I’m wondering what else I can do with my research.
I was asked to rate a Wikipedia entry last evening. I’m checking Wikipedia all the time and such a thing as a pop-up asking me to contribute just because I logged on and looked something up at the same time … well, it’s never happened before.
Wikipedia, “fun with Dictionary,” chasing etymologies of words after I find out how to spell them, searching my way deep into old, old books that’re out of print but saved for posterity by Google Books. Heck, I’ve even mucked around in the old stable of Medieval Scots word finders. Seems I’m into one reference resource or another every couple of hours through my day. But the only online source that’s asked me to rate their work is Wikipedia.
That’s kind of ‘special’.
“Ah, the benefits of membership,” I thought for the heartbeat it took to realize that I wasn’t actually signed in, just then, and that as far as Wikipedia is concerned, I was just Joe Blow.
“Well! That’s even kind of neater. The collective is really serious about stepping up the feedback loop.”
And then it occurred to me that, apart from correcting one village reference from an Irish location to the proper Scotland place in an obscure Wikipedia article, I haven’t originated a single Wikipedia entry or joined in expanding upon others’ contributions since I signed up and logged on, now some years ago. In other words, I haven’t put my “contributor” status to use at all.
In fact, I haven’t been a contributing citizen of the Wiki World wherever I’ve found it, even though I was anxious to be an “early adopter” of the idea of contributory history … the “new paradigm” of collective Master Narrative writing.
Perhaps I need to see a self interest in throwing stuff out into the “edited” noosphere of the logged, dated, annotated histories. And in so doing, expose myself to the nit-picking maelstrom criticism that comes with positing an observation — always imperfectly researched, thought out, or expressed — into the popular draft of our Master Narrative of History.
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Be that as it may, the other day I was wondering to myself if there is a market for some sort of history of pre-Reformation Scots law practice. Maybe something “humanized” by an heroic Templeton at the center of the story about the development of the modern profession of “lawyer.” Or, maybe using an ancestor as the subject of a landmark case. (I’m thinking Roger Tempiltoun or Andro Tempilton that was Maxwell’s capo who was the central figure in a case that went a way towards establishing the authority of the central government’s court and law [the King’s Court] over the common usurpation of legality by thugs of local Lairds, back a few generations before Roger came onto Edinburgh’s legal scene.)
Oh, yes, there’s stories to be told, there, but I’m not sure I’m up to the bullet-proof research needed to make it more than an interesting (to some, I hope) anecdote.
Ha-ha! It’s already here.
Alas, no ‘Tempiltoun’ in the index, and I’m going to have to read the thing to see if there’s any mention of ‘messenger-at-arms’ or ‘justice’ or ‘sheriff’. It’s certain that our Roger Tempiltoun was not one of the few General Procurators through 1549 nor Crown Advocates up through 1582. Nor was his son, James, in either position.
While that doesn’t mean that neither was employed by the college of justice in some capacity, a refresher look at the snippet of text regarding James gives me pause on the whole ‘College of Justice’ thing. It says that James was appointed “justice officer and sheriff officer of Edinburgh principal…”.
Hm-m-m. Maybe James and his dad were, in fact, the burgh’s Sheriff and only occasionally undertook “messenger-at-arms” and other jobs for the crown court? But, what about the “wagiis”? Unless my Scots Dictionary of terms of the period tells me differently, I’m assuming that wages were a regular payment then, as now. Which infers some kind of regular employment by the “justice courtiis” of the king.
This book is going to be an interesting read, whatever the case. It does get into the details of the practice of law back in the mid-sixteenth century, and that’s cool.
OK, I’ve found some Maxwells that begat “Jameses”.
It’s my first discovery of a Maxwell line that coined ‘James’ as a family name. They’re the Maxwells that held the baronetage of Calderwood, now a neighborhood of East Kilbride.
While the timeline of successors can be confusing in the first source book I came across, it seems that back in 1400, one of the many John Maxwells of Pollok split his lands between two sons; the Pollok estates went to the eldest, John, and the Barony of Calderwood went to his second son, Robert. Robert’s heir married Elizabeth Denniston and from their marriage “lineally descended Sir James Maxwell of Calderwood.”
The ‘begats’ gloss over interceding generations; this source is confusing as it skips along the timeline. But Burke is much more clear in covering this generational leap. The detail is tedious, but one of the intervening 2- or 3 heirs married a Boyd from Kilmarnock, possibly bringing that old line of Templetons closer to the Maxwell orbit … it’s fun to speculate about such stuff.
In any case, this line mixed it up with the Hamiltons (of “Finart”? I thought the Hamiltons were Lanarkshire folks) and the Hamiltons are lousy with Jameses. However, the appearance of the first James named in this ‘Calderwood’ direct line doesn’t appear to have been born until well into the mid-1500s, which would means I haven’t found my co-“destrained” pal of Roger.
Oh, well… .
Sometimes you get caught in the eddys.
The ‘eddy’ in this case isn’t even an Edward. It’s James Maxwell, co-abductee of our 16th century lawyer ancestor, Roger Tempiltoun. I was hoping to find James Maxwell among the Maxwells of Nether Pollok, since that branch of the clan were close to the Stewarts, and ‘James’ is a name associated with the Stewarts. So, I chased down that family’s genealogy book [it’s a rather large .PDF], and gathered names:
Bupkis.
I’ve looked into the Maxwells of the Marches — the olde trunk of the tree — and found no ‘James’ among ‘em.
The other eddies of the Maxwell current, among the many lands they spun off through progeny that established their own, separate, domains within and without the Caerlaverock Castle-seated primogenator, haven’t turned up a ‘James’, yet. But, I’ll keep my eye out.
I wonder, as I wander.
BTW: It seems the service that Andro Tempilton (and later, Andrew Tempiltoune — YOU SEE WHAT I’M UP AGAINST, here, with the spelling of our name…!) is greatly simplified, figuring out which “John” among all the John Maxwells in the long line of John Maxwells of Nether Pollok, by the fact that there were so few ‘begat’ through this century.
And, thank you all for looking into the eddies of our Family History. If any of you turn up a James Maxwell in Ediinburgh any time during the 1500s, be sure to let me know.
Ya follow out the details, regardless, and then - wow.
Thankfully, there are days like this one. I was poring through the few ‘facts’ I unearthed last Saturday, chasing thin, thin leads, when I came upon a page with this:
Seal of the abbot of Kilwinning Abbey, circa 16th century.
I didn’t get back to “update” my previous post as I thought I would. Got distracted by the detective work, I suppose. That, and was getting a bit discouraged by that cruel, miserly she-devil, Fortuna. But, then the worm turned — maybe.
I’ve spent my genealogy time this week trying to fill in the blanks in that page of the Calendar of entries in the Papal registers relating to Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 2 that I bought online last Saturday. See, it was confusing to me just when the grant that I found Gilbert witnessing was drafted and made. Hell, I wasn’t even able to tell who the grant was made TO since the grantee was “same as above” on my page, and I didn’t purchase the page before Gilbert’s mention. Just what church body or perhaps bishop that the grant was in favor of seemed not all that important at first. I just wanted to nail down WHEN the grant was made, and by whom — politically speaking.
The issue needing clarification was that the entry to the Calendar… was made in 1333, but mentions a handful of documents dated, first in 1327, and by reference in the previous entry, to 1330, 1312 & 13, and even as early as 1286! I figured that the only non-1333/1327 reference in the entry containing Gilbert — “4 Non. Nov. anno 14” — referred to “fourth nones (dictionary.com says ‘nones’ is the ninth day before the ides, or the 5th?), November, in the year 14 (meaning the 14th year of Pope John XXII’s pontificate, or 1330).” That was the working theory, anyway. But, if this was a recording & confirmation of a grant made by Walter Stewart, Earl of Menteith, as it says right up there at the top, then there was a problem with those dates: Walter died before 1294.
I started by finding out just who Gilbert’s co-signatories were and filling in their birth and death dates. That turned out a bit ambiguous as well. Among the other signatories, a Soulis senior died in 1310 and his junior in 1318. The Reginald de Crauford that was William Wallace’s uncle and sheriff of Ayr died in 1297, and his son, Reginald, seems to have died in 1307. The son of Menteith, Alexander, may have died as early as 1297 as well.
Any which way you cut it, Gilbert wasn’t signing any document along with all of them in the 1320s or ’30s. So my notion that Gilbert was young in 1296 when he signed the Ragman Rolls because he was still around 30 years later was not being supported, and I was no further along figuring out if Gilbert was of the same generation as the James de Templetone that appears in 1316, or if he was, rather, an older uncle perhaps.
And then, while Googling “Andrew Kras’ “, I discovered that Google Books had put up a full version of the Calendar of entries… since I last searched for Gilbert. Or at least that’s what I’m thinking, since this entry hadn’t come up in my many, many searches weeks/months ago. That discovery brought me the page that precedes the one I bought from the folks at theoriginalrecord.com, where I found out that the grantee of Walter Bailloch was Kilwinning Abbey’s abbot and convent.
Seeing what I could find out about the Kilwinning Abbey at the time, I came upon the above seal of its abbot.
“Oh-h, damn! This changes a lot of things,” is what immediately flitted into my mind.
You see, Gilbert’s seal is described as having a praying monk kneeling before the Virgin and Child. My “artist’s rendering” drew on a couple of iconic altarpiece paintings of the period, and looks like this:
The Kilwinning abbot’s seal did not come up in my survey of seals of the late 13th and early 14th centuries.
Ugh! Up til now, I’ve gone with the assumption that Gilbert was a Clunaic priest under the aegis of Paisley Abbey. — And, no, Gilbert was not ever an abbot of Kilwinning — But, the fact that Mestre Gilbert adopted the iconography of that office’s seal as his own strongly suggests that he came up through that abbey, or at least was of its Tironensian Benedictine order and may have had some kind of attachment to the abbey.
[The fact that Gilbert swam with the big fishes, knew William Wallace’s family (and Reginald was apparently not such a “minor lord” after all) and that our ancestor was closely associated with the Steward is doubly confirmed, however.]
And here I’d thought I’d scoured Gilbert to a glossy sheen and was done with him! There’s a lot more reading to do, even though it doesn’t auger for all that much more by way of re-write on Gilbert’s bio.
And I was so ready to move on to Roger and James in the 16th century.
Roger Tempiltoun, court official after 1546
Now this is frustrating:
The above is a ‘fragment’ of a scanned page from the Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, Volume 9 that has been scanned by Google Books. However, that’s all that Google Books has made available online. No context, no explanation.
Apparently one Roger Tempiltoun, my Medieval namesake, worked in the Royal courts in some capacity some time between the beginning of Volume 9 in 1546 and October 1551, and September 1553, dates I know are associated with him in Volume 10. (Volume 10 has him carrying — I think — “letterris of proclamatiounis witht missivis to Linlythqw, Striviling, Renfrew, and Dumbertaine” and was the subject of fines levied against various “lordis” for “deforceing of Roger Tempiltoun, officer” of the courts, presumably.
(I’ve read elsewhere that the messenger was occasionally jailed, beat up or otherwise humiliated by lords receiving messages or summons they didn’t like from superiors. Kind of literally “shooting the messenger.”)
Volume 10 — and 11 and 12 — none are available in more than the pictured-style fragments via Google.
Frustrating.
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UPDATE (2010.01.17.16:21PDT):
Keeping it in the family: Not only was Roger Tempiltoun actually a sheriff and justice of the court, but his wife evidently remained an influencial woman, and his son matured into the office he once held.
This is from the Registrum secreti sigilli regum Scotorum, Volume 6, on Google Books.
