Richard Rolle of Hampole

Richard Rolle (c. 1300–1349) was an English devotional writer, who was born around 1300 into a small farming family at Thornton-le-Dale in North Yorkshire, where, it is claimed, he showed such academic promise as a youth that the Archdeacon of Durham sponsored him to study at Oxford. Unfortunately, the subjects on offer at Oxford did not suit the nineteen-year-old Richard, who was more interested in biblical studies than secular studies such as philosophy, and so he dropped out before graduating. Not wishing to join a religious community, he spent the next few years living as a recluse, initially in the woods near Thornton and then, fearing his family might have him arrested, wandering around the countryside until he was spotted by an acquaintance from university, the squire John de Dalton, who invited him to live as a hermit on his estate at Pickering. Legend has it that it was during this time that Richard’s sister gave him a couple of her dresses to turn into a hermit’s robes.

This was also the period when Richard made great strides in the contemplative life and is thought to have had his first mystical experience. About it he said, ‘I did not think anything like it or anything so holy could be received in this life.’ Sadly for Richard, the secular life in the form of politics intervened and his old friend’s lands were confiscated in 1322, which forced Richard onto the road again. After several years wandering from place to place—reportedly pitching up in Paris, where records from the Sorbonne suggest that he studied theology—he finally arrived back in Yorkshire, at the village of Hampole, near Doncaster in South Yorkshire. It was here at the Cistercian nunnery that he died in 1349, having become something of a spiritual adviser to the nuns resident there. For this reason, Richard is sometimes referred to as ‘Richard Rolle de Hampole’. He also wrote spiritual guides for the nuns and religiously inclined women generally. His main devotee was Dame Margaret Kirkby, a religious recluse (an anchoress) who he is claimed to have cured of an ailment that rendered her speechless merely by visiting her. It was for her benefit that he wrote a commentary on the Psalms and, in particular, The Form of Perfect Living, a guide to the reclusive life, when she was still a young woman embarking on her spiritual journey—both of which were written in (Middle) English. It was Margaret who, after Richard’s death, was instrumental in establishing his reputation. She even moved into the priory at Hampole where he died, to spend the last ten years of her own life there.

Richard Rolle was one of the first pre-Reformation writers to write in the vernacular, the native tongue of the readers. His works were even more widely read than those of Chaucer in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and his influence endured right up until the Reformation itself in the sixteenth century. His works include letters, poems, scriptural commentaries, and treatises on spiritual perfection. The famous poem The Pricke of Conscience was for a long time attributed to him. Perhaps his best known work is The Fire of Love (written in Latin with the title Incendium Amoris), in which Rolle provides an account of his mystical experiences, which he describes as being of three kinds: a physical warmth in his body, a sense of wonderful sweetness, and a heavenly music that accompanied him as he chanted the Psalms. It is because of such rapturous accounts of spiritual development that Rolle is regarded as one of the great English mystics.

  John Booth