17th Century Style Sporrans

[Luke MacGillie]

I've no opinion on 17th century sporrans, but I just had to chime in and tip my hat to anyone who has a traveling liquor cabinet.

It was a recent acquisition

[Guthrumironhead]

I just remembered this one from ca. 1745. This style hung around for a while.

[figheadair]

From the admittedly small picture I'm looking at he appears to be wearing on his left hip, this is where a saxon clothed person would wear his scrip or purse prior to the invention of pockets.

I think you are confusing the sporran (there isn't one) with his sword hilt.

[figheadair]

I do wonder what evidence there is for what sporrans in the 17th century looked like.

Museum artifacts have been shown to be next to worthless, because while they often have attached mythology, they almost never have air-tight provenance.

So we are left with iconography. There are loads of 18th century portraits but AFAIK very few 17th century ones.

I don't see any sporran here, unfortunately (1660)

This painting is said to date to 1700, close enough! Hard to tell exactly how the sporran is made. It does resemble the ones shown in the OP.

Richard, you make a good point. The Wright portrait, which is actually slightly later, about 1683, is the only 17th century portrait (in fact, there are three versions, I can think of that shows Highland Dress. I don’t include Wright’s portrait of about the same date showing the actor John Lacy (d.1681) in a theatrical pseudo-Highland outfit.

As Wright’s portrait don’t show a sporran then in iconography terms we are looking at the early 18th century. The portrait of Lord Duffus c1712 shows a similar type draw-string sporran to the reconstruction, so to does those of John Campbell, 3rd Earl of Breadalbane c1712-15 and Alister Mohr Grant, Champion to the Laird of Grant 1714.

[OC Richard]

Too bad we can't see the top of John Campbell's sporran.

But the other images show us remarkable consistency of sporran design in the early 18th century. They appear to be deerskin.

We can only go back as early as the evidence we have allows, and past that we really don't know, though it's a fairly safe guess that the earliest things we see can be used as a guide to yet-earlier forms.

It's like that with bagpipes. The earliest clear image he have of the Great Highland pipe is The Piper To The Laird Grant in 1714.

We have a number of early-looking sets of pipes in museums but none have much in the way of provenance. The only early-looking set that has a date on it was shown to be a fake in the spirit of the Vestiarium Scoticum.

The style of turnery seen in The Piper To The Laird Grant's pipes and in other presumably early sets is remarkably similar to that seen with old Spanish and Breton pipes, giving us a fair idea of what Highland pipes prior to 1714 might have looked like.

[Guthrumironhead]

I always greatly admired Alister Mhor’s Turceach blade. Short of building one out of components where would I ever find such a piece? Sorry for the derailment of the thread.

[Orvis]

I had a friend in my Jacobite group make a turchail out of a Godwin backsword hilt and a cheesy-looking curved-with-a-clipped-point blade. In other words, a sword from components. If you want a custom turchail, you might try Vince Evans, who has made them in the past (from the photographic gallery on his website). I would imagine that any edged weapons made by Mr. Evans would be VERY pricey.