The performances usually occur during the winter months, and especially around Christmas, and widely scattered as these survivals are, they still retain elements common to versions long since extinct and to each other. The earliest surviving written example of a Mummers' play dates from around 1596. It is accepted by most scholars that the roots of the actions now portrayed in the surviving plays took hold in primitive times and that there is a long gap between then and the first mention in manuscript or print as the plays were handed down in the oral tradition. Over the last three hundred years however, a large amount of information has built up illustrating the rich diversity of the Mummers' play. In all the remaining plays, although the core of the action remains constant, there have been and continue to be, minor changes.
Characters appear and disappear.
Characters have been added or left out at the end of the play according to both local whim and the availabilty of performers on a particular occasion. The changes are relatively unimportant, in most cases illustrating that the performers kept abreast of the times in which they lived. As long as a character died and was restored to life then the ceremony lived on and this basic tenet has resisted all changes, however modern the approach may have become. In the East Midland counties of Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Rutland, the ceremony took the very distinctive form of a Wooing Ceremony and the earliest remaining written example is from Bassingham in 1823, now contained in the Hunter Collection in the British Library. Two forms of this ceremony have survived the centuries, the Long Sword dances in Yorkshire and South Durham and the Rapper dance of Durham and Northumberland.