And in his eighth book he tells us a similar tale of a castle or mansion in Yorkshire, which Wallace blocked up and set on fire:—
“Five hundred men that were into that place.
Got none away, but died withouten grace.”
The numbers of the sufferers in these two cases are doubtless augmented by the license of the bard; but the important fact to be remarked is this, that the narrations of the English chroniclers, and the charges afterwards brought against Wallace by Edward himself, are substantially confirmed and gloried in by these old Scottish traditions.
If we opened the English chronicles of the time, we should find them teeming with horrid details of how Wallace “forced men and women to dance naked before him, pricking them with lances and swords;” of how he “slew infants at their mothers’ breasts”; of how he “burnt alive a whole school full of boys.” “The Chronicle of Rochester” even displays on its margin pictorial illustrations of these horrors. We allude to them merely to observe that when his sentence, in 1305, ordered “that his bowels should be taken out and burnt, even as he himself had burnt a church full of men and women,” the judges only set forth, judicially, a fact which was well known and entirely believed throughout all Scotland and all England.
Nor do modern Scotch historians attempt to deny the ruthless character of this inroad. The “Encyclopædia Britannica” frankly says: “He proceeded as far as Newcastle, wasting with fire and sword, and sparing neither age nor sex.” And Sir Walter Scott thus pithily describes this march: “Increasing his forces that he might gratify them with plunder, he led them across the English border, and sweeping it lengthwise from Newcastle to the gates of Carlisle, he left nothing behind him but blood and ashes.”
History from the earliest period, through all the ravages of Huns and Vandals, down to the cruelties of a Tamerlane or a Nana Sahib, records few, if any, deeds of greater savageness than this one great exploit of Wallace’s life. And it was the main feature of his brief career. The victory of Stirling was thrown into his lap; at Falkirk he was merely beaten and annihilated, but in this march through northern England he showed his whole character. His panegyrist says:—
“The host
Began at Tweed and spared nought they found.