- William the Clerk
William the Clerk ( _fr. Guillaume le Clerc) (fl. c. 1200 – c. 1240) was an
Old French poet who names himself at the end of his only known work: the Arthurian "Roman de Fergus ", aparody of the romances ofChrétien de Troyes , notably the "Conte du graal ".William's may have been a
Scoto-Norman , but the two manuscripts that preserve the "Roman" are from northeasternFrance , perhaps suggesting their provenance there. It was once suggested to have been commissioned byAlan of Galloway for his wedding in 1209, since Alan was the descendant of Fergus, who ruled Galloway as king in the mid-twelfth century. Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann rejected this view and proposed that the "Roman" was commissioned by Dervorguilla, heiress of Galloway, and her husband,John I de Baliol , to promote the claim of their son, Hugh, to the Scottish throne, a claim derived from their ancestorFergus Mor mac Eirc . This dates the work later than their marriage, which took place around 1223, and prior to John's death in 1268, most likely between 1237 and 1241.D. D. R. Owen, ajudging the author to be intimately familiar with major figures and events of the reign of
William the Lion in Scotland, posited as "a strong possibility" that William the Clerk isWilliam Malveisin , a Frenchman who arrived in Scotland in the 1180s and served as a royal clerk. In this scenario, the "Roman" was composed after 1200.Finally, William may be the
William de Bois (de Bosco, de Bosch) who was a clerk of the royal chapel in 1193 and chancellor from 1210 to 1226.References
*Hunt, Tony (2004). "William the Clerk (fl. c.1200–c.1240)." "
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ". Oxford: Oxford University Press. [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29475, accessed 21 June 2008]
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.