Sir Thomas Clanvowe

Sir Thomas Clanvowe (flourished c. 1400) was an English courtier and poet, the reputed author of The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, a poetic debate about love, long attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer. The poem is a traditional dialogue between the two birds on the power of love, with delicate and attractive descriptions of spring, and a verse style that, though faulty at times, is Chaucerian in inspiration. The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, called in some manuscripts The Book of Cupid, God of Love, first appeared in William Thynne’s edition of Chaucer in 1532, and it was not until W.W. Skeat’s edition of Chaucer’s works in 1894–97 that the poem was ascribed to Clanvowe, whose name appeared on the best of the extant manuscripts.

Clanvowe is known to have been at court in the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV, being one of the knights who accompanied John Beaufort, earl of Somerset, eldest son of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, to Barbary in North Africa in 1390.