The Border, England, and the English in Some Older Scots Lyric and Occasional Poems

Abstract

Attitudes to the English expressed by Scottish chroniclers from the late fourteenth to the late sixteenth centuries, and by the authors of historical narrative poems that deal with the formation of national identity and major conflicts between England and Scotland, such as The Wallace and The Bruce, are well documented and often discussed.¹ Similarly, the opposite of this literary manifestation of political tension and enmity, the demonstrable interest in and engagement with English literature among Scottish writers, has been explored extensively by scholars. As Priscilla Bawcutt, Alasdair MacDonald, and others have shown,² the troubled political border between England and Scotland in the late medieval and early modern period did not also form a barrier to the circulation of English manuscripts and printed books in Scotland or hinder the emergence of sophisticated imaginative responses to the works of English writers in those of their Scottish counterparts.³ The major manuscript anthologies of the period, such as Oxford Bodleian Library MS Arch. Seiden B. 24, the Asloan Manuscript, the Bannatyne Manuscript, and the Maitland Folio Manuscript, all contain works of English origin, and there is evidence that prints from Caxton’s press circulated in Scotland at an early date.⁴ Furthermore, some Scottish texts were also known in England, and works by Robert Henryson and the Scottish Observant Friar, William of Touris, for example, were first printed in London.⁵

Occasional verses in manuscripts belonging to the Maitland family show that the family’s interest in Anglo-Scottish affairs and border politics is not reducible to simple nationalist partisanship.