3

William, Son of Alan Wallace: The Documents

A. A. M. Duncan

It is a moot point whether the achievement of William Wallace in his lifetime is as significant as his reputation, enhanced by myth and literary romance passing as history, was to be over the succeeding seven centuries.¹ In my judgment, the reputation-myth ceased to be of contemporary significance in the last decades of the nineteenth century as defence of the 1801 Union seized the centre ground in British politics. Here I turn from the fiction to look at Wallace in the few contemporary texts he has left to us and to set them in the context of their time. We can still learn about the real man from the exercise and may even confirm something of the legend-encrusted reputation.

Wallace is named as the author/sender of four documents the texts of which survived in various conditions to the nineteenth century and survive today. The earliest, and the only one to survive in the original, is a letter by ‘Andrew Murray and William Wallace, leaders of the army of the kingdom, and the community of the kingdom’ to the mayors and communes of Hamburg and Lübeck, probably one to each city, a month (11 October 1297) after the victory of Stirling Bridge. Murray had been wounded at that battle and was to die in the next few months,² so cannot have been – was not – the leader of any subsequent army. The kingdom’s community was associated with them as sender, for leaders of the army alone would not be recognised as rulers or representatives of the kingdom; in other letters they claimed to act in the name of King John, accepted domestically as the rightful king. There must be a suspicion that omission here means that overseas his name would arouse doubts or even derision. I shall return to this letter in greater detail shortly.

Murray and Wallace were still both nominally leaders of the army that invaded northern England when, on 7 November 1297, they issued to the canons of Hexham Priory a letter of protection under pain of life and limb, probably in return for promise of a payment – blackmail – for delivery of which they gave safe-conduct to a single canon.³ But the sole leader of the army was Wallace, carefully retaining the fiction of Murray’s participation and acting in the name of King John. In the hostile chronicle that preserves the two letters, the ruthless hand of Wallace is evident in his orders to behead the sacrilegious Scots who had seized the chalice of the priory.⁴ The failure to apprehend them is usually taken as evidence of a failure of authority, and the desolation caused elsewhere by the campaign as a lack of strategic ability. Yet war was usually waged by pillage and destruction to impoverish the enemy, very rarely by pitched battle, and the reliability of the chalice story is to be judged by the conduct of the Scots in 1296, commanded by their earls, who, according to the same chronicle, ‘in the morning, when they had looted [Hexham Priory] of virtually all its goods, set it on fire and burned not only the church but also the monastery with the whole township, an unheard of crime’.⁵ Our judgment should surely be that Wallace’s blackmail showed better judgment and more authority in 1297 than did the earls’ conduct in the previous year.

The fourth document was an original charter published as an engraving by James Anderson in 1739.⁶ Dated at Torphichen on 29 March 1298, William Wallace knight, Guardian of the kingdom and leader of its army (ductor exercitus) in the name of King John by consent of the kingdom’s community, grants heritably lands near Dundee and the constabulary of the castle of Dundee, by consent of the kingdom’s magnates, to Alexander called Skirmisher (Scrymgeour) ‘for his faithful service and his succour given to the kingdom in carrying the royal banner in the army of Scotland at the time of making these presents’ (the charter). In the Hexham letters the ‘Guardian and leader’ hold office ‘by consent of the community’, a less active role than the ‘choice’ (electio) of earlier and later guardians. The first bands of rebels in 1297 may indeed have ‘chosen’ their leaders;⁷ but the ‘community’ (and the charter shows this meant, in practice, the magnates) accepted their authority on sufferance – very unwillingly according to ‘Fordun’.⁸

There is no doubt that Murray, by an agile strategy, led a successful rebellion in the province from which came his name, and that farther south Wallace too showed a determination to end English occupation wherever he could attack it with advantage. Their successes in different regions contrasted markedly with the craven capitulation by Carrick and the Steward at Irvine on 7 July 1297. But in his very full account of events south of the Mounth, Guisborough tells of Bruce, the Steward, the Bishop of Glasgow, the (awful) William Douglas and William Wallace as leaders but makes not one mention of Murray;⁹ in particular, messengers sent to the Scots to persuade them to surrender at Stirling met only Wallace. The Lanercost Chronicle has the same view of the Scottish command – it was Wallace’s alone.¹⁰ The name of Murray occurs in only one account of the battle of Stirling Bridge, when ‘Fordun’ comments that on Wallace’s side, ‘of the number of nobles only Andrew Murray, father of the noble Andrew [Guardian in the 1330s], fell wounded’ – no mention of command nor of death.¹¹ The inquest of 1300 finding that he was slain against Edward I’s peace at Stirling¹² is assumed to exaggerate the speed of his death after the battle in 1297, although it is just possible that he survived to fall at the siege of Stirling in 1299. To survive eight weeks from Stirling Bridge on 11 September until 7 November 1297, he must have had great stamina under treatment, but since he is not known to have done anything after that battle (unlike Wallace), the traditional view that he took a long time to die is probably correct; he was not leading armies anywhere.

This surely makes his recognition as leader in association with Wallace the more remarkable. We should see it, and the title, not as a preliminary to, but as a consequence of, the unique victory at Stirling, which made them leaders of the kingdom’s army for the next campaign, taking a Scottish army to attack England. This intention may have been decided, and the title agreed, at Haddington about 11 October 1297. Attribution of leadership to Murray must have underestimated the seriousness of his wounds, but even so his unfitness suggests that Wallace was required to accept a noble associate as his senior colleague as the price for ‘consent’ to his authority and using the title officially, that is, especially in summoning men to the host in the name of King John.¹³

The surrender of Dundee Castle by the terrified English garrison soon after Stirling Bridge would demand a Scottish constable for the castle, but Scrymgeour’s heritable grant thereof came later, after a vital duty performed in the army. In November 1297, as we have seen, Wallace ravaged northern England, but in December the English attacked Annandale, and about 25 February 1298 took and burned Annan. Wallace, it is generally said, waited in Scotland for Edward’s invasion. But according to Bower, after an exchange of defiant letters with Edward I, he took an army to Stainmoor (in Cumbria). As the English under Edward I approached, the Scottish hotheads wished to ride out to win their spurs but Wallace sternly imposed discipline, and the Scots advanced in unbroken line, causing the English to flee, when once again Wallace forbade the breaking of ranks in pursuit. This ‘victory’ is unambiguously dated to 20 March 1298, despite which detail, because Edward I cannot have been present, modern writers have wholly discounted the episode as at best belonging to the autumn of 1297 – when he could not have been present either.¹⁴

Edward I is evidently an accretion to the narrative, for Bower himself comments: ‘the English say that their king was not present in person, but someone else in a gleaming suit of armour’. Whoever this commander was (probably Sir Robert Clifford, who was in Carlisle), such an encounter on 20 March fits with an army’s return to Scotland, the magnates holding together until 29 March at Torphichen, when Alexander Scrymgeour was rewarded by the grants made in this charter ‘for his faithful service and succour given to the aforesaid kingdom’. The kingdom had been named only in the charter’s address (custos regni, communitas regni, homines regni), for otherwise the emphasis throughout is upon the king in whose name the grant is made; Alexander’s homage is to the king, as his faithful service could have been, but that was not possible with ‘succour’, even though it was in carrying the royal banner. So ‘service and succour’ were given to the ‘kingdom’.

‘Succour in carrying the royal banner in the army’ suggests ‘saving the day’ not ‘leading the troops to victory’, a military rescue, long after Stirling Bridge but understandable after Stainmoor (20 March), at ‘the time of the making’ of the charter (29 March) although not on its actual date. The Bower narrative, touched already by the growth of legend about Wallace, shows that, avoiding an encounter, Wallace prevented a possible disaster by firm discipline. My own suggestion is that the Scots had been caught in a difficult situation, perhaps with an English force between them and the border (as in 1327), and that Wallace’s discipline got them home under a royal banner carried in the army. Those words, portando vexillum regium in exercitu Scocie,¹⁵ suggest that the succour given was that the banner was always with them.

The displayed ‘royal banner’ would bear the royal arms, the ‘lion’, which in that word was coming to symbolise the kingship of the Scots. A royal banner had been unfurled in the absence of the king by the army defeated at Dunbar in 1296 when the son of Sir William Sinclair, ‘who carried the banner of the lord king of Scotland’, was killed.¹⁶ On both occasions, 1296 and 1298, the banner was surely an assertion that this army marched in the name of King John and hence was the army of the kingdom. But in 1296 he was an honoured prisoner of his magnates, in 1298 a captive of the English king, despite which, to his subjects, he was still ‘the illustrious prince, the lord John, by God’s grace noble king of Scotland’.¹⁷ The banner carried by Alexander Scrymgeour was a defiant proclamation that the English king had not extinguished John’s kingship. It must have seemed vital that it should not fall into English hands.

It may be too that the banner itself had a numinous significance, for it was surely that concealed by the Bishop of Glasgow in his treasury, presumably from the battle of Falkirk, until 1306, when it was taken out and sent to Scone for the inauguration of Robert I.¹⁸ When and how it acquired its special significance we do not know, but the oriflamme of the French king may have been a role model for this Scottish banner. Kept in the treasury of Saint-Denis monastery, the oriflamme was reputed to bring victory to the king, who took it with him on campaign. Thus it went with Louis IX to Egypt, where it was pretty certainly lost to the enemy. This difficulty was met by producing a replica oriflamme to be blessed for the occasion; replicas were lost again at Crécy and Poitiers.¹⁹ What probably made the Scottish royal banner special was ecclesiastical safekeeping and an episcopal blessing, making it a holy object, if not relic, that offered to Wallace, who cherished holy altar vessels, the hope of a victory and a responsibility to keep it from an enemy’s hands. Hence its preservation in Glasgow’s treasury and a concern in 1298 lest it be captured. But it is striking that Scrymgeour’s service for his lands was to be as constable of a castle, with no mention of being heritable bannerman, a right and duty that came to the family from Robert I, perhaps because only a king might grant it.²⁰

As the ‘leader of the army’, Wallace attacked the English kingdom, as in Northumbria, in November 1297 and again in Cumbria in March 1298, when he still calls himself ductor exercitus; this duty would not be changed by the death of Murray. But between the Hexham writs of 7 November 1297 and the charter of 29 March 1298, Wallace also became Guardian, a new responsibility, to protect and defend the Scottish kingdom. In the revised shorter version of his work Bower added a whole passage on this:

He was appointed Guardian of the kingdom not so much by election as by divine intervention, for by a wonderful vision it was shown to various persons worthy in the faith that the most holy apostle Andrew, protector and patron of the kingdom, by hand committed a bloody sword to William Wallace, strictly commanding him to use it everywhere in defence of the kingdom by expelling the English.²¹

Wallace had expelled the English speedily in October 1297 without becoming Guardian; but defence and expulsion had first become a need again about the end of January 1298, when a large English force relieved Roxburgh Castle, so that in February the Scots descended to burn Roxburgh, Haddington ‘and almost all the good towns south of Forth lest the English should find harbour in Scotland’ – anticipating an incursion, and with good reason.²² A major English invasion had indeed been intended but was postponed in February on King Edward’s orders to await his return from Flanders. About late January, I suggest, Wallace had been charged with Guardianship to defend the realm. By March the threat of invasion had receded and Wallace led his attack on northern England, an invasion, so not as Guardian but in his capacity as ‘leader of the army’.

Behind Bower’s elevating tale, we may read the vigorous support of St Andrew for Wallace, urged by the canons of St Andrews, the English in their convent roughly expelled by Wallace, their bishop dead in French exile on 20 August 1297. The invoking of so powerful a saint may have played no small part in the elevation of Wallace – but it also suggests overcoming doubts about Wallace’s appropriateness. If there was an ‘election’ by the community, it was probably in a small gathering, although a prominent Scottish earl did confer his knighthood.²³ As Guardian and knight, Wallace may himself have conferred knighthood upon his older brother, Malcolm, a knight by 1299, and upon Alexander Scrymgeour, a knight by 1306. Of the ‘bloody sword’ we shall hear again.

I return now to the Lübeck letter, the discovery of which we probably owe to Georg Friedrich Christoph, Baron Sartorius von Waltershausen, author of a history of the Hanseatic League, in three volumes published between 1802 and 1808, in which he surveyed sources, remarking that he had recently been informed of documents at Lübeck but doubted that anyone could give a satisfactory account of them.²⁴ Nonetheless, before his death he evidently worked, or had work done, upon them for his collection of source materials, including the letter, ‘edited’ (herausgegeben) by J. M. Lappenberg in 1830.²⁵ The texts seem to have been the responsibility of Sartorius and contain some misreadings, although in case of doubt an engraving of the words in the original was provided in notes. Misreadings were corrected in an appendix, probably Lappenberg’s contribution, where he was working from a ‘facsimile’ of the letter. In 1829 Lappenberg had communicated the existence of the Murray-Wallace letter to a correspondent in England who was told, or assumed, that he had found it, according to the garbled account that appeared in print in 1830.²⁶ Lappenberg sent a copy of the letter, ‘from the records of Lubec’, which reached John D. Carrick to be included in his Life of Sir William Wallace of Elderslie(1830), with text and translation in Appendix H.²⁷ This was reprinted in Joseph Stevenson’s Documents Illustrative of Sir William Wallace (1841), but before publication he obtained from Lübeck a ‘facsimile tracing’ of the letter, presumably by the engraver of the 1830 edition, and included a lithograph in this volume.²⁸ It may have been reproduced elsewhere in the nineteenth century but did not win a place in the National Manuscripts of Scotland. A more correct text was published from the original by the Verein für Lübeckische Geschichte in the Urkundenbuch of Lübeck in 1843;²⁹ it was republished occasionally later in the nineteenth century.

As far as I can tell, the first photograph was published when, in 1911, the archives of Lübeck sent the letter to the Scottish National Exhibition, held at Kelvingrove Park to raise funds for a chair, or chairs, of Scottish History and Literature in the University of Glasgow.³⁰ It was exhibited there in the Palace of History, in a vast collection of artefacts of which a catalogue was published in one volume or, for the truly dedicated, in two volumes with copious photographs, including of the front and back of the letter.³¹What the public made of the letter, or of the twenty-seven editions of Hary’s Wallace displayed nearby, is not recorded.

In 1912 the letter was returned to Lübeck, whose archives were reportedly put in a mine for safety during the 1939–45 war and rumoured to have been taken later to Russia. At a conference in the 1960s, the archivist told me that he had heard stories of documents blowing about a Polish railway station but had been unable to find out more; that they had been destroyed turned out to be a false rumour. Eventually they were handed over to the German Democratic Republic and housed at Potsdam, to be returned to their proper home in Lübeck after the reunification of Germany. The letter was generously brought again to Scotland in 1999, for exhibition for three months in the new Museum of Scotland. The courtesy of this loan of a document that belongs, as do all letters, to the recipient was exemplary. With a few others I was permitted to examine it closely at the end of the exhibition.³²

It is a parchment rectangle with eight lines of writing in Latin, directed to the mayors and communes of Hamburg and Lübeck, intimating that Scottish merchants have told of their favourable attitude to Scotland and its merchants, gives thanks for this and invites them to let it be known to their merchants that they can have free access, with their merchandise, to Scottish ports, because ‘the kingdom, thanks be to God, is recovered by battle from the power of the English’. After ‘Farewell’ and the date ‘Hadsington’, 11 October 1297, an addition asks the German towns to promote the business of John Burnet and John Frere, ‘our merchants’, as they would wish the business of their merchants to be promoted. There is no evidence that these letters promoted a bustling trade between Germany and Scotland;³³ on the contrary, merchants of Lübeck loaned £400 sterling to the English government, for which they were repaid on 20 August 1300.³⁴

But this is an original letter, challenging the historian to learn from all aspects of it, not just its text but the layout, handwriting, method of sealing, seal(s) and folding for dispatch. He might even find the stains of a sea voyage – although not in this case. The handwriting of this letter is in neat straight lines but is very small – a marked contrast to the Scrymgeour charter – and suggests to me the work of a ledger clerk. Moreover, the addition was not written as a postscript on this letter, for the ink and writing show no change; this letter, including the addition, was copied from a previous version, which, it is reasonable to suppose, was the letter to Hamburg. The copying may have taken place after some interval of time, for the place date, Hadsingtona, shows an error that could scarcely have taken place at Haddington.³⁵

At the bottom of the letter two tongues were cut, one about one centimetre broad to carry sealing, the other below it, narrower, to act as a tie around the folded parchment. The folding is clear: the top three lines were turned down, the right-hand end folded over, then again and again, until the document was reduced to a sixth of its original size; the narrow tongue was taken around the document and knotted with itself. Either before or after folding, beeswax was placed around the tongue and impressed with a seal of about four centimetres diameter on the obverse and a smaller seal on the reverse. The claim in 1843 that there had been two seals must have been a guess from the two senders, for there was absolutely no trace of another seal when I examined the original – particularly on this point.³⁶ The sealed and folded document could be carried in a purse.

We might expect the seals to be those of Murray and Wallace, but the evidence is more complex than that. The obverse represents a cheaply or hurriedly made matrix by a craftsman of no great skill, for although the charge is a shield of the royal arms, lion rampant with double tressure flory counter-flory, a wyvern at the top and on each side of the shield, the lion is manifestly off-centre. The legend has been punched on the matrix with curves and straight lines, not individual letters, and its reading is uncertain. The standard reference work offers SI[O]I . . . SCOTT[ ]VM . . . EG;³⁷ I first read S’OI . . . SCOTIIORVM . . . [R]EG, with the tail of an R before EG. The apostrophe could be a damaged I, giving SIGI[LLVM]; a following word – REGNI or COMMVNITATIS is called for – is wholly lost. While possible, an expanded reading as SIGILLVM COMMVNITATIS SCOTTORVM REGNI seems to me to clash with showing the lion, the king’s arms. The oddity of SCOTIIORVM suggests that the original intention was SCOCIE (as on the 1286 seal), changed for reasons now undiscoverable but which cramped what followed. This is now a short gap, for about five letters before [R]EG, so not room for the DEPVTATVM REGIMINI suggested by the 1286 seal, unless abbreviated to DEPVT REG. That is my best conjecture. In putting forward an expanded reading of SIGILLVM REGNI SCOTTORVM DEPVTATVM REGIMINI,³⁸ I confess to being influenced by the 1286 seal, with its shield of the royal arms, but I think it likely that the men of 1297 would also have been so influenced.³⁹

My reading of this seal was made from a cast identified by Ashby McGowan of Glasgow, a learned student of the history of William Wallace, in the Mitchell Library, Glasgow in 1998.⁴⁰ Gilt copper casts of the two sides of the seal attached to the Lübeck letter are sunk in a wooden block, and a label on the back states ‘Made by P. Sinclair Rae. Glasgow. 1912’, at that time a dental technician in Maryhill, Glasgow.⁴¹ Mr McGowan sought to interest in his discovery those who should be concerned; he wrote to myself and failed to receive a reply, for which I tender my apology. He has since published his views on the seal and Wallace.⁴² With the impending arrival of the original in Edinburgh in 1999, a sympathetic journalist at The Herald, Lesley Duncan, took note of his information, inspected the casts and, via Ted Cowan, called on myself for help.

Our attention was concentrated upon the seal on the reverse, no better in workmanship than the obverse. Here, the smaller seal, about twenty-three millimetres in diameter, is struck off-centre on the wax. The charge is a bow and string, before the bow is stretched, with a broad arrow protruding to the edge of the legend with the fletching between bow and string. Two fingers of a hand grasp the string and the arrow behind the fletching,⁴³ but not the bow. About a fourth of the legend is lost after the + at the top, but the bottom sector reads clearly as FILIVS, requiring a name in the nominative, without Sigillvm; that name ended in VS. There are no spaces between words but the following ALANI, with reversed N, is certain. It was only when I made out W as the next letter that Mrs Duncan suggested ‘Wallace’ to me, and I was able to decipher that name with ligatured WAL, the W sharing the stroke (/) with the A, and the L formed by extending the bar of the A. The following A is large, so that after letter I there was no space for the final S; it was crammed within the charge, touching the bow. The whole (with hyphen inserted by me to show the change of register) reads . . . VSFILIVSALANIWALAI-S.⁴⁴

It was not unknown for men to use the seal of a relative or lord if perhaps they had none, but this document calls for the seal of Murray or Wallace. The name Willelmvs fits the space for the lost first name and Andreas will not do. I complete the legend as [WILLELM]VS FILIVS ALANI WALAIS, ‘William son of Alan Wallace’, and claim it as the only known impression of his seal, unrecognised since the document was first printed by Sartorius in 1830. Its modest size surely places the creation of the matrix before Wallace became leader of the kingdom’s army. And it demolishes the names given by literary sources for William’s father; he was, we can be sure, Alan Wallace.

Another version, to be sent to Hamburg, may have borne the seals of the community and the wounded Andrew Murray,⁴⁵ or that of Wallace; the destruction of the Hamburg archives in the eighteenth century means that we cannot be sure. It does seem probable to me, however, that the decision to add the postscript on the Hamburg letter, and to write to Lübeck, a Baltic port less accessible than Hamburg, came after the letter to Hamburg had been written and would be prompted by the identification of two merchants going to the two ports, perhaps one to each. The writing and misspelling suggest that one of the merchants may have written the Lübeck letter.

To return to seals. In 1296, after the fall of King John, Edward I, having collected on his travels in Scotland fealties from about 126 individuals and some burgh communities recorded in forty-five documents sealed by those submitting,⁴⁶ ordered the further collection of a wide range of submissions with sworn fealties recorded and sealed. The fealties were recorded in groups of between one and 100 (rarely more) persons on one parchment, usually from more than one sheriffdom but grouped according to sheriffdom.⁴⁷Seals from these persons were appended, four or five on one string, the strings attached to the documents. The result was fifty-eight (possibly more) documents of submission and fealty with multiple seals.⁴⁸

How was this done? We do not know. The basis seems to be the sheriffdom,⁴⁹ but names from a sheriffdom will appear in groups, each group associated with another or others from other sheriffdoms, these making up one of the fifty-eight documents. All these are dated at Berwick, 28 August 1296, but the number of names is so great that the fealties seem to have been sworn locally at different times. Yet on 25–28 August, in response to royal writs, groups of between twelve and fourteen men from each of six sheriffdoms compeared at Berwick to make a retour on the possessions of the late wealthy widow Elena la Zouche.⁵⁰ Many of the men named swore fealty according to the submission documents – of the Ayrshire thirteen, ten did so. They may have brought to Berwick lists of those who had sworn fealty in the sheriff court, with their seals, to be written up into formal documents at Berwick.

The documents subsequently decayed badly or completely, often leaving only a trayful of seals for each one. Fortunately, between 1300 and 1306 three comprehensive enrolled copies of the 103 (45+58 in the two preceding paragraphs) ragman texts had been made, each called (apparently only since c. 1700) a Ragman Roll (here the RR).⁵¹ If the RR copies are reasonably faithful, then these documents were drawn up by English administrators. Further work on the original fragments might throw more light on how the documents were created.

The RR is the record of submission by some 1,500 men and a few women and should (but does not always) correspond to the names on the surviving seals.⁵² Some 870 seals were catalogued by Bain, about 160 (18 per cent) showing arms; more recently, Dr B. A. McAndrew has published a more careful catalogue of 912 seals,⁵³ and suggests about 20 per cent (180) showing arms. Of the 912, 64 are ecclesiastical, 7 of towns, 17 of women (88 in all),⁵⁴ and on about 35 the charge (but not necessarily the legend) is damaged or obliterated. Of the remaining c. 650 (912–(180+88)), many lack or have fragmentary legends and cannot be associated firmly with a name in the RR but nonetheless show the devices of laymen who were sigilliferous but not armigerous.⁵⁵

These were the men significant enough to have seals, free, propertied, who might serve on the assize in the sheriff court,⁵⁶ who could execute a land sale or purchase, and who were in the region where Edward’s armies and garrisons dominated the native inhabitants – the overwhelming preponderance of names from south of the Forth is unmistakable. They were probably drawn from suitors of the sheriff court in each sheriffdom, the middling folk who in 1297 feared that Edward I would tax them and send them on military service to France.⁵⁷ Some were fairly humble in status.⁵⁸ The devices on their seals were varied and of unknown appositeness. Many employ the fleur-de-lys, some the hunting horn, but a surprising number use the lion rampant (common also in England). Otherwise, birds and the bestiary comprise most of the repertoire: hedgehog, squirrel, rabbit, hound, stag, boar, lamb, even a rhino (McAndrew No. 3486).

Among the names occurring in one ragman text copied to the RR is that of Alan Wallace, a strong claimant to be father of William. This original ragman text, now gall-stained into illegibility⁵⁹ (which I call Text 13, the first figures in McAndrew’s list of its seals)⁶⁰ in the RR version lists 91 names in groups from eight sheriffdoms south of the Forth, plus Perth.⁶¹ Some of these names are found elsewhere in the RR and must have sealed more than one document.⁶² Seven names, including Alan Wallace, come from Ayrshire, two of them, but not Alan, found elsewhere in the RR.⁶³ The corresponding seal found with others from Text 13 shows a curlew, with S ALANI WALAYS (No. 1332).

Would it were that simple! For there is another seal, a fleur-de-lys with the legend S’ALANI WALIS, used twice (Nos. 3465, 3574), one unidentifiable with any part of the RR, the second (No. 3574) with other seals from a document copied in the RR with 75 names, from the sheriffdoms of Ayr (56), Lanark (7) and Dumfries (12). This includes two Wallaces in Ayrshire: Adam (not Alan) and Nicholas.⁶⁴ The former name could be a RR miscopying of ‘Alan’, or Adam could have borrowed Alan’s seal; in either case, the evidence is that either Alan had two seals or else there were two men called Alan Wallace in the county. There are other examples of this ‘same name, two seals’ conundrum, for which there can be no certain resolution with the present state of our knowledge.⁶⁵

But what can be said is that Text 13 was one of two unique in form, for in the RR it describes all those named as ‘tenants of the king’, as another document describes the men named as ‘tenants of the bishop of St Andrews’.⁶⁶ These were men who could lose their lands by forfeiture to the English king because their lords, King John and Bishop William Fraser (an author of the Franco-Scottish treaty and still in Paris, where he died in 1297), had engaged in plotting with King Edward’s enemy, the king of France. These documents name persons selected for a particular reason – liability to forfeiture. Since they pretty certainly did not lose their lands, we may conjecture that after they were assured of this they swore fealty, some for a second time – and this may explain a multiplicity of sealings by Alan Wallace.

The RR does not name the holding(s) of Alan (or anyone else), and we must be content with knowing his name and his sheriffdom, ignoring Blind Hary’s Wallace of the 1470s, which names William’s father as ‘Sir Malcolm’ and his tenancy as ‘Elrislie’. The fourteenth-century chronicle, printed as ‘Fordun’, is more persuasive – that although he was thought ignoble by the magnates, Wallace’s forebears were of knightly status. His elder brother was knighted and had a sufficient patrimony that passed to his descendants,⁶⁷ for William did indeed have a brother, Malcolm, a knight in 1299, and it is likely that they were descended from the Wallaces of Riccarton, a knightly family. What became of Malcolm is unknown, but another brother, John, was executed by the English in 1307.

William has a rightful place in what we make of the history of Scotland. From May 1297 for some fifteen months his career is reasonably documented. But before 1297 it can only be remarked that he did not seal any known ragman fealty, perhaps because he abstained or refused, or because he was not a suitor of the sheriff court. According to ‘Fordun’, he ‘rose from his hiding places’ in 1297, while English sources for the most part denigrate him as ‘a common thief, . . . often outlawed’, ‘a bloody man, formerly a leader of thieves’, and even ‘deserter of piety, plunderer, sacrilegious one, arsonist, and murderer, cruel as Herod, debauched as Nero’.⁶⁸ But there is one English source, the chronicle ascribed to William Rishanger, monk of St Albans, that is specific:

When Edward returned to the south of his kingdom . . . all the Scots by common assent chose and made their leader and recruiter a certain man called William le Waleis, of ignoble family, so that they could renew the war against the king of England – in vain.

How the Scots chose William le Waleis to be their leader and recruiter.

At the same time there was in Scotland a certain young man called William le Waleis,⁶⁹ an archer, who sought his sustenance by bow and quiver. Born and brought up of a lowly and poor family, since he had tried out his audacity in many places, as is the way of strong men, he sought leave from the Scots that he might meet the English and halt their army by his bow, and, so that they would help him, and he would protect their army. He promised them by a sworn oath, that if leave to meet with them was given him, he would take all England and lead them to London, and so deliver up the whole kingdom of England by force. . . . On the spot all the Scots chose the said William le Waleis, of ignoble family, and appointed him leader and recruiter over their army.

This chronicle breaks off about 1300, and the above section, although the frustra, ‘in vain’, shows that it was written after the battle of Falkirk in July 1298, shows no awareness of the capture and death of Wallace in 1305, over which English writers were wont to gloat. The repetition in it is striking, and the content of the second paragraph, with its absurd boasts, speaks not only of its English origin but also suggests a popular poem of the kind preserved in the chronicles of Pierre Langtoft and perhaps written soon after Falkirk. The comment on Wallace’s ignoble birth in ‘Fordun’ is here reiterated; what is new is his strength and his occupation as an archer. His archery skill had been gained not in war but in the pursuit of game for the pot, and if he was criminalised before 1297 (and this depends on a mention of him or a namesake as ‘thief ’ in 1296),⁷⁰ this could have arisen from poaching. But the occupation is surely confirmed beyond a peradventure by the device on his seal of a bow and string, with arrow.

Among the ragmen seals, Patrick Archer, another royal tenant in Ayrshire, shows a stringed hunting horn above a bow and arrow,⁷¹ while William de Kinmonth and Duncan Baird (Nos. 3383, 3503) show an archer or bow and arrow shooting at a stag. The bow alone, however, occurs nowhere else among the 600 non-armigerous seals; and the absence from Wallace’s seal of emblems of the chase – the stag, the hunting horn – suggests that his pursuit was, or should have been, small game. The broadhead arrow depicted on the seal was the weapon not of war but of the hunt; the device on his seal was chosen with care as relevant to Wallace’s status and profession as an archer.

For long the history of archery⁷² accepted a development from the ‘short bow’, known before the late thirteenth century, to the longbow developed then, which gave the English a superiority over lesser races on the battlefield – as over the Scots at Falkirk in 1298. But the few references to short bows are to those intended for women or children; the short bow, supposedly in general use before the late thirteenth century, was a category invented by Sir Charles Oman in the nineteenth century. Archaeology has provided ample evidence for the existence of bows longer than 168 centimetres (5 feet 6 inches) and as long as 192 centimetres (6 feet 3 inches) in the tenth and eleventh centuries.⁷³ The artist of the Bayeux tapestry, following the stylised iconography of an earlier age, depicted bows much smaller than the archers, but in the lower margin of the battle scenes gave the Norman archers unstylised bows of their own height. From the twelfth century there is less archaeological evidence until the dozens of bows and arrows recovered from theMary Rose, sunk in 1545, but there is enough to show that the bow of adult height was the usual equipment in both chase and battle, from at least Viking times until the sixteenth century. Such a bow would be the equipment of William Wallace.

The Mary Rose examples have permitted the construction of replica bows that differ in many respects from modern archery examples, where a modern longbow will store about 50–70 pounds in energy. For this:

an archer uses well-controlled muscle power, the greater part of the work being done by the arm and shoulder muscles . . . The pull on the fingers of the drawing hand corresponds to the weight of the bow, the left hand holding the bow, and the left arm, being fully extended but not locked. The effect of the natural elasticity of the bow is to swing the bow-arm across the chest so, to counteract this, the shoulder muscles have to develop a pull of about 300 lb (136 kg) force ... The resulting force across each shoulder joint ... is greater than three hundredweight (152.4 kg).⁷⁴

The physical development of a professional archer, practising daily, as he/she must, with such a bow, would be remarkable.

The weight (that is, stored energy) of the longbows of the Mary Rose, and of earlier fragments showing that the type had long been known, is 110–170 pounds, at least double the weight of the modern longbow; the enormous energy stored in the drawn bow would allow a range of 300 metres, while the feathering of the arrow would cause it to rotate, so, holding a straight course, to achieve a remarkable accuracy of aim. The energy to achieve this was stored by human effort. Repeated drawing and firing (and shooting ten arrows per minute was not at all unusual) would lead to striking muscular development of the shoulders and arms. The skeletons from the Mary Rose that can be associated with archery tackle are described as ‘huge . . . not necessarily tall, but massively boned’ with changes to the shoulder blades that could be the result of working with heavy bows.⁷⁵

Now, it can be argued that the ignoble of thirteenth-century Scotland would be more familiar with plough and harrow than longbow and arrow, and that their bows, if any, would be less well made, less powerful and less demanding than the yew bows bought for Henry VIII of England. But imported yew bows of quality were indeed possessed by the ignoble in England c. 1300, and there is no reason to think that they did not also reach the Scots in the thirteenth century. Our sources do not permit us to test whether the peasantry were skilled archers or not, but scepticism on this surely cannot apply to William Wallace who ‘sought his sustenance by bow and quiver’, and who would need the most effective implement of his day in both range and power for his hunt, with a lifetime of using it from an early age to perfect his expertise. A broad, powerful man.

That is how he appears in later narratives. In Wyntoun he is ‘of stature . . . strang and stout’, and later ‘manlyk, stout and lyberalle’,⁷⁶ descriptions that were perhaps only conventional, although it is notable that ‘lang’, tall, is not among them. Bower in the 1440s remedied this, sketching a man ‘tall, with the body of a giant . . . broad shouldered and big-boned’, but these words were borrowed from a much earlier description of Charlemagne, already used by him.⁷⁷ This was also the source of the vivid description of a seven-foot-tall Wallace, with ‘great limbs’ and ‘hard muscles’ in the full-blown romance-life by Blind Hary,⁷⁸ a man who fought with the sword. Just once he gives us Wallace the archer, in the context of a fictitious encounter with the English near Cargill (Perthshire):

He shot down fifteen of the enemy before running out of arrows, but his men were not good archers, preferring to fight in close encounter with sword and spear.

Other atrocities were alleged by English sources: that the Scots bound and threw old men, clerics and women into rivers, and Wallace himself was about to preside at such an occasion when the clerics were saved by the intervention of some magnates. One source tells us that after the battle of Stirling Bridge his men showed a lively hatred when they flayed the skin of Cressingham, the English Treasurer, killed in the battle, and divided it into small parts; but another source that Wallace himself ‘caused a broad strip [of the skin] to be taken from head to heel to make therewith a baldrick for his sword’ – a savage gesture of triumph.⁸⁰ How much truth there was in these stories we cannot know.

But there was ample justification for portraying Wallace as a man of the sword in the leadership he gave from 1297, described in the account of his career in the last document to be considered: the record of his offences and sentence on 23 August 1305 preserved by a contemporary London annalist. I give references to the paragraphs of the translation provided here. He first tells us something of Wallace’s entry to London and then his being conveyed to Westminster Hall where he was crowned with laurels in derision because he had once claimed that he should wear a crown there (§1). The annal also claims that when the offence of treason was read out, ‘he answered that he had never been a traitor to the king of England but granted the other crimes charged against him’. The justification for this, that Wallace had never sworn fealty to Edward, is entirely modern.

The official record does make it plain that the king, by his ordinacio enjoined on the justices,⁸¹ had informed the specially appointed justices of Wallace’s offences (§2) and that they then pronounced the penalties incurred by the offender. The king’s authority – his record — sufficed to make guilt absolute, and the final clause of the offences (before sentence) denying the opportunity of defence or response (§7) makes it clear that no evidence was led and that Wallace was intended to be silent throughout. His rejection of treason, which is the annalist’s name for the sedition and felony of the charges,⁸² is not in the official record. But in 1322 the trial of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, began with the judge saying, perhaps in English: ‘Thomas, at the first our lord the king and this court excludes you of [from] all manner [of] answer. Thomas . . . you have ridden with banner displayed . . . as a traitor’, to which Lancaster did riposte that he had never been a traitor – and was ignored.⁸³ This may represent either the procedure of 1305 or an unsuccessful attempt to bar repetition of Wallace’s riposte. In any case, there can be little doubt that he did speak out, perhaps on the first charge, perhaps towards the end when, as an outlaw, he was said to have no right to speak. If, as is likely, the whole proceedings were conducted in insular French,⁸⁴ the accused might pick out the recurring sedition and felonie and make his protest; the details of the rest would be incomprehensible to him unless he had acquired that language, which is doubtful.

So there would be only charges and sentence. Of the twenty or more opponents of Edward I who were executed for treason, only two suffered the penalty, inescapable later, of being drawn to execution, hanged, disembowelled and quartered. Some elements were imposed in different cases: for example, the 296 persons drawn and hanged in 1279 for clipping the coinage, or Llewellyn ap Gruffydd, leading the Welsh against Edward I, killed in a skirmish with an English platoon, whose head was cut off to be displayed on the Tower of London. But in 1283, David ap Gruffydd (brother of Llewellyn), who had enjoyed Edward’s favour and rebelled against him, was sentenced to be drawn to execution because he had betrayed the king, hanged alive for killing English noblemen, taken down, disembowelled and his entrails burned because he had done this at Easter, and his body quartered, the pieces despatched to be displayed as a warning to others – probably in Welsh towns. Only beheading is not mentioned, but as his head was displayed at the Tower, that too was inflicted upon him, although we do not know at what point.⁸⁵

The record of the judgment on Wallace, well summarised and discussed in recent scholarship,⁸⁶ relates each element in his punishment to asserted crimes (§8). For acting as though king in Scotland, and for his other felonies against the king, seeking his death (§3–4), he was drawn to the place of execution; for his robberies, homicides and felonies (§4–5), he was hanged and disembowelled;⁸⁷ as an outlaw (§7), he was beheaded; for his injuries to the church (§8) caused by blasphemous thoughts arising from his bowels, his entrails were burned; and finally, his head was to be displayed in London, and his body quartered and a part displayed on the gibbet at Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Edinburgh (§9). The correspondence with David ap Gruffydd is not exact, and in the circumstances consistency was not up for debate, but the two punishments were clearly meant to be identical; it is likely that the Westminster chronicle is correct when it places the burning of entrails before the beheading, as evidently happened with David ap Gruffydd (§10).

Yet the contrast with, for example, the other Edwardian cause célèbre, that of Thomas Turberville in 1295, is striking. He told Edward’s secrets to the French king (when the two kings were at war), urged the possibility of the Welsh and Scots rising together, and left a trail of treasonable correspondence, yet was merely – forgive the word – hanged for it and left on the gibbet until his body disintegrated.⁸⁸ The sentence on Wallace makes it quite clear why he, and presumably David ap Gruffydd, were treated with such ferocity: his corpse was quartered because he had committed felonies not only against King Edward but also against the people of England and Scotland, and the quarters were therefore displayed before them. The logic of this statement is that the people would rejoice in justice manifestly done, but the act, limited to these two men, had nothing to do with logic; it was to ‘put fear into and to warn’ the rebellious of the awful fate that awaited them if they followed another such leader. The chunks of flesh were intended to cow the subject peoples, the Welsh and the Scots.

But one detail in the charges against Wallace, relating to the death of the sheriff of Lanark at the beginning of Wallace’s public career, seems to have escaped comment (§4). The Latin claims that Wallace ‘attacked, wounded and killed William de Heselrig, sheriff of Lanark, who [held or was holding]⁸⁹ the pleas of the king in open county court’, and postea, in contemptum ipsius regis, ipsum vicecomitem sic interfectum frustatim dimicavit. Dimicare here carries the unusual meaning ‘cut up’,⁹⁰ as required by the rarefrustatim, ‘in pieces’.⁹¹ Hence, ‘afterwards in contempt of the king he cut up the sheriff, slain thus in pieces’.

The gesture is unknown to writers of the time or later. ‘Fordun’ knew little or nothing of the early Wallace, save that he killed the unnamed sheriff of Lanark in that town.⁹² Only with Wyntoun, writing soon after 1400, is there acknowledgment that: ‘Of his good deeds and his manhood / Great tales and songs are made’, and that all his deeds would fill a ‘great book’.⁹³ Wyntoun shows no knowledge of Wallace the archer; rather, he was a swordsman, brawling with the English in Lanark because they taunted him for the ‘sword both sharp and long’ with which ‘it was his use then for to gang’, to which Wallace’s bawdy ripostes, ‘sa said the prest that served thy wif ’ and ‘thi dame⁹⁴ was swyvit [sexually compromised] or [before] thou was borne’, led to the predictable riot, exchanging ‘dint for dint’, from which Wallace escaped with his mistress’s help.⁹⁵ Then the unnamed sheriff, the king of England’s ‘lufftennande’,⁹⁶ came to Lanark, had her arrested and executed, to Wallace’s anguish. He gathered thirty men, entered the town by night, burst into the sheriff ’s lodging, seized him by the throat in his bed, crying ‘the woman’s death of yesterday I shall quit thee now’, and, dragging him downstairs, killed him (from what follows) with his sword.⁹⁷

This source agrees with ‘Fordun’ in killing only one man, so we can reject the version of a battle against an English company given in The Wallace⁹⁸ and accept that the assault could well have taken place at night, as Wyntoun describes. ‘Holding the king’s pleas’ in the charges describes the reason for Heselrig’s presence at Lanark and makes the offence an attack upon the king, for the sheriffs and others appointed by Edward are described as ‘holding his place’, locum suum tenentes, making the same point and leading to the charge that Wallace in sedition to the king acted feloniously ‘in perpetrating his death’. It is striking that this point had somehow reached Wyntoun when he described the sheriff as the king’s ‘lufftenand’.

But neither Wyntoun nor any other source knows the savagery of those two Latin words frustatim dimicavit, ‘he hacked the slain sheriff in pieces’, which so justify the belief recounted by Bower that St Andrew gave Wallace a bloody sword. They show us that in 1297 he was already a man of the sword, secondly, a seeker after vengeance fuelled by hatred, and therefore, thirdly, a man moved by a terrible personal outrage. If I am right in seeing him moved by a personal affront in taking vengeance on Heselrig, then we must surely give some credence to the essential of Wyntoun’s story: that Heselrig had killed a woman dear to William Wallace.

Thus what he did to Heselrig’s body in 1297 was done to his own in 1305. The precedent of David ap Gruffydd’s execution shows that the quartering was not an innovation, not introduced as repayment for the violation of Heselrig’s corpse, which was regarded as ‘contempt of the king’. Yet although the sentence on Wallace makes no connection between the two violations, it seems possible, even likely, that there was one, after the dismemberment of Heselrig was cited to justify that of Wallace. Three weeks after the latter’s execution, Edward began discussions within parliament with some English prelates and magnates and a delegation of ten leading Scots, on the ‘form of peace’ that would settle the government of Scotland and which resulted in the Ordonnance of early October 1305. To these Scots, among them the betrayer of Wallace, Sir John Menteith, whom Edward appointed to a vacant place on the delegation, the execution would be very immediate – his head looked down upon them at the Tower – and some may even have been in London when it took place;⁹⁹ to recall his atrocity might remind them of his lowly origins and justify the quartering of his body.

It is a possibility, but no more, that it was feared that the Scots might protest on religious grounds. In 1299 Boniface VIII, in the bull Detestande feritatis, denounced with characteristically immoderate language the practice of treating the bodies of nobles and persons of rank who died distant from their desired place of burial to a process whereby they ‘were cruelly disembowelled and frightfully severed into pieces’.¹⁰⁰ These were boiled, the flesh separated from the bones and the latter sent to be buried.¹⁰¹ The pope’s denunciation was aimed at noble ranks¹⁰² and not at those who might suffer quartering at Smithfield. It was also ineffective – we need only recall that the corpse of Douglas, killed in Spain in 1331, was dismembered and boiled, his flesh buried there, his bones brought home to Douglas kirk.¹⁰³

But in 1305 Edward I was mending fences with the papacy and its compliant new occupant, Clement V (elected 5 June 1305), sending a well-prepared embassy to Clement, partly to secure release from promises given domestically in 1297–1301, and the revocation of the bull Clericis laicos, and partly to have Robert Winchelsey removed from the archbishopric of Canterbury. So hopeful was Edward of a new relationship that in the month of Wallace’s execution he told the Bishop of Hereford that he intended to petition the pope for the canonisation of Thomas Cantilupe, bishop from 1275 to1282, and did so early in November 1305.¹⁰⁴ He may have judged that it would be well to give the Scots no case (based upon the condemnation in Detestande feritatis) with which to stir up Clement against him, as they had stirred up his predecessor, ‘that Roman priest’, Boniface VIII; hence, perhaps, the implication that by his act Wallace earned the same treatment.

If the later picture of Wallace’s physique doubtfully represents a tradition passed down in tales and songs,¹⁰⁵ I offer the much firmer judgment that – by tradition or by chance – it is close to the truth about the man revealed by his seal. William Wallace the archer must have been strong of arm and broad of shoulder well beyond the average of his time, and skilled of eye and hand. When this man of lowly birth came to lead a people in arms and to defend their kingdom, bow and arrow would give place to the sword with which he is endowed in literature and shown in sculpture. But Wallace in temperament was a man of his time and of his non-chivalric origins, a man of vengeance who killed the sheriff of Lanark and hacked to pieces his corpse, a deed returned in full measure by his judges.

Appendix. William Wallace: The Judgment of 23 August 1305

Modern accounts of the trial of Wallace, particularly those by Professors Bellamy and Barrow and Mr Andrew Fisher,¹⁰⁶ have set the event in a convincing context. Here, from the London annalist, who included the record of proceedings, is a translation of the key contemporary account of what happened seven hundred years ago, followed by a brief excerpt from a chronicle kept at Westminster Abbey, giving details of Wallace’s execution. I have broken the texts into paragraphs and added numbering thereof.

1. From Chronicles of Edward I and Edward II, ed. W. Stubbs, I, 139–42: [Annals of London:] In the same year on 22 August, Sir William Wallace, knight, born of Scottish birth, came to London; a multitude of men and women met him and he was put up in the houses of William de Leyre, citizen of London, in the parish of All Saints ad Fenum.¹⁰⁷ The next day, Monday, the eve of St Bartholomew, he was led on horseback to Westminster; with John de Segrave and Geoffrey de Segrave, knights, the mayor, sheriffs and aldermen of London leading and following him, with many others on foot and horseback. In the Great Hall of Westminster he was placed on the south bench, crowned with laurel leaves inasmuch as it was commonly said that in past times he had claimed that he should wear a crown in that same hall. Forthwith he was called to judgment and charged by Sir Peter Malory, justice of the lord king of England, as a traitor to the said king; he answered that he had never been a traitor to the king of England, but granted the other crimes charged against him. At length the said Peter with other justices pronounced the judgment in the order which follows.

2. [Summary of letters patent:] Edward I to John de Segrave, Peter Malory, Ralph de Sandwich, John de Bakewell and John le Blound mayor of London, appoints them justices at the prison of London to deliver William Wallace ‘according to the ordinance on the matter enjoined by us upon you’. All or four or three of them are to deliver him ‘in the aforesaid way’. John de Segrave, who has custody of William, is to cause William and his attachiamentum¹⁰⁸ to come to the appointed place at the appointed time. At Raurethe [Rawreth, Essex], 18 August, regnal year 33 [1305].

3. [The proceedings:] Trial at Westminster before John de Segrave, P. Malory, R. de Sandwich, John de Balewell and J. le Blound mayor of the king’s city of London, on Monday, the eve of St Bartholomew, in the 33rd year of the reign of King Edward son of Henry.

William Wallace, a Scot and coming from Scotland, taken for sedition, homicides, depredations, arsons, and other divers felonies, came, and after the justices recited how, after the aforesaid lord king had taken the land of Scotland by arms against John Balliol, the prelates, earls, barons and others of that land, his enemies, by forfeiture of the same John and by his conquest he had reduced and subjugated all Scots to his lordship and royal power as their king, had received the homages and fealties of prelates, earls, barons and many others and had caused his peace to be proclaimed through all the land of Scotland and had ordained and appointed keepers of that land in his place, sheriffs, provosts, baillies, and others his agents, to maintain his peace and do justice to all according to the laws and customs of that land.

4. the aforesaid William Wallace, forgetting his fealty and allegiance, pondering every possible felony and sedition against the said lord king, and having joined and allied to himself an immense number of felons, arose and feloniously attacked and assaulted the keepers and agents of the said king, and feloniously and against the peace of the said lord king attacked, wounded and killed William de Heselrigg, sheriff of Lanark, who [was holding]¹⁰⁹ the pleas of the said king in open county court, and thereafter, in contempt of the same king, he cut up piecemeal the said sheriff [who had been] killed thus.

5. Thereafter with the largest possible throng of armed men gathered to him and his felony, he attacked the cities and castles of that land, and caused to be sent out his writs through all Scotland, as though [they were] the writs of the superior of that land, and he ordered his parliaments and musters,¹¹⁰ all the keepers and agents of the lord king having been thrown out of the land of Scotland by the same William. Not wishing to be curbed by such wickedness and sedition, he advised all the prelates, earls and barons of his land belonging to his party that they should submit to the fealty and lordship of the lord king of France and give him help to the destruction of the kingdom of England.

6. Also taking with him some of his fellows he entered the kingdom of England, namely the counties of Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland, and all whom he found there in the king of England’s fealty he feloniously killed by various kinds of death; he feloniously and seditiously assaulted, burned and devastated religious men and nuns dedicated to God, churches built to the honour of God and his saints and with them the bodies of saints and other relics honourably collected in them; he spared none who used the English language but inflicted [upon] all, old and young, wives and widows, children and babes the worst death which he could devise.

7. Thus he persevered every day and hour seditiously and feloniously to encompass the death of the said lord king and the manifest weakening and destruction of his crown and royal majesty. And although after such immense and horrible deeds, the lord king with his great army had invaded the land of Scotland and had defeated the said William, who bore a banner against him in mortal battle, and his other enemies, and had granted his firm peace to all of that land, and had mercifully caused the said William Wallace to be recalled to his peace, the same William persevered seditiously and feloniously, harmoniously and eagerly,¹¹¹ in his afore-noted wickedness, refused to submit himself to the lord king’s peace and to come to it, and so was publicly outlawed in the court of the said lord king as a deceiver, robber and felon according to the laws of England and Scotland; and it is, and is believed, unjust and in disagreement with English laws for anyone outlawed thus and placed beyond the laws and not afterwards restored to his peace to be admitted to defend his position or to answer.

8. It is decided that the said William, for the manifest sedition which he feloniously contrived to bring about his [the king’s] death and to weaken and destroy his crown and his royal dignity, bearing a banner in mortal battle against his liege lord, shall be drawn from the palace of Westminster to the Tower of London and from the Tower to Aldgate and from there through the middle of the city to Elms¹¹² and for the robberies, homicides and felonies which he carried out in the kingdom of England and land of Scotland, shall be hanged there and afterwards taken down. And because he was outlawed and not afterwards restored to the lord king’s peace, he shall be beheaded and decapitated. And afterwards for the dreadful wickedness which he did to the church, in burning churches, vessels and feretories [shrines] in which the body of Christ and the bodies of saints and their relicts were collected, the heart, liver and lung and all the bowels of the said William, from which such perverse thoughts proceeded, shall be put in the fire and burned.

9. And also because he had done the aforesaid sedition, depredations, arsons, homicides and felonies not only to the said lord king but also to the whole people of England and Scotland, the body of the same William shall be cut and divided into four quarters, and the head thus severed shall be put on London Bridge in the view of those passing both by land and water, and one quarter shall be hung on the gibbet at Newcastle upon Tyne, a second quarter at Berwick, a third quarter at Stirling and the fourth quarter at St John’s Town¹¹³ to put dread in and to warn all by-passers and observers.

10. From Flores Historiarum, ed. H. R. Luard, iii, 124

[A Westminster Abbey chronicle:] On the eve of St Bartholomew’s day he was condemned to a very cruel but well-deserved death. First [he was] dragged through the streets of London at horse’s tails to the very high gibbet made for him, on which [he was] hanged by a noose and afterwards let down half alive; next his genitals [were] cut off and his intestines eviscerated and burned in a fire; finally when his head [had been] cut off and his body cut in four parts, the head was affixed on a stake on London Bridge; the quartered limbs were sent to parts of Scotland.