Historical documents consistently support the idea that the whole event, even at the time of the earliest references to it, was a major production involving significant expenses, suggesting it began with a bang, not a whimper. REED grew out of the 1973 Modern Language Association meeting in Chicago when an international group of individual records editors met and agreed that a wholesale attempt to edit all the extant sources should be inaugurated before they suffered further deterioration, dispersal, and misconstruction. Such a project began to be organized under Professor Alexandra Johnston as Executive Editor and in March 1976 REED was awarded a Major Editorial Grant by the Canada Council. . . Since then, the REED project has been putting out about one book a year, each time publishing the performance-related details of a particular city. Four different guilds squabble over their share of a pageant, in a dispute ultimately settled by the city council.
Records express concerns about rowdy crowds, pushing and shoving during the performances.
An itinerant preacher named William Melton, who once threw Margery Kempe out of a church, decried the plays as occasion for drunkenness and wantonness. He suggests that the plays take place on the day after Corpus Christi, so that the religious procession would not be upstaged. It was not the plays, but rather the procession that was moved. The plays continue on the actual feast day, but the procession is shifted one day earlier. The plays had become an unstoppable force, arguably overshadowing the original purpose of the holy day.