compiler of an important collection of Scottish poetry from the 15th and 16th centuries (the golden age of Scottish literature).

A prosperous Edinburgh merchant, he compiled his anthology of verse, known as the Bannatyne Manuscript, while living in isolation during a plague in 1568. His anthology contains many of the best-known poems of the courtly poets known as makaris (makar), or Scottish Chaucerians; it also preserves work by such poets as Alexander Scott who otherwise would be virtually unknown, and it includes much interesting anonymous verse as well. It influenced the 18th-century Scottish revival, when Allan Ramsay reprinted a number of the poems (though often in altered form) in his Ever Green (1724). In 1823 the Bannatyne Club was founded in Edinburgh for the purpose of promoting the study of Scottish history and literature.