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.