“Ample proof that rap has been around for 500 years.” Sorry, blacks, you can’t even claim rap as your own!

John Skelton lived from the 1460s until 1529. He came after Geoffrey Chaucer and Sir Thomas Mallory. He preceded Spenser and Shakespeare. He was a young man when Mallory’s “Le Mort d’Arthur” was published, and he was old when Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia” came out.

Like most rap artists, John Skelton did not have a glamorous background. Nothing is known about him prior to when he began studying at Oxford University in the early 1480’s. There he was awarded the title “poet laureate”, which would be the equivalent of a modern day doctorate of poetry. He soon became famous for his rhetoric, his satiric flair and his translations. In 1488 he joined the court of Henry VII, and was the official royal poet for most of the next 40 years. [...]

Skelton had invented a new style of poetry. Typically they were rapid two or three-stressed lines with frequent alliteration and a single-rhyme pattern repeated for as long as the poet pleases. His style was later dubbed the Skeltonic meter.

As an example here’s the second stanza of The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng, about an ugly old hag who ran a brewery:

Her lothely lere

Is nothynge clere,

But ugly of chere,

Droupy and drowsy,

Scurvy and lowsy;

Her face all bowsy,

Comely crynkled,

Woundersly wrynkled,

Lyke a rost pygges eare,

Brystled wyth here.

Which is not unlike how modern rap artists describe their women…

Incidentally the first line of the poem is: Tell you I chill, a rapper declaration if I’ve ever heard one.

The common folk were often the theme of his poetry - he used more colloquial English and vulgar terms than Robert Burns.

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