Flight of the Heron read-along: Part V chapters 3-4

[regshoe]

But till my last moments my words are the same: there'll never be peace until Jamie comes hame...

The penultimate week of the read-along, and in these chapters we are still very Jacobite.

Next week we will, sadly, read Part V Chapter 5 and the Epilogue.

Comments

[owl]

Whether the tacksmen with less romantic ideas of honour and kinship than Ewen has would have preferred to owe only rent as opposed to rent plus military service (the tacksmen were analogous to the company-level officers if the clan is analogous to a regiment - the position we see Ewen holding) is another story....
Apparently Argyll's decision did hurt the power of the Campbell/government strength during the '45. A significant number of new tacksmen/tenants must have passed on the now-a-request-not-an-order to join the Campbell militias!

[regshoe]

Is Ewen a tacksman? My knowledge of the structure of clans (exactly what 'the cadet branch of Cameron of Ardroy' means, etc.) is not great, but he seems a bit more important than that. It's not clear whether he holds his land at Ardroy on lease from Lochiel or owns it himself, but I think we're probably meant to understand that it's his own.

...anyway, that's rather funny about the Campbells. The book I was reading recently mentioned something similar—apparently the replacement of traditional tacksmen by new factors also led to increased problems with cattle theft!...

[owl]

Maybe technically, although Broster never refers to him as one. This is what wikipedia quotes:

A certain portion of the best of the land [the chief] retained as his own appanage, and it was cultivated for his sole profit. The rest was divided by grants of a nature more or less temporary, among the second class of the clan, who are called tenants, tacksmen, or goodmen. These were the near relations of the chief, or were descended from those who bore such relation to some of his ancestors. To each of these brothers, nephews, cousins, and so forth, the chief assigned a portion of land, either during pleasure, or frequently in the form of a pledge, redeemable for a certain sum of money. These small portions of land, assisted by the liberality of their relations, the tacksmen contrived to stock, and on these they subsisted, until, in a generation or two, the lands were resumed, for portioning out some nearer relative, and the descendants of the original tacksman sunk into the situation of commoners. This was such an ordinary transition, that the third class, consisting of the common people, was strengthened in the principle on which their clanish obedience depended, namely, the belief in their original connexion with the genealogy of the chief, since each generation saw a certain number of families merge among the commoners, whom their fathers had ranked among the tacksmen, or nobility of the clan. This change, though frequent, did not uniformly take place. In the case of a very powerful chief, or of one who had an especial affection for a son or brother, a portion of land was assigned to a cadet in perpetuity; or he was perhaps settled in an appanage conquered from some other clan, or the tacksman acquired wealth and property by marriage, or by some exertion of his own. In all these cases he kept his rank in society, and usually had under his government a branch, or subdivision of the tribe, who looked up to him as their immediate leader, and whom he governed with the same authority, and in the same manner in all respects, as the chief, who was the patriarchal head of the whole sept.

So Ewen could be one of those latter kind where the land is settled in perpetuity and he's the chief of his own mini-clan. His having a Gaelic patronymic (Mac 'ic Ailean) seems to support that.

[regshoe]

Oh yes, that second kind does sound a lot like Ewen! Thanks for the information—very interesting.