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After noting the evidence for the public performance of poetry in Continental Europe, this chapter turns to the impact of print on English poetry: from the late fifteenth century, the printers Caxton and de Worde gave readers a new way to experience poems. At the court of Henry VIII, Skelton exploited both manuscript and print. The Devonshire manuscript, which circulated around Henry’s courtiers, is discussed, as is Tottel’s 1557 Songes and Sonettes, whose cachet lay partly in its making the private poetry of the elite available to a large public. Another popular collection was A Mirror for Magistrates, in which a gathering of poets impersonating famous tragic victims of the past was staged. Although there were signs of a suppler use of metre, the 1560s and 1570s were characterized by highly regular verse. The most skilled poet of this period, Gascoigne, was also responsible for a pathbreaking treatise on poetry.

This chapter takes up the narrative of Churchyard’s life once he leaves Shrewsbury in c.1542 or 1543 and heads towards the Tudor court in search of cultural and/or material enrichment. It considers the question of what it meant to go to court in the Tudor period and compares Churchyard’s representation of his youthful experiences at Henry VIII’s court to contemporary poetry about court by John Skelton, Stephen Hawes, Francis Bryan, and Alexander Barclay. The chapter focuses on the moment at which Churchyard enters the employ of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and considers the nature of their relationship and the kinds of experiences they may have shared. It examines Churchyard’s earliest literary activities and proposes that the author made twelve contributions to Richard Tottel’s Miscellany that may offer insight into what this early literary material looked like.

This chapter examines the most significant poetic miscellanies of the sixteenth century, focusing on Tottel’s Miscellany, A Mirror for Magistrates, and England’s Helicon, showing how these volumes attempted to fashion a reading and writing nation. Songes and Sonettes (commonly known as Tottel’s Miscellany) was first printed at a time of great national crisis and presents poetry as a way of enduring various kinds of suffering, even if its focus seems largely on love. A Mirror for Magistrates construes national history through verse as an object of proper contemplation for those with civic responsibilities. In England’s Helicon, though the focus on pastoral tries to establish a poetic community, we see the emergence of a new, more atomistic society, which poetic ideals struggle to bind together.

This chapter discusses the period when Churchyard takes up a career as a professional soldier, beginning with service at Wark Castle, Northumberland. Attention then turns to Churchyard’s involvement in the English defeat of the Scots at the Battle of Pinkie on 10 September 1547, one encounter of the wars called the ‘rough wooing’ of Scotland. It examines the nature of Churchyard’s service during the Scots campaign led by Edward Seymour, Protector Somerset, and proposes that the author spent as much time at sea as he did on land. The chapter discusses Churchyard’s participation in a failed raid at St Monans in East Fife, at which he was captured, and the author’s release and flight to Lauder Castle. Finally it deals with Churchyard’s service with Sir Anthony St Leger in Ireland during 1551.