The Englishman Who Invented the Scottish Kilt (and the Welshman Who Invented His Own Druids)

Ask any Scot which tartan belongs to their clan and they’ll tell you without a second’s hesitation. Few suspect that certainty, and the very garment behind it, are far more recent than they seem.

The story that follows isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s documented, with names, dates, and sources from the period, in a 1983 book: The Invention of Tradition, edited by historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. And it begins, unexpectedly, with an English Quaker who made iron.

The man who invented the kilt so his woodcutters could work better

In the early 18th century, traditional Scottish Highland dress was the plaid: a long piece of cloth, folded and held with a belt, covering the whole body. It was an awkward garment to work in.

Thomas Rawlinson, a Quaker industrialist from Lancashire, leased land at Glengarry around the 1720s to set up an ironworks, and employed a large number of Highlanders to fell trees and work the iron.

• Rawlinson noticed the traditional plaid got in the way of that physical labor.
• He called in the tailor of a nearby regiment and, according to the account Hugh Trevor-Roper records in that book, asked him to “shorten the dress and make it handy and convenient for his workmen.”
• The result, separating the skirt from the plaid and sewing pleats into the front, was the philibeg: the “small kilt.” The version now associated with Scotland’s most ancient roots.
• Rawlinson himself started wearing it. His local partner, a clan chief, copied him. And, “as always,” the rest of the Highlanders followed their chief’s lead.

According to Trevor-Roper, the philibeg didn’t exist as a word or an object before the 18th century.

It helps to know where the story comes from. It rests on a text by Ivan Baillie of Abereachan published in the Edinburgh Magazine in 1785, decades after the events, which later authors took at face value. Not every historian of Scottish dress accepts it: some, such as Matthew Newsome of the Scottish Tartans Museum, argue that images of Highlanders wearing only the lower half of the belted plaid already exist from before Rawlinson. What nobody disputes is that the short kilt as it’s known today is an 18th-century garment, not a garment of medieval Scotland.

Your clan’s tartan was, very likely, designed by a factory

The story is already surprising at this point. The next layer is even more so.

The idea that every Scottish clan had, since time immemorial, its own tartan pattern isn’t backed by any solid evidence predating the 19th century. There were, admittedly, patterns associated with districts: in the early 18th century the traveler Martin Martin wrote that you could guess which area someone came from by their cloth. But a pattern per district isn’t the same as an official tartan per surname.

• In 1745, during the Jacobite rising, with Edinburgh full of Highlanders, a newspaper of the time (the Caledonian Mercury) advertised a “great choice of tartans, the newest patterns,” with no mention whatsoever of a clan-identifying tartan.
• A Highlander’s identity was recognized at the time by the cockade on his bonnet, not by his tartan.
• A textile firm, Wilson and Son, of Bannockburn, spotted the commercial opportunity of creating a catalog of tartans differentiated by clan and surname. This happened in the early 19th century, not in some remote past.

The decisive moment came in 1822, when King George IV visited Edinburgh. Writer Walter Scott, an admirer and mythologizer of the Highland past, took charge of organizing the visit’s ceremonial.

• Scott appointed Colonel David Stewart of Garth as, in his own words, “dictator” of matters of dress and ceremony.
• Clans were asked to attend wearing their “traditional” tartan.
• Wilson and Son’s catalog was the source many of those “ancestral tartans” actually came from.

Within a few weeks, all of Edinburgh had been, as Trevor-Roper describes it, “tartanized” to welcome a Hanoverian king.

The whole city acted, overnight, as though that tradition had always existed.

The Welshman who invented his own druids

On the other side of Great Britain, in Wales, something similar was happening with an entire religion.

Edward Williams, known by his bardic name Iolo Morganwg (1747-1826), was an antiquarian, a poet, and a man deeply obsessed with the Celtic past.

• Around 1791, Iolo came up with the idea that Welsh bards were direct heirs of the ancient druids, sharing their rites, their religion, and their mythology.
• There’s no historical evidence of that continuity whatsoever. Even scholars of his own time already doubted it.
• Iolo went ahead and created the Gorsedd (meaning “throne”) anyway: a full bardic liturgy, complete with dress, chants, and ceremony, presented as the restoration of an ancient druidic cult.
• In 1819, the Gorsedd was officially folded into the Eisteddfod, the Welsh festival of music and literature, turning it from a set of cultural competitions into a celebration with the air of an ancient rite.

The staging grew after his death in 1826. Iolo officiated inside a circle of small stones; his Gorsedd heirs took up the custom of raising a genuine miniature Stonehenge for each National Eisteddfod. One of them, built in 1898 for the 1899 Cardiff Eisteddfod, still stands in the Gorsedd Gardens, facing the National Museum of Cardiff: almost three-quarters of a century younger than its inventor.

The follower who took the druids so seriously he changed the law

The most unsettling part of this story has a name attached: William Price, a radical free-thinking physician from Llantrisant, and a committed follower of Iolo’s druidism.

Price was convinced that the ancient druids cremated their dead, and that burying a body was, therefore, a betrayal of that belief. In 1884, after his infant son died, he cremated the body himself, in public, on a hillside near his home.

He was arrested and tried. The court, unable to find any British law explicitly banning cremation, found him not guilty, and the case effectively opened the legal path to modern cremation in the United Kingdom.

A tradition invented almost a century earlier, claiming a continuity with the druids that nobody has ever been able to document, ended up changing British funerary law.

Not even royal pageantry is as old as it looks

A third case, documented by historian David Cannadine in the same book, points to the symbol most associated with British continuity: the monarchy itself.

• Coronations in the early 19th century, according to the period press Cannadine cites, weren’t the model of flawless solemnity we imagine today. Queen Victoria’s coronation, for example, was held without any prior rehearsal.
• Victorian press editorials openly criticized the monarchy, its spending, and its ceremonial, something almost unthinkable in today’s image of the British Crown.
• The solemn, precisely timed, visually flawless pageantry we now associate with “the Crown’s age-old tradition” was designed and refined, according to Cannadine, mostly between the late Victorian era and the reign of George VI, largely with photography, radio, and later television already in mind.

The monarchy itself is, obviously, ancient. Its current staging, the part that feels timeless, isn’t nearly as old.

Why Hobsbawm called this “invented tradition,” not a lie

Hobsbawm doesn’t describe these cases as frauds or jokes. He calls them invented traditions: sets of symbolic or ritual practices seeking to instill values through repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past, even when that continuity is, for the most part, fictitious.

His underlying thesis is uncomfortable for any certainty about “the way things have always been”:

• The kilt, clan tartans, and Welsh druidism work, for whoever lives them, exactly the same way a genuinely ancient tradition would.
• Their real age doesn’t affect their symbolic effectiveness.
• Hobsbawm documents the same pattern elsewhere, in the same era: the British national anthem, the flag ritual in American schools, or the “sportsmanship” of English schools are all inventions of the 18th and 19th centuries dressed up as eternal.
• The American example even has a known date and author: the Pledge of Allegiance was written by Baptist minister Francis Bellamy in August 1892, commissioned by The Youth’s Companion magazine for a school patriotic campaign timed to the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival. It wasn’t born in any founding national assembly, but in a family magazine’s promotions department.
• Something similar, on a smaller scale, happens with today’s local festivals, celebrated as if their rituals went back forever: plenty of that pageantry is newer than it looks too.

The question this leaves open isn’t whether these traditions deserve respect.

It’s how many of the ones each of us considers “the way it’s always been” would turn out, if investigated with the same rigor, to have a surprisingly specific birth date.

If you’re curious to explore your own relationship with the past and continuity, the quiz on your relationship with time is a good place to start.

Sources

• Hobsbawm, E., & Ranger, T. (eds.) (1983). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press. Chapters by Hugh Trevor-Roper (“The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland”), Prys Morgan (“From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past”) and David Cannadine (“The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition’, c. 1820-1977”).
• Baillie of Abereachan, I. (1785). Letter on the origin of the philibeg. The Edinburgh Magazine, March 1785.
• Martin, M. (1703). A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland. London.
• G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg y Gyfrol Gyntaf (Cardiff, 1956) and Prys Morgan, Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff, 1975), cited as primary sources in Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983).
• The Youth’s Companion, September 8, 1892: first publication of Francis Bellamy’s Pledge of Allegiance.