the 'Saxon Chronicle,' may suffice for this occasion:

"They cruelly oppressed the wretched men of the land with castle-works. When the castles were made, they filled them with devils and evil men. Then took they those men that they imagined had any property, both by night and by day, peasant men and women, and put them in prison for their gold and silver, and tortured them with unutterable torture, for never were martyrs so tortured as they were. They hanged them up by the feet, and smoked them with foul smoke; they hanged them by the thumbs, or by the head, and hung fires on their feet; they put knotted strings about their heads, and writhed them so that it went to the brain. They put them in dungeons in which were adders and snakes and toads, and killed them so. Some they put in a 'crucet hûs'—that is, in a chest that was short and narrow and shallow-and put sharp stones therein, and pressed the man therein, so that they brake all his limbs. In many of the castles were (instruments called) a 'loathly and grim;' these were neck-bonds, of which two or three men had enough to bear one. It was so made, that is (it was) fastened to a beam; and they put a sharp iron about the man's throat and his neck, so that he could not in any direction sit, or lie, or sleep, but must bear all that iron. Many thousands they killed with hunger. I neither can nor may tell all the wounds or all the tortures which they

inflicted on wretched men in this land; and that lasted the nineteen winters while Stephen was king, and ever it was worse and worse. They laid imposts on the towns continually, and called it 'censerie.' When the wretched men had no more to give, they robbed and burned all the towns, so that thou mightest well go all a day's journey and thou shouldst never find a man sitting in a town, or the land tilled. Then was corn dear, and flesh, and cheese, and butter; for there was none in the land. Wretched men died of hunger; some went seeking alms who at one while were rich men ; some fled out of the land." *

This is set down to the reign of Stephen, just about the time of the battle of the Standard, and about half-way between the conquest of England and the war of resistance in Scotland.

Seeing this going on more or less for two hundred years, it is not wonderful that the Scots, continuing and flourishing under their old Saxon institutions, were grimly resolved to fight to the death against such a rule. The representative of this national feeling was the renowned William Wallace. Of him so much old romance and modern nonsense has been uttered that cautious people are apt to shun his name in history, as, like Arthur, Merlin, Roland, and Odin, that of a mythical person not susceptible of articulate identification. But few historical

*Saxon Chronicle :' Record Edition, ii. 230, 231.

figures come out so distinctly and grandly when stripped of the theatrical properties. He was a skilful and brave general, an accomplished politician, and a public man of unstained faith and undying zeal.

Nor is it at all necessary, in vindicating his fame, utterly to blacken those who would not co-operate with him. The Normans, who had acquired recent wealth and rank in Scotland, were not zealous in standing up for the independence of the people of the country and their protection from Norman tyranny-how could they be expected to be so ? One name among them has been consigned to eminent historical infamy, and for centuries has borne the burden of the ardent hatred of all truehearted Scots-the elder Baliol. I remember our being taught at school carefully to avoid confounding his name with another specially dedicated to infamy-the Belial of Scripture. It is lucky for those who thus lie under historical ban that they are generally beyond the condition of suffering, either in body or spirit, from the execrations heaped upon their memory. And if we should say that even the fame of the departed has a right to be protected from injustice-to receive due praise if its owner has done service to mankind, and at least quiet oblivion if he has done no harm-a more easy consolation for the injustice done comes in the reflection that, under the same name, the demon of the historians is a different being from the harmless

commonplace man who owned the name in the flesh. So this Baliol, while in history he stands forth as the foul betrayer of his country's independence as traitor to the vile allegiance he had sold himself to as guilty of every political crime which historical magniloquence can express-was, in the flesh, a very ordinary sort of man, who, in agreeing to do homage for a territory to the monarch who had preferred him to it, acted on much the same principle as the holder of a snug office at the present day who sides with the statesman who has appointed him to it. And if he was at one time, under sore temptation, guilty of tampering with his allegiance, he did the best he could afterwards to put matters right. Looking to the social and political conditions of him and his class, it would be difficult to find a proposition that would have seemed more preposterous to them than that they should sacrifice the prospects of a good fief for the preservation either of a separate nationality or the liberties of a truculent, self-willed people. The Bruces themselves belonged to the same set; but ere the grandson of the original claimant gained his great victory, the lapse of a quarter of a century of animosity may have nourished a sense of nationality towards the people for whom he fought; and even if he was, after all, only the Norman adventurer, who saw a grand career of ambition as the leader of a people who would not be enslaved, he fairly won the crown he wore.

The battle of Bannockburn, in being the conclusive act which relieved Scotland from the domination of the English King, became also the crisis at which France and Scotland became united in fast friendship. This friendship had been growing during the war of independence, but it could exist as a permanent European institution only after that was over. And at this point arises one of those occasions for rendering history distinct by unravelling minor confusions, which sometimes bring those who do the work of unravelling under suspicion as lovers of paradox. We shall all the more clearly understand the nature and tendency of the alliance by starting with the fact that, before a thorough external union with France, Scotland cast forth certain French characteristics which had found their way into the elements of her political and social condition. The rule of the Normans was the rule of a race who had made themselves French; however rapidly, among a kindred Teutonic people, they were returning to their old Norse character. Of the Norman families which had established themselves in the country, Scotland retained but a small minority after the war of independence, for the obvious reason that the great majority had cast their lots with their natural leader, the King of England. topographical antiquary, tracing the history of the early ownership of estates in Scotland, sees the change expressed with a distinctness plainer than any historical narrative.

The

The early charters are rich in