THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

We cannot tell precisely what impact James’s poetry and his generally Anglicized literary taste had on
contemporary Scotland. Certainly, none of his Stewart successors showed much interest in, or patronage of, literature.
What is clear, however, is that the fifteenth century saw a considerable opening up of the kingdom to wider European
influences, an opening up matched by an insistent and accentuated national self consciousness which largely defined
itself against the threat of English imperialism. The century was marked by the establishment of the first Scottish
universities at St Andrews in 1411, at Glasgow in 1451, and at Aberdeen in 1495, and by the Pope’s raising the
bishoprics of St Andrews and Glasgow to archiepiscopal status in 1472 and 1492 respectively. These moves asserted a
freeing of the upper areas of educational and ecclesiastical life from English claims to suzerainty (the Archbishop of
York had long claimed metropolitan authority over Scotland, and the much older universities of Oxford and
Cambridge had generally assumed that they had the unique privilege of serving the whole island of Britain). The
success of this new enterprise is evident in the educational and professional careers of the three most prominent Scots
poets of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: Gavin Douglas (?1475-1522), a graduate of St Andrews who
was briefly, but unsuccessfully, named as the city’s Archbishop before being nominated to the bishopric of Dunkeld in
1515;
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Robert Henryson (?1424-?1506), probably a Glasgow graduate who later served as a schoolmaster attached to
Dunfermline Abbey; and William Dunbar (?1456-?1513), who appears to have received the degree of MA from St
Andrews in 1479 and who was variously employed by the court of James IV.
Douglas, who patriotically insisted that he wrote in the ‘Scottis’ language, was none the less, as his learned early
poem The Palice of Honour (1501) suggests, a distant disciple of Chaucer’s. His reputation is, however, firmly based
on the extraordinary vigour of the translation of Virgil’s Aeneid into rhymed heroic couplets. The translation,
completed in c. 1513, conscientiously follows the original Latin while managing to possess a quite distinct verve of its
own. Each of the books is provided with a prologue, the first of which complains, with due scholarly disdain, of
William Caxton’s translation of a French retelling of Virgil’s story, dismissing it as ‘na mair lyke Virgill, dar I lay, |
Na the owle resemblis the papyngay [parrot]’. The prologue to Book VII is notable for its keenly observed picture of a
bleak northern winter: ‘Mountayne toppis sleikit with snaw ourheildis [covers], | On raggit rolkis [ragged rocks] of
hard harsk quhyne stane [whinstone], | ... | Bewtie was lost, and barrand schew the landis, | With frostis haire ourfret
the feldis standis.’ Where Virgil speaks out, he perforce expresses himself in what Douglas accepts are ‘hamely playn
termys’, that is with a modern, emphatically Scots, currency. Douglas remakes the Latin text while profoundly
respecting its original integrity. Virgil’s concision may be stifled by Douglas’s vivid adjectival energy, but his
rhetorical figures are part echoed, part literally translated, part transfigured into something rich and strange, albeit a
strangeness related to what the translator half apologetically saw as his ‘harsk spech and lewit barbour [ignorant and
barbarous] tong’.
When Robert Henryson refers modestly to his ‘hamelie language’ and his ‘termis rude’ in the ‘Prolog’ to The
Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian (written in the last quarter of the fifteenth century) he sees himself not only as
a translator, but also as a popular educator seeking for a rough and ready equivalent to the ‘polite termes of sweit
rhetore [rhetoric]’ which were ‘richt pleasand’ to the discriminating ear. He was doing more than rendering the fables
traditionally ascribed to Æsop (and other writers) into the Scots vernacular; he was attempting to make ‘brutal beistis’
speak both naturally and to ‘gude purpois’. Henryson’s thirteen Morall Fabillis expand the often terse original stories
into highly observant, carefully shaped poetic narratives which move inexorably to their moral denouements. They
expose not fussy and improbable animal pretensions to human qualities, but human pride, human vanity, and human
inconsistency. In the extended moralitas which explores the meaning of the ‘The Taill of the Wolf and the Lamb’, for
instance, he suggests that the lamb can be taken to represent the poor whose life is ‘half ane purgatorie’, while the
wolf betokens ‘fals extortioneris | And oppressouris of pure [poor) men’. These oppressors are perverted lawyers who
are out for their own gain, rich men ‘quhilk ar sa gredie and sa covetous’ and tyrannous landowners who attempt to
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ignore the fact that their crimes against the poor cry for ‘vengeance unto the hevennis hie’. Elsewhere, Henryson
seems more inclined to sport with human folly rather than with economic crime. In ‘The Taill of the Uponlandis
Mous and the Burges Mous’ he delightfully exposes the snobbery of a well-off urban (‘burges’) mouse on a social visit
to a country cousin. Dissatisfied with homely, and decidedly Scottish, rural fare (food, the burges mouse insists, ‘will
brek my teith, and mak my wame [stomach] fful sklender’) the two mice resort to the town. Here the opinions of what
constitutes discomfort are reversed and the country mouse, terrified by cats and butlers, quickly returns to her den ‘als
warme as woll’ and to her plain diet of beans, nuts, peas, rye, and wheat. The moralitas points to the ancient
conclusion, much beloved of non-aspirant contemporary humanists, that ‘of eirthly joy it beiris maist degre, |