Boyd Ancient Tartan

Few Ayrshire families are so well dated in the record and so poorly dated in the weaving books: the Boyds can be traced in charters from 1205, but nobody can say when a pattern was first sold under their name.

Four explanations, none of them settled

The name has attracted more etymologies than it can support. One reading takes it from Gaelic buidhe, fair or yellow-haired. Another points at Bute, which is Bòd in Gaelic, and makes the Boyds men of the island. The nineteenth-century writer William Anderson rejected both and argued for Norman or Saxon roots instead. George F. Black took a different line again, holding that the first Boyds were tenants of the Norman de Morville family for lands around Largs and Irvine. The documents do not choose between these, though Black’s version has the advantage of putting the family exactly where the earliest records find them, in the north Ayrshire coastal parishes.

1205 and 1296

The first Boyd on paper is Robert de Boyd, who in 1205 witnessed a contract between the lord of Eglinton and the burgh of Irvine. Ninety years later a Robert de Boyte appears in the Ragman Rolls, the record of homage rendered to Edward I of England. Those rolls survive in two groups, from 1291 to 1292 and from 1296, and were printed by the Bannatyne Club in 1834; they remain one of the few systematic lists of Scottish landholders from the period, which is why so many families date themselves from them.

Between those two entries sits the battle the family remembers best. The Norwegian force under Hákon was engaged near Largs on 2 October 1263, and a Boyd detachment is credited with holding the high ground above the beach. The motto Confido is said to record what Alexander III said as that detachment went forward. That part is tradition rather than record. The battle itself is documented, chiefly in Sturla Thordarson’s saga of Hákon and in the Chronicle of Melrose, but the Scottish archives for it are largely lost and later writers embroidered what remained. A Sir Robert Boyd fought at Bannockburn in 1314 and was rewarded with Kilmarnock and other Ayrshire lands, and Kilmarnock is where the family stayed.

Regents, forfeitures and a scaffold

Boyd fortunes rose and fell faster than most. Robert Boyd governed the person of the young James III, and his son Thomas married the king’s sister Mary and was made Earl of Arran, holding Brodick Castle from 1467 to 1469. The reversal came quickly: the family lost everything, Robert fled to England, and Thomas died in exile. James Boyd, second Lord Boyd, was killed in 1484 in the long quarrel with Hugh Montgomerie. The estates were recovered in the sixteenth century, and a Restoration earldom followed in 1660 for William Boyd. It ended on Tower Hill, where William Boyd, fourth Earl of Kilmarnock, was beheaded on 18 August 1746 for his part in the rising of 1745.

A name without a chief

Alastair Boyd, seventh Baron Kilmarnock, died on 19 March 2009. The barony and the chiefship were both due to pass to his brother, Dr Robin Boyd, who has not taken up either. Boyd is therefore an armigerous name: one that had a recognised chief within the documented past and has none at present. In practical terms that removes the permission question entirely. There is no chief to ask and no chiefly arms in current use, so anyone of the surname, or descended from a Boyd line, wears the sett on their own account.

What the weaving record does not say

The family history is far better evidenced than the pattern. Named family setts overwhelmingly belong to the commercial period after about 1765, when the Bannockburn firm of Wilson began standardising designs and attaching names to them, and the fashion hardened after 1822. The sources consulted here record nothing about when the Boyd sett was first woven, drawn or named, and rather than guess at it the honest answer is that the paper trail for the pattern is thin where the paper trail for the family is not. Where a Boyd kilt is offered as Ancient, Weathered or Muted, those words describe the dye strengths used on the same threading rather than separate designs.

Sources: Clan Boyd, Wikipedia, citing George F. Black, The Surnames of Scotland, and William Anderson; Battle of Largs, Wikipedia; Ragman Rolls, Wikipedia; Armigerous clan, Wikipedia; Peter Eslea MacDonald, tartan history papers, scottishtartans.co.uk.