Category Archives: History

An Exciting Announcement: York Mystery Plays 2026!

Posted on by under Drama, Historic, History, Mystery Plays, News, Production, York Mystery Plays 2026

Update: We are pleased to announce details of our casting/auditions process for The War in Heaven is now live on our Jobs & Opportunities page. We are also still accepting expressions of interest for our backstage & offstage teams.

We’re back!

It’s been a challenging series of years for us, as it has been for many small theatre groups across the UK, but we are thrilled to tell you that we don’t just have news to tease, we have exciting news right now.

This summer, the Mystery Plays are returning to the city centre of York, and HIDden will be with them!

The Mystery Plays is, effectively, the parent stem of HIDden Theatre. We exist because our founders were involved with a performance in the 2010 plays, and we decided we wanted to keep exploring and presenting historic drama from the past. So we came back in 2014, when the current team started working together. 

We all have incredibly happy memories of that experience, and have hoped circumstances would allow us to return. This year, after all the difficulties of the past years- through a pandemic and many changes of personal circumstance- we’re thrilled beyond measure to be working on The War in Heaven (traditionally The Fall of the Angels). It’s the first play in the cycle, so we’ll be leading the parade! It’s quite an exciting play, depicting both Heaven and Hell, and sets up the struggle between good and evil.

Along the way to production, we’re looking forward to sharing not just our journey, but also some history of the plays and the medieval world with you, and we’ll also be pointing out what else is going on, because this year it’s not just two days of performance, it’s an entire festival. So there’ll be lots of ways to discover the Mystery Plays… and lots of ways to get involved.

On that note… we are going to be acting as the “guild of waifs and strays”. That means that if you’re someone who has an interest in participating in the Plays, but you’re not a member of a group that’s already involved, we’re here! Whether you love to perform or you’re interested in backstage projects like building or costuming, or you’d like to be part of our waggon crew, there are going to be lots of opportunities. Get in touch!

The full cycle of plays will be performed on 28 June and 5 July, with the full festival arranged around those dates. We hope to see you there!

An Art History of “The War in Heaven”

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, History, Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

This will make the most sense if you can take a look at our Pinterest board by the same title while you read this! https://www.pinterest.com/hiddentheatre/the-war-in-heaven-ymp-2026/an-art-history-of-the-war-in-heaven/

Let me preface this all by saying, I am not an art historian. I’m just someone who enjoys art, galleries and museums, and I find art useful as a window into how people look at their world and their stories. There’s a theatrical, narrative quality to a lot of historic art, and it says so much about the society which created it. As we head into the design phase of working on “The War in Heaven”, I like to take some inspiration from the art surrounding it- not to recreate imagery (ours will not be a medieval Sunday in the Park with George), but to consider: what symbolism follows a biblical tale? How did medieval people imagine it, versus Renaissance citizens, versus people today? What visual cues are inescapable, and what’s changed, and why?

The “Fall of the Rebel Angels”, as it’s almost universally titled in art, has been fairly popular inspiration for painters for the better part of a millennium. That alone is interesting, because the story in the Bible is relatively thin, scattered across several books; the art, like our play, is reflecting the traditions that have accrued around it, far more than what the text itself says.

The earliest images that I was able to find are from illuminated manuscripts, and date to the 13th century. There is a consistent vocabulary in displaying the Fall of the Angels, with God central, in some sort of sphere, surrounded by many angel faces, and below him, an enormous, open hellmouth into which the fallen drop. One mid-14th century painter, known only as the Master of the Rebel Angels (and known only from two pieces) departs from this to show one side of heaven as empty choir stalls at the very top of the work, while the dominant image is a mixture of robed angels and black daemons falling towards an orb that looks rather like a rotten piece of fruit, sucking them into holes. It’s legitimately one of the creepier iterations of the story. 

These early renditions have a fairly consistent colour palette: golds, blues, reds, browns. A century later the colors expand vastly, and the symmetry that largely frames the majority of the earlier paintings disappears, while the art itself moves from manuscript to displayable painting. Nicholas Frances’ “The Fall of the Angels” is almost Easter-egg pretty with pastels and a soft, velvet quality to the paint. In truth, his fallen angels look more like they’ve fallen asleep, and the way the good angels appear to be pushing them down a river to the daemons below reminds me a bit of nineteenth century log-drivers in America’s upper midwest. Similarly colourful, Neri diBicci’s two iterations of “Fallen Angels” strike me as somehow science-fictional, as if St Michael is fighting dragons on Mars. It’s worth noting, though, that while colourful and somewhat fantastic, there is what I can only describe as a calmness to these paintings. They aren’t overly crowded, the motions portrayed aren’t frantic, and you can stop and look at the details without feeling overwhelmed. They’re also, quite honestly, about as peaceful as a fall into Hell could be.

Skip ahead again and that all changes. The 16th century Falls are, for the most part, crowded, messy, busy, chaotic, detailed. Hieronymus Bosch, whose “Garden of Earthly Delights” triptych may not depict the Fall but is one of the most gloriously creative interpretations of Heaven, Earth, and Hell ever painted, created a “Fall of the Angels” that, while both metaphorically and literally pale by comparison, includes some of his signature features: weird human-animal hybrids, flying monsters, and the odd suggestion that musical instruments may be terrifying. He in turn inspired Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whose “Fall of the Rebel Angels” is something you can stare at for hours and keep finding something new. What I find most fascinating about it is that his St Michael, although the “hero” of the narrative, dressed in golden armour with a blue cape flying behind him- gold and blue being two of the colours traditionally associated with all things heavenly- has long, skinny limbs, joints accentuated by armour, and an oddly small head, all of which together makes me think of a stick insect or a praying mantis. It’s an interesting waypoint, far more complex and distressing than the era preceding it, but still decidedly unrealistic and removed from humanity.

Whatever flesh Bruegel’s angel Michael may lack, the Renaissance artists, who really seem to have found the Fall of Angels inspirational, will make up for it, for their versions are seas of flesh. Their St Michaels are, almost to a one, clad in blue armour and red capes, armed with swords and shields, and they’ve been putting in a lot of hours at the gym. So have the fallen angels, who are now stripped of wings, and grotesquery… and clothing. (This is one aspect which, I promise, will not be featured in our Mystery Play!) This was a period when art became fascinated with the details of human anatomy, with the angles of twisted limbs and the colours and contours of flesh, muscle, and sinew, and for whom the ideal body, whether earthly or angelic, allowed for the maximum study of these aspects.

Other iterations moved beyond framed paintings for the wall in this period: a version of the Fall was designed (though not completed) for the ceiling of the chapel at Versailles, while the story also moves into the realm of sculpture. The detail on these carved works is astonishing, and while they keep some of the style of paintings in their era- a pleated tunic for St Michael, angels and daemons naked and buff- they also offer an item which returns them to their medieval roots in the forms of hellmouths, with the round ears and upturned snouts of a Chinese dragon, or a small lapdog. They are every bit as extravagant as the paintings, giving a sense of the chaos and density of bodies that was envisioned for this episode in the mid-1700s.

Prints abound during the later Georgian and Victorian period, modelled on the paintings of the previous century, now presented in black-and-white, suitable for mass distribution. Unto themselves, they seem less of a creative leap in style, more a carrying-on of Early Modern artistic tradition. My favourite discovery from this century, however, uses the Fall as a parody. It’s a cartoon of Queen Victoria and many of the politicians of her day. The good angels are now respectably clad in long robes and have feathered wings, while the fallen have leathery wings and wear loincloths (presumably a Victorian equation with barbarism)… but almost all of them have the beards and muttonchops that were fashionable in the period and seem, to modern eyes, most decidedly un-angelic! I love it because it shows the familiarity that Victorian audiences had with the story of the Fallen Angels, and also with the previous centuries’ artwork depicting it, since parody only works if you understand the reference points it’s using.

Narrative art (rather than abstract) may be slightly less fashionable these days that in centuries past, and biblical stories no longer dominate the vocabulary from which artists can draw. Nevertheless, a quick perusal of sites like Pinterest or Etsy will show that “The War in Heaven” is still inspiring artists, most of whose work contain references to the earlier depictions. They’re us: carrying on a centuries-old tradition, mining its cues and iconography for inspiration, and then building something new for the 21st century. And that’s why I keep going back to the artwork when trying to brainstorm how our play should look.

A Different Trinity: History, Law & Drama

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Drama, Farces, History

#FridayFarces is back, this time with a consideration of how history, drama, and legal proceedings can interact to instruct as well as entertain us.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a person who doesn’t enjoy drama in some form or another. For most people these days, it’s television and cinema; whether you love television or going to the opera, the point is that the very idea of drama is something that virtually everyone finds appealing. (Tell anyone that you work in theatre or television and watch their reaction.) Law seems to come in for a similar, probably equally misplaced, aura of glamour: scroll through your television menu and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any hour of the day when some legally-based show isn’t airing- in some places there are entire channels dedicated to airing legal cases. Law is drama, in most people’s eyes. 

History sadly comes in for a different response. Only yesterday, a young family friend still in university was saying how much she “can’t get into” history. I understand where she’s coming from: in school, we teach historically abominably, a list of tedious facts purged entirely of humanity and intrigue. But history is all about drama, people, and law; and the drama of law can be a gateway drug when it comes to learning to love history.

I was fortunate to discover this young, entirely unintentionally. A favourite book from my high school years (still on my shelf!), Mary S. Hartman’s Victorian Murderesses, uses famous, well-documented trials to shine light on the often hidden realities of women’s lives, and public responses to them. My brilliant freshman year university course “The Historian as Detective”, gave me books like Natalie Zemon Davis’s enjoyable (and short!) The Return of Martin Guerre* and Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome, by Thoms V. and Elizabeth S. Cohen, both of which rely heavily on trial records to illuminate rural French and urban Italian society, respectively. What I learned then is that the law leaves a detailed record, in a way that very few other historical records can, showing ordinary people caught unexpectedly, made suddenly visible, their everyday lives in captured in metaphorical amber, and set down on paper. Moreover, while trials may be representative more of the “outliers” than their more “ordinary” contemporaries, by showing what was unusual, or not permissible, or in debate, we can understand what was normal, permitted, and accepted by society.

This is one reason why the history-drama-law triad is so important to both the casually curious and serious scholarship. Our farces aren’t quite in this category- there is of course much very erudite research about them!- but primarily they are, to an audience, merely fun. But they reveal other ways that this trio present themselves and talk between themselves.

Both Master Pierre Pathelin and Le Cuvier (to give The Washtub its French title) may have been written and performed by lawyers: The Society of the Basoche, the company of law clerks in medieval Paris. The Basoche are a fascinating group, and I hope to dedicate a day to talking about this most unusual medieval guild at a later date, but for now it’s enough to say that their evolution was an entirely logical phenomenon. The law is full of emotional highs and lows, triumphs and tragedies, justice and injustice- literally the things that define drama, even if there is no stage in sight. Moreover, the Basoche had its own internal jurisdiction, which allowed its students to practice some form of “real” law, the way a mock trial team at a university may do today. If there weren’t any cases on the go, they wrote their own, including causes grasses, mocking lawsuits for Carnival, which allowed them to create “cases” that were particularly absurd or scandalous. Writing true farce, then, without the necessity of a legal framework, may have been an entirely foreseeable next step. By the mid-fifteenth century, the time at which both of our plays were likely composed, the Basoche were working with the company that staged fully religious plays, to contribute to a full day of every sort of drama: morality, mystery, sottie and farce all going on a shared playbill for the public’s day of entertainment. Indeed, the Basoche is today remembered more vividly as a comedy-dramatic enterprise than its actual purpose within the legal-education system. (Thus, to further our theme of interconnectivity between our three themes: the law gave us drama, and today the drama has preserved for us something of the history of law.)

In addition to this very real tie to actual attorneys and clerks, both Pathelin and The Washtub contain aspects of law within the narrative of the drama. The Washtub deals with a contract between a man and his wife, one they draw up in full view of the audience, who functionally serve as “witnesses”, creating what would, in effect, have thus been considered a legally binding document. (One could imagine a sequel in which both husband and wife seek out attorneys to argue about the validity, or amendment, to the contract they have somewhat carelessly drawn up!) In Pathelin the connection to law is still greater: Pierre Pathelin claims to be a lawyer, and the final scene of the play is a trial in a courtroom before a judge. It’s unclear if Pathelin is any sort of attorney at all: Howard Graham Harvey, whose book Theatre of the Basoche is enormously helpful in making sense of the legal aspects of Pathelin, says that “Pathelin’s lack of education raises the strongest presumption that he is nothing more than an unlicensed village practitioner.” In cities, legal training and licensing was becoming more rigorous, as the very existence of the Basoche shows, but in rural areas, the bar to setting oneself up at the bar of law was low; as with Pathelin, cleverness could substitute for a real education. If the play was indeed created by members of the Basoche, perhaps they were making a crack at untrained people who claimed the same mantle of “lawyer” that they so painstakingly studied to achieve. That said, the play also leaves us rather liking and admiring Pathelin, his trickery and audacity, so perhaps it’s less a critical dig and more a nudge and wink- lawyers appreciating that their profession often rewards finding ways to be clever that are just barely, but technically, within the bounds of the law. The play thus gives us a window, however distorted through comedic exaggeration, into village legal practice of the times, while also using it as a source for commentary and comedy. 

One need not, of course, be a student of all three disciplines. But the lawyer needs to understand precedent, or what happened in the past. The historian benefits from understanding the legal framework that shaped and was shaped by the society he or she studies. And those who appreciate the drama of both have a unique opportunity towards making material that might otherwise seem dull as fascinating, alive, and vibrant. We get to take the idea of drama and make it literal drama. Ours must surely be the best of all three worlds.

*Martin Guerre has been dramatised for the stage in multiple versions. The musical version, written by the same people who created Les Misérables, is an extremely interesting study in creating drama by marrying up different aspects of history, effectively destroying much strict historical veracity in pursuit of revealing a completely different aspect of history. I belive some of the women from Victorian Murderesses have also been turned into at least television drama, although I haven’t seen them and cannot say how closely they hewed to the historical record. Still, the fact that these stories were intriguing enough to become drama in the literal sense proves the point that legal history is ripe pickings for history-via-performance!

Meet York’s Tanners’ Guild

Posted on by under History, Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

Look around the place where you’re sitting. How much of what you can see is made of plastic? Although you obviously have many items that medieval people wouldn’t need- couldn’t have dreamed of- such as whatever device on which you’re reading this!- consider this: they didn’t have plastic. Their ubiquitous material of seemingly infinite shaping capabilities was leather. And to have leather, you needed people who could make it from animal hide. Enter the Tanners, the end product of whose work could be seen everywhere medieval people looked. Or walked: shoe were almost universally leather, and everyone would have needed them.

The Tanners were the guild in York who “brought forth the pageant” of “The Fall of the Rebel Angels” or, as it’s named this year, The War in Heaven. Theirs is a play of goodness competing with fire and brimstone, and in that, it is an apt choice for a guild that was necessary, successful, and prosperous, but achieved all of that through work which was (and still is) smelly, polluting, and downright unpleasant.

To get to know the tanners a little better, let’s talk about what they were doing, at least in a very general overview. To make leather, you start with a carcass- they worked specifically with cattle and oxen- removing their hide in large pieces, doing as little damage as possible. Hides would be salted, to help dry them out so that the bacteria that would normally cause them to rot wasn’t able to survive. Once a sort of hide-jerky had been achieved, they had to be soaked to remove all the salt itself. All the fats and clinging meaty bits had to be scraped off, then it had to be soaked in unpleasant things like alkaline lime or urine, to loosen up the hair, so it too could be scraped off. As if urine wasn’t enough, dung would be rubbed into the leather to help soften it up in a process called “bating”. 

The tanning itself gets its name from tannins, which you find in tea or red wine, but in this case came from tree bark, especially oak. From this came “barker” was another word for tanner; our play is alternatively credited to the “Tanners’ Guild” and the “Barkers Guild”, but it was the same craft. The tanners would make vats of a sort of bark tea, and the hides would put into each one, progressively, from weakest to strongest. Along the way, the brown colour we tend to associate with leather was achieved. (There were slightly different processes for other types of hide and leather, which would result in different colours like white or yellow.) All of this, by the way, took several months- a tanned hide was the result of the better part of a year’s labour, though of course more than one was being processed at a time. Once it came out of the final tanning vat, it would get stretched, rubbed with oils, and worked to keep it soft and smooth. And then it was ready to pass on to the next craft guild, the Curriers, for further work.

If all of this sounds fairly miserable, it probably was, and it required enormous amounts of water to achieve, so tanneries tended to be built along rivers, preferably downstream from town, so all of the unpleasant byproducts weren’t directly stinking up the town. Some cities had ordinances that kept the tanning process far away from the city centre. But in York, at least some parts of the process were surprisingly proximate to the city, albeit across the river: Barker Tower is right by Lendal Bridge, the curious little round building on the southwestern side, is named for them, and Tanner Row, the next street southeast parallel to Station Road, certainly indicates their neighbourhood. At the end of the fourteenth century, records suggest that almost all of York’s tanners were resident in the parish of All Saints North Street, which is just around the corner from Tanner Row. All of this is just opposite the Guildhall on the northeast riverbank, and well within the city walls. 

If they were geographically isolated, the Tanners occupied a curious place in York hierarchically. I’m sure you know that medieval craft guilds were- to oversimplify somewhat- a trade union-cum-fraternal organisation. The membership supported one another and passed trade knowledge through their own closed channels, but the guilds and the city government were also tied intimately together in mutually reinforcing ways. For the city, guilds were a way to help organise the city and maintain order by outsourcing some aspects of trade law and enforcement to the guilds; for the guilds, having their regulations recorded and enforced by the city council gave them the heft of law; and fines were split between the city and the guilds, to the benefit of both. Still, guilds weren’t all on the same footing, politically, socially, or financially. The Tanners were reasonably well off on the last count- leather was necessary, everywhere, and lucrative. But because their actual craft, the work and process, were so unpleasant, tanning was held in surprisingly low esteem for such important work. Tanners weren’t brought into the political elite of the city government; none of their members was ever elevated to city mayor.

What did this mean for the plays? After all, mystery plays weren’t just a fun extra for the craft guilds: they were mandated by the city, with hefty fines if a guild failed to do its part. Some monies that the city or guilds took in were apportioned specifically for use in making the plays happen. Scholars debate over whether the plays could be seen as a form of craft advertisement- the leather for devils’ and angels’ costumes and masks was certainly on display in The War in Heaven– or a more pure act of general civic pride and/or religious devotion. (I suspect these things aren’t mutually exclusive.) The plays may have been owned by the guilds, but that was by arrangement with and approval of the city council, who kept a close eye on whether they stuck to their scripts and performed appropriately. The Tanners got to lead the parade with the first play, arguably a visible and prominent position (albeit one that meant they may have had to be ready to perform as early as half four in the morning!). Their production set the tone for the day, and got to be seen before audiences’ attention spans were overly taxed. And their play is a bit of a departure from strict biblical chronology, so it could be said that they were given a bigger play than was absolutely necessary. That, of course, is entirely speculative, since we know nothing about the plays’ authorship or inception. But the point is that, even being passed over for involvement at the highest levels of government, the Tanners didn’t suffer in their prominence when it came to the mystery plays. The stink of their craft may have helped them create a more memorable and off-putting Hell… but as proof that good things came out of those vats of stench, they were able to show the city God, the angels, and a little bit of heaven as well.