Post by Elly on Aug 20, 2005 19:17:01 GMT 10
JIM GILCHRIST
WALK UP A path from a car park above Dryburgh and the meandering Tweed, and you suddenly come face to toe with the Guardian of Scotland, all 31ft of him, counting his plinth. The imposing red sandstone figure of Sir William Wallace has a classical look to him, with his tight-curled beard and winged helmet, as he glares southward towards the Auld Enemy.
That was the early 19th- century take on Wallace. Seven hundred years from the Scottish champion's public disembowelling at Smithfield, London, on 23 August, 1305, he has become so many things to so many people that it is almost impossible to descry the man through the mythology, be it concocted by 15th-century bard or 20th-century Hollywood.
The Dryburgh statue was commissioned by David Stuart Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan, carved by John Smith of Darnick, just a few miles away. Recently, the ire of locals and visitors alike was provoked by the vandals/kack-handed patriots (take your pick), who daubed the saltire-embossed stone shield with an amateurish blue and white paint job.
The site remains tranquil, despite the attention you'd expect on this 700th anniversary, although a dog-eared guestbook indicates that the past week's visitors have hailed from Italy, Germany and Australia as well as Scotland. The sandstone Titan is reminiscent of one of the stop-frame giants from Jason and the Argonauts or some such screen epic, but Wallace's real brush with Hollywood didn't come until ten years ago, and we're still feeling the aftershock.
Cut to the National Wallace Monument on Abbey Craig, Stirling, where, under the Victorian gothic tower which houses the hero's (alleged) sword, tourists are queuing up to have their photographs taken beside another statue of him, or rather of the ubiquitous Mel Gibson, who irrevocably left his stamp on the popular image of Wallace. His 1995 film Braveheart, suddenly made Scottish history, of a sort, sexy, led to a boom in blue face paint, and induced near-apoplexy among Scots historians for the liberties it took with historical actuality.
The statue, portraying a bellowing, dreadlocked figure even has the words "Braveheart" and, of course, "Freedom" incised below it, echoing the blessed Mel's dying breath in the movie. Historian Fiona Watson winces slightly: "I'm not overwhelmed with the idea that it's Mel Gibson who's up there, but, to be fair, I think Braveheart has done Scotland a lot of good. We may resent any idea that the Americans rediscovered our hero for us, but certainly it highlighted Scottish history as a separate entity from British history for the rest of the world.
"It's now up to the Scots to then sell the rest of our culture and, maybe, a slightly more nuanced view of who we are."
The huge popular reception given to the movie distressed Scots historians so much that a group wrote to The Scotsman at the time, complaining that the void left by inadequate or non-existent teaching of Scottish history was being filled by the Gibson version. Watson, director of the AHRB Research Centre for Environmental History, based at Stirling and St Andrews Universities, was not among them but she agrees. "The film was medieval Mad Max," she laughs. "Historians were slagged off for taking it too seriously, but what we were objecting to was not the film, but the fact that so many people who had not been taught their history were taking it as fact."
The cult of Wallaceolatry gives historians serious difficulties in getting to grips with a figure of such mythic, iconic status, she says. She'll be making an attempt, however, on Tuesday, the actual 700th anniversary of Wallace's execution, when she will be among speakers at a memorial service in St Bartholomew's Church in Smithfield, where Edward I - "Longshanks" - made a gory public example of the Scots upstart. "It's not that we as historians have a problem with him belonging to everybody else, it's just that the symbolism has become more important, and to an extent that's where our job ends."
If the saviour of Scotland looms through our history like a sword-wielding colossus, the real man remains in the shadows. We don't even know his date of birth, while, in typically thrawn Scots fashion, Renfrewshire Council and East Ayrshire Council are currently at loggerheads as to whether he was born in Elderslie near Paisley or, as suggested by recent research, in Ellerslie, near Kilmarnock.
Our knowledge of him is largely confined to a year or so, from his slaying of the Sheriff of Lanark in May 1297, through his victory over a far superior English force at Stirling Bridge on 11 September of that year, to his defeat at Falkirk in July 1298, after which he all but disappears, until his betrayal in 1305, when English records record his sham trial, after which he was brutally hung, drawn and quartered.
It was the poet Blind Harry's patriotic epic, The Life and Heroic Actions of the Renowned Sir William Wallace, General and Governor of Scotland, written around 1460, which effectively fuelled the cult of Wallace - right to the present day, for Randall Wallace's Braveheart script owes much to the 15th century makar's account.
To say that everyone wants a piece of Wallace seems in the worst of taste, given what happened to him, yet, like another much disputed and appropriated Scots icon, Robert Burns, Wallace has been adopted by all, unionist and nationalist, modern Scots republican and Victorian North Briton.
In the recent BBC Radio Scotland's series, I Cannot Be A Traitor, Ted Cowan, Professor of Scottish History at the University of Glasgow, showed that even academics aren't immune from Wallace's glamour, and pointed to what he calls "that little iconic exchange" between the Guardian of Scotland and Bruce after the battle of Falkirk. Wallace is supposed to have told the future king that he was prepared to die for his country, whereas the Scottish nobility had been corrupted by luxury.
"This story isn't historical," Cowan commented, with relish. "Fine - I don't care. You have the quisling, treacherous, uncommitted aristocracy confronted by a kind of noble, proletarian ordinary being, and that's what comes out of Wallace, even though I know that it's not historical. There is still enough truth in the vision, in the metaphor, to act as historically representative, in a sense."
Yet as Chris Brown points out in his new book, William Wallace: The True Story of Braveheart (Tempus Publishing), Wallace himself was a noble, although at a lowly level, and this in itself is remarkable: "He was a very minor noble, and it wasn't normal practice in medieval times for people of that stature to take a leading part in politics."
SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS on, Brown believes there is a real need to put Wallace back into his correct historical context: "Only in Scotland could we produce a hero of that calibre, then just ignore him. Also, why is it his death that's being celebrated, rather than his life?"
He is also not alone in his concern that the popular elevation of Wallace has obscured the important roles played by others in the Scottish Wars of Independence, such as Sir Andrew de Moray, Wallace's fellow Guardian of Scotland and, some say, mentor, whose little sung life was celebrated in another Radio Scotland programme, The Forgotten Braveheart. "Generally speaking," says Brown, "Wallace is presented as being the saviour of Scotland when the rest of the aristocracy weren't interested, but that doesn't really hold water. A lot of them were prisoners of war in England at the time. On the other hand, the fact that Wallace and de Moray were able to restore government so quickly suggests they had at least the tacit support of the senior nobility."
Another author who believes we are not doing Wallace's memory justice is David Ross, convener of the William Wallace Society, who, while deriding the Scottish Executive for not making enough of the anniversary, organised the memorial service at St Bartholomew's, as well as making his own personal pilgrimage - "the mourning Wallace never had" - by walking the route which the captured leader would have followed to London. When I spoke to him he had been on the road for 15 days, had overcome blistered feet and was approaching Bedford.
Ask Ross whether a 21st-century Scotland shouldn't be looking forward rather than to the battles of seven centuries ago, and his reply is robust: "Wallace fought against Scotland being ruled from somewhere else, ie, London. Where is Scotland ruled from today? So there's a relevance there right away. Would Wallace have been in favour of the war in Iraq or the Falklands war? I don't think so.
"Is there a cut-off date when these things cease to matter? Why do Jews care about the Holocaust? What would Americans say if you suggested they stop caring about Abraham Lincoln or George Washington?" And he condemns any perception that the Wallace commemoration is somehow xenophobic: "Being pro-Scots shouldn't mean being anti-English."
While Fiona Watson believes that the commemorative service should "complete the circle for Wallace", she is wary of our proclivity for backward-gazing: "I remember the debate last year as to whether Bannockburn should be a holiday, and thinking, 'For goodness sake! Are we just about battles and violence?' Of course it was important, but is that all we are?"
Even our current national poet, Edwin Morgan, clearly felt ambivalent when asked to write a poem for the anniversary: "Is it not better to forget?" his Lines for Wallace ask, but they conclude: "The power of Wallace / Cuts through art / But art calls attention to it / Badly or well..."
Let's shift from the seething heritage industry of Abbey Craig to the more peaceful site above the meandering Tweed, where that awe-inspiring statue gazes across to where the real Wallace led his troops on raids into Northumberland.
A few years ago, I flicked through that dog-eared visitors book, to find one Braveheart- smitten American visitor had scrawled "Freedom!" across the page ...
Seven centuries on from his death, Wallace still casts a long shadow, but for the real man to extract himself from the curse of Mel may take quite some time.
news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=1806372005
WALK UP A path from a car park above Dryburgh and the meandering Tweed, and you suddenly come face to toe with the Guardian of Scotland, all 31ft of him, counting his plinth. The imposing red sandstone figure of Sir William Wallace has a classical look to him, with his tight-curled beard and winged helmet, as he glares southward towards the Auld Enemy.
That was the early 19th- century take on Wallace. Seven hundred years from the Scottish champion's public disembowelling at Smithfield, London, on 23 August, 1305, he has become so many things to so many people that it is almost impossible to descry the man through the mythology, be it concocted by 15th-century bard or 20th-century Hollywood.
The Dryburgh statue was commissioned by David Stuart Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan, carved by John Smith of Darnick, just a few miles away. Recently, the ire of locals and visitors alike was provoked by the vandals/kack-handed patriots (take your pick), who daubed the saltire-embossed stone shield with an amateurish blue and white paint job.
The site remains tranquil, despite the attention you'd expect on this 700th anniversary, although a dog-eared guestbook indicates that the past week's visitors have hailed from Italy, Germany and Australia as well as Scotland. The sandstone Titan is reminiscent of one of the stop-frame giants from Jason and the Argonauts or some such screen epic, but Wallace's real brush with Hollywood didn't come until ten years ago, and we're still feeling the aftershock.
Cut to the National Wallace Monument on Abbey Craig, Stirling, where, under the Victorian gothic tower which houses the hero's (alleged) sword, tourists are queuing up to have their photographs taken beside another statue of him, or rather of the ubiquitous Mel Gibson, who irrevocably left his stamp on the popular image of Wallace. His 1995 film Braveheart, suddenly made Scottish history, of a sort, sexy, led to a boom in blue face paint, and induced near-apoplexy among Scots historians for the liberties it took with historical actuality.
The statue, portraying a bellowing, dreadlocked figure even has the words "Braveheart" and, of course, "Freedom" incised below it, echoing the blessed Mel's dying breath in the movie. Historian Fiona Watson winces slightly: "I'm not overwhelmed with the idea that it's Mel Gibson who's up there, but, to be fair, I think Braveheart has done Scotland a lot of good. We may resent any idea that the Americans rediscovered our hero for us, but certainly it highlighted Scottish history as a separate entity from British history for the rest of the world.
"It's now up to the Scots to then sell the rest of our culture and, maybe, a slightly more nuanced view of who we are."
The huge popular reception given to the movie distressed Scots historians so much that a group wrote to The Scotsman at the time, complaining that the void left by inadequate or non-existent teaching of Scottish history was being filled by the Gibson version. Watson, director of the AHRB Research Centre for Environmental History, based at Stirling and St Andrews Universities, was not among them but she agrees. "The film was medieval Mad Max," she laughs. "Historians were slagged off for taking it too seriously, but what we were objecting to was not the film, but the fact that so many people who had not been taught their history were taking it as fact."
The cult of Wallaceolatry gives historians serious difficulties in getting to grips with a figure of such mythic, iconic status, she says. She'll be making an attempt, however, on Tuesday, the actual 700th anniversary of Wallace's execution, when she will be among speakers at a memorial service in St Bartholomew's Church in Smithfield, where Edward I - "Longshanks" - made a gory public example of the Scots upstart. "It's not that we as historians have a problem with him belonging to everybody else, it's just that the symbolism has become more important, and to an extent that's where our job ends."
If the saviour of Scotland looms through our history like a sword-wielding colossus, the real man remains in the shadows. We don't even know his date of birth, while, in typically thrawn Scots fashion, Renfrewshire Council and East Ayrshire Council are currently at loggerheads as to whether he was born in Elderslie near Paisley or, as suggested by recent research, in Ellerslie, near Kilmarnock.
Our knowledge of him is largely confined to a year or so, from his slaying of the Sheriff of Lanark in May 1297, through his victory over a far superior English force at Stirling Bridge on 11 September of that year, to his defeat at Falkirk in July 1298, after which he all but disappears, until his betrayal in 1305, when English records record his sham trial, after which he was brutally hung, drawn and quartered.
It was the poet Blind Harry's patriotic epic, The Life and Heroic Actions of the Renowned Sir William Wallace, General and Governor of Scotland, written around 1460, which effectively fuelled the cult of Wallace - right to the present day, for Randall Wallace's Braveheart script owes much to the 15th century makar's account.
To say that everyone wants a piece of Wallace seems in the worst of taste, given what happened to him, yet, like another much disputed and appropriated Scots icon, Robert Burns, Wallace has been adopted by all, unionist and nationalist, modern Scots republican and Victorian North Briton.
In the recent BBC Radio Scotland's series, I Cannot Be A Traitor, Ted Cowan, Professor of Scottish History at the University of Glasgow, showed that even academics aren't immune from Wallace's glamour, and pointed to what he calls "that little iconic exchange" between the Guardian of Scotland and Bruce after the battle of Falkirk. Wallace is supposed to have told the future king that he was prepared to die for his country, whereas the Scottish nobility had been corrupted by luxury.
"This story isn't historical," Cowan commented, with relish. "Fine - I don't care. You have the quisling, treacherous, uncommitted aristocracy confronted by a kind of noble, proletarian ordinary being, and that's what comes out of Wallace, even though I know that it's not historical. There is still enough truth in the vision, in the metaphor, to act as historically representative, in a sense."
Yet as Chris Brown points out in his new book, William Wallace: The True Story of Braveheart (Tempus Publishing), Wallace himself was a noble, although at a lowly level, and this in itself is remarkable: "He was a very minor noble, and it wasn't normal practice in medieval times for people of that stature to take a leading part in politics."
SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS on, Brown believes there is a real need to put Wallace back into his correct historical context: "Only in Scotland could we produce a hero of that calibre, then just ignore him. Also, why is it his death that's being celebrated, rather than his life?"
He is also not alone in his concern that the popular elevation of Wallace has obscured the important roles played by others in the Scottish Wars of Independence, such as Sir Andrew de Moray, Wallace's fellow Guardian of Scotland and, some say, mentor, whose little sung life was celebrated in another Radio Scotland programme, The Forgotten Braveheart. "Generally speaking," says Brown, "Wallace is presented as being the saviour of Scotland when the rest of the aristocracy weren't interested, but that doesn't really hold water. A lot of them were prisoners of war in England at the time. On the other hand, the fact that Wallace and de Moray were able to restore government so quickly suggests they had at least the tacit support of the senior nobility."
Another author who believes we are not doing Wallace's memory justice is David Ross, convener of the William Wallace Society, who, while deriding the Scottish Executive for not making enough of the anniversary, organised the memorial service at St Bartholomew's, as well as making his own personal pilgrimage - "the mourning Wallace never had" - by walking the route which the captured leader would have followed to London. When I spoke to him he had been on the road for 15 days, had overcome blistered feet and was approaching Bedford.
Ask Ross whether a 21st-century Scotland shouldn't be looking forward rather than to the battles of seven centuries ago, and his reply is robust: "Wallace fought against Scotland being ruled from somewhere else, ie, London. Where is Scotland ruled from today? So there's a relevance there right away. Would Wallace have been in favour of the war in Iraq or the Falklands war? I don't think so.
"Is there a cut-off date when these things cease to matter? Why do Jews care about the Holocaust? What would Americans say if you suggested they stop caring about Abraham Lincoln or George Washington?" And he condemns any perception that the Wallace commemoration is somehow xenophobic: "Being pro-Scots shouldn't mean being anti-English."
While Fiona Watson believes that the commemorative service should "complete the circle for Wallace", she is wary of our proclivity for backward-gazing: "I remember the debate last year as to whether Bannockburn should be a holiday, and thinking, 'For goodness sake! Are we just about battles and violence?' Of course it was important, but is that all we are?"
Even our current national poet, Edwin Morgan, clearly felt ambivalent when asked to write a poem for the anniversary: "Is it not better to forget?" his Lines for Wallace ask, but they conclude: "The power of Wallace / Cuts through art / But art calls attention to it / Badly or well..."
Let's shift from the seething heritage industry of Abbey Craig to the more peaceful site above the meandering Tweed, where that awe-inspiring statue gazes across to where the real Wallace led his troops on raids into Northumberland.
A few years ago, I flicked through that dog-eared visitors book, to find one Braveheart- smitten American visitor had scrawled "Freedom!" across the page ...
Seven centuries on from his death, Wallace still casts a long shadow, but for the real man to extract himself from the curse of Mel may take quite some time.
news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=1806372005