:: Winter 2006 
Feature
Weaving and Wearing the Tartan Tweed
Today’s Scottish tartans – the colorful wool fabrics of precise blocks and crossbars – have enjoyed a long history of emergence in the Highland regions of modern day Scotland. When the Romans attempted to subdue the inhabitants of this region, they encountered Celts and Picts who preferred battle to subjugation. The poet Virgil described the clothing of these rebellious fighters as being striped wool cloaks of several colors. A scrap of fabric found near the Antonine Wall, one of the barriers built by Romans in the third century A.D. literally to wall off the Highlanders from the rest of Britain, has a woven checkered pattern of light and dark wool from Scottish sheep. Over the following centuries, the Scots experimented with natural dyes and developed a variety of colors for the wool in their woven clothing.
At the time of the Jacobite Uprising against the English in 1745, tartans had become traditional dress among Highlanders. The cloth was woven in cottages throughout Scotland. The colors of the cloth were determined by the natural dyeing substances available to the individual spinner and weaver. After the defeat of the Jacobite forces at Culloden, the English government banned the production and the wearing of tartan fabrics by the Scots. This ban remained in effect for 35 years and was greatly resented. The punishment for being caught defying the ban once was imprisonment. A man convicted of a second offense was forced to serve for seven years as a British soldier wherever he was assigned to go within the British colonies. The only exemption from the ban was for the Highland regiments who had remained loyal to the George II’s Hanoverians. These regiments were allowed to wear their regimental tartans, and this practice kept the tradition from disappearing.
By the time the ban was repealed, the industrial revolution had begun, and cloth production was being transformed from a cottage industry to a mechanized industry. The attractiveness of the regimental tartans, the more fitted style of tartan dress, and a growing interest in attributing specific colors to specific family names combined to create a boom in the production of tartan fabric. One particular event, the visit by King George IV to Edinburgh in 1822 (suggested by Sir Walter Scott), led to the widespread popularity of tartan dress. What an ironic journey for the tartan from the Highlands to London society balls! The descendents of the members of Parliament who banned the wearing of the tartan sought it for their own wardrobes.
People all over the world have come to appreciate the striking tartan patterns that appear in clothing and home/office furnishings. Many men and women of Scottish descent enjoy wearing a tartan that represents a family name, be it a recent name or one from the distant past.
Sources: Tartans: The Facts and Myths, by Libby and Blair Urquhart, UK: Jarrold Publications, 1991
Handwoven Magazine, Interweave Press, Sept./Oct .1996