The transition from these trivial and slightly interesting comic songs
to poems of a serious import, which played so important a part in
Goliardic literature, must of necessity be abrupt. It forms no part of
my present purpose to exhibit the Wandering Students in their capacity
as satirists. That belongs more properly to a study of the earlier
Reformation than to such an inquiry as I have undertaken in this
treatise. Satires, especially medieval satires, are apt, besides, to
lose their force and value in translation. I have therefore confined
myself to five specimens, more or less closely connected with the
subjects handled in this study.
The first has the interest of containing some ideas which Villon
preserved in his ballad of the men of old time.