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 Baernstein’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 Mueldner, 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 in nearly all the Carmina Vagorum.  Instead of a poet with a name, we find a type; and the verse is put into the mouth of Golias himself, or the Archipoeta, or the Primate of the order.  This merging of the individual in the class of which he forms a part is eminently characteristic of popular literature, and separates the Goliardic songs from those of the