THE KILT IN MEDIEVAL SCOTLAND?
Now we shall deal with the misconception that the kilt is a form of medieval dress. We can’t blame this on Braveheart, as the notion existed before its release, but the movie certainly did nothing to help matters. It depicts Scottish Highlanders (and Lowlanders) in the late 13th century wearing poor imitations of kilted garments from the 17th century and painting their faces blue with woad in good 2nd century fashion. Is it any wonder people are confused?
Often when one goes to SCA events and Renaissance Faires one will encounter men in very modern kilts with what are sold as “Jacobite” shirts. These people are simply believing what they have been told—that the kilt is a medieval garment—and accepting that at face value. I have even sat around one SCA campfire and been approached by a young man in full Highland Dress—modern Highland Dress. He was wearing a tailored tartan kilt, elastic kilt hose, elastic garters, modern patent leather dress shoes, a white button shirt with a tartan tie, and Balmoral bonnet with his crest badge. He thought because it was Scottish that it was medieval. We cannot blame people for suffering from these misconceptions. It is what they have been taught by the poorly researched “myths” that pass for Scottish history. So let’s see what we actually do know to be fact about early Highland dress.
The earliest entry in McClintock for Scotland is from 1093. He quotes a document called the Magnus Berfaet saga, in which King Magnus ventures to the Western Isles of Scotland and adopts the dress he finds there. “They went about barelegged having short tunics and also upper garments, and so many men called him ‘Barelegged’ or ‘Barefoot.’” Those wishing to prove the early existence of a kilt almost always cite this document, but nowhere in the document is a kilt mentioned. People overly willing to sacrifice fact for their desire to date the kilt to antiquity jump at the fact that these men went barelegged and make the assumption that if they were not wearing trousers then they must have been wearing a kilt. But this assumption is completely invalid as the kilt is mentioned nowhere in this document, and the clothing that is mentioned consists of a tunic and an upper garment which corresponds perfectly with the contemporary dress of the Irish Gaels of the time—the leine and brat.
The next mention of Highland Dress we get from McClintock is from the 16th century. Let me stress that nowhere is there to be found evidence to suggest the wearing of any form of kilt in Scotland in the time period before the 16th century. People may claim various early dates for the wearing of the kilt, but I have yet to see hard evidence for it. Most often what people are claiming to be a kilt is merely a depiction of a leine, tunic, or acton.
The type of kilt that we will begin to encounter in the 16th century is called (in my poor Gaelic) a feilidh-mhor (great wrap), a breacan-feile (tartan wrap) or simply a belted plaid. All refer to the same garment. I prefer the latter for ease of use. A plaid or plaide is a length of heavy woolen fabric worn over the body like a mantle or a shawl. It has nothing to do with the modern American usage of the word plaid, except that they were often of a tartan pattern, which “plaid” is synonymous with in America. A belted plaid is simply a very long plaid that had been gathered into folds and belted around the body. It is often called in modern reenactment circles a “great kilt.” Despite what you saw in Braveheart the belted plaid was not worn in the 13th and 14th centuries. The belted plaid costumes worn in that movie were not even very good representations of the belted plaids. I honestly do not know how the costumers could have claimed to have done any historical research—they simply designed a garment that they thought looked both Scottish and medieval.
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