Thomas Hoccleve
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.
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.
His first known, datable poem, The Letter to Cupid, was a 1402 translation of Christine de Pizan's L'Epistre au Dieu d'Amours, may have been seen as inappropriately francophile in the context of the rising English nationalism of the early 15th century, which would soon result in the resumption of hostilities in the Hundred Years War.
[7] Having failed to secure a church benefice, by 1410 he had married "only for love" (Regiment, 1.1561) and settled down to writing moral and religious poems, including his most widely circulated poem, the Regement of Princes, which he wrote c. 1411 and dedicated to the future Henry V.[2] He was still married in November 1420 when he and his wife receive bequests in a will.
[9] The episode caused his voice to be "publicly regarded as being unstable"[10] – a poor quality for an author whose most successful work to date was a didactic text.
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".
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.
[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.
[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.
He describes recovering from this "five years ago last All Saints" (Complaint, 11.55–6) but still experiencing social alienation as a result of gossip about this insanity.
The Series continues with "Dialog with a Friend," which claims to be written after his recovery and gives a pathetic picture of a poor poet, now 53, with sight and mind impaired.
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.
