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 And his pretty Merswind trotted on beside him-- Why are we standing still?
Why can't we go away?
Another later story still is told about a priest in Worcestershire who was kept awake all night by the people dancing in his churchyard and singing a song with the refrain 'Sweetheart have pity', so that he could not get it out of his head, and the next morning at Mass, instead of saying 'Dominus vobiscum', he said 'Sweetheart have pity', and there was a dreadful scandal which got into a chronicle.[16] Sometimes our Bodo did not dance himself, but listened to the songs of wandering minstrels.

The priests did not at all approve of these minstrels, who (they said) would certainly go to hell for singing profane secular songs, all about the great deeds of heathen heroes of the Frankish race, instead of Christian hymns.

But Bodo loved them, and so did Bodo's betters; the Church councils had sometimes even to rebuke abbots and abbesses for listening to their songs.

And the worst of it was that the great emperor himself, the good Charlemagne, loved them too.

He would always listen to a minstrel, and his biographer, Einhard, tells us that 'He wrote out the barbarous and ancient songs, in which the acts of the kings and their wars were sung, and committed them to memory';[17] and one at least of those old sagas, which he liked men to write down, has been preserved on the cover of a Latin manuscript, where a monk scribbled it in his spare time.