The question everyone asks
Is Burns a clan?
Short answer: not in the official sense, and anybody who tells you otherwise is usually about to sell you a wall plaque. Here is what the claim actually rests on, what the tartan really is, and what you can wear without pretending.
The short answer
There is no Clan Burns recognised by the Court of the Lord Lyon, because there is no Burns chief. In Scotland those two facts are the same fact. A clan is not a surname with a lot of people in it; it is a legal body with a head, and the head is recognised by a court.
That court is real. The Lord Lyon King of Arms sits as a judge, keeps the Public Register of All Arms and Bearings in Scotland, and can prosecute. Nobody has ever established a Burns chiefship in it. So the honest description of Burns is a numerous and ancient surname with no clan structure, which is a different and less marketable thing.
The Campbell sept claim
You will very often see Burns and Burness listed as septs of Clan Campbell, which is how the name ends up on shop lists under Campbell tartans. The claim is old enough to take seriously and vague enough that nobody can settle it.
The explanation with most behind it is territorial rather than genealogical: a family of Burnses was settled in Ayrshire before the poet's people arrived there, and they owed allegiance to the Campbell Earls of Loudoun, whose seat was at Loudoun near Galston. Allegiance to a Campbell earl is a perfectly good reason to be counted among Campbell followers. It is not evidence that Burnses are Campbells by blood, and it says nothing at all about a Burns in Aberdeen or Antrim or Ontario.
Most published sept lists are not medieval documents. They were greatly expanded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the tartan trade, which had an obvious commercial interest in every surname in Scotland belonging to some clan that sold cloth. Appearing on one confers no rights whatsoever.
About that "family crest"
If you have been sold a Burns coat of arms, you have been sold a picture. In Scots law arms are granted to a person, not to a surname, and they descend to that person's heir. There is no such thing as a coat of arms belonging to everyone called Burns, and using arms that are not yours is an offence rather than a compliment.
The crest badge a clansman wears is the chief's crest inside a strap and buckle, worn to show whose follower you are. With no Burns chief there is no Burns crest badge to wear by right. This is not a technicality that heraldry pedants enjoy; it is the actual reason the badges exist.
So what can a Burns honestly wear?
- The Burns Check, below. It is a generic tartan with no chief attached, which means it is open to anybody, and it was designed for the poet's people specifically.
- A district tartan for where your family actually came from. Ayrshire, Kincardineshire, Galloway and the rest all have them, and place is a more honest claim than a sept list.
- Campbell, if you like it and you are relaxed about the sept question. Nobody will stop you, and now you know exactly what the claim is worth.
The tartan is younger than your grandmother
There is no ancient Burns tartan. There was never a Burns tartan at all until the twentieth century, and the one that exists was made for an anniversary.
When a Robert Burns tartan was proposed, the first instinct was to base it on Campbell, on the strength of the sept connection. That was argued over and dropped, and the decision they reached instead is the reason the cloth is interesting. They built it on the black and white Shepherd's Check, the plainest working cloth in Scotland, because Burns was a farmer. Then they crossed it with a hodden grey overcheck, for the hodden grey of A Man's a Man for A' That, and put two soft green lines through the overcheck for the fields the poems came out of.
It was nearly called the Ayr tartan. The name Burns won because 1959 was the bicentenary of the poet's birth, and in June that year the Burns Federation accepted the design on one condition: that everything made from it be made in Scotland.
The original Burns Check has since been superseded twice, by the Burns Heritage Check and then the Burns Heritage Tartan. All of them are generic tartans. None of them has a clan chief, because there isn't one.
It is not a beautiful tartan. It is muted and busy and it photographs badly, and that is because it was designed as an argument rather than a decoration: a ploughman's cloth with a line of poetry woven through it. Knowing what the grey is doing there makes it much better to look at, which is roughly the Burns effect in general.
Why there is no tartan on the rest of this site
Because a tartan background makes any page look like a shortbread tin, and because this one in particular does not deserve to be wallpaper. So it appears here, once, honestly, and everywhere else on the site it is reduced to a single thread: the fine dark and light of the shepherd's check, crossed at intervals by the grey and its two greens.
That line, under every title on this site, is the Burns Check unwoven back into one warp thread.
Where this came from
- The Court of the Lord Lyon, on chiefship, grants of arms and crest badges.
- The Scottish Register of Tartans, for the status and succession of the Burns Check, Burns Heritage Check and Burns Heritage Tartan.
- Burns Federation material on the 1959 design decision, the rejected Campbell basis and the Ayr name.
- Standard surname scholarship on Burns, Burn and Burness, discussed further on the name.
If you know this subject better than this page does, and you almost certainly do in parts, corrections are wanted. See the colophon.