Scotland: The Story of a Nation. Magnus Magnusson
rapier and riding sword) in the bicentenary of Wallace’s death?
Rod McCance does not accept that Wallace’s stature can be deduced from the size of the two-handed sword. The weapon was not used ‘to the fore’, like a short-sword; the wielder whirled it around his head, moving his hips and shoulders as when using a hula-hoop or winding up for a hammer-throw. It was strength, not size, which mattered. ‘The lower your point of gravity, the better,’ McCance says. ‘It could be suicidal for a tall man, because his body was totally unprotected against a lance-thrust when the sword was being brandished.’ Moreover, the two-handed sword was never carried slung over the back – it was much too long; nor did it have a sheath or scabbard (‘You would have needed arms fifteen feet long to draw the thing!’).
But is it Wallace’s own sword, the sword with which he ‘made great room about him’ in battle? David Caldwell, curator of Scottish Medieval Collections at the Museum of Scotland and author of Scotland’s Wars and Warriors (1998), tells me he thinks it could well be the ‘ghost’ of the original sword, with all its original parts, including the blade, replaced or renewed for display purposes at different times in the past. This would explain why the blade does not have any maker’s or owner’s markings on it.
Perhaps it does not matter, after all. The sword has become a compelling icon of independence – so much so that it has been stolen (by extremist nationalists, it is alleged) on two occasions, in 1936 and 1972, although it was returned each time after a few months. Like so many saints’ relics of yore, the Wallace Sword is something which helps to make legend tangible; and to that extent it is symptomatic of much else concerned with the story of William Wallace. Legend, especially in the way in which it is shaped by succeeding generations, is often a metaphor for the times at which the legend has particular relevance to people. There is, indeed, a very fine line between story and history, between the patriotic legend and the elusive reality of the man who has become enshrined as Scotland’s National Hero. As Ted Cowan puts it:
William Wallace was probably one of the greatest Scots who ever lived – not only for himself, not only for his own lifetime, but for what he became. The mythos of Wallace is just as important as what the man himself achieved.
There are three kinds of sources from which to build up a picture of the life and death of Wallace and his legacy to Scotland’s history.
The first is English-based – primarily official government records and contemporary chroniclers; they are, without exception, violently anti-Wallace.
The second is Scottish-based – the Original Chronicle of Scotland by Andrew of Wyntoun (c.1355–1422), the Scotichronicon by Walter Bower (c.1385–1449), and the Acts and Deeds of Sir William Wallace by Blind Harry (?1440–c.1495), popularly known as The Wallace; they are all vehemently pro-Wallace.
The third, and for many just as important, is folk-memory – local traditions and stories about Wallace which were endemic in many parts of Scotland for centuries and which are still recalled in scores, hundreds even, of surviving place-names associated with him: trees, stones, hills, caves, roads, wells.
William Wordsworth noted this phenomenon in The Prelude when he was contemplating subjects for an epic:
Or I would record …
How Wallace fought for Scotland; left the name
Of Wallace to be found, like a wild flower,
All over his dear Country; left the deeds
Of Wallace, like a family of Ghosts,
To people the steep rocks and river banks,
Her natural sanctuaries, with a local soul
Of independence and stern liberty.
THE PRELUDE, BOOK I
Robert Burns, too, had ambitions to write about Wallace, inspired by a boyhood visit to Leglen Wood, on the Auchencruive estate in Ayrshire, which was reputed to have been one of Wallace’s safe havens:
As I explored every den and dell where I could suppose my heroic Countryman to have sheltered, I recollect (for even then I was a Rhymer) that my heart glowed with a wish to be able to make a Song on him equal to his merits.
LETTER TO MRS DUNLOP, 15 NOVEMBER 1786
Elspeth King, Director of the Smith Art Gallery and Museum in Stirling, is passionately committed to the idea that ‘folk-history’ enshrines a reality which is every bit as significant as formal, documented history:
Memory is an important part of history – it’s the only history which some of the ordinary people of Scotland have, because such history hasn’t been considered as worthy of being written by some of the historians who have acted on Scotland’s behalf; so the ordinary people have taken the process into their own hands.
It was this folk-history which the three main Scottish written sources exploited.
In his Original Chronicle of Scotland, written in rhyming Scots in the 1420s, Andrew of Wyntoun expressed regret that he lacked ‘both wit and good leisure’ to write down all the ‘great gestes [tales] and songs’ about Wallace in ‘a great book’.
Walter Bower, in his Scotichronicon, written in the 1440s, seems to have had access to traditional oral tales with which he embellished his historical narrative. It is in Bower that the heroic legend of Wallace first emerges: Wallace the great warrior, Wallace the patriot, Wallace the generous friend of the oppressed, Wallace ‘the man successful in everything’.
Blind Harry1 claimed that his own epic, The Wallace, was founded on a Latin book (now lost) which had been commissioned shortly after Wallace’s death from Wallace’s boyhood friend and personal chaplain, Master John Blair, by Bishop William Sinclair of Dunkeld (d.1337); the bishop apparently planned to send it to the Pope – to plead the righteousness of Scotland’s cause against England and, perhaps, to promote the case for Wallace’s canonisation as a martyr.
Most academic scholars simply do not believe that such a book ever existed. Even if it did, Blind Harry must have taken very considerable liberties with it. It is apparent that most of the epic relied on traditional stories about Wallace which Blind Harry had collected and collated from different parts of the country.
Blind Harry’s The Wallace is violent, gory, nationalistic and profoundly xenophobic – a sustained and bitter polemic against the English (‘Our old enemies come of Saxon’s blood,/That never yet to Scotland would do good’). It struck an immediate chord in the Scotland of the 1470s, where the unpopular King James III was conducting a policy of rapprochement with England in the face of opposition from his brothers and his court (see Chapter 16). It was one of the first books to be printed in Scotland (by Chepman and Myllar, around 1508, with the blessing of King James IV), and became the text-book of Scottish patriotism for generation after generation; it went through twenty-three editions before the Act of Union with England in 1707. In 1722, when the old Scots of the original was becoming inaccessible to most readers, it was modernised and adapted by another Scottish poet, William Hamilton of Gilbertfield, near Cambuslang, and became the second most treasured book in Scotland, next only to the Bible.1 But after the mid-nineteenth century it fell into obscurity, until Elspeth King produced a new edition in 1998.
It was this remarkable and gory epic which inspired the American writer Randall Wallace to create the novel and the screenplay for the film Braveheart which took Scotland and the rest of the world by storm when it was released in 1995. The academic establishment was scornful of its portrayal of history; but the film caught the imagination of a people who were then moving towards a new chapter in the long, long story of Scotland’s