John Tickhill

John Tickhill, also spelled John de Tickhill, is an English poet who wrote “A Bird in Bishopswood” in 1395. The poem was found by an archivist at St. Paul’s Cathedral, where Tickhill was a rent collector, and was first edited by scholar Ruth Kennedy in 1987. The poem was written on the back of a parchment paper that recorded, in Latin, the accounts of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, from 1395 to 1396. Both the poem and the manuscript date to the late 14th century. 

Tickhill’s springtime “A Bird in Bishopswood” can be compared to other late medieval English and French poems, such as William Langland’s Piers Plowman, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose, the themes of which focus on springtime, reflection, new beginnings, and exploration.