There was a special last night that was going all-out to trash William Wallace, the lead in the movie, "Braveheart," and maybe Scotland's greatest hero. It wasn't much of a trashing as much of the story, as presented by Mel Gibson in the movie, really is true.
You can make up your own mind as what got the story really going was the Battle of Stirling Bridge and the commentators said there were two problems: it wasn't an example of good tactics and Wallace wasn't the leader.
As to the tactics, the English army had a force of about ten thousand men whereas the Scottish rebels numbered about three thousand. The movie showed a two heads-up fight with two columns pounding each other but that isn't what happened as the Scottish force would have been annihilated that way. Instead, the Scots fought a guerrilla war. There was a narrow bridge (i.e. Stirling Bridge) across which the English army had to cross to engage the Scots. The rebels waited until about three thousand of the English had crossed the bridge and then ambushed them. Poor tactics? Um, I'd call that move brilliant.
The second question about the Battle was that they said Wallace didn't command it. There isn't definitive proof but what is known is that Andrew Murray from the northern Highlands had experience with his own rebellion and he brought his own troops to join with those of Wallace. There's no way it can be confirmed who was in command but another thing that is definitely known is that Andrew Murray was killed in the battle thus resulting in what was, in effect, a battlefield commission for Wallace who was subsequently knighted and was named Guardian of Scotland. Whether it was fair for Gibson to excise Murray's role in the fight is for you to judge.
Something that was fairly commonly-known prior to the special was that Isabella of France could not possibly have had an affair resulting in a child by Wallace as she was still only a child and she may well have still been in France. This aspect really isn't so important as, from the standpoint of the movie, it's only important to add an element of romance and also because Gibson wanted to stab King Edward at the end with Isabella telling him she was pregnant by Wallace rather than by his son.
There was another element of romance as the story began with the English sheriff murdering Wallace's new wife. This is fundamental throughout the movie as part of the motivation for what Wallace did but there's one detail: there was no wife. Prior to the start of the rebellion, Wallace's only official act was getting busted for stealing beer. But, what the hell, he was a Scot and he was thirsty.
As to why various inventions were tacked onto the story, monks were commissioned by nobility to modify the story so they could claim to be descendants of Wallace. I suspect but don't know that monks were the ones to take the commission as they were probably among the few who could write at the time.
So, it was not fair to omit mention of Andrew Murray from the story and you can make your own judgment about that but overall the story of William Wallace seems to have been generally true. The attempt to rewrite the rewritten history of Wallace wasn't altogether successful.
Scots may say this special was an example of those damn Anglo Saxons trying to trash the real Englishmen, the Celts. However, the Celts were just as much Germans or at least Germanic as the Angles and the Saxons. In fact, the Celts were so widespread that there was even a tribe of them in Turkey. Every year the Celts in southern Germany and Spain (yes, Spain!) celebrate their heritage. Get this, there's some type of bagpipe they use in Spain. (Thank Cat for this insight as she told me about it.)
I may do a bit on Proto-German, the language that ultimately became English and German, but the tracing of human migration through linguistics was, bar none, the most insufferably boring exercise of anything I studied in school. Cat asked me why I didn't study archaeology in school but really I did ... software archaeology. You can learn a tremendous amount about people by studying their languages and whether digging up rocks or phonemes delivers the most scientific value is something that again I will leave for you to judge.
On, and more thing ... here's the biggest heartbreaker of all: Wallace never even thought of wearing a kilt as Scots didn't start wearing them until hundreds of years later. If you're thinking so what right about this time, um, yeah.
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