Braveheart: The Film That Rewrote William Wallace

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Wallace's life is itself thinly documented; much of the popular story comes from Blind Harry's poem The Wallace, written about 170 years after his death. The film drew on that tradition. This card compares the film with what historians accept, not with Blind Harry's legend.

The film

established Braveheart, written by Randall Wallace and directed by and starring Mel Gibson, was released in 1995. A sweeping epic with large-scale battle scenes, it was a commercial and critical success and won five Academy Awards in 1996, including Best Picture and Best Director. Much of it was filmed in Ireland, with some scenes in Glen Nevis.

Stirling Bridge without a bridge

established The real Battle of Stirling Bridge on 11 September 1297 was won because the English army had to cross a narrow bridge over the Forth. Wallace and Andrew Moray waited until part of the English force had crossed, then attacked, cutting them off. The film stages the battle on an open plain, with no bridge, and omits Moray, who was mortally wounded in the battle.

Princess and peasant

established The film gives Wallace a love affair with Isabella of France, wife of the future Edward II, and implies he fathered her child. In reality Isabella was about three years old at the time of the Battle of Falkirk in 1298 and still in France; she married Edward II in 1308, three years after Wallace's death.

established The film presents Wallace as a humble Highland farmer. Historians generally agree he came from a minor Lowland landowning family in the west of Scotland. His father was probably called Alan, not Malcolm.

Kilts, woad and claymores

established The Scots in the film wear belted plaids and blue woad face paint. Neither belongs to the thirteenth century: woad face paint is associated with the ancient Picts and Britons more than a thousand years earlier, and the belted plaid is recorded only from the sixteenth century. Two-handed swords like Wallace's became common later too.

Primae noctis

shared The film's plot turns on Edward I granting English lords the "jus primae noctis", the right to sleep with brides on their wedding night. Historians have found no trustworthy evidence that such a right was ever exercised in medieval Scotland or England, and many doubt it existed anywhere.

Other liberties

established The film shows Robert the Bruce betraying Wallace at Falkirk, which is unsupported, and has Edward I dying at the moment of Wallace's execution; he actually died in 1307. The title "Braveheart" was originally associated with Robert the Bruce, whose heart Sir James Douglas carried into battle in Spain.

What the history was

This section sets out, briefly, the story the film replaced, as told by the historian G. W. S. Barrow in Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland (1965; 4th edn 2005), still the standard scholarly account of the period.

shared Who Wallace was. Barrow places Wallace in a knightly family that belonged to the feudal following of James the Stewart, from the parish of Paisley; more recent work points to an Ayrshire family headed by Alan Wallace. Either way he was a younger son of the lesser landed class. His brother Sir Malcolm Wallace appears in the records in 1299. Barrow argues that Wallace owed his standing in 1297 to the Stewart's patronage and to links with Bishop Wishart of Glasgow, whom the Lanercost chronicler names as one of the plotters of the rising.

established What he fought for. Wallace did not lead a peasant revolt against the nobility. Every surviving document he issued was in the name of King John Balliol, the deposed king held in England, and by consent of "the community of the realm". Barrow calls him politically and constitutionally a conservative who accepted the feudal order without question. Many lords supported the rising from the start: James the Stewart, Bishop Wishart, Sir William Douglas and the young Robert Bruce, earl of Carrick, were all in arms in 1297, and Macduff, son of an earl of Fife, fought and died for Wallace at Falkirk.

established Stirling Bridge. Wallace shared the command with Andrew Moray, son of a northern baron, who had raised the north independently. Their army stood on the slope of Abbey Craig, a mile north of a narrow wooden bridge that would take only two horsemen abreast, and charged down a causeway to cut the English army in two at the bridgehead. Edward I was not there: he was in Flanders. Moray was mortally wounded and died within weeks, and for the next few months letters went out in both men's names as "commanders of the army of the kingdom of Scotland". Wallace was knighted by an unnamed earl and chosen as Guardian by March 1298.

established Falkirk. At Falkirk on 22 July 1298 the Scottish cavalry fled without fighting. Barrow puts this down to panic rather than treachery, and notes that it is not known whether Bruce was even in the Scottish army. The spearmen, ringed with stakes in four schiltroms, held out until English archers, crossbowmen and slingers broke them.

established After Falkirk. Wallace went to France in 1299 as a diplomat for the Scottish cause and stayed at least a year, carrying a letter of recommendation from Philip IV to the papal court. He was back fighting in Scotland by 1303. When the Scottish leaders submitted in 1304, Edward I excluded Wallace from all terms and ordered other Scots to hunt him down. He was taken near Glasgow on 3 August 1305 by servants of Sir John Menteith, the keeper of Dumbarton Castle, whom Barrow does not regard as a traitor. At his trial in Westminster Hall he denied treason, since he had never sworn fealty to Edward, and he was executed at Smithfield on 23 August 1305.

shared Dress. Barrow notes that the foot soldiers of 1296 from the earldoms north of the Forth wore no body armour, and that Highlanders among them would wear "an early version of the kilt", which startled foreign observers. That is a long way from the film's tartan belted plaids on Lowland farmers, and the belted plaid as a recorded garment is later, but it suggests that bare-legged Highland infantry are not pure invention.

Why it mattered anyway

shared Whatever its faults, the film had a powerful effect. Visitor numbers at the Wallace Monument and other sites rose, and the film is often said to have stirred national feeling in the years before the 1997 devolution referendum, though its political influence is hard to measure. In 1997 a sculptor's statue of Wallace with features resembling Mel Gibson's, inscribed "Freedom", was placed near the Wallace Monument. It was widely mocked and vandalised, was put inside a cage and was removed in 2008.

shared Scholars disagree about what audiences took from it. The sociologist Tim Edensor, quoted by the anthropologist Celeste Ray in her introduction to Transatlantic Scots (2005), suggested that "it may be emotional authenticity rather than historical accuracy that satisfies audiences", and Ray notes that the film was debated as if it were a documentary. The historian Edward J. Cowan, in the same book, recalls that in Scotland it was accepted almost uncritically, with one political party trying to sign up members as audiences left the cinema. American audiences, in his experience of lecturing there, knew it was entertainment and were happy to use it as a starting point for the real Wars of Independence. The media scholar Colin McArthur, whose Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots (2003) is the fullest critique, notes in his chapter that the Wallace Clan Trust, a battle re-enactment group, acted as Gibson's "praetorian guard" during the making and premiering of the film.

Braveheart in America

shared The film's political afterlife was strongest in the United States. Andrew Hook, a literary historian at the University of Glasgow, argues in his chapter of Transatlantic Scots that Braveheart and Rob Roy (1995) were drawn into a romantic version of Scottish history that some American groups used for extremist ends, much as Thomas Dixon had used Highland imagery in The Clansman (1905). The neo-Confederate League of the South, founded by the historian Michael Hill, promoted a "Celtic" identity for the South, and Hook reports that it treated the film as compulsory viewing for members and as a recruiting tool. Its Southern Patriot recommended it in May–June 1995, saying southerners would find it hard to miss the parallels with their Confederate forebears. Hill's own review in the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles praised the film's "well-defined sex roles" and self-sacrifice for a noble cause, cast the English king as a Lincoln figure and concluded that Celtic peoples in thirteenth-century Scotland and the nineteenth-century South had been targets for subjugation. A 1995 review of Rob Roy in the Southern Partisan drew similar parallels with the Confederacy.

shared Hook adds that the John Birch Society urged supporters to see the film, that the racist Christian Identity movement used it alongside the Declaration of Arbroath, and that a Texas Klan leader was reported as hailing it as a potential classic for his movement. Scottish newspapers took up the theme: a 1999 Scotland on Sunday headline claimed the Klan had hijacked Braveheart. Hook is clear that these groups were a tiny minority of southerners and unrepresentative of the Scottish heritage revival. Ray, who has studied that revival in the South at first hand, warns that British journalists have made a genre of linking it to white supremacists, and found that few heritage society members belonged to the League of the South. For many of her informants at Highland games, dressing up like Gibson's Wallace was simply fun.

shared The film also reached Congress. Cowan reports that Senator Trent Lott, accepting the American-Scottish Foundation's Wallace Award in Washington in 2000, said Braveheart had been a major influence on his thinking, and that after seeing it he had left the word "freedom" on the answering machines of fellow southern senators. Cowan suspects that Senate Resolution 155 of 1998, which created National Tartan Day, owed more to the film than to Robert the Bruce. Many supporters of Tartan Day, he adds, had no time for Lott's politics but welcomed his support.

• The film's Battle of Stirling Bridge has no bridge.
• Isabella of France was about three years old at the time of Falkirk.
• Belted plaids and woad face paint did not belong to Wallace's time.
• "Braveheart" was originally a name associated with Robert the Bruce.
• A statue of Wallace with Mel Gibson's face once stood near the Wallace Monument.
• The film won five Oscars, including Best Picture.
• Trent Lott, sponsor of National Tartan Day, said Braveheart was a major influence on his thinking.
• A re-enactment group, the Wallace Clan Trust, acted as a guard for Mel Gibson during the filming and premieres.

• Myth: Braveheart shows how Wallace lived and fought. The film has many major inaccuracies, from the missing bridge at Stirling to the invented romance with Isabella of France. Wallace's life is thinly documented, and the film drew on Blind Harry's poem, written about 170 years after his death.
• Myth: Wallace wore a kilt and blue woad. Woad face paint is associated with the ancient Picts and Britons, and the belted plaid is recorded only from the sixteenth century. Wallace was probably from a minor Lowland landowning family, not a humble Highlander.
• Myth: Lords had a right of jus primae noctis in medieval Scotland and England. Historians have found no trustworthy evidence that it was ever exercised, and many doubt it existed anywhere.
• Disputed: That the film caused devolution. It is often said to have stirred national feeling and boosted tourism before the 1997 referendum, but its political influence is hard to measure.
• Myth: The film's American admirers shared the politics of the extremist groups that used it. Andrew Hook records neo-Confederate and far-right groups adopting the film, but he is clear they were a tiny minority. Celeste Ray found that few heritage society members belonged to the League of the South, and that for many, dressing up like Gibson's Wallace was simply fun.