Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes: Introduction

by: Thomas Hoccleve (Author) , Charles R. Blyth (Editor)

from: The Regiment of Princes  1999

I: Poem, Poet, Context, Sources

Reputation

Since the 1970s, Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes has received a degree of attention it had not had since the century in which the poem was written. While the 43 surviving manuscripts, all written between the poem's composition in 1410-11 and the end of that century, attest to its notability, William Caxton did not choose to print it, and as against the frequent salutes to the trinity of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate in the poetry of the later fifteenth and early sixteenth century, Hoccleve receives just one mention. In the short poem known as "Caxton's Book of Courtesy," addressed to "Lytle John," the unnamed disciple of Lydgate recommends to this "child" a course of improving reading. After four stanzas on Gower and six on Chaucer, and before eight stanzas on his master Lydgate, he devotes two stanzas to Hoccleve's "translacion / In goodly langage and sentence passyng wyse," in which "by his wrytynge playne" he directed his Prince to "vertu apperteynyng to nobles [the nobility] / Of a prynce."¹ George Ashby's poetry of the 1460s and 70s shows he has read Hoccleve, but he mentions by name only "Maisters Gower, Chauucer & Lydgate, / Primier poetes of this nacion."² From the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, when first Thomas Wright and then Frederick Furnivall edited it, the Regiment was largely neglected.

The rest of Hoccleve's poetry fared scarcely better. Early in the seventeenth century William Browne, a minor poet, adapted the "Tale of Jonathas" from his Series, and much later George Mason, a scholar-collector, at the end of the eighteenth century published poems from a manuscript in his possession. But for the most part all of Hoccleve's poetry was either neglected or regarded as part of the large body of undistinguished English poetry written in the shadow of Chaucer. To be sure, historians cited colorful passages of autobiographical writing for their documentary charm, and literary historians cited the several passages in which Hoccleve pays homage to Chaucer. W. J. Courthope in his A History of English Poetry makes perceptive remarks, but the critical assessment of G. Gregory Smith in 1900 best reflects the prevailing literary judgment. Hoccleve, Smith writes, "could never have dreamt himself out of a respectable mediocrity," and in his "jolting verse" there is "the pathological interest of the inability of the changing medium to yield the music of which Chaucer in rather happier circumstance and by dint of genius proved himself the master."³ And in the preface to his Early English Text Society edition of Hoccleve's other poems which preceded his Regiment edition for that series, Furnivall writes: "We wish he had been a better poet and a manlier fellow; but all of those who've made fools of themselves, more or less, in their youth, will feel for the poor old versifier⁴ A more positive assessment is offered by Eleanor Prescott Hammond in her valuable 1927 volume English Verse between Chaucer and Surrey, but in the dominant view obtaining until well into the second half of the present century, Hoccleve's poetry belonged to no canon which students of English literature should be asked to study, let alone take pleasure in.

The recent rehabilitation of Hoccleve's poetry is largely owing to three distinct developments. First, Hoccleve, like other writers of the generation after the great Ricardians (Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain poet, and Gower), has benefited from the recent move to "open up the canon," to see the literature written between Chaucer and Spenser as important in understanding what has come to be called, no longer a terminally ailing "late Middle Ages" but the early modern period. Second, beginning in the 1970s and 1980s a few discerning scholars began to discover in Hoccleve's poetry a level of accomplishment at odds with the older assessment, so that there were reasons besides the historical ones for reading it. In particular the British scholars Derek Pearsall (a brief hint as early as 1966, the year after Jerome Mitchell's subsequently published dissertation), A. C. Spearing (1985), and above all John Burrow (beginning in 1977) wrote perceptively about some of Hoccleve's poetry, though they dwelled on poems other than the overtly didactic and political Regiment. The latest critical development has brought together the literary critical and the cultural interests of his poetry, and in so doing it has extended the critical interest to include the Regiment. It is the interaction of the concerns of the literary critic and the cultural historian that is evident in work on the Regiment by such scholars as David Lawton, Larry Scanlon, and Antony Hasler. Third, the very autobiographical passages which made Furnivall wish Hoccleve had been "a manlier fellow" and which institutional historians such as T. F. Tout have drawn on for documentation have attracted the interest of critics interested in studying the formations of subjectivity in early modern literature, for which purpose Hoccleve joins the unlikely company of Margery Kempe. The interest in Hoccleve encouraged by these recent scholars as well as the inadequacy and relative inaccessibility of the century-old Furnivall edition are the principal reasons why a new edition of the Regiment is needed.

Author and Date of Composition

While most of the manuscripts of the Regiment in typical medieval fashion neither begin nor end with the identification of the name of its author, the fact that Hoccleve introduces his own name as a principal character in the poem ("What shal I calle thee, what is thy name?"/ "Hoccleve, fadir myn, men clepen me"- lines 1863-64) has eliminated any question about authorship. We know a good deal about Thomas Hoccleve, both his career as clerk in the government office of the Privy Seal and his career as poet, from three sources. Documents principally from the Exchequer recording payments for his work as clerk establish the chronology of his professional career, from his early years at the Privy Seal office to the year of his death. These documents by themselves would tell us nothing about his career as poet but for a second source, Hoccleve's occasional references in his poetry to his own chronology and to approximately or precisely datable external events. Taking these autobiographical references together with the documentary evidence allows us to establish an approximately accurate chronology of his life and work. Though contributing imperfectly to that chronology, the survival of manuscripts written by Hoccleve, as poet, as government clerk, and as scribe, add importantly to our understanding of his career. The paleographical work of H. C. Schulz established that nearly all of Hoccleve's other poems, though not the Regiment, survive in three manuscripts written in his own hand, and the content and structure of these holographs provide insight into his career as poet. Also surviving, and a key to Schulz's argument, is the large Formulary which Hoccleve wrote out towards the end of his life, containing model letters, petitions, and other documents in French or Latin, of the sort that a Privy Seal clerk would have to produce.

Recognition that there is a closer connection than one might expect between the government clerk and the poet is one of the many contributions of John Burrow to Hoccleve studies. In his excellent monograph on Hoccleve, Burrow notes the affinity between what he calls Hoccleve's petitionary poetry and the presence of petitionary documents in the Formulary. In the course of another remarkable paleographical essay, A. I. Doyle and Malcolm Parkes have identified one other activity of the poet-scribe, Hoccleve's short contribution as scribe to a manuscript of Gower's Confessio Amantis written by several hands (including the scribe of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales). In addition to demonstrating Hoccleve's "hands-on" connection with another major English poet besides Chaucer, and which very likely put him in touch with the most important scribe of Chaucer's greatest poem, the passage of 415 lines which he copied (Confessio Amantis V.7083-7498), whether by design or chance, begins with the foundationally literary story of the Judgment of Paris and the events leading up to the Trojan War. Yet more, the documents contain a single item pertaining to Hoccleve's library: in 1392 he was bequeathed a book on the Trojan War. Thus the surviving documentary evidence itself invites us to investigate the poet who himself, in his frequent autobiographical pose, solicits our attention.

If Hoccleve inevitably fits Paul Strohm's idea of "the narrowing of the 'Chaucer tradition'" in the fifteenth century, an assessment well presented long ago by Eleanor Hammond, he nonetheless does so in a much more positive way than Hammond or Strohm argue, for precisely in Hoccleve's "narrowness" lies his greatest strength, which manifests itself in his creation of an early modern subjectivity, in his distinctive observations of his time, and in his self-critical awareness of the limits imposed on a poet writing in the wake of Chaucer.

Burrow's monograph provides a clear and full chronology, complete with all the supporting documents, and the briefest summary here will have to suffice. Hoccleve was born about 1367, entered the government office of the Privy Seal about 1387, completed his earliest datable poem, the Epistle of Cupid (a free translation of Christine de Pisan's 1399 "Epistre au Dieu d'Amours") in 1402, wrote the best known of his shorter works, La Male Regle, about 1405, and between then and the Regiment wrote a few occasional poems that can be dated between 1405 and 1409. After the Regiment, he continued working in the Privy Seal until 1426, interrupted only by a period of mental illness which is an important part of the subject of his later Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend - the first two sections of the five-part work known as Hoccleve's Series. He continued as clerk until close to the time of his death in 1426. To return to the Regiment, since so many of the principal concerns of the poem connect so closely with its date of composition, its chronology is best viewed in relation to its historical context.

Historical Context

The approximate date of composition of the Regiment is largely determined by two dates: early in the poem (lines 281 ff.) Hoccleve refers to the burning of the Lollard John Badby, which took place in March 1410; and the poem's dedicatee, Prince Henry, ceased to be a prince when he ascended the throne March 21, 1413, as Henry V. The fact that the poem was written in part to remind the Prince of delinquent payments due him and the evidence for the delay of payments recorded in the documents permit us to narrow the date of composition to 1411, a date corresponding to Hoccleve's assertion that he is writing the poem when he has been twenty-four years in the office of the Privy Seal (lines 804-05). To these indications of termini prior and post quem for the poem's composition, we should add a few other dates pertinent to the poem's concerns: 1399, the date of Henry IV's usurpation of the throne; 1400, the death of Chaucer; and 1408, the death of Gower and the year when the Prince replaced Archbishop Arundel as head of the king's council until his dismissal in 1411. Taken together, these dates and the themes immediately associated with them define a good part of the literary and historical significance of the Regiment.

Hoccleve's poem was written at a time when England was still feeling the consequences of the deposition of Richard II, which haunted the usurper's reign by raising questions about the legitimacy of the Lancastrian line. The effort to assert its legitimacy was a constant concern of the Crown and is exemplified in the Regiment by two flattering references to the Prince's grandfather, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who had died in February of 1399 (lines 512-20 and the Latin gloss at line 3347), and one to Henry, John's father-in-law and the first of the Plantagenet dukes of Lancaster (lines 2647-53). Moreover, the theme of the importance of a king's councilors, a fundamental motif in the popular medieval genre of Fürstenspiegel, had a quite specific significance in the England of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, among other instances manifesting itself in the Prince's active and controversial role during the reign of his father in the years immediately leading up to the poem. In their need for authoritative support, the Lancastrians were diligent in supporting issues of concern to the church. Prominent among these was the Lollard heresy. Introduced early in the poem in the reference to the burning of Badby, the anti-Lollard theme is implicit elsewhere, and resurfaces near the end in a defense of icons in churches - a major object of Lollard attack.

That passage comes immediately after the passage in which Hoccleve causes an illuminated portrait of Chaucer to be inserted in his poem so that readers who have not known, or have forgotten, what Chaucer looked like may have "remembrance" of him. The placement of this third and (because of the portrait) most prominent of the poem's three salutes to Chaucer as "The firste fyndere of our fair langage" (line 4978) immediately before the anti-Lollard passage defending icons suggests that the presence of Chaucer in the poem is not simply a reverential expression of personal loss and poetic debt but also part of its thematic program, which may include, according to the argument of John Fisher, a specifically Lancastrian endorsement of English as the national language. These are a few of the issues with which recent writing on the Regiment has dealt. One of the challenges the poem presents to the reader is understanding how the poem's political and historical thematics interact with its identity as literary artifact.

Structure and Sources

It is not surprising that a poem addressed to a prince on the subject of his governance begins with a prologue; what is so unusual about the Regiment is that in this poem of over 5000 lines the Prologue occupies more than 2000 lines. Understanding this seeming imbalance is another of the issues which critics have variously addressed. Given the complex codicological history of many medieval poems, it is important to recognize that there is virtually unanimous manuscript support for this two-part structure of Prologue and what I shall call the "Regiment proper" as integral.⁵ After the Prologue and the formal address to the Prince, most manuscripts give a rubric which both defines the division and names the work. Thus, to cite British Library MS Arundel 38: "Explicit prologus de principum regimine, incipiendo de fide observanda" ("The prologue of The Regiment of Princes ends here; and the beginning [of the first section of the Regiment proper] on keeping faith").

The Prologue begins with the lament of a speaker who is unable to sleep because of anxiety about instability in the world in general and his own finances in particular. The night passes, he arises, and hastens outside. In his walk he soon encounters an old man whose polite greeting he scornfully rejects. C. S. Lewis recognized long ago in his Allegory of Love that the situation of the speaker is a powerfully effective variation of the opening situation of many medieval dream-vision poems. The gesture of arising in the morning and hastening "[i]nto the feeld" (line 117) belongs exactly to that tradition. But the speaker's thoughts also connect with another, even more pervasive medieval tradition, one that derives from Boethius' enormously influential Consolation of Philosophy; if the references to the instability of Fortune and the echo of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde were not sufficient to recall that source, Hoccleve, in the first of the Latin glosses inserted in the margin of the poem, cites Boethius' work (lines 50 ff.). The prevalence of Boethius in Hoccleve's England is underscored by the fact that John Walton translated the Consolation of Philosophy in 1410, a poem surviving in a number of manuscripts, including two in which it is accompanied by the Regiment. The ensuing dialogue between the speaker and the old man (misleadingly called the Old Beggar by Furnivall and hence by many subsequent critics) belongs to the Boethian tradition in which Lady Philosophy (or Dante's Virgil, or his Beatrice, or the Pearl maiden, or Gower's Genius) tries to educate the speaker as to the groundlessness and moral error inherent in his complaint.

The speaker's rudeness and self-pity are countered by the old man's offer to cure him by attending to his spiritual ills. Though in a secular sense and context, the old man urges him to confess: "Right so, if thee list have a remedie / Of thyn annoy that prikkith thee so smerte, / The verray cause of thyn hid maladie / Thow moot deskevere and telle out al thyn herte" (lines 260-63). The old man asks him if he risks spiritual despair by thinking and worrying about questions which a good Christian knows better than to indulge in. At this point Hoccleve's poem veers from the expected traditional form of Boethian instruction: the old man refers to the recent case of the Lollard John Badby who questioned the church's understanding of the Eucharist and questioned the special spiritual power of priests (lines 281-94). In the ensuing four stanzas Hoccleve quickly shifts from the doctrinal to the political, for the real story here is not the heretical belief of one individual but Prince Henry's presence at the examination of Badby and his unsuccessful effort to persuade him to renounce his beliefs. Thus early in the prologue to a poem addressed to his prince, Hoccleve introduces him and represents him as at once an upholder of the church's opposition to Lollardy, and as a compassionate leader who tries to save a soul.

The old man reverts to examining the speaker and proceeds to describe his own situation as embodying moral virtue clad in a poor dress. Reference to his poor "habit" leads to a long digression on contemporary social conditions in which too many courtiers are wastefully dressed in fashionable attire inappropriate to what they can afford and need in order to perform their functions in society (lines 421-553). Whatever the accuracy of its contemporary reference, recalling the abortive sumptuary legislation of 1363, this passage on clothing abuse in courts by those who strive to gain favors by appearance and flattery derives from a tradition common in the literature of satire and to which the poem will occasionally return. The old man asserts the wisdom he has gained in age, and proceeds to tell a story of his own extravagantly ill-spent youth from which he has suffered and for which he has sought repentance (lines 610-749). For the student of Hoccleve, this passage has the additional interest that it recalls the story of misspent youth Hoccleve tells of himself in his earlier Male Regle.

It is only after the old man's story that the identity of the speaker of the Prologue begins to emerge. In answer to the old man's question, he says that he is employed in the office of the Privy Seal and has been there for twenty-four years (lines 802-05). Hoccleve proceeds to explain his financial worry in some detail, inflating his concern in a restatement of unreconstructed Boethian lament ("Welthe is ful slipir; be waar lest thow falle," line 903). He describes his labor as a writer in the Privy Seal office and reiterates his financial worry, to which the old man replies by offering traditional wisdom (from Augustine, Bernard, and Seneca) on the advantages of poverty. Here Hoccleve inserts the first of the exempla from ancient history whose source we will presently examine. The old man says that Hoccleve is better off than he claims, to which Hoccleve hints that he has greater needs because, having failed in his hope of getting a benefice, he has married. A passage on the games that the lord's men play on poor clerks, a passage of skillful satirical writing made the more poignant from its autobiographical reference, highlights the travails of his professional life (lines 1485-1547). The old man's recognition of Hoccleve's married state leads to a long digressive passage on love, lust, adultery, and procreation (lines 1555-1764).

For the remainder of the Prologue, Hoccleve and the old man direct their attention to Hoccleve's financial needs and the possible help available to him. Since Prince Henry is his lord, the old man recommends that Hoccleve appeal to Henry by writing. It is at this point that, in answer to the old man's question, Hoccleve states his name (lines 1864-65), which immediately leads to the poem's first mention of Chaucer: "Sone, I have herd or this men speke of thee; / Thow were aqweyntid with Chaucer, pardee" (lines 1866-67). After some hesitation, and modification of the old man's suggestions, Hoccleve agrees to write. In the first of the poem's three passages on Chaucer, he laments his death and absence as an instructor (lines 1958-74) before turning to address the Prince.

What is notable about the Prologue is its departure from the lofty and learned tradition of Boethian dialogue with which it begins. The old man merely makes sure that Hoccleve is utterly orthodox in his religious views; his instruction effects no real change in the speaker's moral self-understanding. Furthermore, the poem includes extensive passages on topics drawn from traditional satire and other passages which take us into the real world in which the historical Hoccleve lives and works. In other words, the lofty themes associated with the literary tradition on which Hoccleve draws are finally reduced to the articulation of an immediate socio-economic situation, to which the old man ultimately supplies the solution. The redefinition of Boethian dialogue as begging poem - a genre to which much of Hoccleve's earlier poetry belongs - contributes to this lowering of expectations, and it also creates a potential ethical problem for the didactic treatise on princely rule which it introduces. Thus Hoccleve's poem, in addition to joining the sizeable body of late medieval poetry which exhibits generic instability, also raises fundamental questions about tone: just how is the Prince to take this poem, and how are we? There follows an address to the Prince in an appropriately elevated style (lines 2017 ff.) in which he names the three principal sources of his work, pauses once again to lament Chaucer's absence (lines 2077-2107), and proceeds with his poem.

As noted earlier, all of the Regiment manuscripts recognize the division between Prologue (almost always including the address to the Prince) and the Regiment proper, as well as the subdivisions of the latter, most of them marked by rubrication and, in the more elaborate manuscripts, by illumination. The fourteen or fifteen sections (the manuscripts show under-standable uncertainty about the division within the first two sections) concern the vices and virtues a prince must avoid or observe. These include: (1) on the dignity of a king (lines 2164-91); (2) on a king's keeping his coronation oaths, and on truth and cautious speech (lines 2192-2464); (3) on justice (lines 2465-2772); (4) on observing laws (lines 2773-2996); (5) on pity (lines 2997-3311); (6) on mercy (lines 3312-3458); (7) on patience (lines 3459-3626); (8) on chastity (lines 3627-3899); (9) on the magnanimity of a king (lines 3900-4004); (10) that a king must not base his happiness on riches (lines 4005-4123); (11) on the virtue of generosity and the vice of prodigality (lines 4124-4473); (12) on the vice of avarice (lines 4474-4746); (13) on a king's prudence (lines 4747-4858); (14) on keeping counsel in all situations (lines 4859-5019); and (15) on peace (lines 5020-5439). There follows an envoi consisting of three 8-line stanzas (lines 5440-63).

Unlike Chaucer, Hoccleve is quite candid about his sources for the Regiment proper. In the address to the Prince which immediately precedes these sections, Hoccleve identifies three sources. The first of these cited, the apocryphal letter of Aristotle to Alexander the Great known as the Secreta Secretorum, identifies the literary form in which a philosopher or scholar or clerk instructs a ruler to whom he is necessarily subordinate. This work was widely known throughout the Middle Ages; of the two basic versions of the Latin translation of the Arabic original, over 500 manuscripts survive, and the work was translated from Latin into many vernacular languages. Twelve versions survive in Middle English prose, all later than Hoccleve's, though Hoccleve's use of the work is preceded in English poetry by John Gower, the fifth book of whose Confessio Amantis belongs to this genre. Though the Secreta contains sections on such topics as diet and astrology, Hoccleve like Gower draws only on those sections offering specific moral and political advice to a ruler, and some of this material ultimately derives from genuine Aristotle. While Hoccleve from time to time translates from the Secreta (these passages are identified in the Notes), the key value of this source is the structural relationship it sets up between poet and prince - a relationship which Hoccleve explores and exploits in unexpected ways.

Hoccleve's second source, the De regimine principum of Egidius Romanus (c. 1247-1316), also known as Egidius Colonna or Giles of Rome, is the work of an intellectual who contributed importantly to political and church theory. His De regimine was written for the son of Philip III of France, whose tutor he was. The work's divisions into topical sections doubtless influenced the topical structure of Hoccleve's work, and it supplied his poem with a title, such that the rubrics and explicits of many of the manuscripts imply or state that the entire poem is a translation of Egidius' treatise, an error repeated by some early scholars. The work was translated into Middle English by the prominent translator John Trevisa before 1402. An edition of the single surviving manuscript was recently published, and, in the Notes to the passages taken from Egidius, I have included page references to this translation for comparison.

After Hoccleve identifies these two sources (lines 2038-53), and before he introduces his third source, he inserts a digression of over fifty lines (lines 2054-2107) which addresses some of the questions of his intent with regard to sources and structure. He is the "plotmeel" ("piecemeal," line 2053) translator of those two sources. The word is evidently Hoccleve's invention, and in context suggests casual, undisciplined work. In the lines following, Hoccleve invokes the modesty topos, apologizing to his Prince for his "dul conceit" (line 2057) and immaturity. His work furthermore has "[n]oon ordre" (line 2061) and is a "pamfilet" (line 2060) - something smaller in size and consequence than a book. Though the modesty topos is a tiresomely familiar feature in late medieval poetry, there is plainly a sense in which modesty is not inappropriate when one has just invoked a work ascribed to Aristotle and a second work written by an intellectual heavy-weight.

It is in this context of modesty that Hoccleve offers the second of the poem's three passages on Chaucer, lamenting his death ("My deere maistir, God his soule qwyte, / And fadir, Chaucer, fayn wolde han me taght, / But I was dul and lerned lyte or naght," lines 2077-79). However, when Hoccleve turns back to his task and the identification of his third source, there is a notable change of tone. The description of Jacob de Cessolis as "a worthy man" (line 2110) suggests an author and work less daunting than his other two sources. Hoccleve wittily puns on the language of chess, indicating that he no longer feels out of his element. And while he will "compyle" (line 2132) his work based on passages "scatered fer in brede" ("scattered all about," line 2135) in his three sources, the tone continues as witty. Recent scholarship has shown that "compile" and "compilation," far from having a pejorative connotation, define an important concept of medieval literary structure which is at work in Gower's Confessio and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as well as Hoccleve's later Series.⁶ The term returns in the rubric at the end of the poem introducing the envoi, where nearly all of the manuscripts that have not lost their endings read: "Verba compilatoris ad librum" ("Words of the compiler to his book"). Finally, the Prince does not really need Hoccleve's instruction; he has doubtless read the sources, but the Regiment offers a good digest of stories and instruction, in fact a good bed-time read: "At hardest, whan yee been in chambre at eeve, / They been good for to dryve foorth the nyght" (lines 2140-41).

Following upon this light-hearted passage, Hoccleve completes the identification of his sources by naming Jacob de Cessolis' Chessbook. Like the Secreta, and more so than Egidius' treatise, the Chessbook was one of the most popular didactic works in the later Middle Ages, surviving in a very large number of Latin manuscripts, and translated into many vernacular languages. Drawing on contemporary interest in the game of chess and its moralization, Jacob wrote a treatise in which the pieces and moves of the game are interpreted to comment upon the estates of society, beginning with the king. Hoccleve makes no use of the chess metaphor beyond the stanza of punning wit. The work has been classified as estates satire, but it equally belongs with the Secreta and Egidius' De regimine as a work dealing with the theme of a ruler's obligations. The principal value of the work to Hoccleve was that it provided him with close to fifty exempla to insert in his poem, ranging from epigram-length stories to one of nearly two hundred lines.

While the exempla often serve the purpose of entertainment to which Hoccleve alludes, they have a more interesting function, which the important recent work of Larry Scanlon has explored. For while the entire Regiment proper, with its topical structure of vices and virtues, draws (loosely) on the structure of a Fürstenspiegel such as Egidius', to which it occasionally refers and from which it occasionally quotes, the dominant character of the central sections (sections 1 through 11) is largely determined by its use of exempla through all these subdivisions, a feature almost entirely absent from Egidius' work. Jacob drew these exempla from a variety of sources of history and legend - John of Salisbury's Policraticus, the collections of Valerius Maximus, and diverse collections prepared for the use of preachers in their sermons. The very diversity of the sources creates the possibility that the exemplum will take on a life of its own, apart from and at times in seeming conflict with the context in which it is introduced. The best illustration of this tendency is Gower's Confessio Amantis, a work about which scholars and critics continue to disagree concerning the fit of particular exempla to the frame narrative of the poem. Scanlon in his readings of the exemplum of Lycurgus and his Laws (lines 2950-89) and that of the tyrant with the brazen bull (lines 3004-38) reveals the complex political implications of these narratives as they relate to the larger political themes of the poems.⁷

That the exempla are an integral part of the design of the whole Regiment is revealed in what is by far the longest of these, the exemplum of John of Canace, where the punch-line of the story (a story of a foolish Lear-like father with greedy children) connects directly with the Prologue. At the conclusion of the story, the daughters and their husbands are disappointed to find a stern moral message in place of the money they expect. In the very next stanza, Hoccleve reintroduces the Hoccleve persona of the Prologue and reintroduces his name ("I, Hoccleve, in swich cas am gilty; this me touchith," line 4360) for the first time in over 2000 lines. He thus forces a connection between the Prologue and the Regiment proper, and in so doing implies that the entire work needs to be seen as a series of interactions - between Prologue and Regiment, between poet's mirror (self-portrayal) and prince's mirror (as in Fürstenspiegel), between private and public. In its way the Prologue is just as didactic as the Regiment proper and the latter just as subjective. Against the static linear structure of a Prologue followed by the Regiment proper is the dynamic impulse whereby the two read against each other, and whereby individual inserted exempla animate and complicate what otherwise might seem a discourse of bland platitudes.

The Glosses and Other Sources

In addition to the three named sources, most of the manuscripts of the Regiment contain over one hundred glosses, nearly all of them in Latin and usually placed in the margins of the text. While some of these come in the Prologue, beginning with a quotation from Boethius' Consolation very early in the work, by far the greater number of them come in the Regiment proper and point to additional sources Hoccleve has used. Some of them provide all or part of a text which he translates in the adjacent passage of his poem, some of them merely name the source of a passage, and some of them indicate the subject of a passage of narrative (this last especially for the Chessbook exempla). The glosses have limited value as indication of Hoccleve's sources and do not suggest that he was widely read. It is not surprising that one third of the glosses are from the Vulgate Bible, ranging from Genesis to Paul's Epistles. While Genesis, Kings, and Matthew provide sources for biblical narrative, it is significant that over twenty glosses cite Proverbs and the other books associated with the name of Solomon. The biblical glosses are approximately accurate and usually correctly identified. That Hoccleve had access to a biblical commentary (or Bible with commentary) is indicated in the text, where he names and paraphrases Nicholas of Lyra (line 1725).

A much smaller number of glosses comes from classical authors, including Seneca, Sallust, Martial, and Quintilian, as well as Isidore and Boethius. All but two of the several Seneca citations are spurious; otherwise, these classical glosses (often roughly correct) are most likely traceable not to manuscripts of classical authors but to the popular medieval collections of such passages called florilegia. A third, less expected group of glosses comes from Gratian's Decretum, the great collection of canon law put together in the twelfth century, giving authoritative weight to the moral injunctions of the poem. However, in general the glosses common to the majority of manuscripts of the Regiment do not reveal much about the poem. Whether or not the learning they provided was felt to be useful to the reader, their principal value was surely to give the poem an aura of authority.

Literary Associations: Hoccleve and Chaucer

As noted earlier, Hoccleve's first datable work is an adaptation of a poem by Christine de Pisan, his only contribution to the courtly poetry associated with the Ricardian age. John Burrow (1982) has noted that, given Hoccleve's familiarity with French in his daily work at the Privy Seal, it would be surprising if he were not familiar with the dits and begging poems of a poet such as Deschamps. And the gathering of poems in the two Huntington holographs and the structuring of the Durham holograph as a book (better, a work in progress) have parallels and antecedents in fourteenth-century French poetry. While the subject deserves more attention than it has received, one may doubt that there is much in the way of close intertextual relationships, and in particular one may doubt the particular influence of French poetry on the Regiment. It is similarly difficult to find much evidence for the influence of English poetry on Hoccleve outside of Chaucer. As noted before, he was familiar with at least part of Gower's Confessio, but even the exempla common to Gower's fifth book and the Regiment do not establish beyond doubt that Hoccleve was in these instances influenced by the older poet, and Gower's plain style does not lend itself to recognizable imitation.

The same cannot be said for Chaucer; and given the prominence of Chaucer in the structuring of the Prologue, it is necessary to take a brief look at the influence of Hoccleve's "master." The relation of Hoccleve to Chaucer embraces four issues which have received attention by critics. First and least interesting is the biographical question. In his 1968 book Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth-Century English Poetic and in his brief essay "Hoccleve's Supposed Friendship with Chaucer," Jerome Mitchell is so taken with the then current interest in literary convention that he regards the passages on the older poet as more convention than autobiography. While the matter cannot be proven, not only the distinctly personal tone of the passages lamenting the loss of Chaucer as teacher, but the geographical and cultural proximity of these two government employees makes the autobiographical claim difficult to discredit.

Least controversial is Chaucer's demonstrable influence on Hoccleve's poetry, beginning with the rhyme-royal stanzaic form which Chaucer introduced into English poetry and extending to a number of unmistakable echoes and allusions: at various points in his work, Hoccleve echoes the Pardoner, names the Wife of Bath, alludes to The Book of the Duchess and The Legend of Good Women, and (grotesquely) echoes a passage in The Knight's Tale. As Derek Pearsall has noted, "There is a colloquial ring about his dialogue, a sense of the speaking voice, which makes Hoccleve the only inheritor of Chaucer's well-bred low vernacular."⁸ In short, Chaucer's influence on Hoccleve's poetry is immense.

However, neither that literary fact nor the likelihood of a biographical fact prepares us for the prominent presence of Chaucer in the very structure of the Regiment. (1) When the old man asks Hoccleve what his name is and he replies, the old man immediately remarks "Thow were aqweyntid with Chaucer, pardee - / God have his soule, best of any wight!" (lines 1867-68). (2) At the end of the Prologue, having agreed to the old man's suggestion and immediately before he addresses the Prince, in the place where a classical poet would invoke a muse, Hoccleve invokes Chaucer and the absence of his "conseil and reed" (line 1960; see lines 1958-74). (3) As noted earlier, in the address to the Prince, in the interval between the identification of his first two sources and his identification of the Chessbook, Hoccleve invokes Chaucer again, this time in a more rhetorically elevated style - once again lamenting the absence of his influence as instructor in poetry (lines 2077-2107). (4) Finally, at the end of the next to last section of the Regiment proper, immediately after the topical advice to refrain from holding councils on holidays, Chaucer is invoked as "the first fyndere of our fair langage" who is said to have written better on this topic. There follows the remarkable stanza on the inclusion of a memorial portrait of Chaucer (lines 4992-98), and that stanza is immediately followed by the stanza defending the use of images in churches.

This sequence of passages has invited diverse interpretations. From what was said about Chaucer's actual influence on Hoccleve, it is not implausible to argue that these passages are simply a personal expression acknowledging that influence and expressing his sense of loss. A rather more cynical interpretation, especially supported by (1), is that Hoccleve is exploiting the name and fame of Chaucer to his own advantage. Yet another interpretation emphasizes Chaucer's use to the Lancastrian monarchy; it is not simply to Hoccleve's advantage but to Henry's to appropriate this cultural figure at a time when Henry, as Fisher has argued, was interested in promoting the use of English rather than French. The juxtaposition of the last passage on Chaucer with its reference to his religious poetry and the portrait with the anti-Lollard passage suggests that Chaucer is being enlisted in the assertion of Lancastrian religious orthodoxy. The very diversity of these interpretations, all plausible and none mutually exclusive, nicely fits a poem in which the personal or private and the political are so often in touch with each other. A fourth Chaucerian connection, the allusion to his poetry in Hoccleve's later Series, and the inclusion of some of Hoccleve's poems in early editions of Chaucer, raises other questions about the fifteenth-century use of Chaucer which lie outside the immediate concerns of this edition.

II. Manuscripts and the Rationale for this Edition

The Regiment Manuscripts and Earlier Editions

As indicated at the beginning of this Introduction, the student of Hoccleve has an especially rich array of manuscripts with which to work, and in particular the editor of the Regiment has, not counting a fragment of two leaves, forty-three complete or nearly complete or at any rate substantial copies of the poem. Forty-two manuscripts are described by M. C. Seymour in an essential bibliographical article, which is supplemented by the description of a forty-third manuscript by A. S. G. Edwards. The manuscript evidence demonstrates the identity and coherence of The Regiment of Princes as a single integral work. Indeed the largest group consists of twenty-five manuscripts which contain only the Regiment, and with a single exception which is best explained as loss of leaves rather than exclusion, all contain or originally contained the entire poem. Another five manuscripts contain the Regiment combined with Hoccleve's later Series, four of these oddly including also Lydgate's "Dance of Death." Two more manuscripts bring together the Regiment with, in one case, two parts of the Series, and in the other case, within a large compilation, works of Chaucer and Mandeville's Travels, the entire Series, and Lydgate's "Dance." Another eight manuscripts bring together the Regiment with one or two or three other long poems, either by Lydgate, or Walton's translation of Boethius. In all of these cases the Regiment is presented as an integral poem, with the recognizable structure of Prologue and Regiment, and with the sections of the Regiment usually marked by rubric, by large capitals with or without ornmanent, and in some cases by both. In appearance, the manuscripts range from deluxe ornamented parchment products made for luxury consumption (at least six fit this description) to scrappily penned copies on paper, with the largest number falling in between.

Though not offered as a critical edition, this edition is based on a comprehensive study and full collation of all the extant manuscripts of the Regiment and so departs from the two previous printed editions of the poem, which are principally based on just two manuscripts. The first of these, Thomas Wright's 1860 edition for the Roxburgh Club, is based on British Library MS Royal 17 D. vi, an extensively ornamented parchment manuscript written towards the middle of the fifteenth century, and containing not only the Regiment but also the last three parts of the five-part Series. It is an interesting manuscript and one of the very few to contain a version of the Chaucer portrait which Hoccleve's text calls for, as well as a presentation miniature at the end of the Prologue. However, the quality of these portraits is poor, and so is the text if compared with that offered in at least half a dozen other manuscripts. Like other publications of the Roxburgh Club, Wright's edition was a luxury product with a very limited circulation, and Frederick Furnivall, who had edited the poems of two of Hoccleve's holograph manuscripts for the Early English Text Society in 1892 (e.s. 61), produced an edition of the Regiment for the series in 1897 (e.s. 72), basing his text on British Library MS Harley 4866, though using Wright's Royal manuscript where Harley is wanting leaves or seemingly in need of correction. Furnivall chose Harley in part "because it has the best portrait of Chaucer" as well as providing "some older readings."⁹ It was a good choice because, of the forty-three surviving manuscripts, Harley is one of only two to date from the time of the poem's completion in 1411. The second of these manuscripts is British Library MS Arundel 38, and comparison with Harley reveals a more carefully written and corrected manuscript which was therefore Seymour's choice for copy text in the original plan for this edition, and is used for the excerpts of the Regiment in his Selections from Hoccleve. Arundel and Harley have the closest imaginable relationship apart from the fact that they were written by two distinct scribes with two distinct habits of writing and spelling. Both are vellum manuscripts containing only Hoccleve's poem presented as a deluxe book with an intended but not always achievable plan of four rhyme-royal stanzas to the page. Both are virtually identical in size; different amounts of trimming have rendered their present dimensions distinct, but both are 185 mm. in width, Harley's length from trimming 25 mm. shorter than Arundel, and the frame around the writing area similar: Arundel 185 x 92 mm., Harley 175 x 97 mm. Both manuscripts have, page for page, an identical textual format: when one manuscript departs from the norm of four complete stanzas to the page, so does the other one. The main cause of these occasional irregularities is the introduction of decorative ornament at the beginning of each section of the Regiment proper, and the layout and style of this ornament, whether by a single hand or, more likely, two, is exceedingly close. Both manuscripts originally contained two miniature illuminations, one a scene in which the manuscript is presented to its dedicatee, the other the portrait of Chaucer which Hoccleve had inserted to recall the poet to mind. However, both manuscripts have suffered for their elegance: the leaf containing the Chaucer portrait has been cut out of Arundel, and the leaf containing the presentation scene has been cut out of Harley. Harley also lacks its first leaf, which was ornmented and likely included heraldry, and so lacks the first fifty-six lines of the poem as well as the last twenty-nine lines. Because of the close relationship between the two manuscripts, either one becomes the best source for replacing text missing from the other.

To the demonstrable excellence of these two manuscripts is added the strong probability that they were executed with some degree of supervision by Hoccleve himself. This edition frankly privileges these two relatively "authorized" manuscripts and corrects them where they evidently err. But it is necessary to say something about the other forty-one manuscripts. A new edition of the Regiment must correct the errors of the old editions, in part by making use of the evidence provided by manuscripts which Furnivall did not consult. M. C. Seymour, the originator of the project which ultimately turned into the present edition, in a note to his edition of Selections, advises that "a full collation of all manuscripts will appear" in the new edition.¹⁰ But my completion of that "full collation" convinced me that there was no justification for recording such a mass of trivial data, even in a critical edition (which the present edition plainly is not). With the Regiment, unlike the situation of the B-text of Piers Plowman, or indeed any of the versions of that poem, we have two copies made with the probable supervision of the poet. In addition, even if we did not have the authority of those early manuscripts, any one of over half a dozen of the later manuscripts would make a very good copy-text. In short there is a conservative stability in the Regiment manuscripts resulting in a relatively small amount of substantive variation.

On the other hand, one may disagree with Seymour that the priority of the two patronal copies eliminates the value of readings from later manuscripts. Not only is it well established that "better" readings are often preserved in otherwise inferior later manuscripts, but also in the particular case of Hoccleve, we have evidence that there were originally not two but at least five copies produced for patrons, and manuscripts deriving from those other copies can preserve earlier readings. The Royal manuscript which Wright edited contains a fuller amount of Latin glossing than Arundel or Harley, implying a different, perhaps no less authoritative exemplar. There is evidence that another Royal manuscript, British Library MS Royal 17 D. xviii, derives ultimately from a copy written in Hoccleve's hand (see Marzec and the introduction to Pryor's edition of the Series). More than any other scribal copy, it preserves some of Hoccleve's characteristic spellings, and as a manuscript not closely related to the family of manuscripts of which Arundel and Harley are the best examples, this Royal manuscript often serves as a relatively independent witness confirming their readings. Thus, while Arundel and Harley are the most reliable sources for the text of this edition, when one or a group of these later witnesses gives an arguably better reading, or calls attention to an error in Arundel, I do not hesitate to adopt it.

The Edition and the Holograph Manuscripts

In addition to the expected use of Regiment manuscripts described above, this edition takes the unexpected step of turning to another manuscript resource, that embodied in the Hoccleve holographs. Over twenty years ago, Seymour, in the preface to the first volume of the edition of Trevisa's On the Properties of Things, of which he was the general editor, in a footnote remarked that "[t]he necessary procedures" for recovering "much of Trevisa's spelling habits" are "tested, in a forthcoming edition, on Hoccleve's Regiment against the extant holographs of his minor poems."¹¹ Nothing came of Seymour's forecast until, nearly a decade later, David Greetham, who replaced Seymour as general editor of the Regiment, after initially taking a traditional approach to editing the poem, presented a concerted defense and methodology for an edition of the non-holograph Regiment making use of the authorial spellings recoverable from the holographs. Greetham published two papers on the subject, and began supervising the preparation of a text by a team of editors, to which the present editor was a relatively late addition. Greetham began by noting a broad general distinction between editions of early texts (classical and medieval), which are typically concerned with reconstructing the archetype of extant manuscripts and are thus involved with the genealogy of texts, often employing Lach-mannian stemmatics; and editions of post-Guttenberg texts, in which considerable attention is paid not merely to substantives but to accidentals - that is, to authorial preference in spelling, punctuation, and the like. Hoccleve's Regiment then is offered to test the possibility of combining in one edition a classical, Lachmannian construction of the poem's substantive readings, with a reconstruction of authorial accidentals which goes beyond those of the archetype (the antecedent of the early Arundel and Harley manuscripts) to authorial practice as revealed in the holographs. The results of stemmatic analysis are reported in Marzec and in Greetham (1987).

In these terms, Greetham offered a felicitous solution to the theoretical possibility he had raised, but that solution in turn raises a few practical questions: (1) to what extent is it easily possible to recover authorial usage from the holographs - in short, what is recoverable and with what degree of success? and (2) what in fact is the benefit of such a procedure to the edition which is its product?

The desirability of approximating authorial usage has often been cited by editors - most often in the context of selecting a copy text from available manuscripts felt to come closest to that usage. The usual difficulty is that of establishing authorial usage, and the usual solution is to rely on such more general features as dialect and date. However, with Hoccleve authorial usage is extensively documented by the holograph manuscripts. These provide a rare instance of a medieval English author writing out his own verse, and the characteristics of that verse have the greatest relevance to the non-holograph Regiment. Apart from the Formulary and a few prose passages in the Durham manuscript, the holographs are in verse, so that one is not attempting to apply the language of a will or of a body of personal letters to the editing of a poem. Furthermore, it is highly compatible verse; apart from a group of religious poems, there is remarkable overlap between the poetry of the holographs and that of the Regiment. There are passages in Hoccleve's first-person autobiographical mode, passages of social and political observation, and passages of moral instruction. At the more local level, the Regiment is written, but for its short envoi, entirely in rhyme-royal stanzas; nearly all of the poems in the holographs are either in rhyme royal or in the 8-line stanza of Chaucer's The Monk's Tale. At the still more local level which addresses the practical issue of the recovery of authorial practice most directly, the holographs exhibit a high degree of regularity in two areas: in habits of spelling, and in metrical practice. In both areas it is possible to establish Hocclevean patterns of usage.

Though by modern standards Hoccleve is not a consistent speller, by the standards of his time - by comparison with any of the forty-three scribes copying the Regiment - he is an exceptionally regular speller. The great majority of words in his lexicon have a single spelling. "Thow" and "yow" are always spelled with a w, never a u. The past tense of the verb to "think" is always, all thirty-three times, spelled "thoghte," clearly distinguishing it from the spelling without -e which indicates either the noun (twenty-one times) or the past participle (five times). There is plainly no difficulty in transferring such spellings to the forms which appear in the copy made by the Arundel scribe. In addition, a large percentage of common words are spelled the same in the holographs and in Arundel, so that scribal form duplicates authorial form. Two more problematic categories of words remain: those for which there is more than a single holograph spelling, and those words in the Regiment that do not occur in the holographs. In the first category, for example, "deeth" occurs one hundred and twenty-four times, as against "deth," which occurs only twice, and with no justification such as rhyme position. This exception, and others like it, does not prevent us from speaking confidently of a preferred spelling. But there are also cases such as the spelling of the noun "estat" with one a in non-rhyme position, twice, against "estaat" with double a in non-rhyme position, three times, where one cannot with certainty identify a single Hocclevean form. However, provided that these variations are recognized and made use of, rather than regularized out of existence, in the "translation" from scribal form to holograph form, one is still working with Hocclevean forms. The fact that there is not 100% regularity does not mean that we should not make use of such regularity as there is.

As to the second category of problematic words, those that do not appear in the holographs, most can be reconstructed by analogy to holograph forms. For instance, the first line of the poem contains the adjective "restless." The holographs have the noun "reste" (ten occurrences), and they also have the suffix -less attached to other nouns: fifty-one times it is spelled with double e (-lees), twice (again the minor variant) it is spelled with single e (-les.) Thus it is readily possible to construct a form beginning rest- and ending -lees. But will there be an e in the middle? There is a definite answer, provided by analogy from the holographs, and it points ahead to the second major instrument which the holographs provide the editor. The struc-turally similar adjective "comfortless" occurs twice in the holographs, but in two distinct spellings: "confortlees" and "confortelees." Nor is there anything capricious about the variation here; the metrical pattern, soon to be discussed, calls for a three-syllable word in one case, and a four-syllable word in the other. In the first line of the Regiment, we need two-syllable "restlees," not three-syllable "restelees." Thus access to the holographs and the principle of analogy deliver the word "restlees," which in this case happens to be the spelling the Arundel scribe uses. But even though we use Arundel as base text, we would justify that spelling not because it is the Arundel scribe's spelling - what Greg refers to as the tyranny of copy-text - but because it is the undocumented yet authentic Hocclevean form. In the very few cases where no clear analogy is provided by the holograph evidence (many of them proper nouns of place and person), there is no alternative to accepting the form provided by Arundel, or Arundel's form modified by the elimination of that scribe's nearly unique (among Regiment scribes) use of 3 (yogh) for y or g or gh ("3yft," "kny3t") - a modification which the practice of the Middle English Text Series would in any case make. Hoccleve uses yogh only for the sound of z ("san3," "ma3ed") which is here represented by z. Hoccleve's use of y for the velar fricative ("yates," "yift") is here represented by g ("gates," "gift").

The preceding examples illustrate the results of applying the method laid out by Greetham. By this method it is quite possible largely to construct Hocclevean usage and apply it to the text of the Regiment. But this still leaves unanswered the question, why one might want to do so, other than the always problematic wish to return to authorial intention. In order to reach a satisfying answer to that question, it helps to clear away a false answer. The false answer is that in employing the holographs we are getting back to the poem that left Hoccleve's hands in 1411. In the case of Hoccleve, it is not necessary to engage in a theoretical discussion of the possibility of such a goal for the facts of history rule it out. The Durham holograph dates from about ten years after the completion of the Regiment, and thus about ten years after the writing of the two earliest scribal copies; the Huntington holographs are a few years earlier. Scribal habits change in time - as recognized and accepted, for instance, in the consensus view that the Ellesmere and Hengwrt manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales are the work of the same scribe. The same point is observable if we compare the two different copies of Hoccleve's Lerne to Die preserved, one in the Durham manuscript, the other in a Huntington manuscript. John Bowers has written interestingly about the differences between the two copies, among other points calling attention to orthographic differences and their implications for textual theory and editorial practice. If we had a Hoccleve holograph of the Regiment from the time of the poem's completion, it surely would not be identical to a copy of the poem he could have written out a decade later - the time of the surviving Durham holograph. The differences are minor and the sense of regularity in Hoccleve's spellings remains, but the reconstruction of spellings must be viewed as approximate and probable, not an assured path to authorial intent. Nor is it yet clear why the approximate recovery of spellings is in itself an important editorial achievement.

However, the holographs provide a second kind of evidence which not only largely escapes the shortcomings in spelling recovery but also much more important, gives value to the recovery of spelling and provides a crucially important instrument for presenting Hoccleve's poem: the evidence for his metrical practice. Though spelling habits can change, at least in Hoccleve's case the evidence of the holographs suggests that metrical habits did not change. The same practice is observable in copies of poems he wrote as early as the 1402 Epistle of Cupid and in the Complaint and Dialogue of the early 1420s. The metrical practice common to poems earlier and later than the Regiment may be fairly taken into account in editing that poem.

The earliest investigation of the holographs concentrated on spelling practice, but in 1985 Judith Jefferson presented her essay (published in 1987) on the holographs in which she demonstrated the regularity of Hoccleve's metrical practice. What she discovered was the extraordinary syllabic regularity of Hoccleve's lines of verse. She showed the many ways in which Hoccleve employed variant forms and structures to achieve a decasyllabic line. She demonstrated that, in the first place, final -e when not followed by a word beginning with a vowel or h- plus a vowel, is always pronounced. In the second place, Hoccleve uses an entire arsenal of variant forms - for instance, the pleonastic "that" which she illustrates by this pair of lines from the Durham Lerne to Die: "And now as fisshes been with hookes kaght / And as that briddes been take in a snare" (lines 246-47). The lines are identical in the Huntington holograph, with the minor spelling variant "caght" for "kaght." The key point is that the variants in syntax and in spelling offer alternate syllabic counts - disyllabic "hennes" versus monosyllabic "hens," disyllabic "thanne" (when not followed by a word beginning with a vowel) versus monosyllabic "than," disyllabic "hadde" versus monosyllabic "had." Chaucer too employs such variants for metrical purpose ("what that" or "as that" or "sith that" versus "whan" or "as" or "sith"), but one quickly sees that Hoccleve uses these devices far more frequently. The statistics supporting decasyllabic regularity are impressive. To cite but one telling statistic Jefferson provides: if one examines all the lines in the holographs which do not have an internal final -e - that is, if one eliminates lines which raise the question of whether or not to pronounce final -e within the line - one finds that 98% of the lines have ten syllables. And if one assumes (correctly) that internal final -e is to be pronounced, then 96% of the lines are decasyllabic. These results argue for a metrical regularity even more notable than Hoccleve's fairly regular spelling practice, and they also show how Hoccleve's spellings support the syllabic regularity.

That syllabic regularity was exemplified in the earlier illustration of the two spellings of "confort(e)lees" to fit two different metrical needs. By rewriting the Arundel scribe's text of the Regiment using the spellings of the holographs, many metrically irregular lines become regular and thus reveal Hoccleve's likely intent; at the same time, in many cases the changed line is a notably better line. Since part of the renewal of interest in Hoccleve has involved recognition that he is a better poet than earlier scholars had thought, it was judged important to make use of an editorial procedure which produced a text making the best case for that poetry.

Consider the first stanza of the poem, first as presented in Furnivall's edition, and then as given in Seymour's Selections based on Arundel:

Mvsyng vpon the restles bisynesse
Which that this troubly world hath ay on honde,
That othir thyng than fruyt of byttirnesse
Ne yeldeth nought, as I can vndirstonde,
At Chestre ynnë, right fast be the stronde,
As I lay in my bed vp-on a nyght,
Thought me bereft of sleep with [the] force and myght.

Musynge vpon the restlees bysynesse
Whyche that thys troubly world haþ ay on honde,
That oþer thyng than fruyt of bytirnesse
Ne 3yldeth nou3t as I can vnderstonde,
At Chestres Yn ryst fast by the Stronde
As I lay in my bedde vpon a ny3t
Thog3t me berefte of slepe the force and my3t.

The original first leaf of Furnivall's Harley source is missing, replaced by an eighteenth-century hand copying from another manuscript. In a footnote to the last line, he gives the variant (and correct) reading "the" from Wright's Royal manuscript. The stanza is apparently an unexceptionable example of decasyllabic verse - in fact, of iambic pentameter - with first foot inversions in the first and seventh lines. For the fifth line, Furnivall reads: "At Chestre ynnë, right fast be the stronde." It is of course Furnivall, in one of his rather annoying orthographic interventions, who puts the dieresis over the final -e of "ynne," and the result is a regular, but also ungainly, iambic pentameter line. Seymour in his Selections records Arundel exactly: "At Chestres Yn ry3t fast by the Stronde." The line thereby loses a syllable. Consultation of the sheet of variants for this line shows that the great majority of manuscripts give the spelling fast. However, in the holographs Hoccleve uses that adverb twenty-eight times, in every case spelling it with a final -e. If from the twenty-eight occurrences we eliminate cases where the word occurs either at the end of a line or elided with a following vowel, we are left with seven instances, all of which call for the sounding of the final -e: "I am ny goon, as faste passe y shal" or "And to brynge it aboute he faste wroghte," and so on. Chaucer too always intended this adverb to be spelled with a sounded final -e in the same situations: "That highte the Tabard, faste by the Belle" (CT I[A]719); or "This Nicholas his dore faste shette" (CT I[A]3499).

In addition to this evidence in support of an original reading "faste," the holographs provide the small fact that, on the five occasions when Hoccleve uses the noun "inn," it is spelt "in," never "inne" or "ynne." From these two pieces of information we are in a position to recover authorial practice, and in so doing recreate the stanza Hoccleve wrote. For, as with his later Complaint, Hoccleve's Regiment begins with a powerfully effective stanza. The iambic first line, with its first-foot inversion, initiates a main clause, which is followed by a subordinate clause in the second line, which in turn is followed by two lines of, in effect, parenthetical subordination. It is only with the fifth line that the opening clause is returned to and developed, in a return from digressive subordination to the main issue, the speaker's here-and-now. This return to the main clause calls for, and in Hoccleve's spelling receives, the feeling of return conveyed by a completely regular iambic pentameter line. This line in turn leads, via the subordinate clause of the sixth line, to the powerfully condensed last line, with its first-foot inversion echoing that of the first line. Though Hoccleve is not always a careful poet, especially given his old reputation, it is important to pay attention to small matters which make the difference between poetic skill and poetic incompetence. This demonstration illustrates the nature of the contribution the holographs typically make - not big moves, but ones which give a better sense of what Hoccleve wrote.

While metrical "improvements" are best shown in the context of the surrounding stanza, or at least of surrounding lines, as the examination of the poem's first stanza demonstrated, the following additional examples illustrate how attention to Hoccleve's spellings, especially as they affect final e, alters the following lines of the Arundel manuscript: "Al ys in veyne, thy my3t may no3t atteyne" (line 181) edited: "Al is in veyn; thy might may nat atteyne." "Now goode thrifte come unto the, sone dere" (line 386) edited: "Now good thrift come unto thee, sone deere." "He no price settyth by mesourys lawe" (line 500) edited: "He no prys settith by mesures lawe." "What, sone myn, good hert take unto the" (line 1886) where I would normally have edited to read: "What, sone myn, good herte take unto thee." I have left as in the manuscript "unto the" since the phrase rhymes with "in soothe," a feminine rhyme not uncommon in Chaucer. Arundel loses that distinctive rhythm, in its spelling of the word for "heart," for Hoccleve always spells that word herte, reserving the spelling without -e for "hart" (deer).

Following authorial spelling and the closely related phenomenon of syllabic regularity thus affects the very movement of the verse. Once one has decided to observe spellings that preserve (or reconstruct) authorial versification, it follows that one will also preserve spellings that do not have that function. That procedure pretty well defines the scope and limits of the use of authorial orthography offered in this edition. An unintended additional benefit of this procedure is that a version of the Regiment edited according to Hoccleve's practice makes for an easier reading experience than does the Arundel text, with its less regular spellings and its prolific use of yogh and the vowel y.

Another feature of Arundel and Harley sets them apart from many of the better later manuscripts. In the holographs Hoccleve makes extensive use of the virgule as well as other forms of punctuation, often for the purpose of indicating a pause or clarifying syntax. Both the Arundel and Harley scribes are light in their pointing, but some of the other scribes employ pointing in a way that is more in keeping with Hoccleve's practice. Recalling the evidence suggesting that British Library MS Royal 17 D. xviii ultimately derives from a copy of the poem in Hoccleve's hand, one may suspect that the practice of that scribe, and some others, accurately reflects authorial practice. Though in this edition, in accordance with the policy of the series, I offer a thoroughly modern punctuation, the understanding of the text on which that punctuation is based has been influenced by what the pointing in some of the scribal copies reveals.

One particular use of the virgule requires notice, for it explains a small number of lines which appear to be irregular, either a syllable short, or in seeming neglect of a requisite elision. Though the Arundel scribe uses pointing less frequently than do many other scribes, at line 1775 he writes: "Now sone / and thogh I longe have byden." Normally, one would elide "sone" with "and" as well as "longe" with "have," resulting in a four-stress, nine-syllable line. But the virgule after "sone" here serves as a pause, and the -e is to be pronounced. And so it is in the edited text ("Now, sone, and thogh I longe have abiden"), where the emended form of the past participle merely adds another elision. In some cases the requirements of modern punctuation have prevented me from indicating the suppression of an elision.

Language, Versification, and Style

Discussion of use of the holographs has already touched on matters of language and versification. The reader of the Regiment coming to it after experience with the language of Chaucer will have little difficulty, for the English of London and Westminster is the language common to both poets, and, even in the absence of the glossing provided in the edition, the reader with access to a good Chaucer glossary would not need much additional help. According to METS practice, harder words and phrases are glossed in the margins, and those in the first few hundred lines are glossed generously. Less difficult than Hoccleve's vocabulary is his syntax, where unexpected word order arising from the stanzaic form as well as from the decasyllabic requirement can make some passages seem more obscure than they really are. Some further discussion of Hoccleve's versification is therefore in order.

Hoccleve never attempted the decasyllabic or "heroic" couplets of the great majority of Chaucer's later works. Instead, apart from a few short lyrics, in his principal and longer works he chose either the 8-line stanza of Chaucer's "ABC" and The Monk's Tale (as in La Male Regle, the Remonstrance against Oldcastle, and also used in the three-stanza envoi to the Regiment), or the 7-line "rhyme royal" stanza of Chaucer's The Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, and, of the Canterbury Tales, the tales of the Man of Law, the Clerk, the Prioress, and the Second Nun. To what extent the (in most cases) early, and in all cases moralistic and conservative character of the rhyme-royal tales defined a genre with which Hoccleve identified is difficult to say. At any rate, Hoccleve employed rhyme royal in his earliest datable poem, the Epistle of Cupid, in the Regiment, and throughout his last poems in the Series.

It is of course the skill with which Chaucer used the rhyme-royal stanza he introduced into English poetry that has been a standard against which to point out the deficiencies of Chaucer's fifteenth-century followers. Certainly no poet before Henryson could approach Chaucer's command of the form, but a number of recent critics have noted Hoccleve's considerable, if inconsistently realized, accomplishment. Judith Jefferson in the essay dis-cussed above deliberately confined her attention to the syllabic system of Hoccleve's verse, leaving aside, or deferring to a later study, a discussion of stress patterns. It is the seeming irregularities in the latter, the apparent subordination of the rhythm and stress of speech to the syllabic requirement, that is at the heart of older criticisms of Hoccleve's metrics, and while the issue cannot be adequately dealt with here, it needs a few comments.

As a starting point, consider the following stanza as a successful example of Hoccleve the metrist:

Whán to the thóghtful wìght is tóld a tále,
He héerith ìt as thògh he thénnes wère;
His hévy thóghtes hìm so plúkke and hále
Hídir and thídir, ànd him gréeve and dére,
That hís éres aváille him nàt a pére;
He ùndirstándith nóthyng whàt men séye,
So béen his wíttes fér goon hèm to pléye. (lines 99-105)

All seven lines are decasyllabic, not counting an unstressed eleventh syllable (the final -e) at the end of each line, a feature very familiar to the reader of Chaucer's poetry. The words ending in -es which in modern English would be monosyllabic ("thence," "thoughts," "ears," "wits") are all disyllabic. The basic rhythmic pattern is iambic pentameter, with stressed and unstressed syllables alternating. However, to give a better idea of the expressive naturalness of this language, I have distinguished between strongly stressed syllables (marked with an acute accent over the vowel) and secondarily stressed syllables (marked with a grâve accent). The normal iambic pattern of unstressed syllable followed by stressed syllable is inverted in "Whan to" and "Hidir" and "eres." Lines can be end-stopped, as are the first two and the last four, or run-on, as is the third line.

By no means are all stanzas as uncomplicated as this one, but variations (welcome and unwelcome) should be understood against the principles at work in this stanza. The success of this particular stanza is revealed in the way the meter supports the spoken language: in the strongly stressed "thennes," in the physically forceful pair "plukke" and "hale," immediately followed by the rhythmical variation at "Hidir and thidir," and in the strongly accented "nothyng." The felt presence of this very idiomatic and natural use of stress is plainly more important than any attention to syllable counting.

Thus the very feature of syllabic regularity which Jefferson has documented and which I have discussed with regard to editorial procedure should not be regarded as a key to reading Hoccleve's verse. The consistent decasyllabic line is a given, but what Hoccleve does with it is what matters. Here is an example of a less felicitous stanza, to point up some of the characteristics the reader sometimes must deal with:

Whan reuled wit and manly hardynesse
Been knyt togidere as yok of mariage,
Ther folwith of victorie the swetnesse;
For to sette on him whettith his corage,
And wit restreyne his wil can and asswage
In tyme due and in covenable;
And thus tho two joynt been ful profitable. (lines 3991-97)

The problem here is the awkward word order: the natural order would be "swetnesse of victorie" and "wit can restreyne and asswage his wil" and "in due and covenable tyme." Somewhat less bothersome but scarcely admirable is the redundancy that is contained in this syntax: "due" and "covenable," "restreyne" and "asswage." These features are not entirely absent from Chaucer's rhyme-royal stanzas, but there they are less bothersome. When unnatural word order and redundancy are combined with figurative language, the result makes for a greater sense of difficulty than the content warrants. Typically, these irregularites come not in passages of narrative or dialogue but in passages of moral discourse where it is difficult for Hoccleve's characteristic colloquial speaking voice to sound. One suspects that in such passages Hoccleve is struggling to transfer or translate a prose passage into verse, and when one recalls such passages as Troilus' agonizing inner debate about free will, it is clear that Hoccleve is not the only one having difficulty with such translation. And yet, even in this denser mode, Hoccleve can write with considerable vigor, as in this passage on avarice, which also counters the impression that his moralizing verse is uninterestingly bland:

Weenest thow that thow doost nat wikkidly
That so many a mannes sustenance
Thyself withholdist soul? Yis, hardily,
Thow that of richesse hast greet habundance
And to the needy gevest no pitance,
No lesse offendist thow than he that shakith
Men out of hir good and from hem it takith. (lines 4509-15)

The stanza begins with a first-foot inversion, and the regular second line culminates in the forceful and rightly stressed "Thyself witholdist soul." The tone at the question mark, and after two gentle iambs, leads to the first-foot inversion with which the fourth line begins. The regularity of the fifth and sixth lines ends with the strikingly placed "shakith," which itself "shakes up" the final line, where syntactic regularity is unavoidably and properly disturbed in its rush of monosyllabic functional words which demand to be read rapidly almost as prose. In this case one could even say that the fact that the line is regularly decasyllabic (the final -ith a common variant) is here something of a triumph. In short, Hoccleve's verse, uneven as it can be, at its best needs no apology. As in most successful poetry, it is the speaking voice which matters most, and Hoccleve's frequently effective realization (in both senses) of this principle is what sets him apart from his prolific contemporary Lydgate, and what makes him often a pleasure to read.

Final Notes on the Edition

The text offered in this edition gives a corrected (that is, where necessary emended) version of the text supplied by Arundel (or, where Arundel is lacking, Harley), with orthographic or spelling forms taken from the corpus of Hoccleve holographs, with the modifications noted on page 19. Nearly every word in the text is either (1) a word where the Arundel form is the same as the holograph form, (2) the form (and where there is more than one holograph-supported possibility, a form) used in the holographs, or (3) a form not found in the holographs but constructed by analogy with closely similar holograph forms. As noted earlier, words not found in the holographs necessarily use the Arundel (or Harley) form, modified by the series' practice of modernizing thorn (þ) and yogh (3), and expanding abbreviations.

None of the procedures just described is recorded in the Textual Notes. The Textual Notes identify various decisions that I have made in emending the manuscript. The emendations are for the most part restricted to clarification of sense but also report syllabic or metrical variation in special cases where the usual procedure of orthographic substitution is not straightforward. At an earlier stage of this edition David Greetham proposed documenting holographic forms so that the reader would know whether a particular Hoccleve form occurred only once in the holographs, or fifty times, or three times against a variant form occurring two times, and so on. I have judged this an unsuitable procedure for this edition, and it would result in an ungainly text to read. Similarly, the inclusion of a complete glossary of Hoccleve forms, though of great interest, would take up more space than the editors of this series would like. The edition also includes Explanatory Notes which comment on sources and literary ideas in the poem. The marginal Latin glosses (MLG), identified in the text by a L, are transcribed and translated in these notes. It is important that the reader refer regularly to the marginal Latin text in that Hoccleve uses it as a learned voice to help pace his argument.

A new edition by John Burrow of the Series for the Early English Text Society is forthcoming, and it will include an attempt similar to that in this edition to reconstruct Hocclevean forms for that part of the Durham Series manuscript where the holograph original is missing. A concordance of Hoccleve's holographs would be most useful.



Go To The Regiment of Princes

Bibliography

The increasing number of studies of Hoccleve since the late 1970s, the very large quantity of important historical writing on the period, and the abundance of recent theoretical writing on the editing of Middle English texts, could easily result in a bibliography of monograph length. In the present select bibliography I include works cited in the edition's Introduction and Notes, together with a few additional secondary studies of special value to the student of the Regiment.

Bibliography of Manuscripts and Manuscript Studies

Burrow, John. Thomas Hoccleve. Authors of the Middle Ages 4. Gen. ed. M. C. Seymour. Aldershot, Hants, UK: Variorum, 1994. [An essential resource.]

Edwards, A. S. G. "Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes: A Further Manuscript." Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions. Vol. 5, part 1 (1978), 32. [A supplement to Seymour's descriptive catalogue.]

Green, R. F. "Notes on Some Manuscripts of Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes." The British Library Journal 4 (1978), 37-41. [Fragments from another manuscript.]

Matthews, William. "Thomas Hoccleve." In A Manual of the Writings in Middle English. Ed. A. E. Hartung. Vol. 3. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972. Pp. 746-56; 903-08.

Scott, Kathleen. Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390-1490. A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles. Gen. ed. J. J. G. Alexander. 2 vols. London: Harvey Miller, 1996. [Describes and illustrates the two early Regiment manuscripts which serve as copy texts for this edition.]

Seymour, M. C. "Manuscripts of Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes." Edinburgh Bibliographical Transactions Vol. 4, part 7 (1974), 253-97. [Describes all the extant manuscripts save those described by Edwards and Green above.]


Manuscripts of The Regiment of Princes

London, British Library MS Arundel 38. [The copy text of this edition except where wanting leaves.]

London, British Library MS Harley 4866. [The copy text where Arundel is wanting leaves.]

[While I have consulted and directly or indirectly used all manuscripts of the Regiment, because these are described in Seymour's bibliographical essay and listed in Burrow's monograph, I here list only the three additional manuscripts that are referred to in the Introduction and Explanatory Notes.]

London, British Library MS Royal 17 D. vi. [The manuscript edited by Wright. A relatively deluxe manuscript including, besides the Regiment, the last three parts of the five-part Series.]

London, British Library MS Royal 17 D. xviii. [A manuscript arguably deriving from a Hoccleve holograph.]

London, British Library MS Additional 18632. [A superior manuscript, in text and production, containing also Lydgate's Siege of Thebes.]


Holograph Manuscripts

Durham, England, Durham University Library MS Cosin V. iii. 9. [Hoccleve's Series.]

San Marino, California, Huntington Library MS HM 111. [Hoccleve miscellany including La Male Regle, The Remonstrance against Olcastle, and the envoi to the Regiment.]

San Marino, California, Huntington Library MS HM 744. [Hoccleve miscellany including Epistle of Cupid and the second, incomplete version of Lerne to Die from the Series.]

Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.2 fols. 82-84. [Hoccleve's contribution as scribe to Gower's Confessio Amantis.]


Editions of Primary Texts and of Secondary Sources

Ambrosius Autpertus. Expositio in Apocalypsin. Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis. Vol. 27. Turnholti: Brepols, 1975.

Ashby, George. George Ashby's Poems. Ed. Mary Bateson. EETS e.s. 76. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1899.

Bacon, Roger. Secretum Secretorum cum Glossis et Notulis . . . . Ed. Robert Steele. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920.

Boethius. Consolation of Philosophy. Ed. H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand. Trans. S. J. Fester. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973.

Bridget of Sweden, St. The Liber Celestis of St. Bridget of Sweden. Ed. Roger Ellis. Vol. 1. EETS o.s. 291. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Caxton, William. Caxton's Game and Playe of the Chesse, 1474. Intro. William E. A. Axon. London: Elliot Stock, 1883. [A "verbatim reprint of the first edition."]

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry D. Benson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

---. A Glossarial Concordance to the Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry D. Benson. 2 vols. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993.
Gower, John. The English Works of John Gower. Ed. G. C. Macaulay. 2 vols. EETS e.s. 81, 82. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1900-01. Rpt. 1957.

Hamesse, Jacqueline, ed. Les Auctoritates Aristotelis: Un Florilège Médiéval: Étude Historique et Édition Critique. Philosophes Médiévaux v. XVII. Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1974. [The source of several glosses not in the Patrologia Latina; an example of the florilegia from which medieval writers derived many of their "authoritative" quotations.]

Hoccleve, Thomas. De Regimine Principum, a Poem by Thomas Occleve. Ed. Thomas Wright. London: Roxburghe Club, 1860. [A deluxe, limited edition based on British Library MS Royal 17 D. vi, a relatively deluxe manuscript providing an inferior text to that of Arundel or Harley 4866, and including the last three parts of the five-part Series.]

---. Hoccleve's Works: The Minor Poems. Ed. Frederick J. Furnivall and I. Gollancz. EETS e.s. 61, 73. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1892, 1925. Rev. ed. Jerome Mitchell and A. I. Doyle, 1970. [All of Hoccleve's poetry exclusive of the Regiment.]

---. Hoccleve's Works: The Regement of Princes. Ed. Frederick J. Furnivall. EETS e.s. 72. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1897.

---. Thomas Hoccleve's Series: An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9. Ed. Mary Ruth Pryor. Ph.D. Diss. University of California, Los Angeles, 1968. [Uneven but still valuable Introduction.]

---. Selections from Hoccleve. Ed. M. C. Seymour. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. [Contains an excellent Introduction and Notes.]

Hudson, Anne, ed. Selections from English Wycliffite Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Jacob de Cessolis. A Critical Edition of Le Jeu des Eschés, Moralisé translated by Jehan de Vignay. Ed. Carol S. Fuller. Ph.D. Diss. Catholic University of America, 1974. [One of Hoccleve's sources for his Chessbook exempla.]

---. Libellus de Moribus Hominum et Officiis Nobilium ac Popularium super Ludo Scachorum. Ed. Sister Marie Anita Burt. Ph.D. Diss. University of Texas, Austin 1957. [Currently the most accessible edition of the Latin text of Hoccleve's source.]

---. Caxton's Book of Curtesye. Ed. Frederick J. Furnivall. EETS e.s. 3. London: H. Milford/Oxford University Press, 1868.

Jacob of Voragine. Jacobi a Voragine Legenda Aurea. Ed. Th. Graesse. Third ed. 1890; rpt. Osnabrück: Otto Zeller, 1965.

---. The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine. Trans. Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger. Part 1. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1941.

Langland, William. Piers the Plowman: A Parallel Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions. Ed. A. V. C. Schmidt. Volume I: text. London: Longman, 1995.

Migne, J.-P. Patrologiae cursus completus . . . Series [Latina]. 221 vols. Paris 1844-82. [Though most of the texts in this famous series are available in much better, more recent editions, I have cited this edition for most of the Latin marginal glosses to the Regiment, because of the availability of this series in major libraries and on line, and because the immediate textual source of the glosses is not at issue. The texts are identified by author's name, the abbreviation PL, the volume number, the column number, and where available the location within the column (A-D).]

Mum and the Sothsegger. Ed. Mabel Day and Robert Steele. EETS o.s. 199. London: H. Milford/Oxford University Press, 1936.

Mustanoja, Tauno F. A Middle English Syntax. Part 1. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique, 1960.

Nicholas of Lyra. Biblia Latina cum postillis Nicolai de Lyra et expositionibus Guillelmi Britonis in omnes prologos S. Hieronymi et additionibus Pauli Burgensis replicisque Matthiae Doering. 4 vols. Venice: Octavianus Scotus, 1489. [Hoccleve's explicit reference establishes that he had access to a Bible with Nicholas' commentary.]

Quintilian. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian. Ed. and trans. H. E. Butler. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958-60.

Sallust. The War with Catiline. Ed. and trans. J. C. Rolfe. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Library, 1931.

Seneca. Moral Essays. Ed. John W. Basore. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964-70.

Trevisa, John. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa's Translation of "Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum." Gen. ed. M. C. Seymour. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. [Valuable as an encyclopedia and as a source of the language of science and medicine contemporary with Hoccleve.]

---. The Governance of Kings and Princes: John Trevisa's Middle English Translation of the De Regimine Principum of Aegidius Romanus. Ed. David C. Fowler, Charles F. Briggs, and Paul G. Remley. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997. [Unlike his translation of Bartholomaeus, this translation survives in a single manuscript. The Introduction and Notes are forthcoming in a second volume.]

Walther, Hans. Proverbia Sententiaeque Latinitatis Medii Aevi, Lateinische Sprichwörter und Sentenzen des Mittelalters, Carmina Medii Aevi Posterioris Latina 2.1-5. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1963-69. [The standard collection of medieval Latin proverbs.]

Whiting, Bartlett Jere, and Helen Westcott Whiting. Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly Before 1500. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968.


Historical Background

Aston, Margaret. Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion. London: The Hambledon Press, 1984. ["Lollards and Images," pp. 135-92.]

Brown, A. L. "The Privy Seal Clerks in the Early Fifteenth Century." In The Study of Medieval Records: Essays in Honour of Kathleen Major. Ed. D. A. Bullough and R. L. Story. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Pp. 260-81.

Harriss, G. L., ed. Henry V: The Practice of Kingship. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. [Valuable, concise collection of papers by diverse scholars on the various aspects of Henry's reign.]

Hudson, Anne. The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. [The standard, best account of Lollardy.]

Jacob, E. F. The Fifteenth Century 1399-1485. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961.

McFarlane, K. B. Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.
McNiven, Peter. Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV: The Burning of John Badby. Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1987. [A thorough contextualization of this event.]

Myers, A. R. England in the Late Middle Ages (1307-1536). The Pelican History of England. Vol. 4. Second ed. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1963. [A good short survey, including a more skeptical view of Henry V than that held by his historian admirers.]

Rashdall, Hastings. The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages. Vol. 3. Ed. F. M. Powicke and A. B. Emden. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936.

Strohm, Paul. England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399-1422. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Tout, T. F. Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England: The Wardrobe, the Chamber, and the Small Seals. Vols. 1 and 5. Manchester: The University Press, 1930.


Criticism - Textual, Historical, Literary

Aster, Friedrich. Das Verhältniss des altenglischen Gedichtes "De Regimine Principum" von Thomas Hoccleve zu seinen Quellen nebst einer Einleitung über Leben und Werke des Dichters. Diss. Leipzig, 1888.

Batt, Catherine. "Hoccleve and . . . Feminism? Negotiating Meaning in The Regiment of Princes." In Essays on Thomas Hoccleve. Ed. Catherine Batt. London: Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, 1996. Pp. 55-84.

Blyth, Charles. "Thomas Hoccleve's Other Master." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), 349-59.

---. "Editing The Regiment of Princes." In Essays on Thomas Hoccleve. Ed. Catherine Batt. London: Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, 1996. Pp. 11-28.

Bornstein, Diane. "Anti-Feminism in Thomas Hoccleve's Translation of Christine de Pizan's Epistre au dieu d'amours." English Language Notes 19 (1981-82), 7-14.

Bowers, John M. "Hoccleve's Two Copies of Lerne to Dye: Implications for Textual Critics." Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 83 (1989), 437-72.
Burrow, John, ed. English Verse 1300-1500. London: Longman, 1977. [Extract from the Complaint and Burrow's first critical remarks on Hoccleve.]

---. "The Poet as Petitioner." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 3 (1981), 61-75. Rpt. in John Burrow. Essays on Medieval Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Pp. 161-76.

---. "Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages: The Case of Thomas Hoccleve." Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982), 389-412.

---. The Ages of Man. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

---. "Hoccleve and Chaucer." In Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer. Ed. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. 54-61.

---. "Hoccleve and the Middle French Poets." In The Long Fifteenth-Century: Essays for Douglas Gray. Ed. Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. 35-49.

Carlson, David R. "Thomas Hoccleve and the Chaucer Portrait." Huntington Library Quarterly 54 (1991), 283-300.

Courthope, W. J. A History of English Poetry. Vol. 1. London: MacMillan and Co., 1911.

Doyle, A. I., and Malcolm B. Parkes, "The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century." In Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker. Ed. M. B. Parkes and A. G. Watson. London: Scolar Press, 1978. Pp. 163-210.

Edwards, A. S. G., and Derek Pearsall. "The Manuscripts of the Major English Poetic Texts." In Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375-1475. Ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. 257-78.

Ellis, Roger. "'Flores ad Fabricandam . . . Coronam': An Investigation into the Uses of Revelations of St. Bridget of Sweden in Fifteenth-Century England." Medium Aevum 51 (1982), 163-86.

Ferster, Judith. Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.

Fisher, John. "A Language Policy for Lancastrian England." PMLA 107 (1992), 1168-80.

Green, Richard Firth. Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980. [Especially chapter 5, "An Adviser to Princes," pp. 135-67.]

Greetham, D. C. "Normalisation of Accidentals in Middle English Texts: The Paradox of Thomas Hoccleve." Studies in Bibliography 38 (1985), 121-50.

---. "Challenges of Theory and Practice in the Editing of Hoccleve's Regement of Princes." In Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature. Ed. Derek Pearsall. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987. Pp. 60-86.

Hammond, Eleanor Prescott. English Verse between Chaucer and Surrey. Durham: Duke University Press, 1927; rpt. New York: Octagon Books, Inc., 1969. [Though the Hoccleve selections and notes are brief, this is the outstanding scholarly work in the first half and more of the twentieth century.]

Harris, Kate. "The Patron of British Library MS. Arundel 38." Notes and Queries n.s. 31 (1984), 462-63.

Hasler, Antony J. "Hoccleve's Unregimented Body." Paragraph 13 (1990), 164-83.

Jefferson, Judith A. "The Hoccleve Holographs and Hoccleve's Metrical Practice." In Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature. Ed. Derek Pearsall. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987. Pp. 95-109.

Knapp, Ethan. "Bureaucratic Identity and the Construction of the Self in Hoccleve's Formulary and La male regle." Speculum 74 (1999), 357-76.

Krochalis, Jeanne. "Hoccleve's Chaucer Portrait." Chaucer Review 21 (1986), 234-45.

Lawton, David. "Dullness and the Fifteenth Century." ELH 54 (1987), 761-90.

Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love: A Study of Medieval Tradition. London: Oxford University Press, 1936. [See pp. 238-39 for discussion of Regiment.]

Marzec, Marcia Smith. "The Latin Marginalia of the Regiment of Princes as an Aid to Stemmatic Analysis." Text 3 (1987), 269-84.

McLeod, Glenda. "A Case of faux semblans: 'L'Epistre au dieu d'amours and the Letter of Cupid.'" In The Reception of Christine de Pizan from the Fifteenth through the Nineteenth Centuries: Visitors to the City. Ed. Glenda McLeod. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991. Pp. 11-24.

Mitchell, Jerome. "Hoccleve's Supposed Friendship with Chaucer." English Language Notes 4 (1966), 9-12.

---. Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth-Century English Poetic. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968. [The revision of a 1965 dissertation, and the first book-length critical study of Hoccleve. Useful for reference, but see the reviews by Edward Wilson in Medium Aevum 38 (1969), 331-33; Derek Pearsall in Speculum 44 (1969), 480-81; and M. C. Seymour in Review of English Studies n.s. 20 (1969), 482-85.]

---. "Hoccleve Studies, 1965-1981." In Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays. Ed. Robert F. Yeager. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984. Pp. 49-64.

Mosher, Joseph A. The Exemplum in the Early Religious and Didactic Literature of England. New York: Columbia University Press, 1911; rpt. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1966. [Compare the criticism and revision of this old account of the genre in Scanlon (1994), especially ch. 2.]

Parkes, M. B. "The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book." In Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt. Ed. J. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Pp. 115-41.

Patch, Howard R. The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927; rpt. New York: Octagon Books, 1967.

Pearsall, Derek. "The English Chaucerians." In Chaucer and Chaucerians: Critical Studies in Middle English Literature. Ed. D. S. Brewer. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1966. Pp. 222-25.

---. "Hoccleve's Regement of Princes: The Poetics of Royal Self-Representation." Speculum 69 (1994), 386-410.

Reynolds, L. D. "Martial." In Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics. Ed. L. D. Reynolds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Pp. 239-44.

Robinson, Ian. Chaucer's Prosody: A Study of Middle English Verse Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. [On Hoccleve's verse, see pp. 190-99.]

Scanlon, Larry. "The King's Two Voices: Narrative and Power in Hoccleve's Regement of Princes." In Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530. Ed. Lee Patterson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Pp. 216-47.

---. Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Schulz, H. C. "Thomas Hoccleve, Scribe." Speculum 12 (1937), 71-81.

Simpson, James. "Nobody's Man: Thomas Hoccleve's Regement of Princes." In London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages. Ed. Julia Boffey and Pamela King. London: Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, 1995. Pp. 149-80.

Smith, G. Gregory. The Transition Period. Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1900. [In the first chapter, on the fifteenth-century English Chaucerians, grim assessments.]

Spearing, A. C. Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. [On Hoccleve, see pp. 110-20.]

Strohm, Paul. "Chaucer's Fifteenth-Century Audience and the Narrowing of the 'Chaucer Tradition.'" Studies in the Age of Chaucer 4 (1982), 3-32.

Torti, Anna. "Specular Narrative: Hoccleve's Regement of Princes." In Anna Torti, The Glass of Form: Mirroring Structures from Chaucer to Skelton. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991. Pp. 87-106.

Utley, Francis Lee. The Crooked Rib: An Analytical Index to the Argument about Women in English and Scots Literature to the End of the Year 1568. Columbus: Ohio State University, 1944.

Winstead, Karen. "'I am al othir to yow than yee weene': Hoccleve, Women, and the Series." Philological Quarterly 72 (1993), 143-55.

 

Footnotes

THE REGIMENT OF PRINCES, INTRODUCTION: FOOTNOTES

1 Caxton's Book of Curtesye, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS e.s. 3 (London: H. Milford/Oxford University Press, 1868), lines 351-52, 360, and 361-62.

2 George Ashby, "Active Policy of a Prince," in George Ashby's Poems, ed. Mary Bateson, EETS e.s. 76 (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1899), lines 1-2.

3 G. Gregory Smith, The Transition Period (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1900), pp. 17-18.

4 Thomas Hoccleve, Hoccleve's Works: The Minor Poems, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS e.s. 61 (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1892), p. xxxviii.

5 I accept the traditional label of "Prologue" for the first 2016 (or 2156) lines of the poem. However, those manuscripts providing rubrics intend Prologus to refer only to Hoccleve's address to the Prince (lines 2017-56). See the explanatory note to line 2017.

6 See Alastair J. Minnis, "Late-Medieval Discussions of Compilatio and The Role of the Compilator," Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutchen Sprache und Literatur 101 (1979), 385-91; and Medieval Theory of Authority: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), pp. 194-200. See also Kurt Olsson, John Gower and the Structures of Conversion: A Reading of the Confessio Amantis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992), pp. 1-15, and A.S. G. Edwards, "Selection and Subversion in Gower's Confessio Amantis," in Re-Visioning Gower, ed. R. F. Yeager (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998), pp. 257-68.

7 Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 316-18.

8 Derek Pearsall, "The English Chaucerians," in Chaucer and Chaucerians: Critical Studies in Middle English Literature, ed. D. S. Brewer (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1966), p. 224.

9 Thomas Hoccleve, Hoccleve's Works: The Regiment of Princes, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS e.s. 72 (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1897), p. xvii.

10 Thomas Hoccleve, Selections from Hoccleve, ed. M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. xxxv.

11 John Trevisa, On the Properties of Things, ed. M. C. Seymour, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. xii, n. 1.