Sir John Clanvowe

Sir John Clanvowe (c. 1341-1391) was a Herefordshire knight and a member of the household of Richard II, a friend of Chaucer's circle at court, and one of the so-called Lollard knights. He wrote a short devotional prose treatise, The Two Ways, and served on diplomatic and military missions abroad.

He died near Constantinople in 1391 while returning from a campaign with Sir William Neville. Skeat, in Chaucerian and Other Pieces (1897), printed The Cuckoo and the Nightingale under Clanvowe's name on the strength of its colophon, and later scholars have generally accepted the attribution; the poem is a debate between the two birds set at the court of the God of Love.