he language, together
with a stock of newly-imported Greek and Latin terms,
there still remained, even for ecclesiastical use, a
number of Teutonic words previously employed in
heathen services, just as the names of gods stood
ineradicable in the days of the week; to such words
old customs would still cling silent and unnoticed
and take a new lease of life. The festivals of the
people present a tough material: they are so closely
bound up with its habits of life that they will put up
with foreign additions if only to save a fragment of
festivities long loved and tried. In this way
Scandinavia, probably the Goths also for a time, and
the Anglo-Saxons down to a late period, retained the
heathenish Yule as all Teutonic Christians did the
sanctity of Easter-tide; and from these two the
Yule-boar and Yule-bread, the Easter pancake,
Easter-sword, Easter-fire, and Easter-dance could not
be separated. As faithfully were perpetuated the name
and in many cases the observances of Midsummer. New
Christian feasts, especially of saints, seem
purposely, as well as accidentally, to have been made
to fall on heathen holidays. Churches often rose
precisely where a heathen god or his sacred tree had
been pulled down, and the people trod their old paths
to the accustomed site; sometimes the very walls of
the heathen temple became those of the church, and
cases occur in which idol images still found a place
in a wall of the porch, or were set up outside the
door, as at Bamberg Cathedral there lie Slavic heathen
figures of animals inscribed with runes. Sacred hills
and fountains were rechristened after saints, to whom
their sanctity was transferred; sacred woods were
handed over to the newly-founded convent or the king,
and even under private ownership did not lose their
long-accustomed homage. Law usages, particularly the
ordeals and oath-takings, but also the beating of
bounds, consecrations, image processions, spells and
formulas, while retaining their heathen character,
were simply clothed in Christian forms. In some
customs there was little to change: the heathen
practice of sprinkling a newborn babe with water
closely resembled Christian baptism; the sign of the
hammer, that o