ABSTRACT
Colin was a lower-class name, often associated with rustics (L colonus ‘farmer’; Kinsman 1950:17-23); a clout is a rag or a clod of earth. The combination of rusticity and alliteration in Colin’s name recalls Piers Plowman, a man of the people and a voice of wisdom both in Langland’s poem and in much subsequent didactic verse of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Spenser’s use of the name was perhaps inspired in part by Marot’s Complaincte de Madame Loyse de Savoye (1531), the source of his November eclogue; Marot’s speakers, like Spenser’s, are called Thenot and Colin.
