HAY, GILBERT, or "SIR GILBERT THE HAVE" (fl. 145o), Scottish poet and translator, was perhaps a kinsman of the house of Errol. 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.
Hay's only political work is The Buik of Alexander the Con querour, of which a portion, in copy, remains at Taymouth castle. Three of his translations exist in the collection of Abbotsford : (a) The Buke of the Laws of Armys or The Buke of Bataillis, a trans lation of Honore Bonet's Arbre des batailles; (b) The Bake of the Order of Knichthood from the Livre de l'ordre de chevalerie; and (c) The Buke of the Governaunce of Princes, from a French ver sion of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secreta secretorum. The second of these precedes Caxton's independent translation by at least ten years.
For the Buik of Alexander see A. Herrmann's The Taymouth Castle MS. of Sir Gilbert Hay's Buik, etc. (1898). The Abbotsford ms. has been reprinted by the Scottish Text Society (ed. J. H. Stevenson, 2 vols., 1901 and 1914) . The Order of Knichthood was printed by David Laing for the Abbotsford club (1847) . See also S.T.S. edition (u.s.) "Introduction," and Gregory Smith's Specimens of Middle Scots (1902) , in which annotated extracts are given from the Abbotsford ms. the oldest known example of literary Scots prose.