He is known to have written a number of other works, but other titles definitely ascribed to his authorship, such as The Stewartis Oryginalle (Genealogy of the Stewarts) and The Brut (Brutus), are now lost.

[1] In 1357, when David II returned to Scotland from exile and was restored to active kingship, Barbour received a letter of safe-conduct to travel through England to the University of Oxford.

According to the obit-book of St Machar's Cathedral, Aberdeen he died on 13 March 1395 and state records show that his life-pension was not paid after that date.

Barbour made provision for a mass to be sung for himself and his parents, an instruction that was observed in the Cathedral of St Machar until the Reformation.

The Brus, Barbour's major surviving work, is a long narrative poem written while he was a member of the king's household in the 1370s.

Attempts have been made to name Barbour as the author of the Buik of Alexander, a Scots translation of the Roman d'Alexandre and other associated pieces.

Another possible work was added to Barbour's canon with the discovery in the library of the University of Cambridge, by Henry Bradshaw, of a long Scots poem of over 33,000 lines, dealing with Legends of the Saints, as told in the Legenda Aurea and other legendaries.

Later criticism, though divided, has tended in the contrary direction, and has based its strongest negative judgement on the consideration of rhymes, assonance and vocabulary.

But his authorship of The Brus alone, both for its original employment of the chivalric genre, and as a tale of a struggle against tyranny,[2] secures his place as an important and innovative literary voice who broke new linguistic ground.