The word ‘clan’ derives from Gaelic clann, whose primary meaning is ‘children’ but which acquired a new meaning as ‘kindred’ in the eleventh or twelfth centuries. In theory a clan can be defined biologically as a patrilinear descent group deriving from a common ancestor for whom the clan is named. In reality, for many clan members this kinship link was purely fictive as clans actively recruited outsiders (or ‘broken men’ as they were called) to augment their strength. A well-known fictional example of this, from Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), is the Jacobite chief Fergus Macivor, who is prepared to recruit anyone ‘willing to call himself a son of Ivor’ to maximise his clan’s fighting strength. By the late Middle Ages, the appearance of kinship could be maintained by new recruits adopting the clan name as a surname, but this was by no means universal. Because clans were not closed societies, personal loyalty to the chief was as important to clan unity as a sense of common kinship. Successful clans could expand their territories by subjugating weaker clans and forcing them into a client relationship or even expelling them from their lands altogether, as the Campbells did to the MacGregors of Glen Orchy. It was also possible for a large clan to split up into smaller clans. This happened to the Clann Shomhairle, founded by Somerled in the twelfth century, which split up into three kindreds, the MacDougals, the MacRuairies and, the most successful of the three, the MacDonalds. The MacDonalds themselves broke up into several subdivisions during the declining years of the Lordship of the Isles. Questions of loyalties, inheritance, jurisdiction and landholding in clan society could be very complex because of the hierarchy of senior and junior kindreds within clans and the different degrees of clientage of the subordinate clans in clan lordships. Highland clans arose from the merging of feudal institutions of landholding, private jurisdiction and primogeniture with traditional Gaelic kinship ties in the twelfth century. The system was adopted by the Norse settlers in the Hebrides (for example, MacLeod from the Norse name Liotr, and Lamont from lagman, ‘lawman’) and Lowland and Anglo-Norman families who were granted lordships in the Highlands (such as the Chisholms, Frasers, Sinclairs, Stewarts and so on). The turbulent families who dominated the Borders in the later Middle Ages are also often described as clans, but these were not, and never had been, Gaelic societies and are more accurately described, as they described themselves, as ‘surnames’.
In an age of centralising monarchies, the multi-layered loyalties and power relationships among the Highland clans could only be seen as an anomaly, while the chieftain’s right of private jurisdiction over his clan’s people was a real obstacle to the crown’s goal of subjecting the entire kingdom to direct royal government. The duty of clansmen to perform military service was another serious problem as it gave clan chiefs private armies, answerable only to them. Clan armies could be substantial forces. Around 1600 the Gordons, for example, could raise 3,000 armed men. Scotland in the sixteenth century suffered a succession of regencies and minorities and it was only towards the end of the century that, encouraged by a misleadingly optimistic report on the wealth of the Hebrides, James VI (r. 1567-1625) began a serious attempt to subdue and pacify the Highlands. After James became king of England in 1603, his efforts were redoubled because of his ambition, unfulfilled in his lifetime, to create a unitary kingdom of Great Britain. Lowland opinion had by this time become quite viciously antagonistic towards the Gaels on account of the clan warfare of the Highlands, and the opinion of one anonymous author, who claimed that God had created the first Highlander from a horse turd, was probably widely shared. James’s measures were generally coercive, extending even to attempted ethnic cleansing and genocide. In 1597, James required all chieftains in the Highlands and Islands to produce their titles to their lands, knowing full well that the traditions of Gaelic landholding would make this impossible in many cases. Failure to produce title then became a pretext for dispossession and transfer of the lands to a loyal Lowlander or clan chief who, James was confident, would be willing to pay a handsome rent to the crown (a similar campaign preceded the Jacobean plantations in Ulster). In this way, James was able to order the dispossession of almost all the Gaelic chiefs of the Hebrides, except the MacLeans of Mull. However, few of the dispossession orders were actually carried out. In part this was due to James’s unrealistic expectations for rents. For example, an arrangement with the Earl of Huntly to take over lands in the Outer Hebrides on the condition that he extirpated the resident population broke down over negotiation of the rent. In the case of Lewis, which James had granted to the Fife Adventurers Company, it was successful resistance by the displaced MacLeods that led to failure. James’s most ruthless act was the outlawing and virtual extermination of the MacGregors after they had defeated a rival clan in battle in 1603. Most of the leading MacGregors were hunted down and killed and the survivors were forced to change their names. to the protection of other clans. Clan Gregor was able to re-establish itself later in the century (though it was also soon outlawed again). Like most Lowlanders, James equated Gaelic culture and language with barbarism. In the Statutes of Iona, promulgated in 1609, he sought to detach the clan chiefs from their traditional culture and turn them into agents of Lowland civilisation. The statute included measures to help the Reformed church get established in the still largely Catholic Highlands, banned patronage of bards and required clan chiefs to send their sons to be educated in the Lowlands. A few years later, a knowledge of English was made a condition of succession to a clan chieftaincy. Charles I (r. 1625-49) began by continuing his father’s policies but his reign soon became mired in religious controversy. Charles’s advocacy of an Episcopalian church alienated Scotland’s Presbyterian majority, whose opposition to royal interference found powerful expression in the popular Covenanting movement, which was named after the National Covenant, a defence of Presbyterianism published in 1638. Charles’s unsuccessful attempt to destroy the Covenanters in the Bishops’ Wars (1639-40) began the series of civil wars that wracked Britain and Ireland until 1652 and ended with the creation of the first unitary state of Great Britain and Ireland under the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell.
World History
