Toom Tabard, an Empty King at Stracathro

The hollowed out ghost of a king haunts the quiet kirkyard of Stracathro, the scene of his brutally symbolic humiliation.  If this sounds like one of the Ringwraiths of Lord of the Rings, the mortal kings who were seduced and consigned to an eternal un-dead state because they were seduced by their own attraction to dark power.  Pure fiction, or is it?  The kirk of Stracathro is a relatively modern building, but the place is of interest to archaeologists and others for its ancient history.  Not the 12^th century battle which happened near here, nor indeed the 13^th century event which we will discuss soon.  In 2012 archaeologists from the Roman Gask Project were searching the area for evidence of the world’s most northerly Roman fort, itself a remarkable thing certainly.  The Roman fort here marks one end of a frontier which predates the Antonine and Hadrianic borders.  While the team were searching for Roman age remains, they found a trace of the medieval church site next to the location of the Roman fort.  It was in this church, in the year 1296, that the Scottish king John Balliol was humiliatingly stripped of every badge and emblem of kinghood. 

   As a great-great-great-great-grandson of King David I, Balliol became king in 1292.  But, for a complex number of reasons, and primarily the avaricious connivance of King Edward I of England, Balliol was not able to rule effectively or to be his own man.  The degree to which this was due to his personal failings, sheer bad luck, bad judgement or the malign will of King Edward I of England is open to question, but the facts are these:  Edward was eager to control and manipulate this Scottish king that he had engineered into power.  In 1293, for example, John was forced before an English court, found in contempt and compelled to give up his three main castles. While John was willing to be a vassal king Edward expected him to be a humble servant and put him in an impossible position. When war broke out between France and England Edward's requests became even more outrageous and King John went to make a treaty with France. This treaty of 1295 meant neither country could seek a separate peace with England.  Such was the beginning of the enduring ‘Auld Alliance’ between Scotland and France, a remarkable and profound alliance forged by a king reckoned the weakest that Scotland ever had.

 John Balliol marched his army and against Carlisle. King  Edward marched northwards and soon controlled most of the Scottish lowlands. John had few allies and indeed few options left and he surrendered to Edward in 1296, signing a document which admitted his folly in attacking Edward and handed over control of the land and people of Scotland.

Edward made John suffer by having him dress up as king one last time and then taking the crown from his head, the sword and sceptre from his hands, the ring from his finger and even the fur from his coat. John was publicly humiliated and would later be given the nickname Toom Tabard, meaning empty coat.  Balliol was then imprisoned in the Tower of London and was eventually released into the custody of the Pope. From 1301 until his death in 1314 (significantly the year of the Battle of Bannockburn) he lived on his estate in Picardy.

 The truth behind a legend, even a legend of failure, is hard to disentangle.  Like the despised English King John, known as ‘Lackland’, it’s certain that Balliol was mocked by those who sought to distance themselves from him.  To be painted as a weak vassal of the English despot is a simplistic picture in a complicated period where even eventual champions like Robert Bruce, the future king, swore fealty to Edward.  And yet John Balliol was the monarch who instituted the long-running Auld Alliance between Scotland and France in 1295.

   The Angus connection with his downfall follows King John’s invasion of England., supporting Philip the Fair of France.  Following the Scots’ ineffectual invasion of Cumberland, Edward stormed Berwick.  It was here that Henry, abbot of Arbroath, brought him a renunciation of Baliol's homage and fealty, which led the English monarch to exclaim, 'Has the foolish fellow done such folly? If he will not come to us, we will go to him.' Dunbar was captured and then Roxburgh and Edinburgh Castle was taken by Edward. Stirling.

King John wrote a letter to Edward of England from his camp at Kincardineon 2^nd July, admitting his error in the alliance with France.  On 7^th July, in the churchyard of Stracathro, there was a pitiable drama when Baliol was forced to renounce his alliance with the French king.  He was made to sign a document admitting he had allied himself with his feudal overlord's enemies and surrendered his kingdom to Edward. His surcoat was publicly stripped from his body, humiliatingly removing the arms of Scotland.  Three days later, at Brechin, dressed in a plain white gown, King John gave up his kingdom to Antony Beck, bishop of Durham, representative of the English king.  On that same day he appeared before King Edward at Montrose, who had come north from Dunbar and gave him the white rod, symbol of resignation by a vassal of his fief into the hands of his superior. There is some confusion whether the symbolic humiliation of the surcoat being ripped happened at Stracathro or Montrose.  But no matter.  Also present were the future king, Robert Bruce and his father.  In response to their ambitions and glee at the fate of their enemy, Edward of England sourly commented: ‘Have we nothing else to do but win kingdoms for you?’ In August the former king was taken south to England and had periods of imprisonment before being deported to Picardy.   

   The legend of John’s disgrace descended down the royal line itself.  When John, Earl of Carrick, succeeded to the throne he was obliged to discard his ill-omened birth name John and became King Robert III.  Future Stuarts avoided the name and this aversion may have filtered down into the modern royal family who also avoid the name, following the deaths of sons of queens Alexandra and Mary who bore that cursed name.

Forgotten Sons of Angus: Moonlight of the West

History – even relatively recent history – has at least two faces, depending on who is telling the tale.  Thomas Moonlight was a native of Boysack Muir, in St Vigeans, near Arbroath, born in 1833 and emigrated to America at the age of twelve, unaccountably bored with his situation as a junior assistant to a draper in Scotland.  For some years he was a farmer in the gloriously named  Kansas settlement of Kickapoo (probably not as exotic as it sounds), but then joined the U.S. Army in 1853 and became a famous and at times infamous soldier in the American Civil War and then the subsequent Indian Wars.

Broken hero?  Thomas Moonlight.

    Was there ever a better name for a dashing adventurer than Colonel Moonlight?  There is a legend about the origination of this distinctive name.  Some time in the middle of the 17^th century an Angus farmer and his wife sitting at their hearth were disturbed by the sound of a crying baby at their doorstep.  They opened the door and brought the chilled and abandoned bairn inside.  There was no clue as to who had left the child there.  For some reason, whether it was whimsy or some odd superstition, they did not give the foundling their own surname even though they brought it up as one of their own, but they gave it the name of ‘Moonlight’, after the condition of the night on which he was found.  A twist to this ancestral fable is attached to Thomas’s contemporary, the intrepid George Fairweather Moonlight (1832-1884), a gold-digger who sought his fortune in America and then New Zealand.  Though he was actually born in Glenbervie in the Mearns, legend says he was discovered as an abandoned child on the hard, moonlit streets of Aberdeen one night. (Prosaic people may prefer to believe that the Angus surname actually comes from the place-name Munlichty.)

   When the war between the states broke out Moonlight enlisted for the northern states as an ordinary soldier.   Quickly rising to the rank of orderly sergeant, Moonlight went  from strength to strength in the subsequent campaigns and  he eventually became colonel of the Eleventh Kansas Cavalry.  He dazzled at the battled of Dry Wood, Pea Ridge and Westport.  Then he reigned in 1864 at the end of the Civil War.  Although one army veteran recalled more that 40 years after Moonlight’s death that ‘there was no better or braver man in the Civil War’, it remains hard to judge how effective a fighter he was in the campaigns.  He wrote his own account of his military adventures, but a recent analysis has concluded that ‘He caustically evaluated the performance of others while lauding his own actions’ (‘ “The Eagle of the 11^th Kansas”:  Wartime Reminiscences of Colonel Thomas Moonlight,’ K. Lindberg,  M. Matthews, T. Moonlight, The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 1, Spring 2003.)

   The record of Moonlight’s reputation becomes distinctly darker when he re-enlisted to fight the native Americans in 1865.  Colonel Moonlight has been blamed for the disastrous Battle of Platte Bridge.  Moonlight was in charge of the famous Fort Laramie when he sallied out with 500 men in search of his native enemies in May 1865.  Unfortunately the force was led in entirely the wrong direction.  Things worsened the following week when, on the 26^th May,  he captured two Oglala braves and had them hanged.  His men – or at least some of them – warned him against his subsequent move:  leaving the corpses twisting on the gallows, to the fury of the local population.  The following month there was a further misjudgement.  He led a lightning raid out of Laramie which exhausted the horses and let a large section of his force to limp back to their base.  A raid by Lakota braves deprived the remainder of their steeds and the men were humiliatingly forced to walk 60 miles back to their fort.  The colonel was said to have been drunk during the episode and, even worse, had not put a guard on his remaining horses.  The antagonized and ascendant Lakota Sioux and Cheyennes continued to raid army camps and ambush stagecoaches and on 26^th July 1865 a native force of some thousands defeated the army at Platte Bridge.  There were relatively few army casualties, but the defeat was still humiliating.  On the 7^th July Moonlight was thrown out of the army. 

Fort Laramie.

   And yet, Moonlight was not only a survivor, but proved by his native talent and character in the equally ferocious area of politics and diplomacy.  He became Secretary of State of Kansas in 1868.  Four years later he became a Democratic  state senator and in 1887 he was appointed governor of the Wyoming Territory.  He became minister to Bolivia in 1893 and died in Leavenworth, Kansas on 7^th February 1899.

Advertisement in The Arbroath Directory, 1926, showing the surname still evident locally

The Stone and the Spirit of Independence

The most recent marketing campaign by Angus Council attempting to entice tourists into the county boasts that Angus is the birthplace of Scotland.  How true that may be is a matter for debate and their consciences, but it was doubtless inspired by the fact that the Abbot of Arbroath wrote, or at least sponsored, the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, addressed to the Pope and expressing the case for Scottish independence and voicing support for their chosen king, Robert Bruce:

From... countless evils we have been set free, by the help of Him Who though He afflicts yet heals and restores, by our most tireless Prince, King and Lord, the Lord Robert.He, that his people and his heritage might be delivered out of the hands of our enemies, met toil and fatigue, hunger and peril, like another Macabaeus or Joshua and bore them cheerfully.Him, too, divine providence, his right of succession according to or laws and customs which we shall maintain to the death, and the due consent and assent of us all have made our Prince and King.To him, as to the man by whom salvation has been wrought unto our people, we are bound both by law and by his merits that our freedom may be still maintained, and by him, come what may, we mean to stand.Yet if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule.It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom - for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself..Given at the monastery of Arbroath in Scotland on the sixth day of the month of April in the year of grace thirteen hundred and twenty and the fifteenth year of the reign of our King aforesaid.

   

   It was on the site of the altar of Arbroath Abbey that the Stone of Destiny was surrendered, on 11th April 1951, after having been daringly liberated from Westminster Abbey. The custodian of the abbey, James Wishart, gained a degree of fame in the press for finding the iconic stone, though not to the same extent as those students who brought the slab back from England. Wishart was approached by a group of three men who had carried an object covered by the Scottish flag. He asked if it was the Stone of Destiny and was told it was. The custodian remained with the stone until the police came to recover it. In my possession I have an old Ministry of Works Guide to Arbroath Abbey, with a photograph signed by Mr Wishart, showing the spot where the stone was deposited.




   The Stone of Scone was borne away, ultimately returned to the Abbey. But there were rumours that the stone which was returned was not the original Stone. The mystery of the whereabouts of the relic inspired widespread mystery. For some reason, American reporter Joseph Flanagan believed that the stone had been taken to the island of Iona, and journeyed there to find it, but all he discovered in January 1951 was knowing smiles. Was the rediscovered Stone of Destiny a duplicate and a fraud? Remember that there had been tales which said the stone which Edward I of England was allowed to take from Scone Abbey was a monkish copy.

   Enter the Scottish Knights Templars and the pro-independence 1320 Club, who in the 1970s said that they had access to the ‘real’ Stone of Destiny.  This version of the story says that the stone was taken from Westminister Abbey in the late 16^th century and spirited back to Scotland.  It ended up in St Columba’s Church, Logie Street, Dundee (across the road from the ancient Logie Kirk), under thecare of Rev David Nimmo.  The Stone of Destiny (or perhaps it was a copy made in the 1950s to fool the police?) was displayed in the kirk behind bars.  What is the truth and who knows?  The kirk was demolished in the early 1990s and replaced by a nursing home and the Stone was moved away elsewhere.

Programme of the 1950 Pageant at Arbroath Abbey.

The City of Brechin - Culdees and the Round Tower

Brechin, like that other early beacon of Christianity, Abernethy in Perthshire, has a distinctive and rare round tower that is evidence of its importance to the Celtic Church.  It also gives a clue to the origins or at least overt influence of the clerics who operated here, as there are a large number of such towers in Ireland (76 at one reckoning) and just these two examples in Scotland.  Brechin’s tower, which was said to sway like a reed in the wind according to local tradition, is now joined on to the cathedral, though originally it was free standing.  Its elasticity was tested during storms by some locals who used to insert knives into the gaps in the stonework, and when they retrieved them the blades had been snapped by the movement of the building.  (You had to make your own entertainment in those days!)

Another clue as to the importance of the site in early medieval times is that it is recorded as having a settlement of those shadowy Christian clerics called the celi de, or Culdees, servants of God.  Although famous in Celtic studies partly because of the mystery about exactly who and what they were, there were actually few recorded Culdee settlements in early times, ranging from places of importance like Dunkeld, Lochleven, Monymusk and St Andrews, as far south as York.  The fact that there were two known monastic Culdees foundations in Angus – Brechin and Monifieth – is intriguing to say the least.

   The round tower at Brechin escaped the vandalising renovation which was inflicted on the adjacent cathedral in the 19^th century, though plans to have it demolished in 1807 and have the masonry incorporated into the cathedral were thankfully scuppered, largely through the intervention of Lord Panmure and Mr Skene of Careston.  The architect’s plans were rebuffed, with an addition threat that the first man who touched a stone of the tower in the wrong fashion would promptly be hanged from it.  Even before this date the tower had been subject to attack – usually from the elements.  Although the tower is roughly 85 feet (26 m) high it is topped off with a relatively modern spire.  This again may have been the result of damage recorded in the kirk session records under the date 5^th November 1683:  ‘The head of the Litl Steeple, blowen over.’  The tower may have been originally built probably in the 11^th century, several hundred years before the adjacent cathedral.  The theory that such towers were originally constructed as places of refuge from rampaging Vikings is not proven.

   Another indication of Irish influence is in the name of Brechin itself, which may derive from an Irish personal name, Brachan.  There is however no specific mention of the place until the reign of King Kenneth II (971-995):  ‘Hic est qui tribuit magnam civatem Brechne Domino,’ signifying that the monarch gave the large city of Brechin to the Church.  There is no further substantial trace of this important ecclesiastic settlement until the reign of David I (1124-1153), when the Episcopal office was revived or at least modernised and a charter records rights given to ‘the Bishops and Keledei of Brechin’.  The continued recognition of the Culdees as an entity continues throughout that century, with local Episcopal grants being witnessed by members of the order such as ‘Bricius, prior Keledeorum de Brechin,’ ‘Gillefali, Kelde,’  ‘Mathalan, Kelde,’ and ‘Mallebryd, prior Keledeorum nostorum’.  By the mid 13^th century the Culdees had fallen away and they were replaced by ‘regular’ church offices like deacons and archdeacons.  Many of the Culdees appear to have married and their role was hereditary, but in decline the abbot and others of the old order became a second-rate layman, and a fourth-rate member of society’ [The Culdees of the British Isles, William Reeves, Dublin, 1864.].

   By the 13th century the ecclesiastical power at Brechin was vested in individuals like Albin or Albinus (who died in 1269).  He is recorded as being the first precentor of Brechin Cathedral and later became the bishop here.  This was despite the fact that he was the bastard son of a bastard of David, Earl of Huntingdon, brother of King William the Lion.  His father was in fact Henry de Brechin, Lord of Brechin.  It was during his episcopate that a bull of Pope Innocent IV recorded (18^th February 1250) that, ‘The brethren who have been wont to be in the church of Brechin were called Keledei and now by change of name are styled canons.’  Another sign that times were changing in Brechin was Albin’s introduction of a certain English monk named Egbert, a Carmetite, who was an expert in Arabic.  Although some of the priests and deans of Brechinst still maintained ‘native’ Gaelic names, another mark of the widening of the clerical horizon is in the name of the extremely obscure local martyr St Stolbrand, who sounds as if he would have been more at home in Germany than the Celtic kingdom of  Alba.

The Louping Ague - The Mystery Illness of Angus

Some time between the years 1780 and 1789 a Dundonian physician named Dr William Farquharson wrote to the eminent professor of medicine at the University of Edinburgh, William Cullen, describing a disease or condition which had lately afflicted some unfortunate people in the county town of Forfar.  Several weeks previously a certain Dr Ogilvy had notified Dr Farquharson of a most unique condition which had afflicted some patients in the burgh.  The symptoms were so strange that Farquharson went immediately to see some of the patients and was astonished at what he found in the first family.  They had two children, aged 13 and 5, who had been ill with the condition for three weeks.  The teenage girl was affected a few minutes after he entered the house:

[She]... immediately fell upon her knees; with her head bent back betwixt her shoulders, her neck projecting outwards and very turgid, her eyes not at all disordered nor fixed in this posture, she remained half a minute; after which she got up in great confusion, ran to a large table, leaped up to it at once, though three feet high; her tongue making a circle in her mouth and producing a confused, blubbering noise; - her upper lip the only part of her face any way distorted.  When on the table, she tried to get off her shoes, after which she jumped three or four feet perpendicular for some minutes.  By this time the other was seized in a like manner, and went through the same operation.  Both ran to the table to the head of the bed; from this to the couple and joist of the house.

     But an even stranger sight was to follow.  A maid employed by the family, aged 19, who lived in a neighbouring town was struck with the same disorder.  While Farquharson was present she appeared, having run in a frenzy for over half a mile, followed by her hapless uncle, a fit young man.  In the house all three young people were contorted into a grotesque dance, leaping upon and tumbling over each other:

All this time they have their senses;  answer, as well as the contraction of the mouth permits, you questions distinctly;  but say, the disease, by them called It, forces them to do so and so, and they must obey it. ..These fits sometimes continue half an hour, sometimes longer; but when two of them meet, they leap hours together, mimicking one another, and going over the same process exactly... The people here believe it contagious... The tingling of bells...  brings it on; or even the sight of any of their distressed neighbours.

   Dr Farquharson had prescribed medicine for the sufferers to no effect and requested that Dr Cullen come and see the extraordinary malady for himself, but there seems to be no record that he ever did.  Although there were several other places in Britain that had outbreaks of a similar kind, other authors also noted that the illness was especially prevalent in parts of Angus and linked it to the known condition called St Vitus’s Dance, now more properly known as Sydenham’s chorea or chorea minor.  This infectious ailment is most common in children and is characterised by spasmodic jerking in the body.  Chorea major, meanwhile, was a sort of hysteria which was widespread in Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries. This disorder affected crowds of people who literally danced throughout their communities and may have been a collective hysterical disorder, though the actual cause remains unknown.

   Various writers in the 18^th century noted the ‘louping ague’ in Angus, not least the local ministers who contributed notices of their parishes in the last decade of the century for the Old Statistical Account. Menmuir parish was supposed to be the place where the ague was first noticed and the Rev John Jamieson of Tannadice wrote:

Twenty or thirty years ago, what is commonly called the louping ague greatly prevailed... Those affected with it, when in a paroxysm, often leap or spring in a very surprising manner... They frequently leap from the floor to what, in cottages, are called the baulks, or those beams by which the rafters are joined together.  Sometimes they spring from one to another with the agility of a cat, or whirl round one of them... At other times they run, with astonishing velocity, to some particular place out of doors, which they have fixed in their minds before... and then drop down exhausted.  It is said, that the clattering of tongs, or any noise of a similar kind will bring on the fit.  This melancholy disorder still makes its appearance; but it is far from being so common as formerly.  Some consider it a nervous affection; others as the effect of worms...

   The Rev John Taylor, in Lethnot, noted that the area had been periodically affected by this condition for more than sixty years and said that the condition appeared to be hereditary in some families. By the time of the New Statistical Account, in the mid 19^th century,  the minister of Craig, James Brewster, likewise noted its appearance there and stated the patients ‘have all the appearance of madness; their bodies are variously distorted; they run... with amazing swiftness and over dangerous passes...’  The contemporary minister of Kirriemuir, Thomas Easton, said that cold bathing was the only cure and thankfully noted there was only one person within his parish who was afflicted.

   The writer and traveller Elizabeth Isabella Spence (author of Sketches of the Present manners, Customs and Scenery of Scotland, 2^nd edition, 1811) said that she heard of the ailment while staying at Forfar:

About forty years ago it was remarkably prevalent in Brechin and its neighbourhood... The patient is never strongly affected.  He is conscious of the approach of the fit, and under it suffers a temporary suspension of fear or a sense of danger;  or attention to any thing except the strange gamboling operation to which he is, perhaps, after all, only instinctively impelled.  He generally discovers a strong inclination to run, and to climb into situations at other times impracticable, or capable or exciting terror, but which at those times he performs with apparent ease and pleasure; and to interrupt him in it... is said to have distressing effects... I am told the person afflicted will scramble up the side of a wall with the rapidity of a cat, and leap over tables and chairs in a surprising manner... Though it is often tedious of cure, it is not known to have proved fatal...

   Local author Andrew Jervise, advised the condition had once been found in Stracathro, where, 'As in many other marshy places, the disease of the “loupin’ ague”... was very common among the younger portion of the population, and those afflicted by it are said to have sometimes run a mile on end without being able to stop.’ (Epitaphs and Inscriptions from burial grounds and old buildings in the north-east of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1875, p. 245.)  By his day, however, the mysterious illness seems to have nearly disappeared.

   Even the appearance of an article in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal (‘On some Convulsive Diseases common in certain parts of Scotland’, vol. 3, 1807, 434-7.) did nothing to dispel the mystery surrounding this extraordinary condition, noting the possibility of the condition running in families, some of whom resorted to great lengths to cope with periodic outbreaks.  One family near Brechin had to keep a horse always ready saddled, to follow the young ladies belonging it, when they were seized with a fit of running’.  And, though the anonymous writer noted similar ailments from other parts of Scotland and beyond, the outbreak in Angus seems to have been a highly localised and bizarre phenomenon. 

The Strange Sleep of Margaret Lyall

In the early 19^th century there was nothing to mark out Mary Lyall as different from other young women of her age.  She was the daughter of a cobbler, John Lyall, in the parish of Maryton.  She was in service until 1815 with Peter Arkley (1786-1825), the owner of Dunninald Castle, and then went to work for the Rev Foote at Logie, being about twenty-one year old at the time.  Soon after she started the new job she caught a slow fever which made her bed-ridden for a fortnight, during the latter part of which she was taken to recover at her father’s house.  She was up and about in June and on the 23^rd of that month she returned to work, accompanying Mrs Foote to Budden on the coast of Craig parish where she had gone to bathe in the sea.  It was noticed that Margaret performed her duties in a rather hurried manner.  But on Tuesday, 27^th June, Margaret did not appear and she was found unconscious in her bed.  There were signs of blood around her nose and a pool of blood at the bedside.  When all attempts to wake her failed she was transported to her father’s house, half a mile away, and Dr Gibson was brought from Montrose.  He withdrew blood from her, but Margaret continued in her lethargic state until the afternoon of Friday, 30^th June, when she woke naturally and asked for food.  She was able to say that on Tuesday morning around 2 a.m., she woke up with a nose bleed and put her head over the side of the bed until it stopped.  But she remembered no more.  On Saturday she was found back in her coma.  Although she looked peaceful , her jaws could not be opened to give her water, and during the space of the first seven days when she was unconscious she passed neither urine nor faeces. 

Dunninald Castle a 19th century mansion built to replace an earlier building.

   At the end of a week her left hand twitched, then pointed to her mouth, indicating that she wanted food.  The right side of her body was paralysed.  But food was placed in her left hand and lifted to her mouth.  She was able to consume it, ‘munching like a rabbit’.  The doctor gave her medicine and laxatives to move her bowels.  When her eyes were forced open, they showed only the whites.  Various treatments were tried to rouse her, despite the reluctance of her family and friends, but all failed.  The coma continued and Margaret was anxiously watched.  Sometimes she seemed flushed, at other times pale, and when se was lifted from the bed she became unnaturally cold.  At the start of August she made some response to repeated questions about whether she could hear, slightly moving her left hand.  On the morning of Tuesday, 4^th August, the hand movement recommenced, though Margaret seemed insensible again through the afternoon.  Around eight o’clock her father sat by her and said she should be removed to Montrose Infirmary and asked whether she wanted family worship to be held in her room.  Margaret showed some signs of understanding and was lifted into a chair.  John Lyall held his daughter’s hand and urged her to make an effort to move it.  Her thumb twitched, then the rest of her fingers, then her toes.  John opened her eyes and brought a candle towards her face, asking if she saw it, and Margaret feebly answered  ‘yes’.  In the next few minutes all her senses seemed to recover, but she was too weak to move much.  She had been away from the world for a solid six weeks.

Upon being interrogated respecting her extraordinary state, she mentioned, that she had no knowledge of any thing that had happened;  that she remembered, indeed, having conversed with her friends at her former awakening (Friday afternoon 30^th of June)...that she had  never been conscious of having either needed or received food...She continued in a very feeble state for a few days, but took her food nearly as usual, and improved in strength so rapidly, that on the last day of August she began to work as a reaper in the service of Mr Arkley of Dunninald; and continued to perform the regular labour of the harvest for three weeks, without any inconvenience, except being extremely fatigued the first day.

   But the story was not over.  When the harvest was gathered she continued at Dunninald as a house servant, but on 27^th September she was discovered unconscious again and once more carried to her father’s house.  For fifty hours she was asleep, then she awoke and went back to her job at Dunninald.  Precisely the same thing happened on 11^th October; following another fifty hours’ unconsciousness she again returned to Dunninald.  A Dr Henderson who was visiting the Arkleys prescribed some medicine and the Rev  James Brewster of Craig, who wrote the report , which was published in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (vol VIII, 1817, 250-6.  Reprints of this article occur in other contemporary journals), said that ever since she had been in good health and able to continue in service.  But there was a bitter footnote:

On the morning of September 21, 1816 Margaret Lyall...was found in an out-house at Dunninald hanged by her own hands.  No cause could be assigned for this unhappy act...It was thought by the family, that, a day or two preceding her death, her eyes had the appearance of rolling rather wildly; but she had assisted the day before in serving the table, and had been in good spirits that evening.  On the following morning, she was seen to bring in the milk as usual, and was heard to say in passing rather hurriedly through a room...that something had gone wrong about her dairy; but was not seen again till she was found dead about half an hour after.  She is known to have had a strong abhorrence of the idea of her former distress recurring; and to have occasionally manifested, especially before her first long sleep, the greatest depression of spirits, and even disgust of life.
 

The medical cause of Margaret’s illness and suicide can probably never be recovered.  The Rev Brewster had ruled out the theory that she had been faking her condition.  Perhaps though, there was a family predilection to strange ailments.  One of Margaret’s sisters had been afflicted many years before with St Vitus’s Dance and was ‘almost instantaneously cured by the application of terror’.  We would love to know the story of that case.  Strangely, a very odd, localised form of St Vitus’s Dance, known as the louping ague, spread through parts of Angus like an epidemic in the 18^th century, and we’ll look at the evidence of this soon.

Rev Dr James Brewster, Minister of Craig (1777-1847).  He was the brother of Sir David Brewster.

The Deil o' Glenisla

The Deil o’ Glenisla had many names back in his days of his glory:  the King o’Lintrathen, Bamff, or just plain Ramsay.  Nowadays he would be wearing a security tag on his leg, but a few generations ago he was honoured as a lovable rogue in print (in Blairgowrie, Stormont and Strathmore Worthies by Henry Dryerre (1903) ) and celebrated as a sort of local Rob Roy.  James Ramsay was born in Dundee and claimed descent from the Ramsays of Bamff, which has never been established.  For whatever reason, he relocated to the Kirkton of Glenisla and terrorised north-west Angus and the neighbouring parts of Perthshire with his unique brand of criminality for over forty years.  Being in an upland parish provided Ramsay with the ready opportunity for whisky smuggling and he was often outwitting the hapless gaugers (excisemen).  One story has him journeying down a lane in his horse and cart when he spotted the gaugers laying in wait up ahead.  He quickly removed his stash of spirits and hid them beneath some pig manure and allowed his goods to be searched by the officials when they stopped him.  This violation of his civil liberties later came in handy, because, when he retrieved the whisky from the farmyard, he also carried away three or four chickens that ‘persisted in getting in is way’.  The official search of his transport gave him the perfect alibi that he had not stolen the creatures.  Removal of livestock became a speciality of the Deil.  On one occasion he purloined a cow and sold it at market before the enraged farmed noticed it was missing and on another occasion he audaciously drove a dozen sheep all the way to Dundee and sold them there without being caught.

   Maybe it was a mark of the man, a peculiarity of the district, or the habit of the age, but whenever a local person noticed that some article was missing, he went to the Deil and engaged in a bit of polite word play.  The victim never accused the Deil, only happened to mention that they had a lack of a certain item, then the Deil would kindly hand them back the possession he had stolen.  But if it happened to be an item of foodstuff, then there was no chance of retrieving it.  A publican stole back his own spade from the Deil’s cart one day when he wasn’t looking and had to get it back again the same day when it was stolen off him again.  When the minister gave him a lift on the back of his horse on the way to Kirriemuir market (with the warning to behave himself), the Deil pranked him when he was asked to dismount.  Instead of getting off, he dug his heels into the horse, making it career off, with the furious minister and himself.  As they vanished into the distance he shouted to the amusement of the crowd:  ‘Ha, ha!  Juist see here – the Deil’s awa wi the minister!’  Another trick was the occasion when he ordered two pairs of boots from different cobblers and only had one of each pair delivered, promising to pay cash on delivery for the pair when he had enough money to get the second shoe.  Of course, he matched up the left and right shoe from each pair and never bothered to pay for the remaining shoe of each pair.  He was happy with the slightly odd pair of shoes in his ownership and declared truthfully, ‘And far wad ye get a cheaper pair?’

   The farmer of Pitewan rather trustingly asked the Deil to go to a local ironmonger and get him to fit a pair of iron rings for his cart and deliver them to David Grewar the blacksmith, at Pitmuddie.  On the way to the smiddy the farmer met the Deil and asked him if he got the rings.  ‘Deed did I,’ said Ramsay.  ‘Jist look at them.  Man, aren’t they rinnin roond fine?’  The rings were of course fitted to his own cart and he sped off away from the infuriated farmer before anything could be done.   How the farmer must have chuckled at the lovable rogue who robbed him blind!

   More pathetically, Ramsay enraged his landlord to such an extent that he was evicted, which of course he refused to comply with, so all his furniture was removed and he was turfed out.  The ramshackle house he inhabited was then razed to the ground, so Ramsay camped nearby in a hole in the ground and evidently thrived under the circumstances until he had enough money to move into a new house at Dyke End, Lintrathen, when the winter set in.  His horse occupied one end of this dwelling and he the other – though there was only one entrance.  In this poor house he dwelled for many years and actually endeared himself to his neighbours, to some extent, despite his honest failings.  His health failed him when he neared the age of 70, around the year 1855, and he was taken into the care of relatives in his declining years.  When he died he was interred in his adoped and beloved haunt of Lintrathen.