sheep:  so that there may be rest on the Lord’s day.  But let them come together from all sides to Mass in the Church and praise God for all the good things He did for us on that day![13]

Unfortunately, however, Bodo and Ermentrude and their friends were not content to go quietly to church on saints’ days and quietly home again.  They used to spend their holidays in dancing and singing and buffoonery, as country folk have always done until our own gloomier, more self-conscious age.  They were very merry and not at all refined, and the place they always chose for their dances was the churchyard; and unluckily the songs they sang as they danced in a ring were old pagan songs of their forefathers, left over from old Mayday festivities, which they could not forget, or ribald love-songs which the Church disliked.  Over and over again we find the Church councils complaining that the peasants (and sometimes the priests too) were singing ’wicked songs with a chorus of dancing women,’ or holding ’ballads and dancings and evil and wanton songs and such-like lures of the devil’;[14] over and over again the bishops forbade these songs and dances; but in vain.  In every country in Europe, right through the Middle Ages to the time of the Reformation, and after it, country folk continued to sing and dance in the churchyard.  Two hundred years after Charlemagne’s death there grew up the legend of the dancers of Koelbigk, who danced on Christmas Eve in the churchyard, in spite of the warning of the priest, and all got rooted to the spot for a year, till the Archbishop of Cologne released them.  Some men say that they were not rooted standing to the spot, but that they had to go on dancing for the whole year; and that before they were released they had danced themselves waist-deep into the ground.  People used to repeat the little Latin verse which they were singing: 

  Equitabat Bovo per silvam frondosam
  Ducebat sibi Merswindem formosam. 
  Quid stamus?  Cur non imus?[15]

Through the leafy forest, Bovo went a-riding
And his pretty Merswind trotted on beside him—­
Why are we standing still?  Why can’t we go away?

Another later story still is told about a priest in Worcestershire who was kept awake all night by the people dancing in his churchyard and singing a song with the refrain ‘Sweetheart have pity’, so that he could not get it out of his head, and the next morning at Mass, instead of saying ‘Dominus vobiscum’, he said ‘Sweetheart have pity’, and there was a dreadful scandal which got into a chronicle.[16]

Sometimes our Bodo did not dance himself, but listened to the songs of wandering minstrels.  The priests did not at all approve of these minstrels, who (they said) would certainly go to hell for singing profane secular songs, all about the great deeds of heathen heroes of the Frankish race, instead of Christian hymns.  But Bodo loved them, and so did Bodo’s betters; the Church councils had sometimes even to