Hampole, RICHARD ROLLE

Hampole, RICHARD ROLLE, known as the Hermit of Hampole, was born about 1290 at Thornton in Yorkshire. Sent to Oxford by Neville, archdeacon of Durham, he made great progress in his studies, and at nineteen assumed a hermit's dress, and gave his life entirely to the austerities of religion and to writing, down to his death in 1349, when he was buried in the Cistercian nunnery of Hampole near Doncaster. He wrote religious books both in Latin and in English, and rendered the Psalms into English prose. His great work is The Pricke of Conscience (Stimulus Conscientie), a poem written both in English and Latin. The English version contains 9624 lines on the instability of life, death, purgatory, doomsday, the pains of hell, and the joys of heaven. It was edited by Dr Richard Morris in 1863 for the Philological Society. A small collection of Hampole's prose pieces was edited by the Rev. G. G. Perry for the Early English Text Society in 1866. See also the papers by J. Ullmann in vol. vii., and G. Kribel in vol. viii., of Englische Studien, and Horstmann's monograph (1895).