Joining A Clan?

[gilmore]

It's 1620. Thomas Hawley, from northern Northumblerland is running away from the law, seeing as He has been accused of stealing from the local abbey. Whether he actually did steal anything or not, is irrelevant...he runs north and east, because if he doesn't, someone is going either kill him or cut off his hands. He winds up working a coastal fishing boat and skips off the boat when it anchors in the Firth of Tay. Three weeks later he's found himself a comely lass in a family that owes allegiance to the Lindsays.

He settles down and quits his wandering ways, marries the lass and swears allegiance to the Lindsay Laird.

He's a Lindsay: He's English, he has no genetic connections to the Lindsays, and his name is Hawley. But now, he's a Lindsay, his children are Lindsays, etc.

Now, what's the modern equivalent of that?

There isn't one.

One might as well ask how does one become a citizen of the Confederate States of America, or how does one aquire a title of nobility from a republican country that was once a monarchy.

The above hypothetical question puts the horse before the cart. Women at the time were more often married off by their families and in their fathers' or other relatives' interests, rather than their own. The fugitive Englishman would more likely be allowed to "join" a clan only if he had shown that he had some useful talent or trade, or was financially an asset and not likely become merely another useless mouth to feed. I would guess that it would not be at all unusual for him to be fleeced or otherwise taken advantage of in order to live in clan lands and be given its protection. Only then, perhaps, would he be married off to a clansman's daughter, willingly or with some degree of coercion.

Some may find it interesting and romantic to appropriate the accoutrements of former times, but from time to time reality raises its 21st century head. The clans haven't existed for going on 300 years, and were in their heyday centuries before that. There are reasons for that.

I very much doubt that most modern people, especially Americans, would like living in the clan system at all. Where you lived, how much income you had, whether you fought to the death against some one whom you didn't care about one way or the other, were all determined by one person, the chief. And how happy your life was depended on getting along with your relatives, who surrounded you from cradle to grave. Imagine the most cantakerous, mean-spirited people you are related to. Imagine living next door to them, or in the same house, and interacting with them every day and at every meal, not just at the odd wedding, funeral, Christmas or birthday every few years and at your own choosing. Imagine being trapped in that life with no way out except dying. If you left, you would be at the mercy of anyone who wanted to commit any sort of violence, theft or rape against you.

Now imagine your chief being given a title by the British crown, speaking a language not your own, holding the clan lands in fee from the crown rather than as head of the collective ownership of the extended family as had been the case for centuries, and then evicting most of his relatives in order to raise sheep and amass a fortune for himself.

BTW a laird was/is not at all necessarily a chief, and vice versa. "Laird" is what were called those who held their lands from the crown (usually. Sometimes they held them from great nobles.) They were and are more properly called "feudal barons," and are not at all to be confused with barons who are nobles in the peerage of Scotland, a different thing altogether. In other words, they were Scots landlords. It was not at all unusual for clan chiefs to also be or become lairds, being enfeoffed of land by the crown. But then, that is a different system altogether, the feudal system, as opposed to the older clan system. Neither have very much relevance at all to the day to day lives of modern Scots or other descendants of medieval and earlier Scots.