Andrew Wyntoun

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Andrew Wyntoun (also Andrew of Wyntoun ; * around 1350 , † around 1422 ) was a Scottish clergyman and historian.

Life

Nothing is known about Andrew Wyntoun's family background, education and early professional career. Most of the few known facts of his life are taken from remarks in his own history. His name also appears in some documents dating from 1395 to 1411 in the register of the Augustinian monastery at St Andrews in the Scottish county of Fife . Accordingly, he was elected canon of St Andrews and in 1393 only by the favor of his confreres, as he himself modestly says, was elected prior of the monastery on the island of St Serf's Inch in Loch Leven , a daughter house of St Andrews monastery. In 1395 he visited the lands belonging to his priory. He also brought a trial against William Berkely, Lord of Collairney, from 1406 to 1411 in the court of the Bishop of St Andrews. According to documents, he resigned from his position as prior in 1421, apparently for health reasons. Not long after that, he was likely to have died around 1422.

plant

Wyntoun written at an advanced age at the request of his patron, Sir John of Wemyss, a wealthy landowner of Fife, his rhyming mostly in achtsilbigem meter in Scottish language (and not in Latin, as is usually the time usual) written down Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland ie ( Original Chronicle of Scotland ). This work, which begins with the description of the creation of the world, is a world chronicle divided into nine books, comprising around 30,000 verses, and only from the 6th book onwards it focuses on the history of Scotland . In the first five historically worthless books dealing with early world history, Wyntoun resorted to Orosius , Petrus Comestor and Martin von Troppau as sources. From Book 6 onwards, Wyntoun used lost works such as the genealogy of the House of Stuart written by the Scottish poet John Barbour . According to Wyntoun's own testimony, the representation of the years 1325-90 is essentially based on the writing of an author who was not named by him and who has not yet been identified with certainty. The chronicle, which has been revised several times, tells in its final version, among other things, the death of the regent Robert Stewart, 1st Duke of Albany, who died on September 3, 1420 . Her target audience were literarily educated laypeople who Wyntoun wanted to provide political and moral instruction as well as entertainment.

Together with his contemporary John Fordun , Wyntoun is one of the earliest reliable Scottish historians. He was well aware of the importance of chronology and tried to date events extremely accurately. Some of the facts of Scottish history found in his chronicle are not mentioned by any other source. The poetic value of his work is to be assessed lower.

In reports of Scottish clashes with England, Wyntoun takes a clearly pro-Scottish stance. The work also contains one of the earliest mentions of the legendary robber Robin Hood and his companion Little John , the entry of which is under the year 1283. They were in Inglewood near Carlisle, just south of the Scottish border, and in Barnsdale Forest , which is much further south in England , and were widely praised. Obviously, Wyntoun welcomed the actions of these outlaws as they were enemies of the English officials operating against them.

There are nine surviving manuscripts of the work, popular in Scotland in the 15th and 16th centuries. The first printed two-volume edition was obtained by David Macpherson in 1795 on the basis of the British Museum's royal manuscript , but almost a third of the original text is missing, namely the part that relates less to Scottish history. David Laing edited the complete work in three volumes for the Series of Scottish Historians in 1872-79 . In the years 1903-14 FJ Amours published the six-volume edition, which is still relevant today, for the Scottish Text Society under the title The Original Chronicle of Andrew of Wyntoun: Printed on Parallel Pages from the Cottonian and Wemyss MSS., With the Variants of the Other Texts .

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personal data
SURNAME Wyntoun, Andrew
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wyntoun, Andrew of
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Scottish clergyman and historian
DATE OF BIRTH around 1350
DATE OF DEATH around 1422