A Source for the Anonymous 'Kings of England'

Abstract

IN a study published in 1989, Linne R. Mooney disentangled the hitherto confused relations among a number of Middle English verse chronicles, the best-known of which is John Lydgate's ‘Kings of England sithen William Conqueror’.1 Most importantly, she identified as a separate composition another verse chronicle which, like Lydgate's poem, devotes a stanza to each of the kings of England from William the Conqueror to Henry VI. She dates the poem between 1431 (the date of the last event mentioned, Henry VI's coronation in Paris in the tenth year of his reign) and 1448 (the earliest dated copy), suggesting as a probable occasion for its composition Henry's marriage to Margaret of Anjou, who was crowned at Westminster in spring 1445. She argued against Lydgate's authorship on the basis of the absence of any manuscript attribution, and of metre and style; as she put it, ‘the rhyme and meter … are of too inferior quality to be attributed even to Lydgate’ (266).