Chronicle Propaganda in Fourteenth-Century Scotland: Robert the Steward, John of Fordun and the 'Anonymous Chronicle'

Abstract

The late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries were a period of notable literary activity in the Scottish kingdom. The second half of the fourteenth century saw the production of both John of Fordun's major chronicle, Chronica Gentis Scotorum, and John Barbour's great verse epic, The Bruce. These were followed in the first decades of the fifteenth century by Andrew Wyntoun's rhyming Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland. Then in the 1440s there was another substantial addition to the burgeoning chronicle tradition with the appearance of Walter Bower's Scotichronicon, a reworked, expanded and amended version of Fordun's earlier Chronica.