Peoples of the Kingdom
Highlands and 'clans' (continued)
The new concern with Highland lawlessness which marked the last decades of the fourteenth century was linked inextricably to the activities of the Wolf of Badenoch. With the help of 'wild, wikkid hielandmen' he burned down Elgin Cathedral in 1390; his sons were the organisers of a massive cateran raid into Angus in 1392; and the ritual battle on the North Inch of Perth in 1396 between two sets of thirty-strong bands of Highlanders armed with swords, axes and bows and arrows, which became a cause célèbre for fifteenth-century chroniclers, was between two clans from Moray. Yet this diabolus ex machina, promoter of caterans and organiser of various protection rackets, was not a native Highland chief but a member of the royal house of Stewart. Alexander Stewart, the third son of Robert 11 (1371-90), first intervened in the politics of Moray in 1370. His rise to power over the next two decades and his struggle with the existing earls is a classic story, of both the disastrous interference of the centre in the affairs of a locality and of a division within the royal house, but it is not a tale of endemic Highland violence as such. Feuds, cattle raids, caterans and much else were all used by the Wolf of Badenoch in his war of attrition, but if there is a moral to the story it is of the lengths to which the Stewart family trait of ruthlessness could go. Repeatedly - in the Wolf's twenty-year reign of violence in the north and in James IV's attempted eclipse of the Lordship of the Isles in 1493 - it was the crown or the royal house which disrupted Highland society.
The fight on the North Inch of Perth was described by Wyntoun, writing less than thirty years later, as between two 'clans', and the word was used with increasing frequency over the next two centuries to stigmatise a Highland problem of law and order. Yet violence was confined mostly to the eastern Highlands - the scene of the Wolf's operations - and the frontier zone between Highlands and Lowlands. It is difficult to see that society in the Highlands was any more or less violent than in the Lowlands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Kinship underpinned local society and the bond of manrent extended it to 'friends or allyers' who were not of the kindred; the blood-feud both afflicted the local community and regulated it throughout Scotland. The word is taken from clann, whose literal meaning in Gaelic is 'children', but various ideas became entangled with it which were strictly no part of it.
The nineteenth- and twentieth-century cult of the Highlands - of clan tartans, clan maps and clan societies - have all tended to obscure what a clan was. Few clans had a compact block of territory, either in the medieval period or later; 'clan maps' at best indicate where surnames occurred, but not a clan territory. In the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, as earlier, not all members of a 'clan' were necessarily related to each other by blood; the charter chest of the Campbells of Glenorchy, for example, was stuffed with bonds of manrent, which artificially extended those to whom the chief offered protection; they in turn offered him their allegiance as his 'native men'. It is as misleading to think of these dependents as 'septs' of Glenorchy - a word which did not appear before the seventeenth century - as it is to think of them as Campbells. In most cases, kinship and a common surname obtained only to the inner circle of the chief's family or to cadet branches of it. The notion that all members of a clan were descended from a common and distant ancestor is a nonsense. With a very few important exceptions, including the Campbells and the descendants of Somerled (such as Macdougalls, MacDonalds and Macruaries), most clans have their documented origins, at best, in the medieval period. In a number of cases, such as the Grants who were first called a clan in 1538, ancient lineage rests on fake genealogies. 61 Clan society was fluid and eclectic. Clan Donald embraced various vassal kindreds such as the MacLeods and MacLeans as well as the actual descendants of Donald. It was bound together by marriage as well as by genealogy, and, above all else, by a strong, shared sense of kinship.
|
