Claes noun clothes
‘“Nae doot ye’ll thieve the winding claes from my corpse to make cloots for your snotty-nosed bairns …”’ (A Breath of Snow and Ashes)
Claes, meaning clothes, is a common word in present-day Scots. It is thought to have emerged in Scots during the fifteenth century. Early occurrences include a cheerful chicken announcing she will put on her ‘haly dayis clais’ (in Robert Henryson’s poem The Cock and the Fox, dated to around 1500) and an unfortunate ‘Ionet Lesly’ (Janet Leslie), convicted in Elgin in 1624 for ‘wasching clais [at] the tyme of preitching’. A Dundee citation from 1990 offers not only a slightly different spelling but also a piece of social commentary: ‘“… Ye ken the type - probly bides in Brochty Ferry an’ behs her claze in Markies.” Ina shook her head.’
Claes derives from the plural of Old English clāþ, i.e. clāþas, but - in linguistic parlance - it exemplifies a contraction. Such contracted forms are common in many varieties of English as well as in Scots. Claes also occurs in Tyneside for instance, and close is frequent in non-standard dialects further to the south. Contracted forms are also found in other languages related to Scots and English, such as varieties of Frisian spoken in parts of the Netherlands, with klaed (singular) beside klean (plural) in the west; klêd (singular)/klêr (plural) in the east, and klâid (singular)/klûe (plural) in the north.
In some ways, therefore, claes is not an especially distinctive Scots word. However, there are some remarkable compound forms which don’t seem to be recorded elsewhere (though that is of course no absolute guarantee!). Favourites include claes-beetle ‘a mallet for beating clothes in washing’ (cited from a late nineteenth-century collection of Galloway sayings). And claes-cairryin ‘a visiting of the bride’s house on the night before her wedding, when her clothes were taken to her new home’ (apparently still a custom in Orkney in the 1970s). There is also claeser ‘the trunk in a bothy in which a farm-servant kept his clothes’.
Claes dykes is ‘a clothes horse’ and a claes-hoister/-stenter is ‘a clothes-prop, wooden pole used for raising the clothes-line’, as in this late nineteenth-century citation from Arbroath: ‘Marget brocht up her claes-hoister frae the green’. Finally, a dead (deid)-claes is a ‘shroud’ (recorded in Fife as late as 1940).