THE STORY OF THE SCOTTISH TARTANS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18939, 9 December 1929, Page 2

THE STORY OF THE SCOTTISH TARTANS.

BECAME HONOURED AND ADMIRED FOR GLORY ON THE BATTLE-FIELD. (Special to the “Star.”) LONDON, November 15. Quite recently terminated the season of the year when hosts of holiday makers streamed over the Border to Bonnie Scotland, tourists and sportsmen and others, and they realised the glamour of the tartan on its native heath. It is a picturesque feature, which, whether it be scenery or sport or aught else which draws them northward, adds appreciably to their pleasure. The Scottish season, of which the succession of Highland gatherings has become so prominent a feature, culminates in the Braemar Games in September. At all the wearing of Highland costume is a prime attraction. Distinguishing Clans. Checkered woolleji cloth is not, of course, distinctively Scottish. At some remote period woven fabrics began to be diversified by stripes, and the next step, the simplest manner in which dyed yarns could be combined in the loom to form a pattern, was the production of checks. Tartan is the cloth thus variegated, woven and worn in the Highlands, different patterns of which came to be adopted to distinguish the many different clans. But while the cloth was of very ancient use in Scotland, the association of particular designs with particular clans is of much more recent date. In a learned brochure by a president of the Scottish society, “The Kilt: a Manual of Scottish Dress/* published a few years ago, the origin of the tartan is ascribed to the different-colour-ed fleeces of the sheep, from the wool of which were woven the checkered trews of Celt and Gaul. Through obscure and turbulent ages the tartan gradually developed, was extended from the trews to the plaid, the kilt as a separate garment not having appeared, and slowly diverse patterns began to mark off clan from clan. Plaids of Several Colours. The earliest distinction, however, was an indication of rank. About the middle of the fifteenth century we read of tartan being “of one or two cplours for the poor and more varied for the rich.” Bishop Lesley, the Scottish prelate, banished by Queen Elizabeth for plotting on behalf of Mary, Queen of Scots, said that noble and common people in the Highlands wore mantles or plaids, the nobles preferring those of several colours. The old Scottish kings were entitled to wear tartan of seven colours, and it is significant that the Catholic priests in the Highlands took precedence in this matter and were permitted eight colours. The Highlanders were fervent, if barbarous, sons of the Church. Even after the system of clan distinctions was full grown, a check design in black, green and dark blue was peculiar to Catholic priests and Protestant preachers. The kilt, or fillibeg, as a separate garment came into use only toward the end of the seventeenth century. Originally the kilt and the plaid were in one piece. The name “kilt” implies that it was the end of the plaid “tucked up” and belted round the waist, hanging m folds below. In this form the costume was of great antiquity, sculptured stones having been found in various parts of Scotland, showing it was worn from the sixth century onward. The pugnacious and predatory Piets, ancestors of the Highlanders, doubtless revelled in the freedom of movement it afforded in hunting and fighting, scaling the hillsides, and fording the burns. The Highlanders sometimes struck terror into the Lowlanders by casting off their plaids—huge, naked, hairy fiercely flourishing their dirks and Lochamber axes, with wild Gaelic cries as they charged. Hunting Costume. Kings, nobles and their retainers donned Highland costume when they hunted the wild deer among the hills. John Taylor, the “Water-poet,” in his account of his “Penniless Pilgrimage,” published in 1618, wrote: “Once in the year, which is the whole of the month of August and sometimes part of September, many o£ the nobility and gentry of the kingdom, for their pleasure, do come into these Highland countries to hunt, when they do conform to the habit of tha Highlandmen, who for the most part speak nothing but Irish—stockings made of a warm stuff of divers colours, which they call tartan, as for breeches many of them, nor their forefathers, never wore any, but a jerkin of the same stuff that their hose is of, and a plaid about their shoulders of divers colours.” A traveller in 1703 first mentioned clan distinctions in tartan. “Every isle,” wrote Martin, “differs from each other in their fancy of making plaids, as to the stripes in breadth and colours. This humour is as different through the mainland of the Highlands, in so far that they are able, at the first view of a man’s plaid, to guess the place of his residence.” Originally the number of hues in a clan’s tartan was limited to the vegetable dyes obtainable in the glen in which it lived. Manufactured tartan fabrics, in which aniline dyes are used, are generally garish and ugly. They give no idea of the charm of true tartan, with dyes prepared in the traditional and never glaring, however bright the vegetable tint. Ferocious Highlanders. During the first part of the eighteenth century the clan system was at its zenith. The Highlander’s attachment to his chief and tribe was intense, and of this fervent and ferocious loyalty the special tartan of each clan and sect was a token. Branches of a main clan were shown by variations in the pattern. The Campbells of Breadalbane, for example, had light green crossed with broad stripes of dark green, edged with yellow, while the Campbells of Argyll also had light green crossed with dark green, but with independent white lines. A strict system of tartan heraldry grew up. In the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745 the chiefs led their followers to fight the Stuarts, not from devotion to that Royal family, but because the Highlanders loved fighting and plundering, and their cattle-driving forays and scanty crops of oats and barley for porridge and usquebaugh failed to support Hie growing population of their glens. The Hanoverian Government determined to subjugate the Highlands completely and for eyer, and among their stern measures was the statute making the wearing of the tartan after August 1, 1747. punishable by six months’ imprisonment for a first, offence, seven years for a second, deportation for a third. Many young clansmen and their elders, too, with wives and families, rather than submit to the extinction of their old way of life, sailed for other lands, carrying with them their traditional dress. Now, curiously, the tartan, so long scorned and sometimes dreaded by Lowlanders, as the garb of the caterans of the hills, became the symbol of loyalty to the Stuarts, and was preserved by them in defiance of the law Then, still more curiously, it became a cherished emblem of Scottish nationality. In 1782, amid great rejoicing, the Government was induced by the per-1 sistent and eloquest pleadings of the Marquis of Graham to repeal the Act.

Meanwhile the Highland regiments, an outlet for the military spirit of the clansmen and for the over-populated glens, had covered themselves with glory on many battlefields. So the tartan became honoured and admired. The Highland customs, sports and dances, pipe-music and dress, took on romantic glamour Highland gatherings, of which the tartan is a conspicuous feature, became popular. Lairds arrayed their gamekeepers, ghillies, and attendants in kilts. Queen Victoria greatly en couraged the love of Highland dress, having all the males at Balmoral don the kilt, and even draping many rooms in the castle with tarthn.