City dwellers frequently treat their city as foreground and that which surrounds it as background, or, indeed, as invisible. Such an attitude is, perhaps, part of the urban experience itself, not only in modern cities but also in medieval ones. A city such as York seems small and even somewhat rustic to a dweller in a modern metropolis like New York, Toronto, or London; but to the medieval people who called York home, the city was anything but bucolic. In the opening chapter of his Tudor York, David Palliser argues that "town and hinterland" were linked and complementary rather than opposed "in the case of a provincial capital" such as York. (1) Surely this is so, yet it does not necessarily follow that the citizens of medieval York were always entirely at ease with this complementary relationship. Indeed, one can detect in the greatest literary production of that city--the York cyde--an attitude toward the rural that is both suspicious and colonizing. The plays of York show a dramatic flexibility that allows the city streets on which they are performed to become a variety of places: everywhere from heaven to hell and all degrees between. Yet they are peculiarly cautious when portraying the countryside around the city, as if reluctant to touch the place without strict controls over what aspects of the rural may, and may not, be let inside. This attitude is of course not surprising given the theology of the plays, nor is it unique to them. The ancient and baleful statement "Maledicta terra in opere tuo" ("Cursed is the earth in thy work") (Gen. 3:17), (2) and the striking portrayal of heaven as a city, the New Jerusalem where death, sorrow, and toil will have been eliminated (Apoc. [Rev.] 21), create an enduring and apparently scripturally mandated contrast between the dangers of the rural and the goodness of the city. Naturally enough, in the analogous episodes in the York cycle, the characters echo this contrast: Adam's lament about the earth's hostility to him (VI.93-116) (3) opposes the invitation to heaven at the Last Judgement (XLVII.365-68).
