Layamon,
Middle English "La
3amon," was a medieval poet who wrote the first major work on
King Arthur in the
English language. His
Brut (ca.
1200) is an epic poem recounting the history of
Britain from its legendary founding by the eponymous
Trojan Brutus after the destruction of
Troy by the
Greeks up to the death of
Cadwaladr. La
3amon's poem closely follows its immediate source, the
Norman French Roman de Brut by
Wace, which itself cribs heavily from
Geoffrey of Monmouth's
Historia Regum Britanniae, but La
3amon broke new ground in foregrounding
Arthur as a national hero-king of the grand Germanic tradition, and is the first to mention various events connected with the stories of characters such as
Merlin,
King Lear, and
Cymbeline.
La3amon is generally considered the first major Middle English poet, but his lexicon is almost pure Anglo-Saxon. In the 32,341 lines of the Brut, scholar Robert Lomis counts only 120 words of French or Latinate origin. Nevertheless, in its innovative meter, transitional grammar, and widespread readership, La3amon's Brut is considered a watershed in the development of Middle English prosody and the popularization of King Arthur as a British national hero.
Of La3amon himself, we know almost nothing beyond what he himself tells us in the poem, describing himself as "a humble priest" attached to the church at Ernley (modern Arley Kings in Worcestershire). The name "La3amon" itself means "man of laws" but what exactly that tells us about the poet's life is difficult to say. The letter in "La3amon" typically represented with a "y" in modern English (and a "3" in this writeup) was the Middle English letter yogh, which represents sort of a gutteral "gh" sound.