The theatrical practice in Renaissance England of using boys to play women's roles has traditionally been explained as the product both of European Renaissance social prohibitions against public performances by women and of the establishment of an all-male performance tradition during the Middle Ages by craft guilds and civic groups whose members, all men, staged religious plays. However, considerable evidence shows that craft guilds in medieval England were not exclusively male and that women sometimes performed religious plays: records from Chester, for example, indicate that "wives of the town" performed such a play in the late fifteenth century. Moreover, during the Renaissance, French, Italian, and Spanish women acted in public plays in their own countries and even performed in London, where they were sometimes received favorably despite London audiences' extreme xenophobia.That English women performed on the public stage in the non-acting capacity of singing further complicates any understanding of the English practice of using boys to play women's roles.