Barbour’s ‘Brus’: epic of Bannockburn, chivalry and freedom

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss John Barbour’s epic poem The Brus, or Bruce, which he wrote c1375. The Brus is the earliest surviving poem in Older Scots and the only source of many of the stories of King Robert I of Scotland (1274-1329), popularly known as Robert the Bruce, and his victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314. In almost 14,000 lines of rhyming couplets, Barbour distilled the aspects of the Bruce’s history most relevant for his own time under Robert II (1316-1390), the Bruce’s grandson and the first of the Stewart kings, when the mood was for a new war against England after decades of military disasters. Barbour’s battle scenes are meant to stir in the name of freedom, and the effect of the whole is to assert Scotland as the rightful equal of any power in Europe.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Professor Rhiannon Purdie No other episodes
  Professor of English and Older Scots at the University of St Andrews
• Professor Steve Boardman No other episodes
  Professor of Medieval Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh
• Professor Michael Brown 2 episodes
  Professor of Scottish History at the University of St Andrews

Reading list

• The Bruce
  John Barbour (ed. A.A.M. Duncan) (Canongate Classics, 2007) Google Books →
• Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland
  G.W.S. Barrow (Edinburgh University Press, 1988) Google Books →
• The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III
  Stephen Boardman (Tuckwell Press, 1996) Google Books →
• Barbour's Bruce and its Cultural Contexts: Politics, Chivalry and Literature in Late Medieval Scotland
  Steve Boardman and Susan Foran (eds.) (D.S. Brewer, 2015) Google Books →
• Disunited Kingdoms: Peoples and Politics in the British Isles, 1280-1460
  Michael Brown (Routledge, 2013) Google Books →
• The Wars of Scotland, 1214-1371
  Michael Brown (Edinburgh University Press, 2004) Google Books →
• The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Vol. 1: From Columba to the Union (until 1707)
  Thomas Owen Clancy and Murray Pittock, Ian Brown and Susan Manning (eds.) (Edinburgh University Press, 2006)
• Scotland's Books: A History of Scottish Literature
  Robert Crawford (Oxford University Press, 2009) Google Books →
• A Companion to British Literature: Vol 1, Medieval Literature, 700-1450
  Robert DeMaria Jr., Heesok Chang and Samantha Zacher (eds.) (John Wiley & Sons, 2014) Google Books →
• The Wars of the Bruces: Scotland, England and Ireland 1306-1328
  Colm McNamee (Tuckwell Press, 2001) Google Books →
• Robert the Bruce, King of the Scots
  Michael Penman (Yale University Press, 2014) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m002dpm8

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002dpm8

Auto-category: 941.1 (History of Scotland)