Conclusion

With John of Upland we have, in a way, come home, after surveying the criss-cross of cultures, ‘native’ and otherwise, that paradoxically made late medieval Scotland unique. The country responded with vigour to these complexities, learning from pressure, turning uncertainty into opportunities to make things new. Scottish architecture built on old foundations, and this is as good a metaphor as any for the inspired reception Scotland gave at this time to European and local artistry and learning. Calling up the talents of other cultures is itself a talent, highly prized in centres of power. In Scotland this talent was displayed by kings, queens, chroniclers, Highlanders and Lowlanders; by the clerics who worked so hard to arrange the repair and embellishing of Scottish churches, and the artisans, ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’, who painted ceilings and cut stone; by great lords, lawyers, notaries and schoolmasters. Scots went everywhere, and everywhere went to Scotland.86 A great deal of misery too often accompanied this activity, but my argument is not that the Scots transcended hardship by piping. In the later medieval period Scots experimented with solutions for everything from fish weirs to harps to conflicting law codes to insensible rulers to the rebuilding of abbeys on the Borders. Its cultural and educational activity was part of this business.

Scientists also came to the court of James IV. James conducted experiments with the guidance of a ‘foreign’ alchemist, John Damien, who was given a laboratory in Stirling castle.87 Jenny Wormald has said of Damien’s attempt to fly from the castle’s battlements that it may have been ‘an echo of the world of Leonardo da Vinci; but . . . nothing more typifies the prosaic nature of Scottish society; Damien neither flew nor died a dramatic death, but dropped gracelessly down into a midden’.88 This view of late medieval Scottish culture instances a far-too-common projection back onto the middle ages of post-Reformation virtues of plain-speaking, hard-headedness and lack of sentimentality, and makes one long for Turbet’s unvarnished love of Carver’s ‘burning individualism’ and ‘most sublime music’.89 Scepticism about alchemists or early experiments in flight conducted by scholars wearing wings made partly of chicken feathers is not a bad thing, and it is hard to forget Dunbar’s extremely funny (and invidious) poem on the occasion of Damien’s fall from pride. But Leonardo da Vinci did not live in a ‘world’ entirely separate from the Scottish court; nor would scientific experiments there be but an ‘echo’ of efforts on the continent. James IV founded both ‘the first university in Britain to provide for a Chair of Medicine’ and the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.90 Like Damien he meant to be going places, by sea if not by air; the flagship of his new navy, The Great Michael, ‘wasted all the woods in Fife’ in the building.91 In short, Scotland was not Dogpatch, and Leonardo’s own best patron was finally Francois I, not the unprecedented despots of Italy. The dream of flight was powerful in the courts of late medieval Europe, as it had been centuries earlier in the writing of so serious a thinker as Roger Bacon. We should not be surprised that such a globe-trotting, observant and various country as Scotland had a man inside a court who was willing to try his wings. The dream of flight, after all, is a recognition of the power of travel.