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, is less than 250 years old.

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, by historian Eric Hobsbawm.

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. He 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 Hobsbawm records, 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.

The garment’s very name, philibeg, didn’t exist as a word or an object before the 18th century.

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.

• In 1745, during the Jacobite rising, a newspaper of the time (the Caledonian Mercury) described the Highlanders gathered in Edinburgh wearing “great variety of tartans, of the most fashionable colours,” 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 own catalog, advertised by Stewart just a few years earlier, was the source many of those “ancestral tartans” actually came from.

Within a few weeks, all of Edinburgh had been, as Hobsbawm describes it, “tartanified” 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.

Iolo and his followers went as far as building several miniature Stonehenges across various parts of Wales, to hold their open-air druidic ceremonies there. One of them still stands today, facing the National Museum of Cardiff.

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, Price 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. The case effectively opened the legal path to modern cremation in the United Kingdom.

A tradition invented forty years earlier, built on a religion that never actually existed, 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. William IV’s coronation had, among other mishaps, a logistical problem with the French ambassador’s carriage. Not even the national anthem was sung at Queen Victoria’s coronation: it wasn’t yet an established custom.
• 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.

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.

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”) and Prys Morgan (“From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past”).
• 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.