The name Tailyour is Scotland's own spelling of what English records write as Taylor — but the distinction matters more than it might appear. Where Taylor is one of the most common surnames in the English-speaking world, derived from the widespread medieval trade of cloth-cutting and garment-making and distributed across Britain without particular regional concentration, Tailyour is a specifically Scottish form, its archaic spelling marking a family that took the same occupational origin and gave it a distinctly Scottish identity. The Tailyours of Borrowfield near Montrose in Angus — historically Forfarshire — were the principal armigerous family of this name in Scotland, an established landowning line documented in the records of the northeast across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and carrying the motto In cruce salus — Salvation in the cross. The Tailyour spelling, with its mediaeval retention of the y and the u, was one of the characteristic orthographic habits of Scots in the period before English spelling conventions standardised the form, and it distinguishes the specifically Scottish branch from the much larger English and Irish Taylor population.
What Are the Origins of the Tailyour Name?
The Tailyour surname belongs to the large class of occupational surnames — names derived from a trade or craft rather than from a place or a personal ancestor. The trade of the tailor, the craftsman who cut and sewed cloth into garments, was one of the most economically essential in the medieval period, when ready-made clothing did not exist and every garment worn by every person in every social class required the services of someone who could work with fabric and thread. The prevalence of the trade meant that Taylor and its variants became extremely common surnames across the whole of the British Isles, and the challenge for Scottish genealogists researching the Tailyour name is precisely to distinguish the specifically Scottish armigerous line of Borrowfield from the much larger mass of Scottish Taylors and Tailyours who bore the name simply as descendants of craftsmen. The Tailyour of Borrowfield family achieved armigerous status — the right to bear heraldic arms, registered with the Lord Lyon King of Arms — which distinguished them as a recognised Scottish landed family above the rank of mere surname-bearers, and it is this formal recognition that gives the Tailyour name its place in the Scottish genealogical tradition as something more than a common occupational surname. The northeast of Scotland in which the Borrowfield family established themselves was a region with its own distinct culture, shaped by its Pictish heritage, its North Sea trading connections, and the particular tradition of independent-minded scholarship and commercial enterprise that characterised Aberdeenshire and the surrounding counties across the medieval and early modern periods.
What Lands Were Associated with the Tailyour Family?
The Tailyours of Borrowfield held their estate in the parish of Montrose in Angus. Kirktonhill, a separate Tailyour property, lay in the parish of Marykirk in Kincardineshire — the Mearns, a county of considerable agricultural richness lying between the River North Esk in the south and the River Dee in the north, its fertile coastal plain giving way to the upland country of the Grampian foothills to the west. Borrowfield, the family's estate, was a landholding of the kind that characterised the Angus minor gentry — productive farmland in a county that was among the most agriculturally progressive in Scotland by the eighteenth century, when the improving movement transformed the northeast's farming landscape with a speed and thoroughness that made it a model for agricultural reformers across the country. The Mearns landscape associated with the family's Kirktonhill property is best known in the literary record through Lewis Grassic Gibbon's trilogy A Scots Quair, whose fictional Kinraddie is rooted in precisely the kind of Mearns farming community in which the Tailyour family played their part across the preceding centuries. The broader northeast world of Kincardineshire landed families in which the Tailyours established themselves included distinguished neighbours of considerably greater regional prominence, among them the ancient house of Clan Carnegie, whose Kinnaird Castle and long Angus and Kincardineshire presence made them one of the most significant landed families in the region across the same centuries in which the Tailyours held their Borrowfield estate.
What Was the Clan Motto and What Did It Mean?
The motto of the Tailyour of Borrowfield family is In cruce salus — Salvation in the cross. The cross also appears in the family’s crest: a hand holding a passion cross. Those researching specific armorial details for the Tailyour family should consult the Lord Lyon King of Arms for the authoritative heraldic record.
What Was the Tailyour Family's Place in the Wider Scottish Tradition?
The Tailyour family's significance in the broader Scottish record is modest in scale but genuine in kind. They represent a type of Scottish family that the dramatic narratives of clan warfare and royal intrigue consistently underrepresent: the minor armigerous gentry of the northeast, families of sufficient standing to bear arms and hold land but without the regional dominance of the great houses, their contribution to Scottish life made through the patient management of productive estates, through participation in the institutions of the reformed kirk, and through the accumulation across generations of the kind of local reputation that, while it rarely achieves national visibility, sustains the fabric of provincial society. The northeast of Scotland produced an unusual concentration of such families — the particular combination of agricultural productivity, accessible education through the two Aberdeen universities, and the strong tradition of independent-minded religious and civic life that characterised the region created conditions in which minor gentry families could sustain themselves across many generations without the patronage of great magnates or the drama of national events. The Tailyour of Borrowfield were participants in that regional tradition, and their story illuminates it in ways that the histories of the great families cannot. The northeast community in which they operated was also shaped by families of considerably greater territorial weight, among them Clan Keith, the hereditary Earls Marischal of Scotland, whose Dunnottar Castle and commanding influence over the northeast's political and religious life across the medieval and early modern centuries set the terms within which every family in the region, including the Tailyours, found their position.
How Did the Tailyour Name Relate to the Broader Taylor Surname?
The relationship between Tailyour and Taylor in the Scottish record requires careful attention in genealogical research. The vast majority of Scots who bore the Taylor name across the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries were not connected to the Borrowfield armigerous line but were simply descendants of craftsmen who had adopted the trade name as a hereditary surname through the normal processes of medieval surname formation. The Tailyour spelling is a useful marker of the specifically Scottish armigerous tradition, but it was not consistently used even within that tradition, and the Taylor spelling appears frequently in the records of families with genuine Tailyour of Borrowfield connections as orthographic conventions shifted toward the English standard across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Genealogical research into the Tailyour name therefore requires searching under both spellings across all relevant periods, and the parish records of Kincardineshire and Angus held at the National Records of Scotland provide the most productive documentary starting point for those whose research points toward the Mearns connection.
How Did the Tailyour Name Spread Through the Scottish Diaspora?
The Taylor surname in its various forms — including the specifically Scottish Tailyour — was carried to North America, Australia, and New Zealand through the emigration waves of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where it merged into the much larger English Taylor population to a degree that makes distinguishing the Scottish from the English strands particularly challenging without documented genealogical evidence. For those whose research establishes a Kincardineshire or northeast Scottish origin for their Taylor or Tailyour ancestry, the connection to the Mearns farming tradition and to the specific culture of the northeast is worth pursuing, not least because the relative smallness of Kincardineshire means that the parish records are a manageable body of material to work through systematically.
How Is the Tailyour Name Remembered Today?
The Tailyour legacy endures most directly in the heraldic record of the Lord Lyon — the arms of Tailyour of Borrowfield preserved in the registers as documentation of a northeast Scottish family's armigerous status across the centuries of their Angus and Kincardineshire tenure. The motto In cruce salus — Salvation in the cross — and the passion cross in the crest preserve the family’s religious heraldic symbolism.
Browse our Tailyour Scottish family gifts to explore the available collection.