1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Holland, Richard
HOLLAND, RICHARD, or Richard de Holande (fl. 1450), Scottish writer, author of the Buke of the Howlat, was secretary or chaplain to the earl of Moray (1450) and rector of Halkirk, near Thurso. He was afterwards rector of Abbreochy, Loch Ness, and later held a chantry in the cathedral of Norway. He was an ardent partisan of the Douglases, and on their overthrow retired to Orkney and later to Shetland. He was employed by Edward IV. in his attempt to rouse the Western Isles through Douglas agency, and in 1482 was excluded from the general pardon granted by James III. to those who would renounce their fealty to the Douglases.
The poem, entitled the Buke of the Howlat, written about 1450, shows his devotion to the house of Douglas:—
Writtin in a bill was
O Dowglass, O Dowglass
Tender and trewe!”
(ii. 400-403).
and is dedicated to the wife of a Douglas—
Dowit with ane Dowglass, and boith war thei dowis.”
but all theories of its being a political allegory in favour of that house may be discarded. Sir Walter Scott’s judgment that the Buke is “a poetical apologue . . . without any view whatever to local or natural politics” is certainly the most reasonable. The poem, which extends to 1001 lines written in the irregular alliterative rhymed stanza, is a bird-allegory, of the type familiar in the Parlement of Foules. It has the incidental interest of showing (especially in stanzas 62 and 63) the antipathy of the “Inglis-speaking Scot” to the “Scots-speaking Gael” of the west, as is also shown in Dunbar’s Flyting with Kennedy.
The text of the poem is preserved in the Asloan and Bannatyne MSS. Fragments of an early 16th century black-letter edition, discovered by D. Laing, are reproduced in the Adversaria of the Bannatyne Club. The poem has been frequently reprinted, by Pinkerton, in his Scottish Poems (1792); by D. Laing (Bannatyne Club 1823; reprinted in “New Club” series, Paisley, 1882); by the Hunterian Club in their edition of the Bannatyne MS., and by A. Diebler (Chemnitz, 1893). The latest edition is that by F. J. Amours in Scottish Alliterative Poems (Scottish Text Society, 1897), pp. 47-81. (See also Introduction pp. xx.-xxxiv.)