Chapter 5 - Forging the Nation: Reworking Older Scottish Literature

Summary

In 1489, John Ramsay, a ‘notary public’ in Fife, copied a manuscript for the use of Symon Lochmalony, vicar of Auchtermoonzie in the same county. This book, now Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates’ 19.2.2, contains the two principal epic-romances of Older Scots literature: John Barbour’s Bruce, a poem originally presented to Robert II, King of Scots, in 1375, and ‘Blind’ Hary’s Wallace, which dates from a century later.Ramsay had already completed a copy of The Bruce two years before, although this earlier manuscript, now Cambridge, St John’s College, MS G.23, seems to be drawn from a different exemplar; the Cambridge manuscript is moreover much damaged, the first three books of the poem being missing.