SOURCE: "Barbour's 'other werk'," in Barbour's Bruce, Vol. I, The Scottish Text Society, 1985, pp. 17-37.

[In the following essay, McDiarmid and Stevenson examine the arguments for Barbour's authorship of works other than The Bruce.]

Barbour's 'othir werk'

… In his Wallace, XII, 1213-14, Hary speaks of Barbour writing other verse than Bruce, and like Andrew Wyntoun and Walter Bower before him he specifies an account of the origin of the Stewarts. One passage in Wyntoun has been understood to attribute to Barbour a 'Brute', a version of Geoffreyof Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae. A fifteenth-century MS assigns to him the Scots sections of the De Excidio Troiae of Guido delle Colonne. Modern scholars have made him author of all or some of the Scots Legends of the Saints and, despite the date 1438 supplied by the text, author of The Buik of Alexander. Yet other ascriptions of authorship have been advanced. Each of these attributions will be considered here.

Wyntoun's chronicle (c. 1405-20) makes these four citations of Barbour.

This Nynus had a son alsua,
Schir Dardane lord of Frigia,
Fra quhame maister Johne Barbour,
That mekle couth of this labour,
Translatit weill and propirly,
Fra this Dardane, a genology
Till Robert Stewart oure secund king,
That Scotland had in gouemyng.
(vol. 2, p. 152)

Whether this means that Barbour derived the Stewarts in unbroken line from Dardanus, the founder of Troy and according to Geoffrey the ancestor of Brutus the founder of Britain, will duly appear. The second notice observes that whereas other Scots historians state that their forebears were first brought from Spain to Ireland by Hiber, son of the Greek prince Gadalos, eponymous father of the Scottish people, 'Bot be pe Brute it Barbour say is/Off Irischery all okir wayis' (vol. 2, p. 200); that is, following the Historia, he says that Gurgunt Badruk king of Britain gave Partoloym, the leader of a Scottish fleet, leave to settle the then uninhabited country of Ireland.¹ The third passage (vol. 2, p. 314) like the first two also relates to Geoffrey's narrative:

Off Brutus lynnage quha will heire,
3e luke the tretis of Barbere,
Maid in till ane genology.

A fourth reference (vol. 5, p. 256) is made by Wyntoun after tracing the lines of the Bruce and Balliol families from the twelfth century:

The Stewartis Originall
Maister Johne Barbour tretit haill
In faire metyre, mare vertuously
Than I can think in my study,
Be gud continewatioun
In successive generatioun.

The first comment that should be made on these notices is that each one alludes to a genealogy or line of descent and not, as Jamieson, Skeat and others have supposed, to a properhistory or 'Brute'. That term as used by Barbour and Wyntoun refers only to the Historia. Skeat himself notes the direct reference intended by it in Bruce, I, 560. He might also have noted that in Wyntoun's scrupulous gloss on Hucheon's description of Lucius Iberius as 'emperoure', rather than 'procuratoure' as in the authoritative 'Bruite' (vol. 4, p. 22), the latter work can only be the Historia; for Wyntoun is explicitly opposing Latin authorities to the vernacular Hucheon, and what he is speaking of is 'the hawtane message' to Arthur which in Geoffrey begins, 'Lucius rei publica Romanx procurator'. In the second of the quoted passages the phrase 'be the Brute' patently means 'referring to' or 'following' Geoffrey's Latin history.² Thus Wyntoun gives no cause for attributing to Barbour a translation of that work.

It is significant here that the chronicler cites the 'Originall' with reference to the Celtic kings at two points only, where one of them enters Geoffrey's narrative and where the Stewarts' place in that succession is at last reached. If Wyntoun, who discusses his difficulties with the Celtic genealogy so anxiously, had Barbour's solution before him, he would have mentioned it. Evidently the archdeacon's sole concern was with the British connection. The last of the British kings, however, was Cadwallader, and Barbour would find no acceptable authority to connect the Stewarts with a Welsh prince claiming descent from him.³ If the poet had asserted such a relationship either Wyntoun or Bower would have remarked on it. The vital link could not, therefore, have been properly genealogical, it must have been generic, that is, racial, so that Barbour had to find an origin for his royal masters in Wales or Brittany, in which regions were the reliquiœ Britonum. Of course, history allowed him to do this, and political prophecy, as we shall later observe, made a derivation of this kind sufficiently important.

The usually helpful Wyntoun is not informative here. He says nothing of the persons or deeds of his king's ancestors in the male line previous to the appearance of one of them with Alexander II at St Andrews in 1230 (vol. 5, p. 88):

Thar eftyr dedis syndry done
Come till hym Waltyr Alansoune,
The Stewart of Scotlande, in pleysande wice;
Thar made the kynge hym his iustice.

From Hary's Wallace, however, we learn that the great grandfather of the national hero—his origin would not be Welsh, as often stated, but as with the Stewarts French; 'Wallace' or 'Walays' is a common Scots and English spelling of the illustrious name, Valois—took part in the unspecified 'dedis syndry'. Of Sir William's father he writes, I, 30-4:

The secund O he was of gud Wallace,
The quhilk Wallace full worthely at wrocht
Quhen Waltyr her of Waillis fra Warayn
 socht.
Quha likis till haiff mar knowledge in that
 part
Go reid the rycht lyne of the fyrst Stewart.

A count of the generations reviewed here shows that Hary places his Walter in the same period as Wyntoun's, and that the chronicler also refers to the first Stewart. The most important information is provided by the Cupar and Perth MSS of Scotichronicon (c. 1447-49). Like Wyntoun, who follows Fordun, Bower objects to Barbour's acceptance of Geoffrey's representation of Partholoym as founding the Scoto-Irish settlement by permission of a British king. The objection is politically motivated and would also have troubled Barbour if his intention were not, as I have suggested, to present the Stewarts as the true heirs, racially, to the British tradition. Even so, Bower considered Geoffrey's story dangerous in its tendency and demolished its basis by observing that Partholoym lived several centuries earlier than the king in question (I, capp. XXIII, XXIV).⁴

It is also chronological errors that he mainly seeks to correct in these reported statements of Barbour—that the first Stewart subdued a rebellion by Allan of Galloway in the reign of William the Lyon (1165-1214), and that his son Alan fought under Godfrey of Boulogne at the siege of Antioch (1097). The lord of Galloway, insists Bower, at no time rebelled against the crown, and is known to have died in 1232 (IX, cap. XLVIII). These strictures confirm our deduction from the references of Wyntoun and Hary that Barbour confused the first Walter, who was son of Alan and was made Steward in 1136 and died in 1177, with his grandson the second Walter, who succeeded his father Alan as Steward in 1204 and died in 1241.⁵ The Galloway rebellion that Barbour has in mind is probably the one that actually broke out in 1234. His allusion to the first crusade may be partly explained by muddled family traditions: the first Walter did have a son Alan, but it was a much earlier Alan, the brother of this Walter's grandfather Flaad, that went with Godfrey to Antioch.⁶

Bower's most interesting reference is, of course, to Barbour's derivation of the Stewarts from Wales and from a person called 'le Fleanc de Waran'—'quamvis ponat magister Johannes Barberii, in libello suo quem edidit in vulgari de ortu et origine le Stewartis, quos asserit venisse de Vallia, et originem habuisse de quodam qui dicebatur le Fleanc de Waran.' The Honour of Warin, which included the castle of Oswestry in Shropshire, was one of the march lands of medieval Wales. It was granted early in the reign of Henry I to the Breton knight Alan Fitz Flael, father of Walter the first Steward. Sir Alan's father Flaald, or Flael, was the son of Alan, hereditary steward of Dol in Brittany.⁷ The name was probably thought to mean 'flail' or 'scourge'.⁸

With respect to Fleanc and his descendants there was thus nothing in Barbour's narrative that showed him altering history as it was known to him. Nor could he have done so in his time. Wyntoun's 'Alanson' renders 'Fitz Alan', the family name not yet wholly replaced by that of the office. Thus the common descent of the Fitz Alan earls of Arundel and the Stewards of Scotland was well understood in the fourteenth century. The prose version of the popular pseudo-historical romance Fouke Fitz Warin, composed not long after Bannockbum, relates how William the Conqueror gave the castle of Oswestry and its 'honur' to Aleyn fitz Flael and adds 'de celi Aleyn vindrent tous les grantz seignours d'Angleterre qe ount le sournoun de fitz Aleyn';⁹ and as a political gesture Edward III thought it worthwhile in 1336 to purchase the pretended right of the Arundel family, as the elder and unforfeited branch, to the stewardship of Scotland.¹⁰ For this reason alone, were there not others equally convincing—Barbour's bringing Walter to Scotland in the time of William the Lyon and not, as with Boece, of Malcolm Canmore, also the correct derivation from Warin and reasons yet to be given—George Burnett's suggestion that Boece got his fabulous account of the Stewarts' origins from Barbour must be rejected.¹¹

Boece's Walter is the illegitimate son of 'Fleanchus' and a nameless Welsh princess. Having killed an insulting courtier he seeks the protection of the Scottish king, whom he serves so well in punishing Galwegian and Hebridean rebels that he is rewarded with the Stewardship.¹² In this account he is as fictional as his famous grandfather, the thane of Lochaber. The ghost-name of Banquho is unknown to Andrew Wyntoun and, we may presume, also to Barbour, as certainly to Fordun and Bower. Wyntoun tells the tale of the three witches quite differently, making them and their prophecies only a dream that comes to Macbeth one night when dwelling with his uncle, King Duncan. Apparently Banquho has been invented in order to supply Fleanc with a noble Scots descent. Fleanc's fruitful intimacy with the princess probably derives, however, from Boece's desire to make the Welsh-Scottish conlection that popular prophecy required in the future leader of all Britain a truly lineal one. That Boece had read Barbour's Stewartis seems unlikely; he had certainly read Bower's notes, found them disappointing and 'improved' them.

How then did Barbour link the Stewarts with the British kings? The answer that the evidence permits is one that suits the historian, poet and patriot: having narrated the escape of Cadwallader to the Breton court of his kinsman Salomon,'¹³ he necessarily observed that the ancient line ended there, and in the fortunes of the Stewarts proceeded to demonstrate that the conditions as defined by prophecy for the inauguration of another British dynasty were now fulfilled by their Breton origin, Welsh sojourn and Scottish kingship. Like other Scots poets and chroniclers Barbour was interested in political prophecy,'¹⁴ especially of the anti-English kind. He would have known the much cited saying of Merlinus Ambrosius, quoted in Gray's Scalacronica and Fordun's Chronica, that a king of the British stock will reign again 'when Cadwallader calls upon Conan and leagues himself with Albany'.¹⁵ It was twice remembered in versions of Scotichronicon with reference to the marriage of Scottish princesses to dukes of Brittany.¹⁶

A partial version of the popular Historia Destructionis Troiae of Guido delle Colonne was edited as Barbour's work by Carl Horstmann, Neilson and Brown accepting the attribution and Ritchie finding it very probable.¹⁷ The claim rested on the discovery in two defective MSS of Lydgate's Troy Book, Cambridge Kk, V, 30 and Douce 148 (of fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century date respectively), of supplementary sections at beginning and end in Scots octosyllabic couplets, and particularly on the scribal notices that follow and introduce parts of the Cambridge text, 'Her endis barbour and begynnis je monk', 'Her endis the monk and begynnis barbour'.¹⁸

There is no reason to doubt that the author of the Bruce is intended here but, as Buss and Koeppel have shown, the language of the latter poem differs significantly from that of the Troy fragments. Indications of an ae or e-quality in e or stressed ai, and the coincidence of these in rhyme made possible by that shared sound, are scarcely more clear than they are in Bruce,¹⁹ but the relatively small extent of the fragments underlines the occurrence of e3:e thrice and u:u as against their nonappearance in Bruce. Also, where the Troy verses have several rhymes of the mor: befor type it is notable that Barbour's much longer poem has only one.²⁰

If a regional explanation is not considered, these features should be referred to a later generation than that of Barbour. However, a date of composition much later than the first half of the fifteenth centuryis improbable. The regular use of the relative the quhilk, as also the appearance of the older forms forout, swylke (in rhyme with sylke), at least agree with this opinion. The direct transference from the Latin source of so many words only altered in the termination, such as exaltate, restauracioun, producioune, turbacions, the thrice recurring castres (L. castra), etc., need not convey end-of-century fondness for a Latinate vocabulary but rather facile, perhaps hasty, adoption of the first suggestions of the Latin text. None the less, the ready use of such words is distinctly fifteenth-century, though the prevailing manner has the plainness of the early poets.

In the present writer's view the notion that these Scots verses are the remains of a complete Troy Book is no more than an assumption. They may be simply the supplements that they appear to be. For the existence of a Scots 'Sege of Troy'²¹ there is only the Cambridge scribe's attribution and the Scots translator's preference for Barbour's metre, Lydgate's not yet having been naturalised in Scotland. A peculiarity of the Scots text supports my suggestion.

The Scotsman's source, the Historia, was divided into many Books. At the close of Book XXX, 11.1175-78. he writes:

The auctor reherses to ws
The deth of Thelainonyus,
And Exilinge of Eneas
And [how] Anthenore bannyst was,
Inne one and thretty book followand
Thyre seyde thinges determynand.

And at 2353-56 he inserts an outline of his last Book (XXXIII):

The thre and thretty buke als fast,
How pat Pirrus frome pe feist past;
And also how Vlixes was
With his awne sone slane vpone cas.

Comparing this verbal division with that of Guido's prose, one finds that between 2252 and 2253 has been omitted the concluding matter of XXXII proper, also the greater part of a Book describing the vengeance of Orestes and the misfortunes of Ulysses, and that the 'thre and thretty buke' comprises the matter of Guido's two final Books, XXXIV, XXXV.

Observing the large omission after 2252, which is the main reason for the abnormal numbering, Horstmann attributes it to an unnoticed loss of leaves in the scribe's copy of Barbour. The inconsequent change of matter, however, could not fail to be noticed, and the descriptive numbering of XXXIII proves that it was. If there was a defect in his copy it was probably in the Historia that he used. Most important, the style of the verbal numbering is the same as that used to introduce XXXI,²² and thus gives us no reason for thinking that it was a to introduce no reason thinking that it was a tampering scribe and not the translator himself who was responsible for the omission and re-numbering. Whatever the cause of this procedure it is not what we would expect from a poet engaged upon an independent and full translation of Guido's history, as Barbour is supposed to have been.

By this argument, remembering that Lydgate completed his version in 1420, the Scots supplementary translations cannot be much earlier than 1450, while the language and choice of metre indicate that they were not written much later.

It is doubtful if the Scottish Legends of the Saints would have been attributed, wholly or in part, to Barbour, if regional knowledge and attachment had not been so evident in the story of St Machar, and if in the Life of St Ninian there had not been inserted an account of a rout of English forces, along with the mention of a native of Elgin. The linguistic proofs provided by Buss and Metcalfe that Barbour could have had no hand in the Legends²³ did not deter George Neilson from claiming at least these two lives for the archdeacon, or Graeme Ritchie among others for being sympathetic to the claim.²⁴ There are no grounds other than the above, however, for separating them from the other Legends, and nothing to be said for Metcalfe's speculation that more than one author was involved in the compilation.²⁵

Certain lives admittedly stand out—that of 'the E-gypciane', St Mary of Egypt, is remarkable in its kind, its interest enhanced by matter that is as human as it is extraordinary—but authorial references recur and are plainly by and to the same person, a travelled and well read priest who, despite his 'gret eld and febilnes', had composed a narrative (now lost) of the life and miracles of the Virgin that was read by the devout 'in syndry placis', and now, if infirmity and 'falt of sycht' do not prevent him, will attempt the Legends. In view of these handicaps and the variety of his sources, he must have had the use of an amanuensis and a library. Also, the enjoyment of such facilities when, as he says, he could no longer discharge his duties as 'mynistere of haly kirk', suggests that he was a cleric of high rank, perhaps, a dean or bishop. His various statements seem to represent these two late undertakings as the whole of his literary labours.

He is plainly a man of the north east. His inserted Legend of St Machar begins with a complaint that this 'hye patron' of Aberdeen is neglected elsewhere and 'in bis land we ken hym nocht'. Twice St Columba acknowledges his disciple Machar to be his superior in spiritual things (381, 504-6). The writer knows a well that was discovered by the saint in the cathedral town of Old Aberdeen and that 'serius ɜet til al be toune' (796), and mentions other local evidences of the saint's merits. He appears to be residing in the town or to have resided there. By contrast no local element enters his Life of St Andrew, where he is content to render his Latin sources faithfully. In Ninian, however, he is moved to tell how an old friend who lived at Elgin, 'like mony of his kin before', was cured of his sickness. The friend, John of Balormy, spoken of as now deceased, had been known to him 'mony day'—doubtless it is his son or grandson that I find witnessing a transaction in Elgin cathedral in 1414 as 'Thoma de Balhormi'.²⁶ These scanty facts, with others to be noticed, happen to agree with what is known of a colleague of Barbour at Aberdeen, William of Spyny (which is beside Elgin) who was finally bishop of Elgin.²⁷

The sound values in the Legends, which belong to a more advanced stage of the Scottish system than appears in Bruce, have hitherto been thought to indicate a poet with notably later life-dates than those of Barbour, yet this is not the case, as my notice of one contemporary reference in Ninian will further show.

He mentions, in terms that imply days now distant from him, the panic flight of an English raiding party, misled by Galloway mists, on hearing one, 'Jak Trumpoure', blow his horn as if signalling a surprise attack. This happened he says, 'in my tyme', 'quhen sir davy bruys ves king' (815-942).²⁸ Trumpoure, he also tells us, was 'a gud burdoure'—by which he means either 'a good jester' or simply 'merry company'—and the 'minstrel' of Sir Fergus MacDowel who led the Scots party in that area. The MacDowels were the principal family there and Sir Fergus's leadership would belong to the years 1346-53, for though he was made constable of Kirkcudbrightshire in 1345 his stepbrother, Sir Dougal, was then acting head of the clan,²⁹ In June 1346, however, the latter was captured along with King David at the battle of Durham, and only resumed his place on the patriot side in August 1353 when he left his new master Edward Balliol and made a covenant with Sir William Douglas.³⁰ Fighting ceased some time before 1357 when the treaty was signed that restored David to his kingdom. It was therefore either in 1346-53 or 1346-57, most probably in the former period, that the raid described in the Legend took place. Even if we suppose the poet to have been a young man at this time, the date of his latest composition can hardly be later than the last decade of the century and is probably a little earlier, about 1385-90. Thus his lifetime must have coincided fairly closely with that of Barbour. And the evidence for this conclusion is supported by what we know about Trumpoure. He held land in Aberdeen in 1350—property in the north was a common reward for services in the more disturbed Lowlands—where the author of the Legends may have known him (as he must have known Barbour), and before 1364 had been promoted from the office of minstrel that he holds in the poem to that of Carrick herald.³¹

The dates that these facts provide for the poet, c. 1330-c. 1400, indicate that his linguistic differences from the author of Bruce require a regional, not a temporal, explanation. The Legends almost certainly represent the speech of the north-east. Barbour, I have suggested, was a native of the south-west, where the characteristic Scottish developments would be comparatively retarded by nearness to the still influential speech and literary practice of northern England.

The Buik of Alexander, which translates two distinct sections of Le Roman d'Alixandre, has been assigned to Barbour by several scholars, most notably by George Neilson and Graeme Ritchie, arguing from the remarkable number of similar and even identical lines that it shares with the Bruce.³² The latter circumstance impressed these critics so strongly that they chose to reject the unambiguously worded date in the colophon, 'ane thousand ɜeir/Four hundreth and threttie thair-to neir,/ And aucht and sumdele mare, I wis'; preferring also to ignore, or conveniently misread, the significant statement of a late fifteenth century translator of the whole romance, that he made use of an earlier version, the earliest in Scots, done by Sir Gilbert Hay, and further to discount the differing verse rhythms and sound values of the Buik and the Bruce.

The linguistic point needs only a brief re-statement.³³ It is nowhere clear in Barbour's rhyming that he exploits the contemporary coalescence of a, ai, but quite clear that the author of the Buik uses such rhymes. The Bruce gives no indication of the movement of a to open e but the Buik does. Barbour has one example of the developments of OE eow, og coinciding and the Buik has five. As Ritchie Girvan notes, the translation has some twenty nine cases of e-words rhyming with words in native or French pure e whereas the Bruce has none. These differences argue different authors. Onenegative agreement, as we shall see, may have a special significance; both poets avoid equating French ü with u, and indeed avoid rhyme-words with the former sound, though the other early poems noticed in this discussion show the equation more than once.³⁴ At a time when the new rhyming practice was establishing itself retention of this last distinction would be natural in an author whose experience gave him a special awareness of French values.

Sir Gilbert Hay, a worthy example of his own expressed ideal, the 'knycht clerk', and a writer esteemed by both William Dunbar and Sir David Lindsay,³⁵ is the one name to which a translation of the Alixandre in early Stewart times can certainly be assigned. We learn of his version from another one, completed when 'Fra Christ the cours of ɜeiris could discend/A thousand four hunderithe nyntie ɜeiris and nyne'. In his Conclusion the 1499 translator refers to his 'prolog' (unluckily missing from the two extant early sixteenth century MSS), where he had penned his 'awin excusatioun'. There, he tells us, when he had undertaken his 'making'—a term for composition and not merely transcription—he had named the worthy lord (perhaps a Sinclair) at whose instance he attempted it, and protested, as he is now doing again, the want of poetic facility that made him 'seik and borrow/At wyiser men that hes maid bukis afforrow'. He continues:

All this that followis is bot the excusatioune
Of him that maid the first translatioune
Bot in this buike sone eftir 3e sall se
Quha causit this buike agane to wreittin be.
Quhair and be quhome, quhat tyme it wreittin
 was,
In termes schort to 30w I sail rehears.
I will wreit furth befoir me as I find,
His excusatioun I will not laife behind.
Translaittit it was forsuith, as I hard say,
At ye instance of Lord erskein be schir gilbert
  ye hay,
Quhilk into France trewlie was duelland
Weill fower and twentie ɜeir out of Scottland,
And in the king of Francis seruice was …
Richt sua he wreit with his awin propir hand
Was neuir befoir translaittit in this land,
That is to say out of ye frensche leid.
Thus worthie war it hade a worthe weid …
Thankit be god, now neirhand I haue endit
This noble buik, and pairt of faltis mendit
With help of him yat maid the first indyit.

In spite of its wordiness this is a plain enough statement, yet it has been consistently, indeed wilfully, misread. When he discovered one of the two MSS about 1831 David Laing published a description in his Extracts from the Buke of King Alexander the Conqueroure, taking the title from the 'Explicit', attributing the new poem to Hay, proposing a date of composition about 1460, and making a scribe or redactor responsible for the 1499 date and for all the lines about Sir Gilbert. This odd interpretation was repeated in the 1847 edition of Hay's Buke of the Order of Knyghthood, and by Cosmo Innes in his introduction to The Black Book of Taymouth Castle, 1855, p. vi. Albert Herrmann, who examined one of the MSS at the castle in 1898 saw no reason to alter Laing's account.³⁶ Even J. H. Stevenson, an acute scholar who edited Hay's Buke of the Lawe of Armys in 1901, accepted attribution of the second Alexander to Hay, though noting certain difficulties (pp. xxix-xxxii). Thus he observes that the title, Lord Erskine, is not likely to have been used by its holder's friends after 1438, when he began to call himself earl of Mar, though it might be resumed after 1457 when that claim was finally disallowed, and honestly admits that the poem gives no indication of where Sir Gilbert ends and the so-called copyist takes over—in fact, language, phraseology and style, are consistent throughout, the whole exhibiting a facile ordinariness quite uncharacteristic of the respectable and disciplined Hay.³⁷ None the less, Stevenson understands Sir Gilbert to have made the translation in France and later, in 1499, to have supervised the labours of a grateful scribe.

It is remarkable that a simpler interpretation, more agreeable with chronology and what the MSS actually say, did not occur to these scholars and their successors, Neilson, Brown and Ritchie.³⁸ The 'making' of the MS poem was done by an unknown end-of-thecentury writer who gladly acknowledged the help that he had found in the 'auld translatioun', as he calls it (1. 6028), the only previous Scots version known to him ('Was neuir befoir translaittit in this land'), Sir Gilbert Hay's Buik of King Alexander. The 'worthe weid' that he felt so instructive a tale deserved refers doubtless to his preference of the more fashionable five-stress couplet, popularised by Hary's Wallace (c. 1476),³⁹ to Sir Gilbert's octosyllabic one. It was Lord Erskine, the 1499 author tells us, who induced Sir Gilbert, then living in France, to undertake the first translation. Since this is the same Sir Gilbert Hay who was at Roslin castle in 1456, having then translated three French treatises for Erskine's friend, William Sinclair, earl of Orkney, and we have been told that he was twenty four years abroad, the early translation that bears the much argued date 1438 could very well be his, as the 1499 poem could not. Hay was not a young man when in 1456 he prefaced his Buke of the Lawe of Armys with the interesting self-description: 'Gilbert of the Haye Knicht/Maister in arte and bachelere in decrees/Chaumerlayn umquhyle to the maist worthy king Charles of France'. He may be the Sire Gilbert de la Haye who was at the coronation of Charles VII at Rheims in 1430.⁴⁰ He is likely to have been the Sir Gilbert Hay knight, of the diocese of St Andrews, who claimed that money was owing to him from the Dean of Dunkeld at the time of the latter's death in 1444-45.⁴¹ It is certainly the translator who is at Roslin castle in late 1456, witnessing the testament of the earl of Orkney's father-in-law, Alexander Sutherland of Dunbeath,⁴² and very probably the same who is mentioned in the Exchequer Rolls under 1458-59 as receiving the present of a gown from James II. The birth-date that these notices suggest for the knight is thus about 1400 or a little earlier, with a time of death about 1470, so that his mode of writing should agree with the one we find in the Buik and certainly not with the characteristic end-of-the-century manner and metre of Alexander the Conqueror. External testimony and biographical evidence in agreement with linguistic considerations thus make it at least possible for Hay, known translator of the Roman d'Alixandre, to have been the author of the selections dated 1438.⁴³

There is yet to be considered, however, the argument or rather proposition, advanced by Neilson and Ritchie, that the necessary explanation of the verbal similarities between Buik and Bruce is Barbour's borrowing from his own translation. This is by no means self-evident. Supposing the existence of a Barbour version unknown to the 1499 writer, there is no reason why a second translator should not have borrowed from it in 1438; and there is the possibility that an assiduous reader of the nationalepic assimilated its phraseology to the degree of coincidence that we find in the Buik, especially in passages where the author of Bruce had the same original in view. Fortunately the parallels provide decisive information.

Graeme Ritchie reviewed the correspondences listed by Herrmann, Neilson and Brown and, claiming to have rejected the commonplaces of contemporary style, compiled what he termed an 'Irreducible Minimum' of related lines. Further reduction, however, is possible if we discount as natural responses to like matter many such parallels as the following—'Yat speris al to-fruschyt war' (Bruce, II, 353), 'That speiris all to frushit are' (Buik, IV, 8654). Equally there is little point in parading the unrevealing coincidences of common translation, for example, the following—'Mais n'estoit pas si biaus c'on en deust parler' (Alix, II, 1975), 'Bot he wes nocht sa fayr yet we/Suld spek gretly off his beaute' (Bruce, I, 381), 'Bot he was nocht sa fare suthly/That men bird spek of him greatly' (Buik, II, 2697). One must do what Ritchie and his fellow collectors failed to do, seek out those parallels that suggest or make plain the relative priority of composition.

Saying why he compares Bruce's defensive retreat before the lord of Lorne to Gaudifer's rear-guard action, Barbour naturally explains that Gaudifer like Bruce strove 'For to reskew all the fleieris/And for to stonay the chasseris' (III, 81), but there is, understandably since not needed by the reader of the Alixandre, no such summation in the French writer's description to occasion his translator's lines, 'For to defend all the flearis/And for to stonay the chaissaris' (I, 2787). Bruce vows vengeance for the deaths of his brothers, 'Bot and I leyff in lege powyste/Yar deid rycht weill sall wengit be' (V, 165), and Alexander promising the defenders of Ephesus that he will deliver to them the besiegers, King Clarus and his son, says 'For gif I leif in liege pouste/Thow sall of him weill vengit be' (II, 3153). In the Roman Alexander's 'liege pouste', not a phrase used by the Frenchman, is not at this point the important issue that it is in Bruce; also 'vengit' renders no similar word in the original, and indeed the theme of vengeance has little importance for the French romancer whose hero merely says, 'se Dieu plaist vous en deliveron'. Another case is Barbour's description of the proud English host at Bannockburn, that 'Come with thar bataillis approchand,/With baneris to the wynd waiffand' (XI, 512). It would have been surprising if such an effective detail had been omitted at this high point of the narrative—the Carmelite Baston has it in his Latin account, 'Explicat exercitus splendentia signa per arva' (Scotichronicon, XII, cap. XXII)—much less odd if omitted in the Buik, which has no such picture to carry over from the French yet thus describes Emenidus's first sight of the Gaderan forces, 'He saw the battelis approchand/With baneris to the wynd waiffand' (I, 235). Again, spring-time in the Irish country-side inspires this couplet, 'And feldis strowyt ar with flouris,/Well sawerand of ser colouris' (XVI, 69), and the carpets of the Ephesian palace, we are told, 'strouit war with sindry floures,/Wele sauorand, of sere coloures' (II, 2171). The epithet 'sawerand', it will be agreed, fits better with field flowers than with carpet patterns, and in any case the French poet tells us only that the carpets were of velvet and says nothing about floral decoration.

These indications of priority are perfectly clear. The following is decisive. At the capture of his castle of Douglas Sir James has his prisoners beheaded in the wine-cellar, their victuals thrown in with them and the wine-casks broached, making 'A foule melle' of meile and malt and blud and wyne' that was remembered among the country-folk as 'ye Douglas lardner (V, 410); and in the Buik Porrus fights so feircely that 'Of handis and heidis, baith braune and blude,/ He maid ane lardnare quhare he stude' (II, 4519). The latter description is a very free rendering of 'De piez, de poings, de testes faisoitsa venoison' (Alix., 3464), and plainly recalls the tradition reported by Barbour. Recollection of the Black Douglas would be assisted by the Frenchman's reference to Porrus only a few lines later as 'cil au noir sengler' (3474) ('Be the blak bare I him ken', 4532).

But could Barbour have written the Buik sometime between the Bruce of 1375-77, and his death in 1395, recollecting his own earlier phrases? The parallels could be so explained only if we stubbornly refuse to heed the 1438 date, the more considerable claim of Sir Gilbert Hay, the stylistic and linguistic objections, and one other circumstance; for there would still be the embarrassment of the translator's prologue to the 'Avowis' section, which introduces him as one who writes to forget a painful and luckless love-suit, a conventional romancer's rôle but one that a well-known and elderly archdeacon would assume much less easily than would the younger Sir Gilbert.

Postscript

The direction of borrowing demonstrated above dismisses not only the attribution made by Neilson and Ritchie but also its ingenious development in the textual thesis of Brown.⁴⁴ Sharing the mistaken assumption that the mere fact of so many parallels proved the priority of the Buik but accepting (without discussion) the 1438 date, he argued that the Bruce as we know it must be an extensively re-written version of a lost original, the remanieur having 'improved' Barbour's unsatisfactory performance with the translator's more forceful lines. Apart from the shown falsity of his premise, there is the objection that such substantial interpolations must somewhere have introduced rhymes that betrayed the incredibly audacious interpolator's period, such rhymes as occur in certain spurious lines of the 1571 print.⁴⁵

One more casualty of the same demonstration is Ritchie's assignment to Barbour of The Balletis of The Nine Nobles⁴⁶—'Ballet', the description hitherto used is a misnomer, the second last line having the plural, 'thir balletis'—a set of rudely written stanzas, each one summarising the achievements of its subject, that is found only in MSS of Scotichronicon that are datable between 1480 and 1521.⁴⁷ The argument for the attribution is naive, that they borrow from both the Buik and its French original and also have parallels in Bruce. These points mean to Ritchie that Barbour translated the Roman, re-wrote the part of his translation that dealt with the Nine Nobles, added a 'ballet, proposing Bruce as the tenth and possible noblest Noble of them all, and subsequently wrote a few phrases from the stanzas into his story of King Robert. Of course, the stanzas show only that someone writing after 1438 knew all the above-mentioned poems. I have speculated elsewhere that it was Hary, whose Wallace (c. 1476) shows knowledge of the Balletis and uses all its sources.⁴⁸

A final suggestion of Ritchie, with what deliberation made is not clear, is that Barbour may be the 'Anonymous', the chronicler whose work is incorporated in Wyntoun's history.⁴⁹ There is, he asserts, 'a rich harvest' of parallels with the Bruce, an assertion that can only leave a very puzzled gleaner. What are the significant facts? It is with the death of Robert II in 1390 that Wyntoun expressly ceases to use the contributed matter (vol. 6, pp. 356-7), and one would expect the anonymous composition to have been completed some years later, that is, about the time of Barbour's death, not much later since the writer had spoken with men who took part in actions of the 1330's. In his narrative mention is made, certainly not by Barbour, of 'King Robert de Brussis buke' (vol. 5, p. 378). If the author had been the much admired archdeacon Wyntoun would have named him, and contrary to a common misapprehension, we have no reason to think that he did not know his contributor's identity. All that he confesses to is ignorance of men's actions in the period under review (vol. 5, pp. 359-60): 'Quhat thai did he wist rycht nocht;/Bot, as he fand, in writt he socht'. It is only in the later and less reliable St Andrews and Cottonian MSS that we read 'Quha that dide', etc.⁵⁰

With this last 'redding' of the tangle of Barbour scholarship it becomes possible to look at the content and intention of the one extant poem.

Notes

¹The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. Acton Griscom, 1929, pp. 292-3.

² J. T. T. Brown (The Wallace and the Bruce Re-studied, Bonn, 1900, pp. 85-90) and H. N. MacCracken in a footnote to 'Concerning Huchoun', PMLA, XXV, 1910, corrected Skeat's reading of this phrase. In my Wallace (II, 127), I recognised that a 'Brute' had to be a substantial history but, uncritically accepting Skeat's interpretation, failed to see that only the four passages noted above were relevant as evidence and that all referred to the same work.

³ Fordun, III, cap. XLII, looking to the restoration of rule in England by the British race says nothing about this being achieved by lineal descendants of Cadwallader.

⁴ The dangerous principle involved was the English claim that the conqueror, Saxon or Norman, acquired the pretended right of the Britons to overlordship. Baldred Bisset, in his pleading of 1301 (Scotichronicon, XI, cap. LX), vigorously opposed this argument.

⁵ For these dates see G. W. S. Barrow, The Acts of Malcolm IV King of Scots 1153-1165 (RRSI, Edinburgh, 1960), and Indices thereto. Bower notes the first Walter's founding of Paisley Abbey a little before 1169 (actually 1163-65) at VIII, cap. XIV, his death in 1177 at VIII, cap. XXV, and the death of the second Walter at IX, cap. LVI.

⁶ J. Horace Round, Studies In Peerage and Family History, vol. I, p. 122; The Ecclesiastical History of England And Normandy By Ordericus Vitalis, transl. Thomas Forester, 1854, vol. 3, p. 99.

⁷ Round, op. cit., notes that English descendants held land at Dol in the thirteenth century.

⁸ Compare Anglo-Norman 'le flael', Breton 'le fleil' and verb 'flean' (to lay corn); Welsh 'fflangell'.

⁹Fouke Fitz Warin, ed. L. Brandin (CFMA, Paris, 1930), p. 7. The material version may be a few years earlier. Leland (Collectanea, I, pp. 230-6) in the reign of Henry VIII had an English version. Peter Langtoft and his translator Robert Mannyng (c. 1330) both refer to it.

¹⁰CDS, III, nos. 1218, 1219.

¹¹Exchequer Rolls, II, 1878, p. cv. Bower does not, as the editor George Burnett asserts, accuse Barbour of 'misrepresenting the origin of the Stewarts'; his criticisms are of detail only. In my edition of Wallace, note to I, 30-34, I was mistakenly influenced by Burnett's speculation.

¹²Scotorum historie a prima gentis origine (Paris, 1526), f. cclx.

¹³ Some of the MSS of the Historia have the more characteristically Breton name, Alan.

¹⁴ He makes the bishop of St Andrews hope that Thomas of Erceldoune's prophecy concerning the leader of 'this land' (in the original saying probably Britain) will be verified in Bruce (II, 86-90), and in Book IV discusses the old woman's prophecy when Bruce leaves Arran. The false prophecies relative to Edward I and Ferrand of Flanders are other cases.

¹⁵ An English agent in 1307 reports that everywhere Scots priests recite verses of Merlin saying that 'after the death of le roy Couetous (in Fordun 'regis avari') the people of Scotland and the British, by which they mean the Welsh, will unite and will have the supremacy and their desire, and will live together in peace to the world's end' (CDS, II, p. 537). Scalacronica, p. 3, quotes the 'ditz du Bruyt en Engles', 'that Cadwaladre sal on Conan cal', and Fordun, III, cap. XLII, renders this, 'Cadwaladrus vocabit Conanum, et Albaniam in societatem accipiet … et Bruti diademate coronabuntur'. Scots historians accepted Geoffrey's account of 'Brutus lynnage' but naturally denied any claim of the English and Norman conquerors to its political tradition.

¹⁶ Bower, III, cap. I., applies it to the marriage of Margaret sister of Malcolm IV to Conan duke of Brittany, and the author of Liber Pluscardensis (c. 1460), VI, cap. XX, remembers it when a daughter of James I marries another duke of Brittany.

¹⁷ Ritchie's linguistic arguments (Buik of Alexander, I. cxxxi f. 2, cxc-cxci) depend on his mistaken attribution of the Buik to B arbour.

¹⁸ The fragments are appended to Horstmann's Barbour's Legendensammlung, Heilbronn, 1881. Henry Bergen describes the MSS in his edition of Lydgate's Troy Book, Part IV 1935. He notes that the two MSS share a spurious line and derive from the same copy, and that in the Douce MS (not the Cambridge one) part of the Lydgate text was 'taken down at dictation' from Pynson's 1513 print.

¹⁹ Ritchie Girvan, Ratis Raving (STS), p. Ixii, makes this point, though only implying comparison with the Bruce.

²⁰mor:befor, X. 201. At XI. 382 [sanct] Ihane: ilkan can show only use of the Latin pronunciation (Johannis) for rhyme's sake.

²¹ Horstmann oddly takes the Douce scribe's final note, 'heir endis Oe sege of Troy' to refer only to the Scots supplements and not to the MS narrative as a whole, and therefore thinks that it gives the title of Barbour's version.

²² The XXXI passage is in the Cambridge MS only, the XXXIII one in the Douce only. The scribe of Douce has Lydgate's lines at this point, as dictated to him from the 1513 print.

²³ Carl Horstmann edited the collection as Barbour's Legendensammlung, Heilbronn, 1881, but it is best read in W. M. Metcalfe's edition (STS, 3 vols, Edinburgh 1887-96). See also Metcalfe's The Legends of S. Ninian and Machor, Paisley, 1904. These two Lives are the only ones added to his original by the poet. The best study of the phonology, though certain explanations need restatement, is still that of P. Buss in Anglia, IX (1886), 493-514. On this aspect the grammars of Karl Luick and R. Jordan should also be consulted but particularly Ritchie Girvan's Introduction in Ratis Raving, ed. cit. The following are my own notes. The Bruce has no certain rhyme with :ai that is shared by the two MSS, none with e3:e or u:ü, and no certain case of the e-sound in. The Legends on the other hand have these rhymes—(I) ma adv.: ay 2.993, consale sb.: hale 6.451, say vb.: ta 10.103, lay: twa 12.449, tane: sane (segnian) 19.261, wa adj.: say 29.970; (2) fle vb:pe: degre 9.229, 13.181, ee: me: he pron. 11.49, 18.357; (3) vertu: treu vb. 10.277, 19.635, pu: vertu 10.231, reu sb.: now 30.115; (4) gast (OE gast): beste adv. 2.565, fairare: layre sb. 28.99, regret sb.: Pusgat 29.470, gat pret.: gret vb. 40.641.

²⁴ G. Neilson, John Barbour: Poet and Translator, 1900; The Buik of Alexander, ed. R. L. Graeme Ritchie, (STS, I, 4 vols. Edinburgh 1921-29), pp. ccxviii-ccxxi. It is only the Legends of Machar and Ninian that Ritchie, arbitrarily, selects as probably Barbour's.

²⁵ The two Scottish Lives are not final additions but are inserted at different points, both having the characteristic ending of the other Lives (in Ninian at II, 633-4). The poet's Life of the Virgin is mentioned in both I and XXXVI. The autobiographic remarks are always of the same kind. Modes of introducing as well as ending the Lives recur. There are cross-references. It has not been noticed that the almost verbally identical lists of the kinds of miracles given in Machor (XXVII) and Ninian (XL) are extensions of a very similar one in Alexis (XXIV) 517-28, all obviously by the same pen; compare also Machar 1587-91 with I, 120-3. There are no linguistic or stylistic features to distinguish the stories of Machar and Ninian from the others.

²⁶Registrum Moraviense (Bannatyne Club, Edinburgh, 1837), p. 217. Balormy was beside Elgin in the parish of Spyny (see following note on William de Spyny).

²⁷ Described as of the diocese of Moray, he was student at Paris 1352-63, precentor first at Aberdeen 1371 and then at Elgin 1373, first canon and then from 1388 dean at Aberdeen, and bishop of Moray from 1397 to his death at Elgin 2 August 1406 (Chartularium, ed. Dénifle; Fasti, ed. Watt). He appears with Barbour at Aberdeen in transactions of 1383, 1391, 1392 (Registrum Aberdonensis). Aberdeen cathedral church had a considerable library, perhaps also the Elgin one. The functionaries of the two churches are known; William alone meets all the requirements, and the probable date of the poem, about 1385-90, agrees with his last years in Aberdeen.

²⁸ David II reigned from 1329 to January 1371.

²⁹ Sir Fergus 'had the leding of pe land/In vorschipe and slachtyr bath' (820-1). The English force was considerable, levied from the three wards of 'counteis' of Carlisle (835). For the constableship see Reg. Mag. Sig., Appendix 2, No. 1007. He died about 1383) ibid., no. 722).

³⁰ Sir Dougal witnesses a charter of Balliol at Buittle in Dumfriesshire November 1352 (CDS, III, no. 1578). Wyntoun (VI, p. 22) seems to place the pact in 1356 but Faedera, vol. 5, p. 759, puts it about the date given above.

³¹ The 1350 charter and its 1361 confirmation by David II are in Marischal College, Aberdeen (M.8, No. 14; Mass. 1, No. 3), where I have examined them. The name in the 1350 charter reads 'Jac Trumpur', though Jamieson in his edition of Bruce prints 'Trampour', the mistake being accepted by Ritchie and preventing him from making the identification. In a charter confirmed in December 1364 Sir Dougal MacDowel conveys Dumfriesshire lands 'Johanni Trumpoure … nunc dicto Carric heraudo' (Reg. Mag. Sig., I, no. 206, also Appendix 2, no. 1517).

³² George Neilson, John Barbour: Poet and Translator, London, 1900; The Buik of Alexander (with parallel French text), ed. Ritchie and J. T. T. Like Ritchie, Vol. I, Dr Albert Herrmann in Untersuchungen uber das schottische Alexanderbuch, Halle, 1893, Brown in The Wallace and The Bruce Restudied, Bonn, 1900, published lists of parallels with a commentary.

³³ The classes of rhyme-words in the Buik mentioned below are illustrated here. (1) ilkane: mane (mcegen) sb. I, 2163, sa adv.: sa vb. I, 2313, fa: say II, 1253, vane sb.: ilkane II, 4657, alsua: assay III, 6318, rais pret. plur.: sais III, 6368, hale adj.: esmale III, 8813, alsua: sa vb. IV, 8846, agane: ane IV, 9096, gane: fane adj. IV, 10087, planis: attanis IV, 10921. (2) na: flee vb. I, 3137, damysell: hale adv. II, 2053, luffare: fare sb. II. 3630, hait adj.: met past part. II, 3919, mare: messingare III. 6128, hare sb. (hara): dynare (desjunner) III, 6961, ɜet sb. rhyming equally with veluet II, 7624, debait II, 1323, gait sb. II, 2829, III, 7787. (3) slew: trew adj. I, 1721, blew pret.: drew I, 2215, III, 5077, drew: threw II, 1707, grew: drew II, 4465. (4) On the count of e3: rhymes see Ratis Raving, ed. R. Girvan, Introduction, p. lxviii.

³⁴ Girvan, op. cit., p. lxv, would qualify the significance of this fact by observing that Barbour has only one ui-rhyme, wertu: valu I, 371, but this does not bring him any closer to the practice of the other poems.

³⁵ He is mentioned as such in 'The Lament for the Makaris', 'The Papyngo' and the list of contents in the Asloan MS.

³⁶The Taymouth Castle Manuscript of Sir Gilbert Hay's Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour', Berlin (R. Gaertner), 1898. My quotations, however, are from a transcript of the British Museum MS Add. 40732, kindly loaned by Mr A. J. Aitken, editor of The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue.

³⁷ MS line 19599 in the so-called scribe's Conclusion is identical with line 18535 and with variation occurs earlier. The phrase 'tour and toun' recurs from early in the MS version to the end, as does also the form 'noutherane' (not found in Hay's prose) for the usual 'nouther'. In the rhymes coincidence of and ai, and, e3-words with words in pure is frequent. The relative 'the quhilk(is)', which is common in Hay's treatises and the 1438 translation, is replaced by 'quhilk' and 'that'.

³⁸ Ritchie relegates his commentary on the MS to a lengthy but uncritical footnote, I, pl. lxiii. His account is adopted in the British Museum Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts, 1921-1925, published 1950, p. 154, MS Add. 40732.

³⁹ Compare Wallace XI, 564-76 and XII, 1109-24 with MS 18071-8; Wallace XI, 1065-7 with MS 18570-1; Wallace XII, 583-4 with MS 18014-5.

⁴⁰ Stevenson, op. cit., p. xxvii. Charles's reign commenced de facto in 1422.

⁴¹Calendar of Papal Registers. Papal Letters. X, p. 397; Fasti, ed. Watt, pp. 104, 367.

⁴² Stevenson, op. cit., p. xxviii. Sutherland bequeaths to Hay a silver collar and requests that he say ten psalters for the good of his soul.

⁴³ The second selection, the 'Avowis', ends the poet's work. It has this place in several MSS of the Roman. See Paul Meyer, 'Etude sur les Manuscrits du Roman d'Alexandre', Romania, 11 (1882), 284, 289, 290.

⁴⁴op. cit., pp. 100-12.

⁴⁵ They are intruded at XX, 430, battell: tell, more: before, be: die, daintie: he, all these within twelve lines.

⁴⁶ The text and his discussion of it are in his edition of the Buik, I, pp. cxxxiii-clviii. The subject is also noticed by me in Hary's Wallace (STS), I, pp. cviii-cx.

⁴⁷ These are Brechin Castle 1480, Corpus Christi (?) after 1500, Edinburgh 1510, Law 1521.

⁴⁸ Compare Wallace, VIII, 962-4, 'Amang noblis … Deyme as 3e lest, gud men off discrecioun', with the second last line of Balletis, 'Deme quha doucht-yast was in dedis'.

⁴⁹ Ritchie, op. cit., p. cxx. For my speculation that the Anonymous is the Heriot whose name comes between Eglinton and Wyntoun in Dunbar's list of poets see my note under the discussion of Barbour's native locality.

⁵⁰ Unfortunately Wyntoun's editor quoted this reading in his Introduction and since then scholars seem to have missed his correction of the error in a note to Book VIII, 2959.