The origin of the noble family of Hay dates from a remote period in our national history. In Normandy there were lands and a lordship denominated Hay, and in the roll of the adventurers who accompanied William the Conqueror into England in 1066, Le Sieur de la Haya is expressly mentioned; but the origin of the Erroll family is thus told by tradition:--The Danes, having landed in Aberdeenshire, ravaged the country as far as the town of Perth. King Kenneth hastened to give them battle, and the hostile armies met on the Leys of Luncarty, in Perthshire. The Scots at first gave way, and fled through a narrow pass, where they were stopped by a countryman of great strength and courage, and his two sons, who had no other weapons than the yokes of their ploughs, they having been at work in a field not far from the scene of action. Upbraiding the fugitives for their conduct in flying from the field, these peasants succeeded in rallying them. The Scots turned upon their conquerors, and, after a second encounter, still more furious than the first, they gained a complete victory. It is said that, after the Danes were defeated, the old man, lying on the ground, wounded and fatigued, cried "Hay, Hay," which word became the surname of his posterity. The King rewarded him with as much land in the Carse of Gowrie as a falcon should fly over before she settled; and a falcon, being accordingly let off, flew over an extent of ground six miles in length, afterwards called Erroll, and lighted on a stone still styled the Falcon Stone. The King also raised him to the dignity of nobility, and assigned to him and his family armorial bearings in accordance with the signal service which he and his two sons had rendered to their country. "Till lately, indeed," says Lord Lindsay, in his _Lives of the Lindsays_, "more especially in Great Britain and north of the Tweed, Genealogy merited the ridicule which was so freely lavished on her. It is but a few years ago since the most unfounded fictions were currently believed as to the origin of the Scottish families. The Stuarts were universally held to be the descendants of Banquo--the Douglases of 'the dark grey man,' who fought under King Salvathius against the Danes. It would be endless to enumerate all the fictions with which vanity and flattery peopled the blank of time; they are now forgotten--all save the beautiful legend of the patriarch Hay of Luncarty, on which Milton, in his youth, purposed to found a drama, and which has been immortalised by Shakespeare in the play of _Cymbeline_."