Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/198

 1 86 PROBLEMS OF THE ENGLISH the c Trial ' and ' Crucifixion ' constitute two distinct pageants, the quatrains describing them were not separated in the usual manner, but were written continuously as though for a single pageant, and in the margin the names of the performing guilds were originally all written opposite the first quatrain. It seems probable, therefore, that the scribe of the banns copied them from a text in which the description was not yet divided. If these banns are pre-reformation, as Chambers holds, and as certainly seems probable, it follows that the divergence of the tradition in the collective manu- scripts (between H and the group) may well be as early as the fifteenth century. 1 The question as to whether the Passion pageant was originally one or two is also of interest in con- nexion with the Peniarth manuscript of ' Anti- christ.' Although all the collective manuscripts number the last play, that of Doomsday, twenty- four, in reality of course the number of pageants in H is twenty-four and in the group twenty-five. Now the play of Antichrist, which is the last but one of the cycle, is headed in the separate manuscript, P, c Incipit pagina xx ma ,' from which it follows that the collective manuscript from which it was copied contained only twenty- one plays. Hence we are to infer a steady growth in the number at least of separate pageants from twenty-one to twenty-four, and finally to twenty- 1 If we could argue with certainty that the banns containing the 'Assumption' a&ually represent the performance of 1477, it would follow that the tradition represented by H was earlier than that year.