Was ANY of Braveheart Accurate?

Breaking news: Mel Gibson’s 1995 epic historical drama Braveheart might not be entirely accurate down to the very last detail. To put it very mildly. And just in case you’re brewing any doubts about supposedly historical events depicted in other classic movies, I can also exclusively confirm that Napoleon Bonaparte was never really robbed by a mob of pocket-sized Time Bandits, Abraham Lincoln was never really a secret vampire hunter, Adolf Hitler was never really gunned down by Jewish-American soldiers inside a cinema on fire, and King Arthur and his knights didn’t really defeat the Rabbit of Caerbannog with the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.

My comparisons there are not entirely fair because none of those examples were ever billed as anything other than fantasy, whereas Braveheart was marketed as an “historical epic” which charted the First War of Scottish Independence and implied at least some degree of authenticity. Of course, there are plenty of other historical films that play fast and loose with the facts in favour of telling a thumping good story. But Braveheart – which is often regarded as the second least historically accurate movie ever to be produced – appears to provoke more cries of outrage than most.

Could there be very specific issues unique to the butchering of the story of the Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace which are particularly difficult to forgive? Perhaps Mel Gibson was trying to tell us the real story – based on a five-hundred-year-old source – instead of the usual lies wheeled out by Scottish-hating historians. Or, as many critics have suggested, perhaps the whole project was just another vehicle for Mel to convey just how much he utterly despises the filthy treacherous English.

But does Braveheart really deserve such a harsh reputation, or do some angry historians with soup in their beards just need to take a chill pill and realise that Hollywood blockbusters are not intended to be documentaries? And is there anything at all depicted in the movie which could be considered reasonably accurate, or is the whole thing just a massive pile of deep-fried haggis left to fester in its own grease over a painfully long running time of nearly three hours?

Simple Minds

I’ll tell you something about the 68th Academy Awards held in March 1996. It was an absolutely scandalous shitshow. I’m not talking about the kind of shitshow that involves the wrong people taking to the stage to collect the award for Best Picture because somebody passed Warren Beatty the wrong envelope. I’m talking about the kind of scandal in which the undeniable best motion picture of 1995 made the shortlist but was criminally deprived of the top prize.

Of the five films on the shortlist, Apollo 13 was the one widely predicted to glide home to victory and pick up several fistfuls of Oscars. In complete contrast to Braveheart, Apollo 13 is generally considered to be an impressively accurate piece of work, give or take a few natural tweaks here and there to heighten the tension and improve the flow of the narrative. Yet it was Braveheart that proved to be the surprise victor of the night, picking up a total of four gongs including Best Picture and Best Director for Mel Gibson. It also won the Oscar for Best Cinematography which is a bit odd as the cinematographer himself admitted that some of the battle scenes were out of focus.

Now, I’m happy to state right away that despite any of its perceived failings, I reckon that Braveheart is a great movie. But it didn’t quite deserve to win the Academy Award that year. Having said that, I also think that Apollo 13 is a top movie, but again it was no 1996 Oscar winner in my book. The greatest movie by far on that shortlist was of course the glorious Australian-American comedy-drama Babe in which an endearing talking pig overcomes a series of hurdles to win a local sheep herding competition and become the world’s first award-winning Sheep Pig. This is much to the delight of his proud owner, Farmer Hoggett, who had originally considered serving him up for Christmas dinner. It’s a genuine masterpiece, although the ill-advised sequel Babe: Pig in The City is to be avoided at all costs. And there’s no risk of getting involved in arguments over historical accuracy with Babe as I’ve just done a bit of research into it and apparently it’s not even based on a true story.

However, the Academy had little time for talking pigs or aborted lunar missions back in 1996, and the glory was instead heaped upon the epic retelling of the tale of William Wallace, the real-life 13th-century Scottish military leader who led a rebellion against English rule under King Edward I, and, against staggeringly heavy odds, defeated an English army at The Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297.

One guy who didn’t walk away with an Oscar was the screenwriter for Braveheart, Randall Wallace, although he did make the list of nominees. When I first saw his name flash up on the opening credits, I wondered if he was some direct descendant of William Wallace who was telling the true story for the first time, or if it was Mel Gibson hiding under an improbable pseudonym. In fact, the answer is neither.

Born in Tennessee, the screenwriter, director and producer Randall Wallace is now apparently of the opinion that he is descended from William, although he’s never offered much in the way of proof for this, and it could be tricky as William had no known children. Randall had not even heard of William Wallace until his later years when he visited Scotland to explore his own roots, and came across a statue of Wallace standing near the entrance of Edinburgh Castle. At this point, Wallace was not widely known outside Scotland.

He asked the tour guide for more information and became so fascinated with the story of the freedom fighter that he ended up writing a screenplay based on his life. But he didn’t have an awful lot of historical documentation to work with.

The problem is that despite his status today as one of Scotland’s greatest heroes, not that much was ever written in the history books about William Wallace, and back in the 1990s, he probably wasn’t even a particularly well-known figure in Scotland. Winston Churchill’s sprawling four-volume work A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, published in the 1950s, briefly references “an outlaw knight” in a single sentence, and that’s your lot. Even The Scottish Historical Review, a historical journal published regularly since 1903, had only devoted a handful of its 28,000 pages to William Wallace.

But Randall still had one interesting source to work with; a piece of work that was over five hundred years old and would serve as the foundation of the entire screenplay. The Acts and Deeds of the Illustrious and Valiant Champion Sir William Wallace – alternatively known as simply The Wallace – was an epic ‘romantical biographical’ poem composed by a Scottish minstrel known as Blind Harry at some point during the 1470s. It tells the whole story of William Wallace from his tragic childhood years, through his rise to fame and his battles against the English at Stirling Bridge and Falkirk, right up to his somewhat grisly death.

A niggling little issue here is that whilst the poem may well be even older than Dick Van Dyke, it’s still hardly a contemporary account as it was written about 172 years after the events it recounts. Blind Harry claimed at the time that he had undertaken the task of chronicling the life of Wallace because nobody else had bothered. And he reckoned that he had gleaned much of the information from a manuscript written in Latin by John Blair who was Wallace’s old friend and personal chaplain.

This manuscript was apparently sent to The Pope at some point during the 14th century. However, it all sounds a bit fishy as this manuscript never actually turned up anywhere, and it was nowhere to be found in the Vatican archives. It sounds likely that it only ever existed in Blind Harry’s head.

The poem was composed during a period when peace looked as if it may be at risk of breaking out between Scotland and England, and the Scot Blind Harry clearly didn’t approve of any kind of reconciliation with, as he puts it, “Our old enemies of Saxon blood.” Historians now consider The Wallace poem to be little more than an anti-English diatribe which often flirts with fantasy, depicting Wallace as a chivalrous and almost invincible 7-foot warrior. It’s a romanticised and mythologised version of events which is in no way considered to be historically reliable. Incidentally, some have suggested that Blind Harry was not even really blind, he just put it on like Stevie Wonder.

So, we’re already on slightly dodgy ground here before we even begin to look at Randall Wallace’s screenplay. But even so, the script quickly attracted interest from major production and distribution companies who were keen to get the cartwheels rolling on the project. At one point, Terry Gilliam was offered the role of director which I’m sure would have made for a very different movie. But Mel Gibson would ultimately sit in the director’s chair and take on the lead role – a pretty bravehearted undertaking for such an ambitious and expensive movie, as Mel’s only previous experience as a director was for the relatively low-budget film The Man Without a Face.

The choice of lead actor would have ruffled a few feathers before anyone had even seen a single reel of the film. William Wallace was supposed to be a seven-foot Scottish man in his late twenties, although the height thing was probably just a wild exaggeration from the poem. Mel Gibson was a short-arse Australian-American man pushing forty.

There were certainly plenty of fine Scottish actors taking on other roles in Braveheart, but some may have found it insulting or patronising that the great national hero himself was being portrayed by the Hollywood A-lister from Lethal Weapon. This kind of thing is generally a bit of a divisive topic. I’m very much of the opinion that any actor’s job is to act without necessarily sharing all the personal experiences and embodying all the attributes of the character they’re portraying. At the same time, I wonder how far you can go with that idea – if the role of Wallace had been given to an 83-year-old Chinese woman on crutches, I suspect that some of the audience may have had trouble with fully getting on board with the movie.

But if you were of the opinion that Mel Gibson wasn’t right for the role, one person who would agree with you on that score is Mel Gibson. He felt he was too old for the role and was initially only interested in directing the movie. He didn’t have any qualms about a non-Scot taking on the role though, as he was looking at casting either Brad Pitt or Jason Patric in the part. However, he reluctantly agreed to take on the role himself when it became clear that investors were only willing to throw big pots of money at the project if his own bankable face appeared on the movie posters.

Even so, raising the required $72 million budget wasn’t all plain sailing. Warner Bros made an early offer to fund the whole project but only on the condition that Mel agreed to appear in a fourth Lethal Weapon movie, something which he absolutely wasn’t prepared to do – at least not for another few years. 20th Century Fox eventually stumped up two thirds of the budget, but Mel was having trouble in persuading Paramount Pictures to chip in the remaining third, as the studio was not prepared to put up the full amount and they were demanding an overly-greedy cut of the revenue in return. A smashed ashtray appears to have propelled Braveheart into production. During intense negotiations with the Paramount chief, Mel became so frustrated that he lobbed a glass ashtray at the wall. He later admitted that this move was “posturing bullshit” but it still did the trick. Within the space of just a few days, the guys at Paramount were seeing things more from Mel’s perspective.

And that was a pretty shrewd decision all round, as Braveheart went on to rake in over $213 million at the global box office whilst garnering initial high praise from the audience. We already know that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were big fans, even though I still believe they should have gone with the talking pig. Aside from the Oscars, Braveheart also scooped another 25 major awards whilst simultaneously dazzling the critics, including The New York Times who described it as “One of the most spectacular entertainments in years.”

But of course, they weren’t all in complete agreement. The Guardian wrote: “Seemingly intended as a piece of anti-English propaganda, Braveheart offers an even greater insult to Scotland by making a total pig’s ear of its heritage.” The British author John O’Farrell noted in his book An Utterly Impartial History of Britain: “Braveheart could not have been more historically inaccurate even if they had inserted a Plasticine dog into the cast and retitled the film William Wallace and Gromit.”

And whilst some might say that Braveheart was not respectful to history, it could be said that history has not been kind to Braveheart, as everyone seemed to pile on the film when the full extent of the historical controversies became more widely known. Empire magazine compiled a list of ‘The Top 10 Worst Best Pictures’ in 2005 which was a countdown of all the worst films to have won Best Picture at the Oscars. Braveheart topped the list, beating other strong contenders including A Beautiful Mind, Forrest Gump, and Rocky. The magazine observed: “This typical piece of Pom-bashing from Mel Gibson is just about the all-time worst Best Picture. Randall Wallace might have merited praise for making 14th century history relevant to audiences who thought King Edward was a potato or a cigar, but his dialogue has all the thudding subtlety of a parody.”

That last comment was a rare criticism of the quality of the script. By and large, the film doesn’t usually attract negative comments in regard to the plotting, the production values, the direction, the acting, or the Oscar-winning out-of-focus cinematography. The criticism always seems to zone in on the alleged historical inaccuracies, as if this is the only thing that should matter when producing a massively profitable blockbuster movie. I’m sure that the Paramount chief was about as bothered over such comments as he was about the broken ashtray.

But to try and begin to get our heads around the controversy, we should take a deeper dive into the actual story that the film is telling, beginning with the first big chunk of the movie. Don’t worry, we’re not going to get ourselves lost in a detailed breakdown of every damn scene in this three-hour marathon, but it might be useful to at least refresh our memories of what the film was supposed to be about. And I’d like to pay particular attention to the very beginning of Braveheart, as the opening few minutes are arguably the most problematic of all.

Primal Scream

The movie kicks off with a brief opening narration from a character later revealed to be the future Scottish king Robert the Bruce. He earnestly informs the audience: “I shall tell you of William Wallace. Historians from England will say I am a liar, but history is written by those who have hanged heroes.”

So straight away here, we’re getting a strong vibe that the film is implying that history as recorded by the murderous English is wrong, and that viewers are now going to hear the real story of Wallace for the first time. What a treat!

Robert the Bruce then gives us a very brief sketch of the state of play in Scotland in the year 1280: “The king of Scotland had died without a son, and the king of England, a cruel pagan known as Edward the Longshanks, claimed the throne of Scotland for himself. Scotland’s nobles fought him and fought each other over the crown. So Longshanks invited them to talks of truce – no weapons, one page only.”

We then cut to scenes of a very young William Wallace, the son of a poor farmer named Malcolm. They live a simple life in a Highland glen, along with William’s older brother, John. The three of them are passing by a small thatched hut in which these supposed peace talks between Edward the Longshanks and the Scottish nobles had recently taken place.

But what they stumble across inside that abandoned hut is a scene that will haunt young William well into his adulthood; the hanging bodies of all the Scottish guests invited to the party, including several child pages. That cruel English pagan Edward the Longshanks had apparently lured all the Scottish nobles into a trap, and eliminated any credible challenge to his own comfortable cushion on the Scottish throne.

William’s dad Malcolm is obviously not too pleased with this turn of events. He and his oldest son John head off with a small gang of outraged Scots to give the English a good kick-in. Young William is keen to fight but his dad understandably decides that this is not a good idea, as William is only about nine. It wasn’t a great idea for Malcolm and John either, as neither of them survive to make the return journey.

A relative named Uncle Argyll arrives at the glen to pick up a now orphaned William and take him on a jolly tour around Europe. Uncle Argyll is played by the legendary Scottish actor Brian Cox, famous for his roles as the original Hannibal Lecktor in Manhunter, the brash billionaire Logan Roy in Succession, and the voice of the Green Dragon in Scooby Doo and The Samurai Sword. However, this is a surprisingly tiny cough-and-spit part for Brian Cox, as we don’t see what William got up to during his days travelling with Uncle Argyll. The next time we see William Wallace – soon to be nicknamed ‘Braveheart’ – he’s turned into the guy from Mad Max but with longer hair. Come to think of it, he now looks more like Tina Turner from the third Mad Max movie Beyond Thunderdome.

Wallace now seems pretty well educated and cultured. He speaks multiple languages, is an expert on military strategy, and is generally the kind of bloke you’d want on your side during a brawl in a pub carpark. Scotland is still ruthlessly ruled over by a now ageing King Edward I – or King Longshanks as we’ll call him, as there are far too many Edwards in this story – but Wallace doesn’t seem too bothered by this at first, as he just wants to return to his roots and live out the rest of his life as a simple farmer.

He’s reunited with his old childhood friend Murron with whom he falls in love, and the pair marry in secret in the woods. There’s a very good reason why the wedding was so hush-hush.

Over in evil England, a wedding with a much bigger guest list is taking place. King Longshank’s son, Prince Edward, is getting married to Princess Isabella of France, and his father is keen for the royal bloodline to subsequently flourish with the birth of a new heir to the throne. Could be a problem, though. Prince Edward, who appears to be utterly useless and as wet as a Labrador at a pool party, is also giving out enough gay vibes to break the needle on the weakest of Gaydars.

However, it’s suggested that randy old Longshanks may have been plotting a back-up plan to impregnate the young Princess Isabella himself if necessary. Well, you have to help out where you can.

King Longshanks got his nickname from his unusually tall stature, standing proud at 6 foot two inches, although according to Blind Harry, he would still have been dwarfed by the 7-foot Braveheart. Longshanks is portrayed by Patrick McGoohan, most famous for playing the leading role of Number Six in the surreal ’60s TV classic The Prisoner, but in this case McGoohan is not a number, he’s a very naughty boy. Or to be more accurate, Longshanks is a proper sadistic old bugger with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

He’s feeling particularly cantankerous about his conquest of Scotland, noting that “The problem with Scotland is that it is full of Scots.” But he’s got a plan for that, too. He invokes the ancient custom of ‘Jus Primae Noctis’ – or “Right of the First Night” – which essentially means that an English noble has a legal right to have sex with a Scottish bride on her wedding night and potentially impregnate her so that the blood of the peasant Scottish population will eventually be bred out by the English via the method of legalised assault.

‘Jus Primae Noctis’ would only apply to peasants, not the Scottish nobles who were still hanging around the place and occasionally arguing with each other whilst obeying every command that was sent up by England in order to keep hold of their own assets. Well, some of them weren’t happy about taking orders from England but there wasn’t a great deal being done about it at the time.

But we can understand now why the peasants Wallace and Murron decided not to send out too many wedding invitations, as they obviously didn’t want some porky old drunk English noble turning up at the Honeymoon Suite. Sadly, their cunning ruse still wasn’t enough to pave the way for a happy ending.

Shortly after their secret wedding, a bunch of English soldiers are in town for market day, and one drunken sleazebag soldier spots Murron alone and attempts to assault her. Murron is tough though, and fights off her attacker, but more English soldiers arrive on the scene, as does Wallace who encourages his new wife to get on a horse and flee to their secret meeting place in the grove whilst he fends off the soldiers. However, Murron never makes it.

She is captured and dragged to the town square where she is tied to a pole as the English Magistrate addresses the Scottish crowd and lectures them on decent behaviour. He concludes his lesson in manners and respect by slitting the throat of Murron.

Wallace was still trying to find his wife at the grove during her execution. As soon as he learns of her death, he goes full-on berserk and rallies some of the villagers to quickly join him in an attack on the nearest English garrison which is burnt to the ground. The English Magistrate is captured, and Wallace gives him the exact same treatment that was handed out to Murron.

Wallace now makes it clear that he’s had it with these English invaders and declares that it’s time to win back freedom, as he goes on to lead further co-ordinated attacks on English outposts. The Scottish rebellion has swung into action, but the film seems to suggest that it wasn’t sparked by general national outrage against the greasy English invasion; It was sparked by Wallace seeking personal revenge for the execution of his wife. If that lecherous English soldier had never tried to assault Murron, it looks as if Wallace may have just spent the rest of his life as a peaceful farmer and shrugged in weary resignation over the English conquest.

So let’s hit the pause button to try and figure out how many blatant falsehoods we’ve digested so far. To be honest, it would be quicker to identify anything that the story got right.

The opening narration suggests that Longshanks had seized the Scottish throne by 1280 after King Alexander III died without an heir. I wouldn’t normally feel that wrong dates are anything to get too worked up about, but it does seem quite strange that the script rides against very simple and basic facts which anyone could have checked very quickly even during the pre-Wikipedia days of the primitive 1990s.

In the year 1280, Scotland was still an independent kingdom with King Alexander III still very much alive and ruling over the final years of peace and stability. The Scottish King didn’t pop his clogs until 1286, and he didn’t quite die without an heir. The natural heir to the throne was a granddaughter he had never met. She was called Margaret and lived in Norway where she was born. The only minor niggle was that she was still a toddler.

A temporary government of guardians was set up by Scottish lords to rule until such a time when Margaret was deemed fit to be Queen – or at least old enough to marry someone who could be called a King. But that idea tragically never came to fruition as a 7-year-old Margaret set sail from Norway to Scotland in 1290, but died on the journey, probably from food poisoning.

This left Scotland in a proper pickled porridge, as there now really was no natural heir to the throne, and the Scottish nobles began squabbling with each other over who should take the throne. Two of the most likely contenders were a guy called Robert de Brus – not our narrator and the future king of England, but his grandfather – and another dude called John Balliol. Both contenders were making their pleas on various complex degrees of descension and blood proximity, but Scotland was divided on which one of them should take the crown.

It’s worth noting that Longshanks – who by this point had been King of England for over eighteen years – had made absolutely no move on Scotland following this period of turmoil, and didn’t seem particularly interested. It’s also worth noting that in contrast to his one-line description in the opening narration, Longshanks was not a “cruel pagan.” We’ll assess how much of a mercenary swine he really was much later in the video, but he was actually a devoted Christian.

The Scottish nobles were now worried that their independent kingdom was about to be plunged into a civil war, and so they made a decision which didn’t pan out very well in the long-term. They asked Longshanks to come along and decide who had the strongest claim to the Scottish throne. And it was at this point that Longshanks began to sit up, take interest, and figure out what he could get from all this.

Before talks had even got underway, Longshanks had demanded that all the potential contenders recognise him as Lord Paramount of Scotland which would give him supreme authority. He then chose John Balliol as the winner of the Scottish crown in 1292, largely because it was clear that Balliol was the biggest brown-tongue in the room and would be happy to serve as an obedient little puppet king to the almighty Longshanks. That was the idea anyway.

Longshanks spent three years treating Scotland like his urinal cake, and making demands on King John Balliol to assist England in his frequent clashes with France. Eventually, John Balliol was effectively booted off the throne by the Scottish nobles who’d had more than enough of his constant polishing of Longshanks’ pork sword. They formed another council of guardians to rule over Scotland and got busy on forming a treaty of friendship with France.

This move obviously infuriated Longshanks who promptly invaded and conquered Scotland in 1296, installing English governors across the country. For an encore, he also stole the sacred relic known as The Scottish Stone of Scone and had it installed in Westminster Abbey, just to make it clear that he was the daddy now. This stone had previously been used in the coronation of Scottish monarchs, but it stayed put in Westminster Abbey for 700 years and was used in the coronation of English and later British monarchs. It was eventually returned to Scotland in 1996 although it was temporarily transported back to London in 2022 for the coronation of King Charlie III.

So, the point is that almost nothing depicted at the beginning of the movie is true. That whole scene in which Longshanks lures all the nobles into a trap and has them all murdered was a fictional element first created by the minstrel Blind Harry. Young William Wallace would never have witnessed such a scene anyway as Scotland was still living peacefully as an independent kingdom throughout his childhood and early adult years.

Quite a strange point here is the film doesn’t even always manage to stick to its own narrative. Later on in the movie, Wallace talks of the English inflicting “a hundred years of theft, r-word, and murder” onto Scotland, whilst he also dreams of having “What none of us have ever had before – a country of our own!” Scotland and England’s relationship throughout the 13th century may not have been entirely harmonious but they were at relative peace until 1296. And even the film’s fictional opening sequences indicate that Wallace was born into an independent kingdom and a country of his own, so I have no idea what Wallace is meant to be babbling about.

Wallace’s father – who was actually called Alan rather than Malcolm – never went off and got killed in a war against the English whilst Wallace was a kid, as the war was still sixteen years away by this point. We don’t know for certain but it’s likely that Alan was still alive during the beginning of his adult son leading the rebellion. This means that young Wallace would have stayed put with his family throughout his childhood, and probably led a fairly privileged kind of life. Whilst his dad is depicted on screen as a simple poor farmer, it’s considered to be more likely that Alan was actually a minor nobleman in the Scottish court, and that the young Wallace would have received a high standard of education in his homeland.

He certainly never went travelling around Europe with Uncle Argyll who was an entirely fictional character created for the film. Incidentally, Brian Cox doesn’t now appear to hold Braveheart in high regard. Whilst he is full of praise for Mel Gibson, he has recently made his feelings known on the actual movie. And there’s no typo here, this is exactly what he said: “It is a bollocks, that film. It’s a load of lies. A fucking lie, the whole thing.” That’s a bit harsh from Cox. I’m sure we’re gonna dig up some truth soon, just not quite yet.

So let’s take a look at this whole ‘Jus Primae Noctis’ thing. Did Longshanks really introduce a law under which English nobles could legally assault Scottish brides on their wedding night? He did not.

In fact, it seems unlikely that ‘Jus Primae Noctis’ was ever practiced anywhere in the history of the world. The concept does occasionally get referenced in a variety of medieval texts, and even pops up in historical documents stretching as far back as Ancient Greece, but there’s no conclusive proof that it was ever legally enforced anywhere, and it most definitely wasn’t implemented during the reign of King Edward I. The Scots may have put up with a lot of shit from the English over the years but they would never have tolerated this.

And it wouldn’t have affected Wallace in real life anyway, as he was the son of a minor noble and wouldn’t have been subjected to deeply unwelcome gatecrashers on his wedding night.

The ‘Jus Primae Noctis’ plotline is an unusual addition to the film which had nothing to do with Blind Harry’s poem. It’s often touted as being central to the narrative and instrumental in setting up the vengeful journey of William Wallace, but it’s not really. Wallace didn’t appear to be too interested in forming a rebellion on the strength of the law; he just made sure that he got married in secret.

And the attack on his wife Murron had nothing to do with a law regarding an appalling legal right for nobles; it was a random attempted assault from a drunken soldier. It feels that the only real purpose of the ‘Jus Primae Noctis’ plotline was to make Longshanks look like a thoroughly ruthless and barbaric king, whilst also illustrating the supposed sickening brutality of English rule in an entirely fictional manner.

As for the tragic story of Murron, it was Blind Harry who first gave a doomed wife to Wallace in his poem, although he initially couldn’t be bothered to give her a name. The name ‘Marion’ appeared to be adopted by later scholars, but it was decided to change this to ‘Murron’ for the movie as it was felt that some viewers might get her mixed up with Maid Marion from the legends of Robin Hood. Good point. The idea of two individuals sharing the same name would surely have been far too outlandish for an average cinema audience to handle.

But maybe it’s not that important anyway as there are no records to suggest that William Wallace ever even had a wife. This was just a device employed by Blind Harry to turn the tale of Wallace into a personal revenge story with more of a human element. The real motive for Wallace leading a rebellion against the English was in fact much simpler and perhaps not as dramatically engaging: He didn’t much care for the invasion of Scotland in 1296 and he was determined to send the English packing.

One of his earliest acts of non-conformity was his refusal to sign the Ragman Roll – a document that compelled landowners to pledge their loyalty to the King of England. Anyone who refused was deemed to be an outlaw. And there were plenty of people queuing up not to sign it. The film suggests that Braveheart single-handedly organised this ever-growing gang of outlaws into an effective army of resistance fighters determined to fight the English. He didn’t lead them alone but we’ll get to that a little later on.

The first real-life event that really got under the noses of the English and arguably ignited The First War of Scottish Independence was the moment in 1297 when Wallace killed a guy called William de Heselrig who was the English High Sheriff of Lanark. It’s not entirely clear why Wallace and his gang had picked on this guy in particular but it wasn’t because the High Sheriff had just executed Wallace’s imaginary wife. This was followed up by several other Scottish raids and attacks across the country until it became very clear to Longshanks that he had something of a problem on his hands, and that England was now at war with the Scottish rebels.

And whilst Longshanks is depicted in the movie as the evil villain who had set the wheels in motion by murdering all the Scottish nobles and contenders for the throne, it was actually the Scottish nobles who had practically invited an initially disinterested Longshanks to come and along and piss all over them. Things may have panned out very differently if only the squabbling nobles – who were largely looking after their own interests and protecting their own wealth – could have reached a decision themselves instead of setting up a Medieval X-Factor and then asking Longshanks to take on the duties of Baron Simon Cowell of the shire of ITV.

Strawberry Switchblades

Diving back into the narrative of the movie, Longshanks is obviously furious at the Scottish rebellion but he’s got more pressing matters to attend to in France, so he puts his wet blanket son Prince Edward in charge of crushing the resistance whilst he rides off to shout at some French people. And this leads us into one of the film’s epic battle scenes as we see the English cavalry take on Braveheart’s army at The Battle of Stirling Bridge.

Facing each other on the open plains, it seems that it would be a safe bet to put a few farthings on the English soldiers dressed smartly in their proper uniforms as they greatly outnumber the scruffy hairy Scottish in their clan tartan kilts and blue face paint. The English have shinier weapons too. Whilst Wallace himself is wielding a mighty two-handed broadsword called the Claymore, the rest of his gang have to largely make do with spears and spikes and maybe the odd hand axe. In fact, the most popular weapon at the Scot’s disposal is to lift up their kilts and moon the enemy – an intimidation tactic which is still in practice in parts of Glasgow today.

And yet the outnumbered Scots somehow manage to pull off a surprising victory against the English. And the fundamental points here are absolutely spot on. William Wallace did indeed lead – or at least co-lead – a stunning victory against the English cavalry at Stirling Bridge against all odds. And whilst there are also many alleged inaccuracies at work in these scenes, you could make a strong argument that the producers of the movie made absolutely the right decision to drastically alter at least some of the details.

Longshanks was indeed away attending to other business at this point, but he left the crushing of the Scottish rebellion in the hands of experienced nobles rather than his own son, for reasons which will become clearer later on.

One very real and important character from Scottish history who gets completely erased from the movie is a guy called Andrew de Moray. Back during Wallace’s very early skirmishes with the English, Andrew de Moray was leading his own band of rebels in the northeast of Scotland. The son of a wealthy northern Baron, Moray’s first battles were hardly a glorious success as he ended up getting captured and imprisoned along with a bunch of other Scottish nobles in 1296.

But he managed to escape his shackles and went on to resume the fight, eventually hooking up with William Wallace in 1297 to co-lead the entire rebellion. Some have even suggested that Wallace may have been the junior partner to Moray who had a bit more clout because of his father’s fabulous wealth and influence.

It’s Moray who is usually credited as the strategic mastermind behind the victory at Stirling Bridge, despite the film depicting Braveheart as the sole leader prancing about with his fancy two-handed sword. Following the victory, Wallace was granted the title of Guardian of Scotland, a role he would likely have shared with Moray if the latter hadn’t been seriously injured in the battle and died shortly afterwards.

Historians have complained about how such an important figure as Andrew de Moray was completely airbrushed from the movie despite accomplishing just as much as Wallace by this point, quite possibly a lot more. I see their point, but I also get why filmmakers often have to make ruthless decisions in order to tell a coherent and engaging story. Real history gets incredibly complicated with all kinds of different characters popping up to play a minor part.

Significant deeds and accomplishments from history will often get merged within a much smaller cast of characters to simplify the narrative. Still, Andrew de Moray is a particularly big omission from the movie which could have provided a real-life element of tragedy to the story as Wallace lost his loyal fighting partner in the battle. Maybe it would have made more sense to stick to historical accuracy in this case instead of making up an entirely different tragedy involving Maid Marion.

Sorry, Murron.

One thing that really seems to get under the skin of some particularly grumpy historians is when a film gets a few small details wrong about uniforms or weapons or whatever. Some might find this to be a bit pedantic, and I personally find it hard to get too worked up about a soldier wearing the wrong type of shoelace or belt buckle, or using a specific model of gun that wouldn’t be invented until the following year. Admittedly, in the case of Braveheart, just about everything relating to dress sense on the battlefield is completely inaccurate, but I feel that this is probably of great benefit to the movie.

To be fair, the weapons depicted in the battles are largely faithful, or at least as far as we know. We don’t really know what William Wallace may or may not have been wielding, as nobody at Stirling Bridge thought to take photographs at half-time. It’s been suggested that Wallace would have been more likely to have been using a single-handed sword which would have been more typical of the era.

Swinging around a two-handed sword would have been a bit cumbersome and awkward in such a battle, although bearing in mind that Wallace was supposedly seven feet tall, maybe he could have shrugged off any minor inconveniences. There’s a bit of confusion here as a two-handed sword purporting to be “The Wallace Sword” has been knocking around for centuries and has been on display at The Wallace Monument in Stirling since 1888, but there has been long been expert scepticism over the authenticity, with many believing that the sword has been cobbled together from various bits and pieces, and modified over subsequent centuries. We do know for sure that he definitely wasn’t wielding the specific Claymore sword seen in the movie as these only began to emerge in Scotland between the 15th and 17th centuries, long after the time of our hero.

The costumes and make-up were entirely wrong on every level. Braveheart’s tribe would never have worn blue face-paint. You might have seen blue paint on the faces of the people known as the Picts; a group of Celtics who were giving the Romans a hard time about a thousand years before the First War of Scottish. They apparently liked war paint so much that they usually wore nothing else at all.

They didn’t actually call themselves The Picts – we don’t know what they called themselves – but it was a name given to them by the Romans, derived from the Latin word ‘Picti’ which translates as “The Painted People”. But it has nothing to do with the Scots of the medieval era.

They wouldn’t have been wearing tartan kilts, either. Although some people just assume that any Scottish warrior from any period of history is bound to be wearing a clan tartan kilt, the truth is that tartan kilts didn’t really begin to come into fashion until the 16th century, whilst the concept of tartans being assigned to different clans didn’t begin to take shape until as late as the 19th century. The Scots fighting at Stirling Bridge were more likely to have been wearing chainmail or simple tunics or pretty much anything they could get their hands on.

The same goes for the English soldiers. They look very nice in their swishy matching uniforms in the movie, but they would have actually been rocking a similar kind of hotch-potch style to the Scots. And therein lies the problem of trying too hard to please the pedantics.

If the clothing in the film had been accurate down to the last detail, it would have been harder to distinguish who was fighting who on the battlefield and would have resulted in an incredibly confusing and not very satisfying scene. Come to think of it, it must also have been pretty confusing for the poor sods fighting the real battle. You’re gonna feel a bit glum if you accidentally put an axe in the head of your next-door neighbour because you thought he was wearing the colours of the opposite team.

But the point is that the inaccuracies make for a more engaging and visually striking movie that is easier to follow. Yes, some informed viewers will moan that the battle scenes depict the Scots wearing face paint that was a thousand years out of date and clan tartan kilts from the future whilst Braveheart himself is wielding a sword that has yet to be invented. But when you instinctively think of Mel Gibson’s character in battle, you think of the face paint, the kilt, and the giant sword.

These are some of the more iconic elements of a memorable movie which may not have captivated our attention in quite the same way if the filmmakers had obsessively stuck to the dreary details of real history. I’d give them a pass on this one.

There is however a rather less forgivable omission from the depiction of The Battle of Stirling Bridge: Any hint of an actual bridge is conspicuous by its absence. And the problems here run far deeper than just missing out a bit of relevant background scenery. It also misses the whole point of how exactly the outnumbered Scots managed to defeat the English.

It was a cunning strategy believed to have been calculated by the equally invisible Andrew de Moray. The Scots patiently bided their time out of sight behind the top of a hill called Abbey Craig, as the English cavalry began to cross the narrow structure of Stirling Bridge, under the expectation that they were going to give the Scots a proper pummelling when they got to the other side of the River Forth. It was a long and painfully slow journey across the rickety old bridge as thousands of soldiers were trying to get across but the bridge was so narrow that only two men on horses could cross abreast.

The Scots waited until they had calculated that roughly half of the English forces had crossed the bridge and made it to the marshy ground at the other side where they had begun to flounder a little without any clear direction. At this point, all the Scots came tearing down the hill and started laying into just half of the disoriented English soldiers. At the same time, the Scots also seized control of their end of the bridge where the other half of the English forces were still shuffling slowly along, packed in like sardines.

A natural bottleneck had now got this half of the soldiers trapped. The ones at the front were getting easily picked off by the Scots and had no way of retreating as they were being pushed forwards into big spears by their own men.

It was an absolute massacre, as the English soldiers who weren’t getting cut up with spears ended up jumping into the river and drowning. It was also a remarkably shrewd manoeuvre from Andrew de Moray which proved key to the surprise victory. So it’s a bit of a shame that the film completely ignored this and instead presented an incredibly unlikely scenario in which the Scottish fighters somehow managed to defeat the overwhelming numbers of the English just by charging at them across an open field and shouting lots of rude words.

And it does seem a bit baffling that Mel Gibson couldn’t have stretched to building some kind of rudimentary bridge with that $72 million budget. Maybe he shouldn’t have splashed out quite so much on thousands of tartan kilts.

Returning briefly to the narrative of the movie, a triumphant and increasingly cocky William Wallace has now regained control of much of Scotland, and is leading his men into England where over 700 villages are razed to the ground. This is absolutely true, although he didn’t quite get as far as ransacking the city of York and beheading Longshanks’ nephew, as the film suggests.

We then see William Wallace considering the long-term picture by seeking an alliance with the Scottish nobles and figuring out who should be crowned the new King of Scotland when the English have been booted out. Wallace knows that he can’t stake a claim on the throne himself as he has no royal blood running through his veins. He believes that the best contender to unite the clans is none other than Robert the Bruce, portrayed here by Angus Macfadyen – yes, he’s Scottish – who has been serving as our occasional narrator.

Wallace clearly believes that only Robert has the strength, courage, and influence to lead Scotland into a new era of peace, stability, and freedom. Wallace is big on freedom.

But it’s going to be tricky for Robert to get all the other nobles behind him. Many of them are still happy to suck up to the English for now, and again it’s about selfishly protecting their own wealth. They still own nice estates and chunks of land in England. Falling out with Longshanks is bound to have a nasty impact on their property portfolio.

Another fly in the ointment is Robert’s own father, Robert the Elder. He suffers badly from leprosy and is often seen skulking and scheming in the shadows whilst feeding bad advice to his still fairly young and perhaps slightly naïve son. Robert the Elder is keen to see his son on the throne but his own devious plans don’t include a happy ending for Braveheart.

Over in England, an enraged Longshanks has returned from France and berates Prince Edward for making such a cow’s testicles of everything in his absence, although in real life he would have been berating the English nobles that he had actually left in charge. We get a few small clues as to the extent of Longshanks’ disappointment with his son. For example, there’s a scene in which Prince Edward introduces the king to his new advisor Philip who begins politely explaining his credentials for the role to the foul-tempered Longshanks.

It’s heavily implied that Philip is not just an advisor; he’s also the prince’s lover, or at least one of his sexual partners. Philip barely has time to make it to his second sentence before Longshanks lunges wildly at him and hurls him through the lofty tower window, sending him plunging to his death.

Longshanks is in a calmer mood when he later talks to his daughter-in-law Princess Isabella and asks her to meet with Wallace to negotiate a possible truce. Princess Isabella obediently heads off to talk with Wallace, but what she probably doesn’t realise is that Longshanks has no intention of striking a peace deal. It’s all just a ruse to stall for time so that Longshanks has an opportunity to mobilise his forces and crush the Scots once and for all.

However, Princess Isabella takes quite a shine to Wallace and is impressed by his integrity and his devotion to the cause. And the feeling is mutual. Later on in the movie, the pair end up getting jiggy with it, and Isabella becomes pregnant with his child, although Wallace never learns of this. She keeps this secret from the Royal family for a while, which is probably a wise move as Longshanks is not likely to be celebrating too much when he finds out that a new heir to the throne is going to be half-Scottish and that somebody else has done him out of a job.

It’s a nice little plot twist but there are several more things here that don’t really add up. At the time that Isabella supposedly fell pregnant with Wallace’s child, she would have been no older than ten. I know this was the olden days, but even so, this is pushing it a little bit. Having said that, she was only twelve years old when she married Prince Edward in 1308 at the order of Longshanks, so that’s another reminder that the olden days really were as mad as a box of frogs.

Isabella was born in France and wouldn’t even have set foot in England during the First War of Scottish Independence. As far as we know, Wallace and Isabella never met, and there’s no reason at all why they would have done. The segment in the movie is based on a different version of events depicted by Blind Harry in which Wallace met up with Longshanks’ wife, Margaret of France, although there’s no mention of Wallace impregnating her and even this meeting is not deemed to be historically accurate.

Prince Edward himself was pretty young during this period – around 13 years old – which explains why he hadn’t been left with the burden of fending off the Scottish resistance. And there’s quite a bit of controversy over how both Princess Isabella and particularly Prince Edward were portrayed in the film. The young prince is depicted as being ridiculously effeminate, weak, lazy, self-obsessed, and prone to prancing about in front of mirrors. Not really the kind of guy you’d want to leave in charge of a war.

The real Prince Edward was hardly the most revered member of the English monarchy, but most likely nothing much like the caricature presented here. Historians have speculated that he probably had male lovers but there’s no concrete proof. The idea that Longshanks was plotting to impregnate Isabella himself to stand in for a son who wouldn’t have fancied the job was certainly a load of tosh as Edward went on to father four children with Isabella.

Accusations of homophobia have been levelled at the movie, partly because of the unsympathetic way in which the gay prince is portrayed, and partly because of the fictional scene in which Longshanks hurls the advisor and lover Philip to his death. Some activists feel that Mel Gibson had Longshanks kill Philip in such a brutal way purely because Philip was gay. However, Mel Gibson strongly denies this and makes a very reasonable point: “The king didn’t throw that character out the window because he’s gay. He did it because the king’s a psychopath.”

Princess Isabella was also deemed by critics to have been heavily misrepresented in the movie, as she appears to be a simple and delicate soul who spends much of her time swooning helplessly over Wallace like a lovesick puppy. The reality is that Isabella was actually a pretty tough shortbread biscuit. Known widely as “The She-Wolf of France”, she later fell out big time with her husband after eventually becoming Queen consort to his King. She struck up an affair with the noble and marcher lord Roger Mortimer, and the pair of them managed to whip up enough support to shove the king off the throne, replace him with Isabella’s 14-year-old son, Edward III, and effectively seize control of England.

The deposed king was imprisoned and died of supposedly natural causes shortly afterwards, with the word on the cobbled street being that Isabella had ordered his murder. But Roger Mortimer’s grip on power and his role as de facto leader of England didn’t last long. By the time the young King Edward III had turned 17, he rose up against his mother and her latest bit of trouser.

He had Mortimer executed on charges of treason, whilst Isabella was stripped of any political power and spent the rest of her still very comfortable life away from the limelight. I know it’s hard to believe in these more enlightened and gentler times that a British monarchy could be quite so dysfunctional at heart, but there you go.

However, if we’re talking about characters getting a bit misrepresented in the movie, then there’s one character in particular who might have more to complain about than most, as we head into The Battle of Falkirk – and no, it’s not William Wallace.

The Associates

The movie accurately conveys the fundamental point that The Battle of Falkirk did not end well for Wallace. This was a dramatic showdown between the Scottish freedom fighters and the English army led by Longshanks himself. And again, the odds seemed to very much favour the English.

Things do seem to get off to a fairly promising start for the Scots. Longshanks orders a group of hired Irish mercenaries to get the ball rolling by charging the Scottish lines first. The Irish dudes start advancing angrily towards the Scots but the mood quickly changes when they reach the Scots and realise that their supposed enemy are fellow Celts. The Irish and the Scots shake hands, slap each other on the back, and have a bit of a laugh before they all turn their attention back towards the English scum.

Other developments aren’t going so well. The cavalry of two treacherous Scottish nobles, who were supposed to be fighting for Braveheart, advance towards the English but then suddenly withdraw from the battlefield. It emerges that the nobles were bribed beforehand by Longshanks to bugger off in return for more land and titles. This pretty much means that the Scots are now doomed as they are completely overwhelmed.

They’re probably wishing that Andrew de Moray was still around to think up another cunning strategy, but of course that name means diddly-squat in the movie.

The battle is already lost by the time Wallace gets into a brawl with an English knight and receives the shock of his life when he unmasks his foe. He’s staring into the face of Robert the Bruce. The man in whom Braveheart had invested so much faith and hope had chosen to fight for the English, spurred along by his dodgy dad whispering in his ear. Wallace feels like he’s been stabbed in the back which, to be fair, he’d been lucky to avoid in a literal sense by this point.

He slumps to his knees in utter despair and waits to be captured by the English, but a clearly shamed Robert the Bruce helps to ensure his escape from the battlefield. Robert later angrily confronts his father and vows never to be on the wrong side again.

Sometime later, Wallace agrees to meet up with Robert the Bruce in Edinburgh for a supposed alliance meeting. Robert’s intentions are true, but he doesn’t realise that his father has orchestrated a trap and invited along the English forces to the secret gathering. Robert the Bruce can only scream in horror and rage as Wallace walks into the trap and the English capture Braveheart. Robert finally disowns his father for good, but you can’t help thinking that he’s left this just a tad too late.

Rewinding the reels just a little, it’s true that the Scots were given a proper battering by the English at The Battle of Falkirk. But the Irish didn’t suddenly change sides when they faced the Scots, because there were no Irish fighters participating in the battle. There were Welsh conscripts fighting for the English though, and the film doesn’t mention this which is a shame as it was the Welsh longbows that proved to be a key advantage. The Scots just couldn’t get close enough to stick a spear into the enemy because they were getting picked off by the longbows.

Large groups of the Scottish cavalry did indeed bugger off before the battle properly got started, but this wasn’t because a couple of the nobles had been bribed by Longshanks. That would be a bit silly. If they’d been bribed beforehand and had no intention of fighting, there would have been little point in turning up in the first place, unless Longshanks had insisted on it just to see the look on Wallace’s face. The most likely reason for the abrupt departure is that the cavalry fled when they realised that they were all just going to get proper clobbered if they stayed put.

But some of the most controversial bits of fiction relate to Robert the Bruce who is dealt a pretty poor hand in the movie, even though he’s supposed to be narrating it. Robert the Bruce absolutely did not betray Wallace at Falkirk. He wasn’t even on the battlefield. Whilst we’re at it, his father didn’t suffer from leprosy and wasn’t manipulating his son’s life from behind the scenes.

And whilst it’s likely that Wallace and Robert met up several times considering their notable positions, there’s no surviving historical document that recounts any of the meetings.

To be fair, the real story of Robert the Bruce is more than a little complicated and he did have a tendency to change sides when it suited him, so maybe the fictional betrayal at Falkirk shouldn’t be seen as so outlandish. The future king of Scotland always held a strong desire to lead an independent kingdom, but he did occasionally shift his loyalties to Longshanks. It’s speculated that his own wealth and estates may have played a part in this, but it’s also very possible that he was playing the long game and patiently biding his time until he felt that support for an effective Scottish rebellion was strong enough to topple the English conquerors.

The reasons for his decision not to participate at The Battle of Falkirk are not known for sure, but his divided loyalties at that point may have been a crucial factor. However, he would never have fought against Wallace on the battlefield as this wouldn’t have gone down well at all with his fellow Scots.

Here’s another thing that really gets historians hopping on the spot in fury; The very name ‘Braveheart’ isn’t even connected to William Wallace at all. The real ‘Braveheart’ was Robert the Bruce, albeit he was only given the nickname after he had popped his clogs much later in 1329. According to the 14th and 15th-century chronicles written by John Barbour, a dying Robert was feeling guilty about the pledges he had made but not fulfilled in his lifetime, including a commitment to join a crusade against non-Christians.

He asked his loyal knight Sir James Douglas to embalm his heart after his death and carry it to the Holy Land to fight in his stead. Sir James Douglas probably wished that the dying wish of his boss was a bit less icky, but he did as he was told. Well, kind of.

He ended up putting Robert’s heart in a silver casket and taking it to Spain which is not quite Jerusalem, but I’m sure the knight’s heart was in the right place, unlike Robert’s. Whilst in Spain, the crusading Scots found themselves surrounded by enemy troops and facing certain death. Just before they all got slaughtered, the legend goes that Sir James Douglas retrieved Robert’s heart from the casket, lobbed it at the enemy troops, and shouted something along the lines of “Lead on Braveheart, I’ll follow thee!”

or “Lead on Braveheart, as thou dost!” or “How do you like them apples?” The heart was later retrieved and interred at Melrose Abbey in around 1332.

So it all seems just a little unfair that the movie steals Robert the Bruce’s nickname and gives it to the wrong guy, whilst also making out that the real Braveheart was some kind of Scooby Doo villain as he gets unmasked at The Battle of Falkirk. It’s a bit like making a film called The Outlaw of Sherwood Forest, but having Friar Tuck in the role of heroic leader, whilst Robin Hood is secretly stealing from the poor and handing over his bounty to The Sheriff of Nottingham.

It should also be made clear that neither an unwitting Robert the Bruce nor his father played any part in the eventual capture of the man who nobody called Braveheart. The film largely skips over the events during the immediate aftermath of The Battle of Falkirk. What really happened is that Wallace resigned in disgrace as The Guardian of Scotland, and one of his replacements was Braveheart – as in Robert the Bruce – who would have been unlikely to have received any support for the appointment if he’d just been fighting the Scot rebels at Falkirk.

There’s very little documentation regarding how Wallace spent the next seven years, but a letter from the French king written in 1300 suggests that he had spent at least some time in Rome trying to get support for Scottish independence from the Pope. A juicy reward for anyone who could capture Wallace either dead or alive had been on offer by Longshanks for a while. And he was finally captured in Glasgow in 1305 by a fellow Scot loyal to Longshanks, Sir John Menteith. Wallace was turned over to English soldiers and taken to London to await trial for treason at Westminster Palace.

Here’s a bit of a welcome surprise; The final chunk of the film depicting the last days of Wallace is pretty accurate. In fact it’s so accurate that we’ll follow the real-life events rather than the script as there’s not really too much difference.

During the trial, Wallace was charged with an early example of what might be called war crimes. The prosecution alleged that he had committed atrocities against civilians, “sparing neither age nor sex, monk nor nun.” This sounds more than a little trumped up. Whilst I’m sure some innocent civilians did get caught in the crossfire, Wallace never actively targeted them as his focus was always on disrupting English supply lines and forcing Longshanks into diverting some of his resources away from the war with Scotland.

However, he had nothing to say in defence of those charges. He did however pipe up with a pretty fair point in defence of the charge of treason against King Longshanks. He said: “I cannot be a traitor, for I owe him no allegiance. He is not my Sovereign; he never received my homage; and whilst life is in this persecuted body, he never shall receive it.”

It didn’t really help his case much in this rigged trial, as he was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered in public in a large open area in London called Smithfield. It wasn’t to be a particularly pleasant day out for William Wallace.

First he was dragged naked by four different horses to the execution spot whilst a crowd of onlookers jeered and booed and blew raspberries. He was then hoisted up on the rope and hung until almost dead which requires the skills of a particularly talented hangman as it’s very easy to mess this up and accidentally kill the condemned too early which would be no fun at all.

He was later laid out and tied up on a slab where his limbs were attached to those four horses who were having a busy day. Their job this time was to pull his arms and legs from the sockets. Wallace then had his genitals sliced off, after which his entrails were pulled out and burned in front of him while he was still breathing, before he was decapitated. His head was later planted on a spike on London Bridge whilst the four quarters of his body were put up on display at Newcastle, Berwick, Perth and Stirling.

If you don’t remember the film being quite so grisly, then you’re not suffering from a bad memory. The movie quite understandably tones down some of this stuff and focuses largely on Wallace’s squirming facial reactions, but we get the general idea that he’s having a bad time.

A couple of minor fictional details were added to the movie for dramatic effect. At one point, the Magistrate looks down on the spreadeagled body of Wallace and promises him a swift death if he begs for mercy. This would never have happened, as a swift death was nowhere on the schedule that day. Instead of begging for mercy, Wallace lets out one final defiant cry of his catchphrase “FREEEDOM!”, but in reality he wouldn’t have been in much of a state to cry out anything more articulate than “Ow!”

But it does at least end the film on a satisfying soupcon of triumph sprinkled over the ghastly final moments of our hero.

Other triumphant elements are also squeezed into a grand finale in which the film steps right back into fiction. Whilst Wallace is being executed, Princess Isabella reveals to a dying Longshanks – now incapable of speech – that she is pregnant with Wallace’s baby in a final two-finger salute to the villain of the piece. Had the king lived long enough, he might have figured it out for himself when the baby was born wearing a clan tartan kilt. We know that’s all rubbish of course, but the king would actually have lived long enough.

He held on for a couple more years until he died of dysentery in 1307. And he died doing what he loved the most – fighting the Scots.

And you know, Longshanks probably wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Yes, he was certainly ruthless in his pursuit of the Scots, and he probably shared some of the iron-willed and uncompromising characteristics of many other English monarchs of the era. But he was no cackling pantomime villain.

This so-called “cruel pagan” was a devout Christian, a loving and faithful husband, was capable of showing mercy to his enemies, and he did a lot of great work for charity but he didn’t like to talk about it. In short, he was much more of a complex character than the “psychotic” king as described by Mel Gibson himself, but this film was in need of a baddie.

The very last segment of the film paints an optimistic picture of what happened after the execution of Wallace. Everybody loves an upbeat ending but this was probably just a tad too optimistic. We jump forward to the year 1314 in which Robert the Bruce is now King of the Scots, although his coronation was more an act of defiance against the ongoing English occupation than anything else.

The Scottish rebels face the English forces on the fields of Bannockburn, with the expectation being that the rebels are going to concede defeat and accept English rule under King Edward II. But at the last minute, Robert the Bruce invokes the memory of the great hero William Wallace, and urges his men to fight instead of fawn. Wallace’s Claymore is defiantly thrown into the ground, as Robert’s men chant the name of Wallace before plunging into battle and seriously cracking some English heads.

The closing narration is voiced by Mel Gibson so we’re presumably hearing the ghost of William Wallace: “In the year of our Lord 1314, patriots of Scotland, starving and outnumbered, charged the fields of Bannockburn. They fought like warrior poets. They fought like Scotsmen. And won their freedom.”

Wallace may have been executed before he could see his dreams of freedom become a reality, but his legacy inspired others to carry on fighting towards a victorious conclusion. Three cheers for Braveheart! No, not Braveheart, the other guy. Both of them.

Whatever.

But again, the truth wasn’t quite as simple as that. Over eight years had passed since the execution of William Wallace, and he probably wasn’t on the forefront of everyone’s minds when the Scots faced the English at Bannockburn. Robert the Bruce didn’t just make a spontaneous decision to fight instead of conceding defeat – he’d turned up looking for a brawl. And whilst the Scots did secure a meaningful victory at The Battle of Bannockburn, it wasn’t quite the neatly wrapped ending suggested in the film in which the Scots lived happily ever after.

Those darn Scottish nobles were still squabbling with each other, and there were further battles with the stubborn English to be fought. It wasn’t until fourteen years later in 1328 that Scotland was internationally recognised as an independent kingdom again, but the celebrations didn’t last too long as The Second War of Scottish Independence broke out just four years later. Periodic wars between England and Scotland erupted over the next few centuries, and the crowns were merged in 1603 before Scotland became a part of the United Kingdom in 1707.

So, it’s not quite the smooth happy ending suggested in the film, and of course millions of Scots continue to support the fight for independence today. Still, it made for a more uplifting and hopeful climax than just rolling the credits on the bit where Wallace is getting his genitals hacked off, so there’s that.

Altered Images

On the face of it then, the Braveheart movie doesn’t appear to have got much right in the way of accurate historical details, which is not that jaw-dropping when you consider that most of the movie was based on a poem by Blind Harry written 172 years after the events which was based on a source that doesn’t exist and features a 7-foot tall superhero.

Sharon L. Krossa is one of many medieval historians who remains less than impressed with the result. She said: “The events aren’t accurate, the dates aren’t accurate, the characters aren’t accurate, the names aren’t accurate, the clothes aren’t accurate – in short, just about nothing is accurate.”

Steady on, Sharon. It’s got a few nuggets of truth in there. Somewhere. Many of the characters really existed even if they’re not depicted in exactly the right way or in the right timeline or in the right dimension. The general thrust of the story of William Wallace helping to lead a rebellion against England is true. And the final chunk of the movie covering the trial and death of Wallace is pretty accurate. Also, it turns out that Scotland is a real country.

But whilst I’m sure most rational people can forgive the tweaking and bending of a few facts for the sake of making a good movie, there does seem to be a lot more wrong than right in Braveheart. The film is packed with so much wrong that it’s almost enough to make you wonder what the screenwriter Randall Wallace and Mel Gibson were playing at here, and whether at least one of them had a hidden agenda. A common accusation levelled at Mel Gibson is that the whole project was just an outlet for his rampant Anglophobia and that Mel just utterly despises the English. It’s not the only time that he would be accused of this. He later appeared in the 2000 epic American Revolutionary War drama The Patriot in which the British are depicted as evil sadistic villains committing acts of atrocity which have absolutely no basis in historical fact. The Patriot was described by The Sunday Times as a “160-minute polemic against the British.” But you can’t blame Mel too much as he wasn’t involved in the writing or direction of that one.

It’s not quite the same with Braveheart in which Mel presents the English as either wicked, corrupt, or weak, whilst most of the Scots – aside from a few traitorous nobles – are presented as heroic and brave warriors fighting cruel oppression and injustice.

Gibson himself admits that the real William Wallace wasn’t quite the clean-cut and noble hero that he played in the film. In fact, Gibson describes the real-life village-burning Wallace as “a monster” and “a berserker.” He could even be pretty brutal to his own people, hanging anyone who refused to fight for his cause. But Gibson also notes that he felt compelled to create a romanticised version of Wallace and a particularly ruthless version of Longshanks to tell an engaging tale of good guys taking on the bad guys.

I don’t believe that Mel Gibson really hates the English. He was just following the classic rules of storytelling and cooking up a possibly over-simplistic plotline in which the downtrodden and subjugated heroes take on the corrupt and powerful tyrants. And there’s more than a thimble of truth in the broad idea that the Scots were the downtrodden heroes at the time whilst the English were the tyrants, even if there are bound to be more nuanced depths to the real lives of the people on each side.

Gibson also admits that he generally messed around with history in the film, but he did so in the interests of producing a cinematic experience without any boring bits. As he rather bluntly put it to MTV News in 2006: “I’m in the business of cinema. I’m not a fucking historian.”

When questioned in front of Scottish locals about why he appeared to make such a mess of The Battle of Stirling Bridge and forgot to include, say, a bridge, Gibson argued that the outcome was the same, but he needed to beef things up a bit. He felt that filming a crowded scene around a narrow bridge wouldn’t have been as visually compelling as a big old bash up on an open plain. Gibson felt that the bridge “just got in the way.” At this point, a Scottish guy piped up: “Aye, that’s what the English found.”

But in more recent years, Gibson has revealed that perhaps it wasn’t all just about what works best for the camera. In 2020, he told USA Today: “History is very interesting to me, and I do appreciate the veracity of true history. But I don’t know that history is always true. It’s written by the winners all the time.”

This seems more in tune with the opening lines of narration from the movie, and it appears to signal a change in tone from Gibson’s defence. He’s no longer shrugging and claiming that Hollywood needs to change details to make the story more exciting. He’s now casting doubt on whether widely-accepted historical facts are true, and perhaps even suggesting that his 1995 film might have more truth in it that most scholars would accept.

Maybe there really is an ancient problem with the concept of history only being recorded from certain perspectives, and any hope of complete authenticity is lost as soon as a chronicler begins to convey the events as they personally saw or understood them. But it’s wrong to say that history is always written by winners. Survivors yes, but not necessarily winners. And it’s up to highly-skilled historians to interpret the varying and often heavily biased accounts to pick out the most credible and consistent strands of the stories.

pGibson has already told us that he’s not a fucking historian, and it sounds like he might not have much time for them, preferring instead to invest his faith into a minstrel. I think I prefer his earlier argument. Just blame Hollywood.

As for Randall Wallace, when asked if he believed that the poem by Blind Harry upon which he based his script was true, he replied: “I don’t know. I know that it spoke to my heart and that’s what matters to me.” There are always going to be quarrels brewing at the extreme ends of the debate between the popcorn-munching cinema fans who just want to be entertained by spectacle, and the breed of history enthusiast who starts coming out in hives when they spot something they know to be inaccurate.

Some would argue that real history is so jolly exciting that there’s no need to make shit up. If you’re going to the trouble of re-creating historical events at vast expense, why not try and be as faithful to the facts as possible instead of creating a warped version of history that is likely to be absorbed and consumed as hard truth by viewers who never conduct further research? Case in point; A 2001 re-enactment of The Battle of Bannockburn drew splutters of outrage and howls of laughter when a certain misinformed dude planted himself right at the head of a big procession.

All the other re-enactors had gone to painstaking lengths to ensure that they were dressed in utterly authentic clothing down to the last stitch. But not this guy. This guy had come dressed as Mel Gibson – complete with a clan tartan kilt and blue face paint – and then proceeded to proudly lead the rest of the lazy procession whom he must have assumed hadn’t bothered to make much of an effort.

When someone plucked up the courage to challenge his attire, he defensively pointed out that professional filmmakers were bound to be better informed than rubbish Scottish historians who had never bothered to take much interest in the story of William Wallace. Rewriting history and dishing it up to millions of viewers can be a dangerous game. But is it even possible to make a completely authentic historical movie?

The short answer is probably not. For starters, you’re often trying to tell a long and convoluted story which may well span several years. You’re obviously going to need to condense that story quite a bit in order to maintain the interest of the viewers, unless of course your name is Peter Jackson in which case you’ll probably just try and drag it out even further.

But generally speaking, a writer and director would need to look at trimming down the story, cutting out minor characters, and juggling around the events to tell a more coherent story that flows better on the screen. Real life doesn’t tend to unfold like a tightly-plotted thriller or murder mystery with all the intriguing twists, turns, teasers and revelations popping up at precisely the right moment. Well, my life is a bit like that, but that’s beside the point.

The point is that in any historical drama, the events and the characters are usually going to be simplified, merged, tweaked, replaced, and moved about, at which point it ceases to be truly authentic. As long as the film is preceded by a disclaimer which clearly states that certain elements of the film have been dramatized or fictionalised for narrative purposes, it shouldn’t really pose too much of a problem. It often feels as if some history enthusiasts get over-excitable because they’ve convinced themselves that their superior brains have spotted a mistake by the filmmakers.

But as pointed out by public historian Greg Jenner, historical movies don’t often get stuff wrong. They just choose not to get things right in the interests of making a good movie. For example, if

Braveheart

was meant to be a historically faithful movie, then most of the characters would be talking in 13th-century Scottish dialect. That would score full points for historical accuracy, but null points for producing a global blockbuster that can be understood without the need for subtitles. And as I mentioned near the beginning, I do believe that Mel Gibson made a cracking movie here, regardless of any perceived flaws. I’m not sure it needed to be almost three hours long.

And I can think of one potential bold adjustment that could have really deflected most of the criticism and cemented

Braveheart

‘s place in history as one of the undisputed greatest films of all time. I’ll save that idea for the end of the video. But even as it stands,

Braveheart

is a gripping and visually stunning movie which was clearly produced with creativity and passion. It’s not as good as

Babe

but it would still have deserved to win an Oscar during any other ceremony held in the 1990s. The film certainly has its many detractors today, but as we mentioned before, nearly all of the criticism regards the historical inaccuracies in the script rather than the quality of the production. It’s true that the scope of the dramatization is particularly extreme in this case – and whilst some of the fictional revisions are quite logical under the circumstances, there are other times when it seems as if the filmmakers are just determined to trample all over as much history as possible.

Fans of Robert the Bruce might not be impressed with how their hero was portrayed but his real story was so complex and foggy that it probably worked best in the film to serve up a dramatic plot twist in which he is shamed to be unmasked as a temporary traitor. It quickly gets the point across in a single scene that Robert the Bruce didn’t always stick with the same side. On the other hand, the complete omission of the tragic story of Andrew de Moray feels like a wasted opportunity, the depiction of The Battle of Stirling Bridge misses the point of how the cunning victory was achieved, and it does feel strange that even very basic historical dates and facts are messed around with for no discernibly good reason.

Maybe the most engaging dives into history shouldn’t necessarily be all about dates and numbers and statistics and the exact types of stitching used on medieval tunics. It should be about delivering a strong flavour of the story and perhaps drumming up fresh interest and awareness to hopefully encourage more detailed exploration. If we were judging

Braveheart

only as an authentic historical drama, it’s obviously a complete failure, but if we’re judging it as a slice of entertainment which captures the spirit and essence of the First War of Scottish Independence, then it’s arguably a total success. And it maybe did a lot less harm than it did good. It certainly did a lot of good for Scottish tourism.

Following the release of the film in 1995, the subsequent “Braveheart Effect” saw a massive surge in visitors from all around the world to key sites in Scotland, and is reported to have helped bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in tourism revenue. The film takes the credit for bringing in an extra £35 million to the city of Stirling alone where the National Wallace Monument has witnessed a sustained spike in visitors who had never previously heard of William Wallace. There was actually a little bit of controversy over at the National Wallace Monument in 1997 when a new 12-foot statue of Wallace was installed in the car park.

The thing that got up people’s noses was that it was practically a statue of Mel Gibson with the name ‘Braveheart’ emblazoned across his shield. It was later described as being amongst “the most loathed pieces of art in Scotland” with one local resident complaining to reporters that it wasn’t right to “desecrate the main memorial to Wallace with a lump of crap.” The statue made way for a posh new Visitor Centre in 2008 and was returned to its original sculptor.

But whilst some may have felt vexed about the how the statue was based on that pesky film, it’s very probable that there wouldn’t have been need for a posh new Visitor Centre in 2008 if it hadn’t been for that pesky film. Scottish author Lin Anderson feels that the film may also have played a part in shaping public opinion during the 1997 Scottish Devolution Referendum which led to the creation of a Scottish parliament with devolved powers. It was surely no coincidence that the referendum was held on the 700th anniversary of The Battle of Sterling Bridge.

And the leader of the Scottish National Party, Alex Salmond, appeared to take direct inspiration from

Braveheart

when he concluded a conference speech by repeating Gibson’s catchphrase “Freedom, Freedom, Freedom!” He may have gone a bit too far though when he jokingly threatened to decapitate his Tory opponent Michael Forsyth. But Lin Anderson reckons that

Braveheart

definitely contributed to the shifting political movement within Scotland, although she emphasises that she’s not saying devolution would never have happened without it. Perhaps the most important contribution that

Braveheart

has made to Scottish history, as we’ve just touched upon, is the way in which it has inspired so many people to delve deeper into the real story and raise the profile of a largely ignored historical hero. It’s true that not many people outside of Scotland would ever have heard of William Wallace before

Braveheart

, but he wasn’t even that well documented in his native Scotland, either. The very fact that we’ve been talking about the real story of William Wallace today is because of Mel Gibson’s film, and maybe this fresh wave of interest over the last twenty years has proven to be the real legacy of the so-called “second least historically accurate movie ever made.” The first is

The Patriot

by the way. But don’t blame Mel Gibson, he’s not a fucking historian.

I do still have one major grievance with

Braveheart

though, and it goes right back to that opening narration in which Robert the Bruce proclaims that historians from England will call him a liar but history is written by men who hang heroes. It’s not just English historians who would call the narrator a liar. Scottish historians would call him a liar as well. And it all just feels that Mel Gibson is wilfully misleading the millions of viewers right from the opening sentence. As the British popular historian and author Alex von Tunzelmann told

The Telegraph

in August 2025: “It’s basically pre-empting any criticism. It’s kind of claiming to be the true story – which it definitely isn’t. I can understand why historians put their heads in their hands.”

It would have felt more honest if the film had instead kicked off with an opening narration which ran along the lines of: “This is an almost entirely mythical reimagining of events from history as told by a blind minstrel who wasn’t born at the time. If you want the true story then go and read a book or watch a documentary on The History Channel. Wait, no, don’t bother with The History Channel, you’d be better off watching this nonsense.

At least you’ll get to see Mel Gibson wielding a dead cool sword. FREEEDOM!!!!” If the tone had been more a bit more sincere right from the beginning, some of us wouldn’t have been left with the uncomfortable feeling that Mel Gibson may have been ignorantly pushing a false narrative because he thinks he knows better than fucking historians.

And here’s my final big idea for really improving the movie: They should have put some Hobbits in there. Stick with me on this one, I’m being semi-serious. Whenever I’ve enjoyed watching the film, I often feel like I’m half-expecting a Hobbit or a Goblin to poke their heads out of a hole in the Highlands.

It just feels like that kind of film. Peter Jackson may be in agreement with me here. He’s always said that the style and feel of

Braveheart

was a major influence on how he later approached directing the

Lord of the Rings

trilogy. Just imagine if Braveheart’s two-handed Claymore was a magic sword that he was given by Uncle Argyll who was actually a Grandmaster Wizard. Or just imagine if the Scots had to defeat dragons at The Battle of Stirling Bridge, and King Longshanks turned into a werewolf during a full moon.

If the film had blatantly set out its stalls as a pure fantasy, then it would never have attracted so much criticism and would probably be much more highly regarded today, as the majority of fact-checking critics would have nothing to complain about. The Scottish tourism board would still have seen a boost in revenue, it just may have involved erecting a few giant statues of trolls and unicorns in the City of Stirling which admittedly would have upset some of the locals. I still think it would have worked out for the best.

Might not have won as many Oscars though; The Academy weren’t big on fantastical stories, mythical creatures, and talking pigs back in the 1990s.

If you’re one of the few people who think that

Braveheart

wasn’t quite long enough, then you may be in luck. Mel Gibson first revealed in 2016 that a four-hour cut of the movie could be put together and that he’d be interested in reassembling the footage if he can get Paramount and Fox on board with the idea. It would be piss-funny if the extended four-hour version of

Braveheart

turned out to include previously missing scenes involving an actual bridge at Stirling, an overview of the life and death of Andrew de Moray, the bit where Wallace explains his unusual costumer choices, and long sequences involving King Longshanks being quite nice and making pots of tea for everyone. Not very likely though, is it? There’s more chance we’d be treated to the cut footage of the UFO landing during the Battle of Falkirk, King Longshanks revealing to an anguished Wallace: “I am thy father!”, and a headless Wallace escaping from the execution scene and running away to the heather-crowned hills of the Highlands to live out the rest of his life in freeeeedom.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the main criticism of the movie Braveheart?

The main criticism of the movie Braveheart is its historical inaccuracies. The film is often regarded as one of the least historically accurate movies ever produced, with many details about the characters, events, and timelines being altered or fabricated.

What was the source material for the screenplay of Braveheart?

The screenplay of Braveheart was based on a five-hundred-year-old poem called The Acts and Deeds of the Illustrious and Valiant Champion Sir William Wallace, alternatively known as The Wallace, composed by a Scottish minstrel known as Blind Harry.

What is the historical accuracy of the opening scene in Braveheart?

The opening scene in Braveheart is largely inaccurate. The scene where King Edward I lures Scottish nobles into a trap and has them murdered is a fictional element created by Blind Harry. Scotland was still living peacefully as an independent kingdom throughout William Wallace’s childhood and early adult years.

What is the significance of the ‘Jus Primae Noctis’ plotline in Braveheart?

The ‘Jus Primae Noctis’ plotline, where English nobles have the right to have sex with Scottish brides on their wedding night, is entirely fictional and was not practiced during the reign of King Edward I. It was included in the film to portray King Edward I as ruthless and barbaric.

What is the historical accuracy of the Battle of Stirling Bridge in Braveheart?

The Battle of Stirling Bridge in Braveheart is inaccurate in several ways. The film omits the actual bridge, which was crucial to the Scots’ victory, and depicts the battle as a straightforward charge across an open field. The real strategy involved waiting for the English to cross the narrow bridge and then attacking them from both sides.

What is the role of Andrew de Moray in the historical events depicted in Braveheart?

Andrew de Moray was a significant figure in the Scottish rebellion against the English, co-leading the rebellion with William Wallace. He is credited with the strategic mastermind behind the victory at Stirling Bridge. However, he is completely omitted from the film, which is a major historical inaccuracy.

What is the historical accuracy of the character of Robert the Bruce in Braveheart?

The character of Robert the Bruce in Braveheart is misrepresented. The film depicts him as betraying William Wallace at the Battle of Falkirk, which is historically inaccurate. Robert the Bruce was not present at the battle and did not fight against Wallace. His portrayal in the film is a dramatic plot twist that does not align with historical facts.

What is the historical accuracy of the execution of William Wallace in Braveheart?

The execution of William Wallace in Braveheart is one of the most accurate parts of the film. The details of his trial and execution, including being hanged, drawn, and quartered, are historically accurate. The film tones down some of the grisly details but captures the essence of his brutal end.

What is the impact of Braveheart on Scottish tourism?

Braveheart had a significant positive impact on Scottish tourism. Following the release of the film, there was a massive surge in visitors to key sites in Scotland, including the National Wallace Monument in Stirling. The film is credited with bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars in tourism revenue.

What is the legacy of Braveheart in terms of public interest in Scottish history?

Braveheart sparked a renewed interest in Scottish history and the story of William Wallace. The film inspired many people to delve deeper into the real story and raised the profile of a largely ignored historical hero. It also contributed to the shifting political movement within Scotland, including the 1997 Scottish Devolution Referendum.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Was ANY of Braveheart Accurate?
• Hero image source by Sadie-Michaela Harris / openverse, cc0.