A National Treasure? The Scotichronicon of Walter Bower

Abstract

Walter Bower was born at Haddington in 1385. The church at Hadding ton had close links with the cathedral monastery at St Andrews which was staffed by Augustinian canons, and Bower was trained there as a young man under Prior James Bisset, whom he came to regard as a model superior for a community of religious. In particular, the young canons were encouraged to acquire higher learning in the disciplines of Canon Law and Theology; and it was in association with this vibrant intellectual community that the bishop of St Andrews founded the first university in Scotland in 1410. Bower became a student there in his later twenties and was among the earliest graduates, certainly in Canon Law and possibly also in Theology. Thus equipped, he was himself promoted in 1417, at the age of thirty-two, to be abbot of the Augustinian community on the island of Inchcolm (in the Firth of Forth, off the Fife coast near Aberdour). He remained at Inchcolm for over thirty years. The appointment brought with it the status of a magnate in Scottish society, politics and government. Quite apart from his primary duties as a religious superior and churchman, he was active in the royal council of James I between 1424 and 1437, and was employed as an administrator in the collection of taxes and as a judge in cases brought before Parliament. After the murder of the king in 1437, however, things were more disturbed, as a consequence of the ambitious rivalries of political groups during the subsequent minority of the young James II; Bower did not withdraw entirely from the political scene, but he clearly spent much more time back at Inchcolm from about 1440 onwards, when he half-unwillingly devoted himself to composing the most elaborate work of literature to survive from pre Reformation Scotland, the Scotichronicon. He spent ten years revising it up to the time of his death in 1449. In sum, we are on the one hand considering the literary achievement of a man who was the product of the traditional university system of medieval Europe as it was transferred to Scotland at St Andrews; and on the other hand we are