“Bot Philip the Mowbra said him till
‘The castell, schir, is at your will;
Bot, cum ye in it, ye sall see
That ye sall soyne assegit be.’”
To be judged fairly, Barbour must be read at great length, but a few lines from his account of Bruce’s duel with De Bohun may serve as an example of his spirited style:
“Schir Henry myssit the nobill Kyng;
And he, that in his sterapis stude,
With an ax bath hard and gude
With sa gret mayn roucht hym ane dynt,
That nouthir hat no helme mycht stint
The hevy dusche that he him gaf,
That he the head till harnyss claf.”
Blind Harry, who collected traditions about Wallace and wove them into a poem in the days of James III., could not help referring to Stirling Castle; but his lines on the subject are not more interesting than Barbour’s, and his work as a whole is inferior to that of his predecessor in the field of patriotic poetry.
It is difficult to believe that a Scottish poet could use hard words when writing of Stirling; yet when it suited him, William Dunbar could pen vindictive lines on the place. It was indeed the town more than the castle that roused the “makar’s” displeasure, but the royal dwelling cannot be held to be exempt from the general condemnation. It must, however, be remembered that this dirge which Dunbar addressed to James IV. was composed for a special purpose; the poet’s real opinion of Stirling was probably on the whole a favourable one, just as his love for Edinburgh, expressed in this same work, seemed to turn to hatred when he wrote his satire on the capital. James, in one of his penitential moods, had gone to pray with the Observantine Friars at Stirling; consequently the Court at Holyrood grew dull, and Dunbar felt the dreariness as much as the nobles and ladies. As time went on, and the King continued to remain in seclusion, the court-poet, to relieve his feelings, wrote his “Dregy” or dirge, of which some of the lines are as follows:
“We that ar heir in hevins glory,
To you that ar in purgatory,
Commendis ws on our hairtly wyiss;
I mene we folk in parradyis,
In Edinburcht with all mirriness,
To yow of Striuilling in distress,
Quhair nowdir plesance nor delyt is
For pety thus are Apostill wrytis.
* * * * *
“And all the hevinly court devyne,
Sone bring yow fra the pyne and wo
Of Striuilling, every court-manis fo,
Againe to Edinburghis ioy and bliss,
Quhair wirschep, welth and weilfar is,
Pley, plesance and eik honesty;
Say ye amen, for cheritie.”
Dunbar has another poem dealing with Stirling called “Ane Ballat of the Fenzeit Freir of Tungland.” The subject of this set of verses is the foreigner John Damian, who imposed in many ways on the credulity of James IV. The experiment in flying, spoken of in an earlier chapter, is made fun of by the poet, and although he does not mention Stirling in his account of the impostor’s attempted flight, it is known that the castle was the scene of the exploit. By stating that the poem records the happenings of a dream, Dunbar leaves himself free to indulge his taste for exaggeration. The following are the last three verses of the ballad: