Bartholomew condemned by the nobles of the kingdom of England to a most cruel but amply deserved death. He, I say, this man of Belial, after his innumerable wickednesses, was at last taken prisoner by the king's servants and brought to London, as the king ordained that he should be formally tried, and was on the eve of St. The Flores Historiarum presents a much less romanticized view of William Wallace it presents an English opinion of the Scottish hero:Ībout the time of the festival of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a certain Scot, by name William Wallace, an outcast from pity, a robber, a sacrilegious man, an incendiary and a homicide, a man more cruel than the cruelty of Herod, and more insane than the fury of Nero…a man who burnt alive boys in schools and churches, in great numbers who, when he had collected an army of Scots in the battle of Falkirk against the King of England, and had seen that he could not resist the powerful army of the king, said to the Scots, 'Behold I have brought you into a ring, now carol and dance as well as you can,' and so fled himself from the battle, leaving his people to be slain by the sword. Alban’s Abbey, continued at Westminster Abbey, and today there are approximately twenty manuscripts extant.

This certainty was sorely shaken when I encountered the Flores Historiarum, a Latin chronicle written by several English hands during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. I was still committed to William Wallace, and taking Edward I’s side was unthinkable. But, even with all the embellishments discarded, I had no doubts where my loyalty lay. Later, when I was curious enough to sift fact from fiction, I discovered that both of these retellings were about as accurate as a perjurer’s deposition.

Both stories made me want to cry “Freedom!” with the Scottish warrior and shed tears for his patriotic martyrdom. The much grimier, but still highly romanticized story appealed to my older teenage self. My second encounter with Wallace was in the 1995 movie Braveheart. Wyeth’s poignant illustrations, appealed to my young teenage self. The highly romanticized story, strewn with N. My first introduction to William Wallace was in The Scottish Chiefs, a nineteenth century novel by Jane Porter.

William Wallace by Andrew Fisher