The ancient Scottish Borders trio blessed with genius

I can only plead justification because that’s how the area’s history developed. I still have the later Wars of Independence and other conflicts with England, the Debatable Lands, clan wars and the Borders Reivers to come and they aren’t exactly bloodless tales.

I have shown what an impact the building of castles, the establishment of burghs and especially the creation of religious institutions such as the great abbeys had on the economic development of the Borders. But there was also progress in culture and education, led by the abbeys, so that in the 13th century in particular, the Borders was probably the most culturally advanced part of Scotland.

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For in that century the Borders produced three men of international renown, one a poet and prophet, another a world-class scholar with an extraordinary reputation and the third a philosopher whose thinking is still influential today – and he looks likely to be declared a saint, too.

Michael Scot, Thomas the Rhymer and Blessed John Duns Scotus were a trio blessed with genius. I will deal with each of them in chronological order of their birth for even after long periods of studying them over the years, I still cannot rank them in order of importance. I just like to think they exhibited their own impressive but different types of intellect.

I have written before about Michael Scot and summed him up as “a real man of genius who served Popes and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the early 13th century”.

“He was a polymath, a translator, and both an astronomer and astrologer at a time when these disciplines were combined, while his studies of alchemy gained him the reputation of being a wizard.”

We do not know the date of Scot’s birth or where he was born. It is presumed he was born around 1175 somewhere on the Scottish side of the Border, for he was long known as Scotus and he never disputed the name.

The earliest known surviving biographical material about Scot was by the Italian abbot Bernardino Baldi, who wrote “De le vite de Matematici” (Of the Lives of the Mathematicians) which included this brief biography: “Michele Scoto, that is Michael the Scot, was a Judicial Astrologer, in which profession he served the Emperor Frederick II.

“Some say he was a magician, and tell how he used to cause fetch on occasion, by magic art, from the kitchen of great Princes whatever he needed for his table. He died from the blow of a stone falling on his head, having already foreseen that such would be the manner of his end.”

We know Scot was educated at Durham before studying at Oxford University and then moving to Paris, suggesting that he came from a family of standing for such an education cost a lot of money in those times.

Scot began to become famous for his scholarship and was nicknamed Master Mathematicus before he began to study theology, being ordained a priest not long afterwards. At Palermo on Sicily, Scot became tutor to the young Emperor Frederick II and the two developed a lifelong relationship.

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Fluent in Latin and Greek as well as speaking French and Italian, Scot went to Toledo in Spain to learn Arabic and begin what became the work for which he is most noted – translating Arabic works about Aristotle.

As I previously wrote: “To put that achievement in context, the works of the great Greek philosopher had been ‘lost’ to the western world for centuries, but they had been preserved in Arabic literature with commentaries by Muslim philosophers such as Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd).”

Frederick II called Scot to his court, where he became renowned as the leading intellectual of the age in Europe. He learned astrology and began experiments in alchemy, and while there he worked with the great Italian mathematician Fibonacci, he of the eponymous Sequence, who dedicated a book to Scot.

The Borderer publish his own scientific works on various subjects including astrology. He wrote: “Here beginneth the preface of the Liber Introductorius which was put forth by Michael Scot, Astrologer to the ever August Frederick, Emperor of the Romans, at whose desire he composed it concerning astrology, in a simple style for the sake of young scholars and those of weaker capacity.”

Scot once wrote: “Every astrologer is worthy of praise and honour, since by such a doctrine as astrology he probably knows many secrets of God, and things which few know.”

Other popes asked him to carry out astrological works for them and as a result he was offered the archbishoprics of Cashel in Ireland and Canterbury in England – he turned them both down.

The philosopher Roger Bacon recorded that in 1230: “Michael Scot appeared [at Oxford], bringing with him the works of Aristotle on natural history and mathematics, with wise expositors, so that the philosophy of Aristotle was magnified among those who spoke Latin.”

His study of alchemy first gained him the reputation for wizardry, confirmed by Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy published in the 1320s. Scot appears in the 8th Circle of Hell and is introduced thus: “That other there, his flanks extremely spare, was Michael Scot, a man who certainly knew how the game of magical fraud was played.”

After his death in 1234 – he may or may not have been in Scotland at the time – his legend developed, especially in the Borders. He is said to have used his magic to divert the River Tweed and to have split the Eildon Hills in three, and much more. He is even said to have brought the secret of whisky to Scotland. Sir Walter Scott and John Buchan were just two of the writers who featured Michael Scot the Wizard in their works, and his reputation is still preserved in the Borders and elsewhere.

More famous in his own time, however, was Thomas the Rhymer, also known as Thomas of Ercildoune (Earlston), Thomas Learmonth and True Thomas (c1220-c1298).

The latter name came from his prophecies, quite a lot which became true or at least were interpreted as such. It is known that Thomas was a laird in the Borders at or near modern-day Earlston, and that he wrote one of the first Scottish works in the English language, The Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer.

This ballad is sometimes confused with another ancient Borders ballad, Tam Lin, and it’s from the Tam Lin Balladry website that this description of the Rhymer poem is taken: “Thomas is a young man who encounters a beautiful woman upon a white horse while he lounges on a bank. She reveals herself to be the Queen of Faeries and takes him up on her horse, after sealing his service with a kiss. They travel for a long time and when they stop he expresses hunger.

“She forbids him to eat other than the food and drink she offers him, and while they rest she explains where they are going. She shows him three paths, one beset with thorns which leads to heavan, one fair and lovely which goes to hell, and one green which leads to the faerie lands.

“She bids him to hold his tongue for seven years, and gives him clothing, and retains him among the faeries for those seven years.”

Here is an excerpt from one of the many versions of the Ballad:

True Thomas lay on Huntlie Bank, A ferlie he spied wi’ his eye

And there he saw a lady bright, Come riding down by Eildon Tree.

Her shirt was o the grass-green silk, Her mantle o the velvet fyne

At ilka tett of her horse’s mane Hang fifty siller bells and nine.

True Thomas, he pulld aff his cap, And louted low down to his knee

“All hail, thou mighty Queen of Heaven! For thy peer on earth I never did see.”

“O no, O no, Thomas,” she said, “That name does not belang to me;

I am but the queen of fair Elfland, That am hither come to visit thee.”

“Harp and carp, Thomas,” she said, “Harp and carp along wi’ me,

And if ye dare to kiss my lips, Sure of your bodie I will be.”

“Betide me weal, betide me woe, That weird shall never daunton me;”

Syne he has kissed her rosy lips, All underneath the Eildon Tree.

Famed in his own lifetime and for long afterwards, Thomas the Rhymer was undoubtedly the first superstar of Scottish literature. Alistair Moffat in his vital source book The Borders: A History from the Earliest Times has this judgement on the Rhymer: “Before Walter Scott dazzled the world with the breath of his imagination, True Thomas was quite simply the most famous Borderer who had ever lived.”

Maddeningly we do not know any details of his death or where he was buried, but there is a memorial stone to him erected by the Melrose Literary Society in 1929 near their town on the traditional site of the Eildon Tree under which Thomas slept before his abduction by the Queen of Elfland. It is known as the Rhymer’s Stone.

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Versions of the Rhymer ballad are sung to this day – Steeleye Span and Euan McColl both recorded it – and Thomas has featured in many literary works as well as an unfinished opera by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Still being argued about is the third of our Borders geniuses, Blessed John Duns Scotus. As his name suggests he was born in Duns in the ancient county of Berwickshire in either 1265 or 1266.

Such was his fame later in life and after his death that both England and Ireland tried to claim his as theirs, but contemporary descriptions of him always refer to Duns and Scotus indicating his true origin and the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor installed a cairn marking his birthplace beside Duns Castle in 1966 – I think they were right to do so.

It seems he was destined for the church from an early age and after training as a Franciscan friar was sent to Oxford to complete his education in philosophy and theology. The first thing we definitely know about him was his ordination as a priest in 1291.

His rise to prominence began at Oxford where he was known for his detailed arguments that later gained him the nickname Subtle Doctor. Moving to Paris, Duns Scotus gained fame for his defence of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and for his challenge to the pervading main philosophy of the day, that of Thomas Aquinas.

His constant concern was to marry faith and reason. Duns Scotus’s chief philosophies concerned his attempts to metaphysically prove the existence of God and his concept of what was called the univocity of being.

He also developed the idea of “thisness”, know as haecceity. Followers of his philosophy were attacked by supporters of Aquinas and William of Ockham, and “dunce” became a pejorative word.

Duns Scotus died suddenly in Cologne, Germany, in 1308. His reputation has waxed and waned ever since but one admirer was Pope John Paul II who beatified him in 1993, hence Blessed John.

Pope Benedict XVI wrote of Duns Scotus: “Associating piety with scientific investigation, with his refined and deeply penetrating ingenuity into the secrets of natural and revealed truth, he became a light and example for the entire Christian people. Firm in the Catholic faith, he laboured to understand, explain and defend the truths of faith in the light of human reason.”