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 Kölbigk, 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