MacBeth Tartan

Clan MacBeth

MacBeth, MacBeath and MacBey come from the Gaelic personal name Mac Bethad, meaning roughly son of life. It was a common name borne by many unrelated men: Mac Bethad, Bishop of Rosemarkie, witnesses a charter of David I between 1127 and 1131, within seventy years of the king’s death and with no claimed connection to him. That matters, because the question everyone asks has the answer the wrong way round. The surname does not descend from Mac Bethad mac Findlaích, King of Scots from 1040 to 1057 — Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The king and the surname share a source in the same personal name and nothing more. Macbeth and his queen Gruoch had no children between them; his heir Lulach was her son by an earlier marriage, and Lulach’s line ended as a royal one in 1058. Anyone offering a MacBeth a descent from the king is selling something that cannot exist.

Where the name does have real substance is in medicine. The Beatons, also written MacBeth, MacBeatha and MacBethadh, were a hereditary medical kindred who came to Scotland from Ireland from about 1300. The earliest known member is recorded at Dumfries in the early fourteenth century; the family is associated with Islay from the early fifteenth, and Fearghas MacBeatha, physician to the Lord of the Isles, wrote the Islay Charter of 1408. They served the MacDonald Lords of the Isles, the MacLeans of Duart, the MacLeods of Dunvegan, the Frasers of Lovat and the Munros of Foulis, and were employed by Scottish monarchs between Robert I and Charles I. The kindred adopted the surname Beaton in the fifteenth century; as many as seventy-six of its physicians have been identified between 1300 and 1750, their manuscripts survive in the National Library of Scotland, and a sixteenth-century Gaelic translation of Bernard of Gordon’s Lilium medicinae is the largest Gaelic manuscript in Scotland. The Beaton Cross at Pennycross in Mull carries initials read as Gille-Coluim MacBethadh and his son Domnall, dated 1582. MacBeth has no chief recognised by the Lord Lyon and is not carried as a clan in its own right; it is claimed as a sept by Clan Donald, Clan Maclean and Clan MacBean, which do not agree with one another.

The MacBeth tartan

Six MacBeth entries are registered: MacBeth, MacBeth #2, MacBeth #3, MacBeth Dress, MacBeth Dress (Dance) and MacBeth/MacLulich. The main clan sett carries a design date of 1856, and the weaving trade describes it as based on the Royal Stewart, which is a weaver’s attribution rather than a primary record. Where the 1856 date comes from is not recorded, and no designer and no named weaver are recorded for it.

MacBeth Dress (Dance) is registered under the Fashion category with a date of 2005 and is a genuinely different design — a white-ground pattern with purple, unrelated in structure to the clan sett. MacBeth/MacLulich is a further distinct sett with no recorded date, designer or source, and we would not explain its name by way of King Macbeth’s stepson, because no kinship between the surnames MacBeth and MacLulich is documented. One clean point in the family’s favour: nothing MacBeth comes from the Vestiarium Scoticum. The name is absent from the seventy-five tartans of that 1842 forgery, which is a better bill of health than a good many clans can show.

A note on honesty: nothing at all is registered under MacBeath, McBeth, McBeath or MacBey, so cloth sold under those spellings is the MacBeth sett. Ancient, Modern, Weathered and Muted MacBeth are colourways of one threadcount and are not separately registered. No MacBeth sett predates the commercial era. There is no recorded motto and no recorded plant badge for the name — with no chief there are no undifferenced arms for a crest badge to come from — and the arms and motto of the Bethunes of Fife belong to a different family altogether, one the standard accounts expressly distinguish from the Hebridean Beatons.

Clan facts

References

1. MacBeth tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. Hereditary Physicians in Celtic Medicine — Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh
3. The Beaton medical kindred
4. The Islay Charter of 1408, written by Fearghas MacBeatha