te," says another ecclesiastical
historian, Dr. W. R. W. Stephens, "was in many respects merely a survival
of the old paganism thinly disguised. There was a prevalent belief in
witchcraft, magic, sortilegy, spells, charms, talismans, which mixed
itself up in strange ways with Christian ideas and Christian worship....
Fear, the note of superstition, rather than love, which is the
characteristic of a rational faith, was conspicuous in much of the
popular religion. The world was haunted by demons, hobgoblins, malignant
spirits of divers kinds, whose baneful influence must be averted by
charms or offerings."{7}

The writings of ecclesiastics, the decrees of councils and synods, from
the fourth century to the eleventh, abound in condemnations of pagan
practices at the turn of the year. It is in these customs, and in secular
mirth and revelry, not in Christian poetry, that we must seek for the
expression of early lay feeling about Christmas. It was a feast of
material good things, a time for the fulfilment of traditional heathen
usages, rather than a joyous celebration of the Saviour's birth. No doubt
it was observed by due attendance at church, but the services in a tongue
not understanded of the people cannot have been very full of meaning to
them, and we can imagine |36| their Christmas church-going as rather a
duty inspired by fear than an expression of devout rejoicing. It is
noteworthy that the earliest of vernacular Christmas carols known to us,
the early thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman "Seignors, ore entendez a nus,"
is a song not of religion but of revelry. Its last verse is typical:

"Seignors, jo vus di par Noel,
E par li sires de cest hostel,
Car bevez ben;
E jo primes beverai le men,
E pois aprez chescon le soen,
Par mon conseil;
Si jo vus di trestoz, 'Wesseyl!'
Dehaiz eit qui ne dirra, 'Drincheyl!'"[12]{8}

Not till the close of the thirteenth century do we meet with any
vernacular Christmas poetry of importance. The verses of the
_troubadours_ and _trouveres_ of twelfth-century France had little to do
with Christianity; their songs were mostly of earthly and illicit love.
The German Minnesingers of the thirteenth century were indeed pious, but
their devout lays were addressed to the Virgin as Queen of Heaven, the
ideal of womanhood, holding in glory the Divine Child in her arms, rather
than to the Babe and His Mother in the great humility of Bethlehem.

The firs