Thomas Hoccleve

This article reconsiders the biographical and literary identities of the Privy Seal clerk and poet Thomas Hoccleve. It focuses on balades written by Hoccleve in the first two years of the reign of Henry V, as well as on the Remonstrance to Oldcastle, a longer poem addressing the Lollard knight Sir John Oldcastle and his fellow Lollard heretics. The article argues that Hoccleve was not a proto-poet laureate, producing propaganda and occasional verse in return for royal patronage, but rather that such poems are anti-occasional. These balades and the Remonstrance were not written for royal patrons but are instead about royal power, particularly in relation both to the defense of the faith and to ecclesiastical reform. These topics were of interest not just to noble or bureaucratic readers, but also to ecclesiastics, many of whom Hoccleve may have known personally. Hoccleve’s voice and identity are thus, in part at least, clerical and ecclesiastical, and to some degree independent of royal authority.Copyright 2016 The Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literatur