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Authors: Margaret Frazer

BOOK: A Play of Heresy
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Such a pardon would suffice to save her daughter’s life but not much else, because the law would strip Anna Deyster, proven a criminal, of everything she owned.
It was Powet, meeting Joliffe outside the gate to the pageant yard as they went to their final practice, who told him something more. They had said nothing directly to each other since they had taken Anna Deyster to the bailiffs. Joliffe was leaving it to Powet as to when—or if—they ever spoke together again and felt a spasm mixed with relief and wariness when Powet held out a hand to stop him going into the yard.
The wariness was dispelled when Powet said quietly, “I know you did what needed to be done. There’s no blame to you in it. You’ve heard her mother means to get her pardon?”
“Yes. It’s likely she will, from what I’ve heard. I’m glad.” He was not sure if he was truly glad or not—it was a brutal death and damnation she had given Ned Eme—but he supposed “glad” was what Powet needed to hear and therefore said it.
“There’s something more that you’re not likely to hear. The day she . . .” Powet had to stop, look away, swallow, regain himself before going on. “That day, after she set Ned to meet her, before she killed him, she went to a lawyer. Anna did. We only found out today. She enfeoffed all her property to Cecily. There’s nothing for the law to take from her. I thought—I thought it might matter to you to know everything isn’t lost.”
Oddly enough, it mattered deeply. Robyn Kydwa’s death had surely ended what small hopes beyond bare survival Cecily Kydwa might have had for her life. Now Anna Deyster, giving up hope herself, had given hope back to Cecily. It was, in its odd way, a kind of fair exchange and, “That means that maybe your nephew Herry will have more interest now in marrying her after all,” Joliffe said.
Powet looked momentarily startled. Then thoughtful. “I hadn’t gone that far with it yet,” he said. “But—yes. Yes. Very possibly.”
 
 
Corpus Christi day came beautifully, with weather as perfect as June could offer. The early morning procession of guildsmen, churchmen, mayor, and city officers through the streets was splendid with all the ceremony a prosperous town could give in honor of the Lord. The trains of each guild and church and every monastery in Coventry bore banners and crucifixes, while at the heart of it all was the Sacrament in golden vessels carried by priests in the full glory of their embroidered copes, with over them a canopy of crimson silk on silver-gilded poles held by four of the richest burgesses in their finest furred robes and jeweled collars. As display of Coventry’s faith and the city’s dignity and pride and power, the procession could not have been bettered.
When it was over, the rest of the day was for eating, drinking, general merriment through the streets, and—
the plays.
All the pageant wagons of the various guilds had been rolled out of their yards before dawn by the journeymen and apprentices of their guilds, and hauled into order of their plays in a crowded line along Gosford Street just inside the gateway. Now there was a jumbled time while people streaming back from either being in or watching the procession searched out their own wagons—“Dolt! You’re in the Crucifixion. It comes
after
the Nativity. You’re farther along.”—and began the changing of clothing and doing whatever painting or masking their parts might need.
The Master of the Pageants was a tall, pale man who sensibly rode a tall horse back and forth along the line as he oversaw it all, his helpers trotting at his side until sent hither and yon with whatever orders were needed. He and they would be wearied to the bone by day’s end because on him would depend the smooth forward going of the plays from one playing site to another. Still, he must have done the business before because he was handling it deftly and calmly, by what Joliffe saw of him, and that boded well for the rest of the day.
Piers had disappeared farther along the line to join the other demons at the Harrowing of Hell, but Joliffe caught glimpses of Basset herding and arranging his players at the wagon just ahead of where Sendell was doing the same with his. Gil and his fellow shepherds were practicing ducking behind the cloth hanging to the ground on both sides of the wagon and coming out quickly. Ellis and the other two Kings in their royal gowns and shining crowns were sitting on their horses, calmly above it all. He caught Joliffe looking at him and gave a kingly inclination of his head. Joliffe, robed as First Prophet, raised one hand and waggled rude fingers at him. Ellis looked away and did not look back.
And then, suddenly it seemed, everything went quiet. From away along Gosford Street where the crowd was gathered at the first playing site there was the formless sound of many people talking, but for just that moment there was stillness along the line of wagons. The Master came riding from the rear of the line, the clop of his horse’s hoofs loud on the paving, and drew rein beside Basset standing on his pageant wagon. He looked ahead, then looked at Basset. He said something and Basset answered. The Master nodded and rode a few more yards forward, abreast of the twenty men waiting to pull the wagon. He said something to them. Their leader nodded. The Master turned in his saddle to face back along the line, raised his voice, and gave the order all were waiting for.
“Let the wagons roll!”
 
Author’s Note
 
I was already at work on this book when I went to the symposium “Drama and Religion 1555–1575: The Chester Cycle in Context” at the University of Toronto in May 2010. Besides the scholarly papers that were given, the entire cycle of twenty-three medieval plays from Chester, England, were performed out of doors on wagons moved from site to site on the campus over three half-days. The plays began with the Creation of the World and followed through Old and New Testaments to Judgment Day. Each was done by a different group from schools in Canada and the United States, with no attempt to unify their styles; all were done according to the individual group’s own imagination and resources, their styles widely diverging.
As someone who has seen much theater, both from the audience side and while performing on stages, I was as fascinated by the onlookers’ delight as by the productions themselves. And by “onlookers’ delight” I mean my own as well as what I saw and heard around me. People watched in riveted delight as the Temptress in the Garden of Eden changed into a slithering serpent; cheered when Moses pulled the tablets of the law from the rocky cliff behind him; laughed ourselves silly at the southern hillbilly shepherds settling down for a night of watching their sheep with their coolers of beer and snacks beside them—and were nonetheless deeply moved by their so-humble but sincere gifts to the Christ child. Nor is anyone likely to forget Herod on his high throne, sneeringly throwing the occasional grape at the audience—or the silence as we watched the Crucifixion. And I’m here to tell you that when the demons burst from Hellmouth, to prowl and snarl only a few yards from our faces, we were truly taken momentarily aback. Some plays were stronger productions than others, but at end the overall feeling left was that we had gone a wonderful journey. You did not have to be Christian in that audience to be carried along on the mythic strength of the story.
In short—brought alive by theatrical imagination, these medieval plays
work.
Which pleased me no end, since that was what I was imagining and trying to do with the plays in
A Play of Heresy.
Unfortunately, unlike the cycle of plays played in Chester and York, only two of the cycles done in Coventry remain—that of the Shearmen and Taylors and that of the Weavers. If you should happen on a book titled
Ludus Coventriae or the Plaie Called Corpus Christi
, full of plays, take note this was published under the misconception that what are now called the N-Town plays were the lost ones of Coventry. Instead, the book I used the most while writing this story was
The Corpus Christi Plays
, edited by Pamela M. King and Clifford Davidson, from Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University. Where occasionally things diverge in my story from the facts given in the book, pray remember that nothing is static and what is recorded of plays and pageant houses in the 1500s is not necessarily exactly how things were in the 1400s, a time for which we have less documentation about the plays.
What is intriguing, besides the surviving plays themselves, are the odd bits of information scattered through the town records, such as where some of the guilds had their pageant houses, and the cost for painting Herod’s face and mending the Devil’s garment. These are winnowed out and gathered together in the delight-filled
Records of Early English Drama: Coventry
.
A more immediately available experience of drama in medieval Coventry is that staple of Christmas carols—“The Coventry Carol.” It’s the lullaby that the mothers of Bethlehem sing to their doomed children at the Massacre of the Innocents in the play that, in this book, Basset is directing—one of the two plays that somehow survived when most of the Coventry plays vanished. Listening to the song’s delicate, sorrowing beauty makes one wonder how much of all too perishable grace and beauty is lost from medieval times.
Now for Coventry itself. Again I feel obliged to ask readers to move with me past the clichés about medieval towns, lest it be thought I write too rosy a picture of them. Much of what we “know” about them (such as all their streets were narrow and dark and deep in filth, with people throwing rude things out of upper windows) dates from later centuries, when the shifting economics led to the over-population of towns and cities and the accompanying breakdown of their governmental and social structures. Citizens of medieval towns—quarrelsome and ambitious among themselves though they might be (and the records show they definitely could be)—tended to be very proud and protective of their towns. Sponsoring fine civic events such as the Corpus Christi plays was one way of showing it, mixing piety and civic promotion in a combination very common throughout medieval England. The Tudor economics and their Reformation tore much of that to shreds. For an in-depth look at the inner workings of medieval Coventry, there is
The Coventry Leet Book,
published by the Early English Text Society
.
A number of records exist from medieval Coventry. Out of them, I have amused myself by using names of some actual citizens in this story. There was an actual John Burbage listed in the Coventry subsidy of 1434, when John Burbage of Bayley Lane paid 1s. 8d., sign of a prosperous man. Whether he was in any way an ancestor of Shakespeare’s Richard Burbage, I don’t know, but it’s diverting to know that Stratford-upon-Avon is not far from Coventry and that scholars love to speculate the young Shakespeare may have seen the last performance of these plays in Coventry before the Protestants shut them altogether down. (Turns out it was not, in the long run, the Lollards whom folk had to worry about.) So, if we are speculating, let us speculate that the young Shakespeare perhaps met the young Richard Burbage, descendant of John Burbage, then. But, no, I am not going to write that story.
Johanna Byfeld of Much Park Street is likewise in the records. And in the town records for 1441 is the order that “Richard Eme and all others, who play in the Corpus Christi pageant, shall play well and sufficiently, so that no impediment may arise in any play, on pain of 20s. to the town wall.”
Less happily, the 1431 Lollard uprising and its aftermath are also real, as are the executions, among others, of a Thomas Kydwa and of Alice Garton, just as told here. For this background, “Lollardy in Coventry and the Revolt of 1431” by Maureen Jurkowski in
The Fifteenth Century, vol. 6: Identity and Insurgency in the Late Middle Ages
, edited by Linda Clark, was invaluable.
Of course, should you go looking for medieval places in Coventry mentioned and used in this story, you will find little. The German bombing of 1940 burned out what was left of the medieval heart of the city, including St. Michael’s church (become, by then, St. Michael’s Cathedral) whose shell remains next to the new and glorious cathedral put up in its place for reminder of the great cruelties of mankind and of the grace of forgiveness and mercy.
For a wonderful site for “seeing” Coventry as it was and is, go to
http://www.historiccoventry.co.uk
. There are maps of Coventry at different times over the centuries, and photographs from the late 1800s into the 21st century. A journey in time both delightful and sad.
For a clearer understanding of how suicide—a word not used until centuries later—was seen and responded to in medieval times, Alexander Murray’s three-volume
Suicide in the Middle Ages
was extremely useful.
Biblical quotations are from the Bible in English—now known as the Wycliffe Bible—available in England in the 1400s. Bibles in English were not completely forbidden. Copies are known to have been owned by several kings, and license from a bishop could be had for lesser people to own one. The Church’s principal objection to the Bible being in English was the abuse some people made of it, taking from it what they wanted in order to justify what they wanted to do. It has always sounded better (at least to the perpetrator) to say, “The Bible made me do it.”
By the by, yes, there were organs in medieval England at the time, including portative ones. Yet again I feel obliged to insist that, despite the tedious media clichés, medieval times should not be summed up as nothing but ignorant, ugly, and brutal, existing under a perpetually overcast sky with plague and warfare every day from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance. The surviving art and literature and music from the time show a love of complexity, order, and beauty. Study of the legal structure and the bureaucracy that supported it evidence a society striving to create and maintain an ordered life. There were of course ugliness and injustices and outbreaks of violence—but those are not exclusive to medieval times and it is grossly unfair to characterize the period as if they were. Almost needless to say, the simplistic willfulness of those who continue to portray the time as “nothing but nasty,” ignoring everything to the good that the medieval world has to offer, annoys the hell out of me.

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