No Room at the Inn
The Tilers and Thatchers of fourteenth-century York tell how Joseph and Mary fared after they were turned away by the innkeepers of Bethlehem.
4 BC
King Richard II 1377-1399
The Tilers and Thatchers of fourteenth-century York tell how Joseph and Mary fared after they were turned away by the innkeepers of Bethlehem.
4 BC
King Richard II 1377-1399
This post is number 1 in the series The York Corpus Christi Pageants
From at least the 1370s, a series of pageants was put on in the city of York for Corpus Christi, a summertime Church festival dedicated to the Eucharist. Dramatising the life of Jesus Christ, the plays were performed by members of the Guilds of skilled trades or ‘mysteries’ (hence ‘mystery plays’). The Nativity fell to the Tilers and Thatchers, who began with Joseph and Mary trying to settle into a tumbledown Bethlehem stable.
Simplified for modern readers
Joseph begins:
ALMIGHTY God in Trinity,
I pray thee, Lord, for thy great might,
Unto thy simple servant see,
Pent in this place where we must light
Alone withal;
Lord, grant us good harbouring this night
Within this stall.
For we have sought both up and down
Through divers streets within this city;
So many people are come in to town
That we can nowhere harboured be,
There is such press.
Forsooth I can no succour see
But shelter with these beasts.
And if we here all night abide
We shall be storm-tossed in this shed;
The walls are down on either side,
The roof is riven above our head
(As God is true!)* —
Tell me, daughter,* what shall be said?
How shall we do?
For to great need now are we led,
As thou thyself the truth may see,
For here is neither cloth nor bed,
And we are weak, and all weary
And fain would rest.
Now, gracious God, for thy mercy,
Guide us the best.
* Changed from ‘Als have I roo’, an oath meaning ‘as I have rest’ i.e. the hope of rest in heaven (compare ‘As have I bliss’, ‘As God me save’ and ‘As have I joy’). The Nativity was acted by York’s Guild of Tilers and Thatchers, so Joseph no doubt got a very fair laugh for his comic dismay at the state of the stable’s roof. After changing ‘roo’ to ‘rest’, the sentiment defied all attempts to make it rhyme with ‘How shall we do?’, so another exclamation has been borrowed from The Canterbury Tales (‘The Man of Law’s Tale’, line 169) by Geoffrey Chaucer (?1342-1400), written at about the same time.
* A term of endearment for Mary, who was much younger than Joseph. Mary was not Joseph’s daughter, nor were they married: they were betrothed, a status somewhere between engagement and marriage in modern terms, involving co-habitation but no sexual intimacy. It was an arrangement of convenience, allowing Mary to have her miraculous child to all appearances as a married woman. According to tradition, Joseph and Mary never did marry, and in the Eastern churches Joseph is known as Joseph the Betrothed.