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English drama began as an extension of the liturgy of the same church, which had abolished such displays because of their indecency some four centuries prior. The church made no move to revive an art form they considered to be associated with Satan. Instead, they had utilized “acting” to make the scriptures more accessible to the uneducated.
In the Sixth Century, Pope Gregory compiled antiphons (or chants). These served as the basis for the rituals. In an antiphon, part of a church choir, or perhaps a single voice, chants a section of the service to which another part of the choir or a single voice answers. At first these passages were wordless. It was the Tenth Century before words were added to the antiphons. These were called tropes.
The significance of the change was far-reaching. Dialogue could be exchanged between the separate parts, and thus liturgical dramas were born. The earliest of these dealt with the three Marys attending the tomb of Christ. Needless to say, this trope was staged or Easter Sunday. The popularity of the format brought stories for other services and other Biblical related “holidays” and more elaborate displays. By the Twelfth Century much of the Bible had been transformed into a “play” of sorts.
Unfortunately, the form, which was meant to instruct the masses, held its limitations. The first of those was the lack of space. The churches simply could not hold the crowds coming together for the presentations. Crowds were very rowdy, jostling each other, sometimes actually breaking into fights. Moreover, the crowds demanded more and more secular material in the plays. Therefore, in 1201, Pope Innocent III ordered the plays performed outside the church. In 1255, Urban IV established a street festival, called Corpus Christi, in honor of the Sacrament. These plays were staged in the summer when the weather was better. Soon both the Easter and Christmas plays were abandoned.
The guilds took over the plays when the Church gave up the presentations. They were assisted by the corporations that aided the towns. The plays drew visitors to the towns and so economic support appeared only reasonable for business increased with the influx of people. The different guilds “specialized” in the plays presented. For example, the water carriers guild enacted the Great Flood, grocers performed Adam and Eve in the Garden, etc. If the guilds required more funds to stage an elaborate display, the corporations chipped in the funds.
The guild productions were not limited to pious displays, and more secular elements were added. Soon the plays were not a reflection of Biblical settings and morals, but those of contemporary England. One might see Mrs. Noah acting as the town gossip, shepherds overlooking the nativity suffered from unreasonable landlords, etc. Anachronisms were everywhere. For example, Herod would swear by the Trinity. Another Biblical character might mention Thomas à Becket.
By the Fourteenth Century, these presentations were termed Miracle Plays. A “miracle” in those days meant anything dealing with religion. A Miracle play was one which speaks of an incident in the life of a saint, whereas, a Mystery play is used to characterize incidents from the Bible. However, in Medieval England, no such distinction occurred.
Most miracles plays are in the form of four cycles, or collections. These collections are named after the four towns in which they were most often presented. The cycles are the York cycle (with 48 separate scenes), the Wakefield or Towneley cycle (with 32 scenes), the Chester cycle (25 scenes), and the Coventry or Ludus Coventriae cycle (43 scenes). There was also a Cornish cycle, and single plays or fragments of cycles that were acted at Dublin, Newcastle, Shrewsbury, etc.
Heralds announced the Miracle plays 2-3 days in advance of an actual performance with the crying of Banns. In a small town, the performers used the town square or other public place for the play. At least a dozen stands were constructed. A separate scene would be enacted upon each. With the scenes set up in a circle, the crowds could easily manage the viewing of each. While the crowd moved on to the next scene, another scene would set up so the performance was a continuous “cycle.”
In larger towns, the scenes were set up upon wagons, called “pageants.” The wagons would be stationed at street corners or before a shop where the shopkeeper paid the performers a fee for the privilege. The pageants were arranged so horses (or apprentices) could drag the wagon to the next station.
The anthology The English Drama 900-1642 (Norton) tells us, “The one on which the Second Shepherds’ Play was enacted, for example was said by a well-informed critic to have been at least thirty feet long. In one corner of it, Mak’s house probably stood. Near the center were the fields, where we find the shepherds at the beginning of the drama. In an opposite corner was the stable in Bethlehem, to which the shepherds go in the last scene. Usually there were two decks to the stage; if God was a character there might be three – the top one representing Heaven, the middle, Earth, the lower, Hell. The lower deck also served as a dressing room, and from its side there was an opening representing hell’s mouth, from which smoke belched, and from which the devil frequently leaped with a pitchfork. 
“The major cycles were all written in English, although the early liturgical plays were in Latin. They follow rhyme schemes of a sort, but these schemes are obviously not the work of scholars, nor is the diction generally. Often, too, the plots of the plays are loosely strung together, for plotting was a thing which English dramatists learned from the ancients. The serious and the facetious are frequently jumbled together. Yet these complaints are definitely minor. The miracles are still interesting – quite apart from the historical reasons – because of their rich realism and humor, because they are fundamentally healthy, and because they reflect the growth of a people toward expression, which is freedom.” (pp. 3-4)
Reynolds knew his first “great success” with the introduction of Prince Albert smoking tobacco in 1907. 
The image of the camel used on the package came about with the serendipitous arrival of the Barnum and Bailey Circus in Winston-Salem. An Arabian dromedary called “Old Joe” was one of the featured animals of the circus. It helped in gaining permission to take a picture of the camel that Reynolds had closed the factory and permitted his employe
Ironically, in North Carolina we have replaced one vice with another. Many of the former tobacco farms have been converted into vineyards. I used that idea as a key point in my contemporary Pride and Prejudice novel, Honor and Hope, in which the hero saves the heroine by purchasing the tobacco farm owned by her family. He adds the land to his vineyard. 
“Fritz,” as Prince Frederick William was known, and Princess Victoria met first when Prince Albert and his secretary Baron Stockmar concocted a plan to invite the Prussian royals to London for Albert’s Grand Exhibition of 1851. Fritz was 20 at the time, and Victoria was but 10. The queen permitted Victoria to join the royal families, on the guise as a companion for Fritz’s younger sister. Princess Victoria’s German was fluent and she proved herself the perfect guide for her father’s exhibition. She was vivacious and made a good first impression. The two were permitted great access to one another (a fact which would not have occurred if she were older) over the two weeks the Prussians remained in London. If she had been older perhaps she might have noted the reticence and the alarm with which Frederick William noted the familiarity practiced openly by the British royal family. Life in Prussia would not be the same as life in London.
In the years of waiting, Prince Albert “trained” his daughter in how to be an excellent queen consort. Albert spent two hours daily in this manner. Unfortunately, the Princess Royal was not as adaptable as her father. Victoria’s life in Prussia would never be what she wished. Where in England, the princess’s life held a certain informality, in Berlin she encountered strict court etiquette. Moreover, the Prussia that Fritz would govern would be a military-controlled state. The ruling House of Hohenzollern practiced a state-instilled monarchy. Fritz and Vicky were married in January 1858.
Education in England has roots deep in the Anglo-Saxon period. Latin was the main subject at these early schools and the instruction was directed toward the sons of “aristocracy” of the age. The church saw a need to train additional priests, as well as a need for someone to read the Bible and related documents to others. Both Oxford and Cambridge were founded as a means to train the clergy. It was during the reign of Edward VI that a reformed system of “free grammar schools.” 
“Robert Raikes initiated the Sunday School Movement, having inherited a publishing business from his father and become proprietor of the Gloucester Journal in 1757. The movement started with a school for boys in the slums. Raikes had been involved with those incarcerated at the county Poor Law (part of the jail at that time); he believed that “vice” would be better prevented than cured, with schooling as the best intervention. The best available time was Sunday, as the boys were often working in the factories the other six days. The best available teachers were lay people. The textbook was the Bible. The original curriculum started with teaching children to read and then having them learn the catechism, reasoning that a student who could read and understand the Bible could do the same with any other book.” (Power, John Carroll (1863). The Rise and Progress of Sunday Schools: A Biograhy of Robert Raikes and William Fox. New York: Sheldon & Company.)
Many of the minor plot lines in my latest Regency romantic suspense concern who could inherit a title? There is the matter of the Marquess of Malvern’s losing his memory. Should the Duke of Devilfoard declare his eldest son incompetent and petition for his second son to assume control of the dukedom? Was such even legal? And what of the missing Earl of Sandahl? The original earl falls overboard on his “honeymoon” and cannot be found. Should he be declared dead? If so, who inherits? The logical answer is the second son, but that solution is not what it seems. 
Angel Comes to the Devil’s Keep
On 7 April 1853, Queen Victoria delivered her fourth son and eighth child. Prince Leopold George Duncan Albert was the first of the queen’s children to be delivered with the aid of chloroform, a controversial procedure at the time. The belief by many in the medical field and the theological circles was that God meant women to “suffer” during childbirth so a symbol of Eve’s betrayal in the Garden of Eden. The queen’s use of the drug created quite a debate. It was also argued that a painful delivery assured that mother’s would wish to protect the children for whom they had suffered. The press thought the procedure too dangerous to the queen’s health. It was Victoria’s approval of the procedure that finally broke this archaic “male” perspective of women’s health. 
The diagnosis of hemophilia was not met well by either Victoria or Albert. “Blame” for the condition was denied by both the queen and her consort. So, who can be a hemophilia carrier? “A daughter gets an X chromosome from her mother and an X chromosome from her father. Suppose the X chromosome from her mother has the gene for normal blood clotting. Suppose the X chromosome from her father has the gene for hemophilia. The daughter will not have hemophilia since the normal blood clotting gene from her mother is dominant. It won’t allow the instructions from the hemophilia gene to be sent.
Eventually, Leopold won his mother’s permission to marry. However, his medical condition prevented many eligible princesses from accepting an offer. “Princess Helen of Waldeck-Pyrmont agreed to marry him. The couple tied the knot in 1882. Although when they married they barely knew each other, they soon grew to love, and became very devoted to, each other. The following year, Helen gave birth to a child, Alice. Unfortunately, Leopold didn’t get to spend a lot of time with his beloved family. In March 1884, he went, alone (his wife was pregnant and couldn’t travel) to the south of France, something he always did to escape the cold English winters. While there, he slipped, bruising his knee and hitting his head. That night, he died. The cause is unclear, but the most likely explanation is that he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Four months later, Helen gave birth to their second child, a boy named Charles Edward.”
“About 7 o’clock on the evening of Monday, the 3rd of November, at 42 weeks and 3 days gestation, the membranes spontaneously ruptured and labor pains soon followed. The contractions were coming every 8 to 10 minutes and were very mild. Examination of the cervix at that time revealed the tip of the cervix to be about a half penny dilated. On Tuesday morning, around 3 a.m., the 4th of November, Princess Charlotte had a violent vomiting spell and Dr. Croft thinking that delivery was eminent, sent for the officers of the state and Dr. Matthew Baillie. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, The Lord Chancellor, the Home Secretary, the Secretary of war and Dr. Baillie, all arrived in their coaches and four before 8:00 a.m. But alas, the Princess was only three centimeters dilated at this time.
Every Woman Dreams... 