“On the Pavement, Thinking About the Government”: The Corpus Christi Cycle and the Emergence of Municipal Merchant Power in York

As early as 1376, market towns all over England—from Newcastle to Bodmin, Chester to Norwich, and in between—were counting on the spectacle of religious theater to draw in crowds from the countryside and surrounding villages (King, “York and Coventry,” 22).¹ The growth of the English wool trade in the thirteenth century had quickly led to overseas trade in more diversified commodities, and the wealth that trade created spurred increased dramatic activity. York in particular appears to have channeled an exceptional portion of its wealth into civic drama in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries after the city enjoyed an increase in trade.² In 1415, more than sixty York guilds were listed as participants in the city’s largest dramatic spectacle, the Corpus Christi play cycle, which lasted all day and played to a mixed audience of York citizens and visitors from the surrounding countryside (Johnston and Rogerson, York: REED, 16–26 and 11, trans. 697). John Coldewey notes that, “the centers where drama was first established were the successful commercial centers in the north and in the old Midland grain belt—York, Chester, Beverly, Coventry and Lincoln” (Coldewey, 81), but he also cautions that, “the connection between drama, society, and economic motive . . . is rarely direct except to say that it takes money to produce plays” (Coldewey, 80). Certainly, economic growth does not always lead to increased dramatic activity, but financial stability was integral to the creation of the York Corpus Christi Cycle. In fact, several plays in the cycle insist on the central importance of economic success to York’s civic drama by acknowledging the primary source of York’s economic prosperity—overseas trade—and by endorsing or indicting the political climate created by the primacy of trade in the city’s economy. Some plays call upon ancient biblical authority to legitimize the newly formed civic power of merchants and elevate those guilds, such as the shipwrights and goldsmiths, whose business relationships with York’s merchants provided a local system of support for the successful practice of overseas trade. At the same time, the cycle was also an opportunity for guilds opposed to mercantile power to present narratives challenging the merchant elite’s right to rule. In both cases, the political consequences of increased trade in York are written into the city’s play cycle.

Because York’s mercantile culture is critical for contextualizing the play cycle, it is necessary to outline the economic and political state of York at the time of the play cycle’s inception. York’s increased wealth in the late medieval period was due in part to its strategic position on the navigable River Ouse; not only was York accessible by sea, but the city was also surrounded by an abundance of land suitable for raising sheep, a combination that put York at the center of the burgeoning wool trade and its overseas trade network. By 1300 the city supported a population of about 15,000 (Swanson, 2), and seventy years later the municipality of York, along with those of London, Bristol, and Norwich, was wealthy enough to become a royal creditor, as the Crown sought money to reengage in the Hundred Years War (Liddy, 3, 10). York made royal loans totaling £900 in 1370, and in 1377, when the crown ordered two navy vessels, York actually constructed three vessels, each at a cost of approximately £600 (Liddy, 10–11). York ranked among the wealthiest cities in fourteenth-century England.

The financial and political success of York’s merchants in this period fundamentally changed the structure of the ruling class. According to Christian Liddy, the merchant class gained civic power in fourteenth-century York not only by gaining wealth through trade, but primarily by governing the York staple created by the Crown in the 1353 Ordinance of the Staple (Liddy, 5–6). This ordinance set up a jurisdiction within the city of York where merchants had to go to buy and sell wool exports. With the creation of the ordinance, when merchants came to York...