Clan Nicolson

Two unconnected families carry this name, and it is worth separating them before choosing cloth. The Highland line is Clan MacNeacail, anglicised first to MacNicol and then, from the seventeenth century, to Nicolson. Its eponym was a Nicail or Nicholas living in the mid-thirteenth century, a Scandinavian name in a Norse-Gaelic Hebridean setting. The earliest recorded member is a John “mak Nakyl” of the Wars of Independence. The clan held Lewis until the fourteenth century, when the lands passed to the MacLeods through the marriage of a MacNicol heiress; the MacLeods were confirmed in Lewis in 1343. Earlier tradition also places the family in Assynt and Coigach on the north-west mainland. The male line then settled at Scorrybreac above Portree in Trotternish on Skye, where MacNeacails are documented from 1507. The separate Lowland Clan Nicolson descends from James Nicolson, an Edinburgh lawyer who died about 1580 and whose forebears were Aberdeen burgesses; that family bought Lasswade in 1592 and took a Nova Scotia baronetcy in 1629. There is little genealogical evidence connecting the two chiefly houses.

MacNicols were at Edward Bruce’s siege of Carrickfergus in 1316, and in 1563 brothers of the name were pardoned for fire-raising and homicide on Mull during the MacDonald and Maclean feuds. The Reverend Donald Nicolson, chief in the mid-seventeenth century, is the man generally held responsible for the change of spelling from MacNicol to Nicolson. In 1826 the chief left Scorrybreac and the family settled in Tasmania. The name stayed on Skye through the clearances: Nicolsons were among the crofters at Camastianavaig in the Battle of the Braes in April 1882, where about a hundred crofters met fifty Glasgow policemen sent to serve eviction notices, an affray that helped produce the Napier Commission of 1883 and the Crofters Act of 1886. In 1988 Iain Norman Carmichael MacNeacail was recognised by the Lord Lyon as chief of the Highland Clan MacNeacail, on the condition that he take the Gaelic form of the surname; the Clan MacNeacail Trust had bought the Ben Chracaig ground at Scorrybreac the year before.

The Nicolson tartan

The Scottish Register of Tartans returns thirteen records under Nicolson, and almost none of them is old. The nineteenth-century group is attributed to books and firms rather than to the clan: Nicolson (McIan), MacNicol/Nicolson (W & A Smith), MacNicol/Nicolson (Inverness Tweed Mill Co Ltd), Nicolson (Lochcarron), and the paired entries Nicolson/MacNicol and Nicolson MacNicol. There is also a MacLeod/MacNicol sett, a MacNicol Hunting, a Nicolson Green Hunting, and a cluster of modern personal designs by A. L. Bryan Nicolson covering Lewis, Assynt and Coigach, Taransay, Tiree and Coll, and the Isles. No Nicolson or MacNicol record carries a Wilsons of Bannockburn attribution.

The clan itself recognises only two of these: Hunting MacNeacail and Dress MacNeacail. Chief Iain MacNeacail petitioned the Court of the Lord Lyon on 22 November 2001, and both setts were recorded in the Books of the Court of the Lord Lyon on 21 December 2001, taken from the colour plates in the Sellar and Maclean history of the Nicolsons of Scorrybreac. The clan treats the other Nicolson and MacNicol patterns as unrelated to it.

A note on honesty: the two tartans the chief actually recognises were entered in the Lyon books in December 2001, which makes them younger than most of the people who buy them. Modern, Ancient and Weathered are not three tartans. The Lyon Clerk described them plainly as trade terms: the threadcount does not change, only the dye shades, Ancient being the lighter scheme introduced in the 1920s and Weathered a dulled version. The hunting sett in ancient colouring is the same pattern Clan Cunningham uses. Nothing in the Register ties any Nicolson sett to Wilsons of Bannockburn or to any documented pre-1745 use.

Clan facts

References

1. Nicolson tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. Tartans — Clan MacNicol Federation
3. Chief of the Clan — Clan MacNicol Federation