King Arthur: David Franzoni has a Lot to Answer For

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David Franzoni, Freedom!, King Arthur, Medieval Europe, Picts, Roman Britain, Roman Scotland

After three posts that mostly dealt with the general historical background to King Arthur (2004, dir. Antoine Fuqua, screenplay by David Franzoni), it’s time to actually look at the plot, and now I’ll bring my case for indicting David Franzoni for crimes against geography and assault with a pseudohistorical weapon.

The Northern Frontier

The film takes place in northern Britain, along Hadrian’s Wall. Arthur and his men seem to be stationed at one of the forts dotted along Hadrian’s Wall, which marked the legal extent of Roman Britain. Hadrian’s Wall is the most famous example of a Roman limes, a boundary wall used to separate the Romans from people they did not directly rule. There are at least ten of these structures known, including two that run along the Danube, one in Arabia, and one in Libya. Contrary to popular imagination, however, a limes was not really a towering defensive position like the Great Wall of China; the surviving remains of Hadrian’s Wall are actually quite low to the ground and it would not have been hard for a stealthy band of northern Britons to scale it unseen. The purpose of Hadrian’s Wall was more likely to act as a boundary check-point, controlling the movement of goods and peoples across the boundary and to demonstrate to non-Roman peoples the superiority of Roman engineering (and therefore by extension, military) skills. It would have slowed down a formal invasion and allowed Roman soldiers to send an alarm to one of the more heavily fortified forts along the wall, where substantial garrisons were situated.

Hadrian’s Wall. Note how low to the ground the remains are

Substantial scenes take place at one of the forts. The fort is never explicitly identified in the film, but in Lancelot’s closing voice-over, he identifies the final fight there as being the battle of Badon Hill (a point I had overlooked in my previous post about Germanus—my apologies), so I’m going to call this fort Badon, even though that makes absolutely no sense. Placing Badon on Hadrian’s Wall makes about as much sense as saying that the battle of New Orleans took place in New Jersey, since most of the sites that have been proposed for Badon are well to the south. Some people have suggested that the second battle mentioned by Gildas, the battle of Camlann, took place at Camboglanna, one of the forts on Hadrian’s Wall, but I’ve yet to see any serious argument that Badon was on or near the Wall.

Inside the Badon fort

At the start of the film, the antagonists are the indigenous natives of northern Briton. Historically these people have been referred to as the Picts. But the film instead calls them the ‘Woads’, reportedly because during the script read-through, someone suggested ‘Woads’ sounded cooler. Sigh.

We know the Woads are badasses because right at the start of the film they ambush the carriage bringing Bishop Germanus to Badon and get themselves entirely killed (except for one lucky guy that Arthur decides to spare for no clear reason). So let’s think about this. The Woads live north of the Wall, a heavily protected military frontier. Badon is just south of the Wall. Germanus is traveling up to Badon from the south. Do you notice a problem here? How did the Woads get over the Wall to launch an attack so far to the south? This is typical of the film’s approach to geographical issues, which is that they basically don’t matter at all. (Also, fun fact—carriages won’t be invented for another 1000 years, so they may as well have put Germanus in a humvee.  But see Update.)

After he gets to Badon, Germanus tells Arthur that his men have to go up north of the wall and rescue Marius and his son Alecto (who should be Allectus, but we’ve already established in this blog that movies never get Roman names right. Alecto is the name of a Greek goddess), who happens to be the pope’s favorite godson somehow. Marius is an important Roman who just happens to live north of the Wall, a very long way north as it turns out. Again, let’s think about the geography. The Roman Empire is to the south of the Wall, the hated enemy Woads to the north. Why is Marius, an important Roman, living well to the north of the Wall, in enemy territory? If the Woads dislike the Romans so much, why haven’t they massacred the defenseless Marius? Apparently the Wall and its military fortresses were just randomly plopped somewhere on the British landscape with no regard for who lives where, and Marius accidentally wound up on the bad side and some of the Woads wound up on the good side.

 

And Then There’s the Saxons

To complicate things, the villainous Saxons have landed an invasion force three days north of the Wall and are marching south to conquer Britain. Now, historically, the Saxons began their invasion well south of the Wall, pretty much the opposite end of the whole island actually, but failing to make historical sense is pretty much a given for this film, so by this point I had mostly gotten numb to that problem. But this makes absolutely no geographical sense either. If the Saxons are invading by boat, why land themselves such a long ways to the north and then march south to a major fortification which they will have to conquer before they can then march further south to conquer Britain, when ALL THEY HAVE TO DO IS LAND THEIR INVASION FORCE SOUTH OF THE WALL?

The entire plot of this film falls apart if the leader of the bad guys (or anyone in the audience) just bothers to look at a goddam map. This is like making a film where Canada decides to invade the United States via Mexico. You see how absurd that is? Canadians are too polite to invade anyone. But David Franzoni won’t let little things like geography or manners stop his plot.

Invading Saxons

The villainous Saxons are led by the even more villainous Saxon leader Cerdic (Stellan Skarsgård). We know the Saxons are villainous because they rape women. We know Cerdic is even more villainous because raping woman is too nice for him. He wants his men to kill everyone instead because he doesn’t want them to produce weak children. So he kills his man for being nice enough to rape someone. (Why is it that Hollywood bad guys have to demonstrate their badguyness by killing the bad guys who work for them? Sure, it establishes a hierarchy of badguyness with the main villain at the top, but it seems to me that it would also be a motivation for his men to run away or try to kill him.) Cerdic’s son, Cynric (Til Schweiger) challenges him, and Cerdic once again demonstrates his badguyness by telling Cynric that the next time he challenges his old man, he better have a sword in his hand. Unfortunately, what this really establishes for the audience is that Cynric, who logically ought to be number two on the badguyness hierarchy, is really just a wuss.

Nothing says ‘villainous Saxon’ like furry shoulder pads.

But it does create a situation where the Woads turn out to not be such bad guys at all. They’re actually good guys who just happen to like launching sneak attacks over a heavily fortified frontier to massacre innocent traveling bishops.

The Woads’ lack of genuine badguyness is discovered when Arthur and his men get to Marius’ villa up north. Marius turns out to be an asshole. We know he’s an asshole because he doesn’t want to leave, despite the Saxon army heading his way, and because he’s confiscating all his peasants’ grain and letting them starve. Arthur tells the peasants they’re all free, because Arthur is a good guy and freedom is a good thing. The basic purpose here is to recycle the cliché of the good guy being ordered to rescue someone useless and stupid because that makes the meaningless death of most of the good guys more poignant somehow. The movie’s basically a shitty remake of Escape from New York with Arthur as a more freedom-loving Snake Plissken.

Arthur notices that a couple of Christian priests are bricking up a building, so naturally he insists on forcing his way in, despite the priests claiming this is a holy place. What he discovers instead is that the priests have been torturing Woads there, including a cute moppet whose primary purpose is to remind Arthur of his own unhappy childhood, and Guinevere (Keira Knightley), who eventually turns out to be the daughter of Arthur’s archnemesis the Woad leader Merlin (Stephen Dillane). As usual, this makes no sense. Why are Christian priests torturing people and claiming that the torture chamber is a holy place? Given that the film has already established a contrast between the good British Christianity of Arthur and Pelagius and the bad Roman Christianity of Germanus, making these British Christians horrible people just undermines the dichotomy Franzoni was trying to establish and leaves Arthur as the only Christian who believes anything nice, because freedom and not torturing people are nice.

King Arthur, or SCA event? King Arthur, because if it were an SCA event, the outfits would be more authentic.

The geography, by the way, has gotten worse. Arthur discovers that the Saxons are to the south of them (still north of the Wall, but south of them). They landed three days’ north of the Wall (so apparently Marius’ villa is REALLY far north in Scotland), and have apparently just been hanging out for three days, since Arthur has gotten further north than them without them getting anywhere near the Wall. And because the Saxons are to the south, Arthur is going to have to lead Marius’ people and the rescued Woads over the mountains to the east. The major mountain range in Scotland is the Grampians, which separates the Scottish Highlands from central and southern Scotland. So evidently Marius’ villa is west of Inverness or Loch Ness, and the Saxons, who are coming from the east (having left the region around the mouth of the Rhine river), have sailed northwards around Britain and landed on the western side of Scotland, maybe around Oban or Fort William. They can’t have landed on the east side, because going eastward over the Grampians would still put Arthur’s group north of the Saxons. So apparently Cerdic lands around Fort William, camps out for several days while planning to attack a defenseless villa, marches northeastward up the Great Glen toward the villa despite having the intention of conquering southern Britain, and then discovers that Arthur has gotten Marius out of there. So he then chases Arthur over the Grampians, with the result that Arthur gets south of the Saxons and gets back to Badon before the Saxons do.

It’s not just that the plot would fall apart if the Saxons looked at a map; the plot would fall part if David Franzoni looked at a map. Why the hell is Marius living so far into enemy territory, and why did the Saxons invade western Scotland? Why go north to go south? Because Franzoni isn’t going to let a little thing like geography get in the way of telling a not-very-good story.

After Arthur leads the defenseless peasants over the mountains and fights a battle on a frozen river (because it’s winter in Scotland, but not at Badon), Guinevere helps broker an alliance between Arthur and Merlin to fight their common enemy the Saxons. What Merlin gets out of this isn’t clear, because Arthur has a grand total of 5 men under his command, so he’s basically suckering Merlin into giving him a Woadish army when all the Woads have to do is keep out the way of the Saxons as they head south to plunder Roman Britain. The Woads, after all, are brilliant woodsmen whom even Arthur can’t catch. And instead of fighting among the forests of Scotland, which offer perfect cover for the hit-and-run guerilla tactics the Woads are so good at, and instead of using Badon as a strong defensible position that would multiply the power of his greatly outnumbered forces, Arthur decides the smart thing to do is opt for an open field battle next to the Wall. Why does anyone think this man is a skilled military leader? A ten year old with a pile of snowballs and a mound of snow to hide behind demonstrates more tactical sense than Arthur shows through most of this film.

Woadish trebuchets, cuz why not?

And so the film climaxes in the Battle of What’s In Your Wallet, in which hordes of villainous Saxon barbarians charge across a smoke-filled field to fight a few brilliant horsemen who spend most of their time fighting on foot while Woadish archers, including a leather bikini clad Guinevere, fire arrows at them without ever hitting any of the good guys. I suppose in that situation being insanely outnumbered is actually sort of helpful, because the odds of hitting a good guy are small. Oh, and the Woads also have trebuchets, while the Saxons have crossbows. I’ve seen Lego battles with a greater concern for historical accuracy.

You can’t be a Woad without wearing some woad.

Then Arthur wins and Merlin marries him to Guinevere and the happy couple live happily ever after, and the Arthurian legends live happily ever after, and history lives happily ever after. Everyone winds up happy. But not geography. Geography can go fuck itself.

Update: In response to a question from a reader, I did a little more research into Roman transportation. I had been under the impression that while the Romans used a variety two- and four-wheeled wagons, they did not have a covered, four-wheeled person transport with a suspension system–what i would consider a carriage. However, it turns out that an archaeologist working in Bulgaria in the 1960s did uncover the remains of what he reconstructed to be exactly such a vehicle. This is literally the only known example of such a vehicle, but it did exist, and the vehicle used in King Arthur looks not unlike a reconstruction of it in a Cologne museum. So I have to give the film credit for getting that detail basically right, although whether such a vehicle was still in use in the 5th century and on the edge of the Empire is probably debatable.

The Cologne reconstruction

Want to Know More?
No, you don’t. But if you really must, King Arthuris available on Amazon.

Also, think about picking up this: Britain and Ireland Wall Map (tubed) British Isles

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Centurion: Roman Seal Team Six vs the Time-Travelling Killer Picts

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Centurion, Michael Fassbender, Olga Kurylenko, Picts, Roman Britain, Roman Empire, Roman Scotland, Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle of the Ninth, The Ninth Legion

I’ve done four posts about The Vikings and I’ve got at least three more to go, so I thought I’d take a break and review something different, namely Centurion (2010, dir. Neil Marshall), an action film about the disappearance of the Roman 9^th Legion.

In 1732, a British scholar named John Horsley noticed something curious, namely that the Roman 9^th Legion Hispana disappears from the records sometime in the middle of the 2^nd century AD. In the 19^th century, evidence emerged that it had been stationed at York in 108 AD, and one scholar found evidence that it might have still been there in 116, but by 165, it was apparently no longer in existence (since it is not mentioned in a list of legions at that time). Since another legion was sent to Britain not long after 116, various scholars began to speculate that a revolt had happened in Britain around 116 or a few years later, and that the 9^th Legion had been destroyed in that rebellion. Then in 1954, novelist Rosemary Sutcliff’s novel The Eagle of the Ninth offered a slightly different theory; instead of being destroyed by a rebellion in Roman Britain, the 9^th Legion had marched into what is now northern Scotland to suppress a Caledonian uprising, and was destroyed in the process.

Since then, scholars have continued to debate the fate of the 9^th Legion, and it remains an open question. The idea that it was destroyed in a rebellion around 116 or so continues to be the most plausible explanation for its fate, although some uncertain evidence has been identified suggesting that the 9^th Legion might have been on the Rhine in the 120s, which means that its demise must be sought elsewhere, perhaps in Judea or the Danube. For those interested in the debate, a nice look at the evolution of the problem can be found here.

The Romans pushed into northern Scotland in the 70s AD, encountering a people known as the Caledonians, defeating the Caledonian Confederacy heavily in 84. Despite this, the Romans pulled back soon afterwards, and in 122 began work on Hadrian’s Wall. In the 130s, they again pushed into Scotland, building the Antonine Wall, but around 160, they pulled back to Hadrian’s Wall again and gave up any interest in conquering Scotland.

Exactly why the Romans abandoned their desultory efforts to conquer Scotland is unclear. The Caledonians do not appear to have been particularly effective warriors, and so it is unlikely to be the case that Caledonian resistance forced the withdrawal. A variety of other factors have been offered to explain it. It has been suggested that the Romans concluded the region was too poor to be worth conquering, or that its lack of a market-based economy made supplying the legions more trouble than it was worth. Another intriguing explanation is that when Romans conquered a region, they preferred to adapt the existing native administrative and law enforcement structures rather than imposing their own system. They preferred to co-opt the existing ruling elites because it made social control much easier. But the Caledonians may have lacked enough of a system for the Roman model to be easily applicable.

Nor is it clear exactly what the relationship between the Caledonians and the later residents of Scotland, the Picts, was. It has been suggested that the Roman Empire’s actions in Scotland so disrupted Caledonian society that they gradually reorganized themselves into the Picts, but how and why that process happened is unclear. What is clear is that the Picts did not exist during the period of the Roman incursions into Scotland. The term ‘Pict’ is generally thought to be a Roman one, dating from the later 3^rd century. In the 2^nd century, Romans living along Hadrian’s Wall called the Caledonians Brittunculi (which roughly means “nasty little Britons’).

Centurion

Centurion builds on Sutcliff’s novel by focusing on the 9^th Legion and its fate in northern Britain. Thus the film is entirely historical speculation. There is absolutely no evidence that the 9^th Legion ever went into Scotland, and the idea that it was destroyed in a rebellion is purely guesswork, although definitely educated guesswork, depending on how one reads the various scraps of evidence. The chief villains of the film are the Picts, who, as already noted, didn’t really exist at this point; they ought to be Caledonians.

The film opens at Inchtuthill in 117, where the Romans have established a fort. It’s true that the Romans established a fort at Inchtuthill in Scotland, on the banks of the Tay River, in the early 80s AD, but the fort was abandoned and entirely dismantled less than half a decade later. A prologue text tells us that the Picts of northern Britain are waging a guerilla war against the Romans, who are unable to defeat them, resulting in a stalemate. The fort is attacked by Picts, who use flaming arrows without having to actually light them, and everyone is slaughtered, except the main character, Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender), who is taken prisoner and presented to Gorlacon (Ulrich Thomsen), the Pictish king.

Fassbender as Quintus

Back at York, the Roman governor, Julius Agricola (a genuine Roman governor, but one whose term in office ended in 85 AD) orders the 9^th Legion into the north to fight the Picts. Their general, Titus Flavius Virilus (Dominic West) doesn’t want to go until Agricola introduces him to Etain (Olga Kurylenko), a mute female tracker from the Brigantes tribe. She’s good enough to help them locate Gorlacon’s forces. On the way, they run into Quintus, who has escaped from captivity.

Unfortunately for them, Etain is actually working for Gorlacon and leads the Roman legion into an ambush in which the Picts roll huge flaming boulders down on them to break their formation and then run in and slaughter the whole legion. They capture Titus, but Quintus and a half-dozen other men survive (including the legionary cook).

Quintus decides to rescue Titus, at which point the thus-far incompetent soldiers turn into a Roman version of Seal Team Six, capable of sneaking up on guards and killing them silently (including the cook–apparently Roman cooks get special forces training). But the rescue goes horribly wrong; they are unable to get Titus free from his chains, and he orders them to abandon him and return to York. But one of them has killed Gorlacon’s young son, so the Pictish chieftain sends Etain and a band of Picts to track them down and behead them all and the film turns into a ‘unit behind enemy lines’ story that is almost entirely predictable in its resolution.

We know fairly little about Pictish society in this period (especially since the Picts were actually Caledonians at this time, but let’s just pretend they were Picts), since they were a pre-literate people and the Romans had very little to say about them. The film gives us only hints about Pictish society, but what we see is perhaps broadly plausible apart from the warrior women, for whom there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever. I expected the Picts to be heavily tattooed or wear lots of face paint, but surprisingly the film is fairly restrained here. A few of the Picts wear small tattoos, but most have none. Later in the film, Etain and her warriors mix the ash from a funeral pyre into some woad that they paint on their faces, but it’s not as excessive as I was expecting. Quintus, mysteriously narrating this scene, tells us that this is something that the Picts do “as a sacred rite” indicating that they’d rather die than fail. This, of course, is made-up nonsense; we don’t even have any solid proof the Picts/Caledonians employed face painting at all, much less why they might have done so.

But the film isn’t particularly interested in historical accuracy. The Picts routinely wield recurve bows they must have stolen from the Romans, sometimes wear helmets they must have taken off of time-traveling Anglo-Saxons from half a millennium later, and occasionally use metal shields taken from wandering Greeks a millennium earlier. But then, this is the sort of film where Roman armor, the best available at the time, is essentially useless against the Picts just cuz.

The film routinely ignores issues of basic logic. When the Picts leap over the walls of the Roman fort in the opening action sequence, they immediately start firing flaming arrows. But how are they lighting the arrows on fire? And why didn’t the Romans notice torch-carrying Picts sneaking through the darkness? I guess the Picts also took bic lighters off of those time travelers too. Similarly, when the Picts ambush the Romans, they roll massive flaming boulders down on them, heavy enough to smash the Roman shield wall. What are these boulders made of this could be heavy enough to break a shield wall but still be flammable? Worst of all, Etain has been mute since childhood, when the Romans murdered her whole family, raped her, and then cut her tongue out. If that’s the case, how do the Picts know what happened to her? How do the Romans know her name? How does she communicate with the people who are following her? And why does she have such an absurd-looking spear?

Etain with…whatever the hell that spear is

The film resorts to two obnoxious conventions about women that I’ve already highlighted in this blog. Etain is a precursor to 300 2: Rise of an Empire’s Artemisia, a vicious female killer whose viciousness is entirely rooted in the fact that she was raped and brutalized as a child. Her only motivation is that she hates Romans because of what they did to her. The other significant female character, Arianne (Imogen Poots), who speaks English (standing for Latin) with a pronounced modern Scots accent, is basically a Woman as Prize given to Quintus as a reward for his surviving everything that happens to him. Mercifully she does actually have a separate plot function and is given a bit more agency than Isabel in Ironclad, and some degree of actual motivation for her choices. And at least the film tosses out a line explaining why she speaks Latin, whereas other characters conveniently know either Latin or Pictish (actually Scots Gaelic) with no explanation at all.

Also, as another example of the principle that films pretty much never get Roman names right, ‘Quintus Dias’ makes absolutely no sense as a Latin name, since his nomen is basically a modern Portuguese/Brazilian last name and not Latin at all. Titus Flavius Virilus almost works, except that they’ve misspelled ‘Virilis’.

The whole film is a bit of shame, actually, because the main actors all do a fine job with limited material. The Roman Seal Team is perhaps overly multicultural but is a nice acknowledgement that the Roman army was actually quite ethnically diverse and not just composed of Italians (although Tarak, who hails from the Hindu Kush, is a bit silly, since he would have had to travel through pretty much the entire modern Middle East just to enlist in the Roman army). Michael Fassbender does a particularly good job as Quintus. You actually care about him by the end of the film.

So if you’re in the mood for some mindless action set within very pretty scenery, Centurion is worth a watch, especially if you’re ok with having seen pretty much everything here before. But if you’re looking for a film that actually says anything about Roman Scotland historically, this isn’t the film for you. I’m not sure there is a film for you if that’s what you’re looking for, but it definitely isn’t this one.

Want to Know More?

Centurion is available on Amazon.

Or you could skip the film and read Rosemary Sutcliffe’s The Eagle of The Ninth by Sutcliff, Rosemary (2004) Paperbackthat loosely inspired the film. 

If you want to know something about Northern Britain in the Roman period, there’s David Shotter’s The Roman Frontier in Britain: Hadrian’s Wall, the Antonine Wall and Roman Policy in Scotland

Braveheart: How Not to Dress Like a Medieval Scotsman

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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.