Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie, John Skelton, Christopher Garnish, Against the Scottes, flyting, invective

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is distinctly Scottish has also been fostered by the influence of The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie (fought between William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy at the court of James IV (c.1495)) upon that between John Skelton and Christopher Garnish at the court of Henry VIII. ¹⁶⁴ The Scots had considerable enthusiasm for flyting, and their reputation for exchanges of colourful invective maybe even contributed to the perception that flyting in sixteenth-century England originated in Scotland. In his ‘Against the Scottes’ Skelton opens with an epigraph complaining that they remain verbally combative even following their defeat on the battlefield. He writes indignantly,

Agaynst the prowde Scottes clatterynge,
That neuer wyll leaue theyr tratlynge:
Wan they the felde, and loste theyr kynge? (ll.1-3)

The Scots are so obsessed with flyting obloquy that they are even oblivious to utter defeat and “wyll not know/ Theyr ouerthrow”, Skelton argues (ll.9-10).

England also had a vibrant flyting tradition, and one in which Skelton participates. During the early centuries of the first millennium England was a central focus for flyting with both of its traditional enemies, France and Scotland, and continued to be so during the

example appears in The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse, ed. Celia and Kenneth Sisam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), ‘The Scots in Berwick (1296)’ (“Wenes King Edward with his longe shankes”) and ‘The English Retort’ (“Pikes him/ And dikes him”), no. 52. See also R. M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England (Methuen, 1970), pp.201-8. Such exchanges probably originated on the battlefield. One such exchange of abuse occurs between the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes in the Old English poem, ‘The Battle of Maldon’. See N. F. Blake, ‘The Flyting in The Battle of Maldon’, ELN, 13 (1976), 242-5. Ritualised exchanges of abuse exist in a diversity of other literary and oral cultures. See Robert C. Elliott, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1966), pp.70-3 and pp.62-4 and Douglas Gray, ‘Rough Music: Some Early Invectives and Flytings’, YES, 14 (1984), 21-43 (pp.27-8).

¹⁶⁴ See Nan Cooke Carpenter, John Skelton (NY: Twayne, 1967), p.73; Kratzmann (1980), p.153; Victor I. Scherb, ‘John Skelton’s ‘Agenst Garnesche’: Poetic Territorialism at the Court of Henry VIII’, Qu, 19 (1998), 123-42 (p.126 and p.137) and Greg Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cambridge: CUP, 1988), p.47. Herny Orion St. Onge also postulates a Scottish connection in Churchyard and Camel’s flyting, ‘Thomas Churchyard: A Study of his Prose and Poetry’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 1966), p.38.

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