Thomas Occleve

Thomas Hoccleve or Occleve (c. 1368–1426) was an English poet and clerk. He is seen as a key figure in 15th-century English literature.

Hoccleve is thought to have been born in 1368/9, as he states when writing in 1421/2 (Dialogue, 1.246) that he has seen "fifty wyntir and three". Nothing is known of his family, but his name may come from the village of Hockliffe in Bedfordshire. What is known of his life is gleaned mainly from his works and from administrative records. He obtained a clerkship in the Office of the Privy Seal at the age of about twenty. This would require him to know French and Latin. He retained the post on and off, in spite of much grumbling, for about 35 years. He had hoped for a church benefice, but none came. On 12 November 1399, however, he was granted an annuity by the new king, Henry IV.The Letter to Cupid, the first poem of his which can be dated, was a 1402 translation of L'Epistre au Dieu d'Amours of Christine de Pisan, written as a sort of riposte to the moral of Troilus and Criseyde, to some manuscripts of which it is attached. La Male Regle (c. 1406), one of his most fluid and lively poems, is a mock-penitential poem that gives some interesting glimpses of dissipation in his youth.

By 1410 he had married "only for love" (Regiment..., 1.1561) and settled down to writing moral and religious poems. His best-known Regement of Princes or De Regimine Principum, written for Henry V of England shortly before his accession, is an elaborate homily on virtues and vices, adapted from Aegidius de Colonna's work of the same name, from a supposititious epistle of Aristotle known as Secreta secretorum, and a work of Jacques de Cessoles (fl. 1300) translated later by Caxton as The Game and Playe of Chesse. The Regement survives in 43 manuscript copies. It comments much on Henry V's lineage, to cement the House of Lancaster's claim to England's throne. Its incipit is a poem encompassing about a third of the whole, containing further reminiscences of London tavern life in the form of dialogue between the poet and an old man. He also remonstrated with Sir John Oldcastle, a leading Lollard, calling on him to "rise up, a manly knight, out of the slough of heresy."

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