John Barbour

John Barbour (died 1395) was a Scottish poet and churchman, the earliest Scottish writer whose work survives in bulk. He was archdeacon of Aberdeen from about 1357, studied at Oxford and Paris under safe-conducts from the English king, and served Robert II as a clerk of audit and auditor of the exchequer, receiving a pension for life. His one surviving work, The Bruce, composed around 1375 in some thirteen thousand lines of Scots verse, tells the story of Robert Bruce and James Douglas and the war of independence, and contains the famous lines in praise of freedom. Other works attributed to him are lost.