SOURCE: McLane, Paul E. “Religious Orders in Skelton's Colyn Cloute.” English Language Notes 16, No. 1 (September 1978): 8-13.

In the following essay, McLane shows that other representatives of the Church besides Cardinal Wolsey are the targets of attack in Collyn Cloute, and claims that the poem reveals Skelton to be deeply conservative in his attitude toward the English religious orders.

Although bishops and one particular bishop (Wolsey, the main exemplar of arrogance, ambition, pastoral neglect, and theological and spiritual insufficiency) are the main objects of satiric attack in Colyn Cloute, nuns, monks, and friars, as well as the secular clergy, also are surveyed. And as we might expect, since Skelton was a secular priest, monks, and nuns are treated much more sympathetically than friars.¹

Skelton's closest associations (at least from 1512 to his death in 1529) seem to have been with the Benedictine monks at Westminster Abbey, in whose precincts he largely...