His father and mother, Robert and Herembourg, belonged to Hainaut, and gave him for god-parents Count Baldwin and Countess Yoland—doubtless Baldwin IV of Hainault and his mother Yoland.
[1] Herman was a priest and the author of a verse Histoire de la Bible, which includes a separate poem on the Assumption of the Virgin.
The work is generally known as Le Roman de sapience, the name arising from a copyist's error in the first line of the poem: "Comens de sapiense, ce est la cremors de Deu" the first word being miswritten in one manuscript Romens, and in another Romanz.
This scriptural poem, very popular in its day, mentions Henry II of England as already dead, and must therefore be assigned to a date posterior to 1189.
34), and Jean Bonnard, Les Traductions de la Bible en vers français au moyen âge (1884).