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Clan Cumming

COURAGE


Clan Cumming came originally from the town of Comines in France. A traditional story claims the family descend from the Roman Emperor Charlemagne.

The early descendants of clan Cumming - at this point known as Comyn - came to Britain with William the Conqueror, and over time secured the earldoms of Buchan, Angus, Atholl and Menteith. Through marriage the family also had a claim to the Scottish throne, and two Comyns were part of the Guardians of the Realm after the death of King Alexander III died in 1286. Although John Balliol was selected as monarch, infighting among the other potential claimants culminated in the fatal stabbing of John "The Red" Comyn by Robert Bruce, the grandfather of the future king. Comyn power eventually collapsed with the death of Red Comyn's son fighting on the English side at the Battle of Bannockburn. After this point the spelling generally changed to Cumming, with the Cummings of Altyre taking up the line of chieftainship.

The Cumming clan motto is "Courage" and the clan crest is a lion rampant holding a dagger.

Scottish History

of Clan Cumming


At the top table

The Cummings clan claim a legendary lineage – direct from the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne himself.

The name orginates from Comines near Lisle in northern France on the Flanders frontier with Belgium and is derived from the Comyn family, one of the most powerful factions in medieval Scotland before they were eclipsed by their rivals in the Bruce camp.

Robert de Comyn, a Flemish adventurer, first set foot on the south shore of Britain when he sailed over with the invading Norman forces of William the Conqueror in 1066, eventually securing extensive land holdings in Northumberland, a strategically important area for the Continental conquerors among their northern outposts.

However, some clan historians dispute this version of events, claiming the family name comes from the cumin plant (a variation of wheat).

Others, seeking a purely Scottish heritage, claim they had connections with two abbots of Iona called Comyn who held office in the years 597 and 657.

Another origin of the family is recounted by Wyntoun in his Cronykil of Scotland.

According to this medieval scribe,there was at the court of King Malcolm III a young foreign aristocrat whose honoraryoccupation was Usher of the Royal Apartments(a kind of glorified doorkeeper) and to begin with the only two Scottish words he knew were “come in”. Accordingly he became known by that name.

He eventually married the only daughter of the king’s half brother Donald Bane and his descendants therefore represented the legitimate line of the ancient Celtic kings.

But to return to the historically proven and more feasible Robert Comyn, who came over with William the Conqueror and who is still the most likely ancestor of the clan, his hold on his Northumberland fiefdom proved tenuous and his feudal underlings soon burned down the house in Durham where he was lodging – with their overlord sealed inside.

The rebelling Northumbrians alsoslaughtered Robert’s 700 soldiers (no mean feat) at their barracks in the city.

William the Conqueror retaliated with typically brutal thoroughness, marching northwards with fire and sword, putting any rebels to death and stringing others up on makeshift gibbets along the main roadways as grim examples.

The murdered Robert’s grandson migrated over the border to Scotland in the reign of King David I in the mid-twelfth century and was granted estates in Roxburghshire.

He eventually attained the position of Chancellor of Scotland. These Comyns must have been men of real ability since they were often so swiftly promoted to positions of important authority.

His nephew married into the royal family while a descendant married the Countess of Buchan and his son went on to become Earl of Menteith and also acquired the Lordship of Badenoch by a grant of King Alexander II.

Thus the Comyns had a string of titles to their name, including earldoms and other high feudal honours, and had a place at the top table when it came to the wheeling and dealing that was Scottish politics in those fraught times.

Richard de Comyn stood high in theservice of William the Lion; while in the days of King Alexander II the great Comyn Lord of Kilbride and his wife were the chief movers behind the construction of Glasgow Cathedral in the mid-thirteenth century.

When the great work was only halffinished, Comyn died. His wife, however, in loving faithfulness completed the building as a token of her heartfelt devotion.

There still exists in the lower crypt the two fine likenesses of the Comyn and his lady carved in stone alongside a lifelike head of Alexander II himself; and the three are believed to be the earliest existing reproductions of historical personages in Scotland.

A few years later, in the reign of King Alexander III, there were in Scotland, according to the historian Fordun, no fewer than 32 knights called Comyn.

There was also a Comyn Lord of Strathbogie and as Lords of Badenoch they owned the formidable stronghold of Lochindorb in that untamed wilderness as well as a score of huge and important castles throughout the land, from the verdant vales of the Borders to the granite peaks of the North East.

Tales of their chivalric deeds and achievements filled the Scottish annals of their time.

During the boyhood of Alexander III when Henry III of England was doing his best by fraud and force to bring Scotland under his power, it was Walter Comyn, then Earl of Menteith, who stood out as the most patriotic of all the nobles north of the border to resist the threat of English tyranny.

When Henry, at the arranged dynastic marriage of his daughter to the Scots boy-king, suggested that the latter should render fealty for the Kingdom of Scotland, it was Walter Comyn who put the answer into the youngster’s mouth – that he “had come into England upon a joyful and pacific errand and would not treat upon soarduous a question without the advice of the Estates of Scotland!”

And when Henry marched towards the Borders at the head of his threatening army, it was Walter Comyn who rallied an opposing Scottish force and made the English modify their territorial ambitions.

But just when he had achieved a periodof power and stability, Walter died in mysterious circumstances.

The official version was that he broke his neck after falling from his horse: but the truth seems to have been that an English baron called Russell had become the illicit lover of Comyn’s wife and that she was so besotted that she poisoned her husband’s bedtime drink.

This pair were eventually driven from their estate and the Earldom later vanishedfollowing the debacle with the Bruce faction, eventually being handed over and split up between Stewarts and Grahams.

But two decades before that happened, the nephew of the Earl of Menteith became known as the Red Comyn and his son became the Black Comyn, the latter being one of the sixofficially appointed guardians of the Maid of Norway following King Alexander III’s accidental death after he fell from his horse one night on the rocky shore near Burntisland.

The Comyns were always astute when it came to marrying into prestigious families andthe Black Comyn was no exception, marrying Marjory, the sister of John Balliol, a claimant to the throne after the Maid of Norway tragically died from a fever en route by ship to her new realm.

The Black Comyn also put in a claim for the Scottish throne himself since he was a direct descendent of Donald Bane, second son of King Duncan I.

He was not alone in this since there were at least half a dozen other claimants of varying degrees of authenticity when it came to having royal lineage.

The Black Comyn eventually put hissupport behind Balliol, sheltering him in Badenoch and being imprisoned in the Tower of London for his pains after King John abdicated.

Released to help his cousin, the Earl of Buchan, suppress unrest in Moray in 1297, Comyn instead joined up with William Wallace’s patriotic army.

He died in 1303 but his son, also called John though taking the name of ‘the Red’ to distinguish him from his father, not only continued the family line but also the claim to the throne.

He too ended up in the Tower of London but was among those Scots liberated to join the English King Edward Ist’s war in France.

Along with several other noblemen, he broke away to seek French help for Scotlandand made his way homeward to join Wallace’s forces.

He managed to negotiate a truce with the English in 1304 but there was bad blood between him and Robert the Bruce, to such an extent that Comyn in a heated argument publicly seized his arch enemy by the throat during a meeting of the Scottish Council in Peebles.

Two years later his subsequent con-frontation with Robert the Bruce, by that time theleading claimant, at the church of the Greyfriars in Dumfries, a nervous night-time meeting held to hopefully agree a compromise between the two ruthlessly ambitious men, deteriorated into one of the most violent and controversial incidents in Scottish history.

Whether Bruce had not forgotten theearlier clash, whether Comyn threatened to reveal his rival’s plans to the English (or in fact had already done so), whether Bruce had all along planned assassination, voices gradually became raised in heated argument, daggers were drawn and Comyn collapsed on the stone floor in front of the altar, bleeding profusely, mortally stabbed by Bruce (though finished off by his servant), an act of sacrilege which led to excommunication from the Pope in Rome.

Comyn’s son fled to seek sanctuary with the English and was later killed at Bannockburn.

Always darting in and out of intrigues, one year on top, the next in disgrace, the Comyns had finally met their match in the redoubtable Bruce.

After the Greyfriars murder, their influence dramatically declined and when Bruce became King Robert I he quickly forfeited their estates and stripped them of all their titles and powers, thus ensuring they could never again be the power in the land that they had once been.

Clan clashes

Alexander of Argyll had married the Red Comyn’s daughter and for that reason his son, John of Lorne, became a bitter enemy of Robert the Bruce, his family’s arch foe.

When Bruce was a fugitive in the heather, John tried to hunt him down: but when the tables were eventually turned after Bannockburn it was payback time and the Lornes duly and wisely vanished from the scene.

Only a tame sept of the once proudoriginal family survived as MacDougalls of Dunolly.

The same obliterating fate overcame most connected with the great house of Comyn - they were either put to the sword, fled the country or their name was subsumed into another clan.

The Comyns of the north were defeated by Bruce at the battle of Inverurie in Aberdeenshire in 1308, even though he was being carried about on a litter because of illness when the clash began.

Pulling himself together with typicalfortitude, Bruce mounted his horse and then led his men into victory against their arch enemies. It was said that somehow Bruce miraculously revived not only himself but also the spirits of his whole army whichprevious to this moment had been at a low ebb.

The defeated Comyn fled south (a regular family trait during this harassing time) and his estates were plundered by the jubilant victors. In the churchyard of Bourtie in Aberdeenshire lies the stone effigy of a knight said to have been one of the Comyns slain at the battle of Inverurie.

Gradually throughout the land the Comyns were supplanted by other families.

An instance of this took place on Speyside when a younger son of Grant of Stratherrick eloped with a daughter of a MacGregor chieftain.

Along with 30 followers, the romantic pair fled to Strathspey and found a hiding place in a cavern not far from the castle then known as Freuchie, which was a Comyn stronghold, from which they reigned over the surrounding neighbourhood.

The Comyns looked with disfavour upon such an unwanted intrusion into their traditional lands and tried to dislodge the little band but Grant somehow held out and kept possession of the cave.

Then MacGregor descended along Strathspey at the head of a party of his clan and demanded the return of his daughter.

His defiant son-in-law proved astute. Receiving him with every show of respect, he then somehow contrived in the torchlight and among the shadows of the woodlands to make his men appear a much larger force than they actually were; and a tense reconciliation duly took place.

Grant then pushed his advantage further and complained of attacks from the Comyns, thus inducing MacGregor, always keen on a good scrap, to join in an assault on Freuchie Castle.

By stratagem and sheer guts, they took the stronghold and the chieftain of the Comyns was slain in the brutal attack, his skull remaining a trophy in the possession of the Earl of Seafield to this day.

The Comyns of Dunphail in Moray suffered a similar fate when their old privileges as Wardens of Darnaway royal forest were restricted by the upstart nephew of Bruce, Thomas Randolph.

The Comyns, their honour cut to the quick, set out with a thousand strong force under the leadership of young Alastair of Dunphail to burn Randolph’s new great hall at Darnaway.

The force, however, was ambushed at Whitemire and cut to pieces, though young Alastair fought his way through to the River Findhorn where he found the further bank lined by his foes.

Flinging his standard among them with the defiant shout, “Let the bravest keep it!” he then leapt over the river and with four of hisfollowers made good his escape. Randolph then besieged Alastair’s father in Dunphail Castle, reducing the garrison to starvation point.

On one dark night, however, Alastair managed to heave some bags of meal from a high bank, using a makeshift wooden catapult cut from trees, over the castle parapets and into the starving stronghold.

The following day, by means of bloodhounds, Alastair was tracked down to his hiding place in a cave beside the Divie River.

He begged to be allowed to die by the sword but was instead smothered by thick smoke after Randolph’s troops lit a bonfire at the cave’s entrance.

His corpse was then beheaded and the same happened to some of his followers. The decapitated heads were thrown into the courtyard of the castle with the shout, “Here is beef for your bannocks!”

The old chief tearfully held up the head of his son by the hair and declared, “It is indeed a bitter morsel – but I will gnaw the last bone of it before I will surrender!”

Eventually, a few days later, the garrison, driven mad by hunger, charged wildly out of the castle and were cut to pieces by the surrounding troops.

In the early nineteenth century, the minister of Edinkilly found the skeletons of Alastair and six of his companions at a spot still known as the Grave of the Headless Comyns.

In succeeding hostilities with the English, King Edward III overran the north of Scotland and made David Comyn the Earl of Atholl and governor of the country.

But, like so much else about the Comyns, it was a very temporary triumph because Bruce’s brother-in-law, Sir Andrew Moray, killed David at the battle of Kiblene.

In common with other Highland clans, the Comyns also had centuries long feuds with their neighbours. In particular they had long standing rivalries with the powerful Mackintoshes and tried to drown their foes by raising the waters round their castle stronghold in Loch Moy, an attempt that failed when a Mackintosh clansman set out on a raft one moonless night and broke the dam which resulted in the besieging Comyns being deluged with the floodwaters.

On another occasion the Comyns,pretending peace, invited the Mackintoshes to a feast at Rait Castle near Nairn where, at a secret signal, each Comyn clansman was to stab the rival seated to his left in the heart.

However, a daughter of one of the Comyns was in love with a Mackintosh and revealed the plot, with the result that the Mackintoshes gave their own signal first - and the plotters were duly and fatally hoisted with their own petard.

Another brutal incident arose when Comyn of Badenoch suspected his wife of having an affair with his neighbour, Mackintosh of Tyrnie.

His jealousy reached boiling point when the Mackintosh presented her with a gift of a bull and a dozen cows.

The Mackintoshes were invited to a feast and this time they were all slain.

After the power of the Comyns declined, the Macintoshes and Macphersons moved in on their lands; and on one occasion Alexander Macpherson, known as the Revengeful because of his brutal and ruthless deeds of retaliation, slew nine of the Comyns in a cave where they had been hiding.

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