A Renfrewshire village in the lordship of the High Stewards, traditionally the birthplace of William Wallace on the authority of Blind Harry’s poem of about 1470 — a claim contested by an Ayrshire rival, unsupported by any contemporary document, and commemorated since 1912 by a monument on the site of the Wallace house.
Elderslie stands on low ground west of Paisley in Renfrewshire, on the road towards Johnstone. The name is usually read as Old English, the clearing or field of the elder trees, and the village grew around a small estate rather than a castle or a church of any consequence.
Its fame rests entirely on one man. William Wallace, born about 1270 and executed at Smithfield in London on 23 August 1305, is by long tradition a son of this place, and the village has commemorated him since the nineteenth century. The tradition is old, widely held, and not proved.
Renfrewshire was the lordship of the Stewards of Scotland, the family later called Stewart, who held it from the crown after Walter fitz Alan was granted lands there in the twelfth century and who founded Paisley Abbey close by. The Wallace family were among their followers: the surname itself, Walensis, means the Welshman or Briton, and marks families of Strathclyde British descent settled under Anglo-Norman lords.
Wallaces held land at Elderslie in Renfrewshire and also at Riccarton, Tarbolton, Auchincruive and Stenton in Ayrshire. That spread is what makes the birthplace question hard rather than easy: both of the places claimed for William were held by branches of the same kindred, and neither has a document naming him.
The Elderslie tradition comes from Blind Harry, whose long poem on Wallace, written about 1470, calls him a knight of Elderslie and gives him a father, Sir Malcolm Wallace of Elderslie. Harry wrote nearly two centuries after the events, drew on stories rather than records, and invented freely; his poem is the source of most popular knowledge of Wallace and of much that is certainly false.
Against it stands a document from Wallace’s own hand. The letter he and Andrew Moray sent to the merchants of Lübeck and Hamburg in October 1297 carries his seal, and the seal names his father as Alan Wallace. An Alan Wallace appears in the Ragman Roll of 1296 as a crown tenant in Ayrshire, which has led historians to suggest that William came from Ellerslie, an older form of the name of a place near Kilmarnock, and that the Ayrshire branch, not the Renfrewshire one, was his.
Neither case can be closed. There is no record of Wallaces holding the Ayrshire Ellerslie estate in the middle of the thirteenth century, and no contemporary document links William to Elderslie either. The honest position, and the one most historians now take, is that the family connections of both places are real and that the birthplace is unknown.
Whatever his origins, Wallace emerged in 1297 as a leader of the rising against Edward I of England, won the Battle of Stirling Bridge with Andrew Moray on 11 September that year, and was made a Guardian of Scotland. His defeat at the Battle of Falkirk on 22 July 1298 ended his command, and after years as a fugitive he was taken near Glasgow in 1305, tried in Westminster Hall and put to death.
The rising he began was not finished by him: Robert the Bruce took the crown in 1306 and the war ran on for another generation. But Wallace fought before there was a king to fight for, which is why later Scotland made so much of him — and why a village with a good claim to his family wanted a good claim to his cradle.
Two trees carried the tradition before any monument did. The Wallace Oak, said to have sheltered Wallace and his men, stood in the village until 1856, when it was brought down; relics were cut from its timber and sold, in the manner of the age. A yew known as the Wallace Yew still grows on the site.
The Wallace Memorial was raised in 1912 beside the remains of the house of the Wallaces of Elderslie, which stood near the site of the old castle of the estate; the monument carries a relief and inscriptions, and a commemoration is held at it every August, close to the anniversary of Wallace’s execution. The village otherwise became an industrial one — Stoddard’s carpet works operated here from 1862 until 2004 — and is now a commuter village of greater Glasgow with a monument at its heart.