PEOPLE OF THE ROCKY HOMELAND

THE HISTORY OF CREIGHTON, CRICHTON AND CREYGHTON

By: James H. Creighton

2005 Edition

Tree of Life 2001

This book was researched and written by

James H. Creighton

who died unexpectedly on June 10, 2005

before being able to finish this work of a lifetime.

Compiled and edited by

Susan Creighton Curtiss

2005 - 2009

Published posthumously

in his memory.

Some portions are fictionalized for reader interest.

Cover art and interior artwork

By

James H. Creighton.

All Rights Reserved

Copyright © by Susan Creighton Curtiss 2009

This book may not be reproduced in whole

or in part, in any form without express permission.

For information, please contact

Susan Creighton Curtiss

|JS.CURT@VERIZON.NET

TABLE OF CONTENTS

(SCC 5-16-09)

Credits page 1

Table of Contents page 2

Author’s Inspiration page 4

PART I: THE ROCKY HOMELAND

Chapter 1 Dragon Men of Crau page 5

2 The Men of Creighton page 9

PART II: BEYOND THE VILLA WALLS

3 Justinian’s Syrian Archer page 17

4 Longships-On-Tyne page 25

5 The Lion Goes to Sea page 29

6 The Princeling and the Lion page 33

PART III: WHEN BOYS WERE KINGS

7 Royal Orphans page 39

8 Thurstan de Crechtune page 42

9 The Lion and the Rose page 49

10 Stone Upon Stone page 57

11 Hurley-Burley page 66

12 The Black Dinner page 78

13 Douglas Cast Down page 85

14 Flowers of the Forest page 92

15 Meet Me On the Nith page 97

16 Reformation page 100

17 Lions From the Sea page 110

18 The Silent Lion of Nassau page 112

19 Giacomo Cretonio and the Black Robes page 117

20 The Stock Exchange page 121

PART IV: SEARCHING FOR THE GOLDEN LION

Chapter 21 Prussen-Holland page 126

22 The Golden Lion page 128 23 The Home of Lions page 129

24 The Lion of the North page 133

25 The Brotherhood page 135

26 Gold With Fins page 137

27 Life On the Memel page 142

28 The Veldpredikant page 147

PART V: THE RABBIT

Chapter 29 The Flight of the Earls page 152

30 Sewing the Seeds page 155

31 Landlords page 157

32 Laird of Aghalane page 159

33 Which Thomas Creighton? page 163

34 Wood-Kerns and Wolves page 164

35 Pipes and Drums page 166

36 The Wedding Present page 167

37 Orange Moon Over Antrim page 170

38 Don’t Forget To Water the Potatoes page 172

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 39 Scotch, Irish, German or Dutch? page 175

40 Herring Chokers page 178

41 Bloody-Backs and Linen Goods page 181

42 Evangeline page 183

43 United Empire Loyalists page 185

44 A Son for Nancy Ennis page 187

45 Rabbit Hunting page 192

PART VI: HOME

Chapter 46 Jane Magee page 195

47 Creightonville page 199

48 Crazy Like a Fox page 202

49 The Neighborhood page 205

50 Bonds of Marriage page 209

51 A Decade of Hope page 214

52 Headstones page 216

53 The Border Crossing page 222

54 Hillforts page 225

55 Ties That Bind page 232

56 Bursting Bubbles page 240

57 The Lion in Winter page 244

58 Diamond Hill page 245

59 Pine Island page 247

60 Last Egg in an Emptying Nest page 249

61 Forced From the Den page 251

62 Just W est of Down East page 253

63 Davy Crockett page 255

64 Atomic Kids page 258

65 Rights of Passage page 262

66 When Time Stopped page 265

67 The Laughing Leprechaun page 273

68 Into the Land of Shadows page 277

69 They Shoot Houses, Don’t They? Page 280

70 A Golden View page 281

Appendix 1: To the Memory of James H. Creighton (1946-2005) page 285

Creighton Coat of Arms by James H. Creighton page 286

Notations Page for C.O.A by James H. Creighton page 287

Creighton Banner by James H. Creighton page 288

Appendix 2: To the Memory of Patrick Crichton (1917-2003) page 289

Appendix 3: Combined Bibliography (Creighton, Crichton, Creyghton) page 292

Appendix 4: All Crichton, Creighton, Creyghton Names/Heraldry page 297

AUTHOR’S INSPIRATION

Jim hand stitching his final tipi 2004

These words written by Jim help us to understand a bit of what drove him to create in so many ways. He knew his time on earth was limited; unfortunately his goals were much larger than his time allowed him for completion. It is my pledge to complete and distribute his two final written projects according to his wishes. I hope his words inspire others.

Susan Creighton Curtiss.

“All men and women are born, live, suffer and die. What will distinguish us from one another are our dreams, whether they be about worldly or unworldly things and what we do to make them come about.

We do not choose to be born; we do not choose our parents; we do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die, but we do choose how we live. It is not about what we look like or what we have. It is about taking what we have and doing as much as we can with it. It is about learning and growing. When we are willing to learn what we don’t know and use our experiences, our perfections will begin to show. Collect memories and tie them in the colors of the rainbow, to be taken out and read, containing the story of your life. Write laughter between the lines of family tales before handing them down to new generations who, like relay runners, eagerly wait to add to the plot. Savor the fingerprints on windows and walls of the home, for they are the love notes scribbled around the margins of the family’s heart. May you always speak the truth quietly listening with an open mind when others speak.

Continue to collect the stories and pass them on to generations yet unborn.”

James H. Creight0n

PART I:

THE ROCKY HOMELAND

DRAGON MEN OF CRAU

It began simply enough with questions from Dutch cousins, pondering why their family spelling of CREYGHTON varied from the Scots CREIGHTON. The Dutch branches of the family have been in place in Holland since the end of the 17th century and appear to have much older contacts with the Continent. I knew nothing about mainland European Creighton’s, especially from the Low Countries. In correspondence with Ingrid Creyghton and her relative, Jos Grupping, I saw that much more had to be done to trace the old family, so long entrenched in Lowland Scotland. Who were these people and how did they branch out so far afield? To accomplish this, I had to go back to the beginning. It was farther removed in time than any of us realized.

Our name, in one form or another, has existed as an ancient Celtic surname for 2522 years. To understand the name, one has to understand the people we descend from, the Celts, or more specifically the Gauls and Gaels. 2600 years ago, beginning around 600 BC, the Celts appeared as a race to the ‘civilized’ world of Ancient Greece. Our family name appeared, already well established, 80 years later in Athens.

They had been evolving as a people for centuries along the upper Danube River, migrating down from early beginnings in the Juteland Peninsular of Northern Europe, absorbing earlier cultures along the way. The Batavi of the Netherlands descended from these same early wanderers. Where the Danube (a Celtic name) meets the Black Sea, they mingled with Asian Scythians and began a 400-year intercourse (600-200 BC) with those warrior-horsemen from the Steppes of Persia. They absorbed much of the Scythian culture and made it their own; the horse, the two-wheeled chariots, great wagons and new burial practices are a few examples. The Scythians introduced refined metalworking to the ancient Celts, which they perfected into a unique art form. They began to make and use steel weapons. The Celts also borrowed that Asian phenomenon, the dragon, which they developed into the symbol of their fighting regiments.

From their river settlements, they branched out all over Europe as traders, warriors and metalworkers from Britain to west-central Turkey, becoming the dominant groups, in time, in Southern Holland, Belgium, France, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Bohemia (Czechoslovakia), Romania, Hungry, the Balkans and Northern Italy. From the mouth of the Danube, they traveled regularly south to the Macedonian and Greek trading centers. The beautiful textiles of the Celts and their elaborate metalwork became prized commodities for the civilized nations, who in turn traded fine wines and foodstuffs from Greece and Egypt. Some of these ancient Celts remained in the city-states, perhaps as merchants, soldiers, or hostages to assure peaceful relations between the Greeks and their barbarian neighbors to the north.

Wherever they went, they left place names behind to mark their wanderings; Danube, Rhine, Paris, Belgium, Turkish Galatia and French Gaul were names of ancient homelands. The Boii gave their name to Bohemia and the Italian River Po, a variant of their tribal name. As they migrated west across the southern slopes of the Alps, they followed the rivers into south-central Gaul (France) just north of a 200-square-mile region abutting the Mediterranean Sea still known as Crau, ‘The Place of Stones.’ ‘Cra’ is the root word for stone in almost all known Celtic dialects. In 520 BC, only 80 years after the ‘official’ foundation of the Celts as a defined race, a man of Celtic origin was born who would become a renowned Greek comic poet, the founder of political satire, with the single surname of CRATINUS.

This man has come down through history as Cratinus the Elder (520-423 BC), who became famous in Athens as a contemporary of Aristophanes and Percius. Both of these men wrote much about the works of Cratinus. Only bits and pieces remain of his actual writings, but his satire became the rage in Athens. To have risen to such a level of acclaim must have been the result of hard work, for the Celts, who were rarely if ever seen, were then almost unknown as a people. It was three years after the birth of Cratinus that the Greek historian and adventurer, Hecateus de Milelus, first coined the word naming the people of the interior. In an expedition north along the river Po, he encountered the Boii and related tribes whom he called “Keltoi,” The Hidden People. Perhaps Cratinus was a child of a Celtic envoy taken to Athens for diplomatic reasons. Whatever his origins, the name Cratinus remained intact for roughly 5 generations. During the time of Alexander the Great, Cratinus the ‘Younger’ (356-316 BC) was in Athens, also a famous comic or satirical poet, born 164 years after his ancestor.

The most probable link to this family and the Greeks was the ancient Greek colony of Massilia (Marseilles), in use as a trade center since 600 BC. It was from here that Hecateus de Milelus ventured into the mountains and the headwaters of the Po to name the Keltoi. From here also sailed the Greek explorer and mathematician, Pytheus, who in 325 BC, circumnavigated the British Isles, naming them “Pretani,” the ‘Land of the Painted People.’ The Romans later altered this name to ‘Brittaini, or Britain. During the time of Cratinus the Elder, the colony of Massilia introduced the Hellenic Culture to the Celts of the Rhone River, where they had trading posts as far north as Toulouse among the Volcae Tectosages, the Vocontii, the Allobroges and the Ambarri confederacies.

For centuries, the Keltoi established themselves in permanent locations and began evolving into distinct sub-cultures. The mother tongue, which is reported to have been closer to Old Welsh than the modern Irish and Scots Gael, began to change as groups became separated from one another over time. Those who chose northern Spain and Portugal became the Iberian Gauls (Gaulii is the name applied by the Romans; the Germans called them ‘Kelten.’). These were warlike Celts who either drove out, or assimilated portions of the indigenous Basque Pictonii tribes. The Pictonii were of the same groups who had settled Scotland as early as 1000 BC, to become the Picts, ‘the Painted People.’ The Iberian Celts were great sea raiders, migrating to lands along the southern French coast and at some point venturing to Ireland to become the Gaels. In Ireland, their language altered to become the distinct “Q,” or Goidelic, Celtic dialect.

The Iberian Celts who migrated to coastal France below Brittany retained the older “P” or Brythonic dialect. In the region that the Romans would call Aquitania, the Iberian Celts and the Pictonii would head a coalition of related coastal tribes who portions of eventually mingled with the Aremorican tribes of Brittany, becoming the Cymric-Celts (Cumri), ancestors of the modern Welsh. They were great traders, traveling to Britain in their ships often to trade sheep and wines for tin, lead, gold and silver. Many of the Cymric Celts, such as the Dumnonni, Durotriges and Silure established strongholds or trading centers on the Severn River to be closer to the tin mines of Devon and Cornwall. It was from this mixed group called Cumri that I believe the Creighton line sprung, probably through the Brigante, who had established a colony in northern Britain, in present Yorkshire and Durham.

The Brigante, from old Roman writings, can be traced to four major regions. I would suspect that, along with the Carnutes, both were remnants of one or two original mother clans, with the Carnutes as religious leaders (Druids) and the Brigante as the civic and war leaders of the Celts. In the Austrian Tyrol at Lake Constance, the Brigantii tribe ruled for centuries. The Romans called Lake Constance on the Rhine Brigantium Lacus, or Lake Brigantii. Their region of Austria was called Raetia. A second region was in the Cottian Alps at the Roman town of Brigantio. A third and major group, possibly separated for 1000 years, were the Gallaeci Brigantes of northern Spain, who fostered the Irish and Scotti tribes of Ireland. From their capitol of Corunna in Brigantium Hispania, they were the terminus of the great British tin, gold, silver and lead trade to the civilized nations of the Mediterranean, Greece and Egypt. To administer this trade, king Broegan of Spain had established the Brigante colony at York, in Britain, far in the shadowy past.

In any event, the Cratinus line had existed intact for 164 years during the Grecian Era. There is the possibility that they originated from the Gallic region of southern France, perhaps with the migrating Brigante or Boii, who had moved deep into Gaul from their old mountain haunts, north of Massilia in the Crau Region, the ‘Place of Stones’. As Roman occupation increased, the Boii left the southern region to join the Aquitani, and in turn, the Aremorican tribes, as fighting with Rome began. If Cratinus the Elder’s line originated from the Lower Rhone, then the Crau region would, in fact, have been ‘The Rocky Homeland.’

In the modern Welsh, which descend from the ancient mother tongue, our name is found in the definitions of rock, or rocky. There are multiple words with the same meaning, but ‘rocky,’ as an adjective, is Creighiog. The noun ‘Rocky Place’ in the feminine gender, becomes Creigle, the masculine gender is rendered Creigleoedd. As a side note, the adjective ‘Crych,’ used in many old Scots documents (Thurstan de Crechtune) means rippling, curly, or quavering…for some reason, it does not fit. It was merely the spelling for the time. ‘Craig,’ using the root ‘Cra,’ means steep cliff or rocky outcropping. Craig developed into a separate Scottish clan. From these findings, I believe ‘Creighiog’ indicates that ‘Creighton’ is most probably the original surname, meaning ‘From the Rocky Homestead.’

By 150 BC, the region north of Brittany had become a great trading center. The Gauls of this region to the River Rhine, in modern Holland, were called the Gaulii-Belgae. The confederated Belgae tribes had long ago intermarried with German tribesmen from across the Rhine and this mixed race developed into a great power. They began minting their own gold coins, trading extensively throughout Europe and the British Isles. Many had alternate territories in Britain from a very early date. The Belgae-Cantii were long established south of the Thames (the early Greeks called this region Kanttion), as were the Trinovantes and Catuvellauni north of the river.

And so we find a world west of the Rhine from Holland to Northern Italy almost entirely Celtic in culture as Rome rose as a world power. In 58 BC, Gaius Julius Caesar entered Gaul as the new Roman Governor, to pacify it and bring it into the fold as a part of the empire. To greet him were over 90 separate tribes, each one clinging to home territories and river valleys. His initial purpose was to prevent a mass migration of the powerful Hellvetii Tribe, which had lived in the high Alpine valleys of Switzerland for centuries. If they were allowed to move down into Western Gaul, the combined Celtic opposition would be overwhelming. The 360,000 Helvetii had burned their homes and were massed at the Rhone River at Lake Geneva, at the northern border of the province of Further Gaul. They had talked the Boii, Tigurini and other tribes into joining them; they did not plan to return to their homelands. Meeting them in southern Burgundy, Caesar, with his legions, turned back the migrating Celts. Over 250,000 were killed, 110,000 Helvetii were sent back to their old homeland, defeated.

Rome had, for some time, colonies in what is now southern France and northern Italy, which they called The Province, or Nearer Gaul. It provided a land route from Italy to Spain along the coastal region south of the Alps. The coastal Celts around Marseilles were ‘Romanized’ and had asked for citizenship and protection from their northern cousins in Further Gaul. The Helvetii attempt to migrate to the lowlands became the political reason for sending in the legions, but the overall reason was conquest of the combined tribes of Further Gaul. The general populace back in Rome considered many of the tribes and even the British Isles mythological.

Caesar’s incursion into Gaul resulted in 9 full years of summer campaigns against the confederated Celtic tribes. To promote his political career, he kept a daily journal, which became his 7-book volume, Commentaries on the Gallic War. He wrote in simple, but descriptive terms, locating every tribe encountered, with names of their tribal leaders. Some of these Celtic leaders can be traced directly to modern families. The Atrebate ‘king’ (High Chief) Comminus became the ancestor of the House of Comyn, now Clan Cumming of Scotland. Somewhere in this menagerie were the ancestors of Clan Creighton.

Caesar began by dividing Gaul into four main military districts. The south, adjoining Spain, was Aquitania, holding mostly coastal Iberian Gallic sea raiders. To the north, including the Brittany Peninsular and Normandy, were the confederated Aremorican tribes, which included the Veneti and Osismi tribes of Brittany, the Carnutes on the Loire and the Parisii on the Seine. Among the powerful Carnutes were the training centers and sacred sites of the Druids, the religious leaders of the Celts of Gaul. As the wars escalated, the mountain strongholds of western Brittany became the last holdout for most hostile tribes. Caesar called the vast central portion the Lands of the Celtae, or ‘Greater Gaul’, and north of the Seine to the Rhine was home of the confederated Belgae tribes of Picardy (France), Belgium and southern Holland, Gallia Belgica. This entire region was also referred to as ‘Long-Haired Gaul.’

The Roman campaigns began with the northern Belgae and the Aremorican tribes of Brittany and Normandy. The following year Caesar routed the Aremorican Veneti tribes of western Brittany, destroying their hill forts and forcing thousands to flee to Cornwall, Devon and Wales. His legions also entered Aquitania and subdued the Iberian Celts, driving them north, while other legions went to subjugate the Belgae tribes once again in present day Belgium. Many more fled their homelands for Britain, seeking refuge with tribal members already located there. One Belgae group was the Iceni, who settled in present East Anglia and Norfolk near their Trinovante cousins.

55 BC was the pivotal year. Caesar began with lightning raids across the Rhine deep into Germany, then assembled the legions on the coast and bullied the Morini and other coastal tribes into building a fleet, to attack Britain. He had found an ally in the Atrebate king, Commius, who also claimed territory in Britain south of the Thames in present Hampshire. He sent Commius on ahead to council the Britons (British Celts) and then set sail with two legions for the coast of Kent. The expedition ended in failure, the fleet was destroyed in a storm and the British reception was hostile. Patching a few ships back together, Caesar limped back across the channel, vowing to return the following year in force.

Return he did, with five legions in 600 vessels, accompanied by 200 private merchant ships from the Veneti and other coastal tribes. In two short months, Caesar led his legions inland to, and across the Thames, deep into Catuvellauni lands. Dozens of battles were fought as tribes all across Britain rushed to turn back the Romans, but to no avail. Caesar forced them to submit and demanded annual tribute and hostages to take home to Rome.

Caesar’s ‘conquest’ of Britain brought him much fame, but the island would not be revisited (by a Roman army) for another 93 years. He spent the last four years of his Gallic campaigns (53, 52, 51, 50 BC) in much the same manner, sending now 10 full legions to all points of Gaul to quell uprisings. The Belgae in the north were especially troublesome as Roman garrisons replaced Celtic hillforts (Oppidias) all across Further Gaul. Many tribes turned sides and began fighting for the Romans as cavalry troops and scouts, while old allies, like Comminus and his Atrebates, fought against Caesar.

In 52 BC a massive uprising occurred when the Carnutes raided the grain stores at Cenabum, present Orleans. This Roman garrison was deep within the Carnute homeland, used annually as a wintering post for Caesar’s legions. A charismatic leader arose from Caesars ranks of Celtic cavalry. His name was Vercingetorix of the Aedui tribe and soon, he had an army of over 80,000 Celtic warriors at his command. Many came to his call to arms from as far away as Spain and Britain, converging at a hillfort in Burgundy named Alicia. It was the last large battle, the great Gallic army was crushed and Vercingetorix surrendered. Caesar’s old friend Comminus fled to Britain to remain as king of the British Atrebates at modern Silchester, Hampshire.

Caesar prepared to return to Rome, but faced two more years of resistance. The Belgae had formed a new confederation with the tribes north of present Paris and the homeland of the Parisii. Some of the German tribes across the Rhine were prepared to fight for their Celtic neighbors, all led by a chieftain called Ambiorix of the Celtic Eburones. After much fighting, this rebellion was put down, but only after great losses on both sides. The Parisii had taken a terrible beating in these last campaigns. They left their home island in the Seine where Notre Dame Cathedral stands today and sought asylum in northern Britain with the Brigante. They settled in modern Umberside, just north of the mouth of the Umber River.

Caesar’s last campaign was in the south, as the remaining hostile Iberian tribes of Aquitania rose in defiance of Roman occupation. The last battle was on the Dordogne River at Uxellodunum in 50 BC.

Just which tribe the Creighton’s originally sprang from will never be known. The place-name tying them to a rocky homeland could have been anywhere, but the old family Cratinus hints at a tremendously ancient beginning, as old as the Celts as a known race. By 50 BC, they were long accustomed to both Greek and Roman administrations of the Gallic world. The House of Creighton may have remained semi-civilized patrons of the Romans, or part of the mass migrations to the wilds of Brittany and beyond to western England with the Cumri (Welsh) tribes. They may also have been Parisii, moving directly to northeast England as a result of Roman warfare in 51 BC. Until someone closely inspects the Roman writings for this period for name similarities, we may never have an answer.

During the 93 years preceding the Roman occupation of Britain as a province, the Celts of Gaul became almost totally Roman in nature. The remaining Belgae and Aremoricans prospered as they borrowed the best of Roman culture and infused it with their own unique Celtic heritage. As light infantry and cavalry, they joined the ranks of the Roman legions to fight throughout the Empire.

THE MEN OF CREIGHTON

We tend to think of Britain during these interim years of 50BC to 43AD as devoid of Roman influence. The Britons, for the most part, were fiercely independent and hostile toward Roman interference, but Rome did retain an ongoing contact with the British Belgae. Because many, like the Atrebates shared lands on both sides of the Channel, many encouraged Roman civic rule, but in the west and north, the Cumri kept to themselves. They too had lands in both Brittany and the West Country of Britain, but their only contacts with Rome were in trade, especially from the tin mines in present Somerset and Devonshire. The word ‘Welsh’ did not come into existence for another 400 years with the arrival of the Germanic and Scandinavian sea raiders.

The Creighton’s may have acted as intermediaries for the Romans, being middlemen in the trade with the West Country. With such a long history extending back to ancient Greece, they were in a good position to provide these services. It also ties into future dealings with this family as primarily high-ranking service people to regional administrations. The British tribes, whether Belgae or Cumri, were inter related through marriage and many of these families had lands and relations on both sides of the English Channel.

Of course it was the Cumri Brigante who I have always related with the old family Creighton, because of that tribe’s early land holds in modern Yorkshire. A future Creighton would (perhaps) come out of this region along the Umber River to settle lands in Lowland Scotland. When Rome eventually occupied Britain in 43 AD, the Cumri Silure and Dumnonii were the dominant leaders of the southwest. Their Brigante, Parisii and Corvetii cousins controlled the north. The combined Cumri formed a barrier to Roman rule from Cornwall in the south to modern Galloway and Dumfies in the north. The Creighton’s evidently found a niche among the northern Cumri, somewhere between modern eastern Yorkshire and western Cumberland (Cumri-land).

One interesting story of note occurred around the time of the birth of Christ. A Roman ambassador, traveling in the county of the Southern Picts of Caledonia to arrange a treaty, brought his pregnant wife along. During negotiations his wife gave birth, near Loch Tay at present Fortingall. The son born to this couple was Pontius Pilate. When he became governor of Judea, he remembered the place of his birth and imported palace guards in Jerusalem from the Lowlands along the Pictish/Brigante frontier. Hadrian’s Wall

230 years elapsed. Rome had turned Britain into a carbon copy of Roman Gaul, with Britons sharing the lifestyle of their Latin administrators. Where once proud hillforts stood, Roman villas, cities and garrisons now dotted the countryside from Kent to Hadrian’s Wall (photo above) on the northern frontier. The eastern Belgae had become so assimilated in Roman ways that they thought of themselves as Roman, whether they were from Gaul or Britain. Christianity had become the state religion and an infant Celtic church flowered with bases of operation in Wales and Yorkshire. The once hostile Cumri of the West and North Country formed an alternate ruling body with Rome, with Dumnonii, Silure and Brigante chieftainships rising to power as alternate ‘Kings of the Britons.’ Although they, as a people, demanded independence from direct Roman rule, Rome had found that the best way to appease the Cumri was to place them in charge of the islands ‘natives.’ Only the Picts of Caledonia stood in the way of total Roman control of the province of Britannia. The mainstay of the Roman military presence on the frontier, however, became the Gallic auxiliaries, not local Britons.

The House of Creighton, if they were in fact working for the Roman administration in the north, would nave done so as civilians, at least after 69 AD. British Celts were banned from bearing arms in the Roman army after that time, due to the Iceni Rebellion that almost drove the Romans out of Britain, under Queen Boadicea. This single fact leads to a distinct problem when it comes to our family history. I am still going on the assumption that they were in place as local Celts south of Hadrian’s Wall, but now I see that they also may have had alternate home ties with the older tribal lands in Gaul.

This was a time of frequent travel to and from Rome. Many wealthy Celtic Britons were now full citizens and sent their sons to the cities of Gaul or on to Rome to attend the classical schools. In 203 AD, Pope Victor sent the first Roman Catholic missionaries into present Scotland to oversee the Celtic Culdee Church, which was following their own crude tenants. For the most part, Christianity in any form in the north was rare. In 273 AD a philosopher named CRATON appeared in Rome with his wife and children, possibly on state business as an ambassador. While there, he met Saint Valentine of Terni and he fell under his teachings. Craton converted and his entire family accepted the Christian Faith, only to be martyred soon after during a brief anti-Christian purge in the Eternal City.

By 283 AD, only 10 years after Craton’s conversion, the Roman legions were becoming overburdened with the far-flung responsibility of protecting territories that included Africa, Asia Minor, Gaul and Britain. Germanic Goths and Visigoths were beginning to venture across the borders into Italy and Gaul, causing concern of new attacks. At the same time, other Roman legions were made up entirely of German troops. Rome had learned to depend more and more on non-Latin soldiers and cavalry to fill her ranks. Even before Caesar’s time, Rome had conscripted regiments of African slingers and Syrian archers. Most of her cavalry was now made up of Gallic and German warriors. In Britain, especially along Hadrian’s Wall, the defense depended on these continental auxiliaries.

Throughout the mid 3^rd century the Caledonian Picts raided deep into the Roman occupied regions. After a century of subduing the Cumri of the west, Rome now looked to their old enemies for help against the Painted People. Hadrian’s Wall at the northern border of Brigantium (Land of the Brigantes) had been in place for 150 years, with the smaller Antonian Wall forming the northernmost barrier from the Firth of Forth to modern Glasgow. The land in between became a no man’s land, encompassing what is today southern Scotland from Galloway to East Lothian to the English border. Through the center of this no man’s land ran the Cheviot Hills and the rivers Treed and Clyde. This is where the family Creighton began in historic times, but among the Roman military auxiliaries.

The Cumri warriors of the north possibly supported the Romans, but could not join the legions because of the old anti-British Celtic ban. They operated independently, warring on the Picts as they had always done.

Any of us doing genealogical research anywhere in the British Isles are aware that ‘official’ time began with the Norman invasion of 1066. For Scottish research, 95% of family histories begin around 1124 with the reign of King David I. In this light, Thurstan de Crechtune has become our earliest ancestor, being recorded as a witness to the foundation of Holyrood House Abbey in 1128. Added to this is the common theory that surnames as we know them today were a Norman invention. Nothing could be further from the truth. Surnames arrived in the British Isles with the Romans in 43 AD. By 283 AD, all but the most isolated British tribes had borrowed the Roman practice, including the family Creighton.

24 years ago, I found an old book on the history of Scottish surnames on a dusty shelf at Boston Public Library. An Edinburgh genealogist who had spent his life searching the Lowlands for signs of Roman occupation wrote it in 1854. He had catalogued hundreds of inscriptions taken from ancient marker stones and was an authority on the military garrisons along Hadrian’s and the Antonian Walls. Under Creighton (listed as Crichton) he wrote of one JUSTINIAN CREIGHTONAI, honored veteran of the Pict Frontier as receiving a Roman land grant near Dun Edin (Edinburgh). From that same book, I learned from this man’s research the meaning of the family name. He placed it as ‘From the Rocky Homeland’ and went on to guess where it originated. His thoughts on the ‘Rocky Homeland’ were old Strathclyde, Sutherland, or ‘Southumberland,’ being the northern reaches of modern Lincolnshire.

Of course, he was thinking as a modern Scotsman, trying to trace a known Scots family. His vision, although he was a Roman historian, began and ended with his local interests in and around Edinburgh; most of us do the same in our thinking.

The no man’s land between the walls was well documented throughout the 367 year Roman occupation of Britain. In the second century AD, Cleopatra’s cousin, Ptolemy of Alexandria (Claudius Ptolemaeus), wrote an extensive geography of this region, placing 9 Roman military garrisons within its confines. He was one of about a half a dozen noted scholars who devoted much time to record the expansion of the Empire and looking at all of the known sources, the region where Justinian Creightonai settled comes alive with activity.

Along with the nine major garrisons north of Hadrian’s Wall, dozens of smaller outposts, marching camps, civilian homesteads and private villas dotted the countryside. The Southern Picts had become subdued and romanized, to a degree, working hand in hand with the Roman officials and the Brigante overlords to keep the peace with their northern cousins. Creightonai’s new land holdings were in the lands of the Selgovae and Otalini Picts, who were migrating west into Galloway with the Celtic-Parisii, who had been transplanted from the Umber River to form a barrier to the Highland Picts. Crichton Castle

The remains of Castle Crichton (Photo above) stand on the original farmstead of Justinian Creightonai. Just outside and probably under the castle walls is still visible old Roman era stone works, foundations of possibly the first villa or a garrison. One or both of the Roman marching camps were very near, or on Creighton lands.

Of course, the family land grant would in time become the barony of Creighton, the oldest such barony in Midlothian and one of the first in modern-day Scotland. Today it is the ancient seat centered on the village of Crichton, near Pathhead, 12 miles southeast of Edinburgh Castle. Just west of Edinburgh at the head of the Forth and the eastern end of the Antonian Wall was the important garrison of Elginhaugh (Cramond) at Newbridge. It was built in 140 AD as the northern outpost of a system of forts, supplied by the larger fort of Trimontium (Newstead, Borders) on Hadrian’s Wall, 36 miles to the southeast. In Dumfries, a third fortification, Blatobulgium, defended the west country of Galloway. Connecting these forts were temporary marching camps, large enough to hold from one cohort (600-800 men) to a full legion of 10 cohorts. From Elginhaugh on the Forth radiated roads between the emplacements and it supported 7 marching camps, 2 being at Pathhead on the road to Trimontium.

What was the story of Justinian Creightonai? He was but one of thousands of legionnaires active in this region during that time, many from other lands and countries. Retired and pensioned in 283AD, he would have spent at least 25 years in the military as a regular, or as an auxiliary infantryman or cavalry soldier. That would have made his time of birth around 238AD and active in the legions from about 258-283AD.

Two cohorts of the 12th Legion, ‘Valiant and Victorious’ constructed the fort at Cramond in 139AD. A German contingent, the 1^st Cohort Cugerni manned it for decades after that. In 230AD, the fort was again under the command of the 12^th Legion and they may have still been active along the Antonian Wall when Justinian came of age. Other cohorts there were of the Vocontian Wing of Gallic Cavalry from the Vocontii tribe of the Rhone River in Gaul. In Dumfries, Blatobulgium was home of the Gallic Second Cohort of Tungrians, who also held stations in Cumbria as well as Cramond over the years.

Across Hadrian’s Wall into Brigantium were many fortifications; the main one along the wall was called Housesteads Fort, or Borcovicium. It was first built in 128AD, later improvements occurred in 197, 267 and 296AD. The Gallia Belgica Auxiliary Infantry commanded this emplacement, supported by Syrian archers. At Horrea Classis in Fife, below the Creighton lands, the Second Augusta Legion commanded just north of the wall. Just prior to Justinian’s, retirement the fort at Housesteads received new reinforcements from present Holland. They were called the Cuneus Frisor, or Frisian Cavalry Irregulars, Germanic troops from Tuihantis (modern Twenthe, Holland).

It is from this information that I see that Justinian Creightonai may not have been a British Celt at all, but an auxiliary from Gaul. There is no evidence that Craton the Philosopher was British, only that he was converted and died in Rome 10 years before. My gut feeling is that both of these men were related and from Brigantium, but we must take the Gallic connection into account as another possibility.

The Roman Auxiliary Forces who were stationed on the double walls and at the surrounding forts were multi-national. The enticement for joining the Roman legions, for up to 25-year enlistments, was full citizenship and land pensions. Some British cohorts were made up of Greek slaves, seeking lands and fame. This is how the Dutch Frisians and German Angles and Saxons made a foothold on the island, as auxiliary forces or the Roman Army.

The one cohort that now stands out like a sore thumb is the Vocontian Wing of Gallic Cavalry, stationed at Cramond on the Forth during Justinian’s enlistment period. The fort was less than 20 miles from his eventual homestead. The Vocontii tribe, still in place in their home region on the Rhone River, was from the Crau Region north of Marseilles, where Cratinus the Elder was born 803 years before.

And so you see, this long-ago time that we tend to generalize as Roman, British or Pict was very complex, along the walls. It was the frontier of a giant empire, but it was not the vast wastelands where lone soldiers hid behind earthen ramparts, waiting for the blue-painted barbarians to sweep down from the Highlands. Lowland Scotland, Cumbria and Northumbria teemed with military cities, tribal capitols, civilian centers, grain storage facilities and road and sea links that went all the way to Rome. Craton the Philosopher could have come from this area and could have been related to Justinian Creightonai. One died a martyr to a new religion in distant Rome. The other retired as an old soldier with a veteran’s grant and pension, probably praying to the adopted Persian god Mithus and his own Celtic deities until he died. Or were their roots in the “Petite Crau,” those western Alps of Southeastern France along the ancient River Rhone?

Rome left for good in 410 AD, abandoning the British to their fate. In the south, the Silure and Dumnonii held on to their Roman ways, trying to keep the now British-Celtic legions together. In the north, the Brigante Confederacy did the same, to keep the Picts at bay. Great Romano-British kings arose from both groups, sending Celtic armies to Gaul to help fight Visagothic and Allamanni raiders threatening Rome. At home, invasions of Germanic Saxons, Frisians and Angles and Irish, Scotti and Norwegian raiders threatened the very lifestyle of the island. The time of King Arthur came and went. The Germans overran the east and north while the Scotti and Norwegian Vikings, with help from the Picts, took over West Galloway and Argyle.

The Creightonai homestead in Lothian survived it all, but the land itself changed allegiances with each new century. For long periods of time, Vikings ruled over Creighton lands. The old villa and Roman works fell away to a stronger stone house, but it’s isolated and unassuming location in the rolling hill country must have kept it safe from attack. Of the family we know nothing, other than their being survivors in what was still a frontier.

While Angles took over the region south of the Forth, Norwegian Vikings sought inroads in Brigantium, coaxing the still dominant Brigantes into a confederation of trade and land use. The Danes did the same in the east-central portion of Britain among the Belgae tribes. Saxons took the entire south, barred only by the Welsh of the southwest. With William the Conqueror in 1066, Franco-Vikings (Normans) came to form a new society, based on the continental feudal system.

In Lothian, new administrators fought over proper spelling of old Celtic names, butchering most in the process. The next written rendition of the family name appeared in 1086, with the maps that accompanied the Domesday Survey for the Norman tax collectors. Whoever recorded the lands of Lothian, whether Norman, Saxon or Scandinavian, placed the Creighton homestead on the Domesday Map as the lands of KREKTUN, not Creighton.

It must have been hard for foreign ears to try and spell a Celtic, or more specifically, a Welsh name. This entire region, especially Dumfries and Galloway to the River Clyde, retained the old Welsh far into the 1100’s. Listen to a Welshman today and you try to spell anything that comes out of his mouth…it can’t be done without knowledge of the language!

When the Domesday Survey was conducted, 803 years had elapsed since the time of Justinian Creightonai, the identical number of years that had occurred from Cratinus the Elder’s time to that of Justinian Creightonai. That means that from 283 AD, thousands of Justinian’s descendants could have appeared on stage. If you figure roughly three generations per century, 16-20 generations could have populated the Lowlands and probably Northumbria by 1086. But they were still British Celts. The old homestead would have remained an inheritance of the sons, but the bulkof each generation would have found Dumfries and Galloway home, in Strathclyde.

It had come with the incursion of Angles and Norwegians into Brigantium around 500 AD. The ruling Brigante-Corvetii coalition had allowed the Germans and Vikings access to lands around and in York, but they, as a unified tribal group, began to retire west into the Corvetii lands of Cumbria and north of the Solway Forth (and Hadrian’s Wall) into Galloway and Dumfries, to the River Clyde. The Parisii were already there, intermingled with the native Southern Picts. This region from Cumbria to the Clyde, excluding the Scots-Viking Kingdom of Dalraida in Argyle, became the Kingdom of Strathclyde. It was the last holdout for the northern Cumri, including the House of Creighton. It was here, primarily in Dumfries, Annandale and Nithdale that the family truly evolved over those long years of transition.

This was done in classic Celtic terms of inheritance. Where the Norman system was to allot an estate to the first-born son alone, the old Cymric system allotted lands and possessions to all offspring. If there was more than one son, family lands were divided equally. On a high level, this could result in new kingdoms, as the Dumnonii lands split into the Kingdom of Corneu (Cornwall) and the Kingdom of Dumnonia (Devon and Somerset). On the lesser Creighton level, the original Creightonai estates would have been subdivided son-to-son and grandson-to-grandson until the land base was depleted. Ensuing generations had to look far afield to acquire new lands for future generations. Daughters were as likely to receive land, as were their brothers. Since the lands of Fife, Tayside and the Lothians were primarily in ‘foreign’ hands until the 1100’s, the Creighton’s would have followed the Brigantes into Strathclyde to preserve their Celtic heritage, always searching for new lands.

In Strathclyde, they became local ‘Lairds,’ small-time landowners and civic and military leaders of small farming communities. They fell under the direct patronage of the local Lord or regional leader for the ruling Celtic king of Strathclyde. Many may have entered the Church as laymen and priests, being present when the Scots and Picts were Christianized. As Kenneth Macalpine rose as the First King of Scots (843-860), the Creighton’s probably entered as low key court officials, beginning a 700-year association with the ruling Houses of Scotland.

This was also a time that may have seen many from the family return to Gaul as mercenaries to the Frankish kings of France. It is reputed that the Emperor Charlemagne (Charles the Great, 742-814) imported palace guards from the Lowlands, but it was his son, Louis the Pious (806-843), who made it an official practice. The “Grande Alliance” would last, on and off, until the 1700’s. The main French Royal Guards and army mercenaries would be archers and infantrymen from Dumfries and Galloway for generations.

During the Hundred Year’s War between England and France, Sir John Crichton of Dumfries led an undisclosed number of men-at-arms and archers to help the French lift the siege of Orleans in 1428. His was one of many locally raised Dumfries contingents under Earl Archibald Douglas, numbering 6,000 strong. At Orleans, they fought under Saint Joan of Arc. As a reward from the king, many received lands and titles. Sir John Crichton was appointed Governor of Chatillion-sur-Indre; his friend Sir William Hamilton became Duke of Chatellerault and Earl Archibald Douglas became Duke of Touraine.

There is one last item to explore. In some old histories of Scotland, the family Creighton is passed off as being Hungarian from the early 11^th century! I am surprised that no one else has questioned it, I have been aware of the story for years. It derives from a noted historian of the Shakespearean Era, an Englishman, named Raphael Holinshed. In the late 1500’s, he wrote very detailed histories of England, Scotland and Ireland. His works appeared to be so well researched that William Shakespeare used them as source material for many of his plays, including Macbeth. The trouble was, Holinshed never left England. All of his data was from old books and second-hand information.

He wrote a very detailed lineage of King Macbeth and for the most part, it followed known history. While writing about the reign of Malcolm III Ceannmore (1057-1093), Holinshed wrote of the marriage of Malcolm to the Princess Margaret Atheling, normally called Margaret of Hungary. Born and raised at the royal court in Hungary, she was actually a British-Saxon and sister to the Saxon heir to the English throne, Edward Atheling, grandnephew of the old Saxon king. The Norman invasion had caused King Edward the Confessor to send his family to Hungary for protection and now that William of Normandy sat on the throne, Prince Edward, his mother and sisters Margaret and Christina were forced to travel to Scotland. Margaret married Malcolm as his second wife, and according to Holinshed, the first Creighton to enter Scotland came as part of Margaret’s retinue.

Because of the antiquity of Holinshed’s writings, many historians have taken it as absolute truth. The sad thing is, they have never taken time to dispute it, or follow history as it happened. The Creighton’s historically were service-oriented people, especially to the ruling houses. There is no reason to doubt that they would have been active with the Saxon royalty, negotiating dealings between the Saxons and the Scots, or with the Normans and the Saxons. The Norman invasion was not a sudden occurrence; the political and family wrangling went on for 100 years before William finally claimed the throne.

The Lowland Creighton’s were active church people and in touch with the continental church, traveling as clergy, tutors and priests. We have seen that they had ample opportunity to work in France as military men, as well. The French Royal Guards were farmed out all over Europe to help other kingdoms. There were vast quantities of Scottish advisors in Sweden, Holland, France, Belgium, Hungary and even parts of Germany and Russia.

The most logical explanation to Holinshed’s claim is that Malcolm III negotiated the marriage beforehand, which was a common practice for royal weddings throughout Europe. The Creighton’s were as apt as anyone to have been sent from Scotland to Hungary to do just that. The returning party entered Britain at London, staying for some time at William’s court before traveling to Scotland. The Norman officials were more in line to record people’s names upon entry, where Scotland was still backward and non-literate for the most part. Holinshed probably found the old ship’s passenger lists and recorded everyone in the Saxon contingent as being Hungarian. There are other Scottish families that have received this same distinction. I think that the King of Scots sent a large group of his countrymen to Hungary to bring home a bride.

For the sake of convenience, it seems that Scotland, especially, has ‘tidied up’ many old surnames. Creighton is not the only multi-spelled name on the books. Wherever you look in modern records and histories, it is rendered CRICHTON, pronounced Cry-ton. Often, we as well tend to isolate certain famous family members that bear this spelling as being something special, as if they were set apart. Because the current titled lines all use Crichton, it must be so. Again, nothing could be further from the truth. The name variations for Creighton and many of their neighbors is simply a progression of history due to prevailing language changes and personal preference.

Using the preceding narrative as well as the official recordings of Scottish clans as sanctioned by the Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs, much can be learned about how the family names altered over the centuries. We will first look at the family Cumming. Officially, they are “of Norman origin, the name derived from Comines near Lisle in northern France, on the frontier with Belgium. They claimed to be directly descended from the Emperor Charlemagne. Robert de Comyn came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066 and was given lands in Northumberland…”

On first inspection, this is not unlike hundreds of other current families throughout the British Isles, claiming ties with the Normans. For most, it is wonderful to have documentation going back as far as 1066, most Scottish Lowlander’s history officially begins much later, in 1124 with the rise of David I. We now know that this ‘Norman’ family was originally Belgae-Celtic, from the Atrebate tribes, whose original territory in Gaul was in west-central Belgium. Their famous client-king was Comminus, who, with his offspring, ruled as British Atrebates for centuries from Hampshire. Being one of the major Belgae tribes, the House of Comminus retained their old lands in Belgium as well. The Gallic branch became Romano-Celts and later was incorporated into the Frankish kingdom of Charlemagne. The British branch became Anglo-Saxon.

Another is the Lowland family Leask. The official records place the first known family member on the Ragman Rolls of 1298 and are listed as “Anglo-Saxon’ in origin. Again, this is an ancient family of Gaul, from the tribe Haedui, whose homelands were around Boulogne. In early French documents, the de Lesques owned the great castle of Boulogne, once used by Charlemagne.

The list goes on and on. The family Creighton, we now see, may share a similar history, through the Vocontii Tribe of south-central France. As Creighton, the name carries on as a direct link to an ancient mother tongue. If we take a closer look at the French lines with similar sounding names, we may find that the family has existed there for over 2000 years.

Recently, I found an old will dated in the late 1500’s for a woman who was married to a Crichton. She was Agnes Mowbray, whose family was prominent as servants to Queen Mary of Scots. Her husband was Mary’s Lord Advocate, Robert Crichton of Eliock (Dumfries), the father of James, ‘The Admirable Crichton.’ This, in itself, is the kind of thing that we all find in our ongoing research. What is important in this case, however, is a transcript of the will in its original text. If it were British from this time period, it would have been entirely in Latin. This one is a mixture of 17^th century Scottish, Old English, Latin and God only knows what. Some words are so altered from any known English that they defy description, but throughout is an unmistakable Scots inflection in written form. I will use this document again in later chapters; it is invaluable for family research.

Instead of Robert Crichton, which is how the name is rendered in the modern translation, the original text is rendered Robert CREYCHTOUN. A daughter, also Agnes, is written as CRYCHTOUN, evidently a chosen variation for personal reasons. What I am getting at is that we all spend too much time trying to decipher how and why our names are what they are.

Creychtoun is of course, one the Old Scots spellings for Creighton, in the Scots Gael. Creychtoun and Crychtoun, if you make the ‘ch’ silent, is Cray-ton and Cry-ton. The same can apply to our ‘official’ ancestor, Thurstan de CRECHTUNE, which was probably a 13^th century Scots variation of CREE-TON, or CREK-TON, as in the 1086 survey map rendition of KREKTUN. The ‘CH’ in Crechtune and the ‘K’ in Krektun must have been silent. “Tune” is the old Scots for homestead. The other word, mentioned in the archives of The Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs is “the ancient lands of KREITTON” which may very well be how the Saxons or Norwegians spelled the Creighton name.

This brings us back to the beginning, with Ingrid Creyghton of Holland questioning the variation in her name to Creighton. The only change from the spelling of Robert Creychtoun in the 1595 Agnes Mowbray will with that of Ingrid Creyghton is CHTOUN and GHTON, which is merely a 17^th century and modern ending of the same name. The CH and GH are the same, silent, middle of each name. There is one more uniquely Dutch variation of Ingrid’s name, being an older form of her language, CREIJHTON. People with this name today all seem to descend from a common Creyghton Dutch ancestor.

There is one last item of importance that I failed to point out in this paper. The surnames of Scotland, as elsewhere in the UK, cannot always be indicative of a true surname. Many factors come into play; one was the old Celtic clan system where people carried the name of the local lord or chief (such as a Campbell changing his name to Mackenzie if he vowed allegiance to a Mackenzie chief). Another was an old British Celtic custom in which men had a private (family) name and a second ‘camp name’, much like many Native Americans. In this instance, the ‘world’ would know a man as Conan the Stumbler, where at home, he was Cynan Ap (the son of) Creighton to his immediate family. The last is truly a regional placename. In Midlothian near Pathhead is the tiny community of Crichton (Long Crichton), near Crichton Castle. Once it was the service town for the Lands of Creighton. Residents of the village, wherever they were from, would take the Creighton (Crichton) name as their own, for they were ‘Men of Crichton.’

PART II:

BEYOND THE VILLA WALLS

JUSTINIAN’S SYRIAN ARCHER

In the year 483 AD, A forlorn figure sat in a courtyard on a marble bench, surrounded by young children and barking dogs. A warm south wind blew over the rolling Lammermuir Hills, but still the man felt an ache in his bones. He tugged at the folds of an ancient and worn toga, adjusting the patched fabric from what he considered a chilly wind. Soon, in the warm autumn sunshine, he fell fast asleep.

A crow flying overhead would have looked down on the scene as being typical of many neighbor’s homes of the region. This particular courtyard enclosed the confines of what had been a proud Roman villa, now in disrepair. The house was large and sprawling, but broken ceramic roof tiles had been replaced, like a patchwork quilt, with sheets of slate and even pieces of tree bark. The trees near the villa and surrounding the settlement were all but gone, mostly in the man’s lifetime. Fields of millet and herds of scraggly longhaired sheep now ranged up the hillside to Bankhead Moor.

The 83-year-old man was nearing the end of his life. He was born Marcus Lucius Creightonai, son of Gaius Servilius and great great grandson of Justinian Creightonai, the family ancestor. His was the fourth generation born within these walls. In his long lifetime he had witnessed the end of the Roman Empire in Britannia. He was 10 years old when the legions were called home to fight in Gaul and Italy. They never returned.

The old man was one of the last in the entire region that still used Latin as his chosen tongue, other than clergymen who wandered the countryside. He had been lucky to be born before the Germans came; his father had sent him to the universities at Rome, but his classical studies had taken second place to half a lifetime of fighting the invaders and his northern neighbors.

Deep in his dreams he thought of those long ago years as a student and of his journey home. In Rome he had seen the glory of the empire, but also watched its decay as northerners sought its riches. He had cousins and two uncles there, all studying for advancement in the Holy Church, but he had placed his emphasis on secular studies. With a master’s degree in philosophy, Marcus had ended his studies at age 30, taking a ship to Massilla and then joining a northbound trade caravan bound for Brittany. At his father’s urging, he sought out family members among the Vocontii Gauls of the Druentia River of the Rhone Valley. This is where his great great grandfather had been born, 197 years before.

Marcus found that many of the local families along the Rhone watershed had extended kin from his home region. Like Justinian, they had followed the legions and stayed, bringing over wives and children after they received land grants. Marcus found that his ancestor left four sons and a wife in Gaul. This woman, who had been of the Volcae Tectogages, did not want to venture too far from Britain. Justinian had taken a second wife while stationed on Hadrian’s Wall. This woman, from all reports from his Gallic relations, had been half Syrian and half Vortadini, which was a tribe of the Southern Picts. Marcus made the remainder of his journey home in deep reflection. He had thought himself Roman by birth, a direct descendant of an honored legionnaire. Now he wasn’t sure what he was.

Following the old Roman road from Eboracum (York), he eventually found his way home to the family villa. There he angrily confronted his father. “Why was I not told of my lineage? Am I to believe that I am nothing but a lowborn son of a Gaul and a foreign mongrel camp follower, a Syrian, a painted Pict?”

Gaius eyed his son with unaccustomed resolve. “Were you there on the wall when Rome left? Did you stand side by side with your so-called ‘foreigners’ as the Caledonians swept the countryside? Did you walk the streets of the great civic enclave at Trimontium telling Greek, Syrian, Frisian, Jute, Alammanni, Batavi and Vortadini women that we would keep them safe? Who do you think your playmates were while you grew to manhood? They were all of these, intermingled with the blood of Rome and the Cymri. We stand alone now; Rome will never send back her troops.”

Gaius went on. “You did not know your grandfather, who died as you were born. You did not hear his tales of growing up in this villa, when the Caledonians were truly barbaric. Yes, his grandmother was Martha the Syrian. Yes, she was also of Caledonian blood, through the Vortadini, who now fight on our side. Did you know that she was only 15 when Justinian married her? Do you know why; because she was a warrior who fought beside him against her own kind.”

Marcus had not cooled off sufficiently to respond; he only glared at his father and said, “How could a woman of 15 be a warrior of any kind?”

“When your grandfather was a boy of 15, Martha the Syrian was still living, at the age of 90. She was agile and active and held a clear mind. Perhaps he asked her the same sort of questions, for before she died, she took him on a pilgrimage of sorts. At the rock of Dun Edin she showed your grandfather ancient rock carvings of her people. She made him trace the spiral designs with his fingers, explaining their meaning to him. At isolated camps in the forests she introduced him to the elders of her mother’s people, others were found as servants at scattered villas and marching camps. Her father was in fact a Syrian, but had been born and raised at Trimontium. His ancestors had been of the early cohorts of Syrian archers, long favored as the best in the world. By the time of his generation, the family had settled their small land-hold north of the wall as traders to the Roman military camps. He himself, whose name escapes me, was an interpreter who carried treaty dispatches to the Caledonians. In his travels he met Martha’s mother among the Vortadini, who held ancient title to these very lands.”

“Against the wishes of the Vortadini, the Syrian ‘bought’ the woman, who was a priestess of their old religion. This caused much unrest among the Vortadini and their sister tribes. At Trimontium, the Syrian married the Pict woman; the birth of your great great grandmother was the result of this marriage.”

“But father, why did she grow to fight against her own people?” Marcus was now picking up an interest in the story.

Gaius continued. “As a girl, Martha exhibited many of her father’s features, including the dark skin and hooked nose of the desert people. She had no brothers. Her father raised her to shoot his great bow like a man and the family traveled together on his trading expeditions. Even as a young girl, while visiting the Roman outposts and towns of the Picts, she was known as the “Little Syrian.” From her mother she learned the ancient rites and healing practices of the Vortadini and began receiving the blue tattooed designs of her order (Both the Greeks and the Romans called these ‘the Painted People,’ but in truth the designs were blue tattoos, often covering every inch of the body).”

“In the year 282 AD, as they were returning to the wall from Galloway, a large party of Pictish Catti and Irish Scotti attacked them while crossing the River Nith. Martha was 14. The attackers were some of the same men with whom they had recently negotiated. Martha had, days before, been accepted into their ranks as a novice priestess, through her mother’s efforts. Now, with the Scotti joining them, the Highland Picts sought slaves to sell to the Irish kings. All seemed lost.”

“Now, Marcus, you will see that your pedigree is truly hinged on a remarkably weak thread. If it had not been for aching feet and a blinding fit of depression, we would not be here today.”

“How so, father?”

“Your grandfather’s grandfather had spent his forty-ninth year commanding foot patrols out of the Cramond Fort near Dun Edin. It was his responsibility to train new recruits, mainly fellow Gauls, but some German auxiliaries as well. He was soon to retire and found the menial position very hard to take. He had found out that spring that his wife and sons in Gaul wished to remain with his Vocontii tribal relations, where Justinian wanted them to join him in Caledonia. Throughout that summer he led cohort after cohort of trainees to the marching camps, until he fell ill with fatigue and worry.”

“By autumn,” Gaius went on, “Justinian’s commander saw that what he needed was a change in duties. Word had come from Pinnata Castra (Inchtuthill) that the Caledonian Catti and other Highland tribes were forming in western Galloway with the Scotti to attack Hadrian’s Wall from the west. Although Parisii and Damnonii Britons held the West Country with friendly Southern Picts, he knew that a concerted military presence might deter an outright attack south of the wall. Justinian, with two cohorts of mixed cavalrymen, was sent to patrol the troubled areas. In the saddle once more, his feet stopped aching and his doldrums lifted.”

“He arrived at the River Nith just as the Syrian’s small force was making their last stand. The trader was dead, his young daughter stood in the river with his great recurved bow at full draw, taking a charging Scotti off of his feet with an arrow through the neck. All about her and her fallen father were bodies. When the attackers saw the approaching Roman cavalry, they turned and ran, leaving Martha alone in the bloody water. Martha’s mother and most of the remaining servants were gone, either captured by the barbarians, or dead with her father. On that very spot, with her future husband as her witness, Martha the Syrian swore vengeance against the Painted People and the Scotti raiders.”

“There was an instant bond between the two, Justinian and the young mixed blooded priestess. During that winter he received transfer to Trimontium, to be closer to her. In the spring, the Caledonians came down from the mountains in vast numbers, but most were held in check. Those that found their way to the southern wall found Justinian and Martha everywhere. She fought hand in hand with his cohort, always using her father’s old bow as her weapon. All along the frontier, Martha the Syrian became legend, while still a child. In many battles she stood on the wall with bow in one hand and her instruments of wizardry in the other. The northern Picts feared her as an avenging sorceress, which she was.”

“By that year’s end, Justinian’s cohorts of Vocontii were replaced with new recruits and he sought retirement. Marrying Martha, his grateful commanders rewarded their combined efforts with these lands of Creighton. So you see, my son, there is no shame in what our family descends from. Like the true Romans, we are but a product of the ongoing history of life.”

Gaius Servilius Creightonai was of the last generation stationed at the walls as legionnaires of Rome, giving up most of his life to a dying Empire. While Marcus was safe in Rome, Gaius had watched as the entire island’s system had fallen into chaos after 410 AD. Inter-tribal warfare broke out as soon as the legions departed, with petty kings and princes jockeying for ultimate power. The confederated Cymri, who he associated himself with culturally, ruled the West Country from the tip of Cornwall to the River Clyde. Villa Creighton was but one of many small landholds between the walls, so far independent of overlords. The neighboring lands of Creighton comprised a mixed population of war veterans, transplanted Britons of varied tribal affiliations (both Belgae and Cymri) and remnants of people from all across the great Roman Empire. The blood of half a dozen separate Caledonian tribes (Picts) also ran in the veins of these Border clans. It was the beginning of a distinct Lowland Scots culture, which would be refined and honed over the ensuing centuries as new emigrants occupied the region between the Forth and the Tweed.

Marcus Lucius Creightonai returned in 430 to a changed homeland. When he left for Rome in 415, the legions had been replaced with Brigante tribesmen from Yorkshire. That great tribe of the Cymri, together with the Dumnonii and Silure of far southeastern Britain, shared the rule of a confederacy that controlled the entire West Country as well as the western-third of the Brittany Peninsular in Gaul.

These tribes should not be thought of in their original context, when all of them lived in Gaul before Caesar’s time. They had continued to evolve separately from their mainland cousins. When the Dumnonii and Silure conducted a return migration to Brittany in 383 AD, they did so as Romano-British (Briton) soldiers, and stayed. Their language had altered so much since they first departed Gaul in 55 BC that their continental cousins could hardly understand them. Those members of the tribes who remained in Britain continued to evolve individually, uniting with the northern Brigante, the Parisii, Vortadini and other sub-tribes of the confederacy. To help stabilize the border country along the wall, the Dumnonii of Cornwall and Devonshire sent members north, forming one colony in East Lothian and a second in northwest Galloway. These northern Dumnonii became known as the Damnoni, often confused as a southern Pict tribe, for they settled Vortadini territory in Lothian. The Belgaic tribes who occupied the remainder of what is now southern, eastern and midlands England were the most romanized, but even they sought a rapid return to older Celtic ways. All of the Britons, Cymri and Belgae alike, began forming tribal territories into new principalities and kingdoms. While they all struggled for overall control, the northern Picts eyed the Lowlands as they had always done. Irish Scotti tribesmen from Hibernia (Ireland), allied with the Picts sought the lands of modern Galloway. Now, with the homecoming of Marcus Creightonai, German raiders began frequenting the eastern coastal regions, also seeking a new homeland.

The use of the fictional Marcus Lucius Creightonai (400-484) serves a purpose, that being to help outline early life in the kingdom of Strathclyde from a personal perspective. Because he was a first generation post-Roman-Era Briton fighting for survival, his life chronicles that time of legend, which is often so hard to verify. We have only the writings of the old Welsh historians and men like Gregory of Monmouth to go on. Keep in mind, however, that the ‘Welsh’ were all of those Cymric-Celts, the Cymry, which still means ‘Fellow Countrymen.’ In Marcus’ day, Cambria (Wales) extended from Lands End to northern Ayrshire.

Marcus was a contemporary of many famous men from this distant time. Although he had uncles who had converted and sought the ecclesiastical training of the early church, he himself was still ‘Pagan,’ following the older Celtic and Roman gods. Fellow Countrymen who helped forge Strathclyde into a kingdom were of his and his father’s age.

From his stronghold around York, Coel Hen of the Brigantes ruled as the last Roman Dux Britainumorum. With Rome’s withdrawal, he had become rightfully King of the North. Coel Hen’s wife Ystradwel of the Dumnonii was the granddaughter of Conan Meriadog of Brittany and Dumnonia and her brother Gwrfawr AP Gadfan ruled as king of Dumnonia in his father’s stead.

When Marcus was 12 years old he was witness to the ‘changing of the guard’ in his homeland. Coel Hen (Old King Cole) knew that he did not have the manpower to defend the entire length of Hadrian’s Wall from his towns along the Umber River. If he tried, the Irish Scotti and the Picts would overrun the area north to the Forth. With the Vortadini and Dumnonii protecting the lands of East Lothian, Coel Hen sent in his most trusted chiefs to take control of the entire region. Germans began moving into the old Brigante homeland of Yorkshire almost as soon as he pulled his people north.

Since the German longboats were frequenting the entire east coastal region of Britain, Coel Hen took strong defensive measures. He called the region south of the Forth Rheged, which had Midlothian as its northern territory. He chose as his new capitol the stronghold of Trapain, East Lothian. The Creighton world was changing rapidly.

When the Brigante emigrants arrived, they settled into strong chiefdoms, mingling with the surviving southern Picts and older Britons. This, of course, included the Creightons of Rheged.

East Lothian was then the kingdom of Gododdin, hereditary homeland of the Vortadini, who had once ruled over all of the Lothians. Southwestern Gododdin held the uplands of the Lammermuir Hills and the great forests of Keth. The People of Keth were of the Ortadini, a sub-tribe of the Vortadini. Just south of their forest and beyond the River Keth was placed a Brigante group called Humbie, after their home river in Brigantium. Both of these territories bordered the lands of Creighton as eastern neighbors. A few miles south of Creighton was the old Southern Pict kingdom of the Selgovae in the Selkirk Forest. West of Selkirk Forest was the lands of Ynys Manaw, which, in reality, was old Strathclyde. It included present Dumfries, Annandale and Nithdale. This region was almost entirely Romano-British Celts, Dumnonii and scattered Southern Picts. Beyond the River Nith was Galloway, which was at that time a frontier disputed by Britons, Picts and Irish Scotti clans. It remained hostile to Coel Hen’s move north into their region. A Romano-Celt descendant named Caradog (Ceretic Guletic) ruled North of Galloway, in present Ayrshire. This man and his people held the western door against the Scotti and the Picts from a fortress at modern Dumbarton. Coel Hen claimed ownership over all, as High King of the North.

Marcus Creightonai never saw the founding of the kingdom, for he was away in Rome when Coel Hen died. The king had spent much time in his northern kingdom of Ayrshire and it was there, in 420 AD that he died in battle against his old enemies. By Celtic right, the northern kingdom was divided between his two sons Ceneu and Gorbanian, but it was the local Ceretic Guletic who took over all of Coel Hen’s lands as the next High King. He named his kingdom Strathclyde, moving the Cymry capitol from Trapain, near the lands of Creighton, to Ail-Cluathe. The Irish Scotti, who were making permanent inroads into adjoining Argyle, called this stronghold Dumbarton (Dun-Breatann), which meant ‘Fortress of the Britons’. The Scotti called Galloway the land of ‘Gaels with foreign speech.’

By 440 Marcus Creightonai, if he were not fighting Picts, Scotti or German raiders, would have been highly valued for his diplomatic skills. Latin was still the chosen language between kingdoms, but few could write. Trained and holding a master’s degree in secular studies, he would have been sought out by the local princes and kings of the subkingdoms of Strathclyde. With Dumbarton as the regional capitol, it was probably in his lifetime that saw many of his family move deeper into Nithdale and Galloway, in advance of an ever-increasing number of German speaking people from the coastal regions of the east. The old kingdoms of Rheged and Gododdin, with the Lands of Creighton in the center, were in the direct path of the newcomers, who were mostly Angles.

Marcus would have been aware of other academics, especially those who were schooled in Gaul or Rome. Although he never accepted the Christian faith as his own, he would have worked side by side with his non-secular brothers. The church had been active in Galloway and Ayrshire since before Marcus’ birth.

The Briton historian and Saint Ninian (316-432) was born in Strathclyde. He was trained in Rome, being sent back in 347 to begin converting the Britons and Southern Picts of his homeland. Prince Tuduvallus of Galloway was an early convert and by 397 Ninian had built the first stone church in present Scotland at Whithorn, Wigtown, Galloway.

Another Strathclydian, born near Dunbarton at Kilpatrick 15 years before Marcus, was a man named Maewyn in his native tongue. Like Marcus, he was born to a Romano-British family; his father was a government official, with the Latin name of Calphurnius the Decurio. Maewyn’s older sister Darerca was the second wife of Conan Meriadog, the king of Brittany and Dumnonia. Like Marcus, this boy was born to a predominantly non-Christian household and when he was young; a neighboring clan captured him and sold him to Scotti raiders as a slave. While sheep herding for his masters in Ulster, he made a vow to accept the Christian Faith (if he was able to escape) and someday return to Ireland to convert the Pagans. He did escape, found his way to Gaul and was schooled, returning years later as Patrick, the future saint. Perhaps Marcus was present at Certic’s court the day Patrick’s scolding letter arrived, accusing the king of stealing Irish slaves to bring back to Dumbarton.

For the remainder of his life, Marcus fought to keep his lands intact and to administer to his people who called him chief. The Creighton grants were originally awarded to his great great grandfather for their strategic location. Situated on a major artery connecting the forts on the Forth with those along the wall, the villa sat at the southeast end of the old Roman settlement that serviced the marching camps. Signs of Roman occupation dotted the countryside.

The Chieftainship had remained much the same since the time of Justinian Creightonai. In his later years, Marcus had taken an interest in the history of his lands, reading historical books that had been written by his uncle from the tiny monastery of Soutra, just beyond the limits of his southern territory. From here a growing community of Christians from the Celtic (Irish) Church administered to the Picts of Soutra and Selkirk, or Selgovae Forests.

Marcus and his Creighton allies spent much of their time patrolling for raiding bands of Northern Picts and Scotti, keeping the old defenses of Pathhead, Creighton (Souterraine) Fort, Caickmuir (Cakemuir Castle) and Fala Forts in good repair. If they were not protecting the chief-hold from outside attack, they were raiding neighbor’s cattle or chasing neighbors who had stolen theirs. Only through his uncle’s writings did Marcus learn just who these people on the perimeter of Creighton were.

When Justinian and Martha the Syrian first settled their grant, it encompassed 85 square miles in area. It had been a primary Roman stationing point since 80 AD. The lands of Creighton contained dozens of marching camps, saw mills, produce farms and forts. These ranged the uplands and moors, attesting to its importance as a strategic military location. From its highlands rose the headwaters of the Rivers Tyne, Kinchie Burn, Galla Water, Caickmuir Burn, Salter’s Burn, East Water and Keth (Keith) Waters. It contained the heights of Caickmuir Hill where the signal and ceremonial fires burned. South of the Caickmuir highlands was Falla Moor with its ancient watchtower.

The Creighton settlement of this area was originally to keep the peace between the various Southern Picts, who ringed the chieftainship. The Clan of the Crane of the Southern Vortadini held a territory just across the River Tyne to the north. Their territory looped down the eastern side of Creighton to adjoin lands of their East Lothian cousins, the Ortadini, who held most of the great forest between Kinchie Burn and Keth Waters, called the Forest of Keth. The Clan of the Crane became the family Cranstoun; the Ortadini clan who occupied the forest became Clan Keith. Between Keth and East Waters was also Ortadini territory, but a small group of Celtic Brigantes had settled the area, calling themselves the People of Humbie, after their Yorkshire River Humber. These people were reinforced with new Brigante recruits in Marcus’ time.

Southeast of Creighton, beyond Falla Moor, was the great forest of Soutra. It is unclear if the Soutra were a Pictish tribe, but if so, they would have been of the Selgovae, who ruled the Selgovae Forests southwest of Galla Water. The entire western border of Creighton was the River Tyne, shared by the strong chieftainship of Borth. These people defended the western banks of the river from its steep hillsides from Middleton Moor in the south to Vorgrie Burn in the north. The lands of Borth were also an old veteran’s grant from Roman times, possibly settled at the same time as Creighton. These people became the House of Borthwick.

The Caickmuir (spelled Cakemuir today) district of Creighton, to Marcus, had always had questions surrounding it. Even as a youth, visiting there with his father, it had an aura of something very old. Often he would ride up the Tyne to its headwaters at Loch Middleton, where his men still maintained the old Roman defense walls at Aukenkleaks. These ancient walls presented a barrier across the small plain that connected the Tynehead with that of Caickmuir Burn at the foot of Caickmuir Hill.

This series of fortified walls was the southern most point of his chief-hold. The one mile of open moor presented the only weak spot in his entire river-ringed territory. He placed his eldest son Gaius in charge of the walls. Beyond and stretching endlessly toward the south was the ancient Selgovae-Pict enclave of Selkirk (Selgovae) Forest.

It had been the highlands of Caickmuir that had originally brought Marcus to visit his uncle’s monastery at Soutra. The monks knew the Picts and their ancient culture. Visiting with the elders who had known his uncle, he learned of the books he had written. He would spend hours going over the Latin text, then, with Selgovae guides, venture up into the wilds of Caickmuir.

Roughly two miles wide and six miles long from the western tip of Caickmuir Hill to Fala Camp on the east, the Caickmuir uplands stood as a permanent barrier that separated two portions of Creighton land. Caickmuir Burn ran the length at its northern base; Fala Moor occupied the south side of the highlands. The great ridge was divided into three portions of ownership. The House of Borth owned Caickmuir Hill, in its entirety, since ancient times. On its summit was a very old stone ring, a fairy ring of the Picts. From here, men of all of the surrounding territories took turns as lookouts, urging a timber bonfire into action if raiders were seen approaching the settlements. On its heights also were held many of the older Celtic and Pict annual celebrations, it was a sacred mountain with many mysteries. The men of both, as early settlers, may have been given the mountain to protect by the religious leaders of the Selgovae.

Halfway down the back of the ridge and occupying the smallest of the three sections was an area about 3 square miles. This contained, on its northern side, the old Roman fortress of Caickmuir, still used by all as the main defense in the area. Below it in the Caickmuir Burn lowlands was the tiny settlement of Blackcastle. The People of Crane, who were Vortadini, held this important defensive position at Caickmuir Fort, six miles from their nearest home territory.

The last and eastern portion of the uplands was four and one half square miles in area and was a detached portion of the lands of Humbie. At their small post of Blackshields near Fala Camp was placed a combined Brigante-Ortadini contingent of warriors whose job it was to protect the fertile expanse of Falla Moor and the church properties at Soutra.

It was these three detached properties deep within Creighton lands that had always perplexed Marcus. His peaceful role with all three neighbors was tentative at best. When they were not fighting foreign invaders together, they fought each other, over land, cattle and women. Only after reading his uncles history did he understand. It was due to a true connection to the ancient land itself.

Marcus read in awe, remembering that long-ago argument with his father. It had been Justinian Creightonai who had allowed these land portions to be divided, at the request of Martha the Syrian, his wife. She may have influenced his receiving these lands, for she was half Vortadini and an adept of their old religion. Justinian had been stationed at Caickmuir during his years of service, but during those times the Picts of any nature were suspect, especially so far within their homelands. When he claimed his veteran’s grant, he saw only that Caickmuir Highlands offered unlimited hunting and it connected Caickmuir Burn with the lands of Falla Moor.

In the third year of their occupancy of Creighton, the couple received a delegation from the Picts. The Chief of Crane, who had as distant cousins both Martha and the Ortadini Chief of Humbie Forest, brought the assembly to the half finished villa. With Martha as mediator, Justinian soon learned that if the Picts did not have full access to their sacred sites at Caickmuir, they would go to war against Creighton and drive them out.

At first, Justinian stood defiant. He was not apt to relinquish any land, so long sought after in Rome’s service. Martha alone stood firm, on the side of the Picts. Still under the age of twenty, she exhibited the finesse of a much older person. In her quiet manner, she told her husband of the importance of the ancient hills. She described sacred groves and shrines that were older than Rome. Caickmuir was venerated by all of the Caledonians, even their enemies of the north. The people still sang of that time 300 years before when Julius Agricola first brought the legions into Caledonia. In lightning raids he destroyed entire tribes. Advancing through this territory, he had built the first fort at Caickmuir, ordering the sub-tribe called Fala to assemble at Falla Moor. There his men disarmed the Picts and then systematically killed every one. The Fala Vortadini’s only crime was protesting the building of a Roman fort on Caickmuir. Because of the loss of their menfolk, the Fala became extinct as a tribe, the women sought asylum with the Soutra.

The Fala, Martha continued, had been the keepers of the mountain. They were not warlike, but holy men and priests. Their loss had been felt by all of the Picts across Caledonia. She told Justinian that he had no right to bar the present Picts entry to their holy places.

And so, Justinian relinquished his ownership to the various neighboring clans who sought the high places. He himself was of the old school, a Celt of Gaul and he as well sought out the shrines to worship his own gods. Only a small corridor at Fala Dam granted entrance to the Creighton lands of Falla Moor. Marcus had no idea at the time, but even these would one day be given back to the surviving Picts as the lands of Falla.

The eldest son of Marcus was named Gaius, after his grandfather. As an adult warrior and sub-chief of Creighton, he had rejected the villa as his residence; lying so close to the ancient Roman service town, he found the villa to be an aging symbol to the past glory of Rome. The settlement sprawled just to the east of the villa, a collection of stonewalls and small dark homes of mud and wattle. He opted instead to build a new and stronger fortified house on more commanding ground.

One mile south of the villa the Tyne entered a deep cut between two ranges of hills. It was here, on the eastern bank 50 feet above the river that Gaius began building his hillfort called Dun Creighton. It was a wise decision. Remains of extensive Roman fortifications dotted the hillside, indicating to Gaius that it had long been used as a military emplacement.

Gaius, like his many brothers, rejected the old Roman ways for that of renewed Celtic nationalism. He built his stronghold in the manner of the Celtic Britons. He had fought with Emperor Constantine’s British forces in Gaul against the Visigoths and had seen the great oppidas of his Gallic cousins. Using a combination of reused stone foundations, earthen ramparts, heavy timbers, and mud and wattle walls, he made a rectangular enclosure large enough to hold the entire village of Creighton in case of attack. Against one of the inner walls he began a stone house that would, over the next 1000 years, develop into Castle Creighton. He used the remaining stones to make a series of defense walls and cattle enclosures, stepping down the bank to the river. Behind the new hill fort stretched woodland and fields to the top of Bankhead, 50 feet above the structure.

In 475 AD, Ceritic the High King of Strathclyde died at Dumbarton. This opened an endless fight for succession as his followers vied for the kingdom. Far to the south, Vortigern of the Silure had spent a lifetime as Over King of all the Britons trying to keep the Irish flood from overwhelming his West Country. With the death of the King of Strathclyde, the Caledonian Picts and Irish Scotti pressed down into Western Britain. In a fit of bad judgment, Vortigern hired Saxons, Jutes and Angles from northern Germany and southern Denmark to fight the northern enemy. Within a decade Vortigern was also dead, but he lived long enough to realize his mistake. The Germans had come and fought, but they stayed.

And so it was for the remainder of the century, in those ancient hills of Lammermuir, which fell away to the northeast toward the East Lothian marshes. Old Marcus Lucius Creightonai died shortly after his afternoon nap in the autumn of 483. Three of his sons were followers of Ninian in Galloway and a fourth was with Patrick’s adherents in Ireland. He, though, had stubbornly held to his imperial beliefs, not necessarily rejecting the Celtic-Christian religion, but never embracing it. When he was buried in the old graveyard near Tyne Water outside the villa walls, many from the surrounding chief-holds and sub-kingdoms were present.

To honor the old man’s maternal ancestry from Martha the Syrian, the Vortadini that remained in Lothian sent a delegation. Most of their tribe had been dispersed from Ayr to Cambria by King Vortigern to help defend the west coastal regions. Leading this party of Southern Picts was a son of old chief Cunedda, or ‘Cinneidigh’ in the Scots Gaelic, the ancestors of Clan Kennedy. The Britons sent Prince Geraint of Dumbarton with grave-offerings from King Cinuit, along with an honor guard of cavalry in full, but rusty, Roman battle dress.

Closer to home were the men that owned lands adjacent to, or not far from Creighton, long time defenders of the frontier. There came the old German warrior Bear Hand (Beornheard in Saxon), ancestor to Clan Burnett of the Roxburgh Forest of Jedburgh. From the north shore of the River Tweed came the men of Tweedie, descendants of the Selgovae Picts. Joining them from nearby Dumfries came the Caruthers, whose name derived from ‘Caer Rydderch’ (fort of Rydderch).

Marcus’ immediate neighbors, Cranstoun, Borthwick, Keith and the men of Humbie carried his bier to the graveside as a lone Roman bagpipe played an old regimental battle song. Throughout the streets of nearby Creighton, the women wailed an ancient Celtic farewell dirge to their fallen chief.

Sometime after the funeral someone with ties to a Roman past, perhaps the Caruthers of Dumfries, placed a memorial stone. It was not a head stone as we use today, it was as old as the legions. Throughout the countryside can be found thousands of these markers, some large and assuming, others small and hidden in the weeds. They are carved into the remains of the Antonian and Hadrian’s Wall. They are in pastures and deep in the forests of Selkirk. High atop Bankhead Moor, three miles east of Dun Creighton, a flat polished stone was set in the ground overlooking Marcus’ old villa on the Tyne. In classic Roman carved lettering was the inscription: “In remembrance of Marcus Lucius Creightonai, Citizen of Rome, Philosopher, friend of kings, fearless warrior, loving husband, father and protector of all that you can see. We, his companions, placed this stone.”

16 years later the overwhelming Saxon invasions of southern and eastern Britannia forced all Britons west into what the Saxons called Wales. The city-dwelling Belgae fled their homes and monasteries for safety in Brittany, leaving the Confederated Cymry to defend the entire island. The sea raiders came in longboats from Southern Denmark and Sweden, Jutland, Frisia in the Netherlands, Anglia and Saxony in northern Germany. Although we think of them as being mostly Saxon and Angle historically (Anglo-Saxons), with secondary Frisians and Jutes occupying small regions, the combined invasions were made up of many independent people. The Saxons and Angles were the most numerous, but with them came Franks from the east Rhine, Geats from Gotland in southeast Sweden, Wends from the south Baltic, Swedes, Danes and Norwegians. In 500 AD the new British High King, Ambrosius Aurelianus, also called Artuturius, or Arthur the Briton, called the Cymry to make a stand. Both British and Saxon armies converged on Mount Baddon in southwestern England (its location has never been verified) for the pending battle.

From Dun Creighton, Gaius, now 55 years old, took up the standard and called his men of Creighton to arms. He had reverted back to his given Celtic name, Arthfael AP Owain, Owain being the ‘family’ name of his father Marcus. Under the overall leadership of the Celtic and Vortadini Lothian kings of Rheged and Gododdin, the amassed army from the Forth raced south to join Arthur. At Carlisle below the wall, they waited for Strathclyde’s main army from Ayr and Galloway. Joining there, the mighty army of the north formed into cohorts and hundreds, still fighting as the old Roman armies had done 100 years before. The one change was that this army called their fighting units ‘Dragons’, the ancient Cymric name for its regiments.

On the road south, the men of Creighton could be singled out from those of their neighbors by the war standard carried in Arthfael AP Owain’s train. At the head of his cohorts flew the green dragon, similar to that of the red dragon blazon of the men of Strathclyde, the overall symbol of the confederated Cymry. With its left forefoot raised with bared talons and spouting fire from its mouth, the winged monster looked south toward the Severn River Valley. On the arm of Arthfael and many of his compatriots was the Celtic round shield, painted white with a rampant blue lion in its center. This was the ancient arms of Creighton, used since before the time of Caesar.

What happened to Arthfael AP Owain-Gaius Creightonai in that legendary battle will never be known. He was a fictional hero fighting under the command of a legendary king. The Saxons were beaten that day, but they were not driven back into the sea. They and their kind remained, fighting fiercely to obtain new farmlands, only to settle down peacefully and commingle with their Celtic neighbors.

LONGSHIPS-ON-TYNE

Many believe that our English language began with the arrival of the Angles and the Saxons. ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ mixed with the Celtic British equals English. The Scottish language, if considered at all, is thought to be the Irish Gaelic of the Scotti. Neither is true.

The British Celts had undergone 400 years of Roman rule. Belgae or Cymry, they all spoke variants of what we think of today as the language of the Welsh. Since most also took Latin as a second (and sometimes first) language, the many regional dialects became Celtic with Latin additions. Keeping this in mind, the best way to follow the evolution of the languages is to think of the British Celts of 410 AD as speaking ‘Old British.’ Each individual district and region would have had variations of what had once been a common language.

The German invaders were also multi-tongued and from different regions of Northern Europe. The Jutes were from the Danish peninsula of Juteland, whence the Celts had migrated 1500-2000 years before. The Frisians were from northern Holland. The Angles and Saxons were from Germany Proper, but of different regions and speaking different dialects. Combining these four groups together, along with the assorted sub-groups that accompanied them, all spoke variants of what is properly called Old German.

The German invaders were roaming sea raiders in 500 AD. They ranged the coastal regions, slipping silently up the rivers in longboats that had a shallow draft. Like the later Vikings crafts, these ships allowed them access to inland towns where they ransacked monasteries and plundered entire countrysides. They then slipped away downriver before help could arrive. In warfare they were cruel and relentless. They came with elite fighting men called Berserkers, warriors with giant battle-axes that, either through drug inducement or mass indoctrination, fought long after they should have fallen dead. But, once the battles were won, backup ships brought women and children and all settled down to a peaceful farming society. Wherever this happened, the ‘native’ Celts were relegated to the role of servant or under tenant as second-class citizens. Through this closeness, however, the two languages combined.

From 500-800 AD, the island was divided into distinct linguistic districts based upon where the Germans settled. Excluding the Cymry regions of Western England and Scottish Strathclyde, there arose four Anglo-Saxon dialects.

The Jutes, who first settled southeast England in Kent and Surrey, spoke Kentish, a combination of Jute, East Saxon and Belgae-Celt. The Jutes then shifted westward after the Saxons took over Kent. They removed to the Isle of Wight near Southampton, where their Danish-German dialect mingled again with that of the Belgae-Atrabates, but it still remained Kentish.

A second Saxon dialect was formed in the Midlands south of the Thames in the Kingdom of Wessex (Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset and Somerset). The dialect of Wessex became known as West Saxon. The Low Country Frisians settled this area as well, but their language soon became extinct. The people maintained a small pocket in the west, but they eventually mixed with their Saxon cousins until they lost their identity as a separate culture. The continental Frisians today are the only German-speaking people surviving who still speak a form of the Old German of the 6^th century.

The third grand division was called ‘Mercian,’ for a mixture of Angles and Danish allies who settled the Central Midlands and East Anglia. Mercia would develop into a strong kingdom, which sought power over their West Saxon cousins of Wessex. Here, the Angle-Danish dialects mingled with the local Belgae-Celts.

The fourth linguistic division was Northumbrian, also Angle-Danish and Celt in origin. By the end of the 6^th century, the Brigante coalition controlled their Kingdom of Strathclyde from Cumberland, England to Ayrshire in western Scotland. To their east, however, the descendants of Vortigern’s Anglian mercenaries had occupied the east portions of Yorkshire as the kingdom of Deira. Just to their north and including modern Durham, England and Berwick, Scotland was her sister kingdom of Bernicia. These people had been evolving separately for 120 years. In 600 AD, Mercian Angles joined with Deira and Bernicia to form the great kingdom of Northumbria, which encompassed all lands north of the Umber River into southern Scotland to the Forth. Here as well was the center of the Celtic Church located on the tiny island of Lindisfarne in Bernicia.

The resulting language that evolved from these four groups is now known as Old English. This is not the Old English of the King James Bible, but an older Germanic-Romano—British language based on Old German and Belgae-Celtic dialects. The main thing to keep in mind is that the Belgaic dialects, although related to that of the Cymric Welsh, had 500 years to evolve along separate lines. They were the people closest to the Romans in Britain and Latin words were part of their vocabulary by 600 AD. They also maintained a close relationship with their homeland tribes in Gaul, whose continental Celtic language was being mutated by the Germanic-Franks, forming the roots of an early French language.

The West Saxons became the dominant ruling power, but they also became ‘insular or inward seeking islanders. They cut themselves off from their original German homelands, allowing the English language to develop on its own.

The Northumbrian dialect stood apart from the others in one important aspect. They kept their distance from their Saxon cousins for 150 years. Although they comprised one of the four dialects that made up Old English, Northumbrian also became a separate regional dialect due to their frontier location. They were the first to allow Norwegian settlers into Yorkshire, resulting in the city of York becoming a Norwegian stronghold. They vied for the support of the Northern Picts, helping that nation to breech the Forth and occupy Castle Rock at Edinburgh. Centuries of warfare and periods of intermittent peace with Strathclyde allowed the Northumbrians to enter southwestern Scotland, where Irish Scotti Gaels, Dublin-based Norsemen and British Cymry helped alter the language. The Northumbrian dialect of the Lowlands became known as ‘Scotis,’ or Old Scottish. Akin to Old English and remaining German in origin, it varied considerably with that of the Saxon-based dialects of the south. This was the founding of the language of Lowland Scotland, which is still being altered and improved upon today. It was not Gaelic, Welsh, German, Pict or Norse; it was a combination of all.

Northumbria developed along the lines of any frontier. The people of all races mixed together easily and became very self-sufficient and independent of any outside influence. Far from the Saxon trade centers, they looked across the channel for support and commerce. The intercourse between these regions and Northumbria was pronounced. Old Scottish varied slightly from Old English primarily because of this trans-channel usage. By 833 AD, ‘Scotis,’ (called ‘Ecossaise’ by the Franks of Gaul), became the dominant language of trade in Northumbria and Northern Europe, especially in the Low Countries. There are many marked similarities even today between the Lowland Scots language and that of Norway, Sweden, Denmark and parts of Northern Holland.

Because of the founding of the kingdom of Northumbria, the Creighton lands became separated culturally from the Celtic enclave of Strathclyde. 833 AD marked the 555^th year of Justinian Creightonai and the 333^rd year since the parting of Arthfael AP Owain. Creighton, at the eastern border of Midlothian, was situated at the northernmost limits of Northumbria.

Within old Strathclyde, especially in Nithdale and Dumfries, the language remained Old Welsh for another 700 years, far into the 16^th century. This is the region that received many of the Midlothian Creighton clan, leaving the family lands to the newcomers. Many Northumbrians had arrived with imported earls or with the expanding church, which had been evangelizing the backslidden Northumbrians of Yorkshire from Lindisfarne.

The local church was still Celtic in form, but incorporated many continental priests and monks from, or trained in Gaul. The Franks were rising as a national power supported by a growing number of Viking mercenaries called Normans. Old English as a written language had appeared among the English churchmen, while Scottish developed along the same lines from York and the new northern centers in east Berwick (Bernicia), only 30 miles from Dun Creighton. It can be assumed that many of the Creightons who remained in their home territory sought out the church as laymen and women, being in the forefront of the church in the eastern Lowlands.

As the more traditional Celts withdrew into Strathclyde, their old homes and land were filled with Saxon, Danish and Angle emigrants from Yorkshire. About this time the Norse invasion was beginning, with more warlike Scandinavians called ‘Vikings’ (which meant pirates) coming to pillage and to burn. It was these people, mainly Norwegians and Swedes that rose to such a power within the century that they plied for ownership of the entire island. They took the city of York as their own. With the Viking presence increasing in the Lothians as well as much of northern and eastern England, many place-names became both German and Nordic in origin.

The Saxon-Era, 827-1066, lasted formally for 239 years, the duration of time that the Saxon Royal House ruled Britain from Wilton and Winchester, Wessex. We do not know what our surname became while under their watch, but one or two hints remain that might tell the story.

In or about 833 AD, the lands of Creighton and her neighbors would have altered drastically under the new German culture. Unlike the later Normans, the Saxons (now referring to the collective German Horde) were a relatively quiet people when unprovoked, but they had a distinct system of law and a very rigid class system.

On the top were the royal West Saxons of Wessex. The ruling houses of Northumbria were tied by marriage to those of Wessex. Each kingdom or earldom was divided into shires, set up on old Celtic tribal boundaries. The shires were then divided into rapes, hundreds, boroughs, wapentakes and thane-holds, accordingly. The king’s council, or Witan, ruled from the south. The king’s direct agents were the Aldermen, also Earldorman, who ran the larger districts. In the north at Creighton, their Danish counterpart ‘jarl’ denoted the same class. This term eventually evolved into the English term earl, the overlord of a shire.

Rapes were large districts of a shire, usually of a prescribed area in size, but often dictated by natural land features such as major rivers and mountain chains. Hundreds were divisions of a rape. Boroughs were larger villages earmarked as regional trade centers. Wapentakes were administrative legal districts within a borough and thane-holds were privately owned lands.

Thanes, the lowest rank of title in the Saxon system, were still men of great power on the local level. It is probable that Creighton, Borthwick and Cranstoun lands were infiltrated with German or Danish administrators, but the families would have retained status as local thanes. All were very involved with the local church and sponsored monasteries and ecclesiastical centers within their territories. They were also politically acclimated to perform duties of state locally, intermarrying into German or Nordic lines to do so. The outcome was similar all over Britain. Rebel and loose everything, or conform and retain whatever was dolled out to you.

The ‘takeover’ always followed the same scenario. Dun Edin became the regional trade center of Edinburghshire. Place names, mountains, villages and rivers, were either left with their old Celtic names or altered to the Germanic tongue. Mountains such as nearby Mons Dodrig in Keth, became Dodrig Law. The village of Creighton became something similar to ‘Long Chrighton’ or ‘Long Crigtoun,’ both still actively used on maps of Creighton Parish in the 1500’s.

The Germans brought their own farmers and laborers. Those of the lower classes were called ‘churls,’ tenant workers for the thane. The local Britons usually were forced from their lowland farms while German farmers took over these fertile grounds. At Creighton, the flats between Caickmuir Burn and Salter’s Burn (Saughyland district) and the lowlands in North Creighton along the Tyne at Cranston-Riddle would have been prime agricultural areas. The local Britons were allotted the uplands and moors, less fertile and hilly, for grazing their sheep and cattle. The Creightons probably retained the land use of much of the village, Dun Creighton and Bankhead Moor and possibly Falla Moor to the south, all being in the latter category. For sake of story, I am keeping the Chief of Creighton in place as district administrator and thane, but assimilated into the new ‘Saxon’ culture.

The Northern Pict presence at Dun Edin in 550 AD had brought renewed pressure on Creighton lands. They were becoming Christianized and organizing into kingdoms, but they were still hostile and threatening. The Keith, Creighton and Borthwick lands held the central high grounds of Midlothian. The stone fortresses of Dun Creighton and Dun Borthwick were only two miles apart, protecting the Tyne River roads from northern attack. These great families, as well as the House of Cranstoun would have been perfectly situated to act as ambassadors and go-betweens for the Saxon diplomats and the Pictish kings. By 833, all would have had some foreign blood in their veins.

They would have looked to the future, sending their sons to church-run collegiate schools at home and to France to study in the great universities. There were older schools at Rome, but Paris University drew the most students. In 833, so many students at the universities were of Lowland Scottish origin that many, at high levels, took notice. This great influx of Northumbrian Scottish students helped spread the Scotis tongue to the continent.

THE LION GOES TO SEA

I will now introduce two of the remaining fictional Creightons, to help explain my theory of name changes as well as the tone of the times. I will call the son Ranulf of Chrightoun, of the 17^th generation of Justinian Creightonai the Vocontii. Born in Zealand, Upper Holland in 833, he lived to be a very old man, dying in 923 at the age of 90.

His father was known simply as Riwald the Blue, signifying the lion on his family shield. So many Germans had arrived in the vicinity that many of the older families used the German practice of taking a single name. Soon, surname meanings for hundreds of local families would be forgotten altogether. Many Celtic surnames, however, simply went underground. For the Britons and Riwald the Blue, it was safer to conform than to be called ‘wealas’, the Saxon word for lowborn serf or foreigner. This was the origin of the word ‘Welsh,’ which was systematically attached to any outland Celt, but the Cymry especially. The Briton family Wallace took their name from this derogatory Saxon word.

Riwald the Blue had never been schooled in the classics and he did not seek the safety of the church as many of his family did. He was raised at Dun Creighton but spent his early years in the hills with the sheep herds. He was independent and headstrong, hating the local German warden of the East Forest. They were no longer allowed to hunt on their own land without a permit. Faced with what he saw as unnatural laws and sparked with a rekindled pride in his Celtic heritage through monks stationed at Soutra, he ran away to the sea at age 13.

Shipping out of Umberside as a deckhand, he spent two years on merchant ships along the coastal waters. For safety against the Viking longboats, he chose Devonshire as his homeport until he fell under the patronage of a Breton merchant. This man was a Dumnonii Celt from Brittany and took Riwald onboard as his first mate. From the port of Exeter, they had sailed first to Quimber in Brittany and then traveled north to the Baltic Sea. From France to the Slavic-Lands in the far north, Riwald was amazed that most spoke variants of his Scotis tongue in the seaports and trade centers.

By 832, Riwald owned his own ship and had become wealthy with a lucrative trade with the northern kingdoms. He had begun that season once more from the southern Cymry seaport of Exeter, as he did each year. He took onboard a delegation of Bretons returning to their homes in France; a common occurrence, for the Dumnonii of Devon and Cornwall also ruled the lands of Brittany from Cornouailles and Quimber.

Brother and sister from the House of Poher (my mother’s family, Poore), both had been born in Brittany but were raised by an uncle in their ancient homeland far up the River Exe, on what is today the border between Somerset and Devonshire. Their uncle now dead, Selyfan (Solomon) and his older sister Roiantdreh were going back to claim their inheritance in the principality of Poher, east of Quimber.

During the cross-channel voyage, Riwald became enraptured with the young woman. Raised in the wilds of Exmoor, she found no adventure at living out a life around the antics of the Court of Cornouailles. The woman and the Scottish merchant devised a scheme where she would smuggle herself back onboard, before he left the ports of the Bretons. Dressed as a common seaman, the young woman found her way to Riwald’s ship undetected. Soon they were safely away, up the coast, with stopovers all along the way. By the time they reached the northern ports, Roiantdreh was pregnant. Ranulf of Chrightoun was born at a Frisian seaport, in the waterlogged sub-kingdom of Zealand, the following summer.

Ranulf of Chrightoun inherited his father’s independence and love of travel. In long voyages, the boy saw the northern seaports as well as his mother’s homeland. Because of these trading expeditions and his natural intelligence, Ranulf picked up many dialects at an early age. By the age of 10, he was as proficient at his mother’s Breton as he was with the related Cornish dialect. He was as proficient with the many Germanic dialects encountered in the north but Scotis, he learned, was the ‘trade-language’ in the northern ports.

As he grew older, Roiantdreh finally made peace with her family from Brittany. The boy was able to see first hand the ancient Celtic culture of the Dumnonii. From older family members, he began to take pride in his Creighton past. There were bards in Devon who knew and sang the genealogy of Creighton, bringing the time of Justinian Creightonai to life once more. He discovered for the first time that the Cymry of Devon were the same as his own people of Strathclyde. He vowed to his mother that he would learn as much about the old cultures as possible, wanting to train as a bard. She encouraged his dream, but not as a bard. She wanted him to strive toward an academic career in Europe.

When he was 15 years old, word came that Viking raiders working inland from the mouth of the Tyne, had attacked Dun Creighton. The old monasteries of Fala and Soutra were destroyed and Ranulf’s grandfather and three uncles had died in the attacks. Riwald the Blue was called home to take charge of the thane-hold, leaving the sea forever.

Ranulf’s early training was at the religious schools at Newbattle. The Borthwicks had granted much land to the church and it now owned properties in many surrounding areas, including Cranstoun and Keith. Riwald rebuilt the burned fortress at Dun Creighton, ringing the whole with a timber stockade, but Viking attacks were still prevalent and growing in intensity. In the south, the West Saxons were at war with both the Cymry of Cornwall as well as the Danes of Mercia, leaving Northumbria to its own fate. In the west, Kenneth Macalpine had become the first Scottish king to unite the Picts, Scotti and Strathclydian Cymry together into the combined kingdom of Alba. His capitol was the ancient Pict stronghold of Scone, in Perthshire. The West Saxons looked at this infant kingdom as a threat. Fearing for his family’s safety, Riwald sent Ranulf and his mother to Brittany. He stayed at Dun Creighton, being the local chieftain and responsible for organizing his farmers and tenants into a ‘fyrd levy,’ the Saxon term for regional civilian militia. These farmer-soldiers would prove to be the one thing that would finally bring the Viking invasion to a halt, in Wessex in 871.

In 850, Roiantdreh and her 17-year-old son sailed to Quimber and there took the inland journey to her birthplace. The tiny princedom of Poher was one of the five that had made up the Kingdom of Brittany, united under Roiantdreh’s kinsman, Alain III le Poher. Her father was dead, but her uncle Arnaud Count of Poher ruled from his stronghold in the Mountains D’Aree. Upon arrival, she learned that politics there was as bad as in Northumbria.

The Franks under Charles the Great (Charlemagne) had spent years battling other Germanic invaders and claimants to the various French thrones. Vikings from Norway had been called in as mercenaries and as a reward, were given the lands of Normandy south of the Seine. These great wanderers were adept at river raiding, as were all Vikings. They had established strongholds in Sicily and Russia. Now from Normandy, they looked at total control of the Frankish kingdoms, including Brittany. Through intimidation, political intrigue and coercion, the Normans were eating away the very fabric of Charlemagne’s original goal of a unified French state.

The House of Poher and the royal lines of Cornouailles were undermined by the counts of Rennes and Nantes who, with Norman help, wished to break up Alain le Poher’s kingdom. Not trusting her own family members, Roiantdreh sent Ranulf to Boulogne and the court of Louis the Pious to seek a royal appointment to the University of Paris for her son.

Ranulf found the troubled king at Charlemagne’s old castle, the greatest fortification in the Frankish realm. The ancient Castle Boulogne had once been owned by the family de Lesque, descended from Liscus, chief of the Aedui, mentioned by Caesar in his Gallic War Commentaries. This family would in time become the great Clan Leaske of Aberdeenshire.

Ranulf, upon meeting the King of the Franks, was amazed at Louis’ palace guards. They were Scotsmen from Lothian and Larnarkshire, his own neighbors from home. The court had so many advisors from the Lowlands that Scotis was the informal language of the court. Every Scots advisor, whether tutor or diplomat, was trained at Paris University. Waiting patiently for his audience with the king, the boy found his calling among these expatriate countrymen.

The Roman Church operated the great school of Paris. It held, outside Rome itself, the best masters of the day. Ranulf, at 20 was a latecomer. Most began studies as early as age 12, undergoing the first eight years in general studies of the classics, philosophy and theological pursuits. Ranulf had received much of this training at Newbattle and his age and talents led him directly to the master’s school. Depending on the courses taken, this could last from 8-15 years, but there were a growing number of students who sidestepped the theology for that of secular studies. The church hierarchy fought the trend, but it would grow until culminating in a massive secular movement in the 1100’s as new schools sprouted in Northern Europe and Britain. Most Scottish students (and there were many) chose to go directly into the study of law.

Ranulf achieved Master’s Status in 871 AD, after 18 years at Paris. He was 38 years old. He had taken all that was offered, mixing ecclesiastical studies and philosophy with the secular studies of law. This allowed him to enter the priesthood if he chose, or to work as a consultant to a titled house anywhere in Europe or the British Isles. He was adept at 11 languages including Latin and had learned all that he could about world history and commerce. With what he already had learned as a youth concerning international trade, he was in a prime position to become a man of wealth and prestige.

He had no way of knowing it at the time, but his accomplishment was typical of a growing number of Northumbrians, especially those from Lowlands Scotland. They were the cumulative product of a mixture of outward moving nations…Celts, Romans, Saxons, Angles, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians and Irish Gaels. Their wanderlust and high intelligence would carry them around the globe.

Ranulf’s descendants carried on much as he had done for four generations. The Danish (combined Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) influence continued to grow in the north as the Viking raiders took over most of Mercia, East Anglia and Northumbria. The West Saxon dynasty ruled from Winchester and after Alfred the Great stopped the Danes from taking Wessex, the island settled into a state of semi-peace. The later Saxon kings found that paying off their Danish neighbors was far better than fighting them. The entire north became known as the Daneslaw.

Thomas Crechtune (995-1075) was born in East Creighton near present Lonehead to a man known only by his title, Eric the Shirereeve. Eric the Shirereeve (964-1024) was Ranulf’s great grandson and as sheriff of southeast Edinburghshire, he was responsible for the collection of the king’s taxes in his district. His father Kenneth the Thane retained the fortified house at Dun Creighton, leaving him a small estate near the forest as well as estates in Durham and another near Winchester.

Thomas was raised as the son of a minor official who had dealings with the local earls of Edinburghshire as well as with the courts of Mercia and Wessex. At an early age he was sent to York, where he attended schools. While there, he was put into contact with distant family members ruling as large landowners, who began to promote him for a role in government service. Through their patronage, he found his way to Europe where he, like his forefathers, achieved his master’s degree at Paris. Also like his forefathers, he found that many Scotsmen were there as classmates.

The patron family of York, who sponsored his education, were members of the old House of Poher, of Brittany. Thomas knew little of Ranulf of Chrichtoun and Roiantdreh of Poher aside from that they were past grandparents, long dead. In 920 AD, Norman intrigue had come to a climax at Poher; the raiders plundered the countryside of West Brittany. Roiantdreh’s nephew, Mathuedoi Count of Poher and joint-king of Brittany was forced to flee to the court of Aethelstan of Wessex.

The Saxon king, grandson of Alfred the Great, greeted the Count of Poher warmly. Aethelstan was embroiled in conflicts with the Danish Vikings. Count Poher brought his entire family, plus his court and treasure to England. Aethelstan gave him and his family extensive estates in Wessex, Cornwall and York, appointing Mathuedoi ‘King of all the Bretons in England.’ The family still owned the original Devonshire lands of Winford Hill where they originated, now they owned lands from Cornwall to Yorkshire. With this hereditary status established, the House of Poher ruled the combined Celtic Britons and Bretons for 150 years. It was heirs of Mathuedoi who sponsored the young Creighton student. As in past generations, Thomas underwent the regimen of Paris University, receiving his master’s degree in 1028 at the age of 33.

Returning to his native land, he found a minor position as clerk through the House of Poher with the earl of Northumbria. He met and married a granddaughter of Eric Bloodaxe, the old Viking king of York, with the ancient name of Elfgiva, which meant ‘gift of the fairies.’ Together they established a home in York and whenever possible, returned to Creighton where his father had given them land at present Pathhead.

In his role as clerk, he soon rose to the attention of earl Elfred as a clearheaded, methodical thinker. Fluent in all of the island’s dialects, Thomas had also learned Norman French while on the continent, making him an asset for diplomatic functions. At the time, Danes controlled the island through Canute (Cnut) the Mighty, who had taken the English throne at the death of the Saxon king Edmund Ironside of Wessex. Canute had refined English rule by dividing the kingdom into four major earldoms, Wessex, Kent, Mercia and Northumbria. Wales and what would become western and northern Scotland remained independent kingdoms, although semi-hostile vassal states to the English throne.

One of Thomas’ first diplomatic missions was to accompany the earl’s daughter Elflaed to Scone, Perthshire, to be wedded to the grandson of the King of Alba (Albany). Malcolm II Dunkeld was nearing the end of his life and he had no direct male heirs, other than his grandson, Duncan. To seal diplomatic unity between Northumbria (and England) and Alba, Duncan was to marry Elflaed of York. In 1031 they bore a son named Malcolm Dunkeld, also called Canmore (Ceann-Mor), or ‘Big-Head.’

In 1034 the prince proclaimed himself Duncan I King of Scots. The old House of Albany, in place since Kenneth Macalpine, died with his grandfather. At Scone for his coronation was a large number of Northumbrians. The delegation included Thomas and Elfgiva Crechtune. The new queen was a distant cousin of Elfgiva and through her influence; Duncan was talked into retaining young Crechtune as his court clerk, thus ushering the Creighton family into a 600-year union as service people to the Scottish Crown.

With his marital connections to Northumbria, Duncan had the power to join the eastern kingdoms to those of the west into the semblance of a unified kingdom. The country, as yet, was not called Scotland, but Duncan’s short 6-year reign began the process of regional recognition on the world stage. To assure a free kingdom, Duncan needed help from England, the Scandinavian kingdoms as well as those of Europe. His greatest enemy was from home, with his own relations of Morray seeking to overthrow his rule.

He is remembered as being a young, spoiled and impetuous king, but much of the history came from 15^th century writings. He had an ongoing feud with a northern cousin, Macbeth the Mormaer, or Steward, of Morray. Fearing for his family’s safety, he chose Thomas Crechtune and Andreas Borthwick of Lothian to take his young son Malcolm south to England. The intent was to leave Prince Malcolm and Thomas’ son Eadric with Scotsmen at the Saxon court in Winchester, then proceed to Europe to gain support and foreign aid. Meeting with Crechtune and Borthwick, Duncan looked at his options, which hinged around the volatile royal succession of the Saxon Court. The two young clerks advised the king on the current state of affairs at Winchester.

THE PRINCELING AND THE LION

Canute the Mighty, once the fearful pagan King of Mercia, was ill and would die within months. In his younger days he had ruled as joint-king of England with Edmund Ironside of Wessex, collecting the ‘Danesgeld,’ as Saxons paid the Danes to remain at peace. This Norse national extortion had been in effect for decades. Canute reigned from 1016-1035, becoming a strong leader and great Christian king of England. His wife, though, presented a problem.

Emma of Normandy represented a barrier to the normal and traditional Saxon succession of the House of Ceridic of Wessex. She was not only Canute’s wife, but the widow of the old Saxon king Ethelred the Unready as well as being a Norman, sister to Duke Richard. As Crechtune and Borthwick laid this out to their king, Duncan began to see how severe the state of events had become. The fate of English succession would eventually affect his kingdom as well. He asked for a simplified listing of the claimants.

1. Ethelred King of Wessex had by his first wife:

a. Edmund Ironside Heir to the throne

2. Ethelred King of Wessex had by Emma of Normandy:

b. Edward the Confessor

c. Alfred Prince of England

3. Upon Ethelred’s death, Edmund Ironside became King of Wessex while his mother Emma of Normandy married Canute, King of Mercia.

4. Edmund Ironside had sons and heirs:

d. Edmund

e. Edward Aethling (nephew of Ironside and grandson of Edward the Confessor)

5. Canute has Edmund Ironside murdered in 1016, claiming the throne for himself. Emma of Normandy vows that only her children through Canute will be heirs to the English throne. These sons were:

f. Harold

g. Hardicanute

6. King Canute banished Ironside’s sons and heirs to death in Sweden, but the Swedish king pardoned them and sent them to Normandy. Edward the Confessor and Prince Alfred are taken as wards of Richard Duke of Normandy, while an infant Edward Aethling is sent to Hungary and the court of King Stephen I.

h. The sons of Richard of Normandy, Robert and William both claimed title to the English throne through Emma.

King Duncan pondered over the list for days. He saw the Normans as a threat, being an extension of the Norse overlords that had kept Britain in check through extortion and intimidation for 200 years. Canute’s sons, Harold and Hardicanute were in the same league, molded by their mother and the powerful Goodwin Earl of Wessex. Edward the Confessor, although first in line to assume the throne under normal circumstances, was now 32 and entirely in the Norman camp. He had married a French woman and the Saxon burgers of London, who controlled the king’s council financially, viewed him with contempt. His affinity for Norman French ways soured them. Duncan saw that 19-year-old Edward Aethling, far away in Hungary, posed the best alternative for the future of his new kingdom of Scots. Duncan directed Crechtune and Borthwick to make ready for a diplomatic mission as soon as Canute was dead. His young son Malcolm, as well as Crechtune’s son Eadric would be escorted to Winchester, where they would be out of harm from Macbeth and his agents from Morray. Leaving loyal servants and Elfgiva Crechtune in charge of the children, Crechtune and Borthwick would then go to Hungary and seek aid and support from King Stephen as well as the English prince, Edward Aethling.

The retinue left Scone late in 1035 for the south. Word had come of Canute’s death. With four-year-old Prince Malcolm went Crechtune, his wife and their two-year-old son. They traveled with over 100 servants and men-at-arms, going overland to Edinburgh and there taking sea transport to Southampton. Andreas Borthwick went separately, taking the overland route through Lothian and down into Mercia to meet with the earl of Northumbria before going on from York.

At Winchester, Crechtune made final arrangements for his family and the prince’s care before meeting Borthwick at London. The city was in turmoil. Harold had assumed his father’s throne at Canute’s death, sending his brother Hardicanute to run to the safety of Normandy. Plotting with Duke Richard, Hardicanute conspired to send Edward the Confessor and Edward’s brother Alfred to seize the throne from Harold, but Prince Alfred was killed in the madness and Hardicanute recalled Edward to Normandy before he, as well, was murdered. The two Scotsmen saw that all haste was required to reach Hungary.

The diplomats led a mixed band of civil servants, clerics and soldiery. The military unit was a levy of Lothian tenant-soldiers bound for the Hungarian court as royal guards. Detachments such as these were now in place all over northern Europe in almost every kingdom and duchy. Entrusted to Crechtune was a gift from Duncan to King Stephen, which had personal reverence for Thomas. It was an ancient illuminated Celtic gospel, saved from the flames of Lindisfarne when the Vikings burned the church. A Crechtune ancestor at Soutra had transcribed it in great and colorful detail.

The kingdom of Hungary was just emerging from a barbaric past. The man who they were supposed to seek council with was born a pagan prince to a chieftain of Gran, named Geza. The boy, born at Gran in 975 AD, had only his father’s chieftainship to inherit. But, when he was 10 years old, archbishop Adelbert of Prague brought the Gospel and both the boy and his father were baptized. The boy, called Vaik (Vojk) changed his name to Stephen and he seceded his father as tribal chief in 997 AD.

He rapidly became a rising star in Christendom. For his wife he chose Gisela, sister of Duke Henry of Bavaria, the future Emperor Henry II. Together, the couple forged a Christian kingdom in Hungary. Stephen’s efforts soon came to the attention of Pope Sylvester II and in 1001, the Pope personally crowned him at Gran, proclaiming Stephen the First King of Hungary.

The party of Scotsmen ran into many delays due to warfare across France. They did not arrive at Gran until 1038, only to find King Stephen ill and on his deathbed. They never had a chance to talk with him; he died days after their arrival. Crestfallen, they kept to one side as the king was put to rest. The great book of Lindisfarne was given to the king’s daughter Agatha, who sent it to the family chapel with the Scottish monks. With their domestic and civil servants helping Queen Gisela and her daughter Agatha with the funeral arrangements, the women and Agatha’s princely husband became fast friends of Duncan’s emissaries.

Throughout the weeklong funeral, dignitaries from many kingdoms near and far paid their respects. As King Duncan’s ambassadors, Crechtune and Borthwick introduced the island kingdom to officials that had rarely heard of it, other than being a vassal state of England. Duncan had sent them to Hungary, in part, to discuss unified support by helping place Edward Aethling on the English throne. Agatha of Hungary had recently married Edward Aethling. Crechtune and Borthwick were introduced to their new son, Edgar Aethling. The baby, born that same year, was a contemporary of Prince Malcolm Dunkeld (MacDuncan) and Crechtune’s son Eadric. In 1044 Edgar’s sister Christian was born and a year later, the youngest sister, Margaret was born. These three siblings would become the last heirs to the West Saxon throne of Wessex.

Duncan’s immediate goal, however, was aid in his growing war with his cousin Macbeth. The long negotiations beginning at Stephen’s funeral would last for four years, taking either Crechtune or Borthwick from Gran to Normandy and back again with talks between the two royal princes. They also traveled to England and Denmark to seek council with supporters there. While this was occurring, Macbeth lured King Duncan to an area near the castle of Glamis at Elgin and had him killed. In 1040 the Mormaer of Morray became King of Scots at Scone.

History says that Agatha, who was the force behind Edward Aethling, did not leave Hungary until 1057. I cannot see this as possible, for two reasons. She would have encouraged Edward to seek the throne as soon as her father died. Her mother retired into obscurity, perhaps to a convent. Her cousins, nephews of King Stephen, possibly sought his overthrow, plunging the young Christian country back into tribal paganism. There is reason to believe that it was the nephews who poisoned the king at Gran in 1038. With her husband and her son both heir-apparent to the English throne, she would have wanted to be as close to the center of activity as possible. Secondly, Prince Edgar Aethling is always shown as being born in Hungary, but often his sister Christian is shown as being born in Wessex, which was 1044. A year later, Margaret again is shown as being born in Hungary. I think that the family, with Crechtune and Borthwick, went back to Winchester in 1042 when Edward the Confessor took the throne upon the sudden death of King Hardicanute.

This, of course, leads to a more refined series of events surrounding Crechtune and Borthwick. Macbeth killed Duncan in 1040, ushering in that man’s 17-year reign. Hardicanute died in 1042, allowing the London burgers to force the Witan in calling Edward the Confessor to the throne of England. Edward Aethling was his nephew, long separated since their exile. The king was 40 and Aethling was 26. I see the first Hungarian retinue arriving then, as a royal homecoming. At Winchester, Aethling and Agatha would have met the Scots prince Malcolm, now 11 and 9 year-old Eadric Crechtune. Bonds would have formed from this time. Someone had to pay for Malcolm’s upbringing and Edward Aethling is the most likely source, backed by King Edward’s treasury.

By 1044 when Christian was born, the political situation may have forced the Aethling group back to Hungary, especially if Queen Gisela had died and Agatha was forced to fight for her inheritance. Edward the king had brought many Norman nobles to aid in his government, causing a growing anti-Norman league to form around Earl Goodwin and his son, Harold Godwinsson. Before leaving once again for the continent, Aethling or the king left a young Norman knight named de Lavedre (Lauder) in charge of Prince Malcolm. The boy-prince was already formulating a plan to return to his homeland and take his father’s throne away from Macbeth.

Thomas Crechtune and Andreas Borthwick may have returned to Hungary with the royal couple or stayed in England, but it is doubtful if they ventured far into Scotland due to Macbeth’s presence. It is apparent that both found their way back to Gran before 1057, for that is the year that Edward Aethling made his triumphant return officially as Prince of England with full Norman backing. Sadly, he died four months later, leaving Agatha and her children alone in a foreign land. Upon Edward’s demise, Agatha wished to return again to Hungary with her children. Either King Edward the Confessor or Crechtune talked her into remaining in England. Edgar was 19 and required training to prepare for his possible kingship. His sister Christian, 13 and young Margaret of Hungary, 12, also required religious training and grooming as royal princesses. Agatha consented, allowing the girls to go to the abbey of Amesbury, Wiltshire, while Edgar sought final schooling at Ely in present Cambridge.

That same year and possibly in conjunction with Edward Aethling’s return and backing, Prince Malcolm, now 26, led his expatriate force of Scotsmen and Norman allies north to meet Macbeth. With him went his friend and advisor de Lavedre and 24-year-old Ceridic Crechtune. He found the king and killed him, proclaiming himself Malcolm III MacDuncan, King of Scots. To forge a strong bond with the northern kingdoms, he took as his bride a Norwegian from the royal line of Olav Haralsson, Ingebjorg of Norway (1031-1064). Her father was earl Finn Arnesson of Trondelag, Austratt.

The official coronation was held the following Easter at Scone, 28 April 1058. Both Thomas Crechtune and Andreas Borthwick were honored for helping his family. Both became barons of their Lothian lands and remained in his service as personal advisors. To the Norman knight de Lavedre, he granted the extensive lands of Lauder, southeast of Creighton. Eadric Crechtune as well remained with his friend and king as part of his personal bodyguard. The two would remain fast friends and battle companions for life.

Queen Ingebjorg of Scots died in 1064, 6 years into Malcolm’s reign. The king had become popular with his subjects and all looked to see who he would chose as his future wife. The king would have killed anyone who suggested it, but much of his prosperity was due, not to his father Duncan, but to Macbeth of Morray. Shakespeare’s play does him little justice. He became a competent king and united the entire country, north and south, into a unified kingdom. He built churches and monasteries, which had been wasted and destroyed during the Viking years. 7 years before his death, Macbeth had undertaken a personal pilgrimage to Rome and found favor with the Pope. Deep down, Malcolm III knew he had to follow suit, or loose influence with his nobles.

That year Malcolm learned that his deceased wife’s family planned an attack on England if King Edward should die. This would mean another bout with the Norsemen and this family in particular already had hold of lands as far away as Kiev, in Russia. Malcolm sent Thomas Crechtune and Andreas Borthwick to London to report to King Edward, now old and sickly.

Edward’s Westminster Cathedral was nearing completion and it had become the king’s overriding obsession, but once again, the question of succession was on everyone’s lips. The men learned that Duke Robert of Normandy, Duke William of Normandy, Harald of Denmark and Norway and Harold Godwisson earl of East Anglia all vied for the throne. Again, Malcolm put his support behind Edgar Aethling, now 26, or William of Normandy. The Norman duke had vowed to stop any Danish invasion.

Late in 1065, Edward the Confessor died just after the cathedral was completed. On his deathbed he passed over his nephew Edgar Aethling in favor of Harold Godwinsson, son of the old earl of Wessex. Harold II became king for a few short months. His brother Tostig earl of Northumbria sided with the Danes and Harold met him and the Danish fleet at Stamford Bridge, Yorkshire in September. William of Normandy, while Duke Robert was absent in France, chose to attack directly at Kent before Harold could rally his tired troops. The rest, as they say, is history. William landed at Kent and met Harold’s army at Hastings, where the king fell. The Duke of Normandy immediately named Edgar Aethling rightful heir to the throne, but recanted and claimed it for himself. On Christmas Day, 1066, William the Conqueror took the crown as King William I of England.

Who knows what was in Malcolm’s mind. He chose to benefit from Harald of Norway’s usurpation of the English throne, but he backed the Norman instead, thinking Edgar would receive the crown. He put his arms out to Aethling and his dejected family. For the last time, Crechtune and Borthwick journeyed to Winchester to meet with Agatha of Hungary, who now had ample reason to return home. Her daughter Margaret was now a young woman, as was Christian, Margaret’s sister. Edgar Aethling looked toward Malcolm as a beacon of stability in his northern kingdom, far from the Norman court of William. Sometime during that first year of William’s reign, Agatha was persuaded to join Malcolm’s court with her children, with the hopes that the King of Scots would choose one of her daughters as his wife.

They left by ships from London, with William’s proficient dock clerks recording the names of all members of the ‘Hungarian retinue’ of the aging widow of Prince Edward Aethling. In 1067 they set sail and moved up the coast to the Forth, where Malcolm met them at Edinburgh. Somehow, Raphael Holinshed, in his “Chronicle of England, Scotlande and Irelande” (1577) lists both Crechtune and Andreas Borthwick, along with many other Scots, as being Hungarian. This single error from what became the leading source material for Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” has caused problems in family origins for over 400 years.

Malcolm met them at Edinburgh, where he had established himself to be closer to the border warfare with William’s English forces. He viewed young Edgar as the true King of England and vowed to support his efforts in regaining the throne. Edgar attached himself to Malcolm as one of his knights. The king immediately took a liking to Margaret, but the young woman had chosen religion over marriage and tried to put her older sister to the forefront. The king, though, would hear nothing of it. To save face and assure Edgar’s chance for attaining the English throne through Malcolm, Agatha talked Margaret into marrying the king.

And thus became the founding of many dynasties, with the family Creighton woven throughout. Married in 1070, they had eight children, beginning with six sons. They were Edward, Edmund, Edgar, Ethelred, Alexander, David, Matilda (Maud) and Mary. Two of her sons lived to rule as Kings of Scotland, Alexander and David, and her daughter Maud became the Queen of England when she married Henry I, son of William the Conqueror.

Although she was the Queen of Scotland, Margaret continued to live a very austere and deeply religious life, founding hospices, building churches, and helping the poor. She began a form of women's club, in which the women read the scriptures and embroidered vestments for the Church. She brought refinement to the Scottish Court, with her love of art, education and culture. She helped bring the Scottish church in line with Rome by bringing together the ancient Celtic-Culdee and Roman priests together in a conclave to resolve points of dispute. Versed in the newer cannon laws of Rome, she pushed to abolish the Old Saxon and Celtic Church system that allowed priests and clerics to take wives.

As for Malcolm III, he spent 20 years fighting the Normans who beat at his border. In campaign after campaign he rode down into Northumbria, with Prince Edgar, his growing sons and Eadric Crechtune beside him. Aside from de Lavedre of Lauder who remained his close friend and advisor, Malcolm discouraged further Norman land grants. He chose instead to spread the wealth of his kingdom to those who helped him the most. Large church estates developed, one being in the lands of Keith east of Creighton. Here a monastery called ‘Priests Town’ rose. It became so extensive that the people of the area took the name Preston as their own. On Creighton land east of Fala Dam was built a convent, with new improvements made to the ancient church properties at Fala and Soutra. The Creightons controlled the nun’s abbey from a village called Crechtunedean (Dean Creighton). In North Creighton, the Preston holdings boasted new abbeys and hospices at Cranston-Riddle.

Malcolm’s sixth son David was made the first earl of Galloway, who in turn took many Creightons of Midlothian as tenants and wardens beyond the River Cree.

On November 13, 1093, Malcolm, Eadric Crechtune, and the King’s eldest son Edward led a force into Northumbria to lay siege to a Norman stronghold. While storming the castle, all three lost their lives. Three days later on November 16, Queen Margaret expired at Edinburgh Castle upon hearing of the deaths. Malcolm and Margaret were buried at the Church Abbey of Dunfermline in Fife, which she had built.

Eadric Crechtune’s body returned to East Creighton to be buried beside his father Thomas, who had passed away in his sleep in 1075. Far away at Westminster, Norman clerks pawed through the giant books comprising King William’s Domesday Survey of 1086, but the King now was also dead. They made lists of the 13,000 properties that were of taxable value, which would then be given to the sheriffs and bishops for local collections. They paid little attention as they transcribed names from the accompanying maps, especially those in the Scots Land where taxes were few in coming. Tucked in between Loweder, Neutun and Dalketh was the tiny barony of Krektun. The old knight de Lavedre of Lauder, in leaving the small funeral, made an entry in his journal praising the life of Sir Eadric de ‘Kreitton’.

De Lavedre rode alone, deep in thought, following the general crowd back through the village of Long Crechtune and the river. Ahead of him he watched the 22-year-old Thorstan of Crechtune mount the grade to the stone tower, with a small boy in tow. He knew him as the elder son of Eadric and now, lord of the barony. The boy was his tiny son, Thurstan de Crechtune, three years old. Catching up to them at the gate to the tower, the old knight called out to Thorstan and handed him a cloth-wrapped bundle. “This is for the boy,” he said and then rode on toward Fala and home. Thorstan stood for a moment and then un-wrapped the package. It was his father’s ancient round wooden shield, the faded blue lion now but a distant outline. With tears in his eyes he looked down at the bottom of the hill at the pile of rubble by the river. Then he looked beyond, toward Dalketh and the king’s resting place at Edinburgh, so far beyond the villa walls.

Earlier, I mentioned a memorial stone placed at the top of Bankhead Moor in 483 AD. It is a fictional account, but is in line with what has been described as ‘Roman Graffiti’ scattered all over Lowland Scotland. Throughout its 400-year occupation of Britain, Roman legions and auxiliaries along the Caledonian frontier were cut off from loved ones at home. They carved in stone, many times in the face of the walls, everything from shopping lists to love letters. Thousands of them from all over Britain commemorate deaths of fellow soldiers, wives or children. My source for Justinian Creightonai came from an Edinburgh scholar that studied these stones. His book gave the phrase ‘From the Rocky Homeland’ and it was he who wrote of Justinian being granted the Creighton lands of Midlothian in 283 AD. Perhaps his source was a memorial stone at Crichton Mains, the same Bankhead Moor location that my stone was placed. In any event, Justinian Creightonai was a real person, as was the small boy, Thurstan de Crechtune, mentioned at the end of this chapter; 790 years of fiction, connected at each end by obscure ancestors.

Church Abbey of Dunfermline in Fife

PART III:

WHEN BOYS WERE KINGS

ROYAL ORPHANS

The death of King Malcolm III in 1093 ushered in a new era for Scotland. The fictional Eadric Crechtune of East Creighton, Edinburghshire died in the same battle. They fought against the tyrannical rule of Rufus of Normandy, crowned William II upon the death of his father, William the Conqueror. None knew, at the time of their deaths, how convoluted the lives of the descendants of this Norman family would become.

When the Norman regime took over the Anglo-Saxon lands 27 years before, William I set about restructuring the entire kingdom. He retained the original 40 shires, but placed his loyal Norman, Flemish and Breton (Celtic-Britons of Brittany) knights in charge of all jurisdictions. He created a new system of ‘Honours’ where parts of a shire were controlled from centralized fortified castles. To reinforce his structure, he wed his daughter Constance to Alian VI Fergant Duke of Brittany, who was a descendant of Count Mathuedoi of Poher (Poore). Alain was made First Earl of Richmond. The King also instituted changes in the structure of the church. Some Anglo-Saxon bishops were kept in place, but William brought in continental clergy for the most part. The old church, which had evolved from Celtic origins, now had to adhere to the updated Roman cannon laws and institutions. The whole was due to the genius of Lanfranc Archbishop of Canterbury. University-trained in theology as well as law, he became second to the King. Rural dioceses, active since the 600s found themselves displaced for newer urban bishoprics, better suited for tax collections. Only in Wales, Cornwall and the northern kingdom of Scotland was there resistance to change.

Malcolm III’s demise was due in part to this resistance. The eastern shires of Scotland still fell under the jurisdiction of Northumbria, where the old Anglo-Saxon earls held sway. Culturally, Lowlands Scotland began at the Umber River and encompassed northern Yorkshire, Durham and Cumberland. His uncle, Earl Siward, raised Malcolm at York. In 1069, William sent his sons, led by Rufus, into Cornwall, Devon and Wales to subjugate the Britons of Cymry. Norman-based earls, either relatives or close companions of the King were established to rule over those trouble spots. Angered and uneasy, Malcolm and his brother-in-law Prince Edgar Aetheling sought aid from Sweyn, King of Denmark, who sent a fleet to the Umber River to help them against the Normans, taking York in the process. William turned his army north and wrecked havoc in Mercia and Northumbria. He lay waste the countryside, burning towns, crops, churches and monasteries well into southern Scotland. The Danes were paid to vacate and by 1070, nothing remained in the northern shires but rubble. Widespread famine and economic hardship for the entire island followed. At the Treaty of Abernethy in 1072, Malcolm was forced to relinquish his son Duncan to William as a royal hostage.

This single event, passed over lightly in official histories, was probably the first time Creightons entered the political arena since escorting Malcolm’s wife from Hungary to Scotland. Prince Duncan was the son of Malcolm and his first wife, Ingebjorg of Orkney. The boy would have been about 12 and Malcolm would have sent Scottish caretakers with him to William’s court. Of course, no data remains as to who accompanied Duncan into exile, but the possibility remains that one, or more were Creightons. Malcolm’s wife, Margaret, knew them as trusted advisors. Edinburgh, but 12 miles away from Creighton, remained the royal seat. It may not have been a knight of Eadrics caliber, but the queen would have seen fit to send a clergyman south with her stepson. Prince Duncan, however, never forgave his father for sending him to England. This anger would cause ripples in the royal House of Scotland, which would lead to decades of family feuds. In 1083, King William I retired to Normandy to see to his own never-ending family feuds. He died there in 1087.

Rufus of Normandy was crowned William II upon his father’s death. As Field Marshall, it had been he who ransacked Northumbria. To maintain his dwindling hold on the south and to help his Northumbrian relations, Malcolm brought Gospatrick Earl of Northumbria north. He granted him the lands of Dunbar and other Lothian locations, making this ancient family with Celtic origins the strongest in the southeast. The seat of Gospatrick was at Dunbar, on the coast of East Lothian near the Berwick border. This was an important move, for Berwick had been the location of the ancient Celtic Church at Lindisfarne Abbey. York was the traditional seat of the Saxon Church of England. Archbishop Lanfranc sought to wrest control from the see of York and replace it with central power from Westminster and Canterbury. With Gospatrick of Dunbar came his son, Hudred, as Earl of Lothian, while his son, Helias, ruled as Prince of Lothian from Dundas (South Fort) near Edinburgh. Malcolm’s move assured a stable Anglo-Saxon frontier against Norman advancement into Scotland. These early transplanted earls of Northumbria formed the base of what would become the very powerful clique, the Lords of the East March. *

*This strange word, March, seen so often in histories of Scotland, had an ancient meaning and came with the Normans. It originated in the 9^th century among the Franks. While fighting the independent Celtic kingdoms of Brittany, regions would be taken over and titles of king outlawed. The conquered kingdoms would be divided into smaller ‘Marches,’ with counts becoming the ruling heads as March Wardens. In Britain, the March became a military district of the Borders Region, held by a leading Earl instead of a count. They crossed shire boundaries and used natural land features for defensive purposes. Within England Proper, they were called the ‘Ridings,’ today’s subdivided Yorkshire. In Southern Scotland, they were the East, Middle and West March extending from Berwick to Wigtown, Galloway. In King Malcolm’s time, the terminology did not yet exist.

During Prince Duncan’s forced exile as a royal hostage, he found favor with Rufus, who catered to the boy as he grew. If the boy had Creighton advisors, they would have become Anglicized to some degree during these years. As the boy grew older, Rufus granted him his own castle on the Tyne near Newcastle, as a form of semi-house arrest. From here and with help from William Rufus, Prince Duncan began to conspire with French and English aids against his father.

By 1093, Malcolm found most of his time revolved around his growing family, his saintly wife and his primary holdings of Lothian and Strathclyde. His younger brother Donald Bane, Lord of the Isles, ruled Scotia north of the Clyde. This split in Scottish unity remained in effect for decades. Donald Bane represented the old western and northern mixture of Gaelic Scots, Picts and Norsemen who had formed the House of Alba with Kenneth Macalpine. Malcolm III, although labeled as King of Scots, actually held a firm grip on only his southern and eastern counties, with Saxon-English help. He got along with his brother, but for the most part, the Mormaers controlled the ancient northern kingdoms.

These were the Lords of the north, first named as earls by Macbeth, who had been the Mormaer of Moray. As a unit, the great earls were ‘protectors’ of Scotia. Malcolm upset the apple cart when he began importing Anglo-Saxons from Northumbria as earls of the Lothians and other southern districts. The Mormaer earls north of the Clyde viewed the newcomers with suspicion, while the Britons of Strathclyde saw them as their old Saxon enemies. Many, in fact, called the region south of the Forth ‘Saxony.’ The senior mormaers ruled a vast territory, which included the Scottish Highlands to the lowlands of Fife, Angus and Aberdeenshire. Malcolm and his later royal sons begun to place close associates in the lowland regions north of the Forth, such as the Hungarian knight Bartolf, friend of Edgar Aetheling and Malcolm’s governor of Edinburgh Castle. This man acquired, from Malcolm III, lands in Fife, Angus, the Mearns and Aberdeen. He was the ancestor of Clan Leslie and became a traditional enemy of the House of Forbes of Aberdeenshire. Rapidly, the King’s granting of northern lands to his favorites led to war.

The 13-year reign of William II Rufus of England was a brutal one. His family, his knights, the public and his many enemies jointly despised him. His elder brother Robert was the rightful heir to the English throne, but the Duke was beset with constant fighting in Normandy to retain his continental holdings. Another brother, Henry Beauclerc, roamed Normandy with his own small army. William I had left this Prince with only cash settlements in his will. Henry, whose personal chaplain was Roger le Poor of Caen, was highly intelligent and resourceful. Henry also eyed the English throne.

To pay for his wars, William Rufus stole from his own bishoprics. He continued to fortify the kingdom, however, in the system begun by his father. Honours were expanded and new castles built to protect them. At first, they were wood timber and earthen rampant structures, but followed the same continental design, which became the classic ‘motte and bailey’ stone castle. The Normans were masters of this form of architecture. In the war zones along the Welsh border, the timber castles and forts would remain for another 300 years; massive affairs often with a stucco veneer, painted to resemble solid stone.

In 1093, Rufus once again looked north to Malcolm’s kingdom, now having Duncan Ceanmor, 33 years of age, in his own camp. He sent troops to Yorkshire to occupy Alnwick (pronounced Annick) Castle, held by Robert Mowbray Earl of Northumberland. Prince Duncan, married to a Northumbrian heiress (Eythelreda, daughter of Earl Gospatrick of Dunbar), should have stood with Malcolm, but sent secret emissaries, possibly Creightons, to France instead. That November, Malcolm stormed the castle and was killed, from ambush by Mowbrays men one mile from the castle.

Hopefully, we can now move on. 1093 should have been a footnote, uneventful other than it being the year a king died. The problem lies in the Creighton history. Nothing remains as to who they were in the 11^th century, beyond the writings of Hollinstead in the 1570s. Scottish land charters did not yet exist. The only way we can analyze their advancement and that of their neighbor’s is to study the times and events, both Scottish and English. With France now on stage, that country as well becomes a part of family history. For the first time, a Creighton of record is born and is a contemporary of future kings and villains. While Thurstan de Crechtune was nursed at Dun Creighton, the late King Malcolm’s royal brood waited at Edinburgh Castle, where their mother had also died. They were surrounded by trouble. One uncle, Donald Bane, loomed just across the Forth to pounce on Edinburgh and the vacant throne. Their other uncle Edgar Aetheling abandoned them and left for Sicily, to fight with the Norman dukes located there. Their aunt Christian Aetheling (1044-1102) was the resident Abbess of Romsey Abbey in Hampshire, England. As soon as the double funeral was over, all at Edinburgh waited throughout the winter for the axe to fall. The royal (orphaned) siblings were:

Edgar Ceannmor age 20 (1073-1107) Fought for throne from Lothian.

Alexander, age 16, (1077-1123) exiled to England.

Edmund, age 15, (1078-1100), aligned himself with Donald Bane, exiled as monk to Montachute Abbey.

Maud, age 14, (Matilda, 1079-1118) exiled to the Norman court of William Rufus.

Edward, age 11, (1082- ), exiled to England.

David, age 9, (1084-1153) exiled to the Norman court of William Rufus, spent 30 years in England.

Aethelred, (age unknown), later Earl of Fife and abbot of Dunkeld.

Mary, age 3, (1090- ) probably exiled to Romsey Abbey under aunt’s care.

It would stand to reason that Creightons were already in residence at Edinburgh as royal servants and minor court officials. The town and castle prepared for an assault, which came early in 1094 with Donald Bane (The Fair), who was supported by his 15-year-old nephew, Prince Edmund Ceanmor. Edinburgh fell and Donald Bane proclaimed himself King of Scots. He immediately expelled the remaining siblings to exile in England, sending young Matilda and David directly to Westminster and William Rufus. The English King, however, saw no gain in allowing a northerner to be ruler. He and Prince Duncan led a combined English-French force to Edinburgh, where Donald Bane was dethroned and deposed. Duncan II took control of his father’s kingdom in May, with his brother Edmund and the deposed Donald Bane directly opposed him from Fife and Aberdeenshhire. During his short reign, the first Scottish land charters are recorded. Seven months later, Bane’s men killed Duncan in Aberdeen and Donald once more became king, taking the north for himself and giving the south to Edmund.

Meanwhile Prince Edgar gathered strength in Lothian, with help from Gospatrick and his family, meeting Donald Bane and Prince Edmund late in 1097. Bane was captured and forced into exile, having one eye put out before sending him away. Edmund the boy-warrior was dealt with in less harsh terms, but Edgar had him stripped of his titles. He was forced to join the monks at Montachute Abbey in Somerset, where he died in 1100. That same year events unraveled near Romsey Abbey, where Edmund’s aunt was Abbess and his youngest sister lived in exile. In the New Forest hunting reserve, William Rufus was ‘accidentally’ killed by a hunter’s arrow. Rushing home from Normandy ahead of his brother Robert, Henry Beauclerc seized the English throne as King Henry I. As Edmund Ceannmor lay dying at Montachute, his oldest sister Maud, called Matilda by the English, married the new King. At the royal wedding, 16-year-old David Ceannmor watched the Norman ceremonies, awed by the pageantry. His brother Alexander, now grown, returned home and set up residence north of the Clyde, sharing rule with his brother Edgar. The ancient Antonian Wall split north and south, as assuredly as it had done in the times of the Romans. In 1102, Abbess Christian Aetheling died at Romsey, ending forever the ties with her Hungarian-Saxon roots and Scotland. The old diplomatic families of Creighton and Borthwick remained, now scattered among all of the warring factions as retainers, clergy, knights and chamberlains. With the ascension of David Ceannmor as David I King of Scots, history would alter yet again.

THURSTAN DE CRECHTUNE

Thurstan de Crechtune would have been born around 1090 at Long Creighton village or at Dun Creighton, Edinburghshire. There is evidence that he had a brother or uncle, Alexander, with lands in Berwick. At his birth, the only local Norman was de Lavedre, who became the family Lauder of Lauderdale. One of the first things that King Edgar Ceannmor initiated was a mandatory surname from all of his subjects. Like William the Conquerors Domesday Survey, it undoubtedly had taxation as the ulterior motive, but surname survival through hereditary implementation was how it was promoted. For the grassroots commoner, it held little meaning. These country farmers and urban tradesmen carried on as before with names like John Baker (the baker) or William Miller (the mill-wright). These people rarely traveled beyond their home territory and owed taxes directly to their local laird. It was the titled, or noble houses that were of interest to the King. His tenants-in-chief, his knights and their under-tenants were all dear to his purse. The outdated Saxon ‘first name only’ no longer worked. The new system was also the very beginning of the heraldic process whereas their arms and seals, or crests, evolved into recorded coat of arms. With surname regularity on a father-to-son basis established, tax collection and call-ups for military duty would become much easier. A heraldic blazon, a common name or a home location, as in Thurstan de Crechtune, could now track the often-mobile nobility. As son of Trorstan of Crechtune and descendant of Justinian Creightonai, Thurstan would carry the blue lion arms as his official signature.

With Henry I as his mentor and his sister as queen of England, David Ceannmor, like Edward the Confessor before him, relished the ways of the Norman court. Norman French had been the language of the court since William’s time, but never in the frontier sectors. In Cornwall, Devonshire, Somerset, Cheshire and Wales, Norman earls and knights assimilated into the Celtic society. The same was true in the north. The few Norman imports, like de Lavedre of Lauder, soon became Lowland Scots in name and culture. Only when David returned home to Edinburgh did Norman ways follow.

David Ceannmor was long a prodigy of Henry I. When David’s brother, Edgar, died in 1107 after a brief illness, Henry had already advanced the 23-year-old David to be Prince of Cumbria (the disputed region that had long been claimed by Strathclyde and was actually a southern extension of east Galloway, Dumfries and Annandale). With Edgar’s death, David negotiated with his brother Alexander and once again, they split the Kingdom. Alexander remained in place as ruler of Scotia above the Clyde, while David ruled South Scotland from Northampton, England. This shaky joint-rule went on for 17 years, with Alexander claiming overall kingship as the elder, resident brother. During Alexander’s reign, he created a new bishopric at Dunkeld on Loch Tay, earlier held by lay abbots, which included his younger brother Aethelred. The ancient Culdee community was disbanded in favor of bishops and a chapter of secular cannons. He did much the same in Moray at Spynie and Elgin.

In 1114, Henry I negotiated to have David married to Matilda, widowed heiress of Northumberland, Northampton and Huntingdon. Henry created the Honour of Huntingdon with David as earl. This placed David in control of a vast 11-county manor-hold, straddling the disputed English-Scottish border. Prior to 1124, he was also advanced to become Earl of Lothian and Cumbria, which included portions of Galloway. Throughout Alexander’s reign, David sought to reinforce his holdings with Norman-based knights, which included many Breton and Flemish mid-ranking noblemen. When Alexander died in 1124, David made his grand entry into Edinburgh, surrounded by his friends and companions-in-arms: Comyn, Freskin the Fleming, Walter Flaad (Fitzallen) the Steward, seneschal (chief) of Dol, Brittany. There was Robert de Brus, first Lord of Annandale, Baldwin the Fleming and William de Dufglas (Douglas), who was also a Fleming and a cousin of Freskin. As David settled in to assume the Scottish throne, he had no idea that his 29-year-reign would become a hallmark in Scottish history. His son Henry (1115-1152) remained in England as 2^nd Earl of Huntingdon.

The reign of David I Caennmor (1124-1153) is remembered for two things. A new Norman-English system was one. The second was almost three decades of semi-peace and economic advancement for the struggling kingdom as a whole. He minted the first national coinage since Roman times. He installed a centralized government where close advisors helped him rule by committee. He brought in a national justice system, with justiciars and royally appointed sheriffs in charge of jurisdictions. He granted borough status to towns and he encouraged foreign trade with France, Germany and the Netherlands. He continued to form new bishoprics and found and endowed new abbeys, monasteries and churches. It was during the foundation of these church estates that our name is first recorded in royal charters. David’s reign saw the formation of great abbeys and cathedral chapters at Kinloss, Melrose, Dundrennan, Kelso, Holyrood, Jedburgh and Dunfermline. He brought Benedictines, Augustinians and Cistercians to man the new sites. In rural areas like Creighton, he established important priories, deaneries and convents. The hamlet of Dean Crechtune (shown as Creighton Dean on a map of 1820) near Falla Dam came from this time period. Throughout the Kingdom, the older Celtic Church was almost extinct.

Because of his rapport with his brother-in-law, Henry I, and his lordship of Huntingdon, King David was also able to claim control, for Scotland, the three northernmost counties of England. These were the old counties of Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmoreland. At the same time, through intermarriage, family connections and diplomacy, he acquired the outlying western islands, which had been in Norse hands for centuries. During his reign, Scotland was larger in land area than any other time in her history. The knights who accompanied him to Scotland received great charters of land, placing his Norman and Flemish friends in charge of entire regions. Walter Fitzallen Steward of Dol obtained estates in East Lothian and Renfrew. Robert de Brus was granted Annandale, while Robert de Comyn became lord of lands in Roxburgh and would become David’s chancellor. The knight Baillol (de Bailleuil) received lands in Galloway, but resided in Cumbria. For the Flemish knights, David placed them on the western borders. With Baldwin de Fleming at Biggar in Lanarkshire, Freskin in West Lothian and Moray and William Douglas at Clydesdale, he formed a barrier to the disgruntled Highlanders. Freskin was ancestor of Clan Murray and held identical (ancient) arms as that of Douglas.

As the country changed, so too did the lands of Creighton. In Malcolm’s time, Thorstan had maintained the old stone tower at Dun Creighton, but had dismantled much of the surrounding buildings and ancient walls. Whatever defensive position it once held was lost, through neglect or lack of knowledge. Thorstan was first a farmer and through the generations, much home etiquette had reverted back to the older Celtic Briton tribalism. One of his sons had fought in Wales against William Rufus, bringing back a Cymry wife and long forgotten customs. The son was Ranulf Crechtune, the 8th such named since the time of Ranulf of Chrightoun. On a terrace overlooking the Tyne below the stone tower, Ranulf had constructed an ancient Cymry home, to which even Thorstan could not relate. It was an earthlodge, circular in shape and set halfway into the native soil. It had become a local oddity, its construction watched by half the townspeople. It was 40 feet in diameter and three feet below grade. Strong timbers stood all around the perimeter forming a wall 7 feet tall. Horizontal timbers were locked around the top of this wall. Four tall posts were set upright in the center and crowned with cross braces. Long poles were then set all around one end resting on the top of the outer wall and the smaller ends tied to the top bracing of the center poles. Smaller saplings were then woven in and out through the rafters, forming a great inverted basket. To this, layers of thatching were applied. The entire structure was then covered with packed earth.

Perhaps because Thorstan never had the opportunity to travel abroad, he strove to provide for his many sons. He was well aware of the family past and had raised his offspring to appreciate what they once were. His father’s ancient shield hung proudly over the great fireplace. Through the patronage of his father-in-law de Lavedre of Lauderdale, Thorstan was able to send Thurstan to England for training at Salisbury Cathedral. Styled after the French universities, Salisbury contained a small but important school at the cathedral on Castle Hill, overlooking old Sarum on the River Avon. Nestled behind the royal castle was Bishop Roger le Poor’s residence. Thurstan de Crechtune would be well placed to advance, without going to France, as his ancestors had done.

He went with his uncle, Robert, from East Creighton, who was a cleric and often used diplomat to Henry’s court. Thurstan was fresh from his preliminary schooling at Preston Abbey. In London, Father Crechtune introduced the young man to the queen, who in turn introduced him to bishop Rodger le Poor. This man, who was my mother’s ancestor, was the greatest opportunist of the times. Brought in as King Henry’s chaplain, he was elevated from the rank of lowly parish priest of Avranches to Bishop of Salisbury, Chief Justiciar and Lord High Chancellor* of England by 1103. He was the first Viceroy, acting as ruler in Henry’s absence. When Thurstan met him in 1115, Bishop Roger was the strongest man in the Kingdom, owning the great castles of Devises in Wiltshire as well as at of Sheborne Abbey in Somerset. His sons, nephews and cousins, all from the ancestral House of Poher, were fellow bishops, royal chancellors, justiciars or court clerks. Queen Matilda put up with him for her husband’s sake. Princess Matilda, granddaughter of Malcolm Ceannmor and future Empress, despised him as a charlatan. Loved or hated, the rotund bishop and chancellor cheerfully escorted Crechtune and his nephew to Salisbury Cathedral. Like many bishops and clergy, he was an absentee official of his own diocese, spending most of his time at Devises, held by his mistress, Matilda of Ramsbury. Thurstan, used to the pious Scottish church, was not impressed with the ‘modern’ Norman Church of Rome.

*One note on the position of Lord Chancellor: the ecclesiastical branch in both countries held this high position, also used in Scotland in the next reign, for generations. This is one reason why many sought to send their sons to good universities. Mastering in secular and ecclesiastic studies, they received degrees that allowed them a wide range of careers.

It was while a student at Salisbury that Thurstan began taking the Norman ‘de’ as part of his surname. This cathedral school was a precursor to the great colleges of Cambridge and Oxford and although Roman Catholic, it taught liberalism that bordered on secular tenants. Even the clergy held secular and liberal views, allowing Thurstan de Crechtune to form new outlooks on the world. Bishop Roger had begun a large collection of books at the cannon school. Thurstan while mastering Latin and reviewing Greek and Roman history, discovered possible links to his family name in unusual places. He found a play by Cratinus the Elder of Athens. In other books, he discovered commentaries on Cratinus the Younger. This gave him an eye to the ancient world and encouraged his studies in all areas, especially languages. He not only excelled in Latin, Greek and French, but also learned Aramaic and Arabic. He was one of a growing breed of secular scholars who saw the Moslem conflicts in the Holy Lands as a threat to Christianity. He also became aware of financial gains to be had as a result of the troubles in Palestine.

When he was five, Pope Urban II had called upon the Byzantine Empire of Constantinople to join with the West in a crusade to drive the Seljuk Turks from Jerusalem. The First Crusade, begun in 1095 and Jerusalem, was conquered from “The Saracen Yoke” of infidels in 1099, leaving Godfrey of Bouillon and Baldwin and Eustace of Flanders in charge as rulers of Palestine. Now as Thurstan worked at his studies, he realized that these warring petty nobles of France and Flanders were now great kings of the orient, offering fiefdoms and rewards to all who joined them. He decided that if he were ever to return to Creighton, it would be as a knight and a rich man.

Through a roundabout series of events, Thurstan ingratiated himself with Bishop Roger, who was making many improvements to his castles and cathedral. With the bishop’s help, the young man left school in 112o as squire to one of Rodger’s knights of Devises, bound for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Roger sought sacred relics for his new cathedral and promises from the military orders of Jerusalem to help pay for the construction. Thurstan would play the role of squire and also that as clerk of the expedition. If they encountered Saracens along the way, he would act as interpreter. If they succeeded and met Bishop Roger’s expectations, he would see to it that Thurstan be knighted and rewarded financially for his participation.

The pilgrimage followed a path that had been used for many centuries. With Thurstan went knights and squires from many surrounding castles, all under the wardship of the Earl of Salisbury. A fellow student from the new center at Oxford joined them, who had set as his mission the transport of his father’s heart to be entombed at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. This young man carried with him his father’s tunic, emblazoned with the red cross of the First Crusade. He had fought at Jerusalem in 1099 as a standard bearer, carrying the great cross into battle against the Turks. For his heroism, he was awarded the name Crosbie. This family soon would be established as de Bruce under-tenants in Dumfries.

All along the way were roadside stops, down the Acquitaine coast to Marseilles and on into Italy. These pilgrimage way stations had made the sacred journey big business. One of the primary reasons the crusades began in the first place was the cessation of pilgrimages to Palestine by the Turks. The church as a whole and the local landowners along the route lost too much income. For 200 years it remained a major thoroughfare through seven separate crusades. For those returning from the Holy Lands, sacred ‘relics’ could be bought, mass-produced and pawned off as legitimate objects of antiquity; how many ‘saints bones’ originated from exhumed pieces from the burial sites of Gaul?

Thurstan de Crechtune’s 18 months in and around the Holy City was anti-climactic. Jerusalem had become a melting pot of northerners, from Germany, France, Flanders, the Netherlands and Britain. The country called Palestine had been subdivided into a slew of small principalities, held by force by men who had fought each other back in Europe. As counts and earls of the Frankish regions, they set out with devote aims to free the Holy Lands, but once in place as petty kings, greed took over. They lived like potentates, surrounded by the riches stolen from the ‘infidels.’ Lesser knights who made up the bulk of the fighting force were often fifth or sixth sons of home lords. These men were landless, but acquired fiefdoms in Palestine. The Eastern Church of Constantinople, once they helped drive out the Turks, were set aside as allies as great military orders took over. These, the Hospittalers, The Knights Templar and the Teutonic Knights, rose as paramount leaders of Palestine and Christendom as ‘warrior-priests’ of the three Holy Orders.

Only once did Thurstan have to bear arms, to protect his knight from an ambush. The Knight of Devises had been sent out to carry dispatches to a small post east of the city. Along the way, a band of Seljurks attacked them at a river ford. The Knight was wounded almost immediately by an arrow, which took him under the armpit. Thurstan stood his ground over his fallen lord, fending off four mounted Turks with his sword until the other men rallied to drive the bandits away. The knight lived, rewarding Crechtune with a beautiful silver shield and a stipend of gold. He was promised knighthood when they returned to Britain later that year.

Once back in England, Thurstan found that his knighting was not on the list of priorities. Through service as an interpreter and other diplomatic activities, his cache of gold had increased considerably on the return journey. Bishop Roger praised him for his abilities, but left it at that. He left Wiltshire and headed north, working at various estates along the way. At Hampton, he met the assemblage of men who revolved around David of Huntingdon, ready to claim his throne. The Crosbie Squire was there and through him, Thurstan met Robert de Brus and then David Ceannmor. One night as they sat at high table with the soon to be king, both men were asked to tell of the Holy Lands. It was Crosbie who related Thurstan’s role at the ford, which impressed the Earl. He was well aware of the House of Crechtune and their past role with his parents. In a move to solidify his home assets, he knighted both Crosbie and Crechtune.

The King’s crowning in 1124 was strictly symbolic. He had reigned as joint ruler with his brother since 1107 and many of his lieutenants, like Robert de Brus, already retained titles to lands within David’s jurisdiction. Thurstan, of course, retained title to the family lands of Creighton, but was now close to the King. As part of the ‘new order,’ he incorporated many Norman themes into his fiefdom. First and foremost was the family fortress, which was in extreme disrepair since he left for school in England nine years before. On the lowlands east of Long Crechtune village, he began construction of a manor house. There had been a residence here for generations, where junior family members had often used it as a farm headquarters. Inspired by Bishop Rodger’s use of stone in his own building projects, the young lord reopened the ancient quarries on the south side of Bankhead. He set his under-tenants to work on his big house.

Dun Creighton was another story. It was his birthplace, where his father had recently passed away. Many stones in its walls and foundations dated back to Roman times, covered with the graffiti of many generations. With help from his brothers and the townspeople, the ancient stone tower was dismantled carefully and set aside. It took weeks of labor to mark certain stones for reuse. Rotting timbers were stacked and burned. Finally clear of old structures, the site was graded and prepared for a new building.

Motte and bailey means ‘mound and enclosure.’ Great and small, the Norman-style castle covered Britain as the first line of defense. Between Dun Creighton and Edinburgh stood Dalkeith Castle the strongest in the shire. Wood was still the material of choice, but Thurstan’s timber supply was dwindling and was a primary source of income from his sawmills. East on the high moor of Bankhead, windbreak trees were all that remained of a once deep forest. The Romans and his ancestors used stone, so he would follow suit.

The site already sat halfway down the slope toward the river. His uncle’s old earth lodge was hardly visible, blending into the heather-crowned greenery close to the Tyne. A wide terrace was created where the old stone tower had stood. This was mounded and smoothed. In the center, Thurstan began laying great foundation stones set 10 feet into the bedrock base, forming a pit dungeon. When the walls reached head high from ground level, giant timbers were placed as floor joists. Sheathed with planking and then tiled with flagstone, the first floor was established. The main structure was a combination of upright timbers cribbed between with dressed stone; the walls were four feet thick. A second floor contained sleeping quarters, where a retractable ladder accessed the roof from a hatch in the ceiling. On the roof, a small guard tower completed the defense system. This tower house was the Norman ‘Keep.’ Attached to the west wall on the downhill side was a kitchen, as solid as the tower. In the floor in front of the great cooking fireplace was a concealed hatch that was the only point of entry to the pit dungeon below the main structure. On the north wall, a narrow entry formed the one access to the fortress. It was eight feet from the ground and also had a retractable stair, as its only entrance to the tower. This was the forerunner of the drawbridge, so often seen in movies of medieval times.

The ‘bailey,’ tower, outbuildings and stables were all enclosed by a steep ramp of earth and discarded stone in a great perimeter wall. On top of the wall was placed a palisade of pointed timbers, with catwalks along the top; too small to be called a castle and too large to be a simple home, Dun Creighton now conformed with King David’s wish to bring Scotland into the 12^th century. Scottish lords everywhere followed suit, these primitive tower-homes would symbolize their local fiefdoms and baronies for generations to come. In 1128, David I King of Scots recorded Thurstan de Crechtune as witness to his charter for the foundation of Holyrood House Abbey, near Edinburgh.

About this time, David soured in his views with the English. Henry I, his mentor and brother-in-law, built a strong English castle on the Tweed in traditional Scottish territory. It was called Castle Wark, with the English Northumbrian, Walter Espec, as Henry’s lord-in-residence. This violation of Scottish autonomy infuriated David and he began a campaign of guerilla warfare to drive Espec from his lands.

King Henry I died in 1135 and for twenty years his daughter Matilda waged a civil war with his nephew Stephen of Bloise for the succession. Stephen seized the crown, but faced many barons who gave their allegiance to Matilda. David Ceannmor stood behind her, as well. The split in loyalty tore England to its roots. Some Scottish lords sided with Stephen’s camp, against their king’s wishes. Robert de Bruce Lord of Annandale was one, who relinquished his lands to fight for Stephen in England. Before departing, he left his son Robert de Bruce as Earl of Annandale. With the elder Bruce went the ancient arms, a red rampant lion. The younger Bruce, in defiance of his father, took as his own a red saltire and chief on a gold field. This Bruce shield would eventually tie into that of the arms of Creighton.

David I took advantage of the English turmoil to attack. Thinking King Stephen to be preoccupied in the south as well as with uprisings in Normandy, he gathered a large force and in 1137, rode for Wark Castle on the Tweed. In Scottish histories he was a peace-loving king. In Catholic histories, he was a saint and son of a greater saint, Margaret of Hungary. In English histories written by men caught up in his war, he was the head of a warband of pagan rapists and plunderers who lay waste the entire north. He was in reality similar to those that he fought. It was a time of great local lords who ruled with cruelty and lack of human compassion. On the other hand, the church enveloped these men, placing them as patrons of the church, as devout followers of their ideals. They could co-mingle as Christian knights in the Holy Lands, only to return home as traditional enemies and kill one another without a backward glance.

With the biased histories come conflicting reasons for David’s invasion of England. Many place him in the same mold as the earlier Saxon hordes and Viking raiders, burning towns and monasteries as he devastated the countryside. In truth, he had many reasons, some personal and some to protect Scotland. Empress Matilda was the only child of his sister Maud and Henry I, being the legal heir to the throne. The rift in England lay in Matilda’s earlier marriage to the hated Geoffrey Plantagenet, Duke of Anjou. This is why half of the English barons favored the usurper Stephen of Bloise, grandson of William I. If David only thought of helping Matilda’s cause, he would have gone through diplomatic channels to offer his services.

His primary goal, foremost, was to drive Walter Espec from Scottish lands, second, but just as important, was to take by force his lands of Huntingdon for his son Henry. King Stephen refused to grant the earldom to the Prince of Cumbria. David thought that if he could capture York, the King would be forced to honor the hereditary inheritance begun by King Henry. In 1137, David called his barons to Edinburgh, including Thurstan de Crechtune. He assembled an army and placed his nephew William MacDuncan second in charge. While he lost Robert de Bruce of Annandale to the English side, he retained an equal-ranking defector from Northumberland. This was Earl Eustace FitzJohn of Alnwick, the castle where David’s father had died 44 years before.

FitzJohn brought his forces north and teamed with MacDuncan, who led a mounted force of Lothian and Berwick men against Wark. While the Lowlanders besieged the castle, David rallied the remainder of the country to action. Many came down from the Highlands and the western shores of Argyle because of MacDuncan, son of Duncan Bane Lord of the Isles. The younger Robert de Bruce and William de Comyn were influential in bringing in the Galwegian Picts and Britons of Strathclyde and Galloway, the ancient bulwark of Scottish defense. Once assembled near Dalkeith, David led his ‘common’ army south through Creighton lands to the Tweed and castle Wark, near Coldstream Abbey. While some were left under the command of two of his Lothian barons to continue the siege, the King led his army into England. Twice, he was stopped and turned back, but not before storming lands in Durham and Northumberland. By August 1138, he formed once more at the Tweed in full strength while Stephen’s army was in southern England. Unopposed, he struck deep into Yorkshire.

With no real military support stationed at York, the counts and earls brought their home militias in under the leadership of Archbishop Thurstan of York. He called the warlords to arms under the banners of Saints Peter, John and Wilfred, planting the holy battle standards on a wagon on long staffs. King Stephen sent his aid, Bernard de Balliol, north to team with the senior Robert de Bruce to attempt to negotiate a truce with King David. Ceannmor refused to negotiate once he learned that his son would not be recognized as Earl of Huntingdon.

The two armies met three miles from Northallerton, Yorkshire, on two opposing hills close to the Great North Road. The Scottish Common Army outnumbered the hastily assembled Northumbrian militia force, but the English faced David in defiance from their hill. The battle standards were placed at the summit, surrounded by dismounted knights and rings of archers and foot soldiers. The Scots, long trained as fighters, held the numerical and military advantage. David, from atop the adjoining hill, saw the weakness in English forces and planned the attack. As soon as he assembled his leaders, the Glaswegians stood in his way.

As remnants of the ancient Kingdom of Strathclyde, the men of Dumfries and Galloway had, by tradition, the right to lead the battle. Against his better wishes, David conceded to their demands. The Galwegians fought as they always had, loosely formed and loyal to their immediate chief alone. With Celtic shields, longswords and pict (pick) axes (the weapon of choice of the ancient Picts), they presented a formidable force. David placed these men in the center to lead the charge. Prince Henry, with his Cumbrian archers, western Highlanders and mounted knights took the right, while the Lowlanders, led by FitzJohn and the Lothian earls, formed the left. Thurstan formed his men of Creighton under the blue lion banner as the Galwegians began their uphill assault with screaming battle cries.

The English still called these wild men of Galloway Picts, although they were, by 1138, a mixture of many races. In small clan units, the Britons had borrowed the Pict ‘colors’ and painted their bodies blue, in symbolic designs. The Scottish Highlanders also adapted this form of ‘war paint.’ Centuries before the plaid tartan kilts, the Cymry descendants of the Brigante still fought in ‘dragon’ formations, preferring to go into battle almost naked. Many still spiked their long hair with clay and lime, making a frightful and outlandish display of ferocity. Although the English may have been terrified at their numbers and appearance, they held their ground and their archers took a terrible toll as the Galwegians advanced up the hill. King David, to the rear of the men of Galloway with the bulk of the infantrymen, saw that the battle was already lost.

Prince Henry attempted to take his Cumbrian cavalry around and attack the far right and his sudden charge took the English unaware. The Cumbrians smashed through the ranks of archers, but instead of turning on the rear of the English forces, which would have won the day, he went past to drive the English horses from the battlefield. This foray broke down into individual horse stealing as his men abandoned the battle. In the process, the prince and his men cut themselves off from David’s army. The distraught King quit the field and led his men away, leaving over 10,000 dead or unaccounted for. The Battle of the Standards was over.

This sometimes peaceful, sometimes warlike squabbling over the Borders counties along the Tweed continued for almost 200 years. The castle of Wark became the symbol of Scottish resistance or English occupation for many generations. The ‘war zone,’ however, remained in the west and north, as the ancient earldoms and chieftainships of the Highlands and the Western Isles stood against what they saw as an Anglo-Norman government based in Edinburgh. With Scotland extending far into England during the time of David I, the English forced the border north to the Forth in ensuing reigns, allowing them to build new castles as garrisons all through the eastern lands. Many old Scottish families threw in with the English, causing discord everywhere. Until the early 14^th century, the southern zone from Berwick to Wigtown (West Galloway) remained relatively peaceful, however, with the Lothians providing the center of commerce and government activity. From Yorkshire to the Forth, the culture was mainly that of coexistence, as if the border did not exist for the common man.

For another three generations, the hereditary Barony of Creighton maintained its ancient autonomy. The family remained ‘Lothian,’ but little by little, they began to acquire lands outside of their traditional range, like many of their neighbors. During the early Border Wars of David I, men from all quarters fought side by side, forming alliances and friendships. Lasting ties were made and planned marriages brought unions of families far distant in locations.

During the reign of Henry II Plantagenet of England, the art of Heraldry came full circle, making one of his sons (Geoffrey Plantagenet) the first recipient of royally appointed arms. The practice became not only a law of the land but a craze all over Europe. The barons in both England and Scotland sought acclaim and notice, marrying into powerful families was one way to accomplish this goal. In this case, two houses would be displayed on a single, quartered shield, showing both husband’s and wife’s family blazon. Carved into the foundation stones of Dun Creighton, amongst the centuries of graffiti, can still be seen the Creighton lion quartered with other family emblems of antiquity.

Just as often wives acquired for social and economic advancement, were ‘disposed of,’ where the barons (and sometime kings) cast aside one wife in favor of another, more lucrative union. For the genealogist, this practice presents innumerable obstacles. The Scottish houses, especially, intertwined to such a degree that it was like a giant ball of multi-colored yarn, rolled across the countryside by the wind; the twisted ball becomes tied in a million places and, try as you will, you may never unravel the colors to their original arrangement.

Thurstan de Crechtune, if he survived the Border Wars, would have lived through much of the reign of Henry II (1154-1189), dying around 1177. A hardened warrior-knight of the Crusades, statesman, diplomat and Baron of Creighton, he would have been an ideal character study, but nothing is known of him other than his being witness to the foundation of Holyrood House Abbey. Perhaps he was present at Carlisle in 1153 with King David, as the elderly King personally crowned the son of his niece, the Empress Matilda. Henry I was the first Angevian King of England (Dukes of Anjou), whose official coronation was held one year later at Westminster. David died soon after crowning Henry, at peace among his gardens at Carlisle, leaving his infant grandson Malcolm IV (the Maiden) King of Scots (1153-1165).

It would have been during this time that Thurstan’s sons would have come to prominence. His elder son would have lived from about 1124-1200, becoming of age politically around 1153, when David I died. In England, the Age of Empire had begun as Henry attached Wales and Ireland to his kingdom. Through his marriage with Eleanor of Aquitaine, he acquired much of France as well. The Scots began looking to the Frankish kingdoms for support, knowing Henry would also try to pacify Scotland. Aside from the eldest Creighton sons (as hereditary barons) from 1153-1240, the remaining junior class would have sought any means available for personal advancement.

THE LION AND THE ROSE

The Holy Crusades were at their height, drawing many toward the ranks of the knights of many lands. Attached to noble houses, they sought the capture of fellow knights (or infidels) in battle, gaining riches from their ransom. The Crusades brought this custom to a fine art and is the basis for the beginning of many ‘first families’ of title. Others would have followed traditional means, the university training, the clergy, the diplomatic field or civil positions within government. Schooling in the great universities meant everything and the Lowland Scots were highly intelligent. Then, in 1159, a new opportunity opened to the forward thinking Scots. It came as a result of the Holy Order of the Teutonic Knights.

They had been founded as Prussian knights, preparing for the First Crusade in Jerusalem. As the Crusade wore on from 1095-1099, they swore a vow of celibacy, living a monastic lifestyle, but continuing in their warlike pursuits. By 1159, they were becoming despotic warlords of Northern Europe, building great castles and aligning themselves with German duchies.

In the Netherlands, the merchant fleets of Zeeland and southern Denmark had controlled the North Sea trade for centuries. Since the time of Ranulf of Creighton, Scottish and Northumbrian lords had shared in this trade, taking them to the far reaches of the east Baltic lands. There, they competed with the northern Danes and Swedes, who had spread their trading net deep into the Russian Steppes. The rich market in sable, mink and ermine, along with other exotic items, amber in particular, drew many to this business. In 1159, an elite corps of Flemish Hollanders and North Germans formed a trade union called the Hanseatic League, to monopolize the expanding network.

The Greater Netherlands in the mid-12^th century had become rich, in part due to the Holy Crusades. Countries as we know them today did not yet exist; the entire northern region was an accumulation of individual duchies and city-states. For the most part, the leading houses recognized no ‘national’ boundaries. The Rhine estuary, ancient homeland of the Belgae-Gauls had become a strong group of related duchies under the Counts of Flanders. In what is today Belgium, the southern regions of Holland and parts of western Germany, trade flourished. The Frankish Burundians were beginning to make inroads into this region as well. The Flemish House of Baldwin (Baudouin) controlled much of the region and also ruled from the Holy Lands as kings and counts of Christian Palestine. The Flemish knights who were granted Scottish lands by David I King of Scots; Douglas, Murray, Fleming, Leaske and their tenants, helped tie the Scottish Lowlands with the Low Countries. The formation of the Hanseatic League brought all together.

To achieve it’s rapid development, the League required diligent management as well as military clout. The Holy Order of the Teutonic Knights supplied this service. They began erecting strong castles all across coastal Germany to guard trading posts and shipping ports. The sea loving Frisians of North Holland and the citizens of Zeeland supplied management, ships and crews, while Scotsmen from the Lowlands provided clerks and additional staff. These Scots were those trained at the great universities and were naturally prone, with the Northumbrians, to travel and adventure. With the trading fleets went as many clergymen, for the eastern lands were still pagan. The church was anxious to bring the Slavic people to Christianity before the Muslims reached them. Again, the warrior-monks of the Teutonic Knights led the way.

One of the achievements that David Ceannmor is remembered for is his support and patronage of the ‘military orders.’ In 1159, the Teutonic Knights, the Knights Templar and the Hospittalers were the only three in existence. Although David probably bestowed lands and benefices to all of them, the Teutonic Knights were ‘closer to home,’ for Lowlands Scotland was an extension of Germanic Europe. During David’s reign, Scotland blossomed upon the world stage as a partner in many trade arrangements with European neighbors. It was the men who comprised his zone of advisors, from Berwick to Lanarkshire that provided the brains and money to undertake many of these ventures. I suspect that the Lothian Creightons and the Lanarkshire Douglases first unified during these years, perhaps through marriages of mutual needs. In less than 100 years, they would emerge as a combined strength that would rattle Scotland for many generations.

Thurstan de Crechtune’s youngest son would have been in his fifties in 1188. Military service may have been his only option to gain lands and wealth; the barony would have gone to his elder brother. William the Lion was King of Scots and in that year, the King sent his brother, David Earl of Huntingdon, to the Crusades. With him went a Creighton neighbor, Robertus de Lavedre of Lauder. With the Earl would have gone many from the Lowlands, Cumberland and Northumberland. The younger Creighton, probably already a veteran knight, would have had one or more sons of fighting age who may have accompanied their father. While in Palestine, de Lavedre became a knight and the Earl of Huntingdon awarded him a seal (family crest) for his bravery. This shows how the individual family arms evolved piece-by-piece, altering and adjusting to the times and events of history. Creighton the Younger and his son would have used the original rampant blue lion, but even this would have shown some variation from the eldest brother’s hereditary arms. One family blazon that almost matched that of Creighton was Home (also Hume). This was a family of note from Roxburghshire, which had ancient ties to the earls of Northumbria. Their family arms were white with the rampant blue lion identical to that of Creighton, but displaying a red flory-counterflory border.

The Angevian kings of England, descended from Henry II Plantagenet (also Fitz Empress), had become more hostile to Scotland with each new reign. The Scottish royal line of Malcolm Ceannmor, on the other hand, was in decline. Thomas Chrichtoun’s life paralleled that of the reign of Alexander III (1249-1286), the last Ceannmor king.

Thomas Chrichtoun (1240-1303) would have been the great-grandson of Thurstan de Crechtune and son of William de Crechtune (1210-1282). He had a brother Alexander who held lands in Berwick. One man often shown as his son was Nicholas Chrichtoun, who I feel was a younger brother. Thomas inherited the Creighton lands; Nicholas may have held joint ownership or obtained new lands in Roxburgh near Jedburgh. Thomas’ sons, John, William and Thomas Chrichtoun were alive through the explosive years of the infant queen Margaret the Maid (1286-1290) and Edward I ‘Longshanks’ of England (1272-1307). The House of Creighton began its journey away from the ancient family seat.

These were high times in Scottish history and deserve a simple, but accurate telling. To many, especially Americans, it is the only piece of Scottish history that they are familiar with. It was the time of William Wallace, as played by Mel Gibson in ‘Braveheart.’ As often happens, Hollywood distorted history beyond reason and highly oversimplified known events. Definitive histories, many written in the 1800s, are so detailed and scholarly that Einstein could not follow the web of characters and events.

It had begun in 1286 when the King, Alexander III, died without naming a successor to the Scottish throne. Immediately, the ‘Lord Protectors’ earls of Moray, Caithness, Ross, Mar and others called for traditional councils to name a new king. Because there had been so many intermarriages between the families of William the Lion and his close allies, half of Scotland claimed title to the crown. High on this list were members of the houses of Stewart, Bruce, Comyn and Balliol. Younger houses, like that of Douglas claimed title through marriage to one or the other ‘royal’ lines. The Creightons as well could have had early unions with these families. It presented a complicated mess of dangerous intrigue.

The English King Edward I, unlike the character in Braveheart, was actually a highly principled monarch. He had a special tie with Scotland. Being born and raised in nearby Cumberland, he knew the ruling clans and Houses on both sides of the Solway Firth. He personally favored the Cumbrian family Balliol, but sent his emissaries to Edinburgh to help solve the dispute. All decided, after much bickering, that there was one surviving heir and relative of the Ceannmor line. She was Princess Margaret, a small child living in Norway since birth. King Edward offered his services to help bring her home, but four years later, while on her journey to be crowned, she died at sea. The Mormaer earls and wealthy barons had ruled in the child’s absence, and at word of her death asked Edward I to chose a new king. From a list of 19 claimants, Edward chose his countryman, John Balliol Earl of Galloway (1150-1333). Balliol’s mother, a Galwegian, claimed direct descent from Kenneth Macalpine, making Balliol as close to the throne as any other claimant. Once he obtained the crown, he immediately cut ties with England and began a rebellion. Edward I was preparing to go to war with France. Balliol chose to seek aid from the French. In 1294, he negotiated “The Aulde Alliance” with Philip IV, formalizing a compact that had been active informally for 400 years. It would last, to both countries’ advantage, for another 400.

The Balliol years of 1290-1306 were called “TheInterregrums,” where an English monarch dictated the workings of Scottish sovereignty. Leading up to Balliol’s crowning, Edward I had swayed many southern lords to join the English side. Using their lands and castles, he began sending troops to occupy them until he controlled much of Berwick, Roxburgh and Lothian. In 1296 he traveled to Berwick Castle and called for an assembly of Scottish lords and barons to hear his ultimatum. Called the ‘Ragman Rolls,’ the Lords of Scotland were to swear fealty (total allegiance) to the English king, or be declared outlaw. Each man who swore the oath signed his name. Facing loss of