Category Archives: York Mystery Plays 2026

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.

Meet Lucy Toulmin Smith, the Woman Who Brought Us the York Mystery Plays

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

In honour of International Women’s Day, for this #MysteryPlayMonday, our director reflects on the woman who first brought the York Mystery Plays to modern eyes.

Ever since I first started studying the York Mystery Plays, I was intrigued by the fact that the first modern edition of the plays was edited by a Victorian woman. There were plenty of male antiquarians, discovering medieval documents and bringing them to publication and public notice throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but similar work by women was relatively thin on the ground. Modern medieval drama scholarship has many brilliant, amazing women bringing out new information and insights on a regular basis, and I’m proud to call many of them friends. But I wanted to take some time to get to know the woman on whose shoulders we all stand. 

I must confess I have not hurried into this: Lucy Toulmin Smith has been a name on the spine on the bookshelf for twenty years, and it was only recently that I really got curious about who she was. What was her journey to these plays that tie us together? 

I had always somehow assumed that Smith’s interest in the York plays came from a personal connection to the area. Nope! Lucy Toulmin Smith wasn’t, technically, even British- she was born in Boston in 1838. The family was English, however; her father, Joshua, hailed from Birmingham, and it was during a five-year sojourn to America that Lucy Toulmin Smith was born. Professionally, Joshua was a lawyer, but he’s usually considered a political theorist, and the germane thing, as far as his daughter is concerned, is that he was a prolific writer whose study interests ranged beyond legal matters, to geology and history. (As the daughter of a geologist whose personal interests are history and politics, this made me smile- Lucy and I share something beyond an interest in mystery plays!) The Toulmin Smiths returned to England in 1842 and settled in London.

Other than that she was educated at home, there isn’t much information available about Toulmin Smith’s childhood- we may presume it was standard for any middle class Victorian girl- until the death of her younger brother William in 1851. The family had been educating him to be a helper in Joshua’s research and writing, but that role was then given to Lucy. The need for someone to do that work must have been great, since there were other boys in the family; but they were considerably younger, and waiting for them to grow into it was apparently impractical. I’d love to know what Lucy thought- was this a welcome development, a chance to exercise what would prove to be a brilliant  mind? Was it a disappointment to find that her parents effectively expected her to remain single and at home? We can’t know her thoughts on the situation when, at age thirteen, her path was set. We only know that she rose to the occasion, and beyond.

Joshua Tolmin Smith died in 1869, while he was in the middle of a significant research/writing project about the craft organisations of medieval England. English Gilds was completed by Lucy, and her work on the medieval documents for her father’s study was the seed for her most important project (so far as we’re concerned, at least!). It clearly set off an interest in bringing medieval and early modern documents into modern editions for scholarship, because two years later she published The Maire of Bristoweis Kalendar (The Mayor of Bristol’s Calendar), about that city in the fifteenth century, followed seven years later by an edition of Shakespeare’s Centurie of Prayse, a mostly seventeenth-century compilation. It’s unclear if her projects were self-chosen or suggested by some of the antiquarian societies who published them, but it seems reasonable to assume that theatre history must also have interested Smith, because in 1883 she added to her early modern theatre catalogue with an edition of the 1561 play Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex.

But it was the project that followed which was her most significant, and the one for which Lucy Toulmin Smith is probably the best known: the York Mystery Plays. How long she had been working on it, since the English Gilds project first suggested it, isn’t known- it may have been percolating in her mind for many years, or it may have simply taken that long to secure permission to access the manuscript. But in 1882, the Newcastle Weekly Courant carried the news item that “Lord Ashburnham… has at last consented to the publication of his unique fifteenth century MS. of the York Mysteries, which has never been printed, though its existence has long been known. With much liberality, he has placed it in the hands of Miss Toulmin Smith, who is preparing to edit the whole….”, which hints at least at a start date for the actual work. There seems to have been a fair amount of excitement about the upcoming edition; news items from papers as far away as New Zealand note its incipient publication towards the end of 1884! (No information is readily available about what induced Lord Ashburnham to permit publication of a manuscript that that had remained in private hands, out of sight but apparently not out of mind, for a remarkably long time.)

Although she would go on to publish several more (largely medieval) editions, it was the Mystery Plays that would cement Lucy Toulmin Smith’s reputation in scholarship. One anecdote I found most delightful was that during the 1880s she spent so much time researching at the British Museum that she sometimes used it as a return address when writing letters. That dedication proved worthwhile: her back catalogue of well-received, high-quality editorial work earned Toulmin Smith a second, significant distinction. In 1894, she became the first woman in England to become head of a public library when she took the position at Manchester College in Oxford. It was a job she would keep almost until her death: she died in 1911, only a month after her retirement. 

Finding that one of the photographs that survives (and is kicking around the internet) of Toulmin Smith was taken at the 1899 International Congress of Women, a suffrage group, felt like the perfect ending to my search about Lucy’s life, for it was hard to imagine that a woman of her gifts would not have been part of the movement to give her peers a voice in political life. Her life is a testament to the intelligence and independence women could display even in the most repressive of centuries. And in pursuing her own academic interest through her work, Lucy Toulmin Smith gave to England, and the world, access to one of its great cultural treasures. Her work made mine possible. I hope she got half as much joy from revealing the Mystery Plays to the rest of the world, that those of us who have had the chance to study and stage them so much later have been granted.

Angels Falling Across the Cycles

Posted on by under Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

A look at how the York play “The Creation & Fall of the Angels”, on which “The War in Heaven” is based, compares to the plays of the same story across the three other English biblical dramatic cycles.

York’s Mystery Plays are one of four manuscript groups termed “cycle plays”. All of them have the same premise, the dramatisation of the biblical story from Creation to Doom. The Chester Plays belonged to their city on a model similar, but not identical, to York. The Towneley Cycle are also sometimes called the “Wakefield Mystery Plays”, because they were originally thought to belong to that city; today there is only agreement that we don’t know for sure where they are from, or how they were performed. We know even less about the N-Town Plays, which are probably from East Anglia; they may actually be a collection of plays that were compiled together to form a cycle, rather than having ever been played as such, in the manner of the other plays.

All of the cycles start with the Creation of Heaven and the Fall of Lucifer and the rebel angels, so while the story of our play is well represented in the group (this is not true for every play; not all of the stories appear in all of the cycles), we thought it would be interesting to look at how the other opening plays compared to one another. Here’s a brief look at what you’ll find, if you look at them together:

– The play’s length varies considerably. The N-Town play has fewer than a hundred lines, while Chester’s clocks in just over three hundred. (Towneley and York tie at one hundred sixty each.)

– The short N-Town play includes only four characters: God, Lucifer, a Good Angel and a Bad Angel. Though York is twice its length, it only adds a second angel- one is designated a Seraphim and the other a Cherubim*. Despite being equal in length to York, the Towneley “Creation & Fall” includes nine characters, populating Heaven and Hell slightly more thoroughly. Chester’s angels are the reason the play is so long: eight types of angel are represented in the play, in addition to God, while Hell contains two demons, as well as Lucifer, and Lucifer’s companion in both dominions, Lightborne. He is unique in the plays; no other angel or demon, besides Lucifer, is given a proper name rather than a categoric title.   * Note to the sharp-eyed: Seraphim and Cherubim are indeed the plural forms of types of angels. This is how they are named in the plays. Whether that means that each one is effectively a representative spokesangel of its class, or whether a group of actors recite their lines in chorus to create that plural, isn’t noted.

– York’s play belonged to the Tanners (alternatively called the Barkers). Although the Chester plays may not have been “owned” by guilds on quite the same model as York, Chester’s Tanners have also been considered responsible for their “Creation of Heaven and Fall of Angels” play. We don’t know if the N-Town plays were affiliated with a particular location- it’s possible that they weren’t owned by a single city- and there’s no indication of guilds being responsible for particular plays. Only four of the Towneley plays given any suggestion of guilds, and one of the plays that does is this one. If you happened to guess that the guild named is the Barkers, you win! The association of this guild with this particular biblical story, in performance, was apparently strong across England.

– In the York play, the angels don’t argue about whether to worship God or Lucifer. Lucifer brags, and repeatedly tells the angels that they should worship him, but the Good Angels simply continue to worship God. Those angels who are cast down to Hell with Lucifer don’t say much; it’s the only play where the angelic argument comes down to picking a side and then stubbornly staying with it, rather than actively trying to fight the ones who have made a different choice. 

           By contrast, the bulk of the Chester version is a disputation between various types of angels and Lucifer, as they try to convince him of his misguided pride. The Towneley play likewise offers back-and-forth argument, but their play takes a different tactic: once Lucifer has made his pitch for superiority, the angels then argue amongst themselves over who will follow him and who will follow God, rather than arguing with Lucifer himself. The shortness of the N-Town play does not allow for much debate, although even in its briefness the Good Angel informs Lucifer that he is in error.

            It’s a shame we know nothing about the authors of any of these plays, as these distinctions prompt interesting questions about angelic agency, how much power Lucifer truly has (versus how much he thinks he has!), and the usefulness of debate make for interesting perspectives!

– In the Towneley play, God’s creation of the world is also included in that first play. All of the others have “The Creation” as their second play. That changes what God has to accomplish in the play, so in that iteration, much of God’s opening monologue has to be given to the work of those first few days. In fact, in this play he doesn’t enter into dialogue with the angels at all, he creates them and then is offstage for the rest of the play.

            York’s God is slightly more interactive, naming out Lucifer specifically. But he shares an interesting feature with the Towneley God: in both plays, the fall happens without an explicit directive from God, as if Lucifer’s words alone cause him to be spontaneously ejected from Heaven. As God does reappear to close the play with a monologue about what has happened and why, one has different staging options for the actual moment of the Fall, and could choose to depict God’s actions as direct.

            The Chester God is particularly active in his relationship with the angels, speaking with them at length, and picking Lucifer and Lightborne out especially, as if he knows they have special capacity that may also lead them astray. (One reference describes his commandments to them, not to let pride dominate them, as a dare.) His response to their downfall is almost sorrowful rather than angry.

            N-Town’s version of God dominates the short play, with almost half of its lines belonging to him. What stands out about him is that he expounds on his nature as a trinity more than the others. Chester’s also speaks of this (York’s and Towneley’s do not), but it feels less pronounced in the much-longer play.

            What one takes away from looking at the “Creation and Fall of Angels” plays as a comparative group is just how different medieval perspectives were on the Bible story and how to dramatise it. These Gods are not identical, and their angels, whether good or bad, seem to have quite different characters. From the standpoint of staging the plays, we can look at this as a chance for creative license: although the characters of our particular play seem to think and behave in a certain way, there is scope for seeing them as individual rather than merely as a “type”, and we can do so not because our modern sensibilities have taught us to approach the theatre that way, but because even in the Middle Ages, everyone saw things just a little bit differently.

Director’s Notes: Where to Begin

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

Some notes from our director, Laura-Elizabeth Rice, on where her work with The War in Heavenbegan, getting to know source material, and what she’s learned so far about angels and devils.

In the beginning was the word…

Well, in the theatre, the beginning is the word: the script. Ours, for The War in Heaven and the rest of the Mystery Plays, is a brand-new translation by Dr. Alan Heaven. As a word geek, I’m enjoying getting to know a new iteration, thinking about the words that are chosen, hearing them out, rolling them around in my mouth, considering the echoes of the original, and contemplating why different translators make the choices that they do. Of course, the Mystery Plays are themselves the product of adaptation, of the stories of the Bible, filtered through medieval tradition and understanding. How much tradition of the ancient world influenced the Bible is a much deeper theological debate than I’m willing to entertain, but suffice to say that by the time we’re looking at Mystery Plays today, there is not one “beginning” point but many.

I decided, however, to start with the place that medieval people would have considered the source text, which is the Bible. There are, of course, many different translations of that, too; for the sake of purity, I should probably have consulted one of the earlier Latin iterations- likely the Latin Vulgate- but, confession!, I don’t read Latin particularly well. As a creature of the twenty-first century, instead I hit the internet for one of those webpages that shows various versions side by side, for comparison. Of course it cannot include all the variations of Biblical translation, so I cannot say that any of my discoveries are conclusive. But hope they can be considered a starting point for understanding the play that I hope I can bring out for actors and audiences!

God as a concept seems simultaneously completely obvious (an omniscient, all-powerful entity), and completely ineffable, even- especially- if one is not a person from, or of, a faith tradition. But that, at least, is an answer I could give if someone needed a definition. Yet I realised that if I were asked, “What is an angel? What is a fallen angel?” I actually wouldn’t have a good answer. I’ll come back to this at a later date, but the point now is that I wanted to know exactly what the Bible had to say about them, since their actions drive the play. 

Angels are scattered throughout the Bible- a search suggested there are approximately 300 references to them, depending on which translation you’re looking at- and yet they are never very well defined. The word “angel” means “messenger”, and that’s the capacity in which they appear most frequently, as interlocutors between God and people. Sometimes they are corporeal and sometimes they aren’t, but when they do have a physical presence, they have hands and faces, and sometimes accessorize with a sword or a staff. They can interact with people physically as well as vocally. They’re impervious to fire, and can appear and disappear. One of the few absolutely stated facts about angels is that they don’t have marriages, although whether this implies that they have genders or not isn’t clear. Particularly interesting in terms of the workings of a war in heaven, they don’t just intercede with humans to bring messages; they’re also often God’s agent of smiting, striking people down when they’ve displeased the deity. They also don’t die, which certainly has implications for the outcome of a war in heaven, and perhaps why being sent to Hell is their punishment for rebellion.

Fallen angels aren’t really called such, at least not in any of the translations that I’ve seen, and Satan gets fewer than 50 namechecks. But there are several occasions when Satan (his name means “the tempter” or “the accuser”) hangs out with angels, sometimes those held up in contrast to him, and sometimes with the implication that he has angels which belong specifically to him, separate from God’s. Satan can “masquerade as an angel of light”, which one can read to imply that he is an angel in opposition to light- i.e. an angel of darkness- or perhaps that he is no angel at all. After all, he’s also equated in Revelation with a dragon and a serpent. There is altogether quite a bit less in the Bible about fallen angels or Satan than one might assume, given the weight they carry culturally in both the Middle Ages and today. 

The War in Heaven is, traditionally, called “The Fall of Angels” in the medieval plays. Along with the creation of Heaven, it’s part of the first play in all four cycles. I had therefore assumed, as medieval people seem to have done, that this was a story from the earliest idea of time, in Genesis. But in the Bible, it makes only a brief appearance, in the book of Revelation (12:7-9), at the end of the Bible. There is an earlier allusion (Luke 10:18) where Jesus says he “saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven”, but there is no further detail of the context in which this occurred. And since Jesus isn’t born until the New Testament, presumably the angelic fall wouldn’t be contemporaneous with the creation of the world. I actually quite like the circularity of this, as if the end is in the beginning and the beginning is in the end.

I was surprised that these characters, and the story of the war in heaven, did not feature more prominently in the Bible, given how strong the narrative, and subsequent artistic, traditions seem to be. On the one hand, creating them dramatically almost from whole cloth is a real challenge! On the other hand, it also means the possibilities are endless… almost. It’s still medieval drama, after all! For now, what it really tells me is that I have a lot more research to do, because clearly a great deal of tradition had built up around these characters and events prior to and during the Middle Ages. And that, reader, is part of our play…..

An Exciting Announcement: York Mystery Plays 2026!

Posted on by under Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

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! (You can message us by visiting the “About Us” section of this site, and filling out the form there.)

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!