9 - ‘Thar nobill eldrys gret bounte’: The Bruce and Early Stewart Scotland

Summary

Despite the many scholarly examinations of The Bruce, there has been relatively little interest in the particular political and social context in which Barbour composed his work, or in the way the text might have been moulded for, and received and interpreted by, its original audience in the years around 1375–76. Instead, Scottish historians have been most concerned to discuss The Bruce in terms of its potential usefulness as a historical source for developments in the first three decades of the fourteenth century. The likely dating and nature of the various narratives underpinning The Bruce are obviously important in any debate over the historical reliability of the text. The tendency has been to stress the likelihood that Barbour’s tale incorporated, or made extensive use of, sources composed much closer in time to the events they recorded and described. The recycling of this earlier material made, it has been suggested, The Bruce more historically ‘trustworthy’ than its date of compilation might imply. The notion that The Bruce might have been significantly shaped by the concerns and pre-occupations of Barbour’s own time has received less sustained attention. In some ways this is surprising, since the themes raised and discussed in The Bruce about the nature of Anglo-Scottish relations and the causes, aims and appropriate conduct of warfare between the two kingdoms would seem to have had an obvious relevance to many in the Scottish realm at the point when the work was actually completed. Barbour certainly openly articulated the hope that the exemplary behaviour and attitudes of his principal protagonists would be held up as a mirror to the noblemen of his own time, who were expressly urged to replicate the virtues of their ‘nobyll eldrys’. The belief that the deeds of great chivalric figures were worthy of remembrance and emulation was, of course, something of a truism in late medieval secular texts, but there is no particular reason to doubt that the picture of early fourteenth-century Scotland laid out in Barbour’s work was genuinely intended to be both resonant and inspirational for the nobility of the Scottish realm in the 1370s. The Bruce provides prolonged reflection on the nature of Anglo-Scottish conflict earlier in the century and a justification and encouragement for the pursuit of war with the English crown to recover ‘illegally’ occupied lands and lordships.