The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie

It is not certain how the work was composed, but it is likely to have been publicly performed, probably in the style of a poetic joust by the two combatants, William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy, before the Court of James IV of Scotland.

Dunbar opens with a three-stanza address to his commissar which pours lofty scorn on the poetic pretensions of Kennedy and his commissar, describing what must happen if their self-promotion should move him to reluctantly unleash his own far superior powers; which boast Kennedy answers, also in three stanzas, with a direct, highly personalised address to Dunbar, knocking his claims down to size and commanding him to bide his wheesht.

Both combatants took great relish describing the terrible punishments that would be meted out upon their opponent and the pictures evoked imply the proximity of instruments of execution in the medieval landscape as bleak as that in many images of the time in art.

Dunbar characterises Kennedy, a Gael and native speaker of Galwegian Gaelic, as "of the Irishry" who speaks a barbarous Highland dialect, as physically hideous and withered like a sort of living memento mori, as poor and hungry, and of committing bestiality with mares.

The satire may perhaps give us caricature impressions of the physical appearance and moral vulnerabilities of the two men, even if no actual portraits of either man are known to have survived.

[citation needed] George Bannatyne, in his manuscript copy, added the postscript Iuge ye now heir quha gat the war.