It has generally been held that John Capgrave's Life of St Norbert dates from 1440. This date is given in the work's epilogue (Envoy), along with its dedication to Abbot John Wygenhale of West Dereham. However in 1981 P. J. Lucas challenged this view, proposing that Norbert was written ‘before 1422’ for an unnamed abbot of West Dereham – the prologue does not mention the name of the dedicatee – and was completed in 1440 for dedication to the current abbot, John Wygenhale. In a revised version of a sermon Capgrave delivered at Cambridge in 1422, appended to his Life of St Gilbert in 1451 and entitled ‘a tretis of tho orderes that be vndyr the reule of oure fader Seynt Augustin’ (hereafter Tretis), Capgrave related that he would not discuss the Premonstratensians as he had already written a life of Norbert, their founder, which was composed ‘in Englisch to the abbot of Derham that deyid last’. Lucas proposed that the abbot referred to in this line is not John Wygenhale. He suggested that Wygenhale died in c.1462, as his will is dated 14 January 1461. The abbot who had commissioned Norbert and ‘deyid last’ was not even Wygenhale's predecessor, Robert, who ‘occurs [in] 1428’, but possibly Abbot John, who was elected in 1412. The Envoy was written on completion of the work in ‘Assumpcion weke’, 1440, and dedicated to Abbot Wygenhale, whose abbey was dedicated to the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.