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William Wallace

The Man and the Myth

The History Press

WILLIAM WALLACE, KNIGHT OF SCOTLAND

Perhaps the ultimate Scottish hero, Wallace has been dear to the hearts of Scots and others, of all ages, classes, political and religious persuasions, for seven centuries. His determination has been used to inspire soldiers, athletes and political movements. His life has inspired novelists, poets, songwriters and film-makers. A brief survey of the World Wide Web indicates a vast interest in the man, with more than one million entries for Sir William Wallace. By the same measure, it could be argued that the public interest in Braveheart is rather stronger, since there are more than twice as many websites dedicated to the Mel Gibson portrayal of the Guardian's political career.

Wallace has been the subject of a great many Victorian statues of questionable artistic value, several novels, at least one stage play, a film, a strip cartoon book and a number of popular, if somewhat fanciful, 'biographies'. All of these have been the work of people who have been enthused and inspired (understandably) by the life of one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of Scotland's heroes. Novels, films, plays and cartoons share a common factor: nobody expects them to be strictly realistic portrayals of personalities, events or conditions – they are fantasies devised for entertainment. It could be argued, with some justice, that the latter statement also applies to the bulk of the 'biographies' of William Wallace that have appeared in recent years.

For several writers the starting point, mainstay and – in at least one example – the entirety of their primary research has been the study of Blind Harry's The Wallace epic. Whether the poem is a great work of fifteenth-century literature or nothing more than sheer hagiography in doggerel verse is open to debate; whether it is a generally useful record of the life and work of William Wallace is not. Harry's claim to have used an existing biography of Wallace written by his chaplain, Blair, may be true, but that does not mean that the Blair manuscript, assuming that it ever existed, bore any great resemblance either to Blind Harry's eulogy or the life of Wallace. The shortcomings of The Wallace as a historical record have been demonstrated many times and need no rehearsal here; what is more of an issue is the manner in which Wallace's life has been approached. Since few, if any, of the Wallace biographers have made any serious examination of the social, cultural, economic, political or military conditions of the lesser nobility in either Scotland or England in the late medieval period, they have been prone to assumptions – and perhaps a spot of wishful thinking – about the nature of the society in which William Wallace grew up and in which he made his career.

It has, for example, become an article of faith among Scots that Wallace was a man of the common people, separated from a privileged, foreign and oppressive noble class by language and social ethos. Nothing could be further from the truth. William Wallace was a product of the Scottish noble class, not an enemy of it, and not distanced from it in any cultural or political sense. Like the other members of his class he grew up in Scottish communities, among Scottish people, speaking Scots, but that does not have the same romantic appeal as the struggle of a man to overcome the prejudice and ineffectiveness of a class of aristocratic 'chancers', which is, broadly, the view offered in several recent biographies. The origin of the recent spate of Wallace books is, to a considerable extent, a product of the success of the Braveheart film – it is, as they say, 'an ill wind ...' However, there has been a steady rise in interest in medieval Scotland among historians over the last forty years and much of the credit for that must go to Professors Geoffrey Barrow, Ranald Nicholson and Archibald Duncan, very much the architects of current thinking relating to Scotland in the later Middle Ages.

In 1965 Professor Barrow published the first scholarly examination of the life and reign of Robert I. Entitled Robert the Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland, it was revolutionary in that it was a formal political biography of a Scottish king, not a collection of tales and traditions. In the same year, Professor Nicholson published Edward III and the Scots, the Formative Years of a Military Career, a detailed study of the final attempt of Plantagenet kings to bring Scotland directly under their sway. Both Barrow and Nicholson discovered that a great deal of light could be cast on affairs in Scotland through the study of English state records. In a sense this had been long recognised. In the late nineteenth century the Reverend Stevenson and Joseph Bain published collections of material connected with Scottish affairs. These volumes, Documents Illustrative of the History of Scotland and Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland, have provided medievalists with a wonderful resource for over 100 years. Neither Bain nor Stevenson was an analytical historian so much as an antiquarian, and Bain's lengthy introductions to each of the four volumes he compiled have not lasted the test of time so well as the body of the work. There is no such thing as a perfect work of history and both Bain and Stevenson misdated or misinterpreted the significance, or sometimes the origin, of the odd document here and there, but their scholarship and industry have been a boon to anybody and everybody with an interest in medieval Scotland.

There have, then, been two significant strands of inspiration driving the growth in medieval studies: the romantic – Braveheart and many attractive and romantic volumes from one direction; and scholarship – Barrow, Nicholson, A.A.M. Duncan, Norman MacDougall, Bruce Webster, Stephen Boardman and many more. There has been a good deal of academic research into a very wide range of social, economic and political activity in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Scotland in recent years and a great deal of fine work has been published. Unfortunately, as any academic will be only too ready to tell, new work does not necessarily make much impact on the perceptions of the public. It is forty years since Barrow's Robert the Bruce was published and it is only in very recent times that his findings have started to make any impression on the kind of material that is easily available to the public.

Any book in print is, of course, easily available to the public, but generally the public will not be aware of its existence. If moved to take an interest in history, they are inclined, naturally enough, to look for information at the point of easiest access. In the past this has generally been a matter of consulting the encyclopedias or the sort of general histories of Britain that are familiar to most English and Scottish people from schooldays. 'British' histories are very frequently 'English' histories with, sometimes, a nod in the direction of Scotland, very often at Scottish heroes, including William Wallace – what we might reasonably, if a trifle uncharitably, call the 'Myth and Legend' school of learning. This has led to a historical problem in itself. In the main, English/British histories have indicated that Scotland has been essentially the same as England at any point in history, just a slightly poorer and more primitive version. This is simply not the case. There was a great deal of similarity in certain aspects of social and commercial practice in both countries, but an English traveller was just as much 'abroad' in Scotland as they would have been in France or the Netherlands.

The difficulty is that a great many Scottish people have had to 'unlearn' that sort of accidental conditioning before they can make any real headway in the study of their past. This is not an area in which there has been any great improvement in recent time. Scotland is the only country in Europe where there was, until very recently, absolutely no legal requirement for schoolchildren to be taught the history of their country. The fact that there is no adequate history textbook for Scottish schools compounds the problem, but in any case the teachers, mostly the product of Scottish education themselves, have little or no grasp of their country's history – the problem is circular. Sadly, until very recently, neither the Scottish government nor Scottish education authorities seem to have had any interest in doing anything very practical toward improving the situation, so Scottish schoolchildren have continued to be denied proper access to the history of their country.

The popular view of Scottish society in the Middle Ages has been strongly coloured by the Braveheart image and bolstered by many recent writers. A picture of a community that lived in mud and stone shanties, wore animal skins and conducted such trivial business as they had either by barter or by violence, under the heel of an uninterested, greedy and largely foreign aristocracy which imposed its authority with the noose. None of this is supported by evidence, but is widely accepted nonetheless. How such a crude and primitive society as twelfth-, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Scotland managed to maintain commercial, cultural and political ties with every other country in northern Europe, build wonderful cathedrals, monasteries and castles, produce writers, scholars and soldiers of outstanding quality and survive a sixty-year series of wars of acquisition launched by a massively more powerful neighbour without effective and sophisticated administrative, judicial and above all fiscal systems does not seem to have inspired popular histories to the same degree as tales of gallantry and treachery.

Fortunately, the 'Braveheart Scotland' tendency has been offset to some degree by the remarkable wave of high-quality research that has been published over the last three decades. The first two volumes of the Edinburgh History of Scotland, though a little dated due to archaeological and historical developments in the 1980s and 1990s, between them provide a first-class introduction to the institutions and practices of medieval Scotland. Professor Duncan's Scotland. The Making of the Nation explores the development of Scottish society from what we misleadingly call the 'Dark Ages' to the close of the reign of Alexander III; Professor Nicholson's Scotland: The Later Middle Ages takes the reader from the demise of Alexander to the death of James IV at Flodden in 1513, though it is arguable whether or not Scotland was still truly a 'medieval' society by that point. Duncan, Nicholson and Barrow were instrumental in providing a framework from which other historians could develop the various strands and themes of Scottish society. Several of these are important contributions to the theme of this book, William Wallace, not so much because they examine his life and actions, but because they examine the structures of the society in which he lived. Dr Fiona Watson's Under the Hammer, a study of the invasion and occupation of Edward I, is an invaluable guide to the practices of the Edwardian administration, its effectiveness, its procedures, its effect on Scottish society, and the challenges that it faced.

Any consideration of the career of William Wallace would be redundant without giving some thought to the great figures of his time, most obviously his chief adversary and eventual nemesis, Edward I. There are many biographies of Edward available, but few, if any, that compare to Edward I by Michael Prestwich. There is, at present, no modern scholarly biography of Alexander III which could give the reader an introduction to the society of Scotland during the youth and early manhood of William Wallace; however, there is a collection of essays ranging across economic, ecclesiastical, political and military issues in later thirteenth-century Scotland edited by Norman Reid entitled Scotland in the Reign of Alexander III, which cannot be too highly recommended to anyone with an interest in the life and times of William Wallace.

The political leadership of lords is an important factor in medieval history, whether in France, England, Scotland or Spain. Lordship was a rather more sophisticated relationship than we might expect and will be examined elsewhere in this book, but the interests and actions of the great magnates call for detailed study if the reader is to understand the values, benefits and problems of lord–tenant relationships. Alan Young's The Comyns, Robert the Bruce's Rivals and Michael Brown's The Black Douglases each provide an illuminating view of Scottish noble families at work. The Comyns shows the growth in status of a relatively minor family, who, through consistent service to the Crown and careful management of their interests, came to be one of the foremost interest groups in the country in the course of little more than 100 years. The Black Douglases looks at the spectacular growth of the Douglas family in the fourteenth century, in particular the meteoric rise to prominence of the 'Good Sir James', also known as 'The Black Douglas', and the means by which his personal advancement became a vehicle for the elevation of the tenuously linked Douglas families in Lanarkshire and Lothian from minor barons and lairds to membership of a vast and powerful affinity. Like the Comyns, James Douglas made his career in Crown service. Although a close associate of the king, Douglas did not join the ranks of the magnates (the greatest and most powerful and influential lords) until the death of Edward Bruce in Ireland made a gap in the Bruce party leadership that needed to be filled by a man with martial talents.

The social and economic history issues of medieval Scotland have not yet been so carefully examined by historians as the political arena, but there are useful volumes to be found, in particular Elizabeth Ewan's Town Life in Fourteenth Century Scotland, David Ditchburn's Scotland and Europe and Geoffrey Barrow's Scotland and Its Neighbours in the Middle Ages. Although the history of later medieval Scotland is dominated by war, there has been surprisingly little in the way of military history; though there have been a great many political histories which, for obvious reasons, can hardly avoid the topic of warfare, there has as yet been no adequate work published on the nature and practice of military service in medieval Scotland. It is not clear why this should be the case; the material is reasonably plentiful, much of it from English state records that have been available in print for 100 years and more. The absence of such a volume has led to a general perception of medieval Scottish war that almost completely fails to coincide with any of the evidence. In general terms, there was no great distinction in military dress or normal military practice between Scotland and England, or for that matter France or the Low Countries. Fortunately there have been several good studies of particular events of a military nature. There are no modern scholarly examinations of the battles of Stirling Bridge or Falkirk, but C.J. MacNamee has made an excellent survey of William Wallace's 1297 campaign in Cumbria, Westmorland and Northumberland, published in vol. 26 (1990) of Northern History.

Not unnaturally, Scottish historians have expended a great deal of ink on the subject of Sir William Wallace, but can hardly be expected to provide an objective view of, arguably, Scotland's greatest hero. For English historians, Wallace is a mixed bag. Many English historians, from Charles Oman (if not before) to David Starkey, have taken the view that the success of the house of Wessex in achieving dominance in southern Britain was both inevitable and desirable, and that the extension of the rule of that house, or at least its successors, to a place of superiority throughout the whole of Britain was therefore, to use a technical term from Sellar and Yeatman's masterly survey of 'memorable' English history, 1066 and All That, a 'good thing'. From that perspective, Wallace, like Robert I, Prince Llewellyn or Owen Glendower, inevitably represented an obstacle to their preferred optimum outcome – the British Isles united in one (English) kingdom under one (English) king. The chief problem with achieving a unitary English state in medieval Britain before Edward I's reign was that no one felt particularly strongly about it; the problem after 1296 was that interest among the English generally was not so well-developed or so consistent as it was among English kings.

At various junctures, generally under threat of military force, Scottish kings had accepted the suzerainty of English ones, though the exact extent of that suzerainty was never clearly defined – an indication, perhaps, that the realpolitik relationship between Scottish and English kings was that both parties were involved in face-saving exercises. The Scottish kings may have resented the implications of homage to English kings, but the demands made, when they were made at all, seem to have been gestural rather than practical, indicating that English kings were unsure of their capacity to conquer Scottish kings, but that Scottish kings doubted their capacity to successfully confront their English counterparts.

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Excerpted from William Wallace by Chris Brown. Copyright © 2014 Chris Brown. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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