Gilbert Hay

Who is Gilbert Hay?

Gilbert Hay or Sir Gilbert the Haye, Scottish poet and translator, was perhaps a kinsman of the house of Errol.

If he is the student named in the registers of the University of St Andrews in 1418-1419, his birth may be fixed about 1403. He was in France in 1432, perhaps some years earlier, for a "Gilbert de la Haye" is mentioned as present at Reims, in July 1430, at the coronation of Charles VII. He has left it on record, in the Prologue to his Buke of the Law of Armys, that he was "chaumerlayn umquhyle to the maist worthy King Charles of France." In 1456 he was back in Scotland, in the service of the chancellor, William, Earl of Orkney and Caithness, "in his castell of Rosselyn," south of Edinburgh. The date of his death is unknown.

Hay is named by Dunbar in his Lament for the Makaris, and by Sir David Lyndsay in his Testament and Complaynt of the Papyngo. His only political work is The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, of which a portion, in copy, remains at Taymouth Castle. He has left three translations, extant in one volume in the collection of Abbotsford:

⁕The Buke of the Law of Armys or the Buke of Bataillis, a translation of Honoré Bonet's Arbre des batailles