Clan Forbes

Clan Forbes is an Aberdeenshire clan of the valley of the Don, and its name is territorial rather than patronymic. There is no Clann form of it; the surname comes from the lands of Forbes, and ultimately from the Gaelic forba, a field. The clan’s own founding story credits one Oconachar with killing the bears that infested the ground and claiming it as first occupier, which is legend and is generally presented as such. The documentary record starts in 1271 or 1272, when Duncan of Forbes received a grant of the lands from Alexander III. In 1429 James I granted Sir Alexander of Forbes a royal charter consolidating his estates into the Lordship of Forbes; he is styled Lord Forbes in a precept dated 12 July 1442 and is first recorded sitting in Parliament in 1445. The lordship has remained hereditary in the family and has never merged into a higher title, which makes Lord Forbes the premier Lord of Parliament in the Peerage of Scotland.

The clan’s sixteenth century was dominated by the Gordons. In 1536 the Master of Forbes was accused of plotting to shoot James V with a cannon; the conviction was reversed within days, but the feud was set. The Clan Forbes Society calls 1571 the annus horribilissimus Forbessorum, and the year earns it. Twenty Gordons were killed at a banquet in the great hall of Druminnor Castle. On 10 October 1571 Adam Gordon of Auchindoun defeated a Forbes force at Tillieangus, killing its commander Arthur Forbes — “Black Arthur”, son of the 6th Lord Forbes — along with thirty-six gentlemen, and taking a hundred prisoners. Later that year Gordon’s men burned Corgarff Castle with Margaret Campbell, Lady Forbes of Towie, her children and others inside; twenty-six died, and the ballad “Edom o Gordon” probably descends from it. In the following century the name is better known through Duncan Forbes of Culloden, Lord President of the Court of Session, who raised eighteen Independent Highland Companies against the rising of 1745 while Jacobites besieged his house.

The Forbes tartan

A search of the Scottish Register of Tartans for Forbes returns ten records. The principal one, recorded simply as Forbes, is attributed to Wilsons of Bannockburn and appears in that firm’s Key Pattern Book of 1819. The Clan Forbes Society notes that the further attribution to a Miss Forbes of Pitsligo in 1822 is disputed, and records that Malcolm, Lord Forbes has designated this sett the only official Clan Forbes tartan. A separate pattern listed as Forbes – 1842 is credited to John and Charles Sobieski Stuart and comes from the Vestiarium Scoticum.

The rest are later. Forbes Ancient dates from 1949 and was recorded in the Lord Lyon’s register. Forbes of Druminnor was reconstructed in 1968 from an old rug belonging to the Hon. Peggy Forbes Sempill. Forbes Dress, Forbes Dress (Clans Originaux) and two Pendleton Woollen Mills patterns are twentieth-century fashion work, and two personal tartans for Brian Forbes and family were registered by Blair Urquhart on 11 August 2020.

A note on honesty: the sett people buy as the Forbes clan tartan is a weaving-trade pattern out of a commercial pattern book of 1819, some seventy years after Culloden, not a medieval or clan uniform, and the popular attribution of it to a Miss Forbes of Pitsligo in 1822 is disputed. The Vestiarium Scoticum version of 1842 is worse documented still: that book’s claimed fifteenth-century source was never produced, a supposedly 1721 manuscript was shown in 1895 to have been chemically aged, and Walter Scott doubted the brothers in 1829. “Forbes Ancient” misleads in a different way — it is a genuinely separate threadcount, but one designed in 1949. The Register holds no Forbes Modern and no Forbes Weathered at all; those words describe dye shades of a single threadcount, not distinct tartans.

Clan facts

References

1. Forbes tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. Tartan — Clan Forbes Society
3. Battle of Tillieangus, 10 October 1571