ABSTRACT
In 1765, the Scottish pedlar and chapman ‘John Cheap’, alias Dougal Graham, first published his bestselling chapbook the Entertaining Exploits of George Buchanan, who was commonly called ‘The King’s Fool’. This was a humorous, fictionalised account of a character based on the 16th-century Scottish poet, historian and administrator of the same name. In one episode, George, having got the better of a certain bishop in a debate on religion, was taunted by a member of the same company of Englishmen, who said George alone possessed all the knowledge that was to be found in Scotland. This popular fiction, reprinted repeatedly and hawked across the British Isles in chapbooks for over a century,4 reveals much about Scots’ attitudes towards education. Literary culture is of high antiquity in Scotland: the Dundee Burgh Library dates back to the fifteenth century and is the earliest town library in Britain.
