SKELTON, JOHN. — English satirical poet, born perhaps at Diss around 1460, died at Westminster on 21 June 1529.
He belongs to an age of transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He was tutor to the prince Henry (the future King Henry VIII), author of allegories reminiscent of Chaucer and Langland, and of virulent satirical compositions that have more than once invited comparison with Rabelais. Among his works are especially remembered the allegorical poem *Colin Clout* (1519), which is a personal attack against Cardinal Wolsey, with whom the poet later reconciled, and the *Boke of Philipp Sparowe*, an elegy in which he paraphrases and dilutes the Catholic theme of the death of a sparrow into a long sequence of rather insipid verses.