Portal:Middle Ages/Selected article/8
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The Goliards were a group of clergy who wrote bibulous, satirical Latin poetry in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They were mainly clerical students at the universities of France, Germany, Italy, and England who protested the growing contradictions within the Church, such as the failure of the crusades and financial abuses, expressing themselves through song, poetry and performance.
The derivation of the word is uncertain. It may simply come from the Latin gula, gluttony. It was said by them to originate from a mythical "Bishop Golias", a mediæval Latin form of the name Goliath, the giant who fought King David in the Bible, suggestive of their posing as heavy drinking yet learned students who lampooned the ecclesiastical and political establishment. Many scholars believe it goes back to a letter between St. Bernard and Innocent II, in which he referred to Pierre Abélard as Goliath, thus creating a connection between Goliath and the student adherents of Abélard. Others support its derivation from gailliard, a "gay fellow".
The satires were meant to mock and lampoon the Church. For example, at St. Remy, the goliards went to mass in procession each trailing a herring on a string along the ground, the game being to step on the herring in front and avoid your own herring from being trod on. In some districts, there was the celebration of the ass, in which an ass dressed in a silly costume was led to the chancel rail where a cantor chanted a song in praise of the ass. When he paused the audience would respond: "He Haw, Sire Ass, He haw!". The University of Paris complained:
"Priests and clerks.. dance in the choir dressed as women.. they sing wanton songs. They eat black pudding at the altar itself, while the celebrant is saying Mass. They play dice on the altar. They cense with stinking smoke from the soles of old shoes. They run and leap throughout the church, without a blush of their own shame. Finally they drive about the town and its theatres in shabby carriages and carts, and rouse the laughter of their fellows and the bystanders in infamous performances, with indecent gestures and with scurrilous and unchaste words."
