The wealth of information that can be found in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language never ceases to amaze. The above is defined as follows: “A jocular nickname for the Royal Scots Regiment said to have been given circa 1635 during the Thirty Years’ War by French troops to Hepburn’s Regiment, the ancestor of the Royal Scots”.

In his Memoirs of Sir John Hepburn (1851), James Grant described the French connection: “The Régiment de Picardie treated these claims to antiquity with ridicule, as being somewhat overstrained, and gave Hepburn’s corps the sobriquet of Pontius Pilate’s Guard, which the Royal Scots retain at the present day”. Later, in Lowland Scots Regiments (1918), Sir Herbert Maxwell elaborated on this: “The French officers … gave them in derision the nickname of ‘Pontius Pilate’s Bodyguard’, a nickname which sticks to the Royal Scots to this day. It was in one of these disputes that an officer of Hepburn’s made the famous retort that the Picardy regiment must be mistaken, for had the Scots really been Pontius Pilate’s Guard and done duty at the sepulchre, the Holy Body had never left it”.

Despite the slimming down and amalgamation of Scottish regiments, this nickname for the Royal Scots is still remembered, as shown in an article from the Sunday Post (2022): “The Royal Scots were the oldest regiment in the British Army, tracing their history back to 1633, prompting the nickname Pontius Pilate’s Bodyguard while the King’s Own Scottish Borderers were similarly historic - the regiment was formed in 1689”.

Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language. Visit DSL Online at https://dsl.ac.uk.