John Telfer Dunbar, in his seminal work History of Highland Dress, referred to it as "probably the most controversial costume book ever written".
The 1842 edition of the Vestiarium had its beginnings in the late 1820s, when the Sobieski Stuart brothers, then residents of Moray, Scotland, produced a copy of a document containing tartan patterns and showed it to their host, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder.
As explained in the Preface to the 1842 edition (which is extensively excerpted in Dunbar's History of Highland Dress), the copy which Sir Thomas saw, now known as the Cromarty MS, which bore the date 1721 on the first page and with the title Liber Vestiarium Scotia, was said by its possessors to have been obtained from a certain John Ross of Cromarty, and was said also by them to be an inferior copy of an earlier manuscript.
In this letter, Lauder highly commended the book, stating that several clan chiefs, such as Cluny MacPherson and McLeod, had derived their "true and authentic" tartans therefrom.
Lauder described the manuscript in detail, stating that he had obtained drawings, in colour, of all of the tartans contained therein (about 66 in number) and sent some of these to Sir Walter Scott himself.
In his reply of 5 June 1829 Scott expressed scepticism over the claims of both the brothers Sobieski and the manuscript itself, at the same time requesting that a copy of the MS be sent for investigation by competent authorities in antiquities.
In the listing below, the clan name (with original spelling as it appeared in the VS) is followed by the Scottish Tartans Society number (TS#) and the (modern) thread count.
The Quarterly Review article was occasioned by the appearance of a book by John Sobieski and Charles Edward Stuart entitled The Tales of the Century.
These stories, although presented in fictional terms, lay out the authors' claims to be direct descendants of Prince Charles Edward, the Young Pretender.
Macadam reported that the "document [bore] evidence of having been treated with chemical agents in order to give the writing a more aged appearance than it is entitled to".
This 1721 copy was also presented for examination to a Mr Robert Irvine, the director of a chemical firm who reported that it was "impossible to arrive at any accurate conclusion pointing to the age of the writing".