Robert Henryson (?1424–?1506), William Dunbar(?1460-?1513) and Gavin
Douglas(?1475–1522) each has a considerable body of work. These are writers as
good as Burns or Scott, and far too little read in Scotland today.Robert Henryson
Robert Henryson was a priest, a schoolmaster at Dunfermline, Fife. His Fablesare his
gr eat achievement, but The Testament of Cresseid, a sequel to Chaucer’s Tr oilus,is his
most famous work. His decasyllabic and often stanzaic verse is as quiet as Gower’s.
His Testamenthas a very medieval divinity and morality. Parted from Troilus,
Cresseid took up with Diomede; yet ‘Quhen Diomeid had all his appetyte, / And
mair, fulfillit of this fair Ladie, / Upon ane uther he set his haill [whole] delyte ...’.
‘And mair’ is deadly. Cresseid became a whore and was afflicted with leprosy. An old
leper quotes at her a proverb familiar from Chaucer:
I counsail the mak vertew of ane neid. thee necessity
To leir to clap thy Clapper to and fro, learn
And leve after the law of lipper leid. live leper folk
One day Troilus passes this half-blind beggar:
Then upon him scho kest up baith hir ene, eyes
And with ane blenk it came into his thocht
That he sumtime hir face befoir had sene.
But scho was in sic plye he knew hir nocht; plight
Yit than hir luik into his mynd it brocht then look
The sweit visage and amorous blenking
Of fair Cresseid, sumtyme his awin darling.
Neither recognizes the other; he gives alms out of ‘knichtlie pietie’. The measured
turning of the Troilusstanza render s the encounter objectively but with compassion.
The Fable of the Preaching of the Swallow is less pathetic than the Testament, but
a more universal moral example. In the humorous Fable of the Uponlondis Mous
and the Burges Mous (Country Mouse and Town Mouse), Henryson makes Aesop
at home in a Fife full of humble natural detail.William Dunbar
William Dunbar has a courtier’s sense of the world’s variability:
The stait of man does change and vary;
Now sound, now seik, now blith, now sary, sick sorry
Now dansand mery, now like to dee: dancing die
Timor mortis conturbat me.72 2 · MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE: 1066–1500
Scottish poetry
Events Literature
1306 Bruce crowned
1314 The Battle of Bannockburn c.1325–95 John Barbour, Brus(1375)
?1424–?1506 Robert Henryson
?1460–?1513William Dunbar
1513 James IV dies at Flodden ?1475–1522 Gavin Douglas