Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/151

 bend or. This was not the first dispute of the kind in which Scrope had engaged. At Calais in 1347 his right to the crest of a crab issuing from a coronet had been unsuccessfully challenged (Scrope and Grosvenor Roll, i. 62). Again, before Paris in 1360, a Cornish squire named Carminowe, who bore the same arms, had questioned his right to them. It was then decided that both were entitled to bear them—Carminowe because his ancestors had borne them since the time of King Arthur, and because Cornwall was ‘un grosse terre et jadis portant le noun dune roialme;’ and Scrope because his forefathers had used this blazon since the days of William the Conqueror (ib. i. 50, 214). The bearings were simple, and their recurrence easily explicable in districts so isolated from each other as Yorkshire, Cheshire, and Cornwall. Nevertheless, after a trial extending over nearly five years [see under, for details], in which doubts were thrown on the gentility of Scrope as the son of a ‘man of law,’ judgment was finally given (27 May 1390) entirely in his favour. He got his adversary excused a fine incurred by non-payment of the costs, and the two were publicly reconciled before the king in parliament. The records of the trial and depositions of the witnesses, printed by Sir Harris Nicolas in 1832, throw much incidental light upon the early history of the Scrope family and upon the details of Edward III's wars. Scrope's son, the Earl of Wiltshire, abandoned the crab crest for a plume of feathers azure, leaving the former to the Masham branch. There is an impression of the ‘sigillum de Crabb’ in the ‘Testamenta Eboracensia’ (ii. 187).

The celebrated controversy had been interrupted by the political crisis of 1386–9, in which Scrope sided with the king's opponents, and sat on their commission of government. His opposition at least was disinterested, for he spoke out boldly in parliament on behalf of his much maligned brother-in-law, Michael de la Pole, earl of Suffolk [q. v.] (Rot. Parl. iii. 216–17). On Richard's resuming power and ruling with more deference to his subjects' susceptibilities, Scrope was more than once employed in negotiations with France and Scotland, and occasionally acted as a trier of petitions in parliament. But his advancing age induced him to devote much of his time to good works and the completion of his great castle at Bolton. The abbey of St. Agatha at Easby, close to Richmond, in which his father, its second founder, lay buried, had already experienced his generosity. He now (about 1393) set aside an annual rent of 100l. to provide twelve additional canons to pray for himself and his family. The fine late decorated refectory is said to have been his work (Testamenta Eboracensia, i. 274). He got the church of Wensley made collegiate, and furnished the chapels of St. Anne and St. Oswald at Bolton with a priest apiece (, i. 655). His castle of Bolton, placed on the north side of Wensleydale five miles west of Wensley, was now rapidly approaching completion. The license to crenellate had been granted in 1379, but the contract with the builder is at least a year earlier. Though he lived to see it finished, Scrope passed most of his later life at ‘Scrope's Inn,’ Holborn, or at the manor of Pishobury in Hertfordshire, purchased in 1394 (, ii. 193). As the last stones of Bolton Castle were being placed in position, Richard took his belated revenge upon his old adversaries of 1386. But Scrope's former moderation or his eldest son's favour with the king procured an exception in his favour. On 29 Nov. 1397 a full pardon issued to ‘Sir Richard le Scrop, an adherent of the Duke of Gloucester’ (Fœdera, viii. 26). On the king's overthrow two years later, the odium incurred by Scrope's son as a chief agent of his tyranny threatened his father with a new danger. He appeared in the first parliament of Henry IV, and ‘humbly and in tears’ entreated the new king not to visit the sins of the son upon his father and brothers. Henry graciously consented that they should not be disinherited for Wiltshire's treason (Rot. Parl. iii. 453). With one exception—on the occasion of the attainder of the conspirators of Christmas 1399 in January 1401—this was Scrope's last public appearance. He died on 30 May 1403, and was buried in the abbey of St. Agatha. In ‘Testamenta Eboracensia’ (ii. 186) is a notice of a pension which he had to grant to a person seriously wounded by himself and his servants in York Minster.

By his wife Blanche (d. after 1378), daughter of Sir William de la Pole of Hull, Scrope had four sons, of whom the eldest, William, earl of Wiltshire (d. 1399), is separately noticed.

The second son, Roger, succeeded him as second baron, but died in the same year (3 Dec.), when his son Richard (b. 1393?), by one of the coheiresses of Robert, lord Tiptoft, became third baron; Richard's grandson was John le Scrope, fifth baron Scrope of Bolton [q. v.]

The third son, Stephen, whom his father married to a second Tiptoft coheiress, became in her right lord of Bentley, near Doncaster,