The Baron O’ Brackley & Other Scottish Tales

Headed out to the range early on a glorious spring morning on Saturday and fired up an episode of The Folk Files Podcast, which has become one of my regulars. The show referenced an old Scottish  ballad titled The Baron o’ Brackley, which I found intriguing, so I hied off and gave it a listen. I deferred running off down the side trail till after my Frontier Partisan Biathlon session — but I did fire up some hardcore bagpipe rock from Saor Patrol for my workout music.

Anyways….

This is quite the tale. The folk music page Mostly Norfolk describes it thus:

This incident occurred in September 1666 when John Gordon of Brackley impounded the cattle of John Farquarson of Inveray. In violation of the law, Inveray had been taking salmon from the Dee out of season and his cattle were loose, grazing on Brackley’s land.

In an attempt to draw Brackley from his keep, Inveray stole back his own cattle and those of Brackley. However, Brackley was not killed after this incident in 1666 but tradition may have merged two separate incidents. In 1592 an ancestor of John Gordon of Brackley, known as the Baron of Breaghly, was murdered by guests he had invited to dinner.

Peggy Gordon refers to Margaret Burnet the daughter of a rich nobleman who married Brackley against the wishes of her family and friends. It is unlikely that she betrayed Brackley in real life.

Musicologist A.L. Lloyd writes:

The soil of the Scottish mountainsides was thin and stony, denuded by torrents. Until the middle of the eighteenth century there was poverty and savagery in the glens. Men led fierce hard lives, bound together in clans, often far away from effective authority, forming themselves into bands that sometimes grew to the proportions of a private army, raiding and plundering their neighbours with a ferocity far exceeding the worst excesses of the American Wild West.

Bravery and cruelty, loyalty and treachery abounded in their extremest degree among such societies, as the ballad shows.

The Baron of Brackley presents a pitiless picture of a way of life still persisting in the Scottish north-east (the ballad’s location is near Aberdeen) in the 1660’s, when the Gordons of Brackley were engaged in bitter feuds with the Farquharsons of Inverey raiding each other’s farms, massacring the men and driving off the cattle.

Whether the treacherous wife, who exploits her husband’s sense of honour and pride to send him to certain death outside the walls of his beleaguered castle [it is worth noting that as often as not the ‘castle’ of the petty Highland aristocrat was no more than a fortified farmhouse], is based on a real-life character, we do not know. The ballads may accurately reflect the mood of an age and the spirit of society, but they are rarely reliable in historical detail.

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In 1320, Scottish Barons wrote a letter to the Pope seeking recognition of Scotland as an independent nation with Robert the Bruce as its rightful king. The Declaration of Arbroath is a fundamental text among those representing the medieval stirrings of notions that would revolutionize Europe and then the world in the 17th-19th centuries.

In Episode 5 of Season 8 of Outlander, Jamie Fraser recites from the Declaration. I love this Continuity & Persistence.

“It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, that we are fighting, but for freedom—for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.”