rebuke abbots and abbesses for listening to their songs.  And the worst of it was that the great emperor himself, the good Charlemagne, loved them too.  He would always listen to a minstrel, and his biographer, Einhard, tells us that ’He wrote out the barbarous and ancient songs, in which the acts of the kings and their wars were sung, and committed them to memory’;[17] and one at least of those old sagas, which he liked men to write down, has been preserved on the cover of a Latin manuscript, where a monk scribbled it in his spare time.  His son, Louis the Pious, was very different; he rejected the national poems, which he had learnt in his youth, and would not have them read or recited or taught; he would not allow minstrels to have justice in the law courts, and he forbade idle dances and songs and tales in public places on Sundays; but then he also dragged down his father’s kingdom into disgrace and ruin.  The minstrels repaid Charlemagne for his kindness to them.  They gave him everlasting fame; for all through the Middle Ages the legend of Charlemagne grew, and he shares with our King Arthur the honour of being the hero of one of the greatest romance-cycles of the Middle Ages.  Every different century clad him anew in its own dress and sang new lays about him.  What the monkish chroniclers in their cells could never do for Charlemagne, these despised and accursed minstrels did for him:  they gave him what is perhaps more desirable and more lasting than a place in history-they gave him a place in legend.  It is not every emperor who rules in those realms of gold of which Keats spoke, as well as in the kingdoms of the world; and in the realms of gold Charlemagne reigns with King Arthur, and his peers joust with the Knights of the Round Table.  Bodo, at any rate, benefited by Charles’s love of minstrels, and it is probable that he heard in the lifetime of the emperor himself the first beginnings of those legends which afterwards clung to the name of Charlemagne.  One can imagine him round-eyed in the churchyard, listening to fabulous stories of Charles’s Iron March to Pavia, such as a gossiping old monk of St Gall afterwards wrote down in his chronicle.[18]

It is likely enough that such legends were the nearest Bodo ever came to seeing the emperor, of whom even the poor serfs who never followed him to court or camp were proud.  But Charles was a great traveller:  like all the monarchs of the early Middle Ages he spent the time, when he was not warring, in trekking round his kingdom, staying at one of his estates, until he and his household had literally eaten their way through it, and then passing on to another.  And sometimes he varied the procedure by paying a visit to the estates of his bishops or nobles, who entertained him royally.  It may be that one day he came on a visit to Bodo’s masters and stopped at the big house on his way to Paris, and then Bodo saw him plain; for Charlemagne would come riding along the road in his jerkin of otter skin, and his plain blue cloak (Einhard tells us that he hated grand clothes and on ordinary days dressed like the common people);[19] and after him would come his three sons and his bodyguard, and then his five daughters.  Einhard has also told us that: