He is not the same person as the Scoto-Norman poet William the Clerk, who wrote the Roman de Fergus, sometimes wrongly attributed to the Norman.
Both the Catholic Encyclopedia and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODB) maintains that he lived for a time in England, but it remains that he did not write in the Anglo-Norman dialect.
William's also wrote the Vie de Tobie for one William, prior of Kenilworth in Arden (1214–27), also in the diocese of Lichfield, and Les joies de notre Dame (or nostre Dame), which survives in only a single manuscript.
The legendary Vie de Sainte Marie-Madeleine, a short biography of Mary Magdalene, belongs to an unknown date.
For this William drew on several recent events: the publication of De miseria conditionis humanae by Pope Innocent III, the Fourth Crusade, the interdict placed on England by Innocent in 1208–13, the Albigensian Crusade, and the Albigensian campaigns of Louis VIII of France.