Armstrong Ancient Tartan

A family that could put three thousand horsemen into the saddle in the sixteenth century had no named tartan until 1842, and by then it had had no chief for over two hundred years.

Two readings of the name

The family’s own account begins with Siward Beorn, sword warrior, also called Siward Digry, sword strong arm, said to have been the last Anglo-Danish earl of Northumberland and a nephew of Canute. That is tradition; nothing in the surviving record supports it. A different explanation has been advanced for the Irish Armstrongs, associated with the Ulster Gaelic Mac Trean-Labhraidh, a branch of the O Labhradha: trean-labhradh means strong-speaking rather than strong-armed, and the suggestion is that the English ear turned one into the other. The plain descriptive reading, a byname for a strong man, remains as likely as either; the record does not settle it.

An Adam Armstrong was pardoned in 1235 for causing a man’s death. Alexander Armstrong, second laird of Mangerton, was taken and killed by William de Soulis at Hermitage Castle; the Minholm Cross, put up around 1320 near Mangerton Tower, commemorates it. Gilbert Armstrong served David II as steward and as an ambassador, a Sir Adam Armstrong was in the company of the Earl of March and Dunbar in 1374, and a John Armstrong fought at Otterburn in 1388.

Liddesdale and the Debatable Lands

The family made its reputation in Liddesdale and in the Debatable Lands, the strip between the two kingdoms that neither would concede and neither could govern. A John Armstrong raised a strong tower there around 1425. By the early sixteenth century the Armstrongs held a substantial part of that ground and were reckoned able to muster some three thousand riders, which made them a political problem, not merely a criminal one. In 1528 they burned Netherby in answer to an attack by Lord Dacre.

The best-known episode is the death of Johnnie Armstrong of Gilnockie. The story is that James V, who saw the family as a threat to his authority in the south, drew him to a meeting at Hawick and hanged him there. It survives as tradition, kept alive more by the ballad than by any document. What is on the record is the sequel: when James needed the Border in arms at Solway Moss in 1542, the Armstrongs did not come. Gilnockie Tower, also called Hollows Tower, was built in 1518 north of Canonbie in Dumfriesshire and now houses a clan centre. Mangerton Tower, the chief’s seat, stood a mile south of what is now Newcastleton.

The chiefs end on a gallows

The Union of the Crowns in 1603 removed the frontier that had made the Debatable Lands profitable, and the crown set about pacifying what it renamed the Middle Shires. The Armstrongs did not survive as a clan. Archibald Armstrong of Mangerton, the last chief, was hanged in Edinburgh in 1610 in reprisal for a raid on Penrith, and after the dispersal of the family in the seventeenth century no trace of a chiefly line has been found. The name is therefore armigerous: arms exist, but there is no chief and no prospect of one being traced. For a family so large and so well recorded that is an unusual position, and it follows from state policy rather than neglect.

Check cloth before named setts

The historical Armstrongs did wear patterned cloth, but not this one. The Border country had its own textile tradition, the shepherds’ plaid or Border check: a small dark and light crossweave, the light squares originally the natural colour of undyed wool and the dark ones any of a range of greys, blues, greens or browns. It is among the oldest patterned cloths in the islands and became fashionable among Border Scots from the 1820s with Sir Walter Scott’s encouragement. That, not a clan sett, is the cloth the riders knew.

The Armstrong sett itself first appears in print, spelled Armstrang, among the Lowland and Border plates of the Vestiarium Scoticum in 1842. The book claimed to reproduce an early manuscript and did not; its compilers were exposed within five years, and one of the supporting manuscripts was shown in 1895 to have been chemically aged. Much of the Lowland repertoire nevertheless comes from it, Armstrong included. That does not make the pattern less usable, but it does date it: 1842, not 1542. The labels Ancient, Weathered and Muted describe dye strength and are twentieth-century conventions; the threading does not change between them.

Who wears it, and one who took it furthest

With no chief, no permission is needed and none can be given. Anyone of the name or of Armstrong descent may wear it, and there is no branch sett to choose between. The name is carried by a large population on both sides of the old frontier and in Ulster, North America and Australasia. One of them carried a piece of the tartan to the surface of the Moon.

Sources: Clan Armstrong, Wikipedia; Border tartan, Wikipedia; Vestiarium Scoticum and Sobieski Stuarts, Wikipedia; Scottish Tartans Authority, The History of Tartan.