Laureate, POET, an official attached to the household of the English sovereigns. His early history is involved in some obscurity. In the Domestic Day Book we find one Berdic described as 'Joculator Regis,' and a certain Roger or Raherus, king's minstrel, is said to have founded the monastery of St Bartholomew in Smithfield under Henry I. We read of Richard I. carrying William the Foreigner to Palestine to sing his exploits, and of Edward I. taking the Carmelite friar, Robert Baston, with him to Scotland in 1304. The latter apparently went also for the same purpose with Edward II. to Bannockburn, but was captured by the Scottish soldiers and forced to celebrate their prowess instead, as the price of his freedom. The badness of his verses (rhymed hexameters) was humorously ascribed by the next century Scottish writers to the unwillingness of his conscience. We read of one John Kaye attached to Edward IV. as versifier (versificator), and before this period we meet the term 'laureate' applied on the one hand to one who had earned the laurel wreath at one of the universities for rhetoric and versification in Latin, and on the other to any poet of surpassing merit. Skelton was one of the former, and proudly styled himself 'Poeta Skelton Laureatus' in the headings of his Latin poems; the term 'laureate poet' applied by Chaucer to Petrarch bears the latter sense. The first poet-laureate in the modern sense was Spenser, who was granted a pension of £50 by Queen Elizabeth in 1591; but the first who received the office by formal letters-patent was Ben Jonson. His salary was 100 marks, raised by Charles I. to the same number of pounds sterling, with the addition of a tierce of canary. James II. was mean enough to discontinue the allowance of wine, but it was afterwards resumed, until commuted for £27 a year in the laureateship of Pye. It was long the duty of the poet-laureate to write an ode on the king's birthday—'his quit-rent ode, his peppercorn of praise,' in Cowper's phrase; but this task fell into abeyance towards the end of the reign of George III. The list of poets-laureate preserves the memory of a few names else almost forgotten; but it contains Spenser, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Southey, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. The complete list, with the years of office, is as follows: Edmund Spenser (1591–99), Samuel Daniel (1599–1619), Ben Jonson (1619–37), followed by an interregnum until 1660; William Davenant, knight (1660–68), John Dryden (1670–89), Thomas Shadwell (1689–92), Nahum Tait (1692–1715), Nicholas Rowe (1715–18), Laurence Eusden, clerk (1718–30), Colley Cibber (1730–57), William Whitehead (1757–85), Thomas Warton, clerk (1785–90), Henry James Pye (1790–
1813), Robert Southey (1813-43), William Wordsworth (1843-50), Alfred Tennyson (1850-92), Alfred Austin (appointed in 1896). See W. Hamilton, The Poets Laureate of England (1878); Kenyon West, The Laureates of England (1896).