Hyper/Hagiography:
Archbishop Richard le Scrope

Table of Contents

Welcome to the Hyper/Hagiography Homepage. Click on any of the titles in this Table of Contents to learn more about:

• Statement of Purpose
• Life and Death of Archbishop Scrope: An Introduction
• Archive of Texts and Images
• Other Online Resources
• Feedback.

Statement of Purpose

This page has been created not only as an archive of textual and pictorial materials pertaining to Archbishop Scrope, but also as an experiment to see how emerging technologies might serve the purposes of interdisciplinary projects in medieval studies. In short, Hyper/Hagiography is intended as a model of one way in which students of ecclesiastical, political, and literary history might develop interdisciplinary hypermedia sites relevant to their own research interests.

The Life and Death of Archbishop Richard le Scrope: An Introduction

On the afternoon of 8 June 1405, Richard le Scrope, Archbishop of York, was executed for treason at the express command of King Henry IV. Together with Thomas Mowbray, the nineteen year-old Earl Marshal, Archbishop Scrope had led an armed uprising against the king on behalf of Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland. Scrope was betrayed and captured on Shipton Moor, imprisoned at Pontefract, tried at his own archiepiscopal residence at Bishopthorpe, and eventually beheaded in an open field just outside York's Skeldergate Postern, thus becoming the first instance in English history of the execution of a prelate by the sentence of a lay court.

But for this single dramatic incident, Archbishop Scrope's distinguished but otherwise unexceptional career would have provided little more than a scant footnote to the annals of English ecclesiastical history. By killing the Archbishop, Henry IV took the first decisive step toward checking a rebellion which posed a grave threat to his newly won crown, but in turn Richard le Scrope became, at least in the eyes of many of his countrymen, not only a symbol of courageous resistance to a tyrannous usurper, but a martyr and a saint.

Within a few years of his death, the historical Richard le Scrope was transformed into the central character of popular literary, artistic, and devotional traditions. Scrope's execution and the posthumous miracles attributed to him were made the subject of a number of narrative accounts, pious poems, and political songs. Liturgical offices and prayers were composed to venerate the uncanonized saint, his image was preserved in illuminated manuscripts and stained glass windows, and his elaborate tomb in York Minster became an important shrine for pilgrims.

Archive of Texts and Images

Click on any of the following titles in this to learn more about:

• Chronicles and Histories
  • Archbishop Richard Scrope: A Brief Biography, by Stephen Wright (1997).
  • Clement Maidstone's Martyrium Ricardi Archiepiscopi: Latin Prose
  • Clement Maidstone's The Martyrdom of Archbishop Richard Scrope: English Translation
  • Thomas Gascoigne's Decollatio Ricardi Scrope: Latin Prose

• Poems
  • "The Death of Archbishop Scrope": An English Carol
  • "On the Execution of Richard Scrope, Archbishop of York": Latin Poem
  • "A Political Retrospect (1462)": English Poem

• Liturgical and Devotional Texts
  • "Beatus Ricardus Martyr atque Pontifex": Rhymed Latin Office and Prayer
  • "O Gemma lucis et virtutis": Latin Versicles and Prayer from the Longleat Missal
  • "O Richarde, qui tot signa":  Rhymed Latin Office from a Carthusian prayer book

• Pictorial Representations
  • Illuminated miniature of Archbishop Scrope: Longleat Missal
  • Illuminated miniature of Archbishop Scrope: Longleat Missal
  • Illuminated miniature of the execution of Richard Scrope: Bodl. MS. Lat. Liturg. f. 3
  • Illuminated miniatures of Archbishop Scrope: Bolton Hours (York Minster Library, MS. Additional 2)
  • York Minster: Tomb of Archbishop Scrope
  • York Minster: Painted glass panel (south transept)
  • Watercolor representation of the York Minster glass panel (D.J. Powell, 1819) in the National Portrait Gallery
  • Portrait of Archbishop Scrope in the Great Hall of the Archbishop's Palace at Bishopthorpe (the very room where Scrope was tried and sentenced)
  • Portrait of Henry Bolingbroke
  • Canterbury Cathedral: Tomb Effigy of Henry IV

• Renaissance Reworkings
  • Holinshed's Chronicles (1577)
  • Shakespeare's Scrope
    • King Henry IV, Part One (1598)
    • King Henry IV, Part Two (1598)

• Bibliography of Recent Research (Under Construction)
  • Emden, A. B. Biographical Register to the University of Cambridge to 1500. Cambridge: 1963.
  • Emden, A. B. Biographical Register to the University of Oxford to 1500. Oxford: 1959.
  • Madan, Falconer. "Beatus Ricardus Martyr atque Pontifex." Athenaeum, No. 3171 (August 1888), 160-161.
  • McNivin, Peter N. "The Betrayal of Archbishop Scrope," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 54 (1971), 173-213.
  • Mt., A. "Early Missal: Abp. Scrope," Notes and Queries, Second Series, 1 (1856), 486.
  • Tillot, P.M. A History of Yorkshire: The City of York. London: 1961.
  • Wright, Stephen K. "Provenance and Manuscript Tradition of the Martyrium Ricardi Archiepiscopi," Manuscripta, 28 (1984), 92-102.
  • Wright, Stephen K. "Paradigmatic Ambiguity and Monastic Historiography: The Case of Clement Maidestone's Martyrium Ricardi Archiepiscopi," Studia Monastica, 28 (1986), 311-42.
  • Wright, Stephen K., "Genres of Sanctity:  Literary Representations of Archbishop Richard Scrope," in Richard Scrope:  Archbishop, Rebel, Martyr, ed. Jeremy Goldberg (forthcoming 2007).

Other Online Resources

• Scrope Ancestry and History
• Scrope Family Tree
• Scrope's Ghost at Bishopthorpe
• York Minster
• Henry IV

Feedback

Since this page is designed as an ongoing experiment, your questions, contributions, comments, and suggestions are especially important. Please fell free to contact me via e-mail, or write to me at the following address:

Stephen K. Wright
Department of English
Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C., 20064