Sir. William Wallace 1900 Free PDF eBook (The True Story of BraveHeart ) by A. F Murison
Excerpt from the book introduction
Sir William Wallace was a Scottish knight who became one of the main leaders during the First War of Scottish Independence. Along with Andrew Moray, Wallace defeated an English army at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in September 1297
The ignorance of some otherwise well-informed persons respecting the claims of Wallace as a national patriot,' wrote Dr. Charles Rogers, 'is deplorable.' The documentary authorities are, indeed, fragmentary, and exceptionally perplexing. Some clearly trustworthy; many are conflicting, dissimulation, falsified, false, biassed in all degrees, and full of inference and hearsay set forth in the guise of indubitable fact. The researches of English historians even when they happen to be Scotsmen have not yet rendered further investigation superfluous.
The fact is, that a large critical undertaking must form the basis of any adequate account of Wallace. In a brief narrative, the writer must resign himself to the simple if the somewhat perilous course of telling his story as it has shaped itself in his mind during the perusal of the available authorities, with but occasional and slight indications of the shaping process. The noble poem of Blind Harry, thanks largely to the Ingenium perfervid of the minstrel himself, has been much we may say wholly discredited as history. Harry has been very cavalierly dealt with, however; it is more by a grin than otherwise that he has been vanquished.
Stevenson's tentative protest is here emphasized. For the present sketch, however, Harry is used rather by way of illustration than as a source of facts. He is cited without any claim to credence, except on grounds definitely specified. But such reservation is provisional and conditioned by such rational criticism as may one day yet be applied. The citations in the text have been conservatively modernized. All students of Harry's poem owe their most grateful acknowledgments to Dr. James Moir and the Scottish Text Society.
One is reluctant to believe that there are no more references to Wallace still lying dormant in the muniment rooms of Scottish families. One is no less reluctant to suppose that any patriotic Scot would leave a solitary corner of his muniments unsearched for every possible glint of light upon the great man that has stood forth for six centuries, and will in all probability stand forth forever, as incomparably the most heroic and most fateful figure in the history of Scotland a Hero and a Patriot second to none in the recorded history of the nations.
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