Ni res, mas Dieus et amors."
Not every man could hope to be a knight; but all ranks and both sexes could—and did—sing of God and love. To emperors and princes must be added the lowlier figures of Berceo, in Spain, or—to go afield for the extremest case—the Joculator Domini, the inspired madman, Jacopone da Todi, in Italy. With the juglar strolled the primitive actress, the juglaresa, mentioned in the Libre del Apolonio, and branded as "infamous" in Alfonso's code of Las Siete Partidas. At the court of Juan II., in the fifteenth century, the eccentric Garci Ferrandes of Jerena, a court poet, married a juglaresa, and lived to lament the consequences in a cántica of the Cancionero de Baena (No. 555). In northern Europe there flourished a tribe of jovial clerics called Goliards (after a mythical Pope Golias), who counted Catullus, Horace, and Ovid for their masters, and blent their anacreontics with blasphemy—as in the Confessio Goliæ, wrongly ascribed to our Walter Map. The repute of this gentry is chronicled in the Canterbury Tales:
"He was a jangler and a goliardeis,
And that was of most sin and harlotries."
And the type, if not the name, existed in the Peninsula. So much might be inferred from the introduction and passage of a law forbidding the ordination of juglares; and, in the Cancioneiro Portuguez da Vaticana (No. 931), Estevam da Guarda banters a juglar who, taking orders in expectance of a prebend which he never received, was prevented by his holy estate from returning to his craft. But close at hand, in the person of Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita—the greatest name in early Castilian literature—is your Spanish Goliard incarnate.
The prosperity of trovador and juglar could not endure. First of foreign trovadores to reach Spain, the Gascon Marcabru treats Alfonso VII. (1126-57) almost as an equal. Raimbaud de Vaquerias, in what must be among the earliest copies of Spanish verse (not without a Galician savour), holds his head no less high; and the apotheosis of the juglar is witnessed by Vidal de Besalu at the court of Alfonso VIII. (1158-1214).
"Unas novas vos vuelh comtar
Que auzi dir a un joglar
En la cort del pus savi rei
Que anc fos de neguna lei."