ORO

So I did a little more in depth research on York Cycle plays and Oxford Referance Online pointed me to Mystery Plays which I thought was an interesting name choice, since they aren't very mystery like. But they were basically religious plays that were in vernacular (which means the common language, instead of all in Latin). The york plays or mystery plays could also be named Bible-histories as they were all stories right out of the Bible, almost as if they were like educational children's shows on the television set.
Below I've inserted the excerpt from ORO.


Mystery Play,   medieval religious play which derives from liturgical drama, but differs in being wholly or partly in the vernacular and not chanted but spoken. Also it was performed out of doors—in front of the church, in the market square, or on perambulating pageants. The earlier English name for it was miracle play, now seldom used, and a better name would be Bible-histories, since each play was really a cycle of plays based on the Bible, from the Creation to the Second Coming. Substantial texts of English ‘cycles’ of such plays have survived from Chester, Coventry, Lincoln, Wakefield, and York. Simultaneously with the English mystery play there arose in Europe, in the vernacular, the French mystère, the German Mysterienspiel, the Italian sacra rappresentazione, and the Spanish auto sacramental, to name only the most important. Traces of similar plays are found in Russia, in the states of Central Europe, and also in Denmark.

"Mystery Play"  The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre. Ed. Phyllis Hartnoll and Peter Found. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.  Central Washington University.  8 December 2010  <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t79.e2154>