Memoirs of the Lives of Robert Haldene of Airthrey; And of His Brother, James Alexander Haldane (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 14 SIR JOHN HALDANE. centuries later, a younger son of the border family of Halden, near Kelso, migrated into Perthshire, and married the heiress of Gleneagles, adopting the armorial bearings of that family, instead of his own, but retaining his surname, as derived from his paternal lands. In Scotland, oral tradition runs into the deep and far recesses of legendary antiquity. Its written documents are of comparatively modern date. "Nowhere," says a great Scotch legal antiquarian, Mr. Riddell,?"nowhere is ancestry more prized or paraded than with us, and yet in no country are the means of elucidating it so scanty." In proof of this, a charter of the lands of Frandie, forming part of the Gleneagles estate, granted in the twelfth century to Roger de Halden, by King William the Lyon, and still in possession of the family, is noticed by Sir James Dalrymple, in his Collections (page 392), as amongst the earliest extant. Rather more than a hundred years later, Aylmer de Haldane, of Gleneagles, in Strathearn, is found amongst the barons, who, in 1296, swore fealty to Edward I. of England; and Nisbet, in his " Critical and Historical Remarks" upon the Ragman Roll, observes that the Haldanes were " eVen then barons of considerable consequence," adding, "the house of Gleneagles have vouchers for instructing their antiquity beyond most families in Perthshire." It would be alike tedious and unprofitable to trace their descent, from that period to the beginning of the last century, through seventeen successive marriages, with the noble or baronial families of Graham, Arnott, Mar, Seton, Menteith, Mon- trose, Lawson, Mar (2), Perth, Glencairn, Hume, Marchmont, Tullibardine, Wemyss, Grant, Strathallan, and Erskine of Alva. In fact, there would be nothing very remarkable to arrest attention,...