Hoccleve

Hoccleve, or OCCLEVE, THOMAS (probably so named from the village of Hocclough in Northumberland), an English poet of whom but little is known save that he was born about 1368, was a clerk in the Exchequer, and was writing verse so late as 1448. His chief work is a free, and it must be confessed tedious, version of the De Regimine Principum of Egidius Romanus, over five thousand lines in length, and written in Chaucer's seven-line stanza. A prologue, about one-third of the whole in length, begins the work, and here the author tells us a good deal about himself and his troubles. The most interesting passage is that in which he speaks out his grief for the death of his great master Chaucer, the 'flour of eloquence' and 'mirror of fructuous entendement.' The poem was edited by T. Wright for the Roxburgh Club in 1860. Many other poems are ascribed to Hoccleve, some still unprinted. Some of these are stories from the Gesta Romanorum, as that of Jonathan, son of King Darius, and the wicked woman, which was modernised by W. Browne and printed in his Shepherd's Pipe (1614), where he pays his original a most graceful poetical compliment far beyond his deserts. His Minor Poems and his Complaint have been edited by Dr Furnivall for the Early English Text Society.