Scottish Authors > John Barbour Poet 1320-1395

John Barbour, commonly termed "the father of Scottish literature", was author of The Bruce, the earliest Scottish poem of any length that is now extant. Nothing is known of Barbour's early life, but in 1357 he became Archdeacon of Aberdeen, an office that he held till his death in 1395. As archdeacon he was second in rank only to the bishop of his diocese, and conducted ecclesiastical courts concerning arrears in teinds (tithes), and other offences. There is no evidence that Barbour possessed a university degree, but most archdeacons had a knowledge of canon and civil law; he seems to have studied for a short time in Oxford, and on other occasions travelled, on pilgrimage or for study, in England and France. Barbour was an Auditor of the Exchequer to Robert II, and received from him a pension and other payments, apparently in recognition of his literary labours.

Barbour wrote a lost genealogical work, The Stewartis originall,and modern scholars have attributed other poems to him. But the only work that is certainly his is The Bruce (usually dated to the late 1370s), which celebrates Robert Bruce (Robert I) and the War of Independence. Barbour himself called the poem a "romance", and was clearly familiar with the chivalric themes and stories popular in the Middle Ages: he depicts Bruce as reading aloud the romance of Fierabras to his troops, while they were waiting to cross Loch Lomond. But from the outset Barbour stresses his concern with "suthfastnes", or truth, and the poem is largely faithful to historical fact, much more so than Blind Harry's Wallace. Nonetheless the portrait of Bruce is idealized, and the history is exemplary, designed to instruct Barbour's contemporaries at a period when Scotland was split into factions. A passage in praise of freedom is justly famous:

A! fredome is a noble thing!

Fredome mays [makes] man to haif liking [delight]

Fredome all solace to man giffis:

He levys [lives] at ese that frely levys.

(I.225-8)

But Barbour also celebrates other values - "treuthe", or personal loyalty, courage in adversity, and, above all, the strong and effective leadership that is embodied in Bruce, his model of a good king.

Barbour is a competent story-teller, although his octosyllabic couplets are occasionally monotonous. His style is swift, laconic, and colloquial; yet he is not lacking in rhetorical art, and set-pieces of portraiture and oratory, such as Bruce's speech at Bannockburn, are interspersed among the vivid accounts of sieges, battles and single combat.

Barbour's Bruce, ed. Matthew R McDiarmid and JAC Stevenson, 3 vols. Scottish Text Society, Edinburgh, 1980-85. Selections from books I, II, and XII, in Longer Scottish Poems: 1. 1375-1650, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt and Felicity Riddy, Edinburgh, 1987. Lois Ebin, John Barbour's Bruce: Poetry, History and Propaganda in Studies in Scottish Literature, 9. 1972, 218-42. R James Goldstein, The Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, 1993.

Priscilla Bawcutt

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