ, the lives of the Saints, the whole Bible history, they discovered, could be _shown_ to the people in the form of plays or acted stories. The clergy should write the plays, they agreed, and the clergy themselves should act them! It was a clever idea, cleverly carried out. In various monasteries monks began to write and to arrange such plays, to be acted in the churches on special days, at special pauses in the service. At first the religious scenes they prepared were very simple, and performed chiefly in dumb show.