Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995) needs to be discussed in two quite separate ways: as a classical narrative film engaging with the border country between history and myth, and as an event in Scottish culture. In the last analysis the two are connected.

First, the question of historiography and popular narrative film. Let us put together a composite figure: a historian, preferably of Scotland; better still, a medievalist. They are in the best position to point out Braveheart's widely derided historical inaccuracies: the unlikelihood that William Wallace (1270–1305) and his army would have worn kilts and sported tartan of any kind (they were Lowlanders, not Highlanders) or woad (a feature of the Picts who had inhabited Scotland about a millennium earlier); that Wallace might have bedded and impregnated Isabelle (1295–1358), the French princess married to the future Edward II (1284–1327), since there is no evidence that they ever met and the princess delivered her first child several years after Wallace's death; and that English and Scots nobles would have been accoutred differently (in the film the former wear metal and fine cloth and the latter, leather and rough homespun) since both groups were of Anglo-Norman origin, had attained broadly the same level of material development, inhabited the same European code of chivalry and, very often, held lands in both England and Scotland. All of these inaccuracies are verifiable by reference to historical works on late-medieval Scotland.

A more difficult problem concerning Braveheart's historical veracity relates to the film's omissions of verified historical facts that might detract from its ideological construction of Wallace as implacable opponent, such as his overtures to Edward I (1239–1307) seeking less severe treatment after Edward's defeat of Wallace at the Battle of Falkirk (1298). Ranald Nicholson suggests that Wallace may have made such overtures early in 1304; J. G. Bellamy is more definite, speaking of Wallace as being willing to ‘submit to [Edward’s] honest peace without surrendering into his hands, body or head’. Such a fact is quite literally unspeakable within the ideological universe Braveheart constructs: the film's populist nationalism has something in common with Trotskyist conceptions of the working class as ever ready to rise spontaneously and secure the communist revolution.