Poet (circa 1350), wrote a series of short poems on the victories of Edward III., beginning with the battle of Halidon Hill (1333), and ending with the siege of Guines Castle (1352). Among them is a lyric in celebration of the battle of Crecy (1346). An edition of his works was published by Ritson in 1795, and later in 1825.

  For want of a better poet, he may, by courtesy, be called the Tyrtæus of his age.

  Ritson, the editor of Minot, praises his author for the ease, variety, and harmony of his versification, in which qualities he declares him to have no equals, previous to the sixteenth century, except Robert of Brunne and Tusser. As a poet Minot is certainly equal to these two writers, though perhaps not much superior. In one respect, however, he is entitled to some praise; he is the first English versifier who quits the beaten track of translation from chronicle, romance, and theology. As regards choice of subject he may be classed with his northern contemporary Barbour, though, in every other respect, he is far inferior to the Scottish Homer.

  He stands out clearly from the more ancient ballad-writers, in the subjective side of his poetry. We see Laurence Minot personally anxious for the welfare of England, personally praying for country and king; and the proud exultation over victories won that breaks forth in his songs, sounds from lips that speak in the name of the whole nation, but none the less in the name of this definite personality. The style and metrical form of Minot’s songs are also individual, however they may conform to tradition, and regardless of the fact that all the elements into which exact analysis resolves them, were found already existing by the poet. His originality consists in the blending of the technique of the gleemen’s song with that of the clerical lyric. He has not, after all, given a vivid picture of the event that he sings. We obtain the parts of such a picture singly, like fragments that the waves of lyrical movement have borne to the shore. For with Minot the lyrical element is decidedly uppermost; it is unfortunately not powerful enough in itself to enchain our interest. Thus the impression we receive is very positive, but by no means unmixed; the impression made by a gifted man, who, half folk-poet and half art-poet, is neither entirely, and hence must rank beneath many less important writers.

  His verses are sometimes spirited, but never especially significant.

  No wonder that when the battles were fought by the people itself, and when the cost of the wars was to so large an extent defrayed by its self-imposed contributions, the Scottish and French campaigns should have called forth that national enthusiasm which found an echo in the songs of Lawrence Minot, as hearty war-poetry as has been composed in any age of our literature. They were put forth in 1352, and considering the unusual popularity they are said to have enjoyed, it is not impossible that they may have reached Chaucer’s ears in his boyhood.

  Minot’s verse is fluent; he can expatiate on an old current prophecy and follow the old military fashion of comparing men to beasts, but he has not the imagination or the insight of a poet, and is an artist only in the mechanism of his verse.

  In the war-lyrics of our earliest national poet Laurence Minot,—who may be appropriately termed the laureate of Edward the Third’s reign, as all his extant works celebrate the victories of that monarch,—we, for the first time in the history of our poetry, meet with original invention combined with vigorous expression.

  Minot neither founded nor belonged to a school. In metrical form he presents, in various combinations, the accentual, alliterative verse of the west and north; and the syallabic, rhymed verse of the east and south; rhyme and some degree of alliteration being constant features…. While thus profuse in metrical ornament, Minot cannot, however, be said to show any further care for literary art. He writes in impetuous haste, but without true lyric inspiration; and his energy often confuses his narrative instead of driving it home. But while Minot has no great literary value, and gives almost no new information, he embodies in a most vivid way the militant England of his day. He has but one subject, the triumph of England and the English king over French and Scots. The class divisions among Englishmen are for him wholly merged in the unity of England; himself probably of Norman origin, his habitual language is the strongest and homeliest Saxon.

  He is given to expletives, he seldom or never succeeds in giving us a distinct visual picture; his very variety of metre, etc., looks more like the absence of any distinct grasp and command of one form than like a sense of general mastery. But, as has hardly been the case for three hundred years and more, he has a fairly settled tongue and a generally accepted prosody, with its peculiarities of lilt and swing all ready to his hands; and he manages to make very tolerably good use of them. Indeed, though it may seem rather ungracious, it is not impossible to say that his chief use in literature proper is that he explains Chaucer—shows how the tools were ready for the workman.

  It is in technical points that this writer displays his skill, and he half succeeds in elevating popular verse into a fine art. Minot is something of a court-minstrel, something of a ballad-singer, but he was not strong enough to do what Chaucer might have done in his place—transfigure this combination in the rôle of a great national poet.