Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland by G.W.S. Barrow

For the first half of the twelfth century, kings ruled primarily through personal relationships and patronage, only ruling through administrative and judicial officers in the south of their kingdom. The Shape of the State in Medieval Scotland, 1124-1290 argues that governmental development was a dynamic phenomenon, taking place over the long term. By 1290 accountable officials, a system of royal courts, and complex common law procedures had all been introduced, none of which could have been envisaged in 1124. Between 11, the way in which kings of Scots ruled their kingdom transformed. It uses untapped legal evidence to set out a new narrative of governmental development. This is the first full-length study of Scottish royal government in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries ever to have been written. Examining this history allows us to see how linguistic and material translation bring about cultural or historical translatio and serve as a crucial though not always fully credited mechanism for reshaping historical events and texts from medieval Europe into artefacts suited for modern (mis)appropriation. The history of the Declaration and its later translations offers an example of the ways in which translation contributes to the transformation of medieval texts into the sources of current-and strongly nationalist-fantasies about the middle ages. As I shall show, this transformation has its roots in the process of translation itself, in the inevitable alterations that occur when a medieval Latin manuscript becomes a modern English printed text. Utilizing recent work on the Declaration itself along with the translation theories of Laurence Venuti and others, I argue that English print translations of the Declaration-beginning in 1689 and continuing up to the most recent versions-have dramatically recast it, transforming it from a letter expressing baronial privilege within an esoteric and localized political situation to a universal, populist “declaration of independence.” The result has been the creation of a current popular mythology concerning the document that sees medieval Scots, through the lens of the Declaration, as proto-democrats engaged in a struggle not for privileged baronial libertas but for populist freedom. While not widely known among scholars of the Middle Ages in general, this document has long attracted the attention of historians of the Scottish Wars of Independence, and become an object of near reverence for modern Scottish nationalists and American Scotophiles.

This paper examines an often overlooked piece of textual history: the English print translations of a fourteenth-century Scottish baronial letter known as the Declaration of Arbroath.

Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland by G.W.S. Barrow