neither of which was published. In 1552 he returned to Scotland, and appears to have practised for a short time as an advocate in Edinburgh. Having again returned to the continent, he was in 1554 elected professor of Roman law in the university of Bourges. About this time a treatise published by Baron on the law of jurisdiction was attacked by the jurist Govea. Henryson wrote a Latin reply in defence of Baron, dedicated to Fugger. In 1555 he published another work on Roman law, ‘Commentatio in Tit. x. Libri Secundi Institutionum de Testamentis Ordinandis,’ which was dedicated to Michael de l'Hôpital, chancellor of France. Both these works are included in Meerman's ‘Thesaurus.’ Henryson received high praise from writers on Roman law on the continent. Dempster calls him ‘Solis Papinanis in juris cognitione inferior,’ and adds that Henryson was remembered fifty years after in the university of Bourges as a man in the highest degree versed in classical literature.
Having resigned his professorship at Bourges he returned to Scotland, where in 1557 he was appointed counsel for the poor. In 1563 he was named to the office of commissary, and three years after he became an extraordinary lord of session. In 1566 he was named one of a commission to revise, correct, and print the laws and acts of parliament from 1424 to 1564. The work was completed in about six months. Henryson was the ostensible editor, and wrote the preface to it. He obtained an exclusive privilege to print and dispose of the work for a period of ten years from the date of publication. In 1573 he was one of the procurators for the church. In 1579 Lord Forbes petitioned parliament that Henryson might be appointed one of the commissioners for settling the disputes between the Forbes and the Gordons. He married Helen Swinton, eldest daughter of John Swinton of Swinton, and had two sons and a daughter. He died about 1590. His son Thomas is separately noticed.
[Dempster's Hist. Eccles. Gent. Scot.; Meerman's Thesaurus Juris Civilis et Canonici, vol. iii.; Henryson's Plutarchi Commentarium Stoicorum Contrariorum, Leyden, 1555; Brunton and Haig's Hist. of Coll. of Justice.
HENRYSON or HENDERSON, ROBERT (1430?–1506?), Scottish poet, was probably born between 1420 and 1430, but neither the family to which he belongs nor the place of his birth has been discovered. Sibbald's surmise (Chronicles of Scottish Poetry, i. 88) that he was Henryson of Fordel, Fifeshire, father of the justice-clerk, James Henryson, who fell at Flodden, is not supported by evidence, nor is there any proof that he is related to the Fordel family. His name is not on the university register of either St. Andrews or Glasgow, the only two university seats then in Scotland; and Dr. Laing, in the introduction to his complete edition of Henryson's ‘Poems and Fables,’ thinks it likely that he may have completed his studies and graduated abroad. His common appellation, ‘Master Robert Henryson,’ indicates that he was a master of arts. When he was admitted, 10 Sept. 1462, as a member of the recently founded Glasgow University, he was called ‘the Venerable Master Robert Henrysone, Licentiate in Arts and Bachelor in Decrees.’ Attesting three separate deeds (March 1477–8 and July 1478) granted by the abbot of Dunfermline, he is described as ‘Magister Robertus Henrison, notarius publicus.’ As at that time notaries were commonly clergymen, Henryson was probably in orders, and as on the title-page of the ‘Fables’ of 1570 (Harleian MS. 3865, p. 1; Morall Fables, 1621) he is called a schoolmaster, it is probable that he held a clerical appointment within Dunfermline Abbey. The abbots elected the schoolmaster of the grammar school, which was within the precincts of the abbey, and this may have been Henryson's post. Lord Hailes (Ancient Scottish Poems, p. 273) supposes his office to have been ‘that of preceptor of youth in the Benedictine convent at Dunfermline.’
In the fifth stanza of the prologue to his ‘Testament of Cresseid’ Henryson calls himself ‘a man of age,’ and Dunbar's reference to his death in his ‘Lament for the Makaris’ (written before 1508) seems to indicate that the event was comparatively recent. There are only three after him on the melancholy roll (not including Kennedy, who ‘in poynt of dede lyis veraly’). It is probable that Dunbar knew Henryson, and that if he did not live into the beginning of the sixteenth century, he died very late in the fifteenth. Sir Francis Kinaston [q. v.], who about 1635 appended Henryson's ‘Testament’ to a rhymed Latin version of Chaucer's ‘Troylus,’ embodied in his introduction a tradition, derived from ‘divers aged schollers of the Scottish nation,’ that the author was ‘one Mr. Robert Henderson, sometimes chiefe schoole-master in Dumfermling,’ adding that he died at a very great age. It is quite possible that Henryson wrote his poem ‘Ane Prayer for the Pest’ when the plague, known as ‘Grandgore,’ was in Edinburgh in 1497, but there is nothing to support the surmise (Henderson, Annals of Dunfermline) that he was one of its victims, when, as shown by the burgh records, it raged in Dunfermline in 1499.
