Bloodfeud in Scotland 1573-1625

Violence, Justice and Politics in an Early Modern Society

Keith M. Brown

• Publisher: John Donald
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781788854238
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Scottish History
• Index: History

Feuding had an effect on the history of most of Europe. Scotland provides a fascinating focus for the study of the bloodfeud because feuding survived until remarkably late there, and thus is much better documented than in other European societies. This examination of the Scottish evidence shows its relevance to the wider European community to which the Scots belonged, reveals much about the nature of the bloodfeud in general, and explores the changes in society which at last brought about its suppression. The bloodfeud has been the subject of anthropological rather than historical investigation, partly because it largely disappeared at an early stage in the development of literacy in Europe and has never been a fashionable research topic for historians. In this study of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century feud in Scotland, Keith Brown focuses on its context in society, politics and the ideology that served to uproot the tradition. The book will be of value to historians of many different cultures and periods.

Part One: A Feuding Society

1

The Roots of Violence

An increasing recognition of the fact that violence is a very sophisticated tool, and a critical discussion about violence in the pre-modern period, have made it much less easy to talk about medieval or early modern Europe as violent societies. Lawrence Stone has largely reinforced existing ideas about the all-pervading and casual presence of violence in early modern England where ‘tempers were short and weapons to hand’.¹ J. R. Hale has also highlighted the temperamental aspect of violence, and described how contemporaries understood the medical, psychological and sociological roots of the problem. His consensus explanation was one in which ‘imagination sensed a potential injury to self-respect or self-interest, the blood began to heat up in the heart and when some of this heated blood ascended to the brain violent behaviour followed unless the individual was on his guard’.² In contrast to this, Keith Wrightson, Alan Macfarlane and Jim Sharpe have all argued with varying degrees of intensity for a more refined view of the problem in which violence is less prevalent. Thus Wrightson thinks that violence in England ‘was to a considerable degree constrained by law’, and like Macfarlane is fairly dismissive of casual or common violence.³ Sharpe is less so, but does draw attention to the low numbers of homicides and executions in a society in which both are traditionally assumed to have been high.⁴ More recently Stone has returned to the debate with further evidence that early modern England was five times more violent than contemporary England is, while others, like Louis Knafla, have shown that the traditional picture, though modified, has by no means been exploded.⁵ The question of violence is clearly not a simple one, and it has to be handled with greater sensitivity than has often been the case when discussing Scotland’s violent record.

There was certainly little doubt among contemporaries that late sixteenth-century Scotland was a violent place. In 1582 the privy council announced that

his Majesties peciable gude subectis ower all his realme hes bene troublit havelie with bludescheid, stowth, reiff, masterfull oppressionis, convocationis and utheris enormiteis, to thair great hurt and skaith, without redres or puneisment of the offendouris.⁶

Is this an accurate assessment of a real problem, or the panic response of an insecure government whose outlook was anything but objective? Such sentiments were repeated elsewhere at different times, until the first decade of the seventeenth century when they alter to descriptions of an earlier anarchy which is contrasted favourably with the new peace and stability the king had brought to Scotland. Much of this was clearly myth-making in practice and with intent. This was propaganda designed to persuade men that the crown, and in particular the king himself, was doing a good job. The former king’s advocate, Lord Binning, was eloquent on this subject when trying to squeeze money out of the 1617 convention of the nobility to pay for the king’s visit:

I schaw that the blessingis of justice and peace and fruttis arysing thairof, did so obleis euerie one of us, as no thing in owre power could equall it, desyring that it might be remembered, that whairas the Islander oppressed the Hielandmen, the Hielander tirrannised ouer thair Lowland nighbours; the powerfull and violent in the in-cuntrie domineered ouer the lyues and goodes of thair weak nighbours; the bordouraris triumphed in the impunitie of thair violences to the pairtis of Edinburgh; that treasons, murthours, burningis, thriftis, reiffis, hearschippis, hocking of oxin, distroyeing of growand cornis, and barbaraties of all sortis, wer exerced in all pairtis of the cuntrie, no place nor person being exemed or inviolable, Edinburgh being the ordinarie place of butcherlie revenge and daylie fightis; the paroche churches and churche-yairdis being more frequented upon the Sonday for advancement of nighbourlie malice and mischeif, nor for God’s service; nobilmen, barronis, gentilmen, and people of all sortis, being slaughtered, as it wer, in publict and uncontrollable hostilities; merchandes robbed, and left for dead on day light, going on thair mercats and faires of Montrois, Wigton and Berwick; ministers being dirked in Stirling, buried quick in Cliddisdaill, and murthoured in Galloway; merchandis of Edinburgh being waited in their passage to Leith to be maid prisoners and ransoumed, and all uther abominations which setled be inveterat custame and impunitie appeired to be of desperat remeid, had bene so repressed, puniessed, and aboleissed be your maistes wisdome, caire, power, and expensis, as no nation on earth could now compaire with our prosperities; whairby we wer band to retribute to your maiestie, if it wer the verie half of oure hairt bloud.⁷

Flattery and propaganda this may have been, but was it all just a product of Binning’s imagination? Historians living close to the times they narrated shared these attitudes whether they were men who had done well from crown service, like Archbishop Spottiswoode who wrote of ‘bloods and slaughters daily falling out in every place’,⁸ or men who had been more critical of the crown, like David Calderwood who also wrote of ‘muche blood shed, and manie horrible murthers committed’.⁹ Of course, the church had itself been directly involved in the attack on feud and other forms of violence, and such attitudes could perhaps be expected from ministers, but why then was there such criticism from the likes of Robert Bruce and Robert Rollock in the first place?¹⁰ English observers also expressed shock at the bloody environment in which they found themselves,¹¹ but if this was little more than typical English smugness about foreigners, the Scots’ bloody reputation had spread as far as Spain.¹²

Examples of casual violence are certainly easy to find. The Edinburgh diarist, Robert Birrel, conveys this in his almost incidental references to events like ‘Robert Cathcart slaine pisching at the wall in Peiblis wynd heid be William Stewart, sone to Sir William Stewart’.¹³ Yet a source like this is obviously suspect if one’s intention is to measure violence in Scottish society. A more objective picture might be forthcoming were one to adopt a quantitative approach, but as Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker have pointed out, criminal statistics do not guarantee clarity and often obscure what one wants to know.¹⁴ Certainly any quantification of criminal violence in Jacobean Scotland would encounter almost insurmountable difficulties in the nature of the sources, and in the working of criminal justice which left so much business in local courts and in private hands.¹⁵ Whether or not the apparent rise in feuding between the 1570s and 1590s was accompanied by a rise in criminal violence cannot be answered here, and is probably unanswerable. The very substantial rise in acts of caution registered with the privy council from around 20 per annum in the 1570s to 100 by 1588, and over 300 three years later might just as easily be an indicator of confidence in the crown’s ability to control violence as it is a measure of its prevalence.¹⁶ Nor was the privy council overwhelmed with complaints from people who had suffered violent attacks. There were 20 of these in 1580, 17 in 1585, 23 in 1590, 21 in 1595, 56 in 1600 and 42 in 1605.¹⁷ Once again the rising trend may reflect control rather than any breakdown in law and order, and this looks especially likely as the increase takes place after 1600. Whatever the trend was, the actual numbers were fairly low, and the violence itself was fairly low-key. Most of it concerned spuilyie, housebreaking, intimidation, and assault, and none of the cases reported in 1595 involved slaughter.¹⁸ This does not, of course, mean that there was little criminal violence. The point is simply that one has to have reservations about the extent of criminal violence until more work has been specifically carried out on it. One would also need to know a great deal more about the level of state and domestic violence before one could say with any degree of authority that Scottish society was especially violent. The violence of the feud was only one form of violent behaviour, and to say that Scotland experienced a great deal of it does not necessarily imply that these other forms of violence were equally common. The fact that feuding to some extent depended on a decentralised state, strong family bonds and powerful lordship may even have reduced state, domestic and criminal violence. The very particular violence of the feud should not, therefore, be the only yardstick by which one measures violence in Scotland at this time, and its explanations are not in themselves sufficient evidence of a violent society with casual attitudes to that violence.

Debate about the effective authority of Scottish kings is likely to remain unresolved for some time, but it is perhaps less controversial to argue that the control exercised by the crown over Scottish society was minimal. Power in the Scottish state lay mostly in the localities and in the hands of the nobility who dominated those localities. The idea that the crown was constantly being overawed by the nobility has to some extent been displaced by a scenario in which strong kings held sway over a largely cooperative nobility.¹⁹ The greater understanding one now has of the ro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One : A Feuding Society
• Part Two : Politics and Feud
• Part Three : Uprooting the Feud
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index