In the ballad of "Thomas of Ercildoune," the Queen of Fairyland is represented as becoming enamoured of True Thomas. Among the Icelanders the belief was common. Torfaeus, in his history, gives an account of a female who, having born a child to an Icelander, claimed the privilege of baptism, and deposited the infant at the gate of the churchyard for that purpose, with a golden goblet as an offering. The belief is still held by the Laplanders.
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."
"Circumstantial evidence," says Pratt, "is also so far in favour of the traditionary record as to render it hazardous to set it aside as wholly unworthy of credit. Thus, the Hawkestone at St Madoes, the well-known boundary of the ancient possessions of the Hays of Erroll in Perthshire, is mentioned by Boethius as existing in his day (anno. 1500), and as having been set up immediately after the defeat of the Danes, in 980. Also the Stone so carefully preserved at Slains Castle, and which from time immemorial has been venerated by the family as that on which their ancestor sat down after the conflict. For the origin of these and similar traditions it would be difficult to account, had there been no foundation whatever for the narrative of Luncarty."
Gilbert de Haya, Regent of Scotland during the minority of Alexander II., married a daughter of William Comyn, Earl of Buchan, about 1255.
The old Castle of Slains belonged originally to the Earls of Buchan, and became afterwards, for many generations, the seat of the Earls of Erroll.
There is some doubt whether the Castle owed its erection to Fergus, who lived in the time of William the Lion (1065), or to the Comyns who succeeded to this earldom through marriage with Marjory, only daughter of Fergus, and Countess of Buchan in her own right.
Again,—Saladin, the famous Sultan of Syria, fought Guy de Lusignan, King of Jerusalem, in 1187. Then Phillip Augustus of France, Richard I. of England, with many others, and among them numbers of our Scottish nobility, deemed themselves called upon to fly to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre, and by a third crusade endeavour to wrest its possession from the infidel.
From these facts considerable doubt arises as to which of the "gallant Hays" was the hero of the following ballad. It could hardly be Gilbert, who married the daughter of the Earl of Buchan. If it was, then he could scarcely have been in the third crusade; and there are grave doubts as to the Lady Claribel having been the "child of the Elfin Queen." There may, however, be no doubt that she was beautiful as a Princess, for beauty is no rare qualification of the ladies of the district; nor may it be improbable that she waylaid and captured the Hay in one of the many knightly journeyings in search of adventures which the nobles of those days undertook.
The ladies of those far-off times did many strange things—at least, what now-a-days would be considered such; nevertheless, from the ballad it appears she "made a good wife for all that."