Dan Snow's History Hit - Scottish Clans

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

It is believed clans started to emerge in Scotland around 1100AD and were originally the descendants of kings – if not of demigods from Irish mythology. As well as kinship and a sense of identity and belonging, being part of a clan was an important part of survival throughout the centuries that would follow.Scotland’s leading cultural historian, Professor Murray Pittock, joins Dan on the podcast to share the history of the clans from their Celtic origins through to the Clearances and the present day. They discuss the structure of clans, how the system collapsed and the paradox of how global clanship has become today.This episode was produced by Hannah Ward and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.PLEASE VOTE NOW! for Dan Snow's History Hit in the British Podcast Awards Listener's Choice category here. Every vote counts, thank you!We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Today we're talking about the clan system. The world famous semi-tribal groupings that we associate with the Highlands of Scotland. The problem is, does the clan system really exist? Did it ever exist? And this is where historians come in and burst the old bubbles, folks. It is an absolutely fascinating topic. Many people know about the clans, particularly around the 45, the Jacobite uprising that saw Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, land on the west coast of Scotland, raise an armed force largely from the clans, the Highlands, then march south first to Edinburgh,

and then as far as Derby in the Midlands, before turning back and facing defeat on the field of Culloden. And if you go to the battlefield of Culloden now, you see these long mass graves, these lumps in the ground, on which people have put headstones saying Clan Fraser, Clan Macintosh. And that's what helps to make Culloden one of the most remarkable and evocative battlefields that I've ever visited. My mum is a Macmillan. My grandpa was an incredibly proud Macmillan. He don't think he'd ever really been to Scotland. He was Canadian. His forebears had moved out from Kintyre at the turn of the last century, but he wore his kilt. And we went to the Highland Games in Ontario every summer without fail. The clan system, the culture of clans has proved extremely attractive to many people all over the world.

But what is the truth of it? What is the history? I'm asking Murray Pittock. He is the pro-vice principal. He's a professor of history at the University of Glasgow. He's probably Scotland's leading cultural historian. I'm going to ask him all about the clans, their origins, their military role. How different were they and their decline in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, and then perhaps their rebirth as a consumer brand today. But in the meantime, folks, enjoy Murray Pettock talking about the clans. T-minus 10. The Thomas bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king.

No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Murray, thank you very much for coming back on the podcast. Oh, it's a pleasure, Dan. Great to see you. I look around at British society and religion and royal pageantry,

and it's tempting to think that actually everything we think of as old was actually made up by the Victorians. Were the clans made up by the Victorians? The clans were not exactly made up by the Victorians, but certain aspects of them certainly were. For example, a term clan system, which is still frequently used, was a Victorian invention. There isn't actually a clan system. The term clan really describes certain groups in Scottish society, usually landowning families. They're on a spectrum from the more kinship based to the less kinship based, but they all have strong kinship associations and they're all linked to feudal landholding. They're not tribal.

So basically, the Victorians created the idea that there was a completely separate ethno-cultural organisation within Scotland, which divided Scotland in two, called the clan system. But that really isn't very accurate. So the idea that there's a sort of exceptionalism, there's these wild Highlanders living up in the north of Scotland, on the northwestern fringe of of Europe who still have this kind of Iron Age organisation of kinship groups. That's not true. What is the truth then? Were the clans different from what's going on in Europe at the time? Scotland historically is a relatively small society and relatively small societies tend to keep kinship and associational groups going longer than other ones because obviously you meet people

you know and you've got networks which form a much greater proportion of the overall population of the society. So Scotland's not dissimilar from some other societies in Europe, but it's dissimilar from a society like France, for example, or a society indeed like England. Scotland has a feudal landholding system. Some of that is put on top of a traditional regional kingship system and under kingship systems such as existed in Ireland. So you're looking at levels of fundamentally Irish-type social organisation

in early medieval Scotland. And on top of that is put Norman kinds of association, not because of the Norman invasion, but because Scottish kings invite Normans in in return for land grants, etc. So, for example, a group like the Frasers became Frasers of Lovett, the Lord Lovett. Frasers are an 11th century Norman family, but they're also a clan family. However, they are fundamentally feudal overlords. And the same goes for Macintosh, who was sent up to be Constable Inverness at the beginning of the 12th century and their territory is a territory of feudal overlordship near Inverness

which remains core Macintosh territory to this day. So they are basically the same thing in many respects as feudal barons but they have a stronger kinship and associational base than you might find in England. The reason for that is that it's driven by adjacent territory. The Earl of Surrey owns a lot of territories a long way from Surrey, but a lot of these Scottish chiefs of the name, because that's what they're called irrespective of whether they say the Duke of Argyll is chief of the name of Campbell, but many chiefs of the name don't have British titles attached to them. So the chief of the name often traditionally has a contiguous territory right round what's called his or her, because women couldn't have it, caput, the head place of the estate. So it's much more contiguous

territorially. It's much more contiguous in terms of association by regional locality and also sometimes by institution. And it's linked also in terms of kinship, which is not to say that everyone called Fraser is related to each other. They certainly aren't. They often take the name because they are actually landholding from the chief of the name of Fraser, who is and has been since the 16th century, I think, or the early 17th, Lord Lubbock. That's what's interesting is, you know, the phrase is still there. I've interviewed them about their ancestor, the last man in Britain to be beheaded for treason after Bonnie Prince Charlie's uprising in 1745-46. So there's a tenacity there that is lacking further south.

William the Conqueror's great land grants to William Fitz Osborne and Grosvenor and all these people. After a couple of generations, they fall out of the king and it's going to give them to someone else and they'll disappear. How come the Frasers, the Campbells of Argyll, did it prove stickier? Was the king unable to kind of get rid of these people when he wanted to? There is a degree of greater local autonomy in Scotland. We've got to be careful with that because if you look at the history of the purses of Northumberland, it's not until the 17th century that their local autonomy really gets seriously diminished. Northumberland is a significant issue for the English crown right through into the 17th century and the two risings against the Reformation, the 1530s and 1569-70,

bring that home. Partly it is a degree of, these are people who control the calaters for the crown, and the price the crown pays is their settled control of their calaters. But also, I think contiguous landholding makes a significant difference because it makes the system more crystallized, and there are fewer, as we're a feudal offcuts. Land is often also consolidated by marriages, of course, is in England, but often not absolutely adjacent territorially in the same way, though, sometimes so. But I think the key element is the military element. Military service as part of land holding in Scotland persists for a much greater time than England. When it comes to Bosworth, Richard III has a very, very hard time raising troops. And by the 17th century, Charles II fights at Worcester with a

fundamentally Scottish army. I mean, he can't raise any troops in England as indeed Charles Edward finds a century later. English society is atypical, becomes much less feudalized at a much earlier date. But what happens in Scotland is that a lot of these troops are raised right the way through to the Jacobite period to fight for the Stuarts. And then, although there are many legislative changes to diminish the power of chiefs of the name, the only way in which that's finally diminished is by large-scale recruitment into the British Army. And so Fraser of Lovett's son, who himself is involved in the 45, ends up raising just about as many of the name of Fraser, 900 or 1,000, to fight in Canada in the late 1750s, as was the case with his father and he raised 12 years earlier.

The people who suffer are the ordinary adherents of the House of Fraser and their landholders and dependents in both cases. But military service via the British Army continues into the 19th century as a function of Scottish feudal landholding. And so in 1800, about 26% of Highland landowners in Ireland, the north of Scotland, are British Army officers. So there's a big crossover. The persistence of that crossover means that there's a great deal of gravity in the feudal system. You're right. And the Fraser Highlanders play a possibly decisive part in the fall of Quebec in 59. And then you've got the Gordon Highlanders and all these famous Scottish regiments, which seem to have a kinship ties more so than certainly than the English regiments are being raised into

the 19th century. So what about Robert the Bruce coming all the way back to military service? Is it true that in his struggles to gain independence from England, he makes a kind of bargain that entrenches the power of some of these emerging clan leaders? Yes, he crushes some and he entrenches others. It's an existential struggle. So the chief of the name of Dougal, who takes the other side, suffers very severely. Bruce had his famously Bacchan, which is the stronghold of Comyn in the early 14th century, and he privileges others. For example, the chiefs of the name of Oliphant, who become basically stewards in Forfashire and Angus for the Bruce's reign. But one of the things that's interesting there is that the destruction of Buchan, which is loyal to Comyn, is loyalty to

a Norman, a joint Norman Scots family. These people, I mean, Comyns have got Norman Scots, Norman Celtic, they're hybrids. They're not some kind of dwellers in the mists of the Iron Age outside history. So fundamentally, even in the 14th century, you can see that the struggle to control and to reward magnates in relatively rural parts of Scotland isn't actually linked to ethnicity or race or backgrounds, and certainly not in any mystic way. They are landholders and they're a threat or their potential allies and some of them like clan donald gained by their loyalty to the bruce and others don't but later on the donald autonomy becomes too much and the campbells take over effectively the role of being the lead family

in scotland because of their loyalty that is a very movable feast as it turns out yes when it comes to campbells they're loyal but but to who? That's the big question. So we've got landowners in Scotland, which is quite a geographically complex place. You can definitely establish yourself in a locality and not have too much outside interference for all sorts of traditional and geographical reasons. Is there a period where you see the clans really coalescing, a kind of golden age for the Scotland of the clans? Clans really coalescing, a kind of golden age for the Scotland of the Clans? The thing I would probably say is no.

It's an organisation or a way of describing a certain end of the spectrum of an organisation, which is itself a movable feast and itself is always developing. So if we take ideas like the struggle between the Highlands and the Lowlands, say famous baffle there is Harlaw in 1411, what you're really seeing there is a claim on the earldom of Ross by Donald of the Isles, which is being defended by partisans of alternative claimants to the earldom of Ross. It is a contest over a domestic earldom. You could say there's a negative of a golden age, there's a bad age, and that is the age probably where climate change, the Little Ice Age, impacts there are too many of them for the land to sustain. You get the traditional lawlessness, which infects early modern accounts, mainly because there are a lot of people who are in areas of Northern Scotland that used to be reasonably

fertile, although never very good, but are now no longer fertile at all. I mean, just as you were able to have an extensive viniculture business in East Anglia in the 14th and 15th centuries. So you were able to do a great deal more, though not really viniculture, in Scotland at that time. But then later on, of course, generally the weather declined. And the more marginal you were as a European society, the more it held you back. And that was true. Travelers to Norway and Sweden in the late 18th century were remarking how primitive it was compared to other parts of Europe. But a lot of

that was the legacy of adverse climatic conditions, which of course depopulated Greenland altogether, arguably. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, I'm talking about the clans of Scotland. More coming up. and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades.

Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And so as we enter the 18th century, after coming out of that little ice age, the crisis of the 17th century, again, how much of this is myth? But it seems that when Charles Edward, otherwise known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, lands in 1745, he has key meetings with clan chiefs. And really the decisive moment is convincing enough of these clan chiefs, like Cameron of Loch Eel, to come on side and turn out their men. And this has been romanticised. But is that a fair representation of how Highland politics works at the time? Like how important were these clan chiefs and what kind of, well, formal powers did they have

over the people who lived on their patch? They always retained powers of barony throughout Scotland, which gave them judicial rights, but they also had rights under regality of life and death. They effectively could substitute entirely for the crown and crown justice in the area. But, you know, in a way that translated in a transitional phase, because the Faculty of Advocates, the Scottish Bar

is a royal foundation, into a situation where great landowners and later lesser landowners, and the families of lesser landowners became the regional judges, the sheriffs in Scotland. Once again, there's a spectrum. But basically, the landowner had this power of life and death, they had a power of regality, and they could effectively burn their tenants out, something which was taken advantage of occasionally in 1745, and more frequently at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. So that was the power they had.

But that power, to some extent, extends throughout Scotland. So when we're saying clan chiefs, as we do for shorthand in the 1745, the chief of the name of Ogilvy, the Earl of Airlay, David Ogilvy, raises very substantial, what would be called fighting tail, levy of men for Charles Edward Stuart. But he is the Earl of Airlay. He is a man with land holdings in Angus in the east coast of Scotland. He is a lowland nobleman. But in fact, he can raise men on the same basis because of his powers. And likewise, on the Duke of Athol estates, the legitimate but dispossessed Duke of Athol, the Marcus of Tullibardine, raises a very significant proportion of the overall fighting tale of the Dukes of Athol

because of the loyalty of the House of Athol and its dependence to the Stuarts. So once again, yes, chiefs of the name raise large numbers of men, but these chiefs of the name can be chiefs of the name in places far away from the West Highlands or the north of Scotland, and they could never have spoken the word of Gaelic in their lives. And also, it's not a million miles away from what is even in the 8th century going on south of the border in England, where people like the Verulam family were able to raise militia units sort of from their estates and nearby to support the Hanoverians in the crisis of 1745-46. So again, we shouldn't think of this as some sort of wild other. It's recognisable. It certainly is recognisable. It's just as some forms of Scottish society, often those which were more remote, had the same landholding principles, but were more intensively like, I suppose, feudal or ancestral societies because they lay at one end of the

spectrum and others lay at the other end of the spectrum. So any end of the spectrum in Scotland, even as it were, the more modern inverted commas end of the spectrum is actually also part of a spectrum with England and the rest of Europe. I mean, England tends to be further away because it's relatively demilitarized, but it's not impossible, as you say, that landowners are able to call effectively people out from their own estates for militia service. That doesn't tend to extend to military violence in a civil sense, even in the Civil War period, but it's certainly

part of a spectrum of landlord influence. And of course, I have to remember that the end of the 80s, the beginning of the 19th century, local landlords in England were frequently the JPs. So they had rights of, if not life and death, being able to exclude people, dispossess them, make them homeless because of their local powers as magnates. So again, it is wrong to see the Scottish example as kind of completely separate. That's because it's romanticised and frozen in aspect, and we tend to ignore the fact that English society and other societies go along a similar trajectory. What about the clans after the 45, the last significant Jacobite attempt to seize back

the crown of Britain. What happens to the clans after that? Well, there's an extensive occupation throughout Scotland by the British army, and that takes a very long time to resolve. It's clearly not resolved from the correspondence of the commanding officers and their letterbooks, et cetera, within eight or nine years. of the commanding officers and their letterbooks, et cetera, within eight or nine years. And the things that do resolve it in the end are the recruitment of troops at scale into the British Army, because the incentives to recruit are quite high in cash terms.

They can be up to five pounds a man. Often the landowners get a lot of that, but they do it on the basis of the promise of land grants. And land grants are made both in the new territories, for example, land grants to the Fraser servicemen in Canada, and they're also made on the home estates. The trouble with that is land is really important to the average recruit, but the trouble is that leads over time to highly partable and very small land holding, which again, in adverse climate conditions,

or sometimes even not by this stage, by the end of the 18th century is economically unsustainable. So in a way, the large scale recruitment to the British army accelerates the need for the clearances, because people can no longer afford their rents, and their lands can no longer sustain them. So effectively, they're often moved or are moved to the coast or overseas. There are very widely variant ways in which that's carried out, some of which are horrific and some of which are closer to economic migrancy. Once again, it's a highly mythologized but also incredibly disruptive and unpleasant process. And then what about the freezing and aspic that

you mentioned before, the idea of the tartans, the clan traditions, the games, all the associations that we now think of as, and perhaps our American brothers and sisters in particular, think of as being typical of clans? Well, the first Highland games in Scotland appears to have been at Falkirk Triest in 1780, though Falkirk is not the first place, as it is midway between Edinburgh and Glasgow, you might expect to have a Highland Games. But they are fundamentally, in terms of their growth and development, a romantic and Victorian phenomenon. And so is the development of Tartan as it was long understood. Tartan certainly is widespread in the early modern period and before. There are clan or family associational tartans, but they don't tend to be nearly as strictly regulated as they became in the 19th century,

where companies like Wilson's of Bannockburn and apologists like the Sobieski-Stewarts and James Logan and others who wrote lengthy, codified clan entitlement textbooks. These began with the Society of True Highlanders in London, incidentally, in 1815, codifying who was entitled to what. And this idea that you weren't entitled to wear your ex-Tartan unless you belonged to family X, that was a completely 19th century idea because Tartans originally bagged badges of association and loyalty, not bloodline. And they created the idea of an ethno-cultural tribal society, which Scotland could fit into in the British Empire. So in 1897, the Diamond Jubilee, there are Scots Highlanders parading alongside Zulus and other groups from the British Empire because they seem to fulfill the same criteria. And a lot of British imperial celebration from

Benjamin West's portrait of the death of Wolfe in 1769 to the poetry of the 19th century talks about the Highlander, inverted commas, in terms which suggests that these are our own native tamed savages and you, you know, will be what they are if you'll come into the British Empire. You'll be able to have very positive service and be fully integrated while maintaining your traditions. And that's how Tartan and Highlandism is used and depicted. But that is very largely, apart from its less pleasant imperial overtones, a romantic and Victorian invention. And today I've interviewed and filmed with various clan chiefs who still exist. They have a lovely time. They're flown to America and they go and preside over things and they choose not to emphasise that recent nature of this tradition.

Well, I mean, they doubtless are chiefs of the name, so they're entitled to that. One of the interesting things that's happened in more recent years is the appointment of subsidiary chiefs of the name in, for example, North America, who maybe have not related at all to the line of the chief, but happen to have done a lot for the clan in North America. There's a kind of honorary membership of the top tier, if you like. So one of the paradoxes about this is that the 19th century saw Tartan really portrayed as the badge of locality and ethnicity. It's always been a badge of locality and association, but it intensified that sense of locality and ethnicity as never before. And yet it was that that helped create the idea of tartan as a global signifier

of family and more latterly association, because associational rather than family tartans are a big growth story of the last 40 years, and not just in Scotland, where there have been Pakistani and Sikh and other associational tartans have developed, and they develop elsewhere. But the irony is that this tense badge of locality has become a global signifier, not just of family, but also of Scotland. It's one of the most recognisable global signifiers of Scottish nationality worldwide. And that's a paradox born out of the British Empire. And that's a paradox born out of the British Empire. And today, the clan chiefs have what formal powers?

And in fact, clan membership, obviously, it's entirely, like you said, it's association, it's just voluntary. For people listening to this abroad, when you're born in Scotland, there's no suggestion that you're in a particular clan or not. And indeed, there's no formal powers enjoyed by the leader of that clan. No real formal powers unless they have any powers they may exercise as a feudal landholder. Because if one were to take the current Farquharson of Invercauld, 33rd chief of the name of Farquhar and 17th Baron of Invercauld, his landholding lies roughly where it lay in 1600. He has about, some have been sold recently, but about 40,000 hectares, 100, in terms of anything ancient and feudal. But otherwise, anyone who is, for example, is chief of the name of Farker or Farkerson can say that this is my chief, wherever they are in the world, but there's no obligation on them. They just have a sense of belonging. And since a sense of belonging is what people like, and a sense of belonging without any obligation on you is even better, it's understandably very

popular. What happens if your mother is a fox and it makes the terrible, terrible mistake of marrying an Englishman called Smith? And you end up in a kind of patrilineal way, end up with the name Smith. Can you still be part of that clan, Murray? Well, absolutely, you could be part of it. And the descent of the chief of the name frequently goes to people with no acquaintance with the estate. And often people who are born far away from Scotland may never have really seen it until the day they inherit. This certainly happens. have a chief of the name who is female, the matrilinear and patrilinear naming is less critical than it might be otherwise. A chief of the name can marry and still retain their name because they are the chief of the name. Very modern. There we go. We end up looking to the future. Murray, thank you very much indeed. This is just one of the many, many topics covered in

your new gigantic history of Scotland. Tell us what it's called. So it's Scotland, the Global History, and it's published by Yale University Press. Thank you very much. See you next time. Thanks, Dan. you