“William Wallace”, by Andrew Fisher

 

305 pages, John Donald, ISBN-13: 978-0859765572

William Wallace by Andrew Fisher is “…the smartest, most savvy account of Wallace”, this from noted William Wallace expert…Mel Gibson, which is a laugh seeing as how Braveheart has about as much truth in it as your typical politician. While first published in 1986, this particular edition is from 2002 (which explains the Braveheart reference in the Preface). Speaking of Braveheart, William Wallace is about as far from that movie as Planet Earth is from the sun: there is no blue body paint, no tartans, no kilts…and the Battle of Stirling Bridge takes place on a f**king bridge. It is very much a scholarly type of book, so if you are looking for Braveheart sexiness – to say nothing of bullshit – stick with the movie.

Fisher is obviously a competent scholar, but his writing has the reserved tedium of a British work, lacking as it does the dynamism necessary to capture the imagination of the reader. He does, however, a great job of explaining the times, circumstances and history of Wallace’s era: the conflicts leading up to the Scottish War of Independence, the death of Alexander III, the problems of John Balliol and Edward I’s eventual invasion of Scotland, the uprisings that happened around Scotland (one of which is Wallace’s), the aforementioned Battle of Stirling Bridge (1297), Wallace’s time as a Guardian, the Battle of Falkirk, his return to leading small raids and his eventual capture and execution.

While reading William Wallace it becomes obvious that there just isn’t a lot of information on William Wallace: while Fisher damns other authors for their rampant speculation about the man and his motivations, he then turns around and, in order to better flesh-out his subject, resorts to…rampant speculation. While much of it is interesting and, it must be said, grounded in what little facts we have about Wallace, it made much of the book, from an historical perspective, rather unreliable (it put me in mind of Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen by Desmond Seward, reviewed on August 4^th, 2018, and Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life by Alison Weir, May 1^st, 2019, two books that also speculated madly about their famous yet little-known subject).

But the story told in William Wallace is not just about William Wallace, but of early Medieval Scotland as a whole and its struggle against England and its merciless king, Edward I. And for that it is an invaluable resource as this small, inaccessible yet (evidently) highly desirable piece of Planet Earth sought to retain its independence and make its own way, as so many small nations around the world and across time have tried to do, both back then and right now. That one man has been made the symbol of this struggle may make it easier to grasp, but it also rather cheapens the fight made by so many nameless, faceless men – and women – and their common cause. Wallace was important, but he was not irreplaceable, as this book unwittingly shows.