Late medieval cycle plays in England were original creations of the civic communities, in which parts of the Old and the New Testament were given theatrical presentment carrying didactic as well as entertainment values. Filled with contemporary themes and motifs that referred to the everyday aspects of medieval life they depicted biblical stories by transferring the obscure reality long past to the familiar present. Therefore, when Passion Plays, a considerable part of the late medieval N-town and York cycles, followed the events from the Gospels and staged Jesus’ trial before Pilate, it was amended and amplified with the everyday language and references to create the setting of the contemporary legal surroundings of the late medieval courts of law. As a result, this contextualization, which aimed at introducing familiar elements in order to help in understanding the biblical message, additionally allowed for the plays to utilize Pilate's original hesitation to condemn Jesus and present it in the context of judicial unwillingness of the lay justice to cooperate with the ecclesiastical Courts Christian in England, pointing towards a long and ongoing conflict between the two legal systems.

English medieval cycle plays were performed outdoors on moving wagons or makeshift stages, usually around or during the feast of Corpus Christi, and consisted of even up to over 40 separate pageants covering biblical events from before the Creation to the Judgment Day (Twycross 2008: 27-29). The staged cycles and the managing over stage production of each piece was the responsibility of separate craft-guilds, which were able to fund the erection of the stage, appropriation of props, and pay the amateur actors from among their own midst what eventually made it a “community theatre” where almost all the members of that community were engaged in its creation, preparation, staging and, of course, reception (Beadle and King 2009: xii; Twycross 2008: 26-27). The craft-guilds also had the custody over their part of the script which was often rewritten, amended or written a new, which led to an inevitable transfer of the contemporary themes (Beadle and King 2009: xii-xiv).

According to Greg Walker, through its relation with the audience “a play engages with, represents, foregrounds, inflects, refracts or nuances the cultural assumptions of those who produce, perform and receive it” (Walker 2008: 76).