The Feast of Corpus Christi was a new event for the medieval church, established in 1264 and promoted with more enthusiasm during the 1300s. Its purpose was to celebrate and educate about the meaning of the Host and the doctrine of transubstantiation, in which the bread became the body of Jesus. But its main event was a procession through every town, carrying the Host so that everyone could see it. By this time, there were superstitions about the good luck that would accrue to anyone who saw the Host being lifted up, which is when the miracle occurred. To keep the Mass from being the playground for this superstition, the church just permitted everyone free viewing, once a year.
In a procession, the priests and everyone who held any sort of rank in the town formed a parade. By the 1300s, the craft guilds were highly developed. They were part of a town’s ordinary government; the term “mayor” indicated that the person was the leading guild leader that year, the “major” one. The guilds were all framed as religious organizations, in a time when it was normal to have church and state united. They had patron saints, so sometimes they had their own processions on their saint’s day.
In the Corpus Christi procession, these men carried banners, torches, and images of their patron saints. But they also made large images, probably just pictures on signboards at first, illustrating scenes from the story of Jesus—which, as we know, was considered to start with Adam. Over a period of time—and we have few records so we just have to guess—the guilds began to compete with each other for magnificence of display.
The next step was to pull a pageant that held a living tableau showing the Bible story in question. The “pageant” meant a stage on wheels, a specialized wagon. Sometimes pageants were exactly like floats in a modern parade, showing a castle, a mountain, or a ship. Fully-rigged ships on wheels were very popular, in fact. They also showed animals, exotic ones like elephants, lions, or dragons. But these types of floats were more appropriate for other civic occasions, such as inauguration of a Mayor, or the king’s visit to the town. For Corpus Christi, they stayed with the Bible’s stories alone (with one notable exception, later).
The stage was moving, but the scene shown on it, at first, was not. Medieval towns loved living tableaux because they were simpler than full plays with spoken lines, and they could be staged by children, too. In 1313, the King of England was welcomed to Paris with a series of living tableaux of Bible scenes. Eventually, in Paris at least, these living tableaux began to have some silent movement, the beginning of the Mime tradition. In England, silent tableaux eventually turned into the parlor game of Charades, but only after a long run of civic celebration, such as inaugurations and welcome feasts.
Thus far, the procession was like a Rose Bowl parade with “floats,” or a Macy’s Thanksgiving parade with giant balloons. But at some point next, a guild’s pageant wagon had actors giving short dramatic presentations for their stage of the story. The wagons may have kept moving, again like a Macy’s parade with moving figures. They may have saved their best moments for times when the procession paused, as it did at various churches on the route. It’s not hard to imagine that after one guild had a short play with speaking parts, they all felt challenged to up their game for the following year.
And so eventually the Corpus Christi celebration in northern England, in particular, came to be a cycle of Bible plays, each put on by a different guilt or fraternity, usually on wagons that moved through the town. There are several full scripts and some detailed wagon descriptions that have come to us through fire and flood. The fullest set is from York, but we also have texts and records from Chester and Wakefield. There’s even an intriguing set of play scripts that has an opening line about putting on this cycle in “N-Town,” where “N” stands for “Name.” It seems to be a script that’s available for a town to adopt, perhaps one that has accumulated the best ideas from various towns, or perhaps written by someone who thought he could improve on them all.
In the rest of Europe, Passion Plays developed as staged, stationary events, and they were often presented at other times of the year. I’ll write about those stages and plays as we go, but for now, the pageant wagons of York are calling.