Mapping Guild Conflict in the York Passion Plays

Abstract

In the York play Entry into Jerusalem, Christ gestures to the towers and turrets of York visible above the streets of York while referring to Jerusalem. Christ orders Peter and Phillip to ‘Unto yone castell that is you agayne, / Gois with gud harte and tarie noght’ (U.15–16).¹ Christ’s reference to the castle in the background suggests the concurrence of setting and site. This eliding of the difference echoes the approach to landscape that Mike Pearson borrows from anthropologist Tim Ingold, when he describes the landscape as ‘also taskscape: a work-in-progress, perpetually under construction. It is a matrix of movement, with dis-tinct places as nodes bound together by the itineraries of inhabitants.’² The York pageant wagon routes and environs take on the valence of the Holy Land by way of the annual processions of actors and audiences, just as biblical scenes are inflected with the daily, secular, ecclesiastical and judicial itineraries that move through the same scenes throughout the years. The performance and re-performance of such itineraries over time, argues Pearson, create for partakers ‘a palimpsest, marked and named by the actions of ancestors. “All present experience contains ineradicable traces of the past which remain part of the constitution of the present”’.³