The Prologue of Lawman's Brut famously refers to Wace as ‘a Frenchis clerc’, who presented his Roman de Brut to ‘Ælienor þe wes Henries quene’, thus projecting an image both of social success and of foreignness: Wace is French (as opposed to the English Lawman), and his patron (real or hoped-for) is the no-less-foreign Eleanor of Aquitaine. And indeed, there is no disputing Wace's significance within French cultural history: he was the first writer to have written about King Arthur in the French vernacular, and his style influenced that of the great Chrétien de Troyes. However, Wace is equally significant in the development of Anglo-Norman, and hence, of English literature. His Roman de Brut, Lawman's source, gave rise to a thriving literary genre in both Anglo-Norman French and English, and was arguably more popular in England than in France, particularly in the thirteenth century, while his earlier Vie de saint Nicolas is found not only in two professionally copied manuscripts, but also in a thirteenth-century commonplace book alongside poetry, prose, recipes and accounts in both English and Anglo-Norman French. The text it preserves bears the marks of having been copied many times beforehand and written down by someone whose command of French was far from perfect. In other words, Wace's Vie de saint Nicolas was part of the general culture of thirteenth-century England, just like the Roman de Brut. This popularity of a French-speaking writer in medieval England is not in itself especially noteworthy; after all, French was a dominant language in the cultural melting-pot that was twelfth- and thirteenth-century England.