Fergus, or Le Chevalier au biel escu, ‘The Knight of the Splendid Shield’ (see lines 7008 and 6700), alternatively Fergus et Galiene, according to whichever of the precedents furnished by Chrétien de Troyes is taken as a model, is a romance about Scotland and two of its fairest inhabitants transposed to the Arthurian world established by Chrétien's five romances. The hero is thought to reflect the historical figure of Fergus of Galloway (d. 1161, ultimately descended from the sixth-century Fergus Mor), and his sweetheart Galiene has been linked to Galiena, wife of Philip de Mowbray and relative of the lords of Lothian. No secure dating has been provided for the French text or, for that matter, the Middle Dutch adaptation, though a date in the first third of the thirteenth century seems to invite few objections. The action of the romance is firmly anchored in the topography of Southern Scotland (Geltsdale, Jedburgh, the Lammermuir hills, Glasgow, Argyll, Galloway, Carlisle, Lothian, Liddel Castle [later Newcastletown] in Roxburghshire, Dunnottar Castle in Kincardineshire, Edinburgh, Queensferry, Dunfermline, Roxburgh, Melrose and the nearby Eildon Hills, Tweeddale – some eighteen locations in all) with a glance north of the Forth to Escoche proper (cf. line 2589, ‘En Eschoce u en Lodïen’). The journey times indicated are realistic and the narrator offers a number of apparently informed comments on local customs. The ‘Scottishness’ of Fergus is thus firmly established and is to be taken seriously. Arthur's seat at ‘Carduel en Gales’, usually taken to be Carlisle, is familiar from many of the romances as is the region of Strathclyde in general. The originality of the Fergus author is to have abandoned the more conventional Scottish toponymy for places, like Galloway, with a much less reassuring reputation, thereby extending Scotland's appearance in romance literature. There have been several attempts to interpret the work as in some sense an ‘ancestral romance’, whether written for Alan of Galloway (d. 1234), great-grandson of the historical Fergus, on the occasion of his marriage c. 1209, or John of Balliol (a stepson of Alan) and his wife Devorguilla in the period 1234–41 to strengthen the claim of their eldest son Hugh to the Scottish throne. There has even been an attempt to identify the author with William Malveisin, a royal clerk of French stock, who ended his career as bishop of St Andrews (1202–1238).