Behind the Isle of May, at the mouth of the Firth of Forth, three English warships lay at anchor and waited.
It was the summer of 1490. Their commander was Stephen Bull, a seasoned captain, and he had been sent north by King Henry VII with picked crews, heavy guns and one task. The year before, a Scottish sea captain had captured five English ships raiding in the Forth and towed them into Leith. The captain’s name was Andrew Wood. Henry, the story goes, had offered a pension of a thousand pounds a year to the man who brought Wood in, alive or dead. Five centuries later the Wood name has a cloth of its own, the Wood tartan, and its story is a good deal shorter than his.
Bull knew that Wood was away in Flanders on a trading voyage and must come home this way. He had seized some local fishermen and kept them on deck to point out the Scottish ships when they appeared. Early one morning, two sails came up over the horizon from the south-east. The fishermen looked, hesitated, and then admitted it. Those were the Flower and the Yellow Carvel.
Pierce the wine
What happened next comes to us mainly from Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, a Fife laird who wrote his chronicle of Scotland some eighty years afterwards. He was a neighbour of the Wood family and had the story from people who had grown up on it. He loved a good tale, and historians treat his details with care. The outline is generally accepted.
Wood had two ships to Bull’s three, and no warning. When he made out the English colours he called his crews together. Pitscottie gives him a short speech: these are the men who mean to carry us in chains to the King of England, and by God’s grace they shall fail. Let every man be at his station, gunners to their pieces, crossbows and fire-balls to the tops, two-handed swords to the forecastle. Then he ordered the wine casks broached, and every man drank to his neighbour.
The ships closed and the guns opened at sunrise. They fought through the whole of the long northern summer day. Neither side could board the other or break away. When it became too dark to see, the two squadrons drew apart and lay within sight of each other through the night, patching rigging and tending the wounded.
At first light the trumpets sounded and they began again. By now the ships were grappled together, and they fought so closely, Pitscottie says, that nobody aboard noticed where the tide was taking them. The whole tangled mass of hulls drifted north along the coast of Fife until they were among the sandbanks at the mouth of the Tay. There, at last, the English struck their colours. Wood brought all three ships and their captain into Dundee.
King James IV had Bull and his officers brought before him, praised their courage, and sent them home to Henry with their ships as a present. He added a message. The King of England should know that Scotland had men who could fight by sea as well as by land, and he would be obliged if Henry would stop troubling her waters.
The admiral’s ditch
Andrew Wood had not set out to be a hero. He was born around the middle of the fifteenth century, probably the son of a merchant, and he made his living as a ship’s master trading between Leith and the Low Countries. His two vessels were merchantmen. In those days the difference between a trading ship and a fighting ship was a matter of how many guns you put aboard, and Wood put aboard a good many.
James III hired him to protect Scottish shipping, and in 1481 he beat off an English squadron attacking Dumbarton. His reward was the estate of Largo, on the north shore of the Forth in Fife, and later a knighthood. He served James IV just as faithfully and remained the crown’s most trusted sea captain to the end of his career.
At Largo he built a fortified house. One round tower of it is still standing. Local tradition adds a detail that is too good to check. In old age, it is said, Sir Andrew had a canal dug from his house to the parish church, so that every Sunday he could be rowed to worship in his own barge by members of his old crew.
His family took as their crest a ship under sail, and as their motto Tutus in undis, safe on the waves. The Woods of Largo are recognised by the Lord Lyon as chiefs of the name. Other families of Woods held land across Angus, the Mearns and the north-east, and the surname is now one of the commonest in the English-speaking world. Most people who carry it have no idea there is a Scottish clan attached, let alone an admiral.
A tartan with a birth certificate
Here the story takes a turn that some people find disappointing, and should not.
There is no ancient Wood tartan. For the whole of the period when clan tartans were being collected and named, the Woods, like most Lowland families, did not have one. The sett worn today was started in the early 2000s by a man named Leslie Wood, designed by the tartan scholar Keith Lumsden, and recorded in 2005. The notes filed with the tartan registers say that it “incorporates the colours of the Duke of Fife and Angus district tartans,” the two parts of Scotland with which the family is historically linked. The chief approved it and the newly formed Clan Wood Society adopted it. A dress version followed in 2010. Designed in the twenty-first century, it looks as natural in a scotch plaid flannel shirt as in a kilt.
It is a handsome piece of design. Broad grounds of green and blue meet across a group of five fine red stripes, which the register calls the tartan’s characteristic feature. The whole is framed in black, with a single line of gold on one side and one of off-white on the other. From a distance it is a dark, cool cloth. Close up, the red gives it a pulse.
People sometimes feel cheated to learn their family tartan is twenty years old and not five hundred. The truth is that hardly any clan tartan can be shown to be older than about 1800, and a great many were drawn up by Victorian weavers and given an ancient pedigree afterwards. The Wood tartan has something most of those lack: a plain, honest account of who designed it, why those colours were chosen, and who gave it authority. Specialist retailers now list it beside the old names, made to order as kilts, skirts, scarves and ties or sold by the yard.
Forty-six, in Michigan
Dan Wood teaches shop at a high school outside Grand Rapids. He is about to turn forty-six. He has always assumed his surname was the plainest in America, a name for people who once lived near some trees, and has never given it a second thought.
His wife Karen is the one who does genealogy. Over the winter she followed his line back through Ohio and Pennsylvania to a ship’s list of 1774 and a farm in Angus, and then, because she is thorough, she went looking for whatever there was to know about Scottish Woods. She found the admiral. She found the sea fight, and read Pitscottie’s account aloud at the dinner table while the kids rolled their eyes and Dan, to his own surprise, put down his fork. Then she found the tartan.
A kilt was never going to happen. Dan is not a kilt person. But Dan has worn a plaid flannel shirt nearly every day from October to April for thirty years, and Karen had an idea.
She knew just enough about the history to enjoy it. The word plaid is Gaelic. In Scotland a plaide was a blanket, and then the great length of tartan cloth a Highlander wore belted round him. Scots emigrants and Scottish cloth crossed the Atlantic together, and in America the word came to mean the pattern. By the nineteenth century American mills were selling what they called Scotch plaids by the mile. Flannel was a different thing, a soft brushed cloth, probably Welsh in origin. Put a Scottish pattern on it and you had the shirt that logged the north woods and later dressed half the rock bands of Seattle.
What she had not known was the difference between printed and woven. Most cheap plaid shirts are plain cloth with a check stamped on the surface. It fades, and the inside of the cuff is blank. Real tartan is woven from yarns dyed beforehand, so the colour goes clean through and both faces match. And an ordinary shirt company could never sell her Dan’s own family pattern, because it would not have it. A Highland outfitter would. She found one offering scotch plaid flannel and other men’s tartan shirts in real woven cloth, in the named clan setts it already wove for kilts, cut to the customer’s own chest and sleeve. Long sleeve, button front. She measured one of his old shirts while he was at work.
It came a week before his birthday. Dark green and blue, with five thin red lines running through it.
He wore it the first day open over a grey T-shirt with jeans, the way he wears all of them. Karen noticed that it sat better across his shoulders than his others did, and that the lines of the pattern ran straight. She told him two rules she had read: never wear it with anything else patterned, and wash it cool and hang it up, because a hot dryer is what kills brushed cotton. He said that was one rule more than he usually followed.
On Monday a kid in third period asked him what kind of plaid that was.
“It’s not plaid,” said Dan, who had been waiting all weekend for somebody to ask. “It’s a tartan. It’s mine. You want to hear about a guy who took on three warships with two cargo boats?”
Safe on the waves
Sir Andrew Wood never saw this pattern and nobody pretends he did. What it gives the people who carry his name is a way to say where they come from, in colours borrowed from the country where the family lived, with the blessing of the present chief. That is all any tartan has ever really been, however old it claims to be.
The old captain was a practical man who turned trading ships into warships because that was what the day required. He would probably have approved of a tartan that spends most of its life as a working shirt. It gets worn, it is comfortable, and every so often it gives someone in Michigan an excuse to tell a very good story.
