Otter, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Freedom has been the cry and passion of the Scots for centuries. Of all the heroes of our nation William Wallace stands out as being one of the most cherished of our freedom fighters, so much so that a huge tower, looking like something out of Lord of the Rings, was built to commemorate him where he defeated the English in battle at Stirling Bridge on 11th September, 1297. The previous year Scotland had submitted to the tyranny of King Edward I of England, surrendering their castles and fortified cities. In that same year, we are told by Fordun in his fourteenth century Chronicle of the Scottish Nation, ‘William Wallace lifted up his head from his den – as it were – and slew the English sheriff of Lanark’. The bravery of Wallace ignited hope among the Scots so that ‘From that time, therefore, there flocked to him all who were in bitterness of spirit, and weighed down beneath the burden of bondage under the unbearable domination of English despotism; and he became their leader’.
Despite his victory at Stirling, Wallace was betrayed by fellow Scottish leaders at the Battle of Falkirk the next year, and being sickened by the treachery of the nobles, resigned his role as Guardian of Scotland, preferring to work with the common people. John Comyn, the new Guardian of Scotland, defeated the English at Roslin in 1303, but Edward I regained the nation and ‘all the magnates but [except] William Wallace, little by little, one after another, made their submission unto him’. Wallace, acting in defiance of tyranny, pressed on as a freedom fighter, until in 1305 he was betrayed and taken to London, where he was ‘torn limb from limb, and, as a reproach to the Scots, his limbs were hung on towers in sundry places throughout England and Scotland’.
According to minstrel Blind Harry’s poem of 1477:
‘Wallace about him, from his childhood, kept,
Where’er he went, whether he walked or slept,
A psalter book, where he beseech’d a knight,
Lord Clifford, might be brought unto his sight.
Which done, he caus’d a priest upon the place,
To hold it open straight before his face,
On which he look’d, sometimes his eyes up cast,
Religiously unto his very last.’
Blind Harry claimed that he had acquired this information from a book by Wallace’s confessor, John Blair, who was commissioned by William Sinclair the Bishop of Dunkeld in 1314, to write a book containing the life of Wallace. The intention was to promote Wallace as a martyr in the hope that the Roman Catholic Church would honour him as a saint. Sadly this book has been lost, but it shows the huge respect the Scots had for their hero. The Psalter of this period was in Latin and contained readings from the Psalms and New Testament and it is thought that a priest uncle gave Wallace a copy. In his agonising death as he was being tortured, Wallace took comfort from the Psalms written by another freedom fighter called David so long ago. May we in this turbulent year also find comfort and strength from God’s Scriptures in whatever we face and know that Christ has fought on our behalf to bring us true freedom that is eternal.