Clan Dalziel

History

Dalziel is a name taken from land. The old barony sat beside the Clyde in Lanarkshire, and a parish there is still named for it. Electric Scotland's sources link it to the Gaelic for a white meadow. The name first turns up in the record in 1259, and by 1288 Hugh de Dalzell was Sheriff of Lanark. The spelling has never settled. Dalziel, Dalzell and Dalyell are all in use, often by different branches.

Tradition tells a bolder story. Enemies had hanged a kinsman of Kenneth II, and the king promised a reward to whoever would bring the body down. One man stepped forward, saying "Dal zell", which is said to mean "I dare". According to The Scottish Nation, a nineteenth-century reference, the family's old arms recalled the deed with a man hanging on a gibbet. That book repeats the tale but favours a Gaelic origin for the name, so we treat the story as legend. "I dare" is still the motto.

In the wars with England, the family's loyalties shifted with events. Thomas de Dalielle gave his oath to Edward I in 1296, but The Scottish Nation says he went over to Robert the Bruce afterwards. Sir Robert de Dalzell is said to have kept faith with David II while the king was a prisoner. Historic Environment Scotland, by contrast, records a tradition that a Sir Robert lost the barony around 1342 for living in England without the king's leave. Sources differ, and the evidence is thin. In 1390 Sir William de Dalyell went south with Sir David Lindsay of Glenesk for the celebrated jousting on London Bridge.

The main line rose in the seventeenth century. At Langside in 1568 a Laird of Dalzell was on the side of Mary, Queen of Scots. Sir Robert Dalzell was made Lord Dalzell in 1628 and Earl of Carnwath in 1639. He bought the Carnwath estate in the 1630s, though sources differ on the year and on whether the seller was the Earl of Mar or the Earl of Buchan. In 1647 the earl handed the old barony of Dalzell to his sister's son, James Hamilton of Boggs. The Hamiltons kept it until 1952. Dalzell House, built around a fifteenth-century tower, still stands near Motherwell.

The earls were Royalists and later Jacobites. The Earl of Carnwath was captured at Preston in 1715, condemned and stripped of his titles, though his life was spared. An Act of Parliament restored the earldom in 1826. Electric Scotland reports that the last earl, Arthur Edward Dalyell, died in 1941, and that the title has been dormant or extinct since.

A separate branch settled at the Binns in West Lothian, an estate Thomas Dalyell bought in 1612. His son was General Tam Dalyell. He served the Crown, then went to Russia and rose to general in its army. Later he crushed the Pentland rising of 1666. He also raised the dragoons later called the Scots Greys, in 1681 by Historic Environment Scotland's date and 1678 by Electric Scotland's. His son was made a baronet of Nova Scotia in 1685. In 1944 Eleanor Dalyell gave the House of the Binns to the National Trust for Scotland, and COSCA now lists it as the historic seat.