John Lydgate

John Lydgate of Bury (c. 1370 – c. 1451)[1] was an English monk and poet, born in Lidgate, near Haverhill, Suffolk, England.

Chaucer's The Monk's Tale, a brief catalog of the vicissitudes of Fortune, gives a hint of what is to come in Lydgate's massive Fall of Princes (36,365 lines), which is also derived, though not directly, from Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum Illustrium.

His patrons included, amongst many others, the mayor and aldermen of London, the chapter of St Paul's Cathedral, Richard de Beauchamp, 13th Earl of Warwick and Henry V and VI.

His most famous works were his longer and more moralistic Troy Book (1412–20), a 30,000 line translation of the Latin prose narrative by Guido delle Colonne, Historia destructionis Troiae, the Siege of Thebes which was translated from a French prose redaction of the Roman de Thebes and the Fall of Princes.

[6] Of his more accessible poems, most were written in the first decade of the fifteenth century in a Chaucerian vein: The Complaint of the Black Knight (originally called A Complaynt of a Loveres Lyfe and modelled on Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess); The Temple of Glas (indebted to The House of Fame); The Floure of Curtesy (like the Parlement of Foules, a Valentine's Day Poem); and the allegorical Reason and Sensuality.

At some point in his life he returned to the village of his birth and added his signature and a coded message[3] in a graffito onto a wall[10] at St Mary's Church, Lidgate, discovered in 2014.