Crane, | 68 {Mareh 16, 
and the Wild Huntsman whose band was known as familia Allequint vul- 
gariter vel Arturi (No. 365).* Many anecdotes of this kind came to the 
knowledge of Etienne while searching for heresy in the south of France. 
It is to his credit that he did not put much confidence in these absurd 
stories, although fortunately he deemed them worthy of preservation. 
We have already mentioned the story of the faithful hound, Bedd Ge- 
lert, which is of Oriental origin, and is found, for instance, in the Seven 
Wise Masters. After giving a version of this story, which has become in 
several places a local legend, Etienne proceeds to say that the dog was 
considered a martyr, and its grave was visited by the sick just like the 
shrines of wonder-working saints. Sick children especially were brought 
to the place, and made to pass nine times through an aperture formed in 
the trunks of two trees growing over the hound’s grave, while various 
Pagan rites were performed, and the child was finally left naked at the 
foot of the tree until two candles an inch long were consumed. Etienne, 
by virtue of his office as inquisitor, had the dog exhumed, its bones burnt, 
and the grove cut down (No. 870). In this connection we may mention 
the dances which incur the writer’s ire. He says the devil is the inven- 
tor, guide and advocate of the dancers (No. 461), and adds that there 
once appeared to a certain holy man the devil in the shape of a little 
Ethiopian standing over the woman leading the dance, and guiding 
her about as he wished, and leaping over her head (ibid). Etienne de- 
rives the origin of dancing from the worship of Apis (/béd), and nar- 
rates several examples in which dancers were punished by the floor 
breaking through under them, and the church in which they were 
performing this incongruous act being struck by lightning (Nos. 462-63). 
These dances in the church, or rather, before it, and in the neighboring 
cemetery are frequently mentioned by our author. In Roussillon the feast 
of the patron saint was celebrated by the young people making and 
mounting a wooden horse, and dancing in the church and cemetery (No. 
194). Sometimes the officiating priest was disturbed by these dances, and 
came out and broke them up very unceremoniously, as, for instance, a 
certain Master Stephanus de Cudo (Cudot), who, when he could not 
otherwise stop the throng, seized the peplum of the leader, a majorissa of 
the town, and pulled it off together with all her hair and the ornaments of 
her head (No. 275), a not unlikely proceeding as we shall see in a moment. 
Luxury in dress has always beena favorite subject of denunciation from the 
pulpit, and some of Etienne’s stories prove that there isa greater permanence 
in fashion than we usually imagine. Blond hair seems to have been as popu- 
lar in the XIII asin the XIX century, and the length of ladies’ trains 
seemed then an invention of the devil. We have just seen how a priest put 
an end to a dance by pulling off the leader’s mantilla, and with it her false 
* A counterpart to this myth is that of the bonnes choses, or bonesozes (see L de 
la Marche’s note to No, 97), women who supposed that they accompanied at night 
Diana or Herodias mounted on certain beasts and traversed wide spaces of the 
earth and air, 
