On Scottish clan re-invention in the 18th and 19th centuries
and see the entry on tartan under 'Culture and Sport'
and see the entry on tartan under 'Culture and Sport'
PART ONE
Some extracts from a fascinating site...
1. Throughout the second half of the 18th Century only the army, a few societies and some proud Highlanders kept the Highland tradition and culture alive. Chief among these was the Highland Society of London, founded in 1777. The Disarming Act which had banned the wearing of any of the traditional Highland garb was repealed in 1782 largely through the efforts of this society.[14]Throughout that time a slow current of revival had begun, and in the1820’s the Highland culture exploded back onto the scene and gained unprecedented popularity. The curious thing was that the tradition that found prominence would have been almost unrecognisable to the Highlanders of 150 years before.
2.The Highland Society of London, in conjunction with the cloth manufactures of Edinburgh and surrounds cashed in on the festivities by creating a range of separate clan tartans to be worn by the various clans present. This aided the restoration of the clan system that was abolished after the final Jacobite uprising, although the new form it appeared in was somewhat different to the historical reality.[20] The work of creating clan tartans was carried on by the brothers Allen, who in the 1840’s published two books called Vestiarium Scoticum and The Costume of the Clans. These works claimed to trace and identify the different tartans of the various Scottish clans and their long history. The manufacture of clan tartan clothes and goods took off and has remained strong ever since. In fact individual tartans were only a creation of the 18th Century at the earliest. They had most likely begun in the various highland regiments in the army to distinguish them from each other and were then first introduced into the civil world as recently as the instances described above. While tartan in the Highlands does indeed stretch back to at least the 16th Century, its patterns were usually only whatever was available or which were the latest styles of the day.[21]
3. The kilt too was a recent invention, as Trevor-Roper explains. It was invented by an Englishman named Thomas Rawlinson, who had business arrangements with Ian MacDonnell, chief of the MacDonnell’s of Glengarry in the 1720’s. It was also adopted by the chief himself, and soon the kilt was worn all over the Highlands, to the extent that it was banned as part of the legislation after the ’45. Nevertheless its connection with the Jacobites and this event was enough to make it the garb of choice by Scott and the others who brought the Highlands back into focus, rather than the far older plaid.[22] Interestingly Scots Gaelic was not seen as one of the key elements of Scottishness or even of being a Highlander and its usage grew steadily less throughout the 18th and 19th Centuries.[23] All in all the Highland past and Jacobitism was thus stripped of is political potency and retained as a memory – a past that was uniquely Scottish and applied to all Scots – Lowlanders included - and was something to be proud of yet was exactly that – the past. Current events of great concern, even to the Highlands themselves, such as the clearances of the first half of the 19th Cen., were mostly ignored by such traditionalists. The past and the nationalism on which it was built did not clash with a simultaneous allegiance to Britain.[24]
http://www.napoleon-series.org/research/society/c_scottishidentity.html accessed 17 December 2012
Well worth a full read...
*****
And of course mention must also be made of Highland Games
However, the modern Highland games are largely a Victorian invention, developed after the Highland Clearances.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_games
It is possible to consider many modern Clan Gunn events to be no more than Victorian romanticist events involving new kilts, invented Highland games and Gunns sipping whisky at meetings reflecting English Victorian attitudes... This may be that which tourists want, but is it what the Gunns deserve?
PART TWO - Concerning tartanry, the re-invention of Scottish history and its impact on Scottish nationalism (and Clan Gunn history by implication)
I thought the following fascinating -
In recent years the terrain of Scotland's 'invented' Highland tradition has been well-trodden by an army of scholars who have drawn attention to the Gaelic fantasies which preoccupied Scots from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards: the cult of Ossianic poetry, an explosion of tartanry, and an emotional identification with the sublimity of the Highland landscape. However, despite the place of Gaelic identification in late nineteenth - and twentieth - century Scottish nationalism, the initial romantic flirtation with Gaeldom in the post-Jacobite era held little nationalist potential. The decline of the political threat associated with the Highlands, and the development of the communications with that region, stimulated a 'weekend' identification with the exotic culture of Gaeldom, which had tremendous cultural ramifications. Nevertheless, romantic Gaelicism had not been absorbed within the bloodstream of Scottish political consciousness. Throughout much of the nineteenth century Gaelicism encouraged the emergence of a sentimental vision of Scottish culture rather than any coherent nationalism. The focus of the Highland tradition was on 'appurtenances' rather than on political ideas. Historians recognise that the Highland tradition was at best ideologically peripheral, and, that, rather than laying the foundations for a Gaelic inspired Scottish romantic nationalism, it emasculated Scottish nationalist urges through cultural sublimation. Gaelicism as a form of cultural patriotism often coexisted with British political identity. Indeed tartanry was to some extent the obverse side of British integration. The cult of tartanry was not in general a platform for opposition to the Union, and tended to be co-opted into a Scoto-British imperialism.
From Colin Reid's essay 'Teutonist Ethnology and Scottish Nationalist Inhibition 1780-1890'.
Being page 47 of The Scottish Historical Review Vol. LXXIV, No. 197 April 1995.
In other words if you are bound up by the 'appurtenances' of being Scottish - such as wearing the tartan, seeing meaning in Highland games and other such 19th century inventions - you are emasculating real Scottish nationalism and becoming part of Scoto-British imperialism. Is that what you want to support? We do not yet fully understand Gunn history but much of what is viewed as core Gunn history is 'tartanry' (or romantic fiction if you prefer).
Colin Reid, at the time of the essay, was a lecturer in the Department of Scottish History at the University of Glasgow.
*****
PART THREE - How Sir Walter Scott turned Scotland tartan
A neat little simple slide show summary showing how Sir Walter Scott deserves the blame for the 'myth of the romantic Highlands' tosh (which infects Gunn history) and the symbolism of the tartan; see the BBC site http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/0/22756895
Or, as a review in the Times Literary Supplement says,
It was Scott who, to add “aboriginal” colour to George IV’s “jaunt” to Edinburgh in 1822, invented the cult of the clan tartan (“the ancient Highland costume”) – arguably one of his finer works of fiction.
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1039746.ece
And concerning tartan -
Originally tartan designs had no names and no symbolic meaning. All tartan was hand woven and usually supplied locally. While it may have been true that certain designs were more common in some areas than others, no regulated "clan tartan" system ever existed. Tartan in general, however, came to be extremely common in Scottish Highland culture. By the seventeenth century, tartan clothing was recognized far and wide as characteristic of Highland dress.
http://scottishtartans.org/downloads/fact_sheet_tartan.pdf
So tartan was not symbolic of a clan / tribe; it, at best, historically reflected an area. The similarity between the Gunn and Mackay tartans, for example, certainly is suggestive of tartan used within an area.
So what happened?
Scots expatriates who grew up outside of the Highland line began to get interested in preserving Highland culture. In 1815 the Highland Society of London wrote to the clan chiefs asking them to submit samples of their clan tartans. Many chiefs had no idea what "their clan tartan" was supposed to be and so either wrote to tartan suppliers such as Wilsons, or asked the older men of their clan if they recalled any particular tartan being worn.
In 1822 King George IV visited Edinburgh in a veritable "tartan fest" partly organized by Sir Walter Scott. All the clan chiefs were asked to come out to greet the King in their proper clan tartan. Since many did not have a clan tartan no doubt new tartans were created, or old ones renamed, for the occasion. From this point on the idea was firmly established that in order to even be a proper tartan, it had to be a named tartan. The development of tartan lore over the course of the nineteenth century is complex and beyond the scope of this brief introduction.
http://scottishtartans.org/downloads/fact_sheet_tartan.pdf
Obviously irritated by the widespread that each Highland Clan has a specific tartan sett, Cheape uses careful material culture approaches to debunk this myth. The museum owns order books from from the famous woollen mill of Wilson of Bannockburn, founded in 1724. Cheape writes that this firm's order books in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries describe tartans by numbers only. 'Some were known by names no longer used and only a very few had clan names'. Cheape, using samples from the museum's collection, recounts the great period of creation of new 'fancy' tartans and the first development of named clan tartans, which resulted from the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822. Old designs were then assigned to one clan, such as the design shown in a museum swatch of early nineteenth-century hard tartan in red, yellow, white and deep green. Cheape explains this became the clan tartan of Stewart of Appin, though 'it never was the exclusive property of one clan'. He notes that by the Victorian period, Highland dress was thereafter open to 'imaginative' and fanciful' interpretations until by the late nineteenth centuries clan setts had become fixed, and their original history either denied or forgotten.
page 133, Lou Taylor, Establishing Dress History
So named clan / tribal tartan has no historic validity; it is an invention of the early 1800s which grew with Royal support.... Early tourist souvenirs if you like ... It may, since then, have gained emotional symbolism but it is too often assumed to have an historic importance which it does not have.
And it looks very interesting when you read it against how the first Clan Gunn society at roughly the same time manipulated the idea of the chief line to be that which its key members were drawn from, full details can be found elsewhere on this site. As the romanticist view of the Highlands gets under way due to royal pressure, the Clan Gunn Society makes its 'interesting' decisions under pressure from the aristocracy....
Some extracts from a fascinating site...
1. Throughout the second half of the 18th Century only the army, a few societies and some proud Highlanders kept the Highland tradition and culture alive. Chief among these was the Highland Society of London, founded in 1777. The Disarming Act which had banned the wearing of any of the traditional Highland garb was repealed in 1782 largely through the efforts of this society.[14]Throughout that time a slow current of revival had begun, and in the1820’s the Highland culture exploded back onto the scene and gained unprecedented popularity. The curious thing was that the tradition that found prominence would have been almost unrecognisable to the Highlanders of 150 years before.
2.The Highland Society of London, in conjunction with the cloth manufactures of Edinburgh and surrounds cashed in on the festivities by creating a range of separate clan tartans to be worn by the various clans present. This aided the restoration of the clan system that was abolished after the final Jacobite uprising, although the new form it appeared in was somewhat different to the historical reality.[20] The work of creating clan tartans was carried on by the brothers Allen, who in the 1840’s published two books called Vestiarium Scoticum and The Costume of the Clans. These works claimed to trace and identify the different tartans of the various Scottish clans and their long history. The manufacture of clan tartan clothes and goods took off and has remained strong ever since. In fact individual tartans were only a creation of the 18th Century at the earliest. They had most likely begun in the various highland regiments in the army to distinguish them from each other and were then first introduced into the civil world as recently as the instances described above. While tartan in the Highlands does indeed stretch back to at least the 16th Century, its patterns were usually only whatever was available or which were the latest styles of the day.[21]
3. The kilt too was a recent invention, as Trevor-Roper explains. It was invented by an Englishman named Thomas Rawlinson, who had business arrangements with Ian MacDonnell, chief of the MacDonnell’s of Glengarry in the 1720’s. It was also adopted by the chief himself, and soon the kilt was worn all over the Highlands, to the extent that it was banned as part of the legislation after the ’45. Nevertheless its connection with the Jacobites and this event was enough to make it the garb of choice by Scott and the others who brought the Highlands back into focus, rather than the far older plaid.[22] Interestingly Scots Gaelic was not seen as one of the key elements of Scottishness or even of being a Highlander and its usage grew steadily less throughout the 18th and 19th Centuries.[23] All in all the Highland past and Jacobitism was thus stripped of is political potency and retained as a memory – a past that was uniquely Scottish and applied to all Scots – Lowlanders included - and was something to be proud of yet was exactly that – the past. Current events of great concern, even to the Highlands themselves, such as the clearances of the first half of the 19th Cen., were mostly ignored by such traditionalists. The past and the nationalism on which it was built did not clash with a simultaneous allegiance to Britain.[24]
http://www.napoleon-series.org/research/society/c_scottishidentity.html accessed 17 December 2012
Well worth a full read...
*****
And of course mention must also be made of Highland Games
However, the modern Highland games are largely a Victorian invention, developed after the Highland Clearances.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_games
It is possible to consider many modern Clan Gunn events to be no more than Victorian romanticist events involving new kilts, invented Highland games and Gunns sipping whisky at meetings reflecting English Victorian attitudes... This may be that which tourists want, but is it what the Gunns deserve?
PART TWO - Concerning tartanry, the re-invention of Scottish history and its impact on Scottish nationalism (and Clan Gunn history by implication)
I thought the following fascinating -
In recent years the terrain of Scotland's 'invented' Highland tradition has been well-trodden by an army of scholars who have drawn attention to the Gaelic fantasies which preoccupied Scots from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards: the cult of Ossianic poetry, an explosion of tartanry, and an emotional identification with the sublimity of the Highland landscape. However, despite the place of Gaelic identification in late nineteenth - and twentieth - century Scottish nationalism, the initial romantic flirtation with Gaeldom in the post-Jacobite era held little nationalist potential. The decline of the political threat associated with the Highlands, and the development of the communications with that region, stimulated a 'weekend' identification with the exotic culture of Gaeldom, which had tremendous cultural ramifications. Nevertheless, romantic Gaelicism had not been absorbed within the bloodstream of Scottish political consciousness. Throughout much of the nineteenth century Gaelicism encouraged the emergence of a sentimental vision of Scottish culture rather than any coherent nationalism. The focus of the Highland tradition was on 'appurtenances' rather than on political ideas. Historians recognise that the Highland tradition was at best ideologically peripheral, and, that, rather than laying the foundations for a Gaelic inspired Scottish romantic nationalism, it emasculated Scottish nationalist urges through cultural sublimation. Gaelicism as a form of cultural patriotism often coexisted with British political identity. Indeed tartanry was to some extent the obverse side of British integration. The cult of tartanry was not in general a platform for opposition to the Union, and tended to be co-opted into a Scoto-British imperialism.
From Colin Reid's essay 'Teutonist Ethnology and Scottish Nationalist Inhibition 1780-1890'.
Being page 47 of The Scottish Historical Review Vol. LXXIV, No. 197 April 1995.
In other words if you are bound up by the 'appurtenances' of being Scottish - such as wearing the tartan, seeing meaning in Highland games and other such 19th century inventions - you are emasculating real Scottish nationalism and becoming part of Scoto-British imperialism. Is that what you want to support? We do not yet fully understand Gunn history but much of what is viewed as core Gunn history is 'tartanry' (or romantic fiction if you prefer).
Colin Reid, at the time of the essay, was a lecturer in the Department of Scottish History at the University of Glasgow.
*****
PART THREE - How Sir Walter Scott turned Scotland tartan
A neat little simple slide show summary showing how Sir Walter Scott deserves the blame for the 'myth of the romantic Highlands' tosh (which infects Gunn history) and the symbolism of the tartan; see the BBC site http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/0/22756895
Or, as a review in the Times Literary Supplement says,
It was Scott who, to add “aboriginal” colour to George IV’s “jaunt” to Edinburgh in 1822, invented the cult of the clan tartan (“the ancient Highland costume”) – arguably one of his finer works of fiction.
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1039746.ece
And concerning tartan -
Originally tartan designs had no names and no symbolic meaning. All tartan was hand woven and usually supplied locally. While it may have been true that certain designs were more common in some areas than others, no regulated "clan tartan" system ever existed. Tartan in general, however, came to be extremely common in Scottish Highland culture. By the seventeenth century, tartan clothing was recognized far and wide as characteristic of Highland dress.
http://scottishtartans.org/downloads/fact_sheet_tartan.pdf
So tartan was not symbolic of a clan / tribe; it, at best, historically reflected an area. The similarity between the Gunn and Mackay tartans, for example, certainly is suggestive of tartan used within an area.
So what happened?
Scots expatriates who grew up outside of the Highland line began to get interested in preserving Highland culture. In 1815 the Highland Society of London wrote to the clan chiefs asking them to submit samples of their clan tartans. Many chiefs had no idea what "their clan tartan" was supposed to be and so either wrote to tartan suppliers such as Wilsons, or asked the older men of their clan if they recalled any particular tartan being worn.
In 1822 King George IV visited Edinburgh in a veritable "tartan fest" partly organized by Sir Walter Scott. All the clan chiefs were asked to come out to greet the King in their proper clan tartan. Since many did not have a clan tartan no doubt new tartans were created, or old ones renamed, for the occasion. From this point on the idea was firmly established that in order to even be a proper tartan, it had to be a named tartan. The development of tartan lore over the course of the nineteenth century is complex and beyond the scope of this brief introduction.
http://scottishtartans.org/downloads/fact_sheet_tartan.pdf
Obviously irritated by the widespread that each Highland Clan has a specific tartan sett, Cheape uses careful material culture approaches to debunk this myth. The museum owns order books from from the famous woollen mill of Wilson of Bannockburn, founded in 1724. Cheape writes that this firm's order books in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries describe tartans by numbers only. 'Some were known by names no longer used and only a very few had clan names'. Cheape, using samples from the museum's collection, recounts the great period of creation of new 'fancy' tartans and the first development of named clan tartans, which resulted from the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822. Old designs were then assigned to one clan, such as the design shown in a museum swatch of early nineteenth-century hard tartan in red, yellow, white and deep green. Cheape explains this became the clan tartan of Stewart of Appin, though 'it never was the exclusive property of one clan'. He notes that by the Victorian period, Highland dress was thereafter open to 'imaginative' and fanciful' interpretations until by the late nineteenth centuries clan setts had become fixed, and their original history either denied or forgotten.
page 133, Lou Taylor, Establishing Dress History
So named clan / tribal tartan has no historic validity; it is an invention of the early 1800s which grew with Royal support.... Early tourist souvenirs if you like ... It may, since then, have gained emotional symbolism but it is too often assumed to have an historic importance which it does not have.
And it looks very interesting when you read it against how the first Clan Gunn society at roughly the same time manipulated the idea of the chief line to be that which its key members were drawn from, full details can be found elsewhere on this site. As the romanticist view of the Highlands gets under way due to royal pressure, the Clan Gunn Society makes its 'interesting' decisions under pressure from the aristocracy....