Trade Symbolism in the York Cycle

Abstract

Long ago, Sir Edmund Chambers noted that some endeavour after dramatic appropriateness is visible in the way in which certain pageants in the Corpus Christi cycles were assigned to the producing crafts.' A comparison of the subject matter of different pageants and the crafts performing them suggests that certain subjects belonged to certain crafts. For example, in many cycles, the Noah plays were staged by the shipwrights, the Last Supper by the bakers. In other cases, a connection not apparent to the modem eye may have existed for the medieval craftsman; at York, Beverley, Wakefield, and Chester, for example, the tanners' guilds staged the Creation and Fall of Lucifer. These and other parallels in the assignment of play topic to craft guild in the various cycles include neither all crafts nor all topics. However, they do suggest that the connection between guild and subject was not entirely arbitrary. The basis for these assignments appears to have been the associations which were perceived between the craft guilds and the subject matter.