have worked hard for the month before the justices came!), boxes, and wax. “With this battering-ram,” cries the shocked Bishop Theodulf, “they hope to break down the wall of my soul. But they would not have thought that they could shake _me_, if they had not so shaken other judges before.” And indeed, if his picture be true, the royal justices must have been followed about by a regular caravan of carts and horses to carry their presents. Even Theodulf has to admit that, in order not to hurt people’s feelings, he was obliged to accept certain unconsidered trifles in the shape of eggs and bread and wine and chickens and little birds, “whose bodies” (he says, smacking his lips) “are small, but very good to eat.” One seems to detect the anxious face of Bodo behind those eggs and little birds. Another treat Bodo had which happened once a year; for regularly on the ninth of October there began the great fair of St. Denys, which went on for a whole month, outside the gate of Paris. Then for a week before the fair little booths and sheds sprang up, with open fronts in which the merchants could display their wares, and the Abbey of St. Denys, which had the right to take a toll of all the merchants who came to sell, saw to it that the fair was well enclosed with fences, and that all came in by the gates and paid their money, for wily merchants were sometimes known to burrow under fences or climb over them so as to avoid the toll. Then the streets of Paris were crowded with merchants bringing their goods, packed in carts and upon horses and oxen; and on the opening day all regular trade in Paris stopped for a month, and every Parisian shopkeeper was in a booth somewhere in the fair, exchanging the corn and wine and honey of the district for rarer goods from foreign parts. Bodo’s abbey probably had a stall in the fair and sold some of those pieces of cloth woven by the serfs in the women’s quarter, or cheeses and salted meat prepared on the estates, or wine paid in rent by Bodo and his fellow-farmers. Bodo would certainly take a holiday and go to the fair. In fact, the steward would probably have great difficulty in keeping his men at work during the month; Charlemagne had to give a special order to his stewards that they should “be careful that our men do properly the work which it is lawful to exact from them, and that they do not waste their time in running about to markets and fairs.” Bodo and Ermentrude and the three children, all attired in their best, did not consider it waste of time to go to the fair even twice or three times. They pretended that they wanted to buy salt to salt down their winter meat, or some vermilion dye to colour a frock for the baby. What they really wanted was to wander along the little rows of booths and look at all the strange things assembled there; for merchants came to St. Denys to sell their rich goods from the distant East to Bodo’s betters, and wealthy Frankish nobles