William of Shoreham was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

.

Little is known of his life, but he probably lived in Shoreham, Kent

Shoreham, Kent

Shoreham is a village and civil parish in the valley of the River Darent six miles north of Sevenoaks in Kent: it is in the District of Sevenoaks. The parish includes the settlements of Badgers Mount and Well Hill....

 and was vicar of Chart

Chart

A chart is a graphical representation of data, in which "the data is represented by symbols, such as bars in a bar chart, lines in a line chart, or slices in a pie chart"...

 (near Leeds, Kent

Leeds, Kent

Leeds is a village and civil parish in the Maidstone District of Kent, England. The parish is located to the east of Maidstone.The village of Leeds is five miles from the county town. It appeared in the Domesday Book of 1086 called Esledes - an old English word meaning slope or hillside...

). Seven poems in English are attributed to him, all contained in a single manuscript now in the British Library

British Library

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and is the world's largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is a major research library, holding over 150 million items from every country in the world, in virtually all known languages and in many formats,...

 (Additional Manuscripts No. 17376). Four of the poems are didactic and address points of Christian

Christian

A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

 doctrine, the other three are in praise of the Virgin Mary (one of them a translation from Robert Grosseteste

Robert Grosseteste

Robert Grosseteste or Grossetete was an English statesman, scholastic philosopher, theologian and Bishop of Lincoln. He was born of humble parents at Stradbroke in Suffolk. A.C...

's Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

). He was once thought to be the author of an English psalter

Psalter

A psalter is a volume containing the Book of Psalms, often with other devotional material bound in as well, such as a liturgical calendar and litany of the Saints. Until the later medieval emergence of the book of hours, psalters were the books most widely owned by wealthy lay persons and were...

, but this is now considered spurious.

Further reading

• M. Konrath, The Poems of William of Shoreham (Early English Text Society
  Early English Text Society
  The Early English Text Society is an organization to reprint early English texts, especially those only available in manuscript. Most of its volumes are in Middle English and Old English...
  
  , 1902) - available online