READING, WRITING AND GENDER IN EARLY MODERN SCOTLAND
Why were there so few Scottish women writers? This question is addressed by looking at literacy and the book market in Scotland, noting both its conservatism, and the extreme scarcity of chapbook and ballad literature, and arguing the relationship between reading and writing, the importance of chapbooks in the formation of English writers, and that Scotswomen were hampered both as writers and readers by Scotland’s investment in Latin, which meant that, whereas Englishmen preferred classics in translation, Scots did not, and so their books were inaccessible to their womenfolk. I end by suggesting that women’s creative expression can be found, but in the Scottish ballads.
Women writers; book history; chapbooks; literacy; neo-Latin
It is only too easy to extrapolate from the better-evidenced, and so somewhat more scrutable, cultural history of early modern England, and to assume that literacy and print-culture in Scotland developed on roughly similar lines. But Scotland’s culture is distinct in a variety of respects, and seems to have presented particular difficulties to women. The differences between the two make it possible to probe the fundamental question of the preconditions which permit, or prevent, creative expression.
The work of recovering texts by early modern women writers of English has been going on for more than twenty years now. It is fair to say that the terrain has been mapped, so it is therefore now possible to reflect on the fact that all this work of rediscovery has flushed out remarkably few Scotswomen. So few, in fact, as to prompt the question, ‘why?’ since it certainly has not been for want of looking.
The facts are these. Scotland produced one major published woman poet, Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross (?1570s – after 1630). Her vision-poem Ane Godlie Dreame was printed again and again in Scotland after the first edition in 1603, at least thirteen times down to 1737. Lady Culross also left verse in manuscript: most of what survives is written on the last thirteen leaves of a manuscript volume of sermons by Robert Bruce preached in autumn 1590 and spring 1591, now in New College Library, Edinburgh. Though Lady Culross’s poetry has remarkable qualities of its own, she does not employ the classical tropes, similes and comparanda from ancient history which come naturally to her English contemporary, Aemilia Lanier, or her slightly later fellow-Calvinists, Katherine Philips and Anne Bradstreet.
Apart from Lady Culross, remarkably little writing by Scotswomen was printed either in their lifetimes, or posthumously. The only other Scotswomen to publish before 1700 were Anna Hume, whose Petrarch translation, The triumphs of: love: chastitie: death came out in 1644 (she also edited her father’s History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus), and an unidentified ‘Lady of Honour’ who published a broadsheet poem puffing the Darien Scheme in 1699, The Golden Island.
Women’s writings in manuscript are also scanty. Three women’s names are associated with the group of poets which grew up round James VI in the last two decades of the sixteenth century, Christian Lindsay, whose surviving poem (if she is not a literary fiction) defends Montgomerie, Elizabeth Douglas, who wrote two poems in praise of William Fowler’s Petrarch translations, and Lady Mary Beaton, also a friend of Fowler’s. These women seem to have circulated a little occasional verse within court circles, since their poems made it into miscellany manuscripts. Also from the 1580s, a magnificent love-poem written by one women to another survives in the Maitland Quarto Manuscript, possibly by Marie Maitland, one of its compilers, while Evelyn Newlyn has recently argued that other verse in this manuscript may be hers. A noblewoman of the next generation, Margaret Cunningham, daughter of the seventh earl of Glencairn, wrote a sequence of three spiritual sonnets in 1606 which survives; Lady Grissell Baillie and Lady Wardlaw, both born late in the seventeenth century, are the probable authors of, respectively, a song and a ballad.
Other coteries which included women are discernable in Scotland. John Knox was closely involved with Anne Lock, an English woman writer, and Theo van Heijnsbergen and Nicola Royan also point to his involvement with ‘a landed literary coterie’ in Scotland, that of Cockburn of Ormiston and his wife Alison Sandelandis. Sandelandis was the dedicatee of Sir Henry Balnaves’ Confession of Faith, sent on to her by Knox and eventually printed in 1584.
In the generation after Fowler, women formed part of the cultural nexus around Drummond of Hawthornden (Fowler’s nephew) and his brother-in-law Scot of Scotstarvet. A commendatory poem by Mary Oxlie of Morpeth was prefixed to the posthumous edition of Drummond’s works edited by Edward Phillips and printed in London. He was also in correspondence with Anna Hume. Also connected with Drummond is his close friend and fellow-poet William Alexander of Menstrie, author of a long poem on a classical theme, Sophonisba, published in London and admired by Michael Drayton, among others. Alexander, in turn, is linked with James Cockburne, who dedicated two long poems in rhyme-royal to a woman, Jean Hamilton, Lady Skirling.
Around the same time but at the other end of the country, the intensely religious Barbara MacKay, Lady Reay (also known as Lady Scourie), who lived at Durness in Sutherland, composed a paraphrase of the Song of Solomon, which she did not publish; other religious verses, and a poem on Charles II when he became king of Scotland, which must have achieved some circulation since it is in a seventeenth century Royalist poetic miscellany datable on its contents to the early Restoration. In the north-east, the Quaker Lilias Skene wrote verse, letters and exhortatory prose in late-seventeenth-century Aberdeen, nearly all of which remained private. Suzanne Trill’s checklist of early modern women’s writing in the Edinburgh archives has also turned up a collection of poetry and fragments by Dame Margaret Young, from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century.
In addition, there is a variety of life-writing and introspective religious prose from the seventeenth century, and some account books. Music manuscripts were transcribed by Anne, Lady Elcho, Lady Jean Campbell, Lady Margaret Wemyss, and Anne and Mary Hay. Some women’s religious autobiography was scribally published: The Exercise of a Private Christian, or Barbara Peebles’ Trance (dated 20 July 1660) must have enjoyed some circulation in Presbyterian circles since it survives in three copies, as does Jean Collace’s Some Short Remembrances of the Lord’s Kindness to me, similarly, there are two copies of Margaret Cunningham’s autobiographic writings. The most copious unpublished Scottish woman writer is Anne, Lady Halkett, whose parents were Prince Charles’s tutor and governess respectively. But her formation was not Scottish: she was brought up in England, and her father became Provost of Eton. She received an unusually extensive education, and herself became a governess in later life.
This is a very short list. If you put together Englishwomen’s writings from 1450 to 1700 using the same criteria (i.e. all published writing, all scribally circulated writings, all private verse and prose, household books, music MSS, letters) it would run to something more like a thousand names. Early modern Scotland had a smaller population than England, but that cannot account for this difference. With no Scottish playhouses, it is unsurprising that there is no Scottish Aphra Behn, but that does not explain why there is no Scottish Katherine Philips – or why there are no Scottish Hannah Woolleys or Sarah Jinners, either.
This curious disparity between England and Scotland probably has an explanation, if women’s cultural production is set in the more general social context of reading and writing in early modern Scotland, including asking the basic question of what there was for women to read. The literature on early modern English women writers has on the whole, stressed their disadvantaged position, relative to men. I would like to put forward the suggestion that early modern Englishwomen were still significantly better off than their contemporaries in Scotland.
Reading, Writing and Publication in Early Modern Scotland
The reading public in seventeenth-century Scotland was necessarily a small one. Though it has been asserted that Scotland’s post-reformation religious culture prompted unusually high rates of literacy, Rab Houston has come to quite different conclusions, arguing, on sophisticated grounds, for ‘a very approximate estimate of 75 per cent illiteracy’ in 1640, particularly outwith the cities: ‘if Scotland was to become a more literate country than England because of the influence of the Calvinist church and a national school system it did not do so until after the middle of the seventeenth century’. With respect to women, however, all investigators agree that although women were less literate than men, how much so is hard to assess and evidence (they were not asked, for instance, to subscribe to the National Covenant, which is very useful for assessing literacy rates in men).
Passive literacy (the ability to read only) was a widespread result of pre-modern teaching techniques, and commoner in women than men. Using signatures as key evidence, therefore, ‘may exaggerate the extent of female illiteracy since it is likely that the education of female children was geared to reading and practical skills such as sewing, while boys went on more often to writing’. Margaret Spufford found evidence for more widespread literacy in England than has been thought: she found wives of English farm-labourers who, though they were rural, poor and female, were able to supplement the family income by teaching children to read. But she also observed that ‘England was saturated with the basic equipment for learning to read’ (hornbooks and ABCs, produced in enormous numbers). This is not so clearly the case in Scotland, where ABCs may have been printed, or imported, but evidence is scant.
However, it is also material to ask what the 25% or so of Scots could read, did read. Printers supply a perceived demand, so the books printed in Scotland are important evidence for this. Instructive reading and controversy constituted a major aspect of the market for print: 894 items (including psalters, catechisms, creeds and Bibles) down to 1700. Additionally, Geneva Bibles were imported from the Low Countries.
The market for literature per se was totally different from that of England. Early modern Scotland had an extraordinarily robust and conservative literary canon. The earliest item is the fourteenth-century John Barbour’s Brus, printed six times between 1571 and 1672. The fifteenth century added Henry the Minstrel’s Wallace, first printed by Chepman and Myllar circa 1508, with another thirteen editions between 1508 and 1699, and Robert Henryson’s Morall Fabillis and Testament of Cresseid, printed three and four times respectively. Facile princeps of Scottish vernacular letters was Sir David Lindsay (1486-1555), with 25 editions between 1594 and 1696, mostly of his complete works. The only writer to be added from the later sixteenth century is Alexander Montgomerie, whose poem The Cherrie and the Slae was printed eleven times in Scotland from 1597 to 1700 (one of these editions is of the Latin translation by Thomas Duff, first printed in Würzburg in 1631). The only seventeenth-century poet to achieve canonical status is Elizabeth Melville, printed nine times in the same period.
The continued importance of fifteenth-century poetry and prose to post-Reformation readers is suggested by Henry Charteris, an Edinburgh burgess active in the second half of the sixteenth century, who published, or caused to be published, Lindsay’s Workis (thrice), Squyer Meldrum, and Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid and Moral Fabillis, Gavin Douglas’s Palice of Honour, Barbour’s Bruce, John Rolland’s version of The Seven Sages, and Blind Hary’s Wallace. Dickson and Edmond comment, ‘there is perhaps no Scottish printer whose name is more honoured by those who love the vernacular poetry of the country than that of the worthy burgess’. But it should be observed that he sponsored no vernacular literature whatsoever by his contemporaries.
Things were otherwise in England. Peter Heath, having analysed the wills of clerical book-owners in Norwich between 1500 and 1550, concluded that these men, ‘though possibly more actively literate than is often conceded, were astoundingly conservative and narrow in their tastes’, but in the second half of the century, this underwent rapid change. The fourteenth-century Chaucer was regularly reprinted down to the first decade of the seventeenth century, by which time his readers were struggling with his language. Lydgate fell out of fashion around the mid-sixteenth century, and Piers Plowman was not reprinted after 1561. Edmund Spenser commented on this increasingly marked linguistic/cultural turn in a famous passage of The Faerie Queene:
Dan Chaucer, well of English vndefyled,
On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled.
But wicked Time that all good thoughts doth waste,
And workes of noblest wits to nought out weare,
That famous moniment hath quite defaste,
And robd the world of threasure endlesse deare,
The which mote haue enriched all vs heare.
O cursed Eld the cankerworme of writs,
How may these rimes, so rude as doth appeare,
Hope to endure, sith workes of heauenly wits
Are quite deuourd, and brought to nought by little bits?
Alexander Pope also noted the speed with which English evolved, marginalising older writers:
Short is the Date, alas, of Modern Rhymes;
And ’tis but just to let ’em live betimes.
No longer now that Golden Age appears,
When Patriarch-Wits surviv’d a thousand Years;
Now Length of Fame (our second Life) is lost,
And bare Threescore is all ev’n That can boast:
Our Sons their Fathers’ failing language see,
And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be.
With Chaucer left behind, Sidney and Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare, had their day, and were eclipsed in turn by Dryden and Cowley. As Pope observes, the pace of change was increasing.
Sed in Scotia non. As is well known, James VI undertook a revision of Scots literary writing in the 1580s and 90s, parallel to the efforts of Sir Philip Sidney, George Puttenham and other avant-garde writers in England, but whereas the English of the late Elizabethan age evolved to an extent which alienated readers from the writers who had pleased previous generations, the Scots of King James’s Scotland did not. A Scottish Alexander romance, the Buik of Alexander the grit, written in 1438, was printed in Edinburgh in 1580.
In the second half of the fifteenth century, England’s and Scotland’s literary culture were developing in parallel. The élite of both nations enjoyed Chaucer and Lydgate. Chepman & Myllar printed a short work by Lydgate in 1508, The maying or disport of Chaucer (actually John Lydgate, The Complaynte of a Loveres Lyfe). There is abundant evidence that Chaucer was admired in Scotland. Apart from the many references to Chaucer, ‘of makaris flour’, as Dunbar calls him, Bodley MS Arch Selden B 24, (c. 1489-1500), originally owned by Henry Sinclair, 3rd Earl of Orkney, contains Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. The ‘Paston Letters’ reveal a Scottish nobleman, Thomas Boyd, earl of Arran, borrowing a copy of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes from John Paston (it actually belonged to his sister), and another copy of this very popular work was owned by a Scotswoman, Marion Lyle of Houston, in Renfrewshire (now Boston Public Library Ms f med 94).
However, it should also be noted that John Durkan and Anthony Ross’s Early Scottish Libraries reveal no surviving copies of English books printed in England owned by Scots, and indeed, no English literature whatsoever. Durkan and Ross, of course, can be no more than a flashlight shone on sixteenth-century Scottish book-buying habits. Some Scots who read literary texts in the sixteenth century seem to have preferred to do so in manuscript (hence the Selden, Maitland and Asloan MSS, among others): The Complaynte of a Loveres Lyfe, printed by Chepman and Myllar, is also in the Asloan and Selden manuscripts.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the traffic was two-way. Scots writers were read, and published, in England, after the increase of diplomatic contact which culminated in the marriage of James IV and Margaret Tudor in 1503. Probably the earliest is William Touris, The Contemplacyon of Synners, printed in London by Wynkyn de Worde in 1499, an Anglicised version of a poem written c. 1494–9 by a Scottish Observant Franciscan friar. John Skelton was considerably indebted to the poetry of William Dunbar, who visited England, and also a reader of Lindsay, whose complaynte and testament of a Popinjay was published (Anglicised) in London in 1538. Gavin Douglas and Robert Henryson’s works were similarly published in English versions.
By the mid-sixteenth century, though, the high cultures of the two countries were diverging. The Scotland of Mary and James VI was less receptive to English literature than that of James IV and James V, and the England of Mary Tudor, Edward VI and Elizabeth was most certainly less receptive to Scots. No literary texts by Scots were published in England from 1581 until James went South in 1603, though some Scottish imprints were sold in England in the reign of Elizabeth. There was a certain English curiosity about James, odds-on favourite for the succession, and his mother, prisoner in England. For example, Gabriel Harvey bought James VI’s Essayes of a Prentise not long after its publication in Edinburgh, 1585, and read it 24 February 1585/6. He also owned ‘thos tragical pamflets of the quen of Scots’ (perhaps John Leslie’s various works of pro-Mary apologetic, mostly printed in Paris, offsetting the anti-Mary writing published in London).
It is, of course, the case that diplomatic and other contacts between the two cultures during Elizabeth’s reign ensured that some later-sixteenth-century Scots writers were in contact with English coevals. Notably, Alexander Montgomerie was a close friend of the English poet Henry Constable, while Archibald Douglas, eighth earl of Angus, developed a friendship with Sir Philip Sidney during periods of exile in England in 1581-82 and 1584-85, and had parts of the Arcadia read to him by its author. His secretary, David Hume of Godscroft, Latin poet and historian, was also a member of the party. Gabriel Harvey not only read James’s Reulis and cautelis to be obseruit and eschewit in Scottis poésie, he thoroughly approved it, writing on sig. Kiiir: ‘The excellentest rules, & finest Art that a King could learne or teach, in his Kingdom How mutch better then our Gascoignes Notes of instruction for Inglisch Verse, & Ryme.’ Other evidence of contact has been identified by scholars such as Priscilla Bawcutt and Roderick Lyall. All the same, it should be acknowledged that no more than three works of English literature were published in Scotland during the reign of James: a possible edition of Spenser’s Amoretti in 1595, and more certainly, Sir John Davies’ Epigrammes and elegies, and Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, both published in Edinburgh in 1599 by Robert Waldegrave (himself an English exile), suggesting that Scots curiosity about new English writing was far from extensive.
On a sub-literary level, popular taste was conservative in both nations, and through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cheaply-produced (chapbook) fiction mostly consisted of venerable tales, in linguistically-modernised versions. But the salient difference between the two cultures was that in England, literary writing was innovative and in rapid development. In Scotland, educated as well as uneducated readers preferred time-tested classics.
The Frier and the Boy, a late-medieval fairytale, was still considered worth publishing in Glasgow in 1668. Another late-medieval tale, the Delectable Little History of a Lord and his Three Sons, was published in 1691, 1695, 1698, and 1705, and the romance of Greysteel (also known as Eger and Grime, or Sir Eger), which was sung to James IV, was published in Glasgow in 1687. It was the same in England. Seventeenth-century chapbooks still featured medieval heroes such as Bevis of Southampton, Robin Hood, and Clim o’ the Clough. But there is a salient difference here too, which is the quantity of chapbooks which were produced. In England, there were many, many little books of ‘merry tales’ and ‘pleasant histories’. Spufford comments, ‘the sheer volume of cheap print available after the Reformation was very great … a single member of the group of specialist publishers of chapbooks … had in stock one chapbook for every fifteen families in the kingdom’ (10,000 books, of which 93% were valued at 6d or less).’
The contrast with Scotland is stark: fewer than eighty chapbooks are known to have been published in Scotland over the first 200 years of printing. There may of course have been more; these books were ephemera. But it is notable that when in 1603, an inventory of the stock of the printer Robert Charteris was made, there were almost no chapbooks. There were 500 copies of the only 6d chapbook in his stock, The Freirs of Berwick; quite possibly the entire print run since it was produced that year, and no others. Multiplying up, this might suggest a total production of 40,000 ‘little books’ over 200 years. By 1660, English printers were putting out about 400,000 annually.
The greater appetite for print is also obvious in other areas of English popular culture. The English had a taste for ‘newes’ ― often meaning ‘new anything’ rather than current affairs ― but the equivalent of the English penny printings remained undeveloped in Scotland. In the seventeenth century, about 8,000 different broadsheet ballads were printed in England, accounts of causes célèbres, executions, dreadful murders, signs and portents and bizarre births. In Scotland, a few scandals and executions are reported in pamphlets and broadsheets of the kind common in England, confession of Maister Iohn Kello (who murdered his wife), reporting his penitence and edifying final speech, and single sheets such as The Bischoppis Lyfe and Testament (on the life and death of John Hamilton, Archbishop of St Andrews, executed in 1571). But there are no monstrous births and portents: some edifying ‘last words’ were recorded, but they circulated in manuscript. Very little comic verse was published (eleven items survive). Robin Hood was a folk hero in Scotland as well as England, but the first Robin Hood ballad known to have been printed appeared only in 1700. In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, a very few pamphlets of ‘news’, in the sense of remarkable topical events, published in England were reprinted in Edinburgh, such as The flaming islands, or, A full description and account of the strange and terrible fire, lately broke out of the ground, in the island Fyal (1672) or A true relation of the great victory obtained by the King of the Abissines, called Prester John, against the Turks (1684). Additionally, a poltergeist who manifested in a house in Kirkcudbright was written up by the minister, Alexander Telfair, in a pamphlet published in 1695.
In the first decade of the Reformation, seventeen political broadsheet poems were produced in Scotland, most if not all by Robert Sempill, in two batches, the first in 1567 (the year of the death of Darnley and forced abdication of Mary Queen of Scots) and the second between 1570 and 1573 (on a cluster of related topics, the murder of the Earl of Moray, the defence of Protestantism, and the Massacre of St Bartholomew). But the market did not develop. Seventeenth-century Scottish history does not lack for incident, but there seem to have been no more Sempills. The printer, Robert Lekpreuik, got into serious trouble. He was cautioned by the Edinburgh council on 2 June 1570 for printing unlicensed books, and was in fact imprisoned for between four and seven years in the 1570s.
Seventeenth-century Scotland took an interestingly different response to its causes célèbres. The murder of John Kincaid, Lord of Warriston, by his wife in 1600, the 1630 Fire of Frendraught, and other remarkable scandals were immortalised in ballads which circulated orally, and appear to have been orally composed. Proclamations to one side, seventeenth-century single-sheet publications consist almost entirely of epitaphs and addresses by gentry-level authors such as William Fowler and William Drummond, in English or Latin. Some orally-composed ballads were subsequently printed, but evidence is not easy to find.
Turning now to polite literature, new European fashions in verse and prose are even less well represented by Scottish imprints than is popular culture. Pastoral romance was a hugely fashionable genre throughout Europe in the seventeenth century, and indeed, a Scot resident in France was responsible for one of the most famous, John Barclay’s Argenis, a best-seller both in its original Latin and in English translation. But only two were published in Scotland: the earlier is John Kennedie’s The historie of Calanthrop and Lucilla (Edinburgh: J. Wreittoun, 1626). This was simultaneously published in London, suggesting that its author was unsure that it would find a readership in Scotland. The later is Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh’s Aretina, or the Serious Romance (Edinburgh: ?Evan Tyler, 1660: again, it was also printed in London, in the following year). This suggests that prose fiction remained almost entirely undeveloped (I will turn to the issue of English imports later in this paper).
In fact, it appears that the market for vernacular literature on all subjects other than religion was underdeveloped in Scotland. Some of what was printed may be lost, but all that we have evidence for is 127 items of popular literature produced between 1508 and 1700, and 296 works of polite literature, including the endlessly-reprinted six canonical authors and various single-sheet occasional writings: that is, all Scotland’s presses together issued approximately two items a year of vernacular ‘literature’, taking high and low together, more than a quarter of which consisted of reprints of the canonical authors. Zachary Boyd (1685-1653), himself a much-published writer of religious poetry and prose, complained,
Our Schooles and Countrey are stained, yea, pestered with idle Bookes, your children are fed on fables, love songs, badry ballads, Heathen husks, youths poison…
It is hard to perceive a valid basis for his alarm.
A revealing source of information about Scotland’s print culture is inventories of publishers’ stock, compiled in connection with the financial settlement of an estate after an individual’s death. That of Robert Charteris has already been mentioned; but others tell a similar tale, which is that vernacular literature generally, and books of interest to women specifically, were in short supply. The printer/publisher Thomas Bassendyne died in 1579. Cicero, Terence, and other classical authors were well represented in his stock (especially the schooltext The Distichs of Cato (572 copies). Sixteenth-century Scottish booksellers imported almost all their classical texts from Antwerp, entirely in Latin. For non-Latin-readers, the only access to classical literature he offered was five Virgils in English. As far as other literature goes, his stock included 510 copies of Sir David Lindsay (3s unbound, 4s bound), and 300 of Greysteel (a 6d pamphlet). His holdings of imported English literature amounted to some two dozen books, eleven A Hundred Merry Tales, a copy of [?John] Haywood’s Works, six Skelton’s Tales, three of The Palace of Pleasure, vol. I, a Guy of Warwick, a copy of Piers Plowman, and two of Huon of Bordeaux (a translation of a French romance). He also owned eight imported books aimed at women: two Lanterane of Ladies (price 2s, a book now unknown), four of William Bercher’s Nobilitie of Wemen (18d), and three of Ludovico Vives’ Instruction of Christiane Wemen (6s).
Henry Charteris died in 1599, leaving four complete Bibles, twenty-two New Testaments, 6,204 catechisms, 3,345 psalters, 1,880 works of religious literature, and 1,516 works of secular literature, of which just over half (788) were by Sir David Lindsay. Thus secular literature amounted to a tenth of his stock, and the works of Lindsay alone, a twentieth. John Writtoun, similarly, had 200 copies of his own imprint of John Monipennie’s Abridgement or summarie of the Scots chronicles and no other literature except ‘16 rimmes [reams] of printed wast littill scheitts of paper, consisting in littell pamphlettis and balladis and utheir littell printed copies, estimat all to the sum of ten pundis, xiijs, iiijd’. Booksellers’ wills and inventories tell similar tales of a limited and impoverished vernacular culture. When Robert Byssane died in 1646, his stock of literature consisted of 1,350 copies of Wallace, 1,100 ‘David Lindsays’, 1,000 ‘Rymers Prophecies’ (that is, prophecies of the thirteenth-century prophet Thomas of Erceldoune), and ‘ane bundill of steikit books, pamflets and waist papers’. The word ‘waste’ implies that these printed pages might be sold not as reading material, but to pad bindings or wrap groceries, as toilet-paper, or to line pie-dishes. ‘Used paper was a marketable commodity, much in demand for a great variety of uses’.
Enterprising Englishmen who attempted to sell books in Scotland fell foul of the licensing system for traders: Robert Wodehouse, trading in books as ‘ane forane straynger and unfrieman’ in 1580 was censured by the Edinburgh town council and told to desist, or forfeit his stock. Again in 1593, John Norton, an English bookseller, was delated in Edinburgh ‘for wrangus usurping of the liberty of this burgh’ and told to stop selling books from a booth. These books were described as ‘smallis’ – were they chapbooks? Additionally, the religious authorities’ fear of ‘Seminarie Preests, Jesuits and uther traffiquing Papists, with their coffers and books’ ensured both censorship of printers, and that the ports were policed against undesirable literature.
In England, little books were carried and sold by chapmen, and were thus available all over the country. Scottish pedlars and chapmen do not seem to have carried chapbooks before the last decade of the seventeenth century: by definition, chapmen travelled the country areas, and with (male) rural illiteracy rates running at around 80% in the mid-century, the potential market was small. Roger Leitch’s article on packmen brings together inventories of chapmen’s packs in the seventeenth century: like their English brethren, Scottish chapmen mostly carried cloth and haberdashery, but there is no reference to books or ballads before 1700: Leitch doubts that they were carried before that date. In fact, the market began to develop a decade before: in 1692, Jas. Paterson’s Edinburgh’s True Almanack carries an advertisement: ‘Printed and to be sold be John Reid, The Ten Commandments, with the Lords Prayer, and the Creed, all on a large big Letter’ (for teaching children to read) … ‘with all sorts of Pamphlets and Ballads for Chapman Merchants’. Merry Andrew’s Almanack (Edinburgh, 1702) advertised that James Watson had printed ‘several sorts of peny Books’ and ‘the newest sorts of Ballads’ along with religious and educational works.
Chapmen certainly carried almanacs by the second half of the seventeenth century (a chapman called Alexander Gray brought 1000 copies of an alternative almanac to Aberdeen, in defiance of John Forbes’ monopoly, and the result was a case in the Edinburgh Bailie Court). Almanacs were highly profitable on both sides of the border, and print-runs might reach 50,000 copies (so Scots printers were perfectly capable of producing quantities of ephemera if they thought the market was there). However, almanacs, though they imply readers, do not imply a taste for fiction; they also coexisted with religious literature in a wholly uncontroversial manner, unlike ‘peny Books’.
The will of the printer Andrew Anderson, probated in 1676, seems to corroborate seventeenth-century chapmen’s general lack of involvement in book-distribution from a different angle. Under ‘debts owed to the deceased’ is a list of names of booksellers, mostly in Glasgow and Edinburgh (though there was one in each of the towns of Kilmarnock, Lendrick, and Stirling). They presumably had bought stock from him, and owed sums ranging from 500 merks to £1,000 – but one debtor was a chapman, who owed him a mere £1. It seems reasonable to conclude that Anderson was distributing his publications through booksellers, not chapmen. This is important, because beyond the central belt, only the north-east coast supported booksellers before 1700 (Aberdeen acquired one in 1613, Banff in 1676, Forres in 1678). The poet Lady Mackay, at Durness, lived more than two hundred miles from the nearest bookseller.
Writers as Readers
The preacher Zachary Boyd was extreme but far from unique in his suspicion of fiction. From Plato onwards, moral objections to fiction have frequently been raised. They were also raised, and vigorously, by the English puritan preachers: Philip Stubbes (c. 1555-1610) argued that popular fiction would ‘corrupt men’s minds, pervert good wits, allure to bawdry, induce to whoredom, suppress virtue and erect vice’, Richard Baxter (1615-1691) that ‘tempting books’ were ‘the very poison of youth’. Richard Kilby told children, ‘whatsoever ballet, booke or picture cometh to your handes teare it all to pieces or burn it to ashes, for whosoever made it, the devil devised it for your destruction’. By the mid-seventeenth century in England, this hostility was as futile as it was heartfelt. There is a huge amount of evidence that a printed literature of entertainment was reaching town and country alike. In Scotland, though, the General Assembly of the Kirk was highly aware of the power of the press and exerted considerable control over the printers. Boyd himself, rector and vice-chancellor of Glasgow University, was also the patron of Glasgow’s first printer. More generally, the state and the kirk between them were the major sponsors of printing, and printers could not afford to offend them. The Kirk was perhaps all too effective in suppressing ‘heathen husks’, since the dearth of popular fiction may have had unintended consequences.
Although various factors propel an individual into authorship, hardly anybody writes unless they first read, and in this context, chapbooks are extremely important, as the reminiscences of seventeenth-century autodidacts make plain. Richard Baxter, himself recalled that around the age of ten, ‘I was extremely bewitched with a love of romances, fables and old tales, which corrupted my affections and lost my time’. Fortunately for his spiritual development, a chapman who visited his father carried some religious literature: five or six years later, ‘it pleased God that a poor pedlar came to the door that had ballads and some good books: and my father bought of him Dr Sibb’s Bruised Reed.’ This was a full-sized book of nearly 400 pages. It was first published in 1630, when Baxter was fifteen, but it would not have had the impact it plainly had on him had it not come into the hands of a fluent and practised reader. Similarly, John Bunyan ruefully recalled that as a child, he had been drawn to imaginative fiction, and only subsequently turned to the Bible.
Give me a Ballad, a News-book, George on Horseback or Bevis of Southampton, give me some book that teaches curious Arts, that tells of old Fables; but for the Holy Scriptures, I cared not.
As Margaret Spufford observed, Bedford did not then have a bookshop; this penny and twopenny literature came into Bunyan’s hands via the chapmen who visited his father’s humble farm, or at Bedford market, so he is a testimony to the pervasiveness of a literate culture in England. Also, though Bunyan’s family was scraping along near subsistence level, they, or he, could find pennies for a chapbook once in a while. The preacher Vavasour Powell (1615-70) was of gentry origin (he was sent to Jesus College, Oxford), but as a child, he was first attracted to reading by imaginative literature: ‘Hystorical or Poetical Books, Romances and the like were all my delight’. John Milton, too, recalled that ‘my younger feet wander’d . . . among
these lofty Fables and Romances’.
Most early modern narratives which mention childhood reading are spiritual autobiographies, which, naturally, spurn the ‘pleasant histories’ in retrospect, but if this was true of future religious reformers, it is a fortiori true of other readers. Francis Kirkman, in The Unlucky Citizen (1673), describes the opening-up of a world:
…once I happened upon a Six Pence, and having lately read that famous Book, of The Fryar and the Boy, and being hugely pleased with that, as also the excellent History of the Seven wise Masters of Rome, and having heard great Commendation of Fortunatus, I laid out all my mony for that, and thought I had a great bargain…
This was equally true of girls, who as their reading skills advanced, often went on from the little medieval romances printed in chapbooks to the vast new romances by identifiable authors which were then being translated from French. Lady Elizabeth Delavel (born 1649) wrote in her Meditations, that as a little girl, ‘what I read was altogether romances. I was but some few months past ten years old before I had read severall great volumes of them: all Cassander The Grand Cyrus, Cleopatra and Astrea. Thus vainley passed the blossom time of my life’. Lucy Hutchinson recollects that as a child she would rather read than do anything else (she learned to read at four), and though her mother was a vigilant educator, and her own cast of mind fundamentally serious, the young Lucy was an omnivorous reader: ‘every moment I could steale from my play I would employ in any booke I could find, when my own were lockt up from me … I would steale in some hole or other to read … I thought it no sin to learne or heare wittie songs and amorous sonnetts or poems.’ Lady Anne Halkett does not speak of her childhood reading in her copious autobiographic writings, but, brought up as she was in London, ‘loved well to see plays’: she is familiar with Cowley’s The Guardian, and likens herself to Fletcher’s Celia in The Humorous Lieutenant, so she perhaps also bought playbooks.
In the absence of a literature specifically aimed at children (a development of the eighteenth century), engagement with the written word has to start somewhere. Cheap, available, easy to read, and attractive, these ubiquitous broadsheets and chapbooks were part of early modern English writers’ early formation, even of those who grew up to become Puritan preachers and activists. They were read by the learned in idle moments (both William Cecil, Lord Burghley and Robert Devereaux, third earl of Essex, owned Amadis de Gaule), and by the unlearned as their chief, or only, reading. They were within reach even of a child’s purchasing power: Kirkman is explicit that he and his schoolfriends bought and swopped chapbooks, like the comics of a later age. Baxter presumably did too – his father was deeply religious, and unlikely to have bought ‘pleasant histories’ for his own reading.
Chapbooks, even if forgotten or repudiated in later life, were therefore the compost from which creative writing, whether literary or godly, emerged. The writers who mention the age at which they were fascinated by chapbooks and romances put it around ten, the age when developmental psychologists find interest in fantasy is most intense. Most early modern readers had about four years of reading experience behind them by ten, and the chapbooks’ stereotyped characters and clichéd plots made them very suitable fodder for inexperienced readers. It seems highly probable therefore that the avid consumption of chapbooks in childhood was a stepping-stone to more sophisticated forms of intense engagement with the written word later on.
The basic facts about publication in Scotland suggest that this virtually invisible, taken-for-granted context for future creative effort was only minimally present in the northern kingdom before the end of the seventeenth century. James Melville has left an account of his early reading which is very different from that of Baxter or Bunyan. First, ‘the Grate Buik was put in my hand’ at the age of five. It made no impression, understandably. Two years later, he had not learned to read. He was sent to a minister, where ‘we lerned to reid the Catechisme, Prayers, and Scripture, to rehers the Catechisme and Prayer par coeur [by heart]’. Thus he learned by rote, with little comprehension. His first introduction to reading for pleasure was via his beloved older sister, who used to read to him from Sir David Lindsay. At twelve, he was at school in Montrose, where, he says that ‘ther was also a post [messenger], that frequented Edinbruche and brought ham Psalme buikes and ballates, namlie, of Robert Semple’s making, wherin I tuik pleasure, and learnit sum thing bathe of the esteat of the countrey, and of the missours [measures] and collours of Scottes ryme. He schew me first Wedderburn’s Songs, whereof I lerned diverse par coeur.’ Melville was evidently strongly attracted to vernacular literature, and if he had seen chapbooks he would have bought them, but apart from the Sempill ballads, nothing came his way. He seized upon the Wedderburn brothers’ Compendeous buke of godlye psalmes (1565), but it sounds as if he could not afford to buy it – instead, a practised rote-learner, he learned some of the poems by heart. The only other poetry he mentions as having come his way as leisure reading was Palingenius’s Zodiacus Vitae (apparently in Latin).
The only surviving wills or inventories which suggest that any member of the Scottish booktrade was importing chapbooks from England are those of Wreittoun and Byssane, quoted above, with their bundles of waste-paper pamphlets. There were also very few books cheap enough for a child purchaser, though those that there were were very cheap indeed, given that a Scots shilling was equivalent to an English penny. The printer Thomas Bassendyne’s 1579 inventory lists only Greysteel for 6d: Charteris’s 1606 inventory has Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid for 4d, and The Friars of Berwick for 6d. Robert Gourlaw, bookseller, had in stock in 1586 two Merry Prognostications at 6d each, 25 Greysteels for 8d, 8 Adam Bells for 10d, and a ‘lytill Fortoun buik’ (prognostications, probably), The Complaint of Scotland, The Palace of Honour and Squire Meldrum for a shilling (there were three, one, three and six copies of these respectively, so there were fewer than fifty really cheap books in his entire stock).
There is an evident strand in early modern Scots thinking about literature which echoes the English puritans’ hostility towards purely imaginative writing. Zachary Boyd has already been quoted. In the 1620s, James Caldwell’s The Countesse of Marres arcadia (1625), is a theological work explicitly written as a riposte to Sidney.
Sr Philip Sidneys Arcadia hath manie faire and recreatiue discourses for Ladies; a faire Field in deede to feede on, for young and fond Lovers … But this is a spirituall Arcadia … For heere is a spirituall foode for wearied Soules … The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia is for the bodie; but the Countess of Marre her Arcadia is for the Soule.
However, welcome though Caldwell’s Arcadia may have been to the Countess herself, as a basis for building a fascination with the written word in her thirteen children, it has obvious drawbacks compared with Bevis of Southampton, or even Sidney’s Arcadia.
Women as Readers
There is some evidence for women book-owners and readers in Scotland at a gentry and aristocratic level. Before the Reformation, Scotswomen owned Books of Hours, both manuscript and print. Durkan and Ross have identified no women owners of any other book apart from a psalter owned by the nun Marion Crawford, but we may add the manuscript copy of Lydgate’s The Siege of Thebes owned by Marion Lyle of Houston to their list.
One woman is known to have commissioned a book. Charles Lumsden translated Robert Rollock’s An Exposition upon some Select Psalms (Edinburgh: Robert Waldegrave, 1600), at the behest of Lilias Gilbert, wife of John Preston of Fenton Barns. ‘I happening to reade unto you a little of the Exposition uppon the 42. Psalms: Ye desired me very earnestly to translate the whole booke; which thing I granted-to, and promised to perform.’ Other women received dedications: the French-educated queens Mary of Guise and Mary, Queen of Scots, but also Elizabeth Dunbar (a fifteenth-century countess of Moray), Alison Sandelandis, Mary Erskine, née Stuart, the Countess of Mar, who received two, and her daughter Mary Erskine. Jean Hamilton, Lady Skirling, also received two (from the same author), Jean Fleming, Lady Thirlstane, dedicatee of William Fowler’s Petrarch translation, and Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross.
The Countess of Mar was not only the dedicatee of James Caldwell’s Arcadia and Patrick Simson’s Short Compend of the Historie of the First Ten Persecutions (Edinburgh, 1613-16), a surviving household book from 1638 shows her as a book-buyer. She acquired, or had bound, bibles, a preaching book, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and political tracts. Her literary purchases were a ‘David Lyndsay’ and Alexander Hume’s Hymnes or Sacred Songs (which was dedicated to Elizabeth Melville). She also bought a Juvenal and a Greek grammar, but these were for her son. Arthur Johnson’s Latin psalm paraphrase was dedicated to her daughter Mary Erskine, which suggests that she may have been Latin-literate. But the Countess of Mar was an atypical Scotswoman: she was the daughter of Esmé Stewart, and brought up in France, thus her education cannot be held representative of élite Scotswomen. Frenchwomen of her rank and generation were quite often taught to read Latin, and John Erskine, Earl of Mar, was a diplomat and tutor to Prince Henry: it is therefore possible that the Mars gave their daughter an unusually humanist education.
Apart from these dedications, almost nothing specifically aimed at women was published in Scotland between 1505 and 1700. Englishwomen were the principal target audience for romances (though men also read them), but only two such were published in Scotland. Before 1700, other kinds of writing for women are represented in Scotland by a mere handful of books, all printed in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. The Englishman Richard Allestree’s conduct book, The Ladies Calling, was twice printed in Edinburgh in 1674, and another well-known English work, George Savile, Marquis of Halifax’s The Lady’s New Year’s Gift, was printed there in 1687. Two midwifery manuals were printed, one an English book, Nicholas Culpeper, A Directory for Mid-wives (Edinburgh: G. Swintoun and J. Glen), the other by a Scot, James McMath, The Expert Midwife (Edinburgh: Mosman, 1694). A book which makes a strong case for women as writers, Georges and Madeleine de Scudéry’s Les Femmes Illustres, was translated by a Scot, James Innes, and printed in Edinburgh in 1681, but it is dedicated to Mary of Modena, and responsive to her own cultural world, that of the Franco-Italian Catholic nobility. Among the plethora of Scottish religious writing, one anonymous broadsheet poem in defence of Charles I’s attempted imposition of Laudian Anglicanism is specifically addressed to women, Religions complaint to the honourable ladyes of Scotland, signed P. M., published in 1639.
In early modern England, women constituted a significant market. Suzanne Hull argues that at least 163 published works were aimed at a female readership in England between 1475 and 1640, which between them went through some 500 editions. Englishwomens’s literacy and English printers’ books for women between them created a virtuous spiral from the late sixteenth century onwards. As more of all sorts was published for women, there was more of an incentive for girls to read, the market increased, as more girls were taught, and some of these readers in the fulness of time became writers. Apart from the women who wrote almanacs, cookbooks and ballads, because so many Englishwomen read romances, a few went on to write them. Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania is the best known, but Anna Weamys published A continuation of Sir Philip Sydney’s Arcadia in 1651, Judith Man translated John Barclay’s Argenis (from the French translation, not from the original Latin), and there are unpublished romances by Lady Alice Oldfield and Hester Pulter.
There is nothing of the kind in Scotland. Scotswomen embroidered, but they had to work out their designs by means other than a book intended for the purpose, they cooked, but not from printed recipe-books; there were no published Ladies’ Delights, or Queen’s Closets. The only printed ‘mirror of a godly life’ celebrating a Scotswoman was in Latin, Alexander Julius (Yuill)’s Illustrissimae dominae ... Annabellae Murraviae vitae & mortis speculum (Edinburgh: R. Charteris, 1603).
The question of whether books for women, either entertaining or instructive, were imported from England must also be asked, and the answer seems to be, yes, but not many. The Edinburgh bookseller David Trench issued a catalogue of his stock in 1667. Under ‘History Books, Poems, And Romances, etc.’, about 260 highly miscellaneous items, Trench offered a copy of Braithwait’s English Gentlewoman, a History of Women, the anti-woman Haec Homo, and another contribution to the querelle des femmes, The Woman’s Sharp Revenge. Though there are no recipe books or works of that kind, he did, however, offer some romances, including those international favourites L’Astrée and Clelia, and also the poems of Anne Bradstreet and the Duchess of Newcastle. But two-thirds of his stock (ca. 1,700 items as against ca. 900) is Latin, mostly continental imprints. It seems reasonable, with a mere seven items of particular female interest on offer, to conclude that he did not see women as a major part of his customer base.
A 1690 auction catalogue tells a similar story, though the books are organized differently. Most are theological, with some classics and history. Overall, there are more books in Latin than in English, and more Continental than English editions. The only literary offerings in English are two copies of Sidney’s Arcadia, there are no classical texts in translation other than a copy of North’s Plutarch, and there are no practically-oriented books other than a copy of the Gardeners Laberinth.
Two named sellers, Alexander Henderson and David Freebairn, conducted book-auctions in Edinburgh in 1693 and 1700 respectively. Henderson offered theology in English as well as Latin, including a copy of Foxe’s Martyrologie, but the only romantic literature he was selling was Amadis de Gaule (in French), The Queen of Tartaria, a Play, and two copies of d’Urfé’s romance L’Astrée (in French). There were only two other books which might have specifically attracted a woman reader, a copy of Thomas Toll’s The Female Duel, or Lady’s Looking-Glass (despite its title, a work of theological controversy) and one of Nicholas Culpeper’s Compleat Midwife. A woman buyer might have felt better catered for at Freebairn’s sale, where there were Du Bartas and Quevedo’s Visions in English, Sandys’ and Golding’s translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (two copies of the former), Thomas Hobbes’s Odyssey, Drayton’s Polyolbion, Braithwaites’ English Gentleman and Woman, a conduct book, and Robert Turner’s Woman’s Counsellour (on gynaecology). There was, however, a total absence of English, or even French, romances, poems, or plays. Taken together, these catalogues suggest that the idea of women as book-buyers has failed to develop.
William London’s 1658 Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England looks very different. Almost all of it is in English, even the books on theology, law and mathematics, and almost all the books are also published in England. More than sixty romances are offered, and 100 volumes of poetry: we find, along with many English books, English translations of Battista Mantuan’s Bucolica, Horace’s De Arte Poetica, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Heroides, De Arte Amandi and Tristia, Juvenal’s Saturae and the works of Virgil. Plays have a section to themselves. ‘Hebrew Greek and Latin’ books are not a majority, but a special-interest section, of ten pages (400 books at most). This section includes almost no neo-Latin belles-lettres: Cartwright’s Poemata, Mantuan’s Bucolica, the letters of Paulo Manuzio and Roger Ascham, and the epigrams of Thomas More are the only offerings in this genre.
Thus the evidence of printers’ activities, their stock, and that of the actual booksellers of Scotland, all seems to tell the same story. Very little popular literature was available at any time, apart from the ubiquitous Greysteel, and there was an exceedingly slender offering of polite literature, hardly any of it contemporary. Far more books were imported from the continent than from England, and most of them were in Latin. 50% of the English imports that there were consisted of theology, while 20% were practical guides (there was evidently some demand for practical non-fiction in Scotland, though little was printed there). Scottish printers made their livings publishing Bibles, psalters, catechisms, religious guidance, grammars, (Latin) schooltexts, and the canon of classical Scots texts.
At a very basic level, then, a Scotswoman was less likely to be attracted towards reading – which is the first step towards writing – because she was relatively unlikely to come across reading matter designed to catch her interest, either as a child or as an adult. Moreover, the relation of writer and reader, regardless of gender, is different when there is almost no published imaginative literature by contemporaries. For someone growing up in Restoration Scotland, the idea of literary authorship cannot have come easily, since the canonical writers in Scots were so very long dead.
Furthermore, the educational experience of men and women was even more different than was the case in England. Upper-class Scottish boys and would-be members of the clerisy were forced to learn in an environment which privileged Latin over the vernacular. This was also the case in England, but the pedagogues’ focus on total-immersion Latin (the language of instruction in grammar schools) was offset by private, playtime consumption of popular fiction, available to just about all English schoolboys (the recollections of, among others, Baxter, Kirkman and Bunyan make this clear). Scottish grammar-school boys did not have this resource.
We should not be surprised to find, as we do, that insofar as Scotswomen read and wrote at all, reading and writing are both religious activities for them. There was precious little to encourage them either to read or to write on any other topic. The point is supported by the surviving women’s booklists: Lady Eleanor Montgomerie owned religious books, and otherwise, only Monipennie’s Abridgement of the Scots Chronicle, a history. Lady Calder, who had a booklist drawn up in 1704, only had theology. The Duchess of Hamilton owned books on theology and medicine.
Even gentry-level women who lived in a house with an extensive library were not in a position to develop their interests in any other direction. Their relation to literature was completely different from that of their English coevals, even when they were the product of a profoundly literary household, because cultivated Scotsmen seem to have done their leisure reading, as well as their serious reading, in Latin. We have some information about men’s libraries. As Sir Peter Young’s lists of James VI’s books, made circa 1578, reveal, James was brought up to be trilingual in Scots, French and Latin. Young notes some of his royal pupil’s remarks, one of which is ‘Thay gar me speik Latin or I could speik Scots’. It is surprising how few of James’s books are in English, and moreover, that none of them are literary. He owned such texts as Ascham’s Toxophilus, Eliot’s Governour, and The Institution of a Gentleman, but insofar as he read poetry in his teens, this was either in Latin or in French (for example, he owned the works of Ronsard, which may have been his mother’s, but not those of Chaucer).
Towards the end of the seventeenth century, more than a hundred years later, one might have expected a drift towards reading in English, but the library of the Dean of Edinburgh, Dr William Annand, which was sold up in 1690, consisted almost entirely of classics and theology, with little in English (his only book of English verse was a copy of Hudibras), and no translations. It might be argued that a clergyman was perhaps a special case, but the library of a lawyer, John Nisbet, Lord Dirleton, the Lord Advocate, sold in 1690, was similar. He owned thousands of books, mostly in Latin, Greek, French, and Italian. His small English library included translations of the Argenis, Boccaccio, Orlando Furioso, and Virgil’s Aeneid (the last Ogilby’s illustrated edition, and perhaps bought for its very fine engravings), Drayton’s Polyolbion, no other fiction or poetry in English, and no other translations into English from classical texts. The large library of a doctor, William Balfour, was sold up in 1695. Along with his classical, medical and theological books he owned much Scottish neo-Latin verse (by writers such as John Leech, Thomas Dempster, George Buchanan, Andrew Melville and Robert Fairlie), and other neo-Latin literature, such as the poems of Sir Thomas More and of Raphael Thorius, and John Ruggles’ Latin play, Ignoramus. His French books are mostly histories, memoirs, and medical works, though he bought a few plays, a copy of Du Bartas’s Creation du Monde, ‘burlesques’ of Horace and the Odyssey, and the pornographic L’Escole des Filles. The presence of the last suggests that his library was not ‘weeded’, and it is thus significant that he owned only eighty-two English books in total. He had a copy of Juvenal in Ralph Stapleton’s translation, Gavin Douglas’s Aeneados, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and the emblem-book Parthenia Sacra: these four items constitute his total holdings of verse English, and of translations from the classics. Overall, it is also noticeable that all three men bought far more continental than English imprints.
Another Scotsman’s library, that of the first Duke of Lauderdale, was sold in London in 1689. Since he had spent much of his life in England, it reflects a more Anglicised taste: the catalogue runs to 128 pages, of which ten contain English books on topics other than theology, 579 of them: they include the bestselling romances, Astraea, Clelia, Argenis and so on, Shakespeare, Spenser and Ben Jonson, and ten classical texts in English translation. However, the 57 pages of works in Latin which he also owned (more than half the catalogue) are a typically Scottish collection of continental imprints.
I have left out one Scottish booklist, which records the highly anomalous library of Drummond of Hawthornden, catalogued in 1627. Bald comments, ‘it is certain that Drummond’s taste in books was infinitely removed from that of his Scottish contemporaries. The list of his books is interesting chiefly in so far as it reveals his own outlook, hardly at all as an evidence of a general Scottish interest in fine literature’. Drummond owned a great many classical and neo-Latin texts, but also bought Thomas Churchyard’s Praise of Poetry, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton and Thomas Heywood’s works, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Love’s Labours Lost, Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion, and even something by an Englishwoman, the Countess of Pembroke’s play Antonie. But Drummond of Hawthornden was himself a poet in English, and interestingly, one of his Scottish contemporaries, Arthur Johnston, seems inclined to censure him for it.
Buchanan sought praise for Latin verse,
And rejected his native metres with a harsh blast;
Though Drummond would be able to conquer Buchanan with his Latin muses,
He prefers to speak with a native mouth.
Which is greater? To the one, Scotland offers the first places –
That other bard was barely second among the Latins.
Quaesivit Latio Buchananus carmine laudem,
et patrios dura respuit aura modos.
cum posset Latiis Buchananum vincere Musis
Drummundus, patrio maluit ore loqui.
Maior uter? primas huic defert Scotia; vates
vix inter Latios ille secundus erat.
There can be no doubt that to Johnston, a Latin vates (poet/prophet) is a far more significant being than a national poet.
The Woman as Writer: Classics in Translation
Even when a girl had been taught to read, and came across reading-matter which fired her enthusiasm to the point where she began to try writing for herself, a further stumbling-block in the way of self-expression for women of the seventeenth century was that literary writing called for the confident deployment of classical reference. Mary Oxlie’s poem to Drummond of Hawthornden opens with the modest disclaimer
I Never rested on the Muses bed
Nor dipt my Quill in the Thessalian Fountaine,
My Rustick Muse was rudely fostered,
And flies too low to reach the double mountaine …
Maybe so, but she still knew who the Muses were, that they lived on the double-headed mountain Parnassus, and that the fountain of Hippocrene was the source of poetic inspiration. Similarly, Marie Maitland, if the poem in the Maitland Quarto is hers, adds force and dignity to her declaration of her devotion to her un-named beloved by comparing her own feelings with those of Perithous for Theseus, Achilles for Patroclus, Orestes for Pylades, Achates for Aeneas, and Titus for Josephus (probably the first English-language writer to assemble a canon of homosexual lovers from classical history) as well as citing Penelope, wife of Odysseus, and Portia, wife of Brutus. William Fowler’s friend Elizabeth Douglas, writing in 1587, knew that seven cities vied for the honour of being Homer’s birthplace, and that Ovid was born at Sulmo.
Few Englishwomen studied Latin, and even fewer Scotswomen. But Englishwomen from literate and cultivated families (which is true of most women writers with any literary pretensions) had access to translations. A great variety of classical texts were published in English translation, Arthur Golding’s version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (much used by Shakespeare), North’s Plutarch and Chapman’s Homer are among the best known, but all the principal Latin canonical authors, such as Horace, Virgil, Pliny, and Livy, were translated in the sixteenth century. As Thomas Wilson observed in his 1570 translation of Demosthenes,
such as are grieued with translated bokes, are like to them that eating fine Manchet [best white bread], are angry with others that feede on Cheate breade [browner and cheaper]. And yet God knoweth men would as gladly eat Manchet as they, if they had it.
By the mid-seventeenth century, access to more or less the whole of Classical literature could be achieved without the trouble of learning Latin or Greek: if there was no English translation, there would certainly be a translation into French, and these translations were stocked by the booksellers. ‘French will now answer all’, John Norris, a philosopher sympathetic to women’s intellectual aspirations, advised the poet Elizabeth Thomas (1675-1731), ‘which therefore I would have you learn out of Hand. It is the most commanding, and therefore most useful Language at present’.
In 1668, John Ogilby published a translation of all Virgil’s works in London, in folio. A copy of this sumptuous illustrated book was owned by a Scotswoman, who wrote in it ‘Mary Bowes Junior her Booke 1682’: it is now in Aberdeen University Library [SB f87312 O]. What she will have seen when she opened it was a vade-mecum to the classical world. It is, as it happens, not a landmark in the translation of Virgil (it was rapidly eclipsed by that of Dryden), but it is highly readable. Moreover, the text is copiously equipped with marginal annotations: ‘the son of Jupiter’, ‘Phaeton’s sisters’, Pan as the inventor of pipes, Roman customs, history and religion, placenames, any and all data needed to understand Virgil’s references … all of this information is there in the wide margins, on the same page. It is also copiously illustrated with engravings, and a woman reader might well notice that they carry individual dedications, many of them to women; Anna and Arabella Wentworth, Elizabeth Hutton of Hutton-Pannell in Yorkshire, Margaret Spencer of Wormleighton in Warwickshire, Isabella, Countess of Northampton, the Countess of Strafford, and Flora Backhouse. Far from excluding women, Ogilby’s Virgil consciously includes them, and caters tactfully for their relative ignorance. Mary Bowes did not annotate her book, but an occasional faded ink-spot or pencil mark suggests that it was well read.
However, Ogilby’s Virgil as a whole (as distinct from the individual plates) was dedicated to William Seymour, Marquess of Hertford. Most English translations from the classics do have male dedicatees, because, crucially for their wives, sisters and daughters, few Englishmen, even those with literary tastes, read Latin for pleasure to any great extent: as John Leech commented in the 1620s, the English ‘Latiam barbiton abhorrent’ (‘shudder at the Latin lyre’). Upper-class boys, as well as the middling sort, consumed chapbooks as children; their serious school and university reading in Latin and to a lesser extent, Greek, was offset by access to cheap entertainment in English, and they often retained a taste for light reading in later life (even men as educated as Robert Burton and Samuel Pepys, both of whom collected chapbooks).
Furthermore, most English country gentlemen, parsons, and London merchants with literary tastes had libraries which contained translations as well as, or even instead of, original-language texts. Such men, erstwhile students at Oxford, Cambridge or the Inns of Court, entered on their adult careers with tastes formed by years of education, but did not go on to lead lives which kept their Latin fluent. In the main, they preferred to do their leisure reading in English, and the literary-minded not only bought literature by contemporaries, they bought translations or parallel texts, potentially accessible to their wives and daughters.
Mary Evelyn, daughter of John Evelyn the diarist, is a case in point: her father notes that she educated herself in his study, reading ‘aboundance of History, and all the best poets, even to Terence, Plautus, Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovide ...’ before her death at the age of 19, in 1665: this was on a basis of having good French and some Italian. She could hardly have done so had Evelyn not filled his library with translations. Between 1597 and 1610, John Newdigate of Arbury excerpted and made notes on about fifty writers, including Lucan, Livy, Plutarch, Seneca, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Pliny. Serious and thoughtful reading, but done almost entirely in translation: he returned time and time again to North’s translation of Marcus Aurelius, for example. His wife, Dame Alice, evidently had sufficient leisure to use this library periodically, since her own correspondence suggests that quite a lot of classical knowledge has come her way. By the age of eleven, the future Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was hiding from her governess and working in her father’s library with a Latin dictionary and grammar from ten till two and from four till eight, an endeavour which presupposes having been fired with enthusiasm by texts in translation.
The situation in Scotland was utterly different. If a boy was being educated as a future member of the clerisy, much of his education consisted of a ferociously intensive drilling in Latin. This was a matter of stark practicality. With the court removed to London, career opportunities in Scotland were insufficient. However, complete fluency in Latin opened up the possibility of seeking employment in France, Germany, Poland, or the Low Countries, and there was both a Protestant and a Catholic diaspora out of seventeenth-century Scotland. Scottish Protestants held chairs at Sedan, Geneva, Leiden, and Leipzig; Scottish Catholics at Paris, Orleans, Poitiers, Bourges, Bologna, Zamość, and elsewhere. There were also, of course, learned Scottish monks at Würzburg (notably the poet Thomas Duff) and at Regensburg, Scots Catholics at the papal court such as George Con, poet, controversialist and later, papal envoy to the court of Charles I, and learned Scottish members of the Society of Jesus, such as Robert Abercrombie, James Gordon, and George Christie. Far more seventeenth-century Scots intellectuals worked abroad than English, both absolutely and proportionately.
Scotsmen’s fluent use of Latin creates a major, and significant, difference between English and Scottish culture in the seventeenth century. If one looks at the porportion of books printed in Scotland before 1640 which are in Latin (on a basis of Aldis’s bibliography) there are 316 out of a total 981, which is just under a third, a very much higher proportion than in England. Setting aside works which were of their nature in Latin, such as University theses, grammars, schoolbooks and the like, a significant number of the remainder are belles-lettres in neo-Latin, most of it by Scots. 134 works of polite literature in Latin (i.e. poems, epithalamia, panegyrics, dialogues, etc. on topics other than religion) were published in Scotland before 1640. Also, in the same period, 144 were published in France by Scots (not counting editions of Barclay’s Argenis and Euphorion), and another fifty-nine in England by Scots. One is forced to the conclusion that educated and cultivated Scotsmen not only wrote Latin with fluency, they read it with enjoyment: William Balfour’s library suggests as much, as does that of Drummond of Hawthornden. Saluste du Bartas was one of the most popular writers of his era, but the only Scottish edition of his work was in Latin translation, Adriaan Damman’s Bartasias...de mundi creatione (Edinburgh, 1600: Damman was a Dutchman living in Edinburgh). A genuine market for literature in neo-Latin is suggested by the patterns of both publication and purchasing in seventeenth-century Scotland: literary works in Latin, ancient and modern, far outnumber those in English. Whereas English writers expressed their originality in vernacular poetry and prose, creative writing by seventeenth century Scotsmen was almost entirely in Latin.
Another way of looking at this issue of Scots and neo-Latin is to consult a seventeenth-century Englishman, Edward Phillips, on what he perceived as significant contemporary writing in his Theatrum Poetarum (1675). He lists twenty-eight Scoto-Latin poets, and by contrast, only ten Englishmen known for their Latin verse, nearly all of whom (the exception is William Alabaster) wrote utriusque linguae, and were far better known for their writings in English (they include Abraham Cowley, Richard Crashaw, and John Milton).
These, of course, are not all the English Neo-Latinists there were. Daniel Rogers is missing from the list, for instance, and so are Giles and Phineas Fletcher. But Phillips’s listings are a clear indication that in England, neo-Latin was for a specialised, largely University, audience: it was not a central cultural preoccupation). None of these Englishmen achieved a reputation exclusively as a Latin poet. Apart from Sir Robert Ayton, all of the Scots did.
This, in turn, has a significant impact on women. It is possible to demonstrate that major early modern English women writers, even those who, unlike Mary Evelyn, did not have wealthy fathers, benefited from Englishmen’s libraries and reading-habits. Aphra Behn’s mother was the wetnurse of Col. Thomas Colepeper, and the children were so close that Colepeper represented ‘Eaffry’ in his Adversaria as something like a foster-sister: he remembers her as already making rhymes as a child, and she may well have been allowed, even encouraged, to share his books. Anne Bradstreet was as religious as the Countess of Mar, and as Calvinist, but as a girl, she had free run of the extensive library at Sempringham Castle, where her father was steward. In her New England home, her house contained more than 800 books, and apposite classical reference came easily to her.
Since Drummond was evidently Anglicised in his reading habits, reading extensively in English as well as writing in it, it is not surprising to find that of all Scottish poets of the seventeenth century, it is he whose circle includes a woman writer confidently deploying an amount of classical reference suggestive of a substantial degree of literary education. Mary Oxlie of Morpeth has already been quoted, and she is described as a ‘Scotish poetess’ by Edward Phillips. But Phillips, a Londoner, may not have been sensitive to the distinction between one Northern region and another, and Morpeth is in Northumberland. She was most probably either the daughter of the grammar-school master, Amor Oxley of Morpeth, or married to one of one of his three sons, Amor, Charles and Thomas. All of the sons were educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge. The Oxleys’ strong connection with Christ’s therefore suggests that her cultural formation was English, with the exposure to vernacular literature which that implies in an English household of educators and university graduates.
Drummond also knew one of the few Scotswomen of his generation to be demonstrably Latin-literate, and also a poet who sent him her writings, Anna Hume: he acknowledges her ‘delicate verses’ in commendation of his own poetry, which reveal ‘the Highnes of your Spirit, which ever transcendeth mean Measures’ (this verse does not survive). The presence of cultivated women in Drummond’s circle is further suggested by the two religious poems by James Cockburne which are dedicated ‘to the honourable ladie of highest hope mistresse Ieane Hammiltone, Lady Skirling’, one on the Annunciation, the other on the kiss of Judas, were both published in 1605, and written in rhyme-royal. They are in a courtlier vein than is usual with Scots religious verse, making use of classical tropes and images. One is printed with a poem of commendation by the poet William Alexander, who himself wrote in a similar style, which links Cockburne and Lady Skirling with Alexander’s friends Scot of Scotstarvet and Drummond of Hawthornden.
All early modern women writers were exceptional. But it is important to be aware of the part which means and opportunity play in any achievement. Many early modern Englishwomen could scramble some distance up Parnassus step by small step, starting from a general awareness of literature as entertainment which was fostered by ‘small books and pleasant histories’ at seven or even earlier, and moving gradually through more ambitious reading to classics in translation, or even to the learning of Latin. There were certainly a few Scottish households where this was possible – such as that of David Hume, whose daughter Anna has been mentioned: he spent time in England and was privileged to hear Sidney himself reading from the Arcadia, or that of Sir Richard Maitland, an avid collector and writer of vernacular verse, whose daughter Marie transcribed some of the Maitland Quarto, had a reputation as a poet, and is described as learned. There is some reason to think that the Maitland family may have had a tradition of educating daughters, and marrying educated women: Lady Jean Fleming, dedicatee of Fowler’s Petrarch translation, was the wife of Sir Richard Maitland’s son, the Latin poet Maitland of Thirlstane, and several poets wrote Latin verse on the death of Anne Maitland, Maitland of Thirlstane’s daughter, including David Hume and Arthur Johnston.
A few women learned Latin after their marriage: one such seems to have been Margaret Douglas-Hamilton, youngest daughter of William Douglas (1633–94) and Anne (1632–1716), suo jure Duchess of Hamilton, a deeply pious woman of presbyterian sympathies who married the fourth Earl of Panmure. That she read Latin is clear from the many notes in her own handwriting that appear on the Latin books in the Panmure library, but her sisters did not, so this suggests she chose to educate herself in adult life in order to share her husband’s interests. But the available evidence suggests that most Scotsmen’s patterns of reading created no bridge for their wives and daughters between the world of the catechism and sermons and that of the Muses. It is worth observing that of the women who have been mentioned not all were Scots by formation: Lady Beaton and the Countess of Mar were educated in France, Lady Halkett in England.
In the light of all this, we should not, I suggest, be surprised to find that Scotland’s most important woman poet, Lady Culross, was the daughter of a man with an unusual background for a Scot. He was Sir James Melville of Halhill, and was educated in France as a courtier from the ages of fourteen to twenty-three. He studied French (to the extent of speaking it better than English at some periods of his life), dancing, fencing, and playing the lute; subsequently he learned German, not quite so well, and some Italian. He appears to have been cautious about his command of Latin. When Elizabeth I questioned him about his reading habits, ‘and would know what sort of books I most delighted in, whether Theology, History, or Love matters? I said, I liked well of all the sorts’. It is entirely reasonable to guess that his library, of which there is no direct evidence, contained much French and English, and verse of various kinds, not all of it religious.
Lady Culross’s verse was scribally published among devout Presbyterians: in 1599, Alexander Hume told her, ‘I have seen your compositiones so excellent, so pregnant, so spirituall, that I doubt not it is the gift of God in you’, and another of her poems, addressed to John Welsh in 1606, was evidently written for circulation. Her surviving oeuvre is untouched by classical learning, but it is still relevant that she was brought up among accessible books, even if as a writer, she took the view that classical reference was inappropriate as an ornament of Christian poetry. She was perhaps influenced in this by her uncle, also named James Melville, a fluent Latinist whose vernacular verse does not employ classical tropes.
Women and Oral Culture
An entirely separate issue is whether early modern Scotswomen had their own form of culture, which was oral rather than written. The first reference to an association between women and ballads in Scotland is John Barbour’s fourteenth-century poem The Brus:
Young women quhen yai will play
Syng it amang yaim ilk day.
The implication is that remarkable events in the fourteenth century were redacted into ballads, which were then sung by women, though it is not clear whether they are composed by them.
An unexpected source, the French humanist Joseph Justus Scaliger, who visited Scotland in the late 1560s with his friend and patron Louis Chastaigne, suggests that this was still the case in the sixteenth century. In a passage on ballads, he comments:
We saw in Scotland many nourrices wonderful creators of these trifles for coaxing children to sleep, so that when I heard them, what I heard seemed to me far from unpleasant.
vidimus nos in Scotia nutriculas miras harum nugarum artifices, ad conciliandos pueris somnos. Ut eas audire non invenustum mihi ό visum fuerit.
The association of ballad-singing with women’s culture is strong, both in England and Scotland. John Aubrey the antiquarian (1626-97) observes that ‘in the old ignorant times before women were Readers, the [ballads] was handed downe from mother to daughter, &c. So my nurse has the history from the conquest down to Carl. I in ballad’.
The most enduring of historical ballads is ‘Chevy Chase’, on the Battle of Otterburn (1388), probably the earliest identifiable historic event in genuine Anglo-Scottish balladry. When Defoe passed through Northumberland in the early eighteenth century, ‘we had the Cheviot hills so plain in view, that we could not but enquire of the good old women every where, whether they had heard of the fight at Chevy Chace: they not only told us they had heard of it, but had all the account of it at their fingers end’.
The English broadsheet ballads have long been seen as different from, and inferior to, what are generally called ‘Border ballads’ or ‘Child ballads’, after the collection made by Francis James Child. The broadsheet ballads are self-evidently the product of a print culture, not to their betterment; attempts at ‘high style’ produce bathos and rhodomontade on the one hand, crude moralising on the other. As Fox and others have shown, oral and literate culture in early modern England had mutually permeable boundaries, ‘promiscuous exchange between the oral, scribal, and printed realms’.
But it is not always appreciated that Scottish ballad-production continued through the seventeenth century, and that a significant number of what Child thought of as ‘genuine’ ballads describe early modern events: Sir Andrew Barton’s naval action took place in 1511, the adventures of ‘Kinmont Willie’ in 1596, ‘the laird of Wariston’ was murdered in 1600, the fire of Frendraucht took place in 1630, the marriage of a barely-pubescent Urquhart of Craigston to an adult bride (‘The Trees they Do Grow Green’) took place in 1634, and the ‘Bonny House of Airlie’ was pillaged in 1640. Thus in the later sixteenth, and even the seventeenth century, these compositions were being created alongside broadsheet ballads, apparently for a different constituency, and certainly, within a different frame of reference which remains that of an oral culture, motivated by shame and honour, and little, if at all, influenced by Protestant mores (adultery, rape, premarital sex, incest, murder, and blood-feud are frequently treated in ballads, without reference to the teachings of the Kirk). It is worth observing that Michael Lynch is strongly sceptical of the extent to which the Kirk was able to reach the common people before 1620, even with orally-taught catechesis and psalm-singing.
For example, The Deploratioun of the Cruel Murther of James, Erle of Murray and other ballads on the death of the Regent Moray printed in 1570, and the ballad of ‘The Bonnie Earl of Moray’ (arising from the murder of the first victim’s son-in-law in 1592) are very different creations, while the ‘oral’ composition is the younger of the two. The broadsheets (there are several) argue a case, name names, appeal to history, suggest a course of action, even cite classical figures (one, Maddeis Lamentatioun, brings Juno, Mars, and Lachesis into play). The justly famous ‘Bonnie Earl of Moray’, by contrast, sketches the aftermath of a violent death, particularly its impact on women, his wife and the queen, and hints at emotional undercurrents: the king calls for Huntly to arrest Moray on unspecified charges, but since two of the few specific facts stated are that Moray was handsome, and ‘was the queen’s love’, sexual jealousy is implicitly a factor. No reason whatever is advanced as to why Huntly took advantage of the king’s commission of arrest to murder Moray. The very marked difference between the broadsheet and the lyric ballad is one of genre, but it may also be one of gender. I have argued that most early modern Scotswomen, even at gentry level, were insulated from contact with written literature. It may be, therefore, that the creation and redaction of ballads was women’s means of creative expression. Catherine Kerrigan has also made this suggestion.
‘Child’ ballads often start from a historical event, such as the death of Moray, and universalise it. ‘Mary Hamilton’ is another case in point. It probably originates in a scandal at the court of Mary, Queen of Scots, reported by the English agent Thomas Randolph to William Cecil on 21 December, 1563. ‘The Queen’s apothecary got one of her maidens, a French woman, with child. Thinking to have covered his fault with medicine, the child was slain. They are both in prison, and she [i. e., Queen Mary] is so much offended that it is thought they shall both die.’ Ten days later, on December 31, Randolph wrote: ‘The apothecary and the woman he got with child were both hanged this Friday’. The ballad begins (in some versions) with the haunting verse,
This nicht the queen has four Maries
Each as fair as she can be;
There’s Marie Seton, and Marie Beaton
And Marie Carmichael, and me.
But the speaker, sometimes identified as Mary Hamilton, was made pregnant, either by ‘the hichest Stewart of a’’ (by implication, Lord Darnley, who in 1563 was in fact, still in England), or by a ‘pottinger’ (apothecary). One aspect of the anonymous Frenchwoman’s tale which survives into the ballad is that the infanticidal heroine, on the scaffold, thinks of her parents overseas, and hopes they will never learn what became of her, and in the redactions which describes the lover as an apothecary, he gives her a drink to procure abortion (e.g. one recorded in 1804 by Rev. George Paxton of Kilmaurs, near Kilmarnock, Ayrshire from his ‘aged mother [Jean Milne], formerly an unwearied singer of Scottish songs’).
But the focus of the ballad is very different from Sempill’s reaction to the subsequent royal scandals of 1570: less on the specific human tragedy of 1563, or on making political capital out of harlotry in the Catholic queen’s court, as Sempill would have done, than on the dire position of a young woman working far from home who allows her mistress’s husband or a fellow servant to seduce her, tries to rid herself of the baby, and faces execution for infanticide. This was as suitable a subject of contemplation for a farm servant as it was for a queen’s attendant. One aspect of the treatment which is entirely characteristic of the ‘Child’ ballads is the absence of any overtly pointed moral. The resolution and courage with which the heroine recognises responsibility for her deeds and faces her fate is common in ballad heroines, also found, for example, in the husband-murdering Lady of Warriston.
No ballad-singer is more celebrated than Anna Gordon, Mrs Brown of Falkland (1747-1810). William Donaldson in his article for the Dictionary of National Biography, observes,
Anna Gordon’s ballads are framed from an explicitly female, indeed even feminist, perspective, and carry behind their courtly and magical façade a frequently brutal reality. The ambience is of love and death, the cruelties of fate and chance, and of perilous, enchanted wooings. The songs chart their youthful heroines’ transition from secure maternal households to the dangerous world of men and their violently possessive female kin, at whose hands the protagonists risk not merely rejection but sometimes mutilation or even death.
Mrs Gordon notes that her ballads were passed down a female line of transmission from older women.
they are written down entirely from recollection, for I never saw one of them in print or manuscript; but I learned them all when a child, by hearing them sung by ... Mrs. Farquherson, by my own mother, and an old maid-servant that had been long in the family.
‘Mrs Farquherson’ was her mother’s sister. Anna Brown came from a literate family. Her grandfather on the mother’s side, Forbes of Disblair, an Aberdonian episcopalian with Jacobite sympathies, wrote and published verse early in the century, as well as composing for the fiddle. He separated from his wife, and perhaps in consequence, much of his verse is distinctly misogynist. Her father was a member of the Aberdeen Musical Society (men-only) for twenty years. It cannot be assumed that either of these men’s interests were shared with their daughters, or vice versa.
Mrs Brown herself was a woman of the later eighteenth century. She inhabited a print-culture, was a reader of Ossian and other literary texts, and even a writer of verses. Recent work has challenged the notion that she was, herself, a ‘singer of tales’, and certainly, there are Scotswomen a couple of generations back from her, such as Lady Grissell Baillie (1665–1746), probable author of ‘Were ne my Hearts light I wad Dye’, and Elizabeth Halket, Lady Wardlaw (1677-1727), author of ‘Hardyknute’, who were writing in an evidently literary vein, though in both cases, with reference to an oral tradition. But it is still possible that, through her mother and aunt, Mrs Brown may well stand at the end of a tradition which survived beyond the middle ages and through the Reformation, because it was not until after the Union with England in 1707 and the subsequent Anglicisation of early-eighteenth-century Scotland that women in particular, and the poor more generally, were much affected by the pervasive print-culture of ballads and chapbooks which had saturated England from the end of the fifteenth century. The singers who were collected from in the twentieth century by Gavin Greig, Hamish Henderson and others were as much products of a mixed oral/literate culture as Lady Wardlaw; the creators of ‘Edom o’ Gordon’ or ‘The Bonnie House of Airlie’ show no signs of being any such thing. The suppression of popular literature in Scotland hindered one kind of creativity, but left a path open for another.
As William Donaldson has observed, in early eighteenth-century Scotland, singing and music-making often took place in single-sex settings. ‘The vernacular song tradition thus contained distinct male and female strands. Anna Gordon’s father expressed surprise at his daughter’s skill in balladry and confessed that the words and tunes were previously unknown to him (as they were to his correspondent, the antiquary William Tytler, 1711–1792).’ Even now, ballad-singers’ repertoires tend to be gendered. I would like to put forward the suggestion that this characteristic is a hangover from the seventeenth century, when the disparity between the cultural repertory of Scots women and Scots men was so extreme as to constitute a kind of cultural apartheid.
Last page
Jane Stevenson
King’s College
University of Aberdeen
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