VII.


The songs of the Wandering Students were in a strict sense _moduli_ as
distinguished from _versus_; popular and not scholastic. They were,
however, composed by men of culture, imbued with classical learning of
some sort, and prepared by scholarship for the deftest and most
delicate manipulation of the Latin language.

Who were these Wandering Students, so often mentioned, and of whom
nothing has been as yet related? As their name implies, they were men,
and for the most part young men, travelling from university to
university in search of knowledge. Far from their homes, without
responsibilities, light of purse and light of heart, careless and
pleasure-seeking, they ran a free, disreputable course, frequenting
taverns at least as much as lecture-rooms, more capable of pronouncing
judgment upon wine or women than upon a problem of divinity or logic.
The conditions of medieval learning made it necessary to study
different sciences in different parts of Europe; and a fixed habit of
unrest, which seems to have pervaded society after the period of the
Crusades, encouraged vagabondage in all classes. The extent to which
travelling was carried in the Middle Ages for purposes of pilgrimage
and commerce, out of pure curiosity or love of knowledge, for the
bettering of trade in handicrafts or for self-improvement in the
sciences, has only of late years been estimated at a just calculation.
"The scholars," wrote a monk of Froidmont in the twelfth century, "are
wont to roam around the world and visit all its cities, till much