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Under this new law men and boys were forbidden to ‘wear
or put on Highland clothes including; the kilt, plaid and no tartan or
partly-coloured plaid or stuff was to be used for Great Coats or for Upper
Coats’.
Incidentally, the law, which came into force on August
1st 1747, did not apply to those men serving as soldiers in Highland Regiments,
or to gentry, the sons of gentry, or women. They were allowed to continue
wearing the tartan and the kilt as and when they chose.
Unable to continue manufacturing or even wearing their
normal tartan kilt etc, the traditional Highland wear almost died out.
However the Act did not apply to the whole of present day Scotland but
only to that area we now think of as the Highlands. Roughly speaking,
this was the area north of a line from Dumbarton in the west to Perth
in the east.
Scotland at this time comprised of two different cultures:
(a) the Gaelic Highlands and islands and (b) the Scottish Lowlands. The
English government saw the latter as civilised and generally supportive
of the crown whereas the Highlands were regarded as a vestige of a wild,
untamed, rebellious and catholic past that needed to be controlled and
brought back into line.
As a consequence, weavers in the Lowlands or southern
part of Scotland were allowed to continue weaving the tartan cloth for
military use by the Highland Regiments who still wore the kilt.
The most successful of these weavers, William Wilson
of Bannockburn, developed his own reference manual to ensure quality control
and enable him to meet each regiment’s demand for standard uniforms.
In the latter part of the 18th century Wilson started to name some of
his patterns after towns, districts and family names. There is no evidence
to suggest that they bore any real connection to the names given except
that they were the sources of regular orders for that particular tartan.
In 1815 the Highland Society of London — an
ex-pats club of Scottish gentry — urged clan chiefs to submit a
piece of their clan tartan in order to try and preserve them before they
were lost forever.
Most of the samples deposited with the Society,
however, were patterns woven and apparently designed by Wilson’s
in Bannockburn so probably would not have existed prior to 1765 when William
Wilson started his business. For example Duncan MacPherson, the clan chief
of the MacPhersons, deposited “Number 43, Kidd or Caledonia”
as the MacPherson tartan. This tartan had originally been sold to Mr Kidd
on the east coast of Scotland but later also sold to a Mr MacPherson in
the West Indies. So when Duncan MacPherson visited Wilson’s he was
shown a tartan named the “MacPherson tartan” after one major
buyer and duly registered it as belonging to his clan.
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