Scotland's Forged Tartans

[OC Richard]

I dare say that no tartan lover's library is complete without this wonderful book.

Scotland's Forged Tartans
Donald C Stewart and J Charles Thompson
Edited by James Scarlett
Paul Harris Publishing
Edinburgh 1980

The Editor's Preface begins:

About the year 1820 there appeared upon the Highland scene two young men, the brothers John and Charles Hay Allan. Undoubtedly charming and talented, their passport among the Highland aristocracy, however, was the widely held belief that they were the legitimate grandsons of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Bonnie Prince Charlie of The '45...

It was not long before the brothers began to let it be known that they had in their possession an ancient manuscript which gave precise details of all the old Clan tartans and to hand out details of these to their friends some of whom, it would seem, had not previously known that they had Clan tartans...

In 1842, under the title of Vestiarium Scoticum, the brothers published an edited version of their documents in which the tartan of each clan was described and illustrated....

The tartan trade, ever in search of business, leapt gladly upon the new "old" tartans and nobody ever stopped to consider that the "exact" decriptions left so much latitiude in interpretation that the tartans shown must have come largely from the imagination of the illustrator, brother Charles...

(With) DC Stewart working on the tartans and JC Thompson on the language of the manuscripts... they have shown, with little room for doubt, that the Vestiarium Scoticum and the documents leading up to it were forgeries...

The authors have extracted some quite damning evidence in the course of their investigations, not the least important of which is the frequency with which tartans decribed in the manuscripts can be related to designs current in the 1830's...


As one of the authors states:

We set out to prove the following assertions:
1) the Cromarty MS is a forgery
2) the Douay MS, if it ever existed, is equally spurious
3) the Allan brothers, when they published the Vestiarium Scoticum, knew that it was false.

The Editor's Postscript raises the following issue which is something that I think all lovers of the kilt and of tartan would be well to ponder:

The question is rightly asked, what should we do about the Vestiarium tartans now that they are proved false?
It is a difficult question to answer and the temptation to say "Nothing" is strong, for the tartans were accepted and have been in use for nearly 150 years, and some of the older designs that they supplanted have been taken up by other Clans.

Yet most of the Vestiarium designs are poor and show little artistic skill, and it would be a pity if people were to be discouraged from wearing the more attractive traditional designs.

One Highland Chief overcame this difficulty by registering the correct tartan at the Lyon Court and, at the same time, authorising the wearing of the "phoney" one.
He thus gave his Clan a correct tartan, avoided expense and annoyance for the people who already had the false one, and gave the tartan trade a chance to sell more tartan, a judgement that Solomon would be hard put to it to beat.