WHY are the English so badly represented in Hollywood films? They are nearly always stuttering, flophaired fops or dastardly moustachioed aristocrats hell-bent on deflowering the serving girl.

Every so often the film-makers throw in some Cockney wheeler-dealer for the sake of variety.I can’t watch Braveheart(directed by and starring an Australian) without my blood boiling.

Why is it that foreigners, particularly Americans, pigeon-hole the English and turn us all into walking clichés? Films like Braveheart, with its poisonous antiEnglish ideology, trot out the old stereotypes with furious abandon.

Rugged, lion-hearted, salt-of-theearth Scots and winsome, devil-maycare Irish charmers pitted against vicious, duplicitous and sometimes even effeminate English toffs.

Nice story. But there’s nothing weak or effeminate about the English. We are a tough and bullish breed, more so than any other people in these islands.

It’s no surprise considering our bloody history of invasion and conquest.

England was shaped in the crucible of war.The north in particular has been raided and pillaged, ravaged and burned, by southerners and Scots for hundreds of years.The north was so unruly the Romans built a coast-tocoast wall to control it.It remains the most formidable defensive structure in Europe and every stone lies in England.

William the Conqueror put the rebellious region to the torch, massacring villages in his Harrying of the North. Some were forced to live by thieving and violence, becoming clans of cattle-rustlers, robbers, rogues, murderers and mercenaries.

These Border Reivers were often shipped off to fight in foreign wars or dangled from a hangman’s rope.

The first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, was descended from such men, as are the Charlton brothers, Jack and Sir Bobby, and former US President Richard Nixon.

If anyone in the US thinks the English are effete and soft, try watching us smash the French, the Irish and the Scots in the Six Nations.

We don’t wear comfy pads and helmets like American footballers.

Sadly, Braveheart is just one example of how Hollywood never lets the facts get in the way of a good story. Does it matter, some might say? It’s only a film. Many people base their view of history on what they see in films or TV, and film-makers have a moral duty to stick to the facts, not twist or embellish them. They call it artistic licence. Rightly or wrongly, films are often how history is remembered.

With that kind of power comes great responsibility.