Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 389, March 1848Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 389, March 1848
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
The meagreness of these entries whets one's appetite for some detail
of the stirring and tragical events of which they form the bare
indexes. With the exception of the great Highland feuds, which burned
on so large a scale as to be in a manner historical, the earliest
detailed account of a crime arising in family animosity is connected
with the feud between the Drummonds and the Blairs in the year 1554.
The crime which brought the feud within the notice of the law, was the
murder of George Drummond of Leadcrieff and William his son. The
perpetrators, besides a long list of Blairs, include several other
names still known in the Braes of Perthshire--such as Chalmers,
Butter, Smyth, and Robertson. They were charged with assembling to the
number of eighty, "with jacks, coats of mail, steel bonnets,
lance-staffs, long culverings with lighted lints, and other weapons
invasive." The day on which this tumultuous assembly proceeded to
their work of vengeance was a Sunday, and the place chosen for the
perpetration was the church of Blair. Being apparently afraid of the
number of friends and retainers by whom their victims happened to be
surrounded during the performance of divine worship, it is stated that
they were obliged to postpone their purpose, and that "they passed to
the Laird of Gormok's place, and their dyned with him:" a pretty large
dinner-party, certainly. Leaving spies to watch the enemy's motions,
they were soon afterwards summoned to their task, and their victims
became an easy prey. The occupation of Drummond and his son--when we
remember that it was a Sabbath afternoon--might, perhaps, be scarcely
considered so characteristic of Scottish habits as their
assassination. They were "alane, at their pastime-play, at the
row-bowles, in the high market-gate, beside the kirk of Blair, in
sober manner, trusting na trouble nor harm to have been done to them,
but to have lived under God's peace."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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