Borrowed Feathers: The Spurious Older Scots Ending to Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls in Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden. B. 24

Abstract

ABSTRACT Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden. B. 24 has attracted attention in recent years for the witness it bears to the reception of Chaucer in late medieval Scotland. Its most striking example is the spurious seventy-nine-line ending attached to the Parliament of Fowls, edited afresh for this article. This article teases apart the work of the spurious ending’s author from that of the Selden copyist and investigates how, when, and why this peculiar Scottish rewriting of the end of Chaucer’s Parliament came about. That the spurious ending is indeed a Scottish composition is demonstrated through its linguistic features and sly allusions to two fifteenth-century Scots poems, Henryson’s “The Cock and the Fox” and Richard Holland’s Buke of the Howlat. These, in combination with textual and codicological details explored here, suggest strongly that this ending was written in conscious defiance, rather than ignorance, of Chaucer’s conclusion to the Parliament.