Clan Hay

History

The Hays trace their documented Scottish history to William de Haya, a Norman-descended cupbearer at the court of Malcolm IV and later William the Lion in the mid-twelfth century. It is not entirely clear whether this William or his son, also called William, was the one who married Eva of Pitmilly, a Celtic heiress; whichever it was, the match brought the family the barony of Erroll, on the Carse of Gowrie, granted by William the Lion around 1178. This marriage is generally treated as the clan's true beginning, and William de Haya is regarded as its first chief, well before any of the legends later attached to the family name.

Clan tradition also tells an older and far more colourful story. It holds that in 980 a ploughman named Hay and his two sons, working a field near Luncarty in Perthshire, saw a Scottish army under King Kenneth breaking before a Danish force and threw themselves into the fighting, armed with nothing but the wooden yokes unstrapped from their oxen. The Scots are said to have rallied and won the field, and a grateful king rewarded Hay with as much land as a falcon could cover in a single flight, a bird released from a nearby hill that came down at what is still known as the Hawk's Stane, on the edge of the parish of Errol. This is family legend rather than documented history, and no contemporary record of the battle or the ploughman survives, but it endures in the clan's motto, Serva Jugum, 'keep the yoke', and in the falcon on its crest.

What is firmly documented is the family's role in the Wars of Independence. Sir Gilbert Hay of Erroll swore fealty to Edward I of England in 1296, along with most of the Scottish nobility of the day, but had gone over to Robert the Bruce by 1306 and stayed one of his steadiest supporters through the years that followed. After Bannockburn in 1314, Bruce rewarded him with the hereditary office of Lord High Constable of Scotland, a great office of state that in precedence outranks every title except those of the royal family, and it has descended through the Hays of Erroll ever since.

Sir William Hay was created Earl of Erroll in 1453, and the wider family expanded well beyond Aberdeenshire. A branch descended from a fourteenth-century marriage into the Yester lands of East Lothian was raised to the peerage as Lords Hay of Yester in 1488 and rose further still, in time becoming Earls and then Marquesses of Tweeddale. The senior, chiefly line built its own power around the Aberdeenshire coast, where the earldom's original seat, Old Slains Castle, had been granted to Gilbert Hay along with the former Comyn earldom of Buchan lands in 1308.

Old Slains remained the family base until Francis Hay, 9th Earl of Erroll, built New Slains Castle near Cruden Bay after 1597. Delgatie Castle, near Turriff, had come to the Hays through a fifteenth-century marriage into the Fraser family and later passed out of the name altogether, before the 23rd Countess of Erroll bought it back around 1950. Restored and opened to the public, Delgatie now serves as the official Clan Hay centre.

The chiefship has stayed within the family throughout. The present chief, Merlin Hay, 24th Earl of Erroll, inherited the title from his mother in 1978 and, like his forebears, holds the Constableship of Scotland alongside it, a link stretching back more than seven hundred years between one family and two of the country's oldest offices.