As stated before, when you are not sure if you will live to see tomorrow, God and the church become the only thing worth thinking about. The Catholic Church was still did all of its masses in Latin, being God’s language. However, being that education had taken quite a beating, only a few monks and clergy were able to read and speak it! The Church had a dilemma. How do we teach about jesus and the word of God if no one understands us. The nuns and priests took on the roles of the characters and began to act out the stories. They still used Latin for the masses, but their own language for the stories. These became known as Miracle or Mystery plays. Some of these plays are still around and are still performed to this day. Around Easter, The Passion Play is still performed today which depicts the last week of Christ’s life. In December, you may catch The Second Shepherd’s Play about the birth of Jesus.
As you can imagine, the nuns and priests were not the best actors, so theatre guilds began to form. These were the beginnings of theatre companies. Each guild would take a scene of a longer story and was in charge of presenting that part. Each group would have what looked like a train car, where they would put the play on the upper part of the car and use the inside as a dressing room and to store costumes, scenery, and props. These wagons would be strung together and could be wheeled from town to town. Whole “trains” of wagons would tour together to make a full production. These “train cars” were known as pageant wagons.
Just as there are Renaissance festivals still today, there are also pageant wagons festivals around the globe as well. Germany seems to be a common place for these celebrations.