Cockburn Tartan

Clan Cockburn

Cockburn is a Border name. The earliest claimed record is a charter in the Register of the House of Soutra in which Petro de Cokburne witnesses a grant of arable land at Lempitlaw, long dated to the reign of William the Lion; the dating of that document has since been revised to between 1251 and 1274, so the familiar twelfth-century date should be treated with care. A Robert de Cockburn appears as a serviens in a charter of 1232 to 1242, and Peres de Cockburne on the Ragman Roll of 1296. The derivation of the name is genuinely unsettled — Old English for a rooster and a stream, the personal name Colbrand, and the Cuckooburn near Roxburgh have all been proposed — and we will not pick one.

The principal line was Cockburn of Langton in Berwickshire, southwest of Duns. The usual account is that Sir Alexander de Cokburne acquired Langton, Carriden and Bolton in 1330 by marriage to the heiress Mariota de Veteriponte, though other dates circulate, including 1314 and 1504. Sir Alexander held the office of Hereditary Usher of Scotland. Branches sat at Ormiston and Clerkington in East Lothian and at Henderland and Skirling in Peeblesshire. Debt broke the senior lines in the mid eighteenth century and Langton was auctioned in 1757; the Langton baronetcy went dormant in 1880. Henry Cockburn, Lord Cockburn (1779–1854), Solicitor General for Scotland and a judge of the Court of Session from 1834, wrote the Memorials of His Time; the Cockburn Association, Edinburgh’s civic trust, was founded in his memory in 1875. Cockburn is an armigerous clan with no chief currently recognised by the Lord Lyon.

The Cockburn tartan

Five Cockburn entries sit in the register — Cockburn, Cockburn #2, Cockburn (Old Pattern), Cockburn Blue and Cockburn of Ormiston Dress — but structurally they are one sett: a broad green ground, narrow black tramlines, two dark blue blocks flanking a white centre line, and a yellow and a red stripe. What differs between them is scale, thread proportion and ground colour. Cockburn of Ormiston Dress is the familiar dress treatment, the green ground replaced by white, rather than a new design. For Cockburn Blue, no date, designer or provenance is recorded in anything we could verify.

The provenance of the sett itself is good. It is recorded in the 1819 pattern books of William Wilson & Son of Bannockburn, and the cloth is dated to about 1810 to 1815 in the Cockburn Collection — the earliest tartan collection known to have been assembled by a private individual, made by Lieutenant-General Sir William Cockburn, fifty-six tartans each twenty-five inches wide and mounted in book form, given to the Mitchell Library in Glasgow in 1952. Most of its specimens were woven by Wilsons, and about half of it overlaps the Highland Society of London’s collection, the 1815 initiative that effectively invented the idea of a clan tartan. No Cockburn sett comes from the Vestiarium Scoticum, and no designer is recorded for any of them.

A note on honesty: Ancient, Modern, Weathered and Muted Cockburn are colourways of one threadcount, and no Cockburn sett predates the commercial era. Two things commonly printed about this family are simply wrong. The plant badge sometimes given as “a cock crowing proper” is the crest, not a plant; no plant badge is recorded for Cockburn at all. And the man executed at Henderland about 1530 was William Cockburn, who was arrested, tried in Edinburgh, convicted of treason and beheaded — not Piers Cockburn hanged over the gate of his own tower by James V. That version comes from Sir Walter Scott attaching the Border Widow’s Lament to the story, and the ballad is not the record.

Clan facts

References

1. Cockburn tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. Clan Cockburn — records, Langton and chiefship
3. The Cockburn Collection — Scottish Tartans Authority
4. Border ballads and the Henderland execution — reivers.info