2

Liberty

Praise continued. Its ecclesiastical administration, though, had long since shifted eastwards. From the western island of Iona through Dunkeld in Perthshire, Church government in Scotland gravitated to the east coast of Scotland, and specifically to the emerging ecclesiastical centre of St Andrews in Fife. Here, to an ancient, growing church beside the North Sea, St Rule was said to have brought relics of Scotland’s patron saint. A monastic site since the eighth century, St Andrews seems to have become the seat of Scotland’s most powerful bishop before the end of the first millennium. One of the finest medieval Scottish views can still be experienced if you climb the narrow stone spiral staircase to the top of the eleventh-century St Rule’s Tower. Thirty-three metres high, this landmark for pilgrims predates the surrounding St Andrews Cathedral. From the top of St Rule’s square tower, looking out over the great sweep of St Andrews Bay and the ancient streets of the town centre, you get a good sense of how, ‘imminent itself above the sea’, St Andrews was, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s words, ‘the light of medieval Scotland’.1

Still magnificent, but now a ruin, St Andrews Cathedral dates from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Before the establishment of an Augustinian priory there in 1144, married clergy received pilgrims; the hereditary priests of the Céli Dé (Clients of God), a Scottish and Irish reform movement with strong links to Iona, oversaw the Cathedral church. Later, St Andrews Cathedral suffered over the centuries from storm, fire, and abandonment after the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, but with an internal length of 109 metres it was by far the largest cathedral in Scotland and became an important medieval European pilgrimage site. Its development made St Andrews a hub of religion and learning even before Scotland’s first university was founded there in 1411. Indications of St Andrews as a medieval cultural centre range from the carved lion hunt on the eighth-century Pictish St Andrews Sarcophagus, a sculptural masterpiece still displayed in the Cathedral museum, to the Scots verse Original Chronicle of Scottish history written in the early 1420s by Andrew of Wyntoun (a former St Andrews Augustinian canon), and the so-called St Andrews Music Book (now in Wolfenbüttel, Germany) which preserves treasures of twelfth-and thirteenth-century music from the Cathedral. Among these are the polyphonic ‘Kyrie Virginitatus Amor’, celebrating the Virgin Mary.2

Thirty miles south of St Andrews is an island in the Firth of Forth whose Gaelic name, Innis Choluim, means Columba’s Isle. There in a monastery plainchants were sung to ‘Columba, spes Scotorum’ (‘Columba, hope of the Scots’).³ The Inchcolm Antiphoner in which these chants are recorded dates from the fourteenth century. Containing music as well as lyrics, it is our best guide to the song culture of the Columban church. Yet, as some of the poems mentioned at the end of the previous chapter suggest, a new, more secular cult was growing up around another leader who could be portrayed as the hope of many Scots. This was Robert the Bruce, King Robert I, whose great victory against the English at Bannockburn in 1314 became the stuff of history and heroic amplification.

Bruce was present at the consecration of the completed St Andrews Cathedral in 1318, but he was more an astute, ruthless fighter and ruler than a holy man. He died in 1329, a year after securing England’s formal acknowledgement of Scottish independence. Over four decades later a Scotsman born around the year of Bruce’s death composed the greatest work celebrating the King’s achievements. John Barbour studied in England and France, serving as archdeacon of Aberdeen from 1356 until he died in 1395. His twenty-book poem The Bruce was probably written under the patronage of Robert Stewart, who ruled Scotland as King Robert II from 1371 until 1390; Stewart’s father is favourably presented in Barbour’s vast, rather sprawling work. Unique at this date in being a historical-biographical Scots romance rather than a verse chronicle, The Bruce comprises 14,000 lines of octosyllabic rhyming couplets, though extra syllables in the lines are common. This was a metre favoured in Old French romances (such as Fergus) and in English romances like the early fourteenth-century Sir Orfeo; but to modern ears it can become unduly monotonous, quickening an understanding of why Milton in Paradise Lost avoided what he called ‘the jingling sound of like endings’.4

The Bruce is in many ways an aristocratic work. Its being composed in Scots rather than Latin or French adds to its novelty as a courtly romance and makes it a foundation stone of the Scots verse tradition. Written for a royal patron and celebrating a king, it records heroic deeds of chivalry carried out by titled men. Although the presence of the common people –‘The small folk’ – is recorded from time to time, the focus stays on aristocratic endeavours.⁵ Praise is given to the codes of chivalry, especially to ‘Leawté’ (Loyalty), the vital bond which attaches a man to his superiors in peacetime and in battle.⁶ Offering the great example of Bruce, Barbour’s work is in the long tradition of ‘advice to princes’, a genre comprising how-to-rule manuals for kings which goes back at least as far as Xenophon’s ancient Greek Cyropaedia, and which includes more modern Renaissance works such as Machiavelli’s Il Principe. Bruce’s exploits are compared to those of older, sometimes Classical heroes. There are allusions to other romances, to biblical precedent, and to history. King Robert I is presented as a paradigm of endurance, strategic wiliness, courage and inspirational leadership. He is the king that Scotland needed.

At the heart of Barbour’s poem is a lengthy description of the Battle of Bannockburn. But the flow of the narrative takes in much more than that, moving from Bruce’s involvement in Scottish civil wars to his campaigning with his brother in Ireland. Later the King raids England, and even goes on a posthumous excursion to the Crusades where his heart is carried into battle. Hunted along a stream by enemy bloodhounds, talking in disguise to a housewife, or avoiding attempted assassination, Bruce shows an escapological brilliance which makes him at times appear a heroic emanation from those romances that give Barbour’s poem its form and some of its details. The King emerges as a lover of such narratives. Being rowed across Loch Lomond in difficult times, he reads ‘meryly’ to his knights the chivalric French ‘Romanys off worthi Ferambrace’, whose heroic tale of a small force standing against a more numerous enemy foreshadows Bruce’s own victories.⁷ Yet while Barbour calls his Bruce a ‘romanys’, and several times links the King’s exploits to daring deeds of other romances, he also makes clear from the start that while his poem may be compared with ‘auld storys’ of ‘chevalry’ it is full of ‘suthfastnes’ (truth).⁸ Part romance, part history, part military manual, The Bruce teems with biographical and societal details which have attracted historians keen for the nitty-gritty of siege engines, strategy, or aristocratic attitudes. Sometimes it seems too baggily constructed. Buttressed by sophisticated allusions to the Bible, Cato and St Margaret of Scotland, as well as to King Arthur and Thomas of Ercildoune, The Bruce celebrates a leader’s ‘hardyment governyt with wyt’ (courage ruled with intelligence).9

Bruce’s friendship with Sir James Douglas is central to the poem. When these two heroes are reunited, all their attendant lords weep with joy. Such chivalric flourishes remind modern readers that Barbour’s attention is focused on the nobility, and that his valorizing of ‘fredome’ is not at all the product of a democratic sensibility. Nonetheless, with its wistfully longing ‘A!’, the poem’s most famous passage has appealed to readers of very different complexions in later centuries:

A! Fredome is a noble thing
Fredome mays man to haiff liking.	allows; contentment
Fredome all solace to man giffis,
He levys at es that frely levys.10	lives; ease

These lines describe the sentiments of ‘a noble hart’, the word ‘noble’ here invoking aristocratic assumptions. However, Barbour portrays a king capable of reaching out to ‘Bath mar and les commonaly’ (Highborn and low, all together), as he does in his powerful oration before Bannockburn.¹¹ Uniting the frequently warring factions of Scotland through his force, his rhetoric and his canniness, Bruce leads them to victory against the superior forces of an oppressive neighbour. In so doing he becomes a national celebrity –‘Quharever he raid all the countré/ Gaderyt in daynté [Gathered with pleasure] him to se.’¹²

The Bruce is unflinching in its lengthy descriptions of battle and slaughter. Barbour has an eye for telling dramatic details, as when Bruce’s men make their own shoes out of animal hides, or Douglas mixes discarded foodstuffs with enemy corpses to produce the appalling ‘Douglas lardner’ (larder).¹³ In classic medieval style the poem celebrates how ‘fortoun’ turns her wheel, yet sees all the action as taking place subject to the steering ‘grace off God that all thing steris’.¹⁴ Barbour’s action is very much male-dominated, and earlier ages clearly delighted in the extended detailing of manly military slaughter. Yet contained in the over-long descriptions of the Bruces’ Irish campaigns is an incident in Limerick that, while emanating from male experience, sounds a note arresting not just for its demonstration of Bruce’s generous chivalry, but also for its vignette of lower-class female travail:

The king has hard a woman cry,	heard
He askyt quhat that wes in hy.	happening
‘It is the laynder, schyr,’ said ane,	laundress; sir
‘That hyr child-ill rycht now hes tane	[gone into labour]
And mon leve now behind us her,	must stay; here
Tharfor scho makys yone ivill cher.’	unhappy cry
The king said, ‘Certis, it war pité
That scho in that poynt left suld be,
For certis I trow thar is no man
That he ne will rew a woman than.’	pity; [in such a case]
His ost all thar arestyt he	host; stopped
And gert a tent sone stentit be	pitched
And gert hyr gang in hastily,	made her go in quickly
And other wemen to be hyr by.
Quhill scho wes deliver he bad	while she gave birth he stayed
And syne furth on his wayis raid,
And how scho furth suld caryit be
Or ever he furth fur ordanyt he.	before
This wes a full gret curtasy
That swilk a king and swa mychty	such
Gert his men dwell on this maner	made
Bot for a pouer lauender.15	poor

Barbour’s couplets sound effortless here. Though unusual in some regards, this passage is only one of many that ensure his poem continues to be valued, visited and read (as it was meant to be) aloud.

Some of Barbour’s sources were used also by Walter Bower (1385–1449), Augustinian Abbot of Inchcolm and one of Scotland’s senior churchmen. Though nibbled by rodents in later centuries, an early working copy of Bower’s great Latin Scotichronicon, a prose history of the Scots, survives in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Its fine illustrations show the mythical Scota and others on board ship sailing westwards from Egypt, as well as depicting more historically-based scenes such as Bannockburn. Opening with a short prayer to the Virgin Mary, the manuscript’s preface makes it clear that the Scotichronicon was begun as a transcription of the ‘famous historical work’ of John of Fordun, a fourteenth-century Aberdonian churchman whose own five-book Latin prose Chronica Gentis Scotorum (Chronicle of the People of the Scots), compiled in the 1380s, is the first surviving attempt at a complete history of the Scottish people and is based on many documents now lost.16 As Bower’s ‘laborious work’ developed, though, he made marginal additions to Fordun, and eventually took over as author, producing a huge history of Scotland up to his own time which occupies nine volumes in D. E. R. Watt’s modern edition.¹⁷ The memorable concluding lines – ‘Non Scotus est Christe cui liber non placet iste’ (Christ! He is not a Scot who is not pleased with this book) – are in keeping with Bower’s spirited account of Scotland’s heroic struggles.¹⁸ Impressed by Fordun’s ‘elegant style’, Bower produces a wordy patchwork of earlier sources, digressing in the capacious learned medieval Latin style of the day, familiar to such earlier Latin thinkers as Michael Scot, rather than writing in the more Classically-oriented Petrarchan Renaissance Latin which did not reach Scotland until around 1500.¹⁹

Regarded by historians as among the most valuable records of late medieval Scotland, Bower’s full-bodied work in its earlier sections abounds in curiosities: St Kentigern meets Merlin in an episode informed by ancient Celtic beliefs and tropes; Macbeth threatens to crush the neck of the thane of Fife ‘under the yoke like an ox’s in a wagon’.²⁰ Yet it is in the later books of the Scotichronicon, where Bower appears to be drawing not only on older sources but also on personal experience, that his work has most literary bite. When he departs from Fordun we get a sense of his strong patriotic bias: ‘Anglicus est prodiciosus socius, bonus servus, sed insufferabilis magister sive dominus’ (‘an Englishman is a treacherous associate, a good servant, but an intolerable master or lord’).²¹ Bower chronicles the bloody struggles of the ‘lion-like Scots’ against England, but also details the development of ecclesiastical and other intellectual culture. He gives what may be an eye-witness account of the reception of the papal bulls granted to Scotland’s first university, St Andrews, Bower’s own alma mater.

Quibus in conspectu omnium perlectis ‘Te deum laudamus’ canora voce procedentes usque ad magnum altare clerus et conventus decantabant. Quo cantato et omnibus genua flectentibus, episcopus Rossensis versiculum de Sancto Spiritu cum collecta ‘Deus qui corda’ pronunciabat. Reliqum vero huius diei transigerunt cum inestimabili jocunditate et per totam noctem fecerunt per vicos et plateas civitatis ignes copiosos bibentes vinum in leticia.

When the bulls had been read out before everybody, the clergy and convent processed to the high altar singing Te Deum laudamus in harmonious voice. When this had been sung and everyone was on bended knee, the bishop of Ross pronounced the versicle of the Holy Spirit and the collect Deus qui corda. They spent the rest of this day in boundless merry-making and kept large bonfires burning in the streets and open spaces of the city while drinking wine in celebration.22

One of those who associated themselves with the petition to the Avignon Pope Benedict XIII to grant bulls of foundation for St Andrews University was King James I of Scotland (1394–1437), then a prisoner of the English in Nottingham Castle. When he was eleven it had been decided to send James to St Andrews to be educated under the charge of Bishop Henry Wardlaw, later first Chancellor of the university. However, James was captured at sea, and would spend eighteen years in thrall to his English captors. The royal prisoner received a thorough education, reading the works of the recently deceased English poets Chaucer and Gower, as well as those of the still living John Lydgate. Though a Latin obituary mentions James’s ‘Carmina’ (songs), only one work attributed to him survives.²³ It is contained in a fragile late fifteenth-century manuscript made for important aristocratic literary patrons, the Sinclair family of Fife and Roslin. Now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, this manuscript includes a number of substantial poems by Chaucer and other English poets as well as constituting the first sizeable anthology of Scottish verse. King James I’s work in it is The Kingis Quair (The King’s Book), a beguilingly stylish 1400-line vision poem born out of the King’s captivity, though apparently composed in 1424 when on his release he married the English noblewoman Joan Beaufort. Written in the seven-line rhyming iambic pentameter stanza form used by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde, The Kingis Quair is formally very different from Barbour’s Bruce. It makes no mention of Scotland or England. Yet it too is preoccupied with kinds of ‘libertee’ and enthralment. What we know of James’s life suggests that these were complex issues for him. The English King held him incarcerated (sometimes in the Tower of London), but at other times allowed him considerable freedom and treated him as a useful bargaining counter in negotiations with Scotland and France. James was part of Henry V’s English army in its wars against Scotland’s allies, the French, and was a chief mourner at Henry’s funeral in 1422. The Scottish King married Joan, whose brother, John Beaufort, Fourth Earl of Somerset, had been captured in France in 1421 by Scottish troops and was not released until 1438. James was surrounded by a complex, ironic geometry of ‘thraldom’ and ‘libertee’.24

Apparently written when he was twenty-nine, his poem is partly autobiographical, partly a courtly love poem celebrating his meeting with his wife (it may have been composed for St Valentine’s Day); it meditates throughout on the workings of Fortune and the will of God. Initially its speaker lies ‘in bed allone waking’ and starts to read Boethius’s early sixth-century Latin De Consolatione Philosophiae.²⁵ After the Bible, On the Consolation of Philosophy was probably the most widely read book in medieval Europe; Chaucer translated it. Written in prison by an exiled nobleman, it sets forth the ups and downs of Fortune’s Wheel. James’s speaker enjoys Boethius’s ‘poetly’ prose work. Then, asleep, he is woken by a matins bell which seems to command him through ‘ymagynacioun’ to begin his own story. He writes of being captured by ‘inymyis’ (enemies) and ‘led away’ to ‘thair contree’.²⁶ He can find no reason why Fortune has treated him so, and he bewails his fate:

The bird, the best, the fisch eke in the see,

They lyve in fredome, euerich in his kynd.

And I a man, and lakkith libertee.²⁷

Then, looking out of his prison window, he sees the beauty of spring, hears a nightingale, and catches sight of a beautiful girl, becoming in that instant ‘hir thrall/ For euer, of free wyll’.²⁸ Later, with his head laid against the ‘colde stone’ of the room in which he is held, the speaker has a vision:

Me thoght that thus all sodeynly a lyght
In at the wyndow come quhare that I lent,	where
Of quhich the chamber wyndow schone full bryght,	which
And all my body so it hath ouerwent
That of my sicht the vertew hale iblent;	blinded
And that withall a voce vnto me saide:
‘I bring thee confort and hele, be noght affrayde.’	health
And furth anon it passit sodeynly	away; at once
Quhere it come in, the ryght way ageyne;
And sone, me thoght, furth at the dure in hye	in haste
I went my weye, nas nothing me ageyne, –	[there was nothing against me]
And hastily by bothe the armes tueyne
I was araisit vp into the air,
Clippit in a cloude of cristall clere and fair.29

So the speaker moves upwards through the spheres until he meets Venus, Minerva, Good Hope and Fortune. Like Boethius, he comes to understand the nature of Fortune’s Wheel. Venus advises him to ‘Abyde and serue’, and to reprove those who have ‘broken loose’ from her laws; Minerva, representing reason, counsels that all his conduct must attend to God ‘That in his hand the stere has of you all’, and quotes the biblical advice of Ecclesiastes: ‘wele is him that his tyme wel abit’ (abides); finally, Fortune, in a walled enclosure, shows the speaker how on her Wheel those ‘on hye/ Were ouerthrawe in twinklyng of an eye’.³⁰

After this, the speaker awakes agitated, unsure if he has had only a disturbed dream or a genuine vision. In through the window flies a chalk-white dove which alights on his hand bearing a message of love that reassures him all will be well – as indeed all is, through love, when the prisoner is released. So the ‘goldin cheyne’ of love gives the poet liberty from the ‘thraldom’ of imprisonment, and he gives thanks too for the powerful ordering of

… him that hiest in the hevin sitt.
To quham we thank that all oure lif hath writt,
Quho couth it red agone syne mony a yere	could it read many years long ago
‘Hich in the hevynnis figure circulere’.31	high

This last line quotes the first line of the whole poem, elegantly suggesting how both the Divine Maker and the individual maker – the poet who has accepted the painful shaping of his own life – have eventually become attuned. In God’s will is our peace, as Dante (whom James I probably had not read) puts it in his Paradiso.

The Kingis Quair is the greatest poem written by any monarch. It is also the first substantial work produced in Scots (or English with a slight Scots inflection) by a poet who was not a clergyman. Its shapely construction provides a reminder that the medieval Scots word for poet – makar – is consonant with the ancient Greek word poietes, which also means ‘maker’. The major late medieval Scots poets are still called ‘the Makars’, and King James I’s making in The Kingis Quair is superb. Blending autobiography and vision, the erotic and the religious, James’s work has a much more complex attitude to ‘libertee’ than has Barbour’s Bruce. It is rich in incidental beauties such as precise catalogues of animals (‘The lytill squerell full of besynesse’) and delight in birdsong.32 Its speaker travels to earth in a beam of light, and his muses, accompanied by a Fury (for this is also a poem of suffering), carry ‘bryght lanternis’ in a work marvellously alert to physical as well as spiritual illumination.³³ As a king, James I was remembered as wise, tough-minded, energetic and cultured; the splendid Linlithgow Palace was built at his command. But he lived in an age of ruthless political killings and in 1437 he was murdered. Ironically, given the design of the Quair, Latin verse epitaphs in the Scotichronicon lament Fortune’s eventual cruelty to him.³⁴ None of this detracts from the just and hopeful beauty of his poem. Treasured for centuries, perhaps its most remarkable legacy takes the form of the delicate nineteenth-century mural painted at Penkill Castle near Girvan in Ayrshire by the Scottish Pre-Raphaelite artist– poet William Bell Scott who depicted the visiting English poets Christina Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne and William Rossetti as characters from James’s great poem of changing fortunes.

Vicissitude and hurt, longing and conflict are presented by Robert Henryson (c. 1420–90), using the stanza form of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, in his own Testament of Cresseid. About thirty years younger than James I, Henryson is another of the great Scottish medieval Makars sometimes (though not before the twentieth century) called Scottish Chaucerians. Henryson was a university graduate, but we do not know where he studied. On 10 September 1462 a ‘venerabilis vir Magister Robertus Henrisone’ (distinguished man, Master Robert Henryson) was admitted for a time to the academic community of the new University of Glasgow, which had been founded in 1451. This ‘Henrisone’, who already held MA and Bachelor of Decreets (canon law) degrees, is probably identical to the ‘Master Robert Henrysoun’ who was remembered as a schoolmaster in Dunfermline, Fife.

Henryson’s clear-headed literary genius never went too far. Though he can make use of musically elaborate rhymes, usually his poetry channels passion, using no superfluous word, and often has a possibly ironic, tight-lipped quality. It is unlikely that he knew James I’s work, which had little influence on later medieval poets. However, like The Kingis Quair, Henryson’s masterly Testament presents a journey towards self-knowledge and a Boethian acceptance of fate. Seeking comfort from bitter weather, the poet takes ‘ane quair… / Writtin be worthie Chaucer glorious,/ Of fair Creisseid and worthie Troylus’, then proceeds to another book where he finds an account of Cresseid’s life after she was abandoned by her lover Diomeid.35 Once the beloved of Troilus, Henryson’s Cresseid is now in despair. Returning to her father, she curses Venus for having encouraged her to trust in her good looks. In an ensuing vision the gods, presented in a tragicomic pageant, find her guilty of blasphemy. Now cursed with leprosy, she becomes a beggar to whom Troilus gives alms, but the former lovers fail to recognize each other. Later, when Cresseid realizes that it was Troilus who showed her charity, she sends him the ring that was his first gift to her. After her death, he raises a tomb to her memory.

Henryson’s Testament has appealed to several centuries of very different readers. Without attribution, it was printed in some early English editions of Chaucer from 1532 onwards. The seventeenth-century Englishman Sir Francis Kinaston translated it into Latin, hoping to ensure its immortality. More recently, Seamus Heaney has made a number of modern English versions of works by Henryson, including the Testament in 2004. Heaney hears in the poem ‘the pared down truth of heartbreak rather than the high tone of the pulpit’ and admires in Henryson ‘a unique steadiness about the movement of his stanzas, an in-stepness between the colloquial and the considered aspects of a style that is all his own’.³⁶ Henryson’s narrator lets the reader sympathize with Cresseid, yet the poem ends with a curt one-line sentence: ‘Sen scho is deid [Since she is dead], I speik of hir no moir.’³⁷ Tonally, this abruptness may indicate a pained desire to avoid dwelling on the awfulness of Cresseid’s fate for longer than necessary; or it may sound a brassily sharp dismissal of a foolish blasphemer. Perhaps it represents both.

Such uncertainties pervade the poem, infusing it with an uneasy power as Henryson’s narrative moves along its fated course. That this course will be tragic is made clear in the opening lines:

Ane doolie sessoun to ane cairfull dyte	dismal season; sorrowful poem
Suld correspond and be equivalent…38	should conform

The Testament opens in the middle of spring, conventionally the time for romantic love, but the word ‘spring’ is not used. Instead, we are told it is the period of ‘lent’, the season of giving up, and we sense only a harsh, purifying northern wind ‘Fra Pole Artick come quhisling loud and schill’, which makes the narrator retreat ‘aganis my will’.³⁹ Henryson nowhere mentions Scotland, but, like the other Makars, he can make dramatic use of its climate. A sense of progressing against his will characterizes the narrator’s approach at times, though he realizes his story must go on. While he speaks of his ‘pietie’ (pity) for Cresseid, there is something unflinchingly judgmental in his saying that he shall excuse her as ‘far furth as I may’ (as far as I may).⁴⁰ The set-piece procession of gods who come to judge Cresseid is presented in terms of conflicting emotions. So Jupiter, ‘richt fair and amiabill’ precedes angry, foaming-at-the-mouth Mars who is followed by ‘fair Phebus’, while Venus alternates between being ‘gay’ and suddenly ‘Angrie as ony serpent vennemous’.⁴¹ This atmosphere of changeability bodes ill for Cresseid, whose ‘mirth’ will be changed into ‘melancholy’ as she discovers the vicissitudes of Fortune. Waking, she weeps, and ‘ane chyld come[s] fra the hall/ To warne Cresseid the supper was reddy’.⁴² When her father sees her he is shocked that she now has the face of a leper. Like Chaucer, Henryson has the artistic confidence to earth the cosmic awfulness of pain precisely in a domestic world where children call their elders through to eat. Such homely details intensify the bruise of the humiliated Cresseid’s determination to move away to a leper house, wishing ‘not’ to ‘be kend’ (recognized).⁴³ Just such a failure of recognition lends stinging pathos to Troilus’s later encounter with her where she sits begging:

Than upon him scho kest up baith hir ene –	cast;eyes
And with ane blenk it come into his thocht	blink
That he sumtime hir face befoir had sene.
Bot scho was in sic plye he knew hir nocht…44	plight

Nevertheless, something about this leper makes him think ‘Of fair Cresseid, sumtyme his awin darling’, so he throws her a purse. When, later, she realizes what has happened, Cresseid collapses, confronted by ‘the greit unstabilnes’ in herself that led her earlier to scorn the ‘lufe… lawtie, and… gentilnes’ (love, loyalty and gentleness) of Troilus when she abandoned him.45 Ultimately, this is an undeflectably moral poem aimed at ‘worthie wemen’ for their ‘instructioun’ (and, no doubt, at sagely nodding men).⁴⁶ Yet it is complicated by signs that its own narrator may be flinching from his subject matter. In the final stanza, as well as the abrupt last line the poem uses the word ‘schort’ twice as it hurries as quickly as possible towards its ‘schort conclusioun’, moving away from a disagreeable topic. Although his work seems imbued with the common medieval perception of the female as dangerous, Henryson’s concluding address to ‘worthie wemen’ is indeed brief, makes no attempt to class all women with Cresseid, and has the sound of an abrupt piece of moralizing designed to wind things up as quickly as possible after the discomfiture of the narrative.

Troilus recalls with sadness Cresseid’s ‘amorous blenking’ (glancing or blinking). His phrase links her to the changeable goddess Venus who is ‘Provocative with blenkis amorous’.⁴⁷ While we now know it is an anatomical fact that women blink more frequently than men, it is typical of Henryson that in poems where issues of visual recognition are so crucial he should effectively deploy such a small, telling, erotic phrase. This ‘blinking’ characteristic is also shared by the heroine of Henryson’s The Tale of Orpheus and Erudices his Quene where Eurydice ‘With wordis sweit and blenkis amorus’ asks Orpheus to marry her.⁴⁸ Eurydice is again a woman of strong physical appetites who meets a dreadful fate. Fleeing a lustful shepherd, she is bitten by a serpent and ends up in the underworld, not as a leper but

Lene and dedelike, pitouse and pale of hewe,	pitiful
Rycht warsch and wan, and walowit as a wede,	sickly; withered
Hir lily lyre was lyke unto the lede.49	skin; lead

Leading her out of the underworld, the musician Orpheus can only exclaim over the terrible change that has befallen her once ‘cristall eyne with blenkis amorous’.⁵⁰ So full of love for ‘his wyf and lady suete’ and ‘blyndit… in grete affection’, he looks back at her.⁵¹ This breaks his promise to Pluto, King of the Underworld, who immediately reclaims her. Orpheus weeps over his loss: ‘Bot for a luke my lady is forlore’.⁵² Those words ‘Bot for a luke’, repeated in the poem, have a stinging ordinariness that is characteristic of the schoolmaster Henryson. Retelling this story, he follows not only Ovid and Virgil, but also the Boethius of De Consolatione Philosophiae. As in The Testament of Cresseid, a sense of tragic inevitability underscores the story, and there are elements of harsh moral judgment as well as pity and sympathy. Eurydice follows her sensuous nature, yet is a loyal wife; having searched and searched for her, Orpheus fails in self-control when he glances back at his beloved. His act is a small private one, but the outcome is sudden and catastrophic. Henryson presents it in a few words, again using the characteristic adjective ‘schort’:

In schort conclusion,
He blent bakward and Pluto come anone,	glanced
And into hell agayn with hir is gone.53

Henryson’s gift for plain, functional language, his sense of sharp retribution, and his emphasis on the need to discipline what Burns would later term ‘fleshly lust’ – all these might make him seem to prefigure the often dour milieu associated with the Scottish Reformation. But this level-headed, often humorous poet was dead years before John Knox’s birth. Modern readers may be tempted to read older Scottish poetry in the context of later vernacular culture, but in its day it was mostly made by men in a culture where the main medium of literature and education was Latin. Medieval Scottish literature is frequently an offshoot of Latin models. Henryson was a learned man with a sophisticated knowledge of Latin as well as a liking for vernacular registers, and for legal matters. His fascination with morality tales is of a piece with works produced in many parts of Catholic Europe, and his interest in Providence has recently been aligned with that of the later John Ireland (d. 1496) whose work in Latin and Scots made that prose writer, author of The Meroure of Wyssdome, ‘the most significant Scottish theologian of his and Henryson’s generation’.54 The verse Moralitas (or moral explanation of the story) which is the concluding section of Henryson’s poem Orpheus and Erudices draws heavily on a Boethian commentary by the English Dominican Nicholas Trevet, and warns repeatedly against letting ‘warldlie lust and sensualite’ get the better of reason.⁵⁵

While alert to tenderness, eloquent and idiomatic in its fluent handling of verse, Henryson’s is at times a grave sensibility. Even his Testament, however, can wink at the reader, as it does when the poet comments on bad-tempered Saturn’s ‘meldrop’ (snot) which runs ‘fast’ from his nose.⁵⁶ A gentler comedy of minute attention occurs more frequently in The Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian where ‘Maister’ Henryson, retelling fables by Aesop and others in a wise Scots voice rich in immediate appeal, presents himself both as a moralizing teacher and as a pupil offering his work to be marked in a Latin class:

Of this authour, my maisteris, with your leif,
Submitting me in your correctioun,
In mother-toung of Latyng I wald preif	from; try
To mak ane maner of translatioun…

In using Aesop, Henryson draws on one of the eight authoritative authors – the auctores octo – whose work was standard fare in the medieval European Latin schoolroom. Henryson’s fables also follow patterns present in the tradition of the widely read Latin Esopus by the fifteenth-century German Heinrich Steinhöwel. In one sense, the Morall Fabillis are bookish, even schoolbookish; but at the same time, as animal fables should be, they are utterly accessible. Like James I’s ‘lytill squerell full of besynesse’, but in a more fully realized way, Henryson’s feral and domestic creatures go about their business. Their presentation is fully anthropomorphic, yet still sensitive to the creaturely pursuits of the natural world.57 Relished in an age closer than ours to the smell, blood and pelt of beasts, these Fabillis are at once quintessentially medieval (akin to fabliaux and such popular tales as ‘Reynard the Fox’) and full of allure for a modern audience. The town mouse, ‘Bairfute, allone, with pykestaf in hir hand’, sets off like a pilgrim to visit her country cousin:

Furth mony wilsum wayis can scho walk,	across; wild
Throw mosse and mure, throw bankis, busk, and breir,	bog; moor
Fra fur to fur, cryand fra balk to balk,	furrow; ridge
‘Cum furth to me, my awin sister deir!
Cry peip anis!’ With that the mous culd heir	once
And knew hir voce, as kinnisman will do	kinsfolk
Be verray kynd, and furth scho come hir to.58	[naturally]

Although each fable comes with its moralitas (some more predictably appropriate than others), there is far more jauntiness and humour here than in Henryson’s other major works. In the fable of the two mice forms of the word ‘blyith’ (happy) recur. The moral of that story, which teaches thrift and the wisdom of being content with a modest sufficiency of worldly goods, is that

Of eirthly joy it beiris maist degré,	[holds the highest place]
Blyithnes in hart, with small possessioun.59	possessions

Canniness and a wish to avoid excess permeate Henryson’s work. A well-schooled university graduate, this schoolteacher–poet can cite learned texts with the best of them. But, moving easily between Classical foundations and vernacular artistry, the Latinist Henryson writes in a way that, while building gravitas and auctoritas (that sense of foundational authority beloved of medieval authors), never detracts from his quality of direct address. When, for instance, he makes an accurate reference to Aristotle, Classical polysyllables modulate immediately into common language:

In Metaphisik Aristotell sayis
That mannis saull is lyke ane bakkis ee…60	soul; bat’s eye

In this fable, ‘The Preiching of the Swallow’, Henryson unusually quotes a whole line of Latin (appropriate in such a clerical work), but the entire story itself, like many of Christ’s parables, is placed familiarly in the common world of agricultural life. Details of linseed and flax processing are effortlessly integrated. The swallow’s feathered congregation ignore his advice to eat flax seeds, and so end up caught in the flaxen nets men make, while the swallow, a migratory bird, simply leaves. In its cadences and sudden, vertical-takeoff conclusion, the last line of this narrative recalls the final line of the Testament. There the narrator ended ‘Sen scho is deid, I speik of hir no moir’; in ‘The Preiching’ we have ‘Scho tuke hir flicht, bot I hir saw no moir.’61 Each of these one-line sentences, abruptly bringing down the curtain, exemplifies Henryson’s ability to make dramatic the functionality of language. Without sacrificing the possibilities of subtlety or emotional balance he savours cunningly crafted plain speaking.

Henryson’s protagonists are not explicitly Scottish. His poems almost never mention Scottish places. Yet his works are informed by their location. His account of flax production is technically accurate in its Scots terminology. Cresseid’s route to her leper house may follow the geography of medieval Dunfermline, and one famous Scottish manuscript records a work whose English title would be ‘Master Robert Henryson’s Dream on the Firth of Forth’.62 Nevertheless, if there are Scottish aspects to Henryson’s work, they lie principally in the language, sensibility, and the nature of the terrain in which many of his poems are so firmly earthed. That landscape is one where rough weather is felt as a markedly alliterative presence:

The wynter come, the wickit wind can blaw;
The woddis grene wer wallowit with the weit;
Baith firth and fell with froistys wer maid faw,	uneven
Slonkis and slaik maid slidderie with the sleit…63	Hollows and dells

Descriptions of winter would be developed with gusto by Henryson’s fellow Latinist and Makar, Gavin Douglas, and by later Scottish poets. Yet Henryson’s lack of proclaimed Scottishness makes him very different from the rumbustiously patriotic Blind Hary (c. 1450–93) whose vast, eleven-book poem on the early fourteenth-century Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace was produced around the same time as the Testament and the Morall Fabillis. Hary’s account of the illustrious and valiant champion of his nation bears the full title The Actis and Deidis of the Illustere and Vailyeand Campioun Schir William Wallace Knicht of Ellerslie and dates from about 1477. Circulating in manuscript, it later became one of the first books printed in sixteenth-century Scotland, and enjoyed lasting popularity, going through more editions than any other Scots book before Burns. In the eighteenth century, when many Scottish authors began to worry that some of their upwardly mobile countrymen looked down on the Scots language, Hary’s Wallace was loosely translated into English couplets by William Hamilton of Gilbert-field. In this form it spurred Burns, James Hogg, Tobias Smollett, and other writers in Scotland and beyond. In his autobiographical poem The Prelude Wordsworth enthuses about

How Wallace fought for Scotland; left the name
Of Wallace to be found, like a wild flower,
All over his dear Country; left the deeds
Of Wallace, like a family of Ghosts,
To people the steep rocks and river banks,
Her natural sanctuaries, with a local soul
Of independence and stern liberty.⁶⁴

Throughout the nineteenth century, when Scotland was playing its full part in British imperialism, a cult of Wallace grew and resulted most strikingly in the erection of that crowned stone tower, the Wallace Monument, which still stands as a national phallus on a hill near Stirling. In the late twentieth century Hamilton’s version of Blind Hary’s poem formed a principal source for the screenplay of Braveheart, the Hollywood epic starring Mel Gibson and scripted by the American Randall Wallace. In this way the popular patriotic fifteenth-century poetry of Blind Hary has been channelled into the international popular culture of our own day.

The Latin historian and philosopher John Mair (sometimes called John Major), who taught at St Andrews University in the early sixteenth century, wrote of Hary’s poem that its poet was ‘a master’ (‘peritus’) of the vernacular.⁶⁵ The Wallace could appeal to a highly educated as well as a popular audience. Of Hary himself almost nothing is known except his evident learning. It is possible that he dictated his poem to the John Ramsay whose name is appended to the manuscript, dated 1488. Appropriately, that manuscript is bound together with a copy of Barbour’s Bruce, which is in a sense its great spur and companion poem. Composing about 160 years after Wallace’s death, Hary is further removed from his subject matter than Barbour, and may rely more on popular oral traditions, though he claims some now lost written sources. Chronology is unreliably treated, and Thomas of Ercildoune makes an appearance. Running to 300 pages of rhyming ten-syllable couplets (which can sound awkward to a modern ear tuned mainly to blank verse), the poem is often dramatic, graphic and very bloody. Characteristic is the scene at rocky Dunottar (where Fergus of Galloway had killed his dragon) when Wallace exterminates fleeing Englishmen who have sought sanctuary in a church:

Wallace in fyr gert set all haistely,	[set all on fire]
Brynt wp the kyrk, and all that was tharin,	therein
Atour the roch the laiff ran with gret dyn.	around; remainder
Sum hang on craggis rycht dulfully to de,	miserably
Sum lap, sum fell, sum floteryt in the se.	leapt; floundered
Na Sotheroun on lyff was lewyt in that hauld,	[was allowed to live]; refuge
And thaim with in thai brynt in powdir cauld.66	ashes

Wallace is simply exacting revenge on his country’s oppressors, but that revenge, prolonged over many thousand lines, can become oppressive in itself. Blind Hary helped make Wallace a Scottish superhero, combining martial prowess with hints of underdoggery in a way that would influence both foreign perceptions of the Scots and (especially male) Scots’ perceptions of themselves. This poem has a heroic tale to tell; sometimes it tells it like a comic-strip or a rant. It has dramatic sweep and boundless narrative energy but, while giving thanks that ‘Wallace… has maid all Scotland fre’, we may wish to skip some of the atrocities.⁶⁷ Wordsworth’s conversion of Wallace’s legacies into ‘wild flowers’ and ‘natural sanctuaries’ is seductively disingenuous in its camouflaging of the much mythologized slaughter on which Scotland, like most other nations, was founded. Burns, an enthusiast for Wallace, is more accurate in the verb he chooses for that famous opening line, ‘Scots, wha hae wi Wallace bled…’⁶⁸

Whether considering the popular work of Blind Hary or the versions of French manuals of chivalry produced for a knightly elite by Sir Gilbert Hay (fl. 1450), it is as well to remember that, just as twentieth-century military technology underlies aspects of the development of computing, so the business of killing nourishes the codes of medieval heraldry. When the highly educated Hay, who had served at the French court of Charles VII, writes of how ‘thare is gevin to the knycht his lytill schort suerd… his lang suerde his polax’ and so on, he is describing a chivalric killer at the height of his efficiency.⁶⁹ Small wonder that Hay in The Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis emphasizes that ‘wisedome is the begynnyng of all gude gouernement’ and that the passions must be reined in.⁷⁰ Henryson, in a different way, stresses the same teaching. Relying on French sources, but sometimes transforming them considerably, Hay in his advice to princes tells them that they are ‘of the samyn nature with symple men’ and ‘how thai suld delyte thame in bukis of stories of vertues and vicis’; they should also be particularly wary of women’s advice ‘ffor quhen a womman tretis thy gouernaunce traist wele thy persone is in perile’.⁷¹ Hay’s versions of these knightly texts are among the first examples of Scots prose. They often cite the heroic example of the protagonist of Hay’s long, long poem The Buik of King Alexander the Conqueror. In an age of constant military strife extended narratives of campaigning – whether of Bruce, Wallace or Alexander – attracted noble patrons. Across medieval Europe Alexander narratives were in fashion, and Hay’s Alexander poem complements an older Scots verse translation from French, The Buik of Alexander, which survives in a manuscript dated 1438. Often based on French (and sometimes Latin) originals, such works are hardly exact translations in the modern sense. Like Hay’s prose, they belong to a time when translators frequently added to, adapted or embellished their originals, hoping to provide yet more material for audiences eager to hear of ‘mony hardie knycht of gret renoun’.72

Alexander is also mentioned in Gaelic literature, where in a heroic age ‘Battle-loving warriors’ were celebrated at least as much as in Scotland’s other languages.⁷³ Classical Gaelic was used as a lingua franca among the nobles and literati of Ireland and much of Scotland from around 1200 until the start of the seventeenth century; vernacular Gaelic dialects had been developing since at least 1100, but do not appear widely in manuscripts until the end of the Classical period. Although its authenticity has been disputed, what is perhaps the most arresting surviving poem in the developing vernacular form is the Harlaw Brosnachadh, an incitement-to-battle chant. Like the works of Barbour, Blind Hary, Hay and others, this Gaelic poem encourages lethal martial valour. It is attributed to Lachlann Mór of the bardic MacMhuirich family whose descendants would make Gaelic verse over many generations until at least the mid-eighteenth century. Lachlan Mór MacMhuirich’s poem is dated to the eve of the Battle of Harlaw in 1411, making it an exceptionally early example of vernacular Gaelic verse. Alphabetically structured, it lists adjectives appropriate to the warriors of the Clan Donald, and has a strikingly urgent pattern of syntax and sound, using strong alliteration which can be detected even by the non-Gaelic speaker:

Gu h-àirneach, gu-arranta,
Gu h-athlamh, gu h-allanta,
Gu beòdha, gu barramhail,
Gu brìoghmhor, gu buan-fheargach…⁷⁴

Derick Thomson points out that it deploys an archaic seven-syllable metre with three-syllable line endings, and that it may be the last poem written in that metre.⁷⁵ I have made a version of this poem which, though free in vocabulary, reproduces much of the metre and form of the original in a way that may suggest something of the artistry and force of the Gaelic:

You Clan of Conn, remember this:
Strength from the eye of the storm.
Be at them, be animals,
Be alphas, be Argus-eyed,
Be belters, be brandishers,
Be bonny, be batterers,
Be cool heads, be caterans,
Be clashers, be conquerors,
Be doers, be dangerous,
Be dashing, be diligent,
Be eager, be excellent,
Be eagles, be elegant,
Be foxy, be ferrety,
Be fervid, be furious,
Be grimmer, be gralloching,
Be grinders, be gallopers,
Be hardmen, be hurriers,
Be hell-bent, be harriers,
Be itching, be irritants,
Be impish, be infinite,
Be lucky, be limitless,
Be lashers, be loftiest,
Be manly, be murderous,
Be martial, be militant,
Be noxious, be noisiest,
Be knightly, be niftiest,
Be on guard, be orderly,
Be off now, be obdurate,
Be prancing, be panic-free,
Be princely, be passionate,
Be rampant, be renderers,
Be regal, be roaring boys,
Be surefire, be Somerleds,
Be surgers, be sunderers,
Be towering, be tactical,
Be tip-top, be targetters,
Be urgent, be up for it,
In vying be vigorous
In ending all enemies.
Today is for triumphing,
You hardy great hunting-dogs,
You big-boned braw battle boys,
You lightfoot spry lionhearts,
You wall of wild warriors,
You veterans of victories,
You heroes in your hundreds here,
You Clan of Conn, remember this:
Strength from the heart of the storm.

Even though its date may be in doubt, the Gaelic ‘Clan Donald’s Call to Battle at Harlaw’ seems to me at least as great in its way as Blind Hary’s vast Wallace. Yet the tonal range of Gaelic verse in this period goes far beyond such warsongs to include delicate lyrics like Fearchar Ó Maoíl Chiaráin’s richly worked love poem ‘The Blackthorn Brooch’, or the moving extended lament for a lost son (probably the poet of ‘The Blackthorn Brooch’) by an author whose first name has been lost, but who is known as Ó Maoíl Chiaráin and for whom the killing of his child in Ireland has meant that ‘My son is my own death’.76 Of particular interest is another lament, the earliest datable poem attributable to a female Gaelic author. This is ‘A phaidrín do dhúisg mo dhéar’ (O rosary that recalled my tear) by Aithbhreac Inghean Corcadail, widow of Niall óg McNeill of the island of Gigha. Composed in the 1460s in a Classical Gaelic syllabic metre, it is attuned to the traditions of bardic elegy. The poet produces a work of strong, direct emotion which images her keening to the rosary beads that once belonged to her husband. This device builds from the start a sense of loved, lost intimacy:

A phaidríndodhúisg mo dhéar,

ionmhain méar do bhitheadh ort:

ionmhain cridhe fáilteach fial

’gá raibhe riamh gus a nocht.

 

Dá éag is tuirseach atáim,

an lámh má mbítheá gach n-uair,

nach cluinim a beith i gclí

agus nach bhfaicim í uaim.

 

O rosary that recalled my tear,
dear was the finger in my sight,
that touched you once, beloved the heart
of him who owned you till tonight.

I grieve the death of him whose hand
you did entwine each hour of prayer;
my grief that it is lifeless now
and I no longer see it there.⁷⁷

Often using traditionally Irish adjectivally-enhanced Gaelic ‘kennings’ – image-rich phrases which can link a person to a place (‘lion of Mull of the white wall’) – this lament goes on to hymn the dead man’s qualities, particularly his generosity to poets, but its emphasis falls not on military deeds but on the loss of both intimate and societal happiness. For the poet this man is ‘mo leathchuing rúin’ (‘my darling yoke-fellow’) rather than simply a hardy knight on the battlefield.

Although they shared many of its martial values, Lowlanders writing in Scots scorned this richly varied Gaelic culture which rarely mentioned Lowland Scotland and which was becoming confined increasingly to the Highland regions. Such an attitude of scorn is found as early as John of Fordun, who writes in his fourteenth-century Latin chronicle of how the Lowlanders are ‘domesticated and cultured, trustworthy, patient and urbane, decent in their attire, law-abiding and peaceful’, while Highlanders are ‘a wild and untamed people, rough and unbending, given to robbery… comely in form, but unsightly in dress’.⁷⁸ Sir Richard Holland, whose The Buke of the Howlat is roughly contemporary with Aithbreac Inghean Corcadail’s lament, probably worked for some time at Abriachan near Loch Ness where he would have been surrounded by Gaelic speakers. Yet his substantial and lively alliterative poem presents a Gaelic poet very much as a figure of fun.

The Buke of the Howlat (a ‘howlat’ is an owl) is an allegory whose protagonists, as in Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules, are birds. Holland’s Howlat goes to elaborate lengths to seek more splendid plumage. Into the story are built accounts of Robert the Bruce’s crusading friend Sir James Douglas, and of a great feast at which the Rook, a Gaelic bard, appears. Lines three and five of the following stanza are alliterative quasi-Gaelic gobbledegook, and may indicate that the speaker likes alcohol and (like many Gaels) declaiming his genealogy. Afterwards, in a common Lowlander’s mockery of Gaelic-language constructions, the bard is made to speak of himself as ‘hir’ (her) and ‘scho’ (she). The Rook threatens to aim a poem at the audience, and the repeated ‘O’s of Irish names come out like cries of pain. Linguistic cavorting mixes with mocking energy which Sir Richard Holland both finds in and applies to the music of Gaelic:

Sa come the Ruke with a rerd and a rane roch,	Rook; shout; rough rant
A bard owt of Irland with ‘Banachadee!’	God bless you!
Said: ‘Gluntow guk dynyd dach hala mischy doch;
Raike hir a rug of the rost, or scho sall ryme the.	Reach; bit; roast; flyte you
Mich macmory ach mach mometir moch loch;
Set hir downe, gif hir drink; quhat Dele alis the?’	Devil ails
O Deremyne, O Donnall, O Dochardy droch;	?evil
Thir ar his Irland kingis of the Irischerye:
O Knewlyn, O Conochor, O Gregre Makgrane;	(chiefs or learned families)
The schenachy, the clarschach,	Gaelic genealogist-bard; Scottish harp
The ben schene, the ballach,	playing woman(?); servant
The crekery, the corach,	reciter(?); lamentation (?)
Scho kennis thaim ilkane.79	knows; each one

Whether writing in Latin like the philosopher and historian John Mair or in Scots like Sir Richard Holland, most Lowland writers in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance characteristically treated the Highlands and Gaelic with disdain and mockery. For Scotland’s greatest poetic virtuoso, William Dunbar (c. 1456–c. 1513), the word ‘bard’ is a term of abuse associated with ‘Ersche’ or Gaelic. Although Scottish monarchs in this period may have given gifts to bards when in the Highlands, Dunbar clearly looks down on them. He wants to avoid their culture, one whose traditions include poems of cursing denunciation as well as praise. In Dunbar’s own famous ‘flyting’ or stylized verse quarrel with his fellow poet the Gaelic-speaking Walter Kennedy, the two men take it in turn to hurl abuse at each other. Conventionally in flytings no punches are pulled, and, relishing elaborate alliterative insults, Dunbar has a genius for going for the jugular:

Iersche brybour baird, vyle beggar with thy brattis,	Gaelic vagabond bard; torn clothes
Cuntbittin crawdoun Kennedy, coward of kynd;	cuntbitten; poxed; [by nature]
Evill-farit and dryit as Densmen on the rattis,	ill-favoured; withered; Danes; wheels
Lyk as the gleddis had on thy gulesnowt dynd;	as if; kites; [yellow nose]; dined
Mismaid monstour, ilk mone owt of thy mynd,	[mad once a month]
Renunce, rebald, thy rymyng; thow bot royis;	renounce, rascal; [you only talk nonsense]
Thy trechour tung hes tane ane heland strynd –	treacherous tongue; [has caught a Highland accent]
Ane lawland ers wald mak a bettir noyis.80	a Lowland arse

Dunbar’s carnival of vocabulary here heads rollickingly from ‘Iersche’ (Gaelic) to ‘ers’ (arse). Although we may allow for rhetorical exaggeration (Dunbar wants to win this poetic contest), the verse shows among other things a perceived chasm between the languages of Gaelic and ‘Inglis’, the term Dunbar uses for what we now call Scots. These same lines give a taste of Dunbar’s elaborate language of vitriol. Throughout his work, he delights in a wide spectrum of vocabulary, making use of plain-speaking but also of the enriched formal diction termed ‘aureate’.

Clearly a learned poet, Dunbar may have come from the Lothians. His name appears on a 1477 document at St Andrews University where a William Dunbar graduated MA in 1479. Although relatively little is known of his life, he seems to have visited England at least once, and celebrates Aberdeen, but it is with Edinburgh that he is most strongly connected, having spent the years 1500–13 (or perhaps longer) there. In 1500 King James IV awarded him an annual salary as a member of the Royal Household. Dunbar produced a number of poems, some respectful, some not, about court affairs. Like that of Robert Henryson, Dunbar’s poetry reveals a substantial legal knowledge, and records show him acting occasionally as a court advocate. Valued in his own day, his work was forgotten for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries before it began to be republished (and even rewritten) by Allan Ramsay and others in the early eighteenth century. In the late nineteenth century the literary historian J. M. Ross saw Dunbar as second only to Burns and as exhibiting a distinctively Scots national character; the twentieth-century poet Hugh MacDiarmid read Ross’s Early Scottish History and Literature, and championed Dunbar rather than Burns as a model for modern Scottish poets. Today, along with Henryson, Dunbar is regarded as the greatest of Scotland’s late medieval or early Renaissance Makars.

Dunbar offers remarkably beautiful poetic craftsmanship along with the most dartingly varied themes and forms. Some poets sound the same note repeatedly and with assurance. Since being able to write well is what matters most, this is surely enough, and readers nurtured by the assumptions of Romanticism may admire consistency of voice. Yet this can easily slip into monotony, and there will always be audiences who love the riches of variety, savouring a poet who can be hilariously bawdy as well as producing poems of solemn celebration or of religious glory. ‘Formal’ in the best sense, Dunbar takes poetic forms and makes each resonate to the maximum. For those who rejoice in poetic biodiversity, his marvellously performative oeuvre is palatial and welcoming. It uses all the instruments of the verbal orchestra. Dunbar’s poems are magnificently carved out of sound.

This poet can generate awe through a sense of glory most apparent in his handling of acoustics and vocabulary. Dunbar learned from the music of elaborate medieval Latin (and probably French) poetry. Woven together out of internal rhymes and so filled with delicate reverberation, his poem to the Virgin Mary sings to itself, to us, and to its addressee. It moves into Latin for an internal refrain ‘Ave Maria, gracia plena’ (Luke 1:28–‘Hail, Mary, full of grace’) so that these verses celebrating the glory of the Virgin are themselves bonded to the Holy Writ that so musically interrupts them:

Hale, sterne superne, hale, in eterne,	hail; star [on high]; eternity
In Godis sicht to schyne!	God’s sight; shine
Lucerne in derne for to discerne,	lantern; darkness; by which to see
Be glory and grace devyne!	by
Hodiern, modern, sempitern,	[for this day and for this age and for ever]
Angelicall regyne,	queen of angels
Our tern inferne for to dispern,	darkness; hellish; disperse
Helpe, rialest rosyne.	most royal rose
Ave Maria, gracia plena :
Haile, fresche floure femynyne;
Yerne us guberne, virgin matern,	diligently; govern; mother
Of reuth baith rute and ryne.81	pity; root; bark

Celebrating a realm and person of ultimate beauty –‘peirles pulchritud’ – this is a poetry of appropriate magnificence, in keeping with the sense of glory splendid in medieval Scottish Catholicism. The eloquent fifteenth-century Prior of St Andrews, James Haldenson, was recalled by Walter Bower as adorning his church ‘mera et specabili pulcritudine’ (‘with sheer beauty of outstanding quality’), while William Bower added a rood altar to St Andrews Cathedral that was ‘ymaginibus sumptuosis adornatum’ (‘adorned with costly statues’).82 Dunbar’s astonishingly altitudinous word-music in a poem such as his hymn to the Virgin belongs to this rich Scottish Catholic culture and might be heard alongside the sophisticatedly intercrossing voices in the Mass for Six Voices (c. 1515) and other works by his near contemporary, the great Scottish composer of often rapturous religious music, Robert Carver.

His sense of glory and his preternatural ear make Dunbar a superb religious poet, as the strong dunts of the ‘d’ and ‘b’ sounds that open his poem on Christ’s Resurrection –‘Done is a battell on the dragon blak’ – affirm.⁸³ That poem modulates effortlessly from the pugilistic consonants of its first line to the blessing-like assurance of its sibilant Latin refrain; yet in that refrain the dunting ‘d’s remain audible: ‘Surrexit dominus de sepulchro’ (‘The Lord has risen from the tomb’). Drawing on the Latin Mass for Easter Day (which echoes Luke 23:34), Dunbar has his own Scots language interrupted by the alien yet familiar, ‘other’ yet internalized language of scripture. His technique of using Latin materials in vernacular verse, though used with unique skill, was a common one in medieval writing and is related to that ‘lectio divina’ (holy reading) so thoroughly practised centuries before by the Columban writers who wanted to make the Holy Word shine through their words.

Yet Dunbar has also a wonderful, often riproaring sense of humour. Sometimes this can manifest itself in ecclesiastical garb. In ‘The Dregy of Dunbar’, the poet in ‘hevins glory’ (i.e., Edinburgh) petitions King James IV, praying that he and his court will return from ‘purgatory’ (also known, Dunbar somewhat unfairly suggests, as Stirling). ‘Dregy’ comes from the Latin ‘Dirige’, the opening word of the initial antiphon of the Catholic Office of the Dead. Winding through its elaborate parts, Dunbar’s poem draws on a medieval tradition of liturgical parody, but sounds its own confident and distinctive note – in Latin as well as Scots:

Et ne nos inducas in temptationem de Strivilling:
Sed libera nos a malo illius.
Requiem Edinburgi dona eiis, Domine,
Et lux ipsius luceat eiis.

And lead us not into the temptation of Stirling,
But deliver us from its evil.
The peace of Edinburgh grant unto them, O Lord,
And let its light shine upon them.⁸⁴

The aureate diction of Dunbar’s religious verse is of a piece with his more secular word-pageants or formal verse-tapestries such as ‘The Golden Targe’ which, among other things, blends a paean to the dawn –‘Wp sprang the goldyn candill matutyne,/ With clere depurit bemes cristallyne’ – with praise of Chaucer as the ‘rose of rethoris all’ whose supreme rhetorical skill with ‘fresch anamilit [enamelled] termes’ makes him the greatest ‘lycht’ of ‘oure Inglisch’ poetry. The Anglophile Dunbar also relishes the ‘tongis aureate’ of the English poets John Gower and John Lydgate.⁸⁵ At the same time, his own Scots verse abounds with verbal confidence. If his terms of praise are enamelled and aureate, then the same technique generates elaborately outlandish insults. The internal music of such flyting lines as

Lene larbar loungeour, lowsy in lisk and lonye;	lean; impotent idler; groin; loin
Fy, skolderit skyn, thow art bot skyre and skrumple…86	scorched skin; creased; wrinkled

is the flipside of the interwoven rhymes and terms in Dunbar’s great praise-poetry. Dunbar likes nothing better than dance-poems where he can have words and rhymes circling elaborately round one another. This happens in his formal pageant, ‘The Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnis’, where the conventional vices are accompanied by devils with such good Scots names as ‘Blak Belly and Bawsy Brown’ until the culminating appearance of a Highlander (conjured up by the Devil as the ultimate wicked act) leads to such a ‘schout’ and ‘Ersche… clatter’ that the Devil smothers them ‘in the depest pot of hell’.⁸⁷ Virtuoso-like, and with a characteristically self-aware sense of dramatic performance, Dunbar propels himself across the dance floor in another poem with the words

Than cam in Dunbar the mackar;
On all the flure thair was nane frackar…⁸⁸

‘Frackar’ means ‘nimbler’ or ‘more energetic’, and a nimble energy characterizes Dunbar’s verse. He can mix the aureate with the mischievously satirical, starting a poem with the high-flown line, ‘As young Awrora with his cristall haile’, before going on to chronicle the crash-landing of an eccentric alchemist and birdman, John Damian, who attempted to fly from Stirling Castle to France with a great pair of feathered wings.89 Dunbar has good fun with that one.

His pyrotechnics in shorter poems in no way render this spectacular poet unfit for working in longer forms. His 530-line narrative poem ‘Apon the Midsummer Evin, Mirriest of Nichtis’, also known as ‘The Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo’, manages to be a tour de force without exhausting the reader, who is provided with constant entertainment. Dunbar likes to make poetry that adapts official rituals or documents – whether Church liturgy, court pageants or a formally drawn-up last will and testament. In his ‘Tretis’, as Priscilla Bawcutt points out, he reshapes the courtly game of ‘demande d’amour’, a ludic discussion of love through questions and answers. Dunbar’s provocative poem has a narrator who overhears a widow (medieval widows were conventionally randy) interrogating two wives about their sex lives in a garden of ‘sueit flouris’ associated with courtly love. The women confess their intimate secrets as if the widow were a sexual guru or priest who might absolve them. Their attitude to their husbands lets Dunbar unloose some more of his flyting vocabulary as the men’s failings are rounded on by their wives, while the poet also takes some delight in the scandalous secrets of these ‘gay ladeis’. One, for instance, always charges her husband for sex:

… leit I nevir that larbar my leggis ga betuene	impotent man
To fyle my flesche na fummyll me without a fee gret…90	nor fumble; great

The other wife hates her man as a lecherous waster. Offering its readers the delights of voyeurism, bizarre scandal, and outrageous comedy, Dunbar’s poem reveals the women as superbly appalling sisters of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, but their husbands sound less than saintly. Playing off low actuality against the decorous setting and formal Latin divisions of the ‘Tretis’ adds to its scandalous gusto. Whatever Dunbar does he does with superlative brio, and the ‘Tretis’ is among his most ambitious works.

The poem for which he is best known makes use of several techniques deployed elsewhere – the refrain, the pageant-like listing, the mixture of Scots and Latin. Yet it relies generally on a plain language supplemented by the occasional aureate flicker. Commonly known as ‘The Lament for the Makars’, this work is a sustained memento mori, a poem on the transitory, brittle nature of existence. This is made clear from the early verses, each ending with a refrain (also used by other poets) which translates as ‘The fear of death terrifies me’. The refrain’s tolling repetition throughout takes up 25 per cent of the poem.

The stait of man dois change and vary;
Now sound, now seik, now blith, now sary,
Now dansand mery, now like to dee:

Timor mortis conturbat me.91

What makes this poem unforgettable is the way it moves like a great funeral procession, bearing its extended catalogue of occupations and designations – from renowned rulers to babies – and then its list of individually named poets, all of whom death claims. Yet, the poem suggests with a certain ironic wit, the fame of poets’ names can outlast even death. Modern readers often feel both the shock of recognition on hearing familiar names, and a sense of loss on encountering unfamiliar ones. Time and the erosion of memory have complicated and increased the power of Dunbar’s lament. For while some of the names, such as ‘The noble Chaucer of makaris flour’, remain well known, others are now totally unrecognized. Among these are the names of some older Makars of ‘this cuntre’, i.e., Scotland. The 100-line poem can be heard as a dignified bibliography of loss. Certainly its litany of names has an incalculable cumulative impact. All the verbal variety of names – individual, occasionally echoic – is reduced to the sameness of the Latin refrain that ends each stanza, and whose acoustic inevitability the reader or hearer recognizes from early on, so that its heard inescapability is part of the poem’s disturbing, stately power. Death gathers Makar after Makar in an anthology of loss and (occasionally for us) of literary immortality:

He has tane Roull of Aberdene,
And gentill Roull of Corstorphin –
Two bettir fallowis did no man se:
Timor mortis conturbat me.
In Dunfermlyne he has done roune
With Maister Robert Henrisoun;
Schir Johne the Ros enbrast has he	embraced
Timor mortis conturbat me.
And he has now tane last of aw,
Gud gentill Stobo and Quintyne Schaw	[John Reid of Stobo]
Of quham all wichtis has peté:	Persons
Timor mortis conturbat me.
Gud Maister Walter Kennedy
In poynt of dede lyis veraly –	[on the point of]
Gret reuth it wer that he suld de:	Pity
Timor mortis conturbat me.92

The inclusion of the almost dead Kennedy, Dunbar’s doughty Gaelic-speaking antagonist in their famous flyting, makes the lament all the more moving, though it might just be a sly joke (Dunbar elsewhere wrote a spoof last will and testament for a Kennedy). As the names are read out, a movement is felt that advances towards the poet’s own death and hopes of a literary as well as a heavenly afterlife. It also advances towards the death of any reader whose voice comes to intone the lines, and so to embody the Latin ‘me’ which is the last word of the refrain, and, eventually, of the poem as a whole: ‘Timor mortis conturbat me.’

Some critics feel melancholy suffuses a lot of Dunbar’s work. It is hard to date many of his individual poems, but there may be a sense of gloom that impressively clouds parts of his oeuvre. Still, this is counter-pointed by such a vivacious, precisely detonated humour, and by such a variety of other emotional tones, from glorious exaltation to court intrigue, that it would be wrong to emphasize any one aspect of this poet’s writings at the expense of others. If poetry is an art of enriched expression, then very few poets have been able to express to so convincing a degree the range of human experience. We know comparatively little of this early Renaissance poet’s life; he seems to know a remarkable amount of ours.

No one can be sure exactly when Dunbar died, but he vanishes from official records after 1513. That year was cataclysmic for the courtly and noble life of Scotland. For on 9 September King James IV, during whose reign the country had prospered, was killed fighting the English at the Battle of Flodden. With him died many of his courtiers, churchmen and other leading subjects. James had been a learned man and a distinguished patron of letters. He was reported by the Spanish ambassador to speak seven languages (including Italian). To this polylingual king the probably Scottish-born poet Alexander Barclay (c. 1484–1552) addressed six stanzas of praise in his 1509 translation (via Latin) of the German Ship of Fools; a Latinist who had been ‘a scoler longe, and that in dyvers scoles’, Devon-based Barclay wrote the first substantial pastoral poems in English, his five Eclogues.93

Barclay’s work shows the influence of the European Humanist impulse to rediscover Classical culture and to take learning out of the monasteries and into the wider world. This Humanist influence was felt in James IV’s Scotland where newer Latin books such as the Italian Humanist Lorenzo Valla’s Elegances of the Latin Language (1440) began to circulate. Archibald Whitelaw’s 1484 Ciceronian oration delivered to the English King in Nottingham testifies to the oratorical power of a St Andrews- and Cologne-educated Scottish cleric whose Humanist tastes are clear. In Paris in 1495 the Scottish historian Hector Boece had been an early patron and admirer of Erasmus, and that great Dutch Humanist lamented the death of his own former pupil, James IV’s son Alexander, killed at Flodden. In the early sixteenth century Erasmus saw the Scots (along with the Irish and Danes) as exemplifying a new devotion to literature as a calling. The Montrose-born Latinist Patrick Paniter was admired in later centuries for the ‘Corinthian glitter’ of his prose.⁹⁴ Though not all of it was Humanist, there was certainly an upsurge in Scottish Latin poetry at the time. James Foulis (c. 1490 – c. 1549) dedicated his 1511 collection of Latin verse to Erasmus’s friend Alexander Stewart, Archbishop of St Andrews. A verse from Foulis’s poem to St Margaret of Scotland indicates his elegant accomplishment:

Inter ingentes aquilonis iras
Floribus leuem et zephyri sussurum:
Scotia est naui penetranda, toto ab

    Orbe remota.

Between the angry blasts of the North Wind
And the West Wind’s zephyr-whisper among flowers,
Scotland must be reached by ship, cut off

From all the world.⁹⁵

Yet the international language in which Foulis writes so confidently demonstrates that James IV’s Scotland was far from cut off from the world. That same Latin language and literature underpin Henryson’s work, are vital to some of the greatest moments in Dunbar’s, and are central to translations as different as those of Alexander Barclay and Gavin Douglas. Although modern readers may be tempted to think of the later Middle Ages as the era when vernacular Scots won its liberty from ‘thraldom’ to learned Latin, frequently it makes more sense to see the two languages as rewardingly intertwined. Latin was not only the great language of the European past, it was also a language of the Scottish present, whether for the Scottish authors who wrote in it, or for those Latin-educated Scottish poets who wrote in Scots. At the start of the sixteenth century the magnum opus of Scottish literature is a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid; in the mid-sixteenth century the greatest Scottish poet of the age, George Buchanan, wrote his verse entirely in Latin. In an era when a town clerk of Perth could be christened ‘Dionysius’, Latin was both a medium of international exchange and a local language at the heart of Scottish culture, particularly literary culture.

James IV’s reign had seen the establishment of a new university in Aberdeen (which became a beacon of Latin Humanism), and the arrival of printing when the King’s Clerk Walter Chepman and the bookseller Andrew Myllar established Scotland’s first, if short-lived, printing press in Edinburgh in 1508. In the 1490s Paris-educated James Liddell (author of an arcane Latin treatise on semiotics) had become the first Scottish author to have his writings printed during his lifetime; perhaps the first Scots poem to be printed (in London) was Father William of Touris’s The Contemplacyon of Sinners (1499), a work based on Latin models and annotated in that language. Though enormous in its implications, printing was only one of the great changes in James IV’s Scotland. Legal reforms, artistic patronage, architecture and music burgeoned along with literature during the reign of this King who both won the support of Highland chieftains and seems to have tolerated Dunbar’s views about them. At James’s court the first recorded Africans in Scotland worked as paid musicians and entertainers; the chivalric Tournaments of the Black Lady, held in 1507 and 1508, are alluded to by Dunbar who compares ‘My ladye with the mekle [big] lippis’ to ‘an tar barrell’ in a poem that could be called racist, though its rudeness is mild compared with this poet’s flyting invective elsewhere.96 James IV strengthened Scotland militarily, commanding the building of the Great Michael, the largest warship of its day, and he renewed the ‘Auld Alliance’ with France which had linked the two nations since the thirteenth century. Flodden bloodily interrupted a golden age of Scottish culture. In the words of a famous later lament for the dead in that battle, it seemed that ‘The Flowers of the Forest’ were ‘a’ wede [all withered] away’.97

Yet printing helped quicken the developing literary culture, even as courtly patronage faltered. Chivalric vernacular popular romances in verse and poems by Henryson and Dunbar were among the earliest of the texts Chepman and Myllar published, while, encouraged by the Aberdeen Humanist Bishop William Elphinstone, such printed works as the Aberdeen Breviary and the two-volume Legends of the Saints (1510) disseminated hagiographies of Scottish as well as foreign Christian heroes and heroines. While Flodden was an undeniable blow to Scottish culture, an increasingly confident set of institutions – ecclesiastical, educational and commercial – now existed to nurture a literature that was both confidently Scottish and internationally alert. James Foulis, a Latin ‘poet to his fingertips’, returned to Scotland from France in 1513 and enjoyed a successful legal career, as did his colleague the Latin poet Adam Otterburn whose work (now lost) was admired by Scotland’s greatest Latin Renaissance poet, George Buchanan.⁹⁸ Central to the Scottish literary culture of the age, Latin was the language which let Scottish writers mix with their European contemporaries. Moving among Cambridge, Glasgow, St Andrews and Paris, George Buchanan’s teacher, the philosopher and historian John Mair, produced his Latin Historia Majoris Britanniae in 1521. Where Buchanan in a famous poem would favour Scottish union with France, Mair (who shrewdly critiqued the superlatively ropy patriotic origin myths of both England and Scotland) controversially favoured a union with England; he shared with Buchanan and many earlier and later Scottish writers the view that a people could legitimately get rid of a bad king. Mair’s Latin history was followed in 1526 by the Parisian publication of the Scotorum Historiae of Hector Boece (c. 1465–1536), then Principal of King’s College, Aberdeen. Boece’s work would soon be translated into Scots by John Bellenden, and published in Scotland by Thomas Davidson in 1536. Bellenden dedicated his very free translation to James V, urging him to respect ‘thi commoun wele’, and he responded enthusiastically to the strong narrative imagination of Boece whose long account of early Scottish kings was in line with the Declaration of Arbroath; Bellenden’s Boece also delights in how the Romans were resisted by ‘the Scottis and Pichtis, quhilkis werane pepill full of chevelry and impacient of seruitude’, fighting bravely in their land of ‘montanis, mossis, and fludis’.⁹⁹

Although the divisions between some of its linguistic cultures could be substantial, Scotland was a small country and many of the most active Latin scholars knew one another. So, for instance, John Mair was an acquaintance of Gavin Douglas, the learned, St Andrews-educated Bishop of Dunkeld, whose version of The XIII Bukes of Eneados of the Famous Poete Virgile Translated out of Latyne Verses into Scottis Metre is one of the earliest full translations of a Classical epic into a European vernacular language, and was thought by Ezra Pound to excel its original. Douglas’s great translation was completed on 22 July 1513, six weeks before Flodden. The carnage of the battle was bad news for the nascent Scottish printing industry, and Douglas’s poem was not printed until 1553 when it appeared in London. Yet its subsequent publication, when taken along with other works such as those just mentioned, demonstrates a continuing efflorescence of Scottish writing at a time when literary activity in England was relatively unspectacular. Before the Protestant Reformation England was Scotland’s greatest enemy, yet Scottish poems circulated and were printed there, and Scottish poets were not so narrow-minded as to despise English verse. Not only did they admire and learn from Chaucer and other medieval English poets; they might even write in praise of England’s capital city. An attractive Scottish paean, sometimes wrongly attributed to Dunbar (who hymned ‘Blyth Aberdeane’ instead), begins,

London, thou art of townes A per se.	[tip-top]
Soveraign of cities, semeliest in sight…100

This was composed to serve the ends of a 1501 Scottish diplomatic mission, but it reads with pleasing conviction, and is written in a century when some Scots, such as John Mair, began to think of a united Britain. They were, however, in a minority. Able to look in many directions, Scotland’s literature, at least in Latin and in Scots quickened by Latin, flourished at this time as it had never done before. The work of Gavin Douglas added to its grandeur.

Douglas pursued honour. Scotland’s greatest vernacular Renaissance Humanist was born around 1474, third son of the Earl of Angus. He matriculated at St Andrews University in 1490, just eleven years after William Dunbar (whom Douglas admired) graduated there. They seem to have had some of the same teachers. Douglas got his St Andrews MA in 1494 (perhaps going on to study in Paris), and composed his first substantial poem in 1501. It is called The Palice of Honour. Rooted in medieval culture, yet alert to such modern figures as Petrarch and other Italian humanists, it is an allegorical poem whose speaker journeys to the palace of the title. Dedicated to James IV, and wishing him ‘renoun of cheualrie’, it apologizes in a conventional way for its author’s ‘vulgair ignorance’. The Palice of Honour, though, is a poem awash with knowledge, drawing fluently on Douglas’s rhetorical education. Its three sections all delight in catalogues – whether of kinds of music, admired poets (Classical, English and Scottish), countries, astronomical lore, virtues, or (as in this stanza) learned men:

Ptholomeus, Ipocras, Socrates,
Empedocles, Neptenabus, Hermes,
Galien, Auerroes, and Plato,
Enoch, Lameth, Job and Diogenes,
The eloquent and prudent Vlisses,
Wise Josephus, and facund Cicero,	eloquent
Melchisedech with vther mony mo.
Thair veyage lyis throw out this wildernes,	journey
To the Palice of Honour all thay go.101

Douglas was eager to follow them. His poem celebrates courtly virtues and, dedicated to the King, seems designed to appeal to an audience with a taste for lists, learning, courts and palaces. ‘Honour’ is ‘The michtie prince’ of Douglas’s palace where the ‘chancelair… Conscience’ also resides along with such courtiers as the ‘fine menstraill’ (minstrel) ‘Gude hope’. Conscious of his elders, the pushy twentysomething poet makes it clear that ‘To papis, bischoppis, prelatis and primaitis,/ Empreouris, kingis, princes, potestatis / Deith settis the terme and end of all thair hicht.’102 Virtue is hymned with aureate diction in a poem full of learning, life and ambition. It handles a difficult verse form (only two rhymes per nine-line stanza) with brio. It is full of heroes – from Ovid to Robert the Bruce – and a good deal of it is given over to honouring poets. The literary work to which most attention is paid is the Aeneid by ‘the greit Latine Virgilius’, whose epic is summarized over several stanzas telling of ‘knichtis’ and their ‘cruell battellis’.¹⁰³ Shortly after this summary Venus gives the narrator ‘ane buik’ which she commands him to ‘put in ryme’.

Although none of his works appears to have been printed in his lifetime, Douglas’s later printers took this to be a reference to his subsequent translation of Virgil. It may not be, but an interest in Virgil in the context of poetry, honour and chivalry is certainly evident in The Palice. A corresponding love of honour resonates through the ‘Conclusioune’ to his later Aeneid translation where, drawing on a famous passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he becomes probably the first poet in the English-speaking world to claim that his verse would make his name immortal, so that, when dead,

The bettir part of me sal be vpheild
Abuif the starnis perpetualy to ryng,	stars
And heir my nayme remane, but enparing.	without diminution
Throw owt the Ile ycleipit Albioune	called Britain
Red sall I be, and sung with mony one.104	Read

Yet this announcement in 1513 also marks a turning away from poetry on Douglas’s part, and the writings which survive from the later part of his career show his preoccupation with ecclesiastical ambitions and management. His subsequent career would see him advanced to the position of Bishop of Dunkeld, although, as his family lost out in struggles amongst Scotland’s ruling nobles, it would also involve exile and incarceration, some of it in ‘the wyndy and richt vnplesand castell and royk of Edinburgh’.105 There are occasional further hints of Douglas the patriotic writer of verse and pursuer of honour, as when he defends the kind of mythological genealogy of the Scottish kings which the Declaration of Arbroath had invoked. But it is sad to see such a gifted ex-poet spending his later years intriguing with the Church and state authorities over ‘my promotioun’.¹⁰⁶

Still, the unusual amount of surviving documentation covering his later career should not blind us to the buoyant, generous mixture of tradition and innovation, translation and origination that is Douglas’s Eneados. This monumental translation of Virgil’s Latin epic appears to date in the main from an eighteen-month period in 1512–13 when, among other things, Douglas was appointed one of several men ‘to assist and counsel’ the rector of his alma mater, St Andrews University.¹⁰⁷ The erudition of Douglas’s Virgil is not in doubt, but it is a poet’s learning, with poetry rather than dry scholarship as the driving force. Although a good deal of Douglas’s version is ‘almaiste word by word’ accurate, nonetheless ‘Sum tyme the text mon haue ane expositioun, / Sum tyme the colour will caus a litle additioun, / And sum tyme of ane [one] word I mon [must] mak thre.’108 So, for instance, Douglas will draw effortlessly on the matter of a Latin note in Ascensius’s 1501 printed edition of the Aeneid (which the Scot used) to make it clear that among those in the underworld lives ‘Inordinat Blythness of peruersit mynd’, but most of the time he moves directly from Virgil’s Latin to a Scots that can sound grandly Miltonic (‘Placis of silence and perpetuall nycht’), but more usually makes surefooted use of Scots idiom, as when a fire’s ‘furyus flambe’ is running along thatched roofs, ‘Spreding fra thak to thak, baith but and ben’.¹⁰⁹ ‘But and ben’ means ‘the outer and inner parts of a house’ and is a common Scots expression; ‘flambe’ looks towards French, while terms like ‘perpetuall’ and ‘Inordinat’ are clearly Latinate. The flavour of Douglas’s language is exactly as he describes in his Prologue to Book I of the translation. On the one hand, he protests his own failings in working with his native ‘bad, harsk speche and lewit barbour tong [low, barbarous language]’; on the other hand, he’s really proud to produce this epic ‘Writing in the language of Scottis natioun’, as opposed to the perverted, incomplete prose version by ‘Williame Caxtoun, of Inglis natioun’ on which Douglas flytingly spits.¹¹⁰

Yet even as the Scottish poet proclaims the Scottish purity of his translation, he happily praises Chaucer and confesses that he has augmented his own vocabulary from other sources as Latin writers themselves took terms from Greek. Douglas’s translation is regarded as a masterpiece of the Scots-language tradition, but it should also be seen as a milestone in the tradition of Scottish Latin; that language, as much as Scots, is crucial to the work. The scansion of Douglas’s lines can be unsure at times. Like Blind Hary he uses a sometimes alliterating ten-syllable line which had replaced octosyllabics as a metre for heroic narrative; like his medieval predecessors, he keeps to rhyming couplets. Perhaps only someone who has tried to translate a long work into a strictly rhyming form can fully appreciate how easy Douglas makes it sound. He writes with an energetic confidence, making his couplets carry the action forward so that it can move quickly from urgency to pathos, as it does here when Aeneas recalls searching for his wife through the sacked city of Troy:

And I also my self so bald wox thair,	so bold grew
That I durst schaw my voce in the dirk nycht,	voice
And cleip and cry fast throw the stretis on hycht	call
Full dolorouslie, Creusa! Creusa!
Agane, feil sise, in vane I callit swa,	many times; so
Throw howsis and the citie quhar I yoid,	went
But outhir rest or resoun, as I war woid;	without; mad
Quhill that the figour of Creusa and gost,
Of far mair statur than air quhen scho was lost,	earlier
Before me, catife, hir seikand, apperit thair.	wretch
Abaisit I wolx, and widdersyns start my hair,	I grew dismaid; on end stood
Speik mycht I nocht, the voce in my hals sa stak.	throat so stuck
Than sche, belife, on this wise to me spak,	at once
With sic wourdis my thochtis to assuage:	such
O my suete spous, into sa furious raige
Quhat helpis thus thi selfin to turment?	yourself
This chance is nocht, but goddis willis went…111	the course of God’s will

Although Douglas is hard for the modern reader unused to Scots, he has such a sense of drama, love of language, and dedication to his poetic calling that his work maintains its power to compel and beguile. When the spirits at the underworld’s River Styx, in a famous Virgilian passage, stretch out their hands with longing ‘to be apon the forther bray’, the use of ‘brae’ rather than ‘shore’ is an indication of how confidently Douglas has brought the Classical Latin poet into his ‘rurale’ vernacular.¹¹² He is aware that as a busy Christian churchman in his thirties he has devoted a considerable part of his life to translating a pagan poem. Yet though he sees a potential tension here, he seems relatively unworried by it. After all, not only Virgil but Christ is a ‘prince of poetis’ (since etymologically the word ‘poet’ means ‘maker’), and Douglas has invoked Christ and Christ’s mother as his ‘muse’.¹¹³ Some might be startled when, in one of his original Prologues, Douglas equates the Sibyl of Cumae with his beloved Virgin Mary. This is just an indication of Douglas’s enthusiasm for his poem, and an indicator of Douglas’s participation in a longstanding tradition in which the matter of pagan antiquity could be annexed and ‘translated’ to Christian ends.

A 1510 dialogue by John Mair put into Douglas’s mouth impatience with the obfuscatory arguments of medieval schoolmen, and a wish to return to the text of the Bible. In making available in 1513 a vernacular version of the Aeneid, a ‘wlgar Virgill’, Douglas was writing primarily for a courtly, aristocratic audience of men like his Fife patron, Henry, Lord Sinclair. Such men, like Douglas, might value the Aeneid for its ‘DOUCHTY CHIFTANYS FULL OF CHEVALRY’.114 The Eneados might help guide aristocrats along the paths to the ‘palace of honour’. Yet, though he does not envisage the work being printed, there are indications that Douglas sees it reaching a wider audience that is female as well as male, and that extends perhaps beyond the ‘gentill’:

Now salt thou with euery gentill Scot be kend,
And to onletterit folk be red on hycht,
That erst was bot with clerkis comprehend.¹¹⁵

This wish to move a great text from Latin into the vernacular might seem related to the later Reformers’ impulse to make the Vulgate Bible available in readers’ native tongues. Within a decade of Douglas’s translation, legislation would be passed in Scotland banning the importing of Lutheran texts. Douglas’s wordplay poem ‘Conscience’ laments how ‘halie kirk’ is eroding away, first from ‘conscience’ to mere ‘science’ (learning), then just to ‘ens’ (material stuff).¹¹⁶ Yet such suggestions should be set in the context of a poet who longed to be a Bishop, and who intrigued to gain ecclesiastical ‘promociones’.¹¹⁷ Douglas was an imaginative and ambitious pre-Reformation Scottish Catholic, not a Reformer. His achievement lies in his fusing of medieval and Renaissance modes. As a great Humanist Latinist he produces a Scottish Aeneas whose chivalry might stand beside that of an idealized Bruce, whose battles might captivate readers alongside those of a heroic Wallace, and whose poet’s language might take Scots writing into new areas of vision and expression.

Douglas’s work of Latin translation seems to have raised his game as an original poet. Indeed, since each of its books is accompanied by a substantial prologue authored by Douglas, his Eneados is also an anthology of his own work. Boccaccio had done something similar in his Genealogy of the Gods, a work Douglas admired, but it was an unusual way to proceed. The Scottish poet’s poems, grafted on to Virgil’s, are not uniformly good but they signal admirable ambition. They set out the development and method of translation, turning Douglas’s writerly task into a heroic labour of its own, and are at times absolutely outstanding. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Prologues to Books VII and XII, dealing respectively with winter and with May. Priscilla Bawcutt points out the remarkable fact that ‘No other poet writing in English before Douglas devotes so much space to the continuous description of the natural world.’118 Douglas’s celebration of May draws on literary conventions as well as observation to present its cornucopious world of ‘amerant medis’ (emerald meadows), heat, foliage, singing and dancing beside the sea; he delights in an ecology of abundance. Although it is unlikely that he knew anything about Gaelic poetic treatments of nature, Douglas in his description of winter does owe something to northern alliterative romances, and perhaps to such passages as that on the ‘doolie sessoun’ at the start of Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid. Yet no poet in the British Isles had so concentrated on the season as the Douglas who describes with intensifying alliteration in his ‘tristis prologus’ (sad prologue) that time when the air is ‘penetrative and puire’ (pure):

The soill ysowpit into wattir wak,	soaked; boggy
The firmament ourkest with rokis blak,	clouds
The ground fadyt, and fauch wolx all the feildis,	yellow-brown
Montayne toppis sleikit wyth snaw ourheildis	smoothed; [snow-covers]
On raggit rolkis of hard harsk quhyne stane,	harsh crags; whinstone
With frosyne frontis cauld clynty clewis schane:	surfaces; stony cliffs shone
Bewtie wes lost, and barrand schew the landis,	bare showed
With frostis haire ourfret the feildis standis.	hoar frost covered
Soure bittir bubbis, and the schowris snell,	sore; squalls; biting
Semyt on the sward ane similitude of hell,	turf
Reducyng to our mynd, in every steid,	place
Goustly schaddois of eild and grisly deid,	[old age]; death
Thik drumly scuggis dirknit so the hevyne.	gloomy clouds
Dym skyis oft furth warpit feirfull levyne,	threw; lightning
Flaggis of fyir, and mony felloun flawe,	flashes; fearful squall
Scharp soppis of sleit, and of the snypand snawe.119	showers

This Prologue appears to have been sparked off by translating accounts of the journey to the Underworld in Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid. The ‘hard flint stane’ in Douglas’s translation of Book VI becomes in his wintry Prologue to Book VII ‘hard harsk quhyne stane’, while translating the Latin poet’s ‘skuggis dirk’ (dark clouds) at the entrance to ‘hell’ encourages the subsequent Prologue’s wintry ‘similitude of hell’ where ‘scuggis dirknit’.¹²⁰ With a poet’s instinctively acquisitive ear, Douglas the original writer draws on Douglas the translator, collaborating with him to develop new, original work. Although later in the sixteenth century the poet Alexander Hume would relish a Scottish summer’s day and King James VI would address sonnets to the seasons, not for centuries would another Scottish poet find such sustained inspiration in weathered landscape; shortly after the major republication of Douglas’s work in Edinburgh in 1710, James Thomson (a student at Edinburgh University in the ensuing decade) would begin his own poetic career with a similarly spirited account of winter, then would go on to become famous as poet of The Seasons. Using a gardening image, Douglas images himself as bonded to Virgil’s text as if it were ‘a staik’; Virgil’s example and range nurtured in the Scottish cleric possibilities which allowed his own creative gifts to burgeon.121 Two centuries after his death, Douglas’s work still opened up possibilities for others.

Douglas had a highly educated imagination, but also a taste for popular culture. Gazing into a mirror in The Palice of Honour, the speaker sees not just such English folk heroes as Robin Hood and ‘Peirs Plewman’, but also the Irish ‘Greit Gowmakmorne and Fyn Makcoul’.¹²² This reference to the Gaelic heroic cycle of ballads about Finn MacCoul (Fionn MacCumhail) is a reminder that ‘Heland bardis’ as well as Italian minstrels and Lowland Scottish poets were patronized by James IV, and that bards’ subject matter could be well known in a Scotland where Gaelic was still widely spoken in the north and west.¹²³ Probably Gaelic-Scots bilingualism flourished in areas where the Highlands and Lowlands met. Although John Mair was scornful about the Highlands, his fellow early sixteenth-century Latinist Hector Boece (in Scots translation) wrote of ‘Ffyn Makcoul’ as ‘of huge stature, havyng sevin cubittis in hicht… ane crafty huntare and to all man ferefull for the strang quantite of his persoun’. Recording that there were popular stories and poems about ‘Ffyn’, as there were about King Arthur, this Scots Boece adds a little sniffily that they circulated ‘amang the vulgare pepill, mare than amang apprisit authouris’.¹²⁴

In The Book of the Dean of Lismore, the great manuscript treasury of Gaelic verse which was compiled mainly between 1512 and 1526, there are about two dozen poems from the Fionn cycle. Collected largely in Perthshire, often from packmen and lorgánaigh or wandering Gaelic bards, the poems in this substantial anthology contain much material from the heroic world later designated ‘Ossianic’. We glimpse a male ‘hunter of magical stags’ and a female ‘slender foot, a heel white and pointed’ as heroic nobles do battle and relax.125 The Book of the Dean of Lismore contains Gaelic work which, even in a modern English version, can have immediate appeal:

Honey in the call of any bird;
Honey a human voice in the Land of Gold;
Honey a crane’s song, and there is a heard
Honey Bun Da Threoir’s waters hold.

Honey in the calling of the wind;
Honey the cuckoo’s voice above Caise Con;
Honey in uncluttered, random sunlight,
Honey blackbirds’ songs till sunset’s gone.

Honey the eagle’s cry at the Red Falls
Way above the Bay of Morna’s Boy;
Honey the cuckoo’s call beyond the thickets,
Honey is that pause in the crane’s cry.

My father Finn MacCoul had in his war-band
Seven squadrons ready to fight any
Man or beast; when we unleashed the deerhounds
They leapt ahead, their baying pure wild honey.

My English version here tries to catch some of the musical repetition, the lexical and syntactic patterning of the Gaelic original. There are several short lyrics like this in The Book of the Dean of Lismore. Often, though, its poems are more extended. The poets in the collection like to hymn great Gaelic families and chieftains. Irish and Scottish works, some by professional (often named) Classical Gaelic poets writing in syllabic metres, mingle with work by amateurs. In addition to the heroic poems, a wide range of forms is represented – from religious work to sophisticated erotic lyrics, bawdy poems, and the sort of verse denunciations that gave rise to the Scots expression ‘to playe the baird’ (to write scathingly) and may have nourished the ‘flyting’ tradition in the Lowlands:

Ní h-iongnadh a bheith i bpéin:
fada ó b’ionchrochtha Ailéin;
ná luaidh ar láthair an fhir
chuaidh go a mháthair ’s go a phiuthair.

No wonder he is in torment,
Allan, over-ready for hanging;
say nothing of the manly strength of a man
who slept with his mother and sister.¹²⁶

So Fhionnlagh Ruadh (Finlay, the Red Bard) execrates the son of the chief of Clan Ranald, who died in the first decade of the sixteenth century, and is accused of desecrating Iona. The manuscript contains much older poems, such as those attributed to ‘great Ossian, the son of Fionn’ and to Muireadhach Albanach, as well as more recent works such as a tailor’s denunciation of a ‘grey, bristly, surly pack’ of Highland wolves and an anonymous battle-incitement addressed to the Earl of Argyll, urging him to fight the English who threaten to divide Scotland, and to burn their ‘ungentle’ women and children.¹²⁷

Very different in tone in The Book of the Dean of Lismore is Aithbhreac Inghean Corcadail’s ‘O rosary that recalled my tear’ (discussed above), or Isabel of Argyll’s hurt, courtly love lyric about a secret passion. In the early sixteenth century some poets, not least women, moved from the syllabic Classical Gaelic metres to stress-based verse in vernacular Gaelic, as heard in ‘The Lament for Mackintosh’, whose author complains that, because her husband was killed on her wedding day, she was ‘Am bhréidich, am ghruagaich/’S am bhantraich’s an aon uair ud’ (‘A kerched woman, a maiden/ And a widow all in that one hour’).¹²⁸ The Book of the Dean of Lismore includes work by the earliest known women writers in Scottish Gaelic, as well as a strain of misogyny. ‘I hate a band of poets that includes a woman,’ writes Felim MacDugall in a poem listing his detestations.¹²⁹ This manuscript, written mostly in Gaelic and containing a chronicle in Latin, represents a multifoliate flowering of Gaelic poetry, though there are occasional signs of a language coming under pressure. ‘It is not good to travel on Sunday’, begins another poem by Felim MacDugall, sounding a still recognizable note; the same poet also points out that ‘ní math iarla gan bhéarla’ (‘not good is an earl lacking English’).¹³⁰

In the areas where ‘Inglis’ (or what we would now call the Scots tongue) reigned, the spectrum of verse was at least as wide, but attitudes towards Gaelic culture were mostly hostile. Gavin Douglas may have known about Finn MacCoul, but in The Palice of Honour he also mentions two popular anonymous works of the late fifteenth century, the northern poem ‘Rauf Coilyear’ and the absurd piece ‘auld Cowkew­yis sow’, where ‘a bard’ is classed with ‘Ane vsurar’ and ‘a lolard’ in a catalogue of good-for-nothings.131 ‘Colkelbie’s Sow’ is an absurd and sometimes heavy-handed freewheeling Scots tale of the sale of a pig; suspended between oral rhyming and textual culture, the poem is intoxicatingly fixated on absurd lists, and mocks the moralizings of more serious writers. ‘The Taill of Rauf Coilyear’, on the other hand, shows what happens when a ‘collier’ (or charcoal-burner) meets a king; Charlemagne, in this Scots version of a common European story, seeks shelter in Ralph’s house, is not recognized, and is called ‘uncourteous’ by the tetchy Ralph, who boxes the King’s ears, but the comedy turns out happily when, eventually, the collier goes to court and achieves a knighthood. Like the popular, Scottish-inflected Arthurian Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawane, and like Douglas’s writings, ‘Rauf Coilyear’ looks back to medieval chivalric codes, but it also carries hints of a carnivalesque note sounded more uproariously in ‘The Gyre-Carling’ with its rock-shitting witch or, less scatologically, in ‘King Berdok’ whose Babylonian monarch spends his summer in a cabbage stalk.

These works may sound more enticing in summary than in full, but there is a more convincingly sustained music in the folk festivities of ‘Peblis to the Play’, a Beltane romp, and in ‘Christis Kirk on the Grene’. The latter’s title may sound as if it belongs to a religious work, but the solemn-sounding refrain that supplies the title is played off throughout against the goatlike bleats, bruising fisticuffs and reproachful yells of vying holidaymakers out for a wild spree on the village green. Some mischievous ‘damysellis’ who are ‘licht of laitis’ (light of manners) set things going, then men with names like ‘Heich Hucheon’ (Big Hedgehog) take centre stage for a full-scale brawl.

The millar wes of manly mak;
To meit him wes na mowis;	no joke
Thair durst nocht ten cum him to tak,
So nowit he thair nowis.	knocked; heads
The buschment haill about him brak	[whole ambush]
And bikkerit him with bowis.	attacked
Syne tratourly behind his bak	then treacherously
Thay hewit him on the howiss Behind,	hacked; calves
At Christis Kirk of the grene.132

These ten-line stanzas thrive on acoustic belt-tightening – there are only two rhymes in the first eight lines of each. Iambic tetrameter alternates with iambic trimeter until each ninth line hops on a single foot. This is the tiny line, a two-syllable hiccup, called the ‘bob’, which usually rhymes with nothing else and can be used for comic effect before the refrain that follows. The ram-stam of such stanzas would appeal to later Scottish poets who picked up on variations of this stanza form as well as on the hurly-burly of its contents. The popular tumbling of ‘Christis Kirk on the Grene’ would have a special appeal in the eighteenth century for Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns when they rejoiced in Scots verse that spoke of a popular milieu. Yet in the early Renaissance much of the finest poetry remained courtly or associated with great aristocratic families like the Sinclairs of Fife. Dunbar and Douglas were followed by their admirer Sir David Lyndsay, who held a court position as a herald.

Born around 1486, Lyndsay had strong family connections with Fife, but by 1511 he was active as part of James IV’s royal circle in Edinburgh where he lived close to Gavin Douglas during the time of the Eneados translation. After Flodden, Lyndsay was well liked by the young King James V and the two remained friends until the King’s death in 1542, by which time Lyndsay had been knighted. Lyndsay’s poetic output ranges from dream-vision to flyting, narrative to occasional verse. The King, with whom he flytes, is flattered conventionally one moment, only to be upbraided the next for ‘fukkand lyke ane furious fornicatour’.¹³³ In ‘The Dreme’ Lyndsay’s monarch is warned that the common people are ‘raggit, revin, and rent’, while Scotland is divided, and must have ‘ane gude auld prudent king’.¹³⁴ Drawing on the established international genre of ‘advice to princes’, Lyndsay’s work repeatedly touches on such themes, warning against ‘For commoun weill makand no cair’ even as the author relishes the ups and downs of court life.¹³⁵ In ‘The Testament and Complaynt of Our Soverane Lordis Papyngo’ (1530) a near-dead parrot (papyngo) warns the courtiers,

Traist weill, sum men wyll gyf you laud, as lordis,	Trust
Quhilk wald be glaid to se yow hang in cordis.

The parrot then bids a lengthy, high-toned farewell to the royal dwellings (‘Adew, Edinburgh, thow heych tryumphant toun’) while warning against popular resentment of ‘degenerit’ churchmen whom the King must control.136 One such churchman holds forth in ‘The Tragedie of the Cardinall’ (c. 1547). Written after James V’s death and at a time when Lyndsay’s poetry seems less narrowly focused on court life, this poem presents, largely in his own supposed words, the life and deeds of the devious figure of Cardinal David Beaton who became Chancellor in 1543 but was assassinated in St Andrews in 1546. Although Beaton ends by preaching virtue, parts of the poem come close to a dramatic monologue as the ‘aboundantlie bledyng’ Cardinal, boasting of his own ‘princelye prodigalytie’, celebrates his enthusiasm for ‘banketting, playng at cartis and dyse’. Yet the allure of the poem comes less from what Beaton unwittingly reveals about himself than from what he openly declares. We seem to be listening to his last confession as this burner of Protestant heretics recounts how he planned to kill ‘Sum with the fyre, sum with the sword and knyfe/… And purposit tyll put to gret torment/ All favoraris of the Auld and New Testament.’¹³⁷ The Protestants Beaton martyred are not named, and the poem’s focus is all the stronger for its almost Browningesque concentration on Beaton’s proclamation of his own domination and violence.

Towards the end of his life, Lyndsay turned towards a more companionable biographical poem. Written in the early 1550s, his warm account of a family friend, ‘Squyer Meldrum’, presents an actual military and amorous career in the octosyllabic couplets and literary armature of Arthurian romance. William Meldrum from ‘the schyre of Fyfe’ serves ‘nobill Lowes, the king of France’ and has many adventures likely to gladden the hearts of a Scottish audience:

Thair was slane, of Inglis band,	English
Fyve scoir of men, I understand,
The quhilk wer cruell men and kene,
And of the Scottis wer slane fyftene.138

Although he never marries, Meldrum enjoys passionate lovemakings, retires to Fife, and dies of old age after a regretful farewell to his lovers. So the military knight of the Middle Ages is transformed into a Renaissance country gentleman. This warm blend of biography and rerouted chivalric romance allowed Lyndsay both to accommodate and sweeten recent history. He is a poet who touches excellence only unevenly; most of his works are stronger in part than as wholes. Although he wrote of Scotland, his imagination was hardly confined to it. In ‘The Dreme’, when the figure of Remembrance shows the poet ‘the devisioun of the Eirth’ there is an impressive international roll-call, an acoustic of amplitude and vision in which Lyndsay may enjoy looking away from Scottish politics:

 

Secundlie, we considderit Africa,
With mony fructfull famous regioun,
As Ethiope, and Tripolitana,
Zewges, quhare standis the tryumphant toun
Of nobyll Cartage, that ciete of renoun;
Garamantes, Nadabar, Libia,
Getulia, and Maritania.139

Lyndsay had never seen these places, but clearly enjoys escaping into the high-falutin litany of their names. Yet some of Lyndsay’s strongest verse is about taking scripture to a common audience without the mediation of Church or courtly hierarchies. Alert to the cultural links that went with ‘the weill keipit Ancient Alliance’ with France, to the intonations of the Latin Mass, and the ‘cairfull corrynogh’ or Gaelic funeral lament, Lyndsay, in paying tribute to the ‘eloquence’ of the great translator Gavin Douglas, could also remind his audience that ‘our vulgare toung’ had been consecrated for poetic use.¹⁴⁰ Respectful of rhetorical training, and loyal to his Scots and English precursors, Lyndsay at the end of his career grows increasingly concerned about ‘lawis’ which are ‘Inventit be mennis traditioun,/ Contrair to Christis institutioun’. He turns away from the Classical muses (‘I did never sleip on Pernaso’ (Parnassus)) to take ‘God to be my muse’.¹⁴¹ In ‘Ane Dialog Betwix Experience and Ane Courteour’ (1554) he produces a kind of vernacular retelling of Bible stories. Like Gavin Douglas, Lyndsay was interested in cultural, not just linguistic, translation. Lyndsay argues that Christ spoke to his people in their native tongue, and that, while Latin may be appropriate for doctors, learned poets and others, there is a need both for the laws to be translated into ‘vulgare language’ and for scripture in the vernacular:

 

Bot lat us haif the bukis necessare
To commoun weill and our salvatioun,
Justlye translatit in our toung vulgare.¹⁴²

The use of ‘us’ and ‘our’ here by this courtly poet is a gesture of identification with the wider community which was by this time con­vulsed by the energies of the Reformation. Alert throughout his career to the abuses of Church privilege, Lyndsay probably continues to speak from within the Catholic Church, but his writings show how close some Catholics at this time might be to some of the Protestant Reformers and champions of vernacular scripture. Lyndsay, as he matured, became more and more of a bridge between Catholic and Protestant impulses, and between courtly and ‘common’ culture.

This is most evident in his major dramatic work, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (1552). Lyndsay’s play mixes advice to the monarch with direct appeals to the populace. It stages for mid-sixteenth-century Scots the contemporary and sometimes violent social conflicts in their midst. Burgh records show that there were Corpus Christi plays and other religious dramas acted throughout fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Scotland. Little survives. Lost too are other kinds of drama, ranging from Robin Hood frolics to clerks’ plays performed at the Universities of St Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen. We know earlier playwrights’ names and the titles of their works, but Lyndsay’s Satyre is the oldest substantial extant dramatic text written in Scotland. Drawing on French sotties, or fools’ plays, with their daft sermons, as well as on older French and English morality plays and moralizing farces, Lyndsay’s sophisticated drama operates in dangerous territory. At its heart is the social unrest surrounding the struggle for ‘reformation’ in a land whose king is being told to curb the power and abuses of Churchmen.

The play was designed for performance in Cupar, just ten miles from the St Andrews which had become the epicentre of the Scottish Reformation and scene of notorious sectarian killings, from the burning and torture of several university students, teachers and preachers who campaigned for vernacular scripture and Protestant reforms, to the recent assassination of Cardinal Beaton in 1546. Lyndsay had some involvement with John Knox in St Andrews, where Knox (an ally of English Protestantism) had studied at the University under John Mair, and where Knox preached in 1547 before being captured and enslaved by the French. To author a play which related to the violent ideological struggles and social problems which were developing was a perilous exercise in a Scotland worn down by almost ten years of war against England. Just a decade before in Dundee, about twelve miles by foot and ferry from St Andrews, a friar had been burned when his drama was deemed heretical. Lyndsay may have essayed some contentious contemporary topics earlier. Now, in his mid-sixties, he produced his most ambitious work, operating in a medium which could reach out to literate and illiterate audiences.

In two substantial parts separated by an interlude, this verse drama uses allegorical characters with names like ‘Divyne Correctioun’, ‘Pauper’, ‘Dame Sensualitie’ and ‘Rex Humanitas’ (King Humanity). It starts with Diligence talking about God in rather aureate-sounding language. ‘The Father and founder of faith and felicitie,/ That your fassioun formed to His similitude.’ But soon there is a pause, and Diligence begins again with a much more demotic accent, familiarly asking the audience to pay attention and shut up –‘Tak tent to me, my friends, and hald yow coy!’143 Throughout the play kinds of verse, language and conduct are juxtaposed as Lyndsay both demonstrates dramatic flair and draws on his poetic versatility, transferring elements of poetic form to the stage. So listeners hear about ‘Ane perle of pulchritude’ as well as taking in the flyting talk of ‘Ane fistand flag, a flaggartie fuffe’ (A belching slag, a sluttish tinker).¹⁴⁴ The action advances from a land where Sensuality, Wantonness and other vices (often in clerical garb) have got the better of the King, to a state where, thanks to the intervention of ‘Divyne Correctioun’ and the voices of the country at large, the King calls a Parliament which issues laws to reform the Church and set the state in order. This Parliament comprises the three ‘Estates’ in the (unnamed) country – the secular aristocracy, the spiritual leaders and the merchants; yet its deliberations also involve John the Commonweal, who represents the whole population, and an unruly Pauper who is on his way to St Andrews in search of justice.

This extension of the Parliament so that it comes to speak for the whole people is only one way in which Lyndsay dramatizes struggles against established authority. More obvious are his characters’ repeated denunciations of Church abuses and corruption. Many quote scripture, not only in Latin but also in ‘the New Testament, / In Englisch toung’, as part of their sometimes knockabout disputations.¹⁴⁵ In an act of cultural translation Lyndsay takes the ecclesiastical and academic genre of the formal public arguments or ‘disputations’ held in Latin by scholars and, by staging them in the vernacular while including often bawdily funny dramatic flytings of his own, he appeals to the people at large. In Cupar his play was performed in 1552 in front of James V. Clever dramatic use is made of the real King’s presence alongside that of Rex Humanitas. But the play was also performed before a general audience likely to sympathize with Gude Counsall’s plea:

Wee came nocht heir for disputatiouns;
We came to make gude reformatiounis…146

The King in the play is warned by Correctioun that unless he behaves better he ‘sall be ruttit out’, as Tarquin was by the Romans. The Pardoner with his fake holy relics who denounces reformers such as ‘That Martin Luther, that fals loun’, is presented in as unsympathetic a light as is the Flatterie who cries ‘Heresie, heresie!’ and demands burnings.¹⁴⁷

This play can be starkly violent. After the Parliament has issued its acts, the figures of vice, who have an appealingly awful vitality, are hanged in front of the audience. Some aspects of The Thrie Estaitis are closely attuned to contemporary Reformers’ practice. Calvin and, later, Knox would draw up legal frameworks for the reform of Church and society while appealing to the populace for support. Yet The Thrie Estaitis, while staging these convulsive contemporary debates, concludes less with theology than with comedy as the figure of Folly denounces warring Christian factions. John the Commonweal may speak a vernacular Scots creed that omits the word ‘catholic’, but the last words of the play are addressed to God in Latin. Later writers of varying persuasions would claim Lyndsay as one of their own. His play gives voice and body both to rebellion and to conservatism. In its advice to the King and its sense of the monarch as guided by his people, Lyndsay’s drama can be aligned with the Declaration of Arbroath, with the ‘advice to princes’ tradition, and with the political philosophy of George Buchanan whose verse satire on the Franciscans had led him to flee Cardinal Beaton’s Scotland at the end of the 1530s. Set beside the work of Shakespeare, who was born twelve years after the play was performed in Cupar, Lyndsay’s work looks and sounds medieval. Yet in its very direct engagement with contemporary politics and its unflinching portrayal of social and religious upheaval, it operates in territory Shakespeare avoided. Authored by a nobleman who was for much of his life a courtier, and apparently advocating strict, reforming government, Lyndsay’s play has an energy closely bound up with its energetic contentions about several kinds of political, religious, personal and linguistic ‘libertie’.¹⁴⁸

The image of the iconoclastic author and preacher John Knox, as presented in the 1580 Icones compiled by the French poet and dramatist Theodore Béze (‘Beza’), who succeeded John Calvin as protestant pastor in Geneva. (St Andrews University Library, Typ SwG.B80LB)