Johnston R.A. All Things Medieval: An Encyclopedia of the Medieval World
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coming to tempt the soul of Man. Some actors would jump off the stage
and run into the crowd while the others called out, “Stop him! Don’t let
him get away!” In some plays, the actors turned to the audience to explain
the action or gestured to the crowd as witnesses to what they had said or
done. When a Bible story was presented, the play often took liberties with
the literal story and added comic characters.
Towns in East Anglia put on single-performance plays, usually on re-
ligious themes. These plays were not staged by guilds or in manor halls,
but in towns, and were put on cooperatively by the parish. They combined
a performance with a large community feast, and they were fund-raising
events that tapped donors for subscriptions. Plays might benefi t the parish
church, perhaps to put on a new roof. People from surrounding towns and
villages traveled to see productions. These plays were written locally, and
the manuscripts were sometimes copied and rented to other communities.
The region of East Anglia had so many local plays put on by small commu-
nities that some men began to specialize in stage production and became
semiprofessional theater managers who could be hired temporarily.
Allegorical Drama
Medieval plays did not divide only between religious and secular, but also
between story and allegory. While a religious story might present the life
and martyrdom of a saint, a religious allegory would portray ideas repre-
sented as people. The characters’ names were abstract ideas, such as World-
liness or Temptation, and their actions demonstrated concepts about sin,
the soul, and how to live a good life. These plays are best known as moral-
ity plays. Surviving manuscripts date from end of Middle Ages—the mid-
15th century—so we can’t know how early these plays were performed in
the same form. It is likely that they were fully developed during the 14th
century.
While there are fuller records of morality plays in England, there is evi-
dence that similar plays were valued in other places. In Bavaria, there was
a play about the Antichrist with allegorical fi gures representing Heresy,
Hypocrisy, Mercy, and Justice, who do physical battle. One well-known
play, Everyman, was translated into English from Dutch. The Nether-
lands had a guild of rhetoricians who held competitive drama festivals.
The original Everyman was written for a festival in the 1490s. Every-
man is getting ready to die, which is staged as going on pilgrimage, and
needs companions to accompany him. Most will not go with him, includ-
ing Riches, Kindred, Beauty, and Strength. Only Good Deeds and Wis-
dom will be with him at the end. Other morality plays featured the seven
deadly sins as characters.
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The most famous English morality play is Mankind. The main character
is called simply Mankind, and he represents a generic human being. Man-
kind is a simple farmer, watched over and taught by the fi gure of Mercy.
He is trying to hoe his fi eld, but Temptations come and try to distract him
from his work. The leader is called Mischief. Three minor temptations act
as clowns, and at one point they make the audience since a bawdy song
with them. Mischief brings up a devil, who makes the ground as hard as a
board so Mankind cannot dig in it. Mankind eventually falls away into sin,
but Mercy rescues him.
In another famous morality play, The Castle of Perseverance, the main
character is again named Mankind. This time, he is a noble lord who must
defend the castle against forces of evil with the help of the seven Virtues. His
castle is attacked by the Devil, the Flesh, and various temptations, but he re-
sists them all. Mankind then listens to Covetousness and leaves the castle in
pursuit of riches, but he dies. His soul goes to hell, where it is rescued by the
four Daughters of God (Mercy, Peace, Righteousness, and Truth).
The existing manuscript of The Castle of Perseverance includes a sketch of
its staging. It shows a castle in the center, with a ring of scaffolds for various
scenes of action. The picture suggests the audience stood outside the ring,
with marshals posted around to keep them out of the stage zone. The best
productions may have dug a moat around the stage circle, fi lled with water,
so that the water could be used at some points of the action.
The play Wisdom must have been aimed at a more intellectual audience,
perhaps at court. The soul, Anima, is the main character, and the others are
more abstract. Allegory was an art form in medieval literature, and educated
audiences expected that characters would be abstract representations.
Most play scripts have been lost over time. The diffi culty of recovering
these texts is illustrated with The Pride of Life, a morality play about the King
of Life, who cannot bring himself to face Death. In a monastery in Dub-
lin, a portion of this script was discovered copied onto the back of a roll of
accounts from 1347. The original has never been discovered, nor have any
other copies. Many church libraries were destroyed when King Henry VIII
closed the monasteries and during the following religious civil wars.
The traditions of drama broke down during the Reformation, but some
remained continuous. In England, drama remained a key part of school life.
Most schools produced at least one play every year, perhaps in addition to
Twelfth Night mummery. In regions of Europe that remained Catholic,
such as Spain and Italy, the liturgical dramas to honor saints continued.
The Carité of Arras
The town of Arras, in Picardy, was a French-speaking town within the
commercial environment of Flanders. It had an unusually active theater
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community because the minstrels and jongleurs of the town formed a
confraternity, a religious guild. They had an annual festival to celebrate
their 12th-century miracle of the appearance of the Virgin Mary to two
jongleurs. Mary gave them a holy candle whose wax could cure the dis-
ease of ergotism. The jongleurs named their organization the Carité de
Notre Dame des Ardents and built a chapel for the holy candle, the Sainte-
Chandelle . This gave the town’s minstrels and actors a high social standing
unusual for professional actors.
The annual festival included plays put on by the jongleurs. The jongleurs
were literate, and some of their plays have survived in written form. While
miracle play cycles developed a traditional form that repeated every year
with little change, the jongleurs’ plays in Arras were original compositions.
They are among the few medieval plays that were signed by the authors,
who, as professionals, wanted credit. These plays reached a level of dramatic
sophistication that bridged into the later, early modern development of the
stage. Although the main point of each play was always to call attention to
the need to venerate the Virgin Mary and her candle at the Carité’s chapel,
the play’s action could use anything to draw a crowd.
One play began with a man announcing to the crowd that he was leaving
Arras to take up musical studies in Paris. Other actors were planted in the
audience and joined the action at the proper time to encourage or protest
his decision. His sick father begged him not to leave, so a doctor emerged
from the crowd to help diagnose the father’s ailment. One by one, more
characters emerged from the crowd and added plot complications. The plot
wandered from interest to interest, closing with a group of fairies who put a
curse on the original jongleur such that he could not go to Paris. The clos-
ing lines, addressed to the audience, asked them all to come and venerate
the shrine of Mary.
A play like this represented a new stage in the development of drama. The
actors, who were professional jongleurs, may have been playing themselves,
and the lead actor may have been the author who signed the manuscript.
The stage included not only its own scenery, but also the marketplace and
surrounding buildings. Actors came and went in the crowd and may have
changed costumes out of sight. The loose plot was not organized around a
moral or a Bible story, but rather around local sources of comedy. The jokes
used the names of real citizens of the town, teasing them in bawdy ways.
As a device for gathering a crowd to go into the chapel, this play must have
been very successful. Its secular nature, professional staging, and blend of
artifi ciality and naturalness link it to the sophisticated drama of the Renais-
sance.
See also: Guilds, Holidays, Robin Hood, Minstrels and Troubadours, Music,
Wagons and Carts.
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Further Reading
Beadle, Richard, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Brockett, Oscar G., and Margaret Mitchell. Making the Scene: A History of Stage
Design and Technology in Europe and the United States. San Antonio, TX:
Tobin Theatre Arts Fund, 2010.
Cawley, A. C., ed. Everyman and the Medieval Miracle Plays. New York: Every-
man, 1993.
Orme, Nicholas. Medieval Children. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2001.
Reeves, Compton. Pleasures and Pastimes in Medieval England. New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1998.
Simon, Eckhard. The Theatre of Medieval Europe: New Research in Early Drama.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Symes, Carol. A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007.
Wickham, Glynn. The Medieval Theatre. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974.
William, Tydeman, ed. The Medieval European Stage, 500–1550. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009.
E
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217
Easter. See Holidays
Embroidery
Embroidery was one of the few crafts considered suitable for upper-class
ladies, including queens. Many convents set the nuns to work making em-
broidered altar cloths and vestments. Poor people did not have the re-
sources for any but the simplest decoration, and the middle class probably
added what decoration they could, dependent on their access to free time
with adequate daylight and scraps of colored wool or linen yarn.
Embroidery was also a paid craft. Most extant fi ne embroidery from the
Middle Ages was commissioned by patrons and stitched by professionals,
both men and women. Decorative robes and hangings for use in churches
were the biggest market for professional embroiderers. These ecclesiastical
robes and hangings were heavily embroidered with scenes from the Bible
or the lives of saints. Embroiderers were not a guild craft. They usually
worked for a single patron or in a small network of craftsmen who could be
called on to help execute large commissioned pieces.
The earliest embroidery did not survive well, since, by nature, it was
on fabric. Cloth wore out, or garments were cut down and used in other
forms until these had worn out. All that survives are a few garments in
graves, and they are usually fragments. Pagan grave goods included cloth-
ing, but, most of the time, the fabric has rotted away. Only in the case of
nobles who had ship or coffi n burials do we fi nd any fabric at all.
However, there is clear evidence that the earliest Germanic peoples deco-
rated cloaks and dresses with embroidery. After they became Christian, they
focused on heavily decorated cloths to cover the altar or for a priest to wear
during Mass, and some survived in the keeping of churches. Tunics and
mantles for the nobility, as well as even their shoes, were usually embroi-
dered, often to a degree that astonishes our modern eyes.
Needles were made of iron or a copper alloy, such as brass. Ladies kept
their different-sized needles in fabric needle cases. In the late Middle Ages,
seamstresses began to use thimbles. They were very similar to modern ones,
made of small bits of sheet metal with punched indentations to brace the
needle. Thread was kept on bone or wooden reels and spools.
As early as the sixth century, we fi nd evidence of the basic embroidery
stitches used today: chain stitch, satin stitch, and stem stitch. Embroidery
was practical, such as hemstitch or buttonhole, and it was also decorative.
It was a way for people to make pictures with thread. They outlined leaves,
animals, or even mythical or Biblical fi gures. Using a contrasting color,
they fi lled in the shape with rows of chain stitch or satin stitch.
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218
The importation of silk changed both the nature of embroidery and its
ability to keep well over time. Silk keeps better than fl ax. Silk thread can be
dyed brighter, and embroidery on silk is much fi ner than embroidery on
homespun linen. By the 10th century, the embroidery found on robes and
hangings for the wealthy was very fi ne work. By the late Middle Ages, white
embroidery with drawn threads to create a lace effect was popular.
Gold thread was popular for the fi nest, most expensive work, often for
royalty or commissioned by royalty for the church. Fine gold wire was
wound around silk or wool the way silver wire is wound around a core to
make a violin or guitar string. It was diffi cult to make, and gold thread even-
tually constituted its own craft trade, monopolized by women craftsmen.
In some cases, after the embroiderer fi nished using gold thread, the piece
was hammered to fl atten the gold until it was smooth and shiny.
Pearls and gold ornaments were added to the most expensive pieces.
Tiny pearls had holes drilled and were threaded, and then these threads
were stitched in outline patterns. Gold ornaments either of thin gold leaf
Priests’ robes and other ecclesiastical fabrics were heavily embroidered. In
this painting of priests, each robe has been given decorative details. Some have
embroidery on hems, sleeves, and collars, while others appear to have embroidered
designs all over the fabric. Nuns worked on ecclesiastical embroidery, but churches
also paid secular embroiderers to keep up with the great needs of the church for altar
cloths and wall hangings. (The British Library/StockphotoPro)
Embroidery
219
or of thicker cast gold had tiny holes so they could be stitched on. By the
end of the Middle Ages, goldsmiths were beginning to make something
like modern sequins, small circles with a hole in the center.
Most medieval embroidery covered large areas, perhaps as repeated fl eur-
de-lis designs all over a queen’s cloak or the royal lions on a warhorse’s
quilted coverings. The designs had to be seen from a distance, so while de-
tail work was valued, visibility and the ability to fi ll in areas were even more
important. One technique was to use backstitch, stem stitch, split stitch,
and chain stitch to fi ll in large areas of color. These colored areas were
usually outlined in black. Cross-stitch and brick stitch could also be used.
These focused on counting threads to create little blocks of color forming
a large pattern.
Another popular method of fi lling spaces was called couching the thread.
Very long stitches laid colored threads vertically over the space to be fi lled.
Horizontal threads were laid across these at regular intervals as if to brace
the long vertical threads. Then tiny stitches held these horizontal threads
in place. In the late Middle Ages, and on into the Renaissance, the small
stitches that anchored the long threads began to be part of the design.
Dark blue stitches anchoring couched gold threads could be clustered more
heavily in places to create shadows in, for example, the folds of a saint’s
gold robe. This technique, called or nué, could give an embroidered picture
the quality of a painting. Couching threads could also be done from the
underside. The long threads, often gold-wrapped, were laid across the area,
but a fi ne, plain thread ran along the underside. It caught the top thread
and went down into the same hole, pulling the top thread slightly down
with it. The thread on the underside was not visible on top. (Sewing ma-
chines use a similar method for their standard two-thread stitch.)
Large embroidered pieces, such as hangings for a warhorse, were often
appliquéd with large pieces of colored fabric stitched around the edges.
This saved time over having to create these large fi elds entirely in satin
stitch or couched threads. Appliqué was especially practical when the pieces
were made of fulled woolen cloth that did not fray. When using a fraying
fabric like silk, they may have applied hot wax to the edges.
Professional embroidery for ecclesiastical or royal robes was often
planned and sketched by an artist and then completed by the embroiderer.
Sometimes, designs were drawn in charcoal or ink. Other times, a paper
stencil had holes pricked in all the lines, and chalk dust was forced through
the holes to leave an outline on the fabric. In other cases, the silk could be
stretched on a frame with a light source such as a candle or window behind
it. The pattern on silk or paper could be seen through it.
Frames for stretching fabric could be much larger than the small hoops
commonly used by today’s hobbyists. Since pieces could be very large, the
frames were more like quilting frames. They could be held on trestles like