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By Hugh Peskett
Reprinted with permission from
Burke’s Peerage & Gentry
www.burkes-peerage.net
Scottish and Irish Chiefs are
appearing in Burke’s Peerage & Baronetage for the first time,
apart from those who have been listed before because they have also
been peers or baronets. However, they represent an ancient
aristocracy, part Gael, part Norse and part Fleming or Norman, and
are generally of longer pedigree than the peers and baronets they
are joining. Moreover most of ancestors of the chiefs who are also
peers or baronets were chiefs long before they acquired their other
titles. The pedigree of the Dukes of Argyll starts in debateable and
misty medieval evidence. Duibne was probably great-great-grandfather
of, and lived at least a century and a half before, Sir Gillespic
Cambel, with whom documented certainty begins in the 1260s. His son
Colin, knighted in 1280, gave the Campbell chiefs the Gaelic
patronymic they still use, Mac Cailein Mor, but it was not
until 1445 that a descendant was created Lord Campbell; the 2nd Lord
Campbell was created Earl of Argyll in 1457 and Dukedom came two and
a half centuries later in 1701.
It must be remembered that the
isles in the west, and parts of the West Highland mainland, were
under Norwegian suzerainty until ceded by the treaty of Perth in
1266. Orkney and Shetland remained under Danish/Norwegian rule until
1468–72. A number of chiefly families are of Norse origin. The
Sinclairs and the Gunns trace their pedigrees to names and
relationships in the Orkneyinga Saga and, before that, to the
Jarls of Orkney. A younger son of a Jarl of Orkney was Rollo
alias Rolf the Ganger, founder of the Duchy of Normandy and
great-great-great-great-grandfather of William the Conqueror. The
Sinclairs were themselves of Norman ancestry, from Saint-Clair-sur-l’Elle
near St Lô, but in 1379 Henry St Clair of Roslyn was invested by
King Haakon of Norway as Jarl of Orkney and Lord of Zetland
(Shetland) in right of his mother, heiress of Orkney. Three
generations of Sinclairs acknowledged Norwegian jurisdiction until
William, the 3rd Sinclair Jarl, resigned the Earldom in 1470 to the
king of Scots, from whom he also held the Earldom of Caithness.
Somerled, of mixed Gaelic and
Norse ancestry, was descended from both the 9th-century Norse kings
of Waterford and Dublin and from the 9th-century Gaelic leaders in
the Hebrides. He established the quasi-independent Lordship of the
Southern Isles in the 1150s. It was expanded by his MacDonald
descendants to embrace the Northern Isles in 1354 and flourished
until forfeiture in 1493. Somerled was ancestor of a number of
chiefly families, notably the MacDonalds/MacDonells in their several
branches, the MacDougalls, the MacAlastairs and the MacIntyres.
Traditional genealogies claiming common male-line descent from
Somerled have been confirmed recently by Y-chromosome (the
exclusively male line chromosome) DNA tests showing a single common
male-line ancestor of mixed Gaelic and Norse ancestry.
The Gaelic chiefly families in
Scotland descend in one group from the 5th-century kings of Dalriada
in Ulster, who eventually conquered the entire country, and with
others include Dunbar, Dundas, Duff, Wemyss and Clan Chattan.
Another group, with the oldest documented genealogies in Western
Europe, descend from Eochu, King of Tara, living in AD 360, and
father of Niall of the Nine Hostages, whose son Eogan, King of
Ailech in Ulster was ancestor of the O’Neills of Clannaboy, the
Lamonts, Livingstones of Bachuil, MacLachlans and MacNeills among
others. Another son of Niall of the Nine Hostages was Conall Gulban,
King of Tir Conaill (Tyrconnell, Donegal) and great-grandfather of
St Columba, whose descendants included the O’Donnells of Tir-Conaill
and other Scots and Irish families proud to be the ‘kindred of St
Columba’.
A few chiefs have other origins.
The Murrays and Sutherlands descend from Freskin, a Fleming. The
Frasers have Frankish roots.
Chiefs gave their clansmen
leadership, justice, housing, land to grow food, grazing for their
cattle and, importantly in a more violent age, protection. In return
the chief would expect able-bodied clansmen to fight with him and
for him. While many clansmen were of the chiefly kindred, others
placed themselves under the chief’s leadership and protection and
assumed his name. Therefore the fact that a clansman has the same
name as the chief does not prove that he is related.
Chiefs lost much of their power in
the brutal repression of the clan system, wearing of tartan, etc,
that followed the ’45 Rising and defeat at Culloden. This was
aggravated by a worsening of the climate and a fall in the price of
cattle, upon the sale of which many depended. In a typical case,
economic necessity forced the MacIntyre Chief to emigrate to
America, while the young men who represented the Gunns and the
MacArthurs died unmarried in the service of the Crown or of the
Honourable East India Company army in India or as mercenaries in the
Scots Brigade of the Dutch army. The cousin and next heir to the
Gunn chief, who died in the siege of Gibraltar, had neither land nor
money and became a gardener. His son took advantage of the herring
boom at Wick to join the fishery industry there. The heirs of
MacDonald of Keppoch, of the male line of Somerled, died on military
service in Canada, while their heir back in Lochaber was a cattle
drover. In this way many chiefly families became lost to sight in
the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It is only now, with
increased interest, support of research by clan societies and the
better availability of archives, that the heirs are being traced and
restored.
For Irish chiefs, the diaspora
came earlier. A number of chiefs, who were amongst the ‘Wild Geese’
(Jacobites who left Ireland after defeat at Limerick in 1691), are
now absorbed into the Spanish and Portugese nobility.
Right to a chiefship is
established in Scotland by proof before Lord Lyon King of Arms in
the Lyon Court and use of the plain unhyphenated surname, followed
by matriculation of the plain undifferenced Arms, as ‘Chief of the
Name and Arms’. In Ireland recognition is by the Chief Herald of
Ireland. Current problems about proof of Irish chiefships means that
we can include only fourteen of them in this edition.
Matriculation as ‘Chief of the
Name and Arms’ is unaffected by the mistaken belief that a Highland
chief is chief of a clan and a Lowland or Borders chief is chief of
a name. The 16th-century Scots Privy Council referred to ‘chiefs of
border clans and chiefs of highland names’. However, Lowland or
Border chiefs should not wear a kilt. To quote the late Major Percy
Hope Johnstone, de jure 10th Earl of Annandale and Hartfell,
whose family have been for 800 years Chiefs of the Border clan of
Johnstone, ‘my father always said that the only people who should
wear a kilt south of Perth are military bandsmen, comic singers and
whores’.
This article will feature in the
107th edition of Burke’s Peerage & Baronetage, due to be
published in October 2003. Hugh Peskett is a consultant editor for
the 107th edition of Burke’s Peerage & Baronetage. For
more information on Hugh’s work visit
www.hughpeskett.co.uk |
