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 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