The rebellion of Richard Scrope, archbishop of York, in 1405 was an event of considerable significance in the political and cultural life of the city of York, of the north, and of the kingdom of England. Much of that significance, however, came after the event, through the development and management of a popular cult that commemorated an archbishop ostensibly martyred in the cause of ecclesiastical and political liberties. Rather than clouding our judgment of the short-term implications of the 1405 northern rebellion, the Scrope mythology that developed in the course of the fifteenth century can be taken as a significant phenomenon in its own right, and has indeed been the focus of a number of stimulating studies. Indeed, the present state of Scrope studies seems often to place as much emphasis on the subsequent historiographical and hagiographical construction of the saintly bishop as on the events of the rising themselves: such, perhaps, is the inevitable impact of cultural studies on more traditional approaches to medieval political history.

The present contribution adopts a rather different perspective on the Scrope rebellion, one that is essentially backward- rather than forward- looking. I shall take one strand in the demands of the York rebels of 1405 – the complaints about royal taxation – and attempt to re-think the subject in the context of a tradition of opposition to the financial impositions of the English crown. In so doing, I shall be focusing not on the question of who or what actually drove Archbishop Scrope to rebellion, or the contested issues around the relationship between this rebellion and the longer-lasting feud between the houses of Percy and Lancaster. Rather, my emphasis is on the self-conscious rhetoric of justification within the revolt once it was under way, and therefore on the choices that were made both by Scrope and by his contemporaries about how the ‘causes’ of that revolt were then articulated. The concentration on the question of taxation is justified not only in terms of the need to establish a definitive record of the fiscal exactions of Henry IV's early regime but also because this subject is especially well represented in the extant political record of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, thus allowing for a discussion of the longer-term traditions of tax resistance, both ‘high’ and ‘low’, that may have informed Scrope's agenda