Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1985, Page 83

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Dalhousie; if, on the other hånd, the archaisms appearing in Royal
and Asloan respectively reflect the usage of the author of the
archetype, his linguistic habits must have been formed some consider-
able time before 1500.61 I am inclined to think that the Dalhousie
manuscript is actually the least (and not, as Girvan implied, the most)
modernized representative of a text originally composed in early
Middle Scots; and since there are no marked sixteenth-century char-
acteristics in the language of the Dalhousie transcript, the exemplar
from which the latter was copied cannot have been much later than
1500.
I therefore assume that the Latin original of the chronicle was com-
posed in the last decade of the fifteenth century and very shortly
afterwards translated into the vernacular. It is well known that this
period was one of conflict between Scotland and England: the decade
began with naval clashes between the two sides, and the situation
escalated through the renewal of the Franco-Scottish alliance in March
1492 and the Scottish expedition in support of Perkin Warbeck in
September 1496 to culminate in the so-called ‘Great Raid’ of August
1497. After protracted negotiations, peace was finally restored by the
conclusion in January 1502 of an agreement for the marriage of Mar-
garet, daughter of Henry VII of England, to James IV of Scotland.62
The production of a chauvinistic exposition of the origins of the nation
would have been a natural response not only to the ideological
demands of this particular time but perhaps also to the publication in
the previous decade of Caxton’s Cronicles of Englond (1480 and later
editions), which contained a provocatively anti-Scottish account of the
relations between the two countries.63 If this is the correct framework
61 For the points here considered see Girvan, pp. xlv-xlvi, xlix-1, 1-li.
62 Ranald Nicholson, Scotland: The Later Middle Ages, The Edinburgh History of
Scotland 2 (Edinburgh, 1974), pp. 549-54.
63 I have not been able to pursue this line of enquiry any further for the purposes of
the present paper. For Caxton’s Cronicles as a possible inspiration for the early six-
teenth-century Historia Majoris Britanniae by John Mair, principal of Glasgow Uni-
versity, see Friedrich Brie, Die nationale Literatur Schottlands von den Anfången bis zur
Renaissance (Halle a/S, 1937), p. 321. William Matthews, who apparently is acquainted
only with the Royal text of the Chronicle of Scotland in a Part, is misled by the date of
that manuscript into connecting the chronicle with the reign of Henry VIII: see his
paper on “The Egyptians in Scotland: The Political History of a Myth,” Viator 1 (1970),
289-306, at 303.