Clan Rutherford

History

The Rutherford story begins in Teviotdale, in the parish of Maxton in Roxburghshire, where the lands of Rutherford gave the family its name. Charter evidence places Rutherfords there from the twelfth century: a Nichol de Rutherford appears as a witness to charters between 1161 and 1272, and a cleric named William de Rwthirford witnessed a deed around the year 1200. A family tradition, recorded much later, tells of a man called Ruther who guided an early Scots king safely over a ford on the Tweed and was granted the land in reward. It is a good story, but nothing beyond family memory supports it, and the surname is more soberly read as the ford of someone called Ruther, or a ford for driving cattle.

By the sixteenth century the Rutherfords were established fighting men of Teviotdale, holding land under the wardens of the Scottish Middle March and drawn into the raiding and feuding of Border life. Their best-remembered moment came at the Raid of the Redeswire in July 1575, the skirmish at Carter Bar usually reckoned the last pitched clash between Scottish and English forces. The old ballad of the fray still gives Rutherford a leading part: "Bauld Rutherford he was fu' stout, wi' a' his nine sons him round about", riding out with the men of Jedburgh just as their arrival broke an early English lead and sent the English side fleeing the field.

The family's leading line held the barony of Edgerston, close to Jedburgh, granted to James Rutherfurd by James IV in 1492. One of its lairds, Thomas Rutherfurd, picked up the nickname the Black Laird from the forays he led into England, and the family held on to the estate through more than four hundred years of quarrels with neighbouring houses, among them the Kerrs of Cessford and the Stewarts of Traquair. Cadet families settled at Hunthill, Fairnington and Hundalee stayed bound to this Edgerston line throughout. In 1915 that long tenure ended: William Edward Oliver-Rutherfurd sold up and left the country.

One of those cadet lines, at Hunthill and Chatto near Jedburgh, rose furthest in rank. Andrew Rutherfurd was raised to the peerage as Lord Rutherfurd in 1661 and created Earl of Teviot in 1663, serving as governor of Dunkirk and then of Tangier, where he was killed in an ambush in May 1664. With no direct heir, the Lordship passed to his Hunthill kinsmen, who held the title for a further generation or two before it lapsed early in the eighteenth century.

The wider Rutherford name also produced Samuel Rutherford, the Covenanting theologian born around 1600 near Nisbet in Roxburghshire, whose book Lex, Rex argued that even kings were bound by law, and who sat for the Church of Scotland at the Westminster Assembly in the 1640s. Today the name has no chief that the Lord Lyon recognises, which makes Rutherford armigerous in heraldic terms, yet COSCA still counts it among Scotland's clans and families. Its own tartan, registered in 2006, keeps the Rutherford name on the modern Register even without a chief to lead it.