Clan Sutherland

History

Clan Sutherland traces its descent from Freskin, a Flemish-born nobleman settled in Scotland under King David I, who granted him lands including Duffus in Moray. Freskin's grandson, Hugh de Moravia, Lord of Duffus, gained a footing in the country of Sutherland in the far north, and Hugh's son William was made Earl of Sutherland around 1230, one of the oldest earldoms recorded in the Scottish peerage. The name Sutherland is itself a small puzzle: it is a relic of the Norse era, meaning roughly 'south land', because the county lay immediately south of the Norse-held earldom of Orkney and Caithness, even though it sits in the far north of the Scottish mainland.

For their first generations the earls used the surname de Moravia, 'of Moray', rather than Sutherland, and the family only settled consistently on Sutherland as its own name from around the time of Robert, sixth Earl, who died in 1427. The old Gaelic name for this stretch of country, Cataibh, means the land of the cat, and it survives both in the clan's crest, a wildcat rearing as if to spring, and in Morair Chat, the Gaelic style still used for the chief.

The earls' northern neighbours were often rivals rather than friends. A long rivalry with Clan Mackay, centred on the boundary between Sutherland proper and Mackay-held Strathnaver, is said to have run from the 1370s to a last pitched battle at Garbharry in 1555, and the Sutherlands also clashed with Clan Gunn, including at Leckmelm in 1586. How faithfully these old feuds have come down to us, against how much has been shaped by later retelling, is hard to weigh with confidence, but a contested northern frontier is well attested across the period.

The direct male line failed in 1514, when John, ninth Earl, died without a son and was succeeded by his sister Elizabeth. She married Adam Gordon, a son of the second Earl of Huntly and chief of Clan Gordon, and their descendants held the earldom as Gordons for two centuries, until John Gordon, sixteenth Earl, resumed the Sutherland name and arms and was recognised as such by the Lord Lyon in 1719.

The clan's most difficult chapter belongs to the early nineteenth century. Elizabeth, who had inherited the earldom as a one-year-old in 1766, kept personal control of the vast Sutherland estate even after marrying George Granville Leveson-Gower, created first Duke of Sutherland in 1833. Between roughly 1811 and 1821, thousands of tenant families were removed from inland straths such as Strathnaver to make way for large-scale sheep farming, in what became one of the most notorious episodes of the Highland Clearances; the estate's factor, Patrick Sellar, was tried in 1816 on charges including culpable homicide arising from the evictions and was acquitted. The episode is remembered very differently depending on who is telling it: estate correspondence of the day described it as agricultural 'improvement', while for the families cleared from their homes it meant the loss of land and community, and it remains one of the most bitterly contested chapters in Highland history.

The earldom passed through a female line again in the twentieth century. Elizabeth, 24th Countess of Sutherland, held the title until her death in December 2019, when it passed to her son, Alistair Sutherland, who is the present Earl of Sutherland and chief of the clan.