| Highland Dress |
| Bare legs have been common form in the Highlands at least since the time of Magnus "Barelegs", King of Norway, who with his courtiers adopted the local sartorial custom after subduing the Hebrides in 1098. |
| In 1543, John Elder, a priest, wrote a letter to King Henry VIII of England, in which he explained that Highlanders were called "Redshanks" in Scotland, from their bare legs, and "rough footed Scots" in England, from their shoes of untanned deerskin, worn fur side outside. The kilt, however came much later. The standard outer garment for men was a leine-chroich, a kind of shirt whose tails came down below the knee, dyed saffron-yellow, and made from as much as twenty-four ells (approx. 9 metres) of pleated linen. This in time gave way to the feileadh mor (big wrap), who's name perfectly describes the plaid, the normal Highland dress for men during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The plaid was a huge blanket of woven cloth, a double-width (approx. 2 metres) in breadth and between four and six metres long. To put it on, the Highlander lay down on it, with the lower of the two longer sides just about knee level, and wrapped it around himself, fastening a belt round his middle to keep the thing together. Then he stood up and draped the top half around his torso, and sometimes over his head, according to his whim or the weather. The plaid was particularly handy clothing to wear for herding cattle, and also for wearing when you went out raiding. So much so that when Highland dress was banned after the '45 Rebellion, those who opposed the Act argued that to be bereft of his plaid would be an unfair restriction on the cattle herder or drover, while the army, which had the job of enforcing the law, used the same argument to press that it would discourage cattle rustling. The material from which the plaid was made was raw wool which was first soaked in human urine, which removed the grease and acted as a fixing agent for the colours. Then it was washed and dried. After spinning, each skein of wool was put in a pot with the dye plant or plants and other materials and simmered until it achieved the required colour. The fact that it was virtually impossible exactly to match shades from different batches or pots may explain why check pattern, for which comparatively small amounts of wool of different colours are required, were so popular so early on. |