ABSTRACT
In 1796 George Mason published the first printed book devoted to works of Thomas Hoccleve: Poems by Thomas Hoccleve, Never Before Printed: Selected from a MS. in the Possession of George Mason. George Mason, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, was born in 1735, studied at Oxford, and was called to the bar from the Inner Temple. In March 1785, at a sale of manuscripts formerly owned by Anthony Askew, Mason purchased a copy of Hoccleve’s shorter poems—the manuscript in the Huntington Library, California, and catalogued there as MS HM 11. Most of the earlier history of this copy is obscure. In the short account of Hoccleve himself with which Mason opens his Preface, he refers chiefly to what were then the standard biographical sources: John Bale, Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Brytannie: Catalogus ; John Pits, Relationum Historicarum de Rebus Anglicis Tomus Primus; and especially Thomas Tanner’s Bibliotheca Britannico-Hibernica.
