Kinship and Clientage: Highland Clanship 1451 - 1609

The Northern World

by Alison Cathcart

This volume examines Highland society during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries highlighting the extent to which kinship and clientage were organising principles within clanship. Based on clans located in the central and eastern Highlands this study goes some way to addressing the imbalance in Highland historiography which hitherto has concentrated largely on the west Highlands and islands. Focusing initially on internal clan structure, the study broadens into an analysis of local politics within the context of regional and national affairs, raising questions regarding the importance of land and the nature of lordship as well as emphasising the need for Highland history to be integrated further into broader studies of Scottish society during this period.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2006

About the author

Dr. Alison Cathcart is senior lecturer in history at the University of Strathclyde having previously worked at the Universities of Aberdeen and St. Andrews before moving to Strathclyde in 2005. Dr. Cathcart is primarily a sixteenth-century historian working within the field of early modern British and Irish studies.

Reviews

[Lynn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was quite an easy read for an academic book, interesting and informative. Although the author stresses the differences between clans in the central and eastern Highlands and those in the more-studied west, I was struck by how much the situation in the two areas was alike. Aside from the obvious connection of the Clan Donald (whose control of the earldom of Ross in addition to the Lordship of the Isles meant that its decline left a power vacuum in the east as well as the west), the behaviour of the earls of Huntly as royal agents and regional lords was in many ways very like that of the earls of Argyll. In both cases these super-lords were used by the government to control their areas while taking advantage of royal favour to advance their families' influence; both were seen by government as tools to control disorder and rebellions by lesser clans when in fact they themselves often stirred up trouble among these clans as a means to advance their own agenda. As in the west, the less powerful clans formed defensive alliances with each other; they sometimes sought and at other times resisted ties to the regional powers.

Interesting.