Thomas Hoccleve

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the Duke of Norfolk, 1411–1413, British Library

Thomas Hoccleve or Occleve (1368/69–1426) was a key figure in 15th-century Middle English literature, significant for promoting Chaucer as "the father of English literature", and as a poet in his own right.[1][2][3] His poetry, especially his longest work, the didactic work Regement of Princes, was extremely popular in the fifteenth century, but went largely ignored until the late twentieth century, when it was re-examined by scholars, particularly John Burrow. Today he is most well known for his Series, which includes the earliest autobiographical description of mental illness in English, and for his extensive scribal activity. Three holographs of his poetry have survived, and he also copied literary manuscripts by other writers. As a clerk of the Office of the Privy Seal, he wrote hundreds of documents in French and Latin.

Biography

Hoccleve was born in 1368, as he states when writing in 1421 (Dialogue, 1.246) that he has seen "fifty wyntir and three". Nothing is known of his family, but they probably came from the village of Hockliffe in Bedfordshire.[4] In November 1420, Hoccleve's fellow Privy Seal clerk John Bailey returned land and tenements in Hockliffe to him, which suggests that Hoccleve may indeed have had family ties there.[5]

What is known of his life comes mainly from his works and from administrative records. According to the Regiment of Princes (c. 1411, 11.804–5), he obtained a clerkship in the Office of the Privy Seal at the age of eighteen or nineteen, which he retained on and off, in spite of much grumbling, for about thirty-five years.[2] On 12 November 1399 he was granted an annuity by the new king, Henry IV.[6] It was not always paid as regularly as he would have wished, or in full;[2] he is known for complaining about his lack of funds.

Hoccleve is not known for his successful career. His first known, datable poem, The Letter to Cupid, was a 1402 translation of

didactic
text. In Dialogue with a Friend, the poem that follows the Complaint in his Series, he describes his worsening eyesight, which further hindered his work as a scribe.

On 4 March 1426, the Exchequer 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 (allowance for food and clothing) at Southwick Priory in Hampshire was passed to Alice Penfold to be held "in manner and form like Thomas Hoccleve now deceased".[11]

Work

Hoccleve, more than any other 15th-century writer, worked to cast Chaucer as the "father" of English literature, acknowledging the importance of John Gower and positioning himself as an heir of this tradition. However, despite the initial runaway success of the Regiment of Princes, his popularity was soon superseded by his more prolific contemporary, John Lydgate.[7] Later readers found the Regiment boring and overly didactic; Caxton did not print it, and it was not until the 1970s that his work came to be valued as insight into the literate culture of England under the Lancastrian regime. It is especially valued by contemporary scholars for his frank autobiographical descriptions, in particular his description of his mental illness in the Complaint and Dialogue (1420). His La Male Regle (c. 1406), one of his most fluid and lively works, is a mock-penitential poem that gives some glimpses of dissipation in his youth.[2]

Portrait of Chaucer from Hoccleve's Regement (or Regiment) of Princes

His diction is relatively simple and clear; as a

metrist he is self-deprecating. While he confesses that "Fader Chaucer fayn wolde han me taught, But I was dul and learned lite or naught", this pose was conventional in Hoccleve's time, and an inheritance from Chaucer himself, whose alter-ego Geoffrey was portrayed as fat and dimwitted in The House of Fame and The Canterbury Tales. Later known as the "humility topos", the posture would become a conventional form of authorial self-presentation in the Renaissance.[12]

The Oxford English Dictionary cites Hoccleve as the first recorded user of many words, including annuity, causative, flexible, innate, interrupt, manual, miserable, notice, obtain, pitiless, slut and suspense.

The Regiment of Princes

The Regement of Princes, written for

Jacques de Cessoles (fl. 1300) translated later by Caxton as The Game and Playe of Chesse. The Regement survives in at least 43 manuscript copies.[11] It comments on Henry V's lineage, to cement the House of Lancaster
's claim to England's throne. Its proem, occupying about a third of the whole, contains reminiscences of London tavern life in a dialogue between the poet and an old man.

The Series

The Series, which combines autobiographical poetry, poetic translations and prose moralizations of the translated texts, begins (Complaint, 11.40 ff.) with a description of a period of "wylde infirmitee", in which the Hoccleve-character claims he temporarily lost his "wit" and "memorie" (this stands as the earliest autobiographical description of

Humphrey of Gloucester, and of translating a portion of Henry Suso's popular Latin treatise on the art of dying – a task the friend discourages, saying that too much study was the cause of his mental illness. The Series then fulfils this plan, continuing with moralized tales of Jereslaus' Wife and of Jonathas (both from Gesta Romanorum). The Series next turns to Learn to die, a theologically and psychologically astute verse translation of Henry Suso's Latin prose Ars Moriendi (Book II, Chapter 2 of the Horologium Sapientiae).[13] The theme of mortality and strict calendar structure of the Series link the sequence to the death of Hoccleve's friend and Privy Seal colleague John Bailey in November 1420.[14] Two autograph manuscripts of the Series survive.[15]

Handwriting

Hoccleve has left behind more manuscripts and documents in his own hand than any other known medieval English writer. Four literary manuscripts are generally considered to have been solely or mostly in his hand;

His hand has also been identified in sections of other literary manuscripts, as a copyist and/or corrector. He is Scribe E in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2, John Gower's Confessio Amantis; this manuscript includes work by four other scribes, including the prolific copyist Scribe D, and Scribe B, the copyist of the Ellesmere and Hengwrt manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales.[21] He may also be Hand F of the latter manuscript, who copied a few lines; it has been suggested that he was the first editor of Chaucer's work.[22] Hoccleve also wrote out the majority of the Privy Seal Formulary, British Library, MS Add. 24062,[23] and wrote hundreds of documents in his capacity as a Privy Seal clerk.

Editions

Hoccleve found a 17th-century admirer in William Browne, who included his Jonathas in Shepheard's Pipe (1614). Browne added a eulogy of the poet, whose works he intended to publish in their entirety (Works, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 1869, ii. f 96–198). 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 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.)[24]

Clarendon Press (a division of Oxford University Press) in 1981, provides an excellent sampling of the poet's major and minor works for readers seeking a sense of Hoccleve's work. J. A. Burrow's 1999 Early English Text Society
edition of Thomas Hoccleve's Complaint and Dialogue is becoming the standard edition of the two excerpts from the Hoccleve's later works (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 for modernised spelling that facilitates use in the classroom. These three recent editions all have introductions offering a thorough sense of a poet hitherto under-appreciated.

Further reading

  • Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England, Penn State Press, 2001
    ISBN 0-271-02135-7
  • Perkins, Nicholas (2001), Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint, Boydell & Brewer,
    ISBN 9780859916318
  • Sobecki, Sebastian (2023), "Authorized Realities: The Gesta Romanorum and Thomas Hoccleve's Poetics of Autobiography", Speculum, 98 (2), Chicago University Press: 536–558,
    doi:10.1086/723872
  • Watt, David (2013), The Making of Thomas Hoccleve's 'Series',
    ISBN 9780859898690

References

  1. ^ Furnivall, Frederick James (1891). "Hoccleve, Thomas" . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 27. pp. 56–57.
  2. ^ a b c d e McCormick 1911, p. 966.
  3. ^ "Thomas Hoccleve". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 14 July 2023.
  4. ^ J. A. Burrow: Hoccleve, Thomas...: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004; online ed., January 2008 Retrieved 24 November 2010. Subscription required.
  5. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198790778.001.0001
  6. ^ £10 per annum, raised to 20 marks (£13 6s. 8d.) in 1409, the last half-yearly payment being made on 11 February 1426. His fringe benefits included board and lodging, money for robes at Christmas, two corrodies, occasional bonuses, and fees and favours from clients. A Burrow: Hoccleve, Thomas....
  7. ^
    ISSN 0009-2002
    .
  8. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198790778.001.0001
  9. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198790778.001.0001
  10. ^ "Madness and Texts: Hoccleve’s Series,” in Chaucer and Fifteenth Century Poetry, edited by Janet Cowen and Julia Boffey, King’s College London Medieval Studies, 5 (London: King’s College, London, 1991), pp. 15-29
  11. ^ a b A. Burrow: Hoccleve, Thomas.
  12. ^ The seminal study of this self-effacing performance typical of 15th-century writers is David Lawton's 1987 ELH article "Dullness and the Fifteenth Century".
  13. S2CID 54942824
  14. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198790778.001.0001
  15. ISBN 9780197224205
  16. ^ "Catalogue of Durham University Library Cosin MS V.iii.9". reed.dur.ac.uk. Retrieved 14 July 2023.
  17. ^ "MS HM 111 catalogue and digitization". Huntington Library. Retrieved 14 July 2023.
  18. ^ "MS HM 744 catalogue and digitization". Huntington Library. Retrieved 14 July 2023.
  19. ^ "Detailed record for Harley 219". British Library. Retrieved 14 July 2023.
  20. doi:10.1093/res/hgz042
    .
  21. ^ A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes, "The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century", in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London: Scolar Press, 1978), pp. 163–210.
  22. ISSN 0009-2002
    .
  23. doi:10.1093/res/hgaa050
    .
  24. ^ McCormick 1911, p. 967.

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