Chapter 4 Hary’s Wallace as a Book of Memory

The Wallace is a poem that generates a picture of William Wallace as the substance of legend; it is also a text that invests much of its narrative with ideas of memory, remembering and commemoration. As with the Coupar Angus preface to Scotichronicon, these memorial practices revolve around traumatisation that shapes Wallace’s life and legacy. The particular events of Book 6 (in which Wallace’s leman is killed by the English sheriff, Heselrigg), Book 7 (when Wallace’s uncle is murdered along with other Scottish nobles in the Barns of Ayr) and Book 12 (when Wallace is executed) pivot around trauma as a site of interchange between the individual motivated by a desire for vengeance (Wallace) and the consigning of English violence to collective memory (the effect of the story on Hary’s audience). These episodes in Wallace’s story are similar to what Greg Forter calls ‘punctual trauma’, a once-occurring catastrophic event that dissociates consciousness from itself.5Greg Forter, ‘Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form’, Narrative, 15.3 (2007), 259–85 (259). Forter uses ‘punctual’ trauma to refer to the work of trauma studies scholars, such as Cathy Caruth, who suggest that a ‘historical moment might be experienced less as an ongoing set of processes that shape and are shaped by those living through them than as a punctual blow to the psyche that overwhelms its functioning, disables its defenses, and absents it from direct contact with the brutalizing event itself’ (259). Hary’s Wallace, however, performs the past through narrative not as pathological fragmentation but as the forging of relationships between past and present that focus attention on collective identity and understanding. In this way, they invite what I am calling a participatory trauma that works to facilitate the integration of the past into the audience’s present self-understanding.6My use of the term ‘participatory trauma’ is informed by the term ‘vicarious trauma’ coined by Irene Lisa McCann and Laurie Anne Pearlman to describe the process of change resulting from empathetic engagement with trauma survivors. See, ‘Vicarious Traumatization: A Framework for Understanding the Psychological Effects of Working With Victims’, Journal of Traumatic Stress, 3.1 (1990), 131–49. I use ‘participatory trauma’ to suggest a distinctively cultural version of McCann and Pearlman’s concept in which an author’s use of literary effects encourages readers to react to specific events in the plot and to participate in characters’ experiences. Hary’s rewriting of the past aims not to freeze the past in a timeless state but to create and recreate it in specific moments of recollection. Reconstructions of the past in the Wallace, then, become a vehicle for assimilating historical trauma into a late fifteenth-century Scottish cultural identity.

Hary opens and closes the Wallace with specific calls to remembrance:

For Hary, these acts of remembrance have a precise purpose: to appeal to a sense of Scottish identity predicated upon hostility towards the men of ‘Saxonys blud’, who ‘neuyr ȝeit to Scotland wald do gud’ (Wall. 1. 7–8). In this way, he appears to follow writers, such as Bower, whose colophon to Scotichronicon – ‘Christ he is not a Scot who is not pleased with this book’ (Chron. Bower 8. 341) – directly appeals to a readership that understands itself to be Scottish.8‘Non Scotus est Christe cui liber non placet iste’ (Chron. Bower 8. 340). The emotive language of being able to take pleasure in reading a specific text because it speaks to Scottish interests and concerns connects historiography and biography in ways that mirror the Coupar Angus’ imagining of Fordun’s patrio zelo; the definition and sustenance of a particularly Scottish – and anti-English – sentiment connects author and audience in complementary acts of commemoration. Both texts equate identity not simply with remembering a particular history, but with the specific ideas of taking pleasure in this history. Like Bower’s use of genealogy, discussed in Chapter 3, Hary’s use of ‘our antecessowris’ (my emphasis) is particularly significant in terms of allowing ideas of national sentiment to surface within the text because it manifests feelings of collectivity through its appeal to a shared heritage that Hary’s Wallace seeks to commemorate. It suggests that those fighting for the Scottish cause become ancestors of the kingdom, as well as of individual families; their ‘nobille’ deeds adopt a national – as well as a personal – significance in the Scottish fight against the English. It is this struggle, which takes place between the two calls to remembrance at the beginning and end of the Wallace, that enables the visibility of Scottish national feeling within Hary’s narrative, suggesting – as the Coupar Angus introduction and its emphasis on destruction and reconstruction had done – that trauma, or struggle, is a necessary factor in memory and identity formation.

Trauma in the Wallace is both personal (Wallace is an individual) and collective (Hary entreats his audience to use Wallace as an exemplum for their sense of Scottishness). The act of cultural genocide that I have suggested Bower depicts in the Coupar Angus Scotichronicon is mirrored by another act of attempted governmental genocide in Hary’s poem. In Book 1 of the Wallace, Hary recalls English behaviour in early fourteenth-century Scotland, writing that

Hary tells his audience that the ‘Remembrance’ of the Barns of Ayr and its ‘ramede’ is ‘forthir in the taile’ (Wall. 1. 179), and he turns to the episode in Book 7. The episode concerns the mass murder the Scottish nobility by the English at a meeting in a barn in Ayrshire. Hary makes clear that the premeditated actions of the English are an attempt to rid Scotland completely of its own governing force and its heritage through the annihilation of its nobility. The meeting is a trap designed to bring the Scottish nobles together and to ‘scour out’ their ‘rychtwys blud’ from Scotland (Wall. 7. 16). Furthermore, Hary writes that the ‘fals Sotheroun’ learn from a ‘traytour’ how ‘thai best mycht the Scottis barownis hang’ (Wall. 7. 23, 14, 24), once again hinting at the internal political divisions within Scotland. The English secure the barn so that ‘Nayne mycht pas in bot ay as thai war cald’ (Wall. 7. 204), and the Scots are made to enter ‘Bot ane at anys’ (Wall. 7. 28). As they do so a ‘rynnand cord’ is ‘slewyt our’ their heads and they are ‘hangyt […] to ded’ (Wall. 7. 207–8). As Hary emphasises, ‘Mony ȝeid in bot na Scottis com out’ (Wall. 7. 216). Wallace’s uncle is the first person to be hanged by the English as he enters the barn to ‘mak fewte for his land’ (Wall. 7. 205), but Wallace himself is saved by ‘[g]ret grace’ (Wall. 7. 168), for he is made to ride back to his uncle’s holdings at Crosbie – ironically, in order to collect the ‘charter off pees’ (Wall. 7. 159) that needs to be shown to the English.

Like the burning of the Scottish chronicles by Edward I recalled in the Coupar Angus Scotichronicon, the Barns of Ayr massacre is a fictional incident imagined by Hary for the purposes of his narrative. This does not mean, however, that there is not an element of ‘truth’ located within the episode itself, despite its not being historical ‘fact’. The episode is deliberately fabricated as an instance of ‘punctual’ trauma to help Hary’s audience recall the past; in doing so it provides Hary with a locus for a collective memory that encourages his audience’s participation in the feelings of anger and grief that can be elicited from this empathetic experience with the poem’s characters. In telling the reader specifically that ‘Xviii score’ (360) men were killed, Hary visualises for the reader large-scale atrocity, creating a more easily remembered event than the slightly more abstract invective that the Scots should know that the English would ‘neuyr ȝeit to Scotland wald do gud’ (1.8). What I suggest here is that, while the specific incident did not itself take place, the Barns of Ayr episode comes to represent, synecdochally (or ‘punctually’), the systemic trauma of English atrocity in Scotland. The Barns of Ayr fuses and crystallises myriad events into one single readable and representative moment that can be stored in the memory because of its violent intensity.10263 Likewise, Riddy argues that the ‘Englishmen’s violation of Wallace’s wife’, in Book 5, is ‘a version of their violation of Scotland. Scotland, we come to see, is [Wallace’s] mother, wife and daughter’; ‘Unmapping the Territory, p. 109. In doing so, Hary’s ‘memory’ seemingly follows Augustine’s concept of colligere – collecting – which Carruthers explains as having ‘a specific meaning of gathering together the memories of what one has read and stored in separate places earlier, as well as a general meaning of collecting up earlier experiences of all sorts’.11Augustine, Confessions, pp. 218–19; Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 245. It is through this process of collation and composition, Augustine suggests, that learning and the production of new knowledge occur; moreover, this extended understanding works emotionally, for ‘memory also contains … feelings (affectiones), not in the same way as they are present to the mind when it experiences them, but in quite a different way that is in keeping with the special powers of the memory’.12Augustine, Confessions, pp. 220. In inventing a mnemonic image, Hary also seeks to tag this recollection emotionally, and the scale of the Barns of Ayr episode is particularly appropriate to medieval memoria, which often lauded the mnemotechnical possibilities of violence.13266 Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 75–6. Moreover, emotional tagging makes this recollection paradoxically personal, encouraging readers to commit the singular, spectacular, event to memory. In this way, Hary’s alternative facts act in similar ways to his use of racist language and metonymy that, R. James Goldstein has argued, enable Hary to justify excessive Scottish violence against the English.14Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, pp. 220–30. In order for the episode to embed itself in the memories of his audience, Hary seeks to elicit not only emotions of grief in his description of the Barns of Ayr but, more importantly, feelings of anger directed against the English who, with ‘suttelte and wykkit illusione’, ‘kest all wayis thai mocht’ put the ‘worthi Scottis’ into ‘confusione’ (Wall. 7. 4–6). There are other moments of English brutality within the Wallace and throughout Scottish history, but the Barns of Ayr episode acts as a culmination of horrific violence that brings his protagonist and his audience together into a collective feeling of hatred and a desire for vengeance. As Hary addresses his audience at the end of the episode: ‘Ȝhe nobill men that ar off Scottis kind, / Thar petous ded ȝhe kepe in-to ȝour mynd / And ws rawenge quhen we are set in thrang’ (7.235–7). The Barns of Ayr incident is at once personal and public, individual and collective, past and present. The episode demonstrates Scotland’s loss of its nobles and governors at the same time as it represents the individual grief of Wallace for his uncle who has been killed. Just as Wallace can be understood as standing for Scotland throughout the poem, so the Barns of Ayr episode stands for the great number of violent attacks meted out by the English on Scotland and its people.

The Barns of Ayr episode thus becomes what Pierre Nora terms a lieu de mémoire: a site of commemoration – at once physical and symbolic – that emerges out of a desire to memorialise the past.15Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, 3 vols. Volume 1: Conflicts and Divisions, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 2. It is a specific narrative site to which Hary attaches the memory of Scotland’s history. Hary creates a shared memory between the individual members of his audience (and also between text and audience) in order to bring the collective into being, for without shared memory, and a focus for it, collective identity cannot exist. At the same time, as Bower had done with the image of the bee in the Coupar Angus Scotichronicon, Hary also draws upon schematic forms for training the memory to suggest how this image might function within a collective imagination. The barn itself is a literal storehouse in the world of the narrative, but it acquires a more politically charged connotation when it becomes a macabre repository for the dead Scottish nobility, whose corpses are ‘kest’ by the English ‘in the nuk’ of the barn (Wall. 7. 226). The barn, then, is also mimetic of the nation; in imagining the barn as a lieu de mémoire, Hary makes this building a focus for national grief and remembrance in place of myriad memories that it at once encompasses and overshadows. Similarly, Hary’s narrative on the page becomes a physical storehouse of memory, just as chronicles – as a distinctive form of written testimony – become the collective receptacles for national memories. The episode thus draws upon the ars memoria as a way of fixing the atrocity in the minds of Hary’s audience.

While Hary states at the beginning of the episode that the nobles could only enter the barn one at a time, the ‘trew woman’ (Wall. 7. 252) who speaks to Wallace after the incident has taken place recounts that ‘Our trew barrouns be twa and twa past In’ to the barn (Wall. 7. 271). Although the image of the Scottish nobles entering the barn in pairs recalls aristocratic processionals,16269 I am grateful to John McGavin for reminding me of this in our conversations about the Wallace and memory. the image poignantly echoes Noah’s Ark into which ‘two and two went in’ of ‘every thing that moveth upon the earth’, as ‘the Lord had commanded’ (Genesis 7: 8–10). Noah’s flood was a common episode in the extant English mystery-play cycles, and G.R. Owst notes that it was one of the ‘more familiar Biblical narratives’ that would have been preached in the vernacular.17270 G.R. Owst, Literature and the Pulpit in Medieval England: Neglected Chapter in the History of English Letters and of the English People (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961), p. 114. See also, Brian Murdoch, The Medieval Popular Bible: Expansions of Genesis in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003). It is very likely that Scottish audiences would also have recognised its significance in symbolising God’s judgment and his promise of salvation. Hary, therefore, harnesses a powerful image that would have been familiar to his audience and one that he could expect them to call to mind, and he combines this with the more learned uses of the image of the Ark in the training of the memory.

The presentation of Noah’s Ark as a schema for the trained memory and as memoria spiritualis is discussed at length by Hugh of St Victor (c. 1078–1141) in De arca Noe morali, in which the Ark is depicted as a compartmentalised structure similar to the concept of the memory as a series of organised compartments.18271 For example, the twelfth-century Spanish Beatus super Apocalypsim held at the John Rylands Library, Manchester, depicts Noah’s Ark as a structure with forty-two compartments. See Rylands Latin MS 8, fol. 15r. Furthermore, Carruthers suggests that Hugh’s arca (as Noah’s Ark and as trained faculty) collapses the multiple objects to which it refers into the ‘common metaphor of “storehouse” […] as so many ancient and medieval metaphors of this type also do’.19272 Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 45. When this idea is related to Hary’s Wallace, it is possible to see that Hary combines the multiple meanings of the barn as storehouse within this passage. While this vision of Noah’s Ark is not as fully developed in the Wallace as it is in Hugh of St Victor’s writing – in which the Ark acts as a complete ethical and moral structure allegorically representing the Church and the individual’s spiritual progress – it is distinct enough to suggest that the memorial function of the Ark, and the moral impetus of memory, is being deliberately called to mind. This further highlights the importance of memory and knowledge to Hary’s narrative, but it also reveals the ways in which the Wallace prompts its readers to store the poem’s events in their individual memories at the same time as the collective experience of being a community of readers commits the Barns of Ayr episode to the public memory and written record.

Noah’s Ark was meant to be a structure of salvation, rather than of destruction, and its recollection by Hary – perhaps purposefully – sits uncomfortably in this respect with the destruction meted out by the English in Ayrshire, in order to imprint itself in the memory. The Wallace seems to invert the biblical narrative in which the unworthy die and the worthy are saved; Hary deliberately juxtaposes the sense of salvation associated with the Ark with the cunning barbarity of the English at Ayr, and their conversion of the ‘towboth’ (Wall. 7. 202) into a slaughter-house. The ‘towboth’ was a public building used for the collection of tolls and customs, which sometimes also housed the prison and was the site of executions. Anne McKim indicates that in Hary’s narrative of the Barns of Ayr, the reader is supposed to understand the Barns specifically as a prison, but in the context of Hary’s commentary – that ‘Sic a towboth sen syne wes neuir seyne’ (Wall. 7. 202) – I think the broader sense is more likely.20273 See Blind Hary: The Wallace, ed. by Anne McKim (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2003), p. 17, n. to line 202. Hary cannot believe that a tollbooth which took payment in lives could ever have existed: that a building designed to deal with legal matters has become the place in which such an unlawful act is perpetrated.

Following this image of destruction, the Barns of Ayr episode subsequently shifts to the description of the corpse of Wallace’s uncle, whose body is brought from the Barns and which serves as a physical reminder of the destruction of the Scottish nobility. The narrative moves from the collective space of the Barns to the personalised tableau of Wallace’s grief as the ‘trew woman’ tells Wallace that his uncle was ‘Out off ȝon bern […] born’, and ‘laid law on cald erd’ before her (Wall. 7. 277–78). In an almost ritualistic manner, the woman kisses Ranald’s ‘frosty mouth’ and, ‘with a claith […] couerit his licaym’ (Wall. 7. 279; 281). The image of Ranald’s corpse becomes the final moment of the Barns of Ayr episode, a disturbing and highly visual image conjured to stick in the mind, providing another – deliberately emotive – way in which the audience can remember and recollect the meaning of the Barns and what they represent, both for Wallace and for Hary’s audience. Goldstein argues that, in this moment, which he determines as ‘one of the saddest moments of the poem’, Hary ‘constructs a pietà of words’ in which the audience is ‘invited to participate in the grief of the characters’ in ways that late-medieval Passion lyrics invoke vicarious suffering alongside Mary.21Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, pp. 229–30. In the mind’s eye, the reader is encouraged to remember the visual scene of the crucified Christ embraced by Mary, but Hary was also writing for an audience who typically prepared corpses of loved ones for burial, which extends the participatory grief from literary and devotional association to Hary leading his audience through their own associative memories.22D.S. Miall and Donad Kuiken term these emotions ‘fiction feelings’ and ‘aesthetic feelings’ where events of a story’s plot or the aesthetic techniques of the text ‘interrupt the reader’s automatic processing of language and cue personal memories’; ‘A Feeling for Fiction: Becoming What We Behold’, Poetics, 30 (2002), 222–41 (esp. 223–5). Textually, this pietà echoes – and poignantly reverses – the moment in Book 2 when Ranald meets Wallace, who he assumed was dead. Hurrying to Riccarton, Ranald immediately embraces Wallace and, although he ‘mycht nocht spek’, he ‘kyst him tendirlye’ while tears ‘bryst fro his eyne two’ (Wall. 2. 246, 428). Holding him, Ranald ‘at the last rycht freindfully said … / “Welcum, neuo, Welcum, deir sone, to me!”’ (Wall. 2. 430–1).23Both of these incidents also foreshadow Wallace’s lament for Sir John Graham following his death at the Battle of Falkirk; Wall. 11. 378–404. The image of Ranald’s corpse represents not only an individual man mourned by his nephew; Ranald’s laid-out body, coupled with the memory of the Barns themselves, becomes symbolic of the state of the nation in relation to English brutality as Hary carefully associates Scotland’s suffering at the hands of the tyrannical English with Christ’s persecution under Pontius Pilate.

The death of Wallace’s wife24Critical scholarship usually refers to Wallace’s wife as his leman, but she specifically refuses this moniker in Book 5, saying she ‘wyll no lemman be’ (Wall. 5. 693). Following this, I refer to the ‘woman in Lanark’ as Wallace’s wife. in Book 6 is the audience’s most recent textual memory of Wallace’s grief that precedes the Barns of Ayr episode in Book 7, and Hary verbally parallels the two moments.25Wallace briefly refers to the deaths of his father and brother in Book 3: ‘Than Wallace said, “Her was my fadir slayne, / My brothir als, quhilk dois me mekill payne”’ (Wall. 3. 111–12). In Book 6, Wallace’s wife saves him from English soldiers by providing an exit route to escape with his men. When the English realise that she has helped Wallace to evade them, they ‘[p]ut her to dede’ (Wall. 6. 193). As with the subsequent Barns of Ayr episode, it is a ‘trew woman’ (Wall. 6. 197) who informs Wallace of ‘how all this deid was done’ (Wall. 6. 199). Hary writes that on learning of his wife’s death, a ‘painful wo socht till [Wallace’s] hart full sone’ (Wall. 6. 200) in a reaction that foreshadows his response to hearing of the death of Ranald. Hary follows the popular notion of the heart being the site of understanding and feeling as well as memory.26Jager, Book of the Heart, esp. p. 4. But the audience is also told that, were it not for shame (Wall. 6. 201), Wallace would have fallen to the ground, ‘for bytter baill [sorrow/anguish] that in his breyst was bound’ (Wall. 6. 202). Concealing (‘fenȝeit’; Wall. 6. 208) his own feelings, however, Wallace’s focus is on redirecting his companions’ grief into action, remarking that ‘Quhar men may weipe thar curage is the les; / It slakes Ire off wrang thai suld radress’ (Wall. 6. 223–4).27As Andrew Lynch notes, because medieval emotion is cognitive and embodied, emotion and action are ‘inseparable’, and emotion is often treated as action; ‘Malory and Emotion’, in A New Companion to Malory, ed. by Megan G. Leitch and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 177–90 (178). This concealment is markedly different from Wallace’s response to hearing of the death of Ranald, where he ‘wepyt for gret los off his kyne / That with wunes apon his hors he baid’ (Wall. 7. 272–3). Two immediate possibilities present themselves for the difference in reaction. The first is that, by the time of the Barns of Ayr, the cumulative effect of two significant deaths overwhelms Wallace. The second is that the death of Ranald, alongside so many other Scottish nobles, assumes a greater political and symbolic meaning. Hary provides little clue as to which meaning his audience should privilege, although Wallace’s vision in Monkton church in Book 7, which I discuss later in this chapter, might indicate that the latter interpretation holds more weight. This sits at odds, however, with Wallace’s response to the English queen, who asks him why he cannot stay away from ‘violent wer’ against the English (Wall. 8. 1325). Wallace’s response begins with an account of Edward I’s desire for overlordship in Scotland and a reference to the Barns of Ayr, but it ends with him weeping as he recounts the death of his wife, who ‘dulfully was dycht’ (Wall. 8. 1368). It is this memory that ‘Out of [his] mind … will never bid’ (Wall. 6. 1369). These moments suggest that Hary’s Wallace serves as a figure who models and fosters the audience’s memorial practice through empathetic response to his sorrow. At various moments throughout the Wallace, but especially at the death of Wallace’s wife and the Barns of Ayr episode, Hary confronts his audience with loss and mourning. The loss of his wife and his uncle become pivotal moments in Wallace’s life and define his relationship with the English, who have perpetrated these crimes. Similarly the large-scale massacre of the Scottish nobility that sits alongside – and encompasses – Ranald’s death is a moment of national punctual trauma that elicits collective grief in the Wallace’s audience. Here Hary demonstrates how the individual and the collective merge in the Wallace; read in this way, the Barns of Ayr can be seen as a collective moment – an abstraction – of mourning. This allows the reader at once to assimilate collective and individual memory into a meaningful image where Ranald stands in place of many and active grief integrates loss into a new Scottish cultural identity.28281 Cf. Anderson’s idea of the tomb of the unknown soldier in Imagined Communities, p. 4. The idea is similar here, although Ranald is given a name.

Throughout the Wallace, Hary prompts his audience to recall their inherited memories of violence in which their ancestors may have suffered, and these individual memories are brought together in the imagined atrocity of the Barns of Ayr, in which they take on national significance. In Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur proposes that loss ‘constitutes a genuine amputation of oneself to the extent that the relation with the one who has disappeared forms an integral part of one’s self-identity’.29282 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 359–60. What Ricoeur argues here is that the mourning that follows loss, which is a process of reconciliation, internalises this sense of severance and ‘transforms the physical absence of the lost object into an inner presence’: a presence that manifests itself in a creation of identity.30283 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 366. Textually, this is what Bower hints at in the Coupar Angus introduction: that the lost history he tries to reassemble becomes a defining feature of his own history. It also becomes a history that is essential for all Scots to keep in mind; it is a crucial part of what makes them Scottish. This concept of mourning is also present in the Wallace, in which Hary uses Wallace’s personal loss, and the wider implication of the loss of Scotland’s nobility, to create a feeling of sorrow within his audience for atrocities that took place nearly two centuries previously. The mourning, then, is not only for the events of the narrative, but also for the memories that Hary suggests were being forgotten in the pro-English policies of the late fifteenth century. Returning to the sentiment of the opening lines of the poem, Hary calls on those ‘nobill men that ar off Scottis kind’ to ‘kepe’ ‘Thar petous dede […] in to ȝour mynd / And ws rawenge quhen we ar set in thrang (Wall. 7. 235–37). The repeated calls to us and we create a collectivity among Hary’s readers – they are of one ‘kind’ [nature] – with which he aligns himself and Wallace, past and present. Hary uses the loss and mourning of Books 6 and 7 to prescribe and interiorise a Scottish identity formed around the figure of Wallace as a national hero: a man who did not forget the brutality of the English because it became part of his identity. At once, Hary appeals both to memory – he asks his readers to ‘kepe in […] mynd’ his story – and to the history that he is setting down as ‘suthfast’ (Wall. 12. 1451), recognising their complementary functions in identity formation, an identity that emerges from the storehouse of the murdered Scottish nobles. Hary’s insistence on memory here notes the power of intergenerational trauma. This is specifically not a call to commemorate; by keeping this history in mind here, memory functions as an act of present repetition.

Ricoeur suggests that the ‘historiographical operation’ – that is, the act of historical reconstruction – can be seen to be the ‘scriptural equivalent of the social ritual of entombment, of the act of sepulcher’.31284 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 365. ‘To investigate the relation between history and memory, Ricoeur distinguishes three phases in the historiographic operation. The first is what he calls the “documentary phase”. It is the phase of the eye-witnessing, indispensable for establishing the archives whose aim is to ground the evidence. This is to say that historiography is archived memory. The second phase is explicatory/comprehensive, where one seeks answers for specific questions of research. The third phase is called representative, this is the phase where one gives form in writing, where the historian declares the intention of representing the past as it happened’; Abdelmajid Hannoum, ‘Paul Ricoeur on Memory’, Theory, Culture, and Society, 22 (2005), 123–7 (127). He explains that ‘Sepulcher […] is not only a place set apart in our cities’, the ‘place which we call a cemetery and in which we depose the remains of the living who return to dust’. It is ‘an act, the act of burying’.32285 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 366; my emphasis. This is a distinct feature of Hary’s Wallace, both in terms of providing a sepulchre for Wallace the man in the mind of Hary’s audience, and also for Scotland’s history as a whole. The reader sees briefly this idea of the act of sepulchre in the description of Wallace’s uncle that I have just discussed. The recording of the scene as a moment of history points to Ricoeur’s sense of a scriptural monument being created in the act of writing that mirrors the ritual of preparing and burying Ranald’s corpse. In its invocation of Crucifixion iconography, the scene also posits Wallace’s uncle as a martyr. This deliberate recollection prepares the reader for Wallace’s death, which is specifically written to be seen as an act of national martyrdom. In grieving with Wallace for the deaths of his wife and uncle, the audience is finally invited to grieve for Wallace in Book 12.

As with the recalling of significant deaths in earlier books, Hary is reluctant to give the details of Wallace’s death. The reader is never permitted to see Wallace-as-corpse – Hary ‘will nocht tell’ (Wall. 12. 1407) – although Hary briefly recounts for his audience what happened to Wallace’s body: it was ‘dewydyt’ into ‘v partis and ordand for to pas’ (Wall. 12. 1407–8).33286 Furthering the Christ-like images, the splitting of Wallace’s body into five parts mirrors the five wounds of Christ as much as it recalls to mind the punishment for traitors. Yet, Hary claims, despite the fact that his body was fragmented, Wallace’s ‘spreyt by liklynes was weill’ (Wall. 12. 1409). It is important for Hary that Wallace’s spirit remains intact, not only so that it ‘can fayr / To lestand blys’ (Wall. 12. 1405–6), but also because of what Wallace’s spirit signifies for a collective identity that revolves around his memory. Wallace’s spirit, unlike his dispersed corpse, provides a single focal point for identity formation, another potential sepulchre. This sepulchre is markedly different, however, from the ‘tomb’ of the Barns of Ayr because, although Wallace’s physical body is dead, his spirit (like memory) lives on. Moreover, Hary cannot provide a physical monumental focus within the narrative after Wallace’s death because nothing like that exists. Instead Hary’s narrative, his ‘worthi buk’ (Wall. 12. 1451), and the very act of writing itself, become Wallace’s sepulchre: a physical monument around which it was possible to gather and remember. Hary creates a link between the spirit and the letter; both provide a way of remembering Wallace and his ‘nobille worthi deid’ (Wall. 1. 2). In this way, Hary’s Wallace exemplifies Ricoeur’s conviction that sepulchre is both a place – the cemetery – and an act – the historiographical operation. The Wallace as material – and textual – document stands in for the non-existent tomb of Wallace, and so Hary’s narrative assumes the role of sepulchre as a ‘material place’ and ‘thus becomes the enduring mark of mourning, the memory-aid of the act of sepulcher’.34287 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 366. As an aide-mémoire, Hary’s Wallace performs the social ritual of remembrance not only of the dead, but also of what it means to be Scottish.

Throughout the Wallace, Scottish integrity is pitted against English deviousness and attempts to wipe out Scottish resistance to their rule. Hary creates the Barns of Ayr (and the Wallace as a whole) not only as a sepulchre, but also as a lieu de mémoire to function as an abstract and permanent emblem of Scottish suffering that Hary fears was being ‘smord’ (forgotten/suppressed/suffocated) (Wall. 12. 1434). That is to say, the possibility of forgetting – forced or not, imagined or not – prompts Hary’s rewriting of the past just as it had prompted Fordun and Bower. Nora maintains that, if ‘we still dwelled among our memories, there would be no need to consecrate sites embodying them; Lieux de mémoire would not exist, because memory would not have been swept away by history’.35288 Nora, Realms of Memory, p. 2. Hary hints at this historical necrosis in his admonition of the contemporary situation at the very beginning of the Wallace. At the same time, he seeks to prompt memory through his reimagining of history as a living story. Having begun his narrative by writing that the keeping alive of the memory of ‘Our anteccessowris’, and ‘thar nobille worthi deid’ should be of the greatest importance, Hary qualifies this by saying that ‘vther besynes’ has taken precedence and that ‘[t]ill honour Ennymyis is our haile entent’ (Wall. 1. 1; 2; 4; 5). Matthew McDiarmid argues that in writing these lines Hary was directly criticising James III’s policy of marriage alliances, which had provoked renewed anxiety regarding Scottish independence.36289 McDiarmid, Wall. i. xv. James’s legacy is as an active pro-English monarch, and his pursuit in 1474 of a marriage alliance between his son, James, duke of Rothesay, and Cecily, the youngest daughter of Edward IV, was not popular, particularly among the Scottish magnates in the borders and who sympathised with James’s brother, Alexander, duke of Albany. According to Norman MacDougall, by the late 1470s, Albany had become ‘an uncontrollable March Warden wrecking royal foreign policy’.37See Norman MacDougall, James III (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2009), p. 534. Alongside the ‘unpopular and often arbitrary policies’ pursued by James, Albany’s own political ambitions gained support; the Wallace, therefore, can be read as a poem that ‘boldly articulated the feelings of those who were opposed to the English alliance of 1474’.38MacDougall, James III, p. 248. Hary situates Scotland’s ‘ald Ennemys’ firmly in England – they ‘cummyn of Saxonys blud’ (Wall. 1. 7) – a country that James was apparently favouring over the will of the Scottish nobility. Hary maintains that, rather than holding ‘in mynde’ (Wall. 1. 2) the memory of the Scots, James preferred to honour those who, as had ‘beyne seyne in this tymys bewent’ (Wall. 1. 6), were Scotland’s enemies. Hary intends his assertions to be read as statements of fact that Scotland’s official policy under James III – its ‘haile entent’ – is ‘[t]ill honour ennymyis’, the English who, as demonstrated in Hary’s narrative, desire to obliterate Scotland’s sense of its independence, subsuming it into the governance of the English king.

Both Bower’s preface to the Coupar Angus Scotichronicon (discussed in Chapter 3) and Hary’s Wallace demonstrate an understanding that their texts function to (re)create what has been lost to the Scottish collective memory; that memories which are no longer lived – or within living memory – must be recollected so that they can be repeated through imaginative composition. To this end, Hary’s Wallace and Bower’s Coupar Angus Scotichronicon, as texts and as physical objects, become sites of memory themselves. History is repeated and recalled to Scotland’s memory by Bower’s account of Fordun’s patrio zelo that prompted his ‘collection’ of lost history, and by Hary’s account of Wallace’s sacrifice for his nation. This sacrifice is narrated with strong religious overtones that align the Wallace with the narratives of saints’ lives as Hary seeks to present William Wallace as Scotland’s ‘martyr’ (Wall. 12. 1307). It is this idea of martyrdom that I now examine, for it indicates the ways in which Hary desired Wallace to be remembered by his Scottish readers.

Furthermore, Hary’s poem is a memorial structure informed by violence, pain and compunction. As Carruthers notes:

Consequently, the Wallace as a physical object acts as a Liber memorialis, a book of memory, but one that is concentrated almost solely on William Wallace. Libri memoriales were first written in the Carolingian period and registered the names of those who had been the most frequent benefactors of the community.43296 Jacques le Goff notes that the ‘custom of saying prayers for the dead became widespread early in the history of the Church’, and these Libri provided a record of those to be remembered; History and Memory, trans. by Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 72. On Libri memoriales see also Karl Schmid, ‘Zur Problematik von Familie, Sippe und Geschlecht, Haus und Dynastie beim mittelalterlichen Adel: Vorfragen zum Thema “Adel Und Herrschaft im Mittelalter”’, Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins, 105 (1957), 1–62. Rosamund McKitterick argues that these Libri ‘constitute written forms other than historical narratives in which the past was remembered and commemorated’, and that the Libri ‘augment oral modes and memory as a form of communication’, functioning symbolically on ‘many different social and spiritual levels’.44297 Rosamund McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 25. Ultimately, for McKitterick, they demonstrate the ‘use of writing in commemoration and the recording of social memory’.45298 McKitterick, History and Memory, p. 25. Hary adopts the function of the Libri memoriales and applies it to a national, rather than a local, context; the manuscript book of the Wallace registers the name and actions of one of Scotland’s most important benefactors. But the Wallace also becomes a Liber memorialis for Hary in his own appeals to nationhood in the fifteenth century. Hary prays that his book will serve as a memory not only of Wallace’s struggle against the English, of whom he ‘slew / […] nocht halff enew’ (Wall. 12. 1385–6), but also as one that inspires his audience not to forget the sovereignty that Wallace fought for. What I suggest here is that Hary seeks to register his own bequest to the Scottish national community – the preservation of Wallace’s story in the public memory, a story and sentiment that he feared would be ‘scour[ed] out’ (Wall. 7. 16) if it was not set down as text.46299 DOST smord, v., to smother; suppress, conceal, extinguish. The typical supplication that comes at the end of the poem also suggests this. Hary entreats his audience:

Libri were particularly associated with remembering martyrs, and Hary is keen to depict Wallace in this way at the end of the narrative; he explicitly tells his audience that ‘rycht suth it is, a martyr was Wallace’ (Wall. 12. 1307). Wallace is a distinctly national martyr in his refusal to renounce the independence of Scotland and in his determination that the struggle must continue. His final words call out to the Scottish national imagination to remedy Wallace’s regret that, for ‘part Inglismen I slew / In my quarrell me thocht nocht halff enew’ (Wall. 12. 1385–6). Far from a defeat of the Scottish cause, Hary seeks to rouse national feeling in his audience and to prompt the contemporary community to action by harnessing the popular tropes of the cults of saints and the dead. Saints’ lives were ‘absolutely staple and extremely popular reading matter’ as well as being, ‘arguably, one of the few literary forms to which we know that everyone would have been exposed, in the form of sermons’.47300 Katherine J. Lewis, ‘History, Historiography and Re-writing the Past’, in A Companion to Middle English Hagiography, ed. by Sarah Salih (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 122–40 (123). The memory of the Wallace becomes associational here: Hary deliberately pushes his audience to recall the saints’ lives with which they would have been familiar and to transpose the significance of these onto his narrative’s hero. Furthermore, in Book 7, Hary had unequivocally connected Wallace to St Andrew, Scotland’s ‘vowar’ (Wall. 7. 124).48301 DOST, vowar, n. In the dream vision that Hary narrates, and which saves Wallace from being killed at the Barns of Ayr, Wallace sees an ‘agit man’ (Wall. 7. 72) who gives him a ‘suerd […] of burly burnist steill’, telling him: ‘Gud sone […] this brand thou sall bruk weill’ (Wall. 7. 75–6).49A dream vision in which St Andrew presents Wallace with the bloody sword with which to defend Scotland also occurs in the Cupar Angus recension of Scotichronicon (Chron. Bower 6. 287). While sone is perhaps used merely as a friendly greeting here, it does carry with it the suggestion of a familial link. This does not mean that Hary’s reader is to regard Wallace as the immediate descendant of this ‘agit man’; rather, Wallace is his spiritual heir, and the transference of the sword from this ancient patron of Scotland to the near-contemporary Wallace creates a picture of Wallace as inheritor of a particular kind of Scottish guardianship: patriotic but not royal. The use of the genealogical trope here functions in similar ways to those discussed in Chapter 3, highlighting communal relationships between men of ‘Scottis kind’ (Wall. 7. 235), synchronically and diachronically. This is emphasised by the creation of Wallace as guardian in Book 8 and, at the same time, the image legitimises Wallace’s position as that guardian. Additionally, the Virgin in the vision ‘with a saffyr sanyt [Wallace’s] face and eyne’ (Wall. 7. 94) and, while the reader immediately recalls the cross on which Christ was crucified, Hary’s image of the blue sapphire (a sign of ‘lestand grace’; Wall. 7. 140) also implies here that the Virgin may be making the sign of the saltire of St Andrew, again linking Wallace and Scotland’s patron saint. The image of St Andrew gives the dream a particularly nationalist perspective in its location of Wallace as the heir to the Scottish nation: as Guardian, he becomes the vowar of Scotland and this is recalled in the monk’s vision in Book 12 in which he sees ‘Wallace, defendour off Scotland’ (Wall. 12. 1285), as the man who ‘tuk apon hand’ Scotland’s ‘rychtwys wer’, and who therefore deserves to be ‘lowyt our the lawe’ (Wall. 12. 1286–7). Using these tropes, Hary’s narrative extends from a record of Wallace’s deeds to a full vita (and even possibly a passione at the narrative’s closing), establishing Wallace as a Scottish martyr, hero and near-contemporary patron saint. Wallace’s martyrdom in Book 12 recollects the vision in Book 7, and Wallace is portrayed as being particularly St Andrew-like. Hary’s Wallace demonstrates a call to national feeling and an assertion of Scottish independence from England through the very fact that they have their own patron saint and hero willing to fight for their cause.

If the aim of hagiography was to produce an exemplum of Christian life, then the Wallace capitalises on this idea. In exploiting the interrelationships between hagiography and historiography, Hary’s narrative acts as a national hagiography, promoting Wallace as an exemplum of Scottish national feeling. Wallace is written to ‘be a remembrance’ (Wall. 12. 1456) and to be emulated by Hary’s audience.50303 See Felice Lifshitz, ‘Beyond Positivism and Genre: “Hagiographic” Texts as Historical Narrative’, Viator, 25 (1994), 95–113. But Hary is not only content to depict Wallace in this way at the end of the poem: he treats him not only as saint-like but also as Christ-like, throughout the narrative.51304 Cf. Joanna Huntington, ‘Edward the Celibate, Edward the Saint: Virginity in the Construction of Edward the Confessor’, in Medieval Virginities, ed. by Anke Bernau, Sarah Salih and Ruth Evans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), pp. 327–43. As le Goff notes, if ‘Christian memory manifests itself chiefly in the commemoration of Jesus […] at a more popular level it focuses particularly on the saints and the dead’.52305 Le Goff, History and Memory, p. 71. I have already suggested that the depiction of Wallace as a martyr at his execution marks him as both saint-like and Christ-like, but there are other instances in which this link is explicitly made. In Book 4, the woman whom Wallace has been visiting is persuaded to betray him to the English (Wall. 4. 718–32). When she exposes the plot to Wallace, the woman mourns that she has ‘falslye wrocht this trayn / I haiff ʒou sald’ (Wall. 4. 759–60). The image of Wallace being sold appears again in Book 12, in which Hary writes of Wallace’s being ‘sauld’ to ‘the Sotheroun’ by the Scottish magnates.53306 McDiarmid notes that this is in the manuscript, although he does not include it in his edition. See his note to 12. 1426 (Wall. ii. 121). Sel means both ‘to betray’ and ‘to sell’,54307 DOST, sel, v. and here Hary explicitly associates Wallace’s capture with the betrayal and selling of Christ by Judas Iscariot.55308 See Matthew 26: 1–16; Mark 14: 10–11; Luke 23: 47–49; John 18: 2–4. Conflating Christian and Scottish memory within the image of Wallace, Hary draws attention to his representation of Wallace as a martyr. In asking his book to ‘byd thi tym and be a remembrance’ (Wall. 12. 1458), Hary entreats his audience not only to see his narrative as the physical embodiment – the storehouse or treasure chest – of the memory of Wallace as such a figure, but to use his narrative as a support for their own memories of what being Scottish might mean. It is a national identity predicated on the reading and remembering of Scotland’s history and, importantly, Wallace’s sacrifice and suffering.

For a narrative that does not hesitate to dwell on violence, Hary is reluctant to provide explicit details of Wallace’s execution and he does not allow him to feel pain. Instead Hary emphasises the saintly qualities with which he has invested Wallace throughout the narrative. Death without pain was a common trope of saints’ lives; for example, St Cecilia was made to ‘stonde in a bathe contynuelly boylynge’, but ‘felt neuer disese of hete but satte freshely as she had sete in a medw of sote floures’.56309 Gilte Legende, ed. Richard Hamer, with the assistance of Vida Russell. 2 vols. EETS OS 327, 328 (2006–7), II. 660. Likewise, Wallace’s ‘gud deuocioun’ that had been his ‘begynnyng / Conteynd tharwith, and fair was his endyng’ (Wall. 12. 1403–4). This image of the saintly Wallace further strengthens the link between Wallace and St Andrew that Hary has drawn in Book 7. Moreover, Felice Lifshitz notes that biography – whether of saints or of other figures – appears to have been the most popular form of historical narrative in the Middle Ages and that, between the ninth and eleventh centuries, hagiography and historiography were often indistinguishable. It should come as little surprise, then, that Hary’s Wallace is simultaneously a historical narrative biography and a story with references to saints’ lives in the presentation of Scotland’s national hero.57310 See Lifshitz, ‘Beyond Positivism’, pp. 95–113.

The points at which the Wallace makes reference to the book as a physical object are particularly important ones in demonstrating the links between memory and the book. One of the most significant allusions is made during Wallace’s execution in Book 12. Hary states that a ‘psalter buk Wallace had on him euir, / Fra his childeid fra it wald nocht deseuir’ (Wall. 12. 1393–4). From this the reader learns of the attachment that Wallace feels for the psalter which he has carried with him for the whole of his life, and the reader is made to empathise with Wallace’s determination not to be parted from it even when he is ‘dispulʒeid off his weid’ (Wall. 12. 1396). Coupling the images of clothing and the book, Hary implies that Wallace’s psalter has become part of his clothing and, by extension, part of the fabric of his identity, suggesting that the psalter has not only been a symbol of his Christian devotion, but also a physical reminder for Wallace of the ‘rychtwys wer that he tuk apon hand’ (Wall. 12. 1286) – a righteous war validated by ‘Gud deuocioun (Wall. 12. 1403). Wallace asks Lord Clifford to ‘lat him haiff his psalter buk in sycht’ (Wall. 12. 1398) and the book is held ‘oppyn befor him’ while Wallace ‘Stedfast […] red, for ocht thai did him thar’, until ‘thai [the English] till him had done all at thai wauld’ (Wall. 12. 1399; 1401; 1400). The psalter here occupies a central place in Wallace’s execution. Not only does it emphasise his devoutness – recalling the image of the Virgin choosing Wallace as her ‘luf’ (Wall. 7. 95) – and his belief in the divine sanction of his cause,58311 As he remarks to the English clerk, ‘Yon blyst byschop has hecht I sall haiff blis / And I trow weill at God sall it admit’ (Wall. 12. 1364–5). but it also places the book-as-object in a place of centrality to Wallace’s sense of himself, implying the importance with which Hary viewed the material text in relation to Scottish identity and memory that the Wallace promotes.

The other important reference to the book as a physical object comes in Book 7, during Wallace’s dream vision. After having ‘sanyt [Wallace’s] face and eyne’ with a ‘saffyr’ (Wall. 7. 94), the Virgin presents Wallace with a ‘buk’ (Wall. 7. 105) that ‘In iii partis […] weill writyn was’ (Wall. 7. 109). As Wallace attempts to read the book, he awakes. Just as the reader never learns which psalm Wallace is reading at his execution in Book 12, so Hary never tells us what kind of book Wallace is given – the reader learns only that it is split into three parts, each with different coloured letters (brass, gold and silver; Wall. 7. 110–11). What is of more importance to Hary here is not necessarily what the book is, but what it represents. The clerk interprets the meaning of the book not only for Wallace but also for Hary’s reader. Wallace is told that the ‘thrynfald buk’ is ‘bot this brokyn land’ (of Scotland) that Wallace ‘mon rademe be worthines off hand’ (Wall. 7. 141–2). The book and its systematic division into three sections acts as a memory-aid for what was at stake in Scotland’s struggle against the English. It also reminds the reader of the prophecy that Wallace will save Scotland three times before he dies: ‘off this regioune he sall the Sothroun send / And Scotland thris he sall bryng to the pes’ (Wall. 2. 348–9). At the end of Hary’s narrative, the audience is able to see that Wallace has indeed been the ‘reskew’ of Scotland and has passed the cause onto Scotland’s rightful king, Robert the Bruce (Wall. 12 1142–76).59312 As Anne McKim notes, the passage is ‘an interesting exercise in propaganda as once again Blind Hary suggest[s] that Wallace fought to make Robert the Bruce’s reign possible’; The Wallace, pp. 434–5, n. to lines 1164–76. But I also argue that Hary implicitly draws his audience’s memory back to the admonition at the beginning of the Wallace, suggesting an anxiety about becoming subject to the English through the contemporary policies of James III. This is also highlighted in Book 2 when Wallace is captured by the English, and the Scots fear him dead. The people lament that without Wallace ‘[t]his land is lost […] / Prophesye out, Scotland is lost in cayr’ (Wall. 2. 169–70). While the lament is specific to the narrative that Hary tells, it is not difficult to see the contemporary resonance: Wallace is no longer alive, Scotland without Hary’s retelling of Wallace’s story is in danger of forgetting his struggle and sacrifice, and the rapprochement supported by James III increasingly threatened – Hary implies – the independence that Wallace had sought to win.