Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1985, Blaðsíða 79
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cal indications that the latter is substantially older than the prose
addition. Roy. 17 D. xx may, I think, reasonably be regarded as a
transcript of Wyntoun from the turn of the fifteenth century to which
the prose chronicle was added some thirty years later.
The date of the Asloan manuscript can also be approximately deter-
mined with the help of internal evidence from the text of the Chronicle
of Scotland in a Part- here called “The Scottis originale.” The scribe,
John Asloan, was a notary public in Edinburgh; his career can be
traced from the last decade of the fifteenth century to the year 1530.52
In the text of the chronicle there are a number of references to the
present king of Scotland, and in the first of these Asloan adds the
name of King James V, where the other two manuscripts have no such
specification of the king’s identity: Asloan reads “Till oure souerane
lord lames t>e fyft f>at now is,” Dalhousie “to our Soverane Lord that
now is” and Royal “to oure Sovirane Lord }>at now is king.”53 The
addition in the Asloan copy provides a terminus a quo for the date of
writing, for James V ascended the throne in 1513: the Asloan manu-
script can therefore be assigned to the later part of the scribe’s career,
certainly after 1513 and probably before his disappearance from the
records in 1530. This places it in approximately the same period as the
addition to MS Roy. 17 D. xx discussed above.
From a comparison of the three extant copies of the Chronicle of
Scotland in a Part it is at once apparent that the Asloan and Royal
texts share certain readings over against the readings of the Dalhousie
manuscript, but that the latter frequently - and perhaps even more
frequently - agrees with Royal over against Asloan. Examples of both
types of variant may be seen at the beginning of the piece:54
52 Cf. C. C. van Buuren-Veenenbos, “John Asloan, an Edinburgh Scribe,” English
Studies 47 (1966), 365-72. For a description of the Asloan manuscript, which is now in
the National Library of Scotland (Acc. 4233), see Gisela Gudat-Figge, Catalogue of
Manuscripts containing Middle English Romances, Miinchener Universitåts-Schriften...
Texte und Untersuchungen zur englischen Philologie 4 (Miinchen, 1976), pp. 307-10,
no. 99.
53 Craigie, The Asloan Manuscript, I, 189/12-12; BM III, 38/25; Skene,Chronicles of
the Picts, p. 381/29-30. Other examples (without mention of king’s name) at Craigie, I,
192/26-27, 193/22-23 and corresponding passages in Dalhousie and Royal.
54 Quoted from the printed editions of Asloan and Royal and from my own transcript
of Dalhousie (here without indication of extension of abbreviations); some modifica-
tions of the punctuation and capitalization have been introduced. Cf. The Asloan Manu-
script, I, 185/2-9; Chronicles of the Picts, p. 378/3-8; BM III, 35/2-6.