Philabeg noun the kilt
‘“And here’s one from the ’45 … the famous battle of Prestonpans … In faith, quo Johnnie, I got sic flegs, Wi’ their claymores an’ philabegs, Gin I face them again, de’il brak my legs …”’ (Drums in Autumn)
Philabeg ‘kilt’ is a borrowing into Scots from Gaelic feileadh-beag (little pleat), distinct from the feileadh-mor (big pleat), used to refer to the traditional large garment. There are numerous spellings of the word, ranging from fillebeg to pheliebeg.
Our earliest records date from 1745 - a significant date in Scottish history. The following year, in the backwash of the battle of Culloden, a notorious law was promulgated that both recognised the philibeg’s cultural significance and also aimed to suppress it: ‘No Man or Boy within that part of Great Britain called Scotland … shall on any Pretence whatsoever wear or put on the Clothes commonly called the Highland Clothes: the Plaid, Philebeg or little Kilt, Trowse, Shoulder Belts’. However, this command was (it seems) widely ignored. The antiquarian and editor Thomas Percy, on a tour of the Highlands in 1773, described in a letter to his wife a visit to ‘Glen-Crow’, during which he crossed a pass whose summit was marked by: ‘an Inscription ingraven on a Rock near the Road. REST AND BE THANKFUL 1748. MADE BY THE XXIII REGIMENT … From this summit it is a most romantic View down another part of the Vale, full of little highland farms; where we saw a highlander, mowing his hay, with a Scythe fixed to a long straight handle, like the Shaft of a Spear: he was in a plaid waistcoat & philibegs, without breeches, shirt or stockings ...’. Robert Burns, in the Jolly Beggars (1786), referred to John Highlandman: ‘With his philibeg an’ tartan plaid’.
The traveller Thomas Pennant (1726-1798) in 1771 described the feil beg or kelt, calling it ‘a modern substitute for the lower part of the plaid’. The origins of the garment have been much debated. However, Dictionaries of the Scots Language tells us this in the entry for kilt: ‘It appears to have originated sometime in the late 17th century or in the earlier part of the 18th century from cutting the belted plaid across at the waist so as to make a separate garment … It is incorrect Scots usage to use the plural kilts as a singular’.