Huchown

Huchoun ("little Hugh") or Huchown "of the Awle Ryale" (fl. 14th century) is a poet conjectured to have been writing sometime in the 14th century. Some academics, following the Scottish antiquarian George Neilson (1858–1923), have identified him with a Scottish knight, Hugh of Eglinton, and advanced his authorship of several significant pieces of alliterative verse. Current opinion is that there is little evidence to support this.

The little that is known about Huchoun comes from the Chronicle of Andrew of Wyntoun, which mentions:

Hucheon,
þat cunnande was in littratur.
He made a gret Gest of Arthure
And þe Awntyr of Gawane,
Þe Pistil als of Suet Susane.
He was curyousse in his stille,
Fayr of facunde and subtile,
And ay to pleyssance hade delyte,
Mad in metyr meit his dyte
Litil or noucht neuir þe lesse
Wauerande fra þe suythfastnes.

Interest in the otherwise unknown figure of "Huchoun" - a diminutive form of "Hugh", i.e. "little Hugh" - was spurred largely by the work of George Neilson, a lawyer and antiquarian, who gave a series of lectures at Glasgow University in 1902 centred on the subject, and published a book the same year.

Of the works Andrew of Wyntoun mentions, the easiest to identify was Þe Pistil als of Suet Susane. This has been fairly firmly associated with The Pistel of Swete Susan, an alliterative poem surviving in 5 manuscripts.

The Gest of Arthure, also called Gest Historyalle and described by Wyntoun, has been more tentatively identified as the well-known Alliterative Morte Arthure (found in the Thornton manuscript of Lincoln Cathedral).

The Awntyr of Gawane (literally the "Adventure of Gawain") is less certain. Neilson advanced that it represented the great alliterative work Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Huchoun was therefore also credited with Patience, Pearl, and Cleanness. The fact that a later hand had written "Hugo de" at the head of the manuscript of these works was also taken as supporting evidence. The output of the Pearl Poet, however, is linguistically very distinct from what seems to be the oldest versions of the works more solidly attributed to Huchoun, and this attribution is nowadays dismissed. More likely is the suggestion that the Awntyr of Gawane represents The Awntyrs off Arthure, an Arthurian poem in a rhymed alliterative stanza similar to Swete Susan, which has several variants in multiple manuscripts.

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