“Bot Alexander I tak beforne,
To him I mak na man compeir” (p. 110).
406 lovyt. “praised” (see Glossary).
412 Byschop Wylyhame. Lamberton, as Edward says, went to him at Stirling on May 4, 1304, and again took the oath of fealty, receiving from Edward’s hands the temporality of his bishopric (Palgrave, p. 334). “Strevellyne,” with several variations of spelling, is the usual form in contemporary records.
429 my fay feloune. See on 282.
455 thaim thai. “Thaim” refers to the Scots; “thai” to the English. Barbour is particularly careless in the use of this pronoun. In 458 “thai” is again the English, who were sometimes rather more (“erar may”) in proportion; in 460 “thaim” is the Scots.
466 in the Bibill. The deeds of the Jewish patriots, as recorded in the apocryphal Books of the Maccabees, were, of course, included in the Vulgate Bible of the Church. The rising of the Maccabees and their supporters against the over-rule of the Seleucids in the latter half of the second century B.C. was, for the medieval writers, the prime example of a national uprising against foreign dominance. (See also Bks. II. 330; XIV. 313.)
477 I spak of ayr. Here Barbour appears to refer to the Competitor, last mentioned in line 153, thereby confusing him with his grandson Robert the King. Much grave reproof has accordingly been wasted upon the poet. According to Maxwell, the poem “has been almost irretrievably discredited as a chronicle by a monstrous liberty which the author takes in rolling three personages” (Competitor, Robert “the elder,” and the King) “into one ideal hero” (Robert the Bruce, p. 6). Mr. Brown accuses Barbour of having “deliberately and consciously perpetrated the fabrication” of making his hero a trinity of these three (The Wallace and Bruce Restudied, p. 93). Barbour, it is to be observed, at worst only combines two, grandson and grandfather—he says nothing of the intermediate Robert; unless we force what is said in line 67 to this sense. One chronicler alone distinctly achieves the feat of making the three one person—Geoffrey Baker of Swinbroke (pp. 100-1)—but so far he has escaped censure, and no one rejects his work on that account. Surely in Barbour’s case it is but a striking case of his frequent carelessness of reference (see on 445). He started with King Robert, his subject, in line 25, and it is not too much to ask that “I spak of ayr” goes back to that point. This is a simpler way out than that inconsistently taken by Mr. Brown, who argues that, after all, the reading is probably wrong, and proposes to restore “the original” from Wyntoun’s lines, a paraphrase of Barbour (p. 95). Wyntoun was not deceived, nor was anyone likely to be. Barbour had nothing to gain by purposeless perversity, not even a literary point as has been suggested, for the “Romance” proper begins at line 445, and for it there is but one Robert.
478 swa forfayr. “Going to ruin.” Cf. Gest. Hystoriale, “Fele folk forfaren,” ready to perish (1438). Modern Scots in sense of “neglected,” as in Thom’s Mitherless Bairn; “sairly forfairn.”
485 Said till him. Gray gives a similar account of the alternative proposals here made, putting them, however, into the mouth of Robert Bruce, who, with him, takes the initiative, and stating that they were made upon the occasion of the meeting in the Greyfriars Church, where Comyn refused to listen to them. It must be remembered that Barbour admits the existence of various accounts. Gray supplies also the significant motive: “for now is the old age of the present English King” (qar ore est temps en veillesce de cesty roy Engles, p. 130). Bruce, in this account, speaks of the land being in servitude to the English by fault of Balliol, “who suffered his right and his freedom of the kingdom to be lost” (qe son droit et la fraunchise du realme ad lesse perdre, p. 129). The account in Fordun gives Bruce the initiative in making the offer on the ride from Stirling, and dates it 1304 (Gesta Annalia, cxiii.). See note on Bk. II. 35.