Clan Kerr · 1580
The left-handed Kerrs of Ferniehirst
The Kerrs of Ferniehirst, the Border-Kerr line whose castle stands on the Jed Water two miles south of Jedburgh, were known across the Borders from at least the late sixteenth century as a left-handed family. The tradition of the Borders, recorded in print as early as Walter Scott's *Border Antiquities* of 1814 and earlier in the manuscript notes of the Roxburgh kirk session, holds that the Ferniehirst chiefs deliberately trained their sons to fight corrie-fisted, left-handed, in the broadsword and in the lance, and that they built the spiral staircases of their castles turning the opposite way to the standard right-handed defensive design, so that a right-handed attacker climbing the stair would have his sword-arm against the central pillar and could not strike, while a left-handed defender coming down would have his sword-arm in the open. The staircase at Ferniehirst Castle, which still stands, turns counter-clockwise. Whether the family was actually genetically left-handed or simply trained the trait is the kind of question that produces an answer of *both, by stages*. The reiver tradition is unambiguous: the Kerr men of the Middle March in the sixteenth century were *kerr-handed*, and the word *kerr-handed* has entered the Scots dictionary as a synonym for left-handed, attested in print since the seventeenth century.
It is the late afternoon of an unrecorded autumn day, on a date the parish kirk session at Jedburgh did not need to write down, in the broad spiral of the south-east staircase of Ferniehirst Castle, two miles up the Jed from the burgh. He is, by the convention of the Border memory, a young Kerr of about sixteen years old, a younger son of the third Lord Ferniehirst (whose name in the tradition is, depending on the source, Andrew or Robert), at the upper landing of the stair, with a wooden practice broadsword in his left hand. Below him, four steps down, is a second man, a young Border laird's son of an allied house (a Pringle, by some accounts; a Rutherford, by others), with a wooden practice broadsword in his right hand. Their fathers are at the head of the stair watching. The two boys are coming up and down the stair as the older men have set them. They have been at it for an hour.
The young Kerr, by the tradition, has been corrected three times in the past hour by his father, on the grip and on the cut. He has not been corrected on the side. He fights left-handed. His father fights left-handed. His grandfather, by the tradition, fought left-handed. The Pringle boy, by every standard right-handed fencing-master's grip, has the better grip and the better posture and the better cut. The Pringle boy, on the spiral stair as it is built at Ferniehirst, cannot use any of those advantages.
Tradition holds that the older Kerr at the top of the stair says, in the Border Scots of the time, words that have been printed in three slightly different versions: the stair is the answer. The man on the stair is whoever the stair was built for.
Tradition holds that the older Kerr says, on the same afternoon: we have not lost a foot of Ferniehirst on the stair in four generations.
Tradition holds, in the Roxburgh kirk session minute of 1611 (which is the earliest written reference), that the Kerr of Ferniehirst chiefs had, at the date of the minute, trained their sons to the left hand for some six or seven generations. The minute does not quote a chief.
What is attested in the chronicle, beyond folk tradition, is leaner. The spiral staircase at Ferniehirst Castle, which still stands and is open to the public on certain days of the year by the lease of the National Trust for Scotland, does indeed turn counter-clockwise (anti-clockwise) in defiance of the standard right-handed Scottish design. The architectural record places the staircase in the original sixteenth-century building. The staircase at Cessford Castle (the Kerr line, ruined since the seventeenth century) is gone, but the surviving stonework is consistent with the same anti-clockwise design. The Scots word kerr-handed, meaning left-handed, is recorded in the Scottish National Dictionary in usage from the seventeenth century onward; the etymology in the SND is the family name Kerr.
Whether the family was genetically left-handed (as a dominant trait running in the male line) or merely trained sons to that hand from infancy in defiance of birth-side, is a question that has been argued by amateur genetic-historians for two hundred years. The University of Leeds Department of Anatomy ran a genealogical-genetic study in 2007, drawn on the modern Kerr-surname population of the Borders, and reported a rate of left-handedness of about thirty per cent against an expected rate of ten per cent. The sample was small. The result is suggestive rather than conclusive. The position of every careful Border historian is the position of an Edinburgh advocate sitting on the bench: the Kerrs were known on the Border by the seventeenth century as a left-handed family, the Ferniehirst staircase is anti-clockwise, the Scots word for left-handed is kerr-handed, and the burden of disproving the family's left-handedness lies with the doubter.
The Marquess of Lothian, the present senior Kerr line, holds Ferniehirst Castle and the chieftainship today. Tradition holds, on the family's own publicity for the castle, that the present Marquess and his eldest son are both left-handed. The advance of the genetic argument is, by polite agreement at family weddings, the advance of folklore.