John Skelton seems to have been imprisoned …
Years: 1504 - 1515
John Skelton seems to have been imprisoned in 1502, but no reason is known for his disgrace.
He retires two years later from regular attendance at court to become rector of Diss, a benefice which he will retain nominally until his death.
Skelton frequently signs himself "regius orator" and poet-laureate, but there is no record of any emoluments paid in connection with these dignities, although the Abbé du Resnel, author of Recherches sur les poètes couronnez, asserts that he had seen a patent (1513–1514) in which Skelton was appointed poet-laureate to Henry VIII.
As rector of Diss he causes great scandal among his parishioners, who think him, says Anthony Wood, more fit for the stage than for the pew or the pulpit.
He is secretly married to a woman who lives in his house, and he has earned the hatred of the Dominican monks by his fierce satire.
Consequently he comes under the formal censure of Richard Nix, the bishop of the diocese, and appears to have been temporarily suspended.
After his death a collection of farcical tales, no doubt chiefly, if not entirely, apocryphal, will gather round his name—The Merie Tales of Skelton.
During the rest of the century he will figure in the popular imagination as an incorrigible practical joker.
His sarcastic wit makes him some enemies, among them Sir Christopher Garnesche or Garneys, Alexander Barclay, and the French scholar, Robert Gaguin, who lived from about 1425 to 1502.
With Garneys he engages in a regular "flyting," undertaken, he says, at the king's command, but Skelton's four poems read as if the abuse in them were dictated by genuine anger.
Skelton writes his Phyllyp Sparrowe, produced in about 1506, in characteristic short lines of colloquial English with varied numbers of syllables but two strong beats, end-rhymed in couplets, triplets, and sometimes quadruplets.
Skelton in his Garlande of Laurell gives a long list of his works, only a few of which are extant.
The garland in question was worked for him in silks, gold and pearls by the ladies of the Countess of Surrey at Sheriff Hutton Castle, where he was the guest of the duke of Norfolk.
The composition includes complimentary verses to the various ladies concerned, and a good deal of information about himself.
But it is as a satirist that Skelton merits attention.
The Bowge of Court is directed against the vices and dangers of court life.
He had already in his Boke of the Thre Foles drawn on Alexander Barclay's version of the Narrenschijf of Sebastian Brant, and this more elaborate and imaginative poem belongs to the same class.
Skelton, falling into a dream at Harwich, sees a stately ship in the harbor called the "Bowge of Court", the owner of which is the "Dame Saunce Pere".
Her merchandise is Favour; the helmsman Fortune; and the poet, who figures as Drede (modesty), finds on board F'avell (the flatterer), Suspect, Harvy Hafter (the clever thief), Dysdayne, Ryotte, Dyssymuler and Subtylte, who all explain themselves in turn, until at last Drede, who finds they are secretly his enemies, is about to save his life by jumping overboard, when he wakes with a start.
Both of these poems are written in the seven-lined Rhyme Royal, a Continental verse-form first used in English by Chaucer, but it is in an irregular meter of his own—known as "Skeltonics"—that his most characteristic work is accomplished.
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Years: 1504 - 1515
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