The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
BY
JOHN BARBOUR
Archdeacon of Aberdeen
EDITED FROM THE BEST TEXTS
WITH LITERARY AND HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION,NOTES AND APPENDICES, AND A GLOSSARY
BY
W. M. MACKENZIE, M.A., F.S.A. (Scot.)
AUTHOR OF “AN OUTLINE OF SCOTTISH HISTORY,” ETC.
LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1909
The poem The Bruce, by John Barbour, is preserved in onlytwo manuscripts, one in the library of St. John’s College,Cambridge, and the other in the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh.The former is hereafter denoted by the letter C, the latterby E. Of these E alone is complete in the sense of havingboth beginning and end; the first three Books and Book IV.1-56 are missing in C. On the other hand, C bears to havebeen completed in 1487, E in 1489. Other things being equal,the earlier MS. must, of course, be preferred. Here, however,intervenes a series of extracts, numbering 280 lines fromBooks I. and II., embedded in Wyntoun’s Orygynale Cronykilof Scotland, and the two MSS. of the Cronykil are actuallyolder than those of The Bruce. This raises a difficulty, asWyntoun’s extracts show a goodly proportion of variations inlanguage from the corresponding passages in E, the onlyother MS. which covers the same ground. Professor Skeatconsiders that Wyntoun’s lines are “in a better form (in themain)” than those of E;[1] but, on the other hand, we do notknow Wyntoun’s method of working in such a case—how farhe transcribed verbatim, how far “he modified the languageof the MS. which he must have had before him.”[2] Manylines he omits, and others he obviously paraphrases; he incorporatesmatter from another source; and his version ofThe Bruce lines may quite well be due to memorial reproductionafter a hurried reading. It is not otherwise easy toaccount for scraps of a few lines of the poem being here andthere embedded in narrative independently worded or derived.There is thus no warrant for erecting this chopped-up, second-handversion of the lines in question into a canon or standardfor a purely scribal transcript made for its own sake. It isneedful to enter this plea in view of the separatist theory of[Pg vi]Mr. J. T. T. Brown, for whom the passages in Wyntounrepresent so much of the original or ur-Bruce, out of whichour MS. and printed versions have been elaborated by afifteenth-century editor, who, to do so, borrowed freely andwith no great cunning from the works of contemporaryauthors.[3]
The earliest printed versions of The Bruce raise yet anotherissue bearing on the purity of the text. The first is apparentlyof the year 1571, and only one copy is known to exist.[4] I