And Bodo was a superstitious creature.  The Franks had been Christian now for many years, but Christian though they were, the peasants clung to old beliefs and superstitions.  On the estates of the holy monks of St Germain you would have found the country people saying charms which were hoary with age, parts of the lay sung by the Frankish ploughman over his bewitched land long before he marched southwards into the Roman Empire, or parts of the spell which the bee-master performed when he swarmed his bees on the shores of the Baltic Sea.  Christianity has coloured these charms, but it has not effaced their heathen origin; and because the tilling of the soil is the oldest and most unchanging of human occupations, old beliefs and superstitions cling to it and the old gods stalk up and down the brown furrows, when they have long vanished from houses and roads.  So on Abbot Irminon’s estates the peasant-farmers muttered charms over their sick cattle (and over their sick children too) and said incantations over the fields to make them fertile.  If you had followed behind Bodo when he broke his first furrow you would have probably seen him take out of his jerkin a little cake, baked for him by Ermentrude out of different kinds of meal, and you would have seen him stoop and lay it under the furrow and sing: 

Earth, Earth, Earth!  O Earth, our mother! 
May the All-Wielder, Ever-Lord grant thee
Acres a-waxing, upwards a-growing,
Pregnant with corn and plenteous in strength;
Hosts of grain shafts and of glittering plants! 
Of broad barley the blossoms,
And of white wheat ears waxing,
Of the whole land the harvest....

Acre, full-fed, bring forth fodder for men! 
Blossoming brightly, blessed become! 
And the God who wrought with earth grant us gift of growing
That each of all the corns may come unto our need.[8]

Then he would drive his plough through the acre.

The Church wisely did not interfere with these old rites.  It taught Bodo to pray to the Ever-Lord instead of to Father Heaven, and to the Virgin Mary instead of to Mother Earth, and with these changes let the old spell he had learned from his ancestors serve him still.  It taught him, for instance, to call on Christ and Mary in his charm for bees.  When Ermentrude heard her bees swarming, she stood outside her cottage and said this little charm over them: 

Christ, there is a swarm of bees outside,
Fly hither, my little cattle,
In blest peace, in God’s protection,
Come home safe and sound. 
Sit down, sit down, bee,
St Mary commanded thee.

Thou shalt not have leave,
Thou shalt not fly to the wood. 
Thou shalt not escape me,
Nor go away from me. 
Sit very still,
Wait God’s will![9]