Scripting the Nation: Court Poetry and the Authority of History in Late Medieval Scotland [1 ed.] 0814214622, 9780814214626

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S C R I P T I NG T H E NAT ION

I N T E RV E N T IONS: N E W ST U DI E S I N M E D I E VA L C U L T U R E Ethan Knapp, Series Editor

SCRIPTING THE NATION Court Poetry and the Authority of History in Late Medieval Scotland •

Katherine H. Terrell

T H E O H I O S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S C O LUM BU S

Copyright © 2021 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Terrell, Katherine H., author. Title: Scripting the nation : court poetry and the authority of history in late medieval Scotland / Katherine H. Terrell. Other titles: Interventions: new studies in medieval culture. Description: Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, [2021] | Series: Interventions: new studies in medieval culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Examines the rise of Scottish nationalism through poets at the court of James IV— William Dunbar, Walter Kennedy, and Gavin Douglas—who appropriated and subverted English literary models to create a nationalist discourse that resisted English cultural and political hegemony, defining what is meant by Scots and Scotland”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020043415 | ISBN 9780814214626 (cloth) | ISBN 0814214622 (cloth) | ISBN 9780814281109 (ebook) | ISBN 0814281109 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Dunbar, William, 1460?–1520?—Criticism and interpretation. | Kennedy, Walter, approximately 1460–approximately 1508—Criticism and interpretation. | Douglas, Gawin, 1474?–1522—Criticism and interpretation. | English poetry—Scottish authors—History and criticism. | Scottish poetry—To 1700—History and criticism. | National characteristics, Scottish, in literature. | Nationalism and literature. | Courts and courtiers in literature. | Authority in literature. Classification: LCC PR8538 .T47 2021 | DDC 821/.2099411—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043415 Cover design by Laurence J. Nozik Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Pro

CONTENTS

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Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION

vii 1

CHAPTER 1

On the Uses of the Past: Diplomacy, Genealogy, and Historiography 13

CHAPTER 2

Subversive Histories: Strategies of Identity in Scottish Historiography 37

CHAPTER 3

“Ane worthier genology”: Translatio Imperii and the Divine Imperative of History

63

CHAPTER 4

Legacies of Nationalist Historiography and the Founding of Scottish Poetry

89

CHAPTER 5

Literary Genealogy and National Identity in Dunbar and Kennedy

115

CHAPTER 6

From Courtly Love to Court Poetics: Dunbar’s Petitions and the Scottish Transformation of Tradition

143

CHAPTER 7

“Writtin in the Langage of Scottis Natioun”: The Political Poetry of Douglas’s Eneados

169

EPILOGUE

201

Bibliography

211

Index

229

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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of John Hardyng, “This werke is great, and longe to bring to fyne, / So doeth it euer fro tyme to tyme encrease.” I would like to thank everyone who has helped bring it to completion. I am particularly grateful to Hamilton College for financial support during two sabbaticals, to the staff of Burke Library for their help in tracking down obscure sources, and to my colleagues in the Department of Literature and Creative Writing and in the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program for their encouragement, advice, and friendship. My research was helped immeasurably by a Visiting Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, which allowed me to meet others in my field and deepen my understanding of the Scottish Middle Ages at an early stage of this project. I am equally thankful to the President and Fellows of Clare Hall, Cambridge, for the opportunity—partly funded by a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society—to spend a year there as a Visiting Research Fellow. The Cambridge Faculty of English and the faculty, staff, and my fellow visitors at Clare Hall were wonderfully welcoming; the intellectually engaging and supportive atmosphere at Clare Hall enabled me to complete the greater part of this book while caring for two young children. I would also like to thank the Cambridge University Library staff, both for their research assisIN THE WORDS

• vii •

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Acknowledgments

tance and for obligingly looking the other way during the several months that I nursed my son in the lobby every two hours. Portions of this work that have appeared in other venues are reprinted here with the kind permission of Palgrave Macmillan, Studies in Philology, and Textual Cultures. I am obliged to the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, for the permission to include an image from its manuscript of Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon. I am grateful to the members of the Scottish Medievalists and the organizers of the triennial International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Language and Literature for providing exceptional opportunities to congregate and exchange ideas with other scholars. Many colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic have read drafts, offered advice, and supported my work along the way. In particular, I would like to thank Zubair Amir, Mark Bruce, Jeffrey Cohen, Helen Cooper, Elizabeth Ewan, Andy Galloway, Tony Hasler, Don Kennedy, Sally Mapstone, Roger Mason, David Parkinson, Rhiannon Purdie, Nicola Royan, Randy Schiff, Lynn Staley, and Margie Thickstun. This book has been greatly improved thanks to their advice and that of the anonymous readers at The Ohio State University Press; any errors that remain are my own. I appreciate the assistance of everyone at The Ohio State University Press who has helped to shepherd this project to completion. Special thanks are due to Kristen Elias Rowley, Ethan Knapp, Tara Cyphers, and especially to Ana M. Jimenez-Moreno. I could not have accomplished this project without the help of my mother Gathelee Terrell and mother-in-law Linda Hauschildt; I’m especially appreciative of them both for stepping in to help with homeschooling when a global pandemic struck just as I was finalizing the manuscript. Finally, I would like to thank my husband Thomas Knauer for his love, friendship, and unfailing support with everything from international moves to cups of tea, and my children Matilda and Simon for keeping life interesting and joyful.

INTRODUCTION

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AN ANONYMOUS POEM from the sixteenth-century Bannatyne manuscript exemplifies a persistent Scottish concern with the ancestral origins of national identity.1 Titled “Ane anser to ane Ingliss railar praysing his awin genalogy,” the sonnet’s Scottish speaker forcefully counters English claims of ancestral superiority:

Ȝe Inglische hursone suntyme will avant Ȝour perrogeny from brutus to haif tane And sumtyme from ane Angell or ane sanct As Angelus and Anglus bayth war ane Angellis in erth ȝit hard I few or Nane Except þe feyndis with lucifer þat fell avant ȝow villane of þat lord allane Tak thy progeny frome pluto prence of hell Becauss ȝe vse in hoillis to hyd ȝor sell Angluss Is cum frome Angulus in deid Aboive all vderis Brutus bure þe bell 1. Much of medieval Scottish poetry owes its preservation to the work of George Bannatyne, who occupied himself during an outbreak of plague in 1568 by compiling a manuscript collection of poetry transcribed from older manuscripts: now National Library of Scotland Adv. MS.1.1.6. • 1 •

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Introduction

Quha slew his fader howping to succeid Than chuss ȝow ane of thais I rek not Ader 2 Tak beelȝebub or brutus to ȝor fader.

Invoking a longstanding historical dispute, the poem shows how stories told about genealogy can become focal points for both national pride and international discord. The “Ingliss railer’s” boasting draws upon two venerable legends of English origins: the English people descended either directly from angels, or from Brutus, the supposed founder of Britain who was the greatgrandson of the Trojan Aeneas. The first theory derives from a story told by Bede about Pope Gregory the Great, who encountered a group of handsome, fair-haired Angles being sold as slaves in a Roman marketplace; believing that 3 they resembled angels, he was inspired to send missionaries to Britain. The myth of Trojan ancestry, on the other hand, was popularized in the twelfth century by the chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth, who tells how Brutus discovered Britain, drove out the giants from the otherwise uninhabited island, and named it “Britain” after himself. He then divided its three portions (later Scotland, England, and Wales) among his three sons. This tale was widely believed and frequently cited as a political precedent proving English superiority over the Scots—it could be used to prove both that the Britons were there first and that Scotland (because originally apportioned by a southern sovereign) was a subsidiary kingdom to England. However, this poet is having none of it; instead, after economically dismissing the maternal side of English descent with the word “whoreson,” he neatly traps the “Ingliss railar” in a double bind. If the railar invokes a spurious etymological relationship between “angels” and “Angles” to claim angelic descent, then—since the only angels on earth are those who fell with Lucifer—he has to admit that he came from the devil.4 If, on the other hand, he claims to be descended from Brutus, the result is no better: as the chief of the Angles, Brutus is implicated in their diabolical beginning, a debased condition compounded by his position as a parri5 cide. The concluding couplet therefore offers no real choice: in the reading of 2. Bannatyne, Bannatyne Manuscript, 3:85–86. The poem is sometimes attributed to Alexander Montgomerie (c. 1550–98), although its most recent editor rejects the attribution. See Montgomerie, Poems. An early version of this discussion appeared in Terrell, “‘Lynealy discendit of þe devill.’ ” 3. Bede relates the story in II.i. of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. 4. As Bawcutt notes, the poet suggests that “Angles” may instead derive from “anglus,” “corner,” after the English habit of cowardly hiding themselves away. “Art of Flyting,” 17. 5. Brutus was traditionally identified as a Briton rather than an Angle; this author seems to have confused the groups. Geoffrey of Monmouth did, however, represent Brutus as (inadvertently) killing his father. History of the Kings of Britain, 4.

Introduction

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this author, descent from either Beelzebub or Brutus is equally shameful. The “Inglliss railar” is thus dispatched, and the Scottish speaker vindicated. The Bannatyne sonnet’s preoccupation with negotiating Anglo-Scottish relations through the lens of mythical, genealogical history is one that recurs throughout the history-writing and poetry of late medieval and early modern Scotland. The distant past, seen as the source of national character, rights, and privileges, becomes a fertile source of both inspiration and conflict. This book analyzes genealogically based arguments in the writings of a particular subset of Scottish chroniclers and court poets from the late fourteenth through the early sixteenth centuries. I contend that poets connected with James IV’s court—Gavin Douglas, William Dunbar, and Walter Kennedy— take up a mode of national discourse, rooted in a Scottish myth of origin, from the Latin chronicle tradition established by John of Fordun in the fourteenth century and expanded by Walter Bower in the fifteenth. This longest lasting and most influential tradition of Scottish historiography generates both Latin and vernacular abbreviations and recensions well into the sixteenth century, continuing to inform Scottish thinking about the past. In some cases, the link between the chroniclers and poets I examine is direct and causal: for example, Douglas and Kennedy both reference the nationalist chronicle tradition. In other instances, thematic links and similar emphases suggest a shared frame of reference, in which genealogical myths underlie attempts to forge a uniquely Scottish identity. Yet even as these historians and poets turn to an ancestral past in order to authorize their projects, they inevitably find their tasks complicated by the fact that, by the fourteenth century, the past was highly contested territory, already crowded with the writings of a hostile nation. English historical writers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Ranulph Higden had established authoritative accounts of Britain’s earliest days—accounts that tended to provide rationales for disenfranchising the Scots. Meanwhile, during the fifteenth century, Chaucer’s poetry was increasingly being promoted as the foundation of a national English literature, a situation which made even this most cosmopolitan of poets into a potentially controversial source for Scottish writers concerned 6 with fashioning their own national tradition. While English literary models prove powerfully attractive to Scottish writers, these writers’ engagement with English texts is at times complicated by their aversion to English politics and by their consequent desire to stake out their own literary (and literal) territory. The Scottish writers that I consider in this book both appropriate and subvert English literary models, creating a complex nationalist discourse

6. See, for example, Fisher, “Language Policy for Lancastrian England.”

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Introduction

that, even at its most fervently autonomous, is always engaged in a dialogic relationship with its sources. For these authors, whose intimate involvement with English texts helps to define their own nationalist projects, writing is always also a process of writing back. Far from being symptomatic of complicity in what R.  R. Davies calls the “Anglicization of the British Isles,” the dialogic nature of these Scottish writings resists English cultural and political hegemony through the very act of redeploying English structures for ostentatiously Scottish ends.7 In turning literary indebtedness to their own purposes, the Scottish participants in this (frequently one-sided) dialogue define and delimit Scottish national identity in terms that differentiate it strikingly from its English precedents. Mingling the literary and historical past into narrative representations that take on the autonomous authority of myth, they reveal sources of nation and culture that they then map onto Scotland’s present and project into its future. Writing back to England becomes indistinguishable from the nationalist project of writing Scotland. Thus, chroniclers in the tradition of John of Fordun and Walter Bower, while patterning their histories on English chronicles, fashion compelling myths of Scottish origins that refute English assertions of hegemony over Scotland and powerfully influence Anglo-Scottish diplomacy. Similarly, the early sixteenth-century poets Gavin Douglas and William Dunbar devise narratives of Chaucerian inheritance that authorize their attempts to create a uniquely Scottish poetics, capable of surpassing Chaucer’s achievements. These seemingly diverse modes of writing intersect not only in their similar treatment of English models but also in their common concern with (re) scripting history as genealogical myth, a revisionary process that affirms the continuities between the present and an idyllic past imagined as a site of literary and political precedent. Positioning themselves as writers and as Scots in relation to this complex historical terrain, these writers negotiate a sense of identity rooted in history, while actively seeking to intervene in Scotland’s cultural and political future. As the period during which Scottish culture first began to coalesce around the royal court, James IV’s reign provides a focal point for the poetic texts under consideration in this book. Accordingly, two of the poems most obviously and intimately concerned with Scottish nationalism—John Barbour’s 7. Davies, First English Empire, 170. Davies discusses Ireland, Scotland, and Wales as colonized territories whose Anglicization “was not merely a by-product of the military and political power of the English monarchy.  .  .  . It was also the triumph of the fashionable, the innovative, the exciting, the technologically more advanced, the wealth-creating, the transformative” (170). Davies regards Scotland as a particular paradox, “the most extensively English-settled and Anglicized part of the British Isles,” yet also “the country which retained its political dependence and proved capable of defending it stoutly against the English” (170).

Introduction

5

Bruce and Blind Hary’s Wallace—fall outside the scope of this study. Their perspectives on nationalism and their links to the chronicle tradition have already been well explored, most notably by James Goldstein.8 In choosing to focus, instead, on the court poetry of Kennedy, Douglas, and Dunbar, I address a site of nationalist discourse that is at once more subtle and more complex than Barbour’s and Hary’s poems dealing directly with the Scottish Wars of Independence. While Barbour sought to celebrate and strengthen a nascent monarchy, and Hary to further bolster Scottish nationalism in response to James III’s pro-English policies, the poets of James IV’s reign were concerned with a different set of questions. As Sally Mapstone has argued, “It would be quite wrong to suggest that court life and courtly literature, even the court poet, had 9 the same character before the 1490s as they were to have after them.” James IV’s mature rule opened up a brief space in which Scottish poets could ask not what it was to become a nation but what it was to inhabit one. I contend that this court poetry, written more than a century after Scotland’s reestablishment as an independent nation, seeks to consolidate Scottish national identity through its focus on the court as a site of Scottish self-definition and its persistent concern with marking out a distinct realm of Scottish cultural and poetic achievement. That the shared concerns between chronicle history and court poetry have largely gone unremarked by scholars is attributable, in part, to the fact that authors such as Dunbar and Douglas have long been hampered with the designation of “Scottish Chaucerians,” a phrase that tends to imply uncritical imitation of and unquestioned subordination to the English master.10 The term has long been recognized as problematic, and most critics now agree with Douglas Gray’s assessment that “it always did more harm than good.”11 Yet due partially to the remarkable longevity of the term, the degree to which Dunbar and Douglas challenge Chaucer’s cultural supremacy in their attempt to fashion a preeminent Scottish poetry has not always been sufficiently appreciated. I contend that this poetic project, envisioned in terms of cultural and linguistic renewal, shares with the more overtly political discourse of the chronicles a concern with negotiating the ancestral origins of identity. Scottish poets engage in a complex dance of deference to and defiance against their English models, their admiration for Chaucer’s poetics complicated not only by their desire to surpass his achievement but also by the contentious politics that characterize Anglo-Scottish relations during this period. 8. Goldstein, Matter of Scotland. 9. Mapstone, “Was There a Court Literature in Fifteenth-Century Scotland?” 410. 10. Fox, “Scottish Chaucerians.” 11. Gray, “Some Chaucerian Themes in Scottish writers,” 81.

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Introduction

Similarly, Scottish chroniclers in the tradition of Fordun and Bower both appropriate and undermine English models of history-writing, drawing upon English sources even as they wage a war of words with their English counterparts over the historical grounds for their nation’s independence. A consciously high-stakes venture with potentially far-reaching political consequences, historical writing in late medieval Scotland aims not only to record events but also to shape narratives that directly bolster nationalist ideology. In my treatment of Scottish chronicles as simultaneously literary texts and political documents, a line further blurred by the employment of historical narrative in diplomatic rhetoric, I am influenced by Gabrielle Spiegel’s discussion of vernacular French chronicles, in which she stresses “the social logic of the texts” as comprehending not only “the social space they occupy both as products of a particular social world and as agents at work in that world” but also “their discursive character as . . . literary artifacts composed of language and thus requiring literary (formal) analysis.”12 Deeply embedded in the cultural space that they seek to transform, Scottish chronicles resonate throughout various levels of culture. While the chroniclers provide grounds for refuting English assertions of hegemony over Scotland, their treatment of English history-writing also legitimizes the creation of a uniquely Scottish poetics through the analogous appropriation and transformation of English literary models. I argue that the Scottish chronicles and poetry that most clearly depend on English materials also fully establish Scottish authority and indeed achieve their fullest complexity precisely through this dual posture. Thus far, I have taken for granted the existence of nationalist feeling in medieval Scotland, although the very possibility of medieval nationalism has been questioned by scholars who view the nation as an exclusively modern phenomenon. It has become a commonplace of medieval scholarship to refute Benedict Anderson’s contention that the nation originated in the eighteenth century, “an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroy13 ing the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm.” Opposing the modern secular state to a monolithic medieval Christendom whose “unselfconscious coherence” enabled a worldview that was “centripetal and hierarchical, rather than boundary-oriented and horizontal,” Anderson radically oversimplifies the unity and dominance of the medieval Catholic church, while he overlooks other factors in the complex composition of medieval identities.14 As Kathleen Davis usefully reminds us, to discuss medieval nationalism does not necessarily mean “suggesting that the medieval nation 12. Spiegel, Romancing the Past, 9. 13. Anderson, Imagined Communities. 14. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 15–16.

Introduction

7

is the same as the modern nation, but rather that imagining national identity is not restricted to one set of historically specific conditions such as print culture, democracy, capitalism, and secularization.”15 Anderson’s interpretation of the medieval belies the fact that a universal (or even European) Christendom, united under the authority of the Pope, was little more than a mythic ideal, one that was continually challenged not only by friction within the church itself but also by papal readiness to take sides in secular affairs and by the fail16 ure of shared religious beliefs to prevent European warfare. A brief example from Scottish history—one to which I shall return— should be sufficient to illustrate the complex interplay of nation and religion in medieval politics. In 1299 Pope Boniface VIII issued the bull Scimus fili, protesting against England’s attempted annexation of Scotland by asserting “that the realm of Scotland belongs to the Roman church, and that it was not, and is not, lawful for you to dominate it by force and to subjugate it to your rule.”17 However, the tide quickly turned, as Boniface’s ongoing quarrel with the French led the Pope to side with the English.18 Within twenty years, the special relationship between Rome and Scotland now a thing of the past, and the papacy firmly on the English side of the Anglo-Scottish conflict, Pope Clement V excommunicated King Robert I and placed the entire country under interdict. This blend of political and religious intrigue, involving multiple national rivalries and a highly partisan papacy, hardly resembles Anderson’s vision of a hierarchical medieval society united under Rome. Yet, although I would challenge Anderson’s identification of the nation as a uniquely modern phenomenon, his concept of the nation as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” offers useful insights into the nature of the medieval Scottish nation, a heterogeneous society marked by deep internal divisions, whose members nev19 ertheless frequently imagined themselves members of a united community. In twelfth-century charters, Scottish kings addressed their people as “English, French, Flemings, Scots, Welsh (Britons), and Gallovidians”; two hundred 15. Davis, “National Writing in the Ninth Century,” 613. 16. For critiques of scholars who predicate modernity upon medieval alterity, see Davies, “Presidential Address”; Davis, “National Writing in the Ninth Century”; and Lavezzo, introduction to Imagining a Medieval English Nation. See also Forde, Johnson, and Murray, Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages; and Tipton, Nationalism in the Middle Ages. Scholars of nationalism increasingly support the view that nations have a long history: for example, Gat, Nations; Hastings, Construction of Nationhood; and Smith, “Diasporas and Homelands in History.” 17. Stones, Anglo-Scottish Relations 1174–1328, 85. 18. Nicholson, Scotland, 2:65. 19. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6.

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Introduction

years later, these divisions had largely disappeared, overridden by a pervasive Scottish identity.20 As Rees Davies observes, “By the fourteenth century there can really be no argument . . . kingdom and people were now one.”21 Even the enduring cultural and linguistic split between Highland and Lowland Scots does not seem to have diminished a deeply felt sense of national community. John of Fordun’s fourteenth-century description of Scotland’s peoples illustrates this paradox: The character of the Scots varies according to the difference in the language.  .  .  . The people who speak Scots occupy the coastal and lowland regions, while those who speak Gaelic live in the mountainous regions and the outer isles. The coastal people are docile and civilised, trustworthy, longsuffering and courteous, decent in their dress, polite and peaceable, devout in worship, but always ready to resist injuries threatened by their enemies. The island or highland people however are fierce and untameable, uncouth and unpleasant, much given to theft, fond of doing nothing, but their minds are quick to learn, and cunning. They are strikingly handsome in appearance, but their clothing is unsightly. They are always hostile and savage not only towards the people and language of England, but also towards their fellow Scots because of the difference in language. They are however loyal and 22 obedient to the king and the kingdom [regi et regno]. (2.9.1–5)

Fordun sets up a seemingly irresolvable opposition—colored by his own Lowland bias—between Lowland and Highland Scots, only to neutralize it in the concluding sentence. Lowlanders and Highlanders may have little in common, but they are united by a common respect for both king and, more interestingly, kingdom. James Goldstein has discussed how, by the thirteenth century, the concepts of “rex (the sovereign who in normal circumstances governed the nation) and regnum (in the sense not simply of the geographical territory but also of the body politic)” had evolved into distinct concepts roughly 23 equivalent to the modern distinction between the monarchy and the state. The concept of the communitas regni Scotie—“the community of the kingdom of the realm”—offered the Scottish nobility a paradigm for envisioning the Scottish nation as a continuing political entity, even in the absence of a

20. Quoted in Stringer, “Emergence of a Nation-State, 1100–1300,” 75. 21. Davies, “Presidential Address,”18–19; also see Davies, First English Empire, 54–88. 22. Bower, Scotichronicon. Citations appear parenthetically in text. On the sources of this passage, see the essays by Broun and MacGregor in their Mìorun Mòr nan Gall. 23. Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, 29.

Introduction

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reigning monarch.24 Fordun’s vision of national unity rests neither on kinship, geography, cultural ties, linguistic bonds, nor even on mutual regard, but on a shared respect for the imagined community in which both Lowland and Highland Scots participate. By the fourteenth century, the idea of this community, largely formed in response to English aggression, permeated Scottish society: religion, literature, and conflict with England all played significant roles in promulgating nationalist sentiment. The Scottish church actively differentiated itself from the English church. As Azar Gat has recently recognized, “Rather than conflicting with the national idea, as it is conventionally and erroneously assumed to have been, religion was one of its strongest pillars. It was, in fact, the most powerful and all-pervasive mass medium of the premodern ‘imagined community.’”25 In the fifteenth century, the Scottish clergy—reacting, in part, to Blind Hary’s contention that Edward I had burned all of Scotland’s liturgical books and imposed the English Sarum Use on the Scottish church—experienced “an outburst of nationalist devotion,” in which they promoted previously neglected Scottish saints and introduced a Scottish liturgical use.26 This liturgical revision was accompanied by restoration and building projects, the encouragement of pilgrimage to Scottish shrines, the foundation of distinctly Scottish branches of religious orders, the creation of three new universities, and the elevation of the see of St. Andrews to an archbishopric—all projects designed to enhance Scotland’s self-image and international reputation.27 Moreover, contrary to modernist views that take widespread literacy and print capitalism as preconditions of nationalism, literary culture in Scotland—as in other medieval societies—was predicated upon fluid transmission between oral and written realms; the arrival of print, at first, simply added one more means of dissemination to an already extensive network of distribution. As we shall see, the connections between Latin and vernacular culture were also extensive. Neither was nationalist sentiment exclusively the preserve of the nobility; Alexander Grant finds that the Wars of Independence inspired “a strong hostility to the English and willingness to take part in the Scottish cause among the middling folk of Scotland,” and posits that this feeling may 28 have extended even to the peasantry. Although the exact nature of Scot 24. The phrase was originated by the guardians of the realm elected following the death of Alexander III in 1284. See Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, 23–56. 25. Gat, Nations, 11. 26. McRoberts, “Scottish Church and Nationalism,” 7. 27. McRoberts, “Scottish Church and Nationalism,” 9–12. Ditchburn, “‘McRoberts Thesis,’” discusses additional reasons for changing patterns of devotion. 28. Grant, “Aspects of National Consciousness in Medieval Scotland,” 88.

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Introduction

tish national identity remained a matter for debate, Scotland’s existence as a national entity was widely accepted. This book explores a particular nexus of this widespread nationalist feeling, examining the ways in which court poets and Latin chroniclers jointly created a multifaceted nationalist discourse founded upon the construction of mythical genealogies. The first chapter discusses the stakes of historiography throughout this period, detailing the ways in which historiography was invoked in Anglo-Scottish diplomacy from the late thirteenth into the sixteenth century. Drawing on both English and Scottish texts, I demonstrate that conceptions of the historical record, and the perceived influence of the past on the present, were at the center of both nations’ self-conceptions and were crucial to Anglo-Scottish relations. I then examine the historical attitudes that enabled chronicles to become such productive sites of political argument, arguing that late medieval historiographers combine documentary and genealogical evidence to promote a view of the past as a mythic locus of originary identity. The distant past in particular, pliable because largely undocumented, becomes a prime site for the negotiating of present-day political and ideological concerns. Chapter 2 discusses Scottish historiographical responses to Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Historia Regum Brittanie established an origin myth that was frequently invoked in support of English supremacy over Scotland. Focusing on the development of the contrasting Scottish origin myth from early diplomatic texts through John of Fordun’s Chronica Gentis Scotorum, I contend that even as Scottish chroniclers challenge Geoffrey’s myth and the English claims of hegemony that it comes to represent, their persistently dialogic engagement with Geoffrey’s text reveals the hybridity underlying their constructions of identity. Next, in chapter 3 I turn to the Scotichronicon, Walter Bower’s fifteenthcentury expansion of Fordun’s Chronica, in order to examine the ways in which Fordun and Bower employ the Scottish origin myth to bolster a broader conception of history as translatio imperii (the divinely sanctioned transfer of political power). For Fordun and Bower, Scotland’s spiritual superiority (particularly over the English) provides evidence of an illustrious political destiny; the origin myth serves to further legitimize this posited shift in political power by linking the Scots, in direct lineage, to celebrated centers of ancient authority, and by painting England’s current Norman rulers as an interruption in a divinely sanctioned line. Analyzing Bower’s proposal for a closer alliance of church, state, and historiography, I suggest that Fordun and Bower view their chronicles as actively promoting Scotland’s political destiny.

Introduction

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The fourth chapter investigates the connections between historiography and vernacular poetry in the Scottish literary scene of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It begins by detailing the textual transmission and adaptation of the Scotichronicon: the manuscript contexts of its descendants reveal that Bower’s views on history continue to be influential not only for learned Latin chroniclers but also for anonymous vernacular historians and poets. As the audience for nationalist historiography broadens, its claims grow ever more grandiose; vernacular writers frequently strike a populist tone, constructing England as an inverse reflection of Scotland and pitting Scottish and English ancestries against one another in xenophobic polemics. However, I also demonstrate that this Anglophobic historiography shared readers, scribes, and manuscripts with vernacular poetry that openly reveres English models. Closely examining the Selden manuscript (the only surviving fifteenth-­ century Scottish manuscript to preserve Chaucer’s works), I argue that it appropriates Chaucerian material into its own nationalist vision. I then focus my attention on canonical poets’ engagements with the chroniclers’ genealogically based nationalism. Chapter 5 offers a reexamination of William Dunbar’s investment in issues of Scottish national identity. In the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, the poets’ battle of wits reveals two distinct scripts for Scottish national identity, both of which are grounded in mythical ancestries. The competing loci of cultural and historical authority that the poets posit in the course of their debate reveal that the fundamental conflict between Lowland and Highland cultures was largely shaped by the relation of each to English cultural influences. Further examining Dunbar’s attitude toward his cultural heritage as expressed in poems such as the Golden Targe and the Lament for the Makaris, I find that his concern with claiming Chaucer as a literary ancestor coexists with a desire to mark his own cultural, temporal, and national difference from the Chaucerian voice. Chapter 6 addresses one of the more complex sites of Dunbar’s refashioning of literary tradition: his court poems, particularly his petitions to James IV. Discussing Dunbar’s social and economic position as both poet and courtier, I argue that he underwrites his demands for reward by claiming a newly elevated status for court poetry and transforms the conventions of courtly love poetry into a poetry of the court. In this context, I reassess Dunbar’s petitions to argue that he applies many of the tropes of courtly love to his relationship with James IV, in the process of which he literalizes the implied homosocial focus of much courtly love poetry by establishing the king as the sole object of his economic and emotional desire. In appropriating the timeworn conventions of the courtly love tradition and employing them to explore the com-

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plex interactions of power and desire in the Scottish court, Dunbar fashions a poetics that directly speaks to contemporary Scottish culture and identity. The final chapter turns to Gavin Douglas’s Eneados, a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid that is the Scottish poem bearing the clearest ties to the nationalist project pursued by Fordun and Bower. I propose that Douglas views his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid as a cultural as well as a linguistic process, wherein he divorces Virgil’s narrative from its longstanding ties to the English foundation legend and appropriates its intellectual and cultural authority on behalf of Scotland. Defining a space for Scotland’s ascendancy, Douglas contends that English and Latin cultures have degenerated from their former glories—exemplified by Chaucer and Virgil, respectively—into the ineptitude of their modern-day representatives. Douglas trumps both of these illustrious literary ancestors by assuming a literary authority based both on a newly rigorous approach to translation and on Christian revelation. Moreover, Douglas aligns his poetic prowess with the political prestige of Scotland’s elite and establishes his translation as a participant in an ongoing tradition of translatio studii et imperii, marked both by the transition from Latin to the vernacular and by the transfer of poetic, cultural, and political power from England to Scotland. I conclude that Douglas shapes Virgil’s narrative into a foundational text of Scottish ascendancy that parallels the Scottish origin myth and reveals the interplay between literary and historical authority in the scripting of nationhood.

CHAPTER 1

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On the Uses of the Past Diplomacy, Genealogy, and Historiography

IN MARCH 1291 , Edward I of England set monks throughout his kingdom rifling through their libraries in search of “chronicles, registers, and other confidential [documents], which in any way touch or refer to the status of the realms of England and Scotland . . . or their kings and magnates.”1 Edward’s researches were precipitated by a crisis in the Scottish succession. When the Scottish King Alexander III and his only direct heir—his granddaughter Margaret, known as the “Maid of Norway”—died one after the other in 1286 and 1290, Edward stepped in to arbitrate among the throne’s various claimants, 2 with the underlying motive of imposing his authority as Scotland’s overlord. Despite the ambiguous wording of his request to the monasteries, it is clear that Edward knew exactly what he was looking for: evidence that would support the claim that he intended to make in the swiftly approaching arbitration, now known as the Great Cause, that “it is perfectly clear that from antiquity the kings of England have had, and ought to have, the subjection, homage, fealty, and overlordship of the realm of Scotland.”3 While the appeal generated numerous returns (of which twenty survive), Edward’s clerks dismissed any

1. Stones and Simpson, Edward I, 1:140. 2. Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, 57–78. 3. Title of John of Caen’s Great Roll, as quoted in Stones and Simpson, Edward I, 1:148. They show that the Great Roll’s historical narrative begins in 901 ad; legendary history only becomes a factor with Edward’s 1301 letter to Pope Boniface VIII (1:148–53). • 13 •

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that did not directly bear on this question as “nil novum invenitur” (“nothing new found”) or “nichil continet ad propositum” (“contains nothing to the purpose”).4 The rest were “inspected, investigated, and discussed before all 5 the king’s council,” and soon gathered together into a coherent narrative in John of Caen’s Great Roll. As the Great Cause progressed, Edward sent copies of the letters from the various competitors for the throne to the monasteries, with orders to copy them into their chronicles as evidence. As Antonia Gransden has observed, in the process, “Edward not only produced an official history of his own; he also interfered, for the sake of obtaining and recording historical precedents, with other people’s historiography.”6 Thus enmeshing historiographical production with royal desire and state requirement, Edward extended his monarchical sway: England’s past, as well as its present, became his to command. Throughout the roughly two and a half centuries covered by this study, history remained a hotly contested battleground in an Anglo-Scottish ideological war that frequently erupted into real battle, and manipulation of the past for present political ends became a regularly deployed tool of monarchical power. The legal systems that enabled this manipulation were already in place: “Medieval legal practice in general was founded on the ‘prestige of the past,’ the principle that ‘what has been has ipso facto the right to be. Its central concept, seisin (sasine in Scots), has been defined as ‘possession made venerable by the lapse of time.’”7 Moreover, as both nations learned to define their rights and territories by reference to an increasingly distant past, conceptions of the historical record became crucial factors in defining English and Scottish identity. In this chapter, I give a brief overview of some interrelations of English politics and chronicle history, and then set out a theoretical framework for the two interrelated modes of historical thought—documentary and genealogical—that operate in the chronicles and influence their usefulness both for political purposes and for the dissemination of ideas about national identity. Most of this book will concern the Scottish side of the border. Yet the two nations’ invocations of the past were so interdependent that it will be useful to begin with a brief overview of the English monarchy’s recourse to historiography in its dealings with Scotland and with English historiographers’ attempts to intervene in Anglo-Scottish politics.

4. Quoted in Stones and Simpson, Edward I, 1:144–45; they list the surviving returns, 1:143–44. 5. Bury Chronicle, quoted in Stones, “Appeal to History,” 16. 6. Gransden, Historical Writing in England, 1:442. 7. Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, 59.



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FORGING HISTORIES: HISTORIOGRAPHY AND ROYAL DESIRE Edward’s “appeal to history,” as it has become known, initiated a new methodology of historical research based on the needs of the state, and set in motion a repeated motif in late medieval Anglo-Scottish relations.8 Edward himself would renew his historical research in 1300, by which time the conflict with Scotland was being debated at the papal court. Pope Boniface VIII initially sided with the Scots, and in 1299 issued a bull, Scimus fili, to Edward. Claiming that he knew of no basis for Edward’s claim to Scotland—and that Scotland “belonged rightfully .  .  . to the Roman church”—Boniface invited him to submit evidence to the papal court, demanding that he prove his claim to overlordship.9 This time, Edward wrote not only to abbots and priors (thirtysix in all) but also to nine secular cathedral chapters, all of the English cathedrals, and both universities, asking the former to search their archives and the latter to send scholars of Roman law to the parliament at Lincoln.10 While Caen’s Great Roll started with the year 901, Edward’s response to Boniface now extended the historical scope of his arguments farther into the distant past, tracing his claim to Scotland back to Britain’s mythical founding by the Trojan Brutus.11 According to this myth, drawn from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfthcentury Historia Regum Britannie, Brutus—the great-grandson of the Trojan Aeneas—lands, after many wanderings, in the island then known as Albion, drives out the giants who are its only inhabitants, and names the land after himself. Later, he divides this territory among his three sons: Locrinus and Kamber inherit England and Wales, respectively, while Albanactus, the youngest, is given Albany, later known as Scotland. When Albanactus is killed by an invader, Locrinus retaliates and assumes control.12 Curiously, this legendary material seems to have been an afterthought, inserted into the draft at a late stage—but it was an afterthought that would go on to assume outsized importance in Anglo-Scottish relations, necessitating as it did an answer from the 8. Stones, in “Appeal to History, Part I” describes Edward’s research; expanded in Stones and Simpson, Edward I. 9. Printed in Stones, Anglo-Scottish Relations, 163–75. 10. Stones, “Appeal to History,” 19. 11. Ferguson, Identity of the Scottish Nation, 28–33, gives a balanced assessment of Edward’s case. 12. Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, 43–60. Ullmann, “On the Influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth in English History,” discusses Geoffrey’s influence on a number of subsequent texts and events, including Anglo-Scottish relations.

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Scots. Edward’s reply to Boniface thus inaugurated what James Goldstein has termed a “war of historiography.”13 Throughout Edward’s reign (1272–1307), the political demand for historiography fueled its creation. This was obviously so in the case of the direct results of his initial appeal: as R. R. Davies has observed, “The returns and the potted histories of Anglo-Scottish relations which resulted from the exercise are surely one of the most remarkable medieval examples of the deployment 14 and distortion of the past in the service of the present.” But it was also true in less direct ways. At least one original chronicle seems to have been composed in order to serve Edward’s perceived need: David Matthews suggests that Pierre de Langtoft’s Anglo-Norman verse Chronicle was “designed to answer to the needs the king articulated as he contemplated overlordship of Scotland in 1291. The validating chronicle was not found, so it had to be invented.”15 Beginning with the Trojan origins of Britain and continuing through the reign of Edward I, Langtoft’s virulently anti-Scottish Chronicle effectively streamlines the Edwardian view of history, emphasizing Edward’s rights in Scotland and making particularly good use of legendary material in order to paint Edward as the living embodiment of Brutus and Arthur. Indeed, Thea Summerfield sees the Chronicle as “an alternative ‘appeal to history,’ a vernacular text offering evidence on the same subject as the official record, but in an entertaining way” that could effectively disseminate the authorized narrative.16 She proposes that Langtoft’s effective exploitation of myth may well have “accelerated the use of legendary history for political purposes in future centuries,”17 while Matthews goes even further, attributing Edward’s invocation of legendary history in 1300 to the Chronicle’s popularity.18 Langtoft later enhanced the quasi-official nature of his text by appending Anglo-Norman verse translations of some of the documents in the Great Cause, including Boniface’s bull and Edward’s reply. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia continued to be relevant, as well: the Anglo-Norman prose Brut, based on Wace’s Roman de Brut (1155) and on the Historia, was composed during Edward’s reign. The reign of Edward II (r. 1307–27) would see a further enmeshing of state interest and historiographical production centered upon Anglo-Scottish relations and would further legitimize mythical history. In 1315, the year following Edward’s disastrous defeat by Scottish forces at Bannockburn, his government 13. Stones, “Appeal to History,” 20; Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, 57. 14. Davies, First English Empire, 35. 15. Matthews, Writing to the King, 79. 16. Summerfield, “Testimony of Writing,” 26. 17. Summerfield, “Testimony of Writing,” 41. 18. Matthews, Writing to the King, 79.



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commissioned Andrew de Tange to produce a new Great Roll in triplicate. Tange added to John of Caen’s Great Roll an opening section on the mythical prehistory of Britain (more or less copied from Edward’s 1301 letter to Boniface VIII), as well as an account of the Great Cause itself, up to the deposition of Balliol in 1296.19 This careful assembly of historical precedent, which endorsed the English monarch’s sway over a vast stretch of past time while intending to further his future territorial reach, was completed in 1318 and 20 used in diplomatic negotiations with the Scots at least through the 1330s. The legendary past, which initially made its way into the official record as an afterthought, had become central to the narrative of English rights and identity. Like his father and grandfather, Edward III (r. 1327–77) also seems to have been interested in historiography’s potential to bolster his position in Scotland. At least one chronicle written during his reign suggests a royal commission: Robert of Avesbury’s De Gestis Mirabilibus Edwardi Tertii glorifies Edward’s deeds, not only celebrating his French wars but also justifying, at some length, his claim to overlordship of Scotland.21 Predictably, the renewal of Anglo-Scottish hostilities in the 1330s led to the updating of earlier antiScottish historiography. In 1338, Robert Mannyng of Bourne produced an English translation and adaptation of Langtoft’s Chronicle, applying its lessons of hatred and distrust of Scotland to Edward III’s Scottish wars.22 Although his is a vernacular chronicle not composed for royal readership, Mannyng nevertheless seeks to strengthen the interests of the king and nation by rallying popular support for the English cause, praying that God “Grante me þat bone, 23 þe Scottes sone alle be confonded.” Edward appears to have taken a more direct interest in historiography, as well. In August 1352 Ranulph Higden, a Benedictine monk of St. Werburgh’s abbey in Chester and the most prominent English historian of his day, was called to appear before the king’s council “with all your chronicles and those in your charge to speak and treat with our council concerning matters to be 24 explained to you on our behalf.” Unfortunately this explanation was not recorded, but Peter Brown has suggested that Higden may have been summoned in order to support Edward’s policy of “actively appropriating images 19. Stones, “Appeal to History,” 20. 20. Stones, “Appeal to History,” 21. 21. Robert of Avesbury, Adae Murimuth Continuatio Chronicarum, 279–471; Gransden, Legends, Traditions, and History, 214. 22. Turville-Petre, “Politics and Poetry,” 9–13. 23. Printed as Peter Langtoft’s Chronicle, 2:283. 24. As quoted from the Close Rolls of Edward III for 8 August 1352, in Edwards, “Ranulf, Monk of Chester.”

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of national identity for political and propaganda purposes,” exemplified by his revival of Arthurian mythology (including the founding of the Order of the Garter in 1348).25 If so, Higden was unlikely to have been of much use: not only does his Polychronicon question the validity of the Arthurian legends that Edward was trying to resurrect, but he also points out the contradictions in the Brutus legend. Yet the timing suggests that Edward may have had a more particular objective in summoning Higden to court. In the previous year Edward had released his prisoner the Scottish King David II on parole so that he could discuss Edward’s demands with the Scottish parliament and negotiate his return to his kingdom. Edward planned to exchange David’s freedom, as well as the Scottish territories in his possession, for the assurance that David would nominate one of Edward’s younger sons to succeed him as king of Scotland in the event that he died without a direct heir. When the Scottish nobility rejected this offer at a parliament held between 28 February and 6 March 1352, Edward suggested that David might remain at liberty if he would take steps to overrule the parliament’s decision. However, “David could not, or would not, 26 start a civil war in Scotland to force Edward’s terms upon his own people.” 27 By 22 May, David was again imprisoned in the Tower. His plans for arranging the peaceful cooption of Scotland thus frustrated, Edward turned his attention to other means of asserting his authority. In July he made an indenture with a former Scottish prisoner, Douglas of Liddesdale, and installed him in a castle near the border, ready to support an English invasion.28 When Douglas was murdered in August, that plan, too, came to nothing—yet it shows that in the summer of 1352, Edward was much occupied with plans for Scottish conquest. He may well have regarded his summons of Higden as a replay of his grandfather’s appeal to history—an attempt to cover all of his bases in assuring the success of his imminent invasion. A clearer reiteration of Edward I’s historical researches came in the reign of Henry IV (r. 1399–1413), who in 1399 requested that abbeys and priories throughout England send their chronicles to the king in London. No reason was given for this request, and Henry may well have been primarily interested in shoring up his shaky claim to the throne after the deposition of Richard II. Yet it is also true that in July 1400 the government was actively investigating the details of the 1328 peace agreement with Scotland. On 6 August Henry wrote to the Scottish King Robert III demanding homage and briefly tracing English claims over Scotland back to Brutus; moreover, he had his envoys read 25. Brown, “Higden’s Britain,” 103. 26. Nicholson, Scotland, 2:158. 27. Duncan, “David II and Edward III,” 132. 28. Nicholson, Scotland, 159



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this letter publicly in various border towns and even in Edinburgh.29 On 25 September, twenty pounds were paid to one Henry Somer and his assistants as recompense for “the copying of various rolls (rotuli) and evidences touching the homage formerly done by kings of Scotland to some of the kings of England, and other negotiations (tractatus) formerly taking place between the kings on various occasions—for consideration and inspection in [the copies] by our lord the King and his council, when they were on the Scottish march.”30 When the two sides met for negotiations—of which an unusually full record survives—in October 1401, the English opened with the predictable demand for homage. When the Scots refused, the royal clerk Alan Newark recited “the chronicles and ancient writings bearing on the argument,”31 again emphasizing the myth of Brutus and referring the Scottish diplomats to certain other “chronicles extant, in certain monasteries of England, and still 32 faithfully kept.” The bishop of Bangor added that because of such chronicles, the premise of the king of England concerning the homage was fully established in law, for such chronicles were written by trustworthy persons, some of them monks, who were above suspicion . . . and were kept carefully in monasteries, and other places, which were also above suspicion, [and that there is] a tradition that this sort of homage was done to the kings of England by the kings of Scotland from those times . . . and that the chronicles, speaking of a very distant, ancient, and remote time, provided that they are found in ancient books and charters, and are faithfully 33 and securely kept, as they were written, bear full credit at law.

The bishop’s comments on the value of chronicles illustrate the importance that both the past and the documents that purported to preserve it held in political negotiations. In this case the negotiations were not a success: they broke down when the English commissioners proposed that the question of the Scottish king’s rights be submitted to arbitration, and the Scots pointedly asked whether the English would be willing to do the same with Henry IV’s right to England. Yet the bishop clearly wishes to impress upon his listeners the reliability of chronicles as evidence. Their very antiquity, which seem 29. Discussed in Stones, “Appeal to History,” 80–83. The text of the letter is given in Rymer, Foedera, 8:155–56. 30. P. R. O., Issue Rolls (E 403), 567, under 25 September 1400; quoted in Stones and Simpson, Edward I, 70. 31. Stones, Anglo-Scottish Relations, 350. 32. Stones, Anglo-Scottish Relations, 351. 33. Stones, Anglo-Scottish Relations, 353.

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ingly removes them from any perception of bias (provided that they have been “faithfully and securely kept”) authorizes them as indisputable evidence of “tradition.” However, a dispute that breaks out in the midst of these negotiations illustrates the degree to which historiography had become politicized in the hundred-odd years since the Great Cause. Alan Newark refers in particular to chronicles “by a certain Scot called Marianus,” as if to say that since even the Scots’ own chronicles demonstrate the English argument, it must therefore be beyond dispute. However, John of Merton, one of the Scottish delegates, “at once intervened, remarking that Marianus was a very trustworthy person for the time when he lived, but adding that he was a Scot of Ireland, not a native of their Scotland.”34 John of Merton’s foray into source criticism (intended to cast doubt upon the English argument) shows that by the fifteenth century, when the independence of a realm is at stake the provenance of a chronicle has bearing on its interpretation, regardless of its antiquity or secure keeping. Questions of bias and authenticity are brought to the fore in the complex career of the English spy, forger, and chronicler John Hardyng, whose historical interventions spanned nearly fifty years of the fifteenth century, the reigns of three monarchs, and a change in royal dynasty. In the spring of 1418, Henry V (r. 1413–22) sent Hardyng into Scotland, in Hardyng’s words: To seke his ryght thare of hys sovereynté, And evydence to gette and to espy 35 Appurtenant unto hys monarchy. (40–42)

Narrowly defined, Hardyng’s mission was to seek out documentary evidence that would support Henry’s claim to the throne of Scotland and to gather geographical and tactical information that would assist in an English invasion. Hardyng returned to England three and a half years later, the fruits of his expedition consisting of a severe financial loss, an “incurable mayme” (152), an abiding obsession with the desirability of conquering Scotland, and an impressive collection of documents relating to the English monarchy’s rights in Scotland. He later made a second expedition to Scotland, which resulted in deliveries of additional documents to Henry VI in 1440 and in 1457; in 1463, 34. Stones, Anglo-Scottish Relations, 353. Notably, in older sources “Scot” typically refers to an inhabitant of Ireland. 35. Except where otherwise noted, quotations of the first version of Hardyng’s chronicle come from Peverley and Simpson’s edition of John Hardyng’s Chronicle; citations of line numbers appear parenthetically in text. Also see Kingsford, “The First Version of Hardyng’s Chronicle.”



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he delivered still more documents to Edward IV.36 These totaled nineteen documents in all, seventeen of which have subsequently been revealed as forgeries, probably produced by Hardyng himself. While his initial goal of searching archives at the king’s behest placed him firmly in the tradition instigated by Edward I, Hardyng went further by attempting actually to create the textual record that his monarchs required. Hardyng’s career as a forger and a historiographer can tell us a great deal about the kinds of sources that he and his contemporaries viewed as trustworthy. In making his forgeries, Hardyng shows a preference for antique documents that would provide unambiguous evidence of England’s rights. His “evydences” primarily consist of forged charters in which a Scottish king acknowledges the longstanding and perpetual overlordship of an English king: they range from an homage of Malcolm Canmore to Edward the Confessor, to letters patent of David II acknowledging his fealty to Edward III. According to Alfred Hiatt, “Hardyng’s aim seems to have been to construct a seamless history of the submission of Scottish kings from the eleventh through the fifteenth century”; within a political and legal system that valued historical precedent as authoritative, Hardyng was constructing the best case he could for English sovereignty.37 Hardyng’s own attitude toward his deception seems to have had something in common with that of certain monastic forgers who believed that “the truth was too important to leave to chance;” when documentary proof began to outweigh tradition and oral evidence, they fabricated a written record attesting to the rights they had always possessed.38 Like these monastic forgers, Hardyng seems paradoxically to have held the documentary record in high esteem: he fabricates it when necessary because the production of accessible records, in acceptable and recognizable form, is so vital for secur39 ing his kingdom’s interests. The present’s urgent need for the past justifies him in going beyond merely gathering the fragments of a contradictory and scattered textual record to filling in the gaps where necessary. This attitude carries over seamlessly into Hardyng’s sense of the historian’s task: whereas his documents fill in historical lacunae with supposedly objective records, his Chronicle fills in the gaps with narrative. Hardyng began writ 36. See Hiatt, “The Forgeries of John Hardyng.” Palgrave discusses Hardyng’s documents in Documents and Records Illustrating the History of Scotland, 1:cxcvi–ccxxiv, and prints several of his forgeries in an appendix, 367–78. Also see Hiatt, Making of Medieval Forgeries, 104. 37. Hiatt, Making of Medieval Forgeries, 103. 38. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 149. See also Beer, Narrative Conventions of Truth in the Middle Ages; Constable, “Forgery and Plagiarism in the Middle Ages”; Morse, Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages; Pearsall, “Forging Truth in Medieval England”; and Hiatt, Making of Medieval Forgeries. 39. See Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 231–57.

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ing his Chronicle in the 1440s and ’50s, between deliveries of documents. It survives in two versions: he presented the first, Lancastrian version to Henry VI in 1457; then, in his eighties, he rewrote the chronicle for the ascendant Yorkist dynasty, dedicating it initially to Richard, Duke of York.40 After Richard’s death in 1460, Hardyng soldiered on, now addressing his material to Edward IV; he was still revising this version when he died in c. 1465. This second version of the chronicle—perhaps because of its usefulness as Yorkist propaganda—was widely disseminated and survives in sixteen complete or fragmentary copies and in two sixteenth-century printed editions. Hardyng clearly wrote to fulfill the interests of whichever king and dynasty was in power, as well as to urge his own reward, but his ideological agenda remains constant. Both versions of Hardyng’s Chronicle pay particular attention to what he sees as the intractable problem of Scotland, insisting to whichever monarch is willing to listen that an English invasion would be the easiest solution: Wythin thre yere thaire greate rebellioun Ye myght oppresse and uttirly restrayne, And have it alle in youre possessioun. (22–24)

Even before his espionage mission, Anglo-Scottish relations were of daily concern to Hardyng, who spent his life from age twelve onward in the service of two Northumbrian families—first the Percies, then the Umfravilles—who defended the Anglo-Scottish border. He himself seems to have been present at several important battles between the English and Scots, and served as warden of Warkworth Castle, just south of the border. While the Scottish problem is far from the only issue at stake in Hardyng’s Chronicle (Sarah Peverley reminds us that Hardyng is often just as concerned with the “politically unstable nature of England in the late 1450s and early 1460s”), he tends to structure the rest of his discussion in relation to it—for example offering “divided Englishmen a common enemy to unite against” as a remedy for the factions 41 of civil war. Beginning with the printer Richard Grafton, who published his two editions of the Chronicle in only three months after Henry VIII declared

40. Riddy, “John Hardyng’s Chronicle,” 99–102, suggests that Hardyng began this version at the prompting of the Yorkist faction. 41. Peverley, “Reader Responses,” 21; also see Peverley, “Anglo-Scottish Relations.”



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war on Scotland in 1543, generations of readers have found its anti-Scottish material to be of primary interest.42 Hardyng’s framing of the Chronicle highlights the Scottish issue, as well. The earlier, Lancastrian version of the Chronicle, of which only one manuscript survives (BL Lansdowne MS 204), begins with a dedication exhorting Henry VI to claim his rights in Scotland, and a proem almost entirely concerned with relating the tribulations of his espionage in Scotland and his subsequent difficulties in obtaining reward for his troubles. At least eighty contemporary glosses throughout the manuscript—some of which may be in Hardyng’s own hand—draw readers’ attention to sections that bear on the English monarch’s rights in Scotland, including both the Brutus story and 43 relevant sections of Arthurian legend. Hardyng returns to this theme in the conclusion and additionally supplies an invasion plan (written in the same rhyme royal as the rest of his Chronicle) along with a map of Scotland that downplays the Anglo-Scottish border while playing up Scotland’s attractions as a potential acquisition.44 The second, Yorkist version of the Chronicle is a more complex (although considerably shorter) production, but one that ultimately still focuses attention on the Scottish question. Its opening says less about Hardyng’s own travails, although he does mention his great age, and the fact that “This werke is great, and longe to bring to fyne, / So doeth it euer fro tyme to tyme encrease.”45 Hardyng promotes Yorkist claims more broadly in this version, establishing Duke Richard’s rights to France, Spain, Portugal, and even Jerusalem, as well as to England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. Yet the Chronicle still records approximately twenty-eight instances of Scottish homage to the English monarch, often with pointed reminders that Hardyng has produced evidence of these submissions. The accretion of instances of English superiority results in a narrative pattern whose seeming inevitability reinforces the urgency of Hardyng’s insistence upon conquest. The Chronicle ends with a warning against a perpetually malicious Scotland as the current refuge of the deposed Henry VI, his wife, and son: 42. Of course, as Peverley points out (“Reader Responses,” 21), Grafton’s anti-Scottish preface may well have influenced subsequent reader responses. 43. Riddy, “John Hardyng’s Chronicle,” 96; Hiatt, Making of Medieval Forgeries, 116. On Hardyng’s treatment of the Arthurian legend, see Kennedy, “John Hardyng and the Holy Grail.” 44. See Hiatt, “‘Beyond a Border’: The Maps of Scotland”; and Terrell, “Depicting Identity: Cartography and Chorography.” 45. All quotations of the second version are from Henry Ellis’s 1812 edition of the Chronicle of John Hardyng: this quotation is from the “Proheme” (page 15; lines unnumbered). Subsequently, citations of line numbers appear parenthetically in text.

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For truste it well, as God is nowe in heuen, The Scottes wyll ay do you the harme they may, And so they haue full ofte with odde and euen, Afore that Christe was borne so of a maye, As yet they do at theyr power euery daye. (410)

Hardyng advocates for an idealistic yet prudent policy of mercy: Edward should welcome the Lancastrian faction home, rather than leaving them to conspire with the Scots or French; if that is impossible, he should gain security through war with Scotland. Again, Hardyng offers an invasion plan, this time with three different routes depending on the scale of the invasion the king 46 wishes to attempt. Some manuscripts of this version also include another map, this one more schematic than pictorial; its most extraordinary feature is its depiction, just off the coast of northern Scotland, of the “Palais of Pluto, King of Hell, neighbore to Scotts,” which sends “mysrule thorowe Scotland al and sum,” and thus offers yet another rationale for conquest: “The wilder thei been withoute regyment / The soner muste thei be meked and tamed.”47 Yet if Hardyng’s Chronicle had any success as an impetus to military action, it was quite delayed: Edward IV’s forces invaded Scotland in 1482, approximately twenty years after Hardyng presented his second version to the king. Edward (perhaps misled by Hardyng’s insistence on the ease of conquest) underfunded the campaign and therefore met with little success. Hardyng forged history in every sense: fabricating false documents, he also created a past tailor-made to serve the imperialist interests of his monarchs.48 Alfred Hiatt remarks that it is “probable that the Chronicle and the forgeries were designed to be used in tandem to legitimise English demands. Together they formed a manual for conquest comprising exposition of historical right, documentary proof of ownership, and practical instruction for invasion.”49 In fact, the Chronicle seems to have had greater success as a vehicle for Yorkist propaganda than as a spur to military action, and Hardyng’s documents seem to have been little used in international relations. Yet while Hardyng was never quite able to shape the present to his desires, he found the past to be more malleable. His documents, Chronicle, and maps offer three unique 46. Discussed in Hiatt, “Beyond a Border,” 86. 47. Bodleian Selden B.10; quoted in Hiatt, “Beyond a Border,” 420. Also see Williamson, “Scots, Indians and Empire.” 48. Ryan and Thomas, in their preface to Cultures of Forgery, elaborate on the dual meaning of “forge” and its relation to national identity (x). 49. Hiatt, Making of Medieval Forgeries, 116.



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but complementary ways of looking at the world: the documents suggest that history can best be accessed through surviving scraps of written record, which claim to offer objective, verifiable access to the events of the past. The chronicle takes these scraps as anchors and fills the interstices between them with a seamless account of events, colored by the chronicler’s own perspective. Thus Hardyng’s forged documents provide the evidence on which he bases his history, while the history supplies the narrative context that gives meaning to his documents; this circular pattern of self-authorization enables Hardyng to sustain an internally coherent system fully supportive of English hegemony. The maps add the weight of visual evidence to this system, echoing the seeming objectivity of the documents by claiming simply to represent space as it is, while actually overlaying the land (as the Chronicle overlays past events) with ideological significance. Together, these strategies of representation allow Hardyng to craft the past as the foundation of contemporary identity, rights, and privileges—to effectively rewrite history, reshape the landscape, and change the documentary record in ways that align with his monarchs’ interests, but are ultimately his own. Later monarchs would continue to rely upon chronicle history in their relations with Scotland, and the origin myth derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth, in particular, persists as a touchstone of English claims to sovereignty into the sixteenth century. A short English chronicle probably composed for Henry VII (r. 1485–1509) on the occasion of his daughter’s 1503 marriage to James IV of Scotland, “Cronicles between England and Scotland Sithen the Commyng of Brute,” shares with Hardyng’s Chronicle an emphasis on instances of Scottish homage to English monarchs, English victories over the Scots, and intermarriages between the kingdoms—but unlike Hardyng’s work, it contains little else.50 Beginning with “the noble and mighty man Brute,” who conquers and names the island, and stressing “the old custume among Trojanes that the dignité of th’enheritaunce shuld remayne alwey to the eldest sone,” the chronicle ends with an account of James I of Scotland’s homage to Henry VI and marriage to Joan Beaufort.51 Henry may have preferred this account to that of a longer chronicle that he commissioned, Polydore Vergil’s Anglia Historia; although he did not live to see its completion in 1513, it seems unlikely that Henry—who named his eldest son Arthur—would have endorsed Polydore’s skepticism about Geoffrey’s legendary history, including the origin myth and Arthurian tales. Henry VIII (r. 1509–47) only allowed 50. Wright, Feudal Manuals of English History, 154–70; Kennedy, in Middle English Chronicles and Other Historical Writing, 2678–79, discusses the chronicle and gives the manuscript as British Library MS Lansdowne Roll 4. 51. Wright, Feudal Manuals of English History, 155.

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its publication in 1534, when “Polydore’s belief that Constantine the Great, allegedly a king of the Britons as well as the first Christian Roman Emperor, had bequeathed an imperial crown to his successors on the English throne” became useful for Henry’s ambitions.52 Despite his endorsement of Virgil’s skeptical text, Henry VIII nevertheless remained invested in the English origin myth as a useful tool in AngloScottish relations. In 1542, at war with Scotland, Henry issued A Declaration conteyning the just causes and consyderacions of this present warre with the Scottis, which is largely concerned with rehearsing the historical precedents that underlie Henry’s rights in Scotland. Among other supposed proofs that “the kinges of Scottes have alwais knowledged by homage and fealtie to our progenytours even from the begynnynge,” Henry rehearses the story of Brutus’s division of Britain among his three sons, and asks, “Nowe can there be a title divised of a more playn begynninge, a more juste begynninge, a more convenient begynninge for the order of this Ilande”?53 Even into the mid-sixteenth century, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s “fantasy of insular unity” continued to provide justification for English aggression against Scotland.54 These political appropriations and invocations of historiography—as well as historiographers’ attempted incursions into the political—underline just how significant the writing of history was perceived to be throughout this period. Historiography served as propaganda for royal and national interests: it held the potential to bolster a monarch’s claim to his throne, or authorize a kingdom’s desire for independence; it could justify invasion and conquest, or legitimize rhetorical saber-rattling in diplomatic negotiations. Above all, it laid the foundation of national identity, enshrining the past as a repository of the character, deeds, rights, and privileges of a people—a repository that could be drawn upon as necessary to protect or extend the national interest.

GENEALOGY AND MODES OF HISTORIOGRAPHICAL DISCOURSE So what strategies did chroniclers use in order to give the past such relevance for contemporary readers? When written to order for specific circumstances, the chronicles were obviously important for their royal patrons’ establish 52. Mason, “From Chronicle to History,” 60. 53. Henry VIII, A Declaration conteyning the just causes and consyderacions of this present warre with the Scottis. Also see Head, “Henry VIII’s Scottish Policy: A Reassessment,” and Merriman, “War and Propaganda.” 54. The term is Ingham’s, in Sovereign Fantasies, 2.



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ment of rights and prestige; however, even the lengthy Latin chronicles also attracted a wide readership further down the social scale and long outlasted the immediate circumstances of their composition. Murray Tod, in his analysis of readers’ notes in manuscripts of Fordun’s and Bower’s chronicles, has determined that these texts continued to be consulted through the mid-sixteenth century, by readers who display “a strong spirit of patriotism” along with interests in local history and in personal connections.55 Chroniclers bolstered the authority and underlined the value of their work using two distinct but overlapping kinds of evidence: textual and genealogical. Both modes of evidence locate authority in the past, and both ostensibly provide a tangible link between past and present: the textual mode in the legal documents, chronicles, and other writing that survives from previous ages, and the genealogical mode in the blood that links ancestors and descendants. As we shall see, each kind of evidence offers a markedly different kind of truthvalue, and they are often used in tandem in order to fashion the most persuasive account of the past. Yet the emphasis varies among chroniclers. Although English and Scottish chroniclers both employ both kinds of evidence, the genealogical mode is especially favored by Scottish historiographers. Both nations’ chroniclers conceived of themselves as participants in a high-stakes ideological struggle with real political consequences; yet the ambivalence of the Scottish chroniclers’ relationship to a long tradition of English history-writing tended to complicate their nationalist projects.56 Although history-writing in late medieval Scotland was shaped largely by a desire to bolster nationalistic claims of independence from England, many of the most influential models of history-writing were English. The very texts whose arguments Scottish historians were concerned to refute, like Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia and Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, also provided the rhetorical models that helped to pattern their works. Thus Scottish historical writing is constantly in dialogue with writers on the other side of the political conflict, in a way that, for example, Hardyng’s one-sided vision of the world—securely situated in a long tradition of English historical writing—is not. Scottish chroniclers, in order to defend their national interests against English aggression, must first carve out a space for their own tradition of history-writing amidst the authority of English texts, and for their own history within the context of the English version of events. While textual and genealogical modes of writing each enabled this project in different ways, the 55. Tod, “Narrative of the Scottish Nation,” 248. 56. By “English,” I refer only to the provenance of these histories, not necessarily to their language.

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genealogical mode most easily lent itself to support of Scottish chroniclers’ ideological goals. The textual mode of writing locates authority in the written records of the past. Two forms of written authority each have their appeal for medieval chroniclers. First, earlier histories provide referents for the historian’s claims about the past and may, by their reputation or antiquity, lend additional weight to his claims. Walter Bower, for example, cites roughly 225 different sources throughout his fifteenth-century Scotichronicon, his expansion of John of Fordun’s fourteenth-century Chronica Gentis Scotorum.57 Second, documents function as relics of the past, eyewitnesses whose apparent transparency conveys information directly to the reader without even the necessity of the historian’s interpretation. Chroniclers frequently rely upon both kinds of textual evidence, at times so heavily as to abandon the role of auctor—a creator of original material—altogether, in favor of the arguably lighter duties of the compilator—one who assembles the words of others. At times the posture of compilator can be a convenient dodge: as Alastair Minnis reminds us, “an auctor is responsible for the truth or falsity of what he says; the compilator is not responsible for the truth or falsity of what he ‘recites’ from his auctor.”58 Bower, in fact, claims the status of compilator in his introduction to the shorter version of his history: “I wish to attempt to compile [compilare] from the chronicles of Scotland / a work that is difficult beyond my powers.”59 Although Bower, who elsewhere claims to be merely the scriptor to Fordun’s auctor, writes significant portions of the Scotichronicon himself, his desire nevertheless to disclaim authority demonstrates the attraction of relying upon the words and authority of others. The external authorities of the textual mode, offering objective confirmation of the chronicler’s assertions, lend a scholarly air to the work and, more importantly, suggest both the existence and the accessibility of objective truth. Although citing a range of scholarly sources goes a long way toward establishing a chronicler’s authority, this air of objective truth is perhaps best conveyed through documentary evidence. In England, the textual mode of writing is exemplified by Hardyng’s reliance upon his nineteen (mostly forged) documents. In Scotland, it is epitomized by Walter Bower’s inclusion of the full text of forty-one documents throughout his chronicle; these are either authentic or, like the Donation of Constantine, were widely believed to be so in Bower’s day.60 Hardyng’s case for the English monarch’s right to Scotland 57. A full list of Fordun’s and Bower’s sources is given in Watt, Scotichronicon, 9:234–59. 58. Minnis, “Late-Medieval Discussions of Compilatio,” 389. 59. Bower, “Introduction in Coupar Angus MS,” 9:12–19 (lines 71–72). 60. A full list of Bower’s documents is given in Watt, Scotichronicon, 9:246–49.



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is built so heavily upon the documents that he himself provided that C.  L. Kingsford, the first scholar to devote serious attention to Hardyng’s work, concluded that “it might be said that the Chronicle was composed to defend [Hardyng’s forgeries].”61 The homages of Scottish to English kings enshrined in his documents provide the skeleton upon which he builds his argument, grounding it in moments of supposedly independent and antique authority. Bower, meanwhile, relies upon documents both as an authenticating device and, particularly in the later sections of his chronicle, as a means of preserving documentary history. Bower only occasionally criticizes these documents, for example characterizing Edward I’s claims in his letter to Boniface VIII as “wrong-headed misrepresentation” (XI.44.2); for the most part he lets the documents speak for themselves as direct witnesses to history. For most chroniclers, the written record causes concern only when separate sources appear to be in contradiction, thus undermining the prevailing claim of the textual mode to offer verifiable facts. Yet the textual mode of writing, with its emphasis upon the objectivity of the written word, seldom occurs in isolation. Rather, it is frequently entangled with genealogical writing, a mode that concerns itself with filling in the gaps of the historical record—establishing continuity through bodily lineage despite a lack of written evidence. This mode particularly comes into play when dealing with the distant past, a time for which no genuine documentary evidence exists, although by definition it also extends into the present. Even in Hardyng’s Chronicle—particularly in its second version—his documentary view of history as a series of textual events is complemented by a genealogical vision that sees history’s truest record as extending through bloodlines.62 This view is informed by the text’s Yorkist ideology: as one of its primary goals is to establish the legitimacy of the Yorkist line, it makes sense for Hardyng to place a good deal of stress on heredity. Thus Hardyng pays particular attention to the details by which Richard, Duke of York, and his son can claim the varied thrones to which they are entitled, even sketching out a family tree illustrating Richard’s rights to France (336). Sarah Peverley has noted that “it is undoubtedly Hardyng’s successful blend of genealogy with historical narrative and topical commentary that made his Chronicle so attractive at a time when history, not just genealogy, needed rewriting to accommodate and justify a 63 change in dynasty.” As is typical of the genealogical mode of chronicle writing, Hardyng traces Yorkist genealogy back considerably farther than is necessary to prove the 61. Kingsford, “First Version of Hardyng’s Chronicle,” 468. 62. Peverley, “Genealogy and John Hardyng’s Verse Chronicle.” 63. Peverley, “Genealogy and John Hardyng’s Verse Chronicle,” 282.

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Yorkist claim. Never one to miss an opportunity to prove English precedence over the Scots, he traces the genealogy of the English monarchy all the way back to the mythical Brutus, and from Brutus back to Adam himself; the first example of Scottish submission that Hardyng cites is the homage of Brutus’s younger son Albyne, who inherited Scotland, to the eldest, King Locryne, “the souerayne lorde of all Britayne” (44). This emphasis on homage is typical of Hardyng’s treatment of genealogy as a guarantor of heritable rights. In his Proheme to Richard, Duke of York, Hardyng claims that the Chronicle will be of use Also for your heyres and for your successours, In tyme commyng, to haue a clere knowledge How of this realme the noble gouernours Haue kept, with helpe of baronage, In victorye, tryumphe and surplusage; Sith Brute it wanne in his prioritee, It hath been kept in worthy dignitee. (23)

Hardyng insinuates a direct connection between Britain’s earliest founders and its current rulers, and projects this link onto future generations. Throughout the legendary portions of his narrative, Hardyng stresses the former unity of a Britain now divided; the genealogical emphasis of his Chronicle helps to characterize Wales and Scotland not merely as desirable lands, but as a rightful inheritance. This genealogical view of history is confirmed in one manuscript of the Chronicle, which visually traces the lineage of the kings of England by means of a red line running through its margins, interspersed with crowned 64 roundels containing the names of each king. The manuscript thus maintains a visual illusion of an unbroken genealogy that echoes Hardyng’s own longing for temporal and geographical unity.65 By the time that Hardyng was writing, genealogical narrative—emerging from social concerns with lineage and inheritance, and expanding into what Gabrielle Spiegel calls a “perceptual grid” that broadly colored writers’ outlook—was a well-established mode throughout Britain and France.66 This genealogical mode of thought can ultimately be traced back to biblical 64. Finke and Shichtman, King Arthur and the Myth of History, 141. The manuscript is British Library MS Harley 661. 65. Also see Riddy, “John Hardyng’s Chronicle,” 108. 66. Spiegel, “Genealogy,” 47.



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conceptions of descent from Adam and Eve, and to “an underlying Christian metaphysics which explains the generation of mankind in patriarchal terms, and which thereby seeks a supernatural explanation for the continuance of patriarchy as an exemplary structure of social order.”67 In its secular form, however, genealogical narrative began to flourish in the eleventh century, following “a fundamental change in the nature of the family”: the transition to a “more vertically and temporally constructed lineage” whose primary features were primogeniture and heritable land.68 The practical value of being able to trace one’s land rights was complemented by the conviction that familial honor was equally heritable: as a result, both legal rights and social prestige gained credibility in proportion to their perceived antiquity.69 Accordingly, as the “possession of territory and power came to correlate distinctively with ownership of time,” genealogists grew ever more ambitious, pushing further 70 and further back beyond memory and record and into the realm of myth. Although Georges Duby has called the twelfth-century “appearance of the mythical ancestor” in noble genealogies “one of the most remarkable changes in genealogical writings,” it should occasion little surprise in a conceptual and legal system that placed so much emphasis on precedence and the authority of antiquity.71 Moreover, it hardly seems coincidental that the twelfth century also witnessed a proliferation of foundation myths that purport to explain the origins of peoples and nations.72 Found throughout Europe, these myths typically connect a contemporary people to either the biblical or the classical world, or both, thereby appropriating the authority of antiquity while bolstering group identity. As Susan Reynolds has observed, they are “myths not only in the popular sense that they were not based on real evidence . . . but in the more profound sense that they were developed to explain the present and promote 73 its values.” It was inevitable that familial—and, especially, royal—genealogies would eventually link themselves to the founding figures of these legends, and this familial interest seems to have had the effect of revivifying the origin myths themselves: while many of them had already been around in one form or another for centuries, they began to flourish only when they were taken 67. Spiegel, “Genealogy,” 52. 68. Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies, 75. 69. Duby, Chivalrous Society, 154. 70. Ingledew, “Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History,” 669. Also see Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies, 80. 71. Duby, Chivalrous Society, 156. 72. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 258. 73. Reynolds, “Medieval Origines Gentium,” 380.

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up by the genealogists and directly connected to the present via the trope of lineage. Genealogy flourished on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish border, although its connection to origin myth developed rather differently. Geoffrey of Monmouth developed and popularized the English origin myth in the twelfth century; the primary problem that it posed for genealogists was how to connect England’s current rulers, all descendants of William the Conqueror, to the primal British past that Geoffrey imagined. Matthew Paris was the first to adapt Peter of Poitiers’s twelfth-century Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi, a genealogically structured account of biblical history, into a model for secular history featuring a single royal genealogy. During the reigns of Henry III, Edward I, and Edward II, genealogical rolls were being produced en masse; they survive in more manuscripts (at least thirty-one) than any other contemporary work of historiography.74 These rolls served to reinforce a royal ideology that stressed the longevity of the royal line as well as “the Englishness of the kings of England” by tracing their descent from Brutus by way of the Anglo-Saxon kings.75 Genealogical rolls flourished again in the fifteenth century, when Yorkist and Lancastrian kings needed to demonstrate their hereditary claims to the English throne, as well as their rights in France and Scotland. At least twenty-four genealogical chronicles survive for Henry VI and twenty-two for Edward IV. Both kings claim a mythical ancestry: genealogies commissioned on Henry VI’s behalf during his minority trace his lineage back through Woden, the legendary founder of the Saxons, to Noah. In keeping with Edward IV’s greater interest in claiming the Scottish crown, he commissioned genealogies that draw more heavily on Geoffrey of Monmouth, tracing his ancestry back through the Welsh Mortimers to Brutus, and thence 76 all the way to Adam. Yorkist propaganda drew upon this genealogy to make Edward’s kingship out to be the fulfillment of Merlin’s prophecies from Geoffrey’s Historia; Edward, “the true and undoubted heir of Brutus,” becomes the foretold unifier of Britain and restorer of the original British monarchy.77 In Scotland, linking the royal genealogy to the origin myth posed a different challenge: that of creating, at a relatively late date, an exclusively Scottish regnal line, rather than one that rooted its identity in Irish antiquity. As Dauvit Broun has observed, “It was not until at least a century after Geoffrey of Monmouth and his English counterparts that anything like a comparable narrative of Scottish kingship was produced: indeed, little was made of the 74. De Laborderie, “New Pattern for English Historiography,” 48–51. 75. De Laborderie, “New Pattern for English Historiography,” 54. 76. Kennedy, “Romancing the Past,” 30–32. 77. Allan, “Yorkist Propaganda,” 177.



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opportunities that existed to portray the king of Scots, even in a simple catalogue, as the latest in a long line of predecessors on his throne.”78 While different versions of the Scottish king-list, royal genealogy, and origin myth—often transmitted orally—had existed from the early Middle Ages, these developed more haltingly than in England into a continuous regnal line. Until the late thirteenth century, the Scottish monarchy derived its “authenticating antiquity” from its link with Irish genealogies that extended back 150 generations to ancient heroes; in the twelfth century, this Irish royal ancestry was joined to Anglo-Saxon royal ancestry through St. Margaret (the sister of Edgar the Ætheling, Anglo-Saxon England’s last proclaimed king, who fled to Scotland at the Conquest).79 The royal genealogy was given particular prominence by being recited by the king’s poet at royal inaugurations, including that of Alexander III in 1249.80 Until English aggression forced the issue, this union of Irish and Anglo-Saxon ancestries apparently provided sufficient prestige and antiquity to the Scottish monarchy; there seems to have been little sense of a separate Scottish identity extending into the distant past.81 It was probably only in the 1260s that Richard Vairement, also known as Veremundus, penned the “Scottish Monmouth,” the first continuous narrative history of Scottish origins, extending from antiquity to the reign of Malcolm III. This chronicle, which is no longer extant, has been convincingly posited by Dauvit Broun as the source of Fordun’s Chronica.82 Broun notes that Vairement’s chronicle supplied “an alternative focus for the kingship’s past from Margaret’s English royal ancestors by creating an exclusive history of the Scots and their kings from ancient times.” In so doing, “it provided a way of articulating the idea of Scottish freedom in terms of a sovereign people 83 and kingdom.” Once the Scottish royal genealogy had been projected into a distinctively Scottish past and joined with the origin legend, the antiquity of the Scottish kingdom became a generally accepted fact among well-educated Scots; it was further supported by the fact that by the late thirteenth century the Scottish king-list had evolved to include 112 kings of Scotland itself, spanning a nearly 2,000-year history.84 Although the union of royal genealogy and origin myth occurred relatively late in Scotland, once it happened, it proved remarkably effective, resulting in “a clearer sense that kingdom and people 78. Broun, Scottish Independence, 48. 79. Broun, Scottish Independence, 50–51; Broun, “Birth of Scottish History,” 8. 80. Bannerman, “King’s Poet”; also see Broun, Scottish Independence,161–88. 81. Broun, Scottish Independence, 50. 82. Broun, Scottish Independence, 215–68. 83. Broun, Scottish Independence, 259. 84. Broun, Scottish Independence, 8–13.

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were identical than was the case for Wales and England,” despite Scotland’s greater cultural and ethnic diversity.85 Thus when later Scottish chroniclers come to write their nation’s history, genealogy becomes one of their more important strategies for differentiating their history from that of the English. Partly, no doubt, this genealogical emphasis results from the prominence that the bonds of kinship traditionally held in Scottish society; as Jenny Wormald points out, “It has long been axiomatic that Scottish society and politics were regularly dominated or bedeviled by considerations of kin even more than of rank or status, and certainly of principle.”86 Yet it is also true that genealogy emerged as a defining feature of Scottish history-writing because the legitimacy conferred by a lengthy ancestry made for a particularly effective argument against the English. While the actual lineage of the Scottish monarchs was a complex one, the official royal genealogy successfully effaced the majority of its discontinuities. While the English monarchy had to contend with a lineage plainly ruptured by successive Anglo-Saxon, Danish, and Norman invasions, the aberrations in the Scottish royal line were less visible from a late medieval vantage point. The Scottish monarchy could, with reasonable plausibility, claim an unbroken line of descent from its first kings. This fantasy of an unbroken lineage continued to be so potent at least into the seventeenth century that—after the sixteenth-century historian Hector Boece had further fleshed out the royal lineage—Jacob de Wet was commissioned to paint 110 portraits of often mythical monarchs for the Great Gallery of Edinburgh’s Holyrood Palace (where eighty-nine of them still hang today). The Scots thus attempted to set themselves apart by imagining history as a lengthy genealogical record, thereby tying themselves more firmly both to their past and to their land than, they believed, the English descendants of Norman conquerors could hope to achieve. Establishing a close relationship with their progenitors based on blood ties as well as ideological affiliation, Scottish chroniclers draw the past and present into communion. Whereas the textual model of evidence offers an illusion of objectivity, the genealogical model offers, foremost, an emotional truth that allows contemporary Scots readers to recognize themselves in the figures depicted by the chronicler, to identify shared values in the words and deeds of these historical personages to whom Scottish readers could trace their descent. Spiegel’s comments on the genealogically influenced vernacular histories of thirteenthcentury France are relevant, here; she argues that 85. Broun, Scottish Independence, 39. 86. Wormald, Lords and Men in Scotland, 76–77. For the importance of Scottish kinship, see especially 76–90.



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genealogy enabled chroniclers to organize their narratives as a succession of gestes performed by the successive representatives of one or more lignages, whose personal characteristics and deeds, extensively chronicled in essentially biographical modes, bespoke the enduring meaning of history as the collective action of noble lineages in relation to one another and to those 87 values to which their gestes gave life.

For Scottish historians striving to inspire nationalism and instigate political action, the genealogical mode offered a powerful means of emphasizing the enduring force of the values that came to be associated with the Scottish nation: a belief in the antiquity of the kingdom, loyalty to the king, a uniquely pure Christian faith, and resistance to foreign domination. The genealogical model is ideologically driven, concerned with establishing tradition and precedent; it locates authority in antiquity, in sameness, in the contention that since things have always been a certain way, they must always be so. The “truth” it represents is, frequently, an imaginative truth—the truth of myth and story rather than that of verifiable facts. Thus the chronicler may, for example, feel free to invent speeches for historical personages, speeches that the chronicler would agree were never spoken in precisely this way, but that are felt to be “true” nonetheless, because they are in keeping with the ideologi88 cal position enacted in and signified by the figures’ deeds. Both of these kinds of truth—the factual, scholarly truth of the textual mode and the imaginative, mythological truth of the genealogical mode— are necessary to the ideological project of creating the history of the Scottish nation and encouraging emergent nationalism. The one emphasizes the reality of the past; the other emphasizes its relevance. Both are ultimately subject to the agenda or ideology of the chronicler, who is as free to pick and choose among sources and documents as he is to fill in the gaps of the written records with imagination, myth, and legend. Yet I would argue that the genealogical mode prevails in Scottish historical writing, which, like much medieval history-writing, is often more concerned with the present-day uses of the past than with establishing an accurate record of past events. The directness with which genealogy links past and present enables the activities of distant ancestors to hold continued relevance for conceptualizing identity. Scottish chroniclers embrace the kind of moral truth believed in by monastic forgers and taken to an extreme by Hardyng: their histories are true not because they are verifiable or even because events actually unfolded the way they 87. Spiegel, Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography, 108–9. 88. See Morse, Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages.

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claim, but because events should have done so in order to provide evidence for and examples of the principles held dear by the chroniclers. The past thus assumes a certain malleability, anchored at various points by widely agreedupon events, but flexible in the interstices between these points and particularly pliable in the distant past—a time uncluttered by reliable written record and thus especially adaptable to the chronicler’s ideological aims.89 Within a primarily genealogical vision of history, the distant past assumes the greatest importance: the founding members of the race, the first ancestors, justify the entire course of history thereafter.

89. Also see Waswo, “Our Ancestors, the Trojans,” 276.

CHAPTER 2

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Subversive Histories Strategies of Identity in Scottish Historiography

of John of Fordun’s fourteenth-century Chronica Gentis Scotorum, the chronicler turns his attention to the hermeneutical significance of the Anglo-Scottish border.1 Describing the island, he concludes that at its narrowest point, “as a result of this flowing in of great rivers from both sides, even though they do not touch each other, some historians have written that the country is practically divided into two islands” (II.1.25–28).2 In attempting rhetorically to bisect the island, Fordun suggests a potent fantasy of a clearly delineated border, an unmistakable demarcation that starkly contrasts with the reality of shifting allegiances and permeable boundaries that historically characterized Anglo-Scottish relations. Yet even as it suggests a vision of a wholly autonomous Scottish identity, Fordun’s narrative reveals the traces of a more authentic complexity. Modeled on a lengthy tradition of topographic descriptio going back to Gildas and Bede, the geographical sketch inevitably calls to mind recollections of Fordun’s more recent sources, IN THE SEC OND B O OK

1. An earlier version of this chapter appeared, under the same title, in Cohen, Cultural Diversity in the Middle Ages, 153–72. The material is used here with the permission of Palgrave Macmillan. 2. Citations of Fordun’s Chronica refer to Bower, Scotichronicon: citations of book, chapter, and line numbers appear parenthetically in text. Bower incorporated Fordun’s Chronica into his fifteenth-century work. Watt’s edition of the Scotichronicon, which carefully distinguishes between Fordun’s text and Bower’s additions, has largely supplanted Skene’s Johannis de Fordun: Chronica Gentis Scotorum. • 37 •

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including the English chronicler Ranulph Higden and Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose revisionist challenge to Anglocentric history had itself been co-opted by the English.3 And perhaps more significantly, it leads Fordun to confront the narrative that until this point has been the unwritten subtext of his chronicle: Geoffrey’s account of the Trojan origins of Britain. This moment exemplifies a recurrent paradox of nationalist Scottish historiography: texts that are written for the explicit purpose of delimiting Scotland’s geographical and cultural boundaries nevertheless inevitably expose the vexed “middle places” of Anglo-Scottish relations. The persistent threat of English imperialism from the late thirteenth century onward has a marked effect on representations of Scottish identity. In response, Scottish historians turn to the distant past in order to stake out a territory that is at once literal and literary, and in so doing, they necessarily engage the sources, particularly Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie, that were invoked to support English hegemony. Yet the inherently dialogic structure of Scottish historiography is seldom purely oppositional: rather, Scottish historians create hybrid histories characterized by both appropriation and defiance. Although, like Fordun, historians regularly disavow this hybridity—instead insisting on a natural and autonomous Scottish identity—the subversive potential in Scottish historiography lies precisely in its ability to repurpose English narrative strategies to serve the goals of Scottish nationalism.

GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH AND THE ORIGINS OF SCOTTISH HISTORIOGRAPHY As a source text employed to legitimize English ambitions in Scotland, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Historia Regum Britannie underlies much of medieval Scottish history-writing. Geoffrey’s apparently simple tale of how Brutus arrived in Britain, named it after himself, and divided it among his three sons was already weighted with ideological significance when Geoffrey adopted it, and his retelling only expanded its possible range of meaning. He likely drew his version of the legend from the ninth-century Historia Britto 3. See Otter, Inventiones, 71–73; also see Warren, History on the Edge, 3–9. Fordun’s description particularly recalls that of Higden, who finds Scotland to be a “promunctorium et borealis pars Brittaniæ majoris, marinis braciis ab ea separata versus austrum;” in Trevisa’s translation, “an out strecching . . . departed in þe south side from Bretayne wiþ armes of þe see.” Higden, Polychronicon, 282–83. However, neither Higden (whom Fordun does not cite as a source here) nor any of the corroborating authorities whom he does mention comes close to Fordun’s assertion that Scotland is “in duabus quasi divisam insulis.”



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num, traditionally attributed to Nennius: this brief chronicle offers the Brutus narrative as one of four possible explanations for British origins.4 Nennius took his own cue from the Franks, who had originated the legend of Trojan descent by the mid-seventh century; for them, the myth had primarily served to explain their military prowess and justify their cultural dominance by asserting an equal relationship to Rome—a relationship of competition rather than descent.5 The Franks, in turn, took their cue from Virgil, whose Aeneid had provided the Romans with their own origin legend. As Richard Waswo notes, Indeed, there is a remarkable parallel in the utility of the Trojan connection for the Romans with respect to Greece and for these northern Europeans with respect to Rome. In both cases, the Trojan ancestry offers a relation between their descendants and the historical centers of cultural prestige— Greece and the Roman empire—that is both close and adversarial; it offers association with a memory of glory while maintaining freedom from subjec6 tion to the power, cultural or military, that went with it.

The utility of this narrative pattern, together with the enormous authority accorded to the Aeneid throughout the Middle Ages, contributed to the prestige of a Trojan ancestry. When, in the twelfth century, noble families began looking to establish dynastic foundations, they naturally looked to the fall of Troy as a potential and potent moment of origin: accordingly, by the beginning of the fourteenth century, most of the European nobility could lay claim to a Trojan ancestry.7 For those already enjoying the benefits of power and prestige, a Trojan genealogy could naturalize this possession by establishing it 8 as a deserved inheritance, grounded in the distant past. For the Britons, however, the Virgilian foundation narrative seemed to hold out only the consolation of past greatness, together with an assertion of present cultural, if not political, equality.9 And if this was true in Nennius’s ninth century, when Britons who maintained a separate ethnic identity were either reduced to second-class citizens in Anglo-Saxon England or pushed into present-day Cornwall and Wales, it was even more the case in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth century, following the Norman Conquest which had,

4. Nennius, British History and the Welsh Annals. 5. Waswo, “Our Ancestors, the Trojans,” 272. 6. Waswo, “Our Ancestors, the Trojans,” 272. 7. Waswo, “Our Ancestors, the Trojans,” 266–67. 8. Ingledew, “Book of Troy,” 674–76. 9. Waswo, “Our Ancestors, the Trojans,” 275.

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in turn, relegated the Anglo-Saxons to a diminished status. The Britons now occupied a marginalized position on the fringes of the territories they had once dominated, and even these lands were now coming under the Normans’ acquisitive gaze. Their position was further diminished by a long-standing historical tradition that identified the Welsh as barbarians: carried over from Anglo-Saxon history in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, this attitude intensified in Norman histories like William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum and Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum.10 The very titles of these works make clear that they are concerned with English history, the very existence of which justified England’s dominion. As Rees Davies has observed, “In a past-oriented and a past-validating society, claims to empire and supremacy, as to all other forms of power, had ultimately to be located in the past.”11 Part of what rendered the Welsh barbaric in Norman eyes was that—aside from the few scraps of speculation in Nennius—they had no history, and thus no claim to dignity, let alone power. For Henry of Huntingdon, it is history “which chiefly distinguishes rational beings from brutes. For brutes, whether they are men or animals, neither know nor wish to know anything about their origins or their history.”12 In his Historia Regum Brittanie, Geoffrey challenged this prevailing view by supplying a British counterpart to the Anglocentric historical tradition, one which provided the Britons with their own claim to an illustrious history—and, in the process, expanded the interpretive possibilities of the Trojan foundation narrative. Addressing the problem that, as he put it, “I could find nothing at all about the kings who lived here before the incarnation of Christ, not even about Arthur and the many others who succeeded him,” Geoffrey combined the hints of earlier historians with tales drawn from Welsh legend and transformed them into a coherent narrative of British history from its 13 Trojan origins to the seventh century ad. It seems to have mattered very little to most people that this past largely seems to have been Geoffrey’s own invention: the Historia was enormously popular, with 215 complete manuscripts surviving. It essentially rewrote the common understanding of the island’s history: in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s memorable phrasing, “It was as if someone had hurled a Molotov cocktail against the histories of Bede and William 10. See Gillingham, English in the Twelfth Century, 19–39; Partner, Serious Entertainments, 64–65; and Waswo, “Our Ancestors, the Trojans,” 284–85. For the English “monsterization of the Celtic fringe,” see Cohen, Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity, 35–36. 11. Davies, First English Empire, 34. 12. Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum; quoted in Gillingham, English in the Twelfth Century, 25. 13. Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, 41.



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of Malmesbury, challenging their seemingly imperturbable authority through the time-changing power of a prequel.”14 Geoffrey’s history opened up vast stretches of time to the imagination and supplied a past capable of bearing the weight of various ideologies. Moreover, in redeploying the Trojan myth on behalf of a marginalized and dispossessed people, Geoffrey crucially altered its possible range of signification. The myth no longer functioned exclusively to serve the interests of the ruling elite. Instead, by “transform[ing] the indigenous displaced into the invading displacers,” Geoffrey elevated the Britons to equality with their Norman conquerors—a potentially subversive maneuver that was complicated by his text’s simultaneous ability to exalt the Normans themselves.15 Geoffrey’s motives in supplying this illustrious history have been the subject of much debate: scholars differ on the extent to which Geoffrey identified with either the Welsh, the Bretons, the Normans, or with a more ambiguous, bordered identity. Part of the difficulty stems from the cultural complexity of his place of origin and the resulting impossibility of determining his ethnicity: as Michelle Warren points out, “After 1066, Monmouth would have harbored multiple cultures (Welsh, Breton, Norman, probably English), actively communicating in several languages. Monmouthshire thus encompasses a contact zone, where people lived interactive, improvised border lives of transient identities.”16 And although he identifies himself as Monemuntensis, suggesting an affinity for his place of origin, Geoffrey spent much of his career, from 1129–51, at Oxford, in the service of its Norman archbishop. He complicates the question of his allegiance even further by writing three separate dedications to the Historia, all to Norman nobles: first to Robert of Gloucester, then to both Robert and Waleran of Meulan, and finally to both King Stephen and Robert. The double dedications are remarkable for addressing rivals in the ongoing civil war between Stephen and Matilda: Robert of Gloucester, as Matilda’s half-brother, supported her claim, while Waleran was a powerful 17 magnate in Stephen’s court. Glorifying the British past while appealing to both sides in the Norman civil war over England, Geoffrey’s work can support a range of interpretations: from John Gillingham’s assertion that “Geoffrey was a Welshman whose object was to secure cultural respectability for his own 14. Cohen, Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity, 65. 15. Waswo, “Our Ancestors, the Trojans,” 285. 16. Warren, “Making Contact,” 117. 17. For the text of the multiple dedications, see Wright, Historia Regum Britannie, 1:xii–xiv; for discussion, see Julia Crick, Historia Regum Britannie, 4:113–20; Finke and Shichtman, King Arthur and the Myth of History, 46–51; Warren, “Making Contact,” 118–21; Warren, History on the Edge, 26–29.

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nation” to Michael A. Faletra’s conclusion that he takes a “fundamentally proNorman stance.”18 Others find the work to be less easy to pin down, reading it as an inherently multivalent narrative that resists overt alignment with any single political agenda.19 Like modern scholars, Geoffrey’s medieval readers found support in his text for various ideological positions: it could be read as supporting not only opposing sides of the Norman civil war but also both the Norman conquerors and the conquered Welsh. On the one hand, the ideological thrust of Geoffrey’s tale is clear: Brutus establishes his territorial rights through both primacy and conquest, and passes the land down in perpetuity to his descendants. As Francis Ingledew has noted, by filling the empty stretches of history with invented tales, “the Historia takes possession of time as the basis for 20 ideology.” The authority to narrate time in turn justifies the domination of land in a mutually reinforcing system of temporal and physical conquest. Yet on whose behalf? Patricia Ingham has perceptively noted that the Britons of the Historia are “a doubled people,” open to interpretation both as the ancestors of the contemporary Welsh population, and as the ancestors of the Norman conquerors: In light of Geoffrey’s story of British conquest throughout all of Gaul, Norman invasion of the island of Britain amounts not to a new conquest so much as a recurrence: Britons left the island, conquering the continent; the Normans leave the continent, conquering the island. . . . By implication—but only by implication—Norman presence on the island represents a British future, while the (Welsh) Britons figure its past. The Normans can, by learning and respecting the history of the isle of Britain, begin to weave their glory with the glory of the land they rule and with the British king Arthur. This history provides a way for Norman aristocratic conquerors to capture the richness of a mythic Welsh past while still remaining the conquerors of 21 those whose glorious history they wish to imagine as their own.

Geoffrey’s Historia thus fulfilled just as much of a need for the Normans as it did for the Britons. The Normans were interested in the history of Britain and anxious to define their place within it, yet the Anglo-Saxon history of the 18. Gillingham, English in the Twelfth Century, 20; Faletra, “Narrating the Matter of Britain,” 74. 19. See especially Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies, 21–50; Otter, Inventiones, 75–79; Warren, History on the Edge, 25–30. 20. Ingledew, “Book of Troy,” 680; also see Otter, Inventiones, 69–84. 21. Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies, 42–43. Also see Cohen, Of Giants, 46.



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island (as rehearsed by Bede, William of Malmesbury, and others) was insufficient: “The pedigree of the recently defeated English was neither exalted nor was their history inspiring”; moreover, establishing a genealogical link to the Anglo-Saxon royal line was difficult (though, thanks to the marriage of Henry I to princess Matilda of Scotland—whose mother Queen Margaret was the sister of Edgar the Ætheling, the last male member of the house of Wessex—not impossible).22 Geoffrey’s Historia, it seems, held the potential to be all things to all people: accordingly, Ingham has suggested that “the popularity and cultural usefulness of Monmouth’s fantasy of the Britons involves its ability to accommodate diverse uses . . . serving both the pleasures of parvenu AngloNorman aristocrats and their Welsh resisters.”23 However, the very qualities that made Geoffrey’s text attractive to a Welsh resistance made it problematic for Scots similarly faced with English aggression. In particular, the myth of Brutus, which the Welsh could interpret to signify their own inherited right to Britain, offered no such reassurances to Scots who traced their lineage elsewhere. Nor was it sufficient for Scottish historiographers merely to follow William of Newburgh in accusing Geoffrey of having propagated “a laughable web of fiction.”24 For Scottish historiographers, disputing Geoffrey’s claims was not simply a matter of professional pride; tales told about the distant past could have real political consequences, and in English hands, Geoffrey’s narrative of origins served imperialist ambitions. As chronicled in the previous chapter, English hegemonic claims based on Brutus’s primacy bookend the fourteenth century, with Edward I’s 1301 demand for Scottish homage being repeated precisely one hundred years later by Henry IV.25 One of the chief fascinations of Geoffrey’s narrative is its proffering of “a lost yet promised figure of insular wholeness,” represented both in Brutus’s dominion over the island and in its later reunification under Arthur. This fantasy of unity, Ingham reminds us, “alludes to ancient British days while it also encodes massive political, geographic, and military losses for 26 England, Scotland, and Wales.” In supplying the historical basis for the fantasy of a united Britain, Geoffrey also supplied a ready authorization for later English attempts to turn fantasy into reality through conquest.

22. Wright, Historia Regum Britannie, xix. This genealogy is given, among other places, in Bodley Rolls 3 and Ashmole Rolls 50, pictorial genealogies that trace the descent of Edward I back to Brutus. 23. Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies, 15. 24. William of Newburgh, History of English Affairs, 29. 25. Stones, Anglo-Scottish Relations, 192–219 and 346–65. 26. Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies, 10.

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Thus, while Edward I has been called the “midwife” of Scottish historiography, Geoffrey played a role in its conception, a conception that was bound up in the politics of a colonization that stretched backward into the distant past, even as it endeavored to extend its reach into the future.27 By the time that Edward made his “appeal to history” in order to support his claim to be Scotland’s feudal superior in the Great Cause, “there seems little doubt that . . . the Scots already saw themselves as an established nation, entitled to their separate identity in a defined territory which they collectively embodied as a sovereign nation-state.”28 Edward challenged this self-conception when, after deciding the Great Cause in favor of John Balliol in 1292, he continued to demand a role in Scottish affairs. When his chosen king began to chafe at Edward’s authority, Edward accordingly invaded Scotland and deposed Balliol only four years after setting him on the throne, thereafter assuming direct rule of Scotland and setting in motion the lengthy Wars of Scottish Independence.29 Scottish historiography came into its own in response to the letter that Edward sent to Pope Boniface VIII, justifying his actions in historical terms drawn directly from Geoffrey’s Historia. Geoffrey’s vision of primal unity legitimizes Edward’s attempt to dismantle Britain’s boundaries. In his arguments to the papal court, Edward makes only a few slight changes to this narrative in order to enhance the legal validity of his case: So in the days of the prophets Eli and Samuel a certain valiant and famous man of the Trojan race named Brutus landed on a certain island called Albion which was inhabited by giants. When these had been overcome and killed by his own power and that of his men, he named the island Britain after himself, and called his followers Britons. . . . And afterwards he divided his kingdom among his three sons, that is he gave to his first-born son Locrinus that part of Britain which is now called England, and to Albanactus the second son he gave that part which was then called Albany from the name Albanactus but is now called Scotland, and to the youngest son Camber he gave that part which was then called Cambria after him but is now called Wales, reserving the royal dignity for Locrinus the eldest. Then two years after the death of Brutus, a certain king of the Huns, Humber by name, landed in Albany and killed Albanactus, the brother of Locrinus. On hearing this, Locrinus king of the Britons pursued him, and in the course of his 27. Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, 119. Also see Prestwich, “Colonial Scotland.” 28. Stringer, “Emergence of a Nation-State,” 75. 29. See Watson, Under the Hammer: Edward I and Scotland.



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flight he was drowned in the river which is called Humber after him. And thus Albany reverted to the said Locrinus. (XI.40.27–45)

Here, Albany becomes the second son rather than the youngest, perhaps reflecting the greater prestige that Scotland held relative to Wales by the early fourteenth century. In addition, two significant embellishments to the narrative bring it in line with contemporary law. The stipulation that Brutus divided his lands while “reserving the royal dignity for Locrinus the eldest” clarifies that Brutus’s intention was not to create three separate kingdoms, each brother possessing complete sovereignty within his own domain, but to establish his eldest son as the feudal superior of the younger two. On this basis, Edward asserts that Scotland was never truly a separate and sovereign kingdom. Similarly, the concluding line of the passage establishes, in place of Geoffrey’s ambiguity, a clear precedent for English assumption of authority over Scotland at the death of a Scottish ruler—the exact maneuver that Edward himself was trying to accomplish. The precision of Edward’s language, together with what Goldstein ironically calls the “remarkable correspondence between Trojan and Anglo-Norman law,” suggests a deliberate attempt to heighten the political value of the myth.30 In Edward’s hands, the distant past becomes a valued precedent, capable of establishing his right to a kingdom; forcing a Scottish response on similar grounds, Edward unwittingly inaugurated a tradition of Scottish historical writing that would last for centuries, and raised the stakes of historiography on both sides of the border.31 However, the Scots were relative latecomers to the high-stakes game of colonizing the distant past. When Edward I submitted his letter to the papal court, his version of events was bolstered by a burgeoning historiographic tradition. The Scots, however, had considerably less to fall back on in their response. Compared with English historiography, the Scottish tradition was sparse, and generally not focused on narrating the history of Scotland, per se; for example, one of the main sources of Scottish legendary history, the Lebor Gabála, or Book of the Taking of Ireland, primarily concerns the Irish prehistory of the Scots; other influential sources, including early saints’ lives, discuss Scottish history as incidental to their main narratives. It seems likely that only one comprehensive account of Scottish history had so far been written (likely in the 1260s), and it has not survived: the contents of the chronicle sometimes known as the “Scottish Monmouth,” attributed to Richard Vairement, or Veremundus, can only be deduced from later works that appear to 30. Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, 64. 31. At least in England, the episode also seems to have spurred awareness of the need for better record-keeping: see Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 153–54.

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have used it as a source.32 And as the title ascribed to Vairement’s work attests, by the time that Scottish historians began to write in earnest, they had to contend with a historiographic landscape that already had been largely staked out as English territory. The most authoritative accounts of the island’s earliest days, like Geoffrey’s, tended to disadvantage the Scots; yet these accounts became impossible to ignore, either as literary models or as historical precedents. Faced with this weight of authority, Scottish historiographers seeking to (re)script the past were left with a limited range of options: they could directly challenge the English version of history, or they could exploit the gaps and ambiguities of English historical accounts, anchoring their narratives in the interstices of English history—ironically, the very strategy that Geoffrey of Monmouth employs toward earlier English chronicles. Both of these strategies are employed to good effect by Baldred Bisset, the Scots’ chief representative in Rome, who was tasked with challenging Edward’s account of the past.33 Bisset disputes Edward’s narrative of Brutus as “specious and mutilated history” (XI.49.23) while furnishing an alternative account “in order to provide fuller knowledge of the story” (XI.49.30–31). In doing so, he deploys many of the same manipulations of which he accuses Edward. On the one hand, Bisset takes Edward to task for his self-serving manipulation of the historical record and charges him with basing his case on “unproven fictions about an obsolete distant past” (XI.48.44). Yet in claiming a more authentic knowledge of Brutus’s actions—accepting, for example, Brutus’s division of his kingdom among his sons, while denying “that Albanactus held his kingdom in fee from Locrinus” (XI.61.32–33)—Bisset implicitly admits the relevance of the distant past; as he goes on to flesh out history, this supposedly obsolete antiquity becomes the foundation of Scotland’s freedoms. Goldstein has suggested that we regard this seeming contradiction as “a form of adversarial gamesmanship rather than as a serious betrayal of hermeneutical principles,” and indeed, the Scots had little choice at this point but to 34 play Edward’s game. Once the intimate link between historical and political authority had been established, contesting its legitimacy was insufficient; only a counter-legend would do. 32. Broun, Scottish Independence, 235–68. 33. Bisset’s case survives in two documents: a probable rough draft known as the Instructiones, and a more polished document referred to as the Processus; both are preserved in Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon, and citations refer to Watt’s edition. Although the Processus seems the more likely to have been presented to the papal court, a report on the contents of the Instructiones also seems to have reached Edward: see the “Report to King Edward I from the Papal Court” in Stones, Anglo-Scottish Relations, 220–35. 34. Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, 73.



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Happily, Bisset had an origin myth at hand, one that was readily adaptable to counter Edward’s strategic deployment of Geoffrey’s narrative. The version of the myth that Bisset ultimately presented to the papal court runs as follows: A daughter of Pharaoh king of Egypt landed in Ireland with an armed force and a very large fleet of ships. Then after taking on board some Irishmen, she sailed to Scotland. . . . She conquered and overthrew the Picts, and took over that kingdom. And from this Scota the Scots and Scotland take their name. . . . These Scots are known to have retained the name and country to the present day. Therefore the Scots and Scotland are no concern of the king of England; and the English could have claimed no more of a right to the kingdom of Scotland than the Egyptians. (XI.62.1–13)

Bisset’s direct source for this legend was probably Vairement’s “Scottish Monmouth,” but versions of it had been around for centuries; curiously, one of the earliest references to the Egyptian origin of the Scots occurs in the same chronicle attributed to Nennius that provided Geoffrey’s probable source for the tale of Brutus.35 This common ancestry makes the clash of the English and Scottish legends at the papal court all the more striking: lavishly embellished and invested with political weight, the two myths that once existed comfortably side by side have been transformed into conflicting ideological weapons. In relating his alternative vision of history, Bisset attempts to shore up the boundaries between kingdoms and peoples that Edward has systematically tried to break down; yet his very enforcement of these boundaries relies upon strategies of argument drawn from Geoffrey’s Historia. For Bisset, as for Geoffrey, the most fundamental boundaries are enforced by conquest and borne out through the culture of a people. In Geoffrey’s Historia, Brutus seals his possession of the land through what Howard Bloch has called an “eponymic fusion of names, land, and language”:36 In those days, the island was named Albion, and was uninhabited except for a few giants. . . . With the approval of their leader, the Trojans then partitioned the land among themselves. They began to cultivate the fields and construct buildings, so that, after a short space of time, you would think that they had lived there forever. Then Brutus called the island Britain, after his 35. See Broun, “Birth of Scottish History”; Broun, Irish Identity of the Kingdom of the Scots; Cowan, “Myth and Identity in Early Medieval Scotland”; Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, 104–32; and MacQueen and MacQueen, “Introduction to Books I and II,” Scotichronicon, 1:xiii–xxxiii; the legend had assumed its basic shape by the thirteenth century. 36. Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies, 81.

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own name, and he called his comrades Britons. In devising these names, he 37 hoped to be remembered forever.

Brutus’s conquest of the giants, imposition of civilization, and renaming of the land institute a break with the past and mark a new beginning, simultaneously laying claim to both territory and time. As I have argued elsewhere, “By settling and civilizing the island he naturalizes his possession, seeming to extend it backward ‘forever’ [ab euo]; perhaps most importantly, by bequeathing his own name to the island he transmits his claim into the future, again ‘forever’ [perpetuam].”38 Bisset draws upon this logic, in which a change in nomenclature underscores conquest and unites people and land, in his response to Edward. He thus portrays the Scots’ banishment of the Britons as absolute: When these Britons had been driven from Albany in this way by the Scots, along with their king and the laws, language and customs of the Britons, it is well known that then the name of Albany was banished along with the former lordship held by the Britons. The place of the name Albany was taken by the new name Scotland along with the new people, the Scots, with their rites, language and customs—regarding which the Scots have nothing in common with the Britons. (XI.49.62–65).

Just as Brutus’s successful conquest indelibly marked the island and its people as his legacy, so the Scots’ conquest entirely supplants previous history. Bisset explicitly draws this comparison, claiming that the Scots possess Scotland “by the same right and title as that by which Brutus had earlier occupied the whole of Britain” (XI.49.54–55). Seemingly unaware of the irony involved in citing Brutus as a precedent for the rights of conquerors at the same time that he dismisses English claims based on that precedent, Bisset creates a totalizing discourse that is absolute in its commitment to Anglo-Scottish difference. Using similar reasoning, Bisset attempts to divorce the English from their own supposed history, in the process, bolstering the authenticity of his own origin myth. Following the logic that conquest fundamentally alters the character of a kingdom, he asserts that Edward has no more to do with Brutus than do the Scots. In a strategy that would be used repeatedly by Scottish chroniclers to emphasize the Anglo-Scottish divide, Bisset stresses the ruptured lineage of the English monarchy. Even accepting the fact of Brutus’s conquest, he points out, does not necessarily help Edward’s case. For at that 37. Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, 56. 38. Terrell, “Depicting Identity: Cartography and Chorography,” 82. Also see Otter, Inventiones, 74.



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time, “all the inhabitants of the kingdom of England were Britons, who were afterwards overthrown by the Saxons, the Saxons by the Danes, and again the Danes by the Saxons, and the Saxons themselves by the Normans, that is by William the Bastard and his adherents, from whom (not from the Britons) this king is known to have descended” (XI.61.40–44). Revealing Edward’s bias, Bisset demolishes his claim to have inherited a kingdom from a man who, if he ever existed, was no ancestor of Edward’s. In so doing, he exposes a vulnerability that could be something of a sore spot for the descendants of William the Conqueror. If the popularity of Geoffrey’s Historia is partly explained by its ability to “legitimate and naturalize the Norman occupation of England by linking it to Britain’s earliest prehistory,” Bisset counters this legitimizing function of the narrative by rendering the seams of English identity visible, insisting on the alterations wrought by successive waves of conquest.39 This fracturing of the English past, in contrast with the relative stability of the Scottish monarchy, guarantees the efficacy of the Scottish origin myth. Not content merely to cordon off English from Scottish history as a means of securing the Scots’ possession of temporal and territorial rights, Bisset also emphasizes the physical and cultural boundaries between the two kingdoms. His vision of radical alterity extends well beyond the political realm of Edward’s investment; while Edward’s interests are best served by minimizing cultural and genealogical difference and stressing the feudal and familial ties between the two realms, in Bisset’s writings, the political border emerges as the inevitable consequence of a legion of other more fundamental boundaries. Thus, Hadrian’s Wall provides evidence of an ancient physical separation, but is also a marker of culture. Built by the Romans so that “the Scots and Picts should not be able to make raids into Loegria against the Britons, nor harm them in their usual way” (XI.49.88–89), this border comes to signify a more intrinsic difference marked by a casually customary antagonism: from its beginning, Scotland is “always hostile to the kingdom of England” [semper infestum regno Anglie] (XI.50.59). Safely bounded by this wall, secure in their perpetual hostility toward England and their consequent autonomy from all things English, the Scottish land and its people emerge in Bisset’s writings as whole, complete, and independent, unlike the English with their fragmented identity. Geoffrey’s fantasy of a united Britain has been supplanted by an equally potent fantasy of an island perpetually divided. Yet the very nature of a border implies a relationship between sides; borders are points of interaction as well as separation, and the genesis of Bisset’s narrative—created in response to Edward’s aggression and modeled, by way of 39. Finke and Shichtman, King Arthur and the Myth of History, 45.

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Vairement, on Geoffrey’s myth—belies his absolutist claims of English alterity and Scottish autonomy. The paradox involved in Bisset’s basing his counterdiscourse on his enemy’s foundational text suggests the complexities endemic to Scottish historiography. Writing of a similar predicament faced by Welsh poets, Ingham usefully proposes that “such poignant complications suggest not a complicity with conquest that must be deplored, but the difficulty of oppositional strategies.”40 The persistence of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s role as both antagonist and model for Scottish chroniclers attests to this difficulty, as well as to the creative possibilities engendered by such a paradox.

JOHN OF FORDUN’S CHRONICA GENTIS SCOTORUM AND THE SCOTTISH ORIGIN MYTH When John of Fordun, chantry priest of Aberdeen, set out in the 1380s to compose a comprehensive chronicle of the Scottish people from their mythical origins to his present day, he was attempting a project unprecedented in scale, yet one that clearly followed in the tradition inaugurated by Bisset.41 Like his predecessor, Fordun was alert to the political implications of history; he aimed to fill the need for an authoritative version of the distant past that could rally nationalist sentiment and actually help to preserve Scotland’s liberty and integrity in future conflicts. Contemporary readers appear to have agreed: in manuscripts, Fordun’s Chronica is regularly associated with a dossier of documents related to Scottish independence, including the Declaration of Arbroath and Bisset’s Processus. As Emily Wingfield notes, “The manuscripts of Fordun’s Chronica are thus aptly reminiscent of those witnesses of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia which also contain texts relating to the Anglo-Scottish Wars of Independence. In each case, the chronicles gloss and 42 supplement the historical documents with which they circulate.” At the same time, the documents function as authenticating devices for the chronicles’ narratives. The events of Fordun’s lifetime demonstrate the reality of the danger that Scotland faced, and consequently the ongoing need for nationalist historiography. Scotland’s struggle against Edward I would have been recent memory at Fordun’s birth, and England continued to present a threat. Even Edward II’s disastrous defeat at Bannockburn in 1314 did not prevent him from invading 40. Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies, 39. 41. Fordun completed his Chronica through the year 1153. I follow Broun’s dating of the Chronica to between 1384 and 1387 (Scottish Independence, 215). 42. Wingfield, Trojan Legend, 24. Also see Crick, Historia Regum Britannie, 219.



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again. Although an uneasy peace settlement reached in 1323 held for nearly a decade, when hostilities resurfaced, Edward III attacked with more vigor than his predecessor, eventually capturing the Scottish king David II at Neville’s Cross in 1346 and holding him prisoner for eleven years while occupying large portions of Scotland. David was only released in exchange for a tremendous ransom that significantly burdened the country’s finances. Using the ransom payments as leverage, Edward III continued to make demands and to try to assert his authority over Scotland, demanding at various times that Scotland should be held as a fief from the king of England, and that he or one of his sons should be designated as David’s heir, a proposal that was twice rejected by the Scottish parliament.43 If, after all of this, Fordun remained concerned about English aggression, his fears would prove to be justified: in 1385—just as Fordun was writing his chronicle—yet another English king, Richard II, invaded Scotland. Accordingly, in the early portions of his Chronica Gentis Scotorum, Fordun develops and expands Bisset’s origin myth, solidifying the Scots’ temporal and territorial claims. Fordun, like Bisset, takes Geoffrey’s Historia for his model, more effectively exploiting its subversive potential while deepening Bisset’s 44 critique of Geoffrey’s methods. Yet unlike Bisset, Fordun appears ambivalent about employing Geoffrey’s strategies of fabrication; whereas Bisset follows Geoffrey in confidently forging a streamlined history out of the murky depths of time, Fordun reluctantly admits to the constructedness of history in a way that ultimately threatens historiography’s claim to accurately represent the past. However, even while revealing the seams of history, he promotes a different, genealogically based version of historical truth, one that attempts to circumvent the awkwardness of hybridity by finding verification in contemporary identity. The Anglo-Scottish border looms large in Fordun’s Chronica as a site of contested political dominance, whose significance is determined as much by textual incarnation as by military possession; thus, Geoffrey’s Historia 43. Duncan, “David II and Edward III.” 44. Vairement’s “Scottish Monmouth” appears to lie behind Fordun’s main source, which MacQueen and MacQueen, in “Introduction to Books I and II,” Scotichronicon, vol. 1, identify as “Chronicle-source A” or “the synthesis” (xxiii–xxx). Broun identifies Fordun’s source as “Proto-Fordun” and its author as “the synthesist,” who composed between 1290 and 1296, and developed Vairement’s narrative into a “more complete record of the Scottish past” (Scottish Independence, 260). For a full account of Fordun’s sources, see Broun, Scottish Independence, 215–68, as well as Broun, Irish Identity of the Kingdom of the Scots, 63–81. In the following discussion, I treat Fordun as the author of the entire Chronica, as without an extant source it is often impossible to tell to what extent Fordun alters or embellishes his material, and ultimately, he was responsible for the final shape of his text.

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becomes critical to Fordun’s account of Scotland’s earliest days. Nevertheless, Fordun manages to turn the subversive element in Geoffrey’s myth-making to his own ends, and so the relationship of Fordun’s Chronica to Geoffrey’s Historia is far more complex than the unambiguous hostility that has sometimes been claimed.45 Geoffrey provides Fordun with a successful model for writing the history of a people regarded as uncivilized barbarians by the possessors of more sophisticated historical traditions and for inserting legendary history into the scheme of established historical narrative. Yet while Geoffrey expands the possibilities of English historical narrative from within, Fordun takes the rebellious energy of Geoffrey’s myth and directs it outward, to compete with Geoffrey’s own vision of history. In so doing, Fordun heightens the competitive function of national myth-making, not merely claiming equality with England but insisting upon superiority. In elaborating the myth of Scottish origins and embellishing it from disparate sources, Fordun develops it into a worthy opponent of Geoffrey’s legend. According to Fordun, the history of the Scots begins in the time of Moses, when Gaythelos, the “good-looking but mentally unstable” (I.9.3) son of a Greek king, leaves his father’s kingdom and travels with a band of followers to Egypt, “the most ancient of all kingdoms except for the kingdom of Scythia” (I.10.2). There he marries Scota, the daughter of Pharaoh. After Moses’s exodus, the couple leave Egypt and “for the forty years during which the children of Israel lived in the wilderness under the leadership of Moses, Gaythelos also wandered with his people through many lands with frequent changes of direction” (I.13.7–10). Eventually they land in Spain, and after successfully battling the inhabitants, they found a city, where Gaythelos teaches his people laws derived from those of the Greeks and Egyptians. However, troubled by the continued attacks of the Spaniards, he sends out ships to search for uninhabited territory, and they discover Ireland. In a rousing deathbed speech, Gaythelos instructs his sons Hiber and Hymec to take possession of this land, and successive waves of Scots accordingly settle in Ireland. When the Picts arrive on their shores seeking a place to live, the Scots suggest the “northern limits of Albion, hitherto uninhabited” (I.30.13); they also provide the Picts with Scottish wives, and other Scots follow these settlers. However, soon the Picts ungenerously turn against the Scots in their midst, prompting the Scottish king Fergus Ferard to come to their rescue; he becomes the first king of 45. See, for example, Drexler, “Fluid Prejudice: Scottish Origin Myths in the Later Middle Ages”; Ferguson, Identity of the Scottish Nation; Mason, “‘Scotching the Brut’: The Early History of Britain”; Utz, “Traces of Nationalism in Fordun’s ‘Chronicle,’”; and Webster, “John of Fordun and the Independent Identity of the Scots.” On more congenial Scottish attitudes toward British ancestry, see Boardman, “Late Medieval Scotland and the Matter of Britain.”



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the Scots to reign in Scotland. This is the basic story as related by Fordun, but the way in which he tells it is far from simple. Throughout his recitation of this legend, Fordun implicitly relies upon Geoffrey’s mythologizing while suppressing any mention of Brutus, whose legend his own so patently mirrors and contradicts. Instead, in the early portions of his narrative, he concerns himself with the assertion of a more implicit superiority: inserting the Scots into both classical history through their Greek descent, and biblical history through their relations with the Egyptians, he establishes their origins as doubly illustrious. The historical one-upmanship at work in the legend manifests itself even in the choice of Greece rather than Troy as an ancestral homeland—a sly dig at the prestige of a Trojan ancestry, as Virgil’s Aeneid (the underlying text of the Trojan narrative) opens with the Trojans fleeing the ruins of a city decimated by the Greeks. Yet the correspondences between Geoffrey’s narrative and Fordun’s illustrate the appeal of certain aspects of the myth across the board, including an illustrious classical ancestry, the exile of the hero from his homeland, an eponymous founder, extensive wanderings, and an initial, failed, attempt to settle in an occupied region followed by the successful foundation of a realm in a largely uninhabited land.46 Like Geoffrey’s narrative, Fordun’s depicts its protagonists as bearers of culture, responsible for translating the classical civilization to a barren landscape where it develops its own traditions parallel to and in defiance of the classical world. Of course, the main target of Fordun’s defiance is England itself, and delaying his discussion of the Brutus myth allows him to plant doubts about Geoffrey’s credibility before taking on the central issue. The English and Scottish myths clash even before the Scots land on Scottish soil, with the arrival in Ireland of a second massive wave of Scottish immigrants, led by their king Partholomus. In his first direct challenge to Geoffrey, Fordun dwells upon a major discrepancy between his and Geoffrey’s versions of history: the origins of the Scots’ claims to Ireland. Fordun quotes Geoffrey’s report that one day the English king Gurgunt was out sailing: He came upon thirty ships full of men and women, and when he enquired the reasons for their arrival, their leader Partholomus by name came up to him, and after making obeisance to him, asked for indulgence and peace. He said that he had been driven out of a region of Spain and was cruising around in those waters. He asked him for a small portion of Britain to

46. Waswo, “Our Ancestors, the Trojans,” 287. Also see Reynolds, “Medieval Origines Gentium.” Wingfield, Trojan Legend, discusses the similarities of Brutus and Gaythelos (30).

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settle in, so that he need wander around no longer in hateful sea-voyaging. (I.23.7–14)

Gurgunt allows these Spanish refugees to settle in Ireland, “which was at that time completely deserted and devoid of inhabitants” (I.23.19–20). This version of events obviously causes difficulties for Fordun, because it purports to show that the Scots from the first held their lands as the gift of and under obeisance to an English monarch. Instead, Fordun asserts that, as an earlier wave of Scots (led by Hiber) had already colonized Ireland, it “had been inhabited before the arrival of Partholomus and was not empty, nor had it been received as the gift of a foreign king” (I.24.3–4). Fordun frees the Scots from the political implications of this narrative by suggesting that Geoffrey has mixed up the arrival of the Scots with the arrival of the Picts: a serious error in chronology. In the reign of Gurgunt, he maintains, not the Scots but the Picts were seeking a new home: setting out from Poitou, “They sailed across the English channel to Ireland hoping to receive a place to settle in from the Scots; but the Scots sent them across to Albion” (I.25.3–6). Explaining Geoffrey’s narrative as a case of mistaken identity also usefully clarifies the relationship of the Scots to the Picts. It was well known that the Picts had inhabited Scotland before the Scots’ arrival; by establishing that the Picts possessed that territory as a gift from the Scots, Fordun preempts any questions regarding the legitimacy of the Scots’ right to the land. More important, this clarification allows Fordun to cast aspersion on Geoffrey’s reliability as a historian. “Unless I am mistaken,” Fordun says condescendingly, “this story about the Picts given above in Geoffrey’s version has been described as being about the Scots through the fault of the narrator” [vicio relatoris] (I.25.7–9). If Geoffrey is capable of such a basic error, he implies, who knows what else he might have gotten wrong? Fordun reaches new rhetorical heights as he scornfully dismisses Geoffrey’s account once and for all: “This is the basis for the claim that Ireland had been given to the Scots by the gift of their own king, invented by the idle chatter of the people, who took excessive pride in such a chance piece of advice” (I.25.11–14). Fordun implies that Geoffrey should take his job as a historian more seriously, as he is doubly to blame: first for listening to the “popularis inepta loquacitas,” instead of taking his information from more reliable sources, and then for passing on this mistaken information in his history. This clear disdain for Geoffrey’s methods is reflected in Fordun’s apparent ambivalence toward his own myth-making—an ambivalence that manifests itself in his fragmented presentation of the Scottish origin myth. Throughout the first eight chapters of the first book of his Chronica, in which Fordun



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informs his readers about world geography and briefly rehearses the events of the first six ages of the world, he appears to be fully in control of his material. The narrative voice is unobtrusive, and a casual reader would find it difficult to determine whether Fordun is drawing on one source or several, so seamlessly are they integrated into a single narrative; citations to other works are limited to a quotation from Ptolemy, a brief review of opinions on the authorship of the Book of Wisdom (conclusively deciding on Solomon), and a few unattributed lines of poetry. However, this style of narration abruptly changes when Fordun arrives at the chapter titled “The first move in the origin of the Scots and their first king Gaythelos” (I.9). In this chapter, following a brief introduction, he quotes a passage from “alia cronica,” followed immediately by a longer passage from the “legenda Sancti Brendani,” and then by another passage from “alia cronica.” Returning to his own narration, he cites the Historia Scholastica and Methodius as his sources before concluding with a long quotation from Methodius; this patchwork style of narration continues throughout much of the first book. The abruptness of this change in narrative technique is striking, particularly because the chronicles that Fordun quotes disagree with one another about important facts. For example, was Gaythelos a dutiful son, sent by his father to aid Pharaoh, or an aspiring tyrant, exiled for leading a failed rebellion? Did the Scots leave Egypt when all of its nobles were driven out by a peasant uprising; or were only the Scots expelled due to the Egyptians’ fear of foreign domination; or did the Scots leave in fear of divine wrath? The contradictions multiply as Fordun proceeds further into the story. Gaythelos initially intends to “seize a kingdom and territory from other peoples to be inhabited for ever by force of arms” (I.12.9–10), but he later regrets having abandoned his supposedly original plan to settle only in an uninhabited region (I.16).47 The status of Ireland upon the arrival of the Scots varies wildly: although the Scottish sailors kill some islanders with their oars, the territory is soon after praised for being “devoid of inhabitants” (I.17.19); or perhaps it is inhabited by giants; or else the Scots “killed some of the few inhabitants . . . and enslaved the rest” (I.18.24–25). The list could easily be extended, but this should suffice to give a sense of the contradictions inherent in this section’s juxtaposition of varying sources. Fordun makes no comment; he merely sets the opposing sources side by side and lets readers judge for themselves. The difficulty lies not in Fordun’s narrative technique itself, but in its difference from other portions of his narrative. The typical position of the 47. Goldstein (Matter of Scotland, 109–21), and Wingfield (Trojan Legend, 26–35) both discuss these contradictions, observing that Gaythelos is portrayed more positively in the latter sections of the narrative.

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medieval historian was that of the compilator, who was expected to record the opinions of others, not necessarily to make critical judgments about the soundness of those opinions. This was not the only model of medieval historiography, as Geoffrey’s narrative demonstrates—his primary citation being to a “very ancient book” that may well be his own invention.48 Yet it was an influential one, employed among others by Fordun’s source, Ranulph Higden, whose narrative style—described by Antonia Gransden as “almost entirely a compilation, made up of borrowings from ancient and more recent authori49 ties”—Fordun’s resembles here. However, this historiographical model seems insufficient to explain why the origin myth is the only portion of Fordun’s Chronica to assume this appearance of bricolage, with its assembly of incongruous sources seemingly outside of the narrator’s control. Fordun is clearly on shakier ground here than usual, and although not every chapter in this section suffers from these discrepancies, still it stands out as by far the least assured in the chronicle. Dauvit Broun ascribes this narrative style to Fordun’s source, observing that Book I “exhibits the most tell-tale features of the synthesist’s work: it consists chiefly of passages juxtaposed from different (and often contradictory) sources held together by skillful use of the royal genealogy to create a coherent chronological framework.”50 However, once Fordun moves beyond the earliest period in Scottish history, he resumes a style much closer to the seamless narration with which he began. He will sometimes cite sources or quote directly, occasionally even at some length, but it becomes rarer for his sources to be in contradiction, and the narrative never again assumes the patchwork effect of the chapters that deal with the origin myth. In a text that elsewhere seems so concerned to establish historical precedent, it seems particularly odd that Fordun makes no attempt to disguise these contradictions or to present a more coherent, streamlined version that would raise fewer doubts as to its authenticity and thus be better suited to his ideological goals. In so openly forging a national identity out of the contradictory chronicles of an uncertain past, Fordun exposes the fundamental constructedness of history itself, thereby potentially drawing into question the basis of the very national identity that he writes to support. And to a certain extent Fordun appears to be aware that he risks losing his audience’s confidence. In the midst of this section, he suddenly steps back from his narration and turns his attention to the wider issue of why authorities often disagree, in a chapter titled, “How the chronicle justifies the discrepancies of histories” (I.26). He 48. Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, 51. 49. Gransden, Historical Writing in England, 2:47. 50. Broun, Scottish Independence, 249.



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bases his explanation on the pervasiveness of contradictions among historical narratives, apparently missing the irony of his reassurance that “historians are seen to disagree in many of their writings every day” (I.26.3–4). He goes on to cite Isidore’s opinion that “we ought not to condemn as ignorant historians or commentators or rather writers of fiction [comentatores vel comentores] who give different versions, because the mistake originated with antiquity itself ” (I.26.19–22). Fordun himself inserts the phrase “vel comentores” (“or rather writers of fiction”), perhaps as a dig at Geoffrey’s propensity for substituting imaginative narrative for demonstrable fact. Yet the passage can also be read as placing fiction on a par with fact, equating the comentatores with the comentores. In either case, this justification insufficiently accounts for the discrepancies of Fordun’s narrative and in one sense seems an odd philosophy for a history writer to hold. Far from boosting the truth-value of Fordun’s sources, the pervasiveness of disagreement among chronicles seems to draw the very possibility of truthful historical narrative into question. In Fordun’s hands, the passage comes close to reducing all history to the status of fiction and giving up any claim to veracity about the distant past. However, viewed from another perspective, the blending of fact and fiction may even be seen to support Fordun’s ideological perspective: for if history is merely fiction, then surely fiction may also be history. Seeking documentary evidence for his historical narration, Fordun cannot help but notice that his sources sometimes disagree; yet Fordun’s Chronica ultimately espouses an alternate view of historical truth, one that takes up Geoffrey’s genealogical vision of history while avoiding the complications endemic to a genealogy that must support the interests of both colonizers and colonized. While Geoffrey’s narrative “must constantly strike a balance between continuity and discontinuity, center and periphery, endogamy and exogamy, genealogy and filiation,” Fordun is able to follow Bisset’s relatively unproblematic tying of the Scots to their first ancestors by an unbroken lineage.51 Genealogy substitutes for textuality, as the living descendants of the Scots’ eponymous founders themselves come to signify the truth of Fordun’s narrative. The ideals of contemporary Scots are strengthened and confirmed through being rooted in ancient history, but this process works both ways, finding its proof in the continuity of the bloodline across time: the ancestors of the Scots must have held certain values, because their descendants do. Thus the mythic utility of Fordun’s narrative is scarcely damaged by the discrepancies among his sources, the proliferation of which, when seen in this light, lends credence to the myth’s antiquity and prevalence rather than detracting from its integrity. 51. Finke and Shichtman, King Arthur and the Myth of History, 4.

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Fourteenth-century Scottish nationalism itself comes to seem hearteningly atavistic, largely due to Fordun’s own imaginative additions to his sources. Gaythelos’s deathbed speech exhorting his sons to conquer Ireland, for example, strikes a tone reminiscent of the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath, a patriotic assertion of Scottish independence that, as Alexander Grant has argued, was itself “an attempt to articulate a theory in order to account for and justify events which had already taken place during the last thirty years” of the Wars of Independence.52 After giving its own version of the origin myth and attesting to the unbroken longevity of the Scottish royal line, the Declaration concludes with an eloquent plea for the importance of liberty: “For as long as a hundred of us remain alive, we intend never to be subjected to the lordship of the English in any way. For it is not for glory in war, riches or honours that we fight, but only for the laws of our fathers and for freedom, which no good man loses except with his life” (XIII.3.31–35). Susan Reynolds has reminded us that, as a piece of propaganda, the Declaration “must have been intended to appeal to values and emotions current at the time; the Scottish royal officials who drafted the letter presumably thought that ideas of collective political independence based on a single collective ancestry would seem convincing.”53 Gaythelos’s deathbed speech embodies similar principles, which clearly resonated as powerful ideals to a generation that had already endured lengthy struggles for independence. Equally applicable to Gaythelos’s immediate audience and to Fordun’s fourteenth-century readers, the speech introduces themes that will occur throughout the Chronica: the idea that the Scots possess their lands by divine right, the value of freedom, the ideal of self-sacrifice, and the exclusive power of the Scottish monarch: So now, my sons, receive with gratitude the gifts of the gods offered to you, and go without delay to the island ready and waiting for you, where you will be able to live noble and free, since it is the highest nobility known to man and the joy most desired in the world to all the noblest hearts, or rather it is the precious gem rightly to be preferred to all the jewels in the world, to refuse to endure the rule of any foreign domination, but to accept willingly the hereditary power of one’s own nation only. (I.17.24–36)

In placing these words in the mouth of his founding hero, Fordun establishes these principles as having been central to the Scottish nation from the begin 52. Grant, “Aspects of National Consciousness,” 88. 53. Reynolds, “Medieval Origines Gentium,” 386. For scholarship on Arbroath, see Reynolds, “Medieval Origines Gentium,” 386n46; and Ferguson, Identity of the Scottish Nation, 41n16.



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ning, and thus frees them from the taint of English influence. Just as the Scots possessed their land prior to any English claim, so Fordun suggests that they possessed the principle of freedom prior to any thought of English aggression. In reality, the Scots had not given much thought to their independence until it was threatened, yet although Fordun’s rhetoric here—like the Declaration of Arbroath—may be part of a theoretical justification for events that had already transpired, he prefers to establish the principle of independence as an integral part of a preexisting identity. Fordun thus strengthens both the appeal of that independence and the completeness of a Scottish identity that thereby appears self-sufficient, no longer part of a dialogic relationship with England.54 This attempt to disavow both his own history’s hybridity and the heterogeneity of Scottish identity is analogous to the fantasy of geographical separateness with which I began; before striking at Geoffrey’s myth of Brutus, Fordun undermines Geoffrey’s credibility and shores up Scotland’s autonomy on every front. In so doing, he acknowledges the power of the myth that has been the unwritten subtext of his Chronica all along: as I have tried to demonstrate, Fordun implicitly relies on Geoffrey’s successful pattern of mythologizing and employs his strategy of genealogical argumentation, even as he challenges Geoffrey’s authority. Yet Fordun not only delays this final, pivotal confrontation to the second book of his Chronica, after he has thoroughly laid out his own counter-myth, but moreover subordinates it within a discussion of geographical nomenclature, as if to deny its prominence as the established touchstone of English imperialist rhetoric. By the same token, Fordun recognizes that geographical nomenclature is frequently regarded as coterminous with political authority; unable to ignore the fact that in common parlance the island once known as Albion is frequently referred to as “Britain,” Fordun challenges the Anglo-centric slippage 55 of terminology by which “Britain” becomes synonymous with “England.” Correctly speaking, he says, Albion “gave up its first name after the time of the giants and as a consequence acquired two names, Britain and Scotland,” corresponding to its natural topographical divisions (II.1.30–32). The “primitive and ancient distinction between these kingdoms” is thus inscribed in the land itself, and reflected in terminology of ancient origin (II.2.1). He accrues an impressive range of evidence—largely from Geoffrey of Monmouth himself—in support of this usage before turning to a chapter entitled, “Passages from the same authors maintaining the opposite point of view” (II.4). 54. Nevertheless, Fordun’s next grand statement promoting liberty (2.15) consciously outdoes a similar letter that the Britons send to Caesar in Geoffrey’s Historia (ch. 54); see Wingfield, Trojan Legend, 32. 55. Terrell, “Depicting Identity: Cartography and Chorography,” 84–85.

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Here, at last, Fordun tackles Geoffrey’s narrative head-on; but significantly, he counters it not by challenging Geoffrey himself, but by casting aspersions on nationalistically inflected processes of textual transmission. Fordun directly quotes the most damning passage from Geoffrey’s tale of Brutus: “‘Albanactus son of Brutus gained possession of the land which in our day is called Scotland. He gave it the name Albany after his own name’” (II.4.16–18). Yet he then steps back in order to draw attention to the discrepancies within chronicles, as he has previously discussed the contradictions between them: Although frequent discrepancy of this kind has been found in the chronicles, it must not in the least be held against the writers [auctoribus] who were experts in their field, or rather saints, and wrote their histories carefully according to the truth, altering nothing that they found in their sources, but rather it is the transcribers [scribis] of an antagonistic nation who must be blamed. Through their malice certain chronicles have been turned upside down, degraded and abused in order to weaken the authority of neighboring kingdoms, and often changed so indiscriminately that the purport of one chapter completely cancels out that of the next one. But no matter what difference of opinion of this kind concerning the boundary of Britain is found in the chronicles through the inadequacy of the writers [scriptorum], the commonly held opinion at the present time is that the whole of Albion was called Britain from the name of Brutus, who had settled none of it except for its southern regions. (II.4.18–37)

Fordun goes even further than Bisset in disputing the accuracy of the Brutus myth. While Bisset had accepted that one of the three portions of Brutus’s kingdom corresponded to modern Scotland and disputed only the relevance of that primeval division within contemporary law, Fordun denies that Brutus’s authority ever extended over the entire island. Moreover, Fordun here broadens his critique of Geoffrey into an indictment of the entire English system of textual production. Distinguishing between auctores and scribi, the writers of histories and the scribes who copy and transmit them, Fordun explains away Geoffrey’s narrative of Brutus’s division of the kingdom by denying it even the dubious authority he had previously accorded to Geoffrey’s history. Whereas Geoffrey’s mistake about Partholomus was the result of his careless confusion of two widely separate events, the basis of England’s claim to Scotland derives from the deliberately fraudulent terminology of selfserving scribes. Again, Fordun calls into question the possibility of truthful historical narration—for even when the original authors are credited with good intentions,



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their works are prone to alteration by deceitful scribes for nationalistic purposes. The ease with which Fordun assumes the plausibility of a historical conspiracy in which “the transcribers of an antagonistic nation” pervert the historical record demonstrates the degree to which he envisions history as contested political ground. Yet in condemning the falseness of these scribes, he also exposes the extent to which any historical record is open to interpretation, for he does not explain why he identifies these passages—and not the others that support his view—as the deceptions. Once more privileging genealogical intuition over textual transmission, Fordun suggests that truth is not to be found in historical records unless one already knows what to look for. If the written record may be manipulated for selfish goals, then only a historical perspective that is guided by the intangible insights of myth will be able to negotiate complex historical terrain to arrive at truth. Ultimately, Fordun’s development of the Scottish origin myth represents an attempt to do for the historical landscape what his dream of a clearly delineated border does for Scotland itself: to establish it as the inviolable possession of the Scottish people. Origin myths, like border lines, attempt to forge clarity out of ambiguity, purity out of hybridity; they seek to form orderly narratives and clear demarcations out of fragmented pasts and rugged terrain. Yet just as the starkness of cartographic boundaries conceals their actual permeability, so the ostensible exclusionary force of myths masks their status as spaces of encounter, wherein identity is negotiated through discursive contact with alternative visions of history. Thus while Fordun’s elevation of a genealogical mythos drawn from Geoffrey’s Historia may compromise his assertion of Scottish textual and national autonomy, the hybridity of his history also enables its subversive potential by helping to produce a discursive space in which to cultivate Scottish identity.

CHAPTER 3

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“Ane worthier genology” Translatio Imperii and the Divine Imperative of History

in the Corpus manuscript of the Scotichronicon—Walter Bower’s fifteenth-century expansion of Fordun’s Chronica—depicts a curious incident at the inauguration of King Alexander III (see figure 1). It shows the young Alexander—a boy of eight—enthroned outdoors near a great cross, wearing a crown and holding a scepter. The king is flanked on either side by two nobles, one of whom holds aloft a sheathed sword of state to bestow upon the king at the conclusion of the ceremony. In striking contrast to this sedate trio, an elderly bearded man in highland garb, whose sword indicates a high rank, strides in from the page’s left margin, his gesturing hands outstretched toward the young king. Seemingly in his haste, he treads upon the Latin text of the chronicle, obscuring part of the chapter heading; but he produces a Gaelic text of his own, which the illustrator has inscribed upon a scroll that curls up from his mouth: “banach de re albane alex mak alex,” meaning “Hail Alexander, king of Scots, son of Alexander.”1 The illustration depicts a dynamic moment of national creation. The sudden appearance of the highlander, although he is visually marked as an outsider both by his garb and by his (literally) marginal position, heralds a show AN ILLUSTRATION

1. The illustration is reproduced in color in Bower, Scotichronicon, 5:289. Also see Higgitt, “Bower’s Working Text,” 157–85. • 63 •

FIGURE 1. The Coronation of Alexander III, from MS 171A, f.206r, The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge



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of unity as he acknowledges the king’s authority over all of Scotland.2 Crucially, he establishes this authority as based in narrative: in a shared history that goes back to Scotland’s first founders, “Hiber the Scot . . . the son of Gaythelos, the son of Neolus formerly king of the Athenians by Scota daughter of the king of Egypt” (X.2.40–42). This shared ancestry overrides all division, uniting margin and center, subject and monarch, the elderly highlander and the youthful king. Rising up on its scroll, the highlander’s speech joins the cross, the crown, the scepter, and the sword of state as a potent icon of Alexander’s authority, his words linking the material symbols of office to the history that underwrites their power. Moreover, the scene (as depicted both in the illustration and in the accompanying text) depicts the transmission of this unifying history into official discourse. The chronicle, like the illustration, initially records the highlander’s speech in Gaelic, but then—informing us that this is merely the beginning, for “so reciting the genealogy of the Scots he kept on to the end” (X.2.16–17)— translates the rest of his speech into Latin. The oral recitation of genealogy, which the chronicle depicts as an unanticipated performance [“ecco subito”], becomes enshrined in the chronicle, to then be translated into the language of officialdom and transmitted to posterity. This process of translation and transmission is reflected even in the language used to depict the highlander: initially described as “saying” [“dicens”] the genealogy, then as “reciting” [“pronunciando”] it, by the end, he is said to have “read right through” [“perlegit”] the king’s ancestry (X.2.13–38). Speaking becomes reading; oral history is transmitted into textual history, which in turn becomes the basis for a unified national identity. Perhaps it was this emphasis on the creation of a national community through textual history that attracted Bower to the scene, as this is very much his own goal in the Scotichronicon. Writing during the turbulent minority of James II in the 1440s following the murder of James I in 1437, Bower envisioned his chronicle as a means of promoting unity in a fractured kingdom. Like John of Fordun, Bower saw history in nationalistic terms; if anything, as Sally Mapstone has noted, “on the subjects of Scottish nationalism and independence Bower was even more outspoken than his predecessor Fordun. Given that a prime justification of Fordun’s work was to provide the historical justification for Scotland’s independence from England, exceeding 2. A poet reciting the king’s genealogy seems to have been an expected feature of the Scottish inauguration ceremony for centuries; this recitation was probably a planned event. A thirteenth-century seal of Scone Abbey also depicts a poet at Alexander III’s coronation. See Bannerman, “King’s Poet.”

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its pronouncements in this area was no mean achievement.”3 Yet while both chroniclers look to the past as a source of national pride and political precedent, Bower goes beyond Fordun both in the scope of his ambitions and in his determination to rid Scottish history of any taint of English influence, although he nevertheless defines Scottish identity—and seeks to shape Scottish politics—primarily in relation to England. Continuing the war of historiography begun by Edward I and continued by Baldred Bisset, Bower seeks to project his vision of Scottish nationalism into the future. Nicola Royan and Dauvit Broun have observed that, for Scottish historiographers who deployed the origin myth as a legitimizing response to crisis, “the purpose of the resulting texts is not so much to give an identity to the Scots themselves, but to prove it to the kings and leaders outwith the borders in order to claim the treatment accorded to independent kingdoms.”4 Bower, on the other hand, sees his goal as the shaping of Scottish identity through the creation of a textual community; he aims both to extend history’s reach to a broader community, and to rouse the highest levels of church and state to pursue his nationalistic goals. In a very real sense, Bower sees the future of the Scottish nation as residing in the power of the past.

HISTORY AS TRANSLATIO IN THE SCOTICHRONICON Thus, the scene of Alexander III’s inauguration becomes an occasion for Bower to further embroider the origin myth that underlies his own claims to Scottish unity. Here as elsewhere, he takes much of his text from Fordun; the Scotichronicon is in many ways a collaborative effort between Fordun and Bower, with Bower first relying upon the five books of Fordun’s Chronica, which runs through the year 1153, and then on an incomplete sixth book, as well as on two sets of annals contained in most manuscripts of Fordun’s work and now known as Gesta Annalia I and II, which outline historical events up to 1385. Only for the period between 1385 and 1417 is Bower wholly without the 5 guidance of these sources. Compared with Fordun’s Chronica, however, the inauguration scene achieves particular prominence in Bower’s work. It stands as only one of five historical scenes to be illustrated in the Corpus manuscript of the Scotichronicon: Bower’s own working text, whose production he 3. Mapstone, “Bower on Kingship,” 322. 4. Royan and Broun, “Versions of Scottish Nationhood,” 171. 5. Broun, Scottish Independence, 172–79; 216–30. Also see Broun, “New Look at Gesta Annalia.” A dossier of documents related to Scottish independence is found between Gesta I and II; see Royan and Broun, “Versions of Scottish Nationhood,” 171–72.



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is known to have supervised.6 And among the five illustrations, this one seems most likely to have been originally intended, rather than added later as an afterthought.7 In the text, as well, Bower adds additional emphasis to the scene by expanding Fordun’s description of the genealogical recitation: So the Scots gain additional lustre from the fact that they are sprung from the stock of the kings of Athens, the chief city and capital of the Greeks. It was from there, as our sources tell us, that Greece with its provinces became an imperial power, a nursery of great soldiers and mother of philosophy, and invented and fostered all the beneficial branches of learning. (X.2.43–54)

Bower wholeheartedly endorses the idea of Scottish descent from the Greeks, adopting Fordun’s genealogical vision of history and extending its resonance with his praise of the Greek civilization. Like Fordun, Bower believes in the continuity of character across bloodlines; indeed, he goes on to portray Greece in terms that sound very much like his view of an ideal Scotland: Its people are a most warlike race, well endowed with the gift of wisdom and knowledge, most eloquent in speech, obedient to the laws, pious, peaceable towards other nations, tranquil in its dealings with its own citizens, but implacable and belligerent in the face of injuries inflicted by its enemies. (X.2.49–53)

While Fordun concentrates on narrating the virtues of the Scots’ direct forbears, Bower invests the entire Greek civilization with equal relevance. He extends the symbolic national unity of the inauguration scene backward in time to encompass Greek ancestors as well as present-day Scots; minimizing the distinctions between them, Bower suggests the innate superiority of a continued Greco-Scottish civilization. In doing so, Bower joins Fordun in extending the implications of the origin myth to encompass a broader sense of history as translatio imperii: the translation of empire. Originally theorized in antiquity to account for the transmission of political and consequent cultural power from one people to another, it became a cornerstone of ancient and medieval historiography; the transfer of power was eventually traced “from the Babylonians to the Medes and Persians, then to the Macedonians and after them to the Greeks and 6. Hadgraft, Hall, and Porter, “Bower’s Working Text: Corpus MS,” 149. Bower may well have influenced the illustrator; however, Watt, Scotichronicon, 5:440, note to X.2.4, observes “a certain lack of harmony between Bower’s text . . . and the drawing” in regard to certain details. 7. Higgitt, “Bower’s Working Text,” 181.

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Romans,” eventually arriving in Christian Europe with the Franks.8 Thereafter, it was variously claimed by the Germans, the French, the English, and— as we shall see—the Scots.9 The Scottish origin myth’s justification for the spatial transmission of authority from Greece and Egypt to Scotland provides the basis for Fordun and Bower’s invocation of this trope. However, the broader historiographical concept of translatio imperii implies temporal as well as spatial transmission, seeking to explain the shifts in power that take place throughout the course of history. Significantly, it allows for only one primary locus of power at any point in time. On the one hand, this means that the rise of one civilization inevitably heralds the downfall of another; but it also implies that political and cultural authority are never lost but merely transferred—literally, translated—to the next historical agent. Jane Taylor has observed that in defining historical change in terms of the rise and fall of civilizations, translatio imperii “assumes not just discontinuities . . . but also, vitally, a continuing and transferable core such that a triumphant collective 10 past will be present in each successive generation.” In this model, the authority of history is cumulative: Bower extols the virtues of the Greek civilization in order to augment his praise of the Scots, who partake of their ancestors’ glories. Thus even as translatio imperii acknowledges historical difference, it maintains a myth of cultural continuity between centers of power that works to elide that difference. The origin myth naturalizes the shifts in power inherent in translatio imperii by marking the transfer of power back to the descendants of illustrious progenitors as a rightful inheritance rather than a violent usurpation. Linking the Scots, in direct lineage, to Greece and Egypt as celebrated centers of ancient authority, the genealogical vision of history establishes the Scots’ rights to this powerful tradition and suggests that they may once again take up the mantle of power. The sense of legitimacy accorded by the origin myth is further underwritten by the moral dimension of translatio imperii, which “implies that the transference of dominion from one empire to another is the result of 11 a sinful misuse of that dominion.” This aspect of translatio was elaborated by early Christian writers such as Augustine and Orosius (one of Fordun’s known sources). Writing in the early fifth century, Orosius claims that “if powers are the gift of God, all the more so are the kingdoms from which all other pow 8. Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, 171. On the topos of translatio imperii, see Curtius, European Literature, 27–30; and Stahuljak, Bloodless Genealogies of the French Middle Ages. 9. See Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, 171–72; Christine de Pisan’s Le Livre des faits et bonnes moeurs du roi Charles V le sage; and Polydore Vergil’s Anglia Historia. 10. Taylor, “Sense of a Beginning,” 108. 11. Curtius, European Literature, 29.



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ers proceed.”12 He goes on to explain to “those who grumble (foolishly, to be sure) about our Christian times” that “one God has directed the course of history, in the beginning for the Babylonians and in the end for the Romans”; he explains the “decline and fall” of kingdoms by reference to divine punishment.13 Associating authority with morality, this formulation nevertheless opens up the possibility of divorcing the possession of power from its desert: a period of immorality might presage the fall of a kingdom, but the transference to a worthier successor might not happen immediately. The relationship of morality and authority therefore works in two directions, simultaneously suggesting that those who have power likely deserve it, and that those who deserve it will surely gain it in time. This morally inflected version of translatio imperii offers Fordun and Bower a compelling model with which to predict the ultimate ascendancy of the Scottish nation, informing their expressions of nationalism. In furthering the implications of the origin myth, the idea of history as a divinely inspired translatio imperii also subtly transforms the chronicle’s narrative posture: despite Fordun’s attempts to efface the dialogic origins of his foundation myth, he nevertheless deploys it throughout the early sections of his Chronica as a defensive counternarrative to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s mythologizing and Edward I’s predations. Invoking the trope of translatio imperii and stressing its moralized dimension allows Fordun and Bower to turn this aggressively defensive stance into a formidable attack by according a privileged status to the Scots on ethical as well as legal grounds. The ability to doubly assert legitimacy becomes especially important in a text concerned with weighing the relative merits of Scottish and English claims to power. As the editors of the Scotichronicon have observed, Fordun’s vision of history as translatio imperii bears directly on his conception of Scotland’s position in the British isles: from his perspective, “the Scots had taken over the position formerly occupied by the Picts and Britons; as a consequence, they rather than the English held hereditary right to the monarchy 14 of all Britain.” Genealogically and religiously based, supported by the twin pillars of the origin myth and the moral imperative of history, the Scots’ claim to power rests not only on the classical past, but more particularly, on the historical interactions of Britain’s various peoples. Defining Scottish identity in relation to these insular others, Fordun and Bower balance appropriation with rejection, acknowledging hybridity to the extent that these other peoples strengthen Scotland’s moral and genealogical claims to power, while resolutely 12. Orosius, Seven Books of History against the Pagans, 2:72. 13. Orosius, Seven Books of History against the Pagans, 2:75. 14. MacQueen and MacQueen, introduction to Scotichronicon, 2:xvi.

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maintaining the distinctiveness and superiority of the Scots. And as the Scots’ power rests on genealogy and morality, so their fellow inhabitants progressively lose authority by violating the twin virtues of protecting the royal lineage and supporting the church. Critically, Fordun and Bower’s world is not one in which might makes right: they follow Orosius in attributing the shifts of power between kingdoms to divine intervention, based on the relative ethical merits of the peoples in question. Biblical perspective informs both chroniclers’ views of history as the temporal expression of a divine plan. Bower points out that “it is written in Ecclesiasticus, 10: ‘A kingdom is transferred from one people to another because of injustices and wrong doing, insults and various deceits’” (IV.4.39– 41). Fordun invokes anti-Semitic tradition in support of this historical stance, offering the ancient example of the twelve tribes of Israel, who remained the prosperous chosen people of God only “until they transgressed the law and deserted the Lord God, performing various abominations and provoking the wrath of the divine majesty. . . . Then for all time they were held in disdain and derision by all nations” (IV.7.4–7).15 Applying this outlook to more recent history, Fordun reveals that the Irish, “formerly wealthy and strong,” became “paralysed with indolence and given over to vices and idleness, not content with one king” and so were “thrown out of [their] prosperous cities and towns to the barren and waste regions in the remotest parts of [their] own kingdom” (IV.7.51–59). Even Rome, which “was the mistress of nations, now for her sins . . . is ruling over a few, or I should say rather a very few districts (not even cities, as it is claimed) that are situated not far from her own wall” (IV.8.12–15). If such a fate can befall Rome, Fordun implies, then clearly no kingdom is immune from the damaging effects of sin on temporal power. Events follow this familiar pattern throughout the chroniclers’ account of early British history. Detailing the Britons’ downfall so that it “may continually serve as a warning to other peoples,” Fordun explains that they fall from power when they lose God’s support due to “their unending civil strife, their delight in vile sins, their abandonment of divine worship, their presumption in electing new kings while ignoring their rightful kings” (III.49.28–32). Similarly, the Picts, after falling out with their former allies the Scots, ally “with the pagan Saxons for the purpose of exterminating the Scots” (IV.3.29–30) from their own lands. The Scots, led by Kenneth MacAlpine, therefore conquer the Picts, with the backing of divine authority.16 Fordun comments,

15. See Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 24–26. 16. Broun, “Scotland before 1100.”



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To those . . . who are in the habit of reading histories it seems not at all amazing if God, the omnipotent ruler of all kings and kingdoms and the wonderful preserver in the case of good deeds but terrifying destroyer in the case of bad deeds, has often permitted mighty peoples and kingdoms to perish, as their sins demanded, and will often permit it in the future. (IV.4.28–34)

Significantly, in introducing this episode Fordun dates Kenneth’s reign as beginning in “the two thousand three hundred and forty-ninth year of [the Scots’] exodus from Egypt under their first king Gaythelos son of Neolus king of the Athenians and under Scota wife of Gaythelos” (IV.3.5–8). Illustrious heritage combines with religious steadfastness to justify the appropriation of power from the backsliding Picts and their pagan allies. Fordun and Bower’s account of Anglo-Scottish relations consistently accords the moral high ground to the Scots, crediting the Scottish church with a pedigree to rival that of the Scottish monarchy. The Scots become Christian in the year 203, long before the Britons (II.40), and their faith is soon confirmed by the special patronage of St. Andrew—who, as Bower is quick to point out, is “the apostle of the Lord, the brother of Simon Peter, older than Peter by birth and first to be called,” even though “second in rank or at least third” (II.58.19–23).17 As the only one of the apostles to outrank Peter by any measure, Andrew provides a top-notch foundational figure for the Scottish church, analogous to Gaythelos in the secular realm. This seems to have been a long-standing association; as Michael Lynch has observed, an apparent twelfth-century revival of the origin myth was accompanied by the growth of St. Andrew’s cult, furthering the “intertwined identity of King, Church, 18 and people.” Strengthening this analogy in Fordun’s Chronica, the ship-borne “translacio” of Andrew’s relics from Patras to Scotland parallels Gaythelos’s voyage, with Andrew portrayed as an active agent who wishes to make the trip “to convert those whom he was not able to convert while he was alive” (II.58.20–21). Patrick Geary reminds us that when “relics are recognized as living persons . . . the translatio becomes the story of how an important powerful individual leaves his home, wanders through many dangers, and finally is welcomed into a position of honor and authority in a new community.”19 Gaythelos and Andrew share this prototypical narrative of translation and foun 17. I’m grateful to Mark Bruce for pointing out that here, as elsewhere in the early sections of their history, Fordun and Bower copy language almost word-for-word from later documents (here, the Declaration of Arbroath), thereby increasing the ideological correspondence between these distant ancestors and their later descendants. 18. Lynch, Scotland: A New History, 93. 19. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics, 126.

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dation. Fordun tells how Andrew’s relics are partitioned following his death, with one portion carried off to Constantinople and one portion preserved at the instruction of an angel and entrusted to an abbot called Regulus for transport to “the western regions under the west-north-west at the world’s end” (II.59.7). Regulus is told that God will choose the exact site by causing his ship to wreck there; furthermore, “since that place has been chosen by God, it will be an apostolic see for ever and a firm rock of the faith. . . . So the kingdom in which it is situated will be a steady, strong anchor, and it will be famous for its devotion to the apostle to all the faithful” (II.59.19–24). Although the relics arrive in Scotland at a time when the Scots themselves have been temporarily driven out by the Picts, this has the effect of giving the see of St. Andrews “absolute primacy” in Britain; when the Scots resume authority, Andrew’s relics become part of their inheritance.20 In establishing this apostolic lineage, linking the Scottish church to Christ through only the intermediary of St. Andrew, Fordun and Bower also claim a prominent place for Scotland in the ancestry of the English church. Thus, in their account of the 1176 council of Northampton, at which the English church attempts to bring the Scottish church under its sway, the impassioned retort of the Scottish clergy (probably composed by Fordun) accuses the English of “trying to suppress your own mother, namely the Scottish church, which has been from the outset catholic and free” (VIII.26.35–37). Throughout the narrative, the Scottish church repeatedly has to bail out its southern neighbors, who frequently lapse into sin and neglect their religious duties. After the Christian Britons lose their kingdom to the “heathen” Anglo-Saxons, “the unrelenting enemies of the true God and the Christian religion” (III.17.4– 5), it takes a long while to affect these newcomers’ permanent conversion, which—predictably—does not go smoothly. Bower inserts a long narrative of St. Augustine’s struggles to convert the West Saxons, including a xenophobic legend of how they mock the saint’s efforts by attaching fishtails to his garments. Bower seems to take particular delight in relating how God, angered by their insolence to his messenger, “smote them in their hinder parts, giving them everlasting shame so that in the private parts both of themselves and their descendants all alike were born with a tail” (III.33.11–13). More plausibly, Fordun tells of how the sons of Æthelfrith, king of Northumbria, driven out by civil war and their father’s murder, flee to Scotland and receive Christianity from “the holy fathers whose glorious presence shed constant lustre upon Scotland at that time” (III.40.23–24), only to relapse into idolatry upon regaining their kingdom. 20. MacQueen and MacQueen, Scotichronicon, I.58, n.



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Fordun and Bower’s account of Anglo-Scottish church relations becomes especially pointed when they turn to the Scottish church’s role in the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Basing his account on Bede’s, Fordun relates how when King Oswald of the Angles is anxious for his people to become Christian, he sends to Scotland for spiritual guidance. The Scots duly send a missionary, but he can make no headway, a failing that Bower attributes to “the sin of the Angles” (III.43.53). However, the Scottish church keeps at it, and three successive Scottish saints, Aidan, Finan, and Colman, succeed in converting four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, despite the fact that the Angles continue to try their patience. After only three years, St. Colman “could not endure the ill-will of the learned Angles and so he relinquished his bishopric and returned to his own country” (III.46.4–5). By attributing Colman’s departure to the apparently inexplicable ingratitude of the Angles, Fordun “glosses over” the fact that Colman’s departure was occasioned by a significant defeat: the Northumbrian church’s decision at the 663 Synod of Whitby to adopt the Roman rather than the Celtic date for Easter.21 Rather than acknowledge this, Fordun substitutes unfounded “ill-will” for theological dispute. The Scots maintain this moral high ground throughout his account, and eventually the pride of the English church results in a definitive schism: When the native-born clergy of the English had grown in number—this increase was mainly due to the instruction of the Scots—instead of showing gratitude they began to be resentful of their saintly teachers and to find a great variety of opportunities for forcing them to return to Scotland or for finding the burden which had been laid upon them impossible to endure. (III.48.6–12)

This willful disruption of spiritual lineage occasions civil as well as religious strife, so that “there occurred no peace or very little between the kingdoms” (III.48.13–14)—despite what Fordun portrays as the admirable restraint of the Scots. When approached by the pagan Danes with overtures of friendship and allegiance against the English, they rightly reply that “a Christian prince would never be permitted to give help to pagan infidels against fellow Christians, even if they were his enemies” (IV.20.18–21). This sense of Christian brotherhood is admittedly tenuous, as the Scots’ objections to the alliance disappear with the conversion of the Danes; yet their readiness to forego military advantage for religious considerations contrasts favorably with the English church’s instigation of discord. 21. MacQueen and MacQueen, Scotichronicon, III.46n2.

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In this depiction, the manifold sins of the English against the church are compounded by the severe political transgression of treason: a pattern that, according to the law of translatio imperii, leads to their repeated punishment by conquest. In the eighth century, Fordun records, the Angles “miserably occupied themselves without ceasing in slaughtering and proscribing their own kings” (III.56.7–8). Æthelred, for example, secures the throne by murdering his brother St. Edward and is then murdered in turn. Bower introduces Fordun’s chapter on “The accursed treachery of the Northumbrians against their kings” (III.59) with his own disparaging comments on these “criminal murders, unheard of betrayals and proscriptions” (III.58.29–30); as late as Book XIII, he still cross-references the reader to this event to illustrate that “more than all other peoples [the English] are intent on treachery” (XIII.25.33–34). Book III’s fractious view of the English is juxtaposed with Book IV’s account of “the true succession of the kings of Scots” (IV.1.1). As Roger Mason has aptly observed, “The real hero of Fordun’s chronicle is the Scottish royal line as a whole, a line stretching back into the mists of prehistory” and marked by legitimate hereditary succession.22 Although Fordun and Bower are unable to gloss over all interruptions in the Scottish royal line (chapters 35–37 record the murder of Kenneth II and usurpation by Constantine the Bald), these are portrayed as temporary aberrations in a largely stable succession, while the disruptions on the English side are taken as typical indications of the English character. Thus, Fordun depicts the ninth-century Danish invasions as a divinely warranted sanction against the English: “God Omnipotent despatched against them savage, pagan peoples like swarms of bees . . . who from the beginning of king Æthelwulf ’s reign right up to the arrival of the Normans throughout almost two hundred and thirty years destroyed this sinful land from sea to sea” (IV.40.13–19). As the above passage suggests, Fordun construes this divine chastisement as a mere prelude to the Norman Conquest, which he characteristically attributes to the degeneracy of the English in both the secular and religious realms. He includes an entire chapter, largely drawn from William of Malmesbury, on “The wretched and treacherous life which the English lived” (V.15). He places chief among their sins their confirmation of the powerful Harold Godwinson as king following the death of Edward the Confessor, rather than the hereditary heir Edgar the Ætheling, who at age fourteen was dangerously young to rule the fractious kingdom. Fordun insists that the English are to blame:

22. Mason, “Kingship, Tyranny and the Right to Resist,” 144.



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In the sight of God because they ought not to have rejected the man whom He himself had chosen to reign by his descent from such great kings his ancestors, since he was born of the legitimate line of succession. . . . In the sight of the people since to their own undoing and the everlasting shame and reproach of all the indigenous inhabitants of the kingdom, not according to legal rights but following the emotions of their hearts, the nobles raised a man to rule over them who had no right whatsoever to reign. (V.13.30–41)

For Fordun, disruption of lineage always carries a heavy price: in this case, it leads directly to England’s Conquest by “William the Bastard,” who “harshly and cunningly handed over this land to the savagery of the Normans for its destruction” (V.14.58–59). This emphasis on the fractured succession occasioned by the Norman Conquest is a theme that Fordun repeatedly returns to in order to differentiate the legitimacy of the Scottish nation from that of the English.23 Moreover, Fordun and Bower invoke the Norman Conquest—especially when combined with the earlier victories of the Danes—as evidence for the political destiny of the Scots, as well as their moral superiority. A prophecy supposedly recorded during the time of King Æthelred neatly illustrates the chroniclers’ sense of history as the unfolding of divine imperative, inexorably moving toward the ultimate dominance of the Scottish nation: Because the English are given over to treachery and drunkenness and disregard for the house of God they will have to be crushed first by the Danes, then by the Normans and thirdly by the Scots, whom they regard as worthless. Two of these faults, namely treachery and greed, have been proved to be true first through the Danes, secondly through the Normans; the third, that of neglect of the house of God, still remains to be proved true through 24 the Scots. (IV.39.86–93)

The Scots’ role as instruments of spiritual retribution implies their own virtue as much as English perfidy; the Scottish maintenance of monarchial integrity and Christian faith throughout the periods of turmoil that have afflicted Eng 23. Mason, in “Kingship, Tyranny and the Right to Resist,” comments on the “pervasive influence of this brand of patriotic conservatism” throughout the literature and political action of late medieval Scotland (147). 24. Fordun takes this prophecy from Higden’s Polychronicon (II.173–75), although it ultimately derives from Henry of Huntingdon. Fordun records additional prophecies of Scotland’s greatness at I.28.33–35; III.4.23–26; III.22.21–33; and III.23.1–25; Bower includes several as well, at III.23.29–41; XII.4.41–55; XII.23.239–54; and XV.30.56–92.

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land attests to their favored status in the eyes of God.25 Fordun envisions a future realignment of power in which the Scots will assume temporal as well as spiritual authority, thereby addressing the current imbalance in which the less righteous nation attempts to hold sway over the more virtuous one. Scotland’s triumph would confirm both England’s continued degeneracy under the Normans, and Scotland’s own role as an instrument of divine wrath and as a legitimate inheritor of political authority. In asserting Scotland’s right to political dominance, Fordun and Bower employ legal as well as religious rhetoric, substantiating the Scots’ moral rights through hereditary claims that unite the various peoples of Britain—Picts, Britons, and Anglo-Saxons—in the Scottish royal line. The Picts intermarry with Scottish women from the first and agree to take their kings from the maternal (Scottish) line in case of a disputed succession. Thus when King Kenneth subdues the Picts and “with the consent of God .  .  . form[s] one kingdom out of two” (IV.9.13–16), the resulting unity marks the restoration of familial bonds as well as the authentication of the Scots’ ancient rights. More important to the chroniclers’ argument is the ancestral linkage of the Scots to the Britons, which goes back to the time of Arthur.26 As with the origin myth (discussed in Chapter 2), Scottish assertions of autonomy come into direct conflict with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie, whose hero Arthur had supposedly brought all Britain under his sway—a mythical conquest that, like Brutus’s purported reign over the entire island, was used to support English assertions of hegemony.27 Thus, as Nicola Royan has observed, “in order to maintain the Scottish claim to independence . . . Scottish historiographers needed to undermine Arthurian claims. However, to omit Arthur and to ignore the Galfridian narrative altogether leaves rather 28 too many holes in the chronological pattern.” Therefore, Fordun and Bower 25. Although the Scots suffer periods of civil strife, they are never subject to a foreign people—a vital difference to Fordun. The one real crisis in their history comes in approximately 360 ad, when the Britons and Picts unite against the Scots and defeat them in battle, slaying their king. However, “the remainder who survived the war left their lands. . . . They chose to live free, dwelling as strangers in a foreign land rather than to live in their own land under the yoke of slavery” (II.58.36–40). Soon afterward the Scots return to conquer the Picts and resume control. 26. See Purdie and Royan, Scots and Medieval Arthurian Legend, especially Royan, “Fine Art of Faint Praise,” and Wood, “Where Does Britain End?.” For a positive Scottish reception of Arthurian legend, see Boardman, “Late Medieval Scotland and the Matter of Britain,” and Alexander, “Late Medieval Scottish Attitudes to the Figure of King Arthur.” Royan, “Representations of Arthur in Scotland,” stresses the fluidity of the Arthurian myth. 27. Edward I cites Arthur’s conquests as precedent in his 1301 letter to Boniface VIII; see Stones, Anglo-Scottish Relations, 197. 28. Royan, “Fine Art of Faint Praise,” 44.



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engage with Geoffrey’s narrative only in order to masterfully turn it back on itself, exploiting its ambiguities so as to justify Scottish rather than English dominance. Here, as elsewhere in the Scotichronicon, the legitimate succession of the English comes into question. Fordun hints that Arthur’s “kingship was not strictly his by right” (III.24.17); Bower adds that “he had been born out of wedlock” as a result of Uther’s ingenious ruse to commit adultery through “the unheard of art of the prophet Merlin” (III.24.18–20). Fordun contrasts Arthur’s birth with that of his close relative Anna (either his sister or his aunt, a point on which Geoffrey contradicts himself, much to Fordun’s delight). According to Fordun and Bower, Anna “was born of lawful wedlock and had married the Scottish earl Loth lord of Lothian and king of Norway. . . . By her he had two sons the noble Gawain and the elder Modred . . . and a daughter also, that saintly woman called Thaney the mother of St Kentigern” (III.24.23– 28). Most familiar as the villain of the Arthurian world, Mordred nevertheless has the advantages of legitimate birth, a hereditary claim to the throne, and most of all, being Scottish.29 Therefore, Bower argues, “through Anna by right of legitimate succession the kingdom of Britain was due to Modred” (III.24.29–30). Retelling history from Mordred’s perspective, in which Arthur usurps the throne of the rightful (Scottish) heir, Fordun and Bower reverse the traditional polarities of good and evil in the Arthurian legend, and in so doing reverse the thrust of Anglo-Scottish assertions of sovereignty. Yet the Scots’ main claim to the English throne rests in their ties to the Anglo-Saxon rulers displaced by the Normans; depicting the establishment of this familial connection as a defining moment in the course of translatio imperii, Fordun and Bower consequently modify their typically anti-English stance. While they never waver in their position that the English brought the Norman conquest upon themselves, Harold’s usurpation of the throne allows Fordun and Bower to walk a fine line between celebrating the rightful Anglo-Saxon monarchy and censuring those who allow its overthrow. Quoting from Jocelin of Furness, Bower professes great admiration for this line of “saintly kings . . . of whom each successive person is perceived to have been more conspicuously outstanding in the Christian religion than the one before” (VI.2.3–5). This royal line culminates in St. Edward the Confessor, in whom “the [sanctity] of all his predecessors came together as if by transfusion” (VI.2.5–6). Jocelin’s depiction of the Anglo-Saxon royal line growing greater with each succeeding generation accords well with Fordun and Bower’s belief that great deeds are both cumulative and inheritable, even across national borders. With the death of Harold at Hastings, Edgar the Ætheling and his sister St. Margaret soon 29. See Kelly, “Arthurian Material in the Scotichronicon.”

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become the only English claimants to the throne; fleeing the invading Normans, they are blown by a storm (reminiscent of the one that transports St. Andrew’s relics) to Scotland, where Margaret weds the Scottish King Malcolm III. Edgar’s subsequent death leaves Margaret and her children by Malcolm as the only surviving legitimate heirs to the monarchies of two kingdoms. Fordun’s interpretation of these events stresses God’s role and purpose: So the Lord himself, wishing that saintly royal line, that was standing firm, abandoned by the nobles but not by Him, to possess the land and reign over it as well, with a happy omen for the Scots, graciously united it with the Scottish royal line. From them under God’s providence kings sitting on the royal throne in succession and to this day have flourished, and will flourish as long as God wills it. (V.13.49–55)

Depicting Margaret as a type of the biblical Esther, marrying “by divine providence for the salvation of her fellow countrymen” (V.17.6–7), Fordun exalts her as the bearer of all the best qualities of her royal predecessors; from St. Edward in particular, “as from a pure spring, a stream of religious life poured forth into his great-niece St. Margaret” (VI.2.1–8), and thence to her Scottish offspring.30 In the Liber Extravagans that Bower composes as a sort of epilogue to the Scotichronicon, he reinforces the contemporary political import of this union, proposing to relate “the extent to which the Scottish lineage is now mixed with the Saxon, and Britain becomes different with a lineage of mixed peoples; and how the present king of Scotland ought by the right that is his due to be set over the kingdoms of both Scotland and England.”31 The alliance of the Scottish and Anglo-Saxon royal houses thus unites moral and political authority, giving the Scots a legitimate claim to the English throne as the divinely chosen bearers of this saintly lineage, while insinuating that the Normans are merely the illegitimate instruments of divine wrath. Fordun and Bower thus characterize the Normans as temporary interlopers in a divinely ordained lineage extending between an origin in Greece and Egypt, and an endpoint in which the Scots will fulfill their destiny by assuming control over the entire island. This idea is considerably older than the Scotichronicon; Bower quotes Jocelin of Furness, writing in the early thirteenth century to the Scottish King William I: “Once the hereditary right to the Eng 30. Broun, in “The Birth of Scottish History,” notes that Ailred of Rievaulx (twelfth century) was the first to trace the genealogy of the Scottish royal line to pre-Conquest English royalty (11). Fordun bases much of his account of the English monarchy (Scotichronicon, 3.45–59) on Ailred’s Genealogia. 31. “Liber Extravagans,” 9:54–127 (63).



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lish kingdom had passed down to you by rightful direct lines of descent in successive generations, [Edward] would have made you the rulers, had not the violent plundering by the Normans (as God has allowed) prevented it until the appointed time” (VI.1.32–36). Placed within a lengthy Latin chronicle devoted to charting the rise and fall of kingdoms as a visible manifestation of God’s providence, this old notion assumes a new urgency. Jocelin’s reference to “an appointed time” takes on the authority of prophecy, bolstered by the weight of evidence that Fordun and Bower amass to demonstrate that God takes an active role in transferring power between kingdoms on the basis of their virtue. The unbroken Scottish lineage, strengthened by infusions from Picts, Britons, and Anglo-Saxons and backed by God himself, presages a future in which the Scots will either absorb, conquer, or simply outlast the Anglo-Norman rulers of England, thus completing the process of translatio imperii. Moreover, Fordun and Bower expect to play a role in creating this future. They view themselves and their texts not merely as documenting the transfer of power between kingdoms, but as actively helping to bring about Jocelin’s “appointed time” by influencing a significant number of powerful Scots to act in accordance with their vision of divine providence. Considerations of audience—both real and projected—therefore become important in assessing the historians’ aims. Although Fordun’s political goals are clear from his pointed refutations of English histories, he seldom explicitly discusses either his reasons for writing or his expected audience. Bower, however, has a good deal to say on both subjects, and his musings on the interplay of church, state, and historiography reveal much about his conceptions of Scottish society, as well as his vision of his own text as an intervention in Scotland’s cultural and political development.

STATE-SPONSORED HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE POLITICIZATION OF THE PAST At the conclusion of the Scotichronicon, Bower tellingly declares “Non Scotus est Christe cui liber non placet iste”: “Christ! He is not a Scot who is not pleased with this book!” (XVI.39).32 This peculiar implication that the pleasure taken in a historical narrative can determine the legitimacy of an individual’s Scottish identity emphasizes Bower’s sense of the crucial interplay between past and present in shaping national consciousness. Envisioning nationalism 32. An early version of this section of the chapter appeared in Terrell, “‘Lynealy discendit of þe devill.’” The material is used here with the permission of Studies in Philology.

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as fundamentally tied to the pleasures of history, Bower sees his chronicle as a compendium of Scottishness that will facilitate nationalist sentiment among his audience. This sense of a textually based community extends Fordun’s vision of a national identity primarily defined through genealogy; in his explicit discussions of text and audience, Bower joins reading to lineage as a means of forming bonds to both ancestors and contemporaries. Lineage and chronicle, blood and text, emerge in the Scotichronicon as equally powerful means of establishing a united Scottish identity. Moreover, in proffering his chronicle as a litmus test of genuine Scottishness, Bower assumes not only the existence of a recognizable and exclusive community of Scots but also that his audience will recognize themselves in his depiction of a community whose self-perceptions are shaped by their choice of reading material. In practice, Bower’s readership would have been limited to those with a good understanding of Latin, which largely meant well-educated churchmen like himself, who were intimately involved with the administration of Scotland. Unlike Fordun, who seems to have been mostly self-educated,33 Bower held two university degrees, in canon law and theology, from the then new university at St Andrews. He was also a comparatively powerful figure: during his thirty years as abbot of the Augustinian monastery on the island of Inchcolm, “he ranked as one of the ecclesiastical magnates of Scotland.”34 As such, he was active in the affairs of two royal administrations: those of James I and of the minority government of James II. His various governmental duties included attending parliament, collecting taxes, serving on judicial commit35 tees, and witnessing charters, in addition to various minor functions. These duties would have brought him into contact with a number of other highranking churchmen and magnates. Judging from the manuscript evidence, Bower’s audience was, indeed, largely composed of churchmen, both minor clerics and those who held powerful positions similar to Bower’s own. Identifiable fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century owners of full or partial manuscripts of the Scotichronicon include Paisley Abbey; Simon Finlay, chaplain of the altar of St. Michael in St. Giles church, Edinburgh; the Cistercian abbey at Coupar Angus; the Carthusian monks of the Charterhouse at Perth; the abbot of Dunfermline (possi 33. One of the manuscripts of the Scotichronicon (British Library MS Royal 13 E.X, also known as the “Black Book of Paisley”) attributes the opening sections to “Johanem de Fordoun capellanum ecclesie Aberdonensis”—chaplain of the church of Aberdeen. This is all that is known of Fordun, apart from Bower’s remarks in his Introduction to the Coupar Angus MS. 34. Watt, “Biography of Bower,” 9:206. 35. Watt, “Biography of Bower,” 9:204–8. Elaborating on Bower’s social role, Watt later adds that “university-trained canon lawyers played an exceptionally important part in Scottish society” (342).



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bly Richard Bothwell); an unnamed bishop of Aberdeen; and Bishop George Brown of Dunkeld.36 John Gibson, a canon of Glasgow; Patrick Russell, a Carthusian monk in Perth; and John Law, a canon of St. Andrews, made their own recensions.37 William Scheves, archbishop of St. Andrews, took a particular interest in Bower’s work, commissioning a copy of the abridgement known as the Liber Pluscardenensis, and acquiring the full Scotichronicon as well as Fordun’s Chronica.38 If Bower was trying to reach an influential audience of churchmen, judging from the surviving evidence, he seems to have succeeded. However, it is likely that the records of manuscript possession fail to adequately represent the full spectrum of Bower’s audience. One known reader of the Scotichronicon who seems never to have commissioned his own copy is Gilbert de Hay, the “university graduate, knight, and literary figure” who borrowed the Corpus manuscript from Inchcolm abbey and annotated the text (focusing on events that he had personally witnessed).39 Bower himself tells us that he reluctantly took up the task of expanding Fordun’s chronicle “at the pressing request” (XVI.39.19–20) of Sir David Stewart of Rosyth, a minor noble whose father had been killed at the battle of Shrewsbury. Sir David himself seems to have been generally well regarded at court, although he played little part there; outside of commissioning the Scotichronicon, his fame rests on his abduction of a young heiress to wed to his son.40 His patronage of Bower demonstrates that at least some of Scotland’s minor magnates possessed enough education to understand complex Latin and were sufficiently intrigued by their nation’s past to read lengthy chronicles. As Bower’s most recent editor has observed, “How typical this was of lairds of his standing, we have no means of judging; but Bower gives no hint that this was an excep41 tional case.” Furthering this point, Mapstone notes that Bower’s work seems to have been immediately popular: “Right from the start the Scotichronicon had a constituency both within and outside the principal political circles of the kingdom.”42 Bower himself conceived of his audience in broad terms. He refers to both “military men” as well as “other refined readers among churchmen” as expected members of his audience (XIV.38.47–48). More intriguingly, in the 36. Watt, “Biography of Bower,” 9:186–98. Mapstone gives a full history of the Scotichronicon’s early reception in “Scotichronicon’s First Readers.” 37. Mapstone, “Scotichronicon’s First Readers,” 35. 38. Mapstone, “Scotichronicon’s First Readers,” 39–40; Chesnutt, “Dalhousie Manuscript,” 79. 39. Watt, Scotichronicon, 9:50. Also see Mapstone, “Scotichronicon’s First Readers,” 32–33. 40. Borthwick, “Bower’s Patron.” 41. Watt, “Bower as a Source for His Own Times,” 9:349. 42. Mapstone, “Scotichronicon’s First Readers,” 40.

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Preface to his work in the Corpus manuscript, he sets out his hope that the Scotichronicon will benefit a significant cross-section of Scottish society: In this volume, I believe, rulers will find how to avoid the dangers of war and uncertain issues, [the] religious will learn the rudiments of the monastic life, laymen will learn fruitful lessons, preachers will find tales with a moral. By the force of its example kings will become more cautious, [the] religious will be instructed more in accordance with their rule, and all those who are 43 depressed will be given over to joy by reading it. (114–20)

As a portrait of Bower’s imagined audience, this passage indicates just how wide-ranging were Bower’s aspirations for his chronicle, as well as how allencompassing his belief in its efficacy. This diverse group, bound together by the shared pleasures of history, forms Bower’s imagined community of nationalist Scots. Proposing a further extension of Bower’s audience, L. J. Engels has concluded from an examination of Bower’s Latin that at least certain portions of Bower’s text “give the impression . . . that they are not primarily intended to be read by an educated and exacting public, but to be read and simultaneously 44 translated by a cleric to a lay audience interested in national history.” This suggestion accords well with Bower’s determination to reach as many of his fellow countrymen as possible. His aim to achieve the widest possible circulation is further confirmed by his abbreviation of the Scotichronicon (now represented by the Coupar Angus MS), in order, as he says in its Introduction, “to provide a summary and lighten the load of those transcribing and wishing to copy what follows” (66–67).45 Although Bower eventually adds nearly as much as he omits, he does produce a more focused version, centered more closely on Scotland’s history. The production of this version essentially involved recomposing the entirety of the Scotichronicon, a tremendous undertaking 46 that attests to Bower’s zeal for facilitating the dissemination of his work. Yet Bower’s ideal reader remains the young James II, whom Bower clearly hopes will regard the Scotichronicon as a useful guide upon which to model his own behavior. In aiming to reach this royal audience, Bower was preparing the way for his chronicle to directly influence the running of the Scottish 43. “Prologue and Preface in Corpus MS,” 9:2–11. Parenthetical citations refer to line numbers. 44. Engels, “Bower’s Latin,” 314. 45. “Introduction in Coupar Angus MS,” 9:12–19. Parenthetical citations refer to line numbers. 46. Watt, in his “Biography of Bower,” clarifies how Bower went about composing the two versions.



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nation. It has frequently been remarked that Bower viewed history largely in exemplary terms, that he “regarded his book not just as a chronicle but as a means of spreading moral guidance.”47 Bower expects his work to help shape the future by providing a collection of exemplary and cautionary narratives upon which future generations, and particularly Scotland’s rulers, may model 48 their own lives. Throughout his chronicle, as Mapstone has observed, Bower “writes with a marked sense of the bearing of the past upon the present” that often imparts a sense of urgency to his text, and nowhere more so than in his advice to the young king.49 Explaining the value of history in a concluding passage of the Scotichronicon, Bower expresses his particular hope that James II will learn the lessons of the past: May at least our present king, I ask the Almighty, be aroused by reading this book, and then proceed to rule by good deeds of a temporal kind so that he may hope for eternal rewards. In addition I pray to Christ by the gift of his mercy to bring the king up as the kind of man who will give us something worthy of eternal memory (just as we have from the outstanding kings his ancestors), which we may transmit to posterity with the help of writings about him. (XVI.39.61–68)

Bower imagines government and historiography as mutually constitutive projects: a ruler’s historical reading will help shape his actions into praiseworthy deeds, which in turn will provide material for future chroniclers to record. Again, identity is defined in relation to the text: the kingship of the young James II will be measured by the degree to which he emulates the commendable qualities of his predecessors, as well as by the extent to which his own rule is worthy of being acclaimed in writing. Indeed, Bower envisions a world in which government and historiography will become even more closely linked, thereby consolidating the power of historical narrative to inspire nationalism with the authority of the government to act in the nation’s interest. Near the end of the Scotichronicon Bower sets out a plan for the future production of history: It has been suitably laid down in very many countries (including England, as I have heard) that each monastery founded by kings should have its scribe or writer appointed from among the community, who should make a dated 47. Watt, “Bower the Chronicler,” 9:320. Also see Watt, “Bower the Churchman.” 48. See Mapstone, “Bower on Kingship,” for an analysis of the Scotichronicon as advisory literature. 49. Mapstone, “Bower on Kingship,” 325.

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record of all noteworthy things during a king’s reign which affect the kingdom and neighborhood at any rate as seems to be the truth of the matter; and at the first [parliament or] general council after a king’s death all the annalists should meet and produce openly their sworn statements or writings. The council should choose wise men who are skilled and expert in such matters to examine the writings, make a careful collation of them, extract a summary of what has been brought together, and compile a chronicle. And they should store away the writings of the copyists [of this work] in monastic archives as authenticated chronicles which can be trusted, lest by the passing of time memories of happenings in the kingdom perish. I would advise our king to make arrangements along these lines. (XVI.39.38–51)

Bower’s ideal scenario of historical production takes the comingling of history and politics implicit in Fordun’s thoughtful fabrication of historical precedent one step further. As Watt has noted, “Bower was apparently on the side of an authoritarian alliance of church and state” in his political dealings as well as in his writings, yet this proposal also shows a real concern for the preservation of Scotland’s history.50 In his view, the supply of reliable historical narrative is too important to be left to chance; volunteer historians like Fordun and himself may not always crop up when needed, or may have incomplete information. Instead, the production of history should be managed through the official channels of church and state, working in concert to produce the fullest and most reliable record possible—an authoritative version of events that can be trusted to transmit the collective memory of a nation to the future. As a vision of a harmoniously united community coming together to write itself into being, this proposal is a triumph of Bower’s nationalist imagination; yet its anxious parenthetical reference to England’s possibly superior method of historical production reveals the inherent dialogism of his historiography. Like Fordun, Bower advocates English methods of historiography as the best means of competing against English ideology. In reality, Bower’s fears about the superior organization of English historiography were fanciful; according to John Taylor, “one feature of chronicle writing in fourteenth-century England was the absence of official history and of an official writing centre.”51 Yet Bower’s suspicion of the English and their histories is firmly rooted, leading him to be most distrustful when there appears to be least need: in his view, the English

50. Watt, “Biography of Bower,” 9:207. 51. Taylor, English Historical Literature, 45.



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know very well how to pretend that they are friends, although in their hearts they are enemies; they have been reconciled with words on the outside, but they are raging with hatred on the inside. They know how to twist their faces away from their intentions, their words from their feelings, their language from their minds, and their discourse from their meaning. Hence even you, the Scottish people, though you exercise every precaution . . . you must first of all defend your interests, because their malice is on the alert especially when they feel that in the light of your abundant security you are not on 52 your guard. (XIII.19–22, 42–48)

Thus, when Bower attended a council in 1433 to determine the Scottish response to a peace embassy from England, he eagerly rejected England’s 53 offer. In this, he was in the majority; his animosity toward the English seems to have made him neither “an unusual case nor a uniquely bitter individual” among his contemporaries.54 Yet Bower’s Anglophobia is such that he prefers even to avoid relying on English sources; after the twelfth century, whenever possible he turns to French sources such as Vincent of Beauvais, even for information about 55 England. Indeed, J. B. Voorbij has observed that even in adapting Vincent’s work, Bower “positively avoided copying passages dealing with England,” even when “the result appears illogical.”56 However, this is not to say that he had no knowledge of more recent English chroniclers, only that he patently avoids mentioning them, and that his borrowings can be difficult to detect. Certainly Bower was familiar with Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, “the most famous history in fourteenth-century England”; even the title of the Scotichronicon may be a deliberate echo.57 However, he mentions Higden’s work by name only once, tellingly calling it the “Policronicon Anglorum,” or “Polychronicon of the English” (IX.6.4–5), and the context of this invocation reveals much about his attitude toward the proper uses of English historiography. He cites it as the source of a tale about “how the kings of England are descended on one 52. Watt, “Bower as a Source for His Own Times,” 9:352–53, collects other instances of Bower’s Anglophobia. 53. Watt, “Biography of Bower,” 9:206–7; Scotichronicon 8:24. 54. MacDonald, “Profit, Politics and Personality,” 124. 55. Watt, “Bower the Chronicler,” 9:317. For example, Bower relies substantially on Vincent for his account of Thomas Becket. 56. Voorbij, “Bower and Vincent of Beauvais,” 9:273. Royan and Broun, “Versions of Scottish Nationhood,” suggest that Bower’s hatred of the English may be personal, “perhaps the result of English piratical attacks on Inchcolm and Richard II’s destruction of Lothian (including Bower’s birthplace of Haddington) in 1385” (172). 57. Taylor, Universal Chronicle of Ranulf Higden, 103.

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side from the race or family of the devil” (IX.6). The story relates that Geoffrey count of Anjou, an ancestor of Henry II of England, married a beautiful woman who refused to remain in church through the mass. When forced to do so, she “flew out of the church window in full view of everyone . . . and was never seen again. Afterwards Richard king of England and brother of King John used to tell this story, saying that no one should be surprised if members of such a family hated each other, as they had come from the devil and they would go to the devil” (IX.6.28–30). For a text concerned with documenting the intimate relation of ancestors and descendants, this is damning evidence, made more so by its substantiation in an English text. By prominently citing Higden as the source of this revelation, Bower implies that even the English themselves not only acknowledge but actually boast of their diabolical descent. He thus admits English evidence only to turn it against its source. Bower’s distrust of English historiography may stem from Edward I’s deployment of English chronicles during the Great Cause; like Fordun, Bower is clearly concerned for history’s potential to function as a direct tool of the state, providing evidence of political precedent that can be invoked to counter competing claims. His tendency to locate identity in textuality—combined with the fact that his sections of the Scotichronicon tend to deal with later history, for which more documentary evidence exists—means that he tends to accord textual evidence a higher status than does Fordun. Thus he includes the full text of numerous documents in his chronicle in order to preserve them (including the only surviving copies of Bisset’s Instructiones and Processus) and envisions no higher crime than the destruction of historical records.58 In his Introduction to the Coupar Angus MS of the Scotichronicon, Bower repeats the accusation (originally made by Bisset) that the “ferocious torturer” Edward I on the pretext (as he pretended) of finding out which of them [Bruce or Balliol] could claim the fuller right to the kingdom through a search of ancient writings, after all the libraries of the kingdom had been searched and authentic and ancient chronicles of history had been placed in his hands, he took some of these away with him to England, and the rest he contemptibly 59 consigned to be burned in the flames. (21–27) 58. Watt, Scotichronicon, 9:246–49, lists the forty-one documents that Bower includes. In addition, four of the surviving manuscripts of Fordun’s Chronica contain an appendix (not clearly linked to Fordun’s work) of documents dating from 1296–1320, which may or may not have been associated with Fordun’s work in his own time. Although their contents overlap with Bower’s documents, Bower appears to have used a different collection as his source. 59. Watt notes that although most of Edward’s researches concerned English records, he did appropriate some of the Scottish royal archives. He posits that Bower’s account is “pre-



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In removing historical records, as Bisset had pointed out, Edward was separating the Scottish people from any convenient means of arguing against historically based claims. For Bower, loss of history equals loss of identity; only conscientious historiography can resurrect these foundational texts. As his chief accusation against Edward is this attempted destruction of the Scottish past, so his chief praise of Fordun is that he set his hand to valiant deeds, inspired and on fire with patriotic zeal. He never abandoned what he had begun until by laborious studies (for which he scoured England as well as other neighboring provinces) he made a new collection from what had been lost. . . . The diligence of this man is to be commended, considering that he himself applied his mind to recording everything for posterity which is shown to be the concern not only of man but the divine will. (31–42)

What Edward stole from the Scottish people, Fordun restored. Bower casts Fordun’s imaginative synthesis of earlier myth and legend as a textual recovery, laboriously gained through an exhaustive investigation of records and consultations with numerous scholars throughout Ireland and England. Although Bower’s account of Fordun’s travels cannot be confirmed, his emphasis on the reclamation of textual authority demonstrates Bower’s own investment in the written record. For him, the proliferation of Fordun’s sources reveals the integrity of mythical history, and attests not only to the truth-value of his narrative as a foundation for Scottish identity, but to Fordun’s own identity as a true Scot. The pleasures of history link Fordun, Bower, and their audience together in a textual and national community consolidated around the past. Bower’s proposal for a state-sponsored methodology of historical production aims, by increasing the level of authority inherent in the historical record, to fortify this national identity. Thus history’s utility, in Bower’s view, lies not only in its capacity to provide political precedent and easy reference for future disputes, nor even solely in its ability to function as a repository for the identity of a people and nation, but in its ongoing power to forge that identity out of the great deeds of the past and translate it into the future. In strengthening the cohesiveness of the Scots and promoting the values of their nation, historiography helps to galvanize the process of translatio imperii that will ultimately result in the Scots fulfilling God’s plan for their preeminence. sumably . . . what was in the mid-15th century believed as an explanation for the absence in Scotland of chronicles reaching back before the 1290s” (“Introduction in Coupar Angus MS” 18n25–27).

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Legacies of Nationalist Historiography and the Founding of Scottish Poetry

of James IV, the Spanish ambassador Pedro de Ayala notes that James “is a good historian. He has read many Latin and French histories, and profited by them.”1 James himself would attest to the importance of history in 1507, when he granted a patent giving Walter Chepman and Andrew Myllar the right to set up a printing press in Edinburgh. In this patent, James frames the advent of Scottish printing as a matter of national importance: Chepman and Myllar act “at our instance and request, for our plesour, the honour and proffit of our Realme and Liegis.” Accordingly, James expects them to serve the common good, through the printing of “the bukis of our Lawis, actis of parliament, croniclis, mess bukis, and portuus efter 2 the use of our Realme, with addicions and legendis of Scottis sanctis.” While James seems particularly interested that religious texts “efter our awin scottis use” supplant English “bukis of Salusbery use,” his inclusion of “croniclis” suggests that he also appreciated the potential of historical writing to bolster 3 national consciousness. Chepman and Myllar would expand this mandate by printing not only the Aberdeen Breviary, but also a good deal of vernacular poetry: much of it, including Hary’s Wallace and works by Dunbar and Kennedy, concerned with Scottish identity. And although James does not explicitly IN HIS 1498 DESCRIPTION



1. Bergenroth, Calendar of Letters, 169. 2. Quoted in Dickson and Edmond, Annals of Scottish Printing, 7. 3. Dickson and Edmond, Annals of Scottish Printing, 8. • 89 •

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call for this poetic output from the new press, he himself was also a reader, writer, and patron of vernacular poetry. James’s dual interest in historiography and poetry hardly made him an atypical reader of his day. Rather, there is abundant evidence that throughout the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the same people were reading, copying, and collecting nationalist historiography and vernacular poetry. And whereas Bower’s original audience was largely composed of churchmen, many of these new readers were lay people. Roger Mason observes that “in the century after (roughly) 1460 the clerical monopoly of the higher reaches of learning was gradually eroded and finally broken by the spread of literacy and education among the lay elite.”4 This newly expanded reading public created not only a market for Chepman and Myllar but also an increased demand for vernacular works and translations. Accordingly, as nationalist and increasingly Anglophobic historiography moved into the vernacular, knowledge of the Scotichronicon and its descendants reached a broader audience. At the same time, Scottish vernacular poetry was flourishing, inspired in part by the example of Chaucer and his fifteenth-century English followers. Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas all write in praise of Chaucer—and if their praise is at times tempered by skepticism, it can still seem worlds away from the xenophobic rhetoric of certain historiographers. Nevertheless, these texts frequently circulated within the same milieu, and, as we shall see in the following chapters, vernacular poets were themselves aware of the nationalist historiographic tradition. In this chapter, I first trace the historiographic legacies of the Scotichronicon, before more closely examining the overlapping manuscript contexts and audiences of nationalist historiography and vernacular poetry.

VERNACULAR HISTORY AND THE POLARIZATION OF THE PAST Notwithstanding Walter Bower’s sometimes grandiose hopes for the future of his nation, his views on the present are less than sanguine. Bower sees himself as living in a troubled age: he complains of “the intolerable tyranny growing quickly everywhere throughout the whole kingdom after the death of our most illustrious King James I” (XV.39.146–48). The turbulent minority of James II doubtless contributed both to Bower’s desire for a strong monarchy and to his fear that Scotland was only sinking further into chaos. Yet his wor

4. Mason, Kingship and the Commonweal, 106.



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ries would ultimately prove to be exaggerated. Despite their unfortunate tendency to die young, the Stewart kings presided over a period of relative calm in Scotland’s history. Jenny Wormald has remarked that between the Wars of Independence and the Reformation, the Scots “had a breathing-space when, to an extent remarkable among European countries, they enjoyed, or were in some cases bored by, years of peace; there were few periods of war in those two centuries.”5 Although the English continued to present a persuasive threat, the Wars of the Roses that occupied the greater part of the fifteenth century prevented the resumption of any serious campaigns against Scotland, and Scotland’s stability and prosperity suffered mainly from internal conflict. Yet, perhaps because English enemies presented a convenient rallying point for Scots weary of internal dissent, in the popular imagination the English threat actually grew during the fifteenth and into the sixteenth century. After active conflict with England had largely ceased, Scottish historians and their readers remained committed to a politicized historiography, as can be seen from the widespread popularity of the Scotichronicon and its descendants. Six manuscripts of the whole Scotichronicon survive, along with four copies of Bower’s abbreviated version, best represented by the Coupar Angus manuscript.6 But its popularity is perhaps best attested by the numerous recensions, imitations, and abbreviations that were produced during the later fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Beginning about the time of the Scotichronicon’s completion in the late 1440s, the tradition of Scottish historical writing expanded into a range of different registers. Latin recensions of the Scotichronicon flourished after the mid-fifteenth century. The early abbreviation (c. 1450–61), known as the Liber Pluscardenensis, exists in a French version as well as in six Latin manuscripts.7 Patrick Russell, a Carthusian monk at Perth, drew on both the longer and shorter versions of the Scotichronicon to produce his own text in about 1480.8 The Trinity College, Dublin, manuscript from the end of the fifteenth century and the Columba House, Edinburgh, manuscript from the beginning of the sixteenth century also rely heavily on Bower’s abbreviated Coupar Angus version.9 Meanwhile, George Brown, bishop of Dunkeld, commissioned the 5. Wormald, Court, Kirk, and Community, 3. 6. For details of these copies, see Watt, Scotichronicon, 9:148–98. An early version of this section of the chapter appeared in Terrell, “‘Lynealy discendit of þe devill.’” The material is used here with the permission of Studies in Philology. 7. Skene, Liber Pluscardenendis. For details of the manuscripts, see Drexler, “Extant Abridgements,” 64. 8. Mapstone, “Scotichronicon’s First Readers,” 35; Royan and Broun, “Versions of Scottish Nationhood,” 173. 9. Drexler, “Extant Abridgements,” 65.

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abbreviation in British Library Harley 4764 sometime between 1497 and 1515, and John Gibson Jr. made his own recension in 1501.10 In the early sixteenth century—probably in the 1520s—the popular Extracta e Variis Cronicis Scotie was compiled by a chronicler who claimed firsthand knowledge of the battle of Flodden.11 John Law would round off this Latin tradition with the chronicle he began in 1521, taking the Scotichronicon as a base text but also including material from various other sources. In addition, several recensions of the Scotichronicon would eventually find their way into the vernacular. Shortly after the Scotichronicon’s composition, the vernacular annals of James II’s reign recorded in the Asloan manuscript as “ane schort memoriale of þe scottis corniklis for addicoun,” sometimes known as the Auchinleck Chronicle, may have been written; these contain two 12 distinct sets of entries for the years 1428–60 and 1420–55. If Sally Mapstone is right to suggest that “what may lie behind this work is a kind of pursuit of Bower’s recommendation that material should be gathered at the end of a reign, or in this case reigns, those of James I and James II, and assembled into some kind of coherent form,” this would demonstrate that Bower’s theory of historiographical production, as well as his text, were being taken seriously by at least some of his readers, although not as part of an officially sanctioned effort.13 The presumed Latin source of what would go on to become the most popular of the short vernacular chronicles was composed c. 1470–95.14 Its later vernacular versions, all dated to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, are recorded in the Dalhousie manuscript of c. 1500 (National Archives of Scotland, Dalhousie Muniments, GD 45/31/I–II) as the Cronycle of Scotland in a Part; in the Asloan manuscript of c. 1515–25 (National Library of Scotland MS 16500) as the Scottis Originale; and in a manuscript of Andrew of Wyntoun’s Original Chronicle of Scotland, dated 1482–1530 (British Library, Royal 17.D.xx).15 As Nicola Royan asserts, these vernacular versions attest 10. Mapstone, “Scotichronicon’s First Readers,” 35; Drexler, “Extant Abridgements,” 64; Royan and Broun, “Versions of Scottish Nationhood,” 173. 11. Chesnutt, “Dalhousie Manuscript,” 77–78; Drexler, “Extant Abridgements,” 65–66; Royan and Broun, “Versions of Scottish Nationhood,” 173. 12. Printed in Asloan, Asloan Manuscript, 215–44. A modernized version is also printed (under the name of the Auchinleck Chronicle) as an appendix by McGladdery in James II; also see McGladdery’s discussion, 116–24. 13. Mapstone, “Scotichronicon’s First Readers,” 39. 14. Chesnutt, “Dalhousie Manuscript,” 73–75, suggests the later date; Embree, Kennedy, and Daly, Short Scottish Prose Chronicles, argue for a date closer to 1470 (43–48). 15. See Kennedy and Daly, introduction to Short Scottish Prose Chronicles, 36–53, and text in Embree, Kennedy, and Daly, Short Scottish Prose Chronicles, 110–34.



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to “the thorough permeation of Bower’s text into the Scottish historical consciousness.”16 Sometime prior to 1491, the Nomina Omnium Regum Scotorum, a brief summary of the Scotichronicon or one of its abridgements, was written; it survives in the Dalhousie manuscript. Two closely related vernacular versions appear as ane tractat drawin owt of þe Scottis cornikle in the Asloan manuscript, and as the Brevis Chronica in a manuscript of Wyntoun’s Original Chronicle (National Library of Scotland Advocates MS 19.2.4), where it is supplemented with material taken from John Bellenden’s translation of Hector Boece’s Scotorum Historia.17 Nationalist vernacular history is also represented in Asloan by a unique tract entitled Part of the Ynglis Cronikle, a bigoted account of English history written sometime after 1485 that breaks off, apparently incomplete, at the year 1441.18 As Dan Embree and Edward Donald Kennedy note in their edition of the short Scottish chronicles, the purpose of these texts “was to instill a sense of pride in the Scottish nation; and most, like the longer ones, attempted to alert [their readers] to the threat from England.”19 Among surviving manuscripts, Dalhousie and Asloan most comprehensively represent this historiographical tradition.20 As noted above, their Scottish historical content overlaps considerably, with both containing versions of the Nomina Omnium Regum Scotorum or tractat drawin owt of þe Scottis cornikle, as well as the Cronycle of Scotland In a Part or Scottis Originale. The fact that both of these tracts were also appended in the sixteenth century to manuscripts of Andrew of Wyntoun’s Original Chronicle, written in the 1420s, suggests that later readers felt it to be in need of updating—and not for the sake of recording more recent events, as the Scottis Originale only goes up to the Norman Conquest, and the Brevis Chronica up to 1390. Rather, as Wyntoun’s Chronicle is generally regarded as less polemical than Bower’s, these additions may possibly be seen as attempts to inject some of Bower’s nationalist fervor into Wyntoun’s more dispassionate perspective. As Michael Chesnutt 16. Royan, “Fine Art of Faint Praise,” 48. 17. Chesnutt, “Dalhousie Manuscript,” 76. Dalhousie’s Latin version is printed (omitting several pages near the beginning) in Scott, Laing, and Thomson, Bannatyne Miscellany, 3:44– 60. A translation of the Latin, as well as Asloan’s version, are printed by Embree, Kennedy, and Daly, Short Scottish Prose Chronicles, 156–227. 18. Printed in Embree, Kennedy, and Daly, Short Scottish Prose Chronicles, 144–54; see 58 for dating. The Ynglis Cronickle breaks off midsentence and is followed by a blank folio. Van Buuren, in “John Asloan and His Manuscript,” 25, estimates that possibly fifty lines have been lost. 19. Embree, Kennedy, and Daly, Short Scottish Prose Chronicles, 19. 20. On the Asloan manuscript, also see Cunningham, “Asloan Manuscript,” and Van Buuren-Veenenbos, “John Asloan, an Edinburgh Scribe.”

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has observed, the evidence of these manuscripts taken together “suggests that the study of the nation’s history was intensively cultivated during the reign of James IV.”21 And the fact that it was being promoted in the Scots’ vernacular suggests a further broadening of the audience for nationalist history. In their attempts to reach this wider readership, vernacular chroniclers frequently strike a populist tone, drastically shortening the lengthy Latin chronicles they take as their sources while stripping down Scottish history to its essential elements: the illustriousness of Scottish origins, the inherent freedom of the Scottish nation, the integrity of the Scottish royal lineage, and the perfidy of the English.22 The Scottis Originale, Ynglis Cronikle, and Brevis Cronica replace Fordun and Bower’s partisan, yet nuanced portrayals of key historical episodes with bald assertions of Scottish superiority and Eng23 lish viciousness, and their nationalist claims grow ever more grandiose. For example, while Fordun and Bower accept Brutus’s primacy in the southern parts of the island, the Scottis Originale contends that the Scots arrived on the island not only before the Britons, but before Brutus was even born: “Our nacioun and our name was foundit and our land inhabit lang tyme or Troye was distroyit and or Brutus was borne” (60–62); “þe worthy Kingis of Scottis brukit on richtuis titill mony ȝeris befor or Inglis or Brettonis come in þat ile” (188–89). As Embree and Kennedy note, a major theme of the Scottish Originale is “Scotland’s long existence as an independent nation in contrast to the area to its south, which was repeatedly conquered” by Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans.24 The combative attitude of these vernacular chroniclers extends to their pervasive concern—shared with Fordun and Bower—to establish genealogy as the foundation of national identity. One purpose of the Brevis Cronica and its Latin source the Nomina Regum Scotorum is to flesh out the king-lists that served as the basis for the Scots’ claims to ancient independence: these texts offer a condensed account of the kings of Scotland from Gaythelos through the present day (James I in the Latin Nomina, James IV in the vernacular Brevis).25 While the Scottis Originale and the Ynglis Cronikle are less closely focused on tracing the royal lineage through its generations, nevertheless they take pains to contrast the Scots’ heritage with that of the English, reducing 21. Chesnutt, “Dalhousie Manuscript,” 79. 22. Mason, Kingship and the Commonweal, 86–89, elaborates on the idea of libertas in Scottish historiography. 23. Quotations of these chronicles refer to Embree, Kennedy, and Daly, Short Scottish Prose Chronicles; citations of line numbers appear parenthetically in text. 24. Embree, Kennedy, and Daly, Short Scottish Prose Chronicles, 37. 25. Embree, Kennedy, and Daly, Short Scottish Prose Chronicles, 60–61.



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Fordun’s complex gathering of sources, comparison of myths, and evaluation of relative timelines to the stark declaration of oppositional status. Their invocations of the Scottish origin myth, for example, explicitly contrast it with the myth of Brutus. The Scottis Originale frames the question in terms of competing versions of genealogy. After a short account of Scota’s and Gaythelos’s union, the chronicler invokes the opposing myth: “þe opiniones of þam ar nocht trew þat sayis or trowis þat we come of Brute, quhilk come of tratouris of Troye, as is wele kend” (18–19).26 Both arguing against the view that the Scots might be descended from Brutus and disparaging Trojan ancestry itself, the chronicler goes on to draw out the present-day implications of ancient ancestry. While the Scots continue to draw strength from the might of their Greek founders, “þe mast famous & mast worschipfull nacioun þat evir was in erd” (21–22) (including such heroes as Alexander and Hercules), the English are irredeemably cursed by the legacy of their forebears: “suppos of þaim ar cummyn mony noble & worthy men, ȝit þai ar succedit of þam þat bure & beris þe foull surname of þe tresoun of Troye” (31–32). Ancestry matters to the exclusion of all else, so that even the good deeds of the English are tainted by their treasonous origins. The Ynglis Cronikle makes the point even more sharply: ȝe ar cummyn of Brutus, þat is þe mast faltyf pepill of all þe warld, þat was þe tresonable tratouris of troye, of quhais wikit fals deidis all þe warld reidis. . . . And we ar cummyn and discendit of þe mast noble peple þat evir was in all þe warld, baith of our manhed and treuth—that is, of þe noble Grekis. (9–15)

Dichotomizing the English “ȝe” and the Scottish “we,” the chronicler extends contemporary divisions into the past, thus naturalizing his portrayal of radical difference. In the matter of Arthur, as well, the Scottis Originale tops earlier histo27 riography. While Fordun hints at Arthur’s illegitimacy and Bower makes it explicit, here Arthur is not only “þe son of adultry” (122), or in Dalhousie’s less delicate phrasing, “spurius and a huris sone” (132–33), but also “þat tyrand” (100), an ungrateful oath-breaker who “tuke to him fra the richtuis aire the crovne of Brettane” (112–13). Mordred, portrayed by Fordun and Bower as 26. The chronicler cites Guido de Columna’s thirteenth-century Historia Troiana (a Latin translation of the twelfth-century Roman de Troie by Benoit de Sainte-Maure) as evidence that Aeneas was one of the Trojans who betrayed the city to save themselves. 27. See Chapter 3, note 26 for scholarship on Scottish depictions of Arthur. For Arthur’s role in the Scottis Originale, see Kennedy and Daly, introduction to Short Scottish Prose Chronicles, 38–40; and Royan, “Fine Art of Faint Praise.”

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the rightful but neglected heir, here makes a triumphant comeback: “quhen Arthour was out of þe cuntre in his tyrandry, he [Mordred] gadderit all þe estatis and Scottis men to Londoun & schew þaim his richt, and þar awysitly þe Brettonis chesit him king and crovnit him” (124–26). Mordred’s killing of Arthur thus becomes a “richtuis querell & defence” (127) of his own lawfully bestowed crown. Kennedy surmises that this “unprecedented attack” on Arthur “could have been a reaction against Hardyng’s idealization of Arthur” in his Chronicle, as well as a “veiled attack” on either Edward IV or Henry VII, both of whom played up the Arthurian myth in their own propaganda.28 As so often in nationalist historiography, the distant past becomes a site in which to negotiate present-day power and authority. In contrast to this denigration of Arthur, the Scottis Originale, the Brevis Cronica, and the Ynglis Chronicle all play up a corresponding Scottish hero: the legendary King Gregory, according to Brevis, “þe gretest þat euer was in Scotland, as Arthour in Yngland and Charllis in Frauce” (196–97). He supposedly conquers all of Ireland, as well as England north of the Thames (the Ynglis Chronicle grants him Wales, as well). He subjects them, in the Advocates manuscript reading, to the “Empyre of Scottis” (236), and according to the Scottis Originale holds them for over thirty years (237).29 Fordun and Bower (IV.17– 18) grant Gregory, or Giric, a more limited reign over certain English lands in the time of King Alfred. Elevating Gregory as a national hero on par with Arthur further embroiders the prestige of Scottish history, and provides precedent for more recent claims of Scottish hegemony. The author of the Scottis Originale, for example, carefully lays out the rationale why, by right of inheritance through St. Margaret, England “suld be þe King of Scotlandis” (164). The English delineated in these chronicles have become generic figures of evil, and as such, they provide a convenient external threat against which to negatively articulate a unified Scottish identity—an identity that implicitly defies the internal conflicts that dogged Scotland throughout much of the fifteenth century. The Ynglis Chronicle’s assertion that “all Yngland was euir subtell & fals baith to þar awne nacioun and to all vþiris” (159–60) displaces the internal strife and treachery that dogged the reign of James III onto the English enemy. Although it may well have been written shortly before or after James’s death at the hands of Scottish rebels—among them his own son, the future James IV—nevertheless the chronicler persistently maintains that it is the English who are “euir at discord” (197). By pandering to anti-English 28. Kennedy and Daly, introduction to Short Scottish Prose Chronicles, 53. Also see Kennedy, “Chronicle of Scotland in a Part and the Chronicle of John Hardyng.” 29. See Broun, “Giric, King of Picts,” and the note by MacQueen and MacQueen, Scotichronicon, IV.17n13–18.



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xenophobia in this way, the Ynglis Cronikle twists Bower’s vision of a textual community inspired by historical narrative to renew its commitment to moral conduct and great deeds. Bower’s vision of Scottish greatness does not preclude English morality; in the polarized world pictured by the Ynglis Cronikle, Scottish morality necessitates English wickedness. Yet even these extreme characterizations of English alterity, concerned only with England as an inverse reflection of Scotland itself, exist in a dialogic relationship with English texts, which are invoked both as sources to be refuted and as damning evidence to be used against their authors’ nation. In addition to pitting ancestry against ancestry, the vernacular chronicles pit text against text, projecting the Anglo-Scottish conflict into a literary arena whose stakes are culture and national identity. Historiographical representations of genealogy become particular focal points of contention. The Ynglis Cronikle, for example, claims to be an attempt to redress the wrongs committed against Scotland by the “fals and fenȝeit writ” of biased English chroniclers (3–4); it professes itself to be an attempt at communication across the national divide. Yet surely the actual intended audience are Scots, who are expected to take pleasure in the chastening of their English foes: And as forsamekle as all Ynglismen ar so presumtuos in þar argumentis and collationis of þair cornikillis and sa proude in þar genology and antecessouris quhen þai commoun with ony vþir nacionis quhilkis ar cummyn of a mair noble hous and of ane worthiar genology þan þai ar—for þat caus and for to stanche & slaike þar pryde, I sall, with þe helpe of God, schaw how þai ar lynealy cummyn dovne fra þe Devill, lyke as ȝour awne principale story and cornikle callit Pollicronicon declaris in þe self. (58–64)

Slipping into the third person as he speaks of the English, the chronicler reveals that he is speaking about rather than to them. Although he resumes his second-person address (“ȝoure . . . cornikle”) toward the end of the passage, he clearly views himself essentially as a Scot writing for other Scots.30 Pitting Scottish and English heritage against one another in a historical contest of genealogical supremacy, he simultaneously renews the Anglo-Scottish conflict and projects it safely into the past, an arena fully under his control where he can confidently dictate a Scottish triumph. The Ynglis Cronikle’s invocation of Higden’s Polychronicon seems especially curious, given that the first story it attributes to Higden—that of Albina 30. Embree, Kennedy, and Daly, Short Scottish Prose Chronicles, record other occurrences of this ipse dixit trope, 284n22–23.

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and her sisters—occurs not in the Polychronicon, but in other English histories including Caxton’s Chronicles of England (a version of the prose Brut that he published in 1480) and John Hardyng’s Chronicle (which also draws on the Brut, and whose different versions were completed in 1457 and 1465). Both of these English histories are notable for their anti-Scottish bias, and Chesnutt has suggested that the Latin version of the Scottis Originale may have been composed in response to Caxton’s Chronicle, as well as to heightened Anglo-Scottish tensions in the final decade of the fifteenth century; the Ynglis Cronikle appears to be part of this same literary milieu.31 Its repeated references to “ȝour awne Policronicone” (18) suggest either that the chronicler is misinformed about his sources, or that “Polychronicon” had by this point become a more or less generic name for English chronicles. In either case, the chronicler’s conflation of the Brut’s narrative with Higden’s provides additional ammunition for his attacks on English genealogy. Ironically, James Carley and Julia Crick have noted that the Albina story itself may have originally gained currency in the fourteenth century as a response to the Scottish origin legend.32 In Caxton’s retelling, Albina—a legendary founder predating even Brutus—is the eldest daughter of the king of Syria. She and her seventeen sisters marry, but “afterward . . . this dame Albyne bicome so stoute and so sterne that she tolde litel pris of her lorde and of hym had scorne and despit and wolde not done his wille but she wolde have hir owne will in diverse maters.”33 Albina’s sisters follow her lead, and after being reproved by their father, they take matters into their own hands and murder their husbands. Banished from Syria for their misdeeds, they settle in Britain (named Albion after Albina) where, lacking male company, they mate with devils in the likeness of men and produce a race of “horrible geants.” As Carley and Crick point out, the story is a highly ambiguous one, seemingly designed to answer “to two quite separate and somewhat contradictory requirements. On the one hand, it is an attempt to explain the race of giants to which Geoffrey alluded . . . on the other, Albina’s declaration of sovereignty over an undivided island 34 marks her as a precedent setter and law-giver.” The Ynglis chronicler makes much of the more incriminating aspects of the tale, concluding, “And sa was ȝour forbearis þat first inhabit Yngland engenerit & gottin be þe Devill, & þis ȝour awne corniklis beris plane in þe self, þat ȝe may nocht ganesay” (21–23). In this reading, Albina’s monstrous femininity marks her as a paradigm of the warped and degenerate ruler, and forever taints her descendants. 31. Chesnutt, “Dalhousie Manuscript,” 75. 32. Carley and Crick, “Constructing Albion’s Past,” 359–65. 33. Caxton, prologue to Chronicles of England. 34. Carley and Crick, “Constructing Albion’s Past,” 365.



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The story of Albina also aids this chronicler in extending a primary theme of the Scotichronicon: spirited critique of the English church. Albina’s Syrian ancestry and her prayers (in Caxton’s text) to “Appolyn that was hir god” allow the chronicler to condemn the English on both racial and religious grounds, as they “haue first bene of þe Sarazenis” (32–33). Placing the English on a par with Muslims of the Middle East—still the target of Western Christendom’s crusading ambitions into the sixteenth century—the chronicler depicts them as the bearers of a radical alterity, inimical to Christianity itself. Moreover, he suggests that this supposedly original heresy recurs to taint the English throughout their history. The chronicler portrays Edward I as an idolater who “was dessauit throw a mawment” (212) before generalizing this accusation and bringing it into the present: “ȝit ay on syndry, Ynglismen ar dissauit, trowand in þair mawmentis and vse þaim amangis þaim ȝit dayly” (214–15); “errasy . . . rang evir still and ȝit dois in þat realm” (228–29). English kings continue to abuse the church right up until Henry V, who is said to have “endit his lyf awfully & offerit ane mort to Mahovne” (332–33).35 The chronicler’s national prejudice is such that even supposedly official pronouncements of the church come under suspicion. Referring specifically to Thomas of Lancaster, a rebel against Edward II who was widely venerated as a saint following his execution, the chronicler extends the political conflict into the religious arena: “quhen ilkane of ȝou stikkis & gorris vþer, þan ȝe call þai[m] sanctis of ȝour making. Bot we Scottis men lufis na sanctis of ȝour making. And for his wikit deidis, 36 he was put downe” (238–40). Portraying English saints as wicked men killed for their sins by their equally vicious countrymen, he denies the sanctity of the English church even as he condemns English kings for their “wikit deidis agains God & þe Cristin faith, as þai haue euirmar persewit vnto þis day” (154–55). Elsewhere in the Scottis Originale and Ynglis Cronikle, the Polychronicon serves much the same function as it does for Bower, providing evidence of the diabolical descent of the English royal line. As the Scottis Originale puts it, “And euery man wnderstud genologi of Ynglismen, þar suld few wounder of þam. Suppos þai be werray fals, and þar caus quhy: þar king is cummyn dovne lyne be lyne fra þe Devill, as þar awne cronikle callit Policornica proportis” (206–10). The old story of Henry II’s diabolical ancestry is called upon to explain the characteristics of an entire people. The author of the Ynglis 35. These references to Apollo, “mawments” (idols) and “mahovne” (Muhammad) reflect common medieval misperceptions about Islam. See, for example, Tolan, Saracens. 36. Given-Wilson, “Richard II, Edward II, and the Lancastrian Inheritance.” Although Thomas of Lancaster was, in fact, never canonized, chroniclers including Thomas Walsingham and John Capgrave reported that he was sainted in 1389 or 1390 (569).

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Cronikle goes even further in digging up dirt on English kings, reporting that William Rufus was “engenerit and gottin be ane ewill spreit apon his moder” (89–90), as well as rehearsing the story that Henry II’s ancestor Geoffrey of Anjou “was incobus and gottin betuix a devill & his modere . . . of quhom ar cummyn dovne all þe Saxonis of Yngland lynealy, king be king” (134–36). All of this serves as mounting evidence that something is inherently and unalterably wrong with the English people and their kings; whether taken literally or read as a metaphor for an essential racial and national alterity, the diabolical ancestry portrayed in these chronicles effectively marks the English as bearers of a lineage both separate from and inferior to that of the Scots. In contrast, the chronicler celebrates the Scots’ supposedly continuous royal lineage with almost religious devotion: religious and political loyalty merge in his assertion that “sen þe first tyme þat þe Scottis inhabit þis ile, we haf ay liffit wnder a god and ane king and ay kepit ane armes and sa did ȝe neuir” (25–27). In this context, the doubled singularity of “a god” and “ane king” lends the Scottish monarchs the glow of divine sanction, in contrast to their debased English counterparts. Following a long historiographical tradition, the vernacular chronicles are at pains to emphasize the unbroken lineage of the Scottish kingship and the longstanding freedom of the Scottish nation. Less concerned than Fordun and Bower with establishing political precedent through reasoned argument and historical documentation, these chronicles primarily aim to rouse nationalist sentiment. Thus the Scottis Originale boasts: We may say þis day be werray suthfastness: þar was neuir land nor is no land nor nacioun so fre bygane of all þe warld, nor has standing so lang tyme in fredome as we Scottis in Scotland—for we haue bene xviii hundret ȝeir inconquest, nor neuir was dantit be no nacioun of strange cuntre or king to þis daye, bot evir wndere our kingis of richt lyne discendand fra Gathele & Scota, first inhabitaris of þis land, and fra Fergus forwaid till our souerane lord þat ryngis now present, quhom God kepe and conserf. (178–85)

Stressing Scotland’s superior place among nations and founding this superiority on an ancient (if mythical) ancestry shared by all Scots, the chronicler succinctly establishes the Scottish kingdom and lineage as the obverse of those of the compromised English. All of the primary ingredients of Fordun’s and Bower’s nationalism are here, condensed, popularized, and rendered easily memorable. By moving this politicized historical discourse out of the universal language of Latin and into the Scots’ vernacular, these chroniclers extend Fordun’s



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and Bower’s attempts to forge a peculiarly Scottish identity that is simultaneously grounded in genealogy and textuality. Conflating textual and biological truth, the author of the Ynglis Cronikle contends that “it is nocht till haf bene writtin in ȝour croniklis and in autentik bukis less þan it haf bene werite & trewe in þe self ” (65–66). For this author, authority derives as much from bodies as from books, and the authenticity of the historical record is confirmed by its manifestation in the lived experience of national subjects. Like Fordun and Bower, the vernacular chroniclers are not merely writing about national identity, but writing identity itself—calling it into being through the power of their rhetoric.

HISTORIOGRAPHY AND POETRY IN CONTEXT: MANUSCRIPTS, PATRONS, AND READERS However, the increasing Anglophobia of nationalist historiography gives only a one-sided glimpse of the vernacular culture of late medieval Scotland. At roughly the same time that vernacular historiographers were declaring the English and their histories to be false, idolatrous, and diabolical, Scottish poets such as William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas were holding up Chaucer as a poetic exemplar and claiming him as an important part of their literary inheritance. The result is a curious dichotomy, in which English culture is both denounced and venerated, even within a single manuscript. While the existing scholarship tends to treat Scottish historiography and Scottish poetry as discrete categories, manuscript context frequently complicates this assumption by suggesting that contemporary readers moved fluidly among genres. Bringing the essential elements of Bower’s Scotichronicon to an audience literate in Scots but not necessarily in Latin, vernacular chroniclers were placing their works within a wide-ranging literary milieu. Historiographical polemic and courtly poetry were copied by the same scribes, owned by the same readers, and at times shared the pages of the same manuscripts. The Asloan manuscript, which contains the Scottis Originale, the Ynglis Cronikle, and the Scottis cornikle, provides a particularly illuminating glimpse of reading habits during the early sixteenth century. Together with the Selden manuscript (which predates it by ten to twenty-five years), it is one of a very few surviving Scottish manuscript miscellanies that were produced before 37 the Reformation. John Asloan, the scribe who left his signature scattered 37. Two others are Cambridge University Library MS Kk.1.5.No.6, which contains moral poetry, and British Library MS Arundel 285, a devotional collection. See Bawcutt, “Scottish Manuscript Miscellanies.”

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throughout the manuscript, was a notary public in Edinburgh. He was born c. 1470, and his activities are recorded between February 1494/5 and 11 December 1532; internal evidence suggests that he likely penned the manuscript between 1515 and 1525.38 Unfortunately there are very few clues as to who commissioned the manuscript from Asloan, assuming he did not produce it for himself: Sir Thomas Ewan, a chaplain of St. Giles’s Church, Edinburgh, commissioned another manuscript in which Asloan’s handwriting appears; it (now Bodleian MS Douce 148) contains Lydgate’s Troy Book, with fragments of the Scottish Troy Book. Asloan also copied part of a manuscript of Wyntoun’s Chronicles (NLS MS 19.2.3), but neither it nor the Asloan manuscript itself contain any clues as to their original ownership. Nevertheless, the Asloan manuscript’s contents are intriguing. Although part of the manuscript has been lost—it now contains only twenty-six items of the original sixty—Asloan helpfully included a table cataloguing the original contents. In its original form, the manuscript seems to divide roughly into a first section containing moral and advisory literature and chronicles, primarily in prose, and a second section containing verse with a more imaginative bent. Yet it is well to bear in mind that this apparent division may be the product of modern preconceptions: the mingling of literary and historical pieces in Asloan confirms that advisory literature, imaginative literature, and history were not always read in isolation in this period, and indeed, were not necessarily regarded as distinct genres. In addition to the short chronicles discussed above, the first section includes a long work on penance and confession by John Ireland; the Buke of the Chess (which offers advice to princes); the Cart of the World (a sketch of world topography drawn from Trevisa’s translation of Higden’s Polychronicon); the Porteous of nobleness (a conduct guide); the Spektakle of Luf (which offers moral advice on women and marriage); and the Sex Werkdayis and Agis (a compendium of biblical and classical literature). The second portion of the manuscript contains several works by Robert Henryson; four poems by William Dunbar (including The Golden Targe and the Flyting); John Lydgate’s Complaint of the Black Knight (misidentified as the Maying and Disport of Chaucer); the story collections The Buke of the Sevyne Sagis and the Thre Prestis of Peblis; the humorous poem Colkelbie Sow; romances such as Ralf Colyear and Golagros and Gawain; the fables of The Buke of the Howlat and The talis of the fyve bestis; and other literature, along with some additional devotional and moral works.

38. See Van Buuren, “John Asloan and His Manuscript,” 15–51; and Cunningham, “Asloan Manuscript,” 107–35.



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Clearly the Asloan manuscript reflects a literary taste that could move quite easily among genres, and that saw no necessary contradiction between the Ynglis Cronikle’s assertion that the English are descended from “þe mast faltyf pepill of all þe warld” and either the inclusion of a poem supposedly by Chaucer or Dunbar’s praise of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate in the Golden Targe. Similarly, the manuscript juxtaposes the Cart of the World, excerpted from Higden’s Polychronicon, with the Scottis Originale and Ynglis Cronikle, which take the Polychronicon as evidence of English perfidy. Not only was the vernacular culture of early sixteenth-century Scotland as a whole fluid enough to accommodate a range of responses to the English and their texts, the manuscript shows that a single scribe and reader was able to value both Anglophobic history and Anglophile literature, and either see continuities between their perspectives, or not be bothered by their apparent contradictions. In compilations like Asloan’s, Scottish poetry would be read in the context of nationalist historiography and vice versa. So far as scholars are able to discern from the limited evidence available, Asloan’s manuscript seems to be fairly representative of the tastes of early sixteenth-century readers. Comparing the Asloan manuscript with the other major sixteenth-century manuscript miscellanies, the Bannatyne and Maitland manuscripts, Catherine van Buuren observes the greater focus on “advisory, instructive, moralizing, or devotional” works in Asloan. Attributing the contrast to the change in religious outlook between the times of their composition, she concludes that Asloan’s taste for edifying literature “was in agreement with the general tendency among the reading public of his day and that of the fifteenth century and earlier, and his items would have interested the greater part of the literate population.”39 It may be reasonable to consider Asloan’s collection as recording—rather than establishing—a partial canon of the popular literature of late fifteenth- to early sixteenth-century Scotland. Denton Fox, noting the overlap between Asloan’s collection and the publications of Chepman and Myllar, Scotland’s first printers, avers that the Chepman and Myllar prints and the Asloan MS both furnish something like a standard collection or at least sampling of the corpus of verse known in Scotland in the early sixteenth century. The Chepman and Myllar prints were commercial ventures, and the printers must have chosen poems for which they thought there would be a demand. John Asloan appears, from the prose which he chose to put in his anthology, to be a man of no very advanced tastes or ideas, and he seems, in his selection of verse, to be copy 39. Van Buuren, “John Asloan and His Manuscript,” 50.

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ing out what other people read, and printed, not to be following any récher40 ché interests of his own.

In this light, Asloan’s manuscript would attest to the simultaneous popularity of English-influenced poetry and the Scotichronicon’s vernacular descendants. Both seem to have been part of the body of texts with which most educated people could be expected to have familiarity. While there are few clues as to the Asloan MS’s original readership (beyond Asloan himself), more can be gleaned by looking at the readership of other contemporary codices that share some of its texts. For example, the Dalhousie manuscript, discussed above as sharing two of the short vernacular chronicles that appear in Asloan, is easier to place within a circle of readers and patrons. Its contents speak very particularly to the interests of the Sinclair family, descendants of the Sinclair earls of Orkney. Earl William Sinclair (d. 1480), last earl of the Orkneys and first earl of Caithness, who held high office as one of James II’s regents and then as chancellor, surrendered his Orkney lands to the Scottish crown in 1470. Although the Dalhousie manuscript postdates this surrender by some thirty years, Chestnutt has concluded that it is “altogether likely” that at least its first three items: a history of Norway, a genealogy of the Orkney earls, and a list of the kings of Norway, “were transmitted through the agency of the Sinclair family.”41 Even though the Norwegian connection was no longer immediately relevant to the family’s interests, it would have made sense for them to keep a record of their history. A later item in the manuscript, a Caithness charter, may have related to their new position as earls of Caithness. Earl William Sinclair and his descendants would go on to become a leading family in Scotland’s literary scene: indeed, Mapstone has concluded that “the Sinclair family had as much if not more impact on the patronage of literary culture as did the Crown in the second half of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.”42 Earl William himself presented the Coupar Angus manuscript of Bower’s Scotichronicon to Coupar Abbey in 1445. About a decade later, he commissioned Sir Gilbert Hay to translate three French works: The Buke of the Law of Armys, The Buke of the Ordre of Knychthede, and The Buke of the Governaunce of Princis. Hay’s own career attests to a joint interest in historical and literary texts: not only did he borrow the Corpus manuscript of the Scotichronicon from Inchcolm Abbey and annotate Bower’s account with 40. Fox, “Middle Scots Poets and Patrons,” 120. 41. Chesnutt, “Dalhousie Manuscript,” 67. 42. Mapstone, “Older Scots and the Fifteenth Century,” 9.



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his own recollections of the 1450s and ’60s, he was also the author of an Alexander romance, probably the Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour.43 Several of Earl William’s descendants carried on his literary interests. 44 Although Earl William’s son by his first wife, Elizabeth Douglas, earned his father’s disapproval, together with the moniker of William the Waster (d. 1487), their grandson Henry, Third Lord Sinclair (d. 1513), was a bibliophile and literary patron who probably commissioned the Selden manuscript (Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden. B. 24, a compendium of English and Scottish verse) 45 and for whom Gavin Douglas translated the Aeneid into Scots. Henry was active in the government of James IV, with “ample opportunity to put works into circulation or influence literary views at the royal court”; if Asloan was copying the verse that others read and printed, Sinclair may have helped to determine what kind of verse this would be.46 In addition, Chesnutt has suggested that the Dalhousie manuscript may well have been compiled for Henry Sinclair from materials passed down through his family, which would make Henry the most well-known reader and patron of both vernacular poetry and nationalist historiography.47 Henry Sinclair’s interests in literature and history were complemented by the historiographical, religious, and humanist collections of the other branch of the Sinclair family. Earl William’s second marriage, to Marjory Sutherland, produced fourteen children, one of whom, Sir Oliver Sinclair of Roslin (d. 1523), was a noted book collector. The translations that Hay made for Earl William survive in a copy that Sir Oliver commissioned and had elaborately bound (now NLS MS Acc.9253).48 Sir Oliver is also known to have possessed a copy of Mirk’s Festial and Quatuor sermons (St. John’s College Cambridge MS G 19 [187]). His son Henry Sinclair, Bishop of Ross, owned “the most remarkable” individual library of his day, which included several manuscript and print works of Scottish historiography, in addition to extensive patris-

43. See Brown, “Patrons and Kin of Gilbert Hay.” 44. Mapstone, “Older Scots and the Fifteenth Century,” 3–9. 45. Boffey and Edwards, in their edition of the Selden manuscript, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and the Kingis Quair, accept that the Selden manuscript “appears to have been compiled for Henry, Lord Sinclair,” as his arms appear on fol. 118v, along with a note reading “liber Henrici domini Sinclair” on fol. 230v (21–23). However, they also note that Henry Lord Sinclair’s ownership has been attributed partly “on the basis of a now illegible inscription” (10). Chesnutt, in “Dalhousie Manuscript,” challenges Sinclair’s ownership (89–90); Mapstone, in “Scotichronicon’s First Readers,” accepts it as probable (40). 46. Mapstone, “Older Scots and the Fifteenth Century,” 9. 47. Chesnutt, “Dalhousie Manuscript,” 88. 48. On this manuscript, see Glenn, “MS History of Hay’s Buke of the Law of Armys.”

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tic, humanist, and scientific holdings.49 Another son, John Sinclair, Bishop of Brechin (d. 1566), had a smaller but still impressive library of his own.50 Still another son, Sir Oliver Sinclair of Pitcairns (d. 1576), a favorite of James V, married Katherine Bellenden, the sister of John Bellenden, whose translation of Hector Boece’s 1527 Scotorum historiae was to be found on the Bishop of Ross’s shelves. Although nothing is known of this Sir Oliver’s library, his son, William Sinclair of Roslin (d. 1580–85), was especially active in collecting (and annotating) Scottish historiography: Mapstone notes that he “seems to have seen more MSS of the Scotichronicon than anyone before the eighteenth century.”51 Intriguingly, four manuscripts associated with the Sinclairs—the Dalhousie, Hay, and Mirk manuscripts, along with the first 209 folios of the Selden manuscript—were all copied by the same scribe. Although his identity can only be guessed at, he was apparently someone closely connected with both branches of the family, who was able to perform scribal work intermittently over a number of years: Boffey and Edwards note that “such availability would support an assumption of his status as some sort of Sinclair retainer, possibly a 52 member of the household, or at least within easy reach of it.” Mapstone goes further, suggesting Alexander Sinclair (d. 1521), a brother of Sir Oliver Sinclair of Roslin, as a possible candidate. As a priest and notary public, Alexander would have had the requisite training, and his familial connection would explain his availability to work on manuscripts at several stages.53 Regardless of the scribe’s identity, however, his copying of these diverse manuscripts emphasizes the degree to which not only vernacular literature and Latin historiography but also religious and advisory texts shared the same environment. Of the manuscripts associated with the Sinclair family, the Selden manuscript (dated to between 1489 and 1505) offers a particularly illuminating view of how English poetry—particularly Chaucer’s oeuvre—was received in Scotland and appropriated into the lineage of Scottish poetry.54 Although literary allusions and John Ireland’s testimony clearly show that Chaucer was known 49. Durkan and Ross, Early Scottish Libraries, 16; see also the catalogue of his printed books, 49–60. His manuscripts are unfortunately not catalogued, although Durkan and Ross mention that he “possessed in manuscript the Scotichronicon, Wyntoun’s Chronicle, and Extracta e Variis Cronicis” (16). Also see Cherry, “Library of Henry Sinclair,” which adds to Durkan and Ross’s catalogue; and Lawlor, “Notes on the Library of the Sinclairs of Roslin.” 50. Durkan and Ross, Early Scottish Libraries, 60–63. 51. Mapstone, “Scotichronicon’s First Readers,” 36. 52. Boffey and Edwards, “Scottish Poetical Anthology,” 18. 53. Mapstone, “Older Scots and the Fifteenth Century,” 6. For other possible candidates, see Mapstone, “Older Scots and the Fifteenth Century,” 6n14 and 8n27. 54. Boffey and Edwards, Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and the Kingis Quair.



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in Scotland in the fifteenth century, Selden represents the only extant manuscript evidence of his works’ Scottish circulation before the Reformation; this is all the more noteworthy as the manuscript seems especially concerned with marking Chaucer’s authorship. The manuscript began as a copy of Troilus and Criseyde, and was then expanded over a number of years. The first addition, which seems to attempt the establishment of a Chaucerian canon, “bristles with titles and explicits into which Chaucer’s name is dropped.”55 It includes The Legend of Good Women, The Parliament of Fowls, The Complaint of Mars, The Complaint of Venus, and the short lyric Truth, together with anonymous lyrics and works by Walton, Lydgate, and Hoccleve that are misattributed to Chaucer. This stage of copying, which included upgrading the manuscript with a program of decoration that necessitated recopying the first leaf of Troilus, ends with the Kingis Quair of James I. A new scribe then takes over for the final stage of copying, beginning with the ending of the Kingis Quair, and continuing with Hoccleve’s Letter of Cupid and three poems of Scottish origin: The Lay of Sorrow, The Lufaris Complaynt, and The Quare of Jelousy. Thus from its first expansion and upgrading, and continuing with the second expansion, the Selden manuscript seems to have been concerned to represent the Anglo-Scottish literary tradition. Its take on this tradition is unique, at least in manuscript: it is the only fifteenth-century anthology to place English and Scottish works in dialogue in this way, and its choices seem deliberate. Boffey and Edwards aver that the “addition of the later ‘Scottish’ poems seems to suggest an attempt to balance the earlier English materials in ways that could imply concern with nationalistic and political issues related to contemporary events.”56 However, as we shall see, its representation of Chaucer’s role in the formation of Scottish poetry is not atypical: in Fradenburg’s memorable phrase, Selden “historicizes revisionist poetics in a bound volume,” altering the meaning of the Chaucerian text by placing it within a Scot57 tish context. The manuscript’s misattributions themselves are intriguing, and may help to shed light on the way that Chaucer’s works were perceived in Scotland. Edwards notes that Selden contains more misattributions to Chaucer than any other fifteenth-century Chaucer manuscript, and suggests that “they can be seen as a part of a peculiarly Scottish misappropriation of Chaucerian identity in the 1490s and early 1500s.”58 Several of the poems that Selden misascribes to Chaucer are found in other Scottish contexts with the same misattribution, 55. Boffey, “Kingis Quair and the Other Poems,” 71. 56. Boffey and Edwards, “Scottish Poetical Anthology,” 27. 57. Fradenburg, “Scottish Chaucer,” 172. 58. Edwards, “‘Transitional’ Collection,” 60.

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suggesting a common source. Lydgate’s Complaint of the Black Knight, which Selden titles “The Maying and Disport of Chaucer,” is also found under this title in Asloan and in a 1508 print by Chepman and Myllar that has close links to Selden. Another lyric, “Devise, Prowes and Eke Humility,” is also printed by Chepman and Myllar under Chaucer’s name,59 and John Ireland shares 60 Selden’s misattribution to Chaucer of Hoccleve’s “Mother of God.” Clearly these poems were all circulating within a similar, probably courtly, milieu— one that was so interested in possessing Chaucerian works that it was overeager in ascribing his authorship. T.  S. Miller goes so far as to propose that “it seems likely that some or all of the Chaucerian misattributions in Selden were purposeful,” designed, “in effect, to undo the work of .  .  . earlier English manuscripts in framing Chaucer as the epitome of the English and the Lancastrians.”61 In England, Chaucer was only the first in a series of English poets, including Hoccleve and Lydgate, implicated in what Paul Strohm calls “the emerging link between the mobilization of vernacular literacy and the enjoyment of political power” in Lancastrian England.62 Miller’s conclusions are admittedly speculative. Yet it is true that while in fifteenth-century England the Lancastrian court and its poets, particularly Hoccleve and Lydgate, were promoting Chaucer as the “firste fyndere of our faire langage,” in Scotland these Lancastrian poets were being subsumed into Chaucer’s oeuvre, and Chaucer’s language was itself mutating into a Scottish register.63 While not denying Chaucer’s Englishness, the Selden manuscript endeavors to appropriate his works—and, which seems just as important, his name— into a Scottish literary tradition. The first expansion’s placement of James I’s Kingis Quair at the end of the Chaucerian section suggests that it is to be viewed as the culmination of what comes before. And indeed, the Kingis Quair seems to arise naturally from the preceding Chaucerian texts, with which it shares the themes of love and fortune as it traces the vicissitudes of the young king’s capture at sea, eighteen-year captivity in the Lancastrian 59. The later Bannatyne manuscript of c. 1568 (NLS Advocates MS 1.1.6) shares these misattributions. 60. Edwards, “‘Transitional’ Collection,” 60–61. 61. Miller, “Chaucer Abroad, Chaucer at Home,” 33–35. 62. Strohm, “Hoccleve, Lydgate, and the Lancastrian Court,” 645n13. 63. Hoccleve, Regement of Princes l. 4978; quoted in Fisher, “Language Policy for Lancastrian England,” 1177. Lydgate’s poetry was well-known in Scotland, but seldom circulated under his own name. See Sweet, “Lydgate Manuscripts and Prints.” For general investigations into the Lancastrians’ uses of language, see Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, and Nuttall, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship. On Chaucer’s creation as a public poet in the fifteenth century, see Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers. Chaucer’s appropriation by the Lancastrian regime is discussed further by Fisher in The Importance of Chaucer, and by Hambold in “Chaucer Appropriated: The Troilus Frontispiece as Lancastrian Propaganda.”



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court, marriage to Joan Beaufort, and release. In the final stanza, James pays tribute to “my maisteris dere, / Gowere and Chaucere,” acknowledging his poem’s English ancestry.64 As Boffey notes, “It is almost as if the author of the Quair . . . produced his poem with something like the first fifteen gatherings of the manuscript fresh in his mind.”65 However, the influence appears to go both ways, with this culminating Scottishness reaching backward to color the earlier sections of the manuscript. Boffey and Edwards have noted the “Scotticized” orthography that characterizes the manuscript’s English poems, beginning with the Troilus and then becoming even more pronounced, amounting in the Parliament of Fowles to a “Scots translation, albeit one of variable thoroughness.”66 At times, the manuscript even revises the substance of Chaucer’s works, along with their language: it records a unique ending to the Parliament and appends an original stanza to the end of the Troilus.67 Kylie Murray has observed that this unique treatment of Chaucer’s works extends even to readings of individual lines, as well as to the illustrations and marginal annotations that record early readers’ responses. Discerning a pattern within the manuscript of “subordinating amatory concerns to ethical and political matters,” she reminds us that “this witness must not be treated as an isolated exception, but rather recognized as part of a broader ethical and political agenda seen in the act of reading—and writing—poetry in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Scotland.”68 In the final expansion of the manuscript, the Kingis Quair is revealed to be not only culmination but also source: as the turning point at which the manuscript shifts from Scotticized to Scottish poetry, James’s poem seemingly inaugurates a new literary tradition. The manuscript insists upon his authorship: at the beginning of the poem, an introduction in a later hand reads, “heirefter followis the quair maid be / King James of scotland ye first / callit ye kingis quair and / maid quhen his majestie wes in /Ingland” (fol. 191v). Following the poem, the second scribe’s hand offers its own attribution: “Quod Jacobus primus scotorum rex Illustrissimus” (fol. 211r). That a later writer felt 64. Mooney and Arn, The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems, lines 1373–74. 65. Boffey, “The Kingis Quair and the Other Poems,” 67. 66. Boffey and Edwards, “‘Scotticization’ of Middle English Verse,” 168–71. It is important to note, however, that the degree of Scotticization does not steadily increase throughout the manuscript, but instead is “both variable and relative” (179). 67. On the unique ending to the Parliament of Fowls, see Boffey and Edwards, “‘Scotticization’ of Middle English Verse,” 169; Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament, 129–34; and Murray, “Passing the Book,” 127–32. On the stanza that follows Troilus, see Fradenburg, “Scottish Chaucer,” 173–74. Her acceptance of James Grey as the scribe of Selden has since been disproven, although her discussion of the stanza’s “self-awareness” remains apt. 68. Murray, “Passing the Book,” 122.

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it necessary to stress James’s authorship in a separate inscription demonstrates the importance of James to the collection’s program as it evolved. Miller has suggested that the opening rubric may specify that the poem was written during the king’s eighteen-year captivity in England “in order to clarify that ‘the inymyis’ (line 166) who oppressed him were not disgruntled Scots but rapacious Englishmen,” as part of “a continuing desire among the manuscript’s professional readers to frame the collection as, in some sense, patriotically Scottish over time.”69 Emphasizing Anglo-Scottish strife while downplaying the contentiousness of James’s relations with his subjects—who were, after all, responsible for his murder—the lines stress the dual facts of his royalty and his authorship, fashioning a version of James as a legendary poet-king.70 In Selden, James’s position as a founding father of Scottish literature both parallels and transcends Chaucer’s own. The Scottish poems that follow the Kingis Quair, all complaints, pick up on many of the same Chaucerian themes. However, they also evince a more typically Scottish caution than the optimistic Kingis Quair, in which virtuous love can lead to reason (Venus directs the narrator to Minerva) and offer an escape from the vicissitudes of Fortune. Joanna Martin posits that the resolution espoused in The Kingis Quair, with its exemplification of reasoned love as efficacious in an unstable world, is possible precisely because of James’s Scottishness and his royal status. While he shared the institutional position of English poets such as Gower and Hoccleve vis-à-vis a Lancastrian master for eighteen years, James could respond to their ontological and epistemological doubt with greater confidence, and on returning to Scotland insisted continually on the sovereignty of his majesty and the domestic order 71 of his realm.

James stands apart from the Scottish literary tradition as well, both enabling a new poetics in dialogue with English and broader European models, and occupying a unique, transitional position by virtue of his royalty, his transnational upbringing, and his hybrid Anglo-Scots language.72 James’s putative authorship of the Kingis Quair places him in a doubly illustrious position as the head of both Scottish culture and the Scottish state. 69. Miller, “Chaucer Abroad, Chaucer at Home,” 38. 70. Although James’s authorship of the Kingis Quair is now generally accepted, Fradenburg, in “Scottish Chaucer,” is right to point out that the legend of James’s authorship is itself important to the fashioning of the Scottish literary tradition (171). 71. Martin, Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 28. 72. Kratzmann, Anglo-Scottish Literary Relations 1430–1550, 36.



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Following his long imprisonment in England, James returned to Scotland in 1424, intent on centralizing governmental authority and bringing European culture to the Scottish court.73 He may well have contributed materially to the circulation of Chaucerian works in Scotland by bringing manuscripts back with him upon his release from captivity; indeed, “it has been suggested more than once that Selden. B. 24 may be a copy of an anthology compiled in Eng74 land and then brought back to Scotland by James.” This likely transmission of one or more Chaucerian manuscripts, as well as James’s own hybrid poetic experiments, are of a piece with his promotion of English political innovations: both “reflect a desire . . . to enrich his kingdom with some of the more positive knowledge gained during his enforced sojourn in England.” 75 As Fradenburg points out, “The Quair should indeed be read within the context of fifteenth-century Scotland’s increasing self-awareness, and its corresponding willingness to appropriate what it could from its neighbors—within the context of new concepts of a national polity and centralized authority.”76 The Selden manuscript enacts this dynamic as well, appropriating English poetry into the context of a triumphant Scottishness. Curiously, however, James’s status as a founding father of Scottish poetry, stemming from his authorship of the Kingis Quair, does not seem to have extended much beyond the Selden manuscript itself. Even poets who are particularly concerned to establish their own literary genealogies never mention James: William Dunbar, for example, does not include the king in his catalogue of former poets in the Lament for the Makars. Slightly more evidence survives from chroniclers: Bower avers that James “applied himself with eagerness sometimes to the art of literary composition and writing” (XVI.30.5–6). And the early sixteenth-century chronicler John Mair records, “When he wrote the language of his own country he showed the utmost ability. . . . He left behind him many writings and songs, which are to this day remembered among the Scots, and reckoned to be the best they have. He wrote an ingenious little book about the queen when he was yet in captivity and before 77 his marriage”—which must refer to the Kingis Quair. Yet in some ways the legend of James’s authorship, and the tradition that he inaugurated, assumed greater importance after his death than his poem itself.

73. See Fradenburg, “Scottish Chaucer,” 170–71. 74. Boffey, “Kingis Quair and the Other Poems,” 67; also see Edwards, “‘Transitional’ Collection,” 64. 75. Kratzmann, Anglo-Scottish Literary Relations, 34. 76. Fradenburg, “Scottish Chaucer,” 171. 77. Mair, History of Greater Britain, 366.

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James’s prominence in the Selden manuscript may stem from its status as what Julia Boffey and A.  S.  G. Edwards call a “household book,” defined as “any type of book produced not just for but within the environs of a particular family or household.”78 Family piety may well have played a role in the production of the manuscript, as the Sinclairs were doubly connected to the royal family. Henry Sinclair’s great-great-grandmother Egidia Stewart was a daughter of Robert II. She married William Douglas of Nithsdale and had a daughter, Egidia Douglas, who married Henry Sinclair, Second Lord of Orkney (d. 1422); their son was Earl William Sinclair, Henry, Third Lord Sinclair’s grandfather. In addition, Earl William’s first wife, Elizabeth Douglas, was the daughter of Archibald, Fourth Earl of Douglas (d. 1424) and Margaret Stewart, a sister of James I. Thus Henry Sinclair was both the great-grandnephew of James I and a great-great-great-grandson of Robert II. Boffey and Edwards suggest that the upgrading of the manuscript may have marked a personal occasion, such as Henry Sinclair’s elevation in 1489: “Given that the compilation was almost certainly for private family use rather than destined for presentation, its upgrading could have been intended to make Sinclair’s own family aware of its cultural links to earlier political and literary greatness: such value would have had significant weight and meaning in a domestic context.”79 However, from its links to other manuscript and print traditions, it also seems clear that the manuscript had wider resonance. Its upgrading may also have commemorated a national occasion, the 1503 marriage of James IV and Margaret Tudor: its mingling of English and Scottish texts would make sense as a celebration of Anglo-Scottish alliance and marital union, as would its focus on themes of love. Fradenburg has argued that its unique version of 80 the Parliament of Fowls may have been composed for this occasion. Altogether, as Boffey claims, “it does not seem out of place to understand MS Selden as a volume which makes both familial and nationalistic statements.”81 As a context for vernacular poetry, then, the Selden manuscript makes a nationalistic statement analogous to, although different from, the claims made by nationalist historiography, with which it demonstrably shares a literary milieu. While nationalist historiography attempts to divorce itself from the English tradition, even as it models its narrative structure upon English texts and places itself in dialogue with them, Selden pays homage to English poetry 78. Boffey and Edwards, “Scottish Poetical Anthology,” 19. Also see Boffey, “Definitions of the ‘household book.’” 79. Boffey and Edwards, “Scottish Poetical Anthology,” 28. 80. Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament, 129–30; and “Sovereign Love: The Wedding of Margaret Tudor and James IV of Scotland.” 81. Boffey, “Definitions of the ‘household book,’” 27.



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while stripping it of its most salient links to the English state and appropriating it into a Scottish context. Thus Scotticized and recontextualized as the founding father not of English but of Scottish literature, Chaucer in particular takes on a new role, lending a cosmopolitan flavor to the Scottish literary tradition while, at least in Selden, sharing the role of founder with the superior, royal figure of James I. The audience for Anglophobic historiography and Chaucerian poetry perceived no contradiction between them in part, at least, because they were reading a Chaucer who had been thoroughly subsumed into a nationalist Scottish literature.

CHAPTER 5

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Literary Genealogy and National Identity in Dunbar and Kennedy

the same time that the Selden manuscript was recontextualizing Chaucer as a founding father of Scottish poetry, William Dunbar was performing an analogous maneuver as he sketched out his own poetic ancestry. Laying claim to a Chaucerian lineage while staking out his own cultural and poetic distinctiveness, Dunbar both defines his poetry through and differentiates it from English poetic influences. In so doing, however, Dunbar implicitly enters into a debate over the nature and grounds of Scottish culture, which in the early sixteenth century was far from a univocal discourse. This debate becomes explicit in Dunbar’s Flyting with Walter Kennedy, which elevates a personal quarrel into a clash of English-speaking and Gaelic-speaking Scottish cultures, centered upon the relation of Scottish identity to English influences. Both of these poets ground their visions of Scottishness—as well as their own authorial practices—in genealogical tropes, just as Scottish chroniclers ground the prestige of the Scottish nation in ancestral myths. At times relying directly upon chronicle history and elsewhere invoking similar narrative patterns, Dunbar and Kennedy engage with many of the same issues as the chroniclers from a different (courtly, poetic, and vernacular) stance. This chapter first examines Dunbar’s constructions of literary ancestry and their possible links to early sixteenth-century Anglo-Scottish politics, before considering how Kennedy complicates the question of Dunbar’s Scottish identity with ancestral myths drawn from chronicle history. AT ROUGHLY

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LITERARY GENEALOGY AND POETIC AUTHORITY IN DUNBAR’S VERSE Dunbar lived at the center of the Scottish political scene for thirteen years— from 1500 to 1513—as a member of the royal household and a “servitour” to James IV; as the poet most thoroughly associated with the Scottish royal court in this period, he was ideally positioned to comment upon the political tensions and cultural controversies of early sixteenth-century Scotland.1 However, Dunbar has seldom been viewed by scholars as having much interest in questions of Scottish identity, largely because he appears to identify so closely with English poetic traditions. The poetic ancestry he sketches for himself near the end of the Golden Targe, his most Chaucerian love-vision, consists of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate: an exclusively English triumvirate. Praise of the three had become conventional in fifteenth-century England, but it was less common in Scotland: before Dunbar, only John Ireland and Gavin Douglas pay tribute to all three.2 Yet while the Selden manuscript seems to play down Chaucer’s connections to his Lancastrian followers and his construction as an English national figure, Dunbar stresses the closeness of his own connection to all three poets. Aligning himself with this primarily English tradition of praise, Dunbar celebrates the English influence on his poetry while masking the role that other literatures—particularly Latin and French, but also Italian3—played in shaping his verse. This endorsement (or appropriation) of English poetry may reflect the short-lived Anglophilia of the early sixteenth-century Scottish court in the wake of James IV’s 1503 marriage to Margaret Tudor, or simply a desire to avoid the political altogether: either way, in order to sustain his myth of seamless progress from fourteenth-century England to early sixteenth-century Scotland, Dunbar must obscure the centuries-long political rivalry of the two nations. Accordingly, within the Golden Targe, national boundaries are most notable for their absence. Instead, linguistic and geographical unity merge in Dunbar’s encomium to Chaucer: O reuerend Chaucere, rose of rethoris all (As in oure tong ane flour imperiall) 1. Mapstone, “Was There a Court Literature,” 410–11. 2. Ireland in the Meroure of Wyssdome, praises “gowere, chauceire, [and] the monk of berry” (I. 164). Douglas, The Palis of Honoure, ll. 918–21. On the English tradition of praise, see Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry, 62. 3. Smith discusses French influences on Dunbar in French Background of Middle Scots Literature, 60–77. For the Italian influence, see Jack, Italian Influence on Scottish Literature, 1–28.



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That raise in Britane ewir, quho redis rycht, Thou beris of makaris the tryumph riall, Thy fresch anamalit termes celicall This mater coud illumynit haue ful brycht. Was thou noucht of oure Inglisch all the lycht, Surmounting ewiry tong terrestriall, Alls fer as Mayes morow dois mydnycht? 4 (59.253–61)

The term “Bretane” unites England and Scotland geographically, obscuring political distinctions, while “oure tong” and “oure Inglisch” do so linguistically, calling attention to the shared aspects of the nations’ language while ignoring dialectical variation. Although by the late fifteenth century Scots and Northumbrian English—previously very similar—were diverging linguistically, “Inglisch” or “Inglis” was still the common term for the vernacular language of Lowland Scotland. Consequently, Dunbar is untroubled “by thoughts of possible linguistic treachery in aligning himself with the English language or the English literary tradition.” Instead, here he thinks “linguistically of Scots as a branch of English and aesthetically of the brotherhood of poets,” in which the superiority of Chaucer’s language overrides all other considerations.5 Dunbar similarly effaces difference in praising Gower and Lydgate: O morall Gower and Ludgate laureate, Your sugurit lippis and tongis aureate Bene to oure eris cause of grete delyte. Your angel mouthis most mellifluate Oure rude langage has clere illumynate And fair ourgilt oure spech, that imperfyte Stude or your goldyn pennis schupe to write. This ile before was bare and desolate Off rethorike or lusty fresch endyte. (262–70)

4. Parenthetical citations of Dunbar’s verse refer to The Poems of William Dunbar, edited by Priscilla Bawcutt. In the first parenthetical citation of a poem, I give the poem number in Bawcutt’s edition, followed by line numbers; subsequent citations in text, where clear, refer to line numbers only. While Bawcutt rightly asserts that “few of the titles given to Dunbar’s poems have early authority”—two exceptions being the Golden Targe and the Flyting, whose titles appear in the Asloan manuscript—I use the traditional titles throughout for ease of reference. 5. Jack, “Language of Literary Materials,” 233.

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The stanza’s alternation between “your” and “oure” may initially seem to draw a distinction between the English progenitors, as the sources of “aureate” diction, and their Scottish inheritors, with their “rude langage,” but the penultimate line recalls the geographical union that has been established in the previous stanza. “This ile”—both England and Scotland—stood in need of linguistic and poetic enrichment before Gower and Lydgate inaugurated a golden age of literature. “Your” and “oure” signify temporal rather than national difference: throughout, “your” refers to the foundational poets who enriched the language, while “oure” either alludes to a later group who have gained by the development of the common tongue (264), or joins these distinct groups together as speakers of a shared language (266, 267). Dunbar’s myth of poetic inheritance thus unifies England and Scotland within a single narrative of poetic progress, eliding Anglo-Scottish difference in order to ensure the coherence of his constructed genealogy. The Anglo-Scottish unity implied by this narrative of progress is a myth that reflects certain political aspirations of the Scottish monarchy, but that has little basis in the political realities of late-medieval Britain. As England was, by this period, the only country with the motive or ready means to attack Scotland, it made sense for Scotland to maintain peace with England; yet it was only by making itself a dangerous neighbor—thereby avoiding the appearance of an easy target—that Scotland could ensure its independence from acquisitive English monarchs. This could be a difficult balance to maintain. James III angered his subjects by pursuing peace with England too vigorously—provoking Blind Hary’s criticism that “till honour Ennymyis is our haile entent”6—while failing to propitiate Edward IV, who declared war on 7 Scotland regardless. James IV’s English policy was both more subtle and, initially, more effective than his father’s. Early in his personal rule he made the most of his countrymen’s widespread antagonism toward England, mounting invasions in 1496 and 1497 in ostensible support of the Yorkist pretender Perkin Warbeck, although James’s real motive seems to have been the advancement of his own popularity and Scotland’s prestige on the European stage. Open antagonism against the English was a welcome reversal of policy and, as Norman MacDougall notes, may have “helped to exorcise a sense of collective shame which had oppressed many Scots during the last years of the previous reign.”8 Although these popular wars ended more or less in a draw, they did give James a more powerful position from which to negotiate with the English,

6. Hary the Minstrel, Hary’s Wallace, 1:5. 7. Nicholson, Scotland, 475–91. 8. Macdougall, James IV, 141.



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as evidenced by the upgrade in the marriage prospects that Henry VII was prepared to offer him. Whereas previously the English king had proposed the Countess of Wiltshire’s daughter Katherine as a suitable bride for the King of Scots, once James had shown his strength, Henry promised his own daughter, Margaret, along with a Treaty of Perpetual Peace, which was concluded in January 1502. In August 1503, James IV and Margaret Tudor were married. The importance of this union can hardly be overstated. It necessitated not only a rewriting of Anglo-Scottish relations, but a reengineering of broader diplomatic relations. As Fradenburg points out: A thoroughgoing transformation of Scotland’s relationship to the outside world must have seemed at stake, for the alliance [with England] put on hold, if it did not rupture, ties of loyalty to France that were practically immemorial, however uneven, at times, in practice. It also linked two kingdoms whose enmity was as longstanding and well guarded, even as well 9 loved, as it is possible for an enmity to be.

However, the “perpetual peace” proved to be a fragile one: it lasted only a decade, during which James adroitly played the English and French off of one another with the promise, or threat, of renewing the 1492 Franco-Scottish alliance. When he finally did renew the alliance in 1512, he was quickly drawn into war with England, and invaded in a display of military power that he hoped would be “enough to preserve his credit with the French king but not enough to earn the undying hostility of Henry VIII and render peace-making unduly difficult.”10 The strategy failed spectacularly at the battle of Flodden, where James and much of the Scottish nobility met their deaths. Historians’ accounts of the Anglo-Scottish alliance have tended to be colored by this tragic end; nevertheless, the decade in which the peace held offered a unique breathingspace in which it was possible to imagine a real and lasting intermingling of Anglo-Scottish interests. Indeed, the marriage of James Stewart and Margaret Tudor raised the specter of political union. Upon Henry VII’s death and Henry VIII’s accession in 1509, Queen Margaret became the heir presumptive to the English throne, and would remain so until 1516. With the birth of the future James V in 1512, the union of the two kingdoms under a single monarch (which would, in fact, 11 occur in the next century) must have seemed a genuine possibility. Although Henry VII had anticipated this state of affairs when he agreed to marry his 9. Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament, 94–95. 10. Nicholson, Scotland, 601. 11. Nicholson, Scotland, 595.

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daughter to the Scottish monarch, according to the sixteenth-century Scottish historian Bishop John Leslie, it did not particularly concern him—at least not until the unexpected death of his eldest son, Arthur, just three months after the Treaty of Perpetual Peace was finalized. Leslie records that Henry shrugged off his counselors’ objections to the match with assurances that, if such a union came to pass, Scotland would effectively cease to be: Quhat, sayd he, as god forbid, al my barnes being deid, gif Margaret iustlie succceidet, can the Realme of Ingland thairthrouch kepp ony skaith, and nocht rather gret proffet? for seing the vse now is, that the les cumis to the incres of the mair, Scotland will cum till Ingland, and nocht Ingland to Scot12 land . . . as the les to the mair, the water strype rinis to the fontane.

Like a smaller stream of water absorbed by a greater, Scotland would lose all separate identity in the blending of the two kingdoms. Presumably, James IV possessed a rather different view of the effects of union when in 1513 he (falsely) assured his French allies that ambassadors of Henry VIII had agreed que le roy d’Angleterre et les trois Estatx de son royume luy desclaireront par leur sceaulx et confirmation du pape estre roy d’Angleterre comme celluy qui a marye la fille aisnee du pays et aussique d’anciennete le royaulme luy appartient sy ledit roy d’Angleterre n’a point d’enffens that the King [of England] and the three Estates of his kingdom should declare the King of Scots to be [future] King of England as husband of the eldest daughter of that house and because the kingdom by ancient right 13 belongs to him, if the present King has no children.

For his part, Henry VIII asserted his overlordship of Scotland on multiple occasions, apparently envisioning, like his father, a union in which Scotland would retain neither political nor cultural independence.14 Dunbar’s stance on Anglo-Scottish relations seems to have been—appropriately enough, for a courtier seeking his monarch’s preferment—in line with James’s: welcoming of a fruitful union with England, but also open to the opportunities offered by a French alliance. His verse generally seems to echo the mood of the court: thus when the marriage festivities were in full swing, Dunbar waxed enthusiastic about the match. He may well have been part of 12. Leslie, Historie of Scotland, 2:118. 13. Wood, Flodden Papers, 10:76, trans. 10:73. 14. Macdougall, James IV, 259–62.



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the 1501 marriage embassy to Henry VII; he is known to have been in England at the time. For this reason, Dunbar has widely been assumed to be the author of an encomium, London, thou art of townes A per se, that was recited by a Scottish priest at a banquet held by the mayor of London for the Scottish envoys.15 If so, the encomium would suit the general Anglophile tendency of the Scottish court around the time of the royal marriage. Although James’s proposed English marriage may have been initially unpopular (judging by the reluctant payment of taxes in support of the 1501 embassy) resistance either evaporated or was effectively suppressed in the two years that followed before the marriage actually took place.16 Accordingly, Margaret’s entrance into Scotland and her wedding to James were a triumph of pageantry whose symbolism highlighted the amity between the two kingdoms.17 The climax was the final pageant of Margaret’s entry into Edinburgh, in which she and James passed through an archway that presented the four Cardinal Virtues, over a “Licorne and a Greyhound, that held a Difference of one Chardon florysched, and a Red Rose entrelassed. [a unicorn and a greyhound that supported a difference (an addition to a coat of arms) of a thistle flourished (flowering thistle) and of a red rose, interlaced].”18 The device portrays a potent symbol of union, with the Scottish unicorn and English greyhound joining to support the intertwined red Lancastrian rose and Scottish thistle.19 Such symbols of union seem to have been everywhere: from the margins of the Book of Hours that James commissioned for Margaret, to the decorations on the marriage contract; even the jellies at the wedding ban20 quet featured “tharmys of Scotland England.” The windows of Holyrood Palace were upgraded for the occasion as well, with “the Armes of Scotland and 15. On the question of attribution, see Bawcutt, Poems, 1:27–28; she believes the evidence for Dunbar’s authorship is “slender.” However, the speculation is supported by the Treasurer’s Accounts for 1501, which record the payment of Dunbar’s pension “eftir he com furth of Ingland” (Treasurer’s Accounts, 2:95). Also see Bühler, “London thow art the Floure of Cytes all”; Green, Poets and Princepleasers, 176; and Macdougall, James IV, 249. 16. Macdougall, James IV, 149. 17. For an eyewitness account of Margaret’s journey north and the wedding festivities, see John Younge, Somerset Herald, “The Fyancells of Margaret.” On the royal entry, see Carpenter, “‘To thexaltacyon of noblesse’: A Herald’s Account”; Carpenter, “Word, Image, and Performance”; Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament, 98–122; and Gray, “The Royal Entry in Sixteenth-Century Scotland.” 18. Younge, “The Fyancells of Margaret,” 290; the translation is Carpenter’s (“Word, Image, and Performance,” 170). 19. Carpenter, “Word, Image, and Performance,” 170, gives a more in-depth analysis of the heraldry. 20. For a facsimile of the Book of Hours, see Das Gebetbuch Jakobs IV; Bawcutt, “Dunbar’s Use of the Symbolic Lion and Thistle,” mentions the Book of Hours and the contract (89); Carpenter, in “Word, Image, and Performance,” discusses the jellies (165).

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of Ingland byperted, with the Differences before sayd, to which, a Chardon, and a Rosse interlassed throrough a Crowne was added.”21 Tellingly, “English heraldic representation seems to focus exclusively on the Lancastrian badges of Margaret’s English heritage. But Scottish imagery . . . is increasingly expanded to include heraldic representations of the new marriage alliance.”22 Thus the illuminations in the copy of the treaty that was prepared in England are dominated by the Tudor rose, while in the copy that was prepared in Scot23 land, the rose and thistle are intertwined, with the thistles in ascendance. The differences in imagery imply that the Scots were more open to the imaginative possibilities suggested by the union. Dunbar contributes to this developing symbolism with his poems The Thrissill and the Rois, which celebrates the marriage, and Gladethe, thoue queyne of Scottis regioun, a panegyric to Queen Margaret. These poems depict Anglo-Scottish relations through heraldic and botanical images of union, celebrating the English contribution to Scotland’s lineage while asserting Scotland’s supremacy. Dunbar figures James allegorically as a Lion, Eagle, and Thistle, while portraying Margaret as the “fresche Ros of cullour reid and quhyt” (52.143) who is characterized by her beauty, youth, and virtue. Chelsea Honeyman has noted that in Dunbar’s poems on the queen, Margaret is a fresh young English flower being grafted onto the stronger, more mature Scottish plant in order to reinvigorate it. By reworking this courtly convention to serve specifically political ends, Dunbar both asserts Margaret’s potential to reinforce and perpetuate the Stewart line and maintains Scotland’s primacy in the relationship, stressing its longer history and greater strength. . . . Dunbar’s horticultural metaphor illuminates not only Scotland’s potential for growth through the judicious integration of English culture, but also implies that this growth is natural, thereby figuring Scot24 land’s autonomy as ingrained and inalienable.

Viewed as a poem on Anglo-Scottish relations, the Thrissill and the Rois, “in which Scotland, in effect, domesticates England,” hints at James’s broader diplomatic and political ambitions, as well.25 Dunbar twice describes Margaret as “imperiall,” (147, 168), as well as “empryce” (160), which may align her with the Stewart monarchs’ ambitions—first articulated by James’s father—to claim 21. Younge, “The Fyancells of Margaret,” 295. 22. Carpenter, “Word, Image, and Performance,” 168. 23. Honeyman, “Margaret Tudor and Scotland’s Floricultural Future,” 182. 24. Honeyman, “Margaret Tudor and Scotland’s Floricultural Future,” 182. 25. Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament, 144.



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imperial sovereignty within their realm.26 And while the Rose is clearly placed “Aboif the lilly illustare of lynnage” (150), signaling England’s current triumph over France (traditionally symbolized by the fleur-de-lys) in Scotland’s affections, the comparison implicitly acknowledges the tension between the Auld Alliance and the new. Dunbar’s body of work mirrors this tension, with poems celebrating Queen Margaret and the Anglo-Scottish alliance offset by poems extolling the virtues of Bernard Stewart, Lord of Aubigny, an ambassador sent by Louis XII of France in 1508 in order to urge the renewal of the Franco-Scottish alliance. James’s relations with England had greatly cooled by this point, and the celebratory enthusiasm with which Stewart’s embassy was received was in marked contrast to the coldness with which Thomas Wolsey, sent by Henry VII to prevent the renewal of the alliance with France, had recently been dispatched.27 Dunbar’s hyperbolic praise of Stewart is directed to the “most strong, incomparable knight” (56.9) himself rather than to the “maist hee, maist excellent and maist crystyn prince Loys, king of France” (as Louis XII is described in the title of Chepman and Myllar’s print version), yet the poem nevertheless suggests that Dunbar was well attuned to the political context of Stewart’s visit, and the advisability of striking the right tone. His eulogy for Stewart, who died soon after his arrival in Scotland, similarly focuses on the man’s own virtues as the “flour of chevelrie” (23.8), yet as Bawcutt notes, it “might be seen as an attempt to preserve good relations between France and Scotland, a poetic equivalent of the formal diplomatic letters sent between the two countries.”28 Speaking on behalf of the “Scottis natioun” (23.29), Dunbar here formally expresses the sentiment of the court, which elsewhere he echoes more casually. While James’s politics certainly influenced Dunbar’s verse to the extent of offering material for occasional poems such as these, it is impossible to say to what extent Dunbar’s celebration of English poetics may have emerged from the general Anglophilia surrounding James’s marriage. However, the dating is suggestive. Although datable poems form a distinct minority of Dunbar’s oeuvre, they were all composed within the decade of Anglo-Scottish peace following the 1502 treaty. The 1508 Chepman and Myllar prints provide a terminus ante quem for the Golden Targe and the Flyting; the Lament 29 was printed by Andrew Myllar even earlier, at Rouen in 1505–6. These are the poems in which Dunbar most clearly stresses his praise of English poets 26. Mason, “This Realm of Scotland Is an Empire?” 27. Macdougall, James IV, 254–55. 28. Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, 87. 29. MacDonald, “Alliterative Poetry and Its Context,” 270–71.

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or general affinity with English culture. As Scotland’s relationship with England remained fairly amicable until early 1508 (when the English detained and arrested James’s kinsman the Earl of Arran on his return from France), it seems at least possible to associate Dunbar’s readiness to proclaim an English literary ancestry with a general mood of amicability toward England at the Scottish court. Clearly this wasn’t the only or even the most important factor in Dunbar’s acknowledgement of English literary influence: other poets, for example Henryson and Ireland, also praise Chaucer. Yet none do so as loudly and unequivocally as Dunbar. Dunbar’s remarks on the English heritage of his own poetry might, at first glance, seem to be in line with Henry VII’s view of Scotland’s inevitable assimilation to English norms—and the critical subordination of Dunbar to Chaucer evident in the widely used designation “Scottish Chaucerian” (a result of too uncritical an acceptance of Dunbar’s own genealogical myth-making) demonstrates the tenacity of this reading of Anglo-Scottish literary relations.30 Yet in fact Dunbar’s view of his own place within the poetic tradition more closely resembles James’s fantasy of Scottish dominance than Henry’s expectations of Scottish cultural extinction. Despite his investment in a mythic narrative of Anglo-Scottish cultural continuity, Dunbar simultaneously limits its authority over his own verse; marking his own temporal and cultural difference from the English poets, he maintains his freedom to adapt and transform literary traditions, rather than merely imitate Chaucerian forms. The tension inherent in Dunbar’s ambition to underwrite his poetics with an illustrious ancestry, without relinquishing his own creative sovereignty, plays itself out the poem in which Dunbar most directly engages poetic authority: the Lament for the Makeris. Here, Dunbar offers a view of the poetic tradition that complements that of the Golden Targe. Like the Targe, the Lament locates the beginning of Dunbar’s own literary tradition with Chaucer, followed by Lydgate and Gower. But while the Targe interrogates poetic conventions (as discussed at greater length in the following chapter), the Lament focuses on poets themselves, reading poetic tradition in terms of the bodies, 31 living and dead, of its authors. 30. See Fox, “Scottish Chaucerians,” 164–200; Ridley, “Plea for the Middle Scots.” 31. Scott, in Dunbar, views the colophon as “the chief key to the poem” (250), while Bawcutt, in Dunbar the Makar, agrees that Dunbar’s sickness “is not, I think, mere fiction,” and regards the poem as one in which Dunbar “employ[s] conventions to say something relating to his own experience” (5). Reiss, on the other hand, believes that “the ‘personal’ assertions are best seen as part of a rhetorical tradition” and concludes that “it is wrong to see the piece providing evidence for the poet’s life and state of health” (William Dunbar, 30–31). I follow Reiss in distinguishing between author and narrator, but would add that the question of how



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This focus on bodies emphasizes the historicity of the poetic tradition, sketching out a vision of literary authority contextualized within the relentlessness of time’s passage. The poem opens by emphasizing the narrator’s own physicality: I that in heill wes and gladnes Am trublit now with gret seiknes, And feblit with infermite: Timor mortis conturbat me. (21.1–4)

While it remains a critical commonplace to accept these verses and the colophon to Chepman and Myllar’s print of the Lament, “Quod Dunbar quhen he wes sek” at face value, and to interpret the poem at least partly, if not primarily, as autobiography, there is no necessary reason to conflate Dunbar’s narrator with the poet himself: and as we shall see, there is even some evidence that not all of the poem’s assertions should readily be accepted as factual. Following this first-person introduction, the poem quickly moves through general remarks on the insecurity of “this fals warld” (6) to consideration of death as its one certainty. In a series of seven stanzas evocative of the Dance of Death, Dunbar hammers home the fact that “on to the ded gois all estates” (17), juxtaposing this cold truth with the insistent anxiety of the ailing narrator, whose refrain, “Timor mortis conturbat me” [“Fear of death greatly troubles me”] (21.4) foregrounds the imminence of death’s threat. Still, the narrator evinces a certain detachment from his material until line 45, when the first-person singular, not seen outside the refrain since the poem’s first line, suddenly resurfaces. “I se,” he says “that makaris, amang the laif, / Playis heir their padȝanis, syne gois to graif. / Sparit is nought ther faculte” (45–47). The reemergence of the first-person shows that the narrator’s recital of death’s egalitarian ways has finally hit too close to home. He can no longer avoid facing his fear of death by lingering among tropes of pious poetry and generalized verses that (he seems to think) primarily apply to others: instead, he goes on to more closely examine his own profession. Here once again, Chaucer, Lydgate and Gower stand as the source of literary tradition, but the close poetic relationship evoked by the oscillating pronouns of the Targe, which link “your” and “our” together in a single community of those who delight in eloquent language, recedes here in deference closely Dunbar identifies with his narrator does not materially affect the concerns of the poem. For the original colophon, see Beattie, Chepman and Myllar Prints.

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to death’s primacy. The trio of English poets are still foundational, but here the fact of their deaths overwhelms other meanings: He has done petously devour The noble Chaucer, of makaris flour, The monk of Bery and Gower, all thre: Timor mortis conturbat me. (49–52)

The four-line stanza emphasizes the fleeting nature of time, leaving little room for extravagant praise or grief before history and the poem together move on. This stanza—number thirteen out of twenty-five—occupies the precise middle of the poem, the turning point at which Dunbar, previously concerned with the general human condition, zooms in on his own forebears. But as other poets surface in stanza after stanza to fill the vacancies left by time’s devouring of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, it becomes apparent that the relentless advance of history enables the continuation of literary production even as it forecloses on individual poets. The poem charts a progression forward in time from long-dead poets, to those taken “last of aw” (85), to “Gud maister Walter Kennedy” who “in poynt of dede lyis veraly” (90), before finally arriving at Dunbar himself as the culmination of this tradition. The Lament thus balances a desire for the Chaucerian past with an acknowledgement and celebration of the temporal, cultural, and national difference that enables Dunbar’s own literary production. The apparently seamless line of poetic inheritance that Dunbar sketches out here—an ancestry that disregards national boundaries—resembles that of the Targe. Yet while Dunbar deliberately obscures nationality in the Targe in order to strengthen his myth of continuity, here he stresses the importance of Scottish poets in continuing the poetic tradition inaugurated by Chaucer. One stanza on Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate gives way to ten additional stanzas devoted to the Scots who have carried the torch of literature through the stretch of time between Chaucer’s day and Dunbar’s. The majority of the poem, then, is devoted to this Scottish literary tradition, and the poem remains one of the most complete records of the existence of a literature that has largely been lost: little else is known about fourteen out of the twenty-one Scottish poets mourned by the narrator.32 Dunbar’s concern to catalogue the main literary figures in the Scottish landscape of approximately the past century bespeaks an investment in his own cultural milieu that insists on early sixteenth-century Scotland’s dif 32. Fox, “Middle Scots Poets and Patrons,” 123.



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ference from Chaucer’s England. He takes pride in Scottish literary output that encompasses “balat making and trigide” (59), “anteris of Gawane” (66), and poems “in luf ” “of sentence hie” (74–75); as the final entry in this catalogue, Dunbar’s self-depiction comes across as more Scottish than Chaucerian. Moreover, Dunbar balances the pessimism of chronicling a tradition chiefly marked by the deaths of its participants with a certain optimism implied by these very deaths: for an author attempting to define his place within an authoritative literary tradition, the demise of the authorities is hardly an unmitigated disaster. Like Chaucer’s Clerk, who predicates his tale upon a vision of a Petrarch “now deed and nayled in his cheste” (29), but once “the lauriat poete . . . whos rethorike sweete / Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie” (35–37), Dunbar acknowledges Chaucer as the best of poets while still putting him firmly in his place.33 Buried under the weight of history, rendered inert by the same stretch of time that helps to invest him with authoritative weight, Chaucer offers little threat to Dunbar’s current ascendancy at the other end of the poetic tradition; indeed, Chaucer has become little more than an icon of a particular genealogical myth. It is left to Dunbar to carry on from here: and although he does not (yet?) possess Chaucer’s authority, the very fact of Dunbar’s still-living body gives him the potential for further creation that death has stripped from Chaucer; any poetic innovation, any departure from tradition will be his alone. This ironic optimism may help to explain why the poem seems to have been regarded by its contemporaries as primarily comic, rather than as the tragic meditation on death that it has almost universally been regarded as by modern critics. To my knowledge, Alastair MacDonald has been the only scholar to point out that the printer Andrew Myllar seems to have designed the booklet containing the Lament and three other poems by Dunbar as “a little collection of comic verse” and that Bannatyne included it in the comic section of his manuscript, titled “Ballettis Mirry.”34 MacDonald suggests that “the work may be an ironic parody of a rather trite theme” and that its performance at court would “without doubt lend itself to ironic presentation.”35 This is certainly so, particularly as Dunbar lived at least another eight years after the poem’s likely composition, so was unlikely to be at death’s door. Even 33. Quotations of Chaucer’s works refer to The Riverside Chaucer; citations of line numbers appear parenthetically in text. 34. MacDonald, “Alliterative Poetry and Its Context,” 271. This is the tenth item of the Chepman and Myllar prints, although it was printed by Myllar at Rouen before he began his association with Chepman. The other items in the booklet are the Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo (3 in Bawcutt, Poems), “Kynd Kittok” (not accepted as genuine by Bawcutt), and “The Testament of Maister Andro Kennedy” (19 in Bawcutt). 35. MacDonald, “Alliterative Poetry and Its Context,” 277.

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Dunbar’s lament that “Gud Maister Walter Kennedy / In point of dede lyis veraly” is tragic only if Kennedy is really ill; otherwise it can read as an ironic jab at the competition, in line with Dunbar’s portrayal of Kennedy in The Flyting. Kennedy seems to have lived for another decade, and a hale and hearty Kennedy in attendance at the performance would certainly alter the stanza’s resonance.36 Of course, the comic potential of the Lament does not foreclose other interpretations, just as Chaucer’s Retractions can express genuine piety while also establishing a canon of his works for posterity. Dunbar adroitly balances the tragic and comic, bolstering his own authority while paying tribute to those who have come before. The acceptance of temporal and cultural distance is integral to Dunbar’s self-authorizing stance in relation to tradition. His emphasis on the deaths of succeeding generations of poets implies that together, they form not a community but a lineage. Dunbar’s privileged position at the end of the line, the last, as he says, of “all my brether” (93) complements Chaucer’s own status as the founding member. If Chaucer is the archetypal father-figure, then Dunbar is his heir, as he is also the heir of the intervening generations. This strictly linear depiction of poetic tradition contrasts with the more fluid view taken by other Scottish poets such as Henryson and Douglas, who each portray themselves engaged in literary discussion and debate with their poetic forebears. Dunbar never literalizes his poetic relationships in this way, instead preferring to play out his responses to other authors at the level of the text: in adaptation, alteration, and appropriation. He creates a poetic universe in which his status as the heir to poetic tradition authorizes him to transform it to his own ends, without ancestral interference.

“LAT NEWIR NANE SIK ANE BE CALLIT A SCOT”: FLYTING AND NATIONAL IDENTITY In claiming to embody a Scottish identity that both stems from and transcends Chaucerian authority, Dunbar runs up against a very different vision of Scottishness, one that is rooted in a competing ancestral narrative. In the Flyting, Dunbar and Walter Kennedy engage in a poetic battle of wits—a game whose primary purpose seems to have been the amusement of onlookers and the showcasing of the participants’ linguistic virtuosity, but which draws upon regional and ideological conflicts of early sixteenth-century Scottish society to provide its impact as both entertainment and social critique. One source of its 36. Meier, introduction to Poems of Walter Kennedy, xvii.



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comedy is its articulation of cultural tensions such as the relative authenticity of Highland and Lowland versions of Scottishness, the degree to which ancestry and past events determine present loyalties, and the role of Gaelic and English poetry in shaping the Scottish nation. These competing views of Scottish identity come under additional pressure due to the probable courtly setting of the performance. Before James IV—a sovereign standing in metonymic relationship to his kingdom—questions of national and cultural identity, of political loyalty, and of language take on a particular urgency. For the poets, the stakes of this contest include not only the continued patronage of the royal court, but also the court’s investment in a particular ideal of what it means to be Scottish, an investment whose political ramifications go beyond the merely personal elements of the contest. In the Flyting, issues of Scottish identity and poetic authority converge on a national stage. Although only scanty records of literary flytings survive—this is the only example from early sixteenth-century Scotland37—the evidence points to literary flyting having been a performative genre: an insult contest that would be enacted by the poets themselves in the presence of the royal court.38 In this setting, it was primarily regarded as a comic form, yet as Priscilla Bawcutt and Elizabeth Ewan have both observed, the flyting has its roots in real (lowerclass) social practice: in noisy, public quarrels that sufficiently disturbed the peace of Scottish towns to require the frequent intervention of authorities and that sometimes occasioned severe punishments.39 Dunbar himself complains that no one can pass through the streets of Edinburgh “For stink of haddockis and of scattis, / For cryis of carlingis and dabaittis, / For feusum flyttingis of defame” (55.9–11). Literary flyting contains and formalizes the potentially disruptive energy behind the insults, redirecting it for the purposes of entertainment; yet the form still trades in what Bawcutt calls “an unpleasant aspect of 40 language, the power to cause shame and humiliation.” This disagreeable side of flyting, which leads Tom Scott to brand the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy as “the most repellent poem known to me in any language,”41 nevertheless 37. Bawcutt enumerates later sixteenth-century Scottish flytings in Dunbar the Makar, 222. Also see Bawcutt, “Art of Flyting,” 5–7; Meier, “Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy in Context,” 161–79; Meier, introduction to Poems of Walter Kennedy, cii–cxi; Ross, William Dunbar, 184–86; and Wittig, Scottish Tradition in Literature, 109–13. 38. Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, 233–35. There is no direct evidence that the poets performed the poem at court, but Kennedy’s direct address to James at lines 481–82 demonstrates that it was aimed at a courtly audience, including the king. 39. Bawcutt, “Art of Flyting”; Ewan, “Defamation and Gender in Late Medieval Scotland,” 163–86. Also see Meier, introduction to Poems of Walter Kennedy, cix–cxi. 40. Bawcutt, “Art of Flyting,” 5. 41. Scott, Dunbar, 175.

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provides insights into social conflicts that less abusive poetry might avoid. The most bitter insults—as well as the funniest jokes—are invariably the ones that hit closest to home, so there is some reason to believe that the barbs exchanged in the course of Dunbar and Kennedy’s flyting are not entirely groundless; if nothing else, they give us insight into what kinds of things the participants would perceive as insulting.42 The flyting’s original potential for social disturbance erupts into the literary contest in moments of social criticism that expose the contested terrain of Scottish society and submit it for royal arbitration. Dunbar primarily grounds his attacks against Kennedy in the well-known derogatory stereotypes of the Scottish Highlands, making the Lowlands out to be a bastion of civilization by contrast.43 Kennedy was not actually a Highlander: his family was based in Carrick, in the southwest of Scotland. However, as a Gaelic-speaking region, Carrick shared a cultural affinity with the Highlands and, as Dunbar’s criticism shows, was subject to many of the same stereotypes.44 Portraying Kennedy as a dirty, unfashionable, impoverished thief who cannot compete with Lowland eloquence, Dunbar establishes Lowland Scotland as a cultural center epitomized by its command of English: Sic eloquence as thay in Erschry vse, In sic is sett thy thraward appetyte. Thow hes full littill feill of fair indyte. I tak on me ane pair of Lawthiane hippis Sall fairar Inglis mak and mair parfyte Than thow can blabbar with thy Carrik lippis. (65.107–12)

In maintaining that a Lowlander could fart better English than a native of Carrick could speak, Dunbar exaggerates a real cultural and linguistic difference between the different regions of Scotland. Gaelic—often called “Irish”— remained the primary language of the Highlanders and portions of the southwest, while Lowlanders in the east would likely know it only as a second 42. Other scholars have made this point in relation to certain details of the Flyting, especially in regard to the physical appearance of the two poets, but there has been comparatively little consideration of the larger issues that might be at stake in this poetic contest. For example, see Riach, “Walter Kennedy’s Part in The Flyting.” Exceptions are McGoldrick, “Dunbar, Skelton, and the Beginning of the British Renaissance,” and Hendricks, “Gaelic, Middle Scots, and the Question of Ethnicity.” 43. See MacGregor, “Gaelic Barbarity and Scottish Identity.” 44. Meier, introduction to Poems of Walter Kennedy, cxii.



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language, if at all. As Jon Robinson observes, “Dunbar’s utter rejection of Gaelic . . . should be seen as a deliberate political act, not merely concerning language but nationhood. By denying the Highlander his own language . . . the Gaelic-speaking Highlander becomes a peripheral ‘other’ who need[s] to conform to the culture center of the Lowland court in order to exist.”45 The Spanish ambassador Pedro de Ayala, describing Scotland from his vantage point in the Lowlands, refers to Gaelic as “the language of the savages who live in some 46 parts of Scotland and on the islands.” Ayala’s remark suffices to indicate the popular Lowland opinion of Gaelic-speakers. Despite the fact that James himself spoke this “language of the savages,” he and his court had compelling political reasons to mark out the Highlands as a locus of barbarity, requiring the civilizing imposition of royal authority. In 1493 parliament forfeited John MacDonald, the Lord of the Isles, and annexed his lands to the crown. Over the next fourteen years, James would spend a good deal of energy trying to bring the Highlands and Isles under control. When MacDonald died in 1503, those who sought the restoration of the lordship of the Isles rallied around his grandson, Donald Dubh (who Dunbar memorializes as “The fell strong tratour, Donald Owyr” [27.19]) and openly defied royal authority. As Fradenburg has noted, “James’s attempt to pacify the Highlands and the Isles took place . . . not only through the force of arms but also through the deployment of a rhetoric of civilization and wildness that marked out, in effect, the racial supremacy of Lowland blood.”47 In March 1504 Parliament addressed the “greit abusioune of justice in the northt partis and west partis of the realme,” where “the pepill ar almaist gane wilde” due to a lack of justices and sheriffs.48 Military campaigns to the Isles would follow in 1504 and 1506. Even after Dubh’s imprisonment in 1507, the court continued to characterize the Highlands as a lawless place: in 1510, James petitioned the pope to install a Lowlander as bishop of Arbroath and Iona, so that “his authority and nobility of race may bind that uncivilized people in devotion 49 to the church.” Negative stereotypes could productively advance the king’s political goals. Dunbar capitalizes on this stereotypical association of Highlanders and other Gaelic speakers with barbarism by linking Kennedy’s Gaelic heritage to a debased mode of poetic production, exemplified by the figure of the “baird.” Derived from the Gaelic “bard,” meaning simply “a poet,” in the Lowlands 45. Robinson, Court Politics, Culture and Literature, 155. 46. Bergenroth, Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers, 169. 47. Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament, 238. 48. Brown, Records of the Parliaments of Scotland, [A1504/3/103]. 49. Quoted in Nicholson, Scotland, 547.

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the term acquired shades of meaning colored by the general prejudice against Highlanders: “a poet or minstrel; esp. a strolling singer or player; a vagabond minstrel or buffoon; a scurrilous person.”50 Priscilla Bawcutt’s definition, “a rather low kind of Gaelic-speaking poet or scurrilous entertainer,” encapsulates the word’s several valences for Lowland speakers.51 In Dunbar’s usage, the term represents the epitome of worthless poetic production. “Baird” is the most common of the insults he hurls at Kennedy, though he varies its impact by linking it with related concepts: begging, poverty, theft, deceit, blasphemy, and viciousness. Kennedy is an “Iersche brybour baird, wyle begger” (49), “Ane baird blasphemar in brybrie ay to be” (63), “fals baird” (96), “theif baird” (183), “lyk ane berdles baird that had no bedding” (208), and “Baird rehator” (244); Dunbar advises him to “Beg the ane bratt, for, baird, thow sall go naikit” (120). In fact Kennedy was far from impoverished, owning estates in Gar52 rick and Galloway. Yet Dunbar implicitly parallels material indigence with a supposed lack of poetic resources, insinuating that Kennedy’s poetry is of a lowbrow kind suited to his social inferiority. Through his invariably pejorative use of “baird,” Dunbar ties Kennedy’s alleged poetic deficiencies firmly to his Gaelic heritage. Kennedy becomes a representative of a debased alterity who deserves only to be run out of town, chased back to the periphery where he belongs: the climactic scene of Dunbar’s portion imagines Kennedy and the defiling “Carrik clay” that clings to his boots being driven out of Edinburgh by a rabble of boys, old women, servants, and fish-wives.53 Kennedy’s rebuttal takes on issues of national identity even more directly. Kennedy opens with a vigorous assault on Dunbar’s ancestry, claiming that he is a “deiuillis sone and dragone dispitous, / Abironis birth and bred with Beliall” (249–50). Moreover, Kennedy implies that his opponent fulfills the promise of this descent from Old Testament villains and devils; Dunbar is a “Wod werwolf, worme and scorpion vennemous, / Lucifers laid, fowll feyindis face infernall, / Sodomyt syphareit fra sanctis celestiall” (251–53). Kennedy insists that ancestry is destiny: irredeemably cursed by his monstrous heritage, Dunbar offends against common morality and religious sanctity by his very existence. Developing these initially extravagant claims into a broader conception of genealogy’s role in determining individual and national identity, Kennedy places ancestry at the center of a historical perspective—one that aligns 50. Watson, Essential Gaelic-English Dictionary; Craigie, Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue. The “older Scottish tongue” recorded in this dictionary is, primarily, the language of Lowland Scotland. 51. Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, 20. 52. Meier, introduction to Poems of Walter Kennedy, xv. 53. McGoldrick, “Dunbar, Skelton, and the Beginning of the British Renaissance,” 63.



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with that of the chroniclers discussed in the previous chapters in its emphasis on (re)scripting history as a site of political precedent.54 Kennedy’s outlandish opening insults set the stage for the more historically grounded criticism that follows, in which he takes the activities of Dunbar’s ancestors—real and imagined—to be arguments against his suitability as a courtier, churchman, and poet. In so doing, Kennedy counters Dunbar’s mockery of Kennedy’s own Gaelic heritage by positing Gaelic culture as a more authentic locus of Scottish poetic endeavor than Dunbar’s English models. Instead, he advocates a view of Scottish poetry that conflates political loyalty and religious orthodoxy with poetic worth. Myth and history merge in Kennedy’s account of Dunbar’s ancestry to create a portrait of a family deeply imbued with treachery: How thy forbear is come, I haif a feill: At Cokburnis peth, the writ makis me war, Generit betuix ane scho beir and a deill, Sa wes he callit Dewlbeir and nocht Dumbar. This Dewlbeir, generit on a meir of Mar, Wes Corspatrik, erle of Merche, and be illusioun. The first that evir put Scotland to confusioun Wes that fals tratour, hardely say I dar. (257–64)

Etymology mingles with ancestry in Kennedy’s reading of Dunbar’s past: the spurious derivation of “Dumbar” from “Dewlbeir,” or “Devil (de’il)-bear”55 circularly provides evidence for the ancestry from which it supposedly derives. This mythic ancestor, himself the fiendish product of an unnatural union, merges with the historical figure of “Corspatrik”—otherwise known as Patrick, Eighth Earl of Dunbar and First Earl of March—who remains bestknown for aiding Edward I in his invasion of Scotland and his battles against 56 William Wallace. Conflating Patrick Dunbar with Dewlbeir, Kennedy portrays his pro-English stance as a diabolical pact, made by a man who only held the status of earl “be illusioun”—perhaps implying additional diabolical 54. Robichaud, in “‘The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy’ and Scots Oral Culture,” attributes Kennedy’s genealogical emphasis to his “familiarity with Gaelic oral culture, which placed strong emphasis on genealogical recital” (13). 55. This is Bawcutt’s modern English rendering of the name (Poems, 439n260). 56. Conlee, in William Dunbar: The Complete Works, notes that Kennedy may be conflating this Patrick Dunbar with a distant ancestor of the Earls of Dunbar: Gospatric, Earl of Northumberland (c. 1040–78) who fled to Scotland following the Conquest (see note to lines 257–64).

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intervention, as well as human deceit—and who thus stands as a foundational figure twice over: inaugurating Dunbar’s lineage, he also originates Scotland’s woes. Kennedy thus establishes the Dunbar family as virtually synonymous with the betrayal of Scotland, a point that he substantiates with details drawn from chronicle history: This Corspatrik betrasit Berwik Toun And slew sevin thousand Scottismen within thay wawis. The battall syne of Spottismuir he gart caus, And come with Edwart Langschankis to the feild, Quhair twelf thowsand trew Scottismen wer keild And Wallace chest, as the carnicle schawis. 57 (267–72)

The ultimate effect of Corspatrik’s betrayal of “trew Scottishmen” is that “Inglis tykes in Scotland wes abone” (276), with free rein to commit both real and symbolic outrages against Scotland. Most egregiously, “spulȝeit thay the haly stane of Scone, / The croce of Halyrudhous and vthir iowellis” (277–78), an appropriation of well-known symbols of Scottish political and ecclesiastical independence that confirms the transfer of power into English hands. In return for allowing the English to gain this (supposedly) unprecedented advantage, Corspatrik suffers a twofold fate: first, we learn that he “birnis in hell—body, banis and bowellis” (279), and only afterward that he was “maid exyle / Vnto Edward and Inglis grund agane” (285–86). The temporal disjunction in Kennedy’s presentation of these events—first hell, then England— suggests that hell and England are equally suitable places for an enemy of Scotland to reside, conflating the two realms as well as their masters, the Devil and Edward. Thus portraying the English victory as an affront to God as well as a political loss, Kennedy raises the stakes of his implication that Dunbar is no more a true Scot than this infamous ancestor. Kennedy espouses a view of history that links past and present with a particular directness by positing an essential sameness between ancestor and heir. Thus a criticism of Corspatrik is inseparable from an attack on Dunbar, whom Kennedy assumes to share his infamous ancestor’s villainy in an only 57. Bawcutt, Poems, notes that “Kennedy probably knew Wyntoun and Bower, but the chief source for lines 262–88 (the chronicle mentioned in 272) is Hary’s Wallace, I and VIII” (439n262). That Kennedy regarded the Wallace—classified by modern scholars as a work of literature—as a “carnicle” demonstrates the fluidity of genre at the time.



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slightly modified form. Dunbar’s own infamy, Kennedy implies, centers upon his poetic vocation. While Corspatrick betrayed Scotland through his actions, Dunbar commits treason through fraudulent manipulation of language: It war aganis bayth natur and gud ressoun That Dewlbeiris bairnis wer trew to God or man, Quhilkis were baith gottin, borne and bred with tressoun, Belgebubbis oyis and curst Corspatrikis clan. Thow wes prestyt and ordainit be Sathan, For to be borne to do thy kin defame, And gar me schaw thy antecessouris schame. Thy kin that leivis may wary the and ban. Sen thow on me thus, lymmer, leis and trattillis, And fyndis sentence foundit of invy, Thy elderis banis ilk nycht rysis and rattillis; Apon thy cors vengeance, vengeance thay cry. Thow art the cause thay may not rest nor ly. Thow sais for thame few psaltris, psalmis or credis, Bot geris me tell thair trentalis—of mysdedis— And thair ald sin wyth new schame certify. (305–20)

Dunbar’s ancestors cry out against him not because he fails to uphold their legacy, but because he has incited Kennedy to publicize their treachery. The real accusation here is that Dunbar has slandered Kennedy in his half of the flyting; the political treason of Corspatrik has become poetic treason, expressed in a fraudulent attack on a true Scottish poet. But the implications of Dunbar’s false language go beyond an affront to Kennedy’s honor; the revelation of falsehood also calls Dunbar’s religious capability into question. Sketching yet another lineage, Kennedy names Dunbar “false Eustase air” (321), while comparing himself to “Alathya”—figures otherwise known as Pseustis and Alithia, representatives of pagan falsehood and Christian truth in the ninth-century Eclogue of Theodulus. This portrait of a falsely speaking Dunbar standing against Christian truth is of a piece with Kennedy’s suggestion that Dunbar was “ordainit by Sathan,” that he neglects to pray for his ancestors’ souls, with Kennedy’s later descriptions of Dunbar as a false pardoner (425–28) and a false pilgrim (429–32), and with numerous other insults to Dunbar’s clerical vocation:

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Conspiratour, cursit cocatrice, hell caa, Turk trumpour, traitour, tyran interperate, Thou Irefull attircop, Pilate apostata, Iudas, Iow, iuglour, Lollard laureate Saraȝene, symonyte provit, pagan pronunciate, Machomete manesuorne, bugrist abhominabile, Deuill, dampnit dog, sodomyte insatiable, With Gog and Magog grete glorificate. (521–28)

Ian Macleod Higgins has noted the “salmagundi of negative Eastern imagery” in this passage, which draws upon entrenched stereotypes of Eastern degeneracy in order to taint Dunbar with radical alterity. He continues, “In Kennedy’s view, what sets Dunbar apart, what discredits him absolutely, is that he belongs among the false, a highly mixed group that includes the despotic, the infidel, the heterodox, the heretical, the unconverted, the apostate—and as if to underscore the unnaturalness of all these contrarian figures—the sexually 58 deviant.” The comparison to these myriad representatives of religious falsehood specifically challenges Dunbar’s suitability for the priesthood, a spiritual indictment that becomes a basis for distrusting any and all of Dunbar’s words. For Kennedy, the truest sign of Dunbar’s poetic treachery is to be found in his very language: “Inglis” (English) rather than “Irische” (Scots Gaelic). His comments on Dunbar’s language demonstrate the degree to which regional rivalries influence the construction of foundational genealogies: Thou lufis nane Irische, elf, I vnderstand, Bot it suld be all trew Scottis mennis lede. It was the gud langage of this land, And Scota it causit to multiply and sprede Quhill Corspatrik, that we of treson rede, Thy forefader, maid Irisch and Irisch men thin, Throu his treson broght Inglise rumplis in. Sa wald thy self, mycht thou to him succede. (345–52)

In striking contrast to Dunbar’s portrayal of “Inglis” as the language of Scottish literature and civilization, Kennedy identifies the English language as an instrument of England’s aggression. Although, in fact, Gaelic had never been 58. Higgins, “Shades of the East,” 219–20.



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spoken throughout the whole region contained within Scotland’s sixteenthcentury borders, Kennedy identifies English as a colonial language perpetrated against “trew Scottis” by English oppressors and the traitorous Scots who facilitated their conquest. In reality, the inhabitants of Scotland likely never had shared a common language; instead, Gaelic and English evolved side by side after the Gaels and Angles invaded Scotland from Ireland and continental Europe, respectively, around the sixth century. Displacing natives who probably spoke one or more forms of Celtic, the Gaels settled in the north and west of Scotland, while the Angles settled in the south and east; their languages developed into Gaelic and English. Although Gaelic held sway for a time, English gained ground, and its victory was assured after 1066, when the English royal family fled to Scotland and princess Margaret married the Scottish King Malcolm III. Their son David I and grandson Malcolm IV increased the dominance of English by facilitating the extension of Anglo-Norman influence into Scotland, specifically by granting lands to Anglo-Norman nobility (whose entourages included numerous English-speakers).59 Thus, counter to Kennedy’s assertion, Gaelic was in decline long before the Wars of Independence. But Kennedy is less concerned here with historical accuracy than with ideology, and for him, the English language is irrevocably linked to England’s predations. In portraying the English tongue as an evil analogous to physical starvation, Kennedy declares that the attenuation of the Gaelic language echoes the emaciation of its speakers. If, as Dunbar suggests, Highlanders often go hungry, Kennedy maintains that Dunbar and his relations have caused this poverty by their traitorous support of Englishmen and their language. And even when poverty is no longer a reality—Kennedy later contrasts his own “land, store and stakkis” (362) with Dunbar’s “tome purs” (365)—the prevalence of the English tongue continues to impose a burden by preventing the reemergence of national unity. Kennedy addresses this problem in terms of ancestry and generation, rooting his own poetic authority in an unimpeachably Scottish ancestry; as he later insists, “my linage and forebearis war ay lele” (402). He links the “Irische” language to the origin myth of the eponymous founder Scota, which Fordun had expanded upon in the fourteenth century. As we have seen, by the early sixteenth century the very mention of Scota evokes a certain particularly antiEnglish strain of Scottish patriotism that, however, is not typically viewed as incompatible with the use of English as a language. By specifying Gaelic as the language of Scota’s descendants, however, Kennedy aligns himself with a patri 59. See Barrow, Anglo-Norman Era in Scottish History; Duncan, Scotland: The Making of the Kingdom, 117–42; Jones, English Language in Scotland, 93–94; and Kay, Scots: The Mither Tongue, 30–38.

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otic lineage that necessarily excludes the English-speaking Dunbar; Dunbar thereby becomes further implicated in the alternate lineage of English collaborators that, Kennedy insists, still presents a danger to Scotland. Accordingly, Kennedy draws Dunbar’s political allegiance into question— an area of doubt that holds the potential to be particularly damaging to a court poet, whose hopes for preferment stem from his use of language. Kennedy bases his repeated accusations of “tresone” (400), again, on what he sees as the inevitable similarity between Dunbar and his ancestors: In Ingland, oule, suld be thyne habitacione. Homage to Edward Langschankes maid thy kyn In Dunbar thai ressauit hym, the false nacione, Thay suld be exilde Scotland, mare and myn. (409–12)

Kennedy’s specific accusations against Dunbar center upon his linguistic perfidy. Questioning whether Dunbar can be trusted to use language responsibly within the court, Kennedy claims that Dunbar has inadvertently insulted his monarch earlier in the flyting. In calling Kennedy “Evill farit and dryit, as Densmen on the rattis” (51), Dunbar has overlooked the fact that “Densmen of Denmark ar of the kingis kyn” (356), and therefore are not to be denigrated lightly. And if Dunbar cannot be trusted to avoid such mistakes even in his poetic capacity, when presumably he would exercise particular care with his language, he certainly should not be trusted to represent the court in other lands—a real possibility, as it seems that Dunbar may well have served as an 60 ambassador on the occasion of James IV’s marriage. In a dramatic moment, Kennedy directly addresses James IV, pleading: Hye sauuerane lorde, lat newir this synfull sot Do schame fra hame vnto your nacion! Lat newir nane sik ane be callit a Scot. (481–83)

Impugning Dunbar’s right to identify himself as a Scot, Kennedy inflates personal identity into a matter of national consequence, capable of negatively impacting Scotland’s reputation abroad. Even as a purely rhetorical gesture, Kennedy’s demand for royal intervention focuses attention on the increasingly

60. See note 15 of this chapter.



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vexed issue of Scottish national identity by implicitly drawing James into the dialogue and asking that he choose sides on Scotland’s behalf. In Kennedy’s self-portrayal, he consistently associates himself with Scotland, contrasting Dunbar’s manifold treacheries against God and man with his own exemplary loyalty. Unlike Dunbar, who speaks in order to slander, Kennedy speaks in order to bring the truth to light, exposing Dunbar’s own falsehood and his “antecessouris schame.” As Kennedy’s relationship to an ideal of Scottish nationality rooted in an ancestral view of history is more secure than Dunbar’s, so too, he claims, is his relationship to his monarch: I am the kingis blude, his trew speciall clerk, That newir yit ymaginit hym offense, Constant in myn allegeance, word and werk. (417–19)

Capitalizing on his rather distant kinship to the king,61 Kennedy humbly affirms his inferior social position (he is only a “clerk”), while asserting a “speciall” relationship based as much on “trew” service as on kinship. His loyalty is unquestioned precisely because his “word and werk” are in accord. Claiming to be innocent of the kind of linguistic duplicity of which he accuses Dunbar, Kennedy again inserts himself into a privileged lineage from which he can assert an equally privileged poetic stance. At the culmination of his portion of the Flyting, Kennedy brings together all of his accusations against Dunbar in a spectacular display of genealogical creation, sketching out a fanciful kinship network that is at once less historically grounded and more symbolically resonant than his remarks about Corspatrick. Worth quoting at length in order to illustrate the number of different kinship relations that Kennedy posits, the poem’s two penultimate stanzas connect Dunbar to a litany of biblical villains, historical persecutors of Christianity, famous traitors, devils, and pagan gods: Nero thy nevow, Golyas thy grantsire, Pharao thy fader, Egyptia thy dame, Deulbere, thir ar the causis that I conspire Termygantis tempise the, and Waspasius thine eme, Belȝebub, thy full brother, will clame To be thyne air, and Cayphas thy sectour, 61. His grandmother, Mary, Countess of Angus, was a daughter of Robert III, great-greatgrandfather of James IV. Kinsley, Poems of William Dunbar, 285.

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Pluto thy hede of kin and protectour, To hell to lede the on lycht day and leme. Herode thyne other eme, and grete Egeas, Marciane, Machomete and Maxencius, Thy trew kynnismen Antenor and Eneas, Throp thy nere nece, and austern Olibrius, Puttidew, Baal and Eyobulus, Thir fendis ar the flour of thy four branchis, Sterand the potis of hell and newir stanchis. Dout not, Deulbere, tu es dyabolus! (529–44)

Kennedy reaches deep into the classical and biblical past in order to conjure a fitting image of Dunbar’s degeneracy, again drawing upon the popular Orientalist stereotypes that these names invoke.62 Rather than substitute for the earlier genealogies that Kennedy has sketched out, this passage adds the weight of additional resonance, hammering home the sense that Dunbar is something other than what he ought to be. Moreover, the reference to “Pharoa thy fader, Egyptia thy dame” inverts the origin myth of Scota that Kennedy has referenced earlier. Like “trew Scottis men,” Dunbar has an Egyptian ancestry, but he descends from the villains of the story rather than from the heroine: from Pharaoh who persecuted the Israelites, and Eyptia, Potiphar’s wife, who 63 attempted to seduce Joseph and then falsely accused him of rape. Thus Kennedy transmutes Egyptian ancestry from a source of prestige to one of degeneracy: as Higgins notes, “It makes of the Lowlander an interloper, the bringer of bad (irreligious, sexually deviant) blood, thus leaving the Highlander to become the legitimate inhabitant of Scotland.”64 This inverted ancestry marks Dunbar as the obverse of a true Scot. The conflicting ancestries and authorities of the Flyting reveal the plurality of both poetic and national identity in early sixteenth-century Scotland, as well as point to the ways in which a sense of origin is felt to be crucial in bolstering both forms of self-construction. Poetic and national identity emerge as interdependent, being equally reliant on mythic narratives of past events to support their present positions. Yet with multiple historical narratives— and hence multiple bases of poetic authority—in circulation, poetic identity 62. Higgins, “Shades of the East,” 220–21. 63. Bawcutt, Poems, 2:445n530. 64. Higgins, “Shades of the East,” 221.



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begins to seem an inherently fraught issue.65 Choosing one base of identity— either Kennedy’s vision of an independent Gaelic Scotland resistant to English aggression, or Dunbar’s commitment to the English-speaking Lowlands as the cultural center of Scotland—would seem to necessitate the total exclusion of the other; and yet Scottish identity seldom reduces to such an easy dichotomy. After all, Kennedy composes not only his section of the Flyting but also the rest of his surviving poetry, in English.

65. Hendricks, “Gaelic, Middle Scots, and the Question of Ethnicity,” draws a similar conclusion, that the poem “expose[s] the ethnic dividing line within the Scottish community that results in each side seeing the other as ‘foreign,’ leaving the community without a ‘true Scot’ to call its own” (90). I differ in seeing multiple versions of “true Scottishness” in circulation.

CHAPTER 6

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From Courtly Love to Court Poetics Dunbar’s Petitions and the Scottish Transformation of Tradition

upon the cultural distinctiveness of his own society, in conjunction with his desire for a poetic authority rooted in the Chaucerian past, enables his poetic making: even when not explicitly invoking his literary ancestors, Dunbar’s work tends to emerge from the tension between literary convention and the economic and social realities of contemporary Scotland. In this chapter, I argue that two equally significant breaks with past poetic practice facilitate Dunbar’s creation of a unique poetics, centered upon the complex relationship of poet/courtier to patron/prince in the late medieval Scottish court. Challenging long-established conceptions of poetic merit, Dunbar claims a newly elevated status for court poetry, with which he underwrites his persistent demands for reward. At the same time, Dunbar turns away from Chaucerian (as well as broader European) poetic conventions by rejecting romantic love as an appropriate poetic subject. Yet crucially, far from eschewing the language of courtly love altogether, Dunbar reapplies many of its familiar tropes to his relationship with James IV, drawing on the social and gender hierarchies implicit in the courtly love lyric to explore the homosocial dynamics of James’s court. In appropriating the clichéd conventions of the courtly love tradition to this end, Dunbar fashions a poetics that directly speaks to contemporary Scottish culture and identity. This poetics culminates in Dunbar’s petitions to James IV, a series of poems whose intricate investigation of the court has long been neglected by WILLIAM DUNBAR’S INSISTENCE

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scholars. Indeed, the petitions have often been regarded as some of Dunbar’s least attractive and least critically interesting work. In her 1931 book on the poet, Rachel Taylor memorably comments that “Dunbar is unfortunate in having so many begging-poems preserved. The reader feels that as a poet, and, much more, as a Scot, Dunbar should not have begged in so many tones, and so persistently.”1 Other scholars have found more to commend in the petitions, chiefly their technical skill or the intimacy of their apparently autobiographical character and the window that they offer into life in James IV’s court. Thus C. S. Lewis admires the “almost unfailing skill and taste by which they become little works of art in their own right,” while Harvey Wood claims that “it is in these poems, which deal with Dunbar’s personal interests, that we have him at his best.”2 However, most scholars have passed over the petitions in silence. Between 1968, when T. D. Dorsch found the poems to be “strangely tactless,” and 2004, when A. E. Christa Canitz characterized “the dominant strain” in the petitions as “one of morally compromised self-righteousness,” not a single article devoted to the petitions appeared, despite Priscilla Bawcutt’s cogent reappraisal in Dunbar the Makar: “here, if anywhere, is the core of Dunbar’s poetry and that ‘unifying consciousness’ that some critics would deny him.”3 Antony Hasler has recently revisited the petitions as part of a broader study of late medieval court poetry, rightly asserting that they “richly illuminate the relationship between poet and sovereign at one late medieval court, and the symbolic negotiations of which that bond is woven.”4 However, Hasler and I differ in our interpretation of the contours of that relationship: whereas he finds that “the petitionary poems are above all a flaunting, even a celebration, of the absence of power: a self-abjection” that serves to heighten the splendour of the monarch by contrast, I identify a more aggressive (and self-aggrandizing) agenda in the poems’ approach to James. Moreover, I argue that the petitions’ investment in the literary tradition itself elevates their concerns above the personal. Far from expressing merely vulgar self-interest, Dunbar’s petitions unite economic and poetic ambition in a sustained attempt to discover

1. Taylor, Dunbar: The Poet and His Period, 64. 2. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 93; Wood, Two Scots Chaucerians, 35. Also see Scott, Dunbar; Reiss, William Dunbar, 31–45; and Burrow, “Poet as Petitioner.” 3. Dorsch, “Of Discretioun in Asking”; Canitz, “A Benefice for the Prophet,” 60; Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, 115. 4. Hasler, Court Poetry, 64. Hasler’s study focuses on this relationship, and differs from mine in his conclusion that “since James IV was much concerned with visibility, the identity Dunbar must perform is that of his king’s spectacular obverse—fluid, ‘complex,’ and multiple, at times rather a point of disappearance than a self ” (64).



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the contemporary relevance in timeworn traditions, and to create a poetics that would transform courtly love poetry into a poetry of the Scottish court.

“ANE SERUAND TO THE KING”: DUNBAR AS COURT POET Dunbar’s unprecedented status as a poet in and of the Scottish court crucially enables his poetic ambition, allowing him to claim a national relevance that transcends previous poetic claims of value. Even in England, where Chaucer had posthumously been transformed into a national poet by the Lancastrian propaganda machine, poets tended to cultivate humility before their monarchs.5 Frequently, they had little choice in taking a subordinate stance: Richard Firth Green has illuminated the degree to which those serving in the household of a late-medieval monarch were entirely dependent upon their 6 masters, owing absolute devotion with no certainty of reward. Yet Dunbar, though even more beholden to his king than English courtiers (for reasons that will be outlined below), rejects this one-way model of liberality and instead conceives of the court poet’s role as closely tied to the interests of the court itself. In his estimation, court and poet exist in a relationship of mutual dependency, in which the poet is nearly as crucial to the monarch’s success as the monarch is to the poet’s. Chaucer’s posthumous career would have provided Dunbar with a possible model for the alignment of poetic preeminence with royal prestige; just as Dunbar claims to be Chaucer’s literary heir, he also inherits a Chaucerian legacy suggestive of poetry’s ability to confer cultural— and, by extension, political—capital upon a court. Yet in asking the Scottish court to recognize the centrality of his verse to its own identity, Dunbar had a great deal of cultural weight to overcome. While in England the drive toward appropriating poetry for nationalist purposes was instigated by the court itself. In Scotland it fell to Dunbar to make the case for his own worth in a nation where, historically, the court had paid little attention to its subjects’ literary endeavors. Sally Mapstone observes a “distinctive difference in the character of Scottish royal patronage” compared with that of England, largely due to the fact that a series of 5. On Chaucer’s posthumous elevation to the rank of national poet, see Fisher, “A Language Policy,” and the sources mentioned in Chapter 4, note 63. Chaucer was only the first in a series of English poets, including Hoccleve and Lydgate, implicated in royal appropriations of vernacular literature. However, the poetic scene in fifteenth-century England provides no parallel for Dunbar’s position as a poet residing at the court itself, within his monarch’s household. 6. Green, Poets and Princepleasers.

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Stewart monarchs emerged from long minorities intent upon “re-establishing royal authority. And it was an authority that found its expression more in the acquisition of land than in the commissioning of literature. The dispensation of literary patronage, particularly in the vernacular, was not high on their list of priorities.”7 When Dunbar embarked upon his poetic career at court—documented from 1500 to his (possible) death in 1513—he became the first Scottish poet to live as a member of the monarch’s household, with all of the privileges and anxieties that position entailed. Residing at the center of the Scottish political scene as a “servitour” to James IV, he achieved an intimacy that other poets, who merely performed at court or sought patronage there, could not hope to rival. Yet the very nature of court politics, with its competitive factions battling for royal favor, could fill the life of a courtier with uncertainty, and even royal patronage did not invariably provide security. Moreover, Dunbar’s poetic facility would not necessarily have contributed to his perceived value at court. Green theorizes that the flourishing of loveliterature in the later Middle Ages entailed a weakening of the poet’s status: as love grew to be seen as the preserve of the nobility, talent in verse-making became one of the expected accomplishments of every nobleman. The poet became merely one courtier among many in the “cutthroat competition for household advancement.”8 Accordingly, the evidence suggests that despite the advantage of proximity, it took time for Dunbar to earn the court’s esteem. His beginnings were small indeed: in the early portions of his career (1501–7), he received a pension of only ₤10 a year—half what the “gunnar” and falconer received. It seems that like most court poets of the period, Dunbar at times needed another source of income in order to maintain the high social status expected of a courtier. He probably found some form of employment at court that took advantage of his 9 ecclesiastical training and his skill with a pen —perhaps as a secretary, notary, chaplain, or clerk—in addition to serving as an ambassador, a position in which his poetic facility may have been of some use.10 Yet although Dunbar’s very protestations of worth suggest that the court did not always share his view of his own indispensability, by the end of his life he had clearly become a valued servant: in 1507 his pension was doubled, and in 1510 it was raised to the generous sum of ₤80 a year. Unfortunately, although it is tempting to con 7. Mapstone, “Was There a Court Literature,” 414. 8. Green, Poets and Princepleasers, 134. 9. See Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, 80, 108; Treasurer’s Accounts, 2:93–96, 3:117–18. 10. The encomium London, thou art of townes A per se was performed in 1501 in London by a Scottish priest who accompanied the embassy that was to arrange James IV’s wedding to Margaret Tudor; it has often been attributed to Dunbar. See Chapter 5 for a fuller discussion.



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nect these burgeoning payments with growing recognition of Dunbar’s poetic value, the Treasurer’s Accounts never specify the nature of the services that were so liberally rewarded.11 By the end of his career, Dunbar certainly had no reason to complain of penury, and yet he also seems never to have attained his chief desire: church advancement, in the form of a benefice. Crucially for Dunbar, this benefice was within James’s power to bestow: due to the unique relationship of the Scottish monarch and the Roman church, a man like Dunbar who was both courtier and churchman was even more dependent upon his monarch’s goodwill than his counterparts in England. Whereas elsewhere the nominations of candidates for vacant Church benefices typically fell to the Pope, in Scotland the situation differed. In an indult of 1487, Pope Innocent VIII had modified this traditional papal right by allowing James III to nominate his own candidates to fill the most valuable benefices— those worth more than two hundred gold florins—when they fell vacant; for eight months after the occurrence of a vacancy, the Pope would await the king’s decisions and refrain from making his own nominations. Upon ascending the throne, James IV carried on as though this indult had conferred a perpetual privilege, and subsequent popes did little to interfere: during James’s twenty-five-year reign, he arranged for the distribution of over two hundred benefices.12 Thus Dunbar’s quest for ecclesiastical preferment, as much as his aspirations at court, hinged upon James’s willingness to reward his service.13 Yet despite—or perhaps because of—this total subjection to the whim of his monarch, Dunbar challenges traditional conceptions of poetic value in order to claim an elevated status for court poetry that even his English masters and counterparts do not attempt to assert. In doing so, he also makes the case for his own worth in the hopes of receiving greater compensation—perhaps even his longed-for benefice. Yet traditional decorum prohibited poets from directly requesting payment for their verse: those who did so risked being confused with minstrels, or in Scotland with “bairds.” By the fifteenth century, the term “minstrel” had generally come to be applied to a musician, a lowerclass performer who would be hired to render a service, but who was not generally thought of as having a particular artistic skill; in lowland Scotland, the seat of James’s court, bards were considered to be even less socially accept 11. However, Ridley has argued, in “Plea for the Middle Scots,” that Dunbar primarily served as a poet, “his duty being to write court-odes and other occasional verse” (174). 12. See Cowan, Medieval Church in Scotland, 193–211; Herkless and Hannay, Archbishops of St. Andrews, 1:257–58; and Hannay, Scottish Crown and the Papacy, 10. 13. Dunbar’s verse reflects the necessity of securing James’s favor: fourteen poems, a full sixth of his surviving output, address the king directly (numbers 5, 9, 35, 37, 43, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 79, and 80, in Bawcutt’s edition); several others, which feature the king or discuss aspects of his court, appear to be indirectly aimed at James.

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able, due to their association with the Gaelic-speaking Highlands.14 Thus Dunbar carefully differentiates himself from this lesser category of performers: he prefers to call himself a “makar,” a term that connotes elevated poetic production, while he typically reserves the term “baird” for insults.15 When he terms his fellow poet Walter Kennedy an “Iersche brybour baird, wyle beggar” (65.49), for example, the word simultaneously suggests social, cultural, and poetic inferiority.16 Bards’ ability to capitalize upon their talents—their “begging”—went hand in hand with their low social status and the general lack of respect accorded them by their employers.17 More importantly, they typically received payment only for performing, not for composing verse: even Blind Hary, the author of the Wallace, is mentioned in the Treasurer’s Accounts only as a singer of ballads.18 Dunbar, on the other hand, never requests payment for a performance; instead, he aims at a broader conception of value, suggesting that his “making” should itself be regarded as an important contribution both to existing court culture and to the historical record. Basing his own value in the court upon his poetry (the only specific “service” he ever mentions having rendered to James), Dunbar insists on several occasions that he deserves reward expressly for his indispensable contribution to the court’s prestige. Significantly, he estimates his own value in historical terms: although several surviving occasional poems—doubtless commissions—suggest that his contemporaries appreciated his work’s topical relevance, he frequently takes a longer view, placing his own work in historical context. To give one example, in Schir, ȝe haue mony servitouris, Dunbar includes himself in a long catalogue of James’s “seruitouris” at court, comprised of “Kirkmen, courtmen and craftismen fyne” (67.3), who serve well and deserve compensation. Although he modestly avers that he may be less worthy than some of these, he then proudly declares that: Als lang in mynd my work sall hald, Als haill in everie circumstance, In forme, in mater and substance, 14. Green, Poets and Princepleasers, 127, 206. 15. Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, 17–19. 16. Parenthetical citations of Dunbar’s verse refer to William Dunbar, Poems of William Dunbar, edited by Priscilla Bawcutt. In the first parenthetical citation of a poem, I give the poem number in Bawcutt’s edition, followed by line numbers; subsequent citations in text, where clear, refer to line numbers only. 17. Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, 20, collects other contemporary references to minstrels and bards. See the previous chapter, 131–32, for a fuller discussion of Dunbar’s use of “baird” as an insult. 18. Treasurer’s Accounts, 1:184, 188.



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But wering or consumptioun, Roust, canker, or corruptioun, As ony of thair werkis all, Suppois that my rewarde be small. (28–34)

The “work” whose incorruptibility he extols is plainly his verse, and the deliberate understatement that it will endure as long as that of dancers, musicians, goldsmiths, and shipbuilders conceals what Bawcutt aptly describes as “a proud boast for the immortality of his poetry.”19 Contending that poetry surpasses all other service precisely because it will stand the test of time, Dunbar suggests that his verse will not only help to establish James’s court as a contemporary center of culture; uniquely, it will also translate the glories of the court into the future, preserving the cultural capital it helps to create. This stress on his poetry’s role within the broader historical record is analogous to Dunbar’s careful construction of his own place within literary tradition, as discussed in the previous chapter. His dual emphasis on literary genealogy and national history extends the relevance of his verse, just as his claim for poetry’s superiority elevates its “makar” above the common crowd of courtiers and craftsmen whose works he both records and transcends. Although Dunbar remains one of James’s “servitouris,” he simultaneously fashions himself as a figure set apart from their ranks, uniquely capable of conferring immortality.

“ANE HELL MY PARADISE:” FROM COURTLY LOVE TO COURT Yet Dunbar’s immortalization of James’s court rarely takes the form of simple encomium; Dunbar is as likely to censure its faults as to sing its virtues. Thus his court poetry is frequently characterized by an odd tension between praise and rebuke, as his concern to immortalize the court’s worthy aspects is complicated by his efforts to inspire even greater merit—efforts that are themselves moderated by Dunbar’s personal need for his monarch’s esteem. Attempting to negotiate this complex terrain in his verse, Dunbar turns to the poetic tradition of courtly love, a literary model that presents similar tensions in its endless explorations of the relationship between lover and lady. Dunbar’s transformation of the courtly love genre into a means of negotiating the personal politics of the royal court is enabled by a broader rejection 19. Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, 35.

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of love poetry as an end in itself. A master of the courtly love lyric and lovevision, Dunbar is nevertheless especially attentive to the limitations of love poetry; he typically takes up the subject of love only to reveal it to be, at best, a literary fabrication, and at worst, a morally bankrupt system whose highest good—sexual fulfillment—is usually degrading. This skepticism represents a critical departure from the Chaucerian tradition, in which love poetry could, as Winthrop Wetherbee has observed of Chaucer’s Troilus, “hold the power to guide its subjects to the threshold of spiritual understanding.”20 Yet while Dunbar disallows poetry’s potential in one arena, he advances it in another: for although Dunbar parallels the frustrations of the courtly lover with those of the courtier, he ultimately reserves hope for the corrupt court’s redemption and suggests that poetry may aid in its renewal. In the following section, I contend that in his petitions Dunbar uses tropes of courtly love to explore and even manipulate his relationship with James IV, placing the king in the traditional position of the poet’s lady. But first it will be useful to rehearse briefly the courtly love conventions that Dunbar repurposes to political ends, and to examine the parallels that he draws between the aspirations of lovers and courtiers. In turning to Dunbar’s invocations and adaptations of courtly love literature, it is important to note that by the sixteenth century, the vocabulary of this literature had become so fixed and its imagery so standardized as to be instantly recognizable. As Larry D. Benson points out, “courtly love . . . is especially dependent on the forms of speech.”21 The paradigm of the courtly love genre is deceptively simple. The male poet/lover, wracked with anguish by his love for a noble lady, humbles himself before her and begs for her mercy, pity, or grace. Simultaneously exalting his lady for her purity and virtue and begging for the sexual union that, if granted, would inevitably sully that 22 purity, the poet/lover exists in a state of perpetually unsatisfied desire. At times this desire can ennoble the lover, as he strives to be worthy of his lady;23 yet although she inspires him, the lady also represents a threat to the lover, who sees himself as being “at the mercy of a supreme, arbitrary and perverse power.”24 Consequently, one of the most commonly cited faults of a courtly

20. Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets, 239. 21. Benson, “Courtly Love and Chivalry,” 243. 22. Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love, 147. 23. On the ability of love to impart virtue, see Benson, “Courtly Love and Chivalry,” 240–41. 24. Kay, “Desire and Subjectivity,” 214.



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mistress is her “daunger”—defined as “anything or everything that frustrates a lover,” especially his lady’s “disdain, aloofness, reluctance, reserve.”25 Dunbar’s most traditional love lyric, My hartis tresure and swete assured fo, exemplifies the paradigmatic relationship between courtly lover and disdainful mistress. The Maitland scribe’s colophon, “Quod Dunbar quhone he list to feyne,” proves that at least one early reader interpreted it as a parody of the genre, and his view is supported by the very thoroughness with which Dunbar 26 compresses all of the genre’s clichés into this short lyric. The speaker’s initial address to his lady equates her disregard for him with physical violence: My hartis tresure and swete assured fo, The final ender of my lyfe for ever, The creuell brekar of my hart in tuo, To go to deathe this I deservit never. O man slayer, quhill saule and life dissever, Stynt of ȝour slauchtir, allace, ȝour man am I, A thowsand tymes that does ȝow mercy cry. (34.1–7)

His undeserved death at her hands is made more bitter by the fact that he has faithfully served as her “man” (13, 21, 24). Begging for her “mercy” (7, 8,27, 40, 43), “grace” (20, 40), “petie” (28, 37, 41), and “rewthe” (33, 38)—the only things able to forestall his imminent demise—he reminds her that such cruelty is incompatible with her “nobilnes” (38) and “gentill hart” (41). We learn nothing of the lady beyond the facts of her gentility and her indifference to the speaker; as in much courtly love poetry, the lady herself is essentially absent from the poem, and the emphasis remains on the speaker’s own suffering. Yet we do learn a fair amount about the speaker’s ideal of femininity, in the qualities that he simultaneously ascribes to his lady and bemoans her failure to exhibit. She is a “quhyte dow” (36) and “gentill turtour” (37), charged with exhibiting the feminine traits of “womanlie petie” (28) and “sobir humilnes” (36), together with “rewthe, the frute of nobilnes, / Off womanheid the tresour and the rent” (38–39). In claiming the right to represent her as he will in verse, the speaker assumes authority over his lady’s identity—as David Aers notes, even idealization “is a strategy for controlling the other person, defin 25. Middle English Dictionary, University of Michigan Press, definition 4. 26. MacDonald, “Alliterative Poetry and Its Context,” 275–76, lays out the case for both sides. Bawcutt (Dunbar the Makar, 299–301) finds the hyperbole to be entirely consistent with the genre. Reiss, William Dunbar, 99–100; Ross, William Dunbar, 215; and Scott, Dunbar, 59–60, view the poem as a parody.

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ing her to fit one’s own supposed needs: yet another strategy for outlawing female subjectivity independent of male fantasies.”27 However, as numerous critics have observed, the idealized lady (domna) whom a courtly lover typically worships is not a real woman (femna) at all, but only his projection of an ideal category that excludes real women by its very nature.28 Love can quickly turn to hate when his lady disappoints him by differing from his ideal or threatening to escape the boundaries of his representation, thus revealing herself to be a femna and not a domna at all. The lady of Dunbar’s poem, in refusing to conform to the speaker’s pliant ideal, betrays his notions of her idealized femininity and thus provokes his unflattering representation of her bloodthirsty cruelty. Insisting on his lady’s capitulation, Dunbar’s speaker employs one further courtly love motif: the metaphor of the lady as physician, capable of curing the poet’s lovesickness. David Aers elaborates on the implications: “Since the woman has infinite life-giving powers, it must be her fault, her malevolent 29 withholding of resources, if the male feels discomfited, vulnerable, and ‘sick.’” Using a variant of the metaphor to describe the lover’s relationship to his mistress in My hartis tresure, Dunbar plays on these implications: Lo, deithe is in my breist with furious rage, Quhilk may no balme nor tryacle asswage Bot ȝour mercie, for laik of quhilk I de. (34.25–27)

Granting his lady magical power over life and death, the speaker abases himself before her—yet paradoxically, his assumed posture of weakness allows him to threaten her with dire consequences if she does not give in to his demands: he will die, and she will be a murderess. As so often in the courtly love lyric, the ostensibly servile role turns out to be a rhetorically powerful position, enabling the lover’s speech while limiting the range of possible responses. Affirming that “mercyles may no weycht nobill be” (42), he signals his assurance that, as she is a noble lady, her capitulation is inevitable. Thus in the very act of recording the lady’s unwillingness, the poem functions as a mechanism of control through which Dunbar’s speaker is able to fashion a relationship with the lady solely through the force of his own desire; even by refusing his pleas for mercy, she enters into a relationship that only the speak 27. Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity, 138. 28. Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature, 128–35. 29. Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity, 136.



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er’s (endlessly foretold) death can extinguish. In its almost excessive reliance on the conventional tropes of courtly love, My hartis tresure and swete assured fo not only points to Dunbar’s thorough familiarity with the genre, but also suggests that he treats courtly love primarily as a literary genre, with only a tenuous relation to actual human behavior. Dunbar’s clearest step away from the Chaucerian tradition of love poetry comes in the love-vision of the Golden Targe, a critique of the genre that demonstrates the fundamental incompatibility of love with reason, and thus the unsuitability of love as subject-matter within a moral poetics. The poem opens like a conventional love-vision, with a speaker who falls asleep in a lovely garden setting, only to dream of equally beautiful surroundings. Here he watches in amazement as a bevy of allegorical figures, led by Nature and Venus and signifying different aspects of love, approach on a shining ship. Yet the dream soon turns to nightmare, when Venus spies the speaker and arrays her forces to attack. Battle ensues, and the speaker’s defenders—the staunchest of whom is Reason—prove to be no match for Love’s onslaught. Love triumphs, in a victory that leads immediately to “Hevynesse” (59.227), followed by the stripping away of the trappings of poetic artifice and the reduction of the dream world’s “paradise complete” (72) to a “wildernes” devoid of “birdis, bank, and bruke” (233–34). The cannon blast from Love’s warship, which abruptly terminates the dream, forcefully intrudes early sixteenth-century technology into the Chaucerian space of the love-vision, thereby signaling not only the temporal disparity between Chaucer’s world and Dunbar’s but also a difference of poetic sensibility.30 For Dunbar, love—and, by extension, love poetry—no longer holds the possibility of leading to spiritual growth, as it did for Chaucer. Revealed for the barren wasteland that it is, the world of love loses the capacity to inspire poetry, and its violent end amounts to a rejection of all earlier 31 models of poetic practice in which love played a central and sustaining role. Yet Dunbar’s rejection of love as a poetic subject does not prevent him from drawing productive continuities between the realities of the contemporary Scottish court and courtly love conventions that stretch back to the twelfth-century troubadours. The parallels between Dunbar’s depictions of love and of the court are striking: he portrays the equally abject positions of lover and courtier, each dependent upon the seemingly arbitrary will of an unfathomable superior, in similar language and often with a similarly hopeless tone. The courtier’s complaint, “For lang seruice rewarde is none, / And 30. This display of naval artillery pays homage to James IV’s investment in the construction of a royal fleet; see Nicholson, Scotland, 592–94. 31. On the Golden Targe, see Hasler, “William Dunbar: The Elusive Subject”; Lyall, “Moral Allegory in Dunbar’s Goldyn Targe”; and Scott, Dunbar, 40–46.

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schort my lyfe may heir indure,” (54.7) could just as easily be spoken by the lover who laments, “Quhy vndir traist ȝoure man thus haue ȝe slane?” (34.24). The one groans, “In princes is thair no petie” (54.29); the other cries, “quhair is ȝour womanlie petie?” (34.28). Neither mistress nor patron typically displays the loyalty that characterizes these neglected speakers; instead, ladies and patrons both display a frustrating inconstancy. Dunbar complains that love “is so new of acquentance, / The auld gais fra remembrance” (50.13–14); similarly, in what seems a pointed dig at James’s fondness for foreigners, he grumbles of the Scottish court: Sum givis to strangeris with faces new, That ȝisterday fra Flanderis flew, And to awld serwandis list not se War thay nevir of sa grit vertew. (45.36–40)

Neither the “grit vertew” of the courtier nor the faithful devotion of the lover can prevail against such perversity; thus both lover and courtier must struggle for preferment in worlds characterized by distorted values and unstable rules. In addition to suffering the ills of unjust patronage, both lover and courtier must also contend with an array of (inevitably inferior) competitors. Frederick Goldin lists the names under which they appear in early courtly lyrics: “Laudenfier, trichador, savai, fola gens, fals maador—flatterers and slanderers, intriguers, vicious ones, mad ones, false lovers”—an array of characters who wish to discredit the poet’s love, thereby robbing him of his lady’s esteem 32 and challenging his claims to courtliness. In A Complaint unto Pity, Chaucer admits to his mistress, “Hit were right gret wonder but ye hadde / Of alle servantes, bothe of good and badde” (65–66); although the “leest worthy of alle hem” (67), he is set apart by his genuine devotion. Similarly, in listing the array of “mony seruitouris” (67.1) who crowd James’s court, Dunbar follows a lengthy list of “pleisand .  .  . and honorable” (19) servants with an equally lengthy catalogue of “fenȝeouris, fleichouris and flatteraris, / Cryaris, craikaris and clatteraris” (39–40), implying that James lacks the discernment to tell the “nobill cunning sort” (61) from the “fulis nyce” (65). This is a crowded world, in which rivals can be found around every corner; for a courtier as for a lover, the difficulty lies in setting his sincere devotion apart from the false flattery of his competitors. 32. Goldin, “Array of Perspectives in the Early Courtly Love Lyric,” 58.



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Yet Dunbar’s stance in writing about the court generally remains more hopeful than his attitude toward love. As we have seen, he essentially repudiates love as a corrupt system incompatible with virtue; his criticisms of the court, always more subtle than his explorations of courtly love, imply hope for reform rather than outright rejection. Consequently, he never seems able or fully willing to abandon the court, which he envisions as an essentially good system afflicted by disorder. Expressing a certain faith in the possibility of change, Dunbar persistently appeals to the king not only for his own benefice but also for a sweeping reform of the courtly system of patronage. By contrast, in a particularly damning image of love’s essential fickleness, he maintains: In luve to keip allegance, It was als nys an ordinance As quha wald bid ane deid man dance In sepulture. (50.21–24)

Compared with the impossibility of this ghastly request, asking the king to institute the “equale distributioun” (62.3) of benefices seems a viable proposition. Thus, although at various times Dunbar asserts for both lover and courtier that true stability and reward can only be found with God, his speaker’s claim to “gife our the obseruans / Of luvis cure” (50.15–16) ultimately seems a more satisfying resolution than the prayer in the petition Quhom to sall I compleine that God “rewarde me with na erthlie cure” (54.83). After all, unless this was the last petition that Dunbar wrote, he soon resumed campaigning for a benefice; the much smaller number of love poems in his corpus suggests that his speaker’s disavowal of love more genuinely reflects Dunbar’s interest than this repudiation of ambition. Indeed, instead of advocating a clear rejection of courtly ambition in favor of religious devotion, Dunbar more often presents God as a resource for the successful courtier. In To dwell in court, my friend, gife that thow list, he advises the aspiring courtier to “Hald God thy freind, evir stabill be him stand, / He will the confort in all misaventeur” (81.43–44). Positing God as a guide through the intrigues and reversals of the courtier’s life, in which “trewth dwellis nocht ay for that trewth appeiris” (81.10) and “Ane freind may be thy fo” (81.12), Dunbar envisions the possibility of harmony between courtly ambition and spiritual growth—the same possibility that he denies to love. Consequently, the court appears to offer Dunbar not only the chance to further his career, but, crucially, scope for combining

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worldly ambition with moral action, through fashioning a new poetics that would speak to these joint concerns.

COURT POET AND “KYNGIS GRACE”: POWER AND DESIRE IN DUNBAR’S PETITIONS In adapting the tropes of courtly love to a discussion of the court itself, centered upon the king, Dunbar is, in some sense, returning to the origin of the genre. As developed by the troubadours, the original paradigm of courtly love was, as C. S. Lewis notes, “closely modelled on the service which a feudal vassal owes his lord. The lover is the lady’s ‘man.’ He addresses her as midons, which etymologically represents not ‘my lady’ but ‘my lord.’ The whole attitude has been rightly described as a ‘feudalisation of love.’”33 The novelty of drawing upon the feudal rhetoric of the lord/vassal relationship as a means of discussing the poet’s service to his lady lay primarily in the inversion of gender hierarchy that the reapplication of this rhetoric of service entailed. The courtly lover ostensibly relinquished all power in the relationship, casting himself as his lady’s humble servant and thus subordinating his will and judgment to hers—a reversal of ordinary power relations that appeared to give the woman power over the man. Again reversing the orientation of this rhetoric of service, Dunbar turns the courtly lover’s pleas for his lady’s admiration and sexual favors into the courtly poet’s demands for his lord’s appreciation and financial munificence. But in effecting this transformation, Dunbar—far from attempting to recover original feudal language—retains the trappings of romantic love. Employing many of courtly love’s traditional motifs in his petitions to the king, Dunbar places his monarch in the rhetorical position traditionally occupied by the poet’s lady. In about three quarters of his petitions, Dunbar employs various kinds of courtly love language in his addresses to James. Complane I wald, for example, concludes with these lines: Thairfoir, O prince maist honorable, Be in this meter merciabill And to thy auld serwandis haff e, That lang hes lipinit into the, Gif I be ane off tha my sell, Throw all regiones hes bein hard tell, 33. Lewis, Allegory of Love, 2.



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Off quhilk my vrytting vitnes beris. And ȝete thy danger ay me deris. Bot efter danger cumis grace, As hes bein herd in mony place. (9.67–76)

Dunbar returns to the theme of long service unrewarded that so often characterizes his poems, both of love and of the court. Yet here his choice of language accentuates the always implicit similarity between the position of the lady and that of the monarch. Pleading with James to be “merciabill,” complaining of the king’s “danger” and hoping to be given “grace,” Dunbar explicitly assumes the stance of the courtly lover before his lady.34 To a greater or lesser extent, this pattern extends through the majority of his petitions. Again and again, Dunbar begs the king’s “grace” (5.24; 63.1; 64.14, 21; 67.23; 79.90, 99), asks for his “reuth” (63.9) and “mercye” (68.52) or complains that he is “reuthles” (63.23) or “mercyles” (63.30). He becomes so frustrated by the perpetual delay that he laments, “My hart neir bristis” (67.69), and “It breikis my hairt” (79.83). And, like the lover, he suffers from tremendous jealousy of the 35 (always inferior) competitors who receive what he is denied. Dunbar’s portrayal of James as a physician capable of curing an illness is one of his most potent adaptations of courtly love language. In applying the physician metaphor to James, Dunbar seeks to appropriate the rhetorical strength of the courtly lover’s position, while indicating the complex nature of his own desire. He repeatedly casts James in the role of physician (a trope more traditionally applied to a feminine subject), simultaneously glorifying the power of his monarch and placing James in the rhetorical bind of having either to deny his power or to admit that he deliberately withholds Dunbar’s cure. Dunbar thus attempts to subordinate the king to the power of his rhetoric, demanding an outcome that will be inevitable only if James accepts the terms of this portrayal and acts accordingly. In Schir, ȝit remembir as befoir, Dunbar represents himself as suffering from some nameless illness, linked to the refrain of the poem: “Exces of thocht does me mischeif.” His is a mental 34. Hasler makes the similar point that Dunbar’s language of address to the king can “suggest a pitiless lady whose caprice must be humored” (“William Dunbar,” 79), and that at times “the king is the object of the poet’s desire, the disdainful lady whose ‘graciows countenaunce’ is wealth enough for the loyal subject” (80); however, his argument focuses on what he sees as Dunbar’s own feminization. 35. In Dunbar’s petitions, he assumes more of an autobiographical stance than in any of his other work, casting himself as both speaker and poet. For the sake of convenience, I shall follow Dunbar’s lead and refer to the speaker of the petitions as “Dunbar,” although it is important to note the extent to which his self-presentation in these poems is a rhetorical persona.

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and spiritual rather than a physical ailment, provoked by the thought “that my ȝouthe is done forloir / In ȝour seruice with pane and greiff ” (68.2–3) that goes unrewarded. Whereas the courtly lover’s unrequited desire endangers his life, Dunbar’s continual meditation upon his frustrated ambition threatens to overwhelm him with bitterness, for which he appeals to James for remedy: I grant my seruice is bot lycht. Thairfoir, of mercye and not of rycht, I ask ȝou, schir, no man to greiff, Sum medecyne gif that ȝe mycht. Exces of thocht dois me mischeiff. Nane can remeid my maledie Sa weill as ȝe, schir, veralie. With ane benefice ȝe may preiff, And gif I mend not haistalie, Exces of thocht lat me mischeif. (51–54; 56–60)

Mapping traditional love-language onto a request for ecclesiastical promotion, Dunbar appeals to James as a source of both financial and emotional security: a benefice will solve his money problems and also heal his spiritual anguish. On one level, Dunbar posits an economic interaction of physician and patient, circumscribed by precise terms; the final two lines specify that if this cure fails, it will be Dunbar’s fault and not the king’s—a limitation of liability that does not lessen the urgency of Dunbar’s plea. But the apparent simplicity of this requested transaction belies the speaker’s tremendous emotional investment in its outcome. The language in which Dunbar couches his pleas imbues the benefice with a value that exceeds economic necessity and transforms it into an overdetermined symbol of both the monarch’s benevolence and justice, and of the speaker’s value as poet and “servitor.” Far from being merely an economic expedient, a benefice would be a triumphant vindication of his years of sacrifice and an affirmation of the king’s appreciation. Elsewhere, Dunbar’s feminization of the king becomes even more explicit. This hinder nycht, halff sleiping as I lay depicts a dream-version of the Scottish court and Dunbar’s place within it. Languishing in a depression induced by the fact that “he hes lang maid seruice thair [the court] in vane” (53), the poet/ dreamer is aided by a band of allegorical figures led by “Nobilnes,” who offers the dreamer’s best chance of recovery. As the figure best placed to reward good service, Nobleness plainly represents James, an association further strengthened by a reference at the end of the poem to “the prince” and “his



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nobill intent” (107–8).36 Like James himself in Schir, ȝit remembir, Nobleness is given healing powers: Discretioun counsels, “Nobilnes, his lecheing lyis in the” (50), and later Reason affirms, “Be Nobilnes his help mon first be found” (72). Through this allegorical persona, Dunbar depicts James as an ideal monarch whose inherent nobility is a matter not only of rank but also of character, suggesting that he has both the power and the willingness to heal: Thane com the ladyis danceing in ane trece, And Nobilnes befoir thame come ane space, Saying withe cheir bening and womanly: ‘I se ane heir in bed oppressit ly, My sisteris, go and help to gett him grace.’ (26–30)

Appearing with three ladies and speaking “withe cheir bening and womanly” (29), Nobleness would appear to be a feminine character—and while this may seem an odd choice of gender for the figure who represents the king, it is in line with Dunbar’s repeated invocations of courtly love language in his addresses to James. Again casting James in the traditional rhetorical position of the poet’s lady, here Dunbar overtly writes gender back into the physician metaphor, taking advantage of the allegorical form in order to highlight this aspect of his discursive strategy. As a representation of royalty, this attempt to feminize the king stands in sharp contrast to other late-medieval depictions of monarchy, which approach their subjects with more trepidation. In the Legend of Good Women, for example, Chaucer paints a forbidding portrait of the God of Love, a figure often 37 thought to represent Richard II. Portrayed as a glorious figure whose “face shoon so bryghte / That wel unnethes mychte I him beholde” (F.231–32), the God of Love radiates a power that precludes close scrutiny even as its resplendence attracts the speaker’s observation. The God’s very gaze is a source of terror: “sternely on me he gan byholde, / So that his loking dooth myn herte colde” (239–40). Distant and dangerous, this is a monarch to be courted from afar, if at all; despite Chaucer’s close association with Richard’s court, the only lines of verse that Chaucer explicitly addresses to Richard are the conventional words of advice in the Lenvoy to Lak of Stedfastnesse. The difference between Dunbar’s representation of royalty and Chaucer’s must depend to some extent 36. This identification has been generally accepted by scholars; see, for example, Bawcutt’s commentary in Poems of William Dunbar, 2:466. 37. For example, see Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women; and Wallace, “Writing the Tyrant’s Death,” 117–30.

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upon the different characters of the monarchs themselves: James, who regularly gambled with his courtiers, clearly had a more relaxed style of interacting with his inferiors than Richard, who sat glowering on his throne, expecting genuflection from anyone who came within view.38 Yet Dunbar’s employment of courtly love conventions to depict his monarch also differs radically from Chaucer’s use of similar language. The love-language that suffuses the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women is directed not to the God of Love, but to his queen, Alceste—the personification of the daisy to which the speaker pledges his love and service: The hert in-with my sorwfull brest yow dredeth And loveth so sore that ye ben verrayly The maistresse of my wit, and nothing I. (F.84–88)

Yet it quickly emerges that the speaker’s relationship with the God of Love is just as crucial to his well-being as his attachment to the daisy. The God of Love holds the power of life and death over the speaker, whom he accuses of treachery and threatens with dire revenge until Alceste steps in as the speaker’s defender, changing the course of their interaction. The speaker describes the efficacy of her aid: For, nadde comfort ben of hire presence, I hadde ben ded, withouten any defence, For drede of Loves wordes and his chere. (F.278–80)

The speaker reaps the fruits of his service to the daisy in Alceste’s willingness to intervene and negotiate his formal reentry into the God’s service. In this version of monarchy, kings “ben half-goddes in this world here” (F.387); potent masculinity and supreme rank align in the God of Love, a formidable figure of absolute power who may be productively approached through a mediating female influence, but who, unlike Dunbar’s king, cannot himself be portrayed as feminine. In setting up this love triangle, in which the beloved woman functions primarily to mediate the social relations between men, Chaucer privileges an emphasis on homosocial relations that had been an implicit focus of love poetry since the time of the troubadours. Despite its ostensible affirmation of 38. Wallace, “Writing the Tyrant’s Death,” 118.



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heterosexual relationships, the love lyric is actually a profoundly androcentric mode of discourse, primarily concerned with negotiating same-sex social relations within masculine hierarchies.39 Rouben Cholakian discusses the primacy of the erotic triangle in the troubadour lyric, which tends to revolve around the three figures of the lover, his lady, and “also a third male party who is by turns a slandering eavesdropper (lausengier), a jealous rival (gilos) or a neutral 40 companion;” he finds that these seemingly philogynous texts actually marginalize the female figure, displacing male anxieties onto her while privileging male relationships. Contextualizing Cholakian’s psychoanalytic reading within medieval systems of family and feudalism, Gaunt concludes that the troubadours used their singing “to negotiate their masculinity in as much as they construct and perform a gender system in it, articulate homosocial desire through it, and determine their status in relation to other men by it.” Performed within “the intensely political environment of the court,” their songs became “a currency in the process whereby men form hierarchies.”41 From its outset, then, the poetry of courtly love is concerned with negotiating and intervening in class hierarchies as well as with enshrining a particular set of 42 gender relations. In representing James, Dunbar brings this dual focus of the courtly love tradition—class and gender—to bear upon the single figure of the king. Literalizing the tradition’s implicit emphasis on homosocial relations, Dunbar removes the female figure from the equation altogether, instead identifying James as the sole object of his desire. In Dunbar’s portrayal, James occupies two points of an erotic triangle, in which he stands both as the gatekeeper of the court’s masculine hierarchy and as the mediating, feminized figure charged with enabling Dunbar’s ascent.43 The only woman who occasionally enters into this equation is Queen Margaret. But while Chaucer’s Alceste functions both as an object of heterosexual desire and as a powerful intercessory figure, Margaret remains marginal to the poems’ central dynamic, even when 39. See, for example, Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, 149; Cholakian, Troubadour Lyric; and Gaunt, Gender and Genre, 135–58. 40. Cholakian, Troubadour Lyric, 1. Cholakian’s theory of the function of the erotic triangle within the troubadour lyric owes much to Sedgwick, Between Men. 41. Gaunt, Gender and Genre, 157–58. 42. See, for example, Köhler’s influential view of the troubadour lyric as expressive of class conflict in “Observations”; Gaunt summarizes criticism of Köhler’s study, which finds that Köhler “replicates the troubadours’ own assumptions that the social and the masculine are coterminous and that women play no part in the social” (145). 43. Hasler identifies somewhat different gender dynamics at work in the poem: “Dunbar’s tone still has the effect of wittily feminizing both king and poet, uniting them as a couple of talkative gossips” (“William Dunbar,” 79).

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imagined in a similar role. Attempting to draw James into a courtly love script in which, as we have seen, the poet exercises control through his acts of representation, Dunbar repeatedly fashions versions of the king in which James is more amenable to his desires, such as the hen-pecked husband he wistfully imagines in Schir, for ȝour grace, bayth nicht and day: Ever quhen I think ȝow harde or dour, Or mercyles in my succour, Than pray I god and sweit sanct An, Gif that ȝe war Iohne Thomsounis man. (63.29–32)

“John Thomson’s man” signifies a husband dominated by his wife; Dunbar humorously opines that if James would only be ruled by his queen, “but benefice I wald nocht bene” (6). Placing James into this subservient and emasculated role, Dunbar fantasizes a scenario in which, through his influence with the queen, he could have some control over James’s actions. But he does not envisage this as a real possibility. Alceste’s power of arbitration is, in this comic vision of Margaret, reduced to a joke at the king’s expense, and the queen enters the masculine drama only to be dismissed as a real player. Instead, Dunbar’s portrayal remains focused on James and on the complex dynamics of their relationship, to which Dunbar applies the gendered conventions of love language in an attempt to negotiate his place within the homosocial hierarchy of the court.44 Dunbar’s strategy of feminizing James thus emerges as a form of discursive aggression by which Dunbar hopes to define the parameters of their relationship, while retaining the lover’s typically deferential stance. Yet James proves a far more slippery poetic subject than the average courtly lady, as his royal authority easily allows him to escape the bounds of the poet’s representation. A poet might elevate a lady to a pedestal; James already sits on a throne, where his position as the preeminent authority of Scotland thus precludes any poetic denial of his subjectivity. James thus possesses a far greater measure of power than the typical addressee of a love lyric, resulting in a court poetic that literalizes the rhetorical subordination of poet to mistress. Whereas the courtly lover’s submission to his lady is seldom more than a literary conven 44. The critical view that Dunbar “was primarily the queen’s man” (Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 93) has long prevailed, although far fewer of his poems address the queen than the king. Whatever the relative extent of these relationships may have been in reality, I would argue that Dunbar’s verse is far more concerned with establishing and sustaining a connection with the king than with maintaining the queen’s favor.



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tion, in Dunbar’s poems the rhetorical submission of poet to patron (despite its verbal similarities to the fictional abjection of the lover) reflects a very real difference of rank and power. And whereas a courtly lover can always turn his attentions to another lady, Dunbar’s options for obtaining a benefice—or any other advancement within the courtly hierarchy—are limited by circumstance. Although elsewhere he asserts that in his youth “I had bein bocht in realmes by, / Had I consentit to be sauld” (66.53–54), he seems painfully aware that in Scotland, at least, he can only advance his career by securing James’s patronage. Therefore, in the petitions Dunbar focuses much of his effort on simply insisting upon the fact of his relationship with the king. Unlike the commissions that Dunbar received to commemorate state occasions, the petitions seem to be unsolicited attempts to establish a personal dialogue with James. In cultivating this dialogue, Dunbar seeks a return of the prestige and cultural capital that his verse has conferred on the Scottish court. Although the actual audience of the petitions can only be guessed at, Dunbar establishes an intimate tone; addressing most of the petitions directly to James (“Schir” is the most common first word throughout Dunbar’s corpus) Dunbar keeps himself in view, compelling the king to acknowledge his presence, though not to deliver his benefice. If he cannot control the parameters of their relationship, at least he can ensure that they have one. In this, at least, Dunbar appears to have been successful; not only does the size of his pension regularly increase, but on at least one occasion James appears to have joined in Dunbar’s poetic play, appending to one of Dunbar’s more humorous petitions his own verse instructing the treasurer to provide the Christmas gift of new clothing that Dunbar requests.45 But James’s side of the dialogue generally remains more elusive, leaving it to Dunbar to record the complexities of their relationship even as he attempts to manipulate it through his verse. In adapting the rhetoric of courtly love to address the court, Dunbar must not only make the case that his subject is essential to him and worthy of his devotion, since that would be taken for granted—he must also, in order to perpetuate the desired relationship, make the more challenging case for his own value. Representing himself as the essential true servant without whom the court would lose its integrity, Dunbar adopts the mask of the scorned lover, whose poetry emerges from the frustration of unfulfilled desire. Unlike the traditional courtly lover, however, Dunbar does not find the experience of service to be inherently ennobling. Although the ideal courtly lover would be a paragon of virtue, Dunbar strongly implies that virtue may well be incom 45. Schir, lat it neuer in toune be tald, number 66 in Bawcutt, Poems.

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patible with the persona of the ideal Scottish courtier. As we have seen, Dunbar holds out hope for the court’s eventual redemption, yet he writes from the perspective of a virtuous man living through times in which “Vertew the court hes done dispys” (54.21). Those who succeed at court are not “men off wertew and cuning, / Off wit and vysdome in gydding” (9.11–12), but an assortment of low-born social climbers, deceitful foreigners, and unscrupulous churchmen who Swa thai the kirk haue in thair cure, Thai fors bot litill how it fure, Nor of the buikis or bellis, quha rang thame. Thai pans not of the prochin pure, Had thai the pelfe to pairt among thame. (43.21–25)

In contrast to this powerful greed, Dunbar adopts a persona of naive humility and virtue, who is both unwilling and unable to engage in the deceptions necessary to advance in this cutthroat world. In one poem, describing at length the “diuers wyis and operatiounes” by which “Men makis in court thair solistationes” (5.1–2), Dunbar concludes by setting himself apart from all those who scramble for advancement: My sempillnes, amang the laiff, Wait off na way, sa God me saiff, Bot with ane hummble cheir and face Refferis me to the kyngis grace. Methink his graciows countenance In ryches is my sufficiance. (21–26)

He knows of no way to ingratiate himself with the king but to offer his humility; all that he asks in return is the king’s benevolence. The assumption of this modest persona masks the inherent aggression of Dunbar’s stance as petitioner, downplaying the very claim for poetic value that it implicitly endorses. His work’s worth, he argues, lies in its difference from the lucrative flattery of false courtiers; although his verse is futile by comparison, its sincerity sets it apart: In sum pairt of my selffe I plei3ne: Quhone vtheris dois flattir and feynȝe,



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Allace, I can bot ballatis breif. Sic barnheid leidis my brydill reynȝe. (68.46–49)

The irony of this lament lies in the fact that “barnheid”—childishness—in flattery and lying is morally commendable. Again, Dunbar points to the disjunction between moral probity and courtly success, implying that the true value of his “barnheid” verse lies precisely in its refusal to divorce language from truth. Dunbar takes the moral high ground not in order to be worthy of the court, but in contrast to its degeneracy and in spite of the pressures it exerts on him as a courtier. Unappreciated and frequently overlooked, Dunbar’s persona exists on the margins of the court, yet this condition ironically allows Dunbar to represent himself as the court’s moral center. His only companion in this position is, curiously, James himself. Although Dunbar criticizes what he sees as James’s inexplicable delay in administering justice, he consistently portrays the king as an embodiment of wisdom and integrity, fully capable of reforming the morality of the court and instituting a system of merit-based patronage, if only he would act in accordance with his natural nobility of character. Dunbar repeatedly exalts James: he is the “prince maist honorable” (9.67) who possesses “regale maiestie” (67.22); allegorically, he becomes the “gentill egill .  .  . Quhilk of all foulis does heast fle” (68.26– 27), or simply “Nobilnes” (75.27). Even James’s speech resembles Dunbar’s in resisting the prevailing mode of courtly discourse. While the rest of the court rushes to judgment and indiscriminate slander, James offers an alternative: Gude Iames the ferd, our nobill king, Quhen that he was of ȝeris ȝing, In sentens said full subtillie: ‘Do weill and sett not by demyng, For no man sall vndemit be.’ (33.41–45)

Like Dunbar, James advocates a moral standard that sets him apart from the court’s widespread corruption. Thus drawing an implicit parallel between James and himself based upon their shared propensity for virtue, Dunbar fashions himself as James’s natural ally in the eventual reform of the court. And yet a second, very different picture of James simultaneously emerges from Dunbar’s petitions. In another link to the courtly love tradition that figures the poet’s lady as both heaven and hell, James embodies Dunbar’s ideal of virtue and his hope for the future but also stands as the source of Dun-

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bar’s troubles. Although Dunbar’s satire seldom impinges directly on the king’s character, many of his compliments to James are backhanded, clearly designed to point to the difference between the ideal king whom he praises and the real king who fails to live up to the standards set in his verse. When Patience assures Dunbar’s persona in This hinder nycht that the king “wald not, for ane bischopperikis rent, / That thow war vnrewardit half ane ȝeir” (75.109–10), he points to the king’s custom of stalling for a time before distributing vacant benefices, in order to profit from the rents in the interim. And although he is unable to appropriate the kind of authority over his subject’s identity that the courtly lover frequently claims, nevertheless Dunbar occasionally turns against James in anger, when he strays too far from Dunbar’s ideal: How sould I leif, and I not landit Nor ȝit withe benefice am blandit? I say not, schir, ȝow to repreif, Bot doutles I go rycht neirhand it. (68.76–79)

James’s position precludes a more direct attack than this near reproof, but Dunbar’s meaning is clear enough. And, of course, the very persistence of Dunbar’s pleas that James act in accordance with “his nobill intent” (108) and effect reform indicates that this reform is as perpetually deferred as the courtly lover’s fulfillment—or as the arrival of Dunbar’s benefice, which “micht haue cuming in schortar quhyll / Fra Calȝecot and the New Fund Yle” (79.61–62). This dual failing of James—either to reform the court as a whole or to remedy the specific injustice of Dunbar’s unfulfilled ambition—is the flip side of his potential to be Dunbar’s partner in virtue. Complicating Dunbar’s portrayal of the king, this characterization emerges as much from Dunbar’s pose as courtly lover, and his attempts to rhetorically manipulate James’s course of action, as it does from the poet’s real irritation at the confounding of his ambition. Yet the perpetual deferral of Dunbar’s desire is precisely what encourages his continued production of poetry. In Schir, ȝe haue mony seruitouris, he argues that his overwhelming wrath inevitably leads to verse, as the only alternative to death: My mind so fer is set to flyt That of nocht ellis I can endyt. For owther man my hart tobreik Or with my pen I man me wreik. And sen the tane most nedis be—



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In to malancolie to de Or lat the vennim ische all out— Be war anone, for it will spout, Gif that the tryackill cum nocht tyt To swage the swalme of my dispyt. (67.79–88)

Poetry here becomes synonymous with the venom that spouts from Dunbar’s embittered mind; only its release can prevent his heart from breaking, and only the quick arrival of the needed remedy can prevent its further emanation. Yet if the “tryackill” he desires here is his long-awaited benefice, he places himself in an awkward position by positing its continual deferral as productive of verse—particularly as he has already represented verse-making as his main qualification for ecclesiastical promotion. If Dunbar’s poetry is as valuable to the court as he claims, and if providing the “tryackill” would put a stop to it, then James has little incentive to comply with Dunbar’s request. Thus, although the courtly lover’s stance offers Dunbar a rhetorically powerful position from which to depict his relationship with James and his situation at court, his appropriation of this stance also embroils him in the paradox of the lover’s position, in which poetry is predicated upon unfulfilled desire: 46 as Bloch observes, “the premise of the love song is separation.” Such deferrals are in fact erotically and generically central to the courtly love situation, precisely because the gap between desire and realization perpetuates both the 47 poet’s ongoing connection with the beloved, and the poet’s song. Perpetually poised between fulfillment and frustration, then, Dunbar’s petitions never lead to the benefice he so fervently desires, but do, perhaps, help him to attain some of what the benefice represents: the king’s attention, appreciation, and economic assistance. Through privileging his own relationship with the king, Dunbar’s petitions attempt to negotiate his own position within the hierarchy of the court, a position reliant upon the heightened value that he claims for poetry. Dunbar’s choice of subject matter is itself part of his argument for poetry’s worth. Applying to his monarch the courtly tropes usually reserved for the poet’s mistress, Dunbar extends his critique of love poetry as a genre, implicitly contrasting monarch and mistress as sources of poetic production and choosing the monarch as the more significant of the two. The lady’s role is only to inspire the poet, but James serves a dual role as both subject and 46. Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, 153. 47. Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, 152.

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source of Dunbar’s poetry: provoking desire and providing inspiration, he also supplies the financial assistance that enables Dunbar’s career. This dually constitutive role also places James in an analogous position to the other source of poetic creation cited in Dunbar’s poetry: the literary tradition itself, particularly Dunbar’s own illustrious poetic ancestry, stemming from Chaucer. Concerned to claim this heritage, yet equally concerned to assert his own cultural and temporal distinctiveness from the Chaucerian voice, in his petitions Dunbar blends convention with innovation, drawing upon the forms of courtly love poetry while positioning the king at its center. His transformations of literary tradition restore the relationship of poetry to virtue, while inaugurating a new vision of the poet’s role in the court and enabling the creation of a uniquely Scottish poetics, suited to examining the intricate exchanges of power and desire in the late medieval court.

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“Writtin in the Langage of Scottis Natioun” The Political Poetry of Douglas’s Eneados

the Italian historian Polydore Vergil, who had resided in England for seven years and was engaged in writing its history, wrote to the Scottish King James IV, stating that his attempt to accord equal attention to the Scots had been hindered by a lack of information and requesting that “His Majesty kindly send any annals, if they exist, or a list of the kings in order, and particularly the achievements of himself or his people for insertion in 1 the work.” James seems to have ignored this request, but several years later, in 1521, Vergil received assistance in his work from the Scottish poet Gavin Douglas, then living out the remainder of his days in exile in England. Vergil records in his Anglia Historia that ON DECEMBER 3, 1509,

of late one Gawine Dowglas, Bishop of Dunchell, a Scottishe manne, a manne as well noble in ligneage as vertewe, when he understoode that I was purposed to write this historie hee camme to commune with mee; in forthe with wee fell into friendshippe, and after he vehementlie requiered mee that in relation of the Scottische affaires I showlde in no wise follow the president of an historie of a certaine contriman of his, promisinge within few dayse to 1. Hannay and Mackie, Letters of James the Fourth, 161. Portions of this chapter are based upon a related article that appeared as Terrell, “Kinship, Patronage, and Politics in Gavin Douglas.” The material is used here with the permission of Textual Cultures. • 169 •

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sende mee of those matters not to be contemned, which in deade hee per2 fourmed, in the which there was a verie auncient originall of that people.

Douglas’s “auncient originall” contained a version of the origin myth that traces the Scots’ descent to the Greek prince Gaythelos and his Egyptian bride Scota, and that counters English myths of origin by insisting on the Scots’ ancient and uninterrupted possession of their lands. The “certaine contriman of his” whom Douglas implored Vergil not to follow is almost certainly the historian John Mair, who in his 1521 Historia Maioris Britanniae had dismissed the Scottish origin legend as “a fable” designed to counter English boasting; Mair preferred to abandon a narrow Scottish nationalism in favor of advocating a general peace through the union of the English and Scottish crowns.3 In rejecting Mair’s views, Douglas was probably in the majority among Scots: Hector Boece’s 1527 Scotorum Historia a Prima Gentis, which embraced both Scottish nationalism and its foundational legend, achieved considerably greater popularity than Mair’s history.4 Although Vergil shared Mair’s skepticism about origin myths in general and endeavored to convince Douglas of his 5 views, within a few months he had lost his friend to the plague. Yet Douglas’s investment in this particular genealogically based brand of Scottish history demonstrates a concern for Scottish nationalism that persisted past his conviction for treason against the Scottish state and consequent exile in England. Douglas’s ongoing interest in legendary history becomes all the more intriguing in the context of his decision, made earlier in his career, to translate the foundational text of the competing English origin myth: Virgil’s Aeneid, whose literary and cultural authority Geoffrey of Monmouth had evoked in his scripting of English descent from Trojan adventurers.6 The ideological rivalry invoked by the Scottish origin myth, with its implicit boast of Greek superiority over the English Trojans, supposedly went all the way back to the Trojan war. Yet Douglas’s translation of the Aeneid, which he titles the 2. Polydore, Polydore Vergil’s English History, 1:105–6. 3. Mair, History of Greater Britain, 51–52. See Mason, Kingship and the Commonweal, 36–77. 4. Boece, Chronicles of Scotland. For a useful summary of the changing fortunes of the Scottish origin myth, see Drexler, “Fluid Prejudice: Scottish Origin Myths.” Also see Embree, Kennedy, and Daly, Short Scottish Prose Chronicles, 16–19. 5. Royan, in “Scottish Identity of Gavin Douglas,” points out that “origin myths were a contentious issue in humanist historiography: the key question, perhaps, is less about whether the origin myths were believed by those who recounted them and more about the relative value given to the political purpose they served compared to humanist ideals of intellectual truth” (207). 6. Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain. Geoffrey clearly drew upon Virgil for the background to his tale of Brutus’s foundation of Britain; see esp. 43–44.



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Eneados, betrays no sense of this longstanding antagonism; instead, Douglas approaches Virgil’s epic in a way analogous to Geoffrey’s own invocation of its cultural authority. Requisitioning this authority on behalf of Scotland, Douglas challenges the English appropriation of Virgil’s narrative without contesting either the mastery or the cultural centrality of Virgil himself. Rather than setting his Eneados in competition with the Scottish origin myth, Douglas values the two as complementary discourses that both allow for the derivation of literary, cultural, and political authority from the classical world.

“OUR AWYN LANGAGE”: NATIONAL DISTINCTION AND THE VERNACULAR TONGUE In divorcing Virgil’s Aeneid from its traditional ties to the English foundational legend, Douglas redefines it as a foundational text of Scottish cultural ascendancy; announcing his translation as a break from previous vernacular traditions, he challenges not only the intellectual but also the linguistic order of Scottish writing. When Douglas completed his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid in July 1513, he accomplished a landmark feat that has been widely viewed as the first full translation of a major classical work into English.7 Yet Douglas himself would have strongly disputed such a notion. In the Prologues that he composes for each book of the Eneados, Douglas complicates the status of his work by disclaiming English as his literary language.8 Instead, famously announcing that his book is “[w]rittin in the langage of Scottis natioun” (I.103), Douglas repudiates the linguistic bond between England and Scotland, 9 and affirms a distinct sphere of Scottish literary achievement. In distinguishing the Scottish from the English literary tradition, Douglas follows in the footsteps of his elder contemporary, Dunbar, who as we have seen had attempted to fashion a poetics uniquely adapted to the contemporary Scottish court. Yet for all his attention to Scotland’s cultural and national distinctiveness, Dunbar invariably refers to his language of composition as “Inglis.”10 Until Douglas’s translation altered Scotland’s linguistic 7. Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas, 94; also see Dearing, “Gavin Douglas’s Eneados”; Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 72; and Watson, “Politics of Middle English Writing,” 352. 8. Douglas, Virgil’s Aeneid Translated into Scottish Verse. Citations of book and line numbers appear parenthetically in text. 9. Although Douglas has been widely reported to be the first to distinguish the language of Lowland Scotland from English, in fact Adam Loutfut in 1494 makes the first surviving use of the term “Scottis” (to mean Scots, not Gaelic) in his book on heraldry. The term did not gain popularity until after Douglas’s use of it. See McClure, Scots and Its Literature, 44–47. 10. Dunbar, Poems of William Dunbar, 59.259 and 65.111.

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landscape, Dunbar’s was the more typical usage, while the term “Scottis” typically referred to Gaelic. In the fourteenth century, even the fervently patriotic writer John Barbour saw no contradiction in writing his anti-English epic in a language shared with Scotland’s enemies; linguistic separateness had not yet come be viewed as a sign of nationalism. The difference between Barbour’s readiness in the fourteenth century to apply the “Inglis” label to his language and Douglas’s eagerness in the early sixteenth century to discard the term can partly be ascribed to changes in the language itself. Barbour’s language in the Bruce does not substantially differ from the contemporary Northumbrian dialect of northern England. However, by the end of the fifteenth century, the dialects had diverged enough for them to strike a foreign visitor as separate tongues: writing in 1498, the Spanish ambassador Pedro de Ayala remarks that James IV’s “Scotch language is as different from English as Aragonese from Castilian”—that is, distinctly different, though mutually intelligible.11 The importance of this increasing linguistic divide was heightened by shifts of power within both Scotland and England. The Scottish government grew increasingly strong during the late fifteenth century, and the centralization of its power in the southern city of 12 Edinburgh lent additional authority to Lowland Scots. The development of a system of lay and clerical law courts requiring a specialized vocabulary also contributed to the expansion of the Scots language and its differentiation from English.13 Meanwhile, “the south of England was gaining a similar form of institutionally based prominence,” with the result that England’s Northumbrian dialect lost prestige and began to “slowly assimilate southwards towards the dialect of Chaucer.”14 Once so similar, the Northumbrian and Scottish dialects grew apart as the former began its long decline and the latter emerged as the language of Scottish government and administration. Douglas’s assertion that he writes in “the langage of Scottis natioun” not only runs counter to the prevailing notion among Lowland Scots that they spoke English but also—strikingly—bestows upon Scots the status of a national language. This was a new idea in a society that had long been characterized by the diversity of its ethnic groups and languages, but one that accurately assessed the growing status of Lowland English/Scots within the kingdom. Cowan reminds us that “it may be doubted whether any country of comparable size anywhere in Europe had to contend with so many differ 11. Bergenroth, Calendar of Letters, Despatches and State Papers, 169. 12. Nicholson, “Medieval Scotland.” Previously the more northern city of Perth had been the regular site of government business (544). 13. Jack, “Language of Literary Materials,” 232. 14. Jack, “Language of Literary Materials,” 232.



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ent ethnic groups in the early Middle Ages,”15 and indeed, in royal charters of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, kings frequently address themselves to the “French, Angles, Scots, and Gallovidians of this realm.”16 Although the Wars of Independence did much to solidify Scottish national identity, the linguistic scene in the early sixteenth century remained a complex one, involving a minimum of three languages—English/Scots, Latin, and Gaelic—in regular circulation, in addition to less prominent languages such as French. Each of these languages carried with it a range of social, cultural, and political significances. In Douglas’s day, Latin remained the language of the church and of academic culture, but had been displaced as the language of government in the mid-fifteenth century, when records of parliament began to be kept in Lowland English; it is likely that the business of parliament had been conducted in English even longer. Still, in Scotland as elsewhere, Latin was often considered to hold the highest prestige among languages, and it continued to be valued as a medium of high culture and international communication. As Rita Copeland points out, In the Middle Ages, Latin culture is a privileged stratum within larger cultural communities, and its privilege rests on its symbolic and practical value as a force of continuity against both geographical and historical distance. Latin ties Western Europe together and links modernity with pagan and 17 Christian antiquity.

This very universalism disqualified Latin from consideration as a national tongue; although it could lend a certain gravitas to nationalist sentiment (as in the chronicles of Fordun and Bower), the medium could not reinforce the message. Among Scotland’s vernaculars, French had been imported to Scotland in the twelfth century by the Anglo-Normans and for a time held sway among the Scottish upper classes. Yet in the fourteenth century, French—while still highly esteemed in England—began to decline as a spoken language in Scotland. By the early sixteenth century, French was known only as a foreign language to most of the Scottish nobility, who instead lent their support to the growing prominence of English. Still, Scotland’s “auld alliance” with and cultural ties to France helped to keep the French language alive. In terms of native speakers, Gaelic—by Douglas’s day still the first language of approximately half of Scotland’s population—fared better, though it was sadly diminished 15. Cowan, “Myth and Identity in Early Modern Scotland,” 135. 16. Quoted by McClure, Scots and Its Literature, 8–9. 17. Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, 97.

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from its eleventh-century prominence as the language of state and culture. The increasing centralization of the Scottish government in the southern regions contributed to the marginalization of Gaelic, and most Lowlanders seem to have shared Dunbar’s view, expressed in the Flyting, that the Gaelic language signified barbarity.18 Lowland English, now the language of the government, of the nobility, and increasingly of literature, possessed the best claim to be regarded as Scotland’s national language. Yet even Dunbar, whom Bawcutt suggests may have been “important . . . to Douglas, because he showed the rich possibilities of the vernacular,”19 and who considered the English language to be the distinguishing feature of a cultured Scot, never suggests that one language might represent the Scottish nation as a whole. Rather, he views linguistic affinity as a primary sign of difference within a Scotland that he regards as an inherently multilingual society. Douglas’s equation of “Scottis natioun” with the language and culture of Lowland Scotland takes the marginalization of Highland Scotland, already implicit in Dunbar’s court-centered view of Scottish identity, a step further. Whereas Dunbar puts his poetry in dialogue with Gaelic Scotland, Douglas excludes the Highlands from view, instead shaping a vision of Scottish identity coextensive with cultural models prevalent in the southern centers of governmental and political power. Thus Douglas’s affirmation of a linguistic identity for Scotland also announces his own investment in Scotland’s existence as a political entity. Moreover, Douglas’s decision to repudiate the (formerly default) term “Inglys” as an adequate descriptor for his language seemingly implicates his poem in an oppositional relationship with the English language and culture and, by extension, with the English nation: as Royan has noted, Douglas’s “argument of linguistic separation . . . is identifying language with political as much as lit20 erary choice.” Complicating Scotland’s already intricate linguistic landscape by staking out this new linguistic arena, Douglas sets the stage for his poem to be read in political as well as literary terms. Yet although for Douglas “Inglys” and “Scottis” as languages signify national identity, as well as a broader range of cultural meaning, he never views the relationship of the two languages as simply hostile. He may disdain the “buke of Inglys gross” (I.139) written by “Wilȝame Caxtoun, of Inglis natioun” (I.138), but he also praises Chaucer’s more cultivated “eloquens” 18. See Corbett, Written in the Language of the Scottis Nation, 41–48; Jack, “Language of Literary Materials,” 213–63; McClure, Scots and Its Literature, 6–10 and 44–56; Nicholson, “Medieval Scotland,” 543–44; and Nicholson, Scotland, 273–75. 19. Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas, 43. 20. Royan, “Scottish Identity,” 204.



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(I.341), implying that a language is not worthy of praise or blame in itself, but should be judged by what it can be made to do. And part of Douglas’s project in the Eneados is to extend the capability of Scots. Entering into a discussion of his translation practices in the Prologue to Book I, Douglas at first appears to disdain English altogether, in favor of an exclusive reliance on his mother tongue. He tells us that in translating Virgil, . . . forsuyth I set my bissy pane As that I couth to mak it braid and plane, Kepand na sudron bot our awyn langage And spekis as I lernyt quhen I was page. (I.109–11)

Douglas describes a homely, unpretentious language, as appropriate for children as for poets. And, again, he stresses his conception of Scots as a national language: “our awyn langage,” here explicitly contrasted with “sudron” (“Southern”). McClure notes that “sudron” was not a purely geographical term: as noun and adjective, it had regularly been used to mean specifically “English” (in the political sense) or “Englishman.” In Hary’s Wallace, for instance, the preferred name for the hero’s opponents is Southeron men or Southerons. It was therefore convenient as a language name in being free from the ambiguity of the word Inglis; it might also have been convenient for some, perhaps, in having stronger negative 21 connotations.

In distinguishing “sudron” from “our awyn langage,” then, Douglas hints at both linguistic and national antagonism. Yet he immediately goes on to qualify this distinction by revealing that in order to translate properly, he has had to make some concessions in terms of linguistic purity: Nor ȝit sa cleyn all sudron I refuss, Bot sum word I pronounce as nyghtbouris doys: Lyke as in Latyn beyn Grew termys sum, So me behufyt quhilum or than be dum Sum bastard Latyn, French or Inglys oyss Quhar scant was Scottis—I had nane other choys. (I.113–18) 21. McClure, Scots and Its Literature, 50.

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The problem, he tells us, is “nocht for our tong is in the selwyn skant” (I.119), but that Virgil’s complexity cannot adequately be expressed in a single vernacular tongue, without borrowing from other vernacular languages and from Latin itself. Here, English becomes just one of many resources that Douglas draws upon to augment his own language: absorbing and transforming English words, Douglas puts the English language at the service of a project of linguistic enrichment and establishes Scots as an evolving language whose linguistic boundaries are permeable.22 In thus subordinating English to Scots, Douglas implicitly establishes a hierarchy of vernacular languages in which English is envisioned as a kind of service language to Scots. Avoiding any overt sense of competition between the two languages by portraying English as a useful contributor to his linguistic project, Douglas nevertheless sketches out a narrative of historical progression that places Scots in the ascendant position. By analogously comparing the relationship of English and Scots to that of Greek and Latin, he invokes the theory of translatio studii et imperii, which accounted for the historical transfer of learning and empire from ancient Greece to Rome. Roman culture was thought to have absorbed the best aspects of Greek culture, even as the Roman Empire gained political dominance. This transfer of authority extended even to the philological, as borrowings from Greek enhanced the Latin language with new concepts and expressions. Thus Douglas’s linguistic analogy implies a temporal as well as a philological hierarchy, one that asserts Scots to be the destined superior of the English tongue, even while Douglas readily admits that English is, at present, the more sophisticated language.23 This somewhat presumptuous attitude toward English contrasts sharply with Douglas’s self-abasement before Virgil’s Latin. Contrasting his “Bad, harsk spech and lewit barbour tong” (I.21) with Virgil’s “sweit bell” (I.22) and “precyus wordys deir” (I.23), he goes on to draw a series of analogies that place Scots and Latin at opposite ends of a scale of linguistic prestige: For quhat compair betwix mydday and nycht? Or quhat compair betwixt myrknes and lycht? Or quhat compair betwix blak and quhyte? Far grettar difference betwix my blunt endyte And thy scharp sugurate sang Virgiliane,

22. See Aitken, “Language of Older Scots Poetry,” 18–49; and Bawcutt, Douglas, 144–50. 23. Douglas’s perception does not necessarily reflect reality; Kratzmann, in Anglo-Scottish Literary Relations, observes that “the Middle Scots poetic lexicon is fuller and more diverse even than the range of language used by Chaucer” (13).



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Sa wysly wrocht with nevir a word invane. (I.25–30)

Although Douglas’s humility before the classical master derives from longstanding literary convention and partly refers to the imbalance between their poetic abilities, it also conveys a real sense of difference between the expressive capabilities of Scots and Latin. Scots may be equal or superior to other vernaculars, but Douglas maintains that “besyde Latyn our langage is imperfite” (I.359). In this belief, Douglas follows the traditional linguistic hierarchy that esteemed Latin more highly than any vernacular tongue. Thus when Douglas speaks of the incapacity of his “barbour tong” to express “the bewte of [Virgil’s] ornate eloquens” (I.393), he does not intend to diminish the status of Scots among other vernaculars, but to mark Latin as a specially privileged language: Bot ȝit twychyng our tungis penuryte I meyne into compar of fair Latyn That knawyn is maste perfite langage fyne (I.380–82)

Douglas particularly values the extent of Latin’s vocabulary, although this very richness complicates his task as a translator: . . . thar be in Latyn wordis mony ane That in our layd ganand translatioun hass nane Less than we mynyss thar sentens and grauyte And ȝit scant weill exponyt. (I.363–66)

Latin is able both to be more precise in its reference and to convey a greater solemnity than Scots, a still-developing language whose vocabulary is limited by comparison, and one that has not yet developed a “ryall style” (IX.21) akin to Virgil’s. Although Douglas portrays himself as daunted by the task of attempting to translate this “perfite langage” into his “rurall wlgar gross” (I.43), he nevertheless sees his Eneados as an opportunity to develop just such a high style for Scots, thereby transforming his “wlgar” into a language worthy of relating Virgil’s epic.24

24. Wogan-Browne et al., in Idea of the Vernacular, make a similar claim (276).

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Yet despite his encomia to Latin, in fashioning this high style, Douglas uses Latin, as well as English, as a storehouse of vocabulary from which to enrich Scots, thus placing the perfect language at the service of the imperfect one. Douglas argues that his translation takes nothing away from his source: “God wait, Virgill hass na wyte— / Thocht myne be blunt, hys text is maist perfyte” (I.313–14). But in placing Latin at the service of Scots, he inverts the traditional roles of translator and text: rather than Douglas serving Virgil by making his poem more widely accessible, Virgil serves Douglas by providing him with the opportunity to improve his own language. In staging this reversal of the traditional linguistic hierarchy, Douglas privileges Scots as a dynamic, evolving language even as he asserts its inferiority to Latin’s timeless perfection. Copeland has demonstrated that vernacular translation inevitably poses a challenge to the notion of an ahistorical culture embodied in a universal language: “Even as the vernacular takes over the discourse of official culture, it works to expose what had been the ideological fictions of that culture: it exposes the myth of historical continuity by embodying the inevitability of historical difference.”25 Without challenging Latin’s perfection, Douglas reinserts it into history through his adaptation of Latin vocabulary to suit the needs of Scots. Drawing upon the static perfection of Latin for the sake of the less perfect but more culturally situated vernacular, Douglas places his poem firmly within the cultural matrix of early sixteenth-century Scotland.26 Douglas’s attitude toward Virgil echoes his attitude toward the Latin language: paragons of perfection, both exist in a kind of stasis that contrasts with the vitality of the vernacular. In his panegyric to Virgil, Douglas juxtaposes images of plenitude with images of drought: Nane is, nor was, ne ȝit salbe, trow I, Had, hass or sal haue sic craft in poetry. Of Helicon so drank thou dry the flude That of thy copioss fouth or plenitude All mon purches drynk at thy sugurit tun; So lamp of day thou art and schynand son All otheris on forss mon thar lycht beg or borrow; Thou art Vesper and the day stern at morow, 25. Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, 106. 26. Canitz, in “From Aeneid to Eneados, discusses the “cultural transference which Douglas . . . considers to be part of the translator’s task” (90); Douglas incorporates explanatory notes into his text and elucidates little-known Roman customs by reference to contemporary Scottish equivalents.



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Thow Phebus lightnar of the planetis all— I not quhat dewly I the clepe sall, For thou art all and sum, quhat nedis more, Of Latyn poetis that sens was, or befor. (55–66)

Virgil’s incomparable excellence is such that he is not only the best poet but, in a sense, the only poet, an embodiment of such overflowing poetic skill that he leaves no room for competitors. Having not merely drunk from the well of Helicon, but drunk it dry, Virgil has essentially established a monopoly on poetic excellence that leaves other aspiring poets with no alternate source of inspiration. Their only choice is to bask in Virgil’s reflected glory, always as his inferiors—a position that Douglas implies is essentially futile. His concluding question—“quhat nedis more, / Of Latyn poetis that sens was, or befor” seems especially pertinent. If Virgil is truly “all and sum,” then no more Latin poets are needed—Virgil has already attained perfection, and it would be fruitless to attempt to compete with him on his own linguistic terrain. Acknowledging this as an indisputable fact, Douglas nevertheless leaves a loophole open for vernacular poets writing in languages that have yet to attain the perfection of Virgil’s Latin. Scots clearly falls into the category of imperfect languages, and Douglas views his translation as a major contribution to Scotland’s linguistic and cultural landscape. Offering Scotland’s populace access to the Aeneid, a longstanding signifier of intellectual prestige and cultural value, Douglas aims to further Scotland’s cosmopolitan character and raise its profile among nations. In his closing “exclamatioun aganyst detractouris,” he envisions his book being read at all levels of Scottish society: Now salt thou with euery gentill Scot be kend, And to onletterit folk be red on hight, That erst was bot with clerkis comprehend. (43–45)

By giving an entire segment of the population unprecedented access to Virgil, Douglas’s translation lays the foundation for establishing a community of readers that extends across social boundaries, uniting “gentill” and “onletterit” Scots in a national and textual community partly defined by their shared experience of literature. He expects his readers to gain from this additional knowledge in the usual ways that medieval readers were supposed to benefit from their reading:

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For weill I wait, our wark to mony a wy Sall baith be plesand and eyk profitabill, For tharin beyn seir doctrynys full notabill; It sal eik do sum folk solace, I gess, To pass the tyme, and eschew idylnes. (Direction, 36–40)

In addition to the pleasure it will bring its readers, the book will provide moral instruction and profitably occupy their time. In addition, Douglas promotes the usefulness of his translation to educators: And othir proffit of our buke I mark, That it salbe reput a neidfull wark To thame wald Virgill to childryn expone . . . Thank me tharfor, masteris of grammar sculys, Quhar ȝe syt techand on ȝour benkis and stulys. (Direction, 41–48)

As an educational project aimed at transforming the cultural literacy of a nation, Douglas’s Eneados follows the spirit of the “Education Act” established by Parliament in 1496, which required attendance at grammar schools for the eldest sons of all barons and substantial landowners, who were expected to attain “perfite latyne” and “knawlege and understanding of the lawis,” followed by three years at university.27 Douglas advertises his translation as helping to bring about this ideal of a more highly educated society. He envisions a Scotland in which everyone, from schoolchildren to “onletterit folk” to noblemen like himself, will have at least a basic acquaintance with the greatest classical epic, mediated through their national language. Despite his concern for “onletterit folk” gaining instruction from hearing Virgil read aloud in their own tongue, Douglas nevertheless suggests that the text most directly pertains to the nobility, and balances his inclusive vision of cultural literacy with periodic gestures of exclusion. His initial prologue includes an “Admonitione vnto vnlerned peopill, quhase rudnes can nocht onderstand Vyrgill” (I.n283). Forbidding those who “can nocht spell thar Pater Noster rycht” (I.284) from criticizing his work, he also dismisses the uneducated as incapable of profiting from the text: “Ȝit persave I weill. . . . The kyng of poetis ganys nocht for rurall estait / Nor hys fresch memor for bowbardis” (I.315–17). Instead, 27. Brown, Records of the Parliaments of Scotland, 13 June 1496 [A1496/6/4].



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Greyn gentill ingynys and breistis curageus, Sik ar the pepill at ganys best for ws; Our werk desiris na lewyt rebalddaill, Full of nobilite is thistory all haill. For euery vertu belangand a nobill man This ornate poet bettir than ony can Payntand discryvis in person of Eneas (I.321–27)

Among other purposes, Douglas’s Eneados serves as a mirror for princes, its hero providing a model of ideal behavior for Scotland’s nobility. Therefore Douglas most directly aims to reach Scotland’s elite, exemplified by his patron and kinsman Henry, Lord Sinclair, whom Douglas praises as not only “of ancestry nobill and illustir baroun,” but also as “fader of bukis, protectour to sciens and lair” (I.84–85). For Douglas, Sinclair already seems to embody an ideal of nobility, particularly in the balance of social clout and intellectual desire that makes him a worthy recipient of the Eneados. Douglas tells us that he began his translation at Sinclair’s urging: “My special gud Lord Henry, Lord Sanct Clair / . . . with gret instance diuerss tymys seir / Prayt me translait Virgill or Homeir” (I.86–88). Judging from Sinclair’s ownership (and probable commissioning) of the Selden manuscript, as discussed in Chapter 4, he was interested in increasing the range and quality of texts available in Scots; it is possible to see his desire for a translation of a classical epic as an attempt to elevate the content of vernacular literature, analogous to Douglas’s desire to enrich the vernacular language. In placing his poem at Sinclair’s service, Douglas envisions a yoking of political prestige with intellectual privilege that recalls the Selden manuscript’s use of celebrated vernacular poetry to enhance Sinclair family interests. Sinclair matters to Douglas both as an exemplary representative of Scotland’s elite, and as a well-placed member of his own family. Although their closest common ancestor, William Douglas “le Hardi,” died in 1298, Douglas represents his relationship to Sinclair as a close one, referring to himself as “Gawyn, ȝour cousyng” (Direction, 3), “ȝour kynysman and clerk” (Direction, 15) who is “neir coniunct to hys lordschip in blude” (I.Prol.90). Thus Douglas’s attitude toward Sinclair’s patronage shares little with Dunbar’s tempestuous emotional and financial investment in his relationship with James IV, instead suggesting an alliance that transcends the economic dimensions of the poet/ patron relationship. Douglas presents the Eneados not simply as a commission enacted on Sinclair’s behalf, but as a family project, “this our wark” (Direction 81, my italics):

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For ȝou maid I this buke, my Lord, I grant, Nowder for pryce, det, reward nor supple, Bot for ȝour tendir request and amyte, Kyndness of blude grundyt in natural law (Direction, 72–75)

Kinship counts for a good deal with Douglas, as is shown both by his later political dealings and by his investment in Scotland’s ancestral past. He views the patronage relationship as cementing, rather than extending, the ordinary obligations of kinship: No thing is myne quhilk sall not ȝowris be, Gyf it afferis for ȝowr nobilyte; And of ȝour moblys and all other geir Ȝhe will me serve siclyke, I haue na weir. (Direction, 77–80)

Speaking from a position of kinship and reciprocity rather than as a humble petitioner, Douglas advertises his own participation in the influential class to whom he primarily directs his writing.28 He joins poet and patron in a common goal in order to enlist Sinclair in managing his book’s reception: Quhen thai bakbayte, qhuen evir thai clepe and cry Gyf neyd beys, for your kynysman and clerk Than I protest ye ansuer, and for your wark. (Direction, 14–16)

As Daniel Pinti points out, “The near conflation of powers in the realms of politics and of learning, the combination of noble and clerkly authority, which Douglas ascribes to Lord Henry, is precisely the sort of political argument he 29 seems to make for himself in his very translation.” Enlisting Sinclair in furthering his poetic endeavors, Douglas also inserts himself and his work into the privileged world of politics. For Douglas, the political world, like the literary realm, is one that is largely governed by familial ties: just like his preferred historiography, Douglas’s Eneados visualizes nation as an extension of familial networks. Going on 28. Bawcutt, Douglas, notes that “Douglas’s tone towards Sinclair is that of one equal to another” (93). 29. Pinti, “Vernacular Gloss(ed),” 460.



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to further explain “to quhat effect” (83) he has translated the Aeneid, Douglas expresses his desire That Virgill mycht intill our langage be Red lowd and playn be ȝour lordschip and me And other gentill companȝeonys quha sa lyst. (Direction, 85–87)

Sinclair and Douglas, linked by bonds of kinship and intellectual interest, become emblematic of a larger community of “gentill” Scots. Douglas takes Virgil’s own composition as a precedent for aligning poetic prowess with political power: Virgil’s Aeneid, he notes, “is clepyt the wark imperiall, / Endyt onto the gret Octauyane, / The emperour excellent and maste souerane” (IX. Prol.56–58); in a note on the text, he lays out the familial basis of the text’s political implications: The principall entent of Virgill was to extoll the Romanys, and in specyal the famyllye or clan Iulyan, that comin from this Ascanyus, son to Eneas and Crevsa, otherwais callyt Iulus; becauss the empryour August Octavyan, quhamto he direkkit this wark, was of that hows and blud, and sistyr son to Cesar Iulyus. (I.v.n102)

Here, Roman imperial power is seen as based on heredity; thus by celebrating Roman origins, Virgil’s poetry augments Augustus’s prestige and, by extension, that of the Roman state. Douglas seeks to shape a similar alignment of poetic prowess with political power by dedicating his translation to the service of the Scottish nobility, thereby refashioning Virgil’s narrative of the origins of Roman imperial power into a foundational text of Scotland’s cultural preeminence.

TRANSLATIO STUDII AND DOUGLAS’S LITERARY GENEALOGY Appropriating Virgil’s authority for use in a project of Scottish cultural improvement that is particularly invested in bolstering the prestige of Scotland’s political elite, Douglas again places the author at the service of his translator, displacing Virgil’s intention and reinventing the goals of the poem for a new cultural circumstance. Displacement of this kind is inevitable in translation, which in the Middle Ages invariably functions as a site for negotiating

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broader cultural dynamics. The editors of the Idea of the Vernacular discuss the intricate power relations inherent in vernacular adaptations of Latin texts: In annexing Latin’s cultural authority, vernacular literatures demonstrate their ability to do anything Latin can do, while marking their difference from Latin; asserting the prestige of Latin texts and auctores, they also seek to assimilate their prestige, in an endless shuttling between gestures of deference and gestures of displacement whose most obvious effect is to tie the theory and practice of vernacular writing permanently to the question of its 30 status in relation to Latin.

These words could well have been written of Douglas’s complicated stance in relation to Virgil. However, the landscape of Douglas’s translation is complicated further by the fact that he envisions his Eneados as in dialogue not simply with Virgil’s own Latin text, or even with Latin culture in general, but also with a long tradition of vernacular literature, including prior vernacular versions of the Aeneid. Chaucer provides Douglas with a particularly powerful precedent for his goal of linguistic and cultural enrichment, and Douglas sets Chaucer nearly on a par with Virgil in terms of his poetic influence. Douglas’s praise of Chaucer closely echoes his opening panegyric to Virgil. He compares both poets to sources of flowing water, Virgil to a “flude of eloquens” (I.4), “sweit sours and spryngand well” (I.9) and Chaucer to a “mylky fontane, cleir strand” (I.342). While Virgil personifies “the royss in Iune with hir sweit smell” (I.17), Chaucer gains the title of “royss ryall” (I.342). Douglas also praises the musical qualities of their verse, Virgil’s words reminding him of a “sweit bell” (I.22) and Chaucer of a “hevenly trumpet” (I.340). In his earlier work, the Palis of Honoure, Douglas had referred to “Goffreyd Chaucere, as A per se, sance pere / In his wulgare” (919–20); in the Eneados, it is Virgil who is “A per se” (I.8).31 Virgil is a “peirless perle, patroun of poetry” (I.5), while Chaucer is “principal poet but peir” (I.339). Although Douglas privileges his encomium to Virgil by placing it the beginning of his first Prologue, the striking verbal similarity between his praise of the two poets draws them close together in terms of their perceived value. Indeed, Chaucer emerges as only a step beneath Virgil in the poetic hierarchy—a stunning achievement for a vernacular poet. Following upon Douglas’s dismissal of the Latin poetic tradition (“Quhat nedis more / 30. Evans et al., “Notion of Vernacular Theory,” 321–22. 31. Douglas, Palis of Honoure. For an excellent discussion of Douglas’s depiction of his literary heritage in the Palis, see Royan, “Scottish Identity of Gavin Douglas,” 197–203.



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Of Latyn poetis”), Douglas’s elevation of Chaucer suggests the establishment of a new canon based on poetic merit, irrespective of language. Arguably the first English poet to have achieved international recognition, Chaucer exemplifies the ethos of this canon, as the popularity of his work is limited neither by national boundaries nor by its English language. Instead, it is read “throu Albion iland braid” (I.343), “Albion” here signifying, as it does for John of Fordun, the entire island irrespective of its different nations.32 Chaucer thus offers Douglas a model of a successful writer whose work not only transcends the local limitations frequently associated with the vernacular but whose poetics, characterized by his involvement with European traditions of vernacular and Latin literature, engages larger literary and cultural discourses. Scholars have observed various parallels between Chaucer’s project and that of Middle Scots poets; as Fradenburg remarks, All are writers engaged in the development of vernacular resources and the translation and adaptation of foreign literary models. This literary project was itself part of a larger imperative: the fifteenth century in Scotland was a period marked by a growing, and inevitably double, awareness both of 33 national goals and European horizons.

Yet although Middle Scots poets typically share this double awareness, they tend to manifest it in crucially different ways. Whereas Dunbar, for example, adapts European literary conventions into a Scottish poetics aimed primarily at a local audience, Douglas views his translation as a nationalist endeavor actively aimed at bolstering Scotland’s (and his own) international reputation. Modeling his poetic career on Chaucer’s, Douglas makes a bid for the same sort of international reputation that Chaucer had achieved. The poetic lineage that Douglas establishes for himself reveals the extent of his ambitions: first comes Virgil, then Chaucer, and finally Douglas himself. As Chaucer “standis beneth Virgill in gre, / Vndir hym alsfer I grant my self to be” (I.407–8). Douglas’s humility belies the fact that he audaciously numbers himself third in an illustrious line of poetic succession, one in which vernacular poets approach the distinction of the Latin master. Moreover, Douglas endeavors to surpass Chaucer’s achievement in at least one respect: the accuracy and faithfulness of his treatment of Virgil. Douglas simultaneously proclaims his respect for Chaucer as the principal representa 32. In the Palis of Honoure, Douglas described Chaucer as a poet of “Brutus Albion” (l. 918), apparently conceding poetic sovereignty to England (see Royan, “Scottish Identity of Gavin Douglas,” 199); here, he drops the adjective. 33. Fradenburg, “Scottish Chaucer,” 169–70.

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tive of the English poetic tradition and announces Chaucer’s inadequacy to the task of Virgilian translation, thereby distancing himself from his “mastir.” Douglas points out that Chaucer “In hys legend of notabill ladeis said / That he couth follow word by word Virgill,” (I.344–45), but did not live up to this promise of faithful translation.34 Instead, Douglas avers that, in sympathizing with Dido rather than Aeneas in his “Legend of Dido,” My mastir Chauser gretly Virgill offendit. All thoch I be tobald hym to repreif, He was fer balder, certis, by hys leif, Sayand he followit Virgillis lantern toforn, Quhou Eneas to Dydo was forsworn. Was he forsworn? Than Eneas was fals— That he admittis and callys hum traytour als. Thus, wenyng allane Ene to haue reprevit, He hass gretly the prynce of poetis grevit, For, as said is, Virgill dyd diligens But spot of cryme, reproch or ony offens Eneas for to loif and magnyfy. (I.410–21)

Hence the line of poetic succession that extends from Virgil through Chaucer to Douglas is disrupted by Chaucer’s misrepresentations of Virgil’s hero, whose spotless reputation is essential both for Virgil’s idealization of him as the founder of Rome and for Douglas’s conception of him as the embodiment of “moral vertuus hardyment” (XI.25). Douglas does forgive Chaucer’s trespass, but in a way that seems calculated to diminish the seriousness of Chaucer’s poetic endeavor: Bot sikkyrly of resson me behufis Excuss Chauser fra all maner repruffis In lovyng of thir ladeis lylly quhite He set on Virgill and Eneas this wyte, For he was evir (God wait) all womanis frend (I.445–49)

34. Douglas’s charge here is unjust, as Chaucer never claimed to follow Virgil word for word.



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Douglas claims that Chaucer’s mishandling of the Aeneid results from his excessive love of women—a humorous and excusable fault, but one that contrasts sharply with Douglas’s own rigorous attitude toward translation practice. Whereas Chaucer freely adapts Virgil’s text and mingles it with Ovidian material, Douglas sees himself as closely tied to Virgil: Quha is attachit ontill a staik, we se, May go na ferthir bor wreil about that tre: Rycht so am I to Virgillis text ybund, I may nocht fle less than my falt be fund (I.297–300)

Forgoing the impossible attempt to translate word for word in favor of attempting to accurately represent Virgil’s meaning, Douglas nevertheless sets himself a difficult task. According to Ghosh, “the desire to preserve the text assumes the form of an immense burden, a Miltonic vocation—textual fidelity, conceptualized as the central and almost defining prerogative of literary authority, becomes a grave moral responsibility.”35 And indeed, Douglas’s Eneados has been praised as an embodiment of “the humanist view of genuine translation.”36 Although Chaucer provides Douglas with a potent model for the possibility of a vernacular adaptation of Virgil, in disclaiming Chaucer’s methods, Douglas proclaims his own investment in a newly rigorous mode of translation, characterized by its respect for the integrity of the source text. However, Douglas’s disapproval of Chaucer’s translation barely detracts from his general esteem of Chaucer as the preeminent figure of English poetry, whose greatness parallels Virgil’s and whose international renown Douglas aspires to emulate. Twice in the Eneados, Douglas refers to his ambition to become a poet of “Albion,” like Chaucer himself. In the thirteenth Prologue, the fifteenth-century author of a final book appended to the Aeneid suggests that Douglas’s work will be valued throughout both England and Scotland: it “may be red and song / Our Albyon ile” (XIII.104–5). To this geographical ambition Douglas adds a boast of temporal reach, claiming in the Conclusio that even after his death, 35. Ghosh, “Gavin Douglas’s Maffeo Vegio,” 15. 36. Canitz, “From Aeneid to Eneados,” 81. Also see Dearing, “Gavin Douglas’s Eneados,” 850; Kratzmann, Anglo-Scottish Literary Relations, 170; Simpson, 1350–1547, 72–73; and Watson, “Politics of Middle English Writing,” 352. Bawcutt, in Douglas (23–36) reviews Douglas’s links to humanism, but cautions that “he himself was not a humanist in the strict sense of the word” (36), while Douglas Gray, in “Virgil in Late Medieval Scotland,” finds that “his translation is in some ways the culmination of the older medieval humanism” (13).

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The bettir part of me salbe vpheld Abufe the starnys perpetualy to ryng, And heir my naym remane, but enparyng; Throw owt the ile yclepit Albyon Red sall I be, and sung with mony one. (8–12)

Bawcutt notes that “Douglas seems to have been one of the first to express in English what by the end of the sixteenth century had become a poetic commonplace: the assertion that a work of art can confer immortality.”37 Combining international renown with immortality, Douglas claims for himself a wider relevance than any Scottish poet had yet achieved. Douglas’s desire for international recognition is attested to in at least one other source, though its interpretation has generated controversy. The Scottish historian John Mair, who likely befriended Douglas during their time as students in Paris, dedicates his Commentary to the Fourth Book of Peter Lombard’s Sentences jointly to Douglas and Robert Cockburn, Bishop of Ross: “These reasons have led me to dedicate this work to you, for not only is each of you like myself a Scottish Briton [Scotus Britannus], but also my nearest neighbor in my native land.”38 The phrase “Scottish Briton” suggests an unusual combination of national and international affiliation, and scholars have differed in their opinions as to which half of the phrase should carry the most emphasis. Ruth Morse, discussing Mair’s and Douglas’s circle, concludes that these men share “a group concern with Scottish difference, a kind of linguistic and political proto-nationalism.”39 Robert Cummings, on the other hand, asserts that “the implication here is that they are men who, from whatever motives, and however differently, were disengaged from narrow concep40 tions of their own nationality.” My own interpretation lies somewhere in the middle. Although I believe that Douglas’s concern to increase the sophistication of his national language and culture demonstrates that he primarily identified himself as a Scot, his concern was not simply for Scotland’s internal affairs but for Scotland’s role on the world stage. I would argue that the term “Scottish Briton” applies to men whose identities were rooted in Scotland and 37. Bawcutt, Douglas, 171. 38. Mair, History of Greater Britain, xxxi; the Latin prologue is given on 437. 39. Morse, “Gavin Douglas,” 108. Morse also discusses Mair’s Johannes Maior in primum Sententiarum, in which Douglas is represented as voicing one side of a theological debate in which he urges Mair to return to Scotland and preach the gospel (108). If this dialogue accurately represents Douglas’s views, it may demonstrate his concern for his native land. 40. Cummings, “Gavin Douglas’s Humanist Supplement to the Eneados,” 148.



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who were deeply concerned with the fate of their nation, but whose interests and ambitions transcended national boundaries. While Douglas’s desire to elevate himself to the status of a “British” poet suggests an outward-looking perspective, his international ambitions are balanced not only by his nationalist concern for his country’s cultural prestige but also by his attempts to align his poetic prowess with Scottish political power—implying that he wishes to achieve recognition precisely as a “Scottish Briton.” Thus Douglas’s Eneados may be seen both as an intervention in Scotland’s linguistic and cultural landscape, and as an assumption of broader cultural authority on an international scale. Indeed, Douglas appears to view his translation as a vital stage in an ongoing tradition of translatio studii that privileges Scotland as a new locus of cultural authority; accordingly, his Prologues aim not only to proclaim the ascendancy of Scottish culture but also to demonstrate the intellectual decline of formerly eminent societies. According to Douglas, English culture, in particular, has sadly degenerated from Chaucer’s heyday. Chaucer’s fondness for women may have led him to skew Virgil’s story in favor of Dido, but his “eloquence balmy” (I.341) has now given way to the abominations perpetrated by Caxton, who has shamefully perverted what he was incapable of understanding: . . . Wilȝame Caxtoun, of Inglis natioun, In proyss hes prent ane buke of Inglys gross, Clepand it Virgill in Eneadoss, Quhilk that he says of Franch he dyd translait, It hass na thing ado tharwith, God wait, Ne na mair lyke than the devill and Sanct Austyne. Haue he na thank tharfor, bot loyss hys pyne, So schamefully that story dyd pervert. I red his wark with harmys at my hart, That syk a buke but sentens or engyne Suldbe intitillit efter the poet dyvyne; Hys ornate goldyn versis mair than gilt I spittit for dispyte to se swa spilt With sych a wyght, quhilk trewly be myne entent Knew neuer thre wordis at all quhat Virgill ment (I.138–52)

Caxton’s errors, “so playn and eik sa monyfald” (I.247), include his “prolixt and tedyus” (I.167) extension of the Dido episode, his intermingling of non-

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Virgilian material, his corresponding omission of large swathes of Virgil’s text, his confusion of names, his mistaken geography, and the stylistic ineptitude of his “febil proyss” (V.51). Douglas avers that unlike Chaucer, Caxton is not a poet of Albion but merely an English writer—and a poor one, at that. Douglas concludes his condemnation of Caxton by disclaiming the necessity of competing with English authors: I nold 3he traist I said this for dispyte, For me lyst with nane Inglis bukis flyte, Na with na bogill nor browny to debait, Nowder ald gaistis nor spretis ded of lait. (I.271–74)

The glories of Chaucerian verse have declined into English books with the authoritative weight of bogeys, brownies, and ghosts—insubstantial entities whose relevance to a vital cultural landscape is long past. A national literature exemplified by Caxton is not even worth debating, and certainly not worth engaging in a creative response. While Chaucer’s reputation remains undiminished, the cultural revitalization that he brought to English culture no longer continues. Douglas charts a similar decline in Latin culture, in the form of its latterday representative, Maphaeus Vegius—a young Italian whose Christian allegorical Supplementum to the Aeneid, composed in 1428, earned him the title of “alter Maro”—another Virgil.41 By Douglas’s day, Vegius’s thirteenth book had become an expected feature of Virgil’s text, which doubtless played a role in Douglas’s decision to translate it and append it to his own book.42 However, Douglas does not, apparently, do so without some misgivings—in his view, Vegius has enjoyed a highly inflated reputation. In the Prologue to his thirteenth book, Douglas parodies the dialogic engagement with Virgil’s text that he has carried on throughout the first twelve books and prologues by dramatizing a dream-encounter between himself and an irascible Maphaeus Vegius, who demands to know why Douglas has not yet translated his work. Douglas’s persona responds that the thirteenth book is superfluous: Ȝour buke ekit but ony necessite, As to the text accordyng neuer a deill, 41. For Vegius’s biography and critical reception, see Brinton, Maphaeus Vegius and His Thirteenth Book of the Aeneid; and Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance, 239–47. Vegio’s “Book XIII of the Aeneid” is printed in Vegio, Maffeo Vegio: Short Epics, 2–41. 42. Ghosh, “Gavin Douglas’s Maffeo Vegio,” 5.



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Mair than langis to the cart the fift quheill. 43 (XIII.116–18)

Yet despite this superfluity, Vegius’s work proves useful to Douglas in helping to clarify his own position as translator. Daniel Pinti has demonstrated that the thirteenth book plays an important role in Douglas’s overall poetic project, as a tacit argument “that [a vernacular] auctoritas of Douglas’s kind is, unlike that of the would-be auctor Maphaeus Vegius, the only fitting complement to Virgil and his Aeneid.”44 This establishment of his own superior authority involves both a radical reversal of the traditional linguistic hierarchy (in the implicit claim that Douglas’s vernacular is more suited to Virgil’s text than Vegius’s Latin) and a reassertion of the historical difference that Vegius’s Latin works to obscure, even as his Christianizing allegory fundamentally alters the meaning of the Aeneid. Though willing to serve his audience’s desire for a Christian interpretation of Virgil, Douglas distances himself from the kind of wholesale mapping of Christianity onto Virgil’s text that Vegius advocated, ironically casting aspersion upon the main selling point of Vegius’s book.45 Its recasting of the Aeneid as Christian allegory ostensibly resolved the longstanding problem of the appropriateness of pagan literature for a Christian audience, yet Douglas questions the premise of judging books’ literary value and moral worth by their religious affiliation. His dream-persona cites a well-known tale of St. Jerome in order to justify his inattention to Vegius’s work: I wait the story of Iherom is to ȝou kend, Quhou he was dung and beft intill hys sleip, For he to gentilis bukis gaif sik keip. (XIII.122–24)

In St. Jerome’s dream, he is castigated by God for preferring Cicero to Christ, 46 and subsequently scourged. Douglas’s analogy, however, reverses the usual moral hierarchy in which Christian books trump pagan texts. Comparing Vegius’s Supplementum to one of the “onprofitabill” (XIII.128) gentile books that Jerome was scolded for studying, he accords Virgil’s text the worthier 43. Douglas drew this image from the commentary of Ascensius, the Parisian printer whose 1501 edition of Virgil provided the base text for Douglas’s translation. 44. Pinti, “Gavin Douglas’s Negotiation of Authority,” 325. 45. Brinton, Maphaeus Vegius, 24–30, details Vegius’s allegorical approach, which followed a long tradition of Christian interpretations of Virgil. 46. Jerome, Epistle to Eustochium, 22:30.

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position despite its pagan authorship. Douglas has already devoted a good deal of space in his Prologues to demonstrating the compatibility of Virgil’s teachings with Christian doctrine and defending the intrinsic value of the Aeneid as a source of moral instruction: And, thocht our faith neid nane authorising Of gentiles bukis, nor by sik heithin sparkis, Ȝit Virgil writis mony iust clauss conding, Strenthing our beleve, to confound payan warkis. (VI.57–60)

Following the medieval tradition, which viewed Virgil as a kind of protoChristian, Douglas judges the Aeneid to be sufficiently edifying without the addition of Vegius’s allegorizing.47 Although Vegius turns the tables once more, accusing Douglas of falsely impersonating Jerome and insisting that he take the time to translate “my schort Cristyn wark” (XIII.140), he has to resort to violence before Douglas’s dreamer finally agrees to undertake the task: And, with that word, doun of the sete me drew, Syne to me with hys club he maid a braid, And twenty towtis apon my riggyng laid, Quhill, “Deo, Deo, mercy,” dyd I cry. (XIII.146–49)

Ironically, this beating only increases the parallels between Douglas’s dream and Jerome’s, while revealing the absurdity of Vegius’s attempted assumption of spiritual authority. Despite his trappings of poetic auctoritas—Vegius wears “on his hed of lawrer tre a crown” (XIII.87)—this violent outburst exposes the superficiality of his dignity. As Pinti notes, “Maphaeus’s riotous reaction leads to the translation of the thirteenth book, but it also represents the final deflation of the Italian poet as authorial competition for Douglas. Dialogue has been Douglas’s foundation for authorial credibility, but it is a foundation from 48 which Douglas’s Maphaeus cannot operate.” Everything in the scene, from Vegius’s dated attire and colloquial speech (he addresses the dreamer as “Ȝa, smy!”[XIII.131]) to his violent impulses, argues against his identification as “alter Maro.” As an embodiment of near-contemporary Latin culture, Vegius— at most a pale parody of Virgilian auctoritas—implicitly confirms that Latin 47. Bawcutt, Douglas, 70–78, discusses Douglas’s participation in the continuing debate over the propriety of reading pagan texts. Also see Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages. 48. Pinti, “Gavin Douglas’s Negotiation of Authority in Eneados 13,” 329.



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culture is hardly what it used to be.49 Perhaps most importantly, the fact that Douglas seizes the authority to reduce his auctor to a comical character within his text suggests not only that Vegius is unworthy of Virgilian reverence but that he is inferior to Douglas himself. Yet in dismissing Vegius’s Christianizing Supplementum as superfluous, Douglas in no way dismisses the importance of Christian revelation to his own Eneados, whose claim to eminence largely depends on its status as a cultural as well as linguistic translatio. Incorporating both Vegius and Virgil into his own vernacular text, Douglas updates the Aeneid for a new cultural circumstance while rendering its seams visible in a way that Vegius does not, resting his own authority as a vernacular author precisely on the historical difference that Vegius’s allegory elides. Despite Douglas’s emphasis on Virgil’s moral efficacy and the shared points of doctrine between his teachings and Christian faith—“Twichand our faith mony clausis he fand / Quhilk beyn conform, or than collaterall” (VI.39–40)—Douglas makes no attempt to disguise the incontrovertible fact that Virgil “was na Cristyn man, per De, / He was a gentile, and levit on payane lawis” (VI.78–79). And although Douglas remains a faithful translator, he also takes pains to distinguish his own project from Virgil’s by emphasizing that his own Eneados is a Christian undertaking, reminding us that “I wil na fals goddis wirshepe” (VI.136). Exposing this lack of cultural continuity, Douglas risks calling the continued relevance of the Aeneid into question, even as he seeks to appropriate its cultural authority. However, by facing this challenge head-on, Douglas ultimately turns cultural and religious difference into an asset, simultaneously implying that the Aeneid’s lack of Christian revelation does not diminish its value and that the Christian consciousness of the Eneados does enhance its worth for a Christian audience. Virgil’s text alone is unable to deliver the edifying Christian context that Douglas supplies; therefore, even if Douglas is unable to compete with Virgil’s eloquence, his historical situation enables him to surpass Virgil’s authority on what is arguable a higher level and claim superiority of religious doctrine. This leads to a partial effacement of Virgil’s auctoritas, as Douglas displaces his reverence for Virgil with veneration of a higher authority. When Douglas praises Virgil in the opening of his first Prologue as “the prynce of poetis” (I.418), it initially seems that he can envision no greater authority. Yet, in a rhetorical movement seemingly calculated to emphasize the temporal and spiritual distance between Douglas and his auctor, Virgil is soon displaced by 49. Ghosh, “Gavin Douglas’s Maffeo Vegio,” notes that Douglas’s irreverence toward Vegius also extends to his translation (15).

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another “prynce of poetis” (I.452), now glossed as “thou Kyng of Kyngis, Lord Etern” (I.453). Similarly, Douglas disavows Virgil’s muse, replacing Calliope with the Virgin Mary. He reasons, Calliope nor payane goddis wild May do to me na thing bot harm, I weyn: In Criste is all my traste, and hevynnys queyn. Thou, Virgyn Moder and Madyn, be my muse, That nevir ȝit na synfull lyst refuss Quhilk the besocht deuotly for supple. (I.460–65)

In devoting himself to an infinitely more authoritative muse, Douglas makes a real claim to surpass Virgil’s poetic authority. Combined with his depiction of both Latin and English cultures as currently in decline, and his insistence on his own superior skill as a translator, this claim solidifies Douglas’s assumption of poetic authority on behalf of Scotland. Douglas views his project as part of a dual cultural shift, marked both by the transition from Latin to vernacular, and by the shifting of poetic and cultural authority from England to Scotland.

TRANSLATIO IMPERII AND THE POLITICS OF THE ENEADOS At the same time, Douglas may well have viewed his translation project as participating in a political as well as a cultural shift of power, a connection suggested by his careful alignment of his poetic prowess with the power of Scotland’s elite. In this light, his literary endeavors would constitute the fullest possible embodiment of the concept of translatio studii et imperii, implicitly engaging as they do the question of Scottish nationhood. But Douglas’s political activities have presented something of a dilemma to scholars, who have struggled to reconcile the apparent nationalism of the Eneados with what Bawcutt has called his “markedly pro-English” politics after the military disas50 ter at Flodden. I would suggest that Douglas was not so much pro-English as pro-Douglas, and that his reverence for familial ties helps to explain what might otherwise seem a contradictory stance between his investment in Scottish nationalism and his involvement in the political machinations that ultimately led to his exile. 50. Bawcutt, Douglas, 37.



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Although Douglas was deeply involved in political intrigue on both sides of the border after 1513, scholarly discourse has tended both to exaggerate his commitment to the English cause and to be overly eager to apply conclusions about his post-Flodden activities to his composition of the Eneados. Claims of Douglas’s pro-English bias overstate one side of a complex family and political dynamic. Certainly, the year 1513 marked an important turning point in Douglas’s career: on 22 July he completed the Eneados; just seven weeks later, James IV and much of the Scottish nobility, including two of Douglas’s brothers and his patron Henry Sinclair, were killed at the battle of Flodden. This seems to have marked the end of Douglas’s poetic career, and he soon became deeply involved in the politics surrounding the regency of the infant James V. Appointed one of the Lords of Council in October of 1513, he was one of several lords charged to “remane daily with the queynys graice to gif hir consell in al materis concerning the wele of the realm.”51 When, less than a year after James IV’s death, Douglas’s nephew Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, married Queen Margaret Tudor, Douglas’s relationship with her became familial as well as political, and politics became inseparable from family concerns.52 Douglas proved to be a staunch ally of his nephew in both good times and bad. As long as Angus’s marriage to Margaret remained a happy one, Douglas was able to take advantage of his newly prominent connections. Although outmaneuvered in his bids for the Abbey of Arbroath and the archbishopric of St. Andrews, Douglas eventually received the bishopric of Dunkeld, largely due to the queen’s petitions on his behalf. However, it was difficult for Douglas even to take possession of this benefice, due to the discord that quickly surfaced following Queen Margaret’s marriage to Angus. This marriage displeased the rest of the Lords of Council, and the queen was soon stripped of her powers as regent for James V; Douglas’s close relationship with the queen at this time may be seen from the fact that she authorizes “our lovit clerk and 53 consalour mastir Gavin Douglas” to speak on her behalf before the Lords. However, the Lords decided to call upon John Stewart, Duke of Albany—a nephew of James III and resident of France—to replace her as regent. Even before Albany’s arrival, the Scottish political scene had split into factions with distinct national allegiances: a French faction led by Albany, and an English faction (so identified because Queen Margaret was sister to Henry VIII of England) led by the queen, Angus, and Douglas. One immediate consequence 51. Hannay, Acts of the Lords of Council, 4. 52. Bawcutt, Douglas, 10. My discussion of the later part of Douglas’s life is indebted to Bawcutt throughout, although I draw rather different conclusions. 53. Hannay, Acts of the Lords of Council, 20.

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of this discord, for Douglas, was that at Albany’s instigation he had to undergo a trial and conviction for having purchased his benefice, and then a year of imprisonment, before he was able to claim it. Nevertheless, it is clear that Douglas’s primary allegiance was to his nephew and to the young James V, and not to England or even to his own advancement. Bawcutt has noted that Douglas’s correspondence reveals “how important to Douglas were the bonds of kinship, and how strong his attachment to his own family,” emotions that others skillfully manipulated.54 Adam Williamson, a Scottish ecclesiastic at the English court who was employed to represent the interests of Henry VIII, repeatedly pressed Douglas to assist in convincing Queen Margaret to flee to England with her children, where they would be under Henry’s care and protection.55 In his letters, Williamson lays great inducements before Douglas, promising him that “yff yee soo doo yee shall haff in Scotland what promocioun that it shall plesse you to haff,” and reminding him “that the Quene has put hyr and hyr chyldryn in your handdis; yff yee folow the consell and avysse off hyr brother the Kyng yee canott doo amysse, as I haue vryttyn afore, your blood is maid for euer. And yff yee doo the contrary she may cowrs the tyme that euer she mellyt with your blood” (xxiv). Nevertheless, Douglas resisted, instead encouraging Henry to protect the rights and privileges of the young king and his mother, “that therby na preiudice may happyn to the Kyng nor this hys realm” (xxxviii). As Bawcutt has concluded from these letters, he “could perhaps see the folly of allowing the infant James V to leave Scotland and enter the keeping of an English king.”56 Yet Douglas’s actions during this period also suggest that he was willing to subordinate his own promised advancement to the interests of Scotland and its monarch. Another argument against seeing Douglas as a pro-English politician is the fluidity of the factions at court. Even Douglas and Albany briefly reconciled, enough so that in 1517 Albany entrusted Douglas with a diplomatic mission to renew Scotland’s alliance with France and to negotiate the marriage of James V to a daughter of Francis I—arrangements that were bound to imperil Anglo-Scottish relations. And when the marriage between Queen Margaret and Angus began publicly to fall apart, further disrupting the court’s networks of allegiance, Douglas took the side of his nephew, favoring family ties over the friendship of the queen and her powerful brother. The queen, who had formerly commended Douglas as “foremost in rank among the nobles 54. Bawcutt, “Correspondence of Gavin Douglas,” 57. 55. Douglas, Poetical Works of Gavin Douglas, xx. All quotations of Douglas’s correspondence refer to Small’s edition; parenthetical citations appear in text. 56. Bawcutt, Douglas, 11.



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of the kingdom, second to none in literature and morals .  .  . worthy of the highest ecclesiastical authority” (xiii), now complained to her brother that Douglas “has bene the caus of all the dissention and trobill of this Realme” (cii). Douglas and Angus were now aligned both against the queen and against Albany, to whom Margaret had turned for support. In a last-ditch effort to secure assistance for his cause, Angus sent his uncle on a mission to the English court, where he was not only to accuse Albany of plotting to murder James V and usurp the Scottish crown but also to insinuate that “the Quene, be evil and seinistar consale, is mekill inclynyt to the plesour of the Duke in al maner of thingis, and ar neuer syndry bot euery day togidder, owther forrow none or efter” (xciii–xciv). Accusing the king’s sister of sexual impropriety was perhaps not the best way to elicit his support, but Douglas’s mission was further complicated by the presence of Albany’s own agents at the English court. He depicts even this conflict as a familial one, begging Cardinal Wolsey that Albany’s servants not be heeded because Albany “is capitalle and dedelie inimye to me and all my hous . . . and dois all that he may or can ymagyn to my distruccioun, and exterminatioun of all my kyn” (xcix). It was precisely this propensity for eliding political and familial allegiance that led Douglas to side with his less powerful, less well-connected nephew over the queen and Albany, thereby ruining his own chances for advancement. Douglas failed to secure English support, was stripped of his benefice in Scotland, and was convicted of treason, while Angus gave up his own cause and retreated to France. Less than a year later Douglas died of the plague. The experience of being more or less abandoned by his nephew finally seems to have shaken Douglas’s trust in familial bonds: in his last letter to Wolsey, he distances himself from “the vnworthy Erl of Anguse,” wishes “that I may see him really punyst for his demerittis and promyssis brokyn,” and complains that “I am dissauit be my most tendyr frendis . . . incontrar to all goode lyklyhod or naturall equite” (civ–cv). Yet even at this low point, when, as he says, he is “so full of sorowe and displesour that I am wery of my avne lyf ” (civ), his primary concern is for the “welefare and securite of the Kingis Grace of Scotland . . . for his Grace has maid no falt but is aluterly innocent” (cv). Douglas continues: This is and was my principall directioun and causs of my hyddyr cuming . . . albeit I wald haif procurit as I cowth the weylfayr of my self and frendis besyde, gif thai had not wrocht in the contrar to thair awne distruccioun and myne . . . and gif I durst be so bald as to sollist your Grace and shew quhat wayis war best for the weylfare of the young Kingis Grace my Souerane, I wald be glayd to endeuor myself thairto. (cv)

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Although Douglas freely admits to his own ambition, he characterizes it as secondary to his overarching desire to serve the interests of his young king. It seems clear that Douglas’s conviction for treason was the result of his having chosen the losing side in the battle over James V’s minority and was not due to any maneuvering against the Scottish king or kingdom itself: to the last, he portrays himself as a staunch defender of the rights of the Scottish monarchy. However, largely due to misleading perceptions concerning Douglas’s postwar politics, some scholars—tending to confuse Douglas’s idealization of peace throughout the Eneados with a practical antiwar stance and conciliatory attitude toward England—have denied that he engages in any kind of nationalist discourse in his poetics. Cummings, for example, posits that even before 1513, Douglas may have shared his friend John Mair’s desire for AngloScottish union. He suggests that Douglas’s motives for translating the Aeneid, together with Vegius’s Supplementum, were bound up with “his fear of war or its outcome and his concern for those closest to him” and argues that, in the summer of 1513 leading up to Flodden, “Douglas would have been very shortsighted not to fear the worst.”57 Yet I find little evidence, beyond the eirenical tendencies of his translation, that Douglas opposed war with England in 1513. And as our best evidence for Douglas’s political leanings during the period of its composition, the Eneados more readily supports the opposite conclusion, that Douglas believed in Scotland’s political might and supported a nationalist position—one which the political circumstances of the time would easily have justified. Indeed, for most of the twelve years that it took for Douglas to write the Eneados, he would have had every reason to believe that Scotland was poised on the brink of political as well as poetic greatness. For much of the decade preceding the disaster of Flodden, James IV appeared to be a competent monarch, in firm control of his relations with other states and capable of great diplomatic finesse. If the “Perpetual Peace” negotiated with England in 1502, and sealed in 1503 with the wedding of James IV with Margaret Tudor, was a shaky one, the choice of whether or not to break the peace appeared to rest with James. While Henry VII fretted over whether or not James planned to renew his alliance with France, and the French King Louis XII urged James to do exactly that, James adroitly manipulated both sides: avoiding a firm commitment to France, he used the threat of a renewed Franco-Scottish alliance to keep Henry in check.58 The turning point came with Henry VII’s death and the accession of Henry VIII in 1509. After a brief period of cordiality 57. Cummings, “Gavin Douglas’s Humanist Supplement to the Eneados,” 140–41. 58. My interpretation of these events is influenced by the accounts of Macdougall, James IV, and Nicholson, Scotland.



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between Henry and James, during which the “Perpetual Peace” was renewed, it became clear that Henry was determined to go to war with France. Henry’s entrance into the Holy League in 1511 put James in the position of having to choose between honoring the “Perpetual Peace” with England and honoring the older alliance with France. In 1512, James elected to renew the FrancoScottish alliance. Arguing against earlier interpretations of this choice, Macdougall insists that this was no quixotic decision, the mad act of a dreamer seeking alliance with the only ruler who professed an active interest in crusading, but a carefully considered political decision, arrived at following consultation in General Council, and based on the advice of some of the most experienced European 59 statesmen of the day.

In addition, Scotland possessed considerable military strength, bolstered by the latest technology and a particularly strong navy. When, in 1513, the Holy League began to fall apart, it must have seemed to confirm that the Scots were entering the war on the winning side, and up until the eve of Flodden, Douglas would have been in the distinct majority if he had expected the war to go well.60 Although in the aftermath of Flodden many people felt the disaster to have been inevitable, beforehand there was no reason to expect defeat. Thus Douglas had some basis for aligning his translation with Scottish political might and positing it as a part of a larger cultural and political shift toward Scottish ascendancy. Douglas’s act of appropriating Virgil’s intellectual and cultural authority for a newly proclaimed national language, invoked on behalf of Scotland’s political elite and reinforced by the authority of Christian revelation, amounts to a transformation of Virgil’s foundational myth into a new narrative of Scottish origins. Paralleling Scottish political might with Roman imperial power, Douglas’s Eneados also links past with present through shared traditions of learning passed down through a poetic lineage that extends from Virgil to Chaucer and culminates in Douglas himself. Douglas simultaneously roots his own auctoritas in this illustrious intellectual heritage and offers his nation a new kind of ancestry, based on intellectual ties with the classical world, to complement the old myth of Gaythelos and Scota. The fashioning of literary authority and the scripting of nationhood emerge as mutually constitutive projects, through which Douglas seeks to intervene 59. Macdougall, James IV, 257–58. Macdougall’s remarks are aimed against the view of James as a “moonstruck romantic,” blinded to political realities by his desire to go on crusade, which is put forth by Mackie in King James IV of Scotland, 201. 60. Macdougall, James IV, 263.

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in Scotland’s cultural and political future. Flodden, of course, brought an end to any dreams of Scottish political preeminence, and it seems to be no coincidence that Douglas’s poetic career ended in the same year; the Eneados exemplifies a brief moment in Scottish history when it was possible for a Scottish poet to claim cultural centrality and to envision political triumph.

EPILOGUE

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THIS B O OK has traced the links between nationalist historiography and the poetry of James IV’s court, arguing that both poets and chroniclers worked to establish a Scottish identity that is most often fashioned though an intimate engagement with English texts. Although the internal instability occasioned by James IV’s early death at Flodden spelled the end (for the time being) of Scottish dreams of military and political triumph, it did not diminish Scottish national feeling or the role of historiography in promoting Scottish identity. And while Douglas’s hoped-for alignment of poetic and political prestige was only imperfectly realized in his own lifetime, it would be incarnated two generations later, in the person of James VI and I: the first monarch to be accepted as ruler of both Scotland and England, whose career both as a poet and as a politician challenged tradition and paved the way for a new chapter in Anglo-Scottish relations. Douglas’s fear—expressed to Polydore Vergil shortly before his death— that the nationalist tradition in Scottish historiography would be supplanted by John Mair’s prounion Historia Maioris Britanniae would prove to be unfounded. Douglas died just five years before the 1527 publication of a history he doubtless would have preferred: Hector Boece’s Scotorum Historia, an expansion and reworking of the Scotichronicon that not only endorses the Scottish origin myth but invents new myths to fill in roughly seven hundred years of early history—from Fergus I in 330 bc to Fergus II in 424 ad—that • 201 •

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Fordun and Bower had left blank.1 Even more so than Fordun and Bower, Boece stresses the uninterrupted continuity of Scottish kingship from its first founder down to its current ruler, James V. James awarded Boece a royal pension of fifty pounds, and—as he was unable to read the Latin—commissioned its translation into Scots by the poet and historian John Bellenden, who finished the work in 1553.2 Bellenden’s Chronicles of Scotland, which added material from Bower, Mair, and others to Boece, made a full-scale history of Scotland available in the vernacular for the first time. This was an explicitly nationalist venture: Bellenden aimed “to shape the national identity of the Scots themselves, and Scottish antiquity and independence becomes a means to provide the Scots with national pride.”3 Boece’s and Bellenden’s histories would become “the most authoritative accounts of the Scottish past for the next two centuries,” as nationalist historiography continued to thrive.4 Meanwhile, historiography and poetry remained entangled genres. Bellenden not only authored nationalist historiography, he was also a poet—one whom Sir David Lyndsay (the foremost poet of James V’s reign) praised along with Gavin Douglas in his “Testament of the Papyngo.”5 Constructing a literary genealogy patterned on Dunbar’s and Douglas’s, Lyndsay looks back to the English triumvirate of “Chawceir, Goweir, and Lidgate laureate” (12) as founding figures, “quhose sweit sentence throuch Albione bene soung” (14), before continuing through a register of Scottish poets, culminating with Gavin Douglas, “of eloquence the flowand balmy strand, / And, in our Inglis rethorik, the rose” (23–24). The only living poet to match the greatness of these ancestors, Lyndsay opines, is “Ballentyne” (Bellenden), “quhose ornat workis my wytt can nocht define” (51–52). Bellenden was closely associated with the Douglas family, and almost certainly knew the poet; after Douglas’s exile, Bellenden became the secretary of his nephew Archibald Douglas, earl of Angus, 6 and shows close political affiliation with Douglas’s interests. Unfortunately, little of Bellenden’s verse has survived: he is now known principally as a historian. Yet in the verses within the prologues of his prose works, Bellenden establishes a literary genealogy of his own: as Thomas Rutledge has averred, he “carefully signals his indebtedness to Douglas expressly to situate himself 1. See Royan, “Hector Boece and the Question of Veremund,” on the question of Boece’s sources for this period. 2. Williams, “James V of Scots as Literary Patron,” 189. 3. Harikae, “John Bellenden’s Chronicles of Scotland: Translation and Circulation,” 206. 4. Royan and Broun, “Versions of Scottish Nationhood,” 179. 5. Lyndsay, Sir David Lyndsay: Selected Poems. Parenthetical citations of line numbers appear in text. 6. Rutledge, “Gavin Douglas and John Bellenden,” 109–10, discusses the probability of this identification.

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as Douglas’s literary successor.”7 This indebtedness manifests both in the prologue to his Chronicles of Scotland, which contains close echoes of Douglas’s verse, and in his translation of the First Five Books of Livy, which—starting, as it does, with the tale of Aeneas’s founding of Rome—may have been inspired by Douglas’s Eneados.8 Bellenden’s work had a long afterlife: the manuscript that he presented to James V in 1533 was inherited by James’s daughter, Mary Queen of Scots, and later passed down to her son, James VI.9 James VI (1566–1625) was particularly attuned to the political implications of the written word. He had witnessed his mother Mary’s downfall, which was hastened both by her opponents’ use of her own supposed poems to portray her as an adulterer and murderer, and by a profusion of vitriolic poetic attacks on both Mary and the monarchy, which were published as publicly accessible broadsides. In response, James determined to harness Scotland’s literary energies for his own use: “For James, it was part of the practice of kingship to be in charge of poetry rather than the subject of its charges.”10 From the outset of his personal rule in 1584, James took care to establish his court as Scotland’s poetic center, with himself as its principal patron and arbiter. His first volume, Essayes of a Prentise, in the Divine Art of Poesie, was published in 1584; a second volume, His Maiesties Poeticall Exercises at Vacant Houres, was issued in 1591.11 The Essayes included his own poetry, as well as Ane Schort Treatise conteining some Reulis and Cautelis to be obseruit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie. This publication “was part of a larger movement by both James and Parliament to reestablish the authority of the monarch, and to identify the monarch once 12 more with the Scottish nation.” The Reulis and Cautelis warns poets to “be war of wryting anything of materis of commoun weill” (468), echoing an act of Parliament in the same year that provided “for punishment of the authors of the slanderous and untrue calumnies spoken against the king’s majesty, 13 his council and proceedings.” The same act singled out the historiography of George Buchanan (James’s former tutor) for special condemnation as “not suitable to remain as accords of truth to posterity” and demanded that anyone 7. Rutledge, “Gavin Douglas and John Bellenden,” 96. 8. Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas, 194–95. 9. Harikae, “John Bellenden’s Chronicles of Scotland: Translation and Circulation,” 152. 10. Mapstone, “Older Scots Literature and the Court,” 282. 11. The nearly forty editions of James’s works published during his lifetime are listed by Rickhard, Authorship and Authority, 208–9. Also see James VI, Poems of King James VI of Scotland. 12. Bell, “Kingcraft and Poetry,” 161. Rickard discusses how James used his writings to enhance his monarchy; for his early reign, see Authorship and Authority, 33–68. 13. James VI, Reulis and Cautelis; parenthetical citations appear in text. Brown, Records of the Parliaments of Scotland, [1584/5/14].

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possessing copies of his works deliver them to the court or face a steep fine.14 Buchanan’s stance against Mary, along with his endorsement of the people’s right to resist poor government, were inimical to James. Later, in his Basilicon Doron (1599), an advisory treatise on kingship that he wrote for his son Henry, James advises the prince to study “authentike histories and Chronicles” (from which category he explicitly excludes Buchanan’s and John Knox’s writings), subordinating these only to Scripture and Scottish law as necessary reading for an aspiring king.15 In both the poetic and historiographical realms, James was determined to bring Scottish writing under monarchial supervision. Uniting poetic prowess and political authority under his own auspices, James also sought to further the development of a distinctly Scottish poetics. In the Reulis, he enacts the trope of translatio studii to claim that poetry has progressed over time and has the potential to reach its apotheosis in Scotland: For as them that wrait of auld, luke as the tyme is changeit sensyne, sa is the ordour of poesie changeit . . . now, quhen the warld is waxit auld, we have al their opinions in writ, quhilk were lerned before our tyme, besydes our awin ingynis, quhair as they then did it onelie be thair awin ingynis but help of any uther. (461)

Poetry, that previously “was bot in the infancie and chyldheid,” is now “come to mannis age and perfectioun” (461) by adding contemporary ingenuity to its inheritance of older traditions. Crucially, James envisions Scots poetry as inheriting, rather than competing with, classical poetic traditions. In the Basilicon Doron, James expressly advises Prince Henry against trying to compete with the classics: he dismisses composition in classical languages as inappropriate for a prince, advising Prince Henry to “write in your owne language: 16 for there is nothing left to be saide in Greeke and Latine alreadie.” Instead, the future progression of poetry lies with the vernacular, and particularly with Scots: “It best becometh a King to purifie and make famous his owne tongue.”17 In the Reulis and Cautelis, James emphasizes Scotland’s unique poetic traditions, particularly the genre of flyting, for which he recommends “tumbling [alliterative] verse” (467). He justifies his presumption in offering poetic advice by stressing Scotland’s linguistic and cultural distinction: although others have written on the rules of poetics, “there hes never ane of thame written in our language. For albeit sindrie hes written of it in English, quhilk is lykest to our 14. Brown, Records of the Parliaments of Scotland, [1584/5/14]. 15. James VI, King James VI and I: Political Writings, 46. 16. James VI, King James VI and I: Political Writings, 55. 17. James VI, King James VI and I: Political Writings, 55.

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language, yit we differ from thame in sindrie reulis of poesie” (463). Following Douglas’s lead in identifying Scots as a language distinct from English, James draws heavily upon French sources and generally prefers to align Scottish poetry with France rather than with England, “presenting it as contending with rather than bowing to English cultural standards.”18 James succeeded in spurring a literary revival at court, one that preempted the harsh satires of Mary’s reign with a royalist poetics. An elite group of courtiers often known as the Castalian Band (probably after an epitaph that James wrote for Alexander Montgomerie, his “maister poet”) formed the core of this Renaissance.19 Their work, often “characterized by poetic performances of extraordinary intimacy between sovereign and courtier,” was effusive in its praise of James as both a poetic and political leader.20 John Stewart of Baldynneis, for example, dedicates his Roland Furious (an adaptation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso) to “Maist Mychtie Monarck that in erth does Ring, / And to my verse the chief support expres, / My souueran lord, My Maister, and my King.”21 Similarly, Montgomerie figures James as “A Martiall Monarch with Minerva’s spreit.”22 These poets largely adhered to James’s Reulis, which encouraged experimentation in a wide range of genres and styles, and tended—like James himself—to look to European models for inspiration. Nevertheless, they succeeded in developing a distinctly Scottish style, especially in their use of the sonnet form: a profusion of sonnets emerged from the Scottish court, characterized by an original rhyme scheme (later known as the “Spenserian” sonnet form, though Scottish use predated Spenser’s) and a wide range of subject matter.23 This was a diverse yet thoroughly Scottish poetry, supportive of king and court while outward-looking in its inspiration and its aspiration to bolster Scotland’s cultural image abroad. When in 1603 James VI inherited the English throne and became James I, his literary reputation preceded him to his new country. Six of his prose works, plus his original poem the Lepanto, were published in London in 1603: the Basilicon Doron, which must have promised a preview of the kind of rule the English were to expect, became a best-seller, going through four editions. Neil Rhodes, Jennifer Richards, and Joseph Marshall note that the Basilicon Doron was written with “an eye to the English throne,” and even in its 1597 Edinburgh edition, it was Anglicized by its printers so as to make it more 18. Rickhard, Authorship and Authority, 40. 19. Jack, “Poetry under King James VI.” 20. Dunnigan, “New Critical Cartography,” 107. 21. Stewart, Poems, 1–3. 22. Montgomerie, Poems, 104. 23. Jack, “Poetry under King James VI,” 127–28; McClune, “Scottish Sonnet,” 165–80.

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internationally accessible: “James’s transition from a writer committed to promoting a distinctively Scottish literature to one speaking the language of the future British state might be described as the first act of union.”24 James was preparing the way for his writing to be as instrumental in ruling England as it had been in Scotland. Upon his arrival in his new kingdom, James was greeted as a poet-king with poetic accolades that paid tribute to his work: John Savile writes that James “doth excell, / As his Lepantho and his Furies tell, / In Poesie 25 all Kings in Christendome.” Ben Jonson professes amazement at James’s perfect union of poetical and political authority: “How, best of Kings, do’st thou a scepter beare! / How, best of Poets, do’st thou laurell weare!”26 Yet although James continued to publish prose tracts, including a monumental edition of his collected Works in 1616, he would publish no new poetry during his Eng27 lish reign. His sonnet decrying “Sir William Alexanders harshe vearses after the Inglishe fasone,” probably written after the union of the crowns, may indicate that James tried, for a time, to maintain his role as a patron of specifically Scots verse.28 If so, he was unsuccessful: Scottish literature was rapidly assimilating to English linguistic norms, and James was soon obliged to spread his patronage more widely. Instead, this ardent proponent of Scottish national literature actively downplayed his own Scottishness—and minimized Scotland’s role in the union—for his new subjects.29 Despite the accolades that greeted him upon his arrival in England, James soon found it necessary to assuage fears “that this Vnion will be the Crisis to the ouerthrow of England, and setting vp of 30 Scotland: England will then bee ouerwhelmed by the swarming of the Scots.” James resorted to rhetorically minimizing geographical boundaries in order to stress the island’s unity, a tactic that had long been used by English writers in 31 order to justify Scottish conquest and by John Mair in order to urge union. In a speech to Parliament on 19 March 1604, James asked,

24. Rhodes, Richards, and Marshall, introduction to King James VI and I, 12, 2. 25. Quoted in James VI, Poems of King James VI, vol. 1, appendix A, 276; this appendix gathers twenty-seven contemporary examples of praise for James’s poetry. 26. James VI, Poems of King James VI, vol. 1, appendix A, 278. 27. A manuscript titled “All the Kings short poesis that ar not printed” (British Library Additional MS 24195), which seems to have been partly prepared by James himself between 1616 and 1618, may have originally been intended for publication alongside the Works. See Rickhard, Authorship and Authority, 1. 28. Spiller, “Scottish Court and the Scottish Sonnet,” 101–15. 29. See Bell, “‘No Scot, No English Now.” 30. James VI, King James VI and I: Political Writings, 164. 31. Terrell, “Depicting Identity: Cartography and Chorography,” 89–94.

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Yes, hath hee not made vs all in one Island, compassed with one Sea, and of it selfe by nature so indiuisible, as almost those that were borderers themselues on the late Borders, cannot distinguish, not know, or discerne their owne limits? These two Countries being separated neither by Sea, nor great River, Mountaine, nor other strength of nature, but onely by little small brookes, or demolished little walles, so as rather they were diuided in apprehension, then in effect. (135)

Fordun’s “great rivers” have become “small brookes”; his country “practically divided into two islands” has become “one Island .  .  . indiuisible.” 32 James’s attempts to unite England and Scotland into “Great Britain” were ultimately thwarted: although he styled himself “King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland,” the title never really caught on, and his early plans for a fuller legal and 33 administrative union were scuttled. In another attempt to sway English opinion, James downplayed Scotland’s role in his proposed union even further in a speech to Parliament on 31 March 1607: “For Scotland I auow such a Vnion, as if you had got it by Conquest, but such a Conquest as may be cemented by loue.”34 Later in this speech he restates this idea, cementing the image of inequality with a marriage analogy: “You are to be the husband, they the wife; you conquerors, they as conquered, though not by the sword, but by the sweet and sure bond of love.”35 However, the centuries-long animosity between Scots and English was not easily overcome, and “there was as yet no acceptable ideology which might weld disparate kingdoms together.”36 Creating this ideology was an ongoing project of James’s reign. Accordingly, the iconography of James’s court established his authority by linking him genealogically and symbolically to England’s past—even to the myth of Brutus that had for so long been a touchstone of English presumption. Even before the beginning of his English rule, James paved the way for his immediate family’s acceptance into the English succession by giving his 37 children Henry and Elizabeth names with strong Tudor associations. And in the Basilicon Doron, James appears to accept the legend of Brutus’s primordial division of Britain, advising Henry—if he should be so lucky as to inherit more than one kingdom—never to divide it like Brutus did.38 His links to the 32. See Chapter 2 for a discussion of this passage (2.1.25–28) in Fordun. 33. Brown, “Vanishing Emperor,” 63. 34. James VI, King James VI and I: Political Writings, 161–62. 35. James VI, King James VI and I: Political Writings, 164. 36. Wormald, “Union of 1603,” 32. Also see Wormald, “O Brave New World?,” 13–36. 37. Brown, “Vanishing Emperor,” 63. 38. James VI, King James VI and I: Political Writings, 42.

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Tudors and their mythologies increased dramatically after 1603. James’s royal entry into London in March 1604 was a grandiose masterpiece of iconography penned by the playwrights Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson, with seven triumphal arches constructed for the event by the architect Stephen Harrison.39 The theatrics were intended to begin with St. George and St. Andrew, “in compleate Armour, their Brestes and Caparisons suited with the Armes of England and Scotland,” swearing brotherhood and riding hand-in-hand until 40 they met James. Although this part of the festivities had to be dropped due to poor planning, the entire pageant was replete with similar images of union. The pageant was also shot through with references to London’s Trojan history, although by this time it was widely regarded as perhaps more useful than accurate: as Jonson writes in a note to his portion of the text, “Rather than the Citie should want a Founder, we choose to follow the receiued storie of Brute, whether fabulous, or true.”41 Therefore James is bidden by Genius to “boldly enter Troynovant,” or New Troy; later, the figure of Zeal celebrates James as a type of second Brutus, uniting what had long been divided: . . . so rich an Empyre, whose faiyre brest, Contaynes foure Kingdomes by your entrance blest, By Brute diuided, but by you alone, 42 All are againe vnited and made One.

In the same year, William Herbert’s Prophecie of Cadwallader would make the allusion even more explicit: “Mine eyes distill sweete teares, the teares of ioy, / To see Troyes issue raigne in new found Troy.”43 James had become a Trojan, and this mythical ancestry would continue to be deployed in his court and 44 that of his son, Prince Henry. This genealogy did not go uncontested: on James’s only return to Scotland—fourteen years after he left with the promise to return every three years—the king was reminded of the “ancient nation of Scots, descended of the victorious Greeks and learned Egyptians.”45 Even if authors like Douglas had “successfully re-appropriated the Matter of Troy from the hands of Edwardian propagandists,” it must still have been shocking to some of James’s Scottish subjects, well-versed in Boece and Bellenden’s 39. Parry, Golden Age Restor’d. 40. Dekker, Dramatic Works, 254. 41. Jonson, Ben Jonson, 92. 42. Dekker, Dramatic Works, 298. 43. Herbert, Prophesie of Cadwallader. 44. Parry, Golden Age Restor’d, 64–75. 45. Brown “Vanishing Emperor,” 77.

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nationalist mythologies, to see James forego Scotland’s origin-myth in favor of England’s.46 Mythical genealogies continued to be used to underline poetic and monarchial power well into the seventeenth century, but not in ways that anyone in James IV’s court could have anticipated. James VI and I’s use of the English origin myth walked a fine line between appropriation and capitulation, strengthening his own prestige while diminishing that of his first kingdom. Yet the Scottish origin myth no longer offered a useful basis for political argument once England and Scotland turned from competition to an uneasy cooperation. Nevertheless, Henry VII’s metaphor of Scotland being absorbed into England “as the les to the mair, the water strype rinis to the fontane” did not occur precisely as he had predicted. On the one hand, Scotland had lost its sovereignty, its linguistic conviction, and the cultural and political power of a royal court. Scottish identity, which for centuries had been based, in part, on opposition to England, became less readily defined, while the English were less inclined than ever to respect their northern neighbor. On the other hand, the union of the crowns afforded an opportunity for Anglo-Scottish relations to transcend the competing narratives of the distant past and embrace poetic and political hybridity. James VI and I, the Anglo-Scottish poet-king who secured union and peace at the cost of his own Scottish nationalism, embodied both the promise and the limitations of this new reality.

46. Wingfield, Trojan Legend in Medieval Scottish Literature, 187.

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INDEX

•

historiography, 11, 90–4; of Scots historiography and poetry, 101–113; of Scotichronicon, 79–82, 87, 90

Advocates 19.2.4 (National Library of Scotland MS), 93, 96 Aeneid. See Virgil

Augustine, Saint, 68, 72

Albany. See John Stewart, Duke of Albany Albina, legendary founder of Albion, 97–9

Balliol, John, king of Scots, 17, 44

Alexander III, king of Scots, 13, 33, 63–7

Bannatyne MS (National Library of Scotland Advocates MS 1.1.6), 1–3, 103, 108 n.59, 127

Alexander, William, 206 Andrew, Saint, 71, 208 “Ane anser to ane Ingliss railar,” 1–3

Barbour, John, 4–5, 172

Anglophobia, 11, 84–101, 103, 113

Bede, 2, 37, 40, 43, 73

Anglo-Saxons, 72–4, 77, 94 Angus. See Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus Arch. Selden B. 24 (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS), 11, 101, 105–113, 116, 181 Arthur, legendary king of Britain, 16, 18, 23, 25, 42–3, 76–7, 95–6 Asloan, John, 101–2 Asloan MS (National Library of Scotland MS 16500), 92–3, 101–5, 108, 117 n. 4 Auchinleck Chronicle, 92 audience, 27, 50; of Douglas’s Eneados, 179–83, 185, 190–1, 193; of Dunbar and Kennedy’s Flyting, 129–30, 138; of Dunbar’s petitions, 163; of nationalist Scottish

Bellenden, John, 93, 106, 202–3, 208 Bisset, Baldred, 46–51, 57, 60, 66, 86–7 Boece, Hector, 93, 106, 170, 201–2, 208 Boniface VIII, Pope, 7, 13 n. 3, 15–17, 29, 44, 76 n. 27 Book of the Taking of Ireland. See Lebor Gabála border, Anglo-Scottish, 22–23, 37–8, 41, 49–51, 59–61, 206–7 Bower, Walter, 3–4, 6, 10–12, 27–9, 63–87, 90–7, 99–101, 104, 111, 173, 202 Brevis Chronica, 93–4, 96 Britons, 2, 26, 39–49, 60, 69–72, 76, 79, 94

• 229 •

230

Index

Brutus, 1–3, 15–16, 18–19, 23, 25–6, 30, 32, 38–39, 42–8, 53, 59–60, 76, 94–5, 98, 185 n. 32, 207–8 Buchanan, George, 203–4 Castalian Band, 205 Caxton, William, 98–9, 174, 189–90 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 3–5, 11–12, 101, 106–13, 115–17, 124–8, 143–5, 150, 153–4, 168, 174, 184–90, 199: Complaint unto Pity, 154; Legend of Good Women, 159–61, 186–7; Lak of Stedfastnesse, 159; Troilus and Criseyde, 150 Chepman and Myllar, printers, 89–90, 103, 108, 123, 125, 127 n. 34 Chronica Gentis Scotorum. See John of Fordun Church, 6–7, 9, 15, 66, 70–6, 79–81, 84, 99, 135–6, 147 Clement V, Pope, 7 Corpus MS (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 171), 63–6, 81–2, 104 Coupar Angus MS (National Library of Scotland, Adv. MS 35.1.7), 82, 86, 91, 104 courtly love, 11–12, 143, 145, 149–68 Cronycle of Scotland in a Part. See Scottis Originale Dalhousie MS (National Archives of Scotland, Dalhousie Muniments, GD 54/31/III) 92–5, 104–6 Danes, 49, 73–5, 94 David II, king of Scots, 18, 21, 51 Declaration of Arbroath, 50, 58–9 de Ayala, Pedro, Spanish ambassador, 89, 131, 172 Dekker, Thomas, 208 de Wet, Jacob, 34 diplomacy: Anglo-Scottish, 6, 15–20, 26, 119–23, 196–99; Franco-Scottish, 123, 196, 198–99 documents, 21, 24–5, 27–9, 50, 86–7, 86 n.58 Douglas, Archibald, Earl of Angus, 195–7, 202 Douglas, Gavin, 3–5, 101, 105, 116, 128, 169– 200, 202, 205, 208; and Christianity, 193–4, 199; Eneados, 12, 170–1, 174–195, 198–200; and kinship, 181–3, 194–8; Palis of Honoure, 184; and politics, 194–200

Dunbar, William, 3–5, 11–12, 101–2, 115–16, 146–7, 171–2, 174, 181, 202: Be diuers wyis and operatiounes (5), 157, 164; Complane I wald (9), 156–7, 164–5; court as a poetic subject, 153–68; Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy (65), 11, 123, 128–41, 148; Gladethe, thoue queyne of Scottis regioun (15) 122; Golden Targe (59), 11, 103, 116–18, 123–4, 126, 153; Lament for the Makaris (21), 11, 123–8; London, thou art of townes A per se, 121; Musing allone this hinder nicht (33), 165; My hartis tresure and swete assured fo (34), 151–4; Off benefice, sir, at everie feist (43), 164; petitions, 143–5, 155, 156–68; Quha will behald of luve the chance (50), 154–5; Quhom to sall I compleine my wo (54), 154–155, 164; rejection of love, 149–53; Schir, at this feist of benefice (62), 155; Schir, for ȝour grace, bayth nicht and day (63), 157, 162; Schir, I complane off iniuris (64), 157; Schir, lat it neuer in toune be tald (66), 163; Schir, ȝe haue mony servitouris (67), 148–9, 154, 157, 165–7; Schir, ȝit remembir as befoir (68), 157–9, 164–6; This hinder nycht, halff sleiping as I lay (75), 158–9, 165–6; This wauerand warldis wretchidnes (79), 157, 166; Thrissill and the Rois (52), 122–3; To dwell in court, my friend, gife that thow list (81), 155; To speik of gift or almous deidis (45), 154 Education Act of 1496, 180 Edward I, king of England, 9, 13–18, 29, 32, 43–9, 66, 69, 76 n. 27, 86–7, 99, 133–4, 138 Edward II, king of England, 16–17, 21, 32, 50–1 Edward III, king of England, 17–18, 21, 51 Edward IV, king of England, 21–2, 24, 32, 96, 118 English (Inglis) language, 15, 117, 129–130, 136–7, 141, 171–6, 204–5 Flodden, Battle of, 92, 119, 194–5, 198–200, 201 flyting, genre, 129–30, 204 Fordun, John of, 3–4, 6, 8–10, 12, 27–8, 33, 37–8, 50–61, 63–79, 86–7, 94–6, 100–1, 185, 207 forgery, 21, 24–5, 28–9, 35–6 French language, 116, 173, 175, 205 French people, 7, 24, 68, 119–20, 123, 195, 198

Index Gaelic language, 8, 63–5, 115, 129–32, 136–7, 173–4 Gaythelos, 52, 55, 58, 65, 71, 94, 100, 170, 199 genealogy, 1–4, 10, 26–36, 39, 51, 56–7, 61, 63–70, 74–9, 94–101, 132–5, 137–41, 207– 9; literary, 115–18, 124–8, 168, 183–94, 202 Geoffrey, count of Anjou, 86 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 2–3, 10, 15–16, 25–7, 32, 38–50, 51–61, 76–7, 170–1 George, Saint, 208 Giric. See Gregory Gower, John, 116–18, 124–6, 202 Great Cause, 13–14, 16–17, 20, 44, 86 Greek language, 176, 204 Greeks, 67–8, 95, 170, 208 Gregory the Great, Pope, 2 Gregory, legendary king of Scots, 96 Gurgunt, 53–4 Hadrian’s Wall, 49 Hardyng, John, 20–5, 27–9, 35, 96, 98 Hary (Blind), 5, 9, 118, 134 n. 57, 148, 175 Hay, Sir Gilbert, 104–6 Henry, prince, son of James VI/I, 204, 207–8 Henry II, king of England, 86, 99–100 Henry III, king of England, 32 Henry IV, king of England, 18–20, 43 Henry V, king of England, 20, 99 Henry VI, king of England, 20, 22–3, 25, 32 Henry VII, king of England, 25, 96, 119–121, 123–4, 198, 209 Henry VIII, king of England, 22–3, 25–6, 119–120, 195–6, 198–9 Henry of Huntingdon, 40, 75 n.24 Henryson, Robert, 90, 102, 124, 128

231

Hoccleve, Thomas, 107–8, 110 humanism, 105–6, 170 n. 5, 187 illustration, 63–5 Ireland, John, 106, 108, 116 n. 2, 124 Ireland, 23, 45, 47, 52–8, 96, 137, 207 Irish people, 32–3, 70 Islam, 99, 136 James I, king of Scots, 25, 80, 90, 94, 107–113 James II, king of Scots, 65, 80, 82–3, 90–2, 104 James III, king of Scots, 5, 96, 118, 147 James IV, king of Scots, 3–5, 11–12, 25, 89–90, 94, 96, 105, 169, 195, 198, 201; and England, 118–20, 124, 198; and France, 198–9; and Highlands, 131; language use, 131, 172; marriage to Margaret Tudor, 112, 116, 119–23, 138; as patron, 116, 129, 138–9, 143–68, 181 James V, king of Scots, 119, 195–8, 202–3 James VI/I, king of Scots and England, 201–9: Basilicon Doron, 204–7; Essayes of a Prentise, 203; Poeticall Exercises, 203; Reulis and Cautelis, 203–5; Works, 206 Jerome, Saint, 191–2 Jocelin of Furness, 78–9 John of Caen, 14, 17 Jonson, Ben, 206, 208 Kennedy, Walter, 3–5, 11, 89 115, 126, 128–41 Kingis Quair. See James I kingship, 8, 74, 99–100, 139, 145–6, 156–68, 204 Langtoft, Pierre de, 16–17 Latin language, 173, 175–80, 184–5, 190–4, 204

Herbert, William, 208

Lebor Gabála, 45

Higden, Ranulph, 3, 17–18, 27, 38 n. 3, 56, 85–6, 97–8, 102–3

Louis XII, king of France, 123, 198 Lydgate, John, 102, 107–8, 116–18, 124–6, 202

highlands, 8, 63–5, 129–32, 148, 174

Lyndsay, Sir David, 202–3

Historia Regum Brittanie. See Geoffrey of Monmouth

MacAlpine, Kenneth, 70–1

historiography: auctor vs. compilator, 55–6; English (in Latin), 13–32, 38–45, 84; Scottish (in Latin), 3, 6, 10–11, 32–6, 37–8, 43–61, 63–87, 201–2, 204; Scottish (in Scots), 90–101, 113, 202

Mair, John, 111, 170, 188, 198, 201–2, 206 Malcolm III, king of Scots, 33, 78, 137 Mannyng, Robert, 17 manuscripts, 11, 50, 66–7, 80–1, 91–4, 101–113

232

Index

maps, 23–5

Scotichronicon. See Walter Bower

Margaret, Maid of Norway, 13

Scotichronicon recensions and abridgements, 3, 81, 91–3

Margaret, Saint, Queen of Scots, 33, 43, 77–8, 96, 137

Scottis Originale, 92, 94–6, 98–101, 103

Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots, 112, 116, 119–23, 161–2, 195–8

Scots language, 116, 171–2, 175–80, 204–5

Mary, Queen of Scots, 203–5

Selden manuscript. See Arch. Selden B. 24

monarchy. See kingship Montgomerie, Alexander, 205 Mordred. See Arthur Myllar, Andrew, printer, 123, 127. See also Chepman and Myllar nationalism, 3–12, 58–9, 63–6, 69, 79–80, 87, 89, 100–1, 112–113, 128–41, 170–5, 182–3, 194, 198–200, 201–6, 209

scribes, 11, 60–1, 83, 101, 103, 106–7, 109 Sinclair family, 104–6, 112 Sinclair, Henry, Lord 105, 112, 181–3, 195 sonnet, 205 Stewart, Bernard, Lord of Aubigny, 123 Stewart, Sir David of Rosyth, 81 Stewart dynasty, 90–1, 145–6 Stewart, John of Baldynneis, 205 Stewart, John, Duke of Albany, regent, 195–7

Nennius, 38–9, 47 Normans, 34, 40–3, 49, 74–5

Thomas of Lancaster, 99

Original Chronicle of Scotland. See Andrew of Wyntoun

translation, 12, 65, 90, 170–1, 175–94

origin myths, 1–4, 10, 31–2, 53, 170 n. 5: English, 15–17, 25–6, 30, 32, 38–9, 44–6, 60–1, 94, 170, 207–9; Scottish, 1–3, 32–3, 47–50, 52–61, 65–9, 71, 95, 136–7, 170, 199, 202, 208–9 Orosius, 68–70 Paris, Matthew, 32 Partholomus, 53–4, 60 patronage, 81, 102, 104–7, 145–9, 156–68, 181–2

translatio studii et imperii, 10, 12, 66–79, 87, 176, 189, 193–200, 204 Trojans. See Brutus troubadours, 153, 156, 160–1 Union of the Crowns, 205–9 Vairement, Richard, 33, 45–7, 50, 51 n. 44 Vegius, Maphaeus, 190–3 Veremundus. See Richard Vairement Vergil, Polydore, 25–6, 169–70, 201

Picts, 47, 49, 52, 54, 69–72, 76, 79

vernacular culture, Scotland, 92–113

Richard II, king of England, 18, 51, 159–60

Virgil, 39, 170–2, 175–6, 178–94, 199

Richard, Duke of York, 22–3, 29–30 Robert I, king of Scots, 7 Robert II, king of Scots, 112 Robert III, king of Scots, 18 Robert of Avesbury, 17 Rome, 2, 7, 15, 26, 39, 49, 68–70, 94, 176, 183, 186, 199, 203

Vincent of Beauvais, 85

Wars of Independence, 9, 44, 50, 133–4, 136–8, 173 Wallace, William, 133–4 Welsh, 40–43, 50. See also Britons William of Malmesbury, 40–1, 43, 74 William of Newburgh, 43 William Rufus, king of England, 100

Savile, John, 206

Wyntoun, Andrew of, 92–3, 102

Scota, 47, 52, 65, 71, 95, 100, 136–8, 140, 170, 199

Ynglis Cronikle, 93–101, 103

INTERVENTIONS: NEW STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL CULTURE Ethan Knapp, Series Editor Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture publishes theoretically informed work in medieval literary and cultural studies. We are interested both in studies of medieval culture and in work on the continuing importance of medieval tropes and topics in contemporary intellectual life. Scripting the Nation: Court Poetry and the Authority of History in Late Medieval Scotland Katherine H. Terrell Medieval Things: Agency, Materiality, and Narratives of Objects in Medieval German Literature and Beyond Bettina Bildhauer Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England David K. Coley Political Appetites: Food in Medieval English Romance Aaron Hostetter Invention and Authorship in Medieval England Robert R. Edwards Challenging Communion: The Eucharist and Middle English Literature Jennifer Garrison Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the Canterbury Tales Edited by Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention Steele Nowlin Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism Edited by Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy The Medieval Risk-Reward Society: Courts, Adventure, and Love in the European Middle Ages Will Hasty The Politics of Ecology: Land, Life, and Law in Medieval Britain Edited by Randy P. Schiff and Joseph Taylor The Art of Vision: Ekphrasis in Medieval Literature and Culture Edited by Andrew James Johnston, Ethan Knapp, and Margitta Rouse Desire in the Canterbury Tales Elizabeth Scala Imagining the Parish in Late Medieval England Ellen K. Rentz Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media Edited by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson

Eschatological Subjects: Divine and Literary Judgment in Fourteenth-Century French Poetry J. M. Moreau Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms and the Queer Middle Ages Tison Pugh Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature Jonathan Hsy Translating Troy: Provincial Politics in Alliterative Romance Alex Mueller Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature, and Community in the Late Middle Ages Jamie K. Taylor Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England Edited by Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England Matthew Fisher Fashioning Change: The Trope of Clothing in High- and Late-Medieval England Andrea Denny-Brown Form and Reform: Reading across the Fifteenth Century Edited by Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages Karl Steel Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History Randy P. Schiff Inventing Womanhood: Gender and Language in Later Middle English Writing Tara Williams Body Against Soul: Gender and Sowlehele in Middle English Allegory Masha Raskolnikov