SOURCE: "Walter Map and Giraldus Cambrensis," Latomus, Vol. XXI, No. 3, October-December, 1972, pp. 860-75.

In the following excerpt, Bate refutes the popular notion that Map and fellow Medieval writer Giraldus Cambrensis (also known as Gerald of Wales) were close friends, and further suggests that Giraldus plagiarized some of Map's work.

Over the past fifty years or so, scholars attempting to define the origins of Goliardic poetry and Arthurian romance have shown that two of the most widely propagated ideas about Map are far from being the most accurate, and gradually the bulk of the literature attributed to him, that is Goliardic and Arthurian poems, has been taken away from him, and with them, of course, some of the characteristics which helped to form his personality in the eyes of the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries. Since he did not write the Goliardic poems which later circulated under his name...