Manor and Ancient Barony of Castle Combe. 145 



of the titles anciently possessed by this family" says Sir Harris, 

 "are dormant and the rest extinct, few persons were more dis- 

 tinguished in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, 

 and Shakespeare has given immortality to no less than three indi- 

 viduals of the name. The House of Scrope was ennobled in two 

 branches — Scrope of Bolton, and Scrope of Masham and Upsal, and 

 its members shared the glory of all the great victories of the middle 

 ages. An unbroken male descent from the Conquest, if not from the 

 time of Edward the Confessor, and the emphatic declaration of the 

 Earl of Arundel, corroborated by the statement of many others made 

 in 1386, that the then representative of this family was descended of 

 noble and generous blood of gentry and ancient ancestry, who had 

 always preserved their name and estate in dignity and honour, 

 sufficiently attest their antiquity and importance, whilst the mere 

 enumeration of the dignities which they attained between the 

 reigns of Edward II. and Charles I. proves the high rank they 

 enjoyed. In the period of 300 years, during more than a century 

 of which the barony of one branch was in abeyance, the House of 

 Scrope produced two earls and twenty barons, one chancellor, four 

 treasurers, and two chief justices of England, one archbishop and 

 two bishops, five knights of the garter, and numerous bannerets — 

 the highest military order in the days of chivalry." 



Nor was the acquisition of the Tibetot estates in 1387 the first 

 introduction of the family of Scrope to the County of Wilts. A 

 charter-grant of King Athelstan, in the year 939, of a farm in 

 Wiltshire mentions as one of the boundary marks " Scrope's Pyt," 

 from which it would appear that some of the name resided there 

 127 years before the Norman Conquest. The locality here intended 

 was probably the same as the " Terra de Scrop" in the manor of 

 Purton, mentioned in the Hundred Rolls of Edward I. 



Sir Richard Scrope, Lord of Bolton, the Chancellor of Richard II., 

 whose refusal to affix the Seal of State to that monarch's profuse 

 grants to his favourites, or to deliver it to any other person than 

 the king himself, is a well known historical incident highly hon- 

 ourable to his integrity and firmness, was the plaintiff in the 

 celebrated trial before the Court of Chivalry, presided over by the 



