AN HISTORIC MOMENT
©2008 Matthew A. C. Newsome, FSA Scot,
GTS
originally published in The Scottish
Banner, January 2009
Just a few odds and ends this month.
Depending on when you read your Banner, by the time these
words reach you, the National Register of Tartan, backed by the
Scottish government, has opened or is very close to doing so. This
marks a very historic moment in the annals of tartan history. Never
before has there been an official, nationally recognized
authoritative register for this most iconic cloth of Scotland. That
fact alone surprises many people.
Tartan has always been emblematic of
Scotland, and named tartans specifically have become ingrained into
Scotland’s image world wide. Many simply assume that there has
always been a government office somewhere in Edinburgh (or perhaps
tucked away somewhere in the Highlands) that maintained an official
database of such things. Tartan is confused with heraldry in many
people’s minds, and so the court of the Lord Lyon has also been
thought to have some official listing of “authentic tartans.” Such
is not the case.
Tartan is an industry, it must be
remembered. In past ages when tartan cloth was all produced
locally, in relatively small scale, variety was no doubt the name of
the game. Prior to the late eighteenth century, however, the very
concept of “named tartans” was not part of the culture. There was
simply no need to record every design woven.
That changed with the industrialization
of the tartan industry in Scotland. The first large-scale producer
of tartan cloth was Wilsons of Bannockburn, which opened up sometime
in the mid-1760s. Wilsons supplied tartan to the government for
military uniforms, among other things. Their business required them
to keep record of their tartan patterns, to ensure some degree of
uniformity from one order to the next. So the earliest “tartan
databases” that we really have are the records of the weavers.
Wilsons’ pattern book of 1819, for example, contains some 250
tartans (100 of which have names).
The first non-commercial attempt to
create a database of tartans was by the Highland Society of London.
This was an ex-pat society, similar to American St. Andrews
Societies and the like, that set about to create a collection of
authentic clan tartans. Their method was simple -- they requested
samples of the chiefs and added to their collection what the chiefs
submitted.
After this historic collection by the
Highland Society of London, the only major collections of tartan
patterns for the next hundred and fifty years would be those of
private individuals. There were always people interested in tartan,
its history and usage, but it was never a national effort to
consolidate all the information. Books were written on Highland
clans that contained information about what the “proper” tartans
might be, based on history, tradition, or the will of the clan
chief. But there was no authoritative register to which one could
refer.
In the early 1960s, a group of tartan
scholars and enthusiasts came together to form the Scottish Tartans
Society. One of their aims was to maintain a public register of
tartans that could serve as a central database, amalgamating all the
various private collections and recording details of tartan
specimens housed in museums and galleries as well as those produced
by the weaving industry.
Part of the trouble of maintaining such
a database is that there is not a set number of tartans. It will
never be complete. Tartan is an art form and an industry and
therefore there will always be new designs. Those in the industry
will always have a need for new designs to bring to market. And
individual artisan weavers and designers will always have a creative
impulse to make something new. Traditional tartan designs may be
historic now, but at one time they were new as well! The very
designing of tartan patterns is a part of the Scottish tradition.
By the time the Scottish Tartans Society ceased recoding new
tartans, there were something on the order of 2600 plus tartan
patterns on record.
The Scottish Tartans Authority (STA) was
founded in 1996 and today they maintain the International Tartan
Index (ITI), seen as the industry standard and unquestionably the
most complete database of tartans. There are currently over seven
thousand individual records in the ITI.
This proliferation of tartan patterns is
admittedly confusing to the general public. Most of the thousands
of tartan patterns one will find in the ITI are not in production
and not commonly seen. Tartan patterns that were produced by an
English woolen mill in the 1890s or by a Canadian weaver in the
1960s may be of interest to academics, or to those in the industry,
but to the general public enquirer who simply wants to know “what’s
my clan tartan?” the unmanageable number often only muddies the
waters.
The National Register is a step in the
right direction. It should also serve as a great resource to the
general public looking for basic tartan information. It is
recognized that the government itself has no authority over
tartans -- in other words, the Scottish Parliament cannot tell the
chief of a clan what the clan tartan ought to be. That is the clan
chief’s decision. But the National Register will duly record that
information and make it available to the public.
The task of keeping up with all the
information about Scottish tartans is an overwhelming and costly
endeavor. The Scottish government has the resources to take on this
task. They will continue to have the help of the STA who will
continue to maintain the ITI for the purposes of keeping record of
all those fashion tartans and obscure variants that may not have a
place in the National Register.
I, for one, look forward with great
anticipation to see what place the National Register will create for
itself in the long history of Scotland’s national cloth.
