Outlaw King: Better Than Braveheart

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Billy Howle, Chris Pine, David Mackenzie, Edward I, Edward II, Florence Pugh, Kings and Queens, Loudoun HIll, Medieval Europe, Medieval Scotland, Outlaw King, Robert the Bruce, Stephen Dillane

I finally had time to watch something for this blog after my semester from hell. Hopefully I’ll be able to get to a more regular posting scheduled now. The film I watched is Netflix’ Outlaw King(2018, dir. David Mackenzie). The film tells the story of the early days of the rebellion of Robert the Bruce (Chris Pine) against the English kings Edward I (Stephen Dillane) and Edward II (Billy Howle).

Robert the Bruce

Robert the Bruce (which is an Anglicization of “Robert de Brus”) was descended from a line of Anglo-Norman nobles who arrived in Scotland in the 1120s. On his father’s side he was descended from the Scottish king David I (r. 1124-1153). His grandfather had staked a claim to the throne in 1290, when the Scottish throne became vacant, along with about a dozen other claimants. That “Great Cause” ultimately resulted in King Edward I being invited into to resolve the competing claims. But Edward made all the candidates swear loyalty to him and then refused to render a verdict, essentially seeking to incorporate Scotland into his kingdom despite not having a dynastic claim of his own. Edward correctly realized that with so many candidates, the Scots would have a lot of trouble organizing an effective resistance to him.

What he hadn’t counted on was the rebellion of Sir Andrew Moray and Sir William Wallace in 1297. That rebellion was militarily defeated at Falkirk in 1298, but Wallace continued a bandit resistance until he was captured in 1305, thus making it hard for the English to have complete control.

During all this, the Bruce family was caught between loyalty to Edward and rebellion against him, because they held land in both Scotland and England and resisting Edward would surely have meant losing their English holdings. (To confuse you, there have been lots of guys named ‘Robert the Bruce’. To spare you as much confusion as possible, I’m going to call his ancestors the Lords of Annandale and save ‘Robert the Bruce’ for the famous rebel.) So instead the family played both sides. Bruce’s grandfather, the 5^thEarl Lord of Annandale, turned over his Scottish lands and claim to the throne to his son, the 6^thLord of Annandale, who pretty quickly turned them over to his son Robert. That way, Robert could participate in Moray’s rebellion while the Lords of Annandale supported Edward and opposed Moray and Wallace.

A modern reconstruction of Bruce’s face

But Bruce eventually quickly concluded that Wallace had little chance of success, because he submitted to Edward and reportedly fought on his behalf at Falkirk, helping to defeat Wallace. This was to prove one of Bruce’s biggest obstacles to getting the throne, because his family and he had switched sides so often that when finally made a bid for the crown, few of the Scottish lords were willing to trust him.

By the time Wallace was caught, there were only two real claimants to the Scottish throne left, Robert the Bruce and John Comyn (sometimes called the ‘Red Comyn’, to distinguish him from a cousin John Comyn the Black Comyn). The two of them were essentially rivals, and it’s pretty clear that at least from the start of Andrew Moray’s rebellion, Bruce was always angling for the throne. Neither Moray nor Wallace had any sort of claim to rule Scotland and neither ever asserted a desire to be king. Their cause was just independence from English rule.

By the end of 1305, Edward was starting to suspect that he could not trust Bruce, because he revoked a grant of land he had given Bruce earlier in the year. It was a smart call, because mid-way through 1305, Bruce and Comyn had entered into a secret deal in which Comyn agreed to surrender his claim to the Scottish throne in exchange for Bruce’s lands. At least, that’s what two later sources claim. Bruce’s claim to the throne was stronger than Comyn’s, so it makes sense that Comyn might have decided that land in the hand was worth more than a weak claim in the bush.

At some point, however, Comyn appears to have spilled the beans to Edward and Bruce seems to have found out. He was at the English court and was reportedly warned that he needed to flee, which he did. When he got back to Scotland, Bruce sent a message requesting a meeting at the Franciscan monastery at Dumfries, and Comyn and his uncle showed up. Exactly what transpired at the meeting is unclear, but at some point Bruce pulled a dagger and stabbed Comyn. According to a not entirely certain story, Bruce left the chapel and commented to his men something to the effect that “I doubt I’ve killed John Comyn”. Reportedly one of them responded, “You doubt? I mak sikkar!” (“I’ll make sure”) Two of his men rushed into the chapel and killed both the Red Comyn and his uncle.

Edward II

Whether the famous dialog happened or not, it’s certain that Bruce sacrilegiously murdered his rival. It’s likely, though not provable, that he went to Dumfries planning to at least confront Comyn and probably to kill him for betraying him. English sources depict Bruce as having premeditated the killing, but they’re obviously quite biased.

With such a blatant murder on his hands, Bruce was now committed to rebellion. So he immediately attacked Dumfries castle and forced the English garrison to surrender to him. The Scottish bishops pardoned Robert’s sacrilege and immediately agreed to support him as king, and 6 weeks later he was crowned at Scone, with several of the leading nobles present. A day later, Countess Isabella of Buchan, who was married to the Black Comyn, showed up. As a member of the MacDuff family, she claimed the right to perform the actual coronation, so the ceremony was repeated to strengthen Bruce’s somewhat shaky claim.

By June, Edward’s lieutenant in Scotland, Aymer de Valence, had arrived with a force at Perth. Bruce laid siege to Perth, but rather foolishly failed to take precautions against an attack by de Valence’s forces. He didn’t establish even basic defenses around his camp, so when de Valence’s forces launched a pre-dawn assault on his position, his whole army was routed and he and his family had to flee. The Battle of Methven, as this humiliating defeat is known, was an inauspicious start to his rebellion, and worse was to come.

For safety, he sent his wife, his daughter Marjorie, two sisters, and Isabella of Buchan to Kildrummy Castle with his brother Neil to protect them, but the English forces soon caught up to them. The women were able to flee the castle in time, but Neil was captured when the castle feel and immediately executed. Elizabeth and the other women were caught not long afterward by supporters of the Comyns. They were all sent into captivity in England. Isabella and Bruce’s sister Mary were put into cages that hung from the walls of the castles at Berwick and Roxburgh, while Elizabeth was held at a series of castles for the next eight years.

A possible depiction of Aymer de Valence from his tomb

These events forced the Black Comyn to side with the English against Bruce. In addition to Bruce being a rival to his claim on the throne, he had also murdered Comyn’s cousin and basically won the loyalty of the Black Comyn’s wife Isabella and gotten her captured and humiliated. In some ways he was Bruce’s biggest threat in the months after Methven. Bruce spent the winter of 1306-7 on the run, probably hiding out in the Hebrides, although his movements in this period are uncertain. He sent two of his brothers to gain control of southwest Scotland, but as they crossed Loch Ryan they were ambushed by MacDugall forces who were loyal to the Comyns; Bruce’s forces were again routed and both his brothers were sent to Carlisle, where Edward had them beheaded. The invasion of Loch Ryan may have been intended as a distraction to Bruce’s own landing in Galloway. In that case, it worked, but at quite a cost.

Bruce managed to win a small victory at Glen Trool, forcing de Valence’s forces to retreat by attacking them as they moved single-file through a rocky track along Clatteringshaws Loch. It was more of a propaganda victory than a strategic one, but it proved that Bruce had some ability to win, something he desperately needed if his rebellion was to succeed.

A far more important victory awaited him. He seems to have learned a lesson from Methven that he was fighting against superior forces and needed to be more tactical. A month later, he confronted de Valence’s forces at Loudoun Hill, where he was able to control the terms of the battle. He did a good job preparing the battle site and was able to inflict a serious defeat on the English. We’ll discuss it at length in a little bit.

Loudoun Hill was Bruce’s first significant victory, and it marks the start of a gradual turning poin tin his rebellion. Edward I died two months later, having been kept by illness at Lanercost monastery just south of the Scottish border for several months. Over the next year, Bruce ravaged Comyn-controlled parts of Scotland, demonstrating that the Scots could brutalize each other at least as effectively as the English had, and by 1309 he was sufficiently dominant that he could summon the Scottish Parliament to meet. Finally, in 1314, Bruce inflicted a massive defeat on Edward II at Bannockburn. That victory essentially re-established Scottish independence from England, although the conflict dragged on for years.

Outlaw King

The film focuses essentially on the period between 1304 and 1307, thus exploring only the period of Bruce’s fumbling beginnings as a rebel to the turning point of Loudoun Hill. It opens with a meeting between Edward I and various Scottish nobles outside Sterling Castle, which Edward is sieging while the Scottish nobles make their submission to them. Edward demonstrates the construction of a massive trebuchet which he fires at the castle (with a flaming missile, of course, because they’re absolutely necessary in films these days). Then he allows the castle to surrender. This is a nice historical touch, because in fact when Edward sieged Sterling Castle, he did delay accepting its surrender until he could try out the enormous siege engine he had had built.

Pine’s Bruce is shaggy and brooding throughout the film

In the feast that follows, it’s announced that Bruce’s father has arranged the marriage of Bruce to Elizabeth de Burgh (Florence Pugh). In fact, they were married in 1302 and already had at least one daughter when Bruce launched his rebellion.

The film then moves forward to 1306 and has the mandatory tax collection sequence, because collecting taxes is how you know medieval kings are bad. During the tax collection Bruce starts to realize how unpopular the English are, and then word arrives that William Wallace’ arm has been tied to the market cross, prompting a riot. Bruce promptly returns home, tells his brothers they’re all going to revolt, and then meets the Red Comyn (Callen Mulvay) in an effort to persuade him to work together. Comyn, however, villainously tells Bruce that he’s going to betray Bruce to Edward, thereby eliminating his rival for the crown, thus forcing Bruce to stab him to death. So as the film presents it, Bruce is a very reluctant rebel, rebelling only because everyone hates the English, he’s upset that Wallace has been executed, and Comyn forced him to commit sacrilegious murder.

To put it politely, that’s an extremely generous interpretation of events. Wallace had been dead for a year before Bruce started his rebellion, so it’s unlikely that his execution had any significant influence over Bruce. Most historians feel that Bruce was already determined to rebel when he invited Comyn to the Dumfries meeting, and it’s likely that he called the meeting intending to kill his rival. Far from being a reluctant and selfless rebel, Bruce’s family had been self-serving in its pursuit of the crown and their best interests for a generation. Bruce’s rebellion was purely about his own ambitions.

The two coronations at Scone have been collapsed into a single event, which is understandable, and Isabella of Buchan performs the coronation, although no explanation is offered as to who she is or why she’s doing it.

Bruce offers to meet de Valence in single combat to decide who’s going to control Perth, and de Valence accepts but then underhandedly launches a night-time attack on Bruce, complete with flaming arrows, because when you’re launching a sneak attack you definitely want to make sure your enemies can see your arrows on the way in. So the film positions the Battle of Methven as an act of base treachery against a trusting Bruce. In reality, Bruce did offer de Valence single combat, but de Valence turned the offer down, and Bruce rather foolishly assumed that this meant de Valence wouldn’t attack. So, as with the murder of John Comyn, the film is trying to make Bruce look better than he was. His defeat at Methven was a sign that he was a rather green commander, not that de Valence was especially villainous.

Stephan Dillane as Edward I

Then Prince Edward captures Kildrummy Castle and apprehends Bruce’s women just outside the castle, which is inaccurate but probably a forgivable compression of events. But it’s Elizabeth who gets hung in a cage outside a castle, not Isabella.

After that, Edward I gives Prince Edward permission to ‘unfurl the dragon’, which apparently means that the English have permission to be unchivalrous when they fight. This is totally fabricated, and again seems intended to explain why Bruce is doing so badly at the start of the start of his rebellion—he hasn’t yet learned to fight dirty.

The Battle of Loch Ryan is presented as Bruce’s forces retreating out to the Hebrides to lick their wounds and being treacherously attacked by the MacDugall forces, instead of as an invasion attempt that went badly. The attack happens after Bruce has already gotten across the Loch, so he’s unable to get to back to the fight until it’s already become a disastrous rout.

Then we see Bruce training his forces to fight dirty, which in this case is killing the horses of the knights (something that medieval knights would actually have considered a violation of the rules of warfare) and then they launch sneak attacks on a couple of castles, retake them and burn them. This seems to be a rather garbled presentation of Bruce’s harrowing of Comyn’s lands and a very soft-pedaled harrowing to boot. Can’t have Bruce looking bad.

Then Edward I dies. His son is a complete dick, promising his father to carry his father’s bones into Scotland and then just giving an order to bury him when he died. This is wrong, since Edward died about two months later. An unreliable story claims that he asked his son to either carry his bones into Scotland or carry his heart to the Holy Land, but in reality, Edward had his dad’s body shipped back to London where it was give a proper, if somewhat simple, burial. The grave was opened in the 18^thcentury and his body found to be in remarkably good condition. All of this is clearly intended to build up Edward II as a villain.

Howle as Edward II. The armor isn’t very accurate, but it looks pretty on screen

Loudoun Hill

The film climaxes at Loudon Hill. Historically, Bruce identified Loudoun Hill as an ideal place to fight because it was located on a key road that de Valence’s forces would have to pass through. He chose Loudoun Hill because it was a relatively narrow stretch of dry land running between two large bogs. Bruce had his men narrow the dry ground by digging a series of trenches inward from the two bogs, thus creating a tight bottleneck at the base of a hill and sharply reducing the English advantage of numbers while rendering cavalry almost useless. In doing this, he may have been inspired by a similar tactic employed by the Flemish against the French cavalry at the battle of Courtrai in 1302. When the English cavalry advance, they found themselves forced to attack Bruce’s spearmen through a narrow causeway and up a slope. The result was that the Scots broke the English charge and inflicted enough damage that the English forces fell back in confusion and de Valance fled the scene. It was not a total rout, however; only about 100 English soldiers were killed. But, as I noted, it was a crucial battle because it demonstrated that Bruce could win a solid open-field victory against numerically superior forces.

Loudoun Hill

The film gets Loudoun Hill roughly right, but exaggerates several important points. Bruce himself helps dig the ditches. There’s no evidence of that, but modern audiences like to see kings acting like the common man. In reality, Edward II actually enjoyed ditch-digging—manual labor like digging ditches and laying bricks was a hobby of his—but the film wants to make Edward look worse than he was to make Bruce look better. Bruce’s men also fill the ditch with sharpened stakes, which didn’t happen. Instead of de Valance, it’s Edward who’s in command, when in reality, Edward wasn’t king yet and wasn’t in Scotland at all.

At the start, Bruce stations some of his men in front of the ditch, thus disguising its presence from the English. When the English charge, the Scots scurry behind the ditch, causing the English to crash into the spike-filled ditches. Then the Scots attack, using mostly swords and axes rather than spears. While not exactly correctly, this isn’t so outrageously wrong as to be a serious problem because it does get the basic dynamic of the battle right, although the slope of the hill is behind the Scots and not a factor in the fight.

Edward rides into the battle, but gets unhorsed. Bruce fights him in single combat, soundly defeats him, and then allows him to flee back to his troops. Of all the inaccuracies in the film, this is, for me at least, the most problematic. Not only was Edward not present at the battle, but if he had been and if Bruce had defeated in combat, he would almost certainly have taken Edward prisoner. Having Edward as prisoner would have ended the war right then and there. The English would not have dared attack while their king was prisoner, so Bruce would have been able to dictate the terms of an abject surrender to the English. More importantly, Edward had not fathered any children at this point in his life. If Bruce had killed Edward, there would have been a serious political crisis in England, because Edward’s presumptive heir at this point was his seven-year old half-brother Thomas of Brotherton, and there would probably have been a power struggle within the English government to see who would run the government during the prolonged royal minority. So had Bruce actually allowed (the not actually yet) King Edward II to run off the battlefield, he would have blown the biggest political opportunity of his reign.

Other Thoughts

Throughout the film, I couldn’t help comparing it to Mel Gibson’s rather more famous Braveheart. Although Outlaw King gets a fair number of things wrong and consistently massages the facts to make Bruce seem a more decent man than he was, it’s still light-years better than Braveheart in terms of historical accuracy. For starters, there’s nary a kilt in sight. The costuming at least tried to look period and, in FrockFlick’s opinion got at least halfway there, although a lot of the women are wearing barbettes without a headpiece, making all of Elizabeth’s ladies look like they had bad toothaches that day.

Waiting for the dentist to come through town

Another way that Outlaw King is superior to Braveheart is that both Edward I and Edward II are treated more fairly. Edward I is not a sneering villain bent on sexing his daughter-in-law, and Billy Howle’s Prince Edward isn’t the limp-wristed sissyboy of Gibson’s film. He’s an angry young man eager to move out of his father’s shadow, which at least makes sense as a characterization, and the film accurately depicts his eagerness for battle.

Pine’s Bruce, on the other hand, is a surprisingly bland hero whose shaggy beard and haircut are probably his most notable characteristic. He spends a lot of time looking moodily at the camera, brooding about how poorly his rebellion is going. To the extent that the film succeeds, I think it’s more despite Pine’s performance than because of it. Given that Pine spends an enormous amount of time on-screen, the weakness of his performance results in a film that lacks energy except in the fight scenes, and it’s not surprising that Mackenzie cut 20 minutes from the film after a test audience told him it was boring.

So overall, Outlaw King is kind of a big Meh. It’s not a bad film, but it’s nowhere near what I would call a good film. It’s more accurate than Braveheart, but then so is the average grade school production of Snow White.

Want to Know More?

Outlaw King is available on Netflix.

Fiona Watson’s Traitor, Outlaw, King: Part One The Making of Robert the Bruce offers a reasonable, non-romantic, non-patriotic take on him, making it one of the best things available on Bruce.

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The Bruce: Careful What I Wish For

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Bannockburn, Brian Blessed, Edward I, Edward II, Medieval Europe, Medieval Scotland, Needlepointing the Bayeux Tapestry, Robert the Bruce, Sandy Welch, The Bruce

So I recently watched The Bruce (1996, dir. Bob Carruthers and David McWhinnie, with additional scenes by Brian Blessed). It’s available for free on YouTube. As I watched it, I realized why it’s available for free. It’s dreadful. It’s a low-budget labor of love, but it’s the sort of child only a mother could muster affection for. It feels very much like some enthusiastic Scottish history re-enactor wanted to prove that it was possible to make an historically-accurate movie about Scottish history that was still a really good film, and then only managed to get the first half of the job done.

So I’m a bit conflicted about this film. You’ve all read my posts where I lament about how badly most historical movies deviate from the facts, and I insist that the actual events are often more interesting than the nonsense that Hollywood screenwriters churn out. But now I’ve gotten what I wished for. The film tries adhere to the actual events in the life of Robert the Bruce, and it succeeds far more in accomplishing that than, for example, The Scottish Movie does. But it’s just an awful film.

 

So Who’s This Bruce Guy?

For those who don’t know, Robert the Bruce (d.1329) was a claimant to the Scottish throne during the period when Edward I and Edward II of England were trying to conquer Scotland. (And to address any confusion about his name, it’s an Anglicization of the French family name de Brus; the ‘the’ doesn’t really signify anything special.)

He supported William Wallace’s rebellion and after Wallace resigned his office of Guardian of Scotland (after his defeat at the battle of Falkirk), he and a rival claimaint to the throne, John Comyn, were appointed to the post, but they couldn’t agree and eventually Bruce resigned as well. In 1304, Bruce and all of the other major nobles in Scotland surrendered to Edward I.

This is not what Robert the Bruce actually looked like

 

In 1305, Comyn made an agreement with Bruce that if Bruce rebelled, Comyn was exchange his claim to the throne for all of Bruce’s lands in Scotland. Exactly what happened is unclear, but it appears that Comyn then revealed the deal to Edward, prompting Edward to order Bruce’s arrest. But Bruce was warned and fled the English court. A year later, Bruce and Comyn met up in a monastery church in Dumfries; a quarrel ensued and Bruce either stabbed Comyn to death before the altar or gravely wounded him and left him to be finished off by one of his men.

After that, Bruce claimed the throne of Scotland and underwent coronation by Bishop Wishart of Glasgow. The next seven years saw Bruce waging a series of campaigns to secure his control of Scotland (including slaughtered most of the supporters of the Comyn family) as well as to force out the English, who were now ruled by Edward II. In 1306, one of surviving the Comyn supporters seized Bruce’s wife Elizabeth (as well as a female cousin of his) and sent her to Edward, who held her as a capture until 1314.

He didn’t look like this either

 

Eventually in 1314, Bruce’s brother laid siege to the English-held castle at Stirling. The commander of the castle, in a fairly typical maneuver for the period, agreed that if Edward did not relieve the siege by midsummer, he would surrender the castle to Bruce. This forced Edward II to move to relieve the siege. The result was the Battle of Bannockburn.

The Bannock Burn is a tributary of the River Forth, which runs past Stirling Castle. The swampiness of the Burn made it a good defensible position for the Scots, who took up a position on the northwest side of the stream with a forest at their backs, while the English approached from the south and east.

Or this. Basically, we have no idea what he looked like

 

On the first day of battle, the English cavalry crossed the Burn, only to be repulsed by the Scots, who had formed up pikemen in a formation known as a schiltrom. Wallace had successfully employed this formation at the battle of Stirling Bridge, and unsuccessfully at the battle of Falkirk. Here is proved successful; the English cavalry were turned back. One English knight, Sir Henry de Bohun, made a lance charge at Bruce, who side-stepped the attack and split de Bohun’s head open with an axe.

One reconstruction of the first day of the battle

 

During the night, the English crossed the Burn and took up a new position closer to Bruce’s forces. The next morning, Bruce took an enormous risk and ordered his pikemen to advance, and was able to start forcing the English back. An attempt by the English longbowmen to break up the schiltroms failed when the Scottish cavalry charged them. Caught between the Burn and the advancing schiltroms, the English forces broke ranks. Edward II’s bodyguard, realizing he was in danger, grabbed the reins of the king’s horse and literally forced the king off the battlefield. But the king’s departure panicked his men and the English army routed.

At this point, Bruce was aided by another group of people who charged into the battle. Traditionally, the sources are read to suggest that this group was the Scottish camp followers, meaning the servants, cooks, laundresses, and other non-combattants who travel with an army, the idea being that they wanted to participate in the rout of the English forces. Recent historians, however, have suggested this group was actually a unit of Highland foot soldiers, too undisciplined to fight in a schiltrom but ideal for a shock attack. Regardless, the arrival of this group was the final straw. The shattered English army was slaughtered trying to get back across the stream. Edward was forced to pull out of Scotland and Bruce established (through his daughter Marjorie) a new dynasty that ruled Scotland down into the 16^th century.

The second day of the battle

 

The Bruce in The Bruce

The Bruce follows the story of Robert the Bruce (Sandy Welch) from about 1305 down to the battle of Bannockburn. It gets the politics and the major events basically correct, although it makes up a battle in 1305 in which John Comyn (Pavel Douglas) lures Bruce into a battle with Edward I (Brian Blessed, being his Brian Blessedest) and knocks him unconscious on the battlefield. Luck for Bruce, his brother Nigel drags him off and hides him in a pigsty, only to get killed himself afterward. This seems to be the film’s way to explaining Bruce’s decision to kill Comyn, perhaps because it doesn’t want to admit that the real Bruce submitted to Edward I. But after the confrontation with Comyn, the film basically adheres to fact.

Brian Blessed, doing a rather apoplectic Edward I

 

The film includes a famous story that early on in his wars, Bruce was on the run from the English and hid in a cave, where he saw a spider trying repeatedly to make a web. After numerous failures, the spider eventually succeeded and Bruce learned a lesson in determination from the spider that helped him continue his struggle for years until he succeeded. The story, however, was not originally told of Bruce, but of Sir James Douglas, one of Bruce’s allies. In 1828, Sir Walter Scott repurposed the story and applied it to Bruce.

The film simplifies the battle of Bannockburn down to one day, and employs the traditional camp followers, who make a most unconvincing attack on the English. And de Bohun gets killed late in the battle, after Edward II has been dragged off the field. (But, to the film’s credit, they correctly pronounce his name as ‘day Boon’ and not ‘day Bow-hun’.)

 

So What’s Wrong with the Film?

I think most of the problems with the film stem from the fact that it was made on an extremely tight budget, reportedly £500,000, and a lot of that money was raised from the historical re-enactors who comprise the extras. The list of ‘Associate Producers’ at the end of the film is almost as long as the rest of the credits put together. I think that the donors must have been contractually promised 3 seconds of screen time each, because that would explain the agonizingly long scenes in which peasant extras wander around leading lives of virtuous simplicity and Scottishness.

Nobody slaughters Scotsmen like Brian Blessed does

 

Apparently the budget didn’t allow for some things we normally get with movies. Among the things the production of The Bruce couldn’t afford:

A film editor. The film easily has half an hour of footage in which no one with a speaking role does anything important.

Stunt men. The fight scenes look like the director told the extras “just go in there and wave your sword around and look like you’re fighting.” It didn’t work.

A fight co-ordinator. The credits say they had one, but I think it was Angus from down at the end of the bar, who spends his time fixing motorcycles and who knows a few things about throwing a punch. But only a few. I’ve seen third grade productions of Little Red Riding Hood with more engaging violence. The climactic Battle of Bannockburn scene is therefore boringly staged, incompetently executed, and not really edited at all. And it NEVER ENDS, because all the extras had to get their 3 seconds of screen time.

A historical consultant. Instead, they just invited re-enactors to show up with their gear. As a result, we get lots of highlanders in kilts three hundred years too early. And guys playing bodhrans, which won’t be invented for about half a millennium. Oh, and brace yourself for gratuitous modern bagpipes. They had a piper, and they were gonna get damn good use out of him.

A hair dresser. No one looks good in this film. I mean No One. Well, ok, Oliver Reed and Brian Blessed look decent. Everyone else looks like they ran out of shampoo about a week ago and just decided to let it air dry.

A decent script. Most of the scenes consist of long-winded conversations during which you can easily get up, go to the bathroom, make some more popcorn, and catch up on your email before the end of the scene.

Charisma. I’m unclear why anyone would want to watch this cast. Except Brian Blessed, who is always a pleasure to watch, because you get to relive the best moments of Flash Gordon. All two of them.

But, in the film’s favor, it did have one heck of a good Spider Wrangler. He was so good, they used that spider twice, just in case you didn’t get the message the first time.

 

Oh, and There’s This Little Gem of a Prop

 

Want to Know More?

You could watch this film on Amazon, but honestly, if you’re really in need of curing your insomnia, do it for free at Youtube.

If you want to know more about Robert the Bruce, a good place to start is Michael Penman’s Robert the Bruce: King of the Scots. It’s a bit long, and some readers find it a little too academic. If you want something more readable, consider Ronald MacNair Scott’s Robert the Bruce. Scott isn’t a scholar, but a novelist, and tells the story well with a minimum of mistakes.

Braveheart: Not Quite What We’d Expect to Hear Before a Battle

Tags

Battle of Falkirk, Braveheart, Braveheart Speech, Freedom!, Medieval Scotland, Mel Gibson, Randall Wallace, William Wallace

Mel Gibson’s William Wallace is famous for giving a stirring speech. Before the battle of Stirling Bridge, he gives this somewhat famous speech in which he tells his troops that they are fighting for freedom, although he never explains what freedom means, except that it can’t be taken away.

In reality, we don’t actually know what he said before the battle of Stirling Bridge. Since he wasn’t the main commander, he probably didn’t make any sort of address to the troops as a whole, but he might have said something to his own men. So the speech we get in the film is entirely the product of screenwriter Randall Wallace’ imagination. It’s his idea of what Wallace would have said if he were talking to a bunch of late-20th century Americans watching a movie about medieval Scotland.

So Gibson’s Wallace is famous for a speech the real Wallace didn’t make. As it happens, the real Wallace is famous for a battle speech that he reportedly gave before the battle of Falkirk. An English source, the Flores Historiarum (“The Flowers of History”), has the following to say about Wallace at Falkirk:

“when [Wallace] had collected an army of Scots in the battle of Falkirk against the King of England, and had seen that he could not resist the powerful army of the king, [he] said to the Scots, “Behold I have brought you into a ring, now carol and dance as well as you can,” and so fled himself from the battle, leaving his people to be slain by the sword…”

It’s hard to know how historically accurate this quote is. The author of this portion of the Flores is unknown, but he was almost certainly an English monk at Westminster, writing in the early 14th century. So it’s possible that the source of this quote was someone present at Falkirk, most likely on the English side. But it could also just be derisive gossip among the English. The author is pretty clearly hostile to the Scots; he also refers to Wallace as a “son of Belial” and mentions the various atrocities Wallace committed during his campaign against the English.So our source for this quote is not exactly an impartial commentator. On the other hand, the colloquial comparison of a battle to a party with singing and dancing rings true.

Nevertheless, this quote reputedly by Wallace is quite famous in Britain. It circulates in many forms

“I have brought you to the ring, now dance if you can.”

“I have brought you to the ring, now dance the best you can.”

“I have brought you to the ring, hop if you can.”

“I have brought you to the revel, now see if you can dance.”

“I have brocht ye to the ring, now see gif ye can dance.”

What all of these variations are expressing is the idea, which seems true, that Wallace did not want to fight at Falkirk, but his men insisted on a confrontation with the English.  The quotes capture a sense of weary resignation and Wallace’ awareness that his forces were not strong enough to defeat the English.

It’s pretty obvious why Braveheart leaves out this famous quote. It’s not exactly the sort of rousing speech we would expect to hear a general give his troops. In fact, it’s rather demotivating and raises the possibility that Wallace lost at Falkirk because he wasn’t a very inspiring general. Furthermore, as I said, it clearly expresses the idea that Wallace didn’t want to fight, which is not the way the film wants to depict Wallace. Gibson’s Wallace is eager for battle, makes a suicidal charge at Edward, and has to be dragged off the field, when in reality, Wallace fled the field when his men were clearly losing. That was the smart, tactical choice to make in that situation, but to modern audiences it smacks strongly of cowardice.

So rather than choosing to show audiences the complexity of the situation Wallace was dealing with at Falkirk or show him struggling with an all-too-human sense of despair, the film falls back on a standard Hollywood trope of Heroic Individuality, in which the hero fights to the bitter end, even when doing so is foolish and pointless.

This, to me, is a good example of what I find so frustrating about Hollywood historical films. Randall Wallace and Mel Gibson had a chance to depict the complicated choices and emotions that the real William Wallace was dealing with. They had an opportunity to explore a real man dealing with real problems and trying to make the best of a bad situation. In other words, they had a chance to show this historical figure as a real human being. Instead, they went for a simplistic cliché that offers no nuance and no real life lesson for the audience and simply relies on empty sentiment and a caricature of  masculinity as being about nothing but brute force and raw determination.

On the other hand, I can see why Scottish nationalists prefer Wallace’ made up speech to the one widely attributed to him. It’s definitely the more inspiring speech, and it’s one that certainly can be applied to the modern debate on Scottish independence. Both the Yes and No sides have made Braveheart an issue, with claims that the film’s macho attitude is part of the reason that more Scottish men than women favor independence. Others have disputed these claims. But if there’s any truth behind the claims, I find it unfortunate that some Scots might make a major political choice based on a Hollywood fantasy of a Scottish hero rather than on the actual man.

Braveheart: How to Hate Braveheart A Little Less

Tags

Blind Harry, Blind Harry’s Wallace, Braveheart, Medieval Scotland, Mel Gibson, Movies I Hate, Randall Wallace, William Wallace

I hate Braveheart (1995, dir. Mel Gibson). I make no secret of this fact. I find poorly written, laughably inaccurate, and offensive in a number of ways. But that’s mostly because of how badly it mangles the historical facts it claims to be depicting. But there’s another way to approach this film, one that makes it less problematic for scholars, and that’s as an adaptation of a piece of medieval literature.

Most people assume that Braveheart is based directly on the historical events it purports to depict. But it’s not. It’s actually based on a late 15^th century Scottish poem known as Blind Harry’s Wallace. So what the film claims is a historical movie is actually an adaptation of a medieval poem about Scottish history; it’s not history at all. This isn’t the only time that Mel Gibson has pulled this trick. His Passion of the Christ (2004) is not, as most people assume, based on the Gospel narratives about the life of Jesus Christ; it’s actually based on The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, an early 19^th century account of the visions of a German nun, Anne Catherine Emmerich (who, perhaps not coincidentally, was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2004). There’s some uncertainty whether she or a poet she knew, Clemens Brentano, was the real author of the text, but a close comparison of the film to the Gospel narratives and The Dolorous Passion demonstrates that a number of scenes were clearly taken from the latter text.

Blind Harry’s Wallace

The Wallace of Blind Harry is a long narrative poem in rhyming couplets, written sometimes around 1479 or a little later by a Scottish makar (court poet) known as Blind Harry. Little is known of Blind Harry (or ‘Hary’, as the Scottish records often spell his name), other than that he was employed at the court of Scottish king James IV; he seems to have died in 1492 or 93. The earliest surviving edition of his Wallace dates from 1488, but internal evidence suggests a composition date about a decade earlier.

Blind Harry

Blind Harry claims that his source for the poem was a biography of William Wallace written by John Blair, a childhood friend of Wallace who became his personal chaplain and confessor and later supposedly wrote his biography at the request of the bishop of Dunkeld. There is no evidence for such a text actually existing, but it is not implausible that a Scottish bishop might have commissioned such a work. However, medieval authors were known for inventing sources in an attempt to make their fiction more respectable, so the fact that this biography is unknown outside of Blind Harry’s reference to it makes its existence dubious. Harry clearly mined another narrative poem, John Barbour’s Bruce, for material, often reassigning deeds done by Robert Bruce to William Wallace. Harry also seems to have borrowed things from the Alliterative Morte Arthure, particularly Wallace’ penchant for miraculous dreams, and from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. So the Wallace is not really an accurate historical account.

The Wallace (which, if you want, you can read here, either in its original Scots English or in a modern synopsis) depicts William Wallace as a classic example of a late medieval chivalrous knight. The emphasis is on Wallace’ amazing prowess and his deep hatred to the English, who are depicted as the natural enemies of the Scots.

Harry opens by inventing a family history for his hero, but there’s little evidence that it’s accurate; he names Wallace’ father as Malcolm, whereas in one of Wallace’ own writings, he says his father’s name was Alan. The name Wallace, incidentally, means ‘foreigner’ or ‘Welshman’, which suggests that his ancestry was not of Scottish origin. Wallace’ father sent him to his uncle for education at Dundee.

Much of the early portion of the poem is given over to stories of Wallace killing Englishmen. Eventually he meets and marries a noblewoman. (As an aside, the 18^th century edition of the poem that I’m working from names this woman as ‘Miranda’, a name that is otherwise unattested in medieval sources. Most scholars credit William Shakespeare with the invention of this name is his Tempest. The name, however, is Latin; it means “wonderful, admirable”. So either Shakespeare did not invent the name or the 18^th century editor inserted the name into the text, perhaps because Blind Harry didn’t give the woman a name. Either way, Miranda would have been a much better name than ‘Murron’, which makes the woman sound like a cattle plague.)

Wallace prepares to make war against England. Miranda begs to go with him because she fears the evil English Sheriff Heselrig, who killed her brother. Unfortunately, while Wallace is off making plans to fight, Heselrig kills Miranda. This provokes Wallace into slaughtering all the Englishmen in Lanarkshire. This is quite typical of Blind Harry’s William Wallace; he slaughters at the drop of a hat. Sometimes he has good reason to, as here, but earlier in the poem, he kills a Englishman for trying to take his knife.

Wallace defeats King Edward several times and conquers various castles before defeating Edward at Stirling Bridge. He drives the English out of Scotland, and then marches into England, sieges and captures York, and beheads Edward’s nephew, the governor of the city.

Then the unnamed English queen (who would be Edward I’s wife) comes to Wallace and tries to make peace. Wallace refuses because he doesn’t trust ether her or Edward, but she gives him a large sum of gold anyway, basically because he’s the hero of the poem. Wallace wanders off into France for a while, then returns to Scotland and beats the English several more times, in the process massacring a hundred men who have taken shelter in a church, as well as eighty Englishmen returning from a wedding. Did I mention that Wallace really dislikes the English?

The English defeat the Scots at Falkirk, mostly because a Scottish noble tricks Wallace into sitting out the battle (so Edward wins at Falkirk, but not by beating Wallace). Wallace confronts Robert Bruce, who fails to persuade him to submit to Edward; instead Wallace persuades Bruce to stop supporting Edward. Wallace returns to France, where he conquers Edward’s French lands, but in the meantime, Edward conquers all of Scotland with the help of a treacherous Scottish noble.

Wallace returns to Scotland, more fighting ensues, and then Wallace is betrayed and captured. Robert Bruce returns to Scotland and, inspired by Wallace, takes up the rebellion. Wallace is taken to London where he is executed after being given a comforting glimpse of a psalter he used to carry.

If this summary seems long, I’m condensing a LOT. Harry might have been blind, but he certainly wasn’t mute.

The number of factual errors in the Wallace are staggering. Wallace only actually fought two major battles, he never sacked York or killed the king’s nephew, he never met Edward’s wife (since Edward’s first wife was dead and he had not yet remarried at this point in the poem), he never conquered Edward’s French holdings, and so on.

But from the summary, it ought to be clear how much of this material found its way into Braveheart, including Wallace’ education at the hands of his uncle, the killing of Wallace’ wife, the siege of York and the beheading of Edward’s nephew, Wallace’ defeat at Falkirk being attributed to treachery, Wallace’ role in inspiring Robert Bruce, and the general Anglophobia of the poem. In the Wallace, Wallace has miraculous dreams, whereas in Braveheart, Wallace has a dreamlike encounter with his dead wife, and the comforting psalter at his execution is turned into a comforting glimpse of his dead wife. Since none of these events are rooted in history, it’s clear that the screenwriter, Randall Wallace, was drawing off of Blind Harry’s work. He condensed the narrative and removed all the references to things Robert Bruce actually accomplished later. He pared out the material about Wallace in France, and inserted the material about ‘Primae Noctis’ and Edward II’s homosexuality to make the English both more villainous and more pathetic.

Randall Wallace

Blind Harry has Wallace meet Edward I’s wife. Braveheart changes that to a meeting with Edward’s daughter-in-law and throws in a romance with her, never pausing to consider that this renders Wallace’s encounters with his dead wife rather problematic since he’s cheating on the wife who is coming back from the dead for him.

So while the film makes poor sense as history, it makes considerable sense as an adaptation of a late medieval poem. Why then was Braveheart marketed as based on history rather than based on Blind Harry’s Wallace? For three reasons, I think. First, Blind Harry’s Wallace isn’t a particularly well-known text; studio executives probably calculated, correctly, that there wasn’t a big market for seeing cinematic adaptations of obscure medieval Scottish poems. Second, Hollywood has understood for some time that modern audiences find ‘based on history’ to be a powerfully appealing marketing tactic. Finally, Blind Harry’s Wallace is based, albeit loosely, on history, so in a way, they’re just cutting out the intervening poem, even if that greatly obscures the historical facts.

Nevertheless, I find the idea that Braveheart is a cinematic adaptation of a fictional story comforting. It helps me watch the film without flying into a rage at its near constant glaring historical inaccuracies (Sharon Krossa counts 18 errors in the first two and half minutes of the film alone). What doesn’t work as history works to some extent as chivalrous romance. It’s still poorly written, laughably inaccurate, and offensive, but just less so. So next time you watch Braveheart (if you have to), watch it the way you’d watch the Errol Flynn Robin Hood or John Boorman’s Excalbur, as cinematic fiction, not cinematic history.

Want to Know More?

Blind Harry’s Wallace is readily available in paperback. It’s not really more accurate than Braveheart, but it’s a better work of fiction.

Braveheart: Why Braveheart is Actually a Porn Film

Tags

Braveheart, Droit du Seigneur, Edward II, Isabella of France, ius prima noctis, Medieval Scotland, Mel Gibson, Movies I Hate, Sophie Marceau, William Wallace

One of the frequently remarked-on inaccuracies of Braveheart (1995, dir. Mel Gibson) deals with Princess Isabella (Sophie Marceau). In the film, Isabella is an adult woman (her age is unclear; Marceau was 29 at the time, but Isabella seems to be younger, perhaps early 20s), who gets married to Prince Edward (the future Edward II) during the course of the film. She falls in love with Wallace (Mel Gibson), has sex with him, and at the end of the film taunts Edward I by telling him that she is carrying Wallace’ baby and that her child will eventually supplant Edward II as king.

Sophie Marceau as Isabella

In reality, Isabella was born in 1295, and since the film is set around 1297, that means she was 2 years old and living in France at the time. She married Edward II in 1308, at the age of 13, and hadn’t even been to England when Wallace rebelled. So this romance is entirely fictitious. It’s easy to discount this as simply the sort of obligatory romance that every Hollywood action film has to include; Gibson, in the DVD commentary track, dismisses it as just exactly this. But if we assumed that, we’d be entirely wrong. The romance between Isabella and Wallace is, in fact, critical to the entire film; without it, this movie couldn’t have been made in 1990s Hollywood.

Trigger Warning: This post discusses rape.

A Bummer of an Action Film On the surface, Wallace’ story is poor fodder for Hollywood. He was a rebel in a political dispute that happened 700 years ago that Americans would not have had any real understanding of. He had one major military success that wasn’t fully his, got defeated at his next major battle, and was eventually captured, tortured and executed. The end.

In other words, Wallace lost. His rebellion achieved comparatively little of lasting impact, although it helped to stir up Scottish resistance against the English and laid seeds for Robert Bruce to harvest more than a decade later. That’s not the sort of story that Hollywood likes to tell. It rarely offers films in which the hero dies at the end (among recent action films, Gladiator is the only other one I can think of off the top of my head), but if the hero dies, he must certainly die victorious.

So how can one pull a serious victory out of Wallace’ story? The film certainly builds up the idea that Wallace inspired Bruce to make his rebellion, but that’s still a fairly intangible sort of victory by Hollywood standards. To supplement that, Braveheart’s screen-writer Randall Wallace (note the last name) added the Wallace-Isabella romance so that Wallace can impregnate Isabella and thereby eventually supplant the villainous Edward I and his pathetic son Edward II.

Quite simply, Wallace wins by knocking up Isabella. His military victory is entirely irrelevant to the story, except insofar as it inspires Isabella’s love. In other words, what actually matters in the film in terms of the ending is Wallace’s sexual prowess, not his military prowess. Without the Wallace-Isabella romance, Wallace simply loses, and that’s not acceptable in a Hollywood film. So while the film pretends to be a war movie, it’s actually a porn film in which the whole plot is a contest to see who’s get to boink the leading lady.  

Lights! Camera! *Ahem* Action! Once you start to realize what the real plot of the film is, it begins to read very differently. It’s really about a competition to see who is more sexually potent, the Scottish or the English. Early on, King Edward (Patrick McGoohan) announces that “the problem with Scotland is that it’s full of Scots!” and then declares that he will remedy this problem by reinstituting what the film calls ius prima noctis. This “right of the first night”, more properly called by the French term droit du seigneur (“the lord’s right”), was a fictitious notion that medieval nobles had the legal right to sleep with a peasant woman on her marriage night before her husband did. It’s completely fictitious; no medieval noble every enjoyed a formal legal right like that. But as the movie presents it, it is this fact that triggers the Scottish rebellion. The Scots rebel because the English want to sleep with Scottish women.

But the film thinks that this mass rape of Scottish women is not enough to have inspired Wallace; his rebellion has to be personal. So in the film, Wallace rebels not because of ius prima noctis but because an English soldier tries to rape Wallace’s wife, Murron (Catherine McCormack). The soldier is unsuccessful; Murron fights so hard he’s unable to accomplish his goal, but she gets arrested and executed. So the film doubly determines the film’s rebellion as being about the English desire to have sex with Scottish women.

That sets up a theme of sexual competition between the Scots and the English, in which the issue is which side is sexually superior. And the answer to that question is fairly clear. The Scots are sexually skilled and the English are sexually inept. The English soldier fails to conquer Murron. Later in the film, Isabella’s handmaiden comments that she spent the whole night with an English noble, but all he did was talk, because “the English do not know what to do with their tongues”. In contrast, Wallace is so sexually compelling, Isabella falls in love with him before she meets him; in one of the few actually medieval-feeling details of the film, the first time she hears his name, she is so overwhelmed she has to sit down. And, of course, Wallace spends an awful lot of time waving that anachronistic great sword around…

Ok, so let’s get all Freudian. The film repeatedly invokes sexual imagery during its battle scenes. I’ve already explored how badly wrong the film’s version of the battle of Stirling Bridge is. Instead of the historical battle, the film’s battle is structured as a series of efforts to prove sexual prowess. The Scots taunt the English by flipping up their kilts and displaying their penises; the English, being dressed differently, can’t do the same. Instead, they respond with a couple volleys of arrows that mostly fail to penetrate the Scots, although one Scot is hit in the ass. The Scots respond with further sexual taunting, and the English retaliate by making a rather foolish lance change. Yet this attempt to penetrate the Scots also fails, because the Scots successfully penetrate the English with their spears. During the battle, there’s a brief shot of a Scotsman driving his sword into an Englishman’s groin, symbolically penetrating and castrating him at the same time.

Lest you think I’m reading too much into this, shortly before the battle scene, Wallace meets with his men in a forest to discuss strategy. Hamish, one of Wallace’s lieutenants, makes a joke about the size of his dick, just after Wallace looks up at the long, straight tree-trunks around them and hits upon the idea of making them into spears. So the film pretty much tells us that the spears are really Scottish cocks.

Another example of the film’s Freudianism comes a little after the battle of Stirling. Wallace’ men lay siege to York (which didn’t happen), and they take a battering ram to the gate. They struggle to force their way in, especially since the English are pouring flaming oil on them, but Wallace jumps in to lend a hand. A moment later, the gates are knocked in and there is an eruption of fire. I dare you to watch that scene and not think of ejaculation.

See what I mean?

So for Braveheart, war is all about sex. Wallace is fighting Edward I, but he’s not just fighting him militarily. The two men are locked in a competition to see who gets to sleep with Princess Isabella. The film repeatedly suggests that Edward I has carnal thoughts about his daughter-in-law. In fact, when he declares the revival of ius prima noctis, he does so while he’s looking straight at Isabella. His lust for her inspires the actions that lead to the Scottish rebellion. But Edward doesn’t get to sleep with Isabella; Wallace does. Edward may fantasize about boning her, but Wallace is the one who actually knocks her up. That’s why Isabella’s pregnancy is such a powerful symbol; Wallace gets to have what Edward wants, and the long-term consequences are that Edward’s line is supplanted by Wallace’ seed.

And Here’s Where the Film Gets Ugly In many Hollywood films, the female lead is the prize for victory. But not in Braveheart. Wallace gets Isabella, but he doesn’t get to keep her, because he’s executed. Instead of being the prize, Isabella is just a tool for Wallace’ victory (along with Wallace’ tool, that is). The film treats her like a brood mare or a field to be plowed and sown with seed.

However, unlike her namesake in Ironclad, Isabella has some real agency. She chooses to offer Wallace strategic information, and at the end of the film she announces her intentions to destroy Edward I’s family line. The problem, however, is that her agency is entirely devoted to helping and avenging Wallace.

The film’s only other important female character, Wallace’s wife Murron (where the hell did Randall Wallace come up with that name? It makes her sound like a cattle disease. The woman’s real name was allegedly Marion.), is similarly devoted to Wallace. She is sexually faithful to him to the point of preferring death over being raped. Obviously a woman might make such a difficult choice even if she weren’t committed to her husband, but Murron’s fidelity is reinforced in other scenes. Her faithfulness is supernaturally strong; she returns to him twice after her death, both times to offer him reassurance at difficult moments. While the film is ambiguous about whether Wallace is just dreaming her up or whether her ghost is actually there, the overall impression is that she’s come back from the dead because of her love for him.

Murron, the first time she returns from the dead

So consider what the film has done with its two female characters. Wallace’s wife is intensely, supernaturally, faithful to him. She seemingly returns from the dead twice because even though she’s dead, she’s still his wife and he needs her. Wallace, however, feels no such obligation to Murron, because he sleeps with Isabella once Murron is dead. She is faithful to him even though he is not faithful to her, and her second visitation comes as he’s being executed, after he’s essentially cheated on her. So Murron is willing to ignore his infidelity, simply because she loves him. Braveheart is offering up a classic male sexual fantasy driven by the double-standard. Women exist to provide sex, love, and emotional support and so are expected to be committed to their man, while men are able to sleep around as they choose without losing their exclusive claim on their wives. When you put that together with the fact that Isabella’s entire purpose in the film is to get knocked up so Wallace can defeat her father-in-law, it seems clear that far from being romantic, Braveheart is actually quite misogynist and demeaning to women.

While We’re At It, Let’s Be Homophobic as Well But Isabella’s decision to commit herself to Wallace has a problem with it. She’s married to another man. Broadly speaking, Hollywood morality tends to frown on adultery. Most Hollywood films tend to do one of two things with adultery. Either it is a bad choice that usually leads to worse things like a decision to murder one’s spouse, and must therefore turn out badly and be punished, or it must be presented in a sympathetic light; the marriage has to be bad, the cuckolded spouse must be neglectful or abusive, and the other man has to be obviously a better choice morally. Since Isabella’s adultery has to be presented in a sympathetic light, it has to be clear to the audience that Isabella has a really good reason for cheating on her husband, Prince Edward.

And so the film makes the choice to depict Prince Edward as a classic example of the Hollywood Sissy. Braveheart’s Prince Edward (Peter Hanly) is a slightly-built, almost delicate man. He is far more interested in his boyfriend’s clothing than in either his new wife or in manly pursuits like warfare. He can’t be dragged away from his lover long enough to participate in political councils, so he sends his wife instead. At one point, Edward I throws his son’s boyfriend out a window; when Prince Edward tries to attack him, Edward bitch-slaps him and takes his knife away with contemptuous ease (symbolically castrating him, I suppose). All-in-all, Prince Edward is a pathetic little sissy boy.

He just wants to sing!

This is completely ahistorical. The actual Edward II was a tall, handsome, physically robust and athletic man. Among his hobbies were ditch-digging and brick-laying (rather odd hobbies for a medieval noble, but clearly evidence of his physicality). He loved swimming and rough-housing, and once seriously hurt one of his companions with rough play. At the battle of Bannockburn, when it became clear the English were losing, Edward had to be physically dragged off the field because he wanted to stay and fight. Whatever his sexual preferences might have been (and scholars still debate exactly what his relationships with Piers Gaveston and the Despensers were), it’s clear that the actual Edward was not the limp-wrist he is in Braveheart.

But the historical Edward won’t do. He’s too close to the sort of man the film wants to present Wallace as. Isabella’s choice to cheat on the historical Edward II would be more puzzling, so Randall Wallace and Mel Gibson resort to the oldest and most offensive stereotype of homosexuals Hollywood knows. (To be fair, however, Randall Wallace is not the only author to demonize Edward II; most historical novelists who choose to write about him do similar things.)

I dislike Braveheart because of its numerous historical inaccuracies, its anachronistic notions of ‘freedom’ and its rather simplistic narrative. I hate it because of its deeply-rooted misogyny and homophobia. Gibson demeans women, gays, and the English all so he can run around battlefields stabbing people with his enormous penis substitutes and live out a male fantasy of sexual potency and female devotion.

Years ago, during a class on medieval warfare, some students asked me what I thought about Braveheart. That question is a sure-fire way to sidetrack me for 20 minutes, and I gave them a condensed version of this analysis. A year later, I ran into one of the students from that class. He said, “I went back and rewatched Braveheart, and you’re completely right!” So go ahead, rewatch it and tell me whether you think I’m right. Because once you start to see how Freudian the film is, you can’t stop seeing it.

Want to Know More?

Braveheartis available on Amazon.

Kathryn Warner is pretty much the leading expert on Edward II, and her book on him, Edward II: The Unconventional Kingis one of the best things written about him, although I’m not convinced by her argument that he survived his eventual deposition. Her blog about Edward II is definitely worth a look if you want to know more about him than you ever thought possible.

I wish I could recommend a book about Isabella of France, but frankly everything I’ve seen written about her is complete crap. Stay away from Alison Weir’s book.

Braveheart: How Not to Dress Like a Medieval Scotsman

Tags

Bad Clothing, Braveheart, Medieval Europe, Medieval Scotland, Mel Gibson, Movies I Hate, Picts

If you google “Braveheart”, among the first couple images that come up are this:

Mel Gibson as Wallace in a great kilt

and this:

Gibson as Wallace in face paint

These images are some of the most immediately recognizable ones from the film. And, sadly, they’re complete crap in terms of historical accuracy.

What Medieval Scots Wore 13th century Scotsmen wore clothing that resembled what most northern and western Europeans wore in that period. Both men and women wore tunics (in Gaelic, a leine), a long, loose-fitting shirt that reached down to about the knee for men and about the ankle for women. A man might have worn an undertunic, while women typically wore a kirtle, a simple underdress like a loose slip; in both cases the undergarment would have extended slightly farther than the overgarment, showing below the hemline and the cuff. Men (and women in some circumstances) also wore ‘braies’, a rather baggy pair of shorts that generally reached to the knees or a bit lower. Men and women might also wear hose, footless leggings to keep the legs warm. (See Update.)

The man on the right is wearing braies, the one on the left wears hosen

These would typically have been of wool, and in general they would have been plain rather than patterned. For many they would have been undyed, and so would have been shades of off-white to brown. A very simple form of tartan may have existed in medieval Scotland (a very early example survives from the 3rd century AD, making it pre-medieval, but there’s no surviving evidence from the medieval period itself), but if tartan was worn in this period, it would have been a very simple checker pattern created with light and dark brown wool. So the fabric Wallace wears in the first picture is possible, although there is no evidence that such a fabric was actually produced or worn in medieval Scotland. What we think of today as ‘clan tartans’ were an invention of the 18th century; if medieval Scotmen wore any sort of tartan fabric, it would not have signified membership in a particular clan or family.

More importantly, however, kilts did not exist in the Middle Ages, in Scotland or anywhere else in Europe. The earliest kilts, known as ‘belted plaid’ or ‘great kilts’, evolved out of cloaks worn over tunics. In other words, like the toga, the great kilt is a form of outer garment, worn outside to help keep one warm in cold, wet weather. It was not worn into battle; when early modern Scotsmen prepared for combat, they took off the great kilt and charged into the fight wearing just their leine. Also, they did not belt their kilts in anything remotely like the way kilts are worn in the film.

Any halfway knowledgable costume designer working on a film about medieval Scotland would know that kilts aren’t medieval, and if he or she didn’t know, it would be an easy fact to look up. In this case, the costume designer was Charles Knode, a highly experienced costumer (one of his first major jobs was 1979’s Life of Brian). And yet, despite this, a majority of the Celts (both Scots and Irish) in this film are shown wearing tartan great kilts. So, just to make sure we’re clear about what’s wrong with this, imagine a film set during the American War of Independence. All the American rebels are shown dressed in 20th century business suits, and they’ve put the belts of their pants on over the coats of their suits. How in God’s name did an experienced costume designer make such as massive set of errors?

In order to understand films, it’s critical to realize that virtually everything that appears on screen is the result of active choices that someone made. With the exception of goofs like a catching a boom mike in the shot, what you see on the screen is the product of conscious choices. Set designers, set decorators, costume designers, hair and make-up designers, directors, screenwriters, and actors all make decisions about what they are going to put on screen. So at some point Charles Knode made a decision to produce clothing that he almost certainly knew was completely incorrect. Why?

As the author of Threat Quality Press points out, the answer is not history but historicity. The people making the film didn’t want to make an historically accurate film about medieval Scotland; they wanted to make a film that fits people’s ideas of what medieval Scotland looked like. What they wanted was not actual history, but the impression of history. The one thing that most people know about the Scots is that they used to wear kilts. So Charles Knode decided (or perhaps was told by Gibson) to clothe his medieval Scots in kilts. And he did it well enough that most casual viewers will assume that what they are seeing is correct. Those American revolutionaries might be wearing mis-belted 20th century business suits, but they look plausible.

Can I be in your movie, Mr Gibson? I look sort of generically medieval too

The Infamous Scottish Mullets But it’s not just the clothing that’s completely wrong. Take another look at that second pic, the close-up of Gibson as Wallace. He’s wearing an unkempt 20th century mullet with a couple braids in it. This is fairly typical of how the Scots and Irish are styled in this film. Some of the men have feathers in their hair. There’s absolutely no evidence that medieval Scotmen wore their hair long (which would probably have struck contemporaries as a very feminine style), nor is there evidence that they braided their hair or tied things into it. And even if they did wear their hair long, they certainly would have combed it. Wallace isn’t wearing a traditional Scottish hairstyle; he’s wearing a late-20th century biker or stoner dude’s hairstyle.

Why? Because it makes him look masculine by contemporary standards, while at the same time conveying both untamed wildness and a premodern primitiveness. It enables male viewers of the film to feel a sense of kinship with Wallace and his band of plucky Scottish rebels. It makes him seem more contemporary and therefore accessible.

As a basic rule of thumb, assume that the hairstyles you see in historical films are wrong; the women are almost always styled to be attractive by modern tastes not to be accurate, and the men are just a little less likely to be styled that way.

So those American revolutionaries in their mis-belted business suits? They’re all wearing high-and-tights.

And Then We Get to the Make-up

Just for some variety, another picture of Gibson as Wallace

Of course the thing that stands out the most is that the men are wearing blue face paint. At this point in my analysis, part of me just wants to bang his head on the table and scream “WTF?” But, because I’m committed to helping you make sense of this historical train-wreck of a film, I will swallow my pain and soldier bravely into the lion’s den.

In case it needs saying, medieval Scotsmen did not wear face paint. The inspiration for this make-up choice probably came from some ideas about the Picts, one of the original, pre-Scottish indigenous peoples of Scotland. There’s a lot to be said about the Picts, but I’m not going to say it here; I’ll save it for The Eagle perhaps. But a very quick digression to the Roman period is necessary.

The Scots aren’t, in origin, Scottish. They’re Irish. They originally came over from Ireland to Dal Riata (western Scotland) in  the 6th and 7th centuries. Central Scotland, especially the highland region, was occupied by a people called the Picts, whose ethnic background is still a matter of some debate; some scholars have seen them as a branch of the Celtic peoples, while others feel they are the indigenous, non-Celtic peoples. The ancient Romans tended to use the term ‘Pict’ to refer to all the peoples north of Hadrian’s Wall, probably lumping together a couple of different ethnic groups and cultures. The term ‘Pict’ seems to have been coined in the 3nd century AD, and it means ‘Painted Ones’, at least assuming that the term means what it means in Latin; it’s possible that it’s a Latinization of their name for themselves, in which case we have no idea what it means.

Exactly why they referred to the Picts this way is unclear. One 1st century AD source says that the people of Briton (almost certainly referring to low-land Britons like the Iceni) painted themselves, but it’s not clear that the author actually knew anything about the group we’re calling the Picts. One or two later sources make reference to the Picts painting or tattooing themselves, but that might be because the term ‘Pict’ suggested a people who did these things. It’s important to understand that the Romans had deep contempt for people who voluntarily tattooed themselves; tattooing was a mark of barbarism and social inferiority, something Romans sometimes did to slaves and criminals. In other words, calling these people ‘Picts’ is essentially calling them ‘Savages’. Maybe it means that the Picts painted or more likely tattooed themselves, but maybe it just means that the Romans thought they were a barbaric people. Remembers that during World Wars I and II, the British liked to call the Germans ‘the Huns’, not because the Germans were of Hunnish descent, but because it connotes savagery.

So maybe the Picts liked to wear war paint, or had elaborate facial tattoos. We can’t prove it, but it’s not a wild historical error to show Roman-era Picts decorated that way. But guess what? We’re not dealing with Roman-era Picts in this film. We’re dealing with 13th century Scotsmen, who are descended from a people who displaced, conquered and completely absorbed the Picts. There is absolutely no evidence for Pictish influence on 13th century Scottish culture. By the 11th century the Picts had been completely assimilated to Scottish culture, and they left only archaeological remains and a few hard-to-understand documents. There is absolutely no historical evidence that 13th century Scotsmen painted their faces. But you know who does paint their faces? These guys:

Yup; American sports fans are pretty well-known for this sort of thing. Mel Gibson has given us 13th century Scots made up like 20th century sports fans. And he did it for the same reason that he gave himself a mullet. It makes his character more appealing and accessible to the target audience. He turned the battle of Stirling Bridge into a sports match and showed you which guys to cheer for by painting their faces like sports fans. So those American revolutionaries with their mis-belted business suits and their high-and-tights? They’re wearing Native American war paint.

And you know what’s even worse? The lead make-up artists for Braveheart, (Peter Frampton, Paul Pattison, and Lois Burwell) won an Oscar for their work on this film. Let’s be charitable to the Academy and propose that they gave the award for all of the blood the make-up team painted on Gibson’s face, or because they were just caught up in the excitement surrounding a high-grossing film, and not because they were too dumb or coked-up to notice that the most visible make-up in the film was a thousand years out of place and on the wrong guys.

In all fairness, that’s good blood

I’m just going to curl up in a fetal ball now and quietly weep.

Update: A friend who read this argued to me that Gibson had almost certainly ordered Charles Knode to dress the Scots in kilts. He said that this is a common problem for costume designers, who often know what clothing would be correct but are then over-ridden by directors for reasons of historicity.

I agree that there is a very strong possibility that this is true (and I even suggest it at one point). However, Knode was the man who got the credit for the costuming, and he got an Oscar nomination (although, in what might be a surprising fit of historical clarity on the Academy’s part, he didn’t win), so I think he deserves his share of the blame on this point. While Gibson made a stinker of a film, it wasn’t entirely his fault; he needed a lot of help. As Halle Berry once said about Catwoman, “you don’t win a Razzie without a lot of help from a lot of people…In order to give a really bad performance like I did, you need a lot of bad actors around you.” (By the way, give her speech a look; it’s quite funny. After Braveheart, I needed a good laugh.)

Update: After a comment I received, I did a little more digging and found that 13th and early 14th century hosen were more likely to be footed than footless.

Braveheart: The Scottish Movie

Tags

Braveheart, Edward I, Falkirk, Freedom!, Hugh Cressingham, Medieval Europe, Medieval Scotland, Mel Gibson, Military Stuff, Movies I Hate, Robert Bruce, Stirling Bridge, William Wallace

When Mel Gibson released his Braveheart (1995, dir. Mel Gibson), it proved a worldwide hit. It earned five Academy Awards, and became probably the most successful film about the Middle Ages ever made. Almost 20 years after the fact, a very sizable percentage of my students have seen it. It is also one of the most historically-inaccurate films ever made and a film largely reviled by professional medievalists. Like 300, we’re gonna be feasting on this film for multiple posts. So let’s begin, shall we?

The Scottish Wars of Independence

The political circumstances around Wallace’s rebellion are extremely complex, and can only be summarized here. In 1286, the Scottish king Alexander made the mistake of riding his horse down a rocky slope during a storm, breaking his neck in the process. He left no direct heirs other than a young grand-daughter who died 4 years later, which triggered a major political crisis in Scotland. 13 different nobles put forward claims to the Scottish throne. The two leading contenders were John Balliol and Robert Bruce (often incorrectly termed ‘Robert the Bruce’, a corruption of his French name, Robert de Brus).

Because Scotland was heading for a civil war over this issue, the Scottish nobility invited Edward I of England to arbitrate the dispute. Edward demanded that all of the competitors acknowledge him as the overlord of Scotland. Most of them reluctantly accepted this demand, which was not as outrageous as it sounds today, since Edward’s great-grandfather Henry II had enjoyed this position; in Edward’s view, he was simply claiming a right that had slipped over the past two reigns. In 1292, Edward issued a ruling in favor of John Balliol, a ruling accepted by a majority of the Scottish nobility.

A portrait thought to represent Edward I

In the years following, Edward treated Balliol as a vassal rather than an equal, and eventually in 1296, Balliol renounced his homage. Edward responded by invading southern Scotland and defeating the Scots at the battle of Dunbar. Balliol surrendered soon after. Edward deposed him and sent him into captivity, and proceeded to take control of much of Scotland.

The Scots, understandably, disliked this, and bristled at English rule. In 1297, rebellions broke out in numerous parts of Scotland. Andrew de Moray (or Andrew Murray) seized control of Moray in northern Scotland and began conquering northeastern Scotland in the name of Balliol. About the same time, William Wallace rebelled and killed the sheriff of Lanarkshire in southern Scotland. Wallace’ rebellion struggled to catch up to Moray’s lead; it’s important to realize that at this point, Moray was the leader of the movement, not Wallace.

Edward responded by sending troops into Scotland. He also sent his vassal Robert Bruce, but Bruce chose to side with the rebels. On September 11^th, 1297, the English forces, led by John de Warenne and Hugh Cressingham, encountered the joint forces of Moray and Wallace at Stirling Bridge. The Scots took up a position on boggy ground at the north end of the bridge over the River Forth. A sizeable advance force of English infantry and several hundred cavalry under the leadership of Cressingham advanced over the bridge, but then got slowed down by the boggy ground. The Scottish forces seized control of the north end of the bridge and effectively cut the advance force off from the rest of the army. Because of the narrowness of the bridge, the English were unable to get the rest of their army across the river, with the result that the advance force was slaughtered. Warenne chose to retreat, ordering the destruction of the bridge. The unfortunate Cressingham was killed and his body flayed; legend holds that Wallace had a baldrick made out of his skin. Andrew Moray suffered fatal injuries in the battle and died a few weeks later, leaving Wallace as the dominant figure in the war. Wallace invaded northern England and plundered it. After that, he was knighted and appointed Guardian of Scotland.

Modern Stirling. Note the river–it’s going to be important.

Chris Brown, in his William Wallace: The True Story of Braveheart, offers a somewhat different interpretation of the battle based on the idea that the bridge opened out onto a narrow spit of land between two bends in the river. In his view, what the Scots did was simply occupy the neck of the spit, preventing the English from continuing their crossing and forcing the cavalry back into the infantry. In this view, it was not the Scots who prevented the cavalry from retreating, but the English infantry and the narrowness of the bridge.  It’s a plausible scenario. The chief problem is that archaeologists have not yet identified the location of the bridge, which makes a definitive interpretation of the battle difficult. There is also disagreement over whether the English made a second attempt at crossing the bridge or not.

This is essentially Brown’s reconstruction of the battle. Other reconstructions put the bridge at the bend by the word ‘river’

The primary Scottish tactic during the war was the pike schiltrom (sometimes called a ‘hedgehog’). This was a formation in which a large number of men armed with pikes (essentially long spears) positioned in a circular or square formation with men facing outward in all directions. This presents a wall of pikes no matter what direction the schiltrom is approached from, and since horses will not run into an unmoving object, it provided very good defense against the dominant knightly cavalry of the 13^th century. At Stirling Bridge, the Scottish pikemen charged to the bridge and then formed up a schiltrom, thus effectively separating the two halves of the English army. (If you prefer Brown’s reconstruction, they formed their schiltrom at the neck of the spit.)

However, the schiltrom was essentially a static, defensive formation. Once it had formed up, it could not move quickly because it was only effective as long as it maintained its outward-facing orientation; to move, men on one side would have to walk backwards while keeping in formation. Under Brown’s reconstruction, it could have advanced slowly, since it would not have had to defend its rear, but even if it was entirely forward-facing, it would have to maintain its close formation.

The schiltrom was part of the so-called Infantry Revolution of the 14th century; in the decades after Wallace, it was to help drastically reduce the effectiveness of cavalry. But Wallace and his men were at the forefront of this development, before people had really figured out how to best use pikes.

Stirling Bridge hurt Edward’s war effort, but it was hardly a decisive battle. In the long run, it changed very little strategically. In 1298, Edward came north with another army. Initially, Wallace adopted guerrilla tactics, harassing Edward’s forces but not giving battle. Edward contemplated falling back to Edinburgh but then he got word that Wallace was encamped at Falkirk just a few miles away. Wallace seems to have wanted to retreat from the English forces, which substantially outnumbered his troops, but his men, apparently grown overconfident, insisted on fighting. Wallace took up a position between a woods and a small river. Before the battle, Wallace is reported to have told his men, “I have brought you to the (dancing) ring, hop (dance) if you can.” Not exactly an inspiring speech.

Wallace’ infantry were formed into schiltroms, supplemented by a modest force of cavalry and archers. Edward had a significant force of cavalry and a large number of longbowmen, as well as a sizeable force of infantry.

The English cavalry scattered the Scottish archers but could not penetrate the schiltroms. The Scottish cavalry attempted a counter-attack, but were badly outnumbered by the English cavalry and broke and fled. Then Edward brought forward his archers and proceeded to demolish the schiltroms, which were unable to respond effectively to missile fire without losing their formation. Once the Scottish pikemen had been substantially thinned out, the cavalry charged in and finished them off. Wallace fled into the woods. His reputation ruined, he resigned the Guardianship of Scotland.

The second phase of Falkirk, after the Scottish archers and cavalry were dispersed

Over the next several years, Edward gradually got the upper hand in Scotland. Bruce submitted to Edward in 1301. In 1304, after Wallace was defeated again in a minor encounter, most of the Scottish leadership surrendered, although Wallace did not. Finally in 1305, Wallace was captured near Glasgow. He was put on trial, found guilty, and publicly executed; he was hanged, cut down while still alive, emasculated, disemboweled, beheaded, and cut into four pieces. His head was put on a spike at the Tower Bridge, and his limbs were sent to Scotland for display. That brought Wallace’ rebellion to an end, but not the Wars of Independence.

It’s important to realize that there is no evidence that William Wallace was a particularly skilled general. He only ever fought two major battles, and the victory at Stirling Bridge may have been due as much to Moray’s leadership as Wallace’. He was more successful at guerrilla warfare than open-field battles. At best, Stirling Bridge suggests that he was capable of finding a intelligent way to minimize the English advantage, but attacking when the enemy is disorganized and in a bad position does not require particular genius, just the ability to take advantage of an opportunity. He was smart enough to realize that he was unlikely to win at Falkirk, but lacked the leadership skills to get his men to obey him. In the end, Wallace was a failure as a general; his major contribution to Scottish history was in helping start the process of resistance to English rule, not in delivering a major victory.

Braveheart’s Battle of Stirling Bridge

Braveheart offers versions of both Stirling Bridge and Falkirk, but they’re very different from the historical battles. The first battle takes place on a small plain with low hills and a forest behind the English. There is no river or bridge in sight, and the ground is firm, rather than boggy. Wallace (Moray never even appears in the film) arrays his infantry in a simple line. He instructs his small cavalry force to ride off; in reality this is a flanking maneuver, but it’s intended to trick the English into thinking the cavalry has fled. The English command a mixed force of cavalry, archers, and infantry.

I know there’s a river around here somewhere…

The English commander (who I’m going to assume is  Hugh de Cressingham; I’ve watched this movie several times and I’m never clear on this question, but perhaps I’ve just missed something) orders his archers to open fire on the Scottish position, who are taunting them and flashing their genitals at them. The archers inflict a few casualties, but the Scottish miraculously parry most of the arrows with their shields. This is extremely unlikely.

After a second round of Scottish taunting and English arrows failing to achieve very much, Wallace’ cavalry rides off and Cressingham orders a cavalry charge (which is done with a properly dressed line, in contrast to Olivier’s Henry V). The Scots, however, have a trick up their kilts; they have secretly brought pikes with them, which are laid on the ground where the English don’t see them. Thus the cavalry winds up charging not a disorganized mass of general infantry troops but a pike wall that kills their horses and shatters their charge. The Scots massacre the English cavalry, at which point Cressingham panics and orders the infantry to charge in and a formless brawl ensues as both sides charge each other. Then the Scottish cavalry reappears, and the English forces are completely routed; Cressingham is decapitated in battle.

Could a battle like this have happened around 1300? Yes, given a few assumptions. One of the basic rules of medieval warfare is that the side that advances its infantry is at a disadvantage, since the infantry is likely to lose formation (you can see this when the two infantries charge each other at a full run). So the Scots taunt the English in an effort to get them to advance. Instead, Cressingham orders his longbowmen to attack the Scots, who as infantry are going to be particularly vulnerable to archery (they either have to stand their ground and take the hits or advance and risk losing formation). After two flights the English are winning; the Scots are slowly taking casualties and have done no harm to the English. Cressingham’s obvious tactic is to continue exactly what he’s doing because it’s working.

But then we reach the first assumption; for this battle to happen, Cressingham must be a complete idiot and overconfident. When the Scottish cavalry rides off, he foolishly thinks he’s routed them and sends in his cavalry. Had Cressingham been a more prudent general, he would have kept up the missile fire and considered the possibility that the Scots were trying to flank him. The movie present Wallace’ flanking tactic as being extremely clever when in fact it’s actually a pretty basic tactic. Remember, the English have a forest behind them in the movie; they would have chosen that deliberately to prevent a flanking maneuver.

Then we get to the second assumption. The film suggests that it is possible for a pike unit to hide its weapons on the ground until the last minute and therefore trick cavalry into charging it. That’s a huge assumption, and one I’m fairly dubious of. Pikes have to be positioned and braced firmly on the ground using one foot as a sort of backstop so that the pike won’t slide on impact. That’s a complex maneuver, and not one that can quickly done, especially by troops that have never used pikes before (the film shows Wallace dreaming up the pike strategy the night before the battle). And these are cumbersome wooden poles a couple inches around, rather than actual pikes. Also, the film cheats. In all the earlier shots of the Scottish infantry, there are no pikes lying on the ground, but they magically appear just when the Scots are ready to use them. In reality, the English would probably have spotted the pikes on the ground and figured out what the Scots were up to. So the film’s trick is wildly implausible. But if we assume that somehow this trick could be pulled off, what follows is reasonable.

Whoa, dude! Where did these pikes come from?

At this point, Cressingham sends in his infantry. A smarter tactic would have been to stand his ground, resume archery fire, and force the Scots to charge a defensive line under withering arrow fire. Instead, Cressingham panics and orders his infantry to advance. Wallace rather foolishly does the same thing, and the result is a completely chaotic battle in which the Scots have nullified most of the English advantages but have also lost their own unit cohesion. Had Wallace been a skilled commander, he would have stood his ground and let the English infantry charge his pike wall; instead, he gets a lot of his men killed. Perhaps he knows that he barely has control of his army and figures they’ll charge anyway.

So, assuming that Cressingham was an incompetent general and assuming that the trick with the pikes could be pulled off (which it probably couldn’t), this battle could have happened. In contrast to 300’s Thermopylae, this battle makes sense on some level, if you grant a couple of unlikely possibilities. One of Gibson’s concerns is to depict the battle as an extremely chaotic and frightening event, which is a fair assessment of some medieval battles. In this, he is drawing off the same tradition that Kenneth Branagh tapped into a few years earlier in his Henry V.

But Braveheart’s Stirling is certainly not Stirling Bridge, where Wallace and Moray won because they struck the English army at a vulnerable moment and took up a strong position that exploited the narrowness of the bridge and the bogginess of the terrain.

In a previous post, I said that the right question to ask is not “Is this film historically accurate?” but rather “Why is this film being inaccurate about this particular detail?”, and Braveheart illustrates this principle on several occasions. Why did Gibson make up a battle instead of trying to recreate Stirling Bridge the way it happened? On the surface, it seems like an odd decision. The name of the battle is Stirling Bridge, and it’s a fairly well-known event, at least in Scotland, so you’d think that the omission of the bridge would be a problem. And the Scottish tactics at Stirling Bridge were intelligent; the film could have showcased Wallace’ tactical cunning in a more plausible way than it does.

Years ago I saw an interview with someone involved in the film (I don’t think it was Gibson; it may have been the director of photography) who claimed that they couldn’t find an appropriate bridge to use. This is a fairly silly thing to say, since Hollywood routinely builds sets like that all the time.

I think a much more likely reason has to do with how Gibson wanted to present the battle. As I’ve mentioned, in reality, Wallace and Moray won Stirling Bridge because they made good use of the terrain and the bridge. They cut the English forces in two, held off the infantry that had not yet crossed the bridge, and slaughtered the cavalry, which couldn’t maneuver effectively on boggy ground and couldn’t retreat back to the bridge. But that doesn’t fit Gibson’s narrative of Wallace, whom he constantly presents as a plucky, outnumbered underdog who wins his fights through sheer moral force. Showing the bridge would force Gibson to acknowledge that Wallace won because his control of the bridge kept him from being outnumbered; it would undermine the plucky underdog quality Gibson was trying to create. So it seems to me that Gibson’s version of this battle is inaccurate because accuracy at this moment would have violated the point he was trying to make about who Wallace was and who the Scots are as a people. He consciously re-wrote the past to achieve a particular effect.

 

Braveheart’s Falkirk

After Stirling, Wallace lays siege to York, which never happened, and captures it. He executes Edward’s unnamed nephew and sends his head to Edward. Edward’s daughter-in-law, Isabella meets Wallace and warns him that Edward plans to invade, so Wallace is able to prepare for the forthcoming battle.

In Gibson’s version of the battle of Falkirk, the battle again takes place on a small plain surrounded by hills and forest. There is no Westquarter Burn. The Scots prepare the ground by pouring pitch on the ground.

Both sides line up their troops in a line. There is no sign of the Scottish schiltroms. Edward disdainfully decides not to use his archers, and instead orders his Irish mercenaries (of whom there were none at the actual Falkirk) to advance, with the stated purpose of getting them killed to soften up the Scots. The mercenaries, however, switch sides because of Wallace’ cleverness in getting the Irish to support him. Then he orders his archers to use fire arrows to light the pitch on fire after the English have advanced their forces. The English cavalry breaks, and the two infantries collide (again, ignoring the rule to never advance your infantry if you can avoid it). Wallace again seems to be winning.

The Scots charging at Falkirk

However, the Scottish cavalry refuses to engage, and Edward explains that he has bribed its leaders. The film presents this as a villainous trick, ignoring the fact that Wallace has just done the same thing. Apparently it’s ok when Wallace lures the mercenaries to his side, but it’s evil when Edward does it with the cavalry. Edward callously orders his archers to open fire even though it will mean killing lots of English soldiers. This spells Wallace’ defeat. Wounded (he pretty clearly has an arrow in his lung, which would have killed him fairly soon after the battle), he charges Edward’s position, but is intercepted by Robert Bruce, who helps him get to safety.

So, as with Stirling Bridge, Gibson’s Falkirk is entirely wrong. There are no schiltroms. Gibson’s Wallace uses fire where the real one didn’t. Gibson’s Wallace advances his troops when the real one didn’t. Gibson’s Wallace schemes to get the Irish to switch sides and his Edward does the same to the Scots, when in reality neither of them did anything of the sort. The historical flight of the Scottish cavalry becomes conscious treachery. Instead of fleeing in defeat, Gibson’s Wallace fights against all odds until he cannot fight any longer and must be taken off the field against his will.

It’s easy to see why Gibson’s depiction of Falkirk is inaccurate. The historical Wallace was not a tactical genius; he favored guerrilla tactics; his victory at Stirling Bridge probably owed as much to Moray’s skill as a commander as to his. Reluctant to fight but forced to by his troops, he adopted a static position that was bound to lose the battle because of the English archers, and when he lost, he did the smart thing and ran away.

But once again that runs directly counter to Gibson’s preferred vision of William Wallace. Gibson’s Wallace is a clever commander who makes effective use of stratagems and loses only because he is betrayed by a corrupt nobility who are willing to be the English king’s lackeys. This betrayal is heightened by the rank immorality of the cinematic Edward, who is arrogant, treacherous, and willing to sacrifice his own troops for no good reason (and that’s all just in this scene). The Scots had victory within their grasp, and lose it because they lacked moral resolve, not because the English were better at warfare.

In a future post, I’ll talk about how these battles fit into the wider message of the film. Here, it’s enough to say that there is a sharp disjunction between the historical battles and the blatantly moralistic battles that Gibson presents. There is no reason he could not have shown the battles as they actually happened, except that it didn’t fit his purpose to do so.

Want to Know More?

Although it pains me to admit it, Braveheartis readily available on Amazon.

There are a couple books on William Wallace, but the only one I’ve seen that is worth anything is William Wallace: The Man and the Mythby Chris Brown. Although I’m not sure that Brown is a scholar, the book is well-researched and does a good job laying out what we actually know about Wallace, which is less than a lot of people seem to think. The best work on Edward I is Michael Prestwich’s Edward I (The English Monarchs Series). If you feel you need some context for Wallace’ rebellion, take a look at Michael Brown’s The Wars of Scotland, 1214-1371 (New Edinburgh History of Scotland).

Osprey Books publishes a lot of carefully researched and beautifully illustrated works on specific military campaigns and weapon systems, and their book on Stirling Bridge and Falkirk 1297-98: William Wallace’s rebellion (Campaign)does a good job of surveying Wallace’s military career.