William (generally known as William the Bastard during his lifetime) was convinced that he was uniquely favoured by his Christian God – and so had a licence to do pretty much whatever the hell he liked. He was a correspondingly harsh and austere man. Surprisingly, it was once thought that people gathered round and made speeches at his funeral about what a jovial and generous fellow William had been. Less surprisingly, this story turned out to be incorrect. It was based on a mistranslation of an ancient chronicle – and the good-hearted man the people were talking about was actually the Abbot of Verdun. There’s only one other recorded instance of William attempting a joke. This was when he pretended to stab one of his Norman abbots with a great big knife. You can imagine how side-splitting his unwilling comedy partner found that.
All the other evidence points to William being a cold-hearted killer. His nature was best demonstrated in the winter of 1069–70, when William put down rebellions in England’s northern counties with genocidal savagery.
‘The King stopped at nothing to hunt his enemies,’ wrote the chronicler Orderic Vitalis. ‘He cut down many people and destroyed homes and land … To his shame, William made no effort to control his fury, punishing the innocent with the guilty. He ordered that crops and herds, tools and food be burned to ashes. More than 100,000 people perished of starvation.’
Charles Dickens also wrote a vivid description of the events in his Child’s History of England:
The streams and rivers were discoloured with blood; the sky was blackened with smoke; the fields were wastes of ashes; the waysides were heaped up with dead … In melancholy songs, and doleful stories, it was still sung and told by cottage fires on winter evenings, a hundred years afterwards, how, in those dreadful days of the Normans, there was not, from the River Humber to the River Tyne, one inhabited village left, nor one cultivated field – how there was nothing but a dismal ruin, where the human creatures and the beasts lay dead together.
Here we can see the clear origins of modern Tory party policy towards the north of England. There are other lasting legacies of William’s rule. We can probably blame him for the average Brit being strangely prejudiced against the French, decent food and learning foreign languages. We can certainly blame him because just 0.3 per cent of the UK population owns more than two-thirds of the land in Britain – and 1 per cent of the population owns more than 70 per cent.
William’s very first act after he was crowned on Christmas Day 1066 was to claim that every acre of land belonged to him (strictly speaking if you live in the UK, your house still belongs to the monarch). He then parcelled out this booty to the soldiers who fought with him at Hastings, thus beginning feudalism and a landowning system that has stayed with us ever since. And even aside from all the royals, dukes and earls, people with Norman names like Darcy, Percy and Mandeville are still much wealthier than the general population. According to a 2011 survey they also live an average of three years longer than everyone else. There they are: born to rule over us, just because they’re descended from a gang of roving bandits who got lucky in one battle in 1066 when a stray arrow landed in Harold’s eye. The game is rigged. And it’s William’s fault.
Date of birth: 3 January 1956
In a nutshell: Hollywood actor caught saying bad things on tape – and espousing dodgy history on camera
Connected to: Jesus
‘The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world. Are you a Jew? What do you think you’re looking at, sugar tits?’
So said Mel Gibson on the night of his arrest for drunk-driving in 2006. He has a bad habit of getting caught on tape. In 2010, he was also recorded in conversation with his ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva:
‘You go out in public and it’s a fucking embarrassment to me. You look like a fucking bitch in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of niggers it’ll be your fault. All right? Because you provoked it. You are provocatively dressed all the time, with your fake boobs, you feel you have to show off in tight outfits and tight pants (garbled) you can see your pussy from behind …’
Later he was arrested for a misdemeanour battery on Oksana.
The staunchly Catholic actor and director’s long struggle with alcoholism and related mental-health issues might explain some of this behaviour – but Gibson has also been a malign influence when he’s sober. Here in the UK we can lay many of our problems directly at his feet. By his own admission, his 1995 film Braveheart has been one of the root causes of the populism that has swamped our island in recent years. ‘It certainly woke something up there in Scotland,’ said Gibson in a 2017 Press Association interview. And what it woke was anti-English nationalism.
The film is loosely based on the story of William Wallace, a thirteenth- to fourteenth-century aristocrat and briefly the leader of a war against King Edward I of England. ‘Loose’ in the sense of eight pints of lager and a hot balti working their way through your guts. Gibson (who also directed the film) smeared his face in woad, kilted up in clan tartan and portrayed Wallace as a principled and dedicated patriotic warrior, fond of bellowing lustily as he charges fearlessly into battle. This Wallace is also handy with slogans: ‘We can have what we never had before – a country of our own,’ he yells. No matter that Scotland had been independent for centuries when the real William Wallace led his murderous campaigns – and would remain so. No matter either that kilts were invented (in England) in the eighteenth century.* No matter that no one had put woad on their face for a good thousand years by the time Wallace was leading his murderous rampages.
On the subject of those campaigns, Mel Gibson himself acknowledged in a 2009 interview that the real Wallace was probably a ‘monster’, forever smelling of smoke because he was so fond of burning villages. Mel also – not unreasonably – said that he isn’t worried that his character was nothing like the real Wallace and that he may have ‘messed up’ the history. He was providing a cinematic experience, after all. But then, in the same interview he did go on to say ‘Films are there first to entertain, then teach, then inspire.’
So what was Braveheart teaching? What did it inspire? If you saw the long queues outside the cinemas in Scotland, and watched as grown men emerged after the film weeping, you’d get a fair idea. Also indicative was the fact that Scottish Nationalist Party activists were ready to greet the tearful crowds with leaflets bearing Gibson’s face and slogans like ‘independence isn’t just history’, ‘independence, we need it now more than ever’ and ‘today, it’s not just bravehearts who choose independence’. The SNP party leader at the time, Alex Salmond, also joked to a sword-wielding, kilt-wearing crowd at the annual Wallace rally that he would remove the head of the Scottish Secretary Michael Forsyth during the intermission at the film’s premiere.
In the years since that recruitment drive, the SNP have been careful to give a veneer of respectability to their separatism, claiming that their brand of nationalism is more inclusive and less xenophobic than all the other nationalisms around the world. They imply without noticeable irony that they are better, because they are Scottish.
In spite of such rationalisations, Braveheart still opened the stopper on a poison that has leached into every aspect of British life. It set a tone with its outrageous distortions of reality tied to sentimental flag-waving and outright racism. It helped inspire a resurgence in SNP fortunes and so brought us the misery of the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. There it was shown that millions of votes could be won thanks to transparently nonsensical promises about the bonanza that would come from future oil wealth and angry