SCOTTISH HISTORY SOCIETY FIFTH SERIES VOLUME 4 The Calendar of Fearn ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The Council of the Society is pleased to record that the publication of the Calendar of Team, with its importance for the history of Easter Ross, has been aided by generous sponsorship from the Glenmorangie Distillery Coy., an internationally renowned malt whisky distillers based in the area. The publication of Robin Adam’s edition of the Calendar of Fearn represents the culmination of a project which has been of very great interest to the Glenmorangie Distillery Company. With our roots in Tain, only a few miles from the remains of Fearn Abbey, we would naturally welcome any research which increases knowledge of our home district in Ross-shire, but this present project has touched us even more closely. Next year is the 150th anniversary of the official licensing of our distillery outside Tain at Glenmorangie, and it has been especially gratifying to find at this particular time that we have a personal link to the men who compiled the greater part of the original Calendar itself, Thomas Ross, the last abbot of Fearn, and his eldest son, Walter, who converted the former church lands of Morangie into part of their family estate. It is interesting to note that in the ‘Tain and Balnagown Documents’ reference is made to the ‘aqua vitae pot still and ffleak (worm)’ which were numbered amongst Thomas’s possessions at the time of his death in 1703. It was as laird of Morangie that Walter Ross was to make additions to his father’s writings. Our Company’s connection with Fearn has been further reinforced by our purchase of the Cadboll estate to the east of Tain, another portion of the monastic lands whose later owners and their doings feature prominently in the Calendar’s pages. N. A. H. McKerrow Managing Director The Glenmorangie Distillery Coy. The Calendar of Fearn: text and additions, 1471-1667 edited by R. J. Adam EDINBURGH printed for the Scottish History Society by PILLANS & WILSON LTD., EDINBURGH 1991 Scottish History Society 1991 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: Adam, Robin J. The Calendar of Fearn: text and additions, 1471-1667. I. Title 264. 0200941172 ISBN 0-906245-13-3 The map of Easter Ross, c. 1580, on p.64 is reproduced by permission of the Trustees of The National Library of Scotland. Printed in Great Britain vJjB A/Jj, v G % /O CONTENTS Ian Borthwick Cowan, 1932-1990 a memoir by John Durkan 1 Preface 9 Sources and Abbreviations 11 Introduction 19 CALENDAR OF FEARN Text of Calendar 51 Table of Additions 65 Additions 75 APPENDICES A. Ross Entries in the Protocol Book of William Gray 225 B. Extracts from the Blackie MS 239 C. Alexander Ross of Balnagown’s Subscription List, 1565 243 index 245 I. B. Cowan IAN BORTHWICK COWAN, 1932-1990 A Memoir by Dr John Durkan The world of Scottish history finds itself distressed and impoverished by the untimely death of Ian Borthwick Cowan on 22 December 1990. A native of Dumfries, where he was born on 16 April 1932, his father being a local bank manager, Ian’s secondary education was at Dumfries Academy. Like many Borders men he had an acute sense of Scottish identity, and loved to revisit Dumfries and Langholm whenever he could spare the time. He went up to Edinburgh University in 1950 as a student of history and there, as his custom was, worked hard and played hard, acting as an official of one of the student clubs, a fit apprenticeship for his future role in the service of students of Scottish history. One of his teachers there was Dr Gordon Donaldson, the present Historiographer Royal, who encouraged his nascent interest in Church organisation in pre-Reformation times. Graduating in Arts in 1954, he emerged as Doctor of Philosophy in 1961 with an as yet unpublished thesis on the appropriation of parish churches in medieval Scotland. Already in 1954 he had won distinction among the history students of his year. His study period was broken in 1954 by a spell of two years’ national service in the Royal Air Force, mostly acting as education officer to service personnel at Peterborough, finally with the rank of Flying Officer. Returning home, he was offered an assistantship in the Department of Scottish History under Professor William Croft Dickinson, but a fortunate deflection at the end of this three year tour of duty took him to Newbattle Abbey College where Edwin Muir’s was still an honoured name. As history lecturer there, he encountered the challenge of the mature student whose historical interest had first been stirred by the past of his own locality, a challenge which Ian responded to with verve. His Blast and Counterblast (1960) was an attempt, typically judicious, to put in the hands of students the case for and against Mary, Queen of Scots as seen through the eyes of opponents and partisans. His latest contribution to her still enigmatic story was an essay that drew on his Vatican work in a volume edited by Michael 2 CALENDAR OF FEARN Lynch, Mary Stewart: Queen in Three Kingdoms (1988). The Newbattle experience had given him a sure focus for his Scottish studies such that he could bring a touch of cold reason into areas of perennial popular interest. It was in the late 1950s that I personally came across him attending a lecture I delivered in Edinburgh and had to field some shrewd questions from the back of the hall by a very civil youth who introduced himself as Ian Cowan. Ian’s professional career was placed on a surer footing with his appointment in 1962 to the Department of Scottish History in Glasgow University, first at Bute Gardens within the old Gilbert Scott precinct and thereafter in University Gardens. This came just as significant changes were taking place there and the halcyon days of the sixties were beckoning. In the councils of the University Court, Arts Faculty and eventually Senate his forthrightness yet ever courteous approach were appreciated by colleagues who valued his grasp of practical detail and shrewd commonsense, resulting in his rise to a senior lectureship in 1970 and the title of professor in 1983. Past students testify to his unremitting devotion to his teaching tasks, their sense of dealing with a just man, his personal interest in them and their circumstances well beyond the perception of them as fodder for the machine of further education. Ever the peacemaker, Ian had a penchant for defusing explosive situations, yet as a man of principle he could be combative too, especially if the issue was the present or future status in Scotland of Scottish history. His public lectures could seem to the chance listener terribly tentative, almost every sentence peppered with the word ‘perhaps’ (a mischievous student once claimed to have counted over a hundred in a single lecture), but just as often the ‘perhaps’ was counterpoised by another favourite expression, ‘in fact’. His room always gave the impression of an interminably busy workshop with several works in progress simultaneously, impeded only by the fact that every committee-builder knew that here was the committee man par excellence. As one trudged one’s exhausted way home at the day’s end, there was Ian on his way back in, miraculously refreshed and ready for further labours with senior people coming to evening class to learn about aspects of local or national history in their leisure time. These contributions earned him a place in the administration of the university’s continuing education programme. Ian was regularly present at almost every public Scottish history occasion and his boyishly fresh face was to be found regularly at the centre of many a congenial circle of clubbable historians around convivial tables in diverse parts of Scotland. He loved walking miles to I. B. COWAN 3 some favoured eating spot. He had a teasing humour at such times, particularly evident in the autumn sunshine of Rome. He set a pace as you plodded alongside by shady streets to a remote cantina, such as the inexpensive one in the Via Bianchi Novi, where he expanded and expounded under the benevolent eye of the cantina’s owners, sometimes in the informed company of such another Rome addict as James J. Robertson, lecturer at Dundee in private law then working on papers of the Roman Rota, intimate friend of Ian’s earliest youth. Meantime I personally was glad to rest my chafing feet. He enjoyed the scholarly company at The British School at Rome where he lodged and which in time came to recognise Ian’s special interests and experience by appointing him to its administrative body, the Faculty of Archaeology, History and Letters, during the years 1980 to 1984. Unlike the rest of us, Ian was happy to skip the School’s breakfast in his anxiety to be at the Vatican Archives by opening time, the long hours broken only by a brief mid-morning spell in the courtyard garden at the soft-drink machines, happily replaced during the present pontificate by a small upstairs coffee bar where our own Charles Burns and workers from several nations congregated to exchange scholarly titbits in a place adjacent to both Library, where I generally was, and Archives. In the 1980s, we adjourned at siesta time to a cantina in the Borgo San Pietro, while on Sundays we sallied forth on foot to catch the afternoon bus or train to Frascati where we collected delicious wads of crusty bread, butter and cheese to fetch them to a vine-trellised cantina serving a bottle of the local Chianti wine.