Thomas Hoccleve

Thomas Hoccleve or Occleve (c. 1368–1426) was an English poet and clerk.

Life
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 Hockliffe 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".

Writing
Like his more prolific and better known contemporary John Lydgate, 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 stanzas, 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).