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]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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._
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 1637.