The demon Tutivillus plays one other major role in medieval drama: he is the key antagonist in the play Mankind. In this play he seems, at first, to be just another demon: he appears to have lost any connection to language and even to Judgment Day. Although he does tempt the everyman character, Mankind, into sin, by the late fifteenth century Tutivillus seems to have become indistinguishable from all the other devils and demons that populated the medieval imaginary. Mankind, unlike most medieval drama, can be quite precisely dated to the years between 1465 and 1470. It is the first play that we know was performed by a professional, or semi-professional, self-supporting group, rather than amateur actors sponsored by town guilds or churches. Probably performed in East Anglia (Norfolk and Cambridgshire), Mankind would have been staged by a travelling troupe performing in inn-yards or local manor halls. It falls into the category of “morality play” – unlike the Corpus Christi cycle or mystery plays such as the Towneley Judgment, Mankind does not enact a part of the Bible. Rather, morality plays are allegorical dramatizations of the battle between good and evil. The prototypical morality play is Everyman, which has an “everyman” character who is visited by Death, and turns to allegorical figures such as Fellowship, Worldly Goods and Good Deeds for help. Mankind has these kinds of figures too – “Mankind” is the everyman figure, and the allegorical figures are Mercy, Mischief, New Gyse, Nowadays, and Nought. Where Mankind is unusual among morality plays is in its focus on language, and so this may be the reason the “language demon” Titivillus, rather than a random devil such as Beelzebub or Termagant, joins the cast of otherwise wholly allegorical tempters.

I argued in the previous chapter that the images of language encapsulated in the demon Tutivillus work to reinforce a repressive message: the material, economic image of language that accompanied the sack-bearing version itself is deployed as a strategy of power against monks and other ecclesiastics who took vows of poverty, whereas the literate, documentary image of language used for the gossiping women tales employs a vector of power based upon literacy and the literate culture of the courts. Mankind, I will argue, works in the opposite direction.