Clan Smith
Smith means a worker in iron, and that is the first thing to understand about it. It is the commonest surname in Scotland and in England, it arose independently in many different places, and Smiths are not one family and share no common ancestor. In Latin record the name appears as Faber and Ferro, and in older Scots as Smeayth, Smyith, Smythe and other forms. The name is first recorded in south-east Scotland in the thirteenth century; earlier and later instances include Robert the smith witnessing a charter by the bishop of Dunkeld around 1199, Adam Faber holding a croft at Swaynystoun between 1221 and 1234, William the Smith as a juror at Traquair in 1274, Alan Smyth holding office in Aberdeen in 1398 and Patrick Smyth held in the Tower of London in 1401.
The Highland connection runs through Gaelic. Gow anglicises gobha, a smith or armourer, and Mac a’ Ghobhainn, son of the smith, gives MacGowan and its variants. Within the Clan Chattan confederation the Gows and Smiths appear not among the twelve principal clans but as Sliochd an Gobha Crom, the race of the crooked smith, one of the families who took the confederation’s protection around 1399 without being related to it by blood. The story behind that — Henry Smith, or Henry Wynd, the armourer who stood in for a missing man on Clan Chattan’s side at the Battle of the North Inch at Perth in 1396, fought for pay and was afterwards adopted into the clan — is tradition, popularised by Scott’s novel, and the descent from him is unsubstantiated. The battle happened; the smith is legend. The Clan Macpherson Association does list Gow, Gowan, Smith, MacGow, MacGowne, MacGoun and MacGoune among its associated families, and notes that the association rests on that single episode rather than on geography or genealogy; it pointedly does not list MacGowan, although the Clan Chattan Association does.
The Smith tartan
The register files Smith (reference 3822) in the Name category rather than Clan or Family, with no designer and no date given, though data derived from the Scottish Tartans Authority assigns it 1886. More useful than the date is what the sett actually is: it is the Gow Hunting tartan with the dark blue stripe changed to azure. The eleven-stripe structure is identical to Gow Hunting, stripe for stripe, with colours substituted. So the Smith sett is derived from Gow, which is the Gaelic of the same occupation — and it is emphatically not the Macpherson tartan, which is a structurally different design altogether. Anyone selling you Smith as “the Macpherson tartan” has it wrong.
Three results in a Smith search are other clans’ tartans entirely: Brodie (W & A Smith), Campbell of Argyll (Smiths) and MacNicol/Nicolson (W & A Smith) are named after the W. & A. Smith pattern book published at Mauchline in 1850 — the publisher’s name, not the family’s. They must never be sold as Smith tartans. Smith (Sir William), reference 3823, is a 1975 institutional tartan for the founder of the Boys’ Brigade, filed as Corporate. On the Gow side, the register holds Gow, Gow (Portrait), Gow Hunting, Gow Hunting #2 and MacGowan; MacGowan is not an independent design but the Gow sett woven at a larger scale, and the two are recorded together in the tartan literature. Gow (Portrait) carries the date 1780 and was taken from a portrait rather than a pattern book — the earliest date in this whole group, and a Gow record rather than a Smith one.
A note on honesty: Smith Ancient, Modern, Muted and Weathered are colourways of reference 3822, not separate tartans, and that sett is itself a recolour of Gow Hunting rather than a design of its own. No Smith sett predates the commercial era; the earliest claim is 1886 and the register itself gives no date. Neither Smith nor Gow nor MacGowan appears in the Vestiarium Scoticum, and no Wilsons of Bannockburn or Highland Society of London provenance has been found for any of them.
Clan facts
| Chief | None. There is no chief of the name Smith recognised by the Court of the Lord Lyon, and Smith is properly a sept or associated name — of Clan Macpherson, within the Clan Chattan confederation — rather than a clan in its own right. We cannot confirm that any Smith ever bore undifferenced arms, so we say “no recognised chief” rather than calling the name armigerous. |
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| Motto | Not recorded for Smith. Reference works advise Smiths to use Clan Chattan’s, which is “Touch not the cat bot a glove” (Na bean don chat gun lamhainn) — but that motto belongs to Clan Chattan, not to Smith, and we will not print it in this row as though it did. |
| Plant badge | Not recorded for Smith. Clan Chattan’s is red whortleberry, again Chattan’s rather than Smith’s own. |
| Lands | No single seat. Methven Castle and Braco in Perthshire; Craigend in Strathblane parish, where Smiths were hereditary smiths and armourers of the Barony of Mugdock, tenants and then lairds; lands also in Aberdeenshire, Ayrshire, Renfrewshire and Stirlingshire |