Chapter 1 The North Remembers: Identity and Nation across Scotland’s Borders

G.W.S. Barrow argues that prior to the Treaty of York, the Marches constituted a ‘boundary in its fullest sense’ between Scotland and England, and Michael Brown notes that the ‘long state of formal war which existed between the two kingdoms from 1333 to 1474, though it was interspersed by frequent truces, made the borderlands of the two realms into regions of special sensitivity’.5Michael Brown, ‘The Scottish March Wardenships (c. 1340–c. 1480), in England and Scotland at War, c. 1296–c. 1513, ed. by Andy King and David Simpkin (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 203–29 (203). To some extent, this reflected the division of the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria between the English and the Scots, such that the border line reflected a political but not a cultural boundary.6At its peak, the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria extended as far north as the Firth of Forth. For much of the thirteenth century, cross-border landholding was a significant feature of Anglo-Scottish relations, and the later Wars of Independence were not disputes over the location of the border itself, even if it became a significant ideological presence in writings concerned with those wars. In 1249, the Laws of the Marches were codified. The Laws aimed at providing a process of settling cross-border disputes between kingdoms with entirely separate legal jurisdictions; Cynthia Neville suggests that, in their written form, they ‘became part of the collective memory of the borderers’ as they ‘follow[ed] contemporary fashion’ in setting down ‘in comprehensive and definitive form the customs which had prevailed in the region’ in various ways from ‘as early as the first half of the eleventh century’.7C.J. Neville, Violence, Custom and Law: The Anglo-Scottish Border Lands in the Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), pp. 1–2. The March Laws instituted a separate jurisdiction that required separate administration. From 1295, raids, the taking of prisoners and ransom negotiations increased, and Andy King notes that from this point to 1323 cross-border landholding all but disappeared.8Andy King, ‘Best of Enemies: Were the Fourteenth-century Anglo-Scottish Marches a “Frontier Society”?’, in England and Scotland in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 116–35 (118). After 1296, the English crown instituted March wardens: northern magnates appointed to defend the English Marches against the threat of Scottish invasion. That a large area of the Scottish borders came under English lordship during the fourteenth century meant that cross-border ties were further strained, and March Law was revived during the late 1340s when March wardens assumed a judicial as well as a military role. It was at this point that March wardenships developed in Scotland, where the East, Middle and West Marches reflected the existing territorial interests of powerful border magnates, notably dominated by branches of the Douglas family until 1455, when the Black Douglases’ spectacular fall from power saw Earl James exiled to England.9See Neville, Violence, Custom and Law, pp. 27–45; Brown, ‘Scottish March Wardenships’. On the fall of the Douglases, see Michael Brown, The Black Douglases: War and Lordship in Late Medieval Scotland, 1300–1455 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2007), pp. 283–311. Following English victories at Halidon Hill (1333) and Neville’s Cross (1346), English administration in Berwickshire, Roxburghshire and Dumfriesshire – which had been ejected by Robert Bruce in the 1310s – was reinstated. It was not until later in the fourteenth century that Roxburgh and Berwick came back under Scottish control. This situation would lead the Anonymous Contributor in Andrew of Wyntoun’s Original Chronicle to comment specifically on the end of Robert II’s reign (1371–90) as the point at which the completeness of the realm was re-established.10See Chron. Wyntoun VI.356.1106–12. I discuss this later in the chapter. Throughout the fourteenth century, then, it is possible to see a strengthening of the view that the term ‘Scotia’, which before the Treaty of York had ostensibly referred to the central regions of the kingdom, now had a broader frame of reference: the regnum Scottorum.

While the territories of the Marches gave rise to continued debate between the Scots and the English throughout the later Middle Ages and into the sixteenth century, they also provided space for assimilation. Neville further suggests that ‘the impulse to codify custom’ in 1249 ‘was a determined statement of regional identity’ that differentiated the border lands from the Scots and the English.11Neville, Violence, Custom and Law, p. 3. This chimes with Andy King’s assessment that by the time of Edward I’s sacking of Berwick (1296), English and Scottish Marchers were ‘already thoroughly and comprehensively acculturised’ even as the border itself was ‘sharply defined’.12King, ‘Best of Enemies’, p. 131. Jackson W. Armstrong provides an important study for thinking about the Anglo-Scottish border; England’s Northern Frontier: Conflict and Local Society in the Fifteenth-Century Scottish Marches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), esp. pp. 49–73. The geographic Anglo-Scottish border existed as a very real source of influence and inspiration for Scottish and English writers throughout the Middle Ages. By the mid-fifteenth century, the chronicler Walter Bower was not only referring to an area called the confinibus marchiarum (neighbourhood of the borders; Chron. Bower 6. 311) but also identified the people who occupied that land as marchiani (Borderers; Chron. Bower 7. 283). Rather than a division of land separating the Scots and the English, this demarcation of the Marches suggested ideological, cultural and symbolic divisions that assumed a third identity, that of the border inhabitant, even if this Marcher identity, as Andy King has argued, always assumed a subordinate position to the borderers conceiving of themselves as primarily English or Scottish.13King, ‘Best of Enemies’, pp. 134–5. This suggestion of a liminal identity finds resonance in Gloria Anzaldúa’s argument that boundaries accrue creative potential through the merging of different cultures, even while, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen maintains, the hybridity that influences texts such as Gray’s Scalcronica did ‘not indicate some peaceful melding of two communities’.14Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera = The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). On the idea of the third space, see also Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1990); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 5. The border, therefore, opens up possibilities for identity formation in unique ways as it simultaneously presents uneasy negotiations; it acts as a site of potential anxiety about the multiple identities for which the border makes space. While G.W.S. Barrow has argued for the relatively stability of the Anglo-Scottish border, Andy King’s suggestion that border raids were of significant economic value to the area indicates that the border inhabitants lived within a systemised structure of violence that had the potential to impact not only individual but also collective identity.15See Barrow, Kingdom of the Scots, p. 114; Andy King, ‘“According to the Custom used in French and Scottish Wars”: Prisoners and Casualties in the Scottish Marches in the Fourteenth Century’, Journal of Medieval History, 28 (2002), 263–90. Certainly, from 1295, raiding, the taking of prisoners and ransom negotiations meant that, by 1323, cross-border landholdings had all but disappeared.16See King, ‘Best of Enemies’, pp. 118–19. Sir Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica points to mounting tensions between England and Scotland as a result of Edward I of England’s intention to manipulate the precarious positions of the Bruce and Balliol factions in their pursuit of the Scottish throne following the death of Alexander III in 1286. Here, the ideological division of the border assumes a greater significance for those whose identities were affected by its presence. One way in which this manifests is in Gray’s depiction of Scottish brutality during the First War of Independence. In his account of the murder of Hugh de Cressingham – Edward I’s treasurer in Scotland – Gray recalls that ‘it was said that the Scots had him skinned, and had thongs made from his skin, out of spite’ (Scal. 41). Scalacronica, here, chimes with the fourteenth-century chronicles of Guisborough and Lanercost, and supports the creation of a memory of the Scots as barbarians whose glory came, in part, from taking mementos made from their victims’ bodies: a war trophy par excellence in which violence functions as a mnemotechnical principle.17See Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough, ed. by Harry Rothwell, Camden Society, 3rd Ser., 89 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1957), p. 303; Chronicon de Lanercost, ed. by Joseph Stevenson, Bannatyne Club, 65 (Edinburgh, 1839), p. 190. This violence runs through multiple narratives in Scalacronica. For example, Gray’s version of the Scottish foundation myth recounts that, having arrived in Spain after fleeing from Egypt, the ancestors of the Scots ‘lived by ravaging the peasants of the region’ (Scal. 19).18I discuss the Scottish origin myth in more detail in Chapter 2. The implication is that it is in the Scots’ nature to be brutal and cruel, which, for Gray, delineates their difference from the English, whose defining characteristic is chivalric behaviour, demonstrated by figures such as his father, another Sir Thomas Gray. In his account of his father’s speech to Sir Alexander Mowbray, Gray has his father address his Scottish enemy as a ‘knight errant’ who had come to perform ‘chivalric deeds’ (Scal. 81–3). Sir Thomas mocks his enemy, demonstrating both his own chivalric identity and the lack of those knightly qualities in the Scot to whom he speaks. Of course, these narratives are being produced against a backdrop of cross-border conflict, but they become potent memories of Anglo-Scottish interaction. It is possible, however, to discern an identity in Scalacronica that is very specifically located in the Marches, as is particularly evident in the critique of Edward III’s policies in relation to the Marches in the 1340s, which Gray presumably comments on from direct involvement. In recording these experiences, Gray details how the Marches are continually left to defend themselves and the English garrisons in the north while Edward pursues his interests on the Continent.

For example, in his account of Edward III’s pursuit of his claim to the French throne, Gray recalls that it was only when the king had ‘lost all the castles and towns in Scotland which he had strengthened’ that he turned his eyes to France (Scal. 123). Gray intimates that Edward suspends the Anglo-Scottish stalemate to pursue a bigger honour; with the prospect of the prize of France, the Scottish conflict becomes unimportant to the king whose power base in the south was less materially affected by this change of direction. For Gray, however, and for others living in the Marches, the priorities of the king seem misguided. This perception, and the feelings it generates, achieve their greatest expression in Gray’s account of how, while Edward was ‘leading a high life’ encamped in Antwerp, ‘the English Marchers were defeated at Pressen’ (Scal. 127).19Presson is near Wark, Northumberland. The English Marchers who, in Gray’s recollection, had been instrumental in guarding the border, were now being abandoned for frivolity, and this narrative expresses an understanding of the liminality of the Marchers themselves in English understanding. For Gray, the Marches was a discrete regional society that had a complex relationship to the English crown, and his critique often betrays anxieties of abandonment and isolation.20I address how Gray deals with the Anglo-Scottish border as a geographical and ideological divide in more detail in two chapters: Kate Ash, ‘Friend or Foe? Negotiating the Anglo-Scottish Border in Sir Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica and Richard Holland’s Buke of the Howlat’, in The Anglo-Scottish Border and the Shaping of Identity, 1300–1600, ed. by Mark P. Bruce and Katherine H. Terrell (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 51–67 (esp. 52–7); Kate Ash, ‘Terrifying Proximity: The Anglo-Scottish Border in Sir Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica’, in Boundaries, ed. by Jenni Ramone and Gemma Twitchen (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), pp. 30–44 (esp. 34–42). Throughout Scalacronica, Gray articulates an ambivalence about the border which recognises the performative nature of identity as well as the interdependence of divergent narratives that recreate historical experience.

The Anglo-Scottish border, although it marked a definitive separation of two kingdoms, is not the only boundary that might be considered significant in later medieval Scotland. At the time of Alexander III’s death, Barrow suggests, the ‘primary divisions of [the kingdom] were four in number’: the ‘largest was Scotland north of the Forth’, while the other three lay south of the Forth. By 1286, these other regions, ‘which had never been known by any single name’, were

Scotland’s northern and western regions are another important consideration, looking as they did to other borders with Scandinavia and Ireland. Parts of the western and northern territories of Scotland, particularly the Hebrides, Orkney and the Shetland Islands, were under Norse control for much of the period under discussion here. The Treaty of Perth (1266), following the Battle of Largs, saw Norway cede the Hebrides and Isle of Man to Scotland, while Scotland recognised Norwegian sovereignty over Orkney and Shetland. These territories were not acquired by the Scots until 1468 as part of the marriage settlement between James III and Margaret of Denmark.22See Barbara E. Crawford, The Northern Earldoms: Orkney and Caithness from AD 870 to 1470 (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2013). On the problems faced by the Scottish crown in relation to Orkney and Shetland, see Ian Peter Grohse, ‘The Lost Cause: Kings, the Council, and the Question of Orkney and Shetland, 1468–1536’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 43.3 (2020), 286–308; Alison Cathcart, ‘“O wretched king!”: Ireland, Denmark-Norway, and Kingship in the Reign of James V’, in Rethinking the Renaissance and Reformation in Scotland: Essays in Honour of Roger A. Mason, ed. by Steven J. Reid (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2024), pp. 118–39, esp. pp. 120–5. The lordship of the Isles has often been seen as the thorn in the side – or ‘the Celtic Dirk at [the] back’ – of Scottish kings.23Richard Oram, ‘Introduction: A Celtic Dirk at Scotland’s Back? The Lordship of the Isles in Mainstream Scottish Historiography since 1828’, in The Lordship of the Isles, ed. by Richard Oram (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 1–39. This unfair assessment masks the often cooperative relationship between the king and the lordship.24Steve Boardman, ‘The Gaelic World and the Early Stewart Court’, in Mìorun mór nan Gall, ‘The Great Ill-Will of the Lowlander’? Lowland Perceptions of the Highlands, Medieval and Modern, ed. by Dauvit Broun and Martin MacGregor (Glasgow: Centre for Scottish and Celtic Studies, University of Glasgow, 2009), pp. 83–109. Nevertheless, among several of the Stewart kings there was suspicion of the power of the lordship, and both James II and James III sought to curtail its power and consolidate centralised government, but this was part of a broader project of the Stewart kings to ‘create a state in which the king and his central administration gained control of the localities’ and reduced magnate power.25Sonja Cameron, ‘“Contumaciously Absent”? The Lords of the Isles and the Scottish Crown’, in The Lordship of the Isles, pp. 146–75 (172).

Rather than functioning around a highly developed central government, Scotland was split into regional and local power bases. Despite these tensions between the crown and magnates, we should not assume that the regions of Scotland pulled its sense of cohesion apart. The king relied on nobles’ power over their estates, and appointed local lords from throughout the realm – lowlands and highlands – to their councils, indicating that they were conscious of the cultural diversity of the kingdom. At the same time, magnates were rewarded for service. The interdependence of crown and magnate meant that cooperation was fundamental. By the end of the fourteenth century, John Barbour was describing ‘ye land’ of Scotland as extending ‘Fra Weik anent Orknay / To Mullyr snwk in Gallaway’ (Bruce 1.184–8). Barbour’s sense here is that Scotland as an imagined community – a phenomenon of the mind – encompassed various linguistic and administrative regions under a broad understanding of a regnal community that stretched from Wick in the north to the Mull of Galloway in the south-west. This, however, did not prevent perceived cultural and behavioural differences between lowland and highland Scots from provoking comment. For example, in recounting a battle in Strathnaver (1431) between Angus Dubh and Angus de Moray, Bower comments that

English and Scottish writers’ consciousness of various borders – geographical, cultural, linguistic – and what they signified helped to shape their conceptions of individual, regional and national identities. Proximity to a border could also significantly influence responses to it. Based in Norham, Sir Thomas Gray situates himself not only as English but as a Borderer, and his Scalacronica often betrays the tensions of identity construction in the historical narrative that he shapes. For Gray, the Anglo-Scottish Marches are not necessarily a positive space in which to construct an identity; the border becomes a site of anxiety about the multiple identities coexisting in the region. The Orkneyman Richard Holland was writing in Moray and, therefore, reflecting on the Douglas presence on the Anglo-Scottish border at some distance. Wyntoun compiled his Original Chronicle in Lochleven, which probably escaped the worst of English raiding but was also far enough north for him to take more of an interest in Scotland’s northern regions. Their works expose multiple – and often conflicting – responses to an understanding of what it meant to be Scottish, or not, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Intimately connected to understanding the importance of geographic and cultural boundaries, Sir Thomas Gray, Richard Holland and Andrew of Wyntoun all emphasise affective memory as distinct markers of identity. For Gray and Holland, in particular, the focus on the Anglo-Scottish border as a locus of identity enables a shift in the perceived importance of locality or regionality as markers of sameness and difference specifically related to ideas of geographic or cultural boundaries. In this chapter, I will explore the textual and cultural borderlands at work in Gray’s Scalacronica, Holland’s Buke of the Howlat and Wyntoun’s Original Chronicle to consider the ways in which family assumed a particular importance to thinking about historiographical and memorial projects of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In articulating the significations of the Anglo-Scottish and Scotland’s internal borders, Gray, Holland and Wyntoun all emphasise memory and its effect on articulations of individual identity that might be brought to bear in thinking the nation, or vice versa.

In Scalacronica’s prologue, Gray writes that ‘he who wrote this chronicle […] does not wish to reveal his name plainly’ (Scal. 3). However, he circumvents this professed desire for anonymity by composing an alphabetical puzzle which enables the willing and able reader to discover his name. The game involves teasing out letters of the alphabet and rearranging them to arrive at the name of Thomas Grai:

Coats of arms do not merely identify an individual; they are, usually, an amalgamation of the heraldic symbols of ancestors and, therefore, testify to the composite nature of the self, which emerges from the joining of family lines. These markers of identity, as they represent pedigree and status, are inherently public in their function, serving as visual memorial cues of family associations, allegiances and communities. They show to whom (and how well) one is connected. Through the mnemonic puzzle of the prologue, then, Gray creates a chivalric persona, a knight who ‘is of that order which is enlightened by good customs, a support for the old, for maidens and for Holy Church’ (Scal. 2). Richard Moll characterises Gray’s prologue as an ‘elaborate act of self-fashioning’, in which he appeals to ‘an ideal of courtly behaviour inspired by romance conventions’.30Richard J. Moll, Before Malory: Reading Arthur in Late Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 39. Moreover, this courtly brain-teaser indicates that Gray assumes a certain audience for his text: an audience that is well acquainted with the images that he presents, both chivalric and local. This is supported by his decision to write in the French of England rather than Latin or English. Gray assumes a certain type of reader, and the language of his chronicle indicates an implied way of reading quite different from monastic Latin productions.31See Susan Crane, ‘Anglo-Norman Cultures in England, 1066–1460’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. by David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 35–60. Gray’s conscious choice of language, then, situates himself and Scalacronica within a specific cultural milieu that is crucial to an understanding of the ideas about identity that the text develops.

The use of the mnemonic gives the impression that the identity of Scalacronica’s writer is jointly determined by the text and its readers. Just as the shield identifies the knight, particularly in medieval romance, by being written into the text as Gray is in Scalacronica, the writer’s identity is textually determined.32On the significance of shields and identity, see Yoïchi Shimazaki, ‘L’Amour d’Hector et le motif d l’eiu dans le Lancelot en prose’, Études de Langue et Littérature Françaises, 56 (1990), 6–7. In their expression as memory games within the prologue, then, Gray shows how identities are constructed and how they are performed both on an individual and a collective basis. Gray’s textual identity can be brought into being only by a collaborative memorial interplay between writer and audience. The prologue’s heraldic game points to the complexity, but also the possibility, of identities that are constructed around certain characteristics, such as knightliness, which are identifiable to the right reader and serve as a mnemonic of socialisation.

The acrostic with which Gray presents his readers is not only an intellectual game: it also points to how memory is put to work in the gap between the text and the reader; the wordplay might obfuscate but it also playfully reveals the importance of a creative reading process that was fundamental to medieval understandings of a well-trained memory.33See Carruthers and Ziolkowski, Medieval Craft, p. 13. Gray both presents and hides his identity within the text and, when he challenges the reader to ‘ymaginez’ (Scal. 4), he alludes to the faculty of memory that is both creative and active. Gray’s use of the acrostic in Scalacronica’s prologue is strikingly similar to that at the beginning of Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina (1499), where the first letter of each line taken together reveals the author’s name: Fernando de Roias.34See Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina, ed. by Francisco Alonso (Madrid: Editorial Burdeos, 1987), p. 39. Julian Weiss argues that de Rojas’s example demonstrates ‘a poetic way of half-remembering’ the writer; that the process mirrors the imaginative literary composition whereby the writer locates himself ‘between the extremes of exclusion and willed anonymity’.35Julian Weiss, ‘Memory in Creation: The Context of Rojas’s Literary Recollection’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 86.1 (2009), 150–7 (154). The active work required by the reader to reveal what the writer has hidden shows memory to be a creative reading process as well as a means of composition. In addition to the use of mnemonics, Gray’s inclusion of the Sybil as a guide in Scalacronica’s dream vision section of the prologue explicitly points to the memorial function of the acrostic because it was a device with which the Sybil was long associated.36See Patrizia Lendinara, ‘The Verse Sybyllae de die indudicii in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Apocryphal Texts and Traditions in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. by Katherine Powell and Donald Scragg (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 85–101; Anke Holdenried, The Sibyl and Her Scribes: Manuscripts and the Interpretation of the Latin Sybilla Tiburtina, c. 1050–1500 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). On the authority of Sibylline prophecy, see Maureen Quilligan, The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan’s Cite des Dames (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 105–16.

From the acrostic that demands a reader’s cognitive engagement, Scalacronica’s prologue then transitions to a dream vision in which the Sibyl appears to Gray in a tableau similar to that in Boethius’ Consolation. In the Boethian text, Lady Philosophy appears to the dreamer wearing a robe embroidered at the bottom hem with the Greek letter Pi, and at the top hem with Theta. Between the two, a ‘ladder of steps rose from the lower letter to the higher’.37Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. by Victor Watts, rev. edn (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 4. Establishing himself in this Boethian tradition, Gray adapts this image to set out the structure of his own history. In Gray’s prologue, it is the Sibyl rather than Philosophy who appears and tells him that ‘she [will] show him the way to that which he [has] in mind’ (Scal. 5). The Sibyl takes Gray to an orchard where,

Through the image of the orchard and the wall, alongside the Sibyl’s comments on the sources that Gray is to use for his own chronicle, Scalacronica presents the reader with landscaped and architectural structures for this new historical work, all of which draw upon formal memory training. Orchards, for example, appear repeatedly in medieval literature – usually romance – as locations for recreation and contemplation; like memory, orchards are both pleasurable and useful.40See Teresa McLean, Medieval English Gardens (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1989); Amy Louise Morgan discusses the role of orchards as liminal spaces in romance in ‘“To play bi an orchardside”: Orchards as Enclosures of Queer Space in Lanval and Sir Orfeo’, in The Medieval and Early Modern Garden in Britain: Enclosure and Transformation, c. 1200–1750, ed. by Patricia Skinner and Theresa Tyers (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 91–101. The image of the ladder is one that suggests a state of transition from one position to another, with each source a border between different presentations of the past that Gray must negotiate. In this way, it connects varying kinds of knowledge. The ladder also recalls the scala Jacobis, a common topos in religious writing where the mnemonic function denoted spiritual ascent and the precariousness of that ascent. The scala Jacobis refers to part of a dream or vision which Jacob received in Bethel (Gen. 28: 12–13). In the dream, the stairway stands on the earth and reaches up to heaven, with messengers ascending and descending and God standing at the top. Jacob’s ladder was also used by Richard de Bury as a mnemonic device specifically connected with books, and which he attributes to Hugh of St Victor. In Richard de Bury’s conception, the ladder – which allowed for ascent and descent – resembled the well-ordered memory which could be searched and called upon at will.41Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, 1, 27–29; 14–15.

The architectural structuring of the foundations of Scalacronica draws attention to what is being remembered and by whom: it is Gray who ‘had dreamed these dreams’ and ‘remembered well all the details’ and who began his chronicle to record that which he ‘wished to remember’ (il voet rementoyuer; Scal. 7; my emphasis). Through the Sibyl’s guidance, and through Gray’s own admission that Scalacronica emphasises the ‘deeds’ of Brutus and ‘his successors’, the prologue reminds readers that historiography is selective; the chronicler chooses what to include and, crucially, what to omit. The intention is to remember some things and not others, and Scalacronica relies on the active composition and memory of its author and what he considers worthy of remembering. In using this highly stylised way of acknowledging his sources, Gray not only follows a tradition of holding the ‘best’ sources in high esteem but also seeks to present his own work as a continuation of the tradition of authorising a text through its links and debts to previous works. Gray elevates his own work through such associations, as well as pointing to the writing of history as imaginative reworking, a form of memory. The ascent that Gray and the Sibyl make culminates in the fifth rung of the ladder. The Sibyl prevents the dreaming Gray from ascending the fifth rung because it ‘signifies future events’ (Scal. 7). Continuing the allusion to the great and authoritative histories of England, and drawing on the image of the ladder as a memorial structure, Gray implicitly places his own work as the production symbolised by that fifth rung. It is a new narrative of events fundamentally tied to, and shaped by, the previous supporting histories, and it continues the history of the island of Britain according to the reshaping that Gray determines.

That Gray’s Scalacronica is the product of the fifth rung of the ladder that leans against the wall of memory-history in the orchard is further signified by the ladder itself and its relation to Gray’s identity. The importance of the reader’s active engagement with the text is exemplified by John Leland, who prepared an abstract of the Scalacronica in the sixteenth century. He comments that it was the ladder, specifically, that enabled him to identify the author of the chronicle:

One of these episodes, which focuses on the parentage of Máel Coluim III, appears to engage with contemporary dynastic politics at the same time as it links those directly to a widespread, albeit inaccurate, memory that posited the marriage of Máel Coluim III and St Margaret as the foundational event of a new Scottish dynasty. Rhiannon Purdie has eloquently demonstrated the chronicler’s deft rhetorical skill in her analysis of Wyntoun’s reshaping of the narrative of Máel Coluim III’s parentage. Purdie focuses on the changes that Wyntoun makes to his sources regarding the legitimacy of Máel Coluim III, to argue that, in documenting Máel Coluim as an illegitimate son of King Duncan by a miller’s daughter, Wyntoun sought to rupture genealogical narrative and present Malcom – and his wife, Margaret, daughter of the exiled Saxon king, Edward – as the founders of a new royal Scottish dynasty.46Rhiannon Purdie, ‘Malcolm, Margaret, Macbeth, and the Miller: Rhetoric and the Re-shaping of History in Wyntoun’s Original Chronicle’, Medievalia et Humanistica, 41 (2016), 45–63. In doing so, she suggests, Wyntoun’s focus on illegitimate but ‘best fit’ ruler repurposed history in the prophetic mode in light of the more recent successions of illegitimate Douglases to the earldoms of both Douglas and Angus. In particular, this ‘fit for purpose’ approach rested on the military prowess of Archibald ‘the Grim’ (d. 1400) and his nephew, William, first earl of Douglas, on both of whom Albany was dependent for personal support and national defence.47Purdie, ‘Malcolm, Margaret, Macbeth, and the Miller’, esp. 53–59. See also Boardman’s assessment that by the end of 1389, in a ‘dazzling example of realpolitik’, the ‘earldoms of Douglas and Angus were secured in the hands of bastards whose affinities were politically and militarily loyal or indispensable’ to Albany, ‘both for the preservation of his personal authority within Scotland and in his wider task of defending the realm’: Early Stewart Kings, p. 166. Consequently, Purdie argues, Wyntoun’s historical project reshaped the past to ‘reflect the desires of a broad contemporary audience’.48Purdie, ‘Malcolm, Margaret, Macbeth, and the Miller’, 58.

As with Gray’s Scalacronica, Wyntoun’s choice of vernacular history might have more to do with the status of his audience than their nationality as it were. Gray’s use of the French of England and his heavy focus on chivalric matters supposes a noble lay audience. The same might be said for Wyntoun’s Chronicle, not least because of the decision also to write in the vernacular rather than Latin – several of his narratives make use of the language and style of romance. Wyntoun’s professed principal influence for his recent Scottish history was the ‘romanys’, Barbour’s Bruce. In his prologue, Wyntoun appropriates Barbour’s own appeal to his audience’s understanding of the relationship between rhetoric and history, by reusing the opening lines of the Bruce: ‘Storyis to heire ar dilectable, / Suppose þat sum be nocht bot fable’ (Chron. Wyntoun, I.4.31–2).49Cf. ‘Storys to rede ar delitabill / Suppos yat yai be nocht bot fabill’: Barbour’s Bruce, ed. by Matthew P. McDiarmid and James A.C. Stevenson, 3 vols, STS 4th ser., 12, 13, 15 (1980–85), ii. 1. 1–2. It is probably safe to assume that Wyntoun expected his audience to recognise the reference and to engage their own memories in making the connections between Barbour’s narrative and Wyntoun’s. The explication recalls the understanding that history was studied as part of the trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric) and the principles of composition would, therefore, be familiar to anyone who had received a certain level of education. Rhetoric was designed to teach (docere), move (movere) and please (delectare), and this prologue demonstrates how memory was also understood as a rhetorical practice. Memoria also relied on affect, including pleasure, as an ethical tool of instruction. Indeed, as Wyntoun reminds his reader at the opening of his chronicle:

The Chronicle is also a text deeply invested in ideas of nation and freedom. The Wemyss MS, which ends at the death of Robert II in 1390, prays that God will give Robert III ‘grace / For to governe and hald his land / In als gude pleyt as he it fand, / To leif it bettir at his deceis’ (Chron. Wyntoun, VI.345–5.1102–5). The Cottonian MS, which represents the third recension, praises Robert II as the king who ‘gouernyt weil’ his realm, ‘And fre it helde ilka deil, / And left it fre eftyr his decesse’ (Chron. Wyntoun, VI.355–57.1101–3). Both versions then include a particularly notable comment on the state of Scottish sovereignty and the territorial completeness of the realm:

By the time the Wemyss MS ends, along with the use of the ‘Anonymous Contributor’, England and Scotland had secured a truce. The Treaty of Leulingham (1389) effectively signalled the end of Anglo-Scottish conflict – for a few years at least – but Wyntoun’s interests in borders and identities continue. To think about this in more detail, I want to consider two episodes that sit side by side in the Chronicle: the duke of Orleans’ speech during Anglo-Scottish negotiations in 1391, followed by the Glasklune episode, an account of tensions between the Gaelic-speaking regions of the northern Scottish territories. These accounts both attest to the complex set of interactions between nation and memory in the Chronicle. According to Wyntoun, during the 1391 negotiations, ‘sum said, þat Inglis men, / Þat oure nacion defamyt þen, / And said we, gaderit to oure weris, / Micht noucht al passe thre hundyr speris’ (Chron. Wyntoun, VI.369.1393–96). This insult regarding the Scots’ abilities to muster a large army was ‘said in þe presens / Off þe Duk of Orlyens’, who had always had a ‘special affecion’ for the ‘Scottis nacion’ (Chron. Wyntoun, VI.369.1399–1402). Wyntoun follows this with a speech by Orleans, who states that there ‘Was neuir realme na region / Worthe mar commendacion’ (Chron. Wyntoun, VI.369.1409–10). The duke points out to the English ‘Þat nacion ȝhe may noucht defame, / Bot gif ȝhe smyt ȝoure awyn wi þe schayme’ (Chron. Wyntoun, VI.370.1445–6). Within this imagined speech, Wyntoun establishes Scottish sovereignty – recognised internationally – alongside an image of Scottish chivalric identity, demonstrated through the affection of the duke of Orleans, who was renowned as a cultivator of chivalric culture.54For example, Louis founded the Order of the Porcupine in 1394. See D’Arcy Jonathan Dacre Boulton, The Knights of the Crown: The Monarchical Orders of Knighthood in Later Medieval Europe (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1987). This potent political reimagining on Wyntoun’s part also rests on his distinction between the ‘Inglis’ and ‘oure nacion’ as Wyntoun encourages his reader to identify themselves as part of that collective Scottish identity. That the duke refers to the ‘Scottis nacion’ is particularly interesting in light of the chapter that immediately follows his declaration.

The Glasklune episode, also known as the Battle of Brerachan, shifts the focus from the Anglo-Scottish border to consider the northerly cultural and linguistic borders within the Scottish kingdom that had contemporary resonance. In Book 9, Chapter 12, Wyntoun recounts how, in early 1392, the sons of Alexander Stewart, earl of Buchan (fourth son of Robert II), were involved in a raid into the lowlands of Angus. The episode recollects how a ‘gret hee discorde’ occurred between Sir David Lindsay, lord of Glen Esk and the ‘Hielande men’ (Chron. Wyntoun, VI.371.1453, 1455). Having set a time and place for meeting to resolve the dispute, Wyntoun narrates that ‘Schir Dauid Lyndissay, þat was wise, / Trowit noucht in þaim [the Highland men]’ and sent a spy into their lands (Chron. Wyntoun VI.371.1461–2). However, the ‘Hielande men’ ‘coyme downe al suddandly’, about three hundred of them, Wyntoun estimates (Chron. Wyntoun, VI. 371.1467–70). The story in the Weymss MS continues: ‘Qwhen worde oursprede þan þe cuntre / þat þe Scottis Hielande men / War nere þe watter of Ile þen’ (Chron. Wyntoun, VI.372.1474–6), the good knight Walter Ogilvy, along with Sir Patrick Gray and Sir David Lindsay, seek to engage the raiders in combat. These men, ‘sterne and stowt’ of heart ‘Pressit þaim fast to skayl þat rowte’ (Chron. Wyntoun, VI.372.1492), but Ogilvy is killed, while Gray and Lindsay are badly wounded. At lines 1493–4 of the Weymss MS, Wyntoun writes that ‘In þe Stormonde at Gasklwne / þat dulful dawwerk þat tyme was done’. In the Cottonian MS, Wyntoun gives a rather impressive account of the heroism of Lindsay, who engages in combat such that ‘Throw þe body he straik a man / With his spere doune to þe erde’ (Chron. Wyntoun, VI.373.1500–01). This man, however, presses himself upwards and ‘With a swak … of his suerde’ (Chron. Wyntoun, VI.373.1506) he strikes Lindsay through his boot and through to the ‘bane’ of his leg, severely wounding him (Chron. Wyntoun, VI.373.1509). It is only because Lindsay is sitting on his horse that he is not killed. The episode in the Wemyss MS then ends with references to the ‘gentillis and ȝomen’ killed but whose heroism and loyalty means that they ‘bidande’ on the field with Ogilvy:

Wyntoun’s account then presents his reader with a potent example of loyalty and disloyalty to the crown: by raiding into Angus, Buchan’s sons demonstrated an arrogant failure of loyalty that sought to destabilise further the early reign of Robert III. While the Glasklune episode reflects a long-standing power struggle within the Stewart royal family, Wyntoun’s reshaping of the events in the minds of his readers highlights strong cultural divisions between highland and lowland members of the kingdom. As Steve Boardman notes, one important effect of the Glen Brerachan raid was that ‘it allowed [Buchan’s] opponents to identify him even more closely with a type of Gaelic lordship which was increasingly seen as wild and lawless’.55Boardman, Early Stewart Kings, pp. 180–1. Nevertheless, the slipperiness of the term ‘Scottis’ between this episode and the recollection of events in France immediately preceding it is significant, for it demonstrates the ways in which Wyntoun approached his history as well as the ambivalent or contested nature of markers of identity. If readers have just encountered the whole ‘nacion’ being understood as ‘Scottis’ from the perspective of the duke of Orleans, what were they to make of the insistence in this passage on the ‘Scottis Heilande men’, who are clearly understood as different? Who is included and excluded by the term ‘Scottis’ assumes significance. Wyntoun presents his readers with a memorial challenge between these two episodes, but also within the shaping of the Glasklune episode itself. There is an implicit admiration for the sheer physical capabilities of a man (highland or not) to be able to use the spear with which he has been skewered to lift himself up and strike a blow so fierce that it cuts Lindsay’s leg to the bone. At the same time, the level of violence confirms the cultural differences between the highlander and the lowlander in ways that repeat crystallising views of highland violence.56See MacGregor, ‘Gaelic Barbarity and Scottish Identity’, pp. 7–48. Lindsay, in particular, was renowned as a ‘gentleman’ knight, something that Wyntoun might presume his chivalric audience could recall, not least from his own account of the fight between the Scottish knight and the English Sir John Welles that occurred in London in 1390 (Chron. Wyntoun VI.359–62). In this recollection, Wyntoun describes Lindsay as being ‘al curtasse’ in ‘his deid’ (VI.361.1202) as he spares the life of the wounded Welles. The reader is therefore encouraged to remember the chivalric identity of the lowland Scots – exemplified in David Lindsay – through the extreme unchivalric violence of the unnamed highlander who nearly kills his opponent. It also creates a memorial cue for the chivalric commendation of the Scots from the duke of Orleans in the previous chapter. By comparing these two episodes it is possible to see how Wyntoun reshapes the past and how, in doing so, he creates specific memorial images that show the process of thinking the nation. It is important that the slipperiness of the use of ‘Scottis’ remains unresolved at the end of Wyntoun’s account because it complicates our assumptions about what late medieval writers in Scotland might conclude about Scottishness.

Both Wyntoun and Gray rely on vivid memorial images to think through authorial and chivalric identity. Those individual identities are shaped by the textual and very real borders that Scalacronica and the Original Chronicle engage with ideologically. Yet, while both writers appropriate borders as a fundamental marker of identity, they acknowledge that those borders are not hard lines of division but contested and productive spaces of memory and identity, both individual and collective. In the final section of this chapter, I turn to the process of memorialising family identity in the service of the crown through spatial and temporal borders by examining Richard Holland’s Buke of the Howlat.

A native of Orkney, Richard Holland first appears in the records in 1441 as clericus cathaniensis. By 1453 he was precentor of Moray cathedral. The panegyric stanza at the end of the Howlat associates Holland with the household of Archibald Douglas, earl of Moray, and his wife, Elizabeth Dunbar; the reference to ‘ane dow of Dunbar’ (Howl. 989) has been taken to mean that Holland composed the poem for Elizabeth.58See, for example, Sally Mapstone, ‘Older Scots Literature and the Court’, in The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, I: From Columba to the Union (until 1707), ed. by Thomas Clancy and Murray Pittock (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 273–85; Nicola Royan, ‘“Mark your meroure be me”: Richard Holland’s Buke of the Howlat’, in A Companion to Medieval Scottish Poetry, ed. by Priscilla Bawcutt and Janet Hadley Williams (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 49–62. Archibald was the third son of James the Gross, seventh earl of Douglas, and therefore the great-grandson of the ‘Good Sir James’ through James’s illegitimate son, Archibald the Grim (third earl). The ‘Black’ Douglases had achieved fame with their role in Robert the Bruce’s coup of 1306 and were one of the most powerful aristocratic families in fourteenth-century Scotland. Their supremacy, Michael Brown argues, rested on ‘the rule or misrule of the family over its tenants and neighbours’, and they maintained dominance ‘by fear and force’, which only ended after a ‘bloody conflict’ with James II following the murder of William, the eighth earl, in 1452. The death of earl William forced the Douglases into outright rebellion, which led to the death of several members of the Douglas kin, including Holland’s patron at the Battle of Arkinholm (1455).59Brown, The Black Douglases, p. 5. Following the downfall of the family, Holland seems to have retreated back to Orkney – he is recorded as priest and canon of Kirkwall in 1457 – before following James Douglas, brother of Archibald and now ninth earl of Douglas, into exile in England in 1467. Holland’s Howlat looks back to the lauded image of the Black Douglases presented in such texts as Barbour’s Bruce, in which loyal service to the crown characterised the family. In responding to Barbour’s depiction of the ‘gud schyr Iames’ (Bruce 1.29), Holland centralises and expands a brief episode from Book 20 of the Bruce, in which Douglas carries Bruce’s heart on crusade. In doing so, Holland inventively reimagines the past to centralise Douglas power and loyalty.

Dating the poem has been a matter of much critical enquiry, with Felicity Riddy arguing for a composition date of 1448, where Marion Stewart’s suggestion of a direct connection to the political demise of the Livingstone family indicates a date of 1450.60Felicity Riddy, ‘Dating the Buke of the Howlat’, Review of English Studies, 37 (1986), 1–10; Marion Stewart, ‘Holland’s “Howlat” and the Fall of the Livingstones’, Innes Review, 26 (1975), 67–79. Ralph Hanna seems to concur with Riddy on the date of the poem, noting that the fall of the Livingstones occurred ‘in 1449, shortly after Holland composed the poem’; Howl., 31. More recently, Alasdair A. MacDonald has revisited this issue, putting forward an argument for evidence of a two-stage composition evident in the poem that demonstrates how Holland revised the poem in circumstances quite different from those of its original composition.61Alasdair A. MacDonald, ‘Richard Holland and the Buke of the Howlat: Remembrance of Things Past’, Medium Ævum, 86.1 (2017), 108–22 (108). In his analysis of the Howlat, its language and its imagined topography, MacDonald proposes that Holland’s poem, in its extant version, should be regarded as most likely being composed in the 1440s but with post-1455 revisions (i.e., after the death of his patron, Archibald, and the fall of the Douglases). The place names in the Howlat, MacDonald argues, indicate a particularly northern focus for the poem, which would correspond with Holland’s own retreat back to Orkney.62This rests on MacDonald’s reinterpretation of lines 895–7 (‘That no bird was him lyke / Fro Burone to Berwike / Wnder þe bewes’). Where Amours had identified ‘Burone’ with Burrion (the most northerly point of North Ronaldsay and, therefore, the northern tip of the Orkney islands), he identified ‘Beriwke’ as Berwick-upon-Tweed. The lines thus intimate that the Owl in his borrowed plumage is the finest creature in the whole of Scotland (notwithstanding that Berwick was at this point in English hands). MacDonald argues that the ‘Burone’ reference is correct but that ‘Berwike’ should be understood as a reference to the hamlet of Burwck, the most southerly tip of the Orkney islands. In this case, the howlat is imagined as the finest bird in the Orkneys alone. See MacDonald, ‘Richard Holland and The Buke of the Howlat’, 115–16. Read in this way, MacDonald suggests, the Howlat becomes a consolatory poem, but also one in which the ‘unrestrained dynastic glorification’ of the Douglases might safely still be written.63As MacDonald notes, by retreating to Orkney, Holland ‘had put himself beyond the dangerous clutches of James II, for until 1468–9 Orkney and Shetland still belonged to Denmark-Norway’. MacDonald, ‘Richard Holland and The Buke of the Howlat’, 118. If MacDonald is correct, several memorial aspects of Holland’s work sit more immediately below the text’s surface. But, almost regardless of its dating, it is clear that Holland directly uses and shapes the past to comment on the present, although the praising of past Douglas glory serves different memorial functions in the 1440s when the poem was originally composed, and the mid-1450s when the Douglases had firmly fallen from power and when a 1455 context might suggest a melancholic perspective of how the past could be narrated. I will focus on two sections of the poem. Firstly, I will examine what has become known as the ‘heraldic core’ of the Howlat and its representation of sempiternal honour of the Douglases as the supreme Scottish magnate dynasty. Secondly, I consider the representation of highland culture as it is depicted in the bird-fable section of the poem. Both of these sections demonstrate that Holland uses heraldic imagery and memories of past heroism to situate the fifteenth-century Douglases as the defenders of Scotland’s borders against its ‘fais force’ (Howl. 383).

The Howlat incorporates a frame narrative in which the narrator stumbles upon an owl making ‘ane petuos appele with ane pur mane’ (Howl. 41). The poem then presents a bird fable in which the howlat complains of being ‘fassonit so foule’ (Howl. 55) such that the other birds each give him one of their feathers. On receiving these gifts, however, the howlat becomes so proud and ambitious that Nature demands the return of his borrowed plumage. The howlat is returned to his original state and is left lamenting his condition. At the end of the poem, the narrator comments on the composition of the poem and identifies himself as one ‘Holland’ (Howl.1001). In a celebratory mid-section, which occupies lines 378–624, the Howlat describes the coats of arms associated with specific members of the Douglas family. The moral instruction of the bird fable – concerning misplaced pride – might serve as a warning, either in a general advisory context or specifically directed at an unnamed person. If the Howlat were to be read in this way, the poem would presumably need to be read as a warning to all those who would think to contest the superiority of the Douglases, which might also include the king, James II.

The envelope pattern of the Howlat places the heraldic emblazoning of the Douglas arms and the Douglases’ connections to the Stewarts at the sovereign mid-point of the poem.64The central section of the Howlat poetically represents the coats of arms of the shields of Good Sir James (391–546); Archibald ‘the Grim’, third earl of Douglas (547–85); Archibald Douglas, earl of Moray (586–98); the two younger brothers of Archibald, Hugh Douglas and John Douglas, Lord Balvenie (599–603). Pride of place is given to the Douglases’ connections to the Bruces as Holland recalls how James Douglas ‘oft blythit the Bruse in his distres’ (Howl. 393). Consequently, Bruce ‘blissit that blud’ (Howl. 394) which was ‘lelest’ (Howl. 433). While the poem concerns itself with the Douglas dynasty, Holland situates this magnate self-representation in relation to the national concerns of Scotland memorialised in Bruce’s fight for Scottish independence. In doing so, the Howlat testifies to the prominent position that the Douglases held (or had held) in Scotland’s political sphere. It also demonstrates the way in which these border magnates were ‘fassonit’ as central to Scottish politics and identity. Following the description of the coats of arms of the king of Scotland, Holland introduces the Douglases:

Bruce’s heart and its visual representation on the arms of Douglas – and as retold in the Howlat – stand metonymically for the Douglases’ role in securing Scotland’s independence. The heart not only signifies the relationship between crown and magnate, but also functions as a remembrance of James Douglas’s bravery that, for Holland, becomes the fundamental aspect of Douglas identity, perpetuated in the centrality of the ‘hert’ set ‘heirly and hie’ on the Douglas arms (Howl. 411). Furthermore, the reminder of Bruce’s heart is set against a silver background (the silver ‘feld’; Howl. 410), which signifies the ‘cleir corage’ of Douglas (Howl. 435). Holland’s pun on cor and corage emphasises the memorial aspect of the coats of arms, utilising heraldry as a visual memory of dynastic reputation. This dynastic posturing can be seen in the literary construction of Douglas genealogy. Holland imagines the ‘pursevantis gyde’ embroidered ‘with ane grene tre’ from which cheerful ‘branchis’ stretch out. Each bough is encircled by a ‘bill’ (scroll) on which is written: ‘O Douglas, O Douglas, / Tender and trewe!’ (Howl. 397–403). By implication, the qualities of the Good Sir James – his caring and his loyalty – are passed through the dynastic line, bringing past glory to the present. The introductory stanzas to the Douglas heraldic line-up thus bring together myriad meanings of the heart to prompt readers’ memories of the relationship between courage, loyalty and inheritance through consanguinity.67I discuss the role of genealogy in relation to memory and national identity in more depth in Chapter 2. The repeated focus on hearts in the Howlat – Bruce’s heart in the narrative of James Douglas’s pilgrimage and on the shield, and the ‘trewe Scottis heart’ that is meant to be inspired by the memory invoked by the name of Douglas – links the Bruce, the Douglases and the loyal Scottish reader. Holland indicates that, just as commemoration is at the heart of the Howlat – quite literally in its structure – so the memories of reciprocal king and magnate loyalty sit at the heart of Scottish identity.

The second significant memorial image that Holland uses to think about Douglas loyalty signifies another connection between the individual and the nation. Once again, in the introductory stanza to the heraldic core, Holland refers to the Douglases as the ‘werwall’ of Scotland, that readers should ‘wit […] but wene’. The Douglases are imagined as the ‘unfalyeable’ resistance against the enemy, ‘[b]aith barmekyn and bar to Scottis blud’ (Howl. 382–84). The Douglases’ role as the defenders of the Anglo-Scottish border is foregrounded as a signifier of national identity; their dynasty maintains the border that demarcates Scotland’s sovereignty and they become the barrier that protects the purity of Scottish blood as well as the ‘barmekyn’ that shields the Scots from English acts of aggression. Rather than a site of contact and exchange made imaginatively possible in Gray’s Scalacronica, Holland imagines the Anglo-Scottish border as a frontier, a place of walls and impermeable barriers. This sense of a militarised border also occurs in the bird fable, in which the ‘merlyeonis’, who are ‘borne bacheleris’, are described as being ‘bald on the bordouris’ (Howl. 638–9). The merlins connote both nobility and military force. Here, however, the force is not one of defence (the wall) but of attack (boldness). Holland had asserted this courage in his description of James Douglas as ‘bald in assay’ (Howl. 394), something which he imagined as having ‘blythit Bruse in his distress’ (Howl. 393). The birds of prey in the fable section again intimate a hostile environment in which the only contact across the border is belligerent. Holland’s Howlat, therefore, memorialises the Anglo-Scottish border as intimately connected with Douglas identity that is founded upon loyalty to the king. A similar use of motto and iconography is deployed by Bérault Stuart d’Aubigny, whose personal banner incorporated two smaller banners: one displaying a shield with three lilies, and a border of buckles; the other presenting the arms of Stuart. Joining these two banners was a scroll containing the motto ‘Distantia Jungit’ (unites things distant). As Bryony Coombs notes, this motto, along with the image of the buckle, stresses ‘the Stuart d’Aubigny’s role as the connection, or buckle, that held close Scotland and France’ in a political and military union.68Bryony J. Coombs, ‘“Distantia Jungit”: Scots Patronage of the Visual Arts in France, c. 1445–c. 1545’, 2 vols (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2013), vol. 1, p. 69. Coombs suggests that Bérault made use of an older appropriation of the buckle arising from a thirteenth-century marriage between the Stewarts and the Bonkyl family.69Coombs, ‘“Distantia Jungit”’ p. 80. See also, Elizabeth Bonner (ed.), Documents sur Robert Stuart: Seigneur d’Aubigny (1508–1544), Guerrier et courtesan au service de Louis XII et de François Ier (Paris: Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2011), p. 41, n. 11. John Stewart of Darnely, Bérault’s grandfather, descended from John Stewart who was married to Margaret Bonkyl and who died at the Battle of Falkirk (22 July 1298). In doing so, his reuse of the symbol attests to the ways dynastic imagery sought to imaginatively remember the past and reshape its resonance in the present.

Where Gray locates his individual identity most firmly in the prologue to his Scalacronica – what we might think of as a textual borderland – Holland’s commemoration of the Douglases situates their distinctiveness at the centre of the Howlat. Framed by both the bird fable and the narratorial sections, which continually look forward and backward to the centre, the Douglas mid-section situates identity as far from the edges as possible. This focus on centrality not only informs the poem’s view of the Douglases as the guardians of Scotland’s southern boundary but also turns attention to the northern and western cultural borders of Scotland as the Howlat engages with the division between the lowland Scots and the Gáidhealtachd. As part of the bird fable, Holland introduces the ‘ruke’ as a ‘bard owt of Irland’ (Howl. 794–5), whose language is mocked as a ‘rerd’ of ‘rane roch’ (Howl. 794) as he ‘maid’ his ‘lesingis’ to the company (Howl. 807). Holland’s inclusion of Gaelic shows a familiarity with the spoken language even as he misrepresents and ridicules it. As with the Anglo-Scottish border, this cultural and linguistic boundary offers an opportunity for ambivalent cross-cultural exchange. The mocking depiction of the rook – as a liar whose ‘ryme’ (Howl. 797) serves as an almost incomprehensible set of ramblings –vilifies the Gael as a barbaric Other opposed to the chivalric ideal of lowland ‘Inglis’ represented by the Douglases. Gaelic narratives are reduced – and dismissed – because the recitation of the ‘Irland kingis of the Irischerye’, the poet imagines, can be recited not only by the ‘schenachy’ and the ‘clarschach’, but also by the ‘ben schene’ (singing woman), the ‘bacllach’ (servant), the ‘crekery’ (reciter) and the ‘corach’ (ritual mourner) (Howl. 801–5). Holland dismisses the king-list as simplistic and of little literary or cultural value, both in the figures it lauds and in the skill of the bard in reciting a genealogy which everyone else can recall from memory with no compositional skill. The inference here is that Gaelic material has no relevance to the lowland Scots of the community and that the bard evidences no proficiency in the craft of memory because his recitation is mere recall rather than imaginative composition. This sets the bard of the bird fable in direct opposition to the feat of memoria performed by the Howlat’s narrator in the presentation of the Douglas arms, which, according to the poem, imagines genealogy in stylistically more sophisticated ways.

This representation is not unique in Holland, and many lowland texts – both in ‘inglis’ and in Latin – engage in the denigration of highland culture. Drawing on stereotypes of savagery, cruelty and hostility, writers such as Fordun – and subsequently Bower – distinguish between ‘the manners and customs of the Scots’, which ‘vary with the diversity of their speech’ (Chron. Fordun 42). Jenny Wormald has suggested that by the end of the fifteenth century, Gaelic was thought of as a ‘second-class language’.70Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland, 1470–1625 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), p. 61. Another possibility is that lowland Inglis texts such as the Howlat might be understood as asserting this distinction as a way of denigrating their literary opposition.71Personal correspondence with Elizabeth Elliott. This has important implications for thinking the nation, by drawing attention to what is included and excluded by any given text’s concept of what Scotland was. In her examination of Dunbar’s early sixteenth-century The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, Elizabeth Elliott demonstrates that ‘the work of thinking nation and national identity is scaffolded by the processes of collaboration, circulation and reception that make thinking nation part of the structure of everyday life’.72Elizabeth Elliott, ‘Cognitive Ecology and the Idea of Nation in Late-Medieval Scotland: The Flyting of William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy’, in Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture, ed. by Miranda Anderson and Michael Wheeler (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. 86–98 (98). Elliott argues that in the literary model of flyting, which might be understood as a collaborative literary form, the debate over cultural authenticity between Dunbar’s lowland ‘inglis’ and Kennedy’s ‘Iersche’ allows for cohesive and dynamic understandings of a Scottish identity that encompasses diverse voices and cultures. The productive effects of flyting, however, rely precisely upon opportunities for exchange that arise from trading insults. In the Howlat, however, these opportunities are thwarted by the rook’s silencing by the ‘ravyn’ and his victimisation by the ‘tuchet’ and the ‘gukkit golk’, who ‘fylit him fra the fortope to the fut’ (Howl. 821–4). The ‘barde’, who is ‘smaddit lyke a smaik smorit in a smedy’, is forced to flee the hall in search of ‘watter to wesche him’ (Howl. 825–7), to the amusement of the ‘lordis’ who ‘leuch apon loft’ that ‘the barde was so bet’ (Howl. 828–9). The prospect of flyting is denied in Holland’s Howlat and the chivalric focus of both the bird fable and the heraldic core of the Douglas narrative endeavours to fashion a Scottish identity that sees both English and Gaelic figures as antagonists of the realm. Holland’s Howlat makes the case for Scottishness as it is exemplified by chivalric honour, filtered through the lens of the memory of James Douglas’s service to the Bruce and subsequent generations’ loyalty to the crown. In its military stance, the poem suggests that Scotland is continually threatened by the presence of the Anglo-Scottish border that requires the military might of such a powerful family.

Gray’s Scalacronica, Holland’s Howlat and Wyntoun’s Chronicle all engage in reshaping chivalric identity as a memoria gentis, intimately connecting family and kingdom in mutually beneficial bonds. Holland’s text demonstrates how the signification of the border could bolster a very specific sense of Scottishness that was at once lowland and magnatial, where Gray and Wyntoun express anxieties about cross-border contacts, both across a formal border and with regard to the linguistic and cultural borders of the Scottish kingdom. Robert Bevan sees the border as ‘sometimes porous, sometimes solid, but always flexing’, simultaneously captor and liberator.73Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion, 2006), p. 141. Responses to the border depend, to a large extent, on the proximity of the writer to that border, but ideological borders assume a literary potency in memorialising both Anglo-Scottish relations and the internal politics of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Scotland. All three texts discussed in this chapter demonstrate this flexibility of imagination in reshaping the meaning of ideological and physical borderlands. To do so, they engage in memory-as-practice and underline how integral memory is to the very essence of individual and collective identity.