Clan Dunbar

History

By about 1128, the title Earl of Dunbar belonged to the son of Gospatric, a man whose grandfather was Crinan of Dunkeld and whose uncle had been King Duncan I. Gospatric had once held the English earldom of Northumberland but lost it once the Normans took England, and he made his way back to Scotland; there Malcolm III rewarded him with lands centred on the East Lothian town of Dunbar. Out of that grant grew a dynasty that would rule the eastern Borders and Lothian for the next three hundred years.

Later earls expanded the family's titles, adding the earldom of March and, through the marriage of one earl to Agnes Randolph, the earldom of Moray. By then the Dunbars ranked among medieval Scotland's most powerful dynasties: their base at Dunbar Castle was backed by lands across Roxburgh, Selkirk, Peebles and Berwickshire, with further estates reaching over the border into Northumberland. One of the earls, Patrick, traced his own descent to a daughter of William the Lion, a lineage that put him forward as a contender for the vacant Scottish throne when the Great Cause was decided in 1291-92 -- a contest that John Balliol went on to win.

The family's best-known moment came in 1338, when the Earl of Dunbar and March was away campaigning and left Dunbar Castle in the hands of his wife, Agnes Randolph, remembered as Black Agnes. For roughly five months she directed its defence against an English army led by the Earl of Salisbury, and the castle held out until the besiegers withdrew in June 1338. The episode remains the most often-told chapter of the family's history.

The earldom's fortunes turned in the fifteenth century. Sources differ on the exact numbering of the later earls, but by 1435 the reigning Earl of Dunbar and March, George Dunbar, had fallen foul of King James I, who resented the family's wealth and its grip on the border marches. Parliament declared his titles and estates forfeit, and the senior line lost both the earldom and Dunbar Castle, which passed into royal hands.

The name continued through cadet branches that rose to baronetcies in later centuries: Dunbar of Mochrum in Wigtownshire, created in 1694, Dunbar of Durn in Banffshire in 1698, Dunbar of Northfield, and Dunbar of Hempriggs in Caithness in 1706. One Northfield-descended baronet, Sir Archibald Dunbar, married Mary Brander of Pitgaveny, near Elgin in Moray, carrying the Dunbar name onto that estate and giving its name to a separate Dunbar of Pitgaveny tartan.

Today the chiefship of the Name and Arms of Dunbar sits with the Dunbar baronets of Mochrum, in Galloway rather than in the family's ancestral East Lothian heartland. Dunbar Castle itself is now a scheduled ruin in public care, a visible marker of how far the centre of the family's fortunes shifted after the forfeiture of 1435.