Fiona A. Macdonald - Missions to the Gaels: Reformation and Counter-reformation in Ulster and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland

Missions to the Gaels:
Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Ulster and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland

Fiona A. Macdonald

This eBook was published in Great Britain in 2021 by John Donald,

an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

Birlinn Ltd

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First published in Great Britain in 2006 by John Donald

ISBN 13: 9780859766180

eBook ISBN 9781788853910

Copyright Fiona A. Macdonald, 2006

The right of Fiona. A. Macdonald to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

Typeset by Carnegie Publishing, Lancaster

Acknowledgements

M Y SINCERE THANKS go to a number of people and institutions who assisted in the making of this book. It was begun while I was in the Scottish History department at Glasgow University. I should particularly like to thank Professor Allan Macinnes, now of Aberdeen University, for commenting on my chapters at an earlier stage of their evolution, and for sharing his perceptive knowledge of Highland history. Thanks also are due to Professor James Kirk for some general pointers and to Dr John Durkan for some translations from the Latin. The book was finished in the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine of Glasgow University, where my colleagues created a most convivial, sociable environment that was so conducive to research. It was a department I very much enjoyed working in. In addition, I wish to thank the late Roy Porter, Professor of the Social History of Medicine at the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at University College, London, for some general comments on the manuscript. I am also grateful to my colleagues in a previous department, the Celtic department at Glasgow University, to the peoples of the islands of Harris, Lewis and South Uist, where I had summer jobs, to the people of Skye, where I spent many vacations, and to the people of Moidart, the homeland of my late paternal grandfather, Sandy Macdonald, whose native knowledge, poetry, music and song or religious devotion imbued in me a love of the Gaelic culture.

Special appreciation on the archival side goes to the Right Rev. Mark Dilworth and Dr Christine Johnston, the staff of the Scottish Catholic Archives, Columba House, during the years in which I visited the archive and who hospitably shared with me copious amounts of tea and biscuits, as well as to the staff of the National Archives of Scotland in Edinburgh, where I consulted most of the presbyterian manuscript material used in this book. I also wish to acknowledge the assistance of the manuscript rooms of the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, the British Library in London and the reading room of the Presbyterian Historical Society in Belfast. The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland kindly allowed me to view three boxes of the Papers of the MacDonnells of Antrim, which had not then been catalogued. I am grateful to the Duke of Argyll for permission to consult the Argyll Survey in the National Register of Archives (Scotland) at the National Archives of Scotland, and to Mr Murdo MacDonald, Argyll and Bute District Archivist, who always gives so generously of his archival knowledge. Also fundamental to the ongoing progress of my research were the staff of the Glasgow University Library Document Delivery Unit who dealt with a multitude of inter-library loans over a number of years.

Copyright is acknowledged and I am grateful for permission to reproduce the following maps and figures: Church of Ireland dioceses c. 1570, by permission of Ruth Dudley Edwards and Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group Ltd, London; Highland parishes of the eighteenth century and list of parishes referred to by number, by permission of Charles Withers and the School of Scottish Studies, Edinburgh; Parishes of Argyll and Bute in 1689 (a section of The Highland Parishes in 1698: An Examination of Sources for the Definition of the Gaidhealtachd (see Bibliography)), also by permission of Charles Withers and the School of Scottish Studies, Edinburgh; Synods and presbyteries in the 1640s, by permission of David Stevenson and the Royal Historical Society, London; The Catholic Gaidhealtachd, 1732, by permission of Charles Withers; and The Scottish Gaeltachd in 1698, by permission of Charles Withers and Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group Ltd, London.

I also have to thank a number of people for their more personal contribution in giving time and resources to enable me to undertake my research: my parents, Anne and the late Angus Macdonald, supported me generously with care, time and finance through the long years of education and research which brought me to this stage, and my son, Kaeran MacDonald, lived with his mothers compulsion to research through much of his youth. In particular, I owe a great debt to John Dempster, who made space, literally and temporally, in which I could work and who also digitised the maps. Above all, I would like to thank him for his unqualified friendship over so many decades. And it is in acknowledgement of all that he has done that I dedicate this book to him.

Conventions and Abbreviations

Dates: Dates are given throughout in New Style. Prior to 1600, the new year is taken to begin on 1 January (Scottish usage) rather than 25 March (English usage), and for these months the year is given in its modern form.

Money: Monetary values are generally given as either sterling or Scots, but where unstipulated are Scots prior to 1707 and sterling afterwards.

Quotations: All abbreviations from primary sources have been extended, but the spelling is original. Punctuation is mainly original, but in long, unpunctuated sentences, punctuation has been inserted where this is necessary to assist the sense.

The following abbreviations are used in the text: