Search just our sites by using our customised search engine

Unique Cottages | Electric Scotland's Classified Directory

Click here to get a Printer Friendly PageSmiley

Newlands


Variants Newland, Newlands. A locality name meaning 'of Newland', from parishes found in Counties Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. This name is of English descent and is found in many ancient manuscripts in the above country. Examples of such are a Roger de la Neulonde, County Cambridgeshire, who was recorded in the 'Hundred Rolls', England, in the year 1273 and a Richard le Neulond, County Cambridgeshire, was also recorded in the same year in this ancient document. Names were recorded in these ancient documents to make it easier for their overlords to collect taxes and to keep records of the population at any given time. When the overlords acquired land by either force or gifts from their rulers, they created charters of ownership for themselves and their vassals. Other examples of this name were found in the persons of a John Newlande and Grace Sampson who were granted a marriage license, in London, in the year 1573 and a William Newland and Mary Spratt were married in Saint James, Clerkenwell, in the year 1670.


Our thanks to Willy Newlands for sending this into us.

The chief of the Newlands family appears early in Scottish records in 1469 when Jasper Newlands of that Ilk was involved in a court case at Penpont, Dumfriesshire, where he was in dispute with Lord Carlisle. The trial concerned water rights in Nithsdale, at Drumcow, and Newlands was ordered to “cease from further vexation”. The dispute continued for many years, but Newlands seems to have avoided any further court appearances.

Less fortunate was Walter Newlands of that Ilk, whose “slaughter” by Charles Lowrie was recorded by the Privy Council in 1526.

There were various baronies bearing the name of Newlands, not only in Dumfriesshire and Peeblesshire, but in Stirlingshire and also Kincardine, where the extensive barony was held by the church and valued at almost a fifth of all the church property in the sheriffdom. None of these estates was in the ownership of the family beyond medieval times and the Name was scattered in many parts of Scotland, from the Borders to the northern isles, with strongholds in the North-east, Glasgow and the Lothians. Duncan Newlands was a bailie of Linlithgow in 1493 and Janetta Newlands was heir to lands in the barony of Monkland in 1675. Similar entries appear through the centuries.

From the 1700s onwards, the family was typical of many in Scotland, sending men in uniform and emigrants to all parts of the Empire, often in the service of the East India Company or the Hudson’s Bay Company. These included a Lieutenant Governor in Canada, an Australian MP who surveyed a route for a transcontinental railway, pioneers in South Africa, civil servants in Mauritius, a prominent Senator in the United States who married the heiress to a silver-mine fortune and annexed Hawaii, numerous farmers in New Zealand, a merchant dynasty in Portugal, and the master of a clipper ship, the Champion of the Seas, who set the unbroken record for the greatest distance sailed by a clipper in one day. In the UK, there were leading civil engineers, agricultural innovators and, more recently, an eminent professor of divinity at Glasgow and Cambridge, the Rev. Dr. George Newlands, whose wife Elizabeth has written a three-volume book about the history of the family in Banffshire and beyond.

The clan tartan was re-designed in the 1980s by Jamie Scarlett, OBE, and there are two family pipe tunes -- The Road to Lauriston Castle, composed by Pipe Major Garth Newlands, British Columbia, and The Lady Lauriston, by Pipe Major Bert Baron, BEM.

In 1985, William and Dorothy Newlands of Lauriston came into their Aberdeenshire barony and they have since rebuilt Lauriston Castle at St.Cyrus, which had fallen into disrepair after being requisitioned as an RAF barracks during World War II, and also restored its extensive ravine gardens. The castle was held at one time as a royal stronghold, taken and strengthened by the Plantaganet King Edward III in 1336. The name of the barony was changed to Miltonhaven in 1695 under a burgh charter from King William III and it was granted freeport status, but the little harbour was swept away in a great storm in 1795, leaving Lauriston to be known as the “Drown’d Barony”. The burgh was absorbed by the county in the 1970s.

Travel writer Willy Newlands was formerly on the staff of the Daily Mail in Fleet Street, and Dorothy is a bid writer and director of Boston Morgan, based in the City of London. She is Late Collector of the Wrights in Glasgow (2016) and a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Basketmakers in London.


Back


 


This comment system requires you to be logged in through either a Disqus account or an account you already have with Google, Twitter, Facebook or Yahoo. In the event you don't have an account with any of these companies then you can create an account with Disqus. All comments are moderated so they won't display until the moderator has approved your comment.

comments powered by Disqus

Quantcast