Here is where my old time training on the spirit of the law vs. the letter of the law raises it's ugly head. The letter of the law may not have been and outright ban of the tartan but, the spirit of the law was a ban. In your paper you point out how the ban on traditional clothes ended up in the loss of techniques and patterns of weaving and that once it was legal again many could not afford to return to traditional dress. So the English conquerors and occupiers managed to ban tartan for men at least, to effectively ban the production of fabric in the weights appropriate to the manufacture of men's clothing. The idea here was to attempt to eliminate a culture and they nearly succeeded.