Clan Carmichael

History

Carmichael takes its name from the family's home ground in upper Clydesdale, on the border of Lanarkshire. The name is generally read as a fusion of an old British word for a fort with the personal name Michael, pointing to a fortified place named for the saint rather than to any single founder. Local tradition also remembers a church dedicated to St Michael nearby, which may well be where the place name began.

It was as followers of the Douglases that Carmichael first enters written record: by the 1380s the family held its lands under Douglas lordship, on ground Sir James Douglas had received from Robert the Bruce in 1321 as part of a much larger grant across the district. A vassal line took the Carmichael name as its own within a couple of generations of that grant, with Sir John Carmichael usually named as its founder. Bound to Douglas fortunes from the start, Carmichael fighting men marched with the Douglas host to Otterburn in 1388, a battle the Scots won even though their commander fell in it.

It is a later generation, though, that gave the family the story it still tells. Family tradition holds that Sir John Carmichael unseated Thomas, Duke of Clarence, in a mounted clash at the 1421 Battle of Baugé, where a combined Franco-Scottish force faced the English during the Hundred Years' War, and that his lance snapped in the impact. However much of that survives intact, it is this charge that the family credits for both its crest, a mailed hand gripping a broken spear, and its motto, Tout Jour Prest, 'always ready'.

Carmichael became a barony in its own right in the following decades, and a castle is said to have gone up at the family seat around 1414. From that base, cadet branches spread across the district, giving rise to Carmichaels of Eastend, Meadowflat, Skirling, Mauldslie and Westraw. Separately, families bearing the Gaelic form of the name, rendered as MacGillemichael or MacMichael, had long been settled in Argyll and Galloway; many anglicised to Carmichael too, though their roots lie with the Stewarts of Appin rather than the Lowland barons.

The Carmichaels backed the crown during the civil wars of the seventeenth century, and it cost them: Cromwell's forces destroyed the castle in 1650, and the family withdrew to Westraw for a time. A new house, Carmichael House, rose near the old site in the following century, standing until its roof was removed in the 1950s to avoid tax duties, after which it was abandoned; the roofless shell still stands on the estate today, now a working farm and forestry business rather than a great house.

The chiefship has continued in an unbroken line to the present. The Court of the Lord Lyon confirmed Richard Carmichael of Carmichael as 30th Chief of the Name and Arms in 1981, and it was under his chiefship that the clan tartan was formally recorded in 1984, decades after a sample of the same sett had first been logged with the Highland Society in 1907. Richard Carmichael died in 2025, and leadership is understood to have passed within the family to his son as 31st of the line, according to the clan's own statements; that succession is not independently confirmed here.