Introduction

Nearly four hundred years after Shakespeare’s imaginary conversation, the Scottish Act of 1998 gave legislative and executive powers to an elected assembly that would have the power to make domestic policy and laws for Scotland. For the first time since 1707, there existed a Scottish Parliament and administration. Devolution was promoted as the political recognition of Scottish national identity as separate from the state identity of the United Kingdom. More than just a constitutional shift in governance, devolution was, for many, a return to Scottish independence from an English nation that had asserted its dominance throughout the British Isles from at least the thirteenth century. Indeed, at the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, Scotland’s then First Minister, Alex Salmond, told the assembly that ‘history will judge this day … as the day when the people reclaimed ownership … of our country of Scotland’.3Alex Salmond, Address to the Opening Ceremony of the Scottish Parliament in Parliament Hall, 1 July 1999, http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/vli/history/firstDays/1999opening2.htm [accessed 23 November 2008]

For some, the 1998 Act did not go far enough, with devolution seen as a way of preventing Scotland from ever achieving full independence.4The Scottish National Party’s position makes clear that, while devolution ‘has improved the way in which Scotland is governed’, it is ‘not the same as independence’ because ‘under devolution’ the Scottish Parliament’s ‘powers are limited’. http://www.snp.org/node/240 [accessed 1 September 2009]. However, what devolution did achieve was an official crystallisation of a certain kind of Scottishness. Salmond’s rhetoric notably emphasises a collective ownership of Scotland by ‘the people’ of Scotland. This claim to independence is based on a concept of long-standing sovereignty and suggests that being Scottish is rooted in feelings of a shared understanding of difference and separation. In his assessment of the events leading up to Scottish devolution, BBC Scotland’s political editor, Brian Taylor, remarked that ‘Scottish identity is more than, or perhaps other than, language, culture, sporting links and the rest’. For Taylor, Scottishness is ‘vague, imprecise, emotive: an issue which cannot be determined mechanistically or scientifically’.5Brian Taylor, The Road to the Scottish Parliament (Edinburgh: Pioneer, 1999; rev. edn, 2002), p. 20. In its imprecision, this idea of Scottishness relies on an identity that stretches back to an immemorial past, but one that everyone agrees is there and is definitive. It is what the 2007 National Outcome Strategy defined as ‘the tie that binds people together’; it is ‘our sense of place, our sense of history and our sense of self’.6The Scottish Government, National Outcome (2007), p. 1, www.scotland.gov.uk/About/scotPerforms/outcomes/natIdentity [my emphasis; accessed 21 June 2014]. This Outcome Strategy is no longer available on the Scottish Government website. This insistence on place, history and self argues for a distinctiveness that is at once definable, but not quite: emotive and, therefore, beyond question. In September 2014, the Scottish Independence Referendum recorded voter turnout at nearly 85 per cent, with 55 per cent voting ‘no’ to the question, ‘should Scotland be an independent country?’7The local government areas of Dundee City, Glasgow City, North Lanarkshire and West Dunbartonshire recorded a majority ‘yes’ vote. Scottish Independence Referendum 2014: Analysis of Results. House of Commons Library, Research Paper 14/50 (30 September 2014), p. 4, https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/RP14–50/RP14–50.pdf [accessed 16 May 2019]. The reasons for the failure of the ‘Yes Campaign’ are many and varied and this is not the book to deal with them. What is striking, however, is how the rhetoric used by leaders and local campaigners on both sides of the campaign once again relied on these ideas of emotion, place, history and identity.8See, for example, Stuart McAnulla and Andrew Crines, ‘The Rhetoric of Alex Salmond and the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum’, British Politics, 12 (2017), 473–91. This call to sovereignty connected to place and history has a longer tradition, and it is to older expressions that I now turn my attention to explore the ways in which medieval writings about nationhood are often concerned with the emotive potential of history. This affective aspect of national identity is, I contend, related to the uses writers make of memory and their focus on reshaping the past in light of current circumstances. This is not to conflate the past with the present, or to suggest that the same markers of, and motivations for, articulations of nationhood run seamlessly from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century. Notable, though, are the subtle continuities of memory, affect and reshaping history that trace a fundamental way in which societies think about identity, community and what it means to remember the past. Throughout this book, I draw together historical and poetical works that deliberately rely on formalised conceptions of memory and imagination to narrate the nation. For nearly all of these writers, this means returning to the fourteenth-century Wars of Independence as a historical period to be memorialised, reimagined and embedded in the articulation of late-medieval Scottishness.

The Wars of Independence (1296–1323 and 1332–57) were primarily sparked by English attempts to assert feudal authority over Scotland in the wake of Alexander III’s death in 1286, which triggered a succession crisis. Alexander’s only surviving heir was his grand-daughter, Margaret (the Maid) of Norway (1282/3–90), whose unexpected death on her journey to Scotland led to competing claims (known as the ‘Great Cause’, 1290–92) to the Scottish throne, with several magnate families vying for power.9For a succinct overview of the Wars of Independence, see Michael Brown, The Wars of Scotland, 1214–1371, The New Edinburgh History of Scotland, 4 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). A comprehensive account of the Second War can be found in Iain A. MacInnes, Scotland’s Second War of Independence, 1332–1357 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016). In reality, the two main contenders were Robert Bruce, fifth lord of Annandale and John Balliol of Galloway and Barnard Castle. In 1291, Edward I (1272–1307) was invited to arbitrate the succession but exploited the opportunity to assert his own claim to overlordship. Edward chose to ignore legal advice that favoured Bruce, and judged that Balliol possessed the strongest claim. Balliol became king of Scots in 1292, with the English monarch assuming that the new Scottish king would become his puppet.10For a detailed account of the Great Cause and its consequences, see A.A.M. Duncan, The Kingship of the Scots 842–1292: Succession and Independence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), chapters 9–13; Michael A. Penman, ‘Diffinicione successionis ad regnum Scottorum: Royal Succession in Scotland in the Later Middle Ages’, in Making and Breaking the Rules: Succession in Medieval Europe, c. 1000–c. 1600, ed. by F. Lachaud and Michael A. Penman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 43–59. In December 1292, Balliol acknowledged Edward I of England as ‘lord superior of the realm of Scotland’ and became his ‘liegeman for the whole realm of Scotland’.11E.L.G. Stones (ed. and trans.), Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1174–1328: Some Selected Documents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 127. To further his own claims, Edward had letters of enquiry sent to English monasteries seeking information from chronicles and records ‘touching in any way our realm and the rule of Scotland’.12‘regnum nostrum et regimen Scocie qualitercumque contingencia’: Grant G. Simpson and E.L.G. Stones, ed., Edward I and the Throne of Scotland: An Edition of the Record Sources for the Great Cause, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), i, 139. To support their positions, both the English and the Scots drew on written history, in what R. James Goldstein has called a ‘War of Historiography’ that persisted through the first War of Independence and Robert the Bruce’s reign.13R. James Goldstein, The Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 7; see also, pp. 57–103. Andy King and Michael Penman also note the diplomatic and historiographic ‘war of words’ that underwrote military action between England and Scotland: ‘Introduction: Anglo-Scottish Relations in the Fourteenth Century – An Overview of Recent Research’, in England and Scotland in the Fourteenth Century: New Perspectives, ed. by Andy King and Michael A. Penman (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007), pp. 1–3 (2–3). By 1294, ‘some Scots were working to undermine Edward’s lordship’ and in 1295 the Scottish parliament convened at Stirling to agree a new treaty with King Philip of France, which popularly became known as the ‘auld alliance’.14Brown, Wars of Scotland, p. 173. Edward I’s subsequent retaliation – the sacking of Berwick in 1296, and the defeat of the Scots at the Battle of Dunbar – can be regarded as the beginning of the military conflict. Edward deposed Balliol and placed Scotland under English rule. Led by figures such as William Wallace and Andrew Moray, the Scots rebelled against English occupation and their victory at the Battle of Stirling Bridge (1297) was a significant early success. Wallace became Guardian of Scotland but was defeated at the Battle of Falkirk in 1298. Betrayed by Sir John Menteith, a Scottish nobleman who at the time was the keeper of Dumbarton Castle, Wallace was captured and executed in London in 1305. After killing his rival, John Comyn, in 1306, Robert the Bruce (earl of Carrick and Annandale’s grandson), was crowned as Robert I. Bruce faced early defeats, but secured key victories, notably at the Battle of Bannockburn (1314). The Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton (1328) recognised Scotland’s sovereignty and ended the First War of Independence. The peace was short lived. Following the death of Robert I (1329), Thomas Randolph, earl of Moray, became regent for the six-year-old David II (1329–71). In 1332, Edward Balliol (1332–56), John Balliol’s son, invaded Scotland, supported by the Disinherited (Scottish nobles who had opposed Bruce and were dispossessed of their lands following Bannockburn) and, covertly, by the English king, Edward III. Edward Balliol defeated the Scots at the Battle of Dupplin Moor and briefly seized the crown. David II was forced into exile in France but returned in 1341. Captured at the Battle of Neville’s Cross (1346), he was held prisoner in England for eleven years. The Treaty of Berwick (1357) secured David’s release and recognition of Scotland’s sovereignty, effectively ending the Wars of Independence.15Michael Penman discusses the international dimensions of the conflict and its influence on European politics in David II, 1329–71: The Bruce Dynasty in Scotland (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2005). As Elizabeth Ewan notes, the Wars of Independence have popularly been seen as ‘the crucible’ in which ‘the concept of nationhood was forged’,16Elizabeth Ewan, ‘Late Medieval Scotland: A Study in Contrasts’, in A Companion to Scottish Poetry, ed. by Janet Hadley Williams and Priscilla Bawcutt (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 19–33 (32). but national feeling was in existence well before the onset of Anglo-Scottish hostilities at the end of the thirteenth century, as has been demonstrated in the work of Dauvit Broun and Nicola Royan.17Dauvit Broun, ‘Becoming a Nation: Scotland in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, in Nations in Medieval Britain, ed. by H. Tsurushima (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2010), pp. 86–103; Broun, ‘The Creation of Scotland’, in Why Scottish History Still Matters, ed. by E.J. Cowan (Edinburgh: Saltire Society, 2012), pp. 11–23; Broun, The Irish Identity of the Kingdom of the Scots in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999); Broun, ‘Rethinking Scottish Origins’, in Barbour’s Bruce and Its Cultural Contexts: Politics, Chivalry and Literature in Late Medieval Scotland, ed. by Steve Boardman and Susan Foran (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015), pp. 163–90; Nicola Royan with Dauvit Broun, ‘Versions of Scottish Nationhood, c. 850–1707’, in The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Volume 1: From Columba to the Union (until 1707), ed. by Thomas Owen Clancy and Murray Pittock (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 167–83; Nicola Royan, ‘Hector Boece and the Question of Veremund’, Innes Review, 52 (2001), 42–62. Nor did 1357 signal the end of Anglo-Scottish tensions.18See MacInnes, Scotland’s Second War of Independence. It is notable that between the late thirteenth century and the end of Henry IV’s reign (1399–1413), every English king sought to press their rights to Scotland through military force.

Alongside the fact that the Scottish historiographical tradition shows that the Scots were conceiving of themselves in ‘national’ terms much earlier than the early fourteenth century, I want to return to Ewan’s important point about the Wars of Independence being retrospectively understood as the point at which the Scottish nation came into being. What Ewan points to here are the ways in which the reception of history is shaped by its representation and, while that might be said of all history, it is an element that often gets neglected precisely because it is something that is taken for granted. In focusing on the processes by which the past is rewritten, I suggest that, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, the Wars of Independence became an influential point of national remembrance. The period from c. 1350 to c. 1550 witnessed a strengthening in articulations of Scottishness that sought to draw on the memory of the Anglo-Scottish wars as a scaffold with which to shore up collective identity. In The Matter of Scotland, R. James Goldstein argues that a feature of Scottish medieval historiography is the insistent desire to align Robert I’s kingship with Scottish freedom. This ideological project, Goldstein proposes, was part of a broader approach to shape Scotland’s identity as vulnerable so that it could only be strengthened through absolute loyalty to Bruce.19Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, esp. p. 79. The wars represented a pre-Stewart era, but one in which the origin of the Stewarts’ dynastic power was established. In the later Middle Ages, then, this particular moment of Scottish history became a potent symbol of identity that could be invoked in meaningful ways. And invoked it was. The Wars of Independence feature heavily in the literary productions of the fourteenth to sixteenth century explored in this study; nearly all of them look back repeatedly and insistently to this earlier period of Scottish history. This suggests that, while contemporaneous tensions might be a catalyst for the peaks and troughs of ‘nationalist’ literature, remembering past hostilities offered a potent way of imagining the nation, both in the present and for the future. With the exception of Sir Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica, written in the mid-fourteenth century and which I regard as a ‘border’ text, all of the other texts I examine were written between c. 1440 and c. 1550, during the often-turbulent reigns of the Stewart royal dynasty. These texts might be considered partial in their invocations of history, but in ways that develop the inherent partiality of writing about the past. Texts such as Richard Holland’s Howlat (c. 1455), Hary’s Wallace (c. 1475) and The Complaynt of Scotland (c. 1550) memorialise and imagine both the kingdom and its rulers; in doing so, they demonstrate an ideological project that situates vulnerability at the heart of the national imagination. If we read these texts according to this organising principle, it suggests that Goldstein’s model of Brucean ideology persists through the literary productions of Stewart Scotland. The writing of Scotland’s past becomes, then, deeply engaged in a project of shaping collective memories of a realm and its monarch under permanent threat and in need of protection.

The texts that I examine in this book are the products of a culture that recognises the importance of history and memory to the changing emphases that nationhood assumes over the course of the late fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century. These imaginative endeavours sought to offer a coherent and collective shape to what they determined should be remembered within various textual communities within Scotland. The practice of national memory becomes, then, a mode of selective reconstruction and appropriation that responds specifically to the needs of the circumstances of composition. This is not to say that Scottish writers view nation as always emerging; indeed, they assume that national identity or distinctiveness is – and always has been – there. Rather, all of the writers of this study show a deft awareness of the uses to which the past can be put, drawing specifically on the possibilities that memory and forgetting offer for subtly shifting the emphasis of thinking the nation at any given point.

Several theories of nationhood stress its emergence as a modern phenomenon, seeing the rise of modern nationalism as a reaction against the pre-modern world.24See, for example, Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Ernest Gellner, Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Yet, as Orest Ranum articulates, the problem of thinking about pre-modern national identity is ‘not one of determining whether these identities existed, but of determining what [the] components and functions were at various times’.25Orest Ranum, ‘Introduction’, in National Consciousness, History and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Orest Ranum (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), pp. 1–9 (6). Perhaps the most influential proponent of the modern nation has been Benedict Anderson, who contends, in his highly influential Imagined Communities, that the ‘astonishing power of the papacy’ during the medieval period meant that any notion of collective identity could be understood only in religious (rather than regnal) terms.26Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983; rep. 1991), p. 15. Moreover, Anderson suggests, this sense of identity was unselfconscious: not thought about, constructed or performed in any way, but understood as a given.27Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 16. Thinking the nation, for Anderson, became possible only with the exploration of the non-European world, the decline of Latin as the language of clerical power and the rise of print culture.28Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 16–19. Anderson has become rather a straw man for pre-modern scholars, yet his contention that nationalism should be regarded as belonging with other concepts such as religion and kinship offers an understanding of the nation as a cultural belief that is not incompatible with the evidence we find for national discourse in medieval literature. The processes through which communities are imagined – how and why – speaks productively to this study of how late medieval Scottish writers sought to reshape the past in varying political and cultural conditions. While Anderson argues that ‘simultaneity-along-time’ – referring to the medieval practice of simultaneously situating events in the past, present and future – prevented the nation being imagined as a unit, I would argue that it is precisely this idea of simultaneity that allows for medieval expressions of nationhood which see continuity and synchronicity as constituent parts of thinking the nation.

The idea of the nation, specifically because of its vagueness, acquires a potent imaginative potential that requires the individual to feel themselves part of a collective and to associate certain attributes or characteristics with that identity. It is what Broun has suggestively called ‘a phenomenon of mind’.29Broun, ‘Rethinking Scottish Origins’, p. 164. The function of national discourse is what Patricia Ingham, among others, has termed ‘national fantasy’, approximating to a communality that, as Kathy Lavezzo argues, ‘speaks to impossible and sometimes contradictory’ desires to invoke ‘ever shifting bundle[s] of collective quasi-mythic national traits’.30Patricia Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romances and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 10; Kathy Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000–1534 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 9. In these desires, Thorlac Turville-Petre contends that nationality becomes a powerful identity that seemingly has the least to justify itself.31Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 10. The concept of ‘the nation’ could be reworked and shaped to fit certain ideologies and frameworks of inclusivity – and exclusivity – in ways that other identities were unable to do. For example, in the mid-fifteenth century, Scottish chronicler Walter Bower used religious identity to establish markers of national difference between the English and the Scots. In Book 3 of Scotichronicon, Bower narrates the story of how Pope Gregory sent Augustine to Britain to ‘preach the Word of God to the Angles who were blinded by heathen superstition’ (Chron. Bower 2. 89). Augustine converts the English to Christianity but, in attempting to preach to the West Saxons in Dorset, he is reviled and abused. Bower recalls how, in an act of divine retribution, ‘God smote’ the Saxons ‘in their hinder parts, giving them everlasting shame so that in the private parts both of themselves and their descendants all alike were born with a tail’ (Chron. Bower 2. 91). The English as a national group are marked by difference that is both somatically and religiously racial. Common religion was no guarantee of shared identity in other respects; the double conversion of the English marks religion as a unit by which difference, rather than unity, could be asserted, as it simultaneously makes English religious history constitutive of Scottish collective identity.

It was not only religion that could constitute national difference in the Middle Ages. The root of ‘nation’ in natio, connoting birth, race or stock, meant that lineage constituted an understanding of differences between peoples. Clearly, nation is more than – or at least not restricted to – a single set of conditions; the shifting contexts of politics, power and social organisation necessitate that what a nation means at any point in time is contingent on a number of interdependent factors. As Geraldine Heng’s work demonstrates, from the thirteenth century there emerged a grammar of ‘racial classification and hierarchy’, which sought to theorise ‘a taxonomy of essential differences among peoples’.32Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 5, 70. See also, Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). At the same time Heng suggests, one of the ‘distinguishing properties of the medieval nation’ is that it is ‘always a community of the realm, communitas regni’, in which the ‘symbolising potentials of the king’ enable ‘an expressive vocabulary of unity, cohesion, and stability to be imagined’.33Heng, Empire of Magic, p. 139. The figure of the king as a locus of nation building is often crucial to understanding expressions of nationhood in medieval texts and it is a key feature, in various ways, in all of the texts that form the subject of this study. This regnal focus allows a king’s subjects to understand themselves as a unified community defined by their relationship to the crown as well as each other. This seemingly ‘leveling discourse’, as Heng terms it, brings into medieval consciousness the ‘horizontal comradeship’ that is so important to Anderson’s view of national beginnings.34Heng, Empire of Magic, p. 139; Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 7. In this regard, late medieval Scotland offers an important perspective.

Following the death of Alexander III, the ‘great men … the bishops, abbots and priors, the earl and barons’ of Scotland ‘assembled at Scone’ to swear their loyalty to Margaret of Norway. At this ‘parliament’, six Guardians (custodes) were appointed, ‘styl[ing] themselves as “appointed by common counsel” or “elected by the community of the realm”’.35Barrow, Robert Bruce, p. 17. In G.W.S. Barrow’s assessment of Scottish political thought, ‘Nothing and no one could be an adequate substitute for the king’; the vacant throne necessitated that the kingdom could ‘only resolve itself into a collective entity, into the universality of its freemen, or, in thirteenth-century language, into the “community of the realm of Scotland”’.36Barrow, Robert Bruce, p. 16. This suggests that Scottish practice saw the communitas regni Scotie as something that sat beyond the monarch, although intimately connected to it. As Barrow, clarifies:

My study concentrates on the commemorative aspects of Scottish historiography, to argue that a memorial dimension assumes centrality in the national project of a number of cultural productions written in Scotland from c. 1350 to c. 1550.38I use the term ‘written in’ here to include Gray’s Scalacronica, which was, in part, produced in Scotland, although Gray, himself, was English. In doing so, I explore how specifically chosen recollections were crafted to shape a collective social imaginary. I argue for a deeply reaching impact of the Wars of Independence on the national memory, effectively generating a cycle of trauma that passed through the subsequent generations of Scottish literary production. The texts that I examine demonstrate how the cumulative effects of Anglo-Scottish conflict were woven through the cultural fabric of late medieval Scotland, punctuating the literary expression of both national self-confidence and national self-doubt. The dominant model of trauma, the abreactive model, asserts that traumatic experience generates a ‘temporal gap’ that results in the unrepresentability of that trauma as a result of the brain’s inability to process the event.39See Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 17. Conceptualisations of intergenerational trauma, however, think about personal loss – loss experienced by the individual – and historical absence, which is loss experienced by ancestors as a collective.40See, for example, the work of Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). In this model, present identity can be affected (and effected) by historical trauma through a shared heritage. Through rewriting the past and relying on recollections of the Wars of Independence, the texts I examine suggest that a collective memory of inherited experience was instrumental in raising questions about national identity from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. In doing so, I also contend that these texts rely specifically on medieval understandings of memory and memorial images to articulate the nation.

This system of training the memory by making images in the mind was reiterated in treatises such as the Rhetorica ad Herennium (86–82 BCE), which gives the fullest and most influential account of memoria, as well as Aristotle’s De memoria et reminiscentia, Augustine’s Confessions, and Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae (c. 1267), to name a few examples from the vast corpus of work on memory produced during the classical period and the Middle Ages.46For comprehensive studies see Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Carruthers, Book of Memory; Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (1966, London: Pimlico, 1992); Mary Carruthers and Jan Ziolkowski, The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). In De anima, Aristotle writes that ‘the soul never thinks without an image’, and, in almost all ancient and medieval works concerning memory training, the emphasis on the visual is paramount.47Aristotle, De anima, translated by J.A. Smith from Ross’s edition, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. by J. Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), i. 685. The memory is described as a mental picture, or phantasm, that is inscribed or imprinted physically upon the part of the body that constitutes memory: ‘the structure of memory, like a wax tablet, employs places [loci] and in these gathers together [collocat] images’.48Cicero, Partitiones oratoriae, cited in Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 18. The Ad Herennium describes the formation of loci as the most important part of the development of artificial memory and states that these loci are ‘like wax tablets which remain when what is written on them has been effaced and are ready to be written on again’.49Yates, Art of Memory, p. 23. The conception of the memory as a wax tablet ready to receive and store imprinted sense data was so pervasive throughout ancient and medieval theories of memory that Max Black has termed it a ‘cognitive archetype’.50Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), pp. 219–43. Importantly, this is an image that also expresses a sense idea of the malleability of memory, which can be reworked and reinscribed.

Nevertheless, the image of the memory as a wax tablet does not explain or provide the structures for ordering memory. The content and organisation of memory had to be developed from this, for the systematic arrangement of the memory enabled clarity of knowledge. In order to compartmentalise and structure the memory to render it most useful, ancient and medieval theorists often referred to architectural schema. Augustine, for instance, calls the memory a storehouse, and the metaphor of the storehouse (thesaurus) took on variant forms: of ‘storage room’, ‘treasury’ and ‘strongbox’, cella and arca.51Augustine, Confessions, trans. by R.S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961), pp. 214–17. In her analysis of the symbolic use of buildings in religious and secular texts, Christiania Whitehead discusses how writers used architecture to represent the psychological faculties, particularly memory; Castles of the Mind: A Study of Medieval Architectural Allegory (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), esp. pp. 29–38. Richard de Bury (1287–1345) writes of reading and remembering as a form of architectural journey, describing how perception passes through the eyes to the ‘vestibule of common sense and the atriums of imagination’, where it ‘enters the chamber of intellect, taking its place in the couch of memory, where it engenders the eternal truth of the mind’.52Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, ed. and trans. by E.C. Thomas (London: Kegan Paul, 1888), p. 11. In the twelfth­century De tribus maximis circumstantiis gestorum, Hugh of St Victor (c. 1078–1141) used the image of the money pouch (sacculus) as a metaphor for the organised memory. He describes how the internal structure of the bag allowed coins to be sorted according to shape and size. Hugh advised that ‘each single thing’ should be ‘Dispose[d] and separate[d]’ into ‘its own place […] so that you may know what has been placed here and what there’, for ‘Confusion is the mother of ignorance and forgetfulness, but orderly arrangement illuminates the intelligence and secures memory’.53Hugh of St Victor, ‘Three Best Memory Aids’, in Carruthers and Ziolkowski, Craft of Memory, p. 33. Images of money bags and cells of memory appear often in vernacular writings; in the fourteenth century, for example, François Villon used the rhymed association of memory (memoir) and the closet (aumoiry) in his Lais.54François Villon, Oeuvres, ed. by Louis Thuasne (Geneva: Slaktine Reprints, 1967), pp. 164, 172. These literary references to architectural memory schemes point to the fact that such devices for training the memory were known and understood beyond scholastic and monastic circles. They also attest to an established practice of referring to the memory as a physical storage space that, if it was well organised, could be opened at will and the most appropriate memory easily selected.

Memory in the Middle Ages, then, was not understood in terms of storing and recalling the past for its own sake but, rather, as a means to enable imagination and composition, usually with a moral aim. Composition, therefore, was both a way of remembering and a way of providing future generations with a memory aid. As Carruthers points out, the contents of medieval treasuries or book-chests ‘are valued for their richness in terms of their present usefulness, not their “accuracy” or their certification of “what really happened”’.55Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 38. Consequently, training the memory was not a simple means of increasing the capacity or orderliness of the storage facility. As Elizabeth Elliott notes in her study of the role of Boethian models of consolation in shaping aristocratic identity, composition

What evidence do we have that such theories of memory were current in Scotland from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century? John Higgitt has observed that the ‘triumph of reformed protestantism was much more thoroughgoing in Scotland than in England’, the result being that the extant material once held by monastic houses is scarce.57John Higgitt, Scottish Libraries, Corpus of British Library Catalogues, 12 (London: British Library, 2006), xxxi–xxxii. He also points out that while the books held in royal libraries were ‘largely unaffected’ by the Reformation, they were ‘repeatedly exposed to destruction and dispersal’ by the ‘crises of the Scottish monarchy in the 16th cent., the abdication of Mary Queen of Scots in 1567, and the departure in 1603 of James VI from Scotland to take up the English crown’.58Higgitt, Scottish Libraries, xxxii. The result is that most of the remaining catalogues and booklists date from after the 1430s and there is very little sense of what might have been owned by Scottish monarchs before Mary’s reign (1542–87). From the inventories and booklists that do survive, however, it is possible to see that university and cathedral libraries – as well as the royal collections – contained the stock university texts, and it is not unlikely that many of them circulated in Scotland before the 1430s. Among a wide variety of Latin and vernacular texts were Augustine’s De Civitate Dei and Confessiones, Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, John of Salisbury’s twelfth-century Policraticus, and the Ad Herennium.59Higgitt, Scottish Libraries, pp. 2–29. The libraries of Scotland thus contained many of the political and philosophical works considered crucial by medieval scholars and which were concerned with themes such as kingship, governance and memory. These works point to a nexus of materials that writers could utilise and reliably expect their audiences to have some knowledge of. In this way, the training of the individual memory transforms, in the act of composition, to the shaping of collective memories.

Collective memory, Daniel Poirion suggests, is the ‘communion of a group of individual memories around the same themes and models’.60Daniel Poirion, ‘Literature as Memory: “Wo die Zeit wird Raum”’, trans. by Gretchen V. Angelo, Yale French Studies, 95 (1999), 33–46 (38). For Poirion, writing is ‘indeed, rewriting, not only through the trick of borrowing, copying, and imitating, but through the very nature of a spiritual activity that is simultaneously resurgence, reflection, and reminiscence’.61Poirion, ‘Literature as Memory’, 38. To this, I would add that collective memory focuses on communal acceptance of specific remembrances as authentic and representative. This involves a specific group’s intention to select and arrange representations of the past in a way that encourages individuals to adopt these memories as their own. In this way, I broadly work along the lines established by Maurice Halbwachs, who proposed that collective memory selectively appropriates and reconstructs aspects of the past to respond to the needs of the present.62Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See also Anne Whitehead on the historically conditioned nature of memory: Memory (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), esp. p. 4.

This does not negate the ars memoria, which asserted that the purpose of a well-ordered memory was to be able to recall information selectively in order to reorganise it and compose something new. All the texts that I consider are selective in what memories they choose to appropriate and how they recombine them. Authors such as Wyntoun, Holland, Bower, Hary, Lyndsay and Wedderburn all write about the nature of Scottishness as it is shaped by remembrance of the past. In doing so, they testify to a desire to select and organise the past in new and imaginative ways, performing collective memory work in the production of new texts. But who comprises these groups, and how they overlap, differs between time and place. Who is doing the remembering (or forgetting) and for what purpose becomes a defining feature of the material they present and is what enables diverse memories of the nation to take shape. All the texts that I consider are selective in what they choose to include and what they choose to omit, and this is dependent on the conditions in which those histories are being written. As a result, Scottish history is reshaped through memory as practice.63I am indebted here to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus and also to Monique Scheer’s work on ‘emotions as a kind of practice’, which stresses the historically situated nature of emotion. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. by Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory, 51.2 (2012), 193–220. For, while expressions of national identity in medieval Scottish literature have been discussed in recent years, most recently by Katherine Terrell, the role played by memory as a process in narrating national sentiment has received relatively little attention.64Katherine Terrell, Scripting the Nation: Court Poetry and the Authority of History in Late Medieval Scotland (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2021).

Anxieties around failures of memory, or deliberate forgetting, form the basis of Chapter 3’s consideration of the prologue to an abridged version of Scotichronicon compiled for the abbey at Coupar Angus. In acknowledging John of Fordun’s role in national historiography, Bower invents a memory of the circumstances of the chronicler’s endeavours: Edward I’s strategy of enforced forgetting through his seizure and destruction of written Scottish historical materials. Bower uses the destruction of the material objects of memory to forge another origin story of the narrative historiographical tradition, and it is one that is rooted in patriotic idealism. Where Bower deals with the loss of archive – physical memory – in Hary’s Wallace, the poet grapples with anxieties about social amnesia in the late fifteenth century. Written in light of contemporary politics and a foreign policy that Hary presents as dangerously pro-English, the poem uses memory to secure national sovereignty. The Wallace deliberately focuses on violence as a way of remembering Anglo-Scottish relations of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, deliberately drawing on the Wars of Independence as a foundational principle of Scottishness. In doing so, Hary directs his audience to see how the past should (or must) be remembered, as poetic truth rather than verifiable fact.

The final two chapters of this study sit across what we might think of as another border in Scottish terms: the Battle of Flodden (1513). I suggest that, post-Flodden, writing about Scottish nationhood changes in emphasis. Where the texts of the fifteenth century look back to the Wars of Independence and anti-English sentiment as a memorial cue for Scottish identity, the early poetry of David Lyndsay and Robert Wedderburn’s Complaynt of Scotland articulate national thinking in increasingly insular terms. To do so, both writers locate Scottishness as it is represented and enacted by the king and the commonweal. Chapter 5 looks in detail at two of Lyndsay’s poems from the early majority of James V: the Dreme and the Testament of the Papyngo. Both of these poems, I argue, draw on memory as an ethical foundation of character, taking the cardinal virtue of Prudence as a crucial component of governing or working in the national interest. My study concludes with a discussion of Wedderburn’s Complaynt of Scotland in Chapter 6. Where Lyndsay had personified memory as a guiding figure in the Dreme, in the Complaynt Wedderburn personifies Scotland as a mother with unruly sons. I suggest that Wedderburn’s concerns with Scottish sovereignty and identity in the wake of James V’s premature death prompt a recollection of the past glories of Scotland that can be used as a point of comparison for its present condition.

At the end of this study, we come back to the beginning as Wedderburn pulls at the thread of memory of the Wars of Independence to resist contemporary calls to Anglo-Scottish union. However, his focus is far more on the culpability of the Scots in their own demise rather than solely the imperial ambitions of the English. In reshaping the narrative, then, Wedderburn emphasises Scottish collective enterprise as a way of ensuring sovereignty. What it meant to be Scottish in the sixteenth century relies on the same memories as the previous century did, but it assumes a different emphasis. This study therefore considers writing about the past in new ways to show how memoria, so fundamental to medieval comprehensions of humanity, played a central role in the ways Scottish writers approached their task of shaping the nation through its past.