THE BRUCE BY JOHN BARBOUR ARCHDEACON OF ABERDEEN EDITED FROM THE BEST TEXTS WITH LITERARY AND HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION, NOTES AND APPENDICES, AND A GLOSSARY BY W. M. MACKENZIE, M.A., F.S.A. (SCOT.) AUTHOR OF “AN OUTLINE OF SCOTTISH HISTORY,” ETC. LONDON ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK 1909 PREFACE 1. MSS. AND EDITIONS. The poem _The Bruce_, by John Barbour, is preserved in only two manuscripts, one in the library of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and the other in the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh. The former is hereafter denoted by the letter C, the latter by E. Of these E alone is complete in the sense of having both beginning and end; the first three Books and Book IV. 1-56 are missing in C. On the other hand, C bears to have been completed in 1487, E in 1489. Other things being equal, the earlier MS. must, of course, be preferred. Here, however, intervenes a series of extracts, numbering 280 lines from Books I. and II., embedded in Wyntoun’s _Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland_, and the two MSS. of the _Cronykil_ are actually older than those of _The Bruce_. This raises a difficulty, as Wyntoun’s extracts show a goodly proportion of variations in language from the corresponding passages in E, the only other MS. which covers the same ground. Professor Skeat considers that Wyntoun’s lines are “in a better form (in the main)” than those of E;[1] but, on the other hand, we do not know Wyntoun’s method of working in such a case--how far he transcribed verbatim, how far “he modified the language of the MS. which he must have had before him.”[2] Many lines he omits, and others he obviously paraphrases; he incorporates matter from another source; and his version of _The Bruce_ lines may quite well be due to memorial reproduction after a hurried reading. It is not otherwise easy to account for scraps of a few lines of the poem being here and there embedded in narrative independently worded or derived. There is thus no warrant for erecting this chopped-up, second-hand version of the lines in question into a canon or standard for a purely scribal transcript made for its own sake. It is needful to enter this plea in view of the separatist theory of Mr. J. T. T. Brown, for whom the passages in Wyntoun represent so much of the original or _ur_-Bruce, out of which our MS. and printed versions have been elaborated by a fifteenth-century editor, who, to do so, borrowed freely and with no great cunning from the works of contemporary authors.[3] [1] Preface, S.T.S. edition, p. lxxv. [2] Skeat, p. xxxvii.