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MATTHEW OF WESTMINSTER
The flowers of history, especially such as relate to the affairs of Britain. Vol. II. A.D. 1066 to A.D. I307.

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MATTHEW OF WESTMINSTER
The flowers of history, especially such as relate to the affairs of Britain. Vol. II. A.D. 1066 to A.D. I307.
page 585



About the time of the festival of the Assumption of the blessed Virgin Mary, a certain Scot, by name William Wallace, an outcast from pity, a robber, a sacrilegious man, an incendiary, and a homicide, a man more cruel than the cruelty of Herod, and more insane than the fury of Nero, who with the accursed Ham discovered the nakedness of a man, which God ordained to be covered when he made men aprons, compelling many men and women of England, mingled together, to carol, and play, and dance naked before him, placing behind them tormentors with scorpions, and goads to bind against them and scourge them, and pinch them, so as to make them advance straight forward ; a man who even tore out the bowels of infants crying in their cradles, and hanging at their mothers' breasts ; who burnt alive boys in schools and churches, in great numbers ; who, when he had collected an army of Scots in the battle of Falkirk, against the king of England, and had seen that he could not resist the powerful army of the king, said to the Scots, " Behold I have brought you into a ring, now carol and dance as well as you can and so fled himself from the battle, leaving his people to be slain by the sword ; —he, I say, this man of Belial, after his innumerable wickednesses, was at last taken prisoner by the king's servants, and brought to London, as the king ordained that he should be formally tried, and was on the eve of Saint Bartholomew condemned by the nobles of the kingdom of England to a most cruel but amply deserved death. First of all, he was led through the streets of London, dragged at the tail of a horse, and dragged to a very high gallows, made on purpose for him, where he was hanged with a halter, then taken down half dead, after which his genitals were cut off, and his bowels taken out and burnt in the fire, then his head was cut off, and his body divided into four quarters, and his head fixed on a stake and set on London bridge. But his four quarters thus divided, were Bent to the four quarters of Scotland. Behold the end of a merciless man, whom his mercilessness brought to this end ! In the week after the Nativity of the blessed Mary, the council of king Edward assembled in the New Temple in London ; and there were present the bishops of Chester and Worcester, of England, and the bishops of Saint Andrew's and Glasgow, of Scotland, and the abbots of Westminster and Waverley, and two earls of England, and two of Scotland,


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