Tony Edwards has recently discussed at some length the problem of Middle Scots romance: is there such a thing, and how should it be defined? As he points out, it seems to have developed fairly late in the Middle Ages, and was obviously influenced by both English and French romances. There is considerable evidence for the circulation of the French Arthurian prose cycles in late medieval England; we do not have comparable evidence for Scotland, but presumably they were well known there too, given the close contacts with France. Lancelot of the Laik is closely based on a French prose source (as is the non-Arthurian Clariodus, though its Scots author also used an English version). The LL poet clearly assumes that his readers both know and care a good deal about the Arthurian world. There were certainly other Arthurian romances circulating in Scotland. Golagros and Gawane represents what may well have been a larger body of Scottish Gawain romances, since Gawain was ‘a home-town boy made good’, as Martin Schichtman puts it. Wyntoun's Chronicle names Huchon of the Aule Realle as the author of ‘a gret Gest of Arthure’ and ‘the Awntyr of Gawane’. The Complaynt of Scotland includes an allusion to a ‘lancelot du lac’ (this could be in French, Scots or English), and a mysterious ballad-like couplet of unknown origin about ‘Arthour knycht’.

It is curious, as Edwards notes, that there are no Scottish prose romances: ‘French sources are largely accommodated into older, predominantly English literary models in ways that underscore the cautiously derivative nature of the Scottish form.’ Lancelot of the Laik is indeed closely derived from its French prose source, yet it manages to seem quite different in both content and intention, in part because of its English models. It does not strike me as cautious; though certainly derivative, it is also rather eccentric. It has attracted a good deal of negative critical comment. Margaret M. Gray remarks in the introduction to her edition: ‘It must be admitted that of all the Scottish writers who admired and imitated Chaucer, none have succeeded in producing such colourless and characterless results as are found in Lancelot and the Quare of Jelusy …’. According to Helaine Newstead, the main failing of the poem is ‘the unsuccessful attempt to combine politics with the love story of Lancelot and Guenevere’.