@WilliamWallace ( Braveheart)
In response to concerns that Wallace was not married:
In those days, noblemen in Scottish clans married. Like other noble clan marriages at that time in history, marriages were kept secret because the English over-lord claimed a first right of bedding any new wife before the new husband, and so men wanted to protect their bride, and some kept their marriage secret as long as they could from the English.
After William Wallace was executed by the reigning crown, his name was disgraced, and no one could risk being associated with him for about 100 years. His children were at risk of execution too. The children of the last Welsh Prince of Wales went into hiding too for centuries.
It is extremely unlikely he was not married. Even gay-inclined men married, as marriage and inheritance was the key way in the feudal economic system for each generation to further establish claims to property and feudal authority.
Marriage was above all a property contract. (Even today marriage is a property contract.) In the feudal period property conferred wealth and power. Property was passed on the basis of birthright. Men of noble lineage or property married women with similar noble lineage or property in the feudal period.
Jobs were determined by what your father did, and men married women whose father was in a similar class and profession. Princes married princesses, and fishermen married fisherman's daughters. A match was rarely random, it with someone suitable for their inherited profession, and of the same religion, tribal or national loyalties.
Wallace was a nobleman and had a social obligation to identify suitable brides and limit falling in love with one who was suitable as a wife for his line of work. A nobleman's job was to act as a warrior of behalf of those to whom was shared a fealty obligation of protection.
A wife was an alliance and contract with society as a whole not just between two people. Wars could be fought over noble marriages that harmed the populace it affected.
In Wallace's day, the noblemen of Scottish clans were basically illegally booted out of their land rights by the English noble lines.
It would have been unseemly for a nobleman like Wallace to have no wife from a suitable Scottish family.
in that political era, there were some secret marriages, and after Wallace was executed, any descendant would have feared for their life to claim Wallace as an ancestor.
The Scottish clans were never reinstated, although gradually some married into English noble lines. In time, a great bulk of the dispossessed Scottish clans were pushed into emigrating to America. After the Battle of Culloden, the highland clans were murdered en masse and survivors fled to America. Later, the Highland Clearances saw the English set fire to thousands of Scottish clan homes at a time, leaving the dead and destitute.
The native Scotsman had very good reason to keep Wallace as an ancestor a secret. Wallace was once enemy number one of England, and the English would have suppressed any revitalization of the Scottish nationalistic claims of Wallace. In a feudal world where paternity was destiny, revealing the rebel Wallace as an ancestor would have been unwise.
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