The majority of Linne Mooney's research has been concerned with textual production in England in the mid fifteenth century. Although her interest has increasingly been drawn to scribes and the environments in which they copied texts (most recently the networks centred on the London Guildhall), many of her earlier research ventures focussed more squarely on texts themselves. These were often the kinds of texts that had received little attention from literary scholars. One genre of late medieval literature that she has helped to define is that of didactic writing, a capacious and still under-studied area that encompasses not just works of science and information as categorised by George Keiser but also persuasive and instructional texts from across many fields. Linne Mooney's contributions to this broad area have been of various kinds, beginning with her 1981 thesis and including published editions of texts such as The Seven Liberal Arts and John Somer's Kalendarium. Another edition, of a text that belongs to the subgenre of literary propaganda, appeared as an appendix to an important article ‘Lydgate's “Kings of England” and Another Verse Chronicle of the Kings’ published in 1989. In this assessment of the two works Linne Mooney established that the anonymous poem was entirely separate from Lydgate's poem and recorded the then known copies of both texts. In the present essay I will extend that account of witnesses to include one more copy of Lydgate's poem and several more recently discovered copies of the Anonymous ‘Kings of England’. I will also argue that the augmented list of witnesses for the anonymous poem, and the material form of those witnesses, reinforce conclusions about the work's reception in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and deepen understanding of the circumstances of its production.

Prior to Linne Mooney's 1989 article these two Middle English poems were largely available to scholars through MacCracken's edition of John Lydgate's shorter poems. MacCracken presented both poems together under a single heading: ‘The Kings of England Sithen William Conqueror (with a Popular Redaction)’. Thus described the poem sits amongst other ‘Didactic Poems’ along with others such as ‘A Dietary’ and Stans puer ad mensam.