Free Lament for a Maker by Michael Innes Page B

fairly, Reader, back beyond the Reformation we must presently go.
    You’ll know that while in the highlands the organization of folk was ever by clans, branch upon branch each under its chieftain ramifying out from the stock of the chief, in the lowland parts was no such thing, the unit being ever the family. And great and spreading as a family might be it had seldom the cohesion of the clan, so that the strait binding together of families, and alliance betwixt this family and that, made ever the labour of the lowland landowners. The district was secure and strong in which the lairds were well bound together by band and covenant.
    Now while the Guthries were yet but bonnet-lairds at Erchany the Lindsays of Mervie were great folk, barons that held in chief from the Crown, and whose land ran nigh to the Inneses’, the coarse Fleming creatures, between Moray and Spey. And in the boyhood of James III, when Scotland was a right lawless and faithless place, the Guthries entered into bond of man rent with the Lindsays. The bond is yet preserved in which a Ranald Guthrie swore to Andrew Lindsay ‘to be for him and with him, his kin and friends and their quarrels, in council, help, supply, maintenance and defence, as far as good conscience and reason will, in the straitest form of band of kindness against and before all living men except his allegiance to our Sovereign Lord the King alone.’ Whatever inducement the Lindsays in their wealth gave, or whatever persuasion in their power they exerted, the bond was a most inviolable oath for the five years’ space it was to hold. But the word about the king was but a pious and empty speak: ever in a bond of man rent was some thought of union against the power of the Crown.
    And against the Crown in time it was invoked. For the Lindsays stood in a like bond of fealty to the Earl of Huntly, and to Andrew Lindsay came the day when the Earl wrote that his cousin the Laird of Gight had been summoned to underlie the law in Edinburgh, and that the safety of his life required the instant presence of Lindsay and his carles at St Johnston, thence to ride with the Earl to Edinburgh. So Lindsay summoned Ranald Guthrie and his men to Mervie, and Lindsays and Guthries together rode to St Johnston – which is Perth – and there joining the Earl all held forward for Edinburgh, there to overawe the king’s justices on the Laird of Gight’s behalf. Only Andrew Lindsay, feigning matter of business, tarried a day behind, and riding fast and hard to Erchany there lay with Ranald Guthrie’s wife.
    For a year and a day Ranald Guthrie held himself quiet; then he gathered such power as he might and made a foray upon Mervie and took up Andrew Lindsay, all unprepared from amid his carles, and carried him away. The Guthries carried Lindsay to their own lands and there they hacked the lecherous fingers from him, and they sent him home with an hourglass round his neck to mind the Lindsays they had bided that year-and-a-day only that the bond of man rent might be expired and the Guthrie faith unbroken. And Andrew Lindsay died.
    That was the beginning of the feud betwixt Lindsays and Guthries, and all the mischieving that was betwixt them would be but a dreich tale to tell. But as the generations passed the power of the Guthries grew and that of the Lindsays ever declined and in the Killing Time they were broken entirely, there were no Lindsays of Mervie known any longer among the gentle Lindsays of Scotland, and the burgher folk from Dunwinnie came and quarried all the New Wynd and half the Cowgate from the ruins of Mervie Tower. And the Guthries, that had long memories and unforgiving hearts, would give a bit laugh as they whiles went hunting down Mervie glen.
    But there were Lindsays enough in these lands still, crofter folk with no history, that might think themselves the heirs of the old gentle Lindsays if they would. So still there was the old enmity, Lindsays thinking always of the Guthries as the worse