of the Macphersons. These last were so offended at the decision of
Macintosh that they withdrew from the field, and became, for a time,
spectators of the action. The battle soon commenced, and was fought
with great obstinacy. Many of the Macintoshes, and almost all the
Davidsons, were cut off by the superior number of the Camerons. The
Macphersons seeing their friends and neighbours almost overpowered,
could no longer restrain themselves, and friendship got the better
of their wounded pride. They, therefore, at this perilous crisis,
rushed in upon the Camerons, who, from exhaustion and the loss they
had sustained, were easily defeated. The few that escaped, with their
leader, were pursued from Invernahavon, the place of battle, three
miles above Ruthven, to Badenoch. Charles Macgilony was killed on a
hill in Glenbenchir, which was long called Torr-Thearlaich, _i.e._,
Charles’-hill.[136]
In the opinion of Shaw this quarrel about precedency was the origin
of the celebrated judicial conflict, which took place on the North
Inch of Perth, before Robert III., his queen, Annabella Drummond, and
the Scottish nobility, and some foreigners of distinction, in the
year 1396, and of which a variety of accounts have been given by our
ancient historians. The parties to this combat were the Macphersons,
properly the clan Chattan, and the Davidsons of Invernahavon, called
in the Gaelic _Clann-Dhaibhidh_. The Davidsons were not, as some
writers have supposed, a separate clan, but a branch of the clan
Chattan. These rival tribes had for a long period kept up a deadly
enmity with one another, which was difficult to be restrained; but
after the award by Macintosh against the Macphersons, that enmity
broke out into open strife, and for ten years the Macphersons and the
Davidsons carried on a war of extermination, and kept the country in
an uproar.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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