Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History. Anthony Adolph

       Kilchurn Castle, Loch Awe, Co. Argyll, seat of the Campbells of Glenorchy.

      The records you will be using have been greatly influenced by Scotland’s history, and in particular by King Malcolm III Canmore (d. 1093) and his immediate descendants, who consolidated royal power in Scotland.

      As T.C. Smout writes in his immensely useful A History of the Scottish People 1560-1830 (Fontana Press, 1969, repr. 1985), modern Scotland comprises 80 per cent rough moor and bog, and things have improved vastly since Malcolm’s day. Then, its roughly 250,000 people inhabited tiny islands of semi-cultivated land, linked by boggy footpaths, surrounded by a howling wilderness of wolves, beavers, wild boar and aurochs. Their stone-walled homes, roofed with brushwood, turf or skins, were clustered into tiny farmtouns or bailies. Though ostensibly farmers, most people still depended heavily on Stone Age skills of hunting wild animals and gathering shellfish and fruits. Their overlords, the mormaers or earls, were of Pictish origin, and their groupings and allegiances mainly tribal.

      Malcolm and his wife St Margaret were influenced by the Normans’ adaptation of Roman ideas on how to run countries, and introduced similar systems of government in Scotland. Their son David I (d. 1153) spent 40 years at the English court, where he was Earl of Huntingdon. When he inherited the throne David came north with a great retinue of Anglo-Norman followers. ‘French in race and manner of life, in speech and culture’, the Scottish kings started to transform Scotland into a modern state, using feudalism, creation of royal burghs and sheriffdoms, and church reform as their chief tools.

      To feudalize a country, the king assumed full ownership of all land, and then granted parts of it to lords in return for their military support. David I started this process, leaving the old mormaers in place, but as new feudal lords. Through intermarriage, the old and new aristocracies merged into a semi-Norman, semi-native ruling class.

      The Canmore kings peppered the Lowlands with royal castles, and round each created royal burghs, which were settlements of craftsmen and merchants with trade monopolies over the hinterland. The burgers were drawn mainly from immigrant Normans, Angles, Scandinavians and Flemings, and used English as their lingua franca, contributing to the retreat of Gaelic into the Highlands. David I planted his burghs as far south-west as Ayr and Renfrew, and as far north-east as Dingwall and Inverness, but though they later spread all over the Lowlands, they never penetrated the fastnesses of the Highlands.

      The ‘colonized’ lands were divided into counties, each with a sheriff controlling one of the castles. Sheriffs were either mormaers or Norman lords: the sheriffdoms rapidly became hereditary, but always subject to the King’s good graces. The system was gradually extended into the Highlands until the whole of Scotland had been ‘shired’. The counties remained unchanged until 1974, when they were replaced with large regions (such as Grampian and Strathclyde). These were replaced in 1996 with 32 council areas, broadly based on the old shires.

      From 1286 onwards the Crown began to weaken. Barony and regality courts sprouted up, ostensibly with royal authority, but effectively tools of the excessive local power of the clan chiefs, sheriffs and feudal lords (often, of course, one and the same).