John Lydgate (1370?-1451?); Monk and poet, born in Lidgate, Suffolk, England. He was admitted to the Benedictine monastery of Bury St. Edmunds at fifteen and became a monk there a year later. Well educated, possibly studying at both Oxford University and Cambridge University, and having literary ambitions (he was an admirer of Geoffrey Chaucer and a friend to his son, Thomas) he sought and obtained patronage for his literary work at the courts of Henry IV of England, Henry V of England and Henry VI of England. His patrons included, amongst many others, the mayor and aldermen of London, the chapter of St. Paul's Cathedral, Richard de Beauchamp, 13th Earl of Warwick and Henry V and VI, however his main supporter from 1422 was Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. In 1423 he was made prior of Hatfield Broad Oak, Essex but soon resigned the office to concentrate on his travels and writing. He was a prolific writer of poems, allegories, fables and romances, yet his most famous works were his longer and more moralistic Troy book, Siege of Thebes and the Fall of Princes. In his later years he lived and probably died at the monastery of Bury St. Edmunds.
Lydgate had a consuming passion for literature, and it was probably that he might indulge this taste more fully that in 1 434 he retired from the priorate of Hatfield Broadoak (or Hatfield Regis), to which he had been appointed in June 1423.
Cursed with such immoderate fluency Lydgate could not sustain himself at the highest level of artistic excellence; and, though imbued with a sense of the essentials of poetry, and eager to prove himself in its various manifestations, he stinted himself of the self-discipline necessary to perfection of form.
Lydgate is not quite so great a sinner in this respect as are some of his successors, but his tendency cannot be mistaken, and John Metham is amply justified in his censure Eke JohnLydgate, sometime monk of Bury, His books indited with terms of rhetoric And half-changed Latin, with conceits of poetry.
Lydgate's massive Troy Book, commissioned by Henry V when still Prince of Wales, became the standard history of the Trojan War in English (as its patron hoped it would) and is one of the sources for Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.
Lydgate approached Chaucer's story of Troilus and Criseyde as a scholarly commentator ready to annotate, reinforce, and provide his readers with the historical context to Chaucer's work; Henryson's response is to exploit in his own original way Chaucer's innovative literary devices, including the characterization of Criseyde.
Lydgate clearly accepted the authority of the Historia, regarding it, as Walter Schirmer has noted, as a "historical work containing all the moral and political lessons which history was expected to teach."(5) Lydgate changes nothing essential in Guido's factual matter, though everything is developed at greater length.
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