RK Origins - Clans

It is also of importance that, in the initial flush of Scotland's founding, the importance of traditional scottish clans to the new nation was also high in people's minds. Arriving in Scotland, afterall, was usually accompanied by visions of cattleraids, braveheart, tartan, bagpipes, claymores and highland clans. The clans were as much a social organising aspect of early scotland as were the official ingame functions of town and county governments.

Most of the the original higher level colonisits were also founding members of the original clans, most of the most active newborns either joined these clans or started their own (at the time I recounted some of the experience of the formation of Clan MacTavish in this blog). Of the original twelve clans, three were formed by newborns to Scotland. It is with some pride that I claim having founded Clan MacTavish in this period, and that the other two indigenous clans (Wallace and Fraser) were formed in my home town of Whithorn also.

The clans became the obvious vehicle for developing a Scottish style of governance and institutions. It was from the clans that the committees which eventually put forth the National Consitution were drawn. It was from clan networks that most of the orginal RSA recruits were drawn.

Thus, in the beginning days, clans were involved in the writing of the laws and the maintenance of order, as well as providing the networks from which recruitment to civil and military organisations occurred. This was not just a product of the fact that many of the more experienced players were involved in clans, but also grew from a sense among the indigenous inhabitants that this was the way things were to be done in the new nation of Scotland.