‘Prenés la plume d’un buef,
S’en vestez un sage sot.’—Jubinal, Nouv. Rec., ii. 217.
The spirit of the goliards continued to exist long after the name had been forgotten; and the mass of bitter satire which they had left behind them against the whole papal system, and against the corruptions of the papal church of the middle ages, were a perfect godsend to the reformers of the sixteenth century, who could point to them triumphantly as irresistible evidence in their favour. Such scholars as Flacius Illyricus, eagerly examined the manuscripts which contained this goliardic poetry, and printed it, chiefly as good and effective weapons in the great religious strife which was then convulsing European society. To us, besides their interest as literary compositions, they have also a historical value, for they introduce us to a more intimate acquaintance with the character of the great mental struggle for emancipation from mediæval darkness which extended especially through the thirteenth century, and which was only overcome for a while to begin more strongly and more successfully at a later period. They display to us the gross ignorance, as well as the corruption of manners, of the great mass of the mediæval clergy. Nothing can be more amusing than the satire which some of these pieces throw on the character of monkish Latin. I printed in the “Reliquæ Antiquæ,” under the title of “The Abbot of Gloucester’s Feast,” a complaint supposed to issue from the mouth of one of the common herd of the monks, against the selfishness of their superiors, in which all the rules of Latin grammar are entirely set at defiance. The abbot and prior of Gloucester, with their whole convent, are invited to a feast, and on their arrival, “the abbot,” says the complainant, “goes to sit at the top, and the prior next to him, but I stood always in the back place among the low people.”
Abbas ire sede sursum,
Et prioris juxta ipsum;
Ego semper stavi dorsum
inter rascalilia.
The wine was served liberally to the prior and the abbot, but “nothing was give to us poor folks—everything was for the rich.”
Vinum venit sanguinatis
Ad prioris et abbatis;