SOURCE: "Chivalry and Feudal Obligation in Bar-bour's Bruce," in The Rusted Hauberk: Feudal Ideas of Order and Their Decline, edited by Liam O. Purdon and Cindy L. Vitto, University Press of Florida, 1994, pp. 77-95.

In the following essay, Purdon and Wasserman discuss Barbour's emphasis on feudal custom as opposed to chivalric ideal in The Bruce.

Recently, scholars have begun to demonstrate how, in The Bruce, John Barbour manipulates poetic convention and historical fact for the artistic and poetical purpose of creating a rousing pro-Scots account of the early fourteenth-century wars for independence. Interestingly enough, this growing critical appreciation for the form and content of the oldest extant Scottish "national epic"¹ has repeatedly drawn attention to the poem's curiously deliberate rejection of "chivalry," especially in its treatment of Edward Bruce.²

To understand Barbour's treatment of chivalry and chivalric custom, one must first place the poem in the context of...