Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Royal Mausolea in the Long Fourteenth Century (1272-1422)
- Legal Culture: Medieval Lawyers’ Aspirations and Pretensions
- Thomas of Lancaster’s First Quarrel with Edward II
- Bristol and the Crown, 1326-31: Local and National Politics in the Early Years of Edward III’s Reign
- Mapping Identity in John Trevisa’s English Polychronicon: Chester, Cornwall and the Translation of English National History
- Edward the Black Prince and East Anglia: An Unlikely Association
- William Wykeham and the Management of the Winchester Estate, 1366-1404
- A Lancastrian Polity? John of Gaunt, John Neville and the War with France, 1368-88
- ‘Hearts warped by passion’: The Percy-Gaunt, Dispute of 1381
- The Reasons for the Bishop of Norwich’s Attack of Flanders in 1383
- Loyalty, Honour and the Lancastrian Revolution: Sir Stephen Scrope of Castle Combe and his Kinsmen, c.1389-c.1408
- The Furnishing of Royal Closets and the Use of Small Devotional Images in the Reign of Richard II: The Setting of the Wilton Diptych Reconsidered
- ‘Weep thou for me in France’: French Views of the Deposition of Richard II
Loyalty, Honour and the Lancastrian Revolution: Sir Stephen Scrope of Castle Combe and his Kinsmen, c.1389-c.1408
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Royal Mausolea in the Long Fourteenth Century (1272-1422)
- Legal Culture: Medieval Lawyers’ Aspirations and Pretensions
- Thomas of Lancaster’s First Quarrel with Edward II
- Bristol and the Crown, 1326-31: Local and National Politics in the Early Years of Edward III’s Reign
- Mapping Identity in John Trevisa’s English Polychronicon: Chester, Cornwall and the Translation of English National History
- Edward the Black Prince and East Anglia: An Unlikely Association
- William Wykeham and the Management of the Winchester Estate, 1366-1404
- A Lancastrian Polity? John of Gaunt, John Neville and the War with France, 1368-88
- ‘Hearts warped by passion’: The Percy-Gaunt, Dispute of 1381
- The Reasons for the Bishop of Norwich’s Attack of Flanders in 1383
- Loyalty, Honour and the Lancastrian Revolution: Sir Stephen Scrope of Castle Combe and his Kinsmen, c.1389-c.1408
- The Furnishing of Royal Closets and the Use of Small Devotional Images in the Reign of Richard II: The Setting of the Wilton Diptych Reconsidered
- ‘Weep thou for me in France’: French Views of the Deposition of Richard II
Summary
On 2 August 1400 the court of the constable and marshal of England met at the Moot Hall in Newcastle upon Tyne to hear an appeal by John Kighley, esquire, against Sir Stephen Scrope. Kighley’s charge was the gravest that could have been brought – that Scrope ‘and other great persons’, gathered at the manor of Bingbery in Kent in December 1399, had plotted to murder King Henry IV. This hitherto ignored appeal of treason sheds new light on both the Epiphany Rising, and the broader discourse within the political community in the aftermath of the Lancastrian revolution.
In 1990 Simon Walker charted the dramatic downturn in the fortunes of the Abberburys, an Oxfordshire gentry dynasty who had been closely associated with the court of Richard II, but had failed to weather the storm of his deposition. More recently he has analysed the career of Janico Dartasso, the Gascon squire who remained loyal to Richard II but, in marked contrast to the Abberburys, reinvented himself in Lancastrian service. This article intends to apply the same examination to Sir Stephen Scrope, and to draw some conclusions as to why his experiences following the 1399 revolution resembled those of Dartasso more than those of the Abberburys and the other Ricardian ‘recusants’.
Sir Stephen Scrope’s alleged identification as a party to the ‘Epiphany Rising’ – the failed Ricardian re-adeption of January 1400 – put him in a highly precarious position. Several knights personally known to Scrope, including Benedict Cely, Thomas Blount and Bernard Brocas, had endured traitors’ deaths at Oxford and London in January 1400, while the leading conspirators, the earls of Kent, Huntingdon and Salisbury and lord Despenser, had been lynched in an outburst of popular anti-Ricardian sentiment.
The fall of Richard II in 1399 had created a flurry of personal challenges arising from the deep personal hatreds that had been festering within the kingdom’s political elite over the previous two years. The appeal of treason (a public allegation delivered by an individual or group against another individual or group, in full parliament) had been one of the most destructive political phenomena of the previous reign.
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- Fourteenth Century England III , pp. 167 - 184Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2004