Clan Scott

The surname begins as a description of a people rather than of a family. Scotti was the Roman word for the Gaelic-speaking Irish, the raiders who crossed to settle the western seaboard and in time lent their name to Scotland itself. That neat line will not stand. There is no evidence the surname originated with those first settlers; in the medieval period it attached to the Kingdom of Scotland rather than to the earlier Gaelic kingdom of Dalriada, whose inhabitants did not call themselves by it. Other accounts still derive it from the Scots who came into Argyll out of Ireland, and the two readings have never been reconciled. To a twelfth-century clerk it meant something simpler: this man is a Scot (said, invariably, by somebody who was not).

The earliest certain record is the one George Fraser Black gives in his Surnames of Scotland: Uchtred, styled Filius Scoti, in the charter of about 1120 recording the foundation of Holyrood Abbey and Selkirk. In 1195 Henricus le Scotte witnessed a charter by David, Earl of Strathearn, and early in the thirteenth century a Master Isaac Scotus witnessed charters by the Bishop of St Andrews, the name already at work in the business of the kingdom, a century before the Wars of Independence. Some accounts push the riding families back to Peeblesshire in the tenth century, but the surname is only visible on parchment from the twelfth, and the earlier claim rests on tradition rather than record.

The strangest early bearer is Michael Scott, called the Wizard (1175–c.1232), a real scholar and philosopher whose reputation outran him by centuries. The novelist who shared his surname six hundred years later wrote of him in The Lay of the Last Minstrel as "addicted to the abstruse studies of judicial astrology, alchemy, physiognomy, and chiromancy. Hence he passed among his contemporaries for a skilful magician".

Four generations after Uchtred, Sir Richard Scott married the heiress of Murthockstone and took her estates with her; in 1296 Richard le Scott of the Buccleugh family became feudal lord of Murdostoun, the same place under its other spelling, by that marriage. He was appointed ranger of Ettrick Forest, an office that brought him the additional lands of Rankilburn, and the new laird built his residence at a spot called Buccleuch. The estates became generally known by that name, and so, before long, did the family. It is the hinge of the whole story: the Scotts took their designation from a place, and thereafter the place carried the name of the Scotts.

His son Sir Michael Scott, second Laird of Buccleuch, was a staunch supporter of Robert the Bruce through the Wars of Scottish Independence. Michael distinguished himself at Halidon Hill in 1333, being one of the few who escaped the carnage of that day, and was killed thirteen years later at the Battle of Durham in 1346. He left two sons. Robert became the third laird; John founded the Scotts of Synton, the cadet branch from which the Lords Polwarth descend. Robert died in about 1389, probably of wounds taken at the Battle of Otterburn. Three consecutive lairds, three English battlefields: that is the tax the Border country levied on the families who held it.

Robert Scott, fifth of Buccleuch, succeeded in 1402 after his father Walter was killed in battle, and began the accumulation that made the family formidable. In 1420 he acquired half the lands of Branxholme, held by Scotts from that year to this. He supported the Crown in its long struggle to break the power of the Clan Douglas, and when the king's cause prevailed was rewarded with tracts of Douglas land. On 23 July 1446 Sir Walter Scott took the remaining lands of the barony of Branxholme from Thomas Inglis in exchange for Murdostoun: the family traded away its Lanarkshire inheritance to buy out its Teviotdale stronghold entire. Goldielands, near Hawick, came the same year.

In 1463 Branxholme was erected into a free barony, held of the Crown for the annual payment of a red rose on the feast day of St John the Baptist, a rent so light it was really a statement about standing. The rest follows in a steady line. Newark, on what is now the Bowhill estate, dates from around 1423. William Scott, first laird of Harden, took that estate from Lord Home in 1501. Aikwood was granted to Robert Scott by James V in 1517, its tower dated to 1535. Dryhope came to the Scotts of Harden, and Smailholm, a fifteenth-century Pringle stronghold, to the same branch.

By the end of the fifteenth century the Scotts were one of the most powerful of all the Border clans, and the chief could call upon a thousand spears, not an army in any modern sense, but tenants, kinsmen and clients who lived on Scott ground and owed riding service for it, raised in a day and dispersed in a week. That is also why the word clan belongs here. The Highland-clan-versus-Lowland-family distinction is a nineteenth-century invention, as Sir Crispin Agnew of Lochnaw of the Court of the Lord Lyon has pointed out; an Act of the Scottish Parliament of 1587 speaks plainly of the "cheiffis and chiftanes of all clannis, alsweill on the hielandis as on the bordouris", and names the Border riding surnames alongside the rest.

Like most of the riding families the Scotts quarrelled with their neighbours, and the deepest quarrel was with the Kerrs. It began on 25 July 1526 in an action known as the Battle of Melrose, when Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch attacked to rescue the young James V, who was being held by the Douglas Earl of Angus at Darnick, just west of Melrose. Kerr of Cessford was killed in the fighting and Sir Walter wounded. The raid that opened twenty-six years of blood between two families was mounted on behalf of the king: in the Borders the Crown's business and the family's feud were frequently the same errand.

Sir Walter went on to fight the English at Pinkie Cleugh, and four years later was made warden of Liddesdale and the Middle Marches, the Crown's usual answer to Border disorder being to give the strongest local man charge of the frontier he had spent his life riding across. The Kerrs were biding their time. In 1552 they set upon him on Edinburgh High Street and killed him. The feud was won by neither side; it ended when Sir Thomas Kerr of Ferniehirst married Janet Scott, sister of the tenth Laird of Buccleuch, which is how most Border quarrels were actually closed.

The second great feud opened in 1565, when Scott of Buccleuch executed four Elliots for the minor crime of cattle rustling. Three hundred Elliots rode to avenge their kinsmen; losses on both sides were heavy, and eventually the two clans came to terms. Neither half of that story flatters anybody. Four hangings for stolen beasts was within the reach of Border justice as then practised, and three hundred riders in answer was the recognised remedy. That is the true shape of the reiving Borders: a country where the law and the feud used the same men, the same horses and the same short notice.

The tenth Laird of Buccleuch was a staunch supporter of Mary, Queen of Scots, in the years when that was an expensive loyalty. His son, another Walter Scott, became a daring military leader and is remembered by the name the Border gave him: Bold Buccleuch. In 1596 he carried out the most retold exploit on the frontier, rescuing his vassal William Armstrong, Kinmont Willy, from the fortress of Carlisle, which had been thought impregnable. This is no ballad embroidery: it was a deliberate breach of an English royal stronghold by a Scottish laird, and it was carried through. Walter Scot of Goldielands rode with him, and the tower at Goldielands dates from that man.

Then the frontier stopped being a frontier. James VI's accession to the English throne was followed by a royal policy to pacify the Borders, and the whole economy of raid, warden and reprisal the Scotts had lived inside for three centuries was dismantled by the simple fact of one king holding both ends of it.

Walter Scott, 1st Lord Scott of Buccleuch, took his fighting abroad instead and sought adventure on the Continent for the Prince of Orange in the Netherlands. His son Walter Scott, 2nd Lord Scott of Buccleuch, commanded a regiment for the States of Holland against the Spanish, and in 1619 was advanced to the rank of Earl of Buccleuch. In two generations the family turned from riders into professional soldiers, and from professional soldiers into peers.

During the Scottish Civil War, Francis Scott, 2nd Earl of Buccleuch, supported the National Covenant and opposed Charles I's religious policies, leading his cavalry against the royalist James Graham, 1st Marquis of Montrose, at the Battle of Philiphaugh, fought in the Scotts' own country, a few miles from Newark. The family's politics from here on are Border, Protestant and constitutional, which matters a century later.

Francis died in 1651 and was succeeded by his four-year-old daughter, Mary Scott, 3rd Countess of Buccleuch. The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland allowed Mary to be married at the age of just eleven; she died at fourteen. Her sister Anne Scott followed her and was reckoned one of the greatest heiresses in the kingdom. Said plainly: an estate of that size turned two small girls into property, and church and Crown handled them accordingly.

Charles II arranged for Anne Scott to marry his illegitimate son, James, Duke of Monmouth, who took the surname Scott on marriage. On their wedding day the couple were created Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, and the chief's title has been Duke of Buccleuch since 1663. Monmouth later rose in rebellion, was executed in 1685 and his titles forfeited, but because Anne had been created Duchess of Buccleuch in her own right, hers were untouched. She was succeeded by her grandson, Francis Scott, 2nd Duke. The dukedom survived the scaffold because it had been settled on the Scott rather than on the Stuart.

The Scotts were not a Jacobite family, and a reader tracing the name should know it. Several fought for the government in 1745. Captain John Scott, commanding two companies of Royal Scots, was beaten and taken prisoner at the Highbridge Skirmish that August, losing a sergeant and up to six men; wounded himself, he had the wound dressed at Achnacarry by arrangement of the Jacobite MacDonald of Keppoch. It did not stay so civil. Captain Caroline Frederick Scott of Guise's Regiment held Fort William in March 1746 and has been described as one of the most notorious Redcoats of the rebellion. One story alleges three Highlanders who surrendered to him were drowned in a mill flume at Lochoy, though there is no independent confirmation of it.

Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) was an Edinburgh advocate who invented the historical novel and used it to rebuild his country's idea of itself. From Waverley to Rob Roy, his books did more than any other single writer's to shape the modern romantic image of Scotland, and gave the Highland clans a cultural afterlife that has outlasted every institution the clans actually had. He built Abbotsford near Melrose, on the south bank of the Tweed, and in 1818 led the search that recovered the lost Honours of Scotland and handed them back to the nation.

In 1822 he staged the royal visit of King George IV to Scotland and put the king in tartan. The surge in demand for kilts and tartan outran the Scottish linen industry; the designation of individual clan tartans was largely settled in that same period, and the modern picture of clans, each with its own sett and its own patch of map, was promulgated by Scott himself. Queen Victoria and Balmoral cemented it. The irony is worth stating: the man who made all Scotland look Highland came from a Lowland Border riding family who spoke Scots, took cattle from their neighbours and had no part in Gaelic culture at all.

Two honest footnotes. The enthusiasm he set off is where the sept lists come from: nineteenth-century clan societies and tartan manufacturers drew up rosters linking as many surnames as possible to a clan regardless of historical connection, and readers chasing an affiliation should treat them with care. And Scott ended his life carrying a fortune in debt, which he set himself to clear by writing rather than let it go unpaid, as a point of honour.

The name crossed the frontier early and never came back. Scott appears in Kent by the fourteenth century, the family of Scot's Hall being the notable example, and its descent is unsettled: traced either to Alexander de Balliol or William de Balliol le Scot, brothers of John de Balliol, King of Scotland, or to retainers of King David I who held lands from the Earl of Huntingdon. The sources do not choose between them. Among the English bearers is Reginald Scot, who wrote The Discoverie of Witchcraft. The heaviest English concentrations are Northumberland and Cumbria, the other side of the same frontier, with a late-Victorian London middle class as well. In Ireland the name is first recorded as a surname in the seventeenth century. In Scotland it is one of the twelve commonest surnames in the country.

The branches took houses to match. Sir William Scott bought Ardross in 1607 and the Scotts of Elie held it to the end of the seventeenth century. Scotstarvit Tower was bought in 1611 and rebuilt in the 1620s by Sir John Scott of Scotstarvet. Easter and Wester Bavelaw went to Laurence Scott of Harperrig from James VI in 1628. The Scott family of Cahircon bought Knappogue in County Clare in 1800 and restored it. Piel Castle in England was held by the Scott Dukes of Buccleuch from the late eighteenth century and restored by Duke Walter Scott in 1877–78.

Out of that late-Victorian London line came Captain Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912), Royal Navy officer and Antarctic explorer, known to the world simply as Scott of the Antarctic. His last journal entry, written in 1912, is one of the stories this site keeps.

The senior line is still there. The Duke of Buccleuch is today one of the largest private landowners in the United Kingdom, and the Buccleuch collection hangs at Drumlanrig, Bowhill and Boughton. Bowhill was bought in 1747 by Francis Scott, 2nd Duke, for his son Lord Charles Scott, and remains the family's Borders house; Branxholme, held since 1420, was remodelled in 1837 for the 5th Duke. The chief is Richard Walter John Montagu Douglas Scott, 10th Duke of Buccleuch, whose subsidiary titles (Queensberry, Doncaster, Dalkeith, Drumlanrig and Sanquhar) read like a map of everything the family gathered up. Their motto is the least expected thing about a riding clan: Amo. I love.