The Nomadic Alternative – Page 213

as now - combined the diversions and perversions of a capital city with a ferment of intellectual ideas that alienated the student still further from his provincial parents. "When I came home from school in summer", wrote a student of the Sorbonne, "my father hardly knew me, I was so blackened from tramping in the sun."

The economics of student restlessness depended on shameless parasitism. And like the professional tramp, the successful parasite knows how to sweeten a passive provider. Surian, "by the grace of the continuing insanity of fools", the self-appointed Arch-Primate of Wandering Scholars, granted a friendly church in Austria an indulgence sparing it the predatory exactions of his cult followers whom he threatened with "irrational, farcical and indiscreet vengence". This marvellous document, unearthed by Helen Waddell for her Wandering Scholars concisely surveys the peripatetic ideal.

To live off the backs of other men is the ultimate good. The scholars are "swift and unstable as the swallows who take their food on the wind". They wander "tirelessly tired", shivering or frozen stiff, hungry, thirsty, suffering, wind-lashed, their rags flapping in the wind, one foot unshod, booted by the clergy, rejected by the laity, "bats that find no place with beast or bird".

The Ordo Vagorum horrified the Church. "They wander naked in public", reads a report to the Council of Strasburg in 1291; "they lie in bakers' ovens; the frequent bars, games and brothels. They live by their vices, obstinately persist in their way of life, and offer no hope of their eventual reform." Later in Tudor England Elizabeth I complained of the "scollers of the Universytyes of Oxford or Cambridge yt go about a begging".

A revolution in music accompanied the student revolt; and apart from underground deals in fake relics, popular songs were the principle source of student income.

L'aventure est et bone et bele,
Et le rine fraiche et nouvele.

Such is a verse of a Goliardic song. The Goliards considered themselves a sect, the Family of Golias, an archetypal character who combined gluttony and parasitism with the potency of Goliath.