Clan Gordon

The House of Gordon USA traces the family to Adam de Gordon, who about 1130 gave lands to the newly founded Kelso Abbey for a church at Gordon in Berwickshire. Richard de Gordon is said to have held the barony between 1150 and 1160. Wikipedia repeats a traditional story of an ancestor who slew a monstrous creature in the Merse; it reads as legend and no source here supports it.

The move north came with Strathbogie. Historic Environment Scotland says Robert the Bruce granted it to Sir Adam Gordon about 1314, after Bannockburn. Wikipedia reports Adam's death at Halidon Hill in 1333; the society says his son inherited and Strathbogie was renamed Huntly.

The direct Gordon line ran out in the early fifteenth century. The House of Gordon USA says it ended with Elizabeth Gordon, whose son by Alexander de Seton took the Gordon name and became Earl of Huntly in 1449. Historic Environment Scotland gives about 1445. Either way, the chiefly name passed through a marriage, not an unbroken male line.

The earls built and rebuilt Huntly Castle. The 1st Earl began the palace about 1450, the 4th Earl remodelled it in the 1550s, and the 6th Earl, made Marquis of Huntly in 1599, added the heraldic frontispieces. Wikipedia reports the Forbes feud, the Battle of Tillieangus in 1571 and Glenlivet in 1594. The earl of Huntly became Duke of Gordon in 1684; the dukedom ended with the 5th Duke in 1836 and the marquessate went to a collateral line, so the present chiefs descend from a collateral line.

The sequence from Glenlivet shows how the house survived its own politics. Wikipedia dates the battle to 3 October 1594, between the 6th Earl of Huntly with the Earl of Erroll, who had perhaps 1,500 to 2,000 mostly mounted men, and the young Earl of Argyll, whose force it puts at 10,000 to 12,000. The cause was the Catholic earls' letters to Philip II of Spain. Huntly won the field and still lost the campaign: the king marched north without opposition, the earl went abroad in early 1595, his castles were razed, and Parliament restored him in November 1597. Two years after that he was made a marquis. A numerical account of a battle from a level D source should be read with that in mind, but the order of events is not in dispute between the sources used here.

The site is older than the family. Historic Environment Scotland says the earls of Fife built the Peel of Strathbogie about 1190 to guard a river crossing, so the Gordons inherited a fortified place and then replaced it, beginning the palace about 1450 and adding the heraldic work under the 6th Earl. What stands at Huntly is therefore a record of the earls' own rise, in three building phases, and not of the clan as a whole.

The Register lists Gordon as a military tartan, dated 1794 and made for the 92nd (Gordon) Highlanders, later adopted as the clan tartan. The House of Gordon USA gives a longer account: in 1793 Alexander, 4th Duke of Gordon, commissioned three Black Watch-based patterns from William Forsyth of Huntly and kept the one with a single yellow overcheck, and the Gordon Fencibles wore it first. The society itself says the Highlanders made it famous. The two accounts agree on the sett and differ only on which unit was first.

Gordon Dress (Original) is a separate record. The Register dates it to 1906 and says it first appeared in W. and A. K. Johnston's The Tartans of the Clans. The society also names Gordon Red, Gordon of Esslemont, Gordon of Abergeldie and district tartans for Huntly and Aberdeen, which are not on this site. It dates an early reference to the Gordons' plaids to 1618, when Sir Robert Gordon of Gordonstoun asked that red and white lines be removed to harmonise with the other septs, a single claim from the society that was not independently checked.

The regiment that carried the tartan has its own, better-attested dates. Wikipedia gives the 92nd (Gordon Highlanders) Regiment of Foot as established in 1794, the Gordon Highlanders proper as formed in 1881 when the 75th and 92nd were amalgamated, and the regiment as ending in 1994 in the merger that made The Highlanders (Seaforth, Gordons and Camerons). The article does not say who raised the 92nd or how, so the often repeated recruiting stories are not supported by anything read here. What the dates do establish is that the tartan was in military use for two centuries after 1794, which is a likelier reason for its spread than any clan custom. A buyer choosing between the Register's Gordon and Gordon Dress (Original) is choosing between a regimental-origin sett of 1794 and a pattern first published in 1906, not between a modern and an ancient clan cloth.

The Gordon surname page is at /surnames/gordon/. The link to the clan is rated probable. The name comes from the Berwickshire barony, the chiefly line took it through the Seton marriage of the early fifteenth century, and Wikipedia adds that Gordon is also a British Romani surname with no connection to the Berwickshire family. The surname therefore does not prove membership of Clan Gordon, and no sept list is recorded on this page because none of the sources read gives one.