Excerpt from The Brus: From a Collation of the Cambridge and Edinburgh Manuscripts It is certain that, at the period of these safe conducts, the Archdeacon of Aberdeen was not a mere youth, promoted prematurely to an ecclesi astical office while incapable of discharging its duties. In 1357, the year of the earliest of his passports, John, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, was named by the Bishop of his diocese one of his three proxies to attend that im portant national Council, which voted the large funds for the ransom of David from his English prison. Degrees We must conclude, then, that in 1357, John Barbour, a Seotchman of no noble family, holding a dignity and judicial office in the Church, and attending Parliament as a proxy for his Bishop, was a man of mature age; and yet he appears then to have begun, and to have continued for eleven years, a course of study in foreign uni versities, - an advantage which his own country could not yet afl'ord him. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.