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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2023
Most of Roscarrock's surviving poetry is to be found in the ‘Lives of the Saints': chiefly short pieces which are translations from Latin (for an example, see above, .p 87), together with a few longer items like the hymn to St Endelient (above, p 72). One other poem certainly by Roscarrock was published in the author's lifetime:
Title: Cilenus censure of the aucthor, in his high court of Herehaultry.
Incipit: A Court ther stands twixt heauen & erth, al gorgeous to behold
Form: 94 lines, iambic heptameter couplets.
Signed: Nicolas Roscarrocke.
Printed: J. Bossewell, Workes of Armorie, London, 1572, sig. C.iij-iv.
Three further poems exist which may be by Roscarrock. In probable chronological order, they are:
Title: N.R. in commendation of the Authour, and his workes.
Incipit: In rowsing verse of Mauors bloudie raigne.
Form: 24 lines, 4 stanzas, iambic pentameters rhyming ababcc.
Authorship: No further details.
Printed: G. Gascoigne, The Steele Glas, London, 1576, sig. A.iij verso; reprinted in G. Gascoigne, The Glasse of Government… and other poems and prose works, ed. J.W. Cunliffe, Cambridge, 1910, p 138.
Title: None
Text: Be vertuouus and assur thyselfe thou canst not then but thrive; in only vertw is it sayfe that men themselves survive.
Authorship: Not given. The verse is inscribed on the wall of the chamber in the Well Tower, Tower of London, which also contains Roscarrock's name, and may therefore have been written by him during his imprisonment, 1580-86.
Printed: An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in London, vol v: East London, London, 1930, p 78.
Title: A Sonnet to the Christian Reader
Incipit: Alcides neuer durst at once With monsters two to fight.
Form: 16 lines, common metre.
Authorship: Confundantur qui oderunt Sion. N.R.
Printed: Jasper Loarte, The Exercise of a Christian Life, translated by J. Sancer [i.e. Stephen Brinckley], [Rouen], 1584, sig. *6 verso.
Two poems about Roscarrock by his friend Thomas Palmer are preserved in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 767, part ii, f 54r. Palmer, an Oxford graduate and briefly principal of Gloucester Hall, remained a Catholic and spent the latter part of the sixteenth century in Essex; on his life, see Wood, 1813-20, iii, 150.
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