Appendix F — Mr. Brown’s “Sources” for the “Bruce.”
In pursuance of his “hypothesis of fifteenth-century redaction” of the Bruce, Mr. Brown applies what he claims to be “fair and ordinary tests” to six “selected examples,” in order to show that his hypothesis “has a basis in demonstrable fact.”134 I shall notice such of these very briefly, premising that I do not consider Mr. Brown’s use of his tests either “fair” or “ordinary.” So much, I think, will appear.
1. The Trojan War, Alexander the Great, Julius Cæsar, and King Arthur.
(a) The only thing urged against the Trojan War passage135 is that it is in the suspicious company of the others, and these, Mr. Brown suggests, are derived from Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale, from which he produces a selection of lines to parallel those in the Bruce. It may be urged,136 at the outset, that two contemporary poets dealing with the same set of historical events are very likely to display similarities. As Chaucer himself begins by saying—
“The storie of Alisaundre is so commune,
That every wight that hath discrecioune
Hath herd somwhat or al of his fortune.”
But even in Mr. Brown’s “selected” lines it is the divergencies rather than the similarities that stand out. Chaucer says nothing of “Babilony’s tour”; “his awyne hows” is no parallel to “of thyne owne folk”; and “Bot, ar he deit, his land delt he” has no equivalent whatsoever in the Monk’s Tale. Yet Chaucer has forty lines to Barbour’s eight. In fact, the “example” is a stock one, even to its phraseology, as witness these excerpts from sources half a century and more earlier than either poet: Commendatio Lamentabilis on Edward I. in 1307, “magnus Alexander... Nam ille annos regnans duodecim veneno hausto vita defungitur (15); Vita Edwardi Sec. (c. 1326). Sed ille magnus Græcorum imperator Alexander, totius orbis domitor, cum cunctas nationes orbis subicit, per familiares proditores toxicatus occubuit.” Do such close parallels prove that either Barbour or Chaucer borrowed from chronicles which they never saw?
(b) Mr. Brown argues that the Julius Cæsar parallels are “not less remarkable for significant agreement, as regards the sequence of the narrative,”137 and that “so far as concerns the diction it (the Bruce passage) approaches even nearer the Chaucerian original.”138 But where Chaucer speaks of Cæsar conquering “thoccident” and “the orient,” Barbour enumerates the countries. Is this similarity of diction? According to Mr. Brown, he is giving “simply an expansion of the Chaucerian phrases.”139 Elsewhere, in such a case, Barbour is convicted of “summarising” or “assimilating,” here of “expanding.” This is Mr. Brown’s “fork” from which no author could escape. In twelve lines Barbour comments on Cæsar’s conquests, his imperial position, and his death, and in forty-eight Chaucer gives a detailed biography introducing Pompey, of whom Barbour says nothing, and Barbour is thereupon charged with following “the sequence of the narrative”—as if he could avoid doing so! That Cæsar by both poets is styled “Emperor” goes for nothing; that was the medieval way; as also was the statement that he was killed in “the Capitol,” as Shakespeare, too, believed. But the most striking note of difference remains. Barbour says of Cæsar—
“Hys eyn with his hand closit he,
For to dey with mar honeste.”140
Now Chaucer remarks: “Of honestee yet had he remembrance,”141 and Mr. Brown enrols the word “honestee” among the things “not to be explained either as commonplaces or as mere coincidences.”142 We see Barbour’s idea of his “honeste”; this is Chaucer’s:
“His mantel over his hypes casteth he
For no man sholde seen his privetee.”143
Mr. Brown here seems to have followed Cæsar’s example and “closit hys eyn”!
(c) The only point made with regard to the Arthur lines144 is the calling of Lucius “Emperor,” and regarding this see my note on the passage. Geoffrey of Monmouth does the same. That Wyntoun corrects Huchown, and not Barbour, in this usage—well, Mr. Brown can make all he can of that. Barbour’s dozen lines on the familiar Arthur story is charged with being “an excellent summary of the Morte Arthure,”145 a poem of 4,364 lines! No “expansion” here!
2. The Alexander allusions in Bks. III., X. With reference to these see Appendix E. But why should Mr. Brown speak of “the famous grey palfrey of Lord Douglas” on the strength of one notice in Bk. II. 118? There is nothing to justify the epithet “famous”; and Ferrand was no more an unusual name for a “grey” horse than Blanchard for a white one. Bishop Lamberton might have had “a grey” as well as Eumynedus.146
3. The Ferumbras Romance. I have analyzed this passage in my notes to Bk. III., 435-462. Mr. Brown contends that the adoption of the form Ferumbras for the French Fierabras “points to a knowledge on the part of the Scottish poet” of either the Syr Ferumbras or the Sowdone of Babylone, in both of which this form occurs. It is possibly an adaptation of the spelling Fierenbras, which occurs in The Destruction of Rome and also in a fragment of the romance.147 But there is nothing more remarkable in Barbour’s intrusion of the “m” here than in his calling Lubaut or Lybaut, Lumbard in Bk. X. 324,148 or Capaneus, Campaneus.149 More significant is the name Lavyne for Balan, which is the normal form for all the existing texts, French and English, save the Sowdone, where we have Laban, Lavane and Lavyne, and The Destruction of Rome (French), which has Balan and Laban, the latter of which has given the spelling in “v.” Mr. Brown, however, rules out the Destruction for Barbour, as being “merely related to the Charlemagne cycle,”150 though Dr. Hausknecht accepts it as the original of the first part of the Sowdone.151 Why, then, should Barbour, too, not have known it? Mr. Brown’s conclusion is that the name, with other material, points to the whole passage being based on the Sowdone, and the Sowdone being post-Chaucerian—in which opinion he follows, and even goes beyond, Hausknecht—of the beginning of the fifteenth century, after Barbour’s death, it obviously follows that the lines cannot have been his work.152 Against this may be put Hausknecht’s own conclusion, to which Mr. Brown makes no reference: “It is worthy of notice that the account of the Fierabras romance, as given by Barbour, may be considered, on the whole, as identical with the subject of the French Fierabras or the English Syr Ferumbras, but not with the Sowdan, as there is no mention made of the combat before Rome, nor any trace of what makes up the first part of the Sowdan.”153 A few additional facts will substantiate Hausknecht’s statement.
In the Sowdone the twelve peers are shut up in “Egrymor”; Barbour gives “bot eleven.”154 Mr. Brown says of the Bruce account that, “Every line is traceable in the Sowdone.”155 There is no trace of line 452, or of Lavyne’s “flot” in 456; Charlemagne, instead of “being joyful” at the news that his peers were alive, there bursts out in anger against the traitor Ganelon.156 Conclusive, on Mr. Brown’s own case, is the fact, noted by Hausknecht, that the relics mentioned by Barbour “differ from all other versions.”157 It is not “off the croice a gret party”158 in the Sowdone, but simply “the crosse, the crown, the nailes bente”;159 and there is no mention of “the sper.”160 Nothing is said of the cross in the Fierabras or the Syr Ferumbras, and the Destruction has the crown of thorns, the cross, the nails, and the “signe”161 or shroud. Nor did Barbour invent “the sper,” for it is spoken of in this connection, though not in the final distribution, in the Provençal version of the Fierabras: “e del fer d’una lansa,” the spear-head.162 It would seem, then, that Barbour was using a version of the romance different, in certain particulars, from any we now possess. At any rate, Mr. Brown has to get round these awkward corners before he can transfix Barbour on Lavyne.
4. The Tydeus Episode, Bk. VI. 179-268. It may be granted that Barbour here is not, as Skeat supposed, drawing directly on the Thebaid of Statius, even in memory. But then no more is Lydgate in his Story of Thebes;163 having used, according to Dr. Koeppel, some French prose epic based on the classical story,164 now lost, or giving in his poem “a transcript from a French rendering of Statius.”165 There was ample material, including even, as Gaston Paris has suggested, an abridgment of Statius in Latin prose. Mr. Brown contends that Barbour’s “redactor” borrowed from Lydgate. But here, again, the differences are sufficiently vital to thwart such a conclusion. “Betwix ane hye crag and the se”166 has no equivalent either in Statius or Lydgate, as is clear from Mr. Brown’s own citations;167 nor has the detail that the “gret stane... throu the gret anciente, Wes lowsyt reddy for to fall,”168 for which Lydgate has:
“Beside he saw with water turned down
An huge stone, large, round, and square.”169
In an inductive literary argument differences must be accounted for as well as similarities, and any other possible sources must be satisfactorily eliminated. Opinions as to “the classical parsimony of independent translators”170 are purely speculative.
5. The Hannibal lines, Bk. III. 207-248.—Here Mr. Brown’s argument needs only to be summarily stated to show its inadequacy. Wyntoun borrowed from Barbour in some instances, but not in this; therefore, since there are similarities in the way the same story is told, the Bruce lines are drawn from the Cronykil.171 Wyntoun confesses to having translated from Orosius, Mr. Brown says through Martinus Polonus, and he follows his author closely. Barbour’s narrative is brief and, in several details, faulty, in which he diverges from both the Latin author and his Scots translator.172 The startling error in chronology, especially, “would not be readily made by one using Martinus at first hand,” but with the Cronikyl before him the writer was quite likely to do so!173 The peculiar “touches” in the Bruce passage are noted, but unexplained. It is assumed that “The agreement with Martinus is much too close for it to be considered to be written from memory;”174 and “there is nothing in Martinus that should lead us to expect independent translators to ascribe such a victory to God and in terms so similar:
“Bot throw Goddis gret powste.”175
“Bot throw the mycht of Goddis grace.”176
But the terms are not “similar,” and both are a mediæval rendering of divina miseratio in Orosius and Polonus. The whole argument in this connection is involved and haphazard. What is there illegitimate in the simple hypothesis that Barbour wrote from a well-stored but not perfectly accurate memory, and that Wyntoun preferred the first-hand to the second-hand source? So we explain both similarities and differences. Wyntoun’s lines are a plain following of his Latin author; Barbour’s a brief summary, with expansions and comments of his own leading up to the moral he wishes to enforce; and in this case Mr. Brown cannot point to a single line in common.
6. Froissart and the Bruce.—Here Mr. Brown prints his parallels in full, and the matter can be safely left to the judgment of the unprejudiced reader. It need only be remarked that Froissart (1) calls Douglas William instead of James; (2) sends the heart to the Holy Sepulchre177; (3) makes Bruce choose Douglas; (4) embarks him at Montrose; (5) takes him to Sluys; (6) lands him at Seville: while Barbour (1) is right as to Douglas; (2) sends the heart against “Goddis fayis”; (3) makes the barons choose Douglas; (4) embarks him at Berwick; (5) says nothing of Sluys; and (6) lands him at Valentia. Of Barbour’s “motive” lines, of the repentance for blood-spilling and the saving of his sins,178 Froissart (or Le Bel) has no trace. The two narratives are independent, though, in their trend, alike.