Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/155

 whom Scrope in a vision commanded to remove these obstacles, lifted weights which three strong men could barely raise (, p. 226). Subsequently the prohibition on bringing offerings to his tomb was removed, and they were devoted to the reconstruction of the great tower. The tomb still exists. Henry having averted the threatened papal excommunication, Scrope never received ecclesiastical recognition as a saint or martyr, despite the appeals of the convocation of York in 1462. But he was popularly known in the north as Saint Richard Scrope, under which appellation missals contained prayers to him as the ‘Glory of York’ and the ‘Martyr of Christ.’

Scrope's high character, his gravity, simplicity, and purity of life, and pleasant manners are borne witness to by the writers most friendly to the king (Annales Henrici, p. 403;, ii. 269). Walsingham speaks vaguely of his ‘incomparable knowledge of literature.’ His manifesto, preserved only in a Latin translation, was meant for the popular ear, and the translator's criticism of the ‘barbarousness and inelegance’ of his original is probably a reflection on the English language rather than on Scrope's style. A late York writer attributes to him several sequences and prayers in use in the minster (Historians of York, ii. 429). It was during Scrope's archiepiscopate that the rebuilding of the choir, in abeyance since the death of Archbishop Thoresby, was resumed and carried to completion. The Scropes, with other great Yorkshire families, were munificent supporters of the work. An alleged portrait of Scrope in a missal written before 1445 is mentioned in ‘Notes and Queries,’ 2nd ser. i. 489. A drawing in watercolours by Powell, from a stained-glass window formerly in York minster, is in the National Portrait Gallery.

[There is a meagre notice of Scrope's earlier career in the Lives of the Bishops of Lichfield by Whitlocke (c. 1560) in Anglia Sacra, i. 450; a brief and inaccurate life is contained in the early sixteenth-century continuation of Stubbs's Lives of the Archbishops of York by an unknown author (Dr. Raine suggests William de Melton [q. v.]). This is printed in the Historians of the Church of York, vol. ii. (Rolls Ser.). The fullest and best modern biography will be found in the second volume of Mr. Wylie's History of Henry IV, though his judgment of Scrope is perhaps too severe. It should be compared with Bishop Stubbs's estimate in his Constitutional History, vol. iii. There is a short life by Sir Harris Nicolas in the second volume (p. 121) of his edition of the Scrope and Grosvenor Roll, 1832. The chief original authorities are the Annales Henrici IV, Continuatio Eulogii Historiarum, and Walsingham's Historia Anglicana in the Rolls Ser.; Otterbourne's History and the Monk of Evesham's Chronicle, ed. Hearne; Thomas Gascoigne's Account of the Trial and Execution printed at the end of his Loci e Libro Veritatum, ed. Thorold Rogers, and confirmed in many points by the Chronicle edited by Dr. Giles, 1848; Gascoigne also preserved, and his editor has printed, the exposition by Northumberland, &c., of the causes for which Scrope died. Another account, based on the report of an eyewitness, of Scrope's rebellion and execution is printed from a manuscript in Lincoln College, Oxford, in Historians of York, iii. 288–91. A lament for Scrope occurs in Hymns to the Virgin (Early English Text Soc. 1867), another was printed in the Athenæum, 4 Aug. 1888; Higden's Polychronicon (Rolls Ser.); see also Rymer's Fœdera, original ed.; Devon's Issues of the Exchequer; Godwin, De Præsulibus Angliæ, ed. Richardson, 1743; Le Neve's Fasti Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ, ed. Hardy; Testamenta Eboracensia (Surtees Soc.); Hunter's South Yorkshire; Whitaker's Richmondshire; Yorkshire Archæol. Journal, viii. 311.]  SCROPE, THOMAS (d. 1491), bishop of Dromore, was also called from his birthplace in the parish of Medburne, Leicestershire; in the Austin priory there he is supposed to have received his early education. His epitaph (, p. 768) affiliates him to the noble family of Scrope. In the bull appointing him bishop he is called Thomas Scropbolton (, p. 658), and the barons Scrope of Bolton were lords of Medburne and patrons of Bradley priory. His great age at his death and the arms on his tomb formerly in Lowestoft church (Scrope of Bolton quartering Tiptoft, differenced by a crescent) suggest that his father may have been one of the two sons of Richard le Scrope, first baron Scrope of Bolton [q. v.], who married Tiptoft heiresses. Roger, who became second baron, had, however, a son Thomas who was an esquire as late as 1448. Nor do the pedigrees give a son Thomas to Roger's younger brother, Stephen, ancestor of the Scropes of Castle Combe, and his wife, Millicent Tiptoft. He may perhaps have been illegitimate.

It does not appear what authority Bale and Pits had for the statement that, before becoming a Carmelite at Norwich, Scrope had been successively a Benedictine monk and a Dominican friar. Possibly his dedication of two of his works on the Carmelite order to Richard Blakney, a Benedictine, suggested his having been a member of the same order. One of these books was written as early as 1426. He dedicated a translation of a foreign treatise on his order to Cyril Garland, prior of the Norwich Carmelites. But