Chapter 3 Reassembling Forgotten History: Bower’s Scotichronicon at Coupar Angus

In the Middle Ages, memory, in the form of recollection, was a ‘task of composition’ rather than simply a means of retention: a creative tool of the mind, providing a basis for active contemplation.1201 Carruthers and Ziolkowski, Medieval Craft, p. 1. This creative aspect of memory – remembrance – points to the fact that memories are not only actively made, but that they are open to being repeatedly remade in myriad contexts.2See discussions in previous chapters. Through a close examination of the Coupar Angus Prologue, this process of historical reconstruction becomes distinctly apparent and increasingly political. I suggest that the memories invoked in Bower’s prologue are deliberately crafted to evoke emotional responses from his readers, with the specific aim of fostering a sense of Scottish solidarity. In this, Bower strategically employs the ars memoria, leveraging its emphasis on emotion as a catalyst for memory, to actively guide and shape his audience’s collective remembrance. Through Bower’s work, then, it is possible to see the intersection of personal cognitive strategies and shared cultural remembrance.

While Mary Carruthers’s work focuses primarily on the trained individual memory, she nevertheless argues that texts ‘are the primary medium of the public memory, the archival scrinia (repository) available to all’ from which ‘an individual stores, ad res or ad verba, the chest of his or her own memory’.3203 Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 189. Carruthers suggests here that the individual memory is often created from a set of pre-existing public memories from which an individual can pick and choose their own set of reminiscences.4204 On the selection of memories for particular purposes see Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories, p. 52. In my consideration of Bower, however, I propose that a different, and complementary, intersection between individual and collective (public) memories needs to be considered; one which not only understands memory as a socially mediated process but also repositions individual memory as a foundational tool in the service of broader communal narratives. Here, the compilation of individual memories contributes to the formation of a collective memory that is meaningful and representative because of its composite nature. In suggesting this approach, I draw on medieval theories of authorship, in which writers drew upon many sources to authenticate their own work. The analogy is not identical, but both the nature of compilation and the appeal to older memories as a legitimating force for the new collective memory being created function in similar ways.5205 See A.J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scolar Press, 1984), pp. 94–103; Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Emily Steiner, ‘Authority’, in Middle English, ed. by Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 142–59. On political symbolism and the use of authority, see Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). In departing from Carruthers’s focus on the individual memory, it is possible to see that collective memoria not only works to recall past events or people but also intersects with practices of commemoration, memorialisation and remembrance. To train this collective memory, Bower’s Coupar Angus prologue demonstrates how writers sought to instruct their audiences to remember certain historical events in precise ways. In this way, Bower – following the medieval mnemonists – appropriates techniques for individual memory training and scales them up to support the training of collective memory. I draw, in part, on Maurice Halbwachs’ argument that ‘one may say that the individual remembers by placing himself in the perspective of the group, but one may also affirm that the memory of the group relies and manifests itself in individual memories’.6206 Halbwachs, Collective Memory, p. 40. The techniques Bower employs in his writing draw heavily on the formal mnemonic preparation for memoria that Carruthers discusses; in doing so, Bower demonstrates an awareness of the uses to which the past can be put as well as the ethical principle in creating memories that are useful. My focus, then, is on how these memorial practices might be used in the writing of history, with implications for how the identities of the individual and her place within the community are cultivated.

In the late 1450s, after Bower’s death, another recension, known as the Liber Pluscardensis, was compiled for the abbot of Dunfermline.10Five manuscripts of the Liber Pluscardensis are extant: Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique MS 7396; Edinburgh, NLS Adv. MS 35.5.2; Glasgow, Mitchell Library MS 308876; Glasgow University Library, MS Gen. 333; and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 8. As with the Coupar Angus recension, this version of Scotichronicon abridges the ‘Great Scotichronicon’ yet adds other material to it.11For a fuller discussion of Liber Pluscardensis and its possible authorship, see Sally Mapstone, ‘The Scotichronicon’s First Readers’, in Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance Scotland: Essays Presented to Donald Watt on the Occasion of the Completion of the Publication of Bower’s Scotichronicon, ed. by Barbara E. Crawford (Edinburgh: Mercat, 1999), pp. 31–55 (esp. pp. 34–5). Most significant is the omission of the entirety of Book 7 of the Scotichronicon, which, Mapstone argues, ‘shows an eschewal of its almost exclusively European content in favour of a Scotland-centred focus’.12Mapstone, ‘Scotichronicon’s First Readers’, p. 39. A further recension, the Extracta e Variis Cronicis Scocie (NLS Adv. MS 35.6.13), compiled after 1522, was based on manuscripts in the tradition of the Coupar Angus version and incorporates additional material from elsewhere, including stories from Hary’s Wallace.13Two further MSS of the Extracta are extant: NLS Adv. MS 35.4.5 and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lyell 39. See Extracta e variis cronicis Scocie, ed. by W.B.D.D. Turnbull, Abbotsford Club (Edinburgh, 1842). For the Extracta’s relation to the Wallace, see also Chron. Bower 6. 241. There is evidence to suggest that Hary had access to, and made use of, the Coupar Angus MS while he was composing the Wallace. The dream-vision in Book 7 of Hary’s poem, in which Wallace is given a sword by St Andrew, echoes a vision that is found in the Coupar Angus MS but not MS C of Scotichronicon. See Chron. Bower 6. 287. A final notable version is a French translation of Liber Pluscardensis made c. 1519 by Bremond Domat for John Stuart, duke of Albany (Paris, Bibliothèque St-Geneviève, MS 936). On the death of James IV at Flodden in 1513, Albany became heir presumptive, while the young James V’s mother, Margaret Tudor, was appointed regent. Margaret forfeited her position when she married Archibald Douglas, sixth earl of Angus, in 1514, and Albany was proclaimed regent. Bryony Coombs has suggested that Albany commissioned a translation of Liber Pluscardensis as ‘an aid to the education of the newly appointed Regent of Scotland’.14Bryony Coombs, ‘The Artistic Patronage of John Stuart, Duke of Albany 1518–19: The “Discovery” of the Artist and Author, Bremond Domat’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 144 (2014), 277–309 (283). Setting out the deeds of Albany’s ancestors, the French translation acted as a kind of briefing document and it enabled Albany to ‘promot[e] his own powerful position as Regent of Scotland to the influential European nobles with which he was frequently in contact’.15Coombs, ‘Artistic Patronage of John Stuart’, 283. Albany’s copy of Liber Pluscardensis, therefore, signals not only his pride in his new position but also a desire to ‘convey to others the integrity and importance of Scotland as a key player on the early 16th century European stage’.16Coombs, ‘Artistic Patronage of John Stuart’, 283. The Paris manuscript also contains an illuminated genealogy of the kings of Scotland, beginning with Gaythelos (named Galahel in the manuscript) and Scota; Coombs describes this as an ‘aide-memoire’ for Albany’s position in which the visual images provide ‘a distinctive and memorable image … to serve as an effective mnemonic’ with which Albany might recall the most important elements of Scottish history.17Coombs, ‘Artistic Patronage of John Stuart’, 287–8. Domat’s French translation for Albany testifies to the perceived authority of the Fordun–Bower historiographical tradition into the early sixteenth century. Each of these versions points to a vibrant practice of engaging with, and reshaping of, Bower’s work throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, either under Bower’s own guidance or distinct from it. This engagement, however, is not so unusual; Sally Mapstone has argued that ‘a recurrent response’ of a ‘substantial number’ of Scotichronicon’s readers was ‘to start rewriting it’ and, as Dauvit Broun has subsequently shown, this participatory historiography can be seen from at least the work of Fordun.18Mapstone, ‘Scotichronicon’s First Readers’, p. 32; Dauvit Broun, ‘Rethinking Medieval Scottish Regnal Historiography in the Light of New Approaches to Texts as Manuscripts’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 83 (2022), 19–47. This demonstrates that responses to regnal history not only resulted in close reproduction of textual exemplars but also reveal a ‘textual flexibility’ that could produce significantly varied versions of material in the Scottish historiographical tradition.19Broun, ‘Rethinking Medieval Scottish Regnal Historiography’, 21. Broun draws significantly on the work of John Dagenais, Matthew Fisher and Daniel Wakelin here. See John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de Buen Amor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Matthew Fisher, Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012); Daniel Wakelin, Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375–1510 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). This dynamic practice was something to which Bower himself was clearly attuned in his reworking of Fordun’s material into Scotichronicon. In the first five books, he diligently identifies where he is copying Fordun and where he is making additions to this work, while at the end of Book 6, Chapter 23, Bower signals a significant change. He writes:

The Coupar Angus recension stands out among revisions of Scotichronicon because it is certain that Bower was involved in its compilation. It is possible to see, therefore, the textual – and historical – reshaping taking place under Bower’s direction. This is quite different from Liber Pluscardensis, which, although a major recension of Scotichronicon, establishes a different approach to reworking historiographical material beyond Bower’s controlling hand. This certainty of Bower’s approval of at least one redaction of the Scotichronicon is also importantly different from a text such as Wyntoun’s Original Chronicle, where, although nine manuscript witnesses are extant, there is no evidence of the role Wyntoun himself played in the construction of any of the three recensions. Bower’s own sense of authority and the value of his history are, then, markedly apparent in the work he produces and in the authority that his version of Scottish history subsequently conveys.

There is no mention in the charters of Coupar Angus abbey of the acquisition of Bower’s text and there are no extant charters for Inchcolm abbey for this period. However, the Coupar Angus MS bears the inscription Liber Monasterii S. Marie de Cupro on a title page dated 1694, indicating that at some point the abbey of Coupar Angus did acquire this copy of the chronicle. In the early eighteenth century, Richard Hay claimed that the manuscript was presented to the abbey at Coupar Angus in 1445 by William, third earl of Orkney and first earl of Caithness (Willielmo Orcadum et Cataniae Comite), although, as Watt notes, this date is possibly a mistake, since William Sinclair did not become earl of Caithness until 1455.20Chron. Bower 9. 193. See also ‘Father Hay’s Introduction to “The Book of Coupar”’, Inchcolm Chrs., pp. 245–8 (246). The Coupar Angus manuscript does have connections to the Sinclairs of Roslin: the opening page of the manuscript (part of which can be seen on the cover of this book) bears the signature ‘W Santclair of Roislin knecht’.21Edinburgh, NLS, Adv. MS 35.1.7, p. 1 (note that this manuscript is listed by numbered pages, not folios). This signature was identified by H.J. Lawlor as that of Sir William Sinclair of Roslin (d. c. 1580–85), the great-grandson of the third earl of Orkney.22H.J. Lawlor, ‘Notes on the Library of the Sinclairs of Rosslyn’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 32 (1898), 90–120 (104). According to Hay, the book was recovered from Coupar Angus by Sir William in 1560. In 1565, William Sinclair also inherited Patrick Russell’s copy of the Coupar Angus recension of Scotichronicon (MS P) as well as a copy of the Extracta (NLS Adv. MS 35.6.13), on the death of his uncle, Henry Sinclair, bishop of Ross. Sir William annotated these texts with information drawn from other copies of the chronicle as well as from later printed histories, such as those by John Mair, Hector Boece and John Bellenden.23See Ryoko Harikae, ‘The Maitland and Sinclair Families: The Chronicles of Scotland and its Early Modern Readers’, Textual Cultures, 7.1 (2012), 97–106 (100). On the Sinclairs as book owners, see also T.A.F. Cherry, ‘The Library of Henry Sinclair, Bishop of Ross, 1560–1565’, Bibliotheck, 4 (1963), 13–24. A list of printed books (but not manuscripts) owned by Henry Sinclair can be found in John Durkan and Anthony Ross, Early Scottish Libraries (Glasgow: J.S. Burns & Sons, 1961), pp. 49–60. As W.F. Skene noted, it is likely that at least five of the extant Fordun manuscripts belonged to the library at Roslin Castle, and a further six (including the Donibristle MS) were, at some point, carefully examined by the Sinclairs.24Skene notes that on the last page of the Donibristle MS, a later hand has written the following: ‘This cronicle is sene oure be Williame Sanclair of Roislin knight and compilyit, augmentit, drawn out of yir cronicles’; Johannis de Fordun, Chronica Gentis Scotorum, Historians of Scotland, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1871), xvi, n.1. Mapstone discusses William Sinclair’s annotations in Scotichronicon MSS: ‘Scotichronicon’s First Readers’, pp. 36–7. Sir William, then, appears to have been something of a Scotichronicon collector and the Sinclairs more broadly had a significant interest in Scottish historiography and literary culture.25Henry Sinclair, second earl of Caithness (and cousin to Henry, bishop of Ross), was the patron of Gavin Douglas. Douglas describes Sinclair as ‘Fader of bukis, protectour to sciens and lair’ in the prologue to the first book of the Eneados; The Eneados: Gavin Douglas’s Translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, ed. by Priscilla Bawcutt with Ian C. Cunningham, 3 vols, STS 5th Ser., 17, 18, 19 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press for the Scottish Text Society, 2020–22), 1 Prol. 85. Alongside the various versions of Fordun and Bower that Sir William inherited from Henry, he also came into possession of his uncle’s copy of Wyntoun’s Original Chronicle (BL MS Lansdowne 197), which bears the signatures of both Henry and William on the upper margin of folio 3.26Amours notes that this is ‘a considerably abridged version of the same class as the Royal MS’ of Wyntoun’s Chronicle; Chron. Wyntoun 1. lxvi–lxvii. .

Each of these witnesses and redactions points to prolonged engagement with the Fordun–Bower narrative of Scottish history; additionally, the various redactions of this historiography – including Bower’s continuation of Fordun and Fordun’s own process of compilation – are related to the craft of memory in important ways. Albert C. Baugh connects memory-as-practice to the process of redaction: ‘while following his source closely in plot and in the sequence of episodes that makes up that plot, [the poet] succeeds in fashioning his materials into something new and fresh’.27Baugh, ‘Convention and Individuality in Middle English Romance’, p. 139. While Baugh is referring to medieval romance, his sense of the role of the redaction in demonstrating an agile memory is equally applicable to historiography. It is the introduction to the Coupar Angus recension that I am most interested in for the purposes of this chapter, not only because this inflection is distinctively shaped by Bower’s portrayal of English hostility towards the Scots, but also because in this prologue it is possible to see this process of redaction as a craft of memory most clearly as an ideological project for Bower.

The unique prologue to the Coupar Angus MS of Bower’s Scotichronicon immediately confronts its readers with an absence of written historical memory. Bower narrates how

This annihilation suggests a process of organised forgetting that is being forced on the Scots and, by extension, on their sense of identity through English acts of violence and erasure. As the Czech historian Milan Hübl reportedly told the novelist Milan Kundera, the first step in ‘liquidat[ing] a people’ is to ‘take away’ memory:

Yet, as much as Fordun is inspired and on fire, his ‘laborious studies’ (Chron. Bower 9. 13) are informed by a methodical working-through of the sources available to him so that the ‘new’ material he collects is stored properly in the repository of historiographical memory. In Bower’s threefold narrative of Fordun’s endeavours – collecting the material, rearranging it and then writing a new history – Bower shows his predecessor compiling his Chronica Gentis Scotorum according to the standard model of the medieval theory of imagination, in which sense perception (the material) was transferred to the cell of the brain responsible for logic, or reason (Fordun’s ordering), which was then committed to memory (Fordun’s production of written history).31See Alastair Minnis, ‘Medieval Imagination and Memory’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 2: The Middle Ages, ed. by Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 239–74. Accordingly, Fordun’s reassembled history is not to be seen only as a work motivated by a historical perspective that Bower intimates is nationalist to some degree; it is to be viewed also as an accurate recollection of the history that has been destroyed, despite the fluid historiographical tradition in which Bower sets both Fordun and himself. It is at this point that Bower turns to metaphors of the monastic-trained memory in order to explain Fordun’s activities not only as a reconstructive process of a physical archive but also as a ‘process’ of collective memory training.

Bower describes Fordun as an ‘industrious bee’ (apis argumentosa) scouring the archives and gathering together historical material ‘like combs, flowing with honey in the book he carried on his person as if in a beehive’ (Chron. Bower 9. 15). It is important that Fordun searches Britain to locate his sources, for it not only authenticates Bower’s account of Edward I removing historical texts from Scotland but also lends a legitimacy to Scottish history through the fact that the English see these texts as important and ‘worthy’ of confiscation. Bower here is at pains to suggest the types of memory and record that Fordun consults, indicating the comprehensiveness of his search in order to write his book. In this way the texts that Fordun searches and copies are consciously a diverse repository of others’ memories or histories – stored within chronicles and other books in order that they can be retrieved at a later date. The text into which Fordun puts his findings – his tabulis (Chron. Bower 9. 14) – becomes a new repository, or memory-store of this type, but his notebook itself also becomes a metaphor for the memories it contains: it is a beehive, abundant and overflowing with the honeycombs of Scottish national history drawn from many sources.32232 Cf. Carruthers’s description of florilegia, which, she argues, are the ‘essential book[s] of memory’ because the genre is ‘understood to be volumes only of extracts […] memorative in both origin and purpose’, providing ‘cues for recollecting material read earlier’; Book of Memory, p. 219. The Latin word for the compartments in which bees store their honey is cellae (cell), and there is a long-standing metaphor in which the placement of images in a trained memory is likened to the beehive.33233 Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 45. This metaphor can be found in Longinus (c. first century CE), Quintilian (c. 35–c. 100) and, possibly, Virgil (70 BCE–19 BCE); moreover, Seneca (c. 4 BCE–65 CE) uses the metaphor of the bee to denote a reader or an author. I have previously discussed that the cella was a metaphor for the memory; see p. 000. Furthermore, this metaphor extended also to the study of books and to the keeping of books in orderly cells in a library, attested to in Richard de Bury’s fourteenth-century Philobiblon.34234 Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 42–5. In fact, de Bury’s description of the book collector as an ‘industrious’ bee ‘constantly making cells of honey’ is remarkably similar to Bower’s recollection of Fordun’s process of assembling notes for his national history.35235 ‘Hi sicut formicae continue congregantes in messem et apes argumentosae fabricantes iugiter cellas mellis’ (these, like ants, are continually gathering in the harvest, and the industrious bees are continually making hives of honey’) cap. 8, 136: Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, ed. and trans. by E.C. Thomas (London: Kegan Paul, 1888), p. 76. Cf. Bower: ‘tamquam in alveario, inventa, quasi mellifluos favos accurate congessit’: Chron. Bower 9. 14. The structure of the beehive, with its compartments for storage, is distinctly architectural and, therefore, denotes the ways in which architecture was used as a common metaphor for the trained memory, the cell calling to mind images of the storeroom or the treasure house, or the oratory in which Fordun and Bower might have composed their chronicles. In this description, then, Bower adopts a typical image of both memory and scholarship, again recalling a physical structure that houses both memory and history. Like a physical monument, the textual space of historical narrative becomes a place where memories can be stored; mapped onto the space of the page, these recollections take on precise meanings, ideally understood by, accessible to, and retrievable by all. In this way memory, as embodied within the book, is not only abstract and past, but also tangible and present.

Architectural structures do not always need to function allegorically, however; while Bower’s Coupar Angus prologue participates in the metaphorical use of architecture in mnemonic practices, the text also points to the destruction of books as physical artefacts. The books that Bower’s Edward destroys are important both for what they contain – the memory of Scotland’s past – and for what they symbolise: the material culture from which memory takes its meaning and through which it is secured. In his discussion of the status of architecture during times of conflict, Robert Bevan acknowledges that the destruction of the built environment is an ‘inevitable part of conducting hostilities’, not only in general destruction that results from conflict but also in a deliberate ‘war against architecture’ where the ‘destruction of cultural artefacts of an enemy people or nation’ becomes ‘a means of dominating, terrorizing, dividing or eradicating it altogether’.36236 Bevan, Destruction of Memory, pp. 7–8. Viewed in this way, the Scottish histories that Edward seeks to erase represent a textual architecture of memory, and Bower’s analogy draws on an understanding that collective memory can be located outwith the mind. Moreover, books were stored in buildings that were deliberately targeted by Edward I; as a direct consequence, the architectural structure of the memory becomes linked with the concrete reality of the library, and both become strategic targets for destruction.37237 As David McRoberts argues, that ‘when monastic buildings were sacked […] it was likely that books were destroyed even if they were not targeted specifically’; ‘Material Destruction Caused by the Scottish Reformation’, in Essays on the Scottish Reformation, 1513–1625, ed. by David McRoberts (Glasgow: J.S. Burns & Sons, 1962), pp. 415–62 (433). Scotland’s history and the memory of its own nationhood are, therefore, located in the textual space of written memoria that is invested with a discursive function of remembrance comparable to the built environment that the English sought to destroy.

A similar incident is highlighted by the late fourteenth-century Anonimalle chronicler, who records that, during the 1381 rebellion in England, the rebels ‘burned registers and chancery rolls’.38238 ‘mistrent en feu toutz les livers des registres et rolles de remembrauncez de la chauncellerir illeoqes trovez’: The Anonimalle Chronicle; cited in Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 55. By way of explanation, Thomas Walsingham notes in his early fifteenth-century Chronicon Angliae the rebels’ determination that ‘court rolls and muniments should be burned so that, the memory of old customs having been rubbed out, their lords would be unable to vindicate their rights over them’.39239 ‘statuerunt omnes curiarum rotulos et munimenta veteran dare flammis, ut, obsolete antiquarum rerum memoria, nullum jus omnino ipsorum domini in eos in posterum vendicare valerent’: Chronicon Angliae, ab anno domini 1328 usque ad annum 1388, auctore monacho quodam sancti albani, ed. by Edward Maunde Thompson, Rolls Series 64 (London, 1874); p. 287; translation from Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text, p. 55. Walsingham and the Anonimalle chronicler both imply here that there existed a recognition that written memory could be deliberately targeted in the hope that what it signified might be destroyed and ultimately forgotten. In Writing and Rebellion, however, Steven Justice argues that the rebels’ limited familiarity with documentary culture made them determined to ‘make it theirs’: that they sought to control the way in which these texts could be used rather than destroying them completely.40240 Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 35. Whether the rebels destroyed or appropriated the documents that came into their possession, one thing is clear: books, like the built environment, were understood both symbolically and concretely.

In Bower’s depiction of Edward I’s intervention in the Great Cause in the Coupar Angus prologue, the reader is presented with both of these actions, and it generates an image of Edward as one who, ‘on the pretext […] of finding out which of [Bruce or Balliol] could claim fuller right to the kingdom’ of Scotland, systematically appropriated and destroyed [abstulit et delevit] the written memory of Scotland’s past in an effort to seize ‘the guardianship of the same kingdom for himself’ (Chron. Bower 9. 11, 13; my emphasis). If, as Justice maintains, there was a ‘precise understanding of the forms and procedures of the document and the archive’ among both the educated elite and the broader populace in the later Middle Ages, then Bower (and Bower’s Edward) demonstrates a recognition that both memory and the written document are biddable or subject to the process of imagination.41241 Justice, Writing and Rebellion, p. 48. In relation to documentary culture, documents are usually defined as charters, writs and other legal documents, and the emphasis is on brevity and citability. See Emily Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. p. 4. For the purposes of my discussion here I propose that written public records (in which I include chronicles) should be considered as documentary. This textual consciousness allows Bower to expose Edward’s literate mentality; at the same time, the narrative also shows Bower’s own awareness of the malleability of the written document by writing his own version of Edward acting as a wolf in sheep’s clothing (sub ovili; Chron. Bower 9. 14) and Fordun’s efforts of rewriting the Scottish history that has been lost (ad recolligendum deperditas; Chron. Bower 9. 23). Bower (and Bower’s Edward) also demonstrates a clear understanding of the idea that controlling the past enabled the direction of the future. Bower’s sense of loss here not only marks a perceived tragedy for public memory in Scotland but also, conversely, prompts the creation of history; for, without this confiscation of the ‘old and ancient’ chronicles, Bower suggests that Fordun would not have been ‘inspired and on fire with patriotic zeal’ and, therefore, would not have begun the history that precedes and enables Bower’s own textual production.

The remembrance of Edward I’s attempted annihilation of Scotland’s history in the Coupar Angus prologue is, however, problematised by the fact that there is no evidence to suggest that Edward actually did have Scottish chronicles burned.42242 On Edward I’s use of historical documents see E.J. Cowan, ‘Identity, Freedom and the Declaration of Arbroath’, in Image and Identity: The Making and Re-making of Scotland through the Ages, ed. by Dauvit Broun, R.J. Finlay and Michael Lynch (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1998), pp. 38–68. D.E.R. Watt points out that, although ‘some of the Scottish royal archives were certainly taken south to England where some of them remained until the twentieth century’, in fact, ‘most of Edward’s historical investigations’ during the overlordship debate put before the pope ‘were confined to chronicles and records kept in England’.43243 D.E.R. Watt, Guide to the National Archives of Scotland (Edinburgh: Scottish Record Office, 1996), pp. ix–x; Chron. Bower 9. 18. n. l. 25–7; See also E.L.G. Stones and G.G. Simpson (eds), Edward I and the Throne of Scotland, 1290–1295: An Edition of the Record Sources for the Great Cause, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), i. 137–62. Thus the reader of the Coupar Angus Scotichronicon is confronted, not necessarily with what might have been lost and subject to reconstruction, but with events that might never have occurred. The preface thus presents the reader with an imagined history, in the sense that it is not factually accurate. While there is no evidence that Edward did burn chronicles, Bower relies on the possibility of it having occurred, recalling and reminding his readers of those aspects of Scottish culture that Edward did strategically destroy when monastic houses and other buildings were sacked and razed.

The abbey at Coupar Angus is a particularly apt example. In February 1305, its abbot sent a petition to Edward I’s parliament seeking compensation for the burning of the abbey’s granges and other damages.44244 ‘Ad petitionem Abbatis de Conventus de Coupre petentium remedium de dampnis quæ sustinuerunt per combustionem grangiarum et aliarum domorum suarum et per aliam hujusmodi destructionem post pacem reformatam’: Records of the Parliament holden at Westminster 28 Feb., 33 Edw. I (1305), ed. by F.W. Maitland, Rolls Series 98 (London, 1893), p. 203 (no. 355). While this petition is centred on recompense for the economic damage suffered by the monastery, English acts of aggression could also be seen as a deliberate attempt to attack the Scots’ sense of identity that was manifested in, or through, their buildings, some of which would have contained written documents.45245 Melrose, the mother house of Coupar Angus, was also subject to English aggression, being looted by the English army in 1322 and burned on the orders of Richard II in 1385. See Ranald Nicolson, Scotland: The Later Middle Ages, Edinburgh History of Scotland, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Mercat, 1974; repr. 1997), pp. 104, 197. The implication here is that the English did not only seek to destroy the Scots’ sense of identity in destroying the built (or written) environment; their acts of sabotage also allowed them to give the appearance of winning a war even if there was no evidence to support this. The burning of Scottish property clearly occupied a strong place in the memory of the monastic community at Coupar Angus, and possibly at other monasteries as well. Gwilym Dodd notes the ‘predominance of Scottish religious houses’ among the supplications to the English parliaments, which indicates that the Coupar Angus petition was not exceptional.46246 Gwilym Dodd, ‘Sovereignty, Diplomacy and Petitioning: Scotland and the English Parliament in the First Half of the Fourteenth Century’, in England and Scotland in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 172–95 (185). At the same time, the petition provides a local example of English hostility and Scottish reaction to it. It is possible that Bower used the fourteenth-century events at Coupar Angus to inflect the preface of the Coupar Angus Scotichronicon with concerns with which his immediate audience there could identify. Of course, the notion of maligning enemy nations and individuals is not unique to this particular version of Scotichronicon – it occurs repeatedly elsewhere – but this portrait of Edward’s annihilation of Scotland’s memory that leads to the rewriting of memory-as-history by Fordun and Bower is especially potent in a recension of the chronicle that emphasises English aggression. In his discussion of the Middle English prose Brut, Matthew Fisher notes that many manuscripts of the text ‘exhibit moments of unique local interest, revisions or emendations of facts, and substantive interpolations, additions, or expansions to make partisan political points’. This, Fisher contends, is unsurprising, given that ‘history writing invites participation, and encourages sophisticated readers to go beyond simply reading the text at hand’.47Fisher, Scribal Authorship, p. 188. In one way, the Coupar Angus prologue captures this local interest; at the same time, Edward’s destruction of the Scottish archive is broader in scope and assumes a political significance. Bower implies that it is not just written history that is destroyed by Edward, but also the markers of nationhood embedded in these memories-as-histories, and it is these that need to be recovered. In removing the Scots’ access to their own history – either by confiscation or by destruction – Edward I aimed in part to erase that aspect of Scottish identity associated with the public memory of written historical narrative. By ‘reassembling what had been lost’ (Chron. Bower 9. 13),48248 ‘Ad recolligendum deperditas’ (Chron. Bower 9. 12). Fordun and Bower, along with other Scottish writers engaged in writing ‘histories’ of Scotland, aimed to restore that sense of identity through the memory of the written document, even if that meant deliberately presenting alternative facts.

There is a perceived, yet vulnerable, permanence to written history, as there is with the built environment, suggesting that the recording of shared experience allows that collective memory to be preserved and re-enacted in subsequent writings and for later audiences. In this way both architecture and the written document provide space with meaning through their embodiment of ideologies, memories and identities.49249 See Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka (eds), Medieval Practices of Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), esp. Jody Enders, ‘Dramatic Memories and Tortured Spaces in the Mistere de la Sainte Hostie’, pp. 199–222; Daniel Lord Smail, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late-medieval Marseille (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 43–57, 195–203; Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. and trans. by Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Bower here presents his readers with multiple ways of remembering and forgetting, and himself seeks to remember what had previously been recorded; and at the same time, he highlights Fordun’s own recreation of historical narrative and the synthesising of the two accounts in Scotichronicon. Yet the recollection of the history that had been lost cannot possibly be remembered in the same way, subject as it is to the imposition of the trauma inflicted by its destruction and manipulation at the hands of the English monarch. The Coupar Angus prologue thus articulates an understanding of the precarity of both architecture and textual production, which are subject to targeted destruction as a strategy of war. Bower juxtaposes the ‘ferocious torturer’ (truculentus tortor), Edward, with the violence inflicted by him both on Scottish texts, which are condemned to oblivion through burning, and on the Scottish people and country (plebes atque patrie) who endure plagues and afflictions (plagas et pressuras) (Chron. Bower 9. 12–14). Bower here explicitly suggests that the violence with which Scotland, its people and its cultural productions are treated becomes physically inscribed (or incised) on the memory; they become wounds that cannot be silenced or even fully understood.

Cathy Caruth proposes that trauma acts as a ‘wound’ through which voices become audible, and, as I have argued, it is the destruction of Scottish textual memories that allows this (re)creation and audibility by Fordun and Bower.50250 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 2. It is almost as if Bower indicates that reliving or remembering the traumatic experience of the previous century gives Fordun and himself a legitimate voice for their history. Bower’s remembrance of the late thirteenth-century evisceration of Scottish history from the body of Scotland’s cultural production is a belated reliving of this imagined act of English aggression, and this event is registered as traumatic because, although the act of English atrocity is caught in historical time, the trauma that is stored, collated and recalled becomes what Caruth describes as a ‘narrative of a belated experience’. 51251 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 7. It is this narrative that is reimagined as Scottish history precisely because that history is framed by Bower as a reconstruction necessitated by the traumatic ways in which it came to be forgotten. As Bower would have it, in the prefaces to both the Scotichronicon and the Coupar Angus recension, his history serves the ‘comfort of the king and the kingdom’ as well as being ‘a warning for the future and for the edification of readers’ (Chron. Bower 9. 17). Comfort here carries not only the sense of consolation, but also of providing joy and encouragement to his audience; this brings the Coupar Angus prologue back in line with the preface to MS C and Bower’s initial rationale for compiling his history.52252 DOST, comfort, n; solace, n. Bower’s decision to write Scotichronicon, then, is not only a way of consoling James II and the Scots but is also a way of promoting the feelings of patrius zelus through the recollection of Scotland’s ‘lost’ history.

In reassembling ‘what had been lost’, Scotichronicon, in its various recensions, is a self-conscious act of memory. At the same time, the work is also a process of creation as representation. This is principally evident in the Coupar Angus introduction, as it is in texts such as Hary’s Wallace (discussed in the next chapter), and for historical (or pseudo-historical) writing as a whole, for it highlights the very use of representations of the past and their negotiable varieties of accuracy. Bower and Hary present their audiences with what can be thought of as poetic memory: a commemorative textual monument that situates itself in cultural memory, which is not about giving testimony of past events as accurately as possible, but about making meaningful statements about the past in a given cultural context of the present.53253 For more on cultural memory, see Peter Burke, ‘History as Social Memory’, in Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, ed. by T. Butler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 97–113. Poetic memory thus relies on a feeling of accuracy and authenticity that appeals to a collective audience’s ideas about what the past should be. These problematic national memories are consciously and continually being shaped, and this reimagining allows national struggle to be read as an effort shared by the community. In the Coupar Angus prologue, this is exemplified by Bower’s image of the king and kingdom, which brings the monarch and his people together in a mutual expression of suffering that affects the whole of Scotland. This is reinforced by the narrative of Fordun and Bower working towards the same goal of reassembling Scottish history for national posterity, yet working more than half a century apart. Moreover, Bower signals that the Coupar Angus copy of Scotichronicon represents an exceptional version of the work; he discloses having shortened ‘various events and notable arguments, digressions and exempla clearly serving different purposes’ (Chron. Bower 9. 15). Thus, the Coupar Angus readers’ understanding of the work is fashioned by what Bower has chosen to include and exclude, by what to emphasise and the purpose of that specific manuscript. This not only connects members of a community within a specific historical moment, but also brings together the past and the present in the way that I argued genealogy also functions in Bower’s Scotichronicon. The perceived threat to the Scottish historical record – and implicitly to the national memory and identity documented by that record – underlies the repeated calls to remembrance in Bower’s Scotichronicon.

The anxiety about the preservation of memory that is central to Bower’s historiographical project indicates that memory is not merely about retrieving and reassembling the past; it is also about actively resisting the erasure of national consciousness and historical continuity. Bower’s emphasis on the emotional resonance of memory signals a deeper concern: the fragility of collective memory in the face of time and political upheaval. In the next chapter, I examine how this anxiety is further echoed in Hary’s Wallace, where the urgency to memorialise represents a form of resistance as well as preservation. Where Bower has underscored the precariousness of memory, Hary draws attention to the ways in which historical narrative becomes a battleground for identity, where the act of remembering is as much about safeguarding the present as it is about reconstructing the past.