not specified. A 'Blind Hary' is also mentioned by the near-contemporary poet William Dunbar in his Lament for the Makaris. In this poem Hary is included in a list of deceased poets mourned by Dunbar. The Scots scholar John Mair identified 'Blind Hary' as the author of The Wallace in his work Historia Majoris Britanniae or The History Of Greater Britain of 1521. Date of composition The Wallace appears to date to the latter half of the fifteenth century. The earliest surviving copy, the Ramsay Manuscript, is dated to 1488 but evidence from within the poem itself suggests that it was completed during the 1470s or earlier. Blind Harry refers to having consulted William Wallace of Craigie while composing the poem and Wallace of Craigie is known to have died in 1479. Furthermore, during the 1470s King James III was engaged in a policy of reconciliation with King Edward IV of England. The poem, with its unsympathetic depiction of the English, may represent a criticism of this policy as typified in its opening verse, Publication history At first, The Wallace circulated only in manuscript form. The earliest surviving manuscript of the poem was written in 1488 by John Ramsay, a Prior of the Perth Charterhouse. The Ramsay manuscript is preserved in the National Library of Scotland under the catalogue number Adv. MS. 19.2.2 (ii). Chepman and Myllar published the first known printed edition in the early sixteenth century. Only fragments of this edition survive. A second printed edition was produced at Edinburgh in 1570 by Robert Lekpreuik. A third printed edition was published in 1594, also at Edinburgh, by Henry Charteris. The texts of all three early printed editions agree closely with the Ramsay manuscript. No new editions are known to have been produced during the seventeenth century. The work's popularity continued into the modern era with editions which often differed substantially from the texts of the sixteenth century. William Hamilton of Gilbertfield produced a translation into English entitled The Life and Heroick Actions of the Renoun'd Sir William Wallace, General and Governour of Scotland which was published by William Duncan at Glasgow in 1722. In 1820 John Jamieson edited a more authentic Scots version The Life and Acts of Sir William Wallace of Ellerslie also published at Glasgow. In 1889 the Scottish Text Society published a scholarly transcript of the text of the Ramsay manuscript. Many other editions have