The small estate he held as early as 1312 in Coverdale, south of Wensleydale, he augmented before 1318, by the acquisition of the manor of Clifton on Ure at the entrance of the latter dale, where he obtained a license to build a castle in that year.
Early in the next reign he purchased the neighbouring manor of Masham from the representatives of its old lords, the Wautons, who held it from the Mowbrays by the service of an annual barbed arrow.
One of Edward II's last acts was to invest him with the great castle and honour of Skipton in Craven forfeited by Roger, lord Clifford.
[1] He was a soldier and diplomatist as well as a lawyer, and his services in the former capacities were in such request that his place had frequently to be supplied by substitutes, one of whom was his brother Henry, and for a time (1334–7) he seems to have exchanged his post for the (nominal) second justiceship of the common pleas.
[1] In the tournaments of the previous reign, at one of which he was knighted, Scrope had not disgraced the azure bend or of his family, which he bore with a silver label for difference, and in the first months of Edward III's rule he was with the army which nearly joined battle with the Scots at Stanhope Park in Weardale.
[1] Just before crossing to Flanders in 1338 Edward III sent Scrope with the Earl of Northampton to his ally the emperor, and later in the year he was employed in the negotiations opened at the eleventh hour with Philip VI.
Galfrid le Baker (p. 65) relates the well-known anecdote of Scrope's punishing Cardinal Bernard de Montfavence's boasts of the inviolability of France by taking him up a high tower and showing him her frontiers all in flames.
[1] He now appears with the formal title of king's secretary, and spent the winter of 1339–40 in negotiating a marriage between the heir of Flanders and Edward's daughter Isabella.
Scrope was the more distinguished of the two notable brothers whose unusual fortune it was to found two great baronial families within the limits of a single Yorkshire dale.