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.
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 fool lines written in the irregular alliterative rhymed stanza, is a bird-allegory, of the type familiar in the Parlemsnt 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.
Fragments of an early 16th-century black-letter edition, discovered by D. Laing, are reproduced in the Adversaria of the Bannatyne Club.