—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,