Public spectacle, which may be defined as any orchestration of events designed to engage the minds of spectators, can inform our understanding of the social identity or prevailing mores of past cultures. Typically it evolves as a co-adapted set of devices: superficially, devices such as sights, sounds, smells, splendour and ceremony, but at a deeper level – one might say psychologically – a sense of participation; an affirmation of identity and life's meaning for the individual, as a spectator within a collectivity of his or her peers. The trick is that each spectator imagines that he or she is at one with all, most or many of the others by participating in the common response of the crowd; indeed, the most enduring forms of public spectacle in the period 900–1200 stimulated the crowd to respond in a predetermined way. In doing so they performed four main social functions. The first function of spectacle was essentially contractual: to affirm the mutual responsibilities, or the mutually profitable relationship, between different ranks of the social hierarchy (including God and the saints), or social equals. Another function was to affirm life's meaning, usually by reinforcing belief in God and in the Christian cosmology. A third function might be termed recreational. Village drama, knockabout, satire, skits and the enactment of heroic tales tackled life's big questions in engaging, allusive, fun or frivolous ways, and surely helped people come to terms with them.