hear stories and verses, in their games, in
their feasts, and over their ale."[346]

Somewhat above this group of translators and adaptators rises a more
original writer, Richard Rolle of Hampole, noticeable for his English
and Latin compositions, in prose and verse, and still more so by his
character.[347] He is the first on the list of those lay preachers, of
whom England has produced a number, whom an inward crisis brought back
to God, and who roamed about the country as volunteer apostles,
converting the simple, edifying the wise, and, alas! affording cause for
laughter to the wicked. They are taken by good folks for saints, and for
madmen by sceptics: such was the fate of Richard Rolle, of George Fox,
of Bunyan, and of Wesley; the same man lives on through the ages, and
the same humanity heaps on him at once blessings and ridicule.

Richard was of the world, and never took orders. He had studied at
Oxford. One day he left his father's house, in order to give himself up
to a contemplative life. From that time he mortifies himself, he fasts,
he prays, he is tempted; the devil appears to him under the form of a
beautiful young woman, who he tells us with less humility than we are
accustomed to from him, "loved me not a little with good love."[348] But
though the wicked one shows himself in this case even more wicked than
with St. Dunstan, and Rolle has no red-hot tongs to frighten him away,
still the devil is again worsted, and the adventure ends as it should.

Rolle has ecstasies, he sighs and groans; people come to visit him in
his solitude; he is found writing much, "scribentem multum velociter."
He is requested to stop writing, and speak to his visitors; he talks to
them, but continues writing, "and what he wrote differed entirely from
what he said." This duplication of the personality lasted two hours.

He leaves his retreat and goes all over the country, preaching
abnegation and a return to Christ. He finally settled at Hampole, where
he wrote his principal works, and died in 1349. Having no doubt that he
would one day be canonised, the nuns of a neighbouring convent caused
the office of his feast-day to be written; and this office, which was
never sung as Rolle never received the hoped-for dignity, is the main
source of our information concerning him.[349]

His style and ideas correspond well to such a life. His thoughts are
sombre, Germanic anxieties and doubts reappear in his writings, the idea
of death