Last, and worst of all, Walter Johnstone, brother of Mrs Margaret, had come with attendants to the house of Netherplace by night, broke in, and beat the owner, Mungo Johnstone, in a [Sidenote: 1690.] most outrageous manner, besides squeezing the hands of his son, a boy, that the blood sprung below his nails. The matter was brought before the Privy Council by complaints from both parties, and as the awards went rather against Lockerby and his son for keeping his daughter-in-law out of her rights, than against her and her friends for their violent procedure on the other side, we may reasonably infer that the James VI. style of justice was far from extinct in the land. A case of violent procedure on the part of a landlord towards a tenant occurred about the same time. Catherine Herries possessed the lands of Mabie, in the stewartry of Kirkcudbright, in liferent. In the early part of 1689, she entered into a communing with one Robert Sturgeon, to set to him the small farm of Crooks, promising him a nine years’ lease; and he was admitted to possession, though upon a verbal agreement only. He immediately addressed himself to the improvement of the ground by ditching and draining, and in a year laid out upon it two hundred merks, or something more than eleven pounds sterling. Meanwhile, the lady united herself to John Maxwell of Carse, ‘a notorious papist,’ who had not long before been searched for as a person dangerous to the new government. When the lady learned that Sturgeon had been active among the searchers, she seems to have resolved to discontinue his connection with her estate. At Lammas 1690, alleging that he had been warned away at the preceding Pasch, she caused him to be summoned before the steward-depute of Kirkcudbright, who decreed him to remove within an irregularly brief period. He had no resource but to go to Edinburgh, and sue for a suspension of the decree; but when he returned with this document, he found that the lady, the day before, had violently ejected his wife, bairns, and bestial, ‘whereof many were lost.’ He intimated the suspension; but Lady Mabie, disregarding it, obtained a precept from the steward-depute, ordering him to answer for a thousand merks on account of his unlawful intrusion upon her estate, and authorising his imprisonment till this was paid. Without any other warrant, as Sturgeon complains to the Council, the lady, under cloud of night, sends fifteen or sixteen persons, whereof John Lanerick, writer in Dumfries, was ringleader, with swords and staves, and takes the complainer out of his bed, as if he had been a notorious malefactor, and carries him bound prisoner to the Tolbooth of Kirkcudbright, where he lay six weeks, his wife, bairns, and goods being again ejected, and his house shut up. [Sidenote: 1690.]