[L] _Registrum Prioratus Sancti Andreæ_, 114.
Let us now look to the manner in which the death of Duncan is spoken of by the most ancient authorities. Old Andrew Wyntoun, Prior of St Serfs on Lochleven, who has never yet, to our great wonder, been upheld as one of the greatest poets of his own or any other age,--perhaps we may undertake the task some day, let our readers judge by the extracts on the present occasion with what prospect of success:--Wyntoun narrates the event with the true simplicity of genius, in these two lines:--
"He murthrified him in Elgyne, His Kynrik he usurped syne."
This is distinct enough, in all truth: there is no ambiguity, or room for critical doubt; nor is his fellow annalist, Fordun, less distinct, for he speaks of the slain monarch as _occisus scelere_. But these chroniclers wrote between three and four centuries after the event they commemorate, standing chronologically almost as near our own day as Macbeth's; and when we look into those far older, if not contemporary, annals, which narrate successive events in the briefest possible shape, we find that they contain nothing to indicate that Duncan's death took place in any more atrocious manner than the multitudinous slaughters of kings, with which their narratives are often as crowded as a Peninsular campaign gazette with killed officers. Thus, the register of the Priory of St Andrews simply states, that Duncan _interfectus est_. It is true that the Latin language is deficient in any word to express murder as distinguished from other kinds of slaughter. _Trucido_ is the verb we have been accustomed to associate most nearly with the idea of assassination; but in one of the most circumspect and prosaic of the old annals, that of Tighernac, this very word is applied to the death of Macbeth himself. Blackstone notices the circumstance that the English lawyers had to coin, for their own special use, the substantive _murdrum_ and the verb _murdrare_; equally creditable to their good taste in Latinity and to the social condition of their country. In fact, the Romans looked upon death, in any form, as so bad a business, that they cared little for making nice distinctions about the motive that had occasioned it, or the manner in which it was effected; and it was a condition so generally disliked, that, if any man was absurd enough voluntarily to place himself in it, neither the law nor public opinion troubled itself to express disapproval, either by driving a stake through the body or in any other way. Undoubtedly there were justifiable slaughters and unjustifiable; but the practice of single combat had not arisen to draw a strong and distinct line between death in a fair tournament or duel, and secret assassination. A recollection that this was also the social state of Scotland in the days of Macbeth, will help us far better towards the truth than a criticism on the ambiguous Latin words. It was between that age and the period of Wyntoun and Fordun that single-combat chivalry and the laws of honour had grown up; so, while the older chroniclers had simply to say that the man was killed, without troubling themselves about the manner, those of later date were moved to divide the deaths into two departments--the killed in combat and the murdered. More, probably, by chance than design, the fate of Duncan was put into the latter category; and then a super-structure of particulars was raised upon it--for it must be observed, that the romantic incidents of the slaughter were added at a still later period than that of Fordun or Wyntoun--by Boece and Hollinshed. Here, then, is our case, as lawyers say: Macbeth, in right of his wife, was a claimant of the crown. He kills the existing holder; but there is nothing in the older accounts of the affair to show that he did so otherwise than in the fair course of war. It was what the old civilians would have called a _casus belli_,--an expression which, by the way, we find some accomplished editors using as the Latin for a justification of war. The murder is found only in the later chronicles, which, in all parts of their narrative, have covered their more sober predecessors with a coating of fabulous details like the stalactites of a dripping cave. However the real fact may have stood, we have no _statement_ of Macbeth having murdered Duncan until between three and four centuries after the event. Why,--the case looks vastly better than we thought it did when we began with it; we have some thoughts of believing our own theory, which is more than ever we knew a historical critic do, within the range of our personal observation.