Archdeacon and poet; born in England, probably in Herefordshire, about the middle of the twelfth century; studied in Paris; became a noted theologian; a favorite of Henry II., by whom he was sent on missions to the French and papal courts; was canon of St. Paul and of Salisbury, precentor of Lincoln, incumbent of Westbury, Gloucestershire, and Archdeacon of Oxford (1196). Died about 1210. He wrote many Norman-French and Latin poems on festive and romantic topics, as also in prose in both languages, but the authenticity of the poems now attributed to him has been seriously questioned. The “Latin Poems commonly attributed to Walter Mapes” were edited by Thomas Wright for the Camden Society in 1841, and the prose work “De Nugis Curialium,” in 1850.
The Anacreon of the eleventh century.
Two writers, neither of them undistinguished, and one of them, if we may trust the impression made on his contemporaries, the man of his century—I mean Lawrence, Prior of Durham, and Walter Mapes, Archdeacon of Oxford—have left us numerous specimens of this “sibilant” versification. In their songs we find not only specimens of our psalm-staves, but also other specimens of mixed rhime fully as complicated, and apparently as anomalous, as any that was used by the Troubadour. The hymns of the poetical Prior are for the most part in MS. They are much inferior to the jovial songs and biting satires of the Archdeacon. The latter, indeed, manages both rhythm and rhime with admirable skill; his numbers seem almost to reel beneath his merriment and sarcasm.
He was evidently a man, not only of much learning and extensive reading, but of great taste for lighter literature. His mind appears to have been stored with legends and anecdotes, and he was universally admired for his ready wit and humour. He speaks of himself as enjoying the reputation of a poet, but he gives us no clue to the character of the compositions by which he had entitled himself to this name. His Latin is very unequal; but we are perhaps not entirely competent to pronounce judgment in this respect, as the text in the unique manuscript of his prose Latin work which has come down to us is extremely corrupt. His style is in general not pure; he often becomes wearisome by his attempts at embellishment, and his writings are too much interspersed with puns and jests. His knowledge of the world was evidently extensive, and his observations on men and politics are judicious and acute. He sometimes rises above the prejudices of his age.
Who after all is not to be despised, for though no remarkable poet, he was a stout satirist, and the school of verse which he founded valuably illustrates the popular movements in England during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
There is a want of artistic finish about Anglo-Norman poetry; but the main conception of the “Quest of the Sangréal,” and the chief traits of the story, entitle its author, Walter de Mapes, to the rank of an epic poet. Had those romances ever been remodeled by a Dante, instead of a Malory, the world would have judged the middle ages more truly.
Walter was one of two remarkable men who stand before us as the representatives of a sudden outburst of literary, social, and religious criticism which followed the growth of romance and the appearance of a freer historical tone in the court of the two Henries…. He only rose to his fullest strength when he turned from the fields of romance to that of Church reform, and embodied the ecclesiastical abuses of his day in the figure of his “Bishop Goliath.”
Walter Map was no trivial jester, although the misreading of a piece of his most scathing satire has attached to him the cant name of “the jovial Archdeacon.” Undoubtedly he had a lively wit, could make even an abbot blush, and send table companions out of doors to explode in laughter at his broad contemptuous jest against a blasphemous hypocrisy. He was a wit somewhat of Chaucer’s pattern, ready against cowled hypocrites, and striking, as Chaucer often did, after the manner of his time, with a coarse jest out of the strength of a clean heart. It was the wit also of a true poet. Among the high dignitaries of the Roman Church he was an entirely orthodox divine, and looked down from the heights of theological scholarship upon what seemed to him the ignorant piety of the Waldenses. But the first Church reform concerned Church morals more nearly than theology, and in this sense, by his Latin verse and prose, Walter Map represents the chief of the Reformers before Wyclif. In French, then the vernacular tongue of English literature, he it was who gave a soul to the Arthurian romances, writing, most probably, the Latin original of Robert Borron’s introductory romance of the Saint Graal, and certainly Lancelot of the Lake, the Quest of the Saint Graal, and the Mort Artus. Unassuming as Chaucer, and, before Chaucer, the man of highest genius in our literature, Map was a frank man of the world with ready sympathies, a winning courtesy, warm friendships, and well-planted hatreds.
In the first place, he was an essayist; the “De Nugis Curialium” is not primarily an historical document, but a collection of the essays and miscellaneous papers…. The papers often consist of a mere paragraph containing an anecdote or squib, not what we should be justified in calling an essay; but it is the air of immediate contact with the reader which distinguishes the essayist, though it may take other matters to furnish forth the essay, and on the other hand many of Map’s subjects are all that a Lamb or Leigh Hunt would require. The essay in Map’s time had no precedents, and consequently no recognized literary form; but all the essential qualities of it are found in the “De Nugis Curialium,” and Map will be better understood under this name and view of him than any other.
Walter Map’s undoubted literary remains are scarcely commensurate with the reputation which he has almost continuously enjoyed.
This Welshman has the vivacity of the Celts his compatriots; he was celebrated at the court of Henry II., and throughout England for his repartees and witticisms, so celebrated indeed that he himself came to agree to others’ opinion, and thought them worth collecting. He thus formed a very bizarre book, without beginning or end, in which he noted, day by day, all the curious things he had heard—“ego verbum audivi”—and with greater abundance those he had said, including a great many puns. Thus it happens that certain chapters of his “De Nugis Curialium,” a title that the work owes to the success of John of Salisbury’s, are real novels, and have the smartness of such; others are real fabliaux, with all their coarseness; others are scenes of comedy, with dialogues, and indications of characters as in a play; others again are anecdotes of the East, “quoddam mirabile,” told on their return by pilgrims or crusaders.
