The pageants of the York Corpus Christi Cycle are still usually amongst a reader's first introduction to early drama, but this should not diminish their importance to the history of performance. The thorough work of the REED project has demonstrated the diversity and widespread nature of such activity throughout the medieval and early modern periods, and has helped to demonstrate that “cycle” models such as those at York, Chester, or Coventry were distinctive initiatives rather than merely examples of a broader norm. Performances took place in a dizzying array of contexts, where shared traditions both responded to and influenced local circumstances; interdisciplinary studies have been crucial to acknowledging this reflexivity, exploring the integration of “performance with culture and culture with performance.”

Because of the relative wealth of medieval sources relating to York and the auspicious survival of British Library MS Additional 35390, the Register containing scripts of the city's Corpus Christi pageants, the “mystery plays” have received a great deal of scholarly attention. But the REED N-E project has brought to light sources which help illuminate a broad map of dynamic performance activity across the region, emphasising that York was not some isolated bastion of culture. From a very early period York formed the centre of a wide web of roads, waterways, and other travelling routes in northern England, and each village, town, or city in this web was necessarily defined by its connections to others. Connectivity and movement—of both commodities and ideas—across this network are central to the arguments which follow. The chapter begins with reassessment of the economic circumstances which have underpinned most arguments about York's Corpus Christi performances. It goes on to think about what the surviving biblical drama of York and the Towneley manuscript—once associated with Wakefield, and now more generally with the West Riding of Yorkshire—might tell us about contemporary perceptions of the profound economic changes wrought over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, across the whole of northern England.

Seemingly innocuous substances, wool and cloth are at the heart of these arguments. Scholars of the York plays have given a great deal of attention to how the interests of civic and craft hierarchies influenced the structure and content of performances.