As the liturgical plays grew long and elaborate they ceased to be included in the church service; and gradually it came about that the churchyard, since it would admit of more spectators than the church, was deemed a more fitting place for their representation, as at Beverley, where about 1220 a crowd assembled to witness a play on the Resurrection.[661] Thence, so greatly did the laity love these shows, they passed to convenient greens and highways, somewhat to the scandal of rigider moralists, who held that, though clerks might act in church plays, it was a "sight of sin" for them to hold these performances in a more secular neighbourhood. It was probably in response to this feeling that the regular clergy--save on occasions the friars--gradually withdrew from out door plays, and that lay performers, controlled by the growing and wealthy craft-guilds, practically replaced clerks. The vulgar tongue ousted Latin, and plays proper to Easter and Christmas, linked together into one whole religious story, were acted on the great processional feasts, when daylight is longest, Corpus Christi or, less frequently, Whitsuntide. The process, still somewhat obscure to us, whereby the performances passed under secular control, would seem to be complete in the fourteenth century. Local tradition places the earliest representation at Chester in 1328, while we have more certain knowledge of them at Beverley in 1377, York in 1378 and Coventry in 1392. What part, if any, was played by the professional entertainers, wandering "mimes," minstrels and jugglers in the gradual secularization of the plays we know not, neither is there definite information about the earliest dramatic authors, save that tradition points to Ralph Higden of _Polychronicon_ fame as author of the Chester cycle. Plays, however, were so frequently revised and expanded by local folks, clerks and laymen, that they sometimes became, like the Coventry craft-plays, affairs of metrical patchwork. The last redaction these special dramas underwent was at the hands of Robert Croo, a jack-of-all-trades theatrical, by whom they were "neuly translate" or "neuly correcte" in 1535.[662] [Illustration: OLD HOUSE IN COX STREET]