10 - Barbour’s Bruce in the 1480s: Literature and Locality

Summary

Barbour’s Bruce was a work whose values and motivations belonged firmly in the 1370s. The clear internal and external evidence for its composition in 1375 is backed up by the ethos and content of the narrative. The poem was clearly intended for the entertainment and elucidation of King Robert II and other great lords of the realm, glorifying their predecessors and exhorting them to follow the paths taken by their ‘nobill eldrys’. There can be no doubt that The Bruce reflected the family pride of individuals like Robert Stewart, William and Archibald Douglas and William Keith and a wider identification with the events of Robert Bruce’s reign as providing a moral and physical vindication of the collective freedoms and status enjoyed by the Scottish realm and its nobility. By Scottish standards the readership and reputation of the poem in the decades after its composition are well attested. Both Andrew Wyntoun in The Original Chronicle of Scotland and Walter Bower in Scotichronicon refer to Archdeacon Barbour’s poem as an authority on the events of the early fourteenth century when their long historical narratives of the Scots reach this pivotal period. The perceived value of the work as a ‘suthfast’ account of Robert I’s winning of his kingdom is evident in Wyntoun and Bower’s references to it. Alongside this, it might be assumed that the narrative of personal prowess, valour and martial skill would continue to appeal as entertainment to an audience drawn from the secular nobility. Its use as a template was even more apparent in a second long, verse historical narrative, The Wallace, which was composed in the 1470s by an author known as Blind Hary. In its basic conception, its literary form and in its blatant borrowings from The Bruce, The Wallace demonstrated an obvious knowledge of the earlier work which was acknowledged, within the later poem, as the established authority for the events which follow the end of its own story.

However, although we have good evidence for the date of composition of The Bruce and continued familiarity of Scottish readers with the poem, the earliest extant copies of the work can be internally dated to the later 1480s, over a hundred years after its composition.