Of all Scotland’s heroes, none has been more revered and worshipped than Sir William Wallace, the first great and legendary Scots Leader thrown up from the ranks of the common people. In all of medieval Europe, only the tale of William tell the Swiss archer ranks anywhere close to the stature of The Wallace, and yet the truth is that the world knew lamentably little about Wallace until the Movie “Braveheart” appeared in 1995. The epic film, through its many inaccuracies, underscored just how little was really known about the man Wallace. Over the course of the centuries that had passed since his horrific death the myth had grown to displace the man and for more than a hundred of those years serious, academic students of history had been unable to say with confidence what was true about his exploits and what was not.
That realization launched an entirely new wave of academic and scientific research into what was known of Wallace, using 21st-Century technology and applications, and the results of what is now fifteen years of serious and scientific study have generated new and often amazing insights into the life and motivations of the man the whole world knows now as Braveheart.
In one single, sobering and narrowly-defined way, though, William Wallace’s life paralleled that of the man called Jesus: very little is known about the early life of either one. Both men emerged from obscurity into public awareness relatively late in life, the one at 29 and the other at 30 (at a time when a man was old at forty) and each had a brief meteoric career that ended in a very public and brutal execution. In both instances there is a lack of knowledge about the years that shaped them, as boys and young men, into the public figures they became…
The Forest Laird is my speculation, based upon new research, of what Wallace’s early life might have been, and one flippant observation I made, soon after the original edition appeared in Canada, has somehow stuck and become accepted: “This is the story,” I said, “of the forces and influences that combined to make young Will Wallace angry enough to change his name to Mel Gibson…”
You’ll find a couple of sample chapters appended below.