The House of Bruce

The Bruces took their name from Brix in Normandy and came to Britain in the wake of the Norman Conquest. Robert de Brus received the lordship of Annandale in Dumfriesshire from David I in the 1120s, and marriage in 1219 to Isobel of Huntingdon gave the family the royal descent on which its later claim to the throne rested.

Robert the Bruce seized the crown in 1306 after killing John Comyn at Dumfries, destroyed an English army at Bannockburn in 1314, and was the king to whom the Declaration of Arbroath was addressed in 1320. His son reigned as David II and was captured at Neville’s Cross in 1346. Later Bruces held part of the crown lands of Clackmannan and, through the Earls of Elgin and Kincardine, Broomhall in Fife, which remains the chief’s seat.

The Bruce tartan

The tartans are much later than the family, and their documentation is thin. The Scottish Register of Tartans lists Bruce with the designer given as unknown; a separate Bruce (Vestiarium), credited to the Sobieski Stuarts and so to the Vestiarium Scoticum of 1842; Bruce Hunting and Bruce Old, both unknown; and Bruce of Kinnaird, credited to Wilsons of Bannockburn, the Stirlingshire firm whose pattern books are the main commercial record of early named setts.

A note on honesty: no connection between the Bruce tartan and Robert the Bruce or the fourteenth century is documented, and a claim circulating in the kilt trade that the sett rests on a thread count dating to 1571 could not be verified from any primary source. Sources also disagree over whether the main Bruce sett came from the Vestiarium or from somewhere else entirely.

Family facts

References

1. Bruce tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. Bruce Family History — The Family of Bruce International
3. Vestiarium Scoticum