Chapter II: Introduction: 1. “the Bruce” as Romance

The literary relationships of _The Bruce_ may be briefly indicated. It stands at the beginning of Scottish literature; of its predecessors and contemporaries we have but the names, or possible versions whose place of origin is in dispute. In form and technique, including the octosyllabic couplet, it plainly depends on the French metrical romance, the most fruitful branch of a literature which, for quite two centuries, had been the mother of literatures in Western Europe. The opening line of _The Bruce_ characterizes at once the poem itself, and what was best and most abundant in the literature of the Middle Ages. Barbour, too, it is never overlooked, announces his work as a “romance,” but as such, we gather from what precedes, only in a technical sense; and no mediæval writer would consider this popular method of treatment incompatible with strict accuracy and reality of subject: that is a modern refinement. Barbour certainly did not, nor did those who followed and used him; his selection of the model is simply the expression of his desire to do his work in “gud manere.” He anticipated Macaulay’s ambition in that his history was to differ from the most attractive literary matter only in being true. There were already in French many examples of contemporary history presented in this way as a succession of incidents on the lines of personal memoirs, though history had in the end succeeded in widening its outlook, and consequently found more fitting expression in prose. But that was of Barbour’s own age, and indeed Froissart had made his first essay, as an historian, in verse, which later he recast and continued in the form we know. All the necessities of Barbour’s case, however, led him the other way--the despised condition of the prose vernacular as a literary medium, from which, indeed, it never fully emerged; the character of his audience, which would be either learned or aristocratic; and the nature and associations of his subject, for which only the literature of romance could furnish a parallel or supply the appropriate setting. The literary qualities of _The Bruce_ are, therefore, those of its model; it is a clear, vivid, easy-flowing narrative, and if it is also, as romances tended to be, loose in construction and discursive, it is never tedious, for it deals with real persons and events of real interest, depicted with an admiring fidelity.

2. JOHN BARBOUR.

The year of John Barbour’s birth we do not know, an item which is lacking also for Chaucer: 1320 is a good round guess. Nor have we any knowledge of his family. If, however, the _St. Ninian_ in the _Legends of the Saints_ be of Barbour, a claim for which there is much to be said,[28] it may give us a clue. The adventure of Jak. Trumpoure, there told, connects with the fact that Jaq. (James) Trampour had land in Aberdeen bordering on that of an Andrew Barbour.[29] It may be conjectured that the latter was John Barbour’s father, or other near relative, since the vivid personal details of the affair in the _St. Ninian_ must have come from Trumpour himself, and the fact that he was a neighbour of the Barbours would explain how.

The name Barbour (_Barbitonsoris_) is obviously plebeian. Some ancestor followed the business of barber, as some one of Chaucer’s possibly did that of “hose-making.” The established spelling, Barbour, shows a French termination which takes also the form Barbier, whence Mr. Henderson concludes that John Barbour “was of Norman origin.”[30] But the spelling is merely an accident of transcription; the oldest form is Barber(e) (1357, 1365),[31] which the scribe of the Edinburgh MS. also uses, and which Wyntoun rhymes with _here_ and _matere_; in a few cases it is Barbar. As we might expect, the name was common enough in the English-speaking districts of Scotland.

[28] See Neilson in _Scottish Antiquary_, vol. xi., p. 102 ff., and Buss, _ex adverso_, in _Anglia_, Band ix., p. 495.

[29] Jamieson’s _Memoir_, p. iv.

[30] _Scottish Vernacular Literature_, p. 41.

[31] For this reason Buss always gives the name as Barbere.

All our information about John Barbour, except the little to be gleaned from the complimentary references of later authors, is drawn from official sources,[32] and is thus, of course, perfectly precise, but meagre and uncharacteristic. We learn something of what Barbour did and got, but not what sort of man he was, or what he was like. By 1357, at the latest, he is Archdeacon of Aberdeen, the most important official of the diocese after the bishop, having as his prebend the parish of Rayne, in Garioch; and in the same year (August 13) he has a safe-conduct to go with three scholars, for purposes of study, to Oxford, where he may have seen John Wycliffe. There was, of course, no University in Scotland as yet, and scholars desirous of academic advantages had to seek them at least across the Border, a patronage which Edward III., in his own interests, readily encouraged. Seven years later he is again in England on a similar mission with four horsemen,[33] and on October 16 of the year following he goes to St. Denis, near Paris, this time with six companions on horseback; in 1368-69 he once more visits France “with two servants (_vallettis_) and two horses.” The University of Paris had the highest reputation for the study of philosophy and canon law, and Barbour, whose duty it was to administer the jurisdiction of his bishop, would necessarily be something of a lawyer, though his allusion to the clerkly “disputations” in this field does not suggest much personal interest in legal refinements.

[32] These have been brought together by Skeat in his first volume, pp. xv-xxv.

[33] Skeat here takes _equitibus_ to be “knights,” but this is not a military business. They were, we may judge, the attendants proper to his rank.

His next appearance is in a different though related capacity. In 1372 he is clerk of the audit of the King’s household, that of Robert II., who had come to the throne in the previous year as the first of the Stewart Kings. The year after he is also an auditor of exchequer. The Stewarts were good friends to Barbour, and we see the result in his kindly, almost affectionate, references to the family in his poem. He wrote up their genealogy, but that piece of work is lost. After a long interval he reappears as an auditor of exchequer in 1382, 1383, 1384. For some part, at least, of this interval he was engaged upon _The Bruce_, and its completion in the course of 1376[34] suggestively approximates to a grant of £10, by the King’s order, from the customs of Aberdeen, first recorded in the accounts of March 14, 1377. So also does a pension of twenty shillings sterling from certain revenues of the same city, granted on August 29, 1378, to himself and his assignees for ever.[35] Accordingly, two years later Barbour assigned his pension, on his death, to the cathedral church of Aberdeen, as payment for a yearly mass for his own soul and for the souls of his relatives and all the faithful dead. The practice of these payments can be traced for a considerable time afterwards, but the financial readjustments of the Reformation sent Barbour’s legacy elsewhere.

[34] See on Bk. XIII. 702.

[35] The account of 1429 is the first to state expressly that this perpetual pension was “for the composition of the book of the deeds of the erstwhile King Robert the Bruce” (_Excheq. Rolls_, iv., p. 520).

But the royal bounty had not dried up. In 1386 the poet had gifts of £10 and £6 13s. 4d., no doubt in recognition of further literary labours. And on December 5, 1388, he had a fresh pension of £10 for life “for faithful service,” to be paid in equal portions at Pentecost and Martinmas. This he enjoyed for only a few years. On April 25, 1396, the first payment of twenty shillings is made to the Dean and Chapter of Aberdeen, so that Barbour must have been dead before April 5, 1395, when the accounts for the year began. As his “anniversary” fell on March 13, that date in 1395 was, in all probability, the day of his death. Thus born under the great Bruce, he had lived through the reigns of David II. and Robert II., and five years of Robert III.

Some stray notices of Barbour in other connections add nothing of importance. One, however, lets us know that he was responsible for the loss of a volume on law from the library of his cathedral.

We have really learned nothing as to the personality of the poet. That he was a keen student and a great reader as well as a trustworthy official, and stood high in the royal favour, may be inferred. The respectful and admiring references of Wyntoun and Bower attest his high reputation as a writer and authority on history. But _The Bruce_ of itself would suggest neither the cleric nor the accountant. His pious reflections would be commonplaces even for a lay writer, and his handling of figures is not in any way distinctive. Even of Scotland in the background we get but casual, fleeting glimpses. Barbour is occupied entirely with his heroes and their performances. It is these he undertakes to celebrate, not, primarily, even the great cause which called them forth; and personal loyalty is his master virtue.[36] That he so conceived and developed his subject, his hurried passage from incident to incident, his grim, practical humour, his impatience of inaction or commonplace achievement, his actively descriptive vocabulary, and his vivid realization of the details of movement and conflict--all contribute to the impression of a man of lively, energetic temperament, with a delight in action and the concrete, and so, as his time and circumstances would make him, an amateur and idealist of chivalry.

[36] “His theme was Freedom,” writes Mr. Cosmo Innes. Barbour gives out his “theme” in the first thirty-six lines, and never once mentions it.

Besides _The Bruce_, Wyntoun credits Barbour with _The Stewartis Oryginalle_, a metrical genealogy starting from “Sere Dardane, lord de Frygya”(!), which has not survived.[37] Skeat has also suggested, basing on certain references by Wyntoun, that Barbour wrote a _Brut_ on the mythical colonization of Britain by Brutus, but the inference is disputed by Mr. Brown,[38] and Wyntoun’s language is too vague for a definite opinion. On better grounds there has been attributed to him a _Trojan War_ or _Troy Book_, portions of which have been used to fill up gaps in a MS. of Lydgate’s _Siege_ with the rubric, “Here endis Barbour and begynnis the monk,” and again conversely. An independent MS. gives a larger number of lines in continuation. These fragments have been subjected to close linguistic and metrical criticism by P. Buss in _Anglia_, ix., pp. 493-514, and by E. Koeppel in _Englische Studien_, x., pp. 373-382, and their reasoning on differences of verbal and grammatical usages has been summarized by Skeat,[39] who concurs with their conclusion against Barbour’s authorship. But there are other elements of evidence, and the sceptical discussion of Medea’s alleged astronomical powers with the affirmation,

Bot na gude Cristene mane her-to
Sulde gif credence--that I defend,[40]

is significantly similar to the argumentation on astrology in _The Bruce_, Bk. IV. 706 to end.[41] Faced with the plain statement of the fifteenth-century scribe, Skeat can only suggest that the poem was not by our Barbour, but by another person of the same name--surely the extremity of destructive literary criticism. And every argument of the German scholars against the _Troy_ fragments would clinch the case for Barbour’s claims on the _Alexander_, with which I deal elsewhere. The garrulous and dreary _Legends of the Saints_ probably contain, at least, contributions by Barbour; even Buss admits peculiar features in the _St. Ninian_,[42] and _St. Machar_ is a purely Aberdeen worthy, in whom the poet, too, professes a special interest; these may well have come from Barbour’s pen as the uncongenial but meritorious labour of his old age. Such, at any rate, was the normal progress of a poetic clerk, from translation to original work, to decline at the close upon versions of saintly biographies.

[37] The editor of _The Exchequer Rolls_, vol. ii. p. cv., says: “Bower accuses Barbour of misrepresenting the origin of the Stewarts.” That is not so. According to the summary in Bower, Barbour had it that they came from Wales, and in fact the family was settled in Shropshire on the Welsh March. It had its origin, he said, from one who was called “Le Fleanc de Waran,” who may equate with Alan FitzFlaald, who, however, apparently did not marry a daughter of Warine, the sheriff of that county (Round, _Studies in the Peerage_, p. 116). He affirms, rightly enough, that the first of them in Scotland was Walter, in the days of King William (twelfth century). Where he goes wrong genealogically, according to Bower, is in saying that Walter’s son, Alan, was in the First Crusade, which was obviously impossible; but Alan FitzAlan, uncle of Alan FitzFlaald, was in that expedition. Barbour was dealing with remote personages through family tradition, and whatever his errors as represented by Bower, he does not appear, as is too lightly assumed, to have been the source of the myths of later historians in this connection. Bower’s language does not admit of a Banquo. See _Cupar and Perth MSS._, in _Scotichronicon_, Lib. IX., chap. xlviii.

[38] _The Wallace and The Bruce_, pp. 88-90.

[39] Preface I., xlix-lii.

[40] Edit. Horstmann, ii., p. 226.

[41] See further, Neilson’s _John Barbour_, p. 2.

[42] _Anglia_, as cited.

3. HISTORIC VALUE OF “THE BRUCE.”

A comparison of judgments on the value of _The Bruce_ as a contribution to history plunges us into a thicket of contradictions. Green’s verdict that it is “historically worthless”[43] is but a petulant aside. It repeats itself, however, in the pronouncement of Mr. Brown that “in no true sense is it an historical document,”[44] but Mr. Brown selects, as illustrative of this, examples, such as the Simon Fraser identification,[45] and the Stanhope Park inference,[46] which recoil to the confusion of the critic.[47] Mr. Cosmo Innes has sought to discriminate, unfortunately upon wrong lines. Of Barbour as historian, he writes: “Satisfied to have real persons and events, and an outline of history for his guide, and to preserve the true character of things, he did not trouble himself about accuracy of detail.”[48] As it happens, it is just in his outline--that is, in his dates and succession of events--that Barbour may be adjudged most careless; his details contain the most remarkable examples of his accuracy. The latest expression of opinion on this head is not even self-consistent. In the _Cambridge History of English Literature_ it is thus written of _The Bruce_: first, that “it is in no real sense a history ... though, strange to say, it has been regarded from his own time to this as, in all details, a trustworthy source for the history of the period”--a clear exaggeration;[49] and then a few pages farther on: “While Barbour’s narrative contains a certain amount of anecdotal matter derived from tradition, and, on some occasions, deviates from the truth of history, it is, on the whole, moderate, truthful, and historical”[50]--which is quite another pair of sleeves.

[43] _Short History_, p. 211.

[44] _The Wallace and The Bruce_, p. 93.

[45] See on II. 239.

[46] XIX. 486.

[47] An article on Barbour’s _Bruce_ in the _Saturday Review_, 1872, vol. xxxiii., p. 90, has all the marks of the “belabouring” method of Professor Freeman. Barbour’s “historical value,” it is affirmed, “is as low as value can be,” and there are intermittent shrieks of “shameless falsehood,” “conscious liar,” etc. The usual play is made with the supposed identification of the two Bruces, and it is declared that on this “the whole story hangs,” which, in its own way, is a statement just as unwarranted and absurd. It is easy to fix on the error as to Edward being in the Holy Land when the question arose as to the succession, and the antedating of his death. But the critic, with full opportunity for being correct, can sin as to dates quite as egregiously. “In authentic history,” he says, “somewhat more than three years passed between the death of Alexander III. in Lent, 1289, and the coronation of John Balliol on St. Andrew’s Day, 1292.” Quite wrong. In “authentic history” Alexander was killed on March 19, 1286 (1285 by old reckoning). This is a criticism of Barbour’s “six years” in I. 39! He objects to the statement that the Queen was put “in prison,” because she was entertained in one of her husband’s manors. But she is always officially spoken of as “in custody,” and the stone walls of a manor even make a good enough prison. This is mere carping, and most of the rest is of the same sort, where it does not depend on a forcing or misunderstanding of the text. Barbour, he complains, makes the difference between Bruce and Balliol “one between male and female succession.” So, in a sense, it was (see on I. 54), but the critic has not taken the trouble to understand how. Barbour, however, is certainly confusing.

[48] _The Brus_, Spalding Club edition, 1856, p. ix.

[49] Vol. ii., p. 104.

[50] P. 108.

The fact is that these wayward judgments rest upon too narrow a basis of induction, and that induction, too, usually irrelevant or uncertain--considerations as to the nature of Romance, Barbour’s literary awkwardness and literary dressing, with inadequate examination of the external evidence. But if Barbour professes to write history, as he does profess, and as he gives every evidence of honestly trying to do, he can surely claim to be tried by the appropriate tests--those of official records or other contemporary accounts, and, in the last resource, by his performance so far as these carry us, and by an estimate of the probable sources of what is peculiar to himself. Nor must the quality of his critical equipment be overlooked; he frankly lets us know that of certain incidents different versions were in circulation--some said that the fatal quarrel between Bruce and Comyn fell otherwise than as he has related, and he includes the divergent accounts of how Bruce and his man escaped the hound; and there are other matters for which, lacking certainty himself, he is content to cite popular report. Towards prevailing and attractive superstitions, necromancy, astrology, and the like, his attitude is bluntly sceptical; yet an apparently well-attested case of prophecy--not one, it must be owned, exhibiting any exceptional degree of penetration--he does record, with very distinct reservation of judgment.[51] There is no supernatural machinery in _The Bruce_, no visions, miraculous agencies, or other such distractions: for these we must go to sober prose. But such is not the manner of popular romance with which it has been usual to class the manner of _The Bruce_. Barbour is not writing a conventional romance with historic persons and incidents for his material; he is writing history which has all the qualities of romance in real life. Of the same type were the exploits of Edward Bruce, which of themselves, he says, would furnish material for many romances.[52]

So comes it, then, that a careful and most competent investigator like Joseph Bain can authoritatively pronounce _The Bruce_ to be “of the highest value for the period,”[53] and affirm that “in these details he is almost always correct, with occasional errors in names.”[54] Barbour’s errors, indeed, lie on the surface, and are typical of his time, not wilful perversions on his part--events are transposed, wrong dates given, figures almost always exaggerated. On the other side a study of the notes to the present volume will show how trustworthy he is in the main, and, repeatedly, how strikingly and minutely accurate. His profession to tell a truthful story, so far as his knowledge will take him, must be accepted as fully borne out.

[51] Bk. IV. 767-774. Contempt for astrology, indeed, had already gone pretty far--Chaucer’s _Franklin_ has it (_F.s’_ Tale); but the contrary opinion still held most ground, and prophecy was in the enjoyment of full respect. Theological authority was divided and uncertain on the matter.

[52] IX. 492.

[53] _Calendar of Documents_, vol. iii., p. ix, note. Book I. is a hasty introduction.

[54] _Ibid._

Moreover the reflection is forced upon us at many points that, in addition to the oral accounts of which he makes use, those of actual participators like Sir Allan of Cathcart, and John Thomson for the Irish campaigns, besides relations and reminiscences otherwise derived, Barbour had various contemporary writings at his command. Such was certainly the case with Sir Thomas Gray, who wrote, a prisoner in Edinburgh Castle, twenty years before. His _Scalacronica_ embodies the results of research in the library of his prison where he found Scottish chronicles in verse and prose, in Latin, French, and English, and he expressly refers to such chronicles in his account of Bruce, letting us know that there was in existence a description of the Battle of Bannockburn, and, incidentally, that Barbour even has not exhausted the fund of stories of adventure told of the fugitive King. More curious and suggestive is the citation, in the bye-going, by Jean le Bel, Canon of Liège, of a “history made by the said King Robert” (_en hystoire faitte par le dit roy Robert_), that is the King Robert whom, he tells us, Edward I. had chased by hounds in the forests.[55] It is an allowable inference that these accessible materials were known to the learned and inquiring Barbour, when he took to deal with a subject familiar to him from his earliest years, and so congenial to his instincts, literary and national.

It is worth noting that Sir Walter Scott, on the publication of the _Lord of the Isles_, which draws so handsomely upon _The Bruce_, was accused of a lack of proper patriotism, meaning the pungent and rather aggressive patriotism of a long-irritated Scotland distinctive of _The Wallace_ and certain subsequent productions, but not of _The Bruce_, the spirit of which, too, was in harmony with that of the great reviver of romance. There is no malice in _The Bruce_; the malice and bitterness are in the contemporary war-literature of the other side. And Barbour is no sentimentalist; his patriotism is not pretentious or exclusive, nor such as leads him to depreciate an opponent, and is therefore not a distorting influence on facts, as Mr. Henderson postulates it must have been.[56] It is not possible to point to a single error on Barbour’s part which is fairly traceable to this cause. And his faults and errors, such as they are, may be paralleled over and over again from the most reputable of that century’s historians, to say nothing of those who, in later times, had to weave their web from less tangled and broken material.

[55] _Chronique_, I, chap. xxii.

[56] _Scottish Vernacular Literature_, p. 43.

THE BRUCE