g hay, setting up hedges or fencing
woods, cutting trees, or working in quarries or building
houses; nor shall they work in the garden, nor come to the
law courts, nor follow the chase. But three carrying-services
it is lawful to do on Sunday, to wit carrying for the army,
carrying food, or carrying (if need be) the body of a lord to
its grave. Item, women shall not do their textile works, nor
cut out clothes, nor stitch them together with the needle,
nor card wool, nor beat hemp, nor wash clothes in public, nor
shear sheep: so that there may be rest on the Lord's day. But
let them come together from all sides to Mass in the Church
and praise God for all the good things He did for us on that
day![13]

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 Koelbigk, 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: