Soon the castle itself, 'that castell off stayn,' was in flames, and Fehew, leaping from the fire, met his death:
With a gud suerd Wallace strak off his hed.
In Yorkshire Harry's English geography appears to have been exhausted; the next place he knows south of York is St. Albans, where Edward's queen—
Weill born scho was off the rycht blud off France—
comes to beg for peace to be granted to her pusillanimous husband and his oppressed realm (viii. 1114.) After negotiation Wallace foregoes his claim of battle and agrees to peace, declining, however, to seal any treaty until he again reaches Northallerton,[1] where at last
Thai seyllyt the pes without langar delay.
The Scots had set out from Scotland in October, 'before All Hallow evyn,' and it was August, on Lammas Day,[2] ere returning they alighted by the banks of Tweed.
All this is a puzzle as yet unread, and there is pleasure in submitting a solution containing every needed element. Once more it is a case of confused identities. The thing never happened to Wallace and Edward I in 1297; it did happen in substance to King Robert the Bruce and Edward II in 1322. In the invasion of that year the Scots under Bruce were about Northallerton in October.[3] The abject and cowardly Edward of the poem, who breaks his vow and flees from the battle he had pledged, is the Edward II who narrowly escaped capture by his promptitude of flight before the battle of Byland on October 14, 1322 to be derided by his own subjects, the chroniclers[4] among them, for his
- ↑ Wallace, viii. 1556.
- ↑ Ibid. 1573–4.
- ↑ Bain's Cal. iii. 790.
- ↑ Lanercost Chron. 247–8; French Chronicle of London, p. 45.
