The Handwriting of Fifteenth-Century Privy Seal and Council Clerks

Although most scholars of medieval English palaeography are familiar with the hand of the Privy Seal clerk and poet Thomas Hoccleve, almost nothing is known about the handwriting of his fellow clerks. This article is the first attempt to identify and describe the hands of a number of clerks who wrote for the Privy Seal and for the Council in the fifteenth century. In Part 1, I identify the handwriting of Hoccleve’s fellow clerks, including William Alberton, Henry Benet, John Claydon, John Hethe, John Offord, and Richard Priour, adding writs, letters, charters, and manuscripts in their hands. I also identify the hand of the Council clerk Richard Caudray and attribute further records to the Council and Privy Seal clerk Robert Frye. Part 2 offers a reconsideration of the features of Hoccleve’s handwriting in the light of the new findings. This article also identifies the scribal stints and hands in four documents produced by Privy Seal clerks: British Library, MS Add. 24,062 (Hoccleve’s Formulary); BL, MS Cotton Cleopatra F. iii (Part 1 of the Book of the Council); BL, MS Harley 219; and Edinburgh University Library, MS 183 (Privy Seal and Signet formulary, or ‘Royal Letter Book’). This article reveals the extent to which Privy Seal clerks participated in the copying of literature and offers a more nuanced understanding of the varieties of the secretary script used by government scribes.

Dialogism in Hoccleve

Thomas Hoccleve (c. 1368–1426), a declared admirer of Chaucer, resembles the elder poet in making his narrative frames as rich as the stories they contain. In the frames to his three major works La Male Regle, The Regiment of Princes, and The Series, Hoccleve makes his own persona a focal point for ethical, political, and artistic inquiry. Through the dialogue which Hoccleve enacts between his persona and other figures, historical and allegorical, he makes dialogue itself the topic of his poetry, both its potential for meaningful communication and for dangerous self-exposure. The depicted encounters between him and others call attention to the properties of dialogue itself by virtue of their polyphonic mixture of genres, social roles, and situations drawn from his experience as a clerk in the King’s Office of the Privy Seal and as one stigmatized by an episode of mental illness. Neither a political mouthpiece nor an autonomous humanistic artist, Hoccleve seeks reciprocal communication; his self-performance urges an ethics of listening, a principle of charity that suspends judgment in order to seek understanding.

Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350-c.1500

This volume offers the first book-length history of reading for Middle English poetry. Drawing on evidence from more than 450 manuscripts, it examines readers’ choices of material, their movements into and through books, their physical handling of poetry, and their attitudes to rhyme. It provides new knowledge about the poems of known writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve by examining their transmission and reception together with a much larger mass of anonymous English poetry, including the most successful English poem before print, The Prick of Conscience. The evidence considered ranges from the weights and shapes of manuscripts to the intricate details of different stanza forms, and the chapters develop new methods which bring such seemingly disparate bodies of evidence into productive conversation with each other. Ultimately, this book shows how the reading of English verse in this period was bound up with a set of habitual but pervasive formalist concerns, which were negotiated through the layered agencies of poets, book producers, and other readers.

‘Hokclyff’ and the Will of William Hoton

There are two surviving copies of La Male Regle by Thomas Hoccleve, a lively account of his dissolute life as a clerk of the Privy Seal. One is part of an autograph manuscript of Hoccleve’s works in the Huntington Library, the other an incomplete version in Canterbury Cathedral Archives. Reference to a third copy survives in the will of William Hoton, proved in 1447. As well as La Male Regle, Hoton bequeathed a letter of Pharaoh, a chronicle and statutes, together with a mazer and pious donations. This information, coupled with records of Hoton’s family members, his burial place and associates, produces a profile of William Hoton linking him with the law and the book trade, and possibly with Neville’s Inn, the London town house used by a noble family to whose members Hoccleve addressed some of his poems. Hoton’s will also leads to a second individual who owned La Male Regle—the person who received it as a bequest, the common attorney and citizen, John Mordon. Neither Hoton nor Mordon has hitherto featured in discussions of the reception of the poem, which enjoyed a wider circulation than previously thought.

Last Words

No medieval text was designed to be read hundreds of years later by an audience unfamiliar with its language, situation, and author. By ascribing to these texts intentional anonymity, we romanticize them and misjudge the social character of their authors. Instead, most medieval poems and manuscripts presuppose familiarity with their authorial or scribal maker. Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England attempts to recover this familiarity and understand the literary motivation behind some of the most important fifteenth-century texts and authors. Last Words captures the public selves of such social authors when they attempt to extract themselves from the context of a lived life. Driven by archival research and literary inquiry, this book will reveal where John Gower kept the Trentham manuscript in his final years, how John Lydgate wished to be remembered, and why Thomas Hoccleve wrote his best-known work, the Series. This book will include documentary breakthroughs and archival discoveries, and will introduce a new life record for Hoccleve, identify the author of a significant political poem, and reveal the handwriting of John Gower and George Ashby. Through its investments in archival study, book history, and literary criticism, Last Words charts the extent to which medieval English literature was shaped by the social selves of their authors.

A New Hoccleve Literary Manuscript: The Trilingual Miscellany in London, British Library, MS Harley 219

This essay identifies a hand which copies and corrects much of the literary manuscript, London, British Library, MS Harley 219, as that of Thomas Hoccleve. Texts in Hoccleve’s handwriting include selections from Odo of Cheriton’s Fables and the Gesta Romanorum (a source for the Series), all of a unique copy of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea, and a glossary of French terms translated into Latin and English. Additionally, Hoccleve’s handwriting can be found in corrections to a French Secretum Secretorum (a source for The Regiment of Princes) that is otherwise copied in another hand. This essay offers preliminary observations on the literary implications of these identifications and attempts to situate these texts within Hoccleve’s career as a clerk and poet.