Walter Bower
Scottish chronicler
Walter Bower (or Bowmaker; c. 1385 – 24 December 1449) was a Scottish canon regular and abbot of Inchcolm Abbey in the Firth of Forth, who is noted as a chronicler of his era. He was born about 1385 at Haddington, East Lothian, in the Kingdom of Scotland. In 1991, Donald Watt said of Bower's Scotichronicon that "We are more and more convinced that this book
is one of the national treasures of Scotland, which should be studied in depth for many different kinds of enquiry into Scotland's past."
Life
Some sources say that, at the age of eighteen, Bower assumed the religious habit; he was trained at the University of St Andrews. After finishing his philosophical and theological studies, he visited Paris to study law. Bower was unanimously the abbot of the Augustinian community on Inchcolm in 1417. He also acted as one of the commissioners for the collection of the ransom of King James I of Scotland in 1423 and 1424. Later, in 1433, he took part in a diplomatic mission to Paris to discuss the possibility of marriage of the king's daughter to the Dauphin of France. He played an important part at the Council of Perth of 1432 in the defence of Scottish rights.
During Bower's closing years he was engaged on his work, the Scotichronicon, on which his reputation now chiefly rests. This work, undertaken in 1440 by desire of a neighbour, Sir David Stewart of Rosyth Castle, was a continuation of the Chronica Gentis Scotorum of John of Fordun.
“Walter Bower” enters the record as scottish chronicler. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Walter, Bower and Scottish can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2032430. VIAF identifies the subject as 29564635. The Library of Congress control number is n88653877. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1385, 1449, 1991 and 1417.
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This entry incorporates text from “Walter Bower” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.