The Wallace Sword is an antique claymore purported to have belonged to William Wallace (1272 – 1305), a knight and Scottish patriot who led a resistance to the English occupation of Scotland during the Wars of Scottish Independence. It is said to have been used by William Wallace at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297 and the Battle of Falkirk (1298).
The shaft of the sword measures 4 feet 4 inches in length (132cm) and including the tip 5 feet 6 inches (168cm)[1]. The breadth of the blade varies from 2.25 inches at the guard to 0.75 inches before the point. The sword weighs 6.0 lb (2.7 kg)
History
It has been alleged that after William Wallace's execution in 1305, Sir John de Menteith, governor of Dumbarton Castle received the sword in August of that year. But there are no records to that effect. Two hundred years later, in 1505, accounts survive which state that at the command of King James IV of Scotland, the sum of 26 shillings was paid to an armourer for the "binding of Wallace' sword with cords of silk" and providing it with "a new hilt and plomet" and also with a "new scabbard and a new belt". This repair would have been necessary because Wallace's original scabbard, hilt and belt were said to have been made from the dried skin of Hugh Cressingham, one of the English commanders at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. (This is almost certainly a later invention, although the practice wasn't unheard of.)
No other written records of the sword are found for a further three centuries. In 1875 a letter from the War Office informed that the sword, in 1825 was sent to the Tower of London to be repaired. At that time it was submitted to a Dr Samuel Meyrick by the Duke of Wellington for examination.
Dr Meyrick was an authority on ancient swords but he estimated the age of the sword by examining the mountings only, which as we know were replaced early in the 16th century. Thus he concluded that the sword could not date from earlier than the 15th century. However he did not take account of the blade which must have been of some importance for James IV to have it bound in silk and give it a new scabbard, hilt and belt and it was also described then as the "Wallas sword".[3] The sword was recovered from Dunbarton by Charles Rogers, author of The Book of Wallace. Rogers, on 15 October 1888 renewed a correspondence with the Secretary of State for War, with the result that the Major General commanding forces in North Britain was authorised to deliver the weapon to his care for preservation in the Wallace Monument
.
Historical accuracy
There is reason to believe that this sword did not belong to William Wallace. The blade does not possess a fuller — a near universal feature of blades with this type of cross-section except in processional swords of the Renaissance. The blade in it`s original state would have likley been Oakeshott type XIIIa(also known as Espee de Guerrel or Grete war sword)which became common by the mid-13th century. Such swords would have a long, wide blade with parallel edges, ending in a rounded or spatulate tip.The grip, longer than in the earlier Scottish swords, typically some 15 cm (almost 6 inches), allow good two-handed use. The cross-guards probably down sloping (in the later highland style) or straight, and the pommel either regularly Brazil-nut or disk-shaped but this case perhaps a lobed pommel inspired by the [[Viking style.
Born unknown date
Elderslie, Renfrewshire, Scotland
Died 23 August 1305
Smithfield, London, England
Cause of death
Hanged, drawn and quartered Occupation Commander in the Scottish Wars of Independence
Children None recorded
Parents Alan or Malcolm Wallace (father)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wallace“There’s a difference between us. You think the people of this country exist to provide you with position. I think your position exists to provide those people with freedom.” -William Wallace
When embarking on troublemaking in high school (which was fairly often, I was a regular rapscallion), my friends and I would call our parents and tell them that we were going to be at so-and-so’s house watching Braveheart. It was a credible movie for a bunch of teenage guys to be watching, without being particularly parentally unacceptable, in addition to being 3 hours long, thus giving a decent sized window of supposedly accounted-for time. My parents got me Braveheart on VHS for Christmas my senior year of high school since I had watched it with my friends at least two dozen times. It was a dreadful moment Christmas morning, staring down at the double-VHS box, realizing that in all the times I’d used it for an excuse, I’d never actually seen the movie.
Braveheart was Mel Gibson’s baby, a big budget affair that studios didn’t much want to get behind. Of course, it then made back its budget four times over in theaters and won five Oscars, including one for Gibson’s direction and one for best picture. It sparked a resurgence in Scottish nationalism, which had been simmering for centuries and hovering just below a boil since the discovery of North Sea oil off the Scottish coast. Memorials were erected to William Wallace at the sites of his battles (many fictional), culminating with the 13-ton sculpture bearing Gibson’s face and the title “Freedom” that was installed outside of the centuries-old Wallace Monument. In a savage blow for irony, repeated defacements led to the installation of a cage to protect the statue. In 1997, spurred on by the film’s popularity, Scotland managed to win its own parliament, devolved from that of the UK. It’s like a normal parliament, except everyone wears kilts and the committees fight like warrior-poets.
Not bad for a film with a script constructed of pure and unadulterated bullshit. Kilts weren’t invented for another three hundred years, Wallace probably didn’t knock up Isabelle since she was only ten when he was executed, and what little of Wallace remains in the historical record is hardly valedictory. He was a landowner, knight and medieval warrior, which made him much closer to an illiterate thug than the proto-nationalist freedom-phile featured in Braveheart.
There is a tension in story-telling between the need for drama and the duty to historical accuracy. It’s easy to complain about anachronisms like kilts or democratic philosophy three hundred years before its time. It’s even easier to nitpick that Wallace was an uneducated savage or that prima noctis was never implemented during Wallace’s lifetime in Scotland. But these sorts of complaints are peripheral to the real problem, that the story in Braveheart would be historically inaccurate even with all of those details fixed. Braveheart cannot possibly be true to history because it is not true to people in the first place. Take shows like “Rome” or “Deadwood”, or the plays of the late great Billy Shakespeare. They can be nitpicked to death on historical accuracy just as much as Braveheart, but the difference is that they fundamentally get the way people are.
Wallace is effectively an angel, Longshanks effectively a devil. There is never any question of motivation, the English are right bastards down to the lowest rapist soldier, the Scottish peasants innocent though brutal victims , the corrupt on both sides weaklings. It’s an artificially constructed situation, an elaborate straw man glorification of political violence. You see, it admits that violence is horrific, the battle scenes terrible enough that they had to be cut down in order not to get an NC-17 rating, but the film posits that violence is sometimes necessary and then presents the most extreme case possible as justification. It’s like admitting that killing your husband is a terrible crime, and then pointing out a situation in which the husband is Hitler, you just interrupted him while he was torturing a blind puppy, he already had paid off the corrupt police, and you just happened to have a loaded revolver in hand. That kind of cheap drama trivializes everything that real people go through. Sometimes horrible things are necessary, but it’s never as easy a moral decision as Gibson seem to insist.
Reality is mostly bereft of angels and devils, every one of us is a walking, talking gray area. The mundane face of evil, the ultimate lesson of the twentieth century, is something popcorn fiction avoids. If you can pile all the blame onto the shoulders of devils, the world seems a safer place, but it makes you a more dangerous person because you see a world only of good and evil, and those who anger you can only fit into one side of that schema. And if you pile all of the responsibility onto the shoulders of angels, then you forfeit to any savior that comes along all the moral responsibility of action.
That bitching aside — bitching that equally could be applied to about a dozen films a year churned out by Hollywood — Braveheart is far from a bad film. It constructs a beautiful fantasy, a sort of updating of the fable of Robin Hood. Love, betrayal, blood, honor, good and evil. And we can’t forget: freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedom!
“You admire this man, this William Wallace. Uncompromising men are easy to admire. He has courage; so does a dog. But it is exactly the ability to *compromise* that makes a man noble.” - the elder Robert the Bruce
BYE BYE GONE OVER AND OUT 
ok