One of the earliest texts composed in French is said to be Chanson de Saint Alexis, a collection of a total of 625 verses composed during the 11th century in Old French, a language spoken in France between the 8th and 14th centuries. According to Gaston Paris (1894-1903), a specialist in medieval French literature, these verses were composed around 1040 at the earliest.
They are hagiographic poems (from the Greek hagios ‘sacred’ and graphein ‘to write’; the famous Romanesque church hagia sophia in Istambul, recently transformed into a mosque, means ‘sacred knowledge’), that is, poems that illustrate the lives of the saints. Although it is not known who the author of the songs of Saint Alexis was, Gaston Paris would like to attribute them to Thibaut de Vernon, a canon of the Cathedral of Rouen, which however remains a hypothesis.