Sartorial Mythbusting, Part 2: Plaids and the "Banning" Thereof

Welcome to Part II of Sartorial Mythbusting, in which I tackle the image of traditional Highland dress and the Act of Proscription (1746, took effect 1747) banning it.


First of all, as with the tartan, you have to establish a timeline for "traditional" when you want to ask what is "traditional" Highland dress. The kilt is and has been a part of Highland dress for a long time, but it's actually an evolved form of a garment known as a plaid.

The plaid is a rectangular piece of plaid/tartan cloth draped about the body. This is a substantial piece of cloth - some sources say 12 to 18 feet long - that also doubled as a blanket or wrap when necessary. The female version of this garment was draped like a hooded cloak and was called an arisaid. My friend Doug in college had a theory that the entire purpose of college was to teach you that words you thought meant the same thing mean two different things - nation and state, illness and disease, race and ethnicity, etc. You can now add plaid and tartan to that list.

If a 12-18 foot garment sounds inconvenient, well, just watch how two college-educated people with a set of instructions and a pre-pleated garment fail spectacularly at donning one:



(It took me over an hour to figure out how to convert and compress the file to get that video on here so I really hope you enjoy it!)

After the '45 Jacobite rebellion (which followed the '89, '08, '15, and '19 Jacobite rebellions), Parliament decided it was kind of tired of all these Jacobite rebellions. They passed the Act of Proscription, primarily to disarm the Scots, but also put in the following passage on clothing commonly called the Dress Act (which is a favorite in Highland romance novels):

no man or boy, within that part of Great Britain called Scotland, other than shall be employed as officers and soldiers in his Majesty's forces, shall on any pretence whatsoever, wear or put on the clothes commonly called Highland Clothes (that is to say) the plaid, philibeg, or little kilt, trowse, shoulder belts, or any part whatsoever of what peculiarly belongs to the highland garb; and that no tartan, or partly-coloured plaid or stuff shall be used for great coats, or for upper coats; ... every such person so offending.... shall be committed, shall suffer imprisonment, without bail, during the space of six months, and no longer; and being convicted for a second offence before a court of justiciary or at the circuits, shall be liable to be transported to any of his Majesty'splantations beyond the seas, there to remain for a space of seven years.

Put on a tartan and get schlepped off to the colonies, basically. So things were not looking up for the tartan.

Yet portraiture of the time does not support the idea that this ban was enforced. Take the Campbell portait from my previous post: 1749, two years into the Dress Act. Or take any of these portraits at the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland (1749, 1765, and late 1700s): hemorrhaging tartan, all of them. (Seriously, John Murray, red and green tartan at the same time?)

There are two explanations for this. First, everybody in the National Portrait Gallery is financially well-off, and many are nobles who are "in" with the monarchy, having backed the right (Hanoverian) horse in the '45. The Campbells famously supported the royals even before the uprising, executing the Glencoe Massacre against Clan MacDonald in 1692 over the belated provision of a loyalty oath. These are individuals, therefore, who are likely to be cut some slack in their fashion choices.

Other records, like court records, show us that this lackluster enforcement extended as well to the Scottish hoi palloi. Why might this be?

In the 18th century, people often didn't have multiple changes of clothes. For a peasant Highlander, the plaid not only might be one's only heavy/warm garment, but also one's blanket and bedding. There are court records of bewildered sheriffs writing to their superiors saying that if they enforce the Dress Act as written, they will have a district full of naked people freezing to death come December. (Or come September, frankly - Scotland's pretty darn cold). There were, of course, sheriffs who didn't lose any sleep over this idea, and people who were deported under this act. But generally, the decision was made to ignore the Dress Act, unless tte person in question was engaged in other forms of rabblerousing.

So there you have it: Scottish dress history, myths busted!

Bonus busted myth: wool is bad in the rain.

Most wool is smelly in the rain, that's for sure. But wool is actually one of the best fibers for a wet environment, for two reasons. First, a wool garment can absorb significant amounts of water before the person wearing it feels wet on the inside (according to the American Sheep Industry Association, that figure is 30% of its own weight). Second, wool does something truly wacky: it actually heats up when it gets wet. So wearing wool around Scotland is like carrying around your own little space heater! Let's hear it for sheep!

Sartorial Mythbusting, Part 1: Clan Tartans

When you think of Scotland, you probably think of many things. Haggis. Bagpipes. Rain. But I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that your most thought-of Scotland image is tartan, often also called plaid.

Ah, the tartan! What a glorious tradition, each clan to its own tartan! Imagine them running over Culloden Field in their Highland Charge, displaying to the enemy which families were arrayed against them! How tragic it was when the plaids were banned for most of the rest of the 18th century!

Except not. Time for some sartorial (i.e., clothing) mythbusting!

Here is a portrait of John Campbell, from 1749:

We have a problem here. The Campbell plaid, as we know it, is predominantly blue, green, and white, and looks like this.

So he is definitely not wearing Campbell plaid. (In fact, he's wearing two plaids that aren't "Campbell plaid" – your eyes may be watering too hard from that outfit to tell, but those tartans are different top and bottom). Why not?

Campbell plaids did not exist in the 18^th century. Neither did Stewart plaids, or MacDonald plaids, or MacIntosh plaids, or any other form of official standardized clan plaids. There were very likely regional variations caused by the availabilities of dyes and local weaving techniques, but the official tartans as we know them are a product of the early 19^th century, specifically of a firm called Wilson's of Bannockburn.

At that time, Scotland was hot. Highland regiments won renown for their fighting against Napoleon. Sir Walter Scott's 1814 book Waverley romanticized the '45 uprising like dang and whoa. King George IV even came to Scotland in 1822, and wore tartan! Wilson's knew a good trend when they saw it, and began weaving like crazy on those newfangled industrial looms. This, by the way, is another nail in the coffin for the "plaids as traditional Highland attire" argument – the plaids we see today are completely beyond the capacity of a Highland homespinner, both in weaving and dyeing. (Want to try some virtual weaving yourself? See links below!)

Soon, Wilson's's ('s's's's) tartans were flying off the shelves. To keep track of all the patterns, or perhaps to simply merchandise them better, the tartans were given clan names. The final capping touch on this was the forgery of the Vestiarium Scoticum (a book, and not a skin condition, although it sounds like one) by John Sobieski Stuart and Charles Edward Stuart, two brothers who claimed to be the descendents of Bonnie Prince Charlie. The book, which they said came from an old manuscript, claimed to lay out pre-Culloden tartans by clan. As fake royals trying to bond with the local population and score some freebies like room and board, the Sobieski Stuarts probably claimed this faux sartorial (word of the day!) expertise to shore up their Scottish street cred.

Need more evidence? Look at the 1746 David Morier painting of Culloden, in which the Scots clearly are not wearing organized plaids. The tartans shown also do not align to the 19^th century plaids assigned to the clans we know were at the battle. (There are also some more amazingly eyewatering tartan-on-tartan outfits here – I'm surprised the Hanoverian side could see to aim their muskets.) Eyewitness accounts of the battle support the painting as well. The Jacobites were distinguished by white bonnets, or the berets with white bows shown in the painting. After the battle was lost, the vanquished frequently ditched the bonnet to pass for Royalists. Clearly, this would not have worked if the other 8/10ths of your outfit screamed "Member of a Jacobite Clan."

Some people don't deal well with this revelation. My professor recounted giving a presentation on the above portrait of Campbell and receiving a question from a man who wanted to point out to her that it couldn't be John Campbell, since it wasn't a Campbell plaid. She explained what I've just gone over here – that the "Campbell plaid" is 19^th century construction, etc., etc., and he nodded and nodded, and when she finished, he said, "I understand what you're saying, Professor, but that's not a Campbell plaid." The tourist industry also is very fond of the tartan system, as it enables them to sell mass quantities to Scottish diaspora tourists seeking a bit of heritage to take back. (Which is completely fine with me - the tartan can still connect you to Scottish heritage, or to other wearers, or can just look fun, regardless of what year it was designed. I like tartan. I just want to point out its real history.)

Nowadays, tartans are policed very seriously by the Scottish Register of Tartans, which you can think of as a patent bureau for tartan patterns. If you made a tartan using Tartan Maker or Tartan Designer or Interactive Weaver (go on, it's a hoot) or another progam, I'm sorry to say you can't just declare it your tartan and start making kilts. You must submit it (and pay a fee), and have your submission approved as different enough from all existing tartans to justify its own registration. With everyone from Alberta to Zambia getting in on the act, you can imagine things get tighter every year.

By "policed," though, I don't mean that people will come and tear a tartan off you if they don't you deserve it. Mostly it relates to manufacture and naming rights. People "in the know" would frown on wearing the royal family's three Balmoral tartans if you're not actually a royal (they won't even manufacture them for you in the UK), but tartan-wearing is basically self-policing. If you want to wear one just because you like it, I don't think people would mind. Just don't lie and say you're their long-lost cousin

Coming up next time: the "banning" of the Tartans, and what is a plaid?

Slate on Bagpipes at (Military) Funerals

Slate has an interesting article up on the use of bagpipes (specifically of the Highland variety) at military funerals, occasioned by the recent tragedy at Fort Hood.

According to the article, it isn't that pipes are particularly common at military funerals--they're common at funerals in general, sometimes just for aesthetic reasons, and sometimes because of a family connection to Scotland or Ireland.

It's also interesting to note that there isn't really anything particularly Scottish about bagpipes. As this list shows, bagpipes were a pretty common folk instrument throughout Europe and the Middle East, especially in the medieval period. In modern times, they've come to be associated with Scotland, and most of the older varieties have died out or been replaced by the Great Highland Pipes (best for sheer volume, and what most people in the US mean when they say "bagpipes") and the Irish uilleann pipes (best for range and precision).

Anyway, go and read the article--it's worth a look. And the Jacobites make a cameo! As if you haven't already heard enough of him here, here, here, and again, in a few days, when we get around to posting about Lindisfarne Castle.

Over the Sea to Skye

A much-belated revisitation of our trip to the Highlands, also discussed here, here and here.

The Isle of Skye is a much-romanticized part of the Highlands due to its role in the '45 uprising (what, weren't you paying attention to Justin's post? He worked hard on that!). Flora Macdonald, a Highland Jacobite lady, was engaged to help Bonnie Prince Charlie escape from Scotland by taking him in a boat "over the sea to Skye," as described in the famous Skye Boat Song.

(You can get more insight into the romanticism of the '45 if you click on the video, which is "dedicated to Jacobites everywhere." What does that even mean? How can you be a Jacobite these days? Are you going to go get Franz, Duke of Bavaria and try to put him on the throne - over his own indifference? I get that in many cases, Jacobitism is conflated with Scottish nationalism or Scottish patriotism, but it's just not correct. As Justin pointed out in his post, more Scots fought against Charlie than for him. Anyway, if, like me, you're not a fan of historical whitewashing, just try to concentrate on the fact that Charlie made his escape in drag, as Flora's Irish maid Betty Burke. Surely one of the great examples of monarchical transvestitism.)

Ahem. Focus.

Skye is a four-hour round-trip day-trip from Inverness and allowed us to see some beautiful scenery on the way. It was also a day in which the winds were so heavy that the ferries to Skye were cancelled (we took the bridge, fortunately) which explains our hair in this, and subsequent, pictures:

Once on the island, we visited the Clan Macdonald center, the Armadale Castle Gardens and Museum of the Isles. My only complaint about this day trip was that with Justin and my penchant for nerding, we spent so much time in the museum that we didn't actually have time to eat any lunch on Skye. Fortunately, we brought granola. We're like hardcore hikers, but for museums.

Armadale Castle ruins (that's me in the pink hat)


I strongly recommend the museum. It had very interesting regional history exhibits, often in both Scottish Gaelic and English. Gaelic (pronounced "Gallic" for the Scottish version; same root as "Gaul" for France) was the indigenous Celtic language of Scotland. It's closely related to Irish Gaelic and more distantly related to Welsh, which is the only Celtic language to be very widely spoken. There are 50,000-odd speakers of Scots Gaelic today, contrasted with about 1/2 million for Welsh. These speakers are disproportionately concentrated in the northwest of Scotland and the islands, where their isolation has helped shield them from English. Skye is the island about 1/3 of the way down that map, with a bright purple top tip. The Scottish Gaelic Language College is on Skye, as is a new Gaelic elementary school. Another new one just opened in Inverness. Since regaining some parliamentary powers in 1999, Scotland has been able to leverage some protection for Scots Gaelic, including a broadcast channel in Gaelic on the BBC; however, 50,000 speakers is right on the cusp of the number needed to prevent language extinction. Nobody can say for sure if Gaelic will survive.

Educational trivia about Skye: There is only one high school, Portree High School. It can be so far from students' homes that the students commute to school on Monday and stay in a hostel for the rest of the week.

Pet peeve rant: I have been endlessly amused by the usage across Scotland of what I perceive as schlocky faux-Celtic fonts like the ones on the Portree web site. In the US, it's the sort of thing you'd see at cheesy Irish pubs like Molly Brannigan's. I have NOT been amused by the omnipresence of the font Papyrus. I see it probably every other block. There is not, nor has there ever been, widespread use of papyrus to make paper anywhere in the British Isles. Get a new font.

Skye has some typical Highland scenery, down to the little white dots of sheep:


But it also has massively damp, lush areas straight out of Jurassic Park:


Other events of the afternoon involved whisky tasting. The MacNamaras are from Skye; Justin is part MacNamara.


NOOOOOOOO! CURSE YOU, PAPYRUS!!!

We also visited a beach....


... the ruined castle shown the TV series Highlander...


... and a lovely scenic bridge. Justin looks odd because he's trying to talk the photographer into stepping out of traffic. But wait! What's that in the background? Click to zoom!

The photographer said, "I hope that's your wife." Some days, Justin probably hopes it's not!

Sightseeing in the Highlands: Culloden Field

(This is the latest post in a multi-part series on our recent trip to Inverness, Skye, and the Black Isle in the Highlands. You can find the first two posts here and here.)


Yesterday, we treated our loyal readers to the world-record briefest-ever history of Jacobitism in Scotland. Today, we visit the sight of the last chapter of the Jacobite story, Culloden Field, a soggy moor a few miles east of Inverness.

 

Bonnie Prince Charlie's defeat in the Battle of Culloden marked the end of the 1745 Rising. It was also the last land battle ever fought in Great Britain.  

As I mentioned yesterday, there were Scots on both sides of Culloden--more, in fact, on the government side than on the Young Pretender's--and partly for that fact alone, the battle and its aftermath represent one of the bloodiest episodes of Scottish history (which is saying something).

Historically, though, Culloden is most important as the final major blow to the Highland way of life, and those clans who supported the Jacobite cause were, through imprisonment, destruction of property, deportation, and outright execution, nearly erased from the Highlands.

I won't go into much detail about the battle itself: you can learn a lot more through the excellent National Trust Scotland website--or, if you happen to be in the Inverness area, at the battlefield itself. Access to the battlefield is free, and there are plenty of interpretive signs to help you make sense of the place. The visitor's centre is pricey, but excellently done, and well worth the cost for history buffs.

Today, the moor still looks much like it did in 1746, and provides an appropriately moody backdrop for the day's lessons.

 

One portion of the field includes a large cairn in memory of the fallen Highlanders, surrounded by headstones marking the various mass graves belonging to each clan.

 

  

  

A few of the order of battle markers had had flowers lain on them, presumably by the descendants of the soldiers in that unit.

 

Interestingly enough, there is little offered in memory of the government troops, in part because of the tendency of later Scottish nationalists to romanticize the Jacobite cause--though there were far fewer government casualties on the day.

Nana may have her own comments on Culloden later, but to me, Culloden was just deeply sad. It's so easy to see, in retrospect, the strong reasons that drove soldiers to fight for each side (in fact, many Scots would have had relatives on both sides), and thus all the more tragic, I think, that so many had to die for what they believed in.

As I said yesterday, Culloden and its aftermath started a 100-year flood of immigration from the Highlands to North America. As far as I've been able to learn, I didn't have any family at Culloden: though a batch of MacKinnons were involved in the campaign, they were captured the day before at Littleferry.

More about Jacobites than you ever wanted to know

In Scotland, as soon as you hear the word "Jacobite," you can kiss the next twenty minutes goodbye. (Don't worry, I'll try to have you out in under ten.)

I was thinking yesterday about how to parcel out the remaining posts on our recent trip to the Highlands, but I couldn't find an easy way around the Jacobite problem--that is, the fact that you can't spit in Scotland without hitting some part of Jacobite history, and no single episode in that history makes a lick of sense if you don't know the whole (very complicated) tale. So in the interests of our American readers, here's a brief introduction to the history of the Jacobite cause.

It all started with the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 (Shakespeare's time--I told you this was a long story). Her successor was James I of England and Ireland, who was also King James VI of Scotland, and who ruled as the joint monarch of both nations. This was the beginning of the Stuart dynasty.

James's son Charles I made the regrettable mistake of crossing both Parliament and the Protestants--the latter with his Catholic-style reorganizations of the nominally Protestant Anglican church, the former with his dictatorial style of government. Thus the English Civil War, which ends with Chuck getting his head lopped off by Oliver Cromwell and company, who established a Protestant dictatorship under the guise of a republican "Commonwealth."

(Still with me?)

The Scots, however, didn't recognize Cromwell as their ruler, and instead crowned Charles II King of Scotland, but Cromwell quickly drove the new Scottish king into exile. Charles II had the last laugh, though, as after Cromwell's death in 1658, the Commonwealth collapsed, and Charles II was invited back to the throne (albeit with many of the old royal powers now delegated to Parliament) in the Restoration of 1660.

(Whew.)

Charles was a controversial ruler, though, who tried to take back the powers given to Parliament in 1660 and who converted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed. This didn't sit well with most folks in Britian, who hadn't fought long and hard to establish Protestantism for nothing.

Oh, the Scottish Covenanters also rose up in rebellion against Chuckie II around this time.

Charles' successor, James II/VI, was a Catholic, and even worse, he was even more of a wannabe dictator than Charles. The last straw, though, was the fact that he produced a Catholic heir, whom the Jacobites (Latin: supporters of Jacobus, aka James) would refer to as James III/VII, and others would call the Old Pretender.

(Deep breath.)

So the English kicked James II/VI out in favor of her Protestant daughter, Anne II, and her Dutch husband William of Orange (the namesakes of William and Mary College in Virginia). This event, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, also established Parliament, not the monarch, as the main source of power in Britain.

And here's where all heck breaks loose. The Highland Scots, many of whom were still Catholic, plus various groups of Catholics and conservatives throughout the British Isles (most notably the Irish), didn't recognize William and Mary or any members of the succeeding Hannoverian dynasty. Instead, they thought Jimmy 2-6's son, James III/VII (the Old Pretender), was the rightful king, and spent several decades, with the help of England's enemies abroad, trying to restore him to the thone. (Rob Roy MacGregor, made famous in the US by a film starring Liam Neeson, was loosely associated with the cause.)

Luckily for the English, the Old Pretender was pretty comfortable living it up down in Italy with his wealthy Polish wife. But Jimmy 3-7's son Charles Edward Stuart (aka Bonnie Prince Charlie, aka Charles III) was another matter. He brought his big ego and his inflated sense of honor to Scotland in 1745, where he orchestrated a massive uprising of Highlanders, which after a brilliant start fizzled out very quickly, finally ending with the brutal defeat of the Jacobites at the Battle of Culloden (near Inverness) in 1746.

1745 is as big a date in Scottish history as 1776 is in US history. It was the last time any group of Scots rose up for independence, and it was the beginning of the end for the old Highland way of life. In the immediate aftermath of the battle, the government troops ransacked the Highlands, and things there were never quite the same. Many former Jacobites fled to the US and Canada (the McKinnons, for example, helped Bonnie Prince Charlie escape the mainland, and paid dearly for it, hence their exodus to North America), as well as to Australia and New Zealand.

Lately, the Jacobite cause has been resurrected as part of the growing push for Scottish independence. The 1745 uprising, however, is not nearly so black-and-white as it seems--there were, for example, more Scots fighting for the government than there were for the Jacobites--a fact which I hope will become clear in our next several posts.

Anyway, there's the quick-and-dirty version of the Jacobite story. More than you probably ever wanted to know about it, and I doubt I brought it in under 10 minutes--but enough, I hope, to make sense of what's to come.