In studies of the York Corpus Christi Play, the pageant sometimes known as ‘Fergus’ has proved somewhat enigmatic. Various records attesting to the pageant survive, though no script was ever entered into the York Register, and moreover both the popularity of the piece and the number of times it was actually staged have been brought into question. Perhaps the most intriguing account given of the pageant comes from 1432/3, when a complaint is recorded in the A/Y Memorandum Book concerning the apparently controversial nature of the production:

This complaint offers a rare example of audience response to the York Cycle, and to the passions and conflict which these performances had the capacity to stir: we are told that this pageant led to ‘more noise and laughter than devotion’, as well as ‘quarrels, disagreements and fights’. The idea that such a boisterous response to biblical or pseudo-biblical drama occurred in this period should perhaps come as little surprise. But it is through this record of the response that we have been able to characterise the apparently unique content of this ‘lost’ play, offering tantalising details of the performance and its oddities: namely that the piece could be characterised as the pageant ‘in which Fergus was beaten’; that this beating was perhaps framed (at least in part) as the cause of this controversy; and that the subject of the pageant was not considered to be contained in ‘sacred scripture’.