SOURCE: "Scottish Historiography in the 14^th Centrury: A New Introduction to Barbour's Bruce," Studies in Scottish Literature, Vol. VI, No. 3, January, 1969, pp. 131-45.

In the following essay, Kinghorn provides an overview of The Bruce in the context of the changing nature of historical writing.

Barbour's account of Bruce's career is a verse chronicle written in the spirit of a noble romance, and its author managed to impart to it a unity rarely found in a continuous historical record.

Nine years ago the present writer opened the introduction to a volume of selections from Barbour's Bruce with the foregoing sentence;¹ what follows is intended to elaborate certain comments made in that introduction concerning the work as history.

Preliminary to the study of Barbour's account, it is important to understand how mediaeval scholastics analysed the nature of history. R. L. Poole recalled² the simple classification of Gervase of Canterbury, a...