Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1985, Síða 76

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it was consulted by the cleric or clerics who drafted the Orkney
Genealogy. It would therefore be quite possible for a copy of the
Historia to have been carried to the mainland by a member of the
Sinclair household; and there would have been even more reason for
this family to preserve a copy of the Genealogy, which - as Barbara E.
Crawford has pointed out - was “the only authenticated testimony of
their noble lineage.”43 Such a process of transmission from Orkney to
the Scottish mainland is in faet not just a matter of general probability;
in the case of the Genealogy it is strongly indicated by the existence of
a translation “out of Latin into Scottis” made in the middle of the
sixteenth century by “Deine Thomas Gwld, Munk of Newbothill” at
the behest of Sir William Sinclair, laird of Roslin and direct descen-
dant of the last Orcadian earl. This Scots version evidently represents
a slightly different redaction of the Genealogy from that found in the
Dalhousie manuscript.44 It is preserved as an addition to National
Library of Scotland MS T(emporary) D(eposit) 209, a volume which
belonged to the lairds of Roslin; the principal contents are a series of
Middle Scots prose translations from French sources, originally com-
missioned in 1456 by Earl William Sinclair from Sir Gilbert of the
Haye, a gentleman who had formerly served as chamberlain to the
king of France.45 As I shall demonstrate, the scribe of the Dalhousie
and Haye manuscripts was one and the same person. Munch was
therefore right in assuming that the history of the Sinclairs holds the
key to an understanding of the Dalhousie manuscript, but he was
wrong in associating it with the last earl of the Orkneys. This theory is
chronologically impossible, not only on palæographical grounds but
also because of the date of origin of at least two of the Scottish articles
in the manuscript.
43 Crawford, p. 173. For the use of the Historia in the compilation of the Genealogy
see ibid. p. 175.
44 Crawford, pp. 156-57. The translation of the Genealogy was first printed by Barry,
The History of the Orkney Islands, pp. 404-14, Appendix no. II, and later reproduced
(parallel with the Latin text of the Dalhousie manuscript) in BM III, 61-85.
45 For this manuscript see further section IV below. Haye’s translations are printed in
J. H. Stevenson (ed.), Gilbert of the Haye’s Prose Manuscript, STS ser. I, 44 & 62 (1901-
14).