Thomas Usk (died 4 March 1388) was appointed the under- sheriff of

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

by Richard II in 1387. His service in this role was brief and he was hanged in the following year.

His life

Born in

, Usk was a petty bureaucrat, scrivener, and author. The Westminster Chronicle records his inglorious death.

Author of ''The Testament of Love'' and Contemporary of Chaucer

Born in

, he is the author of ''The Testament of Love,'' which was once thought to be by Geoffrey Chaucer. Usk was a Collector of Customs from 1381 to 1384, when Geoffrey Chaucer was the Comptroller of Customs. If they were not familiar with each other, Usk at least was familiar with Chaucer's poetry. In ''The Testament of Love,'' the god of Love praises "mine own true servant, the noble philosophical poet in English" who had written a poem on

Troilus Troilus ( or ; grc, Τρωΐλος, Troïlos; la, Troilus) is a legendary character associated with the story of the Trojan War. The first surviving reference to him is in Homer's ''Iliad,'' composed in the late 8th century BCE. In Greek myth ...

(i.e. Chaucer).

Informant

Usk had been servant to

John Northampton John Northampton (also known as John Comberton) (died 1398) was a reformist Lord Mayor of London in 1381 and 1382, during dissension in favour of reform of its Common Council in the early years of Richard II's reign. When the oligarchic leader ...

when the latter was

Lord Mayor of London The Lord Mayor of London is the mayor of the City of London and the leader of the City of London Corporation. Within the City, the Lord Mayor is accorded precedence over all individuals except the sovereign and retains various traditional pow ...

from 1381 to 1383. In 1384, he was arrested and released in exchange for informing against Northampton, for he had no desire, he said, to be "a stinking martyr." This earned him the enmity of the party led by the Duke of Gloucester.

Imprisonment, appeal and execution

When Gloucester's party gained power through the

Merciless Parliament The Merciless Parliament was an English parliamentary session lasting from 3 February to 4 June 1388, at which many members of King Richard II's court were convicted of treason. The session was preceded by a period in which Richard's power was r ...

Usk was prosecuted in 1388 and sentenced to be drawn, hanged, and beheaded, with his head put up over Newgate. ''The Testament of Love'' is an

allegorical As a literary device or artistic form, an allegory is a narrative or visual representation in which a character, place, or event can be interpreted to represent a hidden meaning with moral or political significance. Authors have used allegory t ...

prose work written in prison to seek aid. Walter Skeat found that the initial letters of the sections formed an acrostic saying, "MARGARET OF VIRTU HAVE MERCI ON TSKNVI." Properly decoded, the last word is "THINUSK," or "thin Usk." Usk had been a

Lollard Lollardy, also known as Lollardism or the Lollard movement, was a proto-Protestant Christian religious movement that existed from the mid-14th century until the 16th-century English Reformation. It was initially led by John Wycliffe, a Catho ...

, but he was brought back to the

Roman Catholic Church The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...

while in prison. He was hanged at Tyburn in March 1388, and after his body was taken down it was decapitated after thirty strokes of the axe.

Works

''The Testament of Love''
Ed. by R. Allen Shoaf. TEAMS Middle English Text Series.

Notes

References

* * * * The Westminster Chronicle {{DEFAULTSORT:Usk, Thomas Lollards Writers from London 1388 deaths 14th-century English writers Executed people from London People executed under the Plantagenets by decapitation 14th-century executions by England Year of birth unknown