When the poem becomes the history ....... stories of Robert the Bruce ... today

This is one I shall listen to today. 

Penny of Robert the Bruce, circa 1320s

On BBC Radio 4 in the series In Our Time, Barbour's Brus': epic of Bannockburn, chivalry and freedom

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss John Barbour's epic poem The Brus, or Bruce, which he wrote c1375. The Brus is the earliest surviving poem in Older Scots and the only source of many of the stories of King Robert I of Scotland (1274-1329), popularly known as Robert the Bruce, and his victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314. 

In almost 14,000 lines of rhyming couplets, Barbour distilled the aspects of the Bruce’s history most relevant for his own time under Robert II (1316-1390), the Bruce's grandson and the first of the Stewart kings, when the mood was for a new war against England after decades of military disasters. 

Barbour’s battle scenes are meant to stir in the name of freedom, and the effect of the whole is to assert Scotland as the rightful equal of any power in Europe.

With Rhiannon Purdie, Professor of English and Older Scots at the University of St Andrews, Steve Boardman, Professor of Medieval Scottish History at the University of Edinburh and Michael Brown, Professor of Scottish History at the University of St Andrews, Producer: Simon Tillotson"*

Location; BBC Radio 4

Pictures; Penny of Robert the Bruce, Museums Liverpool , Heather Beeton

*Barbour's 'Brus': epic of Bannockburn, chivalry and freedom, BBC Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002dpm8