Clan Elliot

History

Clan tradition holds that the Elliots originated in Angus, near the foot of Glen Shee, and were resettled in Liddesdale in the Scottish Borders around 1320, in the reign of Robert the Bruce. The lordship of Liddesdale had recently been forfeited, and the crown is said to have wanted loyal, fighting tenants on this exposed stretch of the frontier with England. Written evidence for the family's first two centuries is thin, and much of what might have survived was lost when Stobs Castle burned in 1712, so the earliest clearly documented chief dates only to 1476.

Once settled in Liddesdale, the Elliots grew into one of the most formidable of the Border reiving families, sharing the valley, and its constant raiding and feuding, with the Armstrongs. Between them the two families are reckoned to have held around a hundred towers and bastle houses across Liddesdale. The Elliot chief was frequently appointed Captain of Hermitage Castle, the crown's principal stronghold in the district, and the family's own tower at Redheugh, on Hermitage Water, gave the senior line its name: the Elliots of Redheugh.

A cadet branch held Larriston Tower and became known as the Larriston Elliots. The clan's reiving years also left behind the ballad of Little Jock Elliot, whose defiant refrain, 'wha daur meddle wi' me', recalls a sixteenth-century clansman said to have wounded the Earl of Bothwell, and which has long been repeated as an expression of Elliot pride, even though the surviving ballad text was reworked by a nineteenth-century writer.

The 1603 Union of the Crowns brought this way of life to an abrupt end. With Scotland and England under one king, James VI and I turned his combined authority on the riding families, executing some leaders and dispersing others, and the semi-lawless frontier that had sustained the reivers closed for good. The Elliots endured on their Border lands, but as tenants and lairds rather than raiders.

A separate branch of the family rose through law and politics rather than the saddle. Gavin Elliot of Midlem Mill's son was made a baronet of Minto, in Roxburghshire, in 1700, and several of his descendants sat as judges of the Court of Session; one served as Governor-General of India and was created Earl of Minto in 1813. Genealogies trace this Midlem Mill line back to the Eliotts of Stobs, though tracing the exact link between the wider Minto family and the Border reiving Elliots of Liddesdale across the centuries is not entirely straightforward.

Meanwhile the chiefship itself moved from the direct Redheugh line to the Eliotts of Stobs, near Hawick, created baronets in 1666. Redheugh itself passed out of the family for a time before a twentieth-century baronet bought it back; his son, Sir Arthur Eliott, eleventh baronet, held Redheugh and the chiefship until his death, after which his daughter, Margaret Eliott, inherited Redheugh and, in 1991, was recognised as chief in her own right, the twenty-ninth to hold the position.