Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1985, Side 84
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in which to place the Chronicle of Scotland in a Part, the text may be
supposed to have been written in Latin c. 1495 (i.e. after the renewal
of the ‘Auld Alliance’ to which it refers) and to have been translated
into Scots by the turn of the century.
The evidence of art. 4 thus places the Dalhousie manuscript around
the year 1500. An examination of art. 8, though attended with con-
siderable difficulties because of the lack of adequate editions of the
relevant materials, seems to support such a dating. As was said earlier,
this article is a Latin version of a text in Scots found in Asloan’s
miscellany and in manuscripts of Wyntoun. The Asloan copy,64 which
carries the rubric “Heir begynnis ane tractat drawin owt of [>e Scottis
cronikle begynnand in fie thrid age of fie warld,” extends as far as the
year 1513, whereas the Dalhousie version ceases already at 1437; even
shorter is the copy of the vernacular version in National Library of
Scotland MS Adv. 19.2.4, which in its present condition breaks off at
the battie of Otterburn towards the end of the reign of Robert II, but
at one time apparently contained an additional leaf with a continua-
tion as far as this king’s death in 1390.65 A transcript of what Amours
classified as a mixed redaction of Wyntoun’s chronicle66 occupies the
first 434 leaves of Adv. 19.2.4, after which the text now under con-
sideration has been appended on some leaves left over at the end, in a
manner not unlike that in which the Chronicle of Scotland in a Part
was added to the Wyntoun transcript in Roy. 17 D. xx. Indeed, the two
texts have been repeatedly confused, not only in the earliest and the
most recent editions of Wyntoun but also in the British Library’s cata-
logue: in all of these sources the prose piece in the Royal manuscript is
presumed to be the same work as the prose piece in Adv. 19.2.4.67 The
64 Asloan manuscript ff. 124-36; ed. Craigie, I, 245-70.
65 Cf. the text in David Laing (ed.), The Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland. By Androw
of Wyntoun, The Historians of Scotland 2-3 & 9 (Edinburgh, 1872-79), III, 321-38,
which at p. 338/9-26 contains a concluding portion of nearly twenty lines not now found
in the manuscript. The additional text given would correspond to approximately one
normal page of the scribe’s handwriting. Evidently the manuscript, which is much
damaged at the end and at present has 445 leaves in all, once had at least 446 leaves. The
extra leaf must have been lost between the date at which Laing’s transcript was made
and the compilation of the introduction to his edition, for there he describes the manu-
script in its mutilated state (ibid. III, xxiv).
66 Amours (as n. 48), I, lv-lviii.
67 See David Macpherson, preface to 1795 edition of Wyntoun repr. in Laing (as n.