Privy Seal Research Articles

Ian Gilmour, 1926–2007: A Tribute

Ian Gilmour, Baron Gilmour of Craigmillar, Secretary of State for Defence (1974), Lord Privy Seal (1979-1981) and Chairman of The Byron Society (2002-2006), died on 21 September 2007, aged 81. Lord Gilmour chaired The Byron Society, of which he had been a member for many years, as well as a Vice-President, with devotion, authority and urbanity. He also enthusiastically supported this journal, and skilfully oversaw its recent transition to a new Academic Editor and publisher. Remarkably, he did so at a time when his wife was seriously ill and the object of his devoted care. Politician, man of letters and first-rate scholar - he published The Making of the Poets: Byron and Shelley in their Time in 2002 - he was universally liked and rspected within the Society. Indeed, Lord Gilmour's son, Sir David Gilmour, said at the Memorial Service held for his father at St Margaret's, Westminster, on 12 Febrary 2008, that he received 'hundreds of letters' after his father's death that 'applauded his wit, his charm, his generosity, his intellect, his fearlessness in expressing his views, his irreverence, his support for the underdog, his refusal to act from motives of self-interest'. Many members of the Society will recognise these qualities, but may have missed others that Sir David went on to describe. He talked about a man who was also 'something of a martinet about cricket': 'The window of his library at home [] overlooked our cricket net, and sometimes, goaded by our ineptness, he would open it and bellow, Keep your head down pick your bat up straight.' More familiar to members of The Byron Society, perhaps, are what Sir David described as his 'irony', and his capacity to keep 'winning arguments': in Sir David's words, 'he always knew what Shakespeare had said, what Aristotle had meant, what the third-longest river in China was called'. But then he meant a great many things to a great many people. As Sir David went on to say: Some of you will remember him from his Spectator days as a critic of Suez and a champion of social reform. Others will recall his years as a politician, as both a thinker and a ministerial achiever, yet one who lacked the skills of self-promotion to link the two roles and obtain higher things. Most will remember his political insurgence in the 1980s as well as his campaign for justice for the Palestinian people, a cause he championed for most of his adult life, from the day he watched the lines of refugees crossing the River Jordan in 1967. Many of you will remember the summer parties at Ferry House, where he and Mum lived for over fifty years and where he looked after her during her last illness. For us, at least for the moment, the abiding memory is of the benign patriarch in his ultimate years, surrounded by family, friends and his dog, Lucca. Many Byron Society members will remember these things. They will also remember his extended support of the Society, as a gracious host in the House of Lords on the occasion of the annual dinners of the Society, and particularly helpful in the arrangement of the magnificent lunch there during the last London and Nottingham international conference. They will recall, too, a gracious and informed chair of Society meetings and recognise the 'kind, urbane, diffidently elegant man' described by Lord Patten of Barnes in his address at the memorial service. He was also a man who bore his learning lightly - yet, as Lord Patten stressed, that learning was real and considerable. Thinking back to the 1970s, when he first worked with Lord Gilmour, Lord Patten said: Ever since Conservatives were described as 'the stupid party' it has been a feature of speeches by its leading - or not so leading - figures to include a pious section of quotations from Conservative philosophers and writers in their lectures. Disraeli plods along loyally behind David Hume and Edmund Burke with Michael Oakshott bringing up the rear. The difference between Ian Gilmour and others was that he had actually read the works of all these great men in more extensive editions than the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. …

John Gunthorpe: Keeper of Richard III’s Privy Seal, Dean of Wells Cathedral

John Gunthorpe became a master of arts at Cambridge University; he then spent time in Italy engaged in humanistic study with Guarino da Verona in Ferrara, and subsequently spent time in papal service. Returning to England in 1465, he entered the service of King Edward IV, for whom he functioned in a variety of roles, including chaplain, almoner, ambassador, councilor, clerk of parliament, and dean of the chapel royal. Edward IV also made him warden of King’s Hall, Cambridge. Cambridge granted Gunthorpe a bachelor’s degree in theology. Gunthorpe was supported financially through multiple ecclesiastical benefices, the most eminent being the position of dean of Wells Cathedral, to which he was elected in 1472. King Richard III made Gunthorpe keeper of the privy seal; and after 1485 Gunthorpe took up residence in Wells, giving occasional service to King Henry VII. Gunthorpe died in 1498, and his tomb remains in Wells Cathedral.

Haunted Hoccleve?: <i>The Regiment of Princes</i>, The Troilean Intertext, and Conversations with the Dead

Thomas Hoccleve’s medieval and modern readers have repeatedly been drawn to the relationship between the Privy Seal clerk and his older and more celebrated contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer. Hoccleve, of course, invokes his “maistir” in The Regiment of Princes, and had a picture of Chaucer included in its early copies, drawing attention in the text to the portrait’s representational fidelity and symbolic power. 1 Hoccleve’s “canonization” of Chaucer—as a literary progenitor, as a quasi-religious icon, as a model of authoritative advice, and as the founder of a national poetic tradition—have all been the subject of extended discussion, circling around the familiar trope of “father Chaucer,” 2 and recently coloring it with a renewed interest in the public, political, and ideological positioning of fifteenth-century vernacular poetry. 3 In this essay I shall discuss some Chaucerian borrowings and echoes in The Regiment of Princes, many of which have been overlooked or little discussed in the heat of these wider debates. Hoccleve tells us that

Some New Light on Thomas Hoccleve

Some New Light on Thomas Hoccleve Linne R. Mooney University of York As John Burrow points out in his 1994 biography of Thomas Hoccleve, the large number of documents concerned with grants and payments to Hoccleve, together with the autobiographical passages in his poems, ‘‘enable us to know more about Hoccleve than about most vernacular writers of the period.’’1 Burrow’s biography sets forth what we know of Hoccleve from these sources, and its appendix lists not only the manuscripts identified as written by Hoccleve’s hand but also the sixty-nine documents that name him as recipient of grants, annuities, or payments from the Exchequer. These latter Hoccleve life records are written by various clerks of royal government, and have been connected with Hoccleve because they name him. But since Hoccleve served as a Clerk in the Office of the Privy Seal for more than thirtyfive years, we might expect to find among the surviving documents of that Office some samples of Hoccleve’s own handwriting, that is, documents written by him in the course of his work for the Privy Seal. Two such documents were identified by A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes in 1978.2 These are National Archives E 28/29 (temp. Henry IV–V, draft of a document among letters written to and from Robert Frye, Clerk of the Offices of the Privy Seal and Signet) and E 404/31/322 (issue warrant, commanding the Exchequer to pay wages to 24 ‘‘vadletz ’’ of the royal household for accompanying Henry V on his forthcom1 John Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, Authors of the Middle Ages series, 4 (Aldershot, Hants: Variorum, 1994), p. 1. 2 A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes, ‘‘The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century,’’ in M. B. Parkes and A. G. Watson, eds., Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts, and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker (London: Scolar, 1978): 163–210, esp. 82; repr. Parkes, Scribes, Scripts, and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation, and Dissemination of Medieval Texts (London: Hambledon Press, 1991), pp. 201–48, esp. 222. PAGE 293 293 ................. 16596$ $CH9 11-01-10 14:07:26 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ing expedition to France, dated 27 May 1415).3 Doyle and Parkes concluded: ‘‘Doubtless there are more unidentified specimens of [Hoccleve ’s] handwriting preserved among the collections in the P.R.O. and elsewhere.’’4 There are indeed many more documents written by Hoccleve’s hand in the collections of the National Archives, as I discovered when I went to examine the two named by Doyle and Parkes. The almost 150 documents written by Hoccleve that I have discovered so far survive in the following categories of documents at the National Archives (formerly called the Public Record Office, or P.R.O.): E 404, Warrants for Issues of the Exchequer of Receipt, or Lower Exchequer; E 208, King’s Remembrancer / Brevia Baronibus files of the Exchequer; and E 28, King’s Council and Privy Seal records of the Exchequer of Receipt. By far the greatest number of documents (132) I have identified as written by Hoccleve are in E 404 files, which are documents written by Clerks of the Wardrobe and Clerks of the Privy Seal instructing the Exchequer of Receipt to make payments out of the royal treasury. Those written by the Clerks of the Privy Seal command such payments in the name of the king and are stamped on the back with the Privy Seal in red wax. Those written by Clerks of the Wardrobe command such payments in the names of the Barons of the Exchequer, and were authenticated by the Clerks’ signatures. These latter documents, by far the most numerous in these files, are written on small slips of parchment often little more than 4 cm in height (by ca. 30 cm in width) because they simply record the warrant for payment in a few lines of script. The former are written on larger slips of parchment at least 9–12 cm in height (and ca. 30 cm in width), even if only recording a few lines of script, in order to allow space...

The Professional: Thomas Hoccleve

The Professional: Thomas Hoccleve Sarah Tolmie University of Waterloo No man ever writ, but for money. —Samuel Johnson Thomas Hoccleve has undergone a lot of rehabilitation lately. Recent forms of historicism have saved him from lingering censure for dementia, effeminacy, and venality, and enlisted him instead as a participant in the larger social developments of his age: the bureaucratization of fifteenth-century society,1 the drama of assimilating Lancastrian rule,2 the fraught and contradictory rise of a money economy,3 the task of domesticating Chaucer into a national icon.4 He has been reassessed as an ideologue, a translator, a feminist,5 a civil servant, an advi1 See Ethan Knapp, ‘‘Bureaucratic Identity and the Construction of the Self in Hoccleve ’s Formulary and La Male Regle,’’ Speculum 74 (1999): 357–76, and his book The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). 2 See, for example, Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 1399–1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 141–48, 180–86, 197–214; and Derek Pearsall, ‘‘Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: The Poetics of Royal Self-Representation,’’ Speculum 69 (1994): 386–410. 3 See Robert J. Meyer-Lee, ‘‘Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money,’’ Exemplaria 13 (2001): 173–214. 4 Selected examples include J. A. Burrow, ‘‘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; David R. Carlson, ‘‘Thomas Hoccleve and the Chaucer Portrait,’’ HLQ 54 (1991): 283–300; Albrecht Classen, ‘‘Hoccleve’s Independence from Chaucer: A Study of Poetic Emancipation,’’ Fifteenth-Century Studies 16 (1990): 59–81; Ethan Knapp, ‘‘Eulogies and Usurpations: Hoccleve and Chaucer Revisited,’’ SAC 21 (1999): 247–73 ; Jeanne E. Krochalis, ‘‘Hoccleve’s Chaucer Portrait ,’’ ChauR 21 (1986–87): 234–45; James H. MacGregor, ‘‘The Iconography of Chaucer in Hoccleve’s De Regimine Principum and in the Troilus Frontispiece,’’ ChauR 11 (1977): 338–50; Tim William Machan, ‘‘Textual Authority and the Works of Hoccleve, Lydgate, and Henryson,’’ Viator 23 (1992): 281–99. 5 See Catherine Batt, ‘‘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; Ruth Nissé, ‘‘‘Oure Fadres Olde and Modres’: Gender, Heresy, and Hoccleve’s Literary Politics,’’ SAC 21 (1999): 275–99; Jennifer E. Bryan, ‘‘Hoccleve, the Virgin, and the Politics of Complaint,’’ PMLA 117, no. 5 (2002): 1172–87; Anna Torti, ‘‘Hoccleve’s Attitude toward Women: ‘I Shoop Me Do My Peyne PAGE 341 341 ................. 16596$ CH10 11-01-10 14:07:34 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER sor to princes,6 a sufferer of psychotic illness.7 Evidence for such identifications has been drawn from his life records, and from the formulary he compiled for the office of Privy Seal during his tenure as a clerk, but chiefly from his poetry. Yet his specific status as a writer of poetry has remained secondary in much recent criticism: the poet has become a prisoner of context, administrative, political, or cultural. This does Hoccleve a particular disservice because the primary identity of his textual persona is that of poet; he is constantly and consciously engaged in the business of collecting, collating, translating, soliciting advice on, seeking patronage of, procrastinating over, and, above all, trying to sell,8 poetry. The writing of poetic texts, and the implications of this action for the writer of them, and for the various readers, patrons, and buyers of them is the overriding concern of his work. My contention is that Hoccleve’s mission was to create the secular poet, himself, as a professional subject and to figure him explicitly into the economy of representation. No other Privy Seal clerk working in the first quarter of the fifteenth century has left a significant body of poetry; Prentys, Arondel, and the other colleagues Hoccleve mentions in his work shared a literate coterie culture but did not write poems about it, or about anything else, at and Diligence / To Wynne Hir Loue by...

Hoccleve's Dangerous Game of Draughts

IN the early fourteenth-century De ludo scaccorum, Jacobus de Cessolis asserts that the game of chess was devised by a philosopher, Philometer, who was charged with advising the monstrous king Evylmerodach.1 Philometer realized that his life was endangered by this activity, and he developed a game that would amuse the king and simultaneously teach him morals and ethics. In order to accomplish this task, de Cessolis explains that Philometer identified each of the chess pieces with a social class or political office and invested it with moral and ethical traits. Evylmerodach enjoyed the game so much that he mended his ways, and he and his people lived happily ever after, thanks to chess and the manual that accompanied it, De ludo scaccorum. The premise for writing a manual for princely instruction or devising a new game are similar for Philometer and Thomas Hoccleve; Hoccleve's textbook of advice, Regiment of Princes, must reach the future Henry V without irritating him, just as Philometer had to avoid angering Evylmerodach. One way to attempt this was for both creator and author to maintain a light and playful tone. Although critics have noticed the verbal play with which Hoccleve stocks his stanza on chess, little research has been done on the way the poet cites not only de Cessolis's text, but also appropriates his game by using chess-puns to express radical social ideas throughout the Prologue.2 One of these ideas is that Hoccleve's practical experience as a clerk of the Privy Seal legitimates both his address to Henry, and also his repeated requests for payment for his bureaucratic labour, rather than for his poetry. Like Philometer, Hoccleve is aware of the danger this game poses to him, and in the end of the Prologue he implies that the process of writing can feel like judicial torture.

The Language of the Chaucer Tradition by Simon Horobin

REVIEWS one of the book’s strengths is its depth of historical/cultural research. Her methodology is extensive and connective to the point of headiness, informed by Foucault and psychoanalytic, postcolonial, and gender theories . Her methodology resists the literary encapsulation of an organized reading, chosing rather to disperse the text as she constellates its historical and cultural indexes. One of Heng’s most suggestive claims concerns medieval concepts of race, which she extrapolates from a reading of The King of Tars, and which she sees as a concept with cultural power in its own right. It is not simply a secondary function of religion; she argues that it deploys morally valenced physical attributes based in whiteness and blackness, but it also demonstrates lability and cultural performativity across different contexts. Geraldine Heng’s study of romance mingles conceptual acrobatics and deep research: fearless and provocative, a gestural display in an area of medieval studies that tends to the minute and insular. Whether or not you agree with her methodology or are convinced by all of her arguments , Heng’s scholarship and sweep are admirable. This is a must-read for scholars interested in new ways of thinking about the diversity and cultural reach of medieval romance. Christine Chism Rutgers University Simon Horobin. The Language of the Chaucer Tradition. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003. Pp. vi, 179. $75.00. Simon Horobin’s study of the language of the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales is characterized principally by its deliberate diminution of the part played by Chancery in standardizing English at the beginning of the fifteenth century. He follows M. L. Samuels’s 1963 identification of four written standards that distinguish between the language of Chaucer and other literary manuscripts (Type III) and government and commercial documents (Type IV), which after 1430 Samuels calls ‘‘Chancery Standard.’’ Horobin’s treatment is deliberate because the books and articles in which I have advanced the influence of Chancery are cited in his bibliography but never referred to in his text. Anent bibliography, it may be noted that the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English (LALME). PAGE 321 321 ................. 11491$ CH13 11-01-10 14:02:35 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER to which Horobin frequently refers, is not included in his bibliography or in any note that provides bibliographical information. It is edited in four volumes by Angus McIntosh, M. L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin (Aberdeen University Press, 1986). The problem with Samuels’s classification is that we know that at least one of the scribes that he and Horobin included in Class III, Thomas Hoccleve, was, like Chaucer himself, a government clerk. It is hard to believe that the other scribes who wrote literary manuscripts were not also writers of government and business documents. The few manuscripts that Horobin chooses to focus on would not have been enough to support a scribe. Literary scribes must have done commercial work as well and, if so, the dozen or so words on which Samuels and Horobin base their distinction of Types III and IV are less convincing. Henry IV and especially Henry V shifted Chancery and Privy Seal from Latin and French toward English. The stationers and guilds followed suite, and a tradition of writing in English, both commercial and literary , came into being. Assisted by the continuing progress of P. M. W. Robinson’s Canterbury Tales Project, which is producing computer transcripts of all the Chaucer manuscripts, looking forward to computer collation to produce a history of the texts, Horobin has made exhaustive counts of the spellings and grammatical forms of some twelve to fifteen words, especially in the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts. On pages 74–75, where he lists the presence or absence of Type IV (Chancery) forms of five words in Chaucer manuscripts between 1400 and 1500, Horobin concludes that chronology was the most significant factor in determining the presence of Type IV forms. Actually, it was the growing influence of Chancery models and training that helped to regularize writing. The forms that Horobin has cited with reasonable accuracy should be viewed against the background of Chancery practice. At the end of Fisher and Richardson’s An Anthology of Chancery English, which...

Royal presentations to ecclesiastical benefices in late medieval Scotland

The fortunes of most rulers in the Middle Ages were heavily influenced by the use they made of the limited supply of lands, offices and other rights at their disposal, and this facet of kingship has been emphasised in recent works on political relationships in late medieval Scotland. Relatively little attention has, however, been paid to the Scottish monarchs’ use of patronage within the church, at least below the level of bishoprics and abbeys. Under the terms of the celebrated papal indult of 1487, Innocent VIII gave James III eight months in which to suggest candidates for vacant sees and the more valuable monasteries, but in the case of lesser benefices, most of which remained in the gift of local patrons despite the heavy incidence of papal provision and reservation, the crown’s rights of presentation were much more limited and intermittent. This article seeks to explore the ways in which later medieval Scottish monarchs exercised their rights in connection with such benefices, and will concentrate on the early sixteenth century, when the privy seal registers provide a wealth of detail which is lacking for earlier periods. A number of benefices were in the king’s patronage by full right (pleno iure), and to these he was entitled to make a presentation on the occasion of each vacancy. It is noteworthy that many of these benefices were of relatively recent foundation, such as the prebends and offices in the chapel royal of Stirling, founded by James IV. Moreover, a considerable proportion of the benefices and offices in direct royal patronage were minor chaplainries and even parish clerkships, whose endowments were generally modest. Examples include the chapel of St Roche near Stirling bridge, granted to William Hag in February 1500 even though the infeftment was not yet completed, the two new chaplainries created with papal consent in the collegiate church of Methven, to which presentations were first made in 1516, the altar of St Ninian and the aisle of the Scottish nation in the Carmelite church in Bruges, to which William Thomson was nominated in September

The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (review)

Reviews 239 Parergon 20.1 (2003) frame, its strength lies in various individual essays, in particular those of Dickinson and Sharpe, Rabin, Marland, Quinn, Andrews and Ward, which do indeed provide insightful studies of aspects of this interesting area of social history. Deborah Williams Faculty of Law/School of Humanities The University of Western Australia Knapp, Ethan, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England, University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001; cloth; pp. x, 210; RRP US$40.00; ISBN 0271021357. ‘It is, indeed, hard to image a form of literary history that would not be genealogical... In the assumed parthenogenesis of this tradition, the metaphor of paternity, the relation of fathers and sons, has always been central’ (p. 107). The same might be said of an author study that avoids the assumption of literariness and yet this is, precisely, Ethan Knapp’s intelligent and provocative strategem for reading Thomas Hoccleve’s literary works. Hoccleve’s career as a bureaucrat – a clerk – is central to, not excluded from, his production as a poetical writer. Knapp organises his study into six chapters that treat, in turn, Hoccleve’s major output. The Formulary is read both as autobiography and ‘an easily referenced collection of model documents’ (p. 31), and ‘La Male Regle’ (1405) because it ‘substantiates [the] links between bureaucratic practices and the construction of autobiography in Hoccleve’s verse’ (p. 36-7). His translation of Christine de Pisan’s L’Epistre au Dieu d’Amours, known as the Letter of Cupid (1402), deploys Christine’s ‘radical critique of the prevailing connections between gender and authority’ (p. 50) but cannot replicate her authority of experience. Hoccleve’s problem is structurally, rather than ontologically, similar to hers. Hoccleve is one of the emergent lay class of clerics; furthermore, he is married; thus, ‘Hoccleve was not situated to speak for the established cultural traditions of either courtly verse [chevalerie] or clerkly didacticism [clergie]’ (p. 71). Knapp’s reading of the Regement of Princes (1410-1412) thematises two aspects of Hoccleve’s preoccupation with autobiography, or his use of textuality to represent selfhood. The poem is ‘a generic hybrid’: the first part (prologue) is ‘one of Hoccleve’s most typical compositions, the begging poem’ while the second section, ‘the Regement proper … constitutes the first example found in 240 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) English of that most popular of medieval genres, the mirror of princes’ (p. 81). Knapp first positions the Regement alongside John Carpenter’s Liber Albus (1419) to find ‘a vision of writing as a supplement to the fragile human body’ (p. 85). For Carpenter, no less than Hoccleve, ‘the bureaucratic technologies of writing’ offer, at once, a diagnostic occasion to lament the physical and mental costs of writing – ‘My bak unbuxum,’ ‘Stommak … whom stowpynge out of dreede/Annoyeth sore;’ ‘oure yen/ Upon the whyte mochil sorwe dryen,’ the imperative to ‘knytte/… Mynde, ye, and hand’ – and – ‘the promise of a victory over time and age’ (p. 90-92). Knapp argues that Hoccleve uses this promise to reject the Boethian consolations traditionally invoked in such a context. Instead, ‘Hoccleve chooses to represent himself as having found consolation not in philosophy but in the impossible home of textuality’ (p. 106). This conclusion is at some distance from the ‘auspicious opportunity for the development of serious English propagandistic verse’ (p. 81) which, Knapp acknowledges, is the way literary history has usually read the Regement. Knapp’s position here is not to gainsay such a judgement but, more shrewdly, to suspend such readings by first attending to the Regement’s ‘traces of the Privy Seal’ (p. 83); thus the prologue is an integral – and compelling – part of the work rather than a distraction. Knapp is, I think, less persuasive in dealing with a second theme in the Regement which he considers in a chapter titled ‘Eulogies and Usurpations: Father Chaucer in the Regement of Princes’. While the argument makes the wellestablished New Historical move of reading the circulation of a textual trope in the trajectory of historical events – the antagonistic relation between Henrys IV and V provides a model for Hoccleve’s relation to Chaucer – this same move loosens Knapp...

Medieval Literature and Historical Inquiry: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall by David Aers (review)

the Friend'composed from I419, and the literaryholographs he produced in the early I420s, attempting, as many a scholar before him, to untangle biographical fact from fictionaldetail. The main focus of Thompson's richlydetailed essayis the Formulary, Hoccleve's compilation of Privy Seal documents in Latin and French (extantBL MS Additional 24062), made in the lastyearsof Hoccleve's nearlyfortyyear service, and heavily annotated by him. The manuscript evidence attests to Hoccleve's deep attachment to his work at the PrivySeal, which placed him at the centre 'of currentmetropolitan, national and internationalpolitical developments, Lancastrianintrigueand London gossip'(p. 10I). In 'Piety, Politics and Persona: MS Harley 4012 and Anne Harling', Anne M. Dutton discussesthe owner of MS Harley 40 2, a collection of Middle English religious treatises, copied c. I460. Her essay briefly reconstructs the life of the manuscript'spatron, the fifteenth-centurygentry woman, Dame Anne Wingfield, nee Harling, to argue for her use of thisbook as an outwardconstructionof her life as a pious, respectablewoman. Books as gifts are discussedby Mary C. Erler, in 'The Abbess of Malling's Gift Manuscript (I520)', and by James Carley, in 'Plutarch's "Life of Agesilaus": A Recently Located New Year's Gift to Thomas Cromwell by Henry Parker,Lord Morley'. Erler'swork is fine and focused, discussingthe implicationsof a gift made by a nun to a child, while Carley is one of the leading authoritieson books written and given as gifts by Morley, a particularlyable (and adaptable) Tudor courtier. Finally, the volume concludes with 'ManuscriptsAfter Printing:Affinity, Dissent and Display in the Texts of Wyatt's Psalms', Carlson's informative look at the Egerton,Royal andArundelmanuscriptsaswell asprintedtextscontainingWyatt's psalmsand the ways in which theirpresentationand contexts shiftfrommanuscript to print. The range of subjectsaddressed by the volume is impressive, though the essays generally remain quite narrow in scope. There is, however, something here to interestvirtuallyeveryone engaged in the studyof book production and ownership in the Middle Ages. PACE UNIVERSITY MARTHA W. DRIVER Medieval Literature andHistorical Inquiry. EssaysinHonour ofDerek Pearsall.Ed.by DAVID AERS.Cambridge: Brewer. 2000. xv + 212 pp. ?45; $75. This volume coheres through an interesting methodological focus. Without any particularisticbrief, all the contributorshave brought varyinglyhistoricistperspectives to a range of late-medieval texts. The amalgam suggests the richness of approaches one has grown to appreciate in the theoreticallyinformed world after the New Historicism. Forme, the most riveting contributionsin the volume are the two at the centre, provided by the editor and his sometime collaboratorLynn Staley. David Aers, in 'Chaucer'sTaleofMelibee: Whose Virtues?'takesup and demolishestheflaccidclaim that 'Melibee contains much of the truth of Christianity,as Chaucer saw it' (p. 70). Interweaving basic Catholic teachings on 'conflict resolution' with their absence fromChaucer'stext,Aersdevelopsa corruscatingcritiqueof suchpietisticreadings. The essay tails off a bit in its conclusion, where Aers leaves as 'an open question' (p. 81) what to do with his findings in historical terms; some consideration of Chaucer's fascinationwith legalism and with Italian civic culture (his auctour, once removed here, since Chaucer translated from a French 'trot', was after all, a the Friend'composed from I419, and the literaryholographs he produced in the early I420s, attempting, as many a scholar before him, to untangle biographical fact from fictionaldetail. The main focus of Thompson's richlydetailed essayis the Formulary, Hoccleve's compilation of Privy Seal documents in Latin and French (extantBL MS Additional 24062), made in the lastyearsof Hoccleve's nearlyfortyyear service, and heavily annotated by him. The manuscript evidence attests to Hoccleve's deep attachment to his work at the PrivySeal, which placed him at the centre 'of currentmetropolitan, national and internationalpolitical developments, Lancastrianintrigueand London gossip'(p. 10I). In 'Piety, Politics and Persona: MS Harley 4012 and Anne Harling', Anne M. Dutton discussesthe owner of MS Harley 40 2, a collection of Middle English religious treatises, copied c. I460. Her essay briefly reconstructs the life of the manuscript'spatron, the fifteenth-centurygentry woman, Dame Anne Wingfield, nee Harling, to argue for her use of thisbook as an outwardconstructionof her life as a pious, respectablewoman. Books as gifts are discussedby Mary C. Erler, in 'The Abbess of Malling's Gift Manuscript (I520)', and by James Carley, in 'Plutarch's "Life of Agesilaus": A Recently Located New Year's...

Organizing Time for Secular and Religious Purposes: The Contemplacion of Sinners (1499) and the Translation of the Benedictine Rule for Women (1517) of Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester

The career of Bishop Richard Fox was marked by his dedication to hard work and his obsession with the organized management of time. Fox was born about 1448 into a Lincolnshire yeoman family, was educated at local grammar schools and Oxford, was subsequently ordained, and later became a doctoral student at the University of Paris. In 1484 he joined the entourage of the exiled Henry Tudor, who recognized his ability and gave him considerable responsibility in negotiating with the French government and planning the 1485 invasion of England. After Bosworth, Fox became Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal and a member of the royal council with particular responsibility for foreign affairs. He was appointed bishop successively of Exeter, Bath and Wells, Durham, and Winchester. In 1516, he founded Corpus Christi College, Oxford, retired from politics, and returned to Winchester, where he died in 1528.

The Fading Influence of the Medieval Ars Dictaminis in England After 1400

The influence of dictaminal treatises in England was weak throughout the Middle Ages and largely restricted to a limited number of royal clerks and a few academics. Most practitioners were royal chancery clerks who dealt with foreign and ecclesiastical powers. This article focuses chiefly on the use of dictaminal letters by middle class English citizens in the fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries. These letters show little significant influence of continental or English dictaminal theory but are chiefly either sprawling news bulletins like the Paston letters or, more commonly, imitations of the royal missives from the Signet or Privy Seal offices. As the fifteenth century ended even these vestigial dictaminal forms were replaced among the middles classes by business formats, such as the letter of credit, although they retained some use among the upper classes into the sixteenth century and in some royal missives into the eighteenth century. The article concludes with suggestions on ways contemporary genre theory might be usefully applied to analyze the rise and decline of the ars dictaminis.

Sir John Oldcastle, the Office of the Privy Seal, and Thomas Hoccleve's ‘Remonstrance Against Oldcastle’ of 1415

This paper looks at the background against which Thomas Hoccleve's Remonstrance against Oldcastle was written. It draws on unprinted material from British Library MS Harley 431 to demonstrate close links between the Office of the Privy Seal, where Hoccleve was employed, and Sir John Oldcastle and his wife. A re-examination of the Remonstrance, known as a “furiously orthodox” poem, suggests the possibility of ironical readings at some points.

Bureaucratic Identity and the Construction of the Self in Hoccleve's Formulary and La male regle

Previous articleNext article No AccessBureaucratic Identity and the Construction of the Self in Hoccleve's Formulary and La male regleEthan KnappEthan Knapp Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 74, Number 2Apr., 1999 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2887051 Views: 11Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1999 The Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Gwilym Dodd Trilingualism in the Medieval English Bureaucracy: The Use—and Disuse—of Languages in the Fifteenth-Century Privy Seal Office, Journal of British Studies 51, no.22 (Dec 2012): 253–283.https://doi.org/10.1086/663979William Kuskin The Erasure of Labor: Hoccleve, Caxton, and the Information Age, (Jan 2004): 229–260.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07552-9_11 W. M. Ormrod The Use of English: Language, Law, and Political Culture in Fourteenth-Century England, Speculum 78, no.33 (Oct 2015): 750–787.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0038713400131537Jennifer E. Bryan Hoccleve, the Virgin, and the Politics of Complaint, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 117, no.55 (Oct 2020): 1172–1187.https://doi.org/10.1632/003081202X60260

The Coventry Parliament of 1459: a Privy Seal Writ concerning the Election of Knights of the Shire

The Coventry Parliament of 1459: a Privy Seal Writ concerning the Election of Knights of the Shire

From City to Metropolis

THE NINE ESSAYS in this volume are coherent in content and of a consistently high quality: the topics covered are population growth (Finlay and Shearer) and immigration (Kitch); the social topography of the city (Power); the approach of the city governors to sickness (Pelling), plague (Slack) and poverty (Macfarlane); and the generation of wealth by manufacturing (Beier), by internal trade in England (Chartres) and by overseas trade (Dietz). As the editors point out in their introduction, there are aspects of metropolitan life which are almost completely ignored in this collection of essays, for example religion, culture (whether high or low), City companies and City government and the interaction of London and national politics. Slack does however write interestingly about the divergent views of the Royal Council and the Court of Aldermen as to what were practicable and desirable solutions to the plague epidemics in the city. But no volume, even one of nearly 300 pages, can be expected to deal with every aspect of a metropolis as large as London; and this volume, at a modest cost, provides not only original and, on occasion exciting, essays but also a wealth of documentation including over a hundred notes of useful historiographical references provided by the editors in their introductory survey. All the essays are based on source material: some contributors have continued to mine rich seams which they have already made their own. For example Finlay and Shearer have extended the use of parish registers as a fruitful source for population studies along the lines already developed by Finlay in his Population and Metropolis: the demography of London 1580-1650 (1981). Power has continued his study of the Hearth Taxes of the 1660s as indicators of wealth or poverty and in this essay extends his earlier study of 'East and west in early modern London' (published in 1978 in Wealth and Power in Tudor England: Essays presented to S. T. Bindof!) to include the whole metropolitan area. Some source material is here exploited for the first time. Dietz has used the Privy Seal books in the P.R. O. to chart the rapid development of the Thames-side ship building industry between 1558 and 1618, and Beier exploits the burial registers as a hitherto neglected source for the occupations of Londoners. As Beier points out (p. 145) the burial registers list the occupations of females and adolescents, 'groups ignored by most other sources', and although not all burial registers record occupations it has been possible to use those of 15 parishes which cover a reasonably wide range in size, prosperity and location (eleven within the walls and four outside). In all, the trades of nearly 27,000 Londoners dying in the period 1540-1700 are analysed and classified into 13 different categories such as 'building' or 'miscellaneous production'. As Beier admits, the classification is bound to involve anomalies and arbitrary decisions (e.g. is a skinner more properly a leatherworker or a merchant?), but his new analysis opens up interesting lines of enquiry and his conclusion that three-fifths of the city's work force was engaged in production rather than service or trade, does lend convincing support to his assertion (p. 151) that 'the capital as market thesis is misleading where London is concerned.' The novelty, or interest, of the various essays will strike different readers differently. In his analysis of the City's responses to the recurrent problem of plague Slack effectively demonstrates the difficult position of the aldermen who were caught between the rigorous demands of the Royal Council and the sense of social community which prevailed in the local parish. Macfarlane detects in the different solutions to the problem of poverty in the late seventeenth century, a difference of politics. Whereas the Corporation of the Poor which attempted to centralise poor relief and link it to education and 'retraining' was largely supported by Whigs like Sir Robert Clayton, the Tories favoured the more traditional, less directed, parish system of relief which, indeed, finally triumphed. This renewed anxiety about the poor in London in the late seventeenth century may be linked to a change, effectively analysed by Dietz, in the source of London's wealth. The great trading prosperity of London, based as it had been on the import of luxury goods and the monopoly of trade with the

Education and asssociation: the bureaucrat in the reign of Henry VI

This study concentrates on the personnel of the chancery and the office of the privy seal during the reign of Henry VI of England (1422–1461). The educational achievements and involvements of these civil servants are examined to reveal how the qualities they bring to the job affect the level of bureaucratic service offered. Educational involvement afforded the king's clerks the opportunity both to make the contacts necessary to enter the king's service and to prepare for the king's service. At the various levels of the official hierarchy examples are found of bureaucrats who were involved in education as students, patrons, benefactors, collectors, men who made original contributions to learning and men who used their learning to contribute to the efficient functioning of the bureaucracy. Further, their associations with a multitude of educational enterprises and with their fellow clerks assisted in the development of a group mentality and loyalty which contributed to a well-run bureaucracy.

Thomas Hoccleve: Selected Poems ed. by Bernard O’ Donaghue

REVIEWS interested in costume"in anantiquarian way" (p. 44):"Because Annas and Caiaphas are called 'bishops,' that does not imply they are contemporary English bishops" (p. 45). It is a pity that a slim collection of essays so interesting to students should be so expensive and so poorly overseen in production. The repeat printing of a plate (pp. 69, 137) was caught by after-sales service. Not so the footnotenumbering on p. 48, the repetition of"gold1 3" on p. 89, and the omission of the words blood or from the English translation of the stage directions from the Lucerne Passion (p. 84). More careful editing could have insisted on more glossing of the Middle English (e.g., bey , p. 99; Amys mans, p. 102) and have introduced more cross reference between articles. Much of current research on medieval English drama is concerned to recover conditions of performance. Slowly and surely an entirely new perspective is opening on the aesthetics and acting style of Middle English plays. Yet there is still an �rgent need for more and more fully annotated scholarly editions of plays. Cawley's edition of 1952, notwithstanding the fields near Bethlehem, remains exemplary in its attention to text. There is also a need to stimulate and inform intelligent theatrical experiment. Teachers and students and actors have a duty to prevent repetition of the misguided and tedious spectacle that was presented at the York Festival as "the York Mystery Plays, 1984." RICHARD AXTON Christ's College, Cambridge BERNARD O'DONAGHUE, ed. Thomas Hoccieve: SelectedPoems. London: Carcanet New Press; Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: Humanities Press, 1982. Pp. 104. £3.25, $7.00. Thomas Hoccleve has long been recognized for his background contribu­ tions to Chaucerian studies, but it is only in our own generation that he is also slowly gaining a modest, but good, reputation of his own as a unique poet. This clerk of the Privy Seal Office and a minor poet deserves a better scholarly and reading following than he has had. I am pleased that the past 227 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER twenty years have been positive ones for Hoccleve students, and I predict that Hoccleve's rather low reputation will soon be turned around. Bernard O'Donoghue's book is the latest contribution to a twentieth­ century renaissance of positive scholarly attention to Chaucer's younger contemporary, the minor but fascinating and charming poet Thomas Hoccleve (ca. 1368-1426). The ongoing Hoccleve renaissance seems to have started with Jerome Mitchell's Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth-Century English Poetic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968) and to have continued with the revised reprint of Hoccleve's Works: The Minor Poems (ed. Frederick]. Furnivall and I. Gollancz, rev.Jerome Mitchell and A. I. Doyle, EETS, nos. 61, 73 [1892, 1925; reprint in one vol., London: Oxford UniversityPress, 1970]) and the reprint of Hoccleve's Works: TheRegement ofPn'ncesand Fourteen MinorPoems (ed.Frederick J. Furnivall,EETS, no. 72 [London, 1897; reprint,Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprint, 1973]). However, the Hoccleverenaissance really appears to be in a high phase today, first with the appearance ofM. C. Seymour's edition of Selectionsfrom Hoccleve ([Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981]; see the review by Jerome Mitchell, Speculum 58(1983):477-478) and with the ap­ pearance of O'Donoghue's selected edition here under review. In his introduction (pp. 7-18) O'Donoghue discusses (1) the few really positive estimates of Hoccleve's reputation from William Browne in 1614 toJeromeMitchell in 1968 and Ian Robinson in 1971 (Chaucer's Prosody, pp. 190-99), (2) Hoccleve's interest for the modern reader mainly because "he can arrest the reader's interest" (p. 11) and because he "evokes in an interesting way the circumstances of the unremarkable life of a man in his time" (p. 12), (3) a brief summary of responses to Hoccleve's language and style with emphasis on the apparent difficulties with the meter, and (4) O'Donoghue's interest in Hoccleve's autobiographical passages as an important editorial basis for choosing many of the selections. This volume contains nine selections newly and carefully edited fromthe best (often holograph) manuscripts: Thomas Hoccleve's Complaint, The Dialogue with...

The 1983 American Express Women In Management

In May, American Express sponsored the first in what is planned to be an annual series of lectures on women in management. Baroness Young, who is currently Lord Privy Seal, was the speaker.

Public and Private Bureaucracies in England and Wales in the Fifteenth Century

It is just fifty years since Thomas Frederick Tout died on 23 October 1929. Apart from a few formative years at St. David's College, Lampeter, Tout spent the whole of his academic career in Manchester. It was there that in 1908 he read and reviewed Eugène Déprez's Etudes de diplomatique anglaise and soon afterwards conceived the monumental work of a lifetime, modestly entitled Chapters in the administrative history of Mediaeval England. This six-volume work describes the organization of the household of England's medieval kings between the Norman conquest and the revolution of 1399, and the way in which the great administrative departments of state sprang from it. Beginning as a study of the king's personal chamber and wardrobe, it blossomed into a study, first, of the principal and less personal offices of the chancery, the exchequer and the privy seal—their growing complexity and bureaucratization, their increasing professionalism and specialization, and their eventual permanent settlement in or near London—and, second, of the way in which these offices affected, and were affected by, the relationship between individual kings and their subjects. The focus of Tout's work was the court and the central government, institutions and administration.