Before writing _The Scottish Chiefs_, Miss Porter read everything she could find bearing upon the history of England and Scotland during the reigns of the first two Edwards. She personally visited the places she described. She wrote in the preface: "I assure the reader that I seldom lead him to any spot in Scotland whither some written or oral testimony respecting my hero had not previously conducted myself." Besides these sources of information, Miss Porter was familiar with the poem of _Wallace_ by Blind Harry the Minstrel, the biographer of Scotland's national hero. Blind Harry lived nearly two centuries after the death of Wallace, but he had access to books now lost, and collected stories about Scotland's struggle for independence while it was still prominent in the public mind. Although he tells many exalted stories of the numbers whom Wallace overcame by his single arm, the poem is on the whole authentic. Sheriff Mackay in the _Dictionary of National Biography_ writes that the life of Wallace by Blind Harry "became the secular bible of his countrymen, and echoes through their later history." Miss Porter introduced love scenes to vary the deeds of war, but there is nothing else in _The Scottish Chiefs_ which is not true to history, or to that more legitimate source of romance, the traditions common among the people. From the opening chapter, in which Wallace is described as an outlaw because he had refused to take the oath of allegiance to an English king, to his death in London and the final crowning of Bruce, there is not a dull page. Especially interesting is the scene between William Wallace and the Earl of Carrick, after the battle of Falkirk, and the appearance of Robert Bruce, who overheard this conversation, fighting by the side of Wallace. The truth of this incident has been denied, but it is related by Blind Harry. The trial of William Wallace in the great hall at Westminster for treason, and his defence that he had never acknowledged the English government, is most impressive, and is a matter of record.