have thrown vernacular literary styles into greater prominence, or may simply be the result of the fact that the fifteenth century saw a general uptick in the amount of English-language literature being composed and copied. Ultimately, changing literary fashions, along with its perhaps old-fashioned and provincial associations, led to the abandonment of the alliterative form. Its use persisted in Scotland long after it had become a curiosity in an English literary culture totally dominated by the Chaucerian tradition: from 1450 until the following century, every major Scots court poet composed at least one alliterative poem. It is likely that the move of the court of James VI and I from Edinburgh to London in 1603 finally broke the continuous tradition of alliterative metre: its compositional rules were soon forgotten, following which it became "as inaccessible as a dead language". Audience and authors The cultural milieu of the alliterative poets is often described as one more provincial and backward-looking than that of Chaucerian, courtly poetry of the time, with the poems being appreciated by an audience drawn from the landed gentry of the shires rather than the urban sophisticates of the court. The Arthurian subjects of many Revival poems have sometimes been taken as evidence of the movement's provincial or antiquarian character or even of a form of English nationalism. Most of the authors use language closer to the vernacular, use archaic or dialect terms, and structure their work as if to be read aloud to a mixed group of listeners. A more recent interpretation suggests that these qualities are due to alliterative poetry's status as a popular mode closer to the vernacular, or to its tendency to preserve older linguistic forms through poetic formula and convention, rather than resulting from conscious antiquarianism or cultural chauvinism. Several academics, beginning with James Hulbert, have suggested that the Revival's poets could have had a more noble audience, and were part of a conscious regional identity encouraged by powerful northern and western magnates - the Mortimer Earls of March, the Bohun Earls of Hereford and the Beauchamp Earls of Warwick - as a political counterweight to the court. However, as Richard II of England and John of Gaunt both had substantial support and connections in the north-west, it is equally possible to argue that the alliterative poets of this period could easily have had courtly connections. In comparison to some of the authors of