I have a little question that has yet to be answered by anyone with authority.
In the movie Braveheart, all the Scottish foot soldiers mooned the British prior to fighting. I have a Scottish co-worker who thinks this is a historical inaccuracy. I, and several others at work, believe it to be true. I mean why else would you wear a kilt and no underwear Actually we believe as soon as humanity invented a covering for the bottom, we found the need to flash our bums at people in disrespect.
Does anyone know if mooning is in its correct context in that movie?
Brave heart is mostly myth , its derived from a poem about
william wallace written ages ago , also Wallace was supposed to have been a low lander so would not have worn a kilt in the first place , and thus prolly not been able to moon the king with bare buttocks unless he took off his pants(trousers or what ever they wore)
This is hardly authoritative, but I saw an interview with Mel Gibson in which he stated that what the Scots actually used to do was front-flash, that is, raise the front of the kilt to expose the genitals to the enemy. This is also shown in Braveheart. IIRC, Gibson said the Scots did not usually moon their foes, but this was put in the movie more-or-less as a joke.
Oh where can we start?! Well, first of all let’s get clear in our minds who’s doing the fighting. There were no ‘British’. If anything they were English, and some were not even that.
Second of all: you’re worried that the mooning wouldn’t be historically accurate? Why stop there?? Braveheart is the biggest load of historical tosh you’re ever likely to come across. The historical inaccuracies never stop. Want to annoy a Scottish historian? Say you liked Braveheart and it taught you a lot about Scottish history.
Basically it was your typical Hollywood re-write, with scant regard given to any accuracy if it stood in the way of a good plot line. Wallace was nothing like Gibson. Gibson’s accent is bizarre. Wallace’s love interest in the film was something like 3 years old at the time. No-one dressed like that. The face paint misses the period by centuries.
I could go on. But let’s just say that mooning is the least of your worries.
and so sorry futile for lumping the whole island in with the english, my goof. But in the movie there were battles where English, Irish, Welsh and Scottish men stood against Willy and Co. so technically it was, at times, the British.
You mean that the movie of Willy was Hollywoodized? Egad!! I would never have guessed… Seriously, there were/are about a billion things wrong with that movie, check out nitpickers.com.
Bear in mind this quote from elsewhere on the mideivalscotland.org website when you read those nitpicks: * Be very cautious when investigating Highland men’s clothing – there are more myths circulating than sound history, and you will hear many wild tales from people who will swear it is the gospel truth*
The writer of the nitpicks falls into this trap, declaring that *In the 13th century (and the 14th, 15th, and most of the 16th), no Scots, whether Gaels or not, wore belted plaids (let alone kilts of any kind). * Now, while it may be true that Wallace and many of his followers were not highlanders and would not have dressed as such, there are descriptions of Scots Highlanders from the army of Edward Bruce in the 14th century that seem to describe some version of the belted plaid (sorry, I read these descriptions in a couple of books, don’t have time to find a cite on the 'net).
Also, while it’s true that the princess was about 3 when Wallace died, he apparently did have a wife who was murdered by the Sheriff of Lanark immediately before Wallace went from being an outlaw to a guerilla leader. Braveheart is very inaccurate as “Historical Epics” go, but it isn’t all THAT bad…
It’s about as close to the truth as Liam Neeson’s Rob Roy was…
Which still leaves open the question of when “mooning” started as a show of disrespect.
I can tell you that in one of the towers of the Charles Bridge in Prague, there is a statue (of a bell ringer, I believe) which appears to be mooning the viewer. I believe the tower dates to the 14th century.
Well there is a reference in Canterbury Tales to a guy sticking his arse out the window and farting in the friar’s face (I think it was a friar, it has been a while since I read that) It’s not the same thing as mooning since it was so dark the friar could not see the arse. But it was a definite sign of disrespect. I think the tales were written sometime in the 14th century…
Good advice Kwm, as a Canadian I am well aware of the current day beliefs of our living in snow-bound wasteland, living in igloos, dogsleds as transportation, that we make the rye whiskey in the world… well making the best rye is true, but the rest is all myth. Heck, many of the Inuit (Eskimo, to the uninformed) couldn’t make an igloo. Even if they knew how, global warming is causing the snow to be unusable for that ancient craft.
There is no excuse for believing in caricatures, but most people, including myself, don’t have the time or inclination to delve as deep and as involved as would be needed to fully understand all the people of the world throughout history with the correct context.
Not really. There was no such political entity as Great Britain until about 400 years after Wallace’s time, and Ireland has never been part of it. Even so, the Scots are British, so a battle in which English and Welsh armies fought Scottish armies would still not be the Scots fighting “the British”. The only thing that “Britain” would have referred to in Wallace’s time was the island itself.
And I’ll second what Futile Gesture said about the historical accuracy of Braveheart, which goes for just about any recent “historical” Hollywood movie.
Another story Mel Gibson told in that interview: He said he asked a Scot what he wore under his kilt. The guy snapped back with a grin, “Your wife’s lipstick!”
“Speak sweet bird, I know now where thou art”
Nicholas then let fly a fart
As strong as a thunder-clap it was
So that he was nearly blinded by the force
That’s not it exactly, but I remember it’s from The Millers Tale. A goofy lovestruck teen climbs up to his crush’s window, begging for a kiss. Unbeknownst to him, the woman’s lover is in the room with her, and he tells her to stick her butt out the window instead. The goof kisses it, and when he’s done he wonders why she has a beard, and then realizes he was tricked. He borrows a branding iron and comes back asking for another kiss. The woman’s lover says ‘I’ll see if I can get him to kiss my ass this time’ and sticks his out, after which the four lines quoted above take place - and then he gets a hot iron stuck in his crack, and ‘skin a hands-breadth wide on either side’ comes off.
His family had been in Scotland for at least a couple of hundred years - he was as Scottish as Robert the Bruce…whose family had been in Scotland for about a hundred years…
Ummm…He was as Scottish as I am American! You get the picture.
Well, considering the celts ran into battle naked, Gaelic forces mooning enimies might not be that far fetched
Braveheart is a good movie. completely inaccurate, but good none the less!
“Welsh” is from the Old Anglo for foriegner, and was the name the Anglo-Saxons gave to the early Britons (odd, since it was the A-S who were the foriegners.) The Scots came over from Ireland to a place inhabited by both Picts and Britons. People living in Lowland Scotland spoke a form of early Welsh (Cumbrian, I think) and the early Welsh Epic, “Y Gododdin”, was written about a battle involving a Welsh kingdom in modern day Scotland.
Actually we believe as soon as humanity invented a covering for the bottom, we found the need to flash our bums at people in disrespect.