Although it came to nothing, King James III took a very dim view of the plan when it came to light in 1475. He charged MacDonald with treason, confiscated his properties on the Scottish mainland, and compelled him to acknowledge his status as a vassal. John himself proved willing to submit, but the rest of the Clan MacDonald, and in particular John’s son Angus, resented both the territorial losses and the humiliation. For the next twenty years the Isles were divided by this bitter internal dispute, and the struggle left them fatally weakened. In 1490, shortly after defeating his father in battle, Angus was murdered. Three years later, the king of Scots intervened and imposed his authority. The days of the Lords of the Isles, he declared, were over – all their lands and power were forfeit to the Scottish Crown.
The king in question was James IV, who was rather a good king. Although apparently unpleasant in his youth, he matured into a highly capable ruler, a man who understood the realities of power in Scotland and knew how to work the system to his best advantage. More than competent as a military leader, and highly assiduous when
it
came to travelling his realm and dishing out justice, James IV’s real strength lay in his ability to delegate power to the right people. His decision in 1493 to intervene in the Isles was his first political act as an adult, but he was already old enough to appreciate that he would need plenty of help in enforcing the confiscation of the lordship. Even his less capable ancestors had encouraged their lowland nobles to build castles along the highland-lowland divide, entrusting them to bring order to the region.
It was under James IV, however, that the greatest amount of castle-building took place, as Crown and nobility worked together to tackle the problem of reducing the North-West to obedience. The major beneficiaries of this joint-stock enterprise were the Gordon family, earls of Huntly, and the Campbells, earls of Argyll. However, few of the castles built by these men survive today; in fact, the best architectural example of the collaboration between the Scottish Crown and its aristocracy was provided by someone a little more lowly.
Castle Urquhart is one of the most dramatically sited buildings in Scotland. It stands on a rocky spur on the shores of Loch Ness. The site has been fortified since ancient times, but the first castle was built to an enclosure design in the thirteenth century. Because of its position on the highland-lowland fault-line, control of Urquhart was long contested by the Stewart kings and the Lords of the Isles, and the castle was taken and retaken several times by both sides during the fifteenth century. Following the forfeiture of 1493, however, James IV was determined to hold on to it. And so, paradoxically, he gave it to someone else – a minor nobleman called John Grant of Freuchie.
The king’s gift of Urquhart to John Grant in 1509 was a big thank you for more than twenty years of loyal service to the Crown. It made permanent an arrangement that had existed since the last years of the fifteenth century, under which the Grants had held the castle on a series of temporary leases. Nevertheless, the perpetual
custody
of a former royal castle was a terrific prize, and as such it came with several conditions attached. In return for holding Urquhart in perpetuity, the Grants were obliged to keep the castle in good repair, and bound to restore the damaged buildings to their former glory. According to the text of the charter that confirmed the king’s gift, the Grants were ‘to construct within the castle a hall, chamber and kitchen, with all the requisite offices, such as a pantry, bakehouse, brewhouse, oxhouse, kiln and dovecote’.
Most importantly, the king wanted them to construct a tower house on the site. They were ‘to repair or build at the castle a tower, with an outwork or rampart of stone and lime, for protecting the lands and the people from the inroads of thieves and wrongdoers’.
The line about thieves and wrongdoers is the real catch, and goes to show that there is no such thing as a free castle. The king could have got anyone to agree to rebuild Urquhart had it not been located on the fringes of hostile territory; the real job was going to be holding on to the castle in the face of attacks from the disinherited and disgruntled Clan MacDonald. Unsurprisingly, the Lords of the Isles did not take too kindly to being told that their authority was forfeit. In the fifty years after 1493 they endeavoured to win it back, making frequent raids on the mainland, and often sweeping up the Great Glen to try and reclaim Urquhart. On All Saints Day 1513, just four years after John Grant took ‘permanent’ custody, they succeeded. The Grant family were driven out of the castle, and were unable to return for a full three years. When John Grant later listed his losses before the king’s council, it was clear that the clansmen had taken everything but the kitchen sink. Pots, pans, kettles, beds, sheets, blankets and pillows had all been carried away as booty. All the castle’s stores of fish, bread, ale, cheese and butter had been similarly confiscated or consumed. Moreover, the lands around the castle had been completely devastated; three hundred cows and a thousand sheep had been comprehensively rustled. Altogether, John Grant estimated his losses at over £2,000.
Small wonder, then, that the Grant family, when they eventually got a moment’s peace, built one of the more defensible tower houses of the sixteenth century. Although it is now very ruinous, having suffered at the hands of a great storm in the eighteenth century, the Grant Tower still exhibits certain features of real warlike intent. The machicolations around the top of the castle are, for the most part, purely decorative (there are no holes), and may in fact date to a later rebuilding. Over both the entrances, however, they suddenly get serious, standing discreetly but distinctly proud of the wall. Equally subtle but no less murderous in intent are the pistol holes secreted under most of the windowsills. It should also be remembered that, in addition to the tower, the Grant family rebuilt the rest of the castle, as the conditions of their tenure demanded. The strength of the restored fortifications indicate that, come what may, they were determined to cling on tight to the castle the king had given them. And so they did. In spite of repeated attacks, it was not until 1911 that the family finally surrendered their castle, this time into the friendly arms of the state.
John Grant of Freuchie was favoured in 1509 in the expectation that he would defend the area around Urquhart from attack. His role, however, was not simply a military one. He was also expected to govern the region in peacetime, and to this end he was entrusted with extensive police powers. This hardly made him exceptional – even a good, energetic king like James IV, who hardly stopped touring his country to hear court cases, was only able to exercise a loose, supervisory jurisdiction over his kingdom. Most of the decisions and judgements that affected people’s everyday lives were in the hands of men like John Grant.
People who fell foul of the law in John Grant of Freuchie’s neighbourhood could expect to end up in the prison at castle Urquhart. Cold, dank and windowless, its facilities (or lack of them) are typical
of
castle prisons at the time. Apparently the long narrow cell once had a latrine chute at one end, which must been a source of some consolation to both gaoled and gaoler. Because Urquhart is an older castle and had its tower house added later, the prison is situated in the old thirteenth-century gatehouse. With tower houses built from scratch, it was more common for prisoners to be kept in the basement of the tower itself, as was the case at Threave and Borthwick. Prisons in towers like this were, quite literally, pits. Accessible only from a hatch above, they lacked even the basic sanitary facilities once on offer at Urquhart. The only solace for a detainee in such circumstances was that his or her incarceration would probably not last long: days or even weeks, but probably not years. Imprisonment in the Middle Ages was rarely used as a form of punishment. Rather, a prison was used like a cell in a police station or a remand centre – somewhere to hold the accused until it was time to go to court.
Court was never very for away – sometimes just a walk upstairs. At Urquhart it was a short distance across the courtyard to the castle’s great hall. Today little remains of this; only low ruins of walls and cellarage are now visible, but in its day it would have been an all-purpose room, used for public business as well as for dining and entertainment. When occasion demanded, it would also have served as a courtroom for John Grant. Lords in England and Wales would use their castle halls in much the same way, but there was a big difference in the powers they possessed. South of the border, the jurisdiction of a local lord in his manor court would only extend to minor matters – drunkenness, brawling and so on. Everything else was the responsibility and preserve of the king, and lords who exceeded their remit were in turn punished severely. In Scotland, the opposite was true. Even at the lowest level of the baron’s court, lords had the right to fine, mutilate and even execute criminals. An English lord could have you clapped in the stocks, but John Grant of Freuchie could send you to the gallows.
John Grant’s powers over the life and death of offenders in his locale may seem remarkable, but they are far from being the most startling aspect of justice in his day. Beyond the court and prison lay another route, at once more ancient and more commonplace: the blood feud. The word itself conjures up the worst images of medieval Scottish society – the bloody feuding of Walter Scott legend: marauding clansmen armed with claymores, sweeping down from the hills and laying waste to villages; rival families slugging it out for generations… an endless cycle of mindless violence. Like boisterous schoolboys left to play unsupervised, the turbulent nobles of Scotland apparently knew no better.
It would be silly to pretend that there is not some truth in this. Fighting between clans could indeed be drawn out and bloody. The Grants of Freuchie had their fair share of scraps with their neighbours, the Farquharsons; they would frequently make off with each others’ cattle or grain, and raids could end in mutilation and murder. Such a view of feuding, however, gives only half the picture. Blood feuds could also be a way of limiting violence and ensuring peace in a society where the power of the state was weak. The documentary record reveals that individuals and communities would go to extraordinary lengths to restore order when the peace was broken. In October 1527, for example, John Grant of Freuchie made his last datable appearance in a written agreement with the Farquharsons. As chief of the Grants, and accompanied by his sons and other leading members of the clan, he met with Finlay Farquharson and family, his former enemies. Both sides had come together to lay down their weapons and put aside their differences.
‘Deploring of the taking ill, and the cutting off, and the plundering,’ the document began, and went on to say that both sides desired ‘so far as human weakness can, to redeem, satisfy and amend the disgraceful crimes towards God and each other.’
Later in the same document, there are elaborate clauses as to how this restitution of wealth and salving of injured pride is to be achieved.
The
really interesting part, however, comes in the middle. Here, both sides are anxious to spell out that the decision to stop fighting is mutual. Neither side has been pressured into the agreement by some greater power, like a judge, bishop or king. Both the Grants and the Farquharsons, it says, were acting ‘in themselves; neither induced by force nor fear, uncompelled and unconstrained, of their own mere and free wills’.
Agreements such as this were quite common, and prove that there was more to feuding than just fighting. Feuding was also about doing justice, even though to us the whole concept might sound very unjust. A system like this often meant that no one was punished for a particular crime; you could quite easily get away with murder. Without a higher authority waving the sword of justice, you could not expect judgement and demand retribution. The best that both parties could hope for was that the balance would be restored to society, and that the losses on each side would be compensated.
This could result in arrangements that sound quite astounding to modern ears, such as the oft-quoted example of Catherine Patrick. Placed at a disadvantage when her father was murdered in a feud, she was eventually compensated by being married to the murderer’s son. It sounds almost farcical, but the fact of the matter was that an agreement like this was conceived to heal divisions between two kin groups. Catherine had to look on it not so much as losing a father as gaining a husband.
On the one hand, the example of Catherine Patrick shows that, at a very basic level, the victims of crime could expect some form of justice. On the other hand, the justice was rough, and the fact that her father was murdered by one of his neighbours can only indicate that late medieval Scotland was not an especially peaceful place to live. John Grant of Freuchie, having fought with the MacDonalds and feuded with the Farquharsons, could also have told you as much. At the same time, however, he could also have told you about his efforts
to
combat disorder and bring stability to the region around his castle. As a judge, he sat in the courtroom of his great hall, handing down verdicts with an authority delegated to him by the king. As a powerful individual in his own right, he often acted as an impartial arbiter, bringing an end to the feuds of others. As a man who ultimately wanted peace for his friends, family and tenants, he buried the hatchet with his neighbours, and swore to try and live in peace.
Men like Grant built castles like Urquhart in anticipation of troubled times ahead. But the warlike appearance of these buildings can also blind us to the fact that many of them were built in a spirit of co-operation. Constructed with encouragement from the Crown, they are evidence that both the Stewarts and their nobles desired a more peaceful and prosperous society. Scotland in the late Middle Ages was not the romantic but anarchic wasteland depicted by Sir Walter Scott; neither was it a society that never knew peace. When Sir John Grant accepted James IV’s gift of Urquhart, he not only proved that kings and nobles could be perfect partners; he also accepted responsibility to administer justice in the region – to act as policeman, judge and peacemaker. In the words of the charter that the king gave him, he was there ‘to protect the lands and the people’.