Clan Crawford

History

The Crawford story usually opens with a Northumbrian nobleman whose name comes down as Thorlongus, translated as "Thor the Tall"; he is supposed to have escaped north once William the Conqueror began harrying the north of England in 1068–69, receiving land near Kelso from the Scottish crown in return. Other, older tellings point instead to Norman knights arriving in David I's reign as the family's true founders; both cannot be correct, and while most modern writers favour the Anglo-Danish figure, nothing from so far back can be stated with real certainty.

What is clearer is that a grandson of this settler, known as Galfridus de Craufurd, took his surname from the barony of Crawford in upper Clydesdale sometime in the twelfth century, and that the family had put down firm roots in Lanarkshire by 1147, when a Crawford witnessed a charter for the abbey at Kelso. The barony was later divided between two sons, and the portion held by one of them became known as Crawfordjohn, after his own son John, a name that survives as a village in South Lanarkshire today.

By the late thirteenth century the family had moved into Ayrshire, where Reginald Crawford served as Sheriff of Ayr. He was captured fighting for Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Loch Ryan in February 1307 and, with Bruce's brothers Thomas and Alexander, was executed by the English at Carlisle shortly afterwards. Tradition holds that his sister Margaret was the mother of William Wallace, which would make the Crawfords close kin to Scotland's best-known patriot, though the genealogy of that period rests on later chronicle accounts rather than contemporary record and should be read with a degree of caution.

This Ayrshire stock threw off several branches, among them the senior line at Auchinames in Renfrewshire, a Kilbirnie branch, and a Craufurdland branch settled near Kilmarnock. From a further offshoot, the Jordanhill family, came Captain Thomas Crawford, whose scaling of Dumbarton Castle's rock face by night in April 1571 drove out its garrison, still loyal to the exiled Mary, Queen of Scots; the feat secured him a place in the history books and, in time, the office of Provost of Glasgow.

The chiefly line's fortunes did not hold. In 1904 Hugh Ronald George Craufurd, laird of Auchinames, sold Crosbie and the family's remaining Ayrshire and Renfrewshire lands and left for Canada. No successor has since been confirmed by the Lord Lyon, and Crawford has been classed as an armigerous name ever since: a family with a long clan history but, for now, no recognised head. The Craufurdland branch fared rather better, and the Houison Craufurd family still lives at Craufurdland Castle, one of a small number of Scottish seats to have remained with a single family for the better part of eight centuries.

Interest in the name is sustained today mainly by the Clan Crawford Association, set up in 2006 under the legal name House of Crawford to bring together descendants of the family's various branches; six years on, in 2012, the Lord Lyon awarded the association its own coat of arms, blending elements taken from the Crawfordjohn and Dalmagregan branches. The tartan now associated with the name has a separate and later story, first appearing in print in 1842, well after clan tartans of this kind are usually assumed to have come into use.