cryis of carlingis and debaittis,
For feusum flyttinis of defame.
Think ye not schame,
Befoir strangeris of all estaittis
That sic dishonour hurt your name?
The dirty, stinking lanes cut out the light from the parish church; the porches in front of the houses make them darker than anywhere else in the world – isn’t it a shame that so few civic improvements have been made?
Your Stinkand Stull that standis dirk
Haldis the lycht fra your parroche kirk.
Your foirstairis makis your housis mirk
Lyk na cuntray bot heir at hame.
Think ye not schame,
Sa litill polesie to work,
In hurt and sclander of your name?
The high cross in the centre of the town should be a place of gold and silk; instead, it’s all crud and milk. The public weighing beam stinks of shellfish, tripe and haggis:
At your Hie Croce quhar gold and silk
Sould be, thair is bot crudis and milk,
And at your Trone bot cokill and wilk,
Pansches, pudingis of Jok and Jame.
Think ye not schame,
Sen as the world sayis that ilk,
In hurt and sclander of your name? …
Dunbar protests that tailors, cobblers and other low craftsmen crowd the streets, defiling them. A notorious passage leading to the main church, the so-called ‘Stinking Style’, means that the merchants are crammed together as in a honeycomb:
Tailyouris, soutteris, and craftis vyll
The fairest of your streitis dois fyll,
And merchantis at the Stinkand Styll
Ar hamperit in ane honycame.
Think ye not schame
That ye have nether witt nor wyll
To win yourselff ane bettir name?
The entire town is a nest of beggars; scoundrels are everywhere, molesting decent people with their cries. Even worse, nothing has been properly provided for the honest poor:
Your burgh of beggeris is ane nest,
To schout thai swentyouris will not rest.
All honest folk they do molest,
Sa piteuslie thai cry and rame.
Think ye not schame,
That for the poore hes nothing drest,
In hurt and sclander of your name?
As to the merchants themselves, who are supposed to be in charge of all this, their profits go up every day and their charitable works are less and less. You can’t get through the streets for the cries of the crooked, the blind and the lame – shame on you.
Your proffeit daylie dois incres,
Your godlie workis, les and les.
Through streittis nane may mak progres
For cry of cruikit, blind, and lame.
Think ye not schame,
That ye sic substance dois posses,
And will not win ane bettir name?
William Dunbar’s great cry of anger against the corrupt and incompetent merchants running Edinburgh concludes with a plea for reform, proper pricing and better management. He was a junior member of the court of King James IV, and one likes to hope that his passionate protests had some effect; at any rate, it’s the most vivid account of the reality of medieval streets in British poetry thus far – we could almost say English poetry, because Dunbar and his colleagues insisted that they wrote in ‘Inglis’, albeit strongly tinged with the special words and accents of contemporary Scotland.
James IV was one of the most impressive kings Scotland had had. He was multilingual, interested in everything from alchemy to shipbuilding, and he presided over a highly cultured court. Earlier, we noted the widespread influence of the old British languages – now broken up into Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Irish and Cornish. The English wars against the Welsh had helped spread the idea that the old British were barbarians. We will see this in Shakespeare later on, and by late Tudor times the wars against the Irish kick-started a strain of intra-British racism which survives today. But even in Dunbar’s Scotland, when King James was trying to pacify the Gaelic-speaking north (Dunbar used ‘Erse’ or Irish as the preferred term), there was a profound and mutually antagonistic cultural divide. In his ‘Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins’ Dunbar imagines Mahoun – the devil – celebrating with Highlanders, the foreign-tongued Irish or Gaels of the north. I could try to translate for you, but it’s hardly worth it. The point is, they are barely human, and clog up even hell:
Than cryd Mahoun for a Heleand padyane.
Syne ran a feynd to feche Makfadyane
Far northwart in a nuke.
Be he the correnoch had done schout
Erschemen so gadderit him abowt,
In Hell grit rowme thay tuke.
Thae tarmegantis, with tag and tatter,
Full lowd in Ersche begowth to clatter
And rowp lyk revin and ruke.
The Devill sa devit wes with thair yell
That in the depest pot of Hell
He smorit thame with smuke.
Scotland, at least, was still deeply divided by language. In another famous poem, Dunbar engaged in what was called a ‘flyting’, a poetic competition of mutual abuse, with the poet Walter Kennedy. The two men would have stood opposite one another, probably at the court of King James, attacking each other and responding ingeniously to the insults; the competition would be judged on the complexity of the extemporised poetry as well as the invigorating level of abuse – almost identical to today’s ‘battle rap’. It’s now thought that Dunbar probably wrote the whole thing himself, although if he did, he gave some very good lines of attack to his enemy, who portrays him as a dwarfish and treacherous fool, without any control over his bowels or bladder. Dunbar attacks Kennedy for writing in Irish; and what’s interesting is that Kennedy came not from the Highlands, but from the Ayrshire coast in the Scottish south-west. The old British languages weren’t yet in full retreat.
William Dunbar could
