Margaret BAIN

1742 -

• Name	Margaret BAIN
  Born	Pre-1742	Oddsta, Fetlar, Shetland Islands, Scotland
  Gender	Female
  _UID	258C575488F5D711B6E9AA9FAE65933584D8
  Person ID	I6260	YoungFamily
  Last Modified	12 Apr 2022

  
  

  Family	Peter GRAY,   b. 1733, Fetlar, Shetland Islands, Scotland
  _UID	F176ABB5BA23D511B6E7DD3AFA2E9C3537D9
  Children	1. James GRAY,   b. 1752, Mid & South Yell, Zetland, Scotland   2. Ollaphar GRAY,   c. 17 May 1754, Mid & South Yell, Zetland, Scotland   3. Helen GRAY,   c. 20 Nov 1756, Fetlar, Zetland, Scotland   4. Helen GRAY,   c. 9 Nov 1757, Fetlar, Zetland, Scotland   5. Laurence GRAY,   c. 12 Feb 1759, Fetlar, Zetland, Scotland   6. John GRAY,   c. 7 Aug 1762, Fetlar, Zetland, Scotland   7. George GRAY,   c. 14 Nov 1764, Basta, North Yell, Zetland, Scotland ,   d. Aft 1841  (Age ~ 78 years)   8. Margaret GRAY
  Last Modified	15 May 2022
  Family ID	F83	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

• Notes

  y-dna of BAIN on Shetland: BAIN 13 24 14 10 11 14 12 12 12 13 13 30 17 09 10 11 11 25 15 19 30 15 15 16 17(96793)R1b; Scottish Mainland - Celtic / Pictish; The surname means "fair" in Gaelic. The name first appears in Orkney in 1613, with one John BAIN, of Sandwick, South Ronaldsay. In Shetland one George BAIN was in Lerwick in 1687. In Shetland the Fladdabister family has a tradition that the first of their line, John BAIN married to Margaret (or Janet) SUTHERLAND, arrived in 1588 from Caithness or Sutherland (Mainland Scotland), settling in Ocraquoy; None; Parents born in Shetland but lineage not yet provided; The matches for 25 markers in the FTDNA database show overwhelming matches to Scotland and relatively few elsewhere. As to matches at the high resolution 37 marker level, the closest at 35/37 are to two ALEXANDERS, a BUCHANAN, and another BAIN. At 34/37 the surnames all appear to be Scottish; This would seem to be a classic Scottish, and possibly Pictish signature. ================================================================================== There is a distinct possibility that John BAIN born before 1757 is a younger brother of Margaret BAIN and William who had my Williamina BAIN. John BAIN would then also be an uncle of Williamina BAIN, the daughter of William BAIN and Ann FORDYCE. What is tying these families together is the locale in which they can be found at the same times. 1. John BAIN christened his son, John, 23 Jul 1780, at Basta, North Yell. 2. George GRAY, the son of Margaret BAIN and Peter GRAY was christened at Basta, North Yell during 1764. John BAIN christened his first known son, James, on Fetlar in 1777. So, a clear correlation can be made between John BAIN, Sr. first at Fetlar and then at Basta and Margaret BAIN born at Fetlar and also moving over to Basta. =============================================================================== The Scatalds of Fetlar 1716-1717 …in the eighteenth century it was noted that the lands were divided into parishes, and these in turn into scattalds, each with 1,2 or more often 12-20 towns or Hamlets, the lands of which have a right, pro indiviso, to pasture, Peats, etc. in one and the same common speech “The Scattald”. Several records of scattalds survive, so that it is possible to work out the boundaries in some instances…Gifford’s MS Rental of Shetland, 1716-17, mentions thirteen scattalds in Fetlar. [Note mk=merklands, of half an acre each] Oddsta, 136 mk, divided into eight rooms: 1. Urie, 60 mk (6 tenants) 2. Udsta, 24 mk 3. Oddsetter, 12 mk (2 tenants) 4. Frackaseter, 6 mk (1 tenant) 5. Hamar, 17 mk (4 tenants) 6. Snabrough, 8 mk (1 tenant) 7. Uraseter, 6 mk (1 tenant) 8. Fogravell, 6 mk (1 tenant) ================================================================== Isles of Cats (Shetland Islands) Interesting anecdote about the Shetland Islands in general. “…In early Irish literature, Shetland is referred to as Inse Catt—”the Isles of Cats”, which may have been the pre-Norse inhabitants’ name for the islands. The Cat tribe also occupied parts of the northern Scottish mainland and their name can be found in Caithness, and in the Gaelic name for Sutherland (Cataibh, meaning “among the Cats”)…” “…in several specific names within that county and in the earliest recorded name for Shetland (Inse Catt, meaning “islands of the Cat people”)…” “…Watson (2005) compares this usage with the early Irish Innse Orc (islands of the boars) for Orkney and concludes that these are tribal names based on animals…” Wikipedia ======================================================================== normblog The weblog of Norman Geras https://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2006/09/gibbets_and_gal.html « ReFrayn | Main | 101 great goals, and some others » September 18, 2006 Gibbets and gallows I (by Brian Smith) [Brian Smith is a historian who has been researching gallow hills in his native Shetland. Last week he delivered a paper on the subject in Lerwick, and he was kind enough to let me read it. I found it of great interest. Over the next few days, and with Brian's permission, I'll be posting it here on normblog - in serial form because the paper is rather long for a blog post. NG] Gibbets and gallows: Local rough justice in Shetland, 800-1700 1 For a long time now I've been fascinated and puzzled by the fact that there are so many places in Shetland called 'Gallow Hill', or variations on that name. There are actually 13 of them. As you know, there have never been more than 32,000 people in Shetland at one time, and in the middle ages, when I will argue that the gallow hills were in their heyday, there were probably around 12,000 at the most. It is a fearful number of gallows for a tiny community. There are, of course, gallow hills all over the world, from Scotland to Salem. People have been hanging other people for thousands of years, under the mistaken impression that it's an appropriate form of punishment and deterrence against wickedness. For many societies it has seemed as natural an activity as can be. In Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge somebody says that, and I quote: Casterbridge is a old, hoary place o' wickedness, by all account. 'Tis recorded in history [he goes on] that we rebelled against the King one or two hundred years ago, in the time of the Romans, and that lots of us was hanged on Gallows Hill, and quartered, and our different jints sent about the country like butcher's meat; and for my part I can well believe it. But my aim tonight isn't just to argue that the gallows is 'a ghastly relic of a primitive age', as someone said at a debate in Tingwall exactly 50 years ago. It is ghastly, of course, but it isn't obsolete. I am afraid that hanging is still with us, and that it is flourishing here and there. If you are as old as I am, you will recall that it was still a popular punishment in this country in the 1950s, although rapidly becoming less so - partly because of judicial murders like the one carried out on Derek Bentley in 1953. There was still a long way to go. At that Tingwall debate in 1956, 37 Shetlanders voted against a motion 'That capital punishment should be abolished in this country', 27 voted for, and no fewer than 76 abstained. And although gross injustices like the death of Bentley eventually ensured that hanging was abolished in this country, in 2006 it is still the second most popular method of capital punishment in the world. Last year at least 144 men and two women were hanged in eight countries. What I want to do tonight is to hazard some guesses about why there are so many gallow hills in Shetland, and about the nature of the society where they were in use. It isn't a simple enquiry. There are no records of capital punishment, or about anything much here, until the 16th century, and I will be arguing that our gallow hills are much older than that. And there's a second problem. We like to think that we understand Scandinavian society in Shetland, the society that flourished from the 9th until the 15th century. We imagine that it was a law-abiding and civilized place, with its law courts at Tingwall, and Delting and Lunnasting. What we forget is that most of that period is completely invisible to us. From 800 until 1300 - half a millennium - there are no records at all about Shetland or its institutions. I will be arguing tonight that it is wrong to assume that Shetland's administrative set-up in 1300, when we know that the local law courts were in place, was ancient. I will suggest that it was very modern indeed. And my final introductory point. If we want to understand Shetland during its long history and prehistory, we can't rely on one source of information. We have no hope of understanding Shetland if we sit in our studies with books. If we do so we will fail. We need archaeology, and we need to pore over our place names and oral history. We must attend to what was happening elsewhere: in Norway, and in places even further afield. Most of all, we have to put on our walking boots. And that is why Gordon Johnston and I set out, in May this year, to look at Shetland's gallow hills. 2 I want to discuss the 13 hills systematically, and bring out the characteristics that they have in common. Gradually I shall piece together a story. Gordon and I began our survey in the very south of Shetland. There are three gallow hills in the modern parish of Dunrossness. They are the Gallow Hill at Boddam, Gulga in Sandwick, and Da Knowe o Wilga in Sooth Cunningsburgh. Gulga and Da Knowe o Wilga, at first sight strange names, are versions of the Old Norse word gálgi, which simply means gallows. The Cunningsburgh pronunciation is especially odd, but in some parts of Shetland the 'g' sound at the beginning of a word becomes 'blurred' and drops away, and in a process that linguists call centralization the 'a' sound in gálgi alters (in this case) to 'i': gálgi becomes Wilga. I regard all our gallow hills, with one exception that I will discuss last, as medieval in date. I suspect that they were all originally called gálgi, and that all had their origin early in the period when Shetland was a Scandinavian country. The translation from gálgi, or Galgeberg, to gallow hill is easy: the word for gallows is much the same in all the Germanic language. Here immediately we see a concentration of gallows in a very small area. Da Knowe o Wilga, and Gulga, in particular, are exactly two miles apart as the crow flies. And these gallow hills have two other features in common. First of all, they have stunning views from their summits. From Da Knowe o Wilga our poor miscreants would have had as last view a sight of most of Sooth and North Cunningsburgh, and even Noss, on the north, and part of Sandwick and Mousa on the south. And, more to the point, the inhabitants of those districts would have seen the gallows and its lonely passenger. The second feature of these sites is equally striking, and perhaps more surprising. Each of them has prehistoric material in its close vicinity. Take a walk on the Gallow Hill at Dunrossness and you will be staggered by the amount of material there from Shetland's long stone age. The hilltop is strewn with it. And the same is true at Sandwick and Cunningsburgh. Writing in 1911, Elizabeth Stout reported that traces of ancient burials had turned up at Gulga; and there is a large chambered cairn just below Da Knowe o Wilga. We will encounter both these characteristics of Gallow Hills, the breathtaking views and the prehistoric detritus, in almost every case we see. I'm going to mention at this point an objection that I've heard from several people as I've formulated my views about these sites. Some doubt that they can have been real gallow hills. These people hazard the view that they were called Gallow Hill simply because they were off the beaten track and looked eerie. I think there is a subtext in what they say that Shetlanders, especially our civilized Scandinavian ancestors, couldn't have been hanging people as systematically as the hills seem to suggest. They also point out to me that most of the hills have an English name - gallow hill - rather than a Scandinavian one, and that if those hills were used for hangings, that must have happened later, a habit of wicked Scots interlopers here rather than their virtuous predecessors. I think these objections are wrong. The Scandinavian countries are strewn with gallow hills, usually called Galgehøje or Galgeberg. Scandinavians of the middle ages had no objections at all to capital punishment, most often for theft. The Norwegian law is there in black and white: an ordnance of Hakon V's time says that 'anyone who steals goods to the value of two aurar shall hang'. Two aurar was two shillings, by the way. As well as hanging, the Scandinavians favoured the strangling and burial alive of women, and other choice methods. As we shall see, there were alterations in Shetland's administrative arrangements when Scots overlords came along. But that involved a reduction in the number of gallow hills in use here, not an increase. Secondly, there are important traditions that the Shetland hills were indeed used for hanging people. Most people probably don't know that Gulga in Sandwick means gallows. But there is a persistent tradition that it was a hanging site. In fact there are detailed and convincing stories about the gallows itself, and its eventual fate. The story goes that there was a big standing stone at Gulga, used as as a gibbet, which was dismantled about 1820 and cut up to make lintels for new houses there. On Good Friday in 1949 the Sandwick poet Billy Tait took a walk to Gulga, and while he was there he began to write one of Shetland's great poems, 'A day atween wadders'. Billy had been admiring the view, but the day chilled, and he became aware of his uncanny surroundings. This is what he wrote: Dan, laek dis lump At's mirknin aa da Ness an muvvin laidly Across da Sannick rigs, cam a caald stoond; An my fine wirds wilt, an I mindit da day An da place whaar I stoed. Eence a staandin-stane - A gibbet accoardin ta some - hed crooned dis broo, Bit dey caad 'im doon an his grey freestane flanks Dey shapit for lintels fur yun sam aald hoose Wi hits oonteelie name - idder leid, idder loed - At ran i my haid laek da chap an clap o a bell: Gulga, Gulgotha, goelgreff, dung an death. In the same way, there is a hanging tradition in Sooth Cunningsburgh. Some of you will have heard about Kil Hulter, the legendary sheep thief who with a young helpmate prowled around Hoo Field. When that gentleman was finally captured, according to the tale told in Cunningsburgh, the community hanged him at Da Knowe o Wilga. In other words, despite the corruption of these place names, Gulga and Wilga, the people of Sandwick and Cunningsburgh knew perfectly well that there had been gallows on the sites. To complete this introduction to our survey I shall mention two more places: the Gallow Hills in Waas and in Sooth Unst. Once again there are fine views. From the top of the Unst example you can see Uyea, Fetlar and North Yell, and there are also fine views of the east side of Uyeasound, the Westing of Unst, and north to Saxavord. Once again, the gallows would have been very visible from the adjacent and not so near townships, and also from the sea. The same is true of the Gallow Hill at Waas. And they both have prehistoric cairns near their summits. It looks as if the promoters of these hills deliberately chose gallows sites with ancient material in the vicinity. No doubt it made the surroundings, and the proceedings there, more solemn. But there is another aspect of these two sites that I want to mention, in the hope that we can take a step forward towards explaining them. Like the examples in Dunrossness, they aren't in any way 'central'. They don't sit in the middle of their respective parishes. Just as Da Knowe o Wilga was almost on the boundary between Sandwick and Cunningsburgh, the Gallow Hill at Waas is on the edge of both Waas and Sandsting. And the Gallow Hill at Uyeasoond is non-central in a different way: it is in the south of the island, and, as we shall see, there may be a gallow hill elsewhere in Unst. A third example is the Gallow Hill at Eshaness, which is more or less on the boundary with the rest of Northmavine. I repeat what I have said before: our gallow hills, and no doubt the system of justice they exemplify, were very local. They are also very old. Shetland's parish arrangements can be dated to around 1300, and the gallow hills pay no attention to them. So I suggest that the gallow hills are older. (Brian Smith) September 19, 2006 Gibbets and gallows II (by Brian Smith) [The first part is here.] Gibbets and gallows: Local rough justice in Shetland, 800-1700 3 I am moving north. Now we come to Delting and Northmavine, and the Gallow Hills at Brae and Gluss. What I have to say about these places is very speculative; but the points I make may take us a little further forward. When I told Laureen Johnson that we had been to the Gallow Hill at Brae, she said: 'You are surely been in da bleak wilderness hert o Delting da day'. Look at it. There is a burn below the hill called the Gallow Burn, and we might hazard a guess that this is the dreary route where the 'authorities' dragged the condemned men and women on their last journey. In none of the Shetland cases, in fact, is there any easy way up the hill, and I have come to believe that that was deliberate. Capital punishment was an awful and dishonourable end of someone's career, and it doesn't surprise me that it took place a long way from the townships. It was the same everywhere: the gallow hill in Oslo, for instance, is outside the city. And remember Jesus Christ's last long journey to Golgotha: 'a green hill far away/Outside a city wall'. There is a fine vista from this Gallow Hill, again, but this time there is more to see than islands and seascapes. From the summit you get a splendid view of Busta and Waddersty, two important townships on the west side of the parish. My tentative question is: are these gallow hills situated where they are because of prestigious landowners or lessees in the vicinity? Here I want to cite a document. In 1490 Hans Sigurdsson, one of the richest proprietors in Norway, died, and his family partitioned his estates. His lands here included the old royal manor farm of Papa Stour and its adjuncts elsewhere in Shetland. Among those adjuncts were Busta and Waddersty. There can be little doubt that they were prestigious townships, and they might once have had prestigious royal tenants. It may be a coincidence that Delting's Gallow Hill looms above Busta and Waddersty, but it may not. Now let's look at Gluss. This time our gallow hill is called Gulga, as in Sandwick. The name hasn't survived, but it is preserved in the name of a notch in the hillside just south of a hill with a cairn on top of it: Da Scord o Gulga. So we have assumed that the cairn-hill is Gulga. No doubt the procession to the gallows came via the Scord. Look at the mouth-watering view: to the west of Yell, through Sullom Voe, and Foula, and then to Ronas Hill on the north-west. But let's attend more closely to Gluss itself. If ever a gallow hill was attached to a township, this is the place. As at Busta and Waddersty we have no idea who lived in Gluss in the middle ages, but its very geography suggests that it was a prestigious place. There is a large block of arable land, just north of Gulga, and then a fringe of prosperous-looking satellite farms round about, with names terminating in 'setter': Fiblister, Nissetter, Bardister and Tirvister. It looks exactly like the arrangement we find at Papa Stour in 1299, and we know that Papa at that date was a prosperous royal farm. And just as Busta and Waddersty belonged to Hans Sigurdsson in 1490, so did part of Gluss. What I am hinting at is that these two gallow hills might have been related to the townships, and controlled in some way by their prosperous tenants. I have a feeling that something similar was going on at Sandwick. Gulga there is right above the parish kirk, which itself is without doubt in the ancient central township of the area. All these are suggestive examples. But for even better proof of a link between landowner and gallows, I recommend a visit to Fetlar. 4 Gordon Johnston and I went there a fortnight ago. Writing in the Shetland Folk Book in 1964, the great Fetlar folklorist Jeemsie Laurenson reported that '[t]he hole in the Gallow Hill where the gallows stood can still be seen'. We didn't really expect to find it. We walked from the main road to the television mast, and looked around for the summit of the Gallow Hill. We saw it right away. There was a strange excrescence on top of it. I now know that you can see it from all directions: even from Vatster in Yell, if you look hard enough. What is it? No scholar has noticed it, as far as I can find out, although it is well-known by older people in the west of Fetlar. It is one of Shetland's most extraordinary archaeological monuments. Right at the peak of the hill there is a square turf enclosure, still knee-high, and perfectly visible on each of its four sides. It is about 25 yards square. On the east side, nearest Tresta, there are signs of an opening, perhaps a gate. I have discussed it with Ian Tait, our expert on Shetland's vernacular structures, and he agrees with me that it can't be prehistoric, and that it certainly can't have had any modern agricultural function, given where it is. Quite simply, it is a medieval enclosure for the gallows. As Billy Thomason, formerly of Velyie, said to me: 'Yun's whar dey hanged da fokk.' And there, right in the middle it, was a big hole, faced with stone: the hole, as Jeemsie said, where the gallows stood. We can only guess what was going on there, but it was something formal. The enclosure must have been the place where executions were carried out, of course; but the function of the dyke is unclear. Was it to keep observers out? Because observers there must have been. Just as gallow hills were positioned where they could be seen from great distances, there is plenty of evidence that in medieval and modern societies the general public liked to see an execution. It wasn't until 1868, for instance, that the British parliament passed the Capital Punishment within Prisons Bill, ending public hangings, and requiring executions to be carried out behind prison walls. I strongly suspect that what we have found in Fetlar is the enclosure where the people watched their neighbours hang. So what was the administrative background to this Fetlar situation? As I have hinted, it may have been different - very different - from the Scandinavian Shetland we thought we understood. In the late middle ages, and modern times, the judicial process in Shetland took place at parish and Shetland-wide level, in parochial bailie courts and sheriff courts. Here, however, I bring another, older administrative unit into my argument: the herra. Shetland's herras are the same as the Old Norse word hérað, whose basic meaning is rural district. No one has commented on the fact before, but although Shetland's herras have been obsolete for hundreds of years, a remarkable number of them have survived in place names. There were herras in North Yell and Mid Yell, in Lunnasting and Tingwall. And there is a particularly good example in Fetlar. Right underneath the Gallow Hill we find the fertile townships of Tresta and the Fetlar glebe - Da Lower Herra - with the little places called Sooth Dale, Da Baelins and North Dale to the north, called the Upper Herra. So what were these districts? The Norwegian laws of the middle ages, especially the Gulathing and Frostathing laws, are full of references to them. They were rural districts whose inhabitants acted together, especially in judicial and administrative matters. Some of the references are to mundane matters like bridge-building in the herra; but a lot of them deal with the criminal law. 'The men of the hérað,' according to Gulathing Law, 'shall pay the fines for those who live in that hérað'. 'If a man is robbed of his goods, and can see the tracks of men leading away,' we read elsewhere in the same law-code, 'let him call in his héraðsmen' - his neighbours in the herra-district - 'and report his loss'. And in section 156 there is a requirement that two witnesses are needed to testify that a suspect of murder 'moved about through the hérað in such a way that he could have been present at the slaying...' To deal with crimes the herra had its own law court or thing. According to Frostathing Law, 'If a man is wounded in the hérað... a thing shall be called'. What I am suggesting is that the Herra in Fetlar was an ancient judicial district, with its law court and its own gallow hill. Of course, there is no contemporary evidence for any such arrangement. But the place name alone must lead us to some such conclusion. And there may also be a hint of it in an oral source, the utterance of a Fetlar woman hundreds of years after the event, staggering as that may seem. In the 1890s Jakob Jakobsen visited Fetlar, and '[d]uring my stay... ' he wrote, 'an elderly woman living there told me that, according to an old tradition, the Isle... was formerly divided into three small districts, each with its own thing, the present "Herra" being one of them.' I regard that as an amazing piece of information. As I have said, Shetland's herras had been obsolete for many centuries; but here we have an old woman who knew nothing about Norwegian history, with a good grasp of the ancient institution and its functions. And this isn't just a question of administration. Hérað society was aristocratic society par excellence. The belief that the Vikings and their successors were smallholders and democrats, fondly held by many, is rot. Historians like Willie Thomson and Frans-Arne Stylegar have shown that Orkney was full of manor farms in the early middle ages, and it is highly likely that there was a similar social structure here. Shetland's hérað-districts were small, but there can be little doubt that they and their law-courts were controlled by powerful landowners. (Brian Smith) [The third part is here.] September 20, 2006 Gibbets and gallows III (by Brian Smith) [The second part is here.] Gibbets and gallows: Local rough justice in Shetland, 800-1700 5 In Fetlar, then, we found striking archaeological evidence about the island's gallows, and a district called Da Herra that might be connected with it. Are there more examples of the same kind of thing in Shetland? I think there are three, in Unst, Yell and Tingwall, in ascending order of importance. The first case is almost too good to be true. One day in 1774 George Low, an Orkney minister and naturalist, took a walk in Unst. I was shown, he wrote, 'on the top of a precipice called the Heog... a heap of stones called by tradition a place of execution...' There are two places called the Heog in Baltasound that might fit the bill for Low's site: the Muckle Heog and the Peerie Heog, just north of Baltasound. Fortunately, an anthropologist called Ralph Tate came to Unst 70 years later, part of Shetland's first archaeological expedition, and located the place. It was the Muckle Heog, which is arguably the strangest looking hill that I will discuss tonight. It looms over Baltasound and Haraldswick. The summit of it is strewn with prehistoric material, the remains of a chambered cairn: the 'heog' that gave it its name. And Low had more to say about the hill. He heard that it was called the Hanger Heog. At the foot of it, he said, was a heap of stones 'called the House of Justice, from which one ascends by steps to the former. Tradition says [he continued] that whatever criminal ascended the steps of Hanger Heog never came down alive.' Unfortunately, he doesn't say who told him these things. I have to say that I am a bit sceptical about them. If the Muckle Heog was really called Hanger Heog, the name probably doesn't have anything to do with hanging. It is much more likely to be an Old Norse word meaning a steep overhanging hill. But the tradition about the criminals, and the place of execution, suggests that this may be yet another gallow hill; and, if so, the alleged House of Justice and the steps down the hill may be parallels to the structure that we found in Fetlar. Samuel Hibbert went to the Muckle Heog in 1818, and he got more information still. [I]f any accused person, after hearing the sentence of the Lagman, [he said,] was desirous to appeal to the voice of the people, he tried to effect his escape in a direction that led to the more westerly circle of stones situated on an adjoining hill, and if he could reach in safety that sacred site of ground, his life was preserved; but if the popular indignation was against him, he was pursued on his way to the sanctuary, and any one before he reached it might put him to death. Once again the story sounds rather fanciful, but we will find another example of it elsewhere in Shetland. I am a little sceptical about these traditions: they sound artificial and literary. But there is a possibility that they have a kernel of reality. In Yell we don't find any archaeological evidence, but we do have a place name, and an interesting tradition. And we have a Herra. The Gallows Knowe in Yell is at Holsigarth, opposite the laird's house at Windhoose. Windhoose is an ancient manor, the possession, for 11 generations, according to tradition, of a family that guttered out with somebody called Swen Johnson, around 1620. Windhoose is at the centre of the Inherra, the lands on the east side of Whalfirt Voe. The Ootherra, on the other hand, was on the other side of the voe; and since the Inherra is now largely uninhabited, the places on the west are now called, simply, the Herra. There is a fascinating tradition about the Gallow Knowe. The folklorist Laurence Williamson jotted it down in his notebook. The event is supposed to have happened in the time of Charles Neven of Windhoose in the early 18th century. Two men from Vollister in the Inherra had stolen Neven's cattle. Neven said that he would send them to Scalloway Castle to be hanged. An dey said [according to Williamson's note] dey widna go ta Scalloway. Dey wid redder be med a end o in der own ples. So dey wir hanged up on da Gallows Knowe, ower against his hoose, so at he wid hae da plesir ta see dem. Now, I don't believe for a moment that such an event happened in Yell in the 18th century. There were no local executions in Scotland in that era. I suggest, instead, that a tradition of an execution at Windhoose at some distant period, when people got hanged in their own district, may have become attached to an unpopular landlord at a later time. I now retreat from the North Isles to the very centre of Shetland. As everybody knows, it was at Tingwall that Shetlanders of the middle ages had their lawthing - their head court - and their head kirk. And half a mile away, looming over the loch, is the Gallow Hill. You can't miss it: in that parish of gentle contours its jagged top is visible for miles. There is a prehistoric dyke running along the top, so clearly marked that a modern fence has been erected to follow it. You may say: if I am right that there is a link between gallow hills, law courts and héraðs, we should certainly find a Herra in Tingwall. And we do find one. As late as the 16th century people still called the district to the north and west of the Tingwall Loch the Harray, and the word is still preserved in the names of Herrislee House and its adjacent hill. There is a tradition about these sites. John Brand, who visited Shetland in 1700, heard that the lawthing... ...is thought [as he put it] to have been keeped by the Danes, when they were in the possession of the Country. [People] also report [he continued] that when any Person received Sentence of Death upon the Holm, if afterwards he could make his escape through the crowd of People standing on the side of the Loch without being apprehended, and touch the Steeple of the Church of Tingwal, the sentence of death was Retrieved, and the Condemned obtained an Indemnity: For this Steeple in these days was held as an Asyl for Malefactours, Debitors Charged by their Creditors &c. to flee into. Exactly the same story that we heard about the Muckle Heog in Unst. I have almost finished my tour of Shetland's gallow hills. Everything that I have seen and read about the sites that I have mentioned so far suggests to me that they were in use at an early date, and that by the time we have large numbers of records, say from the 16th century on, they were more or less obsolete. That is why the few tales about them are folkloristic in nature. But the stories are coherent enough for us to guess that the gallow hills were part of a system of local rough justice. I have suggested that they were part of a local administrative and aristocratic setup different from anything we find later. Now I go on to describe what happened next, on one last gallow hill. (Brian Smith) [The fourth and final part is here.] September 21, 2006 Gibbets and gallows IV (by Brian Smith) [The third part is here.] Gibbets and gallows: Local rough justice in Shetland, 800-1700 6 When documents come on the scene things become clearer. Between the 1560s and 1615 Robert Stewart and Earl Patrick Stewart were in control of Shetland. Just as they moved the islands' central law court from Tingwall to Scalloway, as is well known, they abandoned Tingwall's Gallow Hill. Having been local, Shetland's administrative and legal set-up became increasingly central. In June 1574, for instance, Robert Stewart held a court in Scalloway, to try five men who had plundered a ship wrecked at Nesting. Robert pardoned them, but only, as the record says, 'efter thay wer haldin twa houris at the gallows fute, and ane tow about thair nek'. Robert or his son established a new Gallow Hill near Scalloway, the 'heiding hill of Berry', or the 'heiding hill of Houll', as it was called. In the 17th century, the last period of capital punishment in Shetland, we at last get to know the names of people who were executed, and of the people who executed them. Despite his reputation, there is no proof that Earl Patrick was a great hanger. In 1602 he erected gibbets in the main islands that he owned, to deter thieves; but there is no evidence that he used them. But things got worse after Patrick's time. It seems to be a rule that when regimes change in pre-industrial societies, the new overlords are very keen on law and order. Patrick's successors devoted a lot of time to crime and punishment, and several people went to the scaffold as a result - not least women. In October 1616, for instance, a year after Patrick's own execution, the sheriff court of Shetland passed sentence on three alleged witches and one habitual thief. They decided that Robert Boundson, the thief - in Lee in Tingwall - should be 'hangit to the death upoun the geibbit', and that Katherine Johnsdochter, Joonka Dyneis and Barbara Scord, the witches, should be taken by the lockman, the hangman, to the place of execution above Berrie, after noon, 'and thair to be wirryet [garrotted] at ane staik quhill they be dead, and theirefter to be brunt in ashes'. And these dreary events continued, throughout the century. Sometimes the punishment and the place of execution varied a bit. In October 1625, for instance, the lockman took Marion Thomasdochter, a sheep-thief, with her hands bound behind her back, to the point of Luckymenis Ness, somewhere near Scalloway, 'and there cast her over the craig into the sea, and drowned her to the death'. But usually the Gallow Hill was the favoured place for punishment, even if it was a lesser punishment than hanging. In February 1685 somebody called John Johnson stole a sheep in the hill between Unifirth and Brindister, in West Burrafirth, and the ranselmen caught him red-handed. It was a minor enough theft, but the judge came down hard. He ordered that John should be 'taken to the comone hangman as a bund thief, with his hands behind his back, and scurged from the castell [to] the gallows, and... receave threscoir of stryps or lasches from the hand of the said comone hangman, and therafter his lugs to be naild to the gallous, a stone being under his feitt to make it a step height, and... after he is nailld therto he may fall therfrom, the stone being takne away from under his feitt'. After that, for good measure, he sent John back to prison, prior to banishing him from Shetland forever - 'never to be sein thairin or to returne thairto under the paine of death'. I have been discussing the change from a medieval system of justice in Shetland, where decisions about life and death were taken in local districts and by potentates throughout the islands, to a 17th century one, where sentences were handed out in Scalloway. One was likely as bad as the other. Both were rough justice. The scene was ripe for further change, as the crown exerted more and more administrative control over the Scottish regions. It is very unlikely that anyone was executed in Shetland, by hanging, or drowning, or burning, after 1700. I suspect that the final victims were women: one of the last of them was Barbara Tulloch, who is referred to in the Tingwall kirk session register as 'a brunt witch' in 1693. 7 I have missed out one thing. What did the participants in these events - the victims, the hangmen, the general public - think about them? We can assume that the victims, the garrotted and burning women and the hanged men, didn't relish the situation at all. I suspect that the lockman didn't like it either. In medieval or early modern societies hangmen seem to have had to do the job, because they had been pardoned for some other crime - on condition that they killed or scourged their neighbours for the rest of their lives. The most tricky question of all is: did the general public think that capital punishment was desirable? Many of them likely did. But if they came face to face with it, as these Shetlanders did hundreds of years ago, did they like it so much? Vic Gatrell, a very fine historian of capital punishment in England between the 1770s and the 1860s, has tackled the subject. He argues that when crowds at a hanging made a commotion, they may not have been delighted, whatever it looked like. They may have been afraid, or angry, or both. A member of parliament remarked in 1868 that 'much of the disgusting levity exhibited [at executions] was no proof of indifference, but was rather an effort of unregulated minds to efface from their recollection the solemn and impressive scene they had beheld'. As Gatrell says, 'the crowd's passion helped to cancel out terror'. I quoted from Billy Tait's poem about Gulga at the beginning of this paper, and I want to end with another, by my friend Lollie Graham. 'Aald Maalie', in my opinion the best thing he has written, is an attempt to get inside the head of a Shetlander confronted with an execution. A mother and her child, Mansie, are discussing the events as a crowd drags a witch, Aald Maalie o da Gyill, towards an unspecified gallow hill. The mother searches for phrases to justify what is going on: her responses to her child are longwinded and hesitant. But as the ghastly day takes its course, mother falters, and finally breaks down. In this poem, and I shall end with a few verses from it, Lollie reconstructs with remarkable acuity how ordinary Shetlanders might have felt as they pondered their local system of capital punishment. An wha is yon dir draggin alang, midder, midder? An wha is yon dir draggin alang Nane helpin her, or carin? Surely, een dey tink is döne some wrang, Mansie, Mansie, Surely, een dey tink is döne some wrang - O look nae mair my bairn! Why are dey cerryin a fiery braand, midder, midder? Why are dey cerryin a fiery braand? Dey'll set da hedder blazin! Ta burn oot evil fae da laand, Mansie, Mansie, Tae burn oot evil fae da laand, Bairn - dönna aks da raeson. O, what's yon lowe on Gallow Hill, midder, midder? O, what's yon lowe on Gallow Hill? Da flems are leapin; see dem! Yon's pör aald Maalie o da Gyill, Mansie, Mansie Yon's pör aald Maalie o da Gyill - May da Loard abön forgie dem. [This is the concluding part of Brian Smith's paper.]