SOURCE: Scattergood, John. “Skelton and Traditional Satire: Ware the Hauke.” Medium Aevum 55, No. 1 (1986): 203-16.

In the following essay, Scattergood argues that, although the incident described in Ware the Hauke is a particular and specific one, the literary treatment of it is highly traditional, using conventional motifs that had appeared earlier in medieval satires of hunting clerics.

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I diosyncrasy and individuality are characteristic of the work of Skelton: his pride and his obsessive need for self-advertisement make him practically incapable of imitating others at all closely. And his poems often have a highly particularized and personalized dimension: contemporary political events prompted many of them, and some apparently came into being because of specific incidents in his own life. As a consequence of this perhaps, that which is traditional in his work is too often obscured or overlooked entirely.

Ware the Hauke, it seems to me, offers a striking...