On the morning of 11 September 1297, an English army stood on the south bank of the River Forth at Stirling and looked at a bridge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was a timber bridge, long and narrow, just wide enough for two horsemen to ride across side by side. Beyond it a causeway ran for nearly a mile across soft, boggy meadows held in a great loop of the river, and beyond the meadows rose a steep wooded crag. On the crag, in plain view, was an army of Scots, mostly spearmen on foot, commanded by two young men of no great rank. One was a northern nobleman called Andrew Murray. The other was the younger son of a minor Lowland knight. His name was William Wallace. No tartan of his survives, if he ever had one; his name is carried now by the loud red Wallace and its quiet brother, the Wallace Hunting tartan<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The English commander was the Earl of Surrey, an old soldier who had beaten the Scots before and held them in contempt. One of his officers, a Scottish knight in English service, pointed out that the bridge was a death trap and begged to be allowed to take the cavalry round by a ford upstream. He was overruled. Hugh Cressingham, King Edward\u2019s hated treasurer in Scotland, a fat and impatient man, said they had wasted enough of the King\u2019s money already. They would go over the bridge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It took all morning. The knights rode across in pairs, and then the infantry followed, and they formed up on the causeway on the far side with the river bending round behind them on three sides. On the crag, the Scots watched, and did nothing at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That was Wallace\u2019s genius that day. He waited. He let the vanguard come over, several thousand of the best troops in the English army. He waited until as many were across as he thought his men could beat. Then a horn sounded, and the spearmen came down the hill at a run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One body of them went straight for the northern end of the bridge and seized it. From that moment the battle was over, although the killing had hardly begun. The English on the north bank could not get back, and the English on the south bank could not get across to help them. The heavy cavalry floundered in the wet meadow. The Scottish spears pushed them steadily back into the loop of the river, and those who were not speared were drowned in their armour. Surrey, who had never crossed, watched half his army die in front of him, had the bridge broken down, and rode for the Border without stopping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cressingham was among the dead. He was so detested that, according to an English chronicler, the Scots flayed his body and divided the skin as trophies, and it was said that Wallace had a strip of it made into a belt for his sword. It may even be true. The thirteenth century was not a gentle time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wallace was made Guardian of Scotland. His triumph lasted ten months. In July 1298 King Edward came north in person and destroyed the Scottish army at Falkirk with his Welsh longbowmen. Wallace resigned the guardianship, spent years abroad seeking help from France and the Pope, came home, was betrayed near Glasgow in August 1305, and was taken to London. He was tried in Westminster Hall for treason, to which he replied that he could not be a traitor to a king he had never sworn allegiance to. He was hanged, drawn and quartered at Smithfield the same day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seven hundred years later most of the world knows him from a film, and the film, whatever its merits, got almost nothing right about how he looked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n William Wallace did not wear a kilt. The kilt, even in its earliest belted form, was not worn anywhere for another three hundred years, and when it was, it was worn by Gaelic-speaking Highlanders. Wallace was a Lowlander from the south-west. His very name means Welshman, a speaker of the old British tongue of Strathclyde. He would have gone into battle in a padded jacket, a mail shirt if he could afford one, and an iron cap. He did not paint his face blue. That was the custom of the ancient Picts, a thousand years earlier. He had no tartan, and neither did anyone else in his army.<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of this makes him smaller. The real man, who out-thought a professional army with a rabble of farmers on foot, is a good deal more impressive than the screen version.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Wallace tartan first appeared in 1842 in the Vestiarium Scoticum, the splendid and spurious book that supplied tartans to so many Lowland families who lacked one. The name of Wallace was by then so honoured that the pattern was taken up at once. It is one of the simplest tartans in existence, a bold check of red and black with a single fine yellow line, and one of the most popular in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTwo by two<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The man and the myth<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The tartan he never saw<\/h2>\n\n\n\n