Ritual, Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town
Mervyn James
Past and Present, No. 98. (Feb., 1983), pp. 3-29.
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RITUAL, DRAMA AND SOCIAL BODY
IN THE LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLISH
TOWN*
THIS ARTICLE AIMS TO DISCUSS A SPECIFIC LATE MEDIEVAL CULT AS
practised in a specific context: that of the late medieval town. The
kind of town to be considered falls typically into the category of
"provincial capital", or at least of "county town", in terms of a re-
cently suggested c1assification.l The cult in question is the cult of
Corpus Christi. Corpus Christi was celebrated annually on a day
which fell sometime between the end of May and the end of June.2
What I propose to discuss are the various rites which were celebrated
on Corpus Christi Day, the various dramatic, theatrical manifesta-
tions which took place in connection with the occasion, and the myth-
ology associated with both. By and large Corpus Christi has received
more attention from literary scholars than from historians. This
is because the famous Corpus Christi play cycles developed in con-
nection with the Corpus Christi cult. The mythology of Corpus
Christi has been very interestingly discussed by, for example, V. A.
Kolve and Jerome Tay10r.~ Much has been written about the ways
the plays were presented and produced, some of this by scholars with
a strong historical sense, as more recently Alan Nelson and Margaret
D ~ r r e l l . ~Nevertheless, there does seem to be lacking among most of
these writers anything more than a very generalized idea5 of the late
* This paper was put together while a member of the Institute of Advanced Study,
Princeton, New Jersey, during the Session 1976-7. I owe a debt of gratitude to that
distinguished institution, and in particular to its School of Historical Studies, whose
Chairman, John Elliott, and fellow-members provided so much by way of hospitality,
stimulating discussion and conversation. I am also grateful to Michael Hunter and Bob
Scribner, who organized the London University seminar on "Ritual, Myth and Magic
in Early Modern Europe" to which it was delivered in November 1979.
See P. Clark and P. Slack, English Towns in Transttion, 1500-1700:Essays in Urban
Htstor,~(London, 1976), pp. 8 ff.
The date of Corpus Christi Day was determined by that of Easter Sunday and
showed the same var~ation from year to year.
V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (London, 1966); Jerome Taylor, "The
Dramatic Structure of the Corpus Christi Play", in Jerome Taylor and Alan H. Nelson
(eds.),.. Medteval English Drama: Essays Critical and Contextual (Chicago, 1972), pp. ~
148 it.
Alan H . Nelson, The Medieval Engltsh Stage: Corpus Christi Pageants and Plays
(Chicago, 1974); Margaret Dorrell, "The Mayor of York and the Coronation Pageant",
LeedsStudtes tn Engltsh, new ser., v (1971), pp. 34-45; Margaret Dorrell and Alexandra
F. Johnston, "The Domesday Pageant of the York Mercers", Leeds Studtes in Engltsh,
new ser., v (1971), p p 29-34
As expressed for example by Taylor, "Dramatic Structure of the Corpus Christi
Play", pp. 152-3.
4 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 98
medieval social background against which the cult was practised and
the plays performed; and very little sense of the specific social needs
and pressures to which both responded. What I aim to do here there-
fore is to fill in the social dimension. Briefly, I propose to argue that
the theme of Corpus Christi is society seen in terms of body; and that
the concept of body provided urban societies with a mythology and
ritual in terms of which the opposites of social wholeness and social
differentiation could be both affirmed, and also brought into a cre-
ative tension, one with the other.6 The final intention of the cult was,
then, to express the social bond and to contribute to social integration.
From this point of view, Corpus Christi expresses the creative role of
religious rite and ideology in urban societies, in which the alternative
symbols and ties of lordship, lineage and faithfulness, available in
countrysides, were lacking.
The feast of Corpus Christi, authorized by a papal bull of 1264
which was published in 1317,' first receives specific mention in Eng-
land when it was celebrated at Ipswich in I 325. In the course of the
following century, its observation spread widely; and although never
exclusively an urban feast, it soon came to occupy a particularly prom-
inent place in the townsman's liturgical calendar. And it was in towns
that the Corpus Christi celebrations assumed their most elaborate and
The general approach owes much to Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations
in Cosmologv (London, 1970); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysts of Con-
cepts of Pollutton and Taboo (London, 1966). For the background of ideas, see Leonard
Barkan, Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven,
Conn., 1975); S. B. Chrimes, Engltsh Constttutional Ideas in the Ftfreenth Century (Lon-
don, 1936); D . G. Hale, The Body Poltttc: A Polttical Metaphor in Renatssance English
Literature (The Hague, 1971); E. H . Kantorowicz, The King's TWO Bodtes: A Study tn
Medteval Political Theologv (Princeton, 1957); F . W. Maitland, "The Body Politic",
in his Selected Essays, ed. H . D . Hazeltine (Cambridge, 1936), pp. 240 ff. The concept
of body was of course by no means solely applied to urban societies; it provided a
symbolism in terms of which all kinds of human social organization, including the
unity of mankind itself and its relationship to the cosmos, could be expressed. See
Barkan, Nature's Work ofArt , passim; Otto Gierke, Political Theones of theMiddle Age,
trans. F . W. Maitland (Cambridge, 1922), p. 10.
It is likely that the role attributed in this paper to the Corpus Christi celebrations
in English urban society was at least similar to that of the feast and its cultus in the
larger towns of western Europe in general. For the European dimension, see for ex-
ample Natalie Zemon Davis, "The Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth Century
Lyon", Past and Present, no. 90 (Feb. 1981), pp. 40 ff.; Neil C. Brooks, "Processional
Drama and Dramatic Procession in Germany in the Late Middle Ages", J l . Engltsh
and Gennantc Philology, xxxii (1933), pp. I41 ff.; Edwin Muir, Ctvic Ritual tn Re-
naissance Venice (Princeton, 1981), pp. 223 ff.; F . G. Very, TheSpanish Corpus Christi
Procession: A Literary and Folkloric Study (Valencia, 1962), passim.
' For the foundation of the cult of Corpus Christi, and the circumstances of the bull,
see P. Browe, Dte Verehrung der Eucharistte im Mittelalter (Munich, 1933), pp. 70 ff.;
Acta sanctorum, x Aprilis, i, (Paris, 1866), pp. 457-64; for the bull Transtturus, see
Magnum bullarium Romanum, iii (Turin, 1858),,pp. 705-8.
According to M. L. Spencer, Corpus Chnstt Pageants tn England (New York,
191 I), p. I I ; cf. E. K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1903), ii, p.
371. But the feast may already have been widely observed by 1318. See Glynne Wick-
ham, Early English Stages, 1300 to 1600, 2 vols. in 3 (London, 1959-72), i, 1300 to
1576, 2nd edn. (London, 1980), p. I 30.
5 RITUAL, DRAMA AND SOCIAL BODY
developed form.9 What happened on Corpus Christi Day was that
first of all a mass took place, after which the congregation formed a
procession in which the Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ, in the
form of the host consecrated at the mass, was ceremonially carried
through the principal thoroughfare of the place where the feast was
being celebrated. It was attended by clergy and layfolk, and in the
larger towns the mayor, aldermen, councillors and other municipal
officials took a prominent part in the proceedings. The gilds were
also required to attend, dressed in their gild uniform, or livery; and
these processed in accordance with a carefully defined order of pre-
cedence, the humbler crafts going first, the wealthier and more im-
portant, in ascending order, coming behind them. Last of all came
the aldermen, councillors, sheriffs: the town magistracy, in fact; and
last of all, marching next to the host with its attendant clergy came
the mayor. The procession made its way to some other church at the
other end of the processional route, where the host was deposited,
and the religious side of the celebrations were there completed. Feast-
ing and other kinds of more secular celebration then followed.1° The
feature to note however is the procession, in which the Corpus Christi
becomes the point of reference in relation to which the structure of
precedence and authority in the town is made visually present on
Corpus Christi Day.
In addition, in many towns the gild contingents in the procession
were accompanied by "pageants" -moving waggon platforms. On
these, theatrical properties and actors were assembled into depictions
of Scriptural scenes and incidents, each one being the responsibility
either of one, or collectively of several, of the gilds marching in the
procession. The pageants might take the form of mute shows. But in
some towns they stopped at predetermined stations to present brief
speeches accompanied by dramatic actions. In others, full-length
plays might be acted at some stage in the proceedings.ll The assem-
bled texts of the latter constitute the well-known Corpus Christi cy-
cles, of which more or less complete examples survive from Coventry,
York, Wakefield, Chester and from another town which was probably
Lincoln.12 Some of these play cycles were so elaborate - involving
For reasons succinctly outlined by Glynne Wickham, TheMedieval Theatre (Lon-
don, 1974), pp. 59 ff., and by Nelson, Medieval English Stage, pp. 10 ff.
lo William Tydeman, The Theatre in the Middle Ages: Western European Stage Con-
dttlons, c. 800-1576 (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 96 ff.; Spencer, Corpus Chnstl Pageants,
pp. 61 ff.
Most of the extensive material relating to the nature of the "pageants", and the
manner in which the plays were presented, is summarized, with bibliographies, but
with polemical intent, in Nelson, Medieval English Stage, passim.
l 2 See Two Covent~l Corpus Chnsti Plays, ed. Hardin Craig, 2nd edn. (Early Eng.
Text Soc., extra ser., Ixxxvii, London, 1957); York Plays, ed. L. Toulmin Smith
(Oxford, 1885); The Towneley Plays, ed. George England and A. W. Pollard (Early
Eng. Text Soc., extra ser., Ixxi, London, 1897); The WakefieldPageants in the Towneley
Cycle, ed. A. C. Cawley (Manchester, 1958); TheChester Plays, ed. H . Deimling(Ear1y
I conr. on p. 6 1
6 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 98
in York, for example, the presentation of over fifty plays - that the
dramatic aspects of the feast were liable to conflict with the proces-
sional and liturgical aspects. Where this happened, the two became
separated. In some towns the procession took up the morning of the
feast-day, the plays the afternoon. In Chester the plays were shifted
to Whitsun week; in York the plays continued to be presented on
Corpus Christi Day, but the procession and mass took place the morn-
ing after. l 3 As a result of this separation two aspects of the celebration
emerged - the procession and the plays - each with a different
significance and function which I will later discuss.
What is the meaning of all this? One thing that seems to be clear
is that in some kind of way the feast and its season is about body -
a special kind of body admittedly: the Corpus Christi; but body never-
theless, and as such related to and modelled on the human psycho-
somatic self, and to the way in which this is experienced. So my
starting point is going to be from the idea - developed by Mary
Douglas for example in Natural Symbols14- that the human experi-
ence of body tends to sustain a particular view of society, the latter
in turn constraining the way in which the body itself is regarded. Of
course, the body of Christ was an essentially religious conception,
involving a relationship between the self and a supernatural order.
But the idea also had a secular and social relevance. "Body" was the
pre-eminent symbol in terms of which society was conceived. l5 Other
images were available - the social order might be seen as a tree, or
as a ship, as a vineyard with its graduated hierarchy of labourers, or
as a church building with its component parts.16 All had the advan-
tage of suggesting structure - separate parts related to each other
within a larger whole. But it was the idea of the social order as body
which had the widest connotation, and which was most obsessive and
fruitful. It suggested in the first place the intimacy and naturalness
of the social bond, since it was presented as a kind of extension of the
psychosomatic self.17 Natural body and social body indeed reacted
in. 12 conr. :
Eng. Text Soc., extra ser., Ixii, London, 1892; re-ed. J. Matthews, Early Eng. Text
Sac., extra ser., cxv, London, 1916); Ludus Coventriae: or, The Plaie Called Corpus
Christi, ed. K . S. Block (Early Eng. Text Soc., extra ser., cxx, London, 1920).
l 3 Spencer, Corpus Christi Pageants in England, pp. 96 ff.
IJDouglas, Natural Symbols, pp. 65, 70.
15 By and large this paper inclines to the kind of "structuralist" approach developed
in relation to systems of religious ritual and belief by Claude Lkvi-Strauss in his Le
totemisme au'jourdhui (Paris, 1962), and in his La pensee sauvage (Paris, 1962). The
view developed is that, through the medium of eucharistic beliefs, a language of ritual
and symbol is set up, in terms of which an "ideal" order is projected which stands in
a dialectical (or "binary") relationship to the actual order, generating a pressure to-
wards a conformity of the latter to the former.
16 Edmund Dudley, The Tree of Commonwealth, ed. D. M. Brodie (Cambridge,
1948);G. R. Owst, Lirerature and Pulpit inMedieval England, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 19661,
P P 72, 549.
l 7 The idea of a close analogy between the body politic and the body natural orig-
inates in the pre-Socratic idea that the world of nature is saturated with mind, and that
'conr, on p. :r
7 RITUAL, DRAMA AND SOCIAL BODY
on each other with a closeness which comes to near-identity. Thus
actions which affected the social body reacted back on the physical
body - physical ailments, for example, being seen as the result of
sins, lapses or crimes which had inflicted harm on the social body.ls
And just as in the natural body the physiological danger points were
at the joints, where member met member, or at the openings where
the body could be invaded by harmful influences from without, so in
the social body tensions arose at the jointures which linked group to
group, class to class; and in the social body too there were the open-
ings through which might pour invasion from without.19
n, I : conr.
therefore all bodies within it were constructed in accordance with similar principles,
and displayed a similar structure, being those perceived in mind. For Plato, in ac-
cordance with his doctrine of "ideas", all living creatures similarly conformed to an
"ideal" primordial model. Aristotle clearly enunciated the structural similarity of social
and psychosomatic bodies, laying down the principle that "the constitution of an
animal must be regarded as resembling that of a well-governed city state": Aristotle,
On the Movement of Antmals, trans. E . S. Forster (Cambridge, Mass., and London,
1937), p. 475. The concept received much emphasis in the writings of the Roman
Stoics, as in Seneca: "We are all parts of one great body. Nature produced us related
to one another, since she created us for the same end": Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistolae
morales, trans. R . M . Gummere, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1917-43),
iii, p. 91. The idea passed into the Christian tradition by way of St. Paul's First Eptstle
to the Corinthians xii. 12, 14-23, 25-6. For these and other authorities, see Hale, Body
Politic, pp. 18 ff.; Barkan, Nature's Work of Art, pp. 8 ff., 64 ff., and references there
glven.
l8 The concept of body meant that social dysfunction was presented in terms of
disease, as in Cicero, De officiis, iii. 5. 22, quoted in Hale, Body Politic, p. 25: "AS,
supposing each member of the body were so disposed as to think it could be well if it
should draw to itself the health of the adjacent member, it is inevitable that the whole
body would be debilitated and would perish". The interest in medicine among the
early Tudor humanists, particularly in Cardinal Pole's household at Padua, led to one
of the most elaborate surviving expositions of social ills in terms of disease. This was
Thomas Starkey's Dialogue between CardinalPole and Thomas Lupset, ed. J .M. Cowper
(Early Eng. Text Soc., extra ser., xii, London, 1871). Starkey sees the English body
politic as afflicted by consumption (loss of population); dropsy (idleness); palsy (lux-
ury); and pestilence (social conflict). By the same principle, applied in reverse, an
explanation for the misfortunes and ills which afflicted the psychosomatic body of the
individual person was sought in the latter's moral lapses and sins, which in turn caused
disorders in the social body. See K. V. Thomas, Rellgton and the Decline of Magic:
Studtes in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centur,~ England (London, 1971),
pp. 106-7. Hence the importance given, particularly in urban societies, to the moral
purity of office-bearers, and the enforcement by urban magistracies of moral policies
on whose effectiveness the well-being of the town and its inhabitants was thought to
depend: Bernd Moeller, Zmpenal Cities and the Reformation: Three Essays, ed. and
trans. H. C. E. Midelfort and M. U. Edwards Jr . (Philadelphia, 1972), pp. 45-6 In
the larger English towns, magistrates were commonly disqualified from office by im-
morality, and urban governments enforced a sexual code which involved punishing or
penalizing adultery, fornication and prostitution; before the Reformation, as after it,
Sabbatarianism was an issue, leading to spasmodic Sabbatarian legislation. For the
attitudes involved, see for example John Stow, A Suruq of London, ed. C. L. Kings-
ford, 2 vols. (Oxford, 19081, i, pp. 189-90, where he reports that in 1383 the citizens
of London, "taking upon them the rights which belonged to their bishops", proceeded
to punish on their own initiative the prostitutes and p
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