WOMAN AS WITCH 17 



of maidens singing the winileod or choral love - song, 

 and accompanied by groups of men, invaded the churches 

 and prepared their common meals inside. A statute of 

 St. Boniface, dated 803, forbids choruses of laymen and 

 maidens to sing and feast in the churches. So early as 

 600 St. Eligius forbids, on the festival of St. John (Mid- 

 summer Day), dancing and capering, and carols and 

 diabolical songs. While even in the ninth century 

 Benedictus Levita must order that, " when the populace 

 V come to church, it shall only do there what belongs to 

 the service of God. In very truth, these dances and 

 capers, these disgraceful and lewd songs, must not be 

 performed either in the churchyards or the houses of 

 God, nor in any other place, because they remain from 

 the custom of the heathens." Here in contact with early 

 Christianity we have clearly the chief features of the 

 primitive worship, or of later witchcraft with its 

 prominent place for the priestesses or witches. The 

 old faith has not yet been broken down, and its rites 

 have not yet disappeared into the byways of peasant 

 marriages, folk-festivals, and witchcraft. Shall we take 

 one more glance at those maidens with their winileod 

 or love - songs, their torchlight dances, and common 

 meal ? Here is a fossil of three or four hundred years 

 later date, which I found, to my great delight, in an 

 old Friesian law-book. After the bridal feast the relic 

 of the old common group meal the bride is to be 

 brought to the bridegroom's house at night in the 

 following manner : 



That this free Friesian woman shall come into the 

 house of the free Friesian man with sound of horns, with 



VOL. II C 



