Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Tartan
TARTAN is a worsted cloth woven with alternate stripes or bands of coloured warp and weft, so as to form a chequered pattern in which the colours alternate in "sets" of definite width and sequence. The weaving of particoloured and striped cloth cannot be claimed as peculiar to any special race or country, for indeed such checks are the simplest ornamental form into which dyed yarns can be combined in the loom. But the term tartan is specially applied to the variegated cloth used for the principal portions of the distinctive costume of the Highlanders of Scotland. For this costume, and the tartan of which it is composed, great antiquity is claimed, and it is asserted that the numerous clans into which the Highland population were divided had each from time to time a special tartan by which it was distinguished. After the rebellion of 1745 various Acts of Parliament were passed for disarming the Scottish Highlanders and for prohibiting the use of the Highland dress in Scotland, under severe penalties. These Acts remained nominally in force till 1782, when they were formally repealed, and since that time clan tartan has, with varying fluctuations of fashion, been a highly popular article of dress, by no means confined in its use to Scotland alone; and many new and imaginary "sets" have been invented by manufacturers, with the result of introducing confusion in the heraldry of tartans, and of throwing doubt on the reality of the distinctive "sets" which at one time undoubtedly were more or less recognized as the badge of various clans. The manufacture has long been carried on at Bannockburn, in the neighbourhood of Stirling, and it still continues to be a feature of the local industries there.
Undoubtedly the term tartan was known, and the material was woven, "of one or two colours for the poor and more varied for the rich," as early as the middle of the 15th century. In the accounts of John, bishop of Glasgow, treasurer to King James III. in 1471, there occurs, with other mention of the material, the following:—"Ane elne and ane halve of blue Tartane to lyne his gowne of cloth of Gold." It is here obvious that the term is not restricted to particoloured chequered textures.[1] In 1538 accounts were incurred for a Highland dress for King James V. on the occasion of a hunting excursion in the Highlands, in which there are charges for "variant cullorit velvet," for "ane schort Heland coit," and for "Heland tartane to be hose to the kinge's grace." Bishop Lesley, in his De Origine, Moribus, et Rebus Gestis Scotorum, published in 1578, says of the ancient and still-used dress of the Highlanders and islanders, "all, both noble and common people, wore mantles of one sort (except that the nobles preferred those of several colours)." George Buchanan, in his Rerum Scoticarum
- ↑ Neither so is it in the French tiretaine or in the Spanish tiritaña.