Career
Barbour's contact with centers of fourteenth-century culture, like Paris and Oxford, and his knowledge of the popular medieval verse epics celebrating the great deeds of past heroes, like Roland and the warriors that fought at Troy, may possibly have stimulated him to emulation. In any case, he found in the recent history of his own nation deeds that in themselves were the equal of any performed around Troy or in the Pyrenees; these were the exploits of Robert Bruce, the leader of the Scottish forces in the long and almost hopeless struggle against the English Plantagenet kings.There were strong heroic elements in the long outlawry of Bruce, an ordeal that was finally rewarded by victory over the English at Bannockburn (1314) and a treaty of peace (1323); Barbour worked these exploits into his most famous poem, Brus (1375). This poem, of 13,500 four-stress lines and twenty books, was an immediate success, and Barbour was awarded an annual pension of twenty shillings in 1378 by Robert II of Scotland. The Brus was probably not Barbour's only poem, however. He may have written a lost poem on the genealogy of the Stuarts, and he is thought to be the author of two other poems, a "Troy" poem of which two fragments exist and a long poem of 33,000 lines, Legends of the Saints. The latter work is based on the Legenda aurea, the famous collection of saints' lives so popular in the Middle Ages, but differs from it in including the lives of two Scottish saints. Barbour is also thought to have put into verse the Gospel story. He died in Aberdeen on Mar. 13, 1395.