Thomas Hoccleve

Hoccleve (right) presenting his work The Regement of Princes (1411) to Henry, Prince of Wales (later Henry V of England), from Arundel MS. 38

Thomas Hoccleve or Occleve (?1369-1426) was an English poet and clerk.

Life

Overview

Hoccleve was probably born in London, where he appears to have spent most of his life, living in Chester's Inn in the Strand. Originally intended for the Church, he received an appointment in the Privy Seal Office, which he retained until 1424, when quarters were assigned him in the Priory of Southwick, Hants. In 1399 a pension of £10, subsequently increased to £13.6s.8d., had been conferred upon him, which, however, was paid only intermittently, thus furnishing him with a perpetual grievance. His early life appears to have been irregular, and to the end he was a weak, vain, discontented man. His chief work is De Regimine Principum; or, Governail of princes, written 1411-1412. The best part of this is an autobiographical prelude "Mal Regle de T. Hoccleve," in which he holds up his youthful follies as a warning. It is also interesting as containing, in the MS. in the British Museum, a drawing of Chaucer, from which all subsequent portraits have been taken.

Youth

Hoccleve, poet and a clerk in the privy seal office for 24 years, is known to us only by his poems and by what he tells us of himself in them.

Hoccleve is thought to have been born in 1368 or 1369; he states when writing in 1421-1422 ((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. In his biographical Male Regle, ll. 17–21, he appeals to "my lord the Fourneval that now is treasurer" to pay him the yearly £10 due to him. Furnival was treasurer from 1405 to 1408. Hence Hoccleve's appeal may be dated late in 1406 or early in 1407. As the poet confesses in the same poem, ll. 110–12, that he had been over-eating and over-drinking for 20 years past (from 1387 to 1407), he cannot well have been born after 1370.

Career

He obtained a clerkship in the Office of the Privy Seal at the age of about 20. 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. Henry IV granted Hoccleve an annuity of 20 marks a year for his long service, but he could not get it paid, and he had only 6 marks a year besides (De Reg. pp. 30–4).

The Letter to Cupid, the 1st 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.

In Male Regle He also confesses himself a coward, and fond of treating "Venus femel lusty children deer" to sweet wine and wafers. He haunted the taverns and cookshops at Westminster (ll. 177–84). When he wrote his best-known work, De Regimine (1411–12), he lived at "Chestres Inne, right fast by the Stronde" (De Reg. p. 1). Before that, he belonged to a dinner-club in the Temple (Phillipps MS. leaf 42).

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 (1300 fl.) 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."

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 3 appear together in the same manuscript. He also compiled a formulary of more than 1,000 model Privy Seal documents in French and Latin for the use of other clerks.

On 4 July 1424 "votre tres humble clerc Thomas Hoccleve de l'office du prive seal" was granted by the king and council such "sustenance" yearly during his life in the priory of Southwick, Hampshire, as Nicholas Mokkinge, late master of St. Lawrence in the Poultry, had (Addit. MS. Brit. Mus. 4604, art. 34; Privy Council Proc. iii. 152).

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".

All Hoccleve's volumes complain of his poverty and his inability to get his pension or salary paid, so that he and his fellows will, he tells the king, have "to trotte vnto Newgate" (Phillipps MS. leaf 40 back). His last poem, written when he had nearly lost his sight, but was too proud to wear spectacles, mentions Prince Edward, probably in 1449 (Mason, p. 29 n.)

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 1970's, 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 3 passages in his De Regimine Principum. Most notably, the Oxford English Dictionary cites him as an early user 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. W.C. 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).

Critical introduction

by Thomas Arnold

The principal work of Thomas Occleve is the poem De Regimine Principum, a free version of the Latin treatise written under that title by Aegidius or Giles, a native of Rome and a disciple of St. Thomas Aquinas, which he dedicated to Philip le Hardi, son of St. Louis. This poem is in the rhyme royal, and contains between five and six thousand lines. Nearly a third part of it is taken up with a Prelude or proem, which is considerably more interesting than the work itself. A slight analysis of this proem will bring Occleve before us, both as a man and a writer, more clearly than anything else could. After a restless night, spent in painful and fruitless musing on the insecurity of all things here below, the poet goes forth into the fields near his lodging in the Strand. A poor old man meets him, and plies him with questions as to the reason of his dejection. After naming various causes of trouble, he says —

  ‘If thou fele the in any of thise ygreved,
Or elles what, tel on in Goddes name;
Thou seest, al day the begger is releved,
That syt and beggith, crookyd, blynd, and lame;
And whi? for he ne lettith for no shame
His harmes and his povert to bewreye
To folke, as thei goon bi hym bi the weye.’

The old man goes on to warn him against indulgence in too prolonged and solitary meditations. By these, he says, men are sometimes led on to deny the faith, as happened in the case of a heretic ‘not longe agoo,’ who denied that after consecration the eucharistic bread was Christ’s body. For this he was burnt, though the prince (Henry) tried hard to save him, and promised to obtain his full pardon and the means of living from the king, if he would return to the faith. He speaks also of the folly of extravagance in dress,— that costly and ‘outragious array,’ which will ruin England if it is not stopped,— on the thoughtlessness and wantonness of youth, and so on.

The author, much consoled and edified, tells his mentor who he is, and how he lives. He is a writer to the Privy Seal, and has an annuity of twenty marks a year in the Exchequer, granted him by Henry IV. But his misfortune is that he can never depend on this being paid regularly, so that he is sometimes in danger of starving. If this be so now, what will be his plight when he is grown old, and has no other resource but the annuity? Herein lies the secret cause of his dejection. The old man, after counselling a religious resignation to the divine will, questions him still further, and finding that he is a literary man, and had known Chaucer, advises him to compose some new work and present it to the Prince, who will perhaps graciously accept it and relieve the author from his distress:

  ‘Write him no thinge that sowneth unto vice,
Kithe thi love in mater of saddenesse,
Loke if thou findë canst any tretice
Grounded on his astates holsomnesse;
Suche thing translate, and unto his highnesse,
As humbely as thou canst, it present;
Do this, my sonë.’ ‘Fadir, I assent.’

But he laments that "the honour of English tounge is deed," with whom he might have taken counsel; then follows the celebrated passage on Chaucer.... The poet returns home, takes parchment, and writes a dedication of his work to the Prince of Wales, Shakspere’s Prince Hal. It is founded, he says, on Aristotle’s "boke of governaunce" (the supposed correspondence between Aristotle and Alexander which made so deep an impression on the mediæval mind), and the work of Aegidius above mentioned; he has also studied the work of Jacobus de Cessolis (Casali) called The Chess-moralized; and the fruits of these studies he now presents to the Prince. The poem is not interesting. The various aspects under which his duty presents, or ought to present, itself to the mind of a ruler are considered successively under the heads of justice, good faith, temperance, mercy, prudence, deliberation, and so forth.

Other poems ascribed to Occleve are the story of Gerelaus emperor of Rome and his virtuous empress, and that of Jonathas and the three jewels. Both these are from the Gesta Romanorum: they have never been printed, but the story of Jonathas was modernised by Browne and introduced into the Shepherd’s Pipe (1614). Some of his minor poems were edited in 1798 by a Mr. Mason. The longest of them, La male régle de T. Hoccleve, exhibits a picture of the jovial and riotous life led by the poet in his younger days, which is in complete accordance with that presented in the proem to the De Regimine.

Recognition

His poem "Lament for Chaucer" was included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900.

Publications

Poetry

• The Regement of Princes (edited by Frederick James Furnivall). London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, for the Early English Text Society, 1897.
  • The Regiment of Princes (edited by Charles R. Blyth). Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1999.
• The minor poems: Iin the Huntington Library MS. HM 111 (Formerly Phillipps MS. 8151), the Durham Univ. MS. Cosin V. III. 9, and Huntington Library MS. HM 744 (formerly Ash-Burnham MS. Additional 133). London & New York: Oxford University Press, for the Early English Text Society, 1970.
• A Facsimile of the Autograph Verse Manuscripts: Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino (California), MSS HM III and HM 744 ; University Library, Durham (England), MS Cosin V. III. 9 (edited by J.A. Burrow & A.I. Doyle). Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the Early English Text Society, 2002.

Collected editions

• Hoccleve's Works (edited by Frederick James Furnivall). London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, for the Early English Text Society, 1892.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

What Does Normal Look Like? (Hoccleve's Compleint) Stephanie Trigg TEDxSydney

• Middle English poets
• List of British poets

References

•  Furnivall, Frederick James (1891) "Hoccleve, Thomas" in Lee, Sidney Dictionary of National Biography 27 London: Smith, Elder, pp. 56-57  . Wikisource, Web, Jan. 26, 2018.
• Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-271-02135-7

External links

Poem

• "Lament for Chaucer"
• Hoccleve, Thomas (1369?-1426) (poem) at Representative Poetry Online
• Thomas Hoccleve at PoemHunter (3 poems)
• Hoccleve in The English Poets: An anthology: Extracts from De Regimine Principum

Books

• Thomas Hoccleve at Amazon.com

About

• Thomas Hoccleve in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Thomas Occleve in the Catholic Encyclopedia
• Occleve, Thomas in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
• Thomas Hoccleve (1368-1450?) at Luminarium
• "Thomas Hoccleve’s Poems for Henry V: Anti-Occasional Verse and Ecclesiastical Reform" at Oxford Handbooks Online

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen & Sidney Lee). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Hoccleve, Thomas