[Sidenote: 1601.]
Among the violences of the age, what would now be called agrarian
outrages were very common. Sometimes it was a pretender to
proprietorship who came in to trouble the tenants of the landlord in
possession; sometimes a tenant was the object of wrathful jealousy
among persons of his own class. Of the former order of troubles we have
an example at this time, in a charge brought before the Privy Council
(February 19, 1601) against David Hamilton, younger, of Bothwell-haugh,
‘servant to the Laird of Innerwick.’ It was for the turning out of
his wife from Woodhouselee, that Hamilton of Bothwell-haugh murdered
the Good Regent. We now see his representative breaking other laws on
account of the same lands.[269] Sir James Bellenden of Broughton, who
was landlord _de facto_, complains against David Hamilton, that, with
a company ‘bodin and furnist in feir of weir,’ he had come, on the
10th of February instant, to the tenants of the lands of Woodhouselee,
‘where they were in peaceable and quiet maner at their plews,’ and
there assailed them with furious speeches, ‘threatening to have their
lives gif they insistit in manuring and lawboring of the said lands,’
and actually compelled them through fear to give up their work. As
David failed to appear and answer this charge, letters were ordered to
denounce him as a rebel.
Before a month elapsed, the Council had under its attention a still
more violent affair, forming a specimen of the second class of
outrages. The complainer here is Patrick Monypenny of Pilrig--an estate
with an old manor-house situated between Edinburgh and Leith. Patrick
states that he was of mind to have set that part of his lands of
Pilrig, called the Round-haugh, to Harry Robertson and Andrew Alis, to
his utility and profit. But on a certain day not specified, David Duff,
indweller in Leith, came to these persons, and uttered furious menaces
against them in the event of their occupying these lands, so that they
had departed from their purpose of occupying them. Duff, accompanied
with two men named Matheson, had also, on the 2d March instant,
attacked the servants of Monypenny, as they were labouring the lands
in question, with similar speeches, threatening their lives if they
persisted in working there; and at night, they, or some persons hounded
out by them, had come and broken their plough, and thrown it into the
river. ‘John Matheson, after the breaking of the complenar’s plew,
come to John Porteous’s house, his tenant, and bad him gang now betwix
the plew stilts, and see how she wald gang while [till] the morn.’ To
this was added a threat to break his head if he should ever say that
Duff had broken his plough. ‘Likeas the said David sinsyne come to
the complenar’s lands, being tilled, and trampit and cast the tilled
furs down, thus committing manifest oppression upon the complainant.’
In this case, the accused persons were assoilzied, but only, it would
appear, by hard swearing in their own cause.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: APR. 15.]
[Sidenote: 1601.