Dan Michel of Northgate

Who is Dan Michel of Northgate?

Dan Michel of Northgate was an English writer, the author of the Ayenbite of Inwyt.

Nothing is known of him except what can be gathered from his work. It is a literal translation in the Kentish dialect of a French treatise entitled Le Somme des vices et des values, which was written in 1279 by Laurentius Gallus, a Dominican monk and confessor to Philip III of France. This work was translated into Flemish, Catalonian, Spanish and Italian, and appears in no less than six English translations.

Dan Michel's autograph MS. is preserved in Arundel MS. 57, which states that the work was completed in the year 1340 on the eve of the apostles Simon and Jude by Dan Michel of Northgate, a brother of the cloister of St Austin of Canterbury. The value of the book is chiefly philological as an authenticated and dated example of the southern dialect. The Ayenbite of Inwyt was edited for the Roxburghe Club by the Rev. Joseph Stevenson in 1855, and for the Early English Text Society by Richard Morris in 1876.