Clan Crawford

The name comes from the barony of Crawford in Lanarkshire, so the clan is named for a place and not for a founder. The surname page covers how the name is recorded. Wikipedia says the clan is of Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon origin and that a belief in the early 1700s that it was Norman was mistaken, while admitting that the early personal names of the main Crawford families are Norman. The Craufurdland family history claims descent from a Danish chief named Thorlongus. Neither account is backed by a document in the pages read, so the earliest ancestry is not established.

The first firm figure is Sir Reginald Crawford, sheriff of Ayr. Wikipedia dates his appointment to 1296 and says the chiefly line of Auchinames and the Craufurdland line both come from his family. The Craufurdland history says he was made heritable sheriff by William the Lion, which would be more than eighty years earlier. The two accounts cannot both be right about the start of the office, and the pages read do not cite the records.

Wikipedia lists the clan's lairds in the usual wars of the period: a Craufurdland laird killed at Flodden in 1513, an Auchinames laird killed at Pinkie in 1547, and Thomas Crawford of Jordanhill, who captured Dumbarton Castle from Mary's supporters in 1570. In the eighteenth century John Walkinshaw Crawford of Craufurdland served at Dettingen and Fontenoy and, according to Wikipedia, attended the Jacobite Earl of Kilmarnock at his execution in 1746. Sir Alexander Craufurd of Kilbirnie was made a baronet in 1781, and his son Robert Craufurd commanded the Light Division in the Peninsular War and died at Ciudad Rodrigo in 1812.

The chiefly line ended its landholding in the twentieth century. Wikipedia says Hugh Ronald George Craufurd sold the Auchinames estates and emigrated to Canada in 1904. Wikipedia notes that he left three male heirs, but the pages read do not say whether any of them or their descendants has petitioned the Lord Lyon, so why the chiefship is vacant is not established.

No Crawford tartan is held as a record on this site, because the threadcount is kept behind a login at the Scottish Register of Tartans and no open primary source for it could be read. Wikipedia reports that the first record of a Crawford tartan is in the Vestiarium Scoticum of 1842 and that none existed about 1739. The Vestiarium is a book of that date by the Sobieski Stuarts whose claim to reproduce an older manuscript is disputed, so the pattern is a nineteenth-century clan tartan and says nothing about medieval Crawfords.

No sept list is recorded for Clan Crawford. Wikipedia lists none, and with no chief there is no one to say which surnames the clan accepts. The Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs says there is no central register of septs. Wikipedia names Clan Wallace, Clan Boyd and Thompson as allied clans, which is a statement about alliances and not about shared surnames. Names such as Craufurd and Crawfurd are spellings of the same surname, not septs.

Clan Armstrong, a Border clan whose last chief was hanged about 1610 according to its association, is another clan on this site with no chief to settle its septs.

The Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs says there are no strict rules on who may wear a tartan and that wearing a clan tartan signals allegiance to the chief. Clan Crawford has no chief to signal allegiance to, so a Crawford wearing the tartan is expressing family or clan identity and not a link to a chief.

The Crawford surname page is at /surnames/crawford/. The link to the clan is rated probable. The clan bears the name and its main branches lie in the area where the place called Crawford is, but the name is a place name found in several parts of Britain, and with no chief there is no one to define membership. No other surnames are listed here, and a person named Crawford is not shown to descend from Auchinames or Craufurdland.