Wace

Wace was a medieval Norman poet, born in Jersey around 1110 and brought up in mainland Normandy, where he tells us in the Roman de Rou he was taken as a child to Caen. He ended his career as a canon of Bayeux, and what is known of his life comes entirely from references in his own poems. His surviving verse includes the Roman de Brut, a history of Britain written around 1155 from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, in which he is the first to mention King Arthur's Round Table; the Roman de Rou, a vernacular chronicle of the dukes of Normandy that he says Henry II commissioned around 1160 and then gave to Benoit de Sainte-Maure; and saints' lives of Margaret the Virgin and Saint Nicholas. His Brut became the basis of Layamon's Middle English Brut. Writers in Jersey regard him as the founder of Jersey literature.