Peter Langtoft was an Augustinian canon of Bridlington and wrote in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. His French verse chronicle spans the years from Brutus, the Trojan-descended founder of Britain, to 1307 and is written in three parts. Antonia Gransden has commented how Langtoft’s chronicle belongs to the “romance” tradition of historical writing, for he “wrote in chivalric terms and in places vividly reflects the courtly cult of King Arthur,” and that he “ascribes chivalric virtues to King Edward [I].”8 Indeed, like many historical writers of the Middle Ages, Langtoft relied on his own personal observations as well as hearsay and rumor for his sources of information. His attitude toward the Scots is not at all flattering, and he is downright nasty in some of his remarks. Gransden believes that Langtoft wrote “for recitation, to amuse men and stir their bellicosity against the Scots.”9 Langtoft’s representations of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce are decidedly negative. Regarding Wallace, Langtoft views him as nothing but an outlaw who lives in the forest and robs:
Our subject compels us to return to the history,
To treating with the Scots for peace without molestation,
To William Wallace who lives in the forest.
At Dunfermline, after the holy festival
Of Christmas, through friends he has made request to the king,
That he may submit to his honest peace,
Without surrendering into his hands body or head;
But that the king grant him, of his gift, not a loan,
An honorable allowance of woods and cattle,
And by his writing the seizure and investment For him and for his heirs in purchased land.
The king, angered at this demand, breaks into a rage,
Commends him to the devil, and all that grows on him,
Promises three hundred marks to the man who makes him headless. Wallace makes ready to seek concealment by flight Into moors and mountains, he lives by robbery.10
Langtoft’s chronicle (like the slightly later one of Walter of Guisborough) contains a gruesome description of Wallace’s execution and death. For Langtoft, it seems as if Wallace’s death is wholly justified and reasonable; after all, in Langtoft’s words, he was “the master of thieves”:
In the first place to the gallows he was drawn for treasons,
Hanged for robberies and slaughters;
And because he had annihilated by burnings,
Towns and churches and monasteries,
He is taken down from the gallows, his belly opened,
His heart and his bowels burnt to cinders,
And his head cut off for such treasons as follow:
Because he had by his assumptions of authority Maintained the war, given protections,
Seized into his subjection the lordship Of another’s kingdom by his usurpations.
His body was cut into four parts;
Each one hangs by itself, in memory of his name,
In place of his banner these are his gonfanons. . .
By the death of Wallace may one bear in mind What reward belongs to traitor and to thief,
And what divers wages to divers trespasses.11
The English chronicler Matthew of Paris, in his Flores Historiarum in the early fourteenth century, describes an equally brutal death:
He was hung in a noose, and afterwards let down half-living; next his genitals were cut off and his bowels torn out and burned in a fire; then and not till then his head was cut off and his trunk cut into four pieces.12
For these medieval English chroniclers, the death of this icon was one to be remembered in the most specific of ways. Future generations who would have read these chronicles would remember the ill deeds of Wallace and his men, and these readers would also recall the grisly end of the outlaw. Public executions in the Middle Ages sought to deter more violent crimes; likewise, the recording of these spectacles of death in historical literature served to warn others of the dangers associated with traitorous acts. R. James Goldstein has commented that Langtoft insists that “the execution reminds us that the authority Wallace dared to transgress against was not King Robert I or the Scottish baronial class he represented, but the sovereign of England, Ireland, and Wales.”13 However, one could also read the description of Wallace’s death (and similar descriptions of others executed in similar ways in the Middle Ages) as a memorial to the dead. While Langtoft and Matthew of Paris did not seek to make a martyr out of Wallace, one can not help but feel sorry for the outlaw, especially after one reads how he was tortured and yet did not cry out for leniency or mercy.
Robert the Bruce is also derided in Langtoft’s chronicle. The Scottish king’s sanity is called into question, and Langtoft pointedly calls him insane:
King Robin has drunk of the drink of dan* Warin, dan: sir (cf. Spanish Don) Who lost cities and towns by the shield,
Afterwards in the forest, mad and naked,
He fed with the cattle on the raw grass.14
The Bruce is here compared to the outlaw of the Welsh Marches, Fouke fitz Waryn (ca. 1167-ca. 1258). That the English chronicler compares the Bruce to this outlaw figure is rather intriguing, for there is no record that the Bruce tried to emulate Fouke’s outlaw tactics that he used against King John (1167-1216). Nevertheless, Langtoft’s association of the two underscores that chronicler’s animosity toward the Bruce and solidifies the Bruce’s reputation among the medieval English as that of an enemy of the state.
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