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Detail from verso of fragment. Click for full image.
Detail from verso of fragment. Click for full image.

Sir Richard Holland (fl. 1450)
The buke of the howlat
[Edinburgh: W. Chepman and A. Myllar, 1508?]
Sel.1.19(1)


Digital images of the fragment

[Image of fragment: recto]
[Image of fragment: verso]

This small fragment from the binding of a sixteenth-century book is a unique survival of one the earliest examples of Scottish printing. Another fragment from the bottom of the same leaf is held by Dundee City Archives. Together, they make up all that remains of the edition of Richard Holland's Buke of the howlat [Book of the owl] printed by Walter Chepman and Androw Myllar in Edinburgh in 1508. Little is known about Holland, a Scottish priest, who composed the alliterative work around 1448 at Darnaway Castle. Like Chaucer's Parliament of fowls, the poem is a bird allegory: the owl, unhappy with his appearance, appeals to the pope of birds, the peacock, to be made more fair. At Dame Nature's suggestion, every bird gives the owl a feather, but the owl becomes so full of pride at his new appearance that the other birds complain to Nature, who despoils him of his borrowed plumage. The poem is dedicated to Elizabeth Dunbar, the countess of Moray, who was married to Archibald Douglas, and includes a long digression on the House of Douglas. It is preserved in its entirety in two later sixteenth-century manuscript collections, the famous Asloan and Bannatyne manuscripts. The text of the fragment is closer to that of the Asloan manuscript.

Detail from Chepman's device
Detail from Myllar's device
Details from Chepman & Myllar's devices. Click for full image.
2008 is the anniversary of 500 years of printing in Scotland. In September 1507 James IV issued a licence to Chepman and Myllar for a printing press in Edinburgh; their earliest known work is an edition of John Lydgate's The complaint of the black knight, printed on 4 April 1508 in what is now the Cowgate. This forms part of The Chepman & Myllar Prints—nine of the earliest works printed in Scotland, in or about 1508, and now surviving only in the copies held at the National Library of Scotland, including poems by the medieval Scottish poets Robert Henryson and William Dunbar.

The type used for The buke of the howlat is the same as that used throughout The Chepman & Myllar Prints, hence the work has been dated to the same year. It was also used by Chepman and Myllar for a folio edition of Blind Hary's Wallace, surviving in fragments at Cambridge University Library (Syn.3.50.3) and the Mitchell Library in Glasgow.

The Cambridge University Library fragment of The buke of the howlat comprises stanzas XLII–XLVII, lines 535–599 of the poem, and is the first item in one of three portfolios of fragments and printing specimens formerly owned by the Edinburgh antiquarian and librarian David Laing (1793–1878), and subsequently belonging to William Spooner Brough, J.P., of Leek, Staffs. (d. 1917) (classmark Sel.1.19–21). They were bought by the Library from his nephew H.H. Brindley, M.A., of St. John’s College, on 19 April 1920, along with separate fragments now held in the Manuscripts Department at MS Add. 6221. Other fragments in this portfolio include part of a leaf from the Nuremberg Chronicle and Henryson's Testament of Cresseid from the edition of Chaucer's works printed by Thomas Godfray in 1532.

Laing, who was particulary interested in Scottish history and literature, joined his father's publishing and bookselling business in 1806 at the age of thirteen and became a partner in 1821. He recovered the fragment from the binding of an early protocol book written in the year 1529 or 1530, along with other fragments almost destroyed by damp, now preserved in Dundee City Archives (Laing, 1867, p. 15). From the size of the fragment, we can tell that the complete poem must have been printed as a small quarto with around thirty lines of type to the page and sixteen leaves in total; it may, of course, have been part of a longer book with more than one poem (Beattie, 1946, p. 396). Laing had published an edition of the poem from the manuscripts in 1823 for the Bannatyne Club, which had been founded that year by Sir Walter Scott for the purpose of publishing unprinted or out-of-print works relating to the history and literature of Scotland. Laing was the first and only secretary of the club, which was dissolved in 1861. In 1824 he was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and in 1837 was appointed librarian to the Society of Writers to H. M. Signet. He edited numerous works for both the Bannatyne Club and the Society of Antiquaries, amongst others. By the time of his death, he had also built up a large personal library of books and manuscripts which was sold at auction by Sotheby's between 1 December 1879 and 24 February 1881.

Detail from the title page of Laing's edition for the Bannatyne Club, 1823
Detail from the title page of Laing's edition for the Bannatyne Club, 1823. S474.b.82.5. Click for full page.
Opening stanza from Laing's edition for the Bannatyne Club, 1823
Opening stanza from Laing's edition for the Bannatyne Club, 1823. S474.b.82.5. Click for full page.


References and further reading:

  • W. Beattie, 'An early printed fragment of the "Buke of the howlat"', Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions, II (1946), 393–397; Robert Donaldson, 'Addendum', V (1980–1983), 25–28. P850.b.41
  • Catalogue of the first[–fourth] portion of the extensive and valuable library of the late David Laing, Esq. ... which will be sold by auction by Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge ... on ... 1st December, 1879, etc. (London, [1879–1881]) 8880.c.348
  • Arthur Diebler (ed.), Holland’s Buke of the houlate: published from the Bannatyne MS. with studies in the plot, age and structure of the poem ( Leipzig : O.R. Reisland, 1893). U.28.108
  • C. Edington, ‘Holland, Richard (d. in or after 1483)’, Oxford dictionary of national biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/13537 (accessed 1 April 2008)
  • [David Laing, ed.], The buke of the howlat (Edinburgh: Printed at Edinburgh [by James Ballantyne and Co.], 1823). S474.b.82.5
  • [David Laing, ed.], The knightly tale of Golagrus and Gawane, and other ancient poems : printed at Edinburgh by W. Chepman and A. Myllar in the year M.D.VIIJ ([Edinburgh: J. Ballantyne & Co.], 1827) Syn.4.82.1
  • [David Laing], 'Sir Richard de Holande', in Adversaria: notices illustrative of some of the earlier works printed for the Bannatyne Club (Edinburgh, 1867), pp. 11–16. S474.b.82.151
  • National Library of Scotland, First Scottish books (2006) http://www.nls.uk/firstscottishbooks/index.html (accessed 31 March 2008)
  • Murray C. T. Simpson, 'Laing, David (1793–1878)', Oxford dictionary of national biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/15886 (accessed 31 March 2008)
  • George Stevenson and Henry William Meikle (eds.), Pieces from the Makculloch and the Gray mss., together with the Chepman and Myllar prints (Edinburgh and London: Printed for the Society by W. Blackwood and Sons, 1918), Scottish Text Society Publications, 65. 759.c.9.51

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