The Punishment Monopoly. Pem Davidson Buck

      CHAPTER 4

       Ancestor Tales of the Revolt That Happened and One That Didn’t

      For telling Alexander I’s story there are just enough facts to play with, far more than for Venis, but nowhere near enough to create a truth. We can speculate, we can do “most likely,” and we can create a picture of the world in which he was an actor. To do it we have to cross the ocean again, this time to the Scottish Highlands. And so we did, my husband and I, both of us now retired and able to do such things. Like our earlier trip to Jamestown in search of an elusive Benjamin Radford, things didn’t turn out quite as expected. To even begin work on Alexander in Scotland, I had made an executive decision about who his parents were most likely to be. I had found, among family researchers, frequent mention of an Alexander Davidson, married to a Sarah McDavid in 1689, with a son named Alexander born a year later. And I found reference to an Alexander Davidson in Dingwall, in the Highlands. So that was my starting point—I thought I had Alexander I’s parents.¹ I went to Scotland, and to Dingwall, and discovered that there were numerous Alexander Davidsons, none of whom seemed to fit. Even worse, the one I had picked had gone through several wives, none of them named Sarah McDavid. I still have no idea who Alexander I’s parents were and thus no idea about my actual ancestor, the Alexander Davidson who did appear in Virginia, having left Scotland, and from whom I am descended. In fact, I know no more about who my ancestors in Scotland were than I did before I went there.

      Before I knew all this, however, I had gotten hooked on early Dingwall history, as I had done with the Powhatan and early Jamestown, and that is a story I want to tell. And as luck would have it, there are several studies of the Dingwall area that focus on the time around Alexander’s birth, which means I have grist for the story I want to tell.² Maybe my Alexander who went to Virginia did come from Dingwall, maybe not. He quite likely did come from the Highlands, however, given that he was a Davidson—the Davidsons were a Highland clan, and there were lots of them around Dingwall. So for the sake of the story, truth will again have to be flexible; if what I relate didn’t happen to my ancestor, it certainly did to lots of other people. For Alexander I’s father, I will just have to make do with an X Davidson to go along with X Radford. And for his mother? I can’t even do “Mrs. Davidson,” because women in Scotland didn’t change their names at marriage. Maybe I’ll just stick with Sarah McDavid—it’s as good a name as any, and after all, she may have been his mother even if the Alexander Davidson I had in mind was not his father.

      So, in this story X Davidson and Sarah McDavid lived in Dingwall, just north and west of Inverness, a town with “a thousand years” of history. I will assume that they had a son, Alexander I, born in 1690. He was much later described in old Kentucky church records as a Jacobite exile.³ Thus he would have been one of the many who fought in three major rebellions between 1690 and 1745 to restore James VII and the Stuart succession to the throne after their removal in 1688. And I know he was in Virginia by sometime in the early 1740s, because his son Alexander II was born there. That timing means that he most likely left Scotland after the 1715 Jacobite uprising, and I will use those two facts to frame my Davidson-in-Scotland story.⁴

      With that framework—inaccurate though it may be—we can now go to Dingwall and to the Firth of Cromarty, where Clan Davidson had migrated, probably after being decimated by the Camerons in the Battle of Invernahavon at the end of the 1300s, after which, as Davidson clan historian Alan McNie asserts, and my father loved to quote, the clan was “of small account.”⁵

      NOW, ABOUT CLANS. I’ve got to describe their basic structure in order to explain the changes and the wars that sent Alexander off to Virginia. However, most studies of Scottish history and social structure have focused on the Lowlands, while those few that do focus on the Highlands are more interested in wars, leaders, and politics than in social structure.⁶ So what I am saying about how people actually lived, particularly about the 1600s and earlier, is largely pieced together from bits and pieces.⁷

      The king’s sovereignty waned with distance from the territorial center—as did that of Wahunsonacock.⁸ The king clearly did not have a monopoly on the use of force, and was unable to punish, at least in the Highlands, so a different strategy was needed. Feudal lords, both clan chiefs and barons, were gaining greater independence from the Crown in the 1200s, so, unable to stop this process, the king instead sanctioned it.⁹ The Crown kept the appearance of control by rubber-stamping the new system, granting titles and feudal rights to clan lands to the chiefs who already held it and endorsing the hereditary passage of those feudal rights and titles to eldest sons.¹⁰ The Crown gave charters to royally appointed justiciars and to many important clan chiefs, endowing them with the power to punish “with gallows and pit,” that is, to execute and imprison. The pit was a dungeon of sorts—a deep hole with smooth unclimbable sides.¹¹ The lords and great chiefs during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were gradually appropriating the power to punish that the king held, at least theoretically. The already existing system of large kin-based clan groupings gained strength, developing during the 1300s into a more clearly defined clan organization. With the weakness of the Crown, particularly in the Highlands, clan leaders could resist the allegiance to the king that feudalism was supposed to entail, and shaped it for their own ends.