style="font-size:15px;"> We weren all, and broght in thair contree:
Fortune it schupe non othir wayis to be.
King James’s story ends quite well. He hears a lady singing and is entranced by her. This will be his own bride in real life, Joan Beaufort, with whom he eventually returns to Scotland. There he wasn’t a bad king, but became entangled in English wars, as Scottish kings mostly did, and was eventually murdered by his uncle, another occupational hazard of Scottish monarchy. But James shared one thing with the best of his subjects – his enthusiasm for Chaucer and the new developments in English verse. The Scottish renaissance was late and brief, but its flowering was extraordinary; and whatever the country’s political freedom, for literary inspiration its writers looked south.
Gavin Douglas, a member of one of the most powerful Scottish families, and later an eminent churchman and diplomat, was the first person writing in any form of English to translate Virgil’s Aeneid, producing a powerful and gripping version. Robert Henryson, a cleric from Fife, wrote a series of dream poems and witty animal fables, and also a coda to Chaucer, the Testament of Cresseid. His great virtue is down-to-earth directness. In his tale of the country mouse and the town mouse, taken from Aesop, Henryson really makes us feel the distinction between the life of a rural peasant, constantly threatened with starvation, and the snug, smug world of a well-to-do merchant in the town – indeed, his town mouse has been elected as a city burgess, freed from any obligation to pay taxes.
This rurall mous into the wynter tyde
Had hunger, cauld, and tholit grit distres.
The tother mous that in the burgh couth byde,
Was gild brother and made ane fre burges,
Toll-fre alswa but custum mair or les
And fredome had to ga quhairever scho list
Amang the cheis and meill in ark and kist.
The town mouse goes to visit her sister in the country, but is deeply unimpressed with the poor food and humble abode, and persuades her to come to the town, where they feed richly:
with vittell grit plentie,
Baith cheis and butter upon skelfis hie,
Flesche and fische aneuch, baith fresche and salt,
And sekkis full of grotis, meile, and malt.
Efter quhen thay disposit wer to dyne,
Withowtin grace thay wesche and went to meit,
With all coursis that cukis culd devyne,
Muttoun and beif strikin in tailyeis greit.
Ane lordis fair thus couth thay counterfeit
Except ane thing, thay drank the watter cleir
Insteid of wyne bot yit thay maid gude cheir.
All is going swimmingly, until first a steward and then a cat find them. The country mouse falls into a faint, and just escapes being eaten by the cat after being played with. The cat departs, and the town mouse reappears to find her sister:
Out of hir hole scho come and cryit on hie,
‘How, fair sister! Cry peip, quhairever ye be!’
This rurall mous lay flatlingis on the ground
And for the deith scho wes full sair dredand
For till hir hart straik mony wofull stound,
As in ane fever trimbillit fute and hand.
And quhan hir sister in sic ply hir fand,
For verray pietie scho began to greit,
Syne confort hir with wordis hunny sweit.
‘Quhy ly ye thus? Ryse up, my sister deir,
Cum to your meit, this perrell is overpast.’
The uther answerit with a hevie cheir,
‘I may not eit, sa sair I am agast.’
Here, as so often in Henryson, I think you can hear the very voices of the Scottish people in the late 1400s. These and other fables tell us about life as it’s being lived. The town is full of luxuries like cheese and cooked meats, but it’s also a place of danger and rapacity. Henryson looks life squarely in the face: elsewhere he writes about leprosy and the plague. In the end, however, he has a very medieval sensibility: everything has an allegorical meaning, and the purpose of poetry is to point the moral. Here’s part of the moral drawn to the end of the story of the two mice, and it’s a familiar Christian one about the virtues of modesty and moderation. The best life is one of ‘sickerness’ – security, or safety, with only modest possessions:
Blissed be sempill lyfe withoutin dreid,
Blissed be sober feist in quietie.
Quha hes aneuch, of na mair hes he neid
Thocht it be littill into quantatie.
Grit aboundance and blind prosperitie
Oftymes makis ane evill conclusioun.
The sweitest lyfe thairfoir in this cuntrie
Is sickernes with small possessioun.
Aside from Chaucer himself, Robert Henryson seems the most lovable and humane of medieval poets. His slightly later and greater contemporary William Dunbar is a very different kettle of fish. More so than anyone before him, we feel we can get inside his mind, though it’s not always attractive. Probably born south of Edinburgh around 1460, this courtier, priest and ambassador to England and Norway speaks in his own voice, in a way that feels new. He writes, for instance, about having a migraine headache:
My heid did yak yester nicht,
This day to mak that I na micht,
So sair the magryme dois me menyie
Persying my brow as ony ganyie
That scant I luik may on the licht.*
Dunbar wasn’t a particularly nice man. He was always whingeing about money, enjoyed ferocious quarrels, and is the author of a spectacularly racist poem about a black African woman who arrives in Edinburgh by ship. But he has a directness that we rarely find before him. Here, for instance, is his furious address to the merchants of Edinburgh, whom he blames for leaving their city in an embarrassingly dilapidated state. May no one, he asks, go through the principal gates of the town without being assaulted by the stench of rotten fish – haddocks and skate – and the screams of old women and ferocious arguments, descending into mere abuse? Doesn’t this dishonour the town before strangers?
May nane pas throw your principall gaittis
For stink of haddockis and of scattis,
