Clan Kerr

Clan Kerr is a Border family of Roxburghshire rather than a Highland one, and unlike most of the names in the tartan books it has no agreed Gaelic form. The etymologies on offer are mutually exclusive: Norse and Middle English kerr, brushwood or marshy ground; Brittonic caer, a fort; Gaelic ciar, dusky; and Irish cearr, left-handed, which is the one the clan’s own tradition prefers. None is proven. A Johannes Ker is recorded near Peebles around 1190, and two brothers, Ralph and John Ker, are taken as the founders of the two lines that mattered: Ferniehirst, a mile south of Jedburgh, and Cessford to the north-east. The branches spent the better part of three centuries in what one account calls a virtual civil war, alternating the post of Warden of the Middle March as the crown’s favour shifted.

Andrew Kerr of Ferniehirst was appointed first Warden of the Middle Marches in 1502, and Ferniehirst Castle, built around 1470, took the consequences: Lord Dacre brought seven hundred men and artillery against it in 1523 and took it, and it was recovered in 1549 by a Franco-Scottish force under André de Montalembert with the Earl of Huntly. The feud with the Scotts opened in 1526, when Walter Scott of Buccleuch killed Kerr of Cessford, and was answered in 1552 when Kerrs cut down Sir Walter Scott on the High Street of Edinburgh. The motto comes out of February 1545 at Ancrum Moor, where the Ferniehirst Kerrs had taken English pay and then turned their horse against the English once the day had gone to the Scots. The branches were joined in 1631 by the marriage of Anne Kerr of Cessford to William Kerr of Ferniehirst, and from that line came the Earldom and later the Marquessate of Lothian. The left-handed tradition is old and genuinely attested: Ferniehirst’s spiral stair turns anticlockwise, to the disadvantage of a right-handed attacker, and the Scots term Kerr-handed is recorded for left-handedness, with the story that Sir Andrew Kerr trained his followers to fight left-handed after Flodden in 1513. It has also been tested. A 1972 paper in the British Medical Journal reported around thirty per cent of those surnamed Kerr as left-handed against eleven per cent generally; a 1993 study found no statistically significant excess.

The Kerr tartan

The Scottish Register of Tartans holds three records under the name: Kerr, with the designer given as Unknown; Kerr Hunting; and Kerr Shepherd’s Plaid. None carries a designer or a date, none carries a Wilsons of Bannockburn attribution, and there is no record at all for a Kerr Ancient, Weathered or Dress.

What can be dated is the book the sett came out of. A Kerr tartan is plate 75 of the Vestiarium Scoticum, published in Edinburgh by William Tait in 1842, in the section its authors headed Lowland Houses and Border Clans, alongside Scott, Armstrong, Home and Maxwell. The trade sometimes dates the pattern to 1588 and the Marquess of Lothian; nothing in the Register supports that, and it is better treated as sales copy than evidence.

A note on honesty: the Vestiarium Scoticum is a forgery. Its authors, who styled themselves Sobieski Stuart and claimed descent from Prince Charles Edward, presented it as a copy of a fifteenth-century manuscript and never let anyone outside the family examine the originals. The chemist Stevenson Macadam examined their copy dated 1721 and reported that it had been treated with chemical agents to age the writing, concluding it could not be depended upon as an ancient document. The Kerr sett is a plate in that book: a Victorian design that happened to stick. Kerr Ancient and Kerr Weathered are not separate tartans but dye recipes, the same threadcount in lighter or muted shades, and the Register records neither.

Clan facts

References

1. Kerr tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. Chiefs — The Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs
3. Vestiarium Scoticum