Anonymous (Chaucerian apocrypha)

These are Middle English poems of unknown authorship that were once printed as Chaucer's own. From the first collected editions in the sixteenth century onward, publishers filled out the Chaucer volume with whatever looked Chaucerian, and for three centuries readers took The Flower and the Leaf, The Court of Love and The Assembly of Ladies for his work.

In the nineteenth century scholars showed from their language and metre that the poems were later, most of them of the fifteenth century, and in 1897 W. W. Skeat gathered the doubtful pieces in Chaucerian and Other Pieces, a supplement to his edition of Chaucer. This page holds the anonymous verse from that volume: the dream-visions and love poems, a short envoy and a virelai, a balade in praise of Chaucer, and the Lollard satire The Plowmans Tale.

The authors are unknown, though some of the dream-visions may be by women: The Flower and the Leaf describes itself as the work of a lady. Skeat's own spelling and word-forms are kept, without his line numbers or notes.