Peoples of the Kingdom
Highlands and 'clans'
There was, however, no single pattern of interaction between kinship and feudalism in the Highlands. Both were dynamic and flexible systems, which might interact differently in the various parts of the Highlands or when the power structure of a locality had to be reformed. This might happen with the natural process of families dying out in the male line with the periodic interference by the crown, displacing one family and replacing it with another. There was also, at times, a deliberate policy by the crown of balancing a nexus of feudal power against one based on kin. One example lay in thirteenth-century Moray, held for the crown after the revolt of 1215 by a seemingly unholy alliance of a Celtic MacTaggart made Earl of Ross and the originally Flemish family of Freskin who had taken the name de Moravia (Murray) and were now made Earls of Sutherland.
An even more important example for the history of the Highlands in the thirteenth century rests in the main and various sub-plots explaining the position of their two most powerful families and the political alliance between them. One was a family of incomers - the Comyns, who first gained a foothold in Moray by simultaneous elevation to an earldom and marriage to a Buchan heiress c. 1210. The other was the Macdougalls, the senior of a number of lines tracing descent from the immensely powerful Somerled (d. 1164), who was both Rí Innse Gall ('King of the Hebrides') and regulus (lord) of Argyll. The power of the Comyns in the Highlands depended on the range of their holdings stretching from Lochaber to Badenoch as well as on the lands the family held elsewhere in Scotland, including the earldom of Buchan; the widely acknowledged authority of the Macdougalls, whose lands were concentrated mostly in mainland Argyll, rested largely on their lineage. One is an example of lightly naturalised feudalism; the other of flexible Celtic kinship. Both were enemies of Robert Bruce, and each was destroyed by him after 1307.
The year 1307 was as important a turning-point in Highland history as the eclipse of the Lordship of the Isles in 1493. The Comyns and Macdougalls, who had been closely linked to the Balliols, were replaced by families connected to Bruce -the earls of Ross, the Campbells, MacDonalds, Macruaries and the Randolph earls of Moray - who were both smaller and differently configured. The most prominent of the Celtic elements were the Campbells and the MacDonalds, one claiming links with the Britons of Strathclyde, the other descent from Somerled. Over the next 150 years, the Campbells would become the most feudal of Celtic kindreds, basing their expansion on feudal charters, the newly created sheriffdom of Argyll and an aggressive adoption of Lowland ways; the MacDonalds, in contrast, fostered a renewed, self-conscious pan-Celtic Gaeldom. A new balance resulted from the Bruce/Balliot civil war. For most of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the MacDonald Lordship of the Isles was a force for peace rather than a destabilising influence: its principal place of residence, at Finlaggan on Islay, was described by one chronicler as a 'mansion' rather than a fortified castle; it became a builder of abbeys and chapels and the chief patron of a renaissance of Gaelic culture and art.
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