Some twelve years after Chaucer's death, Thomas Hoccleve paid tribute to the eloquence, wisdom, and piety of his predecessor in three passages of The Regement of Princes. Hoccleve's admiration, he claims, is based upon personal acquaintance; for when, in the Regement prologue, he first reveals his name to the old almsman, the latter's immediate reaction is to identify him as one of those people who knew Chaucer:

Later, Hoccleve recalls how Chaucer was accustomed to help him with ‘consail and reed’:

The apology for dullness is conventional enough; but there are no good reasons to doubt that Hoccleve had, towards the end of the previous century, sat at Chaucer's feet and received from him some kind of instruction in the art of English poetry.

Given this association, it is not surprising that certain of Hoccleve's own poems should have been attracted into the Chaucerian orbit during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Like Chaucer, Hoccleve ‘wroot ful many a lyne’ in praise of the Virgin Mary (Regement, 4987), and two of his eight Marian poems proved capable of being mistaken for the master's.