The Earliest Scottish Literature

AS has been indicated in the preceding chapter, it is probable that, from a very early period in the English colonisation of Britain, an English dialect was spoken from Forth to Tweed, which was, in most respects, practically indistinguishable from that spoken between the Tweed and the Humber. Even along the north-eastern coast, English was soon the language of the little towns that traded by sea. Before 1124, the communities of Aberdeen, Banff, Elgin, Forres, Nairn and Inverness had formed themselves into a miniature Hanseatic league, on which David I conferred sundry privileges. The inland country behind these communities remained for long in the hands of a Gaelic-speaking people. In the north of Aberdeenshire there is evidence that the harrying of Buchan, carried out by Robert the Bruce, in 1308, as part of his vengeance on his enemies the Comyns, introduced the English language to the inland districts, for in local documents the names of persons change speedily after that date from Gaelic to English. Of a Scottish literature before the wars of independence there is no trace. In the period preceding the death of Alexander III, in 1286, Scotland was so prosperous that it is difficult to believe no such literature existed. But, as the dialect of Scotland was not yet differentiated from that south of the Tweed, such a literature, unless it took the form of chronicles or was of a strictly local character, could not easily be identified. It is noticeable that there is no lack of literature of which the scene is connected with Scotland. The romance of Sir Tristram, which is associated with the name of True Thomas, the mysterious seer of Erceldoune, is preserved only in a dialect which is not Scots. Though the Gawain cycle appears in different forms in different dialects, all of them seem to be English. Yet Gawain, according to the legend, was prince of Galloway; and, as we shall see, there is some reason to connect some of these poems with a Scottish author. The contradiction, however, is more in appearance than in reality. If these poems were composed by a Scottish author, they were, undoubtedly, intended rather for recitation than for reading; and, even if they were meant to be read, a southern scribe would be certain to adapt the forms to his own dialect. This adaptation might be either intentional or unintentional. If intentional, the purpose would be to make the poem more easily intelligible to southern readers; if unintentional, it would typify the result which always ensues in all languages from the mechanical copying of an alien dialect. In the Scots dialect itself, the political separation brought about by the wars of Wallace and Bruce produced considerable changes. The oldest fragments of the dialect are to be found in the phrases introduced for greater precision into the Latin laws of David I and his successors. In these we hear of blodewit, styngisdynt, hereieth and so forth, for which, in the later Scots version, are substituted bludewyt, stokisdynt, hereyelde. Till Scotland has become again an independent kingdom, such words as these, and the vernacular glosses on the hard words in a Latin lease, are all that survive to us the old Scottish tongue. Of early continuous prose there are no remains. The earliest poetry extant appears in the few musical and pathetic verses on the death of Alexander III, which have been quoted a thousand times. Though preserved only by Wyntoun (c. 1420), they, no doubt, are not far removed from the original form of a hundred and fifty years earlier. In Fabyan’s Chronicle are preserved some of the flouts and gibes at the English, baffled in the siege of Berwick and defeated at Bannockburn. But it is with Barbour, whose poem The Bruce is the triumphant chronicle of the making of the new kingdom of Scotland by Robert and Edward Bruce and the great “James of Douglas,” that Scottish literature begins. As the national epic, coloured, evidently, to a large extent by tradition, but written while men still lived who remembered Bannockburn and the good king Robert, it is entitled to the first place, even though conceivably some of the literature of pure romance be not less old.

In John Barbour, the author of The Bru ce, we have a typical example of the prosperous churchman of the XIV century. As we may surmise from his name, he had sprung from the common folk. Of his early history we know nothing. We first hear of him in 1357, when he applies to Edward III for a safe-conduct to take him and a small following of three scholars to Oxford for purposes of study. By that date, he was already archdeacon of Aberdeen, and, as an archdeacon, must have been at least twenty-five years old. He probably was some years older. He died, an old man, in 1396, and we may reasonably conjecture that he was born soon after 1320. In those days there was no university in Scotland, and it may be assumed that the archdeacon of Aberdeen was, in all probability, proceeding in 1357 to Oxford with some young scholars whom he was to place in that university; for the Latin of the safe-conduct need not mean, as has often been assumed, that Barbour himself was to “keep acts in the schools.” The safe-conduct was granted him at the request of “David de Bruys,” king of Scotland, at that time a captive in King Edward’s hands; and Barbour’s next duty, in the same year, was to serve on a commission for the ransom of king David. Other safe-conducts were granted to Barbour in 1364, 1365 and 1368; that of 1365 allowing him to pass to St. Denis in France, while, in 1368, he was allowed to cross into France for purposes of study. In 1372 and 1373, he was clerk of the audit of the king’s household; and, in 1373, also one of the auditors of the exchequer. By the early part of 1376, The Bruce was finished; and, soon after, we find him receiving by command of the king (now Robert II) ten pounds from the revenues of the city of Aberdeen. In 1378, a pension of twenty shillings sterling from the same source was conferred upon him for ever—a benefaction which, in 1380, he transferred to the cathedral of Aberdeen, that the dean and canons might, once a year, say mass for the souls of his parents, himself and all the faithful dead. With northern caution, he lays down careful regulations as to how the dean is to divide the twenty shillings among the staff of the cathedral, not forgetting even the sacrist (the name still survives in Aberdeen) who tolled the bell. Other sums were paid to Barbour by the King’s order form the revenues of Aberdeen, and, in 1388, his pension was raised by the king, “for his faithful service,” to ten pounds, to be paid half-yearly at the Scottish terms of Whitsunday and Martinmas. He died on 13 March 1396. Like Chaucer, he received from the king (in 1380–1) the wardship of a minor who lived in his parish of Rayne in Aberdeenshire. On at least one of the many occasions when he was auditor of the exchequer, Sir Hew of Eglintoun, who, as we shall see, is also reputed a poet, served along with him.

To Barbour also has been attributed a poem on the Siege of Troy, translated from the popular medieval Latin Troy Book of Guide delle Colonne, of which two considerable fragments are preserved with Barbour’s name in a manuscript in the Cambridge University Library. The second fragment is found also in a Douce MS. in the Bodleian Library. There is no doubt that these fragments, which have been utilised to complete an imperfect copy of Lydgate’s translation to Guido, are in the same metre as The Bruce, which is shorter than that of Lydgate. They are also, no doubt, in Scots, but, in all probability, they are in the Scots of the fifteenth, not of the fourteenth, century, and, in detail, do not resemble Barbour’s undoubted composition. More recently, and with much more plausibility, George Neilson has contended that The Buik of Alexander, a Scottish translation from two French poems, is by the author of The Bruce. The similarities of phraseology between The Buik of Alexander (which exists only in a printed copy of about 1580, reprinted for the Bannatyne Club in 1831) and The Bruce are so numerous and so striking that it is impossible to believe they are of independent origin. To return to The Bruce. This, the work by which the reputation of John Barbour stands or falls, dates from his later middle life. He must have been a man of between fifty and sixty before it was finished. It is in no real sense a history, for Barbour begins with the astounding confusion of Robert the Bruce with his grandfather the rival of John Balliol in claiming the crown. As Barbour’s own life overlapped that of king Robert, it is impossible to believe that this is an accidental oversight. The story is a romance, and the author treated it as such; though, strange to say, it has been regarded from his own time to this as, in all details, a trustworthy source for the history of the period.

Barbour’s achievement in his age and circumstances is very remarkable. This is more vividly realised, if his work be compared with the other national epic, Blind Harry’s Wallace, which, in its own country, secured a more permanent and more general popularity than The Bruce. Till into the nineteenth century, one of the few books in every cottage was the Wallace. The causes of this popularity are to be sought in the fact that Wallace, being more genuinely a Scot than Bruce, as time went on, came more and more to be regarded as the national hero, and his exploits were magnified so as to include much with which Wallace had nothing to do. The very defects of Harry’s poem commended it to the vulgar. It professes to be the work of a burel man, one without special equipment as a scholar, though it is clear that Harry could at least read Latin. While Barbour’s narrative contains a certain amount of anecdotal matter derived from tradition, and, on some occasions, deviates from tradition, and, on some occasions, deviates from the truth of history, it is, on the whole, moderate, truthful and historical. Harry’s work, on the other hand, obviously is little but a tradition of facts seen through the mists of a century and a half. Historians are unable to assign to the activity of Wallace in his country’s cause a space of more than two years before the battle of Falkirk in 1298. Harry, though nowhere consistent, represents his hero as fighting with the English from his eighteenth year to his forty-fifth, which is, practically, the period from the death of Alexander III to the battle of Bannockburn. But Wallace was executed in 1305. The contents of the work are as unhistorical as the chronology. If Barbour took care, on the whole, that Bruce should have the best of it, though recognising that he suffered many reverses, Wallace’s path is marked by uniform success. Where Bruce slays his thousands, Wallace slays his ten thousands. The carnage is indiscriminate and disgusting. But, by the time that Wallace was composed, a long series of injuries subsequent to the wars of independence had engrained an unreasoning hate of everything English, which it has taken centuries of union between the countries to erase from the Scottish mind. hence, the very violence of Wallace commended it to its readers. To the little nation, which suffered so severely from its powerful neighbour, there was comfort amid the disasters of Flodden or of Pinkie in the record of the doughty Wallace. Of the author of this poem we know next to nothing. According to John Major (Mair) the historian, Wallace was written in his boyhood by one Henry, who was blind from his birth, and who, by the recitation of his poem in the halls of the great (coram principibus), obtained the food and clothing he had earned. The date of the composition of the poem may be fixed, approximately, with the clue supplied by Major, as 1460. In the treasurer’s accounts various payments of a few shillings are entered as having been made to “Blin Hary.” The last of these payments is in 1492. Harry probably died soon after. Sixteen years later, Dunbar, in his Lament for the Makaris, enters him in the middle of his roughly chronological list of deceased poets. From Major’s account it is clear that Harry belonged to the class of the wandering minstrels who recited, like Homer of old, the deeds of heroes to their descendants. In Scotland, when the descendants of the heroes were no longer interested in such compositions, the bards appeared before humbler audiences; and many persons still alive can remember the last of them as, in the centre of a crowd of applauding yokels, he recited his latest composition on some popular subject of the day. The sole manuscript of the poem, now in the Advocates’ Library at Edinburgh, was written in 1488 by the same time, wrote the two existing manuscripts of The Bruce. That he was a more faithful transcriber than he generally gets credit for having been, is shown by the well-marked differences between the language of the two poems. While, in Barbour, hardly a trace is to be found of the characteristic Scottish dropping of the final ll in all, small, pull, full, etc., we find this completely developed in Wallace, where call has to rime with law, fall with saw, etc. Here also pulled appears as powed, while pollis is mistakenly put for paws and malwaris for mawaris (mowers). As Harry was alive at the time when Ramsay wrote the manuscript, it may have been written from the author’s dictation. Be that as it may, there is nothing in Harry, and more than in Homer, to show that the author was born blind. On the contrary, some of his descriptions seem to show considerable powers of observation, though the descriptions of natural scenes with which he prefaces several of the books are an extension of what is found, though rarely, in Barbour (e.g. V, 1–13, XVI, 63 ff.) and had been a commonplace since Chaucer. The matter of his poem he professes to have derived from a narrative in Latin by John Blair, who had been chaplain to Wallace and who, if many of Wallace’s achievements are well nigh as mythical as those of Robin Hood, was himself comparable in prowess to Little John. He was, however, a modest champion withal, for Harry tells us that Blair’s achievements were inserted in the book by Thomas Gray, parson of Liberton. The book is not known to exist; but there is no reason to doubt that it had once existed. According to harry (XI, 1417), its accuracy was vouched for by Bishop Sinclair of Dunkeld, who had been an eye-witness of many of Wallace’s achievements. But, either the book from which Harry drew was a later forgery, or harry must have considerably embroidered his original; it is inconceivable that a companion of Wallace could have produced a story widely differing in chronology, to say nothing of facts, from real history. 23 But, when the poem has been accepted as a late traditional romance, founded upon the doings of a national hero of whom little was known, Wallace is by no means without merit. Harry manages his long line with considerable success, and so firmly established it in Scotland that the last romantic poem written in Scots—Alexander Ross’s Helenore, or the Fortunate Shepherdess —carries on, after three centuries, the rhythm of harry with the greatest exactitude. There is no lack of verve in his battle scenes; but they are all so much alike that they pall by repetition.

But the Scots of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries did not spend all their leisure in hearing and reading romances or the lives of saints. They had an equal, or, if we may judge from the number of extant manuscripts, a greater, interest in the chroniclers of the past. With the earliest of these and, in some respects, the most important of them we have but little to do, for they do not write in the Scottish tongue. Scalacronica was compiled in Norman-French by Sir Thomas Gray, of Heton in Northumberland, while a prisoner in the hands of the Scots at Edinburgh, in 1355. The valiant knight, ancestor of families still distinguished on the border, finding time hang heavy on his hands, put together from the best sources at his disposal a chronicle from the beginning of the world to his own time. For the period of the wars of independence it is a first-hand authority and, as the work of a man of affairs, whose “hands had often kept his head,” it has a value distinct from that of the monkish chronicles.

Andrew of Wyntoun, who wrote his chronicle in Barbour’s couplet and in the Scottish tongue, was an older contemporary of Walter Bower. He died an old man soon after 1420. Of him, as of the other contemporary chroniclers, we know little except that he was head of St. Serf’s priory in Lochleven, and a canon regular of St. Andrews, which, in 1413, became the site of the first university founded in Scotland. The name of his work, The Orygynale Cronykil, only means that he went back to the beginning of things, as do the others. Wyntoun surpasses them only in beginning with a book on the history of angels. Naturally, the early part is derived mostly from the Bible, and The Cronykil has no historical value except for Scotland, and for Scotland only from Malcolm Canmore onwards, its value increasing as the author approaches his own time. For Robert the Bruce, he not only refers to Barbour but quotes nearly three hundred lines of The Bruce verbatim —thus being the earliest, and a very valuable, authority for Barbour’s text. in the last two books, he also incorporates a long chronicle, the author of which he says he did not know. From the historical point of view, these chroniclers altogether perverted the early chronology of Scottish affairs. The iron of Edward I had sunk deep into the Scottish soul, and it was necessary, at all costs, to show that Scotland had a list of kings extending backwards far beyond anything that England could boast. This it was easy to achieve by making the Scottish and Pictish dynasties successive instead of contemporary, and patching awkward flaws by creating a few more kings when necessary. That the Scots might not be charged with being usurpers, it was necessary to allege that they were in Scotland before the Picts. History was thus turned upside down. Apart from the national interests which were involved, the controversy was exactly like that which raged between Oxford and Cambridge in the sixteenth century as to the date of their foundations, and it led to the same tampering with evidence. Wyntoun has no claims to the name of poet. He is a chronicler, and would himself have been surprised to be found in the company of the “makaris.”

Of Robert Henryson, in some respects the most original of the Scottish Chaucerians, we know very little. He is described, on the title-page of the earliest extant edition of his Fables (1570), as “scholemaister of Dunfermeling.” His birth has been dated about 1425. A “Master Robert Henryson” was incorporated in 1462 in the university of Glasgow, which had been founded in 1451. The entry states that the candidate was already a licentiate in arts and bachelor in degrees. It is probable, therefore, that his earlier university education was received abroad, perhaps at Paris or Louvain. His mastership at the Benedictine abbey grammar-school in Dunfermline and his notarial office would-lead us to infer that he was in lower orders. His death, which may have taken place about 1500, is alluded to in Dunbar’s Lament for the Makaris. There are no dates to guide us in tracing the sequence of his poems, and the internal evidence is inconclusive. Yet we cannot be far out in naming 1450 as the earlier limit of the period during which they were composed.

Henryson’s longest and, in some ways, his best work is his Morall Fabillis of Esope. The material of the book is drawn from the popular jumble of tales which the Middle Ages had fathered upon the Greek fabulist; much of it can be traced directly to the edition of Anonymus, to Lydgate’s version and to English Reynardian literature as it appeared in Caxton’s dressing. On one sense, therefore, the book is the least original of Henryson’s works; but, in another, and the truer, it may take precedence of even The Testament of Cresseid and Robene and Makyne for the freshness of its treatment, notably in its adaptation of hackneyed fabliaux to contemporary requirements. Nor does it detract from the originality of presentation, the good spirits, and the felicity of expression, to say that here, even more than in his closer imitations of Chaucer, he has learnt the lesson of Chaucer’s outlook on life. Above all, he shows that fineness of literary taste which marks off the southern poet from his contemporaries, and exercised but little influence in the north even before that later period when the rougher popular habit became extravagant. The Fables, as we know them in the texts of the Charteris print of 1571 and the Harleian MS. of the same year, are thirteen in number, with a general prologue prefixed to the tale of the Cock and the Jewel, and another introducing that of the Lion and the Mouse. They are written in the familiar seven-lined stanza, riming ababbcc,

As the didactic element is necessarily strong in the fable, little may be said of its presence in Henryson’s work, except, perhaps, that his invariable habit of reserving all reflections for a separate moralitas may be taken as evidence of the importance attached to the lesson. Earlier English fabulists, such as Lydgate, mixed the story and the homily, to the hurt of the former. Henryson’s separation of the two gives the narrative greater directness and a higher artistic value. Indeed, the merit of his Fables is that they can be enjoyed independently and found self-satisfying, because of the contemporary freshness, the unfailing humour, and the style which he weaves into familiar tales. The old story of the sheep in the dog’s skin has never been told in such good spirits; nor is there so much “character” in any earlier or later version of the Town and Country Mouse as there is in The Uponlandis Mous and the Burges Mous. In his treatment of nature he retains much of the traditional manner, as in the “processional” picture of the seasons in the tale of the Swallow and the other Birds, but, in the minor touches in the description of his “characters.” he shows an accuracy which can come only from direct and careful observation. His mice, his frog with his chanticleer, his little birds nestling in the barn against the storm, even his fox, are true to the life. It is, perhaps, this realism which helps his allegory and makes it so much more tolerable to the modern reader. There is, too, in his sketches more than mere felicity: he discloses, again and again, that intimacy and sympathy with nature’s creatures which we find fully expressed in Burns, and, like his great successor, gently draws his readers to share the sentiment. Orpheus and Eurydice, based on Boethius, may be linked with the Fables in type, and in respect of its literary qualities. The moralitas at the close, which is irksome because of its undue length, shows that the conception is similar: the title moralitas fabulae sequitur indicates that the poet was unwilling to let the story speak for itself. This, however, it does, for it is well told, and it contains some lyrical pieces of considerable merit, notably the lament of Orpheus in ten-lined stanzas with the musical burden “Quhar art thow gane, my luf Erudices?” or “My lady Quene and luf, Erudices.” Even in the processional and catalogue passages, in which many poets have lost themselves or gone aground, he steers a free course. When he approaches the verge of pedantic dulness in his account of the musical technicalities which Orpheus learnt as he journeyed amid the rolling spheres, he recovers himself, as Chaucer would have done.

William Dunbar has held the place of honour among the Scottish “makars.” It may be that his reputation has been exaggerated at the expense of his contemporaries, who (for reasons now less valid) have not received like critical attention. Scott’s statement that he is “unrivalled by any which Scotland ever produced” strikes the highest note of praise, and is, perhaps, responsible for much of the unvaried appreciation which has followed. Russell Lowell’s criticism has arrested attention because it is exceptional, and because it is a singular example of extravagant depreciation. It has, however, the indirect value that it prompts us to test our judgments again, and weigh the value of such popular epithets as “the Scottish Chaucer” and “the Scottish Skelton.” There is generally a modicum of truth in easy titles of this kind, though the essence of the epithet is too often forgotten or misunderstood. Of the personal history of William Dunbar, we have only a few facts; and of the dates of his writings or of their sequence we know too little to convince us that any account of his literary life is more than ingenious speculation. As Dunbar appears to have graduated bachelor of arts at St. Andrews in 1477, his birth may be dated about 1460. Internal evidence, for the most part indirect, points to his having survived the national disaster at Flodden, perhaps till 1520. Like Kennedy, his poetic rival in the Flyting, Gavin Douglas and Lyndsay, and, indeed, like all the greater poets from James I, with the exception of the schoolmaster of Dunfermline, he was connected with the court and, like most of them, was of noble kin. These facts must be kept in mind in a general estimate of the courtly school of Scottish verse, in explaining its artificialities and in understanding the separation in sentiment and technique from the more popular literature which is superseded for a time. This consideration supplies, among other things, part of the answer to the problem why the national or patriotic note, which is strongly characteristic of later writers, is wanting at a period when it might be expected to be prominent. In preceding work, with the exception, perhaps, of Wallace, the appeal to history is in very general terms; during “the golden age,” when political forces were active and Border memories might have stirred the imagination, the poets are wholly absorbed in the literary traditions of romance, or in the fun and the disappointments of life at court; only in the mid-sixteenth century, and, first, most unmistakably in the French-made Complaynt of Scotlande, do we find that perfervid Scotticism which glows in later literature. Dunbar’s kinship with the house of Dunbar did not bring him wealth or place. After his college course he became a novice, subject to the strict rule of the Observantines of the Franciscan order. He appears, however, to have fretted under the restraint of his ascetic calling. In a poem entitled How Dumbar wes desyrd to be ane freir he makes frank confession of his difficulties, and more suo describes the exhortation to him to “refuse the world” as the work of the devil.

He found some relief in the roving life of a friar, and he appears to have spent a few years in Picardy and other parts of France, where he certainly was in 1491 with Bothwell’s mission to the French court for a bride for the young James IV. There among the many Scots then haunting Paris, he may have met Gavin Douglas, Elphinstone, bishop of Aberdeen, Hector Boece and John Major; but the Sorbonne, where they were to be found, had, probably, few attractions for him. It is tempting to speculate that the wild life of the faubourgs and the talent of Bohemians like François Villon (whose poems had just been printed posthumously, in 1489) had the strongest claim upon the restless friar. It has been assumed, not without some plausibility, that there are traces in the Scot’s poems of direct French influence, in other and deeper ways than in the choice of subjects which Villon had made his own. By 1500, he was back in Scotland, no longer an Observantine, but a priest at court, pensioned by the king, and moving about as a minor official in royal business. The title “rhymer of Scotland,” in the English privy council accounts during the sojourn in London of the Scottish embassy for the hand of Margaret Tudor, has been taken by some to mean that, beyond his being the poetical member of the company who praised London in verse, he was recognised to some extent as laureate. Of his literary life, which appears to have begun with his association with the court in 1500, we know nothing beyond what the poems tell us indirectly; but of the sentiment of his age, as seen by a courtier, we have the fullest particulars.

Dunbar’s poems fall into two main divisions—the allegorical and occasional. Both show the strength of Chaucerian tradition, the former in a more immediate way, the latter (with full allowance for northern and personal characteristics) in the continuance of the satirical, moral and religious themes of the shorter poems of Chaucer’s English followers. There is, however, a difference of atmosphere. Dunbar’s work is conditioned by the circumstance that it was written by a courtier for the court. Poetry had fallen, as has been hinted, into close association with a small royal and aristocratic coterie. But life at court, though it showed a political and intellectual vigour which contrasts favourably with that of earlier reigns, and had grown more picturesque in serving the exuberant taste of the “redoubted roye,” was circumscribed in its literary interests, and, with all its alertness, added little or nothing to the sum of poetic endeavor. The age may have been “golden”; it was not “spacious.” Literary consciousness, when it existed, turned to the romantic past or to the old ritual of allegory, or to the re-editing, for contemporary purposes, of plaints of empty purses, of the fickleness of woman, of the vanity of the world and of the lack of piety; or it was absorbed in the merely technical task of illuminating or aureating the “rude” vernacular. If, however, the area was not enlarged, it was worked more fully. From this experience, at the hands of writers of great talent, much was gained for Scottish verse which has the appearance of newness to the literary historian. What is, therefore, outstanding in Dunbar, is not, as in Henryson, the creation of new genres or fresh motives. Compared with Henryson, Dunbar shows no advance in broad purpose and sheer originality. He is, apart from all question of vocabulary, more artificial in the stricter historical sense; and he might have deserved no better from posterity than Lydgate and Occleve have deserved had he not supplied the rhythms and added life and humour to the old matter.

If no serious effort has been made to claim Dunbar as a child of the renascence, except in respect of his restlessness, in which he shows something of the human and individual qualities associated with that movement, his contemporary Gavin Douglas has been frequently described as the embodiment the fullest and also the first among Scottish poets, of the principles of neoclassicism. A critic of high consideration has recently said that “no poet, not even Dante himself, ever drank more deeply of the spirit of Virgil than Gavin Douglas.” Others who consent to this have laid stress on the fact that Douglas was the first translator of a great verse classic into the vernacular. If this conclusion were as just as it is, at first sight, plausible, Douglas could have no place, or only a very minor place in this chapter, which assumes a fundamental homogeneity in medieval method, in most respects incongruent with the literary intention of the new learning. Like Dunbar, Douglas was of good family, and a cleric; but he had influence and fortune which brought him a large measure of worldly success. He had become a dignitary of the church when the erst-friar was riming about the court and writing complaints of his empty purse. Unlike Dunbar, he had no call to authorship. His literary career, if we may so speak of the years when all his work was written, is but a part of a busy life, the early experience of a man destined to lose his leisure in the strife of politics. He was the third son of Archibald, fifth earl of Angus, the “great earl,” better known as “Bell-the-Cat.” He was born c. 1475, and completed his early training in 1494, when he graduated at St. Andrews. In 1501, after spending some time in cures in Aberdeenshire and the Lothians, he became provost of the collegiate church of St. Giles in Edinburgh, his tenure of which partly synchronised with his father’s civil provostship of the capital. Between this date and 1513 (that defining year in all Scottish biography of this period) he did all his literary work, The Palis of Honour, King Hart, Conscience and the translation of the Aeneid, begun early in 1512 and printed in 1513. Other writings have been ascribed to him—a translation of Ovid (though, in one place, he speaks of this work as a task for another), plays on sacred subjects and sundry Aureae orationes; but none are extant, and we have his testimony (in the “conclusion” of the Aeneid), which may be accepted as valid, that he made Vergil his last literary task.

His later history is exclusively political, a record of promotions and oustings. He was bishop of Dunkeld from 1516 to 1520, when he was deprived of his see because he had gone to the English court for aid in the Douglas-Albany quarrels. Tow years later, he died of plague in London, in the house of his friend lord Dacre. Just before his death, he had sent to another friend, Polydore Vergil, material for the latter’s History, by way of correction of Major’s account, which Vergil had proposed to use.

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