Walter stands before us as the representative of a sudden outburst of literary, social, and religious criticism which followed this growth of romance and the appearance of a freer historical tone in the court of the two Henries.  Born on the Welsh border, a student at Paris, a favourite with the king, a royal chaplain, justiciary, and ambassador, his genius was as various as it was prolific.  He is as much at his ease in sweeping together the chitchat of the time in his “Courtly Trifles” as in creating the character of Sir Galahad.  But he only rose to his fullest strength when he turned from the fields of romance to that of Church reform and embodied the ecclesiastical abuses of his day in the figure of his “Bishop Goliath.”  The whole spirit of Henry and his Court in their struggle with Thomas is reflected and illustrated in the apocalypse and confession of this imaginary prelate.  Picture after picture strips the veil from the corruption of the mediaeval Church, its indolence, its thirst for gain, its secret immorality.  The whole body of the clergy from Pope to hedge-priest is painted as busy in the chase for gain; what escapes the bishop is snapped up by the archdeacon, what escapes the archdeacon is nosed and hunted down by the dean, while a host of minor officials prowl hungrily around these greater marauders.  Out of the crowd of figures which fills the canvas of the satirist, pluralist vicars, abbots “purple as their wines,” monks feeding and chattering together like parrots in the refectory, rises the Philistine Bishop, light of purpose, void of conscience, lost in sensuality, drunken, unchaste, the Goliath who sums up the enormities of all, and against whose forehead this new David slings his sharp pebble of the brook.

[Illustration:  Ireland just before the English Invasion (v1-map-5t.jpg)]

[Sidenote:  Invasion of Ireland]

It would be in the highest degree unjust to treat such invectives as sober history, or to judge the Church of the twelfth century by the taunts of Walter de Map.  What writings such as his bring home to us is the upgrowth of a new literary class, not only standing apart from the Church but regarding it with a hardly disguised ill-will, and breaking down the unquestioning reverence with which men had till now regarded it by their sarcasm and abuse.  The tone of intellectual contempt which begins with Walter de Map goes deepening on till it culminates in Chaucer and passes into the open revolt of the Lollard.  But even in these early days we can hardly doubt that it gave Henry strength in his contest with the Church.  So little indeed did he suffer from the murder of Archbishop Thomas that the years which follow it form the grandest portion of his reign.  While Rome was threatening excommunication he added a new realm to his dominions.  Ireland had long since fallen from the civilization and learning which its missionaries brought in the seventh century to the shores of Northumbria.