Barbour's 'Brus'

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

What's going on, California?

It's Bluff here.

You know what's better than a relaxing day at the beach?

A relaxing day at the beach with SpinQuest.com, America's number one social casino, with over a thousand slots and table games available to the comfort of your own phone, with instant cash prize redemptions, and new users get a $30 coin package for only 10 bucks.

That's SPINQUEST.com.

I'll see you there.

SpinQuest is a free-to-play social social casino.

Voidwear Prohibited.

Visit SpendQuest.com for more details.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

Fall is Crush Season in California Wine Country.

For a limited time, sip, stay, and savor crush-worthy getaways with up to 30% off and a bottle of local wine at destinations like Pasarobles Inn, Abola Lighthouse Suites, Vespera Resort on Fismo Beach, and Sheraton's San Diego Resort.

Each day celebrates harvest season with wine and exclusive savings.

Explore and book now at crushgitaways.com.

You can also enter to win a Lux trip to Nepa's Silverado Resort.

Visit crushgitaways.com to start planning your Fob Crash.

That's CrushGitaways.com.

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website.

If you scroll down the page for this edition, you find a reading list to go with it.

I hope you enjoyed the program.

Hello, around 1375, John Barber wrote The Bruce, the oldest surviving poem in older Scots, and the only source of many of the stories of Robert the Bruce and his victory over the English at Bannockburn sixty years before.

In almost 14,000 lines of rhyming couplets, Barber distilled the aspects of the Bruce's history most relevant for his own time, when the mood was for a new war against England after decades of disasters.

Barber's battle scenes are meant to stir in the name of freedom, and the effect of the whole is to assert Scotland as the rightful equal of any power in Europe.

With me to discuss Barber's the Bruce are Michael Brown, Professor of Scottish History at the University of St Andrews, Steve Boardman, Professor of Medieval Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh, and Rhiannon Purdy, Professor of English and Older Scots at the University of St Andrews.

Briannan, what, if anything, do we know about John Barber himself?

Well, we know he was active at the court of Robert II.

The first record we have of him is he's the precentor at Dunkeld Cathedral, and he then becomes Archdeacon of Aberdeen in 1356.

So that's the first point in his career.

We don't know when he was born.

We often guess, you know, people often say maybe 1320, 1325.

Absolutely no evidence for it.

The first record we have of him is 1355 and then 1356.

Thereafter, there are records of him going out to England and France on kind of study leave in the 1360s.

By the 1370s, he is occasionally appearing at Robert's court as an auditor of the exchequer in the 1370s, and he does that again in the 1380s.

1378, he gets a pension from Robert of a pound a year.

So we assume this is perhaps for composing the Bruce.

He dies in Aberdeen in 1395.

Well, that sums it up, doesn't it?

Here we go.

The language of the poem is Older Scots.

What's that language and who was using it at the time?

Well we now call it Older Scots because it is the ancestor of what we now call Scots.

But what Barber called it was English and as far as he was concerned it was it was just another dialect of English.

You know such another there's English spoken in Yorkshire, very different from English spoken in London, very different from English spoken in Herefordshire.

So it was the English that was spoken in Scotland and that's what he's speaking and that's what he's writing.

And that's what he calls it when he mentions the language.

And was this widely written in this way?

The only records we have of written Scots start, the only thing that has survived for us dates from the 1370s.

So this is not just the earliest literary work in Older Scots, it's one of the earliest bits of writings in Scots.

The poem itself, it's a poem, it's in octosyllabic couplets, so eight-syllable rhyming couplets.

So

it's actually a very basic and common form for medieval narrative works.

So you've had plenty of other chronicles are written in it, all kinds of other works as well, romances, many of the romances that Barbara's read, but it's not tied to any particular form.

It's kind of the minimal poetic form you can use, which is easy to read, easy to recite.

It's got a regular rhythm.

It's relatively easy to write because you only have to rhyme a couplet, then move on to the next couplet.

There's nothing to stop it.

It's a bit like a train.

So So it gives it this sort of impetus.

And it's also easier to read on a page because you get a relatively narrow column that you can let your eye trail down.

So it's much easier to read than prose, for example.

So this is why it was quite attractive to write in.

Steve, can I ask you, its central character is Robert the Bruce.

Can you tell us a bit about Robert the Bruce and why he's writing about him?

Well, Robert Bruce is better known perhaps as Robert I, King of Scotland, from 1306 to his death in 1329.

The way Bruce comes to the throne is unusual to say the least.

His family has a claim to the crown which becomes active after the death of the Scottish King Alexander III in 1286.

And after Alexander III's death, there's a competition develops between two families, Bruce's family and the Balliol family.

In the end, the Balliol claim wins out.

So King John Balliol is made king in 1292, but crucially at that point, who's been involved in arbitrating that contest is Edward I of England.

And Edward I has established his rights to superiority over the Scottish kingdom in the course of that contest.

When Edward asks for those rights to be recognised by Balliol, Balliol refuses, and in 1296, Edward I invades Scotland, deposes Balliol, and we're into a long period where Scotland is governed directly by the English king.

Let's get back to Robert de Bruce.

What's he doing here?

At that point, Robert is actually quite supportive of Edward because Edward represents a potential way back into the kingship.

So for about 10 years, Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, Lord of Annandale, oscillates between resisting the English administration in Scotland and cooperating cooperating with them against the Balliols and their allies.

Okay, let's talk about the state of Scotland

in the 1370s when Barbo is writing.

Who was king then?

The king in the 1370s is Robert the Steward, Robert Bruce's grandson, who's come to the throne in 1371.

So, in the terms of the long context of the 14th century, it's a period of peace.

But there are still areas of the Scottish Kingdom held by English lords that has been allowed by the terms of the truce established in 1357, and that truce is renewed in 1369.

So it looks as if important places for the Scottish realm, places like Berwick, Jedborough, Roxborough, are going to remain in English hands for the foreseeable future.

And there's a constituency within Scotland, particularly younger lords with interest in the borders, who want to reclaim those lands, reclaim their own estates that are at the moment denied them.

Thank you.

Michael Brown, we don't need the full plot, but what does Barber's Bruce cover?

What period in people?

Barber makes a big deal of telling the truth, but he's also very careful in the way he frames his story.

And he starts it in 1306 with Robert becoming king and takes it through to the death of Robert and his two principal captains, James Douglas and Thomas Randolph, between 1329 and 1932.

It's a long stretch.

It is a long stretch.

It's 14,000 lines as we've heard.

So

he's trying to distil those elements of the story which he wants his audience to grab on to I think.

And so

the seizure of the throne and how it's a legitimate thing.

So this controversial...

So he's trying to make Robert legitimate?

Yeah, he's well, I think Scots regard Robert as legitimate by this time, but what Barbara is doing is trying to elevate that legitimacy and link it to a story about heroism and prowess as well.

So he's glamorising the narrative to a certain extent, and he does that by telling stories about Bruce's initial defeats, his flight into exile, and then his return and the way almost individually he's holding off English forces or assassins who are trying to kill him.

And then onto the kind of narrative of grander warfare leading up to Bannockburn, which you know, in some ways is the climax of the whole poem.

And then from that, you have episodes of war in northern England and in Ireland, culminating in the triumphant peace treaty that Bruce secures in 1328 and the succession of his son.

Well we skipped over Bannockburn for the few people listening who don't know about Bannockburn.

Could you tell us what happened then and why it's so important?

It's important for the Scots and this is a Scottish poem as we've heard written in the 1370s because at that point it's their one great victory over the English.

It's the battle that proves that God is backing them.

It's a judgment and it shows Robert must therefore be the legitimate ruler of Scotland and that Edward II of England has no legitimate right over Scotland.

So it's a vindication of the Scottish claim.

I think it allows Robert from that point on in the reign to rule what has been a very divided kingdom as if those divisions had gone.

They haven't necessarily gone but he's able to do that.

So in his own lifetime he's able to do that.

And looking back from the 1370s, time always smooths out these things.

People are able to accept Bannock Burn as this great national victory and that's what Barbara is writing up.

Well why did Barbara write this at this time?

It's a massive project.

I mean I think it relates to what Steve was talking about about the 1370s.

You've got a new dynasty on the throne, the Stuart dynasty, whose claim is through Robert Bruce.

Robert II is a grandson as well as having the same name as Robert I, Robert Bruce.

So it's about drawing that connection.

with the new family.

It's also, I think, because Scotland is in a place where it has been relatively secure as Steve was saying because of the truce but war is not that far away.

So it's about reminding Scots what they've been through in the past as well.

I mean the question of whether he's writing it for someone.

So Robert Stuart, the new king of Scots, Robert I's grandson, I think has a relationship with John Barber and may be the patron or certainly John Barber has him in mind when he's writing.

So it might be that.

There are other people in Scotland in the 1370s whose family have achieved great things and based their power on what's happened under Robert I's reign.

So reminding Scots of their ancestors, I think, is part of the purpose too.

The case to be made for some sort of patronage is that his other known work, which is lost, is a history of the Stuart family, which seems to indicate that he's quite closely in the service of either Robert the Stuart himself or one of Robert the Stuart's many sons.

Rihanna, can you give us a taste of how the poem might have sounded in performance?

I can give you the opening lines if you'd like.

I'd

take them with ribbons round them.

Thank you very much.

So the poem begins.

Stories to read are deletable.

Suppose that they be naught but fable.

Then should stories that soothfast were, and they were said on good manner, have double pleasance in hearing.

The first pleasance is the carping, the telling of them, and the t'other, the soothfastness, that shows the thing richt as it was.

Do you want to translate any of that?

Sure.

This is Barbara setting out his stall, really.

He's explaining why he's writing this and what the value of it is.

So stories in themselves are pleasant, even if they're not true.

But if you can tell a story that has truth, there's a double pleasure in that.

First of all, in the telling, just the fun of hearing a story, and secondly, in hearing things right as they were, actually hearing history unfold.

And that's what he is offering to his readers and listeners.

What are the star terms in the poem?

Is he particularly good at battles?

Well, he particularly likes battles, and he's clearly writing for an audience who likes battles.

There are so many incidents of Robert finding himself

in straightened circumstances.

He's either alone or he's only got two men and he's fighting against so many, but he fights so brilliantly.

And

everybody's striking on everybody else.

The battle scenes are very similar, but he's obviously writing for an audience who loves this kind of thing.

It's a bit like going to see an adventure film.

You know, they might be full of clichés, you know, but it's clearly what the audience was looking for, this kind of knightly battling and axes being struck onto heads and cleaving them down to the brains endlessly.

He's trying to infuse history with excitement.

There's a kind of

the contest between chivalry and brutality, isn't there, really?

Where do you stand on that, Steve?

Well, the Bruce is

one text of many that are produced in the 14th century that deal with the warfare of the age.

And the 14th century, the era of the Hundred Years' War, is notable for the levels of violence in and around Europe.

And so the Bruce is part of this wider literary exploration of the delivery of violence, the chivalric virtue, the prowess, the bravery,

but also reflecting on what it means to be a chivalric lord.

What other qualities are you supposed to?

Can you give us some examples?

Well, in terms of the Bruce itself, there's obviously an emphasis on Robert's prowess, his ability to hit people very hard

and chop their heads off.

But also, an exploration of other qualities like measure, prudence, acting with cunning and slicht.

There's an attempt to suggest that there are different ways to fight.

And although we tend to have an idea of chivalry as a type of honourable, open field warfare, in a couple of passages, Bruce, particularly talking about the ethics of killing an English garrison in their sleep,

so killing people while they're asleep is not very chivalric, is it?

You wouldn't think so, but in the poem you get this little aside to say, in effect, effect, well, any warrior who is effective would not mind, and we will receive no reproach or no reproof for behaving in this way.

So, there's a rough and readier idea of chivalry, chivalry that wins.

Can we just pause here?

People are asleep, they go and kill them while they're asleep.

Now, what's chivalrous about that?

I mean, how do they square it with chivalry?

I'm just interested.

I mean, it seems mad to me, but there you go, you can explain all this.

Chivalry is a very wide portfolio in the 14th century.

Yeah, and in fact, I mean, one of the interesting things about the Bruce is that you get this sort of played out in conversations between, in particular, two of Bruce's lieutenants, James Douglas and Thomas Randolph, Earl of Murray.

And Thomas Randolph, Earl of Murray, is constantly making observations on the behaviour of his fellows, saying, This really isn't good.

You know, we really shouldn't be behaving in this way.

But yes, one of the things about the Bruce as a work is that it's very much on the more rough and ready end of chivalric texts

in the 14th century.

It's laying out how to fight and win a war

effectively.

That's brutality, isn't it?

Michael, do you want to come in?

I mean, I think Steve's absolutely right.

I mean, I think one of the elements that does come through is that...

Aside from Edward I, who's presented as a tyrant and

a homicidal maniac in many ways, at the opening of the book, and then he disappears, the English aren't presented in terms of being, if you like, morally wrong.

They are worthy opponents and they're giving Bruce a good reputation and they're in turn being praised for their nobility and their own qualities because you want a competition between equals.

And in a sense, that's what chivalric values in the 14th century around war are about.

It's about understanding the rules.

Steve's absolutely right, that the Scots or barber also knows his audience are going to cheer if he shows certain individuals transgressing and James Douglas Bruce's lieutenant and almost the second figure in the narrative.

Can you say a little more about Douglas because he's an important figure?

Yeah so James Douglas historically emerges from a baronial family in southwestern Scotland in the valley of the River Clyde to become Bruce's principal military lieutenant and to build a kind of family name and reputation and landholding that

sweeps across southern Scotland.

So he's the founder of a dynasty and in the 1370s his family are in the audience, powerful individuals and they want to see him presented in a way which is not simply as a noble chivalric warrior but as someone who is transgressing those rules.

So he massacres the English garrison of his own castle on Palm Sunday when they're in church.

He takes the prisoners back and slaughters them in the cellars of his own castle.

And again,

there's a double edge here because that's completely against the rules of chivalry, and yet the Scots see that as legitimate.

Because why are these people here?

Why are they denying Douglas his birthright?

The illegitimacy of their presence removes them, in that case, from the protections of chivalry.

Yeah, I think that reflects back on the Turnbury case, because Turnbury is Bruce's castle, and that preamble to say, well, nobody will reproach us if we take this action against a garrison that is totally unsuspecting.

For a noble audience, landed inheritance is everything.

And those who deny you your inheritance, in a certain sense, the rules are off.

That's what the audience in the 1370s think and respond to.

I'm Bretzky and you're in California and I'm here to tell you about SpinQuest.com, my favorite social casino, with over a thousand slots and table games absolutely free with the ability to win real cash prizes instantly to your bank account.

There's no better time to hop on our $30 coin package for only $10 deal.

Head over today.

I love you.

I'll see you there.

SpinQuest is a free-to-play social casino.

Voidwear Prohibited.

Visit spinquest.com for more details.

Want to stop engine problems before they start?

Pick up a can of C-Foam motor treatment.

C-Foam helps engines start easier, run smoother, and last longer.

Trusted by millions every day, C-Foam is safe and easy to use in any engine.

Just pour it in your fuel tank.

Make the proven choice with C-Foam.

Available everywhere.

Automotive products are sold.

Seafoam!

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score.

We the man to be seen.

Winner, best book.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

Fall is Crush Season in California Wine Country.

For a limited time, sip, stay, and savor crush-worthy getaways with up to 30% off and a bottle of local wine at destinations like Pasarobles Inn, Abola Lighthouse Suites, Vespera Resort on Pismo Beach, and Sheraton San Diego Resort.

Each day celebrates harvest season with wine and exclusive savings.

Explore and book now at crushgitaways.com.

You can also enter to win a Lux trip to Napa's Silverado Resort.

Visit crushgitaways.com to start planning your Fob Crash.

That's crashgitaways.com.

What do you think of the use of this word?

Is it being misused, Brianna?

Chivalry.

Yeah.

It's not being misused because Barbara is so interested in it and he talks about people performing such great chivalry.

He's interested in the display of knightly virtue, so prowess, loyalty.

I mean, this business of reclaiming your heritage.

I mean, that's the Barbara's Bruce Ritlarge, really.

It's the Scots reclaiming their heritage.

So

they will fight to demonstrate their great chivalry.

But if occasionally a small band of Scots has to trick and perhaps slaughter in their sleep a larger band of English, that's okay because they are recovering their heritage.

That's the kind of moral justification for it.

They shouldn't have been here anyway.

So, you know, we'll just kill them.

Let's go back to the poem.

We touched on it, but can you give us an idea of what he did at Bannockburn in terms of writing about it?

He gives us details of sort of military planning, manoeuvres, you know, the fact that Bruce has his men dig holes in the ground where he expects the English are going to come past.

So we get

the legs of the horses.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, so we get the military strategist.

But we also, you know, for the audience, we've got this sort of sense of individual combat.

So, you know,

the Scots watching the English and the English trying to guess what the Scots are going to do.

But the opening sally is, again, this kind of individual combat between an English knight called Henry de Boone and Bruce.

This is the first kind of blow struck.

And Barbara really sets this scene up beautifully.

Remember, all before Bannockburn, we've had all these stories of Bruce sort of hiding, being hunted, you know, with his.

Yeah, yeah, Bruce the Outlaw.

With the spider in the cave.

No, no,

that's an 18th century edition of that.

There are no spiders in here.

Yeah, I like this spider.

Not too much like, oh, sorry.

There's lots of other exciting things.

Hunting dogs.

But I mean, he has endless stories which all kind of blend together, really.

But then the essence of them is always that Bruce is outnumbered and people underestimate him.

They think, right, we've got him on his own.

This is great.

We can kill him.

But no, they can't kill him.

Bruce turns round.

His men come and find Bruce afterwards and they find him casually sitting on the bank of the river with 14 corpses littered about him, because somebody underestimated Bruce again.

So, by the time we get to Bannockburn,

we know as an audience, nobody can surprise Bruce.

Nobody does well if they underestimate Bruce.

So, with this opening scene, we have Henry De Boone looking at the Scots ranks, and he spots Bruce, and we're told that he sees Bruce riding around, not on a war horse, but just on a palfrey.

Basically, he's just cantering about on a pony, and he's got an axe, so he's not looking very grand.

And Henry the De Daboon, we're told, is armoured fiend, and he's got fantastic armour on, and he's on a stade, he's on a massive war horse, and he thinks, brilliant, I'm gonna have the king.

And he rides towards the king, and Bruce sees him riding towards him.

And we break into verse 12.

We break it, we can break into verse, yeah.

Yeah, so we've got Henry sort of looking at Bruce, and he thought that he should well lately win him, Bruce, and have him at his will.

Sin, he saw him horse-id sail, he's only on a pathetic little horse.

Sprint they salmon into the ling, they sprinted toward each other in a line.

Sir Henry missed the noble king, and he, that in his stirrups stood, with the axe that was herd and good, with so great mane, roched him a dint, that nither hat and a helmet stint the heavy douche that he him gave,

that near the heed till the harness clav,

runs towards him, stands up, Bruce stands up in his stirrups, swipes down with the axe, straight into Henry's brains.

That's what happens when people underestimate Bruce.

I see, right.

That's how Bannockburn is set up.

So

your author there, your barber,

really adores Bruce, doesn't he?

He does.

He does.

Absolute hero worship.

Does he go just a little over the top?

Well, I mean, he's patterning him after the great heroes of romance, sort of fictional romance.

So

he's casting him in that light.

And of course, he has this historical figure who did win the Battle of Bannockburn and who did hang on to the crown against pretty fearsome odds at the beginning.

So he's imagining what kind of person must he have been.

So

that's what he reaches for.

Can we stick with Bannockburn for a moment?

Because it's a big, it's a wonderful centrepiece for all of you.

Steve, what would it have meant to his listeners?

Scots through the 15th and 16th century returned to Barbara's Bruce as a type of model for their own society, saying, Here's a great king loyally supported by the lords and offering them good lordship.

So it becomes almost a type of golden age that Scots through the 14th, 15th century look back to and invoke as a type of totem of the coherence of their kingdom.

Michael, can we be a little more specific about his brilliance as a leader of men and in combat, if everything that Barber says is true, is brilliant in combat, but how good he is at what he does?

Yes.

I mean, there's a problem there, which you've already kind of hinted at, which is how much do we believe Barber.

Barber loves Bruce, and Barber is writing for an audience that loves Bruce, and historians love the detail and information it gives us about Bruce, and have tended to rely on him a little too much, maybe.

Well, you've got to define a little before we go on.

Well, he's a Count of Mannockburn.

So his account of Mannetburn has been identified as, in a sense, a narrative which is praising particular families and individuals who are there in the 1370s and inventing roles for people on the battlefield nobody else mentions.

So maybe he's just got better information or maybe he's writing an account which, whilst fundamentally based on events that are recognised, is also adding in details which isn't going to get tick boxes with the audience.

Well let's particularise this to the Douglas family.

Okay.

How they figured and why they're important and how they come into this business of the account.

Yeah, I mean the poem from the beginning is set up as not simply a biography of Robert, but as a biography of Robert and James Douglas, his lieutenant.

Barber introduces James Douglas as a youth deprived of his lands by Edward I and then deciding to join Robert and he signposts at their meeting that these two men are going to work together to free Scotland.

So there's a double narrative and there's a whole series of episodes with Douglas who like Bruce is undertaking exploits leadership.

He clearly is someone whose reputation is for transgressing the rules of normal behaviour.

In Barber he's called the good Sir James.

The English contemporary label for him is Black Douglas and the family chooses the black label and supposedly in Norse country mothers will frighten their children to sleep by saying hushy hushy the black Douglas will get ye.

So that reputation as almost terrorising the English is something which the Douglas family latches onto and James Douglas becomes their kind of focal point and their key figures in Scotland in the 1370s.

So they're lapping this stuff up.

And the information may be from their family stories too.

And this is all in the cause of getting Scotland recognised as a country in its own right, the equal of any other country in what we might call Europe with other countries.

I think there's two things going on.

I mean, this is a story by a Scott for Scots, but it's also about...

for the audience seeing themselves as something which is participating in a wider frame of reference, you know, going back to the the ideas of chivalry.

And Robert himself is generally presented as someone who is honourable towards his captives, who recognises the fallen and respects them for the most part, certainly post-Bannockburn.

And, you know, if you're Scotland and you're on the kind of northern edge of Europe, your route to the continent,

which used to be via England, is now shut off, you're conscious of a need to recognise and be seen as part of this wider European, if you like, elite society.

French seems to enter this.

this.

This is the period, the 14th century, when the Franco-Scottish Alliance becomes increasingly important and Scotland's main continental ally is the Kingdom of France, also at war with England in the Hundred Years' War.

The French don't appear very much in this narrative, but when you're in the 1370s and further into the 1380s, the Franco-Scottish Alliance is very real and the Douglases as a family are particularly associated with it.

So that awareness of how this plays out is important.

At the end of the poem James Douglas carries Robert Bruce's heart on crusade to Spain.

Yes, I kind of wonder how it lasts.

What does he put in a special sealed casket?

A lead casket.

And they've discovered that casket at Melrose Abbey.

Really?

Well, they think they have.

They have something that looks very like it would be that casket, but it's a lead, sealed lead box.

Did they open it?

I think they did, but there's not much.

Rihanna, we're talking about a man who's

writing this barber, very consciously literally, alluding to other heroic poems.

Can you mention one or two of them and tell us the effect this might have?

He does.

I mean, one of the interesting things about his literary allusions is that every one of them that we can trace is to a romance that was only available in French.

So there are romances in Middle English, there's plenty of romances in Middle English by this point that he could conceivably have, you know, audience could have got hold of, been reading.

But when he refers specifically to these chivalric texts, they are they are French texts and they're older French texts.

So for example, Le Romand de Têbe, the Romance of Thebes, that's one that comes up more than once.

This is a story of the siege of Thebes.

So after Oedipus dies, his two sons agree to share a kingdom year in, year out, but Atiocles is on the throne for a year and doesn't want to give it up, so Polynices collects together the heroes, the Argives, and they attack Thebes to try and recover his rightful kingdom.

This was enormously popular,

this tale around Europe.

Barber refers to this specifically when Bruce, one of his many episodes of being sort of apparently trapped by the people chasing him, the men of Galloway are hunting him, and he finds himself alone in a ford and he realises he's too far away to get his men, so he's got to turn and face them alone.

Sometimes he's facing an enormous number of men on his own, isn't he?

On a narrow path with the cliff behind him, and so in this case, 200.

200 men.

Yes, and Barber stops at this point and says it just reminds us that it's very much like when the hero Tidious, who was kind of the messenger of Polynices sent to try and reclaim the kingdom, is ambushed by Otiocles' men and he's ambushed by 50 men, not 200, just 50, and he manages to fight them off.

And this is a really famous episode.

So Barbara says, you know, it's like this, but of course, you know, Bruce is facing 200 men.

And, you know, who do you think is better?

He finishes.

That's only one of the heroic examples he brings forward.

So he's building him up then.

He's building him up.

Is there any sense of verification?

Do we have a BBC verifier?

We don't.

We don't.

But what he's really interested in are these huge kind of epic,

they're called Romans just because they were written in French, but these epic stories, so they have huge political scope, you know, it's somebody reclaiming a kingdom, or it's the story of the fall of Troy.

So we're going to the fall of Troy.

We're going back to the Greeks.

The fall of Troy.

So Douglas, of course, is compared to Hector.

So not to a king, but we have a, specifically compared to Hector of Troy.

He even says he has a bit of a lisp, just like Hector of Troy was supposed to have had.

A lisp or a murmur or

a slight speech impediment that was apparently felt to be very manly.

Better things to do than talk to people.

Steve,

they're lost to us, but have we any idea of Barbara's sources for all this stuff?

I think we can speculate reasonably confidently about two or three sources that Barbara must have had in front of him.

And one obviously relates to Robert Bruce himself.

A lot of these elaborated, embellished stories of Bruce escaping almost certain death really occur in quite a narrow chronological window.

They're the first two, three years of his reign.

And they seem to belong to a tale that is circulating in Europe well before Barber writes and which seems to concentrate on Bruce's outlaw years.

That they present Bruce as an outlaw who is threatened by his enemies, but like a good outlaw, because he has God's backing and because of his own morality, moral courage, and prowess, he wins out.

A sort of variant on the Robin Hood tale.

There's also clearly a collection related to the life of James Douglas that Michael's already mentioned, which seems to run through from Douglas's early life through to his perhaps his death on Crusade in 1330.

It reads more like something like the life of Bertrand de Geclan, the French constable, slightly the story of a man who is rising up from a fairly low social position to become rewarded for his military virtues and his loyalty.

And so it becomes a tale of the recovery of a nation, the recovery of a kingdom, rather than a conventionally chivalric tale, which I suppose comes back to the question that you were asking right at the the start, about what is chivalry?

The Douglas tale seems to be slightly more, shall we say, robust.

Is he seen as a romantic outlaw?

Do people like this outlaw?

Part of it, it's penance, though, partly because he becomes king having murdered his main rival in a church

and is excommunicated by the church for that homicidal act and sacrilegious act.

And Barber presents all the suffering he undergoes, having to be sort of pursued around his own kingdom for years by his enemies.

So that's kind of expiating the sin.

So there is that element to it as well.

And the idea of atoning for his sins.

And that comes full circle at the end of the tale, where Bruce wants his heart to be taken on crusade, at least partly in expiation of his sins.

He says, my hands are covered in blood, and so I want to go on crusade to achieve that type of atonement.

He doesn't do it in his own life so he has James Douglas.

It seems appropriate that James Douglas given that his hands are even more covered in blood than anybody else's.

Yes.

Can we come back to this poem and why did it matter that it was in older Scots rather than say court French which was popular at the time?

Michael.

Yeah that was I mean that's one of the intriguing things is the choice of language because it is I think a point at which that's a conscious decision.

It's not automatic.

And there's an obvious comparison.

So there's a chronicle written by an English knight from Heaton in Northumberland Thomas Gray who's spent time as a prisoner in Scotland written a decade earlier and he writes that in Anglo-Norman so in the French form spoken in Britain and so Barber choosing to use Scots the English form is a conscious decision and personally I think it's practicality it's what his audience understands there's a letter from actually the end of the century where a Scottish earl writing to Henry IV of England says marvel you not that I write in English, but it's clearer to my understanding than French or Latin.

So you're getting into a point where possibly the aristocratic class is starting to find, well, to start to move away from the use of French, certainly in Scotland, and you're seeing similar sorts of linguistic shift amongst the elite in England, if you're thinking of the great poets of the late 14th century in England.

Well, Ossar is the French chronicler, is in Scotland in the 1370s, I think?

65, okay, 1360s.

And he comments that, you know, we're supposed to have this great alliance, but the Scots don't speak French, and they won't speak French, they don't want to speak French.

So, I mean, Barber himself clearly read French and had all these safe conducts to France, so clearly spoke French.

There must have been.

There are some people still writing the occasional diplomatic letter in French, so there are people who knew French, but not everybody, and perhaps less willingness to use it.

There's an important passage on freedom.

Well, these are probably the most famous lines now from Barbara's Bruce.

If anybody knows any lines from Barbara's Bruce, it's probably these, because you will find them in modern anthologies.

A little extract from Barbara's Bruce.

I mean, if there's any extract from Barbara's Bruce, it'll be these lines.

Okay.

He writes, Ah, freedom is a noble thing.

Freedom ma's man to have liking.

Freedom all solace to man gives.

He lives at ease that freely lives.

A noble heart may have none a's.

Na el's nocht that may him plays, gif freedom fail, for

So, well, first of all, freedom is a noble thing.

Freedom gives man pleasure.

Freedom makes you happy.

It gives you solace.

You can live at ease if you have freedom.

And a noble heart, particularly, can never have ease, can never be relaxed.

It can't ever be happy unless he has freedom.

If freedom fails, then you cannot be happy.

Freedom is desired above all other things by noble hearts.

He's obviously, he's not worried about what peasants and the ordinary man might want.

He's not going to be free anyway, but noble hearts.

Does he define freedom in any way?

All of us open our mouths here.

Oh well.

Where shall we start?

Well start wherever you want because as long as you start somewhere.

Yeah, I mean that makes it sound very aspirational and quite cuddly, but in fact that passage goes on to really define freedom as the opposite of thralldom.

That's the threat to come under the dominion

of others and to find your rights and privileges stripped away from you.

So freedom as a positive goal is what we tend to read, but for Barber and for his audience, it's the lurking danger of thralldom that's that's the issue.

Michael?

Yeah, and that thraldom, this is book one, so this is Barber getting his message across at the beginning.

And thralldom is what English rule means, that Scots are not free to enjoy their property, they're not free to protect their families, they are preyed upon by the English king and his forces.

So it's this quite stark representation of the point at which Bruce enters the narrative, if you like, this is what he's saving Scotland from.

So it's part of that build-up.

He does have, towards the end, has

a very clerkly little comparison there where he says,

wise men may say that wedding being married is a hardest bond, but thralldom is well worse than death, even worse than death, and marriage, marriage, thraldom would be, which is possibly not going to go down quite so well these days, but playing to an audience largely of men.

Seems to me there's a sense in which the it's a practical poem, this huge poem, saying how to fight and beat the English.

Did you think he got it right?

It's certainly the approach that seems to be most successful for the Scottish realm in the long run over the 14th and 15th centuries.

The background to the appearance of the Bruce, although they're looking back to this great Scottish triumph at Bannockburn, in the intervening years Scottish armies have been regularly and devastatingly defeated at Duplin Moor, at Halladon Hill, at Neville's Cross.

So in a sense he's distilling the wisdom gleaned from defeat and military disaster.

He says that

this is the way we have to fight and it's a legitimate way to fight.

So there is a shift in the way that people across Europe think about chivalry.

It's not just a moral code, it's a way to fight effectively as well.

That is a contradiction that's inherent in chivalry, not just in Barbara's version of it.

I mean, this business that

to be a good knight, you must display chivalric prowess, which means fighting people and killing people, and yet you're also supposed to be a good Christian, which generally doesn't involve, you know, I mean, this is one of the sort of contradictions of the Crusades.

So, we have other works about chivalry fretting about exactly where the line should be drawn.

I mean Henry V massacring the French prisoners at Agincourt is a famous example.

It's military necessity.

He's worried that these people would be liberated, so he has them killed on the battlefield once they've surrendered.

Totally against the laws of chivalry, but justifiable.

And I think it's that...

Justifiable to whom?

To him.

In the same way that this is justifiable to the Scots.

So these people are, you know, as Steve is saying, this is a pragmatic text as well as an idealistic one.

Staying Staying with you, Michael.

What, if any, has been the wider impact of this Barber's poem, the Bruce, in his own time, and if you've got the stamina and since?

One thing that needs to be said is the earliest manuscripts of this text, which is not surprising amongst medieval texts, are considerably later.

So the earliest manuscripts come from nearly just over a century later in the 1480s.

But we have references to this as the key source for knowing about Robert from the generation after Barber is writing.

So in the early and mid-15th century there are Scottish chroniclers who are saying if you want to know more about this go to Archdeacon Barber's book.

So for a Scottish writer that's probably good provenance.

So we know that other writers are reading this and also that it's an authority on the period.

And then in the 1480s you have strangely two manuscripts produced by the same scribe in Fife for a much more

like middle class, middle folk kind of audience.

So it's written for a local cleric who's from a local Fife family and that suggests you've got a kind of dissemination of this text but actually by that stage it's often grouped alongside a text called the wallace about william wallace which is much worse in almost every measurable respect as poetry is history as storytelling good poetry michael it's just terrible history okay there we are it's good poetry i'm not a judge of poetry obviously so at that point you know barbara and wall bruce and wallace are linked together but they're understood as part of of the kind of narrative of Scotland's past by the late 15th century and 16th century.

Rhiannon, what would propel people to read this today?

It's surprisingly exciting to read when you settle down to read it.

One of the surprising things about Barbara's Bruce, given that this is an enormous work, and it's obviously a very sophisticated construction, and yet when you look at the actual language, it's quite simple.

It's easier to read than other older Scots from the period, put it that way.

It's got a much narrower vocabulary.

He's actually writing in quite plain language.

You've got about 11 different words for hitting somebody, and you know, once you've learnt the ones that you didn't recognise, and a couple of words for being in a hurry.

So it's clearly written to appeal to an audience who maybe didn't have an enormous vocabulary themselves.

Do you think it still has an appeal to a wider audience?

I think it does because he's so good at telling, particularly I think in the early phases, the outlaw tales.

They are fun to read.

And Bruce has so many fantastic moments of just hold my beer, I'm just going to go and destroy these men and come back.

And it is so sparsely and quickly told that it's very engaging.

Well, thank you very much for that.

Thank you, Rihanna, Rhiannon Purdy, Steve Boardman, and Michael Brown.

Next week, it's Dragons.

Thanks for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

I wish I was here for dragons.

Thanks a lot, Muriel.

No dragons in the briefest.

Well, now what we're going to ask you to do is...

No, why don't we start with you, Rihanna?

What did you not get time to say you'd like to have said?

I think I might have talked more about how the first audience would have encountered this poem.

So

some will have read it.

It will have existed in manuscript, otherwise we wouldn't have it.

But the majority of people encountering this would have encountered it as a performance, and obviously not the whole thing, not 13,600 lines over the course of three days where nobody sleeps.

It would probably, they would be selecting bits to read out.

You know, something that a performance, perhaps, you know, after a feast,

you might get a couple of hundred lines.

Or you might have a family, thinking of that later context for the manuscripts, you might have a family that has a manuscript and one person would read out sections.

Or perhaps they'd pass it round, depends how many people are good at reading aloud.

And that makes a difference when you hear it read aloud when you when you can do voices for the characters when you can slow down when you can make it exciting and I think that's something you don't get especially when you're looking at it in a modern printed edition Michael

I mean I think the individual from the poem that that we haven't mentioned at all is Robert's brother Edward Bruce who is built up in many ways as if you like,

the counterpoint to Robert.

So he's a great leader, a great knight, but a foolish commander, a foolish king, and his exploits both in Scotland and then later in the poem in Ireland, which form quite a significant part of the latter sections of the Bruce, show him as a man who's too rash to actually be a king.

And that's completely coloured our view of Edward Bruce, but it's in the poem just to show up what a good leader Robert is.

He doesn't make these mistakes and when he goes to Ireland, he kind of shows to Edward what the difference between the two of them is.

And what is it?

It's recognizing the need for caution, it's recognizing those military tricks that we were talking about, that Steve identifies as kind of stratagems and practical advice.

Edward Bruce just charges in and finally it's fatal for him.

Robert is sending him support but Edward insists on attacking a much larger English army and for once a smaller army is crushed by a larger English army and Edward is killed along with all the knights who've gone with him.

So it's a disaster made by a king who doesn't have that mix of boldness but also caution that Barber wants to get across as the ideal form of leadership for the Scots.

Yeah, I think I pick up a point that Rhiannon alluded to, the way in which there seems suddenly to be a significant audience in late 14th century Scotland for historical and literary works in older Scots English.

Essentially, this is

going from almost nothing to suddenly Barbers, Bruce appearing.

There's an anonymous chronicle that seems to be produced by about 1390, also in Older Scots, and directed to

the same type of interest.

It's interested in warfare, it's interested in chivalric renown, it's interested in recording and commemorating the names of those who have played an active role in the warfare of the 14th century.

And that rolls through into the work of Andrew of Winton in the early 15th century, again writing in Scots a massive history

going back to the origins of the world and tracing it through.

So,

in some ways,

Barber is

important

almost as the first signifier of

this new audience for chivalric material,

warlike material in Scots.

This is risking something, but is it too much of a leap to go to Walter Scott?

In the sense of

is Walter Scott in the tradition?

Did he take anything from it?

If he didn't, we can move on as quickly as possible.

Scots border ballads are very much in the tradition of these kind of episodes.

And I think there is a continuation, particularly in the borders,

between the narratives of the type that Barber and other similar sources in the late medieval period directly into those border stories of people again transgressing, breaking the law, but in some ways being praised for that.

Yeah, the border the border.

Yeah, I mean Scott has exactly that interest in bringing history to life.

I think the difference is that Scott doesn't have that immediate political impetus of I need to get these, I need to get the younger generation of Scots ready to defend their country and not, you know, not risk giving in to the English.

Scott's no longer worried about that, so it's a literary interest.

Yeah, the tales for entertainment is tales of the grandfather, which is actually where the tale of the spider first appears.

It is okay,

I always liked that bit.

The spider's trying to get from one rock to another and fails and fails, but it tries and tries and tries again, and Robert de Bruce thinks, I'll do that.

Yeah, and that's a set of tales designed, as the name suggests, for Scott's young grandson and meant as an inspiration drawn from these historical episodes.

What lessons can you learn

as a young man destined for service in the British Empire?

Okay, well, thank you very much indeed.

That was very lively.

And Simon's coming in to say something or other.

I can do it all again.

I would embrace

that first five minutes of that.

We didn't switch the recording if we had a ton of time.

No, would you like tea or coffee?

Tea tea.

Oh, a little tea, yeah.

Tea,

Nothing for me.

Three teas.

Water, do you want?

No.

No, I'm fine.

Thanks very much.

Hello, Victoria.

In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson, and it's a BBC Studios audio production.

We pulled into

what felt like an old compound.

You think, wow, this is a very old property.

I'm Danny Robbins, and Uncanny is back.

We have three brand new summer special episodes, and things

about to get scary.

I could feel something moving up the side of the bed and I can't quite believe what I'm seeing.

A trip to a tiny medieval town in central Spain turns into a holiday from hell.

I could make out its long matted fur and I am absolutely petrified.

Absolutely petrified.

This was just pure terror.

And we'll investigate more spine-chilling cases in an episode recorded live at the Hay Festival.

Uncanny hay audience, who is feeling team believer and who is team skeptic?

Listen now on BBC Sounds.

School's back and so are the sweet moments.

Right now at Crumble, you can get a chocolate chip four pack for just $9.99.

Freshly baked, warm, and packed with melty chocolatey chips.

Perfect for after-school snacks, study sessions, or family time.

Order in-store, in

online, or through the Crumble app today.

That's a chocolate chip four-pack for just $9.99.

Only at Crumble.