Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1985, Qupperneq 86
78
Adv. 35.6.13. These Extracta were written after 1513, for the compiler
alludes to the battie of Flodden as having been fought in his own
lifetime; moreover, they incorporate material from the lives of the
bishops of Dunkeid by Alexander Myln, official of that diocese in the
second decade of the sixteenth century and subsequently abbot of the
Augustinian foundation at Cambuskenneth.71 Since they contain at
least one indisputable reference to the internal tradition of Cambus-
kenneth abbey,72 it seems reasonable to infer that they were compiled
there after Myln’s provision to the abbacy in 1519, and perhaps with
his personal participation. They would thus belong at the earliest to
the 1520s.73
Art. 8 in the Dalhousie manuscript can accordingly be classified as a
copy of a work based on at least one source that was still circulating
well into the sixteenth century. That the composition of that work
should be placed in the late fifteenth rather than the early sixteenth
century is rendered likely by the faet that it was available to Gilbert
Haldane, mentioned above (p. 56) as the owner of a copy of Role-
winck’s Fasciculus, when he annotated his book with passages relating
to Scottish history; Haldane had bought the book on the Continent in
1491 and doubtless made his annotations shortly after returning to
Scotland. Durkan and Ross reproduce one of these annotations, iden-
tifying it as an account of the reign of James I. They are not, however,
aware - and could hardly have suspected - that the wording is virtually
71 W. B. D. D. Turnbull (ed.), Extracta e variis cronicis Scocie, Abbotsford Club 23
(Edinburgh, 1842), introduction p. xiv; the allusion to Flodden appears on p. 180 and
the material borrowed from Myln on pp. 238-41. Cf. Thomas Thomson (ed.), Vitae
Dunkeldensis ecclesiae episcoporum, Bannatyne Club 1, second [corrected and
enlarged] edition by Cosmo Innes (Edinburgh, 1831), pp. 18-24.
72 Turnbull, Extracta, p. 244, referring to the death of James II: “Casus iste de morte
regis, si dici potest, longo ante, ut fertur, preostensa est regi per quendam Johannem
Tempilmane, qui fuit pater domini Willelmi Tempilmane supprioris monasterii de Cam-
buskynneth. Cui dum gregem in montibus Ochillis...” (my italics; the conclusion of the
passage is wanting).
73 For the date of Myln’s provision see Watt, Fasti (as n. 17), p. 125. He left Cambus-
kenneth in or before 1540 to take over the administration of St Andrews priory and
Holyrood (Edinburgh): cf. Robert Kerr Hannay, Rentale Dunkeldense, SHS ser. II, 10
(1915), pp. xv-xvi. Turnbull already suggested that Myln might have been responsible
for the Extracta, but on partly irrelevant grounds: his identification of the hånd in MS
Adv. 35.6.13 with that in MS Adv. 34.5.4 of Myln’s Vitae is certainly erroneous (cf. his
edition of the Extracta, introduction p. xv).