A Holograph Copy of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes

Abstract

A Holograph Copy of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes Linne R. Mooney The focus of this article is the British Library manuscript Royal 17 D.XVIII, a copy of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes. I here argue first, on paleographic, codicological, and linguistic grounds, that this manuscript is written by the hand of the author Thomas Hoccleve; second, that the text of the Regiment in this manuscript represents a revised version of the poem written in 1412–13, in which the author had made alterations reflecting the changed circumstances of himself, of his dedicatee, Henry of Derby, and of the country a year or two after the completion and first dissemination of the poem; and third, that this manuscript was in fact the copy given to John of Lancaster, later duke of Bedford, to whom a balade written at the end may be addressed. British Library, Royal 17 D.XVIII: A Hoccleve Holograph We have more identified examples of Thomas Hoccleve’s handwriting than of any other vernacular English medieval writer: three manuscripts of his own literary works, two and a half leaves of a copy of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, documents written in his daily work as a Clerk of the Office of the Privy Seal, and a formulary he wrote for that office.1 The [End Page 263] formulary survives as British Library, Additional 24062, a volume of 201 parchment leaves, mostly written by Hoccleve in an informal, loose cursive version of his hand but also, as I shall argue below, containing one quire that includes examples of his neater, more formal, hand.2 The manuscripts of his literary work, recently published in a facsimile by the Early English Text Society, are Durham University Library, Cosin V.iii.9, folios 13–95, and Henry E. Huntington Library MSS 111 and 744, folios 25–68v.3 Ian Doyle and Malcolm Parkes identified Hoccleve as one of the five scribes who wrote the Cambridge, Trinity College R.3.2, copy of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (his contribution, folios 82r–84r);4 and more tentatively as one of the correctors for Adam Pinkhurst’s copy of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the National Library of Wales, Peniarth 392D, the so-called Hengwrt manuscript (his corrections on folios 83v, 138v, and 150), besides a number of documents written in the course of his work as a Clerk of the Office of the Privy Seal.5 I recently published a list of Privy Seal documents written by Hoccleve’s hand, ranging from his earliest years in that office until a time within a year of his death in 1426.6 In the introduction to the facsimile of Hoccleve’s holograph literary works, John Burrow and Ian Doyle comment that the three manuscripts reproduced in the facsimile contain “all the poems currently attributed to him . . . [w]ith the important exception of Hoccleve’s major work The Regiment of Princes, of which no holograph copy is known.”7 I here put forward an argument that a holograph of the Regiment does survive, British Library, Royal 17 D.XVIII, which has not previously been recognized as being written by Hoccleve’s hand.8 [End Page 264] The manuscript Royal 17 D.XVIII has been overlooked by scholars for a number of reasons: first, it and most manuscripts of the Regiment have remained in the shadow of the two sumptuously prepared manuscripts of the poem generally agreed to be original presentation copies, British Library MSS Arundel 38 and Harley 4866; second, it was dated to the quarter-century after Hoccleve’s death by J. A. Burrow in his 1994 biography of Hoccleve;9 third, the hand of this manuscript differs somewhat in general aspect from that of the accepted Hoccleve holographs, as I will discuss further below. The identification of Hoccleve’s hand in Royal 17 D.XVIII depends upon many factors: paleographical, codicological, and linguistic. Appendix A below lists and illustrates the characteristics of Hoccleve’s handwriting that have been identified in manuscripts already attributed to him: the holograph manuscripts, the formulary, and his two-and-a-half-folio stint in Trinity College R.3.2. These characteristic letter forms also occur...