Clanvowe, John

(ca. 1341–1391)

   John Clanvowe was a poet, a diplomat, a knight, and a member of the household of King RICHARD II. He was also a friend and contemporary of Geoffrey CHAUCER, and it was Chaucer more than anyone who seems to have influenced Clanvowe’s style, particularly in his best-known work, The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, or The Book of Cupid. Clanvowe is believed to have been born in Hergest in Herefordshire near the Welsh frontier. Apparently of Welsh ancestry himself, Clanvowe inherited an estate near the border. He became a knight in the service of Sir Humphrey de Bohun, the 11th Earl of Hereford, and fought in France, taking part in the Battle of Lussac Bridge in 1369. When Hereford died in 1373, Clanvowe entered the service of King EDWARD III. Later he was knight of Richard II’s household. Like Chaucer, he was a supporter of JOHN OF GAUNT, and is included among the so-called LOLLARD knights, a group of high-ranking laymen in Richard’s court who were followers of John WYCLIFFE’s heresy. A lover of the pageantry of chivalry, Clanvowe was known for taking part in the famous monthlong tournament of Saint Inglevert in 1389, in which three French knights challenged all comers.

   Clanvowe’s relationship with Chaucer may have begun when both were being sent on similar diplomatic missions under both Edward III and Richard II. Their relationship was close enough for Chaucer to ask Clanvowe to be one of the witnesses to his 1380 release from the charge of raptus by Cecily Champain.

   Clanvowe died near Constantinople in 1391, where he may have gone on a crusade, or, more likely, a pilgrimage with his friend and fellow “Lollard knight,” Sir William Neville, admiral of the King’s Fleet. It is reported that after Clanvowe’s death, Neville refused food and died a few days later. The two were buried in a single grave, and many now believe that the two were longtime companions in a homosexual relationship. Clanvowe is the author of a pacifist religious tract entitled The Two Ways. In this prose treatise Clanvowe condemns worldly excess and encourages his readers to love God and to follow his commandments. He is believed to also be the author of a more accessible poem in a Chaucerian style entitled The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, or The Boke of Cupid (although his son, Thomas Clanvowe, has been thought by some to be the author). This poem, written for St. Valentine’s Day, was attributed to Chaucer for more than three centuries, until manuscript evidence led the great 19th-century Chaucerian scholar W.W. Skeat to link it to Clanvowe.

   The Cuckoo and the Nightingale is a courtly poem of 290 lines, written in stanzas of five octosyllabic (or eight-syllable) lines rhyming aabba. The poem is both a DREAM VISION and a DEBATE POEM. Cupid sends the poet into the woods, where he hears a nightingale singing praises of love,while a cuckoo ridicules his song. The poet chases the cuckoo away and comforts the nightingale, and in the end a parliament of birds is called for, to take place on St. Valentine’s Day. The poem’s debt to Chaucer’s PARLIAMENT OF FOWLS is clear, and Clanvowe also refers at one point to Chaucer’s “Palamon and Arcite,” the early version of The KNIGHT’S TALE. These relationships suggest that Clanvowe’s poem was produced in the mid-1380s. Clanvowe’s two very different works and the fascinating variety of his life, in addition to the rather recent attribution to him of a text long thought to be Chaucer’s, make him and his work an inviting subject for further study.

   Bibliography

   ■ Clanvowe, John. The Works of Sir John Clanvowe. Edited by V. J. Scattergood. Cambridge: U.K. Brewer, 1975.

   ■ Patterson, Lee. “Court Politics and the Invention of Literature: The Case of Sir John Clanvowe.” In Culture and History, 1350–1600, edited by David Aers, 7–42. Detroit:Wayne State University Press, 1992.