SOURCE: Richardson, Malcolm. “Hoccleve in His Social Context.” Chaucer Review 20, no. 4 (1986): 313-22.

In this essay, Richardson reconstructs the life Hoccleve likely led as a king's clerk in the fourteenth century. Richardson finds that the pathetic persona Hoccleve created in his poetry was not merely a generic convention, but rather an accurate picture of Hoccleve's circumstances and social status.

Among other things, the unfortunate poet Thomas Hoccleve is that most characteristic modern literary figure, the little man who tries unsuccessfully to maneuver in a bureaucracy designed to crush him. This Hoccleve persona is one of the most meticulously constructed, endearing, and human in Middle English literature. While Hoccleve's poetry is almost certainly not as feeble as F. J. Furnivall led several generations to believe, we assuredly read Hoccleve chiefly for the autobiographical details he so carefully includes. As Jerome Mitchell notes in our solitary book-length study of the poet...