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    Scottish National Dress and Tartan
    Scottish National Dress and Tartan
    Scottish National Dress and Tartan
    Ebook122 pages1 hour

    Scottish National Dress and Tartan

    By Stuart Reid

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    Tartan is an enormously popular pattern in modern fashion. Beginning as Highland dress, it was originally peculiar to certain areas of Scotland, but is now generally accepted as its national costume: what was once ordinary working clothing of a distinctive local style has been formalised into a ceremonial dress, with tartans once woven according to the fancy of those who wore them becoming fixed with certain patterns prescribed for different families, areas or institutions. This process was not, as is popularly thought, a phenomenon begun by the romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott, but began long before as a reaction to the union with England in 1707. This book traces not only the early stages of that evolution, but the process by which the various tartans became icons of Scottish identity.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateMar 10, 2013
    ISBN9780747813309
    Scottish National Dress and Tartan
    Author

    Stuart Reid

    Stuart Reid was born in Aberdeen in 1954 and is married with two sons. He has worked as a librarian and a professional soldier and his main focus of interest lies in the 18th and 19th centuries. This interest stems from having ancestors who served in the British Army and the East India Company and who fought at Culloden, Bunker Hill and even in the Texas Revolution. His books for Osprey include the highly acclaimed titles about King George's Army 1740-93 (Men-at-Arms 285, 289 and 292), and the British Redcoat 1740-1815 (Warrior 19 and 20).

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      Book preview

      Scottish National Dress and Tartan - Stuart Reid

      SCOTLAND’S NATIONAL DRESS

      THE KILT and the tartan are not only Scotland’s national dress, but unquestionably form the most distinctive and most widely recognised national dress in the world. Strictly speaking the kilt began as a form of Highland dress and is often believed to belong only to that part of Scotland. Yet, while for a time this might arguably have been true, its claim to be the legitimate national dress for all Scots has a very substantial foundation.

      Scottish dress shares many cultural similarities with folk dress elsewhere in the world insofar as what was once ordinary working clothing has over the years been formalised and embellished to turn it into a ceremonial dress suitable for high days and holy days. In that respect it is no different from German lederhosen or Texan cowboy shirts and blue jeans, for example. In short, it is an outward expression of the wearer’s historical and cultural identity and its very distinctiveness encouraged its adoption as a symbol of not just Highland but Scottish identity a surprisingly long time ago.

      In popular myth there is something called the Highland Line, identified with the great geological fault slashing diagonally across Scotland from Dumbarton Rock on the River Clyde to Dunottar Castle on the East Coast just below Aberdeen. Those living to the north of this line are held to be the true Highlanders, the original wearers of the kilt and tartans, while those to the south of it are Lowlanders blessed with only the most tenuous entitlement to wear the tartan and none at all to wear the kilt. In reality history is rarely so simple.

      Before the Wars of Independence culminating in Robert the Bruce’s great victory at Bannockburn in 1314, there is little evidence of such a split. There were rugged parts of Scotland and less rugged parts of Scotland, but neither the English kings who coveted it nor the Scottish kings who defended it ever regarded it as two parallel but different realms.

      When King Alexander III tumbled over a cliff in 1286, leaving no obvious heir, the various claimants to the empty throne appealed to Edward I of England for arbitration. Edward duly judged the case honestly in favour of John Balliol, but also took the opportunity to declare himself Scotland’s feudal overlord. The Scots were unimpressed and refused to be intimidated, but it took nearly twenty years of bloody warfare to settle the matter. Sadly, for much of that time the English were the least of the Bruce’s worries. Before he could lead the Scots army to victory at Bannockburn he first had to fight and win a vicious civil war against the many supporters of the Balliols, chiefly led by the Comyns (or Cummings) in the North and the MacDougalls in the West.

      Their lands, as it happened, stretched in a great arc from Lorne through Lochaber, Moray and Badenoch to the Buchan coast of the North East, and so included most of what would later become considered as the Highlands. Thus the eclipse of the Comyn lords of Lochaber and Badenoch effectively disenfranchised the Highlands in a Scotland thereafter dominated by the Bruces and their Stewart successors.

      At the same time the growing commercial importance of the thriving East Coast ports meant that the hinterland (the Highlands) lacking both economic and political clout, steadily became marginalised so that by the seventeenth century there was indeed a Highland line, of sorts. It was always nevertheless a very indeterminate line and it is instructive to note that when the very last Scots Army was raised in 1745 the regiments of the Athole Brigade raised from amongst the Perthshire glens, the Gordons from Strathbogie and Strathdon, and the Farquharsons from Deeside were considered not as Highlanders but as part of the Lowland Division.

      This elegant Highland gentleman of the seventeenth century in another painting by McIan may look unlikely, but is rather less flamboyantly dressed than a contemporary portrait of Sir Mungo Murray by John Michael Wright.

      It was a similar story with language and if Scots, a tongue in some ways more akin to Flemish and German than to English, became predominant in the east-coast towns, it was still a different matter in the countryside and a form of Gaelic (Buchan Gaelic) was still

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