John Lydgate

John Lydgate of Bury (c. 1370 – c. 1451) was an English monk and poet born in Lidgate, near Haverhill, Suffolk. He wrote an enormous amount of verse—about 145,000 lines by a conservative estimate—and worked in nearly every major genre that Geoffrey Chaucer had pioneered, steering clear only of those, like the fabliau, that clashed with his religious vocation. His Troy Book, a 30,117-line expanded translation of a thirteenth-century Latin history by Guido delle Colonne, was commissioned by Prince Henry (the future Henry V) and aimed to surpass Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Troilus with a full-scale epic.

The Siege of Thebes (4,716 lines) is a shorter venture into chivalric epic. Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale—a brief catalogue of Fortune’s ups and downs—foreshadows Lydgate’s massive Fall of Princes (36,365 lines), which ultimately draws on Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, though not directly. Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, with its rhetorical flourishes of apostrophe, invocation, and digression in a saint’s legend, served as the model for Lydgate’s legends of St Edmund (3,693 lines) and St Alban (4,734 lines)—both local monastic patrons—as well as for many shorter saints’ lives, though not for his more richly devout Life of Our Lady (5,932 lines).

Early life and education

In his late poem The Testament, Lydgate confessed to childhood misdeeds: lying, stealing apples, making faces like a wanton ape, gambling at cherry stones, rising late, being messy at meals, and faking illness. He entered the Benedictine monastery of Bury St Edmunds Abbey in 1382, took novice vows soon after, and was ordained a subdeacon in 1389. A letter from Henry V indicates Lydgate studied at Oxford University, likely at Gloucester College (now Worcester College), from 1406 to 1408, during which he wrote his early Isopes Fabules, packed with scholastic references.

Career

Ambitious as a writer, Lydgate admired Chaucer and befriended his son Thomas. He sought and won patronage at the courts of Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI, with supporters including the mayor and aldermen of London, the chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral, Richard de Beauchamp (13th Earl of Warwick), and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (his main backer from 1422). In 1423 he became prior of Hatfield Broad Oak, Essex, but soon resigned to focus on travel and writing.

He produced poems, allegories, fables, and romances prolifically. His best-known longer works are the moralistic Troy Book (1412–20), the Siege of Thebes (translated from a French prose version of the Roman de Thebes), and the Fall of Princes (1431–8), his last and longest piece. His more accessible early poems, written in a Chaucerian style during the first decade of the 1400s, include The Complaint of the Black Knight (modelled on Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess), The Temple of Glas (indebted to The House of Fame), The Floure of Curtesy (a Valentine’s Day poem like the Parlement of Foules), and the allegorical Reason and Sensuality.

As he aged, his poems grew longer, prompting Joseph Ritson’s harsh verdict: “A voluminous, prosaick and drivelling monk.” A twentieth-century historian similarly called his verse “banal.” The long allegory The Assembly of Gods was once attributed to him but is now considered anonymous, and the satirical London Lickpenny has been thoroughly discredited as his work. He also translated poems by Guillaume de Deguileville into English. In later years he lived and likely died at Bury St Edmunds Abbey, and at some point returned to his birthplace, where he left his signature and a coded message in a graffito on a wall at St Mary’s Church, Lidgate, discovered in 2014.