NOTES
ON
LORD SOULIS.
BY THE EDITOR.
The tradition regarding the death of Lord Soulis, however singular, is not without a parallel in the real history of Scotland. The same extraordinary mode of cookery was actually practised (horresco referens) upon the body of a sheriff of the Mearns. This person, whose name was Melville of Glenbervie, bore his faculties so harshly, that he became detested by the barons of the country. Reiterated complaints of his conduct having been made to James I. (or, as others say, to the Duke of Albany), the monarch answered, in a moment of unguarded impatience, "Sorrow gin the sheriff were sodden, and supped in broo'!" The complainers retired, perfectly satisfied. Shortly after, the lairds of Arbuthnot, Mather, Laurestoun, and Pittaraw, decoyed Melville to the top of the hill of Garvock, above Lawrencekirk, under pretence of a grand hunting party. Upon this place (still called the Sheriff's Pot), the barons had prepared a fire and a boiling cauldron, into which they plunged the unlucky sheriff. After he was sodden (as the king termed it), for a sufficient time, the savages, that they might literally observe the royal mandate, concluded the scene of abomination, by actually partaking of the hell-broth.
The three lairds were outlawed for this offence; and Barclay, one of their number, to screen himself from justice, erected the kaim (i.e. the camp, or fortress) of Mathers, which stands upon a rocky, and almost inaccessible peninsula, overhanging the German ocean. The laird of Arbuthnot is said to have eluded the royal vengeance, by claiming the benefit of the law of clan Macduff, concerning which the curious reader will find some particulars subjoined. A pardon, or perhaps a deed of replegiation, founded upon that law, is said to be still extant among the records of the viscount of Arbuthnot.
Pellow narrates a similar instance of atrocity, perpetrated after the death of Muley Ismael, emperor of Morocco, in 1727, when the inhabitants of Old Fez, throwing off all allegiance to his successor, slew "Alchyde Boel le Rosea, their old governor, boiling his flesh, and many, through spite, eating thereof, and throwing what they could not eat of it to the dogs."—See Pellow's Travels in South Barbary. And we may add, to such tales, the oriental tyranny of Zenghis Khan, who immersed seventy Tartar Khans in as many boiling cauldrons.
The punishment of boiling seems to have been in use among the English at a very late period, as appears from the following passage in Stowe's Chronicle:—"The 17th of March (1524), Margaret Davy, a maid, was boiled at Smithfield, for poisoning of three households that she had dwelled in." But unquestionably the usual practice of Smithfield cookery, about that period, was by a different application of fire.
LAW OF CLAN MACDUFF.
Though it is rather foreign to the proper subject of this work, many readers may not be displeased to have some account of the curious privilege enjoyed by the descendants of the famous Macduff, thane of Fife, and thence called the Law of the Clan, or family, bearing his name.