Bannatyne Manuscript

The Bannatyne Manuscript is an anthology of literature compiled in Scotland in the sixteenth century. It is an important source for the Scots poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The manuscript contains texts of the poems of the great makars, many anonymous Scots pieces and works by medieval English poets.

It was collected by the Edinburgh merchant George Bannatyne who also included some of his own writing.

According to the text of the manuscript itself, it represents;

A note in the manuscript records that it was presented by William Foulis of Woodhall, a descendant of Bannatyne, to William Carmichael of Skirling in 1712.

In the early Eighteenth Century, Allan Ramsay reproduced pieces from the manuscript in his compilation The Ever Green between 1724 and 1727.

The manuscript was acquired by the Advocates' Library of Edinburgh in 1772.

Walter Scott took an interest in the document and participated in an eponymous club dedicated to the study and publication of historic Scots literature. The first printed transcript of the manuscript was published by the Bannatyne Club, in three volumes, between 1827 and 1855.

The Hunterian Club published a new transcript in 1896.

The manuscript is now held by The National Library of Scotland with the catalogue number "Adv. MS. 1.1.6".

The Bannatyne Manuscript was divided by its compiler into five principal sections. It also contains a series of unclassified appendices which were partly written by scribes other than Bannatyne himself.

The first section contains pieces with a religious theme. Many predate the Reformation.

It includes Robert Henryson's "Ane Prayer for the Pest", Alexander Scott's translations of the first and fifty-first psalms, William Dunbar's "The Tabill Of Confessioun", "Rorate Celi Desuper" and "Done Is A Battell On The Dragon Blak" and John Lydgate's "O Creaturis Creat Of Me Your Creator."

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