Clan (Gael. clann, Manx cloan, meaning 'children,' i.e. descendants of a common ancestor). This word became incorporated with the English language at least as early as the 17th century, to mean a body of men confederated together by common ancestry or any other tie, and in this sense it is used both by Milton and Dryden. It came to be applied almost exclusively to the several communities of the Scottish Highlanders, as divided from each other topographically and by distinctive surnames. The word has sometimes been applied to those great Irish septs which at one time were a sort of separate states; but these, with their characteristic forms of internal government, were completely broken down by the power of the English predominance, before the word came into familiar use in the English language. In Scotland it was used in the 16th century to designate the freebooters of the Border as well as the Celtic tribes of the Highlands; and there were two characteristics common to both—the predatory habits, and their distribution into communities. The assumption of a common surname was general, but by no means universal. Men of the most various origin were in the habit of enlisting under chiefs as men now enlist in a regiment. Very often they took the chief's name, but very often they did not. It was essentially a military organisation for defensive and predatory purposes; and the adoption of a common name became a mere survival which kept up the idea and theory of patriarchal times long after the old tribal system had in all its essentials disappeared. In the Act of the Scottish parliament of 1587, for instance, which requires landlords to find security for the conduct of their tenants, it is provided that those 'who have their lands lying in far highlands or borders, they making residence themselves in the inlands, and their tenants and inhabitants of their lands being of clans, or dependars on chieftains or the captains of the clans, whom the landlords are nowadays able to command, but only get their mails (or rents) of them, and no other service or obedience, shall nowadays be subject to this act but in manner following.' Then follow provisions for enforcing the law directly on the chieftains or captains of those clans residing in territories where the owner of the soil—generally the merely nominal owner, in terms of some useless charter—had no control. It was always the policy of the old law of Scotland to require all the Highland clans to have some respectable representative—a man of rank and substance, if possible—who should be security at court for their good conduct. Clans that could find no security were called 'broken clans,' and their members were outlaws, who might be hunted down like wild beasts. The Macgregors were a celebrated broken clan, whom the law pursued for centuries with savage ingenuity. Among other inflictions their name was proscribed, and such members of the clan as endeavoured to live by peaceful industry in the Lowlands adopted derivations from it; hence we have the names of Gregor, Gregory, and Gregorson or Grierson.
The clans are never treated in the old Scots acts with any respect, or otherwise than as nests of thieves and cut-throats. The following passage in the Act of 1581 (chap. 112), which virtually authorises any Lowlander, injured by any member of a clan, to take vengeance against all or any of his clansmen, contains a picturesque and striking account by men who knew and had suffered from the system of the Highland clans in the 16th century. 'The saids clans of thieves for the most part are companies of wicked men, coupled in wickedness by occasion of their surnames or near dwellings together, or through keeping society in theft or receipt of theft, not subjected to the ordinary course of justice, nor to any one landlord that will make them answerable to the laws, but commonly dwelling on sundry men's lands against the good-will of their landlords, wherethrough true men oppressed by them can have no remedy at the hands of their masters, but for their defence are oftentimes constrained to seek redress of their skaitths of the hail clan, or such of them as they happen to apprehend. Likewise the hail clan commonly bears feud for the hurt received by any member thereof, whether by execution of laws, or order of justice, or otherwise.' The Highland clans are often spoken of as a feudal institution, and it is undoubtedly true that 'broken men' were settled upon lands in possession of the chiefs on conditions of military service, just as under the more perfected system of Norman feudalism. The men receiving admission into 'rooms,' or small barns, were in the habit of binding themselves to such service by what was called 'Bonds of Manrent,' under which they engaged to follow their chief in all his feuds and quarrels. But, on the other hand, chieftainship might become, and did often become, dissociated from the legal ownership of land, and in such cases the people of the clan were apt to follow their chief, against the will of their landlords. This was the survival of a far more remote system which constituted the great danger and great corruption of the clans. It dissociated the military power of chieftainship from the responsibilities of property, and from subordination to settled law. This was the evil struck at and denounced by the parliament of Scotland in repeated statutes. In general the great landowners were also great chiefs, and the two powers then worked in harmony, and on the whole in the interests of civilisation under very rude conditions of society. But the severance arose not unfrequently from the more definite laws and rules applicable to the legal descent of landed property. Thus it came about, as the acts above quoted explain, that the head of a clan and the owner, according to feudal law, of the estates occupied by it, were two different persons. Clans did not acknowledge the purely feudal hereditary principle, and occasionally would recognise the chiefship in a brother or an uncle, in preference to the son of a deceased chief. See TRIBE.