In my last post on this thread, I set about correcting some of the erroneous information conveyed by the movie Braveheart. William Wallace, as I've stated previously, is a personal hero of mine, and I think the real man was far more interesting than Mel Gibson's character, as depicted in the film. Whereas I enjoyed the movie immensely -- it's my favorite, as a matter of fact-- the factual errors drive me straight up the wall.
Previously, I attempted to set straight the matter of Wallace's parentage (he was, by his own signature, the son of one Alain Wallace, not Malcolm Wallace, as previously believed) and his family situation. In this piece, I'll tackle the point at which Wallace makes his first appearance on the historical stage: The murder of William Heselrig, Sheriff of Lanark.
In the film, Braveheart, Wallace, after a lengthy absence, returns to his home village, where he becomes reacquainted with and ultimately falls in love with a girl he'd met during his childhood. History is silent on the matter, but here, the movie departs even from "Blind Harry," the Minstrel.
Aw, shit! I wish I hadn'tt written that! A blind, Scottish minstrel? Now I'll have names like "Blind Haggis Harper" racing through my head all night. Too much blues and too much Cheech and Chong have ruined me for life.
Anyway...
Several problems crop up at this point. First, Wallace was almost certainly a native of Ayrshire. As the real-life William Heselrig was the Sheriff of Lanark (in Lanarkshire -- surprise, surprise!), reality would preclude any childhood friendship with Marian Braidfute.
Bear with me.
According to Blind Harry, William Wallace went outlaw after his retaliatory killing of Heselrig. Heselrig, according to the lay, had killed Wallace's lover (or wife), Marian Braidfute, and her family. At this point Wallace, in time-honored Scottish fashion, took matters into his own hands.
In the movie, the Sheriff slits Marian's throat, after she resists the advances of an English soldier. In real life, Wallace's love affair with her may or may not actually have happened. Wallace's neutralization of Heselrig in 1297 (which certainly did happen, and was the apparent cause of his outlawry) may therefore have been the result of any one of -- or a combination of -- several motives. Unlike the scene in the movie, though, Wallace didn't slit Heselrig's throat. He dismembered him with a sword, an incident over which Blind Harry gloats. (Why the writers changed the story, I'll never know. The gorier, historically accurate version would have sold more tickets...)
Granted, Harry himself may have taken certain liberties, but the rather messy death he attributes to Heselrig actually rings true, considering Wallace's penchant for brutality.
This brings us to the matter the sword Wallace carried in the movie. Yes, yes. It looks great. I admit that. But his career as an outlaw/rebel lasted from AD 1297 until 1305. The two-handed claymore (G. claidheamh mor) didn't come into fashion until the closing years of the 15th C., a full two hundred years later.
Next comes the matter of Hamish's axe. First, though, let me bitch about Hamish's name. Dammit, "Hamish" is just an anglicized version of the vocative form of the Gaelic Seumas (James)! When directly addressing a person in Gaelic, the initial consonant of the name undergoes lenition, while an "i" follows the final vowel. Thus, Seumas (pronounced Shamus) becomes Sheumais. As a lenited "s" becomes "h," and "s," when preceded by or preceding a slender vowel, is pronounced "sh," the pronunciation of the name changes from "Shamus" to "Hamish," in the vocative form.
Now letâs get back to the axe. Yes, it's conceivable that a man from Ayrshire might have wielded a sparth. The weapon -- ultimately of Norse origin -- was popular in both Ireland and Scotland from the 9th C. onward. An illustration in Cambrensis's Topographica Hibernica, in fact, depicts a pair of Irishmen fighting with two-handed battleaxes, as do other contemporary illustrations. The typical Celtic/Scandinavian battleaxe, though, was three to four feet long, and not nearly as cumbersome as it looks. The sparth, however (the type Hamish carries in the movie) could be five to six feet long, making it closer in size to a continental bardiche. Only the men of the Western Isles, and their gallowglass (G. gailloglaich) descendants in Ireland used axes of that size.
I'll leave the armor alone. The line between coat-of-plates and brigandine is thin enough, and in metal-poor Scotland, a coat-of-plates incorporating smaller-than-average plates isn't too far-fetched. Besides, most of the Scots were depicted as unarmored -- quite in keeping with recorded history.
I'll leave the clothing alone, as well. The form of breacan plaid in the movie is a bit too modern, but contemporary illustrations (such as that from the charter awarded Carlisle by Edward II) clearly depict Scotsmen wrapped in one-piece garments and employing the upper portions as hoods.
Now we come to one of the most jarring anachronisms, but one that makes the film all more exciting on the visual level: the painted faces. It's well known that various Germanic, and Celtic peoples (and the Picts, as well) decorated their bodies with woad. Body painting, use of makeup and tattooing are among the oldest and most widespread forms of adornment on earth, examples of each existing on nearly every continent. The problem is that in northern Europe, adorning oneself with woad was dying out in late Roman times, and would long since have ceased by the 13th C.
In the movie, Edward I, before departing for France, drives his sonâs entourage of effete courtiers from the room, roughs him up a bit, and orders him to implement a final solution to the Wallace question. All well and good, except for one thing: Edward II was born in 1284, which would have made him thirteen years old at the time.
The next "groaner" (although it's one of the best and most inspiring scenes in the film) is Stirling (AD 1297) segment. The scene in the movie lacks one crucial feature: the bridge.
"What?" asks the gentle reader."What bridge?"
Yep. The battle of Stirling Bridge is what it's called, and with good reason: it was fought on a bridge.
The English commander, John de Warenne, was a bit of a fuckwit, you see. Stirling Bridge was a very narrow bridge (only two cavalrymen could cross at a time), situated in the "u" of a horseshoe bend in the river Forth. Between the north end of the bridge and the hill upon which Wallace and his comrade, Andrew Murray, (who didn't even appear in the film) had positioned their forces was a mile or so of swampy ground, with only a narrow causeway between bridge and hill being negotiable by horsemen.
When de Warenne ordered the vanguard across, Wallace and Murray did what anyone with an ounce of common sense would have done: they charged. In the ensuing non-battle, the lightly armored, far more mobile Scottish infantry massacred the English vanguard, who were unable to maneuver, defend themselves, or even retreat. Most figures agree upon 5,000 English dead, including 100 or more knights.
Those who escaped did so by leaping into the river and swimming across. Many drowned, de Warenne's unarmored Welsh auxiliaries being among the few who didn't.
But that's hardly the last of the inaccuracies. In the movie, a man obviously intended to repres ent Hugh "Ton o' Fun" Cressingham, Edward's treasurer, loses his head (literally!)in a one-on-one showdown with Wallace. In reality, Scottish spearmen dragged him from his saddle and turned him into a human pincushion.
As with Heselrig's death scene, the makers of Braveheart (rather a gory film, all in all) inexplicably passed up another opportunity to add a few gallons of fake blood to the screen (and to sell more tickets). In reality, the Scots skinned lardass Cressingham's remains and made strips of his hide into saddle girths. Supposedly, Wallace made a baldric from Cressingham' skin, as well.
The next problem: In the film, the three nobles who rode forth to parley with de Warenne were named Mornay, Lochlan, and Craig. In reality, the only nobles who showed up for the brawl were Andrew Murray (a great Scottish patriot and hero in his own right, who fought alongside Wallace, and later died of wounds sustained during the battle), James the Stewart, who made a peace offer, only to be rebuffed by de Warenne -- and Malcolm, the Earl of Lennox. Both Stewart and Lennox sat the fracas out entirely, only falling upon the retreating English baggage train and rearguard when the battle was over.
And those spears! Ridiculous! Certainly, Scottish weaponry (that which wasn't imported) was crude by English and continental standards, Wallace's soldiers' pikes had heads of iron or steel, the better to penetrate the English cavalrymen's armor. Speaking of that: Coat-of-plates was in use during the late 13th century, as were scale armors. Both, however, were usually employed as defenses for the torso. For most knights, mail was still the most common form of armor.
Now letâs skip ahead to Falkirk (AD 1298). The formation Wallace's men assumed in the film's Stirling scene was the one that, in reality, they assumed at Falkirk. Had the battle gone according to Wallace's plan, the results would have been very much like those depicted in the Stirling sequence.
The Scottish cavalry, though -- for reasons still not entirely clear, for all that Blind Harry accuses them of treason -- didn't deploy. As a result, the successive volleys from the English longbowmen mowed down the Scottish schiltrons. The English heavy cavalry then trampled the survivors.
The scene in which the Scots ladle pitch into a meadow and then set it afire with flaming arrows is pure fantasy. The Scottish forces did indeed boast a small contingent of archers, whom they deployed between schiltrons. In real life, though, the English cavalry rode them down after dispersing John Comyn (later killed by Robert the Bruce) and the Scottish cavalry.
In the movie -- as in reality -- Edward's army contained Welsh and Irish elements. The Irish, however, certainly did not desert to the Scottish side. Actually, the Welsh threatened to defect. Edward's 1298 campaign was one of the most poorly managed in the annals of military history. Owing to his own rashness (and Wallace's "scorched earth" policy), his troops were on the brink of starvation by the time they reached Falkirk.
The Welsh, having lost their own independence a mere sixteen years before (many of their leaders met ends as ignominious as Wallace's), were hardly the staunchest allies at the time. Their morale, never high to begin with, declined steadily as hunger took its toll. When they complained to Edward, he made the mistake of sending them wine in lieu of food, as he had none of the latter to give.
I'll probably be excoriated for "stereotyping" after saying this, but think about it: Need one have a doctorate in cultural anthropology to imagine the result of several hundred angry Welshmen drinking wine -- on empty stomachs, no less?
Needless to say, a brawl broke out between the English and their Cymric auxiliaries. Several score Welshmen died in the fracas, after which their surviving countrymen spent the night apart from the main army, threatening all the while to defect to the Scottish side.
Think of it as a medieval example of multiculturalism in action...
To wrap up this part of the rant: Longshanks's troops were hardly the cocky, feisty bunch portrayed in the film. They were "on their last legs," and had Wallace's cavalry and archers acted according to plan, the battle should certainly have ended in an English rout.
Plan in one hand, shit in the other, and see which fills the faster!
I had to bitch about the Falkirk sequence, as the Stirling sequence depicts what should have happened at Falkirk, had things transpired as Wallace would have preferred. Having done so, I'll now return to AD 1297.
Wallace was actually knighted. In this respect, Braveheart is accurate. In the movie, he was made sole Guardian of Scotland (though not mentioned in the film, prior to Wallace taking office, there were six Guardians). This, too, is accurate, as is the nobles' indignation at the very thought of a commoner rising above his station.
Then, once again, the bullshit flows like wine.
Robert the Bruce had both a legitimate claim upon and ambitions to ascend to the throne of Scotland. Wallace, however, was a loyal supporter of John Balliol. Balliol, interestingly enough, was a puppet king, placed upon Scotland's throne by Edward I in 1292.
Following the death of Margaret, called "The Maid of Norway," the Scots -- on the brink of civil war -- foolishly asked Edward I of England to resolve the dispute that erupted between the various claimants to the Scottish throne. Among these claimants was Robert Bruce, "The Contender," the grandfather of the film's Robert the Bruce. Edward -- intending to make Scotland his own domain -- chose John Balliol, a weak and indecisive man whom he removed from the throne in 1296, and kept prisoner in England.
Balliol might not have been much of a king, but he was Scotland's king, and as such, Wallace supported him to the bitter end. So much for his pleading with Bruce to unite Scotland, as depicted in the film. Wallaceâs brothers, on the other hand, were Bruce supporters. Interesting, no?
Next, we'll tackle the scene depicting the sack of York. It's a great scene, and leads up to Edward I hurling his son's butt-buddy to his death, from a castle window. (I almost liked Edward during that particular scene. Something about the prettyboy just irritated the shit out of me.)
Unfortunately, none of it ever happened. No, Wallace never sacked York or any other English city. He invaded and terrorized northern England, but as his army had no real siege machinery, he was stuck harrying rural areas and smaller towns and villages. The closest he ever came to a classic medieval siege was his unsuccessful assault on Carlisle.
Here, too, the directors passed up a chance to add more gore to an already bloody film, more's the pity. The War of Scottish Independence was characterized by the atrocities committed by both sides. During the invasion of northern England, the vengeful Scots were perhaps even more brutal than usual. Wallace's Galloway contingents had a particularly nasty reputation in this respect -- so much so that Wallace himself considered them untrustworthy.
In the next installment, I'll tackle the matter of Edward II's homosexuality -- he wasn't quite the "flamer" depicted in the movie -- and Wallace's life in the aftermath of his crushing defeat at Falkirk.