The dance had been from the beginning a subject of contention between Christianity and the Roman world[531]; but whereas the dances of the East and South, so obnoxious to the early Fathers, were mainly those of professional entertainers, upon the stage or at banquets, the missionaries of the West had to face the even more difficult problem of a folk-dance and folk-song which were amongst the most inveterate habits of the freshly converted peoples. As the old worship vanished, these tended to attach themselves to the new. Upon great feasts and wake-days, choruses of women invaded with wanton _cantica_ and _ballationes_ the precincts of the churches and even the sacred buildings themselves, a desecration against which generation after generation of ecclesiastical authorities was fain to protest[532]. Clerkly sentiment in the matter is represented by a pious legend, very popular in the Middle Ages, which told how some reprobate folk of Kölbigk in Anhalt disobeyed the command of a priest to cease their unholy revels before the church of Saint Magnus while he said mass on Christmas day, and for their punishment must dance there the year round without stopping[533]. The struggle was a long one, and in the end the Church never quite succeeded even in expelling the dance from its own doors. The chapter of Wells about 1338 forbade _choreae_ and other _ludi_ within the cathedral and the cloisters, chiefly on account of the damage too often done to its property[534]. A seventeenth-century French writer records that he had seen clergy and singing-boys dancing at Easter in the churches of Paris[535]; and even at the present day there are some astounding survivals. At Seville, as is well known, the six boys, called _los Seises_, dance with castanets before the Holy Sacrament in the presence of the archbishop at Shrovetide, and during the feasts of the Immaculate Conception and Corpus Christi[536]. At Echternach in Luxembourg there is an annual dance through the church of pilgrims to the shrine of St. Willibrord[537], while at Barjols in Provence a ‘tripe-dance’ is danced at mass on St. Marcel’s day in honour of the patron[538].