Supporter
In heraldry, sometimes referred to as attendants, are figures or objects placed on either side of the shield and depicted holding it up. Early forms of supporters are found in medieval seals. However, unlike the coronet or helmet and crest, supporters were not part of early medieval heraldry; as part of the heraldic achievement, they first become fashionable towards the end of the 15th century, but in the 17th century were not part of the full heraldic achievement. The figures used as supporters may be based on real or imaginary animals, human figures, in rare cases plants or other inanimate objects, such as the pillars of Hercules of the coat of arms of Spain; as in other elements of heraldry, these can have local significance, such as the fisherman and the tin miner granted to Cornwall County Council, or a historical link. The arms of nutritionist John Boyd-Orr use two'garbs' as supporters. Letters of the alphabet are used as supporters in the arms of Spain. Human supporters can be allegorical figures, or, more specifically named individuals.
There is one supporter on each side of the shield, though there are some examples of single supporters placed behind the shield, such as the imperial eagle of the coat of arms of the Holy Roman Empire. The arms of the Congo provide an unusual example of two supporters issuing from behind the shield. While such single supporters are eagles with one or two heads, there are other examples, including the cathedra in the case of some Canadian cathedrals. At the other extreme and rarer, the Scottish chief Dundas of that Ilk had three supporters: two conventional red lions and the whole supported by a salamander; the coat of arms of Iceland has four supporters. The context of the application of supporters may vary, although entitlement may be considered conditioned by grant of a type of augmentation of honour by admission in orders of chivalry or by heraldic authorities, such as in the case of traditional British heraldry. Animal supporters are, by default, as close to rampant as possible, if the nature of the supporter allows it, though there are some blazoned exceptions.
An example of whales'non-rampant' is the arms of the Dutch municipality of Zaanstad. Older writers trace origins of supporters to their usages in tournaments, where the shields of the combatants were exposed for inspection, guarded by their servants or pages disguised in fanciful attire. However, medieval Scottish seals afford numerous examples in which the 13th and 14th century shields were placed between two creatures resembling lizards or dragons; the seal of John, Duke of Normandy, eldest son of the King of France, before 1316 bears his arms as. In Canada, Companions of the Order of Canada, Commanders of the Order of Military Merit, Commanders of the Royal Victorian Order: people granted the style the Right Honourable, corporations are granted the use of supporters on their coats of arms. Further, on his retirement from office as Chief Herald, Robert Watt was granted supporters as an honour. In France, writers made a distinctive difference on the subject of supporters, giving the name of Supports to animals, real or imaginary, thus employed.
Trees and other inanimate objects which are sometimes used are called Soutiens. Knights Grand Companion and Principal Companions of the New Zealand Order of Merit are granted the use of heraldic supporters. In England, supporters were regarded as little more than mere decorative and artistic appendages. In the United Kingdom, supporters are an example of special royal favour, granted at the behest of the sovereign. Hereditary supporters are limited to hereditary peers, certain members of the Royal Family, to some chiefs of Scottish clans. Non-hereditary supporters are granted to life peers and Ladies of the Order of the Garter and Order of the Thistle and Dames Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, Order of St Michael and St George, Royal Victorian Order and Order of the British Empire, Bailiffs and Dames Grand Cross of the Order of St John. Knights banneret were granted non-hereditary supporters, but no such knight has been created since the time of Charles I. Supporters may be granted to corporations which have a royal charter.
Confronted animals
Scottish Highlands
The Highlands is a historic region of Scotland. Culturally, the Highlands and the Lowlands diverged from the Middle Ages into the modern period, when Lowland Scots replaced Scottish Gaelic throughout most of the Lowlands; the term is used for the area north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, although the exact boundaries are not defined to the east. The Great Glen divides the Grampian Mountains to the southeast from the Northwest Highlands; the Scottish Gaelic name of A' Ghàidhealtachd means "the place of the Gaels" and traditionally, from a Gaelic-speaking point of view, includes both the Western Isles and the Highlands. The area is sparsely populated, with many mountain ranges dominating the region, includes the highest mountain in the British Isles, Ben Nevis. Before the 19th century the Highlands was home to a much larger population, but from circa 1841 and for the next 160 years, the natural increase in population was exceeded by emigration and migration to the industrial cities of Scotland and England.
The area is now one of the most sparsely populated in Europe. At 9.1 per km2 in 2012, the population density in the Highlands and Islands is less than one seventh of Scotland's as a whole, comparable with that of Bolivia and Russia. The Highland Council is the administrative body for much of the Highlands, with its administrative centre at Inverness. However, the Highlands includes parts of the council areas of Aberdeenshire, Angus and Bute, North Ayrshire and Kinross, Stirling and West Dunbartonshire; the Scottish highlands is the only area in the British Isles to have the taiga biome as it features concentrated populations of Scots pine forest: see Caledonian Forest. Between the 15th century and the 20th century, the area differed from most of the Lowlands in terms of language. In Scottish Gaelic, the region is known as the Gàidhealtachd, because it was traditionally the Gaelic-speaking part of Scotland, although the language is now confined to The Hebrides; the terms are sometimes used interchangeably but have different meanings in their respective languages.
Scottish English is the predominant language of the area today, though Highland English has been influenced by Gaelic speech to a significant extent. The "Highland line" distinguished the two Scottish cultures. While the Highland line broadly followed the geography of the Grampians in the south, it continued in the north, cutting off the north-eastern areas, Eastern Caithness and Shetland, from the more Gaelic Highlands and Hebrides; the major social unit of the Highlands was the clan. Scottish kings James VI, saw clans as a challenge to their authority. Following the Union of the Crowns, James VI had the military strength to back up any attempts to impose some control; the result was, in 1609, the Statutes of Iona which started the process of integrating clan leaders into Scottish society. The gradual changes continued into the 19th century, as clan chiefs thought of themselves less as patriarchal leaders of their people and more as commercial landlords; the first effect on the clansmen who were their tenants was the change to rents being payable in money rather than in kind.
Rents were increased as Highland landowners sought to increase their income. This was followed in the period 1760-1850, by agricultural improvement that involved clearance of the population to make way for large scale sheep farms. Displaced tenants were set up in crofting communities in the process; the crofts were intended not to provide all the needs of their occupiers. Crofters came to rely on seasonal migrant work in the Lowlands; this gave impetus to the learning of English, seen by many rural Gaelic speakers to be the essential "language of work". Older historiography attributes the collapse of the clan system to the aftermath of the Jacobite risings; this is now thought less influential by historians. Following the Jacobite rising of 1745 the British government enacted a series of laws to try to suppress the clan system, including bans on the bearing of arms and the wearing of tartan, limitations on the activities of the Scottish Episcopal Church. Most of this legislation was repealed by the end of the 18th century as the Jacobite threat subsided.
There was soon a rehabilitation of Highland culture. Tartan was adopted for Highland regiments in the British Army, which poor Highlanders joined in large numbers in the era of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Tartan had been abandoned by the ordinary people of the region, but in the 1820s, tartan and the kilt were adopted by members of the social elite, not just in Scotland, but across Europe; the international craze for tartan, for idealising a romanticised Highlands, was set off by the Ossian cycle, further popularised by the works of Walter Scott. His "staging" of the visit of King George IV to Scotland in 1822 and the king's wearing of tartan resulted in a massive upsurge in demand for kilts and tartans that could not be met by the Scottish woollen industry. Individual clan tartans were designated in this period and they became a major symbol of Scottish identity; this "Highlandism", by which all of Scotland was identified with the culture of the Highlands, was cemented by Queen Victoria's interest in the country, her adoption of Balmoral as a major royal retreat, her interes
Tam o' shanter (cap)
A tam o' shanter is a name given to the traditional Scottish bonnet worn by men. The name derives from the eponymous hero of the 1790 Robert Burns poem; the tam o' shanter is a flat bonnet made of wool hand-knitted in one piece, stretched on a wooden disc to give the distinctive flat shape, subsequently felted. The earliest forms of these caps, known as a blue bonnet from their typical colour, were made by bonnet-makers in Scotland. By the year 1599 five bonnet-makers guilds had formed in cities around the country: Edinburgh, Perth and Glasgow. At the end of the sixteenth century, it was said that the Scottish caps were the normal fashion of men and servants, they remained so throughout the seventeenth century. Similar in outline to the various types of flat bonnet common in northwestern Europe during the 16th century, the tam o' shanter is distinguished by the woollen ball or toorie decorating the centre of the crown; the term came to denote a hat associated with Scottish military regiments, derived from the old bonnet, along with the Glengarry and the Balmoral bonnets.
The Balmoral was sometimes described as synonymous with the tam o' shanter. Before the introduction of inexpensive synthetic dyes in the mid-19th century, the Scottish knitted bonnet was made only in colours available from natural dyes woad or indigo. Since that time the tam o' shanter has been produced in a wider range of fabrics, such as serge, as single colours, as well as tartan. Women have adopted a form of this hat, known as a “tammy” or “tam”. In the First World War, a khaki Balmoral bonnet was introduced in 1915 for wear in the trenches by Scottish infantry serving on the Western Front; this came to be known as the'bonnet, tam o' shanter' abbreviated among military personnel to'ToS'. It replaced the Glengarry –, the regulation bonnet worn by Scottish troops with khaki field dress at the start of the war. Knitted, the military tam o' shanter subsequently came to be constructed from separate pieces of khaki serge cloth. Today, the Royal Regiment of Scotland and some regiments of the Canadian Forces continue to wear the ToS as undress and working headgear.
The various battalions of the Royal Regiment of Scotland identify themselves by wearing distinctive coloured hackles on their bonnets. The Black Watch, 3rd Battalion, Royal Regiment of Scotland wear a red hackle in their ToS, as do soldiers of The Black Watch of Canada; some regiments of the Canadian Army wear different coloured toories: the Royal Highland Fusiliers of Canada have traditionally worn dark green. Most regiments, wear a khaki toorie, matching the bonnet. In many Canadian regiments it is traditional for soldiers to wear a ToS, while officers wear the balmorals instead; the tam o'shanter is in rough khaki wool, while the balmoral is in finer quality doe-skin of a pale tan or grey shade. The tam o' shanter was traditionally worn by various regiments of the Australian Army which have a Scottish connection. B Company 5th/6th Battalion, Royal Victoria Regiment wore both a khaki and blue bonnet at various stages, it appears. Hong Kong Police Band bagpipes section wears a red version; the velvet academic tam worn with a tassel is part of the ceremonial dress used at many universities to distinguish those holding a doctoral degree from those holding other academic degrees.
Although referred to as a "tam", the academic tam derives from the Tudor bonnet rather than the Scottish tam o' shanter, the cap is constructed of two pieces of either six- or eight-pointed cuts of fabric attached to a headband rather than the pie segments used in a tam o' shanter. The tam, or tam cap, became a fashionable women's accessory from the early 1920s and was derived from the tam o' shanter, it followed the trends for borrowing from men's fashion. Bonnet Flat cap
Heritable Jurisdictions (Scotland) Act 1746
The Heritable Jurisdictions Act 1746 was an Act of Parliament passed in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745 abolishing judicial rights held by Scots heritors. These were a significant source of power for clan chiefs since it gave them a large measure of control over their tenants; the position of Sheriff-principal originated in the 13th century and still exists in modern Scotland. Appointed by the Crown, over the centuries the majority had become hereditary, the holders appointing legal professionals known as Sheriff-deputes to do the work; the Act returned control of these to the Crown. Since Article XX of the 1707 Acts of Union recognised these rights as property, compensation was paid to the deprived heritors; the long title of the Act, which sets out the scheme and intention, is: An Act for taking away and abolishing the Heretable Jurisdictions in Scotland. For remedying the inconveniences that have arisen and may arise from the multiplicity and extent of heretable jurisdictions in Scotland, for making satisfaction to the proprietors thereof, for restoring to the crown the powers of jurisdiction and properly belonging thereto, according to the constitution, for extending the influence and protection of the King’s laws and courts of justice to all his Majesty’s subjects in Scotland, for rendering the union more complete.
The Act was one of a number of measures taken after the defeat of the 1745 Jacobite Rising to weaken the traditional rights held by clan chiefs, the others being the 1746 Dress Act and the Act of Proscription. Such rights were widespread throughout Scotland. There had been a number of previous attempts to either weaken them. Many remained, one of the most significant being control of the thirty-three Sheriffs who presided over the Scottish court system. In 1745, only eight of these were appointed by the Crown, three were appointed for life, with the rest being hereditary; the Act gave the Crown control over the appointment of Sheriffs, with the role of Justiciar transferred to the High Court of Justiciary. Since these were recognised as private property under Article XX of the 1707 Act of Union, their owners were compensated, although Jacobites were excluded. A total of £152,000 was paid out in compensation, the two biggest payments being £38,000 to the Duke of Hamilton and £25,000 to the Duke of Argyll.
Other recipients included Sir Andrew Agnew, hereditary sheriff of Wigtownshire, who received £4,000 in recognition of his support for the government in 1745. In speaking for the Bill, Lord Hardwicke argued. In response, Argyll quoted Montesquieu in support of his argument that multiple jurisdictions were a check on the Crown and thus a defence of liberty. Since Argyll was one of the main beneficiaries, his intervention was to enable Hardwicke to highlight the House of Stuart's outdated belief in the divine right of kings and unquestioning obedience, he did so by agreeing such safeguards were required for states ruled by an absolute monarch but'fortunately, Britain was not in that position.' This was because the constitution limited the powers of the ensured liberty. George II, in a speech written by Hardwicke, praised the Act as measures for "better securing the liberties of the people there"; the Prime Minister Henry Pelham considered it the most important measure in dealing with Jacobitism in Scotland.
Most of its provisions have since been repealed, but it still specifies that any noble title created in Scotland after 6 June 1747 may grant no rights beyond those of landlordship. The last remnants of feudal tenure in Scotland were ended by the Abolition of Feudal Tenure etc. Act 2000 which came into force on 28 November 2004. Attainder Act of Proscription 1746 Disarming Act 1716 Dress Act 1746 Browning, Reed, ‘Lord Hardwicke, the Court Whig as Legist’, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs
Craigie Aitchison, Lord Aitchison
Craigie Mason Aitchison was a Scottish politician and judge. Mason was born in Falkirk, where his father Reverend James Aitchison was the senior minister of the Erskine United Free Church. Educated at Falkirk High School and at Edinburgh University, where he was the Vans Dunlop Scholar in Mental Philosophy and Muirhead Prizeman in Civil Law, he graduated from Edinburgh with an MA in 1903 and an LLB in 1907. Aitchinson became an advocate in 1907, he was effective as a defence counsel in criminal cases, was regarded as the best advocate before a jury since Sheriff Comrie Thomson. He was noted for the John Donald Merritt cases, he was made a King's Counsel in 1923. He worked with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and others to secure the release of Oscar Slater, the victim one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice of the early twentieth century. Aitchison, leading Counsel at the appeal in 1929 gave a 14-hour speech. An unsuccessful Liberal candidate for Clackmannan and East Stirlingshire in November 1922 and December 1923, he joined the Labour Party and contested The Hartlepools at the October 1924 general election and Glasgow Central in May 1929 — where he reduced a Unionist majority of nearly 6,000 to only 627.
He was elected as Member of Parliament for Kilmarnock at a by-election in October 1929, sat for the constituency until October 1933 as a Labour National Labour member. He was appointed as Lord Advocate in June 1929 serving in the Second Labour Government alongside Sir William Jowitt, the new Attorney General for England and Wales whose defeat at The Hartlepools in 1924 was attributed to Aitchnison's drawing votes to the Liberals, he was made a Privy Counsellor in 1929, served as Lord Advocate until October 1933. He was raised to the bench as Lord Justice Clerk, with the judicial title Lord Aitchison, at which point he automatically resigned his seat in the House of Commons, which resulted in a by-election, his son Craigie was a member of the Royal Academy. Craig, F. W. S.. British parliamentary election results 1918–1949. Chichester: Parliamentary Research Services. ISBN 0-900178-06-X. Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Craigie Aitchison
R. R. McIan
Robert Ronald McIan Robert Ranald McIan, was a Scottish actor and painter. He is best known for romanticised depictions of their battles and domestic life, his wife, Fanny McIan, was a painter and early teacher of art to women. McIan was born in Scotland, in 1803, he became an actor with the joint company of the Theatre Royals in Bristol and Bath before making his way to London. In 1838 he played at Drury Lane in the following year, he gained a reputation for playing Highlanders on the stage, at a time when the novels of Sir Walter Scott had revived interest in Highland culture. It's not clear, he played the jester in the Eglinton Tournament of 1839 and the 1885 DNB says he retired in that year. A letter from Charles Dickens mentions seeing McIan perform on 23 June 1841, not long before McIan's wife started a steady job as a teacher. WP Frith described McIan as "a Highlander and fierce Jacobite", Henry Vizetelly wrote that he "was voted an intolerable bore". McIan married Frances Whitaker, daughter of a Bath cabinet maker.
A friend described them as "The painter and his painter-wife – two who went hand in hand, heart with heart, together through the world". Mrs McIan was a noted painter in her own right, who exhibited at the Royal Academy and other leading galleries, she too favoured historical subjects from the Highlands, such as Highlander defending his Family at the Massacre of Glencoe. The Highlander in question would have been a MacDonald of Glencoe known as Clan McIan. From 1842 until Robert's death she was the first Superindent of the Female School of Design, which became the Royal Female School of Art and part of the Central School of Arts and Crafts, they moved to 9 Great Coram Street in 1843 and 36 Charlotte Street in 1849. McIan learnt to paint whilst he was an actor, submitted his first landscape to the Royal Academy in 1836, he exhibited in the Suffolk Street Gallery in 1835 and 1837 whilst acting at the newly rebuilt English Opera House. His 1838 portrait of novelist Anna Maria Hall was praised by Camilla Toulmin.
He is best known for his illustrations in The Clans of The Scottish Highlands, published in 1845 on the centenary of the Jacobite Rising with text by James Logan. It proved so popular that it was reissued after his death, his depictions of clansmen fanned the romantic revival of interest in Gaeldom, led by Queen Victoria, to whom the book was dedicated. McIan's early paintings concentrated on scenes from domestic life in the Highlands, such as illicit whisky stills and women grinding corn; these culminated in the 1848 sequel to the Clans book, entitled Gaelic Gatherings: Or The Highlanders at Home, on the Heath, the River and the Loch. In life his works took on overtly nationalistic subjects, celebrating the exploits of Highland soldiers against the English and overseas. Paintings of the 79th Cameron Highlanders were commissioned by Colonel Lauderdale Maule to celebrate the end of his ten-year colonelcy of the regiment in December 1852. An Incident in the Revolutionary War of America showed the 71st Fraser Highlanders' heroic defense at the Battle of Stono Ferry and was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1854.
McIan was elected an associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1852 and died at Hampstead, north London, on 13 December 1856. Morse, Belinda, A Woman of Design, a Man of Passion: The Pioneering McIans, Sussex, UK: Book Guild Ltd, ISBN 978-1-85776-583-0 Ambaile.org is a Scottish government site with scans of all the images in the Clans and background on the families. See the Commons link on the right. Archive.org has a poorly OCR'd version of the text of The Clans of The Scottish Highlands. Royal Scottish Academy, The Royal Scottish Academy, 1826–1916, pp. 240–1, ISBN 978-1-110-74938-6 has a list of significant works by both McIans
Scots law
Scots law is the legal system of Scotland. It is a hybrid or mixed legal system containing civil law and common law elements, that traces its roots to a number of different historical sources. Together with English law and Northern Irish law, it is one of the three legal systems of the United Kingdom. Early Scots law before the 12th century consisted of the different legal traditions of the various cultural groups who inhabited the country at the time, the Gaels in most of the country, with the Britons and Anglo-Saxons in some districts south of the Forth and with the Norse in the islands and north of the River Oykel; the introduction of feudalism from the 12th century and the expansion of the Kingdom of Scotland established the modern roots of Scots law, influenced by other Anglo-Norman and continental legal traditions. Although there was some indirect Roman law influence on Scots law, the direct influence of Roman law was slight up until around the 15th century. After this time, Roman law was adopted in argument in court, in an adapted form, where there was no native Scots rule to settle a dispute.
Scots law recognises four sources of law: legislation, legal precedent, specific academic writings, custom. Legislation affecting Scotland may be passed by the Scottish Parliament, the United Kingdom Parliament, the European Union; some legislation passed by the pre-1707 Parliament of Scotland is still valid. Since the Union with England Act 1707, Scotland has shared a legislature with Wales. Scotland retained a fundamentally different legal system from that south of the border, but the Union exerted English influence upon Scots law. Since the UK joined the European Union, Scots law has been affected by European law under the Treaties of the European Union, the requirements of the European Convention on Human Rights and the creation of the devolved Scottish Parliament which may pass legislation within all areas not reserved to Westminster, as detailed by the Scotland Act 1998; the United Kingdom, consists of three jurisdictions: England and Wales and Northern Ireland. There are important differences between Scots Law, English law and Northern Irish law in areas such as property law, criminal law, trust law, inheritance law, evidence law and family law while there are greater similarities in areas of national interest such as commercial law, consumer rights, employment law and health and safety regulations.
Examples of differences between the jurisdictions include the age of legal capacity, the fact that equity was never a distinct branch of Scots law. Some examples in criminal law include: The use of 15-member juries for criminal trials in Scotland who always decide by simple majority; the accused in a criminal trial does not have the right to elect between a jury trial. Judges and juries of criminal trials have the "third verdict" of "not proven" available to them. There are differences in the terminology used between the jurisdictions. For example, in Scotland there are no Magistrates' Courts or Crown Court, but there are Justice of the Peace Courts, Sheriff Courts and the College of Justice; the Procurator Fiscal Service provides the independent public prosecution service for Scotland like the Crown Prosecution Service in England and Wales and the Public Prosecution Service in Northern Ireland. Scots law can be traced to its early beginnings as a number of different custom systems among Scotland's early cultures to its modern role as one of the three legal jurisdictions of the United Kingdom.
The various historic sources of Scots law, including custom, feudal law, canon law, civilian ius commune and English law have created a hybrid or mixed legal system. The nature of Scots law before the 12th century is speculative, but is to have been a mixture of different legal traditions representing the different cultures inhabiting the land at the time, including Gaelic, Welsh and Anglo-Saxon customs. There is evidence to suggest that as late as the 17th century marriage laws in the Highlands and Islands still reflected Gaelic custom, contrary to Catholic religious principles; the formation of the Kingdom of Scotland and its subjugation of the surrounding cultures, completed by the Battle of Carham, established what are the boundaries of contemporary mainland Scotland. The Outer Hebrides were added after the Battle of Largs in 1263, the Northern Isles were acquired in 1469, completing what is today the legal jurisdiction of Scotland. From the 12th century feudalism was introduced to Scotland and established feudal land tenure over many parts of the south and east, which spread northward.
As feudalism began to develop in Scotland early court systems began to develop, including early forms of Sheriff Courts. Under Robert the Bruce the importance of the Parliament of Scotland grew as he called parliaments more and its composition shifted to include more representation from the burghs and lesser landowners. In 1399 a General Council established that the King should hold a parliament at least once a year for the next three years so "that his subjects are served by the law". In 1318 a parliament at Scone enacted a code of law that drew upon older practices, but it was dominated by current events and focused on military matters and the conduct of the war of Scottish Independence. From the 14th century we have surviving examples of early Scottish legal literature, such as the Regiam Majestatem and the Quoniam Attachiamenta (on procedure
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