CHAPTER II.
THE MIRACLE PLAYS AND OTHER POEMS OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
The oldest form of regular dramatic representation in England was the Miracle Plays, improperly called Mysteries, after the French.

To these plays the people of England, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, owed a very large portion of what religious knowledge they possessed, for the prayers were in an unknown tongue, the sermons were very few, and printing was uninvented.

The plays themselves, introduced into the country by the Normans, were, in the foolish endeavour to make Normans of Anglo-Saxons, represented in Norman French[14] until the year 1338, when permission was obtained from the Pope to represent them in English.
The word _Miracle_, in their case, means anything recorded in Scripture.
The Miracle Plays had for their subjects the chief incidents of Old and New Testament history; not merely, however, of this history as accepted by the Reformed Church, but of that contained in the Apocryphal Gospels as well.

An entire series of these _Miracles_ consisted of short dramatic representations of many single passages of the sacred story.

The whole would occupy about three days.