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A pageant wagon is a movable stage or wagon used to accommodate the mystery and miracle play cycles of the 10th through the 16th century. These religious plays were developed from biblical texts ; at the height of their popularity, they were allowed to stay within the churches, and special stages were erected for them.
A medieval pageant is a form of procession traditionally associated with both secular and religious rituals, often with a narrative structure. Pageantry was an important aspect of medieval European seasonal festivals, in particular around the celebration of Corpus Christi , which began after the thirteenth century.
The Barbers' Play: The Baptism performed from a wagon in the street in York in 2014. The York Mystery Plays, more properly the York Corpus Christi Plays, are a Middle English cycle of 48 mystery plays or pageants covering sacred history from the creation to the Last Judgment.
The “Host” would be accompanied by a tableau of biblical scenes which represented sacred Christian history which is the origin of the cycle plays. By 1394, biblical plays were being performed in York, England. The usage of pageant wagons enabled performances to travel across the country to various communities throughout England.
Plays were staged on pageant wagon stages, which were platforms mounted on wheels used to move scenery. They allowed for abrupt changes in location. They allowed for abrupt changes in location. Often providing their own costumes, amateur performers in England were exclusively male, but other countries had female performers.
Other pageants included the story of Moses, the Procession of the Prophets, Christ's Baptism, the Temptation in the Wilderness, and the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin. In given cycles, the plays came to be sponsored by the newly emerging Medieval craft guilds. The York mercers, for example, sponsored the Doomsday pageant.
The biblical portion of the play, a retelling of the Visitation of the Shepherds, comes only after a longer, invented story that mirrors it, in which the shepherds, before visiting the holy baby outside in a manger, must first rescue one of their sheep that has been hidden in a cradle indoors by a comically evil sheep-stealing couple.
The former description was based upon the earliest editions of the play that reflected the space-saving habits of the medieval scribe, who often wrote two verse-lines on a single manuscript line. Thus, depending upon how one interprets the manuscript, a stanza (from the Noah pageant) might appear in either of the following forms: