Bl. Richard Rolle

Today is Michaelmas, the feast of St Michael the Archangel.

it is also the day appointed by the Catholic Church for the commemoration of Bl. Richard Rolle, the Yorkshire mystic and writer who lived in the first half of the fourteenth century.

Bl. Richard Rolle

A fifteenth century manuscript illustration

Image: Wikipedia 

Born about 1300 in the North Riding he studied at Oxford, left without a degree and, returning to his home area adopted the life of a hermit. He created his habit, to her horror, out of two of his sister’s dresses. He may have studied in Paris before returning to his home county. The 1320s when this change of life appears to have occurred were turbulent in Yorkshire with continuing Scottish raids and the political upheaval of the Earl of Lancaster’s downfall in 1322.

Having apparently spent much of his time in Richmondshire, by the late 1340s he was living at the Cistercian nunnery at Hampole close to where the main roads linking Doncaster to Pontefract and to Wakefield diverged. This was in the area of Barnsdale, notorious for its lawless predation in travellers and locals.

It is not clear if he had been ordained and was acting as chaplain, which seems more likely or whether he simply lived alongside the convent.

Rolle died on Michaelmas in 1349, probably a victim of the Black Death. In the years that followed he began to be seen as a candidate for canonisation and material was collected for his cause. In this process his former penitent Margaret Kirby was active and she later joined the Hampole community. Although never formally canonised his tomb and later shrine of ‘St Richard of Hampole’ at the priory was apparently popular with pilgrims up to the 1530s.

Hampole itself appears to have been a stable community, which still had nineteen nuns at the dissolution in 1539.

Rolle had written extensively on spiritual life, responding to a growing market for such works in fourteenth century Yorkshire, and by the fifteenth century he would appear to have been the single most widely read author in English in the country.

By then other distinguished mystical writers, notably Walter Hilton, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and Julian of Norwich, but also not a few others such as Nicholas Love and the autobiographical Margery Kempe, were bearing witness to a lively interest in mystical experience.

 

Wikipedia has a very good, academically grounded biography of Rolle, with a good bibliography, which can be accessed at Richard Rolle

What that account makes very clear indeed is that Rolle deserves to be better known and appreciated as a writer and figure in fourteenth century life than being the rather specialist subject of Middle English scholars. His life is remarkable and fascinating, a window into the world in which he lived and moved. It is well set out in Jonathan Hughes’ stimulating Pastors and Visionaries.

Late last year Rolle was in the headlines - well some at least - with news that a complete copy of his Latin text of probably his most popular work the Emendatio vitae had been identified in the library of Shrewsbury School.

 

There are online articles, all inevitably somewhat similar, but with their own insights, about the discovery from the Daily Telegraph at Medieval manuscript discovered in Shropshire school, from the BBC at 'Priceless' medieval Shrewsbury school text found to be unique, and from Medievalists.net at Medieval Discovery: Richard Rolle’s Original Emending of Life Survives in One Copy  

ZME has an article about the discovery at Scholars Found a Lost Medieval Masterpiece Sitting on a Shelf in a British School Library and Popular Science has one at Forgotten, priceless medieval book found in school library

May Bl. Richard Rolle pray for us