GERALD OF WALES, WALTER MAP AND THE SATIRISTS

In an earlier chapter some account was given of the active hostility shown towards the monastic body by a group of influential bishops in the last decades of the twelfth century. At the very moment when the opposition of the secular clergy in high places was thus making itself felt, another and hitherto unprecedented form of attack began which was to continue intermittently in one form or another until the Reformation. This was the criticism of the monastic life of the country by members of the new class of highly educated clerks who filled various administrative or magisterial posts in the royal and episcopal households or in the various schools, some of which were to develop into universities. The literary education of the day, based as it was on Latin models, and including among its most familiar text-books the satires of Horace, Persius and Juvenal, and the epigrams of Martial, gave to those with a talent for writing a bent towards the satirical and critical, and there was throughout the Middle Ages, especially in the universities of France and Italy, a floating population of men at once brilliant and irresponsible, occupied with matters of religion and yet without depth of feeling, to which earlier and later centuries afford no exact parallel. This type made its first considerable appearance in the literature of Europe in the works of two clerks who moved in the highest English ecclesiastical circles at the end of the reign of Henry II.