John Skelton in Diss and His Bishop Richard Nix: The Skeltonic dicacitas

Abstract John Skelton’s relations with Richard Nix, bishop of Norwich, are likely to have effected the development of the laureate’s poetry, for it is the case that the careers of the two were intertwined before the decade of Skelton’s church-service in Diss under Nix’s authority. Before coming to the diocese, both Skelton and Nix were involved in entertainment-making in the household of King Henry VII; before their household collaborations, both were trained in avant-garde humanist philology. The privately circulated anti-clerical satires as well as the official state poetry Skelton wrote during his Diss exile bear the impress of interests that the poet shared with his bishop; and the Diss-period work prepared Skelton’s re-emergence as a vituperative ‘monitor of error’ in his second court period after 1512.