The last chapter introduced us to the figure of Chaucer as he appears in the Regiment, and offered a comparative, international context for Hoccleve's moral version of Chaucer. In this chapter, we will consider the figure of Hoccleve in greater detail, and will explore other English poetic discourses that contribute to Hoccleve's self-presentation. We will situate Hoccleve with respect to extra-Chaucerian, English literary traditions concerned with Christian allegory and ecclesiastical critique, including Piers Plowman and the texts that comprise the Piers Plowman tradition. In doing so, we will indicate how the figure of Hoccleve emerges at a crossroads between historical personal identity and communal scribal identity, and how ‘Hoccleve’ constitutes in itself an intermingling of English poetic voices – an embodied dialogue concerning the possible applications of English poetic discourse. The advertising (and exercise) of the virtue of prudence proves paramount here: we study Hoccleve's use of the virtue throughout his works, and the prudent examples Hoccleve sets for his contemporaries to follow. Hoccleve's prudent examples indicate a means of reforming English literary ‘thought’ in the early fifteenth century: Hoccleve offers himself as a model for readers, a medium for examining and reflecting on personal and literary reformation in a time of ecclesiastical and political turbulence.

Hoccleve's self-naming in the Regiment occurs almost 1,900 lines into the first section of the poem, and it arrives – as we have seen – with the mention of Hoccleve having been ‘acquainted’ with Chaucer. However, Hoccleve's identity evolves, in its unnamed form, across the span of this first section, in the sequence leading up to the poet's meeting with the old man, and throughout his itinerant dialogue; and this identity emerges at a crossroads between what would appear to be real, biographical details specific to Hoccleve – such as the period in which he has worked for the Privy Seal and the information regarding his marriage – and what might be referred to as his communal identity, his position as a scribe working among scribes and administrators in Westminster.