Villon earned degrees—then a rap sheet—in medieval Paris
François Villon (c. 1431–after 1463) remains Late Medieval France's most famous poet, a University of Paris graduate who kept colliding with the law. Court papers called him Montcorbier or des Loges, yet in his verse he only ever used Villon, and used it often.
He grew up poor in Paris and took his surname from Guillaume de Villon, a chaplain at Saint-Benoît-le-Bétourné and canon-law professor who raised him and whom the poet called more than a father. He started arts studies perhaps at twelve, earning a bachelor's degree in 1449 and a master's in 1452. What he did over the next three years is unknown, and the 1911 Britannica dismissed attempts to fill the gap as futile guesswork.
On 5 June 1455, on the Rue Saint-Jacques, a quarrel with a priest named Sermaise turned to daggers; Sermaise, said to have struck first, was stabbed and felled with a stone and died. Villon fled but won a pardon from Charles VII in January 1456 on the claim that the dying man had forgiven him. That Christmas the chapel of the Collège de Navarre lost five hundred gold crowns, and Villon was part of the gang. An accomplice, Guy Tabarie, later named him ringleader, and Villon spent four years wandering in banishment.
In summer 1461 he sat in the bishop's prison at Meung-sur-Loire for an unknown offence, probably freed in an amnesty when Louis XI took the throne. Arrested for theft in November 1462, he was bailed, fell straight into a street brawl, was tortured and sentenced to hang. On 5 January 1463 the parlement commuted that to banishment, and after that his trail vanishes.
His mock will Le Lais dates from late 1456, and the longer Testament of 1461, written at thirty, is judged his masterpiece. Sixteen shorter poems survive; eleven more in thieves' cant are now often credited to imitators. He turned courtly ideals upside down, celebrating gallows-bound lowlifes and packing his lines with slang, private jokes and real Parisian names.
Source: François Villon
