Tag Archives: york mystery plays

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.

York Mystery Plays: The Documentary Evidence

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Mystery Plays

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!