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Most Historically Inaccurate Movie Ever?

Mel Gibson’s Braveheart won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1995, took in over $200 million at

the box office, and is still acclaimed by action some of the best battle scenes ever put on film. But how “historical” is this historical epic? Fans are

often disappointed to learn major characters really existed, the film is nearly entirely fiction.

Yes, there was a historical William the First War of Scottish Independence in the late thirteenth century. But rather than the rustic commoner depicted in Gibson’s film, he

was It’s documented that Wallace entered the war with his murder of

an English sheriff in 1297, but the this event

is unknown. The movie follows a famous poem in attributing Wallace’s anger to the murder of his wife, but there’s no evidence that this wife even existed,

much less by the English. Older accounts claim that Wallace had already been an outlaw for years after killing five English soldiers who tried to

steal his catch after a fishing allege that the trouble started when a teenage Wallace killed an English noble’s son who bullied him at boarding school.

Clearly, the writers chose the tales about Wallace best suited to the hero of a blockbuster film: a formerly peaceful farmer avenging the death of his one true love

more sympathetic underdog than a private-school kid who psychotically overreacts to a bit of teasing. The same impulse led the writers to take further liberties

with their depiction not only of presented as far too primitive in relation to the English. The facepaint Wallace wears into battle

was actually characteristic of the tribe that lived in Scotland over a thousand years earlier and battled the Romans. By Wallace’s time, the Scots

in chain-mail and armor, and would have been visually indistinguishable from the English. The

stereotypical plaids on however, are anachronistic in a different way: kilts were not worn in battle until 400 years later.

The script plays fast and loose with people too: King Edward outlived Wallace by years, Princess Isabella was a young girl at the time and still in France, and Andrew de Moray, who was an equally important Scottish commander who fought beside Wallace, is omitted entirely. But Braveheart’s most troubling inaccuracy

by far depiction of Robert the Bruce as a coward who betrays Wallace to the English. Not only

did the historical Bruce never Wallace, but he barely knew him, and was far more instrumental in the eventual Scottish victory. In fact, the nickname “Braveheart” itself was historically not used for William Wallace at all, but rather for Robert the Bruce!