Among the everyday people who came at this season in crowds to Coventry, merchants combined business with religious edification, since the fair followed hard on the plays,[655] with others the latter counted most. "If you believe not me," says a preacher in the _Hundred Merry Tales_, at the conclusion of his sermon on the Creed, "then for a more surety and sufficient authority, go your way to Coventry and there ye shall see them all played in Corpus Christi play."[656] We may take it that the dramatic illusion was notably sustained in these plays, and that they "fortified the unlearned in their faith." The men of this midland city had a passion for acting; they performed on every occasion; such adepts were they at their art that we hear of their playing at Court in 1530, at Bristol and Abingdon in 1570, and four times in Leicester between 1564 and 1571-2.[657] In this manner did Warwickshire folk prepare for Shakespeare's coming. The soil on which the Elizabethan drama grew with such luxuriance, had been tilled for well-nigh two hundred years by nameless actors, who set forth on local stages the tragedy, which for simple dignity, has no peer among the tragedies of the world. The famous Corpus Christi pageants were not of lay but of clerical origin. The church was the earliest theatre; clerks the first actors; and the earliest plays grew out of the dramatic rendering of parts of the Easter and Christmas services--a colloquy between those representing the angel at the sepulchre and the women bearing precious ointment,[658] or the singing by a choirboy "in the similitude of an angel" perched "in excelso"--aloft--of glad tidings to personators of the shepherds of Bethlehem,[659] or the successive utterance of clerks in the character of Isaiah, Habakkuk and other prophets of appropriate testimony to the coming of Christ. From such simple, liturgical sources there developed first in clerical, then in lay, hands, a religious drama which ultimately covered the whole field of Christian history from the Creation to the Day of Doom. In view of the near connection between the Coventry monks and the Lichfield canons, it is of great interest to note that the _Peregrini_--the appearance of Christ to the travellers at Emmaus--an early development of the Easter cycle, and the _Pastores_, or the Christmas Shepherds' play, were regularly performed at Lichfield under Bishop Hugh of Nonant.[660] Of other plays, called _Miracula_ or Miracles, whereof the source was not the liturgy, but rather the life of a saint, there is frequent mention; such an one in honour of S. Catherine was performed before 1119 at a monastic school at Dunstable on the road between London and Coventry. Nearly 400 years later a "miracle" on the same subject was seen in the "Little Park" just outside the walls of the midland city.