SOURCE: Burrow, J. A. “Hoccleve and Chaucer.” In Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honor of Derek Brewer, 54-61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

In the essay that follows, Burrow briefly outlines Hoccleve's debt to Chaucer as well as the ways in which Hoccleve might be appreciated more favorably on his own terms. Although Hoccleve's literary art owes much to his mentor, his best work is in the explicit political themes and autobiographical details that Chaucer himself eschewed.

Some twelve years after Chaucer's death, Thomas Hoccleve paid tribute to the eloquence, wisdom, and piety of his predecessor in three passages of The Regement of Princes.¹ Hoccleve's admiration, he claims, is based upon personal acquaintance; for when, in the Regement prologue, he first reveals his name to the old almsman, the latter's immediate reaction is to identify him as one of those people who knew Chaucer:

‘Hoccleve, some?’ ‘Iwis, fadir, þat same...