VII.—THE GARB OF OLD GAUL.
(From the Glasgow Herald, April 7, 1900).
“Oh first of garbs! garment of happy fate,
So long employed, of such an antique date,
Look back some thousand years till records fail,
And lose themselves in some romantic tale;
We’ll find our god-like fathers nobly scorned
To be by any other dress adorned.”
—Allan Ramsay.
The “quelt,” as very ancient writers called it, is one of the few things that are left to remind Scotland of its once distinctive nationality. Together with the Gaelic and the pipes, it makes Scottish history peculiar among the histories of countries. In no other land have the distinguishing marks of a nationality that, as a separate kingdom, has ceased to exist been retained in almost all their original purity. Of the three things, the kilt is perhaps the most interesting. The language and the music have been, and are, confined to the people of the Highlands, either in or out of the Highlands; but the kilt, while no longer the everyday wear of Highland people, has found its way into non-Highland circles, and the tartan has become a fashionable dress. But still, and this is a peculiar thing, it remains the Highland garb, and must, wheresoever seen, be associated with a distinctive country and a distinctive people.
The kilt is the most ancient of all garments. It is the development of the fig leaves of our first parents. Primitive man wrapped himself round with a piece of cloth, when he had cloth, caring little about the niceties of cut or fashion. When the cloth didn’t hang properly he, quite naturally, tied it round his waist with a string, and in so doing transformed his wrappings into a belted plaid, the immediate predecessor of the plaid and kilt. It was certainly not a sense of delicacy but a desire for outward show that led primitive man to clothe himself. Cæsar found the Britons with their bodies painted with woad, and they appeared naked in public. Afterwards they clothed themselves with skins of animals and with woollen garments, the latter of which was undoubtedly the string-bound plaid of the well-to-do Highlander.
The earliest bit of evidence regarding the antiquity of the Highland dress in anything like its present form is a piece of sculpture which was dug in 1860 from part of the ruins of the wall of Antoninus, built in A.D. 140. It shows figures representing very clearly the plaid and kilt, presumably in one piece. Another sculptured stone, found at Dull, Perthshire, gives the bonnet and shield of the Highlander; while a third, discovered at St. Andrews, shows the arrangement of the belted plaid or full dress of the ancient Gael. Both the latter, now in the Museum of Antiquaries, Edinburgh, are of unknown antiquity. Then in A.D. 204 we find Herodian, a classical writer, saying that the Caledonians were only partly clad; and in A.D. 296 a Roman writer, in a eulogy of the Emperor Constantinus, calls the Picts hostilibus seminudis, half-clad enemies. European historians, as a matter of fact, almost always called the Gael of Alban half-naked. Besides, we have Gildas, the earliest of British writers, saying that the Picts were dressed only with cloth round the loins, a rude form of the plaid evidently. And, while both Cæsar and Tacitus assure us that the Britons were precisely the same people as the Gauls, in manners, religion, appearance, and customs, we also read, in other writings of the same date, that the Gauls “wore coats stained with various colours.” Also as a very ancient writer on Scotland tells us:—
“The other pairt Northerne are full of mountaines, and very rud and hornelie kind of people doeth inhabite, which is called Reid Schankes, or Wyld Scottish. They be clothed with ane mantle, with ane schirt fachioned after the Irish manner, going bare-legged to the knie.”
These things all indicate a people partially clad in cloth which was not all of one colour, and it is not stretching the inference very far to identify the garb with the latter-day dress of the Scottish Highlander.
Let us come now to times of which more or less authentic history treats. The first historical reference we find is contained in the Icelandic Sagas. When the death of Malcolm Canmore plunged Scotland into anarchy, Magnus Olafson, King of Norway, was ravaging the west coast and securing a firm hold of the Hebrides for his own country. On his return from that expedition in 1093, the Sagas relate, he adopted the costume of these western lands, and “his followers went bare-legged, having short kirtles and upper wraps, and so men called him ‘Barelegs.’” The seal of Alexander I., whose reign began in 1107, shows him in Highland dress, and as the same seal was used by David I. (1124) and Malcolm IV. (1153), we are quite justified in concluding that these monarchs actually wore what they were represented on their seal as wearing. Such a dress must certainly have existed at that time.
Then, dating from 1350, we have a sculptured representation of a chief attired finely in Highland dress, and in 1471 John, Bishop of Glasgow, treasurer to King James III., in an account for tartan for the use of the King, gives the following item:—“For a yard and a half, £1 10s. (Scots of course), and the colour blue.” Half a yard of “double tartane” for the Queen cost 8s. James V. made a hunting expedition into the Highlands in 1538, and a Highland dress was provided for the occasion. The account of the King’s treasurer shows that it consisted of “a short Highland coit,” hose of “tertane,” and a “syde Heland sarkis,” all for the “Kingis Grace.” The last article was presumably an unusually long shirt.
John Lesley, Bishop of Ross, writing in 1578, says the garments of his day consisted of a short woollen jacket and a covering of the simplest kind for the thighs, more for decency than for protection from cold. About 1580 a writer with a turn for rhyming described the dress of the Highlanders thus:—
“Their shirtes be very straunge,
Not reaching past the thigh,
With pleates on pleates they pleated are,
As thick as pleates can lie,”
which was a very good and concise description of the plaid as it then was. Another writer, in Certayne Mattere Concerning Scotland, published in London in 1603, says the Highlanders “delight in marbled cloths, especially that have long strips of sundrie colours ... with the which, rather coloured than clad, they suffer the most cruel tempests that blow in the open fields, in such sort that, in a night of snow they sleep sound.” From A Modern Account of Scotland, printed in 1679, also in London, we learn that “the Highlanders wear slashed doublets, commonly without breeches, only a plad tyed about their wastes, thrown over one shoulder, with short stockings to the gartering place; their knees and part of their thighs being naked; others have breeches and stockings all of a piece of plad ware.” A writer of 1710 supplements this by saying, “they wear striped mantles of divers colours called plaids”; a statement which brings the evidence to a date so recent as to render the calling of further witnesses unnecessary. That the kilt is a pure outgrowth of Scottish life there is no gainsaying. It could have been imported from Ireland only, and that it was not is proved by the two facts, that the colony of Irish Scots who settled in Argyllshire never overran Scotland, and that the checkered plaid was worn in Scotland at dates earlier than it can be proved to have been worn in Ireland.
The complete outfit of a Highland chief in the middle of the eighteenth century makes rather a formidable list. Here it is:—
Full-trimmed bonnet.
Tartan jacket, vest, kilt, and cross-belt.
Tartan belted plaid.
Pair of hose, made up from cloth.
Tartan stockings, with yellow garters.
Two pairs of brogues.
Silver-mounted purse and belt.
Target with spear.
Broadsword.
Pair of pistols and bullet mould.
Dirk.
Knife and fork.
The garb was completed by a feather, or, in the case of the common people, a tuft of heather, pine, holly, or oak, in the bonnet. Personal decoration was always considered a more important matter than home decoration or even home comforts.
Hair was used for making clothing at one time, for we are told Ossian Fin Mac Coul was “arrayed in Hieland plaidis of hair,” but wool was the general material, and so long as wool was worn, so long—it is said—was rheumatism unknown in the Highlands. In colours green and black predominated, with an occasional stripe of red. The number of colours indicated the rank of the wearer, a King or a Chief having seven, a Druid six, and other nobles four, while the very poor people had their plaids plain. The dyes were got from herbs, and the colours are said to have been so “fast” as to keep for two hundred years. The Celts were proud of the grandeur of their tartans, and an old song makes one of them, when wooing a Lowland lass, say:—
“Bra sall the sett o’ your braid tartan be
If ye will gang to the Highlands wi’ me.”
The rigorous Disarming Act, passed in 1747, created what was perhaps the most critical time in the history of the tartan. The pipes and the tartan were banned as treasonable things, and marks of extreme disloyalty to the House of Hanover. The law expressly enacted that “neither man nor boy, except such as are employed as officers and soldiers, shall, on any pretence, wear or put on the clothes commonly called Highland clothes, viz., the plaid, philabeg or little kilt, trowse, shoulder-belts, or any part whatsoever of what peculiarly belongs to the Highland garb, and that no tartan or party-coloured plaid or stuff shall be used for greatcoats, or for upper coats, on pain of imprisonment for six months, without the option of a fine, for the first offence, and transportation for seven years for the second.” This was stringent enough, and it nearly strangled all that was peculiar to the Highlands. But, thanks principally to the patriotic exertions of the then Duke of Montrose, the ban was removed in 1782, and the Highland garb restored to favour. It is now worn by five British regiments. The Gordons wear the Gordon tartan, the Camerons the Erracht-Cameron, the Seaforths the Mac Kenzie, the Argyll and Sutherlands the Sutherland, and the Black Watch a special tartan closely resembling the Sutherland. Both battalions of the Gordons, and one each of the other four regiments, are now in South Africa.
The Highland garb as we have it to-day is a compound of three varieties, all of which were worn in the seventeenth century. There was first the dress worn by the gentry—a shirt died with saffron and a plaid of fine wool tartan, with colours assorted so as to give the best possible effect. Then there was the dress of the common people—a shirt, painted instead of dyed, with a deerskin jacket above it, and the plaid, not always of tartan, worn over the shoulders instead of belted about the body. The third variety was the trews, but this cannot be traced farther back than 1538. It probably came from Ireland, where it was the dress of the gentry from the earliest periods.
The plaid proper consisted of a long piece of tartan carefully plaited in the middle and bound about the waist in large and very particularly-adjusted folds. While the lower part came down from the belt to the knees, the upper, after various wrappings so as to cover the whole body, was fixed to the left shoulder with a brooch, leaving the right arm at liberty. In wet weather the plaid was thrown loose, and formed a complete covering for the body. The headdress, when there was any, was a round, flat bonnet, the stockings were cut from the web of tartan, and the shoes were made of skin shaped in the best possible way to the form of the foot. The original of the sporran was a large piece of goat’s or badger’s skin profusely ornamented, which hung in front, and served as a pocket.
There seems to have been a time, before the dress developed into its present form, when the belted plaid and the trews were worn together. In 1656 a certain Thomas Tucker, who reported on the settlement of the revenues of excise and custom in Scotland, says one of his collectors, in order to avert the antipathy of the natives to an exciseman, “went clad after the mode of the country, with belted playde, trowses, and brogues.” “In sharp winters,” says a writer of 1680, “they wear close trouzes, which cover the thighs, legs, and feet;” while at the Battle of Killiecrankie, in 1715, “there were several of the common men died in the hills, for, having cast away their plaids at going into battle, they had not wherewith to cover them but their shirts; whereas many of the gentlemen that instead of short hose did wear trewis, though they were sorely pinched, did fare better in their short coats and trewis than those that were naked to the belt.”
By and by, however, the belted plaid and the trews gave way to the plaid and the kilt as we now have them. It cannot be said, indeed, that there ever was a period in which the trews held anything like universal sway. The transition was rather from the original form of the loosely wrapped plaid to the present form of the dress. There is a story to the effect that an English tailor named Parkinson or Ralliston invented the kilt in 1715 or 1745—it is a somewhat vague story—and both Pennant and Sir John Sinclair accept it as truth. Pennant, himself an Englishman, may be excused, but the man who edited the Statistical Account of Scotland might have known better. The Earl of Moray of Charles I.’s day wore the kilt, and Lord Archibald Campbell, in Records of Argyll, shows two pictures, one of 1672 and one of 1693, in both of which the kilt can be plainly seen. Besides, the Highlanders wore it in the rebellion of 1715. It is carrying conjecture a bit too far to contend that the Saxons, who were able to introduce very few of their customs among the Celts, introduced the national dress. The simple fact seems to be that the change from the belted plaid, with the plaid and trews here and there, to the plaid and kilt, took place when the altering circumstances of the people made continuous labour a necessity, and also, therefore, a convenient and inexpensive working outfit.
It gives one an insight into the habits of the times to read that the managers of the piping competition held in Edinburgh in 1783, apologised to the public for the deficiency in dress. The competitors, they said, having no prospect of appearing “before so magnificent and great a company,” had nothing in view in quitting their distant dwellings but the competition at Falkirk, where their instruments alone were essential. In 1785, however, candidates were warned to appear “in the proper Highland habit,” which has since held good. Pipers’ dress was sometimes stylish enough even in the middle of the eighteenth century, for we read that in a procession of the Royal Company of Archers in Edinburgh in 1734 there was “one Highland piper who was dressed in scarlet richly laced.”
In the present-day dress, as is well known, the upper part of the plaid is disjoined from the lower, and made up so as to resemble the ancient form. The kilt itself is plaited so as to resemble the lower half of the plaid, but as a matter of fact, it is always too well plaited to be more than a far-off imitation. When properly made, the garb is certainly one of the most picturesque in the world. It is not so well adapted for the hillside as the old was, having been “improved” too much, but it is remarkable as showing how closely mankind clings to habits and costumes which experience has proved suitable, and which is entwined into the history and traditions of their particular race. As to its suitability for war, a great deal has been said in connection with the present operations in South Africa, and it has been laid to the charge of the tartan that it not only betrays the presence of the wearer, and makes him a target for the enemy’s sharp-shooters, but also exposes the soldier to all sorts of chills, and the attacks of all the vermin that crawl over the ground on which he has often to sleep. There is no use denying the fact that there is a great deal of truth in this, and if the Government press their proposals for the reform of Army dress, and include in these proposals the abolition of the kilt as a fighting garment, it seems as if there will not be one half the outcry there would have been in the same circumstances before the war begun. The campaign has undoubtedly revealed the shortcomings of the kilt as a part of active service dress, but that is no reason why it should be altogether abolished. Sentiment can be satisfied by retaining the kilt for parade purposes and garrison duty, while common-sense will indicate that sentiment, unless it can be proved to be very strong indeed, must have little voice in deciding what is best in the face of the enemy. It would certainly be bad policy to totally dissociate the Highland regiments from their distinctive tartans. Recruiting in Scotland is not what it might be, and when the Highland regiments cease to be distinctively Highland it will decline still further. If the authorities wish to foster the military enthusiasm of Highlanders they cannot do better than foster all that pertains to their part of the kingdom. Besides, the tartan is not now the badge of a rebellious remnant, but of a race that is loyal to the empire of which it is a worthy part, and considering the high position the kilted regiments hold in the British army, it is not too much to expect that their peculiar dress should be left to them, for use in all possible circumstances.
The war has given a decided impetus to the general trade in tartans. The demand from the regulars remains practically stationary, as the number of men wearing the Highland uniform is always the same. Among Scottish Volunteer regiments, however, the kilt is coming more and more into favour, and quite a number of additional “Highland companies” have been formed recently. The 6th V. B. Gordon Highlanders is the only battalion in the Highland Brigade unprovided with the national garb, the Government having, owing to “financial difficulties,” declined to supply the dress. The honorary colonel, Mr. J. Gordon Smith, has, however, now given the regiment £1500 to enable the men to wear their territorial uniform, and it is almost certain that the Government will supply the regiment with the kilt in the future. But it is from fashionable civil life that the bulk of the increased demand comes. The headquarters of the kilt-making industry—for it is an industry—are in Glasgow, but the principal market is in London. The demand in the Metropolis for the Highland dress is very extensive, and the biggest firm of Glasgow manufacturers are kept continually employed fulfilling orders from the South. The favourite tartans are, naturally, those of the kilted regiments, but the fashionable Highland dress consists of the kilt with an ordinary dinner jacket above it—the full outfit would be too Highland for London drawing-rooms. In Scotland the formation of clan societies has, in the cities, revived interest in the different tartans, but in the real home of the kilt, the fastnesses of the Highlands, the dress is practically extinct. A few old men wear it, as well as some of the better class residents, visitors sometimes wear it, while retainers wear it as a sort of livery; but among the people themselves it is, to all intents and purposes, obsolete. The garb of old Gaul has ceased to be the at-home dress of the Highlander, and become the evening dress of the fashionable who would ape a Highland connection, and the mark of the Highland wanderer, who far from home stands by home customs out of patriotic love for his home land. We may regret the turn of events, but there is no use blinking simple facts.—W. L. M.