Finally, the instinct of play proved no less enduring in the Germano-Keltic winter feasts than in those of summer. The priestly protests against the invasion of the churches by folk-dance and folk-song apply just as much to Christmas as to any other festal period. It is, indeed, to Christmas that the monitory legend of the dancers of Kölbigk attaches itself. A similar pious narrative is that in the thirteenth-century _Bonum Universale de Apibus_ of Thomas of Cantimpré, which tells how a devil made a famous song of St. Martin, and spread it abroad over France and Germany[975]. Yet a third is solemnly retailed by a fifteenth-century English theologian, who professes to have known a man who once heard an indecent song at Christmas, and not long after died of a melancholy[976]. During the seventeenth century folk still danced and cried ‘Yole’ in Yorkshire churches after the Christmas services[977]. Hopeless of abolishing such customs, the clergy tried to capture them. The Christmas crib was rocked to the rhythms of a dance, and such great Latin hymns as the _Hic iacet in cunabulis_ and the _Resonat in laudibus_ became the parents of a long series of festival songs, half sacred, half profane[978]. In Germany these were known as _Wiegenlieder_, in France as _noëls_, in England as carols; and the latter name makes it clear that they are but a specialized development of those _caroles_ or _rondes_ which of all mediaeval _chansons_ came nearest to the type of Germano-Keltic folk-song. A single passage in a Byzantine writer gives a tantalizing glimpse of such a folk-revel or _laiks_ at a much earlier stage. Constantine Porphyrogennetos describes amongst the New Year sports and ceremonies of the court of Byzantium in the tenth century one known as τὸ Γοτθικόν. In this the courtiers were led by two ‘Goths’ wearing skins and masks, and carrying staves and shields which they clashed together. An intricate dance took place about the hall, which naturally recalls the sword-dance of western Europe. A song followed, of which the words are preserved. They are only partly intelligible, and seem to contain allusions to the sacrificial boar and to the Gothic names of certain deities. From the fact that they are in Latin, the scholars who have studied them infer that the Γοτθικόν drifted to Byzantium from the court of the great sixth-century Ostrogoth, Theodoric[979]. CHAPTER XIII THE FEAST OF FOOLS