I watched Braveheart again. Hollywood.
But... it goes back so far, doesn't it?
What goes back a long way?
I’m at a loss to understand what you think you’ve learned from a Mel Gibson film. If you’re interested in Scottish history pre-Union, there are far better places to look.
The conflict 700 years ago was between factions of the Norman French nobility. To understand what went on, you need to understand the Normans and how they operated.
When Alexander III of Scotland died, closely followed by his only direct heir, Margaret,” the Maid of Norway”, the vying nobles couldn’t decide upon a successor that would unite all the nobility, especially since she inherited through her mother; her father was Eric Magnusson, Eric II of Norway. And so they turned to the Norman King of England, Edward I, as a mediator.
Robert de Bruce, before he became King, was quite happy with this arrangement, and was indeed quite happy to swear fealty as a Norman noble to the English King. These were matters between Norman nobles. Those ties meant far more than any notions of nationhood. And so when Edward brokered a deal for John Balliol to take the throne of Scotland, de Bruce was fine with that. It was only later, when the power play proved not to be over, that de Bruce decided it was in his interests to press his own case. And press it he did, in time-honoured fashion, by murdering his rivals.
Does any of this have anything to do with whether those of us living in Scotland today will vote for an independent parliament? Nothing at all. Scotland in the late 13th / early 14th centuries was no more a democracy than anywhere else. The feudal system had many more centuries to run. We hadn’t even yet had the Stuart era of the “Divine Right of Kings”, which gave way to the accommodation between the merchantile class and the aristocracy, which was followed by the industrial revolution, which itself preceded universal suffrage.
