Alexander Barclay

Alexander Barclay (?1475-1552) was a Scottish poet and divine.

Overview
Barclaym probably of Scottish birth, was a priest in England. He is remembered for his satirical poem, The Ship of Fools (1509), partly a translation, which is of interest as throwing light on the manners and customs of the times to which it refers. He also translated Sallust's Bellum Jugurthinum, and the Mirrour of Good Manners, from the Italian of Mancini, and wrote five Eclogues. His style is stiff and his verse uninspired.

Section heading
BARCLAY, ALEXANDER (1475?–1552), poet, scholar, and divine, was born about the year 1475. The question whether he was by birth a Scotchman or an Englishman has been abundantly disputed, but there is no evidence to support the latter contention. On the other hand, not only do his baptismal name and the spelling of his surname primâ facie suggest a Scotch origin, but there remains the distinct statement of a contemporary, Dr. William Bulleyn, who lived many years in the northern counties of England, that "Bartley" was "borne beyonde the colde River of Twede." In his Scriptorum Summarium Bale introduces Barclay simply as "Scotus;" and Holinshed, cited by Ritson, likewise calls him a Scot. The Scotchman Dempster also claims him as his countryman (Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Scotorum, i. 106), adding that he lived in England, having been expelled from his native country for the sake of religion; which statement, however, cannot be correct, if Barclay was settled in England by 1508 or earlier, up to which time no religious disputes had occurred in Scotland (Ritson).

Possibly Barclay may have first crossed the border with the view of obtaining a university education in England, according to a practice not unusual among his countrymen even in his day (Irving, 326). He is conjectured to have been a member of Oriel College, Oxford, as it would seem solely on the ground that he afterwards dedicated his chief literary work to Dr. Cornish, bishop of Tyne (suffragan bishop of Bath and Wells), who was provost of Oriel from 1493 to 1507. As a matter of course, we have a suggestion that Cambridge and not Oxford, and a third that Cambridge as well as Oxford, may have been Barclay's university. At the one or the other of the English universities, if not at both, he may be assumed to have studied and to have taken his degrees. In his will he calls himself doctor of divinity, but where and when he took this degree is unknown. Either before or after his university career, while he was still "in youth," he resided at Croydon in Surrey, of which place repeated mention is made in "Eclogue I."

Barclay's student life had, according to his own testimony in the Ship of Fools (sec. "Of unprofytable Stody"), been full of "foly," and it has been supposed that this may have induced him to travel abroad before his entrance into holy orders (Jamieson). The shepherd Cornix, by whom in his Eclogues Barclay evidently, as a rule, designates himself, speaks of Rome, Paris, Lyons, and Florence as towns which he visited among many others, when he saw the world in his youth. In any case his years of travel must have fallen in a most active period of the continental Renascence, when Englishmen were freely gathering in the learning which they were to acclimatise at home.

It is impossible to determine how much of his scholarship Barclay acquired in England. He seems to have had but a slight acquaintance with Greek. Of his knowledge of Latin poets his Eclogues were to furnish ample evidence; of other writers he specially quotes Seneca. But the monument proper of his Latin scholarship is his translation of Sallust's Bellum Jugurthinum’ which he published at some date unknown in obedience to the wish of the Duke of Norfolk. His familiarity with French he showed by composing for publication in 1521, again at the command of the Duke of Norfolk, a tractate Introductory to write and to pronounce Frenche, which is mentioned by Palsgrave in L'Esclaircissement de la langue Françoise, printed in 1530. A copy of Barclay's treatise, probably unique, exists in the Bodleian.

Soon after Barclay's return to England he must have been ordained by Bishop Cornish, through whom he was appointed a priest in the college of Ottery St. Mary, in Devonshire, of which the pluralist bishop held the wardenship from 1490 to 1511. The college of secular priests, of which Barclay was a member, was founded in 1337 by John Grandisson, bishop of Exeter; the manor and hundred had been obtained by him in exchange from the dean and chapter of Rouen, to whom they had been granted by Edward the Confessor. It was here that Barclay, in 1508, accomplished the work to which he owes his chief fame, the English verse translation of the ‘Ship of Fools,’ first published by Pynson in December 1509, with a dedication by the author to Bishop Cornish on the back of the first leaf. In this dedication he speaks of the work as ‘meorum primiciæ laborum quæ in lucem eruperunt,’ but he had previously, in 1506, put forth without his name a book called the Castell of Laboure, a translation from the French poet, best known as a dramatist, Pierre Gringoire's Le Chateau de Labour (1499), a moral allegory which, though of no novel kind, was speedily reprinted by another publisher.

During his residence at Ottery St. Mary Barclay made some other friends and enemies. Among the former was a priest, John "Bishop by name," his obligations to whom he warmly attests in the ‘Ship of Fools’ (sec. "The descripcion of a wyse man"), gravely playing on his name as that of ‘the first ouersear of this warke.’ A certain ‘mayster Kyrkham,’ to whose munificence and condescension he offers a tribute in the same poem (sec. ‘Of the extorcion of Knyghtis’), professing himself, doubtless in a figurative sense only, ‘his chaplayne and bedeman whyle my lyfe shall endure,’ is with much probability supposed to be Sir John Kirkham, high sheriff of Devonshire in the years 1507 and 1523 (see the authorities cited by Jamieson i. xxxvii, and cf. as to the family of Kirkham Lysons, Magna Britannia, part i. ccii–cciii). In the same section of the poem he departs from his general practice of abstaining from personal attacks, in order to inveigh against a fat officer of the law, ‘Mansell of Otery, for powlynge of the pore;’ elsewhere (sec. ‘Inprofytable bokes’) the parsons of ‘Honyngton’ (Honiton) and Clyst are glanced at obliquely as time-serving and sporting clergymen; and to another section (‘Of hym that nought can and nought wyll lerne’) an ‘addicion’ is made for the benefit of eight neighbours of the translator's, secondaries (priest-vicars) of Ottery St. Mary, without whose presence the ‘ship’ would be incomplete.

Barclay's residence in Devonshire may have come to an end with Bishop Cornish's resignation of the wardenship of Ottery St. Mary in 1511, which was followed 2 years later by the bishop's death. Reminiscences of the West occur even in his later poems (‘Bristowe’ in Ecl. iv., ‘the Severn’ in Ecl. ii.); but in the dedication of ‘The Myrrour of Good Maners, translated ‘at the desyre of Syr Gyles Alyngton, Knyght,’ and printed without a date by Pynson ‘at the instance and request’ of Richard, earl of Kent, Barclay calls himself ‘prest: and monke of Ely.’ This Myrrour is a translation from Dominic Mancini's elegiac poem ‘De quatuor Virtutibus’ (1516); and the address prefixed to it contains the interesting statement that Sir Giles Alington had requested Barclay to abridge or adapt Gower's ''Confessio Amantis,’ but that Barclay had declined the undertaking as unsuitable to his age, infirmities, and profession (Warton, iii. 195). The ‘Eclogues,’ the early editions of which are again undated, were manifestly also written at Ely (see in Ecl. iii. the passage on Bishop Alcock, ‘now dead and gone;’ Alcock, the founder of Jesus College, Cambridge, who is also lamented in Ecl. i., died in 1500; and see in Ecl. v. the reference to ‘Cornyx whiche dwelled in the fen,’ and the detailed description of a mural painting in Ely Cathedral). In the introductory lines he states that he was thirty-eight years of age when he resumed a subject at which he had already worked in his youth; and inasmuch as it is clear that at least one event mentioned in the ‘Eclogues,’ the death of Sir Edward Howard (Ecl. iv.) in 1513, could not have occurred long before the allegory concerning it was composed, the above-mentioned statement fixes his birth about the year 1475 (see the argument in Jamieson, i. lv–lxiii, but here the death of Howard is misdated 1514; see Lord Herbert of Cherbury's Life and Reign of Henry VIII, 31). While, then, still in the prime of life, Barclay had taken the vows as a Benedictine monk, and thus enrolled himself in the most conservative and aristocratic of the orders (it is curious that in Ecl. v. he should rather contemptuously introduce ‘a gentell Cluner,’ i.e. Cluniac monk, as a purveyor of charms to women). At Ely he also translated from Baptist Mantuan the ‘Life of St. George,’ which he dedicated to Nicholas West, bishop of Ely (Fairholt); from this translation Mackenzie (ii. 291) quotes some lines in the old fourteen-syllable metre, which are without any striking merit. When certain lives of other saints, said to have been written by Barclay, but all non-extant, were composed, can only be conjectured; the ‘Life of St. Thomas of Canterbury’ is thought by Jamieson to have been written when its author had become a Franciscan at Canterbury; of the ‘Lives of St. Catharine, St. Margaret, and St. Ethelreda,’ the last-named, of course, directly connects itself with Ely.

Under Henry VII, for whom Barclay cherished, or professed to cherish, a deep regard (see Ecl. i.), learning and letters were already coming into fashion, and the early years of Henry VIII were the heyday of the English Renascence. It is therefore not surprising that Barclay, whose efforts as an author began towards the close of the first Tudor reign, and achieved a conspicuous success at the end of the second, should have had a liberal experience of patrons and patronage. He seems to have enjoyed the goodwill of Henry VII's trusted adviser, Cardinal Morton, a prelate of literary tastes (see Eclogues iii. and iv.); but this must have been in the earlier part of his life, as Morton died in 1500. Perhaps, as Archbishop of Canterbury, he had come into some contact with Barclay at Croydon. He was befriended in his maturity by Thomas, duke of Norfolk, the victor of Flodden Field and lord treasurer of England—to whom, as has been seen, he dedicated his translation of the ‘Jugurtha,’ and the memory of whose second son, Sir Edward Howard, he, after the death of the latter off Brest, 25 April 1513, as lord high admiral in the war with France, sang in the graceful eclogue of the ‘Towre of Vertue and Honour,’ introduced into his ‘Ecl. iv.’ Other patrons of his, as has been seen, were Richard, earl of Kent, who died in 1523, and Sir Giles Alington. To another contemporary, of tastes and tendencies similar to his own, he pays in passing a tribute which to its object, Dean Colet, must have seemed the highest that could be received by him. ‘This man,’ we read in ‘Ecl. iv.,’ ‘hath won some soules.’ Little is known as to his relations to Cardinal Wolsey, an allusion to whom has been very unreasonably sought in the mention of ‘butchers dogges wood’ (mad) in the eulogy of Bishop Alcock in ‘Ecl. i.’ On the other hand, Jamieson has directed attention to a letter from Sir Nicholas Vaux to Cardinal Wolsey, dated 10 April 1520, and begging the cardinal to ‘send to them … Maistre Barkleye, the black monke and poete, to devise histoires and convenient raisons to florrishe the buildings and banquet house withal’ at the famous meeting called the Field of the Cloth of Gold (see Calendar of State Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, vol. iii. pt. i. 259). It would probably not have interfered with Barclay's execution of his task had he been the author of a tract against the French king's (query Lewis XII?) oppression of the church, which has been ascribed to him. In the same connection it may be added that a strong antipathy animated Barclay against a prominent contemporary man of letters. Against Skelton, as a wanton and vicious writer, Barclay inveighed with little or no pretence of disguising his attack. At the close of the ‘Ship of Fools’ (sec. ‘A brefe addicion of the syngularyte of some newe Folys’) he alludes with lofty contempt to the author and theme of the ‘Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe,’ a hit very good-humouredly returned, as it seems, by Skelton in his ‘Garlande of Laurell’ (Dyce's Skelton, i. 411–12). Very probably, also, it is in allusion to Skelton that, in his ‘Ecl. iv.,’ Barclay upbraids a ‘poete laureat’ who is a graduate of ‘stinking Thais’ (cf. Dyce, xxxv–xxxvi). But though Skelton paraphrased and presented to Wolsey three portions of Locher's Latin version of the ‘Ship of Fools’ under the title of the ‘Boke of Three Fooles’ (see Dyce, i. 199–205, and cf. ii. 227), neither jealousy nor partisanship, nor even professional feeling is needed in order to explain Barclay's abhorrence of the Bohemian vicar of Diss, with whose motley the sober hue of his own more sedate literary and satirical gifts had so little in common. Bale mentions (Scriptorum Brytanniæ Centuria, ix.) a book by Barclay, ‘Contra Skeltonium,’ which, according to Ritson, ‘was probably in metre, but appears neither to have been printed, nor to be extant in manuscript.’

How Barclay fared at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries we do not know. Some time before this he had left Ely, where he had become a laudator temporis acti, and deprecated the violence which, in contrast with his predecessors, the ‘dredefull Dromo’ used towards his flock (see Ecl. iii. One would be tempted to identify this personage with Thomas Goodrich, bishop of Ely, 1534–54, who ‘reformed’ his see, but that the ‘Eclogue’ must have been written far earlier). At some date unknown he assumed the habit of the more rigorous Franciscan order at Canterbury (Bale, MS. Sloan, cited by Jamieson; cf. Dempster). It is probably a mere coincidence that an Alexander Barclay is mentioned in 1528 as a vehement promoter of the Lutheran reformation and refugee in Germany (see Arber's reprint of Roy and Barlow's Rede me and be nott wrothe, Introduction, 13). The reaction of the last years of Henry VIII's reign was clearly not disadvantageous to Barclay, who was presented, 7 Feb. 1546, by Mr. John Pascal with the vicarage of Great Baddow, in Essex, and 30 March of the same year with the vicarage of Wokey, in Somersetshire.

During the reign of Edward VI, through the greater part of which he survived, he must have acquiesced in the religious changes that seemed good to those in authority; for not only did he hold Great Baddow till his death, but he was in 1552 presented by the dean and chapter of Canterbury to the rectory of All Hallows, Lombard Street, in the city of London. Jamieson has pointed out that Wadding (Scriptores Ordinis Minorum), who promotes Barclay to a suffragan-bishopric of Bath and Wells, probably confounds him with Gilbert Berkeley, who was actually consecrated to that see in 1559, and that the same mistake may be at the bottom of a scandalous anecdote against Barclay related by Bale and repeated by Wood, of which the scene is laid at Wells, ‘before he was Queen Mary's chaplain.’ Queen Mary did not ascend the throne till more than a year after Barclay's death. One is altogether inclined to regard as resting on no better foundation Bale's characteristic assertion that Barclay throughout remained not only ‘ueritatis osor,’ i.e. a Roman catholic at heart, but also ‘sub cœlibatus fuco fœdus adulter.’

A few weeks after his presentation to his city rectory, Barclay died at Croydon, where he had spent some of his younger days. He was buried in the church there on 10 June 1552. Since, as has been seen, he was born about 1475, he had attained to a good old age. In his will, which is extant, he leaves bequests to the poor of Badew and of ‘Owkley’ (Wokey). The other bequests are numerous, but have little significance for posterity; a liberal legacy of 80l. to the poor and other gifts are dependent on the payment of debts owing by one Cutbeard Croke, of Winchester (see Jamieson, i. lxxxvi–lxxxix). Prefixed to Pynson's editions of Barclay's ‘Mirror of Good Manners’ and ‘Sallust’ is a representation of the author in monastic habit presenting a copy of his work to his patron. The face is (at least in the Cambridge ‘Sallust’) interesting; but Jamieson points out that the picture is used for a similar purpose in other publications, so that its chief figure cannot be identified with Barclay.

Even considering the length of his life, Barclay was a very productive writer. No intrinsic importance, however, belongs to any of his minor writings, incidentally mentioned above; in addition to which there has also been attributed to him, on no very satisfactory evidence, the English translation printed by Pynson, as is supposed, between 1520 and 1530, of the travels of Hayton, a Præmonstratensian friar, in the Holy Land and Armenia, originally written in French, and then rendered into Latin by command of Pope Clement V. Warton further mentions, as by Barclay, ‘Orationes variæ’ and a tractate, ‘De fide orthodoxa.’ His literary fame rests on his ‘Ship of Fools,’ and in a less degree on his ‘Eclogues.’ The former of these works remains essentially a translation, though Barclay truly states himself to have added and given an English colouring to his work. It is in any case the most noteworthy translation into a living tongue of a production of very high literary significance. The ‘Narrenschiff’ of Sebastian Brant was published at Basel in 1494, and its immediate popularity is attested by the appearance of three unauthorised reprints in the course of the same year. A Low-German translation was published probably as early as 1497, and in the same year Jacob Locher produced his celebrated Latin version, the ‘Stultifera Navis.’ On this Barclay's translation was founded. He professes, indeed, to have ‘ouersene the fyrst inuention in Doche, and after that the two translations in Laten and Frenche’ (see the Prologe of James Locher in Jamieson, i. 9; the French translation was probably that of Pierre Rivière of Poitiers, whose original was Locher, and whom, in 1498, Jehan Droyn paraphrased into prose). But at the conclusion of the argument (Jamieson, i. 18) Barclay directly refers to certain verses by Locher as those of his ‘Actour,’ or original; and the order of the sections, as well as the additions made to the original German text, generally correspond to those in Locher's Latin version of 1497. Even the preliminary stanzas, headed ‘Alexander Barclay excusynge the rudenes of his translacion,’ correspond to the ‘Excusatio Jacobi Locher,’ whereas Brant's ‘Entschuldigung’ occurs near the end of the German book. Curiously enough, however, the poem of Robert Gaguin, of which Barclay inserted a version near the end of his work, had made its appearance, not in Locher's Latin translation, but in that of Jodocus Badius Ascensius (1505). On the other hand, the woodcuts of Barclay's translation are copied from the original Basel edition, for which it has been supposed that these illustrations, that contributed not a little to the popularity of the satire, were invented by Sebastian Brant himself (see Zarncke, 234 seq.)

Barclay's ‘additions’ are mostly of a personal or patriotic nature; but he also indulges in an outburst against French fashions in dress (sec. ‘Of newe fassions and disgised garmentes’), indites a prolonged lament, the refrain of which suggests a French origin, on the vanity of human greatness (sec. ‘Of the ende of worldly honour and power,’ &c.), and makes a noteworthy onslaught upon the false religious (this is the substance of his ‘brefe addicion of the syngularite of some newe Folys’). The ballad in honour of the Blessed Virgin, which concludes his work, seems also to be his own. As to his general execution of his task, he on the whole manages his seven-line stanza not unskilfully, and thus invests his translation with a degree of dignity wanting to the original. Like Brant, he never forgets his character as a plain moral teacher. He is loyal and orthodox, and follows his original in lamenting both the decay of the holy faith catholic and the diminution of the empire, and in denouncing the Bohemian heretics, together with the Jews and the Turks. The English ‘Ship of Fools’ exercised an important direct influence upon our literature, pre-eminently helping to bury mediæval allegory in the grave which had long yawned before it, and to direct English authorship into the drama, essay, and novel of character.

Barclay's ‘Eclogues’ (or ‘Egloges,’ as they were first called in deference to a ridiculous etymology) were the first poetical efforts of the kind that appeared in English proper; in Scotland, as Sibbald points out, they had been preceded by Henryson's charming ‘Robene and Makyne’ (dated about 1406 by H. Morley). The earliest modern bucolics were Petrarch's, composed about 1350, but these are in Latin. Barclay's more immediate predecessor, and one of his chief models, was Baptist Mantuan, whose eclogues appeared about 1400; and before the close of the century the ‘Bucolics’ of Virgil had been translated into Italian by several poets. The first three of Barclay's ‘Eclogues’ are, however, adaptations from the very popular ‘Miseriæ Curialium’ of Æneas Sylvius (Piccolomini, 1405–64). The theme was one familiar enough to the Renascence age, and its echoes are still heard in our own literature in the poetry of Spenser. Though Barclay's execution is as rude as his manner is prosy, his very realistic complaints furnish a very lively picture of contemporary manners: thus, Ecl. iii., which was probably known to Spenser, and perhaps to Milton, introduces an excellent description of an inn; but a more famous passage in this ‘pastoral’ is the eulogy of Bishop Alcock. Eclogues iv. and v. are imitations of the fifth and sixth of Mantuan. Into Ecl. iv., which treats of the neglect of poets by rich men, is introduced the allegory already mentioned in honour of Sir Edward Howard; the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Shrewsbury, and King Henry VIII appear among the inhabitants of the Tower of Virtue and Honour. The effort is as well sustained as any that remains from Barclay's hand. The whole poem has a touch of bitterness resem- bling that in the October eclogue of the ‘Shepherd's Calendar.’ Ecl. vi., under the title of the ‘Cytezen and Uplondyshman,’ treats the familiar theme of the relative advantages and disadvantages of town and country, here discussed by two shepherds warming themselves in the straw at night. After Amyntas has related the curious and pathetic tale of ‘Cornix’ concerning the unequal distribution among Eve's children of the honours and the burdens of life, Faustus defends the shepherd's estate by dwelling on its representatives from Abel to Christ. In the entertaining colloquy which follows, the town has decidedly the worse of the dispute, though the author is man of the world enough to mingle a little satire in his praise of rustic simplicity.

The following list of Barclay's extant works is abridged from Jamieson, i. xcvii–cix. The doubtful works are queried. Bale's list is incomplete, as is that of Pits. Dempster's and Warton's include several works, already mentioned, which have been attributed to Barclay, but are not extant. 1. ‘The Castell of Laboure,’ Wynkyn de Worde, 1506; Pynson, n. d. 2. ‘The Shyp of Folys of the Worlde,’ Pynson, 1509; Cawood, 1570, &c. &c. 3. ‘The Egloges of Alexander Barclay, Prest,’ n. d.; John Herforde, n. d.; Humfrey Powell, n. d.; Ecl. iv. Pynson, n. d.; Ecl. v. Wynkyn de Worde, n. d., &c.; Powell's edition is in the Cambridge University Library. 4. ‘The Introductory to write and to pronounce Frenche,’ Coplande, 1521. 5. ‘The Myrrour of Good Maners,’ Pynson, n. d.; Cawood, 1570. 6. ‘Cronycle compiled in Latyn, by the renowned Sallust,’ Pynson, n. d.; Waley, 1557; Pynson's edition is in the Cambridge University Library. 7. ? ‘Alex. Barclay, his Figure of our Mother Holy Church oppressed by the Frenche King,’ Pynson, n. d. 8. ‘The Lyfe of the Glorious Martyr saynt George, translated by Alexander Barclay, while he was a monk of Ely,’ Pynson, n. d. 9. ? ‘The Lyfe of saynte Thomas,’ Pynson, n. d. 10. ? ‘Haython's Cronycle,’ Pynson, n. d.