William the Clerk of Normandy

Who is William the Clerk of Normandy?

William the Clerk of Normandy was a Norman cleric and Old French poet. He is not the same person as the Scoto-Norman poet William the Clerk, who wrote the Roman de Fergus, sometimes wrongly attributed to the Norman.

William was married with a family. Both the Catholic Encyclopedia and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography maintains that he lived for a time in England, but it remains that he did not write in the Anglo-Norman dialect. He was originally from Normandy and his works suggest that he resided in the Diocese of Lichfield in England.

William authored "six religio-didactic works for lay audiences". The oldest, dated to 1210 or 1211, and most popular—it survives in twenty manuscripts—is the Bestiaire divin, a work of natural history and theology. It is dated on the basis of a reference to the sad state of the English Church in 1208. It contains many descriptions of animal life. It is dedicated to William's lord, a certain Radulphus, whose name is the object of an etymology given in the epilogue. Radulphus may be Ralph of Maidstone, who was treasurer of Lichfield in 1215. The Bestiaire was given several printings between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.