Thomas Occleve
Encyclopedia
Thomas Hoccleve or Occleve (c. 1368–1426) was an English poet and clerk.
in Bedfordshire
.
What is known of his life is gleaned mainly from his works and from administrative records. He obtained a clerkship in the Office of the Privy Seal
at the age of about twenty. This would require him to know French and Latin. He retained the post on and off, in spite of much grumbling, for about 35 years. He had hoped for a church benefice
, but none came. On 12 November 1399, however, he was granted an annuity by the new king, Henry IV. The Letter to Cupid, the first poem of his which can be dated, was a 1402 translation of L'Epistre au Dieu d'Amours of Christine de Pisan, written as a sort of riposte to the moral of Troilus and Criseyde
, to some manuscripts of which it is attached. La Male Regle (c. 1406), one of his most fluid and lively poems, is a mock-penitential poem that gives some interesting glimpses of dissipation in his youth.
By 1410 he had married "only for love" (Regiment..., 1.1561) and settled down to writing moral and religious poems. His best-known Regement of Princes or De Regimine Principum, written for Henry V of England
shortly before his accession, is an elaborate homily on virtues and vices, adapted from Aegidius de Colonna's work of the same name, from a supposititious epistle of Aristotle
known as Secreta secretorum, and a work of Jacques de Cessoles (fl.
1300) translated later by Caxton
as The Game and Playe of Chesse. The Regement survives in 43 manuscript copies. It comments much on Henry V's lineage, to cement the House of Lancaster's claim to England's throne. Its incipit is a poem encompassing about a third of the whole, containing further reminiscences of London tavern and club life in the form of dialogue between the poet and an old man. Here Hoccleve coined the word "magutavent". He also remonstrated with Sir John Oldcastle
, a leading Lollard, calling on him to "rise up, a manly knight, out of the slough of heresy."
A period of "wylde infirmitee", in which he temporarily lost his "wit" and "memorie" is mentioned in one of his poems (Complaint, 11.40ff.) He recovered from this "five years ago last All Saints" – 1 November 1414 (Complaint, 11.55–6). His "Dialog with a Friend," written after his recovery, gives a pathetic picture of a poor poet, now fifty-three, with sight and mind impaired, but with hopes still left of writing a tale he owes his good patron, Humphrey of Gloucester, and of translating a small Latin treatise, Scite Mori, before he dies. His hopes were fulfilled in his moralized tales of Jereslau's Wife and of Jonathas, both from the Gesta Romanorum
, which, with his Learn to die, belong to his old age.
In addition to writing his own poetry, Hoccleve seems to have supplemented the income from his Privy Seal clerkship by working as a scribe. He may, in this capacity, have been a colleague of Adam Pinkhurst
, tentatively identified as Chaucer's scribe, and prolific copyist Scribe D
, as the hands of all three appear together in the same manuscript. He also compiled a formulary
of more than a thousand model Privy Seal documents in French and Latin for the use of other clerks.
On 4 March 1426 the Exchequer issue rolls record a last reimbursement to Hoccleve (for red wax and ink for office use). He died soon after. On 8 May 1426 his corrody at Southwick Priory was granted to Alice Penfold to be held "in manner and form like Thomas Hoccleve now deceased".
, he has an historical importance to English literature. Their work, rarely considered to rise above mediocrity by scholars before the 1970s, is now thought to provide a wealth of insight into the literate culture of London during the Lancastrian regime. They represented for the 15th century the literature of their time, keeping alive the innovations to vernacular poetics originally made by their "maister" Geoffrey Chaucer
, to whom Hoccleve pays an affectionate tribute in no fewer than three passages in his De Regimine Principum. Most notably, the Oxford English Dictionary
cites him as one of the initial users of the term "slut" in its modern sense, but not in its modern spelling.
The main interest for us in Hoccleve's poems is that they are characteristic of his time. His hymns to the Virgin, balades to patrons, complaints to the king and the kings treasurer, versified homilies and moral tales, with warnings to heretics like Oldcastle
, are illustrative of the blight that had fallen upon poetry on the death of Chaucer. The nearest approach to the realistic touch of his master is to be found in Hoccleve's Male Regle. Compared to Lydgate and his humorous 'London Lickpenny', these pictures of 15th-century London are quite a bit more serious and ruminating about a civil-servant's place in an unstable Lancastrian bureaucracy.
Yet Hoccleve knew the limits of his powers. He seems to say what he means simply, and does not affect what he seems not to feel. As a metrist
Hoccleve takes on a posture that he is modest of his powers. He confesses that "Fader Chaucer fayn wolde han me taught, But I was dul and learned lite or naught"; and it is true that the scansion
of his verses seems occasionally to require, in French fashion, an accent on an unstressed syllable. Yet his seven-line (or rime royale) and eight-line stanza
s, to which he limited himself, are perhaps more frequently reminiscent of Chaucer's rhythm than are those of Lydgate. Prof. David Lawton's ELH article from 1987 entitled Dullness in the Fifteenth Century is the seminal piece of scholarship on this self-effacing posture typical of the 15th century.
A poem, Ad beatam Virginem, generally known as the Mother of God, and once attributed to Chaucer, is copied among Hoccleve's works in manuscript Phillipps
8151 (Cheltenham), and may thus be regarded as his work. Hoccleve found an admirer in the 17th century in William Browne, who included his Jonathas in the Shepheard's Pipe (1614). Browne added a eulogy of the old poet, whose works he intended to publish in their entirety (Works, ed. WC Hazlitt
, 1869, ii. f96-198). In 1796 George Mason printed Six Poems by Thomas Hoccleve never before printed ...; De Regimine Principum was printed for the Roxburghe Club
in 1860, and by the Early English Text Society
in 1897. See Frederick James Furnivall
's introduction to Hoccleve's Works; I. The Minor Poems, in the Phillipps manuscript 8131, and the Durham manuscript III. p (Early English Text Society, 1892).
U.P.) in 1981, provides an excellent sampling of the poet's major and minor works for the reader just trying to get the sense of Hoccleve's work. J.A. Burrow's 1999 EETS edition of Thomas Hoccleve's Complaint and Dialogue is fast becoming the standard edition of these two excerpts from the Hoccleve's later works (now collectively known as The Series), as is Charles Blyth's TEAMS Middle English Text Series edition of The Regiment of Princes from the same year - particularly because of its spelling modernizations which enables ease of use in the classroom. These three recent editions all feature excellent introductions which can give the reader a more thorough sense of the significant of this until recently under-appreciated late-medieval poet.
Nicholas Perkins, Fellow of St Hugh's College, Oxford
, is author of "Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint", a critique discussing the purpose of Hoccleve's most important work.
Biography
Hoccleve is thought to have been born in 1368/9 as he states when writing in 1421/2 ((Dialogue, 1.246) that he has seen "fifty wyntir and three". Nothing is known of his family, but his name may come from the village of HockliffeHockliffe
Hockliffe is a village and civil parish in Bedfordshire on the crossroads of the A5 road which lies upon the course of the roman road known as Watling Street and the A4012 road.It is about four miles east of Leighton Buzzard...
in Bedfordshire
Bedfordshire
Bedfordshire is a ceremonial county of historic origin in England that forms part of the East of England region.It borders Cambridgeshire to the north-east, Northamptonshire to the north, Buckinghamshire to the west and Hertfordshire to the south-east....
.
What is known of his life is gleaned mainly from his works and from administrative records. He obtained a clerkship in the Office of the Privy Seal
Privy Seal
A privy seal refers to the personal seal of a reigning monarch, used for the purpose of authenticating official government document.-Privy Seal of England:The Privy Seal of England can be traced back to the reign of King John...
at the age of about twenty. This would require him to know French and Latin. He retained the post on and off, in spite of much grumbling, for about 35 years. He had hoped for a church benefice
Benefice
A benefice is a reward received in exchange for services rendered and as a retainer for future services. The term is now almost obsolete.-Church of England:...
, but none came. On 12 November 1399, however, he was granted an annuity by the new king, Henry IV. The Letter to Cupid, the first poem of his which can be dated, was a 1402 translation of L'Epistre au Dieu d'Amours of Christine de Pisan, written as a sort of riposte to the moral of Troilus and Criseyde
Troilus and Criseyde
Troilus and Criseyde is a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer which re-tells in Middle English the tragic story of the lovers Troilus and Criseyde set against a backdrop of war in the Siege of Troy. It was composed using rime royale and probably completed during the mid 1380s. Many Chaucer scholars regard it...
, to some manuscripts of which it is attached. La Male Regle (c. 1406), one of his most fluid and lively poems, is a mock-penitential poem that gives some interesting glimpses of dissipation in his youth.
By 1410 he had married "only for love" (Regiment..., 1.1561) and settled down to writing moral and religious poems. His best-known Regement of Princes or De Regimine Principum, written for Henry V of England
Henry V of England
Henry V was King of England from 1413 until his death at the age of 35 in 1422. He was the second monarch belonging to the House of Lancaster....
shortly before his accession, is an elaborate homily on virtues and vices, adapted from Aegidius de Colonna's work of the same name, from a supposititious epistle of Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
known as Secreta secretorum, and a work of Jacques de Cessoles (fl.
Floruit
Floruit , abbreviated fl. , is a Latin verb meaning "flourished", denoting the period of time during which something was active...
1300) translated later by Caxton
William Caxton
William Caxton was an English merchant, diplomat, writer and printer. As far as is known, he was the first English person to work as a printer and the first to introduce a printing press into England...
as The Game and Playe of Chesse. The Regement survives in 43 manuscript copies. It comments much on Henry V's lineage, to cement the House of Lancaster's claim to England's throne. Its incipit is a poem encompassing about a third of the whole, containing further reminiscences of London tavern and club life in the form of dialogue between the poet and an old man. Here Hoccleve coined the word "magutavent". He also remonstrated with Sir John Oldcastle
John Oldcastle
Sir John Oldcastle , English Lollard leader, was son of Sir Richard Oldcastle of Almeley in northwest Herefordshire and grandson of another Sir John Oldcastle....
, a leading Lollard, calling on him to "rise up, a manly knight, out of the slough of heresy."
A period of "wylde infirmitee", in which he temporarily lost his "wit" and "memorie" is mentioned in one of his poems (Complaint, 11.40ff.) He recovered from this "five years ago last All Saints" – 1 November 1414 (Complaint, 11.55–6). His "Dialog with a Friend," written after his recovery, gives a pathetic picture of a poor poet, now fifty-three, with sight and mind impaired, but with hopes still left of writing a tale he owes his good patron, Humphrey of Gloucester, and of translating a small Latin treatise, Scite Mori, before he dies. His hopes were fulfilled in his moralized tales of Jereslau's Wife and of Jonathas, both from the Gesta Romanorum
Gesta Romanorum
Gesta Romanorum, a Latin collection of anecdotes and tales, was probably compiled about the end of the 13th century or the beginning of the 14th...
, which, with his Learn to die, belong to his old age.
In addition to writing his own poetry, Hoccleve seems to have supplemented the income from his Privy Seal clerkship by working as a scribe. He may, in this capacity, have been a colleague of Adam Pinkhurst
Adam Pinkhurst
In 2004, Professor Linne Mooney was able to identify the scrivener who worked for 14th century poet Geoffrey Chaucer as an Adam Pinkhurst. Mooney, then a professor at the University of Maine and a visiting fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, was able to match Pinkhurst's...
, tentatively identified as Chaucer's scribe, and prolific copyist Scribe D
Scribe D
The Trinity Gower D Scribe , often referred to simply as Scribe D, was a professional scribe and copyist of literary manuscripts active during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century in London, England...
, as the hands of all three appear together in the same manuscript. He also compiled a formulary
Formulary (model documents)
Formularies are medieval collections of models for the execution of documents , public or private; a space being left for the insertion of names, dates, and circumstances peculiar to each case...
of more than a thousand model Privy Seal documents in French and Latin for the use of other clerks.
On 4 March 1426 the Exchequer issue rolls record a last reimbursement to Hoccleve (for red wax and ink for office use). He died soon after. On 8 May 1426 his corrody at Southwick Priory was granted to Alice Penfold to be held "in manner and form like Thomas Hoccleve now deceased".
Work
Like his more prolific and better known contemporary John LydgateJohn Lydgate
John Lydgate of Bury was a monk and poet, born in Lidgate, Suffolk, England.Lydgate is at once a greater and a lesser poet than John Gower. He is a greater poet because of his greater range and force; he has a much more powerful machine at his command. The sheer bulk of Lydgate's poetic output is...
, he has an historical importance to English literature. Their work, rarely considered to rise above mediocrity by scholars before the 1970s, is now thought to provide a wealth of insight into the literate culture of London during the Lancastrian regime. They represented for the 15th century the literature of their time, keeping alive the innovations to vernacular poetics originally made by their "maister" Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer , known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey...
, to whom Hoccleve pays an affectionate tribute in no fewer than three passages in his De Regimine Principum. Most notably, the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
cites him as one of the initial users of the term "slut" in its modern sense, but not in its modern spelling.
The main interest for us in Hoccleve's poems is that they are characteristic of his time. His hymns to the Virgin, balades to patrons, complaints to the king and the kings treasurer, versified homilies and moral tales, with warnings to heretics like Oldcastle
John Oldcastle
Sir John Oldcastle , English Lollard leader, was son of Sir Richard Oldcastle of Almeley in northwest Herefordshire and grandson of another Sir John Oldcastle....
, are illustrative of the blight that had fallen upon poetry on the death of Chaucer. The nearest approach to the realistic touch of his master is to be found in Hoccleve's Male Regle. Compared to Lydgate and his humorous 'London Lickpenny', these pictures of 15th-century London are quite a bit more serious and ruminating about a civil-servant's place in an unstable Lancastrian bureaucracy.
Meter (poetry)
In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...
Hoccleve takes on a posture that he is modest of his powers. He confesses that "Fader Chaucer fayn wolde han me taught, But I was dul and learned lite or naught"; and it is true that the scansion
Scansion
Scansion is the act of determining and graphically representing the metrical character of a line of verse.-Overview:Systems of scansion, and the assumptions that underlie them, are so numerous and contradictory that it is often difficult to tell whether differences in scansion indicate opposed...
of his verses seems occasionally to require, in French fashion, an accent on an unstressed syllable. Yet his seven-line (or rime royale) and eight-line stanza
Stanza
In poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe; in popular vocal music, a stanza is typically referred to as a "verse"...
s, to which he limited himself, are perhaps more frequently reminiscent of Chaucer's rhythm than are those of Lydgate. Prof. David Lawton's ELH article from 1987 entitled Dullness in the Fifteenth Century is the seminal piece of scholarship on this self-effacing posture typical of the 15th century.
A poem, Ad beatam Virginem, generally known as the Mother of God, and once attributed to Chaucer, is copied among Hoccleve's works in manuscript Phillipps
Thomas Phillipps
Sir Thomas Phillipps, 1st Baronet was an English antiquary and book collector who amassed the largest collection of manuscript material in the 19th century, due to his severe condition of bibliomania...
8151 (Cheltenham), and may thus be regarded as his work. Hoccleve found an admirer in the 17th century in William Browne, who included his Jonathas in the Shepheard's Pipe (1614). Browne added a eulogy of the old poet, whose works he intended to publish in their entirety (Works, ed. WC Hazlitt
William Carew Hazlitt
William Carew Hazlitt was an English bibliographer.The son of barrister and registrar William Hazlitt and grandson of essayist and critic William Hazlitt, Hazlitt was educated at the Merchant Taylors' School and was called to the bar of the Inner Temple in 1861...
, 1869, ii. f96-198). In 1796 George Mason printed Six Poems by Thomas Hoccleve never before printed ...; De Regimine Principum was printed for the Roxburghe Club
Roxburghe Club
The Roxburghe Club was formed on 17 June 1812 by leading bibliophiles, at the time the library of the Duke of Roxburghe was auctioned. It took 45 days to sell the entire collection. The first edition of Boccaccio's Decameron, printed by Chrisopher Valdarfer of Venice in 1471, was sold to the...
in 1860, and by the Early English Text Society
Early English Text Society
The Early English Text Society is an organization to reprint early English texts, especially those only available in manuscript. Most of its volumes are in Middle English and Old English...
in 1897. See Frederick James Furnivall
Frederick James Furnivall
Frederick James Furnivall , one of the co-creators of the Oxford English Dictionary , was an English philologist...
's introduction to Hoccleve's Works; I. The Minor Poems, in the Phillipps manuscript 8131, and the Durham manuscript III. p (Early English Text Society, 1892).
Recent scholarship
Furnivall's edition of Hoccleve's complete works is still largely the standard of current scholarship and was reprinted in the 1970s, though Michael Seymour's Selections from Hoccleve, published by Clarendon Press (a division of OxfordOxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
U.P.) in 1981, provides an excellent sampling of the poet's major and minor works for the reader just trying to get the sense of Hoccleve's work. J.A. Burrow's 1999 EETS edition of Thomas Hoccleve's Complaint and Dialogue is fast becoming the standard edition of these two excerpts from the Hoccleve's later works (now collectively known as The Series), as is Charles Blyth's TEAMS Middle English Text Series edition of The Regiment of Princes from the same year - particularly because of its spelling modernizations which enables ease of use in the classroom. These three recent editions all feature excellent introductions which can give the reader a more thorough sense of the significant of this until recently under-appreciated late-medieval poet.
Nicholas Perkins, Fellow of St Hugh's College, Oxford
St Hugh's College, Oxford
St Hugh's College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. It is located on a fourteen and a half acre site on St Margaret's Road, to the North of the city centre. It was founded in 1886 as a women's college, and accepted its first male students in its centenary year in 1986...
, is author of "Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint", a critique discussing the purpose of Hoccleve's most important work.
- Knapp, Ethan. The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England, Penn State Press, 2001 ISBN 0-271-02135-7
- "The Regiment of Princes" Edited by Charles R. Blyth. TEAMS, Middle English Text Series. (Introduction)