Scottish clan leader William Wallace is remembered today as "Braveheart" thanks to the blockbuster starring Mel Gibson, but the warlord and rebel was not always known thus.  

It was a long and often humiliating struggle for the young Wallace to assert himself as one of Scotland's bravest fighters, and it wasn't until 1282 and his 14th birthday that he shook off the mantle of Most Easily Spooked Laird of the Highlands, a name he had been saddled with thank to a penchant for running screaming whenever confronted by small rodents.  

However his fortunes turned in 1291 when his family went on a rape-and-pillage package tour to Brighton and Wallace volunteered to stay behind and guard the homestead from marauding Dominican nuns. A short skirmish ensued, during which Wallace clubbed three elderly nuns to death with a milk pail, earning himself the title of William The Not Always Cowardly. 

William The Not Always Cowardly became William The Quite Brave in 1298, when, during a skirmish at Loch Bollock, he dropped a large rock on the head of a foe. Later evidence suggested that the foe was his brother-in-law Kenneth Wallace, dressed in a rival clan's tartan, and that the rock was made of papier mache with haggis smeared on it; but the illusion stuck. 

It was finally in 1302 that Wallace was first called Braveheart, when he accidentally tried to rally the Scots against King Edward the Longshanks of England. Being slightly hard of hearing after a teenage encounter with an angry vole, Wallace misheard his clan allies, believing the English oppressor to be named Edwina the Long Skank.  

When he finally discovered his error it was too late to retreat, and after initial victories, he was hanged, drawn and quartered by a pack of frenzied Dominican nuns hell-bent on vengeance.