daylight running to waste, as I have provided _gratis_! What will the wretches want next?’” Something of the same situation prevailed even in Bodo’s time. This, then, is how Bodo and Ermentrude usually passed their working day. But, it may be complained, this is all very well. We know about the estates on which these peasants lived and about the rents which they had to pay, and the services which they had to do. But how did they feel and think and amuse themselves when they were not working? Rents and services are only outside things; an estate book only describes routine. It would be idle to try to picture the life of a university from a study of its lecture list, and it is equally idle to try to describe the life of Bodo from the estate book of his masters. It is no good taking your meals in the kitchen if you never talk to the servants. This is true, and to arrive at Bodo’s thoughts and feelings and holiday amusements we must bid good-bye to Abbot Irminon’s estate book, and peer into some very dark corners indeed; for though by the aid of Chaucer and Langland and a few Cour Rollis it is possible to know a great deal about the feelings of a peasant six centuries later, material is scarce in the ninth century, and it is all the more necessary to remember the secret of the invisible ink. Bodo certainly _had_ plenty of feelings, and very strong ones. When he got up in the frost on a cold morning to drive the plough over the abbot’s acres, when his own were calling out for work, he often shivered and shook the rime from his beard, and wished that the big house and all its land were at the bottom of the sea (which, as a matter of fact, he had never seen and could not imagine). Or else he wished he were the abbot’s huntsman, hunting in the forest; or a monk of St. Germain, singing sweetly in the abbey church; or a merchant, taking bales of cloaks and girdles along the high road to Paris; anything, in fact, but a poor ploughman ploughing other people’s land. An Anglo-Saxon writer has imagined a dialogue with him: “Well, ploughman, how do you do your work?” “Oh, sir, I work very hard. I go out in the dawning, driving the oxen to the field and I yoke them to the plough. Be the winter never so stark, I dare not stay at home for fear of my lord; but every day I must plough a full acre or more, after having yoked the oxen and fastened the share and coulter to the plough!” “Have you any mate?” “I have a boy, who drives the oxen with a goad, who is now hoarse from cold and shouting.” (Poor little Wido.) “Well, well, it is very hard work?” “Yes, indeed it is very hard work.”