Dumfries: The scene of one of Scotland’s most infamous murders

JUST why does the senior football club of Dumfries rejoice in the name of Queen of the South? The good folk of that lovely town on the River Nith are known as “Doonhamers” because they would always say they were heading “down home”.

Our two greatest Roberts, the Bruce and Burns, have strong links to Dumfries, the former having killed there and the latter having died there, so please read on and find out more about one of our most historic towns.

I am telling part of its story in the fourth instalment in a series about the ancient towns of Scotland and remind you again that the National Records of Scotland’s population figures confirm that we are a “townie” nation, with more people living in towns and villages than in our eight cities combined.

To be included in the list of ancient towns, they all have to be “ancient”, which I interpret as being founded before the Reformation.

READ MORE: Ayr has a special place in Scotland's ancient history 

The columns all deal with towns up to the year 1900, as I will be revisiting them when I do a future series on 20th-century Scotland.

I will be very much dwelling on the early history of these towns and they all have to have played a role, however small, in the history of our nation. They all have to have histories that have been thoroughly researched by proper historians so that a history writer such as myself can base my scribblings on their facts.

I have already decided to amend the original list published last month as the result of a pleading by one of my regular correspondents. Falkirk has been added and indeed I will profile that ancient town next week.

Once again I am indebted to the excellent website electricscotland.com whose online publication of sometimes very ancient manuscripts has been invaluable to me many times. Once again they have come up trumps with the e-publication of William McDowall’s History of the Burgh of Dumfries within notices of Nithsdale, Annandale and the Western Borde, which he published in 1867.

READ MORE: Charting the ancient towns of Scotland: The enticing history of Paisley

It remains the most comprehensive account of Dumfries, especially its early history. McDowall (1815-88) was a journalist, editor of the Dumfries Standard, and a town councillor and such is the veracity of his many sources that I will have no hesitation in quoting from his 157-year-old book.

Like many of our ancient towns, Dumfries can trace its history back to Roman times, though there is no definitive proof of a prehistoric settlement at the location.

Standing on the River Nith about eight miles upstream from the Nith’s confluence with the Solway Firth and 25 miles from the Scottish-English border, Dumfries has always had a strategic significance as the first major town to be encountered on the western route north from England.

Dumfries does not enter written history until the 11th century, but it is generally accepted by most modern historians and archaeologists – multiple remains have been found in the area – that Dumfries and its surrounding area was occupied by Romans in the first and second centuries.

Certainly there is considerable evidence that the Iron Age fort north of the town at Burnswark Hill was attacked and destroyed around 140AD during the occupation of south-west Scotland by the forces of Quintus Lollius Urbicus, then governor of Roman Britain.

McDowall states: “It is not unlikely that the Selgovae (a Celtic tribe), who inhabited Nithdale and neighbouring districts at that time, and who, by means of their rude but strong forts, long resisted the legions of Agricola, may have raised some military works of a defensive nature on or near the site of Dumfries; and it is more than probable that a castle of some kind formed the nucleus of the town.”

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Maddeningly, we also do not know the exact derivation of the name of the town, though a Celtic or Brythonic source is likely, as McDowall acknowledges. He states that Dum-fries “is resolvable into two Gaelic terms signifying a castle in the copse or brushwood”. But he further says that the name might come from the legend that St Ninian founded the town as Friars’ Hill, which evolved in the local language to become Dumfries, though that spelling was not accepted to the second millennium.

We can only speculate about how Dumfries developed in the second half of the first millennium after the Roman Empire had packed up and gone home, leaving many Romanised Britons behind them.

Either by conquest or intermarriage, those Britons, whose capital of the Kingdom of Strathclyde was at Dumbarton, were subsumed into a new kingdom created by Scots who originally came from Ireland into south-west Scotland.

We can only surmise that – after invasions by Picts, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings – Dumfries was confirmed as belonging to the Scots after the victory at Lochmaben in 890 when Giric, king of the Scots and Picts and known as Gregory the Great by some fantasist chroniclers, beat off all opposition including the native Britons to claim the area for his expanding kingdom.

Dumfries enters written history in the 11th century and by the year 1186 it is clear that the settlement had become substantial with its own castle and church, much favoured by the long-reigning King of Scots, William the Lion (below), who often based himself in the area to protect his kingdom against the Lordship of Galloway.

McDowall records: “The existence of such a fortress at a very early period is beyond the reach of doubt. A charter by William the Lion, witnessed by David his brother and others, describes a toft or tenement at Dumfries as being between the Castle and the Church.

“Another charter from the same monarch confers a piece of land similarly situated on Jocelyne, Bishop of Glasgow – the words used in the latter instance, “inter vetus Castellum et Ecclesiam,” indicating that the Castle, even at that period was an ancient building.

“Supposing it to have been at the date of the grant a hundred and eighty years old, this would carry us back to 1000 as the year when this particular castle was erected; but long before that date a Segovian fortlet on the same site may have been planted down and become the germ of the Burgh.”

Again the prefix “dum”, which means fort, would indicate the existence of a castle. In any case, there was certainly a church before another important religious institution was established in the town by Devorgilla, the Lady of Galloway. She gave money to found a monastery in the town which was staffed by the Franciscan Order, the Grey Friars.

It was in Greyfriars that one of the most famous, or infamous, murders in Scottish history took place in 1306.

The Murder

With the English under Edward Longshanks occupying Scotland and King John Balliol deposed and exiled, Scotland had no monarch, a period known as the interregnum.

A depiction of Robert the Bruce’s killing of John Comyn in Dumfries 
(main picture) in 1306

The chief claimants to the empty throne were Robert the Bruce and John “the Red” Comyn. Both had been Guardians of Scotland and both had at one point sworn and renounced allegiance to Edward Longshanks, though there is no evidence, as is often claimed, that Comyn had helped deliver up Sir William Wallace to his cruel fate. Indeed he and Sir Simon Fraser had inflicted a memorable defeat on an English army at the Battle of Roslin in 1303.

If anything, Comyn had slightly the better claim to the Scottish throne, and no matter how the quarrel arose, at the altar of Greyfriars on February 10, 1306, Robert the Bruce stabbed his rival, with legend having it that Sir Roger de Kirkpatrick, Bruce’s great friend and ally, went into the monastery and finished off Comyn, uttering the immortal words: “I’ll mak siccar.”

It is not often realised that the Bruce, having committed the deed that would get him excommunicated, seized the moment decisively and marched to Dumfries Castle, killing the English garrison and proclaiming Scotland’s independence and his kingship.

The resistance of the “Outlaw King” thus began in Dumfries and seven weeks later he was crowned king at Scone.

Longshanks was furious and although made frail by old age and illness, he gathered an army under Aymer de Valence that invaded Scotland. The English made for Dumfries, home of what they saw as an insurrection and, having captured him at Loch Doon Castle, Bruce’s brother-in-law Sir Christopher Seton was hanged and beheaded in the town in line with Longshanks’s policy of no quarter for any Scots supporting Bruce.

Dumfries was never peaceful during the wars of independence and was burned several times by the English but by 1395 it was expanding as a market town and had its own school, Dumfries Academy.

In that year King Robert III gave Dumfries a generous charter that also recognised its growing importance as a port that exported woollen goods and imported wine and spices.

Post-Wars of Independence

In the mid-16th century the Protestant Reformation began to take effect across Scotland but with avowedly Catholic local families such as the Maxwells holding out for their faith, Dumfries was one of the slower towns to adopt the new Presbyterian religion.

John Knox himself took a great interest in converting the town, which duly happened when the Reformation took full effect across Scotland in the 1560s.

Certainly by the time of the National Covenant in the 1630s and 1640s, Dumfries was strongly Presbyterian and later, during the Killing Times, local people died for their adherence to the Covenanters – the Martyrs Monument in St Michael’s Cemetery commemorates three of them.

Dumfries next enters the Scottish history books in a sad way. In 1695, during the great persecution of “witches”, 10 women were executed locally for witchcraft, nine of them strangled and burned at Whitesands.

McDowall quotes from the court record: “Drumfreis, the 5th of Apryle, 1659. The Commissioners adjudges Agnes Comenes, Janet M’Gowane, Jean Tomson, Margt. Clerk, Janet M’Kendrig, Agnes Clerk, Janet Corsane, Helen Moorhead, and Janet Callon, as found guiltie of the severall articles of witchcraft mentioned in the dittayes, to be tane upon Wednesday come eight days to the ordinar place of execution for the burghe of Drumfreis, and ther, betuing 2 and 4 hours of the afternoon, to be strangled at staikes till they be dead, and therefter their bodyes to be burned to ashes.”

Dumfries, in common with Glasgow, resisted the calls to join the Jacobite Risings and, during the ‘45, Bonnie Prince Charlie on returning to Scotland fined the town £2000 and demanded 1000 pairs of brogue shoes for his soldiers. After a three-day stay in the town, he left to go north with £1000 and 255 pairs of shoes.

Most of the town’s many fine buildings date from the 18th and early 19th centuries when Dumfries flourished as a port thanks to the Union of 1707 opening up the transatlantic trade. Once the railways came, Dumfries diminished as a port but remained an important market town.

In 1791, Dumfries gained arguably its most famous citizen when Robert Burns left his farm at Ellisland, a few miles up the Nith, to become an exciseman in the town.

The job was a sinecure gained for him by influential friends and he was able to write some of his finest works in Dumfries. Sadly it is also where he took ill and died on July 21, 1796, aged just 37. His mausoleum at St Michael’s is one of the most beautiful buildings in Scotland.

It was another poet, David Dunbar, who gave Dumfries its nickname. Standing for Parliament in 1857, he coined the phrase Queen of the South to describe the town and it soon caught on. When the town’s professional football club started up in 1919 from the merger of local clubs, they chose the name Queen of the South United.