First Register, p. 237.

[313] These descended from two persons, each named Geoffrey le Scrope,
chief justices of K.B. and C.B. at the beginning of Edward III.'s reign.
The name of one of them is once found among the barons, but I presume
this to have been an accident, or mistake in the roll; as he is
frequently mentioned afterwards among the judges. Scrope, chief justice
of K.B., was made a _banneret_ in 14 E. III. He was the father of Henry
Scrope of Masham, a considerable person in Edward III. and Richard II.'s
government, whose grandson, Lord Scrope of Masham, was beheaded for a
conspiracy against Henry V. There was a family of Scrupe as old as the
reign of Henry II.; but it is not clear, notwithstanding Dugdale's
assertion, that the Scropes descended from them, or at least that they
held the same lands: nor were the Scrupes barons, as appears by their
paying a relief of only sixty marks for three knights' fees. Dugdale's
Baronage, p. 654.

The want of consistency in old records throws much additional difficulty
over this intricate subject. Thus Scrope of Masham, though certainly a
baron, and tried next year by the peers, is called chevalier in an
instrument of 1 H. V. Rymer, t. ix. p. 13. So in the indictment against
Sir John Oldcastle he is constantly styled knight, though he had been
summoned several times as lord Cobham, in right of his wife, who
inherited that barony. Rot. Parl. vol. iv. p. 107.

[314] Blomefield's Hist, of Norfolk, vol. iii. p. 645 (folio edit).

[315] Rot. Parl. vol. iii. p. 427.

[316] Rot. Parl. vol. ii. p. 290.

[317] vol. iii. p. 209.

[318] Id. p. 263, 264.

[319] vol. iv. p. 17.

[320] Id. p. 401.

[321] West's Inquiry, p. 65. This writer does not allow that the king
possessed the prerogative of creating new peers without consent of
parliament. But Prynne (1st Register, p. 225), who generally adopts the
same theory of peerage as West, strongly asserts the contrary; and the
party views of the latter's treatise, which I mentioned above, should be
kept in sight. It was his object to prove that the pending bill to limit
the numbers of the peerage was conformable to the original constitution.

[322] Hody's History of Convocations, p. 12. Dissertatio de antiqua et
moderna Synodi Anglicani Constitutione, prefixed to Wilkins's Concilia,
t. 1.

[323] 2 Gale, Scriptores Rer. Anglic, t. ii. p. 355; Hody, p. 345.
Atterbury (Rights of Convocations, p. 295, 315) endeavours to show that