Aug. 3.
Lady Rothiemay, after a long detention under caution, was this day subjected to trial for giving encouragement to the Frendraught spoilers two years before. There seems to have been a disposition to look lightly on the offence of a woman who had had the deaths of a husband and a son to excite her feelings, and the charge, after being twice delayed, was finally allowed to fall to the ground.
1636. Nov. 10.
The Privy Council, learning that a number of gipsies had been seized a month before, and thrown into jail at Haddington, decreed that, ‘whereas the keeping of them longer there is troublesome and burdenable to the town,’ therefore the sheriff or his depute should pronounce sentence of death ‘against so many of thir counterfeit thieves as are men, and against so many of the women as wants children, ordaining the men to be hangit, and the women to be drowned;’ while ‘such of the women as has children should be scourged through the burgh.’[71]
Dec. 8.
John Greg, ‘in the Haughs of Fingoth,’ complained to the Privy Council of the conduct of Mr James Stuart, commissary of Dunkeld, who, after passing upon him sundry affronts, had lately fallen upon a new trick for his disgrace—namely, to insert ‘Macgregor’ as his name in all public documents in which he was concerned either as pursuer or defender. ‘Now, lately, under the borrowed name of David Martin, servitor to the Laird of Ballechin, he has ta’en the gift of the complainer’s escheat, and in that same gift he calls the complainer John Macgregor, alias Greg.’ By this it was assumed that the Dunkeld commissary intended ‘to draw the complainer under all the courses that sall be ta’en with the Clan Gregor.’ Greg further affirmed that his family name for generations past memory had been simply Greg, ‘and had nothing to do with the race of Clan Gregor.’
The Council obliged Stuart to give caution that he would discontinue this singular kind of persecution.—P. C. R.