St Kilda Kilts & Scottish Gifts

A dragon breathing fire. It’s rare to see a dragon in Scottish heraldry and this is something of a puzzler. The original recorded crest of the Lords Crichton was a goat’s head or a parrot’s head (Willam Rae MacDonald, Scottish Armorial Seals, 1904, 62).

The dragon seems to be introduced by the Viscounts Frendraught, who descend from the 3^rd Lord Crichton. Their title was created in 1642. The crest in its current form is recorded in Nisbet's System of Heraldry of the 1720s: he recorded the viscounts using a 'natural' coloured dragon, while the Crichton Earls of Dumfries used a green dragon.

A best guess for the origin of this little flamer on their crest, might relate to an origin story of the Crichtons that seems to have emerged about the time the Frendraughts became viscounts in the mid-Seventeenth century. A story was recorded by Martine of Clermont (also called George Martine the elder, born 1635, died 1712) which said that the progenitor of the Crichtons came from Hungary. Five names are said to have escorted Agatha (mother of St Margaret) and her children from Hungary to Scotland, these being, Crichton, Maule, Borthwick, Giffard and Fortheringham. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many families had these sorts of early origins tacked onto their genealogies: usually they had no historical value, but were strained attempts of writers at the time to make sense of garbled family legends.  

So this dragon may represent this (fictitious) Hungarian origin, as the main order of chivalry in medieval Hungary was the Order of the Dragon. In support of this theory, the crest of the Maules is also a dragon.

Miles Kerr-Peterson 4 July 2023