[In the following excerpt, Maxwell maintains that the merits of Barbour's poem are to be found in its narrative and reflection of Scottish society in the fourteenth century, but that it should not be considered a reliable chronicle of history.]

… Turning now to the Scottish side of the account [of the Scottish War of Independence], the most important work dealing with this period is the well-known poem entitled The Brus, by John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen. This writer was born a few years after the battle of Bannockburn, and therefore, though not able to describe as a contemporary the early history of his hero, must have conversed with many persons who took part in the events described. It is consequently of the utmost importance to ascertain what degree of reliance may be placed on his veracity.

Unhappily, Barbour's poem, which is of the deepest interest to the philologer as the very earliest extant specimen of Scottish vernacular literature, has been almost irretrievably discredited as a chronicle by a monstrous liberty which the author takes in rolling three real personages into one ideal hero. In this way he has treated father, son, and grandson—all of whom bore the name of Robert de Brus—and gravely presented them as one and the same individual. Barbour was at work on his poem, as he himself informs us, in 1375, forty-six years after the death of Robert I., and it is impossible to doubt that he deliberately and consciously perpetrated the fabrication whereby he made Robert de Brus, the "Competitor," the same as his grandson, Robert de Brus, Earl of Carrick, crowned King of Scots in 1306, and threw into the same personality the intermediate Robert de Brus, Lord of Annandale, who was King Edward's governor of Carlisle during John Balliol's brief war. Such a glaring figment placed in the fore-front of an historical work, might render, and in the eyes of some people has rendered, all that follows it of no historical importance. This great national epic has been denounced as of no more value to history than the romances of Walter Scott or Alexandre Dumas. As the late Mr. Cosmo Innes observed, in editing The Brus for the Spalding Club in 1859:

It suited Barbour's purpose to place Bruce altogether right, Edward outrageously wrong, in the first discussion of the disputed succession. It suited his views of poetical justice that Bruce, who had been so unjustly dealt with, should be the Bruce who took vengeance for that injustice at Bannockbum; though the former was the grandfather, the other the grandson. His hero is not to bedegraded by announcing that he had once sworn fealty to Edward, and once done homage to Balliol, or ever joined any party but that of his country and freedom.

It must be confessed that, at first sight, little of value could be looked for from such a dubious source. But closer examination reveals that the cardinal falsehood is all disposed of in the first few cantos. The first ten of these may be rejected as irrelevant to any honest purpose. After that, in the description of the coronation of the Bruce, his flight, the detailed account of his adventures, and his subsequent campaigns, the poet shows praiseworthy respect for

          the suthfastnes
That schawis the thing richt as it was,

which he declares in his exordium to constitute the superiority of "story" over "fabill." The more closely this part of the narrative is examined, the more fully it will be found borne out by such State papers and other documents as are available for comparison; to which, of course, Barbour had no access. This was enough to convince the critical intellect of Lord Hailes, who, practised as he was in testing evidence, did not scruple to found largely on Barbour's statements.

It is necessary, however, to add a further caution in regard to the witness borne by Barbour on highly controversial matters. Not only was he actuated by the laudable desire to win the applause of his countrymen by showing the leaders of the patriotic movement in the most favourable light, but it was also his interest to pass lightly over anything that might detract from the lustre of the royal house of Scotland. Otherwise the royal bounty might have been checked at its source. On the completion of his work in 1377, Barbour, as shown by the Exchequer Rolls, received £10 by command of the King. Next year a pension of 20s. annually for ever, with power to assign, was awarded him for the compilation of the book of the "gestis" of Robert de Brus. In 1381 he had a gift from the Crown of the ward of a minor, a curious parallel to a similar gift made by the King of England to Chaucer in 1376. Again, in 1388, King Robert II. granted to the Archdeacon a pension of £10 yearly for life, though this probably was made in recognition of another poem, dealing with the House of Stuart, which has been lost. These substantial rewards might have been jeopardised by inconvenient candour on the part of the volunteer laureate.

The verdict, therefore, on the value of Barbour's poem, as a contribution to history, must be that it is worthless as a record of events which led to the War of Independence, but of great merit as a narrative of the events of that war and of the conduct and acts of those who took part in it, and that it vividly reflects the social state of Scotland in the fourteenth century.…