Note 252 — Chapter III · THE MINSTREL LIFE

Early decrees forbidding the clergy to be ioculatores are given on p. 39. More precise is the order of Gautier of Sens (†913) in his Constitutiones, c. 13 (Mansi, xviii. 324) ‘Statuimus quod clerici ribaldi, maxime qui dicuntur de familia Goliae, per episcopos, archidiaconos, officiales, et decanos Christianitatis, tonderi praecipiantur vel etiam radi, ita quod eis non remaneat tonsura clericalis: ita tamen quod sine periculo et scandalo ita fiant.’ If Mansi’s date is right, this precedes by three centuries the almost identical Conc. of Rouen, c. 8 (Mansi, xxiii. 215), and Conc. of Castle Gonther (Tours), c. 21 (Mansi, xxiii. 237), both in 1231. Gautier, Les Tropaires, i. 186, dwells on the influence of the goliardi on the late and ribald development of the tropes, and quotes Conc. of Treves (1227), c. 9 (Mansi, xxiii. 33) ‘praecipimus ut omnes sacerdotes non permittant trutannos et alios vagos scholares aut goliardos cantare versus super Sanctus et Agnus Dei.’ On their probable share in the Feast of Fools cf. ch. xiv. For later legislation cf. Hubatsch, 14, 95, and the passage from the Liber Sextus of Boniface VIII on p. 39. It lasts to the Conc. Frisingense (1440) ‘statuimus ne clerici mimis, ioculatoribus, histrionibus, buffonibus, galliardis, largiantur’ (Labbe, xiii. 1286). By this time ‘goliard’ seems little more than a synonym for ‘minstrel.’ The ‘mynstralle, a gulardous,’ of Mannyng, 148, does not appear to be a clerk, while Chaucer’s ‘goliardeys’ is the Miller (C. T. prol. 560). On the other hand, Langland’s ‘Goliardeys, a glotoun of wordes’ (Piers Plowman, prol. 139), speaks Latin. Another name for the goliardi occurs in an Epistola Guidonis S. Laurentii in Lucina Cardinalis, xx. (1266, Hartzheim, iii. 807) against ‘vagi scolares, qui Eberdini vocantur,’ and who ‘divinum invertunt officium, unde laici scandalizantur.’