The Composition and Revision of Sir Gilbert Hay’s Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour

Abstract

The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour (BKA) survives in two witnesses: London, British Library, Additional MS 40732 and Edinburgh, National Records of Scotland, MS GD 112/71/9. In both, the poem is acephalous. We thus lack the poem’s prologue and are forced to rely on its enigmatic final lines (19311-69) for information about its composition. These final lines are not composed by the poem’s author, nor simply by a scribe. They are instead written by a redactor, who claims to have rewritten, and in the process ‘mendit’, the ‘faltis’ of the ‘noble buike’ (l. 19343). He reports that he began this task in May of 1499 and completed it in August of that year (ll. 19354-55). He also provides details of the poem’s genesis, informing us that it was ‘translaittit’ ‘out of the Frensche leid’ ‘At þe instance off Lord Erskein, be Schir Gilbert þe Hay’ (19319-20, 19334). This article submits the BKA’s final enigmatic lines to further scrutiny. It provides more extensive details concerning the poem’s composition - its author and patrons - and proposes new theories about the poem’s subsequent stages of revision, firstly by its author, then by its 1499 redactor, and finally by its sixteenth-century copyists. The composition contexts and manuscript history of Sir Gilbert Hay’s Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour have much to teach us about book production processes and the compositorial and editorial role of both authors and scribes in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scotland.