VILLON, François. – A name adopted (from that of his protector, the chaplain Jean de V.) by François de Montcorbier, also called des Loges, born in Paris around 1430 and awarded the degree of *maître ès arts* by that university in 1452; he is considered and recognized in modern times as the greatest French lyric poet of the Middle Ages.
The scant information about VILLON’s life from contemporary documents pertains almost exclusively to the legal proceedings arising from his dishonorable conduct as a dissolute scholar, thief, and brawler. On Corpus Christi evening, 5 June 1455, he fatally stabbed a priest with whom he had quarrelled near the Sorbonne. He fled and secured a royal pardon the following year. A further stay in Paris toward the end of 1456 enabled him to take part in the theft of five hundred écus from the Collège de Navarre, discovered two years later. Wandering through central France, he was imprisoned for other offences at Orléans and Meung, from which he was released in the summer of 1461. He returned to Paris for the theft at the Collège de Navarre and for a brawl that ended in injuries, for which he was sentenced to death at the close of 1462; on appeal the sentence was commuted to ten years’ banishment from the city.
Evidence of these turbulent experiences survives in the few poems that can be confidently attributed to him (long printed with his works, but not certainly his, are comic-satirical pieces from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century such as *Le Franc Archier de Bagnolet*, *Dialogue de Malepaye et de Baillevent*, and *Les Repues franches*). These are ballads and other short lyrics in the forms and taste of the day; most appear within the little poem *Le Testament*, where, as in the shorter *Le Lais*, he recalls in half-serious vein his discoveries, tricks, and misfortunes, and pours out his deepest and most sincere feelings: affection for his mother, remorse and regret for time wasted, suffering, and invocations to God.