Wine, Women, and Song | Page 7

passed into
modern languages. The Grandes Chroniques de S. Denis speak of
_jugleor, enchanteor, goliardois, et autres manières de menestrieux_.
Chaucer, in his description of the Miller, calls this merry narrator of
fabliaux a jangler and a goliardeis_. In Piers Ploughman_ the
goliardeis_ is further explained to be a glutton of words_, and talks in
Latin rhyme.[11]
Giraldus Cambrensis, during whose lifetime the name Golias first came
into vogue, thought that this father of the Goliardic family was a real
person.[12] He writes of him thus:--"A certain parasite called Golias,
who in our time obtained wide notoriety for his gluttony and lechery,
and by addiction to gulosity and debauchery deserved his surname,
being of excellent culture but of bad manners, and of no moral
discipline, uttered oftentimes and in many forms, both of rhythm and
metre, infamous libels against the Pope and Curia of Rome, with no
less impudence than imprudence." This is perhaps the most outspoken
utterance with regard to the eponymous hero of the Goliardic class
which we possess, and it deserves a close inspection.
In the first place, Giraldus attributes the satiric poems which passed
under the name of Golias to a single author famous in his days, and

says of this poet that he used both modern rhythms and classical metres.
The description would apply to Gualtherus de Insula, Walter of Lille,
or, as he is also called, Walter of Chatillon; for some of this Walter's
satires are composed in a curious mixture of the rhyming measures of
the medieval hymns with classical hexameters.[13] Yet had Giraldus
been pointing at Walter of Lille, a notable personage in his times, there
is no good reason to suppose that he would have suppressed his real
name, or have taken for granted that Golias was a bona fide surname.
On the theory that he knew Golias to be a mere nickname, and was
aware that Walter of Lille was the actual satirist, we should have to
explain his paragraph by the hypothesis that he chose to sneer at him
under his nom de guerre instead of
stigmatising him openly in
person.
His remarks, at any rate, go far toward disposing of the old belief that
the Goliardic satires were the work of Thomas Mapes. Giraldus was an
intimate friend of that worthy, who deserves well of all lovers of
medieval romance as a principal contributor to the Arthurian cycle. It is
hardly possible that Giraldus should have gibbeted such a man under
the sobriquet of Golias.
But what, it may be asked, if Walter of Lille, without the cognisance of
our English annalist, had in France obtained the chief fame of these
poems? what if they afterwards were attributed in England to another
Walter, his contemporary, himself a satirist of the monastic orders? The
fact that Walter of Lille was known in Latin as Gualtherus de Insula, or
Walter of the Island, may have confirmed the
misapprehension thus
suggested. It should be added that the ascription of the Goliardic satires
to Walter Mapes or Map first occurs in MSS. of the fourteenth century.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 6: See the drinking song printed in Walter Mapes, p. xlv.,
and Carm. Bur., pp. 198, 179.]
[Footnote 7: Carm. Bur., p. 249, note. There is a variation in the parody
printed by Wright, Rel. Antiq., ii.]

[Footnote 8: See A.P. von Bärnstein's little volume, _Ubi sunt qui ante
nos_, p. 46.]
[Footnote 9: See especially the songs Ordo Noster_ and Nos
Vagabunduli_, translated below in Section xiii.]
[Footnote 10: See Wright's introduction to Walter Mapes.]
[Footnote 11: Ibid.]
[Footnote 12: Ibid.]
[Footnote 13: See Müldner, Die zehn Gedichte des Walther von Lille.
1859. Walter Mapes (ed. Wright) is credited with five of these satires,
including two which close each stanza with a hexameter from Juvenal,
Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Horace.]
VIII.
I do not think there is much probability of arriving at certainty with
regard to the problems indicated in the foregoing section. We must be
content to accept the names Golias and Goliardi as we find them, and to
treat of this literature as the product of a class, from the midst of which,
as it is clear to any critic, more than one poet rose to eminence.
One thing appears manifest from the references to the Goliardi which I
have already quoted. That is, that the Wandering Students ranked in
common estimation with jongleurs, buffoons, and minstrels. Both
classes held a similar place in medieval society. Both were parasites
devoted to the entertainment of their superiors in rank. Both were
unattached, except by occasional engagements, to any fixed abode. But
while the minstrels found their temporary homes in the castles of the
nobility, we have reason to believe that the Goliardi haunted abbeys
and amused the leisure of ecclesiastical lords.
The personality of the writer disappears