Perthshire and Kinross

Andrew Wynton was in the early fifteenth century
Prior of the Culdee Monastery on St. Serf’s Island, Loch
Leven. There he wrote the Original Chronicle of Scotland.
This was before the days of printing, but manuscript copies were made by the monks and these are still being
preserved, one in the Scottish National Library, another
in the Royal Library at Windsor, and a third at Cambridge
university.

The book was first printed in 1795. It is not a history,
but is a chronicle of events and people beginning at the
Creation and coming down to 1406. The account of the
Flood, which, by the way, Wynton calls “the spate of Noe,” is very graphic. The chronicle is written in octosyllabic couplets but cannot claim to have much literary or poetic merit. Its great value is that it contains the material of which histories are made, which would otherwise have been lost, and which has proved of the greatest service to our historians, who have used it as a quarry from which they hewed out the facts with which they built up their histories.

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