9 - Saint Ninian, War and the Lordship of Galloway: The Fourteenth-Century Miracle Stories in the Scottish Legendary

Summary

THE Scottish Legendary is a collection of saints’ lives written in Early Scots apparently dating to the last quarter of the fourteenth century: internal references in the text suggest that it was composed after 1371 by an author (assuming a single author is responsible for the entire work) whose life overlapped with the reign of David II (1329–71). The saints’ lives included in the collection are drawn from various texts but the single most significant source was the thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea (Golden Legends) of the Dominican Jacobus Voragine, a widespread and popular work across late medieval Europe. The Scottish Legendary survives in one fifteenth-century manuscript (Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg.2.6), the provenance of which can be traced to the library of a bishop of Ely who died in 1714, but no further back. The work has been the subject of recent historical and literary scholarship, most notably a monograph by Eva von Contzen. The author of the Legendary remains unidentified although several candidates have been proposed. The prologue claims that the work of translating the legends from Latin was taken up at the point that the writer became too frail to continue his duties as a ‘mynistere of haly kirke’. The inclusion in the collection of material on St Machar, a saint whose cult was largely confined to Aberdeen and its hinterland, has led to suggestions that the author was connected to that region/burgh. Aberdeen cathedral kirk was dedicated to St Machar and the preamble to the tale of the saint in the Legendary noted that Machar was the patron of the city of Aberdeen before lamenting that he was not better known in the land where he wrought his miracles: ‘bot in tis land we ken hym nocht’. It may, or may not, be a coincidence that the tale preceding that of St Machar in the Legendary was an account of St Nicholas of Myra, dedicatee and patron of the parochial church of the burgh of Aberdeen. By the mid-fourteenth century the church of St Nicholas in the burgh had acquired a well-endowed altar dedicated jointly to St Lawrence and St Ninian.