All our information about John Barbour, except the little to be gleaned from the complimentary references of later authors, is drawn from official sources,[32] and is thus, of course, perfectly precise, but meagre and uncharacteristic. We learn something of what Barbour did and got, but not what sort of man he was, or what he was like. By 1357, at the latest, he is Archdeacon of Aberdeen, the most important official of the diocese after the bishop, having as his prebend the parish of Rayne, in Garioch; and in the same year (August 13) he has a safe-conduct to go with three scholars, for purposes of study, to Oxford, where he may have seen John Wycliffe. There was, of course, no University in Scotland as yet, and scholars desirous of academic advantages had to seek them at least across the Border, a patronage which Edward III., in his own interests, readily encouraged. Seven years later he is again in England on a similar mission with four horsemen,[33] and on October 16 of the year following he goes to St. Denis, near Paris, this time with six companions on horseback; in 1368-69 he once more visits France “with two servants (vallettis) and two horses.” The University of Paris had the highest reputation for the study of philosophy and canon law, and Barbour, whose duty it was to administer the jurisdiction of his bishop, would necessarily be something of a lawyer, though his allusion to the clerkly “disputations” in this field does not suggest much personal interest in legal refinements.
His next appearance is in a different though related capacity. In 1372 he is clerk of the audit of the King’s household, that of Robert II., who had come to the throne in the previous year as the first of the Stewart Kings. The year after he is also an auditor of exchequer. The Stewarts were good friends to Barbour, and we see the result in his kindly, almost affectionate, references to the family in his poem. He wrote up their genealogy, but that piece of work is lost. After a long interval he reappears as an auditor of exchequer in 1382, 1383, 1384. For some part, at least, of this interval he was engaged upon The Bruce, and its completion in the course of 1376[34] suggestively approximates to a grant of £10, by the King’s order, from the customs of Aberdeen, first recorded in the accounts of March 14, 1377. So also does a pension of twenty shillings sterling from certain revenues of the same city, granted on August 29, 1378, to himself and his assignees for ever.[35] Accordingly, two years later Barbour assigned his pension, on his death, to the cathedral church of Aberdeen, as payment for a yearly mass for his own soul and for the souls of his relatives and all the faithful dead. The practice of these payments can be traced for a considerable time afterwards, but the financial readjustments of the Reformation sent Barbour’s legacy elsewhere.
But the royal bounty had not dried up. In 1386 the poet had gifts of £10 and £6 13s. 4d., no doubt in recognition of further literary labours. And on December 5, 1388, he had a fresh pension of £10 for life “for faithful service,” to be paid in equal portions at Pentecost and Martinmas. This he enjoyed for only a few years. On April 25, 1396, the first payment of twenty shillings is made to the Dean and Chapter of Aberdeen, so that Barbour must have been dead before April 5, 1395, when the accounts for the year began. As his “anniversary” fell on March 13, that date in 1395 was, in all probability, the day of his death. Thus born under the great Bruce, he had lived through the reigns of David II. and Robert II., and five years of Robert III.
Some stray notices of Barbour in other connections add nothing of importance. One, however, lets us know that he was responsible for the loss of a volume on law from the library of his cathedral.
We have really learned nothing as to the personality of the poet. That he was a keen student and a great reader as well as a trustworthy official, and stood high in the royal favour, may be inferred. The respectful and admiring references of Wyntoun and Bower attest his high reputation as a writer and authority on history. But The Bruce of itself would suggest neither the cleric nor the accountant. His pious reflections would be commonplaces even for a lay writer, and his handling of figures is not in any way distinctive. Even of Scotland in the background we get but casual, fleeting glimpses. Barbour is occupied entirely with his heroes and their performances. It is these he undertakes to celebrate, not, primarily, even the great cause which called them forth; and personal loyalty is his master virtue.[36] That he so conceived and developed his subject, his hurried passage from incident to incident, his grim, practical humour, his impatience of inaction or commonplace achievement, his actively descriptive vocabulary, and his vivid realization of the details of movement and conflict—all contribute to the impression of a man of lively, energetic temperament, with a delight in action and the concrete, and so, as his time and circumstances would make him, an amateur and idealist of chivalry.
Besides The Bruce, Wyntoun credits Barbour with The Stewartis Oryginalle, a metrical genealogy starting from “Sere Dardane, lord de Frygya”(!), which has not survived.[37] Skeat has also suggested, basing on certain references by Wyntoun, that Barbour wrote a Brut on the mythical colonization of Britain by Brutus, but the inference is disputed by Mr. Brown,[38] and Wyntoun’s language is too vague for a definite opinion. On better grounds there has been attributed to him a Trojan War or Troy Book, portions of which have been used to fill up gaps in a MS. of Lydgate’s Siege with the rubric, “Here endis Barbour and begynnis the monk,” and again conversely. An independent MS. gives a larger number of lines in continuation. These fragments have been subjected to close linguistic and metrical criticism by P. Buss in Anglia, ix., pp. 493-514, and by E. Koeppel in Englische Studien, x., pp. 373-382, and their reasoning on differences of verbal and grammatical usages has been summarized by Skeat,[39] who concurs with their conclusion against Barbour’s authorship. But there are other elements of evidence, and the sceptical discussion of Medea’s alleged astronomical powers with the affirmation,
Bot na gude Cristene mane her-to
Sulde gif credence—that I defend,[40]
is significantly similar to the argumentation on astrology in The Bruce, Bk. IV. 706 to end.[41] Faced with the plain statement of the fifteenth-century scribe, Skeat can only suggest that the poem was not by our Barbour, but by another person of the same name—surely the extremity of destructive literary criticism. And every argument of the German scholars against the Troy fragments would clinch the case for Barbour’s claims on the Alexander, with which I deal elsewhere. The garrulous and dreary Legends of the Saints probably contain, at least, contributions by Barbour; even Buss admits peculiar features in the St. Ninian,[42] and St. Machar is a purely Aberdeen worthy, in whom the poet, too, professes a special interest; these may well have come from Barbour’s pen as the uncongenial but meritorious labour of his old age. Such, at any rate, was the normal progress of a poetic clerk, from translation to original work, to decline at the close upon versions of saintly biographies.
3. Historic Value of “The Bruce.”
A comparison of judgments on the value of The Bruce as a contribution to history plunges us into a thicket of contradictions. Green’s verdict that it is “historically worthless”[43] is but a petulant aside. It repeats itself, however, in the pronouncement of Mr. Brown that “in no true sense is it an historical document,”[44] but Mr. Brown selects, as illustrative of this, examples, such as the Simon Fraser identification,[45] and the Stanhope Park inference,[46] which recoil to the confusion of the critic.[47] Mr. Cosmo Innes has sought to discriminate, unfortunately upon wrong lines. Of Barbour as historian, he writes: “Satisfied to have real persons and events, and an outline of history for his guide, and to preserve the true character of things, he did not trouble himself about accuracy of detail.”[48] As it happens, it is just in his outline—that is, in his dates and succession of events—that Barbour may be adjudged most careless; his details contain the most remarkable examples of his accuracy. The latest expression of opinion on this head is not even self-consistent. In the Cambridge History of English Literature it is thus written of The Bruce: first, that “it is in no real sense a history ... though, strange to say, it has been regarded from his own time to this as, in all details, a trustworthy source for the history of the period”—a clear exaggeration;[49] and then a few pages farther on: “While Barbour’s narrative contains a certain amount of anecdotal matter derived from tradition, and, on some occasions, deviates from the truth of history, it is, on the whole, moderate, truthful, and historical”[50]—which is quite another pair of sleeves.