Thomas Hoccleve and John Gower were Londoners,—the former a clerk in the Privy Seal Office and the latter probably a city merchant.
Hoccleve is supposed to have taken his name from the village of Hockliffe, Bedfordshire, on the Roman Road, 4½ miles south of Woburn, and 3½ east of Leighton Buzzard. He intended at first to become a priest, but instead he entered the Privy Seal Office in 1308, when he was nineteen or twenty years of age. He complained of the drudgery of copying, and seems to have been always ready to shirk his work. Dr. Furnivall’s side-notes to the autobiographical portion of the Regement of Princes show what the complaints are like: ‘A copier must always work mind, eye and hand together. He can’t talk to other folk, or sing, but must give all his wits to his work. Workmen talk, sing, and lark. We labour in silence, stoop and stare on the sheepskin. Our copying hurts our stomachs, our backs and our eyes. Anyone who has copied for twenty years like I have suffers for it in every bit of his body. It’s nearly done for me. Had I always lived in poverty, I shouldn’t feel it so much now, but the change is strange. God keep me from poverty. I’d sooner die than live miserably.’
As there were many copyists employed in London, we must hope that they were not all so weary of their work as the poet was.
He lived at Chester Inn, which stood on part of the site of the present Somerset House.
‘At Chestre ynne, right fast be the Stronde.’
His daily occupation took him to Westminster, where the Privy Seal Office was situated, and as the Strand was but a poor road we may suppose that he went from home to office in a boat. He went frequently to Paul’s Head Tavern, in St. Paul’s Churchyard, where he made love to the waitresses and others. He also belonged to a dining club, called the Temple Club, ‘the court of good company.’ Often after dinner, instead of going back to the office, he took his pleasure on the Thames, being flattered by the watermen, who fought amongst themselves for his patronage, and called him master, because he paid them well.
He was a good Churchman, and denounced the Lollard Rising in St. Giles’s Fields in January 1414 in good set terms.
Hoccleve was not a very lively poet, and he always seems to have been in want of money. He enjoyed the early part of his life, but when he married and the pinch of poverty came upon him he was very dejected. In spite of his faults we cannot but esteem him, and feel that he has a claim on our gratitude because he was devoted to Chaucer, and was the cause of our possessing the best portrait there is of the poet. Hoccleve was near Chaucer in his last days. He could easily pass from Westminster Palace to the garden of the Chapel of St. Mary. Dr. Furnivall suggests that he was with Chaucer when the great poet died there.[59]
Dr. G. C. Macaulay, in the Introduction to his valuable and exhaustive edition of Gower’s Complete Works, says that the poet speaks with special respect of the estate of merchants, which seems to suggest that it was as a merchant he made the money which he spent in buying his land, and this inference is supported by the manner in which he speaks of ‘our city,’ and by the fact that it is with members of the merchant class that he seems to be most in personal communication. Dr. Macaulay supposes Gower to have been a dealer in wool, with the natural dislike of the Londoner for foreigners. The jealousy of the Lombards which he expresses has every appearance of being a prejudice connected with rivalry in commerce. ‘I see Lombards come,’ he says, ‘in poor attire as servants, and before a year has passed they have gained so much by deceit and conspiracy that they dress more nobly than the burgesses of our city.’[60]