Dan Embree

This is a very useful collection of Scottish chronicles dating from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.Most are in the Scottish version of English used in the Lowlands, not difficult to read if one is familar with the English of the same period south of the border and a few spelling conventions (such as writing "wh" as "qu" ) One (the Vraye Chronique) is written in French, and another (Nomina Omnium Regum Scottorum) in Latin; both of these are furnished with translations into modern English. The others are The Scotttis Originale, The Chronicle of the Scots, the Yngls Chronicle, the Brevis Chronica, ad the St. Andrews Chronicle. Most of these start with the legendary origins of the Scots in the time when Moses was in Egypt, a Greek prince named Gathelys (various spellings) married an Egyptian princess named Scota, and they and their descendants migrated by way of North Africa and Spain and Ireland to Scotland, arriving before the Britons the Picts, or ,of course, the Romans, Anglo-Saxons. and Normans. These stories become fairly historical by about the 11th century, and focus much of their attention on the Scottish War of Independence and continuing struggles with England from the late 1200s down to the early 1500s. Most of the accounts are intensely patriotic Scottish versions i which the Scots are heroically good and the English unspeakably evil. The Ynglis Chronicle varies only in that it focuses on the English, cataloging the evil deeds of everyone who ever lived in southern Britain (even the ancient Britons in that region were evil, according to this version).The Scottis Chronicle and St. Andrews Chronicle are less intensely biased than the others. THe Brevis Cronica is basically an English version of the Nomina Omnium, so the Latin, an English translation, and variant manuscripts of the Scots versions are printed together to facilitate comparison.… (mere)