Evidence suggests that Barbour’s Bruce circulated widely in early fifteenthcentury Scotland – it was used directly by Wyntoun in his Original Chronicle (c.1408–20), drawn upon in The Buik of Alexander (c.1438), and cited by Bower in his Scotichronicon (c.1441–47) – but its earliest manuscript witnesses date from 1487 and 1489, thus over one hundred years after the poem’s composition. The earliest surviving printed edition was produced much later still in 1571 by the Edinburgh printer Robert Lekpreuik (fl.1561– 81), for the printer and bookseller Henry Charteris (d.1599) (STC 1377.5).

This chapter examines the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscript and early print contexts of The Bruce in further detail. It begins with a full description of the two manuscript witnesses – Cambridge, St John’s College, MS G.23 (1487) and Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates’ MS 19.2.2 (1489) – followed by an analysis of their scribes, owners and readers. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between the two manuscripts and to the vexed identity of their scribe(/s).

The second half of the chapter provides a full description of the 1571 print and focuses in particular upon the relationship of this text to the fifteenth-century manuscript witnesses. It also considers evidence for nowlost manuscript and print witnesses and concludes with a brief analysis of later prints and editions.

Cambridge, St John’s College, MS G.23

Cambridge, St John’s College, MS G.23 (olim 191) (MS C) is the earlier of the poem’s two surviving manuscript witnesses, and is internally dated to 1487. In addition to The Bruce, this paper manuscript, measuring c.21 × 15cm, also contains a version of the mid-fifteenth-century Scottish advisory poem known as The Thewis of Gudwomen (fols 164r–167v) and a Scotticized version of John Lydgate’s Dietary (167v–168v). Traces of red ink on the right-hand margin of fol. 168v suggest that a further text(/s) may also once have followed.

The manuscript has been collated by its cataloguer, M. R. James: a12, b12 both lost, c12 (wants 1), d12, e12, f14, g12 – 1212, o12 (wants 11, 12). The loss of the manuscript’s first two gatherings means that The Bruce is acephalous, beginning at Book 4, line 57. The text is copied in single columns, at an average of between 42 and 45 lines per page.

In Troy there lies the scene

Of Hisarlik in north-west Turkey, the reputed site of Troy, Michael Wood writes, ‘The first thing you notice is that the ruins exist at several levels and that there is not, as it were, one single Troy.’ The historical city on which the legend was based was most probably only ever a relatively small city with one thousand or so inhabitants, but the legend itself has far outstripped these humble origins. It has proved to be one of the most enduring and universal stories of Western civilization, and has inspired writers from Homer and Virgil, Chaucer and Shakespeare, to Dryden, Pope, Byron and Joyce, as well as the makers of epic Hollywood films, such as Helen of Troy (1955), Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and Troy (2004).

As with the city there is, however, no single legend of Troy. A cursory survey of classical and medieval narratives reveals that the legend was both wideranging and capacious, encompassing a diverse temporal and geographic range from Jason's initial search for the Golden Fleece to Aeneas' North African and Mediterranean wanderings. Indeed, we might think of the legend of Troy as a set of Russian dolls – a macro-narrative containing within it micro-narrative histories of several generations of infamous characters such as Jason and Medea, Troilus and Criseyde, and Dido and Aeneas, characters whose stories can exist both in isolation and as parts of a larger whole.

This book began by examining the role played by the Trojan legend in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Anglo-Scots Wars of Independence and concomitant ‘War of Historiography’. It discussed how during the Wars of Independence (and in subsequent periods of Anglo-Scots conflict) a myth of Trojan origins was deployed by English monarchs to bolster their claims to lordship and ownership of Scotland. To oppose this, and instead prove Scotland's independence and sovereignty, Scottish historians traced their nation's origins to a Greek prince, Gaythelos, and his Egyptian wife, Scota. The appeal to an alternative origin legend enabled the Scots to derive their origins from a parent race at least as old as, if not older than, the Trojan remnant. That parent race was, moreover, most crucially victorious against the ancestors of the English in the Trojan War.

The book subsequently set out to examine how the Scots responded in literature produced in the centuries immediately after the Wars of Independence to a legend previously used against them. It sought to determine whether there was a specifically Scottish response to the Trojan legend and, if so, what form that response took. In a related vein, it sought to understand precisely what the Trojan legend meant to Scottish writers and readers, and to what extent the Scottish representation of the Trojan legend changed over time. Many of these questions can now be answered in light of the foregoing study.

The Anglo-Scots Wars of Independence and concomitant ‘War of Historiography’, discussed in the Introduction, gave rise in late fourteenth-century and early fifteenth-century Scotland to texts, both historiographical and literary, which simultaneously reflected and developed emerging and increasingly explicit sentiments of Scottish nationality. Chapter 2 will consider the most well known of these texts, Barbour's Bruce, together with a series of other fifteenth-century texts in the Older Scots Romance tradition. But I begin by examining the representation of the Trojan legend and the alternative Scottish origin myth in the following Scottish historical texts: John of Fordun's Chronica Gentis Scotorum, compiled between 1384 and 1387; Walter Bower's Scotichronicon (c. 1441–47); Andrew of Wyntoun's Original Chronicle (c. 1408–20) (NIMEV 399); and two short chronicles – the Brevis Chronica and Chronicle of Scotland in a Part – most probably composed in the last third of the fifteenth century. I will analyse the representation of the Trojan legend and competing Scottish origin myth in each text in turn, assessing the impact of the historical context within which they were composed and the way in which the representation of each legend changed over time. Detailed attention is paid to the way in which the different texts both co-opt and revise Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia, particularly in their presentation of the Greek prince, Gaythelos, who is established as a counterpart to Geoffrey's Brutus.

This final chapter examines The Eneados, the first complete translation of Virgil's Aeneid into English produced in 1513 by the Scottish poet and bishop of Dunkeld, Gavin Douglas (c. 1476–1522). It focuses on the way in which Douglas uses the Trojan legend to reflect, like Henryson, on issues of literary authority and poetic truth, and, like the authors of The Bruce, The Scottish Troy Book and the Older Scots romance tradition, on issues of good self and public governance of both general relevance and speciic applicability to the contemporary Scottish political climate.

I begin by comparing two records of Douglas' response to the Trojan legend that frame, in chronological terms, his translation of the Aeneid: firstly, Douglas' earlier allegorical poem, The Palice of Honour, which contains numerous references to the Trojan legend and its most significant characters, and secondly, Polydore Vergil's account in his Historia Anglica of a personal conversation with Douglas about the Scota-Gaythelos origin myth. The remainder of the chapter focuses directly on the Eneados. It demonstrates how Douglas – like Henryson and Wyntoun – used the Trojan legend to reflect on some of the particular difficulties of authorship facing him, such as writing in the vernacular or constructing a coherent narrative out of a seemingly contradictory literary tradition, and it is argued that Douglas wrote his Eneados in part as a lesson in how to read.

Despite the fact that few medieval Scottish witnesses of Chaucer's poetry survive, his strong influence on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scottish literature is evidenced by verbal echoes and stylistic and thematic parallels in the works of poets such as James I, Blind Hary, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas and David Lyndsay. John Ireland also refers to Chaucer's ‘buk of troylus’ and ‘persounis taill’ in The Meroure of Wysdome (1490).

This chapter examines readings of and responses to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (NIMEV 3327) in two productions: firstly, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden. B. 24, the Scottish anthology containing Troilus and Criseyde which was compiled for the Sinclair family c. 1489–1505; and, secondly, Robert Henryson's individual, creative and challenging response to Troilus, The Testament of Cresseid (NIMEV 285), written sometime between 1475 and 1490. Following on from the previous chapter's analysis of female characters and rhetoric in the STB, this chapter focuses specifically on Chaucer's Criseyde and Henryson's Cresseid. It examines the way in which, in both the manuscript anthology and poem, the two related heroines are constructed not simply as characters per se, but also as texts – emblems and symbols of the Trojan textual tradition. As such, they voice wider concerns about literary interpretation and authority and ultimately question the very nature and existence of poetic truth.

Compared to the 86 Middle English romances listed in the revised Manual of the Writings in Middle English, the corpus of Older Scots romance appears limited – only twelve Older Scots romances are known to survive. Moreover, whereas three Middle English translations of Guido's Historia exist (the Laud Troy Book, the unrhymed alliterative Destruction of Troy, and John Lydgate's Troy Book), there is only one (now incomplete) Scottish translation of this text, The Scottish Troy Book (discussed in the following chapter).

That said, references to the Trojan legend and its heroes abound in the Older Scots romance corpus. In the romance Roswall and Lillian, for instance, which was most probably composed in the second half of the sixteenth century, the hero Roswall is compared favourably in the poem's opening lines to traditional literary heroes, many from the Trojan tradition:

Further comparisons of Roswall to Hector are made throughout the romance. When Roswall's father believes him to be dead, for instance, he is compared to Priam sorrowing for the death of his son, Hector:

The Scottish Troy Book (hereafter STB) (NIMEV 298.5) has been described as ‘the most shadowy work in [the] corpus of medieval Scottish romances, doomed forever to be “the bits in the Lydgate manuscripts” that are neither by Lydgate nor […] by Barbour’. Only two fragments of this c. 1400 Scottish octosyllabic couplet translation of Guido delle Colonne's Latin prose Historia destructionis Troiae (1287) now survive, in two late fifteenth-/early sixteenth-century Scottish manuscripts: Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk.5.30 (hereafter MS K) and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 148 (hereafter MS Do). In both manuscripts the defective STB is combined in a patchwork fashion with Lydgate's Troy Book (hereafter LTB), itself a translation into decasyllabic couplets of Guido's Historia written between 1412 and 1420 (NIMEV 2516).

On the few occasions that the STB has been mentioned at all, it has been commonly classified as a medieval romance, but its generic affiliations are, like those of Barbour's Bruce, in fact slightly more complicated than this. For, the STB is first and foremost a notably close translation of Guido's Historia, which itself purports to be based upon ‘eyewitness’ accounts of the Trojan War, and which was subsequently accepted by its medieval audiences as history. Unlike the Middle English Laud Troy Book, which does align itself with the medieval romance tradition, the narrative trajectory of the STB is furthermore, like Guido's Historia and Lydgate's Troy Book, predominantly tragic, charting first the destructions of Old and New Troy, and then the return to their homeland of the Greek force, increasingly marred by internal divisions and inter-generational conflict.

The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour (hereafter BKA) is one of two surviving Older Scots Alexander romances. In a little over nineteen thousand lines, this romance offers a full biography of Alexander's career, conquests and death. It supplements its main source, the second recension of the Latin Historia de Preliis, by drawing not only upon the Old French Roman d'Alexandre, and interpolations to it such as the Voeux du Paon and Voyage au Paradis, but also upon the pseudo-Aristotelian Secreta Secretorum and several pieces of otherwise-independent Older Scots conduct literature.

BKA is extant in British Library Additional MS 40732 (MS A) and National Archives of Scotland MS GD 112/71/9 (MS B). In both, the poem is acephalous. We thus lack its prologue and are forced to rely on the enigmatic final lines (19311–69) for information about its composition. These final lines are not composed by the poem's author, nor simply by a scribe. They are instead written by a redactor, who claims to have rewritten and in the process ‘mendit’ the ‘faltis’ of the ‘noble buike’ (line 19343). He reports that he began this task in the May of 1499 and completed it in August of that year (lines 19354–5). He also provides details of the poem's genesis, informing us that it was ‘translaittit’ ‘out of the Frensche leid’ ‘At þe instance off Lord Erskein, be Schir Gilbert þe Hay’ (lines 19319–20, 19334).