How do we know about the medieval plays? For this week’s #MysteryPlayMonday, you can learn a little bit about the original documents that have preserved this precious history… and how we’re preserving knowledge of the modern revivals.

An enormous amount has been written about the York Mystery Plays, particularly in the last century. Its clear ties to a city which has retained so much of its medieval character is one of the reasons. Another is the fact that its documentation comes from several different types of source, giving a richer picture of not only how the plays may have been performed, but of the civic life that surrounded them.

York’s plays were not a large, monolithic, single script; they were discrete plays, owned by their guilds, and the original, guild-owned scripts have not (except in truly fragmentary bits) survived. The documents that have come to our time are generally civic in nature, the property of city government, or in some cases remarkable survivors of guilds which have themselves continued through the centuries into today.

Few of these documents are available to see in person; being several hundred years old, they are fragile, require very specific, special care, and knowledge of how to handle them. But it’s still interesting to know just where our information about the plays came from, as well as the kinds of documents that were created- and have survived since!- the Middle Ages. Here, then, is a look at how we know what we know about the York plays.

– “The Ordo Paginarum”. Contained in a book known as the ‘A/Y Memorandum Book’, which was concerned with city government regarding the regulation of the trade guilds, this was an official document that listing the guilds, with a brief summary of each play for which they were responsible, and also included the proclamation which announced to all in the city that the plays were to be performed. It dates to 1415, at which point the plays had already been around for some time, although their inception date is unknown.

– “The Register”. Housed at the British Library as MS Additional 35290, this is a particularly unique document dating between 1463 and 1477. It dates from the middle of the plays’ original lifespan. This isn’t a playing text in the sense that the community-theatre actors would have known; it was created by a city clerk as a compilation from the original scripts, against which he could “quality check” the plays as they were performed. The clerk left some notes in it that help flesh out details about performance, and it is from this record that we know the lines that make up our plays.

            *A facsimile copy of these documents has been printed, if you want to see what the originals look like.

– other York City records. Bureaucracy was alive and well in the Middle Ages! Among the preserved documents are some which show space rented for storing waggons that were used in the plays (called “pageants” at the time), payments made to musicians who were part of the accompanying parade, and other expenses for festivities that were held at the same time.

– Guild documents. Some of the surviving guild records list payments for play-related expenses, which offer up more details about how the plays may have looked, and where they were staged. The Merchant Adventurers’ guild, for example, has a particularly rich 15th century documentary history connected with the plays (in comparison to other guilds which also survive). These documents are scattered among libraries and archives. Their dates range from the 14th to the 17th centuries.

            * The best way to find the content of these documents is via the Records of Early English Drama (REED) volume on York. REED is an extraordinary project, aimed at compiling all records of medieval drama across the UK, and while it is not the kind of thing you sit down to read with a nice cup of coffee, it’s a window into both details of medieval drama and also medieval documentation that’s well worth a perusal. (There are also volumes on nearly all parts of the country, if you’re curious to see how York compares to other places.)

            And what of modern revivals? What are we leaving for the future? It might viscerally seem as though, with modern knowledge about  how much has been lost that could have given us knowledge of the medieval mystery plays, we would intentionally leave extensive documentation. There is a mystery play archive, at the National Centre for Early Music in York, but since, not unlike the situation with the guilds, productions have been somewhat decentralised, the bulk of things like scripts and notes are either housed with individual people or organisations (if they are retained at all!), and their long-term survival is not assured.

Of course, we also have a digital footprint, which at present seems reasonably extensive. How well digital data will survive as technology evolves can’t be guessed. But for the time being, there are several places where you can look through information about our twentieth and twenty-first century renditions of the Mystery Plays. These are the main sites you might find interesting:

York Mystery Plays (yorkmysteryplays.co.uk) – the digital home for the waggon plays as we are performing them.

York Mystery Plays: Illumination- From Shadow Into Light (yorkmysteryplays.org) – a fairly comprehensive website dedicated to various aspects of the twentieth and twenty-first century revivals, both fixed-place productions and on waggons.

York Mystery Plays Archive (ncem.co.uk) – the digital arm of the physical archive located at the NCEM in York.

York Mystery Plays Supporters Trust (ympst.co.uk) – an organisation created to support all mystery play productions, from individual seasonal production to waggon plays to the large-scale productions that have occurred since the millennium

The Soundscapes of the York Mystery Plays (soundscapesyorkmysteryplays.com) – a study looking at what the medieval plays might have sounded like.

All of these online spaces offer slightly different perspectives on what the modern mystery plays have been, and how they have evolved. Our modern history is less tied to the city in a legal sense than was the case in the Middle Ages, but the complexity and richness of the shows is certainly no less than theirs. Perhaps the most remarkable continuation is the association with the guilds, a unique phenomenon that has only revived with the move onto the waggons, but one which directly embeds the waggon plays in the wider York civic life. Hopefully, they’re still preserving their records and passing them down for future centuries of Mystery Play enthusiasts to pore over!