Walter Map

Walter Map was an English cleric and courtier who wrote in Latin in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. He is remembered mainly for a collection of anecdotes that portrays the royal court and the Church of his day, which makes him a useful window onto medieval political life seen from the inside.

Map claimed Welsh origins, but he was probably born in Herefordshire, a county on the Welsh border. He is thought to have studied at the University of Paris around the middle of the century, where he may have overlapped with Gerard la Pucelle. Back in England he served Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of Hereford, and later joined the royal household. Henry II used him as a diplomat, sending him to Louis VII of France and to Pope Alexander III, and took him to the Third Lateran Council in 1179, where he met a delegation of Waldensians. He accumulated benefices at Lincoln, London and Hereford, and in 1196 became Archdeacon of Oxford. Two attempts to win a bishopric came to nothing.

His main work, De nugis curialium, is an unfinished and loosely organised mix of anecdotes, court gossip and some genuine history, written in a satirical vein. Map composed most of it in the early 1180s and added later sections. One part attacking marriage circulated on its own as Dissuasio Valerii, and it was sometimes wrongly attributed to St Jerome. Alongside William of Newburgh, he recorded some of the earliest English stories of revenants, and he was among the first in the West to tell the legend of the head that grew in a grave. Goliardic poetry, including the satire Discipulus Goliae, is also attributed to him, though the authorship is uncertain. A link to the Lancelot-Grail cycle has been claimed, but internal evidence argues against it.

His legacy rests largely on his direct view of the Angevin court and on the satirical bite of his anecdotes, which historians and readers have used both as a source and as a portrait of customs.