Originally the "Scots" or Scottish tongue was Gaelic, the language of the Irish Scots who, landing in Argyll about a.d. 500, finally gave a dynasty and its existing name, to "Scot" land. When the dynasty acquired the Anglicized Lothian and much of Cumberland, it adopted the English speech, consequently the writers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Scotland used a form of northern English or "Ynglis," and knew not Gaelic. They called their speech "English" till the long wars with England led them to draw a distinction and patriotically style it "Scots" or "Scottis". Thus by 1562, Ninian Winzett upbraids John Knox for "knapping English" in his writings, and forgetting the "Scots" that he learned at his mother's knee. Gaelic was no longer reckoned "Scots," it was Ersch, Yrisch, or Erse. Even before the days of Edward I, the town seal of Stirling, on the Forth, describes the Gaelic-speaking men north of Forth as Scoti bruti. The Scottish writers did not know, and therefore despised Gaelic, from which they have scarcely borrowed anything. Latin and French they knew, and enriched their tongue by borrowing from these sources.
The one verse of Scottish poetry that may have survived from the end of the thirteenth century, the lines on the death of Alexander III, are charming, but, if they were written at the time, or shortly after, they must have been modernized, more or less, when Wyntoun, the rhyming chronicler, quoted them about 1420, twenty years after the death of Chaucer.
Barbour.
Setting aside the enigmatic Huchown already discussed, John Barbour, author of "The Brus," a history of King Robert Bruce in rhyming octosyllabic couplets, is the first poet of English speaking Scotland. He remains one of the most spirited and readable; the most like Sir Walter Scott, who used his book in poetry and in prose historical writing.
By 1357 Barbour was Archdeacon of Aberdeen: he was probably born at least ten years before Chaucer. In 1357 he went, with others, to study at Oxford, probably at the Scottish college, Balliol. He also visited France, for studious purposes; he held a position in the Exchequer, and, after finishing "The Brus" in 1376, received a pension from Bruce's grandson, Robert II: other pensions he received: he died in 1396. He had written other works, lost or disputable, and a romantic genealogy of the Stuarts, who were really Fitz Alans, and of ancient Breton origin, not, as was fabled, of the old Scoto-Irish dynasty. "A Buik of Alexander" (the romance of Alexander the Great), is attributed to Barbour with much probability.
Barbour possesses, unlike most of the narrative poets of the Middle Ages, one supreme advantage. He is not telling, for the twentieth time, the Tale of Troy, of Alexander the Great, of King Arthur, or of any dim mythical hero. The events in the history of Scotland which his own father witnessed, make one of the best stories in the world. Bruce was far from a faultless hero, but his adventures are picturesque facts, not inventions: though sometimes Barbour tells the same story twice, with variations. His many defeats, his wanderings in the heather, with a little company or with a single attendant; his flight over sea; his crossings of perilous lochs in frail boats; his single combats; the desperate chivalrous valour of his brother Edward; his own sagacity as a strategist and tactician; his kindness of heart; his love of the romances; the sufferings of his loyal friends, men and women; all his days of almost desperate warfare; all his escapes when surrounded in the hills of Galloway and of Argyll, are matters of historical fact, and can often be traced in English documents of the time. His "crowning mercy" Bannockburn, is as historical as Marathon or Waterloo.
When we think of the wild scenes in which Bruce warred and wandered, Loch Trool, Loch Awe, the whole of the Lennox, the uplands of Don and Dee; when we remember the blending of English armed knights, and of the plaided clans in the ranks of his enemies; his own combination of the Islesmen with "the dark impenetrable wood" of the Lowland spears; the many-hued silks of the standards; the cowled friars who prayed while the warriors fought; the fair ladies who shared the hero's dangers, we see that Barbour has a theme fresh, brilliant, and unique for his poem. He has a true story which is more thrilling than any invented romance.
Barbour notoriously, perhaps in the interests of poetic perspective, rolls up three Bruces, the grandfather, the father, and the hero himself, into one personage. Yet his statements of the numbers of the English engaged are sometimes corroborated by the English muster rolls. Before he has written three hundred lines he strikes the sonorous keynote of his narrative in that praise of Freedom which is worthy of the poet who fought at Marathon.
"Ah! freedom is a noble thing!"