The DARK and MIDDLE Ages

 

 

3948 BC

SCOTS EXPELLED FROM PARADISE

According to Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty, the year 3948 BC was the date that God created ‘of red earth’ Urquhart’s own ancestor Adam, by whom he claimed to be descended 143rd ‘by line’, and 153rd ‘by succession’. Urquhart published his conclusions in 1652 in his Panto-chronachanon, subtitled A Peculiar Promptuary of Time. He initially follows the Old Testament genealogies (Enoch, Methuselah, Noah, Japhet, etc.), but by the late 3rd millennium BC wanders off into mythologies of his own creation. The year 2139 BC, he states, was the date of birth of Esormon, sovereign prince of Achaia: ‘For his fortune in the wars, and affability in conversation, his subjects and familiars surnamed him OUROCHARTOS, that is to say, fortunate and well beloved. After which time, his posterity ever since hath acknowledged him the father of all that carry the name of URQUHART.’ Fortune in war and affability in conversation were qualities that Sir Thomas prized above all in himself: a dashing Cavalier, he fought for the Royalist side in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, and published a succession of mock-scholarly works in which he floated a range of improbable notions, unfeasible inventions and even a new universal language (see 1653).

circa who knows when? BC

THE ORIGINS OF THE SCOTS IN SCYTHIA (OR GREECE, OR EGYPT, OR SPAIN)

According to some of the medieval chroniclers, the Scots had their origins in Scythia, the area of steppes north of the Black Sea whose nomadic, pastoral inhabitants were described by the ancient Greeks. The supposed peregrinations of these proto-Scots is described in the Declaration of Arbroath (1320):

From the chronicles and books of the ancients we find that among other famous nations our own, the Scots, have been graced with widespread renown. They journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes, but nowhere could they be subdued by any race, however barbarous. Thence they came, twelve hundred years after the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, to their home in the west where they still live today.

The earliest version of the story appears to be an 11th-century Irish manuscript, which relates that the Gaels were descended from the Scythian prince Fénius Farsaid, one of the 72 princes who supposedly had a hand in the construction of the Tower of Babel. Fénius’s son Nél married an Egyptian princess called Scota (hence ‘Scotia’, ‘Scotland’, etc.), and they begot Goídel Glas (Latinised as Gathelus), who was credited with creating the Gaelic language when God ‘confounded the language of all the Earth’. In the version concocted by the Scottish chronicler John of Fordun in the 14th century, Goídel Glas becomes Gaythelos, a Greek prince who was exiled to Egypt, where he married the pharaoh’s daughter, Scota. They appear to have left Egypt for Spain at the time of the biblical plagues, and the subsequent death of the pharaoh and his army pursuing Moses and the Israelites across the Red Sea. Neither of these accounts is now generally accepted by historians.

AD 26

PONTIUS PILATE WAS A PERTHSHIRE LAD

Pontius Pilate became prefect of the Roman province of Judaea. There is a longstanding tradition that he was born in Fortingall in Perthshire, his father supposedly having been a Roman ambassador and his mother a local Menzies or a MacLaren. Whatever the truth of this, Fortingall has a more secure claim to fame in the form of the ancient Fortingall Yew, thought to be between 3,000 and 5,000 years old.

circa 380

CANNIBALISTIC CALEDONIANS

St Jerome, visiting Gaul, ‘learned that the Attacotti, the people of the country now called Scotland, when hunting in the woods, preferred the shepherd to his flocks, and chose only the most fleshy and delicate parts for eating’.

548

ST COLUMBA BURIES FELLOW SAINT ALIVE

Death of St Oran on Iona. Legend has it that as his companion St Columba tried to build a chapel on the island, every night the demons of the place demolished it. In order to propitiate the genus loci, St Oran agreed to be buried alive. After three days Columba ordered that his friend be dug up. To the horror of all present, Oran ‘declared that there was neither a God, a judgement nor a future state’. Such views being entirely unacceptable, Columba ordered that Oran be forthwith buried alive for a second time, this time on a permanent basis.

circa 561

WINNING BY A FINGER

The Irish missionaries St Moluag and St Mulhac eyed up the island of Lismore north of Oban with the idea of founding a monastery there. Legend recounts how the two rivals agreed to a rowing race across Loch Linnhe to the island, with the winner becoming the founder of the monastery. As his rival pulled ahead towards the end of the race, St Moluag resorted to a desperate measure: he cut off one of his own fingers and flung it to the shore, so winning the race. He went on to establish his monastery at the place called Kilmoluaig, meaning ‘Moluag’s church’.

583

THE SILENCE OF THE RAMS

Death of St Serf. Among his many miracles, the following is probably the most remarkable. The saint had a favourite ram, which would follow him wherever he went. But one day the ram was stolen. Suspicion fell upon a certain man, who was brought before the saint. The man flatly denied he had anything to do with the ram’s disappearance. But then a bleating was heard coming from the man’s stomach. The ram – which he had killed, cooked and devoured – thus confirmed the man’s guilt.

617

EXTERMINATIONS ON EIGG

St Donan, who had established a monastery on the island of Eigg, was burnt alive along with 150 of his monks by a band of wild warrior women under the command of a pagan Pictish queen. A 17th-century Irish chronicler gives an alternative account of St Donan’s demise:

And there came robbers of the sea on a certain time to the island when he was celebrating mass. He requested of them not to kill him until he should have the mass said, and they gave him this respite; and he was afterwards beheaded and fifty-two of his monks along with him.

Many years later, in 1577, the island witnessed another massacre, inflicted by a raiding party of MacLeods from Skye on the native MacDonalds. On a previous visit, a band of MacLeods, intent on ravishing the maidenhood of Eigg, had been castrated by the outraged MacDonalds; alternatively, they had been bound hand and foot and set adrift, but were rescued by their fellow clansmen. The MacLeods returned in force, obliging the MacDonalds to hide in a cave. The raiders discovered them, lit a fire at the entrance and wafted the smoke into the dark interior, where 200 of the fugitives were asphyxiated. Visiting the ‘Massacre Cave’ in 1814, Sir Walter Scott reported that he found ‘numerous specimens of mortality’. The remains remained unburied for some decades after his visit.

The vendetta was by no means at an end. The year after the massacre at the cave, a band of MacDonalds landed on Skye at Trumpan, herded the local MacLeods into a church, barred the door, and set it alight. Only one person escaped alive, a young girl, who fled to Dunvegan. A strong force of MacLeods went forth and slaughtered the invaders, lined up their bodies under a turf wall and toppled the wall over to bury them.

circa 650

THE SAINT WHO NEARLY WASN’T

Loth or Lleuddun, Chief of the Votadani and King of the Lothians, was furious when he discovered his daughter Teneu was pregnant. In his wrath he ordered that she be thrown down the cliffs on the south side of Traprain Law, former capital of the Votadani. As she fell, Teneu prayed for forgiveness, and came to earth unharmed. Loth, however, concluded from this that she was a witch, and had her cast into the sea near the Isle of May. Again she survived, this time by clinging onto the rock still known as Maiden Hair Rock. From here she was swept up the Firth of Forth, eventually coming ashore at Culross, where she gave birth to the boy who was to become St Kentigern (or Mungo), who built the first church in what is now Glasgow.

687

COFFIN USED TO WATER COWS

(20 March) Death of St Cuthbert. Many stories are told about the fate of his body after his death. One legend recounts how it was enclosed in a stone coffin at Melrose, from where it sailed down the Tweed until coming ashore at the mouth of the River Till (where St Cuthbert’s Chapel now stands). Cuthbert’s body was then taken on to Durham, but the stone coffin stayed by the chapel for some centuries. When a local farmer began to use the coffin to water his cattle, the saint’s angry spirit smashed it to pieces. (This last part of the story appears to have been confected by the Revd Lambe, a vicar of Norham.)

circa 720

EYELESS IN ORKNEY

On a visit to Papa Westray in Orkney, King Nechtan of the Picts was smitten by the beautiful eyes of a local girl, one Triduana or Trollhaena. She, however, did not reciprocate his feelings, and rather than giving him her body, she plucked out her eyes and gave him those instead. Triduana subsequently became abbess of a convent at Restalrig (now part of Edinburgh), and was later canonised as St Tredwell. A chapel dedicated to her still stands on Papa Westray, beside St Tredwell’s Loch, and was long a destination for those suffering from eye problems.

ONE SAINTLY HAND IS WORTH A HUNDRED CANDLES

Also around this time flourished St Fillan, a saint of Irish origin who was abbot at Pittenweem in Fife before retiring as a hermit to Glendochart in Perthshire. He was buried at Strathfillan. It was said that he was enabled to continue transcribing the Scriptures after dark owing to the miraculous light-emitting power of his left hand, thus saving his abbey a fortune in candles. So treasured was this arm of St Fillan that Robert the Bruce carried it into battle at Bannockburn, and to this relic he attributed his victory. As late as the 19th century, those suffering from mental illness were dipped in a pool at Strathfillan, and then tied up in a corner of the ruined chapel overnight. If their bonds had worked lose by the morning, then the saint had restored them to sanity.

809

THE LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME

Legend traces the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France to a treaty supposedly made this year between a Scots king called Achaius or Eochaid and the Emperor Charlemagne, by which the former agreed to help the latter in his fight against the Saxons. However, the first treaty between the two countries of which there is any evidence dates from 1295. Despite a number of vicissitudes, the spirit of amity between the two nations has persisted into the present century. In 2009, for example, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France addressed Prime Minister Gordon Brown with the following words:

You know, Gordon, I should not like you. You are Scottish, we have nothing in common and you are an economist. But somehow, Gordon, I love you. But not in a sexual way.

995

KING KILLED BY MURDEROUS STATUE

Finella, daughter of Cuncar, Mormaer of Angus, sought revenge on King Kenneth II, whom she held responsible for the death of her son. According to the 14th-century chronicler John of Fordun, she lured the king to a cottage in Fettercairn, where she showed him the statue of a boy, and urged him to touch the boy’s head. When he did so, the movement triggered a number of hidden crossbows, which fired their bolts into Kenneth’s body with fatal effect. Finella fled to the coast near St Cyrus, where she was cornered by Kenneth’s men in a steep valley with a waterfall. Rather than fall into their hands, she threw herself over the waterfall to her death. To this day, the place is known as ‘Den Finella’ (grid reference NO 765 6745).

1010

THREE BLOODY STROKES ON A COAT OF ARMS

According to legend, at the Battle of Barry in Angus an ancestor of the Keith family (later Earls Marischal) killed the Viking leader, Camus. To Keith’s anger, another Scottish warrior claimed that he had killed Camus. To resolve this, the king, Malcolm II, decreed that the two men should enter single combat. Keith was victorious, and before his death his opponent confessed to his lie. Malcolm then dipped his fingers in the dead man’s blood and drew three bloody strokes across Keith’s shield – a device born on the arms of the family to this day.

1098

TURNING KINTYRE INTO AN ISLAND

Magnus Barefoot, King of Norway, mounted an onslaught on the west coast of Scotland. Desperate for peace, King Edgar of Scotland agreed to renounce all Scottish claims to the islands west of the mainland – which were anyway already under Norwegian control. Magnus managed to extend his territory even further by having his ship dragged across the narrow isthmus at Tarbert, thus demonstrating (to his own satisfaction at least) that the peninsula of Kintyre, part of the mainland, was also an island.

circa 1117

PSALM-SINGING EARL HAS SKULL CLEFT

Death of Magnus Erlendsson, Earl of Orkney. He had failed to win popularity with his fellow Norsemen by refusing to fight during a raid on Anglesey, instead staying on board his ship singing psalms. Returning to Orkney, he ruled jointly with his cousin Haakon, but they later fell out. Magnus ended up the loser, and found himself Haakon’s prisoner. Haakon ordered his standard bearer, Ofeigr, to put Magnus to death, but Ofeigr refused. So Haakon, in a fury, told his cook to dispatch Magnus with an axe blow to the head. Before this unpleasantness, Magnus is said to have prayed for his executioner (whoever it should turn out to be). The piety of his life, the manner of his death, and the subsequent miracles attributed to him earned Magnus a sainthood. In 1919, in St Magnus’s Cathedral in Kirkwall, a cleft skull and some other bones were found within one of the pillars of the cathedral. These are generally believed to be genuine relics.

circa 1150

AN ARAB VIEW OF SCOTLAND: RAIN, MISTS AND DARKNESS

The Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi wrote that Scotland (or ‘Squtlandiyah’) ‘is uninhabited and has neither town nor village’. Formerly there had been three towns, he said, but civil war had resulted in the deaths of nearly all the inhabitants. To the west of Scotland lay the Sea of Darkness, from whence

there come continually mists and rain, and the sky is always overcast, particularly on the coast. The waters of this sea are covered with cloud and dark in colour. The waves are enormous, and the sea is deep. Darkness reigns continually, and navigation is difficult. The winds are violent and towards the west its limits are unknown.

1153

‘THORNI FUCKED, HELGI CARVED’

A party of Norsemen led by Earl Harald found themselves caught in a blizzard while making their way from Stromness to Firth, on Orkney Mainland. They took shelter by breaking in through the roof of Maes Howe, a chambered cairn that had been built some 4,000 years previously. The newcomers whiled away the time waiting for the weather to clear by scrawling runic graffiti on the walls. ‘These runes were carved by the man most skilled in runes in the western ocean,’ wrote one. ‘Ingigerth is the most beautiful of all women,’ wrote another, beside a drawing of a slavering dog. A third man simply wrote, ‘Thorni fucked, Helgi carved.’

1219

EVIL SPIRITS REJOICE AT BROKEN FASTS

Foundation of Deer Abbey in Buchan. John of Fordun, the 14th-century chronicler, tells us that the first abbot, Robert, was renowned for his piety. On one particular meat-free fast day, after eating his mandatory fish, Robert became immersed in holy contemplation, when ‘a figure of an Ethiopian, black as darkness, appeared to him, and then, with a loud laugh, vanished from his presence’. Robert suspected what was afoot, and summoned the cook before him. There was only one explanation, Robert told the cook. The man had served the fish not in butter, but in animal fat. Ashamed, the cook confessed that this had indeed been the case. ‘How must evil spirits rejoice,’ wrote Fordun, ‘when monks, in disobedience to the rules of their order, eat flesh on days when it is prohibited.’

1222

BISHOP ROASTED IN BUTTER

Abbot Adam of Melrose, Bishop of Caithness since 1214, had become increasingly unpopular with the locals for the rigour with which he exacted his tithes, even going so far as to excommunicate several of them for failing to pay their allotted portion. Things became intolerable when he doubled the duty on the ownership of cows, a tax that was payable in butter. The people took their grievances to the Earl of Caithness, who appears to have been as irritated with the plaintiffs as he was with the man they were complaining about. ‘The Devil take the bishop and his butter,’ the Earl exclaimed. ‘You may roast him if you please!’ The plaintiffs took this as an order, and an angry mob set off to the Bishop’s palace. The Bishop sent out a monk called Serlo to pacify them, but as soon as he appeared he was clubbed to the ground and then stamped to death. When the Bishop himself emerged to discuss an amicable settlement, the mob would have none on it. They seized the prelate, dragged him to his own kitchen, stoked up the fire, and there roasted him in a large quantity of the butter that he had gathered in tithes.

When news of this ‘horrid deed’ was brought to King Alexander II in Jedburgh, he immediately set out on the long journey north. When he arrived in Caithness, he ordered that the perpetrators should be hanged, and that those who were not hanged should have their hands and feet cut off. This proceeding was praised in a bull by Pope Clement IV.

1251

THE WEIGHT OF MAJESTY

The body of the sainted Queen Margaret, consort of Malcolm Canmore (‘big head’), was removed from its burial place in Dunfermline and placed in a lavish shrine. In his Historical Collections concerning the Scottish History preceding the death of King David I (1705), Sir James Dalrymple tells us what happened next:

While the monks were employed in this service, they approached the tomb of her husband Malcolm. The body [of the queen] became, on a sudden, so heavy, that they were obliged to set it down. Still, as more hands were employed in raising it, the body became heavier. The spectators stood amazed; and the humble monks imputed this phenomenon to their own unworthiness, when a bystander cried out: ‘The queen will not stir till equal honours are performed to her husband.’ This having been done, the body of the queen was removed with ease. A more awkward miracle occurs not in legendary history.

1271

THE COUNTESS GETS HER MAN

Marjorie, Countess of Carrick, learnt of the death of her first husband, Adam of Kilconquhar, in the Eighth Crusade. The young man who brought her these tidings was Robert de Brus, Lord of Annandale. According to legend, Marjorie was so captivated by the young man that she kept him prisoner in Turnberry Castle until he agreed to marry her. Among their nine children was the future Robert I of Scotland – Robert the Bruce.

1285

SKELETON DANCES AT FEAST

King Alexander III married his second wife, Yolande de Dreux, in Jedburgh Abbey. At the subsequent feast, in the words of Sir James Dalrymple, ‘a ghost, or something like a ghost, danced’. He continues:

Boece expressely says that it was a skeleton. A foolish pleasantry to frighten the court ladies, or a pious monastic fraud, to check the growth of promiscuous dancing, probably gave rise to this harlequin skeleton.

The apparition was remembered with a shudder when only a year later news spread that the king had met with a fatal accident, falling from his horse over a cliff while rushing to be reunited with his bride of one year.

1307

THE DOUGLAS LARDER

On Palm Sunday Sir James Douglas – aka the Black Douglas aka the Guid Schir James – recaptured his own Douglas Castle and beheaded the entire English garrison. Both heads and bodies were piled up on top of the castle’s food stores in the cellar, and then the whole thing set alight. Douglas did not have enough men to hold the castle, so he withdrew, but not before dropping salt and dead horses into the wells. The incident became known as ‘the Douglas Larder’.

1308

BURIED ALIVE?

Death of the philosopher John Duns Scotus, who was born in the Berwickshire town of Duns. It is possible that he was not in fact dead when he was buried, as, according to tradition, when his grave was later opened, he was found outside his coffin, his hands torn and bloody as if he had made some desperate effort to escape.

1313

CUNNING COWS

(19 February) The Black Douglas captured Roxburgh Castle from the English. Rather than risking a frontal assault, as the light faded he disguised his men as black cattle, and in this way they were able to creep close enough to the walls to put up their siege ladders without being detected.

1330

BOLD HEARTS AND BOILED CORPSES

After the death of Robert the Bruce in 1329, the Black Douglas set out to fulfil his promise to his king to take his heart on crusade to the Holy Land, in order to atone for Bruce’s murder of the Red Comyn in church in 1306. Douglas’s route took him to Spain, where he fought alongside Alfonso XI of Castile against the Moors of Granada. Finding himself surrounded and impossibly outnumbered, Douglas – at least according to legend – took the silver casket containing Bruce’s heart from around his neck and flung it into the enemy host. With that he hurled himself forward to death and glory – and thereafter the Douglas motto became ‘Doe or Die’. After the battle, the Moorish commander recovered his body and the casket, and returned them to Alfonso. Douglas’s corpse was then boiled, the flesh buried in Spain and the bones taken back to Scotland, where they were buried in St Bride’s Church, Douglas. Bruce’s heart was interred in Melrose Abbey. Subsequently, the Douglas family arms incorporated a bloody heart.

1333

AN IRON LADY

An English army under Edward III laid siege to Berwick, which was defended by its governor, Sir Alexander Seton. Edward sent a message to Seton, telling him that if he did not surrender, his son Thomas, whom Edward held hostage, would be hanged. As the English built a scaffold before the walls of the town, Seton’s resolve began to weaken. According to legend, he might have agreed to surrender had it not been for the intervention of his wife. ‘We are young enough to have more children,’ she supposedly told her husband, ‘but if we surrender, we can never recover the loss of our honour.’ So Seton held out against the English, even standing up on the town walls to witness his son being hanged. As for Lady Seton, she afterwards gave birth to two more sons.

That at least is the legend. In fact, the couple had already lost two sons, Alexander and William, fighting the English for David II. Seton himself died around 1348, all his sons having died before him.

1338

BLACK AGNES HOLDS THE FORT

Patrick, Earl of Dunbar, was elsewhere when his castle at Dunbar was placed under siege by an English army under William Montague, Earl of Salisbury. The command of the castle was thus left to his wife, Agnes Randolph, known as ‘Black Agnes’ because, according to the later chronicler Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, she was ‘blak skynnit’. Pitscottie opined that she was ‘of greater spirit than it became a woman to be’, a somewhat grudging view in the light of the formidable defence she mounted against the enemy. When the English started to catapult rocks at the walls, the countess commanded her maids to sweep the battlements with brushes, as if the rocks were no more than flecks of dust. When the English brought up the Sow, a kind of siege tower, she remained defiant. ‘Beware, Montagow,’ she mocked, ‘for farrow shall they sow.’ With that she ordered her men to smash down the Sow with one of the catapulted rocks. ‘Behold the litter of English pigs,’ she shouted, as the English inside clambered out and fled for their lives. In exasperation, Salisbury decided to play what he thought was his trump card. He had as his captive Agnes’s younger brother, the Earl of Moray, and now he brought him into view before the castle with a rope round his neck, telling Agnes that he would be hanged unless she surrendered. She simply told Salisbury to proceed with the execution, as then she’d inherit her brother’s lands and title. In the end, Salisbury abandoned the siege. Her deeds were celebrated in a ballad, which has the English commander despair of ever besting his opponent:

She kept a stir in tower and trench,
That brawling, boisterous Scottish wench;
Cam I early, cam I late,
There was Agnes at the gate.

circa 1339

CHRISTIE-CLEEK THE CANNIBAL

After the armies of Edward III had laid waste some of the more fertile parts of the country, famine stalked the land. Rumours emerged that a butcher from Perth called Andrew Christie had fled to the southern foothills of the Grampians, and there resorted to desperate means to fill his belly. He would, it was said, use a crook to pull travellers from their horses, and then set about butchering, cooking and devouring them. This figure became known as Christie-Cleek (a cleek being a crook), and Christie-Cleek was long used as a bogeyman to frighten children into good behaviour.

1342

A HUMILIATING END

After his capture of Roxburgh Castle from the English, Sir Alexander Ramsay of Dalhousie was appointed as Constable of the castle and Sheriff of Teviotdale by David II. This was taken amiss by another great Border magnate, Sir William Douglas of Liddesdale, who had unsuccessfully tried to retake the castle, of which he had been Constable. Furious at what he saw as a threat to his own sphere of influence, Douglas seized Ramsay in Hawick, and imprisoned him in Hermitage Castle without food. Ramsay, it was said, managed to survive for 17 days on grains trickling through the floorboards from the granary above his cell, before finally succumbing to starvation.

1355

REVENGE IS A DISH BEST SERVED COLD

A French knight serving with the Scots at the Battle of Nisbet Moor near Duns took a cruel revenge for the death of his father, who had been killed by the English in France. He purchased the many common English soldiers who had been captured, led them away to a secluded place, and cut their heads off. The place became known as Slaughter Hill.

1356

EARL BEATEN ABOUT THE HEAD WITH BOOT

Among the Scots soldiers taken prisoner by the English at the Battle of Poitiers was Archibald the Grim, Earl of Douglas. From his splendid armour, the English quite rightly took him for a great lord, who would therefore command a huge ransom.

To avert this eventuality, one of Douglas’s companions, Sir William Ramsay of Colluthy, looked the Earl straight in the eye and cried out, as if in a violent passion, ‘You cursed damnable murderer, how comes it, in the name of mischief, exparte diaboli, that you are thus proudly decked in your master’s armour? Come hither and pull off my boots.’

Taking up the game, Douglas approached Sir William, trembling and fearful, and pulled off one of his boots, which Sir William immediately used to beat him about the head.

The English intervened, saying that he should not beat a lord of so high a rank.

‘What? He a lord?’ exclaimed Sir William. ‘He is a scullion, and a base knave, and, as I suppose, has killed his master. Go, you villain, to the field, search for the body of my cousin, your master. And when you have found it, come back, that at least I may give him a decent burial.’

Then, handing over a modest ransom of 40 shillings for the ‘serving man’, and roaring, ‘Get you gone! Fly!’, he delivered a parting kick to Douglas’s backside. And so the Earl made good his escape.

‘This story, as to some of its circumstances, may not seem altogether probable,’ admits Alexander Hislop, who printed it in The Book of Scottish Anecdote (1888). ‘Yet in the main it has the appearance of truth.’ The story was also included in Sir Herbert Maxwell’s History of the House of Douglas (1902).

1388

DEAD MAN WINS FIGHT

At the Battle of Otterburn, a Scots force under James, Earl of Douglas, defeated the English under Henry Percy (Shakespeare’s Harry Hotspur). Douglas was fatally wounded in the fight, and as he slowly expired he ordered that he be hidden in a stand of bracken so that the enemy would not take heart from hearing of his death. Despite the loss of their leader, the Scots were victorious, and it was to the stand of bracken in which the dead Douglas lay that Hotspur acknowledged defeat – hence the celebrated verse in the ballad ‘The Battle of Otterbourne’:

But I hae dream’d a dreary dream,
Beyond the Isle of Skye;
I saw a dead man win a fight,
And I think that man was I.

1390

AN EYE FOR AN EYE

On a diplomatic visit to the court of King Richard II in London, Sir David Lindsay (later 1st Earl of Crawford), had among his retinue Sir William Dalzell, a knight noted as much for his wit as for his wisdom. Among the English courtiers they encountered was Sir Piers Courtenay, famed both for his jousting skills and for the attention that he paid to his person. One day Courtenay appeared at the palace in a new mantle, embroidered with a falcon and the following rhyme:

I bear a falcon, fairest of flight,
Who so pinches at her, his death is dight,
In graith.

The following day Dalzell turned up in an identical mantle, but bearing a magpie rather than a falcon and embroidered with a different motto:

I bear a pie picking at a piece,
Who so picks at her, I shall pick at his nese [nose],
In faith.

Courtenay was mortified, and challenged Dalzell to joust with sharpened lances. Reckoning his chances of surviving were slim, Dalzell loosened the laces of his helmet, so that when Courtenay’s lance struck his helmet it flew off, saving him from the shock of the blow. This happened again at the second joust, and at the third Courtenay lost a couple of teeth. He complained bitterly to the king, and Dalzell agreed to six more jousts, but this time with both parties putting down a deposit of £200, to be forfeited if either champion could be shown to possess an unfair advantage. Dalzell, who had lost an eye at the Battle of Otterburn two years previously, then demanded that Courtenay sacrifice one of his eyes, so that the two knights should enter the lists with equal optical powers. Courtenay refused, and angrily appealed to the king. But Richard ruled that Courtenay had forfeited his £200, which he handed over to Dalzell. The Scottish knight, he said, had surpassed the English knight in both valour and wit.

1398

ROSLIN MAN BEATS COLUMBUS TO NEW WORLD

Henry Sinclair of Roslin, Earl of Orkney, together with the brothers Nicolò and Antonio Zeno of Venice and 300 settlers, is said to have landed in Nova Scotia, nearly 100 years before Columbus reached the New World. This theory has drawn support from those of a Holy Blood and Holy Grail tendency, who link Sinclair to the Knights Templar and who have pointed out the supposed resemblance of carvings of plants in Roslin Chapel (built by Henry’s grandson) to native North American plants. The more level-headed suggest these carvings are stylised depictions of wheat and strawberry plants. The story appears to have originated in a hoax perpetrated by the Zeno brothers, or possibly their descendant, another Nicolò Zeno, who published their letters in 1558. Supporters of the theory insist that the ‘Prince Zichmni’ in these letters, with whom the Zenos sail across the Atlantic, is Henry Sinclair. In 1996 the Prince Henry Sinclair Society erected a monument to their hero at Chedabucto Bay in Nova Scotia. But as The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says, ‘the Zeno affair remains one of the most preposterous and at the same time one of the most successful fabrications in the history of exploration’.

1402

DUKE EATS HIS OWN FINGERS

King Robert III having been declared incapable of ruling the kingdom on account of the ‘sickness of his person’, the management of the kingdom was in the hands of his brother, the Duke of Albany. Eventually a power struggle arose between Albany and Robert’s son, the Duke of Rothesay, culminating in late 1401 when Albany had Rothesay arrested and confined in his castle at Falkland, the accusation being that Rothesay had appropriated customs revenues from the burghs of the east coast. The historian Hector Boece (1465–1536) gives a more colourful reason for Rothesay’s imprisonment, recounting that after his mother’s death the young man had abandoned all ‘virtews and honest occupatioun’ and ‘began to rage in all manner of insolence; and fulyeit [defiled] virginis, matronis, and nunnis, by his unbridillit lust’. According to Boece, Robert III, disgusted by his son’s behaviour, had written to Albany to ask him to ‘intertene’ Rothesay and teach the young man ‘honest and civill maneris’.

Boece goes on to recount how Rothesay was kept in a tower at Falkland, without ‘ony meit or drink’. His life was prolonged for some days when a certain woman, taking pity on the young Duke, trickled meal down to his place of confinement from the loft above. However, her ruse was discovered, and she was put to death. Another tender woman tried to feed him milk from her breast through ‘ane lang reid’, but was also found out, and ‘wes slane with gret cruelte’. In desperation, Boece continues, Rothesay resorted to eating not only ‘the filth of the toure quhare he wes’, but also his own fingers. Boece was elaborating rumours that widely circulated at the time, but it is conceivable that Rothesay’s death in late March 1402 was due to natural causes, possibly dysentery. This was certainly the view of the General Council that met to consider the matter in May 1402, concluding that Rothesay’s death was caused ‘by divine providence’.

1405

THE WOLF PLAYS CHESS WITH THE DEVIL

Death of Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan, known as the Wolf of Badenoch owing to his irregular conduct (his abandonment of his wife, his burning of Elgin Cathedral, his general taste for rapine and plunder). According to legend, Buchan was visited at Ruthven Castle just before his death by a tall stranger, dressed in black, who asked to play a game of chess with his host. Buchan agreed to the match. Eventually the stranger was heard to say ‘Checkmate’, upon which a terrible thunderstorm commenced, and continued through the night. In the morning Buchan’s body was found dead, without a mark, although the nails in his boots had all been torn out. He was buried in Dunkeld Cathedral, where his sarcophagus, with his armoured effigy recumbent upon it, can still be seen.

circa 1430

A WOMAN CRUELLY SHOD

During the reign of James I, a poor woman in the Highlands was robbed of her two cattle by the chief of a band of caterans. She loudly declared that she would never again put on her shoes till she had carried her complaint to the king. ‘Not so,’ the chief sneered. ‘I’ll have you shod myself before you reach the court.’ And he proceeded to nail two horseshoes to her naked feet, before pushing her on to the high road. A passing Samaritan found her crippled and bleeding, and took her in until her feet were mended. Then the woman continued on her way, eventually showing the king the horrible scars on her feet. James was outraged, and sent a writ out for the arrest of the robber-chief. The latter was soon seized and taken to Perth, where he was tried, paraded through the streets tied to a horse’s tail, and hanged.

1437

KING STABBED IN PRIVY

The attempts by King James I to undermine the Perthshire power base of his uncle, Walter Stewart, Earl of Atholl, led to a deadly feud between the two, culminating in the death of both. Part of the problem seems to have been that a group of witches had told the Earl that he would one day wear the crown. This led Atholl in 1437 to hatch a plot against the king, in conspiracy with his grandson Robert Stewart and Sir Robert Graham. While James was staying at the Blackfriars Monastery in Perth, Graham and a small band of assassins made their entry. According to legend, someone had removed the bolts from the door of the royal chamber, and Catherine Douglas, one the queen’s serving women, inserted her own arm to bar the door – forever after earning the nickname ‘Kate Barlass’. To no avail: the assassins hurled themselves against the door, breaking Catherine’s arm, and gaining entry. At this point the king attempted a subterranean escape, plunging down the privy. By an ironic stroke of fate, only three days earlier James had ordered that the exit of the privy on the outside of the building be stopped up, as he was annoyed that so many of his tennis balls ended up rolling down ‘that foul hole’. So now the king was trapped, and the assassins quickly finished him off with their daggers.

Atholl’s attempted coup received no support, and soon he and his co-conspirators were arrested and brought to trial. The verdict was predictable, but even by the standards of that era, Atholl’s sentence was grisly. His execution was stretched out over three days. On the first day he was hoisted upside-down into the air by a rope attached to his ankles, then repeatedly dropped to the ground. On the second day he was put in a pillory and his head crowned with a red-hot iron band bearing the legend ‘The King of Traitors’, before being dragged through the streets on a hurdle. On the last day, 26 March 1437, while he was still conscious, his bowels were slowly pulled from his belly and burnt before his eyes; then, to make an end at last, his heart was ripped out and his head cut off. The mutilated body was quartered, the segments being displayed in Edinburgh, Perth, Stirling and Aberdeen as a warning to other would-be traitors.

1460

ON THE IRRESISTIBILITY OF HUMAN FLESH

The 16th-century historian Lindsay of Pitscottie recounts that around this time a brigand and his family were apprehended in Angus. They had, it seems, developed a taste for devouring their fellow humans, and the younger they were, ‘the mair tender and delicious’. For these crimes the brigand, together with his wife and children, were all burnt – with the exception of a young girl no more than a year old. This girl was taken to Dundee, where she was fostered until she reached womanhood, when she was condemned to burn for the crimes she had committed as an infant. As she approached the place of her execution, she was berated for her sins by a great crowd. Growing angry, she riposted that if they had ever tasted the flesh of men or women, they would think it so delicious that they would never again desist from the pleasure. And so, unrepentant, the woman went to her doom.

1475

REBEL DEFEATED BY ATHOLL BROSE

The Earl of Atholl captured the rebel John MacDonald, Earl of Ross and Lord of the Isles, by a cunning ruse. He had his men fill a well in Skye, from which MacDonald frequently quenched his thirst, with honey and whisky. The latter, falling for the trick, soon became so inebriated that he was easily taken prisoner by his enemies. This at least is the traditional explanation of that quintessential Scottish dessert, Atholl Brose, which consists of honey and whisky mixed with oatmeal.

1486

EARL BEARDIE DOOMED TO PLAY CARDS FOR ETERNITY

Death of Alexander Lyon, 2nd Lord Glamis, who has passed into legend as ‘Earl Beardie’. It was said that Earl Beardie was one night playing cards with his cronies when one of them advised him to stop because the Sabbath was fast approaching. Earl Beardie flew into a fury and swore he would go on playing until the Day of Judgement. Prompted by this cue, the Devil made an appearance and offered to join the game. It is said that the two are still playing cards together in a hidden room in Glamis Castle.