NOTE: This page is now superceded by an entire online edition of The Skene Manuscript (complete with sheet-music and audio) on my new multimedia website — ScotMus.com!

The Skene Manuscript is definitely one of Lothian's early music gems, originally hailing from Hallyards Castle in Midlothian. It seems to date from c.1615-35, and is, in fact, one of the key documents in Scottish music history as a whole. It belongs to a significant group of seventeenth-century lute manuscripts from various noble houses around Scotland, all of which constitute the earliest substantial body of transcriptions and arrangements of medieval Scottish secular music, and many of the tunes are still current within the folk tradition. Indeed, these lute manuscripts, written in tablature, represent some of the earliest records of folk music from any European nation. The member of the Skene family who is generally associated with its compilation is John Skene of Hallyards, but according to D. James Ross, we should associate it with William Skene of Hallyards.^[1] Whether either was the actual author of the manuscript, or the commissioning patron of it is not known. For current purposes, we will assume the traditional association of the manuscript with John Skene. The manuscript itself is currently held at the National Library of Scotland as Adv.MS.5.2.15.

Most notably, perhaps, Skene's lute book contains the first known transcription of the tune for "The Flowres of the Forrest", a song associated with the massacre of the Scottish army at the Battle of Flodden in 1513, at which the king, James IV fell, leaving behind him the fatal power vacuum which was ultimately to result in the Union of the Crowns of 1603 and finally, the Treaty of Union of 1707, with the loss of Scottish political independence to the UK. However, the song's original lyrics (assuming there actually were any) have been lost, and all that remains is the tune as set in the Skene Manuscript. It is generally assumed, though, that the "flowers" commemorated in the lament were the male youth of the South-west (known in medieval times as The Forest), who were almost entirely wiped out at Flodden by the English. Significantly, many nobles were also killed at Flodden, including a Skene ancestors, Alexander Skene of Skene.

Like much of this lute repertoire from late Renaissance Scotland, the settings are delicately understated, attempting to preserve the assumed archaic "simplicity" of the original tunes, rather than trying to provide vehicles for virtuosic display. Two MP3 excerpts of material from the Skene Manuscript, recorded by Rob MacKillop on the Greentrax label can be heard below:

"The Flowres of the Forrest" (1MB)
- from Rob MacKillop, Flowres of the Forrest (P) 1998 Greentrax Recordings

"The Laydie Louthians Lilte" (380KB)
- from Rob MacKillop, The Healing (P) 2002 Greentrax Recordings

Both exerpts used by kind permission of Greentrax Recordings Ltd.

Two other commercial recordings featuring material from the Skene Manuscript are by Ronn McFarlane on the Dorian label and by Jakob Lindberg on the BIS label:

"The Flowres of the Forrest" has a long history after Skene's transcription, and is still used today as the standard lament at Scottish funerals throughout the world, played on the Highland bagpipes. Several sets of lyrics have also been written for the tune since Skene's time, and one of the first of these was by Jane Elliot around 1755, on the theme of Flodden.

The other major modern version was by Alison Cockburn (née Rutherford) of Ormiston on the subject of seven Selkirkshire lairds who encountered financial disaster as a result of bad speculation.

Another version was published by James Johnson, Robert Burns and Stephen Clarke in the first volume of their epic collection of 600 traditional and modern folksongs, The Scots Musical Museum, published in six volumes of 100 songs each between 1787 and 1803. In their Baroque setting, the lyrics are accredited to a Miss Home. A MIDI version of this Burnsian setting will also be available here shortly.

"Flowers of the Forest", Scots Musical Museum, Vol.1 (1787)

Another historic aspect of the Skene Manuscript is that it includes the earliest known example of the port genre, known in Gàidhlig as puirt. This genre is specific to the clàrsach, the Gàidhealach Celtic harp, for which there are very few early notated sources other than examples in the late Renaissance lute manuscripts. Given this rarity, then, the inclusion in Skene of "Port Ballangowne" is particularly important, although it may have been a modern composition in the style of the Highland genre, rather than an authentic example as such. Regardless, its presence in Skene does signify the interest which Lowland musicians already had in the then quite different musical culture of the North.

Footnotes

very special thanks to Rob MacKillop & ian green (greentrax recordings) for permission to use the musical extracts,
kenneth dunn, senior curator, manuscripts department, national library of scotland for correspondence about the manuscript

[1] D. James Ross, Music Fyne: Robert Carver and the Art of Music in Sixteenth Century Scotland (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1993)), pp.145-146.

[2] Elliot version of "The Flow'rs o' the Forest", in John Greig, Scots Minstrelsie: A National Monument of Scottish Song (Edinburgh: TC Jack, nd), Vol.1, pp.6-7.

[3] Cockburn version of "The Flow'rs o' the Forest", in John Greig, ibid., pp.4-5.