Robert Henryson

The longest poem is his Morall Fabillis, a tight, intricately structured set of thirteen fable stories in a cycle that runs just short of 3000 lines.

[citation needed] Constructing a sure chronology for Henryson's writings is not possible, but his Orpheus story may have been written earlier in his career, during his time in Glasgow, since one of its principal sources was contained in the university library.

[3] He probably had some attachment to the city's Benedictine abbey,[citation needed] the burial place for many of the kingdom's monarchs and an important centre for pilgrimage close to a major ferry-crossing en route to St Andrews.

Henryson generally wrote in a first-person voice using a familiar tone that quickly brings the reader into his confidence and gives a notable impression of authentic personality and beliefs.

His language is a supple, flowing and concise Scots that clearly shows he knew Latin,[citation needed] while scenes are usually given a deftly evocative Scottish setting which can only have come from close connection and observation.

[12] This detailed, intimate and realistic approach, at times, strongly suggests matters of personal experience and attitudes to actual contemporary events, yet the specifics remain elusive in ways that tantalise readers and critics.

Some of this sense of intrigue may be in part accidental, but it is also heightened by his cannily controlled application of a philosophy of fiction, a frequently self-proclaimed feature of the work.

[13] No concrete details of his life can be directly inferred from his works, but there are some passages of self-reflection that appear to contain autobiographical implications, particularly in the opening stanzas of his Testament of Cresseid.

In addition, the scholar Matthew P McDiarmid identified from an index a lost poem by Henryson which began: On fut by Forth as I couth found (not listed below).