7
Felicity Riddy
My subject is a poem written in the late fifteenth century by a poet known only as Hary, or sometimes Blind Hary. Hary’s Acts and Deidis of Sir William Wallace was the most widely read of all Scottish poems for a period of some four hundred years after its composition. It was this poem that fixed the figure of William Wallace in the popular imagination and gave definitive shape to the legend. Moreover, it taught the people of Scotland a way of conceptualising the nation that includes a virulent anti-Englishness but, as I shall argue, is at the same time more than this.
Hary’s Wallace was part of that great flowering of Scottish literature at the very end of the Middle Ages. Robert Henryson, author of the Fables and The Testament of Cresseid, was probably Hary’s contemporary, while William Dunbar, poet at the court of James IV, was perhaps a generation younger but certainly knew of him. The Wallace was composed in the reign of James III: the sole surviving manuscript, now in the National Library of Scotland, was copied in 1488 and the poem itself must have been written a decade or so earlier, probably in the late 1470s.1 We do not know anything about its author, Hary, or even whether this was his first name or his surname. Dunbar calls him ‘Blind Hary’ in his ‘Lament for the Makaris’, and in the early sixteenth century the historian John Mair says that ‘Henry, a man blind from his birth, compiled in my infancy a whole book on the history of William Wallace, and wrote in Scottish verse, in which he was skilled . . . This man obtained an honourable living by reciting histories in the presence of the nobles.’2 In the early 1490s there are records of a Blind Hary receiving royal gifts, and it seems certain that this is Mair’s man. But it is hard to see how the author of the Wallace could have been blind since birth, because in compiling his poem he had clearly read a number of written sources, including Chaucer, and he alludes several times to a Latin book from which he says he is working. Of course, late-medieval reading habits were different from ours: reading aloud was still a common practice and the memory was cultivated in ways that we have now largely forgotten. We know little about how people coped with blindness in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, there seems to be a consensus that Hary’s blindness probably came upon him some time after the composition of theWallace or at least after the preparation for it.
Hary also acquired a somewhat romantic reputation as a minstrel, like the blind crowder that Sidney speaks of in the Apology for Poetry, although he was in fact, like the other makars of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, a bookish writer, as I have already indicated. He is not, I think, a very good poet. He writes in five-stress couplets and, indeed, is one of the earliest Scottish writers to do so. Until the latter part of the fifteenth century the staple form in Scots narrative verse had been the brisker four-stress couplet, which is the form that John Barbour had used for his long poem about the Bruce a hundred years earlier. The five-stress couplet was introduced into English in the fourteenth century by Chaucer, who used it in The Canterbury Tales. In the hands of a poet with a poor ear it has a deadly expansiveness: it is ample and can be wordy, and Hary’s poem is ample too. There are nearly 12,000 lines of it in twelve books, starting with Wallace’s birth and ending with the martyrdom in London. Although there is a certain banal, even McGonagallish quality to the writing, nevertheless the poem as a whole is driven by an extraordinarily virulent, energetic and clearly engaging nationalism (to judge by its later history) that sustains a morality of vengeance and justified murder: ‘Southeron to sla he thinkis it na syne’ (III.270).
In writing the Bruce in the 1370s, Barbour had drawn on the memories of men who had lived through the Wars of Independence or whose fathers had. Hary was writing around a hundred and eighty years after the events he describes, in the latter part of the reign of James III, and the poem seems to have been provoked by contemporary events, particularly James III’s policy of peace with England during the years around 1474–78. This included various forms of rapprochement, including betrothing the future James IV to an English princess, and there was dissension within Scotland about this policy.3
The poem gives a voice to the dispossessed, or rather to fantasies of dispossession. The Wallace conveys extraordinarily well a sense of what it is like to live in occupied territory, with talentless bullies strutting about helping themselves to whatever takes their fancy, lording it contemptuously over the natives and committing acts of random atrocity. It is very good, too, at showing how in a world that is not ruled by law, anything goes, on either side. Wallace’s violence is directed primarily against Englishmen or untrue Scots, and he ostentatiously spares women, children and priests. The world of the poem is one in which young men are humiliated by the temperance and restraint of their elders whose decent aim is to try to make some kind of show of normal living. When English followers of ‘Earl Persie’, as he is called, brazenly help themselves to a baggage horse belonging to Wallace’s uncle, Sir Ranald Crawford, sheriff of Ayr, Sir Ranald receives the news philosophically:
That is bot litill der. [harm]
We may get hors and othir gud in playne,
And men be lost we get them nevir agayne.’ [If] (IV. 60–2)
This kind of middle-aged counsel is lost on Wallace. He accuses his uncle of cowardice, renounces his allegiance to him and pursues the thieves. He catches up with them to the east of Cathcart, kills three of them while his companions kill the other two, loots the baggage train and makes for hiding among ‘trew Scottis’. Thus is the pattern established: Wallace is driven first to quick retaliation for insult or violence and then to outlawry. Wallace knows that love and marriage are not for him, or not for long: he has chosen a different course. At first he says he will not marry at all, but against his better judgment does marry the nameless daughter of Hugh Braidfoot, and they have a daughter. His wife is killed, though, by the English in retaliation for helping him escape; and his mother has long since had to flee from her home in the southwest to Dunfermline Abbey, disguised as a pilgrim, where she dies. When he learns of his wife’s death, Wallace vows that ten thousand Englishmen will die for her sake, and by the end of the poem he must have achieved that aim, although the reader loses count of the dead. The Englishmen’s violation of Wallace’s wife is a version of their violation of Scotland. Scotland, we come to see, is his mother, wife and daughter: there is a strange episode in the second book when he is rescued by his old nurse after being slung for dead into a cesspit, and her daughter suckles him. He was not committed thereafter exclusively to a life on the run – for a period he was Governor of Scotland – but nevertheless was committed to the company of other driven and single-minded men. There was the triumph of generalship at Stirling Bridge, but after the defeat at Falkirk – which Hary turns into a victory – Wallace fought the English in France before returning to Scotland and the inevitable betrayal and martyrdom.
I say inevitable because the pattern of the betrayal and death of the hero whom Wallace’s life exemplifies is offered by those other mythic lives that were so widely known in the Middle Ages: Alexander and Arthur. Perhaps it is because the contours of this myth can be seen so readily in what is known of Wallace’s real-life history that he has assumed the role he has. In or about the 1460s, Hary’s Scots contemporary, Sir Gilbert Haye, wrote a long Life of Alexander the Conquerour, also in five-stress couplets, which tells the story of Alexander’s mighty conquests and his in-the-end empty dominion – empty because it all ends with his early death by poison.4 The medieval Alexander legend is characteristically moralised, though, and is used to provide a lesson in vainglory. The story of Arthur, however, was, like that of Wallace, used for more complex moral purposes, including the exploration of issues relating to English nationalism. By the fifteenth century, Arthur was in some sense to English history what Wallace and Bruce were to Scots. Arthur comes to the throne at sixteen and thereafter conquers the rest of Britain (including Scotland) and much of Europe, and is marching triumphantly to take Rome itself when word comes of treachery at home, forcing his return to England and the final battle that brings about his death. Arthur’s story can be read as a narrative of ambition, a myth of English imperialism. Another contemporary of Hary’s, the Englishman Sir Thomas Malory, uses this myth in his Le Morte Darthur, written around 1470, just before the Wallace. In Le Morte Darthur, Arthur’s reign does not come to an end through a failure of ambition abroad but because of betrayal at home. Malory may have had England’s failure to maintain its hold on France in mind when he wrote of the collapse of Arthur’s imperium.5What happened in France in the first half of the fifteenth century may also be relevant to Hary’s Wallace.
I have already said that the poem is very good at conveying a sense of what it was like to live in enemy-occupied territory. This is in some ways surprising, since when Hary was writing no one in Scotland can have remembered such a time. The territory that did experience English colonisation in the fifteenth century was, of course, Normandy, from the 1420s until the English withdrawal in 1450. A Norman chronicler, Thomas Basin, writing in the 1470s (the same decade, that is, in which Hary composed The Wallace), describes the kind of guerrilla warfare that is one of Hary’s main subjects. It is provoked by the presence in Normandy of oppressive English garrisons, and Basin views the response of some of his fellow countrymen with contempt:
There was also a great number of desperate and lost men who, whether through cowardice, hatred of the English, or a desire to seize the goods of others, or whether, knowing they had committed crimes, wished to escape the snare of the law, quit their fields and houses, did not live in the towns or castles of the French and did not fight in their ranks, but, like wild beasts and wolves, lived in the deepest and most inaccessible forests. . . . They especially attacked the lives of the English, massacring them when the opportunity presented itself, without any pity.6
Thomas Basin was a former bishop of Lisieux, writing in exile, who had collaborated, as many Normans of his class did, during the English occupation: there are plenty of figures like him in the pages of The Wallace, including Robert the Bruce himself, who attempt to distance themselves from the freedom fighters. I do not suggest that Hary knew Basin’s chronicle, which is not the only one to record the activities of the Brigands, as they were called, but he may have heard or read stories of what Normandy had been like under English rule and this helped him to imagine an occupied Scotland. Other Norman chronicles record their hatred of Henry V for his brutality and ruthlessness in terms very similar to those used of Edward I in Scotland.
It is of course important to see Hary’s Wallace in its immediate context as a fifteenth-century poem, and that is how I have been discussing it so far. It is also important, however, to look at the ways in which it is not a fifteenthcentury poem, since it was read for hundreds of years after its composition. It had an extraordinarily long and successful run. It went quickly into print: there are fragments of an otherwise lost edition by the first Edinburgh printers, Chepman and Myller, dated around 1508–9. It was reprinted in 1570 by Lekprevik, and then twice by Henry Charteris in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and then by Andro Hart and others throughout the seventeenth century. There were numerous eighteenth-century editions, including one by the Jacobite printer Robert Freebairn, around 1730, and a modernised one by William Hamilton of Gilbertfield, first published in 1722 and several times reprinted in the eighteenth century. This was the edition read by both Burns and Wordsworth. The printing history suggests that the poem really took off after the union of the crowns, when its bitter resentment at the loss of Scottish autonomy acquired a new contemporary resonance. It taught its readers, in a period of the anglicisation of Scottish culture, how to feel Scottish.
In 1820 the lexicographer John Jamieson re-edited it from the manuscript, and the first Scottish Text Society edition was produced by James Moir in the 1880s. But Hugh Miller, the Cromarty stonemason, recalls in his 1858 autobiography reading what he called a ‘common-stall edition’ as a child, before the scholars got hold of it. He quotes Lord Hailes’s view that it was ‘the bible of the Scotch people’.7 Barbour’s Bruce was also reprinted between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries but much less frequently than Hary’sWallace. Although two editions of The Wallace were published by the Scottish Text Society in the twentieth century – a facsimile of the 1570 print and Matthew McDiarmid’s edition of 1968–69 – by the late 1980s Marinell Ash could argue that Wallace and the Bruce had been killed off as part of national culture by the anglicisation of school history syllabuses. She could not have foreseen the Braveheart effect: Randall Wallace’s script of the film derives from the Hamilton of Gilbertfield version of Hary’sWallace.8
One obvious question the poem poses is, why was it located so firmly in popular culture for so long? By popular culture I mean a culture that unifies, however temporarily and illusorily, and includes both learned and unlearned, young and old, urban and rural. We know that reading a version of Hary’s Wallace sent a ‘Scottish prejudice’ coursing through the veins of the young Burns, and Hugh Miller says:
I was intoxicated with the fiery narratives of the blind minstrel, with his fierce breathings of hot, intolerant patriotism, and his stories of astonishing prowess, and, glorying in being a Scot, and the countryman of Wallace, I longed for a war with the Southron, that the wrongs and sufferings of those noble heroes might be avenged.9
For both these boys, reading about Wallace provided them with a fierce sense of Scottish identity, part of which stems from the anti-Englishness I have already emphasised and part from the pathos of the mythical narrative of ‘the wrongs and sufferings of those noble heroes’. Nevertheless, Scottishness in Hary’s Wallace is geographical as well as historical. It is not only about autonomy but has to do with being part of Scotland as an imagined community: Hary’s Wallace creates a geography of the mind.
In the late 1990s the Scottish Tourist Board ran an advertisement on English television that began, Braveheart-style, with magnificent pictures of Highland scenery. A young couple were seen walking through this landscape, with ‘Let us go, lassie, go’ as a voice-over. Then it moved into a picture of the poet Norman MacCaig, in profile, speaking a couple of his own lines: ‘Only men’s minds could ever have unmapped / Into abstraction such a territory’. These lines come from an early poem, ‘Celtic Cross’.10 What a stone cross asks, says MacCaig, is
Something that is not mirrored by nor trapped
In webs of water nor bag-nets of cloud;
The tangled mesh of weed
lets it go by.
Only men’s minds could ever have unmapped
Into abstraction such a territory.
‘Unmapping into abstraction such a territory’ seems to me to be a good way of describing what is going on in The Wallace: the mythical geography of nationhood that also lies behind our commemoration of the battle of Stirling Bridge. Let me first discuss mapping, though, before I get on to unmapping.
The endpapers of Matthew McDiarmid’s Scottish Text Society edition of Hary’s Wallace consist of two maps of southern and northern Scotland, showing the many locations that are mentioned in the poem. I do not know of any other medieval poem, Scots or English, that has so many place names in it. The historical Wallace’s family originated in the southwest, and in the poem a certain amount of the action takes place in Ayrshire, but by no means all. McDiarmid points out that Hary himself probably came from the ‘area comprising North-East Stirlingshire . . . South-East Perthshire, with the adjoining parts of North-West Fife and South-West Angus’. This may be why he gives Wallace uncles in Dunipace, Kilspindie and Elcho, sends him to school in Dundee, and has his mother seek sanctuary at Dunfermline Abbey. Nevertheless, the effect is to make Wallace, on the run, rallying support or ejecting the English, a more than local hero. He not only rescues Scotland three times, as Thomas the Rhymer prophesied he would in Book II, but his exploits map the country. Real places are mentioned again and again throughout the poem. These are places that had perhaps never before reached the written word, except in documents, and certainly not all together: Blackford, Airth, Leckie, Gargunnock, Drip Ford, Gask, Dalreoch, Ardargan, Kenmore, Murthly. A striking difference between Hary’s Wallace and Braveheart is that in the latter Wallace has been turned into a Highlander. The film uses very few different settings: Wallace’s Highland glen features quite a lot; there are fields labelled ‘Stirling’ and ‘Falkirk’; a home-made-looking Edinburgh and an equally rickety York. By contrast, Wallace in Hary’s poem is constantly on the move all around Scotland, particularly Lowland Scotland, although he does go into the Highlands as well. His farthest-north point is Hugh Miller’s Cromarty:
Into Bowchane Wallace maid him to ryd,
Quhar lord Bewmound was ordand him for to bid . . .
Quhen he wist weill that Wallace cummand was,
He left the land and couth to Slanys pas
And syne be schip in Ingland fled agayne.
Wallace raid throw the north-land in-to playne.
At Crummade feill Inglismen thai slew.
The worthy Scots till him thus couth persew;
Raturnd agayne and come til Abirdeyn
With his blith ost apon the Lammas ewyn;
Stablyt the land as thocht him best suld be,
Syne with an ost he passit to Dunde. (VII.1077–8; 81–90)
This short passage illustrates well the restless movement of the hero, whose actions and those of his cowardly antagonist, Beaumont, who turns tail and flees, are used to map the northeast: Buchan, Slains Castle, Cromarty, Aberdeen, Dundee. Hary says he ‘stablyt the land’, which is both a matter of stabilising it politically and fixing its geography. The nation that is brought into being as an imagined entity, traversed and connected by the hero’s journeys, is not centred on Edinburgh, or even on Glasgow. Edinburgh is mentioned only four times in the whole poem, much less frequently than Ayr, St Johnstoun (Perth), Dundee or Stirling. That is, part of the effect of the mapping of Scotland in The Wallace is to shift the axis, or at least the focus of attention, away from the traditional centres of power and status. Hary’s geography is partly a geography of castles but also of small towns, woodlands, rivers, hills and, of course, a bridge.
Let me invoke another of Hary’s fifteenth-century contemporaries: this is an English chronicler called John Hardyng, who completed the second version of a chronicle of English history some time in the mid-1460s, only ten years or so before Hary’s Wallace was written.11 Hardyng was as obsessively anti-Scots as Hary was anti-English; he wrote to encourage first Henry VI and then Edward IV to make war on Scotland and reclaim what he was convinced was England’s rightful heritage. Like Hary, although for opposite reasons, he loathed any policy of peace with Scotland. His version of ‘British’ and then English history is skewed throughout to support the rightfulness of the English claim to Scottish overlordship, and he actually forged a number of documents to support this point of view, which he presented to Henry VI. Hardyng was a Northumbrian, a follower of Robert Umfreville whose family had been deprived of their Scottish titles in the 1330s; he was an old soldier who had fought at Agincourt and he had a Borderer’s bitter understanding of the relations between Scotland and England. My point in introducing Hardyng, however, is that he was another contemporary mapper of Scotland. At the end of his chronicle he appends a handy invasion route for the royal army to take, with distances between the major Scottish towns: ‘Fro Haddington to Seton iiii m. Fro Seton to Musselburgh vii m. Fro Musselburgh to Edenburgh wher the castell stondeth upon an high roche of stone and a goode merchaunte town with an abbaie of Haly Rodehouse wher your flete may come to lie be you in the Scottish see that is called the water of forth vii m.’ Having got the army to Edinburgh, he then shifts into what passes for verse, addressing the English king:
And if your wille and noble high corage
Thynketh this is ouer litill to your puissaunce
When you have brente with all your baronage
Edenbourgh Toune and ther doon your plesaunce
And haue that castell at your obeissaunce
And it please you ferther for your comforte
To your highness the waie I will reporte.12
He then goes on to describe what we might call the burning, raping and looting route through central Scotland, via Stirling to Glasgow and thence to the coast, ‘wher a flete of the west see myght mete you at Dunbarton and at Ayr’. In some manuscripts of Hardyng’s chronicle there are even diagrammatic maps in case the English army should get lost. Hardyng’s map of Scotland is a place of grand castles dominated by Berwick, Edinburgh, Falkland, Andirstoun (St Andrews), St Johnstoun (Perth) and Dumbarton, with a much smaller castle representing Stirling. The northern boundary of the kingdom is bordered by ‘Styx the ynfernall flode’, which separates Scotland from the palace where Pluto, king of Hell, lives. It is hardly surprising, given these attitudes, that Hary should be so anti-English. But my point is that while Hardyng’s Scotland is a place of military targets and sources of booty, as Edward IV must have found when he invaded in 1482, Hary’s is a place of sites memorialised – like Stirling Bridge – by heroic deeds and the pathos of suffering.
Hary’s Wallace maps Scotland, then, but at the same time unmaps it into abstraction as well. What I have not emphasised so far is the extent to which the story Hary tells is simply untrue. Unlike Barbour’s Bruce, which is treated with some respect as a historical source (if only because, as already suggested, Barbour seems to have had informants who were close to the events in question), Hary’s Wallace has generally provoked derision among historians. Very little documentary evidence survives about the historical Wallace, except for the period in 1297 when he was Guardian of Scotland. Hary claims that he drew on a Latin life of Wallace written by John Blair and Thomas Gray, two priests who knew him all his life. Although Sir William Craigie was inclined to allow that such a text might have existed, I think that most modern scholars assume this was merely a ploy to lend authority to a largely fictitious narrative. I have already suggested that its general contours fall into a mythic pattern, but the poem does more than this: it creates a mythical geography of nationhood, a Scotland of the mind. This is the sense in which I use MacCaig’s phrase: he unmaps the territory into abstraction, into the idea of a nation.
Hary’s Scotland is a place of sites memorialised by heroic deeds, many of which never took place. There was no atrocity committed by the English in the ‘Barns of Ayr’; Wallace never fought a battle at Loudoun Hill; he did not attack the English camp at Biggar, putting the king to flight and killing 7,000 Englishmen; nor did he receive a visitation from Edward’s queen as far south as St Albans, suing for peace; or encounter Robert the Bruce on the banks of the Carron after the battle of Falkirk; or rout Edward’s army at Linlithgow the next day. He did not do these things, and yet the story of his doing them and the places he did them in could be said to have created the idea of a nation. Whether or not Hary really did consult a Latin source, the fact that he emphasises that it was in Latin, the pan-European language of learning, draws attention to the vernacularity and particularity of his own Scots. And as the poem went into edition after edition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it must have become the most widely read work in Scotland after the Bible: the Wallace belongs to the era of print. The most important difference, perhaps, between a manuscript and a printed book is that every manuscript is unique, while printed books are produced in hundreds at a time. The reader of the printed book understands this, however unconsciously; we know that the very act of reading constitutes us members of a reading community. So we can see all those readers of Hary’s Wallace, over four hundred years, as connected through print, forming, as Benedict Anderson puts it, ‘a secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community’, recognising their Scottishness in the pathos of its heroism and its tragically mythical geography.13 However modernised, however anglicised the language became, Hary’s Wallace ‘unmapped into abstraction / Such a territory’.