Scene from the 1577 Holinshed’s Chronicles - (British Library)
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There are many avenues into our story today, many tellings, or variations on a telling. Our source comes to us from a 16th-century man named Reginald Wolfe.
Born in the Netherlands, Wolfe would move to England, stay there, and eventually settle down to work as a bookseller and printer at St. Paul’s Churchyard in London. Noteworthy for a number of reasons, he was a founding member of the royal chartered Worshipful Company of Stationers, and he was Master of the Company for a number of years.
Of Wolfe, it was written that, quote:
“The little that is made known to us is just sufficient to whet the appetite and kindle the curiosity. It reveals to us an active business man, evidently with large capital behind him, setting up as a bookseller, under the shadow of the great cathedral, and rapidly becoming known to the learned and the rich. We see him passing backwards and forwards between [England] and the book-fair at Frankfurt, executing commissions for great nobles, and at the same time acting as the king’s courier … and he was the first in England who possessed any large stock of Greek type.”
He was, it seems, an interesting historical figure in his own right, but we’re not exactly talking about him today. This has more to do with one of his projects, one which he started but could not finish, one which wouldn’t come to bear his name.
In late-1573, Reginald Wolfe died, and in mid-‘74, so did his wife Joane. Witnessing his will and also mentioned in hers was a man named Raphael Holinshed, the man who would pick up that project.
Back in 1548, Wolfe had hit upon the idea of producing a monumental work that would be global in scope and feature national histories, but at some point he’d arrived at the realization that he couldn’t do it alone. It really was a lot to take on and by any measure too much for one person. Wolfe had hired the Cambridge-educated Holinshed along with another man, and after Wolfe’s death, more scholars were attached to the project. In 1577, the results were printed in a first edition, pared down ever so slightly from the initial lofty goal of a, quote, “universal cosmography,” to a more manageable Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, often called Holinshed's Chronicles, or just Holinshed if you’re into the whole brevity thing.
Today, we’re going to be dipping into those chronicles to see what the book has to say about one particular episode, about one particular story that you’re probably already familiar with. Maybe you’ve read it. Maybe you’ve seen it acted out, whether onstage or on screen. Maybe all of the above.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, a podcast that covers medieval history through the stories of its travellers, and a podcast with a Patreon, where you can support the project and listen earlier, more often, and ad-free, and you can do all of that at patreon.com/humancircus or just through the link in the episode notes. Thank you, all of you who have already done so.
And now, back to the story.
Today, I have a story to tell that you’ll almost certainly recognize, but I thought you might like hearing how it goes in the source material, in those Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland we just talked about. We’ll be dipping into the Scotland section for a story you know from Shakespeare, and not the only one which he would draw from this source. The story here is that of Macbeth, but it’s not exactly the same in the chronicles.
Those chronicles were, as I said, a 16th-century text, not actually a chronicle recorded by one for whom the events were contemporary, actually a little more distant from Macbeth than we are from Shakespeare today, if that helps put things in perspective. It’s a work drawing on earlier sources, at least some of which are helpfully listed at the outset. Hector Boethius, the Scottish philosopher and historian who had died earlier in the same century. John Major, of similar description. John of Fordun, the 14th-century Scottish chronicler. Roger of Howden, the 12th-century English chronicler. William of Newburgh, same century, who has previously featured on the podcast for a Halloween special. And so on.
The Scottish section of the chronicles begin from the beginning, not in the Biblical sense, but in a nation founding origin story equivalent to that of the legendary British king, Brutus of Troy. The story here is one of Gaithelus, or Goídel Glas, legendary founding figure for the Gaels of Scotland and Ireland. In this telling—there are other variants—he is the son of a man who built Athens, or else of a king of Argos. Either way, he is trouble, wild and unruly, and often rebuked. Finally, he is banished, and with a band of similarly “strong and lusty young men” goes to Egypt.
There in Egypt, they win renown in war against the Ethiopians under the command of a general named Moses. They are rewarded with the city of Thebes, and Gaithelus himself with marriage to the pharaoh's daughter Scota, the origin, in this legend, of the term Scotia, or Scotland. Things were good for them for a good long while, but with the next pharaoh there was oppression in the land and Moses was sent into exile. When Moses returned and was disregarded by the Pharaoh—and yes, this was indeed that Moses—plagues struck the land—you know the ones—and Gaithelus made up his mind that it was, again, time to move.
He went by ships, his wife, children, and a multitude of Greeks and Egyptians going with him. Along the African coast and then up to Spain they went, settling near a river and beginning construction of a city, before eventually being persuaded to move north and build what is now the city of Santiago de Compostela. There, Gaithelus ruled as king over his people who he now called the Scottish, and they flourished, growing to such an extent that tensions with the neighbours, tensions which had repeatedly boiled over in the past, began again to grow. Gaithelus and his people needed more land, and he had heard of an island to the north with few inhabitants. While he would stay in Spain, his sons would sail there, and that island would be named after one of them, Hibernia, now called Ireland. In generations that followed, they would inhabit the Hebrides and then Scotland itself, the place where they first settled named after the man who had first led them out of Greece and then Egypt. That place, Argathelia, is now known as Argyll.
If you’re wondering when all of this was said to have occurred, the first king of these Scottish in Ireland is placed, quote, “in the year from the creation of the world 3270 … after flood 1616, from the first building of Rome 55, after the entry of Brutus into Britain 870, and,” probably more useful to us in placing all of this, “before the incarnation of our saviour 697.”
I think it’s an entertaining legend and one which really bundles together a lot of elements, and if you enjoyed it, then I would say you’d probably like Amy Jeffs’ 2021 book, Storyland, which is full of highly enjoyable and accessible retellings of such stories, including this one, complete with her own very striking illustrations, but I digress. Let’s get back to the main story.
As for our main characters in the chronicle, not Gaithelus or his immediate descendents, we find them mentioned after the death of a King Malcolme of Alba, of Scotland in other words, but not the full and familiar Scotland of today. We find them after a season of strangeness, with a Christmas earthquake, a summer flood, a terrible frost that led to shortages of food. We meet them together, sons of the two daughters of Malcolm. From the one daughter, Duncan, King Duncan now, who is described as “soft and gentle of nature,” and not always in a good way. From the other, Macbeth, “a valiant gentleman” but “somewhat cruel of nature.” They made quite a pair, so that it was said that the one had too much clemency and the other too much cruelty, so that it was wished that their inclinations had both been somewhere in the middle so that hot and cold met at a happy medium, that they both could have achieved such a balance so that one might have been a worthy king and the other an excellent captain, but it was not to be.
King Duncan’s reign began well enough, in the year 1034. Indeed, it was quiet and peaceful, the kind of climate when just about anyone might prove sufficient to the task, but he would prove inadequate to more challenging times. Negligent even, so that those who were so inclined took advantage of the situation. Some assailed and robbed a man named Banquo, another of Shakespeare’s characters, as he gathered the money due to the king.
They killed a sergeant at arms who was sent after them, and only after they had, quote, “misused [him] with sundry kinds of reproaches.” They beheaded another captain who was dispatched against them. They followed the command of a man named Macdonald, referenced in Act I Scene 2 of the play as
“merciless Macdonald—
Worthy to be a rebel, for to that
The multiplying villainies of nature
Do swarm upon him”
And this “merciless Macdonald” mocked the king openly, saying of Duncan that he was “a faint-hearted milksop” better suited to ruling the idle monks of the cloister than the valiant men of Scotland. Macbeth, in perhaps gentler terms, also spoke of Duncan’s softness and slackness.
Macbeth offered himself and Banquo for the task of putting down the rebellion, and in this they were successful, violently so. In Shakespeare’s words, Macdonald was “unseam'd … from the nave to the chaps.” In the Holinshed, his head went to Duncan on a pole, and his trunk for display on a gallows, and that was just the start.
Macbeth was harsh in reordering the kingdom. He was variously called “a covenant breaker,” “a bloody tyrant,” and “a cruel murderer of those who the king’s mercy had pardoned,” and he had to be dissuaded from further violence meted out upon the rebellious. Crucially though, he was credited in the chronicles with restoring justice and law through his diligent means “to the old accustomed course,” something that Duncan had been deemed incapable of, that contrast between the two of them that the chroniclers had introduced, here being played out to show neither of them to be truly free of flaws.
Their next chapter concerned the coming of the King of Norway with a powerful army, and here Duncan is celebrated for stirring to quickly raise an army, like a quote, “very valiant captain,” but it is then immediately written that sometimes it happened this way, that a “dull coward and slothful person, constrained by necessity, becomes very hardy and active.” So maybe “celebrated” isn’t really the right word.
As it happened, the army King Duncan raised would not be the deciding factor in seeing off the enemy at all. Duncan would actually take to his castle and from there enter negotiations with his Norwegian counterpart outside. He would allow him to think that a surrender would soon be made, that it was only a matter of time and ticking off some formalities, and he would offer provisions to the besiegers, food and drink that were gratefully accepted and which included ale and bread drugged with large amounts of a certain berry.
It wasn’t poison exactly. It didn’t kill the army outside the castle, but it did put them to sleep, and this was not a case of that which didn’t kill you making you stronger. What didn’t kill the Norwegian army, just left them helpless for Macbeth to kill them. He’d been sent for by Duncan, and he and his men, credited by Shakespeare with “redoubl[ing] strokes upon the foe” in open battle, as if “they meant to bathe in reeking wounds,” here simply slew the watch, stormed the camp, and slaughtered their opponents unopposed, those who did wake too dizzied and bemused to put up much resistance.
Their king did manage to escape, but when he fled to his ships he found that most of their sailors had been drawn ashore by the abundant refreshments. They’d been drugged and killed along with everyone else. The king would only manage to furnish one ship with crew, and in that he’d escape, leaving the rest of his navy to be smashed about by the winds and sunk in the days that followed, their remains to be revealed in the ebb of the tide for years to come. There was certainly drama to it, but you can see why Shakespeare instead had Macbeth and Banquo winning heroic victory against the king and his ally, that traitorous thane of Cawdor.
In Holinshed, the Norwegian king’s fleet would be followed by another, this one sent by the king’s brother Cnut, the King of England, and this invasion too was thrown back, no laced food this time, just a force led by Macbeth and Banquo. Just payments extracted from the invaders for the service of burying their dead, a detail which would make it into the Shakespeare though he would use the name of the first invasion’s king and not this one.
These, the chroniclers wrote, were the wars that Duncan, in the seventh year of his reign, had with foreign enemies, wars in which he did not exactly distinguish himself personally. It was after this second war that there occurred a “strange and uncouth wonder,” and you can probably guess what that was.
Macbeth and Banquo were alone “passing through the woods and fields,” away, in other words, from land tamed by human life, without any other companions, when suddenly, there quote, “met them three women in strange and wild apparel, resembling creatures of elder world.” “All hail Macbeth, thane of Glammis,” the first of them greeted Macbeth, and “All hail Macbeth, thane of Cawdor,” declared the second. The third, of course, would “hail Macbeth that hereafter shall be king of Scotland,” and at Banquo’s questioning, the three promised more, but for his descendants, not for him. Then they vanished.
That part at least was all very much as Shakespeare would have it. As for the rest, we’ll find out after this quick break.
…
At first Macbeth and Banquo thought they’d suffered some kind of illusion out there in the wild, hearing such wild prophecy, and they jokingly addressing one another as king, but then it came be thought that the three they’d met had been “weird sisters,” fates, the “goddesses of destiny, or else some nymphs or fairies, imbued with knowledge of prophecy by their necromantical science.” At first, the two had joked, but then that part about Macbeth being thane of Cawdor came true on the one hand, and then on the other King Duncan gave Macbeth a proper grievance, naming his own son Malcolm as successor, blocking Macbeth’s path to the throne and breaking with the old laws of the realm. Now, Macbeth took to more serious plotting, urged on aggressively by his wife, as he would be in the play, but also taking in what sounds like a wider conspiracy, including Banquo and other unnamed “trusty friends.”
In this telling, fate or chance does not cast the opportunity into Macbeth’s lap, with the king coming to visit and sleeping the night so vulnerably in his home. Instead, Macbeth just kills Duncan, at one place or another, and gathering a strong force, has himself proclaimed king. It’s really that simple, and there’s not a great deal of detail to it. Shakespeare, it seems, looked elsewhere for that, or earlier I should say, flipping back through the chronicle some pages to the killing of King Duffe in the previous century.
There, in the 10th century, we find that king wasting away with a mysterious illness, its source unidentifiable by all, despite their best efforts. It was his trusted captain Donwald who discovered witches roasting the king’s wax image over a fire and had them executed, returning Duffe to health. It was Donwald again who took up his side against a rebellion in the north, seeing the rebels defeated and many of them hanged. It was Donwald who pleaded on the behalf of his relatives who were among those rebels, people described in the chronicle as “right beautiful and goodly personages,” but King Duffe would not listen or grant mercy. That was when Donwald began to hate his king.
As you might expect from Shakespeare’s telling of Macbeth’s murder of Duncan, it was Donwald’s wife who, once she understood his hatred, encouraged him in the killing and showed him how it might be done. And it would be done in Donwald’s castle where Duffe was often a guest, but unlike the Shakespearean regicide, neither Donwald nor his wife would actually be in the room when it happened, for he would look to distance himself from it as much as possible.
He did this first by having well trusted and rewarded servants carry out the deed on his behalf. They cut Duffe’s throat while the king slept. They carried the body out into the fields where horses were waiting. They took it to a river, and with the help of ready labourors, diverted the stream to bury the body in the riverbed before setting the water back to its original course, concealing the burial site beneath its path and ensuring that there was no body to damn Donwald by bleeding in his presence, as murder victims were thought to do. While all of this was happening, Donwald himself was lingering with the nightwatch, very noticeably keeping in their company until dawn. I’m not sure if they would have found that strange.
When the shouts of alarm and distress rang out in the morning, Donwald did very much as Macbeth would later do on stage. Rushing into the king’s room with the rest of the watch, he saw the empty bed all caked with blood, and he cut down the king’s chamberlains in a violent rage.
In the aftermath of King Duffe’s killing, there were disturbances in nature and monstrous sights. There were wonderful horses that ate their own flesh, a child born without eyes, a nose, hands, or feet, a sparhawk strangled by an owl. It’s much in tone and content as Shakespeare wrote into the night in his play, when Lennox arrives with Macduff in the morning and tells Macbeth of how the night was unruly, how their chimney was blown down, how there were “strange screams of death, and prophesying with accents terrible of dire combustion and confused events,” how “The earth was feverish and did shake.” And after the Shakespearean Duncan’s body is found, there is the scene outside the castle which closely echoes the source material with the old man speaking of further unnatural doings: a falcon slain by a mousing owl and Duncan’s own horses breaking loose and eating one another.
In the aftermath of King Duncan’s death, as we move back to the story of the Holinshed Macbeth, the old king’s sons fled for Ireland and, in the case of Malcolm, England. Meanwhile back in Scotland, things at first went well enough in King Macbeth’s realm. It did not fall apart right away, nor it seems did his grip on reality. It was not all that bad, at first.
The chronicle paints this period as one of recovery from Duncan’s slackness, from, in the words of the text, his “feeble and slothful administration.” It’s a return to justice, and an end to rampant abuses, misdeeds, and thievery. It depicts Macbeth as the “sure defence and buckler of innocent people,” and includes a whole list of wholesome laws which he established for the public good. But the chroniclers concluded this section on a more ominous note. If Macbeth had “continued in uprightness of justice as he began, till the end of his reign, he might well have been numbered amongst the most noble princes that anywhere had reigned.” He of course would not.
For a full ten years, Macbeth reigned in this equitable manner, but we are told it was only a “counterfeit zeal of equity” to gain favour, an incredible decade-long streak of counterfeit zeal but one which would have an end. There aren’t exactly scenes of shouting at the dead here or moments of “out damn spot,” but eventually the, quote, “prick of conscience” caused Macbeth to worry that he would be served the same cup that he had brought to his predecessor. He began to think again over what those three figures had promised him, started to think about how they’d also promised his good friend Banquo something for the future. He hired killers to murder Banquo and make it look like a common robbery gone wrong. As in the play, they succeeded, but in the darkness of the night, Banquo’s son escaped and fled to Wales where the chroniclers closely followed his descendents for a page or two. We’ll stick with Macbeth.
In the aftermath of Banquo’s death, Macbeth was going through a pretty dark time. “Nothing prospered with [him]” then, and people were rightly frightened to be in his presence. “Many stood in fear of him, so likewise stood he in fear of many.” You can see where Shakespeare got it from, and if you read on in Holinshed from King Duffe’s murder to that of his son, Kenneth, you find similarly inspiring material: a voice in the night that haunts the guilty party and fills them with terror.
When the chroniclers said that Macbeth stood in fear, it perhaps implied a passivity that wasn’t really there. Macbeth wasn’t just standing in fear so much as he was lashing and raging about in it. He was absolutely harvesting his nobles, killing them so that they could no threaten him no longer, but then also benefiting again by putting their forfeited wealth to use in his own defence, in the maintenance of his armed men and then in the construction of a great castle at Dunsinane, the one on a high hill from which he could really rain down his tyranny, the one that, surely, no wood would ever come to.
Macbeth called upon his thanes one after another to contribute their work and resources in the building of the Dunsinane castle—it being up that high hill made the construction quite difficult—but one of them, Macduff of Fife, did not wish to go. Rather understandably, he thought it better to stay away from the king just then. He didn’t want to do anything too offensive—he still sent provisions and workmen who were instructed to do their utmost so that no possible fault could be found with them. But fault would be found with him nonetheless.
When Macbeth on his inspections saw that the Thane of Fife was absent, he was enraged. He thought that Macduff would never obey him, and that the thane had become too powerful. He had been informed already by certain wizards that Macduff would seek to harm him, and after that business with the three women, he was pretty well primed to believe in such things. Macbeth most certainly would have just arranged Macduff’s death at this point, but he wasn’t quite as worried as he might have been.
He was in fact blissfully unconcerned because he’d been told something by a certain witch—and you can see why Shakespeare simplified all this business of witches and wizards to just the three weird sisters—and this witch, who he entirely trusted, had promised him he would “never be slain [by a] man born of any woman, nor vanquished till the wood of [Birnam] came to the castle of Dunsinane.” All very reassuring, all very much as it was in the play, source of the information aside, and none of it was going to do anything to help his people.
Unfortunately for them, just as Macbeth’s fear had turned him against them, his new-found prophecy-given confidence only made him more confident in doing so, and quote, “This vain hope [that the witch had given him] caused him to do many outrageous things, to the grievous oppression of his subjects.” As in the play, Macduff duly fled to England, to Duncan’s son Malcolm, and behind him, Macbeth went to Macduff castle in Fife, took everything of value, and killed everyone he found there. And as in the play Malcolm greeted Macduff cautiously, uncertain whether he could trust his visitor. He proclaimed himself to have all sorts of flaws—an uncontrollable lust, an unquenchable avarice, an unnatural inclination toward deceit—all in order to assess Macduff’s reaction before eventually agreeing to return to Scotland, and to see to Macbeth.
In the closing passages of the story, the nobles of Scotland choose their side, and all awaits the coming of Malcolm, Macduff, and an army of 10,000. Macbeth, for his part, withdraws to his fortification at Dunsinane. Some of his followers urge him to take his wealth abroad, where it might help him find allies he could trust much more solidly than his own subjects, who now have every reason not to be loyal, but he has that prophecy in mind still. He thinks he’s untouchable.
He’s still there when his enemies come marching, still there when that army advances through the wood, cutting and carrying tree boughs as they go, still there to look out from Dunsinane and wonder what it means, all that sudden foliage, and then to remember the words prophecy. He brings his men to order and exhorts them on, but he himself does not make a stand. When the enemy throws down their woody disguise, and he sees their numbers, he turns and flees.
In this telling, he has to be chased down by Macduff on horseback. There’s no “Lay on Macduff,” not exactly, just him finally forced to stop and fight with the declaration that against all evidence he has nothing to fear, not from any man from woman born. That’s when Macduff informs him that, quote, “Now shall your insatiable cruelty have an end, for I am even he that your wizards have told you of, who was never born of my mother, but ripped out of her womb.” And he kills Macbeth and cuts off his head.
This, the chroniclers concluded “was the end of Macbeth, after he had reigned 17 years over the Scotishmen. In the beginning of his reign he accomplished many worthy acts, very profitable to the common-wealth … but afterward by illusion of the devil, he defamed the same with most terrible cruelty.”
Shakespeare, understandably, really zipped through those 17 years, doing away with any celebration of Macbeth as a ruler who restored order and instated many worthy laws, choosing instead to tease out those themes of inner disturbance mirrored in nature, which were not entirely his invention. And there were other changes too.
The playwright borrowed a little from that King Duffe killing to flesh out the rather sparsely covered one of Duncan. He tweaked the whole framing of Duncan and Macbeth as basically being equally flawed and both possessed of unfortunate shortcomings, neither of them so great for their kingdoms, instead giving us his audience something of a clearer villain. He made Banquo something of an unfortunate bystander, or at least a man caught up in events rather than an outright accomplice, perhaps a move of political necessity given that the ruling King James was said to be descended from Banquo. He really expanded on the encouragement offered by Lady Macbeth. He simplified the various supernatural forces at work—witches, wizards, and so on—to just those three otherworldly women, nudging them from the realm of the mysterious and uncertain and into the more plainly infernal, and he brought a ghost into the mix, an element perhaps borrowed from the killing of King Duffe’s son, whose murderer was also troubled by a nighttime voice that kept him from his sleep.
I hope you enjoyed this telling of the story. I’ll be back soon with some bonus listening on the Patreon and soon after that the next full episode, and I’ll talk to you then.
Sources:
Holinshed, Raphael. Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. J. Johnson, et al., 1808.
The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed's Chronicles, edited by Felicity Heal, Ian W. Archer, & Paulina Kewes. Oxford University Press, 2013.
McLuskie, Kathleen. Macbeth. Northcote House, 2009.
Patterson, Annabel. Reading Holinshed's Chronicles. University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Plomer, Henry Robert. A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1900.
Shakespeare, William. Macbeth, edited by Sandra Clark & Pamela Mason. Bloomsbury, 2015.