Principal Contents

BDL testifies eloquently to the cultural ferment of the southern Highlands, and especially Perthshire, in the late Middle Ages. The manuscript intertwines no less than three different cultures: Gaelic culture, in both its Irish and Scottish dimensions, which supplies the bulk of its material; Scots culture, which provides its orthography and script and some items of verse; and the medieval Latin culture of the pre-Reformation church.

Although BDL is devoted primarily to verse, it does contain some prose items, mainly in Latin and Scots.  The longest of these would appear to be a Latin canonical text, written on the former vellum covers of the manuscript.  There is a substantial amount of historical material, chiefly  king lists, chronicles and pedigrees (MS, pp. 27, 44, 78, 83, 141, 144, 171, 186, 242, 243); and a wide variety of notes and jottings, relating to domestic, personal, scientific and business matters, some of these being in Gaelic (MS, pp. 48, 59b, 74, 92d, 250). The relative scarcity of Gaelic prose material in the manuscript is interesting, and suggests that the scribes were aware of a distinction between the roles of the languages at their disposal. The manuscript clearly indicates language-switching (Gaelic/Scots/Latin) and probable diglossia (Gaelic/Scots).

Gaelic verse accounts for the largest part of BDL.  Extracts from the Scots poets, Dunbar and Henryson (MS, pp. 48, 77, 92b, 144), and the English poet, Lydgate (MS, p. 184), also appear.  These are an important indication of the compilers’ contact with the literary world of the Lowlands and beyond, but they are overshadowed by the large collection of Gaelic poetry found in the manuscript.  This collection consists wholly of dán or syllabic verse, in varying degrees of strictness.  Such verse was the primary literary product of the classical Gaelic world (Quiggin, Prolegomena).

Apart from individual quatrains, which are often very difficult to classify in broad terms, BDL contains three main types of dán. These intermingle throughout the manuscript, although sequences of related items occur from time to time.  The most conspicuous category is bardic verse, which includes elegy, eulogy, satire and religious poetry.  Irish and Scottish authors are represented, the latter outnumbering the former by about 44 to 21 (O’Rahilly, Indexes, 1934, 31–56).  On the Irish side, the MS shows a particular interest in bardic verse to Connacht patrons, but its catchment area extents from Tyrone, through Fermanagh, to Munster. The territorial bias of Scottish bardic verse in BDL has been recognised for some time.  The following Scottish families are represented:  MacGregor, MacDonald, Campbell of Argyll, MacDougall of Dunollie, MacLeod of Lewis, MacLeod of Harris and Dunvegan, Stewart of Rannoch, MacNeill of Gigha and MacSween of Knapdale (Watson, SV, xvii-xviii).  Much, but not all, of this type of verse has been edited (see, for example, Watson, SV). The Gaelic ballads edited in this volume form the second largest category of poetry in the manuscript.  The third category of dán in BDL is courtly and satiric verse, ascribed to Irish and Scottish authors.  This has received much less attention than the other two types, but it is currently being studied in considerable detail (see Gillies, 1977, 1978 etc.).

Dr John Bannerman has argued that this distribution pattern, beginning at Fortingall and proceeding westwards to the islands of Lewis and Gigha, ‘would be an extraordinary one seen in any light other than that of the Lordship of the Isles’ (Steer and Bannerman, 206). The MS seems indeed to confirm on other evidence that the scribes were in touch with poets who had enjoyed the patronage of the Lordship in the concluding years of its de iure existence. Yet BDL also had close connections with the Campbells.  Its scribes were vassals of the Campbells of Glenorchy; it contains verse dedicated to or even composed by members of the Campbell aristocracy; and the whole MS was compiled in territory under Campbell sway (ibid., 258–9). In spanning so much of the Gaelic world of the late Middle Ages, BDL is a remarkable MS, whose contents are not matched directly in any other collection known to survive in Scotland or Ireland.  Without it our appreciation of the medieval Gaelic world would be immeasurably the poorer.  We could not begin to imagine the nature or scale of the cultural interaction which is so eloquently attested in this duanaire.