Clan Fraser

The Frasers were an incoming French-speaking family. A Simon Fraser held land in East Lothian by about 1160, and the name spread north during the wave of Continental settlement under William the Lion. Two distinct clans descend from them, both with chiefs recognised by the Lord Lyon: Clan Fraser, seated at Philorth near Fraserburgh in Aberdeenshire under Lord Saltoun, and Clan Fraser of Lovat, whose lands lie around Beauly and the Aird in Inverness-shire.

The Lovat Frasers were nearly destroyed at the Battle of the Shirts in 1544, where tradition holds that only five Frasers survived. Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat, joined the rising of 1745 after long equivocation and was beheaded in London on 9 April 1747, his title forfeited. His son raised the 78th Fraser Highlanders, who served in Canada. Thomas Fraser was created Baron Lovat in 1837 and the attainder was reversed in 1854.

The Fraser tartan

Fraser tartans belong to the commercial era rather than to the middle ages. The Scottish Register of Tartans lists Fraser (1800) as a Wilsons of Bannockburn pattern, and a separate Fraser (1842) credited to the Sobieski Stewarts and therefore taken from the Vestiarium Scoticum. Fraser of Lovat and Fraser Hunting are recorded as further named setts, and a group of Fraser Gathering tartans was designed for a clan gathering in 1997.

The clan’s own guidance is that the green hunting setts are for day wear and the red for evening. That is a convention rather than a rule, and nobody will mind either way.

A note on honesty: no Fraser sett should be described as older than the late eighteenth century, and the popular idea that the surname comes from fraise, a strawberry, is folk etymology working backwards from the cinquefoils in the family arms.

Clan facts

References

1. Fraser tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. Tartans — Clan Fraser of Lovat
3. Modern Clansmen — Clan Fraser of Lovat