The New Murrey and Blue blog

The Battle of Falkirk was fought on 22 July 1298. The English army, co-commanded by the Earl of Norfolk, defeated the Scots, led by Sir William Wallace, who resigned as Guardian of the Realm shortly afterwards. This setback for Wallace, following victory at Stirling Bridge the previous year, where Sir Andrew Moray was mortally wounded, formed a significant scene in the film Braveheart. Mel Gibson, as Wallace, was accompanied by a few thousand troops in tartan and woad but at least two of them wore glasses.

Now Murrey and Blue have dealt with historical anachronisms before – showing that “Friar Tuck” could not have rebelled during Richard I’s reign because there were no friars in England until 25 years after Richard’s death. Similarly, Victoria was British-born and raised, just like her father and grandfather, and would not have spoken with a German accent.

So what of the evidence here?

i) Roger Bacon, incidentally a friar, wrote about using lenses in 1262 but that doesn’t refer to an actual pair of glasses with frames.
ii) In spring 1306, Giordano da Pisa, yet another friar, preached that “”It is not yet twenty years since there was found the art of making eyeglasses, which make for good vision… And it is so short a time that this new art, never before extant, was discovered. … I saw the one who first discovered and practiced it, and I talked to him”.

So 1286, a mere dozen years before the Battle of Falkirk was the earliest that a pair was constructed.