Of this I have got a compleat copy, and the story is very interesting; but I have got a fragment of it from another quarter, which, so far as it goes, is superior.” Etc.
[62]. A market was established here in 1661 by an act in favor of William Farquharson of Inverey, his heirs, etc. This William had a brother and a son John. William Farquharson of Inverey younger, as “a person of known trust and approven ability,” is appointed to keep a guard “this summer for the sherifdom of Kincardine” against cattle-driving Highlanders, July of the same year. Thomson’s Acts, VII, 18, I, 286: pointed out to me by Mr Macmath.
[63]. Macfarlane’s Genealogical Collections, MS., in the Advocates’ Library, I, 299 f; already cited by Jamieson, Ballads, I, 108.
[64]. See a little further on.
[65]. Gilmour’s Decisions, 1701, p. 43. (Macmath.)
[66]. Col. H. W. Lumsden’s Memorials of the Families of Lumsdaine, etc., p. 59.
[67]. History of the Earldom of Sutherland, p. 217 f. To the same effect, Johnstone, Historia Rerum Britannicarum, Amsterdam, 1655, p. 160 f, under the year 1591, and Spotiswood, p. 390, of the editions of 1655, 1666, 1668, under the year 1592. “The History of the Feuds,” etc., p. 67, ed. 1764, merely repeats Sir Robert Gordon. William Gordon’s History of the Family of Gordon, cites Sir Robert Gordon and Johnstone, and calls Gordon of Brackley Alexander.
Still another “Gordon, Baron of Brackley in Deeside,” is said to have been murdered by the country people about him in or near 1540: The Genealogy of the Grants, in Macfarlane’s Genealogical Collections, I, 168, and An Account of the Rise and Offspring of the Name of Grant, printed for Sir Archibald Grant, Bart., of Monymusk, 1876, p. 30 ff, where the date is put (perhaps through a misprint) before 1480. A horrible revenge was said to have been taken by the Earl of Huntly and James Grant: see the well-known story of the orphans fed at a trough, in Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather, chap. xxxix.
[68]. See the Memorandum for Farquharson in “Fourth Report,” as above, p. 534.
[69]. Pointed out to me by Mr. Macmath, who, in making this and other communications relating to the Gordons of Brackley, suggested and urged the hypothesis of a mixture of two events in this ballad.