The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England

1. Bureaucratic Identity and the Construction of the Self in Hoccleve’s Formulary and ‘‘La Male Regle’’

O N E In 1915, in a talk entitled ‘‘The English Civil Service in the Fourteenth Century,’’ T. F. Tout drew the following contrast between Geoffrey Chaucer and his poetic disciple, Hoccleve: Bureaucratic Identity Thomas Hoccleve was a friend and and the in a humble fashion a poetic follower of Chaucer, but while the broad sweep Construction of the great poet’s vision disregarded of the Self personal reminiscence and anecdotic in triviality the lowly muse of Hoccleve Hoccleve’s Formulary found its most congenial inspiration in the details of his private and official and life. In all the great gallery of the Can- ‘‘La Male Regle’’ terbury Pilgrims there was no public servant whose adventures and personality Chaucer deigned to sketch. On a different plane to his master as an artist , Hoccleve is immensely more useful to the historian of administration by reason of his habit of talking about himself .1 In its suggestion that his verse is material better suited to the social historian than to the literary scholar, this statement typifies much of 1. T. F. Tout, ‘‘The English Civil Service in the Fourteenth Century,’’ Collected Papers, 3 vols. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1934), 3: 217–18 (emphasis added). 18 The Bureaucratic Muse the existing commentary on Hoccleve. What I would like to underline, however , is Tout’s characterization of the anecdotal elements of Hoccleve’s verse as simultaneously ‘‘trivial’’ and ‘‘immensely useful.’’ To a certain extent, this near paradox is a result of Tout’s adoption of two different evaluative personas : on the one hand, echoes of T. S. Eliot and an aesthetic scorn for mere personality, and on the other, a dedicated archivist on the lookout for picturesque details that might add color to the sometimes dry annals of administrative history. I cite Tout’s description here, however, because his unusual linkage of the trivial with the functional reproduces a central feature of Hoccleve’s verse: his tendency to disparage his autobiographical ramblings while, at the same time, deploying this material at the formal and thematic centers of many of his poems. For instance, in his earliest autobiographical work, ‘‘La Male Regle,’’ Hoccleve effects a transition from a list of past sins to the present needs of his purse with the self-censuring comment, ‘‘Ey, what is me that to myself thus longe/Clappid have I? I trowe that I rave’’ (lines 393–94)— ‘‘rave’’ drawing attention to the excess of his anecdotal disclosure and the ‘‘what is me?’’ serving to question the value of the self produced thereby.2 But Hoccleve is not raving here; he has just written an intricate and highly self-conscious variation on the begging poem, and he knew very well that it was the autobiographical detail within the poem that would make it a striking and, with luck, a lucrative piece of verse. H. S. Bennett made a point similar to that of Tout when he suggested that the most important fact about Hoccleve was his ‘‘constant gossiping about himself.’’3 Hoccleve’s dominant mode of self-representation is as the iangler, one whose speech is caught midway between restraint and release, between triviality and institutional gravitas, between sexual identity and indeterminacy .4 His work occupies a curious middle ground between gossip and autobiography. He adopts the voice of the gossip, a voice of informal and scandalous revelation, but instead of using this voice to expose another, Hoc2 . M. C. Seymour, Selections from Hoccleve (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). Further references to ‘‘La Male Regle’’ are drawn from this edition and cited by line number within the text. 3. H. S. Bennett, Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 147. 4. Karma Lochrie’s work on the complex gendering of gossip and its place in the deauthorization of women’s secrets provides an important context for understanding the fluidity of Hoccleve’s representations of gender (see Chapter 2). Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). On gossip, see also the stimulating reflections in Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Knopf, 1985). 19 Identity and Self in the Formulary and ‘‘La Male Regle’’ cleve insistently prods at himself. Considered historically, this gossiping habit raises a difficult question. Why should such gossip, which might also claim to be the dramatic first stirrings of vernacular autobiography, come from a clerk at Westminster, one of those whose...