Thomas Hoccleve

Thomas Hoccleve (c. 1368–1426) spent most of his working life as a clerk in the Office of the Privy Seal at Westminster, a post he held from about 1387, copying and drawing up the writs and letters that carried the king's seal. His poems return again and again to the pinch of that career: an uncertain annuity, a hungry purse, and a clerk's anxiety about his standing.

He called Chaucer his master and wrote in his teacher's metres, but his own voice, candid, self-mocking and often anxious, is unmistakable. His early confession La Male Regle (1406) looks back on a wasted youth, and in the Series (c. 1420–22) he speaks frankly of a mental breakdown and his recovery. Several of his poems survive in manuscripts written in his own hand.

The Regement of Princes, written about 1411 for Henry, Prince of Wales (the future Henry V), is his longest poem. It sets a dialogue between the poet and an old beggar before a mirror for princes drawn largely from Giles of Rome, Jacobus de Cessolis and the Secretum secretorum, and it was widely copied through the fifteenth century.