François Villon, the most celebrated French lyric poet of the fifteenth century, composed his first major work, 'Le Lais' (also known as 'Le Petit Testament'), in December 1456 as he prepared to flee Paris following his involvement in a robbery at the Collège de Navarre. Written in the ironic voice of a man bequeathing his worthless possessions to friends and enemies, the poem transforms criminal autobiography into formal literary art. Villon's life was a continuous series of imprisonments, brawls, and escapes from execution, and his poetry drew directly on this experience of social marginality. He disappeared from the historical record around 1463, and his fate remains unknown.

Villon's verse is the most vivid record we have of the voice of late medieval urban poverty and criminality, giving literary form to an underclass experience rarely captured in the period's more elevated poetry. His 'Grand Testament' (1461) and ballads — including the haunting 'Ballade des pendus' ('Ballade of the Hanged') — influenced later poets from Clément Marot to Verlaine and Swinburne, who regarded Villon as the archetypal poet-outlaw. His command of the ballade form within a framework of dark comedy and profound mortality meditation made him a bridge between medieval formal tradition and Renaissance lyric individualism.