Barbour's 'Brus'

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss John Barbour's epic poem The Brus, or Bruce, which he wrote c1375. The Brus is the earliest surviving poem in Older Scots and the only source of many of the stories of King Robert I of Scotland (1274-1329), popularly known as Robert the Bruce, and his victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314. In almost 14,000 lines of rhyming couplets, Barbour distilled the aspects of the Bruce’s history most relevant for his own time under Robert II (1316-1390), the Bruce's grandson and the first of the Stewart kings, when the mood was for a new war against England after decades of military disasters. Barbour’s battle scenes are meant to stir in the name of freedom, and the effect of the whole is to assert Scotland as the rightful equal of any power in Europe. With Rhiannon Purdie Professor of English and Older Scots at the University of St Andrews Steve Boardman Professor of Medieval Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh And Michael Brown Professor of Scottish History at the University of St Andrews Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: John Barbour (ed. A. A. M. Duncan), The Bruce (Canongate Classics, 2007) G. W. S. Barrow, Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 1988) Stephen Boardman, The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III (Tuckwell Press, 1996) Steve Boardman and Susan Foran (eds.), Barbour's Bruce and its Cultural Contexts: Politics, Chivalry and Literature in Late Medieval Scotland (D. S. Brewer, 2015) Michael Brown, Disunited Kingdoms: Peoples and Politics in the British Isles, 1280-1460 (Routledge, 2013) Michael Brown, The Wars of Scotland, 1214-1371 (Edinburgh University Press, 2004) Thomas Owen Clancy and Murray Pittock, Ian Brown and Susan Manning (eds.), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Vol. 1: From Columba to the Union (until 1707), (Edinburgh University Press 2006) Robert Crawford, Scotland's Books: A History of Scottish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) Robert DeMaria Jr., Heesok Chang and Samantha Zacher (eds.), A Companion to British Literature: Vol 1, Medieval Literature, 700-1450 (John Wiley & Sons, 2014), especially 'Before the Makars: Older Scots literature under the early Stewart Kings' by Rhiannon Purdie Colm McNamee, The Wars of the Bruces: Scotland, England and Ireland 1306-1328 (Tuckwell Press, 2001) Michael Penman, Robert the Bruce, King of the Scots (Yale University Press, 2014) In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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  This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you'll find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, around 1375, John Barber wrote The Bruce, the oldest surviving poem in older Scots and the only source of many of the stories of Robert the Bruce and his victory over the English at Banockburn 60 years before. In almost 14,000 lines of rhyming couplets, Barber distilled the aspects of the Bruce's history most relevant for his own time, when the mood was for a new war against England after decades of disasters.

• 2:20Speaker 04

  Barber's battle scenes are meant to stir in the name of freedom, and the effect of the whole is to assert Scotland as a rightful equal of any power in Europe. With me to discuss Barber's The Bruce are Michael Brown, Professor of Scottish History at the University of St Andrews, Steve Boardman, Professor of Medieval Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh, and Rhiannon Purdie, Professor of English and Older Scots at the University of St Andrews. Rhiannon, what, if anything, do we know about John Barber himself?

• 2:50Speaker 05

  Well, we know he was active at the court of Robert II. The first record we have of him is he's the preceptor at Dunkeld Cathedral, and he then becomes Archbishop of Aberdeen in 1356, so that's the first point in his career. We don't know when he was born, we often guess, you know, but people often say, maybe 1320, 1325, absolutely no evidence for it. The first record we have of him is 1355 and then 1356. Thereafter, there are records of him going out to England and France on kind of study leave in the 1360s. By the 1370s, he is occasionally appearing at Robert's court as an auditor of the exchequer

• 3:35Speaker 05

  in the 1370s, and he does that again in the 1380s. 1378, he gets a pension from Robert of a pound a year, so we assume this is perhaps for composing The Bruce. He dies in Aberdeen in thirteen ninety five.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  Well, that sums it up, doesn't it?

• 3:52Speaker 05

  There we go.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  The language of the poem is older Scots. What's that language and who was using it at the time?

• 4:00Speaker 05

  Well, we now call it older Scots because it is the ancestor of what we now call Scots. But what Barbara called it was English. And as far as he was concerned, it was it was just another dialect of English. You know, such another, there's English spoken in Yorkshire, very different from English spoken in London, very different from English spoken in Herefordshire. So it was the English that was spoken in Scotland. And that's what he's speaking and that's what he's writing. And that's what he calls it when he mentions the language.

• 4:26Speaker 04

  And was this widely written in this way?

• 4:29Speaker 05

  The only records we have of written Scots start, the only thing that has survived for us and dates from the thirteen seventies. So this is not just the earliest literary work in older Scots. It's one of the earliest bits of writings in Scots. The poem itself, it's a poem, it's in octus syllabic couplets, so eight syllable rhyming couplets. So it's actually a very basic and common form for medieval narrative works. So plenty of other chronicles are written in it, all kinds of other works as well. Romances, many of the romances that Barbara's read, but it's not it's not tied to any particular form. It's it's kind of the minimal poetic form you can use, which is easy to read, easy to recite. It's got a regular rhythm.

• 5:14Speaker 05

  It's relatively easy to to write because you only have to rhyme a couplet and move on to the next couplet. You know, there's there's nothing to stop it. It's a bit like a train.

• 5:24Speaker 05

  So it gives it this sort of impetus. And it's also easier to read on a page because you get a relatively narrow column that you can let your eye trail down. So it's much easier to read than prose, for example. So this is why it was quite attractive to write in.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  Steve, can I ask you, its central character is Robert the Bruce. Can you tell us a bit about Robert the Bruce and why he's writing about him?

• 5:47Speaker 06

  Well, Robert Bruce is better known perhaps as Robert the First, King of Scotland from 1306 to his death in 1329. The way Bruce comes to the throne is unusual, to say the least. His family has a claim to the crown which becomes active after the death of the Scottish King Alexander III in 1286. And after Alexander III's death, there's a competition develops between two families, Bruce's family and the Baileo family. In the end, the Baileo claim wins out, so King John Baileo is made king in 1292.

• 6:30Speaker 06

  But crucially at that point, who's been involved in arbitrating that contest is Edward the First of England. And Edward the First has established his rights to superiority over the Scottish kingdom in the course of that contest. When Edward asks for those rights to be recognised by Baileo, Baileo refuses. And in 1296, Edward the First invades Scotland, deposes Baileo, and we're into a long period where Scotland is governed directly by the English king.

• 7:02Speaker 04

  Let's get back to Robert the Bruce. What's he doing here?

• 7:05Speaker 06

  At that point, Robert is actually quite supportive of Edward, because Edward represents a potential way back into the kingship. So for about 10 years, Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, Lord of Annandale, oscillates between resisting the English administration in Scotland and cooperating with them against the Baileos and their allies.

• 7:27Speaker 04

  Okay, let's talk about the state of Scotland of the 1370s, when Barbo was writing. Who was king then?

• 7:35Speaker 06

  The king in the 1370s is Robert the Steward, Robert Bruce's grandson, who's come to the throne in 1371. So in the terms of the long context of the 14th century, it's a period of peace. But there are still areas of the Scottish kingdom held by English lords that has been allowed by the terms of the truce established in 1357, and that truce is renewed in 1369. So it looks as if important places for the Scottish realm, places like Berwick, Jedborough, Roxburgh, are going to remain in English hands for the foreseeable future. And there's a constituency within Scotland, particularly younger lords with interest

• 8:20Speaker 06

  in the borders, who want to reclaim those lands, reclaim their own estates, that are at the moment denied them.

• 8:27Speaker 04

  Thank you. Michael Brown, we don't need the full plot, but what does Barbara the Bruce cover? What period in people?

• 8:34Speaker 07

  Barbara makes a big deal of telling the truth, but he's also very careful in the way he frames his story. And he starts it in 1306 with Robert becoming king, and takes it through to the death of Robert and his two principal captains, James Douglas and Thomas Randolph, between 1329 and 32.

• 8:54Speaker 04

  It's a long stretch.

• 8:55Speaker 07

  It is a long stretch. It's 14,000 lines, as we've heard. So he's trying to distill those elements of the story which he wants his audience to grab on to, I think. And so the seizure of the throne, and how it's a legitimate thing. So this controversial...

• 9:11Speaker 04

  So he's trying to make Robert legitimate?

• 9:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, he's, well, I think Scots regard Robert as legitimate by this time, but what Barbara is doing is trying to elevate that legitimacy and link it to a story about heroism and prowess as well. So he's glamorising the narrative to a certain extent, and he does that by telling stories about Bruce's initial defeats, his flight into exile, and then his return and the way, almost individually, he's holding off English forces or assassins who are trying to kill him. And then on to the kind of narrative of grander warfare leading up to Banockburn, which, you know, in some ways is the climax of the whole poem. And then from that, you have episodes of war in northern England and in Ireland. Culminating in the triumphant peace treaty that Bruce secures in thirteen twenty eight

• 9:58Speaker 07

  and the succession of his son.

• 10:00Speaker 04

  Well, we skipped over Bannockburn. For the few people listening who don't know about Bannockburn, could you tell us what happened then and why it's so important?

• 10:08Speaker 07

  It's important for the Scots, and this is a Scottish poem, as we've heard written in the thirteen seventies, because at that point it's their one great victory over the English. It's the battle that proves that God is backing them. It's a judgment and it shows Robert must therefore be the legitimate ruler of Scotland and that Edward the second of England has no legitimate right over Scotland. So it's a vindication of the Scottish claim. I think it allows Robert from that point on in the reign to rule what has been a very divided kingdom, as if those divisions had gone. They haven't necessarily gone, but he's able to do that. So in his own lifetime, he's able to do that. And looking back from the thirteen seventies, time always smooths out these things. People are able to to accept Bannockburn as this great national victory.

• 10:53Speaker 07

  And that's what Barbara is writing up.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  Well, why did Barbara write this at this time? It's a massive project.

• 10:59Speaker 07

  I mean, I think it relates to what Steve was talking about, about the thirteen seventies. You've got a new dynasty on the throne, the Stuart dynasty, whose claim is through Robert Bruce, Robert the second is the grandson, as well as having the same name as Robert the first, Robert Bruce. So it's about drawing that connection with the new family. It's also, I think, because Scotland is in a place where it has been relatively secure, as Steve was saying, because of the truce, but war is not that far away. So it's about reminding Scots what they've been through in the past as well. I mean, the question of whether he's writing it for someone. So Robert Stuart, the new King of Scots, Robert the first grandson, I think, has a relationship with John Barber and may be the patron,

• 11:45Speaker 07

  or certainly John Barber has him in mind when he's writing. So it might be that. There are other people in Scotland in the thirteen seventies whose family have achieved great things and base their power on what's happened under Robert the first reign. So reminding Scots of their ancestors, I think, is part of the purpose too.

• 12:03Speaker 06

  The case to be made for some sort of patronage is that his his other known work, which is is lost, is a history of the Stuart family, which seems to indicate that he's he's quite closely in the service of either Robert the Stuart himself or one of Robert Stuart's many sons.

• 12:19Speaker 04

  Rhiannon, can you give us a taste of how the poem might have sounded in performance?

• 12:24Speaker 05

  I can give you the opening lines if you'd like.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  I'd take them with ribbons round them, thank you very much.

• 12:30Speaker 05

  So the poem begins, "Stories to read are deletable, suppose that they be noch but fable. Then should stories that soothfast were, and they were said on good manner, have double pleasant in hearing. The first pleasant is the carping, the telling of them, and the tother, the soothfastness, that shows the thing right as it was."

• 12:55Speaker 04

  Do you want to translate any of that?

• 12:56Speaker 05

  Sure. This is Barbara, this is Barbara setting out his stall, really. He's explaining why he's writing this and what the value of it is. So stories in themselves are pleasant, even if they're not true, but if you can tell a story that has truth, there's a double pleasure in that. First of all, in the telling, just the fun of hearing a story, and secondly, in hearing things right as they were, actually hearing history unfold. And that's what he is offering to his readers and listeners.

• 13:28Speaker 04

  What are the star turns in the poem? Is he particularly good at battles?

• 13:32Speaker 05

  Well, he particularly likes battles, and he's clearly writing for an audience who likes battles. There are so many incidents of Robert finding himself, you know, in straitened circumstances. He's either alone, or he's only got two men, and he's fighting against so many, but he fights so brilliantly, and everybody's, everybody's striking on everybody else. You know, the battle scenes are very similar, but he's obviously writing for an audience who loves this kind of thing. It's a bit like going to see an adventure film, you know, they might be full of cliches, you know, but it's what, clearly what the audience was looking for, this, this kind of nightly battling and axes being struck onto heads and cleaving them down to the brains endlessly. He's trying to infuse history with excitement, so.

• 14:15Speaker 04

  There's a kind of, the contest between chivalry and brutality, isn't there, really? Where do you stand on that, Steve?

• 14:22Speaker 06

  Well, La Bruise is one text of many that are produced in the 14th century that deal with the warfare of the age in the 14th century, the era of the Hundred Years' War, is notable for the levels of violence in and around Europe, and so. The Bruce is part of this wider literary exploration of the delivery of violence, the chivalric virtue, the prowess, the bravery, but also reflecting on what it means to be a chivalric lord. What other qualities are you supposed to show?

• 14:59Speaker 04

  Can you give us some examples?

• 15:00Speaker 06

  Well, in terms of the Bruce itself, there's obviously an emphasis on Robert's prowess, his ability to hit people very hard.

• 15:09Speaker 04

  Chop their heads off.

• 15:11Speaker 06

  And chop their heads off.

• 15:12Speaker 04

  While he's still on a horse.

• 15:13Speaker 06

  Yep, yep. But also an exploration of other qualities like measure, prudence, acting with cunning and slith. There's an attempt to suggest that there are different ways to fight, and although we tend to have an idea of chivalry as a type of honourable, open-field warfare, in a couple of passages, Bruce, particularly talking about the ethics of killing an English garrison in their sleep.

• 15:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. So killing people while they're asleep is not very chivalric, is it?

• 15:48Speaker 06

  You wouldn't think so, but in the poem you get this little aside to say, in effect, well, any warrior who is effective would not mind, and we will receive no reproach or no reproof for behaving in this way. So there's a rough and readier idea of chivalry, chivalry that wins.

• 16:07Speaker 04

  How can we just pause here? People are asleep, they go and kill them while they're asleep. Now, what's chivalrous about that? I mean, how do they square it with chivalry? I'm just interested. I mean, it seems mad to me, but there you go. You can explain all this.

• 16:19Speaker 06

  Chivalry is a very wide portfolio in the 14th century.

• 16:25Speaker 04

  It seems to, yeah.

• 16:26Speaker 06

  Yeah. And in fact, I mean, one of the interesting things about the Bruce is that you get this played out in conversations between, in particular, two of Bruce's lieutenants, James Douglas and Thomas Randolph, Earl of Murray. And Thomas Randolph, Earl of Murray, is constantly making observations on the behaviour of his fellows, saying, this really isn't good. You know, we really shouldn't be behaving in this way. But yes, one of the things about the Bruce as a work is that it's very much on the more rough and ready end of chivalric texts in the 14th century. It's laying out.

• 17:02Speaker 06

  How to fight and win a war effectively.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  That's different.

• 17:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 17:07Speaker 04

  That's brutality, isn't it? Michael, you want to come in?

• 17:09Speaker 07

  I mean, I think Steve's absolutely right. I mean, I think one of the elements that does come through is that aside from Edward the First, who's presented as a tyrant and a homicidal maniac in many ways, at the opening of the book, and then he disappears, the English aren't presented in terms of being, if you like, morally wrong. They are worthy opponents and they're giving Bruce a good reputation and they're in turn being praised for their nobility and their own qualities because you want a competition between equals. And in a sense, that's what chivalric values in the 14th century around war are about. It's about understanding the rules. Steve's absolutely right that the Scots or Barber also knows his audience are going

• 17:52Speaker 07

  to cheer if he shows certain individuals transgressing and James Douglas, Bruce's lieutenant and almost the second figure in the narrative.

• 18:01Speaker 04

  Can you say a little more about Douglas because he's an important figure?

• 18:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, so James Douglas historically emerges from a baronial family in southwestern Scotland in the Valley of the River Clyde to become Bruce's principal military lieutenant and to build a kind of family name and reputation and landholding that sweeps across southern Scotland. So he's the founder of a dynasty and in the 1370s, his family are in the audience, powerful individuals, and they want to see him presented in a way which is not simply as a noble chivalric warrior, but as someone who is transgressing those rules. So he massacres the English garrison of his own castle on Palm Sunday when they're in church.

• 18:45Speaker 07

  He takes the prisoners back and slaughters them in the cellars of his own castle. And again, there's a double edge here because that's completely against the rules of chivalry and yet the Scots see that as legitimate because why are these people here? Why are they denying Douglas his birthright? The illegitimacy of their presence removes them in that case from the protections of chivalry.

• 19:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that reflects back on the Turnbury case because Turnbury is Bruce's castle and that preamble to say, well, nobody will reproach us if we take this action against a garrison that is totally unsuspecting. For a noble audience, landed inheritance is everything. And those who deny you your inheritance, in a certain sense, the rules are off. That's what the audience in the 1370s think and respond to.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by rising star Sienna Spiro. What is so fascinating to you about impermanence?

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  Everything about us, everything we do is temporary. And I just got terrified of that, you know, what we do with our time and how I feel like the way the world is today and how fast paced it is and how much we don't even acknowledge anything around us. How I felt temporary to the people around me and how that made me scared and how much I wanted to last and make an impact on people and I guess to change the way I looked at things and to change myself and to change how I guess I approached everything in my life. It's important that things are impermanent because nothing would feel special and enjoying, you know, learning to love with knowing it's not going to last.

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• 21:19Speaker 02

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• 21:36Speaker 04

  What do you think of the use of this word? Is it being misused, Brianna?

• 21:40Speaker 05

  Chivalry.

• 21:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:41Speaker 05

  It's not being misused because Barbara's so interested in it. And he talks about people performing such great chivalry. He's interested in the display of knightly virtues, so prowess, loyalty. I mean, this business of reclaiming your heritage. I mean, that's the, Barbara's Bruce writ large, really. And so Scots reclaiming their heritage. So they will, they will fight to demonstrate their great chivalry. But if occasionally, a small band of Scots has to trick and perhaps slaughter in their sleep a larger band of English, that's okay, because they are recovering their heritage. That's the, that's the kind of moral justification for it. They shouldn't be here anyway, so, you know, we'll just kill them.

• 22:18Speaker 04

  Let's go back to the poem. What did, we, we touched on it, but can you give us an idea of what he did at Bannockburn in terms of writing about it?

• 22:27Speaker 05

  He gives us details of sort of military planning maneuvers. You know, the fact that Bruce has his men dig holes in the ground where he expects the English are going to come past. So we get-

• 22:38Speaker 04

  So they break the legs of the horses?

• 22:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's right.

• 22:40Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 22:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we get the military strategist. But we also, you know, for the audience, we've got this sort of sense of individual combat. So, you know, we have, we have the Scots watching the English and the English trying to guess what the Scots are going to do. But the opening sally is, again, this kind of individual combat between an English knight called Henry de Boon and Bruce. This is the first kind of blow struck. And we, Barbara really sets this scene up beautifully. Remember, but all before Bannockburn, we've had all these stories of Bruce sort of hiding, being hunted, you know-

• 23:14Speaker 04

  The outlaw.

• 23:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, Bruce the outlaw.

• 23:16Speaker 04

  And with the spider in the cave.

• 23:18Speaker 05

  No, no, that's, that's an 18th century addition.

• 23:21Speaker 04

  Oh, I see.

• 23:22Speaker 05

  No spiders in here.

• 23:23Speaker 04

  Oh dear, I like the spider in the cave.

• 23:24Speaker 05

  Not too much like, yeah, I'm sorry. But there's lots of other exciting things. Hunting dogs. So, but, I mean, he's, he has endless stories, which, which all kind of blend together, really. But then the essence of them is always that Bruce is outnumbered and people underestimate him. They think, right, we've got him on his own, this is great, we can kill him. But no, they can't kill him. Bruce turns around, you know, his men come and find Bruce afterwards and they find him casually sitting on the bank of the river with 14 corpses littered about him, because somebody underestimated Bruce again. So by the time we get to Bannockburn, you know, we know as an audience, nobody can surprise Bruce. Nobody does well if they underestimate Bruce. So with this opening scene- We have Henry the Boon sort of looking at the Scots ranks and he spots Bruce and

• 24:08Speaker 05

  we're told that he sees Bruce riding around, not on a warhorse, but just on a palfrey, an ordinary, basically he's just cantering about on a pony and he's got an axe. So he's not looking very grand. And Henry the Boon, we're told, is armad fine and he's got fantastic armour on and he's on a staid, he's on a massive warhorse and he thinks, brilliant, I'm gonna have the king. And he rides towards the king and Bruce sees him riding towards him.

• 24:33Speaker 04

  And we break into first with very few people in the world can understand.

• 24:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. So we've got Henry sort of looking at Bruce and he thought that he should well lately win him, Bruce, and have him at his will. Soon he saw him horsed, sa il, he's only on a pathetic little horse. Sprint they salmon into the ling, they sprinted toward each other in a line. Sir Henry missed the noble king and he, that in his stirrup stood with the axe that was herded and good, with swah great main, roach de madent, that nuther hat and a helm stent the heavy dish that he him gave, that near the head to the harness clav. Runs towards him, stands, Bruce stands up in his stirrup, swipes down with the axe, straight into Henry's brains. That's what happens when people underestimate Bruce.

• 25:21Speaker 04

  I see, right.

• 25:23Speaker 05

  That's how Bannockburn is set up.

• 25:24Speaker 04

  So your author there, your barber, really adores Bruce, doesn't he?

• 25:30Speaker 05

  He does. Absolute hero worship.

• 25:32Speaker 04

  Does he go, does he go just a little over the top?

• 25:34Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, he's patterning him after the great heroes of romance, sort of fictional romance. So he's, you know, he's, he's casting him in that light. And of course, he has this historical figure who did win the Battle of Bannockburn and who did hang on to the crown against pretty fearsome odds at the beginning. So he's imagining what kind of person must he have been? So that's, that's the, that's what he reaches for.

• 26:01Speaker 04

  Can we stick with Manetburn for a moment, because it's a wonderful centrepiece for all of you. Steve, what would it mean to his listeners?

• 26:09Speaker 06

  Scots through the 15th and 16th century returned to Barbara's Bruce as a type of model for their own society, saying, here's a great king, loyally supported by the lords and offering them good lordship. So it becomes almost a type of golden age that Scots through the 14th, 15th century look back to and invoke as a type of totem of the coherence of their kingdom.

• 26:36Speaker 04

  Michael, can we be a little more specific about his brilliance as a leader of men and in combat? If everything that Barbara says is true, his brilliance in combat, but how good he is at what he does?

• 26:50Speaker 07

  Yes, I mean, there's a problem there, which you've already kind of hinted at, which is how much do we believe Barbara? Barbara loves Bruce and Barbara is writing for an audience that loves Bruce. And historians love the detail and information it gives us about Bruce and have tended to rely on him a little too much, maybe.

• 27:06Speaker 04

  Well, you've got to define a little before we go on.

• 27:08Speaker 07

  Well, he's a count of Manetburn. So his account of Manetburn has been identified as a sense of narrative, which is praising particular families and individuals who are there in 1370s and inventing roles for people on the battlefield nobody else mentioned. So maybe he's just got better information or maybe he's writing an account which, whilst fundamentally based on events that are recognised, is also adding in details which is going to get tick boxes with the audience.

• 27:36Speaker 04

  Well, let's particularise this to the Douglas family.

• 27:38Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 27:39Speaker 04

  How they figured and why they're important and how they come into this business of the account.

• 27:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, the poem from the beginning is set up as not simply a biography of Robert, but as a biography of Robert and James Douglas, his lieutenant. Barbara introduces James Douglas as a youth deprived of his lands by Edward I and then deciding to join Robert. And he signposts at their meeting that these two men are going to work together to free Scotland. So there's a double narrative and there's a whole series of episodes with Douglas, who, like Bruce, is undertaking exploits leadership. He clearly is someone whose reputation is for transgressing the rules of normal behaviour. In Barb, he's called the good Sir James. The English contemporary label for him is Black Douglas, and the family chooses

• 28:29Speaker 07

  the black label, and supposedly in Norse country, mothers will frighten their children to sleep by saying, hushy, hushy, the Black Douglas will get ye. So that reputation is almost terrorising the English is something which the Douglas family latches on to, and James Douglas becomes their kind of focal point and their key figures in Scotland in the 1370s. So they're lapping this stuff up. And the information may be from their family's stories too.

• 28:55Speaker 04

  And this is all in the cause of getting Scotland recognised as a country in its own right the equal of any other country in what we might call Europe with other countries.

• 29:06Speaker 07

  I think there's, I think there's two things going on. I mean, this is a story by a Scot for Scots, but it's also about for the audience, seeing themselves as something which is participating in a wider frame of reference, you know, going back to the ideas of chivalry. And Robert himself is generally presented as someone who is honourable towards his captives, who recognises the fallen and respects them for the most part, certainly post-Bannet burn. And, you know, if you're Scotland and you're on the kind of northern edge of Europe, your route to the continent, which used to be via England, is now shut off, you're conscious of a need to, to recognise and be seen as part of this wider European, if you like, elite society.

• 29:48Speaker 04

  French seems to enter this.

• 29:50Speaker 07

  This is the period, the 14th century, when the Franco-Scottish alliance becomes increasingly important. And Scotland's main continental ally is the Kingdom of France, also at war with England in the Hundred Years' War. The French don't appear very much in this narrative, but when you're in the 1370s and further into the 1380s, the Franco-Scottish alliance is very real and the Douglasses as a family are particularly associated with it. So that awareness of how this plays out is important. At the end of the poem, James Douglas carries Robert Bruce's heart on crusade to Spain.

• 30:25Speaker 04

  Yes, I kind of wonder how it lasts. What does he put in a special sealed casket?

• 30:29Speaker 07

  It's a lead casket. And they've discovered that casket at Melrose Abbey.

• 30:33Speaker 04

  Really?

• 30:33Speaker 07

  Well, they think they have. They have something that looks very like it would be that casket, but it's a lead, sealed lead box.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  Did they open it?

• 30:40Speaker 07

  I think they did, but there's not much.

• 30:43Speaker 04

  Rhiannon, we're talking by the manner of very consciously writing this, Barber, very consciously literary, alluding to other heroic poems. Can you mention one or two of them and tell us the effect this might have?

• 30:54Speaker 05

  He does. I mean, one of the interesting things about his literary allusions is that every one of them that we can trace is to a romance that was only available in French. So there are romances, there are plenty of romances in Middle English by this point that he could conceivably have, you know, the audience could have got hold of, been reading. But when he refers specifically to these shrivalric texts, they are, they are French texts and they're older French texts. So for example, Le Romain de Thébes, The Romance of Thebes, that's one that comes up more than once. This is the story of the siege of Thebes. So after Oedipus dies, you know, his two sons agree to share a kingdom year in, year out, but Eteocles is on the throne for a year and doesn't want to give

• 31:36Speaker 05

  it up. So Polonises collects together the heroes, the argives, and they, they attack Thebes to try and recover his rightful kingdom. This was enormously popular, this, this tale around Europe. Barber refers to this specifically when Bruce, one of his many episodes of being sort of apparently trapped by the people chasing him, the men of Galloway are hunting him and he finds himself alone in a ford and he realises he's too far away to get his men, so he's got to turn and face them alone.

• 32:04Speaker 04

  Sometimes he's facing an enormous number of men on his own, isn't he?

• 32:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:08Speaker 04

  On a narrow path with the cliff behind him and, and so...

• 32:11Speaker 05

  In this case, 200.

• 32:12Speaker 04

  200 men.

• 32:13Speaker 05

  Yes, and Barber stops at this point and says, it's just, it reminds us that it's very much like when the hero Tidius, who was kind of the messenger of Polonises sent to try and reclaim the kingdom, is ambushed by Eteocles' men. And he's ambushed by 50 men, not 200, just 50. And he manages to fight them off. And, and this is a really famous episode. So Barber says, you know, it's like this, but of course, you know, Bruce is facing 200 men. And, you know, who do you think is better? He finishes.

• 32:44Speaker 04

  That's only one of the heroic examples he brings forward. So he's building him up there all the time. Is there any sense of verification? Do we have a BBC verified?

• 32:55Speaker 05

  We don't, we don't. But what he's really interested in are these huge kind of epic, they're called romans just because they're written in French, but these epic stories, so they have huge political scope, you know, somebody reclaiming a kingdom, or it's the story of the fall of Troy.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  So we're going, yeah, the fall of Troy, we're going back to the Greeks.

• 33:16Speaker 05

  Fall of Troy. So Douglas, of course, is compared to Hector.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 33:19Speaker 05

  So not to King, but we have specifically compared to Hector or Troy, even says he has a bit of a lisp, just like Hector or Troy was supposed to have had, a lisp or a murmur or a, you know, a slight speech impediment that was apparently felt to be very manly, you know, better things to do than talk to people.

• 33:34Speaker 04

  Steve, they're lost to us, but are we in any idea if it Barbara's sources for all this stuff?

• 33:40Speaker 06

  I think we can speculate reasonably confidently about two or three sources that Barbara must have had in front of him, and one obviously relates to Robert Bruce himself. A lot of these elaborated embellished stories of Bruce escaping almost certain death really occur in quite a narrow chronological window, the first two, three years of his reign. And they seem to belong to a tale that is circulating in Europe well before Barbara writes, and which seems to concentrate on Bruce's outlaw years, that they present Bruce as an outlaw who is threatened by his enemies, but like a good outlaw,

• 34:22Speaker 06

  because he has God's backing and because of his own morality, moral courage and prowess, he wins out, a sort of variant on the Robin Hood tale. There's also clearly a collection related to the life of James Douglas that Michael's already mentioned, which seems to run through from Douglas's early life through to his, perhaps his death on crusade in 1330.

• 34:49Speaker 06

  It reads more like something like the life of Bertrand de Geclan, the French constable. Slightly the story of a man who is rising up from a fairly low social position to become rewarded for his military virtues and his loyalty. And so it becomes a tale of the recovery of a nation, the recovery of a kingdom, rather than a conventionally chivalric tale, which I suppose comes back to the question that you were asking right this up there. What is chivalry? The Douglas Tale seems to be slightly more, shall we say, robust.

• 35:26Speaker 04

  Is he seen as a romantic outlaw? Do people like this outlaw?

• 35:30Speaker 07

  Part of it, it's penance though, partly because he becomes king having murdered his main rival in a church and is excommunicated by the church for that homicidal act, the sacrilegious act. And Barber presents to all the suffering he undergoes, having to be sort of pursued around his own kingdom for years by his enemies. So that's kind of expiating the sins. So there is that element to it as well.

• 35:56Speaker 06

  And the idea of atoning for his sins, and that comes full circle at the end of the tale where Bruce wants his heart to be taken on crusade, at least partly in expiation of his sins. He says, my hands are covered in blood and so I want to go on crusade to achieve that type of atonement. He doesn't do it in his own life, so he has James Douglas.

• 36:22Speaker 05

  It seems appropriate that James Douglas, given that his hands are even more covered in blood than anybody else's.

• 36:26Speaker 04

  Yes. Can we come back to this poem? And why did it matter that it was in older Scots rather than, say, court French, which was popular at the time? Michael?

• 36:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, that was, I mean, that's one of the intriguing things is the choice of language because it is, I think, a point at which that's a conscious decision. It's not automatic. And there's an obvious comparison. So there's a chronicle written by an English knight from Heaton in Northumberland, Thomas Gray, who's spent time as a prisoner in Scotland, written a decade earlier. And he writes that in Anglo-Norman, so in the French form spoken in Britain. And so Barber choosing to use Scots, the English form, is a conscious decision. And personally, I think it's practicality. It's what his audience understands. There's a letter from actually the end of the century where a Scottish girl writing to Henry IV

• 37:17Speaker 07

  of England says, marvel you not that I write in English, but it's clearer to my understanding than French or Latin. So you're getting into a point where possibly the aristocratic class is starting to find, well, to start to move away from the use of French, certainly in Scotland. And you're seeing similar sorts of linguistic shift amongst the elite in England, if you're thinking of the great poets of the late 14th century in England.

• 37:40Speaker 05

  Well, Fossard is the, the French chronicler is in Scotland in 1370s, I think.

• 37:44Speaker 07

  Sixty five.

• 37:45Speaker 05

  Sixty five, okay, 1360s. And he comments that, you know, we're supposed to have this great alliance, but the Scots don't speak French and they won't speak French, they don't want to speak French. So, I mean, Barber himself clearly read French and, and had all these safe conducts to France, so clearly spoke French. And there must have been, there, there are some people still writing the occasional diplomatic letter in French. So there are people who knew French, but not everybody, and perhaps less willingness to use it.

• 38:11Speaker 04

  There's an important passage on freedom.

• 38:14Speaker 05

  Well, these are probably the most famous lines now from Barber's Bruce. If anybody knows any lines from Barber's Bruce, it's probably these, because you will find them in modern anthologies, a little extract from Barber's Bruce. I mean, if there's any extract from Barber's Bruce, it'll be these lines.

• 38:29Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 38:29Speaker 05

  He writes, ah, freedom is a noble thing. Freedom ma's man to have liking. Freedom all solace to man gives. He lives at ease that freely lives. A noble heart may have none a's. Now else noth that may him place give freedom fail. For free liking is yarnit or all other thing. So, well, first of all, freedom is a noble thing. Freedom gives man pleasure. Freedom makes you happy. It gives, it gives you solace. You know, you can live at ease if you have freedom. And a noble heart particularly can never have ease, can never be relaxed. He can't, it can't, can't ever be happy unless he has freedom.

• 39:13Speaker 05

  You know, if freedom fails, then you cannot be happy. Freedom is desired above all other things by noble hearts. He's obviously, he's not worried about what peasants and the ordinary man might want. He's not going to be free anyway, but noble hearts.

• 39:26Speaker 04

  Does he define freedom in any way?

• 39:28Speaker 05

  All of us, we're all around here, how well, where shall we start?

• 39:33Speaker 04

  Well, start wherever you want, but as long as you start somewhere.

• 39:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, that makes it sound very aspirational and quite cuddly, but in fact, that passage goes on to really define freedom as the opposite of thraldom. That's the threat, to come under the dominion of others and to be, to find your rights and privileges stripped away from you. So, freedom as a positive goal is what we tend to read, but for Barbara and for his audience, it's the lurking danger of thraldom that's the issue.

• 40:08Speaker 04

  Michael?

• 40:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, and that thraldom, this is book one, so this is Barbara getting his message across at the beginning, and thraldom is what English rule means, that Scots are not free to enjoy their property, they're not free to protect their families, they are preyed upon by the English king and his forces. So, it's this quite stark representation of the point at which Bruce enters the narrative, if you like, this is what he's saving Scotland from, so it's part of that build-up.

• 40:34Speaker 05

  He does have, towards the end, has a little, a very Clarkly little comparison there, where he says, "Wise men may say that wedding, being married, is the hardest bond, but thraldom is well worse than death, even worse than death and marriage, you know, thraldom would be", which is, you know, possibly, you know, not going to go down quite so well these days, but playing to an audience largely of men.

• 40:58Speaker 04

  Seems to me there's a sense in which the, it's a practical poem, this huge poem, saying, "How to fight and beat the English", did you think he got it right?

• 41:08Speaker 06

  It's certainly the approach that seems to be most successful for the Scottish realm in the long run over the 14th and 15th centuries. The background to the appearance of the Bruce, although they're looking back to this great Scottish triumph at Banockburn, in the intervening years, Scottish armies have been regularly and devastatingly defeated at Duplin Moor, Hallidan Hill, at Neville's Cross. So, in a sense, he's distilling the wisdom. Glean from defeat and military disaster, he says, this is, this is the way we have to fight and it's a legitimate way to fight. So there is a shift in the way that people

• 41:50Speaker 06

  across Europe think about chivalry. It's not just a moral code, it's a way to, to fight effectively as well.

• 41:57Speaker 05

  That is a contradiction that's inherent in chivalry, not, not just in Barber's version of it. I mean, this business that, that to be a good knight, you must display chivalric prowess, which means fighting people and killing people. And yet you're also supposed to be a good Christian, which generally doesn't involve, you know, this is, this is one of the sort of contradiction of, of the crusades. So we have other works about chivalry fretting about exactly where the line should be drawn.

• 42:23Speaker 07

  I mean, Henry V massacring the French prisoners of Agincourt is a famous example. It, it's military necessity. He worried that these people would be liberated. So he, he has them killed on the battlefield once they've surrendered, totally against the laws of chivalry, but justifiable. And I think it's that-

• 42:38Speaker 04

  Justifiable to who?

• 42:39Speaker 07

  To him, in the same way that this is justifiable to the Scots. So these people are, you know, as Steve is saying, this is a pragmatic text as well as an idealistic one.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  Same with you, Michael. What's, what if any has been the wider impact of this Barber's poem, The Bruce, in his own time? And if you can, if you've got the stamina, and since?

• 42:58Speaker 07

  One thing that needs to be said is the earliest manuscripts of this text, which is not surprising amongst medieval texts, are considerably later. So the earliest manuscripts come from nearly just over a century later in the 1480s. But we have references to this as the key source for knowing about Robert from the, the generation after Barber is writing. So in the early and mid 15th century, there are Scottish chroniclers who are saying, if you want to know more about this, go to Archdeacon Barber's book. So for a Scottish writer, that's probably good provenance. So we know that other writers are reading this, and also that it's an authority on the period. And then in the 1480s, you have strangely, two manuscripts produced by the same scribe in Fife for a much more, if you

• 43:42Speaker 07

  like, I feel like middle class, middle folk kind of audience. So it's written for a local cleric who's from a local Fife family. And that suggests you've got a kind of dissemination of this text. But actually, by that stage, it's often grouped alongside a text called The Wallace, about William Wallace, which is much worse in almost every measurable respect as poetry, as history, as storytelling.

• 44:06Speaker 05

  It's good poetry, Michael, it's just terrible history.

• 44:09Speaker 07

  Okay, there we are, it's good poetry, I'm not a judge of poetry, obviously. So, at that point, you know, Barbara and Bruce and Wallace are linked together, but they're understood as part of the kind of narrative of Scotland's past by the late 15th century and 16th century.

• 44:24Speaker 04

  Rhiannon, what would propel people to read this today?

• 44:27Speaker 05

  It's surprisingly exciting to read when you settle down to read it. One of the surprising things about Barbara's Bruce, given that this is an enormous work and it's obviously a very sophisticated construction, and yet, when you look at the actual language, it's quite simple, it's easier to read than other older Scots from the period, put it that way, it's got a much narrower vocabulary. He's actually writing in quite plain language. You've got about 11 different words for hitting somebody, and you know, once you've learnt the ones that you didn't recognise, and a couple of words for being in a hurry. So it's clearly written to appeal to an audience who maybe didn't have an enormous vocabulary themselves.

• 45:04Speaker 04

  Do you think it still has an appeal to a wider audience?

• 45:07Speaker 05

  I think it does because he's so good at telling, particularly, I think, in the early phases, the outlaw tales. They are fun to read, and Bruce has so many fantastic moments of just, hold my beer, I'm just going to go and destroy these men and come back, and it is so sparsely and quickly told that it's very engaging.

• 45:24Speaker 04

  Well, thank you very much for that. Thank you, Rhiannon, Rhiannon Purdie, Steve Boardman and Michael Brown. Next week, it's dragons. Thanks for listening.

• 45:45Speaker 05

  I wish I was here for dragons.

• 45:48Speaker 04

  Thanks a lot.

• 45:52Speaker 04

  Well, now, what I'm going to ask you to do is, no matter what, start with you, Rhian. What did you not get time to say you'd like to have said?

• 46:00Speaker 05

  I think I might have talked more about how the first audience would have encountered this poem. So, some will have read it, it will have existed in manuscript, otherwise we wouldn't have it. But the majority of people encountering this would have encountered it as a performance, and obviously not the whole thing, not 13,600 lines, you know, over the course of three days where nobody sleeps. It would probably, they would be selecting bits to read out. You know, something, a performance, perhaps, you know, after a feast, you might get, you might get a couple of hundred lines. Or, you might have a family, thinking of that later context for the manuscripts, you might have a family that has a manuscript,

• 46:43Speaker 05

  and one person would read out sections. Or perhaps they'd pass it round, depends how many people are good at reading aloud. And that makes a difference when you hear it read aloud, when you can do voices for the characters, when you can slow down, when you can make it exciting. And I think that's something you don't get, especially when you're looking at it in a modern printed edition.

• 47:02Speaker 04

  Michael?

• 47:03Speaker 07

  I mean, I think the individual from the poem that we haven't mentioned at all is Robert's brother Edward Bruce, who is built up in many ways as, if you like, the counterpoint to Robert. So he's a great leader, a great knight, but a foolish commander, foolish king. And his exploits, both in Scotland and then later in the poem in Ireland, which form quite a significant part of the latter sections of the Bruce, show him as a man who's too rash to actually be a king. And that's completely colored our view of Edward Bruce, but it's in the poem just to show up what a good leader Robert is. He doesn't make these mistakes. And when he goes to Ireland, he kind of shows to Edward what

• 47:47Speaker 07

  the difference between the two of them is.

• 47:49Speaker 04

  And what is it?

• 47:51Speaker 07

  It's recognizing the need for caution, it's recognizing those military tricks that we were talking about that Steve identifies as kind of stratagems and practical advice. Edward Bruce just charges in and finally it's fatal for him, Robert is sending him support but Edward insists on attacking a much larger English army and for once a smaller army is crushed by a larger English army and Edward is killed along with all the knights who've gone with him. So it's a disaster made by a king who doesn't have that mix of boldness but also caution that Barber wants to get across as the ideal form of leadership for the Scots.

• 48:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think I pick up a point that Rhiannon alluded to, the way in which there's seemed suddenly to be a significant audience in late 14th century Scotland for historical and literary works in older Scots English. Essentially, this is, you know, going from almost nothing to suddenly Barber's Bruce appearing, there's an anonymous chronicle that seems to be produced by about 1390, also in older Scots, and directed to the same type of interests. It's interested in warfare, it's interested in chivalric renown, it's

• 49:11Speaker 06

  interested in recording and commemorating the names of those who have played an active role in the warfare of the 14th century. And that rolls through into the work of Andrew of Winton in the early 15th century, again, writing in Scots, a massive history, going back to the origins of the world and tracing it through. So in some ways Barber is important as almost as the first signifier of this new audience for chivalric material, warlike material in Scots.

• 49:52Speaker 04

  This is risking something, but is it too much of a leap to go to Walter Scott?

• 49:59Speaker 04

  In the sense of did Walter, is Walter Scott in that, in the tradition? Did he take anything from it? If he didn't, we can move on as quickly as possible.

• 50:07Speaker 07

  Scott's border ballads are very much in the tradition of these kind of episodes. And I think there is a continuation, particularly in the borders, in, between the narratives of the type that Barber and other similar sources in the late medieval period, directly into those border stories of people, again, transgressing, breaking the law, but in some ways being praised for that.

• 50:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, the border, the border, sorry.

• 50:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, Scott has exactly that interest in bringing history to life. I think the difference is that Scott doesn't have that immediate political impetus of, I need to get these, I need to get the younger generation of Scots ready to defend their country and not, you know, not risk giving in to the English. So Scott's no longer worried about that. So it's a literary interest.

• 50:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, there, there are tales for entertainment. There's Tales of the Grandfather, which is actually where the tale of the spider first appears.

• 50:56Speaker 04

  Yes. Is it okay? I always, I always liked that bit. The spider's trying to get from one rock to another and fails and fails and fails. But he tries and tries and tries again and Robert de Bruce thinks, I'll do that.

• 51:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, and, and that's a set of tales designed, as, as the, the name suggests, for Scott's young grandson and meant as an inspiration drawn from, from these historical episodes. And what lessons can you learn as a, as a, as a young man destined for, for service in the British Empire?

• 51:26Speaker 04

  Okay, well, thank you very much indeed. That was very lively and Simon's coming in to say something or other.

• 51:37Speaker 05

  Do it all again.

• 51:39Speaker 06

  I wouldn't breathe that first five minutes.

• 51:43Speaker 05

  Damn, we didn't switch the recording if ever not.

• 51:46Speaker 06

  Do you like tea or coffee? Tea.

• 51:48Speaker 05

  Oh, I'd love a tea, yeah.

• 51:49Speaker 06

  Nothing for me. Three teas, water, do you want? No, I'm fine, honestly. Thank you very much.

• 51:54Speaker 10

  In our time with Melvyn Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production.

• 52:04Speaker 11

  We pulled into what felt like an old compound. And you think, wow, this is a very old property.

• 52:12Speaker 12

  I'm Danny Robbins and Uncanny is back. We have three brand new summer special episodes and things are about to get scary.

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• 53:02Speaker 02

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