id="ulink_96a5347d-f36d-554e-a7f5-fb162ee515cd">34 Stevenson, ii, 23
35 Barrow, 92
36 Cal. Doc. Scots, ii, 635
37 ibid., ii, 716
38 ibid., ii, 675
39 Dunbar, 127
40 Fordun, 317
41 Guisborough, 270
42 ibid., 271–2; Lanercost, 134
43 Lanercost, 115
44 Palgrave, 149
45 Stevenson, ii, 25
46 Rishanger, 375
47 Stevenson, ii, 37
48 Stones, 141
49 Fordun, 317
50 Cal. Doc. Scots, ii, 742; Stevenson, ii, 26
51 Stevenson, ii, 26–8
52 Cal. Doc. Scots, ii, 840
53 ibid., ii, 823
54 Fordun, 319
55 Stevenson, ii, 31
* cf note II
5
In the autumn of 1296 Edward returned to England to deal with the problems of the French war, disdainfully remarking as he crossed the border that it was ‘a good job to be shot of shit’ (bon besoigne fait qy de merde se deliver).1
His satisfaction was premature. The fall of Berwick, the collapse at Dunbar, the abject figure of John Balliol, the unopposed progress through the burghs of his new conquest had given him and his lieutenants a false impression of the people they now proposed to govern. The Earl of Surrey was so unconcerned about his duties as Viceroy of Scotland that he retired to his Yorkshire estates leaving the direction of affairs to Hugh de Cressingham. This portly ecclesiastic, sensual and money-loving, concentrated his energies on extracting from the subject Scots, by taxes and sequestration, funds which his master so urgently required for the war against France. He was ably abetted by William Ormesby, the Chief Justice, who with a dog-like fidelity hunted out all who had not signed instruments of fealty, proclaimed them outlaws and seized their properties and goods.2
But Scotland had been stunned and not subdued. A growing band of outraged and dispossessed men took refuge in the forests and mountains of their native land. The pent-up resentment of a proud and spirited race, smouldering like a peat fire below the surface, burst into flame and by May 1297 the whole of Scotland, outside Lothian, was in revolt led by two outstanding men: Andrew Moray and William Wallace.
Andrew Moray had been captured at Dunbar together with his father, Sir Andrew Moray, and his uncle. Escaping from his prison in Chester,3 he made his way to the hereditary lands of his family in the Mounth, the great mountainous mass which divides the Spey river from the Tay. There he raised the standard of rebellion at his father’s castle at Avoch and to him rallied not only the warlike men of Moray, but also the burghers of Inverness under Alexander Pilche. Together they so harried and ambuscaded the English that anguished cries for help were sent to King Edward.4
Down in the Selkirk forest William Wallace, son of a knightly family from the parish of Paisley, was living an outlaw life since neither he nor his eldest brother, Sir Malcolm, had bowed their heads at Berwick. A giant of a man with a mane of brown hair and piercing eyes, Wallace had become a magnet for the discontented. He had recently married a young woman who lived in Lanark. Visiting her by stealth, as a marked man, he clashed with an English patrol. Fighting his way clear, he retreated to her house and as his pursuers hammered on the front door he escaped by the back to the rocky Cartland Crags. Enraged by the failure to capture him, Sir William Heselrig, Sheriff of Lanark, ordered the house to be burned and all within it, wife and servants, to be put to the sword. From that day Wallace vowed an undying vengeance against the English.
Gathering together a band of desperate men, he fell by night on the sheriff and his armed guard, hewed the sheriff into small pieces with his own sword and burned the buildings and those within them.5
For the first time one of the high officials of the hated conquerors had been slain and a ripple of jubilation spread through the oppressed.
Men flocked to Wallace’s banner and with a growing force he turned eastward to where the chief justice was holdings his courts at Scone. On the way there he was joined by that stormy petrel, Sir William Douglas, late commander of the castle at Berwick, with a body of mounted men. Leaving the foot soldiers to follow, Wallace and Sir William, with all the horsemen of the party, galloped ahead in the hope of surprising the chief justice at his sessions. But in the nick of time he was warned of their approach and fled in the clothes he stood up in, relinquishing to his attackers a rich haul of booty.6
The gesture of Sir William was typical of the man. Cruasader, warrior, egoist, he had gone his own way throughout his life with very little regard for anyone else. He had flouted the guardians of the interregnum and insulted the authority of King Edward by abducting and forcibly marrying Eleanor de Ferrers, an English widow, while she was staying with relatives in Scotland.7
Nevertheless, in that heraldic age, the adherence of this great nobleman immediately conferred on Wallace’s band of outlaws the cachet of respectability. Sir William Douglas’s kinship to the family of Moray and the fact that his first wife was the sister of James Stewart, Wallace’s feudal lord, linked the two areas of insurrection. Behind his move it
