I will not pretend to exculpate Henry from the charge of credulity. Far more, however, has been said as to his ignorance than can be well supported. We have no other standard of the measure of his knowledge than his own work; and this, there is every reason to think, much disfigured by unavoidable corruptions. But even judging from this, we have sufficient evidence that, from his early years, he must diligently have used all the means of information which were properly within his reach. He seems to have been pretty well acquainted with that kind of history which was commonly read in that period. He alludes to the history of Hector, of Alexander the Great, of Julius Cæsar, Book VIII. 845, 886, 961, &c., and to that of Charlemagne, whose army, at Ronceval in Navarre, being betrayed by Ganelon, was defeated by the Saracens, Book VIII. 1256. XI. 837. V. Dict. de Trevoux, vo. _Rouncevaux_. With the romances that were most popular in that age he was perhaps as well acquainted as Barbour. He seems to have been familiar with that of _Alexander_; as, like the latter, he refers to Gaudifer, Book X. 342. V. Note on _The Bruce_, B. II. 468.
His acquaintance with the popular romances is perhaps still more apparent from his style of writing. As it abounds, much more than that of Barbour, with poetical allusions to the face of nature, which the poor Minstrel had never beheld, to the change of the seasons, to the supposed influence of the planets or of the constellations; it is more richly strewed with the more peculiar phraseology of the writers of romance; whence a stranger to our chronology might be induced to view the Life of Wallace as of an older date than _The Bruce_, although nearly a century later. We meet with a variety of terms or phrases in _Wallace_, which, from the difference of his habits, do not seem to have been familiar with the good Archdeacon of Aberdeen, as _frekis_, _frekis on fold_; _bane and lyre_; _brycht_, and _frely of fassoun_, for a fair maid, &c. &c.
It is necessary to observe, that the Minstrel’s mode of expression is often very elliptical. In order to understand his meaning, the reader must therefore recollect, that he very commonly omits the pronouns, whether personal or relative. This, to those who are not familiar with the ancient style, has given him an air of absurdity, and has induced the idea of his being far more illiterate than we can reasonably suppose him to have been. Let us take an example or two among many.