in England would for the most part hold good for the other countries as
well.

JUGGLERS, FOLK-PLAYS, PAGEANTS. At the fall of the Roman Empire, which
marks the beginning of the Middle Ages, the corrupt Roman drama, proscribed
by the Church, had come to an unhonored end, and the actors had been merged
into the great body of disreputable jugglers and inferior minstrels who
wandered over all Christendom. The performances of these social outcasts,
crude and immoral as they were, continued for centuries unsuppressed,
because they responded to the demand for dramatic spectacle which is one of
the deepest though not least troublesome instincts in human nature. The
same demand was partly satisfied also by the rude country folk-plays,
survivals of primitive heathen ceremonials, performed at such festival
occasions as the harvest season, which in all lands continue to flourish
among the country people long after their original meaning has been
forgotten. In England the folk-plays, throughout the Middle Ages and in
remote spots down almost to the present time, sometimes took the form of
energetic dances (Morris dances, they came to be called, through confusion
with Moorish performances of the same general nature). Others of them,
however, exhibited in the midst of much rough-and-tumble fighting and
buffoonery, a slight thread of dramatic action. Their characters gradually
came to be a conventional set, partly famous figures of popular tradition,
such as St. George, Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and the Green Dragon. Other
offshoots of the folk-play were the 'mummings' and 'disguisings,'
collective names for many forms of processions, shows, and other
entertainments, such as, among the upper classes, that precursor of the
Elizabethan Mask in which a group of persons in disguise, invited or
uninvited, attended a formal dancing party. In the later part of the Middle
Ages, also, there were the secular pageants, spectacular displays (rather
different from those of the twentieth century) given on such occasions as