It is not easy to answer these questions.  All we know for certain is, that the term Goliardus was in common medieval use, and was employed as a synonym for Wandering Scholar in ecclesiastical documents. Vagi scholares aut Goliardi—­joculatores, goliardi seu bufones—­goliardia vel histrionatus—­vagi scholares qui goliardi vel histriones alio nomine appellantur—­clerici ribaudi, maxime qui dicuntur de familia Goliae:  so run the acts of several Church Councils.[10] The word passed into modern languages.  The Grandes Chroniques de S. Denis speak of jugleor, enchanteor, goliardois, et autres manieres 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.