Clan Morrison

Morrison is not one clan but at least three families sharing an anglicised surname. The Hebridean Morrisons take their name from the Gaelic Mac Gille Mhoire, “son of the servant of Mary”. Their chiefs held the hereditary office of brieve, or judge, in Lewis, which gave the kindred its second name, Clann-na-Breitheamh, the sons of the judge. The brieves’ seat was at Habost in Ness, near the Butt of Lewis, and their stronghold was Dùn Èistean, a sea stack on the north-east tip of the island separated from the shore by a ravine that floods at high tide. Tradition takes the line from a Morrison heiress of an older family who married a MacDonald of Ardnamurchan in the fourteenth century. Separately, a bardic family, the Ó Muirgheasáin, settled in Harris about 1600 in the service of the MacLeods and turned their name into Morrison. Separately again, the Lowland Morisons of Aberdeenshire are sons of Maurice, a Norman given name, and are no relation to either Hebridean family. The one-r spelling Morison was the older form, and Morrison became standard only in the early nineteenth century.

The brieves held their office in Lewis until 1613. After Letters of Fire and Sword were issued on 28 August 1616 the family disappears from the record altogether. The Lewis Morrisons feuded with the MacLeods of Lewis and with the MacAulays of Uig, and the last recorded clan battle between Morrisons and MacAulays was fought in 1654, by tradition near Barvas after a cattle raid. By 1861 there were about 1,402 Morrisons in Lewis, roughly a fifteenth of the island’s population. The chiefship is the part worth being precise about. A clan society formed in 1909 to find a candidate, and in 1965 the Lord Lyon held that no traceable descendant of the Lewis brieves survived and recognised Dr John Morrison of Ruchdi as chief of the whole name and clan of Morrison, his descent traced about twelve generations to the Morrisons of Dun Pabbay in Harris. The modern chiefly line is therefore a Harris one, not a continuation of the Lewis judges.

The Morrison tartan

The Scottish Register of Tartans holds three records under the name, all in its Clan/Family category: Morrison, Morrison Ancient and Morrison Society. For none of the three does the Register name a designer, and for none does it give a date of recording. There is no Wilsons of Bannockburn attribution anywhere under the name, so the Morrison setts cannot be traced to the Stirlingshire pattern books that document so much of the clan tartan trade.

What the red Morrison has instead is a story. In the 1930s a house on Lewis was being pulled down and an old bible was found wrapped in a piece of bright red tartan, with a note dated 1745 saying the cloth belonged to the Morrisons. The sett taken from that scrap was worn at the clan gathering of 1964 and recognised by the Lord Lyon as a Morrison tartan on 3 January 1968.

A note on honesty: that account cannot be checked by anyone outside it. The cloth, the note and the circumstances of the find all reach us through the people making the claim, and a scrap of wool with a written date on it is not evidence of an eighteenth-century clan tartan. What can be documented is a sett that entered use in the 1960s and was recognised in 1968. The Register does hold a separate record for Morrison Ancient, but the words Ancient, Modern, Weathered and Muted as a weaver uses them on an order form mean dye shades rather than different threadcounts, so a Morrison Ancient kilt and a Morrison kilt are usually the same pattern in lighter or greyer colours. The Register holds no record at all for a Morrison Hunting or a Morrison Weathered sett, although both are sold.

Clan facts

References

1. Morrison tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. Origins of Clan Morrison — Clan Morrison Society of North America
3. Members — The Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs