OCCLEVE (or HOCCLEVE), THOMAS (1368-1450?), Eng lish poet, was born probably in 1368/9. What is known of Oc cleve's life has to be gathered mainly from his works. At eighteen or nineteen he obtained a clerkship in the Privy Seal Office, which he retained on and off, in spite of much grumbling, for about thirty-five years. In 1399 he received a small annuity, which was not always paid as regularly as he would have wished. "The Letter to Cupid," his first poem to which we can affix a date, was translated from L'Epistre au Dieu d' Amours of Christine de Pisan in 1402, evidently as a sort of antidote to the moral of Troilus and Cressida, to some mss. of which we find it attached. About 1410 he settled down to married life, and the composition of moral and religious poems. His longest work, The Regement of Princes or De Regimine Principum, written for Prince Hal shortly before his accession, is a tedious homily on the virtues and vices, imitated from Aegidius de Colonna's work of the same name, from the sup posititious epistle of Aristotle, known as the Secreta secretorum and the work of Jacques de Cessoles (fl. 1300) rendered into Eng lish later by Caxton as The Game and Playe of Chesse.
On the accession of Henry V. Occleve turned his muse to the service of orthodoxy and the Church, and one of his poems is a remonstrance addressed to Oldcastle, calling upon him to "rise up, a manly knight, out of the slough of heresy." Then a long illness was followed for a time, as he tells us, by insanity. His "Dialog with a Friend," written after his recovery, gives a naïve and pathetic picture of the poor poet, now fifty-three, with sight and mind impaired, but with hopes still left of writing a tale he owes his good patron, Humphrey of Gloucester, and of translating a small Latin treatise, Scite Mori, before he dies. His hopes were fulfilled in his moralized tales of "Jereslaus' Wife" and of "Jona thas," both from the Gesta Romanorum, which, with his "Learn to die," belong to his old age. After finally retiring from his
privy seal clerkship, he was granted in 1424 sustenance for life in the priory of Southwick, Hants, on which, with his former annu ity, he appears to have lived till about the middle of the century. A "Balade to my gracious Lord of Yorke" probably dates from 1448 or later.
The main interest for us in Occleve's poems is that they are characteristic of his time. They illustrate the blight that had fallen upon poetry on the death of Chaucer. The nearest approach to the realistic touch of his master is to be found in his "Male Regle," which, written about 1406, gives some interesting glimpses of his "misruly youth." But these pictures of 15th-century London are without even the occasional flash of humour that lightens up Lydgate's London Lackpenny.
A poem, "Ad beatam Virginem," generally known as the "Mother of God," and once attributed to Chaucer, is copied among Occleve's works in ms. Phillipps 8151 (Cheltenham), and may thus be regarded as his work. Occleve found an admirer in the 17th century in William Browne, who included his "Jonathas" in the Shepheards Pipe (1614). Browne added a eulogy of the old poet, whose works he intended to publish in their entirety (Works, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 1869, ii. 196-198). In 1796 George Mason printed six Poems by Thomas Hoccleve never before printed . . .; "De Regimine Principum" was printed for the Roxburghe Club in 186o, and by the Early English Text Society in 1897. See Dr. F. J. Furnivall's introduction to Hoccleve's Works; The Minor Poems, in the Phillipps MS. 8555, and the Durham MS. III. 9, ed. F. J. Furnival ; ii. The Minor Poems in the Ashburnham MS. Addit. /33, ed. Israel Gollancz ; iii. The Regement of Princes A.D. 1411– 12, and fourteen of Hoccleve's minor poems, ed. F. J. Furnivall (Early English Text Society, 3 vols., 1892-1925).