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Clans and Families of Ireland and Scotland
X. The Vikings and Normans


"Fesse Chequy," alludes to the counting board used in their hereditary duties during the High Middle Ages. the ancestors of the Stewarts were Seneschals of the counts Doll and Dinan in Brittany, to whom they were related, as per Medieval custom. Alan Fitz Flaald was in England before 1101, and his two sons, William and Walter, were the progenitors of the FitzAlan earls of Arundel in England, and of the House of Stewart in Scotland, respectively. Walter was in Scotland before 1164 and was created Stewart of Scotland by King David I. He was granted wide territories in Renfrewshire and East Lothian, and commanded the King’s army which defeated Somerled of the Isles in 1161. He founded the Abbey of Paisley, near Glasgow, and passed the oflice of Stewart to his descendants, the second of which (the grandson of Walter) adopted the title as his surname. He himself had several sons, including Alexander, fourth High Stewart, and Walter, ancestor of the Menteiths, a branch of the Stewarts who took their name from their earldom.

Alexander’s son James, fifth High Stewart, inherited the Islands of Bute and Arran, as well as the royal name James from his mother, who was the heiress of Seumas (James) mlac Angus mac Somerled, of the Royal House of the Isles. Walter, sixth High Stewart, was prominent at Bannockburn on the Scottish side, and Robert the Bruce later gave Walter his daughter Marjory’s hand in marriage. She became heiress of the House of Bruce when her brother David II failed to have children, and so Robert, seventh High Stewart, became King of Scots in 1372. There was treacherous and sanguinary infighting within the Royal House in the early fifteenth century, especially in the reign of James I, who was, as it happens, an important patron of Anglo-Scottish arts, having married into the Chaucerian House of Lancaster.

Families of the House of Stewart fall into one of two categories: The preroyal Stewarts, who branched off the main stem before the Stewarts inherited the throne of the Scots; and the royal but illegitimate (at least officially) descendants of the Stewart kings. Branches of the Stewarts, royal and pre-royal, settled over wide areas of Scotland, especially in Galloway and Renfrewshire in the Lowlands, but in various parts of the Highlands as well, The Highland Stewarts adopted Gaelic ways, and lived with the traditional flux of lowland feudalism and highland chanshiip, with important bonds of association being drawn up from time to time between the various branches throughout the land. The Stewarts of Appin formed a clan, and inherited the Lordship of Lorn from the MacDougals. There were other important branches in Atholl, Moray, Aberdeenshire, Banffshire and Balquhidder. Steuart and Stuart are simply French-influenced forms, owing to the absence of "w" in that language: these forms do not, broadly speaking, indicate a special line of descent.

The Tobins (Toibin-Norman-French "St. Aubyn") take their name from the town of St. Aubyn in Brittany. They came to Ireland in the wake of the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman invasion, and by 1200 were settled in counties Tipperary and Kilkenny, spreading later into the neighboring counties of


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