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prison, the Châtelet, charged with the robbery of the College of Navarre. He was released quickly on promising to repay his share of the money. The last real fact we have about him is his arrest for brawling later in 1462. Although he seems to have been largely an onlooker he was sentenced to death. Parliament set aside the sentence but imposed banishment from Paris because of his dissolute and wayward life. His reactions to this arrest may be found here in the last four poems of the section called Other Poems, particularly in his ‘Epitaph’, the famous ‘Ballade of the Men Hanged’, as it became called. For those who want more biographical information, Aubrey Burl’s Danse Macabre: François Villon, Poetry & Murder in Medieval France (Sutton Publishing, 2000), is a fascinating read. 12
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Dale’s Preamble I live on the borders of Sutton-Cheam, home of the southron middle-class. One evening in the sun’s last beam blacking and blazing glass on glass of double-glazing, cars that pass, I saw a chancer, wit and crook, called François Villon shift his arse and in my vision sling his hook. And I was left to wonder how a brawling thief and gallows-cheat materialised beside the Plough, a quarter he would think effete, to meet a stuff y, staid aesthete that taught in school to earn his keep. Why rise in such a sober street and ghost the words and make flesh creep? This was a miracle of some kind: that such a short-lived bum could break through time and language, class and mind, an alien temperament, to shake the living daylights loose and make his dark selves speak – the medium, rhyme. – Voice in the long night still awake though never published in its time. Villon, the dead man, speaks to me out of the mediaeval dark. I did not choose his company; he caught me with the odd remark, a paper-mill against a spark. Villon, the dead man, speaks with me. No wit, though not so poor a clerk, I can’t shake off his company. 13

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prison, the Châtelet, charged with the robbery of the College of Navarre. He was released quickly on promising to repay his share of the money. The last real fact we have about him is his arrest for brawling later in 1462. Although he seems to have been largely an onlooker he was sentenced to death. Parliament set aside the sentence but imposed banishment from Paris because of his dissolute and wayward life. His reactions to this arrest may be found here in the last four poems of the section called Other Poems, particularly in his ‘Epitaph’, the famous ‘Ballade of the Men Hanged’, as it became called.

For those who want more biographical information, Aubrey Burl’s Danse Macabre: François Villon, Poetry & Murder in Medieval France (Sutton Publishing, 2000), is a fascinating read.

12

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