Sir Gilbert HayArticle Free Pass Sir Gilbert Hay, also called
Sir Gilbert of the Haye (flourished 1456), Scottish translator
of works from the French, whose prose translations are the
earliest extant examples of literary Scots prose. Hay may have
been the Gylbertus Hay named in the registers of St. Andrews
University in 1418 and 1419. That he received a degree as a
master of arts, that he became a knight, and that he was at some
time chamberlain to the king of France (Charles VII) are facts
known from his own description of himself at the beginning of
the manuscript of his prose translations: he is known to have
been in France by 1432. By 1456 he had returned to Scotland and
had entered the service of the Earl of Orkney and Caithness, at
whose request he began in that year the translation of three of
the most popular works of the Middle Ages: Honoré Bonet’s
L’Arbre des batailles (as The Buke of the Law of Armys, or Buke
of Bataillis); Le Livre de l’ordre de chevalerie, a French
version of Ramon Llull’s Libre