1.5 Hours of History Mysteries To Sleep Or Relax

Tartan itself is ancient, and in August 1933, workmen leveling a small hill at Bell's Meadow in Falkirk, a few hundred yards north of the Antonine Wall, broke open a clay pot with a spade.

Inside was the largest Roman coin hoard ever found in Scotland, roughly 2,000 silver pieces, the latest of them struck around 230 AD.

Stuffed in with them was a scrap of wool, woven in a simple two-tone check.

It's now in the National Museum of Scotland, and it's usually called the Falkirk tartan, though strictly speaking it's closer to a shepherd's check than anything you'd see today.

The word itself shows up in the Scottish royal accounts in 1538, when James V's treasurer paid for Highland tartan to make a kilt for the king before a hunting trip.

So by the 16th century, patterned Highland cloth was known enough for a king to want some.

What nobody at the time ever wrote down was the idea that a particular pattern belonged to a particular family or clan.

The idea that tartan was associated with Highland Scots was already there, but that additional idea of a pattern belonging to a specific clan would have been foreign to a 16th century Scotsman.

The closest anyone came was Martin Martin, a Gaelic-speaking man who published a description of the western islands of Scotland in 1703.

He wrote that every island had its own taste in stripes and colors, and the same was true across the mainland.

So a well-traveled person could look at a man's plaid and guess where he lived.

That's a district pattern of what's popular in each area, but what it isn't is a Klan badge.

Even that much is shaky, since portraits from the period routinely show gentlemen wearing two or three tartans at once.

The Battle of Culloden makes the point better than anything, because when the Jacobite army lined up on Drummossie Moor on April 16th, 1746, it didn't identify its clans by cloth.

And if you've heard of this battle before, despite not knowing much about Scottish history, it's likely because it was the last pitched battle on British soil.

But I digress.

The Jacobite men wore a white ribbon in the bonnet, because that was the Stuart badge, and because there were Highlanders and Tartan on the government side too.

David Morier's painting of the battle, reportedly modeled on captured Jacobite prisoners, shows different patterns on the jacket, plaid, and hose of the same man.

If Klan Tartans had existed, the only army on earth that would have been wearing them wasn't doing so.

The act of prescription that followed the rising included a clause on Highland dress, enforced from August 1st, 1747, that made it illegal for any man in the Highlands to wear the plaid.

A first offense meant six months in prison, and a second meant seven years exile to the colonies.

The cloth itself wasn't outlawed.

Women could wear what they liked, and the Loyalist Highland regiments were exempt, but the effect was the same.

For 36 years, ordinary Highlanders stopped wearing tartan, and whatever local patterns had existed died with the weavers who'd made them.

The law was repealed in 1782, largely through the lobbying of the Highland Society of London, a club of expatriate Scots founded in 1778.