BOTH THE REEVE's Tale and the Host's comments following the Tale of Melibee end with a discussion of a staff— for the Reeve's Tale, it is the weapon Symkyn's wife uses in the final bit of textualized violence, fully repaying the Reeve's enemy for his fabliau. For the Host, it is the “the grete clobbed staves” his wife brings to him to beat the knaves. As the Tales are recopied and then, finally, printed, solidifying the reputation of Chaucer as the first “fyndere” of English verse, these narrative punishments, for me, echo across the fifteenth century in the exemplum “Tale of John of Canace,” included in Thomas Hoccleve's Regiment and printed by William Caxton. What is first a mace and then a club in Caxton's version highlights similar energies of punishment and prosthesis. But the common exemplum and its revisions also introduce that Hoccleve is erased for Caxton, even as he functions as a prologue for print, indeed “Hoccleve is at once everywhere in Caxton … yet nowhere to be found in portfolio.” In fleshing out this absence and erasure, I touch first on Caxton's printing of the Book of Curtesye with its small description of Hoccleve's Regiment. Arguing that the Regiment serves as supplement to the conception of old age and print in Caxton's paratextual materials, I then turn to a discussion of “John of Canace,” uncovering the inscription and staff in an otherwise empty chest. This link between Hoccleve and Caxton helps to reframe some of the exclamations of age-related impairments in Caxton's paratextual material, which I trace in a number of different texts and translations, beginning with Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye and ending with Polychronicon's textual substitution for embodied old age.

It would be difficult to find a better model for embodied old age and its similarities to writing than Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes— the end of the prologue to Regiment makes this model valuable, even as the end of the advisory text and the inclusion of “John of Canace” suggests the model might have been used by Caxton. When Thomas Hoccleve writes of his return home, near the end of the prologue, he describes a literal journey that is also meant to serve as a figurative homecoming, a move toward patronage from the prince.