St Kilda Kilts & Scottish Gifts

We can trace a boar’s head being associated with the Chisolm/Chisholms back to at least 1296, when Richard de Chesehelme of Roxburghshire used a boar’s head as the device on his seal. This would later form the centrepiece for the chief’s coat of arms, the shield. To this was added the crest, which also included a boar’s head, this time being impaled on a dagger.

The crest at least is a reference to the family legend, that two Chisholm brothers saved the life of one of the kings of Scots when he was attacked by a wild boar (which king is unrecorded). Whether this legend informed the shield and then elaborated with the crest, or was made up later to explain the shield is unclear. Many other families claimed to have saved various kings from wild boars, bulls or stags, and most have a whiff of retrospective explanations to explain odd beasts appearing on heraldry.

Apparently, in thanks for saving the king’s life, the Chisholms were rewarded with lands in Inverness-shire. This is how an initially Lowland family became Highlanders.

Chisholm Highland lands in blue, with their original Roxburghshire home marked in red. 

Another legend relates how the two brothers killed a ferocious boar that was terrorising the folk of Strathglass. That two brothers keep appearing in these stories is perhaps because the supporters of the chief’s coat of arms, which are two wild men, which was a very popular symbol in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The wildmen may have been chosen to depict the two brothers, or, again, a story may have been devised to explain the presence of a relatively random piece of heraldic fashion – unfortunately which came first is now impossible to know.

Perhaps most likely is that an early Chisholm chose to represent himself as a boar, as wild and ferocious in battle. A major cluster of boar-head heraldry could be found in Lothian and Berwickshire, especially with the Swintons, Gordons and Nesbitts, so this seems to have been the badge of a network of knightly landowners. Over the centuries, as the Chisholms moved away from Lothian and its old networks, their identity morphed and legends developed to explain enigmatic symbols with forgotten meanings, and so the story became how the Chisholms were vanquishers of the ferocious. The motto reinforces the message of chivalric bravery: ‘Feros Ferio’, I slay/kill the savage/barbarous.  

Read more on the Chisolms here. 

Our older Carrick range version of the Chisholm Crest.

MKP 23 September 2021