Читать книгу Scotland: The Story of a Nation - Magnus Magnusson - Страница 55

Scotland was, therefore, in great distress, and the inhabitants, exceedingly enraged, only wanted some leader to command them, to rise up in a body against the English or Southern men, as they called them, and recover the liberty and independence of their country, which had been destroyed by Edward the First. Such a leader arose in the person of WILLIAM WALLACE, whose name is still so often mentioned in Scotland.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER VII

On the first floor (‘Life of Wallace’) of the National Wallace Monument, which rears to a height of sixty-seven metres on the top of the eminence of the Abbey Craig near Stirling, a glass case displays the most treasured icon of this shrine to the memory of William Wallace, National Hero of Scotland – ‘Wallace’s Sword’.

It is a fearsome-looking weapon: a traditional two-handed Scottish broadsword, measuring 1.7 metres from the top of the hilt to the tip of the blade. The information panel proclaims it to be the weapon wielded by Wallace himself, and draws the conclusion that he must have been a giant of a man: ‘It is reasonable to assume that, in order to wield a sword of this size, Wallace would have had to be of considerable stature – at least six foot six inches in height.’

Meanwhile, in the ‘Hall of Heroes’ above, TV broadcaster and weaponry expert Rod McCance from Cambusbarron, near Stirling, gives informal talks on ‘Scottish weaponry used from 1291 to 1745’.

He shows groups of spellbound youngsters and adults how the weapons were made and how they were used in the brutal exchanges of the battlefield. Scottish weapons were of notoriously poor quality compared with Continental arms, and soon broke or buckled (‘We spent most of our time jumping up and down on our sword-blades trying to straighten them!’); their purpose was to bludgeon rather than to slice, to concuss an opponent and render him vulnerable to a stabbing stroke to the throat or temple.

As for the big weapon labelled ‘Wallace’s Sword’ downstairs, however, Rod McCance has grave doubts. The belief that it is the sword owned and wielded by Wallace is based on tradition rather than on documentary proof – and in that respect it mirrors the current debate about the origin, the deeds and the achievements of William Wallace himself.

The blade of the two-handed sword has no maker’s mark, nor any owner’s mark – and this is rather disconcerting for weaponry experts: it is impossible to date the metal of the blade scientifically, and they can only make judgements about the sword based on style. The hilt could, perhaps, be in keeping with a renovation made during a visit to Dumbarton Castle in 1505 by James IV, the ‘New Golden Age’ king who would meet his death at the disaster of Flodden in 1513 (see here). An item occurs in the books of the king’s Lord Treasurer for 8 December 1505, when the king ordered the sword to be re-hilted:

For bynding of ane riding sword and rappyer, and binding of Wallas Sword with cordle of silk, and new hilt and plomet, new skabbard, and new belt to the said sword, xxvjsh [26 shillings].

The presence of a ‘Wallas Sword’ in Dumbarton Castle in 1505, two hundred years after the execution of William Wallace, can be given a plausible explanation: Sir John Menteith, the man who betrayed and captured the outlawed Wallace and sent him in chains to Edward I for trial and summary execution, was the Sheriff of Dumbarton and Constable of Dumbarton Castle. What would be more likely than that he should have kept Wallace’s sword and stored it in the castle as a war trophy? And what more likely than that James IV, with his taste for dress and pageantry, should choose to embellish this relic (as well as his own formal court rapier and riding sword) in the bicentenary of Wallace’s death?

Rod McCance does not accept that Wallace’s stature can be deduced from the size of the two-handed sword. The weapon was not used ‘to the fore’, like a short-sword; the wielder whirled it around his head, moving his hips and shoulders as when using a hula-hoop or winding up for a hammer-throw. It was strength, not size, which mattered. ‘The lower your point of gravity, the better,’ McCance says. ‘It could be suicidal for a tall man, because his body was totally unprotected against a lance-thrust when the sword was being brandished.’ Moreover, the two-handed sword was never carried slung over the back – it was much too long; nor did it have a sheath or scabbard (‘You would have needed arms fifteen feet long to draw the thing!’).

But is it Wallace’s own sword, the sword with which he ‘made great room about him’ in battle? David Caldwell, curator of Scottish Medieval Collections at the Museum of Scotland and author of Scotland’s Wars and Warriors (1998), tells me he thinks it could well be the ‘ghost’ of the original sword, with all its original parts, including the blade, replaced or renewed for display purposes at different times in the past. This would explain why the blade does not have any maker’s or owner’s markings on it.

Perhaps it does not matter, after all. The sword has become a compelling icon of independence – so much so that it has been stolen (by extremist nationalists, it is alleged) on two occasions, in 1936 and 1972, although it was returned each time after a few months. Like so many saints’ relics of yore, the Wallace Sword is something which helps to make legend tangible; and to that extent it is symptomatic of much else concerned with the story of William Wallace. Legend, especially in the way in which it is shaped by succeeding generations, is often a metaphor for the times at which the legend has particular relevance to people. There is, indeed, a very fine line between story and history, between the patriotic legend and the elusive reality of the man who has become enshrined as Scotland’s National Hero. As Ted Cowan puts it:

William Wallace was probably one of the greatest Scots who ever lived – not only for himself, not only for his own lifetime, but for what he became. The mythos of Wallace is just as important as what the man himself achieved.

There are three kinds of sources from which to build up a picture of the life and death of Wallace and his legacy to Scotland’s history.

The first is English-based – primarily official government records and contemporary chroniclers; they are, without exception, violently anti-Wallace.

The second is Scottish-based – the Original Chronicle of Scotland by Andrew of Wyntoun (c.1355–1422), the Scotichronicon by Walter Bower (c.1385–1449), and the Acts and Deeds of Sir William Wallace by Blind Harry (?1440–c.1495), popularly known as The Wallace; they are all vehemently pro-Wallace.

The third, and for many just as important, is folk-memory – local traditions and stories about Wallace which were endemic in many parts of Scotland for centuries and which are still recalled in scores, hundreds even, of surviving place-names associated with him: trees, stones, hills, caves, roads, wells.

William Wordsworth noted this phenomenon in The Prelude when he was contemplating subjects for an epic:

Or I would record …

How Wallace fought for Scotland; left the name

Of Wallace to be found, like a wild flower,

All over his dear Country; left the deeds

Of Wallace, like a family of Ghosts,

To people the steep rocks and river banks,

Her natural sanctuaries, with a local soul

Of independence and stern liberty.

THE PRELUDE, BOOK I

Robert Burns, too, had ambitions to write about Wallace, inspired by a boyhood visit to Leglen Wood, on the Auchencruive estate in Ayrshire, which was reputed to have been one of Wallace’s safe havens:

As I explored every den and dell where I could suppose my heroic Countryman to have sheltered, I recollect (for even then I was a Rhymer) that my heart glowed with a wish to be able to make a Song on him equal to his merits.

LETTER TO MRS DUNLOP, 15 NOVEMBER 1786

Elspeth King, Director of the Smith Art Gallery and Museum in Stirling, is passionately committed to the idea that ‘folk-history’ enshrines a reality which is every bit as significant as formal, documented history:

Memory is an important part of history – it’s the only history which some of the ordinary people of Scotland have, because such history hasn’t been considered as worthy of being written by some of the historians who have acted on Scotland’s behalf; so the ordinary people have taken the process into their own hands.

It was this folk-history which the three main Scottish written sources exploited.

In his Original Chronicle of Scotland, written in rhyming Scots in the 1420s, Andrew of Wyntoun expressed regret that he lacked ‘both wit and good leisure’ to write down all the ‘great gestes [tales] and songs’ about Wallace in ‘a great book’.

Walter Bower, in his Scotichronicon, written in the 1440s, seems to have had access to traditional oral tales with which he embellished his historical narrative. It is in Bower that the heroic legend of Wallace first emerges: Wallace the great warrior, Wallace the patriot, Wallace the generous friend of the oppressed, Wallace ‘the man successful in everything’.

Blind Harry¹ claimed that his own epic, The Wallace, was founded on a Latin book (now lost) which had been commissioned shortly after Wallace’s death from Wallace’s boyhood friend and personal chaplain, Master John Blair, by Bishop William Sinclair of Dunkeld (d.1337); the bishop apparently planned to send it to the Pope – to plead the righteousness of Scotland’s cause against England and, perhaps, to promote the case for Wallace’s canonisation as a martyr.

Most academic scholars simply do not believe that such a book ever existed. Even if it did, Blind Harry must have taken very considerable liberties with it. It is apparent that most of the epic relied on traditional stories about Wallace which Blind Harry had collected and collated from different parts of the country.

Blind Harry’s The Wallace is violent, gory, nationalistic and profoundly xenophobic – a sustained and bitter polemic against the English (‘Our old enemies come of Saxon’s blood,/That never yet to Scotland would do good’). It struck an immediate chord in the Scotland of the 1470s, where the unpopular King James III was conducting a policy of rapprochement with England in the face of opposition from his brothers and his court (see Chapter 16). It was one of the first books to be printed in Scotland (by Chepman and Myllar, around 1508, with the blessing of King James IV), and became the text-book of Scottish patriotism for generation after generation; it went through twenty-three editions before the Act of Union with England in 1707. In 1722, when the old Scots of the original was becoming inaccessible to most readers, it was modernised and adapted by another Scottish poet, William Hamilton of Gilbertfield, near Cambuslang, and became the second most treasured book in Scotland, next only to the Bible.¹ But after the mid-nineteenth century it fell into obscurity, until Elspeth King produced a new edition in 1998.

It was this remarkable and gory epic which inspired the American writer Randall Wallace to create the novel and the screenplay for the film Braveheart which took Scotland and the rest of the world by storm when it was released in 1995. The academic establishment was scornful of its portrayal of history; but the film caught the imagination of a people who were then moving towards a new chapter in the long, long story of Scotland’s nationhood.