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Clan Donald Magazine Online Edition
Clan Donald Symposium: The Legacy
of the Lords of the Isles
The Red Book and Black Book of
Clanranald by Professor William Gillies, University of Edinburgh
Following his presentation to
the Clan Donald Symposium held at the end of the Chiefs' Hosted Tour
of 2006, Prof Willie Gillies has prepared a paper.
 Given the deliberate and
systematic destruction, in the troubled years following the
forfeiture of the Lordship in 1493, of much of the physical heritage
of the Lordship of the Isles, and the dismemberment of the territory
which had previously been ruled and administered by the Lords of the
Isles, their cultural legacy, a tradition of literacy and written
literature, becomes especially important to the modern student.
Without the testimony of the written word it would be hard to
demonstrate the self-confident, widely connected, well-ordered
culture which is tantalisingly hinted at by the architectural
remains and monumental sculpture. This written record consists
partly of the charters and acts of the Lords of the Isles, which
have been well edited and annotated by Jean and R. W. Munro, and
partly of the literary productions of their learned poets and
historians, a small but significant portion of which have survived
in manuscript form. Although the Red Book and the Black Book were
written long after the disappearance of the Lordship, they are part
of a literary tradition that began centuries earlier, and they
contain material which was certainly composed and put into written
form well within the period of the Lordship.
If we start by asking simply what the Red Book and the Black Book
are, they are paper manuscripts written at the beginning of the
eighteenth century by members of the aristocracy of Gaelic letters �
the professional literati who served as poets and historians to the
old Highland nobility. They were written in the Gaelic script and
used a conservative form of the Gaelic language, a literary dialect
which we call �Classical Gaelic�, and which was used as a lingua
franca by the literati � and to a certain extent by their patrons �
at a time when the vernacular Gaelic dialects of Ireland and
Scotland were becoming ever more divergent. Neither manuscript is
physically imposing, but both contain matter of unique interest and
importance to Gaelic literature and to Clan Donald.
More specifically, the Red Book was compiled by Niall MacMhuirich, a
member of the learned family that had provided generations of poets
and chroniclers to the Clan Donald and Clanranald chiefs, and
resided in South Uist. His hand is recognisable from a number of MSS
he wrote, and his signature is visible on p. 311 of the MS. The
Black Book was compiled by several hands, most importantly by
Christopher Beaton, a member of another famous Gaelic learned family
� one that had provided medical services to the Macleans and several
other Gaelic ruling families, but which also included a number of
members who joined other professions, including the Church and
literature. Christopher may have been employed as a tutor, or
similar, in a family of the Antrim branch of the Clan Donald.
Although Christopher does not sign his name in the Black Book his
handwriting is distinctive, and was positively identified by John
Bannerman some years ago.
It is appropriate to add a word here about Gaelic manuscripts in
general. The earliest surviving Gaelic writings are found in glosses
and commentaries on Latin biblical and exegetical texts from the
seventh and eighth century AD. There are strong indications that
poetry and tales, laws and genealogies and other forms of Gaelic
literature began to be written down at around those times, probably
in a monastic context. No such Gaelic writings have survived
directly from the heyday of the great illuminated Gospel Books of
the pre-Viking era; but copies of all these categories of native
literature can be found in MSS belonging to a later phase of
creative, editorial and antiquarian activity in the late eleventh
and twelfth centuries. Literature collected in these MSS belongs to
the Old and Middle Gaelic (or Irish) period.
While literary activity up to this point had been closely associated
with the monasteries, which had also functioned as centres of
artistic patronage with strong lay connections, Church reforms and
the introduction of the Continental monastic orders in the Norman
period led to a split between ecclesiastical and literary culture,
and a system of laicised learned families sprang up, under the
secular patronage of kings and lords rather than abbots and bishops.
Bardic, medical and legal schools sprang up to cater for the new
scholarly classes, which were marked by a strong sense of
professional cohesiveness and united by their cultivation of Gaelic
literacy. This system survived and enjoyed a mutually supportive,
even symbiotic relationship with the aristocracy in Gaelic Ireland
and Scotland until the Tudor and Stewart re-conquest of Ireland and
the gradual decline of aristocratic patronage of Gaelic arts in
Scotland, which took place mostly in the seventeenth century. The
intervening period, from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, is
known by scholars as the �Classical� or Early Modern period of
Gaelic literature and language.
The Gaelic learned poets, genealogists, lawyers and doctors were all
dependent on writing and manuscripts in one way or another, though
there was an oral dimension in all their professions. The
manuscripts themselves were initially made of vellum, though paper
came in to use from the sixteenth century and gradually took over
from vellum as the preferred medium. Some MSS contained
illustrations and decorated or illuminated characters for headwords
and initial capitals, but many were thoroughly workaday in
character. The manuscript hand was at all times a development from
the Hiberno-Saxon minuscule hand seen in the 9th-century Book of
Kells and in modern �Celtic� alphabets. Despite some scribes�
indulgence in the use of contractions, Gaelic MSS are in general
very easy to read, since the Gaelic hand (known as corr-litir, or
�pointy letter�) could be written quickly without recourse to
cursive or long-hand versions.
In terms of bulk the great majority of Gaelic MSS were written, and
still reside, in Ireland; but a healthy minority are of Scottish
provenance or domicile. Some (e.g. literary or devotional) were held
by the aristocratic patrons, others (including medical and legal
MSS) by the professionals themselves. Many were lost in the general
destruction of native Gaelic society in Ireland and in its decline
in Scotland; but some of the more prestigious MSS excited the
interest of English bibliophiles, and found their way from such
collectors� libraries into the British Museum, the Bodleian Library
at Oxford, or the Library of Trinity College, Dublin. Others were
taken overseas by Gaelic emigrants at the same difficult time, which
explains the presence of Gaelic MS collections in such centres of
learning as Copenhagen, Brussels or Paris. From the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century on there was increased appreciation for
such matters in Ireland, which led to the building up of the
collections of the Royal Irish Academy and, more recently, the
National Library of Ireland. In Scotland, the Ossianic controversy
created a sudden surge of interest in Gaelic MSS and Gaelic
literature from the 1760s on. Out of this interest came the
scholarly work of collecting and studying Gaelic MSS, the main
repository for which nowadays is the National Library of Scotland.
Within this framework, the history of the Red Book or Leabhar Dearg
(hereafter RB) and the Black Book or Leabhar Dubh (hereafter BB) was
fairly typical. RB was one of the MSS procured by James �Ossian�
MacPherson when he toured the Highlands in 1760 searching for MS
sources for Gaelic poetry to vindicate his claims as to the
authenticity of his Ossianic poems in the face of those who, like Dr
Samuel Johnson, claimed that the poems were bogus because no Gaelic
�originals� could be produced. When MacPherson�s party reached South
Uist they called on Clanranald, who sent him to meet his bard,
another Niall MacMhuirich who was actually the grandson of the
author of the Red Book. According to South Uist folklore, the Book
was handed over as a loan, and the family�s fortunes started to ebb
when their Book was not returned. At all events, the MSS collected
by MacPherson were famously deposited with his publishers in London
to be inspected by doubters like Dr Johnson. There RB remained until
MacPherson�s death, when it was passed to the Highland Society of
Scotland�s committee of enquiry into the authenticity of Ossian.
There may have been some sense that the Red Book was indeed on loan,
because it was eventually returned to Clanranald.
The early history of BB is less clear. Having been separated at an
unknown date from its presumed original locus in Antrim, it surfaced
in a Dublin bookstall around 1840, where it was identified and
bought by the Scottish historian William Forbes Skene. In 1892,
shortly before his death, Skene, knowing that the RB was in
Clanranald�s possession, sent him BB, presumably believing that the
two belonged together. Both were given to the nation in 1944 by the
then Clanranald, Angus Roderick, along with a collection of Jacobite
memorabilia. That is why RB and BB are in the custody of the Royal
Museum of Scotland and not in the National Library of Scotland.
As to their names, the �Red Book� is really a misnomer. Gaelic
tradition in South Uist associated a �Red Book of MacMhuirich� with
the famous poetic family, and people have assumed that the surviving
MS was the �Red Book� because some of its contents sound a bit like
the reputed contents of the �Red Book� of tradition. But it is not
red, nor is it as grand as the title suggests. Its central text, the
Clanranald History, contains evidence for copying from another,
perhaps more imposing MS; and this may have been the �real� Red
Book; but the whole idea of a �Red Book of Clanranald� may be a
fiction. The �Black Book� has no better authority: it seems to have
got its name partly to distinguish it from the �Red Book�, and
partly because it has a black cover and contains Clanranald material
(amongst much else). I shall, however, continue to call them by
their traditional names: the Red Book and the Black Book of
Clanranald.
Both RB and BB contain versions of the famous Clanranald History, of
which more in a moment. There is a direct relationship between RB�s
and BB�s version, inasmuch as we can see Christopher Beaton�s
distinctive hand correcting Niall MacMhuirich�s text in a couple of
places (e.g. at RB, p. 179). Clearly, Niall�s text is the
�original�, and Christopher was making a copy of it for his own use.
It is important to establish this fact, because the two texts differ
in other ways, and the textual evidence permits us to say with
certainty that Christopher was making the omissions and additions,
and not the other way round. Unfortunately, that fact was not
recognised by the editors of the text presented in Reliquiae
Celticae, which is one of the reasons why a new edition of the
Clanranald History is a desideratum. My forthcoming edition attempts
to fill the gap, presenting the History as Niall gave it to us in RB.
When talking about Gaelic MSS it is useful to make a distinction
between those made for the use of the patrons, i.e. the chiefs and
their families, and those made for the literati themselves, i.e. the
poets, historians, medics, lawyers, genealogists and so on. An
example of the former sort is the duanaire or �poem-book�, which I
like to characterise as the verbal equivalent of the family
portraits adorning the main stair or public rooms in a Scottish �big
house�. One of the duties of the professional poet would have been
to collect the eulogies and elegies which commemorated the major
life events and the deaths of the chiefs and their immediate family
� including the poet�s own compositions � and put them into the
duanaire. A number of these poem-books survive, mostly from Gaelic
Ireland. Distinct from these are the �professional� sort of
manuscript, which were kept for their own use by the literati. There
could be overlaps in content, of course; but this sort of MS can be
much more miscellaneous in content, reflecting the variety of
professional and informal literary activities which their owners
engaged in.
Although the Clanranald History as we have it (in BB only, since the
first pages of RB are lost) lacks a formal preamble giving its
author�s purpose and intended audience, it was obviously of prime
interest to members of the Clanranald family. Nevertheless, its
present setting, in RB and BB, is less public. Both MSS contain a
great deal of material in addition to the History, though the
History is the largest and most central item in RB at least. I have
suggested elsewhere that it looks as though the History as we have
it is a working version, in a dynamic state. At all events, the
Books of Clanranald as we have them must both be placed amongst the
�professional� rather than the �official� class of manuscripts. As
such, however, they provide a wonderful window into the life and
work of the Classical poet-historians, and of the scholastic
literary culture in the Highlands before the demise of patronage of
the Gaelic arts. In a sense, the most surprising thing is that this
culture survived so late in these branches of the Clan Donald.
RB is now, as I say, acephalous. However, we can work out from the
pagination and size of script that it must have begun with the
Clanranald History (CRH) pretty much as we find it in BB. CRH is to
be taken � or so I argue in my forthcoming edition � as an
innovative synthesis of a number of types of pre-existing source
material and literary genres. The most important of these sources
were (1) the genealogically motivated mythical pre-history of the
Gaels, as taught by the bardic poets and used in their verse; (2)
annalistically based chronicles of the Lordship of the Isles; (3)
similarly based materials for the history of Clanranald; (4) bardic
poems about members of the family, and (4) oral accounts of
seventeenth-century happenings, notably the Highland campaigns of
Montrose and Alasdair mac Colla Ciotaich (�Alexander son of Colkitto�).
Part of the innovative side of Niall�s CRH was the inter-weaving of
poetry and prose. Interestingly, Christopher excised the poems; but
I have argued that they can be seen as integral to Niall�s
�project�, and need to be read as validating the prose narrative. In
addition to CRH, RB has sections containing historical and
genealogical material that could have been included in CRH but was
not so included. I have taken these additional items as indicative
of (1) the dynamic or inchoate nature of the text as we have it, and
(2) the categories of source material used by Niall in compiling CRH.
There are questions as to whether some parts of the History were
already created before Niall got to work; but his creative input to
all sections can be taken as read. Then there is Classical poetry
composed by Niall and other bardic poets, of which two sorts deserve
special mention here (1) courtly love poems, a genre that blended
the conventions of European amour courtois with those of Gaelic
praise-poetry; and (2) poetry belonging to the genre called
iomarbh�gh or �poetic disputation�, a type of poetry which seems to
have blossomed towards the end of the Classical period, in which a
number of poets engage in learned controversy over such matters as
genealogical claims, as a means of keeping their literary,
linguistic and metrical skills honed at a time when bardic schools
were being disbanded. There are also a number of pages which Niall
left blank in RB, into which a later hand added further bardic
poems, including poetry composed by Niall himself. It has been
suggested by Ronald Black that this hand belonged to Niall�s son
Lachlann.
BB is much more miscellaneous in character. It contains Irish poetry
of various sorts, historical notes and accounts in English, and what
I have called �a variety of geographical, computistic and
calendrical lore and learning�. At least two other scribes have
contributed significant amounts of writing to the MS. The CRH falls
in a section all copied by Christopher Beaton and marked off by him
as distinct by means of ink lines drawn round the margins of each
page to create a �box� for the text. In addition to CRH this section
contains some further material copied from RB, plus some that may
have been contained in a lost section at the end of RB. When studied
in conjunction with RB, BB is revealing in regard to the
relationship between Niall and Christopher: Christopher copies with
great accuracy, on the whole; but one can occasionally see him
becoming exasperated by the chattiness that sometimes creeps into
Niall�s narrative, or substituting material with a more southerly
interest where Niall�s Clanranald base has led him to give a more
northerly orientation to his picture. His attitude to Niall�s text
consequently ranges between reverential and familiar. His decision
to eliminate Niall�s poetical interludes, for instance, was a
serious intervention; conceivably, he felt they were an
inappropriate experiment.
We may turn finally to the evidence our manuscripts contribute to
the theme of the present conference: the �legacy� of the Lordship of
the Isles. When the Sleat Shennachie, describing the seating of the
magnates of the Isles at Donald Ballach�s banquet at Aros, tells how
the physician Beaton and the poet MacMhuirich were asked to take
their seats before Maclean, MacLeod, MacNeill and all the other
assembled chiefs, we capture a glimpse of the prestige accorded to
the learned poet (archipoeta in the 1485 charter of Alexander, son
of John of the Isles) in earlier times. The 17th-century vernacular
poetry of the Blind Harper and Mary MacLeod gives us a poignant
reminder of what it felt like to be present in a traditionally
bountiful centre like Dunvegan at the time when a new chief was
espousing new sorts of culture and entertainment, and turning his
back on old customs and preferences. The free or subsidised living
which Mac Mhic Ailein was continuing to offer his �Chronologer and
Poet Laureat� right down to the �Forty-five and beyond was pretty
exceptional.
The surviving MSS written or owned by the MacMhuirichs and the
poetic compositions attributed to them, scattered between Scottish
and Irish libraries, are the visible remnant of the literary
activities that they supplied in return for that free living and
honoured position during the Classical period. The earliest
surviving MacMhuirich MSS are those associated with Cathal
MacMhuirich, who flourished in the first half of the seventeenth
century. But we cannot doubt that there were earlier such
manuscripts, now lost. In the same way that the early
sixteenth-century Book of the Dean of Lismore contains both
contemporary compositions by Eoin MacMhuirich and poems ascribed to
the much earlier figure of Muireadhach � D�laigh, the eponymous
ancestor of the MacMhuirichs, so RB contains verse composed by
recent MacMhuirich bards, including our Niall himself, but also
material composed much earlier for the fifteenth-century John, Lord
of the Isles.
There is also an indirect aspect of the legacy. The Lordship of the
Isles sections of the CRH clearly preserve echoes of chronicles or
annals composed during the period of the Lordship. Although there
are unanswered questions about the compilation and transmission of
such sources, I have suggested that they were most likely kept in a
monastic setting at Iona. If that is correct, we have testimony to
another humane side of the activities of the Lords of the Isles,
namely their patronage of the Church, and also evidence for the
cultivation of Gaelic literacy therein.
In conclusion, I have remarked that RB and BB are physically
unimposing. They are actually pocket-sized, and lack illumination or
decoration. There are strong suggestions that both were the
work-books of working men. But by that very token they capture both
the creative and the transmissional aspects of the life of the
Gaelic literati, and similarly both the inter-poet and the
poet-patron dimensions of their existence. As such they deserve an
honoured place in the Clan Donald heritage and in the history of
Gaelic Scotland in the late Middle Ages.
WG
August 2006
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