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Although Robert Henryson was the major poet of late-fifteenth-century Scotland, his life is even more difficult to construct than the texts of his poems, which must rest on prints or manuscripts made over seventy years after his death. Only one certain reference by a near contemporary survives, fittingly in a poem. In his "Lament for the Makars" (circa 1505), William Dunbar lists Henryson among two dozen dead poets: "In Dunfermelyne he [Death] hes done roune [whisper] / With Maister Robert Henrisoun." Dunfermline was a flourishing market town in western Fife, long a royal burgh and site of a royal palace where the poet-king James I was born. Although Robert Henryson was a common name in Fife, several city records, together with sixteenth-century prints of Henryson's poems, indicate that the poet was schoolmaster in the grammar school of the town's wealthy Benedictine abbey. Like his successors in this prestiguous position, he was probably also a notary public with some legal training.
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