ABSTRACT
At the beginning of any discussion of records, the twin necessities of accurate transcription and painstaking interpretation must be stressed. The dangers are particularly great for medieval drama because the records are, relatively speaking, so patchy that the whole interpretation of a guild's or even a town's dramatic activity can hang on one phrase. The chapter discusses the Chester companies' accounts at length because they contain such a wealth and variety of information related more or less closely to a still-existing set of plays. The York Mercers' indenture which turned up in York in 1971 has been perhaps the most important recent find in medieval dramatic records, and it gave to the Mercers, already a well-recorded guild, the only properly documented wagon in York. Innumerable further questions surround the York Mercers' pageant and its use, just as they do about every other pageant or carriage for which records in some way exist.
