Earl of Dunbar and the Founder of HDT WHAT? INDEX
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HENRY’S RELATIVES SUB SPE MISS ANNA JANE DUNBAR ASA DUNBAR CHARLES DUNBAR COUSIN CHARLES DUNBAR CYNTHIA DUNBAR THOREAU LOUISA DUNBAR MARY JONES DUNBAR ELIJAH DUNBAR Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-grandfather Robert Dunbar was born about 1630-1634 presumably in Scotland, and shortly after 1650 emigrated to Hingham in the Plymouth Colony where he and Rose Dunbar, Thoreau’s great-great-great-grandmother, raised three daughters and eight sons. Robert died on September 19, 1693 and Rose died in November 1700, there in Hingham. Another member of the extended clan and thus a relative of Henry David Thoreau, William Dunbar (1460?-1520?), is considered to have been one of the finest poets produced by Scotland. However, closer to Thoreau genealogically was the Reverend Samuel Dunbar (1704- 1783) of Stoughton MA, whose sermons are preserved by the American Antiquarian Society. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE DUNBAR CLAN THE DUNBARS ANNO DOMINI 835 After the Battle of Scone in which Dursken was slain and his Picts dispersed, King Kenneth I of Scotland awarded a Pict wood-and-wattle strongpoint overlooking the River Forth and the south shore of the entrance to the North Sea inlet known as the Firth of Forth that had been seized and burned by Kenneth Macalpin to a Scots captain named Bar.1 This strongpoint would become known in Gaelic as Dun Bar, or “the tower or fortress of Bar on the hill.” The first person to employ Dunbar as a family name was the Gospatric I who would during the 12th Century rebuild this fortification as a stone castle. The following is a photograph of an art object for sale, intended to represent this Castle Dunbar at its most glorious when inhabited by the Cospatrick family which would later change its name to the name of its castle: The Earls of Dunbar and March would control much of Lothian and all the “Borders” (which were Berwick, Peebles, Selkirk and Roxburgh), and had large holdings in Northumberland and Cumberland. Through marriage to the famous “Black Aggie,” Agnes Randolph, this family would acquire the Earldom of Moray as well, holding Aberdeenshire, Morayshire, Nairn, Buchan, and Inverness. Dunbars would be responsible for the construction of many monasteries, abbeys, and chapels throughout the land. Members would go on the Crusades and the seal of Clan Dunbar would be on the Arbroath Declaration sent to the Pope. Eventually, however, the leader of the Dunbars would fall from the favor of the English king, and this is what the pitiful remainder of Castle Dunbar looks like today, on its cliff overlooking the coastal town of Dunbar: DUNBAR FAMILY 1. Although this site became fortified in 656 CE and 1st appeared in written records as of 680 CE, much earlier human artifacts have of course been dug from the cliff soil. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE DUNBAR CLAN THE DUNBARS 1072 This is the manner in which the Dunbars of Scotland are descended from a Celt who was hereditary lay abbot of Dunkeld, a personage known as Crinan the Thane, Senechal of the Isles, who was said to be “of the kin of Columba” and probably was a grandson of Duncan, the lay-abbot who had been killed in 965. He had been born in 975 and had married the princess Beatrice, daughter and heiress of King Malcolm II. Duncan, the son of Crinan and Beatrice, would ascend to the throne of Scotland and would then, as per William Shakespeare (who got some of the details wrong in his play Macbeth, but never mind), be murdered by Macbeth. In 1057 his son Malcolm Canmore or Malcolm the 3rd would join with his grandfather Crinan the Thane (who at this point had reached age 82) in an attack on the forces of Macbeth in Aberdeenshire, and the result would be the Battle of Lumphannan in which both Macbeth and Crinan fell. In England, prior to the arrival of William the Conqueror from France, there had been a grandson of Crinan, named Gospatric. This Gospatric was Seneschal of the Isles and nephew to King Duncan I, and after his father’s death had become the Earl of Northumberland. When William the Conqueror (otherwise known as William the Bastard, here pictured on a 20th-Century cigarette card) stripped the title Earl of Northumberland from Earl Gospatric in this year, he fled to Scotland in return for Malcolm III’s grant to him of the lands and earldom of Dunbar on the southern shoulder of the Firth of Forth where it becomes the North Sea. It was in this manner that he became Earl of Dunbar and the founder of HDT WHAT? INDEX THE DUNBAR CLAN THE DUNBARS Clan Dunbar of Scotland. The Dunbars of Scotland who had existed prior to this point in time don’t count (any more than those Picts who originally in the 9th Century had built that wood-and-wattle fort atop the cliff at Dunbar) — because they had been other Scots people who had lost influence, who were no relation at all to this Earl Gospatric the inheritor, grandson of Crinan, were merely the usurped, had become, so to speak, “history.” Henry Thoreau, whose mother was a Dunbar, would refer to the William Shakespeare play based in part on this history, Macbeth, in his WALDEN, when he used the descriptor “Wise midnight hags!” in regard to the screech owls in the trees around Walden Pond: DUNBAR FAMILY HDT WHAT? INDEX THE DUNBAR CLAN THE DUNBARS WALDEN: Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, PEOPLE OF Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, WALDEN a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph. At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon beyond the woods sounded sweet and melodious, and at first I would mistake it for the voices of certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes serenaded, who might be straying over hill and dale; but soon I was not unpleasantly disappointed when it was prolonged into the cheap and natural music of the cow. I do not mean to be satirical, but to express my appreciation of those youths’ singing, when I state that I perceived clearly that it was akin to the music of the cow, and they were at length one articulation of Nature. Regularly at half past seven, in one part of the summer, after the evening train had gone by, the whippoorwills chanted their vespers for half an hour, sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the ridge pole of the house. They would begin to sing almost with as much precision as a clock, within five minutes of a particular time, referred to the setting of the sun, every evening. I had a rare opportunity to become acquainted with their habits. Sometimes I heard four or five at once in different parts of the wood, by accident one a bar behind another, and so near me that I distinguished not only the cluck after each note, but often that singular buzzing sound like a fly in a spider’s web, only proportionally louder. Sometimes one would circle round and round me in the woods a few feet distant as if tethered by a string, when probably it was near its eggs. They sang at intervals throughout the night, and were again as musical as ever just before and about dawn. BEN JONSON EURIPIDES AEOLIAN HARP WHIPPOORWILL HDT WHAT? INDEX THE DUNBAR CLAN THE DUNBARS When other birds are still the screech owls take up the strain, PEOPLE OF like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is WALDEN truly Ben Jonsonian. Wise midnight hags! It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the wood-side, reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape night- walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, no expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in their scenery of their transgressions. They give me a new sense of variety and capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair to some new perch on the gray oaks.