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.

[Woot22]

Thanks for the info, this is now on my Amazon wishlist.

[xman]

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.

I wonder to which tartans this are referring.

[CDNSushi]

The tartan trade, ever in search of business, leapt gladly upon the new "old" tartans

Ever the cynic, I would point out, that just as much money was spent on this book by enthusiastic hopefuls trying to discover their clans' tartans, there will be an equal or greater amount of money spent on the book that exposes the whole racket.

It's like causing a disease just so you can sell the cure... Not that I'm accusing the modern researchers of doing anything wrong, but are you sure they aren't actually descendants of the brothers John and Charles Hay Allan? ith:

Just sayin'...

[artificer]

Ever the cynic, I would point out, that just as much money was spent on this book by enthusiastic hopefuls trying to discover their clans' tartans, there will be an equal or greater amount of money spent on the book that exposes the whole racket.

It's like causing a disease just so you can sell the cure... Not that I'm accusing the modern researchers of doing anything wrong, but are you sure they aren't actually descendants of the brothers John and Charles Hay Allan? ith:

Just sayin'...

ohhhhh CDN, but you're a cynical one! (we aren't, by chance, separated by birth, are we?)

[Bugbear]

I wonder to which tartans this are referring.

I didn't realize chiefs register tartans with the Lyon Court, I thought it was just arms and such. That changes my view of clan tartans if the case.

[figheadair]

I didn't realize chiefs register tartans with the Lyon Court, I thought it was just arms and such. That changes my view of clan tartans if the case.

Very few clan tartans are registered with the Lyon Court. The practice started under Malcolm Innes of Learney and included a number of Canadian tartans about the same time - the 60s & 70s mainly. The trouble is that Lyon is not an expert on tartan and so recorded things that he was given by the chiefs who themselves did not necessarily know what they were talking about. Best left to those that know what they are talking about.

[figheadair]

Generally correct but the Sobieskies sometimes produced tartans for clans that already had one - see below. Generally though the older setts have been repleaced by the VS sett.

I think we often tend to forget that ALL the assorted tartan setts worn by all the various clans were designed, named, and thus "invented" by someone at some point in time (all but a very few since the beginning of the 19th century), so instead of villifying the Sobieski-Stuart brothers, I think we should applaud them for being an important part of the tartan design industry, and for popularizing the concept of named tartan patterns for Lowland and Border clans as well as Highland ones.

Some of the tartans that owe their existence to these ingenious entrepreneurs are:

Armstrong
Bruce only the commonly seen clan one. Wilsons of Bannockburn woven their Old Bruce and New Bruce some 20-30 years before the VS
Cameron the red clan sett. The Cameron of Erracht dates to c1793
Chisholm only the commonly seen clan one. There is an example of Wilsons of Bannockburn's older Chisholm on the Cockburn collection c1810
Crawford
Dunbar
Dundas
Erskine
Fraser only the commonly seen clan one. Wilsons of Bannockburn woven their Fraser and Fraser of Lovat some 20-30 years before the VS
Hamilton
Johnston
Kerr
Lindsay
MacArthur
MacLean (hunting)
MacQueen
Maxwell
Ogilvie (hunting)
Ramsay
Rose
Stewart of Atholl
Stuart of Bute
Sutherland
Wallace
Wemyss

[M. A. C. Newsome]

And, I might add, that the Stuarts did not simply invent or design new tartans, but claimed falsely that they had "discovered" sixteenth century evidence for these tartans. It is the false claim for a non-existent history that has earned them their infamy, not the fact that they designed new tartans.

As for the Lyon Court, some chiefs have chosen to have their tartan recorded in the Lyon Court books, but it is by no means a requirement. It simply creates a public record of the chief's wishes of what the clan tartan is; before the advent of the National Register, or other recording bodies such as the STA, STS, etc., some chose to have the Lyon Court record such details. But numerous Lords Lyon have reiterated the fact that tartan is not within the Lyon Court's jurisdiction.

[Tobus]

It is the false claim for a non-existent history that has earned them their infamy, not the fact that they designed new tartans.

Exactly.

But one wonders what would have happened if they hadn't foisted their fraud upon Scotland. Would the tartan craze ever have happened? And even if it did, would the people have gone back to wearing random tartans instead of trying to identify themselves with 'clan tartans'?

It's easy to criticize the Sobieski-Stuart brothers, knowing what we know today. But despite their being fraudsters, at least they did provide a commonly-accepted definition for clan tartans. It gave everyone a starting point, so to speak. Without them as a unifying force, there's no telling what would have happened (or not happened).