Blind Hary

Blind Hary, also called Henry the Minstrel, was a Scottish poet of the second half of the fifteenth century. Little is securely known of his life: later tradition holds that he was blind from birth and lived by reciting verse before Scottish nobles, and the accounts of James IV's treasurer record payments to him in the 1490s.

He is the author of The Wallace (c. 1477), a long Older Scots poem in decasyllabic couplets on the life and deeds of Sir William Wallace, drawing on an earlier Latin life that Hary cites. Vivid, partisan and freely inventive where history fails him, it became one of the most widely read books in Scotland for centuries.