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