LYDGATE, JOHN (c. 1373–c. 1450), English poet, was born at the village of Lydgate near Newmarket. Probably he was educated at the school attached to the Benedictine abbey at Bury St. Edmunds, and in his Testament he has drawn a lively picture of himself as a typical orchard-robbing boy, who had scant relish for matins, fought, and threw creed and paternoster at the cock. He was ordained sub-deacon in 1389, deacon in 1393, and priest in 1397. Lydgate passed as a portent of learning, and, according to Bale, he pursued his studies not only at both the English universities but in France and Italy. Certainly he knew France, and he visited Paris in an official capacity in 1426. It is improbable that he lived many years after 1446, when John Baret, treasurer of Bury, signed an extant receipt for a pension which he shared with Lydgate, and which continued to be paid till 1449. If it be true, as Bishop Alcock of Ely affirms, that Lydgate wrote a poem on the loss of France and Gascony, he must have lived two years longer, which would indicate the year 1451, or thereabouts, as the date of his death.
In 1434 Lydgate retired from the priorate of Hatfield Broadoak (or Hatfield Regis), to which he bad been appointed in June 1423. After 1390—but whilst he was still a young man—he made the acquaintance of Geoffrey Chaucer, with whose son Thomas he was intimate. This friendship appears to have decided Lyd gate's career, and in his Troy-book and elsewhere are reverent and touching tributes to his "master." The themes of his more ambi tious poems can be traced to Chaucerian sources.
Lydgate is a most voluminous writer. The Falls of Princes alone comprises 7,00o stanzas; and his authentic compositions reach the enormous total of 140,000. As the result the bulk of his composition is wholly or comparatively rough-hewn. That he was capable of finished work is shown by two allegorical poems— the Complaint of the Black Knight and the Temple of Glass (once attributed to Hawes), in which he reveals himself as a not unworthy successor of Chaucer. For a couple of centuries Lydgate's reputation equalled, if it did not surpass, that of his master. This was in a sense only natural, since he was the real founder of the school which ruled English letters during the long interval between Chaucer and Spenser. One of the most obvious
defects of this school is excessive attachment to polysyllabic terms. John Metham is amply justified in his censure— Eke John Lydgate, sometime monk of Bury, His books indited with terms of rhetoric And half-changed Latin, with conceits of poetry.
But Lydgate is lucid in style; and his writings are read more easily than Chaucer's. In spite of that, Lydgate is characteris tically mediaeval—mediaeval in his prolixity, his platitude, his want of judgment and his want of taste ; mediaeval also in his pessimism, his Mariolatry and his horror of death.
See publications of the Early English Text Society, especially the Temple of Glass, edited by Dr. Schick ; Koeppel's Lydgate's Story of Thebes, eine Quellenuntersuchung (Munich, 1884), and the same scholar's Laurents de Premierfait and John Lydgates Bearbeitungen von Boccaccios De Casibus Illustrium Virorum (Munich, 1885) ; Warton's History of English Poetry; Ritson's Bibliotheca Anglo Poetica; Furnivall's Political Poems (E.E.T.S.) ; and Sidney Lee's article in the Dict. Nat. Biog.