John Lydgate

Born around 1370 and associated for most of his life with the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, John Lydgate became a monk, priest, and writer whose output was remarkably large even by medieval standards. He studied in England and Paris, and his career brought him into contact with noble and royal patrons who commissioned major poems and occasional works.

Lydgate is often remembered as the most important English poet of the generation after Geoffrey Chaucer. Among his best-known writings are The Troy Book, The Siege of Thebes, and The Fall of Princes, along with saints’ lives, devotional verse, pageants, and shorter courtly poems. His writing ranges from moral and religious themes to classical and historical subjects, showing how English poetry was expanding in ambition during the 1400s.

Although modern readers meet him less often than Chaucer, Lydgate mattered enormously to his own age. His works circulated widely in manuscript, shaped literary taste for decades, and offer a vivid window into the religious, political, and literary culture of late medieval England.