Highland Clansmen

Origins

The fighting men of the Scottish Highlands were a clan society's levy: tenants and tacksmen following hereditary chiefs whose authority rested on kinship, land and the sword. For centuries the clans fought each other and the Scottish crown in raids and feuds. In the late Middle Ages their best warriors wore mail and fought with the great two-handed sword and the axe. From the 1640s, in the wars of the English Civil War period that engulfed Scotland, England and Ireland, Highlanders became a force in national politics, and after 1688 they became the main strength of the Jacobite cause, which sought to restore the exiled Stuart kings to the thrones of Scotland and England.

Organization & Training

A clan went to war under its chief, with his close kin and the tacksmen, the leading tenants, as officers. These men usually stood in the front rank, where the best armed and most eager fighters were needed. Ordinary clansmen stood behind. There was little formal drill. Instead, men learned to handle weapons from boyhood, and clan loyalty and pride kept them together in battle.

Their way of war was built for one moment, the Highland charge, a tactic often credited to Alasdair MacColla in the campaigns of the 1640s. The clansmen advanced quickly, fired a single musket volley at close range, dropped their muskets, and covered the last yards at a run with sword and shield before the enemy could reload.

Weapons & Equipment

The equipment matched the method. The early clansman's great two-handed sword gave its name to the Scottish Claymore, a name later passed to the basket-hilted broadsword of the Jacobite era. With it went the targe, a round leather-covered shield often fitted with a central spike, and the dirk, a long dagger held in the other hand. Muskets and pistols were fired once and then thrown aside. Poorer men carried axes or scythe blades on poles. Many clansmen had no sword at all, and the front ranks were far better armed than the rear.

Notable Actions

Against troops with slow-loading muskets and shaky nerves, the charge was devastating. At Killiecrankie in July 1689, government soldiers were still fixing their Plug Bayonet blades into their musket muzzles when the clans struck, and the battle was over in minutes. In the Rising of 1745, Jacobite charges routed government armies at Prestonpans in September 1745 and again at Falkirk in January 1746.

Culloden, on 16 April 1746, ended it. The Jacobite army was tired, hungry and badly placed on open, boggy moor. The Duke of Cumberland's artillery tore into the waiting clans, and the charge that finally went in met steady redcoats armed with the Brown Bess Musket and bayonet. Cumberland had drilled his men against the charge; the often-told detail that they were taught to bayonet the man to their right is commonly repeated but hard to prove. The battle lasted about an hour and was followed by a harsh campaign of repression.

Legacy

The aftermath dismantled the society that produced the charge. Laws banned Highlanders from carrying weapons or wearing Highland dress, the chiefs lost their heritable courts, and over the following century the Highland Clearances emptied much of the land. The paradox followed quickly. The British Army had raised the Black Watch before the Rising, and from the Seven Years' War it recruited many more Highland regiments. Kilted Highland soldiers fought across the empire and at the Battle of Waterloo, making them an icon of the very state that had broken the clans.

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