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<\/p>\nTartan is one of the most distinctive and recognisable textile in the western world and Scotland has become one with it.<\/p>\n
The earliest reports we see about tartan come from the Roman writers Virgil and Tacitus who wrote that the Picts\/Celts were wearing striped, sometimes across, cloaks, shiny and bright.\u00a0\u00a0 Tacitus also says they were redheads with painted bodies (can I say, just like yours truly ;-))<\/p>\n
The first actual written evidence we see in Scotland is from the treasurer of James III in 1471 who asks for blue tartan for use by the King.\u00a0\u00a0 We also have records from James IV court asking for \u2018iij elnes of helande tertein\u2019\u00a0 He paid 8 shillins for it.\u00a0 An elne was 37\u201d in Scotland but 45\u201d in England.<\/p>\n
In George Buchanan’s 25 volume of History of Scotland published in 1582, he describes the kilt as consisting of tightly woven cross striped woollen cloth.\u00a0 He also says that; they delight in variegated garments, especially striped and that their favourite colours are blue and purple.\u00a0 Their ancestors wore plaids of many different colours and a number still retain this custom, but the majority, now, in their dress, prefer a dark brown, imitating the leaves of the heather, that when lying upon the heath of the day, they may not be discovered by the appearance of their clothes.<\/p>\n
We know that in most villages of the day would have had a weaver, in fact there would\u2019ve been a whole cottage industry with a lot of the community being involved.<\/p>\n
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There would be the gathering of the wool, which came from a now extinct highland sheep.\u00a0 This was a small animal with a short tail,\u00a0 with the males were possibly horned.\u00a0 It would shed its wool naturally and their fibres would\u2019ve been plucked or gathered and spun into a soft fine worsted yarn.\u00a0 Later, the cheviot sheep were introduced which had a harder springy fleece, unfortunately with interbreeding of the two the quality became a lot rougher and is now mainly used for carpets.\u00a0 The tartan we see woven today actually comes from the fleece of sheep in New Zealand, which is sent to Scotland and spun into the tartan we see today.<\/p>\n
Once the wool had been gathered, someone would be responsible for carding it, preparing the fibres. \u00a0Then another person would spin it and then off to the dyers. \u00a0 When ready it would be woven into a check, tweed or tartan.<\/p>\n
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Now it would be time to waulk the cloth.\u00a0 This was usually scheduled for a specific day of the month as it was a community event sometimes lasting the full day with a lot of the village involved.\u00a0\u00a0 You would be told on a certain day to leave your urine bucket at the front door to be collected for the process, it had to be stale.\u00a0 The ammonia from the urine would help make the dyes fast, soften the cloth and remove residue oils that was used to dress the wool, it is also said that it made the cloth showerproof but that could be the whole process of shrinking the cloth to a tighter weave.\u00a0 Then once the cloth had been soaked in the urine it would be laid out on a long table, the villagers would sit around the table squeeze and bang the cloth on the table to shrink and soften it.\u00a0 There are a lot of waulking songs that the villagers would sing whilst working, it would give the process some rhythm while working.\u00a0 This would have been quite the social occasion for the village as everyone would be gathered to take part and it being Scotland a lot of drink involved.<\/p>\n
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At this point there is no evidence that there was a massive range of clan or family tartans.\u00a0 The village weaver would\u2019ve woven up patterns, and, like any artist from any era they may have been proud of their creations.\u00a0\u00a0 It is said that they kept the thread counts on a stick so they could recreate the patterns.\u00a0\u00a0 None of these sticks have ever been found.\u00a0 There may well have been some clan chiefs or wealthy families that might have had their own personal tartan woven but, the general population would\u2019ve have been wearing whatever they could get. \u00a0 Although you could maybe tell someone from another district by the colours of their garment as dyers of each village would\u2019ve been using local plants and insects to create the colours.<\/p>\n
The 18th century saw the tartan revolution begin.\u00a0 Industrialisation had come to Scotland and the very first industry to set up was in textiles.\u00a0 The manufacture of tartans moved into large mill towns, and like many cottage industries, even today, it, along with better roads and transportation into the Highlands crushed the village weaver.<\/p>\n
Following the Jacobite defeat at Culloden 1746, the last pitched battle ever fought on the British Isles, Bonnie Prince Charlie fled the field to South Uist and then on to France.\u00a0 Leaving his supporters to suffer the wrath of the Butcher of Cumberland.\u00a0 Then to further punish Scotland, Parliament issued the acts of proscription, this was not only to disarm the Highlanders but also to rob them of everything that made them who they were, even their dress, which included anything tartan.\u00a0 This was meant to destroy the clans, identities and economic structure of the Highlands.<\/p>\n
This could be one of the reasons we have never found a thread count stick of any village weaver as the consequences of breaking the proscription were horrendous.\u00a0 First offence could be a fine, if you got a nice Sherriff, another could mean shipped off to the colonies for 7 years, presumably as an indentured slave, and finally execution.\u00a0 I personally wouldn\u2019t have risked it.<\/p>\n
The proscription didn\u2019t mean the end of tartan.\u00a0 Highland regiments were exempt; the kilt was worn as part of the uniform.\u00a0 Most of the Scottish regiments wore a form of the Black watch or any that matched the colours.\u00a0 When tartan was standardised and they all wore the Black Watch or 42nd<\/sup> Tartan.\u00a0 The reason the Black watch was the preferred tartan was because the majority of officers in the regiments were Campbells and the Campbell tartan is Black Watch.\u00a0 When Mackenzie raised his regiment in 1778 he decided he didn\u2019t want the Black Watch ‘government’ so added a red and white line over the top.\u00a0 The Duke of Gordon raised his regiment in 1793, his wife didn\u2019t want them wearing the \u2018government\u2019 tartan either so they asked a cloth merchant, Mr William Forsyth, to design a new one for them, he obviously put a lot of thought into it, and stuck a yellow line through the Black Watch.\u00a0 I wonder if they noticed that\u2019s all he did.<\/p>\n We also see from surviving documents that some of the mills in Scotland at the time were sending huge amounts of tartan cloth to the colonies during and after the proscription.<\/p>\n After the repeal of the act in 1782 there was no great rush to go back to wearing the kilt or tartan.\u00a0 It had been 36 years and the people were happy plodding along, in fact a whole generation would not have been around in the \u2018good auld days\u2019.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t until 1822 that tartan truly came back with a vengeance.<\/p>\n It all started in 1815 when two gentlemen, Stewart of Garth and Robertson of Struan, were writing to one another about trying to preserve the older clan setts of tartans.\u00a0 Around the same time the society of London had set up its own collection of \u2018clan\u2019 tartans.\u00a0 There was definitely a tartan revolution starting but the man who really pushed it forward was Sir Walter Scott.\u00a0 With his romantic vision of the Highlands and Highlanders in his books, along with his obsession of bringing history back to life and improving on it<\/p>\n In 1822 Sir Walter Scott and Stewart of Garth were asked to stage manage King George IV’s visit to Edinburgh. \u00a0The king even had a Highland Kilt outfit specially made for the event.\u00a0\u00a0 A wee bit extra info, Ebenezer Scroggie, the man whose headstone inspired Charles Dickens \u2018Scrooge\u2019, had either catered or supplied the drink for the event.\u00a0 Scott had asked all who were attending the functions to wear full tartan Highland dress.\u00a0 The rush was then on to weave tartans to make up the highland dress for the attendees.\u00a0 As most people hadn\u2019t bothered going back to traditional dress after the repeal and it had now been 40 years, the mills were descended upon in mass by customers wishing to either have \u2018their own\u2019 tartan woven or choose some of the tartans already in production.\u00a0 Tartans kept in the mills were not named at this point just numbered.\u00a0 So, most would go into the mill and pick out what they liked and from that point on it was their very own clan tartan.\u00a0 Wilsons of Bannockburn, the main tartan weaving mill of the time, had to build new weaving sheds to keep up with demand, even taking staff from other areas of the business to fulfil the orders and for the next 10 year the mill solely wove tartan.<\/p>\n Tartan was now well and truly part of Scotland and its \u2018history\u2019.\u00a0 There were a couple of brothers around at this time called Charles and John Hay Allan and decided to try and cash in on this.\u00a0 They quietly put a rumour out that they were the grandsons of Charles Edward Stuart, they concocted a story that they had been whisked away at birth and brought up by an English admiral.\u00a0 They were intelligent, charming and good-looking fellows who with their stories, fancies, the sentiments of Jacobite loyalty and of course the romantic literature of the day had the nobility of Scotland eating out of their hands.\u00a0 So much so, they were given free range of Highland estates and lodges to be at their disposal.\u00a0 For a couple of decades, they played off these rumours and lived the high life.\u00a0 Then in 1842 they pop up again only now they\u2019ve changed their names to Charles and John Sobieski Stuart, Sobieski being the name of Charles Edward Stuart mother.\u00a0 This time they say they have an old manuscript from 1571 that was apparently given to Bonnie Prince Charlie at Douay.\u00a0 It was two volumes of work all about highland dress and contained 49 Highland Tartans and 29 Lowland tartans with coloured plates of the actual tartans and they had it published.<\/p>\n Sir Walter Scott and others were asked to verify the manuscript but the Brothers conveniently said their father would not hand it over, so instead they had to look over the published works.\u00a0 The first mistake Scott found was that there was absolutely no evidence that tartan had ever been worn in the Scottish Lowlands, that\u2019s 29 tartans out the window and as for the Highland tartans they could only verify that 6 were indeed correct.\u00a0\u00a0 The wording of some of the text in the works was said to be not to be of the correct century and some of the tartans had certainly come from the mind of John himself.\u00a0 In 1847 an article was published in the ‘Quartley Review’, a popular English Journal of the time, dismissing the manuscript and the brothers as frauds.\u00a0 John did write a rebuttal but by then damage had been done and they moved to the continent where they lived out the rest of their lives.<\/p>\n Just as the Sobieski brothers were sent packing Queen Victoria purchased the Balmoral Estate, Speyside in 1848 and built themselves a wee castle.\u00a0 Queen Victoria, just as her Uncle, George IV before her, was seduced by Scotland’s beauty and, again thanks to Sir Walter Scott, the romantic version of the country\u2019s history.\u00a0 She was even said to have considered herself an ardent Jacobite.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We know that both Victoria and Albert loved tartan as they had Balmoral Castle covered in it from the walls and curtains to the chairs.\u00a0 Prince Albert actually designed the Balmoral tartan himself and Victoria loving the Dress Stewart tartan had a red line added to make it her own.<\/p>\n There is an old story that I was told when I started in this industry.\u00a0 We have to thank Queen Victoria for the introduction of dress tartans.\u00a0\u00a0 It is said that she thought some of the tartans were rather drab so had white added to the base to make them more feminine.\u00a0 There is also another wee story that she supposedly invented the kilt pin. \u00a0She was apparently inspecting a Highland regiment on a very windy day.\u00a0 As the kilts were flying up, she took out a hat pin and put it in the kilt to prevent any embarrassment.\u00a0 I have no idea if these are true but they do make nice little stories.<\/p>\n Tartan is still as popular today as it was back then, probably more so, and it is still evolving as we speak.\u00a0\u00a0 We have ancient, modern, and weathered dyes of each of the tartans.<\/p>\n As you can see all of these tartans are the same sett but have been woven using different dye shades.<\/p>\n The ancient lighter dyes are said to have come from the Victorian era.\u00a0 They thought that if you were using pure vegetable dyes the colours would be lighter.\u00a0 The Modern darker colours are said to be from using chemical dyes.\u00a0 In fact it has been researched by some dyers recently that the modern colours would have been the older shades.\u00a0 The weathered dyes were brought out in the 1950s to mimic a piece of cloth that had been dug up from Culloden.\u00a0 Later, another mill brought out their own version of the weathered but with a bit more depth and colour calling it muted. \u00a0There is white dress tartans but are now only really worn by Highland dancers.\u00a0 You will also hear the term Hunting colours, this is just a green version of a red tartan.\u00a0 The hunting to be worn during the day and the red to be worn in the evening.\u00a0 I think it may have been a clever tailor or retailer that came up with this one.<\/p>\n The Scottish Tartans Authority was set up in 1996 \u00a0by leading tartan mills and enthusiasts to gather together the tartans and have a formal database to preserve the history of tartan and regulate any new tartans coming out, it is still going strong today.\u00a0 We also have The Scottish Register of Tartans which was established by an Act of the Scottish Parliament in 2008 and can register any new tartan designs.<\/p>\n Now because of our history with tartan anyone around the world seeing tartan will instinctively think of Scotland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tartan is one of the most distinctive and recognisable textile in the western world and Scotland has become one with it. The earliest reports we see about tartan come from the Roman writers Virgil and Tacitus who wrote that the Picts\/Celts were wearing striped, sometimes across, cloaks, shiny and bright.\u00a0\u00a0 Tacitus also says they were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":65540,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[413,7,1296,437,1629,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-kilts","category-scottish-history","category-scottish-regiments","category-sir-walter-scott","category-tartan","category-tartan-news"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/project1-m9gb2xku8.live-website.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/hist4-644x1024.jpg\")
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