Another kind of evidence comes in, over the course of the fourteenth century, by consequence of England's expensive war effort. The state itself – in the persons of various place-holders in various government offices, the chancery and household staffs chiefly, including the monarch, nominally, as head of state – undertook to produce and recirculate various newsletters and other official documents, propagating information about the state's achievements, in order to build support. This kind of source, officially produced and circulated, was used by poets as matter for transmutation into metrical propaganda.

With the possibility of such conjunctive evidence for sponsorship comes trouble too, however. In the first place, the official documents so promulgated have mostly disappeared from direct evidence. Being formally ephemeral and of only transient interest, the documents have suffered high rates of attrition, with the result that, often, their existence can only be inferred, from traces (sometimes only imputed) left in surviving other literature. Second, the documentary, historiographical, and poetic idioms in use at the time differ from one another so greatly that one kind of writer's use of matter from another kind of writer's work cannot often be established on a basis of verbal parallels. The stylistic distance traversed in moving materials from one idiom to another is so great as to obscure or obliterate evidence of dependence.

Nonetheless, where (in internal evidence) poets can be shown to have used such official sources (in the external evidence), the convergence of these evidences characterises the poetry as state-sponsored.