A Family Library, Not a City's Own Register

York's plays survive because the city itself kept an official Register; Wakefield's survive by a different and less institutional route. The single manuscript that preserves the cycle takes its more common name, the Towneley Plays, from the Towneley family of Lancashire, into whose private library it had passed by an uncertain date, well before the family sold it at auction in 1814. That accident of ownership means far less is documented about Wakefield's own production history than survives for York or Chester: no equivalent civic register naming which guild staged which pageant, or recording specific performance dates across the cycle's working life, has come down to us, only the play texts themselves and the general knowledge that performance continued until 1576, when Protestant religious authorities effectively ended it along with the other English cycles. The manuscript itself, physically, now rests far from Yorkshire entirely: sold out of the Towneley family's hands, it eventually reached the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, where it remains the primary surviving witness to the plays scholars variously call the Wakefield Cycle, after the city the plays were written for, and the Towneley Plays, after the family that happened to preserve them.