THE

EDINBURGH HISTORY OF
S COT T I S H L I T E R AT U R E
VOLUME 1

From Columba to the Union

(until 1707)

Period Editors: Thomas Owen Clancy and Murray Pittock

General Editor: Ian Brown
Co-editor: Susan Manning
The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature
The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature

Volume One:
From Columba to the Union (until 1707)

Period editors:
Thomas Owen Clancy (to 1314)
Murray Pittock (1314–1707)

General editor:
Ian Brown

Co-editor:
Susan Manning

Assistant editor:
Ksenija Horvat

Editorial assistant:
Ashley Hales

Edinburgh University Press

© in this edition, Edinburgh University Press, 2007
© in the individual contributions is retained by the authors

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

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by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-10 0 7486 1615 2 (hardback)

ISBN-13 978 0 7486 1615 2 (hardback)

The right of the contributors

to be identified as authors of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher acknowledges subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards the publication of
this volume.
 Contents

Preface viii
Ian Brown, Thomas Owen Clancy, Susan Manning and Murray Pittock

Introduction 1
1 Scottish Literature: Criticism and the Canon 3
Ian Brown, Thomas Owen Clancy, Susan Manning and Murray Pittock
2 The Study of Scottish Literature 16
Cairns Craig

Until 1314 33
3 One Kingdom from many Peoples: History until 1314 35
Benjamin Hudson
4 The Topography of People’s Lives: Geography until 1314 44
Sally M. Foster
5 The Lion’s Tongues: Languages in Scotland to 1314 52
William Gillies
6 The Poetry of the Court: Praise 63
Thomas Owen Clancy
7 Aneirin, the Gododdin 72
Jenny Rowland
8 Norse Literature in the Orkney Earldom 77
Judith Jesch
9 Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh and the Classical Revolution 83
Katharine Simms
10 Saving Verse: Early Medieval Religious Poetry 91
Gilbert Márkus
11 Hagiography 103
James E. Fraser
12 Adomnán of Iona and his Prose Writings 110
Clare Stancliffe
13 Theology, Philosophy and Cosmography 115
Thomas O’Loughlin
vi Contents

14 A Fragmentary Literature: Narrative and Lyric from the Early

Middle Ages 123
Thomas Owen Clancy

1314–1707 133
15 Land and Freedom: Scotland, 1314–1707 135
Edward J. Cowan
16 Emergent Nation: Scotland’s Geography, 1314–1707 144
Charles W. J. Withers
17 The Several Tongues of a Single Kingdom: The Languages of Scotland,
1314–1707 153
Christine Robinson and Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh
18 The International Reception and Literary Impact of Scottish Literature
of the Period 1314 until 1707 164
Paul Barnaby and Tom Hubbard
19 Versions of Scottish Nationhood, c. 850–1707 168
Nicola Royan with Dauvit Broun
20 From Rome to Ruddiman: The Scoto-Latin Tradition 184
Jack MacQueen
21 Creation and Compilation: The Book of the Dean of Lismore and
Literary Culture in Late Medieval Gaelic Scotland 209
Martin MacGregor
22 Gaelic Literature in the Later Middle Ages: The Book of the Dean
and beyond 219
William Gillies
23 Philosophy and Theology in Scotland before the Reformation 226
Alexander Broadie
24 Scottish Theological Literature, 1560–1707 231
Crawford Gribben
25 Legal Writing, 1314–1707 238
David Sellar
26 Literature, Art and Architecture 245
Michael Bath
27 Performances and Plays 253
Bill Findlay
28 Balladry: A Vernacular Poetic Resource 263
Mary Ellen Brown
29 Older Scots Literature and the Court 273
Sally Mapstone
 Contents vii

30 Robert Henryson 286

Antony J. Hasler
31 William Dunbar 295
Priscilla Bawcutt
32 Sìleas na Ceapaich 305
Colm Ó Baoill
Notes on Contributors – Volume One 315
Index 319
 Preface

Ian Brown, Thomas Owen Clancy, Susan Manning and Murray Pittock

The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature is conceived and produced as a single entity. In
consultation with the publishers, the editors have sought to present it in three volumes.
This is done for practical reasons. Each volume is in itself of some substance. To publish all
three in one volume might have produced an unwieldy and inaccessible tome, not so much
weighty as burdensome.
The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature in three volumes then is, yet, a single work.
Each editor has taken prime responsibility for an individual period: Thomas Owen Clancy
for up to 1314, Murray Pittock for 1314–1707, Susan Manning for 1707–1918 and Ian
Brown for 1918 onwards. Nonetheless, it is the essence of our editorial process that every
chapter has been considered by all editors. In other words, the conception and shaping of
this History aims to avoid false time divisions, and to promulgate the understanding that
Scottish literature is a continuous and multi-channelled entity from its beginnings – pre-
sumably well before the first remnants that survive from the first millennium – till the
present moment. Similarly, it has sought to include, and give adequate representation to,
wide varieties of Scottish literature, including that in Gaelic, Latin, Norse, Welsh and
French as well as the Scots and English most commonly in the past associated with the
term ‘Scottish literature’. It also includes, as appropriate, oral and performance literature
and diaspora literatures and writers. Scottish literature is best understood as an inclusive,
not an exclusive, term. This is a theme, both of intellectual discourse and architectonic
structure, of The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature.
In preparing this History, the editors have sought at all times to marry the most up-to-
date and rigorous scholarship with the avoidance of a distracting reference apparatus
unsuited to the needs of the general reader. Each of the following chapters is, the editors
hope, marked by both a high degree of accessibility and straightforward readability, and also
by reliability and the intellectual rigour that comes from commanding knowledge grace-
fully worn. It is in pursuit of this aim of a balance of deep scholarship and ease of access
that the three-volume format has been adopted. Although of course it is entirely possible
for an individual reader to choose to focus her or his study on the volume that most closely
meets immediate needs or interests, each volume will be most rewarding when read in the
context and light of the other two.
Readers of volumes two and three are therefore recommended to bear in mind the
matters raised in the Introduction which opens volume one. This contains two chapters
considering the nature and study of Scottish literature, one prepared by the editors, the
other by Cairns Craig. Volume one continues with the first two periods of the History, up
to 1314 and 1314–1707. Volume two contains the period, 1707–1918. Volume three con-
tains the period from 1918 onwards. Each volume has its own index and list of contribu-
tors and so can be read as a coherent whole. The editors, however, make no apology for the
fact that each volume contains material that relates to years beyond its explicit period or
 Preface ix

for the many cross-references between volumes that are required for a full understanding
of the material under discussion. Many necessary cross-references between volumes
demonstrate the power of the continuity of Scotland’s literature. This is a strength of these
volumes, and an essential premise of their underlying argument.
This volume, in common with the other two, has within its period sections a standard
structure. Each period has introductory chapters providing a historical, a geographic and a
linguistic context to the period’s literature. There is also a fourth introductory chapter in
all but the first period concerned with the international reception and literary impact of
Scottish literature. Such a chapter does not exist for the earliest period because during that
time so much of the literature under discussion is shared between the developing Scottish
literary tradition and others. From 1314 on, as more coherent and conscious traditions of
Scottish literature develop, so it is more possible to discern and trace their international
impact. The chapters in this History relating to this impact offer, for the first time, a coher-
ent picture, based on objective measures of levels of translation, of the powerful impres-
sion made by Scottish literature on other cultures. This grew discernibly over the centuries,
but began with some éclat with the enormously important writings of Duns Scotus and,
later, the often-underrated impact of George Buchanan on wider European culture, par-
ticularly the dramaturgic development of writing for the modern European stage. In each
period, following these introductory chapters, a variety of distinguished experts addresses
aspects of Scottish literature in a series of chapters; some focus on the work of individual
writers; more consider the varieties of interaction of writers with one another and with
their cultural contexts.
Taken as a whole, these volumes offer the most extensive, the most various and the most
inclusive history of Scottish literature available to date.
Introduction
 1

Scottish Literature: Criticism and

the Canon
Ian Brown, Thomas Owen Clancy, Susan Manning and
Murray Pittock

Scottish literature has been enjoyed, admired, and argued over by its readers for a very long
time. Only now is it coming of age as a subject of serious critical study. The publication of
The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature comes, fortuitously, eighteen years after that in
1987 and 1988 of the four-volume Aberdeen History of Scottish Literature, an important and
pioneering work to which we as editors of this new History pay tribute. That publication not
only marked a significant moment in the properly contextualised study of Scottish litera-
ture; it remains an important resource for anyone who seeks to understand the nature and
development of this literature. Yet it is a mark of the dynamism of Scottish literary study
that, although there are a significant number of contributors common to both that History
and this, none now choose to address their topics as they did twenty years ago. Indeed, the
way in which these topics are formulated and grouped has itself changed significantly. The
present volumes recognise and celebrate, therefore, developments in both scholarship and
the very conception of the nature of Scottish literature in the intervening years. These new
volumes encompass both a profound enlargement in historical and theoretical understand-
ings of Scottish literature and key changes in the international perception of Scottish
writing as a source of pleasure and a subject of study to readers worldwide.
These changes are manifold. In his 1919 essay, ‘Was There a Scottish Literature?’,
T. S. Eliot described Scottish literature as ‘provincial’, fragmented in itself and with a ten-
dency over time to gravitate towards and be absorbed by metropolitan literary norms. For
most of the twentieth century, it was still possible for alert critics in the Anglo-American
academy to disparage Scottish literature, or simply to ignore it. Even Scots like Edwin Muir
(in Scott and Scotland, 1936) treated Scottish writing as the inevitably flawed product of
the ‘failed Nation’ thesis later developed by Tom Nairn in his The Break-up of Britain (1977)
and by others. But, in this period too, several critical developments took place, as the study
of Scottish literature began to move from the process of forming a ‘canon’ of ‘greatest works’
to developing theories aimed at understanding its particular qualities, affinities and impli-
cations. The theorists of the 1980s rejected the normative traditions of Eliot and the
Scrutiny group of Leavisite critics. This was the period of ‘High Theory’ in literary study,
and critics of the 1980s were at home with cores and peripheries, metanarratives, ideolog-
ically conditioned relationships between base and superstructure, mentalités, discourses,
hegemonic relationships, mythologies, the death of the author and the pleasures of the
text. This kind of thinking was, however, often still alienated from or by Scottish litera-
ture. From it, because literary theory was driven by abstractions and generalisations, not by
4 Ian Brown, Thomas Owen Clancy, Susan Manning and Murray Pittock

particularities and local conditions. By it, because those theorists who came to the study
of Scottish literature frequently found existing criticism to be naively rooted in description
and chronology, and simplistic in its value judgements. Scottish criticism’s theoretical con-
cepts such as the ‘divided self’ or the ‘Kailyard’ were particular to some supposed ‘Scottish
condition’ rather than more widely applicable, and tended to be driven by the need either
to categorise given texts as critically worthy ‘Scottish literature’ or to exclude them from
such consideration.
The highly theorised literary critics of the 1980s were both right and wrong in their crit-
icism of the state of the subject. It is worth noting that throughout the nineteenth and most
of the twentieth centuries, Scottish literature was not taught in schools and universities in
Scotland, let alone elsewhere, apart from isolated texts (usually a novel of Walter Scott, the
odd ballad, or a poem by Burns) that made it into the canon of English literature. The only
exception in universities was Scottish literature in Gaelic, but this had been separated out
into departments of Celtic and was treated as another subject. Those few pioneers like
Thomas Crawford in Aberdeen, who fought to establish the credentials of Scottish literature
as a serious subject of study, did so at peril of their own academic advancement. The key issue
for Scottish literature in its early decades as a specific university subject – in effect the 1970s
and 1980s – was survival; with self-definition as a condition of that survival. This meant that
there was an overwhelming need to ‘show and tell’: in critical jargon, to describe, form and
defend a canon in a literature whose very existence as a body of serious work was still in
doubt. English literature had done the same thing in the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries (in large part, ironically, as a result of the efforts of Scottish critics in
Scottish universities), as had Irish literature in English in the earlier twentieth century. The
nature of Scottish literary criticism thirty years ago, then, may perhaps be best understood as
characteristic of a particular stage in the evolution of a new discipline. Some harsh judge-
ments of its quality were misplaced; others did perhaps respond to a certain defensiveness or
narrowness of focus inevitably incidental to defining a territory. In the 1970s and 1980s in
particular, critics sometimes did not find it easy, either, to distinguish advocacy of Scottish
literature as a serious subject of study from the different (if sometimes overlapping) impera-
tives of political nationalism. This has been as true for the Gaelic literature of Scotland as
for that in Scots and English. Whilst its canon and its study as an academic subject were
established in the nineteenth, rather than the twentieth century, the same defensive and
apologetic tone, compounded with a remorseless recourse to the survey, rather than detailed
critical comment, has prevailed. For scholars of Gaelic, too, the defensiveness can be a
double one – of ensuring their literature’s worth within the field of Scottish literature, as well
as within the wider literary world.
Though there were scholars literate in theory working on Scottish literature thirty years
ago, there are many more now, and the determination of two generations of literary critics
who have devoted their careers to it has been vindicated. Scottish literature has established
itself as a subject of study: not only in Scotland, but elsewhere in the UK, in Ireland, France,
Germany, Italy, Canada, the USA and New Zealand among many other places. It is now
taught seriously in schools, at least in Scotland, and university courses have burgeoned, with
many students coming from abroad to study in Scotland, both at undergraduate and post-
graduate levels. In 2000, the Modern Languages Association of America accepted Scottish
literature as a national literature; by 2004, there was a Scottish publishers’ exhibition at
the vast MLA conference, which attracts 10,000 delegates annually. Academic conferences
on Scottish authors and Scottish literary topics now regularly take place around the world,
and major collections of archives such as the Boswell manuscripts at Yale University and
 Scottish Literature: Criticism and the Canon 5

the G. Ross Roy Collection of Robert Burns, Burnsiana and Scottish Literature at the
University of South Carolina have helped to establish important centres for Scottish liter-
ary study beyond Scotland. The study of Scottish literature in terms of gender, psycho-
analysis, postcolonial and cultural theory has developed hugely. Meanwhile, particular
critical approaches, such as the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘dialogic’ approach of
‘multivocality’ are proving both increasingly popular and notably well suited to studying the
wide range of register and language deployed in Scottish literary texts. In the last thirty
years, too, Scottish writers have entered into new formal partnerships with the universities
in Creative Writing programmes that at once help to sustain writers and to bring on a new
generation of creative talent in Scotland. Such collaborations, and associated support of
Writers in Residence, are having a notable impact on the production of Scottish literature:
the young playwrights Douglas Maxwell and David Harrower have been Festival Creative
Fellows of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, sponsored by the University
of Edinburgh. Blackbird, Harrower’s commissioned play for the Edinburgh International
Festival in 2005, was written during his Fellowship.
A second major change is that the study of Scottish literature has benefited from sub-
stantial international reassessment of the historical and contemporary significance of
Scottish writing and thought. New international scholarly editions, important both for
their scrupulous recovery and publication of unknown or little regarded material and the
extensive collaboration between scholars from many countries involved in their produc-
tion, have contributed to the enlargement of the Scottish literary canon and the sophisti-
cation of critical and theoretical possibilities available to its study. The ongoing volumes
of the Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle being edited at Edinburgh and Duke
Universities and the Boswell Editions at Yale were already established twenty years ago.
Although arguably neither identified their subject matter as ‘Scottish literature’ at the time
of their inception, both are continuing to have a major impact on the study of Victorianism
and Enlightenment in local, national and world contexts. More recently, the Edinburgh
Edition of the Waverley Novels, the Stirling–South Carolina James Hogg edition and new
editions of Stevenson and Burns have helped to place Scottish texts (in the case of Hogg
in particular previously unknown) in the public sphere. As these developments raised the
profile of Scottish thought and Scottish authors, other critics began to see the Scottish
dimension in a number of ‘English’ writers from the same period, such as Byron. Meantime,
the recognition of the importance of Scottish literature in Gaelic and Latin as an integral
and very important element in Scottish literature is being reinforced by new editions of
classic texts, many from the first millennium, in recent collections by such scholars as
Thomas Owen Clancy and Gilbert Márkus.
Philosophers, intellectual historians and cultural critics in both Scotland and North
America have recognised the Scottish Enlightenment as a period and a body of writing of
global importance, and have traced important influences on both Enlightenments and
political emancipatory movements in America and Europe. Critics such as Andrew Hook
and Susan Manning have investigated Scottish-American literary and cultural cross-
currents over several centuries, while R. D. S. Jack, Deidre Dawson, Bill Findlay, Pierre
Morère and others have begun to trace the impact of Scottish writing in Italy, France and
elsewhere in Europe. Much remains to be done in all of these areas, but recognition of
Scottish literature as internationally significant and the internationalising of Scottish lit-
erary scholarship are among the most important developments of the past thirty years.
These developments are intrinsic to the conception of The Edinburgh History of Scottish
Literature: the work of many of its contributors has been central to their advancement.
6 Ian Brown, Thomas Owen Clancy, Susan Manning and Murray Pittock

The new assessments presented in these volumes, by internationally known figures and a
rising generation of scholars of Scottish literature from Scotland, England, Ireland, con-
tinental Europe, Australia and North America, present new contexts and new demon-
strations of the internationalism of Scottish literature. In all these ways, it can no longer
be adequate, or satisfactory, to identify Scottish literature in the chauvinistic way in which
it has sometimes been caricatured. It is a ‘national’ literature, but anything but a ‘narrow’
one, reaching out beyond the nation-state to a European and transatlantic – even global –
reception and sphere of influence.
The growing internationalisation of the student body in many universities has revealed
the wide appeal of Scottish literature; European exchange students from countries such as
Denmark and Switzerland identify the Scottish experience of relating to a powerful neigh-
bour as akin to their own, while American and Canadian students frequently discover
new historical and comparative dimensions to texts in their own national literatures.
Meanwhile, beyond academia, films such as Rob Roy (1994) and Braveheart (1995) have
demonstrated increasing interest in representations – however problematic for historians and
many native Scots – of Scotland and its literature and history. This is not only a transatlantic
phenomenon, but one spread across the anglophone world. In the US Census of 2000,
11 million people identified themselves as having Scottish or Scots-Irish ancestry. A more
general interest in Scotland and its cultures also reaches beyond the anglophone world in all
continents. The resonance of ‘Scotland’ in central and eastern European countries is strong
where political and cultural experience finds an echo, a model and even a paradigm in that
of Scotland. One of the editorial team for this History, visiting the South Caucasus countries
in 2002, found ministers of culture (newly independent of the former Soviet spheres of influ-
ence) using Braveheart and Rob Roy, for all their flaws, as embodiments of important truths
about liberty and the need for freedom. To them, such imaginative re-creations of Scottish
experience represent these values with particular force in the modern world, while the study
of the Scottish Enlightenment, and of contemporary Scottish cultures, continues to bring
ever-larger numbers of eastern European scholars to Scotland.
At the same time, Scottish politics and the prospect of political change kept the country
and its distinct culture in the public consciousness worldwide. Within the UK context, this
political change created a special kind of international dimension for Scottish literature:
increasing interest in its longstanding historical, cultural and demographic links with
Ireland. The IRA ceasefire and the Good Friday agreement, together with a re-examination
of the legacy of sectarianism attendant on devolution, helped to support the development
first of the Irish-Scottish Academic Initiative (1995) and then the Research Institute for
Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen (1999), which has been awarded
over £2 million in research grants. Trinity College, Dublin, has developed a similar centre in
Ireland, partnered with the Irish Studies Centre at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.
Centres for Scottish literary studies flourish in Guelph, Ontario (a city which John Galt
helped to establish in 1824), at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, and at Berkeley
in California.
The growth in interdisciplinary studies in the 1990s provided a further boost for Scottish
literature. Area studies (such as American Studies) are by nature interdisciplinary, and the
study of Scotland was no exception. The partial integration of work in different disciplines
contributed to maximising the impact of Scottish studies, in which there were many oppor-
tunities to carve out new research areas, both institutionally and in individual scholarship.
The Department of Scottish Studies (now Celtic and Scottish Studies) at the University
of Edinburgh, for example, combines ethnological, archaeological, cultural, literary and
 Scottish Literature: Criticism and the Canon 7

historical dimensions in research, teaching and archival holdings. Scottish art and archi-
tectural history have been discussed in landmark works by – among others – Duncan
Macmillan, and Miles Glendinning and his collaborators; Charles W. J. Withers has pro-
duced major contributions to the study of Scottish historical geography. Moreover, the
changing political climate helped incline a new generation of Scottish scholars to the study
of their country. Within the wider public interest in Scottish Studies, interest in Scottish
history, in particular, rocketed, beginning with Michael Lynch’s Scotland: A New History
in 1991. In 1999, Tom Devine’s The Scottish Nation, 1700–2000 briefly outsold the then-
current Harry Potter novel in Scotland.
The Edinburgh History recognises these changes, and its practice has absorbed them. It
is conscious of a more theoretically orientated Scottish literature, of the findings of new
textual editions, of the linguistic and cultural multiplicity of Scottish literature through
the ages, and the continuing importance of Gaelic literature; above all, its contributors are
alert to the multiple contexts in which the literature was created: theological, historical,
geographic, linguistic, philosophical and architectural. All these topics are addressed. The
Edinburgh History does not claim to be a cultural history of Scotland; it is a literary history
(and the problem of defining literary texts and literary periods is considered below).
Nevertheless, it is a literary history that comprehends the overlapping claims of spiritual,
intellectual, spatial and material culture as no history of Scottish literature has done before.
The grand narrative sweeps and authoritative interpretations of the nineteenth-century
Whig historians and their twentieth-century successors have come to seem anachronistic
and naively optimistic; more than that, it is now possible to see them as in thrall to politi-
cal interests that dismissed or neglected large sectors of Scotland’s population and great
swathes of its literature – often those that have subsequently been recovered and appre-
ciated as among Scottish literature’s greatest treasures. So for ‘History’ so constituted, the
present volumes substitute a series of perspectives: multiple authors, many stories, many
forms, themes, approaches and angles of understanding. Michael Lynch’s Scotland: A New
History, referred to already, advances a Scottish politico-national identity founded in
alliances and conjunctions – enduring, fragile, frequently contested and always evolving. If
there is a single ‘story’ told by this new literary history of Scotland, this would be one of its
themes. In each period, the ‘History’ of Scotland is complemented, completed and con-
fronted by matching accounts of ‘Geography’ and ‘Languages’ as equally important contexts
for the literary chapters that follow. Single authors appear both as the subjects of chapters
and as players in the literary milieux and ideological frameworks of their times, or as rep-
resentatives of particular regions, genres or cultural movements. Anonymous literature
receives its due, as do the big personalities who are as much products as subjects of Scottish
literary studies. More writing by women is discussed here than in any previous history of
Scottish literature, and newly configured chapters on ‘The Emergence of Privacy’
(Chapter 6) and ‘Travel Writing, 1707–1918’ (Chapter 30) in volume two bring freshly into
prominence some of the genres in which they have excelled.
In these ways, The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature cumulatively rethinks the
notion of literary history itself, as well as bringing to its chapters the benefit of scholarship
developed over the last two decades to extend the forms of knowledge represented in the
Aberdeen History and its predecessors. Part of the effect of that scholarship may be seen in
the apparently simple matter of the chronological division of these volumes. In the 1980s,
the division adopted was into four periods: before 1660; 1660–1800; the nineteenth
century; and the twentieth century. As R. D. S. Jack then observed, this meant that the
volume he edited had historically to move from the very founding of the kingdom of
8 Ian Brown, Thomas Owen Clancy, Susan Manning and Murray Pittock

Scotland to Charles II’s Restoration. In round terms, this meant more than a full millen-
nium, rather than the century, or a little more, that the other editors dealt with. Any form
of periodisation, of course, faces the problem referred to by Andrew Hook (editing
1660–1800), that a period that makes a great deal of political sense may make little cul-
tural sense. Nevertheless, as Douglas Gifford observed in editing the Nineteenth Century
volume of the Aberdeen History, it is important that works are seen as products of a given
time and background. Certainly, the attribution of work to periods sustains such a process,
despite the undoubted larger problem to which Hook draws attention. The fact is,
nonetheless, that even within a monolithic culture, politically and culturally significant
periods may not coincide.
The present editors have recognised that the issue of periodisation is even more compli-
cated in a multicultural society of the kind that Scotland has always been, but that, espe-
cially since Scottish literature in Gaelic has often been separately treated, has until recently
not received due attention in literary history. One must always ask, ‘Whose history?’ In add-
ition, structural divisions that make sense in a historical narrative may not make equal sense
in geographical or linguistic terms, as Charles Withers points out in his chapters in these
volumes. Within the period structure adopted here, a case can be made for 1314 as a period
marker, though it primarily identifies a substantial transforming event in political and mili-
tary history, having significance for all aspects of the cultures of Scotland. Certainly that
year marks a critical event that can be seen to lead to the influential 1320 Declaration of
Arbroath, though even the influence of the Declaration is open to debate: arguably it was
Baldred Bisset’s 1301 Processus that was the key influence at this time. But the Declaration
can be seen to have led to a different, more explicit conception of the communities of
Scotland so that 1320 was another date considered for the period boundary. Even in litera-
ture in Gaelic, the years around 1314 can be seen to have clear significance: they saw the
consolidation of the two greatest families to patronise formal poetry in the medieval and
early modern periods: the MacDonalds and the Campbells.
Of course, even to include a full section before 1314 breaks with previous literary histo-
ries of Scotland. Taking their cue from literature in Scots, these have tended to take 1314,
and that year’s glorification in the first major Scots text, John Barbour’s The Bruce, as the
starting point for Scottish literature. The Edinburgh History makes a different stand, one
which allows that both for linguistic communities, like the Gaels of Scotland, and for geo-
graphical communities like Orkney and Shetland, such a starting point disenfranchises
languages and communities from the nation’s literary story. Our first section must be con-
tentious – where was Scotland and what was Scottish in the eighth century? – but attempts
to give a literary voice to Scotland’s multilingual and multifaceted map. To do this it must
partly appropriate texts which also stand as canonical texts of other literatures (the
Gododdin, the Orkneyinga saga, the Dream of the Rood). The authors here are aware of the
contested nature of the texts as well as of their historical contexts.
The choice of 1918 to mark the beginning of the final period may also be seen as arbitrary,
or as relating primarily to a world rather than a Scottish event (though again of paramount
military and political moment). Yet that year certainly saw or swiftly led to vast changes in
a wide range of national and international settlements, political, cultural and philosophical.
Further, Scotland lost a disproportionate share of its population in 1914–18, and there was
also a vast accompanying loss through emigration. Economically, the country never recov-
ered the relative industrial strength it had enjoyed at the outbreak of war, class boundaries
loosened and shifted, and the position of women in publishing and the literary marketplace
underwent a revolution commensurate to the changes in their political and social status with
 Scottish Literature: Criticism and the Canon 9

the granting of the principle of universal suffrage nationwide in 1918. In theme, form and
attitude, literature reflected, commented upon and construed these changes. The choice of
1707 as the point of separation between the Renaissance and Enlightenment/Victorian
periods arguably makes more sense in strictly cultural terms than the others, given hitherto
conventional views of the effects of the Union. Yet, as the chapters in the 1707–1918 period
indicate in various ways, recent scholarship has shown that the basis of the Enlightenment,
often in the past attributed solely to the supposed benefits of the Union, is also buried deep
in Scotland’s Renaissance – and, indeed, medieval – cultures. In other words, the
Enlightenment was not simply a transplant, but a native growth of some antiquity develop-
ing under international influences, so that even 1707 may to some extent be identified as an
artificial boundary. Indeed, it can be argued that, for Gaelic literature in particular, the more
appropriate boundary year might have been 1745 or 1746.
The editors recognise, then, that any system of literary periodisation in a complex,
multicultural society like Scotland through the ages will inevitably have an element of
arbitrariness. Contributors have been encouraged to question, qualify and discuss the
appropriateness of the boundaries in individual cases, so that they do not appear to take on
a reified or absolute significance. The divisions may, however, be justified on more than
grounds of simple expediency. The period dates selected for the volumes of The Edinburgh
History allow the contributors – for the first time in a literary history of Scotland – to
explore its earliest multilingual expressions, and to highlight the richness of its medieval
literature, as something identifiably different from, though closely linked to, that of the
Renaissance. Meanwhile, for all the reservations that may be felt about 1707 and 1918 as
boundaries, the period 1707–1918 allows continuities between the Enlightenment and
developments in the long nineteenth century to emerge. As Cairns Craig and other con-
tributors argue, the Scottish Enlightenment did not simply fizzle out around 1800 into a
dreary aftermath of tartanry and Kailyard provincialism, terms that are, in any case, them-
selves being re-examined and re-valued. It, rather, found new channels of literary, scien-
tific and imperial expression as both distinctive and a major contributor to the strength of
Britain in the nineteenth-century world. Indeed, the Scottish Renaissance itself was
arguably as much the child of the Enlightenment-influenced 1890s as of the 1920s.
Notwithstanding the period divisions adopted, a key theme of The Edinburgh History of
Scottish Literature remains that Scottish literature is a continuous and multilayered phe-
nomenon. This is so even if at times it has been perceived, for political and historical
reasons – just as Scottish history itself was by Anglo-Scots historians of the Enlightenment
anxious to assert the nation’s ‘new start’ after the Union – as discontinuous. The fact that
the content of certain chapters leads their authors to consider material beyond their period
boundaries is a sign of exactly that rich continuity, manifest in interactions across time,
space and linguistic idiom within Scottish literature in its international contexts. It is
central to the vision underlying these volumes that Scottish literature is not simply liter-
ature in English or Scots, with some attention paid to Gaelic and a little to Latin.
Significantly more chapters are devoted to aspects of literature in Gaelic than the one or
two chapters per period in the Aberdeen History; while these do not themselves add up to
a sub-history, they make new advances and bring fresh perspectives, particularly to the
modern period. For the medieval period the linguistic net widens, as it must, to include
Norse and Welsh. The continuity claimed for Scottish literature is not simply that of
history understood as an unfolding story, but of thematic and intercultural exchange, both
synchronic and diachronic. At times, it seems as if the various cultural strands of Scottish
literature develop separately; at others, that they interact richly and profoundly with one
10 Ian Brown, Thomas Owen Clancy, Susan Manning and Murray Pittock

another and, of course, other literatures, both influencing and being influenced by them.
For example, it is not only during the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ of the twentieth century that
Gaelic, English and Scots must be read alongside each other (in writers such as Hugh
MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean and Norman MacCaig), but during the eighteenth century,
and the sixteenth too – how else to make sense of Jacobite poetry, or The Book of the Dean
of Lismore?
Since the mid-1980s, contemporary thinking about Scottish literature – within Scotland
and beyond – modern research and theoretical debate, and a surge of interest involving
innovative study and critical writing of high quality, have indeed deepened and enhanced
perceptions. This has taken place in the context of the factors relating to the study of
Scottish literature discussed earlier: theorisation of its study; rethinking of the international
importance of Scottish writing and thought; its increasing international recognition,
respect and popularity and its place within broader interdisciplinary studies. The Edinburgh
History of Scottish Literature draws on such new thinking to explore a range of contemporary
and developing visions of Scottish literature. In so doing, our contributors set out a variety
of evaluations and re-evaluations of the very nature of those visions. The Edinburgh History
celebrates both the variousness of Scottish literature and its substantial contribution to the
literature of the world.
If the meanings of ‘history’ in its nineteenth-century sense needs to be open to question,
so too do ‘literature’ and ‘Scottish’. The particular organisation of sections and chapters
within the volumes’ periods reflects developments within the overall study of Scottish
literature, with serious attention being paid to historical, philosophical, religious, pedagog-
ical, popular and oral forms. Oral and performance modalities have been a notable feature
in the development of Scottish literature and the conceptual and critical issues they raise
are alive throughout these volumes. A similar development in understanding the importance
of diaspora cultures as part of – and yet not part of – modern Scottish culture underlies the
attention paid here to this more extended framework of Scottish writing. The diversity of
Scottish literature from the earliest days until now is reflected in the broadening of the debate
brought about by new critical and ideological approaches. This is reinforced by the devel-
oping understanding of ‘literature’ as an elusive term, better understood when attention
is paid to contexts and to modes of written expression outside the traditional ‘canon’ (as,
for example, in John Cairns’s and David Sellar’s establishment of the genre of ‘legal writing’).
‘Literary’ texts gain new definition when considered alongside historical and philosophical
works in all periods; the impact of gender studies, innovative studies of the languages of
Scotland and contemporary interdisciplinary approaches have all further reinforced the
pressing need to recognise the diversity of Scotland’s past and present literature. These
volumes aim to be a substantial point of reference, as they reflect the ferment of scholar-
ship that has developed modern understandings and perceptions of Scottish literature and
its place in the more general contexts of Scotland’s cultures. They also seek, in a period of
vibrant activity in Scottish literature, to provide an account of current understanding and
useful approaches.
The Scottishness of Scottish literature has always courted exceptionalism. Kurt Wittig in
his landmark The Scottish Tradition in Literature (1958) sought to define a single tradition,
a vision of a Scottish contribution to literature, and discussed what he saw as its key charac-
teristics. Arguably his work grew out of – and sustained for a long time – a prevalent essen-
tialist view of a Scottish tradition within literature. At its crudest, this view could lead to the
bêtise of Norman MacCaig’s being called ‘quisling’ because he wrote in English or an asser-
tion that after a certain stage of her writing career Muriel Spark ceased to be of interest to
 Scottish Literature: Criticism and the Canon 11

‘Scottish Literature’ and became of interest only to ‘English Literature’. Introducing the
Mercat Anthology of Early Scottish Literature (1997), R. D. S. Jack summarises the consequent
definition of ‘Scottish’ literature arising from Wittig’s essentialist view as defining ‘traditions’
and ‘values’ in terms of difference ‘from England’ as follows:

Writing in Scots (The language of the Scots)

Writing unpretentiously (The down-to-earth Scot)
Writing on Scottish themes (The patriot Scot)
Writing from a democratic viewpoint (The democratic Scot)

Jack argues that such categorisations can only limit receptivity to the wide range of Scottish
literature’s dimensions and cultures. The editors of these volumes concur that such a
restricting and constricting perception of Scottish literature is not only intellectually lim-
iting, but also spiritually, emotionally and creatively impoverished.
These volumes rather offer a Scottish literature that is richly varied and interactive, full
of the contradictions – and the vitality of those contradictions – that any large-scale liter-
ature must embody, often without resolving. They accept without question that Scottish lit-
erature exists in a variety of languages, not simply the three most often cited (Scots, Gaelic
and English), but also in earlier times in Norse, Latin, French and Brythonic languages
including Welsh. They also recognise that in the developing diversity of modern Scotland
other languages new to Scotland are likely to make their own contribution to its literature
in the future. Scotland is often and rightly described, not only in modern times, but
throughout its history, as multicultural. Given the rich ways in which such multicultural-
ism is at the centre of Scottish cultures and experience and the ways in which these cultures
work on, with and in one another, the editors would go further and assert that Scotland is
intercultural. It is by no inadvertence that the first chapter dealing with a specific aspect of
literature in the first volume is that of Thomas Owen Clancy, which deals with writing in
Welsh, Gaelic and Norse (see Chapter 6), while the last chapter of volume three, by Alastair
Niven, is entitled ‘New Diversity, Hybridity and Scottishness’ (see Chapter 32).
Given all this diversity, one must ask whether it is either possible or desirable to answer
the question ‘What is Scottish literature?’ On one level, the answer would have to be ‘No’.
Arguably, no question framed in any of the humanities can, or should, give with any con-
fidence a single exclusive answer concerning a complex of external boundaries and inter-
nal relationships. This is as true of ‘English’ or ‘American’ literature as it is of Scottish, but
it may be particularly true of Scottish literature given the several languages in which it has
existed and in which it continues to express itself. On another level, however, it is certainly
possible to indicate features that distinguish ‘Scottish’ from other, particularly other anglo-
phone, literatures. It can be written by Scots, in Scotland or about it; it can be in English,
Scots, Gaelic, Latin and other languages, and it specialises in hybrids: Scots-English in par-
ticular, but also Scots-Latin and Scots-Gaelic. Its writers, especially in recent years, work
across genre boundaries to an exceptional degree. It has a strong bias towards certain
aspects of experience: hidden or suppressed states being one (hence the power of the
Gothic in Scottish writing, as in Irish); a powerful pragmatism being another. It has certain
characteristic forms, particularly in poetry; it has certain characteristic concerns, includ-
ing the infamous divided self. Most particularly, it inflects genre in a manner distinctively
its own. This manner has many expressions. They include the last Latin epic in these
islands, the relationship to questions of native pastoral in eighteenth-century debates, the
demotic inflection of the elegy, the relationship of oral story to narrative construction and
12 Ian Brown, Thomas Owen Clancy, Susan Manning and Murray Pittock

its impact on narrative style, together with many other features that characterise Scottish
writing. Many of these have been thought of as weaknesses (the divided self being the
classic example), but they can equally well be seen as strengths. A huge range of effects,
from Hogg’s sociolinguistic shifts to Barrie’s whimsy, Buchan’s self-aware imperial roles and
Liz Lochhead’s radically demotic classicism, are rendered possible by an unwillingness to
commit to a single view or a single voice which, in many Scottish texts, is arguably part of
the architecture of hybrid self-presentation.
Scottish literature has helped to form, and is a consitutive part of, British literature, as
well as in opposition to it. The history of the discipline of ‘English literature’ itself was in
significant part – as Robert Crawford and others have shown in Devolving English Literature
(1992) and The Scottish Invention of English Literature (1998) – a rhetorical product of
the cultural politics of late eighteenth-century Scotland. Accounts of ‘English’ or ‘British’
literature usually fail to comprehend these things within their own paradigms, and often
simply omit the writers who display them. The hybrid style of literary Scots, for example,
was well known and acknowledged by writers of the generation of William Hazlitt and
Robert Southey; today it is often misunderstood as ‘dialect’ poetry like that of William
Barnes and John Clare. As a consequence, the sheer sophistication of Burns’s effects is
almost completely missed, as is its place in a tradition of verbal virtuosity that stretches
back through Fergusson and Dunbar. Thus, a writer of undeniably global appeal and sig-
nificance is often simply elided from Romantic literary history, notwithstanding his import-
ance for an understanding of Wordsworth and Byron. This is not a plea for Burns’s
inclusion, or for his influence; it is an observation that much of Scottish literary history is
actually incompatible with the English literary models that have defined the canon and
which find linguistic hybridity atypical to their paradigm. But ‘atyplicality’ implies a prior
norm, and it is precisely this kind of reactive or oppositional view that requires to be care-
fully handled if Scottish literature’s separate, but also integral, status is to emerge. In these
volumes, Scottish writing is discussed in its literary relations, not only with England
(a comparison that has tended to produce the outdated ‘cultural cringe’ associated – quite
inappropriately in this case – with postcolonial literature), but with Ireland and France,
with other European countries, with America and with the global diaspora.
Nonetheless, it is important that Scottish literary criticism does not adopt any or all of
these features as denotative. Scottish literature is more often connotative, establishing its
presence by extending a range of possibilities: it is illuminating to read Adomnán’s Life of
St Columba, Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, or Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton as Scottish
literary texts, just as reading Le Fanu, Stoker or even Ulysses as Irish writing expands our
understanding without limiting their significance to representatives of ‘national literature’.
Like all literatures of small nations or cultures sustaining themselves simultaneously within
and against dominant literatures which cross borders to augment their canon (for Sheridan
can be an English writer, but Trollope never an Irish one), Scottish literature is politicised
to an extent. It finds spaces for survival, like Barrie’s islands, refuges for fantasy in Peter Pan,
Crichton and Mary Rose; but its politics are not what characterise it. Its essentials often
expand readings, not contract, simplify or oppose them: they make for richer literary under-
standing of those Scottish texts adopted into ‘English’ literature, just as those English liter-
ature neglects open up new perspectives on the ‘favoured few’. Hogg’s Confessions is now
adopted into ‘English’, while Margaret Oliphant’s supernatural fiction is not; Thomson’s
pastoral is, while Ramsay’s is not. The chapters of this History investigate how and why
this should be so. The totality of relationships within Scottish literature demands a liter-
ary history which incorporates inner narratives, as well as outer ones, a Scottish literature,
 Scottish Literature: Criticism and the Canon 13

which, like America’s or Australia’s literatures, makes sense of what it offers itself as well as
what it offers others. Moreover, it is open to dialogues outwith English literature: for
example, in the hybrid use of language and register in Susan Ferrier and Maria Edgeworth,
or Sorley MacLean’s relationship to European modernism, or the place of the Kailyard in a
late nineteenth-century Europe-wide examination and celebration of kitsch as a cultural
form. Only in the totality of Scottish literary history will it be possible to see the potential
range of its relations to itself and other literatures. That is why this History exists.
What constitutes a ‘Scottish’ writer? Certainly, as noted above and in relation to both
Norman MacCaig and Muriel Spark, there has been a tendency to define ‘Scottish writer’
in an exclusive rather than inclusive way. Other literatures engage in territorial expansion
by laying claim to writers who perhaps belong to several traditions. English literature, for
example, has routinely and selectively appropriated American, Irish and Scottish writers
(to name only three nationalities) to a putative centralised – and canonised – tradition.
This process has been thoroughly exposed by such thinkers as Cairns Craig in Out of History
(1996) and elsewhere. The practice of the editors in this History has generally been to
include those who have been born in Scotland or spent significant or formative parts of
their lives in that country. Such a definition, however, must be flexibly adopted (and this
is particularly so for the first section, which considers a period before modern Scotland’s
borders had been fully fixed). Rigorous application would, for example, exclude John
Barclay, who – although born in France and never having visited Scotland – defined
himself as a Scot. Indeed, writing in Latin, he clearly falls within the medieval and renais-
sance Scoto-Latin tradition. In such cases, an inclusive definition has always been preferred
and is justified – if justification is necessary – by the ways in which Scots have always been
inclined to international exchange and exploration. Further, given the particular history
of Scotland and Empire, the present editors have sought to pay due attention to writers
when they belong to the Scottish diaspora, who are as clearly part of Scottish literature as
the musicians of Cape Breton are of Scottish music.
The organisation of this History in itself signifies a vision of the nature of Scottish liter-
ature. The relational nature of the chapters is carefully developed to include not only a
comprehensive historical survey, but also to allow a multiperspectival approach to its iden-
tity in indicative groupings and at key moments. Detailed studies of major figures are com-
plemented by cross-cutting chapters on conceptual developments, themes and literary
milieux. Convinced of the high quality and coherent existence of Scottish literature from
the earliest times until now, the editors contend that its range and variety are integral to
these strengths. The strength of a literature of such international importance and influence
lies in the ways in which it contains and celebrates variousness of form, idea and meaning
and does so within its very nature, both intercultural and boundary-crossing. Within the
discourses that constitute Scottish literature, there is much diversity, and there are many
compounds.
It is, therefore, fundamental to the theoretical conception of The Edinburgh History that
no single theory or perspective dominates. The emphasis is on plurality of approach,
reflecting the variety and heterodoxy of modern scholarship on the subject of Scottish
literary studies and, indeed, the multifaceted contemporary discussion of Scottishness
itself. The History seeks to illuminate its subject by bringing to bear appropriate and inter-
acting perspectives on specific topics. This approach implies, for example, that authors
such as Adomnán, Buchanan, Lindsay, Ramsay, Hume, Mac Mhaighstir Alastair, Scott,
Conan Doyle, MacLean, Morgan or Lochhead will be discussed in more than one chapter,
even if the author’s name appears in only one chapter title. There can be no single view
14 Ian Brown, Thomas Owen Clancy, Susan Manning and Murray Pittock

or dominant line; the towering figures of conventional literary history gain new dimen-
sions, but also make better sense, when their literary productions are construed through a
range of cultural and theoretical contexts. Through this process of selection and combin-
ation a comprehensive picture of the ‘history’ of Scottish literature, in both its spatial and
temporal dimensions, begins to emerge.
The principles of selection in these volumes, then, are based on grounds of contemporary
and retrospective significance in the light of networks of relationships: spatial, temporal,
linguistic and conceptual. Each chapter develops a theoretical perspective most suited to
the matter of the chapter; contributors have been encouraged to bring their own particular
approaches to their topic. The interaction, and even contrast, of those perspectives is an
important element in the way this History is conceived. Even where a chapter is centred on
a major figure, a diversity of theoretical approach is sustained by the references to the same
author in other relevant chapters; readers will be able to see other possible approaches to a
given topic or body of work. The History thus aims to achieve a proper complexity in rela-
tion to its subject and to recognise the conditionality of critical knowledge. It thus seeks to
avoid easy categories, narrow assumptions or simple acceptance of traditional views about
Scotland or its literatures. Issues of diaspora writing are discussed in specific chapters in the
later periods. At the same time, allowing for the effects of acculturation on passing genera-
tions, important writers of Scottish descent in other literatures – such as Lermontov, who
was proud of and made much of his Scottish ancestry, or indeed Denmark’s greatest Baroque
poet, Thomas Kingo (1634–1703), Norway’s greatest seventeenth-century writer Petter
Dass (1647–1707), whose father was a Peter Dundas of Dundee, or Antoine (or Anthony)
Hamilton (1645?–1719), one of the most important figures in French Classicism – we leave
to study within the context of other literatures.
The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature does not, therefore, claim magisterial author-
ity from any single critical perspective. Rather, it seeks to provide a confident, compre-
hensive and celebratory map of the current lively state and scope of its subject in volumes
whose form and content will advance the continuing expansion of possibilities in Scottish
literary study. The many approaches taken add up to a work which is appropriately innov-
ative, at once in line with recent literary critical developments and properly sceptical of
them. This interactive and multivalent approach allows time and space to contributors –
and The History as a whole – to develop coherent responses to topics, and to avoid the
danger of fragmentation into brief reference-book entries. The volumes fall into five sec-
tions: until 1314, 1314–1707, 1707–1918, since 1918 and ‘Introduction’ (Chapters 1
and 2). This comprises two chapters, the present one and the next, ‘The Study of Scottish
Literature’. These cumulatively outline and elaborate the fundamentally conspectual phil-
osophy of the History. This is that the term ‘Scottish’ is multicultural and multivalent – in
our term, intercultural – and that the term ‘literature’ is elusive and fascinatingly diverse
in its meanings, but not so amorphous as to lack meaningful identity or shape. Scotland
has always been multi-ethnic and multilingual, and the accounts that follow recognise this
more fully than ever before. The ‘Introduction’ as a whole, then, seeks to provide a frame-
work contextualising the work of the History in past, current and anticipated international
critical and theoretical debate.
The Edinburgh History seeks to be as comprehensive as is consistent with a selective crit-
ical history, combining authority with the best of modern scholarship and an inclusive
understanding of the nature of Scots cultures. It seeks to mediate between the specialised
world of learned books and the needs of a wider reading public. It brings a variety of appro-
priate contemporary critical tools to bear on the whole corpus of Scottish literature, while
 Scottish Literature: Criticism and the Canon 15

engaging with problems of canonicity, reception and interpretation. Scottish literature is

seen within the wider field of current and previous literary scholarship, so as to influence
the agenda for critical debate in the twenty-first century. The ambition of The Edinburgh
History of Scottish Literature is to open up new lines of enquiry for scholarship and provide
new perspectives to develop and enhance the understanding and enjoyment of a distinc-
tively Scottish literature.
 2

The Study of Scottish Literature

Cairns Craig

In 1933 appeared a slim volume: Edinburgh Essays on Scots Literature. Its extravagant subti-
tle – Being a Course of Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh by Members of the English
Department and Others – recognised the rare event it recorded: sustained attention to
Scottish literature in a university English Department in Scotland. In the Preface, Herbert
Grierson – editor of the Letters of Walter Scott – acknowledged they were in part response to
complaints about the neglect of Scottish literature. Edwin Muir, reviewing the volume,
commented ‘it would be better for Scottish literature to languish in its time-honoured
neglect, if this is the only publicity it can secure’.
‘Time-honoured neglect’ is a significant reminder of how recent is the development of
Scottish literature as an academic discipline. A Chair of Scottish History and Scottish
Literature was first established in Glasgow University in 1912, funded by the successful
Scottish Historical Exhibition in the previous year. Two world wars were to intervene before
the establishment of the School of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh in 1951, which did not
offer specific courses in Scottish literature until 1969. This is not the full story, of course.
The Celtic strand of Scottish literature had earlier been separated out: a Chair of Celtic was
founded in 1882 at Edinburgh, while teaching in Celtic, especially Celtic literature, was
inaugurated in Glasgow University in 1901, with a Chair there by 1956; Aberdeen’s Celtic
Department had been flourishing since the 1920s. While these centres, and learned bodies
like the Gaelic Society of Inverness, were making significant contributions to the estab-
lishment of a Scottish Gaelic canon and to criticism in the decades before 1930, they were
doing so in a context distinct from the study of the rest of Scottish literature. That by con-
trast was, then, seen as Scottish literature: literature by and large in Scots or English.
The Association for Scottish Literary Studies was founded in 1970 as a result of a confer-
ence at Stirling University in the previous year. Glasgow University’s Department of Scottish
Literature was not established till 1971 – and still remains the only one in Scotland devoted
solely to the study of Scottish literature. Centres for advanced research in Scottish literature
originated even more recently: the Centre for Scottish Cultural Studies at St Andrews in
1993 and the Research Institute for Irish and Scottish Studies at Aberdeen in 1999. Courses
in Scottish literature outside Scotland remain a rarity: Trinity College, Dublin, for instance,
first established a course in Scottish literature in 2001 as an offshoot of the Irish-Scottish
Academic Initiative. It was only in 2003 that the first Professor of Scottish Literature in
England, Murray Pittock, took up the post at Manchester University. While Scottish Gaelic
literature had been served by academic journals since 1904 (The Celtic Review to 1916, fol-
lowed by the spasmodic Scottish Gaelic Studies in 1926 and folkloristic journals from 1957),
the major journals serving Scottish literary scholars more generally are of recent origin:
Studies in Scottish Literature founded in the United States by G. Ross Roy in 1963; Scottish
 The Study of Scottish Literature 17

Literary Journal (since 2000, Scottish Studies Review) in the University of Aberdeen in 1974.
And if a full-scale review of the subject area in a multi-author, multi-volume format repre-
sents a public assertion of disciplinary autonomy, then the study of Scottish literature may
have reached that stage only with the 1988 completion of Aberdeen University Press’s four-
volume History of Scottish Literature.
The present author’s introduction to the fourth volume of that History suggests twentieth-
century Scottish writing developed in waves alongside the development of other indepen-
dent ‘literatures in English’: first, the establishment of American and Irish literatures; then
the assertion by the Empire’s ‘settler’ colonies that their literatures could not be regarded
simply as subsets of domestic English literature; finally, the upsurge of ‘postcolonial’ litera-
tures in former imperial territories. If Scottish writing could be linked to these developments,
Scottish criticism lagged far behind: a glance at any of the now numerous anthologies of
postcolonial criticism reveals no Scottish contributions. In Ireland, from the 1960s onwards,
there was a sustained attempt to read Irish literature as the first postcolonial culture of the
modern world. In 1995, Declan Kiberd argued in Inventing Ireland that since ‘the Irish experi-
ence seems to anticipate that of the emerging nation-states of the so-called “Third World” ’,
it was appropriate, ‘to make comparisons with other, subsequent movements, and to draw
upon the recent theories of Frantz Fanon and Ashis Nandy for retrospective illumination’.
In Scotland, in contrast, the arguments of theorists such as Michael Hechter, in relation to
Scotland’s subjection to a form of ‘internal colonialism’, could not divert attention from
Scotland’s leading role in the creation of the British Empire. Scottish literature, like English
literature, could only be ‘postcolonial’ in the sense that its empire had come to an end.
Cut off from one of the major strands in the development of modern literary theory, the
contemporary study of Scottish literature has been more deeply affected than others by the
inspiration of feminist criticism. Efforts to establish Scottish literature as a separate discip-
line in the 1960s and 1970s were conducted in a cultural context shaped by patriarchal
assumptions: conceptions of cultural independence founded on challenging a Union where
Scotland was regularly figured as feminine partner made ‘masculinism’ the apparently
‘natural’ prologue to autonomy. In such a context, the recovery, since the 1970s, of the for-
gotten and neglected works of women writers has had a disproportionate impact on both
the richness of Scotland’s literary resources and the overall understanding of its literary
history. Scottish Victorian culture looks less hostile to achievement in the novel if
Margaret Oliphant is given her due, and less implacable if Jane Welsh Carlyle’s letters are
treated as seriously as Thomas Carlyle’s histories. Scottish modernism has a very different
tenor if Nan Shepherd’s experiments with the novel are valued as highly as those of Gibbon
or Gunn. From the revival of Elizabeth Melville’s writings and re-estimation of Joanna
Baillie’s plays to the recognition of Muriel Spark’s outstanding contribution to the modern
novel, and the public appeal of Liz Lochhead’s work (confirmed by her role in the new
Scottish Parliament building’s opening), the study of Scottish literature has been under-
going a profound gender change – confirmed, perhaps, by influential sessions on ‘Queer Sir
Walter’ at Modern Language Association conferences in the United States.
This area, perhaps more than any other, illustrates how far the study of Scottish litera-
ture proceeded at a considerable remove from the academic study of Gaelic. From the ear-
liest major anthologies in the late eighteenth century, poetry by women had been at the
heart of the coalescing canon of Gaelic literature, and women occupied key nodal points in
its literary history as it was being evaluated: Mary MacLeod (Màiri nighean Alasdair
Ruaidh) was until recently seen in the historiography as the major force behind the rise of
vernacular metres in Gaelic verse in the seventeenth century; Sìleas na Ceapaich has been
18 Cairns Craig

identified as an innovator in private verse; Màiri Mhòr nan Òran (Mary MacPherson) as a
key poet in the politicisation of Gaelic verse in the 1880s. Such poets have been edited and
studied by Gaelic scholars throughout the past two centuries, without the need of prompt-
ing from a changing scholarly climate – but that difference has passed largely unnoticed by
critics within both the disciplines of Scottish literature and Celtic. That only two survey
chapters were devoted to the Gaelic tradition in the otherwise ground-breaking (and
massive) 1997 collection by Gifford and McMillan, A History of Scottish Women’s Writing,
indicates some of the blind spots that somehow seem to persist. In this case, the blind spot
was to the detriment of the study, casting as it did an accidental veil over that stream of
Scottish literature which has brought forward major and ‘canonised’ women writers since
the fifteenth century.
To some critics, indeed, Scotland’s history has been so insistently male in construction
that Scottish women’s experiences and writings cannot be fitted into any narrative founded
on the nation, since any such effort represents violent appropriation of their self-expression
to purposes they would not support. The traditional problem of how to treat Scottish writers
who make their literary careers in London – J. H. Millar’s pioneering Literary History of
Scotland (1903) excludes Thomson, Boswell and Carlyle – is thus compounded, and the rel-
evance of attaching ‘Scottish’ to ‘literature’ as an explicatory category cast seriously in
doubt. It is a doubt, however, which has always hung over the study of Scottish literature,
challenged on the one side by the redundancy of a national or linguistic boundary to liter-
ary creativity and on the other by the impediments to literary evaluation produced by a
politically – or nationally – motivated criticism. But the study of Scottish literature is not
just a local afterthought to the rise of English studies, or the literary accompaniment to
recent constitutional change: what distinguishes Scottish literature from the newer ‘litera-
tures in English’ is that the study of Scottish literature (at least as defined since 1912) has
been entwined within the study of English – and English literature within Scottish – since
their inception. As Michael Alexander has pointed out in his History of English Literature
(2000), ‘a canon is a selection from the larger literary tradition’, and insofar as there is a
canon of English literature it ‘goes back to the fifteenth century, when Scottish poets
invoked a poetic tradition with Chaucer at its head’. The study of English literature, as
canon, begins with the Scottish poets’ study of Chaucer, and the study of Scottish literature
begins simultaneously in their attempts to specify what is different in their own national lit-
erature. (In doing so, they appear to ignore the fact that this, at least in the court of James
IV, comprised poetry in Gaelic and Scots, even if that led sometimes to such (mock?) rival-
ries as those expressed in The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy.) Dunbar, for instance, in The
Goldyn Targe proclaims the virtues of the ‘reverend Chaucere, rose of rethoris all/ As in our
tong ane flour imperiall’, and the achievements of Gower and Lydgate whose ‘sugurit lippis
and tongis aureate,/ Bene to oure eris cause of grete delyte’. By contrast, in Eneados, first
complete translation of Virgil by a British author (1512–13), Gavin Douglas insists on no
connection between his work in ‘Scottis’ and Caxton’s English: ‘It has na thing ado there-
with, God wait,/ Ne na mair lyke than the devil and Sanct Austyne’. When James VI pro-
posed in Some Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and schewit in Scottis Poesie, that though
English ‘is lykest to our language, yit we differ from thame in sindrie reulis of Poesie’, he was
acknowledging that the study of Scottish literature begins in the effort to distinguish
Scotland’s difference from an English literature with which it has a profound commonality.
Those late medieval ‘makars’ have taken on special significance in the study of Scottish
literature, because they represent the only body of work produced in Scots when the
nation in its modern form was politically independent. The neglect, meantime, of the very
 The Study of Scottish Literature 19

substantial body of poetry existing in Gaelic from this time compounds the separation
already referred to between Scottish literature in Scots or English and that in Gaelic. This
separation, which arguably did not exist in such a stark way in the court of, say, James IV
has led to general ignorance of major medieval Scottish poets who happened to be writing
in Gaelic. Meantime, the ‘makars’ have been treated as a privileged expression of the
nation’s spirit. John Speirs wrote in The Scots Literary Tradition (1940):

For a Scotsman to become fully aware of himself it would seem even necessary that he should
realize his Scottish past something at least partially distinct from an English past,

that ‘Scottish past’ being represented by the poetry in Scots ‘of the fifteenth, and of the
beginning of the sixteenth, century’. This poetry has come to represent, as it were,
Scotland’s Classical literature, curiously neglecting the parallel Classical Scottish litera-
ture in Gaelic. G. Gregory Smith, in the twentieth century, can quote approvingly John
Pinkerton’s sentiment expressed in his Ancient Scottish Poems in 1786:

no man of either kingdom would wish the extinction of the Scottish dialect in poetry [. . .] It
were to be wished that it should be regarded in both kingdoms equally only as an ancient and
poetical language, and nothing can take it so much out of the hands of the vulgar as a rigid
preservation of the old spelling [. . .] In short, the old Scottish poets ought to be regarded in
the same light as Chaucer and the old English ones.

The poetry of late medieval Scotland – in ‘ancient and poetical language’ as remote from
the present as any, separated from the ‘vulgar’ by its difficulty – offered itself as the demand-
ingly ‘Classical’ context in which the reading of Scottish literature could become, properly,
‘study’ rather than mere relaxation. This offer would be accepted at face value at the cost
of a substantial body of Classical Scottish literature in Gaelic.
Nevertheless, the works of those now considered the major authors of the early period
of Scottish literature came only slowly into circulation. Dunbar’s work first reached a
general public in Allan Ramsay’s The Ever Green (1724), because Ramsay had access to one
of the most important sources of earlier Scottish literature, the Bannatyne Manuscript.
Ramsay, however, was an editor who, in the words of W. E. Aytoun, ‘never felt any hesita-
tion in altering, retouching and adding to the old material which fell into his hands, so as
to suit it to the prevalent taste of the age’. The other major source of earlier Scottish poetry,
the Maitland Manuscript, suffered equally when its contents were first made public in John
Pinkerton’s Ancient Scottish Poems (1786), since Pinkerton’s introduction confessed his
own authorship of ‘ancient’ poems he had previously published. By the 1770s, Dunbar’s
status as a major poet was well established – mainly as a result of the advocacy of Thomas
Warton, author of a History of English Poetry (1774–81) – but as late as 1786, when
Pinkerton published his List of Scottish Poets, Henryson was still known only as one of the
poets mentioned by Dunbar in his so-called ‘Lament for the Makars’, and as possible author
of a small number of unattributed poems. Though Barbour’s Bruce, Blind Harry’s Wallace
and David Lindsay’s works remained popularly available throughout the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, they were subject to serious scholarly study only when editions of
Barbour and Blind Harry by John Jamieson, compiler of the Etymological Dictionary of the
Scottish Language (1808–9), appeared. It was not until well into the nineteenth century, at
the instigation of the Bannatyne Club in Edinburgh – formed in 1823 under the presidency
of Sir Walter Scott – and the Maitland Club in Glasgow, formed in 1828, that complete
20 Cairns Craig

editions of the major poets appeared. The dominating figure in this period was David Laing,
secretary to the Bannatyne Club, whose editions of Lindsay (1826), Dunbar (1834) and
Henryson (1865) and Works of John Knox, 6 vols. (1846–64) provided complete and schol-
arly editions of the major writers for the first time, setting a standard for later editions such
as John Small’s Works of Gavin Douglas (1874). The effort of these clubs was extended after
1882 by the Scottish Text Society, formed to ‘publish in each year about 400 pages of
printed matter [. . .] illustrative of Scottish Language and Literature before the Union’.
The differentiation between the study of Scottish literature in Scots or English and in
Gaelic is further illustrated by the parallel and equally important Scottish Gaelic Texts
Society, founded as late as 1934 by Professor William J. Watson.
Something of the differing evolutions of the critical study of the two main linguistic
streams in Scottish literature can be revealed by considering the formation of their literary
canons. It was only in the mid-Victorian period, as we have seen, that the modern canon
of pre-Reformation Scottish literature in Scots was firmly established. Early accounts of
Scotland’s writers, like George Mackenzie’s Lives of Scottish Writers (1708–12) – in which
neither Dunbar nor Henryson figure – and David Irving’s Lives of the Scottish Poets (1804),
were replaced by well-informed histories of pre-Reformation Scottish literature. These
included Irving’s own posthumously published History of Scottish Poetry (1861) and John
Merry Ross’s Scottish History and Literature: to the Period of the Reformation (1884). If the
impulse behind much of the work was antiquarian, the outcome was the establishment of
a body of texts that provided the historical core for a national literature. The historical
Scots language core’s continuing significance to the modern discipline of Scottish litera-
ture is attested not only by the number of times the works have been re-edited, but by the
fact that Canongate Classics, a series aimed at a popular paperback market, has nonethe-
less produced new editions of the works of The Makars (ed. J. A. Tasioulas), Barbour’s Bruce
(ed. A. A. M. Duncan) and Blind Harry’s Wallace (ed. Ann McKim). The effort invested
in making late medieval literature in Scots available to modern audiences – including the
support provided by the Scottish National Dictionary (1931–76) and the Dictionary of the
Older Scottish Tongue (1937–2002) – reveals the extent to which it represents not simply
work of literary distinction, but an origin that justifies Scottish literature’s claim to a dis-
tinctive national identity. In the formal complexities of Dunbar’s poetry, as G. Gregory
Smith put it, ‘the Scot found something that suited his idiosyncrasy’.
Whatever the patriotic intent in the recovery of pre-Reformation non-Gaelic Scottish
literature – and James Watson’s influential Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems
(1706) was published within a month of the settlement of the terms of the Treaty of Union –
it took place in an environment far from antagonistic to English literature. Watson may
have wanted to provide poetry in ‘our own native Scots dialect’, but much of what he pub-
lished was in English, and it was the success of the Scottish airs (some genuine and some
fake) in Tom d’Urfey’s Pills to Purge Melancholy, published in London in 1699 and reprinted
four times by 1719, that inspired Allan Ramsay’s similar mixture, published as the Tea Table
Miscellany (1723). Indeed, Ramsay’s bookshop had over its door a sign with portraits of Ben
Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden – hardly the supporters of a vernacular patriotism.
Ramsay defended his use of the vernacular not as alternative to, but as complement to, his
command of English,

of which we are Masters, by being taught it in our Schools, and daily reading it; which being
added to all our own native Words, of eminent Significancy, makes our Tongue by far the com-
pletest.
 The Study of Scottish Literature 21

Typical of this mutual interaction of Scottish and English literature is David Dalrymple,
Lord Hailes. His Ancient Scottish Poems (1770) was the first published version of the
Bannatyne Manuscript, but he also provided many of the Scottish ballads which appeared
in the enormously influential Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765), edited by the English bishop
Thomas Percy. This in turn stimulated the rage for collecting folk poetry that was to be a
key element in the study of Scottish literature from David Herd’s Ancient and Modern
Scottish Songs (1776) to the School of Scottish Studies’ archive collection of oral literature.
Yet, that distinctive national identity represented only a part – substantial no doubt, but
a part – of the whole. There existed in Scotland a very substantial body of poetry and prose
in Gaelic which itself constitutes a major literature and one that had its own canonical
texts. Strikingly, Scottish Gaelic seems to have found its literary canon during a welter of
editing and anthologising as early as the first half of the nineteenth century, and it has
wavered little from that core. The key text is undoubtedly John MacKenzie’s Sàr Obair nam
Bard Gaëlach, or the Beauties of Gaelic Poetry of 1841, whose authoritative commentaries,
biographical and critical, assured the poets included therein, with few exceptions, a lasting
place. W. J. Watson’s Bàrdachd Ghàidhlig of 1918 continued to provide a poetic core for the
literature until the new wave of bilingual anthologies in the 1990s, while the same scholar’s
Rosg Gàidhlig gave a backbone to its still ill-defined prose tradition.
These texts had not, however, been addressed in quite the critical framework that had
been developed in addressing Scottish literary texts in Scots (or indeed English). Gaelic
literature had in many respects, following the Reformation, been occluded from the view
of Scots and English speakers. Indeed, it is questionable the extent to which, even before
then, the two cultures constituting that of Scotland were bilingual and bicultural and how
far they constituted two parallel, but separate, cultures and languages inhabiting one polit-
ical space. Certainly there is clear evidence from the poetry in, for example, The Book of
the Dean of Lismore that there was precisely the range of intercultural, international influ-
ences on writing in Gaelic that would be expected of any literature whose practitioners
were au fait with writing in other European languages, besides Scots. At the same time,
there was a tendency on both sides of the linguistic borders to develop the literatures of
Gaelic and Scots as polarities, and this was especially so after the cultural and political
changes brought about by the Reformation. This was probably accentuated by the absence
of what would now be recognised as universities in the Gaelic-speaking areas, so that the
developing forms of critical thinking about literature to be found in Scots-speaking areas
were not developed in the same way in Gaelic-speaking cultures. This had two effects. One
is that Gaelic literature tended to be excluded from the definition then developing of
Scottish literature and the other that knowledge of the ‘other literature’ of Scotland was
likely to be based on impression, often politically charged, rather than knowledge. Since
anglophone readers had no direct access to Gaelic texts, the understanding of that aspect
of Scottish literature was bound to be mediated through the presentation of that literature
through translation and the selection process that preceded that. This was not, of course,
universally true. Some key Enlightenment figures were, like Adam Ferguson – himself from
Gaelic-speaking Perthshire – fluent in both languages, but, by and large, the story of the
relationship between the two Gaelic and Scoto-English strands of Scottish literature from
the eighteenth century on is influenced by a sense of the otherness of each.
The ‘otherness’ of Gaelic literature in this process was emphasised by the reaction to
James Macpherson and Ossian. This otherness was often expressed in terms of the heroism
or sentimental power of Gaelic literature and texts were admired in translation, or indeed
in invention, to the extent to which they accorded to this simple and misleading model.
22 Cairns Craig

At the same time, the criteria that were beginning to be seen as contributing to the devel-
opment of a literature worthy of serious respect were often derived from models appropriate
to Scots and English writing, to conceptions of metropolitan and ‘high’ literary culture not
appropriate to the literature in Gaelic. Meanwhile, Celticism and proto-Romanticism were
becoming interlinked. As a result, vernacular Gaelic literature was admired or vilified by
critics often according to a fundamentally political agenda so that the perception of Gaelic
literature was seen through both artistic and ideological lenses that had little to do with that
literature’s own concerns. Meantime, Gaelic writers sought to maintain the integrity of their
own traditions, satirising Dr Johnson, for example, in their canonical forms, at least partly
in reaction to the Ossianic controversy, using concepts and techniques derived from their
own literary tradition. Yet, their work was not in any large scale reaching the object of their
satire, while the Ossianic phenomenon began to mean that Gaelic literature and Celtic
culture was characterised as alien, noble, melancholy, heroic, romantic, even Homeric.
The Ossian affair, however, did spur publishing in Gaelic by the early nineteenth century
as writers and publishers sought to make available actual examples of the range of litera-
ture in Gaelic. At the same time, there was a reaction, intended to justify what was the
actuality of literature in Gaelic. A problem here, however, was that later critics of Gaelic
poetry emphasised the contextual or political aspects of the literature in reaction against
the perceptions of Gaelic literature through the prism of Ossianism. In short, until the
middle of the twentieth century, battle-lines were drawn, following the impact of Ossian,
where those on the non-Gaelic-speaking side seemed to want Scottish literature in Gaelic
to fit inaccurate stereotypes. The pressures of their attitudes, particularly concerning the
idea of a Celtic Twilight, in turn skewed the debates of those working in the field of litera-
ture in Gaelic. Part of this skewing was the engaging by some in a Golden Age view of
earlier literature that risked devaluing and distorting the continuing work of contemporary
writers in Gaelic. And, of course, the tumults of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
history of the Highlands and islands and the changes caused by political and economic
developments throughout Scotland all accentuated the power of stereotype formation and
the force of resistance to it. Nevertheless, in the mid-nineteenth century, figures like John
Francis Campbell of Islay and Donald Campbell, who wrote on the interrelationship of
Gaelic language, music and metre, argued for a view that might now be seen as more mea-
sured. Even into present times, however, the effects of the misunderstandings and misrep-
resentations of Scottish literature in Gaelic, quite the oldest continuing literary tradition
in Scotland, survive. These effects may be intensified by the facts that there is very little
critical writing in or on Gaelic and that most critics of modern Scottish literature have
access to Gaelic texts only through translation.
Another result of James Macpherson’s collection in 1760 of ancient Celtic literature,
‘some in manuscript, but more by oral tradition’, is that collecting and creativity have gone
hand in hand in Scottish studies. Burns’s contributions to Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum
(6 vols., 1787–1803) and Thomson’s Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs (6 vols.,
1793–1841) represented the fulfilment of his desire be invisible within a ‘folk’ poetry.
Equally, the foundation of Walter Scott’s literary success was the collection of oral litera-
ture that made up the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802). What William Motherwell’s
Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern (1827) attempted to do for the Scottish ballads, Alexander
Carmichael did for Gaelic ‘charms, hymns and incantations’ in his Carmina Gadelica ‘orally
collected in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland’. Carmichael’s work, the first volume of
which was published in 1900, was not completed till 1971 – nearly sixty years after his
death – and the massive Greig–Duncan collections of the folk songs of the north-east of
 The Study of Scottish Literature 23

Scotland, gathered before the First World War, was not published in full till the 1980s.
A portion of it had appeared in 1925 as Last Leaves of Traditional Ballads and Ballad Airs, a
title symptomatic of Scottish literature’s sometimes desperate rearguard action to docu-
ment the legacy of cultures being rapidly erased from living memory – and in whose dis-
appearance is foretold the possible extinction of Scotland itself. This has given the study
of Scottish literature what some have described as its ‘nostalgic’ tenor, but defending
Scottish texts from the amnesia of history has been crucial in maintaining not only the
possibility of Scottish literary study, but the very identity of the nation. As Fletcher of
Saltoun famously observed on the eve of the Union, ‘if a man were permitted to make all
the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation’.
Such returns to the folk, however, have left a legacy of critical concern that has under-
mined the international standing of Scottish literature. W. E. Aytoun, in his introduction
to The Ballads of Scotland (1858), could defend the integrity of the folk literature collected
by Walter Scott and declare its result a ‘splendid proof of his diligence, research, poetic
enthusiasm, and vast acquirement’. Yet, Gavin Greig believed that the whole tradition ini-
tiated by Ramsay, and continued by Burns, Scott and Hogg, was a falsification of the real
culture of the folk – Fakesong in David Harker’s 1985 description. In this context,
Macpherson’s fraudulent ‘translation’ of the remains of ancient Gaelic literature could be
seen not as aberration, but rather as prophetic not only of the admitted forgers such as John
Pinkerton, but of the activities of collectors whose commitments were always divided
between the demands of authenticity and the desire to present work of high literary value.
Much of Scotland’s collected literature came under the suspicion that rapidly gathered
round Alexander Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica – that it was ‘a monumental exercise in
literary fabrication’. Such doubts fuelled a construction of Scottish literature in which
Scottish romanticism – from Ramsay’s pastoral The Gentle Shepherd (1725) to the historical
fictions of Walter Scott, and continuing at least as far as the late nineteenth-century
Kailyard tales of J. M. Barrie – was criticised as a means of allowing Scots to evade rather
than confront the unpleasant realities – both political and economic – of their contempo-
rary historical experience. As Katie Trumpener put it, in relation to Guy Mannering, Scott’s
art ‘commemorates in order to forget’ and retrieves the past only ‘in order to relegate it to
the realm of infantile memory’. Scottish literature, in such a construction, may be worthy
of sociological analysis, but it will hardly repay literary study. In John Speirs’s words, criti-
cism can only ‘indicate some of the things that have gone wrong with nineteenth-century
Scotland and that might explain why it did not achieve a literature’. In effect, study of pre-
Reformation Scottish culture was so successful that it trapped Scottish writers into fake
reproductions of earlier versions of Scottish literature. At the same time, the absence of an
integrated study of Scottish literature resulting from the absence, often, of Gaelic texts com-
bined with this fake reproduction of earlier versions of literature in Scots to create a sense
of a deformed literary culture.
In consequence, much of Scottish literary study’s energy has been devoted to tracing
the sources of the deformations of Scotland’s literary culture. Confronted by what David
Daiches described as the The Paradox of Scottish Culture (1964), literary criticism in
Scotland has been dominated by the question of whether, in Douglas Gifford’s words,
‘Scottish literature, tormented by these ambivalences of identity and purpose, lost its way
and dropped its standards drastically.’ If earlier criticism saw Scotland’s ‘ambivalences’ as a
legacy of Reformation Calvinism, or of the loss of national independence and the failure
of the Stuart cause, more recent criticism, often ‘dealing with’ the role of literature in
Gaelic by simply ignoring it, has focused on the Scottish Enlightenment’s ambivalent
24 Cairns Craig

legacy, symbolised in David Hume’s trivial, but symptomatic, efforts to rid his prose of
‘Scotticisms’. The discipline of English literature itself is now generally traced to the ‘angli-
cising’ efforts of the Scottish Enlightenment literati, who encouraged Scots, through the
study of rhetoric, to accommodate themselves to the Union by becoming skilled in the
writing and speaking of English. The consequence, it has been argued, was a split between
the tradition of writing in Scots, powerfully maintained from Ramsay to Burns, and a lit-
erary criticism that did not recognise that tradition’s validity. Robert Crawford considers
that leading proponents of the discipline of rhetoric and belles lettres – Robert Watson,
Adam Smith and Hugh Blair – ‘devalue native literary currency, choosing to compliment
it only when it accords with Anglocentric rules of propriety’. He sees Anglocentrism thus
effectively undermining these thinkers’ own literature, leaving their successors trapped
‘within an institutional history which inhibits the perception of Scottish Literature as a
distinct subject for study’.
If the Scots invented English literature, and thereby dispossessed themselves of a specif-
ically Scottish literature, it was not an invention whose copyright they passed to the
English. Rather, they invented it precisely in order to promote and maintain the central-
ity of Scottish writing within the domain of the new discipline of English. Hugh Blair’s
Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, first published in 1783 but delivered in Edinburgh
since 1759, aspire to an Enlightenment universalism which can traverse Greek, Roman,
French, Spanish and English literatures for the best models of literary excellence. In this
panoramic context what is striking is the prominence given to Scottish examples. Blair’s
elucidation of pastoral, for instance, in a discussion ranging from Theocritus and Virgil to
Pope, concludes: ‘I must not omit the mention of another Pastoral Drama, which will bear
being brought into comparison with any composition of this kind, in any language; that is,
Allan Ramsay’s Gentle Shepherd.’ No higher accolade could be accorded a Scottish poet
than being reckoned the equal of Theocritus, Virgil and Pope. If, thereafter, Blair, notes
that it is

a great disadvantage to this beautiful Poem, that it is written in the old rustic dialect of
Scotland, which, in a short time, will probably be entirely obsolete, and not intelligible,

he is not undermining the relevance of the poem but acknowledging the extent to which,
even in a language nearly ‘obsolete’, there is an achievement that ‘would do honour to any
poet’. Blair gives similar status to Home’s Douglas as an example of modern tragedy, because
it contains one of the ‘most distinguished Anagnorises’ and is equal with ‘masterpieces of
the kind’. And Macpherson’s Ossian, which has ‘all the plain and venerable manner of the
ancient times’, exemplifies the highest of all literary achievements – the sublime: ‘amidst
the rude scenes of nature and of society, such as Ossian describes; amidst rocks, and torrents,
and whirlwinds, and battles, dwells the Sublime’. It is striking that, in however occluded a
way, Blair sees Scottish literature as including Scotland’s literature in Gaelic. Literature in
each of the three languages of Scotland – the Scots of Ramsay, the Gaelic undercurrents
that lie behind Macpherson’s Ossian, and the English exemplified by poets such as
Thomson, whose poetry ‘introduces us into society with all nature’ – is asserted by Blair the
equal of Classical literature’s foremost examples, and therefore certainly the equal of any
English literature.
In Blair’s defence of Macpherson’s Ossian in his ‘Critical Dissertation on the Poems
of Ossian’, what we see is not the development of an Anglocentric conception of Scottish
literature but the assertion of a Scotocentric conception of English (and, indeed, all
 The Study of Scottish Literature 25

modern) literature. Ancient Ossian becomes the model against which modern poetry must
be measured:

Ossian, himself, appears to have been endowed by nature with an exquisite sensibility of heart;
prone to that tender melancholy which is so often an attendant on great genius; and suscep-
tible equally of strong and of soft emotions,

because ‘if Ossian’s ideas and objects be less diversified than those of Homer, they are all,
however, of the kind fittest for poetry’. Ossian, therefore, becomes the fulcrum of Blair’s
aesthetic theory, relating Macpherson’s poem to general philosophical and psychological
principles that provide the benchmarks by which other poetry will be measured:

His poetry, more perhaps than that of any other writer, deserves to be stiled, The Poetry of the
Heart. It is a heart penetrated with noble sentiments, and with sublime and tender passions; a
heart that glows, and kindles the fancy; a heart that is full, and pours itself forth.

Blair’s sentimentalising treatment of what he understands as the Gaelic tradition can be

seen as at once, in effect, colonising Gaelic literature with the new perspectives of roman-
ticism, and simultaneously creating of it an other, so helping separate and ghettoise the
study of Scottish literature in Gaelic. Certainly, his argument shaped accounts of English
literature for a century, both in the conception of poetry as ‘pouring’ from primitive or
natural life, and in Matthew Arnold’s famous assertion that the achievements of English
literature depended on its Celtic imagination:

The Celts, with their vehement reaction against the despotism of fact, with their sensuous
nature, their manifold striving, their adverse destiny, their immense calamities, the Celts are
the prime authors of this vein of piercing regret and passion, – of this Titanism in poetry.

To Blair, too, can be traced early accounts of the history of English literature, like Henry
Morley’s English Writers (1887), which insists that without its Celtic substratum ‘Germanic
England would not have produced a Shakespeare’. Equally, Blair’s defence of Ossian was
deeply to influence the development of Anglo-Irish literature, since it was the effort of
Irish scholars to prove that the authentic Ossianic legends were Irish, rather than Scottish,
that provided W. B. Yeats with the legendary material on which the Irish Literary Revival
was based. Yeats’s insistence on the need for poetry to return to its ancient sources reca-
pitulates Blair’s argument for the centrality of the Ossianic bard to modern literature in
English.
From Blair’s work, and the influence exerted by the Scottish universities on the first
English departments in England – those in University College and King’s College in
London in the 1820s and 1830s – a version of English literature emerged to which the lit-
erature of Scotland was central. Thus in the great ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica (1872–88), there are substantial articles on English literature, on Celtic litera-
ture (by W. K. Sullivan of Cork) and even a ground-breaking one on American literature
(by John Nichol of Glasgow University), but there is no entry on Scottish literature. There
was no need, because the history of English literature presented is so thoroughly shaped by
the demands of Scotland’s different ‘reulis of Poesie’. The author of the article was Thomas
Arnold, an Oxford scholar, and prominent roles were given to Dunbar, Henryson and
Douglas – ‘all of whom, in respect of their turn of thought and the best features of their
26 Cairns Craig

style, may be properly affiliated to Chaucer’. Not only this, a special place was accorded to
Burns:

a man of genius [. . .] whose direct and impassioned utterances, straight from the heart [were]
to prepare the English-speaking world for that general break-up of formulas which the tempest
of the French Revolution was about to initiate.

The article’s culmination is the work of Scott, whose ‘strong memory and inexhaustible
imagination, joined with a gift for picturesque description, and the faculty [. . .] of creat-
ing and presenting living types of character’, makes him the representative novelist of the
age. Jane Austen is not mentioned. Arnold also includes non-imaginative writing and gives
extensive accounts of the works of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith and
Thomas Reid. Even Dugald Stewart is given a key role in the moulding of modern ‘English’
culture through the wide range of intellectual talents who attended his lectures, many of
whom became contributors to those influential organs of a Scoto-English conception of
English literature, the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine. It might seem that the
wish of Clerk of Penicuik, one of the eighteenth century’s foremost antiquarians, had been
fulfilled: ‘Let the two nations’, he declared, applying Book XII of the Aeneid, ‘each still
unsubjected, enter upon an everlasting compact under equal terms.’ English literature, at
the high point of British imperialism, was firmly bound together by its ‘unsubjected’
Scottish contribution.
What had changed, however, was that Scottish literature’s foundations were no longer
identified with Celtic culture – Macpherson’s ‘forgery’ and Irish claims had muddied that
source – but in the shared Anglo-Saxon origins of the English and Scots languages.
Literature in Gaelic was now definitely a separate study. When Blair wrote, Anglo-Saxon
poetry of the pre-Norman period was almost entirely unknown: it was only in 1815 that
the Icelandic scholar Grim J. Thorkelin published Beowulf, a poem that came to be
endowed with exactly the qualities Blair had found in Ossian. As the introduction (1907)
to The Cambridge History of English Literature put it:

Beowulf – romance, history and epic – is the oldest poem on a great scale, and in the grand
manner, that exists in any Teutonic language. It is full of incident and good fights, simple in
aim and clear in execution; its characters bear comparison with those of the Odyssey and, like
them, linger in the memory; its style is dignified and heroic.

It was Thorkelin who encouraged John Jamieson to produce his Etymological Dictionary of
the Scottish Language in order to prove Scots’ Scandinavian origins and therefore the close-
ness of its vernacular literature to Anglo-Saxon. The emergence of an Anglo-Saxon origin
for English literature, in other words, reinforced the centrality of Scots to the traditions of
English literature. It is symptomatic of this Saxon conception of the study of Scottish lit-
erature that an early meeting of the Scottish Text Society,

regretted that too little attention was paid to the language, literature and history of Scotland in
the system of education, and that there was no chair of Anglo-Saxon in a Scottish University.

When the Chairs of ‘Rhetoric and Belles Lettres’ in the Scottish universities became Chairs
of ‘Rhetoric and English Literature’ (Edinburgh, 1865), or, when new Chairs of English
Literature were established (Glasgow, 1862), the possible Celtic origins of English literature
 The Study of Scottish Literature 27

had been entirely displaced by these Anglo-Saxon roots. For John Nichol, taking up the
Chair in Glasgow, the subject he was about to teach began with Hugh Blair in 1759, but
central to it is the study of Anglo-Saxon. In his Inaugural Lecture (1862), he observes that
though

it is only of late years that the researches of Anglo-Saxon scholars have disinterred it, and
shown how much it promised [nonetheless] rude as our Saxon literature was, and scattered as
are its fragments, we may be forgiven a certain pride in the reflection that centuries before the
‘Cid’ was written in Spain, or the ‘Nibelungen Lied’ in Germany, [. . .] or the Troubadours had
sung their earliest lays, [. . .] our ancestors had done so much.

Anglo-Saxon is ‘our own tongue’, the origin of Scots as well as English. David Hume had
prophesied, in a letter to the historian Edward Gibbon, that ‘our solid and increasing estab-
lishment in America’ can ‘promise a superior stability and duration to the English language’
than the French. For Nichol, the truth of this prophecy is seen in the fact that ‘Shakespeare
and Burns are this day read from the banks of the Connecticut and the Columbia river to
the sands of Sydney and the Yellow Sea.’ ‘Shakespeare and Burns’: Scottish literature is
equal with native English literature within the combined cultures that constitute the dis-
cipline of English literature. Andrew Hook has outlined Nichol’s claim to be the founder
of American literary studies because of his Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on American lit-
erature in the 1870s and his book American Literature (1882). Yet, his entries on Burns in
the ninth, tenth and eleventh editions of the Britannica and his books, Sketch of the Early
History of the Scottish Poets (1871), Robert Burns (1882), and Carlyle (1892), all point to the
fact that, for Nichol, the study of Scottish literature is equal with the study of English and
American literature.
That these were not simply the constructions of a British literature in which English and
Scottish elements were merged is clear in the work of Nichol’s Edinburgh contemporary,
David Masson. In ‘The Scottish Contribution to British Literature’, he considered just how
many influential Scottish writers overlapped with the life of Burns and declared that

in reading the writings of such men, one is perpetually reminded, in the most direct manner,
that these writings are to be regarded as belonging to a strictly national literature.

This is confirmed in Masson’s British Novelists and their Styles (1859), which centres around
Walter Scott’s influence and achievement – ‘as, since Shakespeare, the man whose contri-
bution of material to the hereditary British imagination has been the largest and most
various’. Indeed, for Masson, Scott’s ‘influence is more widely diffused through certain
departments of European and American literature than that of any individual writer that
has recently lived’, with the result that he has ‘Scotticized European literature’. For Masson’s
predecessor, W. E. Aytoun, Scottish literature was no less central, as can be seen from the
history of Scottish poetry that acts as introduction to his collection of The Scottish Ballads
(1858). A glance at the examination papers set by Aytoun and by Masson shows how central
Scottish writing was to their conception of the new discipline of English literature. In
Masson’s papers of 1876–7, for instance, questions such as these appear:

Make out (1) as numerous a list as possible of English and Scottish poets ‘flourishing’ about
the year 1380; and (2) a similar list for the year 1600. To each name add a word indicating the
nature of the author’s writing.
28 Cairns Craig

Scottish students in the late Victorian period were being provided with a version of English
literature in which Scottish literature, as a distinct national tradition, was considered one
of its most important components, in both its original formation and recent contributions.
Two years later, Scottish literature in Gaelic was being studied separately under the new
chair in Celtic. While the diaspora had taken this literature as far throughout the world
as Scottish literature in Scots, it was being seen as a distinct study in its homeland. In a par-
allel with the nineteenth-century concerns of university scholars for the Anglo-Saxon and
Germanic roots of English and Scots, and perhaps to an extent influenced by it, Gaelic
scholarship too felt the ‘call of the ancient’. The new university curricula in Edinburgh and
later Glasgow developed close links with Irish scholarship, whose attention to the earlier,
shared forms of Gaelic (Old and Middle Gaelic, Classical Irish) were until very recently
deemed necessary for a full critical understanding of Scottish Gaelic literature. Such schol-
ars were not averse to the trump card philology could seem to give to Gaelic in the ancient-
ness stakes, especially with the evolution in the mid-twentieth century of influential ideas
about the similarities, at either extreme of the Indo-European family, of the Sanskrit and
Celtic languages and cultures. The need that was thus established for philological compe-
tence among those who would pursue an academic career could be said to have in some ways
retarded the development of a mature literary criticism. Conversely, however, it allowed an
understanding of the Gaelic literary tradition over the longue durée, and built crucial bridges
to the increasingly better-supported academic pursuit of Irish-language literature in Ireland.
That ‘Scottish literature’ was now seen as part of English literature is borne out by the
Cambridge History of English Literature, whose concluding volume, the fourteenth, published
in 1916, ends with accounts of some recent developments of English literature, including
extensive chapters on ‘Anglo-Irish Literature’, ‘Anglo-Indian Literature’, ‘English
Canadian Literature’, ‘The Literature of Australia and New Zealand’. There is, however, no
chapter on an emergent Scottish literature precisely because Scottish literature has been
assumed throughout to be a component part of English literature. Thus the section on the
nineteenth century is opened by a chapter on ‘Philosophers’ (by W. R. Sorley), which
includes James Mill, Thomas Brown, Sir William Hamilton, J. F. Ferrier, John Stuart Mill,
William Wallace and the Caird brothers. It also includes a chapter on ‘Critical and
Miscellaneous Prose’ (by Hugh Walker, author of Three Centuries of Scottish Literature),
which deals, alongside Symonds, Pater and Wilde, with Aeneas Sweetland Dallas, Hugh
Miller, W. and R. Chambers, Robert Louis Stevenson and Andrew Lang. It is symptomatic
of this Scoto-English account of the history of English that it should end with ‘Changes in
the Language since Shakespeare’s Time’ by W. Murison of the University of Aberdeen,
which focuses on the ‘worldwide expansion of the English language’. The Scottish rhet-
orical tradition is both the opening and the closing statement of this powerful Scoto-English
tradition – ‘Scoto-English’ not only in terms of the integration of Scottish writing as a
central national tradition, but in terms of the many contributions which Scottish critics
made to the writing of the history of English literature, from Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of
English Literature (1844) to histories of English literature by J. Logie Robertson (1894),
Andrew Lang (1912) and John Buchan (1923).
Given the depth and longevity of this conception of English literature, Scottish litera-
ture’s emergence as an independent national tradition, however focused on two of its three
national languages, was bound to be slow – especially since, unlike in Ireland, there was
no political conflict to underpin a national literature. In consequence, Scottish litera-
ture emerged into a space that was created largely by external forces. First, there were the
centrifugal forces of the emergent new literatures of the English-speaking world which
 The Study of Scottish Literature 29

transformed ‘English literature’ into ‘literatures in English’, a rubric under which Scottish
literature could take its own independent place. Second, study of literature in Gaelic was
seen as a function of departments of Celtic. Third, there was the centripetal force that was
England’s turning in on itself from the 1930s onwards to insist on the importance of its
native traditions. The British Empire’s slow crumbling was accompanied by retreat to
increasingly narrower conceptions of what counted as ‘English’, one in which Scottish
writers were marginalised because they did not reflect issues in the political and cultural
life of England. Raymond Williams, for instance, has nothing to say about Burns in The
Country and the City (1993), despite the fact that John Clare, who receives substantial
attention, ended his life signing his poems as Robert Burns. And Peter Quennell and
Hamish Johnson declared in their History of English Literature (1973) that

we have excluded Robert Burns because we believe that he was, above all else, a Scottish poet,
posthumously adopted into the canon of English literature, whose greatest works belong to a
poetic and cultural heritage quite distinct from that of England.

Fourth, there was the contraction of literary study itself from the broad field of all good
writing to the much narrower field of imaginative or creative literature. This reduced much
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ best Scottish writing from the domain of ‘lit-
erature’ to mere ‘background’.
The unravelling of this massively successful Scoto-English construction of English liter-
ature left Scottish literature with a version of itself constricted by the exclusions that had
been made necessary by that structure. These involved, first, as has been seen, the separa-
tion out and so, effectively, marginalisation of Gaelic literature, since ‘Scottish’ literature
was founded on the Anglo-Saxon origins of Scots; second, a focus on early literature as
more fully and authentically Scottish; and, third, the exclusion of Scottish writers who had
made their careers in England, since they were part now of the autonomous domain of
English literature. The consequence was that the narrative of Scottish literature was read
elegiacally, as in T. F. Henderson’s Scottish Vernacular Literature (1900), which took Burns’s
death as the end of the tradition:

his death was really the setting of the sun; the twilight deepened very quickly; and such
twinkling lights as from time to time appear only serve to disclose the darkness of the all-
encompassing night.

Or it was read as a progressive submission to anglicisation, as Gregory Smith suggested in

Scottish Literature: Character and Influence (1919). For Smith, Scottish literature had
emerged and developed through phases of anglicisation, so that the farther it progressed the
less Scottish it became. Smith, it has been argued, is the first theorist of Scottish literature.
But though his ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ had creative value to Hugh MacDiarmid, it is the
product not of a theory of an independent Scottish literature but of its defeat. Where the
Scoto-English tradition insisted on Scotland’s shaping power on English literature, Smith
presents a Scottish literature that is being ineluctably drawn back into an English literature
with which its origins were, in any case, identical.
Much more robust were the views of Smith’s teacher, David Masson, who believed
Scotland had ‘a greater liability to be acted upon throughout its whole substance by common
thought and common feeling’ than England because, as a ‘small nation placed on the fron-
tier of one so much larger’, its people have been ‘taught to recognise its own individuality by
30 Cairns Craig

incessantly marking the line of exclusion between itself and others’. For Masson, Scottish
literature is born from and develops in resistance to incorporation, from ‘this inordinate
intensity of national feeling’. Masson, the great biographer of Milton, an early holder of a
Chair of English Literature in London, views Scottish literature as not anglicised by its inter-
twining with English literature, but energised by its resistance to identification with English
culture. Take, for example, his eulogy on Sir William Hamilton:

[. . .] not even when discussing the philosophy of the unconditioned or perfecting the theory
of syllogism, does Sir William forget his Scottish lineage. With what glee, in his notes, or in
stray passages [. . .] does he seize every opportunity of adding to the proofs that speculation in
general has been largely affected by the stream of specific Scottish thought; [. . .] reviving
memories of defunct Balfours, and Duncans, and Chalmerses, and Dalgarnos, and other ‘Scoti
extra Scotiam agentes’ of other centuries; or startling his readers with such genealogical facts as
that Immanuel Kant and Sir Isaac Newton had Scottish grandfathers [. . .] It is the Scottish
Stagirite not ashamed of the bonnet and plaid; it is the philosopher in whose veins flows the
blood of a Covenanter.

Masson’s knowledge of Hamilton’s works is also testimony to a conception of literature

much broader than the one that would come to dominate English studies in the aftermath
of 1940s’ ‘New Criticism’. Indeed, Masson was the author of an enormously inclusive
account of Recent British Philosophy (1867) and it is symptomatic that Gregory Smith’s entry
on Masson in the Dictionary of Literary Biography does not mention it. Smith’s Scottish
Literature: Character and Influence (1914) already points to the exclusion of philosophical
prose from ‘literary’ study, an exclusion that both undermines the richness of the Scottish
tradition and deracinates the works of Scotland’s imaginative writers, which depend so
strongly on their philosophical and theological contexts.
It is not by seeking its absolute separation from English literature that the study of
Scottish literature makes sense as a separate discipline; nor even by the effort of trying to
encompass all of Scotland’s several languages, important though that is: what makes the
discipline of Scottish literature distinctly different from the discipline of English literature
is that ‘literature’ itself requires a different definition in Scotland from the ways in which
‘literature’ has come to be defined in England. The definition of ‘literature’ within the
Scoto-English formation of English literature was focused on literature as the crossing point
of historical, philosophical and theological writing and on imaginative literature – as in the
case of Ossian, or of folk poetry – as expressive of historical and philosophical truths. It was
the loss of this complex conception of literature that reduced the Scottish tradition to
Edwin Muir’s ‘few disconnected figures arranged at abrupt intervals’. The effort to create an
autonomous discipline of the study of Scottish literature will have reached maturity when
Scottish literature encompasses and is informed by the whole intellectual history of the
nation in all its languages, an intellectual history more distinguished than that of any com-
parable European country. Then it will acknowledge, in the words of David Masson, that,

considering the amount of influence exerted by such men upon the whole spirit and substance
of British literature, considering how disproportionate a share of the whole literary produce of
Great Britain in the nineteenth century has come either from them or from other Scotchmen,
and considering what a stamp of peculiarity marks all that portion of this produce which is of
Scottish origin, it does not seem too much to say, that the rise and growth of Scottish litera-
ture is as notable a historical phenomenon as the rise and growth of the Scottish philosophy.
 The Study of Scottish Literature 31

Further reading

Craig, Cairns (ed.) (1987–8), History of Scottish Literature, 4 vols, Aberdeen: Aberdeen
University Press.
Crawford, Robert (ed.) (1998), The Scottish Invention of English Literature, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Gaskill, Howard (ed.) (1991), Ossian Revisited, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Gifford, Douglas and Dorothy McMillan (1997), A History of Scottish Women’s Writing,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Gillies, William (2006), ‘On the Study of Gaelic Literature’, in M. Byrne, T. O. Clancy
and S. Kidd (eds), Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig 2 Litreachas & Seanchas Essays on Gaelic
Literature, History and Tradition from the 2nd Scottish Gaelic Studies Conference,
Glasgow 2002, Glasgow: Roinn na Ceiltis, pp. 1–32.
Pittock, Murray (1991), The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity,
1638 to the Present, London: Routledge.
Until 1314
 3

One Kingdom from many Peoples:

History until 1314
Benjamin Hudson

In his Ecclesiastical History, Bede famously declared that Britain was home to four peoples –
Britons, Gaels, English and Picts – and five languages – English, Welsh, Pictish, Gaelic and
Latin. The medieval Scottish kingdom incorporated all four peoples with the later addition
of the Vikings and Normans; the records of medieval Scotland owe a debt to all five lan-
guages, as well as Norse and French. The history of Scotland began before there was a
‘Scotland’, when the lands encompassed by the later kingdom were ruled by the Britons or
the Picts, and the Gaels occupied a minor part of northern Britain. Anachronistic as it may
seem, it is nevertheless true that Scotland was one realm formed from many peoples, and
its construction took place over many centuries.
Before the Scots there were the Britons and the Picts. In the wake of the Roman with-
drawal from Britain there were three important kingdoms among the Britons living north
of Hadrian’s Wall: Gododdin (on the east coast into Lothian and round the firth of Forth);
Strathclyde (round the firth and river valley of the Clyde); and, in the west, the obscure
principality of Rheged. Medieval writers believed that St Patrick, the Apostle of the Irish,
came from Strathclyde, while St Ninian built his famous church Ad Candida Casa at
Whithorn. These northern British kingdoms collapsed during the course of several cen-
turies either through attack (Gododdin) or through annexation (Strathclyde). Beyond the
sparse record of chronicles, much of our knowledge about these kingdoms is gleaned from
literature, such as the verses now known as The Gododdin or the hagiography of individ-
uals such as Kentigern, the saint of Strathclyde.
Beyond the Britons, north of the Forth, were the Picts, one of several peoples so called
by the Romans (the name is also preserved in Poitiers), whose uprising in 367 nearly suc-
ceeded in permanently driving the legions from Britain. The Picts have intrigued scholars
beginning with Bede, who sparked a continuing debate with a casual aside that when the
kingship was in doubt they chose a king from the female rather than male line. In the
twelfth century, Henry of Huntingdon gave them their fame as the vanishing folk of Britain
when he noted that of all the peoples mentioned by Bede, the Picts had disappeared almost
completely. Like the Britons, far too little information about them survives, although they
had scriptoria that, c. 710, a king named Nechtan ordered to produce ecclesiastical calen-
dars using nineteen-year cycles.
The people who gave their name to Scotland were emigrants from Ireland (known as
Scotia to Classical writers). These were the Scoti, the ‘Gaels’ or Goídil in their own language.
As Roman power ebbed, Irish settlements were made along the western British coastline.
The most successful was known as Dál Riata, and the thirteen miles across the North
36 Benjamin Hudson

Channel to the Mull of Kintyre became a highway connecting the colony in Britain with
the original kingdom in what is now County Antrim in Ireland. The traditional date of
c. ad 500 for the transfer of Dál Riata’s capital from Dunseverick to Dunadd by a prince
named Fergus might be correct. British Dál Riata extended from the Ardnamurchan
Peninsula in the north to Arran, and probably as far as the Isle of Bute in the south. In a
simplified scheme later provided by the tract called Senchus Fer nAlban (‘History of the
Men of Britain’), there were four main kindreds (cenéla) in Dál Riata: Gabrán,
Loairn, Óengus and Comgall. By the eighth century, Cenél nGabráin and Cenél Loairn
dominated.
Also from Ireland came missionaries, who converted some of the Picts to Christianity
and built churches among them; from them were sent missions that were important in the
conversion of the English. The most famous church was Iona, founded by St Columba.
Other important churches included those at Applecross and Abernethy. The clergy
brought more than a new religion, for written records were maintained at the religious
houses. Chronicles, laws, theological works and lists of the deceased pious were written or
copied in the scriptorium. From works such as devotional verse composed at Iona there is
valuable information about social customs, theology and standards of learning.
By the eighth century the Irish community in northern Britain experienced a period of
stress and decline. There was political turmoil in Dál Riata as Cenél nGabráin contested
for power with Cenél Loairn, and both kindreds were also involved in military ventures in
Ireland. At this time a prince named Óengus son of Fergus rose to pre-eminence among
the Picts. A contemporary genealogy claims that he was part Irish, but that made little dif-
ference as he eliminated his Pictish rivals and then turned his attentions to the Gaels. His
success is concisely noted by the Annals of Ulster for the year 740: ‘In this year the ham-
mering of Dál Riata by Óengus’. The northern Britons suffered, too. The English embarked
on a military campaign that reached as far as the Plain of Kyle (south of Ayr) in 750. On
1 August 756, Óengus and the Northumbrian king Eadberht forced terms on the Britons
of Strathclyde. To misery in secular affairs for the Gaels were added ecclesiastical reverses.
As part of his reform programme that included the adoption of nineteen-year calendars,
the aforementioned Nechtan rejected the Irish missions in favour of those from the English
of Northumbria, sending the representatives of Iona across ‘the Ridge of Britain’.
Political and military power changed rapidly after the death of Óengus in 761. Like other
charismatic leaders, his successors could not replace him. Towards the end of the eighth
century, families from both Cenél nGabráin and Cenél Loairn were moving eastwards out
of Dál Riata. The Cenél nGabráin prince Constantine son of Fergus (who some scholars
consider to be Pictish) conquered the Pictish kingdom of Fortriu c. 790, and he was fol-
lowed in the kingship by his brother Óengus and their sons. When Óengus’s son Eóganán
was killed in 839, fighting a Viking fleet that had earlier raided in Ireland round the river
Liffey, the way was opened for a new chapter in the history of the Scots.
The Vikings added to, and were a reason for, the confusion of the ninth century. They
appeared in the islands of northern Britain at the end of the eighth century. An Irishman
named Dicúil (who might have been a monk at Iona) mentioned the Viking settlements
in the northern isles – the Shetlands, Orkneys and Outer Hebrides – in his geography
called the Measure of the World (825). Farther south, the Icelandic sagas credit Viking set-
tlements in the Hebrides to chieftains such as Ketil ‘Flat nose’. By the end of the ninth
century there was movement to Iceland; Ketil’s daughter named Aud ‘the deep-minded’
was an early settler. These individuals and their descendants were remembered in later lit-
erary works such as Orkneyinga saga and Landnámabók (‘Book of Settlements’).
 One Kingdom from Many Peoples: History until 1314 37

Just before the mid-ninth century began the career of the man popularly credited with
the foundation of the medieval Scottish kingdom: Cinaed mac Ailpín (anglicised as
Kenneth Mac Alpin). From his home in Kintyre, Cinaed became king of Dál Riata upon
the death of Eóganán. He conquered Fortriu several years later and then began his con-
quests of the other Pictish kingdoms south of the Grampians, a chronology suggested by
some lists of kings. Cinaed and his family immediately began to change the ecclesiastical
and legal orientation of their Pictish subjects. When Viking raids devastated the Church
on Iona, Dunkeld succeeded it as the head of the Columban churches in Britain and,
c. 849, a new church was built there on Cinaed’s orders. Probably at the same time were
begun the annals now known as the ‘Scottish Chronicle’ (also called the ‘Pictish
Chronicle’, or ‘Chronicle of the kings of Alba’) that survives in combination with a later
king-list. Cinaed’s brother and successor Domnall I replaced Pictish laws with the laws of
Dál Riata, probably the origin of the so-called ‘MacAlpine’ laws, a title found on a later,
independent legal text.
The Scots were not living in isolation and alliances were made that, in turn, influenced
internal developments. Cinaed’s daughter Máel Muire was married, in turn, to the Irish
high kings Áed Findlíath and Flann Sinna. Those contacts might have encouraged
Cinaed’s grandson Constantine II and Bishop Cellach of St Andrews in 906 to order the
churches among the Scots to follow Irish practices. These ties allowed Scottish students
such as Catroe, the future abbot of Waulsort and Metz, to study in Ireland. Cinaed’s dynasty
was also politically innovative. All families other than Cinaed’s were denied royal status,
and local rulers were designated mormaers (‘Great Stewards’).
Cinaed and his family moved east during, and probably in part because of, Viking raids.
His son Constantine I faced the famous Viking called Olaf ‘son of the king of Lothlind’
who was the model for the Olaf the White of the Icelandic Sagas. In 866 Olaf raided the
Scots and forced payment of a ‘tax’, which he collected for almost ten years until he was
slain in 875 by Constantine. The king died the following year during a battle with the
Vikings when his army was ‘swallowed by the earth’. Constantine’s son Domnall II died in
900 fighting the Vikings outside his fortress at Dunnottar, a former Pictish stronghold,
while his cousin, Constantine II, fought the Vikings in two major battles in 914 and 918.
In the tenth century the Scots faced a new foe in the English dynasty of Alfred the Great,
whose formidable grandson Æthelstan united the English under his lordship. His ambi-
tions might have been greater, for he attacked the Scots in 934. The outraged Scots retali-
ated in 937 at the battle of Brunnanburh, when Constantine allied with the Viking
chieftain Olaf of Dublin (whose father had been driven from Britain by Æthelstan).
Described as a ‘most lamentable and horrible’ battle in the Irish Annals of Ulster, the
outcome was victory for Æthelstan and his teenaged half-brother Edmund. Constantine
ruled for a few more years before he abdicated to go into religious retirement and was suc-
ceeded by his distant cousin Máel Coluim I.
The ascension of Máel Coluim opened a new era of cooperation between the Scots and
the English that endured, with some exceptions, until the late thirteenth century. Setting
aside border raiding (and Æthelstan’s reign), relations between the Scots and English had
been generally good. Cinaed mac Alpín’s cousins Constantine, Óengus and Eógannán are
listed in the Liber Vitae of the community of St Cuthbert. Constantine II had made an
alliance with Alfred’s daughter Æthelflæd against the Vikings. He seems to have married
an English lady since the name of his son Idulf/Idulb is the Gaelic form of Eadulf, the name
of a Northumbrian king who was slain in 913; Eadulf’s son Ealdred had fled to Constantine
for aid against the Vikings in 914. Sometime before his death in 962, Idulf received
38 Benjamin Hudson

Edinburgh peacefully from the English. When King Edmund of the English raided
Strathclyde in 945, he gave the revenues to Máel Coluim in return for an alliance. Máel
Coluim honoured the agreement with attacks on the Viking kingdom of Northumbria in
949 and 951. In the next generation their sons Cinaed II and Edgar continued the alliance.
The later tenth century also saw the beginning of a less peaceful era. There was civil war
among the descendants of Cinaed mac Alpín. Idulf’s son Cuilén and Máel Coluim’s son
Dub fought for the kingship. Dub was slain as he sought allies among his family’s old rivals
of Cenél Loairn, while Cuilén was killed five years later as he was collecting taxes in
Strathclyde. The hostilities between the families continued into the eleventh century. In
addition, the contest between Cenél nGabráin and Cenél Loairn was resumed. Máel
Coluim I led an army into Moray, where he killed King Cellach. His son Cinaed II may
have forced recognition of his lordship over Cenél Loairn, for the Irish Annals of Inisfallen
call him ‘high king’ of the Scots. The three nobles from Cenél Loairn who are found in
Ireland in 976 may have been looking for an ally against their southern neighbour.
With the accession of Cinaed’s II’s son Máel Coluim II in 1005, the Scots became more
internationally visible. Irish and French writers praised this son of an Irish princess. He
completed the Scottish annexation of Lothian with his victory at the battle of Carham in
1018 and seems to have annexed Strathclyde, the last North British kingdom. Máel
Coluim was succeeded by his grandson Duncan, but far more important for English litera-
ture is his successor Macbeth, probably another grandson. Macbeth’s father, Findláech, had
been king of Cenél Loairn, and Macbeth succeeded to that kingship in 1029. When Máel
Coluim negotiated with Cnut, the king of the Danes and English, in 1031 Macbeth accom-
panied him.
In August of 1040, Macbeth killed Duncan as he made his royal circuit north of the
Grampians, after the latter’s disastrous raid on Durham. Macbeth’s reign was considered
good, and the contemporary verse history known as The Prophecy of Berchán is effusive in
its praise of him. He and his queen, Gruoch, were benefactors of the Church, patrons of
literature, and so secure in their office that they made a pilgrimage to Rome in 1050. There
were rivals, however, such as his cousin Jarl Thorfinn of the Orkneys, who wanted posses-
sion of Caithness, and Duncan’s son Malcolm ‘Canmore’, who fled south to England
looking for allies. In 1054, Earl Siward of Northumbria forced Macbeth to reinstate
Malcolm in his lands. Malcolm attacked Macbeth unsuccessfully in 1057, but Macbeth was
so severely wounded that he died shortly afterwards. His stepson Lulach briefly succeeded
as high king, but Malcolm killed him on St Patrick’s Day in 1058.
The reign of Malcolm III Canmore saw the interest of the Scots turning south and east.
His second wife was the Anglo-Hungarian princess Margaret, whose biography allows a
glimpse into the royal Scottish court. Malcolm was a successful prince who continued the
destruction of Cenél Loairn even as he faced down the Norman conquerors of England. He
and Margaret were patrons of the Church (at Iona they paid for repairs to the church) as
well as literature. The versified list of kings called Duan Albanach (‘Scottish Poem’) con-
cludes with praise for the still-reigning Malcolm. The deaths of Malcolm (in an ambush)
and Margaret in 1093, led to a brief period of political instability. His brother Domnall III
‘Bán’ seized the throne, but Duncan II, a son from Malcolm’s first marriage to the Orkney
noblewoman Ingibjorg, removed him and reigned for six months. Duncan was supported
by the English king William Rufus, but the Scots nobles allowed him to rule only if he sent
away his foreign troops. It was a fatal move, and Duncan was slain within months. Domnall
retook the kingship for four years before Malcolm and Margaret’s son Edgar deposed him
again in October 1097.
 One Kingdom from Many Peoples: History until 1314 39

The descendants in the male line of Malcolm and St Margaret ruled the Scots for almost
two centuries, and overwhelmed their rivals through the simple method of adapting more
rapidly to changing political and military conditions. None of them made the error of
Duncan II: divesting themselves of foreign supporters. Edgar held the kingship because his
patrons – first William Rufus and then Henry I – had resources greater than anything his
rivals could muster. This support had its limits, however, and in 1098 Edgar ceded the
Hebrides to the Norwegian king Magnus III, better known as Magnus ‘Barefoot’. At the
same time Edgar revived his family’s Irish alliances, this time with the Uí Briain princes of
southern Ireland when in 1105 he sent a gift of a camel to the titular Irish high king
Muirchertach Ua Briain.
Perhaps the most important aspect of Edgar’s reign was the fact that he died in possession
of the kingship, easing the succession of his brothers, Alexander and David. The youngest
sons of Malcolm and Margaret were even more influenced by their Norman neighbours than
their elder siblings. Whether in the new men they brought into the kingdom, the religious
innovations they introduced or the administrative reforms they oversaw, their model spoke
French. Together with their convent-educated sister Matilda the queen of Henry I of
England (who abandoned her real name, Edith, in favour of one that sounded more French)
they had literary interests. Matilda commissioned Turgot’s Life of her mother and might
have been the patron for the French version of the Voyage of St Brendan, Alexander encour-
aged book production in his realm, and David collected stories about saints. The brothers
ruled a kingdom that was famous for its centres of learning. In the eleventh century, the
future Bishop Sulien of St David’s studied in Scotland for several years. He might have
studied at St Andrews, which had an important school, and when the bishop-elect Eadmer
arrived there in 1120 its students were part of the reception committee.
Of the two princes, Alexander had the less happy reign. His queen, Sibyl, was a fortune-
less illegitimate child of his brother-in-law Henry, and he held on to his kingship with,
according to a contemporary, a great deal of hard work. The Normans never completely
accepted Alexander (they thought he spoke with a funny accent). David, however, was
considered ‘one of them’, and he certainly had much the easier career. Raised by his sister
Matilda since the death of their parents, he lived at the English court after her marriage.
David was married to one of the wealthiest widows in England, whose estates gave him a
personal fortune unknown to his brothers. He was trusted and admired by his contempor-
aries in two cultures. At the same time that David was bringing his French-speaking
favourites from England to Scotland, his genealogy was being copied in Irish manuscripts
among the pedigrees of the great princes of the Gaels.
Admiration was not synonymous with security. Alexander and David had to face attacks
from north of the Grampians, as Cenél Loairn made final efforts to maintain their inde-
pendence. In 1116, Alexander was attacked at his palace at Scone, but he drove his
assailants to the Moray Firth. David’s absence from the country in 1130 provided them
with the opportunity for a raid along the east coast as far as Strathcathro. Nevertheless, the
superiority of Norman warriors, to be demonstrated again at the battle of the Standard
eight years later, completely overwhelmed their northern opponents, and Cenél Loairn was
destroyed. Echoes of this competition resounded for decades, and the Bishop of the Isles
named Wimund justified his attacks on David, circa 1140, by claiming kinship with the
family of Moray.
The names of the new men now coming into Scotland are found for centuries in Scottish
history: Bruce, Balliol and Comyn to give only three. Their origins varied. Some were
from cadet branches of noble families, while others were fortuneless younger sons or mere
40 Benjamin Hudson

adventurers who caught the royal eye. They were opportunistic, ambitious, greedy and
tough in a fight, all virtues in the twelfth century. In Scotland the newcomers mingled with
the natives as illustrated by the charters of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that were
witnessed by men with French, English, and Gaelic names. Literature reflects assimilation,
and the Romance of Fergus places the native lord Fergus of Galloway in an Arthurian tale.
Together with new men came new observances of religious life. Alexander introduced
the Augustinians into Scotland when he granted them lands at Scone circa 1114. His
brother David’s patronage began before he was king, establishing a colony of monks of the
Order of Tiron at Selkirk (which later moved to Kelso). Aelred of Rievaulx, David’s friend
and former butler who joined the reformed order of Benedictine monks known as the
Cistercians, remarked that David had found only a few religious houses when he ascended
the throne, but left many upon his death. David was also a patron of the Crusading Orders
such as the Templars and Hospitallers. Piety combined with political expediency in some
of his good works. Bishoprics founded at Caithness, Ross and Moray brought contempor-
ary ecclesiastical administration to those regions while firmly establishing David’s author-
ity over people who might be tempted to resist his lordship.
Together with religious change came administrative reform. The Scots began to use the
officials and documents found throughout Europe. While there are charters from the reigns
of Edgar and Alexander, a comparative outpouring is noticeable in the reign of David. He
also led enquiries into land claims, such as the lands belonging to the diocese of Glasgow.
Those who wanted the royal good will had to adapt, such as the community of the Celtic
monastery of Deer, whose privileges and lands listed in the margins of their copy of the
Gospels were confirmed by King David in a twelfth-century charter form used throughout
Europe. Royal officials such as the sheriff appear in charters together with earlier officers
like the maer (steward).
Fascination with the exciting innovations from the continent had disastrous conse-
quences for David’s grandsons Malcolm IV and William the Lion. When they asked to be
knighted by their cousin the English king Henry II, he forced them to surrender their
claims to lands in northern England as the price of his cooperation. This capitulation had
domestic consequences when Malcolm faced uprisings by nobles convinced that he was an
easy prey. They were wrong, as powerful lords such as Fergus of Galloway and Somerled of
Argyll learned to their surprise. When William the Lion allowed himself the luxury of med-
dling in English affairs in support of the rebellion of Henry II’s son, the young Henry, in
1174, the cost was great. William’s capture at Alnwick forced him to sign the Treaty of
Falaise, a complete capitulation by the Scots monarch to the English king. Some of the
damage was undone when Henry’s son Richard the Lionhearted sold the treaty back to
William (while raising funds for the Third Crusade). Nevertheless William and his heirs
never forgot that they had to tread warily in dealings with their southern neighbour.
As important as military adventures was William’s programme of economic reform. This
was a continuation of the programme of his predecessors, especially David, who, with
Bishop Robert, set up a new town at St Andrews in the mid-twelfth century. The collec-
tion of customs duties enriched the royal coffers. The Scots were exporting wool, a com-
modity in demand for clothing the rapidly growing population of northern Europe. As
trade shifted from the Hebrides to the North Sea, the towns of the eastern coast gained an
advantage even though the Irish Sea region remained important. Both Dundee and Ayr
prospered as royally designated commercial centres during William’s reign.
Benign climatic conditions, commercial prosperity and relatively quiet political condi-
tions heralded a Scottish Golden Age during the reign of William’s son Alexander II and
 One Kingdom from Many Peoples: History until 1314 41

grandson Alexander III. The thirteenth century was generally a prosperous time through-
out Europe. The European Climatic Optimum ensured good harvests to feed a growing
population. Even though King John of England dubbed Alexander II ‘the little red fox’, he
was far more astute than his future brother-in-law Henry III of England, whose sister Joan
he married in 1221. Good relations existed between the king and church. Alexander II
indulged himself in the establishment of a mass chaplainry for the soul of his ancestor
Duncan I. There were periodic outbreaks of disorder, but these were local in nature such
as in Caithness in 1230 and Galloway in 1235 and largely a reaction to Alexander forcing
his nobles to recognise an increased royal power. The main area of royal unhappiness was
with the Norwegian suzerainty of the Hebrides. In an effort to retake the Western Isles,
Alexander led an expedition to the Hebrides, but died there in July 1249.
As he was being buried, his eight-year-old son Alexander III was made king in a cere-
mony at Scone, a description of which is the earliest memoir of the rite. Alexander’s reign
followed the tracks laid down by his father: promotion of royal authority with the support
of the Church, continuation of trade contacts, and efforts to regain the Hebrides. In 1263,
the Norwegian king Hakon Hakonarson led an expedition to the Hebrides to reinforce his
authority. The unsuccessful expedition, with its contretemps at Largs, became a disaster
when the king died in the Orkneys on the return journey. Unrest in the Hebrides com-
bined with little enthusiasm for Norwegian lordship (which was reciprocated by a new king
of Norway who had little interest in a distant province) led the Norwegians and Scots to
conclude the Treaty of Perth in 1266. They agreed upon the face-saving fiction that the
Hebrides had been placed under Scottish control in return for a cash payment. The Scots
already had the Isle of Man, which gave them control of the Irish Sea. Now they were the
main power in the seas between Ireland and Britain.
The Golden Age ended in 1286 when, on the bleak morning of 19 March, the body of
Alexander was discovered lying at the bottom of a cliff. His horse had strayed from the path
during the night as the king rode to join his queen. The new monarch was little more than
an infant: Alexander’s three-year-old granddaughter Margaret ‘the Maid of Norway’, the
child of his daughter Margaret and King Eric II of Norway. As the Scottish aristocrats
organised themselves into a regency council known as the Guardians, Margaret’s great-
uncle Edward I of England was making plans to unite England and Scotland through her
marriage to his son, the future Edward II. All came to naught when the Maid of Norway
died in September 1290 in the Orkneys on her journey to Scotland. Now a new problem
presented itself to the Scots: who was to be their king?
On such a simple question followed centuries of bloodshed and misery. The Scottish
nobles asked their southern neighbour to judge the merits of the claims to the throne. At
that time Edward was generally well regarded by the Scots as a successful warrior, crusader
and diplomat. He had even spent his summer holidays at the Scottish court as the guest of
his sister and her husband King Alexander III. Fourteen competitors came forward with
claims to the kingship, although the real contest was between two men: John Balliol and
Robert Bruce (grandfather of King Robert I). While the case was being decided, Edward
ruled Scotland. For many of the Scots nobles this did not pose a problem because they held
lands of Edward in England or Ireland. When he awarded the Scottish crown to John
Balliol, there was little dissension from objective observers.
Edward was determined, however, to use the adjudication of the Scottish succession as
part of a plan to have his lordship over the Scots formally acknowledged. While hearing
the pleas of the claimants to the throne, he had requested information from English reli-
gious houses about the earlier history of Scottish-English royal contacts, particularly the
42 Benjamin Hudson

subordination of the Scots. Disregarding earlier treaties that had defined Scoto-English
relations, Edward insisted that the Scots king was merely one of his vassals. After King John
was involved in several humiliating episodes, the Scottish nobles took direct control of the
government in 1295 and allied with King Philip IV of France. There was now open war
between Scotland and England.
From 1296 until 1314, English armies invaded Scotland and English garrisons occupied
important fortifications, such as Stirling Castle. The Scots were helped by Edward’s adven-
tures in Wales and France, and the increasing unhappiness of the English nobles as
demands for monies escalated. But a confrontation between the Scots and the English was
a grim prospect for the former as the resources and wealth of England were so much greater.
Equally disturbing was division among the Scottish nobles, some of whom were more inter-
ested in personal gain than national liberation. In 1296, the Scottish army was decisively
defeated south of Dunbar in April, while, in July, King John was captured and imprisoned
in the Tower of London. The English conquest of Scotland seemed permanent.
All changed within a year when there arose a Scots leader in the unlikely person of
William Wallace, working with his fellow-leader Andrew de Moray (or Murray). Their
greatest triumph came in September 1297 at the battle of Stirling Bridge, where they
defeated a large English cavalry force, although at the cost of Murray’s life. The occupying
administration of the English collapsed. Chosen to be Guardian of the realm of Scotland,
Wallace was knighted and led raids throughout northern England. A Scottish defeat the
following year at the battle of Falkirk spelled the end for his supremacy. Wallace managed
to remain at large for several years, but in 1305 he was captured and executed.
From 1298 to 1304, the Scottish cause crumbled; by 1304 Edward I was again the master
of the land. Once more the Scots roused themselves to fight for their liberty. Into the always
volatile mix of fear, ambition, and calculation that occupied the thoughts of the Scottish
nobles came two dramatically opposed rivals. Robert Bruce, the grandson of John Balliol’s
rival, wanted the kingship, while Balliol’s cause was espoused by his nephew John ‘the Red’
Comyn. At a meeting between the two at Dumfries Kirk in 1306, Bruce killed John ‘the
Red’. Hastening to Scone, he was made king as Robert I.
King Robert I began his reign inauspiciously. After a series of defeats, Robert fled to
Ireland to recover. Whether or not there is any truth to the legend of the spider – in which
the king, hiding in a cave, takes heart after watching a spider complete its web having failed
the same number of times he had been defeated – it has become over the centuries an
iconic metaphor. Meanwhile in reality, by 1309 the Scots were pushing the English south
of the Forth. These triumphs were helped by the death of Edward I in 1307 and the suc-
cession of his son Edward II. Control of Scotland had become an obsession for the elder
Edward, who died while leading his army north once more even though he was so feeble
that he had to be held upright in order to eat.
The accession of the younger Edward became the occasion for the English aristocrats,
whose fear of the father had been replaced by contempt for his son, to vent their frustra-
tions. Scotland became a less significant issue in the political turmoil at the English court.
King Robert took advantage of the confusion, and his campaigns were so successful that,
by 1314, the garrison at Stirling, the lynchpin of English control in Scotland, was forced
to come to terms with the Scots. If the garrison was not relieved shortly after midsummer,
the castle would be surrendered to the Scots and the English troops would be allowed to
return home. At almost the last moment Edward II decided to relieve the garrison at
Stirling. His hastily assembled forces shambled north and finally found themselves facing
Robert and his army near the Bannock Burn. The outnumbered Scots were able to defeat
 One Kingdom from Many Peoples: History until 1314 43

their much better equipped foes by using the marshy terrain to compress the English
advance and prevent a full deployment of their forces. When Edward II was forced by his
nobles to leave the battlefield, the Scottish victory at the battle of Bannockburn began to
pass into legend, most famously in John Barbour’s epic The Bruce.
In roughly eight centuries, northern Britain had changed from a conglomeration of small
principalities into the kingdom of Scotland. The Scots princes ruled peoples from a variety
of cultures, from the descendants of the Vikings in the Hebrides to the descendants of the
Northumbrian English in Lothian. The merger of these disparate elements continued for
centuries with the final additions to the territory of the kingdom coming in the fif-
teenth century. Whether through luck or plan or simply ‘a great deal of hard work’ the
Scots kings survived as masters of their realm. In 1314 the Scottish kingdom had survived
and triumphed.

Further reading

Anderson, A. O. (1922), Early Sources of Scottish History, 2 vols, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd.
Anderson, A. O. (1908), Scottish Annals from English Chroniclers, London: David Nutt.
Barrow, G. W. S. (1989 [1981]), Kingship and Unity, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Duncan, A. A. M. (1975), Scotland: The Making of the Kingdom, Edinburgh: Oliver and
Boyd.
Houston, R. A. and W. W. J. Knox (eds) (2001), The New Penguin History of Scotland,
London: Penguin Books.
Hudson, Benjamin (1994), Kings of Celtic Scotland, Westport: Greenwood Press.
 4

The Topography of People’s Lives:

Geography until 1314
Sally M. Foster

Societies are much messier than our theories of them, all the more so in this shadowy period
of history when Scotland emerges from 9,500 years or so of prehistoric occupation into a time
when documentary sources are still few and the extensive archaeological resource is scarcely
yet tapped. Inevitably, if somewhat reluctantly, we are often forced to fall back on studying
those physical remains that involved a higher investment of human labour and which, if in
earth and stone, have best survived the ravages of time. Fortunately, we can be reasonably
confident that these will be products of the impact and articulation of the big new ideas that
resulted in changes in society, the ones we want to know about. Alas, the finer grain of
human existence, particularly that of the disempowered, remains largely elusive. Any
overview can be only simplistic, not least given the diversity of human practice.
By the middle of the thirteenth century, to be a Scot meant to be an inhabitant of a his-
torically defined kingdom with an increasingly monetary economy where a stable mon-
archy with mature and regularised tools of government and a regional church structure
ruled over a political entity with geographic boundaries little different from those of today’s
Scotland (excepting that Shetland and Orkney were still Norwegian, Berwick, the Isle of
Man and parish of Kirkandrews were yet to be lost). This is not to say that regional iden-
tities were not important, but that new perceptions of self and community had evolved
over a lengthy period. To understand how this might have happened we need to recognise
and explore the revolutionary, often dramatic, transitions that characterise this period.
First and foremost of these is the move from a kindred-based network of locally-based lord-
ships to more formalised and distant, non-kinship-based relations of lordship. Second,
although people in some parts of southern and western Scotland were already Christian by
the early sixth century, the major missionary movement began early in our period. Quickly
making its mark, the relationship between the Church and secular authorities is critical to
our understanding of this period, not least since the new ideology brought with it the new
technology of writing. This was the means by which new systems of administration could
be introduced. The power of both secular and ecclesiastical authorities ultimately stemmed
from how they generated wealth from the resources of the land, notably agricultural sur-
pluses, and it is to this that our attention will first turn. (Exploitation of marine resources
for anything but domestic purposes does not loom large until the second millennium ad,
and then essentially in Norse parts of Scotland and the burghs.)
The Scotland of ad 550 was already largely deforested and at this time suffering from
adverse climatic conditions. This may have induced a period of social instability. The major-
ity of its inhabitants were farmers practising a mixed economy (arable and animals), but also
 The Topography of People’s Lives: Geography until 1314 45

tapping into the rich natural resources of the land and sea. Enormous regional diversity in
domestic architecture was the norm, whatever the building materials, and details of farming
strategies clearly differ. We can imagine a landscape where the better land is busy with unen-
closed individual farmsteads and hamlets, punctuated by the occasional fortified dwelling
places of the local elite, burial places and ceremonial centres, including, in the south, the
occasional church and graveyard. This rural underbelly is a constant dynamic throughout
our period. The level and precise source of agricultural wealth was dictated by a range of
external factors (such as climate) and internal factors (such as available technology, organ-
isation of society, forms of transport and communication).
The finer texture of the landscape, the form and pattern of any enclosures and regular-
isation of land use, is essentially unknown in the early medieval period, as for preceding
millennia. The only significant innovation that has been noted, and so far only in associ-
ation with a few monastic sites, is the introduction of mould-board plough technology, an
improved means of turning the soil. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the picture is
still one of diversity (we need only note the range of names for land units and their means
of assessment) but with underlying, if asynchronous, trends common across much of the
country. Most notable is the adoption of open fields, a European tradition which reached
lowland England in the tenth and eleventh centuries. This is the means by which arable
land was divided into strips and apportioned to ensure that there was an equitable and
regular redistribution of the available resources between the farmers residing in a ferm toun
or township, nucleated settlements that appear to be a consequence of feudalism and its
influence. Such division of land, known to us by its later name of runrig, is usually charac-
terised by the presence of different type of rig. From the twelfth to thirteenth centuries
broad rig, produced by mould-board ploughs, apparently became the standard from
Roxburgh to Sutherland. It is debated when the system of infields (used just for arable) and
outfields (sporadically used for arable) was introduced. Beyond these was the rougher
ground used for hill pasture as well as other resources. In the western Highlands and Islands,
it is posited that the system of runrig and associated nucleated settlement postdates the
Treaty of Perth (1266), being preceded by a more dispersed settlement pattern and system
of field enclosure by different landowners.
Changes in the character of lordship brought with them changes in settlement patterns,
none more so than when the Anglo-Norman practices of feudalism were introduced.
A feature of such villages was the nearby watermill to which all were obliged to bring their
grain for processing. Despite being largely beyond central royal control, aspects of feudal
land-management practices were apparently also absorbed in the west of Scotland. The
twelfth and thirteenth centuries experienced an improvement in the climate which led to a
boom in the population, enhanced agricultural productivity, the improvement of more land
and the founding of more settlements. Farming became more than a subsistence economy
and payments to the lord were increasingly paid in cash. A part of this wealth made its way
back into the parish churches and castles that these lords built. A significant factor was the
foundation of burghs (chartered towns). These needed efficient rural hinterlands to supply
their foodstuffs and raw products; they also provided the stimulus for a wider range of rural
industries and were the means by which wealth production could be diversified.
Another notable change in the countryside was the introduction of hunting reserves and
parks by Anglo-Norman lords, but also Gaelic lords. Long known to be an elite sport
(see Pictish sculpture, for instance), we now see evidence for the demarcation and control
of large tracts of land specifically for a leisure activity that was strictly the preserve of royalty
and aristocrats.
46 Sally M. Foster

The notion of permanent settlements in which a significant proportion of the population

lived off non-agricultural occupations, such as trade and industry, can be first observed in
the early first millennium ad iron-age oppida of south-east Scotland. Roman military occu-
pation of southern Scotland did not result in the foundation of any towns, but proto-urban
tendencies can be observed in the early medieval power centres, such as the secular fort of
Dunadd in Argyll or around the monastery of Whithorn. We can see how highly technical
specialisms, such as stone carving, vellum manufacture, manuscript illustration and fine
metalworking were taking place in zoned areas under the control of the local secular and
ecclesiastical authorities and that the secular lords (at least) were also controlling local
and foreign trade. Despite the depredations of the Vikings, in general the increase in trade
and centralisation of wealth continued. The big change of the twelfth century was a con-
certed royal campaign to introduce a standardised and structured entity: towns.
The credit for this initiative lies with the energetic David I (r. 1124–53) who introduced
laws intended to encourage and control trade in fixed places, but also William, during
whose reign (r. 1165–1214) the first burghal charters were issued. A new form of commu-
nity was created which had its own legal privileges but also responsibilities. Burgesses, the
principal landowners, undertook administrative responsibilities on behalf of the king in
return for certain rights, and merchant guilds regulated trade (precise arrangements varied
from burgh to burgh). Towns were thus effective vehicles for kings to increase their wealth
(through collections of market tolls, rent, customs and other dues) and to extend their gov-
ernance. Unlike early medieval aristocrats and kings who had fairly hands-on control over
the trade and specialised crafts in their smaller territories, the Anglo-Norman kings created
the means for their wealth and authority to operate at arm’s length.
The majority of towns were founded in the east where they had good communications
with the hinterland and ready access to North Sea trade. They were also sited where royal
authority was weak, such as Moray. As the towns developed, so the influx of people from
the countryside increased. Raw and finished products were brought into the burghs. Goods
finished within the burgh walls included leather, linen, wool, iron, bone and antler prod-
ucts. To judge from the documentary sources, the prime exports were wool, sheepskins,
hides and fish. Trade with Europe was nothing new – Mediterranean and continental mer-
chants had regularly brought wine, salt, dyes, pottery and other goods to Argyll power
centres in the late fifth to eighth centuries ad in return, we presume, for slaves, goods, furs
and perhaps cereals. However, the scale, pace, regularisation and orientation of this new
trade stands out, even if David I was not starting from scratch; authorised trading places on
the Anglo-Saxon model seem likely to have been encouraged by Malcolm III Canmore (r.
1057–93). New markets opened with England, the Low Countries, France, Germany and
Norway and we can detect from documentary and archaeological sources that goods arrived
from even further afield. Not only were the native merchants well travelled, but the ordin-
ary townsperson would have been regularly exposed to foreigners, their goods, ideas and
culture. Such contact must have had a profound impact on all aspects of Scottish life, with
the craftsmen and merchants acting as intermediaries between different walks of life.
We know most about Perth, one of the earliest royal burghs to be founded. It was sited at
a crossing point of the Tay, a locality of high significance to Pictish and later kings, an impor-
tance not missed by the Romans, who sited a camp nearby. Occupied since at least the tenth
century and probably the site of an earlier Pictish settlement that included a church, a new
settlement was laid out on a grid pattern within a demarcated boundary that enclosed recti-
linear burgage plots comprising a frontage house and multi-purpose backland or rig. Perth
rapidly expanded to include a short-lived royal castle and, around its periphery, four religious
 The Topography of People’s Lives: Geography until 1314 47

houses. In general, few new towns were founded during the thirteenth century but tree-ring
dating is producing evidence for synchronous late twelfth-/early thirteenth-century devel-
opment of existing burghs at Perth, Inverness, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Elgin, perhaps
the first formal programme of burgh expansion since their establishment and new-found
prosperity.
Kirkwall in Orkney is probably Norway’s best-preserved medieval town, still on its ori-
ginal site and retaining its medieval street layout: Kirkwall’s urban roots lie in the North
Sea region, not England. A centre from at least the mid-eleventh century, it can be said to
become truly urban when the bishopric is transferred here in 1137 and work begins on its
splendid Romanesque cathedral (the bishopric was incorporated into the metropolitan see
of Trondheim in 1152 or 1153). In contrast to Ireland, the entrepreneurial Norse did not
develop urban centres in their Shetland, Faroe, Iceland or Greenland outposts. The status
of Kirkwall can be credited to the power of the semi-independent Orkney earldom and
Orkney’s role as a staging post between the major trading posts of Ireland and Scandinavia.
The development of urban economies stimulated an increase in rural industries: pottery
production, extraction of smelting of iron, lead and silver and coal mining. These some-
times involved new practices, such as intensified woodland management or new tech-
nologies, such as wind- and water-power or improved methods of firing and glazing pottery.
The Church was an important vector of many technological and agricultural innovations.
In the early medieval period, it was perhaps responsible for the introduction of the hori-
zontal water mill from Ireland or new forms of agricultural practice (mould-board ploughs)
and marine exploitation. The Cistercians, one of the reformed religious orders first intro-
duced to Scotland by David I, were renowned across Europe as agricultural innovators, spe-
cialising in exploitation of sheep. In Scotland they were able major producers of the wool
for which there was much demand in Flanders. Granges run by lay brothers were a new type
of monastic farm expressly developed for sheep management.
By the 1350s, burgesses had come to play such an important part in the development of
the Scottish nation that this political and legal entity was formally recognised as one of the
three estates that made up the Scottish Parliament. The other two estates were the tem-
poral and spiritual lords.
We now need to change the lens and consider what the move from kinship- to non-
kinship-based forms of lordship meant on the ground, and how this related to the Church.
In early medieval Scotland, kin-dominated political structures gradually come to be out-
grown by relations of clientship. As understood from contemporary Irish law, clientship
generally consisted of the payment of food renders, other tribute and service to a lord in
return for land to farm, protection and patronage, a chain of relationships that technically
included all in society. At this time, there was more than one hierarchy of kings and dif-
ferent levels of kingliness. The Anglo-Norman vision of kingship was one in which a single
royalty held sway over all land and people. Knights who swore allegiance to a monarch
could hold land from him in return for military service; the land could then be sublet. The
aim of feudalism was to sever completely any connection between lordship and kin. This
was the means to a European-style state where a king would be supported by an appointed
royal household, royal officials, a network of local royal officials, and of course Anglo-
Norman lords and clerics. These and the complementary legal apparatus were the means
by which a kingdom could successfully continue to expand its territories.
Particularly important are the questions of how, when and where the link with kinship-
based lordship was severed: when did all chains of clientship relations in any one kingdom
extend to a single king? And how different is feudalism from such clientship? Both were
48 Sally M. Foster

means of extending the distance over which a single authority could successfully operate
and each facilitated the establishment of new elites whose authority might be acquired
rather than inherited by right. With feudalism, the land was technically no longer part of
a local lord’s tribal inheritance and the land was not owned by the kindred of the people
who farmed it. The case can certainly be made for proto-feudal structures existing in
eastern and southern parts of early medieval Scotland and that David I’s formal feudal
structure built on this rather than swept it away. The Gaelic and Hiberno-Norse maritime
kingdoms of western Scotland adopted some of the influences and trappings of feudalism,
but theirs remained a world in which clan chiefs dominated. This was a personalised form
of authority where the status of the group was embodied in its leader. The group was defined
by a relationship of kin, although this could be assumed rather than real. Feuding was
common and much depended on the chief’s ability as war leader to reward his followers
with feasts and gifts, and for the individual to be able to assert individual status through
appearance (such as clothes and jewellery). Although this clan system is only documented
as such from the twelfth century, it may be little different in character from the society that
preceded it.
In Pictland and southern Scotland, the evidence is amassing for the prevalence of a
structured form of land organisation that has implications for our understanding of the
development of royal authority across Scotland. In Northumbria, studies are showing how
early medieval territorial and social structures (shires) lie at the root of the feudal struc-
tures of tenure, taxation and territory. In Pictland, there may also be evidence for some
analogous structures that are indicative of a sophisticated form of government (see below).
Something similar to the shire is also presumed to have existed in the area of the old British
kingdoms in south-western Scotland. David I and his successors are associated with a
system of thanages, large multiple estates around the size of a rural parish which were
administered by officials acting as intermediaries between king/earl/provincial lord and the
rest of the population. While the terminology may belong to David I, there is reason to
believe that this form of land division was introduced into Scotland at an earlier date. It
has been argued that this system dates from the reign of Malcolm II (1005–34). Seventy or
so thanages are known and, whatever their antiquity, their correspondence with the parish
system that David I also introduced suggests a common ancient land unit lies behind both.
Thanages can be seen as the widespread centres where relationships of power would have
been negotiated. Stephen Driscoll proposes that the three likely main components of the
thanage have their origin in an earlier Pictish ‘shire’: a principal residence or caput; por-
tions (pett) of agricultural land, perhaps with enclosed main farm and dispersed settlement;
and a ceremonial centre for public events associated with lay and royal power. This was a
flexible system, allowing for the principal authority of any such shire to be a king, secular
or ecclesiastical lord, with a style and form of main residence to match. We cannot say what
the relationship was between the people who lived in a caput and those who tilled the soil,
or whether the resident of the caput controlled services and collected dues in their own
right or on behalf of a king.
The roots of the Pictish shire systems are more difficult to disentangle. Changes in the
eighth and ninth centuries are clearly significant, a pattern clearest in those areas which
are known to have royal associations. Prior to this time, the lordly centres were hilltop
forts. The available evidence suggests that these are starting to be abandoned around the
eighth and ninth centuries and, where new centres have been identified, these are unfor-
tified palaces whose architecture shares more in common with continental forms. The
lord’s hall is no longer physically elevated, but is architecturally imposing. We are surely
 The Topography of People’s Lives: Geography until 1314 49

seeing a more assured kingship, less dependent in places of residence on the overtly mili-
tary symbolism of an architecture with prehistoric overtones. Military superiority is still
important, but expressed in alternative ways, such as through the iconography of public
sculpture (the ninth-century Dupplin Cross is a particularly good example). As to cere-
monial centres, Driscoll argues that there is a tendency at this time to create a new type of
monument, the open meeting place, where the theatre of power could be publicly orches-
trated. The most best-known examples are Scone and Forteviot. The Moot Hill at Scone
was probably built at this time for royal inaugurations and proclamations. While each shire
might have had a meeting place, those associated with royalty had more complex and
important centres. That at Scone became pre-eminent for Alba as a whole at a time when
we are confident that significant changes in kingship were taking place. It seems no coin-
cidence that these are often places that would have still had an extensive upstanding land-
scape of prehistoric monuments. At the same time as creating these public meeting places,
local lords were increasingly investing their resources in the patronage of Christian monu-
mental sculpture and, we must assume, the small churches with which these were associ-
ated. The church buildings are places that must have had a more restricted audience, being
the place where the ecclesiastical and secular elite met. This elitism is reflected in the
highly complex iconography of the St Andrews Sarcophagus, a royal burial shrine, whose
full and precise meaning would have been accessible and legible to few. Symbol-bearing
cross-slabs with their juxtaposition of Christian and lordly imagery can be seen as a mani-
festation for wider public consumption of what is happening inside the Churches. The
physical juxtaposition of the caput, church and the meeting places is also marked.
This model of the key elements of a Pictish shire and how it worked can be extended
forward in time; the later centres equally being places where rituals of vassalage and
clientship were enacted. New architectural packages came with the new feudal lords:
earthwork and timber motte-and-bailey castles, ring-works and, later, stone castles.
Artificially created topography was used, where needed, to reinforce the new authority in
overtly military forms. The towns played an increasingly important role as gathering places
for enactment of royal authority and law, although rarely as residences of the nobility. In
both town and country, the role of the Church in society was also to change dramatically.
It cannot be proved whether the changes observable in eighth- and ninth-century devel-
opments should be attributed to a coordinated campaign under the instruction of a royalty
that was exerting new forms of authority, but this is a tempting hypothesis.
Pictish symbol-bearing stones are found from Shetland to the Western Isles and down
the east coast of Scotland as far as the Forth. The impetus for the creation, spread and
repeated use of this common system of symbolism incised on monumental stones is not
known (nor indeed its precise meaning). This probably took place sometime in the seventh
century and again suggests the involvement of a central authority. Although these sculp-
tures are associated with public places (of burial or meeting, including re-used prehistoric
sites), they appear to be appearing in contexts where they are associated with dead indi-
viduals and are being used to support the legitimacy of the heirs, perhaps at a time when
new social positions needed asserting.
Arguably the main event horizon in this period is the introduction and impact of
Christianity. The extension of royal authority went hand-in-glove with the growth of church
power; developments in the organisation of one often directly parallel the other. The case
has been made that without the combined forward looking and sophisticated planning of the
Columban Church and state, plus the determined military pressure of the Gaels, the entity
called Alba would not have been created in around 900. Local lords and kings could opt to
50 Sally M. Foster

support the Church either by giving it land (and lordship over its inhabitants) or by grant-
ing it the right to certain renders from a specified area. They might also patronise proprietary
churches on their own land. In this way, Christian edifices became a regular part of the land-
scape. In comparison to other parts of the British Isles, kings in Scotland were highly active
in ecclesiastical affairs. The Church promoted a new ideal of kingship and an increasing
reliance on the administrative support that the literate clergy could provide. Churches were
centres of learning, engines for social change, and Scotland was no backwater; sixth- to
eighth-century Iona was one of the pre-eminent cultural centres of Europe.
By the time symbol-bearing cross-slabs appear in the eighth century, Christianity has
patently been embraced by the higher echelons (note also the common insular art style
shared by the secular and ecclesiastical elite). The dispersed distribution of the cross-slabs
reflects the harnessing of Christianity to the local power networks; this can probably be
attributed to the widespread energies of the late seventh-century, romanising Columban
Church of Adomnán and his colleagues, aided by the early eighth-century reforms of King
Nechtan.
How the presence of these churches affected the daily lives of the mass of the popula-
tion is uncertain. A key question is when Churches acquired an ‘official’ as opposed to
private function. Meigle, St Vigeans and Govan were clearly royal burial places but did
these churches operate as ‘minsters’ fulfilling pastoral functions? Bishops existed, but their
precise role, the extent of any authority and their relationship to secular territories, is
unclear. Saints’ cults became increasingly important as it was recognised that relics and
their associated rituals might reinforce royal authority while imposing a shared identity on
their territories. In transferring Columban relics from Iona to Dunkeld in 848/9 Cinaed
mac Ailpín was consciously reinforcing the relationship between his dynasty, its expanded
territories and the centre of the Church.
The creation of Alba and political redefinition of the identity of this kingdom in the
early tenth century may have involved a regularisation and strengthening of the structure
of the Church, including it bishoprics, but David I has to be credited with the biggest
shake-up. As with thanages, he built on what went before, formalising diocesan and parish
boundaries. His creation of a new bishopric in Glasgow extended his authority into
Strathclyde. Here and elsewhere, this was a means of by-passing earlier kindred-based
interests. With his impositions of teinds, the universal extraction of a tenth of all produce
to the Church, the parish unit was territorially and legally created. Local lords, who had
already begun to patronise churches rather than sculpture, now started doing so in greater
numbers. Likewise, there was a flurry of cathedral building in the thirteenth century.
Royalty were also exceedingly active in enticing the new monastic orders then popular
in Europe to Scotland (Benedictine, Tironesian, Cluniac, Cistercian and Valliscaulian),
and in endowing them most generously; likewise, new types of order, such as the
Augustinians. At the same time long-established communities, such as Brechin and
Dunblane, also prospered. Malcolm III’s pious wife (St) Margaret began this trend, a policy
that was developed by her three kingly sons, notably David I. With time, the patronage of
such religious houses broadened as the range of orders to choose from also diversified.
Friaries became popular in the thirteenth century because of their active role in towns.
We have traced some of the ways in which the local geography of power changed in
Scotland from 550 to 1314. That this was a time of big new ideas and big expressions of
those ideas remain writ large in the landscape, above and below our feet, particularly in our
inheritance of sculpture, lordly establishments, towns, monasteries, cathedrals and new
parish centres.
 The Topography of People’s Lives: Geography until 1314 51

Further reading

Campbell, E. (1999), Saints and Sea-Kings: The First Kingdom of the Scots, Edinburgh:
Canongate/Historic Scotland.
Dixon, P. (2002), Puir Labourers and Busy Husbandmen: The Countryside of Lowland Scotland
in the Middle Ages, Edinburgh: Birlinn/Historic Scotland.
Dodgshon, R. (2002), The Age of the Clans: The Highlands from Somerled to the Clearances,
Edinburgh: Birlinn/Historic Scotland.
Driscoll, S. T. (2002), Alba: The Gaelic Kingdom of Scotland, AD 800–1124, Edinburgh:
Birlinn/Historic Scotland.
Foster, S. M. (2004), Picts, Gaels and Scots, London: B. T. Batsford Ltd/ Historic Scotland.
Yeoman, P. (1995), Medieval Scotland, London: B. T. Batsford Ltd/Historic Scotland.
 5

The Lion’s Tongues: Languages in

Scotland to 1314
William Gillies

On the eve of Bannockburn, two languages were spoken widely in Scotland: Gaelic and
Scots; and two languages existed in more restricted domains: Latin in state, ecclesiastical
and scholastic usage, and Norman-French in court and diplomatic circles. Over the cen-
turies preceding the fourteenth, however, Scotland’s linguistic make-up had been more
complex, and the following languages need to be considered in what follows: on the Celtic
side, Gaelic and British, together with the latter’s derivatives Cumbric and Pictish; and on
the Germanic side, Old English and Norse.
The evidence for the prehistoric period (effectively the pre-Roman period) is extremely
thin. It is mostly onomastic in character, surviving by courtesy of Greek sailors and geo-
graphers and Roman soldiers and historians, and supplemented by a scattering of medieval
and modern place-names bearing testimony to the more remote past. These include names
for natural features, such as rivers and headlands, and names for the human inhabitants,
that is, people and peoples. They are linguistically Celtic for the most part, though the
names for natural features include some non-Celtic names which are presumably pre-Celtic
survivals, for example, among river-names, which are known to be the most persistent of
all name-classes.
Turning to the names of places and peoples, we may note that the Classical authors did
not have a word for ‘Scotland’ as such. To them, the whole of Britain was Britannia (‘the land
of the Britanni’). The name of the Roman province was thus based on a name for the whole
island, a descriptor on the same level as Gallia (‘Gaul’) or Hispania (‘Spain’). Again, there is
evidence for a Celtic name for the island of Britain as a whole – *Albiū or similar – but none
for ‘Scotland’ or ‘England’. Below that level, in Britain as in other parts of barbarian Europe,
the major population unit was the tribal grouping. Although the natural barrier of the
Cheviots may have reinforced a tribal boundary between the Brigantes in north England and
the Selgovae and Novantae in south Scotland, there is nothing to indicate that this divide
had any greater significance before the Romans built Hadrian’s Wall in the 120s ad.
Of the early Scottish tribal names some are identifiably Celtic, such as the Selgovae,
whose name survives in Gaelic sealg, Welsh hela ‘hunt’. In fact, some of them recur in other
parts of Britain and Ireland (for example, Cornovii, Dumnonii), or in Celtic Europe (for
example, Lugi), whatever these correspondences may portend. Admittedly, some of the
Scottish names are not so easily analysed as Celtic (for example, the Taexali in Ptolemy’s
Geography), and these have sometimes been held to signify the presence of non-Celtic
peoples. But that is not a necessary inference. For one thing, these names are notoriously
subject to textual corruption, and may contain perfectly acceptable Celtic names in
 The Lion’s Tongues: Languages in Scotland to 1314 53

mangled form. Leaving aside the vexed names, the onomastic evidence for the prehistoric
period is positive for a Celtic presence in all quarters of what is now Scotland. In that
respect, Scotland was simply part of the continuum of Celtic Britain.
Within the Celtic world scholars are aware of dialectal distinctions among the ancient
Celts of Celtic Spain, north Italy and Gaul, and indeed within Gaul itself. Such a distinc-
tion between the varieties of Celtic spoken in Britain and Ireland was fully established by
the dawn of the historical period. The best-known linguistic test for this distinction is the
way in which Celtic speakers dealt with the *q-sound which Proto-Celtic had inherited
from its Indo-European past. In what came to be the Gaelic languages, the *q was retained
and eventually became a c-sound, but in what came to be the Brittonic languages the *q
became a p-sound. Scottish Gaelic ceithir ‘four’ corresponds to Welsh pedwar, pedair (cf.
Latin quattuor for the Indo-European background). This distinction, which recurs on the
continent, has given rise to the terms P-Celtic and Q-Celtic. By the P/Q criterion Britain
as a whole was P-Celtic, and Ireland was Q-Celtic. It is likely enough that matters were
more complicated than this in prehistoric times: Ptolemy’s Geography, for example, records
Brigantes in eastern Ireland opposite the Brigantes in northern England, just as there were
Parisi in East Yorkshire corresponding to the Parisii of Gaul. But the overall contrast
between P-Celtic Britain and Q-Celtic Ireland seems secure.
As for Scotland, the early tribal names show no identifiable Q-Celtic element. It should
be noted that few of these Scottish names are demonstrably not Q-Celtic. But the name of
the west-coast Epidii (cf. P-Celtic *epos ‘horse’) plus the associated ‘Epidian promontory’
(presumably the Mull of Kintyre) is a clear example. In the same way, the generic name for
the Britons, in Latin Britanni, is based on P-Celtic Pritanı̄ (medieval Welsh Prydein), whose
Q-Celtic cognate *Qriteniı̄ lies behind the early Irish term Cruithni ‘Picts’.
The earliest surviving writing in Scotland is in Latin: inscriptions made for the soldiers
and administrators of the northernmost part of Roman Britain. The Roman presence began
with the campaigns of Agricola in the 70s and 80s ad. By the 120s, Scotland was relegated
to a peripheral position by the decision to build Hadrian’s Wall (Tyne–Solway). The build-
ing of the Antonine Wall (Forth–Clyde) in the 140s represented an attempt to secure
southern Scotland within the Empire, but this policy seems to have been replaced, after a
relatively short time, by a policy of using southern Scotland as a buffer zone between the
Empire and the north. While there is clear evidence for interaction between Romans and
natives at such sites as Trimontium (Melrose), the Roman occupation, even in southern
Scotland, was limited by comparison with the degree of Romanisation seen in southern
Britain. Nevertheless, some of the extensive linguistic legacy of the Romans in Britain may
have found its way into the vernacular British of Scotland. While some Latin loan-words
may have been borrowed further south and spread north later, others may go back to the
period of the Roman occupation: such as Welsh pont ‘bridge’ (Latin pons), as in Penpont
in Dumfries-shire; llurugeu ‘breastplates’ (Latin lorica) as worn by the British warriors in The
Gododdin. Since Christianity spread throughout the Roman world, some of the Latin
vocabulary which found its way into British will have done so in a Christian context: for
example, Welsh eglwys ‘church’ (Latin ecclēsia), as in Scottish place-names in Eccles-.
When the influence of the Roman Empire declined, Latin must have continued to be
spoken in Scotland, at least in the context of the Church; compare such early Christian
inscriptions as the Yarrow Stone. How much more widely Latin may have been known, in
aristocratic or trading contexts, is much harder to guess.
The Latin language itself is known directly and minutely from Classical literature,
Roman epigraphy and so on, and from a continuing tradition of literacy centred on the
54 William Gillies

ecclesiastical, scholarly and administrative needs of medieval Europe. As an Indo-

European language, Latin was characterised by having a standard word-shape of root, suffix
and ending. Here, the root specified a lexical item, the suffix was concerned with forming
a word (for example, a noun or verb) based on the root, and the ending supplied such
specifics as number, case, person and gender. Thus dominus ‘lord’ (subject of verb), dominum
‘lord’ (object of verb); dominas ‘you (singular) subjugate’, dominatis ‘you (plural) subjugate’;
rex ‘king’, reges ‘kings’, rego ‘I rule’, rexı̄ ‘I (have) ruled’. Because Latin was a living language,
an informal variety known as Vulgar Latin emerged from spoken or demotic usage which
in turn developed regional characteristics in pronunciation, vocabulary and, to some
extent, grammar and syntax. This was true of British Vulgar Latin as elsewhere in the
Empire, though the further development of demotic Latin into the Romance languages did
not take place in Britain, presumably because the native language had not been driven
underground by Latin to the extent that this happened in other parts of the Empire.
The ancient Celtic dialects of continental Europe were on a par with Latin in terms of
their development from the Indo-European base; and all the indications are that the Celtic
dialects of Britain and Ireland were the same. Indeed, there were certain similarities which
would have made it easier for Romans to understand Celtic speech: for example, Celtic rı̄x
‘king’, rı̄ges ‘kings’. The Celtic word-family of *carāmi ‘I love’, *carantes ‘kinsfolk’ and
*carantia ‘friendship’ would have been fairly transparent to Romans, given the Latin root
of carus ‘dear’ and the suffixes and endings of amantes ‘lovers’ and constantia ‘constancy’. At
the same time, British would have been seriously different from Latin in many other ways:
for example, Celtic had lost Indo-European *p, with the result that the cognates of Latin
pro ‘for’ and prē ‘before’ came out as *ro and *rē; the Indo-European vowels *ei and ē, which
gave ı̄ and ē in Latin, gave ē and ı̄ in Celtic, so that dı̄vus ‘divine’ came out as *dēvos and
vērus ‘true’ came out as *vı̄ros; and at a more fundamental level the reshaped Celtic verbal
system differed from Latin in as many ways as it resembled it.
Within the Celtic language family itself, a sufficient period of independent development
had elapsed for the Q-Celtic speakers of Hibernia and the P-Celtic speakers of Britannia
to speak clearly distinct languages. Although insular P- and Q-Celtic were presumably less
different at the beginning of the Roman period than at the end of it, the difference between
the two in the early Middle Ages was such as to preclude any sense of racial unity or con-
sanguinity that we can detect. On the other hand, British and Gaulish appear to have
formed more of a dialect continuum, at least in early times.
The Romans sought to impose fixed boundaries throughout their Empire and especially
at its limits. This aspiration latterly came under increasing pressure from the ‘barbarian’
world beyond the northern frontiers, which was less static than the Mediterranean-centred
Empire. Later Roman Britain suffered repeated incursions: by Gaels (‘Scotti’) from Ireland,
by ‘Picts’ from beyond the Wall, and by Angles and Saxons from across the North Sea. The
withdrawal of the Roman military presence, from the early fifth century, heralded a period
of anarchy and renewed tribalism, conquest, settlement and migration, with profound
effects on the linguistic make-up of the country.
As regards the Britons of southern Scotland, it appears that during the last two centuries
of Roman rule they were mostly left to act as a buffer zone between the Roman province
south of Hadrian’s Wall and the tribes north of the Antonine Wall. It is uncertain how far
pre-Roman tribal boundaries formed a basis for the territorial divisions that emerged in the
post-Roman period. The men of Gododdin (Old Welsh Guotodin), inhabiting Lothian and
south-east Scotland, bore the same name as the Votadini who had occupied the same ter-
ritory according to Ptolemy’s Geography, which suggests continuity. Dumbarton Rock
 The Lion’s Tongues: Languages in Scotland to 1314 55

appears to have been an important capital in pre-Roman and post-Roman times, but the
territories controlled by its rulers may have changed considerably in the interim. The
kingdom of Rheged, in south-west Scotland and north-west England, may represent a
newer power centre.
The early Welsh poetry attributed to Aneirin and Taliesin offers tantalising glimpses,
however faint and refracted, of these late sixth-century conditions. The poetry portrays a
heroic age of raiding and counter-raiding between and among Britons and Anglo-Saxons.
During the seventh century, however, Anglian imperialism ended this ‘heroic’ period, as
the Northumbrian kings extended their domination through to the Solway and Cumbria.
Rheged disappeared and the surviving British presence in south-west Scotland became
consolidated under the kings of Strathclyde, who continued to rule from Dumbarton for
centuries to come.
North of the Antonine Wall, matters are generally more obscure. Medieval annals and
chronicles from Ireland and England show the Picts (Latin Picti) as powerful players, along-
side the Gaelic Scots, the Britons of Strathclyde and the Anglians of Northumbria, in the
political continuum of North Britain in the period 600–850. But because they disappear
rapidly from history soon after that, there is some doubt as to who the Picts were, and
various theories have been propounded. The term ‘Picts’, whose earliest occurrence dates
from ad 297, is clearly their neighbours’ appellation for them, rather than their own.
(Compare early Irish Goídil ‘Gaels’, which is a loan-word from the Gaels’ British neigh-
bours, to whom they were Gwydyl, or ‘wild men’.) To judge from early Irish Cruithni and
medieval Welsh Prydyn (both meaning ‘Picts’), the Picts may have termed themselves
*Priteni(i), a close congener of the usual *Pritani ‘Britons’. This is borne out by the major
early sub-divisions of Pictland: Caledonia (or similar) as the name for the north-central
Highlands, and the Maeatae as inhabitants of the south Highlands. These early names,
which are also visible through a Gaelic lens in the names for Dunkeld (Dún Chailden) and
Dumyat (*Dún Miäth), seem acceptable Celtic names, as does that of the Verturiones (cf.
early Irish (Mag) Fortrenn), the other early name for a major grouping in the southern
Highlands. Place-names for human occupation (such as tref ‘homestead’, pit ‘piece of land,
estate’) and natural features (such as perth ‘wood, copse’, carden ‘thicket, bush’) encourage
the conclusion that they were P-Celts, Britons like their neighbours in southern Scotland
(compare Welsh tref ‘home’, perth ‘bush’, cardden ‘thicket’).
It has also been suggested that the Picts were linguistically and perhaps racially mixed,
on account of the largely inscrutable Pictish inscriptions and the often outlandish names
in the Pictish king-list. But this appears to be an unnecessary complication, at least for the
historical period. The Picts were militarily strong enough to bring the expansionist aims of
Northumbria to a halt (at the battle of Nechtansmere in 685), and to hold their own
against the Britons of Strathclyde and the Gaels of Dál Riata on several documented occa-
sions. Nevertheless, Pictland seems to have been the recipient of numbers of Gaelic set-
tlers over an extended period. This may have gradually Gaelicised the population before
Cinaed Mac Ailpín (Kenneth Mac Alpin) assumed the Pictish throne (843).
The almost complete lack of documentary evidence for the Northern and Western Isles
and north-west mainland of Scotland has raised questions over their Pictishness before the
coming of Gaelic and Norse settlers (see below). What little evidence we have – mostly
archaeological and onomastic – suggests that the Picts were there, though perhaps not in
great numbers.
Irish raids on and settlements in the west coasts of Britain began in Roman times and
continued in the vacuum created by the latter’s departure. Cornwall and Devon, south and
56 William Gillies

north Wales, Man and (possibly) Galloway were affected. Some were repulsed and others
were assimilated into emergent British kingships. Memories of some are preserved in
medieval Irish and Welsh origin legends and genealogies. They may have been triggered
by the power vacuum in Britain, but perhaps also by Irish economic and political pressures
that we cannot now reconstruct.
For the west of Scotland, raids from Ireland are mentioned from the third and fourth
centuries ad, and there may have been colonisation too, especially in areas beyond the
Roman jurisdiction. As with the coming of the Anglo-Saxons to England, later legends tell
of a unitary expedition, rapid conquest and orderly division of the land won. The reality
was doubtless more complicated than the legend of the coming of the sons of Erc to
Scotland and the foundation of Scottish Dál Riata in ad 500. But the establishment of a
Gaelic enclave in Argyll by that date may be accepted.
There is precious little mention, in Gaelic sources or elsewhere, of contact with the pre-
Gaelic inhabitants of what became Dál Riata – the Picts, according to the English histo-
rian Bede. This may mean that Argyll was sparsely populated or settled in an unorganised
or undefended way. At all events, the Gaelic kingdom of Scottish Dál Riata was well estab-
lished by the time Columba came to Scotland in ad 563 and the Gaelic presence in what
is now Argyll was a fixed part of the political scene in Scotland.
Generically, the Gaels were referred to as Scotti in Latin sources. When they had estab-
lished themselves in western Scotland they were called the ‘Scots of Alba’ to differentiate
them from the ‘Scots of Ireland’. Later the Gaels of Scotland became simply Scotti, and
those of Ireland Hibernenses or similar. Their own generic term for themselves was Goídil,
as we have noted. At this time Alba (etymologically ‘The Land’ or similar) still referred to
the whole of Britain; later it became confined to the part of Britain ruled over by the kings
of the Picts and Scots, that is, Scotland. The Gaels also created many ‘New Ireland’ names
where they colonised, including (Bridge of) Earn, and so on (once Éireann, genitive of
Éire), Banff (once Banbha), Elgin (once Eilginn) and Athol (once Ath-Fhódla), corres-
ponding to early Irish Ériu, Banba, Elg(a) and Fótla, all meaning ‘Ireland’.
Anglo-Saxon raids and incursions from the coastal areas of Germany and Frisia into
England, perhaps prompted by pressure on those areas from further east, are reported from
the fourth century ad. With the collapse of the Roman province, the fifth and sixth century
saw large-scale invasions in the south and south-east, in eastern England and into the
Midlands. Another facet of the early phase of colonisation led to settlements in north-east
England, followed by expansion into south-east Scotland in the seventh century. This
brought a Germanic tongue into Scotland for the first time, if one excepts the many
German auxiliaries of the Roman army stationed in northern Britain.
Whereas the earliest phase of Anglo-Saxon settlement had proceeded rapidly to recon-
figure a large part of lowland Britain, the less ‘civilised’ tribes of the north and west, includ-
ing those of Scotland, offered more prolonged resistance. This would help to explain the
later elevation of this period to the status of a ‘Heroic Age’ by the Welsh literary tradition,
as pointed out above. However, the creation of the kingdom of Northumbria out of the
primitive kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia around ad 600 harnessed an aggressive dynasty
to a powerful war machine. This overran the land of Gododdin and extended its claims to
political overlordship of Strathclyde, Dál Riata and Pictland in the seventh century.
In linguistic terms, the earliest Anglian settlements in Scotland that we can identify
today are among those with names in -ingham and -ington. They are found by the lower
Tweed and in East Lothian (for example, Tyningham, Haddington). By the mid-seventh
century, the westward impetus of Anglian colonisation brought English into Cumberland
 The Lion’s Tongues: Languages in Scotland to 1314 57

and along the Solway coast (that is, through the old kingdom of Rheged). In the eighth
century, Northumbria took over Ayrshire, thereby confining British power to the Clyde
Valley, though it was to expand again later, after Northumbrian power had been crippled
by the Great Army of the Danes in the 860s and 870s. The extent to which Brittonic
speech survived these Northumbrian intrusions is not clear, because some of the Brittonic
place-names there could belong to the tenth-century revival of the kingdom of
Strathclyde. At all events, scholars are less prone nowadays than they once were to assume
genocide or ethnic cleansing as the result of English–British confrontations.
During the late Roman period and early Middle Ages a series of major linguistic changes
affected the Celtic languages, both British and Goidelic, and transformed them from being
highly inflected ‘ancient’ languages to ‘medieval’ languages with a much greater depen-
dency on word order and syntax. This can be seen taking place in the Irish ogham inscrip-
tions, which were being written as these changes were taking place. The early or more
archaic forms may be represented by the name Lugudeccas, later Lug(u)decc, which has lost
the final syllable containing the genitive singular ending. In the same way British Caratācos
gave rise to medieval Welsh Caradawc (modern Welsh Caradog). This sort of development
was not confined to the Celtic languages; one finds similar phenomena in the transition
from primitive Germanic to the earliest extant Germanic languages, and indeed in the
transformation of Latin into the Romance languages.
For Britain, this set of changes, centring on the fourth to sixth centuries ad, is described
linguistically as the transition from (late) British to the Brittonic dialects, later the
Brittonic languages: Welsh, Cornish, Breton and Cumbric. The linguistic developments
which occurred at this time included sound-changes, vowel affection, vowel syncope, loss
of final syllables and the grammaticalisation of the initial mutations. One major factor in
the differentiation of the Brittonic dialects was undoubtedly their physical separation from
one another, largely caused by the Anglo-Saxon expansion into formerly British territor-
ies. For example, when the Northumbrians reached the Solway and north-west England in
the seventh century, they physically cut off the Britons of Strathclyde from those of Wales,
although cultural links clearly continued to exist.
Cumbric is the name given to the dialectal descendant of British spoken in southern
Scotland in the British kingdom of Strathclyde, also known as Cumbria. Although hardly
any specimens of Cumbric literature survive, the evidence of place and personal names,
plus some poetic and genealogical fragments preserved in Welsh sources, suggests that
‘North British’ developed very much on a par with the way in which ‘West British’ gave
rise to Welsh. There is reason to believe that at least limited literacy existed at the court
of the kings of Strathclyde, and in contact with similar centres in Wales. The absence of
surviving records for the literature of Strathclyde is doubtless to be ascribed to the decline
and demise of the Strathclyde court before literacy had become deeply embedded in the
culture, and the way the area later became Gaelicised and functioned at the periphery of
the Gaelic kingdom of the Picts and Scots.
If we compare the evidence for the language of Pictland with that for Strathclyde, the
place-names attest to a linguistic and cultural presence closely comparable with Cumbric
and, indeed, with other parts of the British continuum: the terms perth and cardden, already
mentioned, occur in Pictland (as in Perth or Kincardine). There are differences too: names
in caer ‘enclosed or fortified dwelling’ do not occur far beyond the Antonine Wall, there
are differences in the usage of tre(f) ‘homestead’, and p(e)it ‘holding, manor’ hardly occurs
south of the Antonine Wall. But these are no greater than the dialectal and distributional
differences that occur between (say) Wales and Cornwall.
58 William Gillies

The same is true in regard to aristocratic personal names, where Pictish Drostan, Neithon
and so on bear comparison with Welsh Trystan, Nwython and so on. However, the Pictish
king-list also contains many unrecognisable name-forms; and these have sometimes been
thought to indicate a mixed racial make-up in Pictland. There is nothing inherently unvi-
able in this hypothesis. However, the totality of the names involved can be seen as compris-
ing a strong group of plausible Brittonic names supplemented by a scattering of Gaelic or
Anglo-Saxon names (which would be compatible with what we know about kingly rule in
Pictland) and a further scattering of the sorts of ‘made-up’ names that occur in Celtic king-
lists and origin legends of the early Middle Ages. The residuum of enigmatic names includes
some which hint at scribal mangling of unrecognised Brittonic names, which is again com-
patible with what we know about the manuscript transmission of Pictish materials. There is
a strong suggestion here that future linguistic research should lead in textual-palaeographical
rather than ethnic directions, and that the ‘core’ Pictish names are Brittonic.
The most famous and problematic category of evidence for Pictish language is the Pictish
ogham inscriptions. These manifestations of a script whose origins appear to lie firmly in
the Gaelic world occur in association with the equally celebrated Pictish symbols, which
include animals (naturalistic and stylised) and more abstract forms. Although they yield
some possible words and names, they also contain numbers of ‘nonsense’ forms, including
clusters of repeated consonants and other linguistically counter-intuitive forms. Attempts
to ‘read’ them as Brittonic texts (or indeed as productions in Gaelic or other medieval lan-
guages) have therefore not been very successful. Nor are they numerous enough to let one
perform ‘code-breaking’ tests in a convincing manner. They remain a tantalising linguis-
tic conundrum.
While the earliest Gaelic inscriptions show the language in its ‘ancient’ stage, the earli-
est literary texts, written in archaic Old Irish, are fully ‘medieval’. Gaelic is assumed to have
attained literary status in a bilingual monastic milieu. The texts leave a legacy of histori-
cal, genealogical, legal and imaginative poetry and prose dating back to c. ad 600. (The
‘classical’ Old Irish period was 700–900, followed by Middle Irish 900–1200.) This litera-
ture is mostly preserved in considerably later manuscripts, most of which are of Irish proven-
ance. Though Iona was clearly one of the leading early centres of literate culture, early
‘Scottish’ Gaelic texts are hard to isolate, though recent work has shown some possibilities.
As to the spoken language, one presumes that in the circumstances of language contact
between Gaels and other non-Gaelic speakers in Scotland (see below), together with prac-
tical lack of communication between Ireland and Scotland for most people for most of the
time, Scottish varieties of spoken Gaelic must have existed from the Old Irish period
onwards. Certain syntactic features of Scottish Gaelic which group it with Welsh or
Cornish against Irish may owe their origin to Brittonic-speaking Picts becoming Gaelic
speakers around the ninth century, when the centre of gravity of Gaelic-speaking rule in
Scotland moved east from Dunadd to Scone. This would be slower to surface in written
form in the ecclesiastical milieu, though some unmistakably Scottish characteristics are
now identified in the twelfth-century Gaelic notes in the Book of Deer in Buchan. On the
other hand, the pan-Gaelic organisation of the professional literati constituted a focus for
linguistic conservatism and unity which in time gave rise to a distinct learned dialect used
by the poets and historians and their patrons all over Gaelic Scotland and Ireland right
down to the seventeenth century.
While the English Northumbrians who fought against Urien of Rheged and the men of
Gododdin were heathens, the generation that colonised south-east Scotland were, or
became, Christians. Consequently, Scotland lacks examples of the place-name with
 The Lion’s Tongues: Languages in Scotland to 1314 59

heathen associations that have survived in England (such as Wotan-names, as in

Wednesbury). Having received the Christian faith initially from Iona, the Northumbrian
Church of St Cuthbert became a powerful cultural presence in southern Scotland, just as
Columba’s Iona had done in Pictland. Although the Northumbrian Angles doubtless had
a heroic and court literature like their Celtic neighbours, only a few pieces of Christian lit-
erature survive. A striking testimony to the Northumbrian presence in the south-west is
the magnificent Ruthwell Cross (erected c. ad 730), which carries, in the form of a runic
inscription, quotations from an Old English poem, ‘The Dream of the Rood’.
At the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions, the Germanic languages had been under-
going changes not dissimilar to those that affected the Celtic languages. Primitive English
was still a quite strongly inflected language, though the old Germanic system of noun
declensions and verb conjugations had been simplified and refashioned. There would have
been dialectal distinctions between the Angles and Saxons and Jutes, corresponding to the
different parts of Denmark, Germany or Frisia which they had inhabited; and these dis-
tinctions would have been underlined by separate existence in different parts of Britain
during the conquest and colonisation period. Despite this, the Old English dialects were
relatively similar, at least in written form. Nevertheless, the Northumbrian dialect forms
preserved in ‘The Dream of the Rood’ and ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’, together with some idio-
syncrasies in toponymic usage, give us our earliest glimpses of Scots.
The survival of Latin in the post-Roman period was tied closely to the Christian milieu
and the activities of the Church, in which the Latin language and literacy went hand in
hand together. Though we have to reckon with possible Christian continuity from Roman
times in Brittonic southern Scotland, in connection with the labours of St Ninian at
Whithorn (and, less certainly, in southern Pictland), the principal path of Christian mis-
sionary activity led from fifth-century Britain to Ireland and thence to Gaelic Scotland in
the sixth, from there to Pictland, and thence southwards in the seventh to Northumbria.
The Latin spoken in Roman Britain showed some British features in its pronunciation,
for example, pater ‘father’ was pronounced pader, in line with an identical development in
native words. It was this ‘British’ version of Latin pronunciation that prevailed in the
Celtic Church. The native vernaculars also show through in more subtle ways in the idiom
and syntax of some writers of Insular Latin, though there were equally pressures towards
conformity in the teaching of correct Latin and the study of the Bible and the writings of
the Fathers. There was also continuity between North Britain and Ireland in the develop-
ment of handwriting, where the so-called Hiberno-Saxon hand emerged out of late antique
forms between the fifth and seventh centuries. Especially in the Gaelic world, the vernacu-
lar language was allowed to attain written form beside Latin, with profound effects for the
survival and development of vernacular literature. Since none of the pre-Norman king-
doms had extensive civil administrative systems, the Church was the most complex insti-
tution, and Latin enjoyed usage and prestige by association with it. Later on, when
Norman-style feudalism became the norm, the tradition of writing and reading Latin was
available to provide the principal medium for charters and other official communications.
The Scandinavian incursions into the British Isles were under way by ad 800. Those
aimed at Scotland emanated mostly from south-west Norway. Starting in the form of raids,
they were followed quite quickly by settlement – first in the Northern Isles, then in the
northern Scottish mainland and the Western Isles, and thereafter southwards via a mari-
time corridor that in time extended by way of the Southern Hebrides down to Galloway,
Ireland and the Isle of Man. This formed the basis for the extended Norwegian kingdom
of Man and the Isles.
60 William Gillies

Once these Norse raiders (the so-called ‘Vikings’) reached Dál Riata and
Northumberland, they were attacking literate societies, some of whose records of the time
survive. We therefore glimpse their incursions, from the viewpoint of their victims, in Irish
annals and Anglo-Saxon chronicles, which present them as ruthless murdering heathens.
In reality, of course, violence was also endemic in the societies they attacked. In some areas
(like Dublin and the Isle of Man) the Norse gradually made themselves an established part
of those societies.
The picture is more fragmentary for areas not well served by annals and chronicles,
which include northern and north-west Scotland. Old Norse literature, however, created
in Iceland from the eleventh century onwards, contains literary references, in poetic and
saga texts, to happenings in Scotland as seen from a Norse point of view. Despite scattered
archaeological evidence for a Pictish period in the Northern Isles and the north-west in
general, there is precious little documentary evidence for the pre-Norse linguistic situation
there; and it has been inferred that the Norse take-over in the Northern Isles was pretty
comprehensive. The density of Norse place-names in Lewis suggests that here too there
was a thoroughgoing displacement or acculturation of the pre-Norse population. But else-
where (as in the rest of the Hebrides, and on the western seaboard), the place-name evi-
dence speaks rather of settlement and intermarriage and mingling of cultures. This scenario
may be the origin of the Hebridean Gall-Goídil (‘Foreigner-Gaels’) who are referred to
(mostly as marauders) in some ninth- to eleventh-century historical sources. On the main-
land, Caithness shows almost the same density of early Norse names as Lewis, and place-
names like Dingwall (cf. Tynwald in the Isle of Man) commemorate the Norse institution
of the thing ‘assembly’.
Initially, the Norse language would have been unintelligible to speakers of any of the
Celtic language-groups they encountered in Scotland, though, if Norse and northern Old
English speakers came into contact (say, in Galloway), they might well have enjoyed a
measure of mutual comprehension, since these two Germanic languages had developed
in parallel ways from a shared late prehistoric starting point. The Norse presence is com-
memorated in Gaelic, especially in the vocabulary of the northern and maritime dialects
(such as trosg ‘cod’ and many other nautical and marine terms), and in the English of the
Northern Isles. It can also be diagnosed through the presence of such place-name ele-
ments as -shader and -bost (indicating settlement names), or -ness and -val (indicating
natural features).
While Norwegians were attacking and exploiting the western seaways, Scandinavians
from Denmark were attacking and conquering large parts of England. The importance to
Scotland of the Danish presence in England was twofold: first, the Danes destroyed the
military and political might of Northumbria; and second, they imparted a powerful
Scandinavian element into northern English as a whole, which in time became a vital
element in the make-up of Lowland Scots.
In some cases the fortunes of Scotland’s medieval languages may be seen to follow polit-
ical developments in a straightforward way, but there are still a few puzzles. Pictish (or
Cumbric?) seems to have given way to Gaelic almost completely in the heartlands of early
Dál Riata, which may argue lack of contact because of population displacement or conquest.
Pictish also yielded relatively quickly to Gaelic after the union of the kingdoms of the Picts
and Scots in the mid-ninth century. This collapse may reflect the fact that extensive bilin-
gualism was already the norm on account of longstanding Gaelic settlements in Pictland.
The Gaelic ‘imperialist’ phase continued in the tenth and eleventh centuries, building
on the Scottish kings’ power-base of the whole of Scotland north of the Forth and Clyde
 The Lion’s Tongues: Languages in Scotland to 1314 61

(with the exception of the northern strongholds of Norse). During this phase, we find evi-
dence for Gaelic settlement in southern Scotland both across the firth of Clyde into
Strathclyde, which was by now in terminal decline as a political force, and into Lothian
and the Borders, now that Northumbrian power had been broken by the foundation of the
Danish kingdom at York. It appears that Cumbric lasted longer in the Southern Uplands
than Pictish had done in the north-east. Perhaps the nature of Gaelic overlordship in the
eleventh century involved less intense settlement. But eventually it too disappeared,
leaving Gaelic and English (or Early Scots, as we need to call it by this time) to fight out
the last linguistic conflict.
The Norse settlement in the Northern Isles obliterated any pre-existing Celtic lan-
guage(s) in use there, and they continued to be thoroughly Norse speaking throughout the
early medieval period and beyond. Indeed, Norn survived in Shetland, essentially a
Norwegian dialect, until the eighteenth century. In the west, it seems that Norse–Gaelic
bilingualism was the norm, with Norse being gradually eroded as the power of the Norwegian
Crown became more remote and tenuous. This process would have been accelerated, where
it was not already complete, after the Treaty of Perth (1266). Galloway, like Man, may have
had co-existing or ‘mixed’ Gaelic–Norse populations from early times; here too, though,
Gaelic gradually gained the upper hand as the Norse political presence dwindled.
Gaelic place-names scattered over the great majority of southern Scotland (and even
into north-west England) attest to the presence of Gaelic speakers there during the ‘Gaelic
imperialist’ phase. These include the Bal- and Bel- names (such as Balerno) from Gaelic
baile ‘farmstead’ and the Garvalds (from Gaelic garbh-allt ‘rough burn’). Complex names
like Glenormiston (‘the [Gaelic] glen of [English] Orm’s (ferm)toun’) show the Gaelic set-
tlement succeeding the Anglian. At the same time, names like Gilmerton (‘the [English]
(ferm)toun of [Gaelic] Gille-Moire’) tell of a Gaelic superior holding land within a con-
tinuing anglophone community. The Gaelic presence in the south of Scotland, with the
exception of parts of Galloway and the south-west liable to continuing colonisation and
contact with Argyll, seems not to have been dense enough to oust English as the main lan-
guage of the people, even when the kings of Scotland made Edinburgh their principal
court. By the time when the royal court began to adopt Anglo-Norman ways (especially
under Malcolm Canmore and David I) in the twelfth century, a process of decline had set
in for the Gaelic language.
The imposition of feudalism as the most effective way of governing and administering
their now extended kingdom became an ideal of the kings of Scots from David I onwards,
if not before. It was effected by granting lands directly to Norman lords and tying them in
to an enhanced system of central administration; by bringing in continental church orders;
and by establishing royal burghs. As a result of the first and second of these measures
Norman French came to have a significant presence in Scotland: in the royal court and
chancery, in the castles of the new feudal lords, and in the upper echelons of the Church.
The burghs enhanced trading connections across the North Sea, and the arrival of groups
of merchants and tradesfolk in the new burghs, up the east coast from the Forth to the
Moray Firth, brought speakers of Dutch and other languages into contact with Scots speak-
ers, with a significant impact on the vocabulary of Scots. Continuing contact with
Scandinavia may have had a similar effect, though it is often difficult to determine whether
Scandinavian words in Scots were direct importations, or borrowings resulting from the
longstanding Norse element in the speech of Caithness, Orkney and Shetland. And the
same was true of Gaelic, whose interface with Scots was more extensive in time and space,
and whose contribution to Scots has generally been underestimated by scholars.
62 William Gillies

Scotland enjoyed considerable linguistic diversity in the early Middle Ages. By the time
of the Wars of Independence, this had been reduced to Gaelic and Scots, though with some
fresh complications at a marginal level. Geographically speaking, the northern half of the
country was basically Gaelic speaking with the exception of the east coast littoral strip
joining the royal burghs, and the Norse presence in the far north. The eastern and central
parts of southern Scotland had become Scots speaking, but, in the south-west, Galloway
and Kyle were still strongly Gaelic. The political divisions of the times cut across linguis-
tic divides, and the later dichotomy of ‘Highlands’ versus ‘Lowlands’ was not yet a fact,
though the conditions for it were largely in place.

Further reading

Crystal, D. (1995), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.
Jackson, K. H. (1953), Language and History in Early Britain, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Murison, D. (1974), ‘Linguistic Relationships in Medieval Scotland’, in G. W. S. Barrow
(ed.), The Scottish Tradition: Essays in Honour of Ronald Gordon Cant, Edinburgh:
Scottish Academic Press, pp. 71–83.
Price, G. (ed.) (1998), Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe, Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers Ltd.
Taylor, S. (ed.) (1998), The Uses of Place-Names, Edinburgh: Scottish Cultural Press.
Watson, W. J. (1926), The History of the Celtic Place-Names of Scotland, Edinburgh: William
Blackwood and Sons Ltd.
 6

The Poetry of the Court: Praise

Thomas Owen Clancy

At the core of the genre which dominates northern Britain’s earliest literature is a business
exchange. Urien’s court poet expects of him

Med o uualeu a da dieisseu

gan teyrn goreu haelaf rygigleu

(Mead from drinking-horns,/And no end of good things/

From the best of kings,/Most generous I’ve heard of.)

What the poet does to merit such generosity is perform the praise of his patron in mem-
orable, crisply wrought verse. The symbiotic relationship established by this exchange
could be described in words of constructed intimacy. The same poet’s signature coda runs:

Ac yny vallwyf i hen

ym dygyn agheu aghen
ny bydaf yn dirwen
na molwyfi vryen

(And until I die, old,/By death’s strict demand,/I shall not be joyful/Unless I praise Urien.)

To understand the world of early medieval Scotland and its literature, one must first con-
front the genre of praise poetry. This is so, not only because of its status in the courts of
power, but also because of its commonality across the linguistic and cultural borders of the
different peoples and regions which made up early medieval Scotland. Praise poetry, poetry
of the court, is present in all these cultures, even if it is very unevenly represented, from
the beginning of our period through the Middle Ages and beyond. Indeed, it is fair to say
that for Gaelic literature in particular an understanding of the roots and mechanisms of
praise poetry is necessary for any appreciation of the bulk of its canon, medieval or modern.
Unlike literature in Scots and English, where the modern period has withered the stock of
praise both in current composition and in critical appreciation, praise remains, for Gaelic,
central to the canon and to the most productive of the recent Gaelic poets, the so-called
bàird baile (discussed by Thomas A. McKean in Chapter 14 of volume three).
It is perhaps easiest to get a sense of the longevity of the professional composition of
praise for noble patrons by considering the roots of the traditions represented by the two
Celtic-language literatures from early medieval Scotland. The most common word for poet
in Welsh, bardd, and that in Gaelic bàrd derive from a common Celtic word found in some
64 Thomas Owen Clancy

earliest sources describing Celts, bardos. To ethnographers writing in Latin and Greek for
political masters in Rome, the bardos was part of the Celtic establishment, one of the pro-
fessional class defined by their mastery of law, verse, religious doctrine and tradition. But
also a poet – the bardos sang for his patron ‘sometimes an elegy, sometimes a satire’. Praise
of the patron could lead to bags of gold being thrown to the artist. The bard as ‘parasite’,
influential hanger-on, as well as craftsman of praise and invective, is ethnographised at the
very roots of the tradition.
What does not come over in such a functionalist account is the poet as artist. In early
medieval Ireland, and later in Wales, the poetic profession would become highly profes-
sionalised, the level of literary attainment strict and forbidding. We know from early Irish
legal tracts that, there, poets were graded by their level of attainment, and that the require-
ments for reaching the top of the profession were impressive. Gaelic verse produced by this
professional class, in the earlier as in the later period, is ornamentally complex, highly
stylised, often linguistically crabbed. The same could be said of the court poets of the Norse
world, the skalds who produced dróttkvaett (discussed by Judith Jesch in Chapter 8). It can
sometimes be difficult to believe in an audience sufficiently well attuned to the language
and allusion of poetry of this sort – but its elusiveness to the ordinary ear may well have
been part of its appeal, what separated the highest class of poet from the mere rhymester.
One stanza may serve to illustrate the richness of even the earlier Gaelic verse. A stanza,
preserved only in an Irish tract on metres, praises one Oengus, probably the Unust son of
Uurgust, king of the Picts, who ruled from 729 to 761.

Fó sén dia ngab Óengus Alpain,

Alpu thulchach trethantríathach;
tuc do chaithrib costud clárach
cossach lámach lethanscíathach.

(Good the day when Óengus took Alba,/hilly Alba, with its strong chiefs;/He brought battle
to towns, with boards,/with feet and hands, and with broad shields.)

This is an ambitious verse, with its four-syllable rhymes between lines b and d, but other-
wise its form is fairly common in Gaelic poetry, a syllabic metre comprising seven syllables
in lines a and c and eight in lines b and d. There is a concerted alliteration throughout –
easily appreciable within the individual lines (costud : clárach), but perhaps less obviously
serving as a linking device between each line (Alpain : Alpu; trethantriathach : tuc; clárach :
cossach). This linking also takes place in the final two lines, in the form of a binding rhyme
between clárach and lámach. Some of these features carry forward (depending on the metre)
into the metrically more stringent Classical Gaelic period, while some aspects (such as the
rhymes between individual lines) become even more impressive and difficult to sustain. All
of this allows us to appreciate that behind the general artistry lies a more intricate crafts-
manship – not for nothing have parallels frequently been drawn between verse of this sort
and the precious metalwork or manuscript interlace of the early medieval period.
It would be wrong, however, to draw no distinctions between the different linguistic
traditions in respect of court poetry and praise. We know little of the Welsh tradition before
the twelfth century (and still less of the context of the few plausibly northern poems from
that tradition). Nonetheless, judging from the earliest material, it is less highly regularised,
less strictly ornamented than the poetry from later periods, suggestive of a profession and
a literature still evolving – a plausible suggestion if some scholars are correct in thinking
 The Poetry of the Court: Praise 65

that Latin was still the language of status in Welsh courts into the seventh century. In the
Scandinavian world, for all the complexity of skaldic verse, its practitioners were not the
sort of literary guild we find in Wales and Ireland. In the period before the mid-twelfth
century, in the Gaelic world, the professional poet was the file, and this class seems to have
been highly exclusive, subject to a long period of training. There also seems to have been
a close connection at this period with the Church. There is considerable crossover in per-
sonnel and indeed in metrical form between the Church and the secular literary classes in
the Gaelic world in the early period, though whether we should view all poets as clerics or
clerically trained is more doubtful.
It is in the twelfth century – the period when we begin to acquire a clearer impression
of poetic activity in Scotland – that the poetic class changes in the Gaelic world, in both
Ireland and Scotland. Katharine Simms has suggested that that revolution is connected
not just to church reform and the consequent dispersal of native poetic arts from the
monasteries, but to the dominant voice of one particular family of poets, the Uí Dhálaigh
(see Chapter 9). A member of that family, Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh, was to live
much of his life in exile in Scotland, and father Gaelic Scotland’s most famed and long-
practising poetic family, the Clann Mhuirich, later court poets to the lords of the Isles and
still later to Clanranald. It is crucial to keep in mind, however, that the revolution in poetic
practice begun in Ireland in the twelfth century and brought to Scotland during the same
period was normatively Irish, linguistically and culturally. While this period sees much
more poetry we can attribute to Scottish poets, it is also true that linguistically and metric-
ally the poetry is impossible to locate in place and time for most of the later medieval
period, so conservative and regulated was it. That regulation happened through careful and
extensive training – and this took place in Ireland, as far as we can tell, for the higher class
of poet.
The poetry produced by this class, dán díreach or strict metre verse, is in its most precise
manifestations sharply studded with verbal ornament. In the original, it is a rare and
complex taste; this goes flat in translation, more often than not, partly because of the
stance of praise which dominates this verse, but also because of the use of, for instance,
compressed attributive adjectives like groigheach ‘possessed of herds of horses’. Here is an
attempt to render one stanza from a verse by the poet Giolla Brighde Albanach for an
Irish patron:

Bright hand, long-backed and loving,

with hard spears, stout their spearshafts,
amorous branch with rayed lashes,
winding, mounded hair in tresses.

Here, however, is the original:

Glac gheal bhairrleabhar bhádhach

na sleagh gcrainnreamhar gcruadhach,
géag shuirgheach dhá shúl gcraobhach,
cúl raonach druimneach dualach.

Problems for both translator and reader here go far beyond the difficulty of rendering the
compressed adjectives, and the impossibility of imitating the reflective rhyme between
each pair of lines (in lines c and d, for instance, note the interweave of rhyme between
66 Thomas Owen Clancy

shuirgheach and druimneach, between shúl and cúl and gcraobhach and raonach). The most
confusing aspect for the reader, perhaps, is the way in which poets describe the patron by
referring to him as a part of his body (here, glac ‘hand, half-open fist’), or as a natural object
(here, géag ‘branch, sapling’, which often stands for, and is often translated, ‘warrior, scion,
nobleman’). To appreciate and enjoy this poetry, whether in the original or translation,
one must adapt to these imagistic collages.
The context of court poetry, we have noted, varied from culture to culture, despite strik-
ing similarities. What is most consistent, however, is the poet–patron relationship, one
which was also imitated by religious poets, proclaiming their holy patrons, whether saints
or the divine as Gilbert Márkus explores in Chapter 10. The earliest developed
poet–patron relationship we can explore for northern Britain is that between Urien and
his court poet, ostensibly the poet Taliesin. Urien was the sixth-century king of Rheged,
a kingdom scholars continue to find difficult to locate precisely, though it may have been
centred on Cumbria, and perhaps extended into what is now Scotland (certainly the poetry
refers to regions, such as Ayrshire, Edinburgh and the plain around Falkirk, which are in
Scotland). There are other problems with the poetry to Urien – not only its contested con-
nection to Scotland, but also its earliness. It shares with the Gododdin some of the vexed
issues discussed by Jenny Rowland in Chapter 7 regarding transmission and authenticity,
which remain unresolved.
Despite all this, the twelve poems which, since the 1960s, scholars have tended to treat
as potentially early northern British products constitute something of a schoolbook or
primer of genres. In examining them, we are given a window on to the range of types of
poems at the command of court and professional poets in this early period as in the later.
In what follows, these poems are used as a framework for exploring the generic variations
within praise poetry of all linguistic varieties in early Scotland.
At its most basic, the poet–patron relationship demanded praise of the patron, of his
open-handed generosity, his ferocity in military pursuits (where appropriate), his lineage
and his eligibility to rule over a great territory. The poem ‘In Praise of Urien’ could be our
template here, with its invocation of Urien as [g]oruchel wledic ‘ruler supreme’, a[n]gor gwlat
‘land’s anchor’ and eurteyrn gogled ‘golden king of the north’. Perhaps the most impressive
poem of this sort from within the Gaelic tradition of this period is one written – we do not
know by whom – for Raghnall, long-reigning ruler of Man and the Isles (1187–1229). Here,
the patron is cast as a potential king of Ireland, though he is praised more for his victori-
ous ways aboard his raiding ship, the Black Swan, than anything else. Stanza-long portraits
of Raghnall striding the decks of his ship jostle with compliments paid to his ancestors, and
predictions of his triumphs and his generosity. More so than in the British poetry, physical
bearing is a feature, and even prowess in love – note the intricacy of the verse, a true gem
of the early Classical tradition:

Aithne ar do bharr ’cun bandáil

anald tar faithghi faindfheóir,
gluaisid cuirn do chúil chlannúir
mallshúil nguirm úir dá haindeóin [. . .]

Do rosc mar bhogha in barráid

ac tocht tar rogha in rinnfheóir,
cosmail bláth do chúil chomóir
ré snáth bronnóir úir d’inneóin.
 The Poetry of the Court: Praise 67

(Your head’s well known to women/from far across the soft-grassed lawn./The locks of your
fresh-tressed hair move/a soft blue eye against its will [. . .]

Your eye, like a curve of choice land/besting the pick of straight-tipped grass;/the bloom of
your long hair, like a strand/of new smelted gold from the anvil.)

This poetry can be on occasion encased in its own conventions, difficult to break through.
The poets could turn a neat metrical pirouette on a word for ‘hair’ in Gaelic; the transla-
tion fumbles to show the form.
Such praise for the living could be, perhaps, too ephemeral. Elegy, the mourning of the
dead, was perhaps a more lasting, memorable genre. Here, the basic forms of praise are
retained, but made retrospective, and through that retrospect the subject’s heirs, real or
supposed, could continue to invoke his presence in reiteration of the verse. It is for this
reason, perhaps, that elegy is the best-represented genre within the praise-poetry tradition.
The template from our Urien poems is the magnificent ‘Lament for Owein ab Urien’, with
its shimmering imagery: esgyll g[w]awr gwaywawr llifeit ‘dawn’s wing-tips his whetted spears’;
kyscit lloegyr llydan nifer/a leuuer yn eu llygeit ‘asleep is Lloegr’s broad war band/with light
upon their open eyes’. (The images are arresting, but not obvious. We hesitate before we
see that Owein’s spears are catching the first light of dawn, flecked by the sun like swal-
lows’ wings, or that the army’s open eyes face the light because they are dead.) But we also
have elegies or fragments of elegies for Norse kings and Pictish kings, among others.
Cultural nuances emerge from some of these examples – Mugrón, abbot of Iona 965–80,
composed, alongside his religious poetry, a lament on the death in battle of the Irish king
Congalach Cnogba, who was probably a patron of Iona at this time. More strikingly
perhaps, we have a poem on the death of the Pictish king Cinaed mac Ailpín (Kenneth
Mac Alpin) who died in 858, but it is composed in Gaelic.

Nad mair Cionaodh go lion sgor

fo déra gol i n-gach taigh;
áoinrí a logha fo nimh
go bruinne Rómha ní bhfail.

(That Cinaed with his hosts is no more/brings weeping to every home:/no king of his worth
is there/under heaven, to the bounds of Rome.)

Of course, the essential stance of the elegy could be transferred to more personal sub-
jects. Two fine Scottish examples are the twelfth- and thirteenth-century poet
Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh’s lament for his wife, and the later medieval lament of
his father for the poet Fearchar Ó Maoil Chiaráin. In both of these, the stately, unrelent-
ing precision of the dán díreach plays counterpoint to the unfettered and often random
expression of grief: formality and severe emotion in edgy partnership, as here, in
Muireadhach’s lament for Mael Mhedha:

Táinig an chlí as ar gcuing,

agus dí ráinig mar roinn:
corp idir dá aisil inn
ar dtocht don fhinn mhaisigh mhoill.
68 Thomas Owen Clancy

Leath mo throigheadh, leath mo thaobh,

a dreach mar an droighean bán,
níor dhísle neach dhí ná dhún,
leath mo shúl í, leath mo lámh.

Leath mo chuirp an choinneal naoi;

’s guirt riom do roinneadh, a Rí;
agá labhra is meirtneach mé –
dob é ceirtleath m’anma í.

(My body’s gone from my grip/and has fallen to her share;/my body’s splintered in two/since
she’s gone, soft, fine and fair.

One of my feet she was, one side – /like the whitethorn was her face – /our goods were never
‘hers’ and ‘mine’ – /one of my hands, one of my eyes.

Half my body, that young candle – /it’s harsh, what I’ve been dealt, Lord./I’m weary speaking
of it:/she was half my very soul.)

Some genres within the praise tradition, however, were very much part of the mechanics
of the court, with its warlike aristocracy. Battle poetry, for instance, uses the specifics of one
campaign to enlarge the patron’s reputation, and remind him of his generosity thereafter.
The Urien poems have several striking examples of these, ‘The Battle of Argoed Llwyfain’
being perhaps the most famous, with its heroic exchanges between Urien and his enemy.
Such battle poems could be proleptic as well, designed to egg on the patron to battle by
imagining the scene of his triumph. Of such a type, perhaps, is the poem by Artúr Dall
MacGurcaigh, exhorting his patron Eoin MacSuibhne (John MacSween) to sail back to
Knapdale from his Irish exile and reclaim Castle Sween. Donald Meek, the poem’s most
recent editor, has suggested this expedition never took place, but was a mere fleet of fancy,
designed to augment and flatter.
Battle poetry could overlap in places with the historical reportage of events. So too the
genre of the battle-list, in which the martial career of the patron is delineated. Here, too,
the Urien poems provide us with a template. Within our time-period, however, it is prob-
ably a Norse poem which is the most persuasive and fully realised example of what in Irish
would be called a caithreim. This is the eleventh-century poet Arnórr Thordarson’s Elegy
for Thorfinn the Mighty, Earl of Orkney, which inter alia envisages him as a triumphant
warrior, all over the North Sea region and beyond, to Ireland:

Nemi drótt, hvé sæ sótti

snarlyndr konungr jarla;
eigi raut við ægi
ofvægjan gram bægja.

(Let the host hear, how the bold/king of earls sought the sea;/the outweighing lord did
not/give way against ocean.)

At all times, however, we must be alive to the poet as a creator of fictions. The poet,
whilst perhaps often tied to one court, just as often remained itinerant, moving among the
 The Poetry of the Court: Praise 69

courts of the elite. The nature of praise poetry, however, could cause problems in this
regard. Pumping up one patron at the expense of his neighbouring lords could cause awk-
wardness when next in those neighbours’ courts. Within medieval Welsh tradition, poets
created a fictional ‘calling card’, a reconciliation poem called the dadolwch, to enable them
to get around these difficulties, and we have such a poem from the Urien corpus. Here the
poet apologises for ever having suggested Urien was old and past it – he sees now he is the
best of lords, better than all kings of the north. But it was not only in this way that poets
confronted directly in poems the relationship with the patron. A poem by Muireadhach
Albanach, ‘Guess who I am, o Murchadh’ (Tomhais cia mise, a Mhurchaidh) is something of
a calling card, drumming up business upon the poet’s return to Ireland from four years’ pil-
grimage in the war-torn Holy Land. In another poem, to a Scottish patron, Muireadhach
castigates him for failing to reward him as is his due – he has supplied Amhlaoibh of the
Lennox with a duan and now he sends him a laoidh, expecting to be properly remunerated
for this, and detailing his bill of sale. Another poem in a similar vein by an Irish poet for
the thirteenth-century ruler of the Isles Aonghas Mór likewise recalls his service to the
patron’s father, and his expectation that that man’s bill will be settled by his son. The son
does not go unrewarded, with a tour de force exposition by the poet of exactly why he
cannot come to Scotland to recite the poem himself: he is afraid of boats:

Dobadh olc meisi ar mhuir ngáibhthigh

do ghabháil ráimhe, a rosg gorm
bím ar abhainn chiúin ar creathaibh,
mar ghabhuim sdiúir eathair orm.

Gá córughadh budh coir orum

ní fhedar ré ttocht tar tuinn:
ní fheadar an budh fhearr suidhe,
eagal leam luighi san luing.

(I’d be bad on the savage sea/at taking an oar, blue-eyed one:/on a peaceful river, I
quiver/taking the rudder of a boat.

The right way to arrange myself/I don’t know, crossing the waves;/I don’t know if sitting’s
better,/I’m afraid to lie in the ship.)

In most of these poems reminding the patron of what he owes, there is more than the
whiff of threat. Muireadhach urges Amhlaoibh to remember the good name of his ances-
tors – not just as a sort of pietas, but because their reputation is threatened while Amhlaoibh
continues his stinginess. Satire, the Gaelic poet’s dread recourse, is always waiting to come
to the boil. Unsurprisingly, few patrons were keen to preserve the satires poets cast upon
them – though we have some fine satires from later in the Middle Ages. Perhaps the most
striking note of complaint from the earlier period is a stray quatrain lamenting the actions
of the earl David, the future king David I, against his brother Alexander in 1113. This
stinging verse manages to express not just the anxieties of a political class, but the fears of
interruption to the fruitful state of the poetic class as well:

Olc a n[d]earna mac Mael Colaim,

ar n-aimleas re hAlaxandair;
70 Thomas Owen Clancy

da-ní le gach mac rígh romhainn

foghail ar farasAlbain.

(It’s bad, what Mael Colaim’s son has done,/dividing us from Alexander;/he causes, like each
king’s son before,/the plunder of stable Alba.)

This quatrain, preserved only in an Irish tract on metrical faults, is a reminder of how
fragmentary our record is of the court and praise poetry of medieval Scotland. It also
reminds us that we presume linguistic exclusivity of the various courts at our peril. David
I may have been raised largely in England, but he still, it seems, could be expected to
respond to Gaelic verse. Much later kings, like James I or James VI, also seem to have
attracted the attentions of Gaelic poets of varying sorts. Court poetry, like court music,
could in some cases thrive on its cosmopolitan air; praise poetry need not always be fully
understood to be rewarded.
The generic survey outlined here has been pieced together from very different time
periods and traditions. For no time or place before 1314 do we have anything like a com-
plete picture of court poets and their activities and products. We must, however, envisage
such poetry as being performed in most of the highest lordly halls, and patronised by the
highest members of the aristocracy. We can with some confidence point to verse of this sort
being composed for the British rulers of Dumbarton – though this confidence rests, as Jenny
Rowland mentions (see Chapter 7), on one stray stanza interpolated in the Gododdin. Fitful
verse on Pictish kings in Gaelic may be suggestive that in those courts Gaelic was a lan-
guage of prestige long before the ‘union’ of Picts and Gaels is meant to have taken place.
The idea that a status language was the language of choice for poets in the halls of power,
and not their own vernaculars, is replicated in the Classical period, when a normative
poetic register based on Irish norms prevailed in Scottish courts. In both cases, we are led
to ask questions of the purpose and impact of such verse on its audiences. Were Pictish
kings content to hear Gaelic verse as a form of elite exoticism, or did they expect to under-
stand it also? Parodic texts from twelfth- or thirteenth-century Ireland suggest that even
there, the arcane diction of the highest class of poets could be vexing for patrons. Poets
could, in certain modes, be highly obscure, and this is true also of the skaldic verse prac-
tised in the courts of the earls of Orkney.
Yet, that example reminds of the possibility that, difficult as the poetry is for us, obscure
in its references, rarefied in syntax and vocabulary, it could have been accessible to noble-
men for composition as well as reception. That Rögnvaldr Kali, Earl of Orkney (ruled
c. 1135–c. 1158) is one of the finest practitioners of skaldic verse from this period allows
us to see room for patrons themselves at the literary feast. Bishop Bjarni (bishop
1188–1223), reciting his self-mocking epic to an audience he presumes is bored, allows us
in on a literary circle capable of mocking its own conventions.
Both these phenomena are less visible in the tradition best evidenced for Scotland
during our period – that of Gaelic – though Ireland too knows some poets who were also
rulers, and churchmen composing essentially secular praise poetry are well known. But it
is in the Gaelic world that one senses most potently a literary class prickly about its priv-
ileges and highly exclusive in its sense of who could and who could not practise poetry. It is
only after our period, in the pages of The Book of the Dean of Lismore, that we get hints both
that aristocratic practice of strict metre poetry was possible (beyond the stray individual),
and indeed, that mockery and subversion of the poetic norms were also possible. It is only
at that stage, too, that we have any sense of the presence of women as poets in Gaelic
 The Poetry of the Court: Praise 71

tradition. When we do, in, for instance, the fifteenth-century elegy for Niall mac Néill of
Gigha, composed by his widow Aithbhreac nighean Corcadail, we begin to wonder how
firmly shut the door had been in earlier periods to the practice of poetry by the non-
professional.
In the end, though, we must still confront the fact that for the modern audience and the
modern scholar, praise poetry is some of the most foreign territory of the literature of
Scotland’s past. This is so not just because in the period before 1300 it existed in so many
languages, metrical conventions and literary traditions. It is fundamentally the stance of
the poetry, unironic yet clearly overstated, conventional and allusive, optimistic and
directed, rather than problematised and internal, which forms the barrier. Walt Whitman
suggested in the preface of Leaves of Grass, ‘The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves
and horrify despots.’ Our poets’ livelihood and art depended on cheering up despots. There
is little of the much vaunted ‘democratic intellect’ or demotic spirit here. And yet, our
demotic poets, too, depended on flattering patrons, whether in their most bathetic verses
or in their effusive dedications. We can the more easily edit out this strand of poetry after
the medieval period, but, until the most modern age, literary flourishing relied on the gen-
erosity of the rich, and in the earlier Middle Ages, at least, that in turn depended on the
poets’ praise.

Further reading

Bergin, Osborn (1970), Irish Bardic Poetry, ed. D. Greene and F. Kelly, Dublin: Dublin
Institute for Advanced Studies.
Clancy, T. O. (1998), The Triumph Tree: Scotland’s Earliest Poetry, AD 550–1350, Edinburgh:
Canongate.
Gillies, W. (1988), ‘Gaelic: the Classical Tradition’, in R. D. S. Jack (ed.), The History of
Scottish Literature, Vol. 1: Origins to 1660, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press,
pp. 245–62.
Whaley, Diana (1998), The Poetry of Arnórr Jarlaskáld: An Edition and Study, London:
Brepols.
 7

Aneirin, the Gododdin

Jenny Rowland

The Gododdin is a medieval Welsh poem whose inclusion in this volume immediately raises
questions that take us to the heart of some of the controversy concerning this work. There
is no doubt of its relevance to Scottish literature and history if the poem was composed by
the northern British poet, Aneirin, and the gist of his work preserved with reworking in
Welsh. Scholars are, however, far from in agreement on the authorship and transmission
of the text. The poem derives its medieval title from the kingdom of Gododdin, which in
the early Middle Ages was a British kingdom with a language similar to Old Welsh. Its
centre was at Edinburgh, and the tribe had occupied parts of what is now south-eastern
Scotland and north-eastern England since the pre-Roman period. The poem consists of
laments for members of the war band of one of the kings of Gododdin, Mynyddog
Mwynfawr (‘Mynyddog the Wealthy’), sometime before the kingdom was conquered by
Northumbria in the seventh century. The sole manuscript, from the thirteenth century,
attributes the poem to Aneirin. A section concerning the old northern British kingdoms
in the Historia Brittonum, written in Wales in the early ninth century, names Aneirin with
four others as famous in British poetry in the latter half of the sixth century.
The manuscript of the Gododdin, however, is Welsh and the language of the poem the
standard Middle Welsh of the bardic poets, with some tantalising archaisms. However,
medieval Welsh scribes modernised the works they copied and the Gododdin was one of the
classics which Welsh poets memorised and performed in the bardic contests which tested
their learning. A rubric in the manuscript of the poem says that just as warriors should not
go into battle without weapons, so poets should not go into bardic contests without the
Gododdin. The distance of the kingdom of Gododdin from Wales and the long gap between
the putative date of composition and the surviving manuscript copy leaves many questions
as to how the text was transmitted and the relative role of manuscript copying and oral
preservation. The sole manuscript contains evidence for two variant versions, called A
and B, with B showing signs of having been copied directly from an Old Welsh manuscript.
The poets would have had reasons to embellish a line or modify unintelligible archaisms, as
well as to add to the loosely structured composition. Some verses are generally agreed to be
of later date, with both deliberate and accidental interpolations added in transmission. The
primary question about authenticity of the Gododdin is whether the medieval Welsh poem
could or does preserve anything of a putative original composition; even the most commit-
ted supporters of the poem would not argue that it preserves more than a core or outline of
what Aneirin composed. Some critics would go further, arguing that the poem was composed
and added to in Wales at a much later date, perhaps drawing on some northern traditions.
The controversy over the dating and authenticity of the Gododdin has been particularly
beneficial in stimulating studies of the development of the Welsh language and its early
 Aneirin, the Gododdin 73

orthography. It is now generally agreed that the mutually intelligible British dialects in the
sixth century had evolved sufficiently from the parent Brythonic for a North British com-
position to be preserved in Welsh. Some archaisms of language and orthography suggest
greater antiquity for the text than other early Welsh poetry, although there are linguistic
elements undoubtedly later than the supposed date of composition. Few corroborative his-
torical documents exist for the period, but there are no glaring historical anachronisms.
The depiction of the warrior society, its material details and social values, appears con-
vincing. Reasons put forward for later composition in Wales based on traditions of the Old
North are not compelling given the subject matter, but the dynasty of the kingdom of
Gwynedd in north Wales claimed descent from a Gododdin lord and it is not impossible
that the poem took shape there.
Although the Gododdin has about 1,500 lines in the classic edition of Ifor Williams, and
has been described as an epic, the form is unique in Welsh: a collection of loosely linked
lyric elegies to individuals, groups of heroes, or the entire war band of Gododdin, who
fought a battle at Catraeth, modern Catterick in Yorkshire. Each stanza or awdl is of irregu-
lar length and has one or more end-rhymes in blocks, as well as additional optional orna-
ments such as internal rhyme, alliteration and assonance. Groups of stanzas are linked in
some cases by repetition of opening verbal formulae, such as the best-known series, ‘Gwyr
a aeth gatraeth [. . .]’ (‘Men went to Catraeth [. . .]’). The original order of the verses is
uncertain, and beyond reconstruction. Some verses are clearly variants of verses elsewhere
in the manuscript. In addition, the text of the Gododdin is followed by four poems called
‘Gwarchanau’, which contain material both relevant to the main text and unrelated. Some
obvious interpolations have been incorporated, and others may not be so obvious.
There is little or no narrative in such elegies, making full reconstruction of the back-
ground events impossible. Much is made of their king’s feasting of the war band at
Edinburgh for the conventional period of a year in preparation for the expedition, but this
may owe more to the unifying heroic themes of the poem than an actual gathering of a
picked army for a specific purpose. Catterick would have been within the range of mounted
warriors such as are described in the poem, and it is generally supposed that Mynyddog was
intending to retake British lands recently lost to the Saxons of Bernicia and Deira. The
war band is said to number a conventional 300, large for an army of the period, but small
for conquest and occupation. With deadly enemies closer to hand, such an attempt at
reconquest appears unlikely. Possibly the battle was of no great strategic import, even a
raid, gaining its fame from the poetic response, like ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’,
which transformed a military disaster into personal triumphs of heroism. The war band
seems to have suffered uncommonly high loss of life, which in transmission became a mas-
sacre with only a single or three survivors. The value to historians clearly depends on the
authenticity of the text or reliability of traditions, but interpretation remains too doubtful
for the Gododdin to shed much light on political events as opposed to details of material
and cultural life.
That being said, the heroic ideal depicted in the poem is very much a literary construct
which offers poetic consolation to the survivors, and to later Welshmen who identified with
the earlier conflict against Saxon enemies. This ranges from the most basic ‘a chet lledessynt
wy lladassan’ (‘although they were killed they killed’), to rejoicing in the personal glory of
the dead warriors whose deeds lived up to their promises, and in the lasting fame which their
heroism has bought them through the medium of poetic praise. The extreme stance of the
heroic code has been used to defend the early date of composition, but would seem to have
more to do with the genre. Later medieval Welsh praise poetry depicts a similar unyielding
74 Jenny Rowland

heroism, which in this case can be better tested against actual behaviour as found in his-
torical sources. Welsh poets performed a public, social function of upholding agreed social
values; famously, a line from the Gododdin itself states ‘beird byt barnant wyr o gallon’ (‘the
poets of the world judge men of courage’). If a warrior or leader seriously failed the judge-
ment of the poets, they had the ability to declaim a satire, which was believed to have the
power to maim or even kill. There are, therefore, severe limits to the amount of criticism
praise poetry admits. There must have been a tactical failure behind the loss of life at
Catraeth, but it is not the place of a praise poem to air it. The possibility of individual failure
to measure up to the heroic code can only be hinted at by implication such as ‘ny gilywyt’
(‘there was no retreating’). This black and white picture also does not include even
undoubted tactical moves such as yielding ground or treating with the enemy which can be
glimpsed in the negative statements of what the heroes did not do, or in the criticised
behaviour of the enemy. No doubt honour and fame were important motivations in this
warrior society, but not to the absolute degree presented in bardic Praise poetry.
While it is impossible to restore structure to the jumbled stanzas as they have been
handed down, there are various unifying themes, sometimes handled in a highly individual
fashion, which support the idea of a core composition by Aneirin. One of the most promi-
nent of these is the role of ‘talu medd’ (‘paying for mead’) which is linked to several key
heroic concepts. The warrior, by accepting his leader’s mead in the feast, agrees to fight
faithfully for him ‘Disgynsit en trwm yg kesseuin/gwerth med yg kynted’ (‘He attacked in
battle in the front rank/ in return for mead in the hall’). The mead feast, too, is the occa-
sion for making heroic vows or boasts: promises which go beyond the tacit contract with
the leader and which help to bind the warrior more fully with his fellows. Honour depends
on fulfilling these vows: ‘e amot a vu not a gatwyt/gwell a wnaeth e aruaeth ny gilywyt’ (‘His
intention was a point which was kept. He did better than his vow – there was no retreat-
ing’). These stated vows are not as extreme as promising to fight to the death. In many
cases, however, as in the fight at Catraeth, the promised warfare leads to the hero’s death
and he pays for his mead with his life: ‘gwerth eu gwled o ved vu eu heneit’ (‘The price of
their feast of mead was their lives’); ‘med evynt melyn melys maglawr’ (‘They drank sweet,
yellow, ensnaring mead’). This leads to the surprising, but effective, poetic construct of
sweet mead being a bitter drink – it carries the bitterness of death, both for the hero and
those who survive him:

ket yvem ved gloyw wrth leu babir

ket vei da e vlas y gas bu hir.

(Though we drank bright mead by the light of rush torches – /Although its taste was good,
its bitterness was long-lasting.)

glasved eu hancwyn a gwenwyn vu.

(Their feast was pale mead – and it was bitter/poison).

The light, warmth and camaraderie of the feast are also effectively juxtaposed with the
silence of death, with the poet leaping from the feast to its deadly aftermath: ‘a gwedy elwch
tawelwch vu’ (‘And after carousal, there was silence’).
A major heroic motivation for the warriors is fame. On the most basic level, there are
numerous references to the desire of men to do deeds which will be recounted: ‘mab
 Aneirin, the Gododdin 75

syvn [. . .] a werthws e eneit er wyneb grybwylleit’ (‘The son of Syfno [. . .] gave his life for
the sake of honourable mention’). In some cases, this renown is among the other members
of the war band, or among the people of Gododdin, but primarily it is the lasting and wide-
spread fame of the poets which is seen as the ultimate goal. The unified culture of the
British-speaking peoples meant that in theory the poets could promise ‘clot heb or heb
eithaf’ (‘fame without border or limit’), or that a hero would be remembered ‘tra vo
kerdawr’ (‘as long as there are poets’). The poet, too, has a responsibility to the warriors
who fulfilled their heroic vows, and is seen as witness, judge and recorder of their deeds:
‘Cam ei adaw heb gof camb ehelaeth’ (‘It would be wrong to leave the one of the exten-
sive feats unremembered’); ‘Gwyr a aeth gatraeth [. . .] oed cam nas kymhwyllwn’
(‘Warriors went to Catraeth [. . .] it would be wrong were I not to mention them’).
The poet, then, is part of the camaraderie of the war band, and a mediator between it
and the court and wider world. The heroic choice of a short life with long fame is supported,
but there is genuine sorrow as well. Lines such as ‘o ancwyn mynydauc handit tristlavn vy
mryt; rwy e ry golleis y om gwir garant’ (‘Because of the host of Mynyddog I am sorrowful;
I have lost too many of my true kinsmen’) indicate that the personal glory is not lightly
purchased. The youth of many of the fallen is alluded to, and their failure to achieve the
milestones of adulthood such as marriage: ‘Ny mennws gwarawl gwadawl chwegrwn’
(‘Gwrawl did not desire the wedding payment of a father-in-law’). This key concept is
expressed succinctly: ‘dygymyrrws eu hoet eu hanyanawr’ (‘Their natures shortened their
lives’). The stanzas to individuals often have what appear to be telling details of personal
history and character: one could grasp a wolf mane bare-handed; another was ferocious in
battle, but speechless in the presence of a girl. Play is made on the meaning of their names,
and the name of the hero is often delayed until the end. Savagery on the battlefield is
applauded, but matched with fine manners in court. There are some fairly nominal refer-
ences to Christianity which could be additions, but which would seem to fit with the
society, mingling heroic virtues with Christian ones. Giving gold to poets is as virtuous as
giving gold to the altar; a warrior deserves heaven for not fleeing; the warriors did penance
before battle, but still did not escape death.
The interpolations and additions have their own interest. A single stanza incorporated
into both versions of the Gododdin in the manuscript refers to a battle at Strathcarron
between king Domnall Brecc of Dál Riata and the forces of Strathclyde, noted in the Irish
Annals of Ulster for 642. It is possibly the only surviving literature from the kingdom of
Strathclyde, a British kingdom that preserved its independence until the eleventh century.
The stanza gives an exultant view of the battle from the Strathclyde side in a verse style
similar to that of the Gododdin. The placement of the Strathcarron verse suggests that
Strathclyde may have been important in transmission of the Gododdin. The enigmatic
‘Reciter’s prologue’, which gives a picture of a poet about to perform the poem in the rush-
lit hall, and ascribes it to Aneirin after his death, has also raised speculation of paths of
transmission via Strathclyde.
Near the end of the A-text is a surprising interpolation, ‘Dinogat’s Cloak’, an early art-
lullaby or nursery rhyme, in which a mother and eight slaves sing the praises of his father’s
hunting skills to a little boy, Dinogat, who wears a marten skin cloak. Other verses hint at
the development of a saga about Aneirin as suggested in later traditions in Wales. The four
‘Gwarchanau’ appended to the Gododdin were obviously highly valued in the Middle Ages,
although their relevance to the main text is uncertain. The most difficult and obscure one
is ascribed to Taliesin, named in the Historia Brittonum as a contemporary of Aneirin, but
who developed into a legendary arch-poet in Wales. Two of the ‘Gwarchanau’ celebrate
76 Jenny Rowland

the supposed participation of warriors from north Wales at Catraeth, and the second con-
sists of gnomic and proverbial statements, a type of literature ascribed to Aneirin in the
later Middle Ages.
The Gododdin is also famous for containing what may be the earliest mention of Arthur,
as well as an unrelated reference to Myrddin, the Welsh prototype of Merlin. The
Gododdin warrior Gwawrddur is said to have fed ravens (that is, provided carrion by
slaying the enemy), ‘ceni bei ef arthur’ (‘although he was not Arthur’). The import of this
reference to Arthur depends both on the reliability of the origin and date of the poem, and
whether or not the individual line or stanza is an addition. If genuine, it could support other
indications of the renown in the north of Britain and Scotland in the sixth and seventh
centuries of a presumably historical figure called Arthur. However, as O. J. Padel has
pointed out, the comparison in which the hero praised is inferior to the paragon of the past
is atypical of Welsh poetry, and may indicate Arthur was a legendary and supernatural hero
that no mortal could match. Elsewhere another warrior is said to have defended the pure
poetry of Myrddin. This is almost certainly a later addition, showing the evolution of the
figure of Myrddin from a Strathclyde prophet and wildman to one of the early Welsh poets
compared to Taliesin and Aneirin himself.
While Aneirin never achieved the same bardic fame as Taliesin and Myrddin, there is
evidence for the influence of the Gododdin apart from the rubric in the manuscript telling
of its worth in bardic contest. Numerous echoes are found in medieval Welsh bardic verse,
and one entire poem, ‘Hirlas Owain’, is based on the Gododdin, comparing the deeds and
feasting of medieval Welsh warriors to those of the past. It is clear, however, that much of
the text was obscure even to the bardic poets. Modern scholarship began with the Scottish
historian William Skene, who recognised that many medieval Welsh poems were poten-
tially valuable documents for the early history of Scotland, and oversaw the publication of
the text and a none too reliable translation in The Four Ancient Books of Wales in 1868.
Real understanding of the text came with Ifor Williams’s edition in 1938 and, despite
remaining obscurities, recent editions and English translations have made the text acces-
sible to a wide audience. While the focus on authenticity has been unavoidable, and is
unlikely ever to be fully resolved, the worth of the Gododdin does not depend solely on its
putative antiquity. With its savage delight in warfare, stress on comradeship and honour,
and true elegiac mood, the Gododdin provides an insight into the past, but also into lasting
human values and emotions.

Further reading

Clancy, T. O. (1998), The Triumph Tree: Scotland’s Earliest Poetry, AD 550–1350, Edinburgh:
Canongate Books.
Jackson, K. (1969), The Gododdin: The Oldest Scottish Poem, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Jarman, A. O. H. (1988), Aneirin: Y Gododdin: Britain’s Oldest Heroic Poem, Llandysul,
Gomer Press.
Koch, J. T. (1997), The Gododdin of Aneirin: Text and Context from Dark-Age Britain,
Cardiff, University of Wales Press.
Padel, O. J. (2000), Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature, Cardiff, University of Wales Press.
Williams, I. (1938), Canu Aneirin, Cardiff, University of Wales Press.
 8

Norse Literature in the Orkney

Earldom
Judith Jesch

The red sandstone bulk of the Romanesque cathedral that dominates the centre of Kirkwall
stands as a lasting symbol of the Golden Age of Norse literature in Orkney. Dedicated to
St Magnús, the Earl of Orkney whose martyrdom is remembered in both saint’s life and
saga, built by his nephew Rögnvaldr, earl, poet and crusader, and seat of Bjarni
Kolbeinsson, poet and bishop, the building is closely associated with the main actors in
Orcadian politics and culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The construction of
the cathedral (begun in 1137 and still being built throughout the following century) spans
this fruitful period of literary activity.
The court poets (or ‘skalds’) of eleventh-century Orkney, like Arnórr Jarlaskáld ‘the
poet of earls’, were Icelanders who deployed their encomiastic talents in the service of
Orcadian rulers, as they did elsewhere in the Viking world, having made this profes-
sion an Icelandic speciality. Their genre was known as dróttkvætt (‘composed in court
metre’) and fulfilled the public functions of praise and the recording of important events.
Even in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the evidence for Orcadian literature sur-
vives mainly in Icelandic manuscripts. Connections were close, and some medieval
Icelanders were greatly interested in preserving and recording texts with Orcadian con-
nections. Similarly, much of the evidence for the literary culture of twelfth- and
thirteenth-century Norway has to be reconstructed from Icelandic sources. So, despite
the undoubted Icelandic bias in the records, it is fruitless to try to assign this common
Icelandic–Norwegian–Orcadian literature to any one nationality. Earl Rögnvaldr Kali
Kolsson (ruled c. 1135–c. 1158) was born in Norway of a Norwegian father and an
Orcadian mother, associated extensively with Icelanders, and had a political power base
in Shetland. On his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, which took him via England and the
continent, and which was so productive of poetry, he was accompanied by Icelanders,
Norwegians and Orcadians, several of them also poets. The father of Bishop Bjarni
Kolbeinsson (bishop 1188–1223) was an Orcadian of Norwegian origin and, like
Rögnvaldr, Bjarni was related to the earls of Orkney on his mother’s side. He spent much
of his career in Norway, and he was well known in Iceland. The literary influences on this
Orcadian elite were as wide-ranging as their careers. Like the cathedral masons working
local sandstone into new fashions, Rögnvaldr and Bjarni combined elements from trad-
itional Norse-Icelandic poetry with medieval love lyrics, Scandinavian history and
European learning to introduce new poetic forms.
The physical contexts for this cultural activity are still visible. In Kirkwall, the ruins of
the Bishop’s Palace stand beside the Cathedral. The remains of a fortified house built by
78 Judith Jesch

Bjarni’s father, Kolbeinn, with a medieval Church nearby, can still be seen on his native
island of Wyre. This type of high-status site, pairing a hall or castle with a church, can be
found in several other places in Orkney, demonstrating a symbiosis of secular and religious
power that fed literature as well as architecture. Thus, large halls such as that at Orphir,
called skáli in Old Norse (a term which survives in the common farm-name Skaill), were
used for feasting and entertainment, providing occasions for political debate, storytelling
and the declamation of poetry.
The inhabitants of these halls and castles appear as characters, both major and minor,
in Orkneyinga saga. Written in Iceland around 1200, with a chequered textual history and
problematic preservation, this saga is difficult to characterise generically and appears
to have been rather unevenly constructed from a wide variety of source materials. Its
early chapters cannot be taken as a reliable history of the beginnings of the Orkney
Earldom, but its account of twelfth- and thirteenth-century events seems reliable and
indebted to both the testimony of Orcadian informants and a close knowledge of the
geography of northern Scotland. The suggestion that the saga was actually written by
Bjarni Kolbeinsson is untenable. Nevertheless, some of its material clearly derives from
Orcadian narratives of recent events, narratives that may have been oral, but are so
closely structured and so detailed as to suggest that they also went through a written,
almost annalistic, stage, before being incorporated into the saga. Moreover, the sharply
sceptical narrative stance of much of the latter part of the saga suggests a context of dis-
cussion and debate about recent events that can plausibly be located in this Orcadian
phase. The saga is also important in being the main surviving source for the poetry of Earl
Rögnvaldr and his associates, although here the Icelandic contribution is stronger, as
most of those associates were Icelanders and the cultivation of poetic traditions is best
documented there.
Other evidence for a learned and literary milieu in twelfth-century Orkney comes in the
extraordinary collection of runic graffiti inside the prehistoric chambered cairn at
Maeshowe. Again, the perpetrators seem to have been Icelanders and Norwegians as well
as Orcadians, and several references in the inscriptions to Jórsalamenn ‘Jerusalem-farers,
pilgrims’ indicate those who followed Rögnvaldr to the Holy Land and therefore a prob-
able dating to the 1150s. Although some of the graffiti are no better than those found in
the average toilet, they also reveal a sophisticated knowledge and use of various forms of
runes, and several inscriptions allude to the literature, lore and legends of Iceland and the
remoter Scandinavian past. While hardly literary texts in themselves, the Maeshowe
inscriptions do indicate the broader culture in which the poetry was produced.
Orkneyinga saga preserves an account of the martyrdom of St Magnús in 1117 which
differs in some respects from two Icelandic hagiographic texts, all three deriving from a lost
Latin Vita written by a ‘Master Robert’, possibly an Englishman, but in any case unlikely
to be an Orcadian. There is not much that is specifically Orcadian about these texts in the
international genre of hagiography and they contain little local detail. Like the Vita,
various liturgical texts, also in Latin, were intended to promote the cult of the saint for an
international market. Orkneyinga saga also makes reference, without quoting, to a poem or
poems about Magnús and his successful rival, Hákon Pálsson. No such poetry survives, but
it may have been a vernacular equivalent to the hagiographic texts, like the skaldic verse
about the Norwegian king St Óláfr (d. 1030) that flourished alongside hagiographic nar-
ratives about him. If this lost poetry on Magnús was in this native tradition, it would fill
the chronological gap between Orkney’s eleventh-century court poetry and the literary
innovations of Rögnvaldr later in the twelfth.
 Norse Literature in the Orkney Earldom 79

The best introduction to Earl Rögnvaldr Kali Kolsson is one of his own verses:

Tafl em ek örr at efla,

íþróttir kannk níu,
týnik trauðla rúnum,
tíð er mér bók ok smíðir.
Skríða kannk á skíðum,
skýtk ok rœ’k, svát nýtir,
hvárt tveggja kannk hyggja
harpslátt ok bragþáttu.

(I am quick at playing chess, I have nine skills, I hardly forget runes, I’m often at either a
book or craftsmanship. I am able to glide on skis, I shoot and row so it makes a difference,
I understand both the playing of the harp and poetry.)

Although boasting is not new in Old Norse literature, it usually occurs in highly specific
contexts, and this general presentation of the poet is innovative in its focus on the lyric
self. Moreover, the accomplishments listed by Rögnvaldr are very much those of a
twelfth-century gentleman, rather than one of his Viking ancestors, who would have
boasted of how many battles he had won or warriors he had killed. The reference to books
as well as runes shows that Rögnvaldr had an interest in different kinds of literacy, and
has led some to suggest that he was in fact responsible for the initial preservation of
his own poetry in manuscript form. This would make him an innovator in applying the
new technology of writing in books to the recording of vernacular poetry: the earliest
writing of prose in a Scandinavian vernacular cannot have been much before 1100, and
there is otherwise little evidence for the recording of poetry in manuscripts before
about 1200.
In any case, Rögnvaldr’s poetry marked a new departure for the old form of dróttkvætt.
He kept the highly structured eight-line stanza, but abandoned the long form of the praise
poem in which many such stanzas were strung together. Although there was a tradition
before him of individual stanzas (lausavísur) commenting on events as they happened,
or just after they had happened, Rögnvaldr’s verses are remarkable both for their
number (thirty-eight such stanzas attributed to him survive) and their frequent light-
heartedness and wit. He jokes about the endless mud of Grimsby, about Orcadian clerics
who look like women, about the chattering teeth of a serving-maid in Shetland, about a
friend who falls over in Byzantium while drunk. He makes good use of obscenity and double
entendre, as well as more traditional word play, but also shows a serious side in a
pious stanza declaimed as he approaches Jerusalem, and a sorrowful stanza at his wife’s
sickbed.
Most remarkable of Rögnvaldr’s stanzas are those associated with a visit to the court of
the Viscountess Ermengarde of Narbonne, en route to the Holy Land. Verses by both
Rögnvaldr and some of his followers show them assimilating courtly love motifs to trad-
itional Norse diction. Their frank, physical admiration for a high-ranking and unattain-
able lady, who is presented as having sent them on a knightly quest to the Holy Land, and
their sorrow and grief when absent from her are spiced with imagery and diction drawn
from pagan Norse mythology. Ermengarde is Bíl (a moon-goddess), Skögull (a valkyrie),
and Hlín (a protective goddess). In best twelfth-century fashion, her forehead is fair and
her hair is like silk, but Rögnvaldr also associates her golden tresses with an old story of
80 Judith Jesch

a magic hand-quern that grinds gold for the legendary king Fróði (which explains why the
kenning ‘Fróði’s meal’ means ‘gold’):

Víst ’r at frá berr flestu

Fróða meldrs at góðu
vel skúfaðra vífa
vöxtr þinn, konan svinna.
Skorð lætr hár á herðar
haukvallar sér falla,
átgjörnum rauðk erni
ilka, gult sem silki.

(It is true, wise lady, that your (hair)growth surpasses that of most Fróði’s-meal-haired
women. The prop of the hawk-field (woman) has hair falling on her shoulders which is
yellow like silk; I redden the claws of the greedy eagle.)

In the myth, the quern will subsequently only grind salt for the sea and, in one version, it
does so from the bottom of the Pentland Firth. In alluding to this local myth, Rögnvaldr
manages not only to say that Ermengarde’s hair is like gold, but to compare her to north-
ern women he has known.
Orkneyinga saga explains that Earl Rögnvaldr collaborated with an Icelander called Hallr

órarinsson on a long poem designed to illustrate different metrical forms. This poem was
called Háttalykill (‘Key of Metres’) and originally had five stanzas in each metre. The saga-
writer admits that this was thought too long and notes that ‘now there are only two verses
in each metre’. A badly mangled text of this poem, or at least eighty-two stanzas of it (illus-
trating forty-one metres), survives. Although not very exciting as a poem, Háttalykill is sig-
nificant in three respects. First, it is a systematic treatment of Norse metrics, adapting the
learned idea of the clavis metrica to an exposition of native forms. Undoubtedly, Norse poets
were trained and schooled orally, but this is the first attempt to adapt that schooling to lit-
erate modes. As such, it was a model for Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, a thirteenth-century
Icelandic treatise on poetry and mythology, in which the section on metrics consists of the
exposition of Snorri’s poem Háttatal (‘List of Metres’), illustrating 102 metrical variations
and clearly modelled on Háttalykill. Second, although Háttalykill claims to be a key to
metres, most of the variants on the basic skaldic metre it illustrates are not known from
any earlier or contemporary poetry. In fact, it is likely the two poets aimed to extend the
skaldic art by devising new metres. Third, the ostensible content of Háttalykill is forn fræði
(‘ancient lore’), again extending the boundaries of the skaldic genre. Traditionally, court
poetry had had a contemporary bias, with praise poems addressed to a living, or commem-
orating a recently dead, ruler. While the praise poems could look back on his lifetime’s
achievements, they rarely if ever went further back than that. Háttalykill, on the other
hand, is a historical poem that starts with the mythological origins of the Danish and
Norwegian royal dynasties, and proceeds chronologically up to the Norwegian king
Magnús Barelegs, who died in 1103. As the poem is incomplete, it is likely that it was
intended to be fully up to date. In its strong interest in chronology, it is again a precursor
to Snorri and indeed to Scandinavian historiography. The prose histories of Norway and
Denmark, in Latin and Old Norse, that appear in the twelfth century build on this shift in
poetical subject matter, from the contemporary to the historical, which Rögnvaldr and
Hallr were the first to implement. Moreover, most of the twelfth-century histories of
 Norse Literature in the Orkney Earldom 81

Norway begin in relatively recent times, with the ninth-century rule of Haraldr Finehair.
Snorri (1179–1241) was the first prose historian to take the account of the dynasty back
into mythical times, but Rögnvaldr and Hallr did it first in verse.
A similar interest in Danish history is revealed in Jómsvíkingadrápa, by the Bishop of
Orkney, Bjarni Kolbeinsson. Bjarni is called a ‘skald’ in Orkneyinga saga, and his author-
ship of the poem is referred to elsewhere. This poem, too, is based on the heroic past, this
time the colourful and semi-historical exploits of the Danish Vikings of Jómsborg, pre-
served in an Icelandic saga which survives in several versions, none of them necessarily
older than Bjarni’s poem. His version of the story is close to the surviving ones, and it is
likely that he knew an early written version of the saga. Jómsvíkingadrápa is more than a
jolly retelling of some popular tales. Two aspects of the poem stand out, placing it in the
poetic tradition established by Rögnvaldr. One is its detached, ironic wit. In the first stanza,
Bjarni inverts the traditional poet’s request for a hearing by having the narrator refuse to
ask for silence, claiming he will recite whether or not anyone listens to him. Similar wit-
ticisms are sprinkled throughout the text. Second, the heroic story is spiced with an inter-
calated refrain, which harps on the narrator’s unrequited love for a married woman:

Ein drepr fyr mér allri,

ítrmanns kona teiti;
[. . .]
góð ætt of kømr grimmu,
gœðings at mér stríði.

(That gentleman’s wife, she robs me of all my joy [. . .] the noble lady causes me cruel
suffering.)

This harks back to the beginning of the poem, in which the poet notes that

Hendir enn sem aðra

óteitan mik sútar,
[. . .]
mjök em ek at mér orðinn
ógæfr of för vífa.

(Sorrow’s unhappiness happens to me like others [. . .] I’ve been so unlucky in my dealings

with ladies.)

His love is for a specific woman (though he does not name her) and although it was ‘fyr
löngu [. . .] því hefr oss skapi haldit’ (‘long ago [. . .] I’ve kept my feelings’). Ironically, the
poem has a happy ending, though not for the narrator: it ends with the wedding of the
Jómsvíking hero Vagn to his beloved Ingibjörg. This is the first use in Old Norse–Icelandic
literature of a love-song as introduction and refrain to a narrative poem on a quite different
topic. The device was adopted with enthusiasm by the Icelanders and was the basis for the
long-lived and popular genre of rímur practised there from late medieval into modem times.
Preserved in the same manuscript, and in the same hand, as Jómsvíkingadrápa is an
anonymous poem that is usually understood as a collection of proverbs and therefore called
Málsháttakvæð i (‘Poem of Proverbs’). In fact, it contains much more, including sententious
sayings, aphorisms, lyrics and allusions to fables and to Norse myths and sagas. As in
82 Judith Jesch

Jómsvíkingadrápa, the speaking persona comments deprecatingly on his own verse-making,

and has been unlucky in love. But, unlike Jómsvíkingadrápa, it is not a narrative, but a kind
of commonplace book in verse, drawing on a wide-ranging knowledge of both Norse and
international literary traditions. The manuscript association, some of the content, and
certain linguistic features suggest an Orcadian origin, but the ascription to Bjarni
Kolbeinsson is less sure than for Jómsvíkingadrápa. If indeed composed in Orkney,
Málsháttakvæð i would provide further strong indications of the nature and range of its
medieval literary culture.
The evidence from Icelandic manuscripts thus shows a continuous tradition of poetry
and narrative in Orkney from at least the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. We can
trace the development of court and political poetry into the new forms developed by
Rögnvaldr and Bjarni. Any prose narratives of medieval Orkney have largely been sub-
sumed into Icelandic literary genres, though we do find the narrative mode in some of the
later poetry. Orcadian poetry-making in the second half of the twelfth and first half of the
thirteenth century took place in the context of a wider literary culture which cultivated
both Norse traditions of myth, saga and verse forms, and the international forms of love
poetry and Latin learning.
The Scottification of Orkney was a slow, but inevitable, process and the vitality of Norse
culture began to diminish well before the official transfer of the islands with the impigno-
rations of 1468. There is no evidence for high literary culture in the Norse language after
about the middle of the thirteenth century. A final glimpse of the two strands of that
culture comes in the saga of the Norwegian king Hákon Hákonarson. After his Largs
setback, Hákon intended to return to Norway via Kirkwall, but died in the Bishop’s Palace
there in 1263. On his sickbed, he called for books to be read to him. When he found it
tiring to listen to works in Latin, he called for vernacular books, and sagas of saints and
Norwegian kings were read to him. He expired soon after the end of the saga of his grand-
father Sverrir. These might have been books he had brought with him (for Hákon was a
king who cultivated literature), but it seems equally likely that the successors of Bishop
Bjarni would have had both types of book available to royal guests in their palace.
Although any such books have long since disappeared from the islands, the transfer of
Orcadian literary culture to Iceland has ensured its survival there.

Further reading

Clancy, T. O. (1998), The Triumph Tree: Scotland’s Earliest Poetry, AD 550–1350, Edinburgh:
Canongate.
Crawford, B. E. (1988), St Magnus Cathedral and Orkney’s Twelfth-Century Renaissance,
Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
Frank, R. (2004), Sex, Lies and Málsháttakvæð i: A Norse Poem from Medieval Orkney,
Nottingham: Centre for the Study of the Viking Age, University of Nottingham.
Jónsson, F. (1912–15), Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning, Copenhagen: Gyldendal.
Owen, O. (2005), Orkney in Saga Times, Kirkwall: Orkney Museums and Heritage.
Waugh, D. and A. Finlay (2003), The Faces of Orkney: Stones, Skalds and Saints, Edinburgh:
Scottish Society for Northern Studies.
 9

Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh

and the Classical Revolution
Katharine Simms

From about 1200 onwards, as discussed earlier in this volume, the recorded texts of classical
bardic poetry bear witness to the sudden emergence of a rigid standardisation of require-
ments for a wide variety of metres, whether these were compositions using the ‘dán díreach’
(perfect rhymes), associated with the most accomplished court poets, or the ‘brúilingeacht’
(imperfect rhymes), used by less highly trained poets, or by learned historians, judges or
physicians. At the same time, these poems in the new style are using a standard grammar
and vocabulary which mark the transition from middle Irish to early modern Irish, well
ahead of such changes in prose texts, such as annals, or sagas.
Some scholars have linked this revolution in the composition of bardic poetry with the
contemporary revolution taking place in the Irish Church during the twelfth century, and
suggested that just as church synods were summoned to obtain general agreement to the
imposition of a standardised form of liturgy and canon law, so the poets may have sum-
moned unrecorded assemblies during this century of renewal, to obtain general agreement
to the new rules of metrics and language that were to prevail. The first general assembly of
the poets of Ireland and Scotland to be historically recorded took place in 1351, at a
Christmas feast held by the chief William O’Kelly of Uí Mhaine, in East Galway. However,
a poem celebrating this occasion implies that there had been earlier gatherings of this type,
always previously in response to a general summons coming not from a secular chief, but
from the school of a learned poet. To that extent the theory of an unrecorded ‘synod’ of
the poetic order for the purpose of promulgating the new standards in metre and language
is not out of the question. However, the revolution in liturgy and canon law brought about
by the decision of the Second Synod of Cashel to adopt the usages of the English Church
followed on generations of evolution, which had taken place inside and outside Ireland in
the context of the Gregorian Church reform. A similarly long-term evolution in accepted
teaching on written forms of the Gaelic language and on metrical standards would be
needed before the finished product could be approved and adopted by the poetic orders in
Ireland and Scotland. The present writer has always considered that the most likely
context for this rise of a new orthodoxy is to be found in the extraordinary pre-eminence
accorded by the Irish annals in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries to the Ó Dálaigh
family of poets.
Cú Chonnacht Ó Dálaigh, from Lackan (barony of Corkaree, Co. Westmeath), died in
the monastery of Clonard as an old man in 1139 with the reputation, according to the
Annals of the Four Masters and others, of being ‘in fer dana is fherr dobai a nÉirinn’ (‘the best
praise-poet in Ireland’). In the mid-twelfth century, two of his kinsmen are described (in
84 Katharine Simms

the Four Masters and the Annals of Inisfallen, respectively) as ‘ollamh Desmhumhan le
dán’ (chief poets in the kingdom of Desmond, or south Munster). More relevant to the
present theme are the death notices in the 1180s of two further members of the family,
Tadhg Ó Dálaigh, ‘ollam Erenn 7 Alpan’ (‘chief poet of Ireland and Scotland’) and
Maoilíosa Ó Dálaigh, ‘chief poet of Ireland and Scotland and ‘dux, taoiseach’ (‘high chief-
tain’) of Corca Raoidhe and Corca Adhain (in Westmeath), who died ‘in pilgrimage’ or
religious retirement in Clonard (both in the Annals of Loch Cé, 1181 and 1185). In 1218
the Annals of Loch Cé describe an admired praise poet from a different family as supreme
in his art ‘from the O’Dalaighs down’, implying that every poet of the Ó Dálaigh family
was acknowledged as incomparably the best in their profession. Similarly Donnchadh Mór
Ó Dálaigh (d. 1244) was called by an annalist in the Annals of Connacht ‘a master of
poetry who never has been excelled and never will be’. In this case, we have surviving com-
positions credibly ascribed to Donnchadh Mór, which show him to have been a master of
the new format of dán díreach. This century and a half of acknowledged artistic leadership
suggests that the new and stringent standard that came to prevail for the composition of
dán díreach may have originated as the house rules of the Ó Dálaigh school.
The annal entries concerning Muireadhach Ó Dálaigh of Lissadell (Co. Sligo) are much
more problematic than the death-notices for his kinsmen. According to the Four Masters’
entry under the year 1213:

Finn O’Brollaghan, steward of O’Donnell, went to Connaught to collect O’Donnell’s tribute

[. . .] he visited the house of the poet [Muireadhach] of Lissadill; and, being a plebeian repre-
sentative of a hero, he began to wrangle with the poet very much (although his lord had given
him no instructions to do so). The poet, being enraged at his conduct, seized a very sharp axe,
and dealt him a blow which killed him on the spot, and then, to avoid O Donnell, he fled into
Clanrickard. When O’Donnell received intelligence of this, he collected a large body of his
forces, and pursued him to Derrydonnell, in Clanrickard, – a place which was named from him,
because he encamped there for a night; – and he proceeded to plunder and burn the country,
until at last Mac William submitted to him, having previously sent Murray to seek for refuge
in Thomond. O’Donnell pursued him, and proceeded to plunder and ravage that country also,
until Donough Cairbreach O’Brien sent Murray away to the people of Limerick. O’Donnell
followed him to the gate of Limerick, and, pitching his camp at Monydonnell (which is named
from him), laid siege to that town: upon which the people of Limerick, at O’Donnell’s
command, expelled Murray, who found no asylum anywhere, but was sent from hand to hand,
until he arrived in Dublin.
O’Donnell returned home on this occasion, having first traversed and completed the vis-
itation of all Connacht. He mustered another army without much delay in the same year, and,
marching to Dublin, compelled the people of Dublin to banish Murray into Scotland; and
here he remained until he composed three poems in praise of O’Donnell, imploring peace
and forgiveness from him. The third of these poems is the one beginning, ‘Oh! Donnell, kind
hand for [granting] peace,’ etc. He obtained peace for his panegyrics, and O’Donnell after-
wards received him into his friendship, and gave him lands and possessions, as was pleasing
to him.

A version of this narrative also occurs in the Latin recension of the Annals of Ulster under
the years 1216, and 1218, but it is clearly abbreviated from a longer version similar to the
Four Masters’ account. Here, the emphasis is on O’Donnell’s military victories, and
Muireadhach figures merely as a murderer rather than a poet.
 Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh 85

As Brian Ó Cuív has pointed out in his survey of the evidence, these annal entries are
clearly not contemporary. Richard, son of William de Burgh, had not even conquered
Connacht in 1213, much less had his descendants developed the place-name of
Clanrickard there. In fact, Clanrickard began in the fourteenth century as a population-
name, and did not gain currency as a place-name until the fifteenth century. In 1213–14,
so far from being in a position to besiege Dublin, O’Donnell and O’Neill were struggling
against a concerted attempt by the English to make a final conquest of Ulster, with castles
being built at Belleek on the Erne, at Clones in Monaghan, at Áth Cruitne near Newry,
and at Coleraine. Not only is the entry in the Four Masters non-contemporary, then, but
many of the details are unbelievable. In an earlier article it was suggested that this lack
of authenticity in the annals’ account also cast a shadow of doubt over the nineteen or
twenty poems attributed in manuscript headings to Muireadhach (the twentieth could
be one by Giolla Brighde Albanach, according to some manuscripts). Now the present
writer would compare the semi-fictional prose account of the poet’s career with the case
of the troubadours and trouvères of France. Fictionalised accounts of their lives were con-
cocted as a commentary on genuine anthologies of their verse surprisingly soon after their
deaths. An example is the legend that the trouvère Blondel helped to locate the impris-
oned King Richard the Lion-Heart by singing under his window. Blondel died in 1200
leaving behind a corpus of some twenty songs, and the fictional account of his romantic
rescue of King Richard appeared in the work of the Minstrel of Rheims about 1260. Most
of the poems bearing Muireadhach’s name are of such a high standard of composition
that it is easier to accept them as genuine than as a pastiche, just as the poems ascribed
to troubadours are largely accepted, when the legendary accounts of their careers are seen
as fictional.
Of the nineteen or twenty ‘Muireadhach’ poems, three are explicitly attributed to
‘Muireadhach of Lissadell’ (see checklist: nos 1–3) and these tend to confirm the broad out-
lines of the prose account in the Four Masters. (Because there is no single edition of the
poems ascribed to Muireadhach, this article concludes with a full checklist of his poetry,
editions and translations.) The first in the sequence, ‘Créad agaibh aoidhidh a gcéin’
(‘Whence comes it you have guests from afar?’) addresses Richard de Burgh, and recounts
the poet’s quarrel with O’Donnell, over the slaying of O’Donnell’s servant, and then
announces that the author is throwing himself on the protection of the English, proudly
describing himself as ‘Ó Dálaigh of Midhe’, and saying he is travelling with a fellow-poet
and two servants. The other two are poems of apology to O’Donnell, the second asking for
reinstatement at the end of Muireadhach’s long exile. The first, ‘A Dhomhnaill deglamh
fa síth’ (‘O Domhnall, let us part in peace’) is the one whose first line was quoted by the
Four Masters at the end of their annal entry. The other, ‘Cian ó d’ibess dig ndermaid’
(‘Long since I drank the draught of oblivion’) is apparently another of the original trilogy
of apologetic poems to O’Donnell which were known to the annalists in the early
seventeenth century. These two poems are particularly polished and elegant pieces, full of
circumstantial detail about his quarrel with the king of Tír Conaill, naming his supporters
and opponents, nostalgically recalling his childhood in Connacht by the river Boyle, and
his youth in the household of O’Donnell.
However there are also twelve poems in which this author is invariably described as
‘Muireadhach Albanach’ (‘M. the Scotsman’) in the manuscript headings, with no refer-
ence to the surname Ó Dálaigh. Many details of Muireadhach’s career to be gleaned from
these poems alone bear no relation to the annals’ account, especially the information that
he went with another poet as a pilgrim to the Holy Land.
86 Katharine Simms

Five of the twelve are purely religious poems and one a personal elegy for the poet’s dead
wife Maoilmheadha, and these are undatable (checklist: nos 4–9). Their association with
Muireadhach Albanach rests on manuscript headings in the early sixteenth-century
Scottish Book of the Dean of Lismore, in some cases supported by their skilful standard of
composition. Two further poems addressed to rulers of Lennox in the early thirteenth
century, and ascribed to ‘Muireadhach Albanach’ in seventeenth-century Irish anthologies
(checklist: 10–11), would suit the tale of Muireadhach of Lissadell’s exile to Scotland in
that period.
The remaining four from this group of twelve poems ascribed to a ‘Muireadhach
Albanach’, who is not given a surname (checklist: 12–15), are linked in subject matter and
the identity of their patrons, Cathal Croibhdhearg O’Conor, king of Connacht (d. 1224)
and Donnchadh Cairbreach O’Brien, king of Thomond or North Munster (d. 1242), with
a further four poems on the O’Brien family (checklist: 16–19), all contained in Royal Irish
Academy MS no. 493, a mid-eighteenth-century paper manuscript by the scribe Mícheál
mac Peadair Uí Longáin. This ascribes them to Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh, clearly
identifying Muireadhach Ó Dálaigh of Lissadell with Muireadhach Albanach, or
‘Muireadhach the Scotsman’.
Many genuinely medieval texts have only been preserved for posterity in the paper
manuscripts of the Ó Longáin scribes. Nevertheless the late date of the ascriptions def-
initely identifying the murderous court poet of O’Donnell with ‘Muireadhach the
Scotsman’ does leave some room for doubt as to whether there were two poets of the same
name in the early thirteenth century, one of them an Ó Dálaigh from Ireland, and the
other a Scotsman. There are, however, two points of contact between the three
‘Muireadhach of Lissadell’ poems, and the sixteen or seventeen ‘Muireadhach Albanach’
poems. One is the fact that Muireadhach of Lissadell in ‘Cian ó d’ibhess dig ndermaid’
refers to his long stay in a neighbouring country over the sea, presumably Scotland. The
other is that in one poem to Cathal Croibhdhearg O’Conor, the author, Muireadhach
Albanach, although not directly mentioning a quarrel with O’Donnell, speaks of his
group, two poets and two servants, as ‘an ceathror crosda ar gach ndruing, gan lón énduine
aguinn’ (‘the four forbidden to every throng, without the meal of a single man among us’),
a passage reminiscent of the appeal of Muireadhach of Lissadell to de Burgh. There is a
possibility of an intended pun in the O’Conor poem, since the word used for ‘outlawed’
or ‘forbidden’ is ‘crosda’, ‘crossed’, and other poems in the cycle show that Muireadhach,
with one other poet as his companion, took the cross as a palmer, and went on pilgrimage
to Jerusalem. But this pun would have lost much of its humour if the poet had not also
had a history of outlawry and exile.
Taking the evidence of the poems alone, without laying undue stress on the annals’
account, it would seem that the poem to Richard de Burgh was the earliest, since not only
does the poet explicitly mention his crime and consequent quarrel with O’Donnell, but the
young de Burgh is addressed with advice suitable to a newly inaugurated ruler, and Richard
came of age in 1213–14. The next poem chronologically may be the ode to Alún Óg, the
Earl of Lennox, since scholars tell us this good man died c. 1217 (though there are some
problems with the identity of the patron). The poem recounts his genealogy and hails him
as the lover not of the land he ruled, but of the river Leven that flowed through it. The
second Scottish poem tells us that the Mormaer of Lennox gave Muireadhach cows, corn
and malt, two ploughs and two ploughlands. The poems to O’Conor and O’Brien could all
be associated with visits made to their courts immediately before and after the pilgrimage
to Jerusalem. The unnamed companion poet who features in so many of these poems is
 Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh 87

surely, as Ó Cuív suggests, the other outstanding early thirteenth century author Giolla
Brighde Albanach, who also went from Scotland through Ireland on his way to the Holy
Land and addressed poems to O’Conor and O’Brien alluding to this journey. In the final
stanza of one of the poems composed after the pilgrims’ return from the Holy Land (check-
list: 16), the author explicitly identifies himself with the name ‘Muireadhach Albanach’
and asks King Donnchadh Cairbreach for permission to leave his court:

Ceadaigh dhamhsa dul dom thír,

A Dhonnchaidh Chairbrigh chneismhín,
I nAlbain bhfeadhaigh bhféraigh
Bhfleadhaigh n-ardaigh n-oilénaigh,
Mo ruaig i nÉirinn tar mh-ais,
Ní huaid téighim, is tomhais.

(Let me go to my own land,/O smooth-skinned Donnchadh Cairbreach,/to Scotland of the

woods and the grass,/of the feasts, the hills and the isles./I will visit Ireland again;/not from
thee do I depart.)

The word he uses here is tír, ‘land’, rather than dúthaigh, native land, or it would
become even harder to believe that this is an Irishman, only temporarily resident in
Scotland. However, Muireadhach’s second Scottish poem may help to explain the situ-
ation further. This is addressed to a certain Amhlaoibh, who, according to fifteenth-
century genealogies, may be a son of Alún Óg, Earl or Mormaer of Lennox. It complains
that the estate of land on Ard na nEach that Amhlaoibh gave the poet is not up to stan-
dard: it is marshy and barren, and that the Mormaer of Lennox had formerly treated him
much better. Amhlaoibh should either give him the favoured ollamh’s reward of twenty
milch cows and a townland on Srath Leamhna beside the lord’s residence, or just pay him
twenty cows for his poem, and he can leave for Ireland, perhaps to take employment with
the O’Conors in Connacht. It could have been as a result of his dissatisfaction with his
treatment by a new generation in Scotland that Muireadhach is found addressing poems
of apology to O’Donnell, fifteen years after his original banishment. As Ó Cuív points
out, however, we have only the late and unreliable account of the Four Masters to say
that O’Donnell then received him back into favour. The last poem in this group (check-
list: 20) is attributed either to Muireadhach Albanach or to Giolla Brighde Albanach, in
manuscripts of roughly equal date and authority. It was composed in appreciation of the
gift of a harp sent to the poet in Scotland by King Donnchadh Cairbreach O’Brien.
The author says he would never sell it or give it away in exchange for all the wealth of
Ireland. This piece of Irish wood is compared favourably with the beloved, beautiful
woods of his native Scotland, and here the word used is dúthchas, native land, perhaps
because the author is indeed Giolla Brighde Albanach, who is not even rumoured to have
Irish origins.
Many of his poems like those of Muireadhach Albanach are quoted as models of com-
position in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century bardic grammatical tracts. However we
classify the problematical Muireadhach Albanach, the rest of Giolla Brighde Albanach’s
poems (see checklist), which are all composed outside Scotland, either on the
Mediterranean, in Nazareth or in Ireland, demonstrate that the standard of poetry prac-
tised by a native Scotsman in the early thirteenth century was as learned, and well crafted,
as the best that Ireland could produce.
88 Katharine Simms

Checklist of Poems, Editions and Translations

Poems attributed to Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh

1. ‘Créad agaibh aoidhidh a gcéin’ (‘Whence comes it you have guests from afar?’) Bergin
(1970), no. 20.
2. ‘A Dhomhnaill deglamh fa síth’ (‘O Domhnall, let us part in peace’) and
3. ‘Cian ó d’ibess dig ndermaid’ (‘Long since I drank the draught of oblivion’), E. C.
Quiggin (1913), Prolegomena to the Study of the Later Irish Bards, London: Oxford
University Press, pp. 42–5.
4. ‘Réidhigh an croidhe, a mheic Dhé’, ed. with trans., W. Gillies (1979–80), Studia
Celtica 14–5: 81–6.
5. ‘Marthain duit a chroch an Choimdheadh’, ed. without trans. L. MacCionaith (1938),
Dioghluim Dána, Dublin: Stationery Office, poem no. 41.
6. ‘Mithigh domh triall gu tigh Parrthais’ ed. with trans. W. Gillies (1990), Celtica 21:
156–72.
7. ‘Déana mo theagasg a Thríonóid’, ed. with trans. L. McKenna, Aithdioghluim
Dána (text vol. 1, 1940, trans. vol. 2, 1941), London: Irish Texts Society, poem
no. 70.
8. ‘Éistidh riomsa a Mhuire mhór’, ed. with trans. Bergin (1970), no. 21.
9. ‘M’anam do sgar riomsa aréir’, Bergin (1970), no. 22.
10. ‘Saor do leannán a Leamhain’, ed. and trans. McKenna, Aithdioghluim Dána, poem
no. 42.
11. ‘Mairg thréigeas inn a Amhlaoimh’, ed. without trans. B. Ó Cuív, ‘A Poem Attributed
to Muireadhach Ó Dálaigh’ in J. Carney and D. Greene (eds) (1968), Celtic Studies,
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 92–8.
12. ‘A Mhuireadhaigh meil do sgian’ ed. without trans. by T. Ó Rathile (1977 [1927]),
Measgra Dánta, vol. 2, Dublin: Educational Co. of Ireland, poem no. 69.
13. ‘An foltsa dhuit a Dhé Athar’ ed. with trans. McKenna, Aithdioghluim Dána, poem
no. 43.
14. ‘Tabhram an Chaisg ar Chathal’, ed. with trans. Bergin (1970), no. 23.
15. ‘Fada in chabhair a Cruachain’, ed. with trans. G. Murphy (1953), ‘Two Irish Poems
written from the Mediterranean in the Thirteenth Century’, Éigse: A Journal of Irish
Studies 7: 74–9.
16. ‘Tomhais cia mise a Mhurchaidh’, ed. with trans. Bergin (1970), no. 24.
17. ‘Aonar dhuit a Bhriain Bhanba’, ed. with trans. A. J. Goedheer (1938), Irish and Norse
Traditions about the Battle of Clontarf, Harlem: H. D. Tjeenk Willink and Zoon N. V.,
pp. 45–55.
18. ‘Mo leaba fein dom a Dhonnchadh’ and
19. ‘Roinneam a chompáin clann Bhriain’, ed. with trans. M. Ní Urdáil (2003), ‘Two
poems attributed to Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh’, Ériu 53: 19–52.

Attributed to Muireadhach or Giolla Brighde Albanach

20. ‘Tabhraidh chugam cruit mo riogh’, ed. P. Walsh (1933), Gleanings from Irish
Manuscripts, 2nd edn., Dublin: Three Candles Press, pp. 113–15.
 Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh 89

Translations of numbers 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 9, 8, 4 and 6 respectively are given in T. O.
Clancy (1998), The Triumph Tree: Scotland’s Earliest Poetry, AD 550–1350, Edinburgh:
Canongate, pp. 258–83. Numbers 20 and 12 also appear (pp. 256–7, 264–6), but are there
suggested as Giolla Brighde’s.

Attributed to Giolla Brighde Albanach

1. ‘A ghille ghabhas an sdiúir’ ed. with trans. Murphy, ‘Two Irish Poems written from the
Mediterranean in the Thirteenth Century’, pp. 72–3.
2. ‘Aisling ad-chonnairc o chianaibh’ ed. and trans. H. McGeown and G. Murphy
(1953), ‘Giolla Brighde Albanach’s Vision of Donnchadh Cairbreach Ó Briain’ Éigse:
A Journal of Irish Studies 7: 80–3.
3. ‘Fuigheall beannacht bru Mhuire’, ed. and trans. McKenna, Aithdioghluim Dána, poem
no. 49.
4. ‘Sa raith-se rugadh Muire’, ed. and trans. B. Ó Cuív (1973), ‘A Poem on the Infancy
of Christ’ Éigse: A Journal of Irish Studies 15: 93–102.
5. ‘Meitheal do bhi ag Dia na ndul’ (possible, poet identifies himself as a
‘Giolla Brighde’ in the last verse, and the citation from this poem in the bardic
grammatical tracts makes it too early for MacCionaith’s suggestion of Giolla
Brighde Ó hEoghusa, but it could be by mid-thirteenth century. Giolla
Brighde Mac Con Midhe) ed. without trans. MacCionaith, Dioghluim Dána, poem
no. 42.
Translations of (1), (2) in Clancy (1998), pp. 266–8, 254–6.

Anonymous, but possibly Giolla Brighde Albanach

1. ‘Táinig in Croibhdhearg go Cruachan’, ed. with trans. E. C. Quiggin (1912), ‘A Poem

by Gilbride Macnamee in Praise of Cathal O’Conor’, in O. Bergin and C. Marstrander,
(eds), Miscellany Presented to Kuno Meyer, pp. 167–9.
2. ‘Fada damh druim re hÉirinn’, ed. with trans. B. Ó Cuív (1969–70), ‘A
Poem for Cathal Croibhdhearg Ó Conchunair’, Éigse: A Journal of Irish Studies 13:
195–202. This contains arguments in favour of Giolla Brighde Albanach for all three
poems.
3. ‘Sgian mo charaid ar mo chliu’, ed. and trans. Bergin (1970), no. 52.
Translations of all of these in Clancy (1998), pp. 247–54, 262–3.

Further reading

Bergin, O. (1970), Irish Bardic Poetry, ed. D. Greene and F. Kelly, Dublin: Dublin Institute
for Advanced Studies.
MacCana, P. (1974), ‘The Rise of the Later Schools of filidheacht’, Ériu 25: 126–46.
McKenna, L. (ed.) (1922), Dán Dé: The Poems of Donnchadh Mór Ó Dálaigh and the Religious
Poems in the Duanaire of the Yellow Book of Lecan, Dublin: Dublin Institute for
Advanced Studies.
Ó Cuív, B. (1961), ‘Eachtra Mhuireadhaigh Í Dhálaigh’, Studia Hibernica 1: 56–69.
90 Katharine Simms

Simms, K. (1987), ‘Bardic Poetry as a Historical Source’, in T. Dunne (ed.), The Writer as
Witness, Historical Studies XVI, Cork: Cork University Press, pp. 58–75.
Simms, K. (1998), ‘Literacy and the Irish Bards’, in H. Pryce (ed.), Literacy in Medieval
Celtic Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 238–58.
 10

Saving Verse: Early Medieval

Religious Poetry
Gilbert Márkus

Adomnán of Iona, the ninth abbot of that monastery, tells a story in his Life of St Columba
in which certain wicked men are threatened with death and are saved by his saintly patron:

Certain men, wicked and bloodstained from a life as brigands, were protected by songs that
they sang in Irish in praise of St Columba and by the commemoration of his name. For on the
night they sang these songs, they were delivered from the hands of their enemies, who had sur-
rounded the house of the singers, and escaped unhurt through flames and swords and spears.
[in Richard Sharpe’s translation]

For the seventh-century believer, poetry could be an instrument of salvation, joining the
reciter to God and the saints. Just as a poet in the service of a secular lord or king would
gain protection and profit from his lord and patron, so a poet in the service of God or a
saint would receive the protection of the Lord or of his patron saint. It was a matter of
salvation, both temporal (salvation from death, disease and other disasters) and eternal
(salvation from sin, from judgement and hell). It is this sense of ‘saving verse’ that will
guide the following exploration of the religious poetry of early medieval Scotland, where
both the composition and the recitation of verse were ways of entering into the life-giving
exchange of divine gift and human response.
The poetry we will look at was written in Latin – the international language of most of
western Europe – and in Welsh, Gaelic, English and Norse, in the older forms of those lan-
guages. No poetry of any sort survives in Pictish. These are all ‘Scottish’ languages, in the
sense that they are all languages once used by settled populations in the area we now call
Scotland, though much of it was written by people who would not have dreamed of calling
themselves Scottish.
A Latin poem associated with Whithorn may be the earliest surviving work, attributed
by a much later preface to the poem to a sixth-century cleric called Mugint (found in
Bernard and Atkinson, and translated by Gilbert Márkus in Thomas Owen Clancy’s The
Triumph Tree, 1998). It is not a piece of great literary merit, and reads like a scissors-and-
paste compilation by someone familiar with the Psalms and other biblical books, and with
elements of the Latin liturgy.

Parce domine, parce populo tuo

quem redemisti Christe sanguine tuo
et non in aeternum irasceris nobis.
92 Gilbert Márkus

(Spare, O Lord! Spare your people/whom you, Christ, redeemed with your blood,/and do not
be angry with us forever.)

The first line is from the book of Joel (2: 17), and the third taken from Psalm 85 – ‘Will
you be angry with us forever?’ There is little overall structure to the poem, but the same
theme – ‘we are sinners, have mercy on us’ – is reworked in various ways, except for three
lines towards the end of the work:

Recordare domine, dic angelo tuo percutienti populum tuum,

sufficit. Contene manum tuam, et cesset interfectio
quae grassatur in populo ut non perdas omnem animam uiuentem.

(Remember, Lord, and say to the angel destroying your people,/’Enough! Hold back your
hand,’ and let the slaughter cease/which proceeds among the people, lest you destroy every
living soul.)

These lines suggest that the poem may have been composed in a time of plague. The
words ‘Enough! Hold back your hand’ are from 2 Samuel 24: 17, where David begs
God to call off his angel who had brought plague and was ‘working destruction among
the people’.
The sources of this poem show the importance of the Bible, especially the Psalms, as an
influence on early poetry, offering themes and images which would suffuse the writing of
poets for centuries. Literacy in early medieval Scotland was generally learned from the
Latin Psalter, and students were also expected to learn the Psalms by heart. In addition to
this, a scholar would have learned to understand the Psalms as prophetic, prefiguring the
words and deeds of Christ. So when he read Psalm 68, ‘Those who hate me without cause
are more than the hairs of my head’, he would also read the titulus or heading which invited
him to see this as a prophecy of the persecution and suffering of Christ. He learned to
understand texts as meaning more than they said, to seek ever-widening associations and
references, implicit or only faintly suggested in the text.
In Scotland, poets also drew extensively on their own native poetic resources – the
praise poetry and laments of Gaelic and Welsh verse, and the narrative verses embedded
in sagas. One might expect that Latin verse would show the influence of scripture and
liturgy, while Gaelic and Welsh verse would show the influence of the native traditions.
In fact, cross-fertilisation between these various strands is visible in several ways – the
way Latin poets used native Gaelic patterns of alliteration, for example, in the introduc-
tion of aicill in which the end of one line alliterates with the beginning of the next. Take
this verse from Clancy and Márkus’s Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic monastery (1995),
for example:

Noli Pater indulgere tonitrua cum fulgore

ne frangamur formidine huius atque uridine.

(Father, do not allow thunder and lightning,/lest we be shattered by its fear and its fire.)

In addition to the three-syllable rhyme (underlined) connecting the half-line with the line
end (indulgere with fulgore), alliteration (in bold) binds the end of one line with the begin-
ning of the next: fulgore, frangamur and formidine. As we will see, the native influences on
 Saving Verse: Early Medieval Religious Poetry 93

religious poetry are not only stylistic. They include the absorption of much of the language
and imagery of praise, traditionally applied to a secular lord, into a genre which applies the
word ‘lord’ to God. Images and concepts taken from native laws and from the genealogical
tradition are woven into religious poetry.
There is almost no Scottish religious poetry in Norse surviving from our period, except
poetry reflecting pre-Christian religious beliefs, such as that describing the Valkyries, other-
world women whose weaving of men’s guts, using their heads as weights, determined the
outcome of their battles:

Vitt er orfinn
firi válfalli
rifs reiði
rignir bloði;
nu er firi geirum
grar upp kominn
vefr verþiððar
þe˛r vinur fulla
rauðum veftti
Randversk bla.

(Wide is cast/for falling of the slain/the loom-beam’s swung cloud;/blood rains;/now before
the spears/is come up the grey/weaving of mankind,/when those friendly women/fulfil with
red thread/Randver’s fate.
[Paul Bibire’s translation: The Triumph Tree])

If anything might qualify in Scotland as Norse religious poetry in a Christian sense, it is

hard to find it. The Elegy for Earl Thorfin the Mighty describes his military prowess at some
length, and the slaughter he wreaked, but it finishes with a prayer:

Ætt bæti fiðr itran

Allriks en ec bið likna
Trura tiggia dyrum
Torf-einars guð meinum.

(Mighty Turf-Einar’s glorious kin-mender,/God, keep from harms;/but I pray for true
mercies/for the noble prince.
[Paul Bibire’s translation: The Triumph Tree])

It is questionable if this last stanza qualifies the previous twenty-four stanzas of gore-fest as
‘religious poetry’, however. And if it does, it is not entirely clear which god is being
invoked. Earl Rögnvaldr of Orkney (ruled c. 1135–c. 1158) makes a small contribution to
Norse religious poetry. On a tour of the Mediterranean he goes to Jerusalem wearing a cross,
ties a knot in a bush on St Laurence’s day, and proclaims his faith:

Huat man ek yðre˛ða oðrum

ulfbryníndum kynna
heiðz lofa ek hialmi bliðan
háárannz nema guð sannan.
94 Gilbert Márkus

(Of what shall I tell you, or other/wolf-waterers – /I praise the glad lord of the cloudless/high
hall – other than true God?
[Paul Bibire’s translation: The Triumph Tree])

If it is hard to find religious verse in Norse, we are in much the same position with Welsh.
Though Welsh-speakers were Christians throughout our period, none of what survives in
Welsh from Scotland can be regarded as religious – though it occasionally touches on reli-
gious topics: the Gododdin mentions that the men who died facing their English enemies
first went to confession, and that Beli had prayed for protection before the fight. The poet
himself expresses a prayer for Ceredig:

Ys deupo car kyrd kyvnot

y wlat nef adef atnabot.

(May welcome be his among the host/with the Trinity, in total unity.
[Joseph Clancy’s translation: The Triumph Tree])

But apart from such fleeting lines as these, no religious utterance in the Welsh tongue sur-
vives from early medieval Scotland. The bulk of what we must look at is therefore in Gaelic
and in Latin.
In the early centuries of Scottish Christianity, the monastery of Iona seems to have pro-
duced much poetry in both these languages, though attributions of poems to authors are
almost always questionable in our period. One great poem attributed to Columba (d. 597),
but possibly composed a century or so later than him, is a recitation of the mighty deeds of
God: the Creation, the Fall of the angels and of Adam, the overthrow of the rulers of this
age, the coming of Christ in terrifying judgement, and the eternal separation of the saved
and the damned. Two verses of this poem, the Altus Prosator, will give a flavour of the whole:

Altus prosator vetustus dierum et ingenitus

erat absque origine primordii et crepidine
est et erit in saecula saeculorum infinita
cui est unigenitus Christus et Sanctus Spiritus
coaeternus in gloria deitatis perpetua
non tres deos depromimus sed unum Deum dicimus
salva fidei in personis tribus gloriosissimis.

[. . .] Zelus ignis furibundus consumet adversarios

nolentes Christum credere Deo a Patre venisse
nos vero evolabimus obviam ei protinus
et sic cum ipso erimus in diversis ordinibus
dignitatum pro meritis praemiorum perpetuis
permansuri in gloria a saeculis in saecula.

(The High Creator, the Unbegotten Ancient of Days,/limitless, without origin of beginning
he was,/he is and will be for endless of ages of ages,/with whom is the only-begotten Christ,
and the Holy Spirit,/co-eternal in divinity’s everlasting glory./Three gods we do not confess,
but say one God,/saving our faith in three most glorious Persons.// [. . .] The raging anger of
fire will devour the adversaries/who will not believe that Christ came from God the
 Saving Verse: Early Medieval Religious Poetry 95

Father./But we shall surely fly off to meet him straight away,/and thus we shall be with him
in several ranks of dignities/according to the merits of our eternal rewards,/to abide in glory
from age to age.
[Gilbert Márkus’s translation: Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery])

The Altus Prosator certainly attempts to do justice to its magnificent theme, not least in its
sheer size – it has twenty-three stanzas. Each half-line has a strict eight syllables, though the
stress-pattern varies to some extent, and rhymes within each line connect the half-line and
the line-end: vetustus and ingenitus, and so on. The poem is ‘abecedarian’ – each eight-line
stanza begins with a successive letter of the Latin alphabet – an overarching structure which
would be recognised only by a reader, not by a hearer of the poem. Another feature of the
poem is its use of deliberately obscure vocabulary – words borrowed from Greek and Hebrew,
such as barathrum ‘abyss’, Thetis ‘sea’, iduma, ‘hands’ (from Hebrew, plural of yad, ‘hand’).
Medieval writers, though they were impressed by its splendour, seem to have thought
that the Altus Prosator lacked a certain nuance: where was the mercy of God, the forgive-
ness and healing brought by Christ? A later medieval preface to the poem says that Pope
Gregory did not like the poem and got Columba to write another one.
The poem that was later thought to be Columba’s second attempt is a much shorter and
more intimate Latin piece beginning Adiutor laborantium (‘Helper of workers’). It shares an
abecedarian arrangement with the Altus, each line beginning with a successive letter of the
alphabet. But it shares little else. Where the Altus was a large narrative of great cosmic
events, Adiutor is a short and heartfelt prayer conveying no information to the reader at
all. Where the Altus expresses the self-confidence of those who are saved (‘we shall be with
him in several ranks of dignities’), Adiutor begs the help of a merciful God for a weak and
helpless ‘little man’. Where the Altus conveys its message in complex grammar, obscure
vocabulary and developed rhyme, Adiutor is simple in the extreme: it is composed almost
entirely of short phrases; its rhyme is simply the ending -um or -ium throughout its entire
length; its language is simple and direct.

Adiutor laborantium,
Bonorum rector omnium,
Custos ad propugnaculum,
Defensorque credentium,
Exaltator humilium,
Fractor superbientium,
[. . .] Precor ut me homunculum
Quassatum et miserrimum
Remigantem per tumultum
Saeculi istius infinitum
Trahat post se ad supernum
Vitae portum pulcherrimum
Xristus [. . .]

(O helper of workers,/ruler of all the good,/guard on the ramparts/and defender of the

faithful,/who lift up the lowly/and crush the proud,/[. . .] I beg that me, a little
man/trembling and most wretched,/rowing through the infinite storm/of this age,/Christ may
draw after him to the lofty/most beautiful haven of life [. . .]
[Gilbert Márkus’s translation: Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery])
96 Gilbert Márkus

Incidentally, though this poem was later attributed to Columba, it contains a word that
may be a clue as to its true authorship. The poet speaks of himself as a homunculus, a ‘little
man’. This is an unusual word in our period, but Adomnán (ninth abbot of Iona) uses it
several times in his own writing, and it is a precise Latin translation of his own name, which
can be understood to mean ‘little Adam’ or (since ‘adam is the Hebrew word for ‘man’)
‘little man’. This may be one of the few poems of our period which is ‘signed’ by its author.
Much of the religious writing from our period concerns not simply the believer’s union
with God, but his or her relationship with the saints. The earliest surviving Scottish poem
of this type was written in Gaelic at the end of the sixth century. The Amra Choluimb Cille
is a lament on the death of Colum Cille (Columba) attributed to a poet called Dallán
Forgaill. According to later medieval writers, the poem could protect those who recited it
faithfully, and bring them to the ‘bright kingdom’ through the prayers of Columba. This
should remind us of the much earlier tale of the brigands who were saved from death by
reciting a poem in honour of Columba.
The Amra, written shortly after Columba’s death, laments his loss, praises his virtues,
and entrusts the poet (and the reader) to the power of his prayers. (All the quotations from
this poem are from Thomas Owen Clancy’s translation for Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a
Celtic Monastery.) The language of loss and lament is powerful:
Ní uchtat óenmaige,
mór mairg, mór n-deilm.
Dífulaing riss ré as[-indet].
[. . .] Ar-don-bath ar n-airchend adlicen,
ar-don-bath ba ar fíadat foídlam.
(No slight sigh from one plain,/but great woe, great outcry./Unbearable the tale this verse
tells./ [. . .] He has died to us, who was our chief of the needy,/he has died to us, who was our
messenger of the Lord.)
The bulk of the poem is concerned with praising Columba and sorrowing over his death,
but it opens with a prayer for God’s protection:
Día, Día do-rrogus
ré tías in gnúis
culu tre néit.
Día nime, nim-reilge
i llurgu i n-égthïar
ar múichthe[o] méit.
Día már mo anacol
de múr teintide,
diudercc dér.
(God, God, may I beg of Him
before I go to face Him
through the chariots of battle.
God of heaven, may He not leave me
in the path where there’s screaming
from the weight of oppression.
Great God protect me
from the fiery wall,
the long trench of tears.)
 Saving Verse: Early Medieval Religious Poetry 97

Its closure expresses confidence in Columba’s saving power:

For-don-snáidfe Sïone.
Ro-dom-sibsea sech riaga.

(He will protect us in Sion./He will urge me past torments.)

The praise of the saint is, therefore, uttered between two pleas for the poet’s own salva-
tion. This is how native Gaelic poetry works: the poet praises the patron, and the patron
protects the poet or the reciter of the poem. Just as it worked in the secular world of kings
and warriors, so it worked in the religious sphere. But the poet seeks, even while adopting
the vocabulary and literary style of the native secular poet, to subvert the values of worldly
lordship. Columba is described in terms that would have been instantly recognisable to any
king or warlord: he was a chief (airchend), but a ‘chief of the needy’; he was a pillar (sab,
often used of heroes, champions and warriors), but a ‘pillar of learning’; he won battles
(catha gaelais), but ‘he won battles with gluttony’. In other words, the vocabulary of heroism
is adopted by the poet, but charged with new meanings so as to call into question the values
of the world of chiefs, of battle-victors and destroyers. Columba, the poet says, did a fair
amount of ‘destroying’ (coillid) like any hero, but:

Cuill a neóit [. . .]
Cuill deim de eót,
cuill deim de formut [. . .]
Cath sír so-ch –fir fiched fri coluain.

(He destroyed his meanness [. . .]/He destroyed the darkness of envy,/he destroyed the
darkness of jealousy [. . .]/He fought a long and noble battle against flesh.)

The poet uses the language of the warrior hero precisely to subvert the conventional
account of heroism in a society ruled by warriors.
Other aspects of native Irish culture and law are also woven into the picture of Columba.
For example, the legal concept of snádud, protection, has become important both here and
in other poems. Snádud is the power of a lord to protect a person who passes through his
territory. Here Dallán says of Columba, For-don-snáidfe Sione (‘he will protect us in Sion’).
Dallán portrays himself as a stranger in hostile territory (threatened by sin in this world
and judgement in the next) in need of the protection of a powerful lord.
Other poems in honour of Columba – to be found in Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic
Monastery – share the Amra’s subversive strategy. Beccán mac Luigdech’s poems praise the
saint in much the same way: he was a splendid ruler, a champion, a fort, a hero fighting
battles – but always the heroic language points us not to the virtues of the warlord, but to
the ways of the ascetic, the scholarly and charitable monk. He has ‘freed his monks from
wealth’, and therefore now has the power to protect his devout clients. Similar protection
by the saint is sought in the recitation of the so-called ‘Prayer of Adomnán’:

Ainm huí násadaig Néil,

ní súail snádud.

(The name of Niall’s famous descendant (Columba),/not small its protection.

[Thomas Owen Clancy’s translation])
98 Gilbert Márkus

The praise of Columba is a widespread and long-lasting current in Scottish poetry. In these
earlier examples, the protection he gives is personal, and the imagery of the poetry is sub-
versive of aspects of secular culture. In later poetry, Columba has been harnessed to a national
project. He is still a protector, but now the protector not just of the sick, the sinner and the
poor, but also of the entire Scottish nation. In the fourteenth-century liturgical manuscript,
the Inchcolm Antiphoner, there is an office of St Columba (complete with music). The hymn
calls him ‘our nation’s father’, while the Benedictus antiphon is even more explicit:

Te laudantem serva chorum

ab incursu anglicorum
et insultu emulorum.

(Save the choir which sings your praise/from the assaults of Englishmen/and from the taunts
of foes.
[Gilbert Márkus’s translation: The Triumph Tree])

Devotion to Columba was expressed in other poetic ways, too. One of the most original
of these was the poetry in which Columba’s voice is adopted by the poet. No longer is he
talking to Columba or about Columba; now he speaks as Columba. So a twelfth-century
poet speaks in the saint’s voice of his longing for an island:

Meallach liom bheith i n-ucht oiléin

ar beinn cairrge
go bhfaicinn ann ar a meince
féth na fairrge

(Delight I’d find in an island’s breast,/on a rock’s peak,/that there I might often gaze/at the
sea’s calm.
[T. O. Clancy’s translation: The Triumph Tree])

The poem is one of a genre of works idealising the hermit’s life, a life close to nature, a life
of beautiful simplicity – a little work, a bit of study, fishing, giving food to the poor. One
can imagine a cleric or monk in a busy monastery, surrounded by the pressures and disturb-
ances of community life, longing for the kind of simple life that he imagined Columba
living. This is poetry both as devotion to the saint and as the romantic yearning of a proto-
urban scholar to ‘get away from it all’.
Another poem written in the voice of St Columba has a very different purpose, and a
very different style. At a time when the Columban federation of monasteries was ruled by
the abbot of Derry, the rulers of Argyll and the Isles sought in 1164 to resurrect Iona as a
power-centre within their own territory. When that failed, they set up their own monastery
on Iona, independent of Derry, in 1203. It is in this context that a poet, clearly taking the
Derry-men’s side, writes in the voice of Columba, lamenting that, though God and the
Pope had given him rights over so many places, these foreigners would violate his rights:

Mo roilge, mo roiglés-sa
mo dingnadha, mo dúnadh,
mo shamudh, géin beö-sa,
lem ar cumairce an Dúilimh.
 Saving Verse: Early Medieval Religious Poetry 99

(My graveyards, my chapels,/my strongholds, my forts,/my congregation, while it lasts,/with

me under the Creator’s guard.
[Thomas Owen Clancy’s translation: The Triumph Tree])

The lament is interspersed with accusation and threat:

Muirfed-sa clann tShomairligh

eitir míl ocus duine [. . .]

(I will slay Clann Somhairlidh,/both beasts and men [. . .])

Somerled’s offspring, Clann Somhairlidh, included Raghnall, whose ambition had caused all
this trouble in the first place. Derry-men clearly saw Columba’s interests as coinciding with
theirs, and expected him to feel as they did about any violation of their rights or any chal-
lenge to their authority.
Turning from St Columba, we find Latin verse in honour of the Virgin Mary composed
in the early eighth century by Cú Chuimhne of Iona (d. 747). Its opening lines suggest its
mode of performance:

Cantemus in omne die

concinentes varie [. . .]
Bis per chorum, hinc et inde [. . .]

(Let us sing every day,/harmonising by turns [. . .]/in two fold chorus, from side to side [. . .]
[T. O. Clancy and Gilbert Márkus’s translation: Iona:
The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery.])

Mary’s praises are sung in a rich interplay of images, contrasting Eve and the tree in the
garden of Eden with Mary and the ‘tree’ of the cross; describing Mary as ‘amazing mother
[who] gave birth to her Father’, a common play on the complexities of the incarnation;
applying the Gospel parable of the pearl to Christ, as if she were his oyster; portraying her
weaving the seamless garment which he wore at his death, just as she wove in her own body
the flesh which was his ‘garment’ during his years on earth. This rich collage of images and
associations ends, as usual, with a plea for her prayers ‘that the flame of the dread fire be
not able to ensnare us’.
The thirteenth-century poet Muireadhach Albanach also wrote in praise of the Virgin,
likewise seeking her patronage. But where Cú Chuimhne wrote in Latin, Muireadhach
wrote in Gaelic; where Cú Chuimhne employed biblical and patristic imagery,
Muireadhach resorted to the native repertoire of the court-poet praising his patron – her
virtues, her hair, her teeth, breasts, belly and hands – in return for her protection:

A ÓghMhuire, a abhra dubh,

a mhórmhuine, a ghardha geal,
tug, a cheann báidhe na mban,
damh tar ceann mo náire neamh.

(Virgin Mary, black-browed one,/great thornbrake, brilliant garden,/give me, chief of

women’s love,/for my humbleness, heaven.
[T. O. Clancy’s translation: The Triumph Tree])
100 Gilbert Márkus

Three other saints should also be mentioned here, though their cults are less widespread
and less well represented in the surviving poetry. In the far north, a Latin hymn was written
by Norse-speakers in Orkney in honour of their martyred Earl Magnus (died c. 1115) (trans-
lated by Gilbert Márkus in The Triumph Tree). It is another piece for which both the words
and the music survive, following a strict rhythmic pattern. It also follows for the most part
a strict literary pattern, one common among such hymns: praise of the saint and how God
has given him or her grace to triumph over sin; accounts of the saint’s life and miracles; a
holy death; miracles worked after the saint’s death (usually at his or her tomb, where people
are healed of infirmities and so on); and finally a prayer for the saint’s help and protection.
In poetry of this sort, the local church acts as the poet’s patron, using his verse to promote
reverence for the saint. The church often promotes itself, also, by recounting miracles which
occur at the saint’s tomb, since a saint’s tomb which was a place of healing would attract pil-
grims to the Church.
A different pattern is seen in a twelfth-century Latin poem in honour of St Kentigern, the
patron of Glasgow (translated by Gilbert Márkus in The Triumph Tree). A cleric called
William describes a violent attack on the people of Glasgow by the army of Somerled, ‘King
of Argyll and the Isles’ as he is sometimes styled, in 1164. Bishop Herbert of Glasgow pro-
vokes St Kentigern’s intervention in this impending disaster by mocking the Scottish saints
and rebuking Kentigern in particular. The saint, of course, eventually leads the Glaswegians
to victory, helping them to slaughter Somerled and his army.
Interestingly, in neither the hymn to St Magnus nor the poem in praise of St Kentigern
is the saint’s tomb mentioned. Encouragement of pilgrimage was not in these cases part of
the poet’s purpose. But pilgrimage was certainly important in the case of St Nynia’s poet in
the later eighth century. Two Latin poems, the Miracles of St Nynia and the Hymn for St
Nynia (translated by Gilbert Márkus in The Triumph Tree), follow the pattern of demon-
strating the saint’s holiness and his performance of miracles in this life, and his continuing
miraculous power in heaven, now manifested at his tomb. Interestingly, in the Miracles all
the miracles he performs in his lifetime are associated with the defence of his church: from
a king who drives him out, from a false accusation of adultery against one of his priests,
from hunger and from theft. In the post-mortem miracles, however, the Church is not the
beneficiary of the miracles but their locus: the beneficiaries are the sick and the poor, pil-
grims to the saint’s shrine at Whithorn. Both Miracles and Hymn insist on the tomb, and
the Church in which it was placed, as the place of the saint’s healing power:

Christus adest semper, qui in sancto corpore patrat

omnia que poscunt non dubia mente fideles.

(Here Christ is always present. He, at this holy body, brings about/all things the faithful pray
for, unassailed by doubt.
[Gilbert Márkus’s translation: The Triumph Tree])

It is striking in this context to note how little reference there is, in the earlier poems in
honour of Columba, to miracles taking place at his grave or in the presence of his
relics. Only in the Amra is it suggested that his grave might be an attraction to pilgrims –
‘You find his grave good in its virtue, appointed for every trouble of weather’ – but
generally the saint’s patronage seems to be acquired through prayerful devotion,
and by recitation of the poetry in his honour. It is the recitation of a poem that saves
the wicked brigands in the story in the Life of Columba. It is almost as if the poem
 Saving Verse: Early Medieval Religious Poetry 101

itself has become a relic, an instrument of the saint’s continuing saving power among his
devotees.
The Miracles of St Nynia and the Hymn to St Nynia both emerge from an English-speaking
milieu in the south-west of Scotland, at a time when English rule had extended there from
Northumbria. They post-date by a few decades one of the loveliest poems of the period in
English, which can also claim in some sense to be a Scottish work: the Dream of the Rood.
Around ad 700, fragments of this poem were carved on a stone cross at Ruthwell in
Dumfrieshire, where it can still be seen.

Ondgeredæ hinæ god alme
ttig

þa he walde on galgu gistiga [. . .]

[Ahof] ic riicnæ kyningc

heafunæs hlafard. hælda ic ni dorstæ
bismæradu ungket men ba ætgadre ic wæs miþ blodi bistemid
bi[goten of þæs guman sida] [. . .]

miþ strelum giwundad

alegdun hiæ hinæ limwœrignæ gitoddun him æt his licæs heafdum
bihealdun hiæ þer [heafunæs dryctin . . .]

(God almighty stripped himself,/when he wished to climb the cross [. . .]//I held the great
King,/heaven’s Lord. I dared not bend./Men mocked us both together. I was slick with
blood/sprung from the Man’s side [. . .]//Wounded with spears,/they laid him, limb-weary. At
his body’s head they stood./There they looked to [heaven’s Lord . . .]
[T. O. Clancy’s translation: The Triumph Tree])

These verses seem to have been drawn from the much longer version of the poem to be
found translated by T. O. Clancy in The Triumph Tree. Through this poem, the reader iden-
tifies with the cross itself, which narrates much of the poem in the first person as in the
version cited above, although the poet’s voice also appears as that of a witness, as one
having a dream in which he sees and hears the cross:

Hwæt, ic swefna cyst segcan wille,

Hwæt me gemætte to midre nihte [. . .]
þuhte me þæt ic gesæwe seldlicre treo
on lyft lædan leohte bewunden.

(Listen! the best of dreams I will describe,/which I dreamed at midnight [. . .]/It seemed I
saw a splendid tree/soaring aloft, wound round with light.)

Much of the power of the poem resides in its imaginative juxtaposition of horror and
glory: the cross, which is an instrument of torture and cruel execution, is a glorious jew-
elled and golden tree, a ‘triumph tree,’ a ‘ruler’s tree’, ‘the Saviour’s tree’. Likewise, in both
versions, ‘God almighty stripped himself.’ Here the power lies in the contrast between what
one would ordinarily understand of ‘God almighty’ – power, lack of suffering, glory – with
the following story of a naked man, crucified and dying. This way of speaking was known
to church fathers as communicatio idiomatum, in which what was said of Christ as a man
102 Gilbert Márkus

could also be said of God, since Christ was God. It allows us to say ‘God suffered and died’,
since Christ is God, and what he does God does. This feature of Christian belief makes
such dramatic statements possible: ‘God almighty stripped himself.’
The Dream of the Rood uses this motif to create its effect, along with the shifting sense
of whose voice is talking – the cross itself, the poet-dreamer, and in the end perhaps any
Christian – to bring the reader or hearer to God:

[. . .] Is me nu lifes hyht
þæt ic þone sige-beam secan mote,
ana oftor þonne ealle menn
wel weorðian.
[. . .] and ic wene me
daga gehwelce hwonne me Dryhtnes rod,
þe ic her on eorðan ær sceawode,
on þissum lænan life gefecce

([. . .] Now my life’s hope/is that I might seek that triumph-tree/alone, more often than any
man,/and honour it well./[. . .] I hope for the time when the Lord’s cross/which I saw once
on this earth/will fetch me from this fleeting life.)

The narrative becomes a prayer; the verse about salvation becomes the verse which saves.

Further reading

Bernard, J. H. and R. Atkinson (1898), The Irish Liber Hymnorum, edited from the MSS. with
translations, notes and glossary, 2 vols, London: Henry Bradshaw Society.
Clancy, Thomas Owen and Gilbert Márkus (1995), Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic
Monastery, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Clancy, Thomas Owen (ed.) (1998), The Triumph Tree: Scotland’s Earliest Poetry, AD
550–1350, Edinburgh: Canongate.
Murphy, G. (1956), Early Irish Lyrics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, [reprinted Dublin
1998: Four Courts Press].
Sharpe, Richard (1995), Adomnán of Iona: Life of St Columba, London: Penguin.
Warren, F. E. (1987), The Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church, second edition with a new
introduction and bibliography by Jane Stevenson, Woodbridge: Bodyell.
 11

Hagiography
James E. Fraser

The celebration of a saint through devotional writing developed as a Christian literary phe-
nomenon in Late Antiquity as an extension of the traditional laudatio, a partisan eulogis-
tic biography inspired and shaped by pietas, the author’s sense of duty. The primary object
of the hagiographer’s pietas was not the saint, of course, but God. Hagiography sought to
venerate above all else his supreme power and majesty (made manifest through his having
worked his will through the saint) and benevolence (in having inspired and empowered
the saint to live a life of Christian goodness). Of course, the saint, whose life and achieve-
ment were the particular subjects of the work, had also roused the sense of duty of the
author. He had perhaps admired the saint in life or, much more commonly in medieval
Scotland, had become a posthumous admirer as a result of contact with the saint’s legacy
and cult. Hagiography’s status as a recognisable literary genre unto itself in the earlier
Middle Ages with its own particular rules was established by the seminal study of Hippolyte
Delehaye, Les Legendes hagiographiques. By the seventh and eighth centuries, when the ear-
liest surviving examples from northern Britain were composed, hagiography had long since
become internationally recognised and practised as a form of Christian devotional writing.
The student of such writing cannot but acknowledge the high degree of variability of
style and emphasis within even the comparatively thin hagiographical tradition from
northern Britain, as well as the close relationships often to be detected with other forms of
eulogistic and devotional writing that do not happen to focus upon saints as subjects.
Neither of northern Britain’s two best-known hagiographers from the early Middle Ages –
Adomnán of Iona and Bede of Wearmouth-Jarrow – was principally or exclusively so, and
their different styles reflect a range of different intellectual and cultural influences.
Nevertheless, by the seventh century, a loose set of informal compositional guidelines
for hagiographical writing in Latin had emerged through widespread appreciation and
emulation of a handful of key Late Antique hagiographical works. Like many other acts of
devotion, the production of hagiography tended to place great emphasis upon conformity
to such norms and models of practice, and there are therefore plenty of relatively unin-
ventive and derivative examples of the craft. Some hagiographers, including some who
wrote in northern Britain, exhibited more creativity and art in their work, but even at its
most original hagiographical writing remained largely dependent upon ‘the canon’ for its
form and flavour.
That national frontiers like those of (or, in the earlier Middle Ages, within) medieval
Scotland can be of much relevance in the study of a literary phenomenon that did not itself
respect them is open to serious question. Indeed, the very labelling of particular texts as
examples of ‘Scottish hagiography’ is rarely a straightforward proposition, even as regards
some of the country’s best-known examples, celebrating some of its most cherished saints.
104 James E. Fraser

After all, Aelred of Rievaulx, the twelfth-century writer of Vita Sancti Niniani (The Life of
St Ninian), the most recent edition of which is in Forbes’s Lives of S. Ninian and S. Kentigern,
was an English monk whose northern English monastery was a member of a French monas-
tic order. In much the same way, the eighth-century hagiographical poem Miracula Nynie
Episcopi (The Miracles of Bishop Nyniau), edited by Strecker in Monumenta Germanica
Historica [Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini IV] and best read in translation in Clancy’s The
Triumph Tree, was composed by an anonymous English Latinist, or perhaps by a cadre of
Latin learners. Similarly, neither Jocelin of Furness, author of the twelfth-century Vita
Sancti Kentegerni (The Life of St Kentigern), edited by Forbes in Lives of S. Ninian and
S. Kentigern, nor Turgot, if he was the author of the twelfth-century Vita Sanctae Margaretae
Scotorum Reginae (The Life of St Margaret, Queen of Scots), most recently edited in
Metcalfe’s Pinkerton’s Lives of the Scottish Saints and translated in Anderson’s Early Sources
of Scottish History, were natives of the Scottish kingdom. In the latter case, of course, not
even the saint herself was Scottish by birth.
Nevertheless, the saints Ninian, Kentigern and Margaret are commonly regarded as
‘Scottish’, so that these examples of hagiography can hardly be excluded from consider-
ation here, wherever, and by whomever, they may have been composed. At the same time,
given the origins of their authors, any of these texts might equally be regarded as ‘English’
hagiography. No easier to categorise is Adomnán’s great Vita Sancti Columbae (The Life of
St Columba), wonderfully edited and translated by the Andersons in Adomnán’s Life of
Columba and written on seventh-century Iona in what is now Scotland. St Columba is
perhaps the best known of all ‘Scottish’ saints, yet both the author and the saint were
natives of north-west Ireland, and Irish scholars have been quite content to regard this text
as one of the most important early examples of ‘Irish’ hagiography. Scholarly convention
seems to dictate that what makes a work of hagiography ‘Scottish’, even if it is not exclu-
sively so, is neither the origins (Scottish or otherwise) of the author, nor its place of com-
position, nor even the origins of the saint himself or herself. Rather, it is the significance
or relevance of that saint or that saint’s cult within medieval Scotland. It ought to be noted,
for interest’s sake, that, although several anonymous examples of hagiography exist – such
as Vita Sancti Seruani (edited by Macquarrie in The Innes Review no. 44) – whose prove-
nance seems to be Scottish, the obscure George Newton, sixteenth-century author of a lost
Vita Sancti Blani (The Life of St Blane), is, to this author’s knowledge, Scotland’s one and
only native medieval hagiographer whose name is known to us.
To consider a contrary example, although St Catroe of Metz was himself a native of
Scotland, it has not been usual for scholars to regard him as a ‘Scottish’ saint, seemingly
because this man’s achievement and subsequent cult were of no importance to medieval
Scots. Rather different, and more questionable, forces seem to have been at work, however,
in the cases of such Bernician saints as St Cuthbert and St Aebbe of Coldingham, who
have been almost universally regarded as ‘English’ saints. Perhaps we ought not to be sur-
prised that the ‘Englishness’ of these figures has proven more difficult to reconcile with
‘Scottishness’ than has the ‘Irishness’ of St Columba. As in the latter case, Scotland cannot
have an exclusive claim. Yet, the influence and relevance of the cults of these and other
Bernician saints to medieval Scots in those parts of the kingdom that had formerly been
encompassed by the early medieval kingdom of Bernicia (such as the Borders, Lothian,
Dumfries and Galloway) cannot be denied. Unless we are to formulate a different set of
criteria for Anglo-Saxons, in order to exclude them from consideration as ‘Scottish’ saints,
it would seem that some Bernician saints, and the hagiography surrounding them, are as
entitled to ‘Scottishness’ as Columba and other Gaelic saints. That some ‘Scottish’ saints
 Hagiography 105

have also been of interest to students of medieval Irish and English hagiography, fields of
study that have been particularly vibrant in recent years, can only be a boon and a much-
needed spur to Scottish hagiographical studies.
Scottish or not, the medieval hagiographer’s primary objective to inspire in their readers
something of their own degree of pietas towards God and saint can be misunderstood by
modern readers. It is a particular mistake to regard hagiography as seeking to prove a saint’s
sanctity to a sceptical medieval audience. The goal of the hagiographer was rarely, if ever,
to convince the incredulous, who were few and far between in the Middle Ages, but to
transform disinterested credulity into admiration, and even into partisan devotion. The
rewards that might come from cultivating such admiration and devotion could be many.
In the seventh century, for example, Adomnán framed his Lex Innocentium (Law of
Innocents) as an act of devotion towards St Columba, to whom (that is, to his monastery
Iona) the fines established by the law were to be paid. In the later Middle Ages, churches
found reverence for their saint to be a powerful aid in protecting their claims to property
and jurisdiction.
Like the vast majority of medieval writing, hagiography was composed by clerics for
clerics (and in particular by and for monks), and the principal purpose of most examples was
probably to inspire, edify and educate churchwomen and churchmen. Adomnán wrote
explicitly ‘in response to the entreaties of the brothers’, his fellow-monks of the Columban
community. Meanwhile, the anonymous twelfth-century hagiographer of the fragmentary
Vita et Miracula Sanctissimi Kentegerni (The Life and Miracles of the Most Holy Kentigern),
edited and translated by Forbes in Lives of S. Ninian and S. Kentigern, wrote in order to rouse
the clerics of Scotland from ‘slumbering in negligent sloth as regards reverence for its saints’.
On the other hand, Vita Sanctae Margaretae Scotorum Reginae was written for Queen
Margaret’s daughter Matilda, ‘the excellently honourable and honourably excellent queen
of the English’, that she ‘might have more fully a knowledge of her virtues’, and might, pre-
sumably, emulate them. There is nothing compelling in the evidence to suggest that indi-
vidual works of hagiography were particularly widely known in Scotland in their entirety,
and rather more suggestion that what most clerics knew about saints they learned in epit-
omised form in breviaria like the Breviarum Aberdonense. The importance of hagiography
in rousing popular enthusiasm and attracting pilgrims is, therefore, difficult to establish.
Similarly, how precisely a political position adopted in a work of hagiography might have
become tangible outside the cloister, whether to secular authorities or to the general popu-
lation, when it is highly unlikely that such audiences can have read the text for themselves,
is an intriguing question worthy of closer analysis.
The study of Scottish hagiography has been dominated by historians and other scholars
interested in reconstructing the Scottish past (see for example Alan Macquarrie’s The
Saints of Scotland, 1997). It remains a widespread and fundamental misconception that,
because (like any branch of eulogistic literature) hagiography commonly includes bio-
graphical detail about the saint, hagiography can in any useful sense be described as ‘biog-
raphy’ and treated as such by those eager to flesh out their historical knowledge. Medieval
hagiography is undoubtedly an important source of a range of information about the past,
and, in the particular case of earlier medieval Scotland, it forms one of the most crucial
bodies of textual evidence we have. The hagiographer’s objectives and methods were not
those of the biographer, however, and incautious or insensitive study of the relevant texts
can result in misrepresentations of the Scottish past. On the whole, the fact that
Scottish hagiographical studies have been dominated by scholars seeking to tunnel into
each surviving work, in order to mine it carefully of its perceived factual and biographical
106 James E. Fraser

information, has left the texts rather under-appreciated as works of literary and scholarly
achievement.
Fortunately, a growing number of scholars of insular hagiography are now prepared to
read medieval hagiography as their authors intended them to be read. For example,
Adomnán’s skills as a biblical scholar are only beginning to be appreciated, and the study
of how his scholarly background influenced his presentation of Columba’s story in Vita
Sancti Columbae is still in its infancy. The reputation of Stephan of Ripon, author of Vita
Sancti Wilfrithi (The Life of St Wilfrith), most recently edited by Colgrave, long suffered from
a perceived lack of historical reliability. Now, it is on the rise as a result of similar studies
sensitive to the scholarship he demonstrates. Jocelin of Furness, once similarly decried for
the unreliability of Vita Sancti Kentegerni, is particularly deserving of investigations of this
kind. The depths of individual hagiographers’ understanding of the genre, its possibilities
and its limitations, and their reasons for choosing particular approaches to the subject of
sanctity, for exploring certain themes rather than others, and for structuring their hagiog-
raphy in particular ways, are areas of interest yet to be seriously explored by students of
Scottish hagiography. There is a great deal more to understanding the phenomenon of
authorship than assessing a writer’s capacity and willingness to relate reliable historical
information. The closer we come to evaluating each work on its author’s own terms, the
more shrewd will become our appreciation of the total achievement that each represents.
There seem to have been two periods in particular during which a great deal of hagio-
graphical writing was undertaken in northern Britain. The first of these was a generation
or so to either side of the year 700, and has yet to be satisfactorily explained. The second
was the twelfth century, a period of remarkable flux within the ecclesiastical personnel of
Scotland, when reformist hagiographers seem to have made studies of the fruits of the
earlier period of hagiography as part of their general assessment of the Scottish Church.
Although they purport to describe events of earlier – sometimes much earlier – times, those
who composed hagiographs in northern Britain reveal much more about these two
periods of intensive hagiographical activity than about the times in which their works are
set. The point is well and widely known, but has been insufficiently explored in Scottish
hagiographical studies in the century since Delehaye made and established it as an aspect
of hagiography. Here too, however, the tide may be turning, if recent developments in the
study of the ‘dossiers’ of St Ninian of Whithorn and St Fillan of Strathfillan may be
regarded as an example of a growing trend. Inevitably, the fruits of such an approach to
hagiography can prove to be rather unsettling to traditional, even cherished, ideas
about Scotland’s saints. There is surely more upset to come as this rather different approach
to the ‘historical reliability’ of hagiographical writing becomes the norm in analysing
other dossiers.
The working of God’s will through a saint is normally presented in medieval hagiography
in terms of miracles. The occurrence of such wonders was eventually, of course, to become
fundamental to the official canonisation process. Yet, as a device in earlier medieval
hagiography, the miracle story tends to provide evidence of the quality or enormity of the
saint’s efficacy, rather than proof of sanctity itself (which the writer simply takes as given).
By portraying St Columba’s tense encounter with a Pictish king in a manner that recalls
to mind a similar episode in Muirchú’s recent Vita Sancti Patricii (The Life of St Patrick), and
elsewhere in Vita Sancti Columbae explicitly comparing a Columban miracle to one per-
formed by St Germanus of Auxerre, Adomnán sought to convince the reader that
Columba was no ordinary saint, but one who counted some of the greatest saints on hagio-
graphical record as his colleagues. Such a device reveals not only Adomnán’s own wide
 Hagiography 107

reading within the hagiographical genre, but also that of his anticipated audience. By
drawing his work to a close with a succession of posthumous miracles made manifest in the
presence of English visitors to the tomb of St Nyniau (‘Ninian’) at Whithorn, the unknown
eighth-century hagiographer whose work underlies Miracula Nynie Episcopi intended to
demonstrate that, despite being a local Briton in origin, this saint could be relied upon to
provide efficacious support for the Bernicians who had recently taken control of the Solway
firthlands. So, his cult was worthy of the conquerors’ patronage. Stephan of Ripon
employed miracle stories of a different sort in Vita Sancti Wilfrithi in order to portray the
controversial St Wilfrith (Wilfrid) as a recipient of divine providence, and so absolve him
of such charges as having fathered a child and having been a danger to the Bernician king
Ecgfrith. Similarly, Jocelin of Furness, in recognising that St Kentigern was an interloper
in the see, relied upon miracle stories in order to make clear in Vita Sancti Kentegerni that
it had been God’s will that the saint should come to Glasgow and become the focus of its
dominant cult.
For all their demonstrative and argumentative potential, however, miracle stories were
principally celebrations of God’s love as made manifest through wonders that were
regarded as real events, and celebrations too of the majesty and mystery – and the tangi-
bility – of divine power. Biblical scholars received intensive training in appreciating the
layered meanings of scripture and devotional writing, and using this training to interpret
the layered meanings of real events (like miracles) that could easily be imbued with both
worldly and spiritual significance. Hagiography thus provided a forum for both writers and
audiences to exercise their scholarly skills.
The miracle might also be used by the hagiographer to marry a saint to a landscape or
place, or indeed to what Ó Riain has called ‘the saint’s notional itinerary’. This might be
done by composing a narrative in which episodes of the saint’s life are played out at loca-
tions that, by the time of composition, had become regarded as having associations with
the saint. Vita Sancti Kentegerni, Vita Sancti Seruani and the lost Dunblane Vita upon which
George Newton based his Vita Sancti Blani provide examples of this phenomenon in oper-
ation. Faced with dedications to St Kentigern at various churches between Glasgow and
north Wales, Jocelin deduced that the saint had visited these places in life and described
his career accordingly. A similar treatment of places into which the saint’s cult would
seem to have moved, as if the saint himself had done so, would seem to have occurred in
the dossier of St Blane at Dunblane, to judge from a reference made by Walter Bower’s
Scotichronicon. The anonymous hagiographer of Vita Sancti Seruani was less artful, and
produced a ‘notional itinerary’ that reads like little more than a list of places. This phe-
nomenon may also be detected in the hagiography of the earlier part of our period. There
are hints of something similar in the eighth-century Miracula Nynie Episcopi, and it is even
possible to suspect Adomnán of shaping the Columban dossier according to a ‘notional
itinerary’ and placing episodes of the saint’s life in locations that Columba had never
himself visited.
Surviving examples of Scottish hagiography before the fourteenth century are so few that
the value of comparative studies in establishing useful general conclusions about the genre as
it was practised in Scotland in any period is open to question. We can only guess at how rep-
resentative a sample is left to us. The various offices in commemoration of native saints in the
extant medieval breviaria, derived from medieval hagiography that, for the most part, has not
itself survived, are perhaps the best-known and most tantalising indications of just what has
been lost to us. While students of early Irish hagiography have been able to explore miracle
stories in a number of profitable ways, the methodologies involved in such analyses may not
108 James E. Fraser

be appropriate for the study of the less abundant Scottish evidence. It is a consequence of this
problem that Scottish hagiography, like other forms of earlier medieval Scottish literary
activity, tends to be studied with much recourse to comparative evidence from other places.
Given the difficulties already mentioned surrounding how ‘Scottish’ any particular hagio-
graph may be, this particular scholarly trend is probably to be encouraged in most cases.
If the example of Adomnán’s Vita Sancti Columbae is anything to go by, the production
of modern and accessible critical editions of other examples of medieval Scottish hagiog-
raphy is very much needed. It ought to serve as an impetus to the different kinds of study
discussed above. At present, no other Scottish text comes close to rivalling this one in
terms of accessibility in translation and up-to-date critical and textual analysis. Leaving
aside examples of Northumbrian hagiography, only Macquarrie’s useful edition and trans-
lation of Vita Sancti Seruani deserves to sit alongside Vita Columbae as a text whose Latin
has been examined critically according to recent editorial standards and made available
alongside a translation, although it is nothing like as accessible to the non-specialist. It is
to be hoped, therefore, that the publication of thorough editions and accompanying trans-
lations of a previously unknown work of hagiography pertaining to St Margaret, Miracula
Sancte Margarete Scotorum Regine (The Miracles of St Margaret, Queen of Scots), alongside
Vita et Miracula Sancte Ebbe Virginis (The Life and Miracles of St Aebbe the Virgin) by Robert
Bartlett in his The Miracles of St Æbbe of Coldingham and St Margaret of Scotland is a sign
of things to come in Scottish hagiographical studies. Accessible English translations of Vita
Sancti Niniani and the anonymous Miracula Nynie Episcopi were published in the 1990s, but
the Latin text of the former, along with Vita Sancti Kentegerni and the anonymous Vita et
Miracula Sanctissimi Kentegerni, was last edited in 1874. All three texts are in need of the
detailed critical examination of a modern editor.
Despite the fact that most of the relevant texts have been pored over meticulously by
generations of scholars, in many ways the study of Scottish hagiography is still in its
infancy. As we become less infatuated with picking hagiographs apart in search of tidbits
of historical fact, the field moves into a promising adolescence in which these texts and the
writers who produced them are being allowed to come into their own. It remains the case
that hagiography can be a treasure trove of different kinds of useful historical data, and that
it must continue to be pillaged of this data by those who are interested in it. Hagiographical
literature is, however, also – and largely – instructive of a great many other aspects of
Scottish medieval cultural history, as its students are increasingly coming to appreciate.

[Editions and translations of most texts mentioned can be located through M. Lapidge and
R. Sharpe (1985), A Bibliography of Celtic–Latin Literature, 400–1200, Dublin: Royal Irish
Academy]

Further reading

Foley, W. T. (1992), Images of Sanctity in Eddius Stephanus’ ‘Life of Bishop Wilfrid’: An Early
English Saint’s Life, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen.
Gardner, R. (1998), ‘ “Something Contrary to Sound Doctrine and to Catholic Faith”:
A New Look at the Herbertian Fragment of the Life of St Kentigern’, The Innes
Review 49: 115–26.
Macquarrie, A. (1997), The Saints of Scotland: Essays in Scottish Church History, AD
450–1093, Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers.
 Hagiography 109

Ó Riain, P. (1982), ‘Towards a Methodology in Early Irish Hagiography’, Peritia 1: 146–59.

Picard, J.-M. (1985), ‘Structural Patterns in Early Hiberno-Latin Hagiography’, Peritia
4: 67–82.
Stancliffe, C. (1992), ‘The Miracle Stories in Seventh-Century Irish Saints’ Lives’, in
J. Fontaine and J. N. Hillgarth (eds), Le Septième Siècle: changements et continuitiés,
London: Warburg Institute, pp. 87–115.
 12

Adomnán of Iona and his Prose

Writings
Clare Stancliffe

Adomnán, abbot of Iona from 679 to 704, was a versatile man. He headed the Columban
family of monasteries at a testing time, used his influence to repatriate Irish hostages seized
by a Northumbrian king, and promoted a law exempting non-combatants from violence.
He was also, however, a scholar and the author of two surviving works written in Latin: De
Locis Sanctis (On the Holy Places, edited by D. Meehan in 1958) and the Vita Sancti
Columbae (Life of St Columba, the best edition of which is by A. O. and M. O. Anderson:
Adomnán’s Life of Columba, 1961).
The former professes to be an account of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and other places
in the eastern Mediterranean made by a Gallic bishop named Arculf, who narrated his
experiences to Adomnán. In fact, Adomnán did considerably more than write up the notes
that he took of what Arculf had seen. Not only did he question Arculf carefully about
things that particularly interested him, such as the Holy Sepulchre; modern scholarship
has also revealed that he added a considerable amount of information from books available
to him, particularly from various writings by Jerome. Adomnán thus produced an informa-
tive work which is not a mere travelogue, but which also served as a handbook to monu-
ments and to sites of important events mentioned in the Bible – even, in some cases,
clarifying the meaning of certain biblical passages. His book fulfilled a need and was widely
diffused in the Middle Ages.
Today, however, Adomnán’s Life of St Columba is widely recognised as his major literary
achievement. Such a positive evaluation may surprise those who set out to read this work
for the first time, assuming that it will be a life as they understand that term: a biography.
Once they have penetrated beyond the prefaces and opening chapter to the Life proper,
they encounter a story about an Irishman contemplating becoming one of Columba’s
monks – only to discover that Columba has just died! Readers thus find their most basic
assumptions about the writing of a life have been overthrown: there is no attempt to
present Columba’s life as an unfolding chronological sequence of events from cradle to
grave – although Adomnán does at least end with Columba’s death. Readers who persist
soon discover a second fact: Adomnán has chosen to select and tell only miraculous inci-
dents in Columba’s life. Thus, far from finding that their reading brings them greater under-
standing of the historical Columba, modern readers may feel that Columba is receding from
their grasp, veiled by a supernatural aura.
Both stumbling blocks arise from the misconception in readers’ minds that they are
going to find something approximating to a biography of Columba. Adomnán’s Life of St
Columba, however, is not a biographical, but a hagiographical work. It is concerned to
 Adomnán of Iona and his Prose Writings 111

reveal Columba as a holy man or ‘saint’, and miracles were regarded as the best way of
achieving this objective. As for the lack of attention to chronology, Adomnán was fully
aware of this; but, as modern novels like Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger remind us, chrono-
logy is a linear structure that we impose on to the kaleidoscope of events. It is not how we
remember the incidents in our own lives, nor how we get to know the lives of most people
whom we meet; and it is not the only way of presenting the key events of some one’s life.
In addition, we should bear in mind that Adomnán, like other Irish hagiographers of his
time, appears to have had no conception of the development of someone’s personality over
the course of time. The emphasis rather goes on Columba and other saints being pred-
estined by God for a life of sanctity, right from birth. This renders a chronological account
far less obvious than it is for us.
In the first preface, Adomnán declares his intention of ‘describ[ing], with Christ’s help,
the life of our blessed patron’ in response to the requests of his monks. He skilfully adapts
sentences from the Life of St Martin, an established masterpiece of hagiography, to remind
his readers that the kingdom of God depends on faith rather than eloquence, so leading on
to the point that readers should not be put off by the numerous Irish proper names in his
narrative: a strong hint that his audience might include not just Irish speakers, but those
further afield. The second preface follows, introduced by the opening words of Gregory the
Great’s Life of St Benedict. Adomnán dwells on the significance of Columba’s name, which
in Latin betokens a dove, the symbol of the Holy Spirit; and he mentions a prophecy about
Columba from one of Patrick’s disciples – perhaps a hint that even Armagh should recog-
nise Columba’s status. He then sets out his arrangement of the Life into three books, the
first containing prophetic revelations, the second, miracles, and the third, appearances of
angels and heavenly light. Before embarking on these, he summarises the essentials of
Columba’s life and character in a few sentences. He details his noble ancestry; then how
‘in the second year following the battle of Cúl Drebene, when he was forty-one, Columba
sailed away from Ireland to Britain, choosing to be a pilgrim for Christ’. That is literally all
we are given on Columba’s life. For his character, Adomnán echoes the words of the Acts
of St Sylvester to tell how, ‘though placed on earth, he showed himself fit for the life of
heaven’. Throughout his thirty-four years as ‘an island soldier’, he gave himself to prayer,
reading, writing, or some other work, while he fasted and kept vigils:

And with all this he was loving to everyone, his holy face ever showed gladness, and he was
happy in his inmost heart with the joy of the Holy Spirit.

These two prefaces, coupled with the three-book arrangement of the Life, make two
things crystal clear. First, Adomnán was an intelligent and highly focused writer. His
summary of the salient historical facts about Columba is a model of selection and com-
pression, albeit startling in its omissions: not even his foundation of the monastery on Iona
is included. However, Adomnán conceived of his task as being not to give a full account
of Columba’s life or character, but rather to focus on his miracles. In this, he was following
the example of earlier hagiographers, particularly Pope Gregory the Great and an Irish
writer, Cogitosus. Gregory, in his second Dialogue (which comprises a Life of St Benedict),
had referred readers elsewhere for more information on Benedict’s ‘life and character’, and
himself focused just on Benedict’s miracles. Gregory, after detailing Benedict’s earlier life
and foundation of a monastery on Monte Cassino, had also grouped his miracles by type:
temptations by the devil, prophecies, miracles, leading finally to three spiritual visions. The
influence on Adomnán’s structuring of the Life of St Columba is clear.
112 Clare Stancliffe

As regards Cogitosus, the latter had produced a Life of St Brigit of Kildare some years
before Adomnán wrote. Its influence on Adomnán is reflected not simply in verbal bor-
rowings, but more importantly in the structure of the two Lives. For Cogitosus, like
Adomnán, had put the salient historical facts into his preface, while the thirty-two
chapters of the Life that follows narrate a series of miracle stories. True, Cogitosus’s Life in
Chapters 1 and 2 does begin with Brigit’s birth, an early miracle, and her veiling as a virgin;
and, like Adomnán’s Life of Columba, it ends in her death. But, whereas earlier continen-
tal Lives, including those of Martin and Benedict, had begun with several chapters on the
early lives of their heroes, so that at least the first third of these Lives was told in chrono-
logical sequence, Cogitosus has compressed this chronological section into a tiny propor-
tion of the Life as a whole – a development that Adomnán took to its logical conclusion.
What mattered to him, then, was not the chronological setting of Columba’s life, but rather
his presentation of Columba as a saint, elaborated in his three-book structure: as a prophet,
a worker of miracles and as a citizen of heaven, honoured by angelic visitations.
A second point to emerge from a detailed study of Adomnán’s two prefaces is his aware-
ness of the major landmarks of continental hagiography, and his deliberate decision to place
his Life of Columba in that tradition. The very use of two prefaces is copied from Sulpicius
Severus’s Life of St Martin. But more than this, we should note Adomnán’s echoing of the
words of this Life, of Athanasius’s Life of St Antony, Gregory’s Dialogues, together with the
Acts of Sylvester and Cogitosus’s Life of St Brigit. This is not because he was unable to con-
struct his own sentences in Latin, a foreign language. Rather, he is signalling that Columba
was a saint of the universal Church in just the same mould as the revered saints Antony,
Martin and Benedict. All hagiographers sought to present their heroes as authentic holy men
by stressing their likeness to biblical models: to Christ, to the Old Testament prophets, to
the apostles of the New Testament, and often also to martyrs and to other widely accepted
saints like the monks of Egypt and the monk-bishop of Tours, St Martin. Adomnán, however,
had a particular reason to do so. The Easter controversy had raised questions over the holi-
ness of Columba, particularly at the Synod of Whitby in Northumbria (664). Now, Irish
scholars who favoured the Roman Easter often signalled their allegiance through their zeal
in citing Catholic authors, Pope Gregory the Great foremost among them. Adomnán places
himself in this tradition. Alongside the lives of the two pre-eminent saints of the fourth
century he cites the Acts of Sylvester, the pope who was traditionally held to have baptised
Constantine the Great, and the Dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great, as well as the pro-
Roman Irish author Cogitosus. His particular parallels with Gregory’s Life of Benedict may
also owe something to the fact that the foremost apologist of the Roman Easter at the Synod
of Whitby had prided himself on introducing the Rule of St Benedict to Northumbria.
Adomnán’s subtle apologia for Columba is particularly striking in Book II, Ch. 32, where
he narrates the story of how Columba converted a Pictish family, only to find the son of
the head of the household falling sick and dying just a few days later. Columba returned to
the house, excluded the crowds outside, and knelt and prayed to God. Then he rose and
addressed the dead child, ‘In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ be restored to life, and stand
on your feet.’ At these words the boy revived, and the ‘apostolic man’ took his hand and
led him outside where the crowd’s mourning was turned to joy, and ‘the God of the
Christians was glorified’. Adomnán then continues:

One must recognise that in this miracle of saintly power our Columba is seen to share with
the prophets Elijah and Elisha and with the apostles Peter and Paul and John the rare dis-
tinction of raising the dead to life; and that he, a prophetic and apostolic man, belongs to both
 Adomnán of Iona and his Prose Writings 113

companies, that is of the prophets and apostles, and has an honoured seat in the heavenly
homeland, with Christ [. . .]

Adomnán’s proclamation that Columba should rank with the prophets and apostles
because of his resurrection miracle owes much to earlier Christian tradition, particularly
that concerning St Martin. Martin had gained the reputation of being ‘apostolic’ after a
first resurrection miracle, while a later resurrection – performed, like Columba’s, to vindi-
cate Christianity in the eyes of a pagan crowd – was acclaimed (see Sulpicius Severus,
Dialogues II) as demonstrating his likeness to the apostles and prophets.
The argument, advanced by Picard, that Adomnán evoked the comparison to the
prophets and apostles to counter Northumbrian slurs on Columba’s sanctity is convincing.
But this passage also suggests a relationship to Adomnán’s structure of the Life as a whole.
In effect, Book I portrays Columba as a prophet; and Book II portrays him as performing
the sort of miracles that Jesus and the apostles wrought. It begins, aptly, with a miracle of
Columba turning water into wine, where the parallel to Jesus’s first miracle at Cana is
explicitly noted. As for Book III, this focuses on miracles which show that Columba had
attained such purity of heart that he was already a fellow-citizen of the angels, like the
desert Fathers whose lives were regarded as paradigmatic for later monks. Most telling of
all is the story told in III, where for three days and nights Columba was illumined by the
Holy Spirit, and heard spiritual songs and saw heavenly mysteries which lie beyond all
mortal knowledge. Then, obscure parts of the Bible became clearer than day ‘to the eyes
of his most pure heart’. Adomnán is here echoing the words that Cassian had used for those
Fathers of Egypt who had penetrated to the heart of the divine mysteries through the illu-
mination of the Holy Spirit. This discreet use of Cassian is important. For Cassian, while
acknowledging the miracles wrought by the desert Fathers, insisted that they were un-
important in themselves. What mattered was the purity of heart attained by these ascetics;
their freeing themselves from all the sins that normally come between us and God. Thus,
Adomnán’s tripartite presentation begins with the more public face of Columba as prophet
and miracle-worker; and then turns to the innermost quality of his life, his purity of heart
and illumination by the Holy Spirit, which is both the source of his miraculous and
prophetic powers, and also the only thing about Columba that is of ultimate importance.
The Life of St Columba is thus a subtle, complex work. It was written for a variety of
reasons. For the monks of Iona, it celebrated the life of their founder while also demon-
strating that their abbot, Adomnán, remained a whole-hearted exponent of their founder’s
greatness despite his conversion to a different Easter. At the same time, it can be seen as
addressed not just to a ‘Scottish’ audience, but also to a Northumbrian audience, who are
reminded of the origins of their own Church and the outstanding sanctity of Columba –
and to an Irish audience, who are shown Columba as active in Ireland, and, perhaps, are
tactfully reminded in the Second Preface that Iona should rank on a par with the foremost
churches of the Irish mainland. And yet, all this is done in an eirenic spirit. Adomnán had
grasped that outflowing charity for all lies at the heart of the Christian Gospel, and this
contributes to the perennial appeal of his work.
The Life was also composed with the potential for being read both at a deeper, theologi-
cal level as well as at the obvious surface level. We have already examined the structure of
the Life from this viewpoint, and the remarkable final chapter can itself be interpreted to
reveal underlying depths of meaning, as has been explored by Jennifer O’Reilly among
others. At the same time, the Life can be read at the obvious level as a tripartite collection
of some 140 stories which, taken together, convey to the reader a feel for Columba the
114 Clare Stancliffe

person as well as providing many insights into his life and into monastic life on Iona.
Although there is no connecting narrative thread running through the Life, each story is
well told in its own terms. We see Columba prophesying the presence of a great whale
between Iona and Tiree, and the different reactions of the captains of two boats that
encounter it; or praying for a husband and wife where the latter had a physical aversion to
her husband and wanted the marriage ended. There is the story of Columba not taking his
eyes from the book he was copying when he blessed an implement presented to him, only
to find that he had blessed a tool intended to butcher cattle. His reaction was to pray that
the knife would hurt neither humans nor domestic animals. What we cannot know with
certainty is how close the Columba revealed in these stories is to the historical Columba,
or how far Adomnán has shaped the material so that it reflects his own Christian ideals.
Certainly, we can see signs of Adomnán’s preoccupations in those chapters showing
Columba playing a role in the selection of kings for Dál Riata, and in one where an inno-
cent girl is slaughtered while attempting to shelter in the folds of the clothing of a church-
man who is powerless to protect her.
The long final chapter provides a fitting climax for the work. The narrative builds from
Columba’s prediction that he would soon ‘depart to Christ’, through his leave-taking of the
island, and the moving scene where the white horse, knowing that its master would soon
depart, comes to mourn and is treated with understanding by the saint. The monastery is
blessed, and Columba continues to copy a psalter till he can do no more, ending at the verse,
‘But they who seek the Lord shall not want for anything that is good’. The rest is handed
over to his successor. Then comes Columba’s parting speech to his monks, enjoining charity
with peace; and after that Columba running to the Church for the midnight office and the
dark church lit up by angelic light around him. When the monks enter, the building is dark,
and they see Columba dying before the altar. But their sorrow is juxtaposed with Columba’s
joy at his passing over to his heavenly fatherland, and his vision of angels. Visions seen else-
where of Columba’s passing confirm Columba’s sanctity, and Adomnán ends by acclaiming
him as now added to the fathers, in the company of the apostles and prophets.
This is masterly hagiography. Yet, unlike most saints’ Lives, parts of it still have an extra-
ordinary compelling power. Adomnán has written a classic which has led many to look
back to Columba as an inspiration, and which continues to engage those who take the
trouble to engage with it.

Further reading

Charles-Edwards, T. M. (1993), ‘The New Edition of Adomnán’s Life of Columba’,

Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 26: 65–73.
Herbert, Máire (1988), Iona, Kells and Derry, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
O’Reilly, Jennifer (1997), ‘Reading the Scriptures in the Life of Columba’, in Cormac
Bourke (ed.), Studies in the Cult of Saint Columba, Dublin: Four Courts Press,
pp. 80–106.
Picard, Jean-Michel (1982), ‘The Purpose of Adomnán’s Vita Columbae’, Peritia 1: 160–77.
Picard, Jean-Michel (1985), ‘Structural Patterns in Early Hiberno-Latin Hagiography’,
Peritia 4: 67–82.
Sharpe, Richard, trans. (1995), Adomnán of Iona: Life of St Columba, London: Penguin
Books Ltd.
 13

Theology, Philosophy and

Cosmography
Thomas O’Loughlin

It is a common practice for historians dealing with the early medieval period, especially in
the insular region, to begin by lamenting the paucity of their materials either because cat-
egories of documents are inapplicable in the period or region, or because the evidence has
not survived the ravages of time. Both reasons for a poverty of material apply to scholastic
texts from Scotland in the period of almost a thousand years between c. 550 and 1314.
However, the historian of religious and philosophical ideas faces some additional difficul-
ties related to the very nature of the ideas in question and how they were expressed within
western Christian societies in the Middle Ages.
First, the disciplines that we know today as theology and philosophy are the product of
the rise of university faculty divisions in the thirteenth century. With these divisions arose
a very clear perception among their respective practitioners as regards the extent of their
disciplines, their modes of discourse and an understanding (usually unexpressed) of how
these academic activities related to the life of society at large. Using this thirteenth-century
paradigm of these disciplines, there is only one writer who could be considered under the
headings of theologian or philosopher, John Duns Scotus (c. 1265–1308), and his works
would constitute the only body of evidence. Neither discipline, however, claimed in the
Middle Ages that it began with the universities. Both disciplines cited a long tradition of
texts as their sources, many of which we today might not so readily recognise as ‘theology’
or their authors as falling within the category of ‘theologian’. In this case, Scotland sup-
plies a fine example of modern prejudice in the case of the work De Locis Sanctis (On the
Holy Places) of Adomnán of Iona (edited by D. Meehan in 1958). Usually today seen as
within the religious sub-category of travel literature, the De Locis Sanctis was used until the
Renaissance as a work of theology supplying information on some very specific problems
of scriptural exegesis. Its author was famed not for being an abbot or significant figure in
insular affairs, but as a theological writer.
While the notion that theology or philosophy only came into existence with the rise of
the formal academic disciplines in the thirteenth century might seem a fairly crude form
of historical understanding, we should not underestimate its prevalence. In the minds of
many writers there is an informal canon of writers who merit the label of ‘theologian’ which
often jumps from around the time of Augustine of Hippo (354–430) to Anselm of
Canterbury (c. 1033–1109). If there was anyone of significance in the interval, he can only
merit inclusion as either a ‘special case’ or a lonely exception. An example of a special case
is Bede (c. 673–735). He is often included in anglophone works due to his fame as the
author of the Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum, due to the sheer size of his output, or
116 Thomas O’Loughlin

because his death has been used as a boundary between ‘patristic’ and ‘medieval’ authors
in some bibliographies. Johannes Scottus Eriugena (c. 810–?870/80) is an example of ‘the
peak in the plain’ explanation: in a desolate time, there was just one ‘thinker’ worthy of
the name, who is then studied in isolation from the canonical agenda of the historians.
Among historians of philosophy, the situation is even more extreme. In works that are
‘medieval friendly’, there is often a hiatus between Boethius (480–525) and Anselm.
Among those historians who despise the Middle Ages as containing merely theologians
acting in philosophical mode, there is often a gap between Plotinus (c. 205–70) and
Descartes (1596–1650), with necessary footnotes to Anselm, perceived as the originator of
the ‘ontological argument’, and William of Ockham (c. 1285–1347). This perception, that
there was a time when there was little theology, also has been at the root of many of the
romantic myths about the so-called ‘Celtic past’. Ernest Renan (1823–92) initiated
the contrast between the urban continental scholars with their subtle distinctions and the
rugged monks of the windswept wild Atlantic coasts with their clear religious vision. This
notion has found many adherents in recent decades, where advocates of ‘Celtic
Christianity’ believe one of the characteristics of their movement is that it can be free of
formal theology – a freedom that they believe is modelled for them by their ancient reli-
gious heroes in places like Iona.
How, then, should the investigation of theology and philosophy in the period proceed?
The first step is to note a difference between the investigation of the history of the two dis-
ciplines. If we assume that human beings are going to reflect on their lives, existence and
the great paradoxes that confront humanity, then to say that there was no philosophy is to
restrict the use of the term to a select group of academics. However, this pursuit may take
place within a complex mythology, social rituals and within a religious tradition. It is part
of the identity of ‘philosophy’ as such that it examines those questions in abstraction from
the context in which they arose. In this sense, a history of philosophy will always be a more
restricted endeavour than a history of human thought or the history of a particular culture.
Therefore, a tale or a poem may reflect on the problem of evil or the contingency of human
life, and might even be cited by a philosopher as evidence within an argument. Yet, it
would be inappropriate to subordinate the study of the poem to what stood duty for phil-
osophy at a particular moment. It follows from this that the history of philosophy in any
specific region in the Middle Ages – prior to the foundation of a formal school there – is
the extent to which the standard works were being read there and being absorbed as the
canonical curriculum, for example, in logic, and were for the most part transmitted without
controversial developments. What developments did take place were simply integrated
within the growing stream of the tradition. While we might long to demonstrate this by
noting extant copies of textbooks, teachers’ notes, or telltale references by students, we
should recall the maxim that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In this field
of intellectual endeavour, the Latin west functioned as a single area. The proof that any
particular region was no less involved than another is that students from that region were
not noticeably disadvantaged when they reached continental centres where we know from
positive evidence that scholars were engaging in philosophical enquiries.
The situation is rather different when it comes to theology for not only were there
specifically local needs – every community needs some liturgical books, every monastic
house needed a rudimentary library – but there were specific regional needs such as local
calendars and histories, usually in the form of hagiography. There was a large-scale religious
culture that was the common property of the Latin west, for example, a monastery anywhere
in the west without access to the works of John Cassian (c. 360–435) is inconceivable.
 Theology, Philosophy and Cosmography 117

There were also, however, more particular religious cultures that naturally seem distinct
because of shared local conditions. Moreover, many of those who had been formally trained
in what we call ‘theology’, even when they did not write scholastic textbooks, displayed and
developed their theological learning in whatever religious books they did write. At the same
time, theological speculation was never so prescribed in its forms as the pursuit of philoso-
phy, so it is as meaningful to speak of a book of sermons as a book of theology as a formal
textbook on doctrine. Hence, when we investigate the history of theology in the medieval
world, outside the universities, we have to assume that many works we would not classify as
‘theology’ were intended as such by their authors, while virtually every religious work con-
tains an implicit theology which we can uncover.
This task is, nevertheless, still in its infancy for the whole of the insular region. So, while
we might think of a saint’s life, for example, as evidence for the history of a particular cult
(which it is) from which we might be able to infer the extent of a monastery’s influence at
a certain moment (which we often can), we can also see it as the product of someone who
had some sort of formal training in theology. Their work, the vita, will almost certainly
contain a theology of grace, inspiration, the sacraments and an eschatology, and very prob-
ably a theology of creation, sin, a soteriology and an ecclesiology. With a little careful
reading, the author’s approach to christology and the history of salvation can be teased out
from the way that scriptural texts are cited and comparisons made within the text to the
Old Testament figures, Jesus, the apostles, or other saints. This is an approach to the history
of theology that is still barely known in relation to the literary products of the insular world.
There, these texts are primarily studied in history or language departments, and few who
study theology have the necessary historical or linguistic skills. Yet, it should be noted that
some of the most interesting work using this approach has focused on the literary products
of Iona in the seventh century. Until we have such studies – of every religious document
even so jejune in discursive content as a calendar or a martyrology – any sketch of the
history of theology is preliminary and dependent on what happens to have been done. In
the case of medieval Scottish theology, the maxim must be that absence of scholarship is
not to be equated with absence of evidence.

Adomnán, abbot of Iona (c. 627/8–704)

Adomnán (Adamnanus) became the ninth abbot of Iona in 679 as is discussed by Clare
Stancliffe in Chapter 12. Today he is remembered for his Vita Columbae, but during the
medieval period his fame – he is one of the few insular writers who was labelled
‘illustrious’ – depended on his other book, the De Locis Sanctis dealing with places men-
tioned in scripture. Posing as the account of a pilgrim, ‘Gallic bishop, Arculf’, it is a manual
for solving exegetical problems using geographical knowledge. The work was summarised
several times, most notably by Bede, in his own De Locis Sanctis, and was also excerpted by
him in the Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum V. It became, either directly or through these
excerpts or summaries, one of the standard medieval works on the Holy Places.
The work fulfils a desire expressed by Augustine that there should be a handbook which,
by drawing on knowledge of the places and customs mentioned in scripture, would help to
interpret difficult passages. Adomnán noted places about which there are contradictory pas-
sages (for example, Genesis 50: 13 says Jacob was buried near Hebron, but Acts 7: 16 says
Shechem) and then used ‘empirical knowledge’ of the places to resolve these ‘apparent’ con-
flicts. The information is presented as if it was the result of questioning an eyewitness, but,
118 Thomas O’Loughlin

in fact, it is a compilation of other texts on Palestine, snippets from exegetes such as Jerome
(c. 342–420), and a careful piecing together of clues in the scriptures. The rationale for the
‘eyewitness’ approach also derives from Augustine and his requirements of historica cognitio
(historical acquaintance) in such matters. Adomnán also examined the conundrum of times
and places that surrounds Jesus’s last days before the crucifixion and proposed a solution that
had adherents for many centuries, as discussed in the present author’s ‘Res, tempus, locus,
persona: Adomnán’s Exegetical Method’ (1999). The importance of these studies, however,
is not their precise solutions, even if they are ingenious, but the large academic culture that
they indicate. Here, we have a writer conscious that he lives on the edge of Christendom –
he can locate himself on a world map as supplied by Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) – but
who is fully engaged with the problems of Latin theology in his day.
To try to get some overview on that theological world we have to look at the range of
books that we know was available to Adomnán on Iona. At present we can identify the
texts listed in Table 13.1.
This is not some bare-bones library, but represents the major writers of the Latin trad-
ition, Augustine and Jerome, and some of their most important works. It contains expli-
citly monastic material, as we should expect, but also many works for which there was no
particular reason why they would have been sought out for copying. We can venture, there-
fore, to assert that they had access to a much wider range of material than that which we
see exhibited in the surviving works.
Adomnán was also responsible for developments in canon law, as we see in the extant
canons attributed to him and in his involvement with the Synod of Birr. This led to the
promulgation of his Cáin (or Law of the Innocents) aimed at mitigating the effects of
warfare on non-combatants. It may be found in M. Ní Dhonnchadha’s ‘The Law of
Adomnán: A Translation’ in Thomas O’Loughlin’s Adomnán at Birr, AD 697: Essays in
Commemoration of the Law of the Innocents. Canon law was a major driving force for theo-
logical speculation throughout the Middle Ages. The interest in canon law remained a
feature of life in the monastery on Iona, for we know that Cú Chuimhne of Iona (d. 747)
was one of the copyists involved in the early transmission of the Collectio canonum hiber-
nensis, a highly important assemblage of ecclesiastical law and custom. Indeed, given the
size and complexity of this collection – probably the earliest systematic collection in
Latin – it is possible that it was a product of Iona, where we know there was an extensive
library and the searching/organising skills that the Hibernensis would have required.
Adomnán can be seen as a typical Latin theologian of the period. He was a monk and
many aspects of his theology can only be understood within a monastic framework. He was
a professional churchman for whom theologising was but an aspect of his work: he remarked
on one occasion that he wrote ‘while cares pressed on him from every side’. He was actively
concerned with the Church’s organisation and self-perception, as we see in his interest in
law. He was concerned for the interpretation of scripture and saw that task in terms of unrav-
elling textual knots. He was interested in the history and liturgy of his own community and
region, as is shown in the Vita Columbae. Yet, he had a sense of the larger Latin Church, and,
what is less common in the period, a sense of the Church that is larger than the Latin west.

Adam of Dryburgh (c. 1140–?1212)

Coming from the Anglo-Scottish borders, Adam has become the bearer of several
names: Adam Scotus, Adam Anglicus and Adam the Carthusian – and this has caused many
 Theology, Philosophy and Cosmography 119

Table 13.1 Texts available to Adomnán on Iona

Author Work A B

anon. Actus Siluestri •

Athanasius Vita Antonii •
Augustine De ciuitate Dei •
˝ De consensus euangelistarum •
˝ De doctrina christiana •
[?] Benedict Regula •
Cassiodorus Expositio psalmorum •
˝ Institutiones •
Constantius Vita Germani •
[?] Cumméne Vita Columbae •
Dionysius Exiguus Epistola I •
[Ps]-Eucherius De situ Hierusolyma •
Gregory the Great Dialogi •
‘Hegesippus’ Historiae •
Isidore Etymologiae •
˝ De natura rerum •
Jerome De situ et locorum •
˝ De uiris inlustribus •
˝ Liber quaestionum hebraicarum in Genesim •
˝ Commentarii in euangelium Mathaei •
˝ Commentarii in Naum •
˝ Commentarii in Osee •
˝ Commentarii in Hiezechielem •
John Cassian Conlationes •
˝ De institutis coenobiorum •
Juvencus Historia euangelica •
Leo the Great Sermo XII •
˝ Sermo L •
Paulinus of Nola Epistola XXXI •
Sulpicius Severus Chronicon •
˝ Vita Martini •
˝ Dialogi •
˝ Epistola II •
(A
Text certainly present on Iona as cited, quoted, or referred to in some other way.
B
Text probably present on the basis of the general content of works produced on Iona.)

a confused moment for editors and bibliographers. As a young man, he entered the
Premonstratensian house of Dryburgh, and later became familiar with Prémontré itself and
the French houses of the day. While in Dryburgh, he wrote most of his surviving works, and,
because most of his life was prior to 1200, his works have been included in J. P. Migne’s
Patrologia latina. (For texts, the second edition of R. Sharpe’s A Handlist of the Latin Writers
of Great Britain and Ireland before 1540 (2002) and M. Lapidge and R. Sharpe’s A Bibliography
of Celtic–Latin Literature, 400–1200 (1985) are useful.) In later life – possibly around 1200 –
he left the Canons of Prémontré in order to enter Witham Abbey as a Carthusian, where he
remained until his death sometime around 1212. While a canon he became well known as
a preacher and the sermon – eighty-eight of his sermons are extant – was his favoured form.
Indeed, it is a form that has left its mark on many of his other writings. We know that he
120 Thomas O’Loughlin

wrote at least one work while a Carthusian (De quadripartito exercitio cellae) and probably
others that have not survived.
The modern study of Adam’s works, which began with Wilmart and has Hamilton as
its most detailed expression to date, has shown him to belong within a very specific theo-
logical movement: the monastic theology that began with the rise of the Cistercians.
This flowering of monastic theology produced, over the course of a century, a host of
monastic writers in France and Britain, all of whom shared many assumptions about the
nature of the monastic life and who wrote primarily with a monastic audience in mind.
They invariably knew the earlier works of this tradition and usually knew their contem-
poraries or near contemporaries. This feature is seen in Adam’s writings. There he
shows the same range of patristic sources as the others, along with an interest in the writ-
ings of the Pseudo-Denis, the works of Anselm and Bernard (1090–1153), and the works
of the almost contemporary Victorine authors in Paris, both Andrew (died 1175) and
Hugh of St Victor (died 1142). To study Adam’s theology is to see his place within
these larger twelfth-century movements; and from this we can infer that monastic
thought and writing in Scotland in the period was fully part of the larger western monas-
tic movement.

Michael Scotus (died, 1235 or later)

Although Michael, from Kirkcaldy in Fife, could be seen as the slightly younger contem-
porary of Adam, in reality they are worlds apart. Adam belongs to the last flowering of
medieval Latin theology from within its own resources: his work is characterised by a
monastic ideal of ever greater attention to the inner life. Michael, however, represented
the brave new world that sought out new learning from abroad and was fascinated by the
new natural philosophy to be found in Arabic works based upon ancient Greek learning.
His desire for these new works took him first to Toledo – one of the great translation
centres – and then on to Italy, where he worked at the court of Frederic II and came to
papal attention for his learning. In 1224 he was offered the archbishopric of Cashel
(Ireland), but refused it on the grounds that he could not preach in Irish. He died some-
time in the mid-1230s amidst widespread approval of his genius and work.
Michael belonged to the first generation of scholars who brought back into the western
learning, through their translations, the works of Aristotle and other ancient Greek
writers. But they also brought in the works of Muslim and Jewish scholars, amid a panoply
of other works such as commentaries on ancient texts and works attributed to the ancients.
This irruption of new materials changed the western intellectual scene for ever. It was the
task of centuries to re-imagine the edifice of Latin Christian thought while accommodat-
ing this new learning – a task many believe was never successfully completed. Most of
Michael’s legacy consists of translations of Aristotle (from Arabic), of Arabic commen-
taries on Aristotle by Averroes (d. 1198), and other Arabic works written by Avicenna
(980–1037). His own compositions are concerned with celestial mechanics and astrology
and are cited in Sharpe’s A Handlist of the Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland before
1540. Given, however, the fluid state of definitions in the early thirteenth century, Michael
probably saw all of this as ‘philosophy’ and, naively, as non-problematic for the Christian
culture to which he belonged. It was upon this translation work of Michael, and others,
that all the major thirteenth-century systems were based. This brings us to the most famous
Scottish theologian of all.
 Theology, Philosophy and Cosmography 121

John Duns Scotus, Franciscan (c. 1265–1308)

Born in the town of Duns, John entered the Franciscans and spent the remainder of his life
south of the border, in Oxford and Cambridge, or abroad in Paris or Cologne, where he
died. In the mid-thirteenth century, thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure
began the task of constructing new systems of philosophy and theology that integrated the
Latin tradition with the ‘new’ materials from the Arab world, and which reflected the new
inquisitiveness of the universities. While these soon began to harden into rival systems,
there was still considerable fluidity until much later and John belongs to the second gen-
eration. His system, while less original than that of earlier scholastic thinkers, is an
approach to theology and a range of philosophical questions that is complete in itself.
Within in a few years of his death, it had been adopted by his Order as ‘their’ theology and
become a recognisable school: ‘Scotism’.
John was a prolific writer. Over twenty works are known with certainty to be by him
and, alone among those mentioned in this chapter, can be said to have played a major
influence on Christian thought down to our own day. While he became one ‘school’
within pre-Reformation debates, his work continued to be influential on both sides of
the sixteenth-century divides. On the Protestant side, his stress on the ‘absolute
power’ of God remained an important element for many thinkers, while, on the Catholic
side, his Order continued to apply his system and champion particular aspects of his
work. An example illustrates his influence: John held that Mary, the mother of Jesus,
had to have been conceived without ‘Original Sin’ and despite much opposition from
other schools over the centuries, this became official Catholic doctrine in 1854.
Luke Wadding first published his works as a corpus in 1639, and at present these are being -
produced in a uniform critical edition in Rome. Given that his work is a system, and
can only be appreciated in comparison to other medieval systems, attempts
to present it in nuce are well nigh impossible, but there is a steady flow of guides to his work.

This survey has only picked out a handful of individuals. But theology was, like law, a cor-
porate endeavour in the Middle Ages. To produce these few writers requires not only a the-
ologically rich environment (for example, teachers and books), but an even more
widespread awareness of the questions that drive theology. This more diffused understand-
ing can only be discovered through the analysis of the theology implicit in other religious
texts, or in the arrangement and decoration of books, monuments and buildings. Only
when we have such a context, observing changes taking place over centuries, can a proper
account of any region’s theologies be written.

Further reading

Hamilton, M. J. (1974), ‘Adam of Dryburgh: Six Christmas Sermons’, Analecta Cartusiana

16: 1–62.
Matthew, H. C. G. and Brian Harrison (eds) (2004), Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press: under ‘Adomnán’, ‘Dryburgh, Adam of’,
‘John Duns Scotus’ and ‘Michael Scot’.
O’Loughlin, Thomas (1994), ‘The Library of Iona in the Late Seventh Century: The
Evidence from Adomnán’s De Locis Sanctis’, Ériu 45: 33–52.
122 Thomas O’Loughlin

O’Loughlin, Thomas (1999), ‘Res, tempus, locus, persona: Adomnán’s Exegetical Method’,
in D. Broun and T. O. Clancy (eds), Spes Scotorum Hope of the Scots: Saint Columba,
Iona and Scotland, Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, pp. 139–58.
Williams, Thomas (ed.) (2003), The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Wilmart, André (1930), ‘Magister Adam Cartusiensis’, in Mélanges Mandonnet, vol. 2,
Paris: J. Vrin, pp. 145–61.
 14

A Fragmentary Literature:
Narrative and Lyric from the Early
Middle Ages
Thomas Owen Clancy

In a long Irish text of about 1200 called Agallamh na Seanórach (The Discussions of the Old
Men), St Patrick asks the aged warrior Caílte the location of the best hunt he ever took
part in. Caílte’s response sees him break into poetry, as so often in this text; here the poem
is about the Scottish island Arran:

Arann na n-oigheadh n-iomdha,

tadhall fairrge re a formna;
oiléan i mbearntar buidhne,
druimne i ndeargthar gaoi gorma.

Ard ós a muir a mullach,

caomh a luibh, tearc a tonnach;
oiléan gorm groigheach gleannach
corr bheannach dhoireach dhrongach [. . .]

Mín a magh, méith a muca,

suairc a guirt (sgéal is creite),
can for bharraibh a fiodhcholl
seóladh na siothlong seice.

Aoibhinn dóibh ó thig soineann,

bric fá bhruachaibh a habhann;
freagraid faoilinn ‘má fionnall
aoibhinn gach ionam Arann!
(O’Rahilly, no. 40)

(Arran of the many deer,

ocean touching its shoulders;
island where troops are ruined,
ridge where blue spears are blooded.

High above the sea its summit,

dear its green growth, rare its bogland;
blue island of glens, of horses,
of peaked mountains, oaks and armies [. . .]
124 Thomas Owen Clancy

Smooth its plain, well-fed its swine,

glad its fields – believe the story!
– nuts upon its hazels’ tops,
the sailing of longships past it.

Fine for them when good weather comes –

trout beneath its river banks;
gulls reply round its white cliff –
fine at all times is Arran!)

The text this comes from is a ‘tale of tales’, all relating the adventures and reminiscences
of the Fianna, the wandering warrior bands of Ireland, and especially of their chief warriors,
Oisín (later to be rechristened as Ossian) and Caílte. Whilst the tale is an Irish one, its
heroes were common to the literary stock of Gaelic Scotland also. We can point to tales
about them composed by Scottish authors from the late Middle Ages through to the
modern period, some of these relocated from their Irish origins to Scottish settings.
Agallamh na Seanórach incorporates among everything else a great deal of material derived
from other times and places, and our poem on Arran is of this sort. As a lyric poem, it has
much in common with the nature poetry that would come to the fore in early modern
Scottish Gaeldom – the casual shifts of perspective, the heaping-up of image on image, the
difficult-to-translate crenulations of qualitative adjectives. This gem-like poem illustrates
some of the difficulties we have in trying to understand two of the ‘latent’ literary genres
in medieval Scotland – narrative and lyric. On the one hand, the evidence is suggestive
and comparative – we can point to shared traditions and conjecture Scottish parallels. On
the other hand, many of the individual items themselves are suspended in external media –
just as this poem, perhaps composed in a Scottish context originally, has been preserved in
the fruit pudding that is the Agallamh.
It has been traditional to begin the history of Scottish literature with the first major work
in Scots – John Barbour’s The Bruce – and with the fourteenth century. Throughout this
first section of the History, we have been trying to give some sense of the literary riches of
the earlier period – yes, all this literature is contested, in terms of text, place of origin, rela-
tionship to Scotland, but it nonetheless fills out our sense of Scotland as having a literary
history which goes back before 1314. With certain genres – praise poetry, religious poetry,
hagiography – there is no question but that solid traditions of these had taken root in the
various cultures of early medieval Scotland.
There are, however, uncomfortable lacunae even on the most generous reading of the
earlier medieval corpus. Barbour’s Bruce throws into high relief the absence of substan-
tial narrative texts from the earlier period, in much the way that later the work of Dunbar
casts a shadow on the dearth of lyric. Of course, these works are in Scots, and there is
nearly nothing of any sort in Scots or its predecessor language, northern Old English,
from before the fourteenth century. What throws these lacunae into such high relief is
comparison with the two other Celtic language traditions, Irish and Welsh, among whose
literary corpus we find the various remains of texts of Scottish origin and relevance. Little
of this ‘Scottish’ material is narrative, little lyric – yet both the main Celtic traditions
are noted for the strong presence of narrative and lyric in the earlier medieval period.
Here we think of the weighty story tradition of pre-1300 Ireland – the Ulster Cycle of
tales alone comprises more than sixty individual texts, most from the Old and Middle
Irish period (700–1200). Many of these tales contain dramatic monologues in verse,
 Narrative and Lyric from the Early Middle Ages 125

some of the finest of earlier lyric poetry, employing the voice of characters to express con-
flict, emotional turmoil, despair, and the pleasure of the natural world. This dramatic
poetry is also found in the Welsh englyn cycles (see below), and other similar verses.
Whilst there is little prose narrative from Wales before 1100, what we have from the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries is impressive and masterly. These canons sharpen our
sense of early medieval Scotland as a land of lost literature. And yet the signs of a healthy
narrative tradition, and of lyric performances as well, are there, and this chapter seeks to
explore a few of the fragments which allow us to fill in the lacunae, even if in a specula-
tive vein.
Strikingly, the longest non-ecclesiastical narrative from this period probably composed
in a Scottish context is in the language least represented in this History of Scottish Literature.
Sometime around 1200, a man who called himself Guillaume le Clerc set into French verse
the hitherto unknown adventures in Arthur’s court of the oafish hero Fergus of Galloway.
D. D. R. Owen has argued in several venues that this text is a Scottish composition, and
has speculated on its authorship. As an Arthurian tale, it belongs to the third or fourth gen-
eration in the evolution of that literary cycle: parodic, with a knowing ability to under-
mine Arthurian conventions, confident in its ability to uproot and reorient its heroes in a
Scottish setting. That setting clearly places the text in dialogue with the contemporary
Scottish court, likely to be its original audience. If Owen is correct in assigning this text to
William Malveisin, bishop of Glasgow and later of St Andrews, he joins his contemporary
Bishop Bjarni of Orkney as the two prominent early providers of tales in which courtly love
is a major motivating force. Bjarni (as Judith Jesch discusses in Chapter 8) is author of the
Jómsvíkingadrápa (The Song of the Jomsvíkings) a tale of one warrior (Vagn) and his struggle
amidst a fractious war to keep his vow of love to Ingibjörg. Bjarni’s masterly and bizarre
telling of the tale is self-mocking, as he constantly laments his own ill-luck in love, and
the fact that his audience is not even listening.
For Fergus of Galloway, however, the authorship of the text is secondary to its literary
significance, its rooting in the southern Scottish countryside of Arthur and his court, and
its heroes, at play on the southern uplands. That such tales were being listened to in the
twelfth century is in any case apparent. As Owen also points out, the appearance of clerics
called Master Arthur and Master Merlin in St Andrews in the twelfth century suggests an
audience; so too the presence in Perth of a mirror case with a scene from the Tristan legend
depicted. Much of this, though, represents the participation in Scottish courts in the inter-
national vogue for the Arthurian; Fergus is one of the few testimonies to an early Scottish
response, though there would be later ones.
Two roughly contemporary texts closely linked to Glasgow also partake of this ‘British’
literary tradition. Fragments of the story of a madman named Lailoken are preserved. These
are, on the one hand, clearly related to the hagiographical material of St Kentigern of
Glasgow (as discussed by James E. Fraser in Chapter 11); on the other hand, they are crucial
links in the evolution of the Arthurian character who would come to be named Myrddin
in Welsh, Merlin(us) in Latin and English. It seems clear from Welsh tradition that this
character’s story had always been set in northern Britain. That tradition tells of how he
went mad in the battle of Arfderydd, probably Arthuret in Liddesdale, and lived in the
woods, prophesying. The best and clearest narrative realisation of this is Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s Vita Merlini, which looks to have had some northern sources lying behind it.
But the Lailoken fragments are very much a local Glasgow product, and sport a mad hero
who rebukes saints, outwits kings and exposes the adultery of queens. He plunges to his
threefold death in the end (simultaneously beaten to death, drowned and impaled), and
126 Thomas Owen Clancy

later versions of these texts locate his death and burial on Tweedsmuir, connecting his
grave with political prophecies.
If one erstwhile Arthurian character has some roots in the diocese of Glasgow and its
Latin writers, so too does another. In the various Lives of St Kentigern, the saint’s father is
made out to be Owain, son of Urien (that Urien who, as we have seen, was the object of
early praise poetry). The scenes describing the conception of Kentigern (in one version,
Owain disguises himself as a woman to get close to Theneu, daughter of the king of
Lothian) belong to a series of in-tales in the Life which breathe the air of a more secular
literary world. Here, we should not forget the capacity, and, in some cases, the necessity of
Saints’ Lives to entertain as well as to edify. Saints Lives, like the historical texts discussed
in Chapter 19 by Nicola Royan and Dauvit Broun, can be a productive source of earlier
medieval stories. But in both cases these narratives are made subject to the genres’ overall
design, either to illuminate the saintliness of the hero, or to punctuate chronology.
Throughout Europe, clerics of various sorts were at the vanguard of pioneering new lit-
erature, recycling old legends into new and modish guises and as attentive to the needs of
aristocratic patrons as godly ones. One final narrative text from twelfth-century Glasgow
brings home the fact that churchmen could create heroic poetry and tales of war as much
as the deeds of the saints. The ‘Song on the Death of Somerled’, composed not long after
that event of 1164 by yet another William the Clerk, this time a cleric of Glasgow
Cathedral, celebrates the defeat of the king of Argyll and the Isles in his attack on the
Clyde. (It may be found in W. F. Skene’s Johannis de Fordun: Chronica Gentis Scottorum,
1871.) The imagery is powerful; the poem driving in its immediacy. This is a tale told in
Latin verse, and the audience, most likely the clergy of Glasgow diocese, would glory in the
fact that it was through the intervention of St Kentigern and his successor bishop, Herbert,
that the attacker fell, as the army was bamboozled by vegetation and smoke.

Audi, mira; quia dira diris erant praelia.

Myriceta, et spineta, verticem moventia,
Thymus usta, et arbusta, rubi, atque filices,
Timebantur, et rebantur hostibus ut milites;
In hac vita, non audita erant haec miracula.
Umbrae thymi atque fimi extant propugnacula.
Sed in prima belli rima, dux funestus cecidit;
Telo laesus, ense caesus, Sumerledus obiit.

(Hear and be amazed! To the terrible the fight was terrible.

broom thickets and thorn hedges tossed their heads;
wild thyme burning, orchards, brambles, ferns
filled them with fear, as they appeared as armed men to our foes.
In this life, there have not been heard such miracles.
Smoky shadows of thyme reared up to be our ramparts.
The deadly leader, Somerled, died. In the first great clash of arms
he fell, wounded by a spear and cut down by the sword.)

The climax is that a priest cuts off Somerled’s head, and the bishop holds it aloft, praising
the Scottish saints. This bizarre clerical epic is a reminder that battle narratives must have
formed a stock in trade of court entertainment in secular as well as episcopal halls.
Indeed, the poetry for Urien Rheged discussed in Chapter 6, ‘The Poetry of the Court:
 Narrative and Lyric from the Early Middle Ages 127

Praise’, includes several stirring battle narratives celebrating Urien and his son Owain’s
victories. If these narratives are compressed and allusive, and made subservient to the needs
of professional encomium to praise the patron, we nonetheless engage in them with the
core heroic narrative of the battlefield. So too, from the later medieval period, some of the
earliest attested Gaelic tales, told in verse and preserved in The Book of the Dean of Lismore,
are battle tales, whether of the conflict between hero son and hero father in the tale of Cú
Chulainn and Conlaoch, or of Fionn and his warriors.
Narrative, as we have seen, can intersect with the poetry of praise, and some of the verse
tales from the later Middle Ages are recounted as apologues, affixed to more conventional
praise poems. In the case of one poem by Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh (who is
discussed by Katharine Simms in Chapter 9), composed for the mormaer of the Lennox,
his ancestor’s marriage to the eponymous Leven is emblematic of the river’s centrality to
the Lennox and its rulers, with their seat at Balloch. This is one of the clearest-cut Scottish
examples of one of the most productive motivations for tales in early medieval Ireland, the
genre known as dindsheanchas (lore of prominent places), in which the question ‘why is X
so called’ is answered through story. Here the Leven is called from the king of Scotland’s
daughter who drowned in the river. That such tales were persuasive to their audiences is
shown by the known effects of Muireadhach’s fabricated legend. He makes a Munster
prince in exile, Corc, the lover of Leven, and is surely the first to create this story. But sub-
sequent generations of the Lennox would employ the name Corc, and his son in the story,
Maine, among its sons. A parallel, if more eclectic, situation is that of the Campbells, who
would trace their ancestry to literary heroes – to the warrior of the Gaelic Fianna, Diarmaid
Ó Duibhne, as to the British hero Arthur.
Dindsheanchas lies also behind the one piece of Gaelic narrative in prose we have from
the period in question (not counting here the Gaelic translation of the Historia Brittonum
made in eastern Scotland in the eleventh century). This is the foundation legend of Deer,
which is found in the twelfth-century Gaelic notes to the Book of Deer. The legend tells
of how the mormaer of Buchan interfered with St Columba and St Drostan in their efforts
to establish a monastery; his son fell ill, and could only be cured by his repentance and the
efforts of the clerics. With that, he granted to them the site of Deer, which took its name,
according to this story, from the tears (déara) Drostan shed upon Columba’s departure.
While this is hardly pulsating literature and is perceptibly constructed to advance Deer’s
proprietorship, it is significant for showing north-east Scotland as capable of participating
in the general narrative trends of the wider Gaelic world. It is also one of the earliest pieces
of writing to display distinctively Scottish Gaelic linguistic features.
One of the earliest Gaelic tales relating to Scotland that we have in full, again told in
verse, is affixed to a king-list of the kings of Leinster. The poem as we have it must surely
be fashioned by a Leinster poet, and yet it flatters a Scottish audience as well, implying that
Scottish kings have equal birthright to the Irish kingdom. The tale is of the famous king
Aedán mac Gabráin – historically a king of Dál Riata in Argyll around 600. The tale is
utterly ahistorical, however, recounting as it does how the future king of Leinster was in
exile in Alba. When his wife gives birth to two sons on the same night that Gabrán’s wife
gives birth to two daughters, one of each is exchanged – the result is that Aedán is really
the son of the king of Leinster.
This tale is of interest, not only for the Shakespearean comedic plot, but also as one rep-
resentation of what was clearly a large body of narrative, in various traditions, about Aedán
mac Gabráin. To the Welsh, he was Aeddan Fradog (Aedán the Wily); Irish storytellers
clearly had further tales about him which no longer survive, though some that do depict
128 Thomas Owen Clancy

him as treacherous and devilish. Here, however, he is the Scottish king paramount,
reminding us of central episodes in Adomnán’s Life of Columba in which this king is
ordained, and in which through prayer he, too, achieves victory in battle. He would appear
also to have attained notoriety in English-speaking Scotland, for, in the twelfth-century
account of St Æbbe of Coldingham recently edited by Robert Bartlett, she is ruthlessly
pursued ‘by a tyrant of the Scots called Aidan’ (a quodam Scottorum tiranno Eadano), from
whom she escapes only by taking refuge at St Abb’s Head.
Almost all the narratives we have been discussing so far, with the exception of those
contained in hagiographical material, have been in verse, although tales told in Latin,
Norse, Gaelic, Welsh and French have been mentioned. Viewed from a European
perspective, or even an English one, this is quite normal for medieval narrative. Viewed
from the north, however, it is less so. In medieval Ireland, Wales and Scandinavia, the
dominant mode of narrative was prose. In the traditions of each of these cultures, we find
prose tales involving Scotland to a greater or lesser extent – tales like that of Deirdriu in
the Gaelic tradition, or Njalssaga in the Icelandic. Of course, the Orkneyinga saga is the
greatest example of all of a prose narrative, here in the historical vein, with its roots in
Scotland, although, as Judith Jesch discusses in Chapter 8, its composition lies firmly in
Iceland. Prose narrative is singularly lacking from Scotland, other than the religious or
historical.
This is true, however, of the Welsh tradition before the 1090s as well, so that the absence
of prose narrative need imply no more than lack of survival. The most impressive narra-
tive texts from early medieval Wales are cycles of poems, mostly spoken by characters in
dramatic situations. There has been much debate over whether these are the fragments of
lost tales in mixed prose and verse, or can stand on their own. One of these cycles relates
the downfall of the northern kingdom of Rheged, and the death of its king Urien. The
central poems within it are spoken by a man who bears Urien’s head away from the bat-
tlefield. Whether he has slain Urien or merely beheaded him after he has died is unclear,
but the speaker is riven by inner turmoil, produced by the fact that Urien was both his
kinsman and his lord. While this cycle of poems is certainly a Welsh product as it stands,
there is a possibility that it derives in part from northern compositions.
If so, it shows the British north participating in one of the most striking literary genres
within Celtic literature. The use of the dramatic verse monologue as a lyric form of explor-
ing strong emotion, personal conflict, love, grief is particularly prominent in the Irish trad-
ition, but, as we have seen, also a major part of the Welsh. Maria Tymoczko has described
this as the ‘poetry of masks’, the donning by the poet of a ‘traditional mask’ in order to get
beyond the constraints of professional poetry and explore the inner world of the human.
Some of this Gaelic tradition did certainly take root in Scotland, as witness later versions,
from Scottish contexts, of poetry cast in the voices of Fionn, Oisín and Caílte, or the
heroine Deirdriu’s lament for her lover and his brothers. Deirdriu (whose legend must have
been known in south-east Scotland as her name appears in personal names there in the
twelfth century) also became an effective mouthpiece for celebrating the natural beauty of
Scotland, because of the time she had spent in exile with her lover here. So we find her,
too, voicing praise of nature:

Binn gotha fiadh ndruimdhearg mballach

faoi fhiodh darach ós maoil mullach;
oighe míolla is iad go faiteach
‘na loighe i bhfalach san ghleann bhileach.
 Narrative and Lyric from the Early Middle Ages 129

Gleann na gcaorthann go gcnuas corcra

go meas molta do gach ealta;
parrthas suain do na brocaibh
i n-uamhchaibh socra ‘s a cuain aca.
(O’Rahilly, no. 43)

(Sweet the sounds of the red-backed brindled deer

beneath the oakwood at the hilltops’ crest
gentle hinds, easily startled,
lying concealed in the tall-treed glen.

Glen of the rowantrees with crimson berries

with fruit that’s fit for every birdflock
sleep’s paradise for the badgers
with their litters in their silent burrows.)

Saints, too, were legitimate masks to don, none more so than Columba, whose char-
acter most importantly gave voice to his regret in leaving Ireland behind, but also to
delight in the natural world of the island-studded sea. Though we can have no cer-
tainty of its origins on Iona, a quietly meditative twelfth-century poem depicts the saint
in this mode:

Meallach liom bheith i n-ucht oiléin

ar bheinn cairrge,
go bhfaicinn ann ar a meince
féth na fairrge.

Go bhfaicinn a tonna troma

ós lear luchair,
amhail chanaid ceól dá nAthair
ar seól suthain.

Go bhfaicinn a trácht réidh rionnghlan

(ní dál dubha);
go gcloisinn guth na n-éan n-iongnadh,
seól go subha.
(O’Rahilly, no. 42)

(Delight I’d find in an island’s breast,

on a rock’s peak,
that there I might often gaze
at the sea’s calm.

That I might see its heavy waves

over the brilliant sea
as it sings music to the Father
on its constant way.

Might see its smooth bright-caped strand

(no dismal tryst)
might hear the strange birds’
calls, a joyful strain.)
130 Thomas Owen Clancy

Here, the author taps not just into Columba’s legend, but also into a taste for the sort of
nature poetry which allowed poets to step outside the immediate confines of piety or
patronage.
This chapter has hinted darkly that although we can suggest and cajole the evidence a
little, there is a fundamental lack of strong narrative or lyric in Scotland’s earlier literary
remains. One tale does stand out, however. It is a voyage tale, which tells of the adven-
tures of two of St Columba’s monks on the ocean. The earliest versions of this tale are
Irish, the earliest extant version, indeed, probably composed in Kells in the early tenth
century. But from perhaps the thirteenth or fourteenth century (at the latest fifteenth –
it is found in two fifteenth-century manuscripts) is a version almost certainly refashioned
in Iona.
The tale opens in Ireland, with the murder of one of the royal heirs by a tribe, the Fir
Rois. Columba’s advice is sent for – what to do with these regicides? His advice, sent via
his two monks, here called Sniaghus and MacNiaghus, is that the Fir Rois should be sent
out on to the open ocean. Sailing back to Iona, the clerics decide to follow their example,
cast their oars away, and let God take them where he will. They are borne to a series of
islands, inhabited by cat-heads, dog-heads, pig-heads, giant salmon and other wonders.
In this ocean-desert, they are fed miraculously by God. They come across an island con-
taining a huge tree, inhabited by birds, and one bird sings Psalms and salvation history
and prophesies the Day of Judgement. The clerics fall asleep and, when they awake, they
are given a huge leaf from the tree, to take back with them as a relic. They sail to another
island where they find the Fir Rois, seemingly vindicated or purged, awaiting the Day of
Judgement. And finally, to an island with one great house with a hundred doors, an altar
at each door and at each altar a priest saying mass. After participating, and receiving a
further relic, a golden cowl, they set sail for Iona again. There they return, and place the
cowl and the leaf on the altar in Iona. Before doing so, however, they write the story of
their adventures on the giant leaf. It is worth noting that, at this final point, one manu-
script contains an early piece of critical comment on this tale, saying ‘is sgeol mi-tharbhach
gan chontabhairt’ (‘and a right worthless tale it is without doubt’)!
We may wish to disagree. This later version of the tale is interspersed throughout with
poetry. Many of the poems comment on the action of the prose in a technique very
common in medieval Irish tales, though the poems themselves are raised above mere nar-
rative verse by lyric stanzas:

Glass, fuar errach oighreta

mór a tonda, ’sa trethain
imga cetha ag coimherge
fa an lind-fhairge lethain

(Grey, cold, frosty springtime,

great its waves and its sea-swell
many the mists that are rising
over the wide liquid ocean.)

This tale gives us a glimpse into both Gaelic imagination and narrative technique from
the earlier Middle Ages. It allows us to see that Scotland too participated in that extra-
ordinary fusion of native creativity and Christian belief which infuses so much of early
Irish literature. It also allows us to see the kind of detailed narrative twist such storytellers
 Narrative and Lyric from the Early Middle Ages 131

were capable of. The tale we read is revealed to have been first transcribed on one of the
leaves brought back from the ocean otherworld, a leaf from the tree of the Birds of Heaven,
a tree where the most influential narrative of all, the biblical narrative of salvation, is
declaimed over and again. If we are limited to fragments for the lost genres of early
Scottish literature, those fragments can at times convince us that what we have lost was
rich and deep indeed.

Further reading

Clancy, T. O. (1998), The Triumph Tree: Scotland’s Earliest Poetry, AD 550–1350, Edinburgh:
Canongate.
Jackson, K. H. (1972), The Gaelic Notes in the Book of Deer, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Le Clerc, Guillaume (1991), Fergus of Galloway, ed. D. D. R. Owen, London: Everyman.
O’Rahilly, T. F. (1927), Measgra Dánta, 2 vols, Cork: Cork University Press.
Owen, D. D. R. (1997), William the Lion, 1143–1214: Kingship and Culture, East Linton:
Tuckwell.
Tymoczko, Maria (1996), ‘A Poetry of Masks: the Poet’s Persona in Early Celtic Poetry’, in
K. A. Klar, E. E. Sweetser and C. Thomas, (eds), A Celtic Florilegium: Studies in
Memory of Brenadan O Hehir, Lawrence, MA: Celtic Studies Publications,
pp. 187–209.
1314–1707
 15

Land and Freedom: Scotland,

1314–1707
Edward J. Cowan

On the eve of Bannockburn, Robert Bruce, according to his poetic biographer and eulo-
gist, John Barbour, told his troops that they were fighting for their lives and their families,
as well as for their freedom and their land. The unexpected victory, together with the pro-
pagandist, if inspirational, Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, marked the emergence of a
new, muscular, articulate and memorious Scottish nation, which demanded a new histori-
ography and a new literature. The favoured languages were Latin to broadcast the country’s
great achievements internationally, and Scots for the folk at home; Gaelic remained,
largely but not entirely, an oral medium. Historical and literary models had been furnished
in the 1290s – a Latin chronicle until recently unrecognised, and the famous vernacular
lament for Alexander III. Historians and their public have long debated the accuracy of
the appellation ‘The Scottish Wars of Independence’, arguing that Scotland always had
been, and would remain, an independent country, despite near-total English conquest in
1296 and 1304. Yet, the struggle for independence was to prove as real as it was rhetorical
during the next two centuries and more. From 1371 Stewart Scotland was incessantly dis-
tracted by the aggressive English who inflicted savage defeats in such debacles as Flodden
(1513) and Pinkie (1547). When military endeavours finally failed in the mid-sixteenth
century, more insidious political and cultural infiltrations, in which the Scots admittedly
were often complicit, continued the campaigns. Union with England, seriously debated
by Bruce’s son and successor in the 1350s, remained a perennial possibility while, with
Reformation, Protestantism seemed to herald the promise of religious integration. The suc-
cession of James VI to the English throne was hailed as a dynastic triumph by his acolytes,
but distinguished as a disaster by his people. Ironically the greatest threat to Scotland’s
freedom proved to be her kings between 1603 and 1707, as they successively strove to angli-
cise the northern kingdom, starting with its Kirk and so igniting the momentous
Covenanting Revolution in 1638 and the most tragic and bitter wars in the country’s
history. The Restoration of Stewart/Stuart despotism in 1660 merely extended the agony,
culminating in the misnamed ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–9, the ideologies of which
event the Covenanters could be said to have anticipated. The song Bruce commenced at
Bannockburn ended in the Treaty of Union in 1707.
Following his great victory, Bruce had to pursue a policy of reconstruction as he sought
to heal a kingdom riven by civil, as well as national, warfare. Fiscal, political and legal
reforms were necessary. The Church had to be reassured, the succession guaranteed and
military pressure maintained. Controversially, the magnates had to make choices about
allegiance and whether their English estates were more valuable than their Scottish lands.
136 Edward J. Cowan

Thus, the Disinherited were created to remain a potential threat to the Bruce cause for a
further forty years. They rebelled in 1320 and after Bruce’s death, with English backing,
they supported Edward Balliol, who sought nothing less than the restoration of his father’s
kingship. Some of the rebels had actually affixed their seals to the Arbroath Declaration,
a letter sent to the Pope urging him to put pressure on Edward II of England to recognise
Robert as rightful king of Scots. The inspirational rhetoric, flowing in the names of the
nobles, barons, freeholders and ‘the community of the realm of Scotland’, recounted much
of absorbing interest about the nation’s history, but it went on to make two supreme points.
First, it argued that Scottish kings were responsible to their subjects who elected them and
could thus, if necessary, depose them, the first articulation of the contractual theory of
monarchy, it has been argued, in European history, and one furthermore rooted in a context
of practical politics. Second, the document went on to make a universal appeal to dignity
and freedom:

For so long as a hundred of us remain alive, we will never on any conditions be subjected to
the lordship of the English. For we fight not for glory nor riches nor honours, but for freedom
alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.

It has often been observed that the promise of such notable sentiments was never
realised, particularly during the ‘dark and drublie dayis’ of the fourteenth and early fifteenth
centuries, though such notions are overdue for drastic and substantial revision. The period
was characterised by famine, the bubonic plague known as the ‘Black Death’ and by fairly
continuous warfare, but it was politics as usual during and after David II’s eleven-year stint
as a prisoner following his capture at Neville’s Cross in 1346. It is possible that some of the
nobility who served as hostages between 1346 and 1371, as well as humbler individuals who
served in various diplomatic and negotiating capacities, for example for payment of the
king’s ransom, may have been exposed to the English language for significantly lengthy
periods of time. The process of linguistic exchange may be thought to have been further
reinforced during the captivity between 1406 and 1424 of James I whose Kingis Quair is an
odd combination of Scots and English. He is also, as hostile critics understandably enjoy
pointing out, the first Scottish king who was evidently literate!
The ‘stout, young and jolly King Davie’ had invaded England, ‘desirous to do something
worthy to have memory that he be compared in some part to the glory of his father’. On
his return, he displayed the quality of ‘radure’, severity in governance, much commended
by the commons. He was also a shrewd financial manager, an accomplishment which
tended to benefit the poor rather than the nobles who were the original tax-dodgers. More
importantly perhaps, he presided over a minor literary and historical renaissance, during
which John of Fordun produced his Chronicle of the Scottish Nation in Latin and John
Barbour penned The Bruce. The first sustained vernacular account of Scottish history is to
be found in the ultimately tedious rhyming couplets of Andrew Wyntoun’s Orygynale
Cronykil of Scotland, which was written for a Fife laird c. 1420, a valiant attempt to make
sense of confused, and often competing, traditions about the past. In the 1440s Walter
Bower, abbot of Inchcolm, determined to complete Fordun’s account in his Scotichronicon.
All of these writers, fascinated and inspired as they were by the struggles of Wallace and
Bruce, sought to create a kind of national epic. Barbour famously exulted that ‘fredome is
a noble thing!’, though like the historians, he was much concerned with ‘suthfastness’ or
truth in describing the past, with showing ‘the thing richt as it wes’, so that it would be
implanted in the nation’s memory before it was forgotten. Bower was even more explicit:
 Land and Freedom: Scotland, 1314–1707 137

In particular I shall not aim in my writings at beauty of style with brilliant diction, but I shall
try to devote my attention to the true riches of different historians and to events known to me
otherwise. Indeed the chronicles by themselves are so brilliant, vouched for by the names of
the writers, that they do not need the lustre of an elaborate style to delight the hearts of
readers. In addition to this the artlessness of an uncultivated style has usually removed all sus-
picion of falsification. For how could any one who is quite unable to produce a polished style
know how to fabricate fiction?

The abbot wrote for David Stewart of Rosyth, another laird who, like Wyntoun’s patron,
belonged to a section of Scottish society which demanded access to the nation’s past. Both
Wyntoun and Bower catered for an audience that also increasingly thirsted after the poetry
of the ‘makars’ such as Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas to name only
the best known. Such consumers of history and literature would have had their patriotic
aspirations – as well as any lingering bloodlust – sublimated in Blind Harry’s Wallace. This
epiphanised Scotland’s greatest hero while rendering him parahistorical, a circumstance
which still does not dissuade some would-be historians from seeking history where very
little is to be found. These readers or listeners represent a new social constellation, seldom
celebrated in national annals, namely an emerging middle class. This demanded school and
university education for its (male) offspring in preparation for careers as civil servants,
churchmen or lawyers, or recognised potential in the world of commerce as burghs devel-
oped and trade with the continent expanded. These were people who were perhaps less
concerned with ‘the melancholy procession’ of Stewart kings named James, than they were
with securing their own comfort and the future of their families, who tended to build more
comfortable houses, and to purchase ever more exotic consumables for themselves. Such
men sought a voice in Parliament, which they recognised as the main plank of government
and which we now know to have functioned much more frequently and efficiently in the
later Middle Ages than used to be believed. Monarchs always needed parliaments to raise
revenue in the form of dreaded taxes. Scots understood as well anyone in Europe that such
levies were not freely given without much bargaining and hard-won concessions. The
legend of Wallace was ever present to remind potentially overambitious kings that the
Common Man would come to the fore in his country’s hour of need; nor was the enduring
message of Arbroath forgotten. It was to become one of the invincible assumptions of the
Scottish people that a king was answerable to his subjects, a notion which did not imply
perpetual anti-monarchical revolt because the Scots respected and craved good kingship,
as is testified by much historiography and literature in the period.
Monarchs, in any case, were becoming more distant and impersonal with the passage of
time. An inventory from Edinburgh Castle in the 1370s mentions ‘ane instrument callit
ane gunn’ so signifying Scotland’s experience of the impending military revolution. It was
metaphorically appropriate that James II should have had his head blown off by one of his
beloved weapons when it exploded in his ‘fiery face’ at the siege of Roxburgh Castle in 1460,
for when he married Mary of Gueldres he demanded that the dowry be paid in cannon.
Artillery was expensive, not only to purchase and maintain, but also to service since spe-
cialist gunners were required. Furthermore, it required a new castle design because can-
nonballs could easily penetrate medieval curtain walls and so thicker squatter fortifications
such as tower-houses were preferred. As James’s accident had shown, gunpowder was unre-
liable and, in point of fact, archery was deemed more accurate in some areas until the seven-
teenth century. Artillery, however, caused something of a caste revolution because the
weapons did not discriminate between ranks or classes. As Don Quixote disapprovingly
138 Edward J. Cowan

noted, guns would blindly kill aristocrats as well as commoners. Soon cannon were beyond
the resources of all save the Crown. It is no coincidence that the families who sprang to the
forefront during the depressingly repetitive sequence of minorities from 1406 until the
1580s overwhelmingly operated as keepers of royal castles. That such keepers often failed
to survive the succession of an heir testifies to the strength and popularity of the legally con-
stituted monarchy as it does to the vibrancy and security of the commonweal.
The middling folk also flexed their communal muscle in their relationship with the Kirk.
Contrary to Protestant propaganda, there is good evidence that these folk remained pious,
but that they were possessed of a considerable streak of anti-clericalism, a contempt for fat
cats and idle bellies as represented by some abbots, friars and seculars, and even a resentment
of popes who seemed to behave rather as secular potentates, using their plenipotential powers
for political purposes. Such grievances manifested themselves in an unwillingness to export
valuable resources needlessly to the Vatican, accompanied by a corresponding fad for lav-
ishing decoration on local burgh or collegiate churches. Perennial resentment persisted of
dues (specifically teinds or 10 per cent of income) paid to a Kirk which seemed to have lost
sight of its responsibilities. There was long-standing criticism of poor buildings, priests of
limited ability and complaints about appropriation. The latter practice, whereby the rev-
enues of individual parish churches were transferred elsewhere as an act of charity by the
local patron, can be documented from the twelfth century onwards, but it was more wide-
spread in Scotland than anywhere else except Switzerland. It is doubtful if all criticisms were
equally valid. Many people were probably quite happy with their local non-celibate priest,
just as not all monks abused their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. The Reformation,
however, most likely came about in Scotland, virtually the last country to experience reform,
because people were becoming more pious rather than less, because there was an increasing
demand for spirituality and guidance that was manifestly not being met. A Church riven by
internal dissension and squabbles about authority was hardly best placed to describe the para-
meters of acceptable behaviour that so many of its flock craved. The Presbyterian devout
never seem to understand that parishioners are much more scathing and scatological about
their priests than congregations ever are about their ministers, as the most superficial perusal
of Boccaccio or Chaucer will indicate. In Scotland, both David Lindsay in his play, Ane
Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (first performed at court in 1540 and in public in an extended
version in 1552), and John Knox in History of the Reformation (first printed 1587) manipu-
lated folk humour in the interests of reform. Lindsay’s memorable character, Johne the
Common-weill, although English in inspiration, draws upon well-established popular ideas
about Scottish constitutionalism, ideas matched by his older contemporary John Mair, whose
Latin History offered a more scientific, experiential or commonsense view of the past. The
latter was the first of what might be described as a series of Scottish sixteenth-century ‘con-
jectural historians’ who anticipated their Enlightenment colleagues by some two hundred
years. Although Mair would have no truck with Reformation, two of his pupils emphatically
did – John Knox and George Buchanan, both as it happens implacable critics of Mary Queen
of Scots.
Mary’s personal rule lasted only six years and she was removed before her twenty-fifth
birthday. She has long been associated with scandal, conspiracy, sexual adventurism and
Catholic martyrdom, but arguably the most significant event of her career was her depos-
ition at the hands of her subjects. Knox wrote of the unnatural government of women, due
to their subordination to their husbands whether foreign royals or home-based aristocrats.
Mary’s outrageous behaviour appeared to reflect the legendary female frailty and potential
for corruption so often cited in the course of the witch hunts which seized the Scottish
 Land and Freedom: Scotland, 1314–1707 139

imagination during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thus coinciding with what is
often regarded as the most religion-obsessed period in Scotland’s history. Recent estimates
suggest a total of some 3,837 recorded cases involving the execution of at least 2,500 con-
victed witches, 84 per cent of them women, and this is likely to be an underestimate due
to the loss of evidence. Surviving records indicate that there was a wider target, namely
‘superstition’, nurtured by folk-belief and popular culture, widely considered by Protestants
to preserve remnants of Catholic belief and thus sympathy for the old Church. Into the
diabolical vortex were to be sucked folklore, rituals, cures for people and animals, spells to
restore milk to cows, visits to holy wells, belief in fairies, music, song, dancing, drinking
and sex. There is a kind of phantom history of early modern Scotland to be written, detail-
ing events that are documented in court records, but which never took place outside of the
imagination of inquisitors, torturers, victims and the tragically deluded. Witch-hunting
actually intensified in the south-west as a response to the negotiations leading to union in
1707, in defence of what was perceived to be a threat to the integrity of the Scottish reli-
gious establishment. Poets such as Dunbar and Alexander Montgomerie literally indulged
their fascination for the ‘eldritch’, drawing upon a body of medieval traditional material
and balladry, while at the same historical moment women were being killed for admit-
ting to fairy belief. A hundred years later, when deism raised its unwanted head in the first
skirmishes of what would prove to be the Enlightenment, men such as George Sinclair
and Robert Kirk produced tracts which were intended to prove the incontrovertible exist-
ence of God by demonstrating the reality of witches, fairies, spirits and the supranatural in
general.
One writer who captured something of the new ferment and mutability of the sixteenth
century, and who was seldom limited by his imagination, was Hector Boece, author of the
fabulous, and hugely influential, Scotorum Historia (1527). In his introduction, he explained
that the world and its contents were subject to change; nothing was permanent. He
included in his History only what was known to him through personal study and industry or
by consulting ‘richt trew and faithful auctoris’. Boece was one of the great Renaissance
Scots, but he truly baffled posterity by including hefty dollops of myth, legend, tradition and
sheer invention in his chauvinistic narrative. Yet so popular was his account that John
Bellenden received a royal commission for translating the History into Scots (1531),
a process overseen by the author himself. The Scots, it seems, have always opted for the
more colourful and more flattering version of their country’s past. John Leslie and George
Buchanan, in their respective histories, celebrated a period of over two thousand years
during which language, custom, costume and manners had survived as recognisable entities,
so anticipating those eighteenth-century writers who, dazzled by James Macpherson’s
Ossianic translations, exulted in a culture that was believed to be at least as old as that of
Greece and Rome. Both wrote in Latin, as convinced and well-regarded humanists intent
upon communicating their nation’s history to as wide an audience as possible. Leslie
regarded history as ‘the witnes of tymes, the maistres of lyfe, the lychte of truthe’; not for
him misty fables and the painted colour words designed to obfuscate rather than clarify.
Buchanan, following his old teacher Mair, believed in the supreme authority of the classi-
cists upon whom he was dependent for information about large chunks of Scottish time.
He dismissed as ridiculous the view that the void had been filled by native bards and
seanchaidhean ignorant of letters and learning who relied upon fallible memory and the
expectant patronage of their chiefs. Buchanan, probably the greatest intellect of sixteenth-
century Scotland, was severely dismissive of all fabulists, particularly those who composed
in the vernacular.
140 Edward J. Cowan

Boece, Buchanan and Leslie provide a neat introduction to the Gàidhealtachd, or Gaelic-
speaking Scotland, nowadays associated mainly with the Highlands and Islands, but, in
their day, following the Clyde frontier to almost the edge of Glasgow and spilling over the
geological faultline of the eastern Highlands into the counties of Dumbarton, Stirling,
Perth, Angus and Aberdeen. Part of the Viking heritage was the MacDonald Lordship of
the Isles which extended from the Butt of Lewis to the south end of Kintyre, all adminis-
tered from Finlaggan in Islay. Various other clans were involved in this assertively Gaelic
institution, meeting in council to elect and install the Dominus Insularum, who was a
powerful patron of poetry, music, stone carving and justice. The lordship’s chief character-
istic was perhaps its peacefulness. Its most significant warlike eruption occurred in 1411
when Donald of the Isles led an army into the northern Lowlands to be defeated at the
battle of Harlaw outside Aberdeen. The lordship was eventually forfeited in 1493 by
the Crown, which then employed the Gordons on the north-east and the Campbells in the
south-west as its agents in the Highlands. The Campbells would soon emerge as one of the
most successful, as well as the most hated, of all clans, much of their incentive deriving
from a desire to engross the former lordship. They operated happily in a Lowland as well
as a Highland orbit, often as Crown agents, as when they were employed at the end of the
sixteenth century to despatch the MacGregors in a regally inspired genocidal conspiracy.
So vicious were the measures taken against the ‘children of the mist’ – executing the men,
branding the women, forcibly removing children to be Lowland-educated, and levying
extortionate fines on all from the Borders to Caithness who sheltered MacGregors – that
they generated widespread revulsion. This intensified when the Campbells received
another commission against the MacDonalds of Kintyre and Islay.
James VI, on becoming James I of England, used the resources of his new kingdom to
launch an all-out attack upon Scottish traditional society in the interests of advancing
‘civilisation’. The Borders had long served as a buffer zone between Scotland and England,
and had been cultivated as such, but by the sixteenth century Scottish kings condemned
the ‘clannit folk’ of the region, deploring the ‘gangsters’ (the first appearance of the word)
who operated there and who appeared to be a law unto themselves. Sword and gallows were
employed to cleanse the cleuchs, while in the case of the Grahams of the West March,
transportation was implemented. It can be no accident that so many of the ‘big ballads’
deal with events in the 1580s and 1590s, the product of societies which believed them-
selves to be in a state of siege and which were facing unprecedented and utterly bewilder-
ing assault from their own monarch. In the north-east, ballads similarly commemorated
defeat and treachery at the hands of the Gordons, often with Crown backing. There was a
similar campaign in Orkney and Shetland where Norse law was abolished and the Stewart
earls taken out. James, however, reserved his fiercest venom for the Gàidhealtachd. The
MacGregors were prosecuted for genealogical impertinence because they boasted that their
race was royal, descended as they were from Cinaed mac Ailpín (Kenneth Mac Alpin).
MacDonalds were targeted because their clansfolk aided Irish resistance against the
English. Basically, so far as the king was concerned, Gaeldom, representing an anachron-
istic culture and society, was incompatible with a modern state. He was not in the least
impressed by the two thousand years of history that had so intrigued Leslie and Buchanan.
Indeed, in the Statutes of Iona (1609), James developed a policy which was to be imple-
mented vis-à-vis the Highlands and Islands during the following two and a half centuries
and which can be summarised as Plantation, Deculturalisation and Extirpation. Plantation
involved the establishment of Lowland colonies in Gaeldom at such places as Stornoway,
Inverness, Inverlochy and Campbeltown, which, on the bastide principle, would gradually
 Land and Freedom: Scotland, 1314–1707 141

civilise surrounding inhabitants on exactly the same model then being implemented in
Ireland and the American colonies. Deculturalisation involved such measures as reducing
the number of followers who could accompany a chief, as well limiting the weapons they
were permitted to carry. The statutes attempted to ban the payment of rents in whisky. Inns
were to be established to encourage an influx of travellers in regions still regarded with
superstitious awe. Most significant of all the language was under threat because the sons of
chiefs would not be permitted to inherit unless they could read, write and speak English.
Extirpation, or the rooting out, of the unwanted, is patently exemplified in the case of the
MacGregors. James made no secret of the fact that he contemplated a final solution, if nec-
essary, for other parts of the Highlands as well. He condemned himself out of his own mouth
when he stated that ‘We wilbe spairing to dispose upon ony pairt of these Yllis, and unwill-
ing to extermine, yea skairse to transplant the inhabitants of the same, bot upon a just caus’
(emphasis added). ‘Just causes’ are all too often in the eye of the beholder. Thus, he pro-
vided justification for his own actions, for the Massacre of Glencoe, for the savage and
inhuman treatment of all Gaels in the aftermath of the ’45 rebellion, and for those who, in
the nineteenth century, engineered the Highland Clearances.
James VI is a true enigma, presiding as he did over one of the crucial conjunctures in
Scottish history, the man who fulfilled the prophecies of Merlin by becoming the first king
since the legendary Arthur to rule over the whole of Britain. He it was also who revived the
medieval notion of the Divine Right of Kings in order to counter the theocratic views of
the Presbyterians and the radical ideas about contractual monarchy given a new injection
of life by the publications of Buchanan. The latter, as royal tutor, did not hesitate to ‘skelp
the erse of the Lord’s anointed’ to ensure that James became one of the most intellectually
well endowed of all British monarchs, but the tract in which he was most explicit on the
sovereignty of the people issue, De Jure Regni apud Scotos Dialogus, was designed as a warning,
a depiction of the worst scenario that could befall a king in order that it might be avoided
in future. Even so James’s attempts to treat the Scottish Church ‘like a pendicle of the
diocese of York’, markedly intensified by his successor Charles, led to the constitutional
crisis that was the Covenanting Revolution. Subscribers of the National Covenant (1638)
undertook the defence of their king and their Kirk until such inherent incompatibility
became so obvious that the righteous were forced to take one side or the other. A covenant
was a contract, in perpetuity, into which one entered with God. Usually it was an abstract
notion, but in Scotland it was a physical document which people actually signed, repre-
senting we may think the emergence of a new type of civic responsibility. The Solemn
League and Covenant of 1643 was a more cynical affair, which aimed to trade Scottish mili-
tary aid for a Presbyterian establishment in England. The Marquis of Montrose led the clans
in support of Charles I, while the Marquis of Argyll, chief of Clan Campbell, a devout
Presbyterian by upbringing and conviction, assumed leadership of the Covenant. In his
‘Glorious Year’ 1644–5, Montrose led Argyll a merry, if lethal, dance around the Highlands,
triumphing six times over superior Covenanting forces. Thousands died in a bitter war of
attrition designed to starve the enemy into submission while terrorising the civilian popu-
lation. Both leaders ended their careers in execution.
From 1603 onwards, there is a notable tendency towards anglicisation in Scottish publi-
cations, reflecting a more widespread cultural trend throughout the century, lamented by
poets such as William Lithgow. A further setback was the failure to produce a version of the
Bible in Scots, the magnificent King James version holding sway. Literature almost seems
to have been diverted into political and theological polemic and pamphleteering. The
Covenanters took great care as stylists that their publications were linguistically accessible
142 Edward J. Cowan

to the English. Archibald Johnston of Warriston, the major inspiration behind the National
Covenant, was a capable of compiling a pamphlet in immaculate English while riding from
Dalkeith into Edinburgh, but he retained Broad Scots for his personal journal. For some like
Johnston, Henderson or Argyll the idea of union with England was not totally anathemat-
ical, but, for those who actually experienced the Cromwellian experiment from 1652 to
1660, the experience was miserable since so-called union equated with military occupation.
At the Restoration in 1660, Parliament fawningly welcomed the return of the king, but
rejoicing swiftly transformed to lamentation, at least for some, when the Act Rescissory
annulled all parliamentary legislation since 1633, restored Episcopal government in the
Kirk and declared the covenants unlawful. Charles II was intent upon having his revenge
upon the wretched Scots who had crowned him king after the execution of his father, about
whose foibles and crimes he received endless lectures. Though there were some signs that
religion had lost its stranglehold and minds were turning, as some sort of respite from theo-
logical hair-splitting, to science, philosophy, the law, history and even literature, the most
conspicuous continuing conflict from the 1660s to the 1680s concerned the activities
of the ‘suffering bleeding remnant’. This was those Covenanters who would have no truck
with moderation or toleration and who were driven into ever more extreme actions and
positions as a result of state terror. Alexander Henderson, one of the architects of the
Covenant, once memorably observed that the people make the king, but the king does
not make the people, that the body of the king is mortal, but the people as a society is
immortal. The new leaders of the humble folk who suffered assault, torture, imprisonment,
transportation and often sudden death for their faith totally disowned any type of royal
authority, favouring instead a republic of Christ.
They were ultimately saved by the ‘Glorious Revolution’, which in one fell swoop
expelled James VII and Stuart absolutism, though the subsequent government of William
and Mary, which could have been expected to favour the Kirk, did not prove popular either.
Commentators at the time noted that women were becoming more conspicuous and vocal,
and in a way the same could be said for the populace at large. The king caused great offence
by ordering a treacherous attack on the MacDonalds of Glencoe in 1692 in retaliation
for their support of the exiled Stuarts in the first Jacobite rising, which effectively ended at
Dunkeld in 1689. Further alienation was created when William interfered in the sadly
mismanaged Darien scheme, the Scottish colony in Panama which seemed to promise so
much and delivered only disappointment, debt and death. Those who lost money in the
Company Trading to Africa and The Indies, sometimes called the ‘Company of Scotland’,
were among supporters of an incorporating union when it became known that some sort
of compensation might be forthcoming.
On his deathbed, William commended union. He was succeeded by the childless Anne,
whose heir was designated, by the English without consulting the Scots, as Sophia of
Hanover, granddaughter of James VI. The Scottish Parliament retaliated with the Act of
Security in 1703, which threatened to select a different heir if certain constitutional
demands were not met. Thus began the wrangle which culminated, unexpectedly perhaps
in some respects, in the Treaty of Union of 1707. The Court Party demanded and received
an incorporating union which was largely defensive in aim since the country was at war
and some means of preventing Scotland being used as an invasionary portal had to be
found. Such parliamentary opposition as existed favoured a federal solution, though a
Jacobite minority and a few stalwarts associated mainly with Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun
argued for the status quo. The Scots thus appeared to surrender the sovereignty so proudly
defended in 1320. The literal trade-off was access to English markets, particularly those in
 Land and Freedom: Scotland, 1314–1707 143

its colonies. Scottish nobility and placemen were bribed to vote in favour while the folk at
large were largely hostile, so manifestly so that troops were imported to nip potential
trouble in the bud. Above all, the union was a triumph for the middling sort who were still
content to read their Blind Harry, of which, as at other crisis points in Scottish history,
many copies were purchased in 1706–7, but who honestly believed in the necessity, indeed
the inevitability, of a commercial future. The auld sang had truly ended and henceforth
Scots danced to a much different tune.

Further reading

Cowan, Edward J. (2003), ‘For Freedom Alone’: The Declaration of Arbroath 1320, East
Linton: Tuckwell Press.
Henderson, Lizanne and Edward J. Cowan (2001), Scottish Fairy Belief: A History, East
Linton: Tuckwell Press.
Houston, R. A. and W. W. J. Knox (eds) (2001), The New Penguin History of Scotland from
the Earliest Times to the Present Day, London: Allan Lane/The Penguin Press.
Lynch, Michael (ed.) (2001), The Oxford Companion to Scottish History, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Todd, Margo (2002), The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland, New Haven and
London: Yale University Press.
Watt, D. E. R. (ed.) (1987–98), Scotichronicon by Walter Bower, 9 vols, Aberdeen and
Edinburgh: Aberdeen University Press/Mercat Press.
 16

Emergent Nation: Scotland’s

Geography, 1314–1707
Charles W. J. Withers

If, somehow, we could revisit the Scottish landscape in 1707, we would hardly recognise it.
Our modern countryside of scattered farmsteads and villages surrounded by large fields had
yet to appear. A more open and cluttered scene of small fields and ferm touns was com-
monplace, especially in the arable Lowlands. A traveller from 1707 in the Scotland of 1314
would likewise have encountered a largely foreign country. The patterns of rural settlement
and the structures of rural society might have been familiar, but the capitalisation of
farming, which was such a feature of the eastern and coastal Lowlands from the seventeenth
century, would not have been apparent. Most Scots, in 1314 and in 1707, earned their living
on the land or from its products. But by 1707, Glasgow had emerged as a mercantile centre
quite in contrast to its earlier ecclesiastical status, and Edinburgh was the sole capital of civic
governance, a position once shared with Perth and Scone. By 1707, the Highlands were an
established fact of Scotland’s regional and political geography. Yet in 1314, the idea of
the Highlands as a distinctive cultural region did not exist: simply, the Highlands had not
yet been invented. In 1707, Scotland’s national identity was a 400-year-old presumed
geographical fact. In 1314, Scotland understood as a matter of territory coterminous with
the modern idea of national space likewise did not exist. The Western Isles had only
recently been wrested from the Norse and the borders with England were imprecise. What
was, in 1707, generally accepted and understood as nationhood – a perceived sense of geo-
graphical integrity rooted in shared beliefs and separateness from others – was in 1314 new
and being fought for by a few. In the mid-fourteenth-century Gough Map, Scotland was
uncertainly drawn on Europe’s periphery. By the mid-seventeenth century, Scotland was,
arguably, the best-mapped country in Europe and, in 1682, a Geographer Royal was
appointed to undertake further scrutiny of Scotland’s limits and resources.
How should we explain these differences? Three interrelated themes inform this neces-
sarily summary survey of Scotland’s geography between the battle of Bannockburn and the
1707 Act of Union. The first is Scotland’s geographical emergence as national space and
the issues of its political integration and linguistic diversity. The second is the material
transformation of the Scottish landscape: patterns of rural settlement, the growth of towns
and of industry and so on. The third is the way in which Scotland was geographically ‘fash-
ioned’ – through maps, travellers’ descriptions, chorographical enquiry and via formal
survey. Understanding Scotland geographically in these ways means unthinking the
modern taken-for-granted fact of Scotland’s national space. It also demands more than just
recovering, where sources permit, past distribution patterns or taking geographical change
in this period to be the ‘filling-in’, as it were, of an assumed geographical space. Rather, it
 Emergent Nation: Scotland’s Geography, 1314–1707 145

is about how the above active processes collectively made Scotland through geography and
about how Scotland came to know itself geographically.
In 1314, Scotland was only beginning to assume its modern geographical extent. The
Western Isles had been ceded by the king of Norway in 1266. Berwick was held by the Scots
during the periods 1318–33, 1355–6 and from 1461 before being finally lost to England in
1482. The Anglo-Scottish frontier was an uncertain border. Scottish frontier administra-
tion aimed at military defence and the maintenance of law and order and was overseen, as
in England, by the Laws of the Marches. Scotland had three marches – East and West, first
recorded in 1355 and 1364 respectively, and Middle March, referred to from the mid-
fifteenth century. Much of the eastern and central Borders had been ceded by John Balliol
to Edward III of England in about 1336, and, from 1357 to 1384, territory formally under
English occupation included the Merse, Teviotdale and Annandale. Much of this was
regained in the early fifteenth century. An area in lower Eskdale and Liddesdale, the
‘Debatable Land’, was claimed by both England and Scotland and the definitive boundary
between the two countries was finally settled only in 1551–2. Orkney and Shetland came
under the control of the Scottish Crown only in 1468–9.
Most historians are agreed that the notion of a self-sustaining Scottish identity – of
Scotland as a country and as a people defined by the kingdom itself – was first apparent
between about 1290 and 1320. This sense of self was expressed, among other ways, in the
idea of constitutional independence and in that rhetoric of freedom that underlies the 1320
Declaration of Arbroath. Yet, this sense of national identity – what we may think of as
Scotland’s emergent ‘national consciousness’ – was not at once paralleled by the complete
geographical emergence of the nation as we now know it. Only as the Crown gained author-
ity over these lands and as the idea of the ‘community of the realm’ became widely accepted
did the territorial extent of Scotland come to coincide with the sense of Scottishness and
the geographical idea of Scotland.
Territorial integration was accompanied by linguistic diversity. Within fourteenth-
century Scotland, different languages were spoken – Gaelic to the north and west, Norn,
a dialect of Norse, was common in the Orkneys and Shetlands until the late seventeenth
century, and Scots was prevalent elsewhere. Norman-French was the language of the upper
classes. By the later 1380s, however, French and Gaelic had given way to Scots as the lan-
guage of letters and status, in the Lowlands at least. From this period, we can trace the
emergence of that commonly accepted division within Scotland’s cultural geography
between Highlands and Lowlands. The distinction between the older rocks of Scotland’s
north and west and the generally younger rocks and the more fertile soils derived from them
in the south and east Lowlands and coastal fringes is, of course, geographically meaning-
ful. This fact of topography, combined with its influence upon rainfall and soils, and, thus,
upon growing seasons, has had an enduring effect upon the limits of settlement and types
of land use. But as a cultural divide, the terms ‘Highlands’ and ‘Lowlands’ are not innate
features of Scotland’s geography. They appear from the 1380s onwards as reflections of a
linguistic and political separateness between the Gaelic-speaking society of the north and
west, largely distant from the Crown’s writ, and the mainly Scots-speaking south and east.
This geography of political integration and cultural diversity was evident in the expan-
sion of the Lordship of the Isles along Scotland’s western mainland and in the Inner and
Outer Hebrides from 1346 onwards. The location of castles on Scotland’s west coast – from
Dunaverty on the southern tip of Kintyre to Stornoway on Lewis – reflects a regional geog-
raphy of authority held together by sea power. This ended only with the forfeiture of the
Earldom of Ross in 1475 and of the Lordship of the Isles in 1493. Much of the sixteenth
146 Charles W. J. Withers

century was distinguished by tension between the Highland populations and the Crown. In
his Basilicon Doron of c.1598, James VI considered his Highland subjects ‘for the most part
barbarous’. Throughout the seventeenth century, the region and its population were often
seen, by virtue of language, a perceived moral and an actual geographical distance from reli-
gion and authority, as separate and dangerous. In terms of the geography of language, the
‘Highland Line’ circumscribed what was held to be a cultural region where Gaelic was more
prevalent than Scots or English. Yet, it neither ever existed as a formal administrative
boundary nor marked an absolute distinction between language areas since English was
increasingly known and used within certain social domains within the Highlands from the
seventeenth century.
It is possible from the early seventeenth century to see the emergence of a ‘Greater
Scotland’. In 1621, James VI granted to Sir William Alexander lands in North America
between the English lands of Newfoundland and New England and up to the St Lawrence.
‘Nova Scotia’ did not survive as a formal Scottish colony, but the name endures. In the
Caribbean, a small Scottish community was resident in Barbados from 1625 and many
Scots were exiled to the region as Civil War prisoners in 1650 and 1651. Scots colonists
were present in New Jersey from the 1680s. The attempt in 1698 and 1699 to establish a
fort and trading colony at Darien in Panama – where the name ‘New Edinburgh’ in the dis-
trict of ‘New Caledonia’ testifies to a Scottish colonial geographical imagination at work
– failed wholly in the face of Spanish military opposition and English commercial pressure.
After 1603 and the Union of Crowns, most Scots overseas travelled as individual traders,
mercenary soldiers, students or as members of the Scots Kirk: they were members of an
expanding British rather than a Scottish empire.
Knowing where and how people lived within Scotland – the geography of settlement
patterns – is easier after about 1350 than for earlier periods. Most Scots resided in the
countryside. The basic unit of farming was the ferm toun, or, in the Highlands, the clachan,
an irregularly grouped cluster of dwellings and outbuildings. Around these settlements
were small unenclosed fields in which individual holdings were, usually, scattered through-
out the toun or clachan as intermixed ‘rigs’ of arable land. This was the runrig system.
Within most such settlements, husbandry was marked by a distinction between continu-
ously cropped arable, the infield, and the outfield, lands in which cultivation shifted from
grass to arable and back again in strict rotation. The runrig and infield–outfield systems
constituted the bases to land management in the Scottish countryside although variations
in these systems, determined by terrain, proximity to market and the balance between the
pastoral and arable sectors, imparted diversity to the rural scene.
Expansion in settlement patterns was the result of the advance of agriculture into the
uncultivated waste, and the splitting of touns. In Glen Strathfarrer in Ross and Cromarty,
for example, there was no settlement in the medieval period except for Culligan at the
mouth of the glen. From the sixteenth century, references to new touns being established
appear in what was then the Forest of Affarick. Before about 1400, Ettrick in the disputed
borders was a hunting forest with little evidence of settlement save for the isolated lodges
of forest rangers and managers. From the mid-fifteenth century after the land had passed
into Crown ownership, the number of stedes or forest holdings was greatly increased, and
land use in the region gradually shifted from forestry towards commercial sheep-farming.
The commercialisation of agriculture in the area was further assisted by the substitution of
feuing for short-term leases from the early 1500s onwards. Elsewhere by contrast, such as
in the southern-central Highlands and in the Don and Dee valleys in the late fifteenth and
early sixteenth centuries, royal forests were established as hunting preserves.
 Emergent Nation: Scotland’s Geography, 1314–1707 147

The splitting of toun settlements in the Scottish countryside is evident in the many pairs
or groups of farms which, even today, carry a common name element but are distinguished
by prefixes such as ‘East’, ‘West’, ‘Nether’ or ‘Over’. The reasons why townships were split
are varied. In the Northern Isles, the custom of partible inheritance was an important cause.
On the mainland, at least in those areas under the sway of earlier Anglo-Norman legal
theories of property and descent, primogeniture was commonplace and township splitting
was commonly the result of lands being granted to more than one landholder. Smaller
townships, in principle at least, offered easier management. The seventeenth-century
geographer Robert Gordon, of Straloch in Banffshire, noted how some husbandmen in the
region had found problems in cultivating distant grounds and in negotiating with many
tenants and had opted for smaller townships.
Regional variations were apparent in this picture, in terms of land management and in
landholding. In the north and west Highlands and Islands most notably, and in the upland
parishes of Aberdeenshire, Banffshire, Perthshire and in south-west Scotland, temporary
dwellings known as sheilings were the focus of a summer pastoralism that often included
cheese making. Within this system – which survived in parts of Scotland until the 1930s –
different local customs were apparent in the timing of stock movement and in the length
of time people and beasts would be on the higher grounds. Regional variations in the geog-
raphy of rural social structure, and, thus, of rural wealth derived from agriculture are more
clearly apparent by the later seventeenth century. The Poll Tax returns of the 1690s show
that in the predominantly arable areas of the Lothians, Berwickshire and lowland
Aberdeenshire, the traditional model of the ferm toun with its handful of joint tenants and
cottars was by then uncommon. There, the pattern was increasingly of large farms leased
by single tenants and worked by hired labour. In the increasingly commercially oriented
pastoral areas of south-west Scotland, larger sheep and cattle farms were also more com-
monly worked by single tenants. Levels of multiple tenancy were, generally, higher in the
Highlands and Islands than elsewhere. The prevalence in this region of the tacksman
system, whereby one person would be responsible for the ‘tack’ of land, but who would
sublet most or all of it to others who would actually work the land makes it difficult to know
tenurial structures and overall population levels in detail.
These regional variations were dynamic rather than static. Highland parishes exported
black cattle to the Lowlands, for example, and often imported grainstuffs. Much of the
Highlands practised arable agriculture, although topography and technology limited field
sizes and the extent of worked ground. As Thomas Morer, a traveller to the Highlands
noted in 1689, ‘tis almost increadible how much some of the mountains they plough’. With
hindsight, it is possible to see in his words the danger signs of that overdependence on sub-
sistence farming that undermined the Highland rural economy in the following centuries.
But, in truth, nowhere and no one among the country population was immune from the
effects of harvest failure and concomitant price rises. The distress occasioned by harvest
failure and disease between 1695 and 1701 – the ‘Seven Ill Years’ – was only a more extreme
episode in a varying chronology and geography of rural hardship. There were famines in
the early 1550s, the 1560s, 1571–3, 1585–7, 1594–8 (and in 1602 in the Highlands). The
Northern Isles were terribly affected by famine in 1634; there was general scarcity between
1649–51 and parts of southern Scotland had subsistence crises in 1674 and in 1690.
Scotland’s population geography before 1707 is largely conjectural. We have only esti-
mates for the total: perhaps 400,000 to 470,000 in the late fourteenth century, between
550,000 to 800,000 persons by the late sixteenth century and between 800,000 and
1 million by 1700. Plague was a major killer in 1349 and in 1362 and in later years. Bubonic
148 Charles W. J. Withers

plague was widespread in 1568–9, 1574, 1584–8, 1597–9, from 1600 to 1609, in 1623–4
and especially between 1644 and 1649. High mortality from plague was reported in
Edinburgh, Dundee, Perth, Glasgow, Ayr and Stirling in 1605 and 1606, and in 1623, for
example, the populations of Kelso, Dumfries and Dunfermline were much reduced as a
result of plague. Outbreaks of disease would often be heightened in their severity by affect-
ing rural populations in already straitened circumstances. The fact that mortality statistics,
where reliable at all, are more certain for urban Scotland from the seventeenth century than
for either rural parishes then or for earlier periods as a whole is a reflection of source sur-
vival and the nature of urban administrative systems. The fact that urban mortality records
often enumerated the death of out-of-town vagrants and paupers (and thus inflated urban
statistics) also reflects a country–town migration associated with relief from rural poverty.
The population evidence contained within the Hearth and Poll Taxes of the 1690s must
be treated with caution, but the picture they reveal of population distribution by that
period is one of concentration in the eastern, western and north-east coastal Lowlands and
in the towns. The total tax contribution paid by Scotland’s burghs in 1697 is a good indi-
cator of the principally urban distribution of wealth and economic activity on the eve of
Union. Glasgow and Edinburgh dominated the country: they were, respectively, only about
twice and three times the population of Aberdeen and Dundee yet their tax contributions
were four and nine times as high. More widely, some 68 per cent of Scotland’s tax contri-
butions as a whole came from towns located within that triangle whose baseline lay
between Dunbar and Stirling and whose apex was Montrose. This was different from the
picture by about 1300 where burgh formation was important in the Borders, in the south-
west and, by the later twelfth century, along the Moray coast. Tax returns of the 1360s and
1370s show the predominance and wealth of the east-coast burghs, however, with the
exception of Dumfries, a picture sustained in the tax rolls of 1535, 1583 and 1635. Between
1535 and 1670, in terms of tax roll evidence, Glasgow rises to significance in Scotland’s
urban hierarchy.
Small urban centres, burghs, had existed on the Scottish mainland from the twelfth
century onwards. The evidence of the Great Customs return of 1327 reveals the economic
importance of Scotland’s burghs in the early fourteenth century. Berwick was pre-eminent,
followed by Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Perth. This leading group was followed by a group
of middling-sized burghs such as Stirling, Ayr, the now almost vanished settlement of
Roxburgh, and Dundee. Beneath that group was a tier of minor burghs such as Kirkcudbright
and Lanark. Edinburgh’s status rose steadily during the fourteenth century and the city was
the first ranked in the customs records of 1366–76. Throughout the fourteenth century,
Scotland’s urban geography was dominated by the royal burghs located in the eastern coastal
Lowlands. This dominance was rooted in their control of hinterland market areas and,
notably, in their overseas trade, chiefly in wool, with the Low Countries.
The period from 1400 to 1707 saw numerous changes to the type, number and built
fabric of Scottish burghs. New burghs were established, the overwhelming majority of
which were burghs either of barony or of regality, which meant, by contrast with royal or
ecclesiastical burghs, that they had no monopoly either over a rural hinterland or over
foreign trade. Only a very few were located in the north and west: Kingussie and Inverary,
for example, were established as burghs of barony in 1464 and 1474 respectively. Fifty-eight
burghs – from Aberdour (West) in 1501 to Portsoy in 1550 – were created in the first half
of the sixteenth century. Such burghs were small centres of population – as was the case
for most burghs with the exception of Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee and, increasingly
during the 1600s, Glasgow – and served local trading needs. Some burghs – the so-called
 Emergent Nation: Scotland’s Geography, 1314–1707 149

‘parchment’ burghs – never got much further than an initial planned intention. Even
allowing for this, Scotland’s geography was distinguished from the later fifteenth century
by the gradual rise of that characteristic feature of its landscape, the small burgh.
A further element in the geographical emergence of small-town Scotland was the growth
in numbers, in the later seventeenth century especially, of non-burghal market centres. In
1661, for example, only eleven markets or fairs throughout Scotland were not held in
burghs. By 1707, approximately 150 non-burghal market centres had been founded with
their market or fair licensed by Act of Parliament. This geography of urban expansion –
and the related commercial civility it reflected and engendered – was an element in that
geopolitical integration of the nation noted above. Plans by James VI to establish burghs
in the Highlands and Outer Isles, outlined in an Act of Parliament in 1597, were expanded
upon in the 1609 Statutes of Icolmkill (Iona). The policy was successfully realised only in
the establishment of Lochhead, later Campbeltown, in 1609.
The internal geography of most Scottish burghs was determined by the pattern of
burgage plots, usually long lots of land stretching away from the marketplace. Ecclesiastical
holdings could also influence settlement form: in 1440, for example, Glasgow had thirty-
two manses located around the Bishop’s castle and St Mungo’s Cathedral. As late as 1592,
Edinburgh had only one parish and, by 1640, had only four, although a ‘greater Edinburgh’
made up of the burghs of Canongate and North and South Leith lay outwith the capital’s
formal limits. In the capital and elsewhere, change in the built form involved the use of
undeveloped burgage plots within the urban area or the more intensive use of space within
areas already tenanted rather than expansion beyond the burgh’s bounds. The characteri-
stics of pre-industrial urban development in Scotland were thus building up – construct-
ing high tenements – and filling in. Specialised marketplaces were common – for linen and
woollen cloths, for meal, flesh (meat), horses, fruit and for fish, for example – and some
industries and trades such as tanning and dyeing might be sent to the edges of towns. The
urban social geography of Scotland’s burghs before 1707, however, was one characterised
more by the mixing of ranks and occupations than by that spatial segregation so marked in
later centuries.
Scotland’s industrial geography before 1707 was small scale and largely rural in location.
Activities such as the spinning and weaving of woollen and linen yarn were essentially
domestic in production. Salt working, especially the larger-scale production aimed at export,
was tied to the coasts. Linens, woollens, coal, salt and lead ore were among Scotland’s prin-
cipal exports. Coal mining was concentrated in that band of the Lowlands between Ayrshire
and north Lanarkshire through the Lothians and Fife with small-scale extraction in places
such as Brora, Campbeltown and Canonbie. Coal extraction was by way of open ‘bell’ pits
where the outcrop reached the surface or by narrow sub-surface horizontal workings known
as ‘in-gaun e’en’ (in-going eyes). During the fifty years of its operation from 1575, George
Bruce of Carnock’s mine at Culross, with its deeper shafts and loading island in the Forth,
was reckoned one of the industrial wonders of the day. Sir George Hay’s blast-furnace and
iron-smelting operation at Loch Maree, which began in 1610 and lasted until about 1626,
was a similar local industrial site, but, as a capitalised venture employing non-local labour
and imported raw materials, it was not typical of its time.
In the Borders, gold was extracted from Crawford Muir in upper Clydesdale from the
1540s and from streams near St Mary’s Loch, but the region was chiefly notable for lead
mining in the Leadhills–Wanlockhead district. Large-scale lead mining at Leadhills began
in 1638 under the direction of the Hope family, later the Earls of Hopetoun. The landscape
in this region, even today, is scarred by industrial workings.
150 Charles W. J. Withers

Where concentrations of capital, labour, raw materials and marketing resources came
together, small-scale industrialised regions were apparent by the mid-seventeenth century.
Around Edinburgh, for example, rural industry lay in a zone eastwards from the capital and
Leith into the coal mines of the Esk basin, and westwards towards Bo’ness in salt working
and coal mines. In Aberdeenshire, the numbers of male industrial workers were much
higher in the lowland arable districts than in the upland pastoral parishes. In the Lowlands
generally, advances in agriculture, moves to industrial specialisation and a growth in the
number of manufactories showing an increasingly sophisticated commercial awareness
went hand in hand from the mid-seventeenth century.
Scotland’s geography between 1314 and 1707 is also revealed through the ways in which
the nation was geographically ‘self-fashioned’. It is not appropriate for this period to think
of geography as a discipline in any modern sense of the term – although geography was
taught in Scotland’s universities from the 1580s, usually as a crucial adjunct to the study
of history. Yet, it is possible to see different geographical practices being used, by Scots and
others, to understand the limits and nature of the nation.
One such practice was chorography. This, properly understood, emphasised regional and
local description, in map and word, in contrast to geography’s attention to national matters
or, even, the Earth as a whole. Many of those works of late Renaissance humanism which
historians consider crucial to the formation of Scottish nationhood from the sixteenth
century – Hector Boece’s History of Scotland (1527), John Mair’s History of Greater Britain
(1521), John Leslie’s History of Scotland (1578) and George Buchanan’s History of Scotland
(1582) – begin with geographical descriptions. Mair, for example, discusses the by-then
recognised ‘Highland problem’. Buchanan offers regional descriptions: Lothian, he con-
sidered, ‘far excels all the rest in the cultivation of the elegancies, and in the abundance of
the necessaries of life’. This chorographical work was not accidental. Simply, geography
was crucial to the historical perception of nations and was an understood means by which
nations could, as it were, write themselves down.
The chorographical descriptions and maps of Timothy Pont, undertaken between about
1596 and 1608, provide an important picture of Scotland’s geography (although his cov-
erage of the nation is not total). Pont reveals a rural Scotland dominated by ferm touns.
Larger towns, notable antiquities and the houses of the more prominent individuals are
shown. Pont provides the first serious map evidence for the distribution and character of
woods in Scotland. His work depicts the mountains and other topographical features not
just as stylised features but, as in his description of part of Sutherland as ‘extreem wildernes’,
as qualitative judgements. His work, in combination with that of Robert Gordon and
others, was used as the basis to the first atlas of Scotland, Johannes Blaeu’s Atlas Novus
of 1654.
Traveller’s accounts, which offer outsiders’ views of Scotland, become more common
from the seventeenth century. Not all are as misguided and derogatory as James Howell’s
A Perfect Description of the People and Country of Scotland (1648), where he wrote of
Scotland how ‘The Ayr might be wholesome, but for the stinking people that inhabit it.
The ground might be fruitful, had they wit to manure it.’ From the 1620s, geography was
on the agenda for Scots as a means to state knowledge. An ecclesiastical survey of parishes
in south-west Scotland was undertaken in 1627. Chorographical and topographical surveys
of parts of the country exist for 1632–54, 1642, 1644, 1649 and detailed town maps date
from 1645 (for Aberdeen) and 1647 (Edinburgh).
By the later seventeenth century, the maps of Pont and Blaeu were no longer accurate.
Earlier surveys were only ever partially successful. Sir Robert Sibbald, Scotland’s Geographer
 Emergent Nation: Scotland’s Geography, 1314–1707 151

Royal from 1682, was appointed in order to undertake, among other things, a survey of the
geography and the natural history of the kingdom. In order to produce new maps, Sibbald
appointed the ‘Mathematician and skilful Mechanick’ John Adair to survey the nation.
Geographical information including, literally, the shape of the nation as revealed in maps
was useful knowledge in its own terms, but Sibbald and Adair’s work was underlain by eco-
nomic motives and by a widespread concern to know the current status and future potential
of the nation’s resources. As Adair worked his way round Scotland from east to west, start-
ing with a map of Clackmannanshire in 1681, Sibbald conducted his enquiries through a
standard circulated questionnaire. At about the same time, the German-born John Slezer –
a former associate of Sibbald – undertook a visual depiction of Scotland that was published
in 1693 as Theatrum Scotiae. The geography revealed by these endeavours is not complete:
Adair was hampered by lack of funds and not all his work was published; not everyone
replied to Sibbald and he was held back from publishing his work in 1707 and 1708 because
Edinburgh’s printing presses were fully employed printing pamphlets about the Union. But,
in being produced by reliable correspondents across Scotland, by map makers in the field
and by an artist-engineer viewing the nation’s prospects, the geography that emerged on the
eve of Union was essentially home grown as, in these ways, Scots took geographical account
of themselves.
Given that these related processes of political integration, material change and intellec-
tual assessment were at work between 1314 and 1707, we should not simply see Scotland’s
geography in this period as a static space of containment for the separate production of
Scottish literature. Rather, we might think of Scotland’s geography as the result of these
processes and a collective means to national self-knowledge in which certain kinds of writing
differently shaped what was held to be Scotland and Scottish literature. What we know
about Scotland’s geography in this period comes from certain sorts of literature. Changes in
seventeenth-century agriculture are more clearly discerned, for example, given the rise of the
written lease. Travel accounts such as Martin Martin’s 1698 A Late Voyage to St Kilda and his
A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland, circa 1695 (1703) represent a geographical source
and an emergent literary genre. Regional descriptions were usually in prose. But some, like
the 1652 ‘Poetical Description of Orkney’, noted how

He that would a good historian bee

Esteem’d and prais’d for full Geography,
Must shew the length, the breadth, the situation
The Lawes, religion, Manners of a Nation,

measured the land in a different metre. What are maps if not geographical writing? By
the end of our period, new sorts of literary works aimed at Scotland’s future geography
were appearing: John Reid’s Scots Gard’ner (1693), for example, written ‘for the climate
of Scotland’, or James Donaldson’s Husbandry Anatomised (1697). James Paterson’s
A Geographical Description of Scotland, published in 1681 and reissued in expanded editions
in 1685 and 1687, was essentially a trader’s almanac with tide tables and the dates of fairs.
As the preface put it, this work of geography was ‘Exactly Calculated and formed, for the
use of all Travellers, Mariners, and others, who have any Affairs, or Merchandizing in this
Kingdom of Scotland’. The fact that the first geography book published in Scotland –
Gawin Drummond’s A Short Treatise of Geography (1708) – was produced for the use of
schools highlights the emergence of different markets for geography and different public
spheres in early eighteenth-century Scotland.
152 Charles W. J. Withers

Further reading

Broun, D., R. J. Finlay and M. Lynch (eds) (1998), Image and Identity: The Making and
Re-Making of Scotland through the Ages, Edinburgh: John Donald.
Cunningham, I. C. (ed.) (2001), The Nation Survey’d: Timothy Pont’s Maps of Scotland, East
Linton: Tuckwell Press.
Flinn, M. (ed.) (1977), Scottish Population History from the 17th Century to the 1930s,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McNeill, P. G. B. and H. L. MacQueen (eds) (1996), Atlas of Scottish History to 1707,
Edinburgh: The Scottish Medievalists and the Department of Geography, University
of Edinburgh.
Whittington, G. and I. D. Whyte (eds) (1983), An Historical Geography of Scotland, London
and New York: Academic Press.
Withers, C. W. J. (2001), Geography, Science and National Identity: Scotland since 1520,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 17

The Several Tongues of a Single

Kingdom: The Languages of
Scotland, 1314–1707
Christine Robinson and Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh

The Celtic origins of Gaelic and the Germanic origins of Scots (or Inglis as it was called
by its speakers until the fifteenth century) produced two very different languages. Their
subsequent histories in Scotland further ensured that, even with geographical proximity,
and some lexical borrowing in both directions, these languages would maintain distinct lit-
erary traditions. Latin was in widespread use in Scotland during this period, leaving its own
wealth of literature and a further legacy in the semantic fields of education and law. French,
too, was used, at least until the incarceration of Mary Queen of Scots, but its currency was
limited and, in spite of the fact that French works were widely read, very few literary works
appeared in this courtly tongue. In the north of Scotland and the Northern Isles, the
Scandinavian language of Norn was spoken throughout this period: this produced no lit-
erature, dying out apparently in the eighteenth century, but left its mark on the literature,
speech and place-names of the Northern Isles today.

Scottish Gaelic

The expansion of Gaelic throughout most of present-day Scotland in the centuries pre-
ceding the Wars of Independence was in no small part due to the success and growth of the
Christian Church, which had been established in Iona since the sixth century. The Gaelic
origins of the Columban Church, and the prominence of Gaelic as a working language of
church and lay institutions, ensured for Gaelic in medieval Scotland a prestigious place in
the higher-register spheres of politics, administration and literature. A Gaelic-speaking
court gave patronage to makers of literature at the highest levels of Scottish society: a brief
Gaelic poem from the early twelfth century survives which refers to the Scottish king
Alexander I and his brother David I. In north-eastern Aberdeenshire, the twelfth-century
property records for the monastery of Deer were written in Gaelic and may have been com-
posed for use in a legal court. A relatively late example of the social prestige formerly
enjoyed by Gaelic in eastern Scotland is provided by Aberdeen Grammar School, whose
linguistic policy in the year 1553 allowed students to converse in Gaelic (Hibernice lit.
‘Irish’) as well as Latin, Greek, Hebrew or French, but not apparently in Scots (vernacule).
The high tide of Gaelic began to recede in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries
with the anglicisation of the royal dynasty. The court itself became Norman-French
and English in speech, and the northern English dialect (‘Inglis’) was fostered as the official
154 Christine Robinson and Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh

language. This resulted in the loss of status for Gaelic, especially in the south and east,
where the recession began, with profound and permanent effects for the language and atti-
tudes towards it, which are still felt to this day. From this time, Gaelic begins to recede in
the south and in the east, and the extent of the Gàidhealtachd (‘Gaelic-speaking area’)
begins to gradually contract. At the time of the Union of the Parliaments in 1707, Gaelic
was spoken in a more or less unbroken continuum from the north-west to Banffshire,
Aberdeenshire and Angus in the east, and Perthshire and Dunbartonshire in the south.
Gaelic was still spoken in parts of Galloway until the eighteenth century.
While southern and eastern areas experienced decline, especially at official levels, from
the thirteenth century the Western and Southern Isles enjoyed somewhat of a Gaelic
renaissance. In the mid-twelfth century, the Gaelic Lordship of the Isles, founded partly on
the Norse kingdom of the Western and Southern Isles, emerged as a quasi-independent
state. Under this, Gaelic learning and culture flourished until the late fifteenth century
when the Lordship was finally crushed by the central authorities of Scotland. During this
period, there was much political, cultural and literary contact between western Scotland
and Ireland. Scottish poets trained in Irish schools and Irish poets visited or emigrated to
Scotland – poets from each country addressing poems to Irish and Scottish patrons alike.
An Irish poet received the sum of 100 Scottish pounds from James VI’s court in 1581,
perhaps in payment for a poem.
When we come to the early modern period (i.e. c. 1200–1650), there can be little doubt
that Scottish Gaelic (ScG) was linguistically different to Irish in some important respects,
even though Gaelic-speaking areas were connected by an unbroken linguistic continuum
within which a high degree of mutual intelligibility existed. Nevertheless, we can be
certain that the main linguistic characteristics of modern ScG were either already in exist-
ence, or were evolving, in the period between 1314 and 1707. This is undeniably so, despite
the use of a common written literary language in both countries, and despite the fact that
ScG was referred to as Erse or Irish in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The earliest surviving continuous texts written in Gaelic Scotland, the twelfth-century
Gaelic Notes in the Book of Deer, are of unique historical and linguistic value in the light
they shed on aspects of Gaelic culture in twelfth-century Buchan. Technical terms used
(e.g. mormaer ‘high steward’, pett ‘piece of land’, dabach ‘davoch’), show that in cultural
terms the eastern Scottish Gàidhealtachd had shifted significantly from that of Ireland.
Similarly, the numerous phonetic spellings in the Notes, many of which can be shown to
reflect dialectal features and some of which represent early Scotticisms, testify to the
gradual divergence of ScG and Irish.
Early divergences between ScG and Irish are partly to be explained as the result of
natural linguistic drift over a large geographical area. Early contact with different lan-
guages, including Pictish, Cumbric, Northumbrian English and Norse must also, however,
have been a significant factor in the development of a Scottish variety of Gaelic. It has
been suggested that aspects of the verbal system of ScG, which are structurally more akin
to modern Welsh than Irish, may be due to early contact with a Brittonic language, poss-
ibly Pictish. The phonological feature of preaspiration of historically voiceless stops has
been claimed by some as being due to Norse influence.
In relation to Irish, ScG tends generally to be phonologically conservative but morpho-
logically innovative. The phonological feature of hiatus, in which two adjacent word-
internal vowels are assigned to separate syllables (e.g. laä ‘day’), was a feature of Old Gaelic
(c. ad 600–900) and continues to be a characteristic feature of many modern ScG dialects.
This feature has, however, been lost in modern Irish, and the beginnings of its demise can
 The Several Tongues: The Languages of Scotland, 1314–1707 155

be traced to at least the tenth century: compare ScG disyllabic latha ‘day’ with Irish lá. The
initial mutation of eclipsis is substantially different in ScG and may represent an early diver-
gence between northern (ScG) and southern (Irish) varieties of Gaelic: compare ScG an
cat ‘their cat’ and Irish a gcat ‘their cat’. The reduction of long unstressed vowels is almost
certainly a Scottish innovation (cf. Irish bradán ‘salmon’ and ScG bradan, the latter pro-
nounced with unstressed clear short a), as is the preaspiration of stressed voiceless stops (mac
 machc, map  mahp, cat  caht). Scottish morphological innovations include the second-
person plural imperative ending -ibh (for earlier -idh), whose origins can be traced to the Old
Gaelic period (i.e before the end of the ninth century); the ScG plural ending -an (cf. Irish
-a); the personal pronouns e, i, iad / aid (cf. Irish sé / é, sí / í, siad / iad), and possibly the use
of analytic verbal forms in place of synthetic ones (cf. ScG chuireadh tu ‘you would put’ and
Irish chuirfeá). A small number of syntactic features show a decidedly northern locus, some
of which may have originated in Scotland. Early lexical differences, other than borrowings
from foreign sources, can be due to phonological and/or analogical developments, e.g. taigh
‘house’ (cf. Irish teach, tigh), piuthar ‘sister’ (cf. Irish deirfiúr, siúr), cóig ‘five’ (cf. Irish cúig),
leaghmann ‘moth’ (cf. southern Irish leaghmhan). Other lexical differences are due to seman-
tic developments, e.g. craobh ‘tree’ (cf. Irish ‘branch’), eachdraidh ‘history’ (cf. Irish ‘adven-
ture, tale’).
Despite significant linguistic divergences by the end of the twelfth century, Scottish and
Irish-Gaelic literati shared a common literary language (referred to as Classical or early
modern Irish/Gaelic). This, generally speaking, seems to have been based more on the lan-
guage as used in Ireland than Scotland – the language planners focusing more on ‘central’
(i.e. Irish) features than ‘peripheral’ (i.e. Scottish) features. This prescriptive norm was rig-
orously promoted in the numerous hereditary schools of learning throughout Ireland and
also in parts of Scotland. The use of this ‘common’ literary register tended to obscure the
existence of vernacular registers of the language, and should not be taken as evidence of
the non-divergence of varieties of Gaelic in Scotland and Ireland at this period. The lin-
guistic and literary style of a poem like Dál chabhlaigh ar Chaistéal Suibhne (‘An assembling
of a fleet against Castle Sween’), composed for Eoin Mac Suibhne of Kintyre during the
Wars of Independence (c. 1310), has much in common with bardic poems composed by
Irish or Scottish poets down to the seventeenth century.
A significant number of the surviving Gaelic texts during the period 1314–1707
emanate from western Scotland, many of these written and composed by members of the
hereditary learned families which served the Lords of the Isles and their descendants. More
than a third of surviving Gaelic manuscripts of pre-1700 Scotland are medical in nature.
These are based largely on continental exemplars, were written by members of medical
families such as the Beatons, and date from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Martin
Martin, in his A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland, circa 1695 (1703), reports that
the South Uist physician Fergus Beaton possessed ‘the following ancient Irish manuscripts
in the Irish character; to wit, Avicenna, Averroes, Joannes de Vigo, Bernardus Gordonus,
and several volumes of Hippocrates’. As well as the more usual prose and verse literary
texts, we also find a small handful of legal documents in Gaelic, including the 1408
MacDonald Islay charter, probably written by a physician Fergus MacBeth; the 1555 con-
tract between An Calbhach O’Donnell and the Earl of Argyll; the Skye contract of fos-
terage of 1614, written by the poet Toirdhealbhach Ó Muirgheasáin for Sir Roderick
MacLeod of Dunvegan and Harris; the Lorn contract of lease dating from 1603 to 1616,
written by Hugh MacPhail (fl. 1603–38). The Rev. Mr John MacLean, minister of
Kilninian in Mull (1702–56), informs us that ‘in his first memory it was customary in the
156 Christine Robinson and Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh

country for gentlemen and ladies to correspond in Galic’. One such letter, which has sur-
vived, was written by Lachlan MacLean, chief of the MacLeans of Duart, who was killed
in 1598. A number of early seventeenth-century legal documents (1617–25) were endorsed
in Gaelic, and survive in Dunvegan Castle. These texts are invariably written in the stand-
ard literary ‘Irish’ register of the period. Typical features include the Irish type of eclipsis,
subjective s- pronouns, oblique -igh(e) (instead of vernacular -ich(e)), nominal plural forms
ending in -a (rather than ScG -an).
Despite close adherence to ‘Irish’ Classical norms, occasional slips and hypercorrections
can provide instructive glimpses of the subterranean vernacular language. For instance,
a case has been made for the existence of a number of Scotticisms in a religious text tran-
scribed from dictation in southern Ireland in the year 1467 by a Scottish Gael, Dubhghall
Albannach, possibly a member of the MacMhuirich poetic family. Angus Beaton, in an
early seventeenth-century medical text, lets his linguistic guard down when he writes
tacann for tachdann ‘suffocates’. This vernacular-literary hybrid form, as well as containing
the ‘Irish’ present-tense marker -ann (which may never have been a feature of vernacular
ScG), provides evidence for the ScG change chd  chg, and for the preaspiration of -c.
A mid-seventeenth-century grammatical tract, ultimately deriving from a Classical ‘Irish’
exemplar, but written by a Scottish Gael, possibly in the area of Inverary and perhaps
intended as an instructional textbook, contains a number of Scotticisms including the 2pl.
imperative form in -ibh, ScG eclipsis (ann ccēill), dibh(e) ‘drink’ for digh(e), non-inflection
of polysyllabic adjectives (tar aibnib abhal ēgcosmoil lit. ‘across mighty unlikely rivers’).
The dominance of Inglis/Scots in legal and administrative spheres from the late four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries is reflected in the representation of Gaelic language in some
sources in an orthography based on, or influenced by, Middle Scots. Such orthographic
forms, as well as providing evidence for bilingualism in both Scots and ScG, often bring to
light vernacular features of ScG. We find Gaelic words in Middle Scots guise in late medieval
Highland monumental sculpture, in official bonds and contracts, in poems and charms
originally composed in Gaelic, and in poems composed in Scots. Three texts in Scots-based
orthography, two of which appear to be charms, survive in the The Murthly Hours manu-
script, and as such constitute the second or third earliest surviving specimens of Gaelic
written in Scotland (c. 1370–1430) – some one hundred years earlier than The Book of the
Dean of Lismore.
Richard Hollands’s The Buke of the Howlat (c. 1450) contains a list of terms describing
the retainers one might expect to find in the service of a well-to-do Gaelic household, in
this instance, most likely in northern Morayshire. He refers to the schenachy (seanachaidh
‘historian, etc.’), the ben schene (bean seinn ‘woman singer’), the ballach (balach ‘serf, etc.’)
and the crekery (creacaire). The latter is important in that it seems to provide an early
modern attestation of the older term creccaire, which is recorded in the Old Gaelic law tract
on status, Uraicecht Becc. In the latter the creccaire is listed as one of the lowly professions
(fodána), and it has been suggested that the term signified a person who entertained with
raucous chatter. The term appears to have been obsolete in Ireland during the early modern
period (1200–1650) and its survival in Scotland provides an instance of the conservative
nature of the inherited ScG tradition. Interestingly, this word also survives in a letter
written by Professor James Garden of Aberdeen in 1693 in reply to a query from John
Aubrey about Highland customs. In the letter, Garden refers to an account of the bards by
a student of his from Strathspey, who refers to ‘kreahkirin [creacairean] i.e. such as could dis-
course on any short and transient subject, told news and such modern things, kreahkish [crea-
cais] properly signifying any discourse’. The Strathspey forms are of further linguistic interest
 The Several Tongues: The Languages of Scotland, 1314–1707 157

in that they provide evidence for the ScG development of preaspiration before -c in the
student’s dialect.
The best-known source for Gaelic texts in Middle Scots-based orthography is of course
The Book of the Dean of Lismore, written mainly by the two brothers James (Dean of
Lismore) and Duncan MacGregor in the Fortingall area of Highland Perthshire during the
years 1512–42. The contents of the manuscript, which include extracts from Scots poets
such as Dunbar and Henryson, have a broad geographical and cultural sweep, and include
materials connected with the Campbells of Glenorchy, the recently defunct Lordship of the
Isles, and north-west Connacht. It is becoming increasingly clear that their orthographic
practice was not an eccentric innovation of the early sixteenth century, or indeed of the
MacGregors themselves, and it has been suggested that parts of the manuscript may have
been copied from exemplars written in similar orthography. The Dean’s book contains the
earliest corpus of substantial and incontrovertible evidence for the emergence of dialectal
traits in ScG. These include: the ScG type of eclipsis (nam bas MS nym bass), lenition of
past passive (do chuireadh MS de churre), 2pl. imperative -ibh (éistibh MS estew), preaspira-
tion before -c (shoc MS hocht or hochc), article am and nan (am brat MS ym brat; nan leabhar
MS nyn lowr), loss of final -adh (ghaisgeadh ‘prowess’ MS ghask), n  r following certain con-
sonants (cnead MS cret; ghnìomh MS zreyve; mnàibh MS mrave), reduction of unstressed syl-
lables (toirteamhail ‘huge’ MS tortoyl; deichneabhar MS deachnor). Similarly, the Fernaig
Manuscript, a collection of verse made by Duncan MacRae of Inverinate during the years
1688–93, is also written in a Scots-based orthography, the majority of poems being com-
posed by seventeenth-century Scottish gentlemen. The manuscript abounds with Wester
Ross dialectal features.
Gaelic publishing begins early with the publication in April 1567 of Foirm na
nUrrnuidheadh (lit. ‘The Form of Prayers’), which is mainly a translation of the Book of
Common Order carried out by John Carswell, whose positions included chaplain to the
Earl of Argyll, Superintendant of Argyll and the Isles, and Bishop of the Isles. The lan-
guage of the text is the high register literary language of the period with very few minor
exceptions, as is that of the early seventeenth-century Gaelic version of Calvin’s Geneva
Catechism, the second Gaelic book to be published in Scotland. However, these contrast
with the language of the Synod of Argyll’s shorter catechism of 1659, which is generally of
a simpler and more vernacular nature, including the Scottish type of eclipsis (na bpeacadh
‘of the sins’, a mfa¯s ‘their growth’) and subjective iad; it also includes cánoin, canóin, which
has been interpreted as an early instance of the vernacular ScG form cànain meaning ‘lan-
guage’ with ahistorical long á (cf. Irish canúint ‘dialect’). The publication of religious texts
in the following century, especially the New Testament in 1767, was to see the emergence
of a truly Scottish Gaelic orthography. It is worth noting that ScG may have adopted a
Scots- or English-based orthography similar to that of Manx, had it not been for the pub-
lication in ‘Irish’ orthography of such religious texts in both Ireland and Scotland.
Bilingualism of various types in Scots and ScG was a feature of the period 1314–1707,
and this is reflected in the surviving sources, as it is in the cross-pollination of loan words
between both languages. Early contact between Scots and ScG is evidenced by the reten-
tion of dental articulation in Scots words reflecting Gaelic dental fricatives th, dh, which
had disappeared from ScG by the end of the thirteenth century, e.g. conveth ‘entertain-
ment/contribution due to a superior’  coinnmheadh ‘billeting’, cateran / catherane / ketharan
‘a Highland marauder’  ceithearn ‘kern, band of fighting men’, couthal (possibly conthal)
‘court’  comhdháil ‘assembly’. With the emergence of vernacular ScG in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century sources, a broad range of borrowings from English/Scots is attested,
158 Christine Robinson and Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh

many of which were borrowed long before their first attestation in written sources. The
intimate interaction between both languages is witnessed by the many domestic and
commonplace terms of Scots origin in ScG, for example amraidh ‘cupboard’, being ‘bench’,
burn ‘water’, cuidhle ‘wheel’, furm ‘form, stool’, gàirdean ‘arm’, gloidhc ‘idiot’, peitean ‘waist-
coat’, prìne ‘pin’, searbhadair ‘towel’, snog ‘nice’, trang ‘busy’, truinnsear ‘plate’.

Latin

Latin was extensively used for prose until the fifteenth century and only ceased to be used
as the main language of parliamentary statutes in 1424. It continued, however, to be used
for literary purposes throughout the period and benefited from the French neo-classicist
movement in the sixteenth century. The Education Act of 1496 had already ensured that
the sons of the nobility at least would have perfect Latin, and grammar and rhetoric were
the mainstays of secondary schooling in the early sixteenth century. The best known of the
Scottish neo-classicists was George Buchanan (1506–82) who spent many years in France
before returning to Scotland with his student, the Earl of Cassilis, and subsequently
Buchanan took up the post of tutor to young James VI. Buchanan was prolific in both
poetry and prose, much of it didactic, while his drama was highly influential on dramatic
practice throughout Europe, though particularly on French neo-classical dramatists like
Racine, and his Latin masque was performed during the marriage celebrations of Mary and
Darnley. Nor was Buchanan’s inspiration confined to Horace, Catullus and the Greek play-
wrights, whose works he translated into Latin. Buchanan also looked closer to home and
found much to admire and imitate in the works of Dunbar. Although Buchanan was the
outstanding Latinist of Scottish literature, he was one of a galaxy of scholars including
Boece, his translator Bellenden and William Drummond.

French

French was much less used as a language of verse at court. From the time of Normanisation
of the Scottish court, it was a high-prestige language and Scotland did not escape the
fashion for French verse in the later Middle Ages. The long association between Scotland
and France meant that there was none of the backlash against French that took place at
the English court and the writing of French verse was long seen as an accomplishment. In
spite of this, there is very little evidence of extensive literary work in French emanating
from the Scottish court. In spite of the Guise influence at court, the first language of Mary
Queen of Scots was Scots and she and her attendants had to learn French when she went
to France at the age of five. Nevertheless, she was later able to pen sonnets in French.

Scots

Although Gaelic began to give way to Scots and French at the Scottish court from the end
of the eleventh century, it was the years between 1314 and 1707 that saw Scots progress
from a non-literary tongue, through the period of its greatest flowering and into the start
of its decline as a high-prestige language. Older Scots is divisible into three periods: Early
Scots from 1375 to 1450; Early Middle Scots from 1450 to 1550 and Late Middle Scots
 The Several Tongues: The Languages of Scotland, 1314–1707 159

from 1550 to 1700. As we shall see, these divisions of Scots are not unrelated to the great
historical events from Bannockburn to the Union of the parliaments.
We know that the Germanic language that was to become known as Scots was widely
spoken in the Lowlands of Scotland. Old English (OE) had been spoken in the south of
Scotland since the early seventh century, a minority language among a predominantly
Gaelic-speaking population. Once the throne of Scotland became Normanised, the use of
Inglis began to expand, at the expense of Gaelic and Latin. From the time of King David
I, there was considerable migration into Scotland. French-speaking Anglo-Normans were
granted lands by the king, bringing with them English-speaking servants and, at the king’s
invitation, French and English monks arrived. There was an influx of people from the north
and Midlands of England, speaking Northern Middle English, with all it lexical and phono-
logical influence from the North Germanic, Scandinavian language of the Danish Vikings.
Flemish settlers, too, contributed to this multilingual society, coming together in the pros-
perous royal burghs.
By 1314, a variety of English, with the strong Scandinavian flavour brought by incom-
ers from the north of England, enriched by contact with Gaelic, French and Flemish, had
become the dominant language of all of south and east Scotland, with the exception of
Galloway, which remained Gaelic-speaking. It was known to its speakers as Inglis. At this
point, the term Scottis was reserved for Gaelic. One major factor in the growing supremacy
of Inglis was its success in the commercial, legal and administrative environment of the
burghs. The Wars of Independence were another major factor in its development as a
national language, because, from this time, the north of England looked south for its polit-
ical, cultural and, hence, linguistic lead, whereas Scotland looked to its own court. This
created conditions for the two languages to diverge. The adoption of Inglis by the barons
about this time may also have been an expression of national solidarity in the context of
hostilities with England. This helped to establish the social supremacy of Scots.
Although we can make confident assumptions about spoken language, our first real
written evidence of the language is the Aberdonian John Barbour’s account of the Wars of
Independence in his poem The Bruce. If we look at even a few lines of The Bruce, we can
see features that are diagnostic of a text written in Scotland:

Throu Crabbis consale, that is sle,

Ane cren thai haf gert dres vp hye
Rynand on quhelis that thay mycht bring
It quhar neid war of mast helping.

[. . .]
Engynys alsua for till cast
Thai ordanit and maid redy fast,
And set ilk syne till his ward.

The morphology shows the {is} or {-ys} plural in quhelis and engynys, and the genitive {-is} or
{-ys} in Crabbis, contrasting with southern {-es}. The {-and} of the present participle in
rynand distinguishes it from the verbal noun ending in {-ing} in helping. The weak past tense
is regularly {-it) or {-yt} as in ordanit. The indefinite article is regularly ane, even before a
consonant. The spelling shows the exclusively Scots quh where a non-Scots text would have
wh. We see too the avoidance of doubling vowel graphs to represent a long vowel. Scots
shared the use of vowel + consonant + e as in syne with English, but preferred vowel + i or y
160 Christine Robinson and Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh

as in neid and maid. The voiceless velar fricative, still pronounced in English, although there
usually spelled gh, is here represented, as in modern Scots, by ch as in mycht.
From there on, the language goes from strength to strength. From 1424, it is used for the
statutes of the Scottish Parliament, gradually takes over from Latin as a medium of official
records and begins to take its place alongside Latin as a literary medium, although Latin
retains its hold on the academic and ecclesiastic world. It is a language capable of use at
court, in literature, commerce and conversation at all levels and, although it has many sim-
ilarities to and would have been mutually intelligible with the emergent standard of south-
ern English, it had all the hallmarks of a high-status national language.
As we move into the Early Middle Scots period, the language approaches its zenith.
Poets such as Douglas, Dunbar and Henryson pushed the boundaries of Scots lexically, styl-
istically and metrically. North and south of the border, this was a period of wholesale
borrowing. As he explained in the prologue to his Eneados, Gavin Douglas was merely
extending a tradition of borrowing going back to ancient times and acknowledging an
exploitation that many Scots poets would use after him for the sake of a rhyme.

Nor yet sa cleyn all sudron I refus

Bot sum word I pronounce as nyghtbouris dois.
Lyke as in Latyn beyn Grew termis some,
So me behuyft quhilom, or else be dum,
Sum bastard Latyn, French or Inglis use
Quhar scant was Scottis.

The language Douglas and his contemporaries had to work with shared a common word-
stock with English, words that have changed little between Old English and Early Middle
Scots. Other Old English words had already begun to show differences from their south-
ern cognates. The English backing and rounding of the vowel in stan, ban, and so on, which
result in present-day English stone, bone and so on, did not happen in Scots. Other changes
that happened sporadically in English were found more extensively in Scots. So we get v-
deletion in both languages changing OE hlaford into English lord and Scots laird, but Scots
additionally has siller (silver), gie (give) hae (have) and so on.
To the OE word-stock was added the Scandinavian legacy of vocabulary largely reflect-
ing the intimate and everyday nature of contact between Old Danish and Old English
speakers. Some of these like take, skin and sky were widely adopted, others like gar (cause
to), brae (hill), flit (move house), reek (smoke), gate (road) remained northern in distribu-
tion. Scandinavian borrowing is somewhat unusual in that loans are also found in closed
classes such as prepositions and pronouns. The Scots preposition and infinitive marker til(l)
in the Bruce extract is of Scandinavian origin. The third-person-plural personal pronouns
beginning with th- are a particularly interesting Scandinavian innovation. By Chaucer’s
time, the south of England had borrowed the th- form for the nominative they but retained
the OE h- forms for the oblique cases in hire and hem. In the Reeve’s Tale, he gives his north-
ern speaker a genitive there. The stronger Scandinavian influence in the Northern Middle
English that brought the th- forms to Scotland meant that these were adopted early here.
Indeed, Bruce shows th- forms in all cases. Because OE and the Scandinavian languages both
belonged to the Germanic family of languages, they had much in common and borrowing
was easy. It is not always easy to know whether a word is of OE or Scandinavian origin.
Norman-French loans, unsurprisingly, contribute to the semantic field of feudalism with
few, enfeff, eschete, lele, riall and so on as well as to more general areas with the likes of corbie,
 The Several Tongues: The Languages of Scotland, 1314–1707 161

cummer, moyen and so on. As happened in England, there was a second wave of literary
loans from Central French, but Scots had a more prolonged period of popular borrowing
which brought fasche, tasse, gardyloo and so on into the language as a result of contact with
France during the period of the Auld Alliance. Latin loans frequently arrived via French
and, again, it can often be hard to say whether a particular word comes from Latin directly
or from Latin via French. Interestingly, Scots borrowings may differ in morphology from
English borrowings as in past-participial forms where the {-ate} suffix is used as in educate
(educated). Latin and French between them account for more than 50 per cent of the
vocabulary of Older Scots and this must give a good indication of the vigour of these lan-
guages in Scotland at the time. What was remarkable about the use of French and, to a far
greater extent, of Latin in Scotland, was the extent to which this small, rather impover-
ished country, aspired to and achieved a truly international intellectual involvement.
Educated men would have been equally comfortable writing in Latin or Scots and many of
them would have been able to write tolerably well in French too.
Loans from Flemish, Dutch and Low German often reflect the commercial or seafaring
nature of contact, with calland, mutchkin, doit and so on. The word cren (crane) is used by
Barbour to describe a siege engine. Although cran is known in OE, it has a Flemish cognate
and the John Crab mentioned in the poem was a Flemish engineer; significantly, this is the
first recorded use of the word to refer to lifting gear rather than the bird. The colloquial
nature of loans from these languages means that they may not have been so widely recorded
in writing as the more formal Romance words. David Murison provides a full account of
Dutch loans in his essay in A. J. Aitken and others’ collection, Edinburgh Studies in English
and Scots (1971).
The nature of surviving texts could also have resulted in an underrepresentation of Gaelic
loans. In spite of the numerical superiority of the Gaels, there are surprisingly few Gaelic
words in Early Scots: some are of legal significance like tocher, slanis and conveth; others
of a popular nature such as partan, ker and mant. There is, however, a strong phonological
case for certain Gaelic words being in circulation in Scots long before any written record of
them appears. In ‘What Scots Owes to Gaelic’, McClure (1986) explores the full range of
borrowings. According to Macafee (2002), 34.6 per cent of Older Scots vocabulary comes
from OE, the Romance languages provide a further 46.7 per cent, Flemish, Dutch and Low
German account for a mere 2.2 per cent and only 0.6 per cent come from Gaelic.
With this lexical potential, the virtuosity of Scots poets in all available styles was breath-
taking. Dunbar covers every register from his aureate, heavily Latinate Golden Targe and
Marian lyrics, through to the bawdy but scintillating vulgarity of The Flyting of Dunbar and
Kennedy. In Ane Ballat of Our Lady such lines as

Hodiern, modern and sempitern

Angelical Regine!

show the extremes of Latin borrowing which we associate with ‘The Inkhorn Controversy’
in England. On the other hand, in The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, the vocabulary is
robustly OE and Scandinavian, with a good scattering of French for variety:

Thow pure, pynhippit ugly averill.

With hurkland banis holkand through thy hyd,
Reistit and crynit as hangit man on hill,
And oft beswakkit with ane ourhie tyd [. . .]
162 Christine Robinson and Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh

Printing and the Reformation, however, brought a check to the course of Scots.
Although Chepman and Myllar set up a press in Edinburgh in 1508, this venture was short-
lived, and books printed in England were widely circulated in Scotland. Without doubt,
the most influential book was the Geneva Bible, which every householder worth over 300
merks had to possess, by decree of the Protestant Parliament passed in 1579. The ministers
may have retained their forthright Scots tongue in their sermons, but there must have been
a perception that the word of God was English. The movement of the court southwards
in 1603 was a further blow. The cultural focus moved with it. Anglicised forms were not
new – we have seen that even Gavin Douglas was not above making use of English loans
or English pronunciations. English digraphs begin to appear quite early in the fifteenth
century. Therefore, it is not in the least surprising that even before King James VI and I
moved south, his Scots manuscripts were appearing in almost completely anglicised printed
form and Scottish printers followed English practices. After more than a century of creep-
ing anglicisation, the almost complete obliteration of Scots can be clearly seen by com-
paring the version of James’s Basilicon Doron printed in 1603 with the holograph version:

Holograph MS (1598)
Take heade thairfore, my sonne, to thir puritanis, uerrie pestis in the kirke & commonueill of
Skotland, quhom be lang experience I haue founde na desairtis can obleishe, oathis nor
promeisis binde, braithing nathing bot sedition & calumnies, aspyring uithout measure,
rayling uithout reason & making thaire awaine imaginations uithout any warrande of the
uorde, the squaire to their conscience.

Printed edition (1603)

Take heede therefore (my sonne) to these Puritanes, verie pestes in the Church and common-
weill of Scotland; whom (by long experience) I have found, no desertes can oblish, oathes nor
promises bind, breathing nothing but sedition and calumnies, aspiring without measure,
rayling without reason and making their own imaginations (without any warrant of the
Worde) the square of their conscience.

In this, the more distinctive features of Scots spelling are removed, such as the quh, and
the i or y as a marker of a long vowel. The Scots use of u, v and w graphs are regularised
towards English spelling conventions. More radically, southern pronunciations of cognate
words are reflected, changing lang to long and desairtis to desertes. English plurals in {-es}
replace the Scots {-is} and we even find the lexical substitutions of these for thir and church
for kirk.
Many Scottish court poets began to write in English. Courtiers and aristocrats followed
suit. English was starting to be perceived as the language of the upper classes. While earlier
anglicisations were largely pragmatic and devoid of any notion of the superiority of English,
by the second half of the seventeenth century, English was the higher-status language.
Written Scots continued to be used locally for some private letters and diaries, for kirk
session records and even for court records around the country. In Elgin in 1619 we find that

James Nauchtie deponit Androw Wanes said to Elspett cum[m]ing spous to Iames petrie that
scho was als lyk a witche carling as he was lyk a grandgorie Loun and choppit on her teithe
and said thair was lytill good in her face, also that he said hir harlotrie had almaist garit hir
housband leawe the countrey.
 The Several Tongues: The Languages of Scotland, 1314–1707 163

Not much evidence of anglicisation there! Nevertheless, the erosion of Scots continued so
that, with the Union of the Crowns in 1707, the ousting of Scots by English in all but inti-
mate and informal contexts seemed inevitable. Thus, Scots would come to share the fate
of Gaelic, both in turn ousted as the high-status language of Scotland to become minority
languages, long regarded as socially inferior, but tenaciously maintaining their respective
literary traditions and now becoming increasingly valued in the wider European context.

Further reading

Aitken, A. J., (2002), The Older Scottish Vowels: A History of the Stressed Vowels of Older Scots
from the Beginnings to the Eighteenth Century, ed. C. Macafee, Edinburgh: Scottish Text
Society.
Jones, C. (ed.) (1997), The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Macafee, C. (2002), ‘A History of Scots to 1700’, in the Dictionary of the Older Scottish
Tongue, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. xxix–clvii.
McClure, J. D. (1986), ‘What Scots Owes to Gaelic’, Scottish Language 5: 85–98.
Ó Baoill, Colm (1997), ‘The Scots-Gaelic Interface’, in C. Jones (ed.), The Edinburgh History
of the Scots Language, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 551–68.
Thomson, Derick S. (ed.) (1994), The Companion to Gaelic Scotland, 2nd edn, Glasgow:
Gairm.
 18

The International Reception and

Literary Impact of Scottish
Literature of the Period 1314
until 1707
Paul Barnaby and Tom Hubbard

Introduction

This chapter reviews the international reception and assesses the role and impact of
Scottish writers in the period 1314–1707 in the development of world literature. It focuses
primarily, but not exclusively, on writers who are perceived as Scots abroad and thus directly
contribute to foreign images of Scottish writing and culture. For brevity’s sake, it adopts a
relatively narrow definition of literature as poetry, fiction and drama, touching only briefly
upon philosophy, political science, theology and historiography. While Scottish literature
has often had a significant impact in non-literary art forms – for example, Ossian and Scott
were both highly influential on music and opera – this chapter is inevitably focused on
Scottish literature’s literary impact. The chapter concentrates on reception in non-English-
speaking areas, the emphasis inevitably falling upon Europe.

Reception to 1707

The most striking aspect of Scottish literature’s early reception is the near-complete failure
of medieval and Renaissance writing in Scots to reach an international audience. No trans-
lations into vernacular languages have been traced of Barbour, Dunbar, or Douglas before the
nineteenth century, and of Henryson before the twentieth. To this day only a handful of indi-
vidual poems have been translated. The anonymous ballads have fared better, but their
reception is an essentially late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century phenomenon.
There are only three known translations from Scots into languages other than Latin or
English before Burns. Two stemmed from diplomatic ties with Scotland’s closest pre-Union
allies. In 1591, a Danish translation appeared of A Dialog betuix Experience and ane Courteour
by Sir David Lindsay, who played a prominent role in Scoto-Danish political relations. The
same year saw the posthumous publication of Du Bartas’s translation of James VI’s Lepanto.
The erstwhile French ambassador to the Scottish court had thus wished to thank the king
for translating his own L’Uranie in 1584. Long considered one of France’s major poets
 The International Reception of Scottish Literature, 1314–1707 165

(Goethe was an admirer), Du Bartas’s prestige may have drawn a second translator to
Lepanto, the Dutch poet Abraham van der Myle in 1593.
Lepanto was also translated into Latin by a fellow-Scot, Thomas Murray, in 1604. James
VI’s European importance, however, is less as poet than political and religious thinker.
Following his accession to the English throne, his prose works were widely translated in
what Rod Lyall considers a concerted propaganda initiative to establish the king as leader
of Christian Europe (‘The Marketing of James VI and I: Scotland, England and the
Continental Book Trade’, Quaerendo, 32 (2002)).
English literature from Chaucer through to Shakespeare suffered almost equal neglect in
mainland Europe. Not until the eighteenth century did educated Europeans begin to study
English and, largely following Voltaire’s example, explore its literature. Only then did
Scottish writing in English begin to be translated. European medieval and Renaissance
chroniclers did little to combat linguistic ignorance, branding Scotland an inhospitable
and uncultivated realm. Froissart’s late fourteenth-century lament is repeatedly echoed:

In Scotland you will never find a man of worth: they are like savages, who wish not to be
acquainted with any one, and are too envious of the good fortune of others, and suspicious of
losing anything themselves, for their country is very poor.

Perhaps, too, the extent to which the makars translated, adapted and reworked canonical
European texts rendered their work especially difficult to translate without losing its dis-
tinctive note.
For pre-eighteenth-century Europe, Scottish literature meant neo-Latin literature. Here
Scotland boasted, in George Buchanan and John Barclay, two major figures in the devel-
opment of, respectively, European drama and fiction. Scottish literary historians have
tended to neglect the neo-Latinists as falling outwith or even betraying an indigenous
tradition. It is insufficiently recognised how widely Buchanan and Barclay were perceived
as Scots, belonging to a peculiarly Scottish neo-Latin school. The first international
anthology of Scottish writing, Delitiæ poetarum scotorum hujus ævi illustrium, published in
Amsterdam in 1637, contained exclusively neo-Latin verse (and is discussed by Jack
MacQueen in Chapter 20). It assured, in particular, the European reputation of Florence
Wilson, Mark Alexander Boyd, George Crichton, Thomas Dempster and Andrew Melville
well into the eighteenth century. Such was the Scottish neo-Latinists’ prestige that in 1639
one Parisian bookseller published a Catalogus poetarum scotorum, advertising his stock of
Scottish writing. Scottish neo-Latin verse sold so well in Europe that even writers living
in Scotland printed their work abroad on economic rather than political grounds.
Even before the Delitiæ charted their tradition, Scottish neo-Latinists were generally
recognised as Scots, however scattered their places of publication. In the sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries, original works by Scots appeared in France, Germany, the
Netherlands, Belgium, Poland and Italy. The first Scottish poet to publish abroad may well
be James Foullis of Edinburgh, whose verse appeared in Paris in 1515. The first, though, to
achieve a European reputation, preceding even Buchanan, is Florence Wilson or Florentius
Volusenus. His De animi tranquillitate was published in 1543 in Lyons, where Wilson adhered
to a circle of émigrés seeking a middle path between Catholicism and Reform. Advocating
moderation in an increasingly polarised religious debate, Wilson’s masterpiece was subse-
quently translated into Italian (1574) and regularly reprinted throughout Europe until the
early eighteenth century. Later in the century, Boyd, Crichton, Dempster and Adam
Blackwood were widely read. The latter’s Le Martyre de la royne d’Escosse was published in
166 Paul Barnaby and Tom Hubbard

Paris in 1587. It included, together with a narrative of Mary Stuart’s trial and execution,
Latin verses by Blackwood decrying Elizabeth’s betrayal of her sister monarch. Translated
into French in the 1588 Antwerp edition, these created a blueprint for future European lit-
erary representations of Mary’s ‘martyrdom’.
Buchanan, however, is unquestionably Scotland’s major neo-Latin poet and dramatist.
His tragedies Jephthes and Baptistes appeared throughout Europe in many editions between
the mid-sixteenth and late-eighteenth centuries. Beside numerous reprints of the original
Latin, Jephthes was translated into French (1566), German (1569), Italian (1583), Polish
(1587), Hungarian (1590) and Dutch (1592). Buchanan reintroduced Euripidean and
Senecan tragedy to the European stage, banishing the comical and supernatural from reli-
gious drama, and teaching European dramatists to seek analogous situations in scripture
and in Classical drama. In Buchanan’s hands, drama became a vehicle for exploring con-
temporary moral and political themes and for combating hypocrisy and idolatry. Baptistes
explores religious and political persecution, and Jephthes topical controversies concerning
vows. The fanaticism of his age leads Jephthes to cling impiously to a vow; such fanaticism
Buchanan saw mirrored around him.
Buchanan introduced new psychological complexity into western drama. His heroes,
inspiring compassion rather than horror, are fettered not by fate but by their political
and ideological context. Buchanan established a form which survived well into the
seventeenth century: five acts, unity of time and action, and a chorus serving principally
to draw moral lessons. Through Buchanan’s direct formal and thematic influence on writers
like Bèze, Garnier, Montchrestien and Grotius, his work informed the French Classical
tragedy of Racine and Corneille. In Portugal and the Netherlands, too, Buchanan’s drama
inspired a vernacular dramatic tradition. The first major Portuguese drama, Ferreira’s Inez
de Castro (1567), is modelled directly on Jephthes; the title of the great Dutch tragedian
Joost van den Vondel’s Jeptha, of, Offerbelofte (1659) clearly acknowledges its inspiration.
Du Bellay imitated Buchanan’s satirical verse, inserting a translation of Buchanan’s poem
on college teaching ‘Quam misera sit conditio docentium literas humaniores Lutetiæ’ into
his version of the fourth book of the Aeneid (1552). It was due to Buchanan, Du Bellay
claimed in Regrets (1558), that Scots were no longer considered ‘savages’. Buchanan’s
paraphrases of the Psalms sealed his international reputation as a poet, with twenty-six
European editions in 150 years. The Portuguese neo-Latinist Ludovicus Crucius and major
writers in the emerging vernacular literatures like Kochanowski in Poland and Dousa and
van Hout in the Netherlands imitated them. Van Hout also translated Buchanan’s unfin-
ished verse treatise on astronomy, De Sphaera, which was imitated and continued by Du
Monin in his Uranologie (1582).
The Franco-Scot John Barclay wrote, in Euphormionis Lusinini or Satyricon (1605–7) and
Argenis (1621), the two best-known fictions in neo-Latin literature. Throughout the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the latter was among the most frequently reprinted
and widely translated novels in any language. Versions appeared in French (1622), German,
Spanish (both 1626), Greek (1627), Italian (1629), Dutch (1643), Icelandic (1694), Polish
(1697), Swedish (1740), Danish (1746), Russian (1751) and Hungarian (1792). Following
Barclay’s untimely death, two continuations of Argenis were published in France and one in
Spain. Its absence from most histories of the world novel is thus surprising. Only in Spain
and Germany is its influence regularly acknowledged in two areas. First, Barclay resurrected
the Greek ‘Heliodorian’ novel, with its beginning in medias res and structure based on
suspense and delayed gratification, which supplanted the more loosely plotted picaresque to
become seventeenth-century Europe’s dominant fictional mode. Second, as an allegorical
 The International Reception of Scottish Literature, 1314–1707 167

account of France’s religious wars and a fictional apology for absolutism, Argenis became a
model for dealing with religious and constitutional questions in romance form.
Germany’s major seventeenth-century writer Martin Opitz translated Argenis (1626),
establishing fiction as a respectable genre in German and providing inspiration for the
Baroque political novel (Staatsroman). It influenced Kindermann, Zesen, Weise and, most
significantly, Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus (1669), the masterpiece of German Baroque
fiction. Although neglected by French literary historians, it was Cardinal Richelieu’s
favourite book and admired and imitated by Malherbe, Mairet, Rampale and Jean-Louis de
Balzac. Barclay’s earlier picaresque fiction, the Satyricon, was also popular as a roman à clef
describing the disagreements between his theologian father, William Barclay, and the
Jesuits at the University of Pont-à-Mousson. In Spain, it exerted a major influence (down
to the title) on Gracián’s El criticón (1651–7). Gracián’s introduction invokes Barclay
alongside Homer, Aesop, Lucian, Apuleius, Plutarch, Heliodorus and Ariosto as narrative
model (particularly his ‘mordacidades’ or biting wit). Gracián even introduces Barclay as
a participant in an academic debate, as had the German satirist Schupp in his De arte
ditescendi (1645).
The late seventeenth century saw a rapid decline in the Scottish neo-Latin tradition,
partly concealed by the continuing popularity of the Delitiæ poets. The theologians Gilbert
Burnet, John Napier and Alexander Ross were widely read and translated, but no Scottish
writer of verse, fiction, or drama after Barclay reached a foreign audience before the mid-
eighteenth century.

Further reading

Ascoli, Georges (1927), La Grande-Bretagne devant l’opinion française: depuis la Guerre de

cent ans jusqu’à la fin du XVIe siècle, Paris: Librairie universitaire J. Gamber.
Henry, Peter, Jim MacDonald and Halina Moss (eds) (1993), Scotland and the Slavs: Selected
Papers from the Glasgow-90 East–West Forum, Nottingham: Astra Press.
Michel, Francisque (1862), Les Écossais en France, les Français en Écosse, 2 vols, London:
Trübner.
Price, Lawrence Marsden (1953), English Literature in Germany, Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Smout, T. C. (ed.) (1986), Scotland and Europe, 1200–1850, Edinburgh: John Donald.
Van Tieghem, Paul (1924–47), Le Préromantisme: études d’histoire littéraire européenne,
3 vols, Paris: Rieder.
 19

Versions of Scottish Nationhood,

c. 850–1707
Nicola Royan with Dauvit Broun

Non enim propter gloriam divicias aut honores pugnamus sed propter libertatem solummodo
quam nemo bonus nisi simul vita amittit.

(For it is not for glory, or riches, or honours, but for liberty alone, which no true man surren-
ders, save with his life.)

This statement, from the Declaration of Arbroath (1320), is often presented as the sum-
mation of medieval Scottish identity, and it is true that this document offers the most
compelling vision of the Scots as an ancient people belonging to an ancient kingdom. It
implies a united resistance to domination from outwith the realm, and stresses communal
values over individual self-interest, including that of the king. To argue its case, the
Declaration draws from historical authority and, in so doing, it reflects two consistent
themes of Scottish historiography, indomitability and tradition. Such images of national
identity seem familiar and yet on closer inspection prove to be based on very different
assumptions from those on which they rest today. This chapter outlines both some of the
changes and some of the continuities in Scottish historiography over eight centuries, from
the mid-ninth century until the end of the seventeenth. The continuities of content are
perhaps not surprising, since one generation depends on its predecessors for its information
about the past. Although the progression is neither smooth nor complete, it is fair to say
that the locus of interest moves from the king to the people to the land. This changes the
relationship of the individual and national identity, but it does not necessarily lead to an
easier or a better one.
Kings are vitally important to medieval and modern historiography: as a head of gov-
ernment, as a means of identification and as a measure of time. It is no surprise, therefore,
that the earliest extant form of history-writing specifically about Scotland or one of its early
kingdoms is a plain list of kings with their reign-lengths. The earliest detectable Pictish
king-list (in existence no later than the 840s) was probably intended to give a succession
of kings of Fortriu, the predominant Pictish kingdom, but includes more than thirty kings
before Bridei son of Mailcon, St Columba’s contemporary. Sometime in the mid-ninth
century, probably during the reign of Caustantín, king of Picts (862–76), son of Cinaed mac
Ailpín, this list was dramatically extended back in time by the addition of more than forty
kings, beginning with Cruithne (the Gaelic word for ‘Picts’) and his seven sons, whose
names each call to mind a Pictish region, for instance Cait for the north of Scotland (cf.
‘Caithness’) and Fíb for Fife, and who are each represented as reigning in turn after their
 Versions of Scottish Nationhood, c. 850–1707 169

father. The prosaic simplicity of a king-list is not necessarily a sign of creative impoverish-
ment. In both of these examples, most of the kings must be fictional; some, no doubt, had
literary personalities that are now lost to us. They also make a statement of identity through
longevity; the second, in particular, can be recognised as a powerful statement of a vision
of mainland Scotland from Caithness to Fife as constituting a single Pictish kingdom from
the earliest times.
Although a king-list is a particularly rigid and limiting way of structuring the past, it
might also be used to present other forms of information. One common addition was to
include occasional statements about the founding of churches. In one case, that of the
foundation of Abernethy, this constitutes a brief narrative in its own right. While such
items appear to be incidental to the main business of the king-list, they were probably
crucial to the survival and cultivation of these texts, because they also served to justify
the status of the most important churches of the realm. This demonstrates the alliance of
literate churchmen with political and secular power: without one, the other would find it
harder to survive. Another genre of king-list, this time in poetic form, originating in
Ireland in the mid-eleventh century, records the place and manner of the death of each
king. A king-list of this type, beginning with Cinaed mac Ailpín (d. 858), was probably
written early in the reign of David I (1124–53), and was rendered into Latin elegiac cou-
plets around 1215 (and finally updated around 1250). Although the account of how each
king met his end is very brief, it is likely that at least a few fully fledged death-tales lie
behind this material. We can only guess what these may have been and how they were pre-
sented. A narrative of the death of Dub mac Maíl Choluim (962–6) may, for example, have
been the source of the king-list’s statement that the sun did not shine for as long as his body
was concealed under the bridge at Kinloss. It has also been suggested that this story may
be depicted on ‘Sueno’s Stone’, a massive carved cross-slab at Forres, where Dub is said to
have been killed; if this is the case, then there may be an interesting interaction between
different narrative media. The bare bones of another death-tale may be the origin of the
king-list’s explanation that Cinaed mac Maíl Choluim (971–95), Dub’s brother, was killed
at Fettercairn by the treachery of Finnguala, daughter of the mormaer of Angus because
Cinaed had killed her only son at Dunsinane. This story finds a place in several Scottish
histories in the following centuries, including those by John of Fordun, Andrew Wyntoun,
Walter Bower and Hector Boece; for each writer, it provides a different example, whether
that be the unruliness of women or the dangers of injustice. Elsewhere, there are more elab-
orate additions in the form of notes on events occurring during each reign: these might be
drawn from a year-by-year chronicle as well as more narrative sources. The earliest example
of such a text is the ‘Chronicles of the Kings of Alba’ (or the ‘Scottish Chronicle’) which
begins with Cinaed mac Ailpín. It was probably composed initially during the reign of
Illulb mac Caustantín (954–62). By this time the descendants of Cinaed’s sons Caustantín
and Aed monopolised the kingship, and it is legitimate to speculate that the starting point
of the king-list deliberately emphasises the place of Cinaed as a founder king.
Although Cinaed in modern times is associated with the unification of the Scots and the
Picts, the first king-list to make this link was not composed until the reign of Alexander II
(1214–49). The portrayal of the reigning king as successor to a wider realm was achieved
by the simple expedient of giving a list of kings of Dál Riata (from Fergus mac Eirc to Alpín,
father of Cinaed mac Ailpín) as well as a list of Pictish kings (before Cinaed mac Ailpín).
As a result, Cinaed and his successors were, for the first time, presented as uniting in them-
selves the once separate successions of Pictish and Dál Riatan kings. There was no attempt,
however, to represent the contemporary Pictish and Dál Riatan lists in parallel columns
170 Nicola Royan with Dauvit Broun

even though they were understood to have existed side-by-side: instead, the kings of Dál
Riata were listed first, followed by Pictish kings (and then Cinaed mac Ailpín and his suc-
cessors). It was only a small step to regard the entire text as a single succession, with Dál
Riatan kings coming en bloc before the Picts. This meant that, at a stroke, the reigning king
was presented as the latest in a much longer succession of kings. This is what lies behind
the remarkable claim in the Declaration of Arbroath that Robert I was the 113th king. By
combining Dál Riatan and Pictish kings as a single succession, this extended king-list
implies that the kingdom had, from its origins in the deep past, consisted not only of
Pictland but also the territory of Dál Riata, which was delimited in the list itself as stretch-
ing from the mouth of the river Bann in northern Ireland to Drumalban and to the Western
Isles. Obviously, this does not include the south of Scotland, an omission addressed by
the progressive rewriting of the stated bounds of Dál Riata so that the original Scottish
kingdom was eventually deemed to have stretched from Orkney and the Western Isles to
Stainmore, the southern limit of the diocese of Carlisle. This imagined southern border
seems neither to have been a claim to annex Cumberland nor a memory of Stainmore as
the boundary of the kingdom of Strathclyde: rather, it seems to have been inspired by a
desire to make sense of the garbled Gaelic name for the mouth of the river Bann.
The text in which rulers of Dál Riata, Picts and Cinaed mac Ailpín’s successors were por-
trayed as a single series of over one hundred kings was more than a simple listing of kings. It
was derived from a small crude compendium relating to Scotland’s ancient history which, as
well as the king-list, consisted of two accounts of Scottish origins. One of these featured
‘Gaythelos’, his wife Scota and his son ‘Hiber’, taking the Scots from Greece and Egypt to
Ireland; the other featured ‘Smonbrec’, his descendant Fergus son of Ferchar, and the Stone
of Scone, which began in Spain and reached Scotland via Ireland. No attempt was originally
made to iron out the contradictions between the different elements of the compendium,
but in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries there were a number of inde-
pendent efforts to edit this material to form a more coherent account of the Scottish past.
One of these, datable to the reign of John Balliol (1292–1304), was incorporated by the
Northumbrian knight Sir Thomas Grey into his Scalacronica, an idiosyncratic treatment of
British history (including much detail on the Wars of Independence), written in French and
begun while Grey was a prisoner in Edinburgh Castle c. 1360. Another version formed the
basis of a Latin poem written sometime in or between 1296 and 1306, preserved as part of
a ‘supplementary book’ added by Walter Bower to his Scotichronicon. A third version, which
also included a pedigree of the king of Scots back to Noah, was incorporated into the Original
Chronicle written in Scots by Andrew Wyntoun. And yet another version can be traced in
Fordun’s chronicle, along with the original compendium.
It is striking how, in the origin-legend texts preserved in Fordun’s chronicle, it is Ireland
rather than Scotland that is portrayed as the homeland of the Scots. The other versions
give more prominence to Scotland, but it is not until the Pleading by Baldred Bisset and
his team of procurators at the papal curia that an account of Scottish origins (albeit brief)
centred on Scotland can be found. There it was stated that the eponymous Scota brought
the Stone of Scone from Egypt to Scotland; Ireland was demoted to a stopping-off point
on the journey. It was also asserted that the Picts had been conquered on Scota’s arrival,
thus making the Scots masters of Scotland from primeval times. The Declaration of
Arbroath asserts this even more strongly. As has been noted earlier, it begins by claiming
Robert I as the 113th in a succession of kings all of whom were Scots, and goes on to present
Scottish origins as beginning in Scythia (or Greece in the draft) and reaching Scotland via
Spain without any reference to Ireland. Both Bisset’s Pleading and the Declaration are
 Versions of Scottish Nationhood, c. 850–1707 171

politically charged responses to particular situations, so their assertions are extreme.

Nevertheless, these texts point to two essential features of Scottish historiography. First,
moments of crisis encourage the production or reproduction of identity: it is noticeable
that at least two versions of a coherent origin myth were produced during the troubled
reign of John Balliol. Second, in the construction of a historical identity, the material may
be drawn from many places. The Declaration used various accounts of Scottish origins,
including one drawn from Henry of Huntingdon’s History of the English; other, longer,
accounts of the Scottish past drew on Geoffrey of Monmouth and Bede among other
English writers. The purpose of the resulting texts is not so much to give an identity to the
Scots themselves, but to prove it to kings and leaders outwith the borders in order to claim
the treatment accorded to independent kingdoms.
The various versions of the origin-legend-plus-king-list may have been impressive in
their chronological sweep, but their narrative was largely skeletal. For many years, it has
been a commonplace to regard John of Fordun, an obscure priest (possibly related to
William of Fordun, clerk of the wardrobe to Queen Joanna in 1331–2), as the author of the
first full-scale history of Scotland, the Chronica Gentis Scotorum (‘The Chronicle of the
Scottish People’). Fordun’s chronicle was apparently written when Walter Wardlaw, bishop
of Glasgow, was cardinal (December 1383–August 1387), when he gave a copy of David I’s
genealogy to John of Fordun. The chronicle is in five main books. It begins with Scottish
origins in Greece and Egypt, and gives an account of the journeys of the Scots until their
arrival in Scotland at about the same time as the Picts, with whom they intermingled. This
is followed by the separation of the Scots from the Picts and the creation in 330 bc by Fergus
son of Ferchar of a Scottish kingdom in the west as allies of the Picts. Then is found the
expulsion of the Scots by the Picts and the re-establishment of a Scottish kingdom in the
west by Fergus son of Erc in ad 403. The chronicle then becomes more detailed, giving an
account of each of Fergus’s successors, who were enemies of the Picts, leading to the final
conquest and destruction of the Picts by Cinaed mac Ailpín in 839. The remainder of
the fourth book and the fifth book provide an account of each of Cinaed’s successors as far as
David I (1124–53). That the whole chronicle might be described as almost entirely fictional
is not to diminish it, but rather to recognise it as a magnificent achievement in creating a
complete and compelling narrative of a Scottish past. Book V is followed by an incomplete
sixth book, devoted to David I’s English royal ancestors, which is in turn followed by what
was dubbed Gesta Annalia by W. F. Skene in his edition of Fordun’s chronicle (1871). Skene
published Gesta Annalia as if it formed an incomplete section of Fordun’s work extending
to his own times, finishing originally at 1363 and continued to 1385. The way Skene pre-
sents the Gesta Annalia in his edition is not, however, consistent with how it is found in
most manuscripts. It is, as Skene realised, largely an earlier version of Fordun’s chronicle;
but it is most unlikely to be the work of Fordun himself.
An examination of the manuscripts reveals two separate texts, one which extends only
as far as February 1285 (which may, for convenience, be called ‘Gesta Annalia I’) and the
other (‘Gesta Annalia II’) continuing originally to 1363. Between Gesta Annalia I and II
there is a dossier of documents relating to Scottish independence assembled by Baldred
Bisset and his team of procurators, preceded by a copy of the Declaration of Arbroath. The
dossier is followed by various unrelated texts. It has been argued by Dr Steve Boardman
that Gesta Annalia II, which is characterised by a certain ambiguity to the cause of Robert
Bruce and hostility to Robert Stewart, was the work of Thomas Bisset, prior of St Andrews
who demitted office in 1363. Gesta Annalia I, for its part, may be the final portion of an
earlier version of Fordun’s chronicle written arguably sometime in or between February and
172 Nicola Royan with Dauvit Broun

April 1285. Certainly it overlaps with Fordun’s final book, and has its own book divisions
(distinct from Fordun’s) which suggest that it was part of a much larger work. Also, there
are references in Gesta Annalia I to ancient kings and deeds which are significantly differ-
ent from Fordun’s own work and (where the source can be identified) appear to be earlier.
There are other indications in Fordun’s chronicle itself that its first two books were largely
derived from an earlier text, an ingenious synthesis of a range of accounts of Scottish
origins which seems to have been known to Baldred Bisset and his team in 1301. Although
the extent of Fordun’s debt to this earlier history has yet to be ascertained (and may prove
impossible to establish with certainty), there can be little doubt that Fordun was not the
first to write a continuous narrative of Scottish history. That distinction should be credited
instead to an anonymous scholar whose work was probably finished no later than 1285 and
begun no earlier than 1249.
While John of Fordun may not be the ‘father of Scottish historiographers’, his work is
the only medium through which most of the earlier history written in or between 1249 and
1285 has been transmitted to posterity. His work, moreover, laid the foundations for
Scottish history-writing until Boece’s Scotorum Historia about a hundred and fifty years
later. It was not until the 1440s, however, that Fordun’s chronicle definitely can be said to
have assumed its pivotal position. The earliest surviving manuscripts of his work date from
this period, and it was between 1441 and 1447 that Walter Bower supervised the produc-
tion of an illustrated copy of Fordun’s work, which, as the work progressed, acquired add-
itional material by Bower himself, ending with a substantial expansion of Gesta Annalia
and continuation to the assassination of James I in 1437. This text is the Scotichronicon; it
has a total of sixteen books; and its original manuscript survives as Cambridge, Corpus
Christi College MS 171. Bower (1385–1449) was among the early graduates in canon law
and theology in the University at St Andrews and became abbot of the Augustinian abbey
of Inchcolm soon after, in 1418. He worked sporadically in James I’s government as a col-
lector of taxes from 1424 to 1433, and must have attended royal councils and Parliament
as one of the ecclesiastical magnates of the realm.
The Scotichronicon suggests that Bower was an ardent patriot and a firm supporter of
James I’s authoritarian rule; he was also virulently anti-English, perhaps the result of
English piratical attacks on Inchcolm and Richard II’s destruction of Lothian (including
Bower’s birthplace of Haddington) in 1385. However, Bower’s success as a historiographer
should not simply be attributed to his prejudices. He is also talented in his use of anecdote
to illuminate an event. One such moment occurs in his account of the second marriage of
Alexander III.

Ubi in nupciis regalibus, dum omnia rite fierent, factum est tale ludi similacrum per modum
processionis inter catervas discumbencium, precedentibus in arte illa doctis cum multimodis
organis musicis et tragedicis instrumentis organicis, aliisque post eos vicissim et interpolatim
choream militarem pompatice agentibus, insecutus est unus de quo pene dubitari potuit utrum
homo esset an fantasma; qui ut umbra magis labi videbatur quam pedetentium transire; quo
quasi oculis omnium evanescente, quievit tota illa processio fannatica, melos tepuit, musicum
dissolutum est, et chorealis phalanx diriguit cicius insperato. Risus dolori miscetur et extrema
gaudii luctus occupat; et post tantam gloriam regnum inglorie ululabat, dum postmodum in
brevi se ipsum perdidit et consequentur regem.

(While everything was going on at the royal wedding according to due custom, a kind of show
was put on in the form of a procession amongst the company who were reclining at table.
 Versions of Scottish Nationhood, c. 850–1707 173

At the head of this procession were skilled musicians with many sorts of pipe music including
the wailing music of bagpipes, and behind them others splendidly performing a war dance with
intricate weaving in and out. Bringing up the rear was a figure regarding whom it was difficult
to decide whether it was a man or an apparition. It seemed to glide like a ghost rather than
walk on feet. When it looked as if he was disappearing from everyone’s sight the whole fren-
zied procession halted, the song died away, the music faded and the dancing contingent froze
suddenly and unexpectedly. Laughter is always mixed with grief, and mourning takes over from
extremes of joy: after such splendour, the kingdom lamented ingloriously, when a short time
afterwards it lost itself and as a consequence its king. (Translated by Simon Taylor))

Although the editors of the most recent edition of Scotichronicon note that this is a trad-
itional story attached to the narrative, this underestimates Bower’s skill in ambiguous pre-
sentation. The precise nature of the procession, particularly its final figure, remains unclear:
is it a supernatural warning or is it a carefully staged piece of theatre? The detail, such as the
bagpipes among the wind instruments, gives the impression of solidity and at first it is only
the final figure who seems uncertain. Yet, when he seems to be ‘disappearing’, the rest of the
procession also ceases insperato. So, it is possible that the entire procession was under the
control of this one figure. Although, typically, Bower does not dwell on the mysteriousness,
but moves directly to the moral, underlying his words is the horror that was to result for the
Scots from the premature death of Alexander III.
Bower seems to have come to regard his Scotichronicon as work in progress for another
history of the Scots which he began to write before Scotichronicon was completed. In this
other work, known from its principal extant manuscript as the ‘Book of Coupar Angus’,
Bower abandoned the careful copying of extracts from Fordun which is such a prominent
feature of Scotichronicon, and rewrote and recrafted his material to create an account of the
Scottish past that is more distinctively his own. He divided it into forty books, and referred
to it as an abbreviation of Scotichronicon, although it is not noticeably shorter or simply an
abbreviation, since it expands on some aspects (for example, William Wallace). The most
obvious general difference is that there is greater emphasis on Scottish history, in contrast
to the more eclectic range of material in Scotichronicon. The uneven nature of Scotichronicon
also inspired a rewriting into a coherent narrative of Scottish history known to scholarship
as the ‘Book of Pluscarden’. It has been argued that this may have been begun in the 1450s
and finished in 1461. Not only can the ‘Book of Pluscarden’ lay a claim to be the most pol-
ished and compelling rewriting of Scotichronicon, but also the most popular, if the number
of extant manuscripts is anything to go by.
The most natural response to the vastness of Scotichronicon, however, was to trim it down.
The earliest genuine attempt to produce an abbreviated version was apparently undertaken
in 1451, by Patrick Russell (prior of the Charterhouse in Perth in 1443 and again in 1472–4).
This was copied c. 1489 and, in turn, revised around 1500 or soon thereafter by Richard
Striveling for George Broun, bishop of Dunkeld. It was also common to bring together dif-
ferent elements of the ‘Fordun–Bower–Pluscarden’ canon by collating two different versions,
or continuing one version with the text of another, or physically attaching parts of two
manuscripts together (e.g. BL MS Harley 4764, which contains five books of Fordun’s chron-
icle continued with Striveling’s version of Russell’s abbreviation of Scotichronicon). This
complex texture gave birth to the most popular abbreviated text, the Extracta e Variis Cronicis
Scocie, in the early sixteenth century, as well as a dramatically shortened account, focusing
on Scottish origins and the succession of kings, in a work known appropriately as Brevis
Chronica. These texts, in one form or another, allowed the ‘Fordun–Bower–Pluscarden’
174 Nicola Royan with Dauvit Broun

canon to have an active afterlife in manuscript copies well into the sixteenth century, not
even being entirely supplanted by the historiography of succeeding generations. Part of their
influence must be seen in the continued dependence on the king-list. Roger Mason remarks
that ‘the real hero of Fordun’s chronicle is the Scottish royal line as a whole, a line stretch-
ing back into the mists of prehistory’. If this is true for Fordun and Bower, as it surely is, then
it is no less true for those writers who depend on their accounts.
Fordun’s chronicle, Bower’s Scotichronicon and their successors were all written in Latin.
There is little evidence that this narrative of the Scottish past, despite enjoying something
like canonical status between the 1440s and 1540s, was given an extensive treatment in
the vernacular, although the Book of Pluscarden was translated into French in 1519 for
John, Duke of Albany. In this respect, Scotland’s medieval national narrative stands in
sharp contrast to those of England, France, Ireland and Wales. It is no doubt significant
that the text in the ‘Fordun–Bower–Pluscarden’ canon which was translated into Scots was
the Lilliputian Brevis Chronica; another short vernacular text, The Scottis Original, which
circulated in at least three versions, concentrated on the origins of the Scots as expounded
by the Latin chroniclers. The main chronicle in Scots which circulated in the same period
that Fordun and Bower and successors were dominant in Latin was the Original Chronicle
of Andrew of Wyntoun, written sometime in or between 1408 and 1424. Wyntoun, like
Bower, was a native of East Lothian who professed as an Augustinian canon at St Andrews
Priory. He was a generation older than Bower, and did not rise as high in the monastic hier-
archy, becoming prior of the cell of St Andrews at Loch Leven in 1390 (but not confirmed
until 1395) and resigning in December 1421 due to infirmity. His chronicle in Scots verse
has an impressive canvas, bringing together a range of material from learned tomes to oral
tales. Scottish history is only one of Wyntoun’s concerns, and it becomes prominent
towards the end of the work when he deals with the period from the eleventh century to
his own times. His representation of the Scottish past seems in some ways to be less ideo-
logically fixed than his contemporary, Bower’s. Wyntoun is prepared to admit to multiple
versions and sources and to record them all for the benefit of the reader; he is also willing
to accept that some rebellions may have reasons, if not excuses. One example of this is the
case of Fimbal, known in Scotichronicon as Finuela, garbled forms of Finnguala, whose ear-
liest appearance is in the king-list. For Bower and for Fordun, Finuela is a woman of great
cunning and no morals, described as a maleficta (witch) and a proditrix (traitress); for
Wyntoun, Fimbal is a powerful woman with a possibly legitimate grudge, acting within her
own constraints. Examples such as this show Wyntoun to offer an alternative interpreta-
tion to those offered by the Fordun–Bower–Pluscarden canon. How influential such inter-
pretations were is harder to estimate.
While Wyntoun’s text seems to be the only full Scots vernacular chronicle to have cir-
culated, there is other vernacular material dealing with aspects of the Scottish past. Some
references, such as the account of Sir James Douglas’s crusade carrying Bruce’s heart in The
Buke of the Howlat, are recounted at some length, albeit inaccurately. Others are much
briefer and assume knowledge in the reader, such as Gavin Douglas’s identifications of noble
kings of the past, Gregor and Robert I, in The Palice of Honoure. That both these examples
make some reference to the First War of Independence is of course significant. For while
there is not a substantial tradition of vernacular chronicles in Scots, there are the historio-
graphical romances, The Bruce and The Wallace. These, it might be argued, take the place
of vernacular chronicles, since in their own way, they offer an origin myth of Scottish iden-
tity. They define the Scots as being not-English; they offer a hero who exemplifies and sup-
ports that definition, and contributes to the founding of the Scots nation as distinct, that is,
 Versions of Scottish Nationhood, c. 850–1707 175

by helping to expel the English aggressor. They are certainly powerful narratives: ‘Ah,
fredome is a noble thing!’ from The Bruce is a frequently quoted line, while popular con-
ceptions of Wallace clearly owe more to Harry than to Bower. However, while the figures
they celebrate are more real than some of the early kings of Scots described by Fordun, The
Bruce and The Wallace are no more to be trusted as accurate representations of events.
John Barbour (c. 1320–95) claims The Bruce as a ‘suthfast’ (truthful) narrative, suggest-
ing that its truthfulness makes it more appealing than fictional stories. However, in shaping
his narrative, he makes deliberate reference to romance, just after Bruce has slain Comyn
in Greyfriars Church in Dumfries:

He [Bruce] mysdyd yar gretly but wer

Yat gave na gyrth to yet awter,
Yarfor sa hard myscheiff him fell
Yat ik herd neuer in romanys tell
Off man sa hard frayit as wes he
Yat efterwart com to sic bounte.

Barbour thus distinguishes his work from fiction, but still allows the comparison to stand.
The influence of romance can be seen in the comparisons Barbour uses, balancing Bruce
against Alexander the Great and Douglas against Hector of Troy. It is also evident in some
tropes Barbour exploits to the glory of his heroes, such as the Battle against Odds, where
Bruce is heavily outnumbered and yet prevails. More significantly still, it determines the
structure of the work and its emphasis on the heroic individuals, Bruce and Douglas. This
means, for instance, that Barbour begins his account of Bruce in 1306, when Bruce makes
his final change of allegiance, kills Comyn and begins his campaign as king. Beginning at
that point allows Barbour to omit all discussion of Bruce’s previously uncertain loyalties
and to summarise the complexities of the succession crisis in thirty lines. As a result, it is
far easier to present Bruce unequivocally as a hero.
While The Bruce is often thought of primarily as an account of Bruce’s struggle for
Scottish independence, in fact that makes up only about half of the text: the account of
Bannockburn occurs in the very middle of the poem. The second half is devoted to Bruce’s
kingship, and Edward Bruce’s attempts to liberate Ireland from English rule as his brother
had Scotland. In recording the Irish campaigns, Barbour invites comparisons between
Robert and Edward in both government and generalship, always to Robert’s favour. By such
contrasts, Barbour overcomes the difficulty that peace and just rule are less exciting to
relate than war and rebellion; while Robert is slightly more passive as king, he is never
reduced to a cipher, but always controls the action.
Barbour’s presentation of Robert Bruce as hero and as king came to dominate accounts of
the king and his journey to the throne. Even today, The Bruce is a major source for Robert I’s
life and kingship, and Barbour’s near-contemporaries, Fordun and Wyntoun, refer to it with
respect. The result of this domination is what James Goldstein has memorably described as
‘Brucean ideology’, whereby loyalty to Bruce means loyalty to the Scottish cause, and where
the reverse implies betrayal and defection. For evidence, we might consider the negative
depictions of John Comyn and John Balliol in histories and chronicles. The virulence of this
view is ultimately attributable to Barbour, since contemporary evidence suggests neither was
any less committed to the Scottish cause than Bruce himself.
As a definition of Scottish identity, the Brucean ideology can be seen as a development
of the king-list; the challenge to this view was expressed most strongly by Harry in
176 Nicola Royan with Dauvit Broun

The Wallace, although its seeds can be traced to parts of Bower’s narrative. In both cases,
the figure of William Wallace encourages such a challenge. Wallace’s loyalty is ostensibly
to John Balliol as king, but it becomes evident through Harry’s text that in fact it is devoted
to something more nebulous, an idea of independent Scottishness. For true Scottishness to
exist, there needs to be a king to defend it, just as in the Declaration of Arbroath, but where
the king is unable – as Balliol – or unwilling – as Bruce at Falkirk – then the subject is
obliged to act. Harry is quite clear about Wallace’s status, for he is offered the crown three
times, and each time he refuses it. He is not interested in power for himself, but independ-
ence for the Scots.
As texts, The Bruce and The Wallace are in constant dialogue, and have been since the
fifteenth century, when they were copied together by one scribe. It might be argued that
The Wallace is the more sophisticated poem: its five-stress line has greater flexibility than
the four-stress one used by Barbour and Wyntoun; it demonstrates its awareness of Bower
and Chaucer in similar measure. Yet, The Bruce is the most significant influence. Harry
(c. 1465–c. 1506) borrows episodes from Barbour and converts them into episodes in which
Wallace stars. Harry’s descriptions of encounters between Bruce and Wallace undermine
Brucean ideology, by challenging Bruce’s loyalty to the realm. At the same time, some of
Harry’s statements seem to evoke and strengthen what might be seen as the nationalist
sentiments in Bruce’s speeches, particularly the central one delivered at Bannockburn.
Incipient ideas of a commonwealth which incorporates both sovereign and subject can
thus be seen to develop during the fifteenth century through representations of the past.
The shift in perspectives between the poems can in part be attributed to their circum-
stances of composition. Barbour wrote for the court of Robert II, Bruce’s grandson. The
values expressed are those of the aristocracy, and their expression may in part be designed to
support Robert II as a successor to his glorious ancestor, and to remind other contenders,
especially the Douglases, of their subordinate role. Harry’s patrons, on the other hand, were
Border lairds, less dazzled by an international world of chivalry and more concerned with
James III’s pacific policy towards the English. Harry’s adoption of episodes from Barbour, his
literary allusion to such material as The Knight’s Tale, and his chronological distance from the
events he describes mean that his work is less commonly treated as a reliable source.
However, The Wallace proved to be a long-lasting and influential narrative. It is one of the
first texts printed in Scotland in 1508, and it was reprinted several times during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries; The Bruce, in contrast, fell out of common use. It is possible that
it is as much The Wallace’s different view of national identity that made its popularity as its
exciting and extreme narrative.
In the sixteenth century, historiography was changed dramatically by three things: the
arrival of print; the rise of the vernacular; and the Reformation. Although The Wallace made
a successful transition from manuscript to print, other medieval historiography was not so
mobile and a new style of narrative of the Scottish past appeared, in response to political
and cultural circumstance. Print and the vernacular together increased the audience
immensely, and permitted the easier circulation of a more consistent, sometimes even
authorised, account. The Reformation fractured that account and, as part of that move-
ment, print enabled the circulation of many versions, each putting forward a slightly dif-
ferent view of the past. Since the Scottish Reformation became inextricably linked with the
deposition of Mary Queen of Scots, religious allegiance also took on a political tinge. This
becomes very evident in the historiography, since the main Latin writers, John Leslie and
George Buchanan, took diametrically opposed views on Mary’s treatment. Arguably, Mary’s
history remains one of the most divisive topics in Scottish history and historiography.
 Versions of Scottish Nationhood, c. 850–1707 177

The legacy of these sixteenth-century writers is still visible today. The divisions remained
during the seventeenth century, only hardened by the War of the Three Kingdoms and
finally the movement towards parliamentary union. Historiography had always been and
remains a site of political argument and the quest for identity; arguably by the end of the
seventeenth century, being a Scot came second to the kind of Scot you wanted to be.
The first piece of historiography to appear in print was John Mair’s Historia Maioris
Britanniae, tam Angliae quam Scotiae (Paris, 1521). Mair (c. 1470–1550; he is also known as
Major) was one of the last great scholastic theologians; his Historia is a small part of his
oeuvre, and his only foray into historiography. Originally from Gleghornie in Lothian,
unusually Mair attended university at Cambridge, before studying at Montaigu College in
Paris. His brief time at Cambridge made him more sympathetic to the English than many
of his predecessors, contemporaries and indeed successors in Scottish historiography; he
also believed that Scotland would be better off in union with England than in constant
conflict. According to Mair, as translated by Archibald Constable in 1892 for the Scottish
History Society, such union could only be achieved by one method:

[. . .] to God, the Ruler of all, I pray that He may grant such a peace to the Britons, that one
of its kings in a union of marriage may by just title gain both kingdoms – for any other way of
reaching an assured peace I hardly see. I dare to say that Englishman and Scot alike have small
regard for their monarchs if they do not continually aim at intermarriage, so that one kingdom
of Britain may be formed out of the two that now exist.

For the plan to work, however, such intermarriage had to be between a Scottish king and
an English princess, preferably an heir to the throne: Mair wanted a union of equals rather
than an absorption of Scotland into England. The Historia is, by and large, devoted to the
end of proving this argument. He is proud to be a Scot: for instance, he refutes totally an
interpretation of Bruce and Wallace presented by Caxton (presumably The cronycles of
Englond (1482)), referring to it as ‘silly fabrications’. Instead, he argues the Scottish case,
presenting Wallace as a hero, if slightly stubborn, and Bruce as a noble king acting accord-
ing to right and with courage.
Mair’s standing as a historiographer rose during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
because of his apparently logical approach to his material, and his willingness to pass severe
comment on the credulity, the barbarity and the general unsatisfactoriness of his country-
men. He is, for instance, dismissive of the origin myths:

As to this original departure of theirs out of Greece and Egypt, I count it a fable, and for this
reason: their English enemies had learned to boast of an origin from the Trojans, so the Scots
claimed an original descent from the Greeks who had subdued the Trojans and then bettered
it with this about the illustrious kingdom of Egypt.

His criticisms are widely spread, from the uncouthness of the ‘Wild Scots’, to the negli-
gence of the prelates in failing to found a university before 1411, to kings for taxing instead
of living off their income, to nobles who rebel. In fact, Mair does not diverge drastically
from the views of his contemporaries; indeed many of the same opinions might be found
in Scotichronicon. Equally, just like Bower, he is still largely dependent on chronicles for
his narrative: he is not an antiquarian or a documentary historian, and so he is not really
as modern a writer as he is sometimes presented. Nevertheless, his foregrounding of his
sources and his clearly expressed opinions marked a change in historiographical direction.
178 Nicola Royan with Dauvit Broun

It was not a path that attracted many followers directly in the subsequent centuries. Far
more influential on Scottish historiography, whether as a target or as a model, was Hector
Boece (c. 1465–1536). Born in Dundee, Boece attended Montaigu College with Mair, and
speaks highly of his intellect. Boece was selected by Bishop Elphinstone to be one of the
first teachers at King’s College in Aberdeen in 1495, and he remained at King’s College, as
principal, until his death. His best-known work, Scotorum Historiae a prima gentis origine was
first published in 1527, also in Paris, and by the same printer who had published Mair’s.
Boece’s approach to history was very different to Mair’s in style and in manner. Where Mair
analyses and argues, Boece dramatises and describes; where Mair dismisses the early myths
of origin as nonsense, Boece expands them; where Mair is sceptical about his sources, Boece
presents new ones, unknown by previous writers and unseen by later ones. Nevertheless,
Boece’s presentation is as new as Mair’s approach, for Boece is adopting a humanist mode
of historiography, drawn from Classical models.
Like Mair, Boece is concerned with good kingship: his model is austere, righteous, coura-
geous, just, and also resistant to foreign aggression. His method of teaching is by exemplary
narrative rather than argument. So, in his preface, dedicating the work to James V, just fin-
ishing his minority, he picks out the legendary figures of Gregor, Caratacus and Galdus, and
both Ferguses together with the usual Bruce and Wallace as examples of loyal service to the
realm. All of these resist external pressure: the Ferguses (son of Ferchar and son of Erc) estab-
lish the Scots in Scotland; Caratacus and Galdus resist Roman invasion; Gregor, the Britons
and the Danes. It is not enough, however, to be celebrated in war: Gregor, for instance, is
far more than simply a general, but rather ingenti decore [. . .] bellicis urbanis, religiosisque rebus
princeps (a prince with great glory in war, civics and religion). Boece’s presentation means
that we are shown Gregor in action, fighting a battle, addressing his council, reforming the
Church, remaining chaste, and we are left to draw our own obvious conclusions from the
narrative, about the good king and also, implicitly, about the good subject.
Boece’s view of the relationship between subject and sovereign is one of mutual duty,
and it is possible to infer, particularly from the early books, that the subjects, as repre-
sented by the nobility, have the right to admonish and even depose the sovereign, should
he prove unsatisfactory. Many of his kings are deposed for private immorality as well as
public misgovernment: Lugthacus, for instance, is executed for robbery and sexual mis-
conduct. A radical reading seems further supported by Boece’s adoption of res publica
to describe the realm, a term borrowed from the Roman writer Livy. Any such inference,
though, is misplaced: Boece’s presentation of deposition and election stresses the past
nature of such events, rather than advocating their reintroduction. Nevertheless, Boece is
alert to the dangers inherent in poor kingship, and his deposed kings stand as a threat to
the young James V, just as they do in David Lindsay’s Testament of the Papyngo.
The Scotorum Historia, with its humanist style, its dramatic narrative and its clear moral
and patriotic lessons evidently appealed to a Scottish audience. Within fifteen years of its
publication in Paris, it had found three translators: William Stewart (fl. 1530–40), who
translated it into verse; the anonymous translator of the Mar Lodge version; and John
Bellenden (c. 1490–c. 1548), by far the most influential. Bellenden’s first translation was
commissioned by the king, and presented to him in 1533; Bellenden then revised it several
times, incorporating material from Mair, from Bower, and from other historiographers, and
eventually it was printed as The Chronicles of Scotland by Thomas Davidson (c. 1540). This
was the first complete vernacular history of the Scots in prose and in print, and its influ-
ence can be traced throughout Scottish and English historiographical narratives. It is not,
however, an exact rendition of the Scotorum Historia. During his revisions, Bellenden read
 Versions of Scottish Nationhood, c. 850–1707 179

beyond Boece’s work and incorporates material derived from other writers, including
Bower and Mair. He also condenses and expands as he finds the material interesting:
Boece’s hero-worship of his patron, Bishop Elphinstone, is omitted, while Mair’s criticism
on David I’s enthusiasm for founding monasteries is included. Ideologically, Boece and
Bellenden agree on much: the antiquity of the Scottish realm, the relationship of sover-
eign and subject, the appropriate requirements of a king. In changing the language,
however, Bellenden modulates the material: in particular, res publica becomes ‘common-
weal’, a more emotive and more fluid term, stressing the result above political settlement.
Together, Boece and Bellenden become the authoritative accounts of the Scottish past for
the next two centuries. The existence of both a Latin and a vernacular version was crucial
for this success. The Scotorum Historia reached a European audience of scholars; it also
provided a respectable Classical frame for the narrative. The first edition of the Scotorum
Historia was widely read and cited, by, for instance, Polydore Vergil and John Leland; when
it was reprinted in 1574 and again in 1575, with additional material by Boece and by the
humanist Giovanni Ferrerio, its audience included the Swedish historiographer Olaus
Magnus. It is a primary source for both John Leslie and George Buchanan, and remains a
reference text for historiographers into the seventeenth century. Bellenden’s Chronicles of
Scotland attracted an audience possibly less learned, but no less enthusiastic: in 1641, a Leith
notary Adam Broun copied the whole of the printed version of Bellenden’s text (according
to his own dating, it took him nearly five months) and his is not the only seventeenth-
century copy. Still others used both forms of the text. Some used Bellenden while citing
Boece. William Harrison in his contribution to ‘Holinshed’s’ Chronicles at least admits it:

Hitherto haue I translated Hectors description of Scotland out of the Scotish into the English
toong, being not a little aided therin by the Latine, from whence sometime the translator
swarueth not a little, as I haue done also from him, now and then following the Latine, and
now and then gathering such sense out of both, as most did stand with the purposed breuitie.

Others apparently saw them as complementary: Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie (c.1532–

c.1586) clearly had access both to Bellenden’s translation, presumably in print form, and
also to a copy of the 1574/5 Scotorum Historia, because he begins his own chronicles by
translating the additional material provided by Ferrerio which had not been translated by
Bellenden.
The question remains: why should these versions of the Scottish past be so compelling?
The only other historiographical text with such longevity was Harry’s Wallace. But Harry’s
text is obviously different from those of Boece and Bellenden. Their existence in two lan-
guages is important: there is no translation of Mair until the nineteenth century or of
Scotichronicon until the twentieth. The publication in print must also have been vital, even
though Bellenden’s text clearly circulates in manuscript as well. However, such material
reasons, while important, cannot be the final explanation; the quality of the texts them-
selves must have had a strong appeal. One essential aspect of their appeal must have been
the narrative style – humanist, dramatic and exemplary – preserved and sometimes height-
ened by Bellenden. Mair’s narrative, in contrast, frequently trips itself on its own logic. An
even more significant reason may be the image of the Scots presented, specifically their
wholeness. Central to Boece’s vision is the ancient line of kings, a Gaelic tradition, and,
while rebellion frequently begins in the north-west in the Scotorum Historia, so too did the
Scottish people and their traditions. Because Boece and Bellenden are writing prior to the
Protestant Reformation, moreover, they are able to present the Scots as united under God,
180 Nicola Royan with Dauvit Broun

one church and one monarch. Such an inclusive vision, politically, spiritually and geo-
graphically, is attractive when the affirmation of such unity is no longer possible in the later
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The impossibility of neutrality after the Reformation is apparent in the works of the
Latin historiographers of the later sixteenth century, John Leslie (1527–96) and George
Buchanan (1506–82). In Scotland the fracture was not only religious, it was also political,
a result of the events of the reign of Mary Queen of Scots. Leslie, bishop of Ross, served
as Mary’s ambassador and apologist during her exile; Buchanan was tutor to James VI and
vehemently opposed to Mary and to the Catholicism she represented. Dependent on Boece
for content and similar to him in style, both writers seem to have learned the lesson of his-
toriographical polemic from Mair. Where Leslie argues for the fundamental dangers of
heresy and rebellion, Buchanan examines the right of the people to depose a monarch; in
both cases, they find their proof in the Scottish past.
Leslie is unusual in that he wrote histories both in Scots and in Latin. The Scots account
was written for Mary in the first instance; the Latin history, De origine, moribus et historia
Scotorum was printed at Rome in 1578. It offers a complete account of the Scots from their
earliest origins to the beginning of Mary’s rule; Leslie did not in his formal histories attempt
to describe Mary’s government of Scotland. It has two purposes, one to urge the Scots
back to Catholicism, and the other to persuade all its readers over Europe to accept Mary’s
right to succeed Elizabeth. In arguing for union between Scotland and England, Leslie
seems to follow Mair, but he has no sympathy with rebellion, nor any sense of mutual duty
between ruler and ruled. For instance, whereas Mair spends a chapter outlining Bruce’s
right to the throne through his defence of the realm and his good kingship, for Leslie,
Bruce’s right rests entirely on his genealogy. To break with the sovereign is to break with
the truth, and it is fair to say that Leslie regards all heresy, whether religious or political, as
entirely destructive.
If Leslie was Mary’s apologist, George Buchanan is known as one of her greatest accusers.
His Rerum Scoticarum Historiae, published posthumously in 1582, shows all of the religious
and political tensions of the time, and one more. Buchanan was a Gaelic speaker with
family allegiance to the Lennoxes, a humanist scholar with a reputation far outstripping
Boece’s, a Protestant and, through circumstances as well as inclination, a more radical polit-
ical theorist than any of his history-writing predecessors. All of these qualities have an
impact on his historiography, but particularly his scholarship and his political views. His
political radicalism requires Boece’s account to provide the evidence to support De Iure
Regni Apud Scotos: Dialogus (1579). For Buchanan makes explicit what seems to be implicit
in Boece and Bellenden, namely that the sovereign is chosen by the people and that the
people have the right to resist incompetent or bad government. To demonstrate that such
a practice is justified by ancient usage, Buchanan needs to use Boece’s earliest kings, many
of whom were deposed for various tyrannies. Where Boece’s account stresses that such prac-
tice no longer applied, Buchanan’s offers its revitalisation.
In championing this ancient Scottish model of government, however, Buchanan faced
another problem, namely the already growing doubts that Boece’s kings had any existence
beyond the covers of the Scotorum Historia. During the sixteenth century, understandings of
historical scholarship changed. Antiquarianism, a pursuit of the past through material
remains rather than primarily through narrative, was growing in influence; scholars became
conscious of anachronism, that one age is not the same as another; and there was a more
critical attitude towards sources, particularly chronicles. As a result, Buchanan’s deployment
of the Scottish antique attracted criticism beyond that levelled at his political reasoning,
 Versions of Scottish Nationhood, c. 850–1707 181

particularly south of the border. Nevertheless, it remained an essential reference point

throughout the seventeenth century, finally being translated into English in 1690.
Despite their partisan approaches, Leslie and Buchanan attempt to offer an account of
the whole realm and to create some sort of textual unity. They are the last to do so for some
time, since different patterns of historiography were emerging around them, more partial
and often more fragmented. Accounts that emulate the inclusive narrative tend to sup-
plement the great humanist narratives of Boece and Buchanan, rather than to replace
them; such narratives include Pitscottie’s Chronicles and Leslie’s first Scots History. Both of
these begin where the Scotorum Historia ended, both speak eventually of the author’s own
experiences and those of kin and contemporaries. Both are also partisan – Pitscottie is a
Protestant Fife laird and opposed to Mary and her rule, while, at the time of writing the
History, Leslie was even more closely tied to Mary’s cause, writing the account for her
while imprisoned by the English at Burton. The composition of these texts in the vernac-
ular is significant: more and more, it suggests a particular audience, one literate in varieties
of English, but not Latin, one concerned with divisions and alliances at home, rather than
impact abroad.
In the seventeenth century, such supplementary practices continued, as shown in
William Drummond’s History of Scotland from the Year 1423 until the Year 1542, printed
posthumously in 1655. Just like any historiographer, Drummond (1585–1649) reveals the
occupations of his own time in his description of another. The concerns are perhaps best
summarised by a speech by the French ambassador at the court of James I, arguing in favour
of a French marriage alliance:

But it may be, after mutual marriages have one day joined your two Kingdomes in one, they
[the English] will seek no preheminency over your State, nor make Thrall your Kingdome, but
be knit up with you in a perfect union: Do not small brooks lose their Names when they
commix their Streams with mighty Rivers, and are not Rivers ingolfed when they mingle their
waters with the Seas? Ye enjoy now a kind of mixed Government (my Lords) not living under
absolute sovereignty; your king proceedeth with you more by Prayers and requests than by
Precepts and Commandements, and is rather your Head than Soveraign, as ruling a Nation
not conquered; But when ye shall be joined in a Body with that Kingdom which is absolutely
royal and purely Monarchical, having long suffered the Laws of the Conqueror, ye shall find a
change and a terrible transformation.

This ambassador’s (and possibly Drummond’s) view about the defining characteristics of
Scots government owes a great deal to previous writers. The insistence on the Scots’
indomitability is an essential part of Boece’s vision, union by mutual marriages is Mair’s pre-
ferred method, while the derivation of a particular Scottish mode of kingship from the past
is not dissimilar from Buchanan’s argument. Elsewhere, Drummond shares Leslie’s horror of
rebellion, and aligns his text more with an Episcopalian rather than a Presbyterian settle-
ment. In each case, however, Drummond’s own experience inflects the presentation. For
instance, his attribution of sovereign monarchy to English habits may seem strange, given
James VI’s authorship of The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, but it is possible to argue that,
from Drummond’s perspective, specifically English practice allowed the further develop-
ment of royal power in a manner alien to the Scots experience.
Of course, the French ambassador is also prescient in his account of the relationship
between Scotland and England: the hope of ‘perfect Union’ is instantly denied by the prac-
tice of rivers. Such ‘preheminency’ was not only a matter of government, but also a matter
182 Nicola Royan with Dauvit Broun

of historiography. One of the failures of the Union was an inability to construct a ‘British’
narrative, in which each of the realms had an equal share: even Holinshed had avoided
the issue by simply publishing the histories of Scotland, Ireland and England as separate
narratives without any attempt to conflate them. Without a grand and inclusive narra-
tive of the Scots to replace Boece and Buchanan, it became easier for Scottish history to
become subordinate to English history, and to be rendered marginal in the accounts of the
British realm.
Despite the disappearance of the inclusive narrative, other, more fragmented, styles flour-
ished. By focusing on church, or kin, or the distinguished individual, the special qualities of
the Scots previously allocated to the whole people were confined to specific groups. For
instance, Scottish piety is a consistent feature of Scotorum Historia and even Scotichronicon:
for John Knox (1514–72) and his historiographical disciple David Calderwood
(1575–1660); such piety belonged only to the Presbyterian pioneers and defenders. Knox’s
History of the Reformation in Scotland, like most of his works, is a fine piece of rhetoric. It was
first partially printed in 1587, but the more significant printing occurred in 1644, long after
the Reformer’s death but in the midst of serious religious conflict in Scotland. Knox’s vision
presents the nascent Presbyterian church as God’s chosen people, first oppressed but ultim-
ately triumphant. Knox himself features largely in it, sometimes as an accessory to main
events and sometimes as the lead figure. Knox’s heroic status is confirmed by Calderwood
in The True History of the Church of Scotland (printed posthumously in 1678, but also circu-
lating in manuscript). Both writers are talented at invective, both blatant and subtle.
Calderwood in particular can be unrestrained, for instance in his use of ‘Massemonger or
pestilent Papist’ when describing Mary Stuart’s return to Scotland. He can also be more
cunning, for example when he refers to the bishop of Glasgow ‘lying as Ambassador for
the Kings Mother at Paris’, where it is not clear whether ‘lying’ is a moral verb or simply a
positional one.
Calderwood’s insistence on the truth of his account reflects the contested nature of
church history. A rival account, simply The History of the Church of Scotland, was written
by John Spotswood (1565–1639), archbishop of St Andrews, part of James VI’s Scottish
council and a true establishment figure. Like Calderwood’s and Knox’s, this account was
printed posthumously (1655), but circulated in manuscript. Spotswood is still Protestant:
he celebrates the achievements of John Knox. But his Protestantism clearly favours the
Jacobean Episcopalian settlement and more moderate reformation; in his account of Knox,
Spotswood denies his authorship of the History of the Reformation, referring to its contents
as ‘ridiculous toyes and malicious detractions’. Such oppositions in historiography reflected
the equally bitter divisions in contemporary society, in churchmanship, in political views
and also in nationhood.
In such uncertain times, the loyalty of a powerful kin must have been even more attrac-
tive. This too is reflected in historiography, with more family histories becoming evident.
Family history itself was not an innovation – there are examples from early medieval times,
in Scots, in Gaelic and in Latin – but it reached new prominence in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, both in Lowland and in Highland Scotland. Family histories might
be an attempt to conserve ancient rights being challenged by the post-1603 settlements;
they might also, in the case of Sir Robert Gordon’s History of the Earldom of Sutherland, serve
to educate a new scion in his duties. They also used as their model the humanist histories.
This is particularly evident in the works of David Hume of Godscroft (1558–c.1631), The
History of the House of Douglas (1633) and the History of the House of Angus (printed with
The History of the House of Douglas in 1644). Hume was a follower of Buchanan, both in
 Versions of Scottish Nationhood, c. 850–1707 183

his historical style and in his politics; he was also a supporter of Presbyterianism. This
allowed him to present the frequent rebellious members of the Douglas house as right-
thinking subjects performing a useful corrective to the Crown. Not only did this justify the
position of the Douglases as a leading family, it also enabled Hume to issue his own chal-
lenge to his unsatisfactory sovereigns through his account, precisely as Buchanan and Mair
had done before him.
One feature among many binds all these accounts together: they are all concerned with
the actions of individuals. The king-lists of the earlier accounts are replaced by other lists,
be they the heads of noble families, groups of martyrs and kirk ministers, or distinguished
scholars. The actions of kings bound the whole realm, but, while the actions of the others
may have distinguished themselves or their homeland, they did not necessarily offer or
support a model of wholeness for the people. Instead, they championed a kirk, a kin or even
themselves, in place of the commonweal. It seems as if the fractures in Scottish society after
the Reformation and the War of the Three Kingdoms prohibit an account suggesting unity
in that way. The next attempt to present such an account moved from the individual to
the land itself, in Robert Sibbald’s Scotia illustrata, sive, Prodromus historiae naturalis (1683).
Sibbald’s approach is antiquarian, descriptive rather than narrative, and he is the king’s
geographer, not his historiographer. This is a new view of the Scottish past, and perhaps
an admission of failure. Certainly, the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 did not suc-
cessfully unite Scotland either with itself or with England; nor is there an eighteenth-
century account of the Scottish past that carries the authority of either Boece or Buchanan.
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, just as previously, versions of the past
were written to meet particular ideological standpoints and particular political situations.
By 1707, rival views clashed head-on, and it was not possible to present a whole narrative
of the commonweal. Scottish identity rested as much on its present laws and Church as it
did on its king and its past.

Further reading

Broun, Dauvit (1999), The Irish Identity of the Kingdom of the Scots in the Twelfth and
Thirteenth Centuries, Woodbridge: Boydell.
Burns, J. H. (1996), The True Law of Kingship: Concepts of Monarchy in Early Modern
Scotland, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ferguson, William (1999), The Identity of the Scottish Nation: An Historic Quest, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Goldstein, R. James (1993), The Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland,
Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.
Mason, Roger A. (1998), Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and
Reformation Scotland, East Linton: Tuckwell Press.
Royan, Nicola (2000), ‘The Uses of Speech in Hector Boece’s Scotorum Historia’, in L.
Houwen, A. A. MacDonald and S. Mapstone (eds), A Palace in the Wild: Scotland
and Renaissance Culture, Leuven: Peeters.
 20

From Rome to Ruddiman: The

Scoto-Latin Tradition
Jack MacQueen

In Scotland, as elsewhere, Latin was put to different uses at different periods. The earliest
compositions are official; inscriptions on the second-century distance slabs and altars
set up along the Antonine Wall. Later are the inscriptions on early Christian votive and
memorial stones, dating from the fifth to the seventh centuries, for the most part found in
south-west Scotland, and often to be associated with Ninian’s mission based on Whithorn
in Wigtownshire. More or less contemporary with the earliest of these are the devotional
and pastoral writings of St Patrick (c. 390–461), the Confessions and the Letter to the Soldiers
of Coroticus. Before his enslavement in Ireland, Patrick may himself have been born and
brought up in Strathclyde, and so been a native of what is now Scotland, but, even if this
is not so, Coroticus (Ceredig) certainly held sway in that region. The Letter demonstrates
that for Christians in these parts Latin was the accepted mode of communication, as does
the later penitential hymn, ‘Parce, Domine’, attributed to Mugint, sixth-century successor
to Ninian as abbot or bishop of Whithorn.
Christianity had three important intellectual consequences: first, a belief that the course
of the world, from Creation to Judgement, was purposive; second, that the purpose
received its clearest demonstration in the Middle East, particularly Palestine, and in
Rome; third, that it had been demonstrated locally by the lives of holy men and women,
a fact best given expression by a form of biographical panegyric, the Saint’s Life. This last
was often infected with elements of märchen and hero-tale, which sometimes turn out to
be the most interesting parts for the modern reader. Complementary to all this was the
need for a complex Latinity which did not necessarily follow the norms of Classical usage.
In this context, an important event was the establishment in 563 of the highly literate
community of Iona. The founder, Columba or Colum Cille (c. 521–97), wrote the acros-
tic cosmological hymn ‘Altus Prosator’, it is said on Iona. A later abbot, Adomnán
(627–704), wrote a book on the Holy Places of Palestine, based on information given him
by the Gaulish bishop and traveller Arculf after shipwreck on the western coast of Britain.
Adomnán is better known, however, for his Life of Columba. His primary purpose was to
demonstrate Columba’s saintliness by way of miracle stories illustrating his powers of clair-
voyance and action at a distance. With this, he combines narrative vigour and vividness,
most clearly shown in such episodes as that of Librán of the reed-plot (ii, 39), and the death
of the saint (iii, 22, 23).
Anglo-Saxon influences, particularly the Latin writings of Aldhelm (639–709) and Bede
(c. 673–735), appear in the acrostic ‘Hymnus Sancti Nynie Episcopi’ and in the Miracula
Nynie Episcopi, an epyllion in hexameters, both almost certainly written at Whithorn in the
 From Rome to Ruddiman: The Scoto-Latin Tradition 185

middle to late eighth century. An origin in York rather than Whithorn has been proposed,
but internal evidence seems to contradict such an idea. The poem was known on the conti-
nent, to Alcuin (c. 735–804) in Paris, to whom a copy was sent by the scholars of York, and
to Paschasius Radbertus (c. 785–c. 860), who made use of it in his controversial De Corpore
et Sanguine Domini (831, revised 844). A verse Life, it should be noticed, almost certainly
implies the existence of an earlier prose version. Somewhat later, Latin makes a show in the
Glasgow church of St Kentigern (d. 612). Liturgical verses, not later than the rule of David
I as Prince of Cumbria (1107–24), have been preserved in the late thirteenth-century
Sprouston Breviary. A hymn, addressed to Kentigern, quoted in Book 3 of Bower’s
Scotichronicon, may well be earlier: Bower gives an improbable attribution to Columba.
Märchen play an important part in the legend of Kentigern. The remarkable birth-story
survives most fully in the fragmentary Life, composed during the episcopate of Herbert of
Glasgow (1147–64) by a foreign cleric, perhaps a Tironensian monk of Kelso. It was based,
however, on earlier local material, traces of which are possibly to be found in the prose lec-
tions of the Sprouston Breviary. Kentigern’s dealings with the mad prophet Lailoken
(Merlin) are told in the Vita Merlini Silvestris. This may once have formed part of the frag-
mentary Life, or may be an entirely independent composition, again based on local mater-
ial. It forms the basis of the Vita Merlini Caledonii (c. 1150) by Geoffrey of Monmouth
(c. 1100–55). Although affected by Irish and Anglo-Saxon traditions, the ambience of the
legends of Ninian, Kentigern and Merlin is predominantly British (Cumbric, Strathclyde
Welsh).
Another group of such legends is Pictish, with both main exemplars relating to Churches
and personalities in Fife. The Legend of St Andrew (more properly of St Regulus or Rule)
exists in two forms, a shorter and a longer. The first is to be found in the Bibliothèque
Nationale, Paris. Textually the second is more complicated. Originally it formed part of
the lost Registrum of St Andrews. Two copies of an early section survive in a fourteenth-
century Wolfenbüttel MS; the complete text, however, is preserved only in an eighteenth-
century MS copy in the British Library. The work is essentially the foundation legend, not
only of the metropolitan Church of St Andrews, but also of the Saltire, the Pictish, later
Scottish banner. It thus has a political as well as a religious purpose. The favourable recep-
tion of the relics of St Andrew by the Pictish king, Onuist, gained him the saint’s favour,
which in turn ensured victory for him and his successors in their time of greatest need. In
addition, by way of Onuist’s dream, the Saltire acquired associations comparable to those
of the labarum which had ensured victory for Constantine, first Christian emperor, against
the pagan Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge in 312.
The local associations of the Legend of Servanus (Serf) are with his Church at Culross in
west Fife, and with a number of other places in the area. The saint is elsewhere given an
important part in the birth-story of Kentigern, and Lives of the two saints are bound together
in a volume now in Dublin, but probably originally belonging to Glasgow Cathedral. In the
Legend of Servanus, however, Kentigern receives no mention. The saint’s early years are not
passed in Scotland, but in the Middle East, Jerusalem and Rome, where he becomes Pope,
but is compelled by his angel to abandon the office and set off northwards. Märchen ele-
ments present include a miraculous birth, the angel already mentioned who, like Raphael
with Tobias in the book of Tobit, accompanies the saint in his journeys, a fight with a dragon
at Dunning in Perthshire, and a contest with Satan in a cave at Dysart, Fife. Servanus is also
brought into contact with Adomnán, described as ‘abbot in Scotia’, Scotland, that is, north
of the Clyde–Forth line. Adomnán has thus some kind of metropolitan authority over the
entire region in this portrayal.
186 Jack MacQueen

Abbreviated forms of many other legends, adapted for use in Church services, have been
preserved, for the most part in the Aberdeen Breviary, printed by Walter Chepman in
1509–10. Examples are the Offices of Kentigerna of Loch Lomond (7 January), Moloc
(Moluag) of Lismore (25 June), Drostan of Deer (11 July), Bláán of Bute (11 August),
Maelrubha of Applecross (27 August) and Modan of Rosneath (14 November). The Breviary
contains an Office of St Wynnin of Kilwinning (21 January), which contrasts strangely with
the Life of the same saint preserved by the fourteenth-century English monk John of
Tynemouth.
The saints so far mentioned are all figures of early Celtic Christianity, with Lives written
long after the death of their subject. That of St Margaret (c. 1046–93), Saxon queen of
Malcolm III (c. 1031–93; king from 1058), was written by someone who knew her person-
ally, her confessor Turgot, later (1087) Prior of Durham and (1109) bishop of St Andrews,
who died in 1115. The Life is best preserved in an MS, now in Madrid, but originally copied
for Dunfermline Abbey by a single scribe somewhere between 1460 and 1488. Here there
is little of miracle-story or märchen: Turgot, indeed, expresses some doubt as to whether
miracles are any proof of sanctity, giving only a single, rather homely, example, the preser-
vation of an ornamental Gospel accidentally dropped in running water. The narrative is
full of immediate personal detail in a way which anticipates the later sixteenth-century
panegyric ecclesiastical biographies discussed below.
Before Margaret’s time, the Church in Scotland had drifted into isolation; the contrary
movement towards reunion with the Catholicism of Latin Europe may be seen as beginn-
ing in her work and in Turgot’s biography. Most of the influential pre-Reformation schol-
ars and theologians discussed elsewhere in this work – for instance, Adam of Dryburgh
(c.1140–1212), Michael Scott (c.1160–c.1235), John of Duns, better known as Duns
Scotus (c.1264–1308), Laurence of Lindores (c.1372–1437), John Mair (1467–1550), and
George Lockhart (1485–1547) – spent at least some time abroad, studying and lecturing
in continental universities, especially Paris. The fifteenth-century foundation of three
Scottish universities made it possible for some to continue their activities on home ground.
The word ‘Scot’ originally meant ‘Irishman,’ or more generally ‘Gaelic-speaker’. Scotland
as an independent political entity had been created by Gaelic-speakers. When independence
was threatened, physically by the incursion of Edward I (r. 1272–1307), but also intellec-
tually by his use for propaganda purposes of the earlier Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey
of Monmouth, the Scots of the day found in Gaelic or Gaelic-based records an appropriate
weapon of counter-attack. These records consisted for the most part of king-lists and
genealogies covering the period from Fergus (II), son of Erc, who established his line in Dál
Riata c. 500, to Kenneth I (841–58), who traditionally united the Picts with the Scots to
form a new Scotia. Fergus’s own genealogy extends backwards for many generations and
includes the figure who was later to be regarded as Fergus I. In turn, that genealogy blends
into the wider Irish ‘synthetic’ history most elaborately represented by the Book of Invasions,
the Lebor Gabála Érenn, according to which Gaelic-speakers, Irish and Scots alike, are the
descendants of Gaedel Glas and his wife Scota, daughter of the Pharaoh drowned in pursuit
of Moses and the Children of Israel in their passage through the Red Sea.
The Scots variant of this history figures in the Instructiones and Processus, documents
associated with the Scottish embassy to the Roman curia in 1301. Baldred Bisset had at
least a hand in both compositions. He was Official (a legal appointment) of St Andrews
and parson of Kinghorn, but primarily a professor of law in the University of Bologna. The
Processus in particular is a persuasive and powerful document, surpassed only by the famous
Declaration of Arbroath (1320), whose composition is conventionally ascribed to Bernard
 From Rome to Ruddiman: The Scoto-Latin Tradition 187

of Linton (d.1331), chancellor (c. 1308–28) of Robert I, abbot of Arbroath (1311–28),

bishop of the Isles from 1328. The need to emphasise the independence of Scottish history
continued long after the deaths of Edward I and Robert Bruce. The synthetic history was
presented in detail, together with some account of later events, in the Chronica Gentis
Scotorum of John of Fordun (c. 1320–c. 1384), the five completed books of which conclude
with the reign of David I (1124–53). A continuation in note form, the Gesta Annalia,
brings events up to 1383.
The whole was amplified, indeed transformed, by Walter Bower (1385–1449) to become
the huge Scotichronicon. Bower seems to have been an early graduate of St Andrews
University, founded in 1413; in 1418 he became abbot of the Augustinian house of
Inchcolm. He was a figure of importance in ecclesiastical administration and government
service. Work began on Scotichronicon in c. 1441 and Bower survived to bring it to a con-
clusion in sixteen books, the last dealing with the personal reign of James I (1424–37). This
book and its immediate predecessor show Bower as a genuinely original chronicler; earlier
ones reveal a certain lack of discrimination. Bower quotes from many sources, in verse and
prose, for some of which his is the only surviving evidence. One example in verse has already
been mentioned. Many of the remainder are poems, mostly anonymous, with historical
subject matter; for the most part they are written with some virtuosity in Leonine (rhyming)
hexameters. The thirteenth-century Cronicon Elegiacum, written, as the title suggests, in
elegiac couplets (usually two per king), forms an outline chronicle from the reign of Kenneth
I to that of Alexander III (r. 1249–86). More ambitious is the Chronicon Rhythmicum, prob-
ably written in or about 1306, but with later additions, some probably made by Bower
himself. This falls into three parts: the so-called ‘Scottish poem,’ in its most extended form
dealing with the period from Gaedel Glas to Robert I (r. 1306–29); the ‘English poem,’
dealing with English kings from Ecgberht of Wessex (r. 802–39) to the early years of Henry
VI (r. 1422–71), and the ‘Poem on the Norman Conquest of England’. This last asserts the
hereditary right of Scottish kings to rule England. Like the remaining poems to be men-
tioned, it is written in leonines. An anonymous poem on Robert I’s victory at Bannockburn
(1314) in sixty-eight lines occupies Chapter 21 of Book XII. Substantial parts of another,
attributed to Bernard of Linton, are quoted in the following chapter. A poem of 187 lines on
the same subject, composed by a captured English poet, famous in his day, the Carmelite
Robert Baston, occupies much of Chapter 23. Bower has also preserved three elegies on
James I, one forming the penultimate chapter of Book XVI; the other two appearing only in
the abridged Perth MS. Scotichronicon circulated in manuscript, several times in an abridged
form. One at least of these (the Coupar Angus MS) Bower himself seems to have overseen.
It was not until 1759 that it was printed in two folio volumes edited by Walter Goodall
(1706–66), sub-librarian of the Advocates’ Library. Goodall gave it the misleading title
Joannis de Fordun Scotichronicon cum Supplementis ac Continuatione Walteri Boweri.
During the next three centuries successive writers used modified forms of the synthetic
history as a basis for their own philosophical, political and religious ideas. The most dis-
interested perhaps was the John Mair, already mentioned, who in 1521 published in Paris
his Historia Britanniae Majoris tam Angliae quam Scotiae. Mair’s acute mind had been formed
to a fifteenth-century pattern and his Latinity remains that of a late scholastic theologian.
His title even includes a pun on his own name. Of Renaissance Ciceronianism there is no
trace. Yet, he was prepared to defend his style as appropriate to his method. Britain in the
sixteenth century differs significantly from the pagan Rome of Cicero. Theology is a train-
ing particularly appropriate for a historian, who must make distinctions. This last often
leads him to scepticism on received traditions – for instance, the Greek and Egyptian origin
188 Jack MacQueen

of the Scots and the Trojan origin of the Britons, later usurped by the English. Scotland
and England had long been regarded as polar opposites; Mair regards their histories as com-
plementary, appropriately treated together in a single work. Like Bower, he takes Scottish
history to the reign of James I; English to a later period, the early years of Henry VIII. He
is an early advocate of union between the two kingdoms. In this, one might compare Mair’s
work with the De Unione Regnorum Britanniae Tractatus, written almost a century later in
1605 after the accession of a Scottish king to the English throne. The author, the lawyer
Sir Thomas Craig (1538–1608), urges closer relations between the two peoples, but clearly
assumes that among Scots union is still unpopular. The work was not printed until 1909.
The first printed work to include a reasonably full version of the synthetic history is
Scotorum Historiae a prima gentis origine cum aliarum et rerum et gentium illustratione non vulgari
(Paris, 1527). The final adjective may conceal a reference to Bower’s more ‘vulgar’ and
unclassical history. The elaborate Latinity is already enough to demonstrate that the author,
Hector Boece (c. 1465–c. 1536), was a man of the Renaissance, able to handle the periodic
sentence, the clausula and the vocabulary of Cicero and Livy. He studied and taught in the
College of Montaigu, University of Paris, until he was summoned home in 1497 to teach
the liberal arts and later (1505) to become first Principal of King’s College, the university
in Aberdeen for which Alexander VI had issued a Bull of Foundation in 1495. Boece had
in a sense prepared the way for the Historiae by an earlier work, first of the panegyric bio-
graphical studies mentioned above, Murthlacensium et Aberdonensium Episcoporum Vitae
(Paris, 1522), which centres on the life of William Elphinstone (1431–1514), bishop of
Aberdeen from 1483, and true founder of King’s College. In the dedication Boece refers to
a mysterious collection of books from Iona, deposited there by Fergus II, but destroyed by
Edward I. Towards the end of his account of Elphinstone’s life, he mentions Scotorum histor-
ias de gentis antiquitatibus, also apparently preserved on Iona. On the basis of this the bishop
produced a single-volume History, not now extant, the very existence of which has been
doubted. This comes close to the references in Historiae VII.2 to documents stored on Iona
by Fergus, to the work of Veremundus, and to Bishop Elphinstone’s History.
Boece’s style, like much of his material, was modelled on Livy and Cicero; he was inter-
ested, in an unscrupulous way, in reconciling the recently rediscovered works of Tacitus,
especially the Agricola, with the traditional synthetic history. He includes sections on the
literary works and cultural achievements of the Romans. His primary aim, it seems fair to
say, was not historical truth but an elegant prose using rhetorical rather than historical
methods to persuade the reader of the value of sometimes dubious Scottish antiquities. In
this aim, over some two centuries, he was outstandingly successful. He is a master teller of
tales. Most probably Bower was his main source: the same stories appear in both and, like
Scotichronicon, Scotorum Historiae ends with the reign of James I. The authority, however,
whom he most emphasises is the mysterious Veremundus, perhaps to be identified with
Richard Vairement, culdee of St Andrews in the middle thirteenth century and possible
author of the Historia, eighteenth item in the lost Registrum of the Priory of St Andrews.
Vairement’s career is well documented, but his authorship of the St Andrews material is no
more than conjecture.
Boece was unaffected by Reformation controversies. His two main successors have a dif-
ferent perspective. Both lived through the Scottish Reformation of 1560 and the subse-
quent personal reign (1561–7) of the Catholic Queen Mary, to which their reactions were
different. John Leslie (1527–96), Catholic bishop of Ross (1567–89), and of Coutance in
Normandy from 1592 until his death, was a distinguished canon lawyer and close associ-
ate of the Queen. After her expulsion, his troubled life was mainly spent in France, Italy
 From Rome to Ruddiman: The Scoto-Latin Tradition 189

and Belgium. In 1578 his De origine moribus & rebus gestis Scottorum libri decem was pub-
lished in Rome. In it he expanded on an earlier work in Scots on the period from the death
of James I to the end of 1561. This corresponds to Books VIII–X of the Latin: Books I–VII
are based on Boece and Mair. The most interesting and most personal part is Book X, the
sympathetic account of the minority of Queen Mary and the regency of her mother, Mary
of Guise.
The Rerum Scoticarum Historiae (Edinburgh, 1582) of George Buchanan (1506–82) is
the Protestant equivalent of Leslie’s work. Buchanan became bitterly opposed to Queen
Mary and eager to justify her eventual expulsion. The Historia occupied Buchanan for
many years, during which his intentions sometimes changed. As finally published, it falls
rather awkwardly into three parts. Books I–III form an attempted refutation of the argu-
ments against the supposed early history of the Scots advanced by the Welsh antiquarian
Humphrey Lluyd (1527–68) in his posthumous Commentarioli descriptionis Britanniæ frag-
mentum (Cologne, 1572). Buchanan has the weaker case and, as a consequence, shows
considerable ill temper. Nevertheless, he makes some acute philological observations.
Books IV–XVI cover Scottish history from Fergus I to the death in 1568 of Mary of Guise.
Buchanan rejects the Graeco-Egyptian origin of the Scots, but retains the succession
from Fergus I to Fergus II. Books XVII–XX cover Mary’s personal reign and the immediate
aftermath. Buchanan’s hostility to the house of Hamilton is evident throughout. Book XX
ends abruptly, suggesting that Buchanan was unable or unwilling to bring the work to an
effective conclusion.
The Historia was intended to bolster the theory of an elective rather than purely heredi-
tary monarchy set out in the influential earlier dialogue De jure regni (1579). As the treat-
ment of David I (r. 1124–53), Robert I and James I (and indeed the dedication to the young
James VI) indicates, Buchanan had no absolute hostility to hereditary monarchy, but
rather to tyrants who act against the rational beliefs and legal expectations of their people.
For him, Mary became the supreme living example of such a tyrant. He had hoped that her
power would be tempered by her marriage to her second husband, Henry Darnley
(1546–67), ‘King Hary Stewart’, and by the good influence of her illegitimate half-brother,
James Stewart, Earl of Moray (1531–70), who became Regent after her expulsion. On both,
he lavishes extravagant praise. At his own death, however, Mary still survived as a poten-
tial threat to everything for which he stood.
Buchanan was celebrated, not only as prose-writer, but as poet, famously described by
Henri Estienne as poeta sui saeculi facile princeps, ‘easily the first poet of his own age’. He col-
lected his poems in different ways: for some – Franciscanus and Fratres Fraterrimi, satires on
the mendicant friars, and De Sphaera, on astronomy – the title indicates the subject; for
others the grouping is by metrical form – Elegies (extended poems in elegiac couplets),
Hendecasyllables and Iambs. Following the example of Statius, he put together his longer
occasional pieces as Sylvae, and there are three books of shorter occasional poems, the
Epigrams, mostly but not exclusively in elegiac couplets. These in turn he subdivided further
into ‘Pompæ’, ‘Strenæ’, and the like. Jephthes and Baptistes are tragedies in Classical form,
the influence of which can be seen in later French Classical tragedy and Milton’s Samson
Agonistes. The Miscellanea is a posthumous collection, not so named by Buchanan.
Buchanan was the first Scot to use something like the full range of neo-Classical liter-
ary kinds – genethliacon, epithalamium, strena, ode, elegy, epistle, epigram, eclogue, satire,
tragedy and Lucretian scientific epic, together with translations from the Greek and
Hebrew. Metrically, too, he was a virtuoso. Many of his poems have a Scottish background
or theme. Buchanan was in Scotland from 1535 to 1539, and the earliest poem from that
190 Jack MacQueen

period is probably Coena Gavini Archiepiscopi Glascuensis, an affectionate and indeed

rather awe-stricken account of the conversation at an intimate dinner party given by
Gavin Dunbar, archbishop of Glasgow (1524–47). This is probably earlier than the almost
Juvenalian Franciscanus and the collection Fratres Fraterrimi, of which the archbishop, if
he knew them, would probably have disapproved. Included in the latter is the Somnium,
composed at the Kennedy home in Maybole and based on an earlier vernacular poem by
the poet William Dunbar, ‘How Dumbar wes Desyrd to be ane Freir’. Buchanan completed
the series with the devastating Palinodia. It seems that James V gave Buchanan his personal
encouragement towards the composition of these poems, which were later to cause their
author a fair deal of personal hardship. Three justa, ‘obsequies’, commemorate Magdalene
or Madeleine, daughter of Francis I, king of France, whose marriage at the age of sixteen
to James ended with her death later in the same year, 1537. The justa form a brief coun-
terpart to Lindsay’s ‘Deploratioun of the Deith of Quene Magdalene’, and were no doubt
intended for the same court audience.
Buchanan modelled a short satirical poem in elegiac couplets, Joanni Diguallo, argumento
sumpto ex Adami Otterburni Equitis clarissimi Hexametris, on a poem by another Scottish
humanist, Sir Adam Otterburn (King’s Advocate, 1524, Provost of Edinburgh, 1529,
d. 1548). The poem is a mock-epitaph on a priest and money-lender, John Dingwall
(d. 1531). The poem which follows, addressed to Otterburn, is a humorous defence of the
literary practice of imitatio, important in all forms of neo-Latin composition, and exempli-
fied by the verses on Dingwall. Unfortunately Otterburn’s original poem has not survived
for comparison.
It was probably a later hostile reaction to the Franciscan satires that forced Buchanan to
flee Scotland in 1539,

dum ferus hinc sævit veterani exercitus hostis,

dum tonat horrificas Principis aula minas,
dum nivibus canent impervia culmina montes,
dum valles nimiis impediuntur aquis,

(While the savage army of the old enemy [the Catholic clergy] rages from here, while the
court of the Prince [James V] thunders terrifying threats, while the impassable mountain
ridges are white with snow, while valleys are blocked by floods),

as he observes in a curious appeal for help addressed to Henry VIII’s chancellor, Thomas
Cromwell. An effusive hexameter address to Henry VIII himself belongs to the same period,
but, for almost thirty years, Buchanan lived on the continent, for the most part in France.
There some of his best poetry was composed; one might instance the poem on the miseries
of the humanist’s life in Paris, the first Majæ Calendæ, the Pro Lena Apologia, the pastoral
Desiderium Ptolomæi Luxii Tastæi and the more celebrated Desiderium Lutetiæ, the poem on
the capture of Calais in 1558 and the second Calendæ Majæ. Some of these, together with
his tragedies Jephthes and Baptistes and his translations of Euripides’ Medea and Alcestis, he
wrote during his time at Bordeaux (1539–43). His five years in Portugal (1547–52), during
which he was tried before the Lisbon Inquisition, saw the production of his brilliant Psalms
paraphrases, together with the satirical accounts of the bawd Leonora and her mother and
three savage sets of verses. Two of these were on the pederastic activities of the Portuguese
friars in Africa and Brazil and one on the pretensions of the Portuguese king João III
(1521–57).
 From Rome to Ruddiman: The Scoto-Latin Tradition 191

After his Portuguese experiences, Buchanan returned to France, where he remained

until 1561. In 1558 he wrote Francisci Valesii Mariæ Stuartæ, Regum Franciæ & Scotiæ
Epithalamium to celebrate the marriage in 1558 of Mary to the Dauphin Francis, later
Francis II, whose death in 1560 brought about Mary’s return to Scotland. At this point
Buchanan regarded the Queen as simply the perfection of royal womanhood. He looks
forward to a full political union of Scotland with France. Two later epigrams, ‘Maria regina
Scotiæ puella’ and ‘Eadem Adulta’, demonstrate what he sees as the change from her
earlier to her later personality, a change for which she is made to blame her uncle, Charles,
the notorious Guise cardinal of Lorraine (1524–74), who had been responsible for her edu-
cation. The epigram which immediately follows is a bitter attack on the cardinal.
When he returned to Scotland in 1561, Buchanan became a member of Mary’s entourage.
He retained his earlier admiration and much of his poetry from this period is devoted to
court events. As Leslie McFarlane has noted, he provided Latin verse texts for three
masques. The first was performed in Holyrood as part of the Shrovetide festivities. In this,
the text for the first pageant was an Italian poem, probably by the Queen’s unfortunate
secretary, David Rizzio, for the second Buchanan’s ode, In Castitatem, and for the third his
Mutuus Amor, celebrating the good relations between Mary and her English cousin,
Elizabeth:

rerum supremus terminus

ut astra terris misceat,
regina Scota diliget
Anglam, Angla Scotam diliget.

(Although Doomsday may mingle stars with Earth, the Scottish queen will love the English,
the English queen the Scottish.)

Here as elsewhere, hindsight sometimes gives an ironic twist to Buchanan’s verse.

The second of these masques was in three pageants, celebrating Mary’s marriage to
Darnley on 29 July 1565. In the first, which forms a prologue, Apollo explains that wars
elsewhere have exiled the Muses and himself to Scotland. Mary’s beauty and accomplish-
ments make it the only appropriate place. The second takes the form of a trial, beginning
with Diana, goddess of chastity, laying a complaint with Jupiter that the marriage will rob
her of one of her five chief votaries, all Maries: the Queen herself and her attendants Mary
Fleming, Mary Beaton, Mary Carmichael and Mary Seton. Four goddesses, followed by four
gods, speak against Diana, mainly on grounds of the importance of procreation for the con-
tinuance of life, but with Saturn, gelded himself, asking sardonically: ‘Si tibi fas fuerit tædis
arcere puellas,/ Cur mihi fas non sit præsecuisse mares?’ (If it had been right for you to keep
girls from marriage, why should it be wrong for me to have gelded the males?). Apollo
prophesies a happy issue to the marriage and finally Jupiter as judge turns down the plea.
Mary is to undertake a new form of service (militia). The herald Talthybius, as dempster,
ends proceedings with a formal proclamation of the verdict, which includes some element
of compensation for Diana. The wedding of the Queen, and later of the other Maries, will
produce new virgins for her train: ‘Sic mutant elementa vices contraria, sese/Assiduè peri-
munt, & perimendo novant’ (Thus the contrary elements change their positions: they
destroy themselves perpetually, and by destroying renew themselves). The final pageant
presents bands of horsemen drawn to the ceremony from all parts of the world, Tritons
from Ocean as well as cavaliers from the far north and south. A fourth group represents the
192 Jack MacQueen

conflict between the soldiers of Love, with Cupid on their shields, and those of Wisdom,
with Minerva and her destructive Gorgon shield on theirs. But there can be no real con-
flict; blind Cupid is immune to the Gorgon’s power, and under the tutelage of Minerva the
two can join in one. An elegiac quatrain, Ad Salutem in nuptiis Reginæ, spoken by the four
Maries, seems to form part of the same occasion.
Buchanan wrote a third masque in a single pageant, to be performed at the banquet fol-
lowing the baptism of the future James VI on 17 December 1566. There are also nine
Valentine’s Day poems, four to Mary Fleming as on one occasion Queen of the festivities,
and four similarly to Mary Beaton.
The introductory poem to the Iambs, ‘D. Gualtero Haddono magistro libellorum sup-
plicium Sereniss. Angliæ Reginæ’ is addressed to Buchanan’s younger contemporary,
the Latinist Walter Haddon (1516–72), regarded by Queen Elizabeth as Buchanan’s
equal: ‘Buchananum omnibus antepono, Haddonem nemini postpono’ (Buchanan I place
above all others, Haddon I place second to none). Haddon was an authority on civil law,
particularly as it applied to the Church of England, and a poet who had written in praise
and support of Elizabeth. Apparently, he had asked Buchanan to resume the writing of
verse, but Buchanan claims that he no longer feels able. He is oppressed by old age and
sickness:

missionem cum senecta flagitet

Justam, valetudo imperet,
Libens quiesco, et acquiesco legibus
Pejoris ævi aheneis.

(Since old age demands, and ill-health orders, a lawful discharge from service, willingly I
keep quiet and acquiesce in the brazen laws of a degenerate age.)

If he composes at all nowadays, it is only when the goddesses, Mary and Elizabeth, both
themselves poets, provide the inspiration. If these two were to combine in mutual harmony
and thus give peace to Britain, his own verse would reach a new peak:

Et nostra si quid audiendum vox dabit,

Laudi Dearum serviet,
Virtute quarum pax agros Britanniæ,
Urbes fides, fora æquitas,
Et templa pietas, impiis erroribus
Procul relegatis, colet.

(And if my voice produces anything worth hearing, it will be devoted to the praise of the
Goddesses, by whose virtue peace cultivates the fields of Britain, honesty the cities, equity
the courts, and piety the churches, since impious errors have been banished far.)

Darnley features in none of these poems and indeed was not present at his son’s chris-
tening. Buchanan’s poems to him and against Mary are subsequent to the Queen’s liaison
with Bothwell. Ad Regem Scotiæ Henricum can be dated with some precision. It is a New
Year’s greeting, written when Darnley was recovering from an illness, written, that is to say,
for 1 January 1567, a few weeks before his murder at Kirk o’ Fields on 10 February. The con-
cluding wish is for his health:
 From Rome to Ruddiman: The Scoto-Latin Tradition 193

Optime Rex, opto, sit tibi certa salus.

Hoc satis est unum: quoniam te sospite nobis
Succedent regno prospera cuncta tuo.

(Best of kings, may your health be assured. This is my wish. This one thing is enough, because,
when you are safe and sound, every kind of prosperity will follow for us in your kingdom.)

A second poem, Ad Henricum Scotorum Regem, belongs to the same period. Darnley is the
sun, his supporters are the sunflowers who follow his course across the sky, sensitive to all
the vicissitudes which he undergoes: ‘nos quoque pendemus de te, sol noster, ad omnes/
expositi rerum te subeunte vices’ (We also depend on you, our sun, exposed as we are to
all vicissitudes when you are setting). The poem incidentally may have given Alexander
Montgomerie his image of the ‘dum Solsequium’.
In 1564 or 1565, Buchanan wrote an elegy (in hexameters), Ioannis Calvini epicedium,
in which he draws a contrast between the Protestant Reformer, whose doctrines were so
influential in Scotland, and the five men whose papacies spanned his working life, Clement
VII (1523–34), Paul III (1534–49), Julius III (1550–5), Paul IV (1555–9), and Pius IV
(1559–65). Calvin’s spiritual kinship was with God: animi deus est animus, ‘God is the soul
of the soul’. The lives of the others he presents as in direct contradiction to their names.
Buchanan lays no emphasis on any doctrine that might be regarded as distinctively
Calvinistic; his concern is more with Calvin’s relationship to the popes and papal author-
ity, in terms particularly of the Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent
(1545–63). A little later, in June 1567, Buchanan took occasion as Moderator of the
General Assembly of the Church of Scotland to denounce ‘the bloody decries of Trent’.
There can be little doubt that the punishments of the great sinners in the Classical Hell,
all of which he prophesies for Pius IV,

inter aquas sitiens, referens revolubile saxum,

vulturibus iecur exesus, cava dolia lymphis
frustra implens, Ixioneum distentus in orbem,

(Thirsty in the midst of waters, pushing back up the rock, which will roll down again, his
liver devoured by vultures, vainly filling leaky jars with water, stretched on Ixion’s wheel),

reflect the fact that in 1562 Pius had reconvened the Council to meet the threat posed
by the advance of Calvinism in France, and that in 1564 he had formally confirmed its
decrees.
During his final period, Buchanan wrote poems to some of his many English acquain-
tances. For the most part they were to people who belonged to the circle of Elizabeth’s chief
minister, William Cecil, Lord Burleigh (1520–98). No poem to Burleigh himself has
survived, but four New Year poems are addressed to his second wife, Mildred, eldest of
the learned and accomplished daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke (1504–76). The poems
turn on the relative importance of poetry and wealth and, in particular, on the corrupting
influence of wealth. Mildred apparently exchanged strenæ with him, although her own
verses have not survived. There is also a poem to Sir Anthony complimenting him on his
daughters, the second of whom, Ann, had married Sir Nicholas Bacon (1509–79), Lord
Keeper of the Great Seal (their child was Francis Bacon). (Buchanan wrote an epitaph for
Sir Nicholas, whose opinion on Mary Stuart his own later views much resembled.) Ann
194 Jack MacQueen

made an English translation, published in 1564, of Apologia pro Ecclesia Anglicana (1562)
by Bishop John Jewel (1522–71), an opponent of Calvin and first great expositor of
Anglicanism. With Jewel’s writings, Buchanan felt considerable sympathy: ‘eruditis/ Et
plenis pietatis, entheòque/ Fervore ingenii libris’ (Learned books, filled with piety and the
inspired heat of genius). The lines are from the first of two poems commemorating Jewel,
the second of which ends memorably with ‘Quam parva tellus nomen ingens occulit!’
(How little ground it takes to bury a great name!).
The possibility that a woman might also be a capable monarch is recognised in a poem
addressed to Buchanan’s friend, the English ambassador Thomas Randolph (1523–90). He
had requested him to depict his image of the ideal king, an image which at the end of the
poem Randolph recognises as, in fact, that of Elizabeth: ‘Jam tacitus tecum, “Tentas me
fallere, tanquam/ In tabula nostram qui mihi pingis heram”’. (‘Now silently in your heart
you say, ‘You’re trying to trick me, you who depict my lady as if in a painted panel’). In
effect, the poem is a brief treatise on kingship. More extended treatment of the theme is
to be found in Genethliacon Jacobi Sexti Regis Scotorum, composed on the birth of the future
James VI and I. To a degree this poem is reminiscent of Virgil’s ‘messianic’ fourth Eclogue,
which celebrates the birth of a child who is to be the fulfilment of prophecy, put an end to
civil wars, bring back Astraea, goddess of Justice, and restore the Golden Age. The same
ideas underlie Buchanan’s poem, but with rather more emphasis on the training and edu-
cation of a future philosopher-king. Only if the child is properly brought up, will he enjoy
a successful and peaceable reign. Buchanan emphasises the duty of the parents – Darnley
as well as Mary – to train the child in habits of justice and virtue, qualities more effective
than fear in the practice of government. The patterns of kingship are the Romans, Numa
Pompilius and Servius Tullius, together with the biblical Solomon, none of whom were
warriors. Opposed to them are Alexander the Great, the Tarquins and the Caesars, all of
whom, like many others of their kind, perished miserably. If James follows the better path,
his empire will exceed that of the Spaniards or Portuguese:

Hæc tenero addiscat, maturo exerceat ævo,

Et regnare putet multo se latius, oræ
Hesperiæ fuscos quam si conjunxerit Indos,
Si poterit rex esse sui.

(Let him learn these lessons when he is young, practise them in maturity, and think that if
he is able to rule himself, his empire will be far more extensive than if he brought the dusky
Indians together with the western shore [the Americas]).

The Graces and the Muses must add the final touch to his kingly character.
The nature of the kingship that Buchanan prophesied for James is summarised in the
image of the Phoenix, the unique bird whose birth from its own ashes marks the beginning
of a new era. Buchanan borrowed the figure from Claudian, De Consulatu Stilichonis II,
414–20, but used it to a very different end. His Phoenix exercises imperial power over other
birds, but they do not follow and praise him simply for his beauty of plumage. It is his piety
that inspires them:

pietas etiam intellecta volucrum

Sensibus: usque adeo recti natura per omnes
Diffudit rerum vivacia semina partes.
 From Rome to Ruddiman: The Scoto-Latin Tradition 195

(Piety is recognised even by a bird’s senses: to such an extent does nature spread the undying
seeds of virtue throughout creation).

This piety appears in the fact that when he returns, he carries on his shoulders the ashes
and the funeral rites of his father, just as pious Aeneas abandoned Troy for Italy and a future
Roman Empire, carrying on his shoulders his old father Anchises together with his house-
hold gods (Aeneid II, 707–8, 717). Aeneas’ behaviour exemplified his pietas in spiritual as
well as secular terms: he fulfilled his duty to his father and the household divinities were
essential for the continuance of Troy in the later Roman world, where his descendants were
to be pontifices maximi as well as emperors. The Phoenix conveys this meaning on coins
of Constantine I, the first Christian emperor, who, as supreme ruler over Church and State
alike, presided over the defining Council of Nicaea (ad 325). It was later adopted by Cola
di Rienzo (c. 1313–54), self-appointed Tribune of the Roman People who attempted the
restoration of Rome’s spiritual and secular empire. Later in England the figure was applied
to Elizabeth as herself monarch – emperor, in effect – in spiritual as well as temporal
matters. James will extend this double authority over the whole of Great Britain (9–14):

Pone metum, æternam spondent tibi sidera pacem.

Jam neque Saxonidæ Scotos, nec Saxona Scotus
Infestus premet, et cognato sanguine ferrum
Polluet, et miseras prædando exhauriet urbes,
Sed quibus ante feri tractabant arma Gradivi,
Jam dehinc pacatis conjungent fœdera dextris.

(Lay fear aside; for you the stars promise everlasting peace. No longer shall the children of
the Saxon oppress the Scots, nor the troublesome Scot the Saxon, nor will either pollute the
sword with kindred blood, nor depopulate unhappy towns with devastation. Now and
henceforth the strong right hand will be put to rest and treaties will unite those who
formerly wielded the arms of fierce Mars.)

The image clearly demonstrates that Buchanan did not hold to the Presbyterian doctrine
of the Two Kingdoms.
Buchanan followed the example of the Athenian Stranger in the Platonic Epinomis by
making the study of astronomy,

quæ vis regat ætheris orbes:

An sponte æternos volvat natura meatus –

(what power guides the etherial orbs, or whether nature of her own free will makes them
turn in their everlasting paths),

play an essential part in the education of the ideal ruler. De Sphæra, his great poem on the
subject, began as part of his work as tutor for a young aristocrat, Timolèon de Cossè-Brissac,
a position which he held from 1555 to 1560. Composition proved difficult and in fact occu-
pied him for the rest of his life. At his death, the poem was still incomplete. First printed
in 1584, it was first in what became the accepted form, with some 500 lines added by
Johann Pincier, in 1587. The subject is the perfect spherical universe figured by ancient
and medieval astronomy. In this, the globe of Earth forms the centre, surrounded by the
196 Jack MacQueen

spheres of the planets, among which are included the Sun and Moon, and that of the Fixed
Stars, in which, too, everything above the sphere next above Earth, that of the Moon, is
changeless: cœlum immune senectæ, ‘the sky exempt from old age’, as he strikingly phrases
it. The views which Buchanan ostensibly attempts to refute are the heliocentric hypothe-
ses of the Samians, Pythagoras (sixth century bc) and Aristarchus (third century bc), but
these make a fairly transparent disguise for two of Buchanan’s contemporaries, Copernicus
(1473–1543) and Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), the latter of whom was Buchanan’s corres-
pondent and had his portrait hung in his observatory at Uraniborg. Copernicus had pro-
posed a heliocentric universe in De Revolutionibus Orbium Cœlestium (1543); Kepler in De
Nova Stella (1573), a study of the 1572 supernova, had demonstrated that spectacular
changes might occur above the sphere of the Moon.
The largest collection of Scottish-Latin verse, the Delitiæ Poetarum Scotorum, contains
the works of thirty-seven poets (Buchanan excluded), arranged more or less by alphabetic
order of surname. A further thirty-two, similarly arranged, are included in the third volume
of Musa Latina Aberdonensis. Most are younger than Buchanan. One or two are better
known for their vernacular works or work in another field. For instance, Mark Alexander
Boyd (1563–1601) survives today by virtue of a single poem, his ‘Sonet’, ‘Fra banc to banc,
fra wod to wod, I rin’. Sir Robert Aytoun (1569–1638) has a more extended vernacular
repertoire. The all-round abilities of James Crichton (c. 1560–85), ‘The Admirable
Crichton’, have given him such reputation as he still has. Sir Thomas Craig (1538–1608)
was a distinguished lawyer, author of the classic Jus Feudale and De Unione Regnorum
Britanniæ, already mentioned. The physician David Kinloch (1559–1617) linked his verse
to his professional life in De Hominis Procreatione and De Anatome, et Morbis Internis.
Buchanan’s friend, Andrew Melville (1545–1622), is best known for his part in the Second
Book of Discipline (1578), a manifesto of the stricter Presbyterianism against efforts to
restore a modified episcopacy.
One poet, John Barclay (1582–1621), made his reputation more by his fiction than his
verse. Euphormionis Lusinini Satyricon (1603–7), distantly based on the fragmentary
Satyricon of Petronius, is the tale of a young Scot, Euphormion, and his experiences in con-
tinental Europe. It is partly autobiographical, partly based on the career of his father, the
lawyer William Barclay (1546–1608), and was often reprinted throughout the seventeenth
and well into the eighteenth centuries. In form the satire is Menippean, in which prose and
verse alternate. It is also a roman à clef. The action extends from Euphormion’s departure
from his idyllic birthplace, Lusinia (Scotland), to his final settlement in Scolimorhodia
(‘Thistle-Rose land’, Great Britain) as a court official under the good Tessaronactus (James
VI and I). During his sojourn on the continent his misfortunes are mainly occasioned (Part
I) by Callion (Charles III, Guise Duke, 1545–1608, of a still independent Lorraine) and
(Part II) by the Acignii, the Jesuits whom Callion had established at Delphium (Pont-à-
Mousson, just north of Nancy, site of a university founded by Charles in 1572 and placed
under the Jesuits). Barclay himself was born at Pont-à-Mousson, where his father was then
Professor of Civil Law and his great-uncle, the Jesuit Edmund Hay (d. 1591), was rector.
Father and son both were old-fashioned Catholics who distrusted many aspects of the
Counter-Reformation and any claims of the papacy to temporal power.
Lorraine is not Barclay’s only target. Euphormion’s travels and Barclay’s satire extend over
many countries. In Part II, for instance, we have the account of the attempted encroach-
ments of the Gephyrii (the papacy) on civil government, and in particular the quarrel
(1605–7) between the current Gephyrius (Pope Paul V, 1605–21) and Marcia (the Venetian
republic) over the Church’s temporal prerogatives. Peace was finally established, we are told,
 From Rome to Ruddiman: The Scoto-Latin Tradition 197

by the mediation of one of Barclay’s heroes, Protagon (Henri IV of France, r. 1589–1610),

despite the opposition of Liphippus (Philip III of Spain, r. 1598–1621). Euphormion finds
imperfections even in Scolimorhodia, where he meets the Calvinist Catharinus, whose way
of thought reminds him of the Acignii and (worse!) who smokes tobacco. The lower classes
are arrogant and lazy. The upper classes, however, he finds entirely acceptable.
In 1615 Barclay published his poems in London with a dedication to Prince Charles, the
future Charles I. Some are light verse; for instance, Epistola leporum Neumarchiensium ad
Regem, a verse letter in heroic hexameters from the hares of Newmarket telling King James
how happy they are to be coursed and slaughtered by him. Pugna Gallorum Gallinaceorum,
cui Rex interfuit, is an account in aggressive iambic trimeters of a cockfight attended by the
king. In both, the mock-heroic style conveys a hint of reproof that a great and learned
monarch should indulge himself in such pastimes.
At one level Barclay’s Argenis, in five books, is a heroic romance following the pattern
set by such late Greek novels as the Ethiopica of Heliodorus. As the opening sentence indi-
cates, the setting is Sicily at a remote period:

Nondum orbis adoraverat Romam, nondum Oceanus decesserat Tibri, cum ad oram Siciliæ,
qua fluvius Gelas maria subit, ingentis speciei juvenem peregrina navis exposuit.

(The world had not yet made supplication to Rome, Ocean had not yet yielded place to Tiber,
when a ship from foreign parts put a very handsome young man ashore on the coast of Sicily,
where the river Gelas enters the sea.)

The ship has come from Africa, and the traveller is Archimbrotus, who, soon after landing,
meets another wanderer, Poliarchus, a good soldier but the victim of an apparently hope-
less love for Argenis, daughter of Meleander, the aged king of a troubled Sicily. The plot
develops in terms of these two and involves love and warfare, breaches of friendship, travel,
disguise and intrigue, all leading, however, to a happy ending. Archimbrotus turns out to
be the brother of Argenis, something which explains the strong attraction he had felt
for her and which had led to his estrangement from Poliarchus. He is Meleander’s son and
heir. Poliarchus, in turn, is revealed as rightful king of Gaul, and so an acceptable suitor for
Argenis.
One minor character is the poet Nicopompus, who takes part in, and celebrates, many
of the events described. In Book II, during a discussion with the priest Antenorius, he is
made to claim that he is able to write a fable which will apply powerfully to his own times
while at the same time having an indirect but wholesome effect on the passions and beliefs
of the reader:

Grandem fabulam historiæ instar ornabo. In ea miros exitus circumvolvam; arma, conjugia,
cruorem, lætitiam, insperatis miscebo successibus [. . .] Quia nugari me credent, omnes habebo
[. . .] Et ne traductos se querantur, neminis imago simpliciter extabit [. . .] Præterea & imagi-
naria passim nomina excitabo: tanquam ad sustinendas vitiorum virtutumque personas; ut tam
erret qui omnia, quam qui nihil in illa scriptione exiget ad rerum gestarum veritatem.

(I’ll put together an extended fable in the form of a history. In it I’ll include remarkable events.
I’ll mix arms, marriages, murder, joy, with unexpected twists of the plot . . . I’ll hold everyone’s
attention because they’ll think it’s only a story . . . And in case anyone should complain
of being slandered, there will be no straightforward portraits of individuals . . . Besides,
198 Jack MacQueen

everywhere I shall also make use of imaginary names, to sustain, as it were, the characters of
vices and virtues, so that the critic who wants everything to fit historic truth will be as much
mistaken as the one who denies any such assumption).

The story, that is to say, will be a political allegory that will not have a one-to-one corres-
pondence with historical persons and events, but will set out the current situation in terms
of a fiction the moral application of which may readily be understood by the intelligent
reader. The reference is clearly to the Argenis, apparently written in the third person by an
anonymous omniscient narrator. When the priest applauds the scheme, Nicopompus at once
begins writing. He, in other words, is the purported author of the romance, and the key which
in later editions accompanies the novel unambiguously identifies him with Barclay.
The subject is not entirely remote from that of the Satyricon. Barclay provides many
clues, most obviously in the names of his minor characters. A supposed Sicilian faction,
the Hyperephanii, are followers of Vsinulca, anagram for Calvinus. They are thus identi-
fied as the Calvinist Huguenots. Similarly, Ibburanes is Barberinus, Maffeo Barberini, who,
when the novel was written, was not yet Pope Urban VIII (1623–44), but who had been
papal envoy extraordinary to Henri IV in 1601 and Nuncio in France from 1604. These
are only two of many indications that the ancient Sicily of the narrative is in fact France
during the period of the religious wars. In general, they help to establish that although
Meleander is old and the father of two children, he represents aspects of Henri III, last king
of the Valois dynasty, who died childless at the age of thirty-eight. Similarly, Poliarchus and
Archimbrotus represent different aspects of Henri IV, first of the Bourbon kings and origi-
nally a Huguenot, with his rival Lycogenes as the Duke of Guise, a leading figure in the
Catholic Ligue. Radiboranes is the king of Spain (Sardinia), and Hyanisbe is the English
Queen Elizabeth. However different the detail, the Sardinian invasion of Mauretania
(Book IV) corresponds to the expedition against England made by the Spanish Armada in
1588. The fact that Archimbrotus has been reared at Hyanisbe’s court may indicate the
original Protestantism of Henri IV. The High Priest Aneroestus is Clement VIII, in whose
papacy (1592–1605) Henri IV was reluctantly recognised as rightful king of France and
absolved from the excommunication pronounced in 1585 by Sixtus V (1585–90). Issues
and relationships take priority over precise individual circumstances, but do not necessar-
ily exclude them. Not surprisingly discussions of kingship, the temporal powers of the Pope,
the fate of Germany (Mergania) since the Reformation, free will and predestination, the
value of astrology, all form part of the structure. Argenis herself does not correspond to any
historical figure, rather she is a personification of France, to the possession of which a
variety of suitors aspire. Her hand is won finally by Poliarchus. He is often compared to
Hercules; in art and literature Henri IV was similarly presented as the Gallic Hercules.
The book contains passages tedious to the modern reader, often the very passages which
would have roused most interest in a seventeenth-century audience. During that century
it enjoyed enormous success. The anonymous editor of the Elzevir edition introduced it
with the words:

Euphormionem & Argenidem à Barclaio habemus, Satyrico & Scriptore nostri temporis cele-
berrimo, imo, si cum rerum gravitate, styli majestatem spectes, incomparabili.

(We have the Euphormio and Argenis of Barclay, the best-known satirist and writer of our
time, incomparable indeed if you bear in mind the majestic style which he combines with
weighty subject matter.)
 From Rome to Ruddiman: The Scoto-Latin Tradition 199

Even today, the portrayal of a high-minded but bloodthirsty society retains consider-
able power. And of course, the controlled peripeteia of its sustained narrative and the use
of such devices as internal monologue make it an important, if often neglected, early docu-
ment in the history of the novel.
Barclay always proclaimed himself a Scot, but, in all probability, he never set foot in
Scotland. For ten years (1606–16) he lived at the court of James VI and I in London.
His last years were spent in Rome, and it was there that he wrote Argenis. Like his father,
he was a monarchist. The elder Barclay wrote De Regno et Regali Potestate, a riposte to
Buchanan’s De Jure Regni and other works questioning absolute regal authority. In this, he
followed the lead of another French-based Scot, Adam Blackwood (1539–1613), author of
De Vinculo and Apologia pro Regibus. These treatises greatly influenced James VI and I in
his development of the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings. John Barclay agreed with
their conclusions.
The Delitiæ was edited by one Scottish poet, the physician Arthur Johnston
(1577–1641), and financed by another, the lawyer and statesman Sir John Scot, Lord
Scotstarvit (1585–1670). As Johnston noted in his dedication to Scotstarvit, the greatness
of Buchanan motivated the enterprise:

Extremum hunc terrarum angulum, penè sub ipso mundi cardine jacentem, illustrem olim fecit
Poetarum sui sæculi facilè princeps Buchananus. Hoc Sole extincto, tu novis illum sideribus,
inter quæ & ipse fulges, mirum in modum decoras. Ex his non pauca sunt primæ magnitudinis,
& splendore suo majora illa luminaria quæ Augusti sæculo fulserunt æmulantur.

(Buchanan, easily first among poets of his age, once made this furthest corner of the world,
lying almost under the Pole, illustrious. Now that his sun has been extinguished, you are won-
derfully adorning this corner with new stars, among which you yourself also shine. Among
these, not a few are of first magnitude and in their splendour endeavour to rival those greater
luminaries which blazed during the age of Augustus.)

Johnston goes on to lament the inclusion, at Scotstarvit’s insistence, of his own poetry, but
hopes that his darkness will serve to bring out the brilliance of the others. In fact, Johnston
is probably the most accomplished of the poets included. He began his professional life as
Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Sedan (1604–10). In 1610, after he had graduated
MD at Padua, he became Professor of Physic at Sedan, where he remained until c. 1622,
when he returned to his ancestral home at Caskieben in Aberdeenshire. By 1625, he had
been appointed Medicus Regius, a physician to the king. In 1637, he became rector of
King’s College, Aberdeen. Four years later, he fell ill and died during a visit to Oxford.
Johnston’s admiration for Buchanan found expression in two longish satirical poems,
Consilium Collegii Medici Parisiensis de Mania Hypermori Medicastri and Onopordus Furens.
Hypermorus the Quack and Onopordus are invented names for George Eglisham, a quar-
relsome early seventeenth-century Scottish physician, author of Duellum Poeticum con-
tendentibus G. Eglisemmio medico regio, et G. Buchanano, regio preceptore pro dignitate
paraphraseos Psalmi civ., dedicated to King James, and offered to the University of Paris for a
decision. This was never given, but in the first satire Johnston offers one in their name.
Eglisham is mad:

Te vatum, Buchanane, decus, quem suspicit orbis,

Prisca cui assurgunt sæcula, dente petit.
200 Jack MacQueen

Ille tuis audet demens oppedere Musis,

Quodque nequit livor perdere, rodit opus.
Vatis Jessiadæ cultu donata Latino
Carmina sunt, illo judice, digna focis.

(He snaps at you, Buchanan, glory of poets, whom the world reveres, to whom former ages pay
their respects. Madly he dares to fart at your verses and gnaws at your work, which jealousy
can’t destroy. The psalms of the prophetic son of Jesse [David] rendered in stylish Latin, should
in his opinion be committed to the flames.)

The second poem confirms and defends the diagnosis.

Eglisham’s original attack was partly caused by the attitude to kingship that Buchanan
expressed in De jure regni. It had something in common with William Barclay’s De Regno
et Regali Potestate, already mentioned. But Johnston’s own attitude was in fact closer to
Eglisham’s than he realised. By 1637, probably influenced by Archbishop Laud, whom he
had met at the Holyrood coronation of Charles I in 1633, he had produced his rival version
of the Psalms, Paraphrasis Poetica Psalmorum Davidis. As his introductory verses show, he
shared something of the modern distaste for Buchanan’s perhaps over-brilliant earlier
achievement. Buchanan, he remarks, presents David as king; his own plainer version pre-
sents him as priest and prophet – clearly the more important role:

Apta paludato Buchanani purpura regi est,

Regibus aut si quid grandius orbis habet.
Nil mihi cum sceptris; ego do velamina vati;
Hunc decuit cultu simpliciore tegi.

(Buchanan’s purple befits a king in his regalia – kings or whatever grander object the world
may hold. Sceptres are nothing to me. I give veils to the prophet who should be dressed in a
simpler style.)

The epigram on Drummond of Hawthornden, ‘De Gulielmo Drummondo’, discussed

below, also evinces some distaste for Buchanan, combined with a dawning realisation that
the future for poetry lies in the vernacular rather than Latin. This realisation may also be
seen in the verses on Sir David Lindsay and the much longer epistle to William Alexander,
Earl of Stirling.
Some of Johnston’s best verse comes in translations from the English, most notably his
version of Carew’s ‘Ask me no more’. He gives the stanzas an unusual order, beginning with
what is usually the second:

Ask me no more whither doe stray

The golden Atomes of the day:
For in pure love heaven did prepare
Those powders to inrich your hair.

Ne rogites, roseum sol dum iubar explicat, auro

Fulgentes atomi, quo volitare parent.
Hoc caeli superumque favor te pulvere donat,
Et Venus hunc cirris implicat ipse tuis.
 From Rome to Ruddiman: The Scoto-Latin Tradition 201

(While the sun unfolds its rosy radiance, don’t keep asking me where its atoms, gleaming with
gold, are preparing to fly. The favour of heaven and the gods presents you with this powder
and Venus herself weaves it into your ringlets.)

A number of poems deal with affairs in Europe, particularly the early stages of the Thirty Years
War (1618–48), occasioned by the appointment of Frederic V, Elector Palatine and husband
of James VI’s daughter Elizabeth (1596–1662), as king of Bohemia. The subject is often
slightly disguised; for instance in Querelæ Saravictonis et Biomeæ, ‘Saravicto’ is an anagram of
‘Austriaco’ (gen. ‘Austriaconis’), ‘Austria’, and ‘Biomea’ of ‘Bo[h]emia’. Several other poems
follow the example of Buchanan’s Pro Lena Apologia and offer a defence, half-serious, half-
humorous, of some more or less unsavoury characters – including the poet himself. Apologia
pro Thaumantia Obstetrice ad Senatum Aberdonensem takes the form of a legal document: the
midwife Thaumantia has been put in prison for her scolding tongue; he pleads for her release.
The tone is not always simply jocose; Thaumantia once came to Johnston’s own rescue:

Nixibus in mediis mater defecit, et infans,

Et timui ne mors tolleret una duos.
Arte Machaonia lethum conabar et herbis
Pellere quas medicæ præbuit autor opis.
Sed nihil arte, nihil juvit radicibus uti:
Augebant potius gramina nostra malum.
Sola meis porrexit opem Thaumantia rebus.

(In the midst of her pangs, mother and child weakened and I was afraid that a single death
would carry off both. I was trying to avert death by surgical art and by herbs prescribed on good
authority for medical aid, but neither surgery nor roots were of any help – rather, my simples
[i.e. herbal medicines made from one herb] were making things worse. Only Thaumantia gave
me support in my struggles.)

In Apologia pro Nautis Lethensibus, the Leith sailors are on trial in Aberdeen for drinking
some of their ship’s cargo of wine (a mere two casks!). The defence is in high mock-heroic
style. Contrast In Nautas ad Nobilissimum Virum Georgium Hayum Cancellarium Scotiæ, a
complaint to the Chancellor against the crew of a ship in which his entire wardrobe had
been stolen, leaving him naked as the Graces or the goddesses who contended before Paris
for the prize of beauty. He calls for the severest legal penalties on the barbarous miscreants.
Apologia Piscatoris is a defence of the poet against the charge, brought by the local minis-
ter, of salmon fishing on Sunday. At the same time it is a general celebration of the sport
and business. It attacks the hypocrisy of strict Presbyterianism, demonstrated by the min-
ister’s own domestic arrangements:

Si mihi luce sacra labor interdicitur omnis,

Cur tibi sacrata luce culina calet?
Cur teris ore dapes, & dentem dente fatigas?
Cur sinis ancillam cædere cortis aves?

(If my work is entirely forbidden on the holy day, why is your kitchen hot during the sacred
hours? Why do you grind a feast in your mouth and weary tooth with tooth? Why do you let
your maid slaughter the barnyard fowls?)
202 Jack MacQueen

After a long list of those who must work on Sunday, he adds, rather daringly:

Hei mihi, cur festa est lux piscatoribus unis

Septima, quæ reliquis esse profesta solet?
Stulta superstitio est numeris involvere mentes,
Hic nimium magicæ calculus artis habet.

(Alas, why is the seventh day holy only for fishermen, when everyone else treats it as a working
day? To entangle one’s mind with numbers is a stupid superstition. This kind of computation
savours too much of art magic.)

The poem ends with the conceit that after death at least his happiness will be secure. There
are Fish (the zodiacal sign) in Heaven and rivers, Styx, Cocytus, Phlegethon, in Hell; in
either place he will be able to indulge himself. In all these poems the general style is mock-
heroic. This has no place in the poems on the burning of the tower-house of Frendraught
in October 1630, Querela Sophiæ Hayæ, Dominæ de Melgeine, de Morte Mariti and De Ioanne
Gordonio, Vicecomite de Melgein, & Iohanne Gordonio de Rothimay in arce Frendriaca
combustis. As the titles indicate, chief victims of the blaze were John Gordon, Viscount
Melgum, and John Gordon of Rothiemay, both at the time guests of the Crichtons, who
owned the house. There was a hereditary feud between Crichtons and Gordons. Nothing
was ever proved, but suspicions were rife and fell particularly on Elizabeth Gordon,
Crichton’s wife and Melgum’s cousin. Johnston shared these suspicions and urges that
all the instruments of seventeenth-century investigative and retributive justice should
be used:

Est tibi trajectis armata ciconia nervis,

Est rota, sunt fustes, & iniquo pondere torquens
Anchora cervices, & quæ premat ocrea suras.
Vtque, quod admisit, dirum scelus expiet, ultor
Nunc sceleris, famulos præbebit Mulciber ignes.

(You have the stork armed with crossed sinews [the rack?], you have the wheel, you have cudgels,
and the anchor which twists necks with an unbalanced weight, and the legging which crushes
calves [the boot]. To make sure that she should expiate the terrible crime which she has com-
mitted, Vulcan, now avenger of the crime, will provide his serviceable fires.)

The ballad on the same subject (Childe 196) is certain of Elizabeth’s guilt.
Johnston enjoyed friendly relations with some of the Aberdeen Doctors, the group of
learned clergymen and theologians who accepted episcopacy and in 1638 opposed the
National Covenant. Closest was Robert Barron (1593–1639), Professor of Divinity in
Marischal College, author of Disputatio theologica de formali objecto fidei. The epistle Ad
Robertum Baronium has no theological content, but rather expresses the desire to get away
from the brutal toil of farming in the Garioch, toil which is destroying his ability to write
Latin verse. The farm-work is specified in great detail. The poem thus stands in complete
contrast to another, perhaps his best known, De Loco Suo Natali, the idyllic description of
Caskieben, the Tempe of the Johnstons. A second poem, Ad Robertum Baronium, Theologiæ
Doctorem, de Obitu Filioli, is one of sometimes harsh consolation, addressed to Barron on
the death of his young son and heir. Most of the topics introduced are biblical, but not
 From Rome to Ruddiman: The Scoto-Latin Tradition 203

commonplace – for instance, the behaviour of David before and after the death of his first
son by Bathsheba (2 Samuel 12: 15–23):

Tempus erat luctus, inquit, dum viveret infans

Et flecti posset Numinis ira prece.
Nunc ubi mors telo feriit, quid macerer ultra?
Littora futilibus cur ego bobus arem?

(‘There was a time for outcries,’ he said, ‘while the child was alive, and while the wrath of God
might be deflected by prayer. Now, when death has struck him with his spear, why should I be
tortured further? Why should I plough the sands with useless oxen?’)

Johnston also introduces the possibility that Barron may have been saved from future dis-
appointment in his child, citing the examples of the priest Eli, of Isaac, and of David
himself. The child is now safe in Abraham’s bosom and inhabits the New Jerusalem of
Revelation. Now only Barron can bring comfort to himself: ‘Te verbis solare tuis, nec quære
quod extra est;/Vel nemo, vel, te quod juvet, unus habes’ (105–6) (Comfort yourself with
your own words. Don’t look for anything beyond. You alone have the power to help your-
self, or else nobody does).
Johnston’s death more or less coincided with the outbreak of the religious civil wars in
Scotland and England. Like him, most writers of Latin verse had been Episcopalian and
royalist; the wars and the subsequent Commonwealth meant that such exercises, in effect,
disappeared. Circumstances changed with the 1660 Restoration, only to be followed by
other reversals, the 1688 ‘Glorious’ Revolution and the Hanoverian succession in 1714.
After 1688, Latin poetry and Jacobitism became virtually synonymous.
The career of Archibald Pitcairne (1652–1713) spans much of the later period. He was
born in Edinburgh, received his earlier education in the High School of neighbouring
Dalkeith, and graduated MA of Edinburgh University in 1671. In 1675, he went to Paris
to study medicine and, in 1680, received his MD from Rheims. In 1681, he became a
founder member of the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh. In 1692–3, he was briefly
Professor of the Practice of Medicine in Leiden. He returned to Edinburgh, where, in
December 1695, internal disagreements at the Royal College led to his expulsion
(together with several others). In 1700, he was briefly imprisoned on suspicion of
Jacobitism. In 1701, he attached himself to the Incorporation of Surgeons. Readmission
to the College of Physicians came in 1703. He was something of a mathematician, a close
friend of David Gregory (1661–1708), and an admirer of Sir Isaac Newton, whose
methods he attempted to apply in medicine. He celebrated Newton in a number of poems.
The combination of Newtonianism with Jacobitism was not unusual at the time. After
Pitcairne’s death, his extensive library was purchased by Peter the Great for the library at
St Petersburg.
Pitcairne wrote verses and plays in Scots, but his medical and mathematical writings are
all in Latin, as is his witty prose satire on Presbyterianism, Epistola Archimedis ad regem
Gelonem, written in the late 1680s, but not printed and published until 1710, and then
anonymously. His earliest Latin poem is probably ‘MORMONOSTOLISMOS sive
Lamiarum Vestitus, A Poem on the King and Queen of Fairy’, an imperfect copy of which
appeared as a broadside (?c. 1670) and which was later (1691) printed in full with an attri-
bution to ‘Mr Walter Dennestone’. This was later reprinted in the first part of Watson’s
Choice Collection (1706). Pitcairne often wrote satirically under the pseudonym of the
204 Jack MacQueen

Musselburgh schoolmaster Walter Dennistoun (d. 1700); some of the poems written after
Dennistoun’s death masquerade as communications from the next world. ‘MORMONO-
STOLISMOS’ is a virtuoso translation of an English poem by Sir Simeon Steward
(d. 1629), entitled ‘A Description of the King of Fayries Clothes, brought to him on New-
yeares day in the morning, 1626, by his Queenes Chamber-maids’. There may be some
political significance in the date, the first New Year’s day of Charles I’s reign.
Only one other poem can be dated to the 1670s, but a number were composed during the
1680s, before and after the arrival of King William. Particularly important are the epitaphs
on the men whom Pitcairne regarded as Jacobite proto-martyrs, ‘In Geo. Locartum’, on the
Lord President, Sir George Lockhart (c. 1630–89), shot in the High Street of Edinburgh,
the famous ‘In mortem Vicecomitis Taodunensis’ on John Graham of Claverhouse,
Viscount Dundee (1648–89), a poem translated by Dryden, and (in the early 1690s) ‘In
Geo. Makinnium’, on Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh (1636–91), the Lord Advocate
and founder of the Advocates’ Library. The three appear together in Poemata Selecta, an
apparently anonymous collection in pamphlet form, with date (1709) and author indi-
cated only by cipher. The collection covers the period from 1689 to the Pretender’s attain-
ment of his majority on 10 June 1709, celebrated in a Sapphic ode, ‘Ad Janum. 1709’, which
begins with the contrast between January, the month in which Charles I was executed,
and the happier June of 1709. Several others commemorate the miseries of William’s reign,
the best-known being the adaptation of a fable by Phaedrus, ‘Fabulæ 2. lib.1. Phædri
Metaphrasis’, the story of King Oak (the Stuart monarchy) and King Stork (William II and
III). This particularly reflects the belief that William was responsible for the failure of the
Darien expeditions (1698–1700). There are indications in an MS version that it was com-
posed for an earlier princely birthday, probably that of 10 June 1700. Another Sapphic ode,
‘Ad Marcum Lermontium’, is an invitation to his friend and contemporary, the advocate
Mark Learmonth (d. 1701), to join him at dinner on 29 May, the anniversary of the
Restoration, a Jacobite festival, and to celebrate French successes in the war against William
and his allies (1689–97). Learmonth’s death is commemorated in a curious but powerful
set of hendecasyllables, ‘Ad Dennistonum’, purporting to lament the dead Dennistoun’s
inability to join in an obscene celebration of the death of the landlady Greppa, held at her
hostelry. This celebration, by way of a drinking contest proposed by Hugh Cunningham, a
Presbyterian and Williamite, led to Learmonth’s own death:

Quo non flebilior bonis honestisque

Alter procubuit, nec alter olim
Terras candidior reviset hospes.

(None fell more worthy than he of lament by good and honest men, nor will a second whiter
(than he) ever again visit the earth as a guest.)

The adjective candidior, ‘whiter’, may refer to the Jacobite symbol, the White Rose. The
reign of the Stuart Queen Anne (1702–14) restored hope. In ‘Ad Carolum II’, Pitcairne
uses pastoral terms to ask the long-departed Charles II what he would recommend, if he
were to return now that William is dead. Would he call back his dead brother James? Or
would he offer care of the flock to Anne, who is nearer at hand? Or to the boy whom Anne
calls her brother, but who is still very young (the Pretender)? For Pitcairne the hopelessly
optimistic conclusion is clear: ‘Anna igitur calamos & pastoralia sumet/ Quæ reddet fratri,
si sapit Anna, suo’ (9–10) (Anne therefore will assume the reeds and pastoral equipment,
 From Rome to Ruddiman: The Scoto-Latin Tradition 205

which, if Anne has any sense, she will hand to her own brother). Poemata Selecta contains
only seventeen poems. Many more are included in the posthumous volume Selecta Poemata
Archibaldi Pitcarnii Med. Doctoris [. . .] et Aliorum (Edinburgh, 1727), and in other printed
and MS sources. Several celebrate the death of King William. The monologues ‘David ad
Venerem’ and ‘Venus ad Davidem’ set out the amorous exploits of a Presbyterian clergy-
man, David Williamson:

Mirentur Mahometem Arabes, mirentur et Indi,

Europam alterius Numinis urat Amor.
Ast ego furtivæ Veneris præconia dicam:
Illi sacra libens Tempus in omne feram,

(Let the Arabs wonder at Mahomet, let the Indians; let love of another Divinity burn Europe;
I shall sing the praises of a furtive Venus and gladly make sacrifices to her forever),

and hint that many others may follow the same path.
Pitcairne’s Jacobitism grew with the passing years. Many of his later poems are little more
than ardent wishes for the Pretender’s restoration. In some, there is a realisation of the prac-
tical difficulties and the awful possible alternative. One, ‘Ad Annam Britannam’, is
addressed to the Queen, late in her reign:

Anna Stuartorum Decus et Spes Altera Regum,

Quos Sibi, quos reddi prisca Caledon avet,
Este bonæ, Faustæque Tuis Rex Anna Stuartis,
Et nos Teutonico non onerate jugo.

(Anna, ornament and second hope of the Stuart kings, for whose restoration ancient
Caledonia longs, may you, Anna, and the King [i.e., the Pretender] together be good and
favourable to your Stuarts. Do not burden us with a Teutonic yoke!)

The Teutonic yoke is the Hanoverian succession. Another, among the latest written, is
‘XXV Julii MDCCXIII’. In the Church calendar, 25 July is the feast of the Pretender’s
patron, the apostle and martyr St James the Great:

Quam Te prisca cupit gens Grampia, Sancte, redire!

Et nullam Romæ prorsus habere fidem!
Et Genevæ nullam fictrici Relligionis,
Quæ peperit populis impia facta tuis.

(How the ancient Grampian race longs, Saint, for your return, and for you to have absolutely
no faith in Rome, and none in Geneva, source of the superstition which has spawned the impi-
eties imposed on your people.)

Pitcairne recognised that James’s Catholicism was an obstacle, and could not resist the
temptation to have yet another fling at the Presbyterians. His last publication, Archibaldi
Pitcarnii dissertationes medicæ (1713) was dedicated to the Pretender.
The full title and contents of the 1727 volume show that other Latin poets were active
during Pitcairne’s lifetime. One not there included is James Philp or Philip of Almerieclose
206 Jack MacQueen

(1655–1714/25), who in 1689 acted as standard-bearer to the army of Dundee, to whom

he was related by marriage. He wrote the Grameid, an account of the campaign in epic
hexameters on the model of Virgil’s Aeneid and Lucan’s Pharsalia, which remained in manu-
script until the 1888 edition by A. D. Murdoch. Thematically it comes close to Pitcairne’s
Williamite poems.
Dr Johnson’s famously dismissive remark on Boswell’s Latinity, ‘Ruddiman is dead,’ indi-
cates that in his opinion Scottish mastery of literary Latin came to an end with Thomas
Ruddiman (1674–1757). Ruddiman’s ‘zeal for the Royal House of Stewart did not render
him less estimable in Dr Johnson’s eye’ – or so at least Boswell thought. In a sense, the
judgement is true. But by comparison with his predecessors, Ruddiman’s literary, as opposed
to his scholarly, stature is not great. He wrote metrically accurate but uninspired verse,
including an elegy on his former patron, Pitcairne. His most influential prose work was
Grammaticæ Latinæ Institutiones, but he is now best remembered as a scholarly editor of
works by Scots; his edition of Florentius Volusenus appeared in 1707, of Johnston’s Cantici
Solomonis Paraphrasis Poetica in 1709, and of Buchanan’s Opera Omnia in 1715. Probably
he was mainly responsible for the 1727 Selecta Poemata of Pitcairne and others, although
he allowed Robert Freebairn (c. 1685–c. 1740) to take the credit. He also edited Gavin
Douglas’s Aeneid (1710) and Drummond of Hawthornden’s Works (1711).
Ruddiman, it will be seen, edited vernacular as well as Latin texts. The permanent value
of the former had gradually become accepted during the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies. Douglas’s Aeneid and Drummond’s poems were Scots classics. Yet, the lasting value
of vernacular texts was slow to come to general acceptance. Modern languages changed,
and even became incomprehensible, almost as soon as spoken. The well-known verses by
Edmund Waller (1606–87) encapsulate the situation as it still seemed to many in the
middle seventeenth century:

Poets that lasting Marble seek

Must Carve in Latine or in Greek;
We write in Sand, our Language grows,
And like our Tide, our’s o’erflows.

Latin was the vehicle by which a writer might confidently address his own contemporaries
anywhere, and hope to address posterity. Translations like those of Buchanan and Johnston
were intended to give permanence to otherwise evanescent vernacular beauties. By the
seventeenth century, doubts had begun to surface, as they had years earlier on the conti-
nent. Boyd and Aytoun composed in Scots or English as well as Latin. Much later, so did
Pitcairne. Johnston’s epigram on Drummond stands in sharp contrast to his more conven-
tional remarks in the dedication of the Delitiæ:

Quæsivit Latio Buchananus carmine laudem,

Et patrios dura respuit aure modos.
Cum posset Latiis Buchananum vincere Musis
Drummundus, patrio maluit ore loqui.
Major uter? Primas huic defert Scotia, vates
Vix inter Latios ille secundus erat.

(Buchanan sought fame by composing his poetry in Latin and rejected the measures of his
native tongue with a harsh ear. Although Drummond could have vanquished Buchanan in
 From Rome to Ruddiman: The Scoto-Latin Tradition 207

Latin verse, he preferred to use his native tongue. Which is the greater? Scotland assigns
primacy to the Muses of Drummond. Buchanan was hardly second among Latin bards.)

The final line is ambiguous, but however it is taken, Johnston undoubtedly gives the pref-
erence to Drummond and the vernacular.
If we make a partial exception for Polemo-Middinia, the comic macaronic ‘Midden-War’,
often assigned to him, Drummond wrote nothing in Latin; his entire output, prose as
well as verse, is in an English which sometimes suggests an underlying Scots. Johnston’s
epigram and Drummond’s opus together mark the turning-point in a contest between a
literature primarily Latin, and one in which the language is Scots or English – a contest
which the vernacular was eventually to win. In the early eighteenth century Latin was
still important and creative, but Dr Johnson’s comment shows how much the literary situ-
ation had changed by 1766. Boswell writes in English; his Latinity is poor and of no
consequence.

Latin texts mentioned in this chapter have been published as follows:

Aberdeen Breviary: Breviarium Aberdonense, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1510); facsimile, 2 vols,

(London: Maitland Club, 1852–4).
Adomnán Adomnán’s Life of Columba, 2nd edn, ed. A. O. and M. O. Anderson (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1991).
Barclay, John Euphormionis Lusinini Satyricon, Part 1 (London, 1603), Part 2 (Paris, 1607):
Argenis (Paris, 1621): John Barclay: Argenis, 2 vols, ed. and trans. M. Riley and
D. P. Huber (Royal Van Gorcum, 2004).
Boece, Hector, Murthlacensium et Aberdonensium Episcoporum Vitae (Paris, 1522); ed. and
trans. J. Moir (Aberdeen: New Spalding Club, 1894).
Bower, Walter, Scotichronicon, 9 vols, gen. ed. D. E. R. Watt (Aberdeen and Edinburgh:
Aberdeen University Press, 1987–98).
Buchanan, George, Georgii Buchanani Scoti, Poetarum sui seculi facile Principis, Opera
Omnia, 2 vols, ed. T. Ruddiman (Edinburgh: Robert Freebairn, 1715).
Buchanan, George, Miscellaneorum Liber, ed. and trans. P. J. Ford and W. S. Watt
(Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1982).
Buchanan, George, Tragedies, ed. and trans. P. Sharratt and P. G. Walsh (Edinburgh:
Scottish Academic Press, 1983).
Buchanan, George, George Buchanan: The Political Poetry, ed. and trans. P. J. McGinnis and
A. H. Williamson (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, 1995).
Delitiæ Poetarum Scotorum hujus ævi Illustrium, 2 vols, ed. Arthur Johnston (Amsterdam:
Blaeu, 1637).
Fordun, John of, Chronica Gentis Scotorum, 2 vols, ed. W. F. Skene (Edinburgh: Edmonston
and Douglas, 1871–2).
Mair, John, Historiæ Britanniæ Majoris tam Angliæ quam Scotiæ per Johannem Majorem
natione quidem Scotum professione autem theologum (Paris, 1521); trans. A History of
Greater Britain as well England as Scotland, ed. A. Constable (Edinburgh: Scottish
History Society, 1892).
Musa Latina Aberdoniensis, ed. William D. Geddes and W. K. Leask (Aberdeen: New
Spalding Club, 1892–1916).
208 Jack MacQueen

Philp or Philip, James, Grameidos Libri Sex, ed. and trans. A. D. Murdoch (Edinburgh:
Scottish Historical Society, 1888).
Pitcairne, Archibald, Selecta Poemata, Archibaldi Pitcarnii Med. Doctoris, Gulielmi Scot a
Thirlestane, Equitis, Thomæ Kincadii, Civis Edinburgensis et Aliorum, Edinburgh.
[Robert Freebairn], 1727).]

Further reading

Adams, J. W. L. (1955), ‘The Renaissance Poets (2) Latin’, in J. Kinsley (ed.), Scottish
Poetry: A Critical Survey, London: Cassell, pp. 68–98.
Barrow, Geoffrey (1988), Robert Bruce, 3rd edn, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bradner, L. (1940), Musae Anglicanae: A History of Anglo-Latin Poetry, 1500–1925,
New York and London: Modern Language Association of America.
MacQueen, J. G. (1988), ‘Scottish Latin Poetry’, in R. D. S. Jack (ed.), History of Scottish
Literature: Origins to 1660, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, pp. 213–26.
MacQueen, J. and W. MacQueen (1988), ‘Latin Prose Literature’, in R. D. S. Jack (ed.),
History of Scottish Literature: Origins to 1660, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press,
pp. 227–41.
 21

Creation and Compilation: The

Book of the Dean of Lismore and
Literary Culture in Late Medieval
Gaelic Scotland
Martin MacGregor

The Book of the Dean of Lismore, in appearance an unremarkable quarto paper manuscript
now consisting of 159 folios and four fragments and held in the National Library of Scotland
manuscript collection, is the single most precious manuscript to have survived from late
medieval Gaelic Scotland, and a national literary treasure. Its reputation rests chiefly upon
the Gaelic poetry, composed in both Scotland and Ireland – between c. 1200 and c. 1520,
insofar as it has been or can be dated – which forms the bulk of its contents. It is striking
that the Book’s Irish component preserves some poetry otherwise unknown in what is a
much better attested tradition. On the Scottish side, without the Book our knowledge of
poetic activity in late medieval Gaelic Scotland, and its practitioners, would consist of
shards. That instead, on the basis of this single source, we are able to piece together a picture
which has some claim to substance, coherence and perhaps even representativeness, is a
measure of the thousands of lines of Gaelic poetry of Scottish provenance which the Book
contains. This is the work of professional poets operating at a variety of levels of the bardic
hierarchy, clergy and aristocratic lay amateurs, including women. They belong to the Isles,
Argyll and the central, eastern and southern Highlands. Their output is professional praise
Poetry (including religious panegyric) and satire, heroic ballads and courtly and satirical
verse, overwhelming produced by the amateurs. This catholicity is a hallmark of the Book,
and is consistent with the concluding words of a poem within it by Fionnlagh, chief of the
MacNabs of Glen Dochart, which has been seen as anticipating its compilation:

Ná biodh annsan domhan-sa

do shagart ná do thuathach
’gá bhfuil ní ’na gcomhghar-san
nach cuirthear é san Duanair.

(Let there not be in this world one single priest nor layman who has aught by him that is
not put in the Song-book.)

Its near-unique status as a repository of late medieval Gaelic verse composed in Scotland
has naturally dictated the emphasis of the scholarly attention the Book has received to date.
210 Martin MacGregor

Comparatively neglected has been its social and historical setting, including its compilers’
identities, motives and range of connections; and this in turn demands that attention be
paid to all its contents and languages. The Book also contains excerpts of poetry from
Lowland Scotland and England, and a mass of non-poetic material, mainly in Latin and
Scots. History is primarily represented by a local chronicle whose compilation and con-
tents provide a valuable point of comparison with the amassing of the poetic corpus; and
by excerpts from the Lowland chronicle tradition. Other topics represented include music,
topography, physiology, astronomy, chronology, law, religion, morality and superstition.
Moreover, the Book’s Gaelic poetry, famously and controversially, is without exception
written down not according to the conventions of Gaelic spelling as we see these in con-
temporary, ‘Classical’ Gaelic manuscripts, but according to a quasi-phonetic system based
upon the orthography of Middle Scots, and in secretary hand rather than Gaelic script. The
Book is a place where languages meet, a startling realisation, to modern eyes, of the lin-
guistic plurality and fluidity of late medieval Scotland, and late medieval Gaelic Scotland
in particular. Whether Gaelic, Latin or Scots, its contents viewed in the round reveal the
Book to be in connection with much of Gaelic Scotland, Ireland, Lowland Scotland,
England and beyond. One can fairly claim that no other surviving single source demon-
strates the same ability or will to navigate among a greater number of the literary cultures
of late medieval Britain and Ireland.
On internal evidence, the Book was compiled between 1512 and 1542, the lifespan of
James V: the last date to appear in it is an addition noting his death. The place of compi-
lation was Fortingall, at the mouth of Glen Lyon, at the eastern extremity of the vast tract
of territory known as Breadalbane that stretches west as far as the march between
Perthshire and Argyll. Although uncertainties remain concerning the number of compil-
ers and their respective roles, it seems clear that the key personnel were members of a
lineage of Clann Griogair, the MacGregors, which may have first come to Fortingall in the
person of the vicar of the parish church there, about 1406. His likely grandson, Dubhghall
Maol, is last on record in 1529, and was a clerk within the diocese to which Fortingall
belonged, Dunkeld. One of Dubhghall Maol’s sons, Donnchadh, contributes five poems to
the Book. Another, Seumas, was the dean of Lismore in question, and, on page 27 of the
Book, describes it as his liber, or book. On his death in 1551 he is also described as vicar of
Fortingall, and firmarius of that church. Both Dubhghall Maol and Seumas were notaries
public.
Fortingall may now appear an unlikely epicentre for the extensive web of cultural net-
works and pathways that these men were able to invoke. We need to remember its loca-
tion on one of the two major communicative arteries running westwards and eastwards
across ‘the spine of Scotland’, Druim Alban, close to the point where these converge before
following the Tay across the ‘Highland Line’ at Dunkeld, and on to Perth. In the later
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, these routes were employed by the MacGregors and their
political masters, the Campbells – specifically the Glen Orchy branch of that kindred – in
a joint expansion from their Argyll heartlands which made them the greatest powers
throughout Breadalbane by 1513. The dean of Lismore’s lineage shifted eastwards in
advance of the main migration of their kindred, and seems to have remained in the van of
MacGregor penetration down Strath Tay. It may have been an offshoot of this lineage
which became established and influential in Perth, ultimately making the provostship in
the late sixteenth century.
Clientship brought the MacGregors patronage in various guises, a notable instance
being the advancement of Seumas to the deanery of Lismore by 1514. Although the close
 The Book of the Dean of Lismore and Literary Culture 211

relationship between the kindreds broke down spectacularly after 1550, William J. Watson
in Scottish Verse from the Book of the Dean of Lismore (1937) was therefore wrong to see the
Book as going against the grain of ‘hostile relations between the MacGregors and the
Campbells’. It is in fact the product of an earlier era in which political cooperation, and
the apparently relaxed and benevolent form of clientship which then characterised rela-
tions between the Campbells and their closest dependants, found corresponding cultural
expression. We should remember, moreover, that from the later fifteenth century down to
1530, the Campbell star was very much in the ascendant, both regionally, and at court and
in government. This was the era in which successive earls of Argyll served as Master of the
Royal Household and Chancellor of Scotland. Meanwhile, Sir Donnchadh Campbell –
second chief of the Glen Orchy kindred, and most prolific of any Scottish poet in the
Book – also enjoyed royal favour down to his death at Flodden in 1513 alongside his king
and his chief, Gilleasbuig second Earl of Argyll. It was the era in which the earls also har-
boured realistic ambitions to inherit the mantle of the MacDonald Lords of the Isles, one
manifestation of which was Campbell influence at Iona. All this may well have opened
doors of many kinds to our MacGregor compilers, including a connection to Hector Boece.
Once we both appreciate the true nature of these ties with the Campbells and visualise
Fortingall as a point on a line stretching from Iona and Lismore in the west to Dunkeld –
in the era of bishops like George Brown and Gavin Douglas – and Perth in the east, the
cultural possibilities rapidly begin to multiply.
The distribution pattern of the Gaelic verse of Scottish provenance in the Book bears
out the Campbell affiliations of its compilers. It has been suggested that the pattern delin-
eates the extent of territory under the sway of the MacDonalds, but a better match is pro-
vided by the sphere of influence achieved by the earls of Argyll come the era of the Book’s
compilation, and which then encompassed the Lordship of the Isles. The best represented
area of all is Breadalbane (and Rannoch), with a notable concentration upon the area
including Fortingall at the mouth of Loch Tay; and this is consistent with the establish-
ment of political supremacy here by the Campbells of Glen Orchy and their MacGregor
allies by 1513. The poem by Fionnlagh MacNab already alluded to can be read as a form
of dedication of the Book, to the Earl of Argyll:

ná beir duan ar mhísheóladh

go a léigheadh go Mac Cailéin.

(Bring unto MacCailein no poem lacking artistry to be read.)

The umbrella of Campbell lordship also holds true for the Book’s courtly and satiric
poetry, much of it apparently the output of literary circles centred upon the courts of the
earls of Argyll and the Campbells of Glen Orchy. There lay aristocrats rubbed shoulders
with professional poets and clergy, and composed poetry for their own entertainment, often
at the expense of each other or local notables. Something of the quasi-dramatic setting and
flavour of such occasions is present in Éistibh, a lucht an tighe-se (‘Listen, people of this
house’), the first line of a poem by one of these amateurs, Iseabal, Countess of Argyll
(d. 1510), exalting the sexual powers of her personal chaplain. We would suspect that the
dean, his brother Donnchadh – one of whose poems in the Book is in this vein – and their
father frequented these circles. It is also likely, however, that pathways of kinship and friend-
ship specific to them, and leading back to Fortingall, underlie some of the poetry in the
Book, for example a modest clutch of poems emanating from the north-eastern Highlands.
212 Martin MacGregor

Fortingall’s status as the epicentre of the Book is clearer still when we map its con-
tents over time. The local chronicle very obviously has Fortingall as its hub, while the fact
that its earliest entries, beginning in 1390, deal exclusively with the MacGregor ruling
family could suggest that the commencement of compilation was connected to the arrival
at Fortingall of the progenitor of the dean of Lismore’s lineage about 1406. This gives
potential significance to the further fact that the overwhelming bulk of the datable Gaelic
poetry of Scottish provenance in the Book comes on stream about 1400. The exceptions –
the group of early thirteenth-century poems by one of the pioneers and early masters of the
composition of Classical verse in Scotland, Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh; and the
famous ‘MacSween poem’, purporting to describe a sea-borne invasion of Knapdale from
Ireland in the early fourteenth century – can be explained as having very likely entered the
Book through Irish pathways. This work sits equally well in an Irish context, and the Gaelic
verse of unambiguously Irish provenance in the Book has a markedly different chronolog-
ical profile, starting about 1200.
It is possible, then, that the dean’s lineage was engaged in poetic as well as historical
compilation from its arrival at Fortingall. After about 1400, the profile of the dates of com-
position of the Scottish verse in the Book rises to a peak in the later fifteenth and early six-
teenth centuries, before tailing off very abruptly. The latest poem for which we have precise
dating evidence is an elegy for a MacGregor noble who died in 1518. This is in marked
contrast to the local chronicle, which reaches maturity and its fullest flow in the 1520s,
before falling away equally abruptly. Thus, very little of the poetry in the Book was com-
posed in the period of its compilation. This suggests a transferral of energy from active
poetic creation, on the one hand, to the scholarly and editorial activity that went into com-
piling the Book’s poetic and non-poetic contents, on the other, in the second decade of the
sixteenth century.
The shift may reflect changed political circumstances. Flodden was cataclysmic for the
Campbells, and although their ruling lineage and the kindred as a whole recovered well,
the death of Sir Donnchadh Campbell ushered in a much more anxious, unstable era for
the Glen Orchy branch. The Book looks back to a ‘Golden Age’ of poetic creation con-
tingent with the earlier confident extension of Campbell and MacGregor power into
Breadalbane. This finds expression in the numerous eulogies for Eoin Dubh, the MacGregor
chief throughout this era, and in output of the literary circles in which Sir Donnchadh, ‘the
good knight’, was doubtless a pivotal figure. These may have been most active in the later
fifteenth century. In the wake of Flodden, and the death of Eoin Dubh in 1519, the Book
may give voice to an insecurity and retrospection at once regional and national. This, in
turn, may explain the presence of the clutch of poems collectively lamenting the demise of
the Lordship of the Isles, and the predominantly elegiac tone of the Book’s heroic ballads,
with their preoccupation with warrior-death, the ars moriendi, and commemoration of the
passing of a heroic age.
Four languages co-existed and interacted in late medieval Gaelic Scotland, and all are
present in the Book: Latin, Scots, vernacular Gaelic and ‘Classical’ Gaelic. The last of these
was a formalised, supra-dialectal version of the language used primarily for literary and
learned purposes at the top end of the social spectrum, especially by the aos dána or learned
classes of Gaelic society. It operated, as did these learned classes, in both Gaelic Scotland
and Gaelic Ireland. Its main use was as the language of highly regimented panegyric poetry,
composed in syllabically based metres by professional poets maintained by the secular elite
to validate its legitimacy. This is a thumbnail sketch of the conventional picture of cultural
activity in late medieval Gaelic Scotland, much of the detail of which ultimately rests upon
 The Book of the Dean of Lismore and Literary Culture 213

the considerably fuller Irish evidence. If we approach the Book from this perspective, we
find some consistencies, but a great deal which is surprising. As already noted, it contains
a considerable amount of Gaelic poetry composed not by professionals, but by representa-
tives of those who patronised them: lay aristocrats, both men and women, from the Earl of
Argyll at the very apex of the social spectrum down at least as far as the minor nobility.
Nor do these amateurs seem derivative or lacking in confidence in what they do: much of
the generic sweep, innovation and élan of the Book’s poetry rests upon their contribution.
While all the Gaelic poetic texts in the Book appear to be syllabic, there is no uniform
adherence to Classical standards of metrical strictness. The same is true of language, which
reveals two forms of vernacular influence. First, it is clear that one or more stages usually
lie between the text as composed by the poet, and its reception into the Book, and that,
during the process of transmission, vernacularisation of Classical features took place.
Second, it is equally clear that the language of composition of these texts constitutes a spec-
trum ranging from the strict Classical language to vernacular Scottish Gaelic. The ten-
dency not to observe Classical norms, while more characteristic of the verse composed by
amateurs in the Book, is not confined to them or the genres they espouse. It holds true, for
example, of the fairly substantial body of panegyric poetry composed by the professional
Fionnlagh an Bard Ruadh to his patron Eoin Dubh, chief of the MacGregors from 1461
until his death in 1519.
The potential implications for our understanding of literary culture in late medieval
Gaelic Scotland are many and profound. The artistic world revealed by the Book is much
more fluid and experimental, much less prescriptive and deferential, than we might have
expected. It suggests that the ability to compose and appreciate Classical verse was geo-
graphically widespread, perhaps universal, and certainly not confined to the west and the
MacDonald and Campbell heartlands that were in closest cultural communion with ‘met-
ropolitan’ Ireland. Equally, it suggests that the definition of Classical verse needs to be
broadened and blurred so as to embrace or acknowledge poetry that bore varying degrees
and kinds of Classical influence without observing strict Classical standards. Here, the
Book points in the direction of what has been dubbed ‘semi-bardic’ verse, a genre clearly
well established by the sixteenth century and doubtless originating earlier. This is typified
by the marriage of vernacular language with Classical metre. The departures from Classical
poetic norms in the Book could reflect limited technical competence, or full competence
capable of expressing itself at various levels of purity. Both propositions could be valid, and
would together imply that in appropriate contexts such an approach was perfectly legitim-
ate. This raises further important, currently unanswerable questions about the means by
which training in, or knowledge of, Classical poetry was disseminated in Scotland. One
hypothesis might start – from the fact that the premier exponents of this literature were
apparently all lineages of Irish origin which settled in the west – to argue for a western
Gàidhealtachd which was more culturally orthodox, along Irish lines, in contrast to the rest
of Gaelic Scotland which was not. Yet the compilers of the Book had no difficulty in access-
ing a considerable amount of poetry from Ireland, while a poet from outwith the west like
Fionnlagh an Bard Ruadh may have travelled to Ireland and been familiar with the courts
of Irish secular lords. Another, Dubhghall mac an Giolla Ghlais, who seems to have
belonged to a poetic lineage with no obvious Irish affiliation domiciled in the vicinity of
Fortingall and Rannoch, was, in W. J. Watson’s words, ‘evidently learned and highly
trained; [his] poem is one of the finest in the Dean’s collection’.
The Book also suggests how the relationship between professional poets and their
patrons endowed the latter not merely with the basic competence to turn creators, but with
214 Martin MacGregor

the opportunity to stretch artistic boundaries by manipulating or fusing Classical genres for
subjective ends. The result is original work of the quality of that of Aithbhreac inghean
Coirceadail and Donnchadh Campbell. In the former’s famous lament for Niall MacNeill
of Gigha, A Phaidrín do dhúisg mo dhéar (‘O Rosary that has awakened my tear’), the imper-
ative of personal loss gathers formal structures and topoi drawn from different elements of
the Classical tradition – secular and religious panegyric, and heroic ballads – into unity.
The latter engages in playful subversions of Classical conventions, such as his application
of the language of Classical encomium to the penis of a close political associate. Perhaps
the pupils could sometimes turn teachers and, in similar vein, the Book could suggest the
danger of assuming that Ireland was always the centre and innovator. Its courtly and satiric
poetry gives us our earliest surviving examples in Gaelic of exemplars of these genres, and
perhaps this should be taken at face value. Finally, the vernacularisation taking place
during transmission could suggest that these texts did not remain hermetically sealed off in
a rarefied elite milieu, but achieved a wider social penetration, and indeed may have been
recovered via non-elite pathways, including cultural itinerants.
At every turn the Book’s survival and contents confront us with the dilemma of unique-
ness and representativeness. Given the relatively far-flung distribution pattern of its Gaelic
poetry of Scottish provenance – even if the southern and north-eastern Highlands are
poorly represented, and the northern mainland not at all – it is hard to imagine that
Breadalbane alone possessed the sort of literary scene which gave birth to the Book. Yet,
did that widespread poetic potential give rise to other compilations akin to the Book, or
even to the committing of Gaelic verse to writing at all? Here we face the fact that for late
medieval Gaelic Scotland outwith the west, the Book’s status as a virtually unique survivor,
in terms of the orthography and script it employs, is compounded by a corresponding,
almost total, dearth of Classical Gaelic manuscripts. Why should this be? It is generally
held that the nature of Classical poetry presupposed literacy in Classical Gaelic in its prac-
titioners, and indeed its audience. Watson remarks of a poem in the Book by the dean’s
brother Donnchadh – whom we know to have been capable of using the Scots-based
orthography and script of the Book, and who may have been a key compiler – that:

those acquainted with poetry of this sort, and with its rules, will find it hard to believe that
the author was ignorant of the traditional spelling, and will infer that, so far as Donnchadh
was concerned, the difficult spelling of the MS. was adopted by choice and not on account of
ignorance.

Support for such a thesis is provided both by the independent survival of a poem in the
conventional orthography and script originating from precisely the same milieu and era as
the Book; and by unambiguous evidence that the Book’s use of non-Classical orthography
and script is no isolated aberration. The same is true of manuscripts now lost from which
poems were copied into the Book; of a Gaelic prose charm written into The Murthly Hours,
perhaps as early as the late fourteenth century; and, most significantly of all, of the prac-
tice of scores of late medieval scribes, notaries and stonemasons when faced with the need
to render Gaelic elements – place-names, personal names, descriptive epithets, or tech-
nical terms for which no ready equivalent existed – in Latin or Scots contexts.
What this suggests is the acceptance of, first, Latin and, after 1400, Scots as the basic
languages of written communication, especially prose, in all of late medieval Scotland. In
the western Gàidhealtachd, this was overwhelmingly true in official contexts – legal, eccle-
siastical, administrative – irrespective of whether the communication concerned involved
 The Book of the Dean of Lismore and Literary Culture 215

an external party, or was purely internal. However, where literary and intellectual activity
in Gaelic found written expression here, both in poetry and prose, it did so, as far as is
known, in Classical Gaelic. This reflected the domination of formal culture in the west by
learned lineages which either originated in Ireland, or adhered to an Irish model. Outwith
the west, the influence of Scots ran deeper still, virtually monopolising all types of prose
from the official to the cultural and personal, including letter-writing. As Meek has noted,
this may well explain why Gaelic prose in the Book is overshadowed by that in Latin and
Scots. Even then, Scots provides the orthography and script for what fragments of Gaelic
prose do survive, just as it does for the Gaelic poetry of the Book, and some at least of its
lost poetic exemplars. A provisional hypothesis might be, therefore, that outwith Argyll
and the Isles, and the influence of the ‘Irish’ learned lineages, Classical Gaelic poetry, and
the literacy in the Classical language which this implied, met with a Scots dynamic so
powerful that it resulted in the hybrid written medium evidenced by the Book.
This still fails to explain the absence of other poetic compilations or texts employing
this medium. That some at least did exist is shown by the lost exemplars underpinning the
Book. Yet – and this point may contradict the earlier argument about compilation of the
Book’s poetry perhaps commencing about 1400 – it is not certain if any of these exemplars
pre-dated the era of the Book’s compilation, as opposed to being a part of that process, and
contemporary with it. Likewise, the lost compilation which contained the chronicle
known as the Chronicle of Fortingall, along with Gaelic poetry and miscellaneous items, is
so closely related to the Book that it cannot be invoked as independent evidence. Thus,
the conundrum of the Book is that it suggests that its heartland was integrated into a Gaelic
Classical world whose poetry avowedly went hand in hand with literacy. It and other evi-
dence suggest nevertheless that outwith the west, the representation of any form of Gaelic,
whether Classical or otherwise, in written form, did not conform to Classical norms, but
was virtually monopolised by an orthography based upon Middle Scots. Yet, the Book is a
unique poetic survival, both in terms of its own orthography and – with the one exception
from the same time and place – in terms of any orthography at all. Two possible explana-
tions are destruction of manuscripts on a catastrophic scale, or, more radically and specu-
latively, that in Gaelic Scotland the matter of Classical poetry somehow developed the
capacity to exist without writing, perhaps because it adapted itself to an existing Gaelic
cultural milieu which was predominately oral. This would prompt the further speculation
that the Book may indeed be unique, not in terms of the poetry it contains, but because of
the calculated decision to commit such poetry to writing which it represents: that it was
born of a highly specific conjunction of circumstance, motive and personality.
The Book defies categorisation in other respects. Fionnlagh MacNab’s poem seems to
invoke it as a poem-book or duanaire, but the typology of extant poem-books from the
Classical era throws up nothing like it, even among those specimens classified, because of
their contents, as miscellaneous. It is written not upon vellum, then and long afterwards
the normal medium for Classical Gaelic manuscripts, but on paper. In this, its orthography
and script, and general appearance, the Book invites far more obvious comparison with the
great Scots anthologies of the sixteenth century, particularly the Asloan Manuscript. John
Asloan, a notary public like Seumas MacGregor and his father, made his compilation early
in James V’s reign. His subject matter hints at the Book’s scope and interests, in its melding
of literature and history (the latter including both local and national chronicles), in a
shared fondness for instructional and devotional exempla, and in the occurrence of speci-
mens of misogynist literature. However, the Asloan Manuscript is almost entirely the work
of a single scribe, and its texts are final versions, largely free from errors of transcription.
216 Martin MacGregor

In contrast to this perfected and polished exterior, replete with list of contents, the Book
is anarchic and chaotic. It draws us below the surface and into the raw machinery of the
editorial process. Its texts are typically pock-marked by scribal error, and contested by a
plurality of compilers, each armed with a sheaf of variant readings. This occurs across its
contents with a frequency and intensity unparalleled in the Classical Gaelic, and perhaps
also the Scots, tradition. It makes of the Book a living thing, and suggests an editorial
mission powerful enough in itself to be a reason for the Book’s existence. The extreme
diversity of its subject matter, and its homespun marginalia and memoranda, might link
the Book to the medieval tradition of the commonplace book, as a collection made for the
personal edification and diversion of its self-proclaimed owner, Seumas MacGregor. But
this sits uneasily with the public aura and sense of participation which the Book projects.
It is at the very least a family affair, what Fionnlagh MacNab’s poem refers to as a comunn,
or ‘partnership’. It is the fruit of collective editorial and scribal activity sustained across one
generation, drawing to some degree on earlier compilation, and paying homage in part to
a vibrant, collaborative literary scene which had flourished within the lordship of the
Campbells on either side of 1500.
Two central preoccupations dominate the contents of the Book, in all its languages and
at all its levels from occasional verses and casual aphorisms up to the most formal set-pieces.
The first is ‘the Argument about Women’, to which is subjoined the moral condition of the
clergy. The second is the kingship of the Scots. These were themes of national and inter-
national interest in late medieval and Renaissance Scotland and Europe, and it is in the
Book’s desire to explore them that we see its networks at their most extensive, and the intel-
lectual raison dêtre for them. The first preoccupation largely finds expression in poetry, the
second in prose, but there are points of crossover, most interestingly an airdríomh, or ‘high
enumeration’ in verse, of the genealogy of the MacGregor chief Eoin Dubh by the dean’s
brother Donnchadh. This is the earliest developed elaboration of the idea of the royal
descent of the MacGregor ruling lineage, and includes the assertion:

Tearc aithris a fhine ann

D’ uaislibh Gaoidheal ná glanGhall,
Focht na freimhe agá bhfuil
Do locht leighthe na leabhar.

(Rare is the counterpart of his line among the nobles of the Gaels or of the bright
Lowlanders, who make enquiry of his lineage from those who are readers of books.)

Elsewhere in the Book, Donnchadh concludes a prose version of Eoin Dubh’s pedigree by
stating that he wrote this ‘á leabhraibh seanchaidh nan rígh agus ro-dhaoine’ (from the
history books of the kings and great men) in 1512. The Book contains separate extracts
from works fitting such a description: the pedigree of David I lifted from Book V of Fordun’s
Chronica Gentis Scotorum; and a list of 105 kings of Scots, from Fergus I to James V, copied
directly from the printed edition of Bellenden’s translation of Boece’s Scotorum Historia.
Other tranches of similar material in the Book suggest both the influence of Bellenden in
manuscript, or Boece’s Latin original, and of sources as yet unidentified. Pathways by which
such material could have entered the Book are readily identifiable. Boece was closely con-
nected to the Campbells, and possessed a manuscript of Fordun. Meanwhile, other manu-
scripts were available at Dunkeld – copied in 1497 at the behest of Bishop George Brown –
and at Perth, at the Carthusian Charterhouse founded by James I, and endowed with an
 The Book of the Dean of Lismore and Literary Culture 217

extensive estate in Breadalbane, where its principal tenants and local agents were the
MacNab chiefs.
The Book contains the stanza from Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid which begins,
‘Lovers, be war and tak gude heid about’; two stanzas from the Scots poem generally known
as the Ballate aganis Evill Women, which it attributes to Chaucer; an anonymous version of
part of Juvenal’s sixth satire beginning ‘Quhat alyt ye man to ved a vyff’; an anonymous
quatrain beginning ‘Gyf that zor wyf be deid’; and two stanzas from the English poet John
Lydgate’s treatment of Samson and Delilah in The Fall of the Princes. The first and last of
these items are attributed to Lydgate’s ultimate source, Boccaccio. It is obvious that The
Book’s compilers were targeting texts that contributed to ‘The Argument about Women’,
which is so prominent a preoccupation of the Book’s Gaelic poetry. This is especially true
of its amateur verse, but in fact the concern is ubiquitous. It ranges from the courtly to the
satiric, from casual epigrams of purely local inspiration and relevance through to sophisti-
cated set-pieces by professionals like An Bard Mac An t-Saoir, and embracing Irish authors,
if we accept the ascriptions to Gearóid Iarla, Gerald fitz Maurice, the third Earl of Desmond
(1333–98). The Gaelic corpus is consistent with the non-Gaelic excerpts in that the
misogynistic voice dominates. More thought, however, needs to be given to the role the
non-Gaelic texts may have played, whether as the stuff of recitation by the participants in
the Book’s literary circles, or as literary models for their Gaelic verse.
The Book may delight in parading and debating the sexual excesses of the clergy, yet it
lacks any sense of ideological edge that might sustain its interpretation as a reformist text.
Instead, its poetic retrospection and numerous exempla situate its moral and religious
gravity firmly in the orthodox Catholic Middle Ages. Its compilers had access to, and prob-
ably first-hand contact with, notable Scottish humanists like Brown, Douglas and Boece,
and Renaissance humanist influence has been advanced as one possible explanation for
their editorial evangelicalism. It is equally important to stress that evidence in the Book for
literary contact and sophistication suggests these were not their exclusive preserve, and
imposed by them upon their raw material, but inherent in the material itself. An Bard Mac
An t-Saoir’s two poems visualising a ‘Ship of Evil Women’, long na ndroch-bhan, could have
been composed about 1500, suggesting virtually simultaneous access to the continental
models upon which they probably draw. The sources of Giolla-Críost Táilléar poetic
exempla of the middle or later fifteenth century, on the unicorn and the man in the tree,
and the widely known tale of the monk who spent 300 years listening to the song of a bird,
have yet to be established. They may yet point in the same direction.
Much remains to be done in probing the enigma of The Book of the Dean of Lismore and
its many worlds. It throws down a gauntlet to accepted thinking and rigid definition regard-
ing literary culture in late medieval Gaelic Scotland. From Fortingall, its compilers
engaged the passport of their multilingualism, and orchestrated extensive networks in
order to investigate their own and other cultures across time and space, and in accordance
with their personal, social and intellectual predilections.

Further reading

Gillies, W. (1977), ‘Courtly and Satiric Poems in the Book of the Dean of Lismore’, Scottish
Studies 21: 35–53.
Gillies, W. (1978, 1981, 1983), ‘The Gaelic Poems of Sir Duncan Campbell of Glenorchy
(I), (II), (III)’, Scottish Gaelic Studies 13:1: 18–45; 13:2: 263–88; 14:1: 59–82.
218 Martin MacGregor

Meek, D. E. (1986–8), ‘The Gaelic Ballads of Medieval Scotland’, Transactions of the Gaelic
Society of Inverness 55: 47–72.
Meek, D. E. (1996), ‘The Scots-Gaelic Scribes of Late Medieval Perthshire: An Overview of
the Orthography and Contents of the Book of the Dean of Lismore’, in J. H. Williams
(ed.), Stewart Style, 1513–1542: Essays on the Court of James V, East Linton: Tuckwell
Press, pp. 254–72.
O’Rahilly, T. F. (1935), ‘Indexes to the Book of the Dean of Lismore’, Scottish Gaelic Studies
4: 31–56.
 22

Gaelic Literature in the Later

Middle Ages: The Book of the
Dean and beyond
William Gillies

The Gaelic literary set-up which we find in late medieval Scotland and Ireland, built
around families of literati supporting and supported by the native aristocracy, came into
being in an obscure but unmistakable way in the twelfth century. The key ingredient was
a move to lay patronage of poets, historians and other such figures, replacing an earlier
system in which ecclesiastically based schools and scholars had played a more central role
in the cultivation of literature. An important legacy of this scholastic past was writing,
which is why this literature predominates in Gaelic manuscripts. In Scotland, its presence
can be detected at the royal court in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and it doubtless
flourished in the Celtic earldoms, though the evidence is sparse. Basically it was a pan-
Gaelic system, and we catch glimpses of Gaelic court literature from the Lennox and the
Isles and Man in the twelfth century, beside the greater concentration in Ireland. This was
the beginning of the so-called ‘Classical’ early modern period of Gaelic literature, whose
manuscript remains consist of panegyric and religious verse, courtly love poetry and heroic
ballads, romantic tales and devotional literature, as well as the professional literature of the
learned orders: linguistics, history, law and medicine. The literati were professional and
hereditary, trained in schools, exclusive and male-dominated. They lasted as a social phe-
nomenon until the seventeenth century in Ireland and the eighteenth in Scotland.
The surviving ‘Classical’ literature is nowadays recognised as representing only the
iceberg tip of literary expression in the medieval Gaelic world. It used to be taught, indeed,
that the oral-popular tradition of Scottish Gaelic song poetry, which starts to appear in the
manuscript and printed collections of the later eighteenth century, was a development from
the Classical poetry, coming into being as the latter gradually ceased to be patronised by
the Highland chiefs in the Jacobite period. This picture, of humble peasant remains indica-
tive of a once noble culture, though ideologically attractive to a nineteenth-century audi-
ence, seriously neglects the evidence for the presence, within the Classical period, of
metrically, musically and linguistically distinct classes of Gaelic literature, practised and
purveyed by quite different classes of practitioners. The roots of Gaelic popular song go back
far into the Middle Ages, as can be deduced from early literary allusions, the early existence
of technical terms associated with these categories of composition, discussions in metrical
tracts, and occasional surviving specimens of such texts themselves. Rather than succeed-
ing it, we must see the vernacular, popular strands of Gaelic literature as co-existing with
the learned, ‘Classical’ forms.
220 William Gillies

This diversity of literary modes is perhaps easiest visualised as the entertainment ‘package’
enjoyed by medieval Gaelic society in and around the hall of the Highland chief. This
included not only the official eulogies and elegies of the file (‘learned poet’) or ollamh (‘chief-
poet’), but also a spectrum of performances (dramatic, burlesque or satirical, for example) by
other grades and sorts of poet, song-makers, singers, musicians and entertainers – collectively
known as the cliar. At certain times of year the cliar made itself particularly visible, when the
poet-band travelled en masse on a circuit from court to court. To this public dimension we
must add those forms of literary expression whose locus or function was outwith the court
milieu. These clearly included various religious categories such as hymns and carols, prayers,
texts used for meditational or exemplary purposes, and charms. They included also activity-
related expressions such as labour songs, and songs, chants or rhymes associated with other
formal or ritual or ceremonial occasions, including the keening of the dead. The latter sorts
have been dubbed the ‘sub-literary’ tradition, the Dionysian as opposed to the Apollonian
tradition, and women’s (as opposed to men’s) literature. All these terms have a measure of
explanatory force, as long as we bear in mind that Highland society was a simple and undif-
ferentiated organism in most places and at most times. As it were, the chief’s court was the
heart of the community even for the milkmaid in the shieling.
We can point to some outstanding vernacular Gaelic poetry relating to Perthshire and
Rannoch and the MacGregors from the period just after the dean of Lismore’s lifetime. And
the poetry in The Book of the Dean of Lismore acknowledges in various ways the lowlier types
of literary practitioner, the sorts of people who were mentioned with disapproval by Lowland
authorities who wished to put a stop to their lifestyle. But the Book compositions themselves
emanate from a much more circumscribed milieu. Not only is the ‘sub-literary tradition’ com-
pletely absent, but the accentual tradition of vernacular poetry (as opposed to the syllabic
tradition of Classical poetry) is also virtually absent from the Book. When we recall that the
programmatic Duanaire na sracaire (Watson 1937: 2–5) asks for all sorts of poems to be
included in the MacGregors’ collection, we have to presume that the Book’s compilers and
their associates were ‘words people’ who would have defined the vernacular and sub-literary
material as songs rather than poems. For although it is thought that the official eulogies in
syllabic metre were intoned by a reciter (reacaire) with a harp accompaniment, and although
the heroic ballads in syllabic metre were certainly sung (in recent centuries at least), the
musical dimension was more prominent and integral in the other traditions. The ‘poetry
versus song’ criterion would appear to have been more fundamental than the ‘oral versus
written’ axis (bearing in mind that the oral dimension of many Book texts is strong) or the
‘Classical versus vernacular’ linguistic criterion (given that the Book’s texts include some
compositions that are semi-Classical/semi-vernacular in purely linguistic terms, though the
metrical criterion places them on the Classical side of the divide).
Within the confines of the syllabic tradition of poetry (known as dán), The Book’s cov-
erage is pretty comprehensive. We may note that it is not an orderly compilation. Although
this aspect is exacerbated by dislocation of some pages in the manuscript, the Book gives
no indication of thematic organisation of the sort which we find in, for example, the
Bannatyne Manuscript. Poetry of various sorts is lumped together, and poetry alternates
with non-poetical, and indeed non-literary, material, to such an extent that the Book has
sometimes been seen as a commonplace book or as a repository for rough or working copies
of poems, as a sort of ‘Materials for the Dean of Lismore’s Book’ rather than the dean’s Book
itself. Nevertheless, it is expedient for present purposes, and a fairly simple task, to divide
the Book’s poetic contents into four major categories of composition. These correspond in
part to genre boundaries within the poetry and in part to readily discernible categories of
 Gaelic Literature in the Later Middle Ages 221

interest of the compilers. The categories are: (1) religious; (2) ‘court’, that is to say bardic
and eulogistic; (3) heroic, that is Fenian; and (4) ‘merry’: bawdy, satiric and so on.
The programmatic poem already referred to talks about a duanaire (‘poem-book’) as the
object of the verse-collecting activity. The term duanaire usually implies a straightfor-
ward one-genre collection: typically of eulogy, though sometimes of religious verse. It is
usually created and maintained by a professional poet for his patron. The Book’s background
is more mixed, with its notarial and ecclesiastic and amateur poetic ingredients. Its contents
are likewise more generically complicated, including ‘mock’ and ‘pseudo’ items and other
generic fusions and crossovers, and not a few unclassifiable items and oddities, side by side
with genre-defining specimen pieces. This diversity corresponds also to the make-up of the
authors represented in The Book: clerical members of professional poetic families, gentry
with proclivities for religion, notary-genealogists, aristocratic lampooners. This all con-
tributes to the thoroughly unique flavour of The Book by comparison with all other poem-
books from the Gaelic or the Scottish world.
Some of the most intricately crafted and technically ambitious poems in Gaelic litera-
ture are the compositions of the trained bards (or filidh) on religious themes. They show
their bardic pedigree in their tone. God is the supreme patron, all-powerful, but accessible
to praise. The poet’s own pride and dignity, which is always near the surface in the secular
praise poetry, is transmuted into a problem for God to fix: ‘Curb my pride,’ says the Gaelic
religious poet; ‘make my knees bend’. These poets are clever at seeing – and fond of elab-
orating – paradoxical implications of the triune nature of deity. They are adept at conjur-
ing up visual images of the beauty or the agony of Christ. But they do not usually consider
serious soul-searching as part of their business.
A group of leading early exponents of religious dán was identified by later tradition and
frequently anthologised. These included Donnchadh Mór and Muireadhach Albanach Ó
Dálaigh in the thirteenth century, Gothfraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh in the fourteenth and Tadhg
Óg Ó hUiginn in the fifteenth; all of these are represented in The Book. The Book’s selection
is typical in that sense, and also in its emphasis on poems focusing on Mary as intercessor
and protectrix. But it also includes some religious poems by Muireadhach Albanach not
found elsewhere, and poems in the same vein by poets not known elsewhere. These include
Maol-Domhnaigh mac Mághnais Mhuileadhaigh (‘from Mull’?), who might have been a pro-
fessional poet of the Ó Muirgheasáin family attached to the Maclean chief, and Sir Robert
Lamont, who was probably a churchman rather than a poet by profession. As to the texts,
The Book versions of those which recur in other (mostly Irish) manuscripts are often pretty
closely comparable to the ‘mainstream’ sources. There are signs of linguistic as well as textual
‘weathering’ in some, but additional verses were sometimes preserved uniquely in The Book.
(It remains to be determined in some cases whether these are authentic or accretions.)
In addition to the formal odes, Gaelic religious verse includes devotional poems with
strong narrative elements drawn from widely circulating late medieval collections of
exempla like the Gesta Romanorum and the Legenda Aurea. Whereas the bardic compos-
itions contain frequent allusions to biblical and apocryphal precedents, in this sort of
poetry the ‘story’ becomes more central. In The Book, this genre is associated most strongly
with the name of Giolla-Críost Táilléar, perhaps a professional poet to the Stewarts of
Rannoch, to whom three such moral fables are attributed.
Less ambitious compositions including exhortations to lead a religious life, meditations
and simple pious expressions are also part of the fabric of life as revealed by The Book. Some
of those found in The Book recur elsewhere, such as Seacht saighde atá ar mo thí (‘Seven arrows
[i.e. the seven deadly sins] are trained on me’), whereas others were most probably composed
222 William Gillies

by the dean of Lismore’s associates. They go closely with the Latin prayers, homiletic frag-
ments and ejaculations which are likewise a recurrent part of the ecclesiastical dimension
in The Book, and doubtless in the life of its ecclesiastical owner. A contemporary Gaelic
poem, in Scots orthography like The Book’s and from the same Breadalbane provenance,
consists of admonitions about observing the Commandments. The most significant omis-
sions, given what we know from elsewhere about Gaelic religious poetry at this period, are
lyrical character pieces attributed to Colum Cille, and the sorts of prayers and charms which
ultimately surface in Carmina Gadelica.
The bardic eulogy composed by the file for his patron, recited by a reacaire in the chief’s
hall, was the acme of poetic activity as a public performance. Many of these eulogies were
very long and ornate. They tended to be collected in a duanaire. But these poems were also
preserved by other means: some were studied as specimen texts in the bardic schools, and
the poets themselves clearly collected and exchanged them among themselves. The Book
shows evidence of both channels of transmission. There are MacGregor, Stewart and
Campbell eulogies (such poems as one could have expected to find in a local duanaire), but
also choice items from further away in time and place, including Irish examples. Some of
the big names we have already met with recur, including the Ó Dálaigh poets and Tadhg
Óg Ó hUiginn, but also representatives of other learned families such as Uí Mhaoilchonaire
and Uí Ifearnáin.
A couple of characteristic features may be mentioned. One technique commonly used
by the bardic eulogist was to insert into his poem an apologue or fable relevant to the spe-
cific circumstances of the person being praised. The exemplum was most commonly drawn
from the native cycles of Gaelic literature, such as the Ulster, Mythological or Fenian
Cycles, but biblical and classical exempla are also found. These are often told with great
elegance and economy, and in a couple of cases the apologue alone is in The Book, the intro-
ductory and concluding eulogistic sections having been dispensed with. Again, the eti-
quette of bardic verse dictated that honorific verses to the patron’s wife should be added
where appropriate. Similarly, verses addressed to the poet’s regular patron were added on
when he made a poem for another chief. And many poets concluded with a verse to their
divine patron. This may be seen in The Book: for example, Giolla-Pádraig Mac Lachlainn
concludes his eulogy for James Campbell of Lawers with verse of all three sorts: first to
Margaret Forester, James’s wife; then to Colin, Earl of Argyll (‘a king above kings’); and
finally to God (Watson 1937: 120–5).
It was the job of the file to exalt his master. More pragmatically, he had to compare his
patron to ideal standards of chiefly behaviour. If the chief failed to match those ideals, the
praise could turn (in theory at least) to satire. While full-blown satires are very rare in
the literature as a whole, poems threatening satire are quite common. The Book contains
an excellent example of this trait in an anonymous poem to John Stewart of Rannoch, in
which the poet says, in effect: ‘See me right, o noble, generous one – or else!’ (Watson:
184–93). A satirical elegy or mock elegy on Ailéin, son of Ruaidhrí, chief of Clanranald
(died 1505), by Fionnlagh Ruadh the Bard, shows the vocabulary and imagery of eulogy
inverted (Watson: 134–9). And a scorching satire (as yet unedited) by Domhnall Liath
MacGregor on three Loch Tay-side (?) ladies is designed, explicitly, to blow its victims away
(incomplete in Quiggin 1937: 73–4).
The learned poets also made love poems in the courtly love tradition. They show the
same propensity for metaphysical tightrope-walking as the religious poems, and a repertoire
of courtly love images and symbols related closely to the standard eulogy and to its female
version, as found in verses to chiefs’ wives. They exude a sense of secrecy and furtiveness
 Gaelic Literature in the Later Middle Ages 223

that owes something to the amour courtois and something to the esoteric interests of the
poetic schools. Poetry of this sort survives mostly from seventeenth-century Irish sources,
but all the ingredients are found in a small group of such poems in The Book, including one
by Eóin Mac Mhuireadhaigh, presumably a member of the MacMhuirich bardic family.
It is sometimes said that the high proportion of unusual and esoteric compositions in The
Book, by contrast with the more homogeneous body of poetry extant in the much larger
Irish corpus, indicates differences between the Irish and the Scottish literary traditions.
There may be some truth in this idea, for example in the degree of metrical and linguistic
formality required at different social levels. But it is surely more to do with the intimate,
‘insider’s’ view of the literary tradition that The Book provides for us. For The Book is pretty
unique by Irish or Scottish standards. Outside the praise/dispraise axis, it shows us – again,
with unparalleled richness – a substantial selection of occasional poems on related themes,
composed by professional poets and by relatives and friends of the compilers of The Book.
These include odes to inanimate objects, an elegy to a poet’s wife, a mock elegy on a beggar,
and much else. Again, The Book’s uniquely eclectic coverage has allowed an unequalled
amount of this sort of material to attain written status.
Stories and poetry about Fionn mac Cumhaill and his warrior-hunter band (fian) were in
existence sufficiently early for scholars to designate the fianaigheacht as one of the literary
cycles of the early Middle Ages. It attained particular prominence and celebrity through the
success of Agallamh na Seanórach (‘The Colloquy of the Ancients’) in the twelfth or thir-
teenth century, and poetic texts enumerating the battles and warriors of the fian occur in the
Book of Leinster (completed c. 1160). Nevertheless, The Book counts as an early source for
narrative ballads about the fian, which mostly appear in much later manuscript sources. In
form, these ballads share with bardic eulogy the syllabic quatrains of the dán-metres; however,
the metrical rules for fianaigheacht are less strict than those for the official praise poetry.
The ‘standard’ Fenian ballad tends to be about a hunt or an expedition, a battle or a
quest; and there are also ballads recounting famous episodes from the Fenian literary cycle,
such as the Death of Diarmaid or the cataclysmic final battle of Gabhair. Additionally,
there are numerous examples of ballads founded on the literary conceit which underpins
Agallamh na Seanórach, the meeting of the aged Oiséan, last survivor of the fian, with
Patrick, harbinger of the post-heroic Christian age, which leads to Oiséan telling Patrick,
and hence posterity, about the pre-history of Ireland and musing on past times.
These categories are all to the fore in The Book, which also contains fine versions of the
Praise of Goll mac Morna and Oiséan’s elegy for Fionn (Ross 1939: 60–9 and 190–7). But
The Book also contains more recherché items, such as Caoilte’s rescue of Fionn, which he
had to purchase by providing Fionn’s captor with pairs of all the wild birds and animals of
Ireland (Ross 1939: 40–59), the story containing the Banners of the Fian (Ross 1939:
84–91), and the humorous Lay of the Mantle (Ross 1939: 30–5). There are two treatments
of the Diarmaid and Gráinne story: the ballad narrating the Death of Diarmaid and a dra-
matic monologue in which Diarmaid reproaches Gráinne for parting him from his former
life and friends (Ross 1939: 70–7 and 176–9).
The narrative, lyric and dramatic forms taken by the fianaigheacht recur in other literary
cycles. Striking examples of Ulster Cycle ballads in The Book are the dialogue between
Conall Cearnach and Éimhear when Conall returns after avenging the death of Cú
Chulainn (Ross 1939: 106–15) and the Death of Fraoch (Ross 1939: 198–207). Mention
may be made here of groups of poems associated with the literary figures of Gormfhlaith,
based on a ninth- to tenth-century historical character who was married to Niall Glúndubh,
and Gearóid Iarla, based on the historical Gerald fitz Maurice, third Earl of Desmond, who
224 William Gillies

died in 1398. In the latter case there is at least a possibility that some of the poems attrib-
uted to the literary figure were composed by the historical figure.
The court poetry and the fianaigheacht can yield examples of broad humour. The Lay of
the Mantle, whose carnivalesque tone recurs widely in European literature, gains an extra
frisson when applied to Fionn and his men and their ladies. The juxtaposition of the gross
fabliau of the Fox and the Bull with the feverish imaginings of amour courtois in one of Earl
Gerald’s poems is finely judged. The sustained double entendre in a description of a game of
backgammon that is really about a sexual encounter is clever in a different way (Quiggin
1937: 62–3). Collectively, poems like these point to a subversive, satiric dimension which
is widespread in the Book both in the Gaelic and in the Latin and Scots material. In the
same way, when the resources of bardic eulogy are deployed by Duncan Campbell of
Glenorchy to describe a penis, the creation of an appropriate set of praise-terminology is
simultaneously ribald and artfully inventive.
Among the considerable corpus of ‘merry’ verse in the Book, two closely related strategic
themes recur: the clergy and women. The gap between ascetic and celibate ideals and indul-
gent actuality is a widespread theme in late medieval European literature. It can be a matter
of anti-clerical comment by lay critics; here, given the clerical dimension in the background
of The Book, the criticism can seem tongue-in-cheek or rueful in tone. Duncan MacGregor
himself has a poem listing the sexual ‘dues’ exacted by all the clerical grades up to arch-
bishop (Quiggin 1937: 80–1). In another place, a poet named simply – but significantly –
‘The Parson’ proposes to go philandering on the grounds that this will do a little to redress
the wrong done to men by faithless women over the years (Quiggin 1937: 74–5). This last
poem is transmuted into a ‘Catalogue of Unfaithful Women’, bringing the focus thereby on
to the other prime target of the Book poets. In opposition to the courtly treatment of women
found in the bardic tradition, the satiric poets have their own positions to maintain. A poem
ascribed to the Earl of Argyll argues plainly that what a woman really wants is sex, not love
(Quiggin 1937: 81). Again, one of the Earl Gerald poems ostensibly takes the part of
women, arguing that it is wrong to criticise them since they are actually not all that bad. He
concludes, however, in verses that just might have been added by someone near to the dean
of Lismore, that the real reason women are not so bad is that they like a sexy man (Quiggin
1937: 75–6). And this position receives powerful support from Isabella, Countess of Argyll’s
poem (or has this been ascribed to her through mischief?) on the epic masculinity of her
chaplain – which brings us back to the (anti-)clerical theme (Quiggin 1937: 78).
The sense of a running debate – especially about women – is strong in these poems. It is
reinforced by isolated couplets and quatrains scattered throughout The Book, sometimes
anonymous and sometimes attributed to known or presumable members of the dean of
Lismore’s circle. Given that sexual matters are a fundamental ingredient in these debates,
it is unsurprising that poems on other sexual topics are included, such as Duncan Campbell
of Glenorchy’s lament for his faded virility (Quiggin 1937: 83–4).
Recent scholarship on The Book allows it to re-emerge as the cultural enterprise of the
dean’s family, friends and visitors, centred geographically on his residence in Fortingall.
Intellectually and politically, a Campbell–MacGregor axis provides the dynamic, and such
families as the Macnabs of Bovaine and the Stewarts of Rannoch take their bearings from
it. This scenario provides a rationale to set against the sometimes bewildering succession of
masterworks and trivia, local and exotic pieces that confront us in The Book as we have it.
One of the most important insights we can gain from the poems themselves comes from
the compositions of the dean’s contemporaries, neighbours and relatives – his ‘circle’. Their
poetry, even the light and satirical pieces, is suffused with literary allusions. They clearly
 Gaelic Literature in the Later Middle Ages 225

partook of a literary world that embraced most of the literary corpus that we call early Irish
literature: the Ulster, Mythological and Fenian Cycles and some of the ‘Cycles of the
Kings’. They refer to some poorly attested tales as well as favourites among the early tales;
they also allude to texts which we think of as late romances, though The Book references
mean we have to assume they were in existence by 1500 or thereby. References to native
tales are supplemented by some to Classical Greek and Roman texts, and others to histor-
ically based literary figures like Earl Gerald. The most likely source of this knowledge base
would appear to be the native literati, the professional poets in their role as storytellers and
romancers. The filidh had to be masters of the literary tales not only to tell them ‘at the
great assemblies of the Men of Ireland’, but also to enable them to supply apologues for
their eulogies. We may recall that several such apologues are included in The Book as free-
standing narrative poems, divorced from their eulogistic context.
The compilers of The Book can likewise contribute to our understanding of their world
and motives. It has rightly been emphasised in recent years that Book texts (or some of
them) show evidence for textual reworking, correction and improvement. While the
analysis of these sorts of activity is in its early stages, we can recognise correcting activity
that is compatible with suggestions of humanistic concerns, with the establishment of an
authoritative text. The ascriptions of poems in The Book (not always made by the scribe
who entered the poem itself) are sometimes suspect and sometimes transparently wrong,
but they perhaps furnish further evidence for the same quest for authority. At the same
time, one has to take into account the tolerance of variants at several levels (following an
‘and/and’ rather than ‘either/or’ principle). And one cannot ignore the creative liberties
that are seen to be taken with some texts where we can compare Book versions with those
in other sources. These activities take us well beyond the usual post-Renaissance under-
standing of textual criticism.
The orthographic and linguistic analysis of Book texts has been well begun, but is by no
means exhausted. The barriers to our understanding of this extraordinary manuscript are
formidable, but the richness of the materials is beyond doubt, if we can muster the neces-
sary linguistic, palaeographic, literary and historical expertise to unlock them.

Further reading

Campbell, D. (1888), The Book of Garth and Fortingall: Historical Sketches relating to the
Districts of Garth, Fortingall, Athole and Breadalbane, Inverness: Northern Counties
Newspaper and Printing and Publishing Company.
Gillies, W. (1988), ‘Gaelic: the Classical Tradition’, in R. D. S. Jack (ed.), The History of
Scottish Literature, Vol. 1: Origins to 1660, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press,
pp. 245–62.
McLauchlan, Rev. T. and W. F. Skene (eds) (1862), The Dean of Lismore’s Book: A Selection
of Ancient Gaelic Poetry, Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas.
Quiggin, E. C. (1937), Poems from the Book of the Dean of Lismore, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ross, N. (1939), Heroic Poetry from the Book of the Dean of Lismore, Edinburgh: Scottish
Gaelic Texts Society.
Watson, W. J. (1937), Scottish Verse from the Book of the Dean of Lismore, Edinburgh:
Scottish Gaelic Texts Society.
 23

Philosophy and Theology in

Scotland before the Reformation
Alexander Broadie

Scotland boasts a long line of distinguished philosopher-theologians. This goes back at

least as far as Ricardus de Sancto Victore Scotus, better known to us as Richard of St Victor
(c. 1123–73), who was a monk in the Abbey of St Victor, Paris, under abbot Hugh of
St Victor, and who became abbot on Hugh’s death in 1162. Richard’s most important work
is his De Trinitate – available in an edition produced in Paris in 1958 – devoted to an analy-
sis of the internal dynamic by which God the Father is related to himself by an act of love
and by which the second person of the Trinity is generated from the first in love, and the
third from the second, also in love. The principle of power in these acts of generation is
love, and in effect Richard treats love as the principle of everything that has positive value
in the universe. It is in an act of love that God created the world and maintains it in exis-
tence. Richard notes that we are required to act in love also, for we should love God, and
love our neighbour as ourselves. From this it follows that, insofar as we take up an attitude
of love to the created order, we are informing our lives with the Christian ideal of imitatio
dei, the form of imitation of the divine that is commended by every moral theologian of
the medieval period. Richard’s ideas were taken up by the Franciscans some decades later,
shortly after the Order was founded by Francis of Assisi, a saint whose sermons to all living
creatures show him to have been bound to nature in a bond of love.
The next Scot of international repute in the field of philosophy and theology was
Michael Scott (c. 1160–1235 or later). His immense popular reputation as a necromancer
and astrologer (a reputation reflected in writings from Dante’s Inferno to Sir Walter Scott’s
Lay of the Last Minstrel) should not be allowed to mask his truly important role, as a trans-
lator, in the transmission of Aristotle’s writings via the Muslim world to the Christian west.
He worked as a translator in Toledo from 1210, then in Bologna from 1220 and then, from
1230, at the court of his employer Emperor Frederick II. Perhaps the single greatest achieve-
ment of medieval western theology was the Christianisation of Aristotle, a task completed
by Thomas Aquinas; and Michael Scott contributed a number of the Latin texts that were
essential to that achievement.
A significantly different world-view to that of Aquinas was that provided by arguably
Scotland’s greatest philosopher, John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308), from the village of
Duns in the Scottish Borders. The ideas of Richard of St Victor, as already indicated, were
quickly taken up into Franciscan thought, and John Duns Scotus, a Franciscan friar, took
up Richard’s ideas and developed them a good deal further. Once again the concept of love
is given a central role, influencing much of his system, including, for example, his theology
of the beatific vision.
 Philosophy and Theology before the Reformation 227

That role emerges from Scotus’s discussion of the faculties of the mind and most espe-
cially the faculty of will. Scotus holds the mind to be a strong unity, a doctrine not belied
by the multiplicity of its faculties, for each of these faculties is really identical with the mind
itself. There is, however, a difference between them. The mind can think and when it does
it has the form of a thinker. This form or ‘formality’ is unlike the form that the mind has
when it wills. There are thus these two faculties which are really identical with each other
because they are really identical with the mind, but which are formally distinct because the
act of thinking is a different sort of act from that of willing. Scotus’s concept of a formal dis-
tinction is put to use by him at many points in his theology: for example, he holds that the
many attributes of God are really identical with God (for otherwise he lacks the unity that
Christian theology ascribes to him), but they are also formally distinct from each other,
because the various acts of God, his acts of justice, of mercy, of understanding, and so on,
are different kinds of act. As regards the faculties of intellect and will, a question can be
raised regarding which of them has primacy. That is, granted that there is an order of value
in the universe, is it intellect or will that is the higher in the order? Scotus’s reply is that it
is will, and part of his justification is that the beatific vision is primarily an act of will, not
of intellect. For the beatific vision is primarily an act of love, not of thought; and love is
located not in the intellect, but in the will. Since the beatific vision is the highest act of
which we are capable, and since it is an act of will, the will must have primacy. One of the
ways Scotus expresses this insight is this: that if per impossibile we had a choice between
knowing God without loving him, or loving God without knowing him, we should choose
to love God rather than to know him.
The first major Scottish philosopher-theologian after Scotus was John Ireland (d. 1496),
who graduated bachelor in arts at St Andrews in 1455, before going to Paris, where he
became regent in arts and briefly rector (1469). In 1474 the bishop of Avranche, confessor
to the French king Louis XI, persuaded the king to ban the teaching of nominalist phil-
osophy at the University of Paris, while authorising the teaching of Aristotle and Duns
Scotus. The University was appalled at the prohibition and sent a delegation, which
included Ireland, to protest to the king. This does not imply that Ireland was a nominalist,
but simply that he was a persuasive speaker whose presence would add weight to the dele-
gation. Nevertheless they failed. Ireland subsequently returned to Scotland, rising in due
course to become chaplain and confessor to James III (r. 1460–88). For James’s son,
James IV (r. 1488–1513), he wrote an important work, The Meroure of Wyssdome (published
in three volumes in 1926, 1965 and 1990) in the genre of advice for princes. The Meroure,
which is written in Scots, contains a good deal of interesting theology, and, as is customary
with advice for princes, draws parallels between a prince’s governance of his dominion and
God’s governance of the world, the sub-text being that imitatio dei is a virtue that princes
would do well to cultivate. In particular, God promulgated a perfect set of laws for his
human creatures, and recompenses us according to whether we obey or disobey those laws.
This means that God’s knowledge of our behaviour in respect of his laws must be as perfect
as his laws, for otherwise he may fail to recompense us justly. This characterises God’s gov-
ernance and this should be the model for human princes also, even though, of course, a
human prince cannot have perfect knowledge of the actions of his subjects and so is always
at risk of bestowing recompense unfairly.
Ireland uses these thoughts as the basis of an investigation of a problem that featured on
the agenda of most medieval theologians: the problem of how God’s perfect knowledge of
our behaviour impinges on our freedom to act. Put briefly, if God knows from all eternity
how we will act, we are not free to perform acts other than those that God always knew we
228 Alexander Broadie

would perform, in which case we are not free without qualification. Ireland’s solution to
this problem is much in line with the majority report of the late Middle Ages, namely that
God’s knowledge is timeless, as he is, and that he therefore does not have foreknowledge
of our acts. Instead he knows our acts as if they are present to him, in which case it is as if
he is seeing them now as we are performing them. We know with certainty what other
people are doing when they do things before our eyes, yet our certainty does not imply that
their acts are unfree. So likewise God’s certainty of the acts that are now being performed
in his presence does not imply that the acts are unfree. In that sense, according to Ireland,
God’s perfect knowledge of our acts is not incompatible with human free will. The topic
of human freedom and divine foreknowledge is also taken up by Ireland in his Commentary
on Book I of the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Sadly, his Commentary on Book I and also
on Book II are lost. But his Commentaries on Books III and IV are extant. They exist only
in manuscript and a modern edition would add greatly to our understanding of the
medieval Scottish literary canon.
Shortly after the founding of the first of Scotland’s three medieval universities –
St Andrews in 1411 – Scots were being taught in Scotland by Scots. The majority of the
earliest teachers came back to Scotland after studying at the University of Paris: Oxford
and Cambridge were not common destinations for young Scots, no doubt largely because
of the fraught political relations between Scotland and England. By the late fifteenth
century, there was a considerable contingent of Scots at Paris. One of them, James Liddell
from Aberdeen, who became regent in arts at Paris, was the first Scot to have a book pub-
lished in his own lifetime. Entitled Tractatus conceptuum et signorum (‘Treatise on concepts
and signs’: the sole extant copy is in the National Library of Scotland), it discusses the
mental acts involved in understanding, remembering, imagining, and so on. This field has
been ploughed many times in the Scottish philosophical tradition, as witness subsequent
works, such as David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) and, perhaps even more
impressively, Thomas Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764) and his Essays on the
Intellectual Powers (1785).
The field was investigated in detail by a number of Scots in the generation after Liddell,
in particular by John Mair (c. 1467–1550) and members of his circle. Mair was born in
Gleghornie, a village south of Edinburgh, and attended school at nearby Haddington.
Thereafter he spent a year in Cambridge before matriculating at the University of Paris.
Once there he rose rapidly through the ranks, gaining a doctorate of theology and becoming
Professor of Theology. He wrote over forty books, covering a wide range of subjects, but espe-
cially logic, ethics, history and theology. In addition he was head of a three-man team that
prepared a critical edition of Duns Scotus’s Reportata Parisiensia, a report of the lectures that
Scotus delivered in Paris on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. That Mair, Scotland’s leading
philosopher-theologian of the first half of the sixteenth century, devoted a good deal of effort
to the preparation of that edition accords well with the demonstrable fact that, for centuries
after Scotus, Scottish philosophy had a perceptibly Scotistic streak running through it.
Among Mair’s colleagues at Paris was George Lokert of Ayr, who wrote several books on logic
and also one on the mind. In this, he dealt with the same topics that Liddell had written on
two decades earlier. Lokert went on to become rector of St Andrews University and then
dean of Glasgow. Mair’s colleagues also included William Manderston (c. 1485–1552),
a Glasgow graduate, who became successively rector of the Universities of Paris and
St Andrews, and Robert Galbraith (c. 1483–1544), Professor of Roman Law at Paris, and
then Senator of the College of Justice in Edinburgh. Manderston wrote a large and impres-
sive work on moral philosophy, and Galbraith an even larger and more formidable work,
 Philosophy and Theology before the Reformation 229

Quadrupertitum in oppositiones, conversiones hypotheticas et modales (‘Four-part work on oppo-

sitions, conversions and hypothetical and modal propositions’, Paris, 1510), which is one of
the masterpieces of late scholastic logic. The pattern is clear. All these men, and scores of
others who could be named, returned to Scotland to enrich Scotland’s high culture. In the
three ancient universities, of St Andrews, Glasgow and King’s College, Aberdeen, Scots
could be taught by Scots at as high a level as was available anywhere in Europe.
In Paris, Mair lectured on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and his lectures, a lengthy
set of commentaries, were duly published and several times re-published. Mair begins
his commentary by raising a question concerning the relation between the assent of faith,
that is, saying yes as an act of faith, and the faculties of the mind. In particular he airs a
common concern regarding whether the assent of faith is essentially an act of the intellect
or is something else. Is it, for example, like assents that we give, say, to judgements of
sensory perception or of arithmetic? And his unequivocal reply is that it is not. As with
such judgements, the intellect is involved for, according to Mair, we always have a reason
for giving an assent of faith, even if the reason is simply the testimony of another. We may
have no direct evidence regarding a matter of faith and yet, at the same time, have reason
to regard another person as able to speak with authority on the matter. Faith, then, is not
a blind assent; it is based upon premisses that at least confer probability or plausibility on
the proposition to which assent is given. Faith, therefore, involves an act of intellect. But
faith is not a hesitant assent: it is firm, and Mair adds that the firmness of the assent of faith
cannot be due to the intellect, for, if the premisses gave us certainty, then we would have
knowledge rather than faith. What makes for firmness, where there would otherwise be
hesitation, is an act of will by which we commit ourselves to the religious truths, so that
we are certain of them though we cannot provide a demonstrative proof of them. Thus,
according to Mair, faith is the product of both intellect and will. Because acts of will are
free and an act of will is necessary for an assent of faith, it follows that faith is a free act.
Mair’s own faith, like that of his Scottish colleagues at Paris, seems to have been
unshakeable. In his Historia Maioris Britanniae tam Angliae quam Scotiae (‘History of Great
Britain, both England and Scotland’, 1521), Mair denounces a number of the practices of
members of the Church. It is manifest, however, that all the practices he condemns are
injustices of one sort or another, for instance the issuing of false excommunications and
the failure to administer the sacraments in due season to ordinary people, and the denun-
ciations do not touch on the essentials of the faith. At St Andrews University in the early
1530s, Mair tutored John Knox in theology. There is no doubt that Mair would have been
mortified at the theological positions that Knox subsequently developed, just as he was in
fact appalled at the doctrines that had been worked out by the protomartyr of the Scottish
Reformation, Patrick Hamilton, in his thesis written under the supervision of the ex-Jesuit
François Lambert at the University of Marburg. The thesis came to be known in transla-
tion as Patrick’s Places, and was published under that name by John Knox in his History of
the Reformation in Scotland. The shrill tone of the thesis and its eschewing of lengthy,
detailed and subtle argumentation are worlds away from the writings of John Mair and his
circle, writings that, on the eve of the Reformation, are still very much in the traditional
scholastic mode. Not only is Hamilton’s theology different, but his thesis represents a lit-
erary genre that Mair and his colleagues would have despised as wholly unsuitable for ratio-
nal theological discourse.
During the decades preceding the Reformation there were several other notewor-
thy writings by Scots working in the fields of philosophy and theology. Mention should
be made of Dialecticae Compendium (‘Compendium of Logic’, Paris, 1540 and 1545) by
230 Alexander Broadie

William Cranston (who succeeded Mair as provost of St Salvator’s College, St Andrews),

Dialecticae Methodus (‘Method of Logic’, Paris, 1544) by Patrick Tod, Dialogus de argumen-
tatione (‘Dialogue on argumentation’, Paris, 1554) by John Dempster, and Commentariorum
de arte disserendi libri quatuor (‘Four books of commentaries on the art of reasoning’,
Edinburgh, 1557). These works are all highly technical, unlike the works of a very inter-
esting Scot, Florence Wilson from Moray who studied at King’s College, Aberdeen, and at
Paris, where he was a friend of George Buchanan. Wilson identified closely with the
humanist ethos that was making itself strongly felt in the universities of northern Europe.
He read Erasmus, Melanchthon and many of the Italian humanists, and their Latinity and
ideas made their mark on his own works, as witness the fact that in his Commentatio
quaedam theologica (‘A Theological Commentary’, Lyons, 1539), he refers to the Christian
God as the highest Jupiter, and as the ruler of immense Olympus. But Wilson’s Christian
faith cannot be doubted, despite the vocabulary he deploys. In his De animi tranquillitate
dialogus (‘Dialogue on the Tranquility of the Soul’, Lyons, 1543), he argues for the need to
moderate the tumult of passions, but not to annihilate them. Contrary to Stoic teaching,
passions are not in themselves a bad thing, for they are part of our nature and nature as
such is not evil. Not even death is an evil, he argues, and our suffering unto death can be
an imitatio Christi. Not, adds Wilson, that we should therefore seek a life of suffering, for
suffering impedes the study of wisdom, a study to which, if possible, we should dedicate our-
selves. In none of this gentle Christian humanism is there any sign of hostility to the uni-
versal Church. For all his appropriation of the language of the new humanism, there is no
sign that in his religious affiliation Wilson belonged to the New Order. The contrast with
Patrick’s Places could hardly have been stronger. Wilson spent his last years in France,
probably dying in Lyons in the latter 1550s. Then came the Reformation in Scotland, and
after that date Scottish theologians could not theologise as if the Reformation had not
taken place.

Further reading

Broadie, Alexander (1985), The Circle of John Mair: Logic and Logicians in Pre-Reformation
Scotland, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Broadie, Alexander (1995), The Shadow of Scotus: Philosophy and Faith in Pre-Reformation
Scotland, Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark.
Cross, Richard (1999), Duns Scotus, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wolter, Alan B. (ed.) (1986), Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, Washington, DC:
Catholic University of America Press.
 24

Scottish Theological Literature,

1560–1707
Crawford Gribben

The Scottish Reformation did not begin in 1560, when Parliament severed official links
with the papacy and forbade the celebration of the mass, but the year did represent a break-
through for the Reformation movement. Pressure for reform had been building for decades.
The south-west of Scotland had a long tradition of Lollardy: around 1520, for example,
Wycliffe’s New Testament had been translated into Scots by Murdoch Nisbet (d. c. 1545).
More recently, smuggled texts had diffused Lutheran ideas along the east coast. The north-
east had been evangelised by early Lutherans such as George Wishart (c. 1513–46), who
had been burned at St Andrews despite having had the converted priest John Knox
(c. 1514–72) as his bodyguard. These diverse trends – Lutheranism and Lollardy – met in
the popular opposition to the established Church voiced in such texts as Ane Satyre of the
Thrie Estaitis, by Sir David Lindsay (first performed at court in 1540 and in public in 1552).
Across Scotland, individual towns were declaring themselves supporters of reform. In 1560
this popular pressure gained significant national impetus.
Reformation proceeded at a formidable pace. The structures of the medieval Church
quickly collapsed, and neither the bishops nor the queen did much in their defence.
Adherence to medieval patterns of piety continued in those rural areas where local patrons
proved sympathetic. Scottish Catholicism lost its earlier national cohesion. Irish
Franciscans, working in the Highlands and Islands, strengthened what remained of their
Church; but the Gaelic ethos of their mission introduced a significant Highland–Lowland
divide into the Scottish Catholic imagination. Scottish Catholicism would take some time
to recover its momentum.
Protestant ideas spread throughout the 1560s in a number of texts that indicated refor-
mation’s new theological directions. Wishart’s Lutheran instincts were reflected in the
Gude and Godlie Ballatis (1567), a collection of sometimes-ribald anti-papal verse, but
Lutheran ideas were soon eclipsed by the Calvinism of the dominant Scottish Reformers.
The Book of Common Order (1564) was perhaps the most obvious evidence of the success
of reformation. It exported Protestant worship to local congregations and dominated
Church life until the publication of the Westminster Assembly’s Directory for Public
Worship (1645). The symbolic importance of liturgical order is illustrated by the fact that
a translation of the Book of Common Order, prepared by John Carswell (d. c. 1572), was
published in 1567 as the first Gaelic book ever printed in Scotland or Ireland. The 1647
Westminster Confession of Faith, by contrast, was only translated in 1725. Despite the
importance of liturgy and popular song, however, the coherence of Scottish
Protestantism – and its Lowland base – owed more than anything else to the publication
232 Crawford Gribben

of a vernacular Bible and the dissemination of reformed theology through a state-sponsored

confession of faith.
The Bassandyne Bible was the only complete Bible published in Scotland before 1633.
It was a printing of the most popular edition of the Geneva Bible (1560), a translation
that was designed to educate its readers into proper interpretation. To that effect, it came
supplied with some 300,000 words of marginal commentary discussing manuscript vari-
ations as well as the doctrinal and practical implications of the text. Sales of the
Bassandyne Bible were assured by a 1579 law which stipulated that every substantial
household should possess a copy. Its popularity waned slowly after James VI and I moved
to have the Geneva translations replaced with the new ‘authorised’ translation in 1611,
which was to lack the Geneva Bible’s anti-establishment annotations. James’s authorised
New Testament was first printed in Scotland in 1628, and the complete Bible appeared
five years later. Supplies of the older text dried up after the last English-published edition
of the Geneva translation appeared in 1644. Scots were no longer obliged to own a Bible
that challenged episcopacy and monarchy by divine right, but by then those ideas had
taken a life of their own.
The theology summarised in the annotations of the Geneva Bible was given systematic
expression in the Kirk’s new confession of faith. In 1560, Parliament had commissioned a
number of prominent ministers to compose a confessional statement reflecting the triumph
of reformation ideas. Knox, it appears, was responsible for the first draft of the document,
which was read before Parliament, and revised with five other Johns – Winram,
Spottiswood, Douglas, Row and Willock. The resulting Scots Confession was adopted by
Parliament on 17 August 1560, but it never gained the support of Queen Mary, and was
constitutionally ratified only by the first Parliament of James VI in 1567.
The confession was a particularly Scottish expression of the European reformed con-
sensus. It built self-consciously upon the heritage of the Catholic past, but constructed its
theology on a rather ambiguous medieval foundation. It described the Resurrection in
terms borrowed explicitly from the Apostles’ Creed (art. 10), defended the immortality of
the soul against ‘Phantastickes’ on the radical wing of reform (art. 17), and affirmed the
validity of infant baptism against ‘the error of the Anabaptists’ (art. 23). While other
Protestant confessions listed the individual titles composing their canon, the Scots
Confession defined the boundaries of scripture as ‘those buikis [. . .] quhilk of the ancient
have been reputed canonicall’ (art. 18). Neither would Scottish Catholics have had any
difficulty in assenting to the confession’s Trinitarian introduction (art. 1) – which set it
apart from the anthropocentrism of other Reformation confessions – or its repudiation of
a series of early Christological heresies (art. 6).
But the confession’s articulation of the reformed faith was robust. Christology became
controversial when it was related to redemption: those who regarded the mass as another
sacrifice for sin were ‘blasphemous against Christs death’ (art. 9); against papal claims,
Christ was described as the only head of the Church (arts 11, 16). The Kirk was to be
defined by three marks, or ‘notis’: ‘the trew preaching of the Worde’, ‘the right adminis-
tration of the Sacraments’ and ‘Ecclesiastical discipline uprightlie ministered’ (art. 18).
This ‘trew preaching’ was to be explicitly Protestant, extolling the necessity of justification
by faith, for

quhosoever boastis themselves of the merits of their awin works, or put their trust in the works
of Supererogation, boast themselves in that quhilk is nocht, and put their trust in damnable
Idolatry. (Art. 15)
 Scottish Theological Literature, 1560–1707 233

But the confession also adopted a high view of the sacraments, which it limited to baptism
and the eucharist. It did not advocate transubstantiation, but did argue that the sacraments
were much more than merely ‘naked and bair Signes’.
The confession alluded to ideas that would later cripple the Scottish reformed consensus.
Addressing the parliament that had commissioned its composition, the confession defended
the standard Protestant adherence to godly rule, arguing that the duty of the magistrate was
‘most principallie the conservation and purgation of the Religioun [. . .] and for suppressing
of Idolatrie and Superstitioun’ (art. 24). It also contained the seeds of what would develop
into a fully fledged resistance theory. The Ten Commandments were expounded to prove
that Christians are to ‘represse tyrannie’ and to support lawful government – but only ‘quhil
they passe not over the bounds of their office’ (art. 14). The church–state disputes that
would scar the seventeenth century were rooted in that statement.
The Scots Confession’s robust articulation of Protestant belief was central to the subse-
quent development of Scottish theology. As a document that every candidate for ordination
was obliged to sign, its statements were the presupposed ideological context for Protestant
writers and preachers until the eighteenth century, when its authority was finally occluded.
Legally, the Scots Confession was not replaced when the Kirk adopted the Westminster
Confession in 1647; and after the Westminster Confession was rescinded at the Restoration,
the earlier confession returned to its former status. Bishop Gilbert Burnet described the
Scots Confession during this period as ‘the only Confession of Faith that had the sanction
of a law’, though he recognised that the Westminster Confession was the only one that was
actually read. The authority of the earlier confession prevailed until the Westminster doc-
uments were constitutionally revived at the Williamite revolution.
The Scots Confession should be regarded as the foundation of Scottish Protestant thought
throughout the period. To argue for its centrality, however, is not to imply that its state-
ments enjoyed universal approval. Not every Scot was a Protestant. Among those that were,
the Aberdeen Doctors objected to the idea that original sin had ‘utterlie defaced’ the image
of God from unregenerate humanity (art. 3). The Kirk’s adoption of the Westminster
Confession implied that its Puritan consensus had moved far beyond the relative simpli-
city of the earlier confession of faith. Nevertheless, as a negotiated centre, the confession
nourished the thinking of theological writers as far apart as Bishop Patrick Forbes and arch-
Covenanter Samuel Rutherford.
Of course, to situate Forbes and Rutherford at opposite ends of the theological spectrum
is to exaggerate their differences. It is certainly true that the ecclesiological moods they
represented held quite different attitudes towards authority in the Church: an emphasis on
the calling of the congregation rather than the ordination of the Episcopate had, for
example, allowed apostolic succession to die out. Nevertheless, Forbes and Rutherford were
united by their commitment to a reformed spirituality rooted in shared convictions about
conversion, assurance and the importance of word and sacraments. Despite Rutherford’s
claims, there were virtually no voices challenging Calvinism during this period in the Kirk.
The confession of faith approved by the General Assembly at Aberdeen in 1616, when the
Church was under Episcopal control, was more unambiguously Calvinist than the Scots
Confession. Its widespread rejection, and final repeal by the revolutionary 1638 General
Assembly, owed more to its Episcopal origin and subjection of Church to state than to
any substantial soteriological differences. Similarly, the commission later appointed by
the Covenanters to investigate John Forbes, the leader of the Aberdeen Doctors, acquit-
ted him of Arminianism. Those debates that did erupt tended to focus on liturgy, polity
and conformity, and, apparently, made little impact on local Church life. As contemporary
234 Crawford Gribben

travellers recalled, there was little to distinguish the worship of those committed to
Presbyterianism and their episcopally orientated rivals. The Scottish Church – from the
most conservative of its bishops to the most radical of its Covenanters – shared a commit-
ment to a basic Calvinism.
The breadth of the Calvinist consensus is underestimated in a great deal of the scholar-
ship of early modern Scotland. In literary scholarship, most obviously, Calvinism has been
berated and simultaneously misunderstood, despite the ready availability of its primary
source documents. As a system of thought, it extends far beyond the five points that are
often cited as its summary: total depravity (every part of the human being – body and soul –
is depraved), unconditional election (God chooses those who will be saved without any
reference to anything that the elect might do), limited atonement (Christ died efficiently
only for the elect), irresistible grace (the elect cannot resist the regenerative power of the
Holy Spirit), and the perseverance of the saints (salvation can never be reversed). This
Calvinism was not a variety of fatalism, but a discourse that provided an explanation of
everything from individual psychology to the rise and fall of nations. It was also a discourse
that passed through substantial modifications during the period. The rise of federal the-
ology, for example, appeared to temper bald statements about divine sovereignty by arguing
that God’s overwhelming power always acted in accordance with purposes revealed in
the biblical covenants. The international reception of federal theology – developed by
theologians such as Robert Rollock (c. 1555–99) – illustrates the impact Scottish thinkers
had on the development of the Calvinist international throughout the late sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.
The extent of the development of Scottish theology during the period can be gauged by
a comparison of the Scots and Westminster Confessions. Westminster theology differed
from its progenitor in method and approach, and (occasionally) in content. Westminster
adopted a much more scholastic approach, beginning with a clear definition of scripture
and a much more explicit discussion of canon and its relation to the Church before pro-
viding guidelines for a proper hermeneutic (ch. 1). Only then did it move on to a discus-
sion of God, the Holy Trinity (ch. 2) and God’s eternal decree (ch. 3) as a context for
its discussion of creation (ch. 4), providence (ch. 5) and the scheme of redemption (chs
6–33). Westminster’s structure was logical, rather than ontological, grounded more in
scholastic analysis than in the Scots Confession’s concentration on historically developed
revelation.
These theological developments were driven by a number of significant groups and indi-
viduals. Knox left only one theological text – a treatise on predestination – but his imagi-
nation was stamped on the Book of Discipline and the Scots Confession. Despite his centrality
in outlining the initial consensus, Knox developed personal interests in the political impli-
cations of reformation. Catholic apologist Ninian Winzet (c. 1518–92) criticised Knox’s
anglicised style as part of a wider project to strip the reformed movement of its patriotic
credentials. But Knox caused consternation also among the reformed when he argued that
female sovereignty betrayed divine patterns of authority in his First Blast of the Trumpet
against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558). Calvin, embarrassed, distanced himself
from Knox’s sentiments, but this intense political conviction and sense of prophetic voca-
tion would be inherited by the more radical Covenanters in the seventeenth century.
Among these more radical Presbyterians, Andrew Melville (1545–1622) was often –
erroneously – described as the second leader of the Scottish Reformation. While Knox’s
opinions on episcopacy were always ambiguous, Melville grew increasingly hostile to rule
by bishops. After 1575, he exercised increasing influence in the Kirk, participating in the
 Scottish Theological Literature, 1560–1707 235

composition of the Second Book of Discipline and sitting as moderator four times between
1578 and 1594. In 1595 and again in 1596, Melville made his famous ‘two kingdoms’
speech that denied the king’s claim to be head of the Church. Melville’s opposition to the
Episcopalianism that seemed to underlie this claim led to his imprisonment in the Tower
of London between 1607 and 1611. After his release he was allowed to teach in exile at
Sedan until his death.
One of the students Melville educated at Sedan was a younger cousin who would become
one of the greatest of Scotland’s early modern theologians and, ironically, a bishop. John
Forbes (1593–1648) was the son of Bishop Patrick Forbes, and first Professor of Theology
at King’s College, Aberdeen. He is often described as the leader of the Aberdeen Doctors,
an influential group of theologians who became known for their opposition to the National
Covenant of 1638. Members of the group included David Rait, Principal of King’s College
between 1592 and 1632; William Leslie, who succeeded him; Robert Barron, who in 1625
was made first Professor of Theology at Marischal College; as well as three local ministers,
Alexander Scrogie, James Sibbald and Alexander Rose. The Doctors defended Episcopal
government, encouraged conformity to James’s liturgical innovations, and appealed to
patristic writers more often than they did to theologians of the Reformation – but they were
consistently reformed. What set them apart from their peers was their concern for catholi-
cism: the Covenant, they feared, was dividing the Kirk from the Fathers and from the inter-
national communion of reformed Churches.
The Covenanters did not agree. Their alliance was based on a commitment to jure divino
Presbyterianism, and could tolerate no ambivalence about an ecclesiology for which many
of them were prepared to make – and to become – martyrs. The language of the Solemn
League and Covenant (1643) was itself ambiguous: its adherents promised to preserve ‘the
reformed religion in the Church of Scotland’ and to pursue the ‘reformation of religion in
the kingdoms of England and Ireland [. . .] according to the word of God, and the example
of the best reformed Churches’. The uncertainty as to which communions actually repre-
sented ‘the best reformed Churches’ allowed many of the more radical English Puritans (who
would never have been tolerated in a Covenanted Scotland) to agree to the Covenant’s
ostensible aims. Their ambiguous position was grounded in the more radical Covenanters’
quest to establish Presbyterianism as the only established religion in the British Isles. Led by
ministers of the intellectual capacity of Samuel Rutherford, their ideal society was a the-
ocracy, in which state and Church powers were distinguished, but in which society was
organised along strictly biblical lines. The Westminster Assembly, and the documents it pub-
lished, was to be the platform upon which the Reformation of the three kingdoms should
proceed. Divisions between Scottish and English Puritans, and among Scottish Covenanters,
ensured the failure of the scheme and led ultimately to the Cromwellian invasion, and the
last Anglo-Scottish war.
The Cromwellian administration in Scotland pursued a policy of undermining the
monopoly of the Kirk, and, to that end, balanced its opposition to the General Assembly
(which did not meet between 1653 and 1690) with support for the new theological group-
ings that arrived in Scotland with their troops. Among the range of radical Puritan fellow-
ships, only Baptists, Congregationalists and Quakers would make any significant long-term
impact in Scotland. As in Ireland, the influence of the radical groups was largely restricted
to garrison towns – in the 1650s, for example, Baptist congregations existed in Ayr, Perth
and Aberdeen. Aberdeen also contained the strongest of the Scottish Quaker communities,
which remained generally weak despite George Fox’s visit to Scotland in 1657. Radical
dissent would only become a significant presence in and after the eighteenth century.
236 Crawford Gribben

Cromwellian toleration allowed ministers in the Kirk to negotiate with the Westminster
consensus. Perhaps the most important and most enigmatic of the later seventeenth-century
theologians is Robert Leighton (1611–84). Leighton has been prized for his mystical and
non-dogmatic adherence to the reformed consensus, and, depending upon the interpreter,
illustrates either the opportunities available to the ambitious or the mobility facilitated by
the Kirk’s theological consensus. In the 1650s, under the patronage of Cromwellians, he
served as principal at Edinburgh, delivering theological lectures, littered with Classical allu-
sions, that focused on the soul’s quest for happiness as the momentum for true spirituality.
He was moving on a trajectory away from Covenanted reformation and the Westminster
Consensus, and his peers knew it. After the Restoration, he was appointed a bishop, worked
for the reconciliation of Covenanters to the established Kirk, but died seeing the failure of
his schemes. Leighton’s interests and concerns were shared by Henry Scougal (1650–78), the
son of Patrick Scougal, bishop of Aberdeen, a close friend of Leighton. Henry Scougal was
appointed as Professor of Divinity at King’s College, Aberdeen, in 1673. His interests in pro-
moting holiness alongside orthodoxy were represented in The Life of God in the Soul of Man
(1677). In retreating from scholasticism, Leighton and Scougal were pushing the consensus
to its limits, and perhaps sowing the seeds that would result in the neo-Catholicism of the
eighteenth-century Usages debates. The debates of the 1720s, which, among other things,
debated the propriety of prayers for the dead, did not emerge from nowhere. As Scottish
Episcopalians moved into a denominational world, their interests in medieval piety and pre-
Reformation theology notably increased.
The Kirk’s reformed consensus, therefore, was not a reformed hegemony. While the main-
stream of early modern Scottish theology was represented by the confessional tradition,
important developments were taking place on and outside its borders. Throughout the
period, the basic structures of confessional division were being questioned by the Scottish-
born ecumenical pioneer John Dury (1596–1680). Simultaneously, Scottish Catholicism
was growing increasingly confident and well organised, though Catholic theologians, for
the most part, still had to find homes in continental colleges. James VII and II, himself
a Catholic, succeeded in gaining for his co-religionists a qualified toleration, and estab-
lished a public chapel at Holyrood; but he had gone too far ahead of his population, and an
anti-Catholic backlash was one factor contributing to his deposition in 1688. Catholic
growth quietly continued when the arrival of Bishop Thomas Nicolson in 1697 meant that
confirmations and ordinations could again take place on Scottish soil. But there could be
no doubt that the Revolution Settlement had confirmed the dominance of the Presbyterian
mainstream.
The Settlement unsettled the Episcopalians. In March 1689, the Convention of the
Scottish Estates declared the throne vacant and offered it to William and Mary. William
was not a convinced Presbyterian, and might have lived with the Scottish bishops, had not
Bishop Alexander Ross of Edinburgh declared that he would support the new monarchy
only ‘as the law and conscience allowed’. Ross’s equivocation was bad politics, however
admirable as theology; because of his intransigence, bishops were barred from the Kirk.
Presbyterianism was established with an act demanding that all those in authority in
Church or state should swear that William and Mary were de jure monarchs. Faced with
this repudiation of their past, all of the Scottish bishops and over half the Scottish clergy
refused to accept the Presbyterian settlement. Popular support for these ‘non-jurors’ was
strongest in the north-east, where, even in 1707, 165 Episcopal clergy remained in pastoral
charges. Queen Anne, after her accession in 1702, offered the non-jurors de facto tolera-
tion, but the 1707 Union consolidated Presbyterian power, briefly uniting Covenanters
 Scottish Theological Literature, 1560–1707 237

and Jacobites in opposition to the legal basis of the Kirk. The Toleration Act of 1712 acted
only to split the Episcopal movement between those who would, and would not, pray for
the Hanoverian monarchs. Only after the failure of the 1715 rising did mainstream
Presbyterianism make substantial headway in the north. By then, the Episcopalians were
firmly in dissent, and Scotland was moving steadily towards a denominational world.
For all its variation, the theological literature of early modern Scotland generated
immense cultural authority. It is true that, because those promoting reform had a very
ambiguous hold on political power, the Scottish Reformation was less bloody than
some others; but deviations from the state-defined mainstream could still meet with the
ultimate penalty. Wishart was one of several Scottish Protestant martyrs; John Ogilvie
(c. 1579–1615), later canonised, was Scotland’s only Catholic martyr; Thomas Aikenhead
(1678–97) was a martyr for independent thought, the only individual ever executed by
a Scottish court on the charge of blasphemy. Despite the complexities of its structures
and evolution, Scottish theology, between 1560 and 1707, was very much a matter of life
and death.

Further reading

Coffey, John (1997), Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel
Rutherford, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
de S. Cameron, Nigel M. (gen. ed.) (1993), Dictionary of Scottish Church History and
Theology, Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark.
Mullan, David G. (2000), Scottish Puritanism, 1590–1638, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
The Scots Confession 1560 (1960), ed. G. D. Henderson, Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew
Press.
Torrance, Thomas F. (1996), Scottish Theology: From John Knox to John McLeod Campbell,
Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark.
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), various editions.
 25

Legal Writing, 1314–1707

David Sellar

The Declaration of Arbroath, framed six years after the victory of Bannockburn in 1314, is
a document of international as well as national importance, a declaration of political liberty
which has resounded through the centuries. It has even been claimed that it helped to
inspire the American Declaration of Independence. The ‘Declaration’ is, strictly speaking,
a letter sent by the barons of Scotland to the Pope in favour of their chosen king, Robert
Bruce. The Declaration is written in the beautifully measured Latin prose or cursus favoured
by the papal chancery. Even in translation it is a compelling document which builds up
gradually to its most quoted passage:

Non enim propter gloriam divicias aut honores pugnamus sed propter libertatem solummodo
quam nemo bonus nisi simul cum vita amittit.

(For it is not for glory, or riches, or honours that we fight, but for liberty alone, which no true
man surrenders, save with his life.)

At the beginning of the fourteenth century, the language of the law was almost exclu-
sively Latin. Charters, formularies, the record of legal proceedings, legislation and treatises;
all were written in Latin. Robert Bruce’s statutes of 1318, described by Lord Cooper as
‘the first Law Reform (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act’, were part of the work of recon-
struction of the kingdom after Bannockburn. The most influential treatise on medieval
Scots law, known from its opening words as Regiam Majestatem, is now generally believed
also to date from this period of reconstruction. The bulk of the Regiam mirrors closely the
key treatise on Anglo-Norman law, De legibus et consuetudinibus Anglie, generally known as
‘Glanvill’, compiled about 1200. Some, but not all, of this material is edited to reflect
Scottish circumstances. The Regiam also contains Romano-canonical passages, based on
the Summa of the canonist Goffredus de Trano (d. 1245), as well as native Scottish mate-
rial. The ‘Leges inter Brettos et Scottos’, which belongs to an earlier period and sets tariffs
for killing and wounding, was regularly attached at the end of the Regiam. Another
fourteenth-century treatise, known as Quoniam Attachiamenta sive Leges Baronum is a guide
to procedure in the baron courts. Both the Regiam and Quoniam Attachiamenta remained
in manuscript for centuries, being eventually edited and published in 1609 by Sir John
Skene (see below).
From the end of the fourteenth century, Scots began to displace Latin as the language of
the law, although some formal deeds, such as charters, remained in Latin for centuries.
Scots became the regular language of record in the courts, including Parliament. Already
in 1399 there was famously complaint in Parliament anent ‘the mysgovernance of the
 Legal Writing, 1314–1707 239

Realme and the defaut of the kepyng of the common law’. Acts of Parliament were now
framed in Scots. The nineteenth-century historian Cosmo Innes wrote of ‘those brief
terse statutes which shame the legislation of a later wordy age’. The Royal Mines Act
1424, for example, ‘Of mynis of golde and silver’, which remains in force to this day,
enacted that,

Item Gif ony myne of golde or silver be fundyn in ony lordis landis of the realme [. . .] The
lordis of parliament consentis that sik myne be the kingis as is usuale in uthir realmys.

Another Act of the same year provided that

gif thar be ony pur creatur that for defalt of cunying or dispenses can not or may not follow his
causis the king for the lufe of god sall ordane that the Juge [. . .] purvey and get a lele and a
wys advocate to folow sic pur creaturis causis.

Meanwhile, the Leases Act 1449, again still in force, ‘ordanit for the sauftie and favour of
the pure pepil that labouris the grunde’, gave tenants security of tenure ‘to the ische of thare
termes’, that is, to the end of the agreed term, when land was sold. The records of the
central judicial bodies of the later fifteenth century, such as the Lords Auditors of Causes
and Complaints and the Lords of Council, precursors of the Court of Session, are also in
Scots. A typical decreet of the Lords Auditors, pronounced in 1482, reads,

The lordis auditoris decretis and deliveris that the saide schireff has unordourly procedit [. . .]
Considering that It was clerly schewin befor thaime that the mater of bastardy proponit again
the sade wilzaim was dependand in the spirituale court undecidit.

The records of the Court of Session, established in 1532 as a College of Justice, were also
kept in Scots, as too were the records of contemporary secular courts, such as the Sheriff
Court Book of Fife (1515–22) and the Barony Court Book of Carnwath (1523–42), both
of which have been published. Church courts, however, such as the court of the Official,
continued to use Latin until the Reformation, after which the records of the Commissary
courts that replaced them were kept in Scots.
Notarial Protocol books, extant from the end of the fifteenth century, are also written in
Scots, and provide a fascinating glimpse of law, language and contemporary society. Legal
documents composed in Gaelic are not unknown, but were probably always rare. They
include a charter of 1408 granted by Donald MacDonald, Lord of the Isles, written in Gaelic
rather than the usual Latin, and a contract of fosterage of 1614 for Norman (Tormod)
MacLeod, third son of Ruairi MacLeod, chief of Dunvegan. An early legal work in Scots is
Sir Gilbert of the Hay’s Buke of the Law of Armys or Buke of Bataillis, completed about 1456,
a free translation of Honoré Bonet’s L’Arbre des Batailles. ‘No modern translator’, wrote
G. W. Coopland, who attempted the same task 500 years later, ‘can hope to equal this in
life and dignity’. The following passage, interpolated by Hay into the original, gives some
flavour of his style:

Bot naturally all maner of creature has a passioun of nature that is callit the first movement;
that is, quhen a man or beste is sudaynly stert, thair naturale inclinacioun gevis thame of thair
complexioun to a brethe, and a sudayn hete of ire of vengeance quhilk efterwart stanchis efter
that hete.
240 David Sellar

A number of poets show a familiarity with legal writing and terms of art. William Dunbar
(c. 1460–1513) does so in, for example, The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo,
as does Robert Henryson (c. 1430–1500?) in his Tale of the Dog, the Sheep and the Wolf:

This Wolf I likkin to a Schiref stout,

Quhilk byis ane forfalt at the Kingis hand,
And hes with him ane cursit Assyis about,
And dytis all the pure men up on land.

Meantime, Sir David Lindsay’s (?1486–1555) Ane Satyre of the Three Estaitis includes satiri-
sation of the language of the law itself, as in this passage on procedure in the Church courts:

Thay gave me first a thing thay call citandum;

Within aucht days I gat bot lybellandum;
Within ane moneth I gat ad opponendum;
In half ane yeir I gat interloquendum;
And syne I gat, how call ye it? – ad replicandum;
Bot I could never ane word yit understand him.

Of course, during his incumbency as Lord Lyon King of Arms, Lindsay was himself in a high
judicial position.
Sixteenth-century Acts of Parliament contain many passages of memorable Scots. An
Act of 1504 ordains that

all our soverane lordis lieges beand under his obesance and in speciale all the Iles be Reulit be
our soverane lordis aune lawis and the commoune lawis of the Realme And be nain other
lawis’.

The College of Justice Act 1532 sets out that the king

Is maist desirous to have ane permanent ordour of Justice for the universale wele of all his lieges
and thairfor tendis to Institut ane college of cunning and wise men [. . .]

A notable and lengthy specimen of written Scots is provided by the Confession of Faith
Ratification Act of 1560, which is headed,

The Confessioun of fayth professed and beleved be the protestantis within the Realme of
Scotland publischeit be thame in parliament and be the estaitis thairof ratifeit and apprevit
as hailsome and sound doctrine groundit upoune the infallibill trewth of godis word.

It is instructive to compare this Act with the even longer Confession of Faith Ratification
Act of 1690, ‘An Act Ratifying the Confession of Faith and settleing Presbyterian Church
Government’, and to note the evolution and anglicisation of the language.
From the sixteenth century onwards there are many legal compilations known as
‘Practicks’ that set out the practice of the courts. Some of these, including two of the earli-
est and most significant, Sinclair’s Practicks and Maitland’s Practicks have not yet been pub-
lished, although they enjoyed extensive circulation. The best known of the genre, Balfour’s
Practicks, was compiled about 1580, but not published until 1753. It has been republished
 Legal Writing, 1314–1707 241

recently by the Stair Society, as have the seventeenth-century Hope’s Major Practicks. The
Practicks of Lord President Spotiswoode (d. 1646) were published in 1706. Here is Balfour’s
Practicks on ‘Slauchter’, following Regiam Majestatem:

Thair ar twa kindis of man-slauchter, the ane is callit murther, and the uther callit simple
slauchter. Murther is done privatlie, na man seand nor knawand the samin bot allanerlie the
slayer and his complices, swa that the cry of the people followis not suddenlie thairupon, as is
usit in the law of slauchter.

Practicks have sometimes been divided into ‘Digest’ Practicks and ‘Decision’ Practicks. From
the seventeenth century on there are named collections of the decisions of the Court of
Session that were widely used, such as Durie’s Decisions covering the period 1621–42. Stair’s
Decisions (2 vols, 1683, 1687) are the earliest actually printed.
A compilation of a rather different kind is the De Verborum Significatione (1597) of Sir
John Skene (c. 1546–1617), being

The Exposition of the Termes and Difficill Wordes, conteined in the four buikes of Regiam
Majestatem, and uthers, in the Actes of Parliament, Infeftments, and used in practicque of this
Realme [. . .].

It has been aptly described as, ‘A magnificent legal dictionary – a gold-mine whose riches
extend far beyond the strictly legal’. It is set out alphabetically from ‘ACTILIA’ to
‘ZEMSEL’. Entries include:

FORTHOCHT-felony, praecogitata malitia, quhilk is don & committed wittinglie and will-
inglie, after deliberation and set purpose, and is different from chaudmelle [. . .]

INFANGTHEFE [. . .] ANE Dutch word, quhairof I find divers interpretations [. . .]

TOSCHEODERACHE, ane officer or jurisdiction, not unlike to ane Baillierie, speciallie in

the Iles and Hielandes [. . .]

As already noted, Sir John Skene also edited Regiam Majestatem and Quoniam Attachiamenta,
with others of the ‘auld lawes’, in 1609, producing both a Latin and a Scots edition. The
Scots edition (Skene himself uses the word ‘English’) was done expressly at King James VI’s
own command,

to translate and convert the samine auld Lawes, furth of latin in English, that the samine may
be knawin to all his subjects; and speciallie to them quha are ignorant of the latin tongue,
quhilk I have done diligentlie, and faithfullie.

William Welwood (d. 1622), an early writer on the international law of the sea, whose work
engaged the attention of Hugo Grotius, wrote his Sea-Law of Scotland (1590) in Scots,
‘Shortly gathered and plainly dressit for the reddy use of all Sea-fairingmen’. Welwood’s later
Abridgement of all Sea Lawes (1613) is a much expanded work, of considerable linguistic
interest, as it is written in English, rather than Scots. Thomas Craig (1540–1608) chose,
however, to write his substantial Jus Feudale in Latin, thereby reaching an international
audience. The Jus Feudale is not only an account of the feudal land law of Scotland, but also
a pioneering work on comparative legal history which achieved wide European recognition.
242 David Sellar

Written around 1600, it was not published until 1655, with two further editions, including
at Leipzig in 1716. Although not translated into English until 1934, Jus Feudale has long
been regarded as an authoritative work on Scots law, and Craig an ‘institutional’ writer. It
is a complex work with many strands. One is the glorification of the system of feudalism. In
Craig’s time feudalism had not yet become a term of abuse, and Craig regarded it as a near-
perfect system of government. At another level Craig sought in Jus Feudale to demonstrate,
in tune with James VI’s desire for a perfect union, that Scots law and English law had more
in common than was generally supposed, and were ripe for harmonisation. Craig also wrote
a Latin tract De Unione Regnorum Britanniae, eventually published in 1909, advocating
Anglo-Scottish union.
A leading example of different type of legal writing, familiar to conveyancers, is repre-
sented by the Styles of George Dallas of St Martins (c. 1636–1701): A system of stiles, as
now practicable within the kingdom of Scotland: and reduced to a clear method (1697). The end
of the seventeenth century also saw Sir John Nisbet of Dirleton’s Doubts (Some doubts and
questions in the law, especially of Scotland, 1698), which were followed by Sir James Steuart
of Goodtrees’s Answers in 1715 (Dirleton’s doubts and questions in the law of Scotland, resolved
and answered).
By common consent, however, the most important book ever written on Scots law is The
Institutions of the Law of Scotland by James Dalrymple, Viscount of Stair (1619–95), first pub-
lished in 1681. Stair, as he is universally referred to by lawyers, was a regent in philosophy
at Glasgow University before becoming an advocate. A strong, although not a fanatical
Presbyterian, he served briefly as a commissioner for the Administration of Justice (a judge)
in Cromwell’s time, becoming a Lord of Session after the Restoration when that court was
re-established. He was Lord President of the Court of Session from to 1671 to 1681, but
refused to take the Test Act and went into exile in the Netherlands. He returned with
William of Orange and was reappointed Lord President in 1689.
Stair’s Institutions belong to a recognisable genre in European legal history, in which the
term ‘institute’ or ‘institutions’ is applied to a systematic and analytical account of the law
of a distinct jurisdiction or national legal system, in imitation of Justinian’s Institutes. The
full title of Stair’s work, the earliest manuscripts of which date back to the 1660s, is The
Institutions of the Law of Scotland. Deduced from its Originals, and Collated with the Civil,
Canon and Feudal Laws and the Customs of Neighbouring Nations. ‘No man can be a knowing
lawyer,’ wrote Stair, ‘who hath not well pondered and digested in his mind the common
law of the world.’ In 1693, Stair published a revised and extended edition in four books. In
his Dedication to the King, Stair writes that,

A quaint and gliding style, much less the flourishes of eloquence [. . .] could not justly be
expected in a treatise of law, which, of all subjects, doth require the most plain and accu-
rate expression. To balance which, the nauseating burden of citations are, as much as can be,
left out.

Stair’s style may not be ‘quaint and gliding’, but it is effective. For example, his preference
for custom, or precedent, rather than statute as an agent of legal change produces the fol-
lowing memorable passage:

Yea, and the nations are most happy, whose laws have entered by long custom, wrung out from
their debates upon particular cases, until it come to the consistence of a fixed and known
custom. For thereby the conveniences and inconveniences thereof through a tract of time
 Legal Writing, 1314–1707 243

are experimentally seen: so that which is found in some cases convenient, if in other cases
afterwards it be found inconvenient, it proves abortive in the womb of time, before it attain
the maturity of a law.

In the Advertisement to the second edition, Stair writes,

I have been very sparing to express my opinion in dubious cases of law, not determined by
our customs or statutes, but have rather congested what the Lords [of Session] have done,
than what my opinion would have been in these cases when they were free. But I have used
more freedom, in opening the fountains of law and justice, and the deductions thence arising,
by the law and light of nature and reason, which is the general rule of justice for the whole
world.

Stair did indeed often congest what the Lords had done, but his powers of analysis were
such that he provided Scots law with a rational and coherent exposition that has ensured
its continuing viability to the present day.
Stair’s contemporary, Sir George MacKenzie of Rosehaugh (1635–91), Lord Advocate
in 1677–86 and 1688–9, was also a distinguished legal writer. He is best known for his major
work on criminal law, The Laws and Customes of Scotland in Matters Criminal (1678), and
his short but influential work on private law, The Institutions of the Law of Scotland (1684),
written as a counterpoint to Stair. He also, however, wrote Observations on the Acts of
Parliament (1686), The Science of Herauldry (1680), and many non-legal works, including,
Aretina; or, the Serious Romance (1660), one of the earliest novels in English.
The end of the period under review saw two further fundamental constitutional docu-
ments, and a notable protection of the subject against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment.
The first key constitutional document is the Claim of Right of 1690, which was passed by
a Convention of Estates a year after the English Bill of Rights. It contains an indictment
of the rule of James VII, a statement of fundamental rights, and an offer of the Crown to
William and Mary. The conclusion of the indictment runs:

Therefor the Estates of the kingdom of Scotland Find and Declaire That King James the
Seventh [. . .] Invaded the fundamentall Constitution of the Kingdome and altered it from a
legall limited monarchy To ane arbitrary despotick power [. . .] wherby he hath forfaulted the
right to the Croune and the throne is become vacant.

The notable protection of the subject is the Criminal Procedure Act 1701, headed an ‘Act
for preventing wrongous Imprisonments and against undue delayes in Tryals’, is as impres-
sive a safeguard against arbitrary imprisonment as the English Magna Carta and Habeas
Corpus. Revised and re-codified more than once, it has remained at the core of civil liber-
ties in Scotland. The second key constitutional document is the well-known Act of Union
with England of 1707.

Further reading

Cairns, J. W. (2000), ‘Historical Introduction’, in K. Reid and R. Zimmermann (eds),

A History of Private Law in Scotland, 2 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, vol. i,
pp. 14–184.
244 David Sellar

MacQueen, H. L. (1993), Common Law and Feudal Society in Medieval Scotland, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Paton, G. and H. Campbell (ed.) (1958), An Introduction to Scottish Legal History,
Edinburgh: The Stair Society.
Thomson, J. Maitland (1922), The Public Records of Scotland, Glasgow: Maclehose, Jackson
and Co.
Various authors (1936), The Sources and Literature of Scots Law, Edinburgh: The Stair
Society.
Walker, D. M. (1985), The Scottish Jurists, Edinburgh: W. Green.
 26

Literature, Art and Architecture

Michael Bath

In 1908 James Caw claimed that ‘the authentic history of Scottish pictorial art begins with
George Jamesone’. Jamesone’s reputation as Scotland’s first portrait painter of any distinc-
tion was already developing before his death in 1644, and if Scottish painting consists pri-
marily of a checklist of old masters – of known painters whose work has its own
individuality and distinctive characteristics – then we would have to agree with Caw, and
conclude that the history of painting in Scotland had hardly begun in the period covered
in this volume. But the truth is, of course, that the visual arts already had a long history in
Scotland before the fashion grew up for identifying a national tradition with the names of
a succession of ‘great masters’. That approach to art history was largely influenced by
Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550), and it should be clear that such an approach raises many
of the same problems – of canon formation, national identity, shifting tastes and judge-
ments – that we encounter in the construction of literary histories. Indeed when we find
Caw using the word ‘authentic’ to define a native tradition of which Jamesone is seen as
the pioneer, students of literature will surely recognise many of the same assumptions
which, until quite recently, controlled the ways in which the history of Scottish literature
was being constructed in the twentieth century.
As art history moves into the eighteenth century and beyond it certainly makes some
sense to identify the national tradition with a growing list of eminent painters, and any
history of Scottish art which did not pay due attention to Allan Ramsay (1707–84),
Alexander Runciman (1736–85), Sir Henry Raeburn (1756–1823), Sir David Wilkie
(1785–1841), and so on, would certainly not be doing its job. But if we are to write the
history of the visual arts in Scotland at an earlier period, we shall find it increasingly mean-
ingless, if not impossible, to reduce that history to a checklist of eminent names. We can
certainly put names to a number of artists working in Scotland in the century or more
before Jamesone, and most of these – Arnold Bronckhorst, Andrew Bairhum, Adrian
Vanson, Adam de Cologne, for instance – would at least need to be identified in any ade-
quate history. However, perhaps the first thing one notices about these names is how few
of them are Scots. Scotland was not alone, of course, in its reliance on immigrant artists at
this period, for court painting in England shows a similar predominance of continental,
mostly Dutch, names – Holbein, Cornelis Ketel, Marcus Gheeraerts, Daniel Mytens, or
Rubens, for instance. Ever since François I attracted leading Italian masters to work at his
court in France, northern monarchs, from Henry VII of England to Rudolf II of Prague, had
done much the same, and Scotland from at least the reign of James IV (1488–1513)
onwards was no exception. The readiness of successive monarchs to buy in continental
artists to enhance their courtly magnificence tells us more about national aspirations
towards splendour at court, however, than it does about any native tradition of ‘authentic’
246 Michael Bath

Scottish painting. Renaissance poets and writers, from Henryson and Dunbar through to
James VI’s ‘Castalian band’, also flourished at court, so that what we know about painting
at court might well need to be studied alongside what we should call ‘writing at court’ in
the early modern period. The extent to which a national court culture was a necessary con-
dition for the flourishing of both these sister arts (not to mention music) at this period in
Scotland is a question that needs to be addressed.
It will also quickly become apparent that the really interesting artefacts that go to make
up the visual arts of earlier periods in Scotland are of diverse kinds, in many different
media, and serving all kinds of different purposes. It becomes more and more unrealistic,
before the seventeenth century, to separate the fine arts from the applied and decorative
arts, or to separate any of these arts from the buildings and social practices which used
them. For that reason we need to consider Scottish painting and architecture side by side,
and we need to look at a variety of different objects and visual media. Students of Scottish
literature are likely to want to know what access the readers of late medieval or early
modern texts might have had to visual and pictorial imagery of various kinds. What was
their visual culture? One of the things we shall discover is how close some of the links were,
in the early modern period at least, between literary and visual media of communication. If
we can, at least occasionally, draw inferences or conclusions about the intellectual under-
pinning of both, we may begin to understand why it is that any history of the nation’s liter-
ature that ignored its visual arts might be missing something important.
George Jamesone’s own career itself illustrates the difficulty of making any sharp distinc-
tions between fine art and the applied arts at this period, for Jamesone was trained in the
circle of professional artisans who did decorative work in Scotland throughout the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Born in 1589–90, he was apprenticed in 1612 to John Anderson,
whose recorded commissions include painting the Netherbow clock in Edinburgh, painting
the room where James VI was born in Edinburgh Castle in preparation for the royal visit of
1617, and decorations at Falkland Palace for the same visit. Jamesone himself played a major
part in decorating Edinburgh for the royal entry of Charles I during the next royal visit in
1633, when the king was greeted by symbolic tableaux. These included the figure of true
Religion trampling on Superstition; there were arches depicting the city of Edinburgh and
the fruitful land of Scotland, whose ‘Genius of Caledonia’ addressed the king. A series of
portraits of the historical and legendary kings of Scotland perpetuated a tradition already
well established in the visual arts in Scotland, for which the histories of Boece, Major and
Buchanan had laid the basis. The symbolic tableaux in 1633 also included Bacchus and
Ceres as rural gods of Scotland; a mountain representing Parnassus was adorned with
pictures of the Muses and of the ancient Worthies of Scotland including Hector Boece, John
Major, Gavin Douglas, David Lindsay and George Buchanan. The city recorded its thanks
to George Jamesone for the ‘extraordiner paynes’ he had taken in executing all these
tableaux for the royal entry, costing more than £41,000. Its symbolic programme, with all
the speeches for the king’s Entertainment, was devised not by Jamesone himself, however,
but by poet William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649).
The collaboration between poets and artists in such royal and civic pageantry was, of
course, commonplace throughout Europe at this period, the protocol for royal entries
having developed much earlier in France. Scottish precedents include the entry of Mary
Stuart into Edinburgh in 1561, whilst the celebrations which Mary herself ordered to cel-
ebrate the baptism of the infant James in December 1566 in Stirling took the form of a
triumphant renaissance festival. Evidently inspired by the festivals Charles IX had staged
across France to celebrate the reconciliation of Catholic and Huguenot differences which
 Literature, Art and Architecture 247

threatened to divide the kingdom, and for which the poet Ronsard had helped design some
of the programmes, the Stirling triumph featured a huge fireworks display, feasts, banquet-
ing and pageants attended by representatives of France, England and Savoy. Its high point
appears to have been a night assault or siege of a burning fort, featuring Highlanders dressed
as wild-men, Moors, mercenaries and ‘counterfeit devils’, for all of whom costumes were
commissioned. Guests at the banquet following the baptism were entertained by a
‘Procession of the Rural Gods’ in which a series of Satyrs, Nereids, Naiads and Mountain
Nymphs presented their gifts to the royal family in Latin speeches composed by Scotland’s
foremost European poet, George Buchanan (1506–82). Although the precise symbolic
intention of the festival is difficult to reconstruct from the fragmentary accounts that we
have of it, Michael Lynch’s judgement is difficult to disagree with when he concludes:
‘Stirling in 1566 deserves to be restored to its proper place as the venue of what was by most
yardsticks the first truly Renaissance festival which Great Britain had ever witnessed.’
The combination of pictura with poesis was by no means restricted to such symbolic
pageants, for in the remarkable flowering of decorative painting in domestic buildings of
sixteenth and seventeenth-century Scotland we find a similar readiness to combine word
and image in emblematic formats. Whatever the impact of the Reformation in its icono-
clastic destruction of Scotland’s medieval inheritance of religious painting – which we have
every reason to suppose was very rich from the impressive examples surviving at Foulis Easter
and elsewhere – we should resist the impression that Scotland’s built environment follow-
ing the Reformation was dreich, dour and dull. On the contrary, it was iconologically alert,
spirited in its decorative designs, and polychrome wherever possible. In 1581 Mark Kerr
decorated a ceiling of his house at Prestongrange with one of the earliest and most accom-
plished examples of ‘grotesque’ painting to be found anywhere in Britain, covering the
wooden boards with a profusion of strange humanoid figures, fruit-swags, foliage and
panoplies of arms, mostly copied from details in the series of Grottesco prints by Vredeman
de Vries published a few years earlier in Antwerp. Vredeman’s prints helped to spread the
fashion for a decorative style which, because it goes back to Classical models, was becoming
known throughout Europe as an authentic style of ‘antique painting’, but the same ceiling
also includes details copied from an extraordinary set of fantastic figures printed in Paris in
1565, entitled Les Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel, which announces itself as a collection of
dream-figures out of Rabelais. Evidently the decorative arts in Scotland were, by the later
sixteenth century, closely in touch with pattern-books published on the continent; indeed,
it is only recently that it has become apparent just how heavily reliant the decorative arts
of this period were on continental woodcuts and engravings for their patterns. We might
respond to this discovery in two different ways: either by celebrating it as a sign of Scotland’s
cosmopolitan awareness of European Mannerism in its use of sources and models, or by
regretting the derivativeness and lack of originality of such painting. We should certainly
bear in mind, however, the relationship between imitation and invention in renaissance
theories of composition (today we would call it ‘creativity’). All original work at this period
involved the imitation of existing models, and in poetry it was, after all, no different.
Judging from the large number of examples of such painting – in more than a hundred
buildings – that have survived, it is evident that the immediate surroundings in which
people of all ranks led their everyday lives were visually rich. Many of the decorative
schemes that were painted on walls and ceilings, ranging from houses of modest burgesses
through the castles of the nobility right up to royal palaces, have literary associations and
analogues. These range from straightforward ‘history’ or narrative painting, illustrating
scenes or episodes from literary texts, to more symbolic schemes and topics. At Cullen
248 Michael Bath

House there was the ‘Siege of Troy’ from Homer and Virgil, and the ‘Calydonian Boar
Hunt’ from Ovid, whilst symbolic topics that have survived in houses throughout Scotland
include the Nine Worthies, the Nine Muses, the Four Seasons, the Five Senses, the
Planetary Gods, and the Cardinal Virtues. Ways of representing these in the visual arts had
been established in a wide variety of locations outside Scotland, as well as in prints and
pattern-books, and the Scottish examples invariably show some familiarity with their
received iconology. Most of such topics also go back to literary and rhetorical topoi which
renaissance poets were themselves keen to invoke or describe and, in their tendency to per-
sonify abstract ideas in symbolic forms, such schemes are inherently literary as much as they
are visual or purely aesthetic. All such schemes call for a response from the viewer which
involves an act of recognition, if not of active interpretation.
Such acts of interpretation become even more fundamental when a decorative scheme
uses emblems. It is only gradually becoming apparent how widespread was Scottish familiar-
ity with the emblem-books which, from the 1540s onwards, appeared in increasing numbers
from printing presses on the continent. Normally combining word and image in a format that
put a sententious Latin motto at the head of a symbolic picture, the emblem challenged its
viewer to work out the relation between the two. The answer was often a moral truism that
depended on some inherent property, traditional association, or received meaning sur-
rounding the image. It is in the distinctive Scottish fashion for painted ceilings that we find
them used most tellingly. Claude Paradin’s Devises heroïques, first printed in Lyons in 1551,
were used at Nunraw and at Rossend, and around 1611 Sir George Bruce adapted emblems
from the first English emblem-book ever to be published, Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of
Emblems (1586), to decorate one of the ceilings at his house in Culross, Fife.
Undoubtedly the most interesting and sophisticated of such adaptations of printed
emblems books is the remarkable neo-Stoic long gallery which Alexander Seton, first Earl
of Dunfermline (1555–1622), had painted in 1613 at Pinkie House, Musselburgh. Seton
belonged to a family which had already featured prominently at court, where his father was
keeper of the household to Mary Stuart and his aunt was one of the famous ‘four Maries’
who served the queen. In 1582 his father, George Seton, had an artist, possibly Adrian
Vanson, in his household, and the painting of George, 5th Lord Seton has been described as
‘the richest and most splendid court portrait of the period to survive’, whilst the 1572 por-
trait by Frans Pourbus showing him with his wife and four sons is rightly described (by
Duncan Macmillan) as ‘even finer’. The Setons also commissioned one of the best Scottish
books of heraldry, the illustrated Seton Armorial, whose only rival would be the magnificent
armorial compiled in1542 by Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, Lyon King of Arms under
James V and, as author of Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, most celebrated of Scots poets of
the period after Dunbar and Henryson. Alexander Seton was heir to this Scottish
Renaissance in the visual arts, and set out deliberately to propagate some of its principles
in the buildings he created or improved at Pinkie House, at Fyvie, and at Seton Palace.
For his Long Gallery at Pinkie, Seton used emblems drawn from books by Denis Lebey de
Batilly, Girolamo Ruscelli and, most notably, the Dutch emblematist and tutor of Rubens,
Otto van Veen. Van Veen’s Emblemata Horatiana (1605) illustrates moral commonplaces
from the poetry of Horace which are taken to define the major tenets of Stoic philosophy,
and it seems more than likely that Seton planned his gallery as a re-creation of the antique
stoa, or gallery, from which Stoicism took its name. It is remarkable for the way it uses
emblems to define a programme of neo-Stoic humanism and moderation in this house,
which was built on the site of the last great battle to be fought between the English and the
Scots. Seton had played a significant part, as Chancellor of Scotland, in the Union of the
 Literature, Art and Architecture 249

Crowns, which offered finally to reconcile the two kingdoms’ historic differences. The
gallery is also notable for its inclusion of a portrait of Seton himself in one of the emblems
it adapts from Emblemata Horatiana – a unique instance of a patron portrait in decorative
painting of this period in Britain. Its extraordinary trompe l’oeil cupola, or lantern giving the
impression of a glimpse of the sky, may well owe something, in its host of winged putti
perched on the rim, to the oculus painted for Ludovico Gonzaga in the ‘Bridal Chamber’ of
his Ducal Palace at Mantua in 1474; Seton had been educated by the Jesuits in Rome and
might well have seen such an Italian example. Seton’s own eccentric octagonal certainly
copies the diagram in which Vredeman de Vries illustrates the mathematics for achieving
an eccentric viewing angle with such cupolae, in one of the most advanced handbooks on
the art of perspective, Perspectiva, which had appeared in Antwerp, 1605–6. This suggests
that the decorative arts in Scotland were far from being an outlandish and incompetent
provincial style; at their best they sought to emulate some of the most advanced and accom-
plished European theories and models.
Seton’s building work might also reinforce what has already been said about the import-
ance of seeing the visual arts in their architectural context. Seton did not, as far as we know,
actually design his own buildings, though he must have played an important role in their
conception and execution. He certainly patronised William Schaw (1550–1602), master of
works to James VI (r. 1567–1625), who initiated the Scottish system of masonic lodges in
which modern freemasonry almost certainly has its origins. Not only did Schaw’s new regu-
lations for the traditional craft guild introduce a new category of non-operative masons, it
also required the time-served apprentice to be examined in the more abstract, humanist
techniques of ‘the art of memory’, and not just in the mechanical skills of the craft. Those
techniques for strengthening one’s memory had traditionally advocated the association of
memorable words with striking images, and it seems more than likely that the prevalence
of both image and adage in the decoration of Scottish buildings owes something to this rule.
It was Alexander Seton who composed the Latin epitaph to Schaw one can still read on the
architect’s tomb in Dunfermline Abbey, and for someone of Seton’s standing thus to honour
his architect suggests changing attitudes towards the status and position of the builder/archi-
tect at this time in Scotland. We are almost certainly witnessing the emergence of the
learned patron who begins to take an informed and educated interest in architecture, if not
actually taking up the offices and responsibilities of a practising builder. Charles McKean
has traced the beginnings of that development in the work of Sir James Hamilton of Finnart,
who was appointed by his cousin James V (r. 1513–42) to oversee the building of the new
Royal Palace at Stirling in the late 1530s.
Just as it is difficult to separate the history of Scottish painting from changing assumptions
about art history, so too with architecture it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate the
archaeology, or even the simple chronology, of Scottish buildings from the rapidly changing
ideas of recent architectural historians about the object of their studies. The architectural
evidence is difficult to interpret because of the ruinous condition of so many of the buildings
themselves, and even the best-preserved monuments may have undergone radical rebuild-
ing – often as the very condition of their survival. Changing attitudes towards Scottish
history and identity have also played their part, with Sir Walter Scott sometimes being held
responsible for the nineteenth century’s assumption that the ruinous, castellated style of
Scottish baronial architecture was the authentic product of a turbulent, lawless and essen-
tially militaristic people. Scott certainly influenced an abiding preference for the ruins them-
selves, and a taste for the unharled rubble of buildings which, it has now been established,
would normally have been more smartly and elegantly finished than the rugged appearance
250 Michael Bath

they now have after centuries of neglect or of inappropriate ‘restoration’. As it became

clearer, in the work of twentieth-century architectral historians such as Richard Fawcett and
John Dunbar, that many of the military features of the castellated style could have had little
or no defensive purpose (gun loops, for instance, through which it would always have been
quite impossible to fire a gun), so it has become increasingly accepted that such features may
represent a conscious stylistic choice rather than any kind of political or defensive necessity.
If the characteristic shape of Scottish castellated and baronial mansions of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, with their distinctive cluster of bartizans, turrets, corbels and
skewputts (as at Castle Fraser, Crathes or Craigievar), represents a conscious stylistic choice,
then it becomes vital to establish what sources, models and precedents informed their
patrons’ and builders’ conception of such a style, and a major effort of recent architectural
historians in Scotland has been devoted to establishing its relationship with both native and
continental models. Whilst it has been possible to show that Scotland participated more
fully than was previously thought in the renaissance classicism of other northern European
countries, it is equally evident that the new castellated architecture represents a deliberate
rejection of the forms of Classical antiquity. The most radical interpretation of this rejection
is Charles McKean’s hypothesis that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries anticipated the
nineteenth century by adopting a native ‘baronial’ and quasi-medieval style. McKean’s deci-
sion to describe renaissance castles in Scotland as châteaux signals his determination to iden-
tify some of the European models that inflected this native Scottish style, a decision which
has the support of other contemporary scholars, such as Miles Glendinning.
The documentary evidence that would support such an interpretation remains to be fully
researched, and it has to be said that the jury is still out on this way of reading such archi-
tecture as Scotland’s response to its own history and identity, or to its wider European
connections. That such connections influenced art and design more generally is, however,
apparent from the artefacts in various media which have already been mentioned. To
return, briefly, to the arts of interior design, we know that James V bought tapestries in
Flanders, and in 1539 the royal collection already included such subjects as the History of
R[eh]oboam, the History of Maliasour, a City of Dammys, a History of Percius, History of the
Unicorne, The Auld Historie of Troy, ‘antik work’ of the histories of Venus, Pallas, Hercules,
Mars, Bacchus and Ceres, together with histories of ‘Salomon’ and of ‘Jason that wan the
goldin fleys’. Their titles indicate clearly enough what has been said above about the liter-
ary or narrative basis of so many of the visual images that surrounded people in buildings
of many different kinds at this period. Many of these tapestries, with later additions, remain
listed in royal inventories up to the end of the sixteenth century.
Such needlework decorated both courtly and less exalted domestic furnishings. Mary
Stuart almost certainly learned her embroidery skills as part of her upbringing in France.
Much of her needlework survives on the Oxburgh Hangings and a large number of separate
pieces now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. These copy images with mottoes from
various emblem-books, animals from Conrad Gesner’s great Historia Animalium, and plant-
slips from Mattioli’s Commentary on Dioscorides. In her years of exile she also completed a
number of emblematic embroideries for her state bed, which have since disappeared, and in
1619 these were described in some detail in a letter which Drummond of Hawthornden
wrote to Ben Jonson following the latter’s famous visit to Scotland. In 1603 Drummond’s
uncle, William Fowler (c. 1560–1610) – poet and secretary to Anne of Denmark, wife of
James VI – had seen the same bed of state, which had been returned to Scotland shortly after
Mary’s execution in 1587, and Fowler wrote a very similar description of its emblematic
embroideries, which Drummond had evidently read before writing his letter to Jonson.
 Literature, Art and Architecture 251

Indeed Fowler’s description survives in the National Library’s Hawthornden Papers. Fowler’s
connections with Drummond, which were as much literary and intellectual as family based,
suggest the scholarly network of taste and learning to which such embroideries appealed at
this time.
Fowler’s writings not only include a large number of miscellaneous sonnets and other
poems, a version of Petrarch’s ‘Triumphs’, and a translation of Machiavelli’s The Prince, but
he also wrote on devices and impresas of the Scottish nobility, copied passages from Italian
impresa treatises by Giulio Cappaccio and Giovanni Andrea Palazzi, and love emblems by
Otto van Veen. These were in preparation for an ‘art of impreses’, which he mentions in a
manuscript list of ‘My Works’, though he evidently never finished it. The same list of his
works includes an ‘art of memorye’ and an art of ‘maskarades’, and it is surely in this light
that we can begin to imagine the context which would have drawn a writer such as Fowler,
or his nephew William Drummond, to an interest in the emblems that adorned Mary
Stuart’s state bed. Not only do their designs combine word and image in a format that
requires learned and ingenious interpretation, but they were the product of a court culture
within which Fowler, like so many of his fellow-writers, sought recognition and patronage.
Moreover, in 1594, it was Fowler who had been responsible for designing ‘The Most
Triumphant, and Royal Accomplishment of the Baptisme of [. . .] Prince Henry’ (James
VI’s son, and heir-apparent to the thrones of both Scotland and England) in Stirling Castle.
When we read the account printed in London of this, possibly the most ambitious and
magnificent of the courtly ceremonies ever mounted in Scotland, we are immediately
struck by the copiousness and confidence of its emblematic devices. Not only was the
Chapel Royal rebuilt by William Schaw using an entrance portal based on a design by
Serlio, and representing a significant Classical innovation in Scottish architecture, but a
masque of disguised actors – Moors, Amazons, Knights of Malta and Turks – performed
before the king, whose ‘imprese or device’ was a lion’s head ‘which signifieth after a mis-
tique & Hieroglyphique sence Fortitude and Vigilance: the wordes were, Timeat &
primus & ultimus orbis’ (‘Both the nearest and furthest worlds fear him’). Of the large
number of similar emblems we can give only a sample: a zodiac with sun and moon, with
the motto Quo remotior, lucidior (‘The further away, the brighter it is’); a hand holding an
eel by the tail, ‘alluding to the uncertainty of persons, or of times’, Ut frustra, sic patienter
(‘As it is in vain, so it must be done patiently’). The magnificent banquet was drawn into
the Great Hall on a chariot by a Blackamoor – it should have been the king’s tame lion,
symbolising his fortitude and vigilance, but there were fears that this would frighten the
audience. It carried symbolic figures and emblematic devices, with Latin mottoes, and was
followed by a great ship, signifying the voyage that had taken the king, like a new Jason,
to Denmark to fetch back his bride, similarly bedecked with pageant figures and emblems:

in her fore-sayle, a ship-compass, regarding the North Star, with this sentence, Quascunque per
undas. Which is to say, through quhatsoever seas, or waves, the Kings Maiestie intendeth his
course [. . .] Neptune as God of the Sea, shal be favorable to his proceedings.

What such records might suggest – and admittedly they stray beyond the kind of thing
which we might look for in conventional art histories – is the manifold overlaps between
visual, architectural, literary and ceremonial preoccupations in Scottish social practices
at this period. It is because those overlaps are so manifold, and so persistent, that we need
to study the creative writing of the early modern period with at least some awareness of its
artistic and architectural connections.
252 Michael Bath

Further reading

Bath, Michael (2003), Renaissance Decorative Painting in Scotland, Edinburgh: National

Museums of Scotland.
Fawcett, Richard (1994), Scottish Architecture from the Accession of the Stewarts to the
Reformation, Architectural History of Scotland, vol. 1, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Glendinning, Miles, Ranald MacInnes and Aonghus MacKechnie (1996), A History of
Scottish Architecture from the Renaissance to the Present Day, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Howard, Deborah (1995), Scottish Architecture: Reformation to Restoration, 1560–1660,
Architectural History of Scotland, vol. 2, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
McKean, Charles (2001), The Scottish Château, Stroud: Sutton.
Macmillan, Duncan (1990), Scottish Art, 1460–1990, Edinburgh: Mainstream.
 27

Performances and Plays

Bill Findlay

The lively theatrical culture of medieval and renaissance Scotland is often underestimated.
Certainly, Scotland’s professionally organised theatre industry, embracing popular and ‘legit-
imate’ forms and theatre companies and theatre buildings, was founded in the eighteenth
century. Moreover, a few exceptions aside, dramatic writing lagged in comparison: it slowly
gathered pace in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it was the twentieth century
before a sustained indigenous playwriting culture put down firm roots and a tradition, prop-
erly speaking, was established. Just the same, in both cases – theatrical activity and play-
writing – there are lines of affinity with diverse developments in the centuries before 1700.
Public performances of both a proto and realised theatrical nature can be found in many
guises in the period from 1300 to 1700, and playwriting, in the modern sense, begins to make
fitful appearances in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The surviving records for
the medieval period are fragmentary. New research now under way by John McGavin of
the University of Southampton, under the auspices of the Records of Early English Drama
(of which more details are available at the end of this chapter), seems likely to prove highly
fruitful. Meantime, A. J. Mill’s Mediaeval Plays in Scotland (1927) is here generally drawn on
for records cited: there is sufficient evidence to suggest that, before the onset of censure
following the mid-sixteenth-century Reformation, Scotland boasted rich and varied folk,
religious, and courtly performance cultures. These three categories will be considered sepa-
rately, each in turn, before discussing the extant plays and, where known, their performances.
The earliest written evidence of folk ceremonies and pastimes of a rudimentary dramatic
kind – featuring dance, song, mime and spoken word, all presented before an audience –
occurs in thirteenth-century records of mandates from church authorities attempting to pro-
hibit them in church precincts because of, variously, their pagan origin, threat of disorder,
and, on occasion, indecent nature. They seem to have been summer and winter festival and
fertility rites which followed the seasonal and agricultural calendar. The only extant text in
Britain of a pre-Reformation folk drama is a medieval Scottish ‘Plough Play’ dating from
about 1500. In it, ritual death and symbolic resurrection are enacted through the death and
replacement of an old and ailing plough-ox. Traditionally, such a play was performed in early
January, on the first Monday after Epiphany, to mark the start of a new agricultural year.
Of particular importance in these community rites was the regeneration of the land in spring
and the victory thereby of summer over winter. Folk culture in medieval Scotland had many
expressions of this drama of combat between death and rebirth, as seen in animal resurrec-
tion cults, ceremonial dances, contests between Summer and Winter Kings and Queens,
and various Maying rites. Through pressure from the Church, these were largely chris-
tianised by adaptation to the story of Christ’s Passion and by having the attendant cere-
monies sometimes follow the Christian calendar in accordance with the importance of
254 Bill Findlay

Christmas and Easter. This, however, met a degree of resistance from the people, and both
the Catholic Church and then the Reformed Church were moved to issue edicts against
what they saw as lingering pagan practice, with prosecutions against participants continu-
ing well into the seventeenth century. Yet, where deemed acceptable, the Church tacitly
sanctioned folk festivities, and the municipal authorities gave organisational support, as in
the May games.
References to May celebrations occur most frequently in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies. The most popular such celebration involved the election of a mock king charged with
organising and leading the event, in which costumed members of the community per-
formed. Sometimes the elected person is referred to as ‘King of the May’, or occasionally
‘Queen of the May’, but more commonly as ‘Abbot of Unreason’, with variations such as
‘Abbot and Prior of Bonacord’ (Aberdeen), ‘Abbot of Narent’ (Edinburgh), and ‘Abbot of
Unrest’ (Inverness). But that presiding figure was in time overtaken in popularity by Robin
Hood. In 1508 in Aberdeen, for example, a city statute commanded able-bodied citizens to
ride ‘with Robert huyd and litile Johne quhilk was callit in yeris bipast Abbot and priour of
Bonacord’. In the sixteenth century, he became the leading character in the most popular
form of summer-heralding folk play, and Robin Hood plays were performed in numerous
burghs in the Lowlands and as far north as Inverness and Elgin. The phenomenon finds
mention, too, in poems such as William Dunbar’s ‘The Manere of the Crying of Ane Playe’,
the anonymous ‘Peblis to the Play’, and Alexander Scott’s ‘Of May’.
The popularity of such festivities and the licence they provided for public rowdiness
increasingly alarmed civic and church authorities in the turbulent times of the Reformation.
In 1555, an Act of Parliament specifically sought to suppress the traditional May and
Yuletide plays, threatening performers with fines, imprisonment and banishment. Yet, per-
formances continued, as demonstrated by the Edinburgh bailies’ sentencing a shoemaker
to death in 1561 for playing Robin Hood, occasioning thereby a public riot of protest in
which the gallows were smashed and the terrified provost and bailies forced to seek help
from an unsympathetic Constable of the Castle. Further Acts followed, one of 1589 seeking
to prohibit ‘pasche playis abbot of onresone robene houd & sich uther prophane playis’.
Prohibition and punishment eventually succeeded, with the last recorded performance by
adults of a Robin Hood play occurring in 1610. Other forms of seasonal folk festivity did
struggle on, such as the Lammas play in Midlothian and the ‘Clarke-plays’ referred to in
Robert Sempill’s poem, ‘The Life and Death of Habbie Simson the Piper of Kilbarchan’,
written about 1640. Kirk hostility, nonetheless, succeeded in achieving the near-destruction
of what had been a robust tradition of folk performance of venerable age. Elements of
the death-and-resurrection folk drama did resurface around 1700 in the ‘Galoshins’ folk
play (which survived into the twentieth century); but that Falkirk Kirk Session, in 1701,
censured a group of young men for going ‘about in disguise acting things unseemly’ at
Hogmanay illustrates how pervasive remained Presbyterian disapprobation.
From the Middle Ages through to the Reformation, plays and pageantry based on saints’
lives and their miracles, or more often the Bible, were an annually recurring event. They
served a didactic purpose in dramatising and making familiar to the people, through the
immediacy of the vernacular and strong visual imagery, the stories and moral lessons of the
Old and New Testaments. They were, too, a communal affirmation of faith, presented by
and for the community, with the burgh councils combining with the crafts or trade guilds
to organise and meet the costs. The plays followed the Holy Days of the Church calendar
and were most commonly held outdoors in summer to coincide with the Feast of Corpus
Christi. There are references in the records to Clerk, Candlemas, Morality, Passion and,
 Performances and Plays 255

most frequently, Corpus Christi plays. (The earliest reference to one of the latter is to a per-
formance in Aberdeen in 1440.) The Corpus Christi drama took the form of a series of
pageants dramatising scenes from scriptural history and following a triumphal doctrinal
pattern of Fall, Redemption, and Judgement. Each trade guild in a burgh had responsibil-
ity for a pageant within a series, and the plays were performed either on pageant-wagons
as ‘stations’ on a processional route to a church, or as open-air stationary presentations in
‘playfields’ attached to burghs, such as those at Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Stirling and
Perth. Although no text of one of these religious dramas has survived, it has been argued
that a poem, ‘The Passioun of Christ’, by Walter Kennedy (c. 1460–c. 1508), has its origin
as a passion play of the Corpus Christi cycle.
Religious drama flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but declined as the
sixteenth century progressed because of opposition from the Reformers. In their association
with the practices of the Roman Catholic Church, religious plays were vigorously
denounced as ‘superstitious’; the feast days associated with Catholicism, and on which the
communal religious dramas traditionally took place, were suppressed; new emphasis was
placed on strict keeping of the Sabbath as a day devoted to worship. An Act was introduced
in 1574–5 which stated:

Forsamikle as it is considered, that the playing of Clerk playes, comedies or tragedies upon the
Canonical parts of the Scripture, induceth and bringeth with it a contempt and profanation
of the same [. . .] It is thoght meit and concludit, That no Clerk playes, comedies or tragedies
be made of the Canonicall [sic] Scripture, alsweill new as old, neither on the Sabboth day nor
worke day, in tyme comeing; the contraveiners heirof (if they be Ministers) to be secludit fra
thair functioun, and, if they be vthers, to be punischit be the discipline of the Kirk.

Local Kirk Sessions were allowed to issue licences for performances but the ‘register’ (script)
had to be submitted in advance for approval. In 1574, in St Andrews, for example, permis-
sion was granted to Patrick Authinleck to stage on a Sunday the Comedy of the Forlorn Son –
a play then in vogue across Europe in different vernacular translations – subject to the text’s
submission for revision and the condition that performance did not interfere with times of
religious observance. In 1589, in Perth, permission was given for performance of a drama,
but with a stern proviso:

The ministers and elders give licence to plai the plai, with conditions that no swearing, banning,
nor onie scurrility sal be spoken, which would be a scandal to our religion [. . .] and for an evil
example unto others.

That rebukes were issued in places such as Dalkeith (1582), St Andrews (1595–6), and
Elgin (1600), for offenders having performed plays without a licence, suggests less than full
compliance.
Although the Reformers’ hostility to drama and performances was general, and, as seen
in the suppression of folk pastimes, went beyond religious plays alone, in the early days of
both the struggle for and then the imposition of Reformation, drama was used as a tool of
popular education in the form of propaganda against the Roman Catholic Church and its
sympathisers. In 1535, John Kyllour, a Dominican friar, wrote a Historye of Christis Passioun,
performed in the Castlehill playfield, Stirling, before King James V, his court, and the towns-
people. Kyllour employed the format of a passion play to criticise bishops and priests; for
this, after a period as a hunted man, he was burned at the stake in 1539. James Wedderburn
256 Bill Findlay

of Dundee wrote, and had performed there about 1540, plays which satirised the Roman
Catholic clergy: a ‘tragedie’, Beheading of Johne the Baptist, and a ‘comedie’, Historie of
Dyonisius the Tyranne. For these, he had to flee into exile in France. Although neither
Kyllour’s nor Wedderburn’s texts survive, some ballads or songs from Wedderburn’s may
have been preserved in The Gude and Godlie Ballatis (1567), a collection of pro-Reformation
verse and songs compiled by his brothers John and Robert. Once the Reformation was
achieved, drama was condoned if it served an approved purpose. In St Andrews, in 1571,
John Knox watched a play by a Reformer, John Davidson, dramatising the siege of
Edinburgh Castle ‘according to Mr Knox’s doctrine’. In Edinburgh High School in 1589,
a ‘comedie’ was performed, of an apparently satirical and instructional nature, with the roles
of the Pope, the Cardinal, and five friars being taken by masters and scholars. In his Historie
of the Kirk of Scotland, John Row (b. 1568) writes that there were ‘some theatricall playes,
comedies, and other notable histories acted in publict’ in the early Reformation period. This
suggests that there were more plays than the handful recorded and that, in common with
the medieval drama, much has been lost.
The earliest recorded instance of a rudimentary court masque in Britain took place in
1285 as part of the marriage banquet of King Alexander III in Jedburgh Abbey.
Progressively, from this period down to the departure of James VI to London in 1603 – and
especially during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (court revels being well documented
from 1446 onwards) – dramatic and quasi-dramatic activities such as masques, mummings,
pageants, tournaments, spectacles, royal entries and plays were integral to court life. They
were part of a larger court culture in which music, song, poetry and dance featured large.
Minstrels, fools and tumblers had been employed at court from at least the time of Robert
the Bruce; and by the early sixteenth century, bands of French and Italian minstrels were
retained and Scottish minstrels were given royal grants to allow them to perfect their art
at minstrel schools on the continent. Semi-professional players, guisers, jesters, jugglers
and tale-tellers were also employed, and nominated officers of the court devised enter-
tainments, with texts where necessary. Thus, for example, George Buchanan wrote Latin
texts for Mary Stuart’s masques, and Alexander Montgomerie provided poems in Scots –
‘The Navigatioun’ and ‘A Cartell of the Thre Ventrous Knichts’ – to be performed at
masque-like entertainments for James VI (who himself composed a masque). Monarch and
courtiers were sometimes participants in those semi-dramatic and song-dance entertain-
ments, playing instruments and ‘disguising’ in costumes or ‘play coats’. Two ‘mummyng
gouns’ were made for King James IV in 1506–7, red and yellow taffeta was ordered for
James V’s ‘play coit’ in 1533–4, and ‘certane play gounis to the Kingis grace to pas in
maskrie’ were supplied in 1535.
Royal entries to burghs sometimes featured machinery used to spectacular effect, and
pageantry of a religious, national or Classical nature. (In his poem ‘Blyth Aberdein’,
William Dunbar offers a description of one such royal entry in 1511.) Those allegorical
pageants were on occasion performed on decorated scaffolding of one or more tiers, as men-
tioned in Sir David Lindsay’s ‘Deploratioun of the Deith of Quene Magdalene’ (1537):
‘Disgaysit folkis, lyke creaturis divyne/On ilk scaffold to play ane syndrie storie’. It is not
clear if the form these took was tableaux vivants or a drama of some kind, but it has been
claimed that scaffolding at a celebratory ‘Triumphe and Play’ performed in Edinburgh in
1558, to mark Mary Stuart’s marriage to the Dauphin of France, provided stages for what
was a genuine play.
Regarding the extent to which the court nurtured what we would now regard as more con-
ventional drama, the surviving evidence is tantalisingly incomplete. In his poem commonly
 Performances and Plays 257

called ‘Lament for the Makaris’, William Dunbar lists authors who wrote ‘tragedies’, but
whose work is lost. He also mentions a writer called ‘Patrik Johnson’, about whom there are
other references, in the 1470s and 1480s, as a writer of dramatic texts and as a play-actor
and producer of entertainments, who performed at court with the ‘playaris of Lythgo
[Linlithgow]’. Sir David Lindsay, in his poem The Testament of Papyngo, lists writers who may
also have written dramatic texts, such as Sir James Inglis, composer, he says, of ‘plesand playis
[pleasant plays]’. William Lauder wrote a play performed in 1549 at the marriage of Lady
Barbara Hamilton, and possibly the one performed to mark the marriage of Mary Stuart and
the Dauphin of France in 1558. Robert Sempill wrote a play performed in 1568 in Edinburgh
before the Regent Moray and the nobility. However, of these recorded and potential court
plays, only the texts for Sir David Lindsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis and the anony-
mous Philotus (both discussed below) have survived.
King James VI resisted the Reformers’ antipathy to drama, giving patronage to visiting
companies of English players in 1593–4, 1599 and 1601. They performed before him at
Holyrood Palace and, in 1599, he licensed them to perform in public, meeting the cost of
fitting out for that purpose a public playhouse (the first in Scotland) in Blackfriars’ Wynd
in Edinburgh. The Kirk Sessions objected, drawing in support an Act of Parliament pro-
hibiting stage plays and ‘slanderous and indecent comedies’. Nonetheless, James won the
day and permission was given to the city’s inhabitants ‘to friely at thair awne plesour repair
to the saidis commedeis and playis without ony pane, skaith, censureing, reproche or sclan-
der to be incurrit’. He did the same in 1601, directing the company to perform in Aberdeen,
too, and furnishing them with a letter of recommendation.
However, such royal protection and patronage of theatre was lost with the removal of
James to London in 1603 on his accession to the English throne. By that time, those folk and
religious dramatic forms that flourished in the medieval period had already suffered serious
decline through societal and religious change. Also, there had been a dislocation of court
culture throughout much of the sixteenth century, caused by invasions, civil war, the
Reformation and James’s long minority following his mother’s imprisonment and execution
in England. There was, therefore, no settled courtly or civic means of fostering the emer-
gence of theatre companies and playwrights as occurred in London under the patronage, first,
of Queen Elizabeth and, then, ironically, of James VI and I, who granted licences to William
Shakespeare and others. Had James remained in Scotland and continued his defence of
theatre-making, he might have similarly contributed to creating a hospitable environment
in which playwrights and theatre companies could have emerged. Aside from royal visits in
1617 and 1633, and a short period of residence by James, Duke of York (later James VII
and II), in 1679–82, Scotland lacked the focus of a royal court following James’s departure.
The absence of a monarchy left a vacuum that was filled by the Kirk, to the detriment of
those performance activities, including drama, that had characterised life at court over the
previous two centuries and more. The Kirk had developed a distinctive form of Calvinism
hostile to imaginative art, whether literary, visual or dramatic, unless it served a sacred
purpose consonant with Presbyterianism. The consequences of this antipathy, and the
absence of opposing royal influence, can be seen in the fact that, after James and his court
left in 1603, no stage play was written in Scotland until 1663. Even then, only three plays
were written between 1663 and 1700 (two staged and one unstaged). That the three authors
were episcopalians and royalists, and, therefore, scornful of Kirk diktat, is significant; as is
that the two performed plays enjoyed court patronage, being performed at Holyrood Palace
during temporary residencies by the nobility. The public pageantry associated with monar-
chy was also lost; an exception being celebratory events of a quasi-dramatic kind during the
258 Bill Findlay

visit of Charles I in 1633. Detailed descriptions of his entry to Edinburgh show it to have
been the most elaborate public spectacle staged in Scotland in the seventeenth century (a
smaller event of welcome, comprising devised entertainments, was also held in Perth). A
series of allegorical tableaux and pageants were contrived by the painter George Jamesone
and the poet Sir William Drummond of Hawthornden. The texts for the occasion, written
by Drummond, survive under the title The Entertainment of the High and Mighty Monarch
Charles, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, into his ancient and royal city of Edinburgh.
Turning to the surviving texts of what can be described as specimens of ‘formal’ plays,
the earliest are by George Buchanan in Latin, and by Sir David Lindsay in Scots. While
teaching in Bordeaux, Buchanan translated into Latin, from Greek, Medea and Alcestis by
Euripides, and he composed two original biblical dramas in Latin, Jephthes and Baptistes
(both translated into Scots by Robert Garioch in the 1950s). The translations and plays
were published in Paris and London, and the plays were translated into a number of
European languages, helping to secure a European reputation for Buchanan as a leading
humanist writer. In France, where he lived for many years, his Latin tragedies laid the foun-
dations of French Classical drama. Jephthes and Baptistes were written for performance by
students as a means of promoting the ‘new learning’ associated with the Renaissance, with
its emphasis on Greek and Latin. Both plays are biblical stories dramatising conflicts which
turn on questions of moral conscience. They show strong influence of Seneca and have
been credited as one of the chief means by which Senecan style became established in
Renaissance Europe as the appropriate mode for tragedy.
Whereas, despite their performance by students, Buchanan’s Latin plays were primarily
educational texts for study, Sir David Lindsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis was conceived
as a performance text with a social purpose, as its history shows. Lindsay spent his career at
the court of James V and the regent Mary of Guise, where he was – among senior court roles,
including Lord Lyon King of Arms from 1542 until his death in 1555 – a poet and deviser
and writer of entertainments such as pageants, masques, farces and plays, in which he was
known to perform. The Thrie Estaitis, however, was a much more serious work whose reach
went beyond the royal world. It was first performed before the king at Linlithgow Palace in
1540, then subsequently before a wider audience in Cupar in 1552 and Edinburgh in 1554.
(A dramatised trailer for the Cupar event, ‘The Cupar Proclamation’, is the only surviving
Scottish example of the medieval genre of farce.) In the process, the play grew from being
a short ‘interlude’ presented in the privacy of the court to a full-scale drama of several hours’
duration performed as a grand communal outdoor event in the capital. Its epic dimensions
are appropriate for a morality play whose satire carries a polemic calling for national reform
addressed to representatives of the three estates (clergy, lords and merchants) foregathered
with the monarch and the people at the city’s playfield.
The play is in two parts. The first is a morality tale concerning the moral illness and cure
of the individual, as personified by Rex Humanitas (King Humanity), a young king who
aspires to be noble, but is easily led astray by debauchery and by the flattery, falsehood and
deceit of courtly, clerical and secular advisers. Part one concludes with the king reformed.
Divyne Correctioun, an emissary from God, instructs him to call a parliament, and
Diligence summons the three estates to attend to change their ways. Before the play recom-
mences, and in contrast with its cast of allegorical Virtue and Vice figures, there is a real-
istic and sometimes bawdy interlude involving a pauper from near Tranent who has been
mistreated by avaricious clergy and nobility. In part two, the three estates enter backwards,
led by their vices, thus symbolising their moral turpitude. Rex Humanitas declares his
intention to reform abuses and punish wrongdoers with the help of Divyne Correctioun.
 Performances and Plays 259

We see the reformation enacted, at the heart of which is Johne the Commonweill, a rep-
resentative of the people who is given a central seat in Parliament. Acts of Parliament are
proclaimed for reform of the nation, and the king demonstrates that he will ensure probity
in the body politic and good government in the realm.
Philotus is a verse-comedy, thought to have been composed in the 1580s or 1590s. No
manuscript has survived, but it was published in 1603 with the title Ane verie excellent and
delectabill Treatise intitulit PHILOTVS. Although anonymous, three possible authors pro-
posed are the poets Robert Sempill, Alexander Montgomerie and King James VI. Each
wrote dramatic entertainments for the court: Sempill entertained Regent Morton with a
play in 1567 and King James with a ‘pastyme’ at Glasgow in 1581; Montgomerie wrote verse
to be spoken as part of a court spectacle in Edinburgh in 1579; and James VI wrote a masque
that was performed as part of the festivities at the Earl of Huntly’s wedding at Holyrood in
1586. The consensus is that the author must have been someone closely connected to the
court. No record of a performance survives, but it has been argued, partly on the basis of
internal allusions, that the play was written specifically for court performance. Certainly, in
the post-Reformation period, only within the confines of the court could be staged a
sometimes-ribald black comedy of errors about an octogenarian lecher seeking sexual plea-
sure through ensnaring a girl of fourteen into marriage, but getting his comeuppance. (The
source of the plot is Barnabe Rich’s Of Phylotus and Emilia, from his series Riche, his Farewel
to Militarie Profession, which Shakespeare drew on, too, for Twelfth Night.)
In contrast with Lindsay’s Thrie Estaitis, Philotus is much shorter, centres on what is essen-
tially a ‘domestic’ situation (prompting one description of it as a ‘bourgeois comedy’), has a
clearer structure and plot, and boasts characters that are identifiably human in their motiv-
ation and interaction rather than allegorical. Notwithstanding the use of stock characters
drawn from Italian comedy, and some concomitant stock improbabilities in the plot, Philotus
has a more modern quality than Lindsay’s work, signifying changes in literary taste that had
developed as the sixteenth century drew to a close. Unfortunately, the playwriting promise
displayed by the anonymous author of Philotus had no opportunity to develop further: in
1603, the year of the play’s first publication, the Union of the Crowns was ratified and
James VI and his Scottish court decamped to London. This removed the patronage and
audience that any such playwright would require.
The final surviving dramatic text from the sixteenth century is Pamphilus speakand of Lufe,
a verse translation into Scots by the Edinburgh poet John Burel of a Latin comoedia,
Pamphilus de Amore. It survives in a single copy published around 1590/1 and dedicated to
one of James VI’s intimates. It seems never to have been performed in its day, and was
perhaps intended as a closet play to be read. (A production experiment in 1996, however,
has confirmed that it can be effectively staged.) A love-struck youth, Pamphilus, obsesses
for a girl, Galathea, who is attracted to him, but her parents intend to marry her off to
someone else. Pamphilus seeks the help of an old lady, Anus, in having Galathea choose
between safeguarding her honour and abandoning herself to love of him. When alone with
her in Anus’s house, Pamphilus cannot contain his lust and succeeds, notwithstanding her
protests, in deflowering Galathea. Galathea is left distraught by this ‘maist filthy and profane’
deed, but her own immoderate love has been a contributory factor, as the worldly-wise Anus
informs her. There is a modern appeal in the witty and pervasively ironic way that this story
of adolescent infatuation and sexual obsession unfolds, climaxing in an ambiguous ending
which leaves one pondering whether the lovers are losers or winners.
The Thrie Estaitis, Philotus and Pamphilus are all written in Scots and demonstrate the
strengths of the language as a vehicle for a potential emergent national drama (aided by
260 Bill Findlay

the fact that two of the plays have non-Scottish settings). The consequence of the cultural
disruption which inhibited the realisation of that potential, with James VI’s departure to
England, is illustrated by Sir William Alexander’s four-part Monarchicke Tragedies: Darius
(1603), Croesus (1607), and The Alexandrean Tragedy and Julius Caesar (both 1607).
Alexander moved to London with the Scottish court and his verse tragedies show a pro-
gressive eradication of Scots from his poetic language in favour of a lifeless and prolix
English devoid of any sense of cultural rootedness. The tragedies deal with the successive
fall of four monarchies from Classical times and were intended as literature to be read; this
helps to explain why they are unactable. They were dedicated to James VI and were written
partly as instruction for his son, Prince Henry.
In the wake of the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, aristocratic patronage of dramatic
and other entertainments was able to win some respite from Kirk displeasure. The Account
Books of Sir John Foulis of Ravelston testify to this in the record they provide of his atten-
dance at plays in that period. They show, too, how the repertoire of the Tennis Court
Theatre, in the grounds of Holyrood Palace, and attended by the social elite, followed the
London repertoire, with no Scottish plays featuring after Marciano and Tarugo’s Wiles (see
below). During his residence at Holyrood from 1679 to 1682, the Duke of York encouraged
court masques and seasons of plays at the Tennis Court Theatre. As well, his presence
attracted to Edinburgh, to perform for him, companies of actors from London and Ireland.
The first post-Restoration drama written in Scotland was Marciano: or, The Discovery, by
William Clark (or Clerke), published and performed in Edinburgh in 1663. Significantly, it
was occasioned by the temporary residence at Holyrood of a company of Scottish nobility
returned from the London court. Comments by Clark in a preface to the published play
lambast the anti-drama climate created by Presbyterian intolerance, and, satirically, he has
one of his characters condemn plays as ‘profane . . . abominable, yea, abominably abom-
inable’. Set in Italy, Marciano comprises a tragic main plot in blank verse and a comic sub-
plot in prose, with the two failing to cohere convincingly. The tragedy deals with the
overthrow and restoration of a high-born ruler, thereby offering an implicit parallel with then
contemporary events. In its striving for a high rhetoric, requiring characters to strike heroic
poses, it resembles a closet drama more than a work for performance. The comedy, on the
other hand, on a love theme involving courtship and duping, is well realised and successfully
funny. Marciano shares with Philotus an Italian setting and some Italian influences, but the
modern spirit emerging in Philotus is taken further. For the first time, we have a Scottish play
that looks modern in layout on the page as a performance text, with clear divisions into acts
and scenes, and detailed stage directions throughout. Also, the traditional Scottish prefer-
ence, still evident in Philotus, for dialogue in rhyming verse, is relinquished in favour of blank
verse and prose. As with Alexander’s tragedies, however, Marciano is written in English.
So, too, is the prose play Tarugo’s Wiles: or, The Coffee House, by Thomas Sydserf (also
Sydeserf or St Serfe). It was staged in London in 1667, making Sydserf the first Scot to have
a play premiered there. It was also performed in Edinburgh in 1668, at the Tennis Court
Theatre at Holyrood. Sydeserf was manager of that theatre for a period from 1667 and ran
an acting company based nearby in the Canongate (a legal action records a violent disturb-
ance during one of the rehearsals). Betraying its Spanish models, Tarugo’s Wiles is set in
Spain, though incongruous references to London – apparently intended as a source of
(lame) humour for a London audience – disrupt the smooth progress of the plot. The action
centres on a dispute between knights over the argument that ‘the best way to secure a
woman’s honesty is close imprisonment, and that freedom furnish’d ‘em opportunity to
looseness’. The enactment of that ‘unjust slavery’ and its consequences lead in due course
 Performances and Plays 261

to acknowledged error. The theme of male domination of women retains an interest, but
the deficiencies in the play outweigh this, as confirmed by it having ‘expir’d the third day’
of its run in London.
The tension between the serious and the comic seen in Tarugo’s Wiles and Marciano also
marks Archibald Pitcairne’s The Assembly, written in 1692 but not published until 1722. It
is set in contemporary Scotland and, in it, we find a love plot which is secondary to a weight-
ier one centring on the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and what the author
sees as Presbyterian cant. The only point of overlap is that they share the same contempo-
rary background of religious and political divisions, the same satirising of Presbyterian
bigotry and hypocrisy, and that one or two Assembly men make appearances in the love plot;
otherwise they are in effect, unsatisfactorily, separate plots. The love plot is entertaining and
often funny, but the other is less effective as drama, for it is static and comprises delibera-
tions in the Assembly involving a narrow group of characters. There are amusing moments,
but Pitcairne’s preoccupation with making the Assembly members mere butts for his polit-
ical and religious satire prevents the characterisation from rising above the level of carica-
ture. His partisanship is so unrelieved, and often so blunt, that the cumulative effect is to
dull the satire. For those reasons, as well as the disjunction between the two plots and, most
significantly, the gross offence that the play might have caused because of the transparent
satirising of real people and the, at times, lewd subject matter and language, The Assembly
was never performed in its time. Pitcairne, who also wrote in Latin and is discussed in this
respect in detail by Jack MacQueen in Chapter 20, also wrote a lesser play attacking the
Presbyterian Church, Tollerators and Contollerators; a Comedy Acted in My Lord Advocats
Lodgeing, June 10, 1703.
From the vantage point of 1707, the loss by then of the country’s traditions in folk and
religious drama, and of a resident court culture to provide sustained patronage of theatre –
together compounded by the continuing hostility of the Kirk to dramatic entertainments
and the concomitant climate of discouragement for any would-be playwrights – did not
bode well for the eighteenth century. However, enlightened forces were to marshal as that
century advanced, and organised theatrical activity was to develop apace as never before,
as reflected in the building of public theatres in numerous cities and towns and the estab-
lishment of companies of professional actors.

Note

A major research project under way, Records of Early Drama: Scotland, which will result
in a four-volume publication of records relating to drama, ceremonial, and secular music
before 1642, promises to unearth a substantial quantity of new evidence that may well
revise existing thinking. It is being carried out under the auspices of REED (Records of
Early English Drama) at the University of Toronto. See http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/
~reed/reed.html.

Further reading

Cameron, A. (1987), ‘Theatre in Scotland 1660–1800’, in A. Hook (ed.), The History of

Scottish Literature, Vol. 2: 1660–1800, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press,
pp. 191–205.
262 Bill Findlay

Dibdin, J. C. (1888), The Annals of the Edinburgh Stage: With an Account of the Rise and
Progress of Dramatic Writing in Scotland, Edinburgh: Richard Cameron.
Edington, C. (1995 [1994]), Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David Lindsay of
the Mount, East Linton: Tuckwell.
Findlay, B. (1998), ‘Beginnings to 1700’, in B. Findlay (ed.), A History of Scottish Theatre,
Edinburgh: Polygon, pp. 1–79.
Tobin, T. (1974), Plays by Scots, 1660–1800, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
 28

Balladry: A Vernacular Poetic

Resource
Mary Ellen Brown

In a literary historical period spanning four hundred years – between Bruce and the battle
of Bannockburn and the Union of the Parliaments – the societal, political and religious
upheavals offered ample content for literary retelling. Only some of these occurrences,
however, were transferred to art, with battles – death and maiming – providing oft-used
subjects. William Dauney, in Ancient Scottish Melodies (1838), cites the ‘well known lines
on the memorable battle of Bannockburn in 1314:

Maydens of Englande, sore may ye morne,

For your lemmans ye have lost at Bannockysborne [. . .]

Other texts describe aspects of battles in sometimes awful detail as when Witherington
‘fought vpon his stumpes’ after ‘his leggs were smitten of’. Yet the conclusion of that same
text of ‘The Hunting of the Cheviot’ (Child 162 B) provides a sane and humane hope:

God saue our k<ing>, and blesse this land

w<i>th plentye, ioy, and peace,
And grant hencforth <tha>t foule debate
twixt noble men may ceaze!

These battles are referenced in the vernacular, illustrating a growing tendency throughout
the period under consideration, no doubt encouraged by the shift towards the use of the
vernacular in religious practice. The lines on Bannockburn are designated ‘songe’; the
stanza from Child, by its inclusion in the edition of Francis James Child, ‘ballad’.
Taxonomies may be highly context-influenced sorting mechanisms.
In the period under consideration and especially the sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century evidence, a ballad was many things; and the word might be said to reference a cap-
acious poetic approach. Exemplars were circulated orally, in manuscript, and in print and
no doubt reached many, if not all, segments of the population. Balladry was then popular
and accessible; it was not the monopoly of professional poets and songwrights, but rather
a communicative approach or cultural resource widely available. Some were songs set to
known airs; others lived only as the written word. Balladry as a form of communication was
popular; a ballad was indeed many things.
This being said, it should be acknowledged that while such a loose approach to balladry
and the ballad reflects the lived, historical use of the term as it can be reconstructed, this
264 Mary Ellen Brown

has not been the predominant scholarly approach in the last two hundred years. For the
ballad has been classified and delimited and defined as a narrative song, a story told in song;
and examples printed in Child’s collection (with much help and advice from many Scots),
now referred to as Child ballads, have taken analytic pride of place, putting broadside bal-
ladry, bothy ballads and so-called literary ballads very much on the margins. And this cer-
tainly excludes materials primarily lyrical, which turns out to have been the more historical
sense of the word.
Thus how balladry is defined will very much affect what is found between 1314 and 1707.
And in the discussion to follow both perspectives will be employed, offering implicitly
contrasting theoretical approaches – the one favouring a definition derived from histor-
ical evidence and the other surveying constructions, sometimes called ‘inventions’ or even
‘fabrications’ of the ballad outwith any historical period. There is very little overlap in the
conclusions; together, however, they begin to provide some indication of a vernacular art
whose fullness will never be known.
If, following the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘balladry’ (balletry, balladrie, ballatry) means
‘Ballad poetry; composition in the ballad style’, there are different possible definitions for
ballad, Sc. ballant, suggesting the indeterminacy of the term:

1. A song intended as the accompaniment to a dance; the tune to which the song is
sung . . .
2. A light, simple song of any kind; now a sentimental or romantic composition of two
or more verses, each of which is sung to the same melody, the musical accompaniment
being strictly subordinate to the air . . .
3. A popular song; often one celebrating or scurrilously attacking persons or institutions.
(The ‘ballad’ in this and the prec. sense was often printed as a broadsheet.) . . .
4. A proverbial saying, usually in form of a couplet; a posy . . .
5. A simple spirited poem in short stanzas, originally a ‘ballad’ in sense 3, in which some
popular story is graphically narrated. (This sense is essentially modern: with Milton,
Addison, and even Johnson, the idea of song was present.)

The survey of possible definitions underlines the instability of the word and its multiple
connotations and gives evidence that the use of the word ballad/ballit/ballatis/ballates and
so on largely keys a kind of poetic effusion.
The divisions George Bannatyne made in his 1568 ‘ballat buik’ from ‘copies awld mankit
and mvtillait’ offers an appropriate avenue into the subject: there are ‘ballatis of theoligie’,
‘ballatis full of wisdome and moralitie’, ‘ballettis mirry’, ‘ballattis of luve’, in addition to the
‘ffabillis of Esop’. This ‘buik’ is, in fact, a personal miscellany of familiar authors: David
Lindsay, Alexander Scott, Robert Henryson, James I, Alexander Montgomerie, Gavin
Douglas, Sempill of Beltrees – as well as Chaucer and Lydgate. The inclusion of the two latter
authors suggests an important point: the song and literary cultures of Scotland and England
share many exemplars, illustrating that national borders do not limit the free circulation of
art. Collections like the Bannatyne Manuscript and the miscellaneity of their contents offer
evidence of the capaciousness of the idea of the ballad. When Denton Fox and William
Ringler comment in their 1980 edition that the Bannatyne is the source for the ‘best texts’ of
works by various canonical authors, they emphasise the instability of the text – whether
printed, preserved in manuscript, or recorded from oral tradition. Variation and multifor-
mity – often thought to be earmarks of orally transmitted materials – are not reliable indica-
tors of anything but the times: notions of fixity of text were then altogether different.
 Balladry: A Vernacular Poetic Resource 265

The sources of texts are various: manuscripts such as the Bannatyne and the Maitland,
broadside copies, as well as printed collections. Many of these were ‘recovered’ and made
available in the eighteenth century by Lord Hailes and by nineteenth-century antiquaries
like David Laing (and in more recent editions with twentieth- and twenty-first-century
publication principles). In fact two major antiquarian publishing schemes named for the
two historically valuable literary manuscripts – the Bannatyne and the Maitland Clubs –
played a significant role in printing early materials, deemed valuable, especially in reveal-
ing something about the manners and customs of the earlier periods of Scottish culture
and life. A humorous poem by Walter Scott points to the manuscripts as well as to the
clubs’ role:

Assist me, ye friends of Old Books and Old Wine,

To sing in the praises of sage Bannatyne,
Who left such a treasure of old Scottish lore
As enables each age to print one volume more.
One volume more, my friends, one volume more –
We’ll ransack old Banny for one volume more

Not everything in these works – manuscript or printed – is called ballad, but the word
is a frequent designation, both in commentary and in the text title: ‘The ballad maid upoun
Margret Fleming’, ‘A Ballet shewing how a Dumb Wyff was maid to speik’, ‘A merrie
Ballad, Called, Christs Kirk on the Green’, ‘Ane Ballat maid at New Zeirismess 1559’. This
latter exemplar from the Maitland Quarto Manuscript hints at the occasional, even lyrical,
quality of some of this material:

Eternall god tak away thy scurge

from ws Scottis for thy greit mercie
Send ws thy help this land to clenge and purge
of discord and Inanimitie
Betuixt the leigis and auctoritie
that we may leif in peax withouttin weir
In lawtie, law, in luif and libertie
With merines into this new zeir.

The designation of ‘Christs Kirk’ as a ballad may confound expectation. Nonetheless, the
evidence in such manuscripts makes clear that one should not expect to be able to pin
down ‘ballad’ with any exactitude: for balladry, that which utilised the ballad style,
included a multitude of things, mostly, but not always, lyric; created by known and anony-
mous authors; often set to a tune, with air indicated, but as often as not printed or written
as ‘poem’ and presumably intended to be read; often occasional, expressing political or reli-
gious opinion; and frequently – through vagaries of transmission whether written or oral –
multiform.
Printed works, of course, provide evidence of the contemporaneous conceptualisations
of balladry/ballad that may have been widely accepted, with one of the most fascinating
being The Gude and Godlie Ballatis (1567). Probably compiled early in the sixteenth
century by John Wedderburn, the version published in 1621 by Andro Hart provides a full
title which describes the content: Ane Compendiovs Booke, of Godly and Spiritval Songs.
Collectit out of sundrie partes of the Scripture, with sundrie of other Ballates changed out of
266 Mary Ellen Brown

prophaine sanges, for avoyding of sinne and harlotrie, with augmentation of sundrie gude and godly
Ballates, not contained in the first Edition. Called ‘ballatis’, some of the material published,
especially the third part, was said to be reworkings of secular songs, set to extant, again
secular, airs. There was then a significant enough and well-known body of materials – texts
and tunes, called ballads – deemed inappropriate for religious persons to sing. The work
also underlines the shift, in some quarters, to religious expression in the vernacular, rather
than in Latin. The prologue is instructive:

The word of God Incressis plenteouslie in vs, be singing of the Psalmes, and spiritual sangis
and that speciallie amãg zoung personis [. . .] quhen thay heir it sung into thair vulgar toũg or
singis it thame selfis with sweit meledie, then sal thay lufe thair Lord God with hart and minde,
and cause them to put away baudrie and vnclene sangis.

The Scottish practice under consideration had precedent in Germany in the Reformed
Church, in Luther’s own practices, in the chansonnier of the Huguenots where profane
songs furnished the themes and words and where, for example, an editor might play with
the sense of the words, transforming secular to sacred love. Something very like this hap-
pened in transforming the song ‘John Cum Kis Me Now’. It is impossible to know exactly
which secular song influenced the appropriator here, but numerous versions exist from later
times, suggesting the popularity of the words – ‘John, come kiss me now’ – and the air, said
to have been popular as a dance tune in the seventeenth century. An eighteenth-century
version begins:

John, come kiss me now, now, now!

O John, come kiss me now!
John come kiss me by and bye,
And mak nae mair ado.

The version may well be the one Robert Burns used in 1792 when he contributed his
version to the Scots Musical Museum using as the chorus:

O John, come kiss me now, now, now;

Oh John, my luve, come kiss me now;
O John, come kiss me by and by,
For weel ye ken the way to woo. –

Clearly the initial words might spark creativity; and the religious version too begins with
the now familiar words:

Johne, cum kis me now,

Johne, cum kis me now,
Johne, cum kis me by and by,
And mak no moir adow.
The Lord, thy God, I am,
That Johne does thé call,
Johne representit man
Be grace celestiall.
 Balladry: A Vernacular Poetic Resource 267

The Gude and Godlie version turns Johne into Adam, makes the narrator God, who
describes all the ways in which he has intervened to aid Johne, to save him from damnation,
recounting all the ways Johne – man – has disobeyed. The ‘kiss’ becomes perhaps the
metaphor for acceptance of God’s word and gifts, even a mark of conversion. The Gude and
Godlie Ballatis provides a very opaque avenue into the extant, secular balladry, but does
provide support for balladry’s existing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: something
in the vernacular, something popular, widely known, something sung. The religious trans-
formation of selected examples sought to build on the secular popularity – both of words and
airs – to provide songs and ballads for the religious context, perhaps suppressing the origin-
als in the process. And the contents were called ballatis.
Another view of popular entertainment also comes from the Wedderburn family and
dates from the mid-sixteenth century – Robert Wedderburn’s The Complaynt of Scotland.
The work, dealing in part with concern for the state of Scotland, entails a defence of the
vernacular, broadly speaking, and a praise of the people’s culture. This is contained espe-
cially in Chapter VI where Wedderburn/the narrator/the Complayner may be offering an
account of the kinds of materials popular among the Knights of St John for whom
Wedderburn served as chamberlain. Whatever else, the list of entertainments – of tales and
songs and dances – has long been used to point to the existence of materials that scholars
came to call ballads late in the eighteenth century. The descriptions, examples of the copi-
ousness much admired at the time, are really titles, with no texts given. Some of the titles
are familiar: ‘robene hude and litil ihone’, ‘battel of the hayrlau’, ‘the hunttis of cheuet’,
‘The perssee & the mongumrye met that day that day that gentil day’, ‘thom of lyn’, ‘ihonne
ermistrangis dance’. The narrator who tells that they provided an interlude between work
categorises them differently:

i thynk it best that ve recreat our selfis vytht ioyus comonyng quhil on to the tyme that ve
return to the scheip fald vytht our flokkis. And to begyn sic recreatione i thynk it best that
euyrie ane of vs tel ane gude tayl or fabil to pass the tyme quhil euyn.

hinting at the framing device most familiar in the Canterbury Tales. Further, the narra-
tor says

it vil be ouer prolixt and noles tideus to reherse them agane vord be vord bot i sal reherse
su<m> of ther namys that i herd./sum vas in prose & sum vas in verse sum var storeis and sum
var flet taylis. Thir var the namis of them as eftir follouis.

First tales, then songs, then dances accompanied by the drone bagpipe, other pipes, includ-
ing the corne and one of horne, a trumpet, a recorder, a fiddle and a whistle. Nothing here
is designated ballad, but titles hint at names of ballads of the Child sort.
The word ballad, however, proliferated in the ephemeral press and was more often than
not affixed to titles of texts circulating on broadsides, witness ‘A merrie Ballad, Called,
Christs Kirk on the Green, Imprinted for Patrick Wilson, Upon the Malt – Mercat, Anno
1645’. The broadside form was capacious and indiscriminate, publishing that which would
please – by known authors and the generous anonymous. Politics was one leading subject
as evidenced by the sources James Hogg gathered in compiling and creating The Jacobite
Relics of Scotland (1819, 1821) reflecting the earlier Jacobite times. Hogg’s ‘James, come kiss
me now’, referring of course to the Stuart James, concludes
268 Mary Ellen Brown

Great James, come kiss me now, now,

Great James, come kiss me now:
Too long I’ve undone myself these years bygone,
By basely forsaking you.
Come home again, great James, great James,
Come home again, I pray:
Forgive me the crime; ever after I’ll be thine.
I call thee; do not stay.

Broadsides and various chapbooks and collections record this miscellaneous material, with
subsequent reprintings no doubt accounting for some of the variation, though editorial
interventions must account for more – especially as in the above, when a conscious play was
being made on materials long held as common resource. Add in the vagaries and creativity
of aural/oral transmission and the multiformity of this material proliferates. Prior to 1707,
balladry included just about anything poetic or song-like published, much manuscript
material, and presumably much orally transmitted material. Carrying story and sentiment,
this material might be said to pander to popular taste, vernacular offerings on human
concerns – yes, politics, but also romance, tragedy, adventure. The extant materials, the use
of the word ballad/balladry and their cognates, offer evidence.
In the latter half of the eighteenth century such loose definitional approaches began to be
replaced, perhaps first by William Shenstone in a letter to Thomas Percy, who was then
preparing his most influential The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). Shenstone
opined that he tended to think of a ballad as something that told a story and lyric as some-
thing which focused on feeling. This kind of distinction became ever more explicit in the
nineteenth century and reached its full and most influential development in the collection
of Francis James Child. While Child himself did not define the ballad satisfactorily from the
point of view of more recent scholars, the collection itself – 305 ballads in multiple versions –
has become de facto a definition: what is within is a real ballad; what is without is lesser stuff.
Child did venture a longer definition (1874) considerably before the publication of his
1882–98 edition of the sort Nick Groom in The Making of Percy’s ‘Reliques’ (1999) has called
‘poetics of the source’. Child suggested that such ballads were things of the past, that they
belonged to a certain kind of society – small, homogeneous, unlettered, isolated – that they
were short, narrative, sung art, many examples of which were internationally held in
common. Many of his ‘best’ texts were drawn from Scottish manuscripts and collections,
mostly dating from the early nineteenth century. But these late redactions were presumed to
have ‘survived’ from those remote times, being progressively and successively contemporised
in language, style and content, yielding multiple versions, presumably reflecting the wear and
tear of oral transmission.
Child’s definitional suggestion, together with the textual materials he printed, became
the starting point for David Buchan’s The Ballad and the Folk (1972). Buchan developed a
thesis that the Child ballads, many of the ‘best’ texts being Scottish, had their origins in an
early stage of oral tradition in Scotland – in fact a period roughly equivalent to the period
under consideration here, that is, 1350–1750. Building on historical evidence of a kind of
social structure of small ‘ferm touns’ before the agricultural revolution, he describes a clannit
society and offers it as the context out of which the ballads came. Focusing particularly on
the north-east of Scotland, he postulates that within the small communities, individuals
joined together for communal work and play, in a relatively homogeneous environment.
Such a context, he suggests, might have provided the ideal situation for the circulation and
 Balladry: A Vernacular Poetic Resource 269

development of ballads. There is, however, no ethnographic evidence for ballads and bal-
ladry in this environment.
Working backward, closely analysing the stylistic attributes of the texts – those Child
ballads – Buchan rearticulates the characteristics that have become the means of delimit-
ing, even defining, the Child or ‘classic’ ballad: the ‘best’ narratives tell their stories in
remarkably similar ways; they begin in the middle of things, often without any background
information; they use commonplaces to tell the story; they shift dramatically from scene
to scene; the number of characters is limited. Additionally there is considerable stability
in the stanza forms employed and the types of stories told – family tension, social tensions
and issues, love, sex, politics – packaged in magic and marvellous, romantic and tragic, his-
torical and semi-historical frames. Further, in textual analysis, Buchan points to recurrent
structural, thematic, and content materials, suggesting that the ballads under considera-
tion, at the early period of their development, were the product of a non-literate artistic
process, oral formulaic composition. This theory would account for variation, even in the
repertoire of a single singer, as each performance is both re-creation and creation. The text-
book example of this process is in the eighteenth-century repertoire of Anna Gordon,
Mrs Brown of Falkland (1747–1810), there being a paucity of historical records of this kind
of balladry earlier. We have little evidence, presumably because the materials lived only in
performance, circulating orally. Yet Buchan asserts that ‘a ballad is a narrative song created
and re-created by a traditional oral method, and the folk are the nonliterate participants
in the traditional process of composition and transmission’.
The evidence for the existence of this kind of balladry prior to 1707 is limited. Several
versions have been found, nestled with cognate materials, in early Scottish manuscripts:
‘Sir Colling’ (‘Sir Cawline’, Child 61, SRO, RH 13/15); ‘Litel Musgray’ (‘Little Musgrave
and Lady Bernard’, Child 81, Robert Edward’s Commonplace Book, NLS, MS 9450);
‘The Sheath and the Knife’ (Child 15. Helena Mennie Shire (ed.), Poems from Panmure
House, 1960).
The list in the Complaynt also provides period corroboration for the existence of some
of these 305 ballads prior to 1707; but the word ballad is not used at all: ‘robene hude and
litil ihone’ (?Child 125) is presumably one of the prose tales in the list which begins with
‘the taylis of cantirberrye’. But ‘the battle of the hayrlau’ (?Child 163), ‘the hunttis of
cheuet’ (?Child 162), ‘The perssee & the mongumrye met that day that day that gentil day’
(?Child 161) are definitely among the ‘sueit melodius sangis of natural music of the antiq-
uite’; ‘thom of lyn’ (?Child 39) and ‘ihonne ermistrangis dance’ (?Child 169) fall in the
Complayner’s category dance: ‘i beheld neuyr ane mair dilectabil recreatio<n>e’.
There are slight traces of some of the Child ballads in books by music teachers and in
manuscripts of airs/tunes; these latter are often assumed to have been conscious preserva-
tions of that which was threatened by the religious tenor of the times. Whatever the case,
what is preserved is the name of the tune and the musical line, often in tablature for lute
or viol. The Balcarres Lute Book (c. 1700) records a tune designated ‘Sweet Willie’
(?Child 74); the manuscript of Sir William Mure of Rowallan (1612–28) has a tune ‘Battel
of Harlaw’ (?Child 163); the Skene Manuscript (early seventeenth century) gives tunes
‘Ladie Cassiles Lilt’ (perhaps Child 200) and ‘Ladie Rothemayis Lilt’ (perhaps referencing
Child 196). These and other hints tantalise, but their connection with materials called
ballad today remains indeterminate.
Two other approaches to the historicity of the Child-type ballads deserve mention: the
one looks to the internal events detailed, making the assumption that such materials were
composed and created at the time of the event; the other looks to the date at which the
270 Mary Ellen Brown

ballad text was first collected or printed. M. J. C. Hodgart in The Ballads (1950) suggests
that ‘the period between 1550 and 1650 seems to have been one of the most productive of
historical or semi-historical ballads’. He offers over twenty examples of texts which might
be dated pre-1707, almost a half of which seem to deal with Scottish materials – though,
of course, their circulation was not limited to Scotland. ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ (Child 58) has
been variously dated – 1281 or 1589, depending on the historical evidence given. Yet,
whether or not the ballad belongs in the datable and historical category or the romantic
remained a mystery to one of Child’s primary correspondents, William Macmath, in a letter
contained in Volume 23 of the Child Papers, held in the Houghton Library at Harvard
University:

I was much interested in the intimation, contained in your last letter, that you have ‘finished’
Patrick Spens. Because if you have finished him you must have made up your mind in some
way about him! Either that he is historical, or that he is romantic, or that he is a person you
can say nothing distinct about one way or the other! I have thought a good deal about him
within these last years, in the hope that before you reached him I might have been able to pin
him down. But no I cannot make him any more historical than Johny Cock, a sort of typical
sailor as Johny was a sportsman.

The historicity of this and other ballads remains a matter of debate. Nonetheless, some
insist on dating ‘The Battle of Harlaw’ (Child 163) 1411, while others doubt whether the
ballad, if old, is as old as that. Yet something with that title was mentioned – as sung – in
the Complaynt the middle of the sixteenth century. The case of ‘The Bonny Earl of Murray’
(Child 181) is particularly instructive, dealing with a murder that occurred in 1592 – a
murder of the Protestant Moray/Murray, by the Catholic Huntly. For a scant five years
before Huntly himself capitulated to the Kirk, it is possible that this ballad was sung or cir-
culated and that it had considerable agency in the politico-religious conflicts. Yet, no text
was printed until 1733 in George Thomson’s Orpheus Caledonius and that version is more
lament than narrative, reflecting perhaps an audience familiar with the historical events.
Internal evidences given are sometimes fanciful, at other times convincing: the letters
written by Macmath to Child, housed at the Houghton Library, Harvard, and at the Hornel
Library, Kirkcudbright, reveal careful exploration of the historical salience of various texts,
such as ‘The Baron of Brackley’ (Child 203). Such analyses add a number of ballads, of the
narrative sort, to the historical record.
Dating ballad texts by their first appearances in print or manuscript offers another means
of expanding the known parameters of the ballad corpus. Yet only a little over thirty texts of
Child ballads were recorded in manuscript or print prior to 1707. And the earliest examples
date from English manuscripts and broadsides. ‘Johnie Armstrong’ (Child 169), called
‘A Northern Ballet’ in Wit Restord in severall Select Poems not formerly publisht (London,
1658); ‘The Sweet Trinity’ (The Golden Vanity) (Child 286A), called ‘Sir Walter Raleigh
sailing in the Lowlands’ can be found in Pepys’s collection, presumably made between 1682
and 1685; ‘The Hunting of the Cheviot’ (Child 162) is first found in the Bodleian’s Ashmole
28, dated 1550 at the earliest. It is possible that careful review of all Scottish manuscripts
and broadsides will identify other early versions of the Child ballads.
If books were published, manuscripts made, someone was reading them, perhaps even
using them as reading or performance texts. Broadsides, by their very nature, are much
more ephemeral, sometimes used up, that is read, shared, employed as aides memoires, until
the paper itself disintegrated. Such printed ephemera were produced in bulk and some have
 Balladry: A Vernacular Poetic Resource 271

survived. There are tantalising hints of their distribution. The Edinburgh magistrates
inveighed against them in the late sixteenth century. Slightly later sources reveal that
many beggars or minstrels were singers of songs that they sold; and some of these minstrels
were under protection, others were not. Aberdeen’s Charles Leslie, or Mussel-mou’d
Charlie, born within the period under consideration (1677–1782), was widely known in
the north-east as a seller and a singer. William Walker, in The Bards of Bon Accord:
1375–1860 (1897), observes:

He took early in life to hawking and singing ballads through the country – a Jacobite Homer
singing his own compositions – and was ever a welcome presence in the hamlets of the shire
in those days, when news travelled slowly, and gossips were less numerous than now. He was
a most devoted Jacobite – sang everywhere their bitterest satires, and very probably was the
‘impious wretch’ whom the author of ‘Scotland’s Glory and her Shame’ heard at Laurence Fair,
singing that abominable song, ‘Whirry Whigs awa, man’, to the delight of the ‘profane rabble’.

Leslie sang and sold Child ballads as well as explicitly Jacobite material, some of which
he claimed as his own composition. This underlines the miscellaneity of the materials under
consideration. Some were sold and sung in the streets; the Complaynt suggests their use as
entertainment, as interval between work; some appeared in printed collections, presumably
headed for consumption in the parlour. Certainly a work like Thomson’s Orpheus Caledonius,
in which ‘The Bonny Earl of Murray’ was first published, was destined for the parlour and
reflected the ‘Scotch’ craze of the early eighteenth century. Suffice it to say, that balladry was
spread throughout society and that ballads were a widely available artistic resource. Between
1314 and 1707, ‘ballad’ references a variety of artistic expressions in the vernacular –
whether secular or sacred, political or romantic, local or international – frequently multi-
form, that is existing in versions.
To compose a ballad was to know the prevailing grammar of balladry – suitable topics,
whether incipits and explicits were appropriate, what airs were available, major speech
styles associated with recurrent kinds of situations, shared ways of expression, codes with
connotative significance within the interpretative community. And ballad grammars have
changed through time: first the ballad was lyric and somewhat reflective, later more narra-
tive approaches seem to have been added. When Andrew Lang wrote of how to forge a
border ballad, he was at once interrogating ideas of authenticity that were rampant and
suggesting that, to compose such a ballad, one only needed to understand the rules. In his
introduction to J. A. Farrar’s Literary Forgeries (1907), he suggests:

Take The Border Papers, edited by Joseph Bain (1890). Select a good rousing incident, say the
slaying of Ridley, at the Newcastle football match (May, 1599). Write it with as many rhymes
in e as possible. Avoid profusion of obsolete words. Carefully abstain from dropping into poetry.
Add a few anachronisms, and distort historical facts to taste; employ regular ballad formulae
sparingly and with caution, strain off, dish, and serve up with historical notes, adding to taste
fables about your source a la Surtees. Remember that nothing can be less like an old ballad
than the ballads of Mr D. G. Rossetti.

Balladry was popular. Whatever a ballad was, it enabled individuals, talented or not, to
express themselves poetically and stand a chance of being heard; and there was far more of
it – whether lyric or narrative – than can be recovered today. Balladry probably touched
all portions of society and these ephemeral, occasional compositions, available for scrutiny
272 Mary Ellen Brown

today in limited exemplars, attest to a poetic resource widely and richly employed and
sometimes reached poetic heights as in Child 58, ‘Sir Patrick Spens’:

The king sits in Dumferling toune,

Drinking the blude-reid wine:
‘O whar will I get guid sailor,
To sail this schip of mine?’

The first line that Sir Patrick red,

A loud lauch lauched he;
The next line that Sir Patrick red,
The teir blinded his ee.

Haf owre, haf owre to Aberdour,

It’s fiftie fadom deip,
And thair lies guide Sir Patrick Spence,
Wi the Scots lords at his feit.

Further reading

Bannatyne, George (1980), The Bannatyne Manuscript (with an introduction by Denton

Fox and William Ringler), London: Scolar.
Child, Francis James (1882–98), The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Craigie, W. A. (ed.) (1920), The Maitland Quarto Manuscript, Edinburgh: William
Blackwood.
Mitchell, A. F. (ed.) (1897), The Gude and Godlie Ballatis, Edinburgh: Blackwood.
Wedderburn, Robert (1979), The Complaynt of Scotland, Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society.
 29

Older Scots Literature and the

Court
Sally Mapstone

The early history of Scots literature suggests that the Stewart royal court will play a major
part in defining its course. Yet, this is not what immediately transpires. Following the death
of James I in 1437, literature is generated more commonly outwith the royal household than
inside it. It is not until the end of the fifteenth century that the royal court re-establishes a
significant role in the patronage and reception of literary texts. Writers like William Dunbar
and David Lindsay may deservedly be called court poets, but the periods of minority rule
that complicate Scottish political life in the sixteenth century mean that a royal audience
is not a sustained phenomenon even during Lindsay’s career. Not until the reign of James
VI is literary culture truly at the centre of life at the court of a Scottish sovereign.
During the reign of the first Stewart king, Robert II (1371–90), John Barbour composed
a now-lost verse genealogy of the Stewart family, ‘The Stewartis Orygenale’; this was very
likely to have been a commission from Robert II. It was probably also for Robert, but with
a wider audience too in view, that Barbour wrote his Bruce (c. 1375), a historically based
‘romance’ celebrating the achievements of Robert II’s grandfather, Robert I, in the Wars of
Independence at the beginning of the century. By the time he composed these poems,
Barbour was archdeacon of Aberdeen; he was also in the Crown’s employ as an auditor of
the exchequer. The itinerant nature of the royal household at this period meant that
Barbour had many opportunities for contact with it. But Barbour was not straightforwardly
a ‘court poet’. The pension that he received from 1388 until his death in 1395 may have
been in acknowledgement of one or both of his major works, but it came at the end of his
career as a churchman.
The Bruce, moreover, celebrates Robert the Bruce; but it also celebrates James Douglas.
The Stewarts were a new dynasty, and one that had had to negotiate with interested parties,
including the Douglases, to establish itself after the death of David II in 1371. The Bruce’s
advocacy of the Crown–Douglas accord may employ its version of the historical past to
provide a remedial lesson for the present; but while acknowledging the historical right and
royal worthiness of Bruce, the Stewart ancestor, it also gives full acknowledgement to his
major magnate supporter.
The closeness in standing between the Scottish monarchy and the Scottish nobility is
reflected in the dominant role which magnates play in the transmission of Scottish lit-
erature throughout the fifteenth century. This is evinced in the rapidity with which The
Bruce circulated outwith the environment of the royal court in the half-century following
its composition. Andrew of Wyntoun pays tribute to Barbour’s poem in his Orygynale
Cronykil (c. 1413–20). Wyntoun was prior of the house of Augustinian canons regular at
274 Sally Mapstone

St Serf’s, Loch Leven, Fife. His chronicle consists both of his own writing and, for the
reigns of David II and Robert II, the interpolated contributions of another, anonymous,
chronicler. Wyntoun produced his work for a local laird, Sir John Wemyss of Reres, whom
Wyntoun describes as one whose lordship is ‘nocht lik/To gretare lordis in the kinrik’.
Wemyss, however, was a valued supporter of Robert, Earl of Fife, and later Duke of Albany.
The second son of Robert II, Fife wrested control of the country from that king during
the 1380s, did so again after his older brother Robert III’s succession and, as Duke of
Albany, was governor during the minority and imprisonment in England (1406–24) of
the future James I. Unsurprisingly, the estimation of Albany given in Wyntoun’s chroni-
cle is fulsome. Thus, while Wyntoun supports Barbour’s presentation of the ancestor of the
first Stewart monarch, his chronicle also reflects the views of a Stewart political grouping
whose interests were often athwart those of the Crown. Despite its avowedly localised
origins, Wyntoun’s work intersects with concerns at the Scottish court, but it sits far less
comfortably with a royalist reading of history than had Barbour’s Bruce.
The historical focus of the literature produced in the reigns of the first two Stewart mon-
archs followed a trend established in the Latin chronicle of John of Fordun, composed
c. 1365–75. Fordun’s defence of the historic freedom of the Scottish nation and his
endorsement of the principle of requisite loyalty to the hereditary king, if not specifically
designed to support the Stewart dynasty, was certainly advantageous to it. In the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries the subject of kingship is one central to Scottish literature. In the
reign of James I, however, it received treatment from an innovatory angle.
The ‘court riall’ that appears within the dream section of James’s poem, the Kingis Quair
(c. 1424), is that of Minerva, goddess of wisdom. Royal as it is, however, it functions as a
court in relation to that of another queenly goddess, Venus. With the support of a third
goddess, Fortune, Venus and Minerva assist the poem’s protagonist in his search for fulfil-
ment in love. The Kingis Quair is expressed from a reflective vantage-point that equates
success in love with acquisition of wisdom, and, given the poem’s thinly disguised references
to the life-history of James I, with attainment of kingly self-government. The protagonist
emerges from his dream into a time in which the lady he has loved from afar has become his
‘sovirane’, an allusion to James’s marriage to Joan Beaufort in 1424, the year in which he also
finally obtained his Scottish kingdom. Long service in a love culminating in marriage is seen
as strongly empowering in the Kingis Quair and in its focus on the attainment of a ‘real-life’
queen the poem hints at a new, Scottish courtly setting for its celebratory conclusion.
The Kingis Quair thus puts the amatory into an ethical context. In so doing, the poem
starts off what becomes a pervasive trend in older Scots literature. And it inaugurates
another, equally testing, relationship, that between literature that is courtly and literature
that is of the court. As Derek Pearsall notes in Old and Middle English Poetry (1977), there
is necessarily an overlap between medieval literature reflecting ‘the values and sensibilities’
of a court environment and literature ‘produced in and for’ such a setting. Equally, however,
Pearsall observes that ‘a possible distinction [between them] is more necessary than ever in
the fifteenth century’. Particularly for Scotland. For despite the start that is made under
Robert II, with Barbour’s Bruce, and under James I with the king’s own Quair, a literature
composed primarily for the royal court cannot thereafter be demonstrated with consistency
in Scotland until the late fifteenth century. But literature engaged with concepts of the
court and the courtly is a continuing facet of the older Scots literary tradition.
The Kingis Quair should be seen as a defining moment in the establishing of Scottish
‘courtly’ values, not as an aberration in older Scots literary culture. Denton Fox went as far
in his chapter, ‘Middle Scots Poets and Patrons’, in Scattergood and Sherborne’s English
 Older Scots Literature and the Court 275

Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages (1983), as to label it as ‘a product of the English court,
not the Scots court’. A sixteenth-century inscription in the MS of the poem indeed com-
ments that the Kingis Quair was ‘maid quhen his maiestie wes in Ingland’, but it is clear
from the events to which the poem refers that it was composed when James was moving
from an English to a Scottish context. During his lengthy sojourn in England, James had
had ample opportunity to observe the Lancastrian monarchy. James’s practice of kingship
in Scotland certainly borrowed from the decisiveness and dynastic self-consciousness of
Henry IV and V. As the Kingis Quair illustrates, he had also absorbed the literary produc-
tions both of the reign of Richard II, the king Henry IV had displaced in 1399, and of the
reigns of Henry IV (1399–1413) and Henry V (1413–22) themselves. But his poem treats
its English inheritance with cultural creativity.
It is thus that the Kingis Quair delivers a positive resolution to its amatory dilemma in a
manner that contrasts with the painful or contentious conclusions to Chaucer’s Knight’s
Tale and Troilus, and Gower’s Confessio Amantis. This positivity may be influenced by a
poem composed during the early fifteenth century by one of the Lancastrian dynasty’s
favoured poets, John Lydgate’s Temple of Glass. But the Kingis Quair leaves its narrator with
a confident sense of inclusion in a beneficent divine scheme of things rather than excluded
from the court of love as is the fate of the dreamer-narrator of Lydgate’s poem.
The Kingis Quair also dovetails with considerable originality two major kinds of ‘courtly’
text, the dit amoureux and advisory writing. Amatory literature, of dream, of complaint, of
courts of love, was staple royal and aristocratic fare in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
English and French writing; so too were texts counselling monarchs and nobility on king-
ship and good conduct. The poem had far more of a legacy in Scotland than has been
understood. A Latin poetic epitaph on James I, included in a copy of Walter Bower’s
Scotichronicon, addresses James as both the ‘Source of morals’ and the ‘devotee of Love’. It
appeals to Venus, Minerva and Fortune in the same order as in the Kingis Quair, paying an
intertextual debt to the king’s own poem within its commemoration of him. This tribute
suggests that the yoking of love and wisdom was recognised in both the Scottish court circle
in which the Kingis Quair originated and beyond it as a theme promoted by their king.
By the late 1480s, moreover, a poem that started life in the royal court was being copied
into a high-quality manuscript made for an aristocratic patron: Henry, first Lord Sinclair.
The Sinclairs had had family links to James I, Henry, second Earl of Orkney, and his brother
John having spent time with James in England during his captivity. Subsequent Sinclairs
saw royal service. Their Lowland bases in Roslin, and (from 1470) Ravenscraig, were rela-
tively close to Edinburgh, where the royal court was now commonly based. But there is no
reason to think that the Sinclairs were dependent on the royal court for their exposure to
matters literary. If the Kingis Quair manuscript was, to cite Kathleen Forni’s The Chaucerian
Apocrypha: A Counterfeit Canon (2001), ‘the possession of a small courtly circle’, it must be
understood that, while that circle at times included royalty, the MS itself originated in an
aristocratic household. There is indeed better evidence for the Sinclairs as patrons of courtly
literature in the half-century following the reign of James I than there is for the Scottish
monarchy espousing such pursuits.
While he was James II’s chancellor in 1455–6, Earl William Sinclair commissioned Sir
Gilbert Hay to translate from French versions of three works in the European advisory tra-
dition: the Buke of the Law of Armys, the Buke of the Ordre of Knychthede and the Buke of the
Gouernaunce of Princis. Hay writes that he made the translation of the Buke of the Law of
Armys ‘in his [Sinclair’s] castell of Rosselyn’, that is, in the earl’s household, rather than chez
the earl’s master, King James II. And indeed, shortly after the time when this translation
276 Sally Mapstone

was completed, James II removed Sinclair from the chancellorship. Sinclair’s literary inter-
ests do not seem to have benefited him at the royal court.
Around the time that the Kingis Quair MS was put together in the late 1480s, its first
scribe also made a copy of the Hay prose translations for Oliver Sinclair, Earl William
Sinclair’s second son, inheritor of the Roslin estate. Oliver was the uncle of Henry Lord
Sinclair, whose base was Ravenscraig. Successive generations of the Sinclair family thus
commissioned works and had others copied for them, and this pattern was consolidated in
the next century with the dedication of Gavin Douglas’s Eneados to Lord Henry in 1513.
Sinclair bibliophilia continued to be important in Scottish cultural life in the second half
of the sixteenth century: two of the major collectors, of MSS and printed books, were
Henry Sinclair, bishop of Ross (d. 1565) and William Sinclair, laird of Roslin (d. 1585).
Such a consistent interest in literary culture cannot be established for James I’s successors.
The earlier of the two Scottish Alexander romances, The Buik of Alexander, has a self-
consciously ‘courtly’ prologue to its ‘Avowis of Alexander’ section, and the poem highlights
virtuous deeds of arms and informed love discourse in a manner that suggests a continuity
of interest from the Kingis Quair. But there is no reason to see this poem as an emanation of
the royal court. Its colophon (surviving now in the Buik’s sole witness, printed in 1580) notes
that the poem was concluded in 1438. This was the year after James I had been murdered;
within the Scottish political community machinations for control of government were the
order of the day. The Crown’s party – James’s widow, Queen Joan, and her allies – were being
sidelined as Archibald, fifth Earl of Douglas, was commissioned by Parliament to act as lieu-
tenant-general. It is more likely that The Buik of Alexander was written in an aristocratic
household than amidst the disarray of the royal entourage.
Several major works were composed in James II’s reign, but they all have points of origin
other than the royal court. Bower’s Scotichronicon, a chronicle building on Fordun’s, was
written with the young James II in mind, and takes a largely royalist stance. But it was com-
piled, in the 1440s during James’s minority, at the Augustinian abbey of Inchcolm, of which
Bower was abbot, and at the request of a minor member of the Stewart family, Sir David
Stewart of Rosyth. As James II was emerging from his minority in the late 1440s, Richard
Holland, secretary to Archibald Douglas, Earl of Moray, dedicated to Douglas’s wife,
Elizabeth Dunbar, The Buke of the Howlat. In this elaborate alliterative poem, a bird-fable
frame encases a narrative that itself embraces allegorised allusions to events and individu-
als, continental and Scottish, ecclesiastical and secular.
The Douglas family, in fact, is comparable with the Sinclairs in the longevity of its lit-
erary patronage. But Douglas patronage has a solipsistic focus. Evidence in The Bruce and
The Scotichronicon indicates that the Black Douglases were associated with works in their
own honour from at least the fourteenth century onwards. Holland continues that pattern
placing an encomiastic resumé of Douglas titles at the heart of the Howlat, and in so doing
moving to one side an already brief tribute to the Scottish Crown. Though the Howlat
revives the Bruceian trope of Douglas loyalty to the Crown, its recitation of Douglas might
have an undercurrent of aggression to it.
Holland’s brilliant poem had a clear appeal beyond its immediate audience. Reference
is made to it in The Wallace (late 1470s), it was printed c. 1509 by Chepman and Myllar,
and it was copied into the Asloan Manuscript (c. 1513–20). It is thus quite possible that it
reached the royal court; had it done so early on it would have fed James II’s conviction that
his authority must be confirmed by dealing decisively with the most powerful magnate
family in his kingdom. The killing of William, eighth Earl of Douglas, by James II and sup-
porters in Stirling Castle in February 1452 and the subsequent three-year hostilities against
 Older Scots Literature and the Court 277

his surviving brothers led to the devastation of the Black Douglases’ territorial holdings
and the diminution of their influence.
Sir Gilbert Hay’s massive Alexander verse romance, the Buik of King Alexander the
Conquerour was composed (most probably c. 1460) for Thomas, second Lord Erskine. The
poem survives in sixteenth-century copies of a recension completed in 1499, so the degree
to which it represents Hay’s original composition is unclear. However, a distinct continu-
ity with his prose translations is evinced through the incorporation into the Buik of King
Alexander the Conquerour of a ‘Regiment of Princis’. The emphasis on advice to princes lit-
erature in Hay’s prose and verse works is likely to reflect the interests of his aristocratic
patrons. Like the Sinclairs, the Erskines had reason during the 1450s to contemplate the
impact of the exercise of kingly power. In 1457, Thomas Erskine, Hay’s patron, received a
major rebuff from the Crown when a court in Aberdeen found for James II in the matter
of the Erskines’ claim to the earldom of Mar and Garioch, a title appropriated from their
family to the Crown by James I in 1435. There are, moreover, other things that link the
Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour pertinently back to courtly circles. Its ‘Regiment’
shares phrasing with one work definitely produced for James II, though not commissioned
by him, the vernacular poem known as De Regimine Principum. The earliest text of this
poem is found in the Liber Pluscardensis chronicle, a Latin work completed c. 1460 for
Richard Bothwell, abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Dunfermline. Like other major
churchmen of his day, Bothwell spent much time in governmental circles. In the 1450s he
served among the Lords of Articles and he was also an auditor of the exchequer.
The Liber Pluscardensis and De Regimine Principum were written by authors close to the
heart of political activity in the reign of James II; they bear witness to political agendas that
are consonant with Abbot Bothwell’s activities and tally with the business of James’s par-
liaments. Chronicle and poem make recommendations about improving the execution of
justice and the Crown’s economy. The crucial nature of the king’s role in these affairs is
emphasised by the poem’s direct addresses to him. Both the Liber Pluscardensis and De
Regimine Principum illustrate the almost paradoxical nature of fifteenth-century Scottish
‘court’ literature. They are more closely in tune with contemporary political matters than
any other literary material from the reigns of James II or James III. Yet, their patron was a
cleric, and the Liber Pluscardensis was probably compiled in Pluscarden in Morayshire.
Several of these works from the reign of James II or minority of James III – the Howlat, the
Liber Pluscardensis and the Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour – have associations with
the north-east. All of these works also travelled. De Regimine Principum was as widely dis-
seminated as the Howlat. Like that poem, it was an early Chepman and Myllar publication
in Edinburgh c.1509, and it was still being copied, in manuscript form, into the Maitland
Folio MS in the Lowlands, c. 1570.
The best-known works of the reign of James III are The Wallace and the poems of Robert
Henryson. Neither stems directly from the royal court, but both authors write with a sense
of relation to it. Indeed, the switch in emphasis from royal to non-royal literary commis-
sioning in the century following the composition of The Bruce is well illustrated by the way
in which The Wallace originates from outside the royal household, and in conditions of ide-
ological opposition to it. Unlike his father, who was blown up by one of his own canon
during the siege of Roxburgh against the English in 1460, James III was by the late 1470s
pursuing a pro-English policy, which was much distrusted by the more conservative
members of the political community. The Wallace was composed around this time for
two Lowland lairds, Sir William Wallace of Craigie (in Ayrshire) and Sir James Liddale of
Halkerton (near Edinburgh). Their resistance to the policy of the king’s party was fuelled
278 Sally Mapstone

by its antipathy to their localised interests, which prospered on the instability derived from
border hostilities. In The Wallace these parochial viewpoints are translated into a virulently
nationalistic agenda. And The Wallace reworks The Bruce, the themes of that poem, and the
Bruce, the perceptions of the historic figure, in ways unfavourable to Barbour’s poem and
the Stewarts’ ancestor. The hero of Scotland’s struggle for independence is now William
Wallace. Bruce is presented as an embattled figure, compromised by alliance to the English
for large parts of the poem, goaded eventually by Wallace into assuming his true responsi-
bilities to his country, but still not fully invested in kingship at The Wallace’s conclusion.
In a manner interestingly comparable to the situation with Wyntoun’s Cronykil, The
Wallace’s patrons, though on the face of it minor magnates, had connections to those with
much more political clout. And again, as with Wyntoun, the most telling of these was with
a disaffected brother of the monarch. Liddale was steward to James III’s brother, Alexander,
Duke of Albany; indeed he was involved in the Lauder Bridge rebellion in 1482, in which
James III was temporarily imprisoned by the Albany faction. Liddale was in fact executed
for his part in this business, c. 1485. By the time of the reign of James IV, however, the
Scottish Crown’s hostility to one of The Wallace’s patrons was not being extended to the
poem or, it appears, its author. If, as John Mair first suggested c. 1520, he was known as
Blind Harry, he could not have been, as Mair states, a minstrel, blind from birth. Its
Chaucerian allusions and borrowings from Bower’s chronicle prove that The Wallace was
written by a learned man. It is thus not certain that the ‘Hary’ who received payments at
James IV’s court in 1490–2 is to be identified with the author of The Wallace. But if the king
did, belatedly, offer recognition to the author of an epic poem originally composed in con-
ditions of hostility to the Crown, this would explain why Chepman and Myllar felt them-
selves in a position to publish a folio edition of The Wallace c. 1509.
Robert Henryson’s immediate audience was based around the abbey and grammar school
at Dunfermline. Henryson was a university-educated man, who worked both as a school-
master and a notary public. Under Abbot Bothwell, Dunfermline Abbey had thrived. It
was noted in 1468 that he had ‘enriched [the abbey] with books, ecclesiastical ornaments
and jewels, and [. . .] repaired the buildings of the monastery’. In this literate and stimu-
lating environment, Henryson flourished. Whereas Holland, Hay and Harry had treated
the matter of their patronage with attention, Henryson handles the issue with a lightness
of touch that testifies to the different circumstances in which he wrote. He claims that his
Fables are composed ‘be requeist and precept of ane lord, / Of quhome the name it neidis
nocht record’. The ironic lip-service Henryson pays to the idea of commissioning is indica-
tive of an independent frame of mind that informs all his major works.
This is unequivocally evident in the boldness of Henryson’s response to Chaucer’s Troilus
in his Testament of Cresseid. Continuing the pattern set up by the Kingis Quair, Henryson
treats the essentials of a Chaucerian model to significant reinterpretation. In Henryson’s
recasting of the love-story, it is Cresseid rather than Troilus who moves at death to a posi-
tion of self-knowledge. Thus while again in the tradition of the Kingis Quair, Henryson’s
poem links amatory experience with the way to self-knowledge, it makes far more explicit
the distinction between true love and carnal indulgence. In the Testament, moreover, the
court is not seen in a positive light. Rather, it is a place associated with promiscuity:
Cresseid becomes a prostitute, ‘into the court, commoun’. Self-knowledge is to be found in
the margins of society, in a leper-house. The problematisation of courtliness in the
Testament is consonant with the critical gaze that Henryson bestows on the relation
between humankind and society. Henryson can be a politically engaged writer, but he is a
much less polemical one than Harry, and his emphasis is on seemingly intractable problems,
 Older Scots Literature and the Court 279

both in human self-government and in political or judicial government. Nonetheless, it is

striking that the Fables expose similar concerns to those of The Wallace. In ‘The Lion and
the Mouse’, the advice to princes fable that Henryson situates at the centre of his collec-
tion, the question of the balance between strong kingship and its fallible, at worst, tyran-
nical, potential is left unresolved, as in Harry’s poem.
By the time he (as a parliament after his death put it) ‘happinnit to be slane’ during a
magnate rebellion against him in 1488, James III had ruled longer than either of his two
predecessors. The last decade of his reign was marked by the alienation of tracts of the
magnate community. It is arguable, however, that these worsening relations were actually
fuelled by the formation among James’s advisers of what Roger Mason has termed a ‘royal-
ist ideology’, committed to manifestations of the sovereign’s ‘imperial’ power, and identifi-
able as a European as well as a Scottish phenomenon. The minting in 1485 of the silver
groat bearing James’s head with a closed imperial crown was one demonstration of this. A
discernible, if belated, interest on the part of Scottish monarchy in literary commissioning
may have been another. In the last years of the reign of James III, John Ireland composed a
treatise on confession in ‘the castell of Edinburgh, in the court of our souerane lord’. And
it was for James III that Ireland originally wrote his seven-book Meroure of Wyssdome, a work
re-dedicated to James IV, c. 1490. Ireland was not a top-flight churchman and politician,
but he occupied influential niches in circles around James III and his son. Ireland declares
that ‘the making of this buk he [James III] desirit richt gretlie, and sa did his pepil’, an asser-
tion of the accord of courtly and public taste that is underscored by the Meroure’s theolog-
ical and ethical focuses.
As the reign of James IV took shape, however, it became apparent that taste at court was
very much for things active as well as contemplative. For all his bruited piety, James had
an equal passion for chivalry and tournament. This sense of an almost schizophrenic royal
personality given both to extremes of abstinence and indulgence is captured in the writing
of William Dunbar, one of the two premier poets of James IV’s reign. Dunbar’s own extra-
ordinary variousness as a poet, his equal facility with the pious and the bawdy, transmits
the mixed moods of James IV’s court. Yet though Dunbar spent much of his adult life as a
‘servitour’ in James’s household, the payments he received are more likely to have been for
clerical work than for poetry. It is possible that the substantial increments to his pension
in 1507 and 1510 also recognised his work as a poet; in which case, like Barbour, Dunbar
received royal reward for his writing in the latter stages of his career.
What goes on ‘in cowrt’ dominates Dunbar’s writing, from the elaborate pageantry asso-
ciated with James’s marriage to Margaret Tudor in 1503 to the informal comedy of ‘a dance
in the quenis chalmer’. Yet, as suggested, for Dunbar the court is a contradictory entity – as
he says, ‘courtis dois wary’. And that, as Dunbar writes elsewhere, ‘Vertew the court hes done
dispys’, becomes a key aspect of the imaging of the court in sixteenth-century Scottish
writing. The idea of court life as varying between the ideal and the troubled is explored in
the dream-vision Palice of Honour, composed by Dunbar’s contemporary Gavin Douglas, c.
1500. In what it is tempting to see as a subtle restyling of themes in the Kingis Quair, the nar-
rator encounters the courts of Minerva, Diana, Venus, the Muses, and eventually, Honour,
and experiences courts as both itinerant and settled, unreliable and sublime. He also expe-
riences the court in its judicial role, something established as a motif in the writings of
Holland and Henryson and developed by sixteenth-century writers. Strikingly, it is once
more an amatory court, of Venus, which gives the narrator his most acute difficulties, and
the poem’s association of love and instability is contrasted with its association of the court
of Honour with ‘verteous warkis’. The poem suggests that courtly poetry should have a moral
280 Sally Mapstone

focus, and within it Douglas hints at his next major work, his Eneados, completed c. 1513.
However, while the young Douglas dedicated his Palice to James IV, the more mature poet
dedicated his weighty Eneados to Lord Henry Sinclair. That Sinclair should be deemed a
more fitting patron than the king for the first translation into the Scots vernacular of a
Classical epic is indicative of the degree to which the Scottish Crown had still not consoli-
dated its role as a literary sponsor.
After the 1513 battle of Flodden, in which both James IV and Henry Sinclair were killed,
Douglas turned from poetry to politics. Indeed, in the wake of the devastating destruction
to the Scottish ruling classes brought about at Flodden, Scottish cultural life was at a low
ebb for the next fifteen years. But the coming of the mature rule of the next Stewart king,
James V, in the late 1520s, showed that the definitions to royal court culture commenced in
the reign of James IV did leave a significant legacy. A new phase is inaugurated with the
writings of Sir David Lindsay. For much of his career Lindsay was employed by the Crown
or its representatives in a heraldic capacity. This involved him directly in the creation of
court culture. But Lindsay also had direct experience of the instabilities of court life. The
career at court that he had begun in the reign of James IV was disrupted by the ascendancy
of the Douglases in the minority of James V; and James V’s early death in 1542 also affected
Lindsay’s standing.
Lindsay’s poetry from the reign of James V links the royal court more closely with liter-
ary culture than Dunbar’s or Douglas’s had done, and it also explores the concept of the
court more extensively than had either of those poets. Both these things are at their most
apparent in Lindsay’s Testament of the Papyngo, written in 1530. Cataloguing his poetic con-
temporaries, Lindsay associates success in poetry-making explicitly to those who ‘in the
court bene present’. More dramatically still, the metaphor of the dangerously unstable court
monopolises the central section of the poem, addressed by the dying parrot to her ‘Brether
of Court’. The fall of princes catalogue and the personification of the court as the wayward
‘Dame Curia’ work on the convenient premise that all courts are essentially variable, but
the insistent return to matters Scottish reinforces the peculiar relevance of this message to
that country.
One of the contemporary poets applauded in the Papyngo, was John Bellenden, who,
according to Lindsay, simply needed to ‘Gett [. . .] in to the courte auctoritie’ and his rep-
utation would be made. Bellenden cemented his royal recognition by making for James V
a translation of Hector Boece’s Scotorum Historia. Boece’s Latin work had been printed in
Paris in 1527. Boece had dedicated it to James V, but Bellenden’s translating enterprise
coincided with the commencement of James V’s reign proper. He presented the translation
to the king in 1533, and it was printed by the king’s printer, Thomas Davidson, between
1536 and 1540. The striking textual differences between the manuscript and printed ver-
sions of Bellenden’s Chronicles of Scotland, however, reveal that Bellenden’s allegiances
were not exclusively with the Crown. Bellenden makes additions to his translation,
unprecedented in Boece’s Latin, that applaud the Black Douglas family. Bellenden had
factional links with the Douglases that may have harmed his career at court in the later
1520s. The changes he makes to his translation demonstrate that his support for the family
continued, even in a work ostensibly serving the purpose of providing James V (not a great
Latinist) with a translation of Boece’s broadly royalist chronicle. Once more, it is Douglas
interests that complicate the royal focus of a work within the Scottish historiographical
and advisory tradition.
Appended to the Chronicles is Bellenden’s verse ‘The Proheme of the Cosmographe’. This
continues the Scottish courtly dream-vision tradition and continues also to ally an amorous
 Older Scots Literature and the Court 281

context to the exploring of issues of good self- and kingly government. The narrator wit-
nesses a debate between the allegorical ladies, Virtue and Delight. They are appearing before
a crowned king, surrounded by ‘courtlie gallandis’, who is to choose which one of the ladies
will become his ‘hie Empryis’. The dreamer wakes before he can discover the result, but he
recognises that his dream has figured the famous trope of Hercules at the crossroads, choos-
ing between ‘lust’ or ‘virtew’. The poem’s conclusion inclines strongly towards virtue, and
(recalling Douglas’s Palice) to the idea of poetry as a virtuous activity, but its recognition
that both options are open to poets and to courtiers makes it a suggestive restatement of this
major theme in older Scots courtly writing.
Bellenden’s writing has consonance with that of another poet characterised by Lindsay
as a court writer, William Stewart, who was a servitor both to Margaret Tudor and to James
V. Stewart also produced a translation, in verse, of Boece’s Historia, though this appears to
have been eclipsed by Bellenden’s and was not printed. Their shared concerns indicate a
discernibly developing court culture. Stewart too writes a dream-vision poem, ‘This hyndir
nycht neir by the hour of nyne’, in which Dame Verity appears to him musing on courtly
uncertainties and the need for the cardinal virtues to re-establish themselves in the king’s
household.
This theme, however, is most powerfully taken up by David Lindsay in his later career.
In Lindsay’s writing the advisory courtly mode persistently has the upper hand over the
amorous one. In his play Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (1540; extended 1552), Lindsay
expounds the idea of the reformable monarch by showing how King Humanity can be
counselled away from carnality and into good government. This is a key moment in the
elucidation of this particular theme, but it also leads directly into another, newer issue.
While King Humanity is successfully reformed in the first part of Lindsay’s Satyre, the spir-
itual estate proves a far more obstructive proposition in its second part. Though sympa-
thetic to Protestantism, Lindsay had not embraced that religion by the time of his death
in 1555, but his works abound with material that was subsequently appropriated to the
Protestant cause. Despite the courtly origins of much of Lindsay’s poetry, its accessibility,
both in terms of his readable style and of the readiness of publishers to print his works, made
his writing extraordinarily popular in the rest of the century.
The Scottish Reformation, however, has often been seen as the scourge of courtly liter-
ature. In terms of the printing of it, there is truth in this. Works printed in Scotland
between 1560 and 1603 are predominantly of a religious or political cast. In the early post-
Reformation years, an exception is John Rolland’s Court of Venus, written c. 1560, but pub-
lished in 1575. This unjustly neglected poem offers fascinating variations on a number of
courtly tropes. A court debate between Venus and Vesta, goddess of virginity, ends with
the recognition of Vesta’s superiority, but also of Venus’s power and influence. For all the
Court’s apparently moral resolution, Rolland’s admission of the inexorable power of the
amatory has significant implications for the next generations of writers. Love poetry and
lyrical poetry remain, however, predominantly in manuscript form, even within the reign
of James VI itself. But this is a complex phenomenon. The period 1560–1603 sees both the
growing democratisation of courtly writing in Scotland and an increasing insularity in one
strand of it connected with the royal court.
These contradictory impulses are emerging in the transmission of the poetry of one of
the major lyricists of the sixteenth century, Alexander Scott. He is often celebrated as a
court poet, but as Theo van Heijnsbergen has observed, ‘his role seems to have been more
that of a servant than a courtier’, putting him in the tradition of Dunbar. Unlike Dunbar,
however, but like Lindsay, Scott was a layman, and his poetry does much to advance the
282 Sally Mapstone

secular voice in older Scots writing. Scott’s royal service was associated with the Chapel
Royal at Stirling, and he also had links to the Erskine family, one branch of which we have
seen exercising literary patronage in the fifteenth century. In other words, the royal court
is only one of Scott’s focuses. It features most significantly in his ‘New Yeir Gift to the
Quene Mary’, written following Mary queen of Scots’ return to her homeland in 1561.
While Scott encourages the queen, in traditional fashion, to found her practice on the car-
dinal virtues, he also notably utilises the New Year poem-trope to warn the queen of the
failings of both Catholics and Protestants in her realm.
Despite its courtly positioning, this poem, like virtually all the rest of Scott’s poetry, sur-
vives exclusively in one of the major manuscript miscellanies of the sixteenth century,
George Bannatyne’s MS of c. 1565–8. Bannatyne’s family and acquaintances were people
in the legal, mercantile and printing professions around Edinburgh. These people had
links to the court (the Bannatynes were close to the Bellendens, for example) but it was
not their primary social focus. Alexander Scott seems also to have known the Bannatynes,
which explains the inclusion of his works in the Bannatyne MS. It is precisely this which
makes it tricky to describe all of Scott’s writing as ‘courtly’. It adapts courtly idioms and
ideas; it is not exclusively of the court. In particular, Scott gives voice to a cynical amatory
bawdiness that takes much further the hints of such things in the poetry of Dunbar and
Lindsay. Amatory expression is freed here from the advisory straightjacket in which earlier
poets had felt the need to enclose it, and this may have much to do with the widening lay
audience that such poems were starting to reach.
Manuscript miscellanies were thus an important means of transmitting both older and
new writing among literate and well-connected families and groups. This is well evinced
in the MSS productions of the Maitland family. The Maitlands moved in more elevated
political and social circles than the Bannatynes, and the family fostered several generations
of writers. The Folio MS (c. 1570) and the Quarto MS (c. 1585) lovingly preserve the
poems of its scion, Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington (1496–1586), but the Folio also
substantially includes the poems of Dunbar, and the Quarto has some remarkable contem-
porary poems, including several with eloquent appraisals of a female perspective; women
were important transmitters and recipients of texts within the Maitland family nexus. As
the Scots lyric moves into a wider range of social circles, so further voices and viewpoints
take shape with it.
These developments feed back into the culture of the royal court as it begins to re-form
in the early 1580s following Mary’s deposition and James VI’s minority. James VI was a far
more learned king than several of his predecessors and this fostered his interest in poetry;
but James had also had good reason to regard the political valence of poetry. The 1560s and
1570s had seen a blizzard of polemical poetical broadsides against his mother, often written
by the poet Robert Sempill on behalf of the opponents to the queen’s party. Mary Queen
of Scots’ poetry, whether the Casket sonnets were wholly hers, partly hers, or not by her at
all, had contributed to her political downfall. For James, it was part of the practice of king-
ship to be in charge of poetry rather than the subject of its charges. His Essayes of a Prentice
in the Divine Art of Poesie, printed in 1584, signals the arrival of poetry as a major enterprise
at the Scottish court, with the king as its proponent as well as advocate. The Essayes
included James’s prose treatise on poetics, Some Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and esche-
wit in Scottis Poesie. Yet, for all its apparent prescriptiveness, this work conveys a generous
sense of the range of types of discourse that are entertained and expected at court. Under
James’s aegis, Scottish court writing recaptures some of the variousness most vividly seen
before in Dunbar’s writing. James’s treatise recognised the distinctively Scottish nature of
 Older Scots Literature and the Court 283

certain existing types of writing, notably flyting; it also gave a boost to, for Scotland, newer
modes, notably the sonnet, a form that flourished throughout James’s Scottish reign and
into his English one.
James’s own poetry covers a gamut of formal and informal modes, but some of his liveli-
est poetry about life at court, along with much of his amatory verse, remained in manuscript
throughout his life. This is a phenomenon that extends to the writing of many of the prin-
cipal poets of his reign, notably John Stewart of Baldynneis, Alexander Montgomerie and
William Fowler. It is common to explain this through the concept of ‘coterie culture’, an
elite milieu in which poets write with reference to and often for each other. But though
James is a majestic reference point for the poets of his reign, not all of them write with a
strong sense of a developed poetic community, and it may not be wholly accurate to see the
insularity of these manuscript-based poems in quite those terms. Stewart of Baldynneis in
particular has little to say to or about his fellow-poets, with one exception: James and James’s
poetry are the recurring focuses of his work, and the sole surviving MS of his poetry appears
to have been dedicated to the king.
Stewart’s MS is a showcase for his talents, and it also exhibits the poetic variety encour-
aged by James: it has translation (his Roland Furious, from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso);
sonnets; lyrics. It concludes with his long religious poem Ane Schersing Out of Trew Felicitie.
Ane Schersing works a dramatic variation on the theme of moral choice that is such an
abiding one in Scottish courtly writing. It employs the Hercules at the crossroads idea, but
its narrator is able with relative ease to resist the blandishments of voluptuousness and to
take the path towards felicity. At its revelatory conclusion, he sees ‘the buik of lyf’ in which
is drawn the legend ‘IACOBUS SEXTUS HIC SCOTORUM REX’. Whereas earlier
Scottish advisory writing frequently posits the monarch as the necessary object of reform
and virtuous advice, Stewart identifies James with a divinely inscribed world order. Not
since James I’s own Kingis Quair had the heavenly and the Scottish kingly been so closely
aligned. Yet there is little evidence that Stewart gained dramatically from this apotheosis-
ing of his king; nor is it clear that he was extensively at court in the 1580s, the early part
of which was a highly disrupted time in his family life.
A greater sense of a poetic community, of sorts, comes through the poetry of, as James
was prepared to term him, his ‘Master poet’, Alexander Montgomerie. Throughout his
poetic career Montgomerie has more to say to and about other poets, including Robert
Hudson and the enigmatic ‘Christian Lindsay’. Montgomerie’s celebrated flyting with
Patrick Hume of Polwarth was circulating in the early 1580s and suggests that a poetic
competitiveness was encouraged at James’s court. A performative element is also apparent
in Montgomerie’s Navigatioun, apparently composed for a masque early in James’s mature
reign. But Montgomerie’s period of flourishing at James’s court was relatively brief, proba-
bly not more than half-a-dozen years. And it was reliant on his relationship with James.
As Montgomerie says in one of the sonnets that almost fetishises their closeness, ‘I feid
Affectione vhen I sie his grace/To look on that vhairin I most delyte’. His success brought
him recognition and a pension. But, by 1586, his security was coming apart. Montgomerie’s
pension was funded from the revenues of the bishopric of Glasgow, and enmities over
it, possibly fuelled by his association with Catholic intrigues, drove Montgomerie to the
continent. Though he came back to Scotland within a few years, his position was never
again as close to the king, and his final years saw him outlawed for involvement in the
Ailsa Craig conspiracy. As already suggested, there can be a terrible knowingness in
Montgomerie’s poetry, and it extends to his many poems of rejection or frustration. ‘The
Oppositione of the Court to Conscience’ writes starkly about the hypocrisy necessary to
284 Sally Mapstone

thrive in that environment: ‘First thou mon preis thy Prince to pleis/(Thocht contrare
Conscience he commands)/With Mercuris mouth and Argos eis’. It is not necessary to
interpret this biographically as a work written after Montgomerie had fallen from grace;
he was probably all too aware throughout his life of the precariousness of his serenity at
James’s court.
Montgomerie’s poems survive principally in manuscript, but his longest poem, the
Cherrie and the Slae was printed twice in 1597, the year before his death. Like Stewart’s
Schershing, it is an allegorical poem about making the right moral choices, but, where
Stewart’s poem is categorical, Montgomerie’s is opaque, to the degree that the allegorical
significance of its key symbols, of cherry and sloe, remains disputed. The Cherrie is a vibrant,
suggestive, but highly elusive poem. And it was in its day: the 1597 printings indeed circu-
lated the poem in unfinished form. Montgomerie had been at work on it from early in
James’s reign. His difficulties in finishing it speak to the sense at the core of his work that
vocational and moral choices are hard to square, a sense that was intensified by his court
experience.
The 1580s were the high decade of James’s poetic court culture, but, as Stewart’s and
Montgomerie’s stories show, James’s poets may have not long considered themselves to be
a band of brothers, if they ever did in the first place. The real survivor of this nexus was the
man who was as valuable to James in other spheres as he was as a poet, William Fowler.
Fowler became Queen Anne’s Secretary in 1589 and retained the position after the move
of the court to London in 1603. It is a nice irony that the writing of this most career-minded
courtier is less obviously ‘of’ the Scottish court than that of Stewart or Montgomerie.
Fowler translates (prose as well as verse, Macchiavelli’s Il Principe as well as Petrarch’s
Trionfi), and writes quantities of sonnets, including – unusually – a sequence, the Tarantula
of Love, and psalms; but his poems do not have the consuming Jamesian focus of his con-
temporaries.
‘The other night from Court returning late,/Tyr’d with attendance, out of love with state’
wrote another quintessential courtier and Fowler’s successor as Anne’s secretary, Sir Robert
Ayton. Ayton is the most integrated courtier and poet in Scottish writing since David
Lindsay, and he became more fully ensconced in the royal household than even Lindsay
had done. Ayton’s wry resignation towards a way of life utterly familiar and frequently
vexing descends from the writing of Dunbar, Lindsay and Montgomerie, but is also signif-
icantly different from it. For it is, of course, James’s court in England of which he was
writing. With the removal of the court to England Scottish courtly writing becomes more
permeable to English influences, and Ayton’s poetry has a Jonsonian or metaphysical given
to it. Another era in Scottish courtly writing was opening.

Further reading

Dunnigan, Sarah M. (2002), Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James
VI, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Edington, Carol (1995 [1994]), Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David Lindsay
of the Mount, East Linton: Tuckwell Press.
Mapstone, Sally (1991), ‘Was there a Court Literature in Fifteenth-Century Scotland?’,
Studies in Scottish Literature 26: 410–22.
Mason, Roger (1999), ‘This Realm of Scotland is an Empire? Imperial Ideas and
Iconography in Early Renaissance Scotland’, in Barbara E. Crawford (ed.), Church,
 Older Scots Literature and the Court 285

Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance Scotland, Edinburgh: Mercat
Press, pp. 73–91.
Shire, Helena Mennie (1969), Song, Dance and Poetry of the Court of Scotland under King
James VI, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
van Heijnsbergen, Theo (2001), ‘Dunbar, Scott and the Making of Poetry’, in Sally
Mapstone (ed.), William Dunbar, ‘The Nobill Poyet’: Essays in Honour of Priscilla
Bawcutt, East Linton: Tuckwell Press, pp. 108–33.
 30

Robert Henryson
Antony J. Hasler

In one of his shorter poems, entitled by an eighteenth-century editor ‘Against Hasty

Credence’, Robert Henryson delivers the following warning against that stereotypical late
medieval menace, the talebearer:

Thre personis severall he slayis with ane wowrd –

Him self, the heirar, and the man saiklace [innocent].

This fairly conventional poem may not be one of its author’s most striking, but it says much
about his work. Henryson shares with other Middle Scots poets an acute sensitivity to the
matter of where words come from and where they are going, shown in the principled eclec-
ticism with which he handles genre and register. He constantly worries the boundaries
between kinds and styles of writing, and the divisions between texts and the glosses or com-
mentaries on those texts that figure so largely in medieval literary culture. He is deeply inter-
ested in interpretation and signs; his understanding of what is at stake when signs are read
in the world, or imposed, at whatever cost, on the world, makes him a very serious propos-
ition indeed. This awareness of the ways in which words can trouble other words is often
haunted by a sharp, and ambivalent, sense of the relationship between rhetoric and violence.
Language, as shown by the slanderous speech in the poem just quoted, can harm and invade;
even as it defines and establishes some particularities, it can erase or mutilate others.
Henryson’s biography and canon present problems. Outside some poems represented in
early manuscripts and in the prints published by Scotland’s first printers Chepman and
Myllar, his major works are found in full only in witnesses dating from after his death – the
Bannatyne Manuscript of 1568, prints by Thomas Bassandyne and Henry Charteris, and
sixteenth-century editions of Chaucer which contain The Testament of Cresseid. The little
we know of him suggests that he was no stranger to language in its most executive and instru-
mental forms: the disciplinary regimens of the medieval schoolroom, the sentences and
decrees of the law. Early prints of his poems identify him as ‘scolmaister of Dunfermling’. In
1462, a Magister Robertus Henrisone was admitted to membership of the University of
Glasgow as a licentiate in arts and a bachelor in decrees (canon law). Three deeds in the
cartulary of Dunfermline, dated 1477–8, mention a ‘notary public’ of the same name. The
only certainty about Henryson is that he was dead by 1505, when Dunbar’s ‘I that in heill
wes and gladness’ (‘The Lament for the Makaris’) mentions him close to another poet, Stobo,
whose death is recorded in that year.
A number of shorter poems, their authorship in some cases doubtful, testify to
Henryson’s generic surefootedness, his wide range of metrical and stanzaic experimenta-
tion, and the sovereign confidence with which he negotiates multiple linguistic registers.
 Robert Henryson 287

‘Ane Prayer for the Pest’ builds from the plain and anguished reflection ‘That we suld thus
be haistely put doun / And de as beistis without confessioun’ to a transcendently powerful
conclusion full of aureate Latinisms and complex internal rhyme. Other religious lyrics
include meditations on death (‘The Three Deid Pollis’), old age (‘The Praise of Age’) and
obedience and providence (‘The Abbey Walk’), and allegorical dialogues (the two
‘Ressonings’ between Age and Youth and Death and Man). The impressive ‘Annunciation’
weaves together typological images with great delicacy. At the opposite extreme, ‘Roben
and Makyne’ is an ironically clever exercise in pastourelle mode. In this, a priggish shep-
herd rejects an ardent (female) suitor, only to work up an interest in her too late and be
told that ‘The man that will nocht quhen he may / Sall haif nocht quhen he wald’. Also
comic, in a recognisable vein of medieval burlesque, is ‘Sum Practysis of Medecyne’, a blis-
tering, lexically virtuosic assault on quack physicians.
Some of these poems suggest a reflexiveness of which we will hear more. In ‘The
Garmont of Gud Ladeis’, the speaker offers his lady elaborately allegorical clothes (a hood
of honour, a shirt of chastity, a mantle of humility). Here, the allegory itself is the garment,
overwriting the woman’s body with an ethical text that will suit her better than ‘grene nor
gray’. ‘The Bludy Serk’ narrates the Redemption as chivalric romance, with Christ as lover-
knight saving a damsel from a dungeon. Here a moralitas at the end identifies the bloody
shirt of the title both as the mortal flesh taken on by Christ and as the poem itself, a memor-
ial icon in verse designed to stimulate meditation and encourage readers to ‘Think on the
bludy serk’.
The three longer poems on which Henryson’s reputation rests – Orpheus and Eurydice, the
Fables and The Testament of Cresseid – go deeper in their exploration of medieval moral dis-
course. Orpheus and Eurydice engages with the traditions of medieval hermeneutics, and dis-
plays Henryson’s propensity for setting multiple interpretive models alongside one another
in a single work. The classicising prologue introduces an ancient Greece where male princes
learn ‘Thair fadirs steppis iustly to persewe’ through a patrilineal process of imitation. Yet
other narratives soon come into play. The Muses are avowedly interlingual beings, their
Greek and Latin names both noted, and Orpheus learns his art with his mother’s nourish-
ment; it is Calliope who ‘gart him sowke of hir twa palpis quhyte / The sweit licour of all
musike parfyte’. The more vernacular mode of the Middle English Sir Orfeo is also conjured
up; Orpheus is an earthly king whose bride ‘Is with the fary tane’. To this narrative, evoca-
tively unstable in itself, is added a moralitas borrowed from Nicholas Trivet’s commentary on
Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Orpheus is the ‘part intellectiue’ of humanity, and
Eurydice ‘oure affection’ vacillating between reason and the flesh. Aristaeus, the near-rapist
who startles Eurydice to flight, is somewhat surprisingly assimilated to ‘gude vertewe’, and
the frightened Eurydice flees him for ‘this warldis wayn pleasance’.
Some readers, on no firm chronological evidence, have chosen to see Orpheus as an early
poem, perhaps an ‘immature’ failure; the scholarly interest in medieval interpretation and
translation of the last two decades has led to a fairer estimation. However, it can be said
that Henryson seems to delight in the arbitrariness, the plethora of meanings, the multi-
ple imbalances that emerge from the juxtaposition of text and gloss. The poem openly
brings this tension into view. In the union of Orpheus and Eurydice, it suggests a kind of
allegorical synthesis reminiscent of medieval theories of reading itself, in which the will is
trained by reason:

Than Orpheus has won Erudices,

Quhen oure desire wyth resoun makis pes.
288 Antony J. Hasler

However, we can hardly help recalling – as the poem goes on to do – that this union is
fatally compromised; Orpheus loses Eurydice, and the narrative that contains him is one
of loss rather than plenitude. It is not too much to say that when set against its gloss, the
fable tells of desire’s victory not only over reason, but also its corollary, the synthesising
intellect of the glossator.
The Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian – as most modern editions, following the version
printed by Bassandyne, call it – takes the relationship between text and comment further.
Henryson retells a number of beast fables, and although his exact sources in this tangled
tradition remain uncertain, there is some consensus that two in particular matter: a col-
lection of Aesopic tales in Latin verse written around 1175 and ascribed to one ‘Gualterus
Anglicus’ (Walter the Englishman), and some version of the French beast-epic Le Roman
de Renart. While the lineages of moral fable and beast epic do overlap, their conjunction,
as we shall see in a moment, is an unsettling one, and is indeed at the heart of what makes
Henryson’s enterprise so remarkable. First, however, it is important to show how Henryson
treats the fable in the form he inherited from Gualterus.
Gualterus’s versions, in Latin verse, append a brief moralitas or moral and a few lines of
sententious additio to each fable. Such works were popular both as school texts – they were
easy vehicles for instruction in Latin – and as sources for the exemplary narratives used by
medieval preachers. Henryson’s technique, however, complicates this didactic impulse.
The fables begin with a prologue, a theoretical statement seemingly designed to orient the
reader. It soon reveals itself, however, as something far richer and stranger. Henryson
imperturbably juxtaposes a series of claims concerning the pleasure and profit to be derived
from fiction, without adjudicating among them. The smoothness of the stanzas only partly
masks an oddly accumulative, paratactic shape to the argument, and the reader is not so
much given cogent direction as opened up to a potentially bewildering variety of possibil-
ities. Nor is it easy, in Henryson’s approach, to locate the beast-fable’s convention of the
speaking animal. If literary beasts can represent bestial human concupiscence (‘carnall and
foule delyte’), these animals are also logicians who can ‘Ane sillogisme propone, and eik
conclude’. Figural creatures straddling the boundaries between nature and culture, they
query our capacity to interpret the world through fables.
This is already apparent in the collection’s first fable, ‘The Cok and the Jasp’. A cock
pecking at the leavings on a barnyard floor finds a jewel. It rejects it on what seems the
most ‘reasonable’ of grounds; it is no great lord, and prefers ‘thing of les auaill’ that will fill
its belly. This rooster is so sensible that it is a shock to pass to the moralitas and learn that
the jewel ‘Betakinnis [betokens] perfite prudence and cunning’, and that the cock repre-
sents a fool, who is ‘enemie to science and cunning’ because he mocks what he cannot
understand.
There is clearly provocation here. The cock, after all, is no enemy to the jasper-stone; it
is admiringly appreciative, but finds the jewel alien to its avian nature – a nature which
finds voice in eloquently shaped human rhetoric. Nor can the cock be faulted for not real-
ising that he has found a figurative jewel rather than a real one. Readers have sought to
harmonise fable and moralitas, have treated the moralitates as unfortunate irrelevances that
ground Henryson all too firmly in late medieval reading practices, or have seen in them a
despairing sense of the failure of worldly life to relate to idealising moral patterns. The most
suggestive readings find a more dynamic relationship between the fables and their often
arbitrary morals: the moralitas does not exhaust the fable’s meaning so much as send us
back to it for new insights, always alert to the deceptions of language and the dangers of
premature closure.
 Robert Henryson 289

To complicate matters further, the ‘moralities’ themselves vary – there is, indeed, a
clearer fit between some fables and their morals than others, so that we are presented with
something of a sliding scale. Much of the time there is a playfulness in Henryson’s
hermeneutics, matched within the tales by a considerable delight in witty dialogue. ‘The
Cock and the Fox’ both retells and reworks Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, adding a triple
commentary on Chanticleer’s abduction voiced by his flock of hens. The tone, superbly
modulated, moves through Pertok’s courtly lament for her lover (‘Yone wes our drowrie and
our dayis darling’) and Sprutok’s fabliau-like commentary on his sexual shortcomings (‘Off
chalmerglew, Pertok, full weill ye knaw/ Waistit he wes’) to Coppok’s eruption into a fierce
sermon against lechery. Though roosters are not noted for monogamy, Coppok turns the
full force of her wrath on ‘Adulteraris’ in an energetic sermon:

Thairfoir it is the verray hand off God

That causit him be werryit with the tod.

As Coppok shows, glossing and interpretation are as likely to occur within the narration
as outside it in the moralitas; and while the effect here is entirely comic, such moments in
Henryson’s collection have a grimmer edge too. Transgression of the boundaries between
fable and moral goes with an inflection of the tales towards the social, with commentary
sometimes satiric, sometimes irremediably bleak. In one of several scenes which suggest
Henryson’s legal experience, a sheep is literally fleeced by a corrupt court, consisting
entirely of birds and beasts of prey. Henryson moves into a historical moralitas – the sheep
is the oppressed ‘pure commounis’, the predatory court officials (wolf, raven, kite) their
human-world equivalents (‘ane schiref stout’; ‘ane fals crownair’). But the fable doubles
back into itself and fictive lines are crossed; the moral’s impersonal speaker, suddenly
embodied as a chanson d’aventure passer-by, overhears the sheep lamenting in the bitter
winter cold (‘O lord, quhy sleipis thow sa lang?’).
Other narratives also set up continuities that disrupt the divisions between tale and
tale. This is especially true of the tales connected to the Roman de Renart, which traverse
the larger collection of Fables with a multi-generational vulpine epic. Where the pattern
of tale-plus-morality holds out the chance, however complicated in practice, that fiction
may reach to other kinds of truth, the Renardian tales bring something else again. As
might be expected from these classic trickster narratives, they offer a signifying universe
up for grabs, but eluding the grasp: words are infinitely manipulable, and can be prised
loose from their referential function to take on a weirdly autonomous life, acquiring the
substance of objects, actions, even blows. In ‘The Fox and the Wolf’, a well-educated fox
reads his future in the stars, and realises that he is doomed if he does not amend his ways.
Following the penance imposed by a broad-minded confessor (‘Freir Volff Waitskaith’) –
who seems unconcerned that the fox’s sole regret is that he has eaten too few hens! –
he looks for fish, but is afraid to wet his feet. Catching sight of a kid, he seizes it and in
a warped baptismal ceremony both drowns and rechristens it (‘Ga doun, schir Kid, cum
vp, schir Salmond, agane’). Finally basking in the sun, he contentedly speculates
that his newly filled paunch would make an excellent target for an arrow – and is
promptly shot by the enraged goatherd seeking his lost charge. The fox expires with a
regretful sigh:

Me think na man may speik ane word in play,

Bot now on dayis in ernist it is tane.
290 Antony J. Hasler

The fable’s manipulated sacraments and unanticipated shocks speak not just of ‘play’ and
‘ernist’, but of a deeper and less settled anxiety: in this carnal world, what purchase do
words have on their referents, and how does such shiftiness affect the business of moral
interpretation? What does emerge quite unequivocally from the fable is a direct bond
between performative language and an often-murderous violence; a drowned kid turns to
a salmon in a vicious metamorphosis, the fox’s words of sated contentment become a self-
fulfilling prophecy.
This disquiet is addressed in the pivotal tale of the Fables and its prologue. The narrator
has a dream encounter with Aesop himself – an undisputed literary father, ‘The fairest man
that euer befoir I saw’. The pessimistic Aesop, however, casts doubt on the entire enter-
prise of making moral fictions:

[. . .] quhat is it worth to tell ane fenyeit taill,

Quhen haly preiching may na thing auaill?

Urged by the narrator, however, he tells the familiar fable in which a lion spares a lowly
mouse and is rewarded for his mercy when its friends free him from a hunter’s net. If the
ordering of the fables in the Bassandyne print reflects the author’s own, this fable is at the
structural centre of the collection; it also has Aesop’s own authority behind it. According
to Henryson’s direct moralisation, the lion may signify ‘Ane potestate, or yit ane king with
croun’. This has led some readers to find direct topical allusions to James III’s reign
(1460–88). While this view has had a mixed reception, the fable, in its adherence to the
genre of advice to princes, nevertheless does enact the general notion that feigned fables
can make meaningful interventions in the political world. By a striking displacement,
however, the succeeding fable, ‘The Preaching of the Swallow’, bitterly exemplifies the
failure of prudential counsel, and becomes a precise illustration of Aesop’s point that ‘haly
preiching’ is indeed of no avail. The swallow’s advice to its fellow-birds to peck up flax-
seeds before the fully-grown flax can be woven into the hempen nets of the fowler goes
unheeded, and like poor readers of allegory the birds are distracted by the chaff spread over
the net as bait – under the delusion that it is corn – and trapped and killed. It would be
hard to find a more succinct demonstration of St Augustine’s point, made in the De doct-
rina christiana, that seduction by the surface delights of the letter leads to slavery to signs,
and so to spiritual death.
If the Bassandyne order is regarded as significant, we see here a downturn in the fables that
grows ever more pronounced. All the remaining tales, at some level, take up the notion that
signs are fraught with peril. In ‘The Fox, the Wolf and the Cadger’, interpretation and vio-
lence again go hand in hand, and the connection between them turns on the word ‘nekher-
ing’, roughly glossed as ‘a blow on the neck or shoulders’. The fox and wolf set out to rob a
‘cadger’ (a travelling fish pedlar). The fox steals the cadger’s herrings, and is threatened by
the cadger with a ‘nekhering’ if he tries it again. When the wolf’s turn at theft comes, the
fox tells him about the cadger’s ‘nekhering’. In the fox’s wonderful depiction this takes on a
spurious linguistic reality as a kind of super-herring, surpassingly tasty and succulent (‘It is
ane syde off salmond, as it wair,/ And callour, pypand lyke ane pertrik ee [partridge’s eye]’).
The wolf, not the brightest of exegetes, receives the blow, and the tale ends with a double
moral. The moralitas proper interprets the cadger as death, and ‘mychtie men’ are told to ‘haif
mynd/ Of the nekhering, interpreit in this kynd’. But we cannot easily forget that within the
tale, the term ‘nekhering’ has already been subjected to a less elevated interpretation, which
as the brutal payoff underlines has left the wolf’s blood ‘rynnand ouer his heillis’.
 Robert Henryson 291

And so it goes on. In ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’, a lamb’s elaborate rhetorical defence
does not save him from the teeth of an angry wolf. In ‘The Wolf and the Wether’, a wether
foolish enough to disguise itself as a sheepdog and chase a wolf gets its inevitable comeup-
pance. In the final ‘The Paddock and the Mouse’, a mouse is offered a ride across a river by
a hideous toad, but rejects it on the most unimpeachable grounds of medieval physiognomy
(an ugly face must betoken a wicked mind). The toad replies that ‘Thow suld not juge ane
man efter his face’, words which are both touchingly upbeat and entirely in accordance
with our position as experienced readers of Henryson, who know that appearance cannot
be relied on to coincide with reality. Only in midstream does the mouse discover that the
physiognomists were right: the toad tries to drown the mouse, and is only prevented when
a kite brutally carries off both creatures. A moralitas glosses the mouse as soul, the toad as
body, and the kite as death.
‘The Preaching of the Swallow’ begins with an allusion to the medieval commonplace
of the world as God’s book: ‘we may haif knawlegeing / Off God almychtie be his crea-
touris’. The Fables, however, are more likely to leave us with the sense that that book is
illegible; as Augustine once again would have argued, we are aliens in our own place, lost
in a wilderness of signs from which we can never, in this life, expect truth. Henryson’s
talking animals inhabit a liminal realm where meaning is slippery both for characters and
for those invited to read them. Words, far from opening up new levels of being, are mad-
deningly material and opaque, liable to turn on their wielders. (This is most obvious in the
proverbs with which the characters persistently batter one another, or which accompany
moments of particular Schadenfreude.) Through them we contemplate not only the statu-
tory body–soul duality that Henryson explicitly mentions; we also glimpse at a distance a
pedagogic culture in which coercive violence marks the line between the subject’s body
and the symbolic order of language it must enter.
Henryson’s vexed relationship to the cruelties of the sign is most evident in The
Testament of Cresseid, by common consent one of the most powerful and disquieting
poems of the late Middle Ages. The poem responds to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,
which tells of the doomed love-affair between the Trojan hero Troilus and Criseyde,
daughter of the renegade Trojan priest Calchas. Criseyde ultimately leaves Troilus for the
Greek Diomede, and for a future as a literary archetype of female infidelity. In Chaucer,
Criseyde enters this afterlife of ill-repute with a plaintive awareness of what will become
of her, and accompanied by a good deal of authorial apology for her behaviour which
readers have found notoriously difficult to decode. In contrast to the expansive later
books of Chaucer’s poem, Henryson’s has a punishing brevity which can seem like the
enactment of a death sentence. Cresseid is abruptly dropped by Diomede and (it is
implied, though the matter is in fact far from clear) becomes a prostitute. Taking refuge
with her father, Calchas, she is moved to curse the gods who led her to believe that she
was ‘the flour of luif in Troy’. They respond, and in a nightmarish sequence, try her for
blasphemy and punish her with leprosy. The brief poem builds towards its powerful cul-
mination. Banished to the ‘spittaill hous’ ‘at the tounis end’, the hideously disfigured, by
now unrecognisable Cresseid and her fellow-lepers are begging by the roadside when the
noble Troilus rides by. In an extraordinary moment, the creature before him calls to mind
the face of ‘fair Cresseid, sumtyme his awin darling’ and he is seized by a sudden fever;
and yet, the narrator tells us with devastating simplicity, ‘not ane ane vther knew’. Only
after Troilus has passed does Cresseid learn his identity; overwhelmed by guilt (‘Nane but
my self as now I will accuse’) she dies, after bequeathing what little she has in a last will
and testament. The poem ends, once again, with rumour – ‘Sum said’ he built her a tomb
292 Antony J. Hasler

and inscribed her epitaph on it – and a warning to the ladies in the audience against
deception in love.
For a long time the Testament was caught in the fruitless debate about the validity of the
label ‘Scottish Chaucerian’ as applied to Henryson. The label, of course, ascribes a fixation
on ‘originality’ to a period in which authorship had far more to do with intertextual imi-
tation and echo; it makes as little – and as much – sense to call Henryson a Scottish
Chaucerian as it does to call Chaucer an English Boccaccian. Any assessment of the poem,
however, must take into account the remarkable reading, and revision, of Chaucer that
Henryson performs.
The wintry opening is a series of unexpected reversals. The poem’s first words tell us that
‘Ane doolie sessoun to ane cairfull dyte / Suld correspond’ – that the season, in short, should
fit the poem composed in it rather than the other way round. Its narrative opens beneath an
impossible planetary conjunction; and indeed Henryson’s poem, often treated and even
printed as a sequel to Chaucer’s, stands in an impossible conjunction with its precursor. It
cannot be fitted into Chaucer’s temporal scheme: the Troilus who has come to terms with
Cresseid’s death at the end of the Testament can hardly be the man who, at the end of
Chaucer’s poem, is cut off on the battlefield by ‘the fierse Achille’ (V. 1806) while ferociously
pursuing Diomede. Against this background, Henryson develops a narrator – an aged ex-
lover who treats reading as an aphrodisiac, hoping that it will refresh his ‘faidit hart’. After
finishing Chaucer’s Troilus, he takes up ‘ane vther quair’ to read the tale of ‘fair Cresseid, that
endit wretchitlie’, with the words ‘Quha wait gif all that Chauceir wrait was trew?’ In this
ambiguous figure’s response to Cresseid, prurience and Chaucerian ‘sympathy’ alternate near-
incoherently, rather as if one of the extended apologiae from Book V of Troilus and Criseyde
were being played in insane, gabbled fast-forward. In the climactic trial by the gods,
Henryson’s narrator steps in to appeal for Cresseid; after this he almost fades out, to be super-
seded increasingly by Cresseid herself and finally by the moralising of the very last stanza.
The trial by the planetary deities is as ambivalent as this narrator. The Middle Ages saw
a link between leprosy and lechery, even conceiving of leprosy as itself a venereal disease.
On one level, then, Cresseid’s ‘exclusion’ from Diomede and from human society are
metaphorically linked, as Riddy observes. Yet the gods are less interested in her sexual
transgressions than in the ‘fraward langage’ she directs against them, and few readers have
failed to see their response as excessive. After the trial, Cresseid’s progress is marked by a
series of generic episodes: a ‘complaint’ in which she treats herself as an exemplum for an
imaginary audience of fair ladies (‘In your mynd ane mirrour mak of me’), a lament, and
the last testament. Though some of these are rhetorically spacious, they are pitched against
an increasing sense of their own redundancy: ‘thy weiping’, a ‘lipper lady’ in the spital tells
her, ‘dowbillis bot thy wo’.
Critical conflict over how to read this stark, moving and disconcerting work abounds.
Some have argued that in its course Cresseid acquires self-knowledge, learning to blame
herself for her predicament instead of evasively generalising it, or condemning others. Such
a reading sorts well with the notion that Henryson’s Cresseid, like Chaucer’s pagans in
Troilus and The Knight’s Tale, is striving towards a grasp of her predicament in an unen-
lightened world from which Christian revelation is as yet withheld. An honorable line of
Henryson critics has praised the poem’s deep humanity. Not all readers, however, have
been quite so sanguine about the matter of Cresseid’s ‘responsibility’ for her fate; more than
any other poem in the Middle Scots canon, the Testament has provoked some major femi-
nist readings. In this frame, Troilus’s ‘knichtlie pietie’ is no longer so unequivocal; his
failure to recognise Cresseid in the leper figures the distance between his nostalgic male
 Robert Henryson 293

enclave of romance and the all-too-material world of history to which she has been con-
signed. Her appearance provokes in him an erotic memory of romance fantasy which is also
a disavowal, and when he drops money in her lap he is paying for that fantasy, as Margherita
argues. Cresseid, whose punishment, Kafka-style, is written on her body, has been com-
pared to the condemned man whose spectacular and atrocious public execution sustains
the pre-modern regimes described by Michel Foucault. If we identify with her, this may
have less to do with the moralising ‘sympathy’ of humanist criticism than with the
Foucauldian notion of power’s economy; the surplus horror of her punishment signifies not
the legitimacy of its justice, but the victim’s perverse apotheosis.
There is a similar undecidability in the risk to which the poem exposes the transmission
of literary authority among male authors. The poem draws on the standard tropes of
medieval anti-feminism, yet it makes patent the reliance of such tropes on the tongues of
men. Even its most notably misogynistic moments, such as its claim that Cresseid fell into
prostitution (‘into the court, commoun’) are constantly accompanied by a ‘sum sayis’, or
‘sum men sayis’ – insinuations which are as insubstantial as they are inescapable.
Henryson’s poem follows Chaucer in its meticulous identification with Cresseid, its imagin-
ing of her inner thoughts. At the same time, we are reminded that Criseyde/Cresseid is a
literary figure, a common subject passed from poet to poet just as she is from Diomede to
Calchas to Troilus within the poem. As each of them attempts to secure her meaning –
Diomede sends her a ‘lybell of repudie’, Troilus commemorates her with the most lapidary
of epitaphs – she comes close to figuring poetic language itself, the unstable, mutable matter
which always threatens the control of male poets. The leprosy with which the gods afflict
her within the poem is, after all, Henryson’s own particular innovation; they are perform-
ing the difference to the tradition that his poem makes. As Chaucer’s Criseyde looks ahead
to her literary future, her deepest fear is that ‘thise bokes wol me shende [destroy]’ – and
Henryson provides the book that does just that. In a subtle act of literary usurpation, he
takes the metaphors of Chaucer’s poem and renders them literal, thus, as Fradenburg points
out, assigning primacy to his own poem and turning Chaucer’s earlier work into a kind of
secondary, figurative foreshadowing.
The Testament of Cresseid brings together several paradoxes about Henryson. His is an art
of both superb control and emotional force. As a long tradition of criticism has shown,
Henryson’s work satisfies readers seeking aesthetic unity, while there are few medieval poets
who can be so concentratedly funny, or so moving. Yet, it also speaks with a special intent-
ness to readings suspicious of the price exacted by singular meanings, and alert to contra-
diction rather than resolution – to current critical concern with gender and writing, with
the violence of the sign, with the historicist approaches to hermeneutics and pedagogy that
have lately influenced medieval studies. There is in Henryson’s problematic art some
remainder that eludes containment, and the Testament shows it. When Cresseid dies her
worldly goods are not all bestowed. Her body is left to be eaten by worms and toads, her
spirit to walk with the goddess Diana in ‘waist woddis and wellis’. But Diomede, she thinks,
has ‘baith broche and belt’ that she received from Troilus. In Chaucer, it is her gift of that
brooch to Diomede that to Troilus, and even to Chaucer’s energetically flexible narrator,
seems excessive (‘and that was litel nede’); when Troilus glimpses it on Diomede’s captured
‘cote-armure’, it becomes the final token of Criseyde’s betrayal. The brooch is always more
than needful; it is a surplus that cannot be laid to rest even by this poem. Passing in
the opposite direction to Cresseid herself, it marks her passage, hinting that the series of
transactions surrounding her will never fully be closed, and that readers will continue to
ask difficult questions of Henryson’s work.
294 Antony J. Hasler

The author particularly acknowledges the contribution to the completion of this chapter
of the texts by Louise Fradenburg and Gayle Margherita

Further reading

Fradenburg, Louise O. (1982), ‘Chaucer and the Middle Scots Poets: Studies in Literary
Reception’, unpublished Ph.D., University of Virginia.
Goldstein, James (2006), ‘“Not al grunded vpon truth”: Discipline and Relaxation in the
Poetry of Robert Henryson’, in Peter Brown (ed.), A Companion to Medieval English
Literature and Culture c.1350–c.1500, Oxford: Blackwell.
Gray, Douglas (1979), Robert Henryson, Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Margherita, Gayle (2000), ‘Criseyde’s Remains: Romance and the Question of Justice’,
Exemplaria 12:2: 257–92.
Riddy, Felicity (1997), ‘ “ Abject odious”: Feminine and Masculine in Henryson’s Testament
of Cresseid’, in H. Cooper and S.Mapstone (eds), The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays
for Douglas Gray, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 229–48.
Spearing, A. C. (1985), Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
 31

William Dunbar
Priscilla Bawcutt

Dunbar ranks high in the pantheon of Scottish poets. Intelligent, if not profoundly intel-
lectual, witty and sardonic, he is admired for his metrical virtuosity, the energy of his lan-
guage, and the vividness of his imagination. Despite the lapse of five centuries, Dunbar
retains a remarkable power to excite, to move, and indeed occasionally to infuriate – some
of his views, concerning women, for instance, or speakers of Gaelic, may strike modern
readers as far from politically correct. Yet, his finest poems are in no way dated or parochial,
although securely rooted ‘heir at hame’ in late medieval Scotland, and treat of perennial
themes. It is a testimony to Dunbar’s genius that his words are not only discussed by schol-
ars, but quoted and echoed by modern poets as various as Hugh MacDiarmid, Robert
Garioch, Gavin Ewart and David Harsent. This is true of very few medieval poets.
There is a tantalising lack of biographical information about Dunbar. What little we
know of his life derives partly from his own poems – yet the words of such a jesting and ironic
poet must always be treated with caution – and partly from the presence of his name in con-
temporary records, such as those of the University of St Andrews and, even more import-
antly, those known as The Treasurer’s Accounts, which document the expenditure of the
royal household. Dunbar was probably born c. 1460, at the beginning of the turbulent reign
of James III. His parentage is unknown, but he was a Lowlander, and probably came from
the Lothians, the most fertile and most prosperous region of Scotland. He is very much a
city poet, and during the reign of James IV (1488–1513) spent many years in Edinburgh, of
which he has left two vivid and humorous sketches. The last mention of him in the records
is dated 14 May 1513, only a few months before James IV’s disastrous invasion of England
and death at the battle of Flodden (9 September 1513). Dunbar may possibly have lived on
into the troubled early years of the reign of James V (1513–42), but there is no firm evi-
dence that he did so. It is clear, however, that Flodden was a watershed: the brilliant court
culture of James IV that Dunbar both celebrated and satirised had come to an end.
Dunbar attended St Andrews University in the late 1470s, and was listed among the
licentiates, or masters, in 1479. The arts course, conducted in Latin, was modelled on that
of Paris University, and dominated by the works of Aristotle and his medieval commenta-
tors. There is no evidence that Dunbar had a higher degree in law, but, like other educated
Scottish laymen, he sometimes acted in the courts as a procurator, or advocate. On several
occasions between 1502 and 1504, he represented different litigants in an acrimonious law
suit concerning the property of a Fifeshire laird, Sir John Wemyss of Wemyss. Dunbar’s
close acquaintance with the practice and terminology of the law, more particularly the law
of inheritance, is often evident in his poetry: he jokes about the ‘breif of richt’ in one
(no. 47; all quotations, slightly modernised in spelling, are taken from The Poems of
William Dunbar, ed. P. Bawcutt, published by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies
296 Priscilla Bawcutt

in 1998); makes a metaphorical application of the distinction between the ‘nearest’ and
the ‘verray’ heir in another (no. 49), and devotes two satirical poems to the corruptions of
lawyers and their clients (nos 2 and 74). In a more idealistic vein he voices his belief in the
king as the fount of justice (nos 9, 37, and 52).
It was common for those who had received a university education to enter the Church,
and Dunbar became a priest, although not until 1504, comparatively late in his life. His
desire for a benefice is often voiced in his poems: in one he half-comically implies that he
had youthful expectations of a bishopric (no. 68); in another, more humbly, he says that
he would be content with a poor rural ‘kirk, scant coverit with hadder [roofed with
heather]’ (no. 79). By 1509, if not earlier, Dunbar was a chaplain, possibly in the royal
household, but he never attained high office in the Church. Perhaps he was temperamen-
tally unfitted for such a role, or perhaps – unlike his poetic contemporaries Walter Kennedy
and Gavin Douglas – he lacked the patronage of influential noble kinsmen. Whatever his
status in the Church, Dunbar’s religion was far from superficial. His devotional poems are
few in number, but impressive in quality. Those treating of the Passion (no. 1), the
Annunciation (no. 58), and the Resurrection (no. 10) are the finest religious poems to
survive from pre-Reformation Scotland. (It is possible that Dunbar wrote others that were
suppressed by the Reformers.)
Nothing is known of Dunbar’s life between 1480 and 1500. No firm evidence survives to
confirm any of the sometimes far-fetched speculations – that he participated in a Scottish
embassy to France in 1491, for instance, or that he was a member of the French king’s Scots
Guard. Yet several of Dunbar’s poems imply familiarity with foreign countries, and it is not
implausible that during this period he may have been abroad. The best-documented years,
however, are those between 1500 and 1513. In 1500, he was awarded a royal ‘pensioun’, or
annual salary, of £10; in 1507, this was increased to £20; and in 1510, it was raised again to
£80, a considerable sum at that time. As a member of the king’s household, Dunbar would
also receive a livery, or twice-yearly allowance of clothing, and other occasional fees.
Precisely how he was employed is not certain. He includes himself among ‘the kirkmen,
courtmen and craftismen fyne’, who served James IV (no. 67), but did not hold a high office
of state, such as the Treasurer. There may have been some recognition of his poetic genius
in the award of a pension, but it is improbable that Dunbar was paid solely for being a poet.
Authorship in this period was not normally a full-time occupation, and it is likely that he
held a fairly lowly position among the ‘servitouris’ as a scribe, secretary, or envoy.
Nonetheless, the court was of enormous significance for Dunbar’s poetry. In the first
place, it provided him with his audience, small, intimate and mostly well educated. Several
of his poems are addressed directly to the king, a smaller number to the queen, and many
others envisage readership by members of the court circle, churchmen, lawyers and clerks,
some of whom, like himself, were also poets.
In one poem Dunbar comments revealingly on an earlier one, which contained a comic
portrait of a fellow-courtier. Addressing the queen, he says:

Thocht I in ballet did with him bourde,

In malice spack I nevir an woord,
Bot all, my dame, to do you gam.
(no. 73)

Poetry-making here sounds like an extension of conversation. A playful ‘bourde’, or jest at

another’s expense, is intended to provoke ‘gam’, or amusement, in the listeners. We should
 William Dunbar 297

not, however, trust Dunbar’s disclaimer of malice – there is often a hard, cruel, edge to his
comedy. We should not conclude either that he was merely a coterie poet. There is evi-
dence that many of his poems were read far beyond the confines of the court.
The court, however, supplied Dunbar with much of his subject matter. He celebrated the
wedding of James IV and Margaret Tudor in 1503 with the work now known as The Thrissill
and the Rois (no. 52), and wrote shorter poems, welcoming Margaret to Scotland (no. 15),
and describing her visit to Aberdeen in 1511 (no. 8). Two similarly topical pieces concern
Bernard Stewart, the distinguished French soldier and diplomat, who visited Scotland in
1508: one is a panegyric on his virtues (no. 56), the second an elegy (no. 23) following his
unexpected death. Such poems observe the unwritten rules for court eulogy: their diction
is ornate and learned, the style is highly rhetorical, and the poet speaks not just as an indi-
vidual, but as a representative of the ‘Scottis natioun’. Many poets from other European
courts at this period treated similar themes, but usually at much greater length. It is char-
acteristic of Dunbar that his poems in this mode are short and elegant, and are not syco-
phantic. The Thrissill and the Rois well illustrates his deftness of touch: designed to
compliment the king and his young bride, it also conveys a serious message concerning a
king’s duty to enforce justice, to protect his country from invasion, and to be himself a
model of virtue. All these poems are excellent examples of their kind, but if Dunbar had
written nothing else, it is doubtful whether he would be so admired today.
Dunbar also takes the court as his subject, in a different way. He views it with a critical
and sardonic gaze, and observes a multitude of fools, parasites and rogues parading ‘Daylie
in court befoir myne e’ (no. 67). It is remarkable how often phrases such as ‘in court’, or
even more specifically ‘in this court’, figure in his poetry. Dunbar was no doubt aware of the
varied medieval traditions of court satire – exemplified in Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium,
or Courtiers’ Trifles – which may have contributed to his more general criticism of the
‘courtis of noble kingis’ (no. 47; compare also nos 5, 67 and 81). But several of his poems
are targeted at specific individuals: the paragon of fools, Sir Thomas Norny (no. 39); the
large, clumsy official of the Wardrobe, James Dog (nos 72 and 73); and the irreligious abbot
of Tungland, whose enthusiasm for alchemy was shared by the king (no. 4). All these poems
abound in comic invention. The first piece on James Dog is remarkable for its witty deploy-
ment of canine images: when the poet approaches him, he barks and snarls, and undergoes
a ludicrous metamorphosis from tyke to mastiff to ‘messan’, or lapdog. More serious and
substantial poems contain a weight of saeva indignatio, directed against the idlers and
spongers who haunt the court (no. 67), or against the Highlander ‘Donald Owyr’, a man
whom Dunbar regarded as a traitor and the focus of a serious revolt in the Highlands
between 1503 and 1506 (no. 27).
Dunbar is unrivalled at communicating the anxieties of a minor courtier: lack of recog-
nition, envy of those who appear more successful, fear of encroaching age, and, above all,
a sense of insecurity in a highly competitive world. In a fine poem on mortality, ‘In to thir
dirk and drublie dayis’ (no. 26), Despair counsels the sleepless poet to ‘provyde’ for the
future:

Or with grit trouble and mischeif

Thow sall into this court abyd.

But these sentiments are most pervasive in Dunbar’s petitions, an important section of his
oeuvre, which has not always received sympathetic treatment from critics. They have been
termed ‘begging poems’, a pejorative label which fails to take account of their social origins.
298 Priscilla Bawcutt

In the patronage system of this period, it was often necessary to make supplications to those
in power, if one wished to receive promotion, to correct an injustice, or even to obtain the
arrears of one’s pension. Dunbar’s petitions contain some of his finest poetry, and have a
wide range of tone. Some have a practical purpose; some are light and jesting; others
sombre and deeply melancholy. The self-depiction in these poems is often humorous. In
‘Sanct salvatour, send silver sorrow’ (no. 61) the speaker is so poverty-stricken that he is
obliged to do without breakfast. In ‘Schir, lat it never in toune be tald’ (no. 66) there is a
subtle balance between pathos and self-mockery in Dunbar’s adoption of the persona of an
old horse; excluded from the stall at Yule, he begs for his Christmas livery, which puns on
the term’s double significance as both an allowance of provender for a horse and a courtier’s
set of new clothes.
It is striking how many of Dunbar’s poems, not only the petitions, are preoccupied with
the self. In one he exclaims: ‘In sum pairt of my selffe I pleinye’ (no. 68), and several begin
in the first person: ‘Full oft I muse and hes in thocht’ (no. 14), or ‘I seik aboute this warld
onstable’ (no. 20). They utter complaints: ‘Complane I wald’ (no. 9) and ‘Schir, I com-
plane of injuris’ (no. 64), and voice uneasy questions: ‘How sowld I rewill me?’ (no. 18)
and ‘Quhom to sall I compleine my wo?’ (no. 54). The third stanza of ‘In to thir dirk and
drublie dayis’ signals this self-concern with its emphatic repetitio on ‘I’:

I walk, I turne, sleip may I nocht,

I vexit am with havie thocht,
This warld all ouir I cast about,
And ay the mair I am in dout,
The mair that I remeid have socht.

This is not the egocentricity of love – Dunbar is not noted for his love lyrics – but springs
from ‘exces of thocht’, a phrase that forms part of the refrain to no. 68. ‘Thocht’ signifies a
painful brooding over life and mutability, and informs many of Dunbar’s more serious
poems, including what is probably by far the most famous: ‘I that in heill wes and gladnes’
(no. 21). Its popular title, ‘The Lament for the Makars’, which was conferred not by
Dunbar, but by eighteenth-century editors, is somewhat misleading. The poem is not pri-
marily an elegy for dead poets, but a meditation on death’s inevitability. Dunbar’s tone is
melancholy, but far from morbid. There are undoubtedly some conventional topics in these
poems, and critics have debated to what extent they are autobiographical. It is the present
author’s view that there exists nothing in earlier Scottish poetry that is so nakedly personal
or intimate.
It is not just his own voice that is heard in Dunbar’s poems. He is not a dramatist, nor
primarily a narrative poet, yet many of his poems are highly dramatic. He has a good ear
for the varieties of speech, and this is one reason why his poems are so lively and catch
the attention. Several consist almost entirely of dialogue between two speakers, yet all
differ in tone and structure. They include a highly patterned and formal debate between
two symbolic birds, the merle (blackbird) and the nightingale, on the nature of true love
(no. 24); an erotic and at times obscene dialogue between two lovers (no. 25); a comic
discussion between ‘twa cummaris’ on Ash Wednesday (no. 57); and the poet-dreamer’s
evasive conversation with the Devil, who visits him in the shape of St Francis (no. 77).
The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy (no. 65) consists of nothing but talk – angry talk – and
represents a quarrel between Dunbar and Walter Kennedy, his friend and poetic rival.
Dunbar’s section of The Flyting is particularly dramatic: he not only fills it with his own
 William Dunbar 299

powerful invective, but embeds in it the strident shouts of ‘carlingis’ and fishwives.
Towards its climax, he depicts Kennedy, fleeing down an Edinburgh street pursued by
boys and dogs:

Off Edinburch the boyis as beis owt thrawis,

And cryis owt, ‘Hay, heir cumis our awin queir clerk!’
Than fleis thow lyk ane howlat chest with crawis,
Quhill all the brachis at thy botingis dois bark.
Than carlingis cryis, ‘Keip curches in the merk.
Our gallowis gaipis, lo, quhair ane greceles gais!’
Ane vthir sayis, ‘I se him want ane ane sark,
I reid yow, cummer, tak in your lynnyng clais’.

Dunbar’s most ambitious poem, The Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, consists largely of
dialogue: it is a tretis, or story, in which the poet overhears two young wives and a widow,
alone in a beautiful garden on Midsummer Eve, talking freely about love, sex and marriage.
Each wife, interrogated by the widow, complains about her husband’s unkindness and
sexual inadequacy; the widow then exclaims: ‘Now tydis me to talk’, and instructs them
how to outwit their husbands, and exploit them for their own satisfaction. The ‘talk’ in this
poem is far from naturalistic; it consists of three rhetorical monologues, of which the
widow’s ‘ornat speche’ is the longest and most eloquent. The work is written in unrhymed
alliterative verse, characterised by a distinctive archaic poetic diction. Despite these con-
straints Dunbar often achieves the effect of angry and passionate speech. The first wife
begins her denunciation of her old husband in flyting style:

I have ane wallidrag, ane worme, ane auld wobat carle,

A waistit wolroun na worth bot wourdis to clatter,
Ane bumbart, ane dronbee, ane bag full of flewme,
Ane scabbit skarth, ane scorpioun, ane scutarde behind.
To se him scart his awin skyn grit scunner I think.

The second wife describes how she lies awake at night, cursing the evil kindred who
married her to a man she did not love, and how she resists his advances: ‘My hony, hald
abak and handill me nought sair’. The poem, of course, purports to represent women’s
speech. Challenging the norms of female linguistic inhibition, all three women are remark-
able for their sexual frankness and breaking of verbal taboos. The widow may advise the
wives to assume a modest demeanour and resemble ‘turtoris in your talk’, but in practice
they share men’s taste for ‘langage of lichory’. The work reveals Dunbar’s interest in lan-
guage. It is sprinkled with brief comments on the way people talk: their words are some-
times ‘sweit’, but, revealingly, more often ‘ryatus [licentious]’ and ‘cummerlik’.
At the very end of The Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, the narrator himself speaks to
his ‘auditoris’, and questions this actual or imagined audience:

Of thir thre wanton wiffis that I haif writtin heir,

Quhilk wald ye waill to your wif, gif ye suld wed one?

There is a clear comic parallelism between the inner story and its frame: instead of a woman
interrogating women, the male poet addresses men, and singles out for consideration one
300 Priscilla Bawcutt

of the widow’s most contentious topics, choice of marriage partners. Dunbar intended this
poem to provoke debate among its earliest listeners and readers, and it is not surprising that
the debate still continues among modern critics, on many issues ranging from the role of
the narrator to the depiction of the women. In its structure the poem draws on the trad-
ition of demandes d’amour, the playful discussion of love in the form of questions and
answers. Dunbar has reshaped this courtly pastime, however, into something far more
savage and painful. The women speak bitterly of their married experience, and compare
their husbands to insects, reptiles, beasts of burden and other sick animals. The imagery is
degrading and humiliating.
Dunbar calls himself ‘Dunbar the mackar’ (no. 70), and elsewhere speaks of his verse as
‘making’ (no. 64). These terms, which were probably inherited from Chaucer, were new at
that time in Scottish poetry, and not in common use among his contemporaries. They seem
to lay stress on the poet as skilled craftsman, and the poem as artefact. This aspect of
Dunbar was singled out by Edwin Morgan in a 1952 essay, reprinted in Essays by Edwin
Morgan (1974):

What is immediately noticeable in his work is the display of poetic energy in forms that have
considerable technical and craftsmanly interest.

Dunbar’s genius lies less in his ideas or thoughts – which were largely the commonplaces of
the age – than in the form and texture of his poems. It is in this respect that he is most ori-
ginal and creative. He liked to experiment with different poetic kinds – dream vision, fable,
debate, elegy, testament, flyting – and he had a taste for parody, which seems characteristic
of writers acutely aware of the formal aspects of poetry. But Dunbar cannot be easily classi-
fied. He liked to subvert generic expectations, or put old genres to new uses: a poem which
starts as a religious vision turns out to be a diabolic delusion (no. 77), and a down-to-earth
satiric complaint on the evils of the age ends with a vision of the Last Judgement. Some of
the pleasure of The Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo derives from its intertextuality; in it
Dunbar wittily alludes not only to the demandes d’amour, but to other medieval genres, such
as the chanson de mal mariée, the gossips’ meeting, and even the saint’s legend – the widow
reminds us of this, when she remarks: ‘this is the legeand of my lyf’.
Dunbar is highly adventurous, metrically. He makes only occasional use of the four-stress
couplet, the staple of much early Scottish verse, such as The Bruce, but shows complete
mastery of the long and complex stanzas, usually associated with courtly poetry, such as
rhyme royal and the demanding nine-line stanza of The Goldyn Targe. He also uses more
popular forms of verse, such as the carol and tail-rhyme. He seems to have been the first
Scottish poet to write triolets; and the unusual ‘wasp-waisted’ stanza with internal rhyme
employed in the Complaint to the merchants of Edinburgh (no. 55) was possibly his own
invention. Yet the stanzas apparently most congenial to Dunbar, to judge by their fre-
quency in his verse, are short and simple, arranged in varying patterns of four or five lines,
and often accompanied with a refrain. These refrains, many drawn from proverbial wisdom,
effectively establish the theme or tone of a poem. Dunbar is particularly inventive, and
often comic, in devising rhymes: ‘lyve’ and ‘wive’ are accompanied by ‘laxatyve’ (no. 4);
and it does not enhance the dignity of the burgh of Stirling to be coupled with a ‘spyrling’,
a sprat or other small fish, in this dancing triolet from The Dirige to the King (no. 84):

Cum hame and duell no mair in Stirling,

Fra hyddows hell cume hame and duell,
 William Dunbar 301

Quhair fische to sell is nane bot spyrling,

Cum hame and duell na mair in Stirling.

Commenting on his versatility, W. H. Auden remarked in 1933, reviewing – in Criterion,

12 – W. Mackay Mackenzie’s 1932 edition of The Poems of William Dunbar: ‘The first gift
of such a poet is verse technique, and Dunbar is unfailingly brilliant.’
Dunbar is also verbally adventurous. He moves easily in a wide range of linguistic regis-
ters: native Scots or Latinate, formal or colloquial, legal or liturgical, newly minted words
or archaisms. His style is flexible, and varied, more so than many critics have recognised.
At one extreme is the aureate, ‘high style’ characteristic of The Goldyn Targe and some of
the courtly poems; at the other is the low, colloquial style of The Flyting and many of the
comic poems and invectives. Yet many of Dunbar’s most moving and thoughtful poems
(which include ‘I that in heill wes’ and ‘In to thir dirk and drublie dayis’) can hardly be
classified as either high or low, but are written in a plain, conversational, middle style.
Among early Scottish poets, Dunbar is unrivalled in his sensitivity to the connotations
of words and phrases. His poems abound in verbal ironies, puns and word play. The words
merciful and honesty, for instance, usually have further ironic implications relating to sexual
behaviour. Legal senses often reinforce the sense of abstract nouns: so exceptioun, in a poem
on the inevitability of death (no. 32), signifies both modern ‘exception’ and also ‘defence
or plea in a court of law’; and suspitioun, in a mock-commendation of women (no. 74), sig-
nifies not only ‘suspicion of sexual impropriety’, but also ‘suspicion of judicial bias’. ‘In
secreit place’ (no. 25) is notorious for its burlesque of the language of endearment, and
bawdy double entendres. Dunbar’s poems also abound in imagery, which serves both to
enhance and to degrade. The Goldyn Targe is pervaded with images of brilliant light; allu-
sions to the sun, stars, gold, silver and gleaming jewels form a metaphoric network which
is not only highly decorative, but implies symbolic analogies between love, poetry and the
natural world. Dunbar is particularly inventive, however, in the field of invective and
satire, drawing on the city streets and the world of the farm labourer for reductive imagery.
A courtier dances clumsily, like an old ‘hopschaklit [hobbled]’ horse (no. 70). A social
upstart is ‘Mell hedit lyk ane mortar stane’ (no. 9); this implies that he is a blockhead, with
a head shaped like a mallet. The old husband of the first wife in The Twa Mariit Wemen and
the Wedo has rheumy eyes that are ‘gorgeit [clogged up] lyk tua gutaris that war with glar
[slime, filth] stoppit’; and when he kisses his reluctant young wife, his rough chin ‘heklis’
her cheeks like the heckle used to comb flax. Images of this kind usually have visual or
tactile appropriateness, but their low origin also lends them a further pejorative force.
In recent years scholars have shed much light upon the education and literary culture of
Scotland in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Dunbar was an educated, but not a deeply
learned, poet. He draws upon Classical mythology to embellish The Goldyn Targe and other
poems written in the high style, but shows little sign of the deep interest in the ancient
world and sympathy with humanism displayed by Gavin Douglas. The Latin literary trad-
ition that most powerfully affected Dunbar was that of the medieval Church. Echoes of its
liturgy, its hymns, and the Vulgate translation of the Bible appear in passing allusions to
‘haly writ’, in refrains, such as Timor mortis conturbat me (no. 21) and Vanitas vanitatum et
omnia vanitas (no. 42), and in the symbolic imagery of his fine poems on the Resurrection
and the Annunciation. The diction and imagery of The Ballat of Our Lady (no. 16) is today
so unfamiliar that some readers may be inclined to regard it as a poetic curiosity; viewed in
the context of Dunbar’s own time, however, it is far from unique. Veneration of the Virgin
Mary was at its height in the late Middle Ages, and there are close parallels to its style in
302 Priscilla Bawcutt

the numerous devotional poems in honour of the Virgin Mary, written not only in Latin,
but in every language of western Europe. The ‘Goliardic’ tradition of irreverent parody and
satire is another important strand of Latin writing to which Dunbar was indebted, notably
in such poems as The Testament of Maister Andro Kennedy (no. 19) and The Dirige (no. 84).
Dunbar, like most medieval poets, also owed much to the literature of France. This shows
itself, however, not in debts to specific poets, but in his use of forms or themes that origin-
ated ultimately in France. One such was the widely dispersed tradition of the dream poem,
whose popularity can be traced to the thirteenth-century Le Roman de la Rose of Guillaume
de Lorris and Jean de Meun. Dunbar clearly appreciated the potential of this form, and
placed eleven of his poems within a dream framework. Structurally, they have much in
common: they usually begin by specifying the season and time – often dawn or just before
sunrise – and some end abruptly, even explosively, with the ‘crak’ of a gun (nos 59 and 75).
In others the dreamer is wakened by bird song, which is conventionally melodious in The
Thrissill and the Rois, but comically raucous in A Ballat of the Abbot of Tungland (no. 4). Many
of these poems are punctuated by me thocht, ‘it seemed to me’ – this phrase, stressing the sub-
jectivity of the experience, implies doubts as to the dream’s veracity, when it is reinforced
by other phrases, such as ‘dreming and a fantasy’ (no. 29). Thematically, the poems are
extremely varied – they include a meditation on the Passion, an allegorical love poem, and,
most distinctive of all, an ‘eldritch’ group of blackly comic poems, pervaded by diablerie,
which are better described as nightmares than dreams. The most famous of these is a vision
of the ‘Fasternis Evin’ (Shrove Tuesday) entertainments in hell (no. 47), which begins with
a dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, and concludes with a grotesque tournament between a
tailor and a soutar. The prominence of the dreamer varies greatly: in some poems he is at
the very centre of the action, and in others he is simply a satiric spectator; in The Goldyn
Targe his role alters from detached observer to a man whose reason is overpowered by love.
The poetry that was most important to Dunbar was written in his own tongue, which he
called ‘Inglisch’, as did most of his contemporaries in Lowland Scotland. Dunbar, like
Henryson, was refreshingly free from the sour anglophobia that pervades Blind Harry’s
Wallace, and paid little attention to the political differences between England and
Scotland. In The Goldyn Targe he addressed a glowing tribute to ‘reuerend Chaucer’:

Thou beris of makaris the tryumph riall,

Thy fresche anamalit termes celicall
This mater coud illumynit have full brycht.
Was thou noucht of oure Inglisch all the lycht,
Surmounting eviry tong terrestriall,
Alls fer as Mayes morow dois mydnycht?

This is no mere ‘cultural cringe’ on Dunbar’s part, rather clear-sighted recognition of

Chaucer’s revolutionary impact upon the poets who followed him, in Scotland as well as
England. Chaucer was perceived to be the master of modes and themes that much appealed
to late medieval readers – dream allegory, such as The Parliament of Fowls, and love poetry,
such as Troilus and Criseyde. He popularised new and attractive metrical forms, several of
which were employed by Dunbar. Most importantly, Chaucer was widely admired for the
brilliance of his diction. The terms here applied to it by Dunbar – ‘anamalit [enamelled)’
and ‘illumynit’ – are key images, deriving from the art of the illuminator, who painted
manuscripts with glowing colours. It was as a stylist, rather than as a humorist or storyteller,
that Dunbar learnt most from Chaucer.
 William Dunbar 303

Dunbar was keenly aware, however, of Scotland’s own distinctive literature. At the close
of The Wallace, Harry refers vaguely to earlier Scottish poets, but Dunbar is far more spe-
cific in ‘I that in heill wes and gladnes’ (no. 21). He names twenty-one poets ‘of this cuntre’,
ranging from the fourteenth-century John Barbour to Stobo and Quintine Shaw, who were
Dunbar’s companions in the royal household and who died about the same time (c. 1505).
He makes us aware not only of the number of these poets, many of whom are now quite
forgotten, but of the diversity of their writing – patriotic chronicles in verse, such as those
by Barbour and Wyntoun, mingle with ‘balat making and trigide [tragedy]’, love poetry and
Arthurian romances, such as ‘the anteris of Gawane’. Dunbar, it should be noted, includes
no Gaelic poets in this list, and in The Flyting he humorously dissociates himself from the
culture and language of the Highlanders. The richness of his immediate literary environ-
ment may be briefly illustrated by a few of the close contemporaries whom he mentions:
Robert Henryson (c. 1430–1500?), by far the greatest of Dunbar’s predecessors; Sir Gilbert
Hay, who made prose translations of French chivalric and didactic treatises, and was the
author of a monumental romance, The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour; Richard
Holland, who wrote The Buke of the Howlat, a witty allegorical bird fable, which influenced
several of Dunbar’s poems, particularly the Ballat of the Abbot of Tungland; and
Walter Kennedy (c. 1460–1508), who deserves to be remembered not simply as Dunbar’s
antagonist in The Flyting, but as the author of an impressive devotional poem on the
Passion of Christ.
Dunbar’s own place in the Scottish literary tradition has fluctuated remarkably. There is
no doubt that he had a powerful impact on sixteenth-century poetry. The Goldyn Targe was
one of the first poems to be printed by Scotland’s earliest printers, Walter Chepman and
Andro Myllar. It was singled out for praise by Sir David Lindsay (?1486–1555), and its
influence may be discerned in the aureate diction and rhetorical patterning of many later
works, ranging from the anonymous chivalric romance Clariodus to Alexander
Montgomerie’s (c. 1550–98) allegorical The Cherrie and the Slae. At the other stylistic
extreme is The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, which seems to have initiated the long-
lasting popularity of flyting in Scotland, and also influenced the diction of much political
satire in the second half of the sixteenth century. Less obvious, perhaps, but no less import-
ant was Dunbar’s inauguration of a tradition of writing short, witty, reflective poems upon
a variety of subjects. Some of these are by well-known poets, such as Sir David Lindsay and
Alexander Scott (?1530–84), but many others, often employing Dunbar’s favourite metres,
are anonymous, and owe their survival to the compilers of two great poetic anthologies,
the Bannatyne Manuscript and the Maitland Folio.
A revolution in literary taste occurred, however, in the later sixteenth century, and
Dunbar was virtually forgotten throughout the seventeenth century – no critic mentioned
his name, and none of his poems appeared in print until the publication, in 1724, of Allan
Ramsay’s (1684–1758) Ever Green: Being a Collection of Scots Poems Wrote by the Ingenious
before 1600. The precise reasons for this neglect are obscure; not only changes in literary
fashion, but the growing archaism of Dunbar’s language were probably largely responsible,
together with the obvious Catholicism of his more serious poems, and the flippancy of
others. Ramsay’s Ever Green, however, sparked an enormous revival of interest in Dunbar,
not only among scholars and antiquarians, but among the wider literary public. By the
nineteenth century, he was commonly regarded as the greatest of the early Scottish poets –
in Sir Walter Scott’s phrase, the ‘darling of the Scottish Muses’. Throughout the twenti-
eth century this interest in Dunbar has continued and intensified. In 1927 Hugh
MacDiarmid, seeking a witty, sophisticated and, above all, unsentimental model for
304 Priscilla Bawcutt

modern poets, issued the famous rallying call: ‘Not Burns – Dunbar!’ MacDiarmid’s power-
ful voice thus confirmed – but did not create – Dunbar’s status as one of the greatest
Scottish poets.

Further reading

Bawcutt, P. (1983), ‘The Art of Flyting’, Scottish Literary Journal 10: 2: 5–24.
Bawcutt, P. (1991), ‘The Earliest Texts of Dunbar’, in F. Riddy (ed.), Regionalism in Late
Medieval Manuscripts and Texts, Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, pp. 183–98.
Bawcutt, P. (1992), Dunbar the Makar, Oxford: the Clarendon Press.
Bawcutt, P. (1992), ‘Images of Women in the Poems of Dunbar’, Études Écossaises 1: 49–58.
Bawcutt, P. (1997), ‘ “Nature Red in Tooth and Claw”: Bird and Beast Imagery in Dunbar’,
in L. A. J. R. Houwen (ed.), Animals and the Symbolic in Medieval Art and Literature,
Groningen: Egbert Forstens, pp. 93–105.
Mapstone, S. (ed.) (2001), William Dunbar, ‘The Nobill Poyet’, East Linton: Tuckwell Press.
 32

Sìleas na Ceapaich
Colm Ó Baoill

Sìleas na Ceapaich (‘of Keppoch’) or Sìleas nighean Mhic Raghnaill (‘daughter of the chief
of the MacDonalds of Keppoch’) is perhaps best known as a Jacobite poet, but her output
is a good deal more varied than that. Composing, as she evidently did, mainly in the first
quarter of the eighteenth century, she can claim to be a dominant figure in the poetic tran-
sition between the seventeenth century and the eighteenth.
She was probably born in the early 1660s, a daughter of Gilleasbaig na Ceapaich
(d. 1682), chief of the MacDonalds of Keppoch in Lochaber; her Christian name appears
in Scots as Giles or Geilles or the like, a name reasonably well attested in Scots and proba-
bly identical with the name of the male saint Giles. The principal evidence for her date of
birth is the fact that her marriage contract is dated 1 August 1685. Her husband was
Alexander Gordon of Camdell, near Tomintoul, whom she must surely have met when he
visited Lochaber as factor for the Marquis of Huntly, superior of those lands, and he took
her to live in the north-east. In 1700 they got possession of Beldorney Castle in the parish
of Glass, near Huntly, and probably lived there for the rest of their lives, bringing up at
least five sons and three daughters. By this marriage Sìleas was able to retain much of the
social standing she inherited from her Highland chiefly origins.
The collection of her work employed in this chapter is Bàrdachd Shìlis na Ceapaich
(1972) edited by the present author and comprising twenty-three songs and poems. As
is well known, vernacular Gaelic verse in the seventeenth century consists principally of
songs. These were composed and transmitted only in the oral tradition until they were
written down in the aftermath of 1746, when collectors thought the Gaelic world had
come to an end and set out to collect the fragments. The details of the transmission of
any individual song, or even indeed of the body of Sìleas’s songs, we will probably never
know. Apart from one or two religious texts, where it might be held that their metrical
structure suggests literate composition, Sìleas’s compositions are all songs, even though
we often cannot identify the tune. The words come down to us in manuscript or printed
sources dating from after 1770, and the likelihood is that many of her songs circulated
only orally in Gaelic areas between the date of their composition and the date they were
first written down. It is possible (and tradition, in fact, says) that one or two of them
existed in a manuscript earlier than any of the surviving sources. In the main, however,
it seems likely that a large part in the transmission of songs of the period 1600–1750 was
played by the type of ceilidh-house described in Thomas McKean’s Hebridean Song-
maker: Iain MacNeacail of the Isle of Skye (1996). This was a house of a kind once to be
found in every Highland village, in which the non-literate community gathered regularly
to exchange, transmit and thus preserve for us their traditional tales, songs, dances and
folklore. Sìleas’s songs are all perfectly consistent with having been transmitted to us
306 Colm Ó Baoill

through such a social medium. Inevitably, being repeated and re-learnt in that context
over a considerable period, the songs are liable to change, so that we can never be certain
that we have Sìleas’s ‘original’ text: occasionally the text that survives for us fails to make
credible sense.
Her corpus includes six political songs concerning the events of 1715, and it is not sur-
prising that, with her close MacDonald and Gordon connections, she is no impartial
observer of events. Following the Jacobite defeat at Sheriffmuir, she addresses the losers in
a song to a well-known popular tune:

’S e rìgh na muice
’S na Cuigse Rìgh Deòrsa
Is fada ’nur cadal gun dùsgadh sibh;
Mas tig oirnn an t-Samhainn
Bidh amhach ’s na còrdaibh,
Is fada ’nur cadal gun dùsgadh sibh;
Nan èireadh sibh suas
Ann an cruadal ’s an duinealas,
Eadar ìslean is uaislean,
Thuath agus chumanta,
Sgiùrsadh sibh uaibh e,
Rìgh fuadain nach buineadh dhuinn,
Is dhèanainn an cadal gu sunndach leibh.

(King George is a swinish Whiggish king [. . .]; before Hallowtide comes his neck will be in
ropes [. . .]. If you were to rise with hardihood and manliness, both nobles and vassals,
tenantry and common folk, you would sweep him away from you, an alien king who has no
place with us [. . .].)

Another song, addressed to James before the rising, attacks the 1707 Union vehemently
by punning on the Gaelic word uinnean, which normally means ‘onion’. Addressing
Scotland (a personification which is remarkably rare in Gaelic verse), Sìleas says:

Is goirt leam thug iad sgrìob oirbh,

Mo Mhaili bheag Ò,
Nuair a dheasaich iad ur dìnneir,
Mo nighean rùin Ò,
Nuair a chuir iad uinnean puinnsein
Ga ghearradh air gach truinnsear:
Ma’s fiach sibh bidh se cuimhnichte,
Mo Mhaili bheag Ò.

(It grieves me that they brought disaster upon you [. . .] when they prepared your dinner
[. . .], when they had a poisoned onion sliced on each plate: if you are of any worth, that will
be remembered [. . .].)

The best-known Gaelic song on the Union, that attributed to Iain Lom by Annie
M. Mackenzie in Orain Iain Luim (1964), but probably in fact the work of a minor
Perthshire poet, as discussed by the present author in Scottish Gaelic Studies XVI (1990),
 Sìleas na Ceapaich 307

has been fairly called ‘an inferior composition, often nearly unintelligible’ in Scottish Gaelic
Studies X (1965), and has none of the witty bite of Sìleas’s single stanza.
No one expects a poet to be impartial in politics, and the heroic Gaelic political songs
of the seventeenth century are extremely partial – nearly always to the Stewart position.
That century is designated by Derick Thomson in his An Introduction to Gaelic Poetry
(1974) as one of ‘Clan and Politics’ in the matter of poetry: the songs praise the chief and
his clan in the encomiastic way of heroic verse, following what amounts to something of
a formula. One item in this formula, which has been called ‘the panegyric code’, is the
identification of the allies the subject might expect to find supporting him in battle, obvi-
ously an effective way of boosting a chief’s image among his own people and among
potential allies. There are praise poems which consist almost entirely of this item, the
listing of potential allies. Thomson has suggested in Transactions of the Gaelic Society of
Inverness LVI (1989) that it is from the starting point of such eulogies that there first
appeared, in relation to the 1715 rising, the kind of song that is sometimes called Oran
nam Fineachan (Gaidhealach), ‘The Song of the (Highland) Clans’. These consist essen-
tially of a list of such clans and/or chiefs as will/ought to come out and fight for the
Jacobite cause. The best-known instance of such a song is the one composed by Alasdair
mac Mhaighstir Alasdair and concerned with the 1745 rising cited in John Lorne
Campbell’s Highland Songs of the Forty-Five (1933). There are, however, two related to
the 1715 rising, one of them composed by Sìleas; the other is the work of a male
MacDonald poet, Iain Dubh, so we cannot claim with conviction that Sìleas was the
innovator in this case.
In her song, listing the clan chiefs who will, she says, come out and fight, she is surely a
worthy practitioner of blackmail, for if a chief’s Jacobite credentials are heralded in a
popular song he will be under great pressure to lead his men out. In this context, then, it
must have been no little disappointment for Sìleas that her brother Colla, now chief of
Keppoch (in Brae Lochaber), failed to turn up at Sheriffmuir, despite her expressed con-
viction that he would do so:

Beir soraidh an deaghaidh nan laoch,

Gus a’ bhuidhinn ga’n suaicheantas fraoch,
Gu ceannard a’ Bhràghad
’S a’ chuid eile de m’ chàirdibh:
Buaidh shìthne ’s buaidh làrach leibh chaoidh.

Tha ùrachadh buidheann tighinn oirnn:

Mac Coinnich, Mac Shimidh ’s Mac Leòid,
Mac Fhionghain Srath Chuailte
’S an Siosalach suairce;
’S e mo bharail gum buailear leo stròic.

(Convey a greeting after the heroes, to the band whose badge is the heath to the leader of
the Brae and the rest of my kin: may you have victory in hunt and in battle forever.

Fresh troops are coming to us: Mac Coinnich [the MacKenzie chief], Fraser and MacLeod,
Mackinnon of Srath Chuailte and the affable Chisholm; I am confident that they will strike
rending blows.)
308 Colm Ó Baoill

It will be clear at once that these verses are, metrically, ‘limericks’. This verse form devel-
oped in Gaelic from popular tradition, and in this case we seem to have a deliberate use by
the aristocratic poet of a kind of song likely to be popular among the common people. Two
of her other songs (quoted above) on the 1715 rising are modelled on popular songs whose
refrain lines they use.
At least two of the six songs relating to the war and politics of 1715 are almost certainly
not her work: it looks as if, once she was established as the principal Gaelic poet of the
1715 rising, other songs of that rising came to be wrongly ascribed to her. She is thus
another in the long chain of poets who upheld the ancient Gaelic heroic traditions of clan
and politics. But it is noticeable also that, merely by being a MacDonald poet in firm
support of the Stewarts, Sìleas is part of an important literary grouping: Iain Lom (c.
1624–c. 1695) was the great supporter of Charles I in 1645 and James VII in 1689, the great
hater of Covenanters and Campbells, and he belonged, like Sìleas, to the Keppoch family.
It is likely that she would have known him. In her own time, as we have seen, Clanranald’s
poet Iain Dubh (c. 1665–c. 1725) vied with her in producing his Oran nam Fineachan for
the 1715 venture. And Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair championed Prince Charles before,
during and after his rising of 1746. These MacDonald poets all speak with confidence about
what is good for the MacDonalds, for the Gaels and for Scotland, a confidence undoubt-
edly founded on their family’s history as lords of the Isles, ruling in the Highlands for some
centuries as equals rather than subjects of the kings of Scots.
Sìleas’s most famous song is her great lament for Alasdair Dubh, the warlike chief of the
MacDonalds of Glengarry, who died towards the end of 1721. Some of the lines remain a
little uncertain (due to either unclear oral transmission or inexperienced editing), but the
traditional poetic grief is built up to a climax of praise that rises far above the hyperbole of
any of the eulogies of the seventeenth century:

Bu tu ’n lasair dhearg gan losgadh,

Bu tu sgoltadh iad gu’n sàiltibh,
Bu tu curaidh cur a’ chatha,
Bu tu ’n laoch gun athadh làimhe;
Bu tu ’m bradan anns an fhìor-uisg,
Fìreun air an eunlaith ’s àirde,
Bu tu ’n leòmhann thar gach beathach,
Bu tu damh leathan na cràice.

Bu tu ’n loch nach fhaoidte thaomadh,

Bu tu tobar faoilidh na slàinte,
Bu tu Beinn Nibheis thar gach aonach,
Bu tu chreag nach fhaoidte theàrnadh;
Bu tu clach uachdair a’ chaisteil,
Bu tu leac leathan na sràide,
Bu tu leug lòghmhor nam buadhan,
Bu tu clach uasal an fhàinne.

(You were the red torch to burn them,

you would cleave them to the heels,
you were a hero in the battle,
a champion who never flinched;
 Sìleas na Ceapaich 309

a fresh-run salmon in the water,

an eagle in the highest flock,
lion excelling every creature,
broad-chested, strong-antlered stag.

A loch that could not be emptied,

a well liberal in health,
Ben Nevis towering over mountains,
a rock that could not be scaled;
topmost stone of the castle,
broad paving-stone of the street,
precious jewel of virtues,
noble stone of the ring.
[Thomson’s translation])

Despite the hyperbole, it is clear that Sìleas knew Alasdair, and perhaps more closely
his wife:

Bu tu cèile na mnà prìseil,

’S oil leam fhèin d’a dìth an-dràst thu;
Ged nach ionann domhsa’s dhise,
’S goirt a fhuair mise mo chàradh.

(You were the husband of an invaluable wife,

and it grieves me that she is now without you:
though it is not the same for me as for her,
I have myself suffered a bitter fortune.)

This introduction of the poet herself into heroic praise poetry is a new thing in Gaelic ver-
nacular verse, and perhaps one of Sìleas’s main contributions to the development of Gaelic
literature. While steeped in the heroic tradition, she brings the personal into Gaelic verse
in new ways: not only in her religious verse, but in gentle motherly songs to her children
and songs giving advice about sex to young girls. We learn something about her own earlier
life in songs of this last type, and even more in her laments, especially those on the deaths
of her husband and daughter in 1720 (the ‘bitter fortune’ alluded to in the lament for
Alasdair Dubh):

O chan urrainn mi gu bràth

Dol thoirt cunntais uam do chàch
Anns na rug orm eadar dhà Dhi-Satharna.

Cheud Di-Satharna bha dhiùbh

Chuir mi Anna anns an ùir;
’S tric a dh’fhàg i le sùgradh mi aighearach.

An ath Dhi-Satharna ’na dhèidh,

Mun d’àrdaich air a’ ghrèin,
Thug mi liubhairt do Mhac Dé d’fhear mo thaighe uam.

[. . .]
310 Colm Ó Baoill

’S iomadh smuaineachadh bochd truagh

Tha tighinn eadar mi ’s mo shuain
Ona dh’fhàg mi Di-Luain ad laighe thu.

’S iomadh latha is mi fann

Thug thu ’d shuidhe aig mo cheann,
Is nach dèanainn riut cainnt ach gu h-athaiseach.

(Oh! I shall never be able to set about giving a public account of all that befell me between
two Saturdays.

On the first of these Saturdays I laid Anna in her grave; often had she delighted me with
her playfulness.

The following Saturday, before the sun rose, I gave up my husband to the Son of God.
[. . .]

Many a sorrowful thought comes between me and my sleep since I left you laid low
on Monday.

When I was ill you spent many a day sitting at my head, though I could only speak to
you feebly.)

The light personal touch here, and elsewhere in the laments, has no parallel to the
author’s knowledge in earlier Gaelic song, though we do have a few outstanding personal
laments on bereavement in the older formal professional poetry cited by William J. Watson
and Osborn Bergin. In another composition, the ‘Hymn on the deaths of her husband and
daughter’, we find Sìleas at home in Beldorney Castle after that Monday when Alexander
was buried, looking out across the grounds at the little walled enclosure known as the
Wallakirk:

’S mòr mo mhulad ’s mi ’m ònar,

’S mi ’m shuidhe ann an seòmar gun luaidh,
Is nach faic mi tighinn dachaigh
Fear cumail mo chleachdaidh a suas,
Fear a dh’fhadadh mo theine
Is a dh’èigheadh gach deireas a nuas:
Ona chaidh sibh an taisgeadh
’S goirt a chaochail mo chraiceann a shnuadh.

’S tric mo shùilean ri dòrtadh

Ona thug iad thu Mhòr-chlaich a suas,
’S nach faic mise ’n t-àite
’San do chuir iad mo ghràdh-sa ’san uaigh;
Dh’fhàg sibh Anna aig a’ bhaile
’S bidh mise ga ghearan gu cruaidh,
A’ sìor amharc a’ bhalla
Aig na chuir iad i ’m falach gu buan [. . .]
 Sìleas na Ceapaich 311

’S beag mo ghnothach ri fèilltibh

No dh’amharc na rèise rim’ bheò,
No m’aighear ri daoine:
Chaidh mo chuid-sa dhiùbh cuide fon fhòd;
Ona dh’fhalbh iad le chèile,
An dithis nach trèigeadh mi beò,
Rìgh thoir dhomhsa bhith leughadh
Air an aithreachas gheur a bh’ aig Iòb.

(Great is my sadness as I sit unnoticed in a room, without the prospect of seeing, on his way
home, the one who maintained my normal life; the one who would light my fire and who
would summon everything that was lacking: since you have gone to your coffin my skin has
altered its complexion terribly.

My eyes frequently shed tears since they took you up to Mortlach, for I shall not see the
place where they laid my love in the grave. You left Anna at home, and I shall lament that
bitterly, ever looking at the wall where they have hidden her forever [. . .]

I shall have little to do with fairs or with watching the races for the rest of my life, and I
shall have little joy with people: those who belonged to me have been buried at the same
time. Since the two who would never have left me in life have gone away together, Oh Lord
let me read of the grievous penance of Job.)

In this context, with the mention of visits to fairs and horseraces, Jane Howe’s study of ‘The
Huntly Race and its Trophies’ in Anne O’Connor and D. V. Clarke’s From the Stone Age to
the ’Forty-Five (1983) is illuminating. There we are told how the Marquis of Huntly
between 1695 and 1734 devoted a great deal of energy – as well as finance for ‘the Hountlie
Coup’ – to organising an annual race-meeting during the ‘Charles Fair’ (called after King
Charles II) at what is now Huntly, a few miles from Beldorney. Sìleas’s father-in-law was
James Gordon of Tilliesoule, part of the land on which the town of Huntly was later built.
It is, therefore, very likely that Sìleas and her family, in earlier happier years, attended that
annual fair and enjoyed country life in a way totally unattested in Gaelic heroic verse. And
the trophies for the race-meeting show clearly the Jacobite agenda which underlay it, as it
underlay Sìleas’s political songs.
Sìleas was very much a Roman Catholic, as many MacDonalds and many Gordons
were, and this emerges clearly in various songs (including at least one political song) in
addition to the seven which are on explicitly religious themes, like her ‘Conversation
with Death’ and her ‘Morning Hymn’. These seven are to a large extent didactic, using
formulae that link directly to medieval religious verse. Her song (or poem?) on ‘The
Church’ portrays the Catholic Church allegorically as a great castle, impregnable because
of its construction:

Rinn iad sgliata de chrùn draigheann

Agus staidhir de chrois cheusaidh;
Rinn iad le traisg is le ùrnaigh
A teannachadh gu dlùth ri chèile;
’S i Moire Bhain-tighearn a h-ùrlar;
Dh’fhùirneisich dà ostal deug i –
312 Colm Ó Baoill

’S mòr a fhuair iad rithe shaothair

Feadh an saoghail gus an d’eug iad.

(They made slates from his crown of thorns and stairs from his Passion cross: they welded it
tightly together with fasting and prayer. Lady Mary is its floor. Twelve apostles furnished it;
they put a lot of work into it until they died.)

And then they (the ‘masons’ who built the castle) bound the Creed to it, and the seven
sacraments. Having listed these, Sìleas goes on to list the seven deadly sins, the seven
virtues contrary to them, the seven works of mercy and the four last things – just as these
lists were taught in Apologetics classes in twentieth-century schools. Professor Peter
Davidson of Aberdeen has observed to the present author that this essentially medieval
allegory of the Church as a castle has no real equivalent in the English or Latin verse of
Sìleas’s time.
We do not know nearly enough about the education available to Catholics in the
seventeenth-century Highlands, but Sìleas’s poetry suggests that she for one had a thor-
oughly traditional Catholic education. She might well have been taught by a priest,
perhaps a chaplain to the ruling Keppoch family; it is not surprising, of course, considering
the official attitude to Catholicism at the time, that we have no evidence that there was
such a chaplain.
It can be argued that a poem like ‘The Church’, which looks very much like versified
dogma, is unlikely (despite its singability in form) to have been a popular song. Yet,
Sìleas’s ‘Hymn to the Virgin Mary’, a long retelling of the life of Christ from the New
Testament must be noted: versions of this are still known in the living song tradition of
the Catholic southern Hebrides. This song takes the form of a selection of points from
the life of Mary drawing attention to the life and suffering of Christ. Professor Davidson
has pointed out that in this way it is reminiscent of texts for meditation in use among the
early Jesuits, such as The Mysteries of the Life of Christ our Lord by Ignatius of Loyola (c.
1491–1556). Sìleas, like Ignatius, is faithful to the Gospel narrative, though she tells it in
her own informal words. Songs of that kind may belong to an older tradition in which
ordinary Catholics in Gaelic Scotland and Ireland, not having the Bible in central posi-
tion in their church, derived some of their knowledge of biblical history from orally trans-
mitted songs.
In her song of advice to young girls, Sìleas is willing to illustrate her message by reveal-
ing a little about herself:

Nach fhaic sibh òig-fhear nam meall-shùil bòidheach

Le theangaidh leòmaich ’s e labhairt rium,
Le spuir ’s le bhòtan, le ad ’s le chleòca,
Le chorra-cheann spòrsail an òr-fhuilt duinn;
Saoilidh gòrag le bhriathraibh mòrach
Ga cur an dòchas le glòr a chinn:
‘A ghaoil, gabh truas rium ’s na leig gu h-uaigh mi;
Do ghaol a bhuair mi bho ghluais mi fhìn [. . .]’

[. . .] A nis is lèir dhomh na rinn mi dh’eucoir

’Sa mhiad ’s a dh’èisd mi d’am breugan bàth.
 Sìleas na Ceapaich 313

(See the youth with the winsome, attractive eyes

and the affected speech speaking to me;
with his spurs and boots, hat and cloak,
proud giddy head and golden-brown hair:
at his voice a foolish girl will think
that his voice gives her hope:
‘My love, have pity on me and do not let me die;
love for you has afflicted me since I took my first step [. . .]’

[. . .] It is clear to me now the wrong I have done by the number of those foolish lies of
theirs I listened to.)

On the basis of such unspecific admissions, it is not surprising that the oral tradition
which has retained these songs for us came up with the idea, further developed by writers
on the poet’s life, that Sìleas had a ‘frolicsome’ youth. She is then held to have had a
‘conversion’ following an ‘encounter with death’, and became a devout religious poet.
We do have the text of this encounter in her ‘Conversation with Death’, a theme which
is fairly widespread in Gaelic verse, and it ends with a resolution to amend her life.
Accounts which seek to relate this song – and other references she makes to having
suffered – directly to the poet’s life go on to assert that the ‘encounter with death’
involved a long illness, lasting anything from six weeks to three years, in a few cases called
a ‘trance’ or ‘stupor’. One account says she was without food, drink or the power of speech
for three years. Similarly, a cheerful line about happy days, in a lament she made for a
deceased harper friend, has led commentators to build a whole tradition of an illicit love
affair between Sìleas and the harper.
It is, of course, possible that these accounts, since they have some kind of basis in her
verse, do reflect something historically genuine about her; and there does seem to be some
negative evidence that her eldest son Gilleasbaig was ‘illegitimate’. But it cannot be
without significance that very similar stories are told, in the oral tradition to begin with,
about nearly every Gaelic female poet of the period 1600–1750. In most cases, we have
only the most skeletal of life stories for these poets, but there are always these unpleasant
items about aspects of their lives. Some poets are subject to taboos, often unexplained,
which limit the themes they may compose songs about, or the places where they can
compose them. Most are introduced to us with heavy innuendos about their sexual morals
or fondness for obscene verse. Many have close encounters with the supernatural (as in the
case of Sìleas’s ‘trance’, perhaps) or are regarded as witches. Two of the most important of
the women poets are said to have been buried face down, by their own orders, because of
the need to keep ‘beul nam breug’ (the lying mouth) down.
In other words, Gaelic society, either during their own lives or in retrospect, seems
to view women poets with suspicion. The Reverend William Matheson (1910–95),
who pioneered the study of the Gaelic song of the pre-1745 period, showed in Transactions
of the Gaelic Society of Inverness XLI (1953) that most of these unsavoury charges and tra-
ditions arose originally in a society where the poets with prestige were men. There, women
were required to compose only ‘lighter’ songs, including waulking songs and the like.
When women whose names we know stepped out of line and began to compose ‘bigger’
songs, they came to be suspected of evil intent, witchcraft and the abuse of power. It may
be that the memory of Sìleas na Ceapaich has been affected in a similar way: and the
frankness of some of her songs has handed her detractors useful supporting evidence.
314 Colm Ó Baoill

As a victim of prejudice against women poets, then, Sìleas was probably part of a long
line. As a heroic poet on the Gaelic theme of clan and politics, she claims an important
place in a long tradition. But we may wonder if she had any idea herself that in personal
and private Gaelic poetry she was leading a revolution.

Further reading

Bergin, Osborn (1970), Irish Bardic Poetry, Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
Campbell, John Lorne (1933), Highland Songs of the Forty-Five, Edinburgh: Grant.
Munitiz, Joseph A. and Philip Endean (1996), Saint Ignatius of Loyola: Personal Writings,
Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics.
O’Connor, Anne and D. V. Clarke (eds) (1983), From the Stone Age to the ’Forty-Five:
Studies Presented to R. B. K. Stevenson, Edinburgh: Donald.
Thomson, Derick (1989), An Introduction to Gaelic Poetry, 2nd edn, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Watson, William J. (1937), Scottish Verse from the Book of the Dean of Lismore, Edinburgh:
Scottish Gaelic Texts Society.
 Notes on Contributors – Volume One

Paul Barnaby has worked as a researcher for the BOSLIT (Bibliography of Scottish
Literature in Translation) and RBAE (Reception of British Authors in Europe) projects.
He has published articles on the translation and reception of nineteenth- and twentieth-
century Scottish literature and on French and Italian literary Naturalism.

Michael Bath is Emeritus Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Strathclyde,

author of books on emblem studies, renaissance decorative arts and reading poetry. He has
worked for many years on the Stirling Maxwell Collection of emblem books in Glasgow
University and on relations between literature and the visual arts, which were the subject
of the collection of essays Visual Words and Verbal Pictures (2005) published in his honour.

Priscilla Bawcutt is Honorary Professor in the School of English at the University of

Liverpool, and a Vice-President of the Scottish Text Society. She authored Gavin Douglas:
A Critical Study (1976), and Dunbar the Makar (1992). She has published several editions
of Middle Scots poets, and her edition of The Poems of William Dunbar (1998) was awarded
the Saltire Society/National Library of Scotland prize in 1999.

Alexander Broadie is Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at Glasgow University and is a

Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has published a dozen books on the history
of Scottish philosophy, most recently Thomas Reid on Logic, Rhetoric and the Fine Arts
(2005).

Dauvit Broun has been at the University of Glasgow since 1990, where he is now a senior
lecturer in Scottish History. He is currently the pre-1600 editor of the Scottish Historical
Review.

Ian Brown is a freelance scholar, cultural and educational consultant, playwright and poet.
He was, until 2002, Professor of Drama, Dean of Arts and Director of the Scottish Centre
for Cultural Management and Policy at Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh.
Between 1986 and 1994, he was Drama Director of the Arts Council of Great Britain. He
has published on theatrical, literary and cultural topics.

Mary Ellen Brown is Professor Emerita at Indiana University – Bloomington (Folklore and
Ethnomusicology). She has a longtime interest in Scottish literary and vernacular tradi-
tions and their historical, cultural and political salience. She is currently engaged in a study
of Francis James Child and the making of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads.

Thomas Owen Clancy is Professor of Celtic at the University of Glasgow. He has written
extensively on both historical and literary aspects of medieval Scotland and Ireland, and
is author with Gilbert Márkus of Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery (1995) and
316 Notes on Contributors – Volume One

editor of The Triumph Tree: Scotland’s Earliest Poetry, ad 550–1350 (1998). He is also editor
of The Innes Review.

Edward J. Cowan, Professor of Scottish History at Glasgow University, previously taught

at the universities of Edinburgh and Guelph, Ontario. He is currently Director of Glasgow’s
Crichton Campus at Dumfries. He has published widely on various aspects of Scottish
History. His most recent book is ‘For Freedom Alone’: The Declaration of Arbroath 1320
(2003).

Cairns Craig is Director of the AHRC Centre for Scottish and Irish Studies at the
University of Aberdeen. Formerly at Edinburgh University, he is the author of Out of
History (1996), The Modern Scottish Novel (1999) and was general editor of Aberdeen
University Press’s History of Scottish Literature in the 1980s.

Bill Findlay was Research Fellow in the School of Drama and Creative Industries, Queen
Margaret University College. Editor of several major texts on Scottish theatre and trans-
lation, including the seminal A History of Scottish Theatre (1998), he translated, with
Martin Bowman, eight plays by Michel Tremblay from Québécois into Scots and, on his
own, a variety of European playwrights.

Sally M. Foster is a Senior Inspector of Ancient Monuments with Historic Scotland.

A graduate of University College London and Glasgow University, her publications
include the bestseller, Picts, Gaels and Scots (revised edition 2004).

James E. Fraser is Lecturer in Early Scottish History and Culture at the University of
Edinburgh. He has published several articles investigating seventh- and eighth-century
Scotland through the lens of hagiography, as well as books on the battles of Mons Graupius
and Dunnichen.

William Gillies is Professor of Celtic at the University of Edinburgh. His principal research
interests lie in Scottish and Irish Gaelic language and literature. He is currently complet-
ing an edition and study of the Red and Black Books of Clanranald.

Crawford Gribben is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature and Culture at the University of

Manchester. He is the author of a number of studies on the literature and theology of early
modern Scotland and Ireland.

Ashley Hales is editorial assistant for The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature and research
assistant for Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader (forthcoming from Edinburgh University
Press). A Ph.D. candidate at Edinburgh University, her research focuses on transatlantic
studies, emphasising British emigration and nineteenth-century American literature.

Antony J. Hasler is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Saint Louis

University. He is currently completing Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland:
Allegories of Authority, to be published by Cambridge University Press.

Ksenija Horvat is a lecturer in Drama at the School of Drama and Creative Industries,
Queen Margaret University College. Her research areas include contemporary Scottish
 Notes on Contributors – Volume One 317

theatre, gender in theatre, dramaturgy and theatre history. She has worked as a playwright,
translator, researcher and theatre reviewer.

Tom Hubbard is an Honorary Fellow of the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, and
was editor of BOSLIT (the Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation, at http://
boslit.nls.uk), from 2000 to 2004. From January to June 2006 he was a Visiting Scholar at
the University of Budapest.

Benjamin Hudson teaches history at the Pennsylvania State University. His books include
Kings of Celtic Scotland (1994), Prophecy of Berchán (1996) and Viking Pirates and Christian
Princes (2005).

Judith Jesch is Professor of Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham. She has pub-
lished widely on the Viking age and on Old Norse-Icelandic language and literature, includ-
ing several articles on Orkneyinga saga and associated texts.

Martin MacGregor studied at Edinburgh University before taking up post with Western
Isles Council as Museums Development Officer for the Uists and Barra. Since 1995 he has
lectured in Scottish History at the University of Glasgow, specialising in Gaelic Scotland.

Jack (John) MacQueen is Emeritus Professor of Scottish Literature and Oral Tradition,
University of Edinburgh. He had also been Director of the School of Scottish Studies and
Masson Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature.

Susan Manning is Grierson Professor of English Literature and Director of the Institute for
Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. She works on the
Scottish Enlightenment and on Scottish-American literary relations; her most recent
transatlantic study is Fragments of Union (2002).

Sally Mapstone is Fellow and Tutor of St Hilda’s College and University Lecturer in
Medieval English at the University of Oxford. She has published very widely on fifteenth-
and sixteenth-century Scottish Literature, most recently as the editor of Older Scots
Literature (2005). She is President of the Scottish Text Society.

Gilbert Márkus is an honorary research fellow in the Department of Celtic at the University
of Glasgow. He studied theology and philosophy at Blackfriars, Oxford, and the University
of Edinburgh, and Celtic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is author, with
T. O. Clancy, of Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery (1995), and translator of work
from both Latin and Gaelic, including Adomnán’s Law of the Innocents, ad 697 (1997).

Colm Ó Baoill was born in the City of Armagh in 1938 and came to Scotland in 1966 as
Lecturer in Celtic at the University of Aberdeen, where he later became Professor. His
postgraduate research was on Gaelic dialectology, but his edition of the works of Sìleas
na Ceapaich (1970) led to other work on Gaelic verse of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.

Thomas O’Loughlin is Reader in Historical Theology in the University of Wales,

Lampeter. He has concentrated on the Latin theological literature of the British Isles.
318 Notes on Contributors – Volume One

Some of his more recent books include Celtic Theology: Humanity, World and God in Early
Irish Writings (2000) and Journeys on the Edges (2000).

Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh has been a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, assistant profes-
sor/bibliographer at the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, and
is currently Professor of (Scottish and Irish) Gaelic at the University of Glasgow. His primary
research interests are in the diachronic and synchronic study of the Gaelic languages.

Murray Pittock is Professor of Scottish and Romantic Literature at the University of

Manchester, and was formerly Professor at Strathclyde and Reader at Edinburgh. A Fellow
of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the English Association and the Royal Historical Society,
he was British Academy Chatterton Lecturer in 2002. His work on Jacobitism and Scottish
and Irish Studies in the long eighteenth century is internationally influential.

Christine Robinson is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and

Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. She is also the Director of Scottish
Language Dictionaries. Her research interests include older Scots and the dialects of
modern Scots and through her outreach activities she aims to encourage the study of Scots
language in schools.

Jenny Rowland has been a lecturer in Welsh and Celtic at University College Dublin since
1978. Her main area of research and publication is early Welsh poetry.

Nicola Royan is a lecturer in Medieval and Renaissance Literature in the School of English
Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her research focuses primarily on Scottish his-
toriography of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

David Sellar is an Honorary Fellow of the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh
and Bute Pursuivant of Arms. He has written extensively on Scots law and Scottish history,
including legal history and family history. He is a past Chairman of the Conference of
Scottish Medievalists.

Katharine Simms is a senior lecturer in the Department of History, School of Histories and
Humanities, Trinity College Dublin. Her research concentrates on Gaelic social and politi-
cal history with an emphasis on bardic poetry.

Clare Stancliffe is currently an Honorary Reader in Ecclesiastical History at Durham

University, having trained as a historian at Oxford and held research fellowships at
Cambridge, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Durham. Her research topics include early hagio-
graphy and early Irish Christianity.

Charles W. J. Withers is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Edinburgh.

His research interests include the history of geographical knowledge, mainly in the
Enlightenment, and the historical geography of Gaelic Scotland. Recent publications
include Geography, Science and National Identity: Scotland since 1520 (2001) and Geography
and Revolution (2005).
 Index

Note: A page reference in bold indicates a main entry for that subject.
Aberdeen Breviary, 186 Andrew, St: legends of, 185
Aberdeen Doctors, 202, 233, 235 Aneirin, 55
Acts of Parliament, 239, 240; see also specific acts as author of Gododdin, 72–6
Acts of Sylvester, 111, 112 Anglo-Norman: settlement patterns introduced,
Adair, John, 151 45–6
Adam de Cologne, 245 Anglo-Saxon: in Scottish and English literatures,
Adam of Dryburgh, 118–20, 119–20, 186 26–7
administration Anglo-Saxons, 54, 55
David I, 40 raids, 56–7, 59
new systems of, 44 Anne, Queen, 236
Adomnán of Iona, 12, 50, 96, 115, 117–18, 185 anonymous literature, 7
Cáin (Lex Innocentium or Law of the Innocents), Anselm, St, 116, 120
105, 118 anthologies: Book of the Dean of Lismore compared
De Locis Sanctis, 110, 115, 117–18 with, 215
hagiography, 103, 104, 105, 106 antiquarianism, 180
Life of St Columba, 91, 100–1, 104, 106–7, 108, antique painting, 247
110–14, 128, 184 Antoinine Wall, 53, 184
‘Prayer of Adomnán’, 97 Aonghas Mór, 69
texts available to, 118, 119 apologues, 222
advice to princes, 275, 277, 283, 290 applied arts, 246
Æbbe of Coldringham, St, 104, 128 appropriation, 138
Aedán mac Gabrán, 127–8 Aquinas, St Thomas, 121, 226
Aelred of Rievaulx, 40 Arabic works, 120, 121
Vita Sancti Niniani, 104, 108 Arbroath, Declaration of (1320), 8, 135, 136, 186–7,
Aesop, 290 238
Æthelstan, 37 Scottish identity in, 168, 170–1
Agallamh na Seanórach (Discussions of the Old Men), archery, 137
123–4, 223 architecture, 7
agriculture and art, 245–52
until 1314, 44–5, 47 castellated, 137, 249–50
1314–1707, 144, 146–7, 151 domestic, 45
Aikenhead, Thomas, 237 feudal, 49
Ailsa Craig conspiracy, 283 Pictish, 48–9
Aithbhreac inghean Coirceadail, 71, 214 symbiosis of secular and religious power, 77–8
Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair 307, 308 Argyll, Archibald, Marquis of, 141
Alba, 49, 50, 56 Argyll, Iseabal, Countess of, 211, 224
Albany, Alexander, Duke of, 278 Aristotle, 120, 226
Albany, Robert, Duke of, 274 Arnold, Matthew, 25
Alcuin, 185 Arnold, Thomas, 25–6
Alexander, Sir William, 146, 200 art, 7, 245–52
Monarchicke Tragedies, 260 impact of Scottish literature on, 164
Alexander I, 39, 40, 153 Arthur, King: in Gododdin, 76
Alexander II, 40–1 artillery, 137–8
Alexander III, 40–1, 172–3, 256 Asloan, John, 215
allies: lists of, 307 Asloan Manuscript, 215, 276
alliteration: Gaelic patterns of, 92 assemblies: of poets, 83
Altus Prosator, 94–5 astronomy, 195–6
amatory literature, 275, 282; see also love atlases, 150
American literature, 27 Augustine, St, 117, 118, 290, 291
Amhlaoibh of the Lennox, 69, 87 Augustinians, 40, 50
Amra Choluimb Cille, 96–7, 100 Auld Alliance, 161
ancestry, Scottish, 6 authority, literary: transmission among male authors,
Anderson, John, 246 293
320 Index

Averroes, 120 biography: in hagiography, 105–6, 110–11

Avicenna, 120 Bishop’s Palace, Kirkwall, 77–8, 82
Aytoun, Sir Robert, 196, 206, 284 Bisset, Baldred, 170–1, 172, 186
Aytoun, W. E., 23, 27 Processus, 8
Bisset, Thomas, 171
Bacon, Ann, 193–4 Bjarni Kolbeinsson, Bishop, 77, 78, 81–2
Baillie, Joanna, 17 courtly verse, 70, 125
Bairhum, Andrew, 245 Jómsvíkingadrápa, 81, 125
Bakhtin, Mikhail: dialogic approach of multivocality, Black Douglases, 276–7, 280
5 Blackwood, Adam, 199
Balcarres Lute Book, 269 Martyr de la royne d’Ecosse, Le, 165–6
ballads, 140, 164, 263–72 Blackwood’s Magazine, 26
Balliol, Edward, 136 Blaeu, Johannes: Atlas Novus, 150
Balliol, John, 41–2, 145, 175 Blair, Hugh, 23–4, 27
Bannatyne, George, 264, 282 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 24
Bannatyne Club, 19–20, 265 Blane, St: hagiography, 104, 107
Bannatyne Manuscript, 19, 21, 220, 264–5, 282, 286, Blondel, 85
303 boasting: in Norse literature, 79
Bannockburn, battle of, 42–3, 135 Boece, Hector (Boethius), 158, 169, 178–80, 181,
ballad on, 263 188
Baptists, 235 Consolation of Philosophy, 287
Barbour, John, 20, 164, 273, 303 Murthlacensium et Aberdonensium Episcoporum
Bruce, The, 19, 124, 136, 174–6, 273, 300: Vitae, 188
language of, 159–60 Scotorum Historia, 139, 150, 172, 178–9, 188, 216,
‘Stewartis Orygenale, The’, 273 280
Barclay, John, 13, 165, 166–7, 196–9 Bonaventure, 121
Argenis, 166–7, 197–9 Book of Common Order, The, 231
Epistola leporum Neumarchiensium ad Regem, 197 Book of Deer, 58, 127, 154
Euphormionis Lusinini or Satyricon, 166, 167, 196–7 Book of Discipline, 234
Pugna Gallorum Gallinaceorum, 197 Book of Leinster, 223
Barclay, William, 167, 196 Book of Pluscarden, 173–4, 277
De Regno et Regali Potestate, 199, 200 Book of the Dean of Lismore, The, 21, 70, 86, 209–18,
bardic verse 220–5
influence of Gododdin, 76 battle tales in, 127
revolution in, 83–90 orthographic practice in, 157, 214–15
bards, 63–4, 221, 222; see also filidh Borders, 140, 145
Barnes, William, 12 Boswell, James, 207
Barrie, James, 12, 23 Bothwell, Richard, 277
Barron, Robert, 202–3, 235 bothy ballads, 264
Bartlett, Robert: hagiography, 108 Bower, Walter, 169, 172–3, 185, 187
Bassandyne, Thomas, 286 ‘Book of Coupar Angus’, 173
Bassandyne Bible, 232 Scotichronicon, 107, 136–7, 170, 172–3, 173–4,
Baston, Robert, 187 187, 275, 276
battle ballads, 263 Boyd, Mark Alexander, 165, 196, 206
battle-list, genre of, 68 Brahe, Tycho, 196
battle narratives, 126–7 Braveheart (film), 6
battle poetry: in praise tradition, 68 Brevis Chronica, 173–4
beast-fable: Henryson, 288–91 Briain, Uí, princes of Southern Ireland, 39
Beaton, Angus, 156 British language, 52, 54–5, 57
Beaton, Fergus, 155 British literature, 12, 27
Bede, 35, 117, 171 Britons, 35, 36
hagiography, 103 Brittonic languages, 57, 154; see also specific languages
as theologian, 115–16 broadside ballads, 264, 267–8, 270–1
begging poems: Dunbar, 297–8 Bronckhorst, Arnold, 245
Bellenden, John, 139, 158, 179–80, 216, 280–1 Brown, George, bishop of Dunkeld, 173, 216
Chronicles of Scotland, 178–9, 280 Bruce, Robert (1210–95), 41–2
‘Proheme of the Cosmographe’, 280–1 Bruce, Robert (1274–1329) see Robert I
belles lettres, 24 Bruce, The see Barbour, John
Beowulf, 26 Brucean ideology, 175
Bernician saints, 104, 107 brúilingeacht (imperfect rhymes), 83
Bible, 141, 231–2 Brunnanburh, battle of, 37
authorised, 232 Buchan, David, 268–9
Bassandyne, 232 Buchan, John, 12, 28
Geneva, 162, 232 Buchanan, George, 138, 141, 179, 195–6, 200, 247
influence on poetry, 92 Ad Henricum Scotorum Regem, 193
bilingualism: in Scots and Gaelic, 157–8 Ad Regem Scotiæ Henricum, 192–3
 Index 321

Baptistes, 166, 189, 190, 258 Carswell, John, 157, 231

Coena Gavini Archiepiscopi Glascuensis, 189–90 Cassian, John, 113, 116
De Jure Regni apud Scotos, 141, 180, 189 castles, 49, 78, 137, 138, 145
De Sphaera, 166, 189, 195–6 catechisms, Gaelic: publishing, 157
Epigrams, 189 Cathal Croibhdhearg O’Conor, king of Connacht, 86
Franciscanus, 189, 190 cathedrals: building, 50
Fransisci Valesii Mariæ Stuartæ, 191 Catholicism, Roman 231, 236
Fratres Fraterrimi, 189, 190 drama as tool against, 255–6
Genethliacon Jacobi Sexti Regis Scotorum, 194–5 Sìleas na Ceapaich, 311–12
as historiographer, 176–7, 180–1 Catroe of Metz, St, 104
Iambs, 189, 192 Caxton, William, 177
influence of, 166 ceilidh-houses: transmission of Gaelic culture, 305–6
Ioannis Calvani epicedium, 193 ceilings: painted, 248
Jephthes, 166, 189, 190, 258 Celtic languages 52–3, 54
Joanni Diguallo, 190 major changes, 57
masques, 191–2, 256 P-Celtic and Q-Celtic, 53, 54
as neo-classicist, 158, 165, 166, 189–96 see also specific language
Palinodia, 190 Celtic literature
plays, 158, 258 narrative and lyric in, 123–5
poetry, 189–90, 192–5 praise poetry, 16, 63–4
Psalms, 166, 190, 200 Celtic names, 52–3, 55
Rerum Scoticarum Historiae (History of Scotland), ceremonial centres: Pictish, 49
139, 150, 180–1, 189 ceremonies
Somnium, 190 emblematic devices, 251
translations, 190, 206, 258 folk, 253–4
Buik of Alexander, The, 276 songs and chants for, 220
Burel, John: Pamphilus speakand of Lufe, 259 chanson de mal mariée: in Dunbar, 300
burgage plots, 149 Charles I: royal entry, 246, 257–8
burgesses, 46, 47 Charles II: reign of, 142
burghs Charlie, Mussel-mou’d 271
until 1314, 45, 46–7 Charteris, Henry, 286
1314–1707, 148, 149 charters, 40, 59
parchment, 148–9 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 160, 217, 275, 286
royal entries to, 246, 256, 257–8 Dunbar on, 302
see also towns and Henryson, 292
Burleigh, William Cecil, 1st Baron, 193 Parliament of Fowls, The, 302
Burnet, Gilbert, 167, 233 Scottish poets’ study of, 18
Burns, Robert, 5, 23, 26, 29, 266 Troilus and Criseyde, 291, 293, 302
in collections, 22 Chepman, Walter, 186
sophistication of effects of, 12 Chepman, Walter and Andro Myllar (publishers),
162, 276, 277, 278, 286, 303
‘Caedmon’s Hymn’, 59 Chiaráin, Fearchar O Maoil: lament for, 67
Caílte, 123, 124, 128 Child, Francis James: ballads, 263, 264, 268–9
Calderwood, David: True History of the Church of Christianity
Scotland, The, 182 until 1314, 36, 49–50, 53, 58–9
Calvin, John, 157, 193 Celtic, 116
Calvinism, 193, 231, 233–4, 257 in David I’s reign 40
Cambridge History of English Literature, 28 intellectual consequences of, 184
Campbell, Donald, 22 see also specific forms e.g. Calvinism
Campbell, Sir Donnchadh, 211, 212, 214 Chronicle of Fortingall, 215
Campbell of Glenorchy, Duncan, 224 chronicles: Anglo-Saxon, 60, 169
Campbell of Islay, John Francis, 22 ‘Chronicles of the Kings of Alba’, 37, 169
Campbell of Lawers, James, 222 Chronicon Rhymicum, 187
Campbells, 8, 140, 210–11, 224 chronology: in hagiographies, 110–11, 112
canon Church, Scottish
English literature, 4, 18 until 1314, 44, 47, 49–50
Gaelic literature, 21 alliance with secular power, 169
philosophy, 116 attempts to anglicise, 135
Scottish literature, 3–15, 16, 20 attitudes to performances, 253–4, 255–6, 257
theology, 115–16 criticisms of, 138
Canongate Classics, 20 and Dunbar, 296, 301–2
caputs, 48, 49 and Gaelic poetry, 65
Carew, Thomas, 200–1 use of Latin, 59
Carlyle, Jane Welsh, 17 see also Reformation
Carmichael, Alexander: Carmina Gaedelica, 22, 23, church buildings, 49, 149
222 church courts, 239
322 Index

churches courts, Gaelic, 153, 211, 219, 220, 222–3, 224

founding of, 169 courts, law, 239
paired with halls or castles, 78 courts, Pictish: Gaelic as language of prestige in, 70
church history, 182 courts, Scottish
Cinaed II, 38 anglicisation of, 153–4, 162
Cinaed mac Maíl Choluim: death of, 169 art, 245–6
Cistercians, 47 and Dunbar, 273, 279, 296–7
civil war: late 10th century, 38 languages in, 153–4, 158
clachans, 146 and Older Scots literature, 273–85
Claim of Right (1690), 243 removal to London, 162, 257–8, 284
Clancy, Thomas Owen, 5 Covenanters, 135, 142, 233, 235, 236–7
clan system, 48 publications, 141–2
Clare, John, 12, 29 Covenanting Revolution (1638), 135, 141
Clariodus, 303 Craig, Cairns, 9, 13
Clark, William: Marciano, 260 Craig, Thomas, 196, 241–2
Clarke-plays, 254 Jus Feudale, 241–2
class, middle: emerging, 137–8 Craig, Sir Thomas, 196
clerics De Unione Regnorum Britanniae Tractatus, 188
as authors of hagiography, 105 Cranston, William, 229–30
Gaelic poets as, 65 Crawford, Robert, 12, 24
moral condition of, 216, 217, 224 Crawford, Thomas, 4
as pioneers of new literature, 126 Creative Writing programmes, 5
Clerk of Penicuik, John, 26 Crichton, George, 165
cliar (entertainers), 220 Crichton, James, 196
clientship, 47, 210–11; see also patronage Crichtons, 202
Cogitosus, 111 Criminal Procedure Act (1701), 243
Life of St Brigit, 112 crisis: identity and, 171
Collectio canonum hibernensis, 118 criticism, literary
collections, 20–1, 22–3 on Henryson, 292–3
colonialism: internal, 17 Scottish literature, 3–15
colonies Cromwell, Thomas, 190
Lowland, in Gaeldom, 140–1 Cronicum Elegiacum, 187
Nova Scotia, 146 cross-slabs: Pictish, 49, 50
colonisation Cú Chuimhne of Iona, 99, 118
by Anglo-Saxons, 56–7 Cuilén, 38
from Ireland, 56 culture, Gaelic
Columba, St, 36, 105, 222 in late medieval Gaelic Scotland, 209–18
Adiutor laborantium, 95–6 transmission of, 305–6
Altus Prosator, 94–5, 184 Cumbric language, 52, 57, 61
poetry in voice of, 98–9, 129–30 ‘Cupar Proclamation’, 258
poetry on, 96–8, 100 Cuthbert, St: as English saint, 104
voyage tale of monks of, 130–1 Cuthbertian Church, 59
see also Adomnán: Life of St Columba
Columban Church, 36, 37, 49, 50, 59, 153 dadolwch (reconciliation poetry), 69
Comedy of the Forlorn Son, 255 Daiches, David, 23
commonplace books, 216 Dál chabhlaigh ar Chaistéal Suibne (An assembling of a
Book of the Dean of Lismore as, 220 fleet against Castle Sween), 155
communicatio idiomatum, 101–2 Dallán Forgaill: Amra Choluimb Cille, 96–7, 100
Company of Scotland, 142 Dallas of St Martins, George: legal writing, 242
Comyn, John ‘the Red’, 42, 175 Dál Riata, 35–6, 56, 60, 75, 114, 186
Congalach Cnogba: elegy to, 67 Cenél Loairn and Cenél nGabráin, 36, 38, 39
Congregationalists, 235 king-lists, 169–70
consciousness, national, 145 see also mac Ailpín, Cinaed
Constantine, son of Fergus, 36 Dalrymple, David (Lord Hailes), 265
Constantine I, 37 Ancient Scottish Poems, 21
Constantine II: alliances with Ireland, 37 dán díreach (strict metre verse), 65–6, 67–8, 83, 84
Cooke, Sir Anthony, 193 Darien scheme, 142, 146, 204
Copernicus, 196 Darnley, Henry, 189, 191, 192–3
Corpus Christi plays, 254–5 dates: in literary periodisation, 7–9
courtly love motifs, 125 David I, 39, 46, 153
in Gaelic literature, 222–3 religion, 40, 50
in religious poetry, 99 satire on, 69–70
Rögnvaldr, 79–80 David II: reign, 136
court performances, 256–7, 257–8, 259, 260 Davidson, John, 256
court poetry see praise poetry Dawson, Deidre, 5
courts, church, 239 dead, keening for, 220
 Index 323

‘Debatable Land’, 145 devotional poems, 296, 301–2

de Burgh, Richard, 85, 86 Dirige to the King, The, 300–1, 302
decorative arts, 246, 247–9 editions, 20
deculturalisation, policy of, 141 in English literature, 25–6
Deer, monastery of, 40 familiarity with legal writing, 240, 295–6
Deirdriu, tale of, 128–9 Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, The, 18, 298–9,
Delitiæ poetarum scotorum, 165, 196, 199, 206–7 301, 303
demandes d’amour, tradition of, 300 Golden Targe, The, 18, 300, 301, 302, 303
demotic poets: dependence on patrons, 71 influence on Buchanan, 158
Dempster, John, 230 ‘In to thir dirk and drublie dayis’, 297, 301
Dempster, Thomas, 165 ‘I that in heill wes and gladnes’ (‘Lament for the
Denmark: prose histories, 80–1 Makars’), 19, 256–7, 286, 298, 301, 303
Dennistoun, Walter, 203–4 language, 160, 161, 299, 301, 302, 303
De Regimine Principum, 277 petitions, 297–8
desert Fathers, 113 religion, 296, 301–2
Devine, Tom: Scottish Nation, The, 7 ‘Sanct salvatour, send silver sorrow’, 298
devotional poetry, 221, 296, 301–2 satire, 297, 301, 303
diaspora: Scottish, 10, 13, 14 ‘Schir, lat it never in toune be tald’, 298
Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, 20 and Scottish court, 273, 279, 296–7
Dicúil: Measure of the World, 36 status of, 19, 164, 303–4
dindsheanchas (lore of prominent places), 127 Testament of Maister Andro Kennedy, The, 302
‘Dinogat’s Cloak’, 75 Thrissill and the Rose, The, 297, 302
dit amoureux, 275, 282 Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, The, 240,
divided self, concept of, 4, 11, 12 299–300, 301
Divine Right of Kings, 141, 199 Duncan I, 38
domestic buildings: decorative painting in, 247–9 Duncan II, 38
Domnall I, 37 Dunkeld, 37, 50
Domnall II, 37 Duns Scotus, John, 115, 121, 186, 226–7, 228
Domnall III ‘Bán’, 38 Dupplin Cross, 49
Donald of the Isles, 140 d’Urfey, Tom: Pills to Purge Melancholy, 20
Donaldson, James: Husbandry Anatomised, 151 Dury, John, 236
Donnchadh Cairbreach O’Brien, king of Thormond,
86, 87 Easter controversy, 112, 113
Douglas, Gavin, 25–6, 137, 164, 279–80, 296, 301 economic reform: William I the Lion, 40
editions, 20, 206 Edgar, king of Scotland, 38, 39
Eneados, 18, 206, 276, 280 Edgeworth, Maria, 13
language, 160, 162 Edinburgh, 144, 148, 149, 246, 257–8
Palice of Honour, The, 174, 279–80 Edinburgh Essays on Scots Literature, 16
Douglas, James, 273 Edinburgh Review, 26
Douglas, John, 232 editions: Scottish literature, 5, 19–20
Douglas, William, 8th earl of, 276–7 education
Douglas family, 182–3, 273, 276–7, 280 of emerging middle class, 137
drama: national, 259–60; see also performance; plays of Highland Catholics, 312
dramatic verse monologues, 128–30 use of Latin in, 158
Dream of the Rood, 8, 59, 101–2 see also universities
dream poetry: and Dunbar, 302 Edward I, 41–2
dróttkvætt (in court metre), 64, 77, 79 Edward II: battle of Bannockburn, 42–3
Drummond, Gawin: Short Treatise of Geography, A, Eglisham, George, 199–200
151 elegies, 67–8
Drummond of Hawthornden, William, 158, 246, Elizabeth I, 192, 194, 195
250–1, 258 Elphinstone, William, 188
epigram on, 200, 206–7 emblems, 248–9, 251
History of Scotland, 181–2 embroideries, 250–1
Polema-Middinia, 207 Encyclopaedia Britannica (9th edn), 25–6
Duan Albanach (Scottish Poem), 38 English language
Du Bartas, Guillaume: translations, 164–5 as language of court, 153–4
Du Bellay, Joachim: influence of Buchanan, 166 linguistic exchange, 136
Dubhghall Albannach, 156 rise of, 162–3
Dubhghall mac an Giolla Ghlais, 213 see also Old English
Dub, son of Máel Coluim, 38, 169 English literature
Dumbarton Rock, 54–5 Celtic influence on, 25
Dunbar, Gavin, archbishop of Glasgow, 189–90 lack of international reception, 165
Dunbar, William, 139, 157, 190, 254, 256, 295–304 study of, 4, 12, 18–21, 24–30
Ballat of Our Lady, The, 161, 301–2 englyn cycles, 125
Ballat of the Abbot of Tungland, A, 302, 303 Enlightenment, Scottish, 5, 9, 23–4
on Chaucer, 18 entertainment: in medieval Gaelic society, 220
324 Index

Eóganán, son of Óengus, 36 Fortingall, Perthshire, 210, 211, 212

Eriugena, Johannes Scottus: as theologian, 116 forts, Pictish hilltop, 48
Erskine, Thomas, 2nd Lord, 277 Foucault, Michel, 293
Erskine family, 277, 282 Foulis of Ravelston, Sir John, 260
eulogies see praise poetry Foullis of Edinburgh, James, 165
Europe Fowler, William, 250–1, 283, 284
impact of Scottish literature, 5 Fox, George, 235
interest in Scottish politics and culture, 6 Franciscans, 226, 231
trade with, 46 Francis of Assisi, St, 226
see also specific countries Freebairn, Robert, 206
Ewart, Gavin, 295 freedom, 6, 227–8
exports, 46, 149 in Declaration of Arbroath, 136
extirpation, policy of, 141 freemasonry, 249
Extracta e Variis Cronicis Scocie, 173–4 French language, 153, 158, 161; see also Norman-
eyewitness approach: Adomnán, 117–18 French
French literature: and Dunbar, 302
fables, 222, 288–91 friaries, 50
fairs, 311 Froissart, Jean, 165
faith, 229
Falaise, treaty of, 40 Gaelic, Classical, 70, 155–6, 219–20
Falkirk, battle of, 42 in Book of the Dean of Lismore, 212–13
fame dearth of manuscripts, 214–15
poets, 75 hybrid form, 156–7
warriors, 74–5 revolution in 83–90
family histories, 182–3 Gaelic language, Scottish
famines, 147 until 1314, 52, 58, 60–1, 62, 70
farce, 258 1314–1707, 135, 145, 153–8
farming see agriculture decline of, 61, 141, 153–4
feasts: mead, 74 legal documents in, 155–6, 239
feminist criticism loan-words, 157–8, 161
effect on Scottish literature 17–18 spoken, 58
Henryson, 292–3 see also Irish Gaelic
Fenian Cycle, 222, 223, 225 Gaelic literary culture, 209–18
Fergus, prince, 36 Gaelic literature, Scottish, 8, 9
Fergus II, son of Erc, 186, 188 until 1314, 58
Fergus of Galloway, 40, 125 in later Middle Ages, 219–25
Ferguson, Adam, 21 editions, 5
Fernaig Manuscript, 157 heroic literature, 73–5, 124, 223–4
Ferrerio, Giovanni, 179 introduction of personal into, 309–10
Ferrier, Susan, 13 journals on, 16
feudalism, 45, 47–8, 59, 61, 242 perceptions of, 21–2
and architecture, 49 prose narrative, 127
and languages, 59, 61, 160–1 revolution in, 65
fianaigheacht, 223, 224 separation from Scottish literature, 18–19, 21–2,
Fianna, 124 29
filidh (trained bards), 65, 220, 221, 222, 225 study of, 4, 16, 17–18, 21, 28
Fillan of Strathfillan, St: hagiography, 106 see also praise poetry; specific authors and works
films: based on Scotland, 6 Gaels see Scot(t)i
Findlay, Bill, 5 Gàidhealtachd, 140–1, 154; see also Highlands
fine arts, 246 Galbraith, Robert: Quadrupertitum in oppositiones,
Finnguala, 169, 174 228–9
Fionnlagh an Bard Ruadh, 213, 222 Gall-Goídil (Foreigner-Gaels), 60
fitz Maurice, Gerald, 3rd earl of Desmond, 217, ‘Galoshins’ folk play, 254
223–4 Galt, John, 6
Fletcher of Saltoun, Andrew, 23, 142 Garden of Aberdeen, Professor James, 156
Flodden, battle of, 135, 212, 295 Garioch, Robert, 258, 295
flyting, 282–3, 303 Geneva Bible, 162, 232
Foirm na nUrrnuidheadh (The Form of Prayers), 157 genres, 11–12
folk humour, 138 in Dunbar, 300
folk literature, 23 in hagiography, 103
collections, 21, 22–3 in praise poetry, 66–70
folklore, 139 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 171
folk performances, 253–4 Historia Regum Britanniae, 186
Forbes, John, 235 Vita Merlini, 125, 185
Forbes, Patrick, 233, 235 geography, 7, 147–8, 149–50, 151
Fordun see John of Fordun until 1314, 44–51
 Index 325

1314–1707, 144–52 Harrower, David: Blackbird, 5

as discipline, 150 Harry, Blind, 143
geography books, 151 editions, 19, 20
Germanic languages, 56, 59, 159 Wallace, The, 137, 174–6, 277–8, 302, 303
Gesta Annalia, 171–2, 187 Harsent, David, 295
Gifford, Douglas, 8, 18, 23 harvest failure, 147
Giolla Brighde Albanach, 65–6, 85, 86–7 Háttalykill, 80–1
checklist of poems, 88–9 Hay, Sir Gilbert
Giolla-Críost Táilléar, 217, 221 Buik of King Alexander the Conqueror, 277, 303
‘Glanville’, 238 Buke of the Law of Armys, The, 239, 275–6
Glasgow, 125–6, 144, 148 Hebrides: ceded to Norway, 39, 41
Glencoe, Massacre of, 141, 142 Heliodorian novel, 166
Glendinning, Miles, 7 Henderson, Alexander, 142
Glorious Revolution, 135, 142 Henderson, T. F., 29
Gododdin, 8, 35, 53, 70, 72–6, 94 Henry, Prince of Wales (son of James VI): baptism,
Gododdin, kingdom of, 35, 54, 56, 72 251
Goffredus de Trano, 238 Henry II of England, 40
Golden Age, 40–1 Henry VIII, 190
‘Goliardic’ tradition: and Dunbar, 302 Henry of Huntingdon, 35
Goodall, Walter, 187 History of the English, 171
Gordon, Anna (Brown), 269 Henryson, Robert, 19, 137, 164, 286–94, 303
Gordon, Robert (geographer), 147, 150 ‘Bludy Sark, The’, 287
Gordon, Sir Robert: family history, 182 in Book of the Dean of Lismore, 157, 217
Gordon of Camdell, Alexander, 305 editions, 20
Gordons, 140, 202 in English literature, 25–6
Gothic, 11 Fables, 279, 287, 288–91
Gough Map, 144 familiarity with legal writing, 240
Gower, John, 18, 275 ‘Garmont of Gud Ladeis, The’, 287
Gracián, Baltasar: influence of Barclay, 167 language, 160, 286
graffiti, runic: at Maeshowe, 78 ‘Lion and the Mouse, The’, 279
Greek writers: translated by Michael Scotus, 120 Orpheus and Eurydice, 287–8
Gregory the Great paradoxes, 293
Dialogues, 111, 112 ‘Robyn and Makyne’, 287
Life of St Benedict, 111, 112 and Scottish court, 277, 278–9
Greig, Gavin, 23 shorter poems, 286–7
Grey, Sir Thomas: Scalacronica, 170 Testament of Cresseid, 278, 286, 287, 291–3
Grieg–Duncan collections of folk songs, 22–3 heraldry, books of, 248
Grierson, Herbert, 16 Herbert of Glasgow, Bishop, 100
grotesque painting, 247 Herd, David: Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, 21
Gualterus Anglicus (Walter the Englishman), 288 heroic age, 55, 56
Gude and Godlie Ballatis, 231, 256, 265–6, 267 heroic literature 73–5, 124, 223–4
guilds, merchant, 46 Hiberno-Saxon hand, 59
Guillaume de Lorris: Roman de la Rose, Le, 302 ‘Highland problem’, 150
Guillaume le Clerc, 125 Highlands, 144, 145–6, 147; see also Gàidhealtachd
‘Gwarchanau’, 72, 75–6 High Theory, period of, 3–4
‘Hirlas Owain’, 76
Haddon, Walter, 192 histiography: Scottish, 168–83
Hadrian’s Wall, 53 Historia Brittonum, 72, 75
hagiography, 103–9, 126, 184–6 historians, conjectural, 138
continental, 112 history, 7–8
English, 104–5 until 1314, 35–43
Irish, 104–5, 107–8 1314–1707, 135–43
Orcadian, 78 in Book of the Dean of Lismore, 210
Hailes, Lord see Dalrymple, David in hagiography, 105–6, 108, 111, 112
Hákon Hákonarson, king of Norway, 41, 82 shift from contemporary to, 80–1
Hákon Pálsson, 78 History of Scottish Literature, 3, 17
Hallr
órarinsson: Háttalykill, 80–1 Hogg, James, 5, 12, 23
halls Jacobite Relics of Scotland, The, 267–8
of Highland chiefs, 220 Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner,
paired with churches, 78 12
Hamilton, Patrick, 229 Holinshed, Raphael, 182
Hamilton, Sir William, 28, 30 Holland, Richard: Buke of the Howlat, The, 156, 174,
Hamilton of Finnart, Sir James, 249 276, 277, 303
handwriting: development of, 59 Home, John: Douglas, 24
Harker, David, 23 Hook, Andrew, 5, 8
Harlaw, battle of, 140 Hospitallers, 40
326 Index

Howell, James: Perfect Description of the People and Irish Gaelic

Country of Scotland, A, 150 divergence from Scottish Gaelic, 154–5
humanism, 150, 217, 230 transition from middle to early modern, 83
Hume, David, 23–4, 26, 27, 228 Irish Literary Revival, 25
Treatise of Human Nature, 12 Irish literature
Hume of Godscroft, David: family histories, 182–3 in Book of the Dean of Lismore, 212, 213
Hume of Polwarth, Patrick, 283 influence of Ossian, 25
humour medieval, 64, 65, 70
folk, 138 narrative and lyric in, 123–5
in Gaelic literature, 224 as postcolonial, 17
‘Hunting of the Cheviot’, 263 iron-smelting, 149
hunting reserves, 45, 146 Irving, David
Huntly fair, 311 History of Scottish Poetry, 20
Hutcheson, Francis, 26 Lives of the Scottish Poets, 20
‘Hymnus Sancti Nynie Episcopi’ (Hymn for St Isidore of Seville, 118
Nynia), 100, 101, 184–5 itinerant poets: Gaelic, 68–9

Icelandic sagas: Viking settlements, 36 Jack, R. D. S., 5, 7–8, 11

Icelandic sources: for Orcadian literature, 77, 82 Jacobitism, 10
identity, national, 144, 145, 168, 171 broadside ballads, 267–8
ideology and Latin poetry, 203, 204, 205
Brucean, 175 ‘Song of the Clans’, 307
royalist, 279 James I, 70
Idulf, 37–8 court of: and Scots literature, 274–5
Ifearnáin, Uí, 222 elegies on, 187
imitatio, 190 Kingis Quair, 136, 274–5
imitatio dei, 226, 227 James II, 137
imitation: in art, 247 court of: and Scots literature, 275–7, 277–9
Inchcolm Antiphoner, 98 James IV: court of
Independence, Wars of, 41–3, 135, 159 and Dunbar, 296–7
industrialised regions, 150 and Scots literature, 18, 19, 279–80
industries James V, 190
until 1314, 46, 47 court of: and Scots literature, 250, 280–1
1314–1707, 149–50 James VI and I, 70, 135, 259
Inglis attacks on Scottish traditional society, 140–1, 146
as official language, 153–4, 156 Basilicon Doron, 162
supremacy of, 159–60 court of: and Scots literature, 282–3
see also Scots language Divine Right of Kings, 141, 199
Inglis, Sir James, 257 Essayes of a Prentice, 282
inheritance European reputation of, 164–5
law of: Dunbar’s knowledge of, 295–6 on kingship, 181, 194–5
principle of partible, 147 Lepanto, 164–5
inns: establishment of, 141 masques, 256
‘In Praise of Urien’, 66 patronage of drama, 257
inscriptions: Latin, 184 prose works, 165
Instructiones, 186 Some Reulis and Cautelis, 282–3
intellect: faculty of, 227 urban expansion, 149
interculturalism: Scotland, 11, 14 James VII and II, 236, 243
interdisciplinary studies: and Scottish literature, 6–7 Jameson, George, 245, 246, 258
international assessments of Scottish literature, 5–6 Jamieson, John: Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish
1314–1707, 164–7 Language, 19, 26
Iona, monastery of, 36, 37, 38, 113 Jarlaskáld, Arnórr, 77
as cultural centre, 50, 58 Jean de Meun: Roman de la Rose, Le, 302
establishment of, 98–9, 184 Jerome, 110, 118
library, 118, 188 Jewel, John, 193–4
religious poetry, 94–5 Jocelin of Furness: Vita Sancti Kentigerni, 104, 106,
Iona, Statutes of (1609), 140 107, 108
Ireland ‘John Cum Kis Me Now’, 266–7, 267–8
Gaelic culture, 219 John of Fordun, 169, 274
Gaels as emigrants from, 35–6 Chronicle of the Scottish Nation, 136, 170, 171–2,
as homeland of Scots, 170 173–4, 187, 216
links with Scotland, 6, 28, 37, 154 John of Tynemouth, 186
raids, 55–6 Johnson, Hamish, 29
Ireland, John, 227–8, 279 Johnson, James: Scots Musical Museum, 22
Meroure of Wyssdome, The, 227, 279 Johnson, Patrik, 257
Irish Church, 83 Johnson, Samuel, 22, 206, 207
 Index 327

Johnston, Arthur, 199–203 ‘Lament for Owein ab Urien’, 67

Ad Robertum Baronium, 202–3 laments
Apologia Piscatoris, 201–2 influence on religious poetry, 92–3
Apologia pro Nautis Lethensibus, 201 personal, 310
Apologia pro Thaumantia Obstetrice ad Senatum Lammas plays, 254
Aberdonensem, 201 Lamont, Sir Robert, 221
‘Ask me no more’, 200–1 land claims: David I, 40
Consilium Collegii Medici Parisiensis, 199–200 land management
De Loco Suo Natali, 202 until 1314, 45
epigram on Drummond, 200, 206–7 1314–1707, 146, 147
In Nautas, 201 Landnámabók (Book of Settlements), 36
Onopardus Furens, 199–200 land organisation, 48–9
Paraphrasis Poetica Psalmorum Davidis, 200 landscape
poems on burning of Frendraught, 202 in 1707, 144
translations, 200–1, 206 and saints, 107
Johnston of Warriston, Archibald, 142 Lang, Andrew, 28, 271
Jonson, Ben, 250 languages, 7, 9–10, 11
journals, academic: on Scottish literature, 16–17 until 1314, 52–62
Juvenal: in Book of the Dean of Lismore, 217 1314–1707, 145, 153–63
in Book of the Dean of Lismore, 212–13
Kailyard, 4, 9, 13 change from ancient to medieval, 57
keepers of royal castles, 138 see also specific languages
Kennedy, Walter, 296 Last Leaves of Traditional Ballads and Ballad Airs, 23
and Dunbar, 298, 303 Latin, 5, 13, 135, 174
‘Passion of Christ, The’, 255 until 1314, 52, 53, 59
Kenneth I, 186 1314–1707, 153, 158, 165–7, 184–208
Kentigern, St, 35, 100, 125, 185 character of, 53–4
hagiography, 104, 105, 107, 126 and Dunbar, 301–2
Kepler, Johann, 196 influence on Scots language, 161
king-lists, 186 as language of law, 238
deaths of kings, 169 official records in, 214–15
Leinster, 127 religious poetry in, 91–2, 99, 100
Pictish, 58, 168–70 in Roman Britain, 59
Kings, Cycle of the, 225 Vulgar, 54
kings and kingship, 48–9, 274–5 Latin Psalter: literacy learned from, 92
anglicisation by, 135 laudatio, 103
Anglo-Norman vision of, 47–8 Lauder, William, 257
answerable to subjects, 137 Lauder bridge rebellion (1482), 278
attitudes to, 200 Laurence of Lindores, 186
in Boece, 178 law and laws
Buchanan on, 189, 194–5 canon: Adomnán responsible for, 118
contractual theory of, 136, 141 Dunbar’s knowledge of, 295–6
Divine Right, 141, 199 MacAlpine, 37
James VI on, 181, 194–5 see also legal writing
Northumbrian, 55 Lay of the Mantle, 223, 224
support of Church, 49–50 lead mining, 149
as theme in Book of the Dean of Lismore, 216 Learmouth, Mark, 204
see also advice to princes learning, centres of, 39
Kinloch, David, 196 Lebor Gabála Érenn (Book of Invasions), 186
Kirk see Church lechery: link with leprosy, 292
Kirk, Robert, 139 legal writing
Kirkwall, Orkney, 47, 77–8, 82 1314–1707, 238–44
knowledge: divine, 227–8 languages of, 155–6, 238–9
Knox, John, 20, 229, 231 Legend of Servanus, 185
attitude to drama, 256 Legend of St Andrew, 185
First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Leighton, Robert, 236
Regiment of Women, 234 Leinster: king-list, 127
History of the Reformation, 138, 182 Lennox, Alún Óg, Earl of, 86
and Scots Confession, 232, 234 leprosy, 292, 293
Kyllour, John: Historye of Christis Passioun, 255 Leslie, Charles (Mussel-mou’d Charlie), 271
Leslie, John, 176–7, 179, 188–9
labour songs: Gaelic, 220 De origine, moribus et historia Scotorum (History of
Lailoken (Merlin) Scotland), 139, 150, 180, 181, 189
legends of, 125–6, 185 Leslie, William, 235
see also Myrddin Letters of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, 5
Laing, David, 20, 265 Lewis: Norse place-names, 60
328 Index

Liber Pluscardensis, 173–4, 277 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 10, 29, 295, 303–4
Liddale of Halkerton, Sir James, 277–8 MacDonald, Alasdair Dubh: lament for, 308–9
Liddell, James: Tractatus conceptuum et signorum, 228 MacDonald, Alexander (Alasdair mac Mhaighstir
limericks, 308 Alasdair), 307, 308
Lindsay, Sir David, 19, 178, 190, 200, 248, 256 MacDonald, Iain Dubh, 307, 308
on Dunbar, 303 MacDonalds, 8, 140
editions, 20 MacDonalds of Glencoe: attack on, 142
familiarity with legal writing, 240 MacGregor, Domhnall Liath, 222
plays, 258 MacGregor, Dubhghall Maol, 210
Satyr of the Thrie Estaitis, Ane, 138, 231, 240, 257, MacGregor, Duncan (Donnchadh), 210, 211, 214,
258–9, 281 216, 224
and Scottish court, 273, 280, 281 Book of the Dean of Lismore, 157
Testament of the Papyngo, 280 MacGregor, Eoin Dubh, 212, 216
translations of, 164 MacGregor, James (Seamus) 210, 216
Lindsay of Pitscottie, Robert: as historiographer, 179 Book of the Dean of Lismore, 157
Linton, Bernard, 186–7 MacGregors, 140, 141, 210–11, 212, 224
literacy MacGurcaigh, Artúr Dall: battle poem, 68
learned from Latin Psalter, 92 Mackenzie, George: Lives of Scottish Writers, 20
in Strathclyde, 57 MacKenzie, John: Sàr Obair nam Bard Gaëlach, 21
literary associations: in art, 247–8 MacKenzie of Rosehaugh, Sir George, 204, 243
literati, 219, 225 Mac Lachlainn, Giolla-Pádraig, 222
literature see also specific kind e.g. Scottish literature MacLean, Rev. John, 155–6
literatures in English: development of, 17, 28–9 MacLean, Lachlan, 156
Lithgow, William, 141 MacLean, Sorley, 10, 13
Lluyd, Humphrey, 189 MacLeod, Mary (Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh), 17
loan words mac Luigdech, Beccán: poetry on Columba, 97
Gaelic, 157–8, 161 Macmath, William, 270
Latin, 53 mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, Alasdair, 307, 308
Scandinavian, 160 Mac Mhuireadhaigh, Eóin, 223
Scots, 157–8, 160–1 MacMhuirich bardic family, 156, 223
Lochhead, Liz, 12, 17 Macmillan, Duncan, 7
Lockhart, Sir George (c. 1630–89), 204 MacNab, Fionnlagh, 209, 211, 215, 216
Lockhart (or Lokert) of Ayr, George (1485–1547), MacNeill of Gigha, Niall, 71, 214
186, 228 mac Peadair Uí Longáin, Mícheál, 86
Lokert of Ayr see Lockhart, George MacPhail, Hugh, 155
Lollardy, 231 Macpherson, James
Lom, Iain, 306, 308 Poems of Ossian, The, 21–2, 24–5
Lombard, Peter: Sentences, 228, 229 MacPherson, Mary (Màiri Mhòr nan Òran), 18
London: Scottish writers in, 18 MacRae of Inverinate, Duncan: Fernaig Manuscript,
lords: support of Church, 49–50 157
lordship: move from kinship-based to non-kinship- Mac Suibhne, Eoin, 68, 155
based, 44, 47–8 ‘MacSween poem’, 68, 212
Lordship of the Isles, 140, 145, 154, 211, 212 Máel Coluim I: reign, 37–8
love Máel Coluim II: reign, 38
amatory literature, 275, 282 Maeshowe: runic graffiti, 78
in Kingis Quair, 274 Magdalene, daughter of Francis I of France, 190
philosophy of, 226 Magnus, Olaus, 179
see also courtly love Magnús, St, 77, 78, 100
love poetry, 281 Magnus III of Norway ‘Barefoot’, 39
love-songs: in Norse-Icelandic literature, 81 Mair, John, 181, 186, 228–9
Lowlands, 145 histiography, 177, 179
Lulach, King, 38 Historia Maioris Britanniae, 138, 150, 177, 187–8,
Lutheranism, 231 229
Lydgate, John, 18, 217, 275 Màiri Mhòr nan Òran, 18
Lynch, Michael: Scotland: A New History, 7 Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh, 17
lyrical poetry, 281 Maitland Club, 19–20, 265
lyric genre: from early Middle Ages, 123–31 Maitland Manuscripts, 19, 277, 265, 282, 303
makars, 137, 165; see also Douglas; Dunbar;
mac Ailpín, Cinaed (Kenneth Mac Alpin), 50, 67, Henryson
169–70 Malcolm Canmore, 38
reign, 37 Malcolm III Canmore, 38, 46
MacAlpine laws, 37 Malcolm IV, 40
Mac An t-Saoir, An Bard, 217 Málsháttakvæði (Poem of Proverbs), 81–2
MacBeth, Fergus, 155 Malveisin, William, 125
Macbeth, King, 38 Manderston, William, 228
MacCaig, Norman, 10, 13 Manning, Susan, 5
 Index 329

manses, 149 Navigatioun, 283

Map, Walter: De Nugis Curialium, 297 ‘Oppositione of the Court to Conscience, The’,
maps, 144, 150–1 283–4
Märchen, 185 Montrose, James Graham, Marquis of, 141
Marches, Laws of the, 145 monuments: Pictish, 49
Margaret, Maid of Norway, 41 Moray, Andrew de, 42
Margaret, St, 38, 39, 50 Moray, James Stewart, Earl of, 189
hagiography, 104, 105, 186 Morer, Thomas, 147
Margaret Tudor: in Dunbar’s poems, 297 Morère, Pierre, 5
marine exploitation, 47 Morley, Henry, 25
maritime kingdoms: clan system, 48 mortality statistics, 148
market centres: non-burghal, 149 Motherwell, Alexander: collections, 22
marketplaces: specialised, 149 Mugint, 91–2, 184
markets: access to English, 142–3 Mugrón, abbot of Iona: elegy to Congalach Cnogba,
Márkus, Gilbert, 5 67
Martin, Martin, 155 Muir, Edwin, 3, 16
travel accounts, 151 Muirchertach Ua Briain, King, 39
Martin, St, 113 Muireadhach Albanach see O Dálaigh
Mary, Virgin, 99, 301–2 multiculturalism, 11
Mary Queen of Scots multi-ethnicity, 14
accounts of, 165–6, 176–7, 180, 181, 188–9, 191 multilingualism, 14
embroideries, 250–1 Mure of Rowallan, Sir William, 269
festivals, 246–7 Murray (de Moray), Andrew, 42
languages, 158 Murray, Thomas, 165
poetry, 282 Murthly Hours, The, 156, 214
reign, 138 Musa Latina Aberdonensis, 196
masks, ‘poetry of . . .’, 128 music 164, 220, 256
masques, 191–2, 256 Myrddin (Merlin), 76, 125; see also Lailoken
Masson, David, 27, 29–30 mythological cycle, 222, 225
Matilda (Edith), 39, 105 mythology, Norse: in Orkney literature, 79
Maxwell, Douglas, 5
May games, 254 na Ceapaich, Sìleas see Sìleas na Ceapaich
mead feasts, 74 Nairn, Tom, 3
medical texts: in Gaelic, 155 names, personal
meeting places: Pictish, 49 Celtic, 52–3
Melville, Andrew, 165, 196, 234–5 Gaels 56
Melville, Elizabeth, 17 Pictish, 58
memory, art of, 249 see also place-names
Merlin see Lailoken; Myrddin Napier, John, 167
merry verse: Gaelic, 224 narrative: from early Middle Ages, 123–31
Mhaoilchonaire, Uí, 222 national identity: Scotland, 144, 145, 168, 171
Mhuileadhaigh, Maol-Domhnaigh mac Mághnais, nationhood, Scottish: versions of c. 850–1700,
221 168–83
Mhuirich, Clann, 65 native traditions: influences on religious poetry, 92–3,
middle class: emerging, 137–8 97–8
Millar, J. H.: Literary History of Scotland, 18 natural philosophy: and Michael Scotus, 120
mind: faculty of, 227 nature poetry, 124, 129–30
mining, 149 Nechtan, King, 35, 36, 50
Minstrel of Rheims, 85 Nechtansmere, battle of, 55
minstrels, 256, 271 needlework, 250–1
miracles, 186 New Testament: published in Gaelic, 157
Columba, 100 Newton, George: Vita Sancti Blani, 104, 107
in hagiographies, 106–7, 110–11, 112–13 Newton, Isaac, 203
Miracles of St Nynia (Miracula Nynie Episcopi), 100, Nichol, John: study of Scottish literature, 27
101, 104, 107, 108, 184–5 Nicolson, Thomas, 236
Miracula Sancte Margarete Scotorum Regine, 108 Ninian (Nynia), St, 35, 59, 184
miscellanies, manuscript, 282 hagiography, 100, 104, 106, 107, 108, 184–5
missionaries, 36, 44 Nisbet, Murdoch, 231
Modern Languages Association of America, 4, 17 Nisbet of Dirleton, Sir John, 242
monarchy see kings Njalssaga, 128
monasteries, 98–9 noblemen, 70
monastic orders, 50 Gaelic: courtly verse of, 70
monastic theology, 120 as writers in Book of the Dean of Lismore, 213
Montgomerie, Alexander, 139, 193, 259, 283–4 Norman-French language
Cherrie and the Slae, 284, 303 until 1314, 52, 61
masques, 256 1314–1707, 145
330 Index

Norman-French language (continued) Orkney, 47, 82, 140, 145

influence on Scots language, 160–1 Norse literature in, 77–82
as language of court, 153–4 Orkneyinga saga, 8, 36, 78, 80, 128
Normans, 39–40 orthography
Norn, 61, 145, 153 of Book of the Dean of Lismore, 157, 214–15
Norny, Sir Thomas: in Dunbar’s poems, 61, 145, of Gaelic influenced by Middle Scots, 156–7
297 Otterburn, Sir Adam, 190
Norse language, 52, 60, 61 Owain son of Urien, 126
influence on Scottish Gaelic, 154
religious poetry in, 93–4 pageantry, 246–7, 256, 257–8
Norse literature, 9, 60, 68 painting, 245–6, 247
in Orkney, 77–82 palaces: Pictish unfortified, 48
skaldic verse, 64, 65, 70, 77, 80 panegyric code, 307
Northumbria, kingdom of, 55, 56, 57 parishes, 50, 150
shire system, 48 Parliament, Scottish
Norway, 47 Acts of, 239, 240
Hebrides ceded to, 39, 41 and emerging middle class, 137
prose histories, 80–1 Scots in, 160
Norwegian literature: Icelandic sources, 77 three estates of, 47
nostalgia: in study of Scottish literature, 23 Paschasius Radbertus, 185
Nova Scotia: colony of, 146 pastoral, 24
Nynia, St see Ninian pastoralism, summer, 147
Paterson, James: Geographical Description of Scotland,
O’Brien family: poetry on, 86 A, 151
occasional poems: Gaelic, 223 Patrick, St, 35, 184, 223
Ó Dálaigh, Cú Chonnacht, 83 patrons and patronage
Ó Dálaigh, Donnchadh Mór, 84, 221 Dunbar, 297–8
Ó Dálaigh, Gothfraidh Fionn, 221 emergence of learned, 249
Ó Dálaigh, Maoilíosa, 84 Gaelic, 153, 222
Ó Dálaigh, Muireadhach Albanach, 65, 83–90, 212, MacGregors, 210–11
221 relationship with poets, 66–7, 69, 213–14
checklist of poems, 88–9 see also clientship; praise poetry
‘Cian ó d’ibess dig ndermaid’, 85 ‘Peblis to the Play’, 254
‘Créad agaibh aoidhidh a goéin’, 85 Percy, Thomas: Reliques of Ancient Poetry, 21
dadolwch, 69 performance modalities: as feature of Scottish
dindsheanchas in, 127 literature, 10
lament for wife, 67–8 performances, 220, 253–62; see also drama
praise of Virgin Mary, 99 periodisation, issue of, 7–9
relationship with patron, 69 Perth: development of, 46–7
Ó Dálaigh, Tadhg, 84 Perth, Treaty of, 41
Ó Dálaigh family of poets, 83–4, 222 philosophy
O Donnell, 84–5, 86, 87 until 1314, 115–22
Óengus son of Fergus, 36 before Reformation, 226–30
ogham inscriptions, 58 Philotus, 257, 259
Ogilvie, John, 237 Philp (Philip) of Almerieclose, James: Grameid,
Ó hUiginn, Tadhg Og, 221, 222 205–6
Oisín (Ossian), 124, 128, 223 phoenix, image of, 194–5
O’Kelly of Uí Mhaine, William, 83 Pictish Chronicle, 37, 169
Óláfr, St: texts on, 78 Pictish language, 52, 57–8, 154
Olaf ‘son of the king of Lothlind’, 37 Picts, 35, 54, 55
Old English conquests of Cinaed mac Ailpín, 37
until 1314, 52, 56–7, 59 conversion to Christianity, 36
compared with Scots, 160 Gaelic as language of prestige, 70
religious poems in, 101–2 king-lists, 58, 168–70
in south of Scotland, 159 shire systems, 48–9
Oliphant, Margaret, 12, 17 pietas, 103, 105
Ó Muirgheasáin, Toirhealbhach, 155 piety: in historiographies, 182
oppida, 46 pilgrimage, 100
oral tradition, 10 Pincier, Johann, 195
ballads, 268–9 Pinkerton, John, 19, 23
in collections, 22–3 Pinkie, battle of, 135
Gaelic, 215, 219, 305 Pinkie House, Musselburgh, 248–9
Oran nam Fineachan (Gaidhealach) (Song of the Pitcairne, Archibald, 203–5, 206
(Highland) Clans), 307 ‘Ad Annam Britannam’, 205
originality, 292 ‘Ad Carolum II’, 204–5
origins, Scottish: accounts of, 170–1, 177 ‘Ad Dennistonum’, 204
 Index 331

‘Ad Janum 1709’, 204 ballads, 265

‘Ad Marcum Lermontium’, 204 courtly literature, 281
Assembly, The, 261 effect on historiography, 176
Epistola Archimedis ad regem Gelonem, 203 and Scots language, 162
Jacobitism, 205 Processus, 186
MORMONOSTOLISMOS, 203–4 Prophecy of Berchán, 38
plays, 261 prose: in Latin, 158
Selecta Poemata, 205, 206 prose narratives
‘XXV Julii MDCCXIII’, 205 Gaelic, 127
Pitscottie, Robert Lindsay of, 179 lack of, 128
place-names, 52, 58–9 Orkney, 82
Celtic, 52, 55 prose writings: Adomnán, 110–14
Gaelic, 61 protection (snádud), 97–8
Gaels, 56 Protestantism, 135
Norse, 60 Lindsay, 281
Pictish, 57 see also Reformation, Scottish
places, 107, 127 Psalms: influence on poetry, 92
in scripture: Adomnán, 117–18 Ptolemy: Geography, 53, 54
plague, 92, 147–8 publications: anglicisation of, 141–2
plantation, policy of, 140–1 publishing: Gaelic, 157
plays, 253–62 Puritans, 235
Buchanan, 166
‘Plough Play’, 253 Quakers, 235
ploughs: mould-board, 45, 47 Quennell, Peter, 29
Poemata Selecta, 204, 205 Quonium Attachiamenta sive Leges Baronum, 238
poem-books (duanaire), 221
‘Poetical Description of Orkney’, 151 race-meetings, 311
poetry Racine: influence of Buchanan, 158
early Scots, 18–20, 19–20 Raeburn, Sir Henry, 245
Gaelic 17–18, 18–19 Raghnall, 66–7, 99
Orkney, 82 Rait, David, 235
Welsh, 55 Ramsay, Allan, 12, 23, 245
see also praise poetry; specific authors and works Ever Green, The, 19, 303
poets pastoral, 24
assemblies, 83 Tea Table Miscellany, 20
demotic, 71 Randolph, Thomas, 194
familiarity with legal writing, 240 records
itinerant, 68–9 Gaelic, 186
professionalisation of,64–5 in Latin, 214–15
relationship with patrons, 66–7, 69, 213–14 law, 239
Welsh, 74, 75 in religious houses, 36
see also filidh; skalds Rögnvaldr, 79
political poetry: Orkney, 82 in Scots, 156, 214–15
politicisation: of Scottish literature, 12 of Viking raids, 60
politics see also writing
in broadside ballads, 267–8 Reformation, Scottish, 231–7
public interest in, 6 attitudes to art and literature, 247, 255, 256, 281
see also nationalism effect on historiography, 176–7
Pont, Timothy: maps, 150 reasons for, 138
popes: resentment of, 138 and Scots language, 162
population geography, 147–8 Registrum of St Andrew, 185, 188
postcolonial literatures: development of, 17 Regium Majestatem, 238
Pourbus, Frans, 248 Reid, John: Scots Gard’ner, 151
‘Practicks’, 240–1 Reid, Sir John (Stobo), 286, 303
pragmatism, 11 Reid, Thomas, 26, 228
praise poetry, 80 religion: David I’s reign, 40; see also specific forms
Dunbar, 297 religious houses: patronage of, 50
Gaelic, 63–71, 222 religious painting, 247
influence on religious poetry, 92–3, 97–8 religious performances, 254–6
introduction of poet into, 309 religious poetry, 66
lists of allies in, 307 early medieval, 91–102
and narrative, 126, 127 religious texts: published in Gaelic, 157
Welsh, 73–4 religious themes
Presbyterianism, 182, 234–5, 236–7 in ballads, 266–7
princes: advice for, 227, 275, 283, 290 in Gaelic literature, 220, 221–2
printing Sìleas na Ceapaich, 311–12
332 Index

Renaissance, Scottish, 9, 164 Scots Confession, 232–3, 234

Renan, Ernest, 116 Scots language, 135
representativeness: and Book of the Dean of Lismore, until 1314, 52, 59, 61, 62
214 1314–1707, 145, 153, 158–63
Rescissory Act, 142 bilingualism with Gaelic, 157–8
Restoration (1660), 135, 142 drama in, 259–60
retainers: terms describing, 156–7 historiography in, 174–5
Revolution Settlement, 236 as language of law, 156, 238–9
Rheged, kingdom of, 35, 55, 66 loans, 157–8, 160–1
rhetoric, discipline of, 24 as national language, 159
Richard I, the Lion-Heart, 40, 85 official records in, 156, 214–15
Richard of St Victor: De Trinitate, 226 periods of, 158–9
rigs, 146 Scots literature
rímur, genre of, 81 collections, 22–3
ring-works, 49 integrity of, 23–4
river-names, 52 medieval makars, 18–20
Rizzio, David, 191 Older: and the court, 273–85
Robert, Master: Vita, 78 relation with English, 20–1
Robert I (Robert Bruce), 42–3, 135–6, 170 relation with Gaelic, 21
statutes (1318), 238 Scots of Alba, 56
Robert II, court of: and Scots literature, 273–4 Scots of Ireland, 56
Robin Hood plays, 254 Scotstarvit, Sir John Scot, Lord, 199
Rob Roy (film), 6 Scott, Alexander, 254, 281–2, 303
Rögnvaldr Kali Kolsson, Earl of Orkney, 70, 77, 78, ‘New Yeir Gift to the Quene Mary’, 282
79–81, 82, 93–4 Scott (Scotus), Michael 120, 186, 226
Háttalykill, 80–1 Scott, Sir Walter, 5, 19, 26, 303
Rolland, John: Court of Venus, 281 on Bannatyne manuscripts, 265
Rollock, Robert, 234 collection of oral literature, 22, 23
roman à clef: Barclay, 196 Guy Mannering, 23
romances: historiographical, 174–5 influence of, 27, 249
Roman de Renart, Le, 288, 289 Scotticisms: in Classical Gaelic texts, 156–7
romanticism, Scottish, 23 Scotti (Gaels), 35–6, 54, 56
Ross, Alexander, bishop of Edinburgh, 167, 236 ‘Scottish Chronicle’, 37, 169
Ross, John Merry: Scottish History and Literature, 20 Scottish Gaelic Texts Society, 20
Row, John, 232, 256 Scottish literature
Ruddiman, Thomas, 206 since 1918, 8–9
Grammaticæ Latinæ Institutiones, 206 anglicisation of, 23–4, 29, 141–2
runrig, 45, 146 and art, 245–52
rural society, 144 criticism, 3–15
Russell, Patrick, 173 features of, 11–12
Rutherford, Samuel, 233, 235 in interdisciplinary studies, 6–7
Ruthwell Cross, 59, 101 international assessment of, 5–6, 164–7
multiperspectual approach to, 13–15
St Andrews Sarcophagus, 49 periodisation, 7–9
St Magnús Cathedral, Kirkwall, 77 relations with other literatures, 12–13
saints Scotland as land of lost, 125
Bernician, 104, 107 Scottishness of, 10–11, 13
cults, 50 study of, 4–5, 6–7, 10, 16–31
plays on, 254 use of term, 10, 14, 30
poetry in voices of, 129–30 see also specific authors and subjects
religious poetry on, 96–101 Scottish National Dictionary, 20
see also hagiography Scottish Studies, 6–7
Saltire: foundation legend, 185 Scottish Text Society, 20, 26
salvation see saving verse Scottis Original, The, 174
satire Scougal, Henry, 236
Dunbar, 297, 301, 303 Security, Act of (1703), 142
in Gaelic literature, 69–70, 222 semi-bardic verse, 213
Menippean, 196 Semphill, Robert, 254, 257, 259, 282
saving verse, 91–102 Senchus Fer nAlban (History of the Men of Britain), 36
Scandinavia: influence on Scots language, 160; see Seneca: influence on drama, 258
also Norse; specific countries Servanus: legends of, 185
Schaw, William, 249, 251 Seton, Alexander, 1st earl of Dunfermline: emblems,
School of Scottish Studies, 21 248–9
Scone, 49 settlements
Scone, Stone of, 170 until 1314, 45–6, 56–7
Scotism, school of, 121 1314–1707, 144, 146
 Index 333

‘Seven Ill Years’, 147 Strathclyde, kingdom of, 35, 55, 75

sexual themes: in Gaelic literature, 224 language, 57, 61
Shaw, Quintine, 303 Striveling, Richard, 173
sheilings, 147 sub-literary tradition, Gaelic, 220
Shenstone, William, 268 Sueno’s Stone, 169
Shepherd, Nan, 17 Sulien of St David’s, Bishop, 39
Shetland, 140, 145 Sulpicius Severus: Life of St Martin, 111, 112
shire systems, 48–9 superstition, 139
Sibbald, Sir Robert, 150–1 surveys, 150–1
Scotia illustrata, 183 Sydserf, Thomas: Tarugo’s Wiles, 260–1
signs: Henryson, 286, 291 symbols: Pictish, 58
Sìleas na Ceapaich, 17–18, 305–14 synods: of poets, 83
‘Church, The’, 311–12
‘Conversation with Death’, 313 tableaux, symbolic, 246
education, 312 Tacitus: Agricola, 188
‘Hymn to the Virgin Mary’, 312 tacksman system, 147
lament for Alasdair Dubh, 308–9 Taliesin, 55, 66, 75
poem of advice to young girls, 312–13 tapestries, 250
political songs, 306–7 tartanry, 9
religious themes, 311–12 taxes, 137, 148
reputation, 313 teinds, 50, 138
Sinclair, George, 139 Templars, 40
Sinclair, Henry, Lord, 275, 276, 280 tenements, high, 149
Sinclair family, 275–6 Tennis Court Theatre, 260
‘Sir Patrick Spens’, 270, 272 text: instability of, 264
Siward of Northumbria, Earl, 38 theology
skalds and skaldic verse, 64, 65, 70, 77, 80 before 1314, 115–22
Skene, Sir John, 238, 241 before Reformation, 226–30
De Verborum Significatione, 241 1560–1707, 231–7
Skene, William, 76 federal, 234
Slezer, John: Theatrum Scotiae, 151 monastic, 120
Smith, Adam, 24, 26 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 201
Smith, G. Gregory, 19, 20, 29, 30 thocht: in Dunbar, 298
snádud (protection), 97–8 Thomson, George
Snorri Sturluson, 81 Orpheus Caledonius, 270, 271
Edda, 80 Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs, 22
Háttatal, 80 Thomson, James, 12
Solemn League and Covenant (1643), 141, Thordarson, Arnórr: Elegy for Thorfinn the Mighty,
235 Earl of Orkney, 68
Somerled of Argyll, 40 Thorfinn of the Orkneys, Jarl, 38
songs Thorkelin, Grim J., 26
ballads as, 263, 264, 266 Tod, Patrick, 230
Gaelic, 219–20, 305–6 tombs: saints, 100
sonnets, 283 towns
Spark, Muriel, 10–11, 13, 17 development of, 46–7
Speirs, John, 19, 23 feudal, 49
Spotswood, John: History of the Church of Scotland, geography: 1314–1707, 148–9
The, 182 mortality statistics, 148
Spottiswood, John, 232 see also burghs
Sprouston Breviary, 185 trade
Stair, James Dalrymple, Viscount of, 241 until 1314, 40, 46
Institutions of the Law of Scotland, The, 242–3 effect on language, 61
Stephan of Ripon: Vita Sancti Wilfrithi, 106, 107 translations: of Scottish literature 1314–1707, 164–5
Steuart of Goodtrees, Sir James, 242 transportation, 140
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 5, 28 travel accounts, 150, 151
Steward, Simeon, 204 Treasurer’s Accounts, The, 295
Stewart, Bernard: in Dunbar’s poems, 297 tribal names, 52, 53
Stewart, Dugald, 26 trickster narratives: Henryson, 289
Stewart, James, Earl of Moray, 189 triolets: by Dunbar, 300–1
Stewart, William, 178, 281 troubadours, 85
Stewart of Baldynneis, John: Schersing Out of Trew trouvères, 85
Felicitie, Ane, 283 Turgot: Life of St Margaret, 39, 104, 186
Stewart of Rosyth, Sir David, 137, 276 tyrants: Buchanan on, 189
Stirling Bridge, battle of, 42
Stobo (Sir John Reid), 286, 303 Ulster cycle, 124–5, 222, 223, 225
stones: Pictish symbol-bearing, 49 Union, Treaty of (1707), 142–3, 243
334 Index

uniqueness: and Book of the Dean of Lismore, 214 Welwood, William: sea laws, 241
universities, 229 Westminster Confession of Faith, 231, 233, 234
absence in Gaelic-speaking areas, 21 Whithorn, 35, 59, 91, 107
and English literature, 25, 26–7 Wilfrith, St: hagiography, 106, 107
foundation of, 186, 228 Wilkie, Sir David, 245
links with Irish scholarship, 28 will: faculty of, 227
study of Scottish literature, 4, 16 William I the Lion, 40, 46
theology and philosophy in, 115 William II ‘Rufus’, 38, 39
Urien, king of Rheged, 66, 126–7, 128 William III and Mary II, 204, 205, 236, 243
Urien poems, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69 reign of, 142
Usages debates, 236 Williams, Raymond, 29
William the Clerk, 100
Vairement, Richard, 188 ‘Song on the Death of Somerled’, 126
van der Myle, Abraham, 164–5 Willock, John, 232
Vanson, Adrian, 245, 248 Wilson, Florence, 165, 230
Van Veen, Otto, 248, 251 Commentatio quaedam theologica, 230
Veremundus, 188 De animi tranquillitate, 165, 230
Viking raids, 37–8, 60 Wimund, Bishop of the Isles, 39
Viking settlements, 36, 59–60, 61 Winram, John, 232
Vita et Miracula Sanctissimi Kentigerni, 105, 108 Winzer, Ninian, 234
Vita Merlini Silvestris, 185 Wishart, George, 231, 237
Vita Sanctae Margaretae Scotorum Reginae, 105 witch hunts, 138–9
Vita Sancti Kentegerni, 108, 185 Withers, Charles W. J., 7, 8
Vita Sancti Seruani, 104, 107, 108 Wittig, Kurt: on Scottish tradition, 10
Voltaire, 165 women
Voyage of St Brendan, 39 anti-feminism, 293
voyage tale, 130–1 Gaelic poets, 17–18, 70–1, 313–14
Vredeman de Vries, Hans, 247, 249 and Maitland manuscripts, 282
Vulgar Latin, 54 revolution in position of, 8–9
as theme in Book of the Dean of Lismore, 216, 217,
Wadding, Luke, 121 224
Wallace, The see Harry, Blind witch hunts, 138–9
Wallace, William, 28, 42, 176 writers, 7
Waller, Edmund, 206 see also feminist criticism; specific names
Warton, Thomas, 19 Wordsworth, William, 12
Watson, James: Choice Collection of Comic and Serious writers, 7
Scots Poems, 20, 203 definition of Scottish, 13
Watson, Robert, 24 English: Scottish dimension in, 5
Watson, W. J., 20, 211, 213, 214 in London, 18
Bàrdachd Ghàidhlig, 21 men: transmission of literary authority, 293
Rosg Gàidhlig, 21 women, 7, 17–18, 70–1, 313–14
Wedderburn, James, 255–6, 256 see also specific names
Wedderburn, John, 256, 265 writing
Wedderburn, Robert, 256 early: in Latin, 53
Complaynt of Scotland, 267, 269, 270 new technology of, 44
Welsh language, 57, 94 Rögnvaldr, 79
and Gododdin, 72–3 see also records
Welsh literature, 9 Wycliffe, John: New Testament, 231
cycles of poems, 128 Wynnin of Kilwinning, St, 186
heroic, 55, 56, 73–4 Wyntoun, Andrew of, 137, 169, 273–4, 303
influence of Gododdin, 76 Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland, 136, 170, 174,
narrative and lyric in, 124–5 273–4
praise poetry, 63–4
professionalisation of poets, 64–5 Yarrow Stone, 53
reconciliation poetry, 69 Yeats, W. B.: Irish Literary Revival, 25
religious poetry, 94