Older Scots Language and Literature

The purpose of this dissertation is chiefly to examine two periods of Scottish history - the Reformation period, and the period surrounding the Union of the Crowns - and try to ascertain at which point the English language can be said to have overtaken or the Scots language as the language used in the vernacular and the writing of the Scottish Lowlands. Utilising contemporary sources such as manuscripts, publications and correspondence, in addition to modern scholarship from linguists and historians, this dissertation examines the journey that Scots has undergone from a recognised and respected language used in royal, legal and common venues to what became regarded as a dialect of English or even merely slang. Special attention is also paid to the attitudes that important figures in Scottish history had towards Scots, and how these attitudes might have affected its use and disuse in wider Scottish society.

The story is that of Walter Fitzgilbert and his sons, and the oration ‘Gilbert Hamilton’ gave at the funeral of Robert of Bruce. It is in a many ways a work of fiction, including some historical detail taken from readily available sources in the Scotichronicon, mixed with other material revised and recreated for this narrative’s purpose, such as the motif of a father and son in English and Scottish courts, the murder of the English favourite ‘Spenser’, and the fight at Kinneil Muir with ‘Odomar Vallance’ a composite character based on the historical figures of Aymer de Valance and Henry de Bohun, Earl of Hereford. Parts of the narrative are particularly attuned as propaganda to promote the Hamilton’s as inheritors of an Anglophile tradition, perhaps with origins earlier in Regent Arran’s career, or in his father’s opposition to Regent Albany.

This article examines the portrayal of Macbeth and Malcolm Canmore as illegitimately born men in Andrew of Wyntoun's Orygynale Cronikyl. Portraying two kings of Scots as illegitimate sons was an unusual choice and was one that had textual and narrative implications. Wyntoun increased the role and political agency of Macduff of Fife in the narrative to create an eleventh-century precedent that explained the political career of Robert Stewart, Duke of Albany and Earl of Fife and Menteith, as a regent for three Scottish kings. In order to make sense of Macbeth and Malcolm's portrayals, it is crucial to differentiate between different types of illegitimacy in early fifteenth-century Scotland, as well as identify how each type of illegitimacy impacted issues of good kingship and magnate-noble relations in the text. Although illegitimacy did not outright prevent Malcolm and Macbeth from becoming kings, it did explain Macbeth's descent into tyranny and Malcolm Canmore's political impotence. In both cases, the intervention of Macduff of Fife as a kingmaking figure and as representative of the community of the realm of Scotland guaranteed the proper functioning of governance in a manner similar to how Albany served as regent in Scotland at the time.

This dissertation, originally published in 1995, was the first ever systematic survey which sought to establish the numbers of speakers of the Scots language. The results were tested in a much larger survey in 1996 by the General Registers Office for Scotland and the findings sustained. It was because of these surveys that Scots eventually made it onto the National Census in 2010.

Standardisation on the level of text is visible in the employment of stable and fixed expressions for a specific textual purpose. When gauging the extent of standardisation in texts, one of the parameters which should be taken into consideration is the length of such stable patterns. Since it is more difficult, and therefore rarer, to reproduce long chunks of text in an unchanged form, such a practice points towards greater standardisation. To explore the textual behaviour of long fixed strings in legal texts, this paper concentrates on long lexical bundles built out of eight consecutive elements (8-grams) and their frequency and function in historical legal texts. The database for this pilot paper comprises two collections of legal and administrative texts written in Scots between the fourteenth and the sixteenth century. The research results point to a considerable degree of textual standardisation throughout the corpus and to the most prominent functions of long repetitive chunks in historical legal discourse.

A contemporary solo Expedition to Æthiopia in November 2011 under the premise of and in search of an elusive royal city was executed by the Rev. Deacon Gabra ’AGZI’AABHIR JR, who presents the following report of the findings and geography of the elusive locality. The first report that was given however, was a full field report in 2011 (for the duration of approximately one hour), which occurred at the close the expeditionary week. This primary report was held in Addis Ababa Æthiopia, at ‘Mahbara Qǝdusân Research Centre’, and introduced by Mersha Aleghane Phd; who formally was Asst. Professor of Philology at Addis Ababa University, but now the Dean of that Department. It was furthermore attended by numerous Scholars, being philologists and archaeologists; one of the latter being Æthiopian born ‘Mingistu Gobezie’ whom at that time was head of the said Research Institute (Centre).
This expedition came to a head after a decade of research on Æthiopian monarchic studies and a number of years of research on the subject surrounding events that are held to have occurred at this elusive capital city, id est in relation to 'apostolic-history'. Hence purposes of the expedition lay in the need of the identification of the city in order to substantiate its existence and location, and to further evidence the manuscript accounts related thereto and historical tradition of great import. Identification and locality of the region in question then is undoubtedly of principal geographical and historical import primarily to Æthiopia, notwithstanding however, it is immensely significant for a number of other historic nations in the located region........

This paper presents an analysis of plurality markers in the first extant text from the South-West of Scotland, the Wigtown Burgh Court Book (1512-1534). The inflectional endings for the plural are often included among the Middle Scots diagnostic features so it is quite important to establish what form they had in particular areas. The paper begins with an outline of the Middle Scots dialectal divisions. Next, the geographical position of Galloway is taken into consideration, with special attention paid to the alleged persistence of Gaelic and the possibility of including this region into the map of the sixteenth-century Scots dialects. Then, the presentation concentrates on the Linguistic Profile of Wigtownshire in LALME which was compiled using the same source of textual material as the present paper. The reseach shows that the profile in the atlas should be revised in terms of the {S}-morpheme markers to acknowledge the prevalence of the Scots marking in <-is/-ys>. The feature <-us>, given by the atlas but non-existent as a morphological marker in the textual material, should be removed from the profile.

Shetland consists of numerous islands, islets and skerries. This article is based on the identification and interpretation of almost 200 of them. The majority of the Shetland Island names, some 130-140 names, are of Scandinavian origin, whereas 50-60 names are relatively late Scots constructions. An additional handful of names are of unknown age and origin.

'The Narrative Grotesque' introduces a new critical framework for reading medieval texts. The narrative grotesque decentres critical discourse by turning focus to points at which literary texts distort and rupture conventional narratological and poetic boundaries. These boundary warping grotesques are crystallised at moments of affective horror and humour. Two seminal Older Scots works are used to exemplify the multivalent applications of the narrative grotesque: Gavin Douglas’s The Palyce of Honour (c.1501) and William Dunbar’s The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo (c.1507). These texts create manifold textual hybridisations, transfigurations, and ruptures in order to interrogate modes of discourse, narratological subjectivities, and medieval genre conventions. Within the liminal space opened up by these textual (de)constructions, it is possible to reconceptualise the ways in which poets engaged with concepts of authenticity, veracity, subjectivity, and eloquence in literary writing during the late medieval period.

In this article I explore the significance of St. Margaret of Scotland in Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon. I will argue that Margaret acts as a metonym for the ideal Scottish nation Bower aims to promote; one in which Scotland is independent,
and Church and state are united. I will focus on three key episodes in the Scotichronicon: Margaret’s arrival in Scotland, the translation of her relics, and finally her appearance in a dream-vision to the knight John Wemyss before the Battle
of Largs. Throughout the Scotichronicon, Margaret’s identity as both queen and
saint is mediated through her connection to Scotland itself, both the land and the political entity. Margaret as both enforcer and symbol of God-ordained Scottish independence becomes inextricable from Scottish national identity as both patron saint and mother of a great dynasty of Scottish kings.

This study seeks to demystify the tradition of Older Scots flyting—a form of poetic invective unique to the late medieval Scottish court. Hip Hop battle raps provide a modern venue for exploring the motivations and potential rewards for engaging in this sort of technical poetic contest. The two forms, though culturally and historically distant, both exhibit analogous rhetorical techniques, which make this comparison possible. Each form is concerned with poetic identity—this is evident through each poet’s identification with specific communities or classes; while the concern with demonstrating superior technical skill is also essential to these invectives and is often highlighted through the manipulation of traditional forms and tropes. As an extension of this comparison, we hope to recover something of the tone and purpose of the medieval tradition, namely, that the poets who engaged in these public invectives were actually amicable rivals competing for increased court status and wealth.

In the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, poetic invective raises provocative questions about the nature of an authentic Scottish identity, pitting the lowland Dunbar and his heritage of ‘Inglis’ or English poetry against Kennedy and his association with the Gaelic-speaking region of Carrick. This chapter examines the poem in light of current extended mind theories, as part of a distributed cognitive system in which conceptions of national identity are constructed through ongoing processes of collaboration, circulation, and reception that make thinking nation part of everyday life. Rather than functioning divisively, the Flyting’s antagonistic presentation of a debate over cultural authenticity reflects the dynamic character of national culture, shaping the idea of a Scottish nation whose borders contain diverse voices and cultures.

This article examines the editorial choices made in Edinburgh printer Andro Hart’s 1616 edition of John Barbour’s Brus. Comparison of the 1616 Hart edition with Thomas Speght’s 1602 Chaucer edition displays similar concerns with preserving accessibility to historical texts despite significant language changes in both Older Scots and English, noting shared employment of assistive paratextual apparati. Linguistic assessment comparing Hart and Speght’s editions to their parent texts demonstrates how both editors modernize language to improve reader accessibility while preserving archaic qualities and metricality. Contextualization of the declining prestige of Older Scots during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries further clarifies this assessment. Hart’s edition portrays both a genesis of mutual intelligibility between Scots and English, and a coda for Older Scots as a literary prestige tongue.

Sets the portrayal of the pig in the anonymous Scots fifteenth-century poem The Tale of Colkelbie Sow in the context of medieval fears of social disorder and mob rule, drawing on medieval accounts of the criminal trials of unruly pigs and other animals, and recent discussions of Scottish and medieval literary humour.

This article examines the editorial choices made in Edinburgh printer Andro Hart’s 1616 edition of John Barbour’s Brus. Comparison of the 1616 Hart edition with Thomas Speght’s 1602 Chaucer edition displays similar concerns with preserving accessibility to historical texts despite significant language changes in both Older Scots and English, noting shared employment of assistive paratextual apparati. Linguistic assessment comparing Hart and Speght’s editions to their parent texts demonstrates how both editors modernize language to improve reader accessibility while preserving archaic qualities and metricality. Contextualization of the declining prestige of Older Scots during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries further clarifies this assessment. Hart’s edition portrays both a genesis of mutual intelligibility between Scots and English, and a coda for Older Scots as a literary prestige tongue.

This essay investigates two appearances of the Gaelic folk figure, Cailleach Bhéarra (Scot. Gael. Cailleach Bheurr) in Older Scots comic poetry. The translation of the iconic ‘mother-goddess’ or ‘hag’ of Beara into Older Scots is provocative on two levels: foremost, the casual and familiar language used to relate the comic tales demonstrates a rich folk culture that crossed linguistic and geographic boundaries. Both tales center around the Scottish lowlands, which were not traditionally Gaelic speaking, however the mythical figures seem to fit comfortably within the cultural community of Edinburgh and its environs. The tales further merit attention since the figure of the cailleach is mobilized in a festive context that creates a pseudo-historical narrative of the fantastical origins of Scottish landmarks apparently formed by the cailleach’s excretions. Considering the folk figure in the context of festive, public entertainment informs our understanding of Scotland’s socio-cultural landscape in the early-sixteenth century.

This study assesses two rather odd fabliaux from the fifteenth century, one Scots and one German: 'The Freiris of Berwik' (anonymous, ca.1480) and 'Der Fahrende Schüler' (Hans Rosenplüt, ca.1426–60, “The Itinerant Student”). Both fabliaux hinge on extended episodes of ritual magic, or necromancy, that reach beyond any magical elements hitherto observed in other fabliaux. Not only this, but the conjurings, which act as the catalysts for the comic episodes, are remarkably accurate to extant formulae and recipes found in necromantic manuscripts of the period. This study seeks to bring these analogues into conversation and, in so doing, expose the surprising intersection of an apparently extracurricular form of poetry with modern intellectual trends, albeit trends that skirted the edges of acceptable or legitimate learning.

The fabliau rose as the comic form par excellence in French literature during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By the end of the fourteenth century it had long reached its peak only to be revived by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales. His contribution is widely considered the last great poetic innovation of the genre. However, the fabliau persisted beyond Chaucer: two later compositions reimagine the fabliau in a distinctly fifteenth-century intellectual and artistic environment. Der Fahrende Schüler (Hans Rosenplüt, ca. 1426-60, ‘The Itinerant Student’) and The Freiris of Berwik (anonymous, ca. 1480) use ritual magic to reinvent the long-standing architecture of the fabliau form. Ritual magic, or necromancy, occupied a liminal position in intellectual writing, but it also functioned as an ambiguous literary device across the literary spectrum. This paper will bring the Scottish fabliau into conversation with a German text in order to set both in a wider context of late-medieval comic writing. By instrumentalizing necromancy in a fabliau context, both narratives introduce a controversial scientific and theological question into a tradition marked by conventional stylistic and thematic tropes. These fabliau afterlives encapsulate the shifting intellectual and artistic sensibilities that characterize the late-medieval period.

Description and Date of MS:

This unique manuscript, in the Old Scots tongue, contains one of the largest redactions of the 'Life of and Martyrdom of St.Matthew'. There are a number of earlier manuscripts of his life from the 11th and 12th century written in the Old English or Latin, however most are much shorter accounts. The life is a first century account written contemporaneous to the events and personages who are named and appear therein.

Brief overview of account:

The account itself  draws out the apostolic sojourn of the Apostle and First Evangelist St. Matthew, who is the first gospel writer and first evangelist to leave the Asian continent (Asia Minor). The scene is set in Æthiopia in the royal and capital city of the time. A city which was located on expedition by the author in 2011 G.C. The focus of the text is to establish events that occurred in Æthiopia at the hand of the Apostle, including the conversion of the people and nobility, the establishment of the Æthiopian (Orthodox) Church, and finally the Martyrdom of the Apostle of Æthiopia himself.

Contents of book:

The Translator makes the first known translation of the Unique 14th century Old Scots text. He also edits the text and collates it, dividing the work into books, chapters &c. Explanatory, etymological and historical notes also accompany the text and translation. The original text appears on one page with the translation on the other. The volume also contains a full microfilm copy of the entire text in its manuscript form.       

This work is of the chiefest interest to the Old Scots language and literature, Early Judaeo-Christian and Apostolic history, Æthiopian studies and Geography and Archaeology, and ancient Ægyptian History and so on.

[ 'Life & Martyrdom of S. Matthew, the Apostle of Æthiopia: Translated, Edited & Collated from a significant Unique 14th Century Old Scots Manuscript in the Cambridge University Library, with explanatory and historical notes and exposition' Translated by Rev. Dn. Gabra 'AGZI'AABHIR JR (forthcoming)]

This is a pilot study investigating the role of phrasal fixedness in the development of a standardised text type. The linguistic material comes from the Edinburgh Corpus of Older Scots (ECOS), consisting of samples of administrative records from 15th-century Scotland. The corpus has been searched for re-occurring lemmatic bundles, which are the indicators of emerging patterns and standardising usage in the records, developing in the context of linguistic standardisation of Scots. The findings are interpreted with regard to their semantics and function in the records, and indicate that the text type as such was not yet fully standardised in its repertoire of fixed phrases serving a specific purpose. In individual locations, however, one finds a greater degree of consistency and a tendency to develop a local norm. Similarly, in some specific textual functions the lexical fixedness may be present to a larger extent than in others.

This paper investigates the etymologies of late medieval/early modern genre-specific lexis in a selection of Scots and English legal writings. All the three chosen subgenres, acts of parliament, statutes and burgh court records, were put to common use: they served as a tool of administration on national and local levels. Scotland and England have always had different legal traditions and instruments (Guth 2004: 77). Today, the differences between Scottish and English terminology in the legal domain can therefore be ascribed to the separate legal histories of both countries. Histories of language contact would have had influence on the etymological sources of legal lexis. Before the anglicizing tendencies in Scotland in the mid-sixteenth century, the Reformation and the Union of the Crowns of 1603, Scotland and England differed in terms of the context, extent and form of foreign influences on language. The employment of French and Latin as traditional sources of legal terminology depended on different factors in Scotland and England and operated within a different time frame. Interestingly, this investigation reveals many similarities in the extent and patterns of Romance influence on legal administrative genres in both Scotland and England.
The study concentrates on binomials, a type of lexico-syntactic construction characteristic of legal language in general (Mellinkoff 1963). In the search for motivations behind the repetitive nature of lexical patterns in legal discourse it was postulated that binomial pairs would be most frequently made up of a foreign element (French of Latin) and a native element for comprehension purposes. In this paper I seek to validate that claim.
The paper opens with a historical sketch providing background for the comparison of Scots and English. The following section concentrates on administrative texts as a genre within legal discourse and examines binomials as a feature of legal language. Bearing in mind the importance of repetition as a discourse convention, the paper outlines possible motivations for the formation of binomials. I draw attention to the ‘interpretation hypothesis’ and test it against the material from the Helsinki corpora (HC and HCOS), checking whether this is a valid motivation for the creation of binomial expressions.