The Brus by John Barbour (c 1320-1395)

Often called the ‘father of Scots poetry’, John Barbour is likely to have been born sometime between 1320 and 1330; in any event, well within the generation immediately following the Battle of Bannockburn that he would later immortalise in such brilliant verse. Scotland as a kingdom was being forged around him, with the now famous ‘Declaration of Arbroath’ composed and sent to the Pope in 1320, six years after Bannockburn, in order to defend Scotland’s freedom from servitude and uphold the kingship of Robert the Bruce. As a wee boy, Barbour’s ears will have been full of tales of the mighty battle from people who saw it with their own eyes and fought it with their own swords. He may well also have remembered how the country felt when King Robert I died in 1329. 

 We don’t know much about his early life, but, by 1357, Barbour was Archdeacon of St Machar’s Cathedral in Aberdeen, and he would go on to hold a number of posts in the royal court as well. We also know that he spent time in England and in France in order to undertake study (Scotland’s first university, St Andrews, wouldn’t be established until 1413). Although other historical works have been attributed to Barbour along with ‘The Brus‘, we are certain only about his authorship of the epic and a now lost genealogical history of the Stewart royal house (‘The Stewartis Oryginalle’). He died in 1395. 

In many ways, ‘The Brus’ can be seen as continuing the Brucean propaganda – and demonisation of England to Scotland’s advantage – seen at its height in the Declaration of Arbroath. There are notable parallels, for example, between the Declaration of 1320 and Barbour’s interpretation, writing in the 1370s, of Bruce’s address to his men before the battle. To justify the Scots going to war against the English, Barbour has Bruce invoke

‘the mekill ill/That thai and tharis has done us till’ – this ‘mekill ill’ surely the same ‘trauchles and dree brocht by the English […] the deeds o ill-daein, slauchter, strouth, reivin, and arson, the imprisonin o prelates, the burnin doun o monasteries, the choreyin, and the pittin tae deid o monks and nuns – forby monie ither coontless ootrages that he perpetratit agin oor people, wi nae regaird fur age or sex, religion or rank […]‘ set out in the Declaration. 

Moreover, Barbour has Bruce contrast the morally unassailable motives and divinely ordained cause of the Scots with the morally lacking and unholy ambitions, the pride and avarice, of the English: where the latter show ‘mekill pryd’ and fight ‘for thair mycht anerly’, the Scots ‘haf the rycht/And for the rycht ay God will fecht’, and take to the battlefield ‘for our lyvis/And for our childer and our wyvis/And for the fredome of our land’. Once again, we cannot but be reminded of the best-known lines of the Declaration, ‘It is, forsuith, no fur glory nor siller nor honours that we fecht, but fur freedom alane […]’.

The narrative of Scottish nationhood centred around blameless victimhood, holy exceptionalism and moral superiority relative to its bigger southern neighbour of England must still have resonated with Scots in the 1370s, and Barbour plays on this to the full in ‘The Brus‘. 

The vocabulary of the Middle Scots of ‘The Brus‘ is replete with words that we still recognise in Modern Scots today, albeit sometimes in older forms of spelling: from ‘hame’, ‘heid’ and ‘kirk’, to ‘dochtir’, ‘eftir’, ‘kinrick’, ‘grete’, ‘fecht’, ‘maist’, ‘mycht’, ‘rycht’ ‘deid’, ‘mekill’, ‘skaith’, ‘wrang’ ‘gyf’, ‘thyrldome’ ‘blyth’ ‘gar/gart’ and ‘sekyrly’. 

The epic is full of unambiguous Middle Scots grammatical markers such as the past tense ‘-it/-yt’ ending on weak verbs that we still see and hear in many modern Scots verbs. For example, verbs such as defendit, governyt, schawyt, callit, askit, cryit, hangyt, assayit, commaundyt, makyt, assemblyt, concordit, recordit, assentit, arestyt, degradit, fulfillyt and preservyt are to be seen in every other verse. In addition, there are present participles in ‘-and’ (such as plesand, apperand, takand, ridand, lauchand, and cumand) and the immediately recognisable Middle Scots ‘-is’ inflection to mark possessives and plurals. For example, Barbour refers to ‘the kingis hert’ and has Bruce tell his men to be ready for the fighting ‘in bataillis with baneris displayit‘; or, describing Douglas, Barbour writes that ‘he wes in all his dedis lele’ and ’till gud Ector of Troy mycht he / In mony thingis liknyt be’.

Moreover, the fricative ‘-ch’ sound, still present in Modern Scots, is seen written in many words (such as thocht, mycht, rycht, brocht) and we see Middle Scots pronouns including the Norse-derived forms ‘thai/thaim’ (compare with Old Icelandic ‘þeir, þheim’). Finally, the epic contains countless instances of the visually striking Middle Scots ‘quh-‘ at the start of words that now start with ‘wh-‘; as in quhat, quhar, quhethir, quhen, quha. For example, at the very start of the epic, setting the scene for the events to follow, Barbour writes,’Quhen Alexander the King was deid/That Scotland haid to steyr and leid’; or, later, referring to the Douglas, ‘Bot quha in battail mycht him se […]’.

‘The Brus’ could claim renown not long after its writing; it was clearly well-known and respected by the two most significant 15th-century chroniclers of Scottish history, Andrew of Wyntoun and Walter Bower, both of whom (albeit to differing degrees) quote from and refer their readers to ‘the Bruss buke.’ As well as demonstrating the influence of Barbour’s narrative on the telling of Scotland’s history, such references also speak to the familiarity of the readership of Wynton and Bower with the epic and what must have been the relatively widespread availability of manuscripts of ‘The Brus’ during that era. 

Although ‘The Brus’ was first set down in the 14th century, we know it today only from two manuscripts from the later 15th century (the Cambridge one of 1487 and the Edinburgh one of 1489), both transcribed by the same scribe. Testament to its enduring popularity, we have significant evidence of its being printed throughout the 16th and 17th century, including by famous printers such as Robert Lekprevik (the most important printer of the 1570s); Edinburgh printer Andro Hart (1616/1620); Gedeon Lithgow, printer to the University of Edinburgh (1648), and Robert Sanders, printer to the city and university of Glasgow (1672). Springing forward to the 19th century, no less than Sir Walter Scott, one of the best-known writers in Scotland’s history, drew much inspiration from Barbour’s Brus – including in his highly popular ‘Tales of a Grandfather; Being Stories taken from Scottish History’ (1828) and the last of his Waverley novels, ‘Castle Dangerous’ (1831). The most accessible modern edition of the text – with facing-page prose translation into English – is that of A.A.M Duncan, first published in 1997.