ABSTRACT
Poethood embraces royalty in the person of King James I of Scotland. Young James fell into English hands while making his way to France at the age of about twelve. He was kept in England for nineteen years and in 1424 married Lady Jane Beaufort. His poem, The Kingis Quair, celebrates his love of Lady Jane. William Dunbar seems to have been employed in the service of King James IV as Chaucer was employed by the English court, and like Chaucer he became the recipient of a royal pension. The words remind us that fifteenth-century poets looked to Chaucer as the great master of rhetoric, sadly undervaluing perhaps the qualities that have appealed to later ages. During the decades when the ‘Scottish Chaucerians’ were at work there was only one poet in the south to break through the mediocrity of what was a dull period for English poetry, and that was John Skelton.
