About Hannah Scot
- Born: Hexham, Northumberland, 29th December 1458.
- Died: Marsden Bay, County Durham, 21st November 1509. Executed on the beach, for heresy.
- Favourite authors: Geoffrey Chaucer, Marie de France, Thomas Chestre.
- Most influential childhood read: Chaucer's House of Fame.
- Favourite artwork: The ancient stone carvings of cup-like depressions and concentric circles that were inscribed into an old stone used to support the fireplace in the house where she lived as a child.
- Family: Daughter of Margaret and Adam Scot, her natural father died before she was born. Brought up as the step-daughter of a local landowner, Hannah was married to Henry Bokenam on 16th April 1480, sons Thomas, Ralph, Piers; daughter Susannah born 13th March 1486, the only child to survive into adulthood.
- Most memorable moment: Hearing The Floure and the Leafe, recited in the great hall of Alnwick Castle in the company of Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland and assembled guests, in the summer of 1475.
- In her teens, Hannah developed a love of mystery, perhaps stimulated by the remains of a stone circle in Simonburn, near Hexham, Northumberland, by an ancient carving incorporated into the fabric of the church in the village there, a church in which she would later be married, and perhaps most of all by the remains of antique and mysterious circular shapes carved into an old standing stone that had been used to build the fireplace where she warmed herself on winter evenings when she was a girl. The books in her step-father's library kept the young Hannah spellbound as well, and as she was later to confide to her inquisitors, she could not help but try to interpret the perplexing clues that surrounded her, often as she walked along the line of the old wall that the Romans had built. Hannah was denounced for heresy in 1509, tortured under the orders of the Dominicans and given over to the secular authorities for burning near the end of that year.
- Manuscript copies of significant Medieval works:
ReincarnationEleusinian MysteriesReincarnation